843
Albums Rated
4.39
Average Rating
77%
Complete
246 albums remaining
Rating Distribution
Rating Timeline
Taste Profile
1950
Favorite Decade
Latin
Favorite Genre
US
Top Origin
Enthusiast
Rater Style ?
504
5-Star Albums
5
1-Star Albums
Breakdown
By Genre
Top Styles
By Decade
By Origin
Albums
You Love More Than Most
| Album | You | Global | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Duck Stab/Buster & Glen
The Residents
|
5 | 2.03 | +2.97 |
|
The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter
The Incredible String Band
|
5 | 2.15 | +2.85 |
|
Rock Bottom
Robert Wyatt
|
5 | 2.39 | +2.61 |
|
Black Metal
Venom
|
5 | 2.46 | +2.54 |
|
American Gothic
David Ackles
|
5 | 2.49 | +2.51 |
|
Shleep
Robert Wyatt
|
5 | 2.51 | +2.49 |
|
Darkdancer
Les Rythmes Digitales
|
5 | 2.59 | +2.41 |
|
Devotional Songs
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
|
5 | 2.59 | +2.41 |
|
Scott 2
Scott Walker
|
5 | 2.63 | +2.37 |
|
Casanova
The Divine Comedy
|
5 | 2.66 | +2.34 |
You Love Less Than Most
| Album | You | Global | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Maxinquaye
Tricky
|
1 | 3.05 | -2.05 |
|
Fire Of Love
The Gun Club
|
1 | 2.99 | -1.99 |
|
Haut de gamme / Koweït, rive gauche
Koffi Olomide
|
1 | 2.61 | -1.61 |
|
Penance Soiree
The Icarus Line
|
1 | 2.5 | -1.5 |
|
Trans Europe Express
Kraftwerk
|
2 | 3.16 | -1.16 |
|
Crocodiles
Echo And The Bunnymen
|
2 | 3.04 | -1.04 |
|
Devil Without A Cause
Kid Rock
|
1 | 2.02 | -1.02 |
Artists
Favorites
| Artist | Albums | Average |
|---|---|---|
| Beatles | 5 | 5 |
| The Who | 4 | 5 |
| Miles Davis | 4 | 5 |
| Sonic Youth | 5 | 4.8 |
| David Bowie | 7 | 4.57 |
| Bruce Springsteen | 4 | 4.75 |
| Radiohead | 4 | 4.75 |
| Led Zeppelin | 4 | 4.75 |
| The Rolling Stones | 4 | 4.75 |
| Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds | 4 | 4.75 |
| Prince | 3 | 5 |
| Nirvana | 3 | 5 |
| Leonard Cohen | 3 | 5 |
| Simon & Garfunkel | 3 | 5 |
| Stevie Wonder | 3 | 5 |
| Metallica | 3 | 5 |
| Frank Sinatra | 3 | 5 |
| Peter Gabriel | 3 | 5 |
| The Beach Boys | 3 | 5 |
| Kate Bush | 3 | 5 |
| The Doors | 3 | 5 |
| Johnny Cash | 3 | 5 |
| Neil Young | 3 | 5 |
| Black Sabbath | 3 | 5 |
| Steely Dan | 3 | 5 |
| Aerosmith | 3 | 5 |
| Bob Dylan | 5 | 4.4 |
| Björk | 4 | 4.5 |
| PJ Harvey | 4 | 4.5 |
| Talking Heads | 4 | 4.5 |
| Pink Floyd | 4 | 4.5 |
| Tom Waits | 4 | 4.5 |
| Yes | 3 | 4.67 |
| R.E.M. | 3 | 4.67 |
| Beastie Boys | 3 | 4.67 |
| Pet Shop Boys | 3 | 4.67 |
| Beck | 3 | 4.67 |
| Public Enemy | 3 | 4.67 |
| Madonna | 3 | 4.67 |
| Elton John | 2 | 5 |
| Adele | 2 | 5 |
| Kendrick Lamar | 2 | 5 |
| Emmylou Harris | 2 | 5 |
| Kanye West | 2 | 5 |
| Amy Winehouse | 2 | 5 |
| The Prodigy | 2 | 5 |
| OutKast | 2 | 5 |
| Hole | 2 | 5 |
| Aretha Franklin | 2 | 5 |
| Nick Drake | 2 | 5 |
| Alice Cooper | 2 | 5 |
| Jimi Hendrix | 2 | 5 |
| Rush | 2 | 5 |
| The Pogues | 2 | 5 |
| Fatboy Slim | 2 | 5 |
| Common | 2 | 5 |
| Elvis Presley | 2 | 5 |
| Muddy Waters | 2 | 5 |
| Van Morrison | 2 | 5 |
| Joni Mitchell | 2 | 5 |
| Genesis | 2 | 5 |
| T. Rex | 2 | 5 |
| John Martyn | 2 | 5 |
| LCD Soundsystem | 2 | 5 |
| Eagles | 2 | 5 |
| Can | 2 | 5 |
| Pulp | 2 | 5 |
| Christina Aguilera | 2 | 5 |
| Todd Rundgren | 2 | 5 |
| Marvin Gaye | 2 | 5 |
| Eminem | 2 | 5 |
| Ray Charles | 2 | 5 |
| Wilco | 2 | 5 |
| Depeche Mode | 2 | 5 |
| Isaac Hayes | 2 | 5 |
| Taylor Swift | 2 | 5 |
| Michael Jackson | 2 | 5 |
| Dinosaur Jr. | 2 | 5 |
| Megadeth | 2 | 5 |
| Van Halen | 2 | 5 |
| Creedence Clearwater Revival | 2 | 5 |
| Robert Wyatt | 2 | 5 |
| Fairport Convention | 2 | 5 |
| Elliott Smith | 2 | 5 |
| Bob Marley & The Wailers | 3 | 4.33 |
| The Kinks | 3 | 4.33 |
| Arcade Fire | 3 | 4.33 |
Controversial
| Artist | Ratings |
|---|---|
| Kraftwerk | 2, 5, 5 |
| Echo And The Bunnymen | 5, 2, 5 |
5-Star Albums (504)
View Album Wall
Popular Reviews
Antony and the Johnsons · 10 likes
5/5
I’m at a 5. I am so glad this is on the list.
I suppose it’s only just now hitting me how much of this list so far has been mostly cisgender men. It’s just not something I’ve actively thought about, but… damn, this one really proves that point, huh? This is a beautiful album documenting the transition of our lead singer, ANOHNI. Her voice is great, regardless of the vibrato that sort of sours the earliest tracks on this album, when the instrumentation isn’t as potent. When the instrumentation does get going, this album truly begins to soar in a harmonic way. The quality of the music itself matches up with the messaging of the lyricism & how brilliantly her pain & frustration is expressed, meeting the moment in a way that’s evocative of the soul singers of the 1950s & 60s that this is so obviously inspired by. It’s a perfectly structured album, and I think “Bird Gerhl” is a gorgeous closing track. The entire 35 minutes, no matter how slowly they may start from a purely musical standpoint, all flow together in a harmony. It’s a beautiful album, and one where words currently fail me. What a piece of art. It’s a 5, and I am fully & utterly stunned.
I’m also pissed off that public opinion towards the right for transgender people to simply exist has flipped as harshly as it has throughout the 20 years since this album came out, and the ongoing nightmare that has been the second Trump administration. It is incredibly easy to demonize that which you have never truly met or known, and I feel as blessed as I have to have met so many people that have transitioned or are actively transitioning. This album is a reminder that it truly is gender *affirming* care. It is an affirmation of identity, of happiness, and of one’s true self. To demonize that affirmation speaks more to the sad, sad insecurities of those who will never be able to find happiness in the same way. I can only hope that whenever the pendulum of public opinion inevitably swings back the other way, this album can be re-recognized as a rich piece of art. It so deeply deserves it.
Rocket From The Crypt · 9 likes
3/5
I’m right on a 3.
When this album hits, it hits pretty good – there are some genuinely energetic songs here that come together in complete harmony between the vocals, lyrics, and instrumentation, and I’d say that comprises about half the album. The other half tends to hit on just one or two of the three, but never quite hits that perfect balance on all 3; sometimes, it’ll reach it briefly during one of the other 7 songs, but it never sustains it for long enough to really click like the other 7 do.
I’ll say this – it never falters on the instrumentation. I especially love the usage of the horns here, giving everything a sort of Ska vibe that I think is kinda underrated. The mixing is… a bit suspect at times, with the guitar especially overwhelming almost every other instrument here on most of the songs, but I never thought it was that big of a deal.
I mean, ultimately, it’s a fine album, but it’s just kind of underwhelming for an album to really peak around Track 6 or 7 and then kinda just walk its way to the finish line, you know? I felt less engaged by the halfway mark, and it just sort of wore me down by the end. There’s solid stuff here, and I’d imagine someone will stay engaged the whole way through, but it just doesn’t feel like I needed to listen to this before I die. It’s a solid 3, and that’s really about it.
808 State · 7 likes
5/5
I’m at a very happy 5.
My brain is obviously already predisposed to video game music, so the second I saw this was “acid house”, I got a little bit of hope for something around that general soundscape. The year though, 1989, gave me pause – acid house, this early, even for December 1989, still feels a few years behind when house as an entire genre really found and hit its commercial stride. The optimism was there, but much shakier. This could’ve been really, really bad.
Thank goodness that this is really, really good. This is CRAZY for 1989 – what’s here is so deeply entrenched in the Roland MIDI soundscapes that would define some of the prime Redbook CD audio quality of early 90s gaming, and most of it could easily pass as video game music. Pacific 202 is just a Sonic CD cut, and you can’t convince me otherwise. These are full compositions, mixed really well in the ear to give a lot of the instruments their shine & room to breathe (save, oddly, for the first track). There’s not a dull moment anywhere on this album, at least for my ears (save, oddly, for the last track, but that barely counts). The fact that it's a full setlist with transitions helps a lot to keep the flow of the album going too.
If you’re not into video game music (or house as a genre), this probably won’t click at all, and I find that a little disappointing. Obviously, taste is subjective, but to deny this from being in one’s musical diet is like refusing to watch game shows because they’re too happy-go-lucky. This is a fantastic example of acid house, house music in general, and a great showcase of the Roland soundscape (and presumably MIDI by extension) for 1989. This feels far ahead of its time, and I have to imagine this really did act as a point of inspiration for other artists in the genre moving forward. It’s perfectly attuned to my tastes, and genuinely one of the best discoveries I’ve had throughout this album experience. Super easy 5.
The Bees · 6 likes
5/5
Honestly, I’m at a 5.
You look at the top reviews for this thing on the site, and there’s a whole lot of disdain & vitriol for what essentially boils down to… lo-fi music. This is just modern lo-fi music, but from 2002, recorded by 2 guys in a little shed for a recording studio, in a quaint garden, somewhere on the Isle of Wight. Treating this thing like self-pretentious indie pop when it’s literally just 2 dudes making songs in a shed is wild to me. You can hear the makeshift nature of this album through most of its tracks, and it’s kind of a miracle it comes out as cleanly & as well-produced as it does. The vocals are solid, but really hypnotizing whenever they hit a harmony. The lyricism is super abstract, presumably related to little slices of life on the island. The production / instrumental work is where this thing shines. It really is about as chill as it could possibly be, with the piano & guitar providing sort of a summer-y vibe to it throughout, with clear influences from 1960s psychedelic rock, a little bit of reggae, and mild hints of trip-hop & electronica. You know, lo-fi music. This is a very mellow album, and while it doesn’t necessarily do anything that special, it just creates a sort of vibe that feels really nice to sit in.
It might be the slight dichotomy of getting such a boldly produced cinematic album yesterday written by a cavalcade of artists, followed by possibly the most casual album on the list so far, coming from 2 dudes in a shed, striking my ears in just the right way, but I happened to really enjoy this. Don’t get me wrong, I understand the low scores & the claims that this doesn’t really deserve a place on the list over some other, well-deserving albums – believe me, I’d probably trade this for “Demon Days”, “Yourself Or Someone Like You”, “Ten Summoner’s Tales” or a number of other albums in a heartbeat, but I’m not necessarily mad that it’s here. If anything, I’m glad it is, because I never would’ve stumbled upon it otherwise. It is one of the most relaxing albums we’ve hit upon on the list, and it just caught me on a good day for it. The floor is definitely a 3, but I just think it’s my type of vibe, hence a 5. To be clear, not all 5s are created equal; it’s not like this is as good as Van Halen’s “1984” or anything. It’s just a vote of confidence, really.
Todd Rundgren · 5 likes
5/5
I’m at a 10. I’ve got the words this time, thankfully.
First and foremost: you *need* headphones for this. It won't hit the same way without them. This is full of little intricacies that might get drowned out otherwise.
Talk about a wild fucking departure from “Something/Anything?”, huh? I was expecting much more of the same, but looking at the Wikipedia article for this album before listening to it, it talks about a tonal shift towards more psychedelic-y strange/chaotic stuff brought on by drug use, or at least, a more chaotically structured album than the generally pop-driven tone of “Something/Anything?”. That’s a scary proposition, given that some artists handle drug use as a tool for creation better than others, and to my ears on that last album, I didn’t think he could expand too far out of the box that album provides. Cautious optimism was the vibe going into this.
Straight out of the fucking gate with this album, man. I don’t know how the hell you decide to start an album off with a 26-minute fever dream of a suite, but I’m glad Todd Rundgren’s drug use didn’t ruin his sense of musicality. This thing might’ve bounced off of people’s ears in 1973 (save for some of the critical praise this got), but for 2025, this feels right at home to my ears. It’s avant garde as hell, yes, but I’ll be damned if it’s not entertaining as shit. Prog rock sensibilities across the board here, combined with a Frank Zappa-esque sense of “throw shit at the wall and see what works”, and a proper ear for music that doesn’t disdain the Beatles or the Beach Boys or any of the popular bands of the era, but instead, takes the best parts of them and blends it with those other two parts to create the equivalent of the Abbey Road medley on drugs. I loved every single second of it, and I’m surprised it felt as coherent as it did.
For 1973, the amount of styles that medley touches, while masterfully transitioning between a lot of the tracks, is stunning to me. It is 12 tracks, it goes 26 minutes, and it’s just a crazy premonition to my brain of where the entire decade would eventually go, crumpled into a ball and without making a mockery of anything within it. I let the whole thing play out in one take, while taking little notes, so here’s some out of context gems: “this feels like 1970s Death Grips”, “what the dogs doing”, & “I guess that evokes a flamingo”. There’s a moment specifically on “Zen Archer” that evoked the sort of crazy transitions that Frank Ocean or Tyler, The Creator might pull off in an album, and that one in particular blew me away. All in all, the entire first half of the album is a ridiculous whirlwind, but one that I was willing to let sweep me away into whatever the hell Todd had next. It did kinda feel like listening to the Abbey Road medley for the first time again, and that’s a big, big plus in my book.
So… how about that second half? I suppose we couldn’t leave all of “Something/Anything?”’s sensibilities behind, and what emerges from that is 29 minutes of an extremely focused set of tracks that mostly feel like a prog rock / R&B album, but with a bit of everything sprinkled in, including some Elton John, The Who, & Marvin Gaye. All of the techniques from the first half are here, but distilled back into the very best aspects of “Something/Anything?”. Granted, a third of the 29 minutes is literally from a series of R&B covers from the doowop / Motown era, but they’re brilliantly adapted & performed, in a way that honestly kind of foreshadows the rise of the quiet storm style that would eventually come into vogue down the line. I’m mostly stunned by how much parts of the second half feel like 80s production, albeit with 70s instrumentation. Hell, the start of “Is It My Name?” directly feels like the start to “Enter Sandman”, so this thing is jumping all over the place.
I really want to specifically point at “Just One Victory”, because it does feel like the triumphant ending to the general theme of the second half, which is coming to terms with the idea of fame from music, despite the style of music you’re being praised for not exactly vibing with what you want to create. Apparently, that’s the realization Todd had after the critical praise he received on “Something/Anything?” & the subsequent drug use, and it’s what spurred him to get to this album. It is his own victory lap, sure, but the lyricism overall just speaks to a sort of cheesy hopeful vibe that just feels lost nowadays. It is the sort of bombastic album closer that I fuck with, and even the “repeating chorus while it all fades out” thing feels entirely earned here.
So, yeah, I’ve got no complaints. That’s a stellar album. It feels like an unrecognized masterpiece of sorts, and I really don’t use that word lightly. “A tour de force”, as the top review for this album says on the site. I loved everything here, and both halves stand on their own merits to create 55 nonstop minutes of brilliance. This coming from the same guy who already made a pretty damn good pop album in “Something/Anything?” is nuts to me. For all I know, this might be your favorite artist’s favorite artist’s favorite album, or however many degrees of “favorite artist’s” it takes to get there. The tree of influence this must have spawned, with iron sharpening iron all the way down, has to be immense. I simply refuse to believe otherwise. It is the type of album that makes people want to make music. It’s an easy 10, if not higher. Unbelievable, truly.
1-Star Albums (5)
All Ratings
Funkadelic
4/5
The thing about listening to an album like this is that you sign up for this sort of ethereal experience where once you lose that initial luster of a new soundscape, you start to lose your focus, and once you start to lose the focus, you miss out on the nuances of the performance – the guitar player working overtime to hit every note, the bass player who has to keep the rhythm, the drummer working so fast in syncopation – that once you finally get back into reality, everything that you’ve been listening to hits you like a truck. When you’re listening, it’s a vibe, and it’s a vibe you don’t appreciate until that moment that it ends.
The soundscapes in this album do eventually overwhelm you, and your enjoyment of this album is truly dependent on how much of that soundscape you can stay engaged for. This album, sonically, is nothing short of incredible; every instrument mixed to perfection, every drum kick, every bass strum, every guitar solo just lies perfectly where it needs to. At some point, I got lost in it. However, I can’t give it a 5/5 just because at some points, I briefly woke up from that entrancing feeling. My best advice? Just let go. Put in some headphones, walk around, and let this album carry you.
it's like a 4.5/5 though
Bruce Springsteen
4/5
I feel like a moron for not listening to any Bruce Springsteen before this. This is a brilliantly produced, cohesive project that makes its theme obvious throughout and it's a treat to listen to, but it's another strong 4/5 for me.
Blur
3/5
I feel like the critiques of a very British culture that’s too obsessed with sex and too caught up in the material things isn’t as valid in 2024 as they were in 1994. It doesn’t mean this album is bad; from top to bottom, it never strays from what its purpose is, and I respect the hell out of it for that. It’s a good listen, but I’d say it’s only about a 3.5/5 for me.
Yes
4/5
From a pure technical standpoint, this is instrumentally just so ahead of its time for me (either that or I don’t know shit about ‘60s rock) that whatever sort of mesmerizing feeling it gave me throughout, it ultimately just left me impressed, across the board, except for A Venture. I struggle to give it a full 5/5 but it’s absolutely a 4.5, and I think it’s my favorite album so far.
Elton John
5/5
For all intents and purposes, I have to give this a 5, because it’s so much closer to a 5 than it is a 4 – just after one listen, it stands on its own merit as just a classic album. Not only did it live up to the slightly lofty expectations I had set for it, it blew them away because it’s just far, far, more than what I originally thought it was gonna be. It is my favorite album we’ve done so far.
Run-D.M.C.
3/5
I have to rate this album for what it is: probably the endgame of the Sugarhill Gang-era style of rap, while setting the stage for rap to properly enter the mainstream behind such a commercially safe album.
Without the confidence in themselves & the genre as a whole that exists in this album, then I can’t imagine the genre really taking off like it did for the rest of the decade and the ‘90s onward. By every modern standard, I think it’s a mediocre album, and I personally can’t rate it any higher than a 3… but it’s not a BAD album. A little cheesy, sure, but that’s the sacrifice of making such a safe album.
Neil Young & Crazy Horse
3/5
If I could rate each part of this album, I think I’d give the front half a strong 3/5 (for my sensibilities) and the back half a 4/5, almost solely on production that feels at least 7 years ahead of its time.
Obviously, that balances out to 3.5, but as an entire album, I don’t think I’d feel right rounding that up to 4 – that would put it at the same level as the Yes album, the Springsteen album, and the Funkadelic album, and I just don’t think I enjoyed this as much as those. I think it’s about even with Parklife for me. Definitely better than Run-D.M.C. though.
Solomon Burke
4/5
This isn’t an album you judge by modern standards. This is the sort of album that in 1964, you bought, you sat down, and you just listened. The lyrics eventually came to you the more you listened. This is a vocal showcase, but it’s also a musical showcase – not about how many synths you can use, or how fast you can drum or strum, or how fast you can spit out a melody, but a musical showcase of the innate spiritual feeling it gives some people, regardless of genre.
For my own personal enjoyment, I think just sitting here, vibing, and letting that feeling overcome me is a better experience than either of the last two albums we’ve listened to. I think for me, it’s a strong 3.5 that personally rounds up to a 4, but you have to be in the right mindset and mood for it to be a 4. It’s certainly no less than a 3.
Turbonegro
2/5
This album is absolutely what I hoped it would not be after the first 2 tracks – a kind of PS2 butt rock soundtrack.
If you were to just listen to a random song off this album, it’s probably a great burst of energy. Like, if you threw this album into a workout playlist and had a song occasionally come up on shuffle, I’m sure it would be a great boost. Yet, as a listening experience for a whole album, due to the lack of variance, it’s absolutely the least enjoyable of what we’ve done so far, at least to my ears, and I’m rating it a 2.
Radiohead
4/5
For my first Radiohead album, I think I certainly got a more experimental one, but I didn’t get a bad one. Compared to the last album, we’ve got such a variance of styles, and those styles enhance the core sound & the core message of the album. As a listening experience, it’s a really good album, and I think I have to add every track (except Fitter Happier) to my big playlist pretty much solely on the production and the vocals. Lyrically, I’m sure I missed some stuff, but I don’t know if I really care.
Right now, it’s not a perfect album to me; there were some points where the dissonance of everything turned me away, at least on that first listen. I don’t think I can give it a 5 right now, but it’s no less than a 4. I can see where the hype comes from, and I think if I give it another re-listen or two to just let everything truly overwhelm me, it could easily be a 5.
Coldplay
5/5
I think people know this album as the one with Clocks & The Scientist – I certainly did, and I won’t act like I’m not guilty of that. It's more than that; It’s an instant classic.
In terms of sticking to a theme, expanding on that theme, and keeping both a vocal style & an instrumental style that hooked me in, I think the album as a full experience was as enjoyable of a listen as I’ve gotten out of any other album. If I’m being nitpicky about it, then… yeah, the album sticks to its theme really, really hard, but it doesn’t really feel repetitive to me, even though we’re dealing with a similar one throughout.
Much like Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, it’s not a full 5, but it’s so close to a 5 for me that I think I have to rate it that.
Kraftwerk
2/5
This album could’ve been cut in half, or even into a third, and I would’ve given it a lot of credit for being an early proponent of the style that would come to define a lot of video game music & the synthesizer use that was soon to come in the ‘80s – short little electronica pieces with fun melodies that work as a great background noise, and certainly ahead of its time.
While all of that is still true to me, the issue is that each track is just feels so long to me that they all overstay their welcome. Don’t get me wrong; I understand that this is sort of what it’s like to ride on that titular express, as made obvious by the sound design. The problem is, if you're riding on an express and look outside, a landscape has scenery changes. Even if you’re just stuck looking at trees, each tree has their own thing, and they go by in a blur. These tracks don’t go by in a blur, and they didn't captivate me in like seeing a big mountain in the distance.
In 1977, I'm sure this was great, but in 2024, it feels less like I’m riding a high speed train, and more like I’m stuck on a tourist bus in LA traffic. I'm disappointed to give this a 2 -- not because it's that bad, but because it just doesn't fit my sensibilities for an album experience, and I didn't enjoy it as much as some of the other albums we've done so far.
It was better than Apocalypse Dudes, though.
Lou Reed
5/5
In terms of being a concept album that gives you its story from start to finish, backs that up with great instrumentation, and keeps you rather compelled once it really kicks in, then… yeah. We’ve got a great album here.
It’s not perfect; even though I think Lou’s voice still ended up being the perfect tone by the end of the album, I don’t think the sort of monotony works at the start, when Jim hasn’t gone completely drug-addicted and insane. It also doesn’t really spell out the idea that there’s a story going on here until about track 6, at least for a presumed “casual” listen like I was doing. If you want to go all in on the concept album, then start with a curtain opening or something; give the listener a very audible clue that this is an overarching story and each song has a part to play in it.
I think just because I got so enthralled by it, I have to give it a 5 out of respect for absolutely nailing what it went for, but it's not a very replayable album: if we were going out of 10, I'd probably give it an 8.5/10. I'd recommend the album to anyone, as long as you tell them there's a story first.
R.E.M.
4/5
I think based on what I knew about R.E.M., I was expecting something more akin to their big hits – in terms of the soundscape, it absolutely delivered, and for a debut album, I think it perfectly sets up the framework for all of their future records. They stick to it perfectly, and I think the vocal performance on each track suits every single track.
Lyrically, I was just desperate for more substance. It isn’t gonna drag the album down for me that much, but after Berlin, I'm just kinda underwhelmed. I think I have to give this a 4, but it doesn’t really feel that way to me, just because I couldn’t get past the lyrics thing, I couldn’t enjoy it as much as say, the Yes album or OK Computer, but I definitely enjoyed it more than Neil Young & Run D.M.C. It’s like a 3.6, I guess.
Public Image Ltd.
2/5
i liked it better when he wasn't singing
LTJ Bukem
2/5
well that sure was drum and bass
(it's like a 2.5 but i can't give it a 3)
Björk
4/5
I think it’s hard to quantify this album into numbers.
It’s not an album you can replay; there’s no big hit single here, there’s no catchy one-liners, there’s not even really melodies like that. There’s just Bjork, her voice, her emotions, and her soundscape. It’s hard to enter that soundscape at first, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it turns off some people early on (it nearly turned me off tbh). If you stick to it, what you end up with is a very cathartic album – a baring of the soul of someone who’s so clearly been through so much shit that they had to get it off their chest.
I do think the album could have ended on track 7 to make for a much more complete and fulfilling experience, but the last 2 tracks didn't take away from the sort of mesmerizing feeling the whole album gave me. I’m gonna give it a strong 4, and in retrospect, that’s the same rating I should’ve given to Berlin. They both do an incredible job of conveying their themes and their emotions, but I think the more personal nature of this album pushes it ahead of Berlin for me in terms of concept albums, though like I said; this is an album that you can’t really quantify with numbers. You either feel it or you don’t.
A Tribe Called Quest
5/5
I mean… wow. Sonically, this album feels so full to the ear, from the heavy basslines, the sampled drums & other beats, and perfectly placed vocal flows that I find it impossible to not enjoy this album from that standpoint alone, but...
Look, if Run-DMC made commercially viable mainstream hip-hop possible, and N.W.A. gave rap the blueprint to have the amount of edge you’d find in albums to come, this album is the perfect melding of both – the commercially acceptable sounds of jazz and great sampling that others would continue to try and refine throughout the decade, mixed with the type of vocal flow to appease the holdovers from the Sugarhill Gang-era who couldn’t quite get behind Dr. Dre & company, with a lot of bones thrown in for the N.W.A.-adjacent crowd. Don't even get me started on the ripple effects this album must have had on R&B for the decade and beyond too.
For my money’s worth, this is the best album I've listened to so far. It is easily the most deserved 5 I've given, and if we were going by 10, I’d genuinely give it at least a 9.75/10, if not an outright 10. I think, for my sensibilities, it's basically a perfect album, and I am a complete moron for not listening to it beforehand.
Brian Eno
3/5
Well, it’s not what I was expecting, obviously, but it doesn’t mean I didn’t like it. I think for 1975, it’s a very interesting call to go for an album like this, and in a lot of ways, I think there's a semblance of some modern production here. I don’t think there’s a whole lot to say other than “it sounded really nice,” and I think for my tastes, it did a really good job of filling its soundscape up to keep me captivated.
It’s like a 3 – I don’t think it’s super great, but it’s a really chill listen and it’s something I’d recommend. Just not like, mind-blowing or anything.
Maxwell
2/5
This is an entirely forgettable album for me; it’s not really that good, but it’s not so egregiously bad that it sticks in the brain on account of that. Sure, the soundscape is great, and Maxwell’s vocals are really smooth, but I can’t really tell you the difference between Track 1, Track 3, Track 8, or Track 11 off the top of my head, and that’s just not a good album experience for me.
To me, it suffers from the same problems I had with Apocalypse Dudes & Trans-Europe Express: each track is either too similar or too long. They all sound nice, and I’m willing to give Maxwell credit if this album did indeed innovate and refine a genre like Wikipedia is claiming it did. But by the standards of 2024, I just don’t think it works for me. It’s still better than Apocalypse Dudes, but I actually don’t think I enjoyed it as much as Trans-Europe Express. I’m gonna stay consistent with my rankings of those and give this a 2.
Led Zeppelin
5/5
It’s a 5. It’s the fastest 5 I could possibly give.
Like, I could easily go on about the guitar work, the vocal work, the drum work, and how it all comes together to make one of the greatest rock soundscapes ever, but the strength of this album is simply making its listener feel. This album just enthralled me from start to finish, and that’s a compliment I can give to very few albums.
Really, I’m just… kinda speechless. It’s a perfect rock album in the same way that The Low End Theory is a perfect rap album. Pinnacles and bar-setters of a genre for their eras, with a timeless sound to both.
Soft Machine
2/5
Nah. Just nah.
It’s not egregiously terrible, but these songs drone endlessly on without any clear direction; especially Track 3, my god.
It wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the most baffling instrumental choices I think any of these albums have made so far. For a pretty early attempt to blend jazzy instruments with electronica and synth, I have to give it credit for occasionally succeeding. The problem is, those moments are so short and so fleeting under these incredibly fucking long songs that it’s like finding a $1 bill while you’re walking through a sea of pennies. Those moments are enough to put this album at a 2 for me, but… this just wasn’t it, man.
Sly & The Family Stone
4/5
Man, that’s a really good album. For 1969, I think it completely hits on all of its goals; talk about the social issues of the time, show off some fantastic musical skills, and just make an album you can vibe out to regardless of who you are.
I’m really more impressed by the guitar work on this album than anything else – I’m not one to focus too heavily on individual instruments, since I think a full soundscape should usually be driven by everything working in harmony, but this album manages to achieve a great harmony between its vocals, the basslines, the drums, and all the other instruments that they throw in throughout, while letting the guitar just absolutely shine throughout.
I ripped heavily into Third for not being able to keep its listener engaged, but I think it’s because it was just experimenting too hard for my tastes. On this album, I think Sex Machine is 14 minutes of just an incredibly satisfying jam session (save for that kinda grating guitar about 9 minutes in) that does exactly what I wish Third had done: keep it simple while just finding a fun way to integrate these rock instruments with a jazzy feel.
That instrumental philosophy rings true throughout every aspect of this album, and I think my only complaint here is hoping for a little more lyrical density, but that’s kind of a nitpick. It’s a really fun album, and I think it’s a high 4 that could easily round up to a 5 on any subsequent listens.
Probably didn't need Track 2, though.
Led Zeppelin
4/5
For a debut album, that’s a fucking great album.
A lot of my compliments for IV apply here too – the guitar work, the vocal work, the drum work all come together to make a really, really good soundscape. It’s obviously a lot more refined and perfected by IV, but this album is no slouch of its own, and I think some of its more high energy tracks just feel better to my ears than IV’s songs at certain points. For Stand!, I mentioned how the guitar work stood out to me, but that’s taken to an even higher level on this record for me. As a complete album, I do think there are some songs here that are just a little underwhelming, or a little unfitting, but they don’t take away from my enjoyment of this album whatsoever.
It’s not a 5 for me, at least not on this first listen, but it’s absolutely like a 4 at least, and a highly recommended listen.
Prince
5/5
I mean… man. Slow start, big finish, but what an album.
I’ve always been an MJ guy and not a Prince guy, which is to say I’ve always treated Michael’s albums with incredible reverence, and only given the same reverence to Prince’s big singles – Little Red Corvette, 1999, Kiss, When Doves Cry, Purple Rain, and so on. This album has made me realize I am a moron for not approaching Prince’s albums in the same way. There’s just an energy to this whole thing that’s a bit understated – I thought tracks 2 & 3 were a little disjointed, and I wasn’t vibing with them, but it fucking kicked into high gear for me with Track 6 and then never looked back.
Lyrically, sometimes I wish Prince were a little less horny, but I get the feeling that would be the most futile cause in all of music. Instrumentally, I just hear the quintessential sound of the 1980s all wrapped up into one album; your acoustics, your electronics, your pre-programmed drums, your live drums, your horn sections, your deep voices, and your falsettos.
In every sense of the word, it’s a 5 – realistically, for my tastes, it’s probably like a 4.75 (few tracks go a little long, slight repetition, be less horny), but I’d be a criminal to not round it up. Just a really, really good listen. High recommendation.
Thundercat
4/5
So, I’ve never listened to this in full with headphones in or anything like that – I had a small sense of what the album was like, or at least I thought I did.
If you focus solely on the instruments, you end up with such a funky, bassy record that takes all of Thundercat’s best production beats on To Pimp a Butterfly, and then expands them to fit his own sensibilities lyrically. If you take the time to focus on the lyrics, you end up with all the phases of what it’s like to be drunk: the brief jolts of happiness, the random thoughts that creep in, the deep seated feelings that something isn’t right and you’re just kinda running away from something, and then the overwhelming sadness that comes as that drunk feeling starts to wear off.
They meld together to make a really good soundscape, and ultimately, a really good album. I don’t think it’s perfect – I think some tracks go a little too short, I think some tracks didn’t quite click right with me on this first full listen, and there are some instrumentals where I went “I wish this was used for something with a little more depth,” but those are all nitpicks. The whole album is a great, great listen, and I’d recommend it to anyone.
Strong, strong 4. Probably a 5 if you’re high.
3/5
…It’s just OK.
There’s really nothing that special here – I have a number of songs I sorta liked while listening, just because they hit on some of my musical sensibilities, but it’s a pretty forgettable album otherwise. There’s no standouts, there’s nothing here but a really stripped down style: two vocalists, a good drummer, and a sick guitarist. Instrumentals on this album are great, but the lyrics and the vocal performances just weren’t always clicking for me. It’s a mediocre 3; it kinda just feels like it’s a worse version of Murmur by R.E.M..
3/5
I think this is a strong 3 for me – like, if we could go by decimals, you’re looking at a 3.5 that I can’t personally round up to a 4.
This album hits on a lot of my sensibilities for this era, but I feel like the vision she’s going for isn’t fully realized over the course of this album. You’ve got great soundscapes, and when they hit in tandem with the lyrics, they hit, and I’d say they hit more often than not. However, when they do feel disjointed, it kinda sticks out to me in a way that… doesn’t ruin the album experience, necessarily, but it’s harder to stay invested for me because I kind of have to focus one way or the other instead of working in harmony.
Those moments are what’s keeping me from rounding up to a 4, but this is a really nice sounding album, and I think there’s some high emotional points on it that would make me recommend it to some people I know.
Milton Nascimento
5/5
This is possibly the most conflicted I’ve been on rating an album so far.
The political climate of 1972 for Brazil underscores a lot of this album, and there’s a passion throughout it that’s so easy to feel, but probably very hard to understand in 2024 without an innate knowledge of the subject that I just don’t have. Let me be clear: I’d be a moron to not acknowledge that this is a good album. It does not sound like it came from 1972 at all – there’s an exploration of so many genres here that it feels like the album had an incredible vision of what music was gonna be for at least the next 20 or 30 years, if not longer, and it’s all carried by two things: guitar playing that simply feels timeless, whether it’s acoustic, electric, or bass, and absolutely passionate vocals by Milton Nascimento & Lo Borges that you can feel even through the language barrier.
My confliction is not “is this good or bad” – it’s do I give this a 4 or 5? I feel like I can’t give it a 5 because of that language barrier, and how I don’t think I can fully enjoy the album because of that, but I’d also probably be a moron to not give it a 5 out of pure trust in how cathartic this album must have felt in 1972, and how well it’s aged into modern times; so many of the other 70s albums we’ve heard have occasionally had mixing issues or choices that clearly dated them.
If we were going by 10, it’d be an easy choice to just say 9/10 and get it over with, but for a 5 point scale, I think I have no choice but to round it up, just out of respect for nailing everything it tries to do.
Ray Price
3/5
It’s… realistically, just a 3. It’s a pretty atypical country album for this time period I think, with a little extra flair here and there, and nothing really stands out except for a few tracks… but personally, it’s an album I think I’ll keep in shuffle.
I have an incredible nostalgia for this type of soundscape – the country twang, the strong vocals, the fiddles and violins and strings mixed with crisp drums. The feeling this album gave me really, really did send me back to days of sitting in a car that still took old cassette tapes, with my dad popping them in during any car trips, and they always sounded like this. I haven’t forgotten that sound, but I haven’t actively been seeking it out. This album has made me want to revisit that sound; to find those old cassettes, to see what they were and to see if they hold up.
It’s just a really nice album for me, and I'm glad I listened to it.
Dennis Wilson
3/5
Another solid 3 – there’s some good highs here, not many lows, but overall, I feel just… whelmed. A lot of these tracks feel like they’re missing one extra thing in them that would really fill out each song and make them feel more complete. It’s not a disappointing album per se, it’s just dripping with some unmet potential, I think.
It’s not a bad album, but it’s not one where I’d go back to too many tracks. I think it’s certainly worth a listen – there’s good stuff in here, namely the stretch of tracks 5 through 9, and I’m sure there’s some of the other tracks that would hit better to my ears if I listen even more, but... I think I’m just gonna stick to a 3.
Bill Evans Trio
4/5
That is absolutely pure jazz.
I could nitpick; a few tracks have the instruments going a little too hard sometimes for it to be a super relaxed jazz album, but that’s the type of nitpick that would get you punched in the face. It’s just a great album for easy listening – there are some points where I was maybe hoping for lyrics or a brass section moment, but nothing ever really felt empty. Absolutely a must-listen record, even if it’s only as background noise, because it will eventually suck you in, either with the bass, the piano, or the drums.
I don't think it's a 5 – it's not the type of album that I'd give a 5, but I’m gonna go with a 4. I'm giving it that just because it’s a REALLY timeless jazz record; there’s not a single missed note or beat here. Just a great listen.
The Specials
4/5
I came into this album expecting ska, and to some degree, I did get it, but I kinda wish I came in with different expectations.
This is a highly diverse, really experimental album for 1980 that I think hits more often than not. As far as the production goes, even after a pretty slow start marked by pretty traditional instrumentation, once it starts to get into the experimental, a lot of what’s on this record feels pretty ahead of its era – the sort of soundscapes that diversify themselves throughout this album certainly became more mainstream by the late 90s and early 2000s, and in that sense, this album is way more of a trendsetter than I was expecting going in. For 1980, I’m sure this was a little polarizing, but for 2024, everything in here feels pretty typical, but it still feels kinda fresh and nice, and I’m super impressed by that.
It’s not a perfect album; there are some mixing things here and there, and a few tracks kinda just made me bored, but I think I’ve got to give this thing a 4 out of respect for being able to switch between so many genres and for usually just being really catchy.
Jah Wobble's Invaders Of The Heart
2/5
This album could’ve been cut in half, or even into thirds, and I would’ve given it a lot of credit for being (does this sound familiar yet?) a completely competent album with a great runtime that explores a variety of styles and explores them all in short bursts, with some mediocre vocals, and I’d have given it a 3.
The completely needlessly long runtime and repetitive production that actually permeates this entire album single handedly ruins it. It’s not an egregiously terrible album, but it just drains on and on, and it gets so utterly boring by the end that you barely realize the final track is the final track. It’s a 2, but it’s an Apocalypse Dudes-style 2 where individually, I’m sure these would be great tracks in bursts, but as a whole album, it’s just a miserable experience to me.
Nirvana
5/5
I am in a sort of stunned silence.
I know Nirvana’s big hits, but I don’t think those big hits really represent the true spirit of the band. Smells Like Teen Spirit is obviously nowhere to be found on this album, and it doesn’t feel missed at all. Kurt Cobain and the rest of Nirvana wanted to just be themselves, jam out, and do some of their favorites, big hits be damned. The fact that half of this record is covers is a testament to how little they cared about the commercialism of it all.
There were times where I kinda just zoned out to let the music carry me, but I think that’s the underlying point of Nirvana as a band. It’s very easy to understand their biggest hits, which is where I clearly was (and still am, really), but to understand Nirvana, and to more aptly explore Kurt Cobain, I feel like this album just gives a lot of insight into why Nirvana has endured this long after his passing. I’m sure there’s even more answers on their studio records, but there’s just something about that last song, and the way everyone literally held onto his every breath that just explains why he was so captivating to so many people without a single word.
I really don’t think there’s a flaw in this album – I’m going to give it a 5, but something tells me that I deeply need to go back to the original studio versions of each song in here that I didn’t know to really appreciate these more stripped-down versions even more.
Dolly Parton
4/5
It’s a really, really nice 3 that I’m going to be biased and call a 4, just for how often I felt touched by this album.
It really does just come down to how well their vocals blend together, and my bias towards this sort of general sound. I might have this sort of bias for a lot of the country albums that come up, but I’ll live with that. If nothing else, this album is great for easy listening, and to hear three great female vocalists. For my tastes, it just hit right, and sometimes, that’s all you can ask music to do.
The Rolling Stones
4/5
Sympathy for the Devil set a major tone for a completely different sounding album. I was expecting a sort of big heavy rock album, and instead, I kinda got a sort of pseudo country album mixed with some other flavors and rock stylings, but it’s an album I’m totally down with.
I’ve never listened to a full Rolling Stones album before this, but I thought the production here was incredibly good, and even though it didn’t retain the same energy that Sympathy for the Devil kicked off with, the sort of country/folksy/blues sensibilities that wash over the rest of the album just fit really nicely for me, and I liked it a lot.
It’s a strong 4; certainly worth a listen, and I’m sure that the tracks I wasn’t fully vibing with might be someone else’s favorite; that’s a testament to the pretty good variance in this album.
Talking Heads
3/5
I feel like I just got drugged by David Byrne.
I’ve never listened to a Talking Heads album in full, but I thought I knew some of the eccentricities of the band (and namely Byrne), but clearly I wasn’t fully prepared. This album goes in so many directions lyrically that it kinda distracted me from REALLY great production that feels ripped a little more out of 1987 than 1977. I’m not complaining about the album, necessarily; I think it’s a good listen, but you really have to be in the mindset for it, and you have to accept that shit will get kinda wacky.
It's like a 3.5 that I don't think I can really round up to a 4, but I think it's a good album, and it’s certainly an album that I think needs another listen or two to really get and appreciate more.
Adele
5/5
That’s a 5, through and through, and if we were going by 10, to me, it’d be a 10/10. It comes as no surprise to me that this is the best-selling album of the 21st century thus far, and I feel like a moron for never listening to the whole thing until today.
I really truly think this is the album that defined the sounds of the 2010s, for better or for worse, and the fact that she was only 21 is insane to me. I loved every single song on here, and obviously, I’m a little biased because of growing up on the big hits, but there’s some incredibly good stuff in between that I had never heard until this listen. I think every part of this album, from the production, to the lyrics, to the vocals, hits on everything I love about music. Perhaps, in some subconscious sense, the amount of times I heard the singles from this album on the radio, or on YouTube, or in some movie or ad, is what shaped so many of my musical tendencies as I grew up. Just a spectacular album, and for me, a timeless one.
Tricky
1/5
This may be harsh, but... I really think it’s actually the worst album we’ve listened to so far, at least for my sensibilities.
I think my main problem is that it’s just really boring. Like, with the other “bad” albums we’ve had, they keep a consistent theme, there’s at least an attempt at some energy, and there’s usually at least one song where I go, “you know what, that was kinda catchy,” but on this one… it’s just not there at all. The most important thing an album can do is make you feel something; the “bad” albums got me to feel, even if it was anger at repetition or never evolving a sound, but for this one, I felt quite literally no emotion whatsoever.
I feel like I’ve just listened to a bootleg album composed entirely of raps and instruments from old 90s CD sample discs; you know, the ones filled with nonsensical verses or random lines that ended up in like, Marvel vs. Capcom soundtracks and stuff. The problem is, there’s no way to make any of these songs actually interesting to my ear. Every track here feels like it’s got absolutely no energy, whether it’s in the production, the tempo, or the vocals, and that just goes against a lot of my musical sensibilities.
It’s the first 1 I’m going to give – it’s just that boring to me.
Goldie
2/5
Completely competent drum and bass that I listened to while doing my morning routine.
Just a 2.
Beastie Boys
5/5
It’s hard to find a good way to describe how I feel about this album. It’s certainly not bad; I think it’s one of the best albums we’ve hit upon during this experience. It’s just a lot different than what I was expecting, and it’s a little hard to find a way to really convey that.
Without question, this is fabulous production from top to bottom – I think the lyricism on all these tracks hits the right balance between serious, funny, introspective, and so on. The sampling throughout the album has such a wide and vivid range of styles and soundscapes that really shows just how much the Beastie Boys cared about respecting the genre and its evolving sound through the 90s as white artists.
If I had any nitpicks, it would be that there’s maybe a few too many instrumentals on the album? They’re all great, but they do sometimes fail to keep the energy of a previous track going. There’s also the amount of vocal distortion, which may or may not be a Beastie Boys staple, but I found it sometimes undercut the more serious lyrical moments of the album at times.
In terms of a ranking, I think it’s closer to a 5 than it is a 4, even with my nitpicks and my expectations being kinda thrown out the window. From front to back, I think it’s a good listen, and even if it could’ve been trimmed down a little bit, I think it deserves its place in the 90s rap canon as much as any other critically acclaimed rap album of its time.
Bob Dylan
3/5
It’s another one of those albums where I end up at a 3.5 and I just can’t round it up to a 4.
Don’t get me wrong, for 1965, I think this is great lyricism across the board, and I think the first 7 tracks have such a great energy and sound and tempo to them. It’s the last 4 tracks where the emphasis is so heavily put on the lyrics at the sacrifice of the layered production of those first 7 tracks that kind of drag the album down from hitting that 4 for me. Take for example, “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Smiling),” because it might have some of my favorite lyrics I’ve heard in a song yet, but the absolute minimalist production on it just doesn’t hit on my sensibilities, and that’s where you sort of lose me as a listener.
It could definitely go up to a 4 on some subsequent listens, but I don’t think I can bump it for now.
The Verve
3/5
This album is a test in patience that I’m just not sure I really have.
I can commend a lot of things about this album; I think the guitar playing is fabulous throughout, I think the instrumental interludes are a fantastic showcase of that, and ultimately I don’t think it’s actually that bad of an album. It’s just not my kind of album.
It doesn’t hit on that many of my sensibilities, but much like a game demo, I’m smart enough to tell when something is probably good, but just not for me. I found that, for me, a lot of this album just felt too similar, a bit too boring, and a bit too monotone. I’m sure for another person, they’ll be able to appreciate those parts of it; to ignore the lyrics, ignore the slow prodding tempos that make songs feel even longer than they already are, and simply feel the music in a way that I just can’t. There are points in this album where it all clicks for me, and those moments, while brief, are really nice.
Realistically, for my tastes, I think it’s a 2.5 that I’m going to, perhaps begrudgingly, round up to a 3, if only because I recognize that it has something going for it that just doesn’t fit my vibe. It’s way better than Apocalypse Dudes, at least.
Mudhoney
4/5
I only listened to the original 6 songs from the first EP release, and I think that's the best way to listen to it, because that is an electrifying 22 minutes.
The energy on this album is off the charts, and once it gets going, it’s like a fucking freight train. I ripped on Apocalypse Dudes for not having enough variance, at least to my ears, but this album has enough variance in its short run time to keep everything fresh. I can see why Kurt Cobain liked this so much – there is a truly infectious feeling to it, and for my money, it doesn’t overstay its welcome.
I’m gonna go with a 4 – I thought Chain That Door was kind of boring compared to the rest of the album, and I do think there is a hint of repetition in the styles of each song that does become a bit apparent once that initial wave of energy washes away. I still fucking loved that, though.
The Mamas & The Papas
3/5
The very definition of a 3 – I think all the songs here sound really nice, but there’s only a few real standouts. I think it suffers from the general thing that ‘60s albums tend to do, which is really weird panning that kind of sacrifices the original vision of a song, but it doesn’t make them bad, necessarily. It’s a solid listen, but there’s just not enough to really warrant coming back to a lot of the tracks.
Leonard Cohen
5/5
I am deeply struggling to find the words to say about this album.
It’s very rare for me to think of music as art in the classical sense – the way people get emotional at seeing the Mona Lisa or the Sistine Chapel, where they can feel the weight of history and the absolute mastery of a craft come upon them, mainly because I usually just don’t feel that when it comes to art. I can certainly feel emotion in music, but usually that emotion comes from the passion of a voice or the lyrical content.
This album may be the only time I have felt the weight of a life long lived bear down on me in musical form, and in many ways, it’s a weight I’m not sure I can accurately hold or carry. In some strange way, I feel too young to truly connect to this album and its subject material in full, but I deeply appreciate every song on here and the man behind them.
In that sense, I have almost no choice but to give this album a 5.
The Stone Roses
5/5
I needed the sound of this album badly. When I think of the 1980s, this is the sort of instrumentation I think of, but it also blends in so much of what I love from the early 90s. It’s a great album to just throw on and listen to even if you only care about the instrumentation, but lyrically and vocally, I think every song here has some kind of validity, whether it’s in how they made me feel, or in terms of its actual subject matter.
I’m gonna go with a 5, if only because this album really lightened up my kind of stressed out mood, and I think it’s just hitting on all of my musical sensibilities. It’s not perfect, but I do think it’s much closer to a 5 than it is a 4.
Radiohead
5/5
That’s an instant 5.
I have said before that the most important thing an album can do is to make you feel something, and… this album made me feel a lot of things. To some ears, I can understand it; occasionally, there is an incredible repetition in the soundscape that lingers on for a bit too long, and for those ears, that’s the sort of thing that takes them out of being engaged.
For my money, though, there was not a dull moment in this album – I think almost every track here pulled me into its mood and its lyrics, and that is a testament to the amount of detail and effort poured into this entire album, whether it’s from Thom Yorke’s vocals, the incredible guitar & drums, or just the mixing that made everything stand out that much more. Just a fabulous, fabulous record.
The Police
4/5
It’s… probably a really light 4, at least for me.
As an entire album, I think it does do a good job of keeping a consistent sound (except for Mother, what the fuck), but something could never fully hook me in to the whole thing. In terms of individual tracks, there are great ones on this album – obviously Every Breath You Take was a massive hit, but King of Pain & Wrapped Around Your Finger are both really, really good songs.
I don’t really have a good sense of The Police from before this album, and I have a much better sense of Sting’s solo work in the 90s, but it’s very apparent to me that this is a crowning achievement for both the band and himself, and I do think a lot of these songs have held up incredibly well for being 41 years old. It's honestly way closer to a 3 than a 5 for me, but I'm just satisfied enough to bump it up.
Paul Weller
4/5
I think, much like Synchronicity, I’m gonna go with a light 4, but I think this one’s a little closer to the side of a 5 for me.
As far as the instrumentation goes, I think this is one of the nicest albums we’ve had yet in terms of pure easy listening. Vocally, I do think there were some times where I would’ve loved a little more gruff in his voice to better fit the mood of some of the songs, but other than that, his biggest crime was just sometimes staying a little too monotone for me.
I think my big issue with this album is that it just goes a little long, and like I’ve said, if the sound starts to lose its luster, you start to lose the listener, and there are some tracks on here that either dragged on, or suffered from the infamous “the first minute is the entire song” problem. When this album hits though, it fucking hits, and I can’t say I ever really got bored of the album like that. Is it generic in a few spots? Of course, but when everyone was hitting around this sort of sound in the 90s, there are bound to be a few. I’d definitely recommend it, and I think some of the album’s weaker spots for me would be strong points for others.
4/5
I did something I don’t normally do with these albums, and that’s go back to the first few songs after finishing. I’m glad I did, because I definitely came into this album with the wrong mindset – it originally clicked for me around Track 5 that the sort of cacophony I was embedded in was a very controlled and intentional chaos, which became incredibly apparent by Track 7, and from that point on, once they broke through to me, I thought tracks 8 & 9 were a great string of strong melodies and fun vocals, but that kind of started to fizzle out with how awkward the last 2 tracks felt.
As soon as the album ended, I went back to the first 4 and definitely had a better time with them, except that the Rolling Stones cover was still just a little too different for my tastes. All in all, though, I’d say…weirdly enough, it’s a 3.5 that I’m gonna go ahead and round up to a 4, if only because they managed to pull me out of whatever biases or predispositions I had, and made me really listen to what they were going for, and in that sense, I appreciate the hell out of this album for doing that.
There’s definitely flaws, namely that I just think it’s still a bit off putting near the end, and that sometimes it IS too chaotic, but it’s a really tightly produced album that takes a bit to crack through, and it might not ever crack through for some people, but when you get it, you just get it, and it makes the album work.
Simon & Garfunkel
5/5
That’s an incredibly tightly packed 28 minutes, with a strong variety of subject matters and music styles. A lot of it is held together by the same instruments throughout, but ultimately the album is just nice, and lyrically, it just feels way more in line with what I wish music still was. I’m not opposed to pop melodies or catchy hooks, but just hearing the lyrics on this album makes me want more of this type of poetic license, and not just super contemporary IG captions that everyone wants to write nowadays.
It’s actually a 5 for me – there’s maybe one or two skips, but ultimately, what a triumph of an album, and a masterclass in how to maximize the balance between being meaningful and being melodically appealing without feeling too preachy or too long.
It certainly helps that I actually understood half the references on the album.
Beth Orton
3/5
It’s a resounding 3 that has flashes of a really nice 4, but never ever quite gets there.
Ultimately, the biggest problem this album suffers from is its runtime, but it’s not in the sense that every track goes too long, it’s just that SOME of them do, and those extended periods where the song feels like it’s continuing just for the sake of padding or noise are what really drag this album down. There are some skips, don’t get me wrong, but I thought at least most of this album had really really enjoyable melodies (both vocally and instrumentally) behind them. The problem is, even with its best tracks, there are some moments of lyrical futility where it’s either full of empty platitudes or moments of repetition that are too often to not eventually notice.
I will say, though, from track 8 onward, the album ends on a really nice tone, and if the album were more like its final 5 (and first 2) tracks, I’d probably be pointing in the direction of a 4. It’s just that the other 5 tracks either drag on too long, or they’re just too boring for my tastes. It’s definitely not a bad album though, you just have to be in the right mood to endure some of its longer stuff.
The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
3/5
It’s an incredibly bold and incredibly stupid choice to put two of your 4 worst songs (Skunk & Fuck Shit Up) at the very front of the album, but somehow, what emerges from it is a shockingly nice 36 minute jam session full of really good, diverse energy.
There are still points where the production is a fucking cacophonic mess, but those moments show up less and less after Fuck Shit Up, and by Track 7, the album actually becomes a fun listen up until the final 2 tracks, where it goes back into the bad habits of Skunk & Fuck Shit Up. Really experimental, avant-garde, greasy grungy garage rock that somehow hits on some of my sensibilities from about Tracks 5 through 14, and that’s most of the album, which is a miracle after that abysmal opening.
To put it bluntly, this is the album Apocalypse Dudes fucking wishes it could have been, and it pulls off a bigger comeback than the Patriots did in Super Bowl 51. It is a 3 as a whole, but the good songs on this album, I would genuinely rate a 4.
Television
3/5
It’s a really, really competent and super nice 3.
I think, ultimately, my big thing with the album is that most of its tracks, while technically and instrumentally incredibly solid, with a great sound, and foundationally good to listen to, don’t do enough to stay memorable past those moments of bliss. Vocally, I find Tom Verlaine to be… I don’t know, just not the right fit for the great instrumentation on this album. He’s not bad, necessarily, but it feels more like a bit of Bob Dylan mixed with David Byrne to me, and that just doesn’t vibe well with these instruments.
In that sense, if you can’t keep me engaged with all the parts of your soundscape, it’s harder to hook me into the songs, and most of them never fully hooked me. The guitar work on this album would get a 5/5 if we were going only by that, but as an entire package, I just don’t think there are that many memorable songs to return to that would justify giving this any higher than a 3, but I could be completely wrong.
Kid Rock
1/5
This is the worst Beastie Boys album I’ve ever listened to.
OK, fine, I’ll be real with you, it’s a completely soulless, uninspired, mediocre 2 that probably has at least one or two guilty pleasures on it, if only for their presence in the cultural zeitgeist of the time, or in the obnoxious case of Cowboy, a genuine acknowledgement that there is something catchy to it, however minor, if only for the obvious sample and how Neil Cicierega has used it in the years since.
From listening solely to the clean version, and refusing to hear Kid Rock openly use the N-word on the original final track of this album, what I find is that this is my “rap / country / rock fusion whatever the fuck genre we’re defining this as” version of Apocalypse Dudes, in which if you completely ignore the fucking horribly dated lyrics and just pluck one song from this album at a time while exercising or something else, you will end up with a small but effective boost of energy in terms of having not terrible guitar and drum work, even with Kid Rock just screaming on more than half the tracks.
As an entire album experience though, it is objectively so fucking boring, so draining, so long, so repetitive, and so similar for most of its tracks, that the only reason it’s even partially getting a 2 is that there are at least a few fleeting moments of actual tiny headbops that come in and out, unlike that fucking awful Tricky album (Maxinquaye is still worse, yes, sue me).
Out of a complete lack of respect for Kid Rock as a person though, even though this album is a 2 in my mind, I'm going to rate it a 1 anyway, because fuck you, Kid Rock.
Tears For Fears
5/5
It’s an easy 5.
I’ve never listened to the other tracks on this album besides the big 3 of Shout, Everybody Wants To Rule The World, and Head Over Heels, but almost every other track here really perfectly complements those 3. The one song on this album I wasn’t really feeling was Listen, but I’m going to treat that as kind of an epilogue track, because it sure feels like this album should have ended on Head Over Heels and that applause-filled outro.
Obviously, my opinion might be a bit skewed because we just did a Kid Rock album, but I felt quite literally spiritually cleansed of the stench of Devil Without a Cause by the fantastic saxophone in The Working Hour, and the album just stayed at pure bliss for me after that. I cannot believe that one-two punch of the outro to The Working Hour & the intro to Everybody Wants To Rule The World, because it sent me into the damn stratosphere. Super deserved 5, and a fantastic album.
Mercury Rev
4/5
It’s a 3.5 that I think I’m going to begrudgingly round up, if only because I recognize that its biggest weakness for me is not going to be as big of a factor for some other people.
I will say, first of all, that because of the renaissance of the late 90s aesthetic and style going on right now, something about this album does feel a bit like 2024 instead of 1998. That’s not to say it’s a timeless sound, but it’s certainly a sound that feels like it’s in vogue again, and that helped a lot with this album.
My biggest thing with this album is the vocals, and I know that shouldn’t be a dig in light of really strong top to bottom production (except for The Happy End), but it really did just drag me out of a few of the songs. There are points when the vocals click really well, but when the lyrics are great and the vocal passion isn’t quite there to match it, something just doesn’t work well for me. However, that’s me – this album is certainly deserving of a 4, and I’m sure it would get there on a subsequent listen when something just clicks better for me, and I’ll round it up now to be fair.
David Bowie
3/5
Stuck with a 3 on this one – maybe something never quite clicked for me, but even though I liked a lot of this album, it either felt like Bowie was holding back a little bit vocally to try and better fit the atmosphere of the record, or that lyrically he got a little too repetitive at times in a way that kind of just distracted me from that excellent top to bottom instrumentation – what a band.
I can see what the vision was; a David Bowie soul album, and while I’d say he succeeded, those conflicts between the vocals and lyrics became just a little too distracting for me to completely stay invested in his messaging. It could definitely jump up to a 4 if something clicks right later, but I think for my tastes, a 3 feels right.
The Byrds
3/5
It’s a good, strong, technically sound 3.
There’s definitely some fun ones on this album, and when everything clicks, it clicks really nicely, but it just never retains that for super long on here, whether it’s the vocals not matching the lyrics or the lyrics not matching the instrumentation for a few extended periods. I think instrumentally, the biggest thing this album suffers from is simply the time period it’s in; Thoughts & Words would be an even more awesome track if the drums were mixed in to stand out better, and that applies to other instruments on some of the other tracks. C.T.A.-102’s ending is sick as hell, though.
Ultimately, what’s here is fun and it’s short, and each song has its own distinct flavor, which means the album doesn’t really tire itself out. Good listen, definitely some songs to come back to, but nothing higher than a 3.
Fun Lovin' Criminals
3/5
That’s another 3 for me.
It’s really not a bad album, it’s just kind of unmemorable. I really think the production is the obvious standout here – only 2 or 3 tracks ever really fully got my attention lyrically, and the amount of mixed genres with hip-hop sensibilities does a much better (albeit admittedly less energetic) job than that shitty Kid Rock album we listened to. If we were going solely on production, it's at least a 4. Crime & Punishment is probably my standout here, either that or King of New York.
Much like some of the other albums we’ve listened to, the biggest issue is that it’s just a bit too long and a bit too repetitive in some spots to not notice, and those little moments just build up more and more every time, and that's why as a whole album, I can't go any higher than a 3.
(also i don't know where else to put this but i just kept hearing lotus juice in his voice the whole time LOL)
Siouxsie And The Banshees
4/5
That’s a fucking great 4, wow. It’d be a 5 if we had gotten this around Halloween instead of March, and it could totally still be a 5 the more I listen to it.
There is absolutely no way you could have convinced me this album was from 1981, because from top to bottom, it feels at least a decade ahead of its time in terms of production and its general sound. The guitar work is absolutely on fucking fire here, no matter which song or which style, and the same goes for the percussion.
The only reason I can’t really give this a 5 on the first go-around is that there are a few points where the lyrics felt a bit too silly for the tone of the song, and a few points where there was a sort of emptiness carried by the instrumentation that took me out of it. Regardless, it’s at least a 4, and a great album for 1981.
Sly & The Family Stone
3/5
I just don’t really know, but I think I’m at a 3.
For my tastes and my sensibilities, I think I came into this album with the wrong expectations, which is to say an evolution of the funky, polished, catchy idealism that was present on Stand!, and that expectation broke itself down very quickly. This album is a bit darker, a bit less polished, a bit less “catchy” in the sense that there’s definitely no Everyday People-esque songs on this album, and almost certainly a lack of the idealism from Stand!.
I tried to shift myself into the mood once it became apparent, but to me, there’s a sort of ethereal emptiness to this album that stopped me from ever really getting hooked in. Even with such funky instrumentation, the rougher, obviously re-recorded, re-dubbed, and re-taped vocals kept pulling me away from that instrumentation in a way that I think negatively affected my perception of the individual songs; they all felt like demo tapes to me. As an entire album, I think the looser style of the instrumentation here is very effectively realized, and with the context of the drug usage and loneliness that affected the production of this album, it’s really kind of a miracle that this exists as coherently as it does.
However, I just don’t think all of those elements hit on any of my sensibilities. There is something kind of intoxicating about this album though – I can see myself coming back to listen again and try to understand it better, but I also get the feeling this album is never going to fully click for me, and that’s where I’m stuck with a 3.
5/5
It’s a 5, with a few flaws here and there.
The weakest part of this album is the 3-track stretch of Invincible through Exo-Politics, which to me, tries way too hard to fit into the politically progressive rock niche that Green Day had carved into the mainstream when they dropped American Idiot. There’s something that either doesn’t click right for me, or just outright has not aged well under the lens of 2024 as compared to 2006.
The rest of this album is fucking spectacular. Take A Bow is the most electric opening track to an album I’ve heard in years, and an insanely cool tonesetter for the first 4 tracks. Soldier’s Song is fine, and it works with the backdrop of the Blair / Bush years without feeling too preachy. The last 3 (or 4, if you count Glorious) tracks are a great bit of variety, from super cool energetic bombastic pieces like Knights of Cydonia, or more atmospheric stuff like City of Delusion & Hoodoo.
I do think this album does lose its luster a little quickly, but it managed to grab it back at the end for me – realistically, that stretch of tracks 6-8 probably do round it down to a 4.5 for me, but I’d be a moron to not round it up. Fabulous stuff here.
Missy Elliott
4/5
It’s a really cool 4 that I'm REALLY tempted to give a 5 for the hell of it, but I'll hold back.
I haven’t listened to almost all of Missy Elliott’s solo work before this, and that's completely my fault. She popped off on this album, and I'm a moron for not listening to her before now. There are some songs I’m not sure I’ll go back to, but that comes down to little things like “well, the beat didn’t go hard enough for me” or “I can’t be caught dead listening to this in public” (see: Pussycat), but there’s a lot of variety on this album that just hits my musical tastes right. I could try to explain myself, but when you’re vibing, you’re vibing, and I was REALLY vibing. Really fun album, with really cool production from Timbaland that sometimes misses the mark for me, but her vocals make up for it tenfold.
Massive Attack
4/5
I think I’m gonna go with a 4, but a low 4.
After listening to Tricky’s solo album Maxinquaye, I think I’ve come to my own conclusion that he absolutely works better as part of a group; his rapping is a genuine highlight on this album compared to the absolutely bleak and dreary style he showed on that album. There are still some misses on this album, but my biggest thing is that it’s simply not soul-numbingly boring like Maxinquaye was, as even the “misses” at least have pretty fun production and a few moments of catching the ear in a smooth way; some of it didn’t hook me, but it definitely wasn’t bad.
This is a genuine showcase of pretty cool production that would become a bit more apparent and a bit more mainstream as the 90s went along, and for 1991, a lot of what’s here is still pretty infused with the sort of soul/funk sounds of the 70s, so it’s a fun blend of both styles. A genuinely enjoyable listen across the board (except for Lately), and I’m pretty satisfied to give it a 4. It does just enough to be higher than a 3.
Bob Dylan
4/5
It’s a really nice 4.
Ultimately, there’s just something about Bob Dylan’s music that’ll probably stop me from giving him a 5, maybe ever; sometimes his voice isn’t melodic enough, sometimes his songs go too long, sometimes I have no idea what the hell he’s talking about… but on this record he seemed pretty good across the board. Really inventive and evocative lyrics of images that have long since left the public eye, and references that are ironically probably too intellectually driven now in a world that values TikTok celebrity compared to poetic license (or at least that’s what Bob Dylan would probably say if he had another fucking verse on Desolation Row).
I dunno, I just really liked the album. I wouldn’t say it has any standout all-timer songs, even with the super lauded Like a Rolling Stone, but there’s only really one or two misses on this album for anyone willing to sit through it. I just can’t go up to a 5 though; some of these ARE long as hell.
The Cure
4/5
It’s a 4 that falls just short of me being able to round up to a 5.
I think basically every song here manages to create a super cool atmosphere, and the album succeeds brilliantly at maintaining that atmosphere through its instrumental choices, its production choices, and how snappy most of the songs feel.
The only reason I can’t bump this up to a 5 is because of how it occasionally slips out of that atmosphere in a way that affected me as a listener; I think the choice to go for quiet vocals on tracks 3 & 4 is super cool, but they were too quiet to have a real presence in the song for me. I think some of the outros and intros go a little too long here and there. At Night, in particular, felt like it was just kind of stalling to artificially build up tension to me.
When this album just hits on vibes alone though, it’s a super enjoyable experience that feels like it’s shifting between the 80s and 90s – I really cannot speak enough to the production choices throughout this album. It’s a super cool 4, it could totally be a 5, but I think it’s just not quite there for me.
Kendrick Lamar
5/5
I knew coming in that I would give this one a 5 unless something shifted my opinion of it, and honestly, if I could give this shit a 6 or higher, I would.
TPaB is still the masterpiece, the gold standard, the highest of high bars for me in terms of Kendrick’s albums, but I don’t think I’ve ever properly appreciated the narrative arc of this album until this listen; doing this whole 1,001 albums experience has made me feel more attentive to music than I have in a long time, and this album has, by far, had the biggest boost for me because of that. There is seriously not a missed beat or lyric or breath on almost every track here – the only one I’m still iffy on is Real, but I just don’t think that song will ever click with my sensibilities.
I’ve also never really paid attention to the bonus tracks that are on the deluxe version, but Now or Never just feels like it should be the album closer, to just end the album on an incredibly bright note. I don’t wanna gush too much about this album, but it really is a piece of art, and it’s incredibly deserving of a 5.
Dire Straits
4/5
I feel good with a 3.5 on this one, but I'm gonna round it up to a 4.
There’s not really a bad song here, but there are moments where this album just feels a bit empty, whether it's an outro going a bit long, or the vocals just feeling too monotone, and it makes the songs drag on just a little bit in a way that kind of dilutes them for me. When this album is hitting though, it hits really well and really smooth, with some of the best guitar playing I’ve heard from a 70s album so far. I don’t normally check the reviews on this site too much, but it’s a testament to their variety and their sound that someone’s favorite could be another person’s worst and vice-versa.
I don’t think it can ever bump up to a 5 for my tastes, but what’s here is really nice, and definitely a recommended listen.
Jefferson Airplane
4/5
It’s another 3.5 that I think I’m gonna round up to a 4.
It’s just a really solid album to me – I don’t think there’s a bad song on here, just a few repetitive ones where either the lyrics don’t really do enough or the instrumentation stays a bit too grounded, but I liked a lot of this. Really fun guitar, some occasionally cool vocal melodies, and ultimately, just a really good sounding album that sometimes escapes my sensibilities, but still feels nice to listen to.
White Rabbit should have been longer.
Beatles
5/5
I’ve never heard this album in full. I’ve never listened to a Beatles album in full, really. I know the biggest hits from the band, and that’s really about it.
This is a 10. Like, if I could give this a 10, it would get a 10. Instead, I have to give it a 5. I could try to gush about it, but really, I’m just kinda sitting here, stunned after the ending section of tracks that make up the final 8 of the album, wondering why I’ve never bothered to really go through The Beatles discography like that. This album is a genuine triumph of music, and I would imagine that for its time, it set the highest fucking bar imaginable; it's probably a bar that musicians today are still trying to reach, because for 2024, this still holds up unbelievably and timelessly well. It is indeed worth all the hype.
That medley just hits like a fucking truck, man. This was their last album? That shit’s crazy. That’s gotta be the best final album ever. Just… wow.
Bob Marley & The Wailers
4/5
As an entire album, it’s a really nice 4, but I think tracks 6-10 by themselves are a 5.
I just wasn’t really vibing with the first 4 tracks too much; they felt a little slow, a little too lyrically dense, a little preachy, and not quite “poppy” enough. Track 5 started to bring in the energy, but it was about 2 or 3 minutes too long. Track 6 and onward, though… hoo. That’s really good stuff. Big difference from the front half and the back half; the more melodic instrumentation on the latter half of the album just sucked me in and had me FEELING that music really deeply.
I think the incredibly solid (but still just kind of OK for me) first half does drag it down to a 4 for me, but it’s no lower than that. Really good stuff here.
Emmylou Harris
5/5
It’s a super strong 4 that I’m gonna round up to a 5, just for my tastes.
There are some points early in the album where the production is lacking just that one extra bit for my tastes, but when this album clicks and puts it all together, it’s some of the best country/Americana stuff I’ve heard in a long time. The consequences of “bro country” coming into the scene in the late 90s and early 2000s need to be studied someday, because this is a really good album to me, and I need more stuff like this. Red Dirt Girl? That’s the type of country music I need, not bullshit about trying “that” in a small town, whatever “that” is.
The album is just a little too long for me. Could’ve cut it down to like, 8 or 9 tracks, but there’s really not a bad one here. I enjoyed everything on this album; I genuinely think it hits 12 for 12 for me, and that’s why I’m going with a 5 regardless of its slower moments or its perceived flaws. It’s good music, and that’s what matters.
Morrissey
3/5
This album is weird to me.
Objectively, I don’t think there’s a song that SOUNDS bad on this album; I think the production work and the instrumentation across the board is really well done, really varied, and I’ll probably add a lot of songs from this to my big playlist just because they’re super easy listening.
Lyrically and vocally is where I think this album is kind of weak; it’s not egregiously bad (save for Bengali in Platforms), but it’s the least compelling part of this album to me, even with Morrissey’s super smooth voice. I’ve never heard a Smiths record or a Morrissey record before this, but I think I enjoyed this. I also know nothing about the guy’s personal views, and I don’t know if I really care to.
The problem is that I just kind of found a lot of the songs to be… weirdly unremarkable? I don’t know if it’s a lack of focus on my part, or if I was too hypnotized by the instrumentation, but even when the album has these sort of bombastic guitar solos that capture the ear, those moments just sort of faded away to me after. I do think it’s a great sounding album, but it just isn’t sticking to me in a memorable enough way; it’s a 3.5 that FEELS like it should be a 4, but I’m going to round it down to a 3, even if I’ll probably enjoy most of these songs on shuffle when they come up.
The Kinks
4/5
Feeling a 3.5 and rounding it up to a 4 with this one.
I appreciate the brevity, the self-containment of each track, and I think I really respect the production throughout this album; there’s just little neat touches to each song that make them each have their own identity. I don’t think the individual songs on the album are super memorable, but they have some standout moments, and it’s a really good experience.
I can kind of see why this might have flopped in 1968; it’s just different from some of the contemporaries of this same time period that we’ve heard, and there are some points where the melodies and the catchiness take a backseat to what are sometimes baffling lyrics (I’m still kinda trying to figure out Track 1) but that’s the sort of thing that goes over much better in music nowadays. Pretty good album.
Bonnie Raitt
3/5
It’s a 2.5 that I’m gonna round up to a 3.
I don’t think there’s a bad track on this album, but when this sound starts to lose its luster, it loses it FAST. There are some really nice tracks here, but by the end, too much of it just started to blend together for me. Solid instrumentation, some occasional vocal standouts, but a lot of this just feels really really paint-by-numbers to me, and not in a way that hit with my sensibilities too often. Sort of disappointing, but not bad, just… plain.
Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band
3/5
It’s a 3.5 that I think I have to round down to a 3.
This album is weird. Not like Morrissey-style weird where something just felt unappealing and unnatural, but like, properly weird. There’s appealing stuff on this album, and I liked a lot of it. I think it’s just kind of disjointed to me; sometimes the vocals clash with the lyrics and vice-versa, sometimes the instrumentation doesn’t quite fit the lyrical vision, or at worst, sometimes it’s just kinda boring to me.
I don’t know if there’s necessarily a bad track on this album, but it’s a really diverse record that I honestly think doesn’t go far enough with its bolder choices. If you’re gonna try to be this innovative for 1967, then go all in, because it feels disconnected in a way that doesn’t melodically marry everything quite right to me. Certainly not bad though; I feel good with a 3.
Bert Jansch
4/5
I’m feeling a 4.
There’s just something nice about this album to me; maybe it’s the more intimate nature of the production, and the ability to so clearly hear both him and his guitar in a way that just enhances both. It could be the fact that there are occasionally audible “flaws” on this album that just add to that sort of intimate nature.
I think the weakest part of this album is its vocals, but I don’t think they’re ever bad; sometimes they’re just kind of plain or not as melodic as the guitar or the lyrics are asking for, but there are moments where it all clicks together super nicely. That guitar playing is kinda crazy though; it’s just fun to hear the strumming at work without the usual percussion or other instruments to cover up the more nuanced and technical parts to actually make it sound like that. Just some really nice acoustic stuff here, and it worked really well for me.
Stevie Wonder
5/5
I mean, I knew it would be a 5, I just didn’t expect to want to give it a 6 or higher.
I have consistently said that Songs in The Key of Life is one of the best albums ever made, and my respect for Stevie’s work is off the charts; from Superstition to Sir Duke to Overjoyed and some of his collaborations into the 90s, 2000s, and 2010s, it’s very hard for me to come up with a more consistent artist. He might be the GOAT, and this album is just another masterclass in that.
I don’t know quite how to gush about it; everything here is just classic Stevie, from the funky instrumental of Too High, to the guitar on Visions, the all-timer that is Living for the City, the key changes on Golden Lady, the bassline on Higher Ground, the backing vocals on Jesus Children of America, the incredible vocal performance on All in Love is Fair, the percussion and feel-good attitude of Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing, and the bombastic (& slightly long) outro to He’s Misstra Know-It-All.
Easy as hell 5.
The Thrills
3/5
It’s a 2.5 that I’m incredibly tempted to round down to a 2, but I’ll be nice and keep it at a 3.
When this album hits, it hits pretty well; instrumentally, I think the very best songs on this album click together perfectly, carried pretty handily by the steel guitar and the percussion keeping everything melodically stable. The fast-paced tracks on this are really fun and enjoyable to listen to. Vocally, I don’t think there’s enough emotion or variance in his voice; the soft-spoken thing works on a few tracks, but when you do it for almost every track, it makes everything blend together in a bad and unmemorable way.
That’s the problem with this album: there are too many tracks that blend together in a bad and unmemorable way, and that’s not good for an album experience. The amount of times that the album just gets annoyingly repetitive from both a lyrical and vocal standpoint is so often that it’s just too hard to ignore for me.
The crazy part is that I think I liked about 7 of the 12 tracks here, but for 4 of them to be some of the most boring tracks I’ve heard in a way that they quite literally dragged no emotion out of me but pure disappointment is not good. Still though, those 7 are good to listen to, but not great, and that’s where I’m stuck on a 3 for this.
CHIC
3/5
It’s a 3.5 and I wish I could leave it there.
This is a really good record that gets dragged down by one thing, and I’d be a hypocrite to call it out on the last album and to not call it out here: it’s the repetition. Instrumental repetition is obviously fine, but lyrically, these songs drag on and on most of the time in a way that just doesn’t click right for me. That’s not to say they’re bad; what’s here is absolutely fabulous and super funky. Super cool basslines, guitar work, and percussion throughout this album, and even the vocals sound great with super good melodies that compliment the instruments.
I just feel like this album deeply suffers from the “first minute is the whole song” problem that occasionally rears its ugly head, but I have to reconcile that with stellar production. That’s why I wish I could leave it at a 3.5, because I cannot in good conscience give it a 4 as an album experience. So, uhh… I guess it’s a 3. Dang.
Kanye West
5/5
I have an annoyingly deep connection to this album. In every sense of the word, I do find it to be a timeless classic. I think that THIS version of Kanye West, before every single disgraceful and disgusting thing he's done and said in the 20 years since this album has dropped, is Kanye at his best, and this is his best album of the College Trilogy. It's a genuine 5, and I'm gonna keep it there.
It would be incredibly easy for me to rate this a 1 based on who he is now, in the year 2024, and move on, and give myself the moral brownie points. I just cannot bring myself to do it; I still basically know every line to every song on here, I still think the production is off the charts, and... to be completely honest, THIS version of Kanye West on this album just resonates with me still. Family Business, Jesus Walks, All Falls Down, Through The Wire... these are all obnoxiously good, and they all remind me of why the guy became a superstar to begin with. I miss that guy, not the anti-semitic Nazi-apologizing Trump supporter he's become.
Let me be extra clear: I did not stream the album when I wrote this review. I'm not giving him another cent. I wrote all of this without re-listening, because I know this album that deeply. I still believe it to be a 5, even if the man himself has dropped into the negatives.
So, uh... yeah, I listened to Desire, I Want To Turn Into You by Caroline Polachek today instead. Super cool album with a lot of 2000s influence clearly present throughout; definitely worth a listen, and worth all the hype it got in 2023. I'd probably give it like a 4.5, that I'd likely round up after another listen or two.
Simply Red
4/5
That’s a really good 4.
When this album clicks, it clicks; those are some high-energy tracks with the 80s written all over them to me, in a good way. When I think of the 80s, this is part of the sound my brain goes to: heavy synth work, deep drum pads for percussion, a whole slew of instruments that somehow work together in harmony, plus really fun vocal work that can run the range of “basically screaming” to “really smooth” in a heartbeat.
The slower tracks are what drag this album down to a 4 for me; they’re not bad songs at all, and I think they’re great to listen to, but they just didn’t keep me engaged in the way the higher paced and frenetic songs did. Some of them were a bit boring for me, even.
I’ll admit, a lot of this album can be called “generic,” but I’m a sucker for this type of sound and this type of earworm stuff. If you’re listening to this and not grooving on at least one track, then I think you’re too deep into the “artsy” side of music to enjoy a good time when you hear one.
David Bowie
4/5
I think I’m at a 4.
The weird part is that I would usually round up and give an album like this a 5, but for this one, I just… don’t feel that way. It never really connected to me in that way some of the other albums I’ve given a 5 to, but it’s absolutely no less than a 4. Changes & Life on Mars are all-time classics, and I think this album supplements them with really strong stuff that just never quite hit those heights for me (save for Quicksand & Queen Bitch). It could bump up to a 5 later, but I feel pretty good with a 4.
System Of A Down
4/5
That’s a much better Apocalypse Dudes, to the point where I’ll even go from a 3 to a 4, just because I liked it that much.
My biggest problem with Apocalypse Dudes is that it never really gave me a chance to breathe, and that it never really felt like there was that much variance in its sound; both of them came out in the same year, so I feel confident in saying this album does the heavy hard rock thing so much better.
In terms of both the actual instrumental performance, the actual variance of tracks (i.e., that nothing blended together endlessly), and just the general passion for each track (Apocalypse Dudes felt sort of plastic and fake by comparison), this album just does everything way better, way catchier, and way more memorably. Top notch guitar and percussion work; my only knock is that the vocals felt a little too sharp at times, and that the lyrics (save for the last track and a handful of others) just didn’t add too much depth. Still though, really fun 3 that I enjoyed enough to bump up to a 4.
Arcade Fire
4/5
I’m vacillating between giving this a 3 or 4, and I think I’ve ended up on a 4, but a very strange 4.
I don’t think I paid that much attention to the lyrics on this album, which is kinda crazy, given that it’s so lyrically dense. I also wasn’t feeling the album at first at all; I thought there wasn’t really a specific genre, I didn’t get a sense of variety, and perhaps worst of all, I didn’t get a sense of direction for the album. I don’t know when it clicked for me exactly, but I think at about the halfway point of the album, I just threw out the lyrics entirely, focused on the general mood of the songs, and I tried to catch what I could.
That mood is what’s carrying the album to a 4 for me. Before I threw out the lyrics, I didn’t think there was necessarily a bad song, but I didn’t think there were any standouts either; once I kind of let the “analyst” side of me go away for this album, I just felt a deep, deep nostalgia for oddly, the late 2000s & early 2010s.
For an album made in 2010, talking about nostalgia, it seems clear enough to me that they’re longing for the pre-9/11 vibes of innocence, hope, safety, and just a general brightness to everything. In 2024, to listen to this after the social media era, the Trump years, the COVID pandemic, the BLM movement… it just makes me feel nostalgic for the now underrated brightness of what I can now officially call my youth, as all of that shit just weighs down upon me like an anchor I’m not sure I can drag off of me.
I need to give this album another listen or two to decide what the really good tracks are as opposed to just feeling the vibes, but I know this; I’m definitely listening to it in a car next time. This album feels like it was desperately designed for a car ride. Regardless, I feel good with a 4.
Kelela
4/5
It’s a really nice 4.
This album gives a really bad first impression through its first 4 or 5 tracks, but the stretch from Better to Truth or Dare presents the actual mood of the album so much better. LMK should have been the opening track, because the trap-hop beat on Frontline just gives the wrong impression for this album overall. Relistening to those first 4 tracks after finishing the album the first time gave me a really strong appreciation for this album overall.
Kelela’s vocals on this entire album are fantastic, and this album is at its very best when just she flows on the electronica-infused beats. I can understand some of the complaints about this album, but when it all finally starts to click, the little details in the production become more apparent as the album goes on, and the sort of dullness that the first 4 tracks give gets washed away (at least, it did for me). It’s crazy how much this album improves by Better, seriously.
There are some filler interlude tracks, some of the songs do go a bit long, but what ends up being here is some really cool R&B tracks with a clear Janet Jackson influence in the vocals, and a sort of “lo-fi Timbaland” feel to the production, and it just clicked incredibly well for me. I feel comfy with a 4, and it might even bump up to a 5 the more I listen. Glad to get this one.
Air
4/5
It’s a 3.5 that I’ll round up to a 4.
I think about half of this album just didn’t fully click for me, but maybe it’s because I was still in a sort of “analyst” mode as opposed to just listening and feeling the vibe. We’ve had a lot of vibe albums lately, but this is very much a vibes album. What’s here sounds excellent; there’s not a single bad track on here, and in terms of super relaxing electronica, this is an album you can both study to and fall asleep to on a dime.
For my tastes, some of the songs felt a bit too empty at times or a bit too long, and I was still expecting at least one sort of Daft Punk-esque energy-filled song given the genre, but like… that’s an unfair expectation. This is a good listen, it’s well-recommended, and I’m perfectly ok with a 4 here. Good soundscapes, great vibes.
Pixies
3/5
A resounding 3.
Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t hate the album, but like… it just never clicked. There’s great energy on here, and one all-timer in Where Is My Mind?, but past that, for my tastes, I think what’s here is a cacophonic, unwieldy, jumbled up mess of an album that occasionally shines through in a way that clicks. More often than not though, even with my newfound level of patience to an album with this sound, I just felt like I was listening to glorified noise.
To be more succinct: the guitar gets too harsh sometimes, the percussion is mixed way in the front where it overpowers the vocals, the vocals themselves are sometimes studio quality and sometimes sound like they were recorded off of a microphone hanging from a string 25 feet away in the air in a wind tunnel. When all of those things aren’t happening, and they take a more traditional sound, the album works well for me. It just felt like those moments were more rare than I’d like. Still though, I can hear part of why Kurt Cobain took at least some inspo from this album. It’s not that bad, it’s just not my thing. Hence, the 3.
Pere Ubu
3/5
I feel like I got hypnotized.
Seriously, I really don’t quite know what the fuck to make of that. There’s two ways to listen to this album: by sitting down and trying to actually give a sort of critique on the soundscape of everything, the mixing, etc., and go from there. There’s also the approach I took by “Thriller!” which was to just stand up, walk in place, and let the music simply drag me around. The latter worked for me; I don’t know why, but “Thriller!”, “Drinking Wine Spodyody,” and “Codex” were hypnotically pleasing despite being objectively terrible soundscapes, solely from just walking in place. That hypnotism made me realize this album feels like a Talking Heads album one might create in their sleep (with a really bad hangover).
The first half of this album doesn’t work for me at all; I think it’s too noisy to be a walk in place sort of mood, but the back half works for me. I don’t think I can ever revisit this album except to experience that sort of hypnotic feeling again, because as far as an actual structured album, in the traditional sense, it’s absolutely a 2. However, in terms of just how I felt… I dunno, that feeling and the sort of otherworldly escape I felt seems 4-ish. I’ll split the difference and say a 3. What a strange, strange, almost alien album that doesn’t feel like anything else from 1978 whatsoever.
Manic Street Preachers
4/5
That’s a 3.5 that I’m really begrudgingly rounding up to a 4.
I think the first half of this album fires on all cylinders; great variance in the production, some fun soundscapes, good lyrics, great vocals, and it’s all really fun stuff through Track 7.
Tracks 8, 9, 10, and 11 all blend together in a way that really, really slows down the pace of the album for me. They’re all guitar-heavy songs that sound great to listen to, but they all sound the same to me, and the lyrics just weren’t as good to justify having such a similar sound. You can literally tell they lost steam. Track 12 was pretty nice, though. You just can’t have that much of an album feel like filler though; if this had been the first 7 tracks, it would probably be a really nice 5. It just kinda sticks around too long for its own good, and drags itself down in the process.
I don’t want to give this a 4, but I also just can’t in good faith give this a 3 knowing the quality of those first 7 tracks, so, uh… yeah, I guess it’s a 4, but just know I’m stuck at a hard 3.5.
Pavement
5/5
It’s a 4.5 that I’ll round up to a 5.
Other than the extreme dissonance of Hit the Plane Down, I really don’t think there’s a bad track on this album; there’s a lot of Nirvana to this at the start, but it slowly blends in a bit of R.E.M. as well, and that general soundscape just worked really well for me. I think this album shines best in its guitar and percussion work, but the vocals hold up pretty well against them, as do the lyrics for a good chunk of the album.
Just a really strong listen for me; glad we got this one, and I feel good with a 5.
Red Hot Chili Peppers
4/5
I mean, they really blew their load in the first 7 tracks here, huh?
This is a fantastic album that goes on just a little too long for its own good; those first 7 tracks could stand up with any 7-track stretch on any album like this, and I'll stand by that. The energy and the luster of the sound really started to fade away by Tracks 9 and 10, and it felt especially bad by Tracks 13 and 14 where it just felt like they were rehashing stuff from earlier in the album.
Road Trippin’ is a great closer, but I think that stretch of Tracks 9-14 where the energy starts to fade and the album simply loses its steam is gonna drop this down to a 4 for me. It’s a 4.5 that I just can’t bring myself to round up all the way; it could hit a 5 if one or two of those tracks in the back half of the album click for me better, but it’s a really strong album that’s worth listening to regardless. Think of it this way; it’s a 9/10 for me.
Peter Tosh
3/5
That’s a solid 3.
When this album clicks well, it really clicks well; I think tracks 3-6 are strong reggae tracks, and I think Till Your Well Runs Dry has super fun vibes and a great mix between a typical reggae feel and sort of traditional 70s pop/rock. When this album doesn’t click, it’s a bit too long, a bit too repetitive, and the vibes just don’t fully click with my sensibilities, and I think that happens a bit too much. There’s definitely not a bad track here, but it’s just harder to get lost in the soundscape on this than it was for Exodus. Hence, just a 3.
Legalize weed, though.
The Band
5/5
Surprisingly, I’m gonna go with a 5.
This album feels way way ahead of schedule for 1968 in terms of the general folksy sound that would come to pass by the mid-70s and early 80s; I think the percussion and guitar work are off the charts here. There’s not a single “bad” track on this album either; there are a few that go a little long, but they’re all great listens as far as catching the ear and keeping it engaged.
In general, despite being Bob Dylan’s backing band for a bit, it speaks to the talent that Bob Dylan surrounded himself with for them to produce something that feels this sort of influential and groundbreaking with only a small (but still sizable) portion of his musical DNA scattered throughout the record. There’s just some incredibly cool soundscapes here that have aged fabulously for the 55 years since this album came out, and I think that’ll give it a 5 from me.
Metallica
5/5
I’m not sure quite how I should rate this, given my unfamiliarity with most of the source material, the fact that I sort of zoned in and out while listening to it given its runtime, and that unfamiliarity making me sort of unsure how much the orchestra added to the actual weight of the original songs. There were points where these sort of just felt like studio recordings to me.
With that said, it’s definitely somewhere between a 4 and 5. What a enriching album in terms of that soundscape and that orchestra blended with Metallica’s style. Seriously, seriously incredible stuff here. In some sense, I think my lack of familiarity with the band is a bit of a positive; even if some songs sort of blended together, and even if my focus was a little lost at times, something about either the orchestra’s ability to keep up with them or Metallica’s inherent charm and appeal kept pulling my ear back in pretty quickly.
Are there lulls and periods of this album where you can feel a sort of rest break built in? Yes, but they don’t take away from the experience for me because they blend it super well to a point where those rest breaks are just as needed for the listener to catch their breath. I might need to give this concert at least one more listen to really lock this in, but I’m super comfortable with the idea of a 5 just on vibes, execution, and energy alone. I can’t wait to get more Metallica, mainly so I can come back to this album someday with a very fresh sense of how much the orchestra added and how well these songs were adapted to incorporate them. Either way, I’ll go for a 5. Great stuff.
Pet Shop Boys
4/5
Feeling a 4 here.
There’s no bad tracks here; as far as the soundscape goes, this is super cool for 1987, with some great synth work, cool percussion, and just some pretty captivating melodies. Sometimes, they don’t work or they’re a little repetitive, but when this album clicks, it clicks really well. I’ve never heard the Pet Shop Boys before this, but I get the feeling I’ve been missing out.
I think my biggest nitpick with this album is that sometimes the outros are just too long in a way that doesn’t really enhance the song. Music just can’t overstay its welcome, because it runs the risk of growing boring. I say that with the irony of having listened to 2 hours of orchestral Metallica yesterday, but that album worked because it was live and the energy never quite dwindled for me. On this album… yeah, the energy dwindled a little on those outros. Regardless, this is a really good album, definitely worth the listen, and definitely worth a 4; maybe a 5 if a few songs hit differently.
The Temptations
5/5
Incredibly, it’s a 5.
Yes, the last 7 tracks of this album are a sort of stereotypical doo-wop affair reminiscent of “My Girl” more than the funk-infused and experimental first 3 tracks, but I love both sides of it equally. I think the doo-wop is just incredibly smooth, and even though it’s all just love songs, it manages to blend in that sort of late 50s/early 60s feel with a lot of their contemporaries of the era in a way that makes it feel kinda fresh and nostalgic at the same time for 1969, when Beatlemania was surely still in full swing.
Those first 3 tracks are still really cool; namely Cloud Nine & the 10-minute centerpiece that is Runaway Child, Running Wild; yes, it doesn’t need to be 10 minutes, but it fills its soundscape pretty well and it stays pretty engaging throughout, even if it plays it pretty safe the whole way through.
I can’t really explain why it’s a 5, but I think there’s just something about this sound that clicked with me super well; I don’t think there’s a miss on this album in terms of easy listening, and everything here is just catchy as hell to me. I feel pretty good with a 5.
Nas
5/5
I mean, it’s obviously a 5.
I have some level of bias since I heard this in August 2022 for the first time and basically fell in love with the album there, but I’ve heard songs from it pretty sparsely, so to come back to it about a year and a half later with a more critical ear just tells me I was justified in liking the album the first time. A masterclass in lyricism and in flow with some genuine all-time beats here; I do think the latter half of the album relies a bit more on basslines to carry the beats than any substantial sampling, but Nas overshadows that incredibly well with his honesty and his enigmatic lyrics, even when he makes up shit like “magmatize”.
It really is just a fantastic debut album, and I still feel like I need to listen to more Nas. Super easy 5.
Charles Mingus
5/5
This album makes that Bill Evans album look like a fucking preschool recital, holy shit. What an instant 5.
The layering on every instrumental is perfectly done, the mixing is fabulous, and the avant garde composition of the piano, the brass, and the percussion — good lord, the percussion — is a masterclass in jazz. For 1963, this is experimental as hell, but it’s aged beautifully well. The quickest 40 minutes of an album experience I think I’ve had so far, but in a really pleasing way that had me encapsulated the entire time. I’m really deeply impressed by how much this sort of touched me, and I’m glad I listened to it. Fantastic album, easy 5.
Richard Hawley
4/5
It’s a very nice 3 that I'll round up to a 4.
I really enjoyed this, honestly; I think what’s here makes for a great listen, there’s about 6 tracks that properly caught my ear in a captivating way, but the other 5 or so just sort of exist in a way that were only made for casual listening, at least to me. I thought the last track being fully instrumental was a bit baffling. Regardless though, this album evokes so much of that 50s/60s country sound that I tend to have a bias towards, and I thought it really faithfully captured a lot of its production quirks in a way that made the whole album feel authentically done and with a lot of respect towards that era. Hence, the round-up.
Brian Eno
5/5
I mean, in terms of doing exactly what it’s supposed to do, I’d say it gets a 5 as an ambient album. In terms of the music itself… it’s like a 3.5, maybe, but the point of the album is almost certainly not to critique the actual composition – sure, there are layers to the music, intentional production decisions, and a general melody loop each track follows, but that’s not the stuff to focus on. It’s just about getting lost in the soundscape and going for it.
Obviously, it would be dumb to go, “oh, it’s a 5, that means it’s as good as Illmatic or something” because it’s obviously not, but like… what else am I supposed to rate it, you know? The only knock I have is that 2/1 was probably the most “distracting” of the tracks, but it’s like complaining that a bird is chirping while it’s sunny outside. It happens.
Seriously, I think I’m gonna go with a 5 in terms of keeping me focused, steady, and relaxed for its entire 48 minute runtime. If I had to go out of 10, it’s almost certainly like a 7/10 or something, but that’s just because it’s clearly not at the highest of high levels or anything. What a strange album to include in the 1,001 set, but like… I’m glad it came up, because now I have new focus/study music to add to my collection. Pretty good.
Kanye West
5/5
Once again, I have an annoyingly deep connection to this album. Once again, I do find it to be a timeless classic. I still think that THIS version of Kanye West, before every single disgraceful and disgusting thing he's done and said in the 13.5 years since this album has dropped, is still pretty damn good; not as good as his College Trilogy work, and honestly for me, probably still not as good as 808s, but regardless... ugh, this album is another fucking 5.
Yes, this Kanye certainly resembles a little more of the asshole he's become, but he was driven by that stupidity and that ego to create this piece of art instead of spreading hate. In that sense, I miss this asshole who tried to "redeem" himself by just making incredible music and not being a Nazi sympathizer for the fun of it.
Still though; just classics on classics on classics on this one; Dark Fantasy is a stellar opener, and the 3-track stretch of POWER, All of the Lights, and Monster is such a ridiculous flex. Devil In A New Dress is stellar, Runaway will stick with me forever, and the 1-2 punch of Lost in The World / Who Will Survive in America is a great way to close out the album.
Once again, I didn't listen to this album before giving it this 5, if only because I know it well enough to never have to give Kanye another dime ever again. It is once again, obnoxiously a 5, even if the man has dipped further into the negatives.
So, uhh... this time, I chose to listen to Sean Kingston's self-titled debut album. I mean, honestly? Not bad. Pretty fun album; a lot of 2000s-era production quirks in there, some slang I wish we would bring back in the lyrics, and ultimately, some pretty solid vocal performances by Sean Kingston. It’s got some weird sampling choices, sure, but I feel like I’ve heard worse. A solid 7/10 album.
The Undertones
3/5
It’s a pretty good 3, but it’s just sort of… safe.
It’s hard for me to find the specific words I want to say, because I do think this album has some pretty energetic tracks throughout, but none of them are necessarily that memorable. It’s not an Apocalypse Dudes situation where I felt like every song just sort of blended together, but it is a point where the quantity of the album creates diminishing returns on the quality of the album – at some point, the soundscape loses its luster, and even with the 16 tracks here all being relatively short, some of them do feel unnecessary, even with some decent variety within.
It’s a good listen, and I’m sure it’ll resonate better and perhaps more deeply with someone else, but for my money’s worth, this is an album that you take all the songs in, throw on a playlist, and then just go “oh, this sounds cool” when it comes up on shuffle, and never think about it again afterward. Hence, the 3, but it could go up to a 4 later. The guitar work was absolutely stellar though.
The Triffids
2/5
It’s a 2.5 that I cannot possibly bring myself to round up to a 3… but it’s not that terrible. It’s just boring.
There’s genuinely some good soundscapes here, and I’d say the vocal performance only ever dips to a real low by “Vagabond Holes,” but this album just feels like the equivalent of just getting a vanilla ice cream when there’s so many other flavors and toppings available. Most of the songs are fine to listen to, but when you look at the lyrics, the concepts of each song sort of fall apart with lyrics that are either too contrived or too outdated and “safe” for 1987, let alone 2024.
Instrumentally, I think the mixing on this album is all over the place, and in terms of production, these are trying so desperately hard to sound important and bombastic with this rich variety of instruments, and it just falls flat because as a listener, it’s incredibly easy to tell where they’re just trying too hard. The problem, of course, is that they’ve tried just enough to exist within the limbo of “good enough to listen to, not good enough to care,” and that is the cardinal sin any album can fall into. If I were going by a 10… I dunno, a 5.5, maybe? Decent listen, but instantly forgettable, hence the 2.
Ravi Shankar
3/5
That’s a really intriguing 3.
There are lulls around the middle where the sound sorta loses its luster, but all 4 of the core styles here make for good listening. I enjoyed the first and last styles (Dádrá & Sindhi-Bhairavi) the most because they just sort of had a more natural and free-flowing vibe to them; you can feel these guys feeling the music come to them. It felt to me like that was a bit more deliberate in the Máru-Bihág and Bhimpalási styles, and that’s why I didn’t enjoy them as much, but they’re all good listens.
The only knock I might have on these tracks are the runtimes? I feel like it could’ve been possible to trim this down a little bit, but that’s a knock against the sort of flow I was talking about earlier and I’d be kind of a hypocrite. I don’t think I can go up to a 4 or a 5 because it is kind of just the same throughout, but it’s a very enjoyable listen regardless, and I feel good with a 3.
Lorde
5/5
I’m just a sucker for pop, man. It’s a 4.5 that I’m gonna round up to a 5.
It’s just a really fucking catchy album; there’s a lot to be said about Jack Antonoff’s influence (for better or worse) on so much of modern pop, but when he clicks perfectly with an artist, it’s easy to ignore those production quirks and just get a great feel for the music. Lorde’s vocals and lyrics on this album do a great job of distracting from those quirks in a way that makes her really shine on this album.
I do think she gives a more authentic view of herself on Pure Heroine compared to this album, but they’re intentionally tonally different. Even though I think I still prefer aspects of Pure Heroine more, this album is just full of bops, and it’s got an extremely infectious energy. Oddly, my standout on this album is Liability, which is the least boppy of them all, but it’s just an utterly beautiful piano-driven song that brought me to the verge of tears.
I can feel how this album did influence the direction this style of pop music would take; you don’t get to a Billie Eilish or an Olivia Rodrigo without this sort of album, in terms of its soundscape, its lyrics, and to some degree, its marketability. This style is starting to feel a bit overplayed now, but Lorde really makes it work for herself here, and I’m glad I listened to it. I feel pretty good going for a 5. Certainly no less than a 4.
James Brown
4/5
It’s a pretty decent 4.
James Brown has incredible crowd control on this album, which works well live, but occasionally hits some lull points when you’re dealing with nothing but the music – I thought Lost Someone really started to drag by the end, but the medley afterward started red hot. That’s the sort of thing where I imagine it was way cooler live than how it feels on this album. I also think Night Train was… sort of the “wrong” closer for this set? It seems like it was either recorded separately or recorded in a way where the crowd’s energy was drained.
Speaking of the crowd, they’re basically their own instrument on this album with the way James Brown and his excellent band basically hit every transition in a way to let them realize what’s up next without much of a pause (again, except for the extended dragout section on Lost Someone). Those little lulls are what get this a 4; honestly, it’s probably closer to a 3.5 than it is a 4, but I know it deserves higher than a 3. It’s just a really strong listen that didn’t quite click with me the way some of the other live albums we’ve gotten have, but it's enjoyable regardless.
The Style Council
3/5
It’s a 3.5 that I think I’m going to round down to a 3.
I really don’t think there’s a bad track here, save for two examples: the egregiously cheesy and quintessentially 80s “A Gospel,” and “Strength of Your Nature,” which is fine but did not need to be 4 minutes long.
Every other track, besides My Ever Changing Moods & Headstart for Happiness, ended up as a good listen, but not a very memorable one. Those two were the standouts for me. Individually, I think there’s some good soundscapes, some good vocal performances, and even the instrumental tracks have a nice energy to them.
The problem is that other than those 2 tracks, nothing really stuck to my brain on this album, but I’d honestly say I enjoyed most of it while I was listening to it. There are songs here I’d be happy to hear come up in a shuffle, but I don’t think I’d actively seek them out. I do think it’s higher than a 3, but it’s not quite at the level of a 4, so I’ll stick it at a 3. It might jump up to a 4 later though.
Fiona Apple
5/5
It’s a 4 that I’m gonna bump up to a 5.
I’m kinda just stunned, really, and I’m not really sure if I have the proper words to describe my mood right now. This is the first time I’ve properly heard Fiona Apple, ever; her voice is incredibly unique to me, and her slightly deeper tone just clicked super well for me as the primary instrument on this album. The piano, while it did eventually lose its luster near the end of the album, is a really strong choice for her to play off of, as there were times when she was just gliding with the damn thing. For 1996, this feels like it wouldn’t miss a damn beat if it had come out in 2024.
I also really liked the lyrics here; just evocative enough for imagery to sort of let the brain drift away and get lost, but not in a way where you lose all focus on the soundscape and her vocals. There were a few tracks where the lyrics sort of lost me, and when they lost me, the instrumental and her vocals couldn’t really pull me back in.
However, for the vast majority of this album, something just captivated me, and that’s why even though it’s nearer to a 4 for me, given the runtime, the occasional extended instrumental outros, and the occasional moments of lyrical confusion, I enjoyed this so damn much that I have to bump it up to a 5.
The Psychedelic Furs
3/5
The definition of a 3, really.
I wouldn’t say it’s bad at all, but it never really makes the jump past “good” – Pretty in Pink is pretty fun, as are 2 or 3 other tracks, but this album feels like it’s missing a specific type of signature song. That doesn’t even mean a super commercial hit or anything, it just needs something that really defines their style and stands out, and I just never found that here. It is 1981 rock, which occasionally dips backwards into the late 70s and occasionally dips forward into some mid-80s R.E.M. type of soundscapes, but it never really settles into a spot where I found myself super deeply engaged with any one song, hence the 3.
Sleater-Kinney
4/5
It’s a pretty strong 4.
I don’t know quite how to describe the way I felt during this album, but the energy grew throughout until it basically hit a peak at Not What You Want, before sort of curving back down. I felt a little nitpicky at first, with her vocals not quite meshing with the guitar and the dissonance not really clicking well for me sonically, to eventually just really getting pulled into the musical feel more than anything else.
It’s a testament to the strength of the album that I actually wish the last track had gone longer instead of feeling a little more abrupt – this is just a super fun listen, and if the inner punk/grunge-self in you doesn’t feel the energy off this album at least once, then something’s just wrong. Super fun 4 that has peaks that feel like a 5.
M.I.A.
4/5
It’s a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4.
I think there are a few points of lulls on this album; not necessarily in the instrumental lacking an energy, or vocal repetition, but just points where the soundscape kinda loses a luster really quickly if the vocals aren’t flowing, and vice-versa. Most of the tracks here have a good energy, and a great soundscape, but there were some songs that were just harder for me to stay fully invested in on account of those little lulls.
I do think this album sounds well ahead of its time for 2005; not like, 2020s level of ahead, but certainly a bit more of an early 2010’s flair. I don’t think there are that many standout individual tracks, but the album as an entire package is just a fun listen, and a recommended one at that. It’s not gonna be everyone’s cup of tea; I do think there are some harsher instrumental choices here and there, and sometimes her vocals do feel a bit… aggressive. However, a lot of this just clicked for me as a listener – there were times when I wasn’t feeling a song, kinda zoned out, and enjoyed it more for some reason. Schrödinger’s beat, I guess. Happy with the 4.
Lauryn Hill
5/5
I knew I was giving it a 5, I just… ugh. Wow. It’s so good. I haven’t heard it in full in a bit, but it’s so goddamn good.
There are some songs where the repetition becomes too noticeable to ignore at times, but when this album clicks, it clicks deeply. Her lyricism is great, her vocals are spectacular, and the instrumentals are really fun throughout, especially when they lean into live instrumentation. The biggest knock I have on this album is its length (it’s a little long), but it just doesn’t matter that much to me. It’s not a perfect album, but I love it regardless, and I really wish Lauryn Hill had tried to top herself, but if she never does, she left an absolutely stellar project here, and it’s so highly recommended. Easy 5.
Elastica
4/5
It’s a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4.
It’s pretty good; I think the first half of the album is a bit generic at times, but I really enjoyed the back half of the album. I thought it had way more energy to it. However, when this album kinda hits those generic lulls, it’s just not that sonically pleasing; the guitar can overwhelm the vocals, or the percussion can overwhelm the guitar, or some other rock/paper/scissors type of connection with those 3 elements. When this album clicks and those 3 are in harmony, it’s really nice. Even when it’s not clicking in full, it’s usually hitting on 2 of those 3, and it makes for a fine enough listen.
It didn’t really do enough to ever feel like it was close to a 5, but it’s pretty good regardless, and I think a 4 feels about right.
Amy Winehouse
5/5
It is, thankfully, a 5.
This album has received so much critical acclaim, and yet I only really knew it for Rehab and Back to Black, both of which are fabulous tracks. I think there are a few tracks on here that touched me really deeply, namely Love is a Losing Game & Wake Up Alone. Absolutely fabulous songs, and Amy Winehouse’s voice is spectacular on them, and the entire album. The production is off the charts too; Mark Ronson does a great job evoking the 50s and 60s with modern production for someone who feels ripped straight out of the era of R&B and soul music of that time.
To put it bluntly, I’m glad it’s a 5 because I feel like I would have been underwhelmed if it were anything else. The legend of Amy Winehouse has grown in the years since her death, and the fact that a movie is coming out about her soon is the craziest part. Great timing to get this album, and I’m glad I finally had the excuse to sit down and listen to it in full. I’m so glad that it’s this good, and I’m also so dumb for not listening to the whole thing before today. Fantastic 5. Easily one of the best albums we’ve gotten so far.
Louis Prima
5/5
Surprisingly, a 5.
Well, OK, maybe not that surprising, but for the earliest album we’ve gotten so far to get this out of me is a little surprising to me. It’s just a really fun listen. Louis Prima’s voice and tone has this great energy that gets matched by the band, and on the two tracks that have Keely Smith as the female vocalist, his voice blends really well with hers.
Ultimately, what makes this album is Louis Prima’s vocal energy; yes, the lyrics are there, and they’re pretty solid, but you don’t need them to enjoy this. This is just really fun swing music; it’s a good time, it’s a great listen, and I think the amount of infectious energy it gives out makes it very worthy of a 5. Certainly no less than a 4, at least to me.
David Bowie
5/5
It’s a 4.5 that I’m gonna pretty easily round up to a 5. First Bowie album to get a 5 out of me during this experience.
I can’t exactly explain how I feel after listening to this, mainly because it’s unlike any Bowie album we’ve gotten yet, or anything Bowie that I’ve ever listened to, really. I don’t know what crack Brian Eno put into these collaborations with Bowie, but something just clicked perfectly for me with this album; the synth work, the instrumentation, Bowie’s vocals in the first half, the moodiness of the second half, and really, just the sort of strange mix of melancholy and brightness that I had wavering throughout this album.
It’s very hard to describe it, but I know that I’m glad I listened to this album, and I know that I’d recommend it as an experience. It is not a traditional David Bowie affair, and I’d argue it’s more of a Brian Eno album that happens to have David Bowie on it for a strong chunk of the album, but regardless, I feel pretty good about bumping this up to a 5.
Iron Maiden
5/5
That’s a 5.
I don’t even think I want to expound on that. It’s a fucking 5. Just… ugh. Insanely good. I’ve never heard Iron Maiden before this; I might be fucking stupid. What an incredible album, genuinely. I don’t have the words; I’m writing this right after I listened to it, and I’m stunned, and all I know is that everyone should listen to this. Just beautifully visceral. This shit feels like hearing Thriller for the first time. To me, it feels like the cornerstone piece of a genre. That’s all I can say. Easy 5.
Robbie Williams
4/5
I’m feeling a 4.
I don’t really understand the criticisms this album has been getting on the site – yes, it’s very radio-friendly safe pop, but what’s wrong with that? Not everything has to be this absolutely blowout balls at the wall album. Sometimes, when pop is good, and it clicks, it just… clicks. This album clicked for me; I thought the instrumentation was pretty good, I really like the tone of his voice, and I thought the tempo and the vibes were pretty varied and entertaining throughout. Lyrically, I caught a few things that were dumb as hell, but overall, I’d say this is good, and worth giving a 4 to.
Let me put it this way: I’ve heard worse on some of the previous 121 albums we’ve done before this. To me, this is pretty fun. It’s not blow-me-away incredible, and it breaks the streak of 5’s I’ve been giving (4 albums in a row and 5 out of the last 6 is pretty good), but I definitely enjoyed it, and I’d recommend it. I’d say that makes it worthy of being on the list.
Dusty Springfield
4/5
It’s a 3.5 that I’m gonna pretty easily bump up to a 4.
It’s all in her voice; it’s what carries this album through and through. Even though there’s some super good lyrics in here and some really catchy instrumentals, her voice just glides over everything and cuts through like butter. I think this album shines brightest when the instrumentation is either a bit more minimal, to let her voice stick out the most, or when the instrumentation builds into this bombastic piece to let her voice just glide up with it and still really stick out. Whenever it’s sort of in the middle, where the instrumentation is too much and too sudden, those songs just never fully kept me engaged for one reason or another.
Either way, it’s a fabulous listen, and there are some real classics in here, I think. Pretty pleased with a 4. Shoutout to I Don’t Want to Hear It Anymore.
The Kinks
4/5
I kinda wish I could leave this right at a 3.5, but I’ll be nice and round it up to a 4.
Really, the only thing holding this album back, at least to me, is the technology of its time; there’s some really fun concepts in here, but the execution comes up just short on a few on them, not at the fault of The Kinks, but simply at what was available to them at the time. Lazy Old Sun is a prime example of this; I thought it felt really unique for 1967, and I imagine if they had the technology of even a decade later, they would’ve really made that song pop more than it already does.
I feel good about bumping it up to a 4 because I don’t think there are any bad tracks, just some safe ones that don’t really bring down the mood or the energy, though End of the Season sure tries. Overall, a little too early for its time without feeling out of place. Pretty good album regardless, though. 7/10, if we went by 10.
Bad Company
3/5
I think the first half of the album is a 3, and the back half of the album is a 4, so once again, I’m at a 3.5 that I wish I could keep there.
I think I’m gonna bump it down to a 3. Ultimately, it’s because I think too many songs suffer from extended periods where everything just sort of blends together for too long.
There’s not a single bad song on here, but so many of them just fade into the background after a bit while listening. That wouldn’t be so bad if the entire album had great instrumental pieces, but I find the first half of the album to be a little bland and a bit generic in its instrumentation, so it really sticks out when those songs blend into the background. The second half of the album is great, and doesn’t suffer from it as badly because they have great instrumentation and just better all-around vibes. However, they do suffer from it. It’s a 3.5, but I’ll round it down for that. Another solid 7/10 album.
Frank Sinatra
5/5
It’s a 4 that I’m gonna bump up to a 5 because of some bias.
Yes, there are some lulls on this album, but ultimately, what’s here is timeless. Really, truly timeless. I’ve got a lot of respect for Frank Sinatra’s specific era of music, because it’s stood the test of time. So often now, music is such a 1-way street of “drop, get the public attention for 2 weeks, leave,” and then go support the tour or the merch drops.
There’s so much talk about the “Great American Songbook” that I occasionally see, and I think this album is a great showcase of what that actually is. Yes, in 70 years time, I imagine the kids of 2094 will talk about Taylor Swift and not Frank Sinatra, but that’s the proof that even though music has changed, so much of its DNA can still be traced back to this era, these compositions, these melodies, and voices like Frank Sinatra that make them pop to life.
In that sense, this album just gets elevated higher to me; it’s a man at his peak showcasing songs that have lived on for years and years past their original versions because of this album and the amount of people that have tried to emulate his style. Almost every composition of these tracks, I would argue, is probably most heavily based on Sinatra’s versions, or at least Sinatra’s contemporaries who all took inspiration from him. That’s where the 4 gets bumped up to a 5: this album’s influence, and its timelessness. Great album, even if it has a few lulls.
Motörhead
5/5
It’s a 4.5 that I’ll round up to a 5, but there is one very noticeable flaw. It’s Jailbait. It hasn’t aged well, and it’s morally reprehensible in its lyrics.
With that said, the rest of the album is a ball of energy that overwhelms that one track so much that the entire experience is fine without it. Just a ridiculous display of the guitar, great tempos (and really hard percussion, I would imagine), all anchored in by Lemmy’s voice, which sounds like it’s a cigarette away from falling apart at any given time, but somehow just works perfectly for this sound and this style.
I just really, really liked it; it clicked super well for me, and I feel good about giving it a 5. Never adding Jailbait, though.
R.E.M.
5/5
It’s a 4.5 that I will once again bump up to a 5.
My biggest complaint about Murmur was that I didn’t think the lyrical depth was too strong; the melodies were great, the vocals had a good kick, but the lack of really meaningful lyrics just ate at me. This album remedies that pretty well – there are still a few songs where the lyrics are a bit lacking, but there’s definitely more tracks that blend together the great melodies with really strong lyrics, especially on the more politically-charged tracks.
I really don’t think there’s a bad track on here; even the ones that I thought weren’t as lyrically strong more than made up for it with super strong instrumentation that felt at least 8 years ahead of schedule, and Michael Stipe’s vocals on this record really help to make those instrumentals pop. Ultimately, I think it's just a great album, hence the bump up to a 5.
It’s a very front-loaded 3.5 that I just don’t think I can bump up to a 4.
The first 5 tracks here really clicked well for me, but of the back 7, I really think only 3 of them caught my ear in a really meaningful way. I might be a little tired, but I do think a number of songs in the back half just blend together in terms of messaging, lyrics, overall vocals, and instrumentation that doesn’t really hit the same heights as the first 5.
Ultimately, I do think it’s a good album, and it’s worth a listen – I’m sure someone will connect more deeply to the back half than I did. I just don’t think the album as a whole is good enough to go to a 4, so I’ll feel a little disappointed with a 3. It’s like a 7/10 album, though.
Red Hot Chili Peppers
5/5
Yeah, that’s a 5.
There are a few lulls of “that’s just OK,” and two specifically weak tracks to me: Blood Sugar Sex Magik, and Sir Psycho Sexy (but only for its lyrics, because the instrumental is fabulous).
The rest of the album, however, just really fucking clicked for me. I do think some of those “just OK” tracks could’ve been cut to shorten the runtime down a bit, but there’s just a lot of energy and charm oozing off of this album, man. I think my favorite was probably The Righteous & the Wicked, but about 12 (13 if you count me laughing my ass off at the absurdity of the last track) of these songs were SO good. Just a banger of an album to me, easily deserving of a 5, and one of the more fun ones we’ve gotten overall. I really enjoyed it.
Gene Clark
3/5
I dunno… it’s a 3.5 that I think I’ll round down?
Ultimately, I think it’s harder for me to fairly rate this album because Spotify just doesn’t display the lyrics like that, and to follow along on say, Genius, or something, takes away from the excellence found in a lot of the soundscapes. I can’t fully appreciate the lyrics without sacrificing paying attention to basslines, or backing vocals, or acoustics or electric guitar or synths. The same is true in a vice-versa sense.
Ultimately, though, I really enjoyed listening to this. It’s super chill music, and from the lyrics I have looked up, it’s got good storytelling chops. I do think the vocals are one of the weaker parts of the album, but ultimately, for 1974, I think this is really innovative stuff. Solid album, I wish I could stick to a 3.5, but I just don’t think I can round it up because it never REALLY blew me away like that. Strong 3, like a 7/10 again.
U2
4/5
I can finally give a solid 4 for the first time in a bit.
I don’t think this album ever quite gets up to the territory of being a 5, but regardless, this album just glides from start to finish. Never a dull moment; maybe a few lulls here and there, or one or two songs that didn’t quite click right with me, but there’s not really a moment fully wasted throughout all 42 minutes of this album. Bono’s vocals are fine, and occasionally great, but what really anchors this album is the stellar guitar work and the masterful percussion.
It’s just a good time – good lyrics, good vocals, strong instrumentation and just a delightful listen from start to finish. Very highly recommended 4.
Stan Getz
4/5
It’s a very good 4.
If we’re being really honest, I think this album kind of peaks by The Girl From Ipanema. The good news about hitting that peak so early is that it sustains it really well through the first 5 or 6 tracks of the album. I do think by the end, it finally sort of tapers off, but more from just an inevitable fatigue of the soundscape. What’s here is incredibly relaxing, very enjoyable, and super easy to listen to. It never really falls off a cliff, but it sets the tone so well and so early that every other song, by comparison, feels a bit lesser, but still pretty good.
I think the only reason I’m stuck at a 4 is mainly just how rigid the album can feel; not in terms of the compositions themselves, but simply the instruments at hand. I understand the general vibe of bossa nova, and how going full big band on it would immediately betray everything, but this album sticks really deeply to its core instruments, and it keeps a relatively soft tone throughout. I’ve heard passionately done bossa nova with a little bit more bite to it, and I don’t think this album ever really has that kind of bite to it. Regardless though, it’s a great album, a very recommended listen, and a good time that deserves a 4 – maybe a 5 on a re-listen or two.
The Prodigy
5/5
I’m exhausted as hell from jumping around. That is a spectacular 5.
I’ve never heard this album in full, and I was only vaguely familiar with “Smack My Bitch Up,” but good lord, what a ridiculously energetic collection of songs that manage to feel captivating and engaging throughout all 56 minutes of its runtime.
Part of it was me getting up and being active and letting the energy of the songs come through me in a way where my body hit a sort of adrenaline rush, but part of it really is just the excellent production; great drum samples, deep heavy basslines, great guitar, gritty vocals, and ultimately, just finding the right moments to break down and give a song new life when it started to get a little too repetitive or overbearing on the ears. Those moments really kept the album’s energy up for me, and they always hit at the perfect time.
One of the most enjoyable albums we’ve had yet, and an absolute bomb of energy to boot; easy 5, spectacular electronica, probably a 10/10 if I were going out of 10. Fantastic stuff.
Grateful Dead
2/5
It’s a rather dull 2.5 that I just can't bump up to a 3.
Maybe it’s just because I’m not familiar with Grateful Dead, but this is basically just a 73 minute jam session that’s completely inoffensive to the ears. Boring? Eh, maybe a little. It never really perked up my ears, but I never felt outright bored or annoyed by the soundscape, it just sort of existed.
It’s not a bad listen, but it’s not something I’d recommend unless you’re looking for ambient and almost relaxing background noise. There’s not really any standout bits here, and for a live album, I heard almost nothing of a crowd. It’s a rather forgettable album, but it’s not a 1 because there is some decent energy throughout, and I’d be lying if I wasn’t at least nodding my head along a few times during the few points where everything just seemed to be in perfect sync between the band. A dull 2 feels about right. Right around a 5.5/10.
Led Zeppelin
5/5
That’s a 10.
I’m just glowing with praise, man; that’s a no-skip album from start to finish, with incredible energy throughout, a deeply captivating soundscape entirely anchored by a band working in genuinely perfect harmony. Led Zeppelin IV might have all the classics, but I think this album outshines it. I’m still just shell shocked and really struggling to find the words; all I know is that everyone has to hear this album, and that’s the most glowing praise I can give it. Absolutely spectacular, and one of the very best albums we’ve gotten so far. Wow, wow, wow.
OutKast
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I think I can round up to a 5.
I think the vast majority of this album is incredibly strong, all the way up until Gangsta Shit, and even through Toilet Tisha, but I think the album kinda limps to the finish line after that. I only knew the 3 big tracks going into this listen (So Fresh, So Clean, Ms. Jackson, and B.O.B.), but there’s so many good tracks here; Spaghetti Junction, Humble Mumble, and Gangsta Shit are all standouts to me, and almost everything else before Gangsta Shit is still pretty damn good.
I do wish this ended on a stronger note, but regardless of the final 2 main tracks falling short for me, I think so much of this album does so many things so right, in terms of flow, lyricism, and great beats that I’d be kinda criminal to not give it a 5.
The Who
5/5
Yeah, that’s a 5.
I knew this was the album that had Baba O’Riley, but I never made the connection that Won’t Get Fooled Again was that fucking song. Those are the two standouts, obviously, but everything in between so perfectly compliments each other in terms of the instrumentation and the vocal performance, probably most deeply anchored together by the fantastic percussion throughout this album that really makes each song pop that much harder, especially on The Song Is Over and Getting in Tune.
It’s just a really fucking good album, man. Even its weakest points where the sound lulls a bit or repetition starts to seep in, which are few and far between, are still great to listen to. Very deserving of a 5, and highly recommended.
Sepultura
3/5
It’s a 3.
There are some really good songs here, but I’d say about half of the album hits that good mark, and the other half just sorta falls flat, either from trying too hard to sound edgy and deep, or from not doing enough creatively with its instrumental soundscape to justify the screaming vocals as the main focal point.
When this album hits, I do think it hits really nicely, with a good burst of energy; Born Stubborn is probably my favorite one here. When this album hits those lulls, it just feels like I’m waiting for another chance without getting any kind of feeling from the song itself, no matter how hard it tries to keep the energy up – Lookaway is full of these exotic grunts and backing vocal yells, but they just come across as cheesy to me. Don’t even get me started on the last track, which had me captivated for the first 6 or 7 minutes off just percussion and atmosphere, and then had me begging for it to end by the 10 minute mark when it just kept fucking going.
It’s a good album, but it just has a number of flaws to me that make it so I can’t justify going any higher than a 3.
The Go-Go's
4/5
That’s a super fun 4.
Ultimately, I think it just suffers from being a little too same-y and a little too repetitive to justify a 5 off a first listen, but this is an album made for car rides, concerts, and good times; repetition should be damned with this one. It’s got good vocals that are occasionally reminiscent of David Byrne and Talking Heads, great instrumentation that feels very R.E.M.-esque at times, and ultimately, the vibes are just overwhelmingly fun.
I feel good with giving this one a 4; it could bump up to a 5 if some of the other songs just hit right, but the whole album is a treat to listen to.
Hole
5/5
I’m at a (slightly biased) 4.5 that I think I’m gonna go ahead and bump up to a 5.
This is the general soundscape I’ve kinda been waiting for – I have a lot of love for like, the Goo Goo Dolls or Matchbox Twenty, so this album finally hit around that sound, and it does it super well. The guitar work in particular, while occasionally way too loud in the mix, is really good throughout this whole album. Courtney Love’s vocals, which I’ve never really heard before now, have a great tone to them, especially when she holds notes on the lower end of her register; there’s just a deep grit there that really makes the lyrics pop more.
It’s just a really solid album where everything clicked for me, and I just liked almost every track here; obviously, there’s a number of references to Kurt Cobain, and Courtney’s reputation and image in light of what happened. This album, I believe, was her first chance to really respond with some music, and what emerged is an album that fits right alongside some of its contemporaries for 1998. I feel good bumping it up to a 5; I just enjoyed it that much.
Shivkumar Sharma
3/5
I mean… I dunno what to say, really. It’s probably just a 3, but I enjoyed it.
It’s really strong instrumental music, and it keeps a pretty solid quality throughout the album. Pretty energetic start, bit of a low-key finish. I get the energy of “it’s a farmer’s day” so from sunrise to sunset, yes, this is generally what a soundscape might feel like. It translates well.
It’s just not that captivating to me where I can give it anything more than like, a 3. I zoned out a number of times in this album, and by the end, I just kinda felt like I didn’t need to listen back to it. It’s good music, but it’s not music I’d come back to unless I was really itching for this type of soundscape, or if I wanted to use it for say, ambience or study music. It’s totally competent, and I would recommend people give it a listen… but I’m probably not gonna come back to it, hence the 3. Still good though.
Aretha Franklin
5/5
Well, that’s a 5.
I’ve only ever heard Respect off this album, and other than (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman, I’m just not that deeply familiar with Aretha Franklin's work. I’m a moron for not being deeply familiar with her work – this album epitomizes soul, and it’s very easy to see why she was dubbed the Queen of it within her lifetime.
Her vocals on this record are absolutely stunning, and the main highlight of an album that would not be anywhere as good without them. Even without the absolute monster of a track that is Respect, this album would absolutely stand up on its own, from the immediate power of her voice on Drown In My Own Tears all the way to the passion shown on A Change Is Gonna Come.
Just a fabulous album; it’s a very well-deserved 5. A 10/10, even.
Nirvana
5/5
I mean, that’s probably a 10, right?
Fucking hell, I think I finally get the hype. I definitely listened to this a decade ago or something when I was trying to really get into music to see what I missed, but I probably just dismissed a lot of it outside of the first 3 tracks, because they had the most recognizable name value. Those tracks are awesome, and all-timers, don’t get me wrong, but like… god, the other 10 tracks on here are such an all-encapsulating gem of a record.
Just a perfect encapsulation of the sound of a post-Reagan America pissed off at both him and George H.W. Bush on its heavier songs… but also, just a fucking awesome album in general. Dave Grohl deserves even more acclaim than he already gets – his drum work on this album is absolutely fucking impeccable. Kurt’s guitar riffs are off the charts, and the basslines are really underrated, I think, as the glue holding the percussion from collapsing in on itself on a few of these tracks.
I’m kinda just stunned still, both at my younger self for not getting it, and at this album as a whole. I don’t know why I never really went back to it like this, but I’m very glad I got an excuse to do it now. Just an incredible album.
Joy Division
3/5
I’m at a 3.
Really, the biggest thing I can knock this album for are the vocals; the monotone feel works on about half the tracks, but on the other half, they either just don’t fit, or he’s trying way too hard to make them fit. I Remember Nothing, in particular, has a really captivating and haunting moody soundscape that just gets dragged down so hard by his vocals that it almost killed the song for me.
Regardless, it’s a solid album. There’s good tracks, there’s not really any bad tracks (ok, I fucking hated Candidate though), but there’s not that many captivating and memorable tracks. A lot of it blended together for me, and part of it is from some of the songs just having slightly dull and repetitive soundscapes. The drums are super hit and miss on this album to me; when they’re hot, they are red hot and add a great energy. When they’re missing, it’s basically just because it’s a remarkably basic pattern that sort of drains the energy from the guitar. The guitar usually doesn’t miss though.
I dunno, that’s a lot of words to say “it’s fine, it could have been better, the instrumentation was bland at times, and the vocals are the weakest part”. It’s a solid 3, and I’m sure other people will “get it” more deeply than I did.
Otis Redding
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’m gonna bump up to a 5.
It’s just really fucking good soul music, man. Even if a lot of it is covers, his voice just glides on them and takes control like they were always his to begin with (save for Respect, but… you know). There are little lulls on this album, and I do think songs fade out a little too often instead of hitting a definitive finish, but those are nitpicks: what’s here is really good, and even when those lulls come in, they’re interrupted by his voice booming out with power and you immediately forget they ever happened.
The instrumentation is pretty nice here too; I don’t think many liberties were taken, save for the horn section in the Satisfaction cover, but everything feels pretty true to its original versions otherwise.
I just liked it a lot; it’s a fun listen with some occasionally stunning vocals, and I’m totally fine with giving it a 5. Certainly no less than a 4.
Nick Drake
5/5
I’m going for a 5.
I’ve never heard of Nick Drake before this – I now know who he is, and I feel rather sad. This album, much like the Leonard Cohen album we got a while ago, feels like the weight of a life bearing on me in musical form. Unlike Leonard Cohen, it’s not a life long lived; Nick Drake died at the age of 26. I don’t quite have the words to really describe how I feel, but I do think this album struck a little closer to home than the Leonard Cohen album did, though they both made me feel the same way.
The youth in his voice, and the familiarity of his voice, with a sort of Jack Johnson or John Mayer-esque tone, enhanced even more by the choice to go fully acoustic, is what really made this hit harder for me. To put it in a more succinct way, this is a true tortured poet’s department, and every line here deserves to be studied with a bit more of a critical eye. Just a beautifully haunting album, and well deserved to be on this list. Very deserving of a 5.
Alice Cooper
5/5
Somehow, I think I’m at a 5.
I can’t really explain why – I just enjoyed the hell out of this. At the first track, I was trying so hard to place what the vocals reminded me of, and it took until I Love The Dead to realize that Alice Cooper sounds like Weird Al for parts of this album; maybe that’s just a subconscious thing that added to my enjoyment of this album.
Even without that connection, I think the album just sounds fantastic. It’s got such a good variance of styles, from the sort of rock arena anthem that is Hello Hooray, to the James Bond vibes of Unfinished Sweet, to the sort of jovial and Elton John-esque No More Mr. Nice Guy, and to the blatantly obvious Bob Dylan homage that is Generation Landslide. There’s just a lot of fun to be had on this album.
It does sort of falter by the last 3 tracks, where it tries to take a sort of moodier approach (but they're still fine), but I think the strength of those first 7 tracks and the fun I had with them just gets me to a 5. I enjoyed it that much; great instrumentation, fun vocals, good vibes, awesome album. Definitely deserves to be on the list.
The Divine Comedy
3/5
I’m somehow at a 3.
I pretty much wrote my opinion of this album around Track 3, and even though Tracks 5 and 6 kind of picked up for me, this album is just aggressively OK. To copy and paste what I wrote after listening to “Someone”:
I’m at a weird point with this album so far; it’s technically sound, the production is good, and his vocals are fine, but nothing is blowing me away. Every song is nice to listen to so far, but when you really dig into it, it’s all just homages to the past. This song in particular felt like a cheap version of a 60s Frank Sinatra trying to do a 90s Bond theme, which is fine on paper, and in terms of the execution here, was done pretty well. It just didn’t really have the charisma or a unique personality to really make this song work. Objectively, the horn section in this song was bombastic, it was glowing, it represented the sort of heartache and loneliness the song was going for really well… but I just didn’t believe in the song.
Really, I just don’t believe in the album. It’s not that these are bad songs; they’re all fine, they’re decent to listen to, and the instrumentation gives a great energy to each track. The problem is that nothing truly stands out on its own; everything feels taken from another artist. In terms of the album’s structure, everything just blends together. If you do the big bombastic instrumental part in every song where the strings swell and the vocals hit a fever pitch… then no song feels special. When nothing feels special, you just can’t believe in the album. There is a skeleton of a great album in here, but this just never really sheds its skin to become something that actually stands out. It’s aggressively OK, and no higher than a 3. It definitely doesn’t feel like it belongs on this list.
N.W.A.
5/5
I'm gonna put a 5, for the sake of the website, but realistically, I’m surprisingly only at a 4, because I just can’t bump it up from a 4.5.
Don’t get me wrong, I really want to bump this up to a 5, and maybe on a better day, I can, but like… I dunno, this album kinda falls off after Track 8 for me. I really do think those first 8 tracks cover a great variety of soundscapes, great lyricism, and if it had climaxed on Express Yourself as a totally honest closing track, it’d totally be a 5. I think it just overstays its welcome afterwards, mainly because the last 5 songs are really long, taking up over a third of the album’s runtime by mostly retreading old ground, circling the subject matter a few too many times, or being outright horrendously misogynistic like on Dopeman (Remix). The last 2 tracks are fun though, so like… I dunno, 10 out of 13 isn’t bad?
It’s just an album that goes a little too long – based on like, pure vibes, this album would totally get a 5; it’s just an incredible snapshot of its time, and Ice Cube, Eazy-E, MC Ren, and Dr. Dre (who really doesn’t even do THAT much on this album in terms of actually rapping) are all on top of their game here.
I just think the entire album experience ends up at a 4 because of the run of Compton’s N The House, I Ain’t Tha 1, and Dopeman (Remix) just kinda killing the vibes. Cut those 3 tracks, I’m easily at a 5. With those 3 tracks, I’m stuck on a 4. Regardless, it’s an all-time classic album and it easily deserves to be on this list.
Jimi Hendrix
5/5
Yeah, that’s like a 10.
I’ve really got no words – that was just 73 minutes of pure perfection, as far as I’m concerned. Yes, it does go a bit long, and yes, it does eventually start to wear on you with the guitar riffs and the percussion and the soundscape, and everything in between, but like… I could fucking care less. I loved every single track here (well, OK, “Still Raining, Still Dreaming” could’ve probably been cut), and I genuinely cannot believe I’ve never heard this album in full before today.
I pretty much only knew Voodoo Child (Slight Return), and I knew about the existence of the All Along the Watchtower cover, but I’d never heard it, or the original song for that matter. I’m ignorant enough for not listening to the latter, but the other tracks on here are fucking incredible. I’ve really and truly got no other words; it’s a 10, it’s worth the listen, it’s so deeply recommended, and it’s so easily deserving to be on this list.
Gil Scott-Heron
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
I just thought this album felt really encapsulating to me – it had some lulls early on, but I never really felt bored, I just felt like I was always waiting for the instrumentation to take another step up. They kinda broke down that expectation over time, and I think after getting a bit of energy with Back Home and The Bottle, the rest of the album was gliding for me in terms of the soundscape, the vocals, and ultimately, the comforting feel of the album.
I really think the last 5 tracks (not counting the reprise of Peace go with You, Brother at the end) are just that damn good – Song for Bobby Smith and Your Daddy Loves You, in particular, gave me the same feeling as say, watching Mr. Rogers or Bob Ross. They just felt reassuring in an authentic way that isn’t often recorded in music, in part because there’s no swirling bombastic instrumental behind them, which helped a lot. H2Ogate Blues is a great critique of the politics of the era, and it’s wild how well I think it’s aged into 2024, especially with the damn Reagan diss about a decade early.
I’m just kinda grumpy that this isn’t on streaming, because I’d add every song here if I could. Regardless, it’s a really nice 44 minutes, and I kinda just found a bit of bliss in it. I enjoyed the hell out of it, and I feel good with a 5. It definitely feels like it should be on this list.
Beck
4/5
I’m at a 4.
It’s a really good album, don’t get me wrong, and maybe on another day, it could totally be a 5, but much like Beck’s relationship seemed to wear him down into making this album, I think Beck kinda wore me down over the course of it.
It’s just a little too long, and I think it touches on some of its themes a bit too often; I’m not opposed to the fact that this is 12 tracks and 52 minutes or whatever, but as an album experience, it just feels a bit cramped around the middle with some songs that he wasn’t willing to cut (for likely good reasons, mind you), but they don’t translate as conducively to the album experience for a listener. Instrumentation and lyrics here are fantastic, and in terms of the imagery and the feelings this album is meant to evoke, they do their jobs brilliantly – the swirling instrumental pieces that end a lot of these tracks are beautifully crafted.
I just think the album’s biggest problem is being a little too bloated, and to be quite frank, a lack of true levity. There’s not really a point where anything truly brightens up here, and that lack of a release of tension just sort of hangs a cloud on the album that feels unresolved. I’m sure it more closely resembles reality, and it’s probably consistent with how Beck felt at the time, but I just think it wore me down to not get at least one happy-go-lucky song.
I’m still rather pleased with the album though. I might just be nitpicking at it – it’s a really good album, it’s a strong listen, and it probably hits harder in the light of an actual breakup. I feel good with a 4, and I do think it deserves to be on the list.
Ella Fitzgerald
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I'll rather kindly bump up to a 4.
Let me just be clear: no chance in hell I was gonna listen to the whole thing; I listened to a “best of” version that was only 45 minutes, and I get the distinct feeling that if I had listened to the whole thing, then… I dunno, who knows, maybe I’d somehow get to a 5.
From what I heard, this is super nice though. The orchestra does a great job of bringing these pieces to life, and I’m sure Ira Gershwin had a big say in the way all of these were recorded. Ella Fitzgerald… I’ve never heard her voice before today, for whatever reason. My goodness, what a voice. I don’t know how many more albums she has in these 1,001, but I hope it’s enough to hear more of her, and more of her doing contemporary music instead of more 1920s and 1930s standards.
Seriously, she kind of carries this album, but she shares it pretty equally with the instrumentation as well – I’m such a sucker for this sort of era because it really does feel long gone, even if these compositions have a timeless feel. Yes, there are cheesy lyrics on this album, and yes, some of these songs have lulls here and there, but I just really enjoyed listening to… you know, 45 minutes of what’s a roughly 3 hour album, but I digress. It’s pretty damn good; it’s nowhere near a 5 for me, but it’s enough of a spectacle and a window into the past that I can’t help but appreciate it. I’m good with a 4, and I think it’s worth being on the list.
Rocket From The Crypt
3/5
I’m right on a 3.
When this album hits, it hits pretty good – there are some genuinely energetic songs here that come together in complete harmony between the vocals, lyrics, and instrumentation, and I’d say that comprises about half the album. The other half tends to hit on just one or two of the three, but never quite hits that perfect balance on all 3; sometimes, it’ll reach it briefly during one of the other 7 songs, but it never sustains it for long enough to really click like the other 7 do.
I’ll say this – it never falters on the instrumentation. I especially love the usage of the horns here, giving everything a sort of Ska vibe that I think is kinda underrated. The mixing is… a bit suspect at times, with the guitar especially overwhelming almost every other instrument here on most of the songs, but I never thought it was that big of a deal.
I mean, ultimately, it’s a fine album, but it’s just kind of underwhelming for an album to really peak around Track 6 or 7 and then kinda just walk its way to the finish line, you know? I felt less engaged by the halfway mark, and it just sort of wore me down by the end. There’s solid stuff here, and I’d imagine someone will stay engaged the whole way through, but it just doesn’t feel like I needed to listen to this before I die. It’s a solid 3, and that’s really about it.
Kings of Leon
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’m gonna begrudgingly bump up to a 5, because I think it’s not a 4, but it just doesn’t feel like a 5.
Make no mistake; I think this album’s fucking great. This is incredibly cool to me – I only knew Use Somebody, which I still think is an all-timer of a track, but I’ve never really heard any of the other songs surrounding it, and up until Track 6, everything was blazing hot, all cylinders firing, all engines go, felt like one of the easiest 5s I might give. And yet, of those final 5 tracks, I was only really digging the last 2; something about Tracks 7 through 9 sounded really good, but they never really put the full package together in the same way that the first 6 tracks did.
Who knows? I might just be overreacting to an underwhelming finish; those first 6 tracks hit like crack, man. Absolute bliss for me. Even those last 5 tracks are still good listens; the soundscape never lets up a single time during this album, and you can’t say that Caleb Followill can’t sing his ass off, because he was belting like a motherfucker on this. I’m sure someone will get more enjoyment out of Notion or I Want You than I did (17 is an actively mediocre track), and they don’t take away from the rest of the album at all. It’s a great listen, and it deserves to be on the list; kind of conflicted about bumping it up to a 5, but I really do think it's just too good to only give it a 4.
King Crimson
5/5
I’m at a 5.
I just thought that was great. I don’t even really have that many words – I got completely encapsulated by the soundscape for most of the runtime. Those first 3 tracks are spectacular. Hell, even the long instrumental break during Moonchild kept me captivated for most of it, until I got tired of it by the end. The Court of The Crimson King shot me right back up though.
For 1969, this is utterly ridiculous, in a good way; the layered soundscapes here, the beat drops on the title drops… it just feels really ahead of schedule, man. I’m sure this album has eventually been outdone within its space, and I get the feeling it might even come later in one of these 1,001 albums, but as someone listening to this for the first time, I’m just kinda blown away by how well they absolutely fucking nailed it. For a debut record, no less. Easy 5.
Rush
5/5
Yeah, that’s a 5.
I’ve never heard Rush before today, but I’ve heard people cover Rush. I’ve never heard 2112 before today, but that has a case to be one of the greatest “long” songs ever right off the bat for me. Just a swirling song that really makes use of its 20 minutes; I don’t think there’s a single spot wasted in there, from start to finish. That shit was absolutely fantastic. Easy 5.
Oh, yeah, there’s 5 other songs too. I really liked 4 of them. The only one that never really grabbed me was Lessons. Lessons IS still good though! It just felt too loose compared to the relative structure present in most of the other songs, and it just never really perked up instrumentally for me (unless I'm just deaf or I wasn't paying attention, that is). I say that, knowing that “Tears” is on here, but like… I really liked that one, sue me. Cheesy as hell, probably, but I’m just a big sucker for cheesy stuff when it’s done totally right. So, yeah, the back half of the album gets a 4 from me.
Balance that out, and you get a 4.5, which… come on, I’d be stupid to not round it up. Just an absolute treat of an album to listen to; great lyrics, super good vocals, and incredible instrumentation. That was… man. Easy 5.
Fever Ray
3/5
I’m at a 3.
Ultimately, it’s just fine. There’s some super cool soundscapes here, and the sort of minimalist production being explored here wouldn’t really hit the mainstream for another 5 or 6 years at the least, so that part of the album was fun and felt a bit inventive for 2009.
Really, the biggest thing this album has going against it are the vocals, which only really fit around half the time, and the time itself, where some songs just kinda overstay their welcome, or take a little too long to get to the strongest part. There’s not really a bad song here, just mediocre moments within them, which is fine in moderation, but it’s just a little too often to justify anything higher than a 3. Definitely an album I could sleep to though, and I mean that in a super positive way.
Billy Joel
5/5
I mean, that’s like a 10, probably.
I’m really just stunned that I’ve never heard this album before; Billy Joel has always been one of those artists that’s stayed just out of reach of my musical knowledge, outside of the really big stuff, like Piano Man, The Longest Time, Uptown Girl, and (for better or for worse) We Didn’t Start The Fire. I knew the names of some of the songs on this album, but I don’t think I had ever really heard any of them, save for maybe a little bit of Movin’ Out.
I thought this was absolutely fantastic; very rarely can you tell an artist has hit their magnum opus on the first full album you’ve ever listened of them, but right around the point where Scenes from an Italian Restaurant crescendoed into the big tale about Brenda and Eddie is the point where I realized that like… yeah, this is probably Billy Joel’s best work, and it’s my first proper Billy Joel album.
I genuinely thought every single track was great, not a single lull here. Instrumentation was off the fucking charts, and every instrument that slowly got brought into each song just added more without ever taking away from the essence of the songs. Lyrically, I thought it was just full of imagery, and written in a way that allowed his vocals to really shine through.
I could keep going, but I’m seriously just stunned. It’s a 10 for me. Fabulous, fabulous album. It’s a shame that whatever Billy Joel album comes up next simply won’t be as good, unless he proves me wrong.
The Cars
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’m pretty damn tempted to round up to a 5.
I just had a lot of fun with this album; I thought the instrumentals here were super cool in an avantgarde sort of way for 1978; the synth work was fun, I thought the percussion had a really great tone to it, I thought the guitars were on fire for most of the album, and even when the horns come in, they sort of blend in naturally instead of taking a spotlight. Just on the instrumentals alone, I’d probably give this album a 3, I thought they were really fun. Lyrically, I think this is weird in a good way, because it directly makes the vocal delivery of them super fun – Ric Ocasek sounds like if someone had reigned in David Byrne just a little bit, and to my ears, it pays off super well.
There are a few lulls here and there scattered on this album, but I really don’t know if any track was a miss for me; some of them felt a little too boxed in to more of a traditional sound, but they were still good listens, even if they didn’t captivate me as much. I just really liked this, you know? I’m gonna bump it up to a 5, I think it deserves it. Just a really cool album.
The Saints
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 and… fine, alright, I’ll bump it up.
Shockingly, for a 36 minute album, I think this kinda goes a bit long; 13 tracks is a little much, and some of them circle around the same soundscape a few times in a way that makes listening to the full album sort of a chore by the end. It comes out of the gates pretty hot though, but I only really dug one or two of the final 5 tracks. Sometimes less is more, you know?
Instrumentation is super fun, lots of energy, and the horn section that comes up a few times is really fun. Vocals are a bit jarring at times, but I don’t think they’re ever outright bad, just unbefitting a few times. There are some seriously good lyrics on Private Affair that don’t fully get their credit because he goes all spoken word on them instead of belting them out with the energy they deserve. This happens a few times on the album, and while I don’t think it ever ruins the vibe of the song, it just makes me wish for a little more.
Ultimately, though, I don’t think there’s a bad track on the album, and that’s the key difference between bumping it down to a 3 and bumping it up to a 4 – I had a lot of fun listening to this album, and I think with a little more time and a little more polish, a lot of my little nitpicks could’ve been cleaned up. This was a good album, and I’ll be nice to it because of that hot start to go with a 4. It’s like a 7/10, though.
Bonnie "Prince" Billy
3/5
It’s a 2.5 that I’ll kindly bump up to a 3.
I just don’t think this album ever really hit a groove for me; I appreciate what it’s trying to do, and on the few songs where everything did come together for me, I thought it did its job well. I just think the other songs don’t execute the vision as cleanly or as clearly – there are times where I think the metaphors and the imagery and the storytelling get a bit muddled, and when those get muddled, it takes the focus away from what’s already a pretty minimal soundscape, which simply just never really worked for me throughout this album.
I get what it’s going for, and maybe if I caught this album on a moodier day, I’d be feeling it a bit more, but there’s nothing here that fully grabbed my attention save for a few songs. It isn’t bad though, just not my thing, so I’m OK with a 3.
Ash
5/5
You know what? I’m at a 5.
I really am stunned by that; maybe I’m just sort of overreacting on a first impression, but I seriously enjoyed that a lot. The only track I wasn’t feeling was I’d Give You Anything, which just has a fucking huge wall of noise at the end of it that drowns out any semblance of a melodic structure.
Besides that though… yeah, I just really liked it; I think the vocals are the weakest part, but they’re not bad, they just feel like they could’ve added a bit more character to each song. The lyrics, while sort of lackluster, do the job they’re supposed to do, which is to get the feeling across, and the feeling is expertly weaved into the soundscape – I adore the way this album sounds. I think every song here has a really strong structure to it, save for I’d Give You Anything, and that structure, both vocally and instrumentally is what really carries this album to a super honest spot. I can firmly believe this was an album written by a 19-year-old kid, and that honesty makes its way through every track here in a way that I just kind of admire.
I’m also a sucker for a good Star Wars reference, which I honestly didn’t pick up on until reading the title of the last track, then hearing them humming the Star Wars theme at the end, and then realizing 1977 is when A New Hope came out. It’s a seriously good album, and I’m feeling super good about giving it a 5. I really liked it, man.
Portishead
4/5
I’m right on a 4.
I thought it was good – I think the biggest problem this album has is entirely in managing its pacing and its tone. The sort of ratio between faster songs and slower songs is a bit skewed, and I don’t think the album flows as nicely and as smoothly as it could. It still manages to pace itself well, don’t get me wrong, but as an album experience, it does feel a little more front loaded with the faster stuff.
That brings me to the point of its tone; I think a few songs here kinda touch around the same general soundscape and topics a bit too often, especially by the end, which lines up around the point where the sound design starts to kind of lose that luster, on account of the pacing of the album.
With that said, this is a really nice album in spite of all that; I think the vocals are really nice throughout, finding a super good balance between soft and moody and a bit more excitable and engaged throughout each point of the songs. I think the sound design and production, for 1994, is definitely ahead of schedule – a few songs on here feel like they could’ve dropped in 2018 or 2019 and not missed a beat. Lyrically, I thought it was a little abstract, but the focus here is on the mood and the soundscapes, so I’m not gonna be a stickler about it, because they nailed the mood and the soundscapes on every track, whether I was feeling the track or not.
I don’t think there’s a single bad song here, just different songs that you have to be in the right mood for in order for them to really hit. Someone’s least favorite on here could be someone else’s favorite, and that’s a testament to the variety of the tracks throughout the album, and the sustained quality it has. It doesn’t quite do enough for my tastes to get up to a 5, but it’s absolutely no less than a 4.
The Cure
3/5
You know, I think I’m at a 3.5 that I just can’t round up.
This album is ultimately good; in terms of the soundscape, it achieves the atmosphere it was looking for throughout, it has a decent progression in its lyrics from start to finish, and vocally, I think it does just enough for me to feel the intended emotion throughout the whole record.
I just wasn’t that into it.
For everything this album does right, I just think the overall vision here doesn’t align with my musical tastes as much as I would’ve liked. That’s a bit selfish to say, yes, but it’s just kind of how I feel. I think the overall structure of the album is a bit loose; there are songs where the soundscape could’ve been tightened up a bit more for me, with a lot of empty little gaps of nothing but the drums and guitar that slowly add up to me in a way that doesn’t make the album experience feel great.
I think lyrically, while it gets the progression right, a lot of what’s here is remarkably abstract, and feels very stream of consciousness in a way that diminishes the potent storytelling potential that every song kicks off with – every single intro on this album is fantastic at setting a tone and an atmosphere, but it never managed to keep me hooked from start to finish on most songs until the back half of the album began. Even then, those songs suffer deeply from “first minute is the whole song” in terms of their soundscapes.
Vocally… yeah, it could’ve just been better. It feels very spoken word-y throughout, and it kills me, because I can feel moments where the melodies are right there for him to take advantage of and hook onto, but he just never grabs them as tightly as he could have.
I really do like this album, but it’s dripping with unmet potential to me. It’s right on the edge of a 4, and with some real outside presence to commercially sort of clean up the rougher edges of the album, I really do think this could’ve hit as high as a 5 for me… but that’s for me. I can easily recognize that this style, the way it is now, is gonna absolutely connect to someone better than it did for me. It just wasn’t fully there for my tastes, so I’m gonna disappointingly give this album a 3.
Scissor Sisters
5/5
That’s immediately a 5.
It was just fun, you know? I’ve been waiting for something this goofy and bubbly and happy for a while. We keep getting moody stuff, or hard rock, or semi-pop with a bit of a noir feel (looking at you, Billy Joel). Even when we get stuff that is fun, it’s never this fun and loose and carefree, or at least it hasn’t been for a while.
I’m sort of struggling to say exactly what I liked about the album, because I really did enjoy just about everything here. I think the instrumentation is fantastic, and deeply reminiscent of so many artists and genres that I already like, especially with how many songs feel ripped straight out of Elton John’s style. It Can’t Come Quickly Enough felt like it came straight out of a mid-90s George Michael cut, and the last track, Return to Oz, felt very Bowie inspired in its structure. I love paying homage to artists like this.
Lyrically, I thought every song was great, and it always manages to take itself seriously enough when the time calls for it – there’s a deep dichotomy between the seriousness of “Mary” and the goofier take on coming out expressed on “Take Your Mama,” but they all fit together on this album as a great listening experience from start to finish without feeling weird or out of place. Vocals were great throughout as well.
There’s really not a single complaint from me. Fabulous, fabulous album. Easy 5. I’m a moron for never having heard this before today.
The Who
5/5
Yeah, that’s a 5.
I’m really just blown away by how captivating and energetic that felt for its entire runtime; even during the lulls in the My Generation medley, they just had me baited like a fish on a hook, waiting for every little next step in the song. The structure to the whole thing is perfectly done, going from stuff that’s sort of theirs, sort of not theirs and just using it to really build the crowd's energy up, to breaking out their big stuff and absolutely smashing it out of the park once they do.
The instrumentation was nothing short of incredible here to me throughout the entire album, and Pete Townshend… that motherfucker can sing, god damn. I got no complaints, and no more gushing to do; I’m just gonna call it how I see it – one of the easiest 5’s I’ll ever give. Absolutely spectacular.
The Pogues
5/5
I’m at a 5.
I really didn’t expect to enjoy that as much as I did, but talk about just hitting a vibe I never knew I really wanted to hit upon until now. I’ve never heard of “Celtic rock” as a genre, but like… yeah, this makes sense. Honestly, I’m still kinda just stunned.
I think the instrumentation here is super fun, I think the storytelling in the lyricism is fabulous (especially on the final track), and the vocals are pretty good across the board. The only real knock I could even have on this album is that the volume levels gradually go down as the album goes on, which certainly doesn’t feel intentional.
There are some lulls here and there, but ultimately, I just found myself captivated by what felt like such a lively world. There’s a genuine feeling that all of this could have (and probably did) happen, and it’s reflected in just about every aspect of the album. I thought it was really, really cool, and easily deserving of the 5. Just a super cool listen.
Public Enemy
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
I’ve never really heard Public Enemy before this; obviously I know about Chuck D and Flavor Flav in terms of name recognition and everything in between, but I’ve never listened. God, what a fool I feel like – this album is fucking rocking from top to bottom (ok, there’s a few lulls, but shh). In terms of just about everything from flow, to lyricism, to vocals, and especially in terms of the instrumentals, this album very rarely missed a beat for me.
With that said, I think a few tracks could’ve been cut down or cut out entirely, and that’s really my only major flaw with this album; 63 minutes is a bit of time to commit to an album that never really takes its foot off the gas pedal, even with the amount of instrumental breaks here. The amount of sampling, especially in terms of spoken word speeches and radio criticisms really make it feel like an album that desires your attention at all times, as it should. I just think for my tastes there weren’t many points where I, as the listener, got a chance to fully breathe. Even when songs hit those long instrumental points, they’re so full of evolving noise that you can’t really take that step back to appreciate them. The biggest offender of this is easily the 5:43 runtime of Revolutionary Generation, which just went on for so long that it almost diluted the message for me.
That’s a fucking nitpick though, really; I thought this was a fabulous album, and I’m honestly kinda glad it tested me as a listener. Paying attention for that much time through that many samples and that type of production (again, fantastic production) felt like an endurance test, and it’s a test I probably wouldn’t have gotten through at the start of this entire 1001 Albums bit. I could keep gushing about the flow and the lyrics and all of it, but I’m just glad this album lived up to the very high bar that was in my head. Very deserving of a 5.
Beyoncé
5/5
I think I'm at a 4.5 that I'm gonna very graciously round up to a 5, even though I don't think it's /quite/ at a 5.
It’s probably unfair, given that I listened to RENAISSANCE and COWBOY CARTER earlier this year, and I think those albums are absolutely spectacular, so I’m being a little biased in comparing this release from 9 to 11 years earlier to those albums, but… yeah.
It’s very clear to me that this is an absolutely fabulous album, but for my tastes, there's just /something/ that falls a little flat on this album, and I’m not sure what it is. It’s not her vocals; her vocals are great. It’s not her lyricism, because her confidence after having Blue Ivy shines through brilliantly on these lyrics. I don’t even know if it’s the production; I thought there were great beats throughout this album and some stellar production work, especially on the Pharrell-led tracks… but there are a few songs with that sort of early 2010s pop feel that hasn’t aged as well to me, for some reason. I love Counting Stars, for example – Ryan Tedder produced XO – but if it came out in 2024, it wouldn’t feel as good, you know? In other words, I’m looking at these through a 2024 lens, which is a bit unfair, but ultimately, most of the tracks succeed at keeping a super contemporary feel, even now.
Regardless of anything I just typed out, I REALLY liked this album. It’s super enjoyable, but for some reason or another that I just can't place, I’m just stuck on a 4.5, but I'd be a little rude to not round it up -- it's certainly higher than a 4.
Peter Gabriel
5/5
Of course, that’s a 5.
It’s already the one that has Sledgehammer, Big Time, and In Your Eyes, which would’ve given the album at least a 4 by themselves; almost every other track here acts perfect complimentary tracks, especially the deeply touching song that is Don’t Give Up. Red Rain is this big bombastic opener, and it sets the tone for a wild variance of production that never once lets up throughout the album, even on its weirdest tracks (the last two before In Your Eyes).
If there’s any nitpick I have for this album, it’s that the outros are kind of clunky and a little long, but I imagine that’s some quirk about how radio play would’ve worked in the mid-80s. I think this is fabulous for pretty much the whole thing, top to bottom; the lyrics are great, Peter Gabriel’s voice is magnificent here, and the production compliments it perfectly. It’s one of the finest albums of the 1980s, and very deserving of a 5.
Fatboy Slim
5/5
Well, that’s a masterclass in how to make repetition sound compelling.
This is definitely getting a 5 from me; I thought the energy and the vibes were great here, and that’s why it’s getting a 5. In terms of the tracks by themselves, I would say a couple of them hit on the repetition for a bit long in a way where they began to really lose their luster, but most of them kept the energy throughout in a really strong way, even with the repetition. The only real thing I can nitpick this album for is the length; I don’t think that everything on here had to be around 5 minutes, and I especially don’t think Acid 8000 had to be 7 and a half minutes… but that’s a nitpick.
The vibes are good, the energy is great, the sample work is immaculate, and I felt pretty captivated for most of those 62 minutes. Super cool album, and a hell of a proper introduction to Fatboy Slim for me – that was really fun. Easy 5.
The Louvin Brothers
4/5
I’m at a 4.
Of course, I’m a little biased towards the soundscape, but this is a very lyric-heavy album, and I just really liked the storytelling on it. Yes, they’re all songs of tragedy, and yes, the stories get a little predictable the later you get into the album, but for my money’s worth, this has fine instrumentation, fabulous harmonization, and ultimately, I’m just super satisfied with it.
I don’t think there’s a bad track here, just a few slightly duller ones, but I enjoyed this a lot. It’s not a 5 – it doesn’t do enough to get up to that level, but it’s just good country music with a very traditional lean, and I’m a sucker for a good story. Pretty solid 4.
Fela Kuti
5/5
It’s a 5. It’s a little weird to give a 2-track album a 5, but I think it’s definitely a 5.
Those were 2 really good fucking tracks; Zombie has one of the catchiest choruses I’ve ever heard out of this genre (or others like it), and while Mr. Follow Follow wasn’t as good, it was still pretty damn good. Obviously, the politically charged undertones and the aftermath of this album’s release play a big part in its mythology and its impact, but the songs by themselves are both excellent to me. Sometimes, it’s just as simple as going “the music is really good,” and I think the music is just REALLY good. I’m fine with a 5.
The Boo Radleys
4/5
Big turnaround from a rather slow start to get up to a 4.
I think everything from Track 5 and onward on this album is pretty damn good; solid vocals, solid lyrics, solid topics for the songs, and really nice instrumentation that doesn’t intrude too much with the general “spirit” of each song – they’re just there to provide the melody, and they don’t make the recording space feel like an instrument by itself. You can see where this is going, I hope.
3 of those first 4 tracks are severely muddled and ruined by their production choices, which is utterly baffling to me. I get it, I get it; 1993, loud = new, new = good, and it clearly worked to the critics of the time, but the audio mixing and sudden jump in volume among instruments was all over the place in a way that wasn’t creatively satisfying or sonically pleasing, but just annoying to my ears as the listener. Thankfully, the album learns its lesson, and that’s how it’s getting a 4, but if those other 3 tracks were cleaned up, without having their walls of sound in them, it would be really close to (if not possibly) a 5.
It’s a solid album that really shoots itself in the foot when it comes to a first impression, but it ultimately ends up pretty good. I still think some of the outros are a little long and some of the songs a little too generic to really bump it into 5 territory, but given that I enjoyed most of the album, it’s definitely deserving of a 4, and probably no less than like, a 3.5.
5/5
I’m at a 5.
I just deeply enjoyed that; I thought the instrumentals were off the charts and the ingenuity in the production for 1970 was super cool. A lot of blended synth work here, in a way that made everything feel super sonically pleasing – “Love Has Found A Way” impressed me in particular. Lyrically, while there was some repetition, that repetition never fully extended to the vocals, and I think they were pretty damn good on this album too.
Seriously, I don’t have a complaint about any track; I enjoyed this from top to bottom, and for 1970, it feels a bit ahead of schedule. Super fun album, really good vibes, great variety, and it nails down the “12 dreams” thing it’s going for. Pretty solid 5.
The Beach Boys
5/5
Yeah, I’m at a 5.
I’ve never really heard a Beach Boys album in full like that – the big 60s singles that are all literally beach-y and happy and surf-y are the extent of my Beach Boys knowledge. I know sort of about the Smile Sessions or whatever, and the sort of desperate turn to try and match a wave they knew was coming, but I’ve never actually heard anything from around that era until now.
This was really fucking good, man; such a diverse variety of soundscapes and styles here – I don’t think there was a single bad track on this album. Yes, I know that “Student Demonstration Time” has some odd lyrics about the protestors and they’re especially weird because it’s Mike Love singing it, but I almost kinda don’t care? This is my first sort of Beach Boys experience, so I don’t know if they ever dipped into that kind of heavy guitar before or after this, but I thought it was so out there for my perception of The Beach Boys that I kinda just enjoyed it regardless. Take a Load Off Your Feet was kinda weird, and felt the least fitting from the entire album, but I still liked it.
Seriously, I don’t have any complaints; good production, good vocals, pretty strong subject matters, nice imagery in the lyrics, and overall, just a damn good album. Pretty strong 5 from me.
Alanis Morissette
5/5
Of course that’s a 5.
It was gonna be a 5 just because it had You Oughta Know and Ironic on it, but my goodness, some of those other tracks are fabulous; Forgiven and Perfect, in particular, are so fucking tuned into my sensibilities out of 90s rock, and there’s not a single bad track on here.
Her vocals are off the charts for most of this album; just super strong control for someone constantly singing at such a high pitch, but when she goes deeper… man. Those moments are standout. The guitar riffs and the production on here is fucking crazy good; I don’t know if I’ve paid that much attention to the sound design on the bigger hits with headphones in before, but I clearly underestimated just how much work was poured into the instrumentals.
Yes, it’s pretty clearly dated to 1995, especially with how much You Learn feels like it could’ve been the theme song to a 90s teen drama, but I kinda don’t care – this was just a spectacular listen for me, and I can’t believe I never listened to the whole thing until today. Fantastic stuff here, easy 5.
Jerry Lee Lewis
5/5
That’s a 5. I feel a little dirty giving it a 5, but I think it’s fine.
Jerry Lee Lewis is a strange, strange man. I think he did some really weird shit in his lifetime, and I don’t like any of what I’ve read since I finished listening to the album. However… I can kinda separate it, mainly because I just don’t have any sort of deeper connection to the guy’s music like I did for a certain rapper who shall not be named.
It’s just kind of annoying that this is as good as it is; I don’t have a single complaint. I think the crowd’s energy is electric, I think the live performances from the band are off the charts, and his piano performances (while singing!) in particular are downright incredible. There’s not a single missed note nor a single missed breath from the man, and he had that crowd hanging onto both of them deeply. His stage presence and control are unbelievable to me – I’m glowing with praise about the way this sounds because it just sounds that damn good.
Yes, a lot of this set is ripped wholesale from other artists, and I’d be remiss not to acknowledge that, but I do think he did those songs justice – What’d I Say in particular keeps a lot of the grit from the Ray Charles version, and it just feels good to listen to. Honestly, I enjoyed this a lot, and I really wish the whole thing was on streaming. It’s pretty damn good. Solid 5.
Miles Davis
5/5
Probably no surprise that I’m at a 5.
I’m not gonna be verbose about it: this is a really fucking good jazz album. Every composition here is really well done, and I enjoyed the entire runtime. Not a single lull for me, nor a single miss, or even a single problem with the mixing or production, which is a little wild for a 50s album.
I fell into a deep bliss during that, which makes me really terrified for whenever we get Kind of Blue, because this album has already set a high bar for me, and I know the critical acclaim that Kind of Blue has. Regardless, this is just a spectacular album to me, and I’ll easily come back to this often as studying music or reading music. It’s very deserving of a 5.
Rush
5/5
Yeah, I’m at another 5.
I honestly think that was a more complete top to bottom album than 2112, which is crazy for me to even consider, but I liked it that much. I think the synth work here is off the charts. I think the instrumentation that underlines all of that synth work has a ridiculously infectious energy to it. Lyrically, there’s some great stuff here – Limelight and Witch Hunt, in particular, have aged remarkably well. Even in terms of the vocals, which do feel a little high pitched and out of place at times… I think there’s a super strong performance here all-around. The percussion deserves its own spotlight; Neil Peart deserves more flowers than there are stars in the solar system.
I’ve got not a singular complaint; that was 40 minutes of rock music that hits on every single one of my musical sensibilities – I think it’s catchy as hell, it’s fun to listen to, and if you can’t enjoy hearing people shred on a guitar while percussion goes at 100 miles per hour, then you just don’t know how to have a good time with music. Very easy 5. Spectacular album.
Astrud Gilberto
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I'll bump up to a 4.
I don’t really have too much to add; that’s a super competent bossa nova album. I don’t think there was a bad track here – even the Parade song, for as dumb and goofy and cheesy as it was, sort of won me over with how brazenly out of place it is. It definitely didn’t need to be on the album, but it’s not like it’s a bad listen.
This album never does anything to get up into the territory of a 5 – there’s no rousing soundscapes, no signature songs, and nothing that especially sticks out, save for (at least to me) My Foolish Heart, which just kinda won me over. However, I think this maintains a pretty solid standard of quality throughout, and the vibes just connected perfectly with me. It’s a driving album, it’s a study album, and it’s a “do chores” album, but I enjoyed it all the same. Solid, solid 4.
Kraftwerk
5/5
I’m surprisingly at a 5.
I deeply ripped into Kraftwerk for what I perceived as minimalism on Trans-Europe Express. I haven’t gone back to the album to see if my opinion has changed, but this album did way more for me than Trans-Europe Express.
For me, this just has a way more sonically pleasing soundscape, it’s got a good variety of tone and instrumentation, I think the synth work evolves throughout each track in a way that doesn’t feel like an FL Studio sample loop on repeat for 6 minutes, and ultimately, everything here just felt like had more character and more groove to it. There was way more depth in just Autobahn by itself than the entirety of Trans-Europe Express for me.
The back half of the album is really nice too; I love the dichotomy between Kometenmelodie 1 and 2, and while Mitternacht kinda fell into the repetition of Trans-Europe Express, it never got gratingly long to be an issue. Morgenspaziergang is really nice too; I love the transition from the synth work into the real instruments, and it does feel like a proper end to this journey on the Autobahn.
Ultimately, this album DID have the scenery changes that I felt weren’t present on Trans-Europe Express, and I enjoyed my ride on the Autobahn much, much more. This is 43 minutes of super chill music, and I liked every single second of it. It’s a 5. A damn good one, at that.
Green Day
5/5
It’s like a 10, probably.
I’ve never heard this album in full until today. I’m an idiot. Perhaps the titular American idiot. I never knew there was a big running story and plotline and thread here; I’ve only ever heard the big tracks – American Idiot, Boulevard of Broken Dreams, and Wake Me Up When September Ends. I always knew there was a Broadway musical, but I never made the connection somehow.
This was fucking awesome. There’s not a single missed beat here – from those opening guitar riffs on American Idiot, through the entire running plot of “home sucks, I’m leaving, let’s party, I’m in love, oh shit, never mind, this sucks, I’m going back home” that’s portrayed brilliantly throughout the lyrics and instrumentation of every single track until the sort of epilogue that is “Whatsername,” and the peace that Jesus has finally come to after all his St. Jimmy escapades.
It’s a very malleable plot, but what really drives it are these damn songs; every single one of them is fantastic, from the compositions, the guitar riffs, the extremely high energy, and especially in the lyrics. I now understand why all of these are paired so specifically on streaming. You cannot hear one of them without the other, and you really can’t listen to some of these songs by themselves, unless you remember the sort of context of the album. It really is a damn play.
One small thing about the plot itself… I dunno, it’s a little weird in the end, given how often people find success outside of their hometown in my experience, but in terms of this hellish post-9/11 suburbia that Jesus finds himself in, maybe he really is just more comfortable at home. Regardless of that, I thought this was fucking spectacular. Absolutely worthy of the hype. Really dumb of me to never listen before now, but I now feel as cleansed as Jesus did at the end of this album. One of the easiest 5s yet.
Norah Jones
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
I dunno, there was just something deeply entrancing about that album to me. I’ve heard of Norah Jones before this, but I’ve never heard her sing. Her voice just has such control to it while maintaining a softness that still commands a bit of authority. It is the anchor that keeps this album glued together. In terms of the instrumentation; I get the vibe – big jazzy nightclub atmosphere with a distinctly 50s/60s mood behind it. It works perfectly for this album, but it does get a little draining after about 9 or 10 songs, hence the 4.5.
There’s a few covers sprinkled in here, and the one that stuck to me the most is Cold Cold Heart – that’s a song I’ve heard, but I could never remember it by name or anything. I’m glad it popped up. I think the runtime is my only complaint here, or at the very least, a lack of variance that keeps the album distinctly fresh near the end. Regardless, I thought it was great. Some super standout tracks, and even if it leans into coffee shop fodder a few times, I’m just a sucker for the atmosphere. I’m totally fine with bumping this up to a 5. I am surprised it was as big of a hit as it was though.
The Who
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
I think this was pretty damn good; it’s not perfect, and it’s admittedly probably a little closer to a 4 than it is a 5, but I respect the structure of the album and most of the songs too much to drop it down to a 4. It is a bit long, and certainly a little too loose and open at times where the clear vision of the album gets a little lost in the technicalities of the tracks.
However, that’s nitpicking – it’s weird to say “the instrumentation dilutes the story,” because that’s remarkably dumb for a rock opera. You’re not necessarily listening for the story, you’re listening for the blend of both, and for one of the earliest ones, I’d say this album does a damn good job of setting up a blueprint. It’s also a pretty solid story, going from dumb, deaf and blind to basically a cult leader, only for him to realize he is indeed just as alone as he was, pinball or otherwise. At least, that’s how I interpreted it. There are some feel good moments in here, and some not very good ones (I’m stunned at the molestation, really), but that’s what any good plot should have.
I just liked it a lot – again, it’s not perfect, and I do think 74 minutes is a bit self-serving, especially with a few songs that kind of do nothing other than re-iterate a plot point or two, but regardless of that, what’s here is a super good listen. At the very least, the instrumentation here is great, and while this doesn’t quite hit the superb highs of Who’s Next, there’s enough moments where everything just glides to forget about the looser parts of the album. I’m totally fine with bumping it up to a 5, but it’s certainly a lot closer to a 4.5 than it is a full 5 for me.
Laura Nyro
3/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I just don’t think I can round up to a 4.
Really, the biggest thing this album has going against it is a lack of complete consistency. I’m not opposed to bucking traditionalism and having wild tempo shifts and mood shifts within individual songs, because when this album does it, it usually does it remarkably well, and tends to make sense within the lyrics of each track. It just never keeps a model of consistency in the quality of those shifts, and it stems entirely from her vocals.
Her vocals, for most of this album, are usually pretty good, but there are times when, much like the compositions themselves, it just strains a little too far one way or the other to the point of either breaking, or sounding a little shaky. It’s very apparent when she tries to do those stair step vocals to pitch up or pitch down; it’s not consistent, and it’s not as clean as one would hope. Regardless, though, her vocals don’t ruin the songs at all, they’re just noticeable in a way that doesn’t vibe with my musical sensibilities. I love having vocalists blend in perfectly to the music, and she just doesn’t do it consistently enough here to overlook it.
With all of that said, I think the instrumentals are great, the lyrics are a little weird at times (what in the fuck is “Decembery ice” other than a desperately needed adjective-noun pair) but mostly pretty solid, and the vibes of the album are good. I really did enjoy most of this album, and I’d honestly recommend it; someone will absolutely overlook all of these perceived flaws and just vibe out.
For me, though, it’s just not consistent enough to bump up to a 4, and it certainly never gets anywhere near a 5 as a complete project. If I could keep it at a 3.5, I would, but I’m gonna leave it at a 3.
The Velvet Underground
4/5
I liked it a lot, but I’m just at a 4.
Ultimately, I do think that lived up to the hype – it really picked up after the first 2 tracks, and I thought most of the album afterward was pretty damn good. It’s not like, world-changing to me or anything; I’m sure it hit a lot harder in 1968, since these tricks have since been done to death by a number of bands, but this is pretty fucking innovative for its time.
Heroin, is of course, the standout track; that thumping drum that acts as a heartbeat, the swirling instrumentation growing into a full blown cacophonic panic, while the vocals go on without a care – it’s crazy to make that in 1968. I do think the last track kinda falls flat, but in a way, I like that it does; a very untraditional closing track for a very untraditional album for its time.
I don’t have extremely glowing praise, mainly because I still think I need to dive deeper into the lyrics, but I did really end up liking this. It’s a very strong 4, and it could be a 5 with time for me.
The White Stripes
4/5
That’s a very good 4.
This is my first proper White Stripes album, and all I can say is… I really wish Seven Nation Army wasn’t the big song for them, because it undermines their talent as a band that can cover this wide of a musical net. The variety of instrumentals and genres and soundscapes covered here is incredibly cool and really enjoyable to me. Blue Orchid, ironically, is sort of a bad tone setter – it makes the album feel like it’s gonna be a full rock album, but when it immediately jumps into xylophones and marimbas and maracas and all of these other instruments, it really unlocks the potential of the album.
There’s great stuff on here, but I think my favorite one was The Denial Twist; it felt like a damn Cage the Elephant song a few years early, and I loved that a lot. Little Ghost is a close second for me; it’s a goofy country style song, and I’m a sucker for that kind of sound. Overall, though, this is a pretty damn good album. It’s not a 5 off of a first listen; I think there’s just a few too many filler tracks in here (Red Rain, in particular, is egregious about this) to make the entire album feel as satisfying as it could have been, but it can absolutely grow on me. It’s a VERY good 4, though.
Leonard Cohen
5/5
Well, he got me again.
Last time we got a Leonard Cohen album, I mentioned the weight of a life long lived bearing down on me, but that doesn’t apply as much here – he was only 36 at the time of making this album. By comparison, that’s rather short. However, the allegory I wrote of seeing music as art in that classical sense still applies rather deeply here, to me.
This is an album of poetry, and while it’s not an album of a life long lived, it is an album guided by experience, hope, heartbreak, and a bit more. In a way, it feels like the midway point; obviously, he couldn’t have known that at the time of writing and composing these, but so much of what guides his spiritual belief in You Want It Darker is present here, without the life stories that lead to their definitive definitions in that album.
To cut to the point, I’m rather shocked at the quality of these lyrics – I’ll still need to dive more deeply into them, but the imagery present here simply paints a picture that I still don’t feel like I can fully articulate, appreciate and comprehend. In terms of the instrumentals, I’m at least glad to hear a slightly lighter overall sound on this album; there’s some brighter instruments spread throughout that keep this from feeling overwhelmingly dreary.
I could keep trying to go on, but I just deeply, deeply enjoyed this. It’s a damn good album, and I’d be a fool to give it anything other than a 5.
Metallica
5/5
That’s an easy 5.
I am completely exhausted after listening to that – what a whirlwind 62 minutes of pure energy. That’s my first proper Metallica album, outside of the live one we got a while back, and I am nothing short of stunned. Apparently, this is a more commercially friendly sound, but I kinda don’t care; I thought all 12 tracks here were fucking great. James Hetfield’s screams somehow sound melodic, but when he actually sings, he somehow manages to glide pretty damn well on these tracks. These have some of the most heavy percussion and ridiculous guitar solos that I’ve ever heard – trust me, I’ve heard a lot of insane solos on some of the other albums, and the ones on this album stack up with the very best of them here.
I don’t really have the energy left to gush on and on about this, but I just know that it is one of the most satisfying 5s I get to give yet. I’m so glad this album wasn’t just Enter Sandman and a bunch of mediocrity. What a fucking stunner of an album. 10/10, at least to me.
Fugees
5/5
I’m at a 5.
I just thought that was really fun – lots of great verses, lots of great lyricism, and a very cool minimalist East Coast style of production that doesn’t get too bombastic, and allows for them to really get their messages and their vocals across. Even though Lauryn Hill is clearly the star here, both Wyclef Jean and Pras come out swinging on this album, and occasionally have moments where they really do outshine her. As a group, they really do bring the best out of each other, and it’s a shame that this is the last album they made as a trio. Obviously, some shit went down, but some bands have existed longer over worse disputes.
I truly thought every track here had something to offer, and I don’t think any track really missed a beat. Just a super strong album from top to bottom, and certainly worthy of being on this list of 1,001 albums. If nothing else, it gave us that fabulous cover of Killing Me Softly, which is one of my favorite tracks ever. Pretty easy 5.
Ministry
2/5
For the first time in a long time, I’m on a 2. The last time I gave a 2 to a non-live album was to Calenture - The Triffids, and that was *3 months ago.*
Unlike Calenture, this is just straight up at a 2; it doesn’t even hit the “2.5 that I can’t round up” mark. There’s only 2 or 3 really good tracks at most, and yes, one of them is indeed the batshit insane yet wildly entertaining nonsense that is Jesus Built My Hotrod. The other one, for me, was Hero, if only because I couldn’t shake that it sounded like a Sonic track. TV II is OK, it just sorta clicked right for me for some reason. The first 5 tracks of the album are ultimately fine – they’ve got decent energy, some fun riffs, some fun percussion, and it does hit a solid high at Track 5. It was at a 3, until Scare Crow started.
The final 4 tracks of this album just strike me as utterly directionless, or padding for the sake of it, and there is no more egregious an example of padding than the 8-minute snoozefest that is “Scare Crow” – my god, I’ve never heard anyone pan out *syllables* before. Choosing to end on two instrumental tracks after the remarkably disappointing Psalm 69 is really what dragged this album down from being close enough to a 3 to being firmly at a 2 – what a flat ending to an album that had so much potential from its imagery to its cover to the weirdest title I think we’ve gotten from an album yet.
The really disappointing part is that the framework for a good album is here – speed up some tracks, throw in some extra vocals, hell, add a skit or two to play off of this religious theming; do something to add some extra character to your album. It feels like a fucking beta version of a style that other bands would imitate and refine to a greater degree (probably Nine Inch Nails, really, if I had to guess), and while it never dives into egregiously bad, it does dive into egregiously boring a few too many times at the end. It just fell short at the finish line to me, hence the 2.
Screaming Trees
4/5
That’s a 3.5 that I’ll round up to a 4.
Sometimes, the music just sounds good to your ear. This album doesn’t do anything too special, but I… kinda just liked it a lot. Pretty consistent level of quality from top to bottom, and while there’s only one or two songs that especially stood out (for me, that’s Make My Mind and Traveler – they just kinda clicked well for some reason), there’s not really a bad song here. At worst, the first song makes for a really shaky first impression, but it recovers itself pretty quickly afterward with All I Know.
It could have certainly been a little better, and while I’m not necessarily sure this has to be on the list of albums, it’s a pretty solid showcase of the middle ground of 90s rock; not big enough to be Nirvana or Pearl Jam or Metallica, but just big enough to have a willing audience and a decent spotlight. Frankly, the real miracle is that there’s not a single swear word on the album. It’s just good enough for me to give it a charitable bump up to a 4, and it’s certainly no less than a 3.
Alice In Chains
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll easily bump up to a 5.
I’ve never heard Alice in Chains before this, but I knew the bar for this album was pretty high, and they crossed over it pretty handily. Almost every track here has a pretty infectious energy – a few songs hit an occasional lull, and a few have a little too much repetition at times, but overall, as an album, from top to bottom, I’d say that was about on point with a lot of their Seattle contemporaries of the time.
Nevermind is obviously still the gold standard of 90s grunge rock, and Nirvana’s sound on that album is timeless. I feel like the production on this album, for as good as it is, has the same thing going for it as Jagged Little Pill – just like how that album is sort of trapped in 1995, this album is trapped in 1992. That doesn’t mean it’s bad at all. Most of what’s here sounds super cool; the guitar work in particular, is off the charts. The percussion holds its own, and I’m deeply impressed by the grit in Layne Staley’s vocals.
If I have any complaints, they’re all probably nitpicky – things like “this track goes a little too long” or “the mixing here is a little too loud,” and while those are sort of valid, they’re not present enough on this album for them to be real issues. I just liked this album a lot. This has some great fucking grunge on it, and it’s very deserving to be on the list. Pretty easy to bump this up to a 5.
Orbital
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4.
Really, the only reason I’m not at a straight 4 is because Attached is such a fucking deflating last track. That was 12 minutes of a glorified loop and it just felt like a really sour note to end a really good album.
Regardless, I will not let the final 12 minutes dictate what the first 63 gave to me, which was pretty fucking good. There’s some really fun soundscapes here, and while a lot of it leans into VGM-adjacent territory, I’ve just been listening to a lot of VGM lately, so this sort of soundscape fell right into my recent comfort zone. I think the production choices and sound design for most of this album are really good, and there’s a huge variety of synths to work with, and a lot of it comes together in a pretty harmonious way. The layering that builds up each track to get to something really concrete was well done throughout most of this album, and I found myself just vibing a lot.
I do think the final 17 or so minutes of the album fall flat; that’s the final 4 minutes of Are We Here? and the entirety of Attached, but regardless, I found so much of this enjoyable to listen to that I’m completely fine with bumping it up to a 4. This is some quality stuff here, and I’m really glad it’s on this list.
Gram Parsons
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’m gonna bump up to a 5 with incredibly naked bias.
I’ve said it a million times; I’m a sucker for the soundscape of 50s/60s country because it’s partially what I grew up on. This album takes those soundscapes and blends them really well with 70s rock sensibilities, and it does it in a way where I truly think the best of both shine throughout here.
Vocally, Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris play off of each other so fucking well that it’s kind of mesmerizing to listen to. Lyrically, I thought a lot of these songs, while a little corny or cheesy at times, did a great job of storytelling and capturing moods. Brass Buttons in particular got me damn good.
I just thought this was a damn good album from start to finish – Return of the Grievous Angel is one hell of an opener, and the only track where I kind of shrugged was Love Hurts. Other than that, I just deeply enjoyed it. I’m really glad this is here, and it feels like it should be on the list. No problems with going up to a 5.
Lenny Kravitz
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I think I’m going to incredibly graciously bump up to a 4 that it just barely earns.
I liked most of this album. It has plenty of flaws, but I can look past most of them. I think the self-control in his vocals is a bit lost at times; he can’t decide if he wants to be Ozzy Osbourne, Paul McCartney, Prince, or Stevie Wonder for most of this album. You can’t be all 4. Somehow, he ends up sounding like the lead vocalist from Bowling for Soup for parts of this album as a result, but ultimately, that’s fine.
I think the lyrics on most of the tracks are good – pretty solid messaging throughout. I think the main issue I have with this album’s lyrics simply comes in its repetition, and I Build This Garden for Us is distinctly terrible about it. Really retreading a lot of ground throughout that track. The same thing goes for Be, which quite frankly, just stunlocked me with that “or am I a rapist who needs a release” line, because what the fuck does that mean? Is it about leaving prison? Is it about getting off? It’s a weird fucking line to throw in regardless.
Instrumentation is great across the album – no complaints from me on this one. Some of the tracks went a little long on their outros, but I could forgive it in the same way I can forgive a Stevie Wonder outro for going long, because the vibes are good and the music is a jam.
Ultimately, I do think this album just does more right than wrong to get up to a 4, but that could change on a relisten or two. It’s definitely not within the range of being a 5, though. This is, so far, the only album to have a straight 3 in the reviews so far, which tells me I might be a little generous, and I can see why. This is the type of album that might have more holes or flaws open up over time to bump it back down to a 3, but right now, I feel good about giving it the 4.
Beastie Boys
4/5
I’m at a 4, which is kinda disappointing, somehow.
I dunno, I guess I was really prepared for a 5, but a few tracks here and parts of the big medley at the end just didn’t quite grab me. Regardless of that, I did enjoy most of this album. Other than the revolutionary sample usage here, which is an incredible triumph for 1989 and an incredible tonesetter for rap production in the future…
…honestly, I just don't think there's a lot to wax poetic on. Don’t get me wrong; the beats are great, the flow is great, the lyrics are pretty good, and I think for the most part, the energy stays at a good point throughout. This *IS* the Beastie Boys, and they’re doing great work on most of this album.
There’s just something about a few tracks that I simply felt weren’t too captivating or engaging enough for me to really like them like that. It could just be fatigue from its length or the fact that there’s not any breaks like on Ill Communication. It’s honestly really weird, because I’d probably normally just look past it, but for some reason, when you just know something isn’t as good as you want it to be, you can just feel it. This album is still very good, but it falls short of hitting that 4.5 mark, and even if it had, I’m not quite sure I could bump it up.
Regardless though, it’s no less than a 4 – it’s a super fun album that just kinda fell short for me in a few spots, but it’s a great listen and a great way to cap off 1980s rap.
Buddy Holly & The Crickets
5/5
You know what? I’m at a 5.
For 1957, this feels like a sneak preview of what the 60s would bring to rock & roll, in a very good way. There’s a lot of DNA in here for what the Beatles would eventually refine and revolutionize, but this album stands on its own merits without those comparisons. If anything, it feels like Buddy Holly and friends were trying to capitalize on Elvis’s popularity without realizing they were creating the blueprint for the 60s.
Seriously, this is a damn good album; yes, it has moments where the production is kinda “ehh” but it’s 1957, so I can look past it. There’s some catchy fucking hooks and choruses here, and I love the way the doo-wop feel of the 50s is still represented here in the backing vocals. There’s just a hodgepodge of styles here that blend together very well for a 50s album, and I’ll be damned if “That’ll Be The Day” isn’t the best representation of that on this album.
I feel completely fine with giving this a 5; it’s a tight, enjoyable, and fun 26 minutes that never really overstays its welcome on a single track, and I just enjoyed it a lot. Pretty damn good album.
Frankie Goes To Hollywood
4/5
I’m at a 4.
This is a pretty damn good album, but by the end, it kind of falters into a directionless playlist that makes the album experience suffer just enough to drop this out of the range of a 5.
To put it more succinctly, I think by Track 10, a lot of the songs lose the tighter and more focused structure that was present earlier in the album, and devolve into great soundscapes but with really loose lyrics, and while I could look past it normally, it just happens too much and too often over the final 7 tracks to ignore. The Only Star In Heaven might be an egregious example of this; what a great hook to start off with on that first verse before kind of just rambling around a bit.
With that said, I still liked a lot of the tracks, even those final 7; I just wish the album was a little bit tighter and a little more focused. I don’t think there’s a single bad track here, but some of them feel like they could’ve been non-album singles in order to keep the album experience flowing better. If anything, the biggest knock I can make against this album is moreso how explicitly sexual it is at times. I’m not trying to add a song to my playlist that straight up talks about how mystifying an orgasm can be without any pretense, or just straight up has sex sounds in it like The Ballad of 32, you know?
Regardless, this album is no less than a 4 to me. It could even jump up to a 5 if the album’s structure magically clicks better for me someday, but what’s here makes for an exciting and sort of innovative soundscape for 1984 – I can’t say that I’ve heard too many 80s bands rely this heavily on synth work with an explicitly pop lean, but this album makes it work in spades. It’s a great listen, and it’s very fun; I’m still hung up on it as a full album experience, but it would be ridiculous to not give this album a try. It deserves to be on the list, and it’s a strong 4.
Pixies
4/5
I’m at a 4.
This is a much improved effort over Surfer Rosa for my sensibilities; it blends a bit more of a commercialized sound with their techniques, and in terms of the overall mixing and sound production, what’s here does a much better job of letting each instrument shine, for the most part.
Much like Welcome to the Pleasuredome, though, I do think this album suffers from being a little too directionless in the back half, which is weird to say for a 38 minute album, but that’s just how I feel. There’s a number of tracks here that seem to exist as jam session ideas that pad out time to make the album feel worth the purchase, and while I don’t think any of them are bad, I simply think they’re a little unnecessary, and once again hinder the album’s listening experience.
With that said, I still enjoyed this more than Surfer Rosa – not enough to go up to a 5, but there is the chance that it could all click at a later point for me. There’s some great fucking tracks here, and while some of them get a little dragged down lyrically, I don’t think anything is outright ruined. It’s a much more approachable record, and whether that makes it better or worse is up to personal opinion. I just know this one clicked better for me, and it’s definitely worthy of being on the list. Pretty damn good 4.
Common
5/5
Yeah, that’s a 5.
Obviously, it kills me to give Kanye any kind of credit in 2024, but as I’ve said; the version of the man that existed in 2004 is the version of the man I want to remember and admire if I ever think of Kanye, and his influence is felt all over this album, whether it’s in writing credits, production credits, or just the reshaping of Chicago rap that came in after College Dropout.
Make no goddamn mistake about it, though; this is Common’s album, and he has the final say on everything here. What emerges from this collaboration is something that is distinctly more of his voice than Kanye’s, and that’s why I can sort of look past how much of Kanye’s fingerprints shape this album, because Common is the star here. He’s the main writer, he’s the one rapping, and overall, these are his stories to tell. He tells them beautifully – there’s not a single wasted line here, even when he’s horny as hell on Go!, it’s still delivered with such a confident flow that he just rolls with it without missing a beat.
Speaking of the beats… yeah, Kanye cooked on a lot of these tracks, but so did J. Dilla – I don’t know that I’ve ever really heard a J. Dilla beat (sue me, I still haven’t heard Donuts), but the swirling piano that surrounds the outro of the entire album (and really, most of the beat on It’s Your World) is utterly perfect. I can’t remember the last time an album stuck the landing on the ending that hard.
I could keep gushing here, but it’s just a fabulous rap album for 2005 – obviously, Kanye’s star power after College Dropout is probably what gave this album a bit of commercial appeal, but the end result is all Common’s, and it’s all great. It’s an easy 5 – it might even be a 10/10 for me, genuinely. I don’t think there’s a skip here. I loved this.
The Streets
3/5
By some genuine miracle, I’m at a 3.
This album makes one of the worst first impressions imaginable compared to expectations; when you read something like “rap opera,” the brain makes comparisons to shit like Tommy by The Who, in terms of “opera” in traditional music, or Hamilton in terms of “rap” to tell a story. This album is quite literally neither of those, and to call it a “rap opera” is a genuinely misleading description that might taint the album if you just don’t stick to it.
This is not a rap opera; it’s a rap TV drama. To make the U.K. reference, this is basically just an 11-episode arc of Eastenders or Coronation Street, or some other goofy hokey drama, with a bit of a sitcom lean. To call this album an opera is like calling High School Musical a Broadway production; it just sets the wrong expectations.
Once this album truly settles in, it’s… totally fine, honestly. Completely inoffensive beats, if a bit boring at times (but perfectly fitting on others), decent storytelling (but not anything TOO evocative, save for the genuinely fantastic “Dry Your Eyes”), and ultimately, a fine story that just feels a bit relatable in the end. It’s not THAT great; critics giving this like, a 90 on Metacritic or calling it a top 50 album of the 2000s are severely overrating it.
However, I genuinely think it’s good. It takes a terrible first impression, and eventually finds its voice – yes, the flow could be better, the melodic qualities could use a bit of work, and the delivery feels a little bland without really getting too deep into the emotions trying to be portrayed… but I just kinda ended up liking it. It’s definitely not a 4, and it’s nowhere near a 5, but I can’t agree with the people that are giving this a 1 or 2.
Lower the expectations before you go into it, because you’re not gonna get something like Tommy, which genuinely became a movie. You’re gonna get a 11-episode arc of a TV show where a weed-smoking guy loses his money behind a TV, meets his girlfriend, gets cheated on by one of his friends, and then learns to live with it. A completely average plot for a good album that simply does a good job of executing its vision. In other words, a resounding 3, but one I’d actually recommend.
Ride
3/5
It’s a 2.5 and I wish I could leave it there… but I’ll graciously round it up to a 3, even if I really don’t want to.
I just wasn’t that captivated by this. There’s nothing technically wrong with any of these tracks, and in terms of execution, I think they nailed exactly what they were going for. This is my first time listening to anything shoegaze, and my assessment of it is that it’s like leaving the reverb in as if it’s a smoke cloud from a fire; it just hangs around, and stays there, and it doesn’t really bother you, but it is kind of weird that it’s there.
It’s just… I dunno, for my tastes, not that interesting. There’s not a bad track here, but there’s not really a standout either; it’s a bunch of tracks that just sort of blend together for me in a directionless way. Yeah, the lyricism is fine, but the melodies (both vocally and instrumentally) feel either monotone or buried by the swirling wall of reverb smoke that permeates most of these tracks. It’s cool on the first track, but when you realize that it’s an entire album of just this, it just sort of loses the luster immediately.
It just really does not feel like an album I had to listen to before I die, you know? Could’ve gone my whole life without hearing it, and now that I have heard it, it’s just OK. It doesn’t do anything special, and it doesn’t feel like it stands out. In terms of the individual tracks, they sound pretty neat, and I’m not opposed to the concept of shoegaze, but as an album experience, this just sorta dragged me into mediocrity. At least the last track was nice.
I’ll acknowledge that this could do a lot more for someone else, but for me, ultimately, it’s a 2.5 that just barely does enough for me to bump it up to a 3. However, it could honestly go down over time. There’s just no room for going any higher than a 3, and that’s that.
ZZ Top
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4.
This is a good album, with one big issue for my sensibilities: the solos just go really fucking long, man. I wouldn’t mind it if it were one solo every now and then, but it feels like every single fucking song has to have at least a 90 second solo (or what feels like even longer) in a way that creates such a gap between verses that it just starts to feel like empty noise after a bit.
That’s not to say the solos are bad; a good number of them have excellent guitar work and percussion, and they’re captivating in their own way, but if I were listening to this album in a car, I feel like those solos would just drag the fuck on in a bad way.
With all of that said, though, what’s here is really strong 80s rock. Yes, it’s a bit formulaic, and that formulaic nature is what stops this from ever getting close to a 5 in my ears, but the formula works really well at an individual level. As an album experience, though, it just becomes too noticeable, much like the extended solos do. There’s great energy on all of these tracks, and I enjoyed every single one of them, but I kind of found myself in a holding pattern after the melodies wore off with each new track.
I could keep nitpicking at this, but I’ll just get to it: it’s a solid album with noticeable problems (for my tastes) that manages to drag a lot of great 80s rock standards out while occasionally dragging along and sounding like a drag. However, the good outweighs the bad enough for me to bump this up to a 4; it’s still a pretty enjoyable album and a hell of a way to practice your air guitar, at least.
Sister Sledge
4/5
I’m at a really good 4.
The biggest misstep on this album is the endlessly droning “Somebody Loves Me,” but besides that, what a great CHIC album. Yes, I know; it’s a Sister Sledge album, but this may as well be CHIC ft. Sister Sledge. That’s not to be taken as a complaint at all; I’m sure they had some level of say in the instrumentation and lyricism to make the songs feel more like their own, but this is a Nile Rodgers-led production if I’ve ever heard one.
Some of the lingering issues from Risque are here, but they come up far less often; a few songs hit on a little too much repetition, or a melody that lingers a bit too long, or a soundscape that just loses its luster after 4 minutes without really changing stuff up. Those issues are here, but I can usually look past them because of the excellent vocals of Sister Sledge.
I really don’t have any complaints; it’s a damn good album that gets dragged down to a 4 because of “Somebody Loves Me,” but without that track, I’d probably be at a 5. Honestly, I’ll probably just listen to it that way. It’s a very good listen, it’s catchy as hell, and it’s just some of the best disco of the era. Easily deserving to be on the list.
Butthole Surfers
3/5
I’m… uh… let’s go with a 3.
I don’t know that I’ve ever had less words for an album after listening to it; it’s not that I think this is bad. If anything, its eccentricities, its cacophonies, and all of its intentionally delivered flaws and oddities make it one of the more captivating of the 209 albums we’ve gotten so far, for better or for worse. I truly don’t think this album ever lost me in terms of being attentive and aware.
It completely fucking lost me somewhere in the middle in terms of my own personality, invaded my brain, and simply replaced me with a new man somewhere by the end. This album is a goddamn acid trip on a runaway train that, while you know it’s going entirely off the rails, you are sat down as if this thing is taking you to the destination that you don’t even know you want to go to.
I truly cannot describe the intricacies of this album; it is a complete enigma, and I somehow feel rejuvenated and confused at the same time after listening to it. I may never know quite what overcame me after a single listen, but I… think I enjoyed it. It’s a 3. It’s a very weird 3. It is worth a listen, if only to experience whatever sensation I just felt.
4/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I really want to bump up to a 5, but I just don’t think I can.
What’s here, for the most part, is totally engaging and super rad; the 13 minutes of City, Country, City in particular might be one of my favorite extended instrumental tracks we’ve gotten, and a remarkable showcase of early 70s funk and jazz. This is a great fucking album that feels deeply reminiscent of some of Stevie Wonder’s best.
However, those little extra parts that aren’t as engaging are what drag this album down to just a 4 for me – it’s got nothing to do with the instrumentation itself, or the energy of each track, or the lyrics, but it’s all about the length of some of these tracks. I think Four Cornered Room went on about 2 or 3 minutes too long in a way that didn’t substantially add anything to the track except for some runtime padding. I think The World Is A Ghetto, while fabulous, could’ve been trimmed down just a bit around the edges to make it feel more cohesive in a way that doesn’t sacrifice its soundscape. 10 minutes is long for that track, and there’s a sort of creative bankruptcy to the repetition of saying the song’s title over and over again, at least for me.
The same applies to the first and the last tracks as well – great soundscapes, but I thought The Cisco Kid was sort of unengaging as the opener and Beetles in the Bog just fell flat for me with the vocal and instrumental repetition, especially as an album closer.
Once again though, this is a great fucking album, and my complaints don’t take away from the fact that this is funky as hell, has great lyricism, great instrumentation, super fun energy, and is overall a great listen. I just think for my tastes it could’ve been trimmed a bit to shave down the filler and make for a tighter album experience. It’s really close to being a 5, but it’s an excellent 4 regardless of that, and deserves to be on the list.
Gorillaz
4/5
It’s a 4.
I’ve never heard the debut, though I have heard Demon Days, and while I firmly think Demon Days is the better album of the two after this listen, what’s here is remarkably experimental and genre-bending for 2001 that I have to give this album a lot of flowers. Obviously, Clint Eastwood is the big star of the album, but a lot of this is really fucking good.
The big thing stopping this from being within 5 territory is simply how many tracks feel a little flat or a little repetitive for my tastes; there’s not any bad tracks, but a few too many weren’t clicking for one reason or another, namely the stretch of Tracks 12 through 14, whether it’s the language barrier biting at me, not really vibing with the emptiness in a soundscape, or simply being really fucking annoyed by a never-ending sample of a cheering crowd that anchors an entire song. Yeah, Slow Country sucks, I said it. I did not like that track.
Regardless of that, though, the rest of this album clicked incredibly well for me. It’s a bit repetitive in a few spots, and sometimes the beats kept droning on without much of an evolution in the sound, but I don’t think any of it really took my enjoyment away until that stretch of tracks 12-14. There’s simply too much that doesn’t vibe with my tastes to go up to a 5, but it’s absolutely no less than a 4; great fucking stuff here, and easily deserving to be on the list.
Pink Floyd
5/5
I’m at a 10.
I truly don’t know that I have the words to describe how all of this made me feel, but I imagine I’ll stumble into them as I write stuff; first and foremost, this is my first Pink Floyd album in full. Never heard anything off of Dark Side, and really, the only Pink Floyd track I’ve heard before this was Wish You Were Here, which I think is an excellent track.
I’ve had moments throughout listening to all of these albums where I’ve felt dumb for not listening to an artist or a band before they popped up in this list and I had to be confronted with it. This is perhaps the dumbest I’ve ever felt yet. I don’t want to give a full recap of the plot or anything; that’s for other people to type out and analyze. I just want to type how I feel, which is that this just hit remarkably close to home for me a little too often, but in a good and confrontational way. The wall is a very real, and very valid thing. The message this album is trying to send is arguably more relevant now in 2024 than it was in 1979, and it’s a goddamn shame that apparently Roger Waters himself has lost the fucking plot on it.
I’m still at a loss for words, so I’ll just skip to the finish: there is not a single missed note, or beat, or anything on here. This is 80 minutes of some of the best stuff ever put to tape, in terms of a fully cohesive vision and its execution. I feel remarkably idiotic for not listening to this before, and I curse Doug Walker every day for making “The Wall” into his own personal shitshow of a joke. Just a truly fabulous album that I may never put into words. Just listen to it. It’s a 10 out of 10, and well-deserving of so much of its critical acclaim. I truly, truly loved this.
The Hives
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I think I’m gonna just barely bump up to a 4.
I really wish I could keep it at that 3.5, but what’s here, in terms of energy and atmosphere and tempo is all honestly pretty good. The biggest knock I have on this album is its pacing and some of its production; I think there are too many tracks in a row that rely entirely on the energy of the soundscape, going at blazing fast speeds that are sure to perk up a listener, but at the expense of not being able to comprehend the lyrics, which are a bit incomprehensible throughout chunks of the back half of the album. It would be fine if it were one or two tracks in a row, but it feels like it’s around 3 or 4, and that’s simply too much.
However, I thought too many of the soundscapes during that stretch were fucking rad as hell to ignore them like that. It’s a really entertaining 28 minutes, and that short length stops any one track from truly overstaying its welcome and becoming annoying. These are great individually, but as an album, they’re a little weirdly clumped together.
With that said, the energy is still entirely infectious, and this album stays at a consistent enough quality that I think it can get that bump up to a 4, but it really is hanging on by a thread. I imagine if I come back to this album, those little lingering issues about lyrical comprehension and the overall pacing of the 12 tracks (seriously, who decided to have that many fast tracks in a row in the middle there?) are gonna bite at me more and more to a point where I might drop it down to a 3… but it’s no less than a 3. It’s pretty fun, and pretty good, and I think it should be on the list.
Dr. Dre
5/5
It’s a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
There are some (ok, probably many) aspects of this album that haven’t aged well, but for 1992, Dre’s solo debut, and the introduction of Snoop Dogg to the world, it’d be ridiculous for me to not bump this up to a 5 on account of just how damn well Dre fucking nailed this.
The biggest outliers are, frankly, the tracks where Dre isn’t as prominent on them – I’d say Snoop carries at least half of this album, but even in N.W.A., I can’t really say Dre was a featured rapper to that degree. He was the beats guy, and he fucking kills almost every single beat here. Yes, he dips into his bag of tricks in a way that feels a little same-y the deeper the album goes, but a lot of that is usually saved by just how damn good the lyricism and flow on these tracks are.
I do think the album starts to lose a bit of steam after The $20 Sack Pyramid, and that’s why it’s only at a 4.5 that I’m bumping up and not a straight 5, but I’d be hard-pressed to not call this one of the top 5 rap albums of the 90s; I’m sure I’m being forgetful to a point where it could slip into a top 10 slot, but regardless, I just deeply enjoy this album. I think those first 6 tracks after the intro are all-timers, and even if the album goes on a bit of a descent after Track 10, it’s just too damn good to not bump it up to a 5. It’s a great fucking album, and a genuine landmark moment for west coast hip hop, arguably even more than Straight Outta Compton was. It’s absolutely worth the listen and absolutely worth being on the list.
The Zombies
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I think just barely bumps itself up to a 5.
I wasn’t really feeling the first 2 tracks on this album; I thought they felt a little repetitive in their lyricism and vocals, even if the instrumentals were pretty good. From Track 3 onward though, I thought this album took a nice ramp up in energy; each track got progressively better and better (save for the sort of super generic track that is “I Want Her, She Wants Me”) before it started firing on all cylinders by Track 9 and never looked back. I genuinely had a big grin on my face when I realized “Time of the Season” was that track, because I’ve heard it several times (obviously, the Eminem sample helped a bit), but I’ve never really thought to listen to the original.
The quality that stems from 9 of those final 10 tracks is what gets this to go from a 4.5 up to a 5; I think they’re just too damn good to sell them short by leaving them at a 4. Yes, the album starts slow, but it really does ramp up and finish in a remarkable way; the choice to end on Time of the Season, and save frankly your best song for last is really hard in the modern music industry, and it’s kind of a breath of fresh air to see it happen here. I might be overhyping it a little, but I really, really did enjoy this – I feel good about going to a 5.
The Adverts
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4.
I don’t think this album does anything super special, but it certainly doesn’t do anything wrong; this is a pretty quick 31 minutes that’s full of pretty quality tracks, but as an album experience, I feel like there’s not much of a sense of direction for the band to firmly plant itself on as a debut album.
Individually, I don’t think there’s a bad track here – a few mediocre ones, sure, but nothing ever reaches outright bad. The instrumentation is pretty entertaining, and the vocals know when to switch between calm, angry, and forceful. The lyrics are sort of where this album falls flat; not that they’re bad, but there’s never really a super catchy hook here to really hang your hat on as a signature song.
However, in terms of the album, it just sort of felt like going track to track without a direction, and while Odessey & Oracle was sort of the same way, it worked because of the consistency in the stylings of each track – this album can’t really decide if it wants to be super heavy, a little light, or somewhere right in the middle. It jumps between each tone, and it makes the album experience feel just a little bit too dissonant at times.
Regardless, what’s here is super fun, and most of the little nitpicks I had don’t take away from the overall quality of each track or the album; it’s got a lot of great energy, and when everything is clicking, it feels a little unstoppable in a charismatic way. It just doesn’t click as often as I’d like, but it clicks often enough to bump this up to a 4.
Michael Kiwanuka
5/5
I’m at a 5.
God, what a beautiful, beautiful album. I’ve never heard of Michael Kiwanuka until now, but this album is one hell of an introduction; such a deeply vivid album, from its instrumentals, to its lyricism, and even to its vocals – his voice has such a great fucking tone to it that manages to sound like Bill Withers, Phil Collins, and Seal all at once. In terms of the genres, this album bounces all over the place, but it never once loses any sense of cohesion – it can go from Stevie Wonder-esque pop, to Bill Withers-esque soul, to a bit of Jimi Hendrix on a dime, while managing to explore a lot of other genres within those influences – for example, the instrumental part of Interlude (Loving the People) really stuck out to me. It feels almost Brian Eno-esque at the end while scattering in some awesome electric guitar throughout. Looking at the whole thing, it's basically a modern 70s album, even down to its cover art.
Really, I’m just stunned this never entered my radar before now, and based on Spotify plays and whatnot, this is criminally fucking underrated. I’m really blown away by how cohesive this feels as an album experience; I feel like 2019 was very much a year for “playlist albums” thrown together without rhyme or reason, so to have an album cohesively put together with a definitive start and finish, excellent transitions throughout, and an overarching window of his version of the Black experience (if you didn't get this throughout the album, you truly did not get it) just feels kind of special. I thought this hit on all cylinders from top to bottom, and almost every influence it touches on involves some of my favorite artists ever, so everything here was right down my alley. Just a spectacular album – honestly, probably a 10/10 for me.
Paul McCartney and Wings
5/5
That’s an easy 5, and thank goodness it is.
I always use this album as a sort of benchmark, but it’s been so long since I actually heard it that I wondered if my memory was sort of faltering on me – obviously, Band on the Run and Jet are the two biggest hits off of this album, and some of Paul’s best known post-Beatles stuff, but I couldn’t fully remember the rest of the album.
The rest of the album is just as damn good; the only real point of “ehh” for me was the sort of “first minute is the whole song” track that is “Let Me Roll It,” but even that’s a pretty good song when it comes to it – I think this is just a great fucking listen, regardless of paying attention to the lyrics, and if you do pay attention to the lyrics, I think it just adds even more to the album. The structures on all of these tracks are super fun, both vocally and instrumentally in a way that’s both reminiscent of The Beatles and much closer to some of his contemporaries at the time, like say, Stevie Wonder, Elton John, or even a lot of the U.S. bands that had kinda tried to fill the post-Beatles void (especially on No Words & Helen Wheels).
I could keep going, but I’m just glad this album was as strong as I remembered it being – I truly forgot the album had ended on a small reprise of Band on the Run, so that was a fun looping point. It’s just a great fucking album, and when music can make someone feel this good, there’s not a damn thing wrong with it. Just a really strong listen from top to bottom, and a real pinnacle of 70s rock to me. One of the easiest 5’s I’ll give.
Grizzly Bear
3/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’m rounding down to a 3.
There’s not any bad tracks here, but there’s a number of tracks that just aren’t very captivating to me, and those tracks just drag the album down from the incredibly hot start it had. I was really into the first 4 tracks, but starting from Track 5, I think the album just gets a little too broad from a lyrical standpoint and for some reason, it just nagged at me the entire time. When the lyrics got too broad, the songs felt like they had less substance and less structure, and while that’s probably better for some people, it just doesn’t work as well for me. When the album does strike on tracks that have a structure and a substance during those final 8 tracks, I think it clicks really well, but it only does it a handful of times.
There’s fantastic instrumentation throughout this album, but it just feels like too many of the songs on here are full of missed opportunity for my musical tastes – I want to dig deeper into these slice-of-life monotonous moments that are usually captured pretty well, but the scope of so many tracks being so broad just sort of left me underwhelmed.
Once again, though, there’s not a bad track, and I don’t think this is a bad album. It’s just not fully my thing, but I can see how it could be someone else’s. It’s probably a 4 or maybe even a 5 for someone else, but for me, I’m just kinda stuck on a 3.
The Icarus Line
1/5
I’m at a 1.5 that I’m going to round down to a 1. That is the first, and hopefully last time I will ever have to write a sentence like that.
This album fluctuated for a while in terms of where I was at with it; I thought the first track, “Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers” was fine – not super captivating, but just ultimately fine. I thought the second track, “Spit on It” was obnoxiously mixed and I quickly thought this would be a completely disastrous trainwreck. On the Lash had the worst intro ever, and started to reaffirm my fears, until it ended up actually being pretty good. Caviar was fine, but just sort of a directionless slog. Spike Island was decent – not that good, but it was enjoyable enough that I liked it. Kiss Like Lizards is the highest point of the album – I genuinely think it’s a great track with a lot of fun energy. By that point, I was probably at around a 2.5 that I could bump up to a 3. It was poorly mixed, sure, but it wasn’t so bad that I couldn’t appreciate what the album was going for, it just wasn’t gonna be fully my thing.
Getting Bright at Night is one of the longest, loudest, and least substantial tracks I think we’ve gotten on any album so far. It is a never-ending 9-minute mess with a never-ending guitar that never once lets the song breathe on its own merits, and it immediately fucking dragged down the mood. The sad part is that the album gets in one last good gasp of air with Big Sleep, which I thought was pretty enjoyable. After that point, from Track 9 (White Devil) and onward, the album just… ugh. Tracks 9 and 10 are fine, but completely boring – they exist for the sake of padding. Track 11, Virgin Velcro, is decent enough but it’s not doing anything new or special. By now, every song just blended together and felt the same to me, even the better ones. At this point, I had simply grown tired of the album.
Seasick is decent enough until the final 2 minutes. The final 2 minutes of Seasick broke me. It’s just noise. It’s genuinely just noise. It’s not even noise with vocals to give the appearance of music. It’s truly just noise, and it’s not even noise that’s good and relaxing in the white noise Brian Eno-esque sort of way – it’s some of the most grating and painfully awful noise ever put to tape to be commercially sold. There’s not a single positive behind it. It grows louder and louder, and then it just… transitions into “Party the Baby Off,” as I’m just supposed to accept that I had my ear to the door of a T-1000 getting tortured in a lab for the last 2 minutes like it didn’t fucking exist.
Party the Baby Off has some of the worst lyrics I’ve ever heard in any album closer ever. “But motherfuckers do what they have to, beat your face black and blue” before repeating “take off all your clothes” as the album faded out was genuinely the final straw for me. It genuinely went from an album where 3 of the first 6 tracks were fine to being an utter trainwreck of an album that I simply had no respect for.
Don’t get me wrong, I still think that On the Lash, Spike Island, Kiss Like Lizards, and Big Sleep are all good tracks, and I might throw those in my playlists. However, this album just soured on me to such a deeply harsh fucking degree that I simply don’t think I can even give it a 2, as much as I thought about doing so. If this had had even a decent closing track, I could’ve probably been nice and gone up to a 2, just barely, if only to reward the good tracks for actually being good. It’s just not there for me.
When I gave Maxinquaye a 1, it was because I simply found the album to be deeply boring – there was no energy and it did absolutely nothing for me. I’m at a 1.5 with this one, and because of the lyrics in that last track, I simply refuse to bump it up to a 2. I do think this album has a better energy and is probably still better than Maxinquaye, but it’s the third time I’m giving an album a 1 (fuck you Kid Rock), and it’s only because it had such an extreme decline that just made me feel disappointed that I even listened to it by the end. This did not need to be on the list.
Stan Getz
4/5
As I sort of thought going into this, it’s a very nice 4.
Stan Getz is pretty damn good at this whole bossa nova thing, and this is a really fucking good bossa nova album. As I said about Getz/Gilberto, what’s here is incredibly relaxing, very enjoyable, and super easy to listen to. As I also said about Getz/Gilberto, the only reason I’m at a 4 is mainly just how rigid the album can feel; not in terms of the compositions themselves, but simply the instruments at hand.
This album sticks deeply to its shaker percussion, its cowbell, its guitar, and its saxophone, and it never really strays from that. The compositions are great, but even at just 33 minutes, there’s eventually gonna be some fatigue from hearing the shaker percussion in every single track without ever really pausing that much – the same goes for the saxophone riffs, or the guitar melodies, and the cowbell especially sticks out on the last track.
With all of that said, there’s not a single bad track here, and I really did enjoy the hell out of this – it really could go to a 5 on a subsequent listen or two, because the vibes are just immaculate throughout. It’s a great album, it’s a great listen, and it should be on the list – I wish there was a vocal track or two (or even just a track with a little more bite to it) for variety’s sake, but that’s just my wishful thinking. It’s a very deserved and very strong 4. Definitely deserves to be on the list.
Kate Bush
5/5
I’m at a 5.
This is my first Kate Bush album – obviously, Running Up That Hill was huge a few years ago, but I never really took a deeper dive into her music.
What’s here is one hell of a look at the idea of the human condition and the need for relevancy, comfort, and connection, bedazzled and supplemented with fantastic production work that seems to be the absolute pinnacle of the mid-80s style, refined all the way to this point in 1989. Her vocals are incredible throughout this album, and the lyricism is pretty damn good throughout.
I don’t know that I’ve ever heard a more effective beat drop in my life than the launch of “Rocket’s Tail” – just a masterclass of how to do that sort of thing and have it work perfectly. It’s one of the many examples of great production work blending with Kate’s vision that are scattered throughout the album, but it hits brilliantly on that track in particular. This Woman’s Work might be one of the most emotional album closers that I’ve ever heard. Seeing the scene it’s paired with adds an incredible layer of depth.
Really, I could keep glowing with praise, but I just felt really touched by this album. It hits a few snags of repetition or empty spots at points, but those get immediately washed away by some great line or a great vocal hit or something crazy in the soundscape. It’s just a really fucking strong album, and a very easy 5 for me.
George Michael
5/5
I’m at a 5.
This is my first full George Michael album – obviously, I know the bigger hits and some of his Wham! stuff, but I knew this was the one that had Freedom! ‘90 on it, which is an all-timer track as far I’m concerned, so I was sort of expecting an album with that kind of tone.
Instead, I got something that feels deeply introspective and much more serious / matured than most of his 80s work, and I’m not complaining about it – I love the direction this album takes, and while some might categorize it as moody or whiny, I think it’s a strong separation from his more poppy stuff to show his bigger variety as an artist. Obviously, people are still gonna play Careless Whisper or Last Christmas (or even Freedom! ‘90) more than they will most of the tracks on this album, but I think what’s here is probably deeply underrated in his catalog.
I really don’t think there’s a bad track here – the only odd one out is Soul Free, which is a great fucking track that just feels like it’s on the wrong album, and doesn’t really mesh with the other tracks as cohesively. Regardless, I really loved this album; it’s sort of a shame that his career slowed down heavily after this, but it’s better that he slowed down to make music he was truly engaged with instead of trying to follow a sort of tour/release cycle that Sony was trying to box so many other artists into during the early 90s. This is an easy 5 for me to give, and it’s beyond deserving to be on the list.
I gotta hear this MTV Unplugged half.
The Smashing Pumpkins
5/5
I’m at a 5.
This is my first Smashing Pumpkins album, and while I always knew there was acclaim, for some reason, I just never really went for it – it could genuinely all be in the name. Either way, I’m a fucking moron; this is a great fucking album. Lots of diversity within the soundscape, great lyricism (if a bit broad at times), and Billy Corgan’s vocals are strong as hell, almost chameleon-esque with how he can shift from soft and introspective to a classic rockstar voice on a dime.
I’m just really impressed with how honest this album seems to feel – Nirvana knew how to commercialize their style, and they did it remarkably successfully, even if it was kind of at Kurt Cobain’s detriment. Obviously, Nevermind is a fantastic album, but there’s something that feels just a little too clean about it after listening to this. I can’t explain how or why this feels more raw and honest, but it just does. Sometimes, that works against the album, and I think that honesty sort of collapses in on itself during “Silverfuck”.
Silverfuck’s a great track, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t know that it works as one long 9 minute piece; it feels like an attempt to shove the soundscape of a mini rock opera into what would otherwise be a pretty normal song if you just look at the lyrics. I think the choice of the soundscape works well, and it’s a pretty quick 9 minutes, but in the back of my mind, I just couldn’t shake the feeling that it would work better as 3 separate 3-minute tracks with their own titles to really give the song just a bit more structure and definition. It’s rather honest in what it tries to do, but I think it falls just a little short on its execution, especially with how self-serving the instrumental parts can feel the longer they go. Still a hell of a climax to the album, though, and really enjoyable.
That track is basically the only nitpick I have, but it’s such a minor blip – this album, for me, is like a 9.75/10 at the bare minimum if we’re going by 10. It’s just a remarkably strong rock album, and I can finally see the hype. I know there’s at least one other Smashing Pumpkins album on the list, so that should be exciting when it rolls around. Either way, for my first experience, this was nothing short of spectacular. Very, very easy 5.
Elvis Costello
3/5
I’m at a 3.
For a top 100 album of 1978, I’d say that was alright. Hold on, this is from 1994? Oh, jeez.
Yeah, this album really wears its target audience on its sleeve – it’s a Reagan administration album made right around the point of the Clinton administration, which is to say, for 1994, this just feels outdated and out of touch with its contemporary sounds, especially for a sort of pseudo-rock album. It’s not quite MTV Unplugged, but it sure as hell ain’t Nirvana either.
When trying to really figure out what this sounded like to me, I ended up writing down “a mismatched hybrid between Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel, while capturing neither of what makes either of them so good, and just sort of getting the leftovers,” which… yeah, I’d call that accurate.
I’m sure Elvis Costello has better albums than this, but this just wasn’t super captivating to me – while there’s not a bad track here, and everything’s an enjoyable listen, you can only really coast on “that was alright” for so long. There’s not too many standouts; I’d say of the 15 tracks here, I only really liked about 6 of them, so that’s batting just under average.
It’s not certainly not a bad album, and I’d even recommend it. It’s simply not working for me, if only because it doesn’t feel like an album from 1994 should, and there’s just better albums that do this style and sound that have come out both long before and long after it. However, it could easily work for someone else; a 4 or a 5 on this album wouldn’t feel that unjustified to me. The framework of a truly great album is here, it’s just missing something for my tastes. Hence, the 3.
Skepta
3/5
Hm. I’m at a 3.5 that I think I’ll just barely bump down to a 3, even though I did like this.
Really, the only reason I can’t bump it up to a 4 is because I just don’t think it’s a particularly cohesive album experience. It’s a really strong playlist album, and what’s here brought back those mythical “summer of 2016” vibes that people are still desperately trying to catch, and in that sense, I really liked it. However, as a cohesive album with a vision from start to finish, I think it sort of loses itself by the 8th track and just goes into “here’s the ones with the banger beats” mode, and while it does work extremely well, it gets kinda grating after a bit.
It’s a good album, don’t get me wrong – there are great beats here, some good lyricism (though very slang-heavy for my Kansas brain), and some pretty strong flow (if a bit laggy or too disconnected from the beat at times). There’s a dud or two early on in the album, but after that, it goes into a really strong flow state, and there’s some good highlights here. It’s just not glued together enough as a 12-track album for me to be able to bump it up to a 4, but I do think it’s enjoyable as hell. A really strong 3.
I had to deeply resist writing a Big Shaq joke, so here’s the obligatory mention. Sue me.
The Gun Club
1/5
I just don’t even want to write a review for this one. I’m so disappointed, man. Realistically, it’s actually a 1.5 bumped up to a 2, but because the white lead singer dropped the N word twice (hard R both times), I simply have to drop this down to a 1.
If you go to the Wikipedia page for this album, you’ll get words like “groundbreaking,” calling it innovative, and saying that several musicians have cited the album as an influence. To be completely fair to this album, the only reason why this was at a 1.5 bumped up to a 2 is because I do think this instrumental style works – it’s very early garage rock, but with the sort of blues style flair that really got refined and perfected in the early 2000s indie scene. This is a genuinely innovative album in that sense, and I really liked a lot of the instrumentals here. If this album were just the instrumentals, I’d probably be at a 3, bare minimum.
They are all wasted on some of the worst lyricism and vocals I’ve ever fucking heard in my life. I don’t even want to expand on that, but because I’m already giving this a 1, I may as well tear into them a little bit – they’re the fucking musical equivalent of Desert Bus. He can’t fucking shut up. Every time you play Desert Bus, you gotta nudge the bus a little bit to the right in order to keep it from going off the road, and that’s what his vocals are. Once you notice the “guitar riffs for 5 seconds, random ass lyric, guitar riffs for 5 seconds” pattern that permeates *so goddamn much of this album*, it is truly impossible to ignore. Those random ass lyrics are pushing the bus to the right. They’re annoying to listen to, and I genuinely believe they add almost nothing of substance to this album.
The real stress test of whether or not you’ll like this album is entirely dependent on Fire Spirit, which I think is a genuinely encapsulating track of the entire experience. It’s got a fantastic fucking instrumental, and it’s got what I consider to be the worst storytelling and vocal performance of the entire album. It’s got a story, sure, but it’s like listening to the worst D&D player at your table explain his quest in the most unimaginative way ever.
If you can handle that track without really wincing at either the vocals or the storytelling, there’s a chance you’ll genuinely like the album – I’m being harsh on it, but it’s not specifically bad, it’s just disappointingly mediocre compared to the expectations that were put on it – this thing got good reviews in 1981 and even got a 9.1/10 from Pitchfork in 2021, which is insane to me, because I did not fucking like this enough to even sniff a 3 on account of the vocals and lyrics alone.
I really do think that there’s a great soundscape here, and it did pave the way for a lot of 2000s rock standards that I do like, but they have easily eclipsed what this album did. It just didn’t work for me – I think it drags on like hell, I think it’s draining to listen to once you notice the obvious structural patterns throughout the tracks, and I just don’t think the vocals or lyrics stack up to any kind of modern standard. It’s a 1.5, that gets bumped to a 2, that goes back down to a 1 for the slurs. It’s a damn 4/10 in my heart, though.
Kendrick Lamar
5/5
It’s a 10. I knew it was gonna be a 10 before I listened to it again, but I just had to be completely sure.
Too many people have written too many words about this album for me to add anything truly meaningful to the praise it gets – hell, I even wrote a paper about “How Much a Dollar Cost” once, so I’m worn out on writing things about this album already. I can’t wait to read all of the thinkpieces when this album hits its 10th anniversary next year to reflect on just how special of a piece of art this is – people with bigger vocabularies and more introspection than I will be able to write some beautiful one-liners about its impact and its legacy in ways that I’ll only be able to appreciate and agree with.
For my money’s worth, I truly have nothing but praise for it, and it’s praise that everyone else will regurgitate – brilliant lyricism, incredible flow, fantastic features, genre-bending instrumentals, great vocal work, and ultimately, just one of the more clear and concise visions ever laid out for a single album with damn near flawless execution, especially via the framing of the album provided by the poem and the payoff with the 2pac “interview” at the end.
This is the easiest 10 I could possibly give. I’m sure there are better rap albums out there, I’m sure there are albums with bigger impacts out there, and I’m willing to admit that I know it so well inside and outside from the amount of times I’ve listened to it that I can’t really look at it with a deeply critical eye… but I just don’t care. I truly think it’s the best album of the 21st century, regardless of genre, a top 10 album of all time, and it cemented Kendrick Lamar’s legacy by just his third studio album. Everything since this has been a bonus, and they’ve been incredible bonuses in their own right. I hope this guy drops again soon.
Drake could fucking never.
3/5
I’m at a 2.5 that will just barely get bumped up to a 3 out of pure bias.
I was really expecting a bit more slop out of this album, but listening to it in full, it’s really not that bad, it’s just painfully bland more often than it is truly entertaining. When this album hits though, I genuinely think it hits – I am kind of a sucker for some of these early 2000s nu-metal production tricks and soundscapes, and nobody was doing it like Limp Bizkit was, probably, for better or for worse. There are genuinely great instrumentals here, and Fred Durst's voice drags them down more often than not.
I think Fred Durst’s goofy-ass voice is a gift from God – it is just silly enough to never once be taken seriously, it is just bad enough to hate whenever he's trying to be serious, and it is just good enough that when he’s in full-blown yell mode with guitars blaring behind him, there is an undeniable energy that fills up whatever room it’s heard in. Granted, sometimes that energy is incredible pain and suffering, but when the tracks are good, which happens maybe a grand total of 5 times, (and yes, this genuinely includes the cheesiest fucking song ever, “Rollin’”) it’s a genuinely good energy.
Like I said though, this is usually more painfully bland than it is entertaining, and I think the album takes a steep drop after Track 10 in terms of actually holding my attention. It retreads a lot of the same instrumental production tricks, and they just don’t work that deep into the album – they even fucking reuse Rollin’, which is like, a cardinal sin, probably. You really shouldn’t have the remix be part of the main tracklist. Don’t even get me started on the lyrics.
All of that said, I truly don’t think this is THAT bad – it’s certainly not so bad as to drop it to a 1, but it is relatively bad. I can see the appeal though; sometimes, people just want to fucking rock out without giving a shit about the actual lyrics or vocals and just go with the vibes. This could be someone else's 4 or even somehow a 5 (though if anyone thinks it's a 5, they almost certainly need to get a detox).
For me, it’s truly no higher than a 3, and I’m being extremely generous to give it the bump if only because I think Limp Bizkit is a perfect encapsulation of just how over the top and silly the early 2000s were. It’s a way better Beastie Boys album than Devil Without A Cause was, that’s for sure. Hence, the 2.5 that barely gets bumped up to a 3.
Please don’t give us any more Limp Bizkit albums.
Throwing Muses
3/5
It’s a 3.
I don’t know what to say, really – that sure was an album. Decent vocals, if a bit shaky at times. Pretty fun instrumentals, if a little repetitive in energy and style over the course of the album. Some strange lyricism, but sometimes it’s pretty good. I’ve really got nothing super special to say about it, but I don’t have any negatives either. That’s 37 minutes of solid rock music that never really hits *that* high of a high, but it’s a solid listen. A few tracks get a little boring at points, but the tempo switches do a good job of keeping things from getting too stale.
It’s a rock album from 1986 that sometimes sounds like it’s from 1990 at certain points. It has some good tracks, some mediocre tracks, but not really any bad tracks. It… sure exists. Not sure why it had to be on the list, but I’m not complaining that much. It’s the extreme definition of a 3.
Parliament
5/5
It’s a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
It’s just funky as hell – the only reason I’m at a 4.5 instead of a flat 5 is because there’s a few tracks that are really fucking repetitive to the point of feeling stretched out to pad time, and I really don’t like the lyrics on Handcuffs. Besides that though, what a nice funky album.
The first album we got as a group was One Nation Under A Groove, which came out after this – that album is funky as hell, but it relies a little more on a psychedelic sort of soundscape meant to hypnotize and zone out the brain a bit more than this does. What’s on this album has a lot more of a traditional feel, far more echoed in what was to come from say, Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall or Stevie Wonder’s Songs in The Key Of Life, and in that sense, I kinda like this album just a little more than One Nation Under A Groove, but they’re both great albums. This one is just more attuned to the soundscapes and styles that I love, and thus, it kept my attention for longer.
I also didn’t realize just how damn much Dre took from this album for The Chronic (& Doggystyle, which I kinda hope is on the list), which was a nice happy surprise to my ears. I could keep going, but I just think this is funky as hell – I should’ve given One Nation Under A Groove a 5, but I’ll remedy that by giving this one a 5; it’s pretty deserved and pretty damn good. Certainly no less than a 4.
Einstürzende Neubauten
3/5
I’m honestly at a 3.
Look, it’s very clear to me that this is not “music” in the traditional sense at all, and to categorize this as industrial music ala Nine Inch Nails or Slipknot or the rest is the equivalent of calling the first Gramophone recordings a podcast and then being offended when you can’t understand anything.
It’s a narrative album, and it just happens to be a very loud and very bold one, with really ballsy choices for 1981 and the understanding of “music” as we both knew it then and as we know it today. Does that mean it’s one of the 1001 albums you should listen to before you die? No, not by a long shot. Does that mean I’m mad I listened to it? No, not really. I’m honestly impressed by what’s here – yes, the first few tracks are loud as hell, and the choice to drill directly in my face while yelling at me is about as dejected as I’ve ever felt in this album experience… but then I just sort of got over it and it started to click.
Seriously – I did end up liking this. It’s not an album you add to a playlist, not by a fucking long shot, but it is sort of a journey in sound and a genuine attempt at a story, I think. I have no idea what the story is because of my stubbornness to look it up and the language barrier, but I think it’s genuinely effectively communicated through the soundscape alone. I knew the English titles of these tracks because they’re listed on Wikipedia, so that gave me some level of context to work with, but besides that, this was all up to the soundscape to tell those stories, and I really think it worked.
It’s not that good of an album by any means, but for my money’s worth, it’s a genuinely enjoyable listen, if a bit awkward and uncomfortable, but I think it’s supposed to be. I don’t think it’s worthy of being the worst album by ranking on the site – it’s disingenuous and an overreaction from people who gave up after the first few tracks. For me, it’s enjoyable enough to earn a 3. This is probably a miracle, and a little bit of a pity bump up from a 2.5, but I don’t care – I did like it.
Barry Adamson
3/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump down to a 3.
I dunno, I just wasn’t super impressed, nor was I ever really disappointed. It’s supposed to be the soundtrack for a fictional movie, and I think it does a good job of showing some pretty strong diversity in its instrumentals, and providing the outline of some vague story.
Really, the reason I can’t bump this up to a 4 is because I simply have no idea what the fuck that story is. This album tries to set up a general plotline on “The Vibes Ain't Nothin' but the Vibes”, before really nailing the urgency of the dialogue in “It’s Business As Usual” but I really can’t follow the plot after that.
Seriously, why is there a Miles Davis tribute after that eerie-ass dialogue full of stalker stuff? It sounds excellent, but where is it in the plot? Why is “Vermillion Kisses” a medieval style storytelling moment of a sucker being born every minute to get killed by this princess? Is “State of Contraction” supposed to be about pregnancy and giving birth? After the stalker shit earlier and the literal dream of killing her husband or her lover or whatever? Are they ever actually in love by the end? Why do I care this much about a movie that will never exist and be a flimsy straight-to-DVD thriller at best?
It is a good album though; I did like it, and I think it’s relatively inventive while nailing down the noir movie soundtrack it’s going for. A little long on a few tracks, and certainly not as atmospheric as an actual movie soundtrack would be, but pretty solid stuff here. Only a 3 for the utterly confusing “plot”, though.
Janet Jackson
5/5
I’m at a 5. I would go much higher if I could.
I hold Michael Jackson in a lot of reverence, and maybe that’s a character flaw, for a multitude of reasons I could write about whenever we get Thriller or Bad or Off The Wall. To segue into my point, I’ve never really given Janet a fair shake for whatever reason – I’m genuinely not sure why. I think Scream is one of the best tracks on HIStory, and I know some of her bigger hits. I’ve just never really had an excuse to tackle this album other than laziness.
Once again, I have proven myself to be a fucking moron – this album is fantastic, from top to almost bottom (sorry to “Someday Is Tonight”, it’s just a very awkward fit on this album to me – still a good track though!). While it's definitely stuck in the late 80s, this is New Jack Swing at some of its earliest and its finest; the entire stretch of Rhythm Nation to Livin' in a World (They Didn't Make) is off the charts in terms of production, instrumentals, lyricism, social messaging, and vocals.
Even as the back half of the album transitions into more of a love-driven record, I don’t think anything changes that much other than the atmosphere and mood – obviously, it climaxes at Someday Is Tonight, but there’s still great production and a big variety of styles to keep the album feeling fresh, even if its subject matter grows narrower and narrower.
Regardless of anything else, what I’m most impressed by is that she wrote this at the ages of 22 and 23. Singers nowadays at that age would dream to have something like Rhythm Nation in their catalog, let alone the seven Top 5 singles she had on this album. That’s about as old as Billie Eilish is now, and she's probably the only other artist I can think of with similar critical acclaim at the same age. Hell, it would be a real miracle if Olivia Rodrigo’s next album after GUTS somehow has the cultural impact and acclaim of this.
Ultimately, I truly think Janet broke out an album that could genuinely rival some of Michael’s best (ok, maybe not Thriller, but possibly Bad, and probably Off The Wall). What’s here is nothing short of fantastic, and I don’t think there’s a single miss. A few tracks go a little long, and some production quirks are a little overused, but those are nitpicky in relation to how much I just deeply enjoyed this. It’s so easily deserving of a 5, and I’m very glad I finally listened to it.
There better be more Janet on this list.
Foo Fighters
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll just barely bump up to a 5 just because I liked this a lot.
It’s very hard to not think about Nirvana (and more specifically Kurt Cobain) when listening to this, but it’s just because they’re so tightly linked. Obviously, Dave Grohl has stepped far beyond the overwhelming lingering impact that Kurt left behind to become a star in his own right, but since this album comprises so much of material Dave wrote while he was still in Nirvana, it’s just hard to avoid making the comparison.
It is, however, very easy to listen to this and realize that Dave Grohl is absolutely not Kurt Cobain – even though a number of songs on here feel like they’re directly linked to Nirvana (X-Static absolutely has to be a Nevermind tribute in its vocal style and instrumentation, come on), there’s a pretty strong number that show Dave’s own musical styles well, whether it’s the acoustically laden cheesy “Big Me.” the heavy metal of “Weenie Beenie,” or the hard punk of “Wattershed,” it’s a really good showcase of just how varied the Foo Fighters would come to be once Dave got an actual full band together.
It’s seriously impressive to me that this is all Dave Grohl – obviously, with the benefit of an entire world-class discography later, we know he had this in him all along, but for 1995, it’s a really ballsy shot to take. “The drummer from Nirvana made an album? After Kurt died? What a cash grab, am I right?” It could’ve totally flopped if people didn’t give the music a genuine chance, and I’m so very glad they did – this is a pretty good album.
It’s got a few flaws – I think the lyrics aren’t as tight as they could be (and as Dave would later prove, would be), and some of the instrumental/production choices are a little off putting and screechy at times, but considering how much of this was written long before it was recorded, and that Dave Grohl did it all by himself, I can look over those as nitpicks. It’s just a damn good listen, and a really strong debut – 4.5 barely bumped up to a 5, but very, very good regardless.
Beach House
3/5
I’m right at a 3.
I don’t really know what to say – it’s definitely early 2010s indie rock. I’m not that willing to give it glowing praise, but it’s not a bad album at all, it’s just not my thing.
To expound on this a little, it’s got great instrumentals across the board here – an incredibly relaxing album to listen to, and I appreciate the sort of minimalism and free-flowing vibe it has going for it. I think the vocals are pretty good, if a little too… I don’t wanna say “unmotivated,” but they don’t feel as emotionally driven as they could be, but with these lyrics, it does run the risk of sounding too cheesy if you overdo it, so I’m probably just being nitpicky towards my tastes.
Honestly, I guess I don’t really have any flaws with this. There’s not a bad song here, and everything’s good. It just never captivated me that much. To put it bluntly, it’s a car album. It’s the type of album you put on during a long drive and you just calm your spirits to it. It’s not the type of album you intently listen to and try to break down the meaning of, because with too much focus, this album kind of crumbles on some of its more relaxing and hypnotic moments in the soundscape. We’ve had a few albums before that qualify as “car albums” to me, but this is probably the most blatant example of one thus far.
Again, though, it’s not bad, it’s just not my thing. It’s certainly no less than a 3, I’ll say that. For my tastes, it is a 3, but this could easily be a 4 or a 5 for someone else. Maybe I’ll listen to it on a drive and see if it gets the bump.
Cocteau Twins
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4.
Gotta tell you – not used to an album without proper lyrics. I just don’t know that I could personally give a 5 to an album with vocals, but without lyrics, simply because I’m a sucker for storytelling… but I think a 4 means the album was pretty damn good regardless. And this was pretty damn good.
Sometimes, soundscapes do make an album, and even though this is a 1990 album, it’s very much the dying gasp of the 1980s in full effect – everything here is a sort of pastiche on every 80s trope and style you could think of musically, and it comes together really well. Vocally, I think she’s got a mesmerizing tone to her voice that usually meshes pretty well with the instrumentals, but occasionally, I think the production blends them together too harshly on some tracks where it just kinda negates the positives of both.
That’s not to say there’s any bad tracks here, just some suspect mixing – this is even more of a car album than the last one was, but it’s honestly more of a dreaming album to me (I guess that’s why it’s “dream pop”). I could easily see myself falling asleep to these, or even dreaming up something close to these – good soundscapes with lyrics just out of reach, but the occasionally clear word or two to keep you a little grounded to reality.
I just had fun with it – I can’t wax too much about it because the extent of my criticism is “that sounded really good, but sometimes it didn’t,” and that’s kindergarten-level criticism. It’s a very nice listen; it sounds great, it’s relaxing as hell, and while it does go a little bit too long, I think it doesn’t overstay its welcome long enough to be actively annoying. I’m fine with bumping it up to a 4.
Big Brother & The Holding Company
5/5
I’m at a 10.
I’ve never heard Janis Joplin’s voice until today – her name is pretty damn well known, but finally listening to her… god, what a voice. Extremely unique for its era – Ella Fitzgerald she sure as shit is not. One of the grittiest, harshest, and yet most empowering voices I think I’ve ever heard, and the range of her voice is on full display throughout this album.
Really, the only thing I could complain about is that the band behind her is so fucking good that it’s incredibly easy to zone out and be mesmerized by their guitars and percussion. Combine that with Janis’s voice and you have a deadly weapon of “being so into it you literally forget what the best parts are,” and that’s where I’m at – I would normally wax poetic about individual pieces of an album, but this all blended together to make 37 of the most entertaining minutes I’ve heard yet.
The one thing I can wax poetic about though is the absolutely stunning “Piece of My Heart” – just a bombastic track. Janis is on fire, the band’s on fire, the whole thing is a masterpiece on wax, and a truly flawless song. It’s worthy of a 5 by itself, but this whole album feels like it deserves far higher; just a masterclass to me. Absolutely fantastic stuff.
Bobby Womack
5/5
I’m at a 5.
This is just unabashedly my type of music, and I will not apologize for it one bit. Very, very Stevie-esque stuff here, but without the same sort of emotional maturity or wisdom… but a lot of the funk. Sometimes, all you need is the funk.
That’s not to say this album is entirely stupid or anything – it’s a little stupid, but in the “go stupid and have fun” type of way, not in the “go drink bleach” type of way. I had a lot of fun with this – it’s sort of a final gasp of the late 70s disco era, but just contemporary enough for the early 80s that it kinda sneaks into that “sure, this sounds like it could go next to a Hall & Oates record” place on the record store shelf.
My biggest compliment that I can give, other than the instrumentals being fantastic, is that his voice is absolutely perfect for this style and sound – the only Bobby Womack I’ve heard before this is Across 110th Street (significantly more of a socially serious 60s-style track), and his two features of Plastic Beach, but his voice especially pops on these more funky instrumentals, especially when he’s doing his best Stevie Wonder impression. It’s truly impossible for me to not make the comparison here, sorry.
I just really, really liked this. I could keep going, but I’ll boil it down to this: it’s funky, he’s got a gritty voice, it’s a great combo, and it makes for a great album. Super fun 5.
Country Joe & The Fish
3/5
I’m right at a 3.
I really don’t have a lot of praise or critique either way for this album. It just exists, really. I’m sure it hit a little better in 1967, but by 2024, I’ve just heard so many other bands do these sort of styles while trying to effectively mix psychedelic rock with other genres, and a lot of those other bands have done this just as well or way better than what’s on this album.
Again, that’s not to say this is bad – I’d say it’s good. It’s just not really feeling like I have to hear this before I die. I liked a lot of the tracks here – some of them have odd mixing choices or emotionless vocals, but as a whole album, I’d say it succeeds more often than it fails. It’s just that the success is sort of equivalent to winning a 100cc race of Mario Kart in that it’s just not as satisfying as it could be.
So… yeah. It’s a 3. Fun listen, little long, a little odd at times, but never bad. It’s just kinda there, though.
Elvis Presley
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that will just barely get the bump up to a 5.
I’ve never heard a full Elvis album until this point – obviously, I’d be a moron to not know the hits, which is why I’m very glad this is an album with maybe 4 of them at most, and only 2 if you count the fact that Ray Charles and Little Richard did “I Got A Woman” and “Tutti Frutti” way better than Elvis did here. I didn’t know a lot of the tracks on here, and I enjoyed most of them.
I’d be remiss to not acknowledge that yes, this entire album is basically a cover album of black music made more palatable to white people at a point where everything was too racist to give those black composers and musicians an inch of credit (unless you were an undeniable superstar, and even then…). With that said, huge credit to the backing band; a lot of these are really well adapted for a faster pace and a more rock-driven soundscape, and when they get a chance to shine on here, they knock it out of the park. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t say Elvis sang these songs pretty damn well.
Look, it’s 2024; people know Elvis’s voice by now, whether they’ve heard Elvis himself or someone imitate it. It makes this album a little tougher to digest in that sense, because sometimes, it really does feel like he’s overdoing the whole twangy shtick sometimes to the point of parody on a few tracks. However, when he’s on, he is on like a motherfucker – there’s some serious standout vocal performances here, and in those little moments where everything comes together, I can feel the charisma oozing out of his voice and I can see the appeal of the time take hold. There is something to it all that’s just undeniable unless you’re actively looking to hate it.
I just really enjoyed it – it’s cheesy as hell, and it’s extremely prototypical rock & roll by modern standards, but there’s just something appealing about it even with how much of a culture vulture Elvis was. It’s a great album, and even past its place in history as “the first Elvis album,” I think it holds up on a lot of its own merits. Just barely gets the bump to a 5. Certainly no lower than a 4, I think.
B.B. King
5/5
That’s an extremely easy 5.
Sometimes, you just get really encapsulated in an album to the point where you’re about as in sync with the music as the band was when they recorded it, and I hit that point of sync incredibly early on and never once lost it through the rest of the album. Just incredibly captivating stuff here, at least for me; I thought the crowd was red hot and never really cooled down throughout the album, on either half. I thought the band was on fire throughout the whole thing. I’ve never heard B.B. King’s voice or guitar, but I knew about the status both of those instruments held, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t live up to the almost mythical things I’ve read.
I think that sums it up, really; it’s just an electric album, and the energy is incredibly easy to feel through the speakers or the headphones or whatever way someone might choose to listen to this. It’s a very fast 35 minutes, and I was hung on every last note, beat, vocal, and lyric throughout the whole thing. Absolutely worth the listen. Very, very easy 5.
The Libertines
4/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump down to a 4.
There’s a big chance this album will hit way less on any subsequent relistens, and I’m fully prepared for that to be the case – for a first go-around though, I’m just a sucker for this style, and I think this is 42 minutes of it being done really, really well.
The big thing this album has going for it on its Wikipedia page is that it was “voted the third-most overrated album ever made in a 2005 BBC public poll,” and… that might be kind of fair. I don’t think this is an album that should’ve changed the world or anything, and if it did light the UK on fire, then that’s sort of odd. I don’t think it does anything so special that it should be near a “top 100 albums of all time” list or something similar. Within its own genre and style, I’m sure there are better albums than this, and I’m sure we’ll get to some of them.
With that said, I’m just a sucker for this style – this is a great Arctic Monkeys album, even if this came a year and a half before the Arctic Monkeys dropped their first proper studio album. There’s some serious standouts here; I think “Can’t Stand Me Now” is a hell of an opener, I think “Music When the Lights Go Out” has a really nice sort of local bar feel before the instrumentation kicks in (without distracting from the atmosphere, mind you), and the obvious 60s throwback that is “What Katie Did” just appealed right to my cheesy little musical sensibilities.
I’ll give the album extra credit; I think this is one of the few times an album has actually gotten me on a hidden track, even in the streaming era. The acoustic piece that ends the album is really, really nicely recorded, and I think it’s just a very quaint finish to a rather fun album. The energy never really lets up, and I don’t think there’s a bad track here. It’s not perfect; a lot of this style is stuck in the early 2000s, and it does have that sort of “this fits right on a Tony Hawk soundtrack” smell that sometimes works in its favor and sometimes doesn’t… but I think it works more often than not. I just really, really enjoyed this, but not enough to bump it up to a 5. Very fun album; very good 4.
Muddy Waters
5/5
I’m at a 4.5, and I’ll give it the bump up to a 5.
It’s just really fucking good blues; a few tracks didn’t quite mix with my sensibilities (some of them are a little long, a little repetitive, etc), but I enjoyed this enough that I can recognize that some of the tracks that didn’t work as well for me could very very easily hit for someone else, and that’s why I’ll bump it up to a 5.
When this backing band behind Muddy Waters enters the flow state (which happens plenty of times on this album), they sucked me in just as easily as the listener; when they’re in that mode, and everything is rolling, with the guitars on fire, the deep percussion nailing every beat, and the instruments riffing like there’s no tomorrow, while Muddy’s voice hits its deepest Ray Charles-inspired tones, there’s really nothing like it. It is a mood that is sort of impossible to describe, but very easy to be aware of, and it’s incredibly fun.
This album enters the flow state several times, and it just makes for 45 of the smoothest and fastest minutes I can remember. There’s not a bad track here, just a few that didn’t click with my tastes, but it’s so damn good that I’d be a fool not to give it the 5. It’s a very, very good album, and a highly recommended listen. This was great.
Blondie
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I desperately wish I could leave there, but I’ll go up to a 5.
This is a fucking great album; I’ve heard of Blondie, but I didn’t think I had actually ever heard Blondie, and then One Way or Another came on and I fucking did a spittake. Normally, I have a moment like that once every few weeks in this experience; some song that’s weaved its way into the pop culture soundtrack jumpscares me and I go “oh, this is THAT song” and I get all giddy and happy to finally know the source. They fucking did it to me again later in the album with “Heart of Glass” and I just kinda lost it laughing.
I do wish this album had ended on Heart of Glass though; I think the last 2 tracks are a little bit more “filler” than closer material; they’re not bad tracks at all, but I would’ve been way more receptive to them if they had been placed earlier in the album. They just don’t structurally fit the album as much to me – there’s a few tracks that do feel out of place in terms of the track order, and that’s sort of why I was wavering between a 4 and 5 as an album experience.
However, I think it would be a bit odd to give this only a 4 after I enjoyed it as much as I did; I don’t think this album misses a single beat (literally) from an instrumental or vocal standpoint. From a production standpoint, some of these songs feel right out of the mid-80s instead of the late 70s, so that's fun. Sometimes the lyrics are a little odd, but they’re never outright bad, save for the really deflating “I Know but I Don't Know”. That song feels like it was written by a high school sophomore having to write a poem after procrastinating all day and just spitting that out about 2 hours before the start of class. I say all that, and I think the song has one of the very best instrumentals on the album, so even when the album misses, it still hits.
So, yeah, I’m up to a 5. I do think the track order could’ve been tweaked a bit, and maybe even a song or two could’ve been cut out for not fitting as well with the rest of the album, but that’s for other people to decide on a more definitive track order (other than ending on “Heart of Glass” as the last track no matter what). It’s just a really fun album; it’s 40 minutes of hard hitting rock, anchored by a damn strong voice and some great instrumentation. Highly recommended listen, and I’m totally fine with the bump up to a 5. It's definitely no less than a 4.
M.I.A.
3/5
I’m only at a 3, which is kinda disappointing.
I don’t think it’s a bad album; I’d recommend it, honestly. It just never really clicked for me as a fully cohesive one from front to back. I think there’s a lot of repetition here, but it’s really supplemented by an energetic vocal performance and a lot of great production tricks. However, sometimes those production tricks either didn’t hit as well on a few tracks, or became an outright hindrance with some awkward mixing between the percussion and the vocals or the synths that felt just out of balance enough to be distracting.
I think I liked this album better when it was more focused on being a sort of pseudo-dance record; the heavier beats, the deeper percussion mixed closer to the ears, and the vocals that had just enough processing to blend in without feeling too overdone, and that’s about half of the album. In other words, I liked the songs that feel distinctly modern and about 7 years ahead of schedule for 2007 – super experimental stuff for the time that feels very common now. The other half ranges from “just not really doing it for me” to outright bad on “Hussel” (just REALLY flat for me) and “20 Dollar” (extremely overdone production, and I really did not like the “Where Is My Mind?” interpolation, even though I’m normally a sucker for that sort of thing).
When the album hits, it hits really well – Bamboo Banga is a good (if slightly long) opener, Boyz feels like a great sports hype up track, Paper Planes is an all-timer, and XR2 is a perfect 90s club throwback. For me, it just only hits about half the time, and that’s why I’m at a 3. For someone else, I can hear how it might be a 4 or even a 5, but for my tastes, it just never got up there. Very solid 3 though.
Donald Fagen
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’m going to bump up to a 5 because I just really, really enjoyed this.
I have to be honest to myself with these ratings – I really thought about going for a 4 because “well, some of the outros are a little long, and it’s a little cheesy” but I quickly realized that for my listening experience, I didn’t really care about them in the moment that much. I cared enough to notice them, sure, but they didn’t take away from my overall enjoyment of the album while I was listening to it.
This is just a delight for me – I think I enjoyed it as much as I did because it’s kind of unabashedly cheesy. This is early 80s production at a sort of plateau between the direction of the late 70s and the growing use of synthesizers that would really come to define the mid-80s. This album really tows the line between jazzy soundscapes and some great synth work without overdoing either one. The mixing on this album is as good as audiophiles make it out to be – this is CRISP for 1982, and I guess it’s a testament that the album has never really had to be remastered like that, you know?
Those soundscapes are supplemented really well by his vocals – I know Donald Fagen was one of the members of Steely Dan, but I’ve never heard a Steely Dan album. I have to imagine one will come up, because I want to hear more stuff like this. I think I.G.Y. is a fantastic opener, and a great tonesetter for an album that never really loses steam, save for the occasional long outro, or extended periods where the soundscape doesn’t shift as much as it could.
This isn’t a flawless album, but I don’t think there’s too much I would tweak here. The variety of styles here is super cool, from the moodier & jazzier stuff that comprises the first few tracks, to the arguably city pop-esque “The Goodbye Look,” and the almost Sinatra-esque “Walk Between Raindrops” – slow that track down a bit and you can hear him crooning out those lyrics.
It was just a really fun album for me, I dunno. I could totally see someone getting entirely bored of this and giving it a 2 or a 3, though. It’s gonna be a mixed bag for some people, but it hits on everything I like. Sometimes, when you enjoy an album this much, it’s hard not to go with a 5, and I just feel like I’ve got to give it one. Certainly no less than a 4 for me.
Eels
4/5
I’m at a 4. I need a hug.
It’s just a sad album, you know? Right from the rip, “Novocaine for the Soul” is an obvious drug addiction parallel, and the album never really gets happier from there – the big peak of positivity is probably “My Beloved Monster,” and that might just be because it was used in Shrek.
Seriously, the back half of this album is just a rough dose of suburban reality that never really brightens itself up. It’s a bold fucking choice, and it’s one I really deeply respect; this is a somewhat thought-provoking album for 1996. Taking this shit head on without really pulling any punches as to the nature of social anxiety and a desire to feel like one belongs stands out in the sort of commercialized rock and pop that was starting to come back into vogue around this time.
I don’t think I can give it a 5; there’s a few tracks that hit really well lyrically and vocally, but are supplemented by instrumentals that don’t do too much to stick out, even when they get their little solo moments. Those types of tracks are really prevalent around the middle of the album, and they do make the experience slow down just a little bit too much, but this is still a really strong album. It can read as a bit generic and a little too angsty and moody in that teenage sort of way, but I think it’s possibly more relatable now in 2024 than it was in 1996 as far as the social dynamics go.
It’s a very good 4, and it could be a 5 for people who really fucking relate to some of the subject matter here. It could also be a 2 for people who don’t relate to it at all and want to hear this guy shut up about his poor shitty life. For my tastes, I just liked it a lot, and I thought the storytelling and tone of the album was really well done. And now, I will go get that hug.
GZA
5/5
I’m somewhere between a 4 and a 5, and I think I’ll have to talk myself into either one by the end of this little writeup.
I mean, I don’t have anything negative to say about the album, so that’s a huge plus; this is my first Wu-Tang anything ever, save for the occasional random feature spots from some Wu-Tang members on other projects. I feel kinda dumb for never really listening to them before – it’s not that I haven’t wanted to, it’s just that I’ve been too lazy to really commit to it for some reason.
This album is glowing with great lyricism across the board; really, really strong stuff for 1995, and probably some of the best lyrics of this period from ‘95-’96 where just about everyone in rap was on fire and hitting a creative peak. I think the flows are hypnotic, sometimes almost to a fault, and everyone gets a chance to really shine here – even though this is technically a GZA solo album, it distinctly feels like a Wu-Tang group effort to me based on the amount of features everyone gets.
The only partial knock I can give comes in the beats – there’s not a bad beat, but I do sometimes think the sort of moodier and darker atmosphere of the album gets punctuated just a little too harshly by how dry some beats feel. I’m not saying you have to suddenly brighten up the instrumental while we’re talking drug dealing and Chinese restaurants getting shot up, but it just sort of leads to a sterilized style that stops some tracks from really sticking out more than others, which isn’t great from the perspective of listening to the full album front to back.
With all of that written down though, I think the positives deeply outweigh the completely nitpicky negatives, and I’m gonna go ahead and give this a 5 – it’s a really enjoyable experience from front to back, and it really does have some of the best lyricism I’ve heard from this era. Even if the beats are a little dry at times, that never once takes away from the actual tracks themselves; they just blend in a little too often at times, but that’s probably a me thing more than anything else. This was damn good.
Koffi Olomide
1/5
It’s a fucking 1.
Even without the child rape this guy was accused of in 2019, which is already going to give it a 1 regardless, this is just such a fucking boring album, my god. This is comprised of 58 FUCKING MINUTES of music that sounds like what you'd hear when they're showing b-roll footage of the zoo on a kids show.
The looping instrumentals that comprise the entirety of this album are not only egregiously long and tiresome and boring, but they’re just so fucking annoying to sit through. I talked about Kraftwerk sounding like an FL Studio loop once, but this literally IS one. I would wager to bet over half (if not all) of the backing instrumentals are like, 16 bars at most, on loop. Past that, he’s somehow delusional enough to think he can carry this album with his fucking vocals, while having not an inch of charisma to actually do it and while sounding like a constipated opera singer in training.
Honestly, the 58 minutes might be the worst part. By the time I got to the last track, I wrote the following down, and I think it sums up the crux of my feelings on the album:
“I truly do not care about any of this album anymore. The sooner I never have to listen to it, the better; it’s not even like it’s a bad album from a musical standpoint other than the obnoxiously obvious loops, it’s just painfully, painfully boring in a way that I haven’t felt since Maxinquaye, and honestly, the egregious nature of the looping may make this one even worse. However, at least this has a more positive and beachy upbeat tone throughout the runtime, so it doesn’t get like the depressingly sad type of “please end my suffering” boring. It just gets the ‘stuck at a 3-year-old’s birthday party with none of my friends & 7 other people in their 80s’ type of “please end my suffering” boring.”
Yeah, this is worse than Maxinquaye. This is the worst one we’ve gotten yet. Even if I were so kind as to give the music like, a 1.5 bumped up to a 2 because it “sounds happy,” this dude was convicted of child rape in 2019, so I just don’t even want to entertain the idea of a 2. It’s a bland, boring 1.
We better fucking get Dark Side of the Moon next or something.
Pavement
3/5
I’m at a 3.
It’s not a bad album, but there’s just nothing super appealing about it to me; there’s good tracks here, but it’s very hard to get a real sense of a defined style and tone of this album. I’m a sucker for variety, but sometimes this album switches really harshly in terms of its tones, going from softer acoustic-driven stuff to harsh electric that’s really oddly mixed on a dime, and that leads to a real lack of cohesion that just sort of sours the album as an experience.
I don’t think there are any bad tracks here, but I just think the structure of the album in terms of this track order doesn’t work very well, and as far as the songs themselves go, I just don’t think many of them were as captivating as they could be. Obviously, this is their debut album, so I’ll go easier on them, but from what I remember of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, all the “flaws” (decisions I disagree with, really) were a lot more ironed out on that record, and it just made for a much tighter album that felt more cohesive.
Ultimately, this is fine, and it’s really solid 90s rock. Someone will get more out of this than I did, and I can easily see someone giving this a 4 or a rather generous 5, but I don’t think it’s any lower than a 3. I liked a lot of what’s here, it just wasn’t THAT good to go any higher than a 3.
It’s way fucking better than Haute de gamme, at least.
Pretenders
5/5
That’s a super easy 5.
Chrissie Hynde has been one of the most persistent banes of my trivia existence – I’ve never heard a song by Pretenders until listening through this album, but I’ll be damned if I haven’t been dragged and kicked into learning that Chrissie Hynde is their lead vocalist. Her vocal style on this album just feels super refreshing for some reason that I can’t quite grasp – the closest comparison I have is Alanis Morissette, and there are plenty of times throughout this album where I swear I’m hearing Alanis. I think it’s something to do with the ability to easily switch between a sort of soft spoken word and belting out on a dime.
Past all of that though, this is just an awesome sounding album from an instrumental standpoint – in many ways, this really does feel like the first album of the 1980s. It was recorded in the 70s, and didn’t get released until January of 1980, but this really feels like the first proper album to capture the sounds and stylings of 80s production in full force. A lot of the stuff on here sounds like it could be from any one year of the decade at any given point, and that’s really cool to me. I think the guitar and percussion both have their standout moments here, the guitar moreso, but when mixed with Chrissie’s vocals, it just clicks together perfectly.
I don’t think there’s a bad track on here; maybe a few duller moments, but I’d say this album keeps up the energy pretty much at all times. I really, really enjoyed this, and I’m glad I can finally put a sound to the trivia question that I usually miss. This was awesome. Very deserved 5.
Fishbone
5/5
It’s a highly recommended 4.5 that I'll bump up to a 5.
I’ve always had a slightly softer spot for ska, for whatever reason. I think something about the instrumentation just clicks really well with me, even if the songs are usually kinda hokey and goofy and never that serious. This, however, is… kind of a serious ska album. There’s some real depth to some of the songs here in terms of their lyricism, and I really respect the attempt to try and make a socially conscious album with this soundscape, especially for 1988, well before ska hit the mainstream like a truck in the mid-90s.
When it works, it works REALLY well, and when it doesn’t work… it just kind of exists in a way where you can tell they needed a LITTLE more time to refine it. There’s really not a bad track here – I enjoyed all 41 minutes of this, but for as much as I respect their vision, it’s just not executed as well as I’d like all the way through. With that said, it’s executed really damn well for its time, and definitely set the tone for other bands to come in and really refine it based on their efforts here. I need to take a deeper dive to see if anyone stepped up to that plate.
Regardless of any of that, I thought this was still really, really good. There’s a lot of energy throughout this, and it’s just a damn fun listen for the most part. I think it’s just good enough to give it a 5 – again, a few tracks just don’t work as well, but sometimes it’s really apparent when they were padding for time, or if they sort of couldn’t figure out a proper ending for a song or two. However, I don't really care. It might be a 2 if you really hate trumpets, but it’s almost certainly no less than a 4 in my eyes. I’m definitely pleased with a 5 – I just enjoyed the hell out of it, and I’m very glad to discover this.
Van Morrison
5/5
I’m at a highly recommended 4.5 that I'll bump up to a 5, again.
Much like the Pretenders album felt kind of like the first real album of the 1980s in terms of setting the tone from a production, instrumental, and lyrical standpoint, I think this album might’ve really set the tone as the first real album of the 1970s. Yes, you could call me a complete moron and point to Abbey Road as such, far ahead of schedule, and I would call that valid. However, I really think this touches deeper into the sort of folksy Americana that defined the direction the U.S. took as a way to reclaim its own sound from Beatlemania, and in that way, it feels like the first album of the 70s from an entirely American perspective.
I fucking loved this. The only reason it’s not at a flat 5 to begin with is because I do think some tracks don’t tonally mix super well as a cohesive album from front to back (very specifically targeting “Everyone” here, but Come Running kinda suffers from this as well), and sometimes his vocals are too incomprehensible because he’s throwing too much emotion into them… but those are realistically nitpicks in the long run. They might bite at me more on subsequent listens, but I shouldn’t care that much. I think just about every track here is a fantastic showcase of this jazz/swing/rock hybrid that gets nailed to perfection in terms of the soundscapes – there’s some really stunning stuff, and the 2013 remasters do them incredible justice in terms of balancing and mixing.
Before listening to this, the only Van Morrison song I was aware of was Brown Eyed Girl, and I’m so very glad this isn’t just 39 more minutes of songs that sound suspiciously like that. This is a really, REALLY good album, and it’s very deserving to be on the list. I’m surprised that I’ve never interacted with any of these songs before now, but they’re deeply down my alley. Just a great album, and a very easy one to bump up to a 5.
The Magnetic Fields
4/5
I’m at a 3.3 that I'll bump up to a 4 (I can explain later), but I gotta tell you, I really do admire the scope and scale of this project. I think I would recommend going through an actual listen to this, but not all at once; 23 at a time, just to spread it out and give the brain some sanity.
I really can’t believe I actually listened to all 69. It felt a lot easier doing it 23 at a time with spread out breaks, but it’s still so many fucking songs. I categorized each song into 3 distinctions: liking it, being indifferent towards it, and outright hating it. I liked 30 of the songs here, for various reasons, so that’s pretty good. I was indifferent towards 36 of them, and while I can’t speak to how good or how bad each of the ones I was indifferent towards really was, I’d say most of the “good” indifferent ones were on the second disc, and a lot of the “bad” indifferent ones were on the third disc. I only really hated 3 of the tracks, and part of it is either from subject matter, bad instrumentation, or terrible mixing.
I don’t wanna speak to the entire album as a whole, but I did ultimately enjoy this. It’s a slog, yes, but it’s a rather worthwhile slog. There are some good songs in here, and the scale of the project makes it kind of impressive that I really only hated about 3 of the tracks. Either that, or I have a really high tolerance for mediocrity.
If I had to rate each “disc” (set of 23) as their own individual albums, I’d say disc 1 gets a flat 3 – it wasn’t egregiously offensive, but it didn’t do anything too special either. Disc 2 gets a 4 from me – easily the best set of the whole bunch. Lots of great production, and probably the best lyricism of the album. Disc 3 was the weakest one – it’s a 2.5 that I’d bump up to a 3 because it’s just got the most bland songs on the album, and the good ones are probably the most average between the 3 discs.
That’s how I ended up at a 4; those rankings together average out to about 3.3, but I'll be nice and bump it up to a 4. I admire the hell out of them for making an album that hits pretty well, but if 36 of your tracks get met with a shrug, then you kinda just made 30 good love songs, 36 straight-to-DVD soundtrack songs, and 3 outright bad ones.
However, this is still worth a listen, because I’m sure someone else will like more than 30 songs here. It’s an album with so much variance, and it covers such a strong variety of styles and tones, both in its instrumentals, vocals, and lyricism that it’s impossible for any 2 people to have the exact same tracklist as their “liked” ones (although Epitaph for my Heart & Papa Was A Radio should universally be on that list). It’s a very solid 4, and I can totally see how other people can give it a 5. People giving this a 1 or a 2 either listened to it all at once and got burnt out, or barely listened to it. I’m totally fine with it, and I did honestly like the album.
Never give us a 69-track album ever again, please.
Nine Inch Nails
5/5
That’s an incredibly easy 5.
I’ve never heard this album until today – the extent of my knowledge of Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails is the few times Weird Al has touched on them in polka stuff, and that Trent Reznor did the soundtrack for Quake 2. Yeah, I know, not a great basis to work with.
This album is a fucking masterclass in using sound design to convey not only a mood, or an atmosphere, but personality traits and full-fledged storytelling, and I can’t say I’ve ever really heard an album break convention to use sound so effectively as a device in this way. I love the way harsher tones denote a more broken mind, and how calming stuff represents the last bastion of sanity left in this main character we’re following. I can only assume this is partially Trent Reznor himself, whether it’s a bit exaggerated or not.
I’m really just stunned; that was a very fast 65 minutes, and it’s remarkably just how much it touches on while sticking to its harsher tones – there’s elements of electronica and dance in here, anchored by some very 80s-adjacent soundscapes, but really torn apart and deconstructed, like the last grasps of a mind trying to find comfort in the past and having them distorted and ripped away. Trent Reznor’s vocal range, as far as his emotional depth goes, is rather impressive here.
I could keep going, but I’m just utterly blown away. Somehow, through all of its pain, it’s kind of beautiful in its honesty. This isn’t a playlist album, not by a long shot, but for 1994, this feels deeply fresh and somehow timeless, even if it’s the least traditional sound there could ever be. It’s a really, REALLY good album, and a highly recommended listen. An incredibly easy 5.
Nick Drake
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
It’s just a really, really nice sounding album. I think the lyricism here has a lot of depth, and I do need to dive into them a bit more, but on a first pass, from everything I was able to catch, there’s sort of a melancholy hidden behind all of these brighter tones. Most of this album is more upbeat than anything on Pink Moon, and while it surprised me, it didn’t shock me in terms of the quality of the tracks.
There’s not a single bad one here; I’d honestly say this album goes 10 for 10. The only reason I’m not at a flat 5 is because of my own shortcomings with the lyrics, but I know that’s a stupid reason, hence the bump. A lot of this album is driven by piano, guitar, and percussion, but it’s composed and produced in such a way that the lyrics and vocals get a chance to shine.
In a way, some of the tracks blend together, especially the instrumental ones, but it never takes away from the overall theming of the album – to me, I think this album is mainly about trying to push on through the sad times. There’s a lot of self doubt riddled throughout the lyrics that I was able to catch, but there’s always a hint of hope at the end of most verses and choruses.
I just enjoyed it a lot – I think it’s no less than a 4, and I’d be remiss not to give it a 5.
Lana Del Rey
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 and I’m gonna yet again bump it up to a 5.
Truthfully, I was really leaning towards a flat 4 for most of the album, and then something about the last 4 tracks just clicked incredibly well for me and I felt like I just had to bump it up.
I obviously know who Lana Del Rey is, but I’ve never heard a single one of her albums in full – she’s been the pop star of the 2010s that I just never really connected to for one reason or another. I know some of her bigger singles, but I’m guessing that I was too focused on pop melodies and choruses to really appreciate her stuff to that degree when I was younger. I feel like I need to go back now, because I really did enjoy this a lot.
There’s a lot of Jack Antonoff’s production quirks that permeate this album, and they’re incredibly noticeable on the tracks that sound distinctly like any of Taylor Swift’s more recent stuff. He has a style, and it does work, but I’ll be damned if it’s not starting to feel sterilized & homogenized across all the singers he works with. However, as the album moves on, settles in, and truly gets its identity across as a “this is how the industry can really fuck with your mental health” album, those production quirks sort of melt away, and I got really encapsulated by her writing and her vocals. God, her vocals are beautiful. Her writing is stellar too – lots of great one-liners throughout here, and really strong imagery.
The only reason I was at a 4 for so long is because something felt sort of missing throughout the first 7 tracks of the album – just a little more edge in the vocals or the instrumentation that wasn’t quite there. The last 4 tracks won me over – they just feel like a fully cohesive fit, just one long package that finally kicks in some of that edge and strength that was a real joy to listen to, and properly won me fully over on the entire album. The last track in particular (the Joni Mitchell cover) just solidified it – it’s so thematically fitting to the album, and it just shows me she’s got a real mind for making albums, and not playlists. A lot of these tracks aren’t things you’d typically release as a single, and while a lot of them are “for the girlies,” there’s enough to admire here that I think anyone can pick it up and listen.
So, yeah, I really enjoyed it. I gotta give it another listen to try and catch what I might’ve missed on the earliest tracks, but it’s a really, really nice album. It’s no less than a 4, I think. Maybe a 3 if you hate Jack Antonoff’s style, or modern production in general. I’m fine with bumping it up to a 5. As far as it being on the list, I do feel like it popped up a bit too soon – this is a 3-year-old album, but it popped up in the 2021 edition of the book, so I feel like it got its flowers very very quickly and probably bumped something equally as deserving (or maybe it bumped Haute de gamme, good riddance). However, I am glad it’s here if only because I’m selfishly happy I got to listen to it.
Thin Lizzy
5/5
Well, that’s an easy 5.
I really only know Thin Lizzy for “The Boys Are Back In Town,” and while a lot of this album’s setlist features tracks that carry a lot of that song’s DNA, I do think this album manages to make those tracks stand out and feel rad on their own – this is my first time hearing any of these tracks, whether studio or live, and the energy behind them just felt off the charts. Lots of great variance here too – a few love ballads, a few “great war stories,” and just a lot of bangers from top to bottom.
It does start to kind of wear you down over time – there is a point where a lot of these do start to blend together, feel a little samey, and the blustering guitar and drum solos don’t quite hit as hard as they do earlier on the album. However, make no mistake about it – I think this was a fast and exciting 78 minutes. There’s not a second of empty air here, and even if a track feels “flat,” it’s still an awesome listen. I don’t have any real complaints here, only nitpicks for my musical tastes. I really fucking enjoyed this – very glad to dive deeper into Thin Lizzy, very glad to get some new bangers, and a very easy 5 to give.
Pearl Jam
5/5
I’m at a very very easy 10. (No pun intended.)
I’ll try my hardest to not make any direct comparisons to Nevermind, but let’s be clear; these albums are effectively the Pokemon Red & Blue of Seattle grunge, down to the damn colors of the album covers. You cannot go wrong either way, and comparing the two serves almost no purpose. They’re distinctly different, and it really just comes down to which one you prefer, and I enjoyed them basically equally (with just a slightly biased edge toward Nevermind, based on familiarity).
The only thing I really knew from Pearl Jam was Even Flow – I think most people have probably heard Even Flow, whether it’s from all the videos mocking the indiscernible lyrics, or as just a straight up banger of a track. It’s an all-timer, but I think I’m glad that it was out of the way early on this album, because it gave so much room for so many of these other spectacular tracks to breathe and have their own space.
I truly do not think there is a single bad track here – between the rocking instrumentation, Eddie Vedder’s slightly coarse but controlled vocals, and the excellent writing that evokes some level of imagery and emotion on almost every track, this album swings for the fences and ends up hitting the damn Moon. It is a knockout shot of a debut album, with maybe one or two “lesser” tracks that are still great to listen to. It’s definitely more loaded towards the front and the middle, but I think Release is an incredible closing track.
I really don’t have the words to wax poetic about this – other people will have other platitudes to say that will better capture my mood after listening, but I just thought this was great. Very deserving of all the acclaim it gets, very deserving of being on the list, and I’m just glad I finally had an excuse to listen to it. That’s a really captivating 53 minutes, and so very deserving of a 5. Definitely a 10/10.
LL Cool J
5/5
I’m at a 4.5, and I wish I could leave it there, but I’m gonna be that guy who goes up to a 5.
This album feels like a very distinct bridge between the 80s and the 90s – I’ve mentioned before that Run-DMC made commercially viable hip-hop possible, N.W.A. gave rap the blueprint to have the amount of edge you’d find in albums to come, and A Tribe Called Quest provided the perfect melding of both. This album feels like the bridge between N.W.A. and A Tribe Called Quest – not necessarily in terms of subject matter (though some of it overlaps), but mainly in its production. A lot of these tracks feel blended between the late 80s style (heavily sampling just the drums, more stunted and less melodic flows, long verses without a break) and the early 90s style of production (effective use of pauses, more melodic flows, more diverse sample use).
It’s a really interesting listen for that alone, but what drives this album for me is how effective it is at managing to blend the two in a way that still feels classic and fresh – stuff like Mama Said Knock You Out and Around The Way Girl are the two foremost examples for me, though I’ll throw a quick shout to “6 Minutes of Pleasure” as well.
I don’t think there’s a bad track here, just a few that aren’t as melodic and more driven by wordplay, and to each their own when it comes to that sort of thing, but I tend to enjoy both. I think LL Cool J’s flow is great on most of these tracks, and when it’s not as good, the lyrics do carry it (save for that godawful "I sure wouldn't rape you" line). The beats are relatively diverse, but a few of them sort of fall into that “mainly sampling just the drums” thing.
I just really enjoyed it – I really wish I could keep it a 4.5, because in spite of how much I enjoyed this, I don’t think it’s quite at a 5, but it definitely feels like it should be higher than a 4. I don’t mind going up to a 5, but I can see this falling on any subsequent listens; for now, though, I liked it enough to give it a 5. Someone will probably give this a 3 to balance me out.
The Young Rascals
4/5
It’s a pretty good 3.5 that I’ll bump up to 4.
This doesn’t really get up to a 5 for me, but with another knockout hit or two on here, in that almost timeless “would hear on a medicine commercial made for the boomers” sort of way, I think it would’ve gotten close. Regardless of that, I enjoyed this a lot – it’s very steeped in its time of people trying to catch the success of The Beatles in their own way, but this album tends to feel more original than that. The only times it misses are the moments where tracks feel a little too Beatle-y, namely “If You Knew”, which just felt aggressively OK.
I just thought this was rather nice – a lot of the tracks clicked with my sensibilities, and I thought the instrumentation throughout the album was really strong. There’s a bit of bossa nova in here, some jazz, and even stuff that sounds kinda like Stevie Wonder, which adds up, considering the “A Place in the Sun” cover (by the way, a big thank you to The Young Rascals for introducing me to a new Stevie song). It’s not a great album, but it’s a very enjoyable listen, with some fun melodies, some good vocal structures, and some good vibes throughout. It’s very much a 60s album, but it’s the sort of 60s album that I enjoy. I’m fine with going up to a 4, and I’m glad it’s on the list.
Fleet Foxes
5/5
I’m at a 5.
I’ve been sitting here for the past 15 minutes, and much like I was after Leonard Cohen’s “You Want It Darker,” I’m struggling to find the words to say about this album.
It does evoke art in the classical sense to me, much in the same way that album did, but not in terms of a life long lived that I can’t carry the weight of, nor does it feel like I’m staring at the Mona Lisa in a museum or anything. Instead, this feels more like a family portrait in a living room, and all the stories that can be told about the individual members. This album is rich with variance in its soundscape, its storytelling, and its vocal stylings, and it just evokes the same feeling of a family reunion to me, being regaled by stories of places I’ve never been and people I’ve never met, but making them sound grandiose in their own way, whether it’s from a bright point of happiness or making it sound deeply sad. I can carry those stories with me, much like I can digest this album far easier than Leonard Cohen's.
I’m smart enough to recognize that not everyone will feel this way – I can easily see someone giving this a 2 or a 3 for being “overplayed 2000s indie rock” and being deathly bored of this general style, which is entirely fair. For my tastes, however, this just clicked beautifully for me – I think every track was great, the vocals were fabulous (especially when layered), and even if a few tracks aren’t “lyrically interesting,” there’s still something to the instrumentation that gave them such depth and charm in a way that can really only be captured and felt while listening to it. I deeply, deeply enjoyed this. It’s an incredibly easy 5 for me.
The Sonics
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4 because I just admire the hell out of this.
This is an extremely raw album for 1965 – it feels poorly recorded, poorly mixed, overtly loud, and doesn’t feel like it has as much professionalism as it’s trying to get across. I love every single thing about that – this is raw in a beautiful way, because it’s clearly made with a lot of love and respect to most of the songs they covered here, as well as their original ones. It’s not poorly recorded or poorly mixed – it’s recorded exactly how they want it to sound, because this is their style. It’s so deeply rooted in what would come to fruition roughly a decade later with harsher metal tones and punkier sounds – “The Witch” in particular feels like a damn Motorhead song, and this is 12 years before their debut album.
Honestly, as much as I hated the loudness at the start of the album, in some kind of oddly charming way, it just grew on me – there are points where the screaming becomes too often and a bit obnoxious, but once this album settles in, what feels like ear-bleeding harshness tends to normalize itself and become kinda cool. The sax solo on Have Love Will Travel is a great example of this – it has a sort of scratchy effect because of how much the mic is being distorted, and it’s such a unique effect that I don’t really know if it can be replicated on modern day equipment. In that sense, this album is both desperately of its time and rather ahead of it.
Does that mean it knocks it out of the park on every track? No, not really – there’s definitely a number of these tracks where the effects are still really overdone, and just makes me wish they had toned it down a little bit for a better listening experience. However, I think it gets it right on about 7 of the 12 tracks. There’s not really a bad track here. I think it’s a good album – I can see how people might give it a 1 or 2, but for my tastes, I admire the hell out of this for trying something so bold and loud. It’s probably closer to a 3, but I’m gonna go up to a 4. It’s worth listening to. Probably with loud-ass speakers in a garage somewhere, but it’s definitely worth it.
Rod Stewart
3/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I just can’t bump up to a 4, but the covers by themselves would get a 4 from me.
Before this, I’d never heard a Rod Stewart album in full – hell, I don’t even know if I’ve heard a Rod Stewart song before now. The extent of my knowledge of Rod Stewart is that he was the older looking guy on TV commercials with great hair and a gritty voice who looked a little hokey. Just go Google “Rod Stewart 2005” or something – that’s my enduring image of the guy.
This isn’t a bad album at all, but it says something that of the 9 tracks here, the ones I enjoyed the most were 5 of the covers. It’s only his second studio album, so I’ll cut him a bit of slack for not really finding his own voice as a songwriter yet. However, I can’t really cut him much slack for his compositional skills – when he’s doing covers of other people’s songs, he sounds confident and the band behind him is rocking. When it’s his own original material, the structure of each track just feels off, and falls deeply into the “first minute is the whole song” trap. I enjoyed the covers on here a lot, but they’re a great showcase of other people’s songwriting and compositional abilities, which just makes the wide gap between those covers and the original material here stand out a lot.
His original material on this album isn’t bad, but it’s just painfully drab, like he’s trying to mimic what makes the people he’s covering so effective, but without really nailing the secret sauce that makes it work. Of the 3 original songs on this album, Gasoline Alley is probably the best one, but even it suffers from the “first minute is the whole song” syndrome from a compositional standpoint. Pretty good lyrically, though. The other two are fine enough. It’s just kind of annoying, if only because he’s close to finding his voice here. I’m sure he’ll have his breakthrough on some later album that may or may not be on this list, but it just drags the album back down when you realize its best material isn’t his own stuff.
I do think this is a good album, though – maybe someone will get more out of his original material than I did. I do think the floor here is a 3 though – people giving this a 1 or 2 were already bored of the guy. I just can’t give it a 4, hence the 3. It’s a pretty solid 3, though.
The Dave Brubeck Quartet
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5, simply because I enjoyed it a lot.
This is great jazz, and it’s as simple as that. I’m not a jazz expert, so I can’t speak to the complexities of the compositions or the music theory that went into these tracks. I simply have ears and can tell when my brain is getting a dopamine kick, and I got a pretty good kick out of this one. A few tracks gave me more of a kick than others – specifically, the stuff with the booming shotgun percussion that just added a bit of depth and a more bombastic feel. The piano is great too, and the saxophone is usually on fire. I wish modern bass had the same plunk as there is on this album. I enjoyed a lot of this.
The only minor thing I can throw at it is that I wish more tracks had the bite of the first track, “Blue Rondo à la Turk” – it sets such a unique tone for a jazz album of the era, but it never really gets a follow up like that. Other than that, I guess a few tracks just didn’t click as well for me, but I’m nitpicking – what’s here is a great listen, and is absolutely no less than a 4. I’m up to a 5, and it’s a highly recommended one, if only for studying music at the very least. Pretty damn good stuff.
Hole
5/5
I’m either at a 4 or a 5 – I’ll figure it out as I write this. I really fucking liked this, though.
Courtney Love is, in fact, really good at this. I had some doubt back on Celebrity Skin, but she shut me up back then, and she really solidified herself here for me. She carries herself like a fucking star throughout this album – her voice is confident, her writing unabashedly honest, and the band carries that energy in a way that creates a sort of perfect storm, fueled by anger (at the world, at people, at herself) that’s mostly underlined by an acknowledgement that it is what it is, and she can only really live through it.
Unlike Celebrity Skin, this album doesn’t carry Kurt Cobain’s shadow all over it, at least from a lyrical standpoint. It came out right after his death, so in that sense, a lot of this can be read with the context of Kurt, but it’s not as latent and as sorrowful as it was on Celebrity Skin. Instead, it almost feels like a harmonious anger – part of why her lyrics feel so honest to me is because so much of it is channeled from how much she and Kurt must’ve been under a constant microscope, especially when it comes to their kid. She references her kid several times on this album, and the references to “milk” (almost certainly a drug allegory) don’t go unnoticed.
Granted, all of that’s about the writing and the surrounding context of the album – when it comes to the actual music, I think every single one of these songs are good, but not many of them are outright great, and that’s where I’m sort of flipping between a 4 and a 5. It’s an awesome album, don’t get me wrong – I think it does a great job of slowly building up the anger in each track over time, going from a sort of annoyed indifference, to contempt, to outright hatred by the end. However, there’s something within each track that sort of holds the album back from really hitting a full blown stride for me. I don’t think it’s the instrumentation, though a few songs do hit on the “first minute is the whole song” trope. I don’t think it’s the lyrics, but sometimes, it does feel like once Courtney’s said all she has to say, a few tracks lose their direction and sort of repeat their way to the finish line. It’s definitely not in her vocal performance – as far as I’m concerned, she’s rather flawless throughout most of this.
Really, the only thing I can think of is that the album doesn’t touch on a super diverse number of themes, and that a few tracks tend to dip into a similar well from an instrumental and lyrical standpoint, but that undermines just how good all of the tracks still are, and how well this album is constructed. It’s not a perfect album, but I think I’m gaslighting myself to try and find some sort of overarching flaw here, and there really isn't one. It’s a damn good album, and I enjoyed this a lot. I’m at a 5.
Killing Joke
4/5
I’m right at a 4, but it’s a very highly recommended 4.
I got really lost in the instrumentation of this one – for 1980, this is such a unique blend of electronica, industrial, and some of the standards of 70s rock. It comes together to make a sort of prototypical sound that 90s grunge bands would really utilize and make their own, but this is one hell of a prototype.
There’s some remarkably cool production decisions that underline this album, but it never feels like it’s overdoing anything. A lot of these tracks are still grounded in the basic principles of rock music, and it keeps the album from ever feeling too ambitious – it never once feels like it might collapse under its own weight. There is a sort of story throughout the tracks of anarchy and a revolution being suppressed into oblivion, but it’s never really explicit in its lyrics – it’s more of a thematic thing.
It’s hard to describe what makes this album click so well for me – sometimes, when you’re listening, you just know. I knew this was good throughout; the reason I’m at a 4 is because it does sort of stall out on a few longer tracks, sometimes the lyrics are a bit unclear, and it doesn’t quite stick the landing at the end. Those first 5 tracks are awesome, but the last 3 don’t hit quite as much. Regardless, what’s here is really, really good. It might go up to a 5 if I’m feeling it more another day, but for now, it’s a highly recommended 4.
Small Faces
5/5
I’m at a 4.5, and I enjoyed this enough that I’ll bump it up to a 5.
This is pretty good, but it does feel like two distinct albums sort of merged into one. That’s not a bad thing, but they’re so tonally different from each other and it makes for a really interesting experience. The first half is pretty traditional, and you won’t get many complaints for me – it’s pretty solid rock that leans into a bit of prog and does it rather well. The only track from the first half that I wasn’t feeling as much was “Rene,” and it’s partially in the lyrics. It’s not a bad track though, and it’s a fun listen with a really good instrumental to close out.
I’d say all the instrumentals on the first half are pretty good – the psychedelic intro title track, the 70s rock vibes of “Afterglow” (a little ahead of schedule for 1968), the sort of space-y feel to “Long Agos and Worlds Apart”, the electric guitar that drives “Song of a Baker”, and the rather goofy happy tone of “Lazy Sunday”. They all clicked for me, and they had a really nice variance. If I had to give the first half of the album a rating by itself, it’s a pretty strong 4.
The storybook portion of this album is gonna be what divides people – for my money though, I found it charming. I’ve been playing The Plucky Squire, so my brain is a little attuned towards “silly goofy storybook tale,” and I thought the instrumentation and lyrics throughout were rather nice. I loved the spoken monologues between certain songs – it gave it an audiobook feel, and his voice felt comforting during it. I could totally see this entire half being adapted into a real book, or some kind of made-for-TV 30 minute special. It’s charming, and while it’s rather obvious in its plot, for some reason, it just gave me a nostalgic kind of vibe. It may sound weird, but just on the strength of its execution, I’d give the back half a 5.
Obviously, that balances out to a 4.5, but if I enjoyed this much of the album, I’d be remiss to not give it the bump. This is a rather fast 38 minutes, and while it’s not for everyone (trust me, someone will find the back half immensely boring, or think some of the first half tracks drag a little), it hits just right for me. I’m happy this is on the list – these are the sorts of albums I like. Pretty nice 5.
Blur
4/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I'll bump down to a 4.
I just thought this was good music. It’s a very fun album, and a very good listen, but it also sort of feels like the beginning of the sunset for this era of 90s rock. Maybe I’m wrong, but I just don’t remember many albums with this pseudo-grunge style from like, 1998 onward having this much success and acclaim. It feels like this is right at the split of say, Matchbox 20, the Goo Goo Dolls, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and others bringing the more acoustically-driven and poppier style of rock back into the forefront. Is it Blur’s best album? I dunno. I liked it more than Parklife though. There’s not a bad track here, though it does sort of dull out around the middle before rising back up near the end. Obviously, Song 2 is like, the big eternal hit of the album, but within the context of the entire thing and not just as a single, it just sort of blinks by as a burst of energy.
This album feels like an experiment in soundscapes and sonic tones more than any kind of solid messaging in the lyrics. I won’t go so far as to say it’s a secret Gorillaz record or anything, but my read on this album is that for as much as it’s inspired by American soundscapes and the sort of grunge rock that dominated the first half of the 90s, it deconstructs the genre. That is to say, Damon Albarn doesn’t take this anywhere near as seriously as Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder, or Billy Corgan. He’s sort of taking the piss out of it, and Song 2 kinda proves that – it is entirely nonsensical from a lyrical standpoint, fully driven by the rock melodies and huge energy it brings, but it was a monster success. It sort of begs the question of “were people ever actually listening to those bands, or did they just hear the melodies and rock out?”
That’s not to say every track on here is nonsensical, or to imply that Damon Albarn doesn’t care on this record – there’s a few tracks that take themselves a bit more seriously (namely, Death of a Party & Strange News from Another Star), and they obviously gave a shit about making it sound as sonically complete and fulfilling as possible… but this isn’t that serious of a record in the long run. It’s got great writing, but it’s never the focus here. I know this all reads like I’m complaining, but if anything, I sort of admire this for being such an effective distillation of a genre and a time that feels so captivating to so many people, myself included.
To close out, I’m not at a 5, mainly because the album dips from Tracks 6-10 for me. Those tracks aren’t bad, but they just didn’t feel as captivating or as interesting to me. Track 11 and onward are a pretty good way to close out the album though. It’s a pretty good 4, though – the soundscapes are great, the melodies complex, and Damon Albarn’s voice cuts through like a knife. I liked it a lot.
The Doors
5/5
I’m up to a 5.
I just really liked it – there’s a solid variety of styles here, from the opening track, traditional blues rock that sounds like it would play in a bar full of motorcycle gang members, to some funkier stuff (HUGE fan of Peace Frog), and even some nice calmer tracks like Indian Summer. Ultimately, this album never really punches up above its weight for 1970, but even if it’s not setting the world on fire by innovating and introducing new stuff, it does everything pretty close to perfectly. This is just a really strong album.
This is my first Doors album – I get the suspicion there’s gonna be worse ones along the way, but for now, I’ll ride this high. Jim Morrison’s voice has a pretty good tone to it, and I like how easily it can switch on a dime from really melodic to kinda scratchy – his vocals always meet the moment they call for, and it keeps this album from ever going too far off the rails. Really strong mixing and production here, by the way. I feel weird giving Blur a 4 and this a 5, but I just thought this never let off the gas. It feels really cohesive, and it’s just a super enjoyable listen. Very deserving to be on the list.
David Bowie
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll generously bump up to a 5 – this is the second time I’ve given a 5 to a David Bowie album.
I was sort of wavering between a 4 and a 5, but I just enjoyed this enough to give it a bump – I do think it doesn’t quite get to a 5, but it’s certainly higher than a 4. This is David Bowie’s “American” album, and it’s rather obvious in the instrumental influence – gone are the days of ch-ch-ch-changes and all that. I’m exaggerating a bit, but this is really unlike his other albums we’ve gotten so far; we’re talking about watching porn at drive-in theaters, doing coke, and getting head in Hollywood. This guy’s a rockstar now, or at least Aladdin Sane is.
I think the piano really stands out on this album – I’m a sucker for a good piano, but I can’t say I’ve ever really heard it used as a storytelling device for a sort of insanity meter. It’s present throughout almost every track, and it really decides the tone that Bowie just sort of follows. Obviously, there’s guitar, horns, some great percussion throughout, but the piano just cuts through like a knife on all of them. Aladdin Sane is the standout example of this – the smashing of the damn keyboard makes for a rather visceral tone rarely expressed around this time.
Ultimately, I think whatever he was going for here, he completely succeeded – if this is his “American” album like I think it is, then it’s rocking, it’s gritty, and it’s more American than Young Americans was. It’s a super fun listen, that does dive a bit into what I suspect is a genuine growing insanity from Bowie at the time, but he channels that energy into a really fun rock album. I do kinda wish there was a more bombastic Life on Mars-esque track here (unless you count "Time"), but regardless, I liked it. Totally fine with bumping it up to a 5.
The Flaming Lips
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
For a band formed in 1983, to be able to survive and adapt with the times and survive until 2002 is rather impressive. To make something that sounds this good, and arguably still modern and still totally befitting for 2024, both 19 years after your forming, and 22 years after it came out is downright miraculous – this is an unbelievably well produced album, and its soundscape somehow feels timeless. It blends so many genres and styles; I feel like 70s rock is somehow the foundation of the album, but it’s blended with some R.E.M.-esque vocal work, 90s rave & electronica, and early 2000s hip-hop tropes. In some strange way, it feels totally ahead of its time, oddly nostalgic, and a perfect encapsulation of 2002 rock all at once. I can’t really describe it – this thing defies any conventional logic to me. The only thing I can say is that it sounds fucking awesome.
I do wish it had stuck harder to the sci-fi vibe and the more lyrically driven stuff, and that’s really my only knock on the album – I know it’s not meant to be a concept album, but the first 4 tracks are so cohesive and so strong that the album loses its luster the farther it goes away from the initial tracks. Don’t get me wrong, there’s not a bad track on here, but it does feel like it loses cohesion and focuses more heavily on soundscape and vibes. Some people will like that more than others, but for my tastes, I really started to feel like it dragged just a bit too long by the very last track (again, rad as hell, but just doesn’t feel like it should’ve ended the album over All We Have Is Now).
That’s why I’m not at a flat 5, but make no mistake – this is too damn good to be anything other than a 5. It’s got a great energy, its production sounds timeless, and it is overwhelmingly cool. It has withstood the test of time in a very tangible way, and that’s apparent to me on my very first listen. I fuck with sci-fi stuff super hard, so this was right down my alley – it impressed me and went above and beyond. It’s a great, great album.
Sex Pistols
5/5
I’m at a 5.
It’s just a raw fucking album, and I love that. Right from the album title, this thing sets a tone and an expectation that’s instantly met throughout the whole thing. Never mind the bollocks, forget the bullshit, forget the marketing, forget the catchy album titles – this isn’t “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, it’s the fucking Sex Pistols, and you’ll just have to deal with it.
That’s the expectation, and it’s the core tenet of the album – Johnny Rotten couldn’t give less of a shit about your opinion on his opinion. He is brutally honest throughout this whole thing, and I respect most of that honesty -- the only song I can't really respect the "honesty" on is "Bodies". “Bodies” is probably the one that’s aged the very worst, and I didn’t like it one damn bit, but it’s not like I can debate the guy over it. It's a shame, because the instrumentation is pretty good, but I just can't agree with any part of the messaging. Regardless of how I feel on that track, his honesty in those moments spreads throughout the entire album, with perhaps the greatest prescience of all time in “God Save The Queen” – opinion of the royal family and the British monarchy has probably dipped as far as it has because of whatever avalanche that song probably started.
The instrumentation on here is just as much of a highlight as Johnny Rotten’s vocals and lyrics – this is great punk rock. It’s a little overblown and overdone at points on this album, but when it’s fucking rolling, and Johnny is throwing his nasally voice out there in perfect harmony and energy, there is nothing that hits more of a raw nerve. I could point to 90s grunge, but even that’s steeped within production standards, commercialism, and a more sensible form of storytelling as opposed to how often this album tends to punch down on a few people just for the hell of it. EMI probably fucking deserved it, though.
Anyway, I just really liked it – it is a brutally honest album for 1977, and I’m guessing it sort of snapped people out of this idea that everyone just had to try and be the Beatles. It’s raw as hell, it sounds great to this day, and its influence is likely immeasurable for the 1980s and beyond. Easy 5.
The Fall
2/5
I’m at a 1.5 that I’m going to very generously bump up to a 2, despite my better judgment, because I don’t think this is quite bad enough to deserve a 1. It’s pretty damn close, though.
I’ve made analogies to art in the classical sense before, and this album is art – it’s the type of art you walk up to, notice it’s just two colors painted next to each other, and you wonder how in the hell it ever made it into a damn museum. This is that type of album among the big 1,001 albums featured in the museum – whoever curated this had a damn soft spot for whatever the fuck this was. It’s just… nothingness. I feel nothing after listening to this. I don’t feel apathy, I don’t feel joy, and I don’t feel like it did anything to me. It’s not even white noise – you can focus on white noise and it can let your brain feel something. This truly gave me nothing.
I could go on an existential tangent about “nothing” doesn’t really apply given that I have something to say about it, but the truth is that I just don’t feel like it was worth my time at all. Does that mean it was egregiously awful? No. It is still art – there is some merit to having it be here, but it’s not the type of art that gives me any type of feeling. If Abbey Road is the Mona Lisa, this album strikes me as, say, a Rothko. I’ve seen Mark Rothko paintings before. They’re just squares to me. I find nothing in them, much like I found nothing out of this album. Does that mean a Rothko piece is devoid of artistic merit? No – someone will find a beauty in the slightly offtone shapes, or an appreciation in the individual brush strokes. I didn’t like most of this album, but I never found myself openly angry at it. I just didn’t find beauty in the compositions, nor an appreciation for the individual instruments or vocals. It was a dull album to me.
Why is it a 2 then, and not a 1? I dunno. I guess a few parts just sounded nice enough, and for better or for worse, there is some charm in the guitar riffs and percussion. I didn’t feel anything, and that’s a crime, but I recognize that someone else probably could and will. It’s just not my type of art piece. It’s a 1.5 that’ll go up to a 2, but I will likely never think about this ever again. Very strange for it to be on the list.
Still better than Haute de gamme, though.
Miles Davis
5/5
That’s a very very easy 5.
Much like with “Birth of the Cool”, I’m not gonna be verbose about it – it’s just fabulous, fabulous jazz. What’s here is incredibly rich in its soundscape, and extremely blissful once it gets into rhythm. There’s not a missed note here, and it’s timeless. Fantastic compositions, great melodies, and a perfect mix to give each instrumental room to breathe.
When we got Birth of the Cool, I said I’d be terrified once we got this album, because that one set the bar remarkably high – this is at that same bar. I can’t say for sure if it’s higher, but it’s certainly equal, even if the track count is much less. I enjoyed this just as much, I’ll come back to it as often, and it’s so very deserving of a 5.
Santana
5/5
One of the easiest 5’s yet. Arguably a 10.
That was just blissful for me – what a stunning combination of Latin instrumentation, jazz standards, and rock music, all anchored by Carlos Santana’s fucking insane wizardry with the guitar. I knew he was good, but hearing him seemingly at his peak and his prime like this is fucking crazy – I don’t know that I’ve heard a guitar sound that good ever. Maybe on a Led Zeppelin album, or a Hendrix one, but besides those (which are already amazing in their own right), this feels like a golden standard.
There is not a single miss here, only a slightly lackluster ending (El Nicoya really feels like it could’ve been at the very start as opposed to the last track), but I could care less – this is packed to the brim, and it feels like I could listen to it 10 times and still miss stuff. Just a masterclass in composing, instrumentation, and production tricks; the occasional panning really sells a lot of the depth of these tracks, but much like Kind of Blue, everything is so perfectly mixed that you can still pick out just about every instrument, while giving them each time to breathe.
Seriously, I’m annoyed at myself for only giving Santana credit for the limited amount of stuff I’ve heard on Supernatural – this is excellent. One of the best albums we’ve gotten yet. Very easy 5, and a highly, highly recommended listen.
Dizzee Rascal
3/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’m gonna bump down to a 3.
I honestly don’t know if I’ve ever been more disappointed in an album after listening to it like I was with this one, but it’s not because it’s outright bad. I think it’s good, but it’s in desperate need of several tweaks that, with a bit of time and a bit more outside input, could catapult this into great. I really wanted to give this a 4, but I just can’t.
Let me just give some positives first: there are some great tracks on here. When he’s flowing, and the instrumentals are rolling, this album hits really well, and I can see exactly how it captivated British audiences in 2003 – it’s incredibly risky, rather unique, and taking a swing like this is pretty cool. When it hits, it hits, and it does hit kinda often. There’s one tiny little problem.
I did not like most of the instrumentals on this album. I loved a lot of the lyrics and flow, and I honestly love what it’s trying to do with this bass-heavy, scratchier, synth-driven minimalist style. It just needed more time to cook in the oven. I can recognize that part of it is my musical sensibilities not agreeing with Dizzee Rascal’s, but like… there were 7 tracks out of 15 where I said “the lyrics are great, the flow is great, but the beat needed more to it” or something similar to that. It just felt like a few more instruments would’ve given some tracks some more depth in a way that would’ve made them click more.
The most egregious example to me is the last track, “Do It!”, which has some genuinely great and honest lyricism, arguably the most introspective stuff on the album, and worthy of being the closer… with a really obnoxiously bad beat on top of it. It doesn’t fit at all, and that sort of incompatibility between the lyrics and the instrumentals permeates too much of this album for me to give it a 4. I don’t think this is bad, and I certainly think someone else will enjoy these beats more, but for as much as I really want to give this the benefit of the doubt, I just have to bump it down to a 3. It’s only disappointing because it’s so damn close to being so goddamn good. Just a shame. Very solid 3, though.
The Electric Prunes
3/5
Just a plain 3.
I got nothing. It’s not that good. It’s not that bad. It’s competent. A few baffling production choices, and a rather strange track order (why the fuck did Toonerville Trolley close out the album?), but ultimately it sure felt like a 1967 album trying to capitalize on Beatlemania. I don’t think it’s so bad as to be a 1, and I think it shows enough effort and care to be higher than a 2. No chance in hell it’s higher than a 3 though.
Just for comparison’s sake, by the way, a few other albums we’ve gotten from 1967: Younger Than Yesterday (by The Byrds), Surrealistic Pillow (by Jefferson Airplane), I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You (by Aretha Franklin), and The Velvet Underground & Nico (by… you know). We’ve had 10 albums from 1967 before this, so it’s a good year for music, I guess; so far, before this one, I’d given four albums a 3, five albums a 4, and one album a 5 from this year. Add this to the pile of 3s then. It’s totally, utterly fine. A few good ones, a few mediocre ones, but nothing outright bad. Just not the most captivating or the most special. I don’t know if it needed to be on the list.
Cyndi Lauper
5/5
I’m at a very fun 5.
I’ve known Cyndi Lauper was good – Girls Just Want to Have Fun & Time After Time are quintessential 80s tracks. I didn’t know she was this good. The first 6 tracks on this one may well be all-timers, even if 3 of them are covers. Money Changes Everything surprised me, mainly because I was fully expecting the tone of this album to follow the poppier synths of Girls Just Want to Have Fun, but she pulls off that Springsteen-esque style really fucking well. Her vocals get one hell of a showcase, and it sets the tone that this album doesn’t have to be all bubblegum and sunshine. Jumping ahead, the When You Were Mine cover is pretty damn good too. She Bop is pretty fun, but I couldn’t quite place why I liked it so much. Just catchy as hell. All Through the Night is the emotional peak of the album, and I’m genuinely stunned it wasn’t the last track on the album. Beautiful, beautiful track that I’d never heard until listening through this, but it stunned me.
The album sort of falls down after that – Witness & I’ll Kiss You are both really fun with their own neat production tricks and stylization quirks, but after All Through The Night, they just sort of pale by comparison. The last two tracks are where it just sort of stumbles to a finish line – the Betty Boop stuff didn’t click as well with me for a sort of feminist-driven album and just felt backwards, and Yeah Yeah has a great transition, but the rest feels like it was produced super early on in the album, and Cyndi just didn’t want it to go to waste.
Either way, those first 6 tracks are so fucking good they deserve a 5 on their own, and the album doesn’t collapse so badly as to drop it any lower. When I think of 80s pop and 80s synthwork, this sort of soundscape is exactly what my brain thinks of. To hear it fully encapsulated and properly executed throughout an entire album of the era feels super satisfying, and it certainly helps that most of the tracks are about as catchy and fun as I was hoping for. It’s an incredibly easy 5 for me, even if it does sort of stumble down towards the end. I really, really enjoyed that.
U2
5/5
I can finally give U2 a 5.
We’ve gotten two different U2 albums before this – 1983’s “War”, and 2000’s “All That You Can’t Leave Behind”, so this falls pretty much right in the middle of those two albums. Those averaged out to a 3.5, and I could never really give either album a 5 because I just didn’t think it hit on a consistent level of quality and thematics throughout the listening experience.
This album does that in spades and more – this is a fully coherent album from front to back, with not a single solitary miss (ok, maybe “Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World” is a little too hokey, but shh). The band is on fire, Bono’s vocals have genuinely never sounded better to me, and ultimately, this is just a joy to listen to and a kind of triumph for 1991.
I noted it several times while listening, but a lot of this sound felt like a more refined version of “All That You Can’t Leave Behind” to me – that’s a lot of praise, I think. This sort of soundscape is what traditional rock returned to in the late 90s after its collective grunge era brought on by Nirvana and Pearl Jam, so to hear it in 1991 just tells me that U2 were a bit ahead of the curve.
That’s not to say the influence of grunge and industrial rock isn’t felt all over this album, it just doesn’t dominate the entire thing, and for my ears, after the amount of 90s grunge we’ve gotten, is deeply refreshing. There is a middle ground somewhere in there, and I’d say this album strikes that middle ground perfectly.
I could keep going, and try to break down individual tracks, but I feel like whatever words I write couldn’t do them justice (although huge shoutout to “One”, that’s my first time hearing it and it was incredible to me). This is absolutely worth the listen, and beyond deserving to be on the list. Just a stellar album, and an easy 5.
Tom Tom Club
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4.
It’s not necessarily a great album, but it’s a pretty damn fun one – where it lacks in some of the technical and compositional stuff, it more than makes up for in terms of vibes and enjoyment. There are lots of empty spots on this album that feels like they could be filled in by something more, but those patches of emptiness are simply a reminder that this is 1981, and the world’s not quite yet ready for a Daft Punk-esque synth solo that would break their brains.
Wordy Rappinghood is fun (if a little goofy), and Genius of Love surprised me once it revealed itself is THAT song that everyone (namely Mariah Carey) has sampled, but the album definitely hits a sort of stagnant point until Lorelei for me. Tom Tom Theme is rather short, L'éléphant was just too repetitive for me to really enjoy, especially without the vocal hook or storytelling (that I could understand) to break it up, and As Above, So Below really drags out its chorus despite the rather fun instrumental. After that though, Lorelei is sort of mesmerizing, hypnotic, and mysterious in a way that sucked me in and clicked really well. On, On, On, On, while a bit culty in its lyricism, just worked for me instrumentally and tonally. Booming and Zooming is sort of weird, but its story is captivating enough that I can look past the sort of droning instrumental in the back. Under the Boardwalk feels like the first breaths of 90s Eurodance trying to come to life, and a very good way to end the album.
All of that to say, I enjoyed about 2/3rds of what’s on here, but none of it was outright bad. It’s just not as concise and controlled as I think it could have been, but it’s not enough of a problem to make me think any less of the album. It’s a 3.5 that’ll go up to a 4, and a rather fun listen. I liked it.
Nanci Griffith
5/5
I am at a 5. I am also in bliss.
Is it too late to make that Trio we got way earlier into a Quartet? I know Dolly, Emmylou & Linda don’t need a 4th, but if they ever wanted one, I’d immediately vouch for Nanci Griffith – what a beautiful, beautiful voice. Her vocals add so much emotional depth to what’s already an album full of incredibly well written songs. I know I’m a sucker for country, and this album pretty much hits on every country trope I like, but even if I could remove my biases, I just think there’s something beautiful to the whole thing here.
When I think of country music, I continue to curse the name of Toby Keith and all the other motherfuckers who took this style of country far away and made it into sucking off the troops, drinking beer, sexualizing girls in bikinis, and a bunch of other platitudinal bullshit that doesn’t really represent what country was always made to capture. It’s this type of sound, and these types of stories. It’s the slice of life Americana with good storytelling that calls back to younger days full of starry-eyed hope and wonder. It’s exactly what this album captures so well, and so beautifully.
It certainly helps that there’s a real variety to these tracks – this goes all over the place tonally and even geographically in the lyrics, but it stays pretty grounded and anchored by the core instrumentation of the acoustic guitar, the steel guitar, the fiddle, and the really light percussion. No two tracks feel quite the same, especially if you actually bother to read the lyrics. Her voice just glides on top of everything else though, the little missing puzzle piece that makes these songs totally pop. Even when the choruses get a little repetitive, her voice is just so damn good that it’s easy to get lost in it without a care.
I could keep going, but I just really, really, really enjoyed this. I know there’s a disposition against modern country, and it’s well deserved, but this is the type of album that makes me pray that this style can come back into the forefront someday. Intelligent writing, great storytelling, simple soundscapes, and great vocals. That’s all it takes, and while it’s easier said than done, I really think we can get there if people just put in the damn effort, just like Nanci Griffith did here. Just a stellar 5.
Moby
3/5
I’m at a 3.5, and I think I have to bump it down to a 3.
I think this album has an identity crisis. I thought about it a lot while listening to it, but the core style of this album is split between “composition” vs “feel” for me. I don’t think the album ever really comes to a decision on which way it fully leans, and that sort of indecision is what’s driving me down towards a 3.
I think in terms of the actual compositions, these are sort of thoughtfully lazy – that is to say, each added instrument on top of the many samples, as well as the ongoing layering of instruments that occurs throughout the album is intentionally and thoughtfully produced. Sure, not all of it is sonically and tonally as energetic as one might hope, but there is not one “mistake” in terms of Moby’s composition. It’s very deliberate. The question that arises from those choices is simply “does it make you feel the way he intended?”
I don’t know if every track made me feel the way he intended. I think it leans that way most of the time, but when it hits on feel, it sacrifices part of the actual musicality of everything. I don’t think the composition is particularly as interesting or as captivating as Moby intended it to be. I think the feeling of each track is nailed pretty well, and when it clicks, it clicks. The question that arises from that choice is simply “does it make for a coherent album experience?”
No. No, it doesn’t. At least, not for me. This album never quite finds its true balance between composition and feel, and it suffers from not picking a proper direction. There’s not any bad tracks (ok, save for the painfully boring stretch of Tracks 12-13), but I can’t really say that this album ends up sticking out after listening to it. There’s definitely good tracks, don’t get me wrong, but as an entire experience front to back, things just feel like they come and go – nothing truly sticks in the long term in terms of feel or composition, and it makes for an album with an identity crisis.
I did like most of it, and there are worse ways to use up 63 minutes, but there are also much better ways. I’m not gonna say it doesn’t deserve to be on the list, because this will click with someone much more than it did for me, but I just feel like it had to commit to a more concrete style to really click for me. Hence, the 3.5 that I’ll bump down to a 3.
Ian Dury
4/5
I’m at a 4, but for a while, I think I was honestly pretty close to a 5.
It’s just a very, very British album. I’ve seen enough Taskmaster over the course of the past 3 and a half years to find a charm in this sort of thing, though. People are giving this 1’s and 2’s, and I genuinely don’t hear it at all – maybe if you really fucking hate his vocals and his British-isms, but at that point, you’re sort of just not having any fun at all.
I thought the instrumentation here was pretty good – great variance of styles, switching around from Disco tones, to straight rock, to punk rock, a bit of pop, and it blends itself together in a pretty sincere way. The lyricism is the part that’ll split this album in two, but for my money’s worth, it reminded me a whole lot of “Thank Goodness You’re Here!” – that extremely British indie game that’s making great headway for YouTubers in need of a cozy comedy game.
Yes, sometimes, the insults go a bit too far (namely Blockheads, where it gets just a bit too mean spirited, & Blackmail Man, where he gets so into character he starts using actual slurs), but for the most part, a lot of this just strikes me as extremely British banter that hits a certain comedy niche that was probably prevalent to pubgoers & the Monty Python crowd at the time.
I dunno, I just had a lot of fun with it. It’s charming, it’s well-written (save for those two tracks), and it’s very melodically and compositionally sound. The instrumentals are great, his vocals have a fun flow that switches to whatever the soundscape calls for, and when this album hits its stride, it feels about as confident as any other album of its era, despite how goofy it is, straight from the title and beyond. I liked it, sue me. I’m fine giving it a 4.
The Dandy Warhols
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4.
It’s a solid album. It’s certainly worth being on the list. It’s just not a great album experience, or at least one that’s not as cohesive as it could’ve been.
This album has two distinct issues for me – they’re not big issues, but they’re enough to really mess with the flow of the album. The first involves the pacing – some of these tracks wander on a bit too long in their instrumentals, and they sort of dissipate the vocal moments in favor of letting the instrumentals shine. It’s not a bad approach, but it makes the album run much longer than it needs to. This is 66 minutes that could’ve been trimmed down.
The other issue is simply finding a more proper balance between vocal presence and the instrumentals themselves – there are really good tracks here, but some of them have the vocals get drowned out by the instrumentals so much that the vocals don’t have any presence on them, or at least, not as much as they should. When this album finds the right balance between the two (see: I Love You & Whipping Tree), it hits really well and completely nails what it’s going for. It just doesn’t strike on it as much as I’d like.
Regardless, I still thought this was pretty good – there’s a few tracks that aren’t as captivating as others, but this is just a really good blend of a lot of 90s stuff – sort of a “Pearl Jam meets indie rock” with a bit of Britpop influence as well. It’s a strong album, but it’s dragged down by its track length, its pacing, and arguably its track order – closing out on 15 minutes of instrumentals without one big encore payoff is a little too bold for my tastes. There’s a few tracks that feel too similar, too close to one another. Either way, I liked it. It’s a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4 because I enjoyed it enough.
Fleetwood Mac
5/5
You know, this is my first time actually listening to this album in full. Trust me, I was aware of a few of the songs, and I know where this lands in the pantheon of music – this album is to Fleetwood Mac what Thriller was for MJ, Abbey Road for the Beatles, and Nevermind for Nirvana. It’s that big timeless record that will live on forever; its lyricism, production, vocals, and overall creation studied for years and decades to come, in this case, made more potent by just how heavily the band itself was imploding and hurting while making this. I know all of that. I just didn’t know what I would end up thinking after listening through it.
After finally listening through it, I’m at a 10. Hell, I might be at like, a 15. I might just be overreacting a little while I'm in the moment, but… man, it is exactly that album. It feels like more than that. It feels like whatever I type here will echo whatever people have written for the past 47 years about this album. I don’t know that I can add anything to the praise, and I certainly don’t want to add anything to the discourse.
I keep mentioning this metaphor about thinking of music as art in the classical sense. It’s what I tend to fall back on when my brain is struggling to find the words to praise the compositions on, or the lyrics, or the vocals, or any part of the actual production. When an album has been this good, or touched me this deeply, I lean on it to help me find the words to say.
This album isn’t the Mona Lisa, even though it deserves every bit of praise and acclaim. This album feels like a timelapse of a rage room, captured in slow motion – one where you can appreciate its finest details while recognizing the pain, loss, hurt, hatred, anger, and attempted solace of the whole thing. It’s beautiful in just how raw it feels. It’s beautiful in how relatable it feels. It’s beautiful in just how human it is.
I do have to add some level of objectivity and critique here, and the only knock I could really have is that Tracks 1 and 3 feel rather out of place -- they are sort of left behind under the weight of "Dreams" and everything from Track 4 onwards. They're good tracks, and this album would be sort of incomplete without their presence. They just don't click as well with the rest of the album as a whole.
Anyway, I would truly love to wax poetic about the moments of bliss I felt during Stevie Nicks or Christine McVie’s finest vocal moments, or the pure catharsis of some utterly pained lines, or the instrumentals hitting arguably the climax of 70s rock as a whole, or all 3 of those things somehow happening at the same time to leave me speechless… but like I said, someone else has probably said it better than I ever could. I can’t believe it took me this long to finally listen to it. It’s that damn good. It lived up to every single line of praise that’s ever been written about any individual track here, or the album as a whole. It’s a very easy 10, and it’s probably my new favorite album throughout this entire thing.
How the hell do you follow this up?
Moby Grape
4/5
I’m up to a 4.
The extent of my Moby Grape knowledge is that they were an answer once on Jeopardy. Normally, that means you had at least some cultural impact.
After hearing the album, I can kinda see why – this is just really good rock. Little bit of psychedelic, a little bit of prog, certainly a bit of influence from The Beatles in here, but more than anything else, it’s just a really tight 30 minutes with some strong variety that never seems to hit a snag. I think the guitar’s on fire for most of this, with the vocals finding a bit of Elvis’ aggressive swagger and a bit of Freddie Mercury’s stylization to just make a really strong combo. The lyrics are a little more broad than I’d like, but the vocal melodies are strong enough to get the emotion across, so it balances out.
I just really liked it, what else can I say? I don't think it does quite enough to get up into 5 territory, but it comes close a few times. It stakes itself right at a 4 and never really goes back down. Pretty darn good rock. Certainly not a bad one to get after Rumours.
The Doors
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
That’s just a great album. I don’t really know quite what to say – it’s not the most technically sound, even though the band is on fire for most of it (save for the rather dull Been Down So Long). It’s not the most well written, even though there’s some great lines on here. It’s just an album that oozes charisma from top to bottom, and that charisma creates an undeniable confidence that makes for a pretty damn good 48 minutes.
I do think a few tracks are a little too long, and a few tracks aren’t super captivating, but when the album hits those points, it’s still a really smooth listen that eventually pulls you back in. I will say this – I genuinely don’t think I liked it as much as Morrison Hotel. I don’t know if that’s sacrilege, but I think that album just had a greater variance of styles and slightly tighter composition for my tastes.
Seriously, I got nothing. It’s got good blues, good rock, some strong vocals, and it’s 48 minutes that fly by (save for a few longer spots). I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5 because I just enjoyed it that much. Sometimes, you don’t have to justify it. I liked it.
Public Enemy
5/5
I’m at a 5 – that might just be the best rap album of the 1980s.
I mean, there’s some competition in there, but I don’t know if anyone can listen to that and definitively say it’s worse than either Beastie Boys album of the decade, anything from N.W.A., or Run-DMC. For my money’s worth, it’s certainly the most complete 80s rap album we’ve gotten yet – Paul’s Boutique didn’t quite click for me, and I thought Straight Outta Compton kinda stumbled its way to the finish line.
There’s some all-timers on here, and not a single miss throughout most of the 16 tracks (ok, the interludes kinda suck) but the one that specifically caught my ear is “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos”, because it so distinctly shows to me just how badly Tricky botched that damn track on Maxinquaye with “Black Steel”. Public Enemy’s version here is a masterclass in storytelling about a jailbreak, behind an all-time beat with some great flow and lyricism. Tricky’s version mainly takes from the first verse, and turns it into a sort of psychedelic rock take that removes all the storytelling and soul from the original track – it’s technically sound, and probably the best track on that dogshit album, but when you hear this version of the track, and realize just how much got cut and mutilated by Tricky… ugh, it just makes me mad, man.
I could keep going with the praise for the production (excellent sampling work throughout), the flow, the vocals (Chuck D is on fire throughout this whole thing), and the lyricism, but I feel like listening to the album gets that across better than anything I could say. It’s a super fast hour, a tightly produced album, a very enjoyable one, and it probably culminates in the best rap album of the 1980s. Stellar effort across the board here, and a rather easy 5.
They brought the noise.
Duran Duran
5/5
That’s a pretty easy 5.
I’ve always meant to dig a little deeper into Duran Duran – Hungry Like the Wolf is one of those all-timer 80s hits, instantly recognizable by the laugh in the intro and the immediate guitar riff, but I figured there was more beyond that. A View to a Kill, for example, is a deeply, deeply underrated Bond theme.
I’m very glad I was proven right – this is a deep album. Even past the singles on here, this is full of bangers across the board, and it’s incredibly layered and well produced for 1982. I get it, same year as Thriller, but at the same time, like… same year as Thriller, you know? Two totally tonally different albums in substance and style, both existing within the same space and genre (well, if you consider synthpop as pop, anyway).
I mean, even from the opening of Rio, this thing never really stops going – it’s a constantly captivating soundscape, whether it’s the synth work, the punchy drums, Simon Le Bon’s vocals, or the basslines (which are KILLER throughout this album), and even with each track being at least 4 minutes on average, the whole thing flies by without ever really hitting a lull point or a repetitive spot.
It’s just damn good synthpop, and I do wonder how much of a catalyst this was for bands like Tears for Fears or Eurythmics or Depeche Mode, or even solo artists like Cyndi Lauper to really go balls to the wall with this style and unlock everything further. I enjoyed it a lot – not a single skip here, and just a really fun listen. Very easy 5.
Meat Puppets
4/5
I’m at a 4.
I can see why Kurt Cobain liked these guys. They’re just kind of honest. That is to say, this album isn’t overly produced to hide any flaws – it actively welcomes them at times. There are moments where the vocals are hanging onto the beat by a thread, and to hear something like that in 1984, when everyone is trying to hit on masterpieces to compete with Thriller or any of the other stiff competition of the era, is rather welcomed.
It’s also just a really fun blend of genres with a bit of variety – this album kinda bounces back and forth in time and goes all over the place. There’s some 70s rock tropes in here, the punchiness of 80s drums, a bit of garage/grunge influence that would be more present in the 90s, and even an occasional soundscape reminiscent of late-2000s indie rock. It’s not necessarily ahead of its time or anything, or super innovative, but it sounds pretty damn good.
I can’t say this ever got into 5 territory for me – it certainly flirts with it a few times, namely on the tracks that are perhaps more well known as part of the MTV Unplugged performance, but it never keeps a consistently high mark on the other songs. There’s not any bad tracks here, though. It’s a fun album, and it’s a rather quick 30 minutes, even with about a quarter of it taken up by instrumentals. Obviously, this album’s influence on Kurt Cobain may be its legacy in the long run, but it’s rather good in its own right. Pretty solid 4.
Merle Haggard
5/5
Well, that’s a rather strong 5, ain’t it?
I’m a sucker for this style of country music, what can I say? These are the sorts of soundscapes and storytelling I so desperately want to make a comeback – they’re intellectual, they’re honest, and they provide a storytelling bend that fulfills a different sort of thing other than the “drink beer and make love all day” that modern country tries to hit on.
I’m simply realizing over the course of the several good to great country albums we’ve gotten is that it’s all rooted in Americana and folk music, just with its own style of instrumentation and a rather distinct vocal twang. I’m sure there are modern country singers out there that hit on this exact style, but I’m just too afraid to try to jump back in.
Anyway, I’ve never heard a Merle Haggard album in full before now. I know the name. I probably know a hit or two in my subconscious. I figured this would at least be good, but I wasn’t expecting it to be this damn great. His vocals are fabulous throughout, and the steel guitar has never sounded better to me. There’s not a miss here – maybe a track or two that’s a little too quaint and instrumentally simplistic for my tastes, but everything here is rather good. It’s not perfect, but if it makes you feel something, it’s doing something right. House of Memories in particular got me pretty damn good.
So, yeah, I’m at a 5. Super enjoyable album, from top to bottom, and a very brisk 30 minutes. I really wish people would bring this style back – I know I’m a broken record with each country album we get, but it just fucking kills me.
Bob Marley & The Wailers
4/5
I’m at a 4, and I’m sort of annoyed that I am.
This is not a bad album at all, and it’s certainly no lower than a 4. I’m just annoyed that I haven’t been able to give either Bob Marley album we’ve gotten so far a 5.
This one hits on the same thing that Exodus did, where once you exit the flow state, the album’s cohesion and melodic substance falls apart just enough to bring the album down a bit as a full experience. I thought the first track wasn’t a great tonesetter in terms of mood and atmosphere, but Tracks 2-5 got me into that flow state, and Tracks 6 and 7 were still pretty good, if a bit of a step down. Tracks 8 and 9 certainly aren’t bad, but they sacrifice the melodic depth for lyrical depth, and while they tell good stories, I think they require a deeper context of the sociopolitical climate of the time that I just don’t have, and so I can’t connect to them like that.
Once again, though, this is not a bad album – what’s here is full of the same vibrance and confidence present on Exodus, and its sound feels just as polished despite being 3 years younger. I just don’t think the entire thing hangs on as a front to back experience – there are certainly lulls in the music, and a few tracks fall for the “first minute is the whole song” trap, but usually it’s done so well that it’s easy to ignore. It just has too many of those moments pop up over the course of the album for me to give it a 5, but make no mistake – this is certainly one of the 1,001 albums one should listen to before they die. I just wish it had a little more cohesion to bump up to a 5, but I’m not quite there. Still a great album, though.
Paul Simon
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4.
I think the most famous Paul Simon solo album is Graceland, and “You Can Call Me Al” is effectively the extent of my knowledge for Paul Simon as a solo artist. This is still pretty far away from the mid-80s though – this is pretty fresh after the breakup of Simon & Garfunkel as a duo. I don’t know how much of that is necessarily reflected in these songs, but this does feel like the start of a natural evolution and experimentation past their work.
It’s not too different, obviously – a lot of this is steeped in the slower acoustics and storytelling that made Simon & Garfunkel work as a duo, but when he steps out of the box just a bit, whether it’s the reggae influenced opening track, or the more upbeat tempo of “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard”, something pops just a little bit that makes most of these tracks work.
However, I do think a lot of this album suffers from one continuous quirk that I just don’t vibe with – I think the album is just a little too ambiguous. There’s great storytelling here, but so much of it is made for the listener to fill in too many blanks, and it sort of makes the effort fall apart. There’s nothing wrong with ambiguity, but when it’s done this many times, it sort of loses the mystique and just starts to feel half-baked. You can only ask a listener to think so critically for so long without losing some of the focus on the music. It’s probably how Simon & Garfunkel functioned as a duo, cleaning up the ambiguity to find the perfect balance between intellectualism and airy prose.
That’s not enough to drag it down to a 3.5 by itself though – I think there’s just a few too many acoustic only tracks here for my tastes, but they’re also so well done that I’d be remiss not to bump it up to a 4 overall. This is definitely a good album, and a rather fast 34 minutes, but it did leave me scratching your head a few too many times. Someone else will click with a bit more, but for me, I think it’s a solid album plagued by a few too many faults to really hit its highest potential. Hence, a 3.5 up to a 4.
King Crimson
4/5
I’m at a pretty darn good 4.
This album has a few too many lulls and experimental points for me to really push it near a 5, but what’s here is still pretty captivating in its own weird way. Its experimental nature keeps it from hitting a 5 for me, but it also does enough that I think it pushes it up nicely into a 4, just for trying all of this in 1973, and succeeding, for the most part.
A lot of this album is instrumental, which is fine enough – it’s broken up by 3 normal tracks, and the only one I really wasn’t feeling at all was “Easy Money”; just a little too simple and a bit too boring for my tastes. Felt like there was never a big payoff. The same applies to The Talking Drum, but that at least has the benefit of transitioning perfectly into the absolute stunner that is Part 2 of Larks’ Tongues in Aspic – just an absolutely captivating 7 minutes of a progressive rock instrumental that never really hits a lull point, and just clicked on all my tastes.
So, yeah, I’m at a 4 – it’s an interesting 48 minutes, but it doesn’t do enough to hold my attention throughout the whole thing. It’s a little vague, and occasionally too experimental for its own good, but when it clicks, it clicks, and it clicked enough for me to enjoy it. It’s a very recommended 4, because I can see someone vibing throughout this whole thing and giving it a 5 (or absolutely despising it and giving it a 2).
Super Furry Animals
2/5
I’m at a disappointed 2.
It’s just soulless music to me. It’s never technically bad in terms of music theory or production, nor does it hit any egregiously low points, but as an album experience from front to back, it starts off bland, peaks around tracks 3-6, and then just stumbles straight into “movie soundtrack bait” from Track 7 all the way to the end, even egregiously daring to finish on a Beatles-esque “repeat the same line for 2 minutes to increasingly complex instrumentation” ending track, which is really the nail in the coffin.
The only reason I’m feeling so nice is because of that stretch of Tracks 3-6 – they still feel corporate and manufactured to some degree, but it’s at least hidden well enough by some fun instrumentation and some decent song structures. Something 4 the Weekend is clearly the best track here, and the momentum of that track carried for a bit. As a front to back album experience though, it is an excruciating 41 minutes that never really finds an identity of its own – the first track starting right off with that instrumentation should’ve been a sign that this wasn’t gonna have a great structure as an entire album.
I’m just disappointed, because I think there is the framework for a decent album in here, but it can’t stop chasing commercially successful sounds and aping other people’s styles for long enough to find its own identity. With just a bit more time, and a little more room for the tone and substance of each track to breathe, this could be far better than it is. Instead, it just kind of sits there, with a listener waiting for a breakthrough that never comes to fruition. Hence, the 2, because at least it’s not bad to listen to, just sort of dull, but with an occasional burst of energy.
Maybe I just didn't get it, I dunno.
5/5
I’m at a 5.
My experience with Oasis is still relatively untainted and fresh – yes, everyone knows Wonderwall, and a lot of people know Champagne Supernova, and I’m guilty of knowing (and loving) both. This was always gonna get at least a 3 on the strength of those 2 tracks alone. Past that though, I’m still fresh as a daisy on pretty much all of their stuff; I know Noel and Liam can be pretentious as hell, always at odds, and their confidence is their biggest flaw as much as it is their biggest strength.
It’s a good thing this album uses it as an incredible strength – they shot their shot with the most stadium-friendly rock one could ever produce, without any guarantee that they could really fill out stadiums like that, and they absolutely fucking nailed it. I’m leaning fully into guilty pleasure mode on a lot of these tracks, and I don’t really care. The melodies are fun, the vocals are great, and when the bombast and showmanship matches the quality like this, it just comes across as a sort of victory lap to me, rather than corporate or manufactured. It feels like an indie band that “made it” their way, in their own style, without selling out or sacrificing, even if it probably leans closer to “selling out”.
I just loved this album from front to back. I think Hello’s immediate foreshadowing of Wonderwall kinda eased me in, and I never really looked back – these are energetic tracks, and while a few go a bit too long, or lean into a bit of repetition, I don’t think there’s ever really a dull moment on here. The lyrics are probably the weakest part here, but the vocals and instrumentation shoot this album up pretty damn high for me – when the lyrics do match the quality of the instrumentals, though, it leads to something excellent. If the lyrics, vocals, and instrumentals all click at the same time, it leads to something spectacular. This album only ever hits on “spectacular” a few times for me, at varying points throughout some of the songs, but it clicks on “excellent” a lot of the time. Big shoutout to “Cast No Shadow”, by the way.
I’m sure some people will be absolutely snobbish about an album like this, and I’d be remiss to not recognize my own hypocrisy with how much I tore into Fuzzy Logic by Super Furry Animals for what I perceived as trying to achieve this type of success on a different, more commercialized “Hollywood soundtrack” scale. Maybe it’s because of my own bias with Wonderwall and Champagne Supernova prior to listening to the album in full, but I never felt like I was listening to something inauthentic throughout the album like I did with Fuzzy Logic. There is a fully realized style here that gets pretty adhered to, and while the variety of the album itself is admittedly weaker because of it, it doesn’t make the experience feel lesser to me. This feels like a proper setlist, cohesive, earning its stripes as a 50 minute piece with a beginning and ending, all concocted by Liam and Noel and the rest of the band with the express purpose of selling out stadiums and realizing their dreams.
Is that a bad thing? I dunno, maybe. Maybe I’m the snob for adoring one type of commercial appeal and ripping into the other, but regardless of my own introspections, this album just clicked perfectly for me. This does feel like the inflection point that shifted Britpop for the last half of the 90s, for better or for worse. Its legacy will likely stand as Oasis’ magnum opus, a seminal album of the 1990s, and for unfortunately (and lovingly) giving us Wonderwall. It’s a lot of different things, arguably dated being among them, but for my tastes, I just deeply, deeply enjoyed it. Rather easy 5 for me.
Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band
3/5
I’m… I’m somewhere. When I wrote my little review for Safe as Milk, there’s one sentence I threw in there: “If you’re gonna try to be this innovative for 1967, then go all in.” This album is them going all in, and I feel like the genie took my wish and bastardized it beyond my wildest dreams. Is that a bad thing? Is that a good thing?
Well, it was 79 minutes of something, alright, but you can’t say it wasn’t captivating or intriguing. You can certainly call it bad, but I don’t know that it is bad. Does it deserve to have an average rating of 2.27? No, I wouldn’t go that low. I think I’m at a 3, somehow.
I know what this album is trying to do, or at least, I think I do – it’s simply trying to exist. There is an incredible complexity behind the actual compositions and melodies and everything here, and that complexity is entirely grounded and almost canceled out by the most nonsensical lyrics and the most grating vocal performance that any album has ever had. Grating doesn’t necessarily mean bad in this case, it just means… divisive.
This album’s gonna be divisive. I don’t think it’s bad, I don’t think it’s THAT good either, but it’s a journey. It’s music that fundamentally challenges the entire structure of the genre, of Beatlemania, and of an artist’s obligation to make music that’s actively commercially appealing. It’s batshit insane, but it’s technically sound, even if it feels entirely wrong or completely uncomfortable at times. There may truly never be anything produced like this, with such little commercial appeal, and yet so meticulously produced to evoke such a reaction that it somehow loops around to having appeal again.
I would say it’s like listening to a band trying to perform over Zoom, with each instrument on an individual call, but that’s a disservice to just how brilliantly scattered these compositions tend to be. It’s more equivalent to say, the awful “rival” art present in Pokemon Art Academy on the 3DS – just go look at that shit. It’s designed perfectly to evoke poor artistry, and yet there’s a brilliance within that.
The only issue that this album has, besides its obnoxiously long run time, is its obnoxiously self-centered lead vocalist, who honestly drags this album down tremendously for me. It’s not that his vocals are ever bad, but they overpower the compositions and their complexity so much that it genuinely ruins the spirit of the musicality for me. His presence is not only awkward, it’s unneeded, and yet at the same time, his presence is entirely necessary to make the album’s overall tone work. It’s a conundrum, but it’s easily solved by just lowering his voice in the mix, and minimizing his presence, as well as his overly preachy poetry that sounds like a Brennan Lee Mulligan monologue fed through Google Translate 28 times over.
With all of that said, it is an enjoyable experience, but an excruciating one – the album did lose me at several points, but it also always managed to pull me back in just by doing some completely goofy bullshit that just happened to win me over more often than not. It’s not an album I’ll ever return to, but it’s one where I think I can genuinely appreciate how ballsy and avant-garde it feels for 1969. It’s an oddly recommended 3.
Björk
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4.
This is the second time we’ve gotten Bjork, and this is a much, much different album than Vulnicura. I’m not entirely sure what to make of it. This is a really ballsy album to try and pull off, and frankly, she succeeded entirely at what she set out to do – every instrument here is a voice. Some of it processed to hell and back, but impressive all the same. It gives every track a uniform sound, but not a uniform style, and the versatility that she explores throughout this album is kind of remarkable given its general somber and almost spiritually driven tone.
I could be misreading the album as somber though – I’m just going off the vibe of most of the tracks, a lot of which feel slow, intentional, breathy, and a bit held, as if to give everything its own space to shine. The exception to this is obviously Triumph of a Heart, and in a way, I’m glad she reserved herself from making more tracks like that – it makes that one stand out, feel special, and connect really well as the final track of the overall experience.
I definitely hit the zen state a few times while listening here, but I think the album didn’t do a great job of keeping me in it – for as ambitious as this is, it does fall apart under its own weight a few times. There’s some production choices I disagree with, and there’s a number of times where the melodic structure is lost (albeit intentionally) in favor of a slightly off-beat rhythm that never quite found the balance between musically pleasing and captivating for me.
Make no mistake, though – this is a captivating album. It’s 45 minutes that’ll sort of take you every which way, but you have to be willing to go along with the journey. I don’t necessarily blame anyone who could give this a 2, because it is abrasive, unnatural, and discomforting, but if you’re willing to accept that, it’s an enjoyable enough listen on the strength of its ambition. Anyone giving this a 1 is just too afraid to be challenged by music.
For me, it’s a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4, if only because I respect its ambition so much, and I was genuinely really captivated by the album. It’s not strong enough to carry its own weight and its own concepts for the full 45 minutes, but when this album is rolling, it’s a beautifully layered mess that’s a treat to listen to. Even when it’s not rolling, it’s just a layered mess that’s technically sound, and that’s still an interesting listen in its own right. I liked it, what can I say?
Radiohead
5/5
I’m at a 5.
I’ve sort of just sat here in silence trying to really digest the album, and I think my current inability to put my feelings into truly coherent thought speak more to the quality of the album and its emotional impact more than my words could.
This is the third time we’ve gotten a Radiohead album, and it’s the 3rd time it’s lived up to the acclaim, and this time, I think it went above and beyond – OK Computer was great, In Rainbows was fantastic, and I knew this album would probably get another big adjective to mark its quality, but I really can’t think of one right now. The only thing that even remotely comes to mind is “overwhelming,” and I guess that applies best to both my brain and this album as a whole.
It really is overwhelming, in the best way possible – the closest analog I have to any of the albums we’ve gotten so far is David Bowie’s “Low,” but that’s only in terms of production and stylization. There is something in the general emotion evoked by Thom Yorke and the rest of the band here that takes this album over the top, but it’s something that I seriously just don’t have the words for. I’ve never been left this… stunted by an album.
I recognize its grandeur, I recognize its emotional pull, I recognize the incredible instrumentation and production here, I recognize its ability to use a minimalism in words to try to convey feeling as effectively as possible – every core tenet of praise I have about the album is there, but I just can’t figure out how to say it. All I know is that I thought it was beautiful. There’s not a skip here, save for maybe Treefingers, but this album is a front to back journey – close your eyes, find a focus, and just let it take over. At some point, that zen state will kick in, and there will be nothing like it. It’s a fast, fast 47 minutes, but it sticks for a long time afterward. It’s a highly recommended 5.
Johnny Cash
5/5
I’m at a 5.
This is my first of the Johnny Cash prison albums, and by a weird sort of extension, my first proper Johnny Cash album as well – the man simply exudes charisma, and this is the concert where the famous middle finger photo comes from. Just a fucking legend, really.
This is a good setlist too – I haven’t heard most of these tracks, save for I Walk The Line. This is my first time hearing A Boy Named Sue. That’s a really fun song, and honestly, I feel like it’s aged well enough into today’s standards of LGBTQ+ related issues, gender equality, and how much more personal and attached names feel. There’s some fun stuff here, namely the story about him getting arrested for picking flowers and then writing a whole song about it.
I haven’t heard the Folsom album; I know it’s more acclaimed, and I can’t wait to get there now, but I just really enjoyed this. I think Johnny Cash shines in an environment like this. Even if he seems “bored” at times, like some critics have written, he’s still engaged enough to put on a damn fine show. It’s a really tight 34 minutes, and the crowd brings a great energy that Johnny perfectly plays into. I’m being generous by not bumping it down to a 4 for the San Quentin reprise, but I can always just skip over it on a future relisten. I liked it a lot, and I think it’s worth giving a 5.
The Jesus And Mary Chain
3/5
I’m at a 3.
I don’t think this is necessarily a bad album – I think it’s a decent album bogged down by production choices that hinder the listening experience, but its charm manages to break through in spite of its self-sabotage.
The first and most obvious thing is the reverb effects and the wall of sound – not bad in theory, as long as it’s not overused, overblown in the mix, and doesn’t actively hide the full extent of the instrumentation. So, of course, it’s overused, overblown in the mix, and actively hides the full extent of the instrumentation. The levels of reverb vary throughout the album, but there’s never a good mix on them to have an effective use that adds to the experience – far too often, all of the instruments have the same amount of reverb, so it just feels like I’m sitting in a cave. The volume of the wall of sound that permeates a good chunk of the tracks here also varies, and when it doesn’t totally take away from the vocals or percussion, it’s alright. I just don’t think it ever adds anything to any track – if there were moments where it faded in to create an ambiance or whatever, it would be fine. It just sort of shows up and never goes away, though.
The second thing for me is how little of a presence the drums have, and I can’t help but feel like giving them more space to work with and turning them up a bit would’ve added so much energy to some of the tracks desperately searching for them. The same applies to the vocals at times, but my thing with the vocals is mainly that I wish the guy had a bit more emotion on a few tracks, and didn’t just sound like he was reading off a piece of paper – that’s most prevalent on “In a Hole”.
The third and final thing for me is the track order – I think “Just Like Honey” sets a wildly different expectation for the tone of the album, and it never really finds a natural progression throughout. I’m not really sure what else could have started the album, but “Just Like Honey” feels like such a natural closing track to me. There’s definitely a way to tweak the track order, though.
With all of that said, the album isn’t outright bad; if it were bad, I’d be presenting all of these as outright negatives as opposed to things that could be easily tweaked to create an overall better album experience. I think there’s something enjoyable here, and the framework of everything is in place. All of the charm is there, but I just feel like the production sort of kills it for me. When this album clicks, it clicks pretty well, but it only truly clicks a handful of times, in part because of that damn wall of sound diluting so much of the instrumentation. Of course, this is just my take as a “guy who likes radio-friendly production” sort of listener – I can see how this style as it is would totally click for someone all the way up to a 4 or even a 5, but for me, I’m at a 3. It’s a recommended 3, though.
Tangerine Dream
5/5
I’m at a 5.
I mean, listen; if we’re weighing 5’s next to each other, this is at the low end of the 5’s I’ve given. It’s not doing anything so deeply impressive to actually put it up next to, say, Nevermind by Nirvana or Rumours by Fleetwood Mac. It’s a 5 on its own merits, for its genre, and for my experience with it.
I just really fucking enjoyed this. Yes, one may disparage this as “beep boop music”, but I think it’s more than that – maybe it’s just because I’m a big sci-fi head, but I haven’t really heard an electronica soundscape so deeply capture the feeling of adventure, mystery, and ambience in this specific style so efficiently and effectively. I’m not saying this is easy to make, but it does a lot without really using up too much; a lot of what’s here is based in simple windy synths, panning tricks, volume tricks to add the illusion of depth, and the occasional Moog melody distorted to hell and back.
It’s a really fast 37 minutes, despite how slow it felt in the moment. I walked around while listening to this album, and even my walking just felt more deliberate, more focused; it could’ve been because of how attentive I was to the soundscape, but I’d like to imagine it’s because it just felt more like space to me, with that sense of adventure really getting into my brain and actively working.
It’s an album that’s deeply, deeply enhanced with headphones in, and it’s enhanced even further if you close your eyes – it’s an audio journey, and for me, about as effective as an ASMR video might be in terms of eliciting a specific feeling. Hell, ASMR just barely works for me, but this really fucking worked for me, so it might be even better for someone else. I thought it was a beautifully crafted set of compositions, and I can feel this album’s general influence on so much of modern ambient music. Not quite to the degree of, say, an Eno album, but something relatively close. It’s an enjoyable 5 if you let yourself melt into the soundscape – it’s certainly no less than a 3, at the very worst.
ZZ Top
3/5
The most three-y 3 to ever 3.
It’s not a bad album. It’s not a very captivating album, though. It’s an enjoyable listen, but other than La Grange, and maybe a few other tracks, it’s not a very memorable listen either. It just feels half-baked to me, but perhaps I’m holding this to a much higher standard than I should be.
I fully recognize this album for what it is; it’s for when you’re on the road, trucking along, and you need some rock music to listen to without giving a shit. It totally works in that sense; this is fully competent 70s rock to drink some beer to. It doesn’t challenge itself too much, nor does it ever really challenge the listener. It didn’t really wow me as the listener, either. The instrumentation, other than the usually more involved guitar solos, feels a bit neglected and basic. The percussion in particular sounds like I could play it on some of these tracks, and the extent of my rhythm/instrumental experience is like, playing Rhythm Heaven and slapping a desk.
I dunno, it’s just sort of disappointing compared to the last ZZ Top album we got – they definitely grew more as musicians, and got more comfortable exploring complexities, but the core of what made Eliminator work is here. It’s just not all there in terms of confidence, instrumentation, or bombast. It’s a solid 33 minutes though; I don’t hate it, and there’s not a single bad track here, but I just don’t think I can go any higher than a 3.
Gang Starr
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
I just thought that was a damn good album; it’s definitely split into halves (Tracks 2-9 & Tracks 11-18), but it comes together as a pretty complete package. The biggest split in terms of the production here is how the instrumentals take more of a backseat to the lyricism in the first half, and how they find more of a balance in the second half. There’s some stellar beats here, and some stellar lyricism, and when this album finds that balance, it rolls really, really smoothly.
The only reason I’m at a 4.5 instead of a flat 5 is because I do think this album suffers from what I’m describing as “Harvard rap”. I’m sure that’s not the most concise way to put it, but a lot of this album touches on how braggadocious Guru can be about his verbose vocabulary, finding the perfect rhyme, and disparaging the lack of “intellectualism” in rap music. They would fucking hate today’s rap, I’ll tell you that much, but for 1991, this does feel a little too early to criticize the genre as a whole, unless there were some really fucking dogshit rappers getting radio airplay in 1990 just because hiphop was the new hot thing. Really, the issue isn’t the criticisms, but it’s how often they get touched on in this album – there’s just a few too many tracks that involve him bragging about his wordplay and his skill, and it sort of bogs down the album, even for as much as I liked them.
Regardless of that, DJ Premier is on fire for a lot of these beats, and too much of this album is too damn good to let a slight oversaturation ruin the whole thing. For as much as he bragged, Guru does back it up pretty damn well; there’s some great flow and lyricism throughout this album – the entirety of “Take A Rest” stands out as one of the prime examples to me, but there’s some gems thrown about here. This is a pretty cohesive album from front to back, and it’s worth paying attention to every line.
Ultimately, this is a super dense album, but a breezy and captivating 50 minutes. It’s a really good listen that gets sort of bogged down in its own “intellectualism” at times, but not enough to ruin the overall package. It’s a 4.5 that easily gets bumped up to a 5, and it kinda makes me wonder how this got lost in the 90s rap canon; I guess all the other heavy hitters of the era have drowned this out over the years. It’s a damn good thing it’s on this list, then.
Duke Ellington
5/5
It’s a 5. I don’t need to use any more than 2 paragraphs to explain why.
It’s a live jazz album, what did you think it was gonna get? The only way it could’ve been any lower than a 4 would be if someone had just been yelling into a microphone the whole time. I’m not super deep into music theory to tell someone why these are good, or to explain the deep complexities in the performance. I have an ear, and that’s about all I need, I think. My ear is telling me this was really fucking good.
This is my first time listening to anything by Duke Ellington. I now want to listen to even more of Duke Ellington – I know the name, I know his place in history, and I know his deep, deep importance to this specific era of big band jazz. There’s a reason Stevie Wonder made Sir Duke. He lived up to the hype and more – this is a spectacular 44 minutes; there's neither a wasted note nor a moment where the energy dies down. Mix that with a red-hot crowd hanging onto every single flourish & some stellar compositions, and you end up at an easy 5.
Willie Nelson
4/5
I’m at a 4.
I really, really liked the first half of this album, and then the second half of the album gave me Ella Fitzgerald-adjacent PTSD of the Great American Songbook. That is to say, I think the first half of this album really clicks on a good middle ground between his contemporaries and the “classics” of his time, and the instrumentation that guides them feels like his own. He takes control of those songs in a way that feels good for 1978, and just as good in 2024. The second half of this album throws out that middle ground to focus entirely on the 30s and 40s, and while there’s not a single bad track on the album, it definitely felt like he was in less control of them, and just covering them mostly as they were, and the album sort of loses his touch.
I do think what’s here is good – the Georgia on My Mind cover especially blew me away, and when this album clicks, it really clicks. I just feel like it sort of got… boring near the end. Not like, “dear God, end the album already” boring, but a lot of the back half felt like it touched on topics already explored and covered in the first half, and that redundancy, mixed with the slower tempo of everything started to make me feel drowsy, for some reason. It’s not like I was literally getting bored to sleep or anything, but the instrumentation was so calming and serene, with his vocals so soft-spoken that it simply created the perfect environment to get to that point. When I say it’s “boring”, I simply mean that the energetic songs, or at least the more bombastic instrumentation and tempo go away, and their lack of presence throughout that second half creates a sort of homogeneity that drags the album down to a 4 for me.
It is Willie Nelson, though, and who am I to talk shit on his music taste? The band does a great job, his vocals are stellar, and the emotional pull of every song is left intact here; it is a good album, and a recommended one. If nothing else, that Georgia on My Mind cover gets this album to a 3 by itself, but for me, the entire package is worthy of a 4. It could totally go up to a 5 though.
OutKast
5/5
This whole thing is a 5.
I’ve always been a little scared to tackle this album; obviously, Hey Ya is the monster hit, but even past that, these are basically just two albums thrown together like a Sonic & Garfield pack for the Sega Genesis. They’re entirely unrelated, and they’re clearly put together just to keep the “OutKast” brand name alive. I wrote down two individual reviews for both Speakerboxx & The Love Below as I was listening; I’ll just copy/paste them both here, and then give a sort of epilogue to the whole thing.
For Speakerboxx, that half easily gets a 5.
Big Boi is flowing on this half of the record – this could’ve easily stood on its own without being attached to The Love Below, I think. Fantastic production across the board, great verses from everyone involved, and a really fun mix of like, Funkadelic-esque production stylizations with a bit of Outkast flair, naturally evolved from Stankonia, and still feeling extremely modern for 2003. A lot of these beats still go hard as hell in 2024, and any modern rapper could probably flow on a lot of them.
I’ve always liked Big Boi’s verses just a little more than Andre’s, and so far, this part of the album is confirming my bias – he is on fire on a lot of these tracks, with his faster flow just more attuned to the upbeat tempo and nature of this part of the album. A lot of these are really fun tracks in terms of subject matter. Of course, there’s not a lot of “serious” moments here, but he does know when to reel it in when the time comes.
I’ll say this; it’s a tough fucking act to follow. Andre’s got a lot to beat here – I think this perfectly lined up with my tastes. That’s a stellar album in its own right; I do wish it sort of landed its “ending” a little better, but this is a double package, so hopefully the last track on The Love Below satiates my thirst. When it comes to Speakerboxx, that’s a 5 by itself. I’ve got high, high hopes for Andre, and I hope he doesn’t let me down.
For The Love Below, I’m at a 4.5.
It’s oh so very close to being a 5 for me, but I just think this album doesn’t do quite enough to hit a fully authentic vibe that he’s trying to capture – he succeeds at hitting the vibe, but there’s a few tracks that go a bit long, a few tracks with some weird production choices, and honestly, just not enough features. If you’re gonna do this sort of Prince throwback style, or try to evoke old Bootsy Collins / Funkadelic type of production at times, bring in some of the people that made it work.
With that said, I loved it when he stepped out of that box and did some super unique stuff – there are production tricks on this album that I don’t think mainstream rap & hip-hop really caught up to for at least another 5 or 6 years, unless I’m just deeply ignorant to the early 2000s (and I probably am). Those tracks easily stood out the most to me.
Maybe I’m just a little salty because I wanted to hear Andre rap more, but his presence as a rapper is seriously underutilized on this album. That’s not to say his singing is bad; I think his voice contortions are really good, and he's pretty well trained. Sometimes the production covers up any perceived “flaws”, but if there are any, I barely caught them. I think this is a good front to back album, and it certainly has more of a plotline and a sort of A to Z structure than Speakerboxx did. I do think I enjoyed Speakerboxx more, just because Big Boi was flowing and it felt more fun, but this also could have stood on its own as a solo album. It’s a nice high 4.5.
So, what does that mean for the entire package? Well, obviously, it’s a 4.75 if you average those out, but it’s an easy, easy roundup to a 5. I don’t think that part was ever in question – what I’m most surprised by, in terms of this double album, is how oddly cohesive it feels even with the blatant split. They complement each other well, and they both bring an individual vibe; the usual ATL bounce from Speakerboxx, and the more thoughtful and introspective stuff from The Love Below. Those vibes together do evoke OutKast to me.
In a way, this feels better as a double album under the OutKast branding, if only because I think they would’ve been pigeonholed into these styles if these were released as solo albums. As a whole package though, it does feel like it’s OutKast, and a more individual showcase of the best of their own work. I do wish there was a bit more overlap between Andre and Big Boi across both albums, to keep that cohesion a bit more intact, but I’m just sort of nitpicking at this point. These are two very good solo albums; one gets a 5, the other gets a 4.5, but as a whole package, it’s very easily a 5.
Ghettomusick > Hey Ya!, by the way. Fight me.
Sufjan Stevens
5/5
I’m gonna need more time with this album, but at first pass, I’m at a 4.5 that I simply admire so much that I’m gonna bump it up to a 5.
Perhaps it’s the post-election inner fear talking, but this felt like the perfect album at the perfect time – just an inspired biographical reminder of what I hope this country is, what I hope it can continue to be, and what makes it truly great. I’ve never heard a Sufjan Stevens album for this; never even heard of the guy, really. I’m beyond impressed.
I’m a sucker for historical references in music; not because it’s necessarily great for songwriting, but because it tells me that I’m dealing with someone who knows and is embedded into history, at least to some degree. As a trivia guy, it just gives me a point of reference to really feel where a song is coming from. This album is jam-packed with them, up and down, and quite frankly, the balance between all the references and being able to actively blend them and weave them into such compelling narratives and melodies is one of the most impressive things I’ve heard in the 310 albums we’ve done so far.
Past that, my goodness, the music; what an absolute behemoth of a production this must’ve had. Occasionally, this album gets a little too cute with its vocal mixing at the expense of the listener, but more often than not, that orchestration and instrumentation so perfectly captures a mood that might be impossible to put into words. I say that knowing that his songwriting here is about as impressive as the instrumentation, if not moreso.
It’s a deeply bombastic album, fantastically structured, and its long-ass song titles provide the humor in places where it’s desperately needed. It definitely feels like he had fun making this, but he also knew exactly how much weight this thing was carrying. To find such a great balance between instrumentation, songwriting, vocals and production, while making sure this thing doesn’t collapse under the weight of its own ambition and honesty is nothing short of a miracle. Again, there are flaws here; a few tracks go on a bit long, some of the funny filler could’ve been cut instead of doing it to satiate a long song title or to keep the “musical” structure alive, but those “flaws” are more like production choices that just didn’t click with me.
I need another pass or two on this album without the misty-eyed dread of November 5th, 2024 looming long in my head, to more critically analyze it, and really take away its theming and lyricism more without clinging so deeply onto its messaging of hope and promise… but if the album’s already got me that hooked, in light of what just happened, it’s doing something right. If anything, I feel like I’ll appreciate it even more. It’s a 4.5 that I’m bumping up to a 5.
Laibach
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’m going to cautiously bump up to a 4.
I mean, look, of all the albums to get so soon after the 2024 Presidential election, to get this one is the equivalent of rolling a Nat 1 on a D700. It’s not even that it’s necessarily bad – I genuinely really did enjoy this, but the optics and timing are tremendously and uniquely awful. It feels like starting this project on January 1st led to this as a long, long, sick punchline.
But regardless of that, like I said – I genuinely enjoyed this. Call it sick irony given the consequences of the election and the incredibly militaristic sound here, but in terms of soundscape and vision, this really does feel like an awkward political rally. It’s discomfiting, uneasy, a little too real at times… and I think that’s the point. This is meant to create that sense of awkwardness, to confront it head on, to feel that way without ever explicitly agreeing to it. Given the social contexts of 1980s Cold War politics that deeply underline this album, it feels like a direct statement against the causes that were more present behind the Iron Curtain at the time. In that sense, I think the production and tone here are basically perfect as a form of satire. Really uncomfortable satire, but satire nonetheless.
Where this album falls flat then, for me, is simply in fully committing to its vision and execution – you wanna go down this pathway, and make people awkwardly feel the consequences of something they didn’t sign up for? Make it even less palatable. Make it a little bit screechier, make it a little less clean, make it feel like despair. I know I sound sadistic when I type all of that, but if that’s the point of the album here, I think committing even deeper to the “downfall” of this rally would’ve really nailed this as a home run of a concept album.
Because it plays itself relatively safe, I have to judge it a bit more on the musical execution, and in terms of the musical execution… yeah, this thing kinda falls into the “first minute is the whole song” trap a few too many times. The pulsating, militaristic drums and brass sections grow tiring after too long, and slowly start to lose their effect. The political speeches of despair are effective, but without a real shift in the instrumentation to add to the atmosphere, it comes across as kind of hokey.
Again, I get it – you can’t be too blatant, otherwise it goes from incredibly pointed and direct satire done in a perfectly uncomfortable way, to just straight up being the real thing, and that’s a truly hard balance to hit on. I think they did about as good as they could given the political environment of the time – they could’ve been in some serious shit if they went too far one way or the other, and the fact that they even crossed the tightrope is a miracle to begin with.
So… yeah, I really did like this. I wish it had the guts to be a little more loose, to really drive home how awkward it is, but it doesn’t take away from how oddly engaging those 37 minutes still are. By really leaning into itself, and making it feel so captivating and bombastic, I simply have to wonder… did people really think they were legit? Hell, am I misreading them? I guess I’ll never quite know – the band itself has stayed ambiguous about it for years upon years. Hell, apparently they played North Korea, and I truly don’t know what to make of that. I can only hope I’m right in calling it a deeply biting satire. Hence, the 3.5 that I’m cautiously bumping up to a 4 – heavy emphasis on “cautiously”.
Simon & Garfunkel
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Bridge Over Troubled Water, as a title track, sets an incredible tone and sets a high bar for the rest of the album, and while I don’t think it ever quite touches that bar again, it’s never more than a few inches away. El Condor Pasa is incredibly efficient in its simplicity, Cecilia feels like late 2000s indie rock in the best way possible, Keep the Customer Satisfied is the best Beatles song that Simon & Garfunkel ever made, and once this album gets to side 2, it just keeps rolling from there. There’s maybe one or two stumbles on its way to the finish line (looking right at “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright” & “Bye Bye Love”), but regardless of anything else, that’s a super breezy and really enjoyable 37 minutes.
I don’t think this lived up to like, the super duper universal acclaim that it has, but I can certainly see why people think that way, and maybe one day, it’ll click in that sense for me. Make no mistake about it, though; this is a stellar album. There’s a few tracks that didn’t hit as well for me, but from top to bottom, this thing is beautifully written, composed, and produced. It’s a great listen, and it fits perfectly as a final album for Simon & Garfunkel. Super easy 5.
Pentangle
4/5
I’m at a pretty high 4.
I think after this and the Pogues album we got, I might just be a sucker for medieval-style music with modern instrumentation. I really did like this album; the only reason I’m at a 4 is because the choice to go mostly acoustic sort of creates a homogeneity that the album’s instrumentation never fully overcame for me. To be more specific, there’s just too many tracks that suffer from a “first minute is the whole song” syndrome for me, but those are still pretty good tracks. The ones that overcome it are great, and I think the last track in particular nails it really well. For the lyricism, I think my only real nag is that a few tracks feel sort of similar in subject matter, but otherwise, they completely nailed the feeling; some of these have to be actual old poems and songs brought into modern times.
It’s a relatively breezy 40 minutes, save for Hunting Song, which did feel like the track that dragged the longest; not just in its runtime, but in how slow the pacing of the story felt. Regardless, I enjoyed this a lot – it executes the sort of “folk jazz” thing it’s going for pretty well, the vocalists are both nice, the acoustics (which eventually lose their luster) sound great, and if nothing else, it’s a super easy listen. Pretty solid 4 for me.
Sam Cooke
5/5
Well, that’s obviously a 5.
Just an electric setlist, really – those 36 minutes flew by. I’ve heard of Sam Cooke, but I’ve never actually heard Sam Cooke until now, and that motherfucker can sing his heart out, my goodness. Combine his gritty soulful voice with a red hot band and a red hot crowd, and that’s a recipe for an awesome live album. How this went unreleased for 22 years, I simply don’t understand. How could you listen to that album, with that much crowd energy, and such an honest and soulful performance, and think it’s too edgy? I guess 1963 is still deep in the Civil Rights Movement, and it was more palatable to present him as a gospel star rather than an Elvis Presley-esque pop star, but come on, this would’ve sent Sam Cooke into absolute superstardom. I’ll go so far as to say he wouldn’t have been murdered if this had come out.
Truthfully, I got so swept up into the energy and charisma of the whole thing that I barely have any individual notes on tracks – my ears were attentive, but my brain was on autopilot. There’s a lot of love songs here, which makes some sense, but the energy with which both Sam and the band perform them with is so damn high, you could easily confuse it for a dance album. He’s got the crowd in the palm of his hands too – the amount of call/response parts on this album is kind of unbelievable. It’s really hard to explain how good this album is without listening to it; it is just 36 minutes of pure energy and a spectacular live set. I deeply enjoyed this, and it’s an extremely easy 5.
Muddy Waters
5/5
I was at a 4. Then, “I’ve Got My Mojo Working” happened and I jumped right up to a 5.
I won’t discount the other tracks on this album, because they all act as a grand buildup to that moment, but like… what a show-stopper of a number that is. I can’t even complain that he played it twice. Muddy let out every ounce of energy he had left for that, with himself, his band, and that crowd hitting an absolute fever pitch. It’s one of the most stunning live performances I think I’ve ever heard.
I do have to rewind – this album does sort of start slowly, and you can feel everyone involved with this recording getting more comfortable, more confident, and more energetic as the set goes along. For the first two tracks, everything feels sort of modest and slow, and while it all technically sounded nice, the energy felt flat. My immediate suspicion was that this was a white crowd, and… yeah, this was a white crowd. Well, OK, an integrated crowd, but it sure looks like there were a lot more white people.
By tracks 3 & 4, the band’s energy starts to pick up, as does Muddy’s vocals. Track 5 is when they really let loose – Tiger in Your Tank is just catchy and fun, and that energy carries into “I Feel So Good”. Those opening piano notes, his deeper vocal twang, the crowd screaming… all of it is a buildup to Got My Mojo Working. I cannot stress enough how good this performance is; I can’t capture it in words. It’s worth sitting through both parts, because it’s that damn good. Hell, I looked up the video of the performance just to see how in the zone he was – he was deeply in the zone. How that crowd didn’t just stand up and dance their heart out is beyond me. There is a great shot of a guy doing the Charleston, though.
All this praise towards Got My Mojo Working aside, the album ends on a Langston Hughes-written track. Like, Harlem Renaissance poet, black icon Langston Hughes. The story goes that there was a big riot over a lack of tickets, so the city just shut down the whole festival. Apparently, he wrote the track soon after he learned it, and asked Muddy to perform it. The irony is, that’s not even him on the last track – it’s his pianist Otis Spann. When I said Muddy left every ounce of energy on Got My Mojo Working, I meant that shit. It’s Langston Hughes himself who gets the final words on this album, and that piece of history being so well captured here is kind of amazing.
So, yeah, this gets a big jump up right to a 5. Muddy Waters is indeed as good live as he is in-studio, and his consistency in quality, even up to the 1970s, when we got his album “Hard Again”, is kind of incredible. It makes me kind of mad that blues musicians like him feel sort of lost to time, understated in the modern music canon. This was a real delight, though.
Ghostface Killah
4/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump back down to a 4, but it was pretty close to going up to a 5,
This is my second time hearing anything Wu-Tang related, after Liquid Swords – Ghostface Killah is pretty damn good, man. His verses and storytelling on this album are really good, and the obvious highlight. When he passes it off to the features, they’ve got high bars to reach, and only a handful of them do on this album; all the Wu-Tang members get there pretty easily, and the big surprise, for me, is Ne-Yo absolutely killing it on “Back Like That”.
The reason for this getting a 4 is simply in the skits; there’s so many of them that just kill the pacing of the album for me at times. Even a few tracks without the (skit) moniker are sort of just glorified ones, in a way, getting in one short verse. Those tracks sort of ruin the cohesiveness of the album, even if a number of them do flow pretty well into the main tracks.
Past that, the production on this album, despite the absolutely loaded contributions from MF DOOM, J. Dilla, Pete Rock, and others, is… a little suspect at times. It feels like some of the flows on some of the tracks didn’t quite mesh well, and the overall vision of the album, sort of driven by the storytelling device of the kilo of cocaine set so early on, feels a bit lost and muddled over the course of the whole thing. It feels like there was meant to be a more cohesive plot here, given the amount of skits and setups for future tracks, but a lot of them feel unanswered and sort of left me… befuddled, I guess.
With that said, what’s here is still really good – when this album is rolling, it’s fucking *rolling*, and it succeeds in spite of my perceived flaws and nitpicks. I do think there are ways to improve upon what’s here, namely trimming down some of the “fat” of the album to cut down the runtime, and to more cohesively flow the whole together without the minor comic book, DOOM-esque narrative transitions (which are cool, but just feel a little out of place here with how short they are), but as a whole, this is just a great hour of good beats, good flows, and for 2006, it’s got pretty damn fun wordplay and some great verses. Certainly stands up there with some of its contemporaries for the time. It's a very good 4.5 that just barely doesn't get up to a 5.
Culture Club
5/5
Oh, sue me, I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
I just really enjoyed that, what can I say? I feel firmly established in saying that synthpop will simply win me over every time if it’s done well, and this is done pretty damn well. Obviously, Karma Chameleon is like, the super duper all-timer hit here, forever established in the 80s musical canon, but like… almost all of the other tracks here are pretty good.
There’s not a bad one, just a few that felt either a little long, or a little repetitive, or a little half-baked; a number of tracks lyrically suffer from the “first minute is the whole track” syndrome that really bites at a lot of 80s synthpop. With that said, as long as the instrumentals and the general vocals can overcome that, to evoke some sort of bigger, grandiose feeling that just feels dance-y and fun, it’s enough for me. This album does it in spades; when the lyrics falter, or things get a little stale, a sax solo is always there to save it and bring the mood right back up. Either that, or just some super catchy vocal melody – the layering on the background vocals throughout this album is a real highlight to me. I’d also be entirely remiss to not point out that Boy George sounds strikingly and scarily like George Michael.
I now have a lot more appreciation for Culture Club than I had going into this. Karma Chameleon (and by extension, Do You Really Want To Hurt Me) felt like maybe a one or two-hit wonder sort of thing, but what’s here is *good.* It’s a fast 38 minutes, it’s catchy as hell, it’s tightly produced, and looking at the chart data, no wonder the only thing stopping this album from going to #1 was Thriller. That’s just some damn good synthpop to my ears – I can see how it’d be jarring to some people, and maybe if I were in a grumpier mood, the faltering moments would drag this thing down more for me. Right now, though, I don’t really care. I liked it a lot, and it’s very easy for me to bump it up to a 5.
Method Man
4/5
I’m at a very enjoyable 4.5 that I’ll once again drop back down to a 4.
I dunno, even though I liked most of this, I just don’t think it quite gets up to a 5 for me. I can’t even really explain why; maybe a few beats fell flat, or sometimes the mixing felt off, but as a whole, I never quite found myself fully in the zone with this album like I have with other rap albums, and even other albums by Wu-Tang members. That’s not to say this is bad; when this album does enter a flow state, it’s a really good flow state, but it only lasts temporarily.
There’s great bits of energy, wordplay, vocals and flow all over this album, & as an entire front to back album, it’s a relatively coherent project that breezes by. This didn’t feel like 43 minutes, in a very good way. Method Man’s pretty damn good at this, and the features throughout this album are super fun. I just don’t think that many tracks hit the plateau of “great” – I’m going by feel here, really. There’s definitely standouts, namely “Bring The Pain”, “All I Need”, “Release Yo’ Delf”, & “I Get My Thang In Action”. Those are my top 4 that I’d call “great”, but all 13 tracks here are pretty good.
I guess it’s odd to say “it never stays great long enough to get up to a 5”, but I guess that’s where I’m at with it; just the intangibles that didn’t quite click with me the way they could have. It might be a mood thing, and this could probably easily bump itself up at a later point, but for now, I’m fine bumping it down to a 4. Still pretty recommended though; Wu-Tang Clan still ain’t nothin’ to fuck with.
Jorge Ben Jor
5/5
That’s a pretty damn good 5.
I mean, this album just has charisma in spades, language barrier be damned. It does exactly what it sets out to do – mix Brazilian standards driven by a bit of samba with influences from American pop, R&B, and a bit of Afrobeat in there too. It blends itself together beautifully, on both the slower tracks and the more upbeat ones. I think it might be impossible to listen to this whole album and not get up and move around at least once – whether it’s in the stellar guitar work, the super fun synth and production tricks, the bombastic brass sections, or even just the deeply impressive percussion, there is at least one aspect of this album that’s easy to just vibe to, and that’s not even mentioning his vocal work.
I think his vocals really are understated and perhaps underrated here; even though these instrumentals are great, it feels like there’s a distinct reason for this album to not have an instrumental track on it. Jorge Ben Jor’s vocals have a really good range to them, and the vocal tone of the track honestly makes or breaks the energy at times – I think this is best exemplified in “O Filosofo”, which was the only track that didn’t quite click for me, and it’s partially because his vocals don’t feel fully engaged with the song itself. On the flipside of that, when he gets into a deeply gritty tone on the last track, Africa Brasil, it evokes those moments of true zen and passion from a performer that feel rarely captured on albums or even on tape – Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” comes to mind, both in the album cut and that famous GRAMMYs performance.
Ultimately, this is just fun. It’s 40 minutes that zoom by, but it kept me really attentive to every little detail – what’s here is so deep and rich in its soundscape that it’s impossible to ignore, and frankly worth analyzing to really distill funk in such a pure form. It’s very rare to get international albums on the list, but they’ve usually been pretty damn good (save for that shit show “Haut de gamme”) – this sits right behind Clube Da Esquina as my second favorite international one we’ve gotten so far. It’s a super easy 5 for me.
Hell, just give us another Brazilian album. It can’t hurt at this point.
The Charlatans
5/5
Kinda wish I could hang this one right at a 4.5; solely because I think this is higher than a 4, I’m gonna begrudgingly bump this up to a 5, even if it’s not quite there for me.
I do have a lot of positive things to say about this album though; maybe my expectations were set a little low for a mid-90s Britpop album by a band not named Blur or Oasis, and certainly lowered even more because of Wikipedia labeling this as a partial “hip hop soul” album comparable to Neil Young, but like… damn, I really fucking enjoyed this.
I truly don’t know where “hip hop soul” comes from at all when describing this album; if we’re calling the faster paced, almost rap-esque verses on here “hip hop soul”, then you may as well just call Blues Traveler a rap group at that point. This is Britpop through and through, and honestly, a really strong merging of the more distinct aspects of both Blur and Oasis at the time, namely in the more grungy production with the guitar work, reminiscent of Blur’s self-titled, and the slower, more deliberate vocal style of “What’s the Story, Morning Glory?”. Don’t get me wrong, this certainly isn’t big bombastic stadium rock, and there’s no Wonderwall here, but it feels like it could at least play pretty well in an arena.
There’s some seriously good tracks here; the big standouts are the singles, all of which have at least a million plays on Spotify apiece, but even the supplementary tracks have a few gems: With No Shoes is a pretty good opener, and “Only Teething” immediately comes to mind (even if the percussion there is pretty much from Freedom! ‘90). Really, the only reason I’m not quite at an actual 5 is because some of the supplementary tracks do fall a little short in the execution or the mix – the last 2 tracks in particular really dampen the momentum of the album. Get on It feels like a Bob Dylan track in the worst way; not that it’s a bad track, but that it clicks on all of the habits from Dylan’s work that sacrifice melodic content for slightly more verbose storytelling and a bit of repetition. However, the instrumental and the extended solo throughout really salvage that track from being too boring. Rob’s Theme, on the other hand, simply plays itself too safe, and doesn’t really lean enough into the buildup and execution of the more psychedelic style attempted in the guitars; the drum pattern in that track just kills the mood for me. It’s a sort of flat instrumental to end the album.
But, hey, I said I had a lot of positive things, and those positive things more than outweigh a flat ending – this is just damn good Britpop. It’s energetic, it’s catchy, and it just feels good for 1997. The only thing I can truly knock are the lyrics, for not feeling super coherent or memorable throughout, but when the melodies hit like this, and the overall tracks have such good mixing and instrumentation, it lifts the overall experience in a pretty coherent and fun way. I don’t think this is low enough to call a 4, nor do I think it’s quite at a 5. It really is at a 4.5 for me, but it’s a highly recommended one, so much so that I’ll give it a 5 on the website.
If nothing else, listen to One to Another – that shit’s a banger.
TV On The Radio
3/5
I wish I could hang this at a 3.5, but I’ll have to bump it down to a 3.
This is a weird album, in that I wasn’t too captivated in a lyrical or vocal sense (save for a few tracks), and it was sort of easy to lose track in the moment, but while I was listening to it, there was usually something oddly engaging in the soundscape and production that kept me hooked and attentive. I can’t really describe that paradox, but somehow that’s where I was with this – zoned out and attentive at the same time. Not necessarily hooked on vocals or lyrics, but hooked on hearing how it would all meld around the production and somehow find a melodic basis to work with.
The “problem” with the album then, which I’m sure is rather intentional and purposefully designed, is that it takes a long time to get to that melodic basis on a number of these already long tracks. When a track doesn’t find a melodic basis, it’s just sort of a flop, and this album has enough of those flops to feel disjointed and not as coherent as it could be. That’s not to say there are actively bad tracks (save for the dreadfully minimalistic “Bomb Yourself”, which truly goes nowhere in its 5 and a half minute runtime), but there is a lot of empty space here, and those empty spaces don’t quite do what I think the band wanted, which was a sort of eerie, artsy liminal feel. Instead, it just feels… kinda boring. When it picked up, it hooked me right back into it, but this album doesn’t do a great job of balancing its time between the “empty” and the “full” – if this were a roller coaster, it’d be too many upward hills and not enough drops.
However, with that roller coaster analogy, this album does have enough momentum to not feel like a total wash. I think when the soundscapes do get going, and the tempo and energy pick up, the band genuinely sounds good and all that buildup feels worth the release. There are some good tracks here, and ultimately, I did end up liking the album, just not as much as I think I could have. With a little more tweaking, I think this could’ve found a great balance on its execution, but in this state, it just feels a little undercooked. Someone else will get a bit more enjoyment out of this than I will, but for my tastes, it’s at a 3.5 that just doesn’t quite get up to a 4. Hence, the 3, but a 3 that’s worth giving a try at the very least.
The Monkees
5/5
Ah, what the hell. I’m at a 4.5 that I'll bump up to a 5.
This is my first time hearing The Monkees, outside of “I’m A Believer” – I know about the TV show, but my (admittedly ignorant) reputation of them has always fallen under the same general lens I think most people have about the 1960s in pop music: there’s the Beatles, and then there’s everyone else trying to be the Beatles. It rings especially true for the Monkees; just look at the name, plus it’s a 4-person band that seemingly got thrown together on a whim. You can’t blame me for this.
My expectations were middling, and I’m very pleasantly surprised to be wrong – this is a really charming album. You have to be in the sort of mood for overly bubbly 60s pop like this, so I can understand why the average rating on this is lower… but like, come on, you can’t be that goddamn unhappy for an album like this, can you? I thought this was great – it’s not like, Beatles-level great, but who said it had to be? There’s a lot of unfair expectations levied here on account of being “The Monkees” but if you push past that, you end up with a really good album.
A decent number of these tracks feel like the natural conclusion of the 30s/40s “Great American Songbook” style, and they’re appropriately produced that way, but it doesn’t mean this album feels horribly out of date for 1967. It’s all intentional, but still brought up to the standards of the 60s, and I think they sound great and feel fun to listen to. It’s very weird to feel the fruits of that era coming to roost after listening to so many of those tracks, but it’s kind of cool at the same time. When this album escapes from that “Great American Songbook” box, and gets into its more experimental & Beatles-y stuff, it’s still just as good, with “Randy Scouse Git” being the prime example here. It’s really different from the rest of the album, but without straying too far, and it’s really memorable because it dares to be different enough, especially for a final track.
So, yeah, I’ll give my credit where credit is due to Dolenz, Tork, Nesmith, and Jones – the Monkees may just be a good band after all, or at the very least, their musicianship grew enough to make a genuinely compelling album that feels like it can at least sit at the same lunch table as some of its contemporaries. This sat right behind Sgt. Pepper at #2 for a while, so clearly audiences loved these guys. I thought it was just charming enough to really win me over – the lyricism is good, the vocals are good, the instrumentals are fun and varied, and as a whole, it’s just a really tight 31 minutes that kept me captivated most of the time. I enjoyed it a lot, and it’s worth giving a 5.
Yes
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’m gonna round up to a 5.
The only reason I’m not at a flat 5 is simply because of the shorter tracks here – I get that they’re meant to be solo tracks, made as partial filler and a partial showcase of their individual talents, but they don’t have a really cohesive bend to them that makes the concept work – those tracks are no Speakerboxx / The Love Below, to put it one way. There are great tracks within those solo tracks though – Long Distance Runaround is a treat, and for some reason, Mood for a Day really fucking clicked with me. The rest are just sort of there, though.
The main tracks on this album, which I would consider to be Roundabout, South Side of the Sky, & Heart of the Sunrise are all spectacular, and they’re the reason this gets a bump up to a 5. Roundabout is obviously the huge one, and I loved hearing it again, but I genuinely preferred South Side of the Sky more in terms of the storytelling, sound design, and atmosphere. Heart of the Sunrise is the longest one, and the most “epic” but the reprise of “We Have Heaven” closing out the album feels like a really staggering mistake to me. The track listing in general didn’t feel as coherent as the stuff on “The Yes Album”.
I guess now’s a good time to point out the near-bookending of all this – we did get their last album on January 5th, and it’s now November 18th. That’s 10 months; I have heard so much fucking music this year, that this didn’t quite blow me away in the same way as The Yes Album did, but that’s less a fault of the album and more a consequence of going through this project, and just hearing so much music. It’s still great prog rock, it’s a great Yes album, and I really hope there’s more – it’s a pretty enjoyable 40 minutes, even with a few flat spots in there. It deserves to be bumped up to a 5, and everyone in the world should hear the main 3 tracks on this album at least once.
Neil Young
5/5
Once again, it’s a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5. I just want one fucking day without feeling a “.5”, you know?
This is a very good album; it’s regarded as Neil Young’s best album, and I did enjoy a lot of this. There’s great lyricism, and I deeply dig the country-esque soundscape mixed with rock sensibilities here. I think it’s super well produced, and its storytelling is done really well. There’s not a bad track here, and it’s ultimately a pretty strong 37 minutes, that doesn’t overstay its welcome, though it does start to come a little close.
Really, the only complaint I have, and this might just be a general fatigue talking here, but like… this just felt really same-y after a bit, you know? You can only take so many slow paced, guitar driven, rock/country soundscapes contemplating the intricacies of life. This really needed some levity at some point – I’m not punishing the album for taking itself seriously, because I think it carries a lot of emotional weight and heft, and carries it incredibly well for 1972. But, like, goddamn man, just throw at least one fun song in there, would you?
All that said, this album clicked super well for me; there’s a few lulls in some extended instrumentals, and an occasional “first minute is the whole track” issue, but I think it more than makes up for it in everything else, especially in the lyrics. I’d recommend it to anyone, unless you’re looking for a more upbeat album. This is not that, even with some great guitar riffs throughout. I enjoyed it, even with the lack of levity, and I think it deserves the bump up to a 5.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go listen to like, MJ or something.
Frank Black
5/5
I am strangely at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
I can’t explain it; I had some serious doubts, because I’ve been pretty mixed on the Pixies in the past, and a solo album from their lead singer led me to one of two conclusions: either a more cleaned up, commercialized sound that would be palatable and distinctly different from the Pixies, or leaning even harder into the more avantgarde and loose parts of their hard rock sound, so much so that it somehow would loop around into art. By some miracle, this album manages to hit on both of those, and it weaves in and out of those paths so often that they end up blending together.
I can give an immense amount of praise to most of the instrumentals here; they’re never really stale until maybe 3/4ths of the way through the album, and even then, there’s a very intentional choice to explore different genres in an effort to try and stay fresh. The effort sort of fails, but also sort of works at the same time; I can’t really describe it, if only because there was some general fatigue due to this album’s length that had me start to falter out by the end. I can give some good praise to his vocals too – he really does come across as a strong vocalist on a lot of these tracks, and it’s distinctly different from his Pixies style, which leaned a lot more into a slower, surfer-y vibe. These feel good to listen to throughout.
The only thing I can kinda knock are the lyrics, but even with those, I sort of admire how off-the-wall some of the tracks are in their subject matter; spacecraft being sent to Mars, people who made water more available in California, a hard rock ballad about the 3 Stooges… there’s a lot here. It’s sort of Sufjan Stevens-esque in how varied it all is, and I like how big of a swing it takes.
The biggest issue is the runtime and the amount of tracks; for as entertaining and as fast of an hour as this is, it could’ve been cut down by a bit – a few too many tracks start to tread on the same tone and subject matter, even with the experimental genre shifts towards the end. Get this down to like, 18 or even 15 of the best tracks, and you’ve got a pure winner here. As it stands, it’s still good, but it overstays its welcome just a little too long. That’s why I’m at a 4.5, but I enjoyed this too much to knock it down; it deserves a 5, and I’m kinda stunned that it does. It’s a fun album.
Ryan Adams
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4.
This is a great 70 minutes to *listen* to, save for a few tracks. Very key wording on “listen” – a lot of the time, these tracks do match really well with their lyrical content and their instrumentation. When the album makes sense, it’s rolling, it’s flowing, and it’s providing some great examples of the early 2000s rock scene – basically, everyone trying to mix the Stones with Nirvana, and a hint of rap flair (or at least, that’s how my brain kinda hears it now). I would probably give the very best parts of this album a 5.
The big falldown of an entire point and a half then, comes when the lyrics and the soundscape don’t quite match, which unfortunately happens a little too often – it’s bound to happen at some point with 16 songs, but when I can point out 6 of them that didn’t click, something’s definitely consistent, in a bad way. Nobody Girl is the most key offender of this – the glorification of someone being called a “nobody” and sort of glamorizing a lonely lifestyle should be met with a moodier tone and some slightly somber instrumentation, not a big Britpop-sounding extravaganza reminiscent of Champagne Supernova in its structure that lasts for 9 minutes. There’s other disconnects on the album, and a few soundscapes that really don’t mesh with their lyrics, but that’s by far the worst one to me.
With that said, it is still a great listen – the band is excellent throughout, his voice has a great variety to it, and when everything does click, this album really, really rolls. It just hits too many potholes to really stay consistently good; whether it’s the track order feeling a little chaotic in its tone, the lyricism and the instrumentals not matching, or just some really icky songs in general (who let him fucking record “Harder Now That It’s Over”??), this album just stumbles a few too many times for its own good.
I still enjoyed it, and I think it’s a recommended listen, but when put under scrutiny, it just manages to crumple a bit after a pretty hot start. It’s a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4, but I truly cannot imagine this thing having another 5 tracks laid on top of it.
Funkadelic
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Well, that felt a lot less like Funkadelic and more like… I dunno, Led Zeppelin meets Hendrix meets Eno, or something like that. That was an eclectic blend of every type of rock & ambience & funk there was. I've seen the album cover plenty of times, but I've never heard anything from this album. I enjoyed all 37 minutes of that, save for a few minor things: the mix in Hit It and Quit It wasn’t as friendly as the rest of the album felt, Back in Our Minds felt a little too short and perhaps a little empty, and Wars of Armageddon goes on just a little too long – could’ve trimmed down some of those final 2 minutes where it started to feel endless and directionless at the same time.
Regardless of any minor complaints I have, this is just good fucking music. It’s not as funky as some of their other stuff, and I think my ear is still slightly more attuned to the Parliament side of the George Clinton coin, but… damn, this stands up pretty well to a lot of its rock contemporaries of the time. The guitar solo on Super Stupid blew me away, and I think everyone deserves to hear that at least once. There’s smaller moments like that throughout the album, where the soundscape just overwhelms in the same hypnotic way that “One Nation Under A Groove” did some 326 days ago, but with a higher success rate; sometimes, that album knocked me out of the zone, but I was in it for almost the entire way through here. I really liked this, and it’s a pretty easy 5.
Electric Light Orchestra
5/5
That’s obviously a 5.
This is my first time listening to this album in full – obviously, I know Mr. Blue Sky, but that’s about it, really. My experience with ELO as a whole is super minimal – maybe an occasional thing heard on the radio, but the big thing, other than Mr. Blue Sky, is reading once that John Lennon reportedly said the Beatles, had they stayed together, would’ve likely sounded like ELO.
That sentiment rings pretty damn true here: this feels like a Beatles album, in a very good way. Perhaps there’s a bit more bombast and synth, but in terms of the overall compositions, vocal styles, and just the underlining intangibles… yeah, this feels like where they all could’ve gone.
Admittedly, I’m not quite sure how to describe my overall thoughts here – I think this is just fantastic across the board, from top to bottom, but I wonder how much of it is simply a factor getting really into the zone with this general style. This clicked extremely well with me; just about everything I like in this album can be traced back to every style present in the genre around this time. There’s some jukebox U.S. rock influence ala Boston or Kansas, there’s obviously the Beatles, there’s occasionally a dip into some Zeppelin/Stones style stuff, the piano feels sort of Elton John-esque at times, and the synth/vocoder work blends in part of what was making disco, pop, and R&B work incredibly well at the time. I do wish there were a few more chances to have me, as the listener, breathe a bit within the songs themselves, as some of these go at a breakneck speed without much of a pause, but I kinda love the rollercoaster feel. It’s an album that feels tailor-made to me, which makes it all the more baffling that I’ve never really interacted with it until now.
It also makes it sort of baffling that, once the experience of the album wore off, it almost felt like the cracks started to pop up, oddly enough. Again, this is a great album, it’s easily deserving of a 5, and I loved everything here, but… I couldn’t help but get a lingering sense that maybe, just maybe, the album’s bombast overstays its welcome and creates just a bit of a homogeneity that stops some of the tracks at an individual level from feeling as memorable. That is to say, I kind of found it hard to remember why I was super into stuff like Turn to Stone, Sweet Talkin’ Woman, Across the Border, Night in the City, etc – those feel incredible in the moment, and they work cohesively and brilliantly within the album, but until I went back to listen to them again, I couldn’t really place why I had liked them after I was done listening to the album. Perhaps it’s just a “first time listening” thing.
Ultimately, though, this is just too damn good to let little cracks or perceived imperfections get in the way of what this is, at its core: 70 minutes of blistering rock, that maybe sometimes goes a little too fast for its own good, but it more than makes up for it with the orchestral instrumentation, the huge variety of influences, and a very distinct style that clicks extremely well with my tastes. Someone else can write about the nitty gritty of the compositions and really break down why this has all those intangibles that just work, but for my ears, good music is good music, and this is fantastic music. It’s an absolute highlight of the 1970s, and a crime that I haven’t heard it until now. Very, very easy 5.
Miles Davis
5/5
I’m at a 5, and I’m glad I get to say a little more than “it’s just good jazz”.
It’s good jazz with a little bit of a rock flair to it, and that distinction adds a bit of depth. It’s not an overwhelming rock flair – you’re not gonna get an extreme hybrid with like, a sick guitar solo in here, but the instrumentation of traditional jazz mixed with the electric guitar and synth-driven keyboards is blended together really well, in such a way that neither overpowers the other too much to be a distraction.
Shhh / Peaceful does feel like the “lesser” of the two songs here, but it’s like picking between two different slices of pizza – at the end of the day, it’s still pizza. There’s not a wrong pick, one just might feel more flavorful. In this case, “In A Silent Way” is the more flavorful for me. Starting with the almost Eno-esque droning tones, before going into a really fun trumpet & keyboard driven riff held together by a super catchy bassline, then finishing back on the Eno-esque tones with a little more of the middle part involved, just caught my ear more.
Ultimately, this album really succeeds through its simplicity; there are ways this could’ve gone wrong, but it never does. It doesn’t go too risky, and I think that’s the correct choice. It plays itself super safe, so it’s not as engaging as Birth of the Cool or Kind of Blue, but the different style of production makes the comparison feel a little weird. I can honestly boil it down to “I just liked it.” If Bitches Brew is indeed this but even better, I cannot wait for that to pop up on the list. As far as this album goes though, it’s a 5.
Simon & Garfunkel
5/5
I’m at a 5.
It is getting a little hard to praise Simon & Garfunkel after listening to three albums of theirs, but this is a pretty damn good album. The big highlight is obviously the first 7 tracks and the mini-narrative of the fragility of life at all ages, whether it’s at your youngest or your oldest. “Voices of Old People”, while less of a track and more of a documentary-esque look at the elderly, is a genuine standout to me here, if only for being a really strong example of a track built for “serving the narrative”, especially so for 1968. The way that leads right into Old Friends and the subsequent reprise of Bookends flows perfectly, and it really solidifies those first 7 tracks as something kinda special.
If I have any “complaint” about the album, I guess I just wasn’t as engaged by everything else. None of the last 5 tracks are bad; Fakin’ It is pretty fun, with a great tempo and a good hook. Punky’s Dilemma is a goofy sort of Sesame Street-esque cut about avoiding the draft. Mrs. Robinson is obviously the big commercial standout of the back half, and it’s pretty catchy, even though I’ve never seen the movie it’s based on. A Hazy Shade of Winter is probably my favorite one there; it feels distinctly like Simon & Garfunkel’s style and production, even with the rock & roll stylizations thrown in. It could’ve totally fit into the “Bookends” part of the album without a hitch. At the Zoo is charming, if a bit cheesy, and a slightly odd choice to end the album on. They’re all great tracks, but as their own side, they just weren’t as compelling to me as their own set of songs as the Bookends half was.
Either way though, it’s a great 30 minutes; Paul Simon’s songwriting chops are on full display here, and there’s really not a missed beat throughout. I do wish the “Bookends” portion of the album had a little more to it. Hell, it could’ve taken up the entire album and I wouldn’t have complained one bit. As it stands, I just enjoyed this a lot, and it’s another damn good Simon & Garfunkel album. No complaints giving this a 5.
The Byrds
4/5
I’m at a 4.
Well, it’s definitely a much more engaging album than “Younger than Yesterday” was, mainly because this album finds a more distinct musical identity (early prototype psychedelic rock) and really plays around with it in a variety of ways. It doesn’t always succeed, but it does take some pretty good swings, and when it clicks, it really clicks. The album only ever lost me on one track, which was “I See You”. Past that, everything else ranged from good to great, but it never really reaches an upper echelon of making me drop my jaw or anything.
The biggest flaw this album suffers from, is that even with its experimentation of a relatively “new” genre, it tends to just… settle. Too many tracks find their rhythm or their melodic hook, and then go stagnant. The worst offender here, and I hate to say it, is the ode against the atomic bomb “I Come and Stand at Every Door”, which has a great message settled in front of an ultimately really flat melody that pretty much undermined my desire to listen to it. The other issue is simply in the track order, and I only say this because 2-4-2 Fox Trot not being immediately before Eight Miles High is criminal from a synergy standpoint – it’s a decent track that’s sorely misplaced as the final track, and it makes the album end on a flatter note than if it had finished on literally any other track on the second side.
I did enjoy this though – it’s under 30 minutes, so it flies by, and most of the tracks are at least an interesting listen, mostly in the instrumentals, but sometimes the lyrics hit really nicely. I liked it a lot, save for a few perceived flaws, but those are easily adjustable, and partially limited by the mid-1960s. It’s a pretty darn good 4.
Badly Drawn Boy
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’m gonna very easily bump up to a 5.
I’ve learned it before, I should learn it again; never judge a late-90s/early 2000s album by its strange, strange cover. Everyone was collectively on one back then. I thought for sure, going into this, it would be some indie rock art album that got a little overrated at the time, aged sort of awkwardly in its avantgarde-ness, met with too much critical acclaim, and only ended up on the list with a bit of bias adjacent to that time period. I feel like it’s happened before.
This, however, was just a great album. There’s a really strong variety of styles here, some great production, some good vocals and lyrics throughout, and it just clicked extremely well for me. It wears a lot of inspirations on its sleeve, but it does so without ever sounding like a ripoff or a pastiche; the influence from the 60s & 70s is prevalent in spades here, but it blends it so well with 90s instrumentation that it just sort of morphs into that era. Even past that, though, you can hear the future of late 2000s / early 2010s indie rock here – Cause a Rockslide, even if it becomes a bit directionless and flat around the middle, starts off sounding like a mix of Cage the Elephant & Tame Impala. The entire 63 minutes is full of flavor like this that consistently kept me engaged and on my toes as a listener, and I don’t think there’s ever a dull moment or a part that feels like a repeated track. It’s extremely well done for the time.
It certainly helps that there’s a semblance of a front to back narrative throughout the album, but it’s not an extremely clear one to me – that’s not necessarily a negative, because it just means I was really entranced in the general soundscapes to fully invest in the lyrics to that extent of finding winding plots, though it’s not like I wasn’t paying attention. When this album hits on its more emotional tracks though, whether in a happy or sad way, it hits incredibly well. His vocals do a great job of finding the tone of the song and just getting it across, enhanced by some great lyrics on those tracks. When this album wants to go full rock, it nails it too – Disillusion feels like it could’ve fit right into Persona 5 or one of its many spinoffs.
Look, I could keep gushing, but I’m just surprised that this album managed to exceed my expectations that much for a guy I’ve never heard of, with an album cover like that, in a time period where it does feel like people were really glazing everything (no offense to Limp Bizkit) to try and make a new star in a sort of stagnant genre. This does feel like an album that should have at least one award under its belt, and I’m glad it does. It’s probably the reason why it’s on this list, and I’m also glad about that too. I thought this was really good, and I have no problems bumping it up to a 5.
The Verve
4/5
I’m at a 3.5, and I wish I could leave it there, but I think I’m going to barely bump this up to a 4, even with some hesitations in doing so.
I mean, I’ve been sitting here for about 68 minutes of total music, and I just sort of feel… strange. This is not a bad album at all; it’s incredibly technically sound, and in terms of the actual soundscape, production, melodies, and appeal, what’s here is a marked improvement over the sort of dreadfully bland “A Northern Soul” from 290 albums ago. As a whole, I really did enjoy most of the tracks here. Bitter Sweet Symphony is still pretty damn good, and most of the other 12 tracks are enjoyable.
However, this album falls into the same trap and pit that “A Northern Soul” did – it takes a while for it to fall into that pit, but it gets there. I wasn’t able to put this into words 290 albums ago, but I’ve figured out what it is now: this album treats every single track like it’s the closing track of the album, and it creates a homogenous sort of effect where all the luster of the orchestral arrangements, and the big epic swirling soundscapes sort of become… mundane. It doesn’t ruin the album experience as much as it did on “A Northern Soul”, mainly because they managed to figure out how to make most of the tracks compelling while sustaining me as a listener for the most part… but it does really start to creep in the longer the album goes on. This could easily be avoided if they just threw in some “lesser” tracks, but… I dunno, hearing what ELO did on “Out of The Blue”, which does a pretty similar thing with giving every track a level of bombastic importance, but to a much more successful degree, makes this album feel like it sort of failed in comparison.
Don’t get me wrong, what’s here still sounds great across the board, and I’m sure most of, if not all of these tracks will likely feel better individually, separated from the 68 minutes that turn the album experience into a bit of a slog. The strength of that individuality is, oddly enough, what’s giving me the leeway to bump this up from a 3.5 to a 4, if only because I feel like this deserves higher than a 3. I vibed so much more with the tone and soundscapes and the general energy of this album compared to “A Northern Soul”, and I fully acknowledge that most of these tracks, if they pop up on shuffle, are gonna feel fucking great to listen to. As an entire album experience, front to back, it starts strong, and then really settles into a flatline around the middle, with occasional little peaks back upward, but… man, when it settles, it settles in a weird way that doesn’t feel as engaging as it could have or should have. This is full of individually good to great tracks that simply don’t mesh super well as an album – when you’re deep in the trenches, it just feels too similar to really feel good as an album. They just sound so damn good though. I feel OK with bumping this up to a 4 – I could easily regret it in the future, but it feels correct right now.
The Clash
5/5
I’m at a 5.
That’s 35 minutes of really fucking good punk rock, man. I can hear a lot of U.S. new wave inspiration on here, but they turned up the energy and really channeled it in a good way here; there’s not much filler, a lot of fast tempos, and some great lyricism that gets its point across through the really nice grit in Joe Strummer’s vocals.
My single complaint is pretty minimal, and entirely subjective: I think Police & Thieves should’ve been the last track on the album. There’s an absolute breakneck speed on those first 11 tracks, most of which are around or under 2 minutes, & they cover such a variety of topics that it keeps the sound fresh on all of those tracks. However, when Police & Thieves comes in, and takes up 6 minutes doing its reggae cover (which is really well done, by the way), it just kind of stops the album’s momentum in a way that I think turns the album downward for me. Not that much, but enough to sort of feel jarring once the next track goes right back to being under 2 minutes. It feels awkward, and I think the album would’ve greatly benefited if it had been the last track.
Regardless, what a fun album. Guitar work is on point throughout, the percussion is punchy, the tempo is great, the lyrics have a deserved anger to them & make some pretty decent points (some of which still ring true in 2024), and Joe Strummer’s vocals bring it all together to make this work. I do sort of wish a few tracks were just a little longer, if only because I selfishly think 35 minutes of this soundscape feels criminally short compared to how much I enjoyed it. Pretty easy 5.
Faust
3/5
It’s a 3, but a strangely compelling & oddly entrancing 3.
This feels like I’m listening to music itself go through a midlife crisis. I know that’s incredibly weird to say, but hear me out. The album starts off with the big wall of noise that drones on and overwhelms in “Krautrock” for an excruciating 7 minutes before the drums finally pop in to give some semblance of a crutch, before also blending into the soundscape like everything else. I’m stretching, but it feels like a journey through a brain going through a total mental breakdown. The Sad Skinhead feels almost like a slight bargaining stage of grief, what with the xylophone solo of all the things and the more comedic tone.
Based on the lyrics in Jennifer (“your red hair’s burning, yellow jokes come out your mind”), it kind of reads to me like her death (or some other traumatic event involving her) is the reason why “Krautrock” feels so empty, hence the reprise of the wall of noise at the end of the track. Hell, maybe the traumatic event is that “Picnic on a Frozen River” that makes up part of Track 4.
The last 3 tracks, mostly instrumental with lyrics thrown in every now & then, feel like his attempt to finally rebound from whatever happened, exploring a wide variety of styles that sort of jump around a lot of the late 60s and early 70s, and hell, it feels the album jumps ahead to a Moby track by Track 6, with a sort of electronica/dance structure reminiscent of the 90s.
The last track kinda sells my theory; every time he says “yes, it’s all right” on “It’s a Bit of a Pain”, his vocals get covered up by an incredibly harsh sound, and once this other person he’s talking to presumably leaves, that harsh sound takes over as the primary lead instrumental, scattered and kinda riffing awkwardly like an electric guitar, all while a nice bubbly happy acoustic plays behind it. He’s not over Jennifer, he’s not happy, and with how abruptly the album ends, it feels like he’s doomed to fall back into that emptiness again. I’d say there’s honestly a semblance of a narrative close to my interpretation here – I’m probably stretching by calling it “music going through a midlife crisis”, but it feels like there’s something to it.
With all of that said, you can have a compelling and entrancing narrative, but I don’t think the execution of it is that strong here – it’s not a bad album, but this does suffer from settling for way too long on some of its least compelling melodies or rhythms without properly evolving or changing (or taking too long to do so, killing the vibe a bit). The tracks themselves have no reason to go for 7 or 8 or even 11 minutes – at times, it feels like the album is trying to justify its own existence, and that’s never really a vibe you want to get out of an album. When it all clicks, and it finds its entertaining melodies, this album does work for me. It doesn’t work that often, but it worked just enough that I felt compelled to pay attention, even in its flatter moments. It’s not an album I think I can go back to, but I like it enough to give it a 3. If nothing else, it’s interesting, and being interesting is way better than being boring.
Morrissey
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 that will get bumped up to a very begrudging 4.
I simply don’t have a link to Morrissey’s stuff in a more personal sense to feel like the art is inseparable from the artist here like it is for other problematic performers (looking at you, Mr. West) – I know the guy’s kind of a shithead (I’m being very generous with “kind of”), and I’ve got to reckon with that, but I think I can live with it, for one reason or another.
I’ll say this; because I know he is who he is, I paid a whole lot of attention to the lyrics on this album, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I think I like Morrissey when he’s not fucking complaining. The best tracks on this album are the ones that avoid overt bitching about society or ones that avoid when he goes “woe is me” and gets all self-referential and whiny. When he's fucking complaining, I despise the man, but at least he complains to some good instrumentals.
There are 6 tracks I really liked on a first pass; “Irish Blood, English Heart”, “I Have Forgiven Jesus”, “Come Back to Camden”, “First of the Gang to Die”, “Let Me Kiss You”, & “All the Lazy Dykes”. That last one is probably the most controversial pick up there (especially with that title), but I think it’s a genuinely progressive track for the time, even with the chance that it’s just Morrissey trying to court controversy of some kind. He still performs it, so he has to believe in its message to some degree.
The other 6 tracks are at least technically sound, and none of them are necessarily bad, they’re just either not super engaging or lyrically rather annoying. There are times where I thought another singer or band (namely Oasis, who he really tries to ape at certain points on this album) would’ve killed it on some of the more average tracks. It’s never in the soundscape, even if most of the tracks rarely feel like they’re from 2004. They all sound good, but instrumentally, this really feels like it’s jumping around from the late 80s to the late 90s to me, in a way that’s noticeable, but passable.
Ultimately, I did like the album, and I like it enough to bump it up to a 4, begrudgingly. It trims the awkwardness of Viva Hate down, has much more concise songwriting and energy in the tracks, and when he’s not bitching and moaning, this album really works for me. Of course, he moans and bitches a lot, but at least he’s moaning and bitching in a better way than he did on Viva Hate. I could (and probably will) come to regret the 4, but for now, it just feels kinda right. At the very least, I think it’s no less than 3 (or a 2 if you REALLY fucking hate this guy, which is fair).
Arcade Fire
5/5
I’m at an emphatic 5. I loved that.
This is the second time we’ve gotten Arcade Fire – I thought The Suburbs was a good album, but for my tastes, it relied really heavily on the “vibes” of the instrumentation and a sort of nostalgic feeling that I don’t know is necessarily cultivated well throughout the course of that album. Going into this one, my biggest hope was for an album that managed to blend the dense lyricism of The Suburbs with a more engaging soundscape, and a more fruitful “narrative” hook that would balance my tastes a bit more.
This absolutely nailed what I was looking for – I wasn’t necessarily prepared for a more somber and bitter tone, but this is exactly the type of album that clicks for me. Right from the rumbling tones of the intro in “Black Mirror”, all the way to the desperate plea that ends “My Body Is a Cage”, I just felt captivated and attentive throughout. Whether it was in the instrumental choices (lots of Springsteen influence here, but a bit of ELO-esque bombast as well), the emotion in the vocals (both happy and sad, sometimes painfully so), or the storytelling in the lyrics (big shout to “(Antichrist Television Blues”), I just don’t think this album has a dull moment. There’s always something to pay attention to, and I think it enrichens and rewards me as the listener for caring.
I can’t fully explain the nitty-gritty of why this album’s lyricism clicked with me so well, but let’s just say that the way this album tackles religion, and the concept of “God-given justified self righteousness”, really aligns with my take on it. That’s not to say there’s no place for religion that gives someone such confidence, especially if they can turn it into a positive, but this album really deals with the fall from grace and the despair that follows from most people who have that mindset. My favorite moment in the album is the ending to “(Antichrist Television Blues)”, if only because that abrupt cutoff, and the subsequent hanging onto the pure silence gave me chills. That silence is God himself, responding for the first & only time on this album, with nothing but unspoken contempt, and that silence speaks volumes. It’s a brilliant production choice in an album full of them.
So, yeah, I thought this was spectacular. Maybe it just hit closer to home, but I think even without that connection, there’s just a great rock soundscape here, and it really shines throughout the album. Some people might dismiss this as preachy, and that’s a bit fair – if it doesn’t click, it doesn’t click, and I can easily see how this could fall on deaf ears (or ears that simply hate indie rock). For my tastes, I loved it. One of the easiest 5’s I’ve given yet.
Bee Gees
3/5
I’m at a 3.
I’m really not quite sure what to make of this album. This is my first time hearing anything by the Bee Gees that isn’t How Deep is Your Love or Stayin’ Alive, so my brain was certainly more predisposed to expect a poppier, brighter record – not necessarily even disco, but just more… fun, you know? I don’t know if my struggles with this album are a result of misplaced expectations, or if it’s truly on the band for stretching out into a genre that they just don’t feel comfortable in.
This really is a technically sound record – I think the lyrics & the instrumentation are pretty good here, and when their vocals click, the tracks do work really well, defying expectations in a positive way. However, I can’t help but think that the general tone of the album, in terms of the front to back experience, is just too somber for a band like the Bee Gees, at least in terms of how I perceive them. There’s so many tracks that are just sad orchestrally-driven breakup songs, and that lack of variance becomes more apparent the longer the album goes. Even past that, there’s just a lot of love songs in general, and it really wore me down to not get anything poppier or brighter or more energetic for the vast majority of the album – even Led Zeppelin knew to put Black Dog before Stairway to Heaven, you know what I mean?
I guess this album just suffers from impostor syndrome to me – it’s not that the Bee Gees can’t pull off this style of rock, because they technically did. They just didn’t do it in a way that feels like their own style, and while I don’t really have a better sense of what “the Bee Gees” musically are, past my limited exposure… I dunno, it just feels like they’re trying to take the best of other people’s styles while trying to pass it off as their own. It’s kind of like stolen identity, and when I was listening to most of these tracks, I just couldn’t shake the feeling of “this song would be hitting much better with me if it were someone else performing it”.
It’s really in the vocals, and I don’t want to disparage the Gibbs like that, but… man, it just didn’t sound right for most of the album. It’s really apparent on “Dearest” – you get Michael Jackson or some other highly accomplished vocalist who can hit those notes, you’ve got a hit. When it’s Robin Gibb doing it, sounding like a mix between Billy Crystal & John Mulaney, it just feels off, and it’s a feeling this album never really shakes off of itself.
I want to like this more than I do, and I want to give this more than a 3, but I just can’t justify it. It’s an album with well written and well composed songs that just seem sung by the wrong band for the job – it’s like when other artists do the vocals on a demo as a placeholder. It suffers from a lack of variance that really affects the album experience, even if there’s not a bad track here. It’s not a bad set of songs though, and I’m sure someone will enjoy this more than I did. I dunno, there’s just too many things that add up to make this really click for me, and that’s why I’m stuck at a 3.
The Flying Burrito Brothers
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5, and I refuse to be shamed for it.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again; I’m a sucker for old country music like this. I’m also fully biased, and I’ll admit that every single time. I feel justified in bumping this up to a 5 though – I thought this was a really well done blend of country music with a bit of rock/psychedelic rock-driven influence that blended the best of both worlds, while still feeling distinctly like a country album. It sticks pretty closely to the country side, and I suspect that’s why this album has such a low average rating on the site, but when this album chooses to let loose (especially so on “Hot Burrito #2”) and lean into the rock side, it really opens up.
That’s not to say the country side of this is bad at all – the lovely sound of the steel guitar behind some more rock-driven instrumentation is like, almost heaven for me. Lyrically, I can see the complaint that some of this is rather basic, but like… what country music isn’t basic at a pure surface level? It’s about the imagery, and this album does a pretty solid job of setting the imagery throughout, enhanced further by the despair in the vocals (which thankfully, get less nasally as the album moves along). I thought every instrumental did a pretty good job of setting an emotional tone as well, even if it did enter a sort of homogeny on a few tracks.
I don’t know how many more times I’ll have to justify giving old country music such high ratings, but for my money’s worth, this album earned it – I thought it had a nice energy, some good variance in the subject matter, and the soundscapes are right down my alley. I can totally understand someone else giving this a 3, or even a 2 if they despise country music to hell… but I’m at a 5, and I do not care. Send all complaints to the people who raised me on this type of music.
SAULT
5/5
It’s a 5, without hesitation.
It does take a little bit for this album to really get going, but once it hits that point, it’s impossible to look back. It’s very easy to question this album’s inclusion in the book, given its recent status, but I’m so, so glad it’s here. I cannot believe I’ve never heard of this album. This escaped my radar in 2020, during the absolute height of the public visibility of the BLM movement & the George Floyd riots, and while this album feels tailormade for that moment, it still connected incredibly well for me in December of 2024.
This is an album about black positivity, black excellence, and black affirmation. I am a half-Filipino, white-passing male. I fully acknowledge that I can’t ever fully relate to this album, or the black experience, but I can continue to listen and do my part to make this world a better place, and that includes lifting up albums like this that so deeply acknowledges what it is to be black, both in the positives & the negatives, and share a better understanding of that experience. This album’s messaging, mainly in the lyricism, but sometimes celebrated in the instrumentals themselves, is really well done.
As far as the music itself goes, which is the core part of the album here, it’s usually pretty good – the biggest knock I can have on it is that there are a few tracks that overstay their repetitive parts, and while I sort of acknowledge the artistic merit to the repetition in the vocals, it does get a little grating, and a few tracks fell a little flatter because of it. My other knock is that the album really should’ve ended on “Miracles”, because the two tracks after that pale in comparison and don’t feel like a satisfying way to end the album.
All of that said, I really can’t recommend this enough – no words I could type that gush over the lyrics, vocals, instrumentation & messaging could compare to listening to this album in full, and really, truly digesting it for what it is as a piece of art. If nothing else, the transition from “Us” into “Eternal Life” and the subsequent tracks that follow, all the way up until “Miracles” are truly, truly magical. That sequence, by itself, catapults this album right into a 5, but the whole thing is worth a listen, & this is very, VERY deserving to be on the list.
Arcade Fire
4/5
I’m at a 4 right now, but I get the album’s hype, and I really think this could be a 5 in the future for me.
I’m trying to place myself in the year 2004, because I really think this album is a little bit of a prisoner of the moment. To have graduated high school in 2004 means to be born in 1986 – to have lived mainly through the Clinton years, with parents living mostly in perceived economic prosperity, seemingly no major wars, and the illusion of harmony. By the time you get up to that age though, where it all starts to crack a little bit by 2000, before completely shattering by 9/11 and the subsequent fallout… that’s where this album lies. The point where the illusion of prosperity cracks, and the grim reality of adulthood sets in. This is not a politically driven album, but it is a coming of age album, and all of those events feel crucial to understanding the mindset of listeners and critics at the time, and at the end of the decade.
My closest analogue is saying “this album feels like American Idiot if Green Day had played it straight,” and that might sound weird, but it just feels that way to me. What’s here is done with a bit more… not necessarily “sincerity”, but it’s more easily digestible (& arguably more relatable) when it’s wrapped up in the vibes of a 1980s coming of age ensemble film full of realistic introspection than Green Day’s take on a rock opera concept album full of imagination & indignation. Does that make it better? Eh, taste is subjective at that point – I preferred American Idiot to this, but I understand the appeal here.
All of that said, these reviews are supposed to be about the music, and that’s where this album currently lands at a 4 for me – I have been agonizing trying to figure out exactly why this album isn’t at a 5 for me right now, because it really does click on a lot of my musical sensibilities. The writing is great, the instrumentals are usually pretty good, and ultimately I think the ambition and bombast here is incredibly admirable, especially for an indie rock band’s first ever album. This has 5 written all over it, but I’m just not there.
The only explanation I can come up with is that I don’t feel like I grew up with the sense of broken adventure and shattered innocence this album tries so deeply to invoke. In the most basic sense of the word, no matter how hard I’m trying to step into those shoes, I simply cannot relate to the core of the lyricism at hand here. Without that connection, the album doesn’t work as well – sure, sometimes there are production choices in the mixing I disagree with, and some songs fall kinda flat at times for me, but none of that is an indictment on the album’s quality. This is a good album. Like, really good. But it’s tailor-made for a generation I’m not a part of, and experiences I simply missed out on, perhaps caused by too much cheery bright-eyed optimism when I was younger. It kills me that I feel like I missed the boat here.
Like I said, this could (& probably will) be a 5 for me in the future, but I have to feel all of this firsthand before it gets there. For now, this is at a 4, but it’s a highly, highly recommended 4.
Dead Kennedys
5/5
It’s an electric 4.5, and I'm gonna bump it up to a 5, though not without a few "flaws".
I’ve heard of Dead Kennedys, but I’ve never actually HEARD Dead Kennedys – I vaguely knew about their status in punk rock before listening, but it really only hit me right before listening about just insanely bold it is to make that the name of your band in the late 70s / early 80s. It set a tone that immediately got matched by the first track, and never really looked back.
I can compare this pretty handily to The Clash’s debut album in terms of pacing and instrumental energy – both of them jump right out of the gate, and have pretty long stretches of just breakneck speed, covering a variety of topics. This album goes even fucking faster though, and that energy is hard to put into words. However, I think this album does suffer from chasing that energetic high a little too much – it’s not that it can’t maintain it, because it definitely does, and to a more consistent and arguably more satisfying degree than The Clash’s album (still not over “Police & Thieves” railroading the pace of that album). It maintains it, but at the sacrifice of the lyrical quality.
This is an album full of biting political satire, most of which is certainly based in real anger, and a general desire to actually do something about it instead of sitting around on one’s ass. However, at varying points in the album, I think that satire loses some of that fire & that bite, and turns into more of a gripe-filled chomp, or something so over the top that it just feels cheesy to the point where the song loses its focus (most disappointingly done by “I Kill Children” – not a bad track, though!).
There’s other moments throughout the album that add up to ALMOST knock this down to a 4 for me – a few tracks honestly go TOO fast vocally for my tastes, some of them don’t feel as cohesive instrumentally (but it’s never on the guitar, though), and that hard-R N-word on “Holiday in Cambodia”, for as much as I understand the intent and impact of its usage in the song (and that censoring it in any way would be a disgrace to the idea of “punk” in the late 70s/early 80s), simply cannot be overlooked or excused. That track still slaps though, sue me.
As a whole, this is an electric 33 minutes – there’s a few too many things that add up for me to give this a pure, flat 5, but make no mistake; I highly recommend this. Its lyricism, for the most part, still rings pretty true in 2024 (Let’s Lynch the Landlord is ESPECIALLY timely with the CEO thing, but “fascist California” never really came to pass like that), the instrumentals are insanely energetic, and it’s just a rollercoaster of an album. No problems with bumping it up to a 5.
808 State
5/5
I’m at a very happy 5.
My brain is obviously already predisposed to video game music, so the second I saw this was “acid house”, I got a little bit of hope for something around that general soundscape. The year though, 1989, gave me pause – acid house, this early, even for December 1989, still feels a few years behind when house as an entire genre really found and hit its commercial stride. The optimism was there, but much shakier. This could’ve been really, really bad.
Thank goodness that this is really, really good. This is CRAZY for 1989 – what’s here is so deeply entrenched in the Roland MIDI soundscapes that would define some of the prime Redbook CD audio quality of early 90s gaming, and most of it could easily pass as video game music. Pacific 202 is just a Sonic CD cut, and you can’t convince me otherwise. These are full compositions, mixed really well in the ear to give a lot of the instruments their shine & room to breathe (save, oddly, for the first track). There’s not a dull moment anywhere on this album, at least for my ears (save, oddly, for the last track, but that barely counts). The fact that it's a full setlist with transitions helps a lot to keep the flow of the album going too.
If you’re not into video game music (or house as a genre), this probably won’t click at all, and I find that a little disappointing. Obviously, taste is subjective, but to deny this from being in one’s musical diet is like refusing to watch game shows because they’re too happy-go-lucky. This is a fantastic example of acid house, house music in general, and a great showcase of the Roland soundscape (and presumably MIDI by extension) for 1989. This feels far ahead of its time, and I have to imagine this really did act as a point of inspiration for other artists in the genre moving forward. It’s perfectly attuned to my tastes, and genuinely one of the best discoveries I’ve had throughout this album experience. Super easy 5.
Garbage
5/5
That’s a great 5.
I’ve heard of Garbage, but outside of the name, I barely knew anything about them. Perhaps most embarrassingly of all, I didn’t even realize the band had a female lead singer. My immediate apologies to Shirley Manson – her stage presence comes to life on this album, and she’s got it in spades here in an undeniably cool way. Hell, my apologies to the entire band; this feels like quintessential 90s stuff that should’ve been on my radar a long time ago, but better late than never.
It’s very weird to say “ahead of its time” for 1995, but in a weird way, this does feel a bit ahead of its time, in terms of the wide variety of soundscapes and genres tackled through this album – a lot of this is based in 90s UK & US rock, and it never strays too far from that core, but it touches on nearly every base within that core. There’s trip-hop influence, Britpop influence, the occasional 80s structure with a 90s edge, a bit of UK house & electronica, forays into grunge & industrial… if you can think of it, it’s on this album, and it usually succeeds really well at integrating those styles into their own sensibilities. I would argue this level of variety didn’t really come into vogue for another… 6 or 7 years, maybe? I could be entirely ignorant about the mid to late-90s, but people were really chasing the ghost of Kurt Cobain for a while.
Ultimately, this blew away any expectations I had for it. Supervixen is an interesting tone setter with great production. Queer is just a Billie Eilish song (in the best way possible). Only Happy When It Rains is a great meta track. As Heaven Is Wide is just a kickass song that could totally work as a video game track (and it literally was in Gran Turismo 1). Not My Idea feels like a blend of industrial rock with Alanis Morrissette’s sensibilities. A Stroke of Luck is a great trip-hop influenced track with some fun juxtaposition in the soundscape. Vow is the most catchy way to describe visceral revenge that I can remember. Stupid Girl has the structure of an 80s track with a 90s edge, and I really dug it. Dog New Tricks & My Lover’s Box are the only two tracks where I went “meh” on, but they’re still fine. Fix Me Now is admittedly generic as hell, but it just clicked for me. Milk feels like a James Bond title theme, in a really smooth way.
I loved it, what more can I say? Very easy 5, and I’m mad at myself for not listening to anything by Garbage earlier. I refuse to make the obvious joke.
George Harrison
5/5
I’m at a 10.
From my own internal perception, in terms of enduring star power & legacy, the importance of the individual Beatles has usually gone in the order of McCartney, then Lennon, then George, then Ringo. Sorry, Ringo. I’ve never really reflected on why though. Obviously, Paul had the longest and most successful career, and John Lennon’s place in pop culture is only exacerbated by his murder. The extent of my knowledge on George’s solo stuff, before listening to this album, was “Got My Mind Set On You,” and even that, that’s just a cover. I truly genuinely can’t even tell you anything about Ringo’s solo stuff. He does some funny MS Paint art, though. Again, sorry, Ringo. All of this is preamble to say that going into this, based on the album title, and my general unfamiliarity with George’s work, my expectations weren’t that high, even with the acclaim this album has. I wanted it to be good, but I would’ve totally settled for “pretty solid”.
I deeply fucking underestimated this guy. I knew he had written hits as a part of the Beatles, but my brain has always associated those songs as just that – Beatles tracks. They’re not “George Harrison tracks”, and that feels like a bit of a cardinal sin now; I might be overreacting on a first pass, but what’s here is a remarkable showcase of his own talent, in a way that even now, feels understated and underappreciated. This is a rich album, with fantastic songwriting across the board, and I’m genuinely struggling to put my enjoyment of the album into words.
There’s really no analog comparison to make here, save for maybe Dave Grohl’s work with Foo Fighters after the death of Kurt Cobain, but even then, that first Foo Fighters album, where it’s basically all him, doesn’t reach the level of quality that this album immediately clicks on. Even from Track 1, the immediately smooth guitar subverts any expectation of coming out swinging with a big rock hit, only for My Sweet Lord to immediately satiate that taste, and the album genuinely never stops rolling from there, save for maybe one or two little snags across the way. It’s a truly mesmerizing experience, especially if you’re as unfamiliar with the quality of his work as I was. It feels like listening to a man truly free his soul and his creative spirit in real time, and it is truly pleasing.
There are a few things I can point out – I do think this album goes back to the well of the Beatles split a few too many times, to the point of near exploitation, but he treats the subject with such a sincerity and an honesty that it does come across as a necessary exercise for himself and any lingering demons than a chance to capitalize on the band’s breakup. There’s also not as much variety in the subject matter throughout (mostly love, the Beatles split, and religion), even if his songwriting and the bombastic instrumentation supersedes it and makes something compelling out of almost every track here. There also really didn’t need to be two versions of “Isn’t It A Pity” on here; this is the only time I can ever compare Fred Durst and a member of the Beatles for committing a sort of album sin.
The Apple Jam tracks are pretty fun too; just 30 minutes of some really fun instrumentals – they are a bonus, but I can’t help but wonder if including them throughout the album as the last tracks on each of the 4 main sides would have worked. I think it could have created a cool variety throughout. At the very least, “Out of the Blue” by itself could’ve been cut up into 4 miniature parts on each side – that is 11 electric minutes.
I can keep trying to find the words to gush about this album, but I truly don’t have them right now. All I know is this: this immediately gets a seat at the table next to Band on the Run (also a 10) as far as solo Beatle albums go, and it already feels like a quintessential 70s album. I don’t know if it’ll personally match Band on the Run for me (mainly because of the runtime, and the fact that this explores a really wide variety of genres past just “rock”), but given time, it could get there. Just a spectacular effort across the board that’s truly mesmerizing to listen to on a first pass, and I think it’ll get better with any subsequent listens. It’s an incredibly easy 10.
I really gotta listen to more of the Beatles, man.
Little Simz
5/5
I’m at a 5.
This album has a very unique balancing act to follow, and it rides that tightrope incredibly well. This is an album that deconstructs toxic confidence, yet still portrays a healthy confidence while lifting up female empowerment. It shows the honest struggle of a devil-may-care attitude, yet still shows the honesty of wanting to make an impact, both at a local and global level. It’s an album that attempts to find beauty in tragedy, and yet, no matter how hard she tries, she never quite succeeds at finding it. That last one’s not a diss at her; it’s a testament to her songwriting that she refuses to sugarcoat this stuff, but still manages to present it in such a captivating way.
It’s a very push-and-pull driven album, a lot of which feels based on her own personal experiences, and that honesty is what truly sells this album. I can’t think of many current rappers that could pull an album like this off – so much of modern mainstream rap culture, save for a handful of artists, places value within the material things, so to get an album like this, one that tries to lift up the soul itself as the core of all earthly possessions is such a welcome message & a breath of fresh air. It’s also a breath of fresh air to get an artist I’m familiar with – Little Simz is fantastic, and while I hadn’t listened to this album before today, I have heard her 2021 album “Sometimes I Might Be Introvert”, which genuinely deserves a spot on the 1,001 albums list as much as this one does.
This was great – really strong production throughout, the occasional showcase of some crazy flows, great storytelling & lyricism across the board, and it’s just a really tight 35 minutes that leaves no stone unturned. I do think “Sometimes I Might Be Introvert” is an even better album, but this one easily sets the framework in motion for that album to exist and thrive like it has. I really liked this; easy 5 for my tastes.
Marty Robbins
5/5
I’m at a 5.
It’s just great storytelling, man. Every track here just nails it. I know I harp on “old country” a lot, but this goes a bit beyond that – this is a fabulous showcase of music as a device for pure storytelling. I think sometimes it’s very easy to get caught up in neat instrumentation, melodies or vocals, and I’m as guilty of that as anyone, but this is just pure storytelling. Yes, his vocals are great throughout this album, and his higher registers are stunningly emphatic, but what makes this album work is in the simplicity of it all. Most of these have really easy vocal patterns in the verses & choruses, really basic instrumentation in the guitar, and all the strength is laid out in the lyrics, which have more of a poetic scheme to them. It’s very easy to follow along to, and it is a reminder that music, as an art form, was originally made for stuff that sounds like this, at its very core, because it was made to be easily digestible, teachable, and shared to the masses.
I really liked it – it just clicked wonderfully for me, and it does make me sort of yearn for music to be this “simple” again. OK, well, maybe not this simple, but I’d love to be able to just sing a song without having to feel like I need to hit a whistle note like Mariah Carey or anything. It is pure country music, plain and simple, and it should be up there within the standards of the genre itself. That’s just how you do it; easy 5.
Beastie Boys
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that will get bumped up to a 5.
This is the third Beastie Boys album we’ve gotten, but we’ve gotten them in a sort of weird, reversed order; going from Ill Communication, to Paul’s Boutique, and THEN to their debut album makes for a weird expectation. I’m giving this 5 with a bit of grace – this is the weakest of the 3 albums we’ve gotten so far, so I’d consider Paul’s Boutique a retroactive 5, if I could go back to give it that.
With that said, it’s still really fucking good. Rick Rubin’s production, while much emptier compared to the other two albums we’ve gotten (and nowhere near as rich and full in its sampling) is still pretty cool here. It’s no surprise that the biggest hits on this album are the ones that blend rock sensibilities with rap’s flow, and while it’s a formula pretty directly copied from Run-DMC (and we’ll get to Run-DMC later in this write-up, trust me), I think it’s a much more successful blend here than on Raising Hell, because it’s not as entrenched in percussion-based beats, allowing the rock instrumentals to shine, and letting the vocals flow more naturally, especially with their adlibs, group flow, and call-and-response style.
This album does suffer to me when the percussion overtakes the flow, and I think that’s a lesson most rappers have learned from; I’m not saying you can’t structure a great rap song around a percussive beat (quite literally, just look at Sticky from CHROMAKOPIA), but when it comes to 80s rap, I find it just stilts everything a bit, and forces really basic rhyme schemes that don’t play well with my tastes. It stilted Raising Hell for me (which admittedly, maybe I was a little harsh on), and it stilted this album a bit, though not as much. Run-DMC’s influence on the Beastie Boys is obvious here, but it’s more so obvious through Rick Rubin himself, who had a hand in producing both albums. Hell, “Slow and Low” is literally a demo of a Run-DMC track repurposed for the Beastie Boys. It fits them well enough, but they didn’t do enough to really make it their own.
With my mild bitching out of the way (which really boils down to personal taste), allow me to fucking gush over how much personality and charisma these guys showed in spite of some emptier beats – the Beastie Boys themselves make this fucking album, and they stamp their mark pretty instantly. Rhymin and Stealin is drenched in percussion heavy reverb that could’ve really sunk the album on a potentially bad first impression, but their vocal style and their lyricism come out of the gate to make that track work. This album is at its very best when the Beastie Boys get to show off that personality, and it’s most apparent on “The New Style”, “No Sleep Till Brooklyn”, and “Paul Revere”. Their charisma just oozes off of this album, so whenever Rick Rubin has them doing their best Run-DMC impression, that’s when the album suffers, because it’s not their musical voice, and everyone knows it. (I promise that I do actually like Run-DMC.)
It is still the weakest of the 3 Beastie Boys albums we’ve gotten so far, but those albums wouldn’t exist without this one, and there’s some great fucking tracks here. It’s a breezy 44 minutes, with great lyricism (for the most part), smooth flows, and some unique production for 1986 – the beat switch in The New Style got me really fucking good. Some of it’s emptier, but that’s all personal taste; Rick Rubin’s beats click more often than not, and like I said, the Beastie Boys are too damn charismatic and too damn good on this album to let a few bum beats kill their vibe. It’s a damn good rap album, and I have no problem bumping it up from a 4.5 to a 5.
Joni Mitchell
5/5
I… might be at a 10. I’m serious.
I’ve never actually heard Joni Mitchell until today – her name was familiar, and I think I have a decent sense of her place in the 60s/70s folk canon, but she’s always been more of a trivia factoid to me than anything else. I’ve just never really had an excuse to interact with her music. I did think this would be good, but my expectations were a little more folk-y & a bit subdued.
Holy fucking shit, I was not expecting this though. I harped a lot on storytelling when it came to the Marty Robbins album we got the other day, and this is storytelling in spades. A little more complex, sure, but the imagery she provides throughout is vivid and full of life in a way that’s more relatable to modern times than gunfighter ballads – there are some lines that hit me like a fucking truck throughout this album, and that’s the mark of a fantastic *writer.* There are great songwriters, but she’s really flexing pure writing here. It also helps that she’s really fucking good at making these work as songs; there are catchy choruses and vocal patterns all over this album, but they’re still very easy to follow along to story-wise, save for maybe “Just Like This Train”, but even then, it’s still gettable.
That writing ability is just as matched by her vocals (seriously, what a voice – it got me plenty of times throughout the album), and the extremely jazzy/Americana-influenced band behind her. The instrumentals here are fantastic, and give each song room to breathe, their own distinct identity, and just perfectly compliment each other. When this album wants to go full rock, it can do it without blinking an eye – same thing applies to piano ballads, guitar ballads, nightclub tunes, et cetera. I don’t have a single complaint about the production here; everything feels perfectly mixed, and the transitions are seamless when they happen. It all feels totally coherent, and that’s a testament to the quality of every track here.
Everything about this album is right down my alley, and I’m really, truly stunned that none of this has ever entered my stratosphere until now. It’s a remarkably tight 37 minutes that kept me captivated on every single word, while still managing to leave room for attention on her vocals and the band behind her. I may simply be blindsided by lower expectations followed by such a strong album, but damn, this really got me good. It’s a hell of an introduction to Joni Mitchell, at the very very least. For my tastes… yeah, I’m at a 10. It was *that* good.
Bad Brains
3/5
I’m at a 3.5. This is the part where I try to talk myself into either direction.
There’s definitely a good number of positives – this is a really energetic album, and that part is undeniable. Most of the instrumentals here are pretty good, if a little bit homogeneous by the end of the 32 minutes that this album takes up. I can hear the blended genres throughout, and the inspiration that this album gave to a few bands is pretty apparent. When the vocals and lyrics click, the album really rolls, in a good way. I think it only really rolls about 60% of the time, though. The other 40% of the time isn’t bad at all, but it just sort of suffers from not feeling as captivating.
That 40% suffers from one major issue, at least for my tastes – a few songs just kind of fizzle out. The instrumentals keep rolling, sure, and their energy sticks around, but you can really tell when they sort of ran out of ideas to go with a certain concept, but just said fuck it and recorded anyway. A guitar solo is usually there to try and really distract from the lack of lyricism / mildly repetitive vocal endings, but my brain is too attentive to lyrics and whatnot to let that sort of thing go. It’s a pretty flashy album, in terms of its soundscapes, and I really do love that aspect of it. I just wish the lyricism was there to go with it.
I guess I’m going down to a 3 then – it’s a pretty recommended 3, for the standout tracks at least, but this album just doesn’t have enough of a consistency past the first 4 tracks to justify bumping it up to a 4. I totally recognize that this could be a 4 or even a 5 for someone else, though, and I do think it has a place on the list. It just sort of lost the luster for me, and its cracks started to pop up soon after. I still liked it though -- this fucking rips. It sounds rad as hell, and it's a fun album, but it just doesn't overcome enough for my tastes. Hence, the 3. It could easily bump back up though.
Jurassic 5
5/5
I’m at a really nice 5.
Took a few tracks to get going, but once this thing hit its stride, there was no fucking stopping it – that is 56 minutes of stellar rapping. There’s a lot of underground influence here, and it certainly shows in the sample-heavy production style. Once they really get their flows in motion, this becomes catchy as a motherfucker; “A Day at the Races” is the point at which this album finds an unstoppable groove, and a rising tide really does lift all ships in this case. The beats feel more free, their voices blend even better, and the lyricism takes a step up to another level, all while continuing to sound extremely hypnotic, and pretty easy to follow along to. It flows all the way until the last track. I did like it, with the sort of avant-garde sample work, but it threw me for a loop in terms of being the closer. It’s more of a bonus than anything, so I don’t have any real complaints.
Really, the biggest compliment I can give to the album is that it’s just really fun to listen to; at its very core, this is extremely catchy & melodic rap that harkens back to the origins of the genre, in a way that I think might’ve been lost in some of late 80s-90s gangsta rap, and was thankfully revived throughout the early 2000s (perhaps culminating in the mainstream with Eminem’s 2002-2003 stuff). That doesn’t mean this album doesn’t go hard at times, but there’s a real focus on soundscapes and enjoyability rather than heavier lyricism. Yes, the braggadocious aspect of rap is in full force here, but it’s presented with a lot of unity that feels like I, as the listener, get to be a part of the team. Their group flow really does do it for me.
So, yeah, it’s a pretty fast 56 minutes, it kept me extremely captivated, and with the lyrics in front of me, I felt like I could find their flows pretty fast. It might be a little too old-school at times, but for my tastes, I really liked it. Once it found its rhythm, it was just undeniably cool. Feels like a hidden gem on the list, and it’s a pretty easy 5 for me.
Beatles
5/5
Well, it’s a 10 – let’s just establish that immediately. Just a trailblazer of an album.
This is my second full Beatles album – my image of these guys is still based around their earlier 60s stuff (Hard Day’s Night, Can’t Buy Me Love, etc) mixed with the brilliance featured on Abbey Road. We’ve had some solo albums, but those are more indicative of their individual styles. Honestly though, this album does feel like they all kind of just made miniature solo albums and mashed them all together into a 30-song showcase. In that sense, this album has a lot less cohesion than I was expecting going into it, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing – it doesn’t fully align with my tastes for an album experience, but what’s here is so fucking good for 1968 in particular that the quality of almost every track simply overwhelms any complaints I could have about album cohesion.
Back in the U.S.S.R. is an absolutely brilliant opener, and one of my favorite Beatles tracks ever. It’s a hard bar to top, and I’m a little biased, because I’m not sure if it ever really does top it. It does stay around that level for most of the album though – a few tracks didn’t click with me as well (namely Lennon’s stuff, which might be a bad omen for whenever his solo albums pop up here), but it’s a true testament to the quality of the band that they can kinda just fuck around, go write a shit ton of songs while they’re off getting stoned (or sorry, “spiritually rejuvenated”) in India, both at a group level and an individual level, and then whittle them down into something that’s this damn good. It’s really an enigma to try and describe this album, because so much of what’s on here feels like the blueprint for the deconstruction of rock & roll into several different genres, subsets, and styles for decades to come.
It’s extremely avant-garde for its time, and in a way that benefits any current-day listener. It’s really easy to say “oh, this sounds like [x]” when it should be the other way around. I can hear everything from Muddy Waters, to Ray Charles, to Ella Fitzgerald, to Led Zeppelin, to Gorillaz, to Nirvana, to the White Stripes, and far far more scattered musically throughout this record – it’s all there, but all the credit in the world needs to go to Paul, John, George, Ringo, & George Martin as well. I hesitate to say they “pioneered” these soundscapes, but I can’t imagine a lot of this would be so heavily in the modern mainstream for the decades after without this album making it all feel commercially viable, and allowing the room for even further refinement & experimentation.
There are parts of my brain that do wish this had been trimmed down to the very best of the very best – it’s the Beatles, so they could get away with a 30-song album in 1968, but there is definitely a bit of filler here that does pull down the record a bit. Abbey Road is a better album, in part because they knew exactly where to trim the fat down, and make a more cohesive experience… but I have to imagine Abbey Road doesn’t get that cohesion without this album throwing everything at the wall and making most of it stick. For what it’s worth, a lot of this is still too good to throw away, and I hesitate to imagine a world where nobody gets mildly tortured by the (actually catchy, sue me) Ob-La Di, Ob-La-Da, or truly tortured by the (extremely, extremely out there) Revolution 9, which simply didn’t click for me at all.
Ultimately… it’s the Beatles. What else can I say? They had the star power to make this work, and they absolutely made it work. It’s a landmark album in its own right, and I really, really enjoyed it. It’s a pretty damn good 10.
Mike Oldfield
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Hard to find anything to wax poetic about when it comes to 50 minutes of mostly instrumental music, but it’s a real testament that two tracks, coming in at over 23 minutes apiece, can be that captivating when given the time and space to really breathe, as well as giving each instrument their own chance to shine. It’s certainly not everyone’s cup of tea, but for my tastes, this hit right down the line of “good prog rock meets VGM sensibilities”, and the ever evolving and growing soundscape on both tracks, each with their own individual segments before some good resets, really made it feel like less of a slog that it could’ve been.
One of my biggest pet peeves in music is when a song ends up lingering for too long; I’m not saying I need constant stimulation, but I’m too attentive as a listener to not notice when a drum pattern is stuck in limbo, or a guitar riff gets repeated a few too many times, or if the vocals / lyrics get stuck in a holding pattern. This album works because it’s constantly finding new innovations within the big sandbox that it has room to operate in – pretty much every minute in Part 1 finds a new instrument to add to the mix, or a new tone or soundscape to experiment with. It’s ever changing, but it’s slow, subtle changes that kept me engaged, and felt like a natural evolution throughout. Part 2 does this pretty well – it doesn’t do it *as* well, but it knows when to change up the soundscape to stop it from getting too stuck.
It is really a miracle that this felt like it flew by – we’ve had albums that are less than 30 minutes that feel slower than this did, but I guess that’s more of a knock on pacing as a whole than it is to the quality of those albums, most of which have still been good. I’m just glad this had such room to breathe in; not everyone can pull off 26 minute songs and keep it captivating. These are, by far, the longest ones we’ve gotten as a group, and I guess it’s a real testament to my own musical growth that I could endure it, analyze it, and appreciate it. Sure, there’s a Metal Gear Solid 5-adjacent boost in the name here that helps a lot, but if we had gotten this in February or March, there’s a real chance I could’ve just ignored it. Either way, this was really fucking good. It’s a real music journey that lasts for 50 minutes, and even past its Exorcist-based popularity, the rest of the album is an absolute treat. Pop some headphones in, sit down, relax, and just let Mike Oldfield take you as far as you can go. It’s a very, very easy 5 for me.
Wild Beasts
3/5
I’m at a 3.
This album doesn’t find an identity in terms of what it wants to talk about, and in terms of how it wants to approach its subject matter. This is meant to sound like a coming of age album, glorifying the freedom of youth, romance and companionship, as well as some of the dread that comes with that. It sort of succeeds, but it’s done with a very male-skewed view that simply hasn’t aged well as of 2024 going into 2025 – I think the biggest offenders of all the tracks here are the 1-2 punch of “This Is Our Lot” & “Underbelly”, both of which just sort of gave me an ick that left a bad taste in my mouth, and made me rethink a bit while looking back at the whole album.
The lyrics on “This Is Our Lot” start nice, being out on the town with the boys in the bar, but it quickly shifts into this idea of ‘we’re using ourselves as bait for the ladies, please come and bite, I beg of you.’ I think “Underbelly” doubles down on it with the line of “How Lothario leers at slut”, and while I get the historical reference, and the overall tone of both tracks, it strikes me as desperate, and almost makes it sound like they’re entitled to it. While I’m sure it’s intended in a way that feels more juvenile, there are so many other ways you can express lust and carnal desire without feeling like you’re entitled to it.
A lot of the love tracks on this album ultimately then feel rooted in the idea of entitlement – Hooting & Howling has the lines “any rival who goes for our girls will be left thumb-sucking in terror and bereft of all coffin bearers.” Those lines read fine on a first listen as a sort of funny & over-the-top idle threat, but after the other tracks sort of reveal an implied entitlement, they just seem controlling and awkward. There’s only one track that really involves comeuppance of this idea, which is the tail end of “All The King’s Men”, but it’s literally too late by the time those realizations come in.
I may be reading this with a little too much of a skew against them, but it’s hard not to read these lyrics in the romance-driven tracks without that perceived entitlement to a relationship, and while it might’ve played better in 2009, I just don’t think it’s aged well at all. There are definitely ways to read this that look more positive, with an implied chivalry aspect to the whole thing, but I just can’t make a real conclusion one way or the other, because this album really does struggle with its own identity. I’ll give it some benefit of the doubt, but… man, I just don’t know.
I also think this album just can’t really decide if it wants to be instrumentally driven or vocally driven and as such, this album never really settles into a good balance of the 2. Don’t get me wrong; there’s definitely a musical identity in terms of the soundscape and production – what’s here is a modernized 80s sound, certainly driven with a bit of Peter Gabriel-esque influence. It usually sounds pretty good, and it’s an album that I suspect would sound pretty good while going for a drive. There are really catchy guitar riffs, percussion, and vocal melodies in this album, but there’s also a lot of repetition that drags it down musically.
Ultimately, I don’t think this is THAT bad, and I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt for good reason, but all things aside, it’s just an album that can’t figure out what it wants to say, how it wants to say it, or even WHY it wants to say it. The instrumentals, vocals, and production do a good enough job at keeping things steady that I think I can give this a 3 on the strength of its sound alone, but it could drop down to a 2 the moment it starts to feel too boring or repetitive.
If anything, I wish this entire album were more like its bonus track, “Through the Iron Gate”. That shit was rad.
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
I don’t have that much to wax poetic about, honestly – this is just really good music, that finds itself right between the crossroads of late 60s folk/Americana & 70s dad rock, and somehow finds a really nice blend of the two that evokes the best of both, with a pretty strong variety of subjects & soundscapes to keep it all a pretty breezy, enjoyable and coherent 37 minutes. A few songs are a little stale at points (namely “Helpless” choosing to reprise most of the track), but it never lingers long enough to cause any issues with the album itself.
I guess the main reason I’m at a 4.5 is just because Neil Young’s solo (or at least, what feels like solo) tracks on this album feel really detached from Crosby, Stills & Nash – they’re not bad at all, and they’re a great showcase of his own talent, but they make the album feel just a little disconnected. There’s also a few tracks that feel a little too open lyrically, in a way that leaves them slightly too broad for my tastes. Still though, what’s here is too good to not bump up to a 5; the guitar riffs are on point, the vocal harmonies sound spectacular, and if nothing else, the feelings this album evokes from its instrumentals just have a timeless vibe. I really liked it, and I have zero shame in bumping it up to a 5. Pretty strong pick for my first CSNY album.
Pink Floyd
3/5
I… um… I dunno, a 3?
This is Pink Floyd’s studio debut – I gave a lot of love to The Wall, and it’s a brilliant album deserving of its acclaim. I figured this wouldn’t be like The Wall, simply because that’s a gargantuan album, and this is only a 41 minute debut. I was fully expecting some good, solid rock, and that’s what I got through the first 5 tracks. Side 1 of this album is a really strong basis for the melodies and soundscapes they’d choose to explore in the future, without Syd Barrett in the group.
Side 2 of this album is a journey that I don’t think I can fully put into words. I don’t know if it’s my brain being slightly tired, or my expectations being sent into a different dimension, but once the brakes go off the rails and Syd Barrett’s LSD-inspired brain takes over this album during “Interstellar Overdrive”, it is… certainly a fucking experience. I can’t tell what the prerogative of the album became over the course of its final 20 or so minutes, but from the ‘18 different Classic Doctor Who episodes playing at the same time’ experience of the final 5 minutes of “Interstellar Overdrive”, to the strange strange epiphanies of Grimble Grumble on “The Gnome”, the invasion of Syd’s meditation space during “Chapter 24”, the awkwardly morbid fate of “The Scarecrow”, and the complete breakdown of a nice happy bicycle-based love story in “Bike” (which ends in what I can only describe as ‘the first time seeing Sid’s toys from Toy Story, but in audio form’ (i.e., mildly terrifying).
I truly do not know what to make of the back half of the album. It pretty much erased my memory of the first 5 tracks, all of which are really good, but… sometimes it’s about how you finish, and this album finishes in such a way that I feel like *I’ve* somehow done LSD for the first time. If the intention was that sort of feeling, then they nailed it, to a degree perhaps only matched by “Locust Abortion Technician”. It’s just not at all what I was expecting from a Pink Floyd album – it doesn’t make it bad at all, but it’s just so far removed from my expectations that I’m not sure WHAT to rate it. I guess I’m at a 3, if only because I don’t really feel like I enjoyed the second half of the album as much as I was an unwilling participant on Syd’s version of the Willy Wonka boat ride. Perhaps it’ll click for me another day, but I do admire this album for being… whatever the hell it is. An enigma, perhaps, but for my current mindset, a 3. It could totally go up, though.
Genesis
5/5
Well, that’s a 5.
This is my first full Genesis album – I’m very aware of the whole Peter Gabriel to Phil Collins switch, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything from either era of the band, save for Misunderstanding (which is basically a Phil Collins solo track, let’s be real). To put it more blatantly, the fact that this is a full blown prog rock album (and by extension, Genesis being a full blown prog rock band at this time) kinda hit me out of nowhere, but I am not complaining one fucking bit – this is spectacular.
Call me dumb if you want, it might be a bit deserved. I’ve just always assumed, based on both Peter & Phil’s 80s work, that Genesis leaned more into rock with a bit more blues involved (i.e. Chicago, Boston, Toto, etc), and not big booming Yes or King Crimson-esque stuff. This is proper prog rock, and it’s treated with the full slate of respect; there are melodies upon melodies upon melodies throughout this album, and it somehow keeps an incredibly tight rhythm while somehow finding room within each sandbox to keep expanding far beyond the imagined scope at the start of each track. The shining example here is “Firth of Fifth”’s extended instrumental break, but I simply have to give a huge shout to all of the longer tracks on this album, especially the instrumental outro of “The Cinema Show”. It’s very rare to have that many long tracks be *that* captivating.
When this album does lean back from its prog rock sensibilities, it still sounds great; “I Know What I Like” has some killer melodies with a Beatles-y flair, & “More Fool Me” is a really nice bit of foreshadowing for Phil’s solo success to come – stellar vocals & harmonies on that track, seriously. “Aisle of Plenty” is fine, with some decently layered guitar riffs, but it is a bit of an odd ending to the album to pun on UK supermarkets and whatnot.
It does require a bit more attention lyrically than I would’ve figured on a first pass; it certainly feels like there’s a lot of sociopolitical commentary scattered throughout this album, most of which is probably UK-based. The only one I *think* I picked up on was “The Battle of Epping Forest”, which I sort of took as a 60s/70s culture war allegory, replete with greedy CEOs and executives simply making money while enjoying watching the warhawks and the hippies fight. I’m probably way off in that analysis, but there’s certainly something close to that. The rest of it, if it is UK-based, will probably just remain a bit of a mystery to me.
Regardless of all that, I’m still just a bit stunned; it’s clearly on me for never really listening to Genesis before now, but for this to exist, and have gone under my radar for years upon years is rather annoying. Better late than never – it’s just a spectacular prog rock album, and I feel like I really need to dive deeper into Genesis. I’ve probably been missing out. Very easy 5.
Neil Young
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
Hell of a rebound from Rust Never Sleeps, huh? In the three albums we’ve gotten since that involve Neil Young, they’ve all been a 5 to my ears. This isn’t quite as good as Harvest or Deja Vu, but this is still really fucking good.
I think I’m learning that I like Neil Young the best when his lyricism matches the power of his instrumentals – his voice still feels like it’s punching a little bit above his range, but when he’s managing to pull every bit of emotion from his guitar or piano to compensate, and when the lyrics match that, it all somehow finds a harmony that’s difficult to explain, but easy to feel. I really like feeling that harmony, and that harmony is present throughout most of the tracks on this album. There’s a few tracks that don’t quite find that harmony, namely “I Believe In You”, which just feels… weird for a Neil Young song, I dunno. It needed a little more time to cook, I think. When that harmony is there though, this album just glides really smoothly.
There’s some great tracks on this album – the obvious standout here is Southern Man, which just unapologetically rules, and I feel bad that Neil Young felt like he had to apologize for writing it. That man was correct in every single thing he said there, and he did it while rocking out. Past that, between “Only Love Can Break Your Heart”, “Don’t Let It Bring You Down”, “Birds”, and “When You Dance, I Can Really Love”, this just finds a really sweet spot between folk music and rock music. While I think it’s showcased at a bigger and better scale on Deja Vu, this still really worked for me at a smaller, more intimate, and less bombastic level. I do wish that “When You Dance” had a little more going in the back, though.
Ultimately, this is just a damn good album – it’s a little bit heavy on the “woe is me” type of track, which sort of skews the album’s balance, which is why I’m at a 4.5, but the album as a whole is just too enjoyable to not give a 5. It really is that good, and I hope people can feel that same harmony that I felt while listening to this. I really hope the rest of Neil Young’s stuff on this list stays at the same quality as these last 3 we’ve gotten.
Bon Jovi
5/5
Easy, easy 5 – probably a 10, really.
I knew this was the one with the big 3 hits of “You Give Love a Bad Name”, “Livin’ on a Prayer”, and “Wanted Dead or Alive” – it was always going to get a 3, bare minimum because of those 3 tracks. The real question, for me, was simply if the rest of the album would live up to the remarkably high bar of those tracks. It did that, and more – I’m really annoyed at myself for not digging deeper into this album; everything on here just fucking kicks ass.
Say what you will about 80s rock like this – yes, it’s been overplayed to hell & parodied to the point where some of these tracks have lost some of the same impact they had 38 years ago… but I just don’t fucking care, man. When it rips, it rips, and this album rips in the fastest 44 minutes I can remember. Let It Rock is a fantastic opener where the charisma of the album oozes in spades immediately, followed by the starstudded 1-2 punch of You Give Love a Bad Name & Livin’ on a Prayer – I am genuinely hard pressed to think of any other 80s rock album that has a 2-track stretch comparable to that. Social Disease is fun; bit of a Phil Collins vibe in the percussion, and it’s baked in a lot of 80s production tricks that just fit my tastes. Wanted Dead or Alive is the other of the big 3 here, and this is my first time realizing that he’s been singing about the band the whole time (“steel horse” should’ve been obvious, I know). The first half of this album is just banger after banger.
Past that, the entire second half of the album was blind to me, but man, it fucking rocks – Raise Your Hands has a Britpop structure with an American edge that elevates the track for me, and feels like a great stadium cut. Without Love is drenched in a pop song structure, and reminds me a lot of Jefferson Starship, but that’s part of why I liked it a lot. I’d Die For You feels like this hybrid of The Police & Journey that clicked really well for me, if a little cheesy in the chorus. If I have any complaint, it’s that Wild in the Streets & Never Say Goodbye should’ve flipped their track order – they both rock, with Wild in the Streets feeling like a very Springsteen-esque cut, but Never Say Goodbye is like, custom made to end concerts, and it should’ve ended this album.
Ultimately, this is just pure 80s heavy glam metal at one of its finest points, and I’m a pure sucker for it. Perhaps it just struck me really well on a first listen, but I think I'll be coming back to this one for a while. I really do wish I had heard some of these tracks before now, but better late than never – it’s a very easy 5 for my tastes, and it just fucking rules.
We gotta get more tracks with key changes in these 1,001 albums.
Various Artists
5/5
It’s a 5.
I suppose Christmas is as good of a day as any to learn that Phil Spector committed murder in 2003 and died alone in a jail cell, rotting for his crimes 18 years later. That shadow will now loom over this, and the rest of the stuff he produced, and it only gives me even more disdain for the fucking wall of sound. However, because it’s the holiday season, I feel no desire to shit on the man, at least not yet – I get the feeling I’ll have plenty of opportunities to do that on some of the more prominent records of the 1960s soon to come.
For now, I think this is as good of a time as any to explain that I have a love/hate relationship with Christmas music; when it’s good, it’s so fucking good, but you have to be in the season, in the mood, and most of all, you have to avoid oversaturating yourself. Too much Christmas music, and suddenly, that inner Scrooge takes over and you’ll never want to hear another refrain of any of these tracks for at least a year.
Thankfully, it’s the season, I’m in the mood, and the only Christmas music I’ve really indulged in so far is George Michael, Mariah against my will, and oddly, Jschlatt. There’s not a lot of overlap, thankfully, so a lot of these compositions felt pretty fresh to my ears – I have to imagine some of the performances here became the standards over time, at least in a more pop-driven atmosphere for the 6 decades since this dropped.
Although I have to give a huge credit to the standout vocal performances and extra flair added on each track because of these singers, I think the orchestral compositions and big-band feel of this whole thing really make this album. It’s a combined harmony for sure, but I know most of these tracks by their more “basic” forms. Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, for example, doesn’t normally sound like a 1970s Western film, but to hear it in that style on this album really shakes it up a bit, and stops this from being a traditional, paint-by-numbers Christmas album. Those shake-ups and Beatles-esque moments are here in spades, and it’s a rather enjoyable 34 minutes because of it.
So, yeah, I’m at a 5. Realistically, more of a 4.5 that goes up to a 5, but I’m in the holiday spirit, and this scratched a real itch – great singers, great compositions, great melodies, and yes, solid production, even if that murderous motherfucker tainted some of it with his stupid wall of sound. It’s just a damn good Christmas album, and I’m glad the site owner rigged it just for this occasion (or did they?). Really fun stuff.
That last track could’ve been skipped, though. Put the vocals in the bag, or whatever the kids say.
Mylo
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4.
I dunno, I don’t have too much to say – it sure is house / electronica. I’ve heard this sort of style before, and this album does it pretty well. It’s an album that’s very easy to pay attention to in the moment, and get a good feel for the individual tracks, but it’s one of those albums that’s hard to describe the feeling afterwards, and that’s where I’m sort of stumped. I think the production here is mostly good, but I can’t really recall why – there’s lots of trance-inducing drums, synths, and samples that create great harmonies that feel encapsulating for minutes at a time, before moving onto the next one. I suppose this album “fails” when the trance becomes escapable, and it happens enough times where I think this album falls down to a 3.5.
It also slowly loses a bit of luster over time – at a certain point, the production tricks feel more common, the tracks go a bit too long, the melodies and patterns get a little repetitive, and it’s just easier to notice the cracks the longer the album lingers on. 55 minutes is a bit long here, and while most of this is still enjoyable, it’s very clear that some of the fat could have been trimmed, and more importantly, more of these tracks could’ve had a little more time to cook. There are points where this album feels like it can explode into a Daft Punk-esque second gear, but it never really reaches that deeper point. A lot of these songs find their rhythm & groove and then just settle, which sort of sterilizes each track to my ears, which just end up thinking about ways the tracks could keep growing and getting more bombast. It feels like there’s a lot of missed potential here. I’m complaining a bit here, but it’s just because I’ve heard better in the genre, and I feel like this is really close to cracking through into an all-timer.
Ultimately, I did enjoy it, but if I can’t really linger on it in a deeper sense besides “it sounded pretty good, but it could have sounded even better”, I do sort of question whether or not it’s really in a “listen to this before you die” tier of music. It’s still a solid album, and it lines up with my more VGM-adjacent tendencies, but there’s probably better examples of this genre that are already in the list, or ones that could have replaced it. I did like it though, hence the bump up to a 4.
Al Green
5/5
That is a smooth as silk 5.
I only knew the title track going into this one – obviously, we’ve heard “How Can You Mend A Broken Heart”, but I didn’t realize Al Green ever did a cover of it. Past those two tracks, the other 7 were all mysteries to me, and my hope going in was that they would all be good enough to come together coherently and make a really strong album.
It succeeded and more – just banger after banger after banger throughout this one, in 34 minutes of the smoothest soul music I’ve ever heard. I’ve only ever really known Al Green for “Let’s Stay Together”, but the vocal range and delivery exceeded what I was expecting. I knew he had a damn good voice, but he was channeling guys like Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder & Ray Charles without a hitch, while still sounding totally unique to all 3 of them. His voice is the instrument that really carries the emotional weight of this album, and the overall church-y vibe to the whole thing gives it an intimacy that’s hard to replicate.
If I had to knock the album anywhere, it’s that a few songs do sort of stagnate, and his vocals alone, as good as they are, can’t always carry some of these tracks to the finish line without my ears noticing a bit of repetition or padding. With that said, when this album manages to find that pure state of zen, it is *perfectly* executed. “Old Time Lovin’” & “I've Never Found a Girl (Who Loves Me Like You Do)” are great tracks that do a great job of setting the tone leading up to it, but his version of “How Can You Mend A Broken Heart” is the shining example that hits the real emotional climax of the album for me. When it gets to that point, and the emotions simply take over, with his instincts going into auto-pilot, it’s a harmony felt by both Al & the listener, and it’s one of those indescribable things that just can’t be captured in words.
I loved it, plain & simple – it’s the type of soul music I’ve been waiting to get from the generator for a while, and I can only hope we get more stuff like this sooner than later. Just an extremely easy 5 for my tastes.
Tom Waits
4/5
I’m not even sure how to rate this album – I’m either at a 3 or a 4, and I gotta talk myself into it one way or the other.
This is my first time listening to Tom Waits – for some reason, the name sounds familiar, but I genuinely haven’t been able to place it at all. I don’t have any songs from the guy in any of my playlists, so I have no idea what the hell my subconscious is trying to tell me here. If anything, after listening, I’m a bit more confused, with a hint of strange admiration – I have no idea if I’ve ever heard an album that’s this scattered in terms of genres, soundscapes, styles, vocals, or production. It’s not even scattered in a bad way, it’s just scattered in a way that’s really jarring, a bit incoherent, and throws any and all album tradition and structure out of the window. It’s very unique for 1985, especially because the formula for an album felt pretty set in stone at this point, especially post-Thriller.
I did like a lot of the tracks on this album, which is where I’m more inclined to give it a 4, but his vocals have such a weird consistent inconsistency that makes me want to go down to a 3, and I really can’t decide what should win out. His vocals have a really deep raspy grit to them, which sometimes works for the tracks, and sometimes doesn’t – I think it really distracts from the instrumentation and lyricism, most of which correctly nails a storytelling vibe. Beyond that, the fact that his vocals sound filtered, recorded away from the studio, while the instrumentation has a really crisp tone to it, makes each track feel weird to listen to with headphones in. Downtown Train is the clearcut example here to me – the mismatch between his vocal quality and the instrumentals is extremely apparent, so much so that when Rod Stewart covered the track, it became a huge hit for the guy.
And yet, for whatever reason, I just find myself sort of charmed by this album, in an inexplicable way. It’s not as commercially acceptable as it could be, but that’s still fine. It sets its expectations from Track 1 with how out there and unusual that instrumental is, and never really strays too far from that vision. Does it align with my tastes that much? No, not necessarily, but I really did end up liking a lot of the tracks here for their storytelling and their ability to capture a mood. It’s not the most melodic, but when the instrumentals want to find a groove that works, it really does work.
It’s a very strange album, and I’m not sure how much of it I can ever fully return to, but I think I admire its sort of dirty throwback style enough to bump it up to a 4 – you can only make something that sounds like this with a full intention to do so, and a deeper knowledge of exactly how to do it. It succeeds at that, and it does so in a way that doesn’t feel so far astray from the standards of 1985 to really harm the musicality of it all. I could totally go down, but I think I’m good with a 4.
The Associates
3/5
I’m at a 3. It took a lot of rehab work, and the quality of the last 3 tracks to get there, but this album crawled its way up to a 3.
I’m really not sure what to make of this album, because I can’t quite figure out exactly what’s wrong with it. The biggest and most obvious flaw is the dichotomy between the vocals and the instrumentation – far too many tracks on this album deeply suffer from them never really being in sync. The best way I can describe it is like trying to play around in FL Studio with two songs that you know won’t make for a good mashup, but trying to make it work anyway. Individually, I think the vocals could’ve worked on a lot of the tracks I was indifferent towards if the instrumentation had been better adapted to suit the vocals. However, that same criticism applies to the instrumentals as well – I think a lot of the instrumentals here are really good, but the vocals should’ve been more adapted to them.
That’s where my biggest issue with this album lies – it’s got good vocals, and good instrumentation, but save for the final 3 tracks, they just don’t work together that well, and I’m not sure which adaptation would make the album more preferable to me. It really is a case by case basis, just based on the vibes of each track. I understand this sort of post-punk new wave experimental thing the production is going for, but it really doesn’t work as well as it could have. If anything, I’m frustrated that the last 3 tracks fully nailed it, because it just means Tracks 2 through 7 could’ve done it too. Nude Spoons was irredeemable, though.
I am giving this album a bit of a long leash, but it’s because I can sense the framework of a really, really good one in here, at least for my sensibilities. I fully understand the average rating this has on the site – it’s abrasive, unusual, and never really meshes together to make a cohesive album experience until those last 3 tracks… but I just didn’t hate the rest of the tracks enough to go down past a 3. It’s a strange album, and I’d personally only really recommend it for super niche circumstances, but I think it’s got a place on the list for all its oddities. Hence, the 3.
Black Sabbath
5/5
I’m at a 10.
It just fucking rocks. What else am I supposed to say? This is my first full Black Sabbath album, and my first full album of anything involving Ozzy Osbourne – I’ve heard singles before (War Pigs, Iron Man, Crazy Train, etc), but never a full album. I figured this one would be good, given the international success of everyone involved, but I wasn’t expecting it to be that good.
Wikipedia mentions that this is generally considered to be the first true heavy metal album, and I can hear it – that opening track feels unlike any other atmosphere from an opening track on any other 70s album. It’s cool as shit, and sets a perfect tone for the rest of the album. After that, this thing breezes by – the harmonica at the start of The Wizard clicked perfectly with my sensibilities, and the entire soundscape just ruled. Behind the Wall of Sleep & N.I.B. are both sick as hell; the guitar solos during N.I.B. in particular are some of the best I’ve ever heard. Wicked World is oddly jazzy, with a bit of a Ram Jam - Black Betty type of vibe. Sleeping Village is pretty cool, before closing out on the blues-driven standout that is Warning. I hesitate to say “Ozzy Osbourne sounds kinda like Muddy Waters”, but it was the first comparison that came to mind vocally, and the instrumentation throughout is just spectacular.
I could try to go deeper into the intricacies of what I liked about every track here, but it’s an experience much better served for the ears to hear, with headphones in, and full attention to the melodies being played. It’s surprisingly not as “heavy” as I thought it would be, at least for my modern standards of what’s considered heavy metal, but I’m not complaining at all. It’s a sick fucking album, I loved every single second of it front to back, and I’m a bit annoyed at myself for never listening to this until now. On a first pass, the charisma this album holds is simply undeniable (unless you REALLY fucking hate anything to do with Satan), and I have to imagine more of this album will reveal itself the more I come back to it. It already feels like a landmark album, and it’s just an easy, easy 10 for me.
The Byrds
4/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump down to a 4, but it’s a pretty recommended 4.
I’ve really liked Gram Parsons. I’ve been sort of ambivalent towards The Byrds. This is a collaboration album, and my expectations were decent, but not super strong. I do think this album exceeded them, but not to the point of a 5. This is good country music, but there are two things that sort of pull this album down to a 4 for me.
The first is that this album (and I cannot believe I’m saying this as a bit of a knock) is that the soundscapes on these tracks lean too much towards country, and don’t find a great balance between the rock sensibilities of The Byrds, and Gram Parsons’ general style. I know it’s weird to say “the country album has too much country”, but Gram Parsons himself clearly learned from this experience, and really refined the blend I think he was searching for on both the Flying Burrito Brothers album we got (1969), and his last album, Grievous Angel (1974). In theory, this combination should work remarkably well (and it does, for the most part) but the blending of genres isn’t as effective here as it could be, and that’s slowly noticeable throughout the album. However, when it works, it works – the best execution of it is on “One Hundred Years from Now” with that steel guitar solo, & “Nothing Was Delivered”, with a more rock-heavy percussion style. Past that though, this is mostly just country, which left me a little disappointed.
My other knock is simply in the vocals, and I’m realizing, with this album, how much a distinctive vocal twang can really make or break the general feel of a country soundscape. When Gram Parsons takes lead vocals here, everything simply feels right – his vocals anchor everything perfectly, and he’s got the best tracks on the album. Whenever McGuinn or Hillman take lead, the tracks are still good, but there’s just something that feels a little off (save for You Don’t Miss Your Water & Blue Canadian Rockies) – I can’t really place what it is, and maybe it’s just a bit of bias involved, but they don’t fully anchor themselves as in sync as they could be with the instrumentation. The vocals across this album are still good, but they’re not as consistently strong as they could be, and they lean more towards the rock side of the instrumentation that simply isn’t quite there.
Hence, the 4, but make no mistake – it’s a pretty good 4. Those other albums I mentioned would not be as good or as strong without this one leading the way, and what’s here is still a really enjoyable listen, and a pretty breezy 32 minutes. It’s just not as good as it could be, and it falls a little short for even my country-biased ears, just because it doesn’t fully commit to a true blend of the genres. I still liked it, though, and I do recommend it. It could even go up to a 5 if a few tracks just hit better at a later point.
Serge Gainsbourg
3/5
I’m at a 4 if it’s not as autobiographical as it seems, and if the main protagonist here is intentionally meant to sound & feel really, really creepy. I’m at a 1 if it’s as autobiographical as it seems, and if the main protagonist here is intentionally meant to sound romantic & feel really, really seductive. I’m going to give the full benefit of the doubt, split the difference, and go with a 2.5 that I’ll bump up to a 3.
From a purely musical standpoint, this album nails the tone it’s going for, which is a cinematic runthrough of a relationship caused by chance (i.e., him hitting this 15-year-old with his Rolls Royce & immediately being smitten), and ending in a tragedy of sorts (a plane crash). The orchestration, the choir, the percussion, his vocal stylings, her spoken dialogue – the cinematic feel of it all is really well done, it feels around 30 years ahead of its time (some of this felt like late 90s / early 2000s movie trailer music to me) and it’s a decently engaging 28 minutes with really strong production, and I did like the core of the album.
The big difference maker comes in Serge Gainsbourg himself, and I really can’t get a read on the guy. He was out here having relationships with significant age differences, but never as young & as disgusting as a relationship with a 15-year-old would be – I want to say he was more of a DiCaprio type – girls in their twenties, and all that. Everything about this, at least musically, suggests to me that he knows this behavior, at least with THIS big of an age gap, is deeply inappropriate, and I don’t think our protagonist here is meant to be endearing to me as a listener. However, to engage in behavior that’s so close to it in real life, without the underaged stigma, makes this album a bit of a strange enigma, and I just don’t want to go down the rabbit hole even deeper into his own personal life.
So, I’m at a 3, because I just can’t tell (and don’t really want to tell) either way. I don’t think this is an album that romanticizes pedophilia, but I can’t say it explicitly condemns it either. I’m giving a rather heavy benefit of the doubt here, and it would not surprise me to see this go down to a 1 with further research. However, if he’s relatively cleared of my suspicions, it could go up to a 4. It’s not within the range of a 5 at all for me, just based on the subject matter in general. For now, based on the effectiveness of the music at hand, I’m going to stay at a 3. Certainly a strange pull for the first album of 2025.
Alexander 'Skip' Spence
2/5
I’m at a 2.5 that I’ll bump down to a 2.
The Wikipedia article for this album cites someone as saying this is "one of the most harrowing documents of pain and confusion ever made". I will cite myself as saying this is “one of the documents of confusion ever made”. Don’t get me wrong, I read the backstory on Skip here, and his entire mental breakdown is a tragedy. I do think this music, to some degree, was created as a result of the entire ordeal. It’s not fully captured in song form here though, and I feel as if there’s areach being made to try and connect some of this music to his psyche. I do believe music can speak wonders to the condition of the heart and the soul, but this doesn’t do that – to my ears, on a good chunk of the tracks, this is just a slightly broken guy rambling on a guitar, and not a deeper inner look into his state of mind at the time, though it does come up on a few tracks.
That’s not to say there’s not musicality here – 4 of the 12 tracks here got me good, for one reason or another: “Cripple Creek’, “Weighted Down”, “War in Peace”, & “Broken Heart”. It’s mostly in the storytelling, though “War in Peace” got me on that really weird and ethereal soundscape for 1969. Most of the album, though, is simply unpolished, and while a lot of that is a side effect of this album being comprised entirely of demo tracks, I think most of the tracks themselves are just kind of unremarkable to begin with. Scattered hints of melodies, scattered thoughts in the lyrics, mumbled confusion of the vocals… I just don’t really see a pathway where this could’ve been salvaged into a “complete” album, even if it had the time and effort that Skip Spence wanted.
Hence, the 2. I gave it a long enough leash, but ultimately, if 8 of your 12 tracks are unremarkable at best or total duds at worst, it’s just not a compelling project. Honestly, based on the circumstances surrounding its release, this feels a bit exploitative, as if his producer was trying to make a quick buck with the best of intentions, but instead just aired some of his ramblings into the world in a way that likely shot his reputation down even further. It’s a really slow 44 minutes, and while it has a small gasp of breath from tracks 5 to 8, it’s just not enough to go to a 3, and a 3 is honestly the ceiling for this album anyway. I hope he found his peace when the time called for it, but I don't think this album should be cited in talking about this time period of his life.
T. Rex
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
We haven’t really gotten too much 70s glam rock, but I hope they all sound kinda like this from here on out – I thought this album just *sounded* cool as hell, with the guitar seemingly jumping back and forth through time to deliver whatever vibe or mood Marc Bolan (another bane of my trivia existence) wanted to get, and he grabbed a whole lot of them. There’s a bit of the Beatles, a bit of Bowie, a bit of Hendrix, a bit of Ray Charles, a bit of the White Stripes & Cage The Elephant, et cetera – his guitar is, for the most part, what anchors the album and makes it feel really compelling. I’ll give big props to the percussion as well, though; when it had to step up and really deliver on any crazy rhythms, it did it without getting in the way of the guitar, and they work in a really good harmony.
His vocals are pretty good too, if a bit inconsistent – on some tracks, they have a really good impact, and really compliment the soundscapes (Lean Woman Blues comes to mind for me), but on a few tracks, they feel a bit paint-by-numbers (Jeepster & Planet Queen come to mind). Overall though, they don’t ever detract from the album; I just wish there was a bit more consistency to how much they truly added. I suppose that’s kind of why I’m at a 4.5 instead of a flat 5 – for as good as this is as a top to bottom package, and for as pioneering as it certainly sounds for 1971, I think there’s just a bit of fluff throughout the album. I’m not saying to delete any individual tracks, but a few of them go a bit long, or simply settle a bit.
Case in point: I really liked the last stretch, from tracks 8 to 11, but for my ears, it’s very easy to notice that they do settle into a “first verse is the whole song” trope, and while most of them are compelling enough to ignore it, it’s just kind of biting at me for whatever reason. It feels like they could’ve dragged a little more out, to tell a more coherent story in each track as opposed to just settling for capturing the mood again and coasting on that.
With that said, it’s just too good of an album to let my own little nitpicks get in the way of how much I enjoyed this – it’s a really good 40 minutes, it flies by, and even when it doesn’t feel like it’s flying by, it’s just got enough depth to stay captivating regardless, whether it’s in his vocals, his lyrics, or the instrumentation. It’s a bit rare for the album to hit on a consistent harmony with all 3, but even with just 2 of the 3, it’s still really strong glam rock. I liked it a lot, and I feel pretty good about bumping it up to a 5.
Les Rythmes Digitales
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to an extremely generous 5, if only because I really liked it.
It’s a little harder to write about electronica / dance stuff like this, even for my VGM-pilled brain, because I’m just really locked into each track while listening, trying to get a feel for the composition, the intentions of the production, and trying to encase myself in the mood and atmosphere and vibe of each track. It makes it harder to judge the album as an entire front to back project, cause my brain treats it more like a YouTube playlist, and I can’t really tell which way is the best approach for an album like this. With that said, I did enjoy a lot of these tracks here – only two of them really fell flat for me (Disco II disco & Damaged people), but the other 11 all range from “totally fine” to “pretty good” to “great”. I do think this album tends to settle a bit, and doesn’t really pull out the most of its soundscapes and production on a number of tracks, but they’re usually still enjoyable enough to listen to that I can just ignore it.
Instead of any track to track analysis, I’ll just give some bits and pieces of what I wrote down while listening, and I think it should give a good sense of how diverse I thought this album was.
“90s arcade high score music that gets a little annoying after a bit”
“Vulfpeck-y bass guitar and some Phil Collins sounding drums”
“Huge ‘Sweet Dreams Are Made of This’ energy, while giving C64 keygen vibes and a bit of the Sonic Heroes Special Stage music”
“DDR / Beatmania adjacent vibes, a Ghostbusters feel to the guitar, with big ‘Whoa I’m In Space Cuba’ energy”
“Namco-esque synths and a big Eye of the Tiger style buildup”
“Wario learned how to use a talkbox”
“Sonic CD but not as funky”
“Face to Face drums with a grimey SEGA Genesis bassline sound”
I suppose if I really wanted to distill it down, it’s just 80s inspired electronica with a lot of VGM sensibilities.
Ultimately, this is a pretty good hour of synth-pop / electronica / whatever the fuck genre this is – I was sort of hoping for more UK house type stuff, but I’m not at all opposed to this. Is it an album I needed to listen to before I died? Eh, probably not. Am I glad I did? Yeah, absolutely. This album pulled from a lot of soundscapes and styles I really enjoy, and to hear it in this form, with this general production, really clicked for me. I’m certainly being a bit generous with a 5 here, but I was just locked in to every track, and I can’t say that for every album we’ve gotten so far. I just thought it was a really fun listen – It felt compelling, and each track felt unique in their own way, so it never got stale for me. Hence, the 4.5 bumped up to a generous 5. I can totally hear how someone might get a 2 out of this, though.
Roxy Music
5/5
I’m at a 5.
It just sounded really, really, really full for 1972, and I suspect that’s partially because of Brian Eno’s contributions to this album. I didn’t realize he was a part of this band until after I was done listening, and it truly explains a lot. This album has a super crisp mix, really deep percussion, and just a wonderful blend of genres and styles that feels innovative far beyond its years. A good number of these tracks truly sound modern to my ears, and while it’s partially in the audio quality being as good as it is, a lot of it is in the more manic production. This album is full of energetic drum fills and long instrumental sections that I can’t say I’ve ever really heard in stuff from 1972, and it’s just really, really cool.
I could point to obvious stuff like The Beatles & David Bowie as two of the major inspirations that this album might’ve taken, but I just hear a lot of stuff in here – little bit of ska (on Would You Believe?), a little bit of electronica (on Ladytron), a little bit of industrial / grunge (on Chance Meeting), a little bit of big band jazz (also on Would You Believe?), and I can’t even really describe all of the things I heard in “Virginia Plain”. It’s just a rich and varied soundscape that kept me captivated on almost every track – the only real “meh” here is 2HB, which is, oddly, a Humphrey Bogart tribute track. I guess they really fucking liked Casablanca.
Ultimately, it’s an album that I think deserves to be listened to, in order to really understand & truly *feel* the depth of the soundscape. I don’t think I can accurately capture it in words; it’s that good, and I’m deeply glad it’s on this list, because I don’t think I would’ve ever, EVER, stumbled upon it otherwise. It’s no lower than a 4 in my mind – maybe a 3 if you can’t stand the big bombastic feel on a few tracks, which this album tends to dip into quite a bit. For my tastes though, this just feels innovative beyond belief for its time, and I highly recommend it. Super easy 5 for me.
The Offspring
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Before listening, the only tracks by The Offspring I really knew were “Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)”, and their contributions to the Crazy Taxi soundtrack. I'm glad they've got more than that in their bag. In a weird way, I suppose I’m listening to the birth of the soundtrack of the late 90s at play here – not necessarily as impactful or as timeless as Nirvana, but just as important. Nirvana might’ve captured a post-Reagan anger across the entire U.S., but this feels like it’s capturing a more youthful side of that population – college kids, high schoolers & the like. It’s the sort of music that endured well into the mid-2000s, to match a sort of juvenile swagger of the time, tinged with just a hint of regret. I should know, because I sort of grew up on it.
It’s reflected in the music too – a little messier, a little more unpolished, a bit over-the-top at times, certainly a bit cheesier & really in your face. I don’t think I’d have it any other way. The ancestors of punk rock are all present here (The Clash, Dead Kennedys, Sex Pistols, etc), but with a grunge-infused 90s flair that’s somehow both trapped within its time and nostalgic all the same. The guitar riffs are loud and booming, the percussion a little crazy and manic, and the energy is simply undeniable from track to track. Sure, a few of them suffer from the whole “first minute is the whole track” syndrome that will end up plaguing the “pop punk” era as a whole, but for the most part, I think a lot of these tracks miraculously avoid sounding too similar.
I dunno, perhaps I’m just a bit overstimulated and impressed by how much I enjoyed this (or how much of a throwback it is for me), but for my tastes, I think I have to give this a 5. It’s definitely not perfect, but it’s a pretty damn good 40+ minutes, and while it’s absolutely going to bounce off of other people, I’m more than willing to lean into this style and embrace it, however flawed it is. It’s my type of 90s cheesy punk rock, and I really, really liked it. No shame in a 5 – certainly no less than a 3.
Red Snapper
4/5
I’m genuinely at a 4.
Look, from the get-go, my expectations were a little low – 2000 trip-hop album, with a barebones Wikipedia page, a 2.7 rating on the website, and a Spotify page that includes the band’s name in the title of the album. With such little care or reverence, it felt like I shouldn’t give a shit.
And yet, for whatever reason, this aligned directly with a lot of my VGM sensibilities in a way that’s hard to describe – the first track on this album gave me “technopop Silent Hill” energy, and I think that soundscape carrying itself through a lot of this album, on a very slow buildup to a purely manic final track in “They’re Hanging Me Tonight” just really clicked for me. There’s not actually a cohesive narrative here at all; this is just 11 tracks with varying degrees of trip-hop and techno soundscapes meant to evoke the feeling of say, Y2K or The Matrix. And yet, I only really found myself annoyed by one track in “Shellback”.
From Track 5 onward, this album just found a groove for me that slides right into all of my VGM sensibilities – the awkward choppy rap samples & the helium-infused alien version of Donald Duck on “The Rake”, the completely out of left field explicit lyrics (which simply made me laugh) and MVC2 / fighting game vibes of “The Rough & The Quick”, the heavier bass & machinery feel of “Bussing”, the Plok!-esque SNES feel to “Alaska Street”, the dynamic ambience of “Belladonna”, and the eerie “church organ at a fucked up cult” vibes from “They’re Hanging Me Tonight”. Each track had something new to offer, and while I’m sure it’s easy to scrutinize the compositions themselves (there’s definitely some form of “the first minute is the whole song” to most of them that my ears didn’t catch), I was just in a zone that I really liked being in.
Look, if you hate this sort of soundscape, it’s an album that’s definitely a 2, or even a 1. For how much I managed to enjoy it, I’ll give it a pretty generous 4. Does it deserve to be on the list? Eh, no, probably not – there’s a number of albums that could’ve made it over this one, and I’m still stunned beyond belief that albums like No Jacket Required, Demon Days, and The Colour & The Shape aren’t on the list. However, I think I’m glad that it is, if only because it’s music that fits a niche that would be criminally unrecognized without being on here. There might be albums that do this better on the list, and for all I know, this genre & style could be criminally over-recognized on the list (as in, I will go to the author’s house and confront him in a criminal way (this is a joke)). Overall, I did like it, and I like it enough to give it a 4, even if I might regret it in the future.
Aimee Mann
4/5
I’m at a 4.
This album was fighting for its life for a while there – the first 2 tracks clicked really well for me, and then somewhere around tracks 3-6, it just wasn’t really hitting in the same way – the lyricism got a bit broad, the instrumentation not as compelling or energetic, and in a way, it felt like “Stevie Nicks doing 90s teen dramas for a cheap paycheck”. It just went for a bit too long, and while none of those tracks are bad, they all felt… I dunno, just not as genuine as they could be.
Every single track after that clicked for me – “Say Anything” is a really fun track that ironically channels Stevie Nicks in a good way. “Jacob Marley’s Chain” has some great lyricism that I simply loved, anchored by that titular reference to “A Christmas Carol”. “Mr. Harris” really clicked for me, despite the tricky-to-navigate subject matter, because it’s played up so genuinely and so lovingly, with a soundscape and vocal performance to match it. “I Could Hurt You Now” goes a little long (could’ve ended during the instrumental break), but also manages to channel Stevie Nicks in a compelling enough tale of silent revenge. “I Know There’s A Word” does a good job of making the mundane feel a bit compelling, and the super serious orchestration mixed with her vocal performance made the track work for me. “I’ve Had It” is a really nice track, explaining partially why she left her previous band Til Tuesday to go solo. “Way Back When” is fine – it really only won me over for being about as instrumentally goofy as a few Beatles tracks we’ve had, and her vocals simply sound nice on it.
So, yeah, 9 out of 13 is a pretty good mark to hit. It’s not an all-time album or anything, but I took to it once the teen drama-core songs stopped, and I think her vocals / lyricism on the rest of the tracks are really engaging, and kind of lovely. There is certainly a lot of Fleetwood Mac / Stevie Nicks influence throughout these tracks, tinged with a hit of 90s grunge & attitude, and it’s a soundscape I really like. Every instrumental here worked for me, and her storytelling on the latter half of the album clicked for me. It’s not enough to go up to a 5 (although, if those “teen drama” tracks hit nicer in the future, it could be), but I feel pretty good at a 4. At worst, a 3.
The United States Of America
4/5
It’s a rather strange 4, and I think I admire it because it’s so strange. For the record, I only listened to the first 10 tracks, like the original release.
I dunno, I just found myself really mesmerized by this album – the vocal effects, the vague electronica work, the early synths, and the innovation that comes as a result of all this new tech that nobody’s really had time to play with yet, creates a super ethereal experience unlike any of the other 60s psychedelic rock albums we’ve gotten so far. It’s immediate from the vocal filter on “The American Metaphysical Circus” that this is way beyond the scope of casual listening, and I suspect that’s partially why this has such a low rating on the site. It’s not for everyone, and the true entry points into the album don’t come until much later.
This album starts weird, asks you to trust where it’s going, and then eases into a better blend of familiarity, normalcy, and this album’s specific brand of avant garde. “Hard Coming Love” has the first real sense of normalcy after the 90 seconds of harsh guitar noise (the worst part on the album by far), but it immediately sort of eschews it – the production tricks from 3:20 onward are the real tipping point of this album’s production, because if you dig that part, and how it all sort of melts around and falls apart, you’ll dig the rest of the album. If you think it’s just noise, the rest of this album is going to rub you the wrong way.
“Cloud Song” is kind of sweet, though it has a bit of a “first minute = whole song” thing to my ears. “The Garden of Earthly Delights” has a sort of electronica sitar feel to it, with some nonsensical lyrics and average vocals, but remarkably cool production tricks that create an interesting vibe. “I Won’t Leave My Wooden Wife” has an oddly space-y / transmission feel to it, which culminates in a sort of old-timey radio broadcast effect that swaps between the vocals and instrumentation that clicked really well for me. It’s also just kind of a weird track overall, because the production really has no rhyme or reason to it, but I kind of like the manic feel of it all.
“Where Is Yesterday” feels like if The Who (in their Tommy era) did a track for The Shining with a hint of Pink Floyd, and that’s a blend that feels super cool to listen to. “Coming Down” starts off with the sickest intro to the weirdest ‘Yes’ song ever – it’s definitely got elements of prog rock in it, but the production tricks & soundscape carry it more than the vocals / lyrics do. “Love Song for the Dead Che” is an Eno-esque ambient cut with a really lovely feel because of the vocals / lyrics.
“Stranded in Time” is the most normal track on the album by far, with a very Beatles-y feel. “The American Way of Love” starts the same way, before going into an even harsher version of the meltiness featured on “Hard Coming Love”, and ending on a weird ethereal rewind / medley of the entire album. As an entire front to back project, its lack of coherency (save for the occasional smooth transitions between tracks) is oddly coherent, and in line with the general vibe the album is trying to give off. It doesn’t always succeed, and it’s certainly rough around the edges at points, but I think what’s here truly is admirable, especially for 1968 – some of the production tricks here are really innovative for the time, and would come into vogue much later.
From a pure musical standpoint, I’m at a 4; I don’t think this does enough to get up to a 5, nor does it quite come close, but I enjoyed it a lot. It’s a very strange album for its time, and I respect that they were willing to take big swings at stuff that would later feel much more commonplace. If nothing else, their innovations make each track feel compelling and worth listening to, and I never really got bored (save for Cloud Song kinda biting at me). It’s a unique experience that won’t appeal to everyone, and I can understand why people might give it a 2 or even a 1, but I think it’s a 4 that deserves no less than a 3.
Aretha Franklin
5/5
I’m at a 10.
I’ll keep this short – I’m not gonna write a whole soliloquy & I’m not gonna use every adjective in the book, because there’s only 3 words I need to describe this album: it’s Aretha Franklin.
When we got I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You a while back, I mentioned that the only other Aretha Franklin track I really knew about was “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” and I didn’t realize that track was on this album until I peeked at the track list. I also realized that I’m a liar, because Chain of Fools is also on here, and I adore that track. Going into this, I figured those songs, by themselves, would carry this to a 4, bare minimum – the rest of this album is just unbelievably good, and an even better showcase of her vocal power. Every single track is stellar.
This album is simply driven by her ability to pull the most emotion out of her material, in a way that makes the listener feel it in the same way that she’s delivering it, and she does it perfectly, beautifully, and brilliantly. It is a feeling that simply cannot be understood unless you listen to her voice & the instrumentation that anchors it. Even at just 29 minutes, this is such a rich & fulfilling album, and I’m simply left stunned & wanting more. Go listen to it -- it's a 10.
George Jones
4/5
I’m at a 4.5, and I think I’ll have to bump it down to a 4, even though I liked it a lot.
I’m a sucker for country music from this era, and this is just an album of great country music. The instrumentation (and that steel guitar) is great, his vocals are lovely, and the lyricism evokes imagery and emotion about as well as most country albums of the time do. I really feel like George Jones simply doesn’t get the same acclaim or credit as his contemporaries from this time, despite his rather prolific output. It might be an indictment of some of his songs feeling very one-note & sad and mostly driven by relationship woes, and that’s my biggest indictment on this album.
When this album steps out of the box of “oh, my poor relationship is over”, the songs have a really fun energy, as “The Weatherman” & “Our Private Life” are both uptempo standouts to me. It is, however, just a bit too one note when it comes to relationships as the main topic over the course of the album. Hell, I really do like all of the love songs on this album regardless, but they’re just a collection of songs that slowly start to feel too similar the more they pop up, and some of them directly disagree with each other (“Pass Me By” & “Borrowed Angel” comes to mind as the clearest example).
Let me put it this way – if this had even one or two more uptempo tracks that weren’t about the sorrow of a lost relationship (or fawning over a new one), I think I’d be at a 5 without a question. I’m probably being a bit harsh, but I think I’ve been really, really kind to country albums from this era as they come up, and this one, while still great to my ears, needs to get a little bit of a knockdown because of the lack of variety. In my brain, it’s like a 9/10, and I really did like it a lot, but for the site, I think I simply have to give it a 4. I still really recommend it though, if only because we simply need more country music like this.
American Music Club
3/5
I’m at a 3.
I dunno, I just sort of bounced off of this album, not for a lack of trying. I think the instrumentation does a fabulous job of finding & maintaining a mood on this album on every track, and I consider that the highlight. If nothing else, this is a really nice 41 minutes of easy listening, and it’s probably really easy to get entranced by the soundscapes to the point of enjoyment. They’re genuinely a few years ahead of schedule, and give a good preview of some of the more contemporary / indie stylings of the 90s to come.
However, for my ears, which are just too attentive to the vocals & lyrics, I simply bounced off of this because they do kill the mood / vibe on some of the tracks for me. It’s not because they’re outright bad – they never really dip lower than “painfully unimpressive”. The reason I bounced off of this album is because the lead singer’s vocals, combined with the usually mediocre lyrics, make the entire thing feel like it’s a cover band of another artist trying to do original material, and while I absolutely know it’s not the case, there’s just something about it, when it all combines, that creates that weird anachronistic effect. This is an album from 1988, that sounds like the mid-90s, but evokes other bands in such a way that it feels like the tribute bands & rip-off acts of those more popular ones, and it’s a stigma that my brain could never really shake off.
It certainly doesn’t help that the guy’s vocals reminded me the most of Morrissey, which is “hit and miss” at best, and “pathetically whiny” at worst. Past that, I wrote down “a guy at the bar who’s convinced he can do a great Michael Stipe impression,” and I fear I’m starting to get a little mean. I suppose I’ll end my mean streak by saying that “The laughing stock proves that the world is made of rock” sounds like a poorly translated quote from a foreign philosopher that this guy desperately thought sounded cool. It feels like a Morrissey line. My sincerest apologies to this guy – I simply think Morrissey is a tool.
I’ll give this album credit where credit is due though – it does break the stigma of “cover band doing original material” a few times, namely on “Blue & Grey Shirt” and “Western Sky”, both of which I really liked, the latter especially so. This truly isn’t a bad album, it’s just painfully unimpressive to my ears. It’s not that compelling lyrically or vocally, but for 1988, I’m impressed by how much these guys had their finger on the pulse in terms of the instrumentation. I don’t know how many other “slowcore” albums are on the list, but I feel like it’s a genre I could enjoy. I just don’t think this one, with American Morrissey and a lot of strange lyrics in tow, is the one that’s gonna break through for me. It’s a 3 for me, but I can understand how it could be a 4 or even a 5 for someone else.
Dusty Springfield
5/5
I’m at a 5.
This is the second time we’ve gotten a Dusty Springfield album – after “Dusty in Memphis”, I thought of her as more of a rock girl, with a little bit of soul influence. Going into this one, I was sort of expecting more of the same, even with a decade gap. Obviously, I was a bit wrong – this is much more doo-wop / R&B oriented than “Dusty in Memphis” was, and it’s a style that I honestly think worked better here, at least for my tastes. Once again, it should be quickly noted to say “give black artists their due”, as this is an album entirely comprised of covers. It’s not all from black artists, but a good chunk of it is. The parts that aren’t lean a little closer to that fabled “Great American Songbook” style, which I think works really well with her vocals.
If anything, my biggest compliment I can give to this album is that despite this being a 60s album, so much of this, at least production-wise & in the structure of each track, feels pretty modern. Sure, not everyone nowadays is crooning R&B to grand bombastic orchestration, but the core of the album, in her vocals, the choruses & the melodies, feels like a blueprint for what would become the pop music of the 70s & 80s. Not all of that credit can go to Dusty, obviously, but her voice really opens up a lot of the tracks for me. The power in her vocals, which was already present on “Dusty in Memphis”, simply feels bigger here, in part because of the instrumentals, which do a much better job of working in conjunction with her as opposed to sort of stealing her shine like they did on “Dusty in Memphis”.
That improved harmony is why I’m at a 5 – this album just glides to a really smooth 32 minutes, and while it’s not quite the same feeling as hearing Aretha Franklin absolutely belt out a track, there is something in the air when her voice & the instrumentation blend wonderfully, which happens enough times for me to feel like I'm justified in giving this a 5. It’s a fun album, and I don’t think there’s a single dud (well, maybe Mockingbird). It might hit a little less if I had heard most of the original versions of these tracks, but I think Dusty Springfield & the band performed them with pretty good justice. I think it’s no less than a 4 (or a 2, if you really hate cover albums being on the list), and for my tastes, I have no problems giving it a 5. I liked it a lot, what can I say?
Crosby, Stills & Nash
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Thankfully, C, S, & N are still pretty damn good without Y. I don’t think I have much to wax poetic about here – this is just a great album. Sure, a good chunk of it is mired in relationship issues, and the variety of styles on each track isn’t as strong as what was on Deja Vu (lots of acoustic tracks here, little less pure rock than I was expecting), but the quality of the songwriting, and the emotion their voices are able to pull out of those lyrics, especially in the harmonizations, is really, really strong, and really enjoyable to listen to. Even though some of the more personal context of each track is kind of lost to time (I don’t think anyone’s really itching to read about Judy Collins & Stephen Stills anymore), the imagery in the lyricism is so good that it really can apply to any kind of relationship.
I truly don’t think there’s a single bad track here, and even its weakest one (You Don’t Have to Cry, just for the repeated lyrics) is still pretty good. It’s not a flawless album by any means, but for 3 people to come together, each members of their own bands, and drop an album with this much cohesion & quality, on a first try, is pretty damn remarkable. It’s the type of chemistry you can’t really teach, and arguably the blueprint for other “supergroups” that followed throughout the 70s. While I imagine Neil Young’s inclusion muddled that chemistry for a bit for years afterward, this album is a great showcase of why Neil Young wanted to join these 3 in the first place. I think it’s no less than a 4, and for my tastes, a very easy 5.
Doves
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Going into this one & seeing the line about “the best debut album since Oasis” on Wikipedia set the bar rather high. I’m not quite sure if they matched that bar, since I’ve never heard Oasis’ debut album, but they’ve created something here that I think justifies that statement, even if it’s tonally far different than what I was expecting.
I really cannot remember the last time an album won me over this much on account of just vibes & soundscapes – the vocals do a great job of gliding on the instrumentals & pulling out some of the emotion, but the buildup on each track, and the cinematic feel of the whole thing, opening up the mind to imagery beyond just the lyricism, is what’s making this album really work for me. Every single track here captures a mood, whether it’s melancholy, loneliness, hope, or anxiety, and the production does a great job of making each track feel unique, despite how much of a similar ground most of them tend to cover.
I can understand the idea of this album just being “ambient moody soundscapes” for one person’s ear, and if the cinematic buildup style they tried to capture doesn’t work for you, this album’s going to bounce off of you. I think that’s kind of a disservice, though – maybe it’s just because I listened to this with a full attentive mind & headphones in, but I found myself really captivated & enraptured by the world each soundscape brought me into. It’s not a direct 1:1 comparison, but my closest analog is “The Downward Spiral” in terms of effectively using sound design to convey a story – Trent Reznor does it better, don’t get me wrong, but this felt kind of similar to me.
It doesn’t always work – I think a few tracks sort of settled when they could’ve gone into a higher gear, I think a few of the lyrics fall flat on some tracks and leave more questions than answers, and occasionally, the instrumentals or vocals get a bit drab or repetitive. However, when it does work, I think it’s one of those things that’s very easy to feel and hard to describe, and this album never once committed that cardinal sin of making me feel nothing.
Ultimately, I really enjoyed this, and while I can totally see why someone might give it a 2 or a 3, I just felt so impressed by it, and I think it’s pretty deserving of a 5. I’m glad it’s on the list, and I’m glad that the 2000 Mercury Prize nominees haven’t given us a bad album yet. It’ll be really awkward if I don’t like Parachutes by Coldplay though.
The Notorious B.I.G.
5/5
I’m at a 4.5, and I’m kind of conflicted about whether I should go down to a 4 or go up to a 5.
I’ve heard this album before – I think anyone who claims to know 90s music has at least heard one of “Juicy” or “Big Poppa” before, and in my case, I listened to the whole thing for the first time… gosh, maybe a decade ago, when I was 15. I liked it back then, but I never really gave a lot of thought to the lyricism, and this is obviously when people still liked Diddy, before… well, you know.
So, with several years removed from listening to this album in full, but with years of the songs coming up in my big playlist, I was really curious about how it would hold up as a complete front to back package. I’ve matured in spades since 2015, and as part of this whole 1,001 albums thing, I’ve learned to really & truly pay attention to music, and analyze it a lot more past “it sounds good”, for the most part. From the intro, though, this weirdly felt akin to riding a bike – once my brain locked in on “Things Done Changed”, a lot of it came right back to memory. From a purely musical standpoint (i.e., melodic flow, instrumentals/beats, mood-capturing energy, etc), this really is a masterclass on most of the tracks. Easy Mo Bee deserves a lot of fucking credit for the opening stretch of this album, because his stuff is an incredible tonesetter, and a bar for every other producer on here to meet, and they all got pretty close.
The lyrics need to be talked about, because they are mostly the reason I’m wavering between a 4 and a 5 – it’s not even necessarily in the fact that a lot of the deeply misogynistic stuff has aged so poorly (although that is a really big factor that should not be understated), and more so in the fact that when you really pay attention, a lot of these tracks end up circling the bases on flexing, bragging, self-hype, and threats of violence, with a touch of domestic abuse throughout. Granted, that’s probably a lot of Diddy’s influence striking through on this album (and I’ll get to him at some point), and from what I remember of “Life After Death”, his songwriting improves tremendously in those regards to make a more varied, thoughtful, introspective & arguably, a more fruitful & better album. On here, though, while those subject matters have legs for a while, by tracks 14 and onward, it just feels like retreading old water, and it does get sort of bland. The curse of a long album, I suppose.
However, I’m more inclined to lean towards a 5, if only because Biggie Smalls makes those lines, as poorly aged and repetitive as they might be, sound compelling and unique and mesmerizing every single time – yes, this is a 70 minute album, but it genuinely still flew by for me. Part of that is familiarity, but a lot of it comes in how charismatic and unique Biggie’s voice is, and how he’s able to pull you into the story he’s telling almost every time, without fail. It really didn’t hit me until I had headphones in just how smooth the man’s flow is – the ending of “Everyday Struggle” struck me as the key example, with the bass picking up, the percussion getting a little louder, and the clarity where you can hear just how on-beat he was the whole time becoming apparent. It’s that sort of mesmerizing appeal that’s pulling me towards a 5, and I think it’ll stay there.
I’ll be damned if old Puff Sean Diddy Daddy P. Combs didn’t do his damn best to drag this down to a 4 though – it’s not even that he does anything especially bad, but for the love of God, man, do you need to be doing hype-man adlibs on every single fucking track? It’s a side effect of getting this album after all the crimes really came to light, but I just don’t need to hear the man give an Ariana Grande-esque “yuh” after every single fucking line Biggie says. It happens so often that it feels like I’m listening to a man ride coattails in real time, and it is by far the worst side effect of The Notorious B.I.G.'s success.
Ultimately, though… I dunno, maybe I just have too much reverence for this album from my younger years, but I think I just have to give it a 5. I can see the case to go lower, and if I were going in with totally fresh ears, I’d probably be there. I cannot change the misogynistic parts of this album from existing, and they do genuinely drag it down on a modern relisten (and don’t even get me started on why the interlude had to be on this album), but on so many of the tracks, I’m just reminded of why Biggie felt special. Even in 2015, I just knew. Beyond the mythos of the Tupac rivalry & his own subsequent death, the man’s talent was on full display, and in 2025, I think his musicianship still speaks for itself. I could (& probably will) go down to a 4 in the future, when I have less of a starry-eyed glaze, but I feel OK about giving this a 5.
The Smiths
4/5
I’m at a 4.
I mean, it’s definitely the best thing I’ve heard that has Morrissey singing lead vocals on it. Not the highest bar to clear, but not a particularly low one either. For a while, I was considering a 5, but I think “Barbarism Begins at Home” sort of rubbed me the wrong way with how much it leans into the “first minute is the whole song” syndrome without ever really getting that captivating. It wasn’t boring, at least. After that, “Meat is Murder” is like… it’s a good track, and its messaging makes sense & has a sort of gentle scolding approach I like, but it’s just a really heavy way to close out the album that I don’t think flows well with the general upbeat tempo on most of the tracks.
Don’t get me wrong, I know this album leans into a lot of cynical & nihilistic lyrics, but it covers and shadows them under some excellent production that stands up next to some of the greats of new wave / indie rock at the time. “Meat is Murder” is just really heavy overall, though I can’t blame them for making it the last track. Whoever’s gonna skip it because of the message would’ve skipped it no matter where it was in the track order, and it’s better to make the last one skippable than any of the others, I guess.
I really did like the rest of this album, though. “The Headmaster Ritual” is also kind of a heavy track lyrically, but the instrumental really, really makes it digestible with an R.E.M.-ish feel. I kind of bounced off of “Rusholme Ruffians”, but it’s a fun listen, at least. “I Want The One I Can’t Have” is REALLY good (or at the very least, the vocal structure is super catchy and appealed right to me).“What She Said” is fine & has a cool instrumental, but I don’t think Morrissey’s vocals are as strong as they could be. I loved the lyricism on “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore”, but that long swirling section didn’t click for me as well as it could have – I do think it could’ve had a little more after the initial fake out ending from a lyrical standpoint. I listened to “How Soon Is Now?” even though it’s only on the US release, and… yeah, that’s just an awesome track. “Nowhere Fast” is fun, and a little goofy (the only time Morrissey has felt endearing to me in a while), but “Well I Wonder” might be the standout of the album – it perfectly captures a sort of innate human fear that’s usually hard to put into any kind of form, but they did it somehow.
So, yeah, there are a few too many flaws for my tastes to really go up to a 5, but it’s absolutely worth giving a 4. I liked it a lot, and I can only hope Morrissey’s slow descent into madness doesn’t get documented on the rest of The Smiths albums on the list. Fingers crossed.
John Martyn
5/5
I’m at a 5.
I normally harp on lyrics a bit – the lyrics on this album are pretty good, don’t get me wrong, but about halfway into this one, I kinda decided to just throw them out and let the soundscape and his vocals carry me the rest of the way. Thankfully, his voice is so clear that I got most of the lyrics anyway, but… man, this is a great sounding album, and the lyrics enhance it even further. For 1973, I’m struck by how modern this feels – obviously the mixing & the remasters help a bit, but in terms of structure & production, you could easily convince me this is an album from say, 2018, and I’d probably believe you if you gaslit me enough.
I dunno, I just really liked this – I’m reminded of everything from John Mayer (acoustic wise) to U2 (some of the production & structure) to Stevie Wonder (in terms of the backing synths to add a bit of flavor), and I’m sure there’s a world of other things I could point to, but I’m a little mesmerized by how much I enjoyed this to think of them all. This does, appropriately, feel like a more upbeat version of Nick Drake’s general style, and the first track being a tribute to him makes all the more sense. Past that, though, this is the sort of stuff I wish Nick Drake did do – take the songwriting talent and ability to pull the most of them with the vocals, and blend them with more contemporary instrumentation to create something that feels a bit beyond its years. I think this type of music fits right into my sensibilities, and I think it’s absolutely worth giving a 5.
AC/DC
5/5
I’m at a 10.
Going into this, I knew Highway to Hell (and who doesn’t, let’s be honest), but my knowledge of AC/DC, besides some of the obvious super hits (TNT, Back in Black, For Those About To Rock, You Shook Me All Night Long, Thunderstruck, Shoot to Thrill), is rather limited. I imagine that’s the case for most people, but I’ve always wanted to take a little bit of a deeper dive. I was definitely expecting that most songs were gonna be similar, but hopefully, they would kick ass.
They kicked ass, alright, and they blew me away in the process – normally, I might complain about repetition or whatever, but I’m willing to ignore it when the quality of every track is just that damn strong. It’s much easier to type about it when you’re in the flow state of listening to the album, but like… I dunno, I’ve never really felt more in sync with a band while listening to a rock album. I’ve hit similar states a handful of times (i.e. Nirvana, Black Sabbath, Bon Jovi, Led Zeppelin), but even then, this one felt different. Someone else may chalk that up to “well, it’s just Highway to Hell 10 times, of course you could predict it,” and maybe that’s true, to some degree. I just… it’s hard to put into words, but it felt sort of ethereal to me.
This is my first time listening to a lot of these tracks, and there’s some insane standouts here that are criminally underplayed on Spotify, even if every track on the album has 13 million plays – “Touch Too Much” is fantastic, as is “If You Want Blood (You’ve Got It)”, but I think the most underrated one here is “Beating Around the Bush”. It has the second lowest plays on the album, but I thought it fucking ruled, especially with the Ram Jam-style back & forth call/response structure. I’m just a sucker for that sort of thing. I’d love to keep waxing poetic, but I’d just be circling the bases with praise – it’s an unbelievable album, and while the appeal may wear off over time, I think a lot of these tracks are gonna hit like a truck when they come on in shuffle, and I’ll appreciate them all over again. For now, I’m at a 10, and I’ve got no shame in that.
LCD Soundsystem
5/5
I’m at a 5.
My big confession is that I know the name LCD Soundsystem, but I’ve never heard them – I thought I had, but for years, I was confusing them with “009 Sound System”, aka the band (or guy?) with that one song that got overused to death on YouTube in 2009. Granted, I did think I had a sense of what LCD Soundsystem actually was, but, uh…
Boy, was I wrong. And, boy, was I glad to be wrong. I was expecting indie rock music, but I was sort of expecting the grungier side of it – it does eventually come into play on the last track for a bit, but for the most part, this is electronica indie rock, and it’s the type of electronica (and the type of rock) that I really fucking vibe with. Straight from “Get Innocuous!”, this album hit the ground running and never really slowed down for me. Granted, there are a few things I can point at – a few songs do settle into a rhythm when they could’ve kept building and expanding, and a few tracks got a little boring because of that. However, that “boredom” more so manifested itself into just falling out of the trance that most of the tracks put me into – James Murphy does a fantastic job of finding a rhythm, sticking to it, and pulling the most out of it that he can. Once he hits a wall, it’s a little easier to “wake up” from the trance, and that’s where the ‘boredom’ comes in, but it’s a boredom that’s still tinged with the anticipation of something new.
I’m sure someone will complain that this is 55 minutes, and that the soundscapes all blend together & meld together into one long, boring, plodding album, and if that’s the way your ears heard this, then I dunno, I guess I can’t blame you that much. It is an acquired taste to like this sort of thing, but for my money’s worth, I just can’t understand how this might be the electronica album that bounces off of someone. This isn’t Kraftwerk doing FL Studio loops for 10 minutes on Trans-Europe Express (and no shade to Kraftwerk, that’s just their most boring album to me – their influence on this album & electronica as a whole is felt here), this is blended really well with rock instrumentation that evokes everything from Talking Heads to DEVO to the Beastie Boys & Queen. As someone who went into this 1,001 albums thing turned off by really long tracks (and can still easily be turned off by them), I just think that even with most tracks on this album being over 6 minutes long, they’re all captivating in their own way, even if I bounced off of one or two.
Ultimately, I just thought this was great – far beyond what I was expecting it to be, but a very welcome surprise. I need to listen to the debut album whether it’s on the list or not, and that includes the ‘really should’ve been a major hint’ track of “Daft Punk Is Playing at My House,” which I’ve read the title of, but never made the connection for. As far as this album goes, it’s a 5, through and through – a really fast 55 minutes, and a really enjoyable listen.
Nirvana
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 – I’ll have to talk my brain one way or the other.
This is my first time listening to In Utero in full – much like Nevermind, I knew the bigger hits, but everything in between was a mystery to me. Granted, some of it was on the MTV Unplugged album we got around 350 days ago, but it’s been a while, you know? When I finished Nevermind, I thought I had a real sense of clarity about the hype behind Nirvana, and specifically, what Kurt Cobain really and truly meant to a rabid generation waiting for their sort of musical messiah that would inspire people and lead a counterculture revolution of sorts. Obviously, I’m exaggerating a bit, but from the way he’s still held up as this sort of mythical figure in the 27 Club and all that, it’s hard to not perceive him as something at least close to that.
In a way, I’m very glad that this album is all about trying to deconstruct that image as much as possible – this is not the radio friendly unit shifter that Nevermind was. This is Nirvana, as a group, led by Kurt Cobain (but not defined by him), openly rejecting the MTV-driven movement that made Nevermind a monster smash success. This is riding the wave of what grunge would soon become, and what would soon be picked up on by Alice in Chains, the Smashing Pumpkins, and others – fuck the refinement of it all & make something raw that speaks to the soul and comes from the heart. There’s not anything like Smells Like Teen Spirit or Something in The Way on here, and it’s honestly kind of welcome.
That’s not to say that the Nevermind style goes away; the tracks that do lean back into that style are fantastic, and the highlights of this album for me. However, this album still shines rather bright whenever it accepts its grungier, heavier, more gritty, and less polished sound. At its core, this is a raw album, and while Kurt Cobain’s lyrics tell the stories of each track, his presence feels less notable here than on Nevermind from a vocal perspective. Let me put it this way – imagine if Freddie Mercury just stopped belting, and just sort of… sang, without any of the showmanship that made him famous. It wouldn’t sound bad, but it would be noticed, and it would certainly feel different. That’s what Kurt does here – gone is the extreme polish, and in comes a man battered and wounded by the effects of global fame. Don’t get me wrong, his voice still has great standout moments, and his presence is unmistakably there, but it’s tinged with a combative tone, and that combative tone spread to the rest of the band, and arguably, to the rest of the genre following his suicide.
That’s all preamble about Kurt – what do I think of the actual attempt, musically, to shift away from Nevermind’s style and introduce a grittier, more “raw” Nirvana that would still sound fresh and innovative? Well, I’d say it worked – I really do like the unpolished feel of this album. Dave Grohl’s drumming is still fantastic, but the overall feel of each track is looser, more reminiscent of the garage punk bands that inspired Kurt in the 80s. “Serve the Servants” is a great opener, and the album doesn’t really slow down from there, though it falters a little – stuff like “Rape Me” and “Milk It” didn’t quite mesh well with my tastes but they’re still solid tracks. I bounced totally off of “Radio Friendly Unit Shifters” & “tourette’s”, though I didn’t hate them – just a little too out there for me, even for Nirvana.
Ultimately, while I don’t think it lends itself to the same knockout consistency of Nevermind, I also don’t think they wanted to achieve that at all. As far as how it translates into a full album, that’s where I’m stuck between a 4 and a 5, because I can’t really get a grasp on how much I liked the album for itself, and how much I liked it for the attempt to reclaim their own image. I don’t think it’s as good as Nevermind, but it’s still Nirvana, and some of my favorite songs from them (Heart-Shaped Box, Dumb, All Apologies) are on this album. I think, just based on the strength of those tracks (and most of the others), as well as the (mostly) successful attempt to disavow the idea of Kurt Cobain as a musical savior, that I’m gonna bump this up to a 5.
God bless Kurt, though, man. Gone too soon.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
Surprise, surprise – I like the 2000s indie rock band doing indie rock stuff, who would’ve thought? I’ve read the name “Yeah Yeah Yeahs” before, but I didn’t think I had heard them – obviously, “Maps” threw a big wrench into that one once it came up, but beyond that, I hadn’t heard the rest of the album. For 2003, this seems to be a bit of an innovator; to some degree, it feels like the birth of the indie rock style that would define the mid-2000s, specifically on the Arctic Monkeys side of the spectrum. It’s a sound I’m naturally drawn to, and so this album ended up being right down my alley, for the most part. Speaking of the production, apparently this was from one of the members of TV On The Radio – we got an album from them a while back, and I think this album does a really nice job of hitting the highs on the roller coaster than “Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes” did, at least for me.
Karen O – what a voice. I wasn’t expecting a female vocalist going into this, but her energy & vocals are what elevates this album up for me. Don’t get me wrong, I fucking love the instrumentation on a lot of these tracks – there’s a variance in styles across the board, evoking everything from the White Stripes to the Arctic Monkeys to Linkin Park & Blink-182. It never ever gets boring, but the album does eventually get a little stale in terms of the “hey, listen to this sick-ass guitar solo & our kickass drummer” production. Her vocals are what keep the album floating well above water, and she’s got a stellar range – she can switch from softer to raspier & grittier on a dime, and she does a great job of pulling the most emotion out of both the lyrics & the instrumentation.
If I have any knocks, it’s that for as much as the instrumentation/vocals rock, the lyrics are a bit of an afterthought, and it’s sort of a shame that it never really comes together as one big coherent package (save for “Maps”), but they’re all still good enough to work in a strong enough harmony, and it never takes the album that far down for me. Granted, it’s enough to take it down to a 4.5, but that 4.5 is moreso driven by the fact that this does have a little bit of that early 2000s “PS2 sports game menu” stink to it. It’s not overwhelmingly there, like how I felt with Apocalypse Dudes (which I really feel like I should revisit, I dunno), but it’s got one.
However, it’s definitely good enough to overcome that – the album is just a really fun ball of energy that definitely felt ahead of schedule for 2003, and probably set a lot of subsequent indie rock (or just mainstream rock, even) into motion. I really liked it – it’s a super fast 37 minutes, and while it has its flaws, it’s super enjoyable, & it’s just easy to get lost in each track and headbang your heart out. I’m glad it’s on the list, and I’m glad I can finally put a name to that damn TikTok sound that I’ve heard for months on end. No shame in bumping it up to a 5 – certainly a 4 at worst (or a 3 if you got really bugged by the production).
Tim Buckley
4/5
I’m at a 4.
Wikipedia lists this as “psychedelic folk,” and I can’t say I find that description too accurate. It doesn’t feel as psychedelic as other 60s acts we’ve gotten, and I hesitate to call it “folk”, because it doesn’t really feel that close to acts like Simon & Garfunkel, or Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. I can’t really place a specific genre on this either; I guess my best attempt would be “ambient pop”, and certainly with a sad bend.
It really does jump around between genres though – a bit of reggae influence, some straight jazz, some solid folk stylings with a bit of a rock lean, and oddly, some elevator music (that vibraphone’s really present throughout this thing). However, it never really strays away from the “ambient pop” feeling I described – a lot of these tracks are anchored in finding a rhythm, sticking to it, and expanding when necessary. It’s a formula that only works because the ambience is captured so well, and complemented further by his vocals. His voice has a strong power to it, and while his held notes do start to feel long and repetitive over time, when it works, it really worked for me.
The biggest knock I have on this album is that it’s too long for what it offers, and that the tracks don’t do enough evolving to justify some of the longer run times – Gypsy Woman is the key offender here. You wanna make that track 12 minutes long? Fine, as long as you can actively expand it in a better way than the sort of lackluster “give / take” approach, especially when it’s taking a lot more instrumentation away compared to what it’s giving back. Past that, I do think the album, for as much as it jumps around in terms of genres and influences, simply has a problem with pacing – Dream Letter is the third slower song in a row after the opening track, and even though I think its lyricism is stellar, it just hits less because it’s the last track of a 21 minute stretch of slower songs.
Those pacing issues, and the length of the album are why I’m at a 4 – it’s a great set of tracks, don’t get me wrong, but as a full front to back album, the progression isn’t as satisfying as it could be, and so it makes the 44 minutes feel slower than they should. If you listen to this and find it boring, I understand that too; maybe I was just in the mood for some slower and more relaxed stuff, so this hit really nicely for me. I do like this album, and I’m glad it’s on the list. I don’t think it should have a 2.78 average – it’s not that bad, but it doesn’t fully succeed at what it’s going for as a complete project. The moods are right, the lyricism is good, the instrumentals are fine; the ingredients are there, but the recipe feels incomplete. With a few tweaks, and a little more “fun’ sprinkled throughout (it’s a rather drab album, let’s be honest), I do think this could’ve gone up to a 5 for me. As it stands, though, it’s a 4; probably closer to a 3.5, but “Sing a Song for You” is an excellent closer that bumped me up to a flat 4.
Beatles
5/5
I’m at a 5.
The first time I ever heard the Beatles as a kid was from a little jukebox toy – you can look this up, just Google “Golden Oldies Jukebox Coin Bank” or something like that, it’ll pop up. One of the songs there was Can’t Buy Me Love – it only played the chorus, out of a really crappy speaker, and yet it was the song I always gravitated to. When it wasn’t that song, I’d just keep pushing the button until I heard Can’t Buy Me Love again.
I suppose it’s only right that the song is on this album, then. I already had it in my big playlist, but I just wanted to tell that story. How about the rest of it then? Obviously, “A Hard Day’s Night” might start with the single most memorable guitar hit ever, but the rest of the tracks here are… pretty good, for the most part. This is obviously not the Beatles at their peak; this feels more like say, some of the solo albums Michael Jackson released before Off the Wall sent him into the stratosphere & Thriller sent him into another plane of existence. It’s a little more raw, a little less defined, and still within the growing pains of it all, throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks and what doesn’t. I do think the DNA of a lot of their future monstrous success is on this album, though, and it certainly helps that this was a gigantic hit in its own right. You don’t get the rest of Beatlemania without starting here, and you certainly don’t get it without the rest of the tracks living up to the weight of the two biggest ones on this album, and I really think they did, even if they’re not quite as good.
“I Should Have Known Better” has some solid harmonization & lyrics, and the harmonica feels super rare for a Beatles track. “If I Fell” has a really cool Bossa Nova vibe, even if the vocals do drown it out just a bit. “I’m Happy Just To Dance With You” has a really nice percussive pattern that evokes The Beach Boys. “And I Love Her” is an absolute standout – the Spanish guitar adds so much. “Tell Me Why” is the most 50s sounding track on the album, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing; I really liked the big band / nightclub feel of it all. “Any Time At All” has a really nice grit to John’s voice that makes it stand out, even though it feels pretty instrumentally close to say, The Byrds or other contemporaries. “I’ll Cry Instead” has a lot of obvious influence from Bob Dylan, but it’s got a really nice melody and a good tone in the vocals. “Things We Said Today” has great lyricism, even if it’s slightly repetitive, and it’s just a super catchy track. “When I Get Home” has a lot of the DNA that would later be present on Paul’s solo stuff with Wings, even though John’s got lead vocals on it. “You Can’t Do That” is a really bouncy track with some great harmonization & backing vocals. “I’ll Be Back”’s acoustically driven soundscape, as well as their harmonizing vocals blend really, really well, and I think it’s a really nice closer.
I’m not at a 10 like I was with Abbey Road & The White Album – it’s not as good as those albums, and I’m sure most people would agree with that. However, what’s here is still fun, and I can totally understand why The Beatles blew up before & especially so after this. It’s pretty damn good rock & roll, and it shifted the blueprint for everybody for the rest of the 60s. They became the bar for success, and they set the tone for what to strive for musically. I’m not saying everyone tried to be the Beatles, but everyone had to be a little more Beatle-y, across all genres. I’m just glad it’s a short one – I don’t know that I could handle another 90 minute masterclass from these guys, so I’ll take 30 minutes of “pretty damn good” as the alternative. It’s an easy 5 for me.
Still several more to go from these guys.
Judas Priest
5/5
I’m at a 10, and I think I’m learning that I’m actually really into metal.
I’ve heard of Judas Priest – I sort of knew their place in the heavy metal canon, but I’ve never *heard* Judas Priest. We’re 10 years after Black Sabbath dropped their debut, so heavy metal was already well established by this point. This is also 6 albums deep into their own discography, so while I was expecting this to be really refined and really good, I still wasn’t really prepared for just how much this feels like *the* precursor to 1980s heavy metal, and specifically, the sound Metallica would refine even further. This feels a lot like a Metallica album, but with just enough of the late 70s present to keep it sort of unique. Didn’t stop me from comparing it to a lot of 90s bands, though.
The album just kicks ass, dude. I don’t even want to be super flowery about it – from the opening riffs of the guitar, and the power in Rob Halford’s voice, the album immediately shoots out of a cannon and never looks back. Honestly, though, what struck me the most about the first track, and really set the tone for the rest of the album, is just how fucking good the percussion is. It’s deeply crucial to making each track work, and every single time a fill cuts through the power of the guitar and his vocals, it’s immediately striking & powerful. I could go on an aside about Dave Holland being convicted of sexual abuse in 2002, but that’s the sort of thing that doesn’t drag down the quality of the music, just my opinion on the asshole.
I’m just kinda stunned, really – I thought of several bands & artists while listening to this: Metallica, Crush 40, AC/DC, Chicago, Boston, Men Without Hats (somehow), Capcom’s sound team (You Don't Have to Be Old to Be Wise is just Storm Eagle’s theme), the Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Police, Phil Collins (the percussion on Steeler has that same effect from In The Air Tonight), and more. All of it is there, and it’s baked right into 36 minutes of some of the slickest heavy metal I’ve heard yet. It just fucking ruled, and I was encapsulated into every second. Eventually, some of the allure will wear off, and I’ll pick apart some of the more repetitive parts of the album, or how the lyricism isn’t as tight as it could be on some of the songs… but right now, I could fucking care less. It’s a kick-ass album, and it just clicked perfectly for me. Definitely worth a 10.
Oh, oh, I do have one thing – I would’ve flipped “Steeler” & “The Rage”. “The Rage” is a way better closer; imagine if the ending of Steeler just kept going and transitioned. That shit would’ve been sick. That’s the only thing I got. Still a 10.
Ramones
3/5
I’m at a 3.
I didn’t hate the album, but… man, that felt disappointing compared to expectations. I like the lyrics, I like the instrumentals, I like the vocals, and I even appreciate what the album is going for with this whole “simplistic songs” thing to counteract the bloat of heavy ballads and bombastic songs at the time. In a way, it’s sort of a general rejection of the idea that music can or should feel so important, and for something that some people list as “the first punk rock record”, I can kinda hear it, and why it was appealing then. Hell, it’s arguably appealing now, but…
…it just didn’t click for me. I think that, even though this album is clearly polished to make their intentions clear, the intentions themselves aren’t as executed as well or as impactfully as they could be. While I was listening, I wrote down the thought “I wonder if you could mashup Blitzkrieg Bop to all the instrumentals on this album and get away with it”. If I can say that, it means you haven’t introduced enough variance or musicality to the project at all, and I know that for some people, this being a “every track is the same” album is appealing. The thing is, I’ve heard other “every track is the same” albums, and they know how to keep something fresh to make them still feel entertaining. Look at Highway to Hell – that’s probably the prime example of an “every track is the same” album, but it’s ridiculously entertaining throughout.
There are things that keep this close to a 4 – the lyricism, when they bother to try and not just give up after writing a chorus and a 2-line verse, tends to be pretty good. There are occasionally some really cool percussion / guitar shifts, and as a whole, at least it’s only 30 minutes of this, and the tempo keeps it up from ever being dreadfully boring. However, it's just enough to go past a 3 for me. It’s really not a bad album, and maybe I’m just bouncing off of it because I’m a little too attentive (or not in the mood for it), but ultimately, it’s just not any higher than a 3 for a first listen -- it could go up higher in the future.
Iggy Pop
4/5
I’m at a 4 – more of a 3.5 that’s getting bumped up to a 4, but a 4 nonetheless.
Right from the opening percussion (which was 100% stolen by Jet when they did “Are You Gonna Be My Girl”), this album takes off and (for the most part) keeps stepping on the gas, except to ogle at some teenagers here and there. By far, those are the most awkward parts of the album, and stop it from approaching a 5 at all. When Iggy Pop (produced by David Bowie, who does an excellent job) isn’t drooling over sixteen year olds, the album usually hits a lot more than it misses, though the tank gets a little close to empty a few times. Warning lights, at least.
This is punk music, with a bit of a poppier lean, and it’s the type of punk music I think I prefer – this is an interesting case study to get this & the Ramones back to back. I bounced off of the Ramones with a perceived feeling of “isn’t this just Blitzkrieg Bop 14 times”, and less admiration because the lyrics felt like an afterthought. Granted, that’s incredibly oversimplifying it, but I stand by my thought that the album wasn’t a very exciting experience for my over attentive ears. This, on the other hand, won me over despite sharing a lot of similar structural qualities from a musical standpoint. It won me over a bit more just because I think the tracks have a much better variance in styles, and the lyricism (when it’s not pedophilic-ish) just paints bigger, bolder pictures for my brain that really make each track feel important. Even when it’s broad, there’s something that feels kind of captivating – for example, what IS the sin in “Some Weird Sin”? Why does “The Passenger” choose to stay under glass, and why does he feel like he can claim all of the things he sees without ever truly interacting with it? Who IS the “Neighborhood Threat”? It’s not actually building up to some big climax, sure, but it just gives my brain more to think about & digest & truly interact with, and I appreciate that style.
Granted, it’s far from perfect – I do think a few tracks go a bit long to the point of repetition (the last track in particular is beyond guilty of this, could’ve ended 2:34 in), and even I can only pull so much from my imagination to enhance some of these tracks. “Turn Blue” in particular didn’t earn that big bombastic ending it tried to give itself, even though I liked the track. It’s not a great album, hence the 3.5, but I enjoyed it enough (& I got really into the instrumentation on a few tracks) to the point where I think I’m justified in bumping it up to a 4. It could go down in the future, but this just clicked for me on a first listen.
P.S.: I couldn’t figure out where to slide this in, so I’ll just say that I think this album uses the intensity of the percussion in a way that reminds me a lot of Daft Punk, and it’s partially what stopped a lot of the tracks from feeling too stale over time – simple production trick, but extremely effective when done the right way. If it weren’t for that, and other little Bowie-adjacent touches that keep the tracks fresh, I’d probably just be at a 3. Still, I feel good with the 4.
Elton John
5/5
I’m at a 5.
It was well worth the 387-day break between “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” and this album; these are the only two Elton John albums on the list, and I feel like I need to listen to the man’s whole discography after this one. This is not as fun (and thankfully not as long) as Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t feel as impactful in some fashion.
Tiny Dancer is the obvious standout here, but I’ve never heard the rest of the songs on this album – I loved almost every single one of them, save for “Goodbye”, which, while haunting & a good track, feels TOO depressingly sad as the closer, even for an album that’s generally steeped in sad-ish songs. What strikes me the most about this album is how not poppy it is; I wrote this down while listening to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (though I didn’t include it on the website at the time), but whenever I think of Elton John, I’m expecting a bunch of songs similar to stuff like I’m Still Standing or Don’t Go Breaking My Heart; the big poppy hits that he’s kind of nestled into for the last decade, at least whenever he does collaborations. That diminishes what kind of artist Elton John is though, and I think this album proves that at a higher level than Goodbye Yellow Brick Road did, in terms of the general emotional impact relative to each song.
Granted, that’s a whole year of “only remembering the stuff I really, really liked off of that album” striking my brain, but GYBR (does anyone type this??) is a relatively upbeat album compared to this one; this is where Bernie Taupin & Elton John get to flex their storytelling ability, whether it’s in Taupin’s lyrics, or Elton’s vocals, or in the orchestration that gives each song a cinematic flourish that I’m just a sucker for. I’d be remiss to not acknowledge the problematic nature of “Indian Sunset”, which I find to honestly be the biggest & brightest example of that cinematic flair, arguably moreso than Tiny Dancer for me. Inherently, the biggest red flag in the song is the use of the term “red man” in referring to the Native Americans, but the other red flag is simply letting two white British men decide to write a song with historical inaccuracies & stereotypes about the Oklahoma Territory, the Trail of Tears, and that general time period. With that said, I can’t help but feel like the two truly had the best of intentions when writing the track, and I think the general feel of the imagery & the story they’re trying to tell via the vocals & orchestration creates the emotional impact they’re going for, and hopefully gets the point across of “hey, the colonization and everything really fucking sucked, actually”.
Ultimately, I think it’s just a fabulous album, and picking between this and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is a coin flip – they’re both doing different things, and I can’t truly compare them directly to each other. It should come as no surprise that this is a 5 – I’m really sad that there’s not more Elton John on the list, but hopefully he’ll have a surprise feature or two somewhere along the next… oh, 607 or so albums. Surely, there’s at least one? Either way, I owe it to myself to listen to the rest of his 70s stuff at the very least.
Quicksilver Messenger Service
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll surprisingly bump up to a 5.
From the album cover, I sort of assumed we’d get country music, and I was dead wrong – this is psychedelic rock, recorded seemingly live, and as such, I think there was a slight collective PTSD from that endlessly long and rather drab Grateful Dead album we got a while ago. Not a bad album, mind you, but a really fucking boring one. It did not help that the first 6 tracks of this are a 25 minute setpiece riffing on one track.
Thank the good lord above that these guys know how to make 25 minutes actually sound captivating – I actually really, really enjoyed the opening suite that starts this album. It is just one long extended riff on a track, and therefore, maybe the longest cover I’ve ever heard, but they do a great job of keeping it fresh. It certainly helps that each little changeup is its own track here, to keep those changes really obvious, and to stop it from *feeling* like a 25 minute slog. Each individual segment does have its own vibe, and I really, really enjoyed “When You Love” in particular, just for being totally eerie as hell, especially when the audience noises come in.
Mona is fine. It’s sort of Hendrix-y, but a bit too lowkey, without being fully in harmony, & it doesn’t really get its own conclusion, which threw me off. It is part of another 3-track set though, and Mona’s shortcomings are quickly resolved by both “Maiden of the Cancer Moon” & “Calvary”, which both really clicked for me. The former feels very Hendrix-y, even with how short it is – it finds the harmonization between everyone and the energy that “Mona” doesn’t. Calvary is a remarkably strong 13-minute track that has a really nice, building, swirling structure reminiscent of Western movies and militaristic soundscapes, before sort of settling into a more serene & ethereal tone for its final 5 minutes – a calm after the storm, if you will.
I would’ve ended the album there, mainly because the Happy Trails cover falls flat on its face as a final track after all that, but regardless… I dunno, I really enjoyed this. This is, at its very basic core, just 50 minutes of a jam session, but it does feel infinitely better than that Grateful Dead album that we all had a bit of an ick towards, and I’m just glad they’re flexing their technical chops in a more fulfilling way that doesn’t feel self-serving and pretentiously artsy. It’s probably no less than a 3 – I think the people giving this a 1 or a 2 on the site either have no patience for these sorts of albums, or they just really did not pay enough attention to care about the little details that I found captivating. Realistically, it’s definitely not a flat 5, since it does have a little bit too much empty air at times, but I feel no shame in giving it the bump; I liked it a lot, and for 1969, I think this is about as good as you can ask for in terms of “50 minute jam session” albums.
Sonic Youth
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4.
I haven’t heard of Sonic Youth until today, so I had literally no expectations going into this one. I was just sort of hoping it would be good 90s indie rock, and I think it succeeds at that. However, I also think this album just doesn’t commit hard enough to the sound it’s trying to go for, and when it does fully commit, it overcommits to the point of near-parody (pointing directly at the wall of sound on “On the Strip” that would make Phil Spector rise from the depths of hell if it could). In a sense, this is pretty good indie rock, but it’s also trying to be grunge, punk, & straight rock all at once, and it cannot decide on a clear cut universal sound throughout the album.
It’s not bad at all though, & they’re pretty proficient at all the styles they try, and that’s mainly why I’m at a 4 – for as indecisive as these guys are about their style, the tracks, for the most part, still shine through to have at least one good moment, even on the flatter tracks. The only one I really, really hated was “Orange Rolls, Angel's Spit”, and even that has a pretty good guitar solo around the 2:31 mark in that track. This album shines at its best when the band does know what it wants to do, and keeps a consistent tone for a few tracks, probably best exemplified by the stretch of “Theresa’s Sound-World” to “Youth Against Fascism” (again, save for “Orange Rolls”). The album sort of falls down after that, save for the excellent “Chapel Hill”, but it never really got boring.
For a first impression of Sonic Youth, I’m left… not underwhelmed, but I feel like I’ve gotten a good appetizer that isn’t cooked as well as it usually is. I hear the potential these guys have, and I do want to check out another album from them. They’ve probably got better stuff, and even then, I thought this was still good. Not overwhelmingly great, but I enjoyed a lot of the instrumentation, vocals, and lyricism here to the point where I feel good bumping it up to a 4. You can’t hit on every track, but if you can hit on over half of your tracks, while still providing some good moments on those flatter tracks, then you’ve still made a pretty strong album.
Elvis Costello
4/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump down to a 4.
It’s a good album – certainly a much better one than “Brutal Youth” was for me, and for a while, I was at a 5. However, I think the album does sort of stagnate to the point where even though the individual tracks are good, it does become… not “boring” per se, but there is an impatience & a desire for something that feels different, which slowly grew for me to the point where all the nitpicks started to add up, and the entire album suffered because of it.
I do like every single track here; there’s not a bad one at all, and for the most part, I think there’s a strong harmony between the lyrics, vocals, and instrumental, even if it’s occasionally skewed to be a bit cheesy in one of those 3 aspects. However, my ear became especially attentive towards the general structure of each track, and that’s where the impatience grew – Elvis Costello’s criminal sin on this album is that every single track, for the most part, has the exact same structure, down to the outro. Verse / Chorus / Verse / Chorus / Verse / Outro (with one repeating line for about 30-45 seconds). At some point, my attentive ears couldn’t ignore it, and it just became the thing I noticed on every track.
Does that mean it’s a bad structure? No, not at all – realistically, almost every modern pop / rock song has this sort of structure. It’s all about how you disguise it & make it sound entertaining, and for as good as the instrumental/vocals/lyrics are on this album, I don’t think it’s disguised enough, nor is it quite entertaining enough (i.e., full harmony of the 3) in a way that keeps each track as fresh as it could be, hence my slow, boiling impatience for something different, because I gave it a lot of leeway before it finally bit at me.
With that said, the album is still remarkably good, and honestly, I wish I could leave it at a 4.5, because I don’t think the repetitive structure is *that* big of a boon on the album. It is, however, enough to stop me from giving this a full 5. I’ll still give it a lot of praise – for 1977, this does feel like a great showcase of both the past and what was to come in the 80s & arguably the 90s; I hear a lot of Rob Thomas in Elvis Costello, and Matchbox 20’s general soundscape is something I’ve been waiting for throughout this entire stretch. This album did get remarkably close to that, in a 70s form, and I think it does a great job of making hybrids between rock / pop & everything inbetween, even though I do wish it leaned a bit more into the full blown rock side of it. I liked this a lot – if it weren’t for the structure thing, I’d be at a 5, but it’s just too prevalent an issue for me to ignore, hence the 4. A very very good 4, though.
Mariah Carey
4/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump down to a 4, but I was definitely at a 5 for a while, and it could easily go back up someday.
A while back, I looked at the list – I imagine most people tend to, especially when they’re almost 400 albums in & pretty deeply entrenched & committed to finishing the list. I did a little CTRL+F, and I looked for Mariah Carey, because I kinda figured she’d have to have one, and I fully expected it to be Daydream. Instead, it was this album, and that’s stuck with me – Daydream is the one with Fantasy, One Sweet Day, Always Be My Baby, and some of the other massive hits, and it’s the one that I would think of when noting her presence as one of the biggest artists of the 1990s. Mariah herself has apparently called THIS album her magnum opus, which surprises me. The only track I knew off of this album was the title track, Butterfly, which is a seminal 90s ballad as far as I’m concerned. Past that, though… nobody really talks about the other singles (or tracks) on this album. They don’t really come up in “best of” conversations, and even now, after listening, I’m still a bit baffled about why Daydream wasn’t the pick here.
Granted, I’m only baffled because I’m a sucker for pure pop, and this is not quite pure pop – this is pop with far more of an R&B/hip-hop blend, and when it hits, it REALLY fucking hits. There are some great tracks on this album, and I can’t say I ever really disliked any of them. It hits 12 for 12 in terms of like, enjoyability & easy listening, which is what I would expect from a Mariah Carey album. On that count, this album was probably always bound to get at least a 4 from me. However, I do think this suffers from not feeling as timeless as it could be – this production is heavily stuck in 1997, and while it might work for something seminal like Jagged Little Pill, it doesn’t quite work as well here when Mariah just has other songs that actively ARE timeless.
That lack of “timelessness” links up to her vocals as well – besides Butterfly (which is again, all-timer as far as I’m concerned) and a few other tracks, I find her to be a bit… “breathy” on this album. Granted, who the fuck am I to critique Mariah Carey’s vocals, but I only say she’s “breathy” in the sense that so many of the choruses & bridges, which have great lyrics, tend to be buried by the production, instrumentals, and her own backing vocals – just enough to make her main vocals, normally a bit more potent & present in the mix on her biggest hits, feel a little lost in the shuffle, and it stops them from having the same impact that they could.
The other thing knocking this album down for me is in how many of the tracks here are indeed big bombastic 4 to 5 minute long Celine Dion-esque ballads – Walter Afanasieff, one of the producers of this album, may as well be the Jack Antonoff of the 80s & 90s. Just look at the guy’s work. He is immensely prolific for Mariah’s career, and some of my favorite songs ever by her are steeped in his production. However, I do think Walter sort of stumbles here – I think he let Mariah get a bit self-indulgent around the middle of the album, where so, so many of the songs settle into a “first or second minute is the whole track” sort of phase that slowly becomes a bit tiring to listen to, no matter how great Mariah’s vocals are on those tracks. The same thing rings true with the Prince cover – it’s a great cover, but it’s an absolute momentum stopper on the album for me, because it’s just so tonally different from what surrounds it, and at 7 minutes, it really sucks the air out of the room, and stops “Outside” from truly hitting as the great album closer that it is.
All of that said, it’s still Mariah Carey in the 90s, and I’m still a sucker for a lot of this album’s quirks, which is why I’m still at a 4.5 bumped down to a 4 – for as much as I ripped into this album hitting a “most of the tracks feel kinda similar” point, there’s something about them in the moment, where you’re just absolutely stuck in a zen state, mesmerized for a while about how someone can sound THIS goddamn good, with some pretty strong lyrics, where none of those complaints I had truly matter. It’s only when this album escapes that zen state (usually mid-track) where it starts to fall apart a bit, but I was in the zen state for most of the tracks for a long, long while there.
I can hear every other female pop star of the mid to late 90s throughout this album, but there’s a few obvious influences in particular – “Fourth of July” feels a lot like a Janet Jackson track, and “Fly Away (Butterfly Reprise)” is remarkably similar to “Together Again”, even though Janet’s album came out after this one. There’s a bit of Celine Dion, obviously, but I’m surprised at how much of this album feels like Whitney Houston’s late 90s / early 2000s stuff; “Breakdown”, “Baby Doll” & “Close My Eyes” in particular struck me as very Whitney-esque, which makes it even more criminal she doesn’t have a damn album on this list. Truly insane to me.
Realistically, I’ve almost talked myself back up into a 5, but trust me; I can understand why people might give this a 3, a 2, or even a 1. It’s a bit self-indulgent at times, Mariah’s not as captivating as she could be, and its production, for as good as I think it is, feels remarkably dated 28 years later, which sticks out compared to her bigger hits. Honestly, though, there’s not a single bad individual track here as far as I’m concerned, just an album experience that collapses a bit under its own weight and ambition. It is a style & and a time period that I’m just an absolute sucker for – this is directly right at that 4.5 line for me, but this does have enough little flaws that build up over time to the point where I have to bump it down to a 4 on a first listen, but if it ever clicks better on another day, I’m shooting straight up to a 5. I totally recommend it regardless -- it is unabashedly my style, and I won't apologize for that.
It still probably should’ve been Daydream, though. (P.S., shoutout to the Mobb Deep sample on "The Roof". Sick, sick sample flip.)
Eagles
5/5
I’m at a 10.
I always assumed this would get high marks from me whenever it came up – my dirty little secret is that I’ve never listened to the full album. Everyone on the planet knows “Hotel California”, but past that, I’ve never listened to another Eagles song ever. I know about the talents of Don Henley, Joe Walsh, and the rest of the band, and I know that a compilation album of theirs is the best-selling album of all time in the U.S., so I figured the talent had to be potent, and the hype had to make sense. I always assumed this was going to be a 4 at bare minimum.
Boy, I wasn’t expecting this though – this is up there with Band on the Run for me as a seminal 70s album, and that’s on a first listen. Someone else has probably written words that could praise these compositions better than I ever could. Perhaps there’s an irony that I’ll end up writing more about Mariah Carey than I will about an album like this, but I just… ugh. The only real “eh” here is “Pretty Maids All in a Row”, and even then, I still liked that one a lot. Every other track hits like crack – there isn’t a miss among the other 8, and that includes the lovely orchestration of “Wasted Time (Reprise)”.
It’s about as good of a 70s rock album as I’ve ever heard with this sort of style – it’s got a nice country lean that just attunes me even more to it, and I truly think the mixing is perfect. Every single instrument sounds more crisp than I’ve heard on almost any other 70s album, and it just makes each track feel that much better to listen to. The lyrics are great too, and the emotion gets pulled out from the vocals in a way that makes them both feel even better. I’m serious when I say that there hasn’t been a 70s rock album that’s worked this well for me since Band on the Run, and in terms of an initial impact, I feel oddly close to how Rumours absolutely blew me away.
I can’t bottle up that feeling into words that can truly aptly describe my currently rattled brain, but just know that this is a high, high recommendation. I have been sleeping on the Eagles for far too long, and I need to listen to more of their stuff. They are far, far beyond just “Hotel California” as a single song, and even if most of the tracks here do qualify under “70s dad rock”, I can only hope the rest of their discography is just as good “70s dad rock”, because I’ll rock with it as long as it rocks. As far as this album goes, this is a 10, through and through – just a fantastic album.
The Rolling Stones
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
Really, it’s only because the lyricism of “Brown Sugar” just gives me a bit of an ick, even though the energy on that track is fabulous instrumentally. That, and I think “Sway” was a little early in the album, and felt like a sort of artificial attempt to be bombastic so early on, and it just didn’t click for me. Should’ve been later in the album. Past that though, once this album really gets going on Wild Horses, it never stops – those last 8 tracks are a fantastic showcase of the Rolling Stones at what could arguably be their peak. This is only the second time we’ve gotten them on this list, and the first time in almost a year, so my experience with their repertoire is remarkably limited, but this is really good stuff.
Mick Jagger, Keith Richards & the rest of the band have never sounded better to me, and perhaps it’s because so much of this album is secretly deeply rooted in country, even more so than Beggars Banquet was. Look no further than Dead Flowers, which might be my song of the album, though there’s genuinely really not a bad choice; Can’t You Hear Me Knocking has that super cool 4 minute samba-inspired instrumental with the sax rolling, Bitch is just pure classic rock, I Got The Blues has a really nice spiritual vibe only accentuated by the organ solo, Sister Morphine is a great example of how to make drug addiction sound reprehensible (with great imagery to boot), and Moonlight Mile is just a stellar closing track.
Ultimately, the highs of this album are really, really high, and that’s why I feel good about bumping this up to a 5, even if the first 2 tracks didn’t vibe for me super well. It’s a breezy 46 minutes (well, OK, more like 38 for me), and it just makes me want to get even more of the Stones – call me Thanos, perhaps. I enjoyed the hell out of that.
Pink Floyd
5/5
That’s a 10.
Going into this, I only had ever heard “Wish You Were Here”, and even then, I mainly knew it from, oddly enough, the Ninja Sex Party cover, which I’ve listened to more times than the original. It’s a great cover, sue me. However, listening to it on this first runthrough of the full album, with the context of everything that surrounds it… yeah, the original is miles ahead. The whole album is a masterpiece.
Grieving someone who is still alive is a curse afforded only to those with such empathy for the wellbeing of others that it affects them personally. (Yes, this includes Roger Waters, despite how much of a dickhead he is nowadays.) It is a curse that I have held a few more times than I’d care to admit, and it’s a curse that this album displays in a way that I haven’t necessarily heard captured in musical form. Granted, this is grief with a tinge of celebration, and perhaps some relief that Syd Barrett didn’t truly get caught up in the machinations of the machine & the executives that the rest of the band so artfully complain about on this album… but it’s still grief.
It’s grief that other people can & likely will put into better words than I ever could – I’ve been trying to write something for maybe 30 minutes now, in an effort to put my full thoughts into words, and I keep staring at this blinking text cursor rattle my brain. All I know is that Pink Floyd knew how the hell to put that grief into musicality that may never ever be touched or replicated. There’s not a missed note, beat, or lyric through the 44 minutes this album goes for, and it feels like a privilege that I get to listen to such a grand representation of a cruel, cruel curse.
It’s a fabulous album, and it certainly ranks within the top 5 of all the 401 albums we’ve now gotten, at least for me. It’s a 10 – just go listen to it. No words can do it justice.
Johnny Cash
5/5
I’m at another 10.
I’ve only ever known the cover of “Hurt” from this album – it’s immensely famous, and it’s a track that Johnny Cash basically stole, in brilliant fashion. I never knew it was only the second track here, though. I’ve always assumed it was the closer, because it feels so poignant and so… final. I’m so very, very glad that it’s not though, because this album is structured in such a way that it works perfectly in conjunction with “The Man Comes Around” as the opener, and arguably creates a narrative throughout where Johnny is trying to atone for those sins so present and so fruitfully captured on that cover of “Hurt”. From Simon & Garfunkel, to Sting, to Depeche Mode, & ironically enough, the Eagles, as well as scattering of rerecordings of covers he already did, it’s just a stellar 51 minutes. It leaves me with the same sense of “getting it” as I had after listening to Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged album. I truly do get what Johnny Cash meant to people now, and in particular, what he likely meant to my dad.
The thing that strikes me the most about this album, besides the excellent song choices to cover, most of which I’ve never actually heard the originals of, is in its intimacy. There’s no bombastic backing bands here & no intense instrumentation (save for the piano on “Hurt”) – just pure, stripped down music, left to the barebones machinations of a guitar, whatever else was lying around, and Johnny Cash’s voice. In this gravelly, withered state, it arguably sounds more impactful here than at any other point in his life. It’s the core instrument, and it’s on full, vulnerable display. It gives each and every track a gravitas that has only ever been matched, to my ears, by Leonard Cohen on “You Want It Darker”, and even then, Johnny’s vocals still have a musicality and a natural charisma to them that elevates them higher.
If there is a God, which Johnny Cash so desperately prays to throughout this album, then let him bless Rick Rubin for making sure Johnny Cash still had a voice throughout the final 7 to 8 years of his life, & bless Johnny Cash for just laying it all out on what he knew would likely be his final album in his lifetime. It’s a gift, a treasure, and a privilege to listen to this, truly. Easy, easy 10.
Calexico
4/5
I’m at a 4, and it’s a 4 that feels very relevant.
It doesn’t become super apparent until “Across the Wire” hits you over the head with it, but this is an album centered around the process of immigrating from Mexico to the U.S., with the hopes of a greater & better life. It’s not always telling that story, but for the most part, looking back at the lyrics of the first 10 tracks makes it readily apparent (especially Sunken Waltz, which doesn’t click well as an opener, but makes a lot of sense going back to it). Given all of the current ongoings with the Trump administration, this feels like a story that needs to be told, even with the downer ending of our protagonist getting caught, jailed, & imprisoned in chains. This album doesn’t do a *great* job of telling the story, and I do wish the lyricism had more of a personalized feel as opposed to a broader “anyone can be this guy” sort of characterization, but I respect it for telling the story regardless.
From a musical standpoint, while I do think the album is a bit scattered throughout the first 10 tracks as it tries to find its footing, the soundscapes are great – the mix of Afro-Latin instrumentation, Spanish guitar, blues, jazz, & electronica creates a super cool blend that I’m not sure has been captured very often in music. Albums like this are probably out there, but I’ve never really heard one that sounds like this, with a consistency in capturing the vibe, even if the tracks themselves can feel a little flatter or not as engaging. I thought it was a really enjoyable 48 minutes, even if the album had plenty of ups and downs along the way – the instrumentals clicked super well for me, but the tracks with vocals felt a little bit hit & miss, just for the lyricism thing I mentioned earlier.
It’s far from a perfect album, but the story it tells & the pride it takes in showcasing its sound is so desperately needed in today’s climate – obviously, the downer ending feels harsh, and perhaps far too real in the face of everything currently going on, but its realism should act as a rallying cry to avoid these sorts of sad endings. I really liked it, and while it’s not at a 5, it feels like it should be no less than a 3 – I’m at a 4 because it just felt really fresh & really cool to me. It’s a highly recommended album.
Miles Davis
5/5
I'm at a 5, but I do think this is the weakest of the Miles Davis albums we've gotten so far.
This is, from a technical standpoint, *really* impressive jazz work, and the instrumentation & experimentation it goes for does feel like a natural evolution from “In A Silent Way” – when we got that album, I said that “if Bitches Brew is indeed this even better, I cannot wait for that to pop up on the list”. Well, it popped up, and even though I do like this album, I think it suffers from two things that almost dragged me down from a 5.
The first is obviously the length; 93 minutes is a long ask for jazz like this – it’s double the runtime of “In A Silent Way”, and with tracks going as long as 27 minutes, I think Miles Davis himself might've been sipping that brew, because it is HARD to make jazz sound compelling for 27 minutes, even for someone as good as him. I couldn’t even listen to the album in one full sitting; I had to break it up between the first two tracks and the last 4.
The second is the fact that this is a mostly improvised album; few strokes of structure along the way, but for the most part, this is him & his crew riffing. It’s not a bad approach; I love the idea of letting the music take you wherever you think it should go, but the issue comes in the structures being a little too flimsy. More bluntly, I think too many people are stepping on each other’s toes, and it doesn’t create a good hierarchy of instrumentation, in such a way where everything feels too chaotic, too disjointed, and there’s never really a “dominant” lead instrument for too long on any of the tracks. Sure, some cut through more prominently like the lead sax (or trumpet, or whatever brass instrument it was), but it constantly feels like a fight between the guitar, piano, and the brass for the lead instrument. That structure might work for some people, and I can totally understand why, but for my tastes, I gave it a lot of leeway, and I just think the album never quite found the same groove as the other 3 Miles Davis albums we’ve gotten so far.
When I wrote my review on “In A Silent Way”, I said the album succeeded in its simplicity – it never went risky, and it played itself super safe. The balance between the traditional jazz & the electric guitar & the keyboards was really strong, and I think this album throws that balance out the window in a way that’s just a little too forceful for my tastes (or for my expectations). It’s not bad at all; it sounds like I’m ripping into it, but this is still a fantastic listen that’s admirable for what it’s going for, but just a little too chaotic for me. I imagine the reasons I’ve laid out are why this has the lowest rating on the website of all the Miles Davis albums we’ve gotten so far. It’s a big leap in ambition that landed on a wet spot and never quite found its footing, but still landed nevertheless -- it's a 5, but just barely for me.
4/5
I’m at a pretty good 4.
River of Orchids is a really awkward tonesetter that doesn’t match with the rest of the album, which is realistically just a big tribute album to the “weirder” side of the Beatles – a lot of these tracks are steeped in 70s-style production sensibilities, just with the fidelity, clarity, and advances in audio that 1999 provides. From “I’d Like That” onward, this whole thing really clicked for me; sometimes the lyricism is a little “I’m 13 & this is deep”-coded, but the instrumentation and vocals are great throughout.
Beyond just “weird Beatles” though, this leans into a range of other 70s/80s/90s artists, whether it’s Steely Dan, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, any number of prog rock bands of the era, and even just a hint of Nirvana. It’s a unique blend of artists & styles that makes the album feel fresh, and while a few tracks don’t click as well, none of the tracks after the first one feel unimportant, and it makes the album experience feel really good.
It’s not up to a 5 for me – I think a few too many tracks settle into a repetitive phase that brings them down at an individual level, but the entire flow of the album, the production, the lyricism, and occasionally the lyrics (especially on “Harvest Festival”) are all still great. It’s not exactly an album that takes the best advantage of being from 1999, but for a band that began in 1972, this feels about as contemporary as it could while still paying homage to what got them there. I really liked this; it’s a breezy 50 minutes, and I think it’s worth giving a 4.
Everything But The Girl
4/5
Realistically, I would love to hang this directly at a 3.5, because I don’t think it’s quite good enough for a 4, but I do think it’s better than a 3, so a 4 it is.
My immediate comparison that comes to mind is “Nick of Time” by Bonnie Raitt, in terms of the general structure & theming of the album. Hell, even instrumentally & vocally, I’d say there’s a lot of similarities. I bounced hard off of Nick of Time, even though it’s a totally technically sound album, simply because the luster of its soundscapes faded away really quickly, and the whole thing ended up feeling too plain.
This album nearly falls into that same trap, but manages to avoid it by doing one simple thing that Bonnie Raitt didn’t: even if the luster does fade away after enough time, it knows how to change up its instrumentation mid-song in such a way that the luster returns. To put it more bluntly, this album succeeds simply in feeling bigger, and selling its listener on that, without feeling overdone. I found the instrumentation here to have a bit of grandeur that wasn’t present on that Bonnie Raitt album, and it felt like it came more naturally. Maybe I’m just a sucker for the more sophisticated style this album gives off (hence the genre title of Sophisti-pop on Wikipedia), but compared to Nick of Time, I felt more captivated by each track, just on account of the instrumentation. Some points off for the drum machine though; some real drums would’ve made a few of these tracks pop off a lot more.
Thankfully, Tracey Thorn has an absolutely lovely voice that overrides a lot of my complaints about the drums; super reminiscent of Celine Dion when she goes into her more ballad-y tones, but her control just glides on a lot of these instrumentals for me. The biggest knock I can give to this album is the same thing others have echoed; a lot of these tracks do boil down to feel pretty similar, no matter how much the instrumentation or vocals hide it – there are some great lyrical moments on a few tracks (I really liked Lonesome For A Place I Know), but a lot of the tracks are lyrically bland enough that it becomes noticeable.
Hence, the 3.5 that I’m going to begrudgingly bump up to a 4; I can understand how someone might give this a 2 or a 1, because it might be boring to ears more attuned to metal/rock, or more poppier 80s stuff ala MJ or Cyndi Lauper or the like, but for my tastes, the calmer yet controlled tone of this album clicked really nicely. I don’t think it’s that great of an album, and just from the tone of Tracey Thorn’s voice, I have to imagine there’s a more captivating Everything But The Girl album that could’ve been on the list, but I enjoyed this one enough – it’s a fun listen, and if nothing else, it’s remarkably smooth.
(P.S.: It would’ve been a 3 without the sax, probably. Sue me.)
Leonard Cohen
5/5
I’m at a 5.
No big allegories relating this to an art museum or anything like that; it’s just excellent poetry put into musical form, and I really, REALLY enjoyed it. I’ve dabbled in poetry before; I’m not great at it, but sometimes I’d like to think I do alright. This is masterful poetry – Leonard Cohen has always done a good job of pulling out emotions from something in his songs, whether it’s his older wistful vocals & biblical allegories on “You Want it Darker” or the immensely dreary heartbreak present on most of “Songs of Love & Hate”, and this album proves no different.
This is thankfully a much brighter album, or at least not painted as darkly – a lot of these tracks are drenched in the more mysterious & painfully confusing moments of one’s life, but they usually have something sunshine-y scattered throughout, to keep the imagery rich & hopeful, even while acknowledging the sadness of it all. Honestly, most of that sunshine comes in the instrumentation, which is more varied & “musical” than what I can remember on the other two Leonard Cohen albums we’ve gotten.
Once again, I will fully understand someone giving this a 3, or a 2, or even a 1 – if you’re not big on lyricism, or you find his voice bland, or you just want something truly bright & happy & poppy, this isn’t it. You have to be in the right mood (and arguably the right timeframe, it’s a night album imo) to get it, but I think what’s here is significantly more digestible & “gettable” than the other two albums, which still feel drenched in life experiences I may never truly feel or understand. This feels like poetry you can analyze without having to go layers deep; it’s remarkably vivid, and his songwriting still shines. I really truly enjoyed this – it’s a 5 for me; not a high end 5, but a 5 nonetheless.
“So Long, Marianne” rules, by the way.
The Mothers Of Invention
4/5
I’m at a 4.
This is my first time listening to ANYTHING by Frank Zappa ever, so starting at the debut is probably a good point; I'm vaguely aware of his place in this general era of music, but I couldn't tell you the first thing about the guy before listening to this. I did enjoy this a lot, though.
Admittedly, the last 20 minutes or so of the album cloud & overshadow the first 40 minutes, and tried their hardest to do a Men in Black-esque mindwipe on me, which probably worked to some degree. It is impossible to talk about this album in full without acknowledging that the final 20 minutes feel like a glimpse into the very molecules of the drugs that powered so much of the 1960s, and those molecules seep their way through the music & into the mind, and it is… certainly a trip of sorts. I’m not sure how to feel about that part of the ride – I didn’t hate it, but I’m not sure it’s a trip I’d willingly hop onto again.
Those first 40 minutes are really good though, and they’re strong enough to keep this at a stable 4 – a lot of it is riffs on other artists of the 60s, especially on the folksier/hippie side of things, but there’s some doo-wop, rock & a little bit of the Beatles scattered throughout. “Go Cry on Somebody Else’s Shoulder” is the blatant obvious pastiche here, specifically of “Put Your Head On My Shoulder”, but the album works mainly because it plays these genres totally straight, in a very Weird Al-adjacent way that strikes a good chord with me. The best way to parody something is to do it as faithfully as possible, and Frank Zappa & friends here completely nail that vibe.
When they do play it totally straight though (namely on “Trouble Every Day”, the standout of the album for me), it just tells me that they could’ve REALLY done some great work without having to riff on the entire culture of the 60s to that point. Granted, this album wouldn’t be as good without it, but there are moments here where the writing feels contrarian, a little too loose, or just outright toxic in its negativity. It’s never *bad* writing, but it occasionally tries to punch below the belt a little too much, to the point that even Trey Parker & Matt Stone would probably tell him to dial it back.
Ultimately though, I liked it – for 1966 in particular, this feels well ahead of schedule. It’s far from perfect, but so much of what’s here in its experimentation & willingness to go against the grain feels innovative in a way that’s hard to describe, but once again, kind of easy to feel after listening to it. Apparently, Paul McCartney once said this album acted as one of the inspirations for Sgt. Pepper’s, so… I’m excited to get that one now. As far as this album goes though, it’s a solid, solid 4 for me -- no less than a 3.
Richard Thompson
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
I’m learning that I’m a sucker for vivid imagery in folksier singer-songwriter albums like this, but more than that, I’m a sucker for when the world reveals itself within a track. I love focusing on slices of life sometimes, but when a line just *clicks* and reveals so much beyond what’s being presented in the lyrics, those are the aha moments that stick with me and make me appreciate the quality of the songwriting.
This album does that plenty of times, and it’s probably why I’m really, really into it – it certainly helps that they pair that with great instrumentation that feels befitting and adds onto the atmosphere of each track instead of just being there for the sake of qualifying as music. It also helps that Linda Thompson sounds a lot like Emmylou Harris & her vocals harmonize brilliantly with Richard’s. I’m really stunned he has the first name basis on the album cover, since she has way more of a spotlight.
It’s not a perfect album; I do think this leans into sad themes a few too many times, which sort of contrasts with the brighter soundscape in a way that lends itself to quicker burnout potential. When it’s on one though, it’s a fantastic album – stuff like “Withered and Died”, “Down Where the Drunkards Roll” and especially “The End of the Rainbow” are heartrendingly sad, but so well written, composed & performed that I think it’s impossible not to admire them.
Hence, the 5, because I admire too much of this album to not give it that bump – the only track I’m down on is “Has He Got A Friend For Me”, simply because modern cynicism over guilt-driven manipulation makes that track read much differently now than it would’ve read in 1974, and even then, that might just be a personal thing. I think the rest of it is really good; a few tracks might lean into that “first minute” syndrome, but the quality of the performances and the imagery override any complaints I could bring up. It’s a really recommended listen; for me, it’s no less than a 4, and pretty easy to bump up to a 5.
Peter Frampton
5/5
I believe I’m at a 10.
Perhaps it’s the slight high of ending on the unbelievable closer that is “Do You Feel Like We Do”, but… man, that’s the blueprint for a live album right there. That’s exactly how you fucking do it – make sure the crowd is loud enough to hear, and let them have a presence, and let the music give them the energy to enhance the feel of the whole thing. It sure helps that the music itself was stellar – I’m normally big on lyrics, but when you’re at a live concert, it’s not like you can just pull up a lyric sheet (well, you can, but you’ll be exposed as a fraud probably), so I listened to this purely on the basis of the band, his vocals, and the energy of the crowd.
I cannot remember the last time a live album was THAT good. Granted, we haven’t gotten many, but the ones we have gotten always tend to pull back the crowd enough to make them a non-factor, have a few obvious cuts that ruin the flow, or have a lot of studio overdubbing that’s noticeable enough to sort of ruin the illusion of a “live album”. If there was any here, it must’ve been subtle or minor, because I’m convinced this was fully live all the way through – the only cut I could feel was on “Wind of Change”, and that track was probably my weakest one (that, or “Shine On”, oddly enough).
Other than those two tracks, which are both still fun listens, this feels like nothing short of a masterclass in terms of track variety, crowd control, and really, just how to perform live in general – Peter Frampton has a really nice voice that plays charismatically live (not sure about his studio work, since this is my first time ever listening to the guy), but it’s his guitar work that steals the show in combination with the rest of the band – that last track, as well as the cover of Jumpin Jack Flash are the two standout examples of it. On both, it seemed like the crowd was ready to hit a fever pitch that might literally cause a minor hit on a seismograph. Maybe that’s just an excellent job on acoustics & mics, but it felt indescribably electric, even as a recording – I can’t imagine what it would’ve been like in San Francisco.
I truly don’t have any major flaws here – maybe the one line about molestation on “It’s a Plain Shame”, and even then, I feel like I might be reading it wrong, somehow? It’s a weird line that seems like it’s from the perspective of a crazed fan that Frampton wants nothing to do with; still a strange train of thought, though. One line aside, and two “eh” tracks, it’s just a stellar 80 minutes, and I do feel like it’s reset the bar for my expectations of what live albums should be like on this list. Insanely good – a 10, through and through.
Jethro Tull
4/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I think I’m going to bump down to a 4.
Perhaps it’s just because I felt a little more zoned out while listening than I’ve felt like for the last few albums, but for as good as this was, it always found little pockets where it just sort of lost my attention for one reason or another. It could’ve been trying to decipher some of the more confusing lines in the first half, or getting a little lost in the instrumentation choices in the second half, but there was always something that just pulled me back enough to feel a bit broken by the album experience.
Granted, that’s not a major indictment on the tracks themselves or anything – from a pure listening standpoint, this is 42 minutes of great 70s rock, but more so an indictment of the amount of genre-blending within “rock” itself that permeates this album enough to make me feel a little dizzied and overwhelmed. This album can never fully decide which subgenre of rock it wants to settle into, and it makes for a slightly inconsistent brand throughout the whole thing that I was unable to really shake off – this album can go from acoustically-driven folksy Simon & Garfunkel-y style instrumentation, to heavier, Metallica-adjacent stuff, to regular 70s rock (ala the Frampton album we just got), and occasionally, a deeper dip into prog stylings. They all sound good, but it feels like a rotating door of styles that makes each track feel… just slightly off for me, in a way that’s hard to justify, but felt weird to my ears, I dunno.
I’ll say this – it’s incredibly close to staying at a 5, and it could get back up there someday, but it’s just a number of little things that add up for me; the “pockets of zoning out”, the inconsistency of “style” (just a personal thing), and perhaps I feel burned by the fact that the second half of the album has a such great consistency in tone & continuity with the Jesus-themed tracks, and the first half sort of drops it by Track 2. Even though most of the first 6 tracks are great, some of them are short & some of them feel tonally awkward next to each other. As an album experience, there’s just something nagging at me about the whole thing that’s bumping me down to a 4. It’s still a highly recommended 4, though – really strong stuff here, and it’s gonna kill me that I can’t place why it just feels slightly off.
DJ Shadow
5/5
That’s an easy 5.
This is a little more in the Fatboy Slim / Prodigy type of instrumental drum & bass album genre than it is a “hip hop instrumentals” album (ala MF DOOM’s Special Herbs), but I’m totally fine with that – this exceeded any and all expectations I had for it. It’s a breezy 60 minutes of some incredibly varied beats & soundscapes that feels innovative beyond its years, in a way that feels more attuned to the mid-2000s than 1996.
I really don’t have THAT much to say about it – a lot of my praise would come down to “really cool percussion” or “neat synth work” or “great sampling throughout” or “this sounds like this video game I really like”. It’s really just an audio journey that’s meant to be experienced with headphones in, ears attentive, eyes occasionally closed to bop your head to, and your hands available to hit some sick air drums.
If I have any knocks, it’s that some of the shorter, intermission-y tracks feel out of place (not the alien transmission ones, but stuff like “Untitled” & “Why Hip-Hop Sucks In '96”) & a few songs enter some repetitive states,but those are incredibly minor knocks – I really, really enjoyed this. It’s a wonderful listen, a great album experience, and a very welcome surprise for my ears; an album like this is the reason I’ve stuck with this for 412 albums so far, and it’s a very easy 5.
Bill Callahan
3/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I will sadly bump down to a 3, even though I did like a lot of this.
My “issues” with this album have nothing to do with the technical side of things – I love the tone of his voice, which feels like it’s constantly morphing into some mixture of Johnny Cash, Nick Drake, & Leonard Cohen, and feels remarkably comforting yet authoritative. I love the instrumentation on a lot of these tracks, with the percussion used to something rather close to perfection on a vast majority of the tracks, and the rest of the instruments enhance the mood provided by the vocals. I really love the lyricism on about half the tracks here – when the metaphors & imagery click, as they relate to animals & inner struggle between thoughts, actions & moods, they click in a way that paint some remarkably vivid pictures.
That’s a lot of praise for something I have to bump down to a 3, so what exactly IS the issue here? The issue, at least for me, comes in the fact that this album just circles the waters a bit too long on each track, making them either overstay their welcome, or overlap too much with other ones on the album. It’s done in a way that dilutes & homogenizes the whole thing just a bit too much, in a way that’s too… rehearsed, I suppose? There’s a track or two that feel stuck within the script he’s trying to give (namely “The Wind & The Dove” & “My Friend”), and he’s really stuck on trying to make that metaphor work, no matter how hard it is to decipher. The same feeling of being “stuck” applies on the last track, “Faith/Void”, and it applies to the whole thing besides the lyricism – at 9 minutes, that track really drags along in such a way where the beauty of it is lost, and the meaning just becomes a few lines he feels obligated to repeat to fill up time.
With all of that said, I hear the acclaim, and I can feel why the album got rave reviews in 2009, and why it’s on the list. I do think it’s been surpassed by other albums that do this style better, and tell their stories more concisely, to trim down the fat in ways that feel more compelling. It’s a very 70s-esque album for 2009, and I really admire that, especially in a year I know best for big pop hits. It’s a strong 3.5, but I can’t bump it up to a 4 right now for all that I mentioned, hence the 3. I do recommend it, though, and it could bump up to a 4 someday.
The Mothers Of Invention
3/5
I don’t know that I can put a number to that.
I’m typing this one right after finishing the album for the first time – not giving myself any time to reflect or really think about what I just spent the last 40 minutes on, and I am… sort of just lost. Not in a bad way, not in a good way, but in a way that just feels ethereal & liminal, and oddly discomfiting and perhaps a bit lonely. This is another one of Frank Zappa’s counter-culture “the 60s kinda suck and this whole hippie thing is bullshit” albums, but it’s done in such a way that lends no respect or credence to the material it mocks in the first place, save for maybe the Hendrix parody that I’ve never heard the original track of.
This feels like a GTA radio station from hell, mixed with a TV show that I’ve seen/shown once before during the Thursday variety streams: it lasted one episode, from 1969, and it’s called Turn-On. The point of that show was just strange rapidfire, short form satirical comedy with an absurd bend, weird electronica fever dream music backing it, no time to breathe, think, or ponder, & it would ultimately just slap you in the face with whatever punchline it wanted to give – rinse and repeat in 30 second bursts for 28 minutes. It was cancelled promptly because nobody got it, shortform was scary, and the material was… very, very strange for 1969. It’s a show I respect even though I found it awkward to sit through, a little dated, and certainly a bit surreal.
This album gives me that same feeling in musical form – maybe a bit more intentional & designed to elicit such a harsh and jarring response. It’s certainly more forceful than Turn-On is. As such, I have no idea if I can put a number to this. It’s not a 5 – it’s too avantgarde and I think some of the concepts / material within this album are a bit curmudgeonly, even as a satire of the 60s that Frank seemed to fucking despise. It’s not a 1 or 2, if only because I respect what this is going for, even if I tend to disagree at times. I guess I'm at a 3.5, but I don't know whether to bump it down to a 3 or up to a 4. Putting this on the same level as that Bill Callahan album we just got feels strange, wrong, and awkward, as with any album this might be compared to that I also gave a 3. Bumping it up to a 4 also feels weird to me, because I'm not sure it's that deserving of one, even for how much I admire this.
All I know for sure (and I’m not even sure if I do know anything at this point) is that Frank Zappa succeeded at realizing some sort of vision on this album. I’m just not sure if it’s a vision that was worth realizing; this is, by far, the strangest album we’ve gotten so far. This classifies as music, and there are some good tracks here, but for the most part, I’m left with… something.
I hesitate to bring up the “art gallery” comparison again, but I think it’s somewhat earned here: this feels like someone smashing a Banksy piece to bits and pieces just to try and paint over it and “fix” the art themselves. I feel like if that happened, most people would say the Banksy piece is a better, more technically sound piece of art, beloved to some degree. To smash it, however, provides a new canvas, perhaps uglier than the original, but one that might be appreciated all the same, if the attempt to “fix” it is good enough. I can’t say whether or not this album is “good enough” in the artistic sense – that’s for other people to mull about and debate over for years to come, but I do think it’s “good enough” in the sense that Frank Zappa got to make his art, regardless of opinion. It’s a 3.5 that, unfortunately, I'll bump down to a 3 for me – it's certainly worth listening to, but it just didn't strike me as well as it could have.
The Lemonheads
4/5
I’m right at a 4.
Wikipedia really shouldn’t call this grunge. It sets an expectation that immediately gets wiped away from the first strums of the guitar, and thankfully, settles into something that’s right down my alley – this is R.E.M. with the RPM turned up a bit, with a hint of Matchbox 20, the Goo Goo Dolls, or Counting Crows in there. There’s certainly some influence from grunge, especially in the guitar/percussion, but it’s not the driving sound/genre of the album, at least compared to what most people would call “90s grunge”.
This is the sort of alt-rock that I have a lot of love for, specifically because it’s a bit on the poppier side of things; give me a good chorus, some strong melodies in the verses, some catchy enough repeatable lyrics, and blend it with a band that knows how to play the instruments they’re given, and you can’t lose in my eyes. This album doesn’t always click on all of those, but it clicks a LOT of the time. The main reason I’m at a 4 is because the album does sort of get a bit stale around the middle – the structure of “cool acoustics with heavy percussion” gets a bit overplayed, and the lyricism and vocals don’t overcome that stigma, specifically around tracks 5-7. They’re still fun listens, but they’re just not as compelling to me for whatever reason. The same applies to the last 2 tracks on the original release; that cover from the musical Hair feels rather strange as the “ending” of the album – the Mrs. Robinson cover on the rerelease remedies that, but that original finish would’ve been a bit strange in 1992, I think.
Regardless, I did enjoy a lot of this – it’s right down my alley, and maybe with enough time, it could go up to a 5. For now, it’s a recommended 4, that feels like a bit of a “normal” cleanser to my ears after that Mothers of Invention album – that’s still a fine enough album, but I really needed something traditional today, and The Lemonheads came through. I gotta check out more from these guys, I think.
My Bloody Valentine
3/5
I’m at a 3, but I was surprisingly close to a 4 at points.
I tend to harp on the thought that “the first minute is the whole track” is a desperately negative thing, and it usually is – I find it to be an exercise that shows that a song is sometimes just an idea stretched out to fill time, with nothing really thought out past the first chorus. Shoegaze is the exact type of genre that leans into this philosophy as a tool for music to explore soundscapes through minor adjustments, and challenges the notion of “first minute = whole track” being inherently bad. If I’m being honest, as far as this album goes, it succeeded a few times – there are tracks here that I would classify as “first minute”-y tracks that really won me over, but it’s about a 50/50 split.
The last time we got a pure shoegaze album, to my memory, was “Nowhere” by Ride, released in 1990, and my initial assessment of shoegaze was that “it’s like leaving the reverb in as if it’s a smoke cloud from a fire; it just hangs around, and stays there, and it doesn’t really bother you, but it is kind of weird that it’s there”. This is a different variety of shoegaze, blended with more ethereal instrumentation & production to feel like the in- between phase of a lucid dream. The overblown guitars feel like the brain starting to stir awake, but whenever melodies pop in to cut through the mix, it’s a welcome remnant to grasp onto and really make something click.
It’s a very hit and miss effect (at its very worst on “nothing is”, which just droned for me as an exercise in madness), but when it works, it really works – there are about 4 or 5 tracks on this album I think I could go back to, just to try & capture that same feeling they gave me again. The other 4 or 5 tracks fall short of that same goal, and don’t inspire the same level of imagination, mainly because their instrumentation isn’t as captivating, and there’s never a chance to enter the zen state with them.
I do think I “get” shoegaze now, in a more proper way; apparently, these guys have two other albums on the big list, and if “Loveless” is this absolutely seminal 90s record and the pinnacle of this style that people claim it to be, I think it could be really good. For this, as a 1997 project dragged all the way into 2013 like it’s Duke Nukem Forever, I think it’s a fine enough showcase of the genre, and with maybe a little more time to reflect on each track and modernize them, this could’ve really shined through a bit more. For now, it’s a 3, with glimpses of a 4 for me, but too much inconsistency & a few too many “first minute”-y songs to get to that point. It is a recommended listen though; my “meh”s could be someone else’s “wow”s, and I guess that’s the beauty of a genre founded in noise as an instrument.
5/5
I’m at a 10. Obviously.
This is my first time hearing this album in full, and save for the title track (& When I’m Sixty-Four), my first time hearing or paying attention to a lot of these tracks. Yes, that includes “Lucy in The Sky with Diamonds”, which, on a true first listen, I can understand why they have never ever beaten the LSD allegations, & “A Day in the Life”, which is an absolutely stunning finale that I can’t find the words to praise. If there’s one thing I can appreciate this list for, it’s making me finally listen to the Beatles as album creators; it’s very easy to know all of the bigger hits, but I’ve never had an appreciation for the albums as complete projects until going through this. Hell, I’ve never really had an appreciation for the Beatles themselves until now – always an admiration of their status in pop culture, and an acknowledgement that music would not be the same without them, but never a full blown “holy shit, wow” until going through these albums.
This album, on a first pass, feels like a natural evolution of the soundscapes & production style of “A Hard Day’s Night”, “Rubber Soul”, and “Revolver” in their most polished & refined & bombastic way – granted, I’ve never listened to the latter two in full, so I can’t speak to if that’s actually true, but solely from what I’ve heard of their singles around this time, it just seems that way, perhaps with a hint more rock. That polish starts before you begin the album – even in the cover art that everyone on the planet has parodied since, the showmanship that’s present throughout this album makes itself known immediately, from those gaudy-as-hell military outfits, and their “past selves” literally to their right. Beatlemania is dead, and long live these bright colorful guys. It must’ve been striking as hell for 1967.
I don’t really wanna go on a big track by track analysis, nor do I want to go on another soliloquy about the brilliance of John, Paul, George, & Ringo – I’ve given them praise beyond belief for the other 3 albums we’ve gotten so far, and I’m sure I’ll give even more praise once Rubber Soul & Revolver do come up, if those albums are indeed as good as expected. As far as this whole project goes… man, it’s a hell of an album. Straight from the screams of Paul McCartney & the harmonization of the group to introduce themselves on the first track, all the way until the absolute brilliance of “A Day in the Life”, it’s just a marvelous 40 minutes.
Granted, this isn’t the best Beatles album we’ve gotten – some people will say this is their magnum opus, and while I can hear it, I sort of disagree with it. I think there are a few tracks here that feel sort of like afterthoughts; as such, they aren’t as concise & tight as stuff on the White Album or Abbey Road, and the album experience does suffer a little for it. I also think the concept isn’t taken as far and as fruitful as it could have been. This is Sgt. Pepper’s band, but we only really get an acknowledgement of the show they’re putting on at the start and the excellent reprise – a skit or two to really flesh out the concept would’ve done numbers for me. Then again, that’s not really the point of the album, is it? It's a rather loose frame that just allows the Beatles to sound "different" from expectations.
This is revolutionary in the sense of “high art concept album” done in a poppier form blended with rock, and it opened up the doors for the Beatles to experiment for the rest of their time together as a band, and probably made them all individually realize that the scope of their inevitable solo careers could be modeled on the ambitions this album set out for them. So, yes, this is the runway to the rest of the Beatles’ discography, both as a group, and as individual artists. However, it’s also the runway for literally everyone else to follow at the time, whether it’s in protest (like the Mothers of Invention album we quite literally got 3 days ago), in tribute (like the several versions of this album that have been done by groups of artists inspired by it), or in an effort to capture the same lightning in a bottle this must have given (and that list is too monumental to even count).
So, all that said, it’s a 10 – not quite at the same level as the White Album or Abbey Road for me, but a brilliant album nonetheless, with some of John & Paul’s finest songwriting, George’s most George-y song ever interrupting their flow in a positive way, and Ringo… I guess he hit some really nice notes on “With A Little Help From My Friends”, and his percussion has some standout moments. I gotta give Ringo more credit someday. Regardless, they’re all in fantastic harmony, and it produced a fantastic album. Long live those bright, goofy outfits.
P.S.: Joe Cocker’s version of “With A Little Help From My Friends” is a better track to me. That’s probably heresy, but I have more nostalgia with it, so I’m biased, sue me. Ringo's version is still pretty nice, though.
The Rolling Stones
5/5
I’m at another 10 – that was a fantastic album.
Nobody told me the Rolling Stones were like this, you know? This is the third time we've gotten them, and they get better every time for me. To say “70s rock band” feels like an understatement – it’s obviously the easiest way to describe them, but this album is just a wonderful blend of rock, country, blues, soul, and a lot of other genres with the right amount of guitar flair and heavier percussion to mold them into something that Mick Jagger could just glide on vocally, and for the rest of the band to work in a harmony that’s kind of indescribable.
I could type a lot of things that sound similar to what I wrote yesterday, when we got Sgt. Pepper’s, but I don’t want to tread on the same stuff – it all feels like a buzzword to me right now. It’s critic speak, and I don’t want to engage in that when the album just evoked something in the soul for me that feels hard to put into words. This feels like the type of album that was made for me, as a sort of endgame to all the Gram Parsons-driven country/rock hybrid albums we’ve been getting for the last 417 days, and I think it’s the best of them. Hell, when this blends with harmonica & sax to bring in a poppier vibe that evokes Stevie Wonder and others, it gets even better.
I’m sure someone else has the words for this – I don’t. I can only encourage other people to find the same zen state I did, because there is nothing like it. For someone else, it might just be “overrated ragtime/rock/blues/country that Mick Jagger sort of yells over”, and that’s fair enough – for me, it’s just that easy to find the rhythm and feel as in harmony with the band, more so than on any of the other albums from the Stones that we’ve gotten so far. It’s not a flawless album – there are lull spots, and one egregious use of the N word, but I understand why this is called the best Rolling Stones album by some people, and why the magazine gave it that much praise. I think it’s that damn good, and it’s a 10.
P.S.: “Stop Breaking Down” is a perfect track with headphones in. I will not hear otherwise.
The Cardigans
5/5
Well, that’s a 5.
Been a while since I’ve had an, “oh, this is THAT song” moment, but I sort of felt it coming with the 754 million plays that “Lovefool” has on Spotify. Truly cannot believe that wasn’t in my big playlist until now.
But, hey, that’s just one of the 11 tracks on here – how do the rest hold up? Well, I can safely confirm that, for my ears, this is the type of “fun” album we haven’t really gotten since that Scissor Sisters album, or at the very least, the type of instrumentation that’s just bubbly & happy, mixed with some rather sad lyricism full of self-doubt. I love a good “happy song / sad lyrics” combo when it’s done right, and the Cardigans know how to do it really well. I genuinely thought I hadn’t heard of them at all until now, but again, “Lovefool”.
There’s some super good standouts here for my ears – “Your New Cuckoo” feels like a super genuine opener about 2 people just falling in love with some city pop vibes, and I’m ok with buying into that. “Been It” is really catchy, reminiscent of “Girlfriend” by MJ, though it’s a bit repetitive over its last 90 seconds or so. “Never Recover” is awesome; big Teen Titans energy with a 60s feel, and it’s really easy to get caught in the groove of it. “Step on Me” has some devastatingly sad lyrics, but the instrumentation makes it feel really modern and a great listen. For some reason, the elevator music / hard rock structure of “Losers” really worked for me.
I think that cover of Iron Man deserves its own paragraph – it’s a super bold move to take such an iconic heavy metal track (which I’ve only really heard in passing, without paying super close attention to; it’ll be in the list, I’m sure of it) & make it a lo-fi lounge-y track that you might hear in a modern cozy indie game about like, serving coffee or something. I thought it was cool as hell, & for 1996, feels insanely timely for 2025. That exact style of production feels more relaxed & normal now, & I really wonder how they settled on that nearly 30 years ago.
I would’ve flipped “Great Divide” & “Choke” – “Choke” is a really nice track, and it has a bit of a “Billie Eilish does Mr. Blue Sky” vibe going for it that I think works great as a closer… if “Great Divide” didn’t exist. I think the glittery instrumentation on that track is lovely, I think the Sinatra-esque tone to the vocals and structure works really well, and as a sort of narrative ending to the abusive relationship talk that permeates this album, ending on a track that finally has some sort of happy positive conclusion would’ve felt satisfying.
Regardless, I really, REALLY liked this – it’s a breezy 39 minutes, a welcome pop cleanser with a hint of edge, & another one for the “this is THAT song” pile that will certainly continue to grow. It’s a super easy 5 for me, and I’m very glad it’s in the list; super deserved, and highly recommended. Great, great stuff here.
David Bowie
5/5
I’m at a 5.
This is the fifth David Bowie album we’ve gotten, and this is the third time I’ll be giving him a 5; big recovery from starting 0-2 with a 3 and a 4. This is also probably my favorite one we’ve gotten so far. I’d have to relisten to Low or Aladdin Sane to be absolutely certain, but considering those were both 4.5 bumped up to a 5, this one getting it right from the jump should say a lot.
If this is David Bowie’s cocaine album, then he picked the correct direction to go while he was on that shit – this is even more rock/American than Aladdin Sane was. When the guitars are rolling on this one, it feels about as even with a ZZ Top or Thin Lizzy-style band, one driven by just kickass guitar & percussion, and letting everything else build around that. I hesitate to invoke Paul McCartney & Wings, but this got around that point a few times.
For the record, I do recommend listening with headphones in, as opposed to like, stereo speakers or anything, just to get the full depth of the soundscape in your ears. It really does enhance the whole thing. That rings true for any album on the list, but I think it really did wonders here.
Station to Station is a stellar opener – 3 minutes just to get to any vocals, sure, but the sound design and pacing of the whole intro is really well done, so it flies by. The entire stretch before the switch-up halfway in feels like the closest I’ve heard David Bowie to doing a full blown prog rock song, so that was rad. When it does switch up, while the repetition eventually creeps in… man, that’s a really good switch the first time you hear it. The whole energy of the track shifts, and enters a smooth groove that glides the rest of the way. Rather sad lyricism, but a great track.
Golden Years is a bit lyrically confusing to me, but given that it was written for Elvis Presley of all people (I cannot IMAGINE what that room would’ve looked like), you can probably partially ignore them – it’s all in the charisma of the performance, and David Bowie certainly channels his best Elvis Presley for it. Really good pseudo rap flow to the whole thing too, and I thought it was cool as hell.
Word on a Wing is a bit preachy, but I admire the honesty that seems to be present in Bowie’s vocals – the lyricism does eventually start to feel repetitive and tread water, but I think it’s still an enjoyable listen. Probably my weakest track on the album, though. That gets partially remedied by TVC15 – while it ABSOLUTELY suffers from “first minute = whole song” syndrome in a way that would normally make my ears suffer, there’s something fun in the groove of the whole thing that made me just accept it for being what it was, letting loose, and really just enjoying the feel of the track. That’s probably what Bowie was going for, and I’m glad I let myself feel it before giving up on it.
Stay is TVC15 with an even funkier bend, and the entire soundscape is cool as hell, but those last 2 minutes are something really special that I think you can only really feel as a raw first listen one time. I do wish the second verse were better, just for my tastes, but paying attention to the lyrics at that point is like trying to find a rare bug on a roller coaster – ignore them and just enjoy the ride, you know?
Wild Is the Wind is a good closer – I do feel like Bowie tried just a hint too hard to capture the sort of 50s/60s soul/crooner vibe, and the reverb effect on his vocals wasn’t helping out either, but he sounds pretty good regardless, especially on the higher notes in the last 2 minutes. The instrumentation on that, with all the blended guitar & effective drum breaks, really clicked for me.
So, yeah, I have no real flaws – a few lull spots maybe, some occasional preachiness, and maybe a bit of repetition that pulls this down, but I think this is the sort of David Bowie album I’ve been waiting for. It’s his 70s rock / cocaine album, and I think it finds a groove that’s been missing from his other stuff for my ears (which has all still been really good); at 6 tracks, it’s concise with no filler, and it’s an awesome 40 minutes that blinks by once you get lost in that groove. Super easy 5 for me.
Everything But The Girl
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I'll bump up to a 4, but just barely.
On paper, I love the idea of blending Tracey Thorn’s excellent vocals on Idlewild with a more unique sound, aka the D&B / electronica of the mid/late 90s. There’s good beats here, and her vocals sound as strong as ever. The album sort of succeeds at finding a general baseline for its basslines, and in that sense, what’s here is a really competent 41 minutes of tracks. I did enjoy the album. For me, though, the issue is one that’s annoyingly simple to say, but hard to actually execute: the tracks just don’t go far enough.
This album is just missing part of the thrill that makes a roller coaster ride of an emphatic D&B track so compelling to listen to. Her vocals are there, and the basic beats are there, but we’re not leaning enough into the electronica aspects to really make each track go, at least for my tastes. Too many tracks on this album suffer from not going far enough, and too many tracks on this album suffer from simply not going anywhere at all, at least for long enough that it’s a noticeable issue.
4 tracks really stood out to me: “The Heart Remains a Child”, “Walking Wounded”, “Flipside”, and “Mirrorball”, and I suppose those tracks represent my other issue with the album; one that doesn’t necessarily matter as much, but one still bothering me all the same. There’s supposed to be a harmony that exists between lyrics, vocals, and instrumentation, and while this album has a safe enough harmony between the vocals and instrumentals, the songwriting chops that kept each track afloat on Idlewild are sort of thrown out here, save for those 4 tracks. It’s an unfortunate sacrifice to give more attention to the instrumentals/vocals, but with them feeling underbaked for my ears, it feels like an unnecessary one.
I’m digging into it a bit, but I still don’t think this is a bad album at all; I really liked it. For me, it’s just an undercooked one. I understand the desire to not fully sacrifice your sound and style to the D&B that permeates this album, but like… even Cher fucking used autotune on Believe, you know? Any kind of vocal effect would’ve done something to accommodate the electronica-infused production here, even if it was only for 5 seconds on each track. Either that, or just letting the instrumentation really explode and do its thing, as opposed to settling for a looping beat most of the time. Ironically, the "Wrong" remix present on the album partially remedies this issue (instrumentally, not vocally), but I hesitate to call it part of the main tracklist.
As far as the core 9 tracks go, this album’s got so much potential, but it never fully finds it for my tastes. With that said, the execution is still strong, and the album still has enough of a groove that I will BARELY bump this up to a 4. I really hope we get another album from them where they can fully perfect this for my tastes, but this is still fine enough all the same.
Public Enemy
4/5
I’m at a 4.
I dunno, maybe my expectations were a bit too sky high after the brilliance of both “It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back” & “Fear Of A Black Planet”, but this one fell a little shorter for me. I don’t think it’s in the production – the beats here are still good enough, though this clearly isn’t as up to par as those two albums. It’s not totally in Chuck D’s flows or lyrics, because his stuff is still sharp for the most part, but he does have moments where the energy just doesn’t feel as present. It’s partially in Flavor Flav’s, because he’s sort of relegated to a P. Diddy-esque hype man role ala “Ready to Die”, and his contributions to this one come across a little more bitter & angry compared to his stuff on the other two albums; I might just be missing something, though, who knows?
I’m not sure exactly what it is, but the closest thing I can come up with is just that the album’s subject matter just hasn’t aged particularly well. Sure, a lot of this still has a prescience to it, but it lacks the sort of timeless bite that makes the prescience have a point that really sticks. A lot of the complaints brought up here are valid, but much like Flavor Flav’s stuff, it’s rooted in a way that doesn’t address the core of the issue and just sort of fantasizes around it. That lack of a call to action, in a meaningful sense, something so blatantly present on the other two albums, feels replaced by a call to just sort of acknowledge it and hope someone listens. Once again though, I might just be missing something.
That’s not to say there’s no bite – the first 4 tracks are great, and “By the Time I Get to Arizona” is a fantastic track that contains the direction I wish this album had really, really stuck to, but a lot of this album does come across as flatter, especially the last 4 tracks (save, partially for “Shut ‘Em Down”). That’s NOT counting the Anthrax remix of Bring tha Noize, which is, for better or for worse, nu metal being born right there in 1991. That shit was rad.
With all that said, it’s still a great Public Enemy album, but something is just missing here – whether it really is the subject matter not aging as well, a more bitter tone to everything, or the production / storytelling not hitting the same level as the first two PE albums we got, it’s something noticeable enough for me to give them a 4 for the first time. I still recommend it, though. It’s a solid 52 minutes, and it’s still got Chuck D flowing like a motherfucker – when he’s rolling, there’s still an infectious energy that’s too damn good to ignore. He’s just not rolling as much on this one, hence the 4. Again, though, and I cannot stress this enough: I might just be missing something.
Neil Young & Crazy Horse
5/5
I’m at a 5.
I truly don’t know what went wrong with Rust Never Sleeps – did I just not have the tolerance for it? Was the folk half THAT bad for a guy who’s shown to have great songwriting chops in the several albums we’ve gotten since? It’s the only Neil Young album I haven’t given a 5, and I feel like I need to revisit it, given that it was the 7th album we got.
Regardless of all that, this is a stellar album; the only “meh” here is “The Losing End (When You're On)”, and I still thought it was a pretty solid track that just didn’t click for me. The rest of this is a great rock album, and Crazy Horse’s contributions that shined on the back half of Rust Never Sleeps are in full force here, arguably better, more fleshed out, and more grand, in a way that really enhances the album experience. Even with the two longer tracks on this album, both of which are excellent, this thing flew by. Neil Young’s vocals are great, though his lyricism is a bit flatter here than on Harvest or After The Gold Rush. The instrumentation is what sells this album by a mile – the extended guitar solos, the grunge-y feel (for 1969!), & the twangy hint of folk & country scattered into this really makes it work.
I don’t wanna go on a longer diatribe, because I think the music truly speaks for itself here; I just really, really liked this. I think it’s easily deserving of a 5, and it’s absolutely worth being on the list. Neil Young is really, REALLY good at this.
Cornershop
3/5
I’m at a 2.5 that will get the bump to a 3, because it’s not so bad as to warrant a 2.
I admire that this is on the list – it’s a good showcase of some Indian flair, especially in terms of 90s pop-ish stuff. It’s not an outright bad album, but… goddamn, it’s just kinda boring. Not even boring in the “this has no potential” way, but boring in the “each track just goes way too long” way. They met their potential early on a lot of these tracks, and kept dragging it out to the point where it just got less enjoyable the longer it went. That’s the biggest issue here; this did not need to be 54 minutes. The instrumental tracks that permeate this album are fine, but they go on and on, and it’s just… ugh.
Let me put it this way: it’s been a while since I sort of zoned out of an album. I love entering a zen state, where my attention is fully on the instrumentation, and I can feel in harmony with the tracks. I heavily dislike entering a zoned out state, where I’ve partially given up on the album and it turns into background noise after the first 30 seconds of a track. That’s where I ended up for most of the first half of the album, save for “Brimful of Asha” & “We’re in Yr Corner”. The back half is a little better – “Good Shit”, “Good to be on the Road Back Home”, and that cover of “Norwegian Wood” are nice, but the instrumental tracks on that back half are really, really bland (save for "It's Indian Tobacco My Friend", due to the loudness factor), compared to the vague experimentation present on the instrumentals in the first half.
This album just needed to be condensed – cut down the instrumentals, put focus on your best tracks (and hell, shorten some of them down too), and make this a really concise 30-35 minutes, as opposed to the slogfest of a 54 that it becomes. Hell, even the best tracks feel like they could’ve done a bit more; I didn’t listen to the Fatboy Slim remix of Brimful of Asha, but I have to imagine it does that “bit more” that was really missing for me. As it stands now, it’s just a flat album experience, with a few moments that sound really nice, but they’re few and far between, stuck in the crevasses of longer instrumental tracks that kill the mood. It’s a 2.5 that earns a 3 for its competency, but that’s as high as it goes.
Janelle Monáe
5/5
It’s a 10. It's probably higher, honestly.
Janelle Monae, Kansas City, Kansas native & featured artist on “We Are Young” by fun – also one of the pop artists of the 2010s that’s eluded me. Before listening to this, the only other track I really knew her for was “Make Me Feel”, but I always told myself I’d listen to her someday. Today is that day, and today is the day that truly proves that procrastination is a sin sent by the Devil, or whatever another religious equivalent is, or just whatever bad forces exist in the world. I was absolutely blown away by this album – this jumps right into the top 5 of all the albums we’ve gotten so far, in terms of ones that are new to me. I haven’t been ranking them like that, but an album like this makes me wish I were.
Right from the concert hall intro, letting you know you’re in for a play and a massive concept album, especially with the orchestration, it sets a tone that immediately goes into overdrive – those first 4 tracks are an electric experience that I cannot begin to describe, especially once “Locked Inside” drops the sample of the Rock With You drums. From there, it’s all about the worldbuilding, complemented by a myriad of genres and styles that are too immense to count, yet so perfectly executed. There’s some fabulous lyricism throughout this album, and while the story is hard to follow without really devoting energy to it, the broad strokes that get painted of this world shine through and make the narrative between Sir Greendown & Cindi (aka 57821) become obvious through just the music alone. I have always been a firm believer that lyricism matters, but I love an album where the music alone can tell a story like this. The lyrics simply enhance the experience, and I think they work in harmony in a way that very few albums with this intent & of this caliber have been able to match.
Janelle Monae is unbelievable, truly. Her vocals on this album are a gift, and she showcases them often enough that, by the end, it’s easy to take them for granted when she hits the final notes to close the album. I truly cannot praise them enough, nor can I praise this album enough – this is the type of shit that is right down my alley, and my procrastination towards her feels like a 15-year-stretch of wasted time. This is an unbelievable debut studio album, on par with (and probably surpassing, for my tastes) “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill”, and just as impactful.
Or so you’d think, anyway. The GRAMMYs rewarded Lauryn Hill in spades in 1999, and for this… they fucking let Usher’s Raymond v. Raymond beat this out for “Best Contemporary R&B Album”. Criminal on a level only matched by Macklemore somehow winning over good kid, m.A.A.d city, and arguably even worse. Past that, this album feels… underrated, somehow? Not many plays on Spotify, at least relative to what it feels like it should have given the quality here. For my money’s worth, I think this album will get the recognition it someday deserves, and Janelle Monae, by extension, who’s still chasing a damn GRAMMY. Just on a first listen alone, this gets a retroactive bump to one of the top 5 albums of the 2010s for me. Absolutely unbelievable – a 10/10, maybe a 15, maybe a 20, who really knows? It’s off the number scale for me, and it’s by far one of my favorite albums to discover on this list. An absolute delight, a long overdue introduction for me, and what will certainly be my catalyst to dive deeper into her discography. I’m out of adjectives – just listen to it. It’s beyond worth it. It’s a masterpiece, and I don’t use that word lightly.
The Avalanches
5/5
It’s a 5.
I got up, I hopped around, and I just felt the music once it became clear this was gonna be another sample heavy “plunderphonics” album, ala DJ Shadow, but with a much more electronica/synth/club bend, as opposed to the more hip-hop/trip-hop vibe of “Endtroducing…”.
Since I was literally just vibing that hard, I can’t really give any major critiques on the music or the samples – a few tracks were certainly less energetic than others, and a few of the shorter transitional tracks felt awkward, but… that’s a pretty damn fast 60 minutes. Super easy to get up and groove to, and when it nails a good beat drop / switch / whatever the hell, it feels kinda electric. The length of the album does bite at the experience a little, since a few tracks do feel like they peak after the first minute, and the overall energy isn’t quite as strong as a Fatboy Slim / Prodigy album, but it’s still pretty strong regardless.
I wish I could provide a more critical analysis, but when you’re in the groove, I don’t think critiques necessarily matter – someone else can break down the complexities of the 4/4 (or 3/4) beats here, but I think my foot feels the complexities of tapping just a bit too hard on the ground. I really, really enjoyed this – it’s worth the acclaim it gets, and it’s a highly recommended 5 from me.
Sparks
5/5
I’m at a 5.
I don’t know if it’s a 5 necessarily because of the music itself being a big bombastic knockout set of tracks – there are certainly standouts like “Thank God It's Not Christmas”, “Hasta Mañana, Monsieur” & “Equator”, but all in all, at a pure musical level, I wouldn’t classify this into the big top tier of any particular genre it’s going for. This is at a 5 because it’s a consistently great set of tracks, that does a fantastic job of blending a lot of musical genres (i.e. pop, glam rock, prog rock, blues, etc) & artists (i.e., Queen, Elton John, Pet Shop Boys, The Beatles, Green Day somehow, Genesis, etc) into a coherent sound that feels unlike anything else in 1974 that I’ve heard, one that vaguely transcends genres to be its own, totally unique thing, full of elements easy to pick out, but hard to put together. It fully succeeds even though it could totally have crumbled under the pressure to make it all fit together.
If I have any knocks, it’s oddly in the mixing – I could be wrong about this, but I think there’s a really subtle wall of sound effect in the mix that stopped the clarity of everything from feeling as clean as it could, and it rubbed me the wrong way throughout. It added a bit of depth, and gave the percussion a really cool feel, but it comes at the expense of… something. My best guess is that the extra “space” in the mix feels emptier, and adds a slightly cavernous feel that’s present, but never acknowledged. I can’t exactly place it, but it just bit at me that nothing felt quite as clean as it could. Perhaps that’s an intentional choice? It would certainly add to the avant-garde feel of it all – this album constantly feels like it’s one bad note away from having a track fall apart, but it balances itself throughout, and acts as a sort of triumph for complete experimentation.
So, yeah, I’m at a 5. It’s a really fun album, and perhaps with enough time, I can really appreciate these tracks more for just how technically sound they all are – this has to be a complex album to write sheet music for, and performing it is a different story, especially if they did any of these live. They all have good stories, they keep the band on their toes with all the tempo changes and pauses, and as a listener, I think the layering tricks in the mix, even with that “cavernous space”, is still pretty unique for the time. It’s a divisive album – I can totally hear how this might be a 3 for “average, weird rock that doesn’t know what genre it wants to be & nasally annoying vocals” or something, but I’m at a 5 because I admire how big of a swing it took and how well it stuck the landing. May joy and whimsy live on, I guess.
The Doors
5/5
It’s a very easy 5.
This is the third (and final) time we’ve pulled Jim Morrison and friends, and they’re gonna go 3 for 3 on getting 5’s. For a debut album, talk about knocking it out of the fucking park – that is 44 electric minutes of music. Not a single miss here, although perhaps my experience with “End of the Night” was enhanced a bit more by sitting in a pitch black room while listening to it.
I haven’t been able to write more than 2 or 3 paragraphs about any of the Doors albums we’ve gotten because they usually put me into such a zone while listening that I just melt into the music and appreciate the experience. That might still be true here, because I don’t know what to type about this that someone else hasn’t typed – it’s got great blues influence throughout, it’s a landmark piece of psychedelic rock, the gritty tone in Jim Morrison’s vocals glide on each track, and Smash Mouth totally ripped “Walkin on the Sun” from “Soul Kitchen” (ok, maybe nobody’s typed that last one).
I’ll say this – my main experience with “Light My Fire” before listening to the full 7 minute version on this album, was with… Stevie Wonder’s excellent, excellent cover, from his 1969 album “My Cherie Amour”. It’s an album that’s not on the list, but I think it’s worth listening to regardless. That cover of “Light My Fire” gave me a very different expectation from the version featured here, and honestly, they both stand up really well next to each other. I think Stevie Wonder somehow turning that into a big band swinger track with a jazzy vibe & room for a harmonica solo, when it originated with Jim Morrison’s sort of duller (but good!) vocals, and the craziest organ/guitar solo ever, is simply a testament to how radically music can be interpreted.
Anyway, this is a fantastic album – it's a great debut, an incredibly strong package from front to back, and for the last time we’re getting The Doors in this 1001 album experience, it’s a hell of a way to go out. It's a very, VERY easy 5.
The Teardrop Explodes
3/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump down to a 3.
It’s really not THAT bad, it just feels significantly “worse” than some of its other new wave contemporaries – I know Wikipedia will classify this as “post-punk neo-psychedelia”, but that doesn’t feel fair. I hesitate to say “dollar store Duran Duran demos”, but it feels that way at times.
When this album tries to feel bigger and introspective in its lyricism, it kinda falls flat on its face, whether it’s in the lyrics making no goddamn sense, the vocal performance not having the conviction to match what it’s going for, or the instrumentation just barely meshing with the lyrics. This album feels a lot better when it’s focused on the energy of the instrumentation, and once they really hone in on that during the back half of the album, it clicks a lot more. Granted, they kind of ruin all goodwill they built up with the absolutely mediocre closer of “When I Dream”, which feels like the biggest offender of “first minute” syndrome that there’s been in quite some time… but they don’t ruin it THAT badly – enough for me to lean fully downward on the 3.5 side of things, but it was already leaning that way regardless.
I understand why the average rating for this is like, a 2.89 – it’s repetitive, it takes a while to really get going, and a lot of the tracks are inconsistent in the execution in a way that drags down the experience. From a purely competent musical standpoint though, I love the sound of the synth work & percussion here, and sometimes the vocals really do mesh nicely. When it all comes together, it sounds good. Granted, it’s still never as good as say, Duran Duran or R.E.M. or Talking Heads, but it creeps into “fun cheesy 80s new wave” territory enough times that it kind of won me over, regardless of how it compares to its contemporaries.
So, yeah, it’s a 3.5 that I’ll bump down to a 3, but it’s got a good, earnest energy throughout, and you can tell they really are trying. Other bands and artists would perfect this further, but for 1980, it’s really not THAT bad. Maybe with enough time, a few of these tracks will click more to the point where I’d feel safer with a 4, but it would take a LOT of time, I think. Regardless, it’s a solid listen, and a solid 3.
Fats Domino
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
I know, perhaps it's heresy to not give this a flat 5, but it’s just because there’s a few too many “woe is me” sad tracks on the album, sue me. Besides that, Fats Domino did live up to what little I knew of him – “Blueberry Hill” is a trivia staple and a pretty strong song in the musical canon, but I’ve never heard it until now. Hell, I’ve never really heard Fats’ voice until now, and while I was expecting more of a Ray Charles-y tone, I’m surprised that he has a slight country twang on him. I’m not surprised that these were all pretty good tracks; classic blues structure to a lot of them, and his voice really glides on some of the heavier percussion / piano / sax present throughout this thing.
Not too much to say besides that, really. I have a decent reverence for 50s music like this, and it’s just because it’s all stood the test of time, and they’re simple & easy tracks. These fit the bill, and I had a good time listening to them – pretty breezy 27-ish minutes, even if it took a bit longer to find them all on streaming like that. I can hear why Elvis called him “the real king of rock & roll”, and how influential his music must have been to his contemporaries. It’s a good album, and I’d be a moron to not give it the bump up – it’s certainly no less than a 4.
Pet Shop Boys
5/5
I’m at a 5.
It’s only been about 10 days since we got “Walking Wounded” by Everything but the Girl, and my main thing with that album was that it didn’t really commit enough to the sort of electronica / drum & bass feel it was going for, at least for my tastes. It’s my closest analog to this album, since we’re dealing with artists doing a radically different sound from an 80s album in the 90s. Well, OK, maybe not AS “radically” for the Pet Shop Boys, but we’ve thrown out 80s synthesizers & drum machines for the 90s UK house brand of booming orchestra hits, advanced spacier electronica, & more upbeat dance numbers.
In this case, since they went full throttle in committing to this soundscape throughout the whole thing, it pays off way better for me here than it did on “Walking Wounded”. I’m not saying that to be harsh on the album, but the difference in commitment is night and day to me – obviously, 1996 drum & bass is different from 1993 UK house-driven synthpop, but the Pet Shop Boys lean fully into it. It’s a natural evolution for the sound on “Actually”, and it’s played in an overly catchy & commercially safe way, but it really clicked for me, just because it’s a super fun listen.
It also helps that the songwriting chops present on “Actually” are refined and arguably even better on here – so much of this album is written with the context of the gay experience, from both a closeted and open experience, and it creates a sort of intimate & personal vibe that both contrasts and works really well with the wide open dancing soundscape of the album. Occasionally, that lyricism / vocals are a little buried in the mix, or overshadowed by the synth work, but when it comes to the forefront (ESPECIALLY so on “The Theatre”), it feels really, really nice.
Ultimately, it’s a 5 for me, but the reason I enjoyed this is a two-sided coin; since they did fully lean into this style, if it’s something you’re predisposed to hate, then this is gonna be a repetitive “video game-y” 2 for you, but if it’s something you love (like me!), then it’s a perfect blend of early 90s SEGA-esque Roland synth work that calls back to stuff like Sonic CD or Daytona USA, while blending the songwriting chops and production sensibilities of the Pet Shop Boys, which were already on great display on “Actually”. It really, REALLY worked for me, and I think it’s a great album – hence, a pretty easy 5.
Britney Spears
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I will bump up to a 4, partially to spite the people that gave this a 2.66 average, and partially because I just had fun with it.
I am a full blown sucker for this style of pop… if it’s done consistently well. This album comes out swinging on its first 6 tracks, and absolutely falls down on its final 5 tracks, though not for a lack of trying – simply a lack of perceived conviction. Britney Spears’ vocals are great throughout this album, and when she’s on fire, she’s in total sync with the music; even if it’s written for her, she’s got the conviction to make it her own and add her own flourishes throughout. That conviction goes away from Track 7 onward; the production is still fine, as are her vocals, but the lyricism feels like it was pulled out of a generic pop star songbook – it’s hard to describe the “lack of conviction”, but it’s easy enough to feel, especially with the difference in quality of the first 6 and last 5 tracks.
Here’s the thing – I’m still a sucker for this style of pop. Yes, this album falls down a bit, but it’s still a really solid listen even at its most bland points. When it’s riding high, it feels really good & really fun – even cheesy tracks like “Soda Pop” or “Born To Make You Happy” just sort of keep punching until they win you over, or at least they did for me. I sort of understand why this only has a 2.66 – yes, it’s not Metallica or Black Sabbath or anything like that, but there’s room for this type of bubbly hyperpop with a Y2K feel & overblown Swedish production on the list. If nothing else, the cultural impact of Britney Spears & the boy bands & pop stars surrounding this general wave of the late 90s (i.e. NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, Ricky Martin, Christina Aguilera, etc) makes this album worth being on the list, if only for a sense of historical context.
So, yeah, I’m at a 3.5 bumped up to a 4 – really strong first 6 tracks, really flat final 5, but as a whole package, a nice, easy, commercially safe & bubbly 42 minutes that feels good to listen to, and occasionally has some really standout moments. I liked it.
P.S.: "Deep in My Heart" is actually a fucking banger, but it's not on the original track list, which is criminal. Also, “Email My Heart” is an incredibly silly track, even for 1999.
The Jam
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4, but it was REALLY close to a 3 for a bit.
Perhaps reading Wikipedia for this album set a wrong expectation – “Revolver meets Off The Wall” feels like a hell of a claim to make, and… I don’t really know if I hear it. Granted, I haven’t heard Revolver, so I can’t say how distinctly different it is from any of the 3 other Beatles albums we’ve gotten so far, but I’ve heard Off the Wall many many times. This is nowhere near anything from Off the Wall, at least from what I can distinctly remember about the album. Even if you boil it down to just the percussion as the drummer claimed, I only hear it a handful of times – if anything, the drum work here is way closer to Stewart Copeland’s work with the Police on Synchronicity, at least to my ears.
Of course, inspiration isn’t the same thing as “exact style”, so I won’t knock that too harshly – besides, I think the percussion on this album fucking rocks. Hell, I really liked a lot of this album – really solid lyrics, good vocals, super strong instrumentation (bassline particularly deserves a mention), and there’s not really a bad track here. The only reason I’m wavering between a 3 and 4 is just in the full album experience as a 35 minute thing – this doesn’t really have the greatest set of cohesive tracks, and I do think a lot of these soundscapes and subject matters step on each other’s toes from track to track. Even at just 35 minutes, a sort of homogeneity comes up that’s, as usual, hard to describe but kind of easy to feel in the moment.
Ultimately though, this did win me over – there’s a really nice stretch from Tracks 5-9 that kind of solidifies this as just good enough to get bumped up to a 4. It certainly helps that there’s not a “bad” track here, as even the most avant garde & weird one in “Music for the Last Couple” struck me as fun. If it is a little bit of a Revolver-inspired soundscape, it just makes me want to hear what The Beatles did on that album, since it feels mostly refined here. It sounds like if I've heard “Start!”, then I’ve probably already heard “Taxman” though. Oh, well. If the percussion on Off The Wall is way more prominent than I remember, past the obvious first hits of Rock With You, then I can’t wait for it to show up too. For this album, it stands as a nice little punk rock / new wave sort of hybrid that’s closer to the late 70s than the 80s, but still finds a really solid niche that clicked well enough for me to give it a 4.
Can
5/5
I am unbelievably at a 5.
You have to fully accept what this album is going for to appreciate it – that means you have to fully buy in, you have to fully commit, and you have to fully accept that this is music clinging onto a thread of sanity that will unravel over the course of 73 minutes, taking you on a ride that, for better or for worse, will sort of discomfort & challenge the very notion of what “music” is.
For my money’s worth, this is a masterclass in sound design, atmosphere & feel – for 1971 in particular, this is far, far beyond anything I’ve ever heard from the decade, and it may genuinely be revolutionary. It’s certainly one of the most experimental & avant-garde albums we’ve gotten so far, and while I’m no stranger to “experimental”, it’s very rare for the quality of the album to match the sort of audacity and boldness of what it’s trying to do – Kollaps got a 3 from me, Trout Mask Replica got a 3, & Locust Abortion Technician got a 3 – all solid enough albums, if only for how bold they are & well they execute their vision, but this album executes it in a way that leaves space to fully appreciate just how wild everything is. It’s a trip, yes, but it’s a trip that has just enough space between listener & artist to allow the vision to become clear as you’re listening, and sort of have a better aha moment than could ever have happened on those other three albums.
As far as the “music” itself goes, it’s harsh, it’s gritty, it’s certainly a bit throat-y at times, but it’s always anchored by the saving grace of consistent percussion – a tiny little lifeline to hold onto that resembles the normalcy of music, and perhaps the only sane normal thread of this protagonist’s ongoing anxiety-induced mental breakdown, performed and executed brilliantly by production work that feels years before its time – there are elements of 90s grunge rock, some weird electronica, vaguely jazzy tones, and oddly, sort of an anti “Kid-A” vibe, where the total non-ambience sort of loops around into a cacophony of sound that feels coherent despite itself. Yes, the vocal work & lyrical content make barely any sense, but at some point, they really don’t need to – the transition from good 70s rock to “I have no idea what the fuck is going on” happens rather fast, but still kind of slowly naturally comes out of nowhere.
Trust me, I understand why this has an average of 2.79 (still, hilariously, higher than Britney Spears’ album) – it is NOT easy to enjoy this if you don’t fully buy into it, and even if you do buy into it, there will be moments where repetition & a sort of fatigue comes in, especially because this is a 73 minute album. It is, however, meant for one continuous experience, and it’s certainly a nighttime-y sort of album, to allow for its harsher and more horror-adjacent elements to really shine. I had a few moments where I just went into a pitch black room for 2 or 3 minutes just to really let a few tracks fully encapsulate my ears (looking specifically at “Aumgn” though), and it worked like a motherfucker. Insanely harsh percussion that feels like a sort of sacrificial ceremony happening, before dogs eventually come in and bark at you out of nowhere in a pitch black room? That’ll get the anxiety rolling.
So, yeah, it’s a 5 for me. Again, you HAVE to buy into what the album is going for, and it is a one-shot, no skip experience, but it’s a journey worth taking – if you let yourself settle in and go along with the ride, the soundscape alone will conjure up images that tap into the creative spirit in a way that not many of these “experimental” albums have done before. It is harsh, and occasionally annoyingly loud, but I think those are compromises that had to be made to really sell the experience of the album. It could very well be revolutionary, or I could just be gassing up an overblown pretentious mediocre album that could be perceived as art if you squint at it for long enough. That’ll be for any subsequent listens to decide, but I really think this is gonna hold up well for me. I fully bought in, and I really enjoyed it, hence the 5.
Faith No More
4/5
I think I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump down to a 4.
It’s not because it doesn’t do enough to get up to a 5 – I liked the album a lot. I just because I don’t think it did anything outstanding enough to feel like a 5. Every single track here is technically sound, pretty catchy, and great to listen to. It’s an album I’d definitely recommend. It just doesn’t feel like it has the big knockout shot that stands on its own merits as opposed to feeling like another band, or sort of leaving me truly wowed like some other metal or rock albums I’ve given 5’s to.
In case it wasn’t obvious, I can’t fully shake the whole “this sounds a lot like the Red Hot Chili Peppers” thing. Yes, I know, 1989, and therefore, this is before Blood Sugar Sex Magik, so it’s more of a chicken/egg deal. It’s not even like it’s a negative – I love the instrumental style on this album, and it leans a bit more into the metal side of things, so I can’t definitely say “hey, this is just RHCP”. However, given that Blood Sugar Sex Magik (and Californication, by the way) sort of refine this style and really knock it out of the park with multiple tracks that really feel like timeless hits, as opposed to this one, where “Epic” sort of qualifies, as does “The Real Thing”, but not in the same impactful way. It just feels like this album falls a little short of the potential it tries to reach.
It’s still a good album, though – like an 8.75/10, give or take a quarter of a point. I really did enjoy a lot of this – I listened to the main 9 tracks and the great cover of “War Pigs”, and that’s a pretty satisfying 51 minutes. I do wish the album started off on a better note than “From Out of Nowhere”, which feels like a Phil Spector masterclass in how to ruin a song, but everything past that is pretty damn good. It’s *right there* as far as being a 5, and hell, maybe it’ll bump up someday if another one of these tracks clicks way better for me. For now, it’s a 4.5 that I’ll bump down to a 4, but it’s a highly recommended 4 regardless – super unique for 1989, and probably a strong harbinger of the metal rock-rap fusion to come throughout the late 90s and early 2000s.
Jack White
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
Perhaps a bit of hypocrisy from me to dock Faith No More for being a little too close to the Peppers, and for me to bump this up when this “Jack White” guy is clearly ripping off the White Stripes, but when you’ve got it, you’ve got it, and this album, despite how closely it toes the line to being a vaguely misogynistic set of tracks, manages to tightrope its way into having it.
In all seriousness, it is at a 4.5 for that very reason – the instrumentation, vocal work, and general production would put this at a flat 5 for me, because it really is enough of a departure from the more “glamorous” rock stylings of the White Stripes (probably partially Meg’s finishing touch to Jack’s sensibilities) to a more cutdown, vaguely country / ragtime-y feel that takes a bit more inspiration from the 60s & 70s to create a more distinct, yet familiar sound. Similar enough that you could just call this a White Stripes album, but with enough of Jack’s own voice to really make this feel like a solo album.
The issue with not giving this a flat 5 then, is of course Jack’s own voice – the lyricism on these tracks really do tow a fine line for me; never into full blown pre-19th Amendment sexism or anything, but just right on that edge of subtle, vague gaslighting & blame with a hint of reasonable doubt. It does feel like Jack is blaming a lot of the seemingly biographical incidents on this album on women in general; even if Meg is never mentioned, this being his first solo album after the disbandment of the White Stripes leaves a bit of room to point in that direction. It doesn’t help that he got divorced the year after this dropped.
However, I might just be projecting my own interpretation onto these tracks, and I can’t imagine Jack White is actually like that at all – at worst, this album just hasn’t aged very well lyrically in an era where women’s empowerment is more encouraged & vague swipes like this come across as petty with a lack of real self-reflection. Musically, the album is a delight to listen to, and its quality is kind of undeniable (ESPECIALLY the piano work). It is a damn good record, and I do think it’s worth bumping it up to a 5 – there really isn’t a bad track here, and the wide variety of styles plus the energy he brings to each track makes it a really enjoyable 42 minutes. I had a lot of fun with it at least, & it's probably no less than a 4.
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
4/5
I’m at a 4, but if it weren't for a handful of mediocre tracks, I'd be at a 5.
Sorry to Elvis Costello – third time we’ve gotten him, and he just hasn’t cracked a 5 for me. This one was at a 5 for a while, though, so that’s a good positive, and I did enjoy a lot of this album. Hell, I think it solves a lot of the reasons I gave for not giving “My Aim Is True” a 5 – the album doesn’t really stagnate until about 10 tracks in, the song structures aren’t as concrete & inflexible as they were, & as far as the variety in the soundscape goes, this has a really nice showcase of styles that feels like they have more depth to them.
So, if everything feels solved, and the tracks sound good, what gives? Well, the reason I’m at a 4 is because the bad tracks are actually just… kinda bad this time. "My Aim Is True" never had a truly bad track, but the ones that are "bad" here just... ugh, man. When this album hits that stagnant point on Tracks 10, 11 & 12, it really kills the vibe & the momentum the whole thing had going for it. 7 of the first 9 tracks clicked really well for me, but that is a 3-track stretch that is mediocrely drab at best. They did not click at all for me. The album really pulls it back in for “Pidgin English” & “You Little Fool”, but I’ll be damned if “Town Cryer” isn’t a flat ending.
I did like 9 of the 15 tracks here, but if 40% of the album isn’t quite clicking like that, then you’ve bloated it a little too much. However, that 60% is really fucking good, and has some of the best tracks I’ve heard from Elvis Costello yet. The Attractions, as a band, seemingly add a lot of nice depth to his soundscape, evolving to a really nice point that feels even more pleasing than what I heard on “My Aim Is True” – if that 60% were all that’s here, I’d be at a 5 without a question. That other 40% is what drags this down to a 4, but it’s still a 4 I’d highly recommend – the tracks that didn’t click well for me could click well for someone else (although, given that this has an average of 3 on the site, they probably didn’t). I feel bad that I haven’t given Elvis a 5 yet, but I feel like it’s gonna click at some point. He’s gotten real close twice, so maybe the 4th time’s the charm.
P.S.: If nothing else, “Man Out of Time” fucking rules. That’s a great, great track.
Tom Waits
5/5
You know what? I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
It took a little bit to get rolling, but after the sort of weird 3-track start (though Underground is fine), I think this album finally finds its voice by “Johnsburg, Illinois” and just kind of glides from there. This is not the same type of album as Rain Dogs, and I think it’s all the better for it – he’s not trying to mold his vocals to the heavier rock-influenced, vaguely Springsteen-ish instrumentals present on that album, but has instead made every track here work with his vocals to lean into his grittier strengths in a more cohesive way. Granted, my entire premise is a bit undermined by the fact that this album came BEFORE Rain Dogs, but I stand by it – this album feels more complete to me because it finds a better harmony between his vocals and the instrumentals, and that was my biggest thing holding me back before.
It also helps that I think the lyricism is just better on these tracks – even when they make no goddamn sense at all (see: “16 Shells From a 30.6”), they’re still sort of captivating in their delivery & natural flow. However, when they do make sense (and they make sense plenty of times), I think some of the lyrics on these tracks feel like a sort of contemporary, mildly buzzed Bob Dylan for the 1980s – a little nonsensical at times, but when they need to lock in and truly tell a story, Tom Waits knocks it out of the park. Look no further than “Soldier’s Things”, which I think is a real highlight from any of the 438 albums we’ve gotten so far – that is a masterclass in lyricism, and it hit a little close to home for me.
So, yeah, I’m at a 5 – once this thing gets rolling, it finds a sort of voice that speaks more for the “common” man, and going for a mostly local tone on a lot of these tracks lets their personality, humor, or sincerity shine through in a more authentic way than they did on Rain Dogs. That’s not to say Rain Dogs is a bad album, but this feels way more like the “real” Tom Waits to me. It’s a lovely album, and its abrasions work to Tom’s strengths to create a really cohesive 41 minutes (well, OK, 33 or so if you don’t count the first 3 tracks not clicking as well, but shh) that really worked for me. I can hear why this is at a 2.97 on the site, but I just don’t think they’re engaging with the album in the right way. I really, really enjoyed this, and I’m really glad this was on the list. Good job, Tom.
Queens Of The Stone Age
3/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump down to a 3.
I’ve heard of Queens of the Stone Age, but I haven’t *heard* them (or in this case, him) until now. This is, much like the first Foo Fighters album, secretly a solo project, although the drums are by someone else. Unlike the first Foo Fighters album, I think this one just sort of flounders in a vague kind of mediocrity – nothing’s ever technically “wrong” on this album, and it sounds really nice when you’re not paying attention.
Unfortunately, I am the exact type of person to pay attention, and that attention applies to everything. I think the lyricism isn’t as precise and measured as many of its other 90s grunge contemporaries that we’ve got (i.e., Smashing Pumpkins, Alice in Chains, Nirvana), and the broader strokes don’t really paint any kind of consistent picture for most of the tracks. I think the instrumentals are good, but suffer from the occasional really long repetitive pattern in the drums & guitar that doesn’t get covered up by the often safe vocals – his voice, when he’s really experimenting with the range it can take on these instrumentals, can sound super good, but he plays it really safe on a lot of these, and as such, it sort of inconsistently shifts between engaged & disinterested. Sort of like the Britney Spears album we got, there are points where his conviction feels a little half-baked & it just feels off.
However, all of those criticisms are partially from my listening style – there were points on this album where I did just sort of toss the lyrics aside, tried to sort of zone out & just let the music come to me, and those moments, while hit & miss, did click pretty well when a zen state kinda came to me. That said, it was just as easy to snap out of that zen state when something more abrasive or audibly awkward came in; the out of key guitar on “You Can't Quit Me Baby” & the harsh electronica/synth work that ends the album are the two biggest examples here.
As a whole, I did enjoy this, but it’s clearly not at the same level as its contemporaries, at least on a first pass – it’s not as refined, it feels a little too garage-y at points, and it doesn’t do a great job of filling its emptier vocal space. I’ve read reviews that say their later work, when an actual full band comes in, is significantly better & arguably landmark worthy, and I’m willing to believe that. This isn’t a bad album, it just didn’t click well for me. I can hear the potential for sure, and there are some good tracks on this. It’s just not a great experience, at least for me, hence the 3.5 bumped down to a 3.
Pulp
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Once again, a Mercury Prize winning album has come through for me – I really liked this. We haven’t had an album that the site defines as Britpop in a bit, and this did scratch a sort of itch that’s been missing for a bit. If the last time we got an actual Britpop album was indeed in November, then that’s a long time without one, and this is a nice return to form.
Granted, I don’t think this is fully entrenched in the Oasis / Blur style of Britpop, with more bombastic instrumentation & a grander vision to fill out stadiums with heavier rock. This album really succeeds when it hits on its more local points, sorta like the Tom Waits album we just got. It does a really nice job of blending those local points with R.E.M.-esque instrumentation, a vaguely Bowie-esque vocal tone, and synth work that feels sorta like Depeche Mode. It’s a form of Britpop that harkens back to the late 70s & mid-80s, mixed with more of the contemporary issues of the mid-90s, and it’s a really cool blend to hear that carves its own unique niche in the wider space of Britpop. Granted, a good chunk of those contemporary issues are really awkwardly horny in a way that feels strange to listen to in 2025, but hey, 30 years ago, what can you do?
I really don’t think there’s a bad track here – a few awkward listens, and the occasionally over-produced track that lasts a little long, but nothing ever so egregious as to feel out of place or boring. This is a really cohesive 52 minutes that does feel like it stands up with the best of its era, even if it’s not in the same musical space as its peers. I love the more local approach, and I think it adds an air of authenticity & relatability to each track that something like, say, “Champagne Supernova” could never really provide, even though I love that track. So, yeah, I’m at a 5 – realistically, maybe more of a 4.5 bumped up to a 5, but I thought it was a fun album, & I highly recommend listening to it. If nothing else, “Common People” lives up to those 235 million plays on Spotify.
Christina Aguilera
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Christina Aguilera is one of those artists where she had undeniably big hits, and yet I can’t really think of anything past the major ones, like Genie in a Bottle, What a Girl Wants, or Moves Like Jagger. Going into this, I expected her vocals to be great, and the pop sensibilities to click really nicely, but I wasn’t really sure how compelling of a package the whole thing would be – based on the bigger hits I knew, she had a really specific vibe that might’ve felt a little jarring over the course of a full album, especially in this case, where it’s 78 minutes long.
Thankfully, she shut down my expectations rather quickly – this is the sort of pop album that I’ve been waiting for on the list, even more so than Britney’s debut album. It fits the right sort of sassy, overproduced, hip-hop influenced, confident mid-2000s vibe that I adore, since Disney & Nickelodeon bit on this style hard as hell when they were trying to make pop stars (and kinda succeeded, for the most part). That's the stuff I grew up on, so this clicked super well for me. This feels like it’s around the peak of that style, and I think it really shows; this is hard-coded to 2006, even with the 60s vibe she tries to set at the start of the album. In some weird way though, with this style coming back in fashion for the mid-2020s, mixed with the more simplified & streamlined pop stylings of the 2010s, this feels oddly modern, now? Either that, or I’m just hitting the nostalgia pill hard with this style of production, which feels sort of lost nowadays.
Either way, I really liked this – talk about a vocal showcase, my goodness. I knew she was good, but I didn’t know she was THIS good. Occasionally, she oversteps the boundaries of each track with an overdone vocal flourish that borders on parody, but for the most part, she’s right within the vocal range she should be to keep her presence really strong, projecting a sort of operatic power that feels like only Adele or a few others really have nowadays. She dips into everyone else’s bag though; there are points here where she sounds like Whitney, or Celine, or Mariah, or Janet, and there’s more than a few times where she just absolutely bites “Crazy in Love” by Beyonce, most blatantly and egregiously on “Here to Stay”. Still, though, what a fucking voice – “Mercy on Me” in particular seems undeniably powerful, even as someone who’s sort of lost his faith.
As far as the production goes, I already touched on it, but I thought it was really good throughout – a few moments where the instrumentation feels like a bit much for the subject matter, sure, but the energy was great throughout, and usually fit the tone of each track really well. Whether it’s gospel, 60s pop, 70s funk, a Mary J. Blige-esque rap cut, or glittery 90s ballads, the variety of styles here still feels cohesive, despite the amount of producers from track to track, and it keeps the full 78 minutes feeling pretty fresh. It certainly helps that the lyrics on this album are pretty good; Christina (or her team of writers) know how to write some catchy fucking hooks & bridges, and the vocal structure on the verses feels great. When she has to go into full storytelling mode, it’s usually compelling (see: "Oh Mother").
In case it wasn’t obvious, I REALLY fucking liked this. A few overproduced moments, and a few awkward tracks (see: “Nasty Naughty Boy”, which still has great production regardless), but this is right down my alley for 2000s diva pop. I see that 2.74 average on the website, and I call a little bit of bullshit on it – if this were anyone but “Christina Aguilera” as the artist, or some random singer they’ve never heard of, this would be at a higher average on the website. It’s a protest vote against this style of music, same as Britney’s album, and I think it’s petty as hell. Granted, I’m the type of petty to want to drag Kid Rock down to the worst album on the site, or at least right next to Haut de Gamme, but I digress. I think it’s impossible not to have fun with this; even if you barely pay attention to the lyrics, her voice and this production is just super fun, and really easy to vibe to. I could keep gushing about this album, and how effectively it uses its two discs a la Outkast’s Speakerboxx / The Love Below, but I’ve already typed 788 words, and I think the music would say more than I could.
So, yeah, it’s a 5 for me. One of the easiest I’ll personally give – I am a total unabashed sucker for this style, though, so I can understand someone else being cold on this. Probably shouldn’t be any less than a 3, though. Maybe a 2 if it really is THAT grating.
Kings of Leon
3/5
I’m at a 2.5 that I will bump up to a 3.
When we last got Kings of Leon, for “Only By The Night”, I really enjoyed the first 6 tracks on that album. Only 2 of the last 5 clicked for me, and that was enough to buoy it at a 4.5 that I bumped up to a 5, because the soundscapes were still good, and the tracks felt competently safe. Plus, it was a great casual listen – I even listened to it again after I was done with this one, and yeah, that one still holds up really nicely.
For this, though? This is significantly worse to my ears, and while the instrumentals are totally fine, I don’t-uh real-a-lay like-ah his voice-uh add-ing an extra sylla-bul-uh on alm-ost ever-ay line here-uh. He really can’t decide what vocal tone he wants to take, and while I absolutely love his energy & more deliberate performance on “Only By The Night”, on here, it feels like a parody, or at the very least, it feels consistently inconsistent in a way that is frustrating as all hell to listen to.
Lyrically, this album takes a deep step down too – I’ve been praising a few albums as of late for going for the more local approach instead of taking broad strokes, but these are a little too local, and sort of creepy – I really didn’t need to know that you “accidentally” had sex with a 17-year-old, or you were too soft, or whatever the hell is going on on “Rememo”. It never really finds a foothold, save for maybe 2 or 3 tracks.
I don’t wanna rip into this that much, but I just didn’t like this one that much. This album is what happens when an entire project is comprised of the mediocre parts of “Only By The Night”, from a less sharp, less mature, less confident, less commercially driven version of Kings of Leon, and while it’s probably more true to their authentic selves, I don’t think it makes for a very good album. Competent enough, sure, but everything about the lyrics & vocals on this one strike a nerve in a way that feels significantly more grating than anything on that last album. I understand why the other people in my group gave that album a 3, but after hearing this one, I wouldn’t be surprised if they dip down to a 2 or even a 1 here.
For me, I’m at a 2.5 that gets bumped up to a 3. I truly don’t think it’s THAT awful; individually, these are fine enough tracks, but as an album, it just sort of shoots itself in the foot as an incohesive project. I vaguely hear the appeal for this album over “Only By The Night”, and why people could rate this higher, but it’s just not my thing, I think. For my tastes, this really, really didn’t need to be on the list. Not in a Haut de Gamme way, but in a “this is really fucking mid” type of way.
Digital Underground
3/5
I’m at a 2.5 that I will barely bump up to a 3 for its competence.
This was really damn close to being a 2, though. Obviously, it’s overly horny, it hasn’t aged that well, the instrumentals are sort of one-note, and the flows & rhythm pale in comparison to some of their peers of the time. I can look past all of that for 1990, partially because it’s sort of experimental in its own way, and for as awkward & uncomfortable as the lyrics & delivery are here, I truly cannot say there is a full-on “bad” track, save for “Freaks of the Industry”, which is a really, really egregiously horny track. I did *not* like that one. Besides that, there is some bad (& truly awkwardly explicit) content, sure, but this is a fully competent 65 minutes.
It is the fucking longest 65 minutes I have ever heard in my life, compounded by the fact that this so blatantly could’ve been cut down to maybe half of the runtime – dear fucking god, who let them make 8 out of the 14 tracks here last over 5 and a half minutes!? Hell, if you consider 4 of them miniature skits / interludes, there’s only 10 tracks here, and the other 2 go at least 4:24 long, so like… shit, man, this is just a long fucking album. It would be one thing if these were all compelling for the lengths of their tracks, but only a handful of them are – so many of these circle the bases for so long that they lose any and all appeal they had for the first half of their run time. I can’t tell how much of that is trying to fill up CD space, or ego & hubris, considering that the version of this album that was released on cassette is a mind-numbing 81 minutes with 3 extra tracks, and an even longer (and probably even more explicit) version of Gutfest ‘89. How the fuck can you find space for 16 more minutes here?!
With all of that said… I think it’s competent enough to remain at a 3, but just barely. If anything, the miniature 5-track arc about the sex packets at the end is what saved this from being a 2; really solid world-building there, and the tracks felt compelling enough throughout (namely “Packet Man”, because “Sex Packets” goes on for like 3 minutes too long). Make no mistake, though; I’m giving this a long, long leash that it probably doesn’t deserve. This will almost certainly fall down to a 2 over time, and I fully expect a barrage of 1s from future people discovering this site. It may or may not deserve it – I do think there’s a lot of solid stuff here, even despite the extremely horny lyrics. It really is just too goddamn long, but when it clicked, it clicked well enough for me, hence the barely bumped 3.
Cocteau Twins
5/5
You know what? I think I’m at a 5.
The last time we got a Cocteau Twins album, I specifically wrote the following: “I just don’t know that I could personally give a 5 to an album with vocals, but without lyrics, simply because I’m a sucker for storytelling”. However, I think this album hits just the right type of vocal presence, where they’re used as an instrument and not as a guiding melody of each track, in a way that I can feel comfortable with giving this a 5.
“Heaven or Las Vegas” structured its songs in a way that was more of an homage to the 80s as a whole, and it used its vocal presence in a way that felt more poppy & familiar – the vocals felt like they could have real lyrics to them, and it was nice to listen to, but felt sort of awkward for my ears. This album leans fully into the ethereal & the dreamy – a lot of this is Eno-esque white noise, with the vocals used to just sort of flow each moment into the next. There’s not many moments where you can feel a general chorus open up, and as such, it’s a lot easier to zone out and let the rest of the instrumentation take you where it goes. Really good instrumentation too – lots of great percussion & guitar melodies are here, and each track does have a good structure to it, so the vocals still feel important, even if they’re used differently.
Much like the last Cocteau Twins album, I do think it’s hard to really find a way for me to analyze this any further other than just “it sounds really good”. It is, however, an improvement over my grand analysis from last time, which was “that sounded really good, but sometimes it didn’t” – there is not a single bad track here, only brief moments where it’s a little loud, or just a hint repetitive enough to get out of the zen state. It is on a lower end of the 5 scale, but I think it’s a 5 nonetheless – a really enjoyable 41 minutes, and if nothing else, fabulous studying music.
Arrested Development
5/5
I’m at a 4.5. I gotta talk myself into it one way or the other.
I loved around 80% of this album, and that 80% generally includes the instrumentals, the vocals, and a really nice chunk of the lyrics – this has fabulous production, really strong flows for most of the tracks, and I do love a lot of the messages here when they’re not overly preachy.
The 20% of this album I didn’t like is overly preachy, and it has me absolutely trapped – I feel really close to bumping this down to a 4 on the sole account of just how god damn preachy towards the gospel this ends up being the longer it goes – all this talk about purity, finding God, and returning to the soil with the amount of biblical references, allegories, and allusions… it just becomes too much. I tolerated it through the first 12 tracks or so because it’s done in a really clever way that doesn’t feel heavy-handed, and flows really nicely towards the ideas of unity that are usually presented well enough throughout this album.
Track 13 is what sort of finally made me put my foot down, though, because it strikes me as… fake feminism? Again, 1992 vs. 2025 and all that, but the lyricism on that track feels like it hasn’t aged as well, especially in comparison to how lovely “Natural” is right before it. I don’t think it’s possible to be too feminist, but it is possible to take it to the point where it feels vaguely creepy. Specifically, the use of “females” just gave me a sort of ick, because it hasn’t reflected well into how we talk about women nowadays.
Tennessee is a fantastic track, no complaints about that, but goddamn, that last track just struck a nerve in a way that makes all the preachiness of the earlier tracks feel worse. Earlier on, the album draws a distinct line in the sand between “brothers” and “gangsters” (sometimes with the N-word used in place of the latter). I can’t speak to racial makeup & stereotypes like that; it’s not my conversation to have as someone who isn’t a black person… but it does feel really, really awkward in 2025. It acts as such a strong pushback against the gangsta rap that came into effect in the late 80s and early 90s, and it hasn’t aged well. It doesn’t read quite as “unifying” as it probably should be. If it was unifying back then, then power to it, but given modern-day rhetoric about “the good ones” and “the bad ones” that racist people feel emboldened to speak on nowadays, it truly feels awkward & dated in a way that feels kind of uncomfortable.
So, yeah, that 20% of the album really stings for me. And yet, that 20% doesn’t feel like it should override the 80% of that which I did like – when this album isn’t being extremely overly heavy-handed with rhetoric that hasn’t aged well, it is a genuinely great showcase of some of the future flows, production, & general messaging that would better integrate more spiritual topics into the “heavier” rap as the decade went along. For 1992, I think this is a remarkably strong album for most of the tracks; again, the preachiness comes down to toleration & perspective, and for me, if only 2 or 3 tracks don’t click like that on a 15-track album, you’ve gotta be doing something right. It probably did have a lasting impact & impression on a lot of the more socially conscious rappers that would emerge in the years to come, and I think that deserves its flowers.
So, yes, it’s a 4.5 that I will bump up to a 5, but with the caveat that it hasn’t aged well in the approach to its messaging. Objectively, there is nothing wrong with using your platform to spread a message of unity like this, and I cannot imagine that the sort of differentiation between “brothers” and “gangsters” isn’t meant as more of a framing device for the members of the group to get their points across & set themselves apart from a musical standpoint. It is not *their* fault that the messaging has been co-opted by bad faith actors who have twisted it to this point, and I get the feeling that if they had another crack at an album like this, they’d be able to more carefully choose their words to avoid such a thing. The lyrics on this prove that to me, because they’re usually too damn good and too damn vivid to not evoke some type of really nice imagery.
Ultimately, it’s a funky album, with a lot of great beats, great flows, and great lyrics, dragged down a bit by the approach to its messaging, & the length of the album (57 minutes is crazy here, given how much it sort of spins the spiritual wheels). It is a 4.5, straight up, but I enjoyed enough of this that I think it gets the bump up to a 5 for the website. Certainly no less than a 3.
Gary Numan
4/5
I’m at a 4.
I’m just really impressed at where this is for 1979. It is electronica, but it’s electronica done in a way that feels like a direct throughline to the more club-oriented & dance-y rock stuff that Daft Punk and others would really define as their own. Even past that though, it’s just remarkable synth work, done in a way that clearly affected the rest of the 80s, and opened up a whole new Moog-driven world that everyone would take advantage of, especially hip-hop when the time came for it – every track here feels like it’s a few notes away from being “Push It”.
As far as the science fiction thematics, I think it works as an obvious framing device for this soundscape. Given the contexts of the time (i.e., Star Wars, Star Trek, Close Encounters, etc), it’s a bit stereotypical, but it’s the easiest way to connect to an audience. There’s some solid lyrical work here, but it never goes into anything deeper than vaguely thought-provoking broad strokes, and I do think that’s a bit of a missed opportunity. Lots of world-building, but never an actual real story, save for “Metal”, which I think really worked.
Musically… yeah, this is definitely outclassed by a lot of its peers, and there’s significant “first minute is the whole song” moments throughout this whole thing. Lots of repetitive melodies, and eventually, this synth work does lose a bit of its luster. It hit me by around Track 6 or 7, and then REALLY hit by Track 8 – you can only get away with long synth notes moving up and down while some cool percussion goes on for so long. It is definitely a long experience, even at 41 minutes, but these are all individually solid / good / great tracks, so I’ve got no real complaints, save for “Conversation” being endlessly long at 7 minutes.
With all of that said, I just admire this too much for it to drop any lower than a 3.5 for me, and I feel good about giving it a 4. Yes, it’s repetitive, but I haven’t heard anything from the late 70s using synthesizers this effectively, at least in this vaguely synthpop-esque / trance-y style. One could point to Kraftwerk, and that’s fair enough, but I think Kraftwerk used their synths to create a more calming soundscape reminiscent of a nice happy train ride or drive on a highway, not a mildly existential robot society seemingly devoid of humanity, save for a handful of people. I think it’s a good album, and it really clicked with a lot of my sensibilities. Hence, the 4.
Peter Gabriel
5/5
That’s an easy 5. It might be a little higher.
Certainly a much different vibe from “So”, but I love the approach this album takes – extended looks into the melted minds of people, whether it’s intruders, assassins, racists & stalkers, or mental health crises ala the desperate need for attention, panicked amnesia, & schizophrenics with an impulse. For 1980, this feels decently ahead of the curve as far as using sound design & production to get these themes across, and the excellent lyrics & vocal performances on a lot of these tracks only help to enhance it.
In a weird way, I think this might be a more complete album than “So”, which I already considered one of the finest albums of the 1980s. Yes, it’s less commercially-driven, & the tracks are a little stripped back to tell more personalized stories, but the theming of this album feels more consistent, even with the variety of topics that are tackled. It feels a lot more deep and thoughtful, and I think I prefer that to some of the poppier stuff on “So”. It also helps that there’s not really that much filler to let the instrumentals have their shine like there was on “So” – when a track is done, this album lets it fade out, and then smashes right into the next one, to allow for just enough breathing room to self-reflect, but not too much as to feel sort of boring. That pacing issue might’ve been “So”’s only perceived flaw, but like I said on that review, it might’ve just been a quirk for radio play.
I don’t wanna write too much more about this album, since I think listening to it is more rewarding than reading about it, so here’s some quick rapidfire praise: Kate Bush’s vocals were great on a few tracks, Phil Collins’ drum work is impeccable as always, the guitar melodies felt really ethereal and complex at times, & when Peter Gabriel finds a cinematic mood, he nails it with a noir feel that lays the groundwork for some of the other big “cinematic” tracks of the 80s, ala Smooth Criminal. “Biko” is a fabulous closer, by the way.
It’s a testament to Peter Gabriel’s fluidity as an artist that he can pump out insanely good prog rock with Genesis, an all-time pop album with “So”, & something as moody & unique as this. It’s an excellent album, and while it requires a bit more attention than “So” did, I think it’s an incredibly rewarding album, made all the better for it. Not a single skip here for me, and a very easy 5. Probably a bit higher, honestly – I really, really enjoyed this.
Talking Heads
5/5
I’m at a 5.
The last time we got Talking Heads was 38 albums into this whole thing, and I just don’t think I was prepared back then. I thought it was especially weird & avant garde, and took a million different directions lyrically in a way that distracted from the production. I gave it a 3.5 bumped down to a 3, and that’s probably “incorrect” in light of the 410 albums we’ve since gotten, some of which took exponentially weirder turns.
It feels good to remedy that with this album, which certainly feels more normal, stylized & consistent than Talking Heads: 77 did. Of course, bubbling underneath the surface of some excellent Brian Eno-infused production through a variety of styles & some really good guitar/percussion/synth melodies, is an album entirely based around fear & paranoia. Certainly a bit similar thematically to Peter Gabriel 3, but not quite in the same way – that album tended to focus more on individual stories and snapshots of melting minds, as opposed to this album, with a sort of chronic panic that exists in broader strokes, with the intent to capture a feeling as opposed to tell a specific story.
For the most part, this album REALLY succeeds in doing so – there are great lyrics abound on this thing, & the instrumentals do a great job of complimenting them, but David Byrne’s vocal performance enhances the panic in those lyrics & the instrumentation to an incredible degree, and he is an absolutely highlight of the album. The eccentricities of his voice that made Talking Heads: 77 feel captivating but inconsistent lyrically are channeled really nicely here as a way to fully capture the mood of each track, with “Cities” as probably the best example here.
Much like Peter Gabriel 3, I think this does need a bit more attention to really get the album, but it feels equally as rewarding to me. There are a few tracks that didn’t land as well as they could / should have (namely “Electric Guitar”), but I really enjoyed a lot of this. It might just be the 400+ days since the last one talking, & the amount of music I’ve since heard that made this one feel better, but I do think they found a really nice balance between the eccentric captivating production & storytelling on this one, in a way that fully clicked for me. It’s a pretty good 5, and I’m glad it’s on the list.
Destiny's Child
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
Honestly, I don’t really feel like I have that much to say in terms of fully justifying that rating – I’m a lot more prone to like this stuff than the average user of this site, and I’m unabashedly a sucker for late 90s / early 2000s pop like this, in all of its vaguely overproduced & self-important / self-indulgent glory. It’s what I grew up on, and it’s just my sort of style, I dunno. One of these days, I might absolutely tear into one of these types of albums, but only if it’s so aggressively bad or mediocre that it overrides any love I have for this stuff. It might be a toxic bias, but it is obnoxiously fun to me, and I won't apologize for it.
I do feel like I have to talk about the music, and I think there’s a bit of warranted praise in giving this the bump to a 5 – obviously, Beyonce steals the fucking show here in a way that foreshadows her superstardom (& by foreshadowing, I mean it’s about as subtle as a solar eclipse), but Kelly Rowland & Michelle Williams’ vocal harmonizations deserve some love too. When they take lead, they don’t really miss a step, and each track generally has a really nice flow to it that feels seamlessly smooth.
Instrumentally, this is my style of production, and while there’s not necessarily a lot of variety, each track does bring its own kind of mood that still feels sort of distinct. Lots of heavy melodies on the more ballad-y tracks; Brown Eyes, in particular, is from the same guy who did all of Mariah Carey’s big 90s hits, and his fingerprints are all over that – wouldn’t surprise me if that’s a reworked Mariah track. In terms of the hip-hop influence, this album sort of succeeds in its simplicity; Independent Women, Pt. 1 is the prime example here – it’s just a few orchestral-ish hits, strings & some drums, but it’s incredibly effective. By the way, shoutouts to the Edge of Seventeen sample on Bootylicious & the Tarzan Boy / Push It interpolations on Nasty Girl.
Lyrically, I think this album *really* hits on its choruses, which all noticeably feel really good when they come in the second time; I’m not sure what this phenomenon is, but every great pop artist has it, where the brain sort of subconsciously downloads the melody / flow of a good chorus the first time, and really vibes with it the second time. It’s in spades on this album, and that’s partially why I enjoyed it as much as I did. On the flipside, of course, is Independent Women Pt. 2, which is honestly pretty good save for the Tom & Jerry-sounding sample in the chorus, which just murders the vibe of the track in a bad way. As far as the verses go, they’re generally pretty good, though a few tracks are certainly a bit more basic & repetitive (or horny) than others, and a few of them feel a little overly petty by today’s standards.
That last track felt a little awkward knowing that Destiny’s Child basically went on hiatus right after this album’s promotional stuff, and it did rub me the wrong way, sort of like the self-indulgent track on Christina Aguilera’s album we got about a week ago, but at least it’s showing love to each other & not sort of proclaiming your presence forever while fans say your praises. As far as why I’m not at a flat 5, that sort of plays into it, but there are a few tracks that go a little too long, or overdo the production in a way that buries the vocals & lyrics in a way that didn’t click for me… but I enjoyed this a lot. It’s certainly not enough to bump it down to a 4, and I feel good about giving it a 5. As I said earlier, it might be a toxic bias for me; I can understand this getting a 3, or a 2 if it's THAT grating. I will, however, lament that some of the reviews on this site can’t find the same enjoyment that I can out of these turn of the century pop albums, but c’est la vie, I suppose.
Liz Phair
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I think I’ll bump up to a 5.
Very early on, when I was sort of making mental comparisons, my brain went to Alanis Morrissette, and specifically, how she’s able to project her voice to get the emotional pull of a track across. Her vocals on “Jagged Little Pill” are sort of a benchmark for me, as far as 90s women-led rock goes, and while I don’t expect artists to match her, I think the way she uses her voice to really drag the most of out of the lyricism & instrumentals are sort of a standard to go by. This album slowly but surely challenges the idea of “power = emotion” as a benchmark, and it did eventually succeed.
Liz Phair is not Alanis Morrissette, nor is she trying to be; the more apt comparison, perhaps, is like Joni Mitchell deciding to tackle Nirvana. Alanis Morrissette projected herself as more of an iron woman, ready to take on the struggles of the world with a “look at me now” demeanor that better fit the cultural imprint of 1995. Liz Phair, on this album, projects herself as sort of a battle-tested, scarred but still standing woman, coming from a place of confidence, yet projecting a light air of insecurity, adding a sincerity to the whole thing that feels unique compared to some of the other women-led rock albums we’ve gotten. These are more thoughtfully written tracks, and the introspection present on the lyrics overrides the need for a more powerful vocal performance. That’s not to say Liz Phair doesn’t have good vocals on this album, because she does; a little shakier, a little more nasal-y, not as pitch-perfect on the held notes as it could be, but that vulnerability lends itself to each track in a good way.
Instrumentally, I do think this album doesn’t quite find a set identity, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing – there’s a lot of variety between piano-driven tracks, acoustic stuff, more Blues Traveler-y instrumentation, Sheryl Crow-esque stuff, and obviously, a lot of Nirvana. It jumps around a bit, but the core messaging of each track is what keeps the album afloat, and she can adjust really nicely to each style, still all guided within “rock” itself.
It is a bit long at 55 minutes, and I do think it treads water a couple of times in the subject matter, but it’s not enough for me to really bump it down to a 4. I would rather leave it at a 4.5, if only because for my own personal tastes, the vocal presence is still a little short for me, and occasionally, the lyricism is a bit too broad to paint the picture she’s going for, but it’s too good of an album to give it a 4. It’s a solid 5, and I do recommend it – you have to be in the right sort of frame to accept her brand / musical projection of femininity, but it’s a very rewarding album once you get deeper into it. I really liked it.
Tori Amos
5/5
Well, I’m pretty sure I’m at a 5 – I just need to figure out exactly why, because my brain hasn’t quite cracked it.
It’s definitely because of the lyricism; it’s both wonderfully & painfully vivid, even in its more flowery and verbose moments. It’s certainly from her vocals, which project the same confidence as someone like Kate Bush, and sound lovely throughout the whole thing. It’s… partially from the instrumentation, which is really nice, if a bit too attached to the piano on a few tracks, in a way that made the 57 minute runtime start to get a little homogeneous. Altogether, I think it’s a lovely album, beautiful through the honesty of its pain, and one of the finest examples of a singer-songwriter we’ve gotten so far. Everything about this screams a 5 to me, and I’m pretty damn sure it is one, because I certainly enjoyed it as if it were one.
Why, then, am I sort of struggling to justify giving it a 5? Is it because it’s sort of like an Oscar bait film, where you feel like you have almost no choice but to come to that conclusion, or is this actually standing on its own merits, and I’m just sort of paranoid about it? Is it because we just got “Exile in Guyville”, which is sort of an antithesis to this album in a lot of ways, or am I just burnt out on two albums with similar, yet different thematic views of femininity & portraying confidence as back to back, hour long experiences? Those are both sort of true, to some degree, but I think my brain has finally cracked why I’m struggling, & I’m not sure how valid it is.
I think I’m struggling to give this a 5 because I’m feeling woefully ignorant to a lot of the subject matter & themes this album tackles, due to a lack of personal experience. I’m empathetic towards an incredible amount of this album, especially so on “Me and a Gun”, which is horrifyingly portrayed, yet wonderfully performed, enhanced by the choice to go fully acapella on it. However, I’m just not able to feel a lot of these tracks, at least not with the emotional pain that Tori Amos used to write & perform them. That’s no fault of her own, and it shouldn’t play a factor into my rating at all (& it won’t!), but I can’t help but feel like I’m giving this a 5 more so out of an emotional connection to her strife, as opposed to a full appreciation for the actual musical qualities of the album. Whether or not that’s actually true is basically dependent on how I approach these tracks in the future, but I think this is an album that needs a few plays to fully grab the depth of, both vocally, instrumentally, lyrically, and tonally. I’ll certainly replay it a few times, because it’s a deeply touching album, and I’m sure that I missed a few things along the way.
I will give this a 5, because I did enjoy it a lot – it would be weird to drop it down to a 4 just on sole account of “did I actually like the musical parts of this album that much”, because I do think the emotional weight of this album goes hand in hand with the musical parts, in a way that’s oddly intertwined, yet separately impactful. It is easy to sort of ignore the instrumentals and focus on the stories, but the stories themselves are enhanced by the power of the instrumentals behind them. They work together brilliantly, but it is easy to get lost in one opposed to the other the longer the album goes, and that’s probably my only real “knock” on the album. If your big issue is reconciling the emotional impact with the musical impact though, then you’ve made one hell of an album. It’s worth a 5, and it’s worth a lot of listens. I’m very glad I finally listened to Tori Amos.
I also need a hug, probably.
Eurythmics
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
This is my first time properly listening to a Eurythmics album, and while everyone on the planet knows the title track, I’m surprised that some of the other ones on here weren’t big hits too; “Love Is a Stranger” is a really solid opener that has some catchy vocal structures, & “Wrap It Up” is energetic as hell, feeling like a direct precursor to stuff like Pump Up The Jam or Get Ready for This. Annie Lennox’s vocals, which I only really know from the title track and her other all-timer in “Walking on Broken Glass”, really shine here, and capture the mood of each track nicely. If she was the primary songwriter on a lot of these, then she knows how to make a pretty solid chorus / hook too.
This is obviously an extremely synth-driven album, which is sort of expected, but I was more surprised at how effectively some of the traditional instruments blended into these soundscapes, namely in the guitar, horns, & piano scattered throughout the album. They’re only used lightly, to compliment the lead synth melodies, but their presence feels important every time, so it works really well. This album also never really strays too far from its core of R&B / pop, which keeps everything just grounded enough to not feel overly futuristic or digital like a Kraftwerk album, or too reliant & gimmicky, ala “Temporary Secretary” (please don’t come at me, I don’t hate that song, but it *does* feel a bit gimmicky). Everything works together in a pretty strong harmony, and even though each track shares a general core of instruments, they all still feel decently distinct enough to not feel boring or homogeneous. I feel like this did pave the way for more experimental synth work over time, and there’s probably the earliest hints of Dubstep & EDM in here; maybe not in the most innovative or forward-thinking way, but with just enough of a spark to get the ball rolling.
Honestly, it’s only at a 4.5 instead of a flat 5 because everything after “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” sort of felt like it was padding for time; they’re not bad tracks, but they all go about 2 times as long as they need to, even if they’re filled up decently well. “This City Never Sleeps” was pretty effective, but again, could’ve been like, 4 or 5 minutes instead of 7. However, I liked it too damn much to not bump it up – it’s a breezy 42 minutes, it’s a really good album, and it does honestly hold up. At worst, it’s a 3 if the more “boring” parts of the album nag at you that badly.
Todd Rundgren
5/5
I’m at a 5.
I took an interesting approach to this; Todd Rundgren himself gave a little title to each side of the album, and they do feel relatively self-contained in scope, so I approached this as 4 miniature albums, as opposed to one long big one. Is that the right way to approach an album like this? Normally, probably not, but in this case, I think it really worked.
Side 1, titled “A Bouquet of Ear-Catching Melodies”, comprises the first 6 tracks, and they’re a pretty damn good tonesetter. Couple of Beatles-y instrumentals / structures, lots of great vocal melodies, & ultimately, just a really fun set of tracks. Good variety too; the sadder tracks hit the sort of emotional notes they were supposed to, and for the most part, the lyricism was on point for each track. A few had broader strokes than others, but they all worked well for me. It was a good start, and probably my second favorite set on the album.
Side 2 takes up tracks 7 through 13, titled “The Cerebral Side”, and I don’t think he was lying about it – a lot of those tracks required a bit more attention to the lyrics & soundscapes to properly paint the picture, but the instrumental / vocal quality was still on par with everything from the first side. I especially liked “The Night the Carousel Burned Down”, because of how effectively it used the production and sound design to get the sort of eerie mood across, while retaining the faux cheerful attitude of the carousel & midway. It’s a really nice set of tracks, though I’m not sure I liked it as much as Side 1.
Side 3 is my favorite one here; only 5 tracks, 14-18, but they’re filled with some really strong guitar solos and some energetic instrumentation across the board. It’s titled “The Kid Gets Heavy”, but it was actually THAT much heavier? In the guitar sense, sure, but I’d say from a lyrical standpoint, it was more so a continuation of “The Cerebral Side”, itself already a solid continuation of the Ear-Catching Melodies. I do appreciate that this album builds on itself so nicely, though. It’s a pretty good set of tracks, & I really enjoyed them – “Couldn’t I Just Tell You” in particular feels like a slight precursor to the big power pop / power rock anthems of the 80s.
Side 4, tracks 19-25, is my least favorite one here, but it’s not bad, just a little flat compared to expectations. It’s titled “Baby Needs a New Pair of Snakeskin Boots (A Pop Operetta)”, but apparently, the plot of this little operetta is stuck within the liner notes of the album, which just aren’t online from a first search, so maybe the plot was flimsy and imagined at best. I sort of see a vague line through each track, but nothing really concrete. As far as the music itself goes, it sure feels like 70s rock. The live opener to this side was a little harsh on the ears, and a few of the lyrics just felt sort of juvenile and awkward, but the musicality from the first 3 sides are intact & there is something genuinely enjoyable here.
As 4 mini-albums, I’d say at the absolute worst, these are all maybe a 3.5, bare minimum. I enjoyed each side a lot, and as an entire 90 minute package, I think it’s a pretty consistent 25 tracks. There’s not a single one that felt specifically “bad” to my ears, save for maybe “Slut”, but that’s just a lyrical thing. This is probably more of a slog if you treat this as one long album, but I don’t think it’s intended in that sense. Regardless, I really liked it – it’s a 5 for me, & a really interesting way to treat a double-album experience for the 70s, with a lot of innovations & some unique production for its time.
Holger Czukay
5/5
I’m at a 5.
I entered a big long zen state for that one, so my analysis isn’t going to be as fruitful as it might normally be, but that felt like a more accessible, commercially friendly take on the avantgarde sound design & manic instrumentation from “Tago Mago”; the residue of that album is still kind of in my ear, so perhaps I’m a little biased in giving this a 5, but I think it earned it.
There’s some really neat soundscapes on this, including a Funkadelic meets David Bowie vibe on “Cool in the Pool”, the vaguely biblical panic of “Oh Lord, Give Us More Money” with the car horns, destroyed buildings, loud guitars, and oddly, a sort of Kraftwerk meets Queen vibe. “Persian Love” is, well, lovely – sort of a calypso vibe mixed with 70s disco & rock, and it works surprisingly well. “Hollywood Symphony” returns to the same kind of Kraftwerk meets Queen vibe, but with more of a prog rock bend reminiscent of Yes, and synth work that feels adjacent to Van Halen’s “Jump”.
I enjoyed it a lot – obviously, the shadow of “Tago Mago” & how innovative and beyond its time it felt looms large on this, but the safer approach works really nice here, and this album being like, 30 minutes shorter certainly helps quite a bit. It’s got a good solid variety, a great core base of instruments to work from, & the sampling on this gives a sort of pseudo-plunderphonics vibe that feels unique for 1979 all its own. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, & it does occasionally get a little lost in the weight of its own ambition, but I think it’s a pretty successful solo work. Hence, the 5. At worst, a 3.
Van Morrison
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
I don’t think I quite fully caught the vibe of the album as intended, but I think I picked up on most of it – if this is as improvised as it’s all claimed to be, then the intention of this album feels like closing your eyes, trying to find the sort of mental imagery & setting of each track, and then letting Van Morrison’s voice & his stream of consciousness train of thought paint the broad strokes for your brain to fill in the story, enhanced by some fabulous instrumentation throughout.
This is a masterclass of sound design, but not in the Nine Inch Nails sense, where the production is used as a harsher tool to express unstable emotions. It’s more so sound design in the classical orchestration sense, a la Beethoven or other composers of his time. I’m not foolish enough to say Van Morrison or his team are actually Beethoven or anything, but what makes classical music work well enough & feel sort of timeless is the intention of each track. This album thrives on trying to create an atmosphere, and letting Van Morrison guide you through that atmosphere. It succeeds more often than not, & while I might be hyping it up a bit much in terms of Van Morrison’s intention vs the actual outcome, I do think they sort of work hand-in-hand; this was designed to be as different from something like “Brown Eyed Girl” as possible, and it certainly is. It’s also different from anything on Moondance, which took a more measured & traditional approach. It’s a testament to Van Morrison’s fluidity as an artist, honestly. I really liked this.
The thing is, for my brain, I think I only caught the general mood of the track on about 6 of the tracks – specifically, “Beside You” & “Ballerina” didn’t quite click the way that I think they could have, but that’s less of a fault of Van Morrison’s approach, and more so my inability to catch their vibe. When this album clicks, my goodness, does it click. Cyprus Avenue & Madame George in particular felt brilliantly produced, and the mood brought on by that soundscape felt ethereal for 1968. Those two tracks alone are worth the listen.
I understand why this has a 3, because approaching this like a typical album will leave the mind with a lot of confusion – lots of repetition, weird broad lyrics, some instrumentation that’s nice to listen to but makes no sense… all things I might say if I treated this like Moondance. It’s an impossible feeling to describe once that zen state really truly clicks, but it’s something that I think is worth chasing on every track. Hence, the 4.5 bumped up to a 5.
David Bowie
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Sixth time around for David Bowie, by far the most we’ve gotten of any singular artist. Fourth time in a row he’s getting a 5 from me – this goes right behind Station to Station as my second favorite Bowie album so far. Again, I’d probably have to relisten to “Low” or “Aladdin Sane” to really give a proper ranking of my favorites so far, but it’s a testament to the man that he could release an album like this in 2013 and still feel so damn compelling around 40 years after his prime.
As far as the production goes, this does feel like what a “modern” David Bowie album should sound like; enhanced and refined from his 70s/80s work, with new production tricks abound. There’s a lot of influence from late 2000s indie rock here, and while it’s a little jarring at first to hear David Bowie seem so contemporary, the combination of his more withered (yet still powerfully present) vocals & the classic production tricks strewn throughout keep everything grounded in a way that still distinctly feels like a David Bowie album, and not just him jumping on the trends of the era. The only real tracks that sort of feel flat like that are “Boss of Me”, which felt rather broad & a little too plain, & “Valentine’s Day”, but that one makes up for it decently well with the lyricism and storytelling.
This album really does shine well lyrically – a few broader tracks than others, but so much of this album feels like a sort of meta-commentary on the time David Bowie spent away from the industry, as well as a commentary on his older status. I still haven’t listened to Blackstar, because I know it’s on the list, but if that album is the grandiose swan song in musical form that it seems to be, he certainly planted the seeds for it here. When he’s not wistfully looking back on his Berlin period, and how radically the landscape has changed, he’s just jamming out, in ways that are less cerebral than I’m used to from Bowie, but certainly welcome enough, especially on the stadium rock-esque “(You Will) Set the World on Fire”.
I really want to point at the last track, “Heat”, in particular. I could be wrong, but I really think the track is about his father controlling the prisons of his mind, long after his death. Him saying “I can only love you” is likely referring to himself, and the amount of identities he went through just to try and find one that he felt could mentally appease his dad. I can see why that track would end the album, even if I preferred “You Feel So Lonely You Could Die” from a musical standpoint. “Heat” seems deeply personal, and I think it’s worth ending on, assuming my interpretation is right. It’s a hell of a track either way.
So, yeah, I really enjoyed this – it’s probably a little jarring to people who hold his older stuff in mythical regard, and I imagine that once we actually get Ziggy Stardust, I’ll understand exactly why. For my younger, more contemporary tastes, this felt like a really nice blend of Bowie’s older sensibilities with modern, updated production. It’s not perfect, but given that the 53 minutes of this flew by in a heartbeat, it felt captivating all the way through, and it was certainly worth the listen. Hence, the 5.
Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
Going into this, I only knew the title track, so imagine my surprise when this album kicked off with a sort of Jackson 5-esque R&B/soul cut. It’s hard to classify this as a rap album, because it does feel like more of a R&B album where Grandmaster Flash & friends happen to rap on some of the tracks, some of the time. It is definitely old-school hip-hop though, and I’m very glad the album does enough to stay fresh & energetic; I really did expect this to be 35 minutes of stuff similar to “The Message”, with some rather minimal production & less of the established blending of funk & rap that would come to define the genre.
Hell, the “Genius of Love” sample on “It’s Nasty” immediately threw me for a loop – that might be one of the earliest examples of sampling in hip-hop ever, given that the original track only came out a year earlier. Super fun track, too. Scorpio is cool as shit; a bit long, sure, and a little bit of “human” presence would’ve done wonders to break up the monotony of the modulation, but it’s a remarkably unique blend of electronica and talkbox work for 1982. “It’s a Shame” has a few awkward production tricks, and the vocal intensity feels a little high compared to the lyrical content, to the point where it almost feels a little condescending, but I’ll give it a pass for 1982.
Dreamin’ is a little awkward, given that we’re not THAT far removed from “Songs in The Key of Life” at this point in time, & “Hotter Than July” had come out 2 years before. He was (& still very much is) alive, so the tribute feels a bit strange. In a way, I’m almost reminded of all the LeBron parody songs trending online right now, but this is far more earnest. Is it glazing? Yeah, probably – you don’t write the lyric “I dream about you Stevie, you make me wonder” unless you’re going for remarkably cheesy praise. I think it’s a bit long for what it is, but I adore Stevie Wonder, so I think it’s fair enough to shoot your shot on wanting to meet the guy like this. I do think though, that if you’re gonna do a Stevie Wonder tribute, you have to have a harmonica solo. Sort of criminal that there wasn’t one; felt more like an Earth, Wind & Fire cut at the end of all that.
“You Are” is painfully fine – for my ears, lots of vocal & instrumental flash instead of lyrical substance for a gospel track like that, though that opening piano is beautiful. I might be a bit hypocritical given that one track on the Christina Aguilera album we got recently, I do think it just sort of circles the platitudinal bases, with the spoken word interlude there as a sort of anchor. “The Message” solidified its place as a rap classic for me here – I’ve never fully given the lyrics their due on that track, but they’re excellent, & the skit at the end is a very direct snowball trail to get to “Fuck Tha Police” just 6 years later.
I now have a way better understanding of this album’s place as an influence on hip-hop, & there is a pretty direct throughline to get from this album to the rest of 80s rap to come. There’s also a lot of R&B standards that would come into vogue the more the genres overlapped; it wouldn’t surprise me if the usage of “Genius of Love” here inspired Mariah Carey’s usage of it on “Fantasy”. Overall, it’s a pretty good 37 minutes, and any shortcomings I have with it can be sort of wiped away by “it’s 1982” – at worst, I think this is a 3, bare minimum. It’s a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5 because I sort of admire it for what it is, and some of the cheesier stuff on this sort of won me over.
Bauhaus
3/5
I’m at a 3.
Honestly? Not that much to write home about. Perhaps it’s some distractions from the Switch 2 Direct lingering in my brain, but this album never quite found the hook to pull me in – Tracks 3-6 really worked for me, and the last track hit pretty nicely, but the rest of them (1, 2, 7-9) sort of felt flat. There’s not an expressly bad track here, just a lot of vague mediocrity, or at the very least, some uncompelling listens.
This is definitely 1981 post-punk, but beyond that, nothing here really caught my ears as doing anything particularly special. A few Bowie-esque vocal patterns, some funky basslines here and there, but nothing out of the ordinary that makes me want to say “wow, I had to listen to this before I die”. I liked half of the songs, and I was less impressed by the other half. I don’t feel like I gotta expand on that too much, so… yeah, take it or leave it. I’m sure there are better Bauhaus albums, as I’ve heard the name before, but this one just didn’t click for me. It's not bad, but I'm not itching to recommend it or anything. Hence, the 3.
Genesis
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Not quite what I was expecting as a follow-up to “Selling England by the Pound” – that’s a pretty straightforward prog rock album. This is… certainly something, though I think its wild eccentricities are right down my alley. Peter Gabriel should probably be tested for drugs.
This is a science fiction journey that starts in New York City with a graffiti artist named Rael, who becomes abandoned by his brother & entrapped in a cave, before dealing with humanoid factories & weird insectoids that can’t decide how society should work. He then finds 32 doors that seemingly only have one way out, before escaping to face his fears. He then dies of anesthesia, gets revived as a humanoid blob of gelatinous flesh, meets some mythological temptresses, but because he’s so goddamn boring, he literally kills & eats them. Afterwards, he canoes his way to a society of “Slippermen” (and by all means, please Google “Slippermen”), who rip his dick off in an attempt to make him fully human again… before a fucking raven takes his ripped off dick and flies away with it. He finds a portal back to New York City, but before going through it, sees his brother drowning in river rapids near a ravine, and decides to save him… before it turns out, he was his own brother all along. He has saved “himself”. From what? I have no earthly idea.
That is, at the very least, my rough interpretation of whatever this story is, which is a maddening concept album that feels like a Star Trek parody on drugs. I truly cannot imagine writing this at all. And yet, for whatever god damn reason, because it’s Peter Gabriel, his maddening vision somehow fruitfully comes to life in one of the coolest prog rock soundscapes I’ve heard from a 70s album. Even if you ignore the batshit insane plot from a lyrical standpoint, the instrumentals, vocal performances & song titles do a decent enough job of getting a framework across.
I don’t think this is as good as Selling England by the Pound, if only because it’s 40 minutes longer & is significantly more confusing due to the concept album plotline, but in terms of pure musicality, this feels kind of even. There’s some fantastic melodies throughout this thing, some excellent guitar work, and some absolutely mental drum patterns from Phil Collins. Honestly, the whole album feels pretty captivating throughout; even at 94 minutes, I never found myself in too much of a lull, but it certainly helps that each side of this album is sort of its own act in this overarching story. Combine that with the number of ambient instrumentals that work as transitions, and the pacing of this album keeps it feeling fresh.
I liked it, but I totally get why someone else might hate it – it’s a weird fucking album, for sure, and following this plot might take away from some of the more musical moments scattered throughout. It’s definitely not the straight-forward, easy, mesmerizingly good album that “Selling England By The Pound” was, but it’s not trying to be at all. For Peter Gabriel’s final album as a member of Genesis, he sure went out with… it. I still truly don’t know what “it” is, but he sure seemed happy to find it.
Ultimately, this is a goofy science fiction album that plays itself totally straight, and which has no right to work as well as it does. I’m a sucker for that sort of campy B-movie bullshit, sue me. At worst, I think it’s a 3 if you hate the presence of a plot, or if the album is just too long to hold one’s attention – for me, it’s a 5. God bless the other members of Genesis for indulging Peter in this wacky plot. How that same man wrote “Melt” & “So”, I’ll never truly know. What a guy.
Björk
5/5
I’m at a 5.
First time I’ve given Bjork a 5, though Vulnicura would’ve probably gotten the nod had it ended after Track 7. It’s a hell of a solo debut – we haven’t gotten any of her work with The Sugarcubes yet, but I know they’ve got an album on the list. I’ll be really interested to see how different this is when that album comes around, because of all the Bjork albums we’ve gotten so far, this is the most… “normal”. Certainly the most commercially accessible, at the very least.
This is a much prettier, nicer, & happier album than either Vulnicura & Medulla – lots of house/club tracks, some lovely vocals throughout that are gliding on some smooth trip-hop / ambience-driven instrumentals, & some great sound design / production throughout to create an atmosphere of Bjork just taking a long trip in the city. It makes for a breezy 48 minutes, and I don’t think there’s a bad track here; maybe a few dull moments spurred on by long outros, but nothing overwhelmingly distracting from how good this tends to be.
For 1993, I don’t know how much this was necessarily rocking the boat, but it does feel like the seeds for something bigger for pop music were being planted here. Trip-hop was in full effect, sure, but this feels like the most it’s been sort of commercially blended with pop music’s sensibilities to this point in 1993. It’s also showcasing a variety of styles that could be explored within the soundscape of trip-hop itself. A track like “The Anchor Song” is wildly different from “Like Someone In Love”, & “Like Someone In Love” couldn’t be more different from “There’s More to Life Than This”, but their instrumental bases make them fit like a glove in the full album experience.
Bjork’s vocals certainly help – still a little ragged and loose, as they have been on her other albums, but they’re a bit stronger here, used as a complimentary instrument to enhance the instrumentals, as opposed to a primary lead relying on the emotional pull. All the vocal approaches she’s taken so far have been valid, but they clicked really nicely on this one, just because this album feels simpler & more straightforward than the other ones we’ve gotten. The lyricism being streamlined, yet still vivid, also helps a lot; everything feels pretty grounded in terms of how one might deal with a lot of the situations presented on this album, but Bjork’s imagery gives it just enough of a grandiose scale to give each track a gravitas it might not have earned otherwise.
I really liked this – Bjork has certainly won me over on account of her ambition, and the earliest pieces of that ambition seem to be rooted here. I wouldn’t say this does anything particularly crazy, but Bjork is radical in just being herself on this album. It’s a welcome style at a point in time musically dominated by the bombastic, larger than life attitude portrayed by a lot of rock/grunge stars, or the pop stars carrying themselves with the poise of an untouchable superstar. Bjork is… just a lady, going around the city, partying at the club, gazing at the stars, and feeling a little lovey-dovey at times. A quaint enough journey, elevated by the gravitas she naturally & effortlessly infuses into each track. It makes for a damn good album, and a 5 for me.
Stephen Stills
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Just like “Something/Anything?” by Todd Rundgren, this album also has 4 individually titled sides, each with their own particular vibe, and just like that album, I split this into 4 miniature albums. Once again, it really worked.
Side 1, taking up the first 5 tracks, is titled “The Eagle”, and it’s rad as hell – sort of an “Americana bossa nova” vibe to the whole thing, blending the 70s rock sensibilities of bands like Chicago or Boston with a little bit of Afro-Cuban percussion and riffs. Not a single miss there – just 17 minutes of pure jams that clicked really, really nicely for me. It’s a stellar start to the album.
Side 2, taking up tracks 6-11, is titled “The Wilderness”. It’s a REALLY nice set of country music tracks, with a bluegrass lean that really appeals to my sensibilities. Great fiddle solos, excellent use of the steel guitar, some lovely texturing by the piano, & some really nice lyrics throughout to create some vivid midwestern imagery. The only vague knock I have is that Stephen Stills doesn’t have the full country twang that some of his contemporaries have, but he sounds great regardless. I deeply enjoyed it; special shoutout to “Don’t Look at My Shadow”, which has a perfect finish to the entire side / first half of the album.
Side 3, tracks 12-17, is titled “Consider”, which doesn’t really have a specific theme, but it’s just a great variety set. I really liked it – lots of bouncing around between genres & styles of rock, jumping around from influence to influence. “It Doesn’t Matter” feels a lot like a Byrds track, “Bound to Fall” feels like a Beatles cut (sort of White Album-y?), “How Far” feels a lot like Simon & Garfunkel, “Move Around” feels sort of like a David Bowie track, & “The Love Gangster” has a bit of Jimi Hendrix in it that really pulls the funk together. It’s a super fun set of tracks, and it might be my highlight of the whole album.
Side 4, tracks 18-21, is titled “Rock & Roll Is Here To Stay” – I was in the zen state for a lot of it, so my analysis won’t be as fruitful, but I liked it a lot. Certainly a rock-driven side, & even though there’s a bit of a homogeneity that emerges after leaving the zen state, it’s really enjoyable in the moment. There’s some great percussion patterns, some really smooth guitar melodies, vocals that glide kinda like silk, and some really nice solos that carry a good chunk of each track. “Blues Man” is a lovely tribute to Jimi Hendrix, Al Wilson & Duane Allman, who all happened to die in 1970 & 1971, all in their 20s. It’s a strong way to end a side called “Rock & Roll Is Here To Stay,” and a solid way to end the entire album. In a weird way, this might be my least favorite side, but only because I didn’t feel like I was as engaged by the content of the tracks, and more so mesmerized & sucked in by their soundscapes and vibes. It’s still a really good set of tracks, though.
As a whole album, there’s really not a single miss here. This is weighed down a bit by its length, so I understand why this has a 3, but for my money’s worth, Stephen Stills has proven himself a very, very, very capable artist outside of the vague mythos of CSNY. Obviously, this is “Manassas”, but it’s a band Stephen Stills put together to act as a backing band to perform tracks he wrote entirely by himself. It’s listed on Spotify as a solo Stephen Stills album, & that’s honestly kind of fair. I’d be remiss not to give an incredible amount of credit to that backing band though – they killed the instrumentals on almost every track here. The songwriting isn’t as sharp as the sharpest stuff on the CSN/Y albums we’ve gotten, but it’s certainly not dull. When it clicks in the most vivid ways, it really clicks, especially so on Side 3.
It’s a shorter double album, thankfully sitting at just 74 minutes, but if you treat it like 4 mini-albums of around 18 minutes each, it’s a really fruitful set of tracks with a wide variety of styles & soundscapes that never really manages to miss. As a whole, this feels like it’s gone underappreciated in the larger canon of 1970s rock, & that’s kind of a shame. I really, really liked it, & I think it’s worth giving a 5. I’m very glad it’s on the list. Good on you, Stephen Stills (& all the other people you credited on the cover that I’m too lazy to type out).
Tortoise
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4.
I wasn’t expecting this to be a fully instrumental album, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing – I liked the first 26 minutes and 24 seconds of this album a lot. If this album were just the first two tracks, I’d be at a 5. So, what exactly do the last 16 minutes and 36 seconds do to warrant bumping this down by a point & a half?
Well… nothing, really. That’s a positive & a negative – the last 4 tracks here are fully competent tracks that fit in decently enough with the rest of the album, maintain the mood, and they’re fine enough to listen to. They also do absolutely nothing for their runtimes, and as such, they’re very one-note compared to the bigger journeys present in the soundscapes of the first two tracks. Those first two tracks aren’t perfect, but they kept me on my toes by changing up the soundscape every minute or two, so it was easier to stay engaged with them. The last 4 tracks find their soundscape immediately, and just never really change, so the feeling of a journey is lost. It wouldn’t be a bad thing if they didn’t show they could competently & effectively do it so well on the first two tracks. The only one that comes close to finding that journey is the last track, “Along the Banks of Rivers”, but it’s still fundamentally just a percussive beat, a wall of sound, and some up/down guitar hits that feel like they’re from a SpongeBob track.
I do feel like I’m being just a little unfair towards this – perhaps my overt attention on the first 2 tracks gave me a bad impression for the last 4, since those first 2 just felt more rich to me. I might need to listen to this in a pure zen state, just to see if the last tracks click better, or to see if they are just that “bland” comparatively. Overall, though, I did like this. It’s competently done ambient music with some high highs (great guitar, expressive percussion, fun synth work) and some flat lows (droning one-note walls, a few blatant drum loops, less engaging guitar) that feels sort of like a prototype for what Radiohead would more successfully commercially blend on Kid-A. It’s an inoffensive 43 minutes, and while I can see how that inoffensive style makes it easy to ignore and give a 2 or something, I think it’s at a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4 because it really did engage me for those first 2 tracks. If over half the album’s runtime is that good, who am I to bump it all the way down?
k.d. lang
4/5
I’m at a 4.
Took a little bit for me to realize that this is more of a “country music meets 50s soul/swing music” album than a pure country album, but once that vibe fully rolled in by Tracks 3 & 4, the album really started to work for me. There’s not that much to say, outside of the obvious stuff: k.d. lang’s vocals are absolutely wonderful throughout this album, and have sort of a “Dusty Springfield meets Aretha Franklin” vibe to them, especially on her more operatic tones. The instrumentals are pretty good – great blend of saxophone, acoustic guitar, steel guitar, light percussion, & fiddle. Each track has an instrumental that fits the mood, and each track generally sounds pretty good because of it.
My only real knock is in the lyrics, because I do think they’re not as sharp as they could be on some tracks. At the very least, for a country music album, there are rather broad strokes that don’t evoke the same imagery on every track, or not as much imagery as the song titles would lead one to believe. They’re not ever bad, but they’re just sort of flat at times. That flatness leads to a few vocal performances that are technically sound, but don’t showcase the full range of emotion as other tracks do. When they click though, they click really nicely, especially on something like “I’m Down To My Last Cigarette”. Regardless, I liked this a lot – no bad tracks, just a few that didn’t click as well as others, hence a pretty solidly recommended 4. It’s a 3 at worst if you don’t like country music.
Aphex Twin
5/5
It’s a 5.
This is my first Aphex Twin album, and while I’m very aware of his status as an electronica legend of sorts, I’ve just never really gone out of my way to look up a track. I’m sure I’ve heard at least one of these before – his music is simply too ubiquitous for me to have never encountered it, but I didn’t recognize any during this listen. Is that a good thing? Well, maybe; I feel like this is the sort of music that’s meant to come & go, as opposed to other stuff that really sticks in your brain. The only ambient music I’ve ever really recognized off a few notes is stuff off of Kid-A. That’s not to undersell anything here though; they are remarkably well composed & produced tracks. With enough time spent with this album, I’m sure I could specifically point out each track on a case by case basis, and really be able to describe the intricacies of what makes it tick.
I didn’t want to do that on a first listen, though. I just wanted to feel the music itself, and… yeah, I felt it alright. This is remarkably good electronica for presumably 1985 to 1992, and it’s very easy to find a zen state for the vast majority of the 74 minute run time. My brain recognized a lot of intricacies in the production, especially in terms of shifting waveforms for all these synths & 808s that added depth to each track, but my brain wasn’t really *perceiving* those intricacies in the moment. In the moment, I just felt comforted by each soundscape, as a vaguely textured white noise that was really nice to read to. This is radically good studying music. I wrote a few things down on each track, just to stay attentive, but it was like writing notes for a lecture – write first, comprehend later.
Even then, my notes are really scattered, and nothing of too much substance; “big booming bassline”, “nice chiptune vibes”, “cool rapid percussion”, “sounds kinda like Earthbound”, “nice 808s”, etc. I don’t know that it would do much good, because describing these tracks will never replicate what it’s like to listen to these tracks, & the entire 74 minutes is worth listening to, whether it’s with headphones in, on plain speakers, on a nice soundbar, or in a car. It is a blissfully good album, and while the electronica can get a little grating at certain points (a few really high pitched synths or some extra heavy bass), it’s never enough to ruin a track. It’s a 5 for me, and I’ll gladly come back to this.
Kacey Musgraves
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
Right off the bat, I have to avoid the temptation to make any direct comparisons to Taylor Swift. This is my first time actually properly listening to Kacey Musgraves, and I don’t think it’s fair for me to use another artist in the same space as a sort of crutch – yes, this is a country pop album, but this leans into more of an indie rock direction with a yacht rock bend that usually evokes something like Tame Impala or Coldplay. When she sounds like Taylor, then those comparisons are fair, but I’d only say about 3 or 4 tracks here lean that direction at most. I actually do like Taylor Swift, by the way, but I’ll have to expound on that more once we get 1989.
As far as Kacey Musgraves goes, I’ve heard of her name, and so, so many of my friends have praised this album in particular. I know this album had massive acclaim, but that acclaim, combined with the sort of mythical status my friends gave this, led to me sort of avoiding it. Really, it’s just in the expectations – this isn’t a Janelle Monae thing where I just sort of lazily never bothered (large regret), but more of a “I really don’t want to let my friends down if I think it’s bad” sort of thing.
Of course, I have proven myself to be a moron – I really, really liked this album. While I don’t think the songwriting is as sharp & witty as it was always made out to be, given the amount of broad lovey-dovey platitudes throughout this thing, it’s still pretty good. If nothing else, the way Kacey performs these tracks more than makes up for some of the flatter lines – her vocals are lovely, evoking more of an Alison Krauss vibe on her twangier parts, and Ariana Grande on her held notes. She glides on a lot of these instrumentals, with some really nice vocal melodies & structures. Every track is really nice to listen to from a technical standpoint; there’s a handful of tracks where the instrumentals don’t quite give back to her in the same way (i.e., no matching synth melodies or less energetic percussion), but it’s never enough to ruin a track.
As far as those instrumentals go, there’s a really nice variety that starts to emerge from Track 4 onward. Like I said, my brain went to Tame Impala quite a bit (ESPECIALLY on “High Horse”), but it’s just a general conglomeration of indie rock sensibilities from The White Stripes onwards, blended with pop sensibilities of the early 2010s, some 90s/00s Quiet Storm, a hint of Alanis Morrissette, & country similar to both Taylor Swift’s Fearless (I know, I know, but shh), the Emmylou Harris solo album we got a while back, & a lot of Shania Twain (we’ll get to Come on Over eventually).
I can’t really justify the bump up to a 5 other than my own personal enjoyment – objectively, it’s probably closer to a 4, but something about the last 3 tracks really got me good, especially with how lovely “Rainbow” is as a closing track. That one is fabulous. I think it’s just a catchy album, with a lot of nice choruses & hooks that brought a really warm energy. It’s not a nighttime album, so maybe I’ll have to listen to it outside, during the proper golden hour, to truly capture the vibes this album is going for. For now, it just clicked remarkably well with me, hence the bump to a 5. Not only do I feel like I need to listen to more of Kacey Musgraves, I feel like I need to text a few people about being this late to the party.
My Bloody Valentine
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
When we got “m b v”, I said that I thought I “got” shoegaze now, & that if “Loveless” was this absolutely seminal 90s record and the pinnacle of this style that people claim it to be, I thought it could be really good. I’m glad to say the critics were all correct, for the most part; I’m still not insanely high on this album, but I’m pretty damn pleased by it. Out of the 11 tracks here, only 2 or 3 felt like they couldn’t put me in a zen state, but that’s a pretty good mark to hit on.
As with “m b v”, this is a variety of shoegaze blended with more ethereal instrumentation & production to feel like the in-between phase of a lucid dream. Ironically, getting Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks just 11 days ago really helped me with figuring out how to approach listening to this album, but while Van Morrison supplements his stream of consciousness approach with some ear-pleasing instrumentals, this is supplemented by soundscapes that would make a pilgrim think you’ve captured the sounds of Hell itself. In this case, that’s a positive. Listening to this has made me realize that this is sort of a “Cocteau Twins does grunge” album – a lot of the tracks here do have a generalized structure, with a verse / chorus / bridge, but it’s all buried pretty heavily by a lot of reverb, quietly mixed vocals, & harsh guitar / synth work, with enough of each instrument poking out to acknowledge them, but not truly understand them.
So, where exactly does this album succeed to the point of a bumped 5? It’s not THAT tonally different from “m b v”, and compositionally, a lot of the tricks are generally the same. Well, it’s mainly in the fact that each track feels like it flows into the other in a much more cohesive way; while there’s only a handful of true transitions on the album, the way this is structured feels like it’s moving from scene to scene in some type of movie, with each track feeling different from the next, yet just tonally similar enough to work. Past that, “m b v” really suffers from a number of tracks having a “first minute is the whole song” syndrome, and while the same is occasionally true here, it’s covered up more nicely, and far less persistent. There are loops, yes, but they pulled me into the zen state long before I had a chance to care about those loops.
Honestly, it’s just a more enjoyable soundscape overall – “m b v” feels like it’s obligated to use noise based on the expectations & success of this album, but this album feels like it’s trying to innovate noise itself. It’s still not the most pleasing, and I’d definitely take, like, a Brian Eno ambience over a Shoegaze ambience a lot of the time… but this stands up pretty well. Hell, for 1991, I’d argue this is way ahead of the curve in terms of effectively “taming” harsh noise as an instrument. In a different sense, for something that came out only 9 years after Thriller, it defies all of the conventions of the 80s in a really cool way.
Is my opinion of this album a little skewed because we got “m b v” first? Perhaps, but I think going backwards like this is a positive. Seeing the band at a “lesser” point before getting their more critically acclaimed stuff is a natural curve, and I do think I would’ve bounced off of this way way more if we didn’t get “m b v” first. I really did like it; it might just be the pinnacle of what shoegaze is. At the very least, it’s set a new high bar for what the genre should sound like to my ears, even if that is simplified down to just “Cocteau Twins doing grunge”. It’s a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5, and at the very very worst, it’s a 3.
Neneh Cherry
3/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump down to a 3.
I really don’t have that much to say – this is a fully competent hip-hop album from 1989. It’s definitely dated as one from how heavy the instrumentals use Roland synth patches, drum machines loops & MIDI instruments… but also, what other album is gonna give you a line like “cramp my freedom” nowadays? As far as Neneh Cherry herself goes, she’s got a good singing voice & a good rap flow. When she’s on, she’s on, and she sounds great to listen to. As far as the songs themselves go, I think this album finds a strong base for each track to start on, and then sort of coasts on that base for a while – almost every track here feels like it starts to spin the wheels about 70% of the way through, lyrically, instrumentally & vocally.
That sense of “spinning the wheels” is why I’m more inclined to bump down to a 3, though I’d love to leave it right at a 3.5. This is a fun album to listen to, but too many tracks feel a little too long, some of them feel a little lost lyrically, & ultimately, a decent number of tracks aren’t very compelling once they reach those points. It’s still a really enjoyable listen, at least for me, because this is 100% a product of 1989. A few tracks here are so lyrically dopey & preachy that they sort of won me over just for having big “song made for a fake boy band on a Disney Channel show” energy, and some of them won me over because the instrumentals feel like they would’ve fit right into a dance scene in a John Hughes coming of age movie.
So, yeah: fun album, fun listen, but not a very compelling one. If a few tracks clicked a little better, I’d be at a 4, and maybe they’ll click better in the future, but for now, I’ll bump it down to a 3. I still liked it, though. Not sure that I HAD to listen to it before I died, but I’m glad I did.
Kate Bush
5/5
I am surprisingly at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
It took a little bit for this album to really start registering in my brain, because it is SO wildly & radically different from what I’d expect a Kate Bush album to sound like at this point. Between “The Sensual World” & her features on Peter Gabriel’s albums, her style seemed pretty defined, so to get such an avant-garde & experimentally bold one like this threw me off guard. I think I liked this, though.
Admittedly, I’m still not even quite sure what the overall theme of the album is – “The Sensual World” was a look into the human condition & how human connection is a necessary thing, but this album feels like a more scattered look into pain, panic, plight & paranoia, whether it’s Vietnam-induced PTSD, a seance to summon the ghost of Harry Houdini, the struggles of Australian aborigines, or whatever the hell “Get Out of My House” was. It’s a much wider album, and that wideness comes with a variety of soundscapes & styles, all rooted in a little bit of chaos. Well, chaos & a myriad of synths, drum machines & MIDI instruments. For 1982, this feels almost like Kate Bush trying to do a Bjork album, and it really did work for me.
I don’t know that I can type too much more about this; it’s gonna vary wildly from person to person, and I’ll probably need another pass or two with this album to really dig deeper into its eccentricities. It’s an interesting listen, and I’m probably giving it the bump up to a 5 just because I found it captivating & fascinating; from a purely musical standpoint, it’s compositionally closer to a 4, but there’s something in the delivery & structure of the album, and how it ramps up the chaos even more from track to track, that commands attention. I liked it; it’s probably no less than a 3. Maybe a 2 if you’re THAT thrown off by how wildly different this is. For me, it’s a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5 – certainly a weird one, but it’s worth digging into.
MC Solaar
5/5
That’s a 5.
Color me pleasantly surprised at how damn nice French hip-hop feels to listen to; the amount of extra syllables & nuance in the language allows for some really mesmerizing flows to pop in & out without ever once breaking the rhythm of each track. MC Solaar runs through a myriad of styles here, hopping from Snoop Dogg to Phife Dawg to College Dropout-era Kanye to Shaggy, & he makes it work every time, & it’s really, really pleasing to listen to, even without understanding a single word of French.
Instrumentally, this album jumps all over the place: some mid-2000s soul sampling, a little trip-hop, some shit that sounds like Sonic Adventure 2, some Grandmaster Flash-style funk, some ‘90s West Coast, a little bit of Nas, some N.W.A.-esque record-scratching heavy stuff, a little bit of Jamaican / reggae influence… it’s a lot, but it all sounds great. That’s a rough overview of styles, but there’s really not a definitive production style this album ever goes for. It’s certainly limited by the technology of 1991, but it feels really fresh & really cool all the same. Honestly, I’m impressed that this is 1991, because it does feel like a general amalgamation of styles that would really define the decade. Is this ahead of its time? Hell, maybe.
Since I can’t exactly speak to the lyricism itself too much, save for translating a few songs just to get a better sense of the vibe, all I can really compliment is that the instrumentals tend to really match the lyrics. It’s truly an album that needs to be heard to understand, but it’s a very good rap album for 1991, and especially so for a French rap album. I liked it a lot, and I’ll absolutely bump this a few more times. It’s a pretty good 5.
The Residents
5/5
This is a very subjective 4 that I will bump up to a 5, solely out of spite for the people on this website giving this thing a 2 on average.
Listen, I’ve heard some BAD shit on this list. Like, really, really bad shit. This is not a bad album; it’s just a weird album. Even among weird albums, I’ve heard weirder, like Kollaps, Locust Abortion Technician or Trout Mask Replica. With a literal 2 average, I was expecting this to be loud, obnoxious, exponentially strange & so extremely avant-garde that it has no sense of commercial value & exists only as an extreme example of what music itself is.
And yet, it’s not that at all. It’s truly just a weird album. It’s totally musically competent, with some genuinely enjoyable soundscapes & some fun production that feels ahead of the curve on a couple of tracks. It’s primarily a rock album, sure, but it dabbles in such a variety of styles that it’s hard to lock this down to any one specific genre. It’s incredibly experimental, & the only time it ever truly borders on obnoxious is the loudness of the electrocution at the very end of the album, but even that’s justified in its usage as a storytelling device, changing this person’s personality like it’s a fucked up psych ward. Lyrically, there’s a lot of nonsensical garbage (positive), but when this album wants to try and tell a story, it knows when to pull back on the oddities and let a bit of fun writing & imagery shine through. Hell, even vocally, I think the weird pitching effects give the whole album a sort of Looney Tunes vibe. It really does feel sort of like a comedy album, so approaching it with a way more fun lens that allows for this sort of experimentation made it all click better.
I genuinely am trying to justify why this has an average of 2 at all – maybe my brain can pull more from video game soundscapes & the eccentricities in them. At the very least, my experience with all of the other strange albums on this list lessens how awkward this might feel. For a lot of people, this is going to bounce off of them like a pinball to a bumper. Even then, the third-lowest rated album on the entire site? It’s not even remotely that bad, & at the very least, it’s captivatingly strange, which is more than I can say for a handful of truly dreadfully boring albums.
Honestly, it really is worth a listen before you die, because if this doesn’t feel that abrasive to you, then you’ve probably passed the test for the REALLY weird shit on this list, or just weirder shit in general. As far as my experience goes, I genuinely really liked it – it's a 3 at worst, but I’m at a 4 because a few too many tracks felt a bit repetitive & not as compelling as some of the other, weirder ones. However, for the sake of the site, I’m absolutely giving this a 5 to try and skew the ratings back upwards.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
4/5
I’m at a 4.
This is my first time listening to Nick Cave, who I’ve heard *of*, but never *heard* until now. For a first impression, I think this is pretty good – lots of heavier but very intentionally designed soundscapes, some good grit in the vocals, and a nice progression throughout a lot of the tracks that keeps them as captivating listens. I don’t think there’s ever a bad song here, & for the most part, I enjoyed a lot of this album.
The big key issue I have with this album is about some of the storytelling on a handful of tracks on the back half, specifically Tracks 6, 8, & 9. It’s not that the songwriting is necessarily bad, but they each have their own issues that keep each track from feeling very satisfying, dragging out the 41 minute runtime of the album into something that feels longer. “When I First Came To Town” is a great listen, but the lack of a reveal for why exactly all these townsfolk have turned on the guy leaves it feeling empty for me, combined with the soundscape getting a bit sterile within the last minute or two, reaching the peak of intensity just early enough to overstay its welcome. “Loom of the Land” suffers from a lot of the same issues, enhanced further by the story in the track just not being very interesting. “Jack the Ripper” sort of suffers from these same things, but my issue there is more so that the big intense buildup in each instrumental just feels a bit overdone by that point in the album. It’s also just a bad vibe to end the album on, with the whole toxic relationship thing. They’re all good tracks to listen to, but they’re nowhere near as exciting as the instrumentals and vocals make them out to be, & that disconnect is just biting at me too much.
That excitement is thankfully present on the front half of the album – I think the first 4 tracks here click really nicely, & while “Christina the Astonishing” might feel like a similar sort of drag, the calmer nature of that track worked really nicely for me as a pace breaker to the intensity of the first 4. Mileage may vary, depending on how much you want to listen to a story of a woman so saintly she can smell sin. “John Finn’s Wife” is probably my standout track of the album – just a good old-fashioned duel over a lady, with a great blend of storytelling & vocal/instrumental intensity that feels befitting of the scope & scale it’s reaching for.
Overall, it’s a slightly mixed bag – if the storytelling is never captivating, this album will never really click, and it’ll probably be a 3 that’s in way over its head. If it is captivating, then it’ll click a lot of the time, and be a 4 or a 5, depending on your parameters for a good story. For my tastes, I’m at a 4, mainly because the album experience feels just a bit longer than it should on the back half, with the instrumentals / length of each track never quite matching the true scope of the storytelling. It’s still a pretty recommended listen, though, and I do hope there’s more Nick Cave on the list.
Steely Dan
5/5
I’m at a 5.
This is my first time properly listening to Steely Dan – my hopes have been pretty high ever since we got “The Nightfly” by Donald Fagen back in September, and this experience was gladly worth the wait. Steely Dan has lived up to the acclaim & the hype; this is a great, great rock album that dips its toes into everything from 50s/60s style rock & roll, bossa nova, CSNY-style harmonics, Elton John-esque piano ballads, & a bit of prog rock. There’s not a single bad track here, save for *maybe* “Show Biz Kids”, but that’s just the refrain sort of nagging in my head; I still liked that one.
As far as the songs themselves go, I don’t have much to complain about, just a lot to praise in scattered tones that just boils down to “they all sounded really great”. “Bodhisattva”’s got the dueling guitars in its solo, “Razor Boy”’s got a good elevator music vibe, “The Boston Rag” has an excellent solo, “Your Gold Teeth” has a guitar filled with swagger, “Show Biz Kids” has a really nice building instrumental, “My Old School” has some great brass in its solo, “Pearl of the Quarter” has great steel guitar, & “King of the World” is a cool as hell prog rock track. Every track has something really captivating about it, which is a huge positive for an album experience.
I’d be remiss to not give a bit of love to Donald Fagen’s vocals, which do glide on a lot of these tracks really nicely. Lyrically, the storytelling is a bit scattered, but it sounds like vaguely full stories that intentionally don’t paint a full picture is part of the Steely Dan mythos, so I’m not too plussed about that. Overall, I just really enjoyed this. It’s a super breezy 41 minutes that never once misses a beat, & I really hope there’s even more Steely Dan on the list. Pretty easy 5 for me.
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
5/5
I am finally at a 5 for Elvis Costello.
The fourth time is indeed the charm – my big thing holding me back with “My Aim Is True” was a repetition in the structure of each track that nagged at me too much, & while that was solved by “Imperial Bedroom”, that album has a few too many tracks that I just considered mediocre. “Brutal Youth” is just weird; maybe I’d bounce off of it less now that I’ve listened to 3 other albums by him, but I thought it was horribly out of date for 1994.
This, though? This came out swinging from the top & just kept rolling – the album never once hit a point of stagnation for me, the song structures are way more flexible, even with an overreliance on the chorus on a number of tracks, & the variety in the soundscapes are even better than they were on both “My Aim Is True” & “Imperial Bedroom”, showcasing even more depth from The Attractions in a way that really lets them feel like a co-artist here, and not just Elvis Costello’s band.
All of the things I gave praise to Elvis Costello for on those other two albums are here in spades, & for a second album, this is way, way up there. Most artists tend to stagnate a little with their second one, but he knocked it out of the park as far as I’m concerned. It’s a quicker, cleaner, more fun album that allows itself to stay loose & maintain an energy that’s infectious throughout. The shorter tracks here make it so nothing overstays its welcome, and the pacing of the album really knows how to spread itself out between its immediately high-tempo intros & slower buildups. It is a very, very quick 35 minutes, and that’s not even counting the bonus tracks on the remaster – Radio, Radio is a banger.
So, yeah, Elvis Costello finally has his 5 from me, and it’s a very well-earned one; this is my favorite album from him yet, and I’ll definitely give this a few more plays. This one’s a recommended listen for sure.
Marvin Gaye
5/5
I… feel weird giving this a number. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a very good 5, but there’s something awkward about rating a man’s ability to air out his grievances.
It’s especially awkward because this is my first full Marvin Gaye album – obviously, I know some of the bigger hits, but for my first one, getting a long open letter recapping a failed, chaotic, vindictive, messy & dysfunctional marriage ending in a nasty divorce period is certainly a first impression. I almost feel like I’ve been trauma dumped on, & that’s a lot to take in; I’m just not sure I really want to take it in.
With that said, the blend of the raw, honest lyricism & the excellent production here go hand in hand – I truly have no complaints about the musical content itself. Marvin Gaye’s voice glides like silk on a lot of these tracks, & when he means a line, there’s just a hint of extra vitriol, or grief, or whatever emotion each track calls for that makes the delivery feel all the more emphatic. Instrumentally, this thing is funky as hell – lots of great synth work & syncopation that feels heavily influenced by George Clinton & Stevie Wonder. Even with a lot of these tracks going a bit long, there’s something intoxicatingly captivating about the delivery, & it never really feels annoying to listen to. Really, my only knock on the album experience is the entire instrumental reprise of “When Did You Stop Loving Me, When Did I Stop Loving You” taking up 6 minutes of runtime – that was unnecessary.
Is it a boring album? It depends – I think if you fully ignore the lyricism here, then a lot of these tracks do end up following a similar archetype & structure that could easily feel like a 74 minute drag “woe is me” album. If you dive into the lyricism, then there’s some really biting lines in here that enhance each track in a very compelling way. To my brain, I see this album as if this is a live look at Marvin Gaye’s psyche over the course of this big divorce trial, hopping in & out of live testimony, sad reminiscing, some daydreaming to ignore some pain, & ultimately, the resolution that there is the ability to love, even after all he’s gone through.
Outside of the lyricism, I entered a zen state for a lot of this, so I can’t speak to the extent of musical repetition on the album (save for “Time to Get It Together” being extra with it), but my ears caught it a handful of times. I still managed to ignore a lot of it, just because I found this to be such an interesting album. It’s a great listen, however awkward & messy it feels to listen to it, but much like a guilty pleasure movie, there’s something satisfying about it that’s hard to quantify. It’s why I feel weird giving this a number, because I’d love to just sort of admire it as the open & honest art piece it is. Since I have to give it a number though, it’s a 5, and a highly recommended one.
Brian Eno
4/5
I’m at a 4.
Definitely the least ambient soundscapes I’ve heard from Brian Eno yet, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing – what a remarkably strange journey through sound that was. We’ve had earlier examples of sampling before this, namely in 1979’s “Movies” by Holger Czukay, but this feels like the first real mainstream use of the technique by an artist popular enough to bring it to a forefront. Granted, this sort of sampling of full radio / TV recordings hasn’t really stayed in vogue, but I do think you don’t get to some of the more vocal-heavy samples of 1980s rap without Brian Eno sort of giving the OK here.
I do have one question here – how much influence did David Byrne truly have on this album? He’s listed as playing a multitude of instruments on here, but I’d love to know just how much of this album’s direction is his vision. It certainly feels like Brian Eno wouldn’t dip his toes into this sort of thing without David Byrne’s influence looming larger, but there’s some part of me that thinks Brian Eno sort of concocted this concept on his own, & just had Byrne there since he’d understand the eccentricities of it all. I probably just need to read more articles about this – it’s a really fascinating project to me.
It’s not the most compelling album experience though, which is why I’m at a 4. A few tracks go too long, & a few tracks have really short instrumental loops that really start to nag once the track’s felt like it’s gone too long. Even though this is only a 40 minute album, the sampled vocals present feels rather scattered throughout, so the pacing of the album makes it feel a bit longer than 40 minutes. These are all small things that don’t necessarily ruin any one individual track, but they build up over the course of the album. There are also a few tracks that just didn’t click with me.
I did like a lot of this though, and if nothing else, I admire just how strange it is. Brian Eno certainly had the credibility to release something like this, but it’s just so far out of his established ambient wheelhouse for me that I’m surprised he actually did it. The amount of variety in this album is really cool, and I do hear a lot of influence on not just rap, but a lot of 80s pop music as well, in terms of just letting loose & letting the experimental freak flag fly. I really think it’s worth a listen – it might not be the most palatable album by modern standards, but the DNA of a lot of the decade to come is in here. It’s only a 4 for me, but it’s a pretty recommended one.
Talking Heads
5/5
I’m at a 5.
The randomizer giving us this album one day after Brian Eno & David Byrne’s collab “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” is one of the more remarkable things that’s happened. Somehow, I still don’t really have an answer to if Eno influenced Byrne more on that album or vice-versa, but I’m not mad about that – this might be one of the more remarkable production jobs I’ve heard yet from Brian Eno, and he’s worked on a lot of stuff so far on this list.
For a second album, I think it’s interesting that this feels so different from Talking Heads ‘77. A lot of that album’s DNA is still very present here, as it should be, but most of David Byrne’s eccentricities feel more purposefully controlled here. His “weirdness” on ‘77 felt sort of abrasive, at least back when we got that album on day 38 of this whole thing. On this album, while it’s all still there, it feels far more endearing. I could chalk that up to listening to many, many weirder albums since then, as well as “Fear of Music”, but I really do think something about the structure of each track has been simplified here, in a way that’s more commercially appealing without sacrificing David Byrne’s vision. It feels like a natural evolution, while still feeling uniquely different.
That entire commercial appeal is thanks to Brian Eno, but his contributions compensate for the slight sterilization of David Byrne – the instrumentals on this album more than add the “weird” factor that Byrne’s missing, but that weirdness is channeled into innovation for 1978 that’s too damn electric to ignore. While this might not seem as strange now, I have to imagine the heavier emphasis from the band on guitar riffs, basslines, drums breaks, all textured by some ambient Eno strings & synth work made for an especially unique blend back then, punctuated by David Byrne’s more controlled vocals gliding on these tracks. I really feel like I can hear a lot of 80s new wave / synthpop tricks here, and while it would be more refined in the decade to come, this is a pretty good swing.
Seriously, I’m just impressed by how well Brian Eno embedded himself into David Byrne & the band’s sensibilities like this; maybe I just haven’t given him enough credit as a more malleable producer, given how much I associate him with ambient music, but this sounds fantastic for the time, especially from “Artists Only” onward. That is a great 5-track stretch, though I might’ve flipped around the last two tracks. I really liked this, what can I say? I’m glad the first 3 albums by Talking Heads are on the list, because it does feel like a proper rise in quality from album to album. This isn’t as good as “Fear of Music” to me, but it’s right behind it, and equally as enjoyable. It’s a rather good 5.
Q-Tip
4/5
I’m at a 4.
Been a while since we got anything from a member of A Tribe Called Quest, but Q-Tip delivers pretty damn well here. So much so that I’m really not sure I have that much to say; it’s a pretty solid 44 minutes, with some great production work, some great verses, some eclectic flow, & it’s just a really smooth listen with transitions that keep the album experience on its toes. I enjoyed a lot of this.
So, why a 4 then? Realistically, some of my gripes with this album just boil down to “my brain got a little bored sometimes”. Just because I enjoyed a lot of this doesn’t mean I enjoyed every aspect of every track, and there’s just a lot of aspects that pile up over time that keep this from feeling like a totally clean album experience – some beats get stale after enough time, some of the lines on some of the verses are a little awkward, there’s an occasional repetition in the flow that isn’t as compelling to listen to the second time around, & the big one for me is that Q-Tip’s voice feels just a little too sterile at points here. His rapping voice stays around the same register on a number of tracks, and once the ear picks up on that, it sort of creates the perception that each track feels too similar, even if that’s not necessarily true.
If the brain is sort of popping in and out like that, then you’ve made a pretty good rap album, but not a classic rap album. If there was just one or two more knockout tracks here, I might be compelled to go up to a 5, but I just think there’s too many little micro-issues that pile up to get there. Still, though, even if it’s not a classic, it’s a pretty good one. As a solo artist, Q-Tip retains a lot of the shine that makes A Tribe Called Quest incredibly compelling to listen to. It’s just not all there, but for 2008, enough of it is there to give this a pretty good 4.
The Mars Volta
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I will bump up to a 5.
Realistically, if it weren’t for the instrumental confidence and swagger this album has in spades, I’d be at a 4, just for the storyline here making not a damn inch of sense. However, this album just sounds too fucking good to not bump it up to a 5 – I really, really do love the instrumentals here, and they’re the catalyst for the bump. If you’ve heard the album, you know, and I hope you’ve heard the album if you’re reading this. I do have to harp on the plot for a bit though. I really tried to pay attention to the lyrics, and I had a broad stroke outline of abandoned shipyards, countries at war, some dog-like creatures, an intentional suicide, and a forced amnesic revival, but I couldn’tan’t give you any names or motivations, save for maybe Cerpin Taxt.
It is an incredibly weird story, that the album itself only provides some broad strokes for, with a decent chunk of lyrical repetition that on a first pass, truly feels sort of detrimental to the whole thing, creating pockets of repetition that slowly drag each track down, though not enough to ruin anything. Again, the confidence this album displays itself with is what keeps it from falling apart. Upon further research, this album’s plotline is derived from a short story that the band wrote, indeed talking about a man named Cerpin Taxt who attempts suicide by jumping off a bridge, onto open traffic, in the midst of an overdose – everything we hear about in the album itself is apparently set during a comatose state that he’s in following the attempt & the mental state he’s in after surviving the first one. That second jump is the “intentional suicide” inferred during “Televators”, and that’s the one that gets him. “Take The Veil Cerpin Taxt” is just a brain-dead epilogue, perhaps acting as a funeral. There’s a chance I’ve interpreted some of this wrong, but I think I’ve got the general real strokes of the plot here. There’s a lot more (& I mean a LOT more) in the depths of the story, but I don’t really care to read about the societal implications of this man’s comatose civil war between life and death.
Now, do I necessarily like the idea of a companion story being needed to understand the plot of an album? Eh, not really, but I’m not sure that it necessarily matters – once again, I have to praise the confidence this album portrays itself with, because everything here is taken at face value, totally performed as if this is all normal, and if you just roll with it, you’ll enjoy it all the same. It does make the lyrical repetition feel less jarring, knowing that there are the remnants of a brain trying to activate itself, so even if it feels awkward from a musical standpoint, it makes more sense with the story.
I’ve harped on all of this storyline shit, but what about the actual music itself? Well, that’s where this album gets the easy bump up to a 5 – this is heavy metal with progressive rock sensibilities, & it is fucking eclectic at its highest points on this album. Manic percussion is the underlining piece of the soundscape here, and while the vocals do a great job of gliding on them, the drums just have an overbearing presence that makes them stick out in an already full soundscape, with heavy guitar riffs and synths abound. It does feel like a natural mesh of 60s/70s prog rock stylings with the nu-metal / grunge trends of the 90s, coming together in a way that allows the best aspects of both to shine. There are a few lull spots on some tracks, brought on by those pockets of repetition I mentioned earlier, but they’re quickly overridden by a new vibe coming in just as fast to keep each track moving. The only really extended one is the 3 minutes of ambience on “Cicatriz ESP”, but I still liked that a lot.
So, yeah, color me pretty impressed. I do wish more of the story was made clearer within the music itself, & the broad strokes are what’s got this at a 4.5 for me as opposed to a flat 5. Make no mistake, though – this whole thing is interesting enough despite its vagueness, & to even pique the curiosity is a good enough goal here, especially if it leads to discovering the proper story. Musically, it’s a stellar 60 minutes that really does fly by, for the most part. I enjoyed this a lot, and while it’s certainly not everyone’s cup of tea, I really, really think it’s worth a listen. For me, it’s a very easy bump up to a 5.
Venom
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’m gonna just barely bump up to a 5 because how well it stuck the landing on the last track.
Seriously, “Don’t Burn the Witch” is that fucking good. If it were even a little bit worse, I’d be at a 4 that I admire a lot, but it seriously nails it, and I think I have to go up. It’s very weird for me to give a 5 to an album with a sort of slower start, because the first 2 tracks here set a really awkward tone.
Literally, that first track starts off with a truly awful tone, with whatever that scratchy-ass sound is. The mixing is off, the lyricism is bland, the vocals feel a little sickly, and the reverb muzzles some of the bite it’s going for. There’s still something compelling there, though, & while the second track builds upon it nicely with some great guitar work, this album still doesn’t really break through until “Buried Alive” starts.
It is really a vibe shift once that slower, grungier guitar comes in – the album finds a brand new level of confidence that it never really lets go of; the production feels better, the grit in the vocals gets a really nice presence, the reverb is used more effectively, & the lyricism expands to provide way more imagery, in a way that makes each track feel more vivid, for better or for worse (especially for ‘worse’ on “Teacher’s Pet”). It really makes the album feel better for the rest of its run time, and it hits a pretty damn good stride.
I have to acknowledge it – “Teacher’s Pet” is an insanely awkward song. It sticks out here for how different it is from the rest of the album, lyrically, & it’s just an insane thing to write a song about to begin with. There’s a clear difference from something like “Hot for Teacher” by Van Halen & this, and one’s enjoyment of the track really depends on the tolerance for the lyrics. I don’t think I have the tolerance for the lyrics, but obnoxiously enough, I think the track might have either the best or second-best production on the album. At its very, very worst, it’s got some consensually awkward shaming involved that feels far too intimate for my tastes, even in a comically exaggerated way. It’s not a bad listen at all, though, which is why it’s not knocking this album down to a 4. Sure as hell not a playlist track, though.
Really, the most impressive thing here is that this is from 1982 – it’s not the craziest heavy metal in the world, but all of the proper tones for the faster advancements of heavy metal throughout the 80s are here, especially in terms of setting the stage for a band like Metallica to take it to another level. I would even argue this is a pretty handy prototype for some of the 90s grunge to come as well. I don’t think this sounds quite the same as what modern “black metal” is considered to be, but it all has to start somewhere. Objectively, this is probably a 4, but between its historical significance, & the way it just nails the finish so well, that I feel safe about bumping it up to a 5. At the very, very least, I don’t think it’s deserving of a 2.46 average on the site. That’s criminally wrong.
P.S.: I’ve never really heard an album end with a teaser for the next one. That’s pretty fucking cool.
Bruce Springsteen
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
We haven’t gotten Bruce Springsteen since the second day of this entire experience (this is album #480 for me), but he’s done it once again: I really, REALLY liked this. That said, I don’t think I can give this album’s songwriting & storytelling the justice they deserve, in part because I think some of the cultural contexts of this album are simultaneously outdated & way too close to home at the same time. I don’t want to come across like an expert on something that I’m not, but I feel like I’m informed enough to point out that this album is kinda stuck in 1984, for better or for worse. It’s why it’s so frustrating that this album still feels close to home; so many of the struggles Bruce is writing about here haven’t changed, at least not that radically. Trust me, I’m not trying to drink the Reagan-era “it’s morning again in America” working class Kool-Aid – you could make a handful of tweaks to these tracks and they’d fit just as well in the current political/economic climate.
I think this album has aged really well with its criticisms, and I think it’s aged poorly in terms of some of the starry-eyed gaze at which Bruce Springsteen hoped we’d resolve those criticisms. This is the slice-of-life Americana I’ve preached about a few times, and Bruce Springsteen’s writing is stellar on a number of these tracks. This is, by & large, the most “baby boomer” album we’ve gotten so far, written by one, for them, and shining through to express the frustrations of a generation. There’s a reason this sold 30 million copies, & why it has the critical acclaim that it does. I’m just not a baby boomer. Granted, my dad was one, which is why some of these tracks feel like they’re hitting a bit closer for me: I can totally see him in every single one of these tracks. It makes each track feel even more full & vivid than it already is, & that enhances the album to a higher degree for me.
I do think “Darkness on the Edge of Town” has higher highs than this album, but this has a better consistency in terms of track quality, and my own personal feelings are too strong to ignore. There’s certainly a few lulls in the instrumentals at times, a few hokey lyrics by modern standards, & for as much as I love Bruce Springsteen’s vocals here, I wouldn’t mind if he took a lozenge. Overall, though, this is a great, great album. It’s definitely stuck in 1984, both lyrically & production-wise, but I don’t think it should sound any other way. I think it’s no less than a 4, and for me, a very easy bump up to a 5.
Pantera
4/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump down to a 4.
Admittedly, I don’t think I have a big soliloquy in me on this one. I think this is a great, great album that just doesn’t quite hit the same bloodrush of intensity as some of the other heavy metal albums we’ve gotten on the list so far. With bands like Black Sabbath, Metallica, Judas Priest, or AC/DC, I’ve found a really nice flow state where I’m in total sync with the band while listening, and I just never got there with this one.
Realistically, it’s a multitude of small things that add up. The mixing is awkward in a few spots, & in those moments, the guitar/drums don’t have the presence necessary to fill up the soundscape. The vocals are occasionally too homogeneous in their delivery to the point where the screaming tone totally blanks out the lyrics. Perhaps most egregiously, I think the level of repetition on a good chunk of the outros here makes each track overstay its welcome; not too badly, but just enough to feel annoying. It would be less of an issue if a few tracks didn’t also have intros that last way too long. Those give an immediate “first minute is the whole song” sort of impression that’s hard to shake off.
With all of that said, this is still kickass heavy metal, and I’d totally be at a 5 if these things were cleaned up. They’re just too persistently bothersome for me, but this is still a 4, bare minimum. The fact that this has an average below 3 on the site tells me that people either really hate 90s heavy metal, or those issues I mentioned are just amplified to a crazy degree for them. Regardless, I liked this a lot, but it’s just got too many little things for me to give it a 5, at least not on a first pass. It could totally go up though. It’s still a pretty recommended 4, though.
The Pretty Things
5/5
I’m at a 5.
I don’t know that I’d call this a “rock opera”, at least not by the standards that something like “Tommy” or “The Wall” would set in the years to come, but this is a pretty damn good first crack at a concept album that at least resembles those albums. This is just a big character study about the life & death of one S.F. Sorrow, & how irrevocably his life changes for the lonelier and drearier following his wife’s death in a blimp accident (presumably the Hindenburg).
Admittedly, it’s very easy to go through this album without necessarily realizing there’s a plot here, because each track doesn’t flow into the next as gracefully as later concept albums would, but I like the general arc here; he’s born, he finds the beauty in everything as a kid, he meets his future wife, survives a war that kinda shatters his childlike wonder, gets married, and then has to watch his wife die. The funeral happens, and he goes on a sort of spiritual journey to try and find peace for himself, only to discover that he cannot get his wife out of his mind, and that this “well of destiny” truly is just emptiness. After that, his worldview is fully broken, and he becomes a bitter, sad, lonely old man. It’s a sad arc, but I think it makes for a compelling album.
So, how about the music itself then? I’ll give you a hint: it sounds a lot like another band who recorded at Abbey Road Studios. It is truly impossible to ignore any comparisons to the Beatles here, because there’s a multitude of production tricks pretty much taken wholesale from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Is that a bad thing? Honestly, I don’t think so – while the production is similar enough, it’s not close enough to say these guys are “ripping off” the Beatles, at least not to my ears. Mileage may vary on that, but I’m of the mind that “Sgt. Pepper’s” gave a lot of bands the greenlight to experiment as much as they wanted, & The Pretty Things simply took advantage of riding that wave. This album also leans far more into the psychedelic side of things on a number of tracks, & I generally just thought the whole album sounded great, especially in the guitar work. There’s a couple of panning quirks, but I chalk that up to the 60s more than anything.
Ultimately, I enjoyed it – it’s not as good as its later contemporaries would be, but this does feel like a pretty nice runway for a Tommy-sized plane to take off from. I don’t think there’s a bad track here, & it’s a pretty breezy 40 minutes. It’s a 5 for me, but I can see how it’s as low as a 3 for other people. If nothing else, “Old Man Going” kinda rules.
The Undertones
4/5
I’m at a 4.
Not much to say on this one, really; it’s just a straight improvement from their debut album. Perhaps it’s me being more attentive in the 377 days since we got the last Undertones album, but I just thought this clicked better. There’s improved songwriting, a more balanced showcase of all the instruments as opposed to just the guitar (which is still excellent by the way, but the percussion REALLY gets its shine here), some smoother vocal performances, & the variety of each track sticks out nicely because the album flows better. It’s weird to praise an album for being longer, but I think the extra time here gives each track more room to breathe, in a really fruitful way that makes the album experience feel more memorable.
Are there still a few unnecessary tracks? Yeah, probably, and it’s partially why I’m at a 4. That said, there’s never a bad soundscape here, & this is a pretty breezy 35 minutes regardless. I liked it, what can I say? Just an easy listen, with some occasional standout melodic moments, and a good chunk of tracks that really clicked for me this time around. Hence, the 4.
Tito Puente
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Honestly, one’s rating of this album boils down to “how much can you tolerate 40 minutes of mambo music”, because this is objectively 40 minutes of the same general soundscape, big horn sections & all. I can totally hear someone becoming bored of it and giving this a 2 or a 3 (to which I also say, whoever you are, you had zero fun listening to this album), but for my fully swaying & moving body that had a great time just vibing for those 40 minutes, I can’t give it anything less than a 5.
Of course, I have my mild complaints – a few soundscapes are certainly repetitive, overusing some of their fancier tricks a few too many times in the songs itself, & I do wish some tracks gave a little more space to the vocals, because when they’re rolling, they bring a sort of Sinatra-esque vibe that I think really meshes well with the instrumentals. That’s not enough to drag it down though. I’ll say this: if there had been a “Hong Kong Mambo 2”, then maybe I’d be at a 4.
It’s just really good mambo music, what can I say? I enjoyed this a lot, and I feel good about giving it a 5.
Donovan
3/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump down to a 3.
Not too much to say; pretty solid psychedelic folk. I liked 6 of the 10 tracks here a lot, so batting 60% on “pretty good” is a fine enough bar to hit. However, this album is just glacially slow, which is why I can’t give it a 4 in good conscience. It’s not because it’s a bad album – in many ways, I’d honestly recommend it as a showcase of psychedelic standards of the time with more Bob Dylan-esque folk sensibilities. It makes for a really cool soundscape when it’s at its most upbeat, and even on a lot of these slower tracks, there’s something about the tone of his vocals and the imagery produced by some of the lyrics that makes each track feel just a little bit intoxicating.
It is THAT damn slow though. A number of tracks loop the instrumental to the point of losing the luster, and a good chunk reuse lyrics in a way that enhances a feeling of deja vu that persists throughout the 40 minute runtime here. There’s not even a bad track, or a bad soundscape. It’s really a fine enough album that’s dragged down by how often it spins the wheels. Each track overstays its welcome by just enough to feel consistently bothersome, and the 4 tracks I didn’t click with enhance that “bothersome” factor by a lot. Again – nothing is bad here, and in terms of playlist stuff, a lot of this is super easy listening that would feel great at an individual level. It just drones on as an album. Hence, the bump down to a 3. I still liked it, though.
“The Trip” really should’ve been a bigger track, by the way. That one was rad.
R.E.M.
5/5
I’m at a 10. I’m also slightly emotionally exhausted.
There’s something to be said about the brilliance of this album, and the ways in which it so earnestly portrays grief & pain, while still using it as a stepping stone to inevitable happiness, framed via the frustrations of a generation & shadowed by the plight of the Reagan years. If Nirvana’s “Nevermind” was the grungy anthem for Gen Xers pissed off at the world, this album is its more somber counterpart, made for those who really just needed someone to tell them it would all be OK. Honestly, you could write essays about this album and there would still be things left uncovered.
However, flowery language fails me here. I really don’t have that historical soliloquy in me. At most, I can praise this album for everything it does right, because I don’t think it does a single thing wrong. Instrumentally, I love the shift to a more grunge-influenced soundscape, clearly influenced by the impact of Nirvana, yet still so recognizably being R.E.M. on all of these tracks. I think Michael Stipe’s vocals are as stellar as ever, & the slight anger that underlines a lot of these tracks is enhanced by some of the shakier tones in his voice.
As far as the songwriting goes… I just can’t believe these are the same guys who wrote a bunch of vague nonsense on “Murmur”, you know? Don’t get me wrong, “Murmur” is a great album, but the lyrics there always nagged at me. “Document” does a better job than “Murmur”, but there’s still a few on that album that bite at me too. This one, though? Fucking hell. Just a bombshell lineup of well-written tracks. It’s the best stuff they’ve written so far, by far, at least for my tastes. Even when it feels sort of cheesy, like on “Everybody Hurts”, which has been overplayed to death (& perhaps ruined by Vine), there’s something in how earnest it all comes across that keeps each track grounded.
Believe me, I’d love to go even deeper into how much I enjoyed this, but I’m already just drained. I’ll end on this note: apparently, this is the album Kurt Cobain was listening to when he committed suicide in 1994. Whether or not that’s real, or just urban myth, I’m not entirely sure; lots of conflicting sources on that. Either way, Michael Stipe’s relationship to Kurt is well-documented in its own right, and Kurt’s on record as saying this album’s tone is the direction he would’ve wanted to take Nirvana in. In that sense, iron sharpened iron here in a remarkable way. I really, truly loved this. It is one of the best albums we’ve gotten in this experience, and it’s an absolute 10. Just a stellar, stellar work of art.
Jimmy Smith
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
Not much to say to this one: just an organ, a saxophone, some drums, and an occasional guitar going back and forth taking little solos for 38 minutes. Is it sort of repetitive? Yeah, I’d say so. Did it affect my enjoyment? Not even a little bit – this album sets its tone early as an easy-listening dinner club style jazz album, and never raises expectations to a higher big-band level, so I never felt annoyed that each track was the same.
It’s definitely just a “pop on and do whatever while listening” album. Why is it on the list? Well, the book explicitly says the following:
“Redolent of church pews and skating rinks, the organ was once relegated to hip-free zones, a square cousin to the autoharp and accordion. And then along came Jimmy Smith, who turned his attention to the instrument in 1954 just as the Hammond company was unveiling its relatively compact new B3 model. Smith transformed the organ's lamentable image with his soulful synthesis of bebop, blues, and gospel, creating a powerfully grooving new sound. He spawned a new style of music—soul jazz—and a host of disciples who took up the Hammond B3 and formed combos.”
So… yeah, I guess it’s just a revolutionary use of the organ as a soul instrument that defines this album’s presence on the list. It gets a lot of shine here, and while my brain went to the Monty Python intermission theme many times while listening, I can only say that’s kind of a positive. I enjoyed this, and I feel fine bumping it up to a 5, though I can understand the case for going as low as a 3. That’s the floor, though; these are really good arrangements, & it’s just too smooth to not vibe out to.
Scott Walker
5/5
I’m at a 5.
I dunno, something about the “Disney” feel of this album really clicked for me – the blend of the orchestration, his vocal tones, & the rather rich & vivid lyricism on each track all fall right into my wheelhouse. I’m a big fan of music that forces the listener to feel involved, if only because I really enjoy trying to catch and figure out the vibe of each track. That’s not to say there’s not a place for easy listening “turn your brain off” music, because I adore that all the same. This is just an album that mixes the best sensibilities of both – really good lyricism & really easy instrumentation, that provides the “correct” soundtrack to each song.
I’ll say this – this is mostly an album of covers, which does diminish it a little bit, but his delivery & poise & confidence on each track overrides that for me. It really is all in the delivery; something like “The Girls & The Dogs” only really works if you approach it with a Mary Poppins-esque whimsy. That works both ways, like with the triumphant vibe on “The Amorous Humphrey Plugg”, which wouldn’t feel the same without the bombastic tenors of his voice. Of the four tracks Scott wrote for this album, I think that one is probably the best, but there’s not really a miss here.
It’s definitely not an album for everyone – to ignore the lyricism would probably lead to some variant of “pretentious orchestration by a man who’s trying too hard”, and to focus too heavily on the lyricism might lead to some variant of “pretentious poetry by a man who’s trying too hard”. I think this album finds a healthy balance, but the onus is on the listener to find that balance in their own right. Whether or not placing so much on the listener is a good strategy is for other people to debate. With that said, I don’t understand how this has an average of 2.46 on the site, because I really think it’s a 3 at worst. For my tastes, I really enjoyed this, & I think it’s deserving of a 5.
Kate Bush
5/5
I’m at a 5.
It’s weird – I never knew this was sort of a two-sided album, even with how incredibly prevalent “Running Up That Hill” became a few years back. Past that song, I truly knew nothing else here, but once again, Kate Bush has really come through. This isn’t the best album we’ve gotten from her; that still goes to “The Sensual World”, but this album’s highs are pretty damn close to that one’s.
I do feel like the first 5 tracks here get overshadowed by the story/concept side of the last 7 tracks, but they’ve all got something going for them. “Running Up That Hill” is the all-timer here for the synth work & imagery it provokes, especially in terms of pleading to God himself. It went viral for a reason, and it’s just a great track. “Hounds of Love” simplifies that imagery a bit but adds a nice sense of panic; while it might be my weakest track here, I think it’s a great listen. “The Big Sky” does something really ethereal with the percussion work that just brought me into a total zen state. “Mother Stands for Comfort” is eerie as hell, and sort of reminds me of a Peter Gabriel 3 type of track, with even her vocals matching the cold, killer instincts of this murderer. “Cloudbusting” is a great listen, but it has a lot of historical context that I just need to dive deeper into to really “get” the track, I think. Regardless, I liked all 5 of them.
It is the second half of the album that really shines here though – while “The Sensual World” took a look into the human need for desire, relevancy & comfort, all of “The Ninth Wave” focuses heavily on hope, insecurity, & survival, showcasing the dreams & delusions of a woman drowning in the middle of the ocean, presumably from a shipwreck or something. It really is an excellent set of tracks, with a heavy emphasis on sound design to compliment the instrumentation & her stellar vocals. It definitely leaves some of the onus on the listener to piece it all together, because it is just a mish-mash of soundscapes and styles otherwise, but I think it’s all incredibly well written and performed.
I really want to focus on “Hello Earth” in particular, because something about the use of the choir in that song really, really clicked for me – it’s so disconnected from the main soundscape of the rest of the track that it almost feels like angels observing our protagonist, both within her dreams/delusions & in the outside world, watching her drowning body. It’s the sort of thing that’s really open to interpretation though, which is the hallmark of a great moment in a concept album to me. In the same way that books can be interpreted in multiple ways, having a moment like this where any listener can have an entirely different vision is just incredibly cool to me.
Once again, I do think “The Sensual World” is a better top to bottom album, but that’s entirely subjective, and it shouldn’t be used as a way to diminish this one. This is a great album in its own right, and I loved it all the same. Since this is the last Kate Bush album on the list, the onus is on me to go through the rest of her discography. With that said, going 15/15 means you did pretty fucking good, Kate. Just a remarkable stretch of albums, all deserving to be on the list. As far as this one goes, it’s an incredibly easy 5.
Pere Ubu
4/5
I am somehow at a 4.
Call it Stockholm Syndrome if you want, because it very well could be – I found myself utterly captivated by just how goddamn out there this one was. I had the same general feeling with “Dub Housing”, but while that album sounded truly, truly horrendous at certain points, the very worst part of this album is the egregiously awful buzzsaw tone that permeates the first track. If you can get past that, the rest of the album feels a lot nicer by comparison (save for the shattering glass on “Sentimental Journey”, although I think it’s kind of fitting, somehow), though it’s still a tremendously strange journey through some manically designed soundscapes. Honestly, I really did like everything from “The Modern Dance” onward, so if your first track is your worst track, I guess it speaks to the sort of people they wanted to weed out from the very top.
I think this album is entertainingly strange, & it’s very intentionally designed to evoke the imaginative senses in ways that normal music may not be able to capture. There’s no heartfelt lyrics, there’s no beautiful string sections, & there’s certainly no mesmerizing vocals. This album evokes stuff like “fucked up jazz you might come upon in a dream”, “a crowd horny for propaganda”, “Donnie Thornberry-core”, “trauma dumping ASMR”, “being held hostage on a UFO”, and my favorite, “the first sentient android’s attempt to make Roxanne by The Police solely off a prompt”.
Do the tracks actually reflect this at all? I dunno, mileage may vary, but solely based on my brain going to such strange & avant-garde places throughout the 36 minute runtime, and my belief that most of this is a genuinely competent (save for the first track) & intentionally designed album… I honestly feel captivated enough to give it a 4. Realistically, more of a 3.5 that I’m bumping up to a 4, but I think it’s actually earned it. Am I insane? Yeah, probably. Do I regret it? Not yet. Will I? Who knows. Either way, I’m giving it a 4 and you can’t stop me.
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
4/5
I’m at a 4.
I always wanted to listen to a Tom Petty album, based off of some of the bigger hits I know (mainly Free Fallin’, let’s be honest), but I didn’t quite realize we were basically getting a 5th Elvis Costello album already. For better or for worse, that’s my immediate key comparison here – so much of this style reminds me of Elvis Costello’s first 2 albums. It’s obviously not 1:1, as Tom Petty’s vocal style on this album is a bit more gravelly, evoking more of a Springsteen meets Dylan-y vibe, & the Heartbreakers are going for more of a classic rock vibe as opposed to a sort of “pop infused with punk rock” vibe that The Attractions went for. It’s still close enough that a lot of my praise towards those Elvis Costello albums apply here.
In that sense, I’m kind of just a broken record. Genuinely, there’s not that much to say, other than scattered bits of praise – I love the Steely Dan vibes of “Breakdown”, I love the simplicity of the lyrics on “Hometown Blues”, I really liked the guitar section on “Anything That’s Rock ‘n’ Roll”, I appreciate the blatant Bob Dylan impression on “Strangered in the Night”, & “American Girl” is just a great track. Besides that, it’s just some good old rock & roll – not quite at a 5, but a very solid 4.
P.S.: I can’t believe “Full Moon Fever” isn’t on this list. Gonna have to get to that one in my own time.
Anita Baker
4/5
I’m at a 4.
I knew I recognized the name Anita Baker from something; Sweet Love is what MF DOOM sampled for Hoe Cakes. I don’t know why it didn’t click until listening to it. Past that though, how does Anita Baker actually stack up as an R&B artist within that sort of pseudo ”quiet storm” prototype phase, before it went ballistic in the ‘90s? Well, I think she did pretty good. Ultimately, her vocals sound great, the instrumentals are really nice (if a bit repetitive when paying too much attention), and the general structure of each track finds a pretty nice groove. I liked a lot of this album.
I’ll admit, a few tracks took multiple listens to really click for me here, but I think my approach to listening was a little too methodical at first. I didn’t really give myself that room to just relax and enjoy the songs for what they were, because I found myself too focused on the “flow” of each track (i.e., a little too focused on lyrics/structure). I’m glad I made the adjustment to literally just chill out, because the vibe of each track came through way more clearly, and it allowed my ears to pick up on a lot of nuances I was missing otherwise.
With all of that said, there are points where you can tell the outros are heavy on padding, or the breaks between choruses/verses are a bit long. However, those moments don’t detract from the songs at an individual level too badly. They just build up over the course of the album to a point where it becomes a nuisance, and that’s partially why I’m at a 4. I’m also at a 4 because for as nice as this is, this does tread over the same ground a few times, and the general instrumentation does feel sort of the same for a good chunk of the album. There’s lots of great production tricks to sort of disguise that, and each track does feel really nice to listen to, but the spectacle of Anita Baker’s voice can only cover those little spots up for so long.
So, yeah, I’m at a 4, but it’s a pretty nice 4. At the very least, it’s some damn smooth R&B – perhaps a little overproduced, and not quite at the same pure emotional level as someone like Aretha Franklin, but I think that comparison is a bit unfair to begin with. I feel like 80s R&B is a different style entirely, with the shadow of Quincy Jones’ production on Thriller hanging over a lot of the decade. Comparing it to the 60s or even the 70s feels sort of unfair. Regardless, I enjoy this style a lot, and I’m a pure sucker for it. Hence, the 4.
Saint Etienne
3/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump down to a 3.
It’s a nice enough 3, though. Honestly, my closest comparison is “Maxinquaye if it had a personality”, which feels pretty apt. Unlike Maxinquaye, I really did enjoy a good chunk of this. The trip-hop beats infused with pop sensibilities work really well at certain points on this album, and out of the 15 tracks here, I’d say that about 8 of them clicked with me at a higher level, and most of the other 7 still sounded pretty good regardless. There’s not a boring track here, just boring moments within each track that slowly build up over the course of the album experience that drags this down immensely.
I feel like anything more I have to say would be negative (i.e., pointing out all of those boring moments to justify my giving it a 3), but really, the positives of this album are best heard by listening to it. Realistically, all of my negatives are only there if you’re *really* paying attention to the music while listening to it, because it’s very very easy to get lost in the soundscape of a lot of these tracks and never even notice the repetition. It does sneak through during some extended instrumental sections, where the vocals go away and sort of minimize the soundscape, but those moments aren’t *super* prevalent in the album. They’re still there though, and they happen often enough that at best, I think this album has a ceiling of a 4.
All that said, I think it’s a genuinely enjoyable 58 minutes. It’s a long one, but it was at least interesting enough to keep me engaged. Mileage may vary, so I can understand people giving this a 1 or a 2, but for my ears, I just had a nice time listening to it. It’s not super special, and I can’t necessarily say it deserves to be one of the 1001 albums to listen to before one dies… but I liked it regardless. A solid, solid 3.5 that goes down to a 3.
Johnny Cash
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Weirdly, I think I prefer parts of “At San Quentin” more, mainly in the moments where Johnny gets to more directly interact with the crowd and show off a lot of that outlaw country charisma that made him famous… but this is probably the better setlist, and a really fitting one for a prison album. It’s the first prison album he recorded, though the second one we’ve gotten on the list – everything I said about “At San Quentin” applies here, with a little more emphasis on the musical side of things. The little gravelly tones in his voice, the punch in the percussion, and the overall energy of the band / backing vocalists comes through really clearly.
That said, I love the way this album really gives some space to the prison crowd itself – the announcements for prisoners, the crowd popping for certain lines, and perhaps most effectively, the silence in the room when Johnny’s in the middle of a great storytelling track. They’re hung onto his every word, and there’s a reverence in the air for the guy that comes through because of it. Their presence feels like an enhancement to Johnny’s performance here, as opposed to the more “typical” sounding crowd of fans vibe that “In San Quentin” gave off. It just creates a different atmosphere, that when combined with the longer runtime, really makes the prison feel more intimidating, cold, & real, which makes Johnny’s choice to go there all the more interesting & entertaining.
Is it THE best live album ever recorded? I don’t know if I’m qualified to answer that, given that I don’t listen to too many live albums. From what we’ve gotten on the list so far, I think there are some that I prefer, but that’s just because I’m a sucker for an electric crowd atmosphere & some fun stuff that you can only do in a live setting. Something like “Live At The Harlem Square Club” by Sam Cooke comes to mind. I’d also be remiss to not point at Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged album.
With that said, it certainly feels like one of the best live albums ever recorded, and I’m not gonna argue with anyone who says it’s THE best. It’s way, way up there, and it’s just a kick-ass album regardless. I enjoyed this a lot – it’s Johnny Cash singing in a damn prison. It was always gonna get a 5, and it earned it in spades. Great, great stuff here.
Talvin Singh
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a slightly biased 4.
When it comes to mostly instrumental albums like this, I don’t think there’s too much to say, because you either like it, or you don’t. In this case, I liked it. I didn’t like it enough to give it a flat 4, because there’s certainly enough repetition in the soundscape and enough filler moments to create a DBZ arc, but I like this enough to bump it up to a 4.
My bias is simply that this appeals to a lot of my VGM sensibilities. That is to say, give me a PS1 jungle style beat, and I’ll vibe with it a lot of the time. This feels a LOT like PS1 jungle, and I love the way this blends aspects of traditional Indian music, Japanese DnB, & electronica. It makes for a really coherent soundscape, one that’s not too far removed from the Ridge Racers or Ape Escapes of the world, but just distinct enough to feel unique, at least for the hour-long runtime that this has.
I do fully understand why this has a 2.61 average on the site, because to an ear that’s not paying attention, every track here sounds the same. Hell, even to my ears, I’m sure there are a few tracks that sounded the same that I just sort of chose to ignore. At an hour long, it’s shorter than some of the other DnB albums we’ve gotten, which helps a bit. It’s still long though. However, when it fully clicks, there are moments here where it just feels great to listen to – the stretch of Eclipse to Light in particular is the best stuff on the album, by far. If I gave this another listen, I might find it tedious, but I do think the floor here is a 3 regardless. It’s totally competent Indian-infused electronica that I vibed with on most of the tracks, and even at its most bland, it still sounds pretty good to listen to. Hence, a 3.5 bumped up to a slightly biased 4.
5/5
Hell has possibly frozen over: I’m at a 4.5 that I’m going to bump up to a 5.
Somehow, someway, Bob Dylan has done it. Granted, the last time my group got an album from him was 428 albums ago, so I’ve heard a lot of fucking music since then that’s perhaps reshaped my approach to listening to someone like Bob Dylan. My brain feels way more attuned to understanding the more flowery poetic language from the folk music of the 60s, thanks to listening to way more albums from the era. Hell, even when we got those albums, I gave them a 3.5 & a 4, so it’s not like I hated the guy.
Coming back to some of these songs a year later, a lot of them have clicked more nicely in terms of my ability to interpret them, and that added skill adds a bit of depth to both sides of this performance. As far as the first side goes, I think the intimacy of Bob Dylan, his harmonica, and his guitar, to a fully silent crowd, hung up on his every word, all there to witness his poetry… there’s something really, really cool about that. It’s very easy to picture in the mind too, so closing the eyes to imagine being there adds a lot to the atmosphere. Is it sort of goofy? Yeah, of course – Bob Dylan’s vocals in a fully acoustic setting are more exposed, more raw, and more prone to the shaky flaws that other people were motivated to parody in the many many years since. For some reason, though, I found that open-air atmosphere to feel vulnerable & endearing. Combine that with a good tracklist, and I really found myself enjoying the first half.
Of course, for my tastes, the electric half is where this album shines; nowadays, there’s something silly about the idea of “tainting” folk music by giving it a rock & roll lean, but I guess it was something to be heckled and jeered for back then. Bob’s backing band does a great job throughout the whole set, and by today’s standards, they’re not doing anything THAT crazy. Hell, even for 1966, this is just one year before psychedelic rock came into the mainstream at a higher level. In terms of albums we’ve gotten on the list, there’s albums from The Byrds, The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, the Velvet Underground, & of course, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, all released in 1967. Bob Dylan’s just opening the door at this point, really. As a whole, it’s not like he’s sacrificing that much – a lot of the storytelling on the electric side of the album is still there & present, and his vocals honestly sound pretty good with the heavier tones of the band covering up the shaky flaws in the first half.
I really want to point at the version of “Like a Rolling Stone” on here in particular – the Judas intro is one thing, but what struck me the most about it is how much the slightly slower tempo affects the vibe of the track in a really, really cool way. It creates just a bit of a psychedelic vibe, especially in the way Dylan slows down that famous “how does it FEEL” line. It’s a small change, but it does so much to let Bob’s vocals hang in the air just a bit longer. Combine that with the way the band is totally in sync with each other, and with Bob & his harmonica, it feels specifically focused & motivated just to shut this one heckler up and make him realize that this is the direction music’s gonna go in. There’s something really special about that specific recording, and it’s the cherry on top of a pretty good album. It’s honestly what gives this the bump up from a 4.5 to a 5 for me.
So, yeah, it’s a 5 for me. Does that mean Bob Dylan has finally clicked for me? I dunno. There’s a chance the rest of these studio recorded albums that we’re bound to get don’t appeal to my sensibilities like this one did, and as a whole, I think I’m still just a bit shaky on the guy. Granted, that shakiness was an average of 3.75 (and I suppose now a 4.16), so perhaps I’m overstating my case. At the very least, I think I’ll have a much healthier appreciation for the rest of the Bob Dylan albums we get from here on out, and if nothing else, this album lived up to the “important document in the development of popular music” line on its Wikipedia page. Good on you, Bob. Play it fucking loud, indeed.
The Velvet Underground
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Words escape me here – that was a 40 minute ride through some noisy, controlled chaos, and I loved basically everything about it. There’s a chance I’m gaslighting myself into liking another “artsy” album just for being different, but in this case, I think there’s a genuine case to be made in calling this a progenitor of heavy metal, shoegaze, industrial, & punk rock. For 1968, going all in on using feedback and overblown stuff as a storytelling device & an intentional instrumentation choice feels kind of revolutionary, especially so on the 17-minute adventure that is “Sister Ray”. By modern standards (& arguably, even by the early-mid 70s), this general style has been played to death, and gotten louder & screechier. As such, this album doesn’t sound as crazy to the ears as it probably did back then. We’re literally just a year after Sgt. Pepper’s, so something like this popping up from that band with the banana on the cover must’ve been jarring as hell.
I’ve heard noisier & stranger stuff on the list though, so something like this where the musicality is still pretty intact throughout the whole thing makes it all feel normal by comparison. There’s good storytelling throughout this thing, some great guitar riffs, some maddening percussion, and enough of a vocal presence to keep the 40 minute runtime flowing really well. It’s abrasive as hell, but that’s why I like it. It’s definitely not an album for everyone, and I think that even for me, it would’ve been too much a while ago. I really don’t know what else to say – I think this is an album best experienced by just listening to it and letting the brain go nuts. I’m at a 5, but I totally understand why it might be a 3 or even a 2 for someone else.
P.S.: Shoutout to “The Gift” for being the very first “Subway Surfers-core” track ever put to tape.
Mekons
3/5
I’m at a 3.
A tale of two sides, really – I found myself utterly baffled by the first half of the album. I thought it had no real consistency, I thought the lyricism was strange, I thought the instrumentation was fine enough (if a bit overmixed, overblown & sort of cacophonic), and as a whole, I just generally didn’t grasp onto a “modus operandi” for the album. Those first 5 tracks, even after a re-listen where they sort of clicked more, are a weird, artsy, fully competent 2.5 that I think just didn’t quite grab me in the sort of avant-garde way it was going for.
The back half of the album is a solid, solid 3.5, that actually leans into the “post-punk meets country” vibe that I thought the full album would be going for. There’s some positive comparisons to the Pogues in here, some stronger lyricism/melodies, and just a general nicer blend of instrumentation (and strangely enough, better audio fidelity) that makes for a nice enough set of tracks. They’re not *great,* but they’re pretty good, and I enjoyed them, especially on Flitcraft, Abernant 1984/5, & Last Dance. Lost Highway is fine, but the abrupt fadeout sort of feels rushed and leaves the track “unfinished” to the ears.
Obviously, that balances out to a 3. I feel like I need to listen to this album starting from Flitcraft, before looping around and ending on the baffling tones of “Psycho Cupid”, to see if that would make the progression of the album flow better… but I don’t want to take away from their original intent and vision. I can genuinely see both sides of the coin on this one – there’s an argument to be made for as high as a 5, and one to be made for as low as a 1, and somehow, they’d both probably be valid. I’m split on that difference, hence a 3, though I think that’s the ceiling for my own personal tastes. It’s not a bad album, just a strange, strange album. Maybe it’ll fully click one day.
P.S.: The book says the following about this album:
“The Mekons are one of the UK's most brilliant and undervalued groups. Formed as a loose collective in Leeds in 1977 when they started messing around with the Gang Of Four's equipment, they released a couple of chaotic LPs (plus single "Never Been In A Riot," directed at The Clash) and then took a sabbatical. Energized by the UK miners' strike of 1984 to '85, the band (with original members Jon Langford and Tom Greenhalgh) re-emerged with Fear And Whiskey, lauded by many as the best album of the decade.”
I would love to meet the “many” here, because I think you have to be a musical freak to call this the best album of the 1980s. Maybe they're onto something, I dunno.
Circle Jerks
5/5
Eh, fuck it. I’m at a 5.
The WarioWare of albums, if you will, given the rapidfire pace – it’s the shortest one in the entire list at just 15 minutes, yet it somehow manages to pack in everything it wants to say as concisely as possible throughout its 14 tracks. It’s not like these are poorly written tracks either; save for one use of the F-slur on track 2 (it was 1980, so I get it, but still), these are all competent tracks that generally have something to say, and get their points across well enough. Special shoutout to the prescience of “Paid Vacation”, by the way.
Of course, it’d be stupid to focus on this one solely for the lyrics or vocals, because while they’re there, they’re just a way for the instrumentation to come in red hot as a motherfucker & do some bullshit that absolutely nobody else was doing in 1980. Sure, the Sex Pistols did their whole thing in 1977, but that at least stayed within a semblance of the rock/metal music of its time. For 1980, this is taking Johnny Rotten’s core philosophy and putting it on a treadmill going about 2.5 times as fast. Even with the Dead Kennedys album we got, which went at a breakneck pace, this is even faster. It feels way, way closer to the sort of insanity that would go more “mainstream” circa the early 2000s, or at the very least, the sort of thing my brain associates with manic Newgrounds animations or early YouTube AMVs.
It’s not an all-time great album or anything, but it’s a kickass 15 minutes that pulls no punches and does exactly what it sets out to do. It’s dumb goofy fun hardcore punk that spits on any form of musicality that came before it, in the best way possible. I’m very glad it’s on the list, because it does feel like it’s influential to some degree. Realistically, it’s probably actually just a 4, at the very most, but from the fucking vibes alone and how easy it to just rock out to this shit, I’d be selling myself short to not give this a 5.
Anyone who gave this a 1 is lame as hell.
Tracy Chapman
5/5
I’m at a 10.
This is our group’s 500th album, and I truly cannot think of a better one to get. Obviously, some level of personal bias would have adored to get, say, “Thriller” or “Songs in the Key of Life”, but this feels like the perfect album at the perfect time, and I’m so, so very grateful that the randomizer has dropped this one to be the big halfway mark. Going in, I knew it was the one with “Fast Car”, and that’s really about it. Tracy Chapman’s entire legacy is made by that song alone. Very rarely can you call something a “perfect track”, but if there ever was one, “Fast Car” is that. It’s transcendentally good. With that said, the rest of the album is absolutely spectacular.
As far as my ability to write anything that can do any of these songs the justice they deserve, I don't think I can do it at an individual level. Frankly, you could probably write an entire essay about each track on this album, and it would be a fascinating read. I do, however, have broad strokes – I think the social messaging present throughout this album consists of some of the most sadly prescient lyrics I’ve ever heard, made all the worse by the fact that we haven’t really done a damn thing about it for 37 years. Perhaps it’s those political undertones that leave me somewhat wordless, as I think Tracy Chapman presents them here in such a clear & digestible way – these are really easy to understand, & these are songs that were so desperately needed in 1988 that it makes this album’s popularity just as easy to understand. It also makes the current state of everything in 2025 all the more baffling, as we’ve strayed far, far beyond the empathy and hope this album tries to portray, even in its most grieving moments.
As far as the instrumentation goes, I have positive comparisons; lots of R.E.M.-esque soundscapes, hints of Matchbox 20, Bob Marley, and oddly, Peter Gabriel, especially on “Mountains o’ Things”. I think these are perfect types of soft soundscapes to let the lyricism shine through, perhaps at its brightest on a purely acapella track like “Behind the Wall”, or the brilliantly defiant closer that is “For You”. It’s the exact sort of style that I tend to gravitate towards for heavier albums like this, and I love every track’s instrumentation here because of it (though perhaps there could’ve been just a hint more to “She’s Got Her Ticket”).
Those are my broad strokes though, and my broad strokes aren’t able to paint the picture this album so clearly lays out. I can’t do it justice; you just have to listen to it for yourself. I’ll grant this, as a sort of concedement – I do think if you listen to this without giving the lyrics their due, then this will not hit in the same way. Hell, if you listen to this without the right amount of empathy, it’ll feel like empty platitudes for worst-case scenarios, but that’s the sort of defeatism that this album tries to push back against. That’s literally the entire point of “Fast Car”. At the very worst, I think this album has the floor of a 4, and I can totally understand why. As far as my tastes goes, it has truly everything that I could want in an album, and I’m at a 10 for that very reason. It’s 36 minutes of socially conscious brilliance, and I truly can’t believe I haven’t given Tracy Chapman the full extent of her flowers until now. It really is the perfect way to mark the halfway point.
I can’t wait to get some awful bullshit tomorrow.
The Stranglers
5/5
That’s a pretty damn easy 5.
This was originally released as “The Stranglers IV”, which is really, really funny for a debut album. With a sense of humor like that, thank goodness these guys have the songwriting chops & musical brains to match it. This is 40 minutes that very nicely bridges the gap between the incoming heavy synth work of 80s new wave, and the post-punk sensibilities of the first 3 Talking Heads albums, made all the more impressive by the fact that this is from 1977, when Talking Heads made their debut.
In case it wasn’t obvious, I’m talking about the organ. That organ is the star of the show here, and a great anchor that separates them from some of the contemporaries of their time. The way it’s used here is immediately reminiscent of arcade games & a hint of a “futuristic” vibe, but it doesn’t overwhelm the soundscape at any point, acting less like a Kraftwerk instrument and just as a substitute for another electric guitar. There are moments where it bears down on these tracks and sets itself as the dominant instrument, but the mixing leaves all the room in the world for the guitars, drums, and vocals to shine.
Speaking of the vocals, they’re really good here; not because of some overwhelming ability to sing, but in how perfectly they just melt into the instrumentation. The fact that he sounds really nice, with just a bit of a blend between David Byrne & Michael Stipe (at least to my ears) helps a lot. Lyrically, I think this album finds a really nice balance between being earnest and being funny, which is a big positive, as this album never takes itself too seriously, but it does treat each song with a gravitas that keeps everything honest. It helps the instrumental breaks on a lot of these tracks fly by faster, because it’s already set the tone of a “just have fun and vibe out” track almost every time.
I just really enjoyed this one; it’s a super breezy 40 minutes that never once gets boring or stale, at least for my tastes. Sometimes, it just has to sound that damn good, and this one did. Hence, a really easy 5, and a big recommendation.
Can
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
Yeah, that’s a lot different from Tago Mago, and a bit of a middle ground between that album’s noisy chaos & the vague plunderphonic-y approach to Movies. This is way closer to an instrumental album, with the vocals/lyrics having a really minimal presence, mainly used to give some texture. I think it’s an approach that works; this is more traditional than anything Can-adjacent we’ve gotten so far, so the “unique” factors are stripped away in favor of more ambient sound design and ever-growing layers of instruments on each track.
So, much like a Cocteau Twins album, I suppose my analyses really boil down to “it sounds really good, but sometimes it’s a little bland”. I don’t have the ear to critique the technical aspects of some of the more stunning drum or guitar solos here, but I can tell you that they’re always interesting, at the very, very least. I didn’t give the same space to the lyrics/vocals as I normally would, but they’re fine, I suppose. The sound design works really well for some of the more “real world” aspects of the album, mainly in the city/metro stuff, and I think they enhance the tracks well.
Really, I have no major complaints about the content of each track, just a minor one that really bites throughout the whole thing: this album really spins its wheels on its solos. They all go just a little bit long, to the point where the allure starts to fade, though it never gets to a point where it totally loses its shine. The space in between those solos is filled really nicely, and the solos themselves hit like crack when they first pop in… but they do go just a little long. It’s really apparent on “Bel Air”, which is a 20 minute track that could’ve probably been cut down to like, 15 or 16 minutes if some of that wheel-spinning got trimmed. I love it as a finale, and I think it stays engaging throughout, but it’s not as engaging as it could be.
That’s basically why I’m at a 4.5, and not a flat 5, though I do think I wouldn’t blame anyone for going down to a 4 or even a 3 because of that. It’s valid if you’re not that captivated by these soundscapes, as there is a bit of homogeneity to the instruments that also sort of bites throughout the album. It didn’t ever really get to a “first minute-y” critique for me, but it does become noticeable eventually. One’s ability to tolerate or ignore that is what’ll set the tone for a score here, and for my tastes, I think I tolerated it enough here that it never became a big issue. Overall, I liked this – not the breeziest 40 minutes, but a pretty darn good 40 minutes all the same, hence the bump up to a 5.
Linkin Park
5/5
Yeah, that’s a 5.
That’s my first time listening to a Linkin Park album in full, and I think I finally, finally understand just why nu-metal struck such a chord in 2000: it just sounds cool as hell. Even when we got the Limp Bizkit album on the list 275 days ago, I very consistently gave a lot of love to the instrumental side of that album, because I’m a sucker for nu-metal production tricks & soundscapes. The only thing that dragged that album down is Fred Durst’s goofy-ass voice, which I called a “gift from God” in the comedic sense.
Chester Bennington, rest his soul, has a genuine gift from God on this one. The amount of power he’s able to belt with on this album is crazy It might not be everyone’s tea, and I’m sure a younger version of me would’ve dismissed it as some form of “melodic yelling” that couldn’t possibly stand up to "real vocalists". I’d tell that version of me to shut the fuck up nowadays – Chester gives an insanely captivating vocal performance that drags out every inch of emotion it can possibly muster, on some lyrics that are incredibly effective. It’s not super flowery language, nor does it evoke the sort of imagery that Stevie Wonder waxing poetic about the morning rain might, but it’s perfect in the way that it captures a specific feeling & a specific frame of mind, enhanced further by how well the instrumentation plays into it. Everything is in a harmony here that’s hard to describe, but easy to feel. All the credit in the world to Mike Shinoda, by the way; his rap verses & flows slide in perfectly to compliment Chester's vocals, and they absolutely glide on the instrumentals.
Trust me, I’m someone who’s generally huge on lyrics, but I didn’t feel like they were deeply necessary to capture the mood of each track. That said, I need to go back and check them further, because I’m sure there are some moments that feel a bit more “poetic” than I’m giving this credit for. Regardless, I equate the overall performance to something more like slam poetry, where body language and intent matter just as much as the lines themselves do. These are brilliantly performed, and they never really overstay their welcome. A few tracks didn’t quite hit the same as others, but that’s to be expected with an album where the criticism of “all the tracks kinda sound the same” is somewhat valid (if a bit stretchy). With that said, much like AC/DC’s Highway to Hell, I’m willing to ignore it when the quality of every track is just that damn strong, and if you’re not willing to ignore it, you’re never, ever, EVER gonna like this album.
Is it possible that I’m getting a little swept up in a first-time listen? I dunno, maybe. I don’t think I really care if I am or not – I mostly just feel like I’m beyond late to a party that I should’ve gotten into years ago. Hell, I don’t know that I would’ve appreciated this album as much without some of the metal-oriented stuff we’ve gotten on this list to this point. This is the nexus point of nu-metal in a lot of ways, because I do think everyone in the genre tried to chase the sound of this album after seeing just how damn successful it became. I’ve seen people say Meteora is better, and I may just have to listen to that one for myself. As far as this one goes… yeah, it’s a super easy 5. At the end of the day, it just kicks ass. Not one complaint from me.
Syd Barrett
4/5
That’s a slightly uncomfortable 4.
It’s an intriguing album, that’s for sure. Lyrically, I don’t think I caught most of the references or metaphors involved in it, but I’m not sure this is really an album meant in that sense, at least not by the second half. This feels much more like a documentation of a singer trying to desperately cling on. There’s flaws present in the instrumentation and vocals, there’s the producers chiming in, and there’s just a very, very raw feeling to this album that I don’t think any album we’ve gotten so far has had. There’s no polish for a lot of the second half. It’s a lot of glorified demos that are being documented and put to tape for the sake of putting out something adjacent to an album.
I think I kind of love that, though. It feels vaguely exploitative, but I have to imagine Syd Barrett was still in control of enough of his mental faculties that he approved of this releasing in the way that it did. It’s uncomfortable for sure, but it also feels like being this open & honest about the flaws & mistakes present in the album is something more reflective of Syd’s general nature. It is, in some strange way, a proper mirror of the man, or at least that’s how I’m choosing to see it. There’s a chance that this is just entirely exploitative and Syd simply said “fuck it, I don’t care” while wanting to put out something more. I don’t necessarily want to dive any deeper into the making of this album though, so I’ll leave that to my curious brain on another day.
I know I’ve harped on the second half quite a bit, but I found the first half to be rather musically enjoyable, and for all the flaws in the second half, it’s just such a compelling listen that I don’t think anything really gets knocked down that badly. I understand why this has the average it does on the site, but I do think this really needs the context of knowing Syd Barrett’s general story to this point to understand how fascinating of a release this is. I think it’s worth being on the list for that reason. Hence, the slightly uncomfortable 4.
The Chemical Brothers
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4.
We’ve gotten stuff like this before, mainly in “The Fat of The Land” by The Prodigy & Fatboy Slim’s “You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby”. As the direct comparisons, I don’t think this album gets to the same level as those two. The energy isn’t as high, the “danceability” isn’t really there for a lot of these tracks, & as a whole, there’s a number of baffling production decisions that just drag this thing down throughout the already long 63 minute runtime.
There’s a bunch of smaller ones, like a few sections of each track taking a bit long to transition from point A to point B, and really harping on a repetition in a way that left me unsatisfied until the drops/transitions occurred. The big one, however, is just in how often this album puts a heavy emphasis on one instrument that absolutely monopolizes the soundscape & sort of burns the ears up. It’s especially egregious on the endings of “Setting Sun” & “It Doesn’t Matter”. If your brain is as attentive as mine is, those moments happen way more than they should, and it lends itself to a sort of negative simmering feeling that doesn’t fully go away until something else distracts the ears away.
With that said, it’s not THAT bad, otherwise I would be giving it much lower than a 4. I’m tearing into it a bit, but that’s because this album’s “flaws” are so potent that it’s easier to point them out. It’s harder to pinpoint the parts of this album that work really well, because the soundscapes are always encapsulating the ears in some fashion. There are nuances throughout this thing that I almost certainly didn’t catch, but as I said, that “simmering feeling” sort of distracts the ears from catching it in the first place. When this album does find a zen state, it clicks really nicely, and I honestly did enjoy 7 of the 11 tracks here in a “yeah, I’d listen to this again” sense.
So, it’s getting a rather generous bump up to a 4 – I’ve nearly talked myself back down into a 3, given that even the tracks I liked have a number of stagnant moments within each one, but I think the energy level and the overall production here is still fine enough to warrant it. It’s nowhere near the level of the other big beat / plunderphonics-y albums we’ve gotten, but it’s a wholly competent 63 minutes that is, at the very least, interesting to listen to as a progenitor of the more polished & more energetic albums that would emerge in the wake of its popularity. I liked it, flaws & all, hence the bump up to a 4. No more than a 7.5 out of 10 though, if we were going that route.
Blue Cheer
3/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump down to a 3.
It’s definitely got elements of heavy metal, that’s for sure. I just don’t think it’s very polished metal, and while that roughness might appeal to others, I think it just sort of bounced off of me this time. Part of it is 1960s production jank, and hard panning to the left/right channels that sort of messes with the mixing, but a lot of it just boils down to the guitar solos being that unpolished to the point where a harmony between the vocals & drums disappears for a lot of them. I respect this album’s “fuck it, let’s jam” mentality, but in terms of actually listening to it, there’s a lot of times where a super cool vibe and a nice rhythm get totally washed away by the harshness of two guitars clashing against each other like they’re both playing separately in different rooms.
With that said, I enjoyed 4 of the 6 tracks here a lot, and I admire the proto-metal elements of this for sounding relatively close to the stuff that would later be polished to a much higher & much more culturally significant degree. This is more of a prelude to what Led Zeppelin would do, at least to my ears, but it’s a pretty nice prelude. There’s really not THAT much to say as far as the quality goes, because it really is a “you like it or you don’t” sort of album. Clearly, based on the average on the site, it seems like a number of people don’t, but I do think this is worth listening to. It’s no worse than a 3, and maybe with time, this could go up to a 4 if some of the more discordant solos click a little nicer. For now, though, I’m fine with the bump down. Wouldn't blame anyone at all for giving this as high as a 5, though.
Mudhoney
4/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I will bump down to a 4, but I’ll be damned if I’m not struggling with giving it a 5 just for the hell of it.
Welcome back to Mudhoney; we got Superfuzz Bigmuff as the 45th album of the whole thing, and I gave it a 4, mainly for “a hint of repetition in the styles of each song that does become a bit apparent once that initial wave of energy washes away”. 462 days later, my brain is a bit more forgiving of grunge-adjacent “repetition”. It is, however, not totally forgiving, hence the struggle between bumping it down or bumping it up. This is, at bare minimum, a 4 to my ears – it’s just some kick-ass grunge, and another example of Seattle in 1991 being the closest equivalent to the Garden of Eden there’s ever been in the world of music.
So, why the struggle then? Honestly, if I had to guess, I think the album just feels long. At 42 minutes, it’s a little under double the runtime of “Superfuzz Bigmuff”, so I think some of the luster just slowly erodes away over the course of the album. There’s never a decline in quality, because every track here is pretty good, but there’s just a decline in a listener’s tolerance. I don’t think this album fully does enough to keep the listener’s attention for its entire runtime, & while I know you can’t go full-throttle for the ENTIRE album, I had phases throughout listening to it where I entered less of a “zen state” and more of a fugue state. That’s not me calling the album boring, but I think there are portions in a number of tracks that coast for a bit, followed by extremely subtle transitions into the next segment of the song, in a way that sort of just sneaks up on the listener… but without the sort of “wow” factor that’s more typical of grunge of this era. That’s the “fugue” state I’m talking about, because I had to rewind every time it happened just so my brain could fully catch it.
So, is that my fault as a listener, or their fault as composers? Is it anyone’s fault, really? The answer is no, no, and definitely not. It’s their style, and I think it works well enough. Even if I don’t fully vibe with it, it’s not anything egregious enough to ruin the album, but it does bump it down to a 4 for me. It also doesn’t quite stand next to its contemporaries – I do feel like if I gave this a 5, it would be within the same space as Nevermind or Ten, and I just don’t think it’s there. That said, I do recommend this a lot; I don’t think it’s deserving of the 2.83 average on the site. Maybe with a few more listens, I’ll go back up to a 5 anyway. For now, it’s a bump down to a 4, but it’s still a pretty enjoyable 42 minutes, and a pretty good album.
Fleetwood Mac
4/5
I’m at a 4.
When we got Rumours roughly 221 days ago, I finished that review by asking “How the hell do you follow this up?”, and I think the answer is… you just can’t. It’s in its own bracket, ala Thriller or Nevermind. With that said, if you look at Bad or In Utero, those albums still stand up on their own legs – in Bad’s case, by successfully expanding on Thriller’s sensibilities & mixing them with the new production tricks/styles that had emerged in the long gap, and with In Utero’s case, by deconstructing the tropes that made Nevermind such a success, but without fully sacrificing or shunning them, using them as a tool to enhance the storytelling of the album.
This album tries to do both, and it just doesn’t work. It’s only been 2 years since Rumours, so the amount of “new tricks” to pull from isn’t very much; that didn’t stop Lindsey Buckingham from trying really, really hard to integrate new wave / post-punk trends into Fleetwood Mac’s style, though. Do his tracks work? Honestly, kinda. They’re just not as compelling, not for a lack of trying. I just don’t think Lindsey Buckingham is the guy to thread that needle, and the tracks he took control over, for as fun and experimental as they are, don’t have the polish that other artists would truly apply once the 80s really started to roll.
As far as “deconstructing” Rumours, this album sort of tries to do it, but that attempt comes at the sacrifice of the writing. There’s never a dull vocal moment here, but so many of these tracks lack even the most minor bit of worldbuilding to give a proper “life” to each track. They come across as the sort of leftover lines scattered throughout the production of Rumours, with platitudes and one-liners abound, but without the same heart, honesty & intensity. That just leaves a vague impostor syndrome that hangs over a lot of the album for me – I’m not trying to invalidate their feelings, because there are some really well written tracks on this album, but as a whole, it just doesn’t carry the same weight & believability.
So, between the lesser writing & the avant-garde stuff (for Fleetwood Mac anyway) blending into a 20-track album, while it’s a fine enough listen, it just doesn’t work in a coherent sense. That lack of cohesion isn’t what makes this album sit at a 4, though – if anything, I admire the approach to try to make something that isn’t just Rumours again. Hell, I even liked 15 of the 20 tracks here, even with a lot of my perceived flaws of the album. The main reason I’m at a 4 is because the album is just too damn cyclical, and it leads to the album feeling bloated. Rumours is one of the tightest 39 minutes ever put to tape, and that’s not even including “Silver Springs”. This album is 74 minutes, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s just not a fully compelling 74 minutes. It steps on its toes with a lot of the subject matters at hand, & while it’s never dull at any point, it is very easy to lose interest in a track the longer the album goes because of the repetitive theming of the album.
All of those complaints / thoughts aside, when this album hits, it hits really nicely, and as a whole package, I do think I like this album. While there’s not any mega-hits ala “Go Your Own Way” or “The Chain”, there’s some great, great tracks here like “Sara”, “Sisters of the Moon”, “Brown Eyes” & “Tusk”. It’s just too big for its own good, and as a successor to “Rumours”, it collapses under its shadow. I do recommend it, because at the end of the day, it’s still Fleetwood Mac in the ‘70s. It’s a pretty strong 4, and other bands of the era would still kill to have an album like this. That said, if it had just been tightened up a bit more, I think it just would’ve clicked better across the board. C’est la vie, though.
Cream
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5 because I just had a lot of fun with this.
I’ll preface any of my praise by saying this: Eric Clapton’s an asshole. Granted, he seems like the sort of sensible asshole that has empathy & some level of remorse, or at least the ability to fake it well enough that he’s not inspiring any real, additional damage past his initial waves of stupidity. In that sense, the line between art & artist is a little easier to separate here, but forgive me if I’m giving him too much leeway or credit.
Anyway, enough about Eric: how about the actual music itself here? Well, it sure is some 1967 psychedelic rock. Mileage will vary about the enjoyability of this, and in a way, it really does boil down to whether or not you think it sounds good, because this feels like a quintessential example of what 1967 psychedelic rock is like. If you were to feed a prompt asking for this type of soundscape into an AI, and burn an entire fish family alive in the process, you’d probably get something like this.
I really, really enjoyed this – there are a handful of moments where the album repeats verses & riffs and enters a bit of a stagnant state, but those moments don’t ruin the album that badly for me. That’s mainly why I’m at a 4.5, because they’re prevalent enough to be noticeable, but not obnoxious enough to bother me. When this album isn’t in a stagnant phase, it’s firing on all cylinders; the guitar work here is as good as advertised, the percussion is an incredible anchor that feels just a bit ahead of schedule for 1967, and the vocals are honestly pretty good; little bit of a subdued David Bowie vibe to them that feels like the perfect compliment to the occasionally chaotic soundscapes that surround it.
I really don’t have that much to say – when this album is firing on all cylinders like that, it’s easy to get caught up in the energy & hit a total zen state, so I never had any deeper thoughts on the tracks like that. Is it a little silly to bump this up to a 5 on account of just having fun with it? Maybe, but I enjoyed it enough that I think it’s earned the bump. Huge shoutouts to “Dance the Night Away”, “Tales of Brave Ulysses” & “SWLABR”, by the way. Those 3 are my standouts for sure.
5/5
I’m at a 10.
I’m just speechless, really. I know Yes is good, because they’ve gotten 5’s from me for each of their last two albums, and I know this album in particular has high acclaim, but fucking hell, I still wasn’t ready for that to be as stunningly intoxicating as it was. It lived up to the expectations & more – that is 38 minutes of electric prog rock, without a single dull moment at any point, or even a single wasted beat or measure.
I don’t want to make whoever’s reading this waste any time; if you’re somehow reading this without having listened to it, go listen to it, right now, and if you’re reading this after you’ve listened to it, go listen to it again, right now. Get your headphones in, turn them up to max volume, and just let the sweet, sweet sounds of Jon Anderson, Steve Howe, Chris Squire, Rick Wakeman & Bill Bruford wash over your ears and bask in it. It is a 10, through and through. I hesitate to say “perfect album”, but it’s about as sinless as Jesus was. All-timer stuff.
Miriam Makeba
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
Miriam Makeba has a deeply fascinating life – just go read her Wikipedia page for a few minutes, because the circumstances that lead up to the release of this album feel like they would make for an incredible biopic. I don’t need to see Timothee Chalamet as Bob Dylan, I want to see someone play Miriam Makeba, and do it justice too.
As far as the music itself goes, that sure feels like South African music, and a lovely showcase of it too. Peter Gabriel sort of gave a taste of this style a while back, but that has a much “bigger” feel by comparison (and several years of recording advancements, perhaps). This is trimmed down, and really hones in on her vocals as the basis, save for the intensity of the first track, which is a banger of an opener. Her vocals are fantastic throughout this whole thing, gliding on every track whilst having some stunningly strong moments. They do live up to the blurb on the cover art, though I do think this album does focus a little too much on her at times, instead of showcasing a bigger richness to the South African soundscape they’re going for. Instrumentally, I think this album does eventually stagnate into primarily a guitar/bass showcase, but when it’s showcasing a bigger range of instruments, it’s just a great, great listen. As a whole album, I think if you’re not vibing with this style within the first 5 tracks, it’s just not an album you’re gonna enjoy, because this album basically reveals all of its production tricks in those first 5.
I will say this – because it reveals all of its tricks so early, even at just 35 minutes, this album does start to feel a little longer than that by around track 10 or 11. I’m not saying this should’ve been trimmed down at all, but I do think a bigger variety (or really, just a greater instrumental showcase past the first few tracks) would’ve helped the songs go by a bit faster. That’s basically why I’m at a 4.5, but I enjoyed this far too much to not bump it up. I’m really impressed by the overall clarity of these tracks; even if the version on Spotify is likely a remaster, to get that much out of these old recordings & give a proper space to let each instrument & vocalist shine (or laugh their ass off, in a weirdly psychotically charming way), then you’ve done something right. It’s a super fun album, and a well-needed dose of international flair that’s been missing from the list for a while now. Hence, the 4.5 bumped up to a 5. Good stuff, Miriam. Rest in peace.
4/5
I’m at a 4.5 & I’ll have to talk my way into either a 4 or a 5.
I dunno, I just found myself a little underwhelmed compared to the expectations I had – whenever an album pops up on the list that has both the critical acclaim & the sales to back it up, it feels like a sort of cultural zeitgeist, and the sort of album where once you hear it, you fully & totally understand why it has that place. The first 3 songs fit that bill really, really nicely, & the rest of the album coasts off of those 3 tracks, carrying itself rather well to a smooth 50 minutes. I’m not disappointed by the quality of the album, because it is a 4 at the very, very least. I just feel like I’m leaving this album without having fully gotten it, because it just doesn’t feel like a fully satisfying front to back album. There’s not a bad track, there’s not any noticeably awkward moments, and in terms of production / vocal work, I have genuinely no major complaints. I just think the pacing of the album doesn’t lend itself to that “all-timer” status.
I do have a nitpick, and it may be a big enough nitpick to qualify as a complaint, as it’s one that just permeates throughout the remainder of the album for me: I just don’t think the lyricism is that tight. A lot of the political statements that underline this album add heavily needed context to a number of these tracks, but without them, I think parts of this album don’t feel as satisfying, at least to my ears. A lot of the political statements being made are in reference to specific events, but painted with broader strokes, and as such, I think they’re left too open to interpretation on some of its more biting ones. I might just be reading them the “wrong” way, though.
As a whole though, even with the lyricism not feeling as tight & as timeless as it could be on its more politically driven tracks, when it gets closer to the personal level of “Achtung Baby”, it hits really, really nicely. It’s just not all-time songwriting, at least not to the level I was expecting based on the critical acclaim. Does that drag the album down enough to give it a 4 as opposed to a 5? Eh, not necessarily. Really, if there’s anything that’ll drag the album down to a 4, it would be that the album isn’t as “energetic” as I was expecting, with a lot more of these tracks feeling folksier, & the overall tone of the album coming across as more preachy than I anticipated. There’s a lot of biblical / spiritual overtones that permeate the album, and while it’s to be expected from U2, it feels especially heavy-handed on this one. “I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For” may as well be a church hymn.
At a base level, each of my complaints about pacing, lyricism, or overall tone aren’t enough to drag them down to a 4 by themselves, but when you pile them on top of each other, for my own personal tastes, I think they just compound in a way where I can’t personally give this a 5, at least on a first pass – hell, I listened to the album twice, just to be absolutely sure with myself, and I’m pretty comfortable with where I’m at – hence, the bump down to a 4. Still like a 9/10, though.
Make no mistake: I really did enjoy this album, and I can see it easily going up to a 5 if it just clicks better on a different day. If this is someone’s favorite U2 album, I wouldn’t question that one bit. It’s certainly my second favorite one, from what I’ve heard. For my tastes, based on what we’ve gotten from the list, my favorite goes to “Achtung Baby”. Hell, since this is the last U2 album on the list, I guess it’s up to me to see if the rest of “The Unforgettable Fire” lives up to “Pride (In The Name of Love)”. As far as Bono & friends go, it’s a solid 16/20, but batting an average of 4 is pretty damn good regardless. Hell, it would be 13/15 if “All That You Can’t Leave Behind” wasn’t here. C’est la vie, though.
Emerson, Lake & Palmer
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Once again, there’s really only so much you can say about prog rock. It's my first time listening to (or even knowing about) ELP, but I liked this a lot. This isn’t quite at the level of a “Close to the Edge”, but for my money’s worth, this is about on par with “The Yes Album”. That just means this is really, really good prog rock, enhanced a bit further by the heavy emphasis on keyboard work, giving this more of a VGM-adjacent feel that appeals to all of my sensibilities. I can very specifically hear lots of inspiration for Zelda & Metroid stuff throughout the 20-minute masterclass that is “Tarkus”, though there’s also a little bit of Kirby, Final Fantasy & Galaga in there. The music speaks for itself, though the addition to make an entire plot about a mechanical armadillo fighting other mecha beasts in a vaguely biblical parallel is a cherry on top. It’s giving incredible Evangelion energy, and I’m all here for it.
So, how about the rest of the album? Well, outside of the vaguely transphobic panic / weirdness of “Jeremy Bender”, the rest of the album holds up fine. Obviously, it’s not at the same level as Tarkus, but it holds its ground rather well – “Bitches Crystal” is the standout track of the back half, acting as a ragtime piano-driven prog rock piece, and it just sounds cool as shit. “The Only Way” & “Infinite Space” are a good two-part piece, though I do think “Infinite Space” could’ve benefited from having some extra instrumentation to it. “A Time and a Place” needed some extra percussive energy at the top, but once it gets going, that shit rules – that ending is kind of a stunner. “Are You Ready Eddy?” is just a good goofy way to close out the album; it’s obviously not that “good”, but it’s just fun, especially with the pastiche of 50s style doowop production across the board, even down to the reverb-heavy vocal nonsense.
It’s a 5, what can I say? Give me some good prog rock, and I’ll be there for it every time. If you somehow manage to fuck up prog rock, you simply shouldn’t be making music, plain & simple. The only reason this has the average that it does on the website is because people despise video game music or anything that sounds like it here, & that’s just pretentious as hell. This was a lot of fun, and I suspect I need to go hunt down some more ELP to listen to.
P.S.: The line alluding to the Holocaust on "The Only Way" was crazy. I have no earthly idea how that stayed in, especially for 1971. It's not even a bad/offensive line, given that it's a halfway common sentiment to call out God for allowing tragedies to happen. It's just surprising that it stayed in given that it wasn't THAT long ago at the time.
Echo And The Bunnymen
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
The second I saw this was yet another early 80s British post-punk / new wave album, I just felt kind of “meh” about it – I understand that new wave took over the world, but I feel like there are more genres & styles from the first half of the 1980s that are worth putting on the list over yet another post-punk / new wave band. I’m not a hater, it just feels oversaturated. That said, I knew going in that as long as it hit all of the right tropes, and had a banger or two, that I would still enjoy it regardless. Really, at the end of the day, I just really, really wanted an album that was worth writing about.
Thankfully, I do have an album worth writing about, one that certainly hits all the right tropes & more – classifying this as “post-punk” feels like an incorrect label to me, because it’s much closer to a bridging gap between the style R.E.M. would make famous & the folkier, guitar-driven sensibilities of what would become Britpop a decade later. Hell, it even dips into some of the more bombastic forms of Britpop that Oasis would bring in, via the really cool orchestral work throughout this album, giving each track a gravitas it may not have otherwise.
For 1984, this album’s general mood, soundscape, lyricism & overall vibe feels far, far ahead of the curve, more so than it has any right to be. There are certainly some complaints I have – I think the lyrics are broad at times, and for as good as the vocals are, I think they could be a little more “expressive” on some of the earlier tracks. There’s also “Thorn of Crowns”, which sticks out like a sore thumb, but is at least a bizarre enough track to be an interesting listen & not just boring.
When this album really clicks though, is whenever it finds its zen state (ala a Cocteau Twins album or Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks”). This album REALLY finds its zen state over the course of the last 4 tracks, with the entire stretch of “The Killing Moon” to “Ocean Rain” acting as some of the coolest post-punk / new-wave “vibes” stuff I’ve heard on the list so far. It helps that the lyricism / vocals hit a really high point on those 4 tracks, compared to some of the looser / broader stuff earlier on the album. It’s the main reason this is getting the bump up to a 5, because I got really entranced by them.
There’s some more scattered praise I have, like our lead vocalist channeling everyone from Bono to Michael Stipe to David Bowie to “accidental Elvis” on Thorn of Crowns, & the incredibly cool 2000s indie vibe feel of “My Kingdom” clicking as nicely as it did. It really is a surprise to me that this is 1984, because it just feels like a 90s album, through and through. It’s not gonna play well for everyone, especially if the earlier tracks don’t click like that, but for my tastes, I’m pleasantly surprised that this was as good as it was, and I’m certainly happy it’s on the list. It’s a 4.5 that I think is worth bumping up to a 5.
John Prine
5/5
That’s an easy 5.
Color me impressed; I’ve never heard of John Prine until today, but his songwriting chops evoked an immediate level of nostalgia that I didn’t really know I had in me. This is country music, and it’s the slice-of-life old school country I love to preach about whenever it comes up, but this has the added benefit of being beautifully & vividly written. When he’s trying to nail down some comedy, he certainly can, like on “Your Flag Decal Won't Get You Into Heaven Anymore”, but he can just as easily switch it on a dime to evoke a deep sense of sobering reality, as on tracks like “Sam Stone”. This album tackles everything from the power of nostalgia, to the consequences of reminiscing, to the blind loyalty present in jingoism & patriotism, and perhaps most effectively, the fear of the mundane.
Of course, the songwriting wouldn’t mean anything if he didn’t have the vocals or instrumentals to back it up, but thankfully, he does – my brain immediately goes to the comparison of “Willie Nelson’s twang with a Bob Dylan rhythm”, and it’s a lovely blend that evokes both of them really nicely. Instrumentally, while this leans mostly into the acoustic side of things, there’s a lot of steel guitar, fiddle work, and even a great electric guitar solo on “Pretty Good”. Nothing ever overshadows each other, with the instrumentals and vocals giving themselves space to breathe, and the lyricism still shining through with the way the vocals are just slightly elevated in the mix. As far as listening to this album goes, even if you somehow manage to ignore the lyrics, it’s just 44 really smooth minutes that never find a dull spot. However, doing that would sell both this album & yourself incredibly short.
As an entire package, this just fits right in line with my sensibilities. It’s just an album that feels full of life, with a living, breathing soul to it that feels lost nowadays. Rolling Stone once called John Prine the “Mark Twain of American songwriting”, and I’m honestly inclined to believe them after just 13 tracks. If nothing else, as a debut album, this comes out swinging & never really slows down, and you can’t ask for a better beginning than that. I hope he’s got more on the list, but even if he doesn’t, I feel like I need to listen to more of him. For my tastes, it’s an easy, easy 5.
Giant Sand
2/5
I’m at a 2.5 that I’ll bump down to a 2, though I wouldn’t blame a single person if they gave it a 1.
It’s got concepts of an album, that’s for sure. Honestly, I find myself just sort of flatly unimpressed, but unbothered all the same. That’s 58 minutes of… something. It’s music, don’t get me wrong, but it’s just indescribably bland. Lots of yapping, lots of flowery language that even I can barely translate into an intended meaning, and lots of circling the wheels on each track. Eventually, it gets to the point where it no longer feels like a cohesive album & instead, a set of Soundcloud EPs on shuffle with a vague soundscape & theme connecting them all together.
Genuinely, I don’t have the words to even insult it, because I just don’t understand the album. I don’t get how it possibly made the list, and I can barely hear an appeal that only lingers because each track is at least instrumentally competent in a way that’s not as bland as the album experience itself is. When this album SOUNDS good, it’s nice enough to not feel deathly bored, and it does at least consistently sound good, entirely from an instrumental standpoint. Vocally, though? It just never once feels believable. Going from a guy like John Prine where you can hear the emotions coming out of his voice, mirroring the passion that he put into his songwriting, to whatever the hell this is, genuinely shows the importance of a good vocal performance in crafting & recording an album.
I had to check for myself what the book says about this, and I’ll simply copy & paste it wholesale, because I think it may be the most bold-faced attempt at gaslighting that I’ve seen in the book so far.
“After a decade in Tucson, Howe Gelb emerged with the most successful incarnation of Giant Sand: a trio with drummer John Convertino and Joey Burns on bass. The band were a musical project as unpredictable as its central figure—a singer/songwriter forever changing his route, following the freedom lessons of Bob Dylan and Neil Young and emulating the idiosyncratic weirdness of his jazz idol Thelonious Monk.
Like a faulty radio transmission, mixing country sentiment with volcanic electricity, earthiness with weirdness, Giant Sand made some of the best records of the American underground in the 1980s (The Love Songs, 1988) and '90s (Center Of The Universe, 1992), but none worked like Chore Of Enchantment. Recorded in Tucson, Memphis, and New York with a variety of producers, the album has a cohesive feel, the musicians losing themselves but always finding their way back.
Slide-guitar instrumental "Shrine" is played by Rainer Ptacek, who died of cancer before the album's release, and a melancholy, elegiac atmosphere permeates the record, complemented by haunting Mellotron® and organ. Lyrics are both enigmatic and colloquial; arrangements move from ethereal to punkish distortion, from silence to exuberance, with the singer always distant, whispering in your ear.
Astonishing from beginning to end, full of strange songs about women (the voluptuous "Temptation Of Egg"), midlife experiences ("Shiver,"an underground hit of sorts), and the downright cryptic (the arousing guitars that fuel "Satellite"), Chore Of Enchantment lodges in the mind and refuses to leave.”
First of all, RIP to Rainer Ptacek, because that does give “Shrine” a bit more gravitas than just some plain guitar to end the album, but… “enigmatic & colloquial”? Did we listen to the same fucking album here? I’ll say this: Chore of Enchantment did not lodge in my mind, and it will likely leave very easily. It’s not SO awful as to give it a 1, given that I genuinely liked “Punishing Sun”, “Astonished (In Memphis)”, & “No Reply”. There’s also a handful of tracks that sounded good, but never really combined with the lyrics & vocals to make it a complete package, consistently falling short in a frustrating way. There is SOMETHING here, and with a lot of extra polish and a lot more traditional structure/production, I think there’s at least a chance to get to a wholly middling 3 that at least has a couple more solid tracks. As it stands, to my ears, it’s a 2.5 that I’ll bump down to a 2. I almost have the frame of mind to give it a 1, just because it’s not deserving to be on the list & that review in the book reads like propaganda, but I’m not that cruel. Someone else can be that cruel though, and I would not blame them one fucking bit.
Patti Smith
5/5
I’m at a 5.
I feel like calling this a punk rock album is a little bit of a misnomer, because past the intensity of the opening track (which might be an all-timer, by the way), from a musical standpoint, this leans far more into the sort of style that Kate Bush would later refine & redefine in her own way. This is an album centered around liberation, in a lot of different ways: sexual liberation, feminine liberation, liberation via death, liberation via financial freedom, et cetera. It’s the underlying line that connects all the tracks, and some form of liberation & freedom is there, whether it’s a type of freedom you agree with or not. In many ways, it mirrors the sort of liberation that Patti Smith likely felt as a woman being herself in a space generally dominated by men at the time. Sure, you had your Joni Mitchells or your Janis Joplins, but in terms of fully letting loose & throwing it all out there without a real care in the world, this just feels different, in a way that’s hard to explain, but easy to feel, if you’re listening to the music.
It’s not a perfect album; I think there could be a little more clarity on some of the lyrics, though they’re brilliantly written for the most part. I think this album does have a few flatter instrumentals, mainly on “Redondo Beach” & the ending portion of “Kimberly”, but those aren’t a big deal, given that the overall intensity & lyricism of those tracks are still undeniably cool. Really, I’m nitpicking – when this album is rolling, it feels like it has unstoppable momentum, and that momentum has carried through to influence a ridiculous amount of artists. Everybody from Michael Stipe to Morrissey (boo) to Courtney Love to Siouxsie & beyond have cited this album as a sort of inspiration point, and I can hear it in a lot of different ways. It’s only 44 minutes, but it might be some of the most defining music of its time. No words I can type can really capture the feeling of listening to each track, so if you somehow haven’t heard it, go listen to it, right now.
Once again, though, is it punk rock? By the musical standards that would later be set, I don’t think so. The heavier guitars aren’t here, nor are the crazy percussive moments, at least not in the spades they would be by the mid-80s. However, in terms of unabashedly being yourself… that’s the most punk shit you can do. It’s not “punk rock”, it’s rock music made for the people who can identify as the punks of the world, and that’s a wider net than the term “punk rock” could capture by itself. It’s a kickass album that carries its own gravity field, pulling so many people into its sphere of influence that it probably affected music as we know it. It is absolutely an album one must listen to before they die. It’s a very easy 5. Arguably a 10. Good on you, Patti.
Bruce Springsteen
5/5
I’m at a 10. It's probably higher, honestly.
Listen, I can understand why “Born in the U.S.A.” is the more heralded Bruce Springsteen record – he already had bigger name recognition, the songs were genuinely perfect for the time, and as a whole, that title & cover art just invokes an explosion of patriotic fervor brought on by the illusions of the Reagan years, even if the music itself was made for a crowd who recognized that not all was sunshine & rainbows in the land of the free. I get it.
For my money’s worth, though, this is the best Bruce Springsteen album we’ve gotten so far. Going in, I was hoping for something that carried the gravitas of the two other albums we’ve gotten from him, since I figured it wouldn’t be as polished. Obviously, I knew “Born to Run” would be here, but I’ve never heard anything else from the album, and even in terms of that title track, I had only heard the cover version on “Welcome to the Pleasuredome” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. It’s a great cover, but it’s incomparable to the original. Born to Run is very obviously the climax of this album, but the entire buildup to get there is unbelievable in its own right. This might have the most explosive 5-track start to an album I’ve heard in a while, and as an entire package, I can only really say it has a partial stumble on “She’s the One”, but that’s just because it has the unenviable task of following an all-timer. It is as close to a perfect 39 minutes as you can get.
“Thunder Road” is electric – just a perfectly written track, with a great vocal performance to boot, acting as a constantly layered 6-minute piece, building up the intensity of the instrumental, in a way that constantly keeps itself entertaining. It sets an incredibly high bar for the rest of the album to follow.
“Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” has the sort of “throwback” production that Phil Collins would so effectively use on his cover of “You Can’t Hurry Love” – just a wonderfully done blend of 60s doo-wop sensibilities with 70s rock & roll, all done in a way that feels timeless to this day.
“Night” has great lyricism & vocals, but it’s also just a set piece for the band to go nuts on, and they knock it out of the park – it’s truly criminal that it only has 8 million plays on Spotify, because it sounds like a Red Bull.
“Backstreets” is a dazzling 6 minute piece, with great (& positively ambiguous) storytelling, arguably even better layering than “Thunder Road”, and an unbelievably captivating bridge, capped off by one of the grittiest vocal performances I’ve heard from Bruce Springsteen ever.
“Born to Run” is… well, it’s “Born to Run”. You just have to listen to it. It is exactly where this album hits its climax, and it really is worth all the acclaim. I knew I would like Bruce’s version, but I wasn’t expecting to feel THAT much more captivated by the grit in his voice, and the little tinges of folksy, Bob Dylan-esque production still present in the original like this.
“She’s the One” is that tiny, tiny misstep – still a good track, if a bit platitudinal (& a little overly descriptive) for the lovey dovey lyrics. The Phil Spector influence is the big one here – it’s just a little too strong on the wall of sound, and overall, it’s just a noticeable step down from the high of “Born to Run”. Honestly, the album might’ve been paced even better if you swapped it with “Meeting Across the River”.
“Meeting Across the River” is a really thematic noir track, with the sort of context-driven storytelling that I’m a sucker for on tracks like this. It helps that it’s got more of a lo-fi instrumental mood to it, underlining a calm sense of dread that’s present throughout the story of this poor guy who’s gonna absolutely get whacked in a job gone wrong (& knows it, too). It’s the most unique track on the album in terms of a departure from the rock / Americana stuff, and if it had come after “Born to Run”, I think the shift would’ve been just crazy enough to work.
“Jungleland” is unbelievably good – it’s the longest track on the album, but it’s arguably the most passionately performed, with Bruce using his penmanship to craft an incredibly vivid view of New Jersey at this time, underlined by a spectacular performance from the band, especially on that fucking 3-minute saxophone solo. It’s paced perfectly, and Bruce knows when to give the lyricism their gravitas, most prevalent on the spoken-word exasperation present in the final verse. Once that piano explodes afterward, it’s just a cinematic sort of bliss that feels like the perfect way to end the album on.
I’m out of adjectives, but I wouldn’t write a paragraph about every single track here if I didn’t enjoy this THAT much. It’s a stunner of an album, and one of the best of 1975, if not all time. It’s very obviously a 10, and certainly within the top 10 (if not higher) of all the albums we’ve gotten so far, at least for me.
P.S.: Frankly, it’s unbelievable to get this and “Horses” by Patti Smith back to back. Two 8-track rock & roll albums with captivating black & white cover art, both highly influential in their own right, with the critical acclaim to match it. Two sides of a very similar coin, yet existing in their own spaces & representing two different parts of the same scene. Just a treat to get properly introduced to both of them in a 48-hour span, and one of the highlights of this experience so far, even some 518 albums in.
The Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy
4/5
I’m at a 4.
This is hyper-socially conscious hip-hop for 1992, filled with a lot of harsh truths, some biting observations, & a lot of musing about society in a way that’s all fair, if a bit heavy-handed at times. This is sort of a mirror to the Arrested Development album we got a while ago, which felt preachy in a positive way, save for the 20% of it that gave me an ick. I don’t really have an ick with the content of this album though – much like the Arrested Development album, I liked around 80% of this, but the 20% that’s nagging at me consists of a few verses & tracks that aren’t “icky”, but more so outdated & pearl-clutchy, at least by the standards of 2025.
Let me be clear: when this album is matching its lyrical prowess with some good vocals, underlined by some production chops that feels very reminiscent of Public Enemy, then it’s absolutely rolling. “Vocals” in this case can mean both rap flow & authoritative tone – “Satanic Reverses” & “California über alles” are great examples of rap flow, but something like “The Winter of the Long Hot Summer” (fantastically prescient track, by the way, my favorite on the album) is a great example of how effective a rhythmic, authoritative tone can feel for a politically driven album like this. If you have a conviction for what you’re saying, people will be more inclined to listen, and I think a lot of this album is worth thinking about at a somewhat deeper level.
The 20% of this album that’s biting at me is still worth thinking about at that deeper level, but it’s undermined by a sort of “holier than thou” thought process that puts an overt emphasis on a lot of the negatives, while neglecting some of the positives present. Take for example, “Television, the Drug of the Nation” – great track through its first two verses, and then it sort of leans into an awkward “won’t we think of the kids!” angle, before rebounding nicely into the power of endorsement… and then totally losing me in the fourth verse. Granted, children’s TV improved tenfold by the early 2000s, so perhaps it’s just an “outdated” moment, but it’s still leaving a bad taste in my mouth.
There’s a few examples of this sort of thing throughout the album: “Everyday Life Has Become a Health Risk” feels fair, if a bit overblown nowadays with a more renewed focus on agricultural oversight & healthy living in the years since. “Socio-Genetic Experiment” feels a little tone-deaf in how it approaches tolerance to bigotry, and by modern standards, you just don’t really give an inch to racists, no matter how well-intentioned you want to be. The hook on “Financial Leprosy” feels like an unnecessary shot – perhaps the idea of modifying natural beauty felt taboo in 1992, but by modern standards, it feels very accepted to do whatever you want to feel comfortable in your own skin, & shaming that is one of the biggest missteps this album takes, undermining a pretty solid track about how people are constantly manipulated into feeling rich even if society is, at large, comprised of the poor.
Those pearl-clutchy, outdated missteps are part of the reason why this is going down to a 4, though I’d be remiss to not acknowledge that sometimes, this album just doesn’t work from a musical standpoint – for as good as the beats are, sometimes they’re a little scratchy or a little overblown. There’s also moments where the vocal flow just feels off, compensating for moments where the lyricism is trying just a little too hard. Overall, I did enjoy this. I totally understand why the critical acclaim is there without the sales to match it, given the heavier political/social elements, but it’s an album that would slide in really nicely into today’s rap/hip-hop landscape (with some tweaks, obviously). For me, it’s a 4, which in retrospect, is probably what I should’ve given “3 Years, 5 Months And 2 Days In The Life Of…”, but c’est la vie.
Eminem
5/5
I guess I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5, though it’s not without an obvious level of bias.
I just have an unapologetic soft spot for this album – years ago, when I was trying to really get into rap for the first time, I went through a number of decently acclaimed 90s “mainstream” rap albums, and this was one of them, alongside stuff like 2pac’s “All Eyez on Me”, Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic” & “2001”, both “Ready to Die” & “Life After Death” by Biggie, and overall, just a lot of other “basic” 90s rap albums. Nothing deeper than the “guys a white person might be able to name” level, really. I was probably just a little too young for it at the time, if we’re being honest, but it did give me a better appreciation for the genre, and it’s the spark that would eventually lead me to becoming a proper fan.
All of that aside, how does the music itself hold up? It’s definitely Eminem circa 1999, when Slim Shady could say whatever the hell he wanted and get away with it. Obviously, within a lot of modern contexts, so much of this album has aged poorly, and yet in some ways, that’s the entire point. Slim Shady is a psychopathic misogynistic bully, a pathological liar, and just a slimy little shitbag asshole who you’d never really want to give the time of day to. Eminem does not do anything that indicates that you should actively like Slim, nor does he ever really encourage him as a sort of “hero” figure. He’s the protagonist, yes, but you’re just trapped along the ride to watch him.
The line between Slim Shady & Marshall Mathers is pretty well drawn here, and I’m choosing to give grace for the period – this album is very dated to 1999, with references that almost nobody might get nowadays, save for the bigger stuff (like the OJ trial or the Lewinsky scandal), but that also means it comes with the sort of language that just doesn’t fly anymore. As far as how it’s used here, given that it’s played for ridiculous over the top comedy effect, ala a Wayans Brothers film like Scary Movie, or just the general South Park-ish / Jerry Springer culture of the time, I’m not as inclined to police this album’s tone like I might with other stuff. It is sort of a “you had to be alive at the time” thing. I’m not defending it, at least not in the sense of “we should normalize it again”, because we absolutely should not – it’s just one of those weird societal things of the late 90s / early 2000s that was later exploited (and are still currently being exploited, honestly) by the very, very worst actors to perpetuate true hate & bigotry when others weren’t trying to do so. It doesn't necessarily make it OK, but it does give it some level of leeway, at least for my brain. That said, I'm speaking for myself – I refuse to speak for the marginalized people that were affected by this, and if they didn't / don't like it, then they have every right to voice those concerns.
So, with my lack of policing, I’m basically at the point of “How entertaining is the album?”, and I think it’s still pretty entertaining. Eminem’s flows, rhyme schemes & structures are on full display, even for a debut (I know, I know, "Infinite", but shh), and it’s complemented by some great production. When this album succeeds at its over the top bullshit, it just glides, and I think it glides all the way up until “Cum On Everybody”. It kinda falls down a little bit afterward, but not that badly. There’s really only one track that felt like it went too far for me, which was “As the World Turns”, but beyond that, the only knock on the album I have is that it’s just a little bit long, with a few tracks that feel sort of unnecessary, or some outros that feel like they last forever. Obviously, I’m giving a lot of grace here, and if I’m being totally honest, it’s probably closer to a 4 than a 5… but I just have too many memories associated with this damn thing, so I feel good about giving it a 5. Forgive me, perhaps.
Coldcut
3/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump down to a 3.
Not that much to say, honestly – since it’s not on streaming, it’s a little hard to give bigger analysis besides “it sounded good, but sometimes it didn’t”, which is especially true given that this is an electronic dance / house album, with a little bit of hip-hop infused. It came out swinging with an absolute banger in “People Hold On”, then held on pretty well until getting to the other major banger of “Stop This Crazy Thing”, and then gliding decently well through to “What’s That Noise?”, which is where I ended the album, since I have no idea if the remixes are part of the original track listing or not.
This is getting bumped down to a 3 because there’s just a lot of stuff here that’s not that compelling – there’s extended portions where percussive beats last for like 30 or 40 seconds without anything else going on, there’s a few tracks that just feel extra long and could’ve easily been shaved down, and there’s a few tracks that just settle into a certain groove and then coast on that groove afterward. Don’t get me wrong, I liked a lot of this (around 8 of the 11 tracks I listened to), and it does scratch a little bit of an electronica groove that hasn’t been present from the randomizer lately, but it just feels underbaked & a little too long for its own good.
I do wish I had more to say, but with albums like this, you’re either feeling the music or you’re not. I felt it, but not as consistently as I would’ve liked, and the moments where I wasn’t feeling it really stuck out at me. I’ll add whatever’s on Spotify that I liked, but as a whole album, it’s just a 3.
Blood, Sweat & Tears
5/5
I’m at a 5.
When an album just sounds THAT good, is there really that much to say? I’m a little strapped for time, so I won’t write a big soliloquy – this album just rocks. Incredible fidelity for 1968, even if the version on Spotify is probably a remaster of sorts; this is one of the first albums ever recorded on 16-track tape, so it really lends itself to some production tricks and layering that feel pretty damn ahead of the era (and showcasing that people were indeed just limited by the technology back then). They used those 16 tracks about as effectively as you could – the depth in the horns, the percussion (holy SHIT, the percussion), the flutes, the guitars, the harmonicas, the vocals, and pretty much everything here all fits snugly into the soundscape & it all sounds fantastic.
That sound quality wouldn’t necessarily mean jack if the songs themselves weren’t good, but thankfully, these are all REALLY good tracks, or at the very least, they’re so tightly performed that they have a natural charisma that overrides any kind of lyrical cheesiness & or anything else that might feel awkward. David Clayton-Thomas manages to channel the grit of a Bruce Springsteen, the passion of an Aretha Franklin, & the smooth charm of a Stevie Wonder throughout these tracks, and his voice is variable enough to fit all of the genres this goes through, whether it’s funkier, more of a gospel tone, jazzier, or just straight rock & roll. Hell, the album starts & ends with a take on a 19th century Erik Satie piece. The variety is really strong here, and it keeps everything on its toes.
I just enjoyed this a lot; it’s a breezy 45 minutes, and to my ears, I can vaguely hear the case for how this beat out Abbey Road for Album of the Year at the GRAMMYs. I still think Abbey Road is a better album, but this has a charm to it that just feels more casually appealing at times. At the very least, the instrumentals on this thing are a groovy, groovy killer. It’s a 5 for me, and probably a little higher. Very deserving to be on the list.
Ray Charles
5/5
I’m at a 10. I feel like I’m floating.
Just unbelievable, really. I’m too pressed for time to write anything that long, but I think if you take Ray Charles, some deeply reworked country songs, & an orchestra that perfectly compliments the natural charisma that he displays throughout this album, then you have the recipe for a masterpiece.
Genuinely, I’m stunned to the point of speechlessness. I truly cannot believe this is from 1962, and I can’t believe how fucking crisp the 2024 remasters are on Spotify. This is our first Ray Charles album, and while I had a pretty damn healthy respect for the guy, I’ve never listened to one of his full albums like this. I’m aware of his hits, but they couldn’t have prepared me for this album. Far from it – Ray Charles feels like he’s singing these straight from his soul, and that’s the sort of mixture of total zen & true passion that you can only tap into a handful of times, in the most magical moments. Somehow, I think Ray Charles pulls it out on this album for almost all of the 12 tracks. Granted, that might just be because I fully closed my eyes and got absolutely lost in each track, but I think that’s the best way to listen to this album. The lyrics are a helpful enough guide, sure, but for this one, just let them go. Ray Charles will take the brain to places that feel like they’re a heartbeat away, if you allow him to take you there.
I truly can’t explain what I felt while listening to this – the closest comparison I have is when we got “Lady Soul” by Aretha Franklin, and even then, this just felt different. It’s an easy, easy 10. Ray Charles might just be magic, man.
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
4/5
I’m at a 4.
This is our fifth Elvis Costello album, so I’m running out of words to really say about the guy. If you’ve heard “My Aim Is True”, “This Year’s Model”, or “Imperial Bedroom”, then this is generally more of the same, with a little more of a pop lean as opposed to the sort of new wave-y stuff that was more prevalent on the former two.
Seriously, I can’t think of anything more to say: an Elvis Costello album at this point feels like a pretty nice slice of pizza. It’s some fine rock music that generally hits pretty well, with a few tracks that just… don’t. This is a totally competent 40 minute album that never really had a bad track, thankfully. If someone wanted to give this a 5, I wouldn’t even blame them. To my ears, there’s just a couple of mediocre tracks, some flatter instrumentals, a less engaged vocal performance at times, & one baffling (if historically relevant, I suppose) use of the N-word as it relates to Northern Ireland’s struggles around this time. I won’t defend it, but I don’t think I have enough historical knowledge to really indict the guy for it. Someone else can tear into him if they want, it just makes “Oliver’s Army” a really awkward listen otherwise.
There are a few really standout tracks to me: “Party Girl”, “Goon Squad”, & “(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding” are my highlights here. “Oliver’s Army” would be there too, but… y’know. I do think about 9 of the 13 tracks have some really nice moments within each of them – “Big Boys,” “Green Shirt”, “Chemistry Class” & “Two Little Hitlers” are the ones that didn’t click for me, and even then, they’re not bad, they’re just flatter & don’t have anything that really perk the ears up past a passive listen.
I got nothing more to add: good instrumentals from the Attractions, fine vocals from Elvis, and some solid songwriting for a pretty solid 40 minutes. Hence, a 4, but a recommended 4.
P.S.: I like Elvis Costello, but I’m more just surprised that he has 6 albums on the list when it feels like you could really just get away with “My Aim Is True” & “Next Year’s Model” and be done with it.
Randy Newman
4/5
I’m at a 4.
I didn’t know Randy Newman was on this list at all, because like many people, he’s just kind of been the Disney song guy to me. Color me decently impressed – he’s got some good witty tracks on this album, a lot of which is baked with Twain-esque sarcasm, delivered in a very intentionally dry way, to make it bite that much more. This is a pretty lyrically driven album, as the instrumentals themselves stay pretty soft & out of the way, so as to let his vocals & lyrics stand out more. It’s an approach that works & it’s an approach that I really like.
It’s also an approach that just sort of has a ceiling, but thankfully, this album hits that ceiling right as it finishes up – a track like “God’s Song” feels like a natural conclusion, and as a structured album, this has a pretty good start & a pretty good finish. If someone felt inclined to give this a 5, I wouldn’t blame them. Why am I at a 4 then? I dunno, I think it’s just a little too lo-fi for my tastes. I hesitate to use the Bob Dylan card here, but he at least knew that audiences need a little something to hook onto past just his words, and Randy Newman only really offers that hook around… oh, 60 to 70% of the time, at least to my ears.
Hence, the 4. Realistically, probably more of a 3.5 bumped up to a 4. It is definitely an album where you have to really hone in on the lyrics to get the extent of it, so I can understand why someone might give it a 2 or 3 if it’s not their cup of tea. It just clicked for me, what can I say?
Pulp
5/5
I’m at a 5. It’s probably just a little higher.
This album is not “Different Class 2”, nor is it ever trying to be. It’s a concept album (or at least, one to my ears) about exploring the desperate search for fame, and using it as a crutch & a substitute for happiness. It’s a little stretchy, but I think there’s a general plot here.
“The Fear” is sort of a prologue, spoken in the reflective, moody aftermath of all that’s about to happen. The lyrics spell out the core theme of the album, really: “This is the sound of someone losing the plot / Making out that they're okay when they're not”.
“Dishes” is where we meet our protagonist, which appears to be a characterization of our lead singer, Jarvis Cocker. He just wants to be something more than the guy who does the dishes & loves his wife, even if he tries to hold it all in. Just listen to the performance; the vocals & instrumentation open up a lot more as the vague frustration grows & his calmness cracks. It’s a really neat touch that frames the song as a man who’s just generally stuck in a rut and wants nothing more than to leave it.
“Party Hard” might seem jarring at first, but I love the dichotomy between the heavier guitar and his softer, buried vocals. It makes it feel like a mourning, desperate man lamenting that he can’t really have “fun” without resorting to other stuff, all amidst the buzz of a larger party, and that imagery feels really striking.
“Help The Aged” is sort of a last ditch effort to stick to the principles he was trying to espouse on “Dishes”, but not before coming to a sort of flawed realization that death comes to us all – instead of taking it to mean that he should appreciate what he has & just roll with it, or to just make steps to improve himself, he takes it in the belief that he has to totally change his image to achieve the sense of “something more” he’s desiring.
So, naturally, he becomes a porn star on “This is Hardcore”. Bit of a jump, but it’s a rather intentionally desperate jump. I love the way the orchestration gives the whole track some seedier & more sinister undertones. Whatever the case, his gambit seems to work. “TV Movie” is the immediate aftermath of this fame; he’s alone now. His wife isn’t there (possibly a divorce), and he’s just lamenting how dry life is without her. “A Little Soul” is him sort of crashing out to his son, realizing just how badly he’s coming across as a father & pleading with him not to end up the same way.
“I’m A Man” is him trying to bounce back from that moment of vulnerability, and trying to tell himself that he is indeed still a man, still trying to get booked, and still sort of grasping for that same level of fame he had after the porn tape. It’s just self-affirmations that feel like they’re going wrong, really.
Does “Seductive Barry” need to be 8 minutes? No, probably not – as an album track, I think about 3-4 minutes of it would be snappier & better paced. Does it work as an 8 minute track? Yeah, I’d say so – there’s an excruciating sense of being stuck in the room with the guy & the superstar girl he’s (possibly) in the room with, fantasy or otherwise, sort of invading whatever moment they’re having. That invasion of privacy grows as the track continues to go longer & longer. It’s uncomfortable, but that discomfort is very intentional, and it sort of exposes the awkwardness of “fame”. The foreplay all feels rehearsed, with any vague charisma only brought on by stature in the industry. There’s not a real spark here, so the “fakeness” of our main character gets brought into the forefront more & more. In that sense, I like the track. Still too long though. Shoutout to Neneh Cherry, by the way.
“Sylvia” is finally the epiphany point for J.C., as he finally realizes that he looks like any other vapid face in the crowd nowadays, using women (who all look like what I’m assuming to be his ex-wife, Sylvia) as a form of jewelry to make himself look better, and his self-worth is utterly diminished, even with the level of fame he’s seemingly rebounded to. It’s an apology track, and it’s the sort of fall to grace he really needs. “Glory Days” (not a Springsteen cover, though thematically similar) is the aftermath of that epiphany, really expounding on just how badly fame has changed him, reverting back to his simpler self, trying to make amends with some of the people he left behind.
“The Day After The Revolution” is the result of that public attempt to make amends, with the rest of the world sort of joining in his rebirth and rejecting the whims of fame. Is it his dream? I dunno, maybe. He mentions sleeping in on “Glory Days”, and this song starts with him unable to fall asleep in his dusty little room. Great vocal performance on this one, as he displays a real sense of liberation. As a way to end the album, it works really well.
“Like A Friend” is apparently a bonus track, but I think it still thematically works within the album; you could put it between “This is Hardcore” & “TV Movie”, since it can very easily be read as a man full of ego after finding his fame, treating his wife like nothing more than a resident in HIS home, and in HIS world. It could also go right between “Seductive Barry” & “Sylvia”, since it can just as easily be read as him realizing how fake this entire relationship is, frustrated at his own willingness to play along for the sake of a good time.
In case it wasn’t obvious, I’m just really enthralled by this as a project. If you somehow haven’t heard it, go listen. It’s a damn good album, and it explores its themes really well, blending the overall vision with some really well-performed vocals (emphasis on “performed”, like an actor), & a great job from the band, especially on the percussion & guitar work, both capturing the mood on every track here. If you just don’t see a plot, or you’re actively not seeing a throughline, then I can understand giving this a lower rating. For my tastes, and for my possibly stretchy brain, I think this pretty handily earns a 5. Great job, Pulp.
The Slits
4/5
I’m at a 4, though it does feel more like a 4.5 if you count that cover of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”.
Takes a little bit for this album to fully reveal itself, but once it gets going, it finds a tonally weird yet mesmerizing groove that can’t really be stopped: this is a strange, strange mixture of a lot of styles that somehow really works. We have a singer who sounds like Bjork, doing her best attempts to sound like David Byrne at times, to instrumentation that feels like a blend of R.E.M., Talking Heads, and the Go-Gos, all with a little bit of a reggae-infused flair that channels some of Bob Marley’s weirder, more experimental stuff.
That first track, though… oof. Just a bad tonesetter, really. Once “Shoplifting” hit, and revealed this album as a sort of jack of all trades one, with a sort of ska / hip-hop vibe permeating a number of the tracks, that’s where the album starts to shine. It’s not perfect, with a few harsher instrumentals or some more boring vocal parts, but it just sort of sucked me in. Seriously, the overall flow of the album finds a really nice pace that’s easier to get lost in, without coming across as too lo-fi or too ambient. I can’t describe it that well, given how much I just ended up vibing & grooving around, but if you hear it, you’ll just get it.
It’s a 4 for me – I wish I could give a better “analysis” of sorts, but I think the music speaks for itself. It’s gonna have to speak for me in this case, because I can’t find the proper words other than all the comparisons I made up top. It’s worth a listen to me, and I just really ended up liking it.
P.S.: That cover of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” feels YEARS ahead of schedule. It should’ve been on the main tracklist.
Spacemen 3
3/5
I’m at a slightly generous 3.
It’s just a fascinating listen, really. How compelling can you make repetition sound, and how far can you push that luck with your listener until they give up on you? Further more, can you get them back if they ever do give up?
I have answers to all of these questions, I think: Can you make repetition sound compelling? Yes, as long as your tracks aren’t too long. This album has a number of tracks that are a bit too long. However, when it’s not that long, some sort of hypnotic vibe washes over, where the brain is listening & engaged, but not actively comprehending, and that’s the sweet spot for making repetition sound compelling. When this album finds that sweet spot, no matter how awkward the soundscape might be (especially proven by “Suicide”), it’s a good spot to be in, as long as you can stay there. Eventually, these tracks do sort of push you away from that sweet spot, but when you’re in it, it’s just… nice. I can’t totally explain how.
So, how far can you push that luck with your listener? I’d say about 5 minutes into “How Does It Feel”, honestly. “Honey” is a fine start with some weird vocal effects going that distract heavily from the instrumentation, “Come Down Softly to My Soul” is a solid (though non-evolving and sort of bland) “vibes” track, but it’s “How Does It Feel” that feels like the lowest point of the album, really. It is 8 minutes of our little band here trying really, really hard to find a sweet spot, with a slower drip feed of music than a modern Nintendo service. It is really hard to not feel utterly down on this album after that. “I Believe It” doesn’t help either; same sort of thing as Track 2 where the vibes are there, but just sort of bland.
So… when did they get me back? Honestly, just a sonically interesting guitar sound on “Revolution” was the outstretched hand I needed to at least hear them out the rest of the way, and from that point onward, the album settled into something that’s not necessarily “better”, just executed in a far more compelling way. “Let Me Down Gently” gives big Eno vibes, “So Hot (Wash Away All of My Tears)” is just a more sonically compelling version of “I Believe It” & “Come Down Softly”, and… boy, let’s talk about “Suicide”.
There is not a single world in which that track should have worked. Honestly, it loses its steam right before the end, so in a way, it didn’t really work. Yet, to my ears, it did find that weird, compelling sweet spot. I can’t describe it; it has all the aspects of a repetitive, endless droning mess that I might normally rip on a track for, but for whatever reason… it just clicked. The lead guitar melodies aren’t doing anything special, they’re just layered and slowly evolving in a way that feels like lo-fi white noise, anchored by my own real knock on the track, which is that damn repetitive backing guitar riff. It’s somehow both hypnotic and frustrating at the same time – I don’t know how it worked, and maybe if I weren’t listening with headphones in, I would’ve despised it. However, I liked it.
“Lord Can You Hear Me” is nice. Feels sort of Nirvana-y, really. It feels like a nice, calmer endpoint after the 11 minutes of “Suicide”. Honestly, I wish it were a little longer just to let those horns near the end have a little more shine. As a whole package then, it’s a 3. A fascinating listen – it somehow kinda succeeds at what it’s trying to do as a sort of ambient psychedelic/shoegaze album, but the execution is all over the place for the first half of the album. Even once it finally settles into a more compelling spot for the second half, it’s still far from perfect. However, I think I admire it enough to give it a 3, though that’s the ceiling for me. Realistically, I’m probably closer to a 2.5, but I don’t think this is THAT bad to warrant a 2. If someone else does, I wouldn’t blame them though. It’s a strange one, but I think it has a place on the list in its own weird, niche-y way. Good job to Spacemen 3, I guess.
The Beach Boys
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Obviously, I suspect that the randomizer was just a tad bit rigged in light of Brian Wilson’s death, but even a few days ago, when I was looking back at the bands we had gotten so far, it struck me as a surprise we’d only gotten the Beach Boys once so far, especially knowing that this album would be coming down the pipeline eventually. “Surf’s Up” clicked with me really nicely, so I figured if this one was the one with the massive acclaim, it would also hit like that.
Yeah… yeah, it did. It’s not at a 10 level for me, which feels a little disappointing, but there’s not a single bad track here – it is every bit as good as it’s been advertised & more. I reserve the big 10 for whenever something just hits me at the deeper levels, or when my brain especially clicks to the point of pure disbelief. I never got there with this one on a first listen, but I’ll be damned if I don’t get there someday, because this is immediately entering the rotation. It’s my first time listening to this album in full; it’s my first time hearing a lot of these tracks, really. Obviously, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” is the monster commercial hit, but past that, the rest of the album was a mystery to me.
Generally, when my brain still thinks of The Beach Boys, it conjures up the poppier stuff, like “Surfin’ U.S.A.” or “Good Vibrations”, & even after listening to Surf’s Up a few times, my brain still just doesn’t connect the wires. That said, this is the perfect antithesis to that poppier stuff – not necessarily in the instrumentation, but just in the delivery & lyricism. A lot of these tracks are imbued with sadness, indicative of something deeper & more melancholy. Even for something like “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”, my brain only realized the slight level of sarcasm present throughout the track on this listen. Hell, apparently “God Only Knows” is one of the first pop tracks to evoke the word “God” in that sense, ignoring spirituals & whatnot. The depth that this album presents itself with is what gives this album its place in musical history – if you don’t get here, you probably don’t get to the deeper, richer stuff that would slowly emerge from both the Beach Boys, The Beatles, and several others in an “iron sharpening iron” sense. Sgt. Pepper’s is apparently pretty directly inspired by this album. Hell, you probably don’t get to something as eternal as “Songs in the Key of Life”, but we’ll get to that when it comes up.
I wish I could type more in-depth here, but I just don’t think I can really type up a storm about the tracks themselves. The compositions, lyricism & delivery will leave far more of an impact than whatever I might write. It’s a damn good album, and everyone in the band deserves all the credit in the world for this one, even Mike Love, as begrudgingly as I have to give it to him. Brian Wilson, though… flowers, balloons, slices of cake, stacks of cash, piles of presents; the whole 9 yards, really. His production work on this, in addition to his writing & instrumental work, is remarkably good. Hell, even the mono mix doesn’t feel like mono at times, managing to pull off a better “wall of sound” effect than Phil Spector did on basically everything I’ve heard the guy touch.
So, yes, R.I.P. to Brian Wilson, and let this album live on forever as a sort of magnum opus for the Beach Boys. It’s a very easy 5, and one day, it’ll probably click in THAT sense where I can say “easy, easy 10”. An excellent album, and a cornerstone piece of music.
James Taylor
5/5
I’m at a 5.
I have a healthy appreciation for James Taylor, but as more of a two-hit wonder in my brain: “Fire and Rain” off of this album, & his cover of “You’ve Got A Friend” from its follow-up. I always figured I’d like the guy, and I knew he had a little more of a place in music than those two tracks, they’re just the ones that come to mind. Boy, am I glad this is on the list to finally kick my ass into listening to him: this was great. The first tracks here are really good, if a little more guitar-heavy off the top, but once “Steamroller Blues” opens up the soundscape to a new world of possibilities, this album rides into an even nicer stride. Hell, the final 5 tracks that end this thing are a fantastic stretch.
If I have any missteps here, it might just be that the “Oh, Susannah” cover feels out of place; it could’ve been cut, and it would make for a remarkable run from Steamroller Blues to the end of the album. Beyond that though, I really have no complaints. James Taylor’s vocals glide like silk on these tracks, adapting to the mood & tone of any track on a whim. Even though the guitar is his main anchor, they both blend wonderfully into the instrumentation this album throws in, especially on the funky section that ends the album on “Suite for 20 G”. Even when it’s just him & his guitar, it’s still captivating & malleable all the same; something like “Oh Baby, Don’t You Loose Your Lip on Me” strikes me as a sort of lo-fi Muddy Waters. His songwriting is great too; I especially want to give a nod to “Anywhere Like Heaven”, which just clicked wonderfully for me, but there’s some strong, strong lines throughout this whole thing.
It’s an extremely tight 32 minutes, and it says everything it wants to say & more. Again, outside of “Oh, Susannah” being here (which is just a personal preference more than anything), I think you can’t pace the album any better than that. I really enjoyed this, and I’m glad James Taylor is no longer a two-hit wonder in my brain. If it’s a little too bubbly at times, I can understand giving it a 3 or 4, but for my tastes, this is a very easy 5. I feel like I gotta listen to the follow-up now, even if it’s not on the list.
William Orbit
5/5
I’m… at a 5, I think?
This is gonna be a weird one, because I’m still not ultimately sure. Let’s just say I had a unique experience with this album. Normally, I try to listen when my brain is fully attentive, fully awake, and not prone to any kind of “sleepiness” factor. So, for whatever reason, I decided to listen to this one slightly attentive, slightly awake, and decently prone to a “sleepiness” factor. The results are… kind of incredible, really.
Years ago, I read that Salvador Dali would sometimes sleep with a key in his hand, his head laid back, and whenever he did fall asleep, he would drop the key onto a metal plate, making a sound loud enough to wake him up pretty much instantly, and spark his creativity with whatever image his brain had conjured up in those fleeting moments. I’ve always thought the story was fair, but a bit exaggerated; surely, you can’t have the brain produce that sort of thing in fleeting moments of lucid awareness, right?
This album did that. It did that in a way that I’m not sure I fully comprehend, and I feel like I didn’t experience the album the “correct” way because of it. I’m also not sure that matters. I found myself closing my eyes to try and just feel the vibe of each track, for a lot of the early tracks. I do it decently often; there are portions of entire albums I’ve listened to with my eyes closed just to really enhance the emotions & the atmosphere. For this album, for whatever reason, instead of drifting into my focused zen state, I found myself melting into something decently close to sleep, especially starting around the end of Track 5 leading into Track 6, and from that point onward, I think I felt that sort of Dali effect click for me.
This album’s sound design works in such a way where if you do try to find that zen state, and get sort of lost in it like I did, there’s always something around the corner to sort of shake you out of it, whether it’s sound effects, vocal moments, percussive drops, extra instrumentation coming in hot to change the vibe of the track, and more. Those moments were my equivalent to Dali dropping his key and “waking up”, and my brain was conjuring up weird, weird images of things that didn’t exist, yet felt like they could exist in reality. My brain is more attuned to these sorts of soundscapes as video game music, so naturally, I was thinking of stuff like indie puzzle games, weird horror stuff, vague RPG overtones – realistically, a lot of this is because I played part of Chapter 3 of Deltarune earlier today, so my subconscious was working overtime, I think. Beyond that though, there were pixel explosions of stars, sudden jumpscares, perspective shifts… lots of stuff that feels distantly lost, but stuff that I wouldn’t have really thought up without this album’s soundscape as the backdrop to inspire it.
Of course, I never actually fell asleep. If I had fallen asleep, I wouldn’t have been writing notes about each track while listening, including bits & pieces of other stuff my brain came up with. Never revealing those, though. It’s the closest I’ve come to experiencing something like lucid dreaming, and while I’m not sure that’s the vibe this album was going for… it might be one hell of a tool for that sort of thing. So, yes, I suppose my recommendation for this album is to use it as a soundscape to dream to, once it gets into its more ambient stuff over the course of the last 36-ish minutes of the album. How about those first 27, though? I liked it; less easy to zone out to, but they’re all pretty good, especially with “Water From a Vine Leaf” as an opener.
Genuinely, I need to relisten to this when I’m not on the verge of falling asleep – realistically, though, I could’ve stopped at any time on this initial half-asleep listen, because I was very actively aware of it. I chose to stay in it, because I was enjoying it, perhaps a bit too much. There is a non-zero chance this album was designed for this sort of thing, and if so… good on you, William Orbit. I’m gonna give this a 5, as crazy as it feels. I do think I would’ve given it at least a 4 regardless, just because it kept me oddly captivated in a way similar to “Playing With Fire”, but in a more potent & truly ambient way. All I know is, I really liked listening to this one, via whatever strange reasons emerged.
P.S.: I promise I wasn’t on drugs. If anything, I think I probably just experienced what it’s like to be high for the first time, somehow via a potent tiredness, a strong imagination, & ambient music. Maybe that’s all it takes.
Adam & The Ants
3/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump down to a 3.
I do wish I could leave it at a 3.5 though, because this is a pretty enjoyable album, for the most part. Whenever it’s not *that* enjoyable though… boy, it’s just kinda dry. That dryness looms over a bit too much of the album for me to give it a bump up to a 4 – there’s just too many tracks that have sections that didn’t really grab me like that. In those drier moments, something just looms in the soundscape for a bit too long, whether it’s a sort of mediocre guitar solo, a vocal performance that doesn’t have the right level of conviction, or just a drum pattern that doesn’t really have the right kick to it.
Even when none of those are present, sometimes the tracks just didn’t really click for me, despite their best efforts, due to a general lack of presence from the band themselves. Take “The Human Beings” as an example – fun concept, good looping vocals, but when the instrumentation isn’t there to evolve the track and give it a sense of progression, it makes the track fall a bit short. Same goes for “The Magnificent Five”; totally fine track, but the soundscape hits a high point at the intro, and just sort of stabilizes afterward. Even on the best tracks on this album, there’s moments that feel a little weird, like “Antmusic” using its chorus as a bit of a crutch, “Ants Invasion” having some noisy guitar at the end, or “Jolly Roger” abruptly ending without any fun pirate-y guitar solo stuff.
Whenever it’s not dry, I like it, but I especially like it when these guys sort of bite Talking Heads a bit, which is making me realize that… maybe I just really want to listen to some Talking Heads, you know? Ultimately, this feels like a weird in-between of post-punk & new wave, leaning a little more towards post-punk’s vocals / structure while trying to integrate new wave soundscapes, but it’s not doing the most effective blend job, at least to my ears. I hear all the potential in the world though, and there are some great tracks here. Had these guys not broken up within a few years, I think they would’ve been able to ride the wave of a new wave a bit longer. As far as this album goes, it’s just not quite there for me. It could totally go up to a 4 someday if some of this clicks a little better, but for now, I’ll stay at a 3.5 bumped down to a 3.
Le Tigre
4/5
I’m at a 4.
Unique as hell for 1999, I’ll say that. This album feels innovative right off the top, in that it’s just that different from any of its contemporaries. In a lot of ways, this album feels like a time-shifted anomaly, one that does eventually stabilize itself as it goes through its 32 minute runtime, but an anomaly nonetheless. It’s a pretty fun anomaly though.
Honestly, I can’t really think of a good description for how this album sounds; the best thing I have is “the Go-Gos on a little bit of acid”, but that sort of undermines the amount of genres this thing kind of tackles – there’s some Dead Kennedys energy here, little bit of plunderphonics, some 60s-inspired production that sometimes hits on both a Sgt. Pepper’s vibe & a Velvet Underground track at the same time. However, if you listen to the songs themselves, instrumentally, it’s just consistently a bit off-kilter; the actual instruments feel like a blend of MIDI & real stuff, with samples thrown in at lower bitrates to accentuate how slightly off it is, and ultimately, for 1999, it’s just really inspired production that’s intoxicatingly strange. To my ears, it’s more reminiscent of how people perceive 1999 through a Y2K aesthetic in modern times, which makes it feel ahead of the curve & yet totally thematically fitting.
Like I said though, this does stabilize itself – the later tracks of this album don’t carry the same weird energy as the first half does, but they’re still fine regardless. I do wish the album ended on a higher note than “Les & Ray”, but there’s no shame in having a kind of tribute track close out any album. Genuinely, I’m just kind of surprised that this is from 1999, and I’m more surprised I haven’t heard of Le Tigre until now. This isn’t quite up my alley, but I think it’s still cool as hell. It’s a 4 for me, and I’m glad it’s on the list.
P.S.: I need Hayley Williams to cover “Let’s Run” immediately. Also, huge fan of that “Fuck Guiliani” line on “My My Metrocard”.
Raekwon
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll just barely bump up to a 5.
Rap albums are the hardest to write reviews for, especially when you get every single solo album by a Wu-Tang member on the list before you get “Enter the Wu-Tang”. I can only really compare this to the other members of the group, but I think that feels sort of unfair in its own way. These guys have their own styles & philosophies, and even with Ghostface Killah acting as the Luigi to Raekwon’s Mario here, it still doesn’t feel right to compare this to Fishscale, Tical, or Liquid Swords.
With that said, this is probably my second favorite solo Wu-Tang project on the list behind Liquid Swords. It’s not an indictment on quality, just a matter of enjoyment, and I just enjoyed this one a lot. Hard to write about it though; when you’re in the zone with a rap album like this, it’s hard to write down any intricacies. It basically boils down to “how good was the flow, how good were the beats, and how good were the lyrics”, and in this case, the flow was great, the beats were pretty cool (if a little simple at times, lacking some of the flash on other Wu-adjacent stuff), and the lyricism does a pretty good job with storytelling, though it doesn’t really have as many cool one-liners as something like Tical or Liquid Swords.
If I have any complaints… it’s just a long one, you know? 18 tracks in 1995 is a tough ask, and I do feel like this album circles the bases on a few topics a few too many times. It’s a really fun listen, don’t get me wrong, but… I dunno, I think it could’ve been trimmed down a bit. Past that, there’s some lyrics on here that just feel really out of place 30 years later, as per the course, but even for its time, this is a little heavy on the homophobia, isn’t it? It’s honestly enough to make me consider dropping it a point, but I’m gonna give some level of grace here.
I do wish I could just hang it at a 4.5, but the entire stretch of “Glaciers of Ice” to “Wu-Gambinos” is simply too damn good to not give this a bump up. It clicked nicely for me, but I can also see an argument for this being one of the weaker solo Wu-Tang albums, especially if you just fucking hate Ghostface Killah for whatever reason, or if the production style doesn’t feel as tight. Hell, there are moments here where the “cool” mafia imagery of the Wu-Tang Clan can just feel a little bit yappy. For my tastes, I really enjoyed it, flaws and all – it’s a 4.5 that will just get the bump up to a 5, though if someone wants to bump it down, I wouldn’t blame them.
Cowboy Junkies
4/5
I’m at a 4.
I really like the approach this album goes for: sort of an MTV Unplugged vibe, given that these all seem to be recorded live outside of a studio, around just one microphone capturing everything. It leads to a much more intimate feel to each track, but without a crowd & a very minimalist approach to the instrumentation, the enjoyment of this album boils down to “How long can you withstand the style?”
That’s where I’m at a 4 – I love this style, but 52 minutes of it does eventually wear its welcome. The vocals are great, but they never really get into a higher, more emotionally-driven register, so her crooning, slower style feels far less effective by Track 12 than it does on the first 6 or 7 tracks. The instrumentation is great, but the minimalist approach feels less effective; this, however, was very easily avoidable had they just stuck to the added sounds of violins & steel guitars that they introduced on Tracks 5 and 6, but they never really use them to their full extent. It leaves very open gaps in the soundscape of each track that just feel empty for the sake of “ambience” that, again, loses its effectiveness. I can’t really speak to the lyrics, since a lot of these are covers, but I do wish they had chosen a few more tracks that leaned into the Americana side of country that I typically enjoy. That’s just personal preference, though.
However, for all of those complaints, it’s still a very nice album. Hell, it’s a really enjoyable listen – only a few tracks get that dry to the point of feeling boring, but in terms of the soundscape & overall mood of the album, the intimacy DOES feel really nice at first. I wish it found a way to keep up the mood throughout the entire album, but even when it starts to falter, these aren’t bad tracks. The album experience just sort of drags on, but they’re all enjoyable individually. If you’re the type of person who can enjoy the full 52 minutes without any complaints, then power to you. I think it’s a super unique recording, most of which I did like, and I can’t bring myself to go any lower than a 4. I feel like I need to listen to more of these guys.
The Go-Betweens
3/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump down to a 3.
This is a fine album; it’s a look into 10 of the houses that exist on this hypothetical road known as 16 Lovers Lane. A lot of these guys don’t seem to be in love though, as plenty of tracks here deal with breakups, manipulation, some vague sense of peer pressure… honestly, it feels like only 2 or 3 houses here actually have proper lovers. Bit of irony, then.
It’s a good concept for an album, and I wish they stretched it out to really explore this hypothetical street more, and properly dig into a day in this single neighborhood. As it stands, it’s 10 tracks of varying quality that range from “very good” to “fine, but it didn’t click for me”, and that’s mainly why I’m bumping this down to a 3. There’s always something with a lot of these tracks – there’s ambiguous meanings to the lyrics, some abstract vocal structures, moments where the song doesn’t feel like it’s progressed from an instrumental standpoint, or just longer intros and outros that feel like they’re padding for time on an already somewhat short album. Having one of these doesn’t sink a track, nor does it ever really sink the album that badly, but they’re consistently present, and that builds up over time to make the full 37 minutes feel not only longer than it is, but less fulfilling. It just doesn’t feel like the album has a proper track to track progression, due to so many tracks sharing a similar tone or subject matter.
Of course, I’m emphasizing the negatives, but this is never a bad album. It’s the type of album where, despite its flaws, I genuinely considered giving it a 4 because it’s still got a nice charm to it, and for as consistently present as my “somethings” are, they don’t last THAT long in each track. They’re there long enough to be noticeable, but sometimes, I was still enjoying it regardless. There are great instrumental moments here, some fun vocals that feel like a guilt-free Morrissey, and some lyrics that are genuinely really touching, like on “Streets of Your Town” or “Dive for Your Memory”, which might be my favorite song on the album. In a way, I’m bumping this down to a 3 because a number of tracks & styles just didn’t click for my tastes. If someone wants to give this a 4 or a 5, I wouldn’t blame them, because I can hear it. It just didn’t fully work for me.
Don McLean
5/5
I’m at a 5. Honestly, I’m a bit higher, though not quite at a 10.
Well, I’m very glad this isn’t just American Pie & then 28 minutes of tracks that also happen to be there. It’s American Pie and roughly 26 minutes of tracks that stand close enough to the shoulders of the giant that is the title track, keeping things entertaining & keeping the album at a consistently strong quality. My apologies to “Babylon”, it just feels sort of flat as the ending, especially when it could’ve closed perfectly on “The Grave”.
I’m really learning that 70s singer-songwriters are more my speed; gone is the verbosity & overt flowery language of the man that Don McLean calls a jester on this album, and in comes a group of artists inspired by the pacing & pop sensibilities of the Beatles & Elvis, while still channeling a lot of the sobering emotions that an artist like Bob Dylan brought out of these guys. It is a much nicer blend to my ears, and one that’s perhaps best personified by “American Pie”, which stands as an all-timer for a reason. I don’t think I need to use any extra words on it, because it’s that good.
How about the rest of them, then? “Till Tomorrow” is very James Taylor-y, and it just clicked really nicely for me, as a guitar-driven earnest ballad on love slipping away. “Vincent” is the other monster hit here, & it’s a brilliantly performed tribute to Vincent van Gogh. I’ve never heard it until today, but I deeply enjoyed it. “Crossroads” & “Winterwood” both tackle love as it relates to religion & reconnecting with it, but they’re written in such a way where you can see it as just a passionate love being a cure. I liked them both.
I think “Empty Chairs” is just beautiful. Simple as that, really. “Everybody Loves Me, Baby” is a pretty fun track about power dynamics & deconstructing the stature of emperors, kings, pharaohs, or any other imperialistic figures. I especially appreciate the way he sort of bites the structure of “American Pie” on it, just to be a bit meta. “Sister Fatima” is fine; I wish it were a bit more clear about the scammy nature of exploitative people in religion, but the sarcasm comes through well enough. “The Grave” is a fantastic track that honestly should’ve closed the album; it’s a very clear statement against the Vietnam War, and the imagery present between the muddy shithole this soldier died in & the idealistic grave his family makes for him at the end acts as a sobering image, and it would’ve been perfect to end on.
I don’t want to hate on “Babylon” that much, but it just feels like more of a transition track that should’ve been put between “Winterwood” & “Empty Chairs”, as opposed to an epilogue piece to “The Grave” and the overarching themes of “American Pie”. It’s a fine track, not bad at all, and it has a place somewhere in the album. It just shouldn’t have ended the entire thing, though I get the feeling ending on something religious was important to Don McLean.
Regardless, it’s a great, great album. A little emphasis towards the lyrics is needed here, since it is kind of just guitar-driven singer-songwriter stuff otherwise, but they’re all really well-written. It clicked wonderfully for me, and I’m glad the full album is on the list. It’s a very easy 5; a bit higher, really.
Eagles
5/5
I’m at a 5. Just a bit higher, really.
Not quite at the same level as “Hotel California”, but it didn’t need to be; this is just a great hybrid of country & rock, that leans a bit more into a Thin Lizzy or a ZZ Top style as opposed to just sort of biting the Rolling Stones. Of course, making all of those comparisons sort of undermines just how good the Eagles are as a band, and how much credit they rightfully deserve here. This is a great album off the jump – I definitely figured I would’ve heard “Take it Easy” at some point, and once that chorus hit, it immediately clicked.
I wasn’t prepared for the rest of the album to just click like that for me, though. I don’t want to write a paragraph on every track here, but there’s not a single miss here, as far as I’m concerned. The writing on this album is really strong, & both Glenn Frey & Don Henley deserve their credit for vocally bringing these tracks to life. However, it wouldn’t hit like that if not for the band’s performance. They’re on fire throughout this whole thing; every guitar solo, every percussive solo, and any chance for the soundscape to shine isn’t wasted, no matter what’s getting the spotlight. Honestly, adding Joe Walsh to the band by “Hotel California” feels like adding Kevin Durant to the Warriors all those years ago; it’s just not fair. Big shoutout to the banjo taking over the track on “Earlybird” and just killing it, by the way. It’s also perfectly paced, which feels like a nice addendum to how much I was hating on “Babylon” being the closing track to “American Pie”; “Tryin’” is how you do it, with the band going all out & and giving the album a real sense of finality. It’s not as good as “The Last Resort” was for “Hotel California”, but it still puts a nice bow on the whole thing. I guess the Eagles are pretty good at making full albums feel satisfying.
I’ve got no complaints, really. Scattered nitpicks, sure, but I don’t feel like typing any of them out, because I enjoyed this far too much to care. It’s a very, very good debut album, and after listening to these guys twice, I’m starting to see why that 70s Greatest Hits album of theirs is the best-selling album ever in the United States (supposedly; I kinda don’t buy it, honestly). Hopefully, we’ll get that second place album soon, but as far as this one goes, I’m at a very, very happy 5, if a bit higher.
Baaba Maal
3/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump down to a 3.
Hard to say that much here, given the language barrier, the lack of any translations, & a general unfamiliarity with this style of music. It’s one of those albums where you either like it, or you don’t, and in my case, I was liking it until I didn’t. It never got bad, though; it simply lost its luster & got a little too stale for me.
I was at a 4 through the first 6 tracks of this album; there’s a sense of progression on each track, some good instrumental / vocal work, and even with the repetition present, the loops at least had a nice energy to them to keep them from feeling stale. They’re also, at an average, about 4:57 long, if you do that math. It wasn’t doing anything special, but it was at least fun to listen to – there’s a distinct line between a “good listen” and a “fun listen” for albums like this for me, where a good listen is technically sound, but not the most engaging, and a fun listen IS engaging.
It’s tracks 7 through 10 where this album takes a dip for me, simply into “good listen” territory, but to a really, REALLY unengaging degree. The repetition is more potent, the vocal work feels limited to a couple of lines followed by a vocal run for some “flair” that feels manufactured, and the sense of progression on each track is just lost. Those tracks average out about to 6:04 long, so even though it’s only about a minute longer on average, that’s a lot more measures of repetition that just add up to feel frustratingly incompatible, especially with how nicely the first 6 tracks felt for me. At least “Minuit” is really nice as the last track. I liked that one.
At the end of the day, I just think this album could’ve trimmed itself down, because 58 minutes of this will lead to a bit of burnout, especially with how many tracks go over 5 and a half minutes. At its best, this is super engaging music from Senegal, and I really do think it’s a soundscape & a style worth listening to. At its “worst”, though, it doesn’t do anything necessarily wrong, it just painfully loses its luster, making the album experience just kinda drag, at least to my ears. Someone who’s on a drive, or a run, or using this as ambient background noise without giving it the same sort of focused attention I did will probably really vibe with this. Hell, I probably need to listen to it that way. It’s not a bad album, and it’s certainly at least better than the dogshit that was “Haut de gamme”. For my ears, it’s a 3.5 that I’ll bump down to a 3, but it could pop itself back up to a 4 if these just catch me differently on another day.
Bruce Springsteen
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I'll bump up to a 5.
It’s not Bruce Springsteen’s best production, given how much this thing bites from the rock trends he missed out on between 1995 and 2002. It’s not Bruce Springsteen’s sharpest writing, but with the wounds of 9/11 pretty fresh, I can’t blame him for not digging into them too deeply, even for as much as he touches on it. It’s not Bruce Springsteen’s strongest album on the list.
It is, however, the perfect album for the moment, by a guy whose voice & thoughts seemed especially needed. The Wikipedia article for this album says that “Springsteen felt compelled to record The Rising when, in the aftermath of the attacks on September 11, 2001, a stranger in an adjacent vehicle rolled down his window and said: ‘We need you now’.” I can’t say that guy in the car was wrong – these tracks do feel needed. Yes, by 2025’s vision of the world, the sense of hope & perseverance present on a lot of these tracks are a bit washed away by the bitter taste of the U.S. military’s intervention in 2003 and beyond… but for July of 2002, these work, and they work rather well. They’re capturing emotions in broad enough strokes, yet just malleable enough to fit the situations of a lot of people who lost loved ones in the WTC, Pentagon, or Flight 93. Even without the context of the attacks casting a shadow on this album, most of them are written in such a way that they just work, saying the thoughts that some people might’ve been unable to express in light of any grief or tragedy.
I obviously have my complaints on the album – I think a number of tracks here are a little too “poppy” for Bruce’s general style & sensibilities (“Waitin’ on a Sunny Day” & “The Rising” come to mind). I think there’s a handful of tracks where going more acoustic would create a better sense of intimacy, pulling more emotions out of them, giving them a better impact (“Countin’ on a Miracle” & “You’re Missing”, in this case). Past that, I do think Bruce’s vocal twangs lean a little too much into the Toby Keith-esque style of country that was dominating the charts at the time, and while his vocals are never once bad, they just leave a weird taste in my mouth, yearning for some of the grittier tones of his 70s/80s stuff.
I will say, though, for as much as I’m sort of ragging on the production, I genuinely did enjoy a lot of these tracks. There’s certainly something cheesy to late 90s / early 2000s rock now, but hearing Bruce unabashedly go for it just worked in my brain. Don’t get me wrong, I think I would’ve preferred more of an updated yet familiar sound, ala David Bowie’s “The Next Day”, but going full throttle into the 21st century like this just feels fun.
I won’t blame anyone for going for a 3 or lower on this, because it is rather long, and it’s WAY different from anything I’m used to from Bruce Springsteen. However, it just clicked for me, and ultimately, I think it does what any good Bruce Springsteen album is supposed to do: evoke the imagery of the very best aspects of the country. Yes, that’s normally bookended with “whilst acknowledging the criticisms that come with it, and what we should be doing to fix it”, but for 2002, I’m not necessarily sure people needed to hear those criticisms. They just wanted a sense of togetherness, and Bruce provides it here without being overly patriotic. Never once is the flag held up high in the lyrics, nor is America portrayed as a bright shining beacon. It’s all based in a sense of community, like on the back to back tracks of “Worlds Apart” & “Let’s Be Friends (Skin to Skin)”. It’s extremely apparent on “My City of Ruins”, which works as a great closer.
I guess I’m at a 5 because this just clicked for me like that. It does feel weird, though, as it’s far from the highest of highs that is “Born to Run”, and while I think I still personally prefer “Born in the U.S.A.” over this, it probably does pass “Darkness on the Edge of Town” for me, for having a more contemporary / familiar sound, like the music I grew up on. It's definitely got a chance to go down in the future, but for now, I'm OK with the bump up to a 5.
Harry Nilsson
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
I’ve never heard of Harry Nilsson until listening to this, but as it turns out, apparently I have. Not from the chart-topper that is “Without You” (of which I need to hear the Mariah Carey cover), nor from “Jump into the Fire”, as I’ve made the grave mistake of never watching Goodfellas. It was goddamn “Coconut”. I like the song, don’t get me wrong, I’m just stunned that my once in a while epiphanies on this sort of thing went to the goofy comedy track this time around.
This is a pretty good album, and I’d say there’s no misses here, though it won’t go without a little bit of nitpicking on my part. I do think this album is a little heavy on covers, but it’s fine enough given that he bends the tracks towards his strengths – I do wish he had a few more original tracks here though. There’s a little bit of repetition throughout some tracks; not enough to be a big deal, given the energy the instrumentals bring on each track, but enough to poke at the ear a little bit (“Let the Good Times Roll” & the first 3 minutes of “Jump into the Fire” are guilty here). My biggest thing here is probably just how many times tracks end on a fadeout; I felt a little robbed at times of a bigger finish, but that’s just personal preference at that point.
All of that said, I wouldn’t be bumping this up to a 5 if I didn’t enjoy it for a reason – it’s just a catchy album that tackles a lot of styles & genres whilst evoking some Beatles-y sensibilities (apparently, they loved this guy), with great instrumentation & vocals throughout. They’re not all winners from a lyrical standpoint, but if I can give some love to “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” despite how ridiculous it is, who am I to judge the writing of something like “Down” or “Coconut”? I wish I had more to say, but it’s a breezy 35 minutes that’s worth a listen, and I liked it. At worst, it’s a 3 if you fucking HATE “Coconut”.
Talk Talk
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll yet again bump up to a 5.
It’s really only because most of the tracks feel a little longer than they should, because otherwise, I’d be at a flat 5 without question; this was a REALLY nice album. It doesn’t do anything super special lyrically, but where it shines is pulling the most emotion out of the broad strokes the lyrics give, from both the vocals & the instrumentation. Mark Hollis is pretty good at this, giving each track a sort of gravitas reminiscent of Tears for Fears or some of Peter Gabriel’s solo work; he’s got a great control over the tone of each track, knowing when to switch between a more authoritative voice & a softer one when the moment calls for it.
Instrumentally, this album feels like a natural progression of what Phil Spector was sort of trying to do with the wall of sound, but mixed really nicely with the synth-driven sensibilities of 80s new wave; there are moments where it all feels a bit loud, yet the clarity of each instrument & synth isn’t sacrificed in those moments. It also helps that this uses a lot of acoustic / traditional instrumentation – the guitar on “I Don’t Believe in You”, the piano scattered throughout the album & the fantastic harmonica solo on “Living in Another World” are some of the standout parts for me. Each of the first 4 tracks layers itself really nicely, so it never feels like it comes out of nowhere, and they build up enough trust that when they do just get into it later in the album, it’s not as jarring as it could be.
Again, my only complaint here is some tracks losing their luster after too long – a lot of these could have been trimmed just a bit to pace the album quicker, and in the case of “April 5th”, I think it loses a sense of progression about halfway in, making the last half of that track feel like it’s spinning the wheels a lot. I guess “Chameleon Day” didn’t click for me that well, but its imagery of night vs day plays really nicely with “Give It Up” & “Time It’s Time” surrounding it, as one is about simply giving up on life & the other is about persevering through it.
All in all, it’s a well constructed album, and while it could be trimmed a little, it’s not that big of a deal for me – it’s a super enjoyable listen to the ears if nothing else, and I liked it a lot. A very easy bump up to a 5 for me, and I’m glad I finally bothered to listen to a Talk Talk album.
The Last Shadow Puppets
5/5
I’m at a 5.
I’ve had a pretty healthy respect for Arctic Monkeys for a while, and I think I might’ve read about this side project from Alex Turner once on a Wikipedia dive, but I’ve never listened to it until now. Of course, calling this an Alex Turner side project sort of undermines how much of a group effort this truly is, so some big kudos to Miles Kane, James Ford & Zach Dawes.
With that said… yeah, this is an Alex Turner side project. It is not another Arctic Monkeys album, instead opting for a more cinematic feel, inspired by stuff like James Bond soundtracks, golden age Hollywood (the strings are SO good on this album) & spaghetti westerns of the 60s, blended with some of the indie rock sensibilities of Arctic Monkeys (& everyone else within that general style) to create a really cool set of tracks that feel really captivating, even without the lyrics or vocals to go with them.
It is a blessing that the lyrics & vocals match their quality – in essence, this is a much, MUCH better version of “16 Lovers Lane” by the Go-Betweens, which our group got about 6 days ago. All of these tracks tackle the same ideas of breakups, manipulation, peer pressure, and more, but this album underlines them all with a true sense of lost connection & lost love, written with such earnesty that they all feel plausible, real, and more emotionally fruitful. That added sense of relatability ultimately gives a lot more for Alex Turner to work with vocally, and he knocks it out of the park. There’s a really strong flexibility to his voice, and while it’s explored a bit more on “AM” (which is CRIMINALLY not on this list), the earliest showcases of it are here, gliding through angrier & softer tones in a way that pulls the proper sense of emotion out of each track here.
If you’re not a fan of Arctic Monkeys or other bands with a similar style, this album will probably not hit like that. I loved this style though, and I really, really enjoyed this album – it’s a breezy 35 minutes that feels perfectly paced. If anything, I’m kicking myself for reading about this on Wikipedia years ago & not bothering to give it a listen, because this is right down my alley. One of the better albums from the back half of the 2000s that we’ve gotten so far, and a very easy 5 for me. Great stuff.
Ananda Shankar
3/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump down to a 3, though I really wish I didn’t have to. The album forced my hand, though.
I liked 6 of the 8 tracks here, honestly. “Dance Indra” is ultimately just fine; totally nice listen, but rather plain. I respect Ananda Shankar’s mission statement on the cover of this album, and for the most part, his goal to combine Western music, “modern” electronic devices, & Indian music through the sitar, which his dad arguably made palatable & famous to American audiences, is really successful here. The first 5 tracks of this album, including the covers of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” & “Light My Fire”, alongside the banger that is “Metamorphosis”, are a great listen, and “Raghupati” brings back the energy at the end. All in all, those 6 tracks would probably be at a 4.5 for me, one that I might be compelled to round up, since “Dance Indra” isn’t even bad to me.
It is all brought down to hell by Track 6, “Sagar (The Ocean)”, which isn’t even necessarily that bad of a track, but is so painfully, utterly boring that it screeches the momentum of the first 5 tracks to a grinding, 13-minute halt that feels like listening to a deflated balloon in slow motion. I truly love the way it starts, and the opening 2 minutes of it show incredible potential. I just didn’t get any sense of musical progression out of it, at least not for the first… god, 7:40-ish of that track? If you’ve gone 7:40 without any audible progression to the ear, then you haven’t made wallpaper music, you’ve made blackout music. The lights have gone out, the crowd is confused, and you can’t see the sheet music in front of you, so you just stick to the most basic tones & riffs imaginable until the lights start to come back on. The lights do go back on in that track, but they come in so late (like, the 10:20 mark of a 13-minute track??), that the vibe is already dead at this performance. I don’t think it’s an understatement to say that this is the single-most album-stopping track there has been on a single one of the 544 albums we’ve gotten to so far, at least to my ears.
Am I overreacting because I got bored? Yeah, maybe. Is it possible that I just didn’t enter an intended zen state & the track just felt like it droned on because of it? Yeah, that’s definitely possible, but after the energy of the first 5 tracks, my brain wasn’t prepared to go into that vibe. Was there more to the track that my ears simply didn’t pick up on? Possibly, but it did feel like algorithmically generated sitar tones over a droning synth loop for 7 minutes, so if there was more in that first portion, I wasn’t very compelled to listen for it. Hell, if it only knocked down the album by a point to my ears, was it really THAT bad? I guess not, but it was just that fucking stale to me that I don’t think I can give this album a bump up to a 4. So, despite my rather regretful 3, I do highly recommend this album. Just skip “Sagar (The Ocean)” and you’ll get a really competent 27 minutes of great sitar work mixed with Western instrumentation that probably earns at least a 4, if not a 5, especially if it just clicks that nicely for you. It did for me, but… damn, that track is a momentum killer.
Kraftwerk
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
A rather long 361 days since the last time we got a Kraftwerk album, but that’s a break that feels well-needed. It’s also the last Kraftwerk album on the list for us, so it feels good to end on something that finally feels a bit closer to the Daft Punk-y style of electronica my brain expected when we first got “Trans-Europe Express” as our 12th album. I still need to give that a re-listen, because I was probably too harsh on it.
Gone is the imagery of winding landscapes & European transportation, swapped in for the science fiction worlds that most electronica of this era was usually pointing at. It’s rewarded pretty immediately; the first 4 tracks of this album kick ass, acting as some of the more danceable stuff Kraftwerk had put out to this point, with synth-driven grooves that do a good job of foreshadowing what video game soundtracks would eventually be in the not-too-distant future. A lot of the first 4 tracks immediately bring to mind weaker soundchips, ala a Commodore 64 or a ZX Spectrum, but tracks 3 & 4 in particular just sound exactly like SEGA Genesis tracks to me. “Metropolis”, in particular, is fantastic – the highlight of the whole album for me.
It does start to fall down a little bit over halfway through “Neon Lights” for me, as I think the sense of repetition in the lead synth melody just got a little strong to my ears & it made the track feel a bit stale, starting around the 5:30 mark. It’s still a good 9 minutes though. The same sort of applies to “The Man-Machine”, though I can’t tell if that’s just residue from the back half of “Neon Lights” wearing me down. As a closer, it never really hooked me in, and it doesn’t feel like a super satisfying ending to the rather rich world that gets established on the first 4 tracks.
All of that said, this is a pretty damn good Kraftwerk album, and you can feel the direct lines from this sort of electronica to the French house madness of Daft Punk starting to take form here, especially with the vocoded voices present throughout the album. I don’t think it’s as consistently satisfying to me as “Autobahn” was, but in terms of getting what I finally was expecting / wanting from Kraftwerk, this is thankfully scratching an itch in history that my brain is grateful for. It’s more compelling on a first pass than “Trans-Europe Express” was to my ears, at least. The last 7 or so minutes of the album falling short for me is a little lame, but it’s not that big of a deal to bump this down to a 4. It’s a breezy 28 minutes, and if you’re not as bothered by the sense of repetition, it’ll be a breezy 36 minutes. All in all, it’s a 4.5 that I feel good about bumping up to a 5.
Wilco
5/5
I’m at a 10.
I knew this one had acclaim going in, and I’m very glad that it lived up to it. It’s much easier to feel this album in the moment, while your ears are just encapsulated by it & while the brain is conjuring up the imagery to match. In this case, it’s one of those albums where I got so deeply encapsulated that I’m having trouble finding the words to write down. There’s broad strokes flying around my head; “stellar lyrics”, “his vocals pull incredible emotion out of them”, “instrumentation & sound design that always fits the mood”, “perfectly captures a feeling my brain hasn’t gone to since Radiohead’s Kid A”, “did these guys steal the Beatles’ talents on ‘I’m The Man Who Loves You’ like they were the Monstars”, and so on. I guess I’ll touch on those a bit.
Vocally, it did feel dry at first, but the intentions revealed by the end of “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” made the monotony of that track suddenly feel brilliant, and from that point onward, I was all in on Jeff Tweedy’s style. It’s subdued yet authoritative, for the most part, but when he needs to break out for the sake of the track, he meets the moment really nicely. I think the instrumentation & sound design do deserve as much credit as they’ll get here – I absolutely love the way each track sounds, & I can’t say I ever had a dull moment with the instrumentation, save for the last minute or so of “Reservations”. The moments where everything feels like it’s falling apart on a few tracks do a great job of mirroring the mental state of each track’s protagonist (is it the same guy throughout?), but even in this album’s happier & brighter moments, the instrumentation never really misses a beat. I’m fully convinced they stole a track from the cutting room floor of Sgt. Pepper’s for “I’m The Man Who Loves You”.
As far as the Kid A comparison goes (which, by the way, also a 10 in retrospect), perhaps it’s a bit of a stretch, but this does feel a lot like a Radiohead album to me, at least in the way it’s structured & performed. I’m obviously not the first person to point this out & I won’t be the last. It did capture some type of vibe though, one that became far more apparent to me by “Radio Cure”. It’s like capturing a panic attack in slow motion, with all of the insecurities & self-doubt brought to the forefront. Sometimes, people say their brain is thinking at 100 miles an hour, so what if you just caught that on a camera & tried to actually view it? Kid A does a similar thing, but it takes the approach of sonic therapy in an effort to heal, whereas this one feels like introspection, swaddled in clothing that feels like toxic disdain for yourself, never quite resolving that inner turmoil.
The lyrics do deserve a bit of love for enhancing that vibe; for tracks like these, I’m very much the type of person who follows along, reads them in the moment, and just treats it like a sort of live karaoke, to try and get a sense of how my brain would feel saying them. It’s a hit & miss approach, but in this case, it just worked perfectly. This is an album that I might define as poetry, but not in the curmudgeonly Bob Dylan sense where it’s far too wordy. It’s poetry in the style of a Maya Angelou, where the rhymes & verbiage are simple, but the imagery they evoke says far beyond the words themselves. Much in the same way that a poet can enter a zen state while reading their words aloud, I think I entered a zen state while reading along. I wish I could bottle up that sort of zen state, when it just feels like you’re in sync with the music, so I could more properly describe it, but I haven’t been able to do it for these moments on the last 545 albums, and I don’t think I’ll have an epiphany for the 546th.
All in all, I just really, really enjoyed this. I haven’t been avoiding it for years, I’ve just never had a drive to listen to it until now, and I’m obviously a moron for not biting the bullet earlier. It’s one of those albums where I’m just glad I started doing this “project” to begin with. Fantastic stuff here, and a seminal album of 2001. Probably the whole decade, really. It’s a 10.
Justin Timberlake
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
Lots of bias from me on this one, unabashedly so, and yet I don’t care one bit. I have a soft spot for a lot of this album, and while I don’t think it’s as good as FutureSex/LoveSounds (rather criminally not on the list), I still like it regardless. There’s a couple of misses for me, namely “(And She Said) Take Me Now” & “Right For Me”, but beyond those, the other 11 tracks here are just guilty pleasures of mine, and I won’t take any slander.
Obviously, it’s nowhere near perfect, and in terms of albums with this general style… yeah, I’ve heard better from the list. This is tremendously dated to 2002, and Justin Timberlake’s name recognition & star power coming off of both the breakup of N*SYNC & his breakup with Britney Spears is partially why this album was as big as it was. It’s largely known as the one with “Cry Me A River” & “Rock Your Body”, and I’d be a fool to not acknowledge they’re the two biggest tracks for a reason. “Rock Your Body” in particular might have the best 35 seconds of Justin Timberlake’s entire career; the buildup to the bridge of that track, and the bridge itself, will forever live in my brain. I will genuinely rewind that part so, so many times because it’s just perfect to my ears.
As far as the rest of the tracks I like go, “Senorita” is a banger, and “Like I Love You” just scratches my brain really nicely with the opening guitar & Justin’s vocals gliding throughout. “(Oh No) What You Got” is good; a little long though, and it does stagnate about halfway in. “Take It From Here” is largely similar, but Justin’s vocals do a much better job of filling out the last half of that track. “Nothin’ Else” is deeply underrated to my ears; one of my favorites on the entire album, giving huge Stevie Wonder vibes. “Last Night” is just catchy to my ears, with a kind of Persona-esque vibe that’s right down my alley. “Still On My Brain” is cheesy as hell, but it reminds me a lot of the Mariah Carey-esque power ballads of the mid-90s (down to the stock explosion in the bridge), so I’m just a sucker for it. “Let’s Take a Ride” is legitimately a banger and I won’t hear otherwise; something about the vocal structure of that track just has a really nice groove to me. “Never Again” is a Brian McKnight track (quite literally), and Justin’s vocals ride the piano in a way that pulls out the same emotion as “Back at One” does. If you know, you know.
All the credit in the world to Pharrell Williams & Hugo, as this album would be nowhere close to what it is without their production work taking center stage for a lot of the album. Yes, Timbaland is here on a few tracks, and his stuff is fine, but it sounds more like he’s trying to copy Pharrell’s homework instead of bringing his own philosophy, and it makes his tracks feel less compelling. That’s no fault on Timbaland though; he just wasn’t the primary producer here. He redeemed himself big time for FutureSex/LoveSounds.
All in all, I understand why this has a 2.68 on the site; it’s not Justin’s best work, it’s dated by 23 years, it could’ve been trimmed down a bit from the 63 minute runtime, it’s cheesy as hell, and a lot of the emotional pull here entirely depends on a relationship between two pop stars that you may or may not give a shit about. However, for my Michael Jackson-influenced pop brain, this is a guilty pleasure album of mine. Obviously, the flaws are a bit more apparent on a re-listen years later with a more critical ear, but when I was in the groove with the tracks that I already like, I was just having a good time, and you can’t take that away from me. It’s a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5, and it was probably always going to be that for me. If someone else wants to give this a 3, I wouldn’t blame them one bit. I think it might be a little bit of a stretch to go for a 2, though, and a 1 just tells me you were never gonna like the album to begin with.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
5/5
I’m at a 5.
This is the second time we’ve gotten Nick Cave, and while I liked “Henry’s Dream”, my big thing with that album was just a big disconnect between the bombast of the instrumentation & the rather plain storytelling that accompanied some of the tracks. This album remedies that in the best way possible, giving the same sort of storytelling tone as “John Finn’s Wife” did, but expanded out for most of the runtime here. That creates a much more satisfying top to bottom album, powered not only by the strength of its lyricism, but pulling out much more measured & intentional vocal performances that fit each track. Special shoutouts to both PJ Harvey & Kylie Minogue, who absolutely kill it on their features.
Obviously, all of these tracks (save for the last one, kind of) are based on titular “murder ballads”. If you hate death (or every track having a similar subject matter), you’re not gonna like this album, and if you like death, you might really like this one (especially on “O’Malley’s Bar”). For my money’s worth, I think these are pretty well written & they’re certainly well performed. Yes, some of them are a little cheesy, and a few of them are a little awkward (namely “Lovely Creature” & “The Kindness of Strangers”), but I never once found myself bored throughout the 59 minute runtime of this album, which is a pretty good sign.
Part of that is from how many tracks still manage to infuse a lot of humor, despite the morbid tones present throughout this thing. “The Curse of Millhaven” & “O’Malley’s Bar” fit the bill for me here, with the former acting as a sort of 7-minute Irish drinking song about the biggest menace in the most cursed town in the world, and the latter acting as Nick Cave doing his best impression of a deranged Batman villain, killing without a care in the world & monologuing while doing it, in one of the most entertaining 14-minute tracks I’ve ever heard. I’d also be remiss to not acknowledge Nick Cave dropping so many “motherfuckers” in the span of 5 minutes on “Stagger Lee” that you could say he’s doing a Limp Bizkit impression a few years early.
All in all, I just think it’s a damn good album; lots of fun variety throughout, and captivating enough storytelling (despite some repetitive themes) that it made a whole hour fly by pretty quickly. It’s not gonna be for everyone, but if your ear is more attuned to the cinematic tones this album reaches for, it should click well enough to at least give this a 4. For my ears, it’s a pretty easy 5.
Aerosmith
5/5
Pretty damn easy 5.
Juvenile as hell & a bit suspect lyrically for some dudes in their 40s, over-produced to high heaven & dated like a motherfucker to 1989, with Steven Tyler belting like there’s no tomorrow & the band playing with an energy that’s beyond reminiscent of Bon Jovi’s “Slippery When Wet”. It is yet another encapsulation of 1980s hard rock, and it’s just a style that I am an unabashed complete sucker for. Don’t get me wrong; I see the haters, I understand the haters, and I honestly kind of get where it’s coming from. With that said, I could give less of a shit about any of their entirely valid complaints. I am a simple man with a simple rule for 80s hard rock, which is “just rock the fuck out and let me enjoy it”.
They rocked the fuck out, and I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it a LOT, really. Give me some power guitar, some loud drums, & Steven Tyler belting to some totally fine lyrics on a decent variety of styles, no matter how vaguely one-note it ends up feeling, and you’ve got a successful formula for an album. This is, ironically, my first full Aerosmith album. The extent of my Aerosmith knowledge is probably like most people’s: “Sweet Emotion”, “Dream On”, “Walk This Way”, & the eternally cheesy classic “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing”. None of those are on this album, so I truly had no point of reference, but I’m very glad I didn’t come into this with an expectation. 3 of those 4 tracks are the slower, more ballad-y ones, and in the case of “Walk This Way”, it’s much closer to the Thin Lizzy school of 70s rock. They’re all very different from what this album goes for, which is just pure 80s hard rock, flaws & all.
I hit a complete zen state with this one, so as far as the individual tracks go, I don’t really have much to say. The bigger ones on this album (mainly the singles & especially “Janie’s Got a Gun”) lived up to their acclaim, but this thing is just peppered with high-energy stuff throughout, a lot of which is well written when it’s not horny as hell. Even when it is horny as hell, it’s so over-the-top cheesy that I can’t in all seriousness really think that a 41-year-old Steven Tyler actually wants “young lust”, or that he’s actually “masturbating with a noose” on Voodoo Medicine Man. I really wish I could touch more on a lot of these tracks, but I was extremely locked in on the vocal progressions (killer when he hits the one syllable at a time thing), the drum fills & guitar solos. Obviously, my brain caught the lyrics, but they’re secondary here to the energy everyone brings.
For my first full Aerosmith album, I think this was pretty damn good. Obviously, I’m biased, but again, it’s a style that works for me. I know “Toys in the Attic” is the one with the classics, and I’ll be ready whenever we get that one, but I’m glad to get something from their comeback phase in here as a primer. Pretty easy 5 for me.
Frank Ocean
5/5
It’s a 10.
When we got Adele’s “21” over a year ago, I said that it might’ve been the album that defined the sounds of the 2010s. That’s partially true, but “Thinkin Bout You”, by itself, rewired the entire landscape. It’s the sound of hip-hop & R&B in the 2010s coming into light, in real time. Sure, Carly Rae Jepsen and Adele and Justin Bieber & whoever else set the tone for pop music of the decade pretty quickly, but this is the blueprint, right here. This became the mold to follow. Everyone hopped into it, old & new alike. It’s the catalyst for the whole decade, and its effects are still felt well into 2025, with a lot of moodier modern pop standards adopting Frank Ocean’s more intimate & vulnerable tone that he takes on the latter stage of this album & fully explores on “Blond”. It’s a consequence of this album taking off into the stratosphere, and for better or worse, I think it really has inspired a generation.
Someone else will be able to write the words that I can’t, but this is a truly formative album for me. I don’t remember when it fully hit my radar, but I want to say it was around 2016 or 2017. With each consecutive listen that I gave this thing years ago, I just kept uncovering more & more. Everything from the Stevie Wonder-esque “Sweet Life”, to the slow smooth groove on “Super Rich Kids” (very grateful for the “Real Love” interpolation, by the way), to my first instruction to longer tracks on “Pyramids”, to the undeniable catchiness of “Lost” (took me YEARS & a Breaking Bad watch to get the proper meaning), & the perfect 1-2-3 punch of “Bad Religion”, “Pink Matter” (my introduction to Andre 3000 & subsequently OutKast), and “Forrest Gump” as effectively the final tracks of the album… god, it’s just so so good.
I burnt out on this album for a while, so this is the first full listen I’ve given to it in years. Coming back to it with a lot of the wisdom I didn’t have opens the album up even more, and even on this listen, I found myself catching little subtleties that my brain just glossed over. The writing is a bit dated to 2012, but even then, I can’t really find any faults in it. It’s much more aligned to societal complaints & gripes as opposed to Frank Ocean’s more soul-baring stuff, but that’s partially why I prefer this to “Blond”. It's also because this just aligns a little more with my pop-influenced brain. They’re both great, great albums though.
I know, I know – this album’s success & all the artists it inspired has opened up a Pandora’s Box of sorts, and if you want to blame Frank Ocean for a sea of mediocrity that may have emerged from the people who were inspired by this album (but without the talent to match it), then go ahead. Does he deserve it, though? Absolutely not. It is not Frank Ocean’s fault that the people inspired by him, for the most part, couldn’t quite capture the same magic. It’s why people still want him back; hell, it’s why I still want him back. I know the circumstances surrounding another Frank Ocean album make it kind of unlikely, but if it ever does happen… everyone’s ready & waiting, and I do mean everyone. As far as “channel ORANGE” goes though, it’s very obviously a 10 to my ears. It’s a formative album to my musical tastes & sensibilities, and probably one of the most impactful records I can think of in my lifetime.
JAY Z
5/5
I’m at a 5.
It’s our first Jay-Z album on the list, but also our last. Outside of maybe The Black Album or Reasonable Doubt, you probably couldn’t pick a better one than this. I haven’t heard this album in full in a while, and unlike a lot of the other albums that I have some level of familiarity with on the list, I basically forgot everything here, save for the hooks & choruses on the really famous stuff. Thankfully, I was very quickly reminded why I had every track from this album in my big playlist to begin with; this album just fucking rules, man.
Unfortunate release dates aside, this thing is the perfect blend of the Biggie/2pac era of production & the chipmunk soul that would come to define Roc-a-Fella records throughout the mid 2000s, including some guy called “Kanye West” who happens to have produced a few tracks here. Modern insanity aside from the man (total fucking dickhead), I’ve always said I like the version of the guy from 2004, and an even younger, hungrier one is present here, and he does have some of the best beats on the entire album. “Heart of the City (Ain't No Love)” is the shining example to me; I fucking love that sample flip. That said, Just Blaze is the star of the show beat-wise here, and Jay fucking flows on all of these tracks regardless of who made them.
It’s extremely easy to just sit back & zone out whenever Jay-Z is rapping, because the tone of his voice & all of the minor inflections that he does to give extra emphasis on each line just add a lot to each track. I know, it’s just the way his voice is, but that means the man was literally born to rap. If you get that type of voice, you gotta do it. Zoning out on these tracks though means you’re missing out on a world of wordplay, interpolations, flips & pop culture references – Jay-Z’s style here is, unironically, The Blueprint for the more soulful direction rap would take in the mid-2000s, while still retaining & blending in the swagger & braggadocious lifestyles of the 90s. There’s not THAT many specific bars or witty one-liners, ala modern day Instagram captions or a banger Kendrick lyric, but Jay’s style lends itself to smarter lines, layering them onto each other, in an effort to paint a picture. It’s a style I like, and it’s a style that Jay himself would refine later down the line, to keep up with the contemporaries who bit & expanded upon his style.
I’ve genuinely got no complaints – great production, great flows, great lyrics, and if nothing else, this album delivered us both Eminem’s first verse on “Renegade” & kickstarted the beef with Nas that would eventually lead to “Ether”. Jury’s out on if giving us Kanye West was a good thing in the super long run, but I’ll be damned if it didn’t pay off for about 10 years. Sure, it’s a little long at an hour, but when it’s that entertaining, is the runtime really that big of a deal? I really enjoyed it, and I’m very glad it’s here to give me an excuse to give it a re-listen. A pretty easy 5.
Metallica
5/5
I’m at a 5.
The elephant in the room is of course the lack of a very audible bassline, but ignoring that (seemingly as the mixing process did), I’m just fucking annoyed at myself for not digging deeper into heavy metal & hard rock years ago. Metallica’s self-titled album proved it to me, every band & album within the genre we’ve gotten before & since has proven it to me (save for “Apocalypse Dudes”, which again, deserves a re-listen on my part), and this album has once again, really reaffirmed it.
I’ve really got nothing major to complain about – I was just jamming out for 65 minutes, and I love the more political leaning bend this album takes. Everyone in the band deserves their credit, even Jason Newsted, despite his quite literally inaudible contributions to this album. Quite frankly, it’s a miracle this album is as good as it is despite a truly baffling mixing job at times. It’s not the same “commercially appealing” vibe as the self-titled is, but it’s a vibe I fuck with regardless. This is Metallica doing more of a prog rock approach on a number of tracks, letting the instrumentation set the tone even more than the lyrics & vocals already do, and showcasing it with some incredible fucking solos across the board, from a guitar & percussive standpoint.
It’s just a kick-ass album, man. I fucking loved it; someone else can write the 700-word track by track breakdown & history lesson about this one, because it does deserve that type of breakdown. I’m just gonna listen to it again and rock the fuck out, because I think the music speaks for itself. A very easy 5 for me. If it had a bassline, I might be entering 10 territory, but c’est la vie.
2Pac
5/5
I’m at an easy 5.
Not too much to say from me, other than a bit of anger that I chose to listen to “All Eyez On Me” when I was younger because it was the one that had “California Love” on it. I should’ve listened to this one, after giving it a full listen for the first time, it may very well be 2pac’s magnum opus, as some people say. Not a single miss here, with the only real minor complaint I have being the runtime. 65 minutes is a little long here, and that’s enough to make even 2pac’s flows & structures start to feel a little stale, in part because it does start to circle the bases just a little bit on subject matter after “Dear Mama”. Trust me, I see the irony of saying that it gets stale when “All Eyez On Me” is literally twice as long, but I haven’t heard that album in full in years, and I'd be probably REALLY worn out by it nowadays.
I’m too pressed for time to go super deep into this album, so I do have to keep this shorter, but I have two mandatory bits of praise. 2pac’s rap flow has a melodic tone to it that very few people of this era could match – it’s all in the timing & inflection that he raps with, as even his voice reaches kind of a crescendo at the climax on a lot of verses, structuring them in a way that feels like an R&B track, leading into the chorus in a way that feels super satisfying. It helps that, much like Jay-Z, his voice just feels made for rap, and his lyricism throughout this album only enhances it. There are bars upon bars upon bars on this thing, and I can fully understand why Kendrick would quite literally still go to war for the guy, like he did against Drake.
West Coast production in the ‘90s is a fucking dream, man. This might have some of the tightest beats of the whole decade. At the very least, it feels like a rather early pinnacle to the Chronic / Doggystyle / G-Funk era, before production advanced further & further going into the latter half of the 1990s. 2pac flows on these, no matter what tempo, but the variety of styles in the production work is what gives the album the variety it needs. The only reason that the 65 minute runtime isn’t a bigger thing for me is because, despite the subject matter starting to loop on itself, each beat feels fresh, and gives the tracks their own shelf life without it really affecting the enjoyment of the album. It really is a ridiculous stretch through the first 8 tracks though (9 if you count the intro). I really wish Kendrick would hop on something like “Young N****z”.
As a whole though, just a banger of an album. “Dear Mama” is very obviously THE highlight, but each track brings something to the table. 2pac may have never been more prescient in his life than the constant presence of paranoia & self-fulfilling prophecies that’s in the lyrics throughout this album. He did, however, channel that paranoia into more of a celebration of existence, tinged with the newfound knowledge after the attempt on his life that it’s all indeed that fragile, while pleading with the streets to stay smart. It gives the album a more intimate sense of depth than “All Eyez On Me”, which was perhaps a bit too sharpened by the desire for "revenge via living" borne out of his own prison experience, and a little too heavy on the party / gangsta side of things.
I’m still just mad at myself for not spinning this one years ago, and I’m mad at myself for really only knowing 2pac by “All Eyez On Me” (still a great but very long album!) and some of his bigger singles. It’s as good as advertised, and if only one 2pac album could make the list, I’m glad it was this one. A very easy 5 for me, held back from being a 10 only by everything after "Dear Mama" not hitting quite as hard.
I might need to go spin "The 7 Day Theory" now.
Baaba Maal
4/5
I’m at a 4.
Just a better version of Lam Toro, really. My big issues with that album were that it was too long, and that the sense of progression got completely lost by track 7 and beyond, with each track hitting a stale point way too fast, making the whole thing feel like an exercise in enduring repetition. Good soundscapes, but not very compelling listens.
This album remedies that to a nicer degree; even though each track here is about 6:02 long on average (if you’re only doing the original 8 tracks like I did), they don’t hit that stale point early enough for it to be a bigger deal. Yes, there’s still repetition abound in this thing, and mileage may ultimately vary on how much you can endure the first minute or two of each track, which sets up the foundation that gets layered upon every time, but for my tastes, it’s a less bothersome repetition than what was present on Lam Toro. It also helps that a lot more of these tracks have a better overall structure, cutting out some of (but not all) of the “fat” that got left in. There’s not as many moments of tracks looping at a specific point for 2-3 minutes at a time, and the vocals have a much more constant presence, giving each track a good sense of progression. Overall, I enjoyed this one a lot more, just because it’s paced much better.
That said, I’m still only at a 4 because, for the most part, this album never quite evoked a bigger sense of imagery for me. On other primarily instrumental albums, I can feel the vibe a soundscape is going for, and get sort of whisked away by my brain, connecting to the music in a deeper fashion. This album only got there maybe two or three times, which isn’t bad for 8 tracks, but the other 5 or 6 times literally evoked nothing from me. They’re good listens, but they are basically just wallpaper to the brain. If this album did a little more with its sound design, perhaps I could’ve entered that state more, but the music speaks for itself well enough. It just didn’t quite speak to *me* like that. It’s a good one though, and it clicked nicely for me. Still just a 4, ending a streak of 5s for me, but a solid 4 regardless. I wouldn’t blame anyone if they went for a 3 or lower, though.
Stephen Stills
4/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll just barely bump down to a 4.
It’s a good album, don’t get me wrong, and honestly, it’ll probably click like a 5 someday. On a first pass, though? It’s just not quite there. Stephen Stills’ songwriting, while good, isn’t as strong as it could be, and not as strong as it would later be on “Manassas”, nor as strong as it was on the CSN(Y) albums. It’s a little broad here, with too much room for interpretation on a number of tracks, making the emotional pull a bit too ambiguous. It certainly doesn’t help that a lot of the context for that emotional pull feels sort of lost to the 55 years since this album dropped. Without that emotional pull, there’s just less “substance” to the album for me.
That leaves two other qualities to pick up some weight, being his vocals & the instrumentation. They’re both pretty good here, but once again, it just didn’t quite get there for me. Stephen’s vocals are good, but while I know he’s not necessarily a belter, there’s never really anything super standout. Namely, I never felt like he was using his voice to get the most emotional pull out of the tracks, and more so just singing the way one would “logically” sing them. For an analogy, it’s like a gifted technical singer hitting all the right notes on an Aretha Franklin track, but without that deeper, truly personal touch.
For the instrumentation itself, I’d argue much of the same thing – at a technical level, it’s wonderfully done, with a huge variety of instrumentation & some genuine star-studded appeal here. Jimi Hendrix rips a fucking stellar guitar solo on “Old Times Good Times”, as does Eric Clapton on “Go Back Home”. Hell, he got Ringo Starr on drums on a pair of tracks here, and he does a pretty good job. I think my thing with the instrumentation is that it’s kinda compensating for the “lesser” lyricism & vocal work. The problem is, at least to my brain, I think it ended up overcompensating. A little too much flashiness feels present here, and it creates a disconnect for me. I liked a lot of these tracks, but I felt like I was just enjoying them because they sounded good & did everything technically right, as opposed to genuinely feeling engaged with the tracks themselves, and entering that sort of “zen state” like I have with CSNY albums & with Stephen Stills himself on “Manassas”.
That’s not to say there weren’t tracks I engaged with, because there definitely were. Hell, I really did enjoy a lot of the album, regardless of feeling that deeper sense of connection or not, because at the most technical level, it’s still a very enjoyable listen. It’s just some intangible things about my own personal tastes that built up over the course of the runtime stopping me from giving it a full 5 on a first pass, but I’d still recommend it regardless. If you like CSNY-adjacent stuff, it’s certainly going to scratch an itch. It’s a good 38 minutes, but for whatever reason, I never felt like it took the next step that would make me go “yep, this is a 5”. It probably will someday, though, hence a 4.5 barely bumped down to a 4.
Madonna
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
One of two present on the list, this is my first full Madonna album, and really, my first proper dive into hearing anything she made after the 1980s (I guess “Vogue” came out in 1990, but shh). Granted, I’ve never been that big into Madonna, but I know her place in music history, and just how damn brightly her star was shining at her peak. For my first Madonna album, I have to imagine this is a bit of a style shift, but it’s a style shift that certainly works for 1998. It’s a bit dated to the era, sure, but it’s dated to the era in the best way. Sort of like how “Jagged Little Pill” is a quintessential example of 1995 production, this feels like the electronica trends of the late 90s finally being thrown into a high-profile situation and nailing it across the board. A lot of these tracks must’ve felt even cooler to listen to in 1998, and it’s no surprise to my ears why this had the acclaim it did.
Once again, I feel justified in saying that “Walking Wounded” by Everything but The Girl just didn’t go far enough in how it integrated electronica into pop, with Madonna’s effort here lapping that album in spades. Her vocals glide on these tracks, and the lyricism is often pretty damn good to match. Excellent production work across the board here, especially on William Orbit’s stuff (Ray of Light is indeed as good as advertised, thanks Weird Al). My only real knock production-wise is the length of the album. A number of these tracks could’ve been trimmed down to avoid some of the repetition, no matter how good the vibes were and how much space a CD had.
So, why the 4.5 then, and not a flat 5? A few tracks just bounced off of me, that’s all. Part of it is fatigue from the length of the album, part of it is that sense of repetition creeping too long, and part of it is just “the beat was too plain”. Realistically, I don’t have any major problems with the album. It’s a really good listen, no matter how “dated” it might feel. If you’re not the type of person to already feel predisposed to electronica like this (I’m avoiding video game music comparisons like the plague on this one), then it may very well just bounce entirely off of you, and I suppose that explains the average on this being less than a 3 on the site. A bit undeserved to my ears, though I guess a 38-year-old who wasn’t as present in the 1990s suddenly coming back into full swing by riding the electronica wave might be a little bit “how do you do, fellow kids” to some.
Ultimately, I just really enjoyed this – smart songwriting with some lovely tributes to her family throughout, great production work, gliding vocals, and if nothing else, 66 minutes of chill enough beats to do whatever the hell you want to, whether that’s studying, driving around, or belting out the chorus to “Ray of Light” on a whim. It didn’t all click, and the album does feel a little long, but it clicked enough where I feel just fine bumping this up from a 4.5 to a 5. Good stuff, Madonna.
Chicago
5/5
I’m at a 10.
I’m just exhausted. What can you really say after listening to something like that? You want me to wax poetic about how blessed these guys were to have extremely proficient people at every position of the band in terms of their instruments & their voices before deaths shook their vision? You want me to praise every aspect of the production up & down, both in the mixing, structure, pacing & progression of the whole thing? You want me to say that “Free Form Guitar” is some “Tago Mago” by Can-esque insanity that’s super cool even though it barely fits on the album?
Trust me, I want to. I want to write paragraphs up and down about this thing, but I’m just exhausted. I have not heard a band that in-sync on a debut project ever. I have not moved my head around that much to some ridiculous percussion work since… I dunno, maybe we got “Nevermind” by Nirvana? I have not lamented someone’s own stupidity this much in terms of Terry Kath killing himself like a complete moron, and I’ve literally never heard of or *heard* the guy until listening to this album. Jimi Hendrix apparently once said that Kath was even better than he was, and I’m almost inclined to believe it.
I understand that the overly bombastic, flashy style of this album is not everyone’s cup of tea. Hell, it’s only got a 3.18 on the site for that reason. I, however, could not give less of a shit. This is the sort of album that is perfectly down my alley, and I loved every single one of the 76 minutes here. That does include “Free Form Guitar”, for the record. I’m literally just too spent from the revelation that this has been here the entire fucking time, and yet I only knew these guys from their 80s Peter Cetera-led soft rock ballad era, which I already have a guilty pleasure soft spot for. I have literally never heard any other Chicago besides that era. The fact that THIS was here, the entire time, and I just never ever bothered to listen… god, it’s like a guy selling Bitcoin a decade ago for pennies, you know? I’m just stunned. I’m literally too stunned to write anything further. Someone else can put it all together; they’ll capture the words that are floating around my brain and express them, because right now, I truly can’t. It’s a 10. It might be higher. Regardless, it’s one of the very best albums I’ve gotten to discover from this whole thing.
Todd Rundgren
5/5
I’m at a 10. I’ve got the words this time, thankfully.
First and foremost: you *need* headphones for this. It won't hit the same way without them. This is full of little intricacies that might get drowned out otherwise.
Talk about a wild fucking departure from “Something/Anything?”, huh? I was expecting much more of the same, but looking at the Wikipedia article for this album before listening to it, it talks about a tonal shift towards more psychedelic-y strange/chaotic stuff brought on by drug use, or at least, a more chaotically structured album than the generally pop-driven tone of “Something/Anything?”. That’s a scary proposition, given that some artists handle drug use as a tool for creation better than others, and to my ears on that last album, I didn’t think he could expand too far out of the box that album provides. Cautious optimism was the vibe going into this.
Straight out of the fucking gate with this album, man. I don’t know how the hell you decide to start an album off with a 26-minute fever dream of a suite, but I’m glad Todd Rundgren’s drug use didn’t ruin his sense of musicality. This thing might’ve bounced off of people’s ears in 1973 (save for some of the critical praise this got), but for 2025, this feels right at home to my ears. It’s avant garde as hell, yes, but I’ll be damned if it’s not entertaining as shit. Prog rock sensibilities across the board here, combined with a Frank Zappa-esque sense of “throw shit at the wall and see what works”, and a proper ear for music that doesn’t disdain the Beatles or the Beach Boys or any of the popular bands of the era, but instead, takes the best parts of them and blends it with those other two parts to create the equivalent of the Abbey Road medley on drugs. I loved every single second of it, and I’m surprised it felt as coherent as it did.
For 1973, the amount of styles that medley touches, while masterfully transitioning between a lot of the tracks, is stunning to me. It is 12 tracks, it goes 26 minutes, and it’s just a crazy premonition to my brain of where the entire decade would eventually go, crumpled into a ball and without making a mockery of anything within it. I let the whole thing play out in one take, while taking little notes, so here’s some out of context gems: “this feels like 1970s Death Grips”, “what the dogs doing”, & “I guess that evokes a flamingo”. There’s a moment specifically on “Zen Archer” that evoked the sort of crazy transitions that Frank Ocean or Tyler, The Creator might pull off in an album, and that one in particular blew me away. All in all, the entire first half of the album is a ridiculous whirlwind, but one that I was willing to let sweep me away into whatever the hell Todd had next. It did kinda feel like listening to the Abbey Road medley for the first time again, and that’s a big, big plus in my book.
So… how about that second half? I suppose we couldn’t leave all of “Something/Anything?”’s sensibilities behind, and what emerges from that is 29 minutes of an extremely focused set of tracks that mostly feel like a prog rock / R&B album, but with a bit of everything sprinkled in, including some Elton John, The Who, & Marvin Gaye. All of the techniques from the first half are here, but distilled back into the very best aspects of “Something/Anything?”. Granted, a third of the 29 minutes is literally from a series of R&B covers from the doowop / Motown era, but they’re brilliantly adapted & performed, in a way that honestly kind of foreshadows the rise of the quiet storm style that would eventually come into vogue down the line. I’m mostly stunned by how much parts of the second half feel like 80s production, albeit with 70s instrumentation. Hell, the start of “Is It My Name?” directly feels like the start to “Enter Sandman”, so this thing is jumping all over the place.
I really want to specifically point at “Just One Victory”, because it does feel like the triumphant ending to the general theme of the second half, which is coming to terms with the idea of fame from music, despite the style of music you’re being praised for not exactly vibing with what you want to create. Apparently, that’s the realization Todd had after the critical praise he received on “Something/Anything?” & the subsequent drug use, and it’s what spurred him to get to this album. It is his own victory lap, sure, but the lyricism overall just speaks to a sort of cheesy hopeful vibe that just feels lost nowadays. It is the sort of bombastic album closer that I fuck with, and even the “repeating chorus while it all fades out” thing feels entirely earned here.
So, yeah, I’ve got no complaints. That’s a stellar album. It feels like an unrecognized masterpiece of sorts, and I really don’t use that word lightly. “A tour de force”, as the top review for this album says on the site. I loved everything here, and both halves stand on their own merits to create 55 nonstop minutes of brilliance. This coming from the same guy who already made a pretty damn good pop album in “Something/Anything?” is nuts to me. For all I know, this might be your favorite artist’s favorite artist’s favorite album, or however many degrees of “favorite artist’s” it takes to get there. The tree of influence this must have spawned, with iron sharpening iron all the way down, has to be immense. I simply refuse to believe otherwise. It is the type of album that makes people want to make music. It’s an easy 10, if not higher. Unbelievable, truly.
Ladysmith Black Mambazo
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Not too much to say, given that I mostly zoned out to this in the most positive way: that is 100% 42 minutes of South African acapella, and I enjoyed all 42 minutes. Easy as that, really. A lot of the harmonizations gave the album a more spiritual tone, obviously enhanced by some of the actual spirituals present here. The thing that struck me as the most interesting part of the album is how well my brain was able to use the gaps where percussion would obviously sit, taking those empty spots & just sort of using them as percussion in its own way. The group is very keenly aware of this too – there’s never ever a drum track, nor even a click track made with their mouths, but with the way they come into each rhythm, their voices go deep enough that the brain automatically fills it all in, whilst sounding totally natural.
If the sense of repetition here is not your thing, this album will bounce off of you. It’s not an album made for deeper critical analysis, it’s an album to just enjoy from an auditory standpoint. I certainly enjoyed it – there’s not a bad moment here, and when they find a hypnotic groove to settle into, it’s very easy to get caught in that groove with them. It’s not the most impressive album on the planet or anything, but it’s a super fun listen, and I enjoyed it enough that giving it a 5 feels fair to me.
4/5
I’m at a 4.
That sure is 1960s country music; as far as listening to it goes, no real complaints other than a lack of variety in the instrumentation, though the composition of each track more than makes up for it. Her voice is great, especially on her held notes, and she glides on the instrumentals really nicely. If we were going just on the vibes, I might be compelled to go up to a 5, though it would be a rather hard sell.
All of that said, I think it’s the subject matter (NOT the lyricism, because each track is written really well) of each track that’s holding this album down for me. I thought Loretta Lynn would be a little more concrete in her opinions about relationships (or at least, be able to keep more stable ones than she portrays throughout this album), but I guess she’s more inconsistent than that. I dunno, it’s a minor thing, but it’s just kind of bugging me. The title track is great – it’s authoritative, and it’s her putting her foot down about her man’s drinking. Fine enough to turn it around on “The Shoe Goes On the Other Foot Tonight”, but that doesn’t fully absolve you of being met with the same criticism. That’s addressed well enough on “Saint To A Sinner” though, and it’s got a good empathic tone to it. To my brain though, that gets washed away by the closing track, “I Got Caught” – how are you gonna try to justify being a cheater by going “oh, well, YOU do it too, I just got caught doing it”? It feels like gaslighting, and none of it lines up with some of the earlier stuff in the album.
Yes, this is not a concept album, and yes, none of these tracks are actually connected, but between a growing sense of hypocrisy in the subject matter for a number of these tracks, combined with the amount of “woe is me, my man is leaving me” stuff on the album, I just feel like the vision for this album got lost somewhere between creating all of these songs & then actually deciding what should go on the album in a coherent way. Individually, all 12 of these are good to great tracks (with “The Devil Gets His Due” as the other major highlight aside from the title track), but as a whole album, it just kind of grinds a little bit, even though it’s only 28 minutes long.
Ultimately, the similar instrumentation throughout, overlapping subject matter, hypocritical tone at times, and just a lack of cohesion is what’s keeping this at a 4 for me. I’m not that grumpy about all of those things though, and I am a sucker for old country music like this regardless, so maybe on another pass or two, it could go up to a 5 for me. It’s still a fine album, and Loretta Lynn’s vocals are the shining part of the entire thing. For now though, just a 4.
Depeche Mode
5/5
I’m at a 5.
My first proper Depeche Mode album – all the big singles I know of are on the follow-up to this, “Violator” (which is also thankfully on the list), so I went into this one totally blind. I’m pleased to report that Depeche Mode is indeed that fucking good – this didn’t necessarily blow me away, but it did affirm that I’m a moron for never digging deeper, as has been proven multiple times by the list at this point. This album does feel exactly like what I’ve always assumed Depeche Mode to be like; a little moody, heavy on the synths, rhythmically pleasing as hell, and vocally gliding on all of these electronica-influenced pop beats.
I’m actually surprisingly really impressed by the lyrics; maybe I’ve just never paid as much attention to the lines of “Policy of Truth” or “Enjoy the Silence”, but these tracks all felt really well-written, and despite the filter & the slightly monotone feel of the vocals, the inflections pull some really good emotions out. Of course, the emotions are brilliantly complimented by the instrumentals, which act as THE highlight of the album. The spatial awareness these guys have in terms of capitalizing on a moment in the soundscape feels really reminiscent of Kate Bush. When a beat drops like that, it turns the energy of the track up on a dime, and they use that trick to perfection. In many ways, these are crafted similarly to hip-hop beats, and the momentum of each track shifts naturally in the same way. That spatial awareness applies to the sound design as well; a track like “Behind the Wheel” doesn’t work as well without the spinning plate / hubcap intro, and “I Want You Now” probably isn’t as effectively desperate without the vocal sounds throughout. All in all, it’s just a really well-produced album.
I wish I could gush more, but that was just 44 minutes that flew by in a heartbeat. The transitions on this album keep the pace moving really steadily, and the energy from the instrumentals is pretty infectious once they get going. This feels like a good hybrid sound between Eurythmics, Talking Heads, and a little bit of that goth rock vibe that The Cure explored on “Pornography”, whilst staying true to the synthpop trends of the mid-80s. I enjoyed it a lot, and I’m glad this was on the list and not just “Violator.” I’ll be looking forward to that one, though. For now, this gets a very easy 5 from me.
The White Stripes
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
Weirdly, I don’t feel like I have that much to say about this album. I figured since it was their bigger, more famous, more acclaimed “all-timer for the whole decade” album that I’d have more, but… no, it really is just an album that speaks for itself musically. Obviously, “Seven Nation Army” casts a big looming shadow on the rest of the album, setting a weird mental expectation that each track should be trying to chase that high, but that’s not what this album is trying to do at all. This is just a stellar showcase that feels like a culmination / peak of the garage rock scene of the early 2000s meeting the expectation / acclaim of the Rolling Stones & more, and as an album experience, it’s a free-flowing set of tracks that works really nicely together. I do wish some tracks actually transitioned into others, to give a sense of connectivity that generally feels missing on the album, but overall, it’s an album you can glide on off of the vibes & energy alone.
If I have any complaints, it’s that the album is a little more one-note than I thought it might be, given that the starring instrument of the album is Jack White’s distorted guitar, which gets a lot of play over the 50 minute runtime here. It does make a few too many tracks feel similar to each other, even with the variety of rock styles this album explores, and that does affect the album experience just a bit. Jack White’s vocals remedy this a lot of the time, with his voice gliding to meet the style, but to my ears, it lacks the full range of emotional depth that was more apparent on his later solo work. It stops each track’s lyrics (all generally well-written) from really shining. These are the sorts of little nitpicks that are stopping me giving this a flat 5, but they are nitpicks -- I could very well have just missed stuff on a first pass that would shut me up on a re-listen.
That said, it’s not an album made for the lyricism & or the vocal work – they are instruments that are made to give texture to the instrumentation, and it just happens to be a strong bonus that they’re both pretty damn good. As a whole, I really enjoyed this; for my tastes, I’m not sure if it’s honestly as good as Jack White’s solo album that we got, but it does feel more fulfilling overall than “Get Behind Me Satan” did. I do, however, wish the range of instrumentation that was present on that album were on here as well. With no bad tracks, some very high highs & a super enjoyable energy, how can you really complain? It didn’t quite hit the extreme critical acclaim for my ears, but it’s a damn good album regardless, and a worthy bump up to a 5.
Ryan Adams
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Just a sad album, huh? I feel a bit emotionally spent after that. We’ve already gotten “Gold” from Ryan Adams in the past, and that album feels like an attempt to be a diet Bruce Springsteen by comparison. A nice 70 minutes to listen to, yes, but it doesn’t quite have the same emotional pull this album does. This is a wonderfully written album by comparison to “Gold”, with really only two tracks biting at me: “Amy”, which just feels too personal given that it’s the real name of his ex who inspired this album, and “Why Do They Leave?”, because it’s just too heavy on the “woe is me” side of things. A couple of nitpicks are on other tracks, but nothing that’s ever too bad. Overall, I genuinely thought this entire album did a great job of evoking the imagery it’s going for. It’s all enhanced further by the production, which usually knows when to let Ryan shine in his most intimate moments, and when to let the instrumentation guide the mood, especially so on the showstealer that is “In My Time of Need”. That's a beautiful track.
I will forever be a sucker for “old” country, and while this straddles the line just a little bit, for the most part, it feels like an updated version of that general sound & style, ala Emmylou Harris’s “Red Dirt Girl”. It’s no surprise then that she’s on this album as a backing vocalist, and one of the members of her band produced this entire thing. I adore the instrumentals on this album, though I do have one complaint: that damn harmonica pops up when it just doesn’t need to. I normally love a good harmonica segment, and it’s used well at times, but there are moments where just wallowing in the silence a little bit would be more emotionally effective, and really let the song soak in. Other than that harmonica, I cannot think of a single complaint. Praise all abound for the instrumentals.
Vocally, while Ryan Adams doesn’t do anything *too* differently from “Gold”, his slightly shaken sense of confidence, coming off of the break-up that inspired this album… you can feel it on the more personal tracks here. Outside of “Amy”, which felt a little uncomfortable, I love the intimacy & softer tone he approaches these tracks with. A lot of them feel mostly acapella, save for some slight guitar, so he’s baring his soul, in a sense. When it’s at its very best, it’s emotionally gripping in a way that feels far too captivating to ignore. When he needs to belt though, he belts pretty well – still a little bit of that “diet Springsteen” vibe, but he generally tends to evoke the country stars of the past, especially Johnny Cash on “Damn, Sam (I Love a Woman That Rains)”.
All in all, I’d say the music speaks for itself really well here, and I think feeling the emotions this drags out are more effective than reading about it. If you’re predisposed to country music, you’ll enjoy this a lot. If not, then… I dunno, at least give this a try. If you somehow haven’t heard it, go listen to it with headphones in, and let Ryan's vocals & this excellent production wash over you. It is a great country album, and to my ears, a much tighter & more fulfilling album than “Gold” was. For my tastes, a very easy 5.
P.S.: I’m now aware of the allegations made against Ryan Adams. It sucks, and if they’re true, he sucks even more. I’m partially more willing to separate art from artist here, just because I never had a deeper connection to the guy before listening to him via the list, so just know that an endorsement of a 5 for this album is anything but an endorsement of the man himself, no matter how good his damn writing seems to be here. It’s worth a listen, but it’s not worth giving him a dime.
Underworld
4/5
I’m at a 4 – closer to a 3.5 bumped up to a 4, but a 4 regardless.
I always think it’s a little hard to write about an electronica album, since it really does usually just boil down to enjoyment of the beats, and in this case, I generally enjoyed them. This sounds exactly like what 1996 techno / electronica should be, and I don’t think there’s ever a bad track here. There’s certainly ones that didn’t click for me, like “Confusion the Waitress”, “Air Towel” & “Blueski”, but they’re not bad, just actively a little more stagnant & boring than the rest of the album.
So, why only a 4 then? Well, it’s long as hell, for one. A lot of these could’ve been trimmed a bit – it’s not necessarily an issue in the moment while you’re just grooving & moving around, so much like a Nintendo game, the flaws aren’t really there until you hold it up to a microscope and take a deep, deep analysis. There’s sections of each track that just sit in a general soundscape just a little too long, and those slowly build up over the course of the album, even in a subconscious space. Like I said though, it’s not that noticeable.
The big thing, at least for my ears, is that this album just gives a little too much space to the vocals, as opposed to letting the instrumentation shine at its brightest. A lot of these tracks don’t have super compelling lyrics, so giving the vocals as much space as they do, where they sort of trim around the instrumentals & the entrancing effect of the beats, makes it feel like the album can’t decide quite what niche it wants to fill. Don’t get me wrong, the balance between the vocals / instrumentals is still pretty correctly skewed towards the instrumentals, but when it’s noticeable that the vocals have center stage, it’s really noticeable, and drags down the album for me, since they just don’t blend as well on a number of tracks.
When this album is rolling, though? This is damn good electronica. It’s much more into the trance / techno side of things, as opposed to the more dance-y / plunderphonics stuff we’ve generally been getting, but I’m not complaining about that one bit. Even for the first 32 minutes of this album, over the course of 2 rather long tracks, I thought that the layering and progression throughout both of them was incredibly satisfying. The plunk on a lot of the percussion / bass / synths here is super effective, especially with headphones in. When this album gets into a zen state, it’s very easy to feel, and those moments are where this whole thing shines. Big shoutout to “Rowla”, by the way.
I want to really harp on the last track, “Stagger”, because I have a very strange comparison I wrote down, and yet it’s one that I think works – “This feels like if R.E.M. made an album like Kid-A, but chose to base it off of Kraftwerk’s electronica style.” The vocals throughout this album, even when they’re not really blending into the soundscape, do feel just a little bit like Michael Stipe. “Stagger”, with the way the synth melodies go, really feels like a sort of modern take (for 1996) on Kraftwerk’s general 70s style. It’s a bit washed away by choosing to end the album on some remarkably annoying drums, but regardless, I think it’s a super cool closer, and I’d kind of love to hear an entire album in that style, albeit with more polish. Hopefully, something like that is on the list.
Overall, then, I did enjoy this. It’s certainly long at 73 minutes, but it’s never ever sonically boring & it’s always competently passable at its worst. For me, there’s moments that are more stale than others, but it all boils down to taste. I don’t quite hear some of the bigger acclaim this album seems to have gotten, but I can understand why it did, especially for 1996. I don’t think it’ll ever hit a 5 for me, but I like it enough where I think a 4 is pretty deserved.
The Sabres Of Paradise
2/5
I’m at a 2, possibly against my better judgement.
I’m normally very gracious to techno / electronica stuff on the list, usually because it tends to evoke video game music, and I like video game music a lot. This was not that. This was a cacophony of synths & drums, with a myriad of aurally annoying effects thrown onto them, without any true sense of proper musical composition whatsoever. The repetition is bothersome, the zen state is basically impossible to get into, and worst of all, this isn’t even something you can move to at the club – maybe for like, 1 minute per song, at most. It is, by far, the least satisfying electronica album the list has given us so far. I take almost no joy in this album, though I honestly did kind of like 5 of the tracks here.
The only reason it is getting a 2 is because it wasn’t so utterly incompetent as to deserve a 1, and there were a number of moments, however fleeting they were throughout the album, where my ears were grooving and my head was swaying. It’s also not as painfully boring as something like “Haute de gamme” was. It’s at least intriguing sometimes, even if that intrigue generally results in disdain and annoyance. This is not a horrible album, it’s just a bad one that could’ve been made much better by choosing more traditional techno instrumentation & shortening these tracks down by quite a bit. I kept taking notes throughout this thing as opposed to totally giving up, so that counts for something, right?
In short, I feel like if I took enough lessons, I could probably make tracks that feel more satisfying and competently put together than this in FL Studio, of which I have very, very limited experience. If I ever feel that way about an album on the list, then you have not done a good job. This is not an album I needed to hear before I die, it did not deserve a spot on the list at all, and it barely saves itself from falling all the way down to a 1. Someone else can give it a 1 if they want, and I won’t blame them at all. Just disappointing for me. Anything above a 3 for this may require psychiatric evaluation (or at least a question about genuinely paying some level of attention to the album as opposed to just hearing it).
John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Eric Clapton before Cream, John McVie before Fleetwood Mac, & then two people I’ve never heard of in Hughie Flint & John Mayall. RIP to John Mayall, by the way. Great drums & vocals though; they shine really well here. Take those 4, do a bunch of blues covers & a couple of originals, and you get a groovy fucking album that showcases their talent really nicely. Yes, I hesitate to give Eric Clapton credit, but his guitar playing more than earns the right to get the co-starring role on the album art. Apparently, it’s kind of revolutionary in terms of the production circumstances, so that’s a big plus.
No misses here, save for “Another Man” being kind of unpolished to my ears, but overall, I enjoyed all of this. All the covers seemingly do justice rather well – even the slightly baffling drum solo thrown into “What’d I Say” is fine. I do, however, wish it had a bit more of the original track incorporated into it. The original tracks are all good, *especially* “Key to Love”. If I have any complaints, it’s that I wish the mono mix gave just a little more room to some of the buried instrumentation, but that’s a really minor nitpick, partially brought on by the technology of the era. There’s moments where you can barely hear an organ or harmonica in the back, and other instruments that I wish had more clarity to them.
All in all, it’s some damn good blues, especially with the way the electric guitar is incorporated. This is the only album recorded by this version of the band’s lineup, and that’s a bit of a shame, but I think it ultimately ended up pretty well for most of these guys. Hell, if you follow the throughline of the Bluesbreakers as a whole, Fleetwood Mac emerges out of it pretty damn quickly. I can see exactly why this is on the list, and I can see why Rolling Stone had it in their top 500 for a while. Pretty fast 38 minutes, and a very enjoyable album. A recommended 5.
Björk
5/5
I think I’m at a 10.
Perhaps it’s the slight tear welling up in my eye after finishing out on “Unison” talking, but I adored that. Oddly, I have a comparison that might not fit at first glance, but I think it works here: “The Downward Spiral” by Nine Inch Nails. That album is about the carnal feelings of depression & the inner pain that slowly builds up to a breaking point of suicide. It uses sound design brilliantly to portray that pain, and it all comes to a head with screechingly violent guitar tones, an utterly shattered vocal performance, and a beautiful kind of honesty that succeeds at making you *feel* it, once the album is all said and done.
This album is about the carnal feelings of love & the inner happiness that slowly builds up to a blossoming point of marriage. It uses sound design brilliantly to portray that happiness, and it all comes to a head with beautifully gliding orchestration, an optimistically strong vocal performance, and a beautiful kind of honesty that succeeds at making you *feel* it, once the album is all said and done.
I’ve quite literally spelled it out, but to my ears, this album is to love exactly what “The Downward Spiral” is to that sense of pain. Bjork portrays it with some of the most sensational lyricism I can remember – obviously, a lot of it is about sex & lust, but the language she uses brings out something deeper. It’s not like she’s hiding what any of these songs are about, but she still manages to “disguise” it while still being absolutely implicit about it, and portraying a sort of primal beauty to it. It feels like poetry. I could also just be really easily impressed by flowery language being used in this sense, but regardless, I adored this album’s writing.
The lyricism wouldn’t mean a damn thing if Bjork couldn’t sing them well enough, and her vocals truly shine here – if you’ve heard the album, then you know. Whether she’s belting or going softer, her vocals match the mood the instrumentation brings every time. I especially love the moments that sound like errors, as clearly intentional as they are – things like the vocal hesitations on “It’s Not Up to You” & “Undo” are perfectly done, and give the album an air of authenticity.
For as much as those vocals shine though… it’s all in the instrumentation & sound design here. We are so far ahead of schedule for 2001 that it’s honestly ridiculous. Even now, for 2025, this album still feels like it’s doing stuff that nobody wants to touch in a modern musical landscape. The orchestration is beautiful throughout this whole thing. I wish I had deeper notes on it, but when you’re in the moment, the last thing you want to do is ruin the serenity of those moments washing over you. When this album isn’t giving off world peace-inducing orchestration, it’s going for a softer, more intimate form of electronica, marked by rather small but present beats. It’s extremely effective, and anchors every track in a way that melts downward, back into her vocals, and back into the lyricism, all working together in harmony. Overall, the production is remarkable here, full of nuances that I’m sure will reveal themselves further to me on any subsequent listens, and layered beyond belief for something that came out 24 years ago.
As a whole, I wish I had enough of the words to dive deeper into the whole thing, but much like “The Downward Spiral”, I’m blown away. It is as good as advertised, and for the last Bjork album we’ll be getting on the list, it’s a wonderful way to go out. Bjork has proven her versatility is a superpower, and the order in which we got her albums is probably perfect. Consider me a fan. As far as this goes, to borrow from what I wrote about “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”, it’s a seminal album for 2001, and probably the whole decade. It’s a 10.
Def Leppard
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
I’m a sucker for 80s glam metal / rock stuff, and this is no exception, but I think my general unfamiliarity with Def Leppard led to a bit of a curve here. I thought the album loaded itself really nicely through the pacing of the first 3 tracks, and then had a slow descent downward from Track 4 onward, with the overall energy of each track just doing less and less for me the more it went on. There’s no bad tracks here, but let’s just say I felt totally burnt out by “Action! Not Words” – a fun track to listen to, sure, but one that just totally bounced off of me for no reason other than “man, this just feels plain to me now”. Thankfully, “Billy’s Got a Gun” is a captivating enough closer that I feel safe bumping this up to a 5, though it was probably always going to get the bump regardless.
I don’t really have that much to say about the intricacies of this thing – the instrumentation is good, though I do wish the drums had a little more to do throughout this thing. The vocals are great, save for a few songs where Joe Elliott feels a bit monotone even in his screamier moments (once again, looking at “Action! Not Words”). Lyrically, it’s exactly what you’d expect; this never gets to the same level as some of the stuff on an album like “Slippery When Wet”, though it doesn’t matter that much. “Photograph” is the highlight here, as well as the moody tones of “Billy’s Got a Gun”, but they’re all written well enough that they pass the “nothing egregiously bad” test of lyricism.
Overall, one’s enjoyment of this album will be entirely based on how much you like ‘80s soft glam rock with a pop lean, and it’s a style I’m generally a sucker for. This is not quite as good as its contemporaries in terms of a full album experience, but it still stands up decently well, with my only real complaint being “it just kind of sounds the same after too long”. We’ve had other albums in this space that kept the energy all up the way through, at a blazing breakneck pace, and this one just didn’t keep it there for as long as it could have. Regardless, I like it enough to bump it up to a 5, though I do hope they figured out their pacing issues for “Hysteria”, whenever we get that one.
Alice Cooper
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Second (& last) time we’ve gotten Alice Cooper, second time they’ll get a 5, and I think this one is pretty deserved. This was just a fun listen, what can I say? While the lyricism isn’t as tight as it was on “Billion Dollar Babies”, it’s still clever enough to have a presence, and Alice Cooper’s relatively gritty & blues-infused vocals do a great job of blending them into the soundscape. The instrumentation here is truly what makes the album shine. The guitar is rolling throughout this thing, the brass sections glide off of the percussion, and it’s anchored really well by some twangy basslines. Yes, it’s just great blues rock, but the production involved is incredibly slick, making everything pop just a little more. The “West Side Story” references throughout “Gutter Cat vs. The Jets” & the subsequent sound design of “Street Fight”, the breathy start to “Blue Turk”, the vocal filter & rain on “Alma Mater” & the layered orchestration on “Grande Finale” – all of them enhance their tracks further, giving the album a gravitas that feels needed.
I don’t think I need to go super deep here, as the music mostly speaks for itself. It’s a breezy 36 minutes, with a lot more variety than I was expecting (some blues, some Beatles, some prog, etc), and overall, it’s just a catchy album. “Grande Finale” is a great cap on the whole thing, and a bit of a show-stopper, befitting for an album very loosely based on West Side Story. I liked it a lot, and I think it’s worth a 5.
Black Sabbath
5/5
I’m at a 5. Arguably a 10, but I think that might be the events of the day skewing me just a little bit. Eh, fuck it, I’m at a 10. Ozzy deserves it.
I’ve been sitting here for like… 5 minutes in silence, just letting that album soak in. Stellar stuff, across the board. No words I could type can do the music justice; if you somehow haven’t heard it, just go listen. It’s a perfect blend of what would become heavy metal throughout the decade with little tinges of jazz & piano throughout, including a beautiful instrumental in “Laguna Sunrise”. Quick shoutout to “Changes” for giving me a “this is THAT song” moment. It’s not the same thing as their self-titled was, but it’s just as good. If nothing else, when this fucking rips on the guitar & drums, I felt just as in sync as I did listening to that debut. That’s a feeling that’s unmatched at its very best. In all, it’s 45 minutes of some of the tightest 70s rock / metal I’ve ever heard, with great lyrics & vocals to boot. If “Paranoid” is even better (and I’m pretty sure it’s got a shot, given that tracklist), then I can’t fucking wait to get there.
I will say, I knew the randomizer would give us something related to Ozzy, similar to how we got “Pet Sounds” after Brian Wilson’s death. Going into this, I wasn’t really thinking “Why THIS album in particular?”, but after listening to it, I think I can answer that, even if it didn’t pop into my mind beforehand. This is an album where Ozzy Osbourne quite literally admits he’d rather live life in a way where he can reach his highest creative potentials than give up the sources of that creativity, no matter how much it might be killing him. That’s the entire point of “Snowblind”. Most of this album revolves around that general central idea of living life in that way, and I can think of no better painted picture of Ozzy Osbourne. It’s not glamorous, not by any means, but I’ll be damned if it’s not inspiring, in its own weird way. By all accounts, the man should’ve been dead long before July 22nd, 2025, but… he lived. He lived one of the most full lives you could possibly imagine. He believed in himself. He didn’t have to pretend. He didn’t let the empty people try and interfere with his mind. He lived his life. And now, he’s left us all behind.
It’s a 10. Let the Prince of Darkness rest in whatever paradise he ended up in.
Primal Scream
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I think I’ll bump up to a 4, though I’d prefer to leave it right at a 3.5.
Brian Eno-esque ambience, Rolling Stones-esque indie rock, a little bit of George Michael’s production style & early ‘90s house instrumentation, all thrown into a blender with a bunch of other genres & just seeing what comes out. It’s a weird formula, but for some reason, I think it worked. This is not an album you sit down with headphones in and close your eyes and actively engage with, given the amount of tracks that spin their wheels for a while; it’s one where you throw it on in the background and just do stuff to. With that said, it’s produced like an album that you’re meant to pay attention to, with some solid lyrics, vocals and some decently layered (if repetitive & slightly long) instrumentation throughout. Your ears will perk up at all the soundscapes, and how effectively the blending seems to work, even with the length & repetition of this thing. In a way, I did enjoy this one a lot. It’s a great album to listen to, but it’s such a paradoxical album to me. Why am I enjoying something that’s so technically proficient, yet designed to play as nothing more than ultra deluxe room tone?
For once, I just don’t really have an answer. I can look back throughout my little notes I had on this thing, but they’re all just complimentary of the vibe, even through the repetition. A lot of these tracks evoke sort of a “Freedom! ‘90” vibe to me, including the blatantly shameless ripoff that is “Loaded” – just listen to that chord progression & then sing the chorus in your head. It is a 6 minute enigma comprised mostly of that chord progression and some random synths throughout, yet because I enjoy “Freedom! ‘90” so much, I just didn’t mind it at all. Seriously, what the hell gives about this album?
It’s not like I enjoyed the whole album either – there are definitely ones that bounced off of me like “Don't Fight It, Feel It” & “Shine Like Stars”. Yet, for the most part… I dunno, I guess it really is just all in the vibes. That’s the least satisfying conclusion I’ve ever come to about an album, because I’m normally really good at pinpointing why something works for my tastes, but this album has sort of broken my brain. I’m glad it has, don’t get me wrong; it’s a nice album. It’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, and I’m sure a subsequent relisten will have other tracks that totally bounce off of me. It’s just gonna bother me that the answer really is just “the vibes”.
So, uh… yeah, I dunno. I guess it’s a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4. There’s no bad tracks, nor bad vibes, and everything is just hypnotizing enough to feel smooth & groovy in the moment, even if it does sort of mentally fall apart after the fact. I guess this album is sort of like having a bunch of vanilla ice cream with different toppings on every track. It’s good ice cream, it’s good toppings, and it’s enjoyable. It’s just hard to believe vanilla ice cream could be that consistently enjoyable. In this case, I guess it was for me. I’m satisfied with that analogy.
Antony and the Johnsons
5/5
I’m at a 5. I am so glad this is on the list.
I suppose it’s only just now hitting me how much of this list so far has been mostly cisgender men. It’s just not something I’ve actively thought about, but… damn, this one really proves that point, huh? This is a beautiful album documenting the transition of our lead singer, ANOHNI. Her voice is great, regardless of the vibrato that sort of sours the earliest tracks on this album, when the instrumentation isn’t as potent. When the instrumentation does get going, this album truly begins to soar in a harmonic way. The quality of the music itself matches up with the messaging of the lyricism & how brilliantly her pain & frustration is expressed, meeting the moment in a way that’s evocative of the soul singers of the 1950s & 60s that this is so obviously inspired by. It’s a perfectly structured album, and I think “Bird Gerhl” is a gorgeous closing track. The entire 35 minutes, no matter how slowly they may start from a purely musical standpoint, all flow together in a harmony. It’s a beautiful album, and one where words currently fail me. What a piece of art. It’s a 5, and I am fully & utterly stunned.
I’m also pissed off that public opinion towards the right for transgender people to simply exist has flipped as harshly as it has throughout the 20 years since this album came out, and the ongoing nightmare that has been the second Trump administration. It is incredibly easy to demonize that which you have never truly met or known, and I feel as blessed as I have to have met so many people that have transitioned or are actively transitioning. This album is a reminder that it truly is gender *affirming* care. It is an affirmation of identity, of happiness, and of one’s true self. To demonize that affirmation speaks more to the sad, sad insecurities of those who will never be able to find happiness in the same way. I can only hope that whenever the pendulum of public opinion inevitably swings back the other way, this album can be re-recognized as a rich piece of art. It so deeply deserves it.
John Martyn
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5 on the strength of “Small Hours” as a closing track.
Second (and last!) time we’ve gotten John Martyn, second time he’ll get a 5 from me. Not too much to say about this one, weirdly enough. I think the music speaks for itself here – it’s a natural step forward from the “more upbeat version of Nick Drake” vibes of “Plain Air”. This is leaning ever so slightly into the synthier tones that would become new wave/post-punk, but by holding back, it manages to create something more akin to soft, jazzy trip-hop, blended with John Mayer’s or Jack Johnson’s guitar-driven musical sensibilities. When it works, it works really nicely – 6 of the 8 tracks here clicked for me, with only two of them falling short: “Smiling Stranger” & “Big Muff”. “Smiling Stranger” is nice, but it’s just missing an extra kick of energy that would really bring the song together for me. “Big Muff” is also good, but the total lack of instrumental progression (or even a small sense of it) pulls the track down hard for me. That first minute syndrome struck hard there, but neither of them are actively bad tracks. They just didn’t click for *me*.
I was fully prepared to bump this down to a 4 because of that – 5 out of 7 tracks hitting well would probably warrant that, but then “Small Hours” happened, and it just felt *that* damn good. Full vibes track, and it’s a natural conclusion to the happier back half of the album, with the beach sounds & the synth work meshing wonderfully for an 8-minute wonderland in my mind. It’s a good enough album closer that I feel zero shame in bumping this up to a 5. The two tracks I wasn't vibing with are still good to listen to, and my taste is subjective anyway; they’ll probably click for someone else.
Overall, just a good album – not quite as good top to bottom as “Solid Air” was, but it’s still pretty good all the same. Is it one that felt important enough that I had to listen to it before I died? I’m not sure, but you could convince me there’s not 1,001 albums out there better than it. If nothing else, it’s given me a blissful track in “Small Hours”. I enjoyed it, and I think it’s worth the bump up from a 4.5 to a 5. Good stuff once again, Mr. Martyn.
P.S.: “One World” is *begging* to be sampled, especially around the 2:10 mark. Someone get on that.
Femi Kuti
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Not much to say; just a fucking vibe, really. I came in without expectations and I have emerged from it a much groovier man. Femi Kuti has proven himself as good as his dad to my ears; just some great big band energy, with some keyboard & sax thrown in for good measure to create 73 minutes of pure, unadulterated Afrobeat funk. Pretty good vocals, some politically active lyrics, and perfect instrumentation. In terms of the overall vibes, no complaints from me.
In terms of the actual pacing, structure & track order… very few complaints, but they’re there. 73 minutes *is* a bit long, and there are some musically stagnant moments on a handful of tracks that could’ve been trimmed down to keep the album a bit more concise. Structurally, I think some of these tracks are a little too similar to each other, in terms of the tempo & instrumental progression, but it’s never actively an issue while you’re in the moment, so it doesn’t matter that much. In terms of the track order, I just would’ve flipped the last two; I think “Live For Today” would’ve been a nicer ending.
Those are all nitpicks, though – this album is one where words cannot explain the energy or the vibes, and I highly encourage just listening to it, headphones in or not. It’s really fucking good; a little long, sure, but it doesn’t matter when you’re just grooving along. A super fun 5 for me, a well-needed energy boost, and an album that’s definitely worth being on the list. Great stuff.
Isaac Hayes
5/5
I’m at a 10.
Sometimes, I write that “words fail me” and then somehow manage to write 500+ words complimenting an album to high heaven and back. In this case, they are failing me, fully & totally. I can’t properly think straight after feeling “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” at a visceral level, and therefore I can’t truly write anything further. All I can say is, off of a first listen alone, this is indeed the “landmark recording in soul music” that Wikipedia cites it to be. It feels as tall as the Eiffel Tower & as masterfully crafted as the Great Pyramids – “landmark” is not hyperbole here, and I can only recommend listening to it, with headphones in & with full, undivided attention.
A top to bottom hot buttered stunner, simple as that. 10. I need to listen to more Isaac Hayes.
The Cramps
4/5
I’m at a 4.
Solid stuff overall here – feels a bit more like a Weird Al-ish album, with a healthy respect & admiration for the garage/punk/rockabilly style it’s going for, but with more of a comedic / less serious lean. It’s all played totally straight, which is the key to making the album work. When it works, it really works; the best stuff on this album is enjoyable as hell, especially given that most of these are shorter tracks. They don’t overstay their welcome, and even if they do, it’s still good enough to survive off of the instrumental vibes alone for the most part. All in all, this feels like a natural step forward from the slightly unpolished tones of a band like The Sonics (who are covered here!), while blending them with the production tricks and clarity that would emerge throughout the 70s. It’s a good mixture, and one that makes for a fun album.
So, why the 4, and not a 5? It’s just because the musicality isn’t as consistent as I’d like it to be, I dunno. The first two tracks don’t set the tone right – they’re reverb-heavy, the lyrics / vocals feel a bit dissonant, and while it’s all technically sound, it’s got that intangible feeling of something being “off”. After those first two tracks though, this album mostly glides; only two other tracks didn’t quite click for me, and that’s “Mystery Plane” & “I’m Cramped”, the former for the repetition in the instrumental biting at me too much, and the latter for having big secret track energy as part of the main album. I also think that “Fever” just doesn’t quite work as an ending track – I would’ve closed on “The Mad Daddy” or “Tear It Up”.
Am I nitpicking? Yeah, probably, but those are all enough to keep this at a 4 for me. Make no mistake though; it is a *fun* album. If you can look past some of the quirks I didn’t vibe with, you might be at a 5, and I wouldn’t blame that at all. If they’re THAT big of a deal, then maybe this won’t play well for you. Regardless, I enjoyed it. It’s a solid 4, and maybe if we were listening to this in October, I might be inclined to let the spookier / fall vibes carry me to a 5. For a July listen, it’ll sit at a 4.
The Modern Lovers
4/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump down to a 4, though I’d love to leave it there.
The top review on this site calls this album “unoriginal, uninspired, gutter trash”, and I have no idea how that could possibly be the takeaway after listening to this. It’s “un” a lot of things – it’s unpolished, it’s unusual, and it’s undeniably a little awkward… but I think those are all strengths for the album. Jonathan Richman’s vocal performance here can be summed up by two words in my mind: “weird earnestness”. He has hesitations, he doesn’t sound super confident, and it feels like he’s one mumble or stutter away from making a track fall apart. Is it intentional? I’m not entirely sure, but whether it is or not, it does add a charming sense of earnestness to the whole album.
For my brain, I can imagine a guy standing on a stage, performing live for the first time in front of his peers & friends, and being *absolutely scared shitless*… but still getting through it. The band around him kills it; not a single bad instrumental on this thing, and for being recorded in 1971, this does act as a pretty good preview of the punk scene to come in the years afterward. There are really high highs on this album – “Pablo Picasso” & “Hospital” are standouts for me in particular, and as an entire 35 minute package, I can’t really say there’s a bad track here.
So, why the bump down to a 4 then? There’s 3 tracks in my mind where the “weird earnestness” just didn’t fully click for my tastes – “Old World”, “Girlfriend”, & the closer, “Modern World”. It’s not because the vocals or instrumental don’t work, but it’s because the lyricism just feels a little too ambiguous in terms of intent, compared to the rest of the album. This album’s strength is his earnestness, and it works mostly because these are well-written tracks that make themselves incredibly clear in meaning, intent & tone. When you add a little bit of ambiguity, then his vocal hesitations, while still good, act as more of a lack of commitment to his beliefs, and that muddies the waters a little bit. They’re still good tracks to listen to, and they don’t shake the album that badly, but having 3 of them is enough for me to bump this down from a 4.5 to a 4.
Make no mistake though; this is anything but “unoriginal, uninspired, gutter trash” – for 1971 & 1972, this is pretty original, decently inspired, and far from being trash. It’s an album I highly recommend, and I’d be at an easy 5 if the writing on those 3 tracks were cleaned up just a little bit. Hell, I’ll probably be at a 5 in the future anyway if even one of those tracks clicks nicer on a future listen. It’s a really enjoyable album, and I really did like it. It’s no less than a 4 to my ears, and it deserves to be on the list. Pretty good stuff.
Frank Zappa
5/5
Yeah, I’m at a 10.
That was 45 minutes of near-perfect instrumental energy. When you are fully in sync with a band, and truly feeling music as it enters your ears, you’ve hit upon the deepest type of connection you can make with the art form. Every time that happens for me, I know an album is an instant classic to my ears, and there’s no exception here. The only thing I can’t believe is that this is from Frank Zappa, of all people.
Color me deeply surprised; I would’ve never expected it to be Frank Zappa that ended up making such an eclectic jazz fusion album. I’ve admired the guy’s musicianship for sure; neither “We’re Only In It For The Money” nor “Freak Out!” were bad at a technical level. Even the worst rating I gave him was a 3, and it’s only because the former felt like an album I couldn’t really put a number to. To pull out THIS though? For 1969, this feels far, far ahead of schedule, in a way that I can’t really describe, but I can only vaguely guess at.
I wish I could write more, but much like “Hot Buttered Soul”, the music can say far more than I could. If you hit that point of being in sync, you’ll know exactly why. If it doesn’t click by the absolutely electric *violin* solo during “The Gumbo Variations”, then it never will, & it probably was never going to. If it doesn’t, then you probably won’t enjoy this like I did. For my tastes, though? Easy 10.
3/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump down to a 3.
Not deserving of a 2.1 average and a top 10 lowest rating on the site at all – honestly, this is a totally fine album. Abrasive? Sure, a little bit, but even in terms of “noise rock”, I have literally heard more ear-piercing & screechy, manic albums on the list than this. This doesn’t even hit the same level of pure noise as the final 2 minutes “Seasick” did off of “Penance Soiree”, which is still arguably the worst 2 minute stretch I’ve had in the 579 albums we’ve gotten so far.
I really can’t figure out why this has a 2.1 on the site other than being scared of the lack of an acoustic guitar or a “traditional” melody, but like… this is a pretty competently produced album. A lot of the musical sensibilities are there, with the instrumentation just swapped out for slightly harsher & more avantgarde stuff. Guitar melodies are more overdriven or synthy, percussion takes on a more breathy & monster-y tone, et cetera. I *DO* think this album slacks on providing good “dressing” for each track (i.e., complimenting the lead melodies with enough instrumentation to fill out the soundscape), and it does leave some of the tracks a little more try than they need to be. That said, I didn’t mind listening to any of this at all, and it’s a solid enough 40 minutes if you’re not as sensitive to the eccentricities of it.
So… why am I at a 3.5 bumped down to a 3, then? It’s just not the most compelling album, really. Competent, yes, but in terms of maintaining interest & keeping me engaged, I don’t think that many tracks truly got there. I enjoyed about 7 of the 10 tracks here, but in terms of actually being fully engaged with them all the way through as opposed to just admiring the soundscape, I would say… I dunno, maybe 2 or 3 tracks, at most? This album also has some clear flaws in my brain; not egregious by themselves, but when stacked up, just kill the flow a bit: too much repetition, too many tracks that go just a little too long, & barely any payoffs to the some of the bigger buildups that happen in each track. You can sit there through a long segment that feels like it’s leading to a crescendo that just never shows up, and it kind of deflates the track a bit.
If this album were a little tighter, a little shorter, and a little more musically inclined to give those payoffs, I’d definitely be inclined to bump this up to a 4. However, this album just never gets THAT compelling, and all the things it does to try and offset that never really worked for me, no matter how much I mostly enjoyed the sound design & “weird” witchy tone of the album. It’s like sitting through a decent production of a play; nothing’s ever wrong or bad, it’s just not as good as it could be, and it just doesn’t feel as satisfying. It’s certainly not a 2.1 nor is it a top 10 worst album on the site. I’d love to leave it at a 3.5 for my tastes, but I’ve got to bump it down to a 3.
Dr. Octagon
2/5
I’m at a 2.5 that I will bump down to a 2, even though I genuinely liked about 7 of the tracks here.
I don’t know, man. That’s just aggressively mediocre to my ears. Kool Keith had a good feature on Jurassic 5’s “Power in Numbers”, but he sheds that general style here for the eccentricities of Dr. Octopus, the “homicidal, extraterrestrial, time-traveling gynecologist and surgeon”. I am not a big fan of Dr. Octopus. This isn’t a Slim Shady situation where the over-the-top nonsense loops back around to genuinely witty wordplay with a party flow & an enjoyable vibe. Dr. Octopus, as a character, is crass, a rapist, and an all-around generally terrible alien with not a single redeeming quality to him. It’s not enjoyable to hear about his escapades, and there’s never really a comeuppance for it. It’s kind of just torture porn, in a way.
Of course, I’m prone to give some degree of leeway since it is still so over-the-top that you can’t imagine Kool Keith advocating for any of this, but it’s aged really poorly into 2025, and even for 1996, this just feels like shock-jock perverted humor to some degree. I just don’t fuck with the lyrics that much. On top of the lyricism being an issue, what really drags this fucking album down is the beats, vocals, & flows. It’s just the most dry energy I’ve heard from a mid-90s rap album yet. Kool Keith does not have a rap voice like a Biggie, a Jay-Z, or a Tupac, and it desperately shows. He’s relatively monotone throughout the whole thing. It wouldn’t be a major issue if he just had a normal flow, but of course, Dr. Octopus being the alien scumbag that he is, simply refuses to glide on the vast majority of these already dry fucking beats. It’s a very “stream of consciousness” style of rap, but it just doesn’t work, especially with the verbosity on so many of the early tracks diluting the theming of the album.
Ultimately, I just didn’t like it that much. It’s not the worst album ever, but… fuck me, it’s just boring. The shock jock value doesn’t draw any humor (and that’s like, half the songs), and it’s an hour long, which just means it drags the fuck on. If it were shorter & tighter, I might be more inclined to barely bump it up to a 3, but… nope. It’s just not a good album experience. I don’t know if this should be on the list, really. If I’m ever thinking that, then something just isn’t clicking. Hence, a 2.5 bumped down to a 2. If it clicks for you, then good on you; I hear the appeal, but it's just not there for me. It's a shame, because I do think Kool Keith is GOOD at rapping, based on what I've heard. I just don't really like Dr. Octopus, which makes me kinda disappointed.
PJ Harvey
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Not too much to say, really. Once this album’s momentum gets rolling (either from the literal first guitar hit on “Oh My Lover” or the cool, abrupt ending / transition from “O Stella” into “Dress”), it just refuses to stop. This is a grunge album to my ears, and it’s a pretty damn good one at that. Incredibly feminist, with some *great* lyrics across the board that exude confidence whilst showing some vulnerability & honesty. PJ Harvey’s voice matches the mood on these lyrics on pretty much every track, and the instrumentation rocks the fuck out alongside her.
All of these tracks bring something to the table, whether it’s the desperate tone of “Oh My Lover” (enhanced by the production choice to have her farther from the mic), the anti-Cinderella tone of “Dress” (desperate to impress a man & failing), the essence of love poured into “Victory” (“Angel at my table, God in my car” is a *great* line), the absurd disses of “Sheela-Na-Gig” (“Put money in your idle hole” is a CRAZY line), or the biblical parallels of the last 5 tracks combined with the harder rock instrumentation, the whole album just flows. The only real minor nitpicks I have are that “O Stella” feels a little broad & “Fountain” feels a little off as a closing track, but they’re minor.
It’s an album where the music speaks for itself, and more specifically, where PJ Harvey gets to let loose. I wish she had kept this style more for “Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea” (or that we had gotten this first), but I might need to go relisten to that one to see if my original thoughts hold up. Regardless, for a debut album, I fuck with this heavy – it’s much more aligned to something like “Exile in Guyville” by Liz Phair or “Horses” by Patti Smith, while integrating some Pearl Jam-esque grunge to really hit the mark. I liked it a lot, and I think it’s a pretty damn good (and pretty recommended) 5.
Slayer
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Just pure energy distilled into 28 of the most manic minutes ever put to tape. Rage incarnate, perhaps. The tempo of this thing almost loops back around to comical – this is a prime example of an album where “every song sounds the same” is used to an advantage, ala AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell”. Once this album’s momentum gets going off of that first guitar riff (oddly similar to PJ Harvey yesterday), it just doesn’t fucking stop. Pausing this thing at any point after the literal first note is probably tantamount to a crime.
Lyrically, just a monstrously brutal album, in a good way. I complained about “torture porn” on the Dr. Octagon album, and honestly, if we had gotten this first, I might’ve been a bit more receptive to that album’s more surgical, Hannibal Lecter-esque approach to brutality as an interesting dichotomy. However, I’m way, way more inclined to hear about decapitation, mutilation, blood raining down within purgatory & the entire bridge of “Necrophobic” coming from a raspy, raspy voice in Tom Araya, while guitar wails & percussion rolls. The surgical approach that Dr. Octagon takes isn’t terrible, but the rap instrumentals on that album aren’t really compatible with it to my ears. Here, though? The pure rage distilled into these instrumentals becomes infectious, and the lyrical intensity enhances them. Sure, the mixing doesn’t really give each instrument the clarity that I wish it had, but that’s not the point; this thing is meant to be played loud, full blast, so that you can just fucking feel it. I definitely felt it.
The only real reason I’m not at a 10 is simply because I think this album went just a little bit too fast at times – I know that might be criminal to say, but as someone who likes to soak in all aspects of a track & not just the pure energy emanating off of it, I think the album could’ve benefitted from just a few more brief moments of letting the listener breathe. It’s a pure nitpick though; if anything, I’m probably just salty that I could barely pick up the lyrics to “Necrophobic” because it was going 100 miles an hour. Regardless, it’s an easy fucking 5.
P.S.: Yes, “Angel of Death” sort of deifies the torturous aspects of the Holocaust, and that’s a bit tonedeaf. On the other hand though, is that not kind of insane, and proving just how batshit evil & monstrous the Nazis were? If Slayer is taking all of this shit from real, heinous crimes that were done by Josef Mengele, in a way where it fully fits into the other over-the-top absurd violence & gore of the album… does that not say something obvious? I can see why people got mad at the track (and no shame to those who still hate it), and a line or two specifically condemning shit would’ve been nice, but it’s pretty strongly implied that the Nazis were pure fucking evil. I don’t know that I would’ve opened the whole album with it, but it has a place somewhere in here.
Traffic
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Sometimes, you just have “it”, what can I say? At face value, someone else might hear this and recognize it as a wholly competent 70s album that hits on all the right rock tropes at a technical level, but they just can’t vibe with it for one reason or another, and I wouldn’t blame anyone for not being that impressed by this. However, Steve Winwood & friends here absolutely nail it for my tastes.
Admittedly, I didn’t really take many notes of substance for this one; just a lot of timestamps where I’m impressed by certain instruments (piano, flute, drums, guitar, etc) & a LOT of praise for Steve Winwood’s vocals. The man has some pipes. If I could sing like that, you bet I’d be singing anything & everything, including the seemingly “cheesier” stuff people rag on him about. I refuse to accept any slander of “Valerie” though. Lyrically, this album’s pretty straightforward, save for the mildly baffling “Freedom Rider” – the strength of the storytelling entirely comes in the delivery, and it’s most apparent on “John Barleycorn (Must Die)”. The slower, more deliberate approach to match the tone of the original track is really effective, while still giving Steve room to add some power.
Instrumentally, this album shines; not a single dull moment here, and with headphones in, this thing just has a ball of momentum that refuses to stop once it gets going. It’s especially strong on the eclectic closer that is “Every Mother’s Son”. When every instrument hits a sort of fever pitch around the chorus & Steve’s vocals are gliding on them, it’s one of those moments that just sort of elevates an album to a higher point for me.
So, yeah, no complaints at all, only praise here. For 1970, this feels a little ahead of schedule, and I’m just really impressed by it. A very strong 35 minutes that, if nothing else, is really enjoyable to listen to from start to finish. I just caught the momentum of this thing, and I think it’s easily worth a 5, if a bit higher. Not quite a 10, but a highly recommended album regardless.
P.S.: There’s two things I just need to point out; the flute solo on “Freedom Rider” is rad as hell, & someone NEEDS to sample the percussion of “Empty Pages” around the 3 minute mark.
Janis Joplin
5/5
I’m at a 5.
I never quite hit the same “fever pitch” status like I did whenever we got “Cheap Thrills” last year, but I feel like I got pretty damn close a few times. This is a more polished version of Janis Joplin, tapping a little more into her Aretha-adjacent bag while still keeping her blues-rock sensibilities intact, with just a bit of a country twang. Lyrically, this is pretty damn strong; straight-forward to understand (or at least feel emotionally), and Janis performs them brilliantly. Vocally, she’s still as stunning as she was, and I can’t imagine there’s any real complaints a person could have about her vocals here. If you think her grittier moments sound too much like Marge Simpson or something, I guess that’s fair, but I personally love how the grit in her vibrato comes across. I especially want to point at “Cry Baby” – the knockout track of the album for me, for sure, though they’ve all got great moments. The variety on this is strong enough that any track might be someone’s favorite.
Instrumentally, I feel like the more “polished” style works really well (literally no complaints other than “I really, REALLY wish there was a brass section in this album”), but it does lose part of the chaotic appeal that made Janis Joplin feel like the eye of the storm like she did with Big Brother & The Holding Company. This album never gets THAT crazy, so it does feel like she’s sort of overshadowing everything else with her vocals just a bit, but that’s more so on her backing band not matching her energy in quite the same way Big Brother did (or maybe, her matching their slightly lower energy?). They’re still really good throughout the 34 minutes here though (literally just listen to “Buried Alive in the Blues” or “My Baby”, they could go that hard if they wanted), so it’s basically like complaining about a pizza with a little less pepperoni than the other; not a huge difference, but noticeable enough if you really care.
Overall, this is a pretty easy 5. There’s not a single miss here, and while it didn’t quite get to the same heights as “Cheap Thrills” for me, it’s still a highly recommended album regardless. You can’t possibly listen to this and hate it unless you’re actively trying to, and if you are actively trying to, you’re kinda just lame, I think. I can only say “damn” that Janis Joplin left the world far, far too soon. She would’ve killed the rest of the 70s, I’m sure of it.
Suzanne Vega
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Historically, there’s been a pretty good track record with singing-songwriting women on the list for my ears, and Suzanne Vega is thankfully no exception to that. The only track I knew from her before listening to this album was “Tom’s Diner”, but I’m not sure that really prepared me for this album like that. This is a bit of a lyrically-driven album (although the instrumentation & vocals are arguably strong enough on their own), but I think at its very core, a lot of the themes here are still rather straightforward, just expressed with a bit of poetic flourish to try and create more vivid & richer imagery. It’s most apparent to me on the tracks that take a more medieval tone, like “The Queen & The Soldier”, which is one of my top 2 tracks on the entire thing. At the very base level, that track is nothing more than a sad woman pushing a man out of her life who means well, but the imagery & verbiage of the track elevates it higher, swirling to the more bombastic climax of the soldier being killed on her order, while she still sits alone, anguished & depressed with a crown on her head, and his death solving nothing.
The other of my top 2 tracks is “Marlene on the Wall”, which is an acoustically-driven banger about the struggle of full commitment to love. It feels like an early 90s track in the best way, and it’s arguably the best showcase of Suzanne Vega’s narrative vocal style. She still carries a good sense of power in her vocals, but it’s underlined with a sense of clarity & observancy that adds both urgency & earnestness to the track. It’s present throughout the album, but “Marlene on the Wall” specifically blends it with more of the catchy 80s vocal hook style that’s usually not as apparent on this album.
Even though those are my top 2, there’s so many well-written tracks on this album that could easily get their own paragraphs. I love the double metaphors at play for “Freeze Tag”, blending childhood innocence with only being able to “act” out a relationship. I *really* love the sense of helplessness portrayed on “Small Blue Thing”, and the tone in her voice fully creates the sense of empathy present in that track. “Some Journey” is a super strong track that tackles something I’ve occasionally wondered: how different could some friendships be if you met outside of the confines of your hometown, without the baggage or history emerging from it?
If I have any minor knocks, it’s that “Cracking” is a bit of a bad tonesetter (without a second listen), “Knight Moves” is a little ambiguous & “Neighborhood Girls” isn’t as compelling of a closer as some of the other tracks might’ve been, but those are nitpicky at best. Any album that can get me this engaged in its storytelling while having great instrumentation has to be doing something right; this is a REALLY strong album for my tastes. It’s worth a 5 to me, and I’m kicking myself for not looking any further into Suzanne Vega past “Tom’s Diner”. Definitely worth being on the list, and a pretty recommended one at that.
The Rolling Stones
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Not *quite* as grand as “Exile on Main Street” to my ears, but it’s like comparing two sports cars against each other; they’re both extremely rich & they both get the job done. It's hard to complain about 42 minutes that sound that good, especially once I found that zen state for something as bombastic as “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”. That little sneak preview we got from the George Michael album a while back did wonders here; the more the ending kept expanding, the more my brain just fully melted into itself.
So, how about the rest of the album then? Honestly, just pure classic rock & roll with a bit of a country lean; about what I’ve expected out of the Rolling Stones, but there’s no need to shake anything up when it works as well as it does. “Gimme Shelter” is as good as advertised, and possibly a rare example to my ears of a track sounding better *without* headphones in, as the bassline & guitar got way more of a pop from my speakers, adding a bit more depth to the whole thing. Everything in between the start & finish is still very good, but it’s not as good as those two tracks are. That doesn’t make this a 2 track album, not by a long shot, but even on a first pass, I did find myself sort of bleeding tracks into each other. I might chalk that down to getting way too into the groove throughout the whole thing, though.
I’ve got some light notes written down: the dueling guitars approach on “Love in Vain” works really nicely, “Live With Me” might be the most Beatles-y the Stones have ever sounded to my ears, “Let It Bleed” is horny as hell but the energy is great, the tempo shifts on “Midnight Rambler” are super effective, and “Monkey Man” is just a pure ball of energy by its outro. Clearly, I liked this whole thing, and if there’s not a bad track here, why am I not at a 10 with it? I guess it just never really hits that same overall technical showcase fever pitch that I felt on a multitude of tracks for “Exile on Main Street”, but I did feel it here – just not as often. Without that sense of being fully in sync (save for “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” & a lot of the outro for “Let It Bleed”), it just never hit that deep level of connection for me.
Regardless, it’s an easy, easy 5. It’s a stellar Rolling Stones album, the second best one I think we’ve gotten so far, and a stellar album, period. This does end off that “classic” stretch for us, with the only other 2 Stones albums remaining being some of their earlier, pre-”Beggars Banquet” work. I can only hope they’re worth being on the list, but as far as this one goes, it’s an obvious recommendation. A stunner for 1969, and another big thumbs up for Mick, Keith & friends.
Sonic Youth
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I think I will just *barely* bump up to a 5, though I’d prefer to leave it there.
Lot more on the “sonic” side of Sonic Youth for this album, and while a lot of it has now blended together in my brain after 49 minutes of a *lot* of overdriven guitar, percussion, and layered buildups & chords, it’s the sort of album where being present in the moment for each track enhances it much more than just listening to it for 49 minutes flat. These tracks are designed to work with their soundscapes as a storytelling tool, meaning if you do zone out, tracks won’t be quite as effective.
Yes, lyrics & vocals have an obvious presence here (and I’d be remiss to not point out that Kim Gordon’s tracks are the strongest ones on the album, especially “Kool Thing”), but for the most part, I think the strength of this album comes from how unique it feels for 1990. This doesn’t feel like a slight leftover from the metal of the 80s, nor does it feel like it fits into the same “grunge” box ala Nirvana or Pearl Jam. It feels like a hybrid of late-70s post-punk with the sort of late 90s pop-punk that would emerge after grunge’s peak period, with just a bit of shoegaze thrown in. It’s a weird hybrid, and one that feels a little incompatible at points on the album, but when it clicks, it REALLY clicks, and I think it clicks enough here to justify a bump up to a 5.
I will say this though: I think the album has a bit of a dropoff after “Disappearer”, and that’s not just because I got jumpscared by “Mildred Pierce”. I think the focused nature of the first 7 tracks of the album get lost somewhere in the final 4, and that’s why I’m really hesitant to actually bump this up to a 5. There’s nothing wrong with any of the last 4 tracks, but they’re either too long for what they are, or they just circle the bases a lot instrumentally, and when the first 7 tracks are already long enough to begin with, a fatigue can definitely set in that just pulls the album experience down. This is not a “fast” 49 minutes, not by a long shot, but I think it’s a rewarding one if you let yourself get immersed. If you can’t find yourself fully immersed into this sort of thing, it will feel so much longer. That immersion break happened for me around the last 4 tracks, but I can’t really tell if that’s just from the tracks actually getting less focused, general soundscape fatigue, or just listening to this at a sort of bad time.
Regardless, I think it does earn the bump up to a 5, but just barely. I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt because of the strength of the first 7 tracks here, and honestly, it can be extended out to the first 9. Yes, some tracks are obviously too long, and this whole thing could’ve been trimmed around the edges quite a bit, but I don’t think it ruins it as badly as it could have. At the absolute worst, I still think this is a 4 minimum, and a much tighter album than “Dirty” was, in terms of finding a sound and really committing to it. They explore that sound out to its edges, but it’s much more of a consistent soundscape to my ears. It’s a more abrasive sound at times, but that abrasion is used as a strength more often than not. When it’s good, it’s very good, and even at its “worst”, it’s still sonically compelling to some degree that keeps this from ever hitting a point that’s truly ever bad. Hence, the bump up to a 5.
Steely Dan
5/5
I’m at a 5. OK, a little higher, but not to the point of a 10.
That sure is Steely Dan. All my praise from “Countdown To Ecstasy” applies here (with a little more of a pure 70s rock lean), and this is an even better album to my ears. Not a single miss, and another track that gave me a “yep, this is THAT song” moment via “Reelin’ In The Years”. Genuinely, 41 minutes of near-perfect 70s soft/yacht-adjacent rock to my ears, foreshadowing a lot of the trends the genre would take in its sort of post-Beatles poppier form, while giving a lot of breathing room for bands like Boston, Chicago, Thin Lizzy & more to work with & help refine.
I mean, I just don’t have any complaints. I have a nitpick; I think “Change of the Guard” probably should’ve been the last track, with “Turn That Heartbeat Over Again” coming before “Only a Fool Would Say That” to pair the sort of faux-cynicism tracks together. It’s a total nitpick though; this is an album that is *deeply* rich in terms of instrumentation, gliding vocals (the other non-Fagen vocalists do great here), really strong musical structures, and smart enough lyricism that’s not too crucial to a listening experience, but just enhances it well enough if you can pick up on it. The only track where you kinda need the lyrics is “Fire in the Hole”, and even then, I think that’s the most straightforward one on the album.
Does this mean Steely Dan is a band where if you’ve heard them once, you’ve heard them all? I dunno, maybe. Elvis Costello got away with that to a pretty successful degree, and he’s got 6 albums on this damn list. Even if it does mean that, I wouldn’t complain about a formula that works. I love the entire tone of this thing, and I think I might really fucking like Steely Dan. They’ve got 2 more albums on the list, so the jury is still out on if they have 2 really good ones and then 2 really bad ones. As far as “Can’t Buy A Thrill” goes… yeah, that’s about as good as it gets. Absolutely deserving to be on the list, definitely one you should hear before you die, and just another bit of evidence to add onto the pile for 1972 being one of the greatest years for music ever. An easy 5, if a little higher.
Taylor Swift
5/5
I’m unabashedly at a 5.
Haters gonna hate, hate, hate and all that. Here’s a quick story: the first time I ever heard “Shake It Off” was at a high school pep rally in 2014. I thought it was a little cheesy, & I didn’t know who was singing it. It was catchy as hell though, and the chorus got stuck in my ear. Once I got home, I googled it. Imagine my surprise to find out it was Taylor Swift, the country artist, and it was THE biggest song in the world at the time. As a 14-year-old boy, I fell victim to the classic “this is popular, so I’m going to hate it” trope, and I… was wrong. I was very, very wrong.
Someone wanting to demean the type of women who listen to & enjoy Taylor Swift might write something along the lines of the following: “these are songs made for the Grey’s Anatomy-loving / idealized love & empathy generation of women who grew up with The Notebook as their favorite movie, a pink DS to play Nintendogs on, and who would swear by scrolling through Pinterest & writing down every thought they have in the Notes app as self-therapy.” Of course, tell this to any woman who actually enjoys Taylor Swift and they’d probably take it as a massive compliment. That’s modern-day girlhood for you. I wouldn’t have written something like this in 2014, but as far as my mindset back then goes, I probably was doing some kind of subconscious celebrity-driven misogyny (or just the whole “eww cooties” thing taken to a natural, if really flawed conclusion).
I came to the realization that I was wrong in 2021, as a 21-year-old man, when Taylor Swift started to drop her re-recordings of all her albums in light of the ownership situation, giving me an excuse to actually listen to all of these tracks that I thought all of my girl friends (*please* note the space) had been overhyping for years, with a decently fresh mind, a good bit of empathy, and the realization that I was never going to stop the train, so I may as well take a ride on it, just for fun. Of course, I proved myself to be a moron, as one does with this sort of thing. They were all right, to some degree, and I found myself enjoying her stuff far more than I did from just hearing it in passing on nearly every commercial or radio station for years. Granted, I still think “Red” is a *really* mediocre (if not outright bad) album, but hey; I also think “Fearless” & “Speak Now” are *really* good, so it weighs out.
When the “1989” re-recording came out in late 2023 (66 days before starting this 1001 Albums project), I gave it a listen, and a weird wave of nostalgia came over me, with every song feeling familiar, but only just now coming into full focus. I had forgotten just how many monster hits were on this thing; you would think “Shake It Off” would obviously be the biggest one, but “Blank Space” has more plays than it on Spotify (2.1 billion), and 4 of the tracks have at least a billion plays. I haven’t heard the album in full since then, but hearing it again now, with 588 albums across several decades & styles inbetween to sharpen & hone my musical tastes… yeah, this one’s still really fucking good too. I listened to the original version this time, since she got her ownership back, and let me tell you; it blows the re-recording out of the water. Good to finally hear this thing as it was intended.
Taylor Swift is a good, if not great (albeit really self-indulgent to an annoying point as of late) songwriter, with her biggest strength being able to find one or two cutting lines that can immediately capture the modus operandi of a song through some striking imagery. Whether or not you agree or care about that modus operandi is another thing, but regardless, her lyricism comes out really well on this album, especially so on “Clean”, but every track has a gem of a line somewhere in it. Her production team on this (especially Max Martin, arguably hitting a peak) knock it out of the park with this sort of hybrid mix of an 80s new wave style with the production tricks & heavy synth work of the early 2010s, and while it’s certainly dated to 11 years ago, it’s the sort of soundscape where if you like it, you’ll really like it, and it clicked very nicely for me this time around.
Some people would call this album a pop Bible, and while I disagree (it’s “Thriller.” “Thriller” is the pop Bible.), I won’t dissuade people from having that take at all, since this is probably one of the most influential pop albums of the decade. Much like Frank Ocean’s “channel ORANGE”, this album’s success & all the artists it inspired has opened up a Pandora’s Box of sorts. However, I think that Pandora’s Box has finally started to pay off – the new “big 3” of Olivia Rodrigo, Chappell Roan & Sabrina Carpenter (Billie Eilish is in there somewhere, trust me, she’s just not fully “pop music” to my ears) are a direct product of the wave that Taylor Swift started with this album, and they’re all expanding on it in a way that feels like a proper renaissance of radio pop music after it got really stagnant around mid 2019 into early 2021. I’m not saying we should thank Taylor Swift for their success, but I don’t know if we get to this point without this album.
I’ve done all this yapping without talking much about the album itself, but it should be obvious that I enjoyed the hell out of it. I’ve come away from this with arguably an even greater appreciation for it, now having a much better sense of the styles she & her team were pulling from throughout this album, and with how well-crafted of an homage it all is. Yes, its commercialism can be used as a knock against it, and you could just as easily call it “corporate, overproduced nonsense that loses the soul of what makes music music”. I wouldn’t hate on anybody for that take, but it’s probably just a cycle that’s been perpetuated for years. I’d bet a dollar someone called “Thriller” overproduced nonsense compared to the heart shown by the Rolling Stones, or “Abbey Road” as such compared to the “true” musicianship of Aretha Franklin, or hell, Beethoven’s 9th Symphony compared to the earliest attempts at orchestral work. Musical tastes are constant & ever evolving, much like mine were between 2014 and 2021, and especially so since I’ve started this whole 1001 Albums project.
All of this bullshit rambling preamble aside, I've grown to fucking love this album. If you can allow yourself to let loose and open up your mind for just 49 minutes (or 60 minutes via the deluxe), what emerges is a tightly crafted, well-written, well-composed & well-sung pop album that stands up with (and next to) some of the best of its genre, full of monster hits, which has probably shaped an entire generation, for better or for worse. It is probably the best Taylor Swift album, and it’s her at her pop peak. I know one of her COVID-era albums is on the list, and I’ve never heard that one before, so I’ll be ready when we get that one, but as far as "1989" goes, it’s an easy 5.
By the way, did I mention that I'm older now than Taylor Swift was when she recorded this album? Yeah, she did this album when she was 24. I'm cooked.
Emmylou Harris
5/5
Yeah, that’s a 5.
Emmylou Harris’s voice is just such a conduit for emotion that it’s able to carry a whole track by itself, and it carries this entire album brilliantly. The instrumentation enhances it a lot, but… man, her vocals are just that good. I can’t describe them with any other word but “angelic”. It’s pretty variable too; while a lot of this album is comprised of sadder songs, the closing track “Queen of the Silver Dollar” ends with her just going “da da da” to the tune of the chorus, and it gives off a party vibe.
This is an album made of mostly covers, so I can’t quite give the songwriting all the credit in the world except to the original artists. It’s a loaded lineup by the way; Merle Haggard, Shel Silverstein, John & Paul, Dolly Parton herself, and more. Emmylou Harris at least knows how to pick them. However, she does have one track she penned on here: “Boulder to Birmingham”, a lamenting ballad about her inability to really cope with Gram Parsons’ death 2 years before. It’s a brilliantly written track, and it really does capture the feeling of being sort of an emotional powderkeg. It makes me wonder why she didn’t write more original material, especially with how good “Red Dirt Girl” turned out 25 years later.
I do think the music speaks for itself here; I can’t really write any more words praising “old country” like this, and Emmylou’s voice will portray far far more depth than what I can say about these tracks. This is a great 5; it’s worth a listen, it’s worth being on the list, and once again, Emmylou Harris has just blown me away. Not bad for someone who I’d never heard of before starting this whole 1001 Albums thing.
Daft Punk
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll easily bump up to a 5.
That’s the first time I’ve ever heard “Homework”; I’m far more aware of the other Daft Punk albums, but I just never went back to this one. It’s certainly different – Daft Punk would later expand its range into a little more of a soft pop blend with the electronica / EDM / house standards that are so clearly set up on this album, and I definitely prefer everything from “Discovery” onward, but even the “worst” Daft Punk album that my ears have heard is still a fucking banger.
“Around the World” is obviously the all-timer here, but most of the 74 minute runtime of this album is a treat. Really, the only reason I’m at a 4.5 and not a flat 5 is because a few tracks just felt a little long (“Rollin’ & Scratchin’” & “High Fidelity”), & “Rock’n Roll” in particular just kind of bounced off of me after about 5 minutes. Little too noisy, and the abrupt ending doesn’t help. Past those minor bumps though, what emerges is a very strong album that’s more instrumental / club-centric than its successors. Mileage will vary on how much one would like the straight instrumental approach, but as someone who already listens to a little too much video game music, it didn’t bother me as much here.
The thing that struck me the most about the production work / composition is how much this album tends to rely on its lower, bassier tones, using anything extra high as a point of contrast to make the progressions feel more fulfilling. When it works, it works, but there are points on this album where it doesn’t, and it’s pretty noticeable when it doesn’t. Those moments are generally fleeting, but it does show the slight messiness of this album compared to how tightly they would refine it down the line.
Of course, I’m nitpicking apart the little things I didn’t like about this because the rest of it is just worth all the praise a Daft Punk album should get. It’s still a great, great debut album, and I wouldn’t blame anyone for preferring this sort of style more to their later work. If the biggest complaint I have is “a few tracks were a little long & the progression isn’t always perfect”, then you’ve still made a great electronica album, since I’ve definitely said the same stuff about other electronica albums that were far worse than this. It’s an extremely easy bump up to a 5, and a very recommended album. I wish “Discovery” or “Random Access Memories” were here on the list, but alas.
Sade
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
Little bit of a frontloaded album, especially through the first 4 tracks, but regardless, that’s a hell of a debut to make for 1984. This feels like it’s trying to single-handedly move soul music forward, and I think it probably did in a lot of ways. Even from just an instrumental standpoint, this thing just oozes with a type of smooth charisma that still feels fresh now, and probably felt REALLY fresh in 1984. This is expanding upon the DNA of 70s soul groups (especially Earth, Wind & Fire), and it’s doing it in a way that feels like a preview for the rest of the 1980s to come. Of course, those instrumentals wouldn’t quite hit the same without Sade’s smooth as silk voice gliding on top of them, and she knocks it out of the park here. She adds great depth to each track by herself, giving the lyrics a bit more gravitas, & her higher registers are stunning when they come in, given that she stays low for most of the album.
So, why the 4.5 and not a flat 5? A few tracks were a little too long (“Hang On to Your Love”), a little too simple, a little too repetitive (“I Will Be Your Friend” for both), a little too slowly paced (“Sally”)… nitpicks, again, but the sort of nitpicks that build up to make an album experience feel like just a little bit more of a drag to my ears. There’s also “Why Can’t We Live Together”, which is a solid track with a good message… but it feels wrong as the album closer, and it doesn’t feel like it meets the same quality as the rest of the album. Instrumentally, it sounds like it’s from 1977 as opposed to 1984, and it doesn’t really feel as unique as the preceding 39 minutes.
As I said before, this is a bit frontloaded, especially with “Smooth Operator”, and I think the album hits its peak at “Cherry Pie”, after already hitting what I thought might be a peak at “Frankie’s First Affair”. That slow falldown afterward is what’s putting this at a 4.5 as opposed to a flat 5, but regardless, it’s an incredibly easy bump up. This is neo-soul as we currently know it being born, with a hint of Japanese city pop standards thrown in, pulling influence from Earth, Wind & Fire, Stevie Wonder, some Hall & Oates, and hell, a little bit of Huey Lewis to my ears. It’s a great blend to have, and for my tastes, it fits perfectly. I was hoping a little more Sade would be on the list (especially the album with “Kiss of Life” on it), but I guess I’ll have to check those out in my own time. Great album, great pick, definitely glad I heard it before I died, and an easy bump up to a 5.
Tim Buckley
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Looking back at what I wrote about “Happy Sad”, my biggest issues with that album involved the pacing and the sense of progression, making the length of the album feel far longer than 44 minutes. This is thankfully a much better paced album, with a significantly better sense of progression, making this thing fly by in a way that doesn’t feel like 42 minutes. It also adds all of the “fun” that felt lacking from “Happy Sad”, but I suppose the title of that album should’ve been a giveaway back in January.
Lyrically, this thing is really dense, which might be my only proper knock on it; I’m big on lyricism, and this is a very well-written album, but I’m also big on letting the vocals flow, and I think this album has points where the structure & the lyrics just don’t mesh as smoothly as they could. This album remedies that through two things: great vocals from Tim Buckley, hitting far higher & more varied registers than I remember him hitting on “Happy Sad”, & by just having a precision strike of instrumentation sort of attacking it at all times, and at all angles; it’s a slightly loud album, but in a way that always fits & elevates the emotional bend that the tracks are going for.
A shining example of this is on “Pleasant Street”, which is about the feeling of being on drugs (heroin specifically) and how pleasing it can all feel despite the horror that emerges from a lack of true self-control. The storytelling still emerges from the slightly screechy tones of the electric guitar, the acoustics rolling, and the percussion finding a good groove, but it’s Tim’s vocals hitting the full range of emotion on the track that really sells the sense of “nightmarish ecstasy” that the lyricism is trying to portray. Put them all together, and you get something that really works as the sum of its parts, in a harmony that wouldn’t work otherwise.
There’s other standouts that work in a similar way for me, namely on “Hallucinations” (which has great sound design for 1967), “Once I Was” (just a wonderfully written track about paranoia over lost emotional connection, elevated by the wistfulness of the instrumental), and “Goodbye and Hello” (a grandiose instrumental with orchestral flair, with the lyricism elevated by how stoic his vocals feel). The whole album takes this sort of approach though, and it REALLY worked for me. It doesn’t always work, but those are only for brief sections of each track.
I enjoyed this a lot – it’s aligned to my tastes a lot more than “Happy Sad” was, it’s far better paced to stop it from feeling like a drag, and I think it just carries a pep in its step that makes it a more palatable album. It’s even in the cover; he’s smiling here, as opposed to the frown he had. Yes, the lyricism is still a bit more drab than it might feel like on a first pass, but I love a good “sad album that sounds happy” dichotomy when it’s done right, and this does it pretty well. I think it’s worth giving a 5, and I’m far more ready for the third Tim Buckley album to pop up, whenever it does.
Nitin Sawhney
5/5
I’m at a 5.
When we got this, I went straight to Wikipedia to look at the genres, and I saw it said “downtempo, drum & bass”, and I immediately assumed we would be getting another 58 minute electronica piece driven mostly by video game-esque beats. I would like for someone to edit the damn Wikipedia article for this album, because it gives a *tremendously* wrong impression. This is a deeply enrichening 58 minutes that covers a wide variety of genres, using electronica as a sort of cover-all base to aid in the production, but this goes everywhere from pop to jazz to R&B to DnB, with a lo-fi lean and a lot of worldly Indian influence. The instrumentals are what aid the overarching theme of the album, which is ultimately how much humanity has been impacted & predisposed to self-defense instead of community ever since the dropping of the first atomic bomb, starting in present time for 1999, and going backwards to Oppenheimer’s realizations, quoted in a way that feels a bit chilling by the very end.
From a storytelling standpoint, it’s hard to point out any perceived “flaws” here; this takes a more intimate approach at times, so mileage will simply vary on being able to pick up the themes & political overtones of this album, and I do think there is a bit of correlation to picking up on them & being able to enjoy this album to its fullest extent. It does hit you over the head pretty hard with it though, so if you somehow manage to ignore it, that’s on you, I think.
From a musical standpoint, there are definitely some flaws in my brain, but they’re not overly bad, save for one. “Pilgrim” is fine, if entirely undercooked due to the way it was recorded; never ever record vocals first & then beat second, unless you’re Kendrick Lamar working with Pharrell Williams. It needed a rerecording & a lot more work. I think “Nadia” is a little too long; cutting it down to an essential 3 minutes would make that track pace itself way better. “Serpents” is… wholly unnecessary to the album. It’s the biggest glaring flaw here, and while it’s not an overly *horrible* track, I do think it’s a bad one, and it could have easily been cut. If you already weren’t enjoying the first 7 tracks of this album, it might be the breaking point to just give up on this album entirely. I’m very glad the first 7 tracks clicked as nicely as they did for me, because it really seems like it could be that bothersome.
“Anthem Without Nation” is an interesting case study in lyricism making or breaking an atmospheric song at times; Genius doesn’t have the lyrics, but Spotify does, and they’re very easy to translate if you Google them. Looking through the translation, it’s a very slow boiling anger relating to how indigenous peoples tend to get thrown away and ignored in favor of colonized history; it’s an anthem for those people who feel like they have no nation even though they’re the true natives of the land. Without a translation though, all of this is lost, and the track could easily feel like another 6-minute slog after “Serpents” took a swing at the vibe. I think it’s an admirable track, but musically it’s just far too slowly paced, and the building percussion creates a bigger sense of repetition. I would’ve done it with more traditional instrumentation, but perhaps the synthetic instrumentation is a metaphor for the “overtaking” of nations. I do like it from a storytelling perspective, but musically, it could just as easily have been cut, with “Immigrant” flowing into “Nostalgia” as a better 1-2 punch.
Oh, and uh, I guess “Nostalgia” is just a little repetitive. That’s my only thing on that one. The rest of the album flows great.
All of that aside, those are just things I would tweak about the album to give it stronger pacing for my tastes; at its core, this is still a very strong album, and a lot deeper & richer than I thought it would be at first glance. Hell, just look at that album cover. That album cover does not inspire confidence whatsoever. I’m very glad this is on the list, and even with a track like “Serpents” acting as a make or break battering ram for some people, I think the rest of this album is more than strong enough to earn a 5. It’s an album where you can draw a clear line between an active listener and someone treating this 1001 Albums project as just colorful noise to listen to. I really, really enjoyed it, and I’m very glad it’s on the list. Hence, the 5.
The War On Drugs
5/5
I’m at a 5; maybe a little higher.
This is a hard one to try and distill, because for the most part, I think you could get away with listening to this album with your eyes closed, just to catch the vibes & overall tone of it, and you’d still probably capture at least 70-80% of the essence of this thing. It’s an album where sound design tells most of the story, with the lyricism acting as texture to enhance and specify the mood, but not as something crucial, at least not until specific points in each of the songs. His Bob Dylan-y vocals add a bit as well, to portray some of the emotion, but you could just as easily blend it into the soundscape (and this album DOES do that a handful of times).
The 20 to 30% of this album where the lyricism feels more crucial (but again, not overly so) adds a lot of texture to my brain that just hammers the track home. Take a track like “An Ocean in Between the Waves”; it’s about losing sight of someone because of being buried down under a pile of stress, and being unable to fully recognize them because of it. It’s a little hard to parse from just listening, but I do think the instrumental provides so much of the necessary information to get there, and the lyricism is what hammers it down. The same applies to a track like “Eyes to the Wind”, where the lyricism expresses a sense of social dejection & self-inflicted loneliness, but the instrumental still tells so much of the story.
“Burning” is the point of the album where a sense of clarity is reached, and in many ways, it’s the climax point of the album, one where you could arguably just end it and have a satisfying 8-track narrative. The entire buildup, starting from “The Haunting Idle”, is REALLY well done, and once the tension releases itself, THAT’S the clarity point. Once again, the lyricism hammers home the track; it feels like being “released” from the clutches of this relationship has fully untethered him from some of his stress & tension. The clarity point hit for me as a listener too; while the framing of these songs have all made it seem like a relationship with a woman, it’s almost certainly been about his relationship with himself – his “release” here is an intentional choice to pick himself up and get past the demons in his life. The narrative is extremely obvious in retrospect, but it reframed so much of the album for me. The soundscape on this track, with the super triumphant tone, tells that story all the same, and they work hand-in-hand very nicely.
I *love* the choice to not end on “Burning”, though. The last two tracks are more of an epilogue based in introspection, and they cap off the album in a way that feels like well-needed therapy past the storm, to try and truly seal those inner demons away for good. The clarity that comes after “Burning” gives the last two tracks a bit more lyrical clarity as well, but they’re still very driven by their soundscapes.
“Lost in the Dream” is about self-love being a catalyst to open the windows to the soul, made specifically for the people who are most intimately in your life to see through. It’s done through the simple observance of a soldier lost in a daydream, and the curiosity of wanting to know his thoughts. It’s very lyrical, and it’s the most Bob Dylan-y song on the album, by far. However, there’s still something in the soundscape itself that aids the storytelling of the album. It’s that clarity popping up again. It’s just so much calmer. Even if you ignore the lyricism here, the difference from “Burning” to “Lost in the Dream” is still kinda striking from just an instrumental standpoint.
“In Reverse” is very Eno-y to start, and once it really drops, it reveals itself as a good blend of “Burning” & “Lost in the Dream” from an instrumental standpoint. Lyrically, while it’s a little hard to parse, there’s a simple framing that makes the entire track make sense: he’s still talking to himself. It’s his “darker” depressed self giving a sort of goodbye to his “brighter” happier self, as the darkness fades away, at least for now. That “war” in the first line is just the first 8 tracks. The vestiges of that “darker” soundscape fading out to end the album tells the story all the same, and it puts a great bow on the entire thing.
Of course, a lot of this is still interpretative, and I’ve sure made it sound like the lyrics give far more than they do, but I promise; this is an album where you can just listen and pick up on the overall mood swings, and that story from just the instrumentals & production alone is still extremely satisfying. To put it bluntly, I think you can get lost in the dream & still get most of this album. It’s a little artsy, perhaps, but it’s the type of artsy that’s right down my alley. I think it’s worth the acclaim, I think it’s worth being on the list, and I think it’s another example of the sort of stuff I missed out on in the 2010s. It’s a highly recommended album, and an easy 5 for me, if a little higher.
New York Dolls
5/5
How could you not fucking give that a 5?
Seriously, just go fucking listen to it. I don’t wanna type up a whole soliloquy about it; it’s 42 minutes of just incredibly fun proto-punk rock & roll that feels ahead of schedule for 1973, with great guitar work, really strong percussion, and a whole variety of instruments. Todd Rundgren did a hell of a job producing these guys to get the most of them & to capture the full energy of their sound & style, but consider me really fucking impressed by the New York Dolls themselves. These guys are innovators, and you can hear just about everyone they influenced (it's a LAUNDRY list on Wikipedia, seriously) at some point throughout this album.
It’s obviously a 5, and to give it anything less tells me you’re either a curmudgeonly fool or someone who’s been burned too many times by actually shitty 70s rock to not appreciate this for what it is. OK, fine, you can give it a 4 if you thought the overuse of the choruses was just too big of an issue or something. Either way, just loosen up and have fun with this thing – it flew by in a heartbeat, and I was rocking out the whole time. Easy, easy 5. Arguably a 10.
Michael Jackson
5/5
I’m obviously at a 5. I love this damn album, man.
It’s not 10 material like Thriller will almost certainly end up being, but I’m honestly just glad to finally get a damn MJ album here. This is Day 597 of the whole thing, and the odds of not getting a single one through the first 596 were about 9%. It was worth the wait; this album is as good as I remember it, and I caught a lot of new intricacies to it on this listen. It is harder for me to write about albums I’m far more intimately familiar with, since I’m gonna be biased as hell, so I’ll just say the obvious stuff that everyone else has written about: “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” is an all-time intro track that sets the tone for the whole album, “Rock with You” is arguably genre defining, “Off the Wall” is groovy as hell as a title track, “She’s Out of My Life” is a perfect ballad, the whole album is the last great record of the Disco era, and “did you know ‘Girlfriend’ is actually a Paul McCartney cover?”
OK, maybe people don’t really write the last part, but regardless, this is an album that’s been dissected to hell and back. There are video essays out there about nothing but the drum fill that starts “Rock with You”, so I don’t know if I can really add much with my own two cents to the galaxy of opinions & think pieces that exist about this album, and the opening catalyst for a run of albums that quickly turned Michael Jackson into the single most famous man in the known universe, after already becoming a superstar as big as the sun with his brothers.
So, why the 5 and not an all-timer super duper 10? For me, the album just loses some steam after “Off the Wall”, really. “Girlfriend” is fun, and I have a soft spot for it, but it sticks out here quite a bit, especially after the stellar run of the first 5 tracks. “I Can’t Help It” is great, but there is a sense of that Stevie Wonder repetition that comes in at the end that’s just a little hard to ignore. “It’s the Falling in Love” is a good track, but it’s one where I constantly forget it’s a part of the album, and while Michael’s vocals & the key change at the end bring it all together, it just feels off. “Burn This Disco Out” is a really underrated closing track; it’s super fun and it’s groovy as hell, but I can’t help but feel like the tempo could’ve been punched up a little bit to match the same energy as the first 5 tracks. Go to YouTube and set it to 1.10 speed, because I think it kind of proves my point.
Regardless, it’s obviously a 5. It’s a genre-defining album, and if someone wants to make a case for it as Michael’s best record, I’d be willing to hear them out. It’s probably his most impactful, in terms of starting the ascent of his career to the plateau that would be reached only 3 years later on Thriller. We’ll get there when we get there, and hopefully it won’t take too long to get there. Hell, hopefully we get it first, and not “Bad”, but I won’t mind either way.
P.S.: Since this is the first MJ album we've gotten, I'll acknowledge the elephant in the room. Yes, Michael Jackson was weird as hell around children in terribly awkward, uncomfortable & insensitive ways at best & a genuine serial sexual predator at worst, but for better or worse, his work as an artist is so monumentally crucial to both my own journey for truly enjoying music when I was younger & the entire landscape of the industry at large that I feel like I can separate the art from the artist in a historical sense. Does that say something about me? I dunno, probably. I just cannot see myself taking some of the most influential music of all time out of my diet, especially when I’ve been digesting it for at least 16 years. I know I’m not the only person still listening to his music even in light of what’s come out, and I see praise for the guy’s music nearly every day on social media, so I can only shrug. Extreme heavy side-eye to the “Michael did nothing wrong” crowd, though.
Stevie Wonder
5/5
It’s the greatest album of all time.
I knew it was going into it, and even with the last 597 albums I’ve listened to occasionally leaving me mesmerized beyond belief, it only took one more listen of this piece of art to remember that it is, indeed, the greatest album of all time.
The first time I heard this album in full was around 2013. My musical journey, in many ways, begins around that year. Sure, I’d heard music all my life, but I wanted to really, truly dive into it and finally figure out what my tastes were really aligned towards. I did that the way any absolute moron would at the age of 13: I made a Pandora account and let the radio station play, liking whatever I liked and disliking whatever I didn’t. I let the algorithm send me along, even back then. Obviously, that strategy’s a little loose, but I’d honestly recommend it; I think it’s much easier for a younger brain to digest individual tracks for a while, to let the seeds plant in and really figure out what constitutes “good” music to them. I figured out that I really liked pop music, but along the way, a lot of 70s & 80s stuff popped up. Obviously, this “Stevie Wonder” guy showed up eventually, and while I knew him by name as that blind guy who makes music, I think the chemicals in my brain fundamentally changed the second I heard “Sir Duke” for the first time.
“Sir Duke” is a perfect pop song. No ifs, ands or buts about it – if you want to study any singular track in history to figure out pop structure, you have to listen to “Sir Duke”. I’m fairly certain that was the catalyst for me to sit down and listen to “Songs in the Key of Life” for the first time, but not before getting through the vast discography of this other guy called Michael Jackson, of whom we happened to get “Off the Wall” from just yesterday. Unbelievable back to back pulls. Whenever I got around to “Just Good Friends” off of Bad, I figured I was in for a real treat by the time I’d loop around to Stevie.
So, after looping around, I chose to go straight into this one. Gotta tell you; maybe not the greatest move to have your first Stevie Wonder album be this one. I felt overwhelmed back then by the size & scope of it, and with my brain much more attuned to poppier stuff, I remember really getting into the first side of the album, but just feeling drained by the second half, since it all just felt so long. Michael’s stuff is usually snappy, constantly hitting you musically, and while this album occasionally did that, its artistry was lost on me, due to a general lack of just worldly experience & a brain not ready for it. I still liked a lot of the album, but I don’t think I truly got it.
Fast forward to… I want to say 2017 – I’m not sure exactly why I wanted to listen to the album again, but with a LOT more experience with music (especially with more of Stevie’s singles prior to this album) & a bit more worldly experience to pull from, I fucking got it. Everything about the first side of the album clicked in full, from an instrumental, vocal & lyrical standpoint, and I felt HOOKED to it. And yet, for whatever reason, a lot of the second side still didn’t click with me as easily. I’ve checked my playlist on this; the only songs I had from the second side were “Isn’t She Lovely”, “As”, & “Saturn”, with “Another Star” not getting added until *2023*, BY ITSELF, without the rest of the second half in tow. I’m guessing I heard it from Spotify’s radio feature and added it to a playlist, but I can’t believe I left so much of the second side untouched until now. What the hell was wrong with me, man?
So, that brings us here. August 20th, 2025, with 597 albums done in this project, a UNIVERSE of musical influence brought into my stratosphere that’s expanded my tastes to the fullest point they’ve ever been, and another crack at an album that I had already proclaimed, on several occasions, to be the greatest album of all time from the greatest recording artist of all time. I made a post on social media years ago saying it’s an album that needed to be taught in schools. I stand by that, by the way. Trust me, I got through the first half the same as I always did, with a newfound appreciation for the second half of “Ordinary Pain”, which I had always been a little bit iffy on, and “Isn’t She Lovely” was as lovely as it’s always been.
I have no earthly idea how I managed to ever bounce off of the stretch from “Joy Inside My Tears” to “If It’s Magic”. Sure, you could call it a little long, but I got deeply lost in the rhythm of “Joy Inside My Tears” in a way that felt like listening to “Hot Buttered Soul”. “Black Man” feels so culturally relevant with the 250th coming up, and with so much more history in my brain, the references finally clicked on this track, making the whole thing feel so much more fulfilling. Because of all the worldly albums we’ve been getting, the samba grooves of “Ngiculela - Es Una Historia - I Am Singing” felt far more grand to me than before. “If It’s Magic” has such lovely lyrics & one of the prettiest harps I’ve ever heard, and the way it thematically links to “As” is something I’ve never appreciated until this listen. I finally appreciate “Another Star” within the context of the album, and how it just blasts that fucking Latin disco groove for its final 4 minutes in a way that feels utterly infectious… ugh. What a bow on the album, if you choose to end it there.
However, I do think this album would be incomplete without the “A Something’s Extra” part. I fucking adore “Saturn” – one of my favorite Stevie Wonder tracks of all time, and arguably more relevant than ever. I had entirely forgotten about the next two tracks though. “Ebony Eyes” is groovy as hell, with a lot of Beatles-y DNA, and it feels like a leftover Innervisions-era cut because of the talkbox being used. “All Day Sucker” is a really good track; it feels like one of Stevie’s ‘80s tracks (specifically the style he would take by “In Square Circle”), due to the bass & synth work. Ironically, a lot of the DNA of that track feels like it was used for “Just Good Friends”, so maybe Michael REALLY liked that one. I did remember the overall harmonica-driven lo-fi tone of “Easy Goin' Evening (My Mama's Call)”, but hearing it as the true album closer here… man, it just evoked a whole world of imagery to my brain that my 13-year-old self would’ve never once come up with. It is a perfect way to end an album titled “Songs in the Key of Life”. Life is tiring & exhausting, as Stevie’s been singing about the whole time. Sometimes, you really appreciate it in the moments where you can just sit there and soak it all in. That’s what the track is trying to represent, and it clicked beautifully this time.
So, yes, my 12-year odyssey with this album finally feels complete, and I can indeed confirm it’s the greatest album of all time. I can’t possibly put a number to it; obviously, it’s a 5 for the site, but in terms of a rating… you can’t rate this. You can only sit back, listen, and get lost in it. I still think it can be taught in schools, the same way we teach books, and if we all took the lessons of this album to heart, we’d be living in the utopia that Stevie seemed so hopeful we could achieve at the age of 26. Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention: he was *26* here. He wrote the greatest album of all time, as a culmination to an already incredible stretch of albums that could singularly define anyone’s career by themselves, at the age of *26*. Unbelievable. Even with his output slowing down by the ‘90s, I really think there’s a case to be made for Stevie Wonder to be the GOAT. It’s been 20 years since his last album, and while he’s still performing, I feel like he can give us at least one more album. We need his insight now more than ever. As far as this goes, we are coming up on the 50th anniversary of this album next year, and I can only hope it receives a rose parade’s worth of flowers when the time calls for it. It’s a masterpiece, and to my ears, the pinnacle of an entire art form.
I cannot wait for our next album to be just the worst thing ever. Or, hell, I dunno, maybe we’ll get Thriller & I can write another essay’s worth of words.
Caetano Veloso
4/5
I’m at a 4.
I mean… yeah, that sure sounds like Brazilian music after “cannibalizing” a bunch of genres for itself. AKA, “American-izing” it. It’s just a 60s rock album with a Brazilian flair, and as such, I don’t really know how to rate it other than “I had a pretty good time listening to it.” This album’s never bad, just occasionally a little flat in a way that didn’t make me move or groove as much as the majority of the album did, hence the 4 as opposed to a 5. It’s a fun listen, and a breezy 34 minutes. His vocals are smooth, and the Portuguese language sometimes lends itself to getting him into a slightly rap-adjacent flow state that’s groovy.
Only two tracks really fell THAT flat for me (including the closer, sadly), but even then, they’ve still got groovy moments within. As a whole, this is a pretty good album. I’m not sure that it’s one I had to listen to before I died, but I didn’t mind listening to it. It should have a higher average than 2.85, that’s for sure. The floor for this is a 3, and if you didn’t bop your head at least once, I think that speaks a little more about you than the music does. I like it enough to give it a 4, and maybe it’d be a 5 if I got really into the groove on these tracks another day. It’s certainly got the potential. It might be the shadow of “Songs in the Key of Life” looming over this one, I dunno.
Eminem
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’m bumping up to a 5, simply because of my past history with this album & because I think the dichotomy between “Slim” & “Marshall” on this album is incredibly fascinating.
I heard this for the first time in like, 2013 or 2014, and I appreciated it as a sort of "pinnacle" to Dr. Dre’s production style back then, without really gathering the lyricism to the degree I was able to on this listen. Eminem’s frustrations about the media & politicians misinterpreting his intent with the Slim Shady LP throughout this album, especially on the issue of Columbine, are honestly really valid. It does come across as a little bit “woe is me” at times, as well as a little bit of an overcorrection at points to turn up the most controversial parts of Slim Shady in ways that TRULY have aged badly, even by the character’s standards. There are some horrid lines here, especially apparent from Bizarre’s guest verse on “Amityville”. When this album is rolling though, it’s an undeniably good rap album with Eminem flowing like water, even with the instrumentation & production work coming across as a lot more dry / simplistic than I remembered it being.
I already gave my two cents on the character of Slim Shady from when we got “The Slim Shady LP” in June – he’s a psychopathic misogynistic bully, a pathological liar, and just a slimy little shitbag asshole who you’d never really want to give the time of day to. This album explores what happens when THAT guy gets the eyes of the world upon him, newfound overnight fame, and how to cope with that. And honestly, as far as Slim goes… he handles it pretty well here, on the tracks where “Slim” takes the lead. Yeah, he’s pissed off, grumpy, wants to be left alone & all that, but with all the public pressure, he doesn’t go to anything too extreme. Hell, he embraces the fact that the world sees him as a shitbag that’s inspired some of the other little shitbags of the world to be themselves so proudly, whilst wholly denouncing the worst elements that come with that pride. It’s not a redemption arc for Slim as much as it is him finding his people & acknowledging that a community, even in its own fucked up way, can be a positive.
It’s the tracks that involve “Marshall” here (who definitely blurs the line between himself and the real Eminem) that are the most striking to me. He blends in pretty well with Slim, so much so that I think it’s hard to really figure out who's got what track at times. The big hint is that Slim always announces himself to the world, because he’s too much of an attention hog to not do it. Whenever he doesn’t, you’re dealing with Marshall, who’s slowly battered and beaten down throughout the album. “Stan” (all-timer track) is definitely Marshall; he’s empathetic towards Stan’s situation, and he’s just shocked that people would take the Slim Shady LP as seriously as they did. That shock becomes more of a total frustration by “Who Knew”, with him being blamed for everything under the sun, including Columbine, which is utterly ridiculous if you really think about it. His frustrations on that track boil over to “The Way I Am” (all-timer track, by the way), where he fully lets loose and just accepts the blame, leaning into it and letting the stress wash over him like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
That self-fulfilling prophecy comes back to bite him by “Marshall Mathers”, where he’s fed up by the media attention that comes with accepting the blame, all the beefs that come with it, and all of the family stress & consequences as a result of the fame hitting a boiling point. You go from there to “Drug Ballad”, which has all the makings of a Slim Shady track in terms of the humor & style, but… he never shows up. This is Marshall getting horribly, horribly drunk, causing a car wreck & getting deep into alcohol to a toxic degree. You see where this is going? Yeah, it’s a buildup to “Kim.” “Kim” is tremendously visceral; the sound design is striking, Eminem’s performance is arguably Oscar-worthy, and it’s one of the most uncomfortable, spine-chilling tracks ever put to tape. It’s torture porn, in a way, but it’s the culmination of the stress, alcohol & drugs wrought upon Marshall through the album, acting as a realization of “‘97 Bonnie & Clyde” come to life. It is the end of Marshall’s tracks on the album, since “Under the Influence” & “Criminal” are both Slim.
Now, did Eminem realize he had accidentally made a Greek tragedy while writing this shit? No, probably not. Does my writing fall apart a bit when you realize “Amityville” is probably also Marshall under my rules? Yeah, maybe. Does this Dr. Jekyll / Mr. Hyde-esque “story” enhance MY enjoyment of the album all the same? Absolutely. I think it’s enough for me to get past some of the more minimal aspects of the production that feel less “enjoyable”, some of the more harsh lyrics as a man under extreme pressure saying things purely out of stress & anger, and it reframes the album in a way that feels far more narratively fulfilling as a front to back project. At the very worst, I think this album is a 3, especially if its length & partial bloat are a big enough issue. I think it’s a 4.5 on account of what I said above, but I feel pretty safe bumping this up to a 5. It’s a more fleshed out album than the Slim Shady LP was, and while it’s arguably not as “fun”, it gave Eminem the street cred to prove he would be far more than a one-album wonder. Pretty good stuff.
The Temptations
4/5
I’m at a 4; maybe more of a 3.5 bumped up to a 4, but still.
There’s not a bad track here, and I did enjoy the album, but while I was listening to this, something just felt a little bit off, and I couldn’t exactly place what it was. Trust me, I don’t think it’s any remnants of “Songs in the Key of Life” making me hyper-nitpicky or anything, but I can get a general sense of when something feels off in an album. It finally clicked by “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” – for lack of better verbiage, I think this album is not as “effortlessly smooth” as it presents itself. When you listen to an album like “Hot Buttered Soul”, it’s effortlessly smooth, and you can actively feel it, hitting a zen state without even really trying. While I was listening to this, even though all of the technical aspects to the production are correct, I found myself struggling to hit the sort of zen state each track was trying to induce.
That’s sort of where I’m at for the whole 34 minute runtime; I think this album tries to glide upon “vibes” alone to a degree, but the instrumentation isn’t quite as fulfilling & rich as it needs to be to get there, and the vocals aren’t as clear to be able to fully subconsciously get there. When the “vibes” require a little extra focus, something doesn’t feel quite right, and I never felt like I truly hit the full zen state while listening to the album. Even from the very top of the album, with the pseudo-live recording of “Funky Music Sho Nuff Turns Me On”, the muddled mix makes the energy feel a little off. Sure, the “crowd” is having fun, but the energy is not as infectious as it wants to be.
Notice, however, that I said the “full” zen state; this album is still strong enough in terms of carrying a mood & an energy that a sort of zen state is achievable. It’s just not as fulfilling as it wants to be, at least to my ears. Part of that is just the structures & progression on a lot of the tracks not feeling as apparent or satisfying as they could be. “Do Your Thing” might be the prime example for me here; it’s a track trying to glide on the vibes, but 2:30 in is where the outro starts, and there’s just no real indication of it whatsoever. The fadeout to mark the end just sort of sidles in, without the instrumentation & vocal energy really acknowledging it. It makes the ending of the album feel flat.
That’s not to say it ruins all of the tracks or anything; “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” is still great in spite of the length & the tension from the instrumental never fully having a payoff, and the vast majority of the tracks still overcome the struggle of not being as “effortlessly smooth” on account of being shorter, snappier & still ultimately being nice to listen to.
All of this is vast preamble to say that I think the production needed a little more time to cook so that these tracks COULD hit their highest potential, because it’s all there. Hell, I wouldn’t be at a 4 if I didn’t think they hit some of that potential. It’s also entirely possible that I was just in the wrong frame of mind for this, caught slightly off guard by the more orchestral tone of the album, clearly inspired by what Isaac Hayes & others were doing. Regardless, it’s a solid, solid album, and even the Temptations on a slightly off day are still the sort of soul / R&B music that my tastes are aligned to, hence a 4, albeit a slightly shaky 4.
Wire
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Just a ball of energy really; not as consistently manic as some of the other fastpaced, rapidfire albums we’ve gotten, but it is as consistently good throughout the whole thing. It’s another strong example of an album where “every song sounds the same” is used to an advantage – granted, not EVERY song sounds the same, and there’s just enough variety to not feel super pigeonholed into a style. It is, at its core though, post-punk with a slightly faster BPM, and the pacing of this album lends itself to one where you don’t have a lot of room to breathe, in a good way. Because so many of these are shorter tracks, even for the tracks that might feel just a bit stale by comparison to others, it’s not really felt since you’re just onto the next one immediately.
Lyrically, I don’t think there’s many tracks that actually really care to tell a story; hell, there’s a track on here where they just challenged themselves to write a song with 100 syllables, so when they sort of threw the lyrics out and just used it as a path for a vocal structure, then I threw them out too. I like the vocals here; a little bit flatter or more nasally at times, but it fits with the tone of the album, and they’re not bad at all. There’s some catchy structures too, and for tracks this short, I’m surprised at how earworm-y some of these get in the moment.
Is 35 minutes and 21 tracks too long here? Maybe a little bit, but I don’t think it actively subtracts from the album at all. At worst, the minor bloat makes the more mediocre ones stick out a bit more, but like I said, they just fly by. Honestly, for 1977, I think the overall style of these tracks feels just a little ahead of pace, with a few tracks feeling much more like the early 2000s rock bands who would kind of bite this tone. I had a lot of fun with it, and for my tastes, I feel pretty safe giving this a 5. At worst, a 3 if the pacing / tone of these tracks bounces off of you that badly.
Adele
5/5
I’m at a 5.
It’s not the timeless record “21” was & still is, but I don’t think it was trying to be. This is a much safer affair that leans into a lot of the pop production tricks that had emerged since “21”, relying on an all-star cast of producers that include everyone from Max Martin to Danger Mouse to Bruno Mars, as well as a good chunk of the cast that helped her out on “21”. Does that mean this is Adele’s “sell-out” album or anything? Absolutely not; I found this to be a super enjoyable listen, retaining a lot of the DNA from “21”, just without the same timeless ballad-y tone.
That lack of a “timeless” tone led me to think that I knew next to nothing about this album, save for “Hello”, and in many ways, I really didn’t. That said, I had a couple of moments where I hit my “oh, this is that song” epiphany – “Send My Love (To Your New Lover)” got me immediately, especially so by the chorus. I’ve genuinely always thought that was a Lorde track, and I don’t think I can be blamed for that; the entire instrumental structure feels super similar to “Royals”. The same thing hit me later in the album with “Water Under the Bridge”, but only by the chorus.
So, how about the rest of the album? I enjoyed the whole thing, honestly. It definitely plays itself safer & a bit more sterile, but mileage will vary based on how much you appreciate the slightly overproduced style of the mid-2010s, and for better or worse, I’m a total sucker for it. “I Miss You” feels like an Imagine Dragons track, in a good way. When I was listening, I wrote down that “this is far ‘sexier’ than I’m used to from Adele”, and I think that added sense of confidence permeates throughout the album nicely. “When We Were Young” is just an Elton John track & it’s impossible to not hear it; “you look like a movie, you sound like a song” is a line that feels like it’s ripped straight from his songbook.
“Remedy” is pretty good as a ballad to her son, but I think it reveals one of my softer issues with this album; a few of these tracks feel like Adele singing songs that could be covered by other artists without missing too much of a beat. That’s what splits a timeless record from a very good one; “21”’s strength comes in the fact that it’s nigh-impossible to hear anyone but Adele singing a lot of those tracks, a la Aretha Franklin with the albums we’ve gotten from her so far. “Remedy” is a track that sounds like Kelly Clarkson or Rihanna could sing it, and it would keep a lot of the same emotional impact. That’s a mark of really great songwriting, so it’s not too much of an issue, but it does make this album stand out less.
“River Lea” goes back to the sort of Imagine Dragons-core with its instrumental, but Danger Mouse makes it work. The lyricism is super strong & it feels like the sort of track where you can’t hear anyone but Adele singing it due to the lyrics. The same applies to “Love in the Dark”, which feels the most like a track from “21”, and it shows. The orchestral overtones give it some great gravitas, and her vocals flow on that thing. I really like the intimacy of “Million Years Ago”; her vocals channel Mariah Carey a little bit, it’s very well-written, and the guitar-driven approach worked for me a lot.
“All I Ask” & “Sweetest Devotion” are a hell of a 1-2 punch to close the album out on; Bruno Mars is one of my favorite artists ever, and his fingerprints are all over the former. Granted, it does sound like Adele’s doing her best to just match Bruno’s likely demo recording of it, but the man can write a damn good ballad, and the key change at the end of that track really pulls it all together. I wish it had been a duet, honestly. “Sweetest Devotion” just rules; the percussion & electric guitar really make the track pop as a closer, and Adele’s vocals carry a lot of strength that makes the lyricism (devoted to her son) hit even harder. It’s kind of structured like a Coldplay track, which is a net positive for me.
So, yes, I still *really* enjoyed this. I have no idea how a number of these tracks missed me a decade ago, especially given that this is the second-best selling album of the 2010s (behind, you guessed it, “21”) & the fourth-best selling album of the century so far. In particular, I have no idea how I missed “All I Ask”, since I was huge on Bruno at the time, & “When We Were Young”, which is probably my favorite one here. Even though I’m late to the party, it’s better late than never. I do think this will bounce off of people more easily than “21”, since it’s far more poppy & a little more sterile by comparison; even if that’s the case, I think the floor here is a 3, since there aren’t any bad tracks & Adele’s voice is still magical on a lot of these. It’s not a 10 to my ears, but it’s certainly an easy 5.
Dinosaur Jr.
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’m going to just bump up to a 5 on account of just how fascinating “Poledo” is as an album closer.
The Wikipedia page for this album made it pretty apparent this would cover a whole slew of subgenres of rock & grunge (especially shoegaze), and for 1987, this thing feels like an incredibly strong preview of the trends that would make up the early 90s. When people talk about “80s songs that sound like 90s songs”, they need to point to this album immediately. I love the way this whole thing sounds, although there is the pretty obvious elephant in the room to address, and it’s why I’m at a 4.5 that I very nearly bumped down to a 4.
This thing does way too much on two specific tracks: the opening/closing guitar of “Little Fury Things”, which is a great opener otherwise, and the ending of “Tarpit”, which feels like a fucking tornado hit the studio and they just happened to be recording. Tarpit is a good track too; it feels the most like a mid-90s grunge track for almost all of its runtime, and then the last minute just decides to make your ears feel some kind of torture. It’s harsh, it’s abrasive, and it rivals that one part from the final 2 minutes of “Seasick” off of “Penance Soiree” in terms of absolutely dreadful noise to fill your ears with. However, because it’s shorter and fades itself in, almost working hand-in-hand with the melting vocals, I think it’s not as bad. It’s just a bit overtweaked.
When this thing isn’t too loud for my tastes, it’s REALLY good, especially once the album hits a peak by the 1-2 punch of “The Lung” & “Raisans”, which I think have infectious energy that you can only really feel while listening to it. So much of this album fits within the DNA of R.E.M.’s style, but with the extra kick & edge that would make grunge more prevalent by the early 90s. I’m not saying our lead vocalist here is Michael Stipe or anything; he’s very shaky at points, occasionally a little off-beat, and not as confident as he could be, but he gets the job done, and usually sounds pretty solid all the same. Since the instrumentation is the star here, his vocals are just texture work, and it’s a fine texture at worst, and a pretty damn good one at best.
So, what’s the hype about “Poledo” that bumps this up to a 5 for me? It’s just a fascinating track for 1987 in terms of the overall sound design. The sudden static & harsher tones that interrupt the track evoke a genuine sense of unsettling eeriness. I’ve never been jumpscared by an album like that before, I think. It feels totally cinematic in a way that hasn’t been captured by any of the previous 603 albums we’ve gotten so far, and it’s just so thematically different from the rest of the album that I can’t help but admire it. It feels like a fucking creepypasta, in the best way, down to the abrupt cutoff at the end.
It’s enough to bump the whole album up to a 5 for me; just *barely*, mind you, but there’s truly no bad tracks here to my ears, just some overly harsh parts that drag the experience down a bit. I think it’s a hell of a preview for 1987, and when I was really in the groove with the album, I felt the same sort of “in sync zen state” feeling I had with bands like Nirvana, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, and more, though not as potently throughout the whole thing. Regardless, I think it’s worth the bump up, and even if I didn’t bump it, I’d still highly recommend it as a progenitor to all the rock trends of the 90s, and just a fun time once you get past its harshest moments. I’m glad it’s on the list, and I enjoyed it a lot. A thumbs up from me, and a 4.5 bumped up to a 5.
Amy Winehouse
5/5
I’m at a 5.
My initial reaction upon seeing this pop up was just some surprise that this album was here – I figured “Back to Black” would cover the bases pretty well in terms of Amy Winehouse & her style, and going back to her debut might just retread the bases a bit. After all, she IS just a jazzy singer evoking the 50s & 60s with more modernized production, right?
Go ahead and slap me across the face for that one – we’ve got a fucking R&B album here clearly inspired by the Lauryn Hills & Erykah Badus of the world. This thing could not be farther from old Frank Sinatra, cited often as the inspiration for the album title. Amy Winehouse is NOT just a jazzy singer evoking the 50s & 60s like that; she’s inspired that way vocally, sure, and that inspiration comes through a number of times on the album, but production-wise? This is just a slightly updated take on 1996 through 1998 in the black R&B / girl group scene, with some of that 50s/60s flair, though used more so as an additive to enhance the 90s production, in a way that probably felt fresh (if slightly dated) for 2003 and feels oddly modern in 2025.
Lyrically, I really like this album; there’s a full spectrum of ideas on display here in terms of how to portray femininity, and while some of it hasn’t aged as well (specifically the gender dynamics at play on “Stronger Than Me”), I think a lot of this album is fully fair to Amy’s experiences up to this point in her 19 (19!!) year-old life. Some of this album is flirtier, especially on stuff like “You Sent Me Flying” or “Amy Amy Amy”, some of this is sadder, like “Take the Box” or “October Song”, but I find most of this album to just be confident, in a way that’s not really revolutionary, but just openly welcomed for 2003.
Take a track like “Fuck Me Pumps”, celebrating *those* types of people who show up at the clubs, framing it in a way that’s not necessarily shaming anybody, and instead just putting their style to power, even admitting it wouldn’t be as fun without them. The flipside is sort of true on “I Heard Love is Blind”, which is a track that takes flimsy excuses for cheating to a comical level, yet still portraying it with a sort of klutzy confidence that you can’t help but admire the audacity of, especially since the track is played for laughs. This album runs through a spectrum of confidence, both in its flirtier & defiant ways, and Amy Winehouse portrays the confidence through her vocals incredibly well. Obviously, her vocals are the star of the show here; even at 19, she’s belting these out, and her voice would only get even stronger by Back to Black. I can’t complement them enough.
Really, I’m just immensely surprised that this album feels so evocative of something like “Miseducation”, without all of the spiritual elements behind it. “Back to Black” only painted a corner of a picture of Amy Winehouse for me that I simply boxed her into, and that’s entirely my fault. This is an album that aligns with my musical sensibilities so, so much, and to hear Amy Winehouse doing it THIS well is a welcome surprise, and an awesome find for me. I think it’s a breezy 53 minutes (45 if you choose not to listen to the bonus tracks, which are both really good), and I’m just kicking myself for questioning this thing’s presence on the list to begin with. It isn’t as good as “Back to Black”, but that’s designed to be a timeless record due to its style. I think it’s just as enjoyable at its best points, and overall, you can’t go wrong here. This is a 5, and an easy one at that. At worst, a 3 if you really fucking hate R&B.
P.S.: "In My Bed" is insanely good. Standout of the album for me.
Dion
4/5
I’m at a 4.
There’s an immediately striking line on the Wikipedia page for this album: “On its completion in 1974, Dion effectively disowned the record, stating that the production made it sound like ‘funeral music’.” I think he’s got a point, although I do think it’s a little bit hyperbolic & carries a far more negative connotation that I got out of listening to this. Yes, this is a Phil Spector disasterclass at times, but I only found 3 of the tracks here to truly suffer from the wall of sound effect: the opener, “Born to Be with You”, “(He's Got) The Whole World in His Hands” & the closer, “Good Lovin' Man”. Even with the wall of sound bearing itself down on these tracks in a way that feels far too noticeable, they each have their own little issues.
“Born to Be With You” has all the potential in the world, but it just comes across as utterly plain. For as much as it tries to do, the production really holds it back. To my ears, it’s too long for what it is, spinning the wheels to a 7 minute runtime that doesn’t feel as satisfying as it could be. Past that, the instrumentation isn’t consistently rich enough to evoke the vibe it’s going for, even though Dion’s vocals meet the mark. It’s not his fault at all. It’s never really his fault at any point on this album; his vocals are STRONG, and often overcome some of the bad production choices to still make a good chunk of these tracks really nice.
“(He's Got) The Whole World in His Hands” is simply caked in reverb, to a point where it’s obnoxious. I like the vibe of the track, but I see exactly where Dion would call this thing “funeral music” – it’s got a weirdly ethereal vibe due to the reverb, but not in a wholly spiritual way like I’m sure Phil Spector may have intended. It just comes across as nearly culty. With a better producer in tow here, I think this track has just as much potential, but there’s just too much meddling involved.
“Good Lovin' Man” is honestly a fun track, and I like the 50s throwback style a lot here, but it’s just so overblown with the wall of sound that everything feels muddled, down to the backing choirs & instrumentation & even a good chunk of Dion’s higher registers. Under the hands of a better producer, this could be a super fun way to end the album, but with Phil’s hands on this thing, it just feels off.
As far as the other 5 tracks go (“Make the Woman Love Me”, “Your Own Back Yard”, “Only You Know”, “New York City Song”, & “In and Out of the Shadows”), I like them all a lot. Phil Spector takes a playbook out of how Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” uses a more subtle wall of sound (just go listen to the pre-chorus, you’ll hear what I mean), and it’s used to really strong effect. Honestly, a lot of those tracks feel very Elton-y, which is probably why I liked them. Granted, “In and Out of the Shadows” is HEAVY on the wall of sound, but since it blends much more with Dion’s more powerful vocals, the whole thing has a bombastic feel that makes it all work. “Only You Know” is probably my favorite one here; great lyricism about encouraging a friend, the instrumentation & vocals come through really nicely due to the more subtle wall of sound, and the percussion has some great highlights.
As a whole then, even if batting 5 out of 8 would only be a 62.5% on the grading scale, I do think the 3 tracks that got hit by the wall of sound in a bad way are still honestly not THAT bad, and they have their moments. They’re just ruined by Phil Spector – not the only thing he’d murder in the next 30 years. It’s a shame this is the only Dion album on the list, because I LOVE the tone of his voice, and he seems like someone I’d really enjoy. I’ll have to hunt down some more of his stuff. As far as this album goes, I feel fine with a 4. The best tracks here are REALLY strong to my ears, and since it’s only 35 minutes, none of the affected tracks bring down the album that badly. I do think the 2.62 average is far too low, and it may be just an overreaction to the first track plodding along the way it does. Did it need to be on the list? I dunno, maybe. I enjoyed it though, so that works for me.
Joan Armatrading
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Well, that didn’t sound like 1976 at all to me. That sounded like at least 1986, if not a little further. Immediately, as with a lot of other people, the mind goes to Tracy Chapman, but these aren’t really Tracy Chapman tracks. Yes, vocally, they’re pretty similar, but Joan Armatrading blends the sort of spoken, conscious style of Tracy Chapman’s scattered & scatty vocals with the flair and twang of an Elton John. Lyrically, these are “conscious” tracks, sure, but conscious in the frame of love as opposed to societal stuff. I don’t think there are many tracks here that portray that kind of idealized love that other singers might croon about (“Love and Affection” & “Like Fire” come to mind), but instead, a lot of mildly flawed (yet fair / fun) scenarios for it.
I mean, hell, the album starts on “Down to Zero”, which is basically about a guy who’s utterly humbled after getting broken up with, and having to crawl back to the person that he already had it best with beforehand. “Water with the Wine” is just a good night after a very drunken bar trip, with a lesson to not go too crazy out there. “Save Me” is an interesting twist on the first track, with someone basically drowning in her own sorrow & needing someone to save her… but he just won’t do it. “Somebody Who Loves You” is basically begging someone to admit to cheating so she can come up with an excuse to forgive him & take the heat, but he just won’t do it.
I’m harping on the lyrics a bit because I think they add to the album, but the big secret is that they are ENTIRELY unnecessary. Joan Armatrading’s vocal style is lovely, and her passion comes through on a lot of these tracks. The other star of the show is the instrumentation, and it’s where this album shined brightest for me. Everything from the guitar, percussion, keyboard, piano, the steel guitar, the sax, and so on just fits perfectly. Beyond that, the way this album is mixed & composed evokes a sense of being far beyond its years. I can’t recall a track where I could specifically say “yeah, this one sounds like 1976 to me.” Honestly, I think Hootie & The Blowfish is my closest comparison in terms of an overall groove, but as a whole, it just feels like a ‘90s album that came to fruition very early. It’s hard to describe without listening to the album, and if you’re somehow reading this without having listened to it, just go fucking do it.
I really think the music speaks for itself far more than I can here; it’s a 41 minute delight. A few tracks go a little long & spin the wheels in a way that feels like padding, but the grooves & her voice are both so infectious that you’ll never care about it in the moment. I’m very glad this is on the list – when I saw she was a singer-songwriter with a folk & pop lean, I simply hoped it would be interesting enough to warrant being on the list, and it was in spades. This is an excellent find, and a very strong 5 to my ears.
P.S.: The final 2 minutes of “Tall in the Saddle” are fucking awesome.
Erykah Badu
5/5
I’m at a 10, even with one mild flaw to the album in my mind.
Much like Janelle Monae back in March, Erykah Badu is one of those R&B artists that’s just escaped me, for almost no reason at all. I’ve definitely heard her before, since she’s done a number of features over the years, but this is my first full Erykah Badu album. It’s the only one on the list, and it’s one hell of a pick – I fucking loved this.
It’s hard not to point to “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” at some point while listening to this, but I think that does both albums a disservice. Erykah Badu is not Lauryn Hill, and while their musical sensibilities & production styles might be similar, these albums aren’t going for the same thing. “Miseducation” is a hip-hop / rap album first & foremost, with Lauryn’s singing abilities constantly used to enhance the hip-hop base each track is built on to elevate it to a higher level. This album leans far more into the 70s Stevie Wonder-esque style of R&B and soul music, with Erykah’s rapping abilities occasionally used to enhance the R&B base of each track. This is a *soul* album first & foremost, and that’s a big enough distinction that it places each album distinctly separately from each other, no matter how intertwined they might feel.
So, with all that preamble, how effective is Erykah Badu as a soul singer? Words can’t describe it; you simply have to hear her voice. Yes, sometimes she leans into a sort of Lenny Kravitz-y nasally tone, but it never once brings a track down. When she’s at her finest on this album, she’s evoking the past brilliantly, especially so on “Orange Moon”, which might be one of the most beautiful tracks I’ve ever heard in my life. Her voice blends so well into the instrumentals on this album, working hand-in-hand in a way where it all melts together into a harmony that’s hard to describe but impossible not to feel in the moment. Instrumentally, I adore the production here all the same; this does lean heavily into a “modernized” version of Stevie Wonder’s ‘70s work, combined with some of the overproduction flair that had come to pass in the “quiet storm” era of R&B throughout the 90s. That flair is simplified though, taking the best of its emotional pull while giving it a jazzier & funkier tone to create the grooves that make this album glide.
There’s no better example of this than the 5 tracks that start the album; “Penitentiary Philosophy” is an incredible opener, down to the melodic interpolation of “Ordinary Pain”, the swirling instrumental & the much-needed cooldown of the final minute. “Didn’t Cha Know” has a beat that’s smooth as silk, and J. Dilla’s production work does wonders. The back-to-back-to-back punch of “My Life”, “...& On”, and “Cleva”, all flowing into each other, with one long lingering theme of living your life with a self-confidence that’s too undeniable for people to bring you down, is a highlight of the album for me. Those first 5 tracks set the tone, and they act as such a strong start to the whole album that I fully bought in the rest of the way.
This album’s tracks get longer and longer, so mileage will certainly vary about how willing you are to buy into what this album is selling. Since I’m already accustomed to the sort of Stevie Wonder-esque “bloat” this album has, it was never that big of a deal for me. It is crazy to acknowledge that the final 3 tracks here are longer than the first 5 though; it’s something I felt vaguely aware of while listening, but since I was already DEEP into the groove, it’s not something that affected my experience with the album. However, those final 3 tracks are where my one flaw with this album lies. It’s the track order; very specifically, I think “Green Eyes” & “Time’s a Wastin’” should’ve been flipped.
Within the normal context of the album, “Time’s a Wastin’” feels unnecessary; I think the lyricism is just a little broad to really send a message like she wants to, singing in broader platitudes as opposed to a more focused message like Stevie or others would’ve given. Because the lyrics are so broad, I don’t think they justify the 6 minute runtime; it’s a smooth instrumental, and her vocals glide when they do, but for what it’s actually saying, it’s not saying that much. Overall, I think it’s a bit of a momentum stopper right before the big finish. However, if it had come directly after “Green Eyes”, which is all about a sort of “relapsing” journey based around truly getting over an ex (maybe Andre 3000?), I think its broader messaging would be fine given the specificity of “Green Eyes” as an example of how to stop drifting along in life, and it would feel far more digestible.
There’s lot more I didn’t touch on, like the fun dichotomy of “Booty” & “Kiss Me on My Neck” in terms of subject matter, the backstory behind “A.D. 2000” and my own personal frustration that we’ve moved nowhere in terms of police brutality & racial profiling, the deeper beauty of “Orange Moon” and how I think it’s a ballad to her son (genuinely an all-timer), the slightly long (but fun!) minimalist reggae vibes of “In Love with You”, or the absolute groove of “Bag Lady”, but those are all things that need to be heard once you’re in a full flow state with this album.
If you can’t hit that flow state, you won’t be able to digest this as fully as I did, but I think it’s very achievable. Lyrically, these are about as simple as you can get, hitting you over the head with their meaning. Even if you can’t get into the lyrics, the grooves & her voice are so damn smooth that you can feel each track without a second thought. As a whole, even with my one flaw, I think this stands up as a pinnacle of the neo-soul genre, and I’m once again blown away both by my own stupidity at ignoring someone, and at just how damn good they ended up being for my tastes. It’s a 10. A great, great album.
I gotta listen to Megadeth after this? Talk about a tone shift, jeez.
Megadeth
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Just a pure ball of energy, once again. I wish I could type more, but that’s an album you’re meant to feel as opposed to just sitting down and listening to it. Pop headphones in, move your head around, stomp your feet, do the whole song & dance and let Dave Mustaine and friends pull you into their demonic little world full of guitar songs & percussion that would make a pilgrim proclaim witchcraft off their skills alone, not even considering the lyrics.
Seriously, I got nothing. We’ve done this song & dance with heavy metal enough times now. If you can’t feel those tracks, it’s gonna be a 3 at most. If you can feel them, it’s an easy 5, without question. I enjoyed the hell out of that, and I’m ready for the other Megadeth album on the list.
Korn
3/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump down to a 3, though I did honestly enjoy a solid chunk of this.
If you like nu-metal, you’re gonna fuck with the production on this a lot. All the general tropes of the genre are here, and in terms of the energy it all brings, it will evoke a sort of 1998 mosh pit of overblown guitar, wacky bass & percussion booming in your ear. From solely an instrumental standpoint, I don’t think I have anything really major to complain about for the album.
Lyrically, I think the only obvious super duper miss here is “All in the Family” – Fred Durst has not honed his songwriting at all (and frankly, I’m not sure he ever really did), nor has he trained his voice to go into its goofier tone that made “Chocolate Starfish” a fun listen regardless of how mediocre most of the tracks are on that album. It’s a juvenile back & forth that’s too edgy even by the Springer-y standards of 1998, it’s aged terribly, and it’s not even a witty rap battle by the standards of fucking Supa Hot Fire. “Boom Bam Bop Badabap Boom Pow” is probably a better line than anything Fred Durst or Jonathan Davis wrote here.
Speaking of “boom bam bop badabap boom pow”, it’s time to talk about the vocals, which are ultimately fine – Jonathan’s voice doesn’t lend itself to a very musical tone, so he relies a lot more on grittier, heavier, moodier stuff to try and enhance the instrumentation. Generally, it works well enough, but there are moments where he sticks out in a bad way, specifically on the multitude of times he does his weird scatting bit throughout the album. It’s jarring as hell, it never really works, and it sounds more like the Tasmanian Devil thrown into a spin cycle in a recording booth.
I want to quickly touch on the torture porn of “My Gift to You”, which is far more digestible if you treat it like he’s playing a character consumed by his demons. Honestly, the mood of that track sets it apart in a cool way for me, as the eerie atmosphere the instrumentation builds around the track is kind of incredible. It’s totally fucked up to a sickening degree, but they at least know it. They’re not making it into any kind of pleasure except his own sick twisted fantasy. I would deeply advise against following any of Jonathan’s deeper, darker, cruel, rape-y fantasies in that track, but if you can accept it as a character of sorts, its perverse nature is fascinating, and his vocals feel almost primally sub-human.
Overall, I liked about 9 of the tracks here (10 if you include Cheech Marin’s very goofy bonus gift), but I didn’t like the entire album experience that much. It’s a bit bloated due to CD length, it rounds the bases on its tracks a number of times, and the overall nu metal style feels a bit repetitive even after 45 minutes, let alone 67. Since this album takes itself far more seriously than “Chocolate Starfish” did, and doesn’t really have the same charisma behind it as “Hybrid Theory” does, it just ends up as sort of an average metal album draped in nu metal production. It’s totally fine, and an enjoyable listen if you love the production, but as a whole experience, I think it’s a 3.5 that I just can’t bump up to a 4, hence a 3. Always skip “All in the Family”, at the very least.
The Blue Nile
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I will easily bump up to a 5.
The top review for this album on the site says that the “lyrics are incoherent, the instrumentation is a disconnected mess, and the song structure is completely nonexistent”. I think this would only be true if you’re looking at it from a traditional 80s British pop lens, ala a Peter Gabriel or a Kate Bush. This is not a traditional album, but it’s far from an incoherent, disconnected mess. (I would also like to point out that the same person who wrote this review has the top review for Bjork’s “Vespertine”, an album rooted much in the same general “vibes first” atmosphere, where they also complained about song structure. There’s a pattern here.)
I’ll say this right off the top though; the title track is a BAD tonesetter for this album. I would argue it doesn’t need to be on the album, honestly, but maybe it’s just because I can’t quite catch the same visions that the other tracks were able to evoke so easily. “A Walk Across the Treetops” as an opening track just doesn’t work for me. It does the least effective job of telling a story through its soundscape, and the lyrics are far, far, far too broad to truly evoke the imagery it wants to. The other tracks are far more concise, and far more melodically pleasing. It’s not a bad song, but it’s a bad start to the album, and it’s honestly SUCH a bad tonesetter that it wouldn’t surprise me if it soured / sours people on the album immediately.
If it wasn’t obvious, this is an album where the instrumentation sets most of the tone, with the vocals used as texture work to capture more of the emotional tone, with the lyricism acting as something that can add optional depth. That optional depth added a lot for me, so boo/hiss to that person who called them incoherent. They’re just more novel-y in tone, and not quite as easy to digest. That said, I think I’ve cracked the meaning on a lot of the tracks, and that understanding of the meaning evokes bigger & broader imagery, even past the initial tone the album gives from just the vibes alone.
“Tinseltown in the Rain” is a track where I think the vibes alone carry it pretty well; I couldn’t really crack the lyrics on this one, outside of just a Hollywood air surrounding a relationship on the brink of collapse. The funk of the instrumentation though & the sort of Peter Gabriel-esque rhythm to it? By itself, that carries the track really nicely, and I think it should’ve opened the album.
“From Rags to Riches” is a little shaky – I think it’s mostly an interpretation on Joseph’s story in the Bible, given the coat of many colors reference, but framed as freedom from parental pressures with the grass not being as green on the other side. That said, it’s a little long & I don’t think the sound design throughout the outro is compelling enough to warrant the runtime. It does have a sort of Aphex Twin vibe to it that I find appealing, so ultimately, I think the track works.
“Stay” reads to me as a track about navigating the perils of growing up, mostly from a mental aspect. I specifically get that vibe from the lines “Candy girls want candy boxes / She loves the music box forever”. If it is from the perspective of a parent helping a daughter to navigate their older years, then it’s incredibly sweet. It can also read like a pair of teenagers promising to be there for each other through the tougher times to come, which is still heartwarming. Once again, just the energy of the instrumental makes this one work, and the vocals capture that sort of desire to help really nicely.
“Easter Parade” is a tricky one, but I think it’s a snapshot of a truly perfect moment in time, whilst mourning the fact that there may never be another snapshot like this ever again. There’s confetti everywhere, hats thrown in the air, and a truly happy crowd all running forward with a passion & excitement they may never collectively have again. It explains the somber tone to the instrumentation, and I think that dichotomy of mourning what may never be again through the lens of achieved perfection is kind of beautiful.
“Heatwave” feels kind of straightforward to me; it’s about a generational gap. The older people’s air, their star (the sun); it’s all different to the youth, who are feeling the weight of the elderly’s decisions bearing down upon them. That’s the heatwave. That’s a heatwave we’re still in, arguably more literally than ever. I couldn’t tell if he was singing from the perspective of the old people or the punished youth though, and I think that’s intentionally ambiguous. Regardless of that, I think the vibes from the instrumentation alone are just effortlessly fruitful, and the whole track is a highlight to me.
“Automobile Noise” is an interesting closer. I think it’s about a guy who’s fed up with the hustle & bustle of the city and just wants to wind down in a place that’s a little more quiet. The titular “automobile noise” is a honk. He says the line at moments when people will just honk at him. Listen to his vocals again. Just really pay attention to them. He’s weary & he’s worn down. The noises he’s talking about in the tracks aren’t evoked for fondness; they’re evoked as just repetitive nuisances in his way. He’s walking in the rain, getting honked at, and it’s just the same damn thing every day. He would rather be anywhere else in the world. It’s sort of a downer ending to the album, but I’m just fascinated at how effectively sound design & lyricism can be used hand-in-hand to such an effective degree like this, especially for 1984.
Once again, notice how I didn’t gush for anything about the title track? That’s the only reason I’m not at a flat 5 here. To call this album an incoherent, disconnected mess after all of that tells me your imagination isn’t as rich as it could be, and while I might let it slide for the title track, the rest of this is undeniably a delight. I don’t know if my soliloquy of interpretations will change anyone’s mindset towards this album, but hopefully it evokes a greater sense of understanding what the album is trying to do, and appreciating it in that sense. To my ears, it’d be foolish to let one track bump this all the way down to a 4; it’s an easy bump up to a 5.
P.S.: I’m very glad that The Blue Nile lived up to the expectations I set upon them from “The Downtown Lights”, which is the only track I knew from them before now; it’s on their followup “Hats”, and I’m sad that it’s not here on the list. I gotta check the whole thing out.
Carole King
5/5
It’s a 5. Maybe just a little higher.
The only thing I knew of Carole King before listening to this is that she originally wrote “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” for Aretha Franklin. That was already enough trust to make me believe she’s a great songwriter, but color me more surprised to find she also wrote “You’ve Got a Friend”. I knew James Taylor’s version was a cover, but I never bothered to check who wrote it, and his version is one of my favorite songs of all time. I suppose Carole King’s songwriting has been a bit more prolific than I’ve realized.
This album has some monstrous, monstrous acclaim, and while I can’t say I hear it to the extent of “top 25 album of all time”, I hear it to the extent that it might be the most digestible, easy-listening album I’ve ever heard. Yes, something like a “Thriller” or a “Nevermind” is a better album, but in terms of simplicity & being able to distill songs down to a pure form, Carole King approaches these tracks like a surgeon to a knife. There’s not a piano or vocal note misplaced, not a stray bass hit, nor a lingering percussive moment. These are crafted, both in their words & their instruments, like a piece of marble that’s been chiseled to the finest detail. Much like a sculpture, it’s very easy to take it all in without realizing just how intimately the connection is between the artist & the art, and how much time it really took to make.
Even now, when I’m writing all this, I’m not sure I’ve really grasped just how intimate that connection truly is, but it does seem like a lot of these tracks are based around her own life. Channeling all of that into these songs is an achievement, especially with just how poppy this album comes across. For as sad as the subject matter tends to be, and how intimate the piano-driven instrumentation is, a lot of these tracks still find a super easy rhythm to get into, evoking a sort of Elton John meets Fleetwood Mac vibe (with much more of a late 60s Motown lean) that really makes the album work.
Carole King’s voice certainly helps it a lot; she’s got a good power in her voice when she wants to belt out (“Home Again” is certainly proof of that), it’s very jazzy when she’s riding on a track with a good groove (just listen to “It’s Too Late” or “Smackwater Jack”), and she knows when to hold it back to let the mood sort of linger in the air a bit longer. Take a track like “So Far Away”, where she’s able to portray frustration through a somber tone really nicely, but the flute at the end of the track really sells the mood.
I think her best vocal performance, surprisingly, is on her version of “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman”; Carole King’s not trying to be Aretha Franklin here, and I think her take on the song she wrote matches the sort of personal frustrations portrayed throughout the album to that point, but with more of an emotional release. Her vocals are slightly shakier compared to other tracks, as if she’s scared to admit a freedom she hasn’t felt in a long time. There’s a more focused intimacy to this version that makes it work really nicely. When Aretha belts out that title line, and the instrumentation is swirling around her, it’s such a grandiose ball of energy that you forget it’s meant to be a song praising the performance of her partner for making her feel so comfortable. Carole’s approach here focuses far more on the “you” as opposed to the “natural woman”, and that shift really frames the song in a way that makes it fit on this album, especially as a closing track.
In all, I’m just glad this was as good as I hoped it would be, given the acclaim. I think with a few more listens, a lot of this album will come even more naturally to me, and it’s certainly worth a few more plays. If you’re not as inclined to care, then I guess it’s possible to find this as a boring piano odyssey of some lady who felt sad once & then got happier again, but if you treat it that way, I just don’t know what to say. I liked it a lot, and while it’s not an all-time super duper 10 to me, it’s a very easy 5 that aligns to a lot of my sensibilities, and I can easily hear how this would’ve influenced so many of the 70s singer-songwriters we’ve heard on the list. It’s worth listening to before you die, for sure. Good stuff, Carole.
The Crusaders
5/5
I mean, it’s obviously a 5.
For as much as I wish the rest of the tracks here had a vocal presence after the excellent “Street Life” (which I’m amazed I’ve never heard before), I think this album’s groove works fine enough without them. Go ahead and look at all the musicians that played on this album on Wikipedia, and do a deep dive into alllll of the albums they’ve had a hand in. It's unbelievably prolific. This feels like listening to the “We Are The World” of session jazz musicians.
I really don’t have anything else to say; the music speaks for itself. Even if you want to treat this as nothing more than call music or the stuff you hear when you’re watching a forecast on the Weather Channel, it’s the fucking best call music I’ve ever heard & the smoothest jazz to watch a weather radar to. 40 minutes of absolutely groovy bliss, and one of the best jazz fusion albums this list has given us; one hell of a feat given that we’re 613 days into this. A spectacular album.
Van Halen
5/5
It’s a 5. Arguably a 10.
I knew Van Halen had to be good, but before listening to this, the extent of my Van Halen experience is the cover of “You Really Got Me” that’s on this album, and “Jump” from their other album on the list, “1984”. Eddie Van Halen’s talents have been apparent to my ears for a long time, given that he absolutely fucking rips it on the guitar solo on “Beat It”, and I knew David Lee Roth’s vocals have always been praised, even if I really only knew them from the far more poppier tone of “Jump”. Needless to say, there were decently strong expectations here.
This knocked it out of the fucking park from Track 1 and never once looked back; I don’t even have to say that much about the album itself, because this fucking rips. If you have ears, you will enjoy this, and if your ears don’t enjoy this, you need to calibrate your brain. Eddie Van Halen’s guitar feels like a weapon used to maximum efficiency, especially on the absolute madness that is “Eruption”, and David Lee Roth’s vocals are incredibly strong throughout the album, with a mix of grit you can’t teach & an energy that feels sort of like an American Ozzy Osbourne. Past that though, I’m beyond stunned that I never hear more about the percussion & bass from these guys. All the credit in the world to Alex Van Halen & Michael Anthony, who just as easily kill it in their roles; this album would feel incomplete without them, and I think they deserve some billing.
I don’t want to go track by track or anything; I think the music speaks for itself. It’s a super tight 35 minutes that never lets off the gas pedal, and I love the variety it still explores while existing in a hard rock / heavy metal space; “I’m The One” & “Feel Your Love Tonight” are the two most surprising tracks here, just in terms of the swingier 50s/60s vibe they evoke while still being so distinct to this era of rock. For 1978, this does feel a little ahead of schedule, and I have to imagine a lot of the heavier glam rock of the 80s can trace some inspiration back to this album. I wish I had more to say, but I’ve just found myself in one of those in-sync grooves where the music washed over me like a magical sound shower; my ears are drying off, and the only thing I can tell you is that I feel musically cleansed. It’s a super easy 5, and arguably a 10.
Bee Gees
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5 because I liked it enough, but… damn, this thing has some identity issues to me.
Our second & final Bee Gees album on this list, meaning we won’t get to any of their disco stuff. The jury is out on whether that’s a bad thing or not. We got Trafalgar back in December 2024, and while I thought it was fine, it felt like an album less suited to the Bee Gees’ strengths. Part of that, of course, is the perception of the Bee Gees as those guys who sang “Stayin’ Alive” & “How Deep is Your Love”, so I just don’t think I was able to really give them the benefit of the doubt as a rock band. Going into this one with that perception helped a bit, as did the acknowledgement that this is part of the post-Sgt. Pepper’s trend of conceptual artsy albums trying to succeed in the wake of the Beatles.
This isn’t really a concept album; it’s loosely based around the Odessa theming & the sort of loneliness and search for love that comes after drifting asea, but I would say this is as much of a “concept” album as, ironically, Sgt. Pepper’s – it’s just a framing device that allows the Bee Gees to experiment a little more. They take the experimentation to another level though; the orchestrally driven, almost pompous tone to this album feels heavier in scope & scale than one would expect, and while it kind of collapses under its own weight, the foundation of these tracks (their mildly cheesy songwriting & their vocals) is sturdy enough to stop this from feeling like it’s ever too much, save for a few tracks.
I admire the scale of the album, honestly, but it’s part of the identity issues I alluded to; if this album was originally conceived as a full concept album, then the parts of it that remain feel really disconnected from some of the other tracks. For example, why the hell is “Edison” here? Lyrically, it feels about as weird as that Stevie Wonder tribute track from Grandmaster Flash a while back, and both vocally & orchestrally, it’s in such a weird box of trying to fit into the near regal tone of the first 3 tracks of the album. You could try to apply the same thing to “Marley Purt Drive” and its country-rock vibe, but it at least aligns with the sense of trying to rediscover love that was established in the title track. This general disconnect pops up a few times in the album (especially between the vocal & instrumental tracks on Side 3), but “Edison” really sticks out as the least necessary track here.
Since most of the tracks here can still fall under the vague linking concept of the album (the rediscovery of love), it begs the question: did this need to be 17 tracks, or is part of it just padding? I would say no; this could definitely be trimmed down to a more essential tracklist, but since I did honestly enjoy the vast majority of this album, I’m not sure the album benefits from actually being trimmed down. While there’s not a super duper highlight standout track to me, there’s never a truly bad one here, and since I vibe a lot with the instrumental approach this album takes, I didn’t find myself with a sense of repetition. Granted, I did listen to the first half of this album & then took a break before listening to the second half, but still.
There is one other part to this identity crisis; it’s a smaller one, and one I can’t really fault, but it’s definitely there for me. Some of these tracks are *really* Beatles-y. When I was listening to “Melody Fair”, for example, I couldn’t shake off the perception of “a weirder Eleanor Rigby”. “Lamplight” has an outro that feels a lot like “Hey Jude” to me, and “Give Your Best” feels like a little bit of a riff on “With A Little Help From My Friends”, at least lyrically. I understand you can’t escape their influence fully, but I feel like they were chasing The Beatles just a little too harshly here. There’s other examples of it on the album, but those are the ones that stick out most distinctly to me.
There’s also a “chase” that applies in the sense of trying to make something timeless, not just from the album perspective, but from a worldly perspective. I admire the scope, but the most prevalent example of the Bee Gees overstepping their boundaries in a nearly flagrant way here is the bold audacity of “With All Nations (International Anthem)”. I can’t possibly imagine where the idea of making an international anthem would’ve possibly fit into the original concept, let alone on a side that has a square dance only two tracks before it, but even past that; the *Bee Gees* thought they could make a fucking international anthem? I mean, it sounds good, don’t get me wrong, but who let them delegate themselves for the job?
It sounds like I’m ragging on this album, and in many ways, I am, but I’m only ragging on it because despite all of these things that might take down any other album as a piling series of mistakes, the Bee Gees somehow honestly make it work. The mixed-match conceptual tracks with the other stuff isn’t a big deal to my ears, since they’re all under the same general orchestral base for the most part, leaving each track less disconnected than they feel. It helps that Robin, Barry & Maurice all contribute some great vocals to the tracks that keeps the energy up throughout. The 17 tracks here is certainly long, but I don’t think the album necessarily benefits from trimming them down. The scope & scale of the album is almost pompously large, but taking that audacious of a swing and creating something that doesn’t totally collapse under it counts as a win in my book.
It’s an enjoyable 63 minutes if you lean into it, and while I understand the 2.72 average it has on the site, I think it’s a bit unjustified. While I’m half tempted to bump it down to a 4, I think I admire this enough to bump it up to a 5, despite the sort of “identity crisis” I think it has. At the very worst, I think the floor for this album is a 3. A TL;DR of sorts: I liked it, sue me.
David Holmes
4/5
I’m at a 4.
It took a bit for this album to get going, but once the modus operandi of the album becomes clear as a soundtrack album of sorts, the intent of these songs & the imagery they evoke becomes a lot more clear in the brain. This is intentional background music, in a way that’s extremely compelling in its finest moments & just sort of really drab at its worst, though I might need to relisten to it to see if that truly holds up.
Granted, the only reason I was able to eventually make that connection for “soundtrack album” is from a sense of curiosity that popped in during “Rodney Yates”. I’m listening to it again right now as I’m writing this. To my ears, it felt sort of flat, without a sense of progression, and a general surprise that it had gone 6 minutes. It had 8 million plays on Spotify, and I just couldn’t figure out why, so I dug a little deeper into David Holmes, and discovered he did a lot of the incidental music for the Ocean’s Eleven series in the 2000s. To that point, I had already gotten a sort of Metal Gear Solid vibe that I fucked with out of “Let’s Get Killed”, but the album hadn’t really given me a reason to evoke any imagery past that point.
With that framing in mind, the rest of the album after Rodney Yates clicked really nicely. I do think they’re all better tracks than the first 6, since they do a much better job at establishing an atmosphere for the brain to vividly work itself around. Obviously, it’s hard to fuck up the Bond theme, so “Radio 7” is an easy success, but both “Slasher’s Revenge” & “Freaknik” subsequently felt like songs that could fit into the Brosnan-era James Bond movies as background music. “Caddell Returns”, with its shifting energy, jumping from point to point gave the sort of Ocean’s Eleven heist vibe that I’m aware of in pop culture, but have never actually watched. I guess I owe it to myself to see the movies. “Don’t Die Just Yet” does a great job with the swirling orchestral work, and it ends up feeling like a credits theme throughout its outro.
This is far from a 1 or a 2, and I think framing it as an electronica album undermines what it’s trying to do. It’s an atmospheric album with electronica elements, and to my mind, it does a much better job of evoking a movie mood than “Oedipus Schmoedipus” did last year, and I think it uses its electronica elements to a more fulfilling degree than Moby did on “Play”. Perhaps with a full relisten under the framing of “this is a soundtrack that you’re meant to do things to”, I’d be more inclined to bump it all the way up to a 5, given the sort of spy / heist-y nature of the album (underlined really nicely by the eavesdropped NYC conversations sampled throughout the album) but for now, off of a first impression, I feel pretty safe with a 4.
Django Django
5/5
That’s a 5.
It's a little hard to place this album in a box, but I’ll try to give some sort of genre descriptor here: what would happen if you got the Beach Boys to collaborate with the White Stripes & Daft Punk? Even with something as intriguing as that, I don’t think I’ve really covered the extent of genres that this album blends so effectively & so mesmerizingly well. A little bit of psychedelic rock, a lot of electronica, & certainly some pop, but all tinged with rhythms that feel outside of their genres, never staying content to ride within any singular mood. There are tracks that feel like Kraftwerk, some that feel like they’re building towards a Western-y vibe, and others that would fit into modern sports anthems, ala “Seven Nation Army”. I can’t state enough how much variety this album has, and more importantly, I’m not sure I can really convey how good it does at making at all feel so coherent.
I’ll give my praise to the vocals; that Beach Boys comparison might feel slightly extreme, but the way they harmonize is definitely trying to evoke “Pet Sounds”, and it’s highly effective. Instrumentally, I think every track finds a really strong rhythm as a base & builds upon it in a way that gives a super strong sense of progression, save for “Zumm Zumm” (just a little long), & “Love’s Dart”, but that’s fine because of the storytelling nature of that track. Oh, right, lyrics; pretty good lyrics across the board here, but if you want to just go with the flow on this album, the vocal rhythms & structures are so easy to pick up on that I’m not sure you need the lyrics to enjoy this. It enhances the tracks a bit, especially on some of the story-driven ones, but they’re not too necessary.
Overall, while it might be just a little bloated at 48 minutes (there’s no bad tracks at all, just a bit of fatigue from the constant sense of energy this album brings & a slight overlap in subject matter), it still flew by, & I think it’s a great fucking album. I’m glad this is on the list, because I would’ve never found it otherwise, and I think I might need to listen to some more Django Django, since this is their only album here. This style is appealing as hell to me, and I really hope there’s more stuff like this on the list. It’s an easy 5 for me, and another win for a Mercury Prize nominee; they’re REALLY good at their jobs.
Sheryl Crow
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ve got to talk myself into one way or the other, but I’m leaning towards a 5.
First things first: it’s a *good* album. My knowledge of Sheryl Crow comes in her poppier stuff, ala “All I Wanna Do”, and not in the more rock-heavy tone this album generally takes. Color me impressed by the variety on display here; there’s everything from a noir-driven track in “We Do What We Can” to a sort of Peter Gabriel-esque cut in “Solidify”, the rap flow present on “The Na-Na Song”, the Tom Petty-esque “Leaving Las Vegas”, & the grunge energy that starts the whole thing on “Run Baby Run”. Sheryl Crow’s vocals are pretty damn good throughout, the lyricism is super strong, and instrumentally, I think this is a really nice slight update to the mid/late 80s sound that people like Suzanne Vega kicked into gear, with just a bit of 90s flair and production behind it. For 1993, some of these do feel a little ahead of pace. As a whole, I really can’t say there’s a bad track here, and for my tastes, I dug the entire album.
So, what the hell is the issue stopping me from giving this a definitive bump up to a 5? It’s just the pacing, really. This album’s one plague is repetitive outros & occasionally fully repetitive rhythms that extend the runtime, in such a way that even though it’s a decently brisk 49 minutes, it feels longer than it should. There’s plenty of things that could’ve been cut down in each track to avoid that sense of repetition, and while I don’t think it’s going to actually be enough to bump it down to a 4 by itself, it’s something that pulls the album down for me.
There is something else biting at me, but I also don’t think it’s going to warrant bumping this down to a 4 – I think “We Do What We Can” is really, really confusingly written. I just can’t follow the “he” of the track, given the shifting perspectives, and while it doesn’t undermine the noir instrumental of the track, having a muddy story to something as smooth & perfectly captured as that does kind of undermine the noir *theming* of the track. Combine that with its 5:37 runtime, and the fact that it comes right after “All I Wanna Do”, it’s probably the track that needed the most work, or at least another pass to see if it cohesively fit at that point in the album. I’m not sure it does, but it definitely has a place on the album.
So, between the pacing of the album making it a little longer than necessary, the repetition in the outros & one awkward track placement, is that enough combined to bump it down to a 4? Perhaps on another day, but for a first impression, I’m still just too impressed by the variety tackled on this album and how effectively Sheryl Crow bounces from song to song here without really feeling like she’s out of place on anything. The floor for this album is a 3, especially if the stuff I mentioned is an amplified issue. It’s got issues, sure, but at the end of the day, I still liked it a lot. I’m gonna bump it to a 5, and I think it’s earned that. A thumbs up from me. I need to add a little more Sheryl Crow to my big playlist.
Gotan Project
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I will bump up to a 5, though not without some level of mild criticism.
I suppose I should’ve realized “Gotan” is just “Tango” with its syllables reversed from the second the groove settled on “Queremos Paz”, but regardless, I found myself very pleasantly surprised here. I will say, I’m not sure this is “tango” in the groove & sense I know it as, but perhaps I’m conflating tango music with samba music. Either way, I think the sort of Italian trip-hop vibe this album portrays works really nicely. The accordion is the star of the show here, by far. The melodies it brings & how it perfectly combines with a lot of the instruments (especially the guitar) is a real treat, and having it as the anchor for all of these beats that a rapper could easily flow on provides a unique vibe. I had to check; outside of quoting the original book one time in a review, I’ve never typed the word “accordion” as part of any of the 618 albums we’ve gotten so far. Isn’t that crazy?
It’s a solid 58 minutes, but realistically, that’s part of the reason why I’m nearly tempted to bump this down to a 4 – this could’ve easily been trimmed down just a bit. The tracks that need their runtime are obvious, and make the most of their entire time to keep constantly evolving & flow in a way that justifies going 6 or 7 minutes. “Triptico” is a perfect example of a track that earns its 8 minute runtime; possibly my favorite one on the album, or at least tied with “Last Tango in Paris”, which also earns its 6 minutes. A handful of these tracks could’ve been trimmed by at least a minute or two, or at least reworked in a way that keeps them interesting for their full runtimes. A track like “Epoca” is an example; it’s apparently rather famous commercial music, so going from that approach helps the imagination open up in a suave way, but without that context, it’s just a 4:30 loop that falls flat after the energy “Queremos Paz” brings.
Some of these are just a bit long or a bit repetitive; “Santa Maria” is catchy, yes, but the percussion loop gives no sense of progression, so the track comes across a little stale unless you’re actively moving around to it. The same applies to the closing track, “Vuelvo al Sur”. “El Capitalismo Foraneo” could’ve been cut around the 4:30 mark, since it captures the sort of “Italian James Bond” mood effectively by that point, and the rest feels like padding. The same “flatness” that might be perceived from “Epoca” applies handily to “La del Ruso”, probably my least favorite track here, though not an outright bad one. Following the groove & the energy of “Last Tango in Paris”, it just feels like a bland 6 minutes. If it were my call, I would’ve closed out on “Last Tango”.
Is all of that enough to bump it down to a 4? I’d say no. Since I never really felt THAT affected by this stuff while actually listening & getting into the groove, and since the majority of the tracks caught my ear in a way that hasn’t quite been captured over the past 618 albums, I think I’m fine with keeping this bumped up. The floor is definitely a 3 here; these are far too catchy to not at least get intrigued & entranced by a couple of these. I’m avoiding my video game references as much as possible here, but trust me; the comparisons ARE there. For 2001, even with trip-hop far less in vogue at the time, this manages to kind of reinvent its wheel by adding the tango elements, simultaneously giving both genres a fresh air that meshes far better than I would’ve expected. I like the album, and at worst, it’s great fucking background noise to read or study to. It’s an earned bump to a 5 for my tastes, and a welcome surprise from the list. Did I need to hear it before I die? Maybe not, but I’m glad I did.
Mott The Hoople
5/5
I’m at a 5, though not without one minor complaint about the track order.
We haven’t gotten too much 70s glam rock; the last one I can distinctly remember was “Electric Warrior” by T. Rex, but while that album struggled to maintain a harmony between the vocals, lyrics & instrumentals, I’d say this album maintains it for the vast majority of its runtime. There’s a lot of Bowie-esque DNA in here, but it’s mixed with the sort of eclectic instrumentation of a Bachman Turner-Overdrive, a Thin Lizzy, or a Chicago. It blends really nicely, and it’s enhanced by how many styles this album takes. It’s a little one-note at times, but having something like “Hymn for the Dudes” as an earnest, slightly cheesy pro-Christianity anthem with swirling choral work, followed by something as upbeat, energetic & goofy as “Honaloochie Boogie”, is a good 1-2 punch that showcases the variety very well. Same with “Violence” & “Drivin’ Sister”.
So, what’s the track order issue? I just think “Ballad of Mott the Hoople” should’ve ended the album, that’s all. Move it down to the very end, and its sort of self-indulgent nature works really nicely, especially as it would work hand-in-hand with “I Wish I Was Your Mother” as a juxtaposition on found families & the desire to keep a relationship going as long as possible, no matter how diminishing the returns may be the longer it goes. Both of them are lamenting the inevitable loss of a relationship, but the latter relates to how a more stable upbringing would be able to save this current one, and the former relates to the fatigue of maintaining the band & ultimately, that it’s just too addictive to actually stop for now. “Ballad of Mott the Hoople” not being the last track here sort of undermines that, and I think the album ends in a far less effective way because of it. It’s not enough to bump it down, but it is noteworthy to me.
Overall though, it’s a strong 43 minutes; perhaps a little more generic than I’m making it sound, and if that sense of “these guys aren’t that original” is permeating that badly, then I could easily see this as low as a 3. For my tastes, I’m at a 5 because I just had a lot of fun with it. It’s not anything super special, but it’s consistently catchy & the instrumentation is energetic throughout. The vocals are a little nasally at times, and while I wish he was more melodic at points, it never ruined a track for me. Good lyrics throughout this whole thing too. All in all, I just liked it a lot, and sometimes it’s that simple. Hence, a 5.
Deerhunter
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 and I’ve got to talk myself one way or the other.
This album is… interesting. From the first track, I thought it would be a Cocteau Twins / My Bloody Valentine-esque shoegaze-y album with an indie rock lean, and I was pretty sold on it. Once the track abruptly ended though, and I got thrown into something similar yet different, and that pattern repeated for the next few tracks, I couldn’t really grasp the concept of the album. This is my first Deerhunter album (& possibly my only one, since it’s the only one on the list), so I just didn’t have anything to go off of. I googled stuff while listening, sure, but nothing about this album became more clear to me as a result of it. The lyrics felt weird, the instrumentation felt a bit repetitive, the vocals unclear at times, and overall, the thing just felt… blurry.
All of that is intentional, and it’s why I’m nearly tempted to go up to a 4 solely on account of the guts it takes to release an album that’s so… forcefully cryptic, yet still so open. On a first listen, there’s not really an overarching theme here, nor is there a sense of continuity. A few tracks flow into each other, but usually, these cut off abruptly. It took googling the album title to reveal much more; “Halcyon” means happiness, so we’re digesting happiness throughout the album here, as the album is hopping from piece to piece, a series of memories, capped off by “He Would Have Laughed”. If you check the song titles, it all seems to add up. In a way, this album is telling you exactly what it is, if you choose to engage deeper with it: a long tribute to a life well lived, abruptly cutting off at possibly its happiest moment right before death.
Normally, that sort of narrative revealing itself to my brain would be able to convince me to bump an album up, as it explains far more, giving everything a bit of depth, and expanding the soundscape. The issue, however, is that for as cool as the concept is, I don’t think the album itself really does a great job of actively telling that story. In the abstract & on paper, the idea of floating from memory to memory works, but in execution, I don’t think this album sells it well enough from a musical standpoint. The abrupt cuts feel too abrupt, the lyricism feels a bit too abstract, the instrumentation feels a bit stale at times, a few tracks go too long, and vocally, it never feels as engaged as it could be. I know some of that is intentional, but there are ways to do it that blend into the music in a way that keeps the listener engaged without the need to figure out the narrative. For a 46 minute album, these are genuine criticisms that I can’t fully ignore. Going into this album with nothing to work off of, it’s up to the music to be able to create & set the tone to its most fulfilling potential, and I just don’t think it gets there.
So, what the hell do I rate this? I’m not really sure. I’ll compromise. I think, just for the sake of the site, I’m going to give it a 4 solely to keep the average steady & as a vote of confidence for what the album is trying to achieve (and what it arguably does achieve). For my musical tastes, I think it’s at a 3.5 that I’ll bump down to a 3, but it’s far from a bad album. It’s a recommended one that I just think doesn’t meet its full potential for my tastes, as there are other albums on the list that nail this sort of dreamy, floating, stream of consciousness vibe just a little more effectively to my ears. It’s still a good album, and for the site, I’ll give it a 4.
Gillian Welch
5/5
I’m at a 5, but I think "I Dream A Highway" has basically singlehandedly bumped me up to a 10.
I really have been sitting here for 10 minutes trying to figure out what exactly to type out, and… I just don’t know. I know exactly what this album is about, and Gillian Welch (who I hadn’t heard of before today) portrays it perfectly in her writing: this is an album about grieving the passage of time itself, and how it relates to the fading memory of everything from first loves to past regrets to historic events to marks on clothing, & to artistry itself, all blending into distant thoughts as the world moves on. I know exactly what this album is doing, and it succeeds in a way that I just can’t put into words because of how stunning the last track is. Nothing I write would be able to do it justice.
Here’s the one paragraph I think I can get out. Time is indeed the ultimate revelator, and I think time has done this album well. 24 years after it came out, and the fading sense of artistry she talks about, specifically as it relates to piracy/streaming on “Everything is Free”, feels more prescient now than ever. It’s a 1-2 punch capped off by the absolute tour de force of “I Dream A Highway”, which lays out that grieving of time present throughout the album with some wonderfully poetic lyricism. It’s the song that kept me stunned, and I’m still not even entirely sure if I can give it due justice. It feels almost spiritual in nature.
I can only type something about the last 2 tracks because that’s what’s lingering in my mind. The rest of the album before that feels like a fruitfully strong buildup to get there, and it's brilliant in its own right with a classic country lean, but I really can’t keep going. I think you just have to listen to it. It is an album bred so deeply in a sense of earnest intimacy through its guitar-driven minimalism that you need to just sit down, headphones in, and really just *listen*. The lyrics enhance this album so, SO much, almost to the point of necessity, but even if you can’t grab the lyrics, you can grab the emotion. There is nothing that could have prepared me for how I’m feeling in the aftermath of it, and if nothing else, it’s an unbelievable testament to what one can do with nothing but a guitar, some words, and their voice. I can only hope other people feel it as deeply as I did, and if they can’t, then I won’t fault them for it; I can only shrug. I think it’s a 10.
Brian Eno
4/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump down to a 4.
It’s a good album; it’s Brian Eno’s first solo work after leaving Roxy Music, so he’s still far more inclined towards the glam rock side of things, but it’s a strong showcase of the avant garde production work to come, as well as some small previews of his more ambient stuff throughout a lot of these outros. All in all, in terms of the musical aspects, I don’t think I really have that many complaints. It’s 42 minutes of super solid rock, with a few earpiercing synth moments here and there, good vocals throughout, and some manic instrumentation, including a few guitar solos from Robert Fripp of King Crimson.
So, why the bump down to a 4? Just a couple of small nagging things that added up over time. “Needles in the Camel’s Eye” is a little underbaked as an opener to my ears, and its shoegaze-y aspects feel like they set the wrong tone for the album. “Driving Me Backwards” feels just a little too out there, at least as the 5th track. It’s so tonally different from anything else here that it’s jarring, and while I admire what it’s going for (successfully, at that), I just think it feels out of place on the album. “Dead Finks Don’t Talk” has a bit of a repetitive structure, and the sense of progression in the track suffers because of it. I think “Some of Them Are Old” should’ve ended the album, flipping with the title track, which progressed too slowly to my ears, even though I like the layering.
As an album experience, these are all minor things, and they don’t matter THAT much, but to my ears, it’s enough of a structural issue to pull the album down to a 4. There’s other little things; some louder synths, some wildly different subject matters back to back that are jarring, some cynical lyricism at times… it’s all nitpicky, but it just doesn’t feel as tight as it could be. For a debut solo album though, if we’re only dealing with the minutiae of structure, you’ve still made a good album, and it’s one that can easily be improved upon. Lord knows Brian Eno would improve on it, especially in his production work. Hell, for 1974, this thing occasionally feels far ahead of schedule, especially on “The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch”. In all, it’s a 4.5 that I’ll bump down to a 4, but it’s a recommended one regardless; I enjoyed this a lot.
LCD Soundsystem
5/5
I’m at a 10.
Going into this, I was generally expecting something akin to “Sound of Silver”, their other album on the list: electronica indie rock, with a fun bouncy lean, some fast tempos & catchy rhythms, and overall, just a more headbanging record. Instead, what has emerged feels much more akin to a post-punk electronica Bowie / Talking Heads record, and while it’s a different vibe from the groovier stuff on “Sound of Silver”, I think the emotional depth & maturity present in the lyrics here creates a far more impactful record, and one that certainly touches on some stuff that feels a bit closer to home. Weirdly, I think my closest comparison is to Wilco’s “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”, at least in terms of the vibe.
It’s very easy to get caught up in the moment while listening to these, as they all do slowly find a groove, in a sort of Kraftwerk-y building way, layering over time to reveal the instrumentation in full, before letting the vocals & lyricism guide the emotion. One thing that’s apparent to me though is that you have to know that LCD Soundsystem disbanded in 2010 to truly get this album’s modus operandi. This album, in part, is about the uncomfortability of reforming the band. “oh baby” spells it out, in a roundabout way; it’s effectively a track about two exes who’ve stayed close, and one of them begging the other to take the increasingly obvious hint that he’s ready to get back together.
“other voices” is rather obviously a massive Talking Heads tribute, down to James Murphy channeling David Byrne’s vocal style, and the whole thing is just a 5 minute bop about how easily you can be manipulated & influenced by everything surrounding you, especially with the passage of time. It might be my weakest track on the album, but it’s still a good one.
“i used to” is effectively the denial stage of grief over someone’s death; someone who clearly meant a lot to James. I mentioned the uncomfortability about reforming the band, and that line about “uncomfortability” comes directly from one David Bowie, who, in many ways, is the other focal point of this album’s theming. He’s the one being mourned here. We haven’t gotten “Blackstar” yet, but I’m looking forward to it, as sad as it’ll be. It’s clear that Bowie’s death shook James up.
With that in mind, “change yr mind” is basically just a Bowie track, with oddly, a sort of Morrissey lean to it. Yes, I know, strange comparison, but it feels like a song Morrissey might write if he tried to reunite The Smiths so soon after leaving (and if his solo stuff had flopped). It tackles some of the self-doubt about performing, while acknowledging that it’s not going to be the same as before, and you may as well take them as they are. It might be a bit self-centered, but it’s at least earnest & honest.
“how do you sleep?” is a 9 minute callout of a guy who formed a record label with James years ago, breaking down the slow deterioration of their friendship. The lyricism is a bit loose, but with some of the context I looked up, it’s… pretty friendship ruining stuff, especially as it relates to money. The instrumentation here is a highlight; a slowly building intensity with near-perfect progression & ending in a fully swirling synthy soundscape that feels like an Eno/Kraftwerk collab.
“tonite” is funky as hell from the get-go, and it makes a pretty solid point that all the songs about living life like it’s your last day do generally mention the word “tonight”, as if it really IS about to be an inevitable young death. I think I recognize one of the synths in the song as coming from Bomberman Hero’s “Monogenic”, so that was cool. It’s a groovy, groovy track, and the entire last verse is one of the best on the album.
“call the police” is remarkably prescient, especially in light of some… recent events. Hell, maybe every “recent” event imaginable. Instrumentally & vocally, there’s a bit of a U2 vibe, with a “Friday I’m In Love” bend to it & a hint of Bowie throughout. Great lyrics throughout addressing the generation gap & the elderly clinging to power, and it’s just a banger of a track.
“american dream”, from an instrumental standpoint, feels a little bit like “Love on the Brain” if it was produced by Brian Eno. Lyrically, it’s acknowledging the destructive cycle of a self-wallowing pity party sustained only by cheap sexual enjoyments, as a sort of midlife crisis. By this point, that “american dream” feels far, far out of reach. It could be a bit autobiographical, I dunno. The swirling synth work in the latter half of the song has the same effect as “how do you sleep?”, and his despondent vocal tone mixed with the flooding heavy synths feels almost like drowning. I think it’s a track that’s so strong it could’ve ended the album, and it arguably should have. Probably my favorite one here.
“emotional haircut” has a bit of a garage band vibe to it in the instrumentation, which I kinda rock with. It’s definitely the most post-punk track on the album, feeling more reminiscent of DEVO but with just a hint of 90s grunge to it. Lyrically, I don’t know if I quite grabbed this one, but I think it’s just sort of a callout to the people who were vehemently against LCD Soundsystem ever reforming, and basically telling them to stop mourning their “death” & just listen to them as they are now.
Of course, the irony comes in “black screen” being the final stage of grief in accepting David Bowie’s death. I’ve learned that James Murphy was supposed to be one of the primary co-producers of “Blackstar”, but he just didn’t feel confident enough in himself to commit to the project. It’s a rather sad track, and as a tribute to Bowie, I think it works as a strong album closer. I’m not sure if the 5 minutes of Eno-y piano driven ambience were fully necessary, but they do act as a chance to reflect & release some of the emotional tension of the album.
I wouldn’t write a paragraph for each track here unless I think it deserved it; this is a wonderful album, and for the top review on the site to disparage it this much is beyond disappointing. I guess I’m the target audience here, because something about this appealed DEEPLY to me. I think it’s beyond worthy of being on the list, and I can only hope their next album actually comes out… well, soon enough. They can take their time. For now, it seems like I need to go back to both their debut & “This is Happening”, because I’ve clearly been missing out if this is supposed to be “worse” than those. This is a 10 for me, and I’m very, very glad it’s here. Stellar stuff.
Curtis Mayfield
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
Just some strong socially conscious soul here from Curtis Mayfield, who I’ve heard of before, but apparently never actually heard, even with how famous his name is. I know the “Superfly” soundtrack is on the list, and I’m definitely looking forward to whenever we get that. For this album though, it does take a little bit of time to really find its groove & messaging – “Billy Jack” is a solid storytelling opener, and I did like it, but the sense of progression feels really slow, and the instrumentation feels kinda stagnant.
“When Seasons Change” takes those issues and arguably makes them worse; it’s the weakest track here, by far. I think the instrumentation is just too simplistic for the vibes it wants to capture, and without a compelling vocal hook to pick that up, the track just feels like it’s only giving half effort into both. The lack of focus in a lot of the lyrics didn’t help either; I get the “be thankful if you can sustain yourself” thing it’s got going, but it switches from someone who can and someone who can’t, and there’s not really a cue to tell when it happens. While it does touch on the themes the rest of the album carries to a greater degree, as a sort of torch-bearer to introduce them, it’s a rather flat track.
However, once “So in Love” begins, something about the whole album fully changes; his vocals get more confident, the instrumentation finds more of a groove, and the lyricism gets tighter, more precise, and everything really clicks into place. “Jesus” might be a little long, but it’s got the same sort of religious approach Stevie Wonder took for a lot of his stuff, and that extra idealized version of Jesus works for me, even if my faith is beyond shaky. It helps that it’s groovy.
From that point, the album slides out on a 3-track look at the mixed sense of community present in the world at the time; “Blue Monday People” is basically just a far more effective version of “When Seasons Change”, with a nice sense of coordination & hope behind it. “Hard Times” is a flipside of that, tackling the racism that’s still beyond prevalent then (and now), with even a cruel twist of another black man holding Curtis up. “Love to the People” is basically just a “yeah, everything kinda sucks, but I’m not giving up” track, and it’s a good sense of positivity to close the album on. All 3 are rich with the instrumentation & vocals (especially in the guitar / bass), and they work in a good harmony.
The singular “bad” track here is enough to pull it down to a 4.5 from a flat 5, but it’s an easy bump back up. I just thought this was a good album, and while it did take 2 tracks to really get going, I think the album wouldn’t work without them. They just needed some work, that’s all. Overall, I’m just glad I listened to some Curtis Mayfield now. If the “Superfly” soundtrack is supposed to be his magnum opus of sorts, then I’m definitely excited for it. As far as this one goes, it’s an easy bump to a 5.
The Divine Comedy
5/5
I'm at a 5. Perhaps a little higher.
Color me impressed; maybe it’s the 477-album gap between this album & “A Short Album About Love” expanding my tastes a lot more, but I found this to have much, much more character behind it. That album came out of the gates bombastically, but it felt like it was using the past as a crutch; it never really built up to a point where I felt like I could properly believe in what they were trying to do, nor did it really stand on its own original merits. This album feels far more original from Track 1, as it immediately sets the tone by introducing the titular Casanova as a living, breathing womanizer of a character in the first track, and simply explores love through that occasionally deprived, sometimes icky lens. This feels much more like a 90s album out of the gates, and that contemporary nature helps the album find its own feet immensely. I really enjoyed this.
With the knowledge that this is all generally a character, I can’t find any real fault in the lyricism; a little much at times, sure, but that’s Casanova’s vaguely misogynistic character speaking. Since it feels far more grounded to me, I think I just found it far easier to believe in this album’s premise, and as such, trust the arc of the “story” they’re telling here. This does have a loose framework, and while it’s definitely a concept album, it’s not rigid. That’s not a negative; I like the looser approach here, as it allows the album to jump from scenario to scenario & explore a wider range. If this had been boxed into following a plot, I think it would’ve suffered. This album kind of reveals itself as a sort of vague radio production by “Theme from Casanova” (which should’ve ended the album, but we’ll get there), and I think seeing it as a bunch of individual scenes with the same character keeps a good consistency & moral bar to hit.
Instrumentally & vocally, I think this album really really shines; there’s a lot more variety present here than on “A Short Album”, and the orchestral work feels fully earned when it comes in after setting a more traditional, Britpop-y rhythm for each track. I wish I could offer more specifics on this part, but it’s genuinely just worth listening to. I hear a lot of other British bands throughout this thing; a bit of Pulp, & a bit of Simply Red, but I’m most struck by how much this kind of reminds me of “Scott 2”, which we got back in May. This album has a sort of “Disney” feel to it, much like that one did, and while it’s a lot more horny & nowhere near as starry-eyed, the energy just feels fun & uplifting throughout, and it’s a really contagious feeling that kept me from ever truly noticing the length of this thing. Seriously, this was a brisk 52 minutes.
If I have any minor nitpicks, it’s that if you’re gonna provide a sort of meta outro on “Theme from Casanova”, it should’ve ended the album. It would’ve thematically fit better with “The Dogs & the Horses” as proof of the dogs having their day & the horses having their year, and the lack of a final real orchestral lift / swirl would’ve fit better as an indication of being past your prime. Instead, where it’s at just feels like a bit of a letdown given the building tension, though “The Dogs & the Horses” is a damn good closer regardless.
I think they really did hit on this album, and it makes the inclusion of “A Short Album About Love” in the list all the more baffling; maybe I need to give it a re-listen to see if my thoughts hold up, but given that this is here and immediately a superior & more satisfying album, I question its inclusion. Regardless, I shouldn’t use the other album as an excuse to lift this one up; it absolutely stands on its own merits, and I think it’s just a delightfully strong listen. Great instrumentals, great vocals, strong lyricism, and ultimately, just an album I’m far more inclined to believe in. A good first impression really can make or break an album, and this set a damn good one off the top and never looked back. Hence, a very strong 5, and arguably a bit higher. This one deserves to be on the list, for sure.
2/5
It’s one of the most fascinating 2’s I think I will give.
This is album 627. We’ve done a lot. I’ve never heard an album like this before, and I can’t say I want to listen to it again. However, I found myself utterly captivated by this thing as an experiment in what constitutes music.
Oh, trust me; this isn’t good. I wouldn’t recommend it with headphones in (take it from me), but in a weird way, I think I would genuinely recommend listening to this before you die & I think its presence on the list is a wondrous experiment. My brain is imaginative at times, and for this album, once it revealed itself as a cacophonous mess of unstructured, yet structured chaotic jazz, my brain immediately went to Eric Andre’s intro where he just destroys his fucking set.
Effectively, that chaos is this album. This is a rage room for session musicians, captured with full improvisation, in different audio channels, at different tempos & with reverb caked on top. It’s the type of chaos that you cannot truly put into words & only feel. In a weird way, I think this may be the most potent example of chaos ever put onto tape in an audio sense, at least from what I’ve heard. I’m sure there’s something else utterly baffling out there that qualifies as even better / worse, but I don’t think I’ll try to seek it out.
Since I can’t put it into words, I can only say… give it a listen & just feel it. I found a comedy to it; beyond Eric Andre, I thought of the one scene in "Band Geeks" from SpongeBob (yes, the one with "Sweet Victory") where they decide to play loud & contort Squidward’s face to hell. It’s a baffling album, and I think it’s certainly taking a spot away from one that deserves it more, but it’s a fascinating 2, and one that I would recommend listening to, if only for the experiment of one’s reaction. This could be someone’s 5 if it clicks like that, and in some way, I can’t possibly argue with that. It’s also just as easy to give it a 1. It is a raw, unfiltered album, a complete mess, and yet there is JUST enough of a semblance of the typical jazz one might know that it clings onto a sense of normalcy that never truly arrives, but is always just pertinent enough in the background to keep a bit of a hook, if you can tolerate this thing for any more than the first 5 minutes. I didn’t hate it, and I almost have half a brain to give it a 3 just for the hell of it, but from a purely musical standpoint, I think I have to stay at a 2.
P.S.: If nothing else, it makes for great noise to clean your ears out afterward. Literally. I used a Q-Tip (not the rapper) and it worked really, really well. Make of that what you will.
Fred Neil
4/5
I’m at a 4.
I wouldn’t necessarily call this “folk rock” – I think it puts the album into a Dylan-y box that’s hard to shake the perception of, given that the first track has some of the most unconnected lyrics I can remember in a bit, and overall, the lyricism doesn’t strike a “folk” tone at all. This is easier to classify as a blues rock album with folksy elements, leaning towards an instrumental minimalism more adjacent to folk rock, but not exactly a vocal one. With that framing in mind, I think this is a strong blues rock album.
I do think “The Dolphins” suffers from the chorus being shoehorned in, but after that, this album finds a really nice rhythm. It’s rather easy to be serenaded in by his sadness & his joy, and the way the instrumentation is recorded gives the whole thing a very minor wall of sound effect that adds depth to the deeper tone, but not to the higher ones. Part of the higher tones of this album include the harmonica, which I’m just a complete sucker for, as well as the guitars, which tend to find really nice melodies and just settle there, in a way that’s certainly repetitive, but not obnoxious, so it works just fine. It’s a weirdly hypnotizing album in that way. Since his vocals are in that deeper range, and oddly reminiscent of Randy Travis (a guilty pleasure ‘80s country singer I like), they pop out in a way that glides on the instrumentation, even if he strays off the percussion for a solid chunk of the album.
So, why a 4? Few tracks just didn’t click, simple as that. “The Dolphins” feels a bit flat as an opener, and a weird tonesetter for my ears. “Ba-Di-Da” feels like the vocals don’t match the woeful urban city life the track should be going for & it just doesn’t meet the potential it could have. “Green Rocky Road” has a great instrumental rhythm, and his vocals glide, but I’m just stuck on the lyricism feeling totally incohesive.
I’d be remiss to not talk about the 8 minute closer that is “Cynicrustpetefredjohn Raga”, which is a solid experimental instrumental, but it just doesn’t feel as… clean as it could be. It’s a raw track, & it feels a little unrehearsed, but I admire the swing of trying to make a sort of sitar-y / Indian-inspired song using more of a bluegrass base for the instruments. When it’s all in rhythm together, the track works really well, but I’d say it only has a cohesive rhythm for sections of the track. That inconsistency feels a little frustrating as a straight 8 minutes; it feels like listening to a track where the volume fluctuates against your will & you constantly have to adjust. I do wonder if the track would be better if it was trimmed to a more concise 4 minutes.
Overall though, when this album is rolling, it’s a damn fun listen, at least to my ears. I didn’t find myself ever hating it, and in all, it’s just a strong 38 minutes. I don’t know if I can ever see myself going up to a 5, but it wouldn’t surprise me if someone else gets there. If the minimalism & his vocals just bounce off, this could easily be a 3 or even a 2. I’m fine with a 4 here; it’s a totally inoffensive, play-it-safe album that never hits a low point & takes one big swing where mileage may vary. I liked it.
Justice
5/5
Yeah, I think I’m at a 10.
Just a flawless album, really. I mean, sure, I can nitpick about some tracks maybe going a little long or some occasional notes that are a bit too loud, but in terms of a tight 48 minute club set, with transitions smoother than any Anthony Fantano ending & an endless supply of energy, how can I not go up to a 10 with how much I enjoyed this?
This is my first time listening to this album as a full, uninterrupted experience, but make no mistake about it; this album’s presence has been in my life since the first time I ever heard a SoundCloud mashup. OK, maybe not literally, but if you were ever on the site in the mid-2010s, Justice tracks became an essential staple of mashup culture, and that’s something that I think still rings true today. “Waters of Megalovania” has 23 million fucking views, and that was made a decade ago. People are still doing fresh stuff with this album, and that’s solely from a mashup perspective. The amount of albums at the professional level this must have inspired has to be immense. This album is nearly 20 years old, and I think it sounds like it could’ve been made this year. That’s how ahead of pace these guys were.
The songs I recognized on this listen were “Genesis” (again, SoundCloud), “D.A.N.C.E.” (by far the biggest hit), “DVNO” (helped write a Jeopardy clue about it once), “Stress” (surprisingly enough, from the Jay-Z curated soundtrack to NBA 2K13 – good fucking pick, Jay), & “Waters of Nazareth” (yet again, SoundCloud). 5 out of 12 is a pretty good track record, and I think the other 7 hold up pretty well. Hard to say too much about them, given that this is an album you simply have to feel for yourself to really judge the quality on, save for “TTHHEE PPAARRTTYY” effectively showing me that Kesha REALLY stole that flow from Uffie (who I have never heard of before today) for TiK ToK.
It’s hard to not acknowledge some sort of Daft Punk comparison here, but I honestly never thought about it THAT much during the course of the album. This is a little harsher, a little more techno-y, and the grit in the synths gives this a bit of edge that I can’t say I remember “Homework”, “Discovery”, or “Random Access Memories” having, at least not to this degree. It’s certainly possible that “Human After All” or the “Tron: Legacy” soundtrack has a bit more like this, but I’ve just never heard them. Either way, the comparison is warranted, but to my ears, it’s just not that linked, you know?
Overall, I think this album feels like an introduction to the EDM sensibilities that would enter mainstream pop for the 2010s, while standing on its own as a kind of pinnacle / bar for the bass-heavy electro-house style that people are still chasing. It’s a SUPER tight 48 minutes, and even in the minor spots where the album hits some sort of a lull, it knows exactly when to pick back up with something that refreshes the energy instantly. This flew by for me, and I’m very glad to remedy my ignorance of not having heard this in full before. I think it’s a 10.
The Strokes
5/5
I’m at a 5.
This is my first time listening to the whole thing, and... I think I get it. I suppose the hype for this album comes mainly in the fact that it had to feel REFRESHINGLY new for 2001, after rock & roll had grunge’d itself into a Nirvana-shaped corner for a while, & once the sort of acoustic alt-rock of the late 90s started to feel overplayed. You can hear the rest of the decade taking shape with this album, and while it doesn’t feel as special now as it probably did back then, given how many bands took this record’s style & adapted it to their strengths, I think there’s still something special here. After all, if you’re the first garage rock band with this style to really hit it big & shift the genre for at least 6 or 7 years at the least, if not all the way through today, you have to make sure you knock it out of the park on a first swing.
Weirdly enough, I think the title track that opens the album is a lot more basic than I was expecting, but this album presents itself like a slowly rolling avalanche, so the intensity & all the extra tricks pick up as the album gains momentum. Momentum is genuinely a real thing with an album, and if you can hit on a few great tracks in a row, even the mediocre stuff can feel good in the moment. Thankfully, this album never hits a mediocre spot, and by the time it gets to “Someday”, it just feels like you can’t stop it. At its core, this album is built on really strong basic rock foundations, but it supplements it by giving the guitar & percussion a sort of subtle swing rhythm that meshes with the slightly filtered vocals. Combine that with some good lyricism (or at least, really strong vocal structures) & you end up with a recipe for success.
It really is that simple – to quote the man himself though, “work hard and say it's easy”. Julian Casablancas & friends here clearly made sure this thing sounded about as sonically good as it could possibly be, and while it sure sounds like the sort of album you could make with your friends if you practiced enough, there’s a lot of production work under the hood. All in all, it’s just a breezy 36 minutes (or 38 if you went out of your way to play both “New York City Cops” & “When It Started” like I did). I don’t know that I’d say it’s a top all-timer album of the decade/century like that, but I can easily hear the entire decade stemming from this album’s influence, and I think that probably puts it on some sort of well-earned pedestal. Regardless, it’s an easy 5, and well-deserving to be on the list; I really liked it.
The Beach Boys
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
When we got “Pet Sounds”, I very specifically mentioned that when my brain still thinks of The Beach Boys, it conjures up the poppier stuff, like “Surfin’ U.S.A.” or “Good Vibrations”. The entire first half of this album has finally scratched that itch; the first 6 tracks here are that poppier, doo-wop version of the Beach Boys sort of getting it all out there for the people who like it. I’m a total sucker for it, so I think they all work; certainly heavy on the repetition, and not the most compelling from a lyrical point, but in terms of a kind of infectious, joyful energy, it’s just there in spades. It’s nothing special, but it’s fun, especially once some key changes start to enter in.
The last 5 tracks (because I cannot possibly call that nothingburger of a burger-filled interview a “track”) act as a really strong precursor to the expanded effort on “Pet Sounds”, and while it’s certainly more of a prototype here as opposed to the swirling, meticulous & laborious work Brian Wilson put into “Pet Sounds”, I think it’s just as effective in terms of bridging the gap. The harmonies from the group are on full display, and when they enter the ears like that, it’s just blissful. Past that, the lyricism just feels more concrete, giving a bit more of a storytelling edge. They’re (thankfully) not trying to be Bob Dylan or anything, but it’s just slightly more mature, and it feels far more adjacent to the folksier side of pop/rock that would come into vogue for the latter half of the 1960s.
Realistically, the only reasons I’m at a 4.5 instead of a flat 5 are because of two things: the “school dance” vibes of the first 6 tracks wearing just a little thin, even with how fast each track is, and the interview being… well, totally fucking useless. Maybe a little fun, if you want to know their lunch orders, but it’s the most pointless “bonus” track I think we’ve gotten on the list. Regardless, it’s an easy enough bump up to a 5. I’m sure there’s a lot more that could be said here, but I think at its core, it’s just a nice album. It’s a good blend of the doo-wop Beach Boys & the critical “Pet Sounds” acclaim, and if nothing else, it’s a fun, breezy 27 minute record (again, not counting the last "track").
This is the third & final Beach Boys album on the list, and that’s a straight 15/15; good picks for the list, and clearly, I need to listen to more of them. Maybe not the Mike Love era, though. Once again, thank you Brian.
Derek & The Dominos
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
Once again, Eric Clapton is an asshole. I shouldn’t have to preface that, but I feel a need to say it anyway. I’ve given him some benefit of the doubt, but from what I’ve read since… yeah, dude’s a mega asshole. Still though, good music can be made by mega assholes, and this is good music.
Ironically enough, even with how much acclaim “Layla” (deservedly) gets as the shining opus of Eric Clapton’s career, I think a lot of what I wrote from “Disraeli Gears” still applies to this album. To quote myself, “there are a handful of moments where the album repeats verses & riffs and enters a bit of a stagnant state, but those moments don’t ruin the album that badly for me. That’s mainly why I’m at a 4.5, because they’re prevalent enough to be noticeable, but not obnoxious enough to bother me. When this album isn’t in a stagnant phase, it’s firing on all cylinders; the guitar work here is as good as advertised, the percussion is an incredible anchor that feels just a bit ahead of schedule, and the vocals” – and I’m going to cut myself off there, because I think my main complaint with this album comes in Eric Clapton’s vocals.
I don’t think Eric Clapton is truly feeling the emotions he’s trying to pull out on a number of these songs. When you look at how he belted out “Layla”, you can absolutely feel it, and it’s the sort of thing that’s so raw that even if it’s about lusting over another man’s wife, you almost kind of root for him to succeed, as weird as that sounds. Compare that to the track right before it, “It’s Too Late”, and you can feel just how phoned in that performance is – it’s not a bad performance, but it’s a very color-by-numbers cover that he’s not putting his all into. That sense of not “feeling” pops up for a decent chunk of the tracks here for me, and combining that with his grittier / lower registers feeling a bit strained / forced on the more blues-y tracks of the album, it makes his vocals the weakest part here for me.
I will also challenge the whole “prevalent enough to be noticeable, but not obnoxious enough to bother me” thing – these do get just a little bit obnoxious enough to bother me. I think the solos on this album go just a little too far with self-indulgence; knowing when to cut them off is a talent in its own right, but this album lets a lot of its instrumental breaks hang in the air for just a little too long. “Key to the Highway” is the prime example here; it didn’t need to be 10 minutes, and the amount of times it blueballed hitting an exit ramp on the extended solo in the middle just felt torturous by the end. This album ends up going longer than it should because of it; I think at least 8-10 minutes worth of slightly indulgent solos could’ve been trimmed down, as well as its two most plain tracks in “I Am Yours” & “It’s Too Late”.
With all of that said, I don’t think it’s enough for me to bump it down to a 4, though it’s certainly leaning closer towards it – when this album IS rolling, it just feels infectious, and for 1970, a lot of this does feel slightly ahead of schedule, especially in the guitar / percussion work. For the high tempo stuff here, there’s no notes; it’s just great rock & roll. The blues stuff could use a little more work, but when you’re in the groove (and it’s still very easy to be entranced into the groove), it just never feels like a big deal. At the end of the day, “Layla” by itself is such a strong track that it sort of overrides all of these things that are basically just nitpicks about how I’d approach this album. I think it’s worth the bump to a 5, and at worst, I think the floor here is a 3.5 that could go either direction. For my tastes, I enjoyed it. Sometimes, it’s that simple.
Still a mega fucking asshole, though.
Queen
5/5
I’m at a 10. Hell, maybe higher.
Everyone knows Queen, right? “We Will Rock You”, “We Are The Champions”, “Killer Queen”, “Another One Bites The Dust”, “Bohemian Rhapsody”, “Bicycle Race”, “Under Pressure”, etc, etc – an unbelievably strong stadium rock/pop catalog led by Freddie Mercury’s vocals with a spotlight on them brighter than the sun. People know Queen, even if they think they don’t. They’re that ubiquitous.
This is my first full Queen album, and I found myself rather surprised that I knew absolutely nothing here. For a band defined by singles known the world, I found that extremely strange. I figured it would still be good as long as Freddie Mercury was… well, Freddie Mercury, but I also sort of had the assumption that this album was just here to represent an era of Queen before they went big. I am thankfully, extremely, extremely wrong – this is a fucking stunner of an album that somehow feels underrated, unknown & like a hidden gem in a catalog that includes more diamonds than a Tiffany ring.
Nobody fucking told me Queen was a hard rock band with prog-esque sensibilities for their first two albums like this; much like Genesis, I think I had a vague awareness of a shift towards a more radio-oriented sound at some point, but I figured it wouldn’t be this steep. I suppose “Bohemian Rhapsody” is more of a last gasp of this era of the band, and we’ll get to that whenever we get “A Night at The Opera”, but this album feels like expanding Bohemian Rhapsody out to 40 minutes, and it is a fucking unstoppable avalanche by its second-half suite, with “The March of the Black Queen” acting as an unbelievable climax.
I really wish I could describe more here, but I’ve just got broad praise, since I think this album is far better heard than it is described. I love the sort of medieval tone throughout with the lyricism, and I guess this is really where the name “Queen” makes a bit more sense. I think Freddie Mercury takes some time to warm up, but when he fully finds himself, he feels just as fucking stunning as he always does, especially on his held notes. Obviously, the rest of the band does a stellar job here, especially in the guitar / percussion work, and the tempos this thing eventually reaches feel electric. There are signs of the stadium success to come here, but it’s concentrated into much more of a heavy rock package as opposed to some great sports-y songs.
It really is that good; I haven’t felt as in-sync with a rock band like that since the Black Sabbath album we got after Ozzy’s death (or, I suppose “Hot Rats” by Frank Zappa, but shh). I now have to acknowledge that Queen is likely far, far more than the strength of their singles, especially since this album only had one, and it wasn’t even the best track on the album (though it’s certainly up there). If this was sitting here, with this many great tracks, what the hell lies deeper in this pile? I’m extremely excited to find out, and I think that applies to their entire discography past the two albums left on the list. As far as this goes, it’s an easy, easy 10.
Skunk Anansie
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I think I’ll bump up to a 5 on the “I just enjoyed it, what can I say?” criteria.
It really is that simple; sometimes, I just happen to really like an album. Oh, there’s flaws here, don’t get me wrong, but as a 50 minute package, I’m just surprisingly pleased by how much I enjoyed it. Much like seemingly the entire rest of the site, I have never heard of “Skunk Anansie” until this moment, but I’m glad this album’s in the list to at least give them a showcase.
This album jumps around from style to style; in the broadest definition, I would say it’s what would happen if Alanis Morissette had gotten to lead an Evanescence album, but that undermines some of the vocal & instrumental variety here. There are some genuinely softer ballads here that feel a bit more adjacent to Janis Joplin’s ability to shift the power of her vocals on a dime, though with an R&B touch that’s slightly understated, but very present. Instrumentally, there’s some tracks that feel like Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Garbage (yes, the band), and occasionally, Radiohead, as weird as that sounds. The variety that’s present here keeps the album fresh, and while it’s mostly lead by the power of her vocals guiding the emotional lean of each track as opposed to a real instrumental showcase (only a handful of really strong solos), I think the band is more than serviceable to capture the mood.
So, what exactly are the “flaws” that have me hesitating to give it a flat 5? For one, a few tracks have disconnected outros that don’t really seem to add anything to the album, since there’s not really an overarching narrative here. Secondly, I just think the band’s “serviceability” starts to really show for the final 2 tracks – they’re technically sound, but it’s clear that her vocals & the lyricism are guiding the tracks a bit more than they are. It makes the album end on a slightly flatter note, since the passion just doesn’t feel reciprocated (ironically, probably the overarching theme of the album) and while that’s not the worst thing, signs of it start to pop in by “Good Things Don’t Always Come To You”, so the last 4 tracks do slowly let off the gas on their way to the finish line, though I did enjoy all of the tracks here.
In all, even with a slight “genericism” lingering over the whole album (which I think the top review is trying to get at, albeit in a mildly pretentious way framed as trying to achieve perfection), I think this is the sort of female-led rock album that just appeals to a lot of my musical sensibilities. The floor here is a 3; if the “genericism” feels more overwhelming to the ears, then I wouldn’t blame someone for going there. If you can fully buy into what they’re selling (which I think is rather easy), then it’s probably somewhere between a 4 and a 5, and I just think I enjoyed it too much to want to bump it down, even with the flaws this thing has. It’s far from perfect, but I found it surprisingly enjoyable, and I think it earns a 5.
Happy Mondays
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
As most Americans probably do, I only know Shaun Ryder from being on “DARE” by Gorillaz. This is his band, and this is the first album we’re getting from the two albums they have on the list. I sort of knew about his speaking style, but I think “DARE” gives a sort of bad impression; it’s just a little bit out of his range, and the difference between his lower tone & the falsetto that the chorus is sung in makes him feel… not lazy, but more dulled down. It didn’t give me super high hopes going in, but I figured this would still be nice.
Thankfully, I’m a bit of a moron. Shaun’s got good vocals here; it could be the 15 year difference showing, but I just think these tracks are far more suited to his range & as such, they pleasantly surprised me. Yes, he’s still got the speaking style to his vocals, but sometimes he really does glide on the beats in a melodic way, especially when he’s surrounded by the energy of the instrumentals. Speaking of these instrumentals, I’m pretty surprised at how coherently this mix of styles works; we’ve apparently gotten Madchester albums in the past, but this is the first one that feels so upfront about it. This is 90s electronica meeting 60s psych rock (with just a hint of the Britpop sensibilities of the mid-90s to come), and it works very, very well.
Lyrically, I do think the album is a little loose, but given that this is probably filled with a handful of UK-adjacent references & my belief that the lyrics are probably the least important aspect here (though they do enhance a few tracks), it’s not that big of a deal. I think “Bob’s Yer Uncle” is the track where they matter the most, and it’s just to give even more of a creepy lean to the character being portrayed – Shaun’s whispery vocals are already slightly unsettling & combine it with an instrumental that feels as upbeat as it does, and you get the most interesting track on the album. As far my favorite goes, it’s probably “Loose Fit” or “Step On”, though it’s the type of versatile album where I can see any track being someone’s favorite.
So, why a 4.5 and not a flat 5? Occasionally, Shaun’s flatter vocals do come in & bring down the energy, and that’s part of it, but it really does just come down to the outros on this thing adding far too much filler time to the album. I’m not saying time is an extreme premium or anything, but this could’ve easily been 3-4 minutes shorter by just trimming down some of the outros that go absolutely nowhere. I know it’s probably just a radio quirk to allow hosts to get their monologues / throws to the next track in, but… save those copies for the radio stations & not for the album version, you know?
As a whole, the flaws aren’t that big, and I just found this far too enjoyable to seriously consider bumping it down to a 4; for my tastes, it’s an easy bump to a 5. I think I wanna listen to more Madchester stuff now; I’m not sure what else qualifies on the list, but I’m ready for it if it’s there. As fast as Happy Mondays goes, I can only hope that “Bummed” is as good of an album as this one was, whenever it comes up.
Prefab Sprout
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
Well, this sort of threw “sophisti-pop” on its head for me with the first track being a sort of R.E.M.-esque country cut about disdain for the mundane, and then it just kept surprising me. I’m starting to find that “sophisti-pop” is maybe just fancy genre talk for “80s singer-songwriters who stuck to pop”, because this is certainly not the same thing as Sade, the Blue Nile, or even Everything Like The Girl.
This is really just a pop album with a rock lean to my ears; yes, the lyricism is flowery at times & comprehending them that can elevate a few tracks, but I think they’re equally as straightforward, since a lot of these are just love songs. To my ears, so much of this album is guided by the instrumentals & vocals as a guide to portray the emotion, and it works really effectively; this might be one of the best-produced ‘80s albums I’ve heard so far. Thank you to Thomas Dolby. I hesitate to really label this as “sophisti-pop”, since the same sort of elements are there, but I just think this album shines even on a casual listen. Take a track like “Bonny” for example, where it feels like a ‘90s track more reminiscent of a Matchbox 20 or a Sister Hazel. Even if you don’t catch a lyric, there’s a growl in his voice that kicks the track into gear.
That sort of thing applies throughout the album; there’s plenty of new wave ‘80s tropes & production here (especially on the more synth-heavy stuff), but I don’t think this album really strays from the core belief that the music is the most important aspect. Hell, take a listen to “When Love Breaks Down” – when Paddy gets to the chorus & starts to let it out, the track just gives a sort of infectious energy, while still feeling totally instrumentally calm. That’s the energy this album tends to give off – calm on the outside, and just a bit more chaotic & nuanced on the inside. I don’t want to go on another track-by-track breakdown on what each track sort of gives off; I did it for The Blue Nile, but since I think the music speaks for itself more here, it doesn’t feel necessary.
I will say though, as far as the 4.5 goes, it’s simply that the last 2 tracks just fell a little short for me after how blissful “Desire As” became. “Desire As” is the only track where I think a full paragraph might be necessary, because it might be my favorite track on the album. For some context, given that most of the tracks here talk about the aftermath of a breakup / affair (“Goodbye Lucille #1” being an inability to move on, “Horsin’ Around” being a reckoning of immaturity & its consequences, and plenty more), I think “Desire As” is the perfect culmination of all of the lessons of those tracks coming to a head. It’s basically just choosing to walk away from a paranoia-driven relationship on one’s own accord, even if happiness existed in spades before any accusations came flying in. Vocally, it’s sort of monotonous (with some good subtle vocal shifts), but I like that approach, as it gives the track a sort of level-headed maturity. Lyrically, there’s some repetition, but I see it as a sort of self-affirmation that he’s made the right choice to walk away. The production work sells the track brilliantly; the instruments build up, from a sax line to added percussion to some swirling string work, and layered backing vocals to bring the track & the album to a sort of climax point.
When you have a track that feels like every lesson has been learned, why wouldn’t you end on that, as opposed to a track about angels killing Marvin Gaye because they’re jealous of him? OK, well, that last track is conceptually cool as hell actually (though a little flat in execution), but still – this album should’ve ended on “Desire As”. Regardless, a pair of good tracks that just fall short after a great one is no reason to bump an album down all the way to a 4. This is a good one, and I really found myself entranced by it at points. Consider me sold on Prefab Sprout as a band I need to listen to, consider me a bit annoyed that there’s not any solo albums from Thomas Dolby on the list (seriously, great production work – hopefully he’ll pop up on another album), and consider this album as being a worthy pick on the list to my ears. It’s an easy bump up to a 5.
David Crosby
5/5
Yeah, that’s a 5. Hell, maybe higher.
Very weird for this to shift from a traditional CSNY-esque album to something rather Eno-esque by its final 3 tracks, but something about this felt ethereally good. I really don’t know how to put it into words; I’m super stunned or anything, but I think it’s an album where the musicality more than speaks for itself. The first 2 tracks here are “normal” (and very good too!), and then once “Tamalpais High” hits, the album lets the aural side of music speak more for itself than the lyrics do. I could be wrong, but I think this is a really technical album for 1971. Nothing’s that crazy, but just in terms of the mixing, layering & harmonization required to achieve the sort of blend of melancholy & bliss told mostly through the music, this feels decently ahead of pace, and certainly far from expectations from one of the guys from CSNY.
This also happens to be a remarkably star-studded record, which makes it all the more impressive that they signed up for an album like this & not something more adjacent to Deja Vu – the rest of CSNY are here, as is Joni Mitchell, plus the drummer from Santana in their Abraxas era, and seemingly all of both Jefferson Airplane & The Grateful Dead. Look, I ripped heavy on the Grateful Dead for their abysmally drab live album we got 502 albums ago, but their slow, building instrumental style works wonders here, especially when combined with the rest of the musicianship on this album & David Crosby’s penchant for harmonization. This is a slow 37 minute album, and it’s one that makes you just kind of sit in for the whole runtime, but it’s the sort of slow album that makes you really appreciate it by the end of it. Hell, it made me wish “I’d Swear There Was Somebody Here” would go for at least another 3 minutes, so they did something right.
I guess my single nitpick would be that “Song with No Words” should’ve ended the album with how short the final 2 are, but regardless, it’s a deeply satisfying album, and honestly, it’s probably better than both of Stephen Stills’ solo albums on the list. I might need to listen to Graham Nash’s in my own time since it’s not here, but this shoots right up as one of the best CSNY-adjacent albums we’ve gotten. There’s still 3 more Neil Young albums on the list, which feels kind of crazy. Regardless of all that, this album exists in a blissful little space and I’m so very glad to have heard it. It’s an easy 5 for me, and probably a bit higher.
The Beta Band
5/5
You know what? I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
It’s not an album for everyone, and I can tell you that immediately. This is an oddity, and sort of an evolving one. I think the opening track isn’t a great tonesetter for what this eventually settles into, which is a trance-inspired ‘60s-style psychedelic rock album with electronica / triphop elements lending a helping hand to set the tone, in a way that feels sort of like a prototype Gorillaz (ignore that they’re both from 2001) if Jim Morrison was a member.
One’s ability to enjoy this album will come entirely in how much you allow yourself to be entranced by these beats; I’m generally predisposed to softer, somewhat ambient stuff, so the minimalist approach here worked for me. I also think these tracks layer upon themselves really nicely in a way where the longer fadeouts & outros on this album feel natural, feel earned, and almost feel rewarding. Normally, I’m one to bitch & moan whenever a long outro happens, because it usually happens once a track has felt like it’s run its course, and it’s just padding for time. That only happened a few times here, and even then, it never felt like that big of a deal. Sure, some of these COULD have been cut down a little, but I think doing so might take one out of the entrancing effect just a bit too early & abruptly.
I say all of this like it’s an album actively trying to hypnotize you in a way, and I’m not entirely sure that’s the intent, but it gives that effect regardless. The vocal harmonies this album brings feels sort of like the Beach Boys with Beck leading the way, and the vocal structures of this album glide on the beats really nicely. I don’t think I really found myself actively trying to comprehend most of the lyrics, but it’s a testament to the album as a sort of aural experience that I caught them. Part of it is the repetition (this album REALLY hits lines over your head at times), but part of it is just getting lost enough in the beat that you can focus elsewhere and still stay in the rhythm.
Again, it’s not for everyone; the floor here is a 3, and that’s if the beats just don’t feel appealing or if the repetition feels too prevalent. Perhaps my slightly distracted state while listening to the album helped a bit, but I think it’s very easy to get lost in the rhythm regardless. For as absolutely stupid as the cover art is (seriously, who let them pick THAT?), I think the album just really clicked with me. It feels like much more of a nighttime album than a daytime one, so that might help too.
For how much I enjoyed this, even though I was sitting at a steady (but slowly rising) 4 for most of the album, I think it’s just consistently good enough and entrancing enough to get the bump up to a 5. Yes, it’s a “slower” 45 minutes, but much like David Crosby’s album from yesterday, it’s the sort of slow album that makes you really appreciate it by the end of it. I certainly have. Hopefully, their other album on the list sticks to this style.
TV On The Radio
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I think I’ll bump up to a 5, though I’m a little shaky on it.
The last time we got TV on the Radio was November 2024, and it happened on a day when we got a glitch and basically got two albums at once. This album is making me wonder if I gave “Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes” a fair enough shake & not just a slightly rushed job to play catchup, because I found myself really enjoying this one. I gave that album a 3, with an analogy about it having too many upward hills on a roller coaster & not enough drops. Nowadays, I find myself a little more patient with longer songs to reach a certain point, so it could just be my tastes growing a bit, but it also could be true that this album comes straight out of the gates a lot quicker.
This album’s first 3 tracks clicked really nicely for me, especially by the obviously “It’s The End of The World”-inspired track “Dancing Choose”. I think it hit its first shaky point on “Stork & Owl”, which just totally bounced off of me for a couple of reasons (namely the vocals feeling especially weird). “Golden Age” also felt a little shaky, but it might just be bad timing given the whole religious psychosis surrounding the rapture bullshit that happened recently & the lyricism feeling just a bit too “literal” now compared to how this might’ve been perceived in 2008.
Thankfully, they rebounded immediately with how lovely “Family Tree” is – seriously, that’s a standout track. “Red Dress” is good too, but I fear the lyricism / vocals go by just a little too quickly to really comprehend the depth of the subject matter. It’s sort of a Hey Ya thing, but at least Andre draws attention to it blatantly, whereas this one feels like it’s almost an afterthought, even if it’s not. It’s a groovy one, but I just feel like it’s very easy not to hear him and just want to dance.
After that, I think the album glides to a pretty strong finish; “Love Dog” feels like a sort of lo-fi Phil Collins track about someone deeply devoted with nobody to show love to, and I think the slower tempo of the track works for it. The outro is a little long though. “Shout Me Out” is super fun, especially with the tempo change in the middle absolutely boosting the energy of the track to a higher level. The volume is a little overblown though. “DLZ” is good; it feels like a shoegaze-y Tame Impala, and it’s “that one from Breaking Bad”, but even without the context of how well it’s used in the show, I think it just grabs the attention in a way that feels kind of authoritative. “Lover’s Day” is lusty as hell, but I think the track works as a kind of triumphant ending; besides, something about the idea of relationship-affirming sex that’s so good it invokes a marching band, heavenly strings & a church choir is so comedically over the top that I can’t help but admire it.
It’s all of the “thoughs” that are present through this thing that are keeping me at a shaky bump up; I do think this has enough little paper cuts that build up to the point where I could go down to a 4, but I never found myself actively disappointed with a track other than “Stork & Owl”. The rest of my complaints are basically just nitpicks about the lyricism occasionally feeling a bit confusing (hell, the childbirth scenario of the opening track didn’t click until he said “womb”), the mixing being a little strong at times (plenty of shoegaze-y / wall of sound elements that feel a bit overblown), & occasionally some vocal structures that just felt a little too loose (“Red Dress” comes to mind).
It’s not a thousand paper cuts though, so for as much as the album feels like it has “flaws”, I just think the foundation the album is built on is strong enough (& I just enjoyed it enough) that I think bumping it down wouldn’t feel fair. It’s a shaky bump up, for sure, but I think this is a good enough album to earn it. I certainly think it’s more enjoyable than the last one we got, though I may need to give it another try. It’s a strong 50 minutes regardless, and the floor is a 3 if all the little issues do compound that badly. For me, it’s a 4.5 that earns the bump up to a 5.
Prince
5/5
Holy fucking shit.
I said it when we got “Sign ‘O' The Times”; I’ve always been an MJ guy and not a Prince guy, which is to say I’ve always treated Michael’s albums with incredible reverence, and only given the same reverence to Prince’s big singles. Much like back then, this album has made me realize I am a moron for not approaching Prince’s albums in the same way. Somehow, someway, perhaps through either stupidity or some level of buying into the “feud”, I have never heard this specific album in full.
Don’t get me wrong; it’s too ubiquitous in pop culture for me to know nothing about this. “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life” & the rest of Prince’s opening speech is one of the most famous verses to start an album ever (though I’ve somehow never heard the rest of the brilliant madness that is “Let’s Go Crazy”), and I think everyone is at least aware of “Purple Rain”’s opening chords & the monstrous guitar solo to end it. I think it’s nearly impossible to have avoided “When Doves Cry” if you’ve heard any ‘80s playlist ever, and I’ve somehow managed to hear “I Would Die 4 U” without knowing it ever transitioned into “Baby I’m a Star”, which further cements my utter ignorance about this whole thing as an album experience.
I mean, what can you really say after listening to that album? Not one miss, not a single bad chord, not a single bad drum hit, and not a single bad note. You wanna talk about notes? Let’s fucking talk about the fact that Prince screeches out his passion in a way that’s infectious as hell. I knew this album leaned a little more into the glam rock sensibilities of the 80s, but I never realized it was THIS deep. His vocals on this thing are a fucking marvel, and it’s made me realize just how much Michael Jackson suddenly thrust some of Prince’s DNA from this album into his own style for everything after Thriller, and most obviously on Bad.
Look, someone else can write paragraphs on paragraphs about this thing; the synth work, the percussion, the guitar (my GOD, the guitar), the near-perfect structure of the album, the overt horniness of “Darling Nikki”, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I can’t do it. I’m just stunned. I’m slapping myself for never giving Prince a fair shake when I was first really trying to get myself into music a decade ago, and I’m slapping myself for never listening to this album in full when I could’ve had the chance all these years later. This is that damn good; I think for my tastes, it’s better than “Sign ‘O’ The Times” on account of the length & energy (though the fact that it’s even in the conversation is a testament to that album), but I’ll let other people say if it’s better than Thriller. That’s a debate I’ve got too much bias on to put my two cents into, but I will at least say this – “Purple Rain” is a far, far, far better closer than “The Lady in My Life” is, and I still love the latter. Hydrogen bomb / coughing baby type shit. This album is a 10, by the way. Maybe higher. I figured that was obvious. Fucking hell.
The Birthday Party
2/5
I’m at a 2.5 that I’ll bump down to a 2, though I do genuinely think that with the right framing & a bit more immersion, it could bump up to a 3, and possibly higher, somehow.
This album is an exercise in megalomania, egotism, paranoia, & fear, with a bit of a sadistic lean, touching on things like religion, murder, & sins, mixing itself in with totally incomprehensible concepts along the way. It is musically incoherent, yet intentionally designed that way to evoke a natural abrasiveness, and it’s one that’s openly invited by the album, constantly pushing the boundaries of what it’s allowed to “musically” do, forcing you to accept it for what it is, even if you actively don’t like it. This album, in some fashion, is the audible equivalent of failed gaslighting combined with Stockholm Syndrome, and once that makes itself apparent, parts of this album make more sense.
That’s a big fucking word salad to basically say “inner machinations of a psychiatric inmate-core”. Nick Cave’s vocals fluctuate between that one homeless guy next to your local pharmacy who’s on so many drugs that you actively fear him, and shades of what would eventually come with his work with The Bad Seeds, some of whom are members of The Birthday Party. As far as the instrumentation goes, the guitar plays its role as the loudest & most distracting thing here, acting as a sort of barrier to the vague, echoing morally corrupt consciousness that Nick Cave portrays. This is contrasting against the percussion, which generally tends to find a decent rhythm on a lot of these tracks, save for the moments where it feels like they’re smashing it with such ferocity that it feels like The Hulk destroying a music store. The bass is the singular consistent instrument here, and I suppose it represents one vague thread of normality left in the minds of the protagonists of all these tracks.
This is all in combination with the lyrics, which are normally either drowned out or screamed out, save for an occasionally calmer moment. The lyrics feel incomprehensible at times, and I still think they’re written from the perspective of a total madman who’s lost all grip on reality. That is the mindset & immersion that feels like it can crack, unlock, & truly open up this album. I made it a point for the final track, “Junkyard”, to go the extra mile & sit in a room with total darkness, just to feel the track as I was listening to it. That’s an extreme measure, mind you, but I just couldn’t get that sort of “psychiatric inmate” frame out of my mind, and I just wanted to see what would happen.
It felt claustrophobic. Genuinely, as his vocals grew more intense, and as the soundscape continued to swirl up with a sort of manic passion, I found myself wanting to turn the lights on, get up, and get out. In a way, it kind of felt awesome because of just how effective it was. I’m sure that’s not the intent of the album, but I just found it so fascinating that I could feel the potential that might come with a second listen. If I came back to this album another day, I think I might be able to appreciate it as an audible journey through genuine madness. As it currently stands now, I think the album itself just has too many musically driven flaws in terms of song length, some genuinely ear-piercing mixing at times, & a few moments where the performance / facade breaks for long enough to just feel far less engaging at some points than others.
The ceiling for this album, to my mind, is a 4. I’m at a 2.5 that I’ve nearly talked myself into bumping up to a 3 on account of potential alone, but given that the first half of the album bounced off of me in a way that badly set the tone (seriously, “She’s Hit” might still be the worst track on the album given the absolutely glacial pacing), I just don’t think I could do it in good faith. I do, however, genuinely recommend this as an album one you should listen to before you die just for the aural hell of it, and I admire the vision / scope of the album & the authenticity at which they just fucking went for it, without a single care for perception or commercial appeal. It’s a 2.5 that will go down to a 2 for now, but I can see it going up should I ever come back to this.
PJ Harvey
5/5
I’m at a 5. Possibly higher.
I just feel somber after listening to that, which in this case, is the hallmark of a highly effective album. This is a war-based album, one that touches on real history that I believe spans from World War I to World War II, with a slight commentary on the events of the Middle East that dominated much of the 2000s on “Written on the Forehead”. It is soberingly & brilliantly written, with many of these tracks seemingly from the perspective of soldiers either in the moment or reminiscing with a PTSD-driven eye, yet it musically leans towards a garage rock vibe that anchors the album in a sort of contemporary folk-esque way. These feel like they could’ve been written years ago, and given the intense research PJ apparently did in making this album feel as accurate & sort of emotionally pulling as possible, I think she did a great job at somehow evoking the events of a century ago while making it feel palatable to modern tastes.
I’ll give a lot of credit to the production work here; this is a 2011 album, with garage rock leanings, but it feels like it could have been recorded today. None of the obvious production marks of the early 2010s are here, with a very consistent set of instruments (namely the lower, heavier percussion that anchors a lot of the tracks), and as such, it sort of adds to the vaguely timeless feel of these tracks. Sure, some of these tracks have extended intros that feel a little long in the moment, but I think they work in the sense that they build up tension very well, especially after some of the heavier tracks here. Vocally, I think “Let England Shake” is a bit of a bad tonesetter for the more thoughtful & narrative tone she takes for most of the album. I really like a lot of her vocals here, even when she goes full Bjork on “England”.
I can’t really understand some of the 1s & 2s on the site; either they didn’t pay an inch of attention to the lyricism, their brains can’t come up with the imagery that she’s trying to evoke, or they just bounced off of this for reasons I can’t possibly figure out. Yes, it should not take a (then) 42-year-old English lady to remind me of the horrors of war, but if you’re using that as an excuse to diss the album, then you were never going to engage with this in good faith. I think this might be the best PJ Harvey album we’ve gotten so far, and I already thought “Dry” was really, really good. I desperately need to relisten to “Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea”, as I think I’d appreciate it more now. As far as this goes, I think the floor here is a 4, and for my history-loving tastes & with how much I just connected to this in a sobering way, it’s easily at a 5 for me, if not higher. Very, very good stuff & yet another successful Mercury Prize-nominated/winning album.
Roxy Music
4/5
I’m at a 4.
It’s definitely a good album, I just don’t think it’s as good as their debut. Even if I wasn’t using their debut as a benchmark, I just think this album comes across as one that’s ambitious in scope but without a consistently satisfying execution. Going solely off of the instrumental / vocal vibes here, I can’t say there’s anything inherently flawed – this is a fun album to listen to, for sure. It’s sonically strange at points, but it never strays too far to a point of being bad. I liked every single track here, genuinely. Lyrically, I found myself totally lost half the time, but I don’t know that this is an album where lyrics matter as much, given how the album feels like it’s going off of the instrumental energy for a strong percentage of the runtime.
I can’t exactly place one specific reason why I’m at a 4 here; I think it’s just a bunch of compiling issues; a few endings to tracks feel sort of abrupt (like “Beauty Queen”), I think a few tracks go a bit long (certainly “The Bogus Man”, though I did like most of the 9 minutes), I think the vocals occasionally verge on parody at times, and once again, I just think half the lyrics make no real sense. Even with all of that, I was still around a 4.5 going into the title / final track, and while I liked it, I just think it didn’t really feel like a satisfying closing track to the album, given the slightly hypnotic repetition.
If there’s anything I’ll give a deep compliment to the album on, it does a fantastic job at creating an atmosphere to each track; Brian Eno probably has something to do with that here, and it’s a small preview of his later ambient work, but with a slightly more eerie lean a lot of the time. These are sonically interesting, if nothing else, and that especially rings true on the album’s highlight track, “In Every Dream Home a Heartache”. It is pathetic in nature, given an obsession with a sex doll acts as the core anchor of the first half of the track, but it’s fully self-aware of how pathetic it is via the instrumental. Once the big solo starts halfway through, the track just shifts into another gear, and the fakeout ending makes it work even better.
So, yes, it’s a 4 due to a number of issues that pile up, but I did enjoy this album a lot. It could still get up to a 5 someday if other tracks just click a little better / more consistently, and I think the floor here is still a 3.5 at worst. This is a fun album, I’m glad it’s on the list, and while I don’t fully hear all of the critical appeal, I think I hear enough of it to understand why people gave this such high praise. It’s an experimental, ambitious album that feels like a post-punk / glam rock hybrid, & a precursor to what the Talking Heads would later truly finish & master in their own way (ironically enough with Brian Eno’s help). I just don’t think they hit on this album as effectively as they could, but it’s still a damn fine effort regardless. A strong 4.
Ray Charles
5/5
I’m at a 5.
It’s not as consistently dazzling as “Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music” (and honestly, I’m not sure there’s a track here that quite hits the highs of that album), but it’s a damn fine album regardless. Ray’s voice doesn’t quite maintain the same level of charisma, the band’s not as sharp (& the split between big band / strings for each half feels a little disconnected), and it just doesn’t feel as tightly knit as it could be. Regardless, I think the music & the vibe speak for itself here. These aren’t bombastic takes on country songs, these are dinner / nightclub vibes, with Ray Charles here to regale with his sad tales of lost love & broken hearts. Admittedly, it does start to feel a little stale/same-y by the end of it, but I found myself pretty emotionally in sync for a lot of the album.
Since it is sort of a one-note, “let the music speak for itself” kind of album, I’m just not sure I have that much to say. I wish it were as good as “Modern Sounds” was, but even if it’s not, it’s still a 5 for my ears. Ray Charles’ lyrics are good, his vocals still carry a suaveness & natural charm even if the charisma isn’t fully there (there’s certainly parts where it shines through), and when the big band is truly rolling in the first half (or the strings in the second half), I think it’s an absolutely lovely listen. I wouldn’t blame anyone for going down to a 4 (or honestly, even finding a sort of “boredom” spot if each style bounces off & going all the way down to a 3). I enjoyed it a lot, though, hence the 5.
Manic Street Preachers
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Certainly not what I was expecting from the same band who had rather Britpop-y tones on “Everything Must Go” – this is a drearier, darker, cynical album that feels like a proper merging of the politically driven punk of the 1970s and the grunge of the early 1990s, coming to a head in a way that’s musically pleasing as hell, generally lyrically strong (save for the last track, to a degree), and overall, it just strikes me as immediately more memorable than their other album on the list. Granted, part of that is the disappearance of their lead writer / lyricist Richey Edwards, who wrote so many of the darker tracks here while he was going through deeply intense personal problems of his own. In a way, this feels almost like an autobiography of pain; less of a suicide note & more of a manifesto of frustrations about the world at large, written through a multitude of perspectives & frames that all somehow feel vivid, imagined, and all too real, even in their “worst” moments.
It’s a deeply honest album, and while I think you could maybe get away with not paying attention to the lyrics to a certain point, eventually this album’s penchant for its darker themes will catch up, and hit you over the head with some remarkably apt introductory quote, or a sonic soundscape that’s too forceful to ignore. I think the production on this thing is remarkably strong, and for 1994 in particular, it feels ahead of schedule. I listened to the original mix for this, but apparently, the US mix included in the 20th anniversary deluxe edition is the band’s preferred mix, and supposedly even better. I may need to prove that for myself.
This really does feel like nothing of the era; I guess the closest comparison, to some degree, are the two sides of the coin that were “Hypocrisy Is The Greatest Luxury” & “3 Years, 5 Months And 2 Days In The Life Of…”, but while those rap albums either suffered from pearl-clutching, heavy-handed “holier than thou” attitudes or outdated rhetoric in the name of an agenda, I think this album places no active judgment on the listener, instead acting as, well… a sermon. The name “Manic Street Preachers” makes a lot more sense now, given that this does feel like sitting in on one man’s crusade against the injustices of the world, framed through a lot of marginally radical, morally stretchy, and yet not wholly unjustified viewpoints. It’s food for thought to say the least, and I can’t say I find myself actively fighting back against anything here, save for the last track “P.C.P.”.
I chalk it down to the “political correctness” of 1994 being perhaps just a little too aggressive for the time; I do think the sort of push for less harmful language isn’t necessarily an equivalent to suppression of “freedom to say what you want”, but I can see how tiptoeing around it and losing sort of an edge to fight back against bullshit in light of that push could piss off people in the wrong way. However, I also just think that all the fear-mongering the song has just never came to pass – if it was a valid-ish fear back then, then I can’t really hate on it, but it’s certainly the track that’s aged the worst here. It’s still musically energetic as hell, though.
So, yes, it’s a 5, but I do think it’s an abrasive album at points; “The Intense Humming of Evil” being written from the cold, cruel, heartless perspective of a literal Nazi, for example, might be just a little too close to home, no matter how chillingly accurate that coldness probably is. The same applies for a track like “4st 7lb”, but in a different way; it’s a very open & honest perspective from the mindset of someone with anorexia, and it’s so vividly written that I can see the poor girl in that track mentally shrinking & thinning out in my head. When this album’s writing shines in that honest way, it can be a brutal mirror to the past & part of the present, but one that I think has aged in a fruitful & memorable way, even 31 years out. If the writing here feels too unsettling or the musicianship doesn’t strike the same way, I think the floor here is a 3, and I wouldn’t blame anyone for going there. I really liked it, though, and it’s certainly one of the most interesting albums we’ve gotten, even 645 in. Hence, the 5.
The Killers
5/5
Of course it’s a 5. Hell, it could be a 10.
I know how much acclaim this album has, even if I’ve never heard it in full before today. It’s impossible to have not heard “Mr. Brightside” at any point if you’re at least 20 years old, and if you’re really into Weird Al, it’s probably nigh impossible to have not at least heard the chorus of “Somebody Told Me”, though if you only know that snippet, you’re missing out. Those two tracks are the all-timer monster hits, and the rest of the album… surprisingly enough, a bit more varied than I would’ve thought. I’m really impressed by the slight blend of the garage rock style the early 2000s made famous with this sort of updated take on Talking Heads-era new wave / post-punk, especially in the synth work that makes a lot of this album pop. It’s easy to hear the two main hits & conclude that these guys were just another 2000s indie rock band with a garage lean that rode the wave, but that severely undermines just how damn good this all is.
It is certainly one of those albums where the music speaks for itself, so I’m not sure I can add anything meaningfully new to the sea of opinions over the last 21 years that someone else hasn’t already written (or will soon write) some 1,000 words on, but I can try to add some quick, scattered opinions.
“Jenny Was a Friend of Mine” is obviously a perfect tonesetter & a great introduction to the band, but it does feel like it might set up expectations for more of a concept album, even if that thought is washed away immediately by “Mr. Brightside”. “All These Things That I’ve Done” is a little preachy, but I think it’s fine.
Brandon Flowers’ vocals are great throughout this thing, even if I do wish he had a little more of an emotional lift on a few tracks – just ever so slightly monotone at points, you know? “Believe Me Natalie” is super fun, & it feels slightly ahead of pace for 2004, feeling like a slight foreshadowing of the synth-infused pop of the late 2000s.
“Everything Will Be Alright” is just a little long for what it is, but I think the atmosphere works really well as a closing track. I think “Glamorous Indie Rock & Roll” would fit perfectly between “Andy, You’re a Star” & “On Top” if it were naturally in the album.
I do wish there was just a little more variety in the soundscape; it's a breezy 45 minutes for sure, but it does blend together just a little bit after the high of listening has worn down. That's not a bad thing to my ears, it's just a testament to how "in the moment" this album can make a listener feel.
And yeah, I think that’s all I really need to get out into the world. It’s a stellar album, and if you somehow haven’t heard it, just do it; it’s one of the most satisfying debut records of the decade, an instant rock classic, and a great 45 minutes where if you let yourself just rock the fuck out, you’ll never have a bad time. The only way you can hate this is if you have some deep-seated regret about the early 2000s & this album acts as some painful reminder of it. I would’ve been 4 when this dropped, so unless I tripped & fell in a Walmart while Mr. Brightside was playing on the speakers & forgot, I have nothing to link a bad memory to. This shit rules, man. It’s an easy 5, if not a 10. Banger after banger after banger, simple as that.
Fatboy Slim
5/5
I’m at a 5.
The last time we got Fatboy Slim was 474 days ago; I gave that album a 5 and called it a masterclass in how to make repetition sound compelling. 474 days later, I feel like that is a weirdly dismissive statement that undermines just how fucking tough this style of music is & how impressively this album comes together. This is a masterclass not in repetition, but in how to mesh samples together in a coherent, exciting, and constantly entertaining way. Yes, this is occasionally a repetitive album, but to point that out while you're listening to it leaves a sort of impression that you’re a bystander to the groove as opposed to immersing yourself in it, and that makes you kind of a square. Time is supposed to fly when you’re having fun, and damn it, I had a LOT of fun here. I’m not sure if this is better than “You’ve Come a Long Way Baby”, given that it has been 474 days, but I’ll damned if I don’t feel just as good after listening to this one. When this album is rolling at its highest points, it feels like listening to a DJ having the set of their fucking life.
Of course, this album isn’t immune to criticism; this is Fatboy Slim’s first album, after all, so a lot of the tighter refinements that he’d make by that second album just aren’t here. There are points where intros go a little long in a way that tests the patience at points (specifically the first 1:20 or so of “10th & Crenshaw”), or some tracks that go a little long in a way that stalls some of the album’s momentum (namely “The Weekend Starts Here”), at least one track that’s a little too basic (“Punk to Funk”), & one track that just doesn’t have a great sense of progression (“The Sound of Milwaukee"). If I had listened to just the original UK tracklist, this would be a 4.5 that would still be bumped up to a 5.
Thank goodness then for the two extra tracks included on the U.S. version of the album; “Michael Jackson” & “Next to Nothing” really bring the energy back after the original last two tracks pull the vibes down just a bit. The punchier, techno-inspired percussion in the former really makes the track, & the vague chaos of all the synths flying around in the latter really works for me, especially as it makes for a more compelling album closer. Granted, those tracks make the album go from 57 minutes to 70 minutes, but I think the trade-off for a more satisfying ending is worth it. There’s not a track I’d cut or replace from the original UK version, even with some of its flaws.
I can acknowledge that electronica / plunderphonics stuff isn’t for everyone, so I guess I’m not that surprised by the 2.99 on the site (even if it is a little baffling to me). For my tastes, it’s just really easy to pop headphones in and fully get immersed into this sort of thing. As always, there’s some level of VGM influence that makes this easier to digest for my ears, and I guess that helps far more than I can ever realize. This album is a damn good 5, and subconsciously, it was probably always going to be a 5 the second it popped up. I highly recommend it, and I’m glad it’s on the list.
The Beau Brummels
5/5
Surprisingly enough, I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
I think this album’s biggest mistake is starting on “Are You Happy” – it’s by far the most Bob Dylan-y sounding track on the album, and while I can appreciate the logic of easing a listener in by reminding them of their comfort folk singer for the era before going into the Bluegrass-infused fantasy stuff with a psychedelic lean, I think it’s a bad tonesetter. To me, it just sounds like they weren’t confident enough in starting the album with the more “real” opening track of “Only Dreaming Now”, which immediately just feels far more striking with the instrumentation & vocal style. It certainly has a lot more to say lyrically, with at least some semblance of a story. Once that track starts, if you can allow yourself to get into the groove & atmosphere this album invites from an instrumental standpoint, then it will all just sort of melt into place the rest of the way there.
I’m really surprised this went the way it did – it’s a shorter album, thankfully, so nothing overstays its welcome too long, and the pacing is pretty strong. Lyrically, these aren’t very high concept songs, but they are well-written, evoking some solid imagery that the instrumentals just enhance. If anything, it almost feels like a fairy tale album of sorts – there’s songs about a blind painter in high demand from women, a timekeeper who loses track of time, a hammer so heavy it weighs down a train, & a wolf returning a lonely flower from a dark forest back to the sunlight via flight. It’s all a bit cheesy, sure, but they play it with a sort of earnestness that I just can’t really help but admire.
There are tracks that aren’t really in the same realm; “It Won’t Get Better” is about living life as if it’s always the best it’ll be so you’ll appreciate it more in the moment. “Triangle” is about the harmony between love, the sun, & rain as it relates to nature, and it probably works as a double entendre of sorts. “Old Kentucky Home” is just a cover of the normal track, but it’s performed very well. Ironically enough, I think “Are You Happy” could’ve ended the album, as it seems to thematically fit pretty well as an epilogue meant to evoke a sort of childlike joy after all of the fantasy stories. It would certainly stave off the Bob Dylan comparisons until the end at least.
As a whole, it’s just an album that feels more & more open the more you allow yourself to get into it, and while it starts on a wrong note, I think it built its momentum back up really well, to the point where I’ll bump it up from a 4.5 to a 5. You have to buy in, and even if that means just closing your eyes and trying to let yourself imagine some of the tracks, then by all means. I think the floor here is a 3, especially if some sort of lingering disdain for Bob Dylan really throws you off. To my ears, it’s just imaginatively written, rich in the instrumentals, and when he’s not doing a dollar store Bob Dylan, his vocals are honestly at just the right tone to really sell some of the “importance” of the tracks, no matter how goofy they might be. I liked it, and I think it’s worth giving a 5. Not bad for an initial “who the hell are these guys” reaction.
Tom Waits
4/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump down to a 4.
I think I understand what this album is going for, or at least in broad strokes; it’s a view into how people confront & cope with the very concept of mortality. Some people go out screaming about the eventual destruction of the world, some people reject both heaven & hell to accept the idea of dust, & others get denied death by an ocean that refuses to let them drown, or just rot away with regret in their hometowns. When this album focuses on the morbid & cruel side of mortality, I think its writing shines at its best, and Tom Waits’ scratchier vocal tones work well as a worn down soul unable to care any more than that.
This album also focuses on the occasionally brighter-ish side of mortality, though still from a sort of cynically celebratory tone. Some people dream of being Hollywood stars (in their own fucked up way), some find a weirdly perverse pleasure in seeing the almost gladiatorial forms of destruction happening across the country, other people wait for Jesus to return not as a messiah, but as a celebrity to be worshipped, & others see him as an evil figure after they leave the confines of a religion that’s trapped them. This album’s commentary on religion & fame are pretty sharply written as well, and I do think Tom Waits carries that vocal weight in a way that works.
It’s a storytelling album, one that leans on the writing talents that were present on “Swordfishtrombones”, but with the heavier tone of a Nick Cave album. On paper, it’s a good blend, and honestly, it mostly works well in execution. I think Tom Waits does a damn good job with the writing across the board. It’s the musicality that brings the album down to a 4 for me, because for as well-written & as well-performed as a good number of these tracks are, there’s just far too many things that feel bad to the ears.
This album is a “death by 1,000 paper cuts” situation. I think there are moments where the instrumentation is severely overblown in the mix, especially the horrid tambourine on “All Stripped Down”. I think there are some tracks where a singing vocal would have a better impact than the spoken word approach that’s occasionally taken. I think Tom Waits could use a lozenge half the time. The biggest paper cut, at least for me, is that the album just doesn’t find the right balance between atmosphere & musicality until about halfway through the album. The first half here is a little slower to get going, especially on a first listen, but the second half strikes more consistently, and it feels more aligned with the previous Tom Waits albums we’ve had, save for the baffling “Let Me Get Up on It”.
Make no mistake; I did enjoy this one. Slow to start, yes, but it does come together as a really cohesive package, and an interesting set of tracks that all tackle mortality in a good way. I don’t think too many tracks overlap with their concepts, and if they do, they play a sort of devil’s advocate vibe that keeps it fresh. This is a longer album at 53 minutes, and I do think it could easily weigh down a listener, especially if the first half of the album strikes a really bad chord. For my storytelling brain, I can’t say it ever became a big issue, but there are probably tracks here that could’ve been cut to make the pacing work better.
I can honestly understand someone going as low as a 2 or as high as a 5; this is not an album for everyone, and I think if this were someone’s first Tom Waits album, it could leave a bad taste in the mouth, or act as a sign of brilliance. Since this is our third, and I’ve enjoyed the last 2 we’ve gotten, I never felt like it got to that latter point. If this album were cleaner, tighter, and perhaps not partially recorded in a literal cellar (seriously, look it up), perhaps I could look past its early flaws & bump it up to a 5, but since they just compound in a way that never really shakes away, I’m stuck bumping it down to a 4. I did like it though, and I’m glad it’s on the list.
Willie Colón & Rubén Blades
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
There’s only two salsa albums on the list; this one & Tito Puente’s “Dance Mania”, which we got in April of this year. There’s a 20 year gap, so it’s certainly an interesting look at the difference in production, instrumentation, & the boldness of the lyricism, all while maintaining a pretty similar core. “Dance Mania” does feel like it’s constantly pushing upwards, trying to lift its energy up with a mostly musical showcase, though it certainly hit some stagnant points, with not a lot of space given to the vocals. This album, while a little more “stagnant” in the sense of really sticking to a particular groove / beat, makes up for that with some soul / R&B-infused horn sections & vocal stylings, with some more political / “life”-driven lyrics, partially influenced by Stevie Wonder to some degree (“Siembra”, in particular, feels like it’s trying to channel a little bit of “Another Star”).
As with “Dance Mania”, most of the rating boils down to “how much can you tolerate 43 minutes of salsa music”, as it’s very easy to ignore the lyricism here; I certainly did, given the language barrier – I only skimmed them after translating to get the vibe. I do think this isn’t as energetic as “Dance Mania” is, & I do wish it had infused just a bit more into some of the instrumentals after they settle, but there’s still a total groove that a lot of these tracks hit, and even with the longer runtimes occasionally making tracks feel like they’re dragging, I never found myself actively bothered by anything. It’s a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5; it’s not as danceable & not the breeziest runtime, but it’s still damn good salsa music, and I just had a really fun time.
Minutemen
5/5
I’m at a 4.5; I’ll bump it up to a 5 for the site as a vote of confidence, though I do think I’d rather just leave it at a 4.5.
43 tracks, 74 minutes, and the nigh-impossible challenge of making it feel entertaining the whole time. Frankly, it’s a miracle that they basically succeeded for like, 95% of the runtime. This is a fast-paced album, even with the length it has, and I can’t honestly truly say I ever felt a sense of burnout until the final 4 or 5 tracks; not their fault, they’re not bad tracks, the album just starts to get a little long. You can tell why none of the 3 band members picked them for their sides, as they do sort of blend together in more of a less satisfying way.
I really am impressed by how much this stayed entertaining; for 1984, this isn’t reinventing the wheel, it’s just showing a very refined form of it. This is post-punk with a slightly hardcore lean at times, but I would say this leans closer to a more “traditional” sense of rock & roll, taking the DNA of the faster-paced albums we’ve gotten (see: “Group Sex” or the Dead Kennedys album we got), combining them with more of a Talking Heads tone & just a touch of the Rolling Stones. All of that is to say, this is more musically thought out, and just a bit more “safe” than your traditional post-punk album. The tracks being pretty short helps a lot too.
I do think it’s hard to give any kind of track-by-track analysis here; this album does eventually slowly blur together, even with as much focus as I tried to give it. I don’t think it’s an album for everyone; I can easily see disdain for this being as long as it is, or getting bored by some level of perceived repetition. I don’t think it had to be 74 minutes; there are some tracks that could’ve probably been trimmed out, but at the same time, this album does work like a loosely crafted puzzle. It’s more fruitful to listen to this as one straight 74 minute shot; pausing this at any point will make the mind wander, and I certainly found myself wandering at a few points when I did have to pause. It’s surprisingly coherent, even with 43 tracks, usually keeping the energy up in a similar way. I think you have to buy into this to enjoy it, but even still, I think there is fatigue.
I do think this is worth listening to before you die, in the sense that it’s a musical gauntlet that’ll challenge your attention span, but it also stands on its own merits as a really fun listen, especially with how much they manage to pack into a lot of the tracks with such a short time for each. Ultimately, I’m at a 4.5; one I wish I could leave there, but as a vote of confidence for the scale of the project, and for how much they really did keep it entertaining longer than they had any real right to, I think it deserves a bump up to a 5.
Jane Weaver
5/5
I’m at a 4.5, and I think I’ll bump it up to a 5 for my tastes. I just vibed with this too much.
Here’s a scattering of genres that Spotify has applied to this thing: “psychedelic”, “space rock”, “french jazz” (?), “diner” (??), “krautrock”, “chamber psych”, & “art pop”. I have no real idea how to classify all of that into one album, but if I had to apply a genre to this thing, it would be “down my alley” – I’m a sucker for a good synth-led album with a little indie rock/pop in it, and this scratched an itch to my ears that we haven’t *really* dabbled with too much throughout the 651 albums we’ve gotten so far. The closest thing my brain has is “Vespertine” by Bjork mixed with parts of “american dream” by LCD Soundsystem, and even then, I think this album does something different. There are definitely “krautrock” elements here, assuming I have the genre right to my brain; a lot of pulsating synths, mildly repetitive beats that do a good job of slowly layering on top of each other – where a band like Can (whose former lead vocalist has a guest spot here as the narrator on "Ravenspoint") or a guy like Holger Czukay might use that as a chance to drive down a harsher tone, it’s used here as a way to enhance some of the more ethereal parts of the album.
The ethereal parts of the album worked really well for me; while listening, I wrote down that “it feels like audible Shoegaze / a comprehensible Cocteau Twins track” for the first 3-4 tracks of the album, and that vibe pulled me in really nicely. Yes, a few tracks go a little long because of it, but I never found myself actively annoyed by it. Once this album hits track 4, I think it leans far more into an electronica vibe, yet still keeping more of the pulsating rhythms of the first 3 tracks in a way that feels more natural. My brain’s immediate comparison is to Valve’s soundtrack for Portal 2, yet there’s an indie rock lean here that’s a bit understated. That vibe shifts again by Tracks 8 & 9, where the album feels like it leans far more into ambience & atmosphere as its driving tone, complimented by some of the more pulsating elements being pulled back & some lovely imagery from the lyrics on “Valley”, & the sort of spaced-out, sci-fi tone of “Ravenspoint”, with the reverb-heavy vocals fitting the tone nicely. “I Wish”, the closing track, sounded like a slower version of “Blinding Lights” by The Weeknd, which I just really fucked with.
Vocally, there’s a lot of Bjork comparisons here, yet with a little bit more melody in her voice. Could just be the lack of an accent, I dunno. Lyrically, I didn’t have a clue half the time, but I think the general scope of the lyricism helped to enhance each track; there’s a lot of science-y / mathematical references in here, which certainly fits for an album titled “Modern Kosmology”. I don’t think the lyrics matter that much anyway; a lot of this album is about getting caught / lost in the vibes, and this album just hit on the vibes really nicely for me. It’s certainly not an album for everyone; I understand some of the 2’s & 3’s here, as you just have to have a taste for this style. It’s also not the most special album; I’m not going to complain and say “you don’t need to hear this before you die”, because I’m very glad I heard it & I would recommend it, but it does feel like a sort of token indie pick for a more recent version of the book while giving a nod to a blend of genres that hasn’t really popped up too much.
Overall though, I did fuck with this a lot; a few tracks just didn’t wow me as much & or they went a little long, but the entire 44 minute package scratched an itch for me. I don’t think there’s a bad track here, and I think it’s a super easy album to listen to, both in a focused / casual listen (since I’ve been listening to it while writing this very review & still vibing with it all the same). I’m just a sucker for the style, I think, so take my enjoyment with a grain of salt. Regardless, I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
Big Black
5/5
You know what? Fuck it, I’m at a 4.5 that I'll bump up to a 5.
I had some thoughts going into this; I figured it would be noisy (yes), with a little bit of a punk / industrial lean (yes), but I also assumed it would be a little annoying (no), abrasive (yes), & overall, it would feel like another “same”-y 1980s punk album that could either really hit or really miss. Thankfully, what I’ve been greeted by is, oddly enough, a blend of “Double Nickels on the Dime” (in terms of the instrumental vibes / energy), & Tom Waits’ “Bone Machine” (in terms of some heavier, yet honest subject matter on a handful of tracks). This album isn’t as quickly paced as the former, nor is it as well written as the latter, but for 1985, this feels like it takes parts of the best of both, leaning more towards using the soundscape as the primary storyteller, but using the harsher tones to more of a musical advantage as opposed to Tom Waits using it for a little bit of a shock early on in his album.
Lyrically, there’s tracks about a falsified sexual abuse ring in Minnesota, the struggle for white-passing black people, crooked cops making shit up for money, small towns that are so boring they light shit on fire for fun (been there, literally done that), consensual physical touch taken to its extremes, falling back into the vices of alcohol, a slightly schizophrenic / paranoid mind, and cattle mutilation as a 9 to 5 job. Yeah. not exactly the same thing as Tom Waits’ struggle with mortality, but in terms of the brutally honest approach a lot of these tracks take, without ever going into anything truly gory or sickening (save for the first track, which is uncomfortable in that “Kim” by Eminem way where it’s a character), I think there’s some merit to that comparison. I think these are all mostly well written, even if the soundscape takes precedence, especially when it overshadows the vocals. It helps that there’s good liner notes for each track on Genius.
Musically, it’s just a heavy fucking album. The guitar, percussion, bass, the whole 9 yards is LOUD, it’s abrasive, it’s full of echo & reverb, and yet for whatever reason, I found myself engaged, brought on by the fact that there are melodies & riffs & a general normal musical structure hiding underneath the “face value” volume. Other than “Passing”, a lot of these tracks do have a good sense of progression despite some repetition, and their drops are incredibly effective when they hit. I think it’s a little bit same-y for the 37 minute runtime, but if you allow yourself to just get into it, as fully harsh as it feels, there’s something satisfying there.
I was definitely leaning towards a 4 for most of it, and yet something about the very last track showcasing that they keep the same energy live as they do in the studio really sold me on bumping it up & it sold me on them. Of course, afterward, I realized I hadn’t looked up anything about these guys, so I did a quick look at Wikipedia one more time, and… this is Steve Albini’s band. As in, prolific producer Steve Albini who passed away last year. We’ve had albums produced by him before, namely “Surfer Rosa” & “In Utero”, so it all makes a lot more sense now. I bounced off of “Surfer Rosa” very early on into this project (it was album #91!), but I feel like nowadays, I’d take much more kindly to it, so that needs a relisten.
It’s not an album for everyone; I think the floor is a 3, and I do understand the 2.72 on the site. I’m at a 5 just because I enjoyed the hell out of it after the last track clicked really nicely. This was a good one to my ears, and I’m very sold on anything else we get in the future produced by Steve Albini (including yet another PJ Harvey album down the line) since this is the only Big Black album on the list. Rest in peace, Mr. Albini, and thank you for giving the list something this batshit crazy for 1986.
Talking Heads
5/5
Well, that’s obviously a 5. Arguably a 10.
That’s from 1980? Fucking hell. That felt way ahead of schedule. Electronica-infused polyrhythms with a clear African inspiration (apparently from Fela Kuti, which makes a lot of sense – no pun intended), but full of little intricacies in the production work that makes Brian Eno sound like a time-traveling mad genius. Seriously, “Seen And Not Seen” immediately felt like a hip-hop beat from 1992 with that intro, and “Listening Wind” felt like a trip-hop track. Every single soundscape here, including the more ambient Joy Division-inspired “The Overload, is basically perfect. For 1980, this is one of the most impressive production jobs I can remember, and given that it holds up as fresh *45* years later, they were clearly way, way, way ahead of pace.
David Byrne has never David Byrne’d it up more than he does here – his vocal style feels more eccentric than ever, but with a much more natural, controlled rhythm that feels like he’s fully come into his own after the steady improvements on both “More Songs About Buildings And Food” & “Fear Of Music”. It’s impossible to not notice him here, and while this album was apparently designed to prove Talking Heads was more than just a “vehicle for David Byrne”, I think it failed spectacularly in that case, solely on account of the brilliant madness that is “Once in a Lifetime”. It’s utter nonsense, sounding like a pastor going through a slow mental breakdown, behind one of the catchiest beats of the 1980s, and David Byrne sells it brilliantly.
It’s also fair to say the band has never “Talking Heads”’d it up more than they do here either – yes, Brian Eno’s production work does a lot for this album, but do you hear the band on this thing? This is groovy as hell, even in its most avantgarde moments. The percussion, in particular, is a highlight, but there are some killer fucking basslines on some of these tracks, hidden deep underneath a full charcuterie board of instrumental layering that had to be complex as hell for 1980. I’m deeply, deeply impressed.
This is worthy of the acclaim & more; I’m not sure if I can definitively say it’s better than “Fear of Music” to my ears, just because I was really into the consistent theming of that album, as opposed to more of a loose, rhythmically driven theme here, but it’s just as good & certainly as enjoyable. It’s definitely the most fun I’ve had listening to a Talking Heads album, that’s for sure; it’s undeniably catchy as hell, and even a track like “The Great Curve” overcomes some deeper sense of repetition by just being effortlessly easy to move around to. It’s an album where the music speaks for itself, and I think I may find myself behind the wheel of an automobile grooving my head around to every track here in the near future. It’s an easy, easy 5.
As far as Talking Heads goes then, I think it’s a hell of a job by the randomizer to make sure we got this one last out of the 4 Talking Heads albums on the list. I gave ‘77 a 3.5 bumped down to a 3, which is a mistake I need to rectify with a re-listen, since it was the 38th album we had gotten and my ears weren’t ready for it. Everything else got a 5, so I suppose that adds up to an 18.5/20, or about a 4.62 on average. Either way, I’m very glad I’ve finally listened to these guys – they deserve their place in musical history, for sure.
Paul Revere & The Raiders
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’m somehow having to talk my way into bumping one way or the other, though I’m leaning towards a 5.
Genuinely, I’m surprised at how varied that was for 1966 – the influences of just about everyone else in the genre is pretty apparent here, especially when it comes to the Beatles, the Beach Boys, & the Doors, but with flashes of the Rolling Stones & Johnny Cash in there. This album jumps from spot to spot, and yet the energy the band brings is pretty consistent, making this whole thing feel like a strong, cohesive record. There’s some big highlights here; “Kicks”, “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone”, “Get It On”, & “Louie, Go Home” are probably my top songs after a first listen. “Get It On” in particular feels well ahead of pace for 1966, even if it’s a cover. Overall, there’s not a bad track here, and for a 29 minute album, this thing is packed pretty damn well, and I enjoyed it a lot.
Why the hell am I even considering bumping it down to a 4, then? As always, a bunch of little piling nitpicks for me that just build up. “Little Girl in the 4th Row” is probably the weakest track here, and that “Little” in the title certainly doesn’t help much. The harmony has a nice Beach Boys-y tone to it, but the track feels a little slow & it just doesn’t really go anywhere. “Ballad of a Useless Man” has a great instrumental & good lyrics, but the disconnect with the vocals having a twangier, country tone (especially frustrating with “Steppin’ Stone” right after) just nags at me a little bit. “All I Really Need Is You” is a cool track, especially with the surprise beat switch at the 2 minute mark that feels ahead of pace for the time, but the vocal structure is too loose, too Dylan-y, & loses a lot of coherence by the third verse. It’s a good track, it just probably needed a little more work to really tie it together.
Past that, I have the extreme nitpick that some of these tracks should’ve ended on an actual finish instead of a fadeout, but given that my issues boil down to 1 mediocre song, 1 that needed work & some production choices that I just disagreed with, can I really bring myself to bump down an album that I enjoyed this much? No, not really – the floor here is definitely a 3, especially if you’re not into the amalgamation of ‘60s styles present on this thing, or if you just get sort of bored for whatever reason. I’ll bump this up from a 4.5 to a 5; if there was another dud track on here, I’d probably be at a 4, but this is a quick burst of energy that just feels great to listen to for my ears. If anything, I’m still riding the intense percussion from “Get It On”, so maybe in the future this could go down, but right now, I feel inclined to bump it up. Fun stuff for 1966.
Dexys Midnight Runners
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4, but I did like this a lot.
There’s only one truly bad track here to my ears, and that’s “I Couldn’t Help It If I Tried”, and it’s mostly because the track goes nowhere for its entire runtime, & because I Couldn’t Understand Him If I Tried, and believe me; I tried. That’s the biggest sin of the album; I cannot understand Kevin Rowland on a number of these tracks unless I have the lyrics in front of me, and what makes it worse / annoying is that the vast majority of these tracks have incomplete / incorrectly structured lyrics online, leaving me partially in the dark on just what the hell some of these tracks are talking about while I can’t understand his talking.
You would think that a lead vocalist being mostly incomprehensible would lead to an actively bad album, but the neat trick of Dexys Midnight Runners is that, for most of these tracks, the band themselves just have a weirdly infectious energy that somehow works in their favor. This is a ska-ish soundscape, relying on a lot of horns & percussion to do the heavy lifting. Thankfully, they pull it off, and even though a lot of this album ends up sounding the same, I can’t say it’s that big of an issue since they just generally sound that good. Their instrumentals are all strong, save for the nothingburger of “I Couldn’t Help It If I Tried”, and even then, I think it’s just poor execution of a well-intentioned vibe / atmosphere that they just don’t maintain very well.
It also helps that even with Kevin Rowland having absolutely no enunciation in his voice whatsoever, his melodic enough voice still maintains a pretty strong structure, to the point where the lines that do come clearly out of his voice paint a decent enough picture towards the intent of each track. His vocals being incomprehensible is a sin, yes, but he balances it out well by just earnestly fucking trying to keep a melody regardless, and I’d say he generally succeeded. Past that, it also helps that for the tracks that do have mostly complete lyrics to follow along to, I’d say a good chunk of them are pretty well-written. This album’s other big sin is just lingering around; I’d say there’s at least 4 or 5 tracks here that go about a minute too long.
Overall, it’s an album with flaws, and it’s one that should probably fall flat on its face because of those flaws; however, there’s something still weirdly infectious about the energy this album brings, and even after a dud track or a long outro, the intro to the next track usually lifts up the mood in a way that just feels kinda bright. I wish I had a better sense of an overarching theme / inspiration for the album, but I do feel like part of it is just picking yourself up after the tough times, and they certainly nailed that vibe from the instrumentals alone. His vocals being incomprehensible is dragging this down to a 3.5, along with the lingering tracks, but I think it’s worth a bump up to a 4 because it still ends up as a pretty fun listen despite itself. Definitely looking forward to their other two on the list now.
P.S.: If nothing else, “Geno” & “Seven Days Too Long” are rad as hell.
Iron Butterfly
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
I’ve vaguely heard of Iron Butterfly before, mainly as it relates to the title track. I didn’t think I’d ever heard it before, but it hit me right as I saw the title that Weird Al threw the track’s chorus into one of his polka medleys. That’s all I knew of it though – a remarkably small taste. It’s a hell of a track once you get to it, though, and absolutely a highlight for 1960s rock, feeling like the extended solo on Light My Fire & somehow pulling even more out of it.
There are 19 minutes before that track though, and… I really liked most of them. “Most Anything You Want” is a really strong opener that sets the tone, with a fun interpolation of “Light My Fire” in there. He also sounded like Rick Astley to my ears, so that was kinda fun. For Track 2 and 3 though… there’s a cardinal sin to my ears that has me at a 4.5; both “Flowers and Beads” & “My Mirage” essentially loop halfway through. I can partially excuse it for the former, since it does at least have a fun outro & a catchy melody that stops it from being too much of a bother. The latter, however, is inexcusable, mainly since it’s a slower track that already takes about 2:30 of repetition to get through before the first loop, his vocal style feels like it’s stretching for time, and I have absolutely no idea what the lyricism means. It also doesn’t help that both tracks are back to back, so hearing the same looping trick done twice in a row after I was already bothered by it the first time did not help the pacing of the album at all. Thankfully, “Termination” has a really cool afterlife-y atmosphere that feels like a breath of fresh air, & “Are You Happy” is a very strong & very energetic entree to the main course that is “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”.
I’m not really sure I can say too much about the track, since it’s one that deserves to be heard rather than read about, but the sense of journey & progression that comes through the track, with each member getting a little showcase (most fun to my ears on both the extended drum / organ solos) is super cool. In a way, it sort of goes nowhere, but that would be doing a disservice to how complex / technically sound each solo is, especially for 1968. Of all the really long tracks we’ve gotten so far throughout the 657 albums we’ve done, this one might be the one that’s flown by the fastest. Part of that is just getting a lot more used to / appreciative of long tracks, but I got totally lost in the grooves here and before I knew it, I was 13 minutes into the track with only a light scattering of “this sounds cool” notes. It’s a track that obviously lifts this album to a 5 by itself, and honestly, it could lift up higher if there’s even more intricacies to it that my brain just didn’t catch on this first listen.
So, yeah, this certainly lived up to the acclaim for me. I can only vaguely understand the 2.93 on the site; if that repetition on tracks 2 & 3 hit that badly, or if the Doors-esque instrumentation didn’t click right, then fair enough, but it just feels like robbing yourself of enjoying a roller coaster ride because you saw a few drops of rain. This is a very good album; even with one half-flop to my tastes (the first half of “My Mirage” isn’t *that* bad), the title track alone is worth the price of admission, and the journey to get there is pretty good all the same. This is an easy bump up to a 5, and I liked it a lot.
Creedence Clearwater Revival
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5, though I do sort of wish I could just leave it there.
It’s a good album, but it certainly takes a little bit to get going. “Born on the Bayou” is a good opener, but the solos in the track do go a little long & get a little stale which does sort of stunt the progression / momentum of the track. “Bootleg” is fun, but the last minute or so is just a little repetitive. “Graveyard Train” is… not a bad one, but it’s an 8-and-a-half minute track defined by a bassline melody that may or may not hypnotize you into enjoying it. I found some pleasure out of it by just walking around to the rhythm of it and sort of trancing my way into a groove, but for the most part, I think it’s just deathly long. The storytelling is nice & I do like what it’s going for, but it’s definitely the weakest track here, and I’d easily skip it on any future relistens.
With the first 3 tracks here all having nitpicks / issues like this, I’d be very inclined to bump this down to a 4 if not for the final 4 tracks here all knocking it out of the park. The cover of “Good Golly, Miss Molly” has an infectious energy, and they sure do Little Richard justice. “Penthouse Pauper” feels structured similarly to a Hendrix track (my brain specifically went to “Voodoo Child”), and the lyricism is strong as hell. Mix that with some strong vocals from John Fogerty (who delivers in spades on this album), and the track just works really, really well. “Proud Mary” is exactly what it is; not the most special track in terms of instrumentation, nor the most dazzling showcase here, but lyrically, it’s a wonderful slice of ‘60s Americana that must’ve just struck the right nerve at the right time.
“Keep on Chooglin” is just fucking rad. I got fully entranced in the groove / energy of it, and even though it’s a 7 minute closer, I could’ve easily sat in it for double the time. Apparently, it used to close out CCR concerts while going even longer, which makes sense to me. It’s a super strong closer track to cap off a 4-track run that just elevates the album really nicely. Is it enough to *really* bump it up to a 5? Admittedly, it feels like a bump up as more of a vote of confidence for how strongly the album closes as opposed to a fully rewarding album experience, but given that I couldn’t find any real flaws with the final 4 tracks to my ears, & the fact that I liked the first 2 tracks even with their minor issues, I feel safe with a bump up. The only real dud here is “Graveyard Train”, and even then, there’s probably a version out there that cuts down a lot of the filler time to make it more focused, which would help a lot of my issues with the track (it really is a nice bass melody if you can let yourself get into it).
So, yes, I’ll bump this up to a 5, though I’d rather let it sit at a 4.5 if I could. If nothing else, it’s told me that my smaller knowledge of CCR (“Fortunate Son”, “Up Around The Bend”, & “Have You Ever Seen The Rain”) should’ve been met with full listens to these albums years ago, as opposed to just some of the singles. I’m glad they’ve got two more on the list after this one, and I’m just glad I got to hear one that has two pretty-well known tracks on it. It’s a good album, it’s a fun listen, and at only 33 minutes (even with 3 tracks taking up 21 minutes of that run time), it’s a well-paced breeze, save for one track. Pretty nice stuff all around, and a fair bump up to a 5. The floor is probably a 3, I dunno.
Machito
5/5
It’s obviously a 5. I think it’s probably a 10.
Just a spectacular jazz album with some Latin / Cuban influence, really. They make this shit sound so easy, and it’s probably full of deeply layered big band performances & harmonies full of intricacies that I could only barely keep up with. This thing is a ball of brass-driven energy with frenetic percussion & horn stabs & melodies & counter-melodies galore. For 1957, even with a 2000 remaster, I’m stunned at just how coherent & how deep this thing feels. This is an album where the music more than speaks for itself, and you just need to go listen to it to really feel it. It’s a 33 minute fireball that never really hits a bad point, and I’m just stunned that this is as good as it is.
If I have one nitpick (and it’s a very minor one), it’s that the album could’ve probably ended on the superb climax that is “Tin Tin Deo” for a 10-track masterpiece, but even with the album going for 2 songs past that, they’re both still remarkably good. If they had come in earlier, and still let the album finish on “Tin Tin Deo”, it’d still be perfect. Hell, I think it might still be perfect regardless. I’m riding the high of this thing right now, so maybe my energy will simmer down on it in the future, but my immediate analysis is that this is about as close to a perfect jazz album as there could be, at least for my tastes. A total stunner, one of the best jazz albums we’ve had on the list so far, and an easy, easy 5. Probably a 10.
Queen Latifah
3/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll barely bump up to a 4, though I don’t think it deserves it.
Weirdly, I sometimes forget Queen Latifah is one of the more accomplished women in R&B / hip-hop history, mainly because she’s settled much more into an acting career for a lot of my lifetime. She’s deeply recognizable, for sure, but I always associated her as a singing actress as opposed to a trailblazer of sorts for women in the genre. She made this album when she was 19, so I was a little predisposed to give some benefit of the doubt towards the flaws here.
Honestly, I’m not sure there are truly that many flaws. As far as production goes, The 45 King (who you WILL know by the end of this album) does a great job with some really strong variety, including some jazzier stuff & a house-inspired lean on a few tracks, with lots of good samples too. KRS-One gets in an interesting beat too. As far as the rapping goes, Queen Latifah’s on point here; save for a slightly shaky start to the album where she feels a tad off-beat, she really finds a good rhythm throughout this thing, and her technical skills never come into question afterwards. She does set herself up for some really strong future success here. Overall, as far as the “flaws” go, there’s certainly not many on the technical side of things. If you’re here for the beats & the flows, you’re in for a solid 49 minutes.
There is one, very, very obvious… let’s not say “flaw”, but let’s go with annoying consistency throughout this album. Queen Latifah cannot stop introducing herself. This is an album entirely composed of raps about herself, save for maybe 2 or 3 tracks. She is fighting invisible enemies throughout this whole thing. They can’t touch her flow, she’s the baddest MC, the ladies watch her glow, while the men should all flee; she’s the best, they’re the worst, she’s the star, they’re the dirt – nobody can touch her, lest they get burnt; she can’t be beat, she’ll make you stomp your feet, & all these sucka wack men can’t rhyme on Mark’s beats. Do you see what I’m getting at here? Every song has the same general structure / topic matter (HERSELF!), and while it’s disguised pretty well for most of the album, at a certain point, it just becomes so patently obvious that it just loses its edge by the end.
The fact that she has a multitude of tracks of her bragging about her talent wouldn’t even be an issue if more tracks had something to say, like the fantastic “Ladies First” (seriously, why wasn’t Monie Love bigger?), or “Evil That Men Do”, but… damn, it really is just a whole album bragging about herself beyond very few tracks. It’s honestly enough to make me strongly consider bumping it down to a 3. However, when this album is rolling (& it rolls STRONG through “Ladies First”, slowing down a bit afterward), it’s a treat to listen to. There are moments here where her flow evokes Chuck D / Public Enemy as much as it does Run-DMC, so she’s clearly taking her inspirations and tweaking them to her own style. As I said, it’s not a technically bad album. A few flatter beats at points, but her rapping is strong, & her flows are good. Hell, the lyricism isn’t even bad despite most of the tracks being new & creative ways to praise herself – there are really good bars / wordplay here for someone who was only 19 when they recorded this.
I want to give this a 4. I don’t think it’s really earned it, and I’m certainly much closer to a 3 after laying this all out in writing. This is probably the most 3.5-y 3.5 that there’s ever been, because it’s better than a 3 on account of her talent & these beats generally coming through in a way that feels energetic for 1989, even if it’s deeply dated to the era. It’s not a 4 because the album is both too long & too repetitive for its own good, and yet I cannot shake the whole “she’s only 19” thing here. It feels like an album designed in a way where most of the tracks could be released as singles or radio if they so chose, allowing a strong introduction in a variety of styles & beats. It’s not a great album experience because of that, but it’s a technically sound set of 12 tracks that never really lets down at any point; the messaging just gets stale, even if it’s full of fun individual listens. I’m going to bump this up, but… damn, it just doesn’t feel like it’s earned it. A very, very shaky bump to a 4.
Edit: Yes, another rare use of the edit feature here for me to say "why the hell didn't I bump this down to a 3?", and rectifying that by doing so. I promise I won't do this that much more, but... this one really needs it.
Jungle Brothers
5/5
I’m at a 5. I really should’ve given Queen Latifah a 3.
A bit of an irony to both her and Monie Love popping back up on this album’s monstrous posse cut, “Doin’ Our Own Dang”, featuring themselves, Q-Tip, De La Soul, and of course, the stars of the show, the Jungle Brothers. Let’s be real; these guys are basically the cousins of Tribe Called Quest. Hell, apparently, they gave them their name, which isn’t too surprising given all of the references to tribes throughout this thing. This is a super positive rap album for 1989, and yet it doesn’t feel like an outlier next to its peers. I’d honestly argue it’s the second best rap album of the 1980s we’ve gotten so far, right behind “It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back”.
I found myself in a total groove state here, following along with lyrics & just going to the beat, so I really don’t have too much to say about each track, other than the overarching vibes of positivity, reclamation, & happiness (and one weird outlier track about the rapture). “Black Woman” sticks out, just in terms of lifting up women at a time when the whole genre felt like it was aiming the other, deeply misogynistic way. “Acknowledge Your Own History” probably has the best lyrics on the album, in terms of black empowerment. For a 16-track album, I think it’s a hell of a testament to their writing that nothing really overlaps too much, and their flows feel fresh every time.
Instrumentally, I think this thing shines; a solid soft balance between the future jazzier tones that A Tribe Called Quest would bring to the table by “The Low End Theory”, and the sort of cheesier ‘80s Slick Rick / Run-DMC style, whilst blending in a myriad of samples that are recognizable across the board if you’ve heard enough rap. As a result, some of these tracks feel like they’re evoking artists from years later; “Good Newz Comin’” in particular feels like a Tyler, The Creator track & “Tribe Vibes” feels like it could fit into 1994 or 1995, not 1989. KRS-One seems deeply underrated as a producer.
Overall, I think it’s an hour that easily speaks for itself; I certainly enjoyed the hell out of this, and as a progenitor of sorts to a vibe / style that De La Soul & A Tribe Called Quest would later refine & make famous, this album really works, especially for 1989. It makes me feel kinda silly for bumping up yesterday’s Queen Latifah album to a 4 when it’s not even really in the same class (even though I liked it!). This is probably my second-favorite ‘80s rap album we’ve gotten so far, and to my ears, it’s a very easy 5. Strong, strong stuff.
Robert Wyatt
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
Fascinatingly bizarre, to say the least. While it slows down a little too much in the second half of the album (hence the 4.5), I found myself entranced by the sort of “super abstract Bowie” vibes this album has going for it. There’s not really a bad soundscape here; based on the 2.38 on the site, I figured it would be louder & abrasive, but this is far more attuned to a sort of Brian Eno-y ambience, meddled with by throwing some avant-garde melodies at the wall to compliment it, but never hitting a point that felt truly loud or obnoxious. If anything, this is a really technically sound album, in terms of mixing the instruments to create a good sense of space between everything, volume control for his vocals (which are abstract, but never bad), and the complexity towards some of the instrumentals here. In particular, I think the brass / percussion work on this thing is super cool, & the guitar riffs that occasionally chime in add a flair to each track that makes it all work.
Lyrically, I couldn’t tell you a damn thing happening here. In the abstract, I think it’s very loosely an album where a guy in love breaks up with his girlfriend (first 3 tracks), slowly goes insane following some sort of accident (based on the nonsense lyrics on Tracks 4 & 5), with the last track acting as a proper descent into madness, but that’s just my read on things. It makes sense to be based on some sort of accident, based on Robert Wyatt becoming a paraplegic before recording this album, though he claims he wrote most of / all of it before the accident. Robert Wyatt, by the way, is the former lead drummer / vocalist for Soft Machine.
When we got “Third” as our 22nd album, I gave it a 2 because those tracks went on without any clear direction, & they lasted an ungodly amount of time. I don’t think going back to that album would raise it up any higher than a 3 for me, but I do wonder if this album feels more aligned to what they envisioned. I think this is much tighter, for sure, given the shorter (yet still long) tracks. I think the attempts to blend some jazzier tones with synth work is much more effective here. His vocals are still kinda silly in nature, but he uses them well to create a better atmosphere overall. I’m genuinely fascinated that this has an even lower rating on the site than “Third”, because I think it’s just far more enjoyable.
It’s not everyone’s cup of tea; the floor really is probably a 2 if the sense of progression on this thing isn’t super strong (it has some ‘eh’ moments) or if his vocals still feel extremely weird (understandable), but I liked the weird, entrancing effect this had on me. I think it’s a coherent album, and 40 minutes that you have to buy into, but it’s worth it to my ears, and I recommend it. It's a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
Sonic Youth
5/5
I’m at a 5.
I think this album is an acquired taste of sorts; for its time, it’s a slightly unnatural blend of the shoegaze that was, the heavy metal there is, and the grunge that soon would be. It leans into a lot of heavier guitar tones, focusing on the “sonic” side of Sonic Youth, much like “Goo” did, and while it’s not complimented as nicely by some more sophisticated buildups & chords, this album overwhelms that issue by just creating a more concrete atmosphere that carries over from track to track. It feels like a heavy album, even with a lot of these tracks just being generalized teenage-y first-world shit (frustration with politics, love life issues, lost marijuana, LSD trips, ego trips, etc), and I just think the soundscape itself is super cool to sit in.
Much like “Goo”, you have to be a little more present in the moment with these tracks, since the instrumental shifts really sell the ebb & flow of the album – vocals & lyrics have a presence here, but half of the time, I found the lyrics nonsensical & the vocals (mostly from Thurston Moore as opposed to Kim Gordon, who honestly has some weaker stuff here) sound like Bob Dylan got kinda trapped in there with them & went along with it. “Rain King” in particular feels like a direct rip on his flowery, verbose lyrical style, and it has far more of a vocal twang that just screams parody to me. They don’t matter as much here, though they do occasionally have their moments.
Unlike “Goo”, I can’t say there’s a dropoff here – a slight homogenization boils up by the second half, due to the first half having really long tracks & since this is a 70 minute album as opposed to a 49 minute one (though the pacing feels better, somehow). I only found one track to really hit a stale point by itself, and that was “Kissability”. Past that, I just found myself pretty damn satisfied for the whole thing, especially through the first 10 tracks.
As I said though, it’s an acquired taste; if you’re not into the shoegaze of the era, or the heavy metal, or if the grunge aspects are underbaked here, combined with a long runtime that can occasionally feel like it’s going nowhere or getting too same-y, then the floor here is a very understandable 3, and I wouldn’t blame that. Hell, I could even forgive a 2 under the right explanations. For me, this just worked; I think the intensity & the energy for most of the album glides really nicely, and the vocals, for as Dylan-y and non-melodic as they occasionally feel, tend to work for the more frustrated & grumpy tone this album usually takes.
I do think I would’ve given this a 3 or a 4 if it had popped up earlier in the list (or hell, if it had been our first Sonic Youth album), but hearing some of their other stuff, as well as a lot of surrounding albums within this space certainly helped a bit. I don’t think it meets the critical acclaim as a top 10 album of the 1980s like that (though it’s pretty damn good for a rock album), but I generally see where the critics are coming from. I enjoyed it, and while there are probably flaws I could’ve touched on (especially in shaving down the runtime here and there), I think those are for other people who disliked this more to amplify. I’m personally at a 5; I just liked it a lot.
P.S.: I now do feel fatigued from hearing a shit ton of overdriven guitar at high tempos for the last few weeks. Enough with the damn “Atomizer”s & the “Double Nickels on the Dime”s & now this – I just want some nice, happy, fun pop music tomorrow, or anything chill.
Prince
5/5
I’m at a 5. Probably higher, though not quite a 10. To answer that top comment, yes, you did, & I think I also just had sex with Prince.
Well, I asked for a fun pop album at the end of that last review & I got a damn good one. I thought Prince was already horny as a motherfucker on Sign O’ The Times, but… no, this is the album where he just lusts for sex the whole time. He gets it a lot too! “Little Red Corvette” is that, “Let’s Pretend We’re Married” is that, “Automatic” is that (the whispered panning is weirdly intimate), “Lady Cab Driver” is that, and… yeah. I mean, that is what “International Lover” is, right? I don’t even think I need to describe the details on that; he let it all hang out there. God, no wonder there was such an obvious contrast back then between him and Michael. I know, I know, someday we’ll get Thriller, but once again, “The Lady in My Life” as a comparative closing track feels wild.
OK, OK, it’s also unfair to characterize this as nothing but “the horny album” – that would take away from the production work here, which is sort of a prototype for what would eventually emerge & grow into a behemoth by Purple Rain, but… man, this is a masterclass in funky synthwork. I can’t really even describe it; it’s not as layered as Purple Rain, but the general groove / rhythm of this thing feels like a natural bridge between the Earth, Wind & Fire R&B style of the late 70s & the new wave synthpop of the 1980s, blended with a healthy mix of Kraftwerk-esque electronica & Journey / Boston-esque soft rock. There isn’t full blown heavy metal ala “Let’s Go Crazy” or anything, but there are certainly moments that feel like foreshadowing of the bigger things that would come in just 2 years.
I don’t think I can really write a paragraph on every track here (lord only knows everyone else has), but I do want to quickly point at two tracks; “D.M.S.R.” feels far ahead of pace for 1982, and honestly, it feels like a prototype French house track, ala Justice or Daft Punk. It doesn’t really have all the same elements to it, but the repetition & rhythmic buildup are there, as is the obvious hook of “dance, music, sex, romance”, which I’m sure has been sampled at some point. “Lady Cab Driver”, much in the same vein, reminds me of “Lady (Hear Me Tonight)” by Modjo, to the point where I’m convinced they just sort of took it and never really mentioned this track’s influence. He says “lady” in basically the same way! I know the latter uses a different sample for its base, but the overall energy / rhythm / layering is all there. They’re two of my favorite cuts on the album; the whole thing is a delight to listen to, even if I only knew the first two tracks coming into it (which, to be fair, were huge singles).
If I have any complaints holding me back from a 10, it’s simply the length of this thing; there are definitely parts where tracks could’ve been trimmed around the edges to make it feel more concise & just a little tighter, but regardless, it’s an easy, easy 5, and certainly higher. This is the last Prince album we’ll get on the list, but I definitely need to hunt down more of them. As I’ve said in the past, I’ve been an MJ guy & not a Prince guy (reverence to Prince’s singles as opposed to the albums), but I’ll be damned if getting arguably his 3 best albums hasn’t made me appreciate him far, far more. He’s an icon, truly, and finally listening to these feels long overdue. A perfect 15/15 for Prince (or, in another sense, a 20+/15), and that just feels right. Hell of a run.
Happy Mondays
3/5
I’m at a 3.
Definitely a step down after “Pills 'n' Thrills And Bellyaches” clicked so nicely, but make no mistake; I didn’t hate this album. This is just not as good, plain and simple, and it’s because of one very loud & very obvious decision in the production / recording process. This thing is utterly drenched in reverb. There’s a gag on the SiivaGunner channel (video game music with comedic bait & switch changed melodies / mashups) where a certain subset of uploads of Kingdom Hearts songs are heavy on the reverb, to sell part of the joke, but for this album, it feels like a very defined & intentional choice to center the album around it. It *deeply* makes the album suffer.
It’s not in the compositions; these are well composed songs, occasionally bringing to mind bands like Tears for Fears, U2, and to some degree, Joy Division & Talking Heads. It’s not in Shaun Ryder’s vocals; as muffled & buried in the mix as they are, I think he generally tends to bring a decent gravitas to the emotions he’s trying to pull off on the tracks, though there are a few dry vocal structures. It is partially in the writing; you can tell the verses were an afterthought here, given that so many of the second verses are just minor rewrites of the first verse to fit the same syllabic structure, & a lot of the lyrics here are just kinda crass for the sake of it to some degree.
It is solely in the mixing / production process where this album buries itself to a totally fine 3 – the synth work gets the most reverb, creating a cavernous effect that acts as almost a reverse wall of sound, opening up far too much. The percussion / guitar are generally more unfazed by it, but the synths overwhelm them, and in turn, Shaun Ryder’s vocals get it the worst, already buried under both the guitar & percussion, before the synths just run them all over. To its credit, the album at least tries to find a balance in the compositions where the synths are played down, to let the other aspects get a bit of shine, but those moments are fleeting. Once the synths come back in, the mild annoyance just resurfaces with them.
Overall, it’s a fully competent 3; not a bad album, per se, and I do genuinely hear a sort of appeal for this grittier, Shoegaze-ier, post-punk influenced form of Madchester, before ‘90s house music gave Shaun Ryder the chance to enter a much more commercially appealing soundscape… but it’s not the sort of Madchester that works for my tastes. If someone wants to give this a 4 or even a 5, if they made a compelling enough case, I could maybe understand it. I do think the people giving this a 2 are justified, though. I’m at a 3 just because I found it to be utterly fine, and not much more than that. It probably did leave some type of influence though, so… good on Shaun & friends, I guess. I’ll take “Pills 'n' Thrills And Bellyaches” every time, though.
Drive-By Truckers
4/5
I’m at a 4. Well, OK, more of a 3.75 bumped up to a 4, but you’ll understand in a moment.
Well, it’s a long fucking album, that’s for sure. This could’ve definitely been trimmed down a bit, especially to help with some of the pacing issues this thing has. I did like it, though. I do not have the time nor the energy to go into any kind of long Lynyrd Skynyrd-adjacent soliloquy – lord only knows this album mentions them enough. Their impact on the Drive-By Truckers is very apparent throughout, especially with the second half acting as an album version of a made-for-TV biographical movie, retelling various life events of the band, culminating in the plane crash that took the lives of some of the original lineup. I’m not huge on the second half of the album, mainly because I think the track order / pacing / length all feel kind of off… but let’s not put the cart before the horse here.
I really liked the first half of this album; that is to say, most of the first 11 tracks. I think it’s got really strong instrumentals & pretty good storytelling, with just the vocals occasionally sticking for me as a “not twangy enough” thorn of sorts. Despite my initial fears with the concept, I was pleasantly surprised. To draw a comparison, it reminded me much more of Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois, acting as a retrospective on Alabama & most of the U.S. southwest. It’s less of a hopeful album & more of a reminiscence on the reckoning of the “Southern Thing”, as this album tends to call it.
I do think it toes a line rather well; there’s only a few tracks in the first half that I think could be easily misconstrued, and an occasionally privileged lyric here and there, but as someone who’s grown up in a deeply red state, but with people who never seem to actually portray all the stereotypes of the typical Republican voter… gosh, something about the first half of the album was speaking to me. I’m careful to praise it, since there are certain flags thrown up (namely the George Wallace stuff, even if he’s 100% called a racist in hell), but given that it’s from 2001, they’re mildly understandable flags from a political era that somehow feels bygone at this point. I do think there’s something here, made for only the people who have really lived in something adjacent to it to truly understand. If it were me, I’d give that first half a flat 4, and honestly, it would stand up by itself as a really strong album.
The second half… well, it’s not bad, but they go full “did you know about this band called Lynyrd Skynyrd?” mode, in a way that feels endearing at some points & irritating at others, but ultimately, it all comes together in a way that just doesn’t feel as compelling as they want it to be. “Let There Be Rock” is fun, but “Road Cases” is genuinely useless here; probably the least necessary track on the album. “Women Without Whiskey” is totally fine; very bro-country for my tastes, but I didn’t mind it. “Plastic Flowers on the Highway” is easily the highlight of the second half; genuinely, a fantastic track. “Cassie’s Brother” is fine; I think the tempo is a little slow, & the funk aspects don’t really work for me, but the storytelling is fine enough. I think putting “Life in the Factory” as an oral history of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s formation as the *6th track* of a 9-track narrative is a mistake. Start with that one!.
“Shut Up and Get on the Plane” is a fun listen, but it just never hooked me (and that may be a defining issue of the whole second half, really). ”Greenville to Baton Rouge” rips an absolute fireball of a guitar solo 3 minutes in that won me over. “Angels & Fuselage” has a glacially slow pace through the first half of the track, with his raspier vocals acting as a genuine detriment, but something about the back half, where it all sits in a guitar-driven ambient silence worked well for the atmosphere & intent of the track.
I think my biggest issue with the back half is that there’s just no suspense / emotional hook whatsoever, due to basically the entire history / impact of the band still being told in piecemeal throughout the first half of the album. For the final 3 tracks acting as a retelling of the plane crash that effectively killed Lynyrd Skynyrd, there’s no tension in the air (pun unintended), and I just don’t think they did a great job of capturing something deeper from the moment. Instead, they just try to recapture the emotions Lynyrd Skynyrd might have felt. Contrast that to a track like “Plastic Flowers on the Highway”, which is a tribute track to their real friend who died in a car accident, and the difference is night & day. I feel compelled to learn more about their friend, and how it directly impacted them, especially with the lead singer having to see more accidents on that same highway afterward. I feel less compelled to look up stuff about the aftermath & eventual revival of Lynyrd Skynyrd following the plane crash.
It’s not necessarily a failure as storytellers, since they do a good job of capturing the mythos & impact & overall legacy of Lynyrd Skynyrd throughout the entirety of the album, but the concept getting narrower & narrower as the album moves along makes the tracks suffer. Combine that with some long outros, a little too much emphasis on guitar work as opposed to vocal structures, and lyricism that doesn’t feel as strong / sincere as the first half, it just piles up, despite being wholly competent. The back half of this album is a 3.5, and one that I’ll let stick there, though I’d probably bump it down to a 3 by itself.
So, a strong first half that’s a 4, and a shaky second half that’s a 3.5 – balance that out, and you get a 3.75, and it’s one that I feel compelled to bump up to a 4. This album is at its best when Lynyrd Skynyrd are used as a framing device to talk about how the band has impacted culture & personal lives, and not when they’re the main characters. I think there’s enough tracks that do that, as well as a strong enough overall package (or at least, a fun enough listen if you’re already predisposed to country / rock soundscapes like I am), that I’m comfortable in giving this a 4. It’s a very American-centric album, and even more so to the American southeast (& parts of the midwest), so in a current time where it’s very, very understandable to hate that part of the country, I can’t blame anyone for giving this a low rating out of pure disdain. I also can’t blame anyone for giving this a low rating because it’s way too fucking long. I’ll stick with a 4.
Primal Scream
4/5
I’m at a 4. More like a 4.25, I guess.
When we got “Screamadelica” in July, I couldn’t really place why I had enjoyed that album, eventually boiling it down to “pretty good in the moment”. This album feels a bit more substantial, with a little more weight behind it. This is not the House-inspired psychedelica ambience of “Screamdelica” – this is a 1997 album much more rooted in trip-hop, Britpop, techno, & sort of an industrial-driven ambience, slightly reminiscent of the Madchester we just got on “Bummed” by Happy Mondays, though with a lot more polish to it that keeps the whole thing from feeling too saturated.
I really am stunned this is the same band, by the way; I know they tend to jump around & explore genres on each of their various albums, but given that they wholesale ripped off “Freedom! ‘90” by George Michael the last time I heard them, I’m just more surprised at how effectively they’ve done this style. It’s got elements of a bunch of different genres, staying within the same general instrument bank, whilst exploring a bunch of different paths on it, including a Motorhead cover (with an explosion that’s WAY too loud), straight Britpop on “Medication”, some Sonic Adventure-esque stuff on “If They Move, Kill ‘Em”, and a David Holmes sort of track via “Trainspotting”, used in the movie itself. Granted, I’m at a 4 because the moments where they sort of lose focus & lose a sense of progression feel a little underwhelming compared to the rest of the album (scattered throughout, but namely around Tracks 5-7, though they’re still good to listen to).
I do think it’s a little harder to describe the energy of this album, since a lot of these are more rooted in the instrumentals as an audio journey of sorts, as opposed to big vocal structures or witty one-liners; the most ‘lyrical’ track here is probably “Star,” which ironically enough, made me wish it had a little more of a George Michael energy to the instrumental. Beyond that though, a track like “Kowalski” is that audio journey I’m talking about; certainly abrasive (& yes, this whole thing is far too loud at times), but well-intentioned, well-designed, and ultimately, it just has a good sense of progression that keeps the track fresh throughout, especially with the synths & vocal samples.
It is a little long at 53 minutes; as with a lot of these instrumentally-driven albums of the ‘90s, there’s a lot of little trimming that could be done around the edges to give everything a better flow, but that’s just a personal nitpick. I really liked this one; I do think it deserves higher than a 4, but it doesn’t really justify going all the way up to a 5, given that I hit plenty of minor lull points throughout. I guess it’s sort of a 4.25, but I obviously can’t do that. Either way, this is right down my sort of alley, and I’m glad it’s on the list. I gotta listen to some more of their albums in my own time, since this is the last one we’ll get.
The Pogues
5/5
I’m at a 10.
Fucking hell. That was worth a 500 day wait between albums; I thought “Rum Sodomy & The Lash” was a damn good album, almost solely on account of the Celtic rock energy, but this is *excellent.* Certainly one of my favorite ‘80s albums we’ve gotten so far in this thing, and we’ve gotten 122 of them so far. I hesitate to say “top 10”, but probably within the top 20.
Unlike “Rum Sodomy & The Lash”, a lot of these songs fit into a more contemporary bubble, less about the escapades of the past (or whatever half the songs were about on the last album, since most were traditional / riffing on traditionals), and more of a socially conscious one, not only to the issues of Ireland at the time (lots of vaguely nationalist viewpoints here, but decently justified ones), but also some lovely tracks set around the world. “Turkish Song of the Damned” is a very adventurous track, “Fairytale of New York” is a super fun Christmas track, “Fiesta” is a Polka-infused Spanish delight, and “Thousands Are Sailing” (my personal favorite here) might be one of the most brilliantly written tracks in regard to the impact of immigration to America, leaving your roots, and finding success that wasn’t possible back home, even if you miss it dearly.
Since I felt totally locked in & in-sync with the infectious energy of this album, reading along with the lyrics on its faster paced tracks (especially “Bottle of Smoke”, which is fucking awesome), I don’t have as many notes as I’d like to write a deeper, longer review; that, and I just don’t really have the words that can capture that energy as effectively as it deserves. Someone else can cover for me on this one in terms of the individual tracks (which are all so, so good, save for “Worms”, but it’s practically a bonus track), but just know that the soundscape of this album, which feels like an Irish version of Streetlight Manifesto at full blast, blew me away. It’s not that much different from “Rum Sodomy & The Lash”, but the grit in his vocals combined with a lot more technical skill in the percussion (deeply underrated), just elevates everything to another level. Past that, on this album’s softer moments (namely the first part to “Streets of Sorrow” & “Lullaby of London”), they just feel earnest, with a little bit of a wistful gravitas that matches the moment & imagery the lyrics are allowing for.
I’ll give a single nitpick; the album probably didn’t need “Worms”. I understand that “The Broad Majestic Shannon”, for as good as it is, isn’t the most energetic closer, especially after everything else, but “Worms” feels just a little weird to end on. It’d be like if the post-credits scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off had been… well, the actual final scene of the movie. I’m not sure what else could’ve ended the album (maybe the 3-track medley?), but I do think the ending feels just a little flat as a capper to the whole project.
Regardless, it doesn’t matter that much. This is an album that needs to be heard rather than read about, and frankly, it blew me away. I knew the wait for this one would be worth it, and it exceeded all of my expectations. I don’t know if other Pogues albums hit a downward slope after these two, but I need to hear more of these guys before I die, and that’s a testament to just how good of an impact 2 albums can have if they’re done right. This is an excellent album, a 10 for me, and probably a top 20 album of the 1980s (hell, maybe 15 or higher?) that we’ve gotten so far, at least to my ears.
Christina Aguilera
5/5
I’m at a 5.
A lot of my general notes on Christina Aguilera that I wrote down from “Back to Basics” apply here – a remarkable vocal showcase, an operatic power that feels a little unparalleled at points (not as potent here, but still very strong), and much in the same way that album was hard-coded to 2006, this is hard-coded to 2002, still pulling from some of the Neo-soul of the late ‘90s but with a lot of the hiphop / R&B production tricks that Justin Timberlake & Destiny’s Child were using at the time. This album sounds a lot like both at times, with a track like “Dirrty” feeling like it’s more so made for “Justified” than this album, and with “Can’t Hold Us Down” feeling remarkably close to “Survivor”’s general style. There’s plenty more, but I never saw it as a negative or as a ripoff / bite; hell, Christina and Justin toured their albums together, so they clearly knew their styles were similar. I’m a sucker for it, as has been established, and while mileage may vary, I found myself enjoying a lot of these tracks. As far as her vocals go & the production work here, I have little to no complaints, save for a few jarring left turns that don’t feel super cohesive (and I’ll get to that soon enough).
Where this album differs from “Back to Basics” comes in a sense of confidence – she’s a made woman by that album, but here, she’s trying to actively make herself, and convince herself along the course of this album that she can break free of all the Disney Channel cookie cutter bullshit as a kid that she disparages about on “Make Over” & other tracks to be a more seriously taken artist, and ultimately, a more seriously taken woman. I would say she really succeeds. A lot of these tracks are worth taking seriously, especially towards the back end (“I’m OK” by itself practically made me cry), and the big hits here are deserving of being big hits. For a 77 minute project, a lot of these are very strong tracks; they’re well-written, well-produced, and there’s an honesty & an earnestness that underlines the album in the mature way she’s looking for. I wouldn’t be at a 5 if I didn’t think she succeeded at that job. There is, however, one nagging thing about this album that I have to point out, because it cannot go unnoticed.
The track order is a little messy around in the back half of the album; I think it’s not a big issue until after “Beautiful”, since it feels like the peak of the album (although that’s the 23 years of hearing that track talking), because “Make Over” & “Cruz” feel like extreme left turns, especially the former. Granted, if you flip those tracks, I think “Cruz”’s softer, ‘70s rock inspired style would transition well into the sort of grunginess of “Make Over”, or at least, not feel as jarring after “Beautiful”. “Soar” feels very misplaced afterwards; it’s a soaring ballad that I really like, but its subject matter feels like it could’ve totally ended the album at that point. Hell, it could’ve probably ended the album for real. The 1-2 punch of “Get Mine, Get Yours” & “Dirrty” stick out like sore thumbs afterward; they’re both fun tracks, but they just feel weird after “Soar”. If they had come in right after “Cruz”, it might’ve flowed better. They would've felt weird as hell after most of the previous tracks. "Stripped Pt. 2" feels like it was thrown in as an afterthought, and it barely works as a transition to the final 3 tracks.
All that said, I have no notes on the 1-2-3 punch that ends the album; “The Voice Within” feels like it could’ve closed the album, and yet, I think the heartbreak of “I’m OK” adds such a deep context to the self-assurance & self-confidence she’s seeking throughout this album, that it pulls the entire album together wonderfully. Ending on that sad note wouldn’t work, so “Keep On Singin’ My Song” works well as a closer, even if it doesn’t quite end on the bombast I wish it had (seriously, a breakbeat?). I do wish it was a 1-2-3-4 punch though, as the themes of “Soar” would transition wonderfully into “The Voice Within”.
Realistically, the track order doesn’t matter that much, but it does keep the album from feeling as fully cohesive as it could have been. Regardless, even if a few tracks didn’t click for me on a first pass because of that shaky cohesion, I think this is a hell of an album for 2002. Honestly, I think it does a way better job than “Justified” did in terms of truly establishing a solo career, given that Justin got a lot of Michael Jackson-rejected Neptunes-written scraps on that one to work from, whereas Christina wrote a lot of these herself, to my understanding. I think it’s even better than “Back to Basics” was, which I already was a total sucker for. I also hear a lot of the modern artists this album influenced, which is a pretty damn strong list according to Wikipedia, so clearly, she did something right. I think this is pretty easily a 5. I think it more than earns it & I’m very glad it’s on the list.
P.S.: She sneaks in The Lick™ on "Get Mine, Get Yours", and when my ears caught it, I got mildly annoyed and laughed. I just want anyone in the future to also know this happens as a warning of sorts.
Hüsker Dü
3/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump down to a 3, though if Grant Hart had chosen to end “You Can Live at Home” after 2:30 or so, I’d probably be willing to barely bump this album up to a 4.
This is a strange, strange project. It’s bloated like a motherfucker, for one. The first half of this album all feel like leftovers, which is weird to not exactly start on your best stuff. Out of the first 11 tracks, I only liked about 6 of them, and even of the 6 I liked, there are criticisms noted as a “little repetitive” (These Important Years), “the outro needed some more work” (Standing in the Rain), “vocals very nasally” (Back from Somewhere), “not a fan of the one-chord fakeout ending” (Ice Cold Ice), & “outro VERY repetitive” (Too Much Spice). No notes on “Friend, You’ve Got to Fall” though. This album really, really does not find an identity through its first 11 tracks, and while they’re all decent to listen to with a good energy to the instrumental every time, the lack of a more focused / thought-out structure (the lack of bridges on most of these tracks is astounding, as is the repetitive / long / overplayed outros & every track starting with guitar/drums) really makes the album feel like it’s going absolutely nowhere for the first half, in what I would categorize as a competent, yet unsatisfying 3.
For whatever reason though, the back half of the album (the last 9 tracks) suddenly find most of that; the structure to the tracks feels more thought out, the lyricism feels like it has more of a point, and the instrumentals kicks up in a way that just feels way more satisfying, turning the repetition into a positive as opposed to a sort of dry negative. Genuinely, if this album were just the last 9 tracks by themselves, I’d be at a 3.5 that I might be persuaded to bump up to a 4. I genuinely think either “Turn It Around” or “Up in the Air” would’ve made for great closing tracks, and if the album had ended there, I’d feel pretty satisfied with them.
“You Can Live at Home” is one of the worst closing tracks I’ve ever heard for any album in my life. It is the culmination of an album-long frustration that I had with one Grant Hart. His penmanship is fine, and his instrumental work on the tracks he’s not singing on is generally good. However, I fully believe he cannot sing worth a damn, even though his vocals occasionally work at points on this album under really specific soundscapes. Bob Mould might be a diet Michael Stipe, yes, but at least he sounds close enough at points that it’s easy to just vibe along with it, as if this really were an R.E.M. album, and I think his tracks are generally better structured throughout the album. Grant Hart is the opposite. Grant Hart sounds like a bad Elvis Costello impersonator with an even more nasally voice, like a Muppet parody, and even then, I think a Muppet parody could do a better job. My issue with “You Can Live at Home”, however, is not from his vocals; it’s the fact that the entire last 2:30 of the track goes absolutely fucking nowhere, and with the inaudible lyrics (seriously horrible mixing) themselves already seemingly acting as a subliminal diss to Mould, given their internal issues and the break-up of the band afterward, I find it to be nothing more than a fully petty 5:24 of boring inaudible nothingness, capping off an album that should’ve ended on his partner’s tracks.
It is singlehandedly dragging this album down to a 3, but make no mistake; this album isn’t that bad. The 20 tracks here all generally sound fine (save for the last one), and I’d say the very best ones are probably worthy of being a 4, if they had been able to pick them out and really flesh them out. The mediocre ones are what pull this down, especially that last one. Past that, the length of this album & the repetition of the intros / outros is too much to ignore. This was probably always going to get a 3 once the sort of “diet R.E.M. with a Green Day lean” thing came into my head, but at least it fought back during that second half to be a respectably good 3.5 that almost became a 4. Hell, it'd probably be a 4 if you cut out like, 80% of Grant Hart’s tracks. Ultimately, it’s just a 3 though, and it definitely didn’t need to be a double album.
Throbbing Gristle
4/5
Yeah, fuck it, I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump to a 4.
No, this is not “better” than Husker Du’s “Warehouse”, or any of the other albums I’ve given a 3 in the past. If anything, this 4 is a vague protest vote over this album becoming the lowest rated album on the site for whatever reason. This is… utterly fine. Certainly an experiment in sound, with a few heavily abrasive moments, but I found myself kinda drawn to the weird, eerie atmosphere of this thing, and with a few tracks I genuinely liked.
“I.B.M.” is a weirdly atmospheric starter track, directly sampling actual old tape used in computers before hard drives became the norm. “Hit By a Rock” is probably the most middling attempt at a “real” track here, anchored by a sort of “train” percussion that at least keeps the whole thing from feeling like a mediocre tedium. It’s not good, but it’s fine. “United” is a good joke; take your first real single & then speed it up to hell. Little pitchy though.
“Valley of the Shadow of Death” feels like sitting in a pub, with a buzz in the brain after you get drunk, vaguely eavesdropping in on conversations your brain can’t understand. The only crime of this track is that it’s 4 minutes long. Same thing applies to “Dead on Arrival”, which feels like a Kraftwerk track corrupted by a glitch; lots of buzzy, abrasive synth work in this one, but at least it’s anchored by a competent beat. The only crime is that it’s 6 minutes long and feels like it goes nowhere, so it ends up being a little boring in the long run.
“Weeping” & “Hamburger Lady” are the two highlights of the album for me, honestly; the former feels like a very open & honest confession about a spiral of heartbreak & depression, with the sound design & lyricism being soberingly brutal. It did give me a sort of Nine Inch Nails vibe. The latter just has really cool sound design, with an engine noise adjacent to the accident that inspired the (probably not true, but still) story of the Hamburger Lady, who feels like she’s constantly fading in & out of consciousness with the slightly echoed vocals.
“Hometime” is just FNAF ambience set over the noise of a child telling you about her day, which you can go recreate on YouTube right now, if you want. Again, the biggest crime is in the length. “AB/7A” is fun, and I did like it – I just wish the lead synth progressed a little more, but the entirety of the background instrumentation going through a little bit of chaos is pretty cool regardless. “E-Coli” is a fascinating experiment in sound; the ambience itself is sort of mediocre, but the dichotomy of the two lectures from each scientist, with one excited to experiment & the other concerned with tainting nature, each in their own channel, is pretty well done for 1978. Again, it’s just too long.
“Death Threats” is ballsy, especially with putting one from your husband’s ex in there. Imagine if Kendrick put on a voicemail from one of Drake’s exes at any point in that beef; it would’ve gone nuclear levels of viral. Immediately following up those death threats is “Walls of Noise”, which frankly, should have ended the album. It’s the worst soundscape, by far, but as a transition to basically say “go fuck yourselves” with, I think it’s kind of hilarious. It also does contain actual sound design within; it felt like a tornado destroying everything except for my house, being forced to listen to the suffering of everything around me. “Blood on the Floor” is… well, it’s there. Probably didn’t need to be.
Honestly, the biggest issue with this album is that most of its tracks just linger / meander for too long past the point of being interesting. If this were a tighter experiment in sound, acting as more of a rapidfire push (like, 2 minutes for the longer tracks I mentioned at most), I think this album might be a little more warmly received, at least not to the point of being the lowest one on the site. It’s nowhere near as abrasive as I thought it would be; that horrendously loud “jazz” album we got from John Zorn was much, much noisy / abrasive / “worse” than this. Calling this “nothing but noise” undermines the effort & time it took to actually design this thing – I would challenge anyone who says so to try and recreate some of these tracks, to see if you can do it. Granted, “Hometime” is probably really easy to recreate, but still.
All of that in mind, I’m at a 3.5 that I will bump up to a 4, as a vote of confidence for what the album tries to do (and succeeds at doing! just in a “too long” way), as a sort of a protest vote against this having the lowest rating on the site, and as an acknowledgment that this genuinely deserves to be on the list, even as just as an experiment in sound. It is not better than most of the albums I’ve given a 3, but I do think it’s more sonically interesting & compelling than most of the albums I’ve given a 1 or a 2. It’s certainly way fucking better than Haute de gamme or Kid Rock, that’s for sure. I genuinely liked it.
Slint
5/5
I’m at a 5. Perhaps slightly higher.
I’m not sure how to describe that, really. At its core, it’s essentially an early version of the foundation that Nine Inch Nails would take to a more industrial extreme on “The Downward Spiral”, but here, because it’s still rooted mostly in calmer instrumentals & with a spoken word approach for the vast majority of the album, I found this to be oddly poetic, with a tension building over the course of the album. A great poet knows how to build suspense, letting each line paint more & more of a picture until it finally bursts into life in front of you, with the ability to imagine far beyond just the words you’re presented with.
This album fits the bill on all ends; the spoken word / singing / screaming dynamic that acts as a sort of push/pull throughout the album is very effective, used in combination with the intensity of the guitar & the instrumentation to accurately capture a sense of tension & or a changing mood. It certainly helps that the lyricism here paints really, REALLY great pictures; whether it’s the coming-of-age pleasantry behind “Breadcrumb Trail”, the insecurities of love on “Nosferatu Man”, the social anxiety of “Don, Aman”, the suicide note that is “Washer”, or the lamentation of leaving your childhood behind on “Good Morning, Captain”, each track tells its own story very, very well, enhanced further by the vocal / instrumental shifts at play. Even without the lyrics, I think just the tone of his voice & the ways the instrumentals move captures an energy to each track that tells the story all the same.
I really want to focus on the last 3 tracks in particular, because I think they’re the highlights of the album. “Washer” is one of the best audio journeys I think we’ve gotten throughout the 673 albums we’ve done so far (counting this one), and the way that track slowly layers its despair with the passing realization that this guy is gonna kill himself is done incredibly well. It just sort of stunlocked me, and while I might be able to kind of understand someone bouncing off of that track, I think the fact that I didn’t even really notice the last 3 minutes of somber guitar work fly by as I just sat and digested it says a lot about how effective that track is.
The next track, “For Dinner…” being an instrumental afterwards, allowing the listener to just sit & reflect on it further, is a very good choice as well. While listening to it, I noticed that the track always tries to lift into something bigger, and yet never really gets there itself, eventually paralyzing itself into one note, almost as if the track itself is mourning the suicide from the last one, unable to move on. Even the title implies to me that it’s a routine that simply can’t be finished as normal, since it just trails off.
“Good Morning, Captain” is super effective, in a way that I’m not sure that I can really describe accurately. The entire buildup of this captain & this boy (who is either his son, himself, or some other childlike representation of his youth) is really well done in the storytelling, and it’s paid off brilliantly in the vocal / instrumental outro, especially when Brian McMahan belts out those last lines with a visceral ferocity that feels like it came deep from within his soul. It needs to be heard & experienced to truly feel, and I certainly felt it. I think it’s a great closing track that solidifies the whole thing as a truly great album.
So, yes, I’m at a 5. It might be a little higher, even. This thing came out of left field with its post-rock, math rock, whatever the hell mish-mash of genres it has on Wikipedia & surprised me by being as brilliantly designed, thought out & effective as it is. It feels like it’s pioneering, to some degree, even if the tree of influence this album might’ve spawned took a while to sprout. I’m very glad it’s on the list, as I never would have found it otherwise. Not bad for a 6-track album made from some Kentucky boys.
Bebel Gilberto
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll easily bump up to a 5.
Sometimes you just catch a vibe, you know? This definitely caught a vibe for me; it’s bossa nova updated with some of the ambient, trip-hop sensibilities of the 1990s, with occasional hints of jazz fusion & big band in there. It’s a great fit, at least in the way it’s done on this album. Unlike the Gotan Project album we got back in September, this album feels a lot more subtle about infusing its extra instrumentation, more akin to how a 90s remixer might take on a 60s album instead of making something that feels different & new. It never overwhelms the bossa nova / jazz base that each track is built on, and only enhances it in a way that feels pretty contemporary for 2000. Suba, the producer for this album, died due to smoke complications after successfully recovering this album from a fire. He has an album on this list, “Sao Paulo Confessions”, which we’ll get later on down the line, and I really hope that album retains a lot of the style he set forth here. He did a damn good job.
Bebel Gilberto certainly carried on her father’s legacy here; her vocals are really good on this album, and remarkably calming too. A track like “Mais Feliz” reminded me a little bit of Janet Jackson’s slower songs, and that’s a really positive comparison in my book. When she enters her faster, rap-influenced tempos, she glides on it all the same, especially so on “Bananeira”, which might be the highlight of the album. Her English vocals are really nice too; “So Nice (Summer Samba)”, besides showing me that Nintendo blatantly ripped off the melody for the track for StreetPass on the 3DS, showed me that she has sort of a natural Sinatra-y swinger voice to her, and one that could totally do a duet with anyone. I feel like I need to check out more of her stuff beyond this, especially any collaborations.
So, why the 4.5 if I enjoyed this so much? The only nagging issue I have with this album is that most of the tracks loop halfway through, or simply repeat lyricism in a way that makes each track just feel a little bit unfinished. They’re clearly not, and it’s intentionally done. I don’t mind it, but it is something that feels more & more noticeable as the album goes on – really, this could have been easily fixed if they had just written a few more lyrics to make the loops feel less noticeable, or tweaked some of the instrumentals appropriately so that they could disguise it with a better sense of progression. It’s not a big enough deal for me to bump this down to a 4 though; it’s an easy bump up to a 5, and ultimately, just a deeply relaxing (whilst energetic) bossa nova album. I can easily hear how this crossed over into mainstream appeal (apparently over 1 million copies sold worldwide by 2004), and I’m glad it’s here on the list. Pretty damn good stuff.
Van Halen
5/5
I’m at a 5. A little higher, though not quite a 10 like their debut.
Everyone knows “Jump”. That’s their big one. This album basically starts at that point (though “1984” is a cool synthy open), and then it rides the high of that track & Panama, hitting one more extremely high point on "Hot for Teacher", before just cruising all the way to a really nice, if slightly flat finish. It may sound like I’m a little down on this album, but that’s just because their debut was insanely good, and this one is only really, really good. Eddie Van Halen’s guitar is still a deadly weapon, atoning big time for the “Beat It” solo he ripped without the band’s permission by killing it on every track here. David Lee Roth’s vocals still rip, even if they’re just a little more subdued / poppier here compared to the sort of “American Ozzy Osbourne” comparison I gave for their debut. Alex Van Halen’s percussion is on point throughout this album, and I feel like he gets even more room to shine here than on the debut, or at least more noticeably given some of the percussive solos on this thing.
Obviously, the big difference between this & their debut is the heavy use of the synthesizer, which permeates this album in a way that makes it feel more specifically dated to 1984 than the timeless sort of sound to their self-titled, but in a way, I kind of like that you can place this album so specifically to its time. “Jagged Little Pill” certainly doesn’t suffer from sounding like 1995 at every turn. To my ears, it means you’ve made something stand out so uniquely and yet so ubiquitously that people associate your sound as a core memory of the decade, and that’s gotta feel cool, to some degree.
I do wish this ended on a more definitive note than “House of Pain” – it does make the album feel like more of a collection of tracks as opposed to a fully flowing energy, but regardless, it’s still 33 minutes that kick ass. It’s worth hearing it over me describing it, so I’ll stop here, but I will say one thing: “Jump”, by itself, feels like an anthem that would’ve lifted this album to a 4, bare minimum. The whole thing is really, really good, and while it’s not as good as their debut, it all still just rips. It’s a 5, and probably higher, though not a 10.
Taylor Swift
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5. Forgive me, perhaps.
I’ve never listened to “folklore”, and I don’t know if that would enhance my enjoyment of this album or not, but I do think this album came in at just the right time. This is definitely a winter album, and with Daylight Savings Time having just happened, and all of the November / December-y vibes this gives off, I think the imagery present in these lyrics feels that much more vivid. Instrumentally, that mood is enhanced a lot more, given how many of these tracks are rooted in more simple, piano/guitar-driven melodies, straying far from her poppier influences on 1989, grounding everything in a way that just feels more authentic. Taylor Swift’s vocals are great here, evolving much more from the country twangs of her earlier albums, leaning into her contemporaries of the time (i.e., Lana Del Rey, Lorde, the rest of the Jack Antonoff girlies, etc). She’s sort of biting their style, but adapting it to her own strengths. Lyrically, I think this is the strongest album I’ve heard from her, collabing with a lot of more “indie”-centered artists (HAIM, The National, & Bon Iver) to hone her songwriting to her biggest strength: her storytelling.
I don’t give a shit about Travis Kelce’s dick or whatever the hell she apparently sang about on that one track from “The Life of a Showgirl” (which I also haven’t listened to, at least in full) – I do, however, give a shit about a well told story, and while a lot of these are still rooted in topics of love & heartbreak (most of which are thankfully, seemingly, not about herself), there’s a solid maturity to them that keeps them grounded, as well as an idealism to all of them that, while wholly unrealistic at points, at least feels hopeful in a way that clicks with my sensibilities. At one point during this album, specifically on “happiness”, I wrote down the words “these lyrics feel very Sorkin-esque” – you know, Aaron Sorkin, of “The West Wing” & “A Few Good Men” fame. If you’ve seen The West Wing at all, or any of the films / shows he’s done, then you have to be at least partially aware of the long, “inspired” soliloquies he writes for his characters, with a starry-eyed vision that strives to capture the very best of us, or something like that. Taylor Swift’s lyricism here occasionally feels Sorkin-esque, creating unrealistic expectations of amicable splits & ways to cope with heartbreak & trauma that you can just fly out of like an angel, and while it usually doesn’t bother me in the moments it pops up, I can sense an abrasion stemming from that, & it’s a trap that she’s fallen into more and more ever since “Midnights” (her first album after the “mores”) dropped.
When her lyricism is on point though, you get some truly great tracks like “champagne problems”, “‘tis the damn season”, “ivy” & “marjorie”, which are my 4 really big standouts from this album. They are some of the best Taylor Swift tracks I’ve ever heard. “Ivy” in particular feels like it’s pulling from a sort of Jane Eyre vibe that just appealed to me, with her poetic license shining through on that track in a really vivid way. Out of the 15 tracks here, I liked 12 of them, with only 3 not quite clicking for me, for one reason or another: “dorothea”, “cowboy like me”, & “closure”. I wish I could go more into depth about more of the tracks here, but I’m strapped for time, and I’m just not sure how to really describe them without just re-telling them. “marjorie”, however, I think deserves just a bit more: I know a lot of people who lost close ones during the pandemic, and something about those lyrics brought in one hell of an emotional wave.
Overall, I enjoyed this a lot. It’s far from perfect, but I do think this album has much higher highs than 1989, at least on a first pass. I’m not entirely sure if it’s a better overall album, given that this does end up feeling slightly bloated & a little bit too samey in the long run (hence the 4.5), but they’re very different albums at very different times at VERY different points in her career, so the comparison is a bit moot. I also just don’t have a nostalgia for this album that’s clouding my judgement, so do with that what you will. If I’ve gathered anything from this, it’s that I need to listen to “folklore”, preferably around the springtime, if the seasonal aspects of both albums are meant to be followed. I think it’s a damn good album, and whether or not it deserves to be on the list (especially for a 2021 edition, VERY soon after release) can be debated by those who wish to engage in that conversation. I’m glad it’s here, if only to give me an excuse to listen to it. I think it’s a 4.5 that I’ll very easily bump up to a 5. Sorry, maybe.
Bob Dylan
5/5
I’m at a 5. Hell, I’m actually probably higher. Hell froze over a while ago; this is a full tundra at this point.
When we got Tom Waits’ “Swordfishtrombones” in March of this year, I wrote down that “some of the lyrics on the tracks feel like a sort of contemporary, mildly buzzed Bob Dylan for the 1980s”. Bob Dylan, on this album, feels like the 1980s Tom Waits of the 1990s, which is basically to say that… well, he sounds a lot like Tom Waits here, telling some stories in the same little dirty dive bar that a group member imagined when they reviewed “Swordfishtrombones”. That imagery permeated into my head throughout the album, and I think it really makes the whole thing click that much more.
For 1997, this is no longer the voice of a generation writing protest songs, asking people how they feel, or writing endless amounts of vaguely confusing purple prose that felt like a novel to decipher. This is, surprisingly, the most straightforward Bob Dylan album we’ve gotten so far, helped by the fact that a lot of these are just tracks about being an older, heartbroken man sort of lamenting his mortality, his shattered relationships, the futile chase to retain them & the feelings of lost time that come with it. It’s an extremely grounded album, enhanced by Bob Dylan’s more gravely 56-year-old voice. Yes, it’s still kinda goofy, but he’s aged into a sort of old gunslinger of an artist who’s allowed to express these regrets in a way that feels very genuine. In a weird way, this is the most control I’ve heard Bob Dylan have in his voice, which is more than passable on a majority of these tracks. I hesitate to say he finally became a good singer, especially given what Adele did for “Make You Feel My Love” a decade later, but there are moments here where Bob Dylan really does sound confidently strong, and it gives the tracks an added sense of conviction.
Daniel Lanois’ production work is what truly, fully makes this album work. Bob Dylan provides a great foundation, but the moodier tones of the backing band, as well as the slight filtering on Dylan’s vocals throughout the album, add the contemporary touch that’s desperately needed to make this album feel like it’s from 1997 as opposed to 1967. In the same way that “Tanto Tempo” subtly infused its extra instrumentation into a bossa nova base, Daniel Lanois adds just the right amount of light grunge / trip-hop elements into Dylan’s style, where it adds to each track in a way that captures the same emotion & conviction that Bob Dylan put into writing & singing each of these tracks. It also helps that there’s a decent variety of genres explored here, perhaps most surprisingly the reggae / blues-inspired energy of “Can’t Wait”.
If there’s any one singular all-timer highlight here, it’s “Not Dark Yet”, which is one of the best-written tracks I’ve heard from any artist, ever. The sunset-driven imagery, building with past regrets & eventually culminating in this character on his death bed, felt like a man preparing for a funeral, in a way that reminded me deeply of “You Want It Darker”, with the instrumentation growing more intense in a way that felt reminiscent of Johnny Cash’s cover of “Hurt”. Granted, Bob Dylan is still alive, 28 years later, so that same emotional impact of his actual death is not there yet (and I hope it’s not there for a while longer), but the fact that the track feels so viscerally indicative of death is impressive all the same.
If there’s a lowlight here, well… yeah, it’s “Highlands”, but only because it’s 16 minutes. I actually didn’t mind it at all though; when I was listening, my brain went back to the old dive bar imagery that permeates the album – the stream of consciousness style, while sort of undermined by the repetition in the instrumental, slowly started to come around to work for me. In a way, I’m vaguely reminded of Weird Al’s “Trapped in the Drive-Thru”, where a lot of the dialogue is sort of uselessly conversational, and yet vaguely compelling, for seemingly no reason. (I refuse to give R. Kelly any credit.) Yeah, there’s a whole aside about some waitress in Boston that Bob Dylan barely indulged in drawing a picture of, but it serves to sell the bigger point of the track: Bob Dylan just wants to be a fucking hermit, but he’s in too deep at this point as an artist, and he just has to settle for mentally living in the highlands. Could’ve gotten to the point way faster than 16 minutes, but again, the dive bar imagery in my head made the track work more fruitfully.
Overall, it’s a remarkably strong album, and one that I wouldn’t possibly have expected from Bob Dylan, especially 3 decades after his most relevant period. He basically disappeared for the vast majority of the 1990s, only to come out with something that still holds up really well 28 years later. The writing is on point, his vocals have finally caught up, the production meshes perfectly, and I think the slight Tony Bennett-esque career renaissance that emerged from it was probably well deserved. Granted, I’m not sure if it’s “win the Grammy for Album of the Year over OK Computer” levels of deserved, but I’m surprised at the fact that it’s even slightly justifiable in my head. This is a damn good one, and I think it’s the best Bob Dylan album we’ve gotten, and probably the best one we’ll get. We have 3 more of these damn things to go, all from the 1960s. I can only hope at least one of them matches the quality of this one (and hopefully, that’s “Blonde On Blonde”) – to my ears, this is a 5, if not a little higher. It’s that good. Hell of a job, Bob.
Hugh Masekela
4/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump down to a 4, but I’ll be damned if I don’t want to give this a 5 just to reward its highest highs. Can’t justify it though.
It sure is 73 minutes of afrobeat-influenced jazz, with a little more of a lean towards the “jazz” than the “afrobeat” the longer the album goes along. I think it’s a delightful listen regardless, since it’s usually pretty rich in instrumentation, with melodies galore & some keyboard / percussion work that feels electric. However, there’s so, so many little paper cuts this thing has where I struggled to decide if it was a 4 or a 5.
The length is… yeah, it’s too long. A lot of these tracks do have a good structure to them, and at their best, they can make some of these 10 minute tracks sound more compelling (especially so on “Maesha”, what a track). Whenever these tracks lose their structure, or get far too loose, the album hits a stale point that sounds good, but just sort of blends together in a deeply unsatisfying way. Disappointingly, Miriam Makema’s track “Unhome” is an example of this, as is the closing track, “Ingoo Pow-Pow”. They’re not bad listens at all, but they both go absolutely nowhere the whole time, just feeling like a bit of a slog in the long run of an already long album. For “Ingoo Pow-Pow”, it’s even worse, because it just doesn’t feel like it deserves to close the album out over “Maesha”, at least not to my ears.
I also think this album just consistently misses the mark about when to end tracks; a lot of these build up to a really nice point, progressing in a way that feels like it’s the climax to end on… and then reverts back to the opening minute or so, just going along for another minute or two, like a YouTube video left on loop. It’s frustrating because there ARE tracks here that hit the fun, satisfying big-band finish, and do it spectacularly. That’s part of the “structure” issues I have here, which stops the album from having a more natural flow.
I really do want to give this a 5, but I can’t justify it to myself – the instrumentation feels great in the moment, but the compositions themselves aren’t as disciplined as they could be. Their technical skills are incredible, and when they can hit on an electrifying sort of moment, the album feels like it’s soaring. Whenever it hits a stale point though, it just feels like it’s stuck in a traffic jam, and those moments are too persistent to keep the album’s momentum as fruitful as it could be. It is still a deeply, deeply enjoyable jazz album, but I do wish there were more of the Afrobeat elements of the first few tracks retained throughout the majority of the album, as opposed to small scatterings of it in the back half, when it mostly becomes a straight jazz / blues album. It’s a bunch of smaller paper cuts, but it’s enough where I think I have to give this a 4; granted, a 4.5 bumped down to a 4 that I still really recommend as an album, but one that just doesn’t feel as complete as some of the other jazz albums we’ve gotten. Still though, pretty good stuff.
Creedence Clearwater Revival
5/5
I’m at a 10.
No flaws there. Not a single one. Just a CCR masterclass, really. John Fogerty’s vocals are on point here, the writing is about as sharp as it could possibly be, and the band is firing on all cylinders, especially in the guitar / percussion work. That is a stellar 42 minutes. The only track I knew going in was “Up Around The Bend” (all timer, obviously) – of course, “Lookin’ Out My Back Door” gave me a classic “this is that song” moment, & “Who’ll Stop The Rain” did as well. The cover of “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” here is electric; maybe just a tad long, but the way it builds & evolves around the melody for the final 7 minutes or so after playing it perfectly straight in the beginning is just super cool to hear.
“Ramble Tamble” is a great opener, & I liked the blues tones of “Before You Accuse Me” a lot. I’m surprised at the 1-2 punch of Little Richard inspired tracks for “Travelin’ Band” & “Ooby Dooby”, both of which gave me really big “Tutti Frutti” vibes, especially the latter. It just makes me think we need more upbeat, purely energetic tracks like that nowadays; make it go viral on TikTok next year or something. “Run Through The Jungle” is immediately striking with the intro & outro effect, and despite John Fogerty’s protests, that is a perfect anti-Vietnam track. “My Baby Left Me” has huge Ray Charles energy, in a good way, and I love the way the instrumentation layers itself throughout “Long As I Can See The Light”, which is a really strong capper on an album that’s loosely centered around traveling & leaving to escape some sort of hardship on a vast majority of the tracks, given that he finally finds a desire to return home, according to the lyrics.
I really, truly don’t have any complaints. That’s as close to perfect as you can get, I think. Stop reading this & just go listen to it, if you somehow haven’t; a foot-stomping banger of a time, elevated by John Fogerty’s voice and his pen, capturing the very frustrated essence of 1969 / 1970, in a way that just rocks like a motherfucker. I loved that – an easy, easy 10. I can only hope “Green River” is just as good.
Ute Lemper
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4, but I was struggling with this album for a while.
I do think she could do a better job of projecting more of her own voice onto these tracks, as opposed to settling for following some of the guides that it seems like she was given on the vast major– hold on, sorry, I think I started without some extra context. Let me rewind a little bit so you can try to figure out where I’m coming from.
This is an album with a cavalcade of contributions from other artists on the list, mostly with instrumentation from the Divine Comedy (who do a great job throughout), and tracks submitted by themselves, Elvis Costello, Nick Cave, Tom Waits, & Scott Walker, among others. It’s lead by German singer / actress Ute Lemper, who I have never heard of, and yet has a pretty darn good voice & a pretty darn good resume, namely in musicals. She didn't help to write *anything* here though, which is surprising; she's mostly here as a vocal catalyst for the tracks, and given the "cinematic" nature of the album, the fit works. This album is a set of 11 tracks (and then one utterly avantgarde piece by Scott Walker) that all feel like they’re taken from musicals / operas, and some of them are! “Tango Ballad” is from the Threepenny Opera, & “Streets of Berlin” is from a play called Bent, about the persecution of homosexual men in Nazi Germany. Of course, you’d never know any of this unless you actively looked up some of these tracks, and… yeah, that’s my immediate major issue with this album. A lot of these songs exist in their own space, without any leading context.
It is really noticeable throughout this album, straight from the beginning – “Little Water Song” is meant to be a contrasting track, showing a sort of wondrous beauty to the underwater scenery this lady is going through… as she’s being drowned to death by her lover, slowly losing consciousness. That dichotomy makes for a very good track, if you can get the context. I had to listen to it twice to fully get there, and I came out of it thinking the track should have opened with some kind of audio design to note a struggle, and really set up the track more fruitfully. This is my big issue with the album, and one that it takes a while to overcome, arguably never really doing so, given that it's all in slightly better writing. For the vast majority of tracks here, I think even just 30 seconds of sound design to add well-needed context would make a lot of these tracks click better.
My other issue with the album comes in the disconnect between tracks, and that’s part of the risk of having this many cooks in the kitchen, especially with such a broad style between them, and without any real "authorship" from Ute Lemper. Since this isn’t a concept album where all of the tracks connect, it feels more like jumping from scene to scene in a bunch of random different musicals, and I immediately felt that disconnect once “The Case Continues” happened; at first, I thought it might’ve been a continuation of the same drowning murder from the opening track, but instead it’s a track about a clingy heartbroken lady desperate to keep a boyfriend who broke up with her over the phone, with the worst (but also funniest) lines on the album: “My only crime was passion, wild and uncontrolled / If sex were an Olympic sport, we'd've won the gold”. How do you go from a lovely orchestrated track about the dichotomy of seeing beauty as you’re drowning to “but we should be having SEX right now, damn it!” to a (very good, mind you) James Bond-esque instrumental?
Granted, that issue becomes far less prevalent after “Streets of Berlin” (and trust me, the whole album improves exponentially by “Streets of Berlin”), but the first 5 tracks here don’t feel like they fit together at all. “Passionate Fight” is fine; it needs more work, but it’s a decent song about a guy who’ll never be satisfied by any one night stand he’ll get. “Tango Ballad” is really roughly structured, probably from being an English translation of German lyrics, & I could not get a single thing out of the lyrically incoherent “Couldn’t You Keep That To Yourself”. Elvis Costello, you’ve done better, man. The only thing that acted as a saving grace through the first 5 tracks is that the Divine Comedy do a great job with the instrumentals, and that Ute Lemper has a great voice. Seriously; she does a great job of keeping this album from falling apart. I do think she could do a better job of projecting more of her own voice onto these tracks, as opposed to settling for following some of the guides that it seems like she was given on the vast majority of these tracks (literally, stealing Elvis Costello’s inflections on most of the ones he wrote), but it’s not a big deal. The instrumentals & her vocals combined made each track still feel like a good listen, at the very least.
Thankfully (and I do mean *thankfully*), those vocals / instrumentals are finally met with some songwriting chops & just the tiniest extra hint of context / setup in each track that makes the whole album click much better starting with Tom Waits’ “The Part You Throw Away”. “Streets of Berlin” is good, by the way, it’s just desperately in need of the context I mentioned earlier. Tom Waits’ songwriting style does wonders here, for a track about relationship advice after a breakup with some good imagery & an Italian instrumental, and it’s the spark for a back half of the album that’s good enough to that’s good enough to pull this thing from a 3.5 (that I likely would've bumped down) up to a 4. “Split” just rocks; super fun back & forth. “Punishing Kiss” is probably the most ‘eh’ track in the back half; the first two verses really needed to be flipped to set up the context of a woman using a TV show as escapism for her life, but it’s explained decently enough, with a damn good instrumental to it. “Purple Avenue” is just lovely, and thanks again to Tom Waits for some vivid imagery. “You Were Meant For Me” feels like a “Defying Gravity”-esque climax, and while it still desperately needs some opening context, her vocals are stunning & the way the instrumentation swirls around her as the centerpiece of the “scene” makes for a fantastic listen. I was genuinely stunned it didn’t end the album.
“Scope J” is… strange. 11 minutes where I have almost no idea what’s going on, fully avantgarde, and Scott Walker’s production work here feels like a far cry from the Disney-esque baroque tones of “Scott 2”. Yet, I found myself kinda sold on the avant-garde nature of it all, as if the desperate thoughts of someone trapped in Russian captivity (from some war, I dunno when) & the lack of peace that comes with it were all brought to life in audio form. That was my interpretation, anyway. It’s a fascinating listen, and far, far removed from the rest of the album, yet I think that disconnect makes it stand out in a way that works as a closing track. It doesn’t fit at all, and yet, it worked for me.
If this had stayed at the same quality level as the first 5 tracks throughout, I probably would be at a flat 3. As it stands, it's a 3.5 that will go up to a 4 based on how much I liked the back half. Frankly, it's kind of a miracle. I'm not even wholly sure it’s earned it, given that it's effectively a mishmash of tracks from a bunch of different artists to help up prop up Ute Lemper as opposed to an album where she has any kind of an actual, established "authorship". It's definitely bothersome, but other artists have made whole careers out of being ghostwritten (like a certain Canadian rapper), so I can't fault it too badly here. It does, however, make me wonder if she has any actual writing talent of her own. I don't really know if I need to find out. Ultimately, something about the album from “Streets of Berlin” onward clicked for me far more – maybe it’s better instrumentation / lyricism across the board, maybe it’s the smallest amount of context helping the tracks lyrically, and maybe it’s just the more energetic nature of the back half covering up more of the flaws. I can’t really figure it out, but I don’t think I want to. I just know that it was more enjoyable, and that’s all I need to justify it. There’s really not an actively bad track here (OK, “Couldn't You Keep That to Yourself” kinda sucks, but shh), just some baffling early flow between tracks that doesn’t work, but it ended up winning me over on account of its musical strength. Nowhere near enough to get a 5, but I think it's an earned bump up to a 4 regardless, and I am genuinely glad it's on the list.
I cannot believe this album made me write my longest review.
The Bees
5/5
Honestly, I’m at a 5.
You look at the top reviews for this thing on the site, and there’s a whole lot of disdain & vitriol for what essentially boils down to… lo-fi music. This is just modern lo-fi music, but from 2002, recorded by 2 guys in a little shed for a recording studio, in a quaint garden, somewhere on the Isle of Wight. Treating this thing like self-pretentious indie pop when it’s literally just 2 dudes making songs in a shed is wild to me. You can hear the makeshift nature of this album through most of its tracks, and it’s kind of a miracle it comes out as cleanly & as well-produced as it does. The vocals are solid, but really hypnotizing whenever they hit a harmony. The lyricism is super abstract, presumably related to little slices of life on the island. The production / instrumental work is where this thing shines. It really is about as chill as it could possibly be, with the piano & guitar providing sort of a summer-y vibe to it throughout, with clear influences from 1960s psychedelic rock, a little bit of reggae, and mild hints of trip-hop & electronica. You know, lo-fi music. This is a very mellow album, and while it doesn’t necessarily do anything that special, it just creates a sort of vibe that feels really nice to sit in.
It might be the slight dichotomy of getting such a boldly produced cinematic album yesterday written by a cavalcade of artists, followed by possibly the most casual album on the list so far, coming from 2 dudes in a shed, striking my ears in just the right way, but I happened to really enjoy this. Don’t get me wrong, I understand the low scores & the claims that this doesn’t really deserve a place on the list over some other, well-deserving albums – believe me, I’d probably trade this for “Demon Days”, “Yourself Or Someone Like You”, “Ten Summoner’s Tales” or a number of other albums in a heartbeat, but I’m not necessarily mad that it’s here. If anything, I’m glad it is, because I never would’ve stumbled upon it otherwise. It is one of the most relaxing albums we’ve hit upon on the list, and it just caught me on a good day for it. The floor is definitely a 3, but I just think it’s my type of vibe, hence a 5. To be clear, not all 5s are created equal; it’s not like this is as good as Van Halen’s “1984” or anything. It’s just a vote of confidence, really.
Sarah Vaughan
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Not too much to say on that really; just a totally intimate nightclub performance of some wonderfully sung standards. A slight bit of PTSD for those who experienced the full 3-hour version of the Ella Fitzgerald album, perhaps, but since I listened to an abridged version, I don’t think I encountered any of these. Sarah Vaughan has a truly lovely voice, and the chances she gets on this album to show her natural charisma are well-appreciated. It’s obviously got a few little flaws, but I like that they’re kept in; no live performance, no matter how rehearsed, ever goes 100% well, and keeping them in makes it feels much more authentic. The audio quality is great for 1957 too, and while I do wish the band / crowd had just a little more of a presence like some of the other live albums on this list, they still have enough of one that this does still feel like I’m sitting in the crowd for it.
It’s a great live album, simple as that. The floor here is probably a 3 if you’re not big on standards, or a 4 if the mic falling over during “Willow Weep For Me” is a big enough issue for some reason. There’s a few little lull moments here and there on some tracks, but nothing that ever seriously took me out of the immersion. I enjoyed it a lot, and I think it’s a pretty darn good 5.
Bob Dylan
5/5
Alright, fine. It’s a 5.
Yeah, I’m just as surprised at myself at this point. When we got “Highway 61 Revisited” as the 68th album in this whole thing, I wrote down that “there’s just something about Bob Dylan’s music that’ll probably stop me from giving him a 5, maybe ever”, and yet, here I am, giving the guy his third 5 in a row. I guess I’ve learned to appreciate Bob Dylan, although I do think there’s a pretty clear reason I said that back then, and it’s a reason that this album thankfully doesn’t lean into very often.
It’s not confusingly verbose purple prose half the time. Much like “Time Out of Mind”, I’d say a lot of these are surprisingly straightforward, just with a little more of a flowery language meant to evoke clearer imagery, as opposed to the more enigmatic riddles of “Highway 61 Revisited” or “Bringing It All Back Home”. I don’t wanna go track by track, but there’s a great blend of progressive social commentary mixed in with some genuinely witty / biting lines for the era, in a way that makes the whole “voice of a generation” thing feel a lot more earned. He was, what, 21 or 22 when he wrote most of this album? It’s not that he’s espousing anything new, he’s just putting it into words in a way that probably felt more contemporary for the era, especially with the conversational tone he takes on a lot of these tracks. There’s a lot of great verses here, and frankly, it’s too many to note. I think it’s all very digestible though, and certainly far more understandable on a first pass than whatever the fuck “Ballad of a Thin Man” & "Desolation Row" are supposed to be about.
It also helps that Bob Dylan’s presence here really is stripped down to its bare essentials: you get him, his voice (which feels shockingly controlled, melodic & genuinely good on a strong number of tracks), his guitar, and his harmonica. He can rip some damn good harmonica solos. It makes me sort of understand why the shift to a more electric soundscape on his later albums was met with some level of backlash. The conciseness of these tracks, & how present Bob Dylan feels as a narrator in them, letting the music act as more of a backing soundtrack for his delivery, all adds up to create a super effective style that lets the lyricism breathe out more. Going electric took away some of the focus on that lyricism, and I’m sure some people would’ve preferred for Bob to stay as a folksy, singing narrator as opposed to… well, a singer.
Again, I don’t really wanna go track-by-track here; I think the lyricism is what sells the album decently well (though the instrumentals are pretty damn good), so a lot of this album’s enjoyment will boil down to how much you can digest those lines / the humor in some of them, as well as dealing with Bob’s vocals, which are thankfully, nowhere near as nasally here as I thought they’d be. He still can’t really hold a note, though. It is a product of its time and there are definitely some dated references that will go over a less informed head (specifically for some actresses / name brands / other singers & whatnot), but I’m lucky enough to have a big trivia base in my head that I understood a good chunk of it. To my ears, I still don’t think it’s as good as “Time Out of Mind”; I think the last 3 tracks lose a little bit of steam, with 2/3rds being covers, and the last one being just a little too silly to close out what had been a mostly serious album to that point. They’re all good tracks, mind you, they just feel out of place in the track order. It is close to being in the conversation though, which I’m surprised by. All of that said, it’s a 5. A well-earned 5 too. Good job, Bob.
P.S.: “Blowin’ in the Wind” really is THAT good of a track. No wonder this is the album that made him famous.
Buena Vista Social Club
5/5
I’m at a 5.
I don’t have that much to say, thankfully. I’d heard of “Buena Vista Social Club” as a title before listening to this, but I’d never heard the album or really knew what it was all about. It’s just a revival of the Cuban music of the 1940s, done with modern instrumentation & made by Cuban locals with a passion for the craft. Their love for this, and their genuine desire to share it with the world, clearly comes through on this album, and their energy is infectious. There’s a quote from a Guardian article, cited for an essay noting this album’s inclusion into the Library of Congress, calling this “the album that collapsed the cold war wall between Cuba and the west”. That feels like a pretty apt description.
There is one minor critique I have, but it’s probably related to how Cuban songs / “classical standards” were just composed back then – I just think there’s a bit of repetition on a number of tracks. It didn’t bite me too badly, but “El carretero” was the one that got me the most, given that it’s just a slower track in general. Given that the soundscapes & the vocal harmonies (as well as the lyrical storytelling, to a degree) are the focal points of the album, it’s a very minor critique, but one that doesn’t matter that much in the long run. I do wish there were a few more fast-tempo tracks, but that’s just my own tastes speaking. Overall, it’s just a delightful album, and worthy of all the name-brand praise it gets. It’s maybe a little long at an hour, but given that I was up and moving when the time called for it, as well as sitting & vibing when the mood called for it, I’d say they did a great job of keeping me along for the ride, and capturing the emotions they wanted to on each track. I really enjoyed it, and I think it’s an easy 5. Thank goodness it’s on the list.
The Only Ones
4/5
I’m at a 4.
There’s an old phrase: “a chain is only as strong as its weakest link”. It takes about 30 seconds for this album to reveal its weakest link, and that is lead vocalist, Peter Perrett. Everything surrounding him screams success; the band can fucking rip a good instrumental break, the guitars sound awesome, the percussion has a good power to it, the bass feels deep, and overall, everything surrounding him has a sort of natural charisma / personality to it. There’s nothing technically wrong about this album.
Peter Perrett’s voice is… I mean, it’s not even that bad, really. It just sticks out like a sore thumb. He’s not doing anything wrong, he just doesn’t fit on most of these tracks. He somehow sounds like both lead characters in Smiling Friends combined, occasionally feeling disinterested in his delivery. He’s trying, and there are moments where his voice does work decently well, and occasionally harmonize well to disguise his pitfalls. It’s just too noticeable as the weak link of the album, and while I’m not saying singers grow on trees, it does feel like they could have found someone else out there, you know?
All of that said, even if he’s the weakest link, this is still a very strong chain, and one that’s strong enough to give it a 4. Some of these tracks fucking rip, especially “The Beast” & “The Immortal Story”, & instrumentally, this is as good as any late 70s power pop I can remember. The vocal structures for the verses are still good, even if the vocals themselves are shaky at best and outright bored at worst, and the lyricism is generally alright. The energy emanating off of this album still makes for a fun time, and I did slowly accept that his voice was just kinda like that. I do think the opening track is a mediocre tonesetter, but everything afterward (save for “It’s The Truth”, which is just kinda boring) is honestly pretty good, or at least, acceptably fun. If the biggest sin here is a mediocre vocalist who sounds like what would really happen if a band needed to train a short-term replacement off the street in a Disney movie, while the rest of the band sounds fucking great, then it’s not that bad of an album. The floor here is definitely a 3; maybe a 2 if you’re extremely annoyed by his voice. I’m at a 4, and I think it earns it.
Finley Quaye
2/5
I’m at a 2.
It’s just boring. That’s the TL;DR: it’s really, really fucking boring. Instrumentally, it’s not bad, and there’s generally a decent energy that comes through on a number of the tracks that keeps this thing at least generously listenable. The attempts at blending in some extra genres onto a reggae base are alright at best & sort of an overproduced flop at worst. There are some egregiously boring tracks here though; a lot of the back half of the album suffers from incessantly plain instrumentals with no sense of progression whatsoever, or an utterly plain lead melody that’s not memorable in the slightest. The back half is the worst half, but at least the front half of the album is trying to do something fun, and generally, it works well to the ears, even if it slightly falls apart under any kind of real analysis.
Finley Quaye, in addition to singing here, produced this album himself, and I’ll give him some credit for keeping it together. This is a Scottish man, whose dad was born in London, and his great-grandfather was born in Ghana. This is… Jamaican reggae music. I’m not saying there’s not any overlap here between musical styles, because there almost certainly is, but the link in terms of familial influence feels more like a tribute act for the hell of it than one with any kind of deeper roots. His vocals are fine; slightly melodic at best, often passably “too present” in ways that take attention away / overshadow some of the instrumentals, and downright incomprehensibly babbly at worst. His presence is sort of felt, but ultimately, I found it to be distracting more than anything, and that’s because of this album’s real biggest sin.
I have absolutely no idea what the fuck he’s saying. Lyrically, Finley Quaye is no Bob Marley, and as such, the vast majority of lines here feel unfinished, they feel yappy, and as a whole, none of these tracks come across as feeling complete. The only shining grace here is the lovely “Your Love Gets Sweeter”, which has such a positive & bright vibe in its actually structured lyrics, that I can sort of look past the mediocre instrumental to give it some praise as the track I enjoyed the most. Beyond that, though… boy, some of these make not a goddamn lick of sense. I can’t even really go back and tell you which ones, because I found myself baffled half the time to even wager a guess. It’s very easy to hear though. Going off of Spotify plays, I guess people like “Even After All”, and that track seems like… I dunno, apologizing for soldiers being murderers and loving them regardless, or something? I couldn’t parse it, and I somehow parsed most of “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway”. Maybe it’s a UK thing.
I don’t think it’s a terrible album, just one that’s so utterly mediocre that it comes across as deeply boring – I do think there are bad tracks, but nothing that brings outright rage because it totally sucks or anything, just purely underwhelming energy, or a lack of care that makes me not want to care. I think it has maybe the most boring track we’ve gotten throughout the 1001 so far, which is the 4-minute drum loop that is “Red Rolled and Seen”, a track that truly, truly goes nowhere for its entire runtime. Even “Haute de gamme” at least bothered to put a lead melody on its dogshit tracks. Ultimately, the early instrumental energy, the enjoyable “Your Love Gets Sweeter”, and the earnest effort put into a lot of this album to at least present itself as a passable attempt to refresh reggae music for the late ‘90s, all get this the saving grace of a 2. I truly don’t think it actually gets as low as a 1 (save for “Red Rolled and Seen”), and maybe the ceiling here is a 3 if some of these tracks ever click a little better in the future, though I don’t see myself coming back to this album anytime soon. For now though, it’s 51 minutes (too long) that leaves me unimpressed, but at least in a way where I can tell they tried. It’s a 2.
No more “Quaye”s on the list, thankfully. Between this & “Maxinquaye”, I can’t say they’ve been lucky.
Boston
5/5
I’m at a 10.
Yeah, I knew this was gonna be great going into it, given my familiarity with the first two tracks here (and that is one hell of a 1-2 punch to start on), but the rest of the album fucking rocks all the same. Once the prog-esque intro to “Foreplay / Long Time” kicked in, a lot more of the variety of the band came through, and the wave of energy those first two tracks brought stayed at the same level for pretty much the whole time. Instrumentally… I mean, goddamn, if I could play a guitar with even 1% of the talent these guys have, I’d feel blessed. The percussion is fantastic too, with the drums finding new ways to pulse out power on every track. The electronica / synth stuff present here blends in perfectly as well, especially on some of the organ solos with just a touch of reverb present to give them a cool depth effect. I have no complaints on the instrumentation whatsoever; this might be ‘70s “dad rock” at a peak of sorts, and this is coming from a fucking debut album.
Vocally, Brad Delp sounds like the king of the fucking world here – what a voice, genuinely. I have no idea how you can channel that much power & command into tracks like these, let alone still manage to bring out the extent of the emotions that aren’t really present in the lyrics. The lyrics themselves are generally pretty straightforward, and that’s an advantage here, since it gives Brad more room to drag as much as he can out, and he somehow pulls out far, far more than I think other vocalists would have. His held notes are crazy, his highest pitches feel unattainable nowadays, and as a whole, he shines just as much as the instrumentals do.
It’s a perfect combination, and combined with some masterful production work to keep everything glued together, as well as a solid variety of genres within this arena rock base, the whole thing rocks. It is 37 minutes of near perfection – if I have even a minor nitpick, it’s that the last two tracks feel just a little lesser compared to the first 6. “Something About You” just kinda feels the same as “Peace of Mind”, and “Let Me Take You Home Tonight” doesn’t really feel like a closing track until they punch up the energy for the last minute or so – they’re still both great tracks though, with the former still hitting some insane adrenaline rushes (especially at the drop near the end) & the latter just being a lovely (if slightly cheesy) love track, with a sort of southern gospel energy at the end.
Ultimately, there’s nothing here that would persuade me from giving this a 10. It’s a stellar set of tracks that feels like a greatest hits album, and yet, it’s their fucking debut. It’s a masterclass in how to do energetic ‘70s rock, and even with a number of these tracks (especially “More Than A Feeling”) being overplayed to death in the 49 years since this came out, for my first time listening to the vast majority of these tracks, I thought they all fucking ruled. No real complaints, no skips, no pausing, and no way this is getting anything lower than a 10. I loved it. I gotta listen to their other albums, I think.
Supergrass
5/5
Yeah, that’s a 5.
I didn’t really know what to expect going into this, but color me surprised. I think these guys might’ve made something that’s just as enjoyable as “(What’s The Story) Morning Glory?”, though obviously not as impactful. This album feels like taking an amalgamation of a bunch of 60s/70s British styles, and giving them a bit of a Britpop update, and it works remarkably well. The energy from the instrumentals & their vocals is deeply infectious, especially with the punch of the percussion & a lot of the guitar / keyboard melodies leading the way. It helps that these tracks are generally fast as hell, working at breakneck tempos that bring an energy that’s reminiscent of Oasis, yet still managing to channel more of a Beatles-y vibe on some tracks, and shades of the Sex Pistols on others, and that’s underselling just how many different singers/bands I was reminded of throughout this thing. This album doesn’t discriminate in terms of styles, with every track feeling different, yet still in the same instrumental base, to keep a sense of continuity throughout.
If I have any complaints towards it, it’s that I think the lyricism doesn’t quite have the depth it could have on a number of tracks, with just one looping verse & a chorus to carry the track. It’s especially noticeable around tracks 5-11, and perhaps most bothersome on “Time”, with just loose fragments of lines present throughout the track. There are some tracks that really do have fully structured verses though, and I really liked those. Overall, the instrumental energy / vocal delivery of these tracks manage to keep the album from ever really hitting a lull point – even when I was finally starting to notice the looping lyrics, I found it never really affected my enjoyment of the album. Besides, this is a 19-year-old, a 21-year-old, & a 26-year old, managing to make this type of layered, rich, youthful expression of an album. I can let some of their songwriting slide, since they’re just trying to capture their own vivacity in musical form, without a real regard for the “picturesque” nature of it all. The lines they did come up with are still pretty good, so I won’t blame them for saying “good enough” and letting them loop.
I don’t want to really go indepth for a track through track analysis here, so here’s some scattered notes: “sort of a Teen Titans vibe”, “don’t be a snitch”, “Travis McCoy, you fucking fraud”, “total ball of energy”, “What the fuck did Lenny do?”, “Is there a subway between Earth & Hell?”, “fine, I’ll sit up straight, damn”, “rather Beatles-y”, “they sound like South Park characters”, “really nice surprise harmonica”, “this feels like a prog interlude”, & “we need more goodbye tracks”. If nothing else, this all just means I was engaged with the album throughout, and I think it’s an album worth engaging with. It is a fast 40 minutes, and a super enjoyable one at that – I’m very glad it’s on the list, and I’m very excited to get their other album on the list somewhere down the line. Hopefully, that one is just as good, but this one is a very easy 5 to my ears.
Songhoy Blues
4/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’d love to keep there, but I think I’ll bump it down to a 4.
This album is a brilliant ball of electric guitar-infused blues rock, with a West Africa lean, brought on by the exile forced upon its band members to ongoing civil occupations caused by Sharia law. Granted, my geopolitical knowledge is rather minimal, so I’m certainly not an expert to speak on how this album came together, but I’m very glad they’ve channeled whatever frustrations that must’ve arisen from the situation into a great album. I don’t really understand any lyrics here, but I’m guessing based on a good chunk of the vocal passion thrown in that there’s certainly some level of political content in the lyrics, even in broad, chanted, rhythmic strokes. The instrumentation is where this album shines, with this album at its very best when it approaches everything with a rock lean at higher tempos. The opening track “Soubour” won me over immediately, and it felt like the album was gonna easily roll all the way to a 5.
The thing that’s stopping me from giving this a 5, and sort of stumbling down to a 4, is simply in the luster of the album going away to my ears. It’s a very dazzling album when it starts, and it carries its momentum well through the first 6 tracks or so, but save for “Petit Metier” & “Mali”, I found myself catching a generalized production pattern that slowly pulled the energy away. I think most of the last few tracks boil down to an acoustic guitar melody, a hypnotic chanty vocal style, and a slightly looping bass / percussion track, done in a way that doesn’t feel as distinct & as enrichening as the first 6 tracks came across. If you listen to a track like “Nick” or “Ai Tchere Bele”, there’s a noticeable bounciness to the percussion, coming across in a way that almost feels sort of like an Irish jig – that energy is infectious, and even when it loops a little bit, you don’t feel it because it’s just fun. When this album slows down then, that sameyness feels more amplified, and the later tracks just didn’t hook me as well as a result. They’d probably feel great on their own, but as a flowing album experience, it just didn’t fully hit for me.
I do think if I had proper translations of the lyrics in front of me (which I could not find to save my life), it could easily change my perspective of some of the atmosphere / tone of the back half of the album, but given that the first half carries itself so strongly from a musical standpoint, that shift in energy doesn’t come across as well to my ears. Don’t get me wrong: this is a *great* album. The issues I have with it are just down to personal taste; I highly recommend it regardless, and I’m very glad it’s on the list, because I certainly wouldn’t have found it otherwise. I’d love to keep this at a 4.5, but given that I found myself more disengaged for the back half of the album, solely from a musical standpoint, I think I’d be lying to myself if I bumped this up to a 5, hence the 4. A highly recommended 4 though.
Incubus
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I will bump up to a 5 with totally naked bias.
I’m learning something about myself when it comes to nu-metal, or nu-metal adjacent stuff; as long as the production work is met with even marginally decent lyrics, I’ll probably enjoy it. For better or worse, these soundscapes & instrumental styles are the sounds of movie trailers, game trailers & the overall pop culture of my super early youth. Even as late as 2005, a good 6 years after this album came out, I’m pretty sure this style was hanging in there, even if it was by a thread. Granted, I don’t think I’ve heard any of the songs on this album (outside of the obviously huge “Drive”) until now, but there was something oddly nostalgic to all of this.
I’ll be the first person to tell you that enjoying this album comes down to how much you enjoy this style as a guilty pleasure, and I, for better or worse, enjoy this style as a *deep* guilty pleasure. I do think it’s a little more warranted here though, as this album takes a lot of clear inspiration (at least to my ears) from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, just blending their style with more of a nu-metal lean. It’s probably why “Drive” became such a monster hit, since it does feel like it could easily fit onto “Californication” with a few tweaks. This album is mostly defined by heavy, heavy guitar work though, in a way that’s sort of overwhelming, yet still pretty melodic. Throw some record scratches on top of that, some cheesy lyrics, along with some punchy percussion, and you end up with the general base for each track. I think they do a great job of keeping it fresh every time in spite of that; a track like “Nowhere Fast” with a sort of drum & bass tone in the percussion is different from the heavy rock of “Privilege” & far, far different from something like “Battlestar Scralatchtica” or “Drive”. There’s good variety here, even if it can feel occasionally same-y to the ears.
Brandon Boyd’s got a pretty darn good voice by the way; occasionally, he sounds like Weird Al (perhaps most blatantly on “The Warmth”) & other times, he feels sort of Nickelback-y, but generally, I think he gives a good gravitas to each track, especially when he needs to yell something out. There’s some shaky vocal structures on some tracks, but he’s in a good key that makes it easy to sing along whenever a solid chorus comes up. I know “Drive” isn’t the only song here, but it’s the shining example of this. I think the other big one is probably “Pardon Me”, which in addition to a decently catchy chorus, surprised me with the rap flow, feeling like a sort of proto-Linkin Park. I’m not comparing Brandon to Chester here or anything, but it just clicked well in a familiar way.
I did call them cheesy lyrics, but they are at least lyrics that attempt to say something; generally, I think the thread of the album is accepting personal growth & maturity in the aftermath of hard times, trying to reclaim your life afterwards. It’s at least what “Drive” is about, and most of the tracks leading up to it (& after it) touch on those general themes of trying to find a path forward. There’s not really a link between each track like that, but as far as actually trying to put an album together, I’d say they flow decently well – maybe “Battlestar Scralatchtica” interrupts the pace of the album a little too abruptly, but other than that, I guess my only real confusion comes in “Out from Under” ending the album. It’s not a bad one at all, but the “fuck the authority” track coming in after an album that’s largely been about personal growth, especially during 1999 (a year where I can genuinely think of no historical reason to go “fuck the authority” mode) feels out of place as the closing track. Put it anywhere else, and then end on “Pardon Me”, and I think the album would end in a really fulfilling way.
I do think I’m giving this a lot of “guilty pleasure” bias, but I still think the floor here is a 3, at worst. People giving this a 1 or 2 like it’s a disgusting presence on the list are overreacting – at worst, I think this is a decently produced piece of nu-metal influenced rock, and at its best, I think it’s got some genuine hits & great variety that speaks to the cultural zeitgeist of this style of music in 1999 / 2000, however awkwardly it’s aged over the years. Is it an album you HAVE to listen to before you die? I dunno, probably not, but I’m glad I listened to it in full all the same. Apparently, it’s their album after this with genuinely great acclaim, so maybe I’ll listen to that in my own time. As far this album goes, I’m a total sucker for it, and while I acknowledge that it’s probably closer to a 4 for my tastes, I feel inclined to bump it up to a 5 just because I found myself enjoying it that much. Sorry, I guess.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
5/5
I’m at a 4.5; I’m gonna bump it up to a 5 on the strength of its first 7 tracks, but the last 5 really had me contemplating a 4.
I’m a little stretched for time, so I can’t go as in depth as I’d like to here, but I really, really loved this album through its first 7 tracks. I think the choice to go with more minimal, moody & somber piano-driven soundscapes for the whole album works very well, and save for a few tracks near the end, generally do a great job of capturing the emotional vibe Nick is going for. Nick Cave’s writing feels deeply vivid here, and the emotions he’s able to pull out, with a strong sense of empathy for the guy’s philosophically waxed heartbreak & his relationship with religion, is remarkably well done. He’s opening himself up on this album, writing less about the murder ballads of the past, and taking the first person perspective that other great songwriters inevitably grasp control of. The ideas of a non-intervening God, the defeatist attitudes towards the goodness of people, the sudden belief of destiny & the heartbreaking shattering of inevitability play really nicely through the first 7 tracks, and if this album had been just those tracks, I think I’d be at a 10. They’re that good.
After that point though, I think the album hits a bit of a PJ Harvey-adjacent snag for its final 5 tracks; when he’s on point with his writing, as on “Idiot Prayer” & “Far from Me”, the album still shines brilliantly. “Idiot Prayer” being about a murderer seeking forgiveness on his way to death row struck a nice chord with me, and “Far from Me” does a great job of capturing the slow deterioration of something full of deep devotion, taking as long to write as his relationship with PJ Harvey lasted. It’s a fantastic track, and it should have ended the album.
The other 3 tracks… well, two of them aren’t bad; “West Country Girl” is honestly fine, it just didn’t hook me for whatever reason. “Black Hair” is needlessly repetitive, sure, but I like the idea of an obsessive focal point on a track meant to proclaim love. He’s obsessed with the black hair, just as much as he’s obsessed with the rest of her. It’s just brought down by an accordion that’s deeply distracting and ends up going nowhere, which sort of ruins the attempt at a more intimate vibe.
“Green Eyes” is just useless. The spoken word echo doesn’t work, the “twinkling cunt” is an insane two-word phrase, and it just feels like it’s rehashing “Black Hair”, but in a worse & needlessly trite way. It doesn’t need to be on the album, and its presence here as the closing track to the entire package feels like a backbreaker that, if it weren’t for the strength of the first 7 tracks, would bump this all the way down to a 4.
That said… man, I really, REALLY connected with the first 7 tracks here. I had to actively stop and pause after “Where Do We Go Now But Nowhere?”, because it got me really fucking good. I think those first 7 tracks are brilliant. It might just be that break in between that caused the last 5 tracks to not hit as nicely (though “Green Eyes” is definitely useless). They’re good enough that I feel like this still deserves a bump up to a 5. Hell, if “West Country Girl” or “Black Hair” click nicer in the future (though it’s unlikely for the latter), I might be even a little higher than a 5. No matter what, it’s a damn good album, it deserves to be on the list, and I highly recommend it.
Marvin Gaye
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll pretty easily bump up to a 5.
Maybe it’s because of Prince taking the sort of foundation Marvin Gaye set on this album to a natural extreme on “1999”, or just the much more sex-positive culture that’s been fostered in the 52 years since this album came out, but I found myself less inclined to hear this as just a “sexy” album. I’m more inclined to treat it as a sort of landmark in mixing the soul music of the late 1960s with a sort of carnal passion that would come to define the R&B music of the next… well, several decades to come. This is a sexually liberating & radically freeing album, especially for 1973. Marvin Gaye’s voice sells everything here, and frankly, it just kind of sounds like sex. The same applies to the instrumentals, which… hoo. The sax / percussion work here is a perfect backdrop for the lyricism for the vast majority of the album, and as a whole, the atmosphere this album creates for itself clearly set a new standard for other artists to follow, in terms of talking about passion like that. Just listen to a track like “If I Should Die Tonight”. That one’s incredible.
Here’s a fascinating stat for you, which could be coincidence, but I will actively choose to believe is correlation & causation: according to a CDC study on the vital statistics of 1974 (Page 75 here: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsus/nat74_1.pdf), the average number of births per month from January to June of that year was roughly 251,812. The average number of births from July to December was roughly 277,627. According to the Billboard 200 (https://www.billboard.com/artist/marvin-gaye/), this album’s peak on the charts was #2, in October of 1973. Add 9 months to that, and you get to… July of 1974. Yes, this album’s peak lines up with enough lovemaking to raise a rolling birth average by 26,000 babies per month for the back half of an entire year. If this really is a tangible & provable Marvin Gaye effect, then maybe this album deserves a 10 for that alone, I dunno.
So, why a 4.5 and not a flat 5? Eh, just a little one-note by the end, really. The passion is there, his vocals are sensual, and nothing is wrong at all. I just think the album loses some of the steam it has after the excellent “Distant Lover”, as the final 2 tracks didn’t quite come across as strongly as the first 6 did, especially on “You Sure Love to Ball” (great instrumental though). Regardless, I’d be a moron to not bump it up – this is Marvin Gaye setting a brand new standard for how to approach the topics of sex, sensuality & passion in music, and doing it in a way that still feels tasteful & sophisticated enough (especially in the instrumentation / vocals) to treat it as a serious shift, as opposed to a shock factor / publicity switch off of the back of the more socially conscious tones of “What’s Going On”. I’m very excited to get “What’s Going On” down the line, but as far as this goes, it’s a 4.5 that’s easily bumped up to a 5.
Weather Report
5/5
I’m at a 5.
This album has a 2.98 average on the site (criminally low), with the second highest review calling it “the most background music, white-people-dinner-party type jazz you can get” – what fucking white people parties are you going to where people are playing THIS type of synth-heavy jazz fusion? I want a fucking invite, immediately. This album is fucking awesome, especially for 1977. The only track that felt a little abrasive was “Teen Town”, but that’s just because of the super punchy percussion, and even still, I liked it. This entire package is, from top to bottom, a remarkable vibe, and one that I loved just sitting in, soaking in, and occasionally jumping around in. I can’t even really give super detailed track notes, because I was just caught in the groove of this thing. The keyboard melodies are complex yet digestible, the percussion & rhythm knows exactly when to punch up to pull one’s attention back in, the guitar work (especially in the bass, my GOODNESS, the bass) is incredible, and as a whole, it’s 38 minutes that blink by in a heartbeat.
Yes, there are other bands that would take this style of jazz fusion (especially in Japan) & refine it to its finest form, but for a 1977 album, this feels like it’s leading the way, and I can’t help but give this a 5. Sure, it’s not as evocative to the emotions as say, Miles Davis, but it’s just as energetic, just as technically complex, and just as melodically sound, with my ears fully amazed at certain points. I loved this whole thing, and to my tastes, it’s a 5, through and through.
Frank Sinatra
5/5
I’m at a 5.
25 minutes into the album, with my brain feeling sad because of the vivid imagery in the lyricism, the lovely sombering tone to the orchestration, and Frank’s voice crooning a deep sense of woe right into my ears, I stood up and looked out of a window, standing in a little doorway with the lights on behind me, but in front of me, a pitch black darkness, save for this one little light I see out of my neighbor’s window. “What Is This Thing Called Love?” was playing, and I just stood there, hearing the song, without a single line in front of me, yet understanding every word & feeling it all the same. The light went out right as the song ended. You can’t feel anything more potent than that. That cover art of Sinatra, cigar in hand, on a moody blue street in the rain, contemplating how something so potent as love can work both ways… that’s the mood of the album. You have to find a way to get into that headspace & that mood to truly appreciate this for what it is.
Granted, maybe you don’t have to be as cinematic or as immersive as I managed to find myself in, but I’ll be damned if it didn’t do wonders. I can’t go track by track here, since the album is decently one-note in that sense, but my goodness, you have to just feel those tracks for 50 minutes, somehow, someway. It is a sobering mood, and for 1955, I’m just stunned at how well that sense of heartbreak & loneliness is captured so, so well. It’s been 70 years since this came out, it’s the oldest album on the list, and yet it might be one of the finest “sad” albums I’ve ever heard. You do have to hear this before you die, and I’m so very glad it’s here. Frank Sinatra, you did damn good with this one. It’s a very easy 5 for my tastes, if not a bit higher.
Germs
3/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump down to a 3.
This is a fine enough album – it’s just not really my style. Instrumentally, I think what’s here has a pretty damn good energy to it, and the band is technically sound. Their performances help steer a rhythm that each track needs to keep from falling apart (save for when they intentionally fall apart, for effect), and they’re good enough that the album stays very listenable throughout. I think where this album falls down for me comes in two things, one more consequential than the other. The first is in the repetition; not a big deal, given that this is just what 1970s punk rock is, and more of a hit-or-miss in terms of how well they shake it up from track to track. I’d say they shake it up well around 60% of the time, but that other 40% just hits a total snag for me, and somehow makes the first 29 minutes of this album feel a lot slower than that, especially after “Media Blitz”. The second is… well…
Darby Crash has a very abrasive voice. I think I get what he’s going for, and I admire his vocal style as a pure ball of energy, throwing caution to the wind for vocal structures & any kind of safe enunciation to use it as an instrument unto itself. I think it works on a few tracks, but for my tastes, he’s just a little bit too free / loose here. I think a lot of these tracks have decent enough lyrics to them, but I can’t understand what he’s saying to save my life without those lyrics in front of me. Even when I can kinda catch those lyrics, I don’t think a lot of the vocal structures here feel very melodically compelling, actively challenging and rubbing up against the rhythm of the instrumentation to create that abrasive effect.
I can hear the appeal, don’t get me wrong, and if someone wants to give this a 5 on the strength of that abrasion working for them, I can’t really fault it. It’s the make or break aspect of this album though, and it’s probably why this has a 2.53 on the site. This is influential, as I can hear a lot of other punk bands start to form from the foundation that this album set, but it just didn’t feel as compelling as it could to me. Maybe with a little more of an open mind on a future relisten, this could go up to a 4, but I don’t really see myself coming back to this album anytime soon. I do respect everything it’s going for, & I can’t say there’s ever actually a bad track here, just a lot of flatter ones, partially due to his vocal style. It just never did anything to really elevate higher, hence the 3.5 bumped down to a 3.
Joni Mitchell
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Not quite the easily digestible tones of “Court & Spark” (which I gave a 10 to), but a lovely road trip album regardless. This album is deeply inspired by a lot of Joni’s personal life, making it a little harder to digest at first, but I think once the “therapeutic road trip” angle comes in, a lot of this album really melts into place. Joni Mitchell apparently went traveling a LOT in 1976, crossing through a lot of America while on & off various tours, even with no driver’s license. This album is practically her recollection of those cross-country trips, reckoning with why she did them, the sense of heartbreak that caused her to do them in the first place, and trying to heal her tensions & vices that came to light before & after the trips. I suppose “Hejira” really makes sense as an album title, given that it’s a loose translation for Muhammad’s spiritual pilgrimages from Mecca to Medina.
I think it’s a very well written album; rather verbose at times, and occasionally a bit cryptic (namely on “Amelia” with its false alarms), but full of vivid & rewarding imagery in its most straightforward moments. “Furry Sings the Blues” being about the decay of such a vitally important spot in music (Beale Street in Memphis) stood out really well to me, as did the deep desire for marriage on “Song for Sharon”. I do think “Court & Spark” is a better written album, but it’s just because I was able to pick up on a lot of the metaphorical writing there on a first pass, whereas some of these took a bit longer to reveal themselves, though they're rather vivid all the same. Joni Mitchell’s voice is still very good; not as dazzling as it was on “Court & Spark” due to her more conversational / talkative tone on this album, but she still has some moments with a presence & power that can only come out of someone who really means the tracks they’ve written.
Instrumentally, it’s a much more blues-y / jazz inspired album, which leaves it a bit more somber & slightly more one-note than the variety of “Court & Spark”, yet the moody attitude rolls along really nicely. I compare it, in a sense, to “Autobahn” by Kraftwerk; not in the style of music at all, but in terms of capturing a sense of travel. The simplicity of the lead guitar on a lot of the tracks, when surrounded by the passing bass melodies, the very light percussion, and the myriad of other atmospheric instrumentation (special shoutout to Neil Young’s harmonica on “Furry Sings the Blues”) really creates the feeling of just looking out of a window whilst driving or flying or some other form of transportation, and just contemplating life as it is, while the scenery whips by. I think it’s very easy to have those moments as a passenger or a driver, lost in your own thoughts. That’s what this album captures very well, and while the sense of verbosity in the lyrics is intimidating at first, I think they’re just there to give richer depth to the imagery that her voice & these instrumentals already succeed at capturing. They’re optional, and they add a lot to the album, but they’re not crucial.
As a whole, then, I really enjoyed it. I do think there’s a bit of mixing issues on a few tracks that distract from what the album is going for, with some instrumentals burying Joni’s voice in the mix. This could’ve also been trimmed down by a bit; I wouldn’t cut any tracks, but some verses here feel a little more tangential than others, in a way that’s not as tight as it could be. Overall, though, it is a road trip album, and it may be even more enhanced by just listening to it in a car. I think it’s a rewarding album if you choose to engage with the lyricism, but it’s not as necessary as it seems on a first pass. It’s got great instrumentation (quick acknowledgement for Jaco Pastorius of Weather Report doing bass on some of these tracks, & any of the other session musicians here), great vocals, and I can’t find many flaws with it. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s certainly mine, and I think it’s a 5.
Iggy Pop
5/5
I’m at a 5.
It might be the 302 albums we’ve gotten since “Lust for Life” & a newfound penchant for the avantgarde speaking, but I found myself really enjoying the atmosphere this album brings. It’s founded on a sort of “electronic rock / blues” vibe that slowly grows moodier & more intense over the course of the album, eventually culminating in the sirens at the very end of “Mass Production”, & that slow burn approach works very well here. David Bowie’s production work is fantastic, with a lot more layers to it than I was expecting, especially for synthier stuff circa 1977. Windier tones, some pulsating drum beats, & a lot of heavier, yet muted guitar work sets the stage nicely on a lot of the tracks, and while it’s sort of adjacent to “Low”’s style, it’s a much different energy, leaning into some poppier rock & roll tones without getting too "happy". I haven’t heard “Heroes” yet, so maybe those comparisons will become rather obvious down the line. The music tells most of the story here, with Iggy Pop’s vocal performance only serving to enhance that atmosphere – he’s usually pretty deliberate in taking a more monotone approach, making his higher pitches feel like they have extra force behind them, and it works really well.
I do hear how this one might be more hit & miss – I listened to it with headphones in, so some of the interesting layering on a track like “Nightclubbing” or “Dum Dum Boys” might not come across as well on pure speakers. It’s an album that rewards paying attention to its instrumental choices, but it’s not a necessity to do so. Lyrically, I’d say these are pretty strong, enhancing the tracks, but they barely matter as much; “Dum Dum Boys” is the only one where the extra emotional weight of his breakup with the Stooges makes the lyricism feel sort of necessary, though his vocal style gives most of the emotional pull regardless. If all of those add up in a way that doesn’t mesh with one’s style, I can hear how this could be as low as a 2 for someone, as it might come across as a bit too safe or plain. I know it hit me at one point; “Baby” is a fine track that just didn’t fully click for me, so that could easily spread to a lot of the album.
For my tastes though, this is a pretty damn good project, with great moody tracks that know exactly when to flip an energetic switch. Seriously, listening to it as background noise while writing this has made me realize just how damn good the guitar work is here. I’m glad it’s on the list, and it’s a very strong 5. This is the last solo Iggy Pop album we’ll be getting, but against all odds (literally a 4.68% chance), we’ve yet to get any of his work with the Stooges, and that’s 3 more albums for Iggy Pop to impress me with. I gave Lust for Life a 4, I’m gonna give this a well-deserved 5, and I can only hope that those Stooges albums live up to expectations now.
Silver Jews
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4; took a bit to get there, and it only really solidified it by the last track.
I put a decent amount of stake in lyrics, but my approach to lyricism is less about understanding the words in full, and more so capturing a general picture to pull from. I think the best albums can create great imagery with very few words, and as long as the picture itself can be painted in a vivid way where the *intent* of the track falls into place, it’s an enriching experience.
I had absolutely no idea what the fuck the first 3 tracks on this album were trying to paint. They were painting little bit of pictures with their individual lines, sure, but I was never able to grasp a full picture out of them. Even on a re-listen after enjoying the back half of the album far more, I only got super broad strokes of intent that left those tracks less fruitful to my brain. I’m decently sure “Slow Education” is about a sort of drab approach to life & nothing has really ever improved after the Biblical interpretation of creation, but it’s not supplemented by anything to paint the full picture. “Room Games and Diamond Rain” is definitely a love track, but I never really got half the lines. “Time Will Break the World” creates a great image of a mansion in the wintertime, but I was never able to capture the intent of the track – the rich people need to fix climate change, maybe?
“I Remember Me” finally sets itself straight, with some level of clear, straightforward imagery about a love ruined by a coma, and it’s a great track that starts to set up the back half of the album, but not before the confusing “Horseleg Swastikas”. I have no idea what the fuck that one’s about; again, it creates a decent enough picture, but the intent of the track is lost on me – is it just about striving for no ambition, or something? After that, “Transylvania Blues” just kinda kills as an instrumental. “Let’s Not and Say We Did” is a great example of painting a picture entirely on the vibes alone; I wasn’t album to get the lines at all, but the up-tempo nature to everything created a sort of childlike vibe to it that spelled out the intent of the track really well, and I just enjoyed it.
“Tennessee” is very R.E.M. / Sufjan Stevens-esque, and it really is just a nice cheesy love letter to the state & the love he wants to find in moving there. “Friday Night Fever” is a George Strait cover, and it’s just a nice straight country track. I’m surprised George Strait doesn’t have any albums on the list, but I guess he’s more of a singles guy. “Death of an Heir of Sorrows” is a lovely tribute track to a friend that recently died, and just the title alone evokes something – I couldn’t really figure out what, but it clicked very well, and his sadness is palpable. It’s the capper to a nice 5-track stretch that elevates this album up from a 3.5 to a 4 for me.
Oh, right, his vocals & the instrumentals and all that – I think David Berman (rest in peace) does a fine enough job, if a little plain at times. He’s not trying to be a gifted singer, but he has just enough of a melodic tone in his more half-talking style that it works. It’s earnest, at least, and you can tell he’s trying, even if other singers might’ve been able to pull a bit more emotion out of the lines. Instrumentally, I did like this; it feels more like indie rock with country instrumentation, as opposed to “country music” as one might traditionally define it, but I think it’s good all the same. I think once the lyrics get to their more straightforward point in the back half of the album, the instrumentation feels more potent at capturing the mood, which helps a lot.
Overall then, with the first 3 tracks & “Horseleg Swastikas” being unable to paint a strong picture for me, but the other 6 painting pretty good ones, I think I’m justified in bumping this up from a 3.5 to a 4. I understand the 2.68 rating on the site, as I felt tempted to sort of give up on the album once 4 of the first 5 tracks weren’t clicking for me (I’d give those 4 tracks a 3, as a totally competent if bland set of tracks), but “I Remember Me” & the back half really pulls this thing up nicely. I do think I want to hear more of these guys; David Berman seems like a talented songwriter. I’m glad it’s on the list; others can debate if it really needs to be an album you hear before you die (it’s probably not, I dunno), but I enjoyed it. It’s a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4.
The xx
5/5
I’m at a 5. Hell, probably a little higher.
Pretty striking minimalism here. I’ve gotten so used to tracks that fill up their soundscape with everything to add as much “depth” as possible, and yet here, that sense of empty space is used to a really, really strong degree. This album doesn’t do anything super complex with its melodies, relying on the presence (in the “aura” sense) of the instrumentation to sell the mood. Everything here is deliberate, whether it’s a simple guitar pattern, some punchier or lighter percussion, or pulling back that instrumentation to let the vocals breathe more. It’s so tightly produced that it’s easy to notice what the album is trying to do, but it’s also easy to underappreciate how effectively it’s doing it, because it does it almost effortlessly. It stems from the usage of the empty space in the tracks; it’s an instrument unto itself, and it’s used really, really well. A number of tracks make the instrumentation quieter, letting that empty space stick out more.
Lyrically, this is an album focused mostly on love, but a specific corner of love; namely, the tension that exists in the paranoid little corner of the brain that’s too hesitant to fully commit to a relationship out of previous fears. Some tracks overcome it, others don’t, some take place long after that tension has boiled over in a sad way, and some leave that tension unanswered. In a way, it’s a little bit one-note, and mixed with the generally persistent instrumentation, I can hear how this album might bounce off to some people as one that’s a little too similar for its own good. For my tastes though, I think this album approaches the subject matter with enough musical variation that it never got stale or felt too similar. Part of it comes in the vocals; I really, really like Romy Madley Croft’s vocal style, as she reminds me of Bjork with more of a slight British accent. She harmonizes well with Oliver Sim, and while his vocals aren’t as trained, I think it helps make the tension feel more authentic, since it sometimes feels like they’re talking past each other rather than talking to each other.
Overall, the lo-fi, vaguely dreamy tone of the album worked really well for me. I think the lyricism enhances the tracks, but they’re not as necessary to capture the soft-spoken nature of the album. These aren’t confrontational tracks, nor are they angsty or messy. They’re just… complicated. I can’t think of many other albums that leave relationships in such a gray area, with a lot of the anxious, earnest & avoidant honesty intact. Commitment is a struggle, clinging on feels like delaying the inevitable, breakups are tense, & those lingering feelings of regret are really hard to navigate around. This album captures that overall anxiety really well, & it makes a track like “Stars” really stick out as the first truly comfortable relationship portrayed on the album, and a very appropriate closer. I think it’s structured really well to get to that point, and in that sense, it’s a super successful album. If it bounces off from just a musical standpoint, I could understand that, but I think it deserves its flowers. Hence, a 5, if not a bit higher.
Slipknot
5/5
What the fuck do you rate that?
I dunno, I guess a 4.5 bumped up to a 5? Maybe? That’s my first instinct, anyway. Don’t get me wrong; if we’re going entirely off of musical proficiency here, this would probably be at a 3, but if you’re coming to an album like this looking for musical proficiency on the lines of a Duke Ellington or a Stevie Wonder, then go somewhere else. Fuck off, even. This is an album made to capture a visceral sense of frustration & rage rooted in some kind of deep-seated, pent-up aggressive depression. Corey Taylor’s not here to serenade you with a vocal melody, he’s here to fucking scream in your face, and you just have to sit there and listen to him, and there’s not a goddamn thing you can do about it. If you’re so inclined to agree with what he’s saying, or at least, you choose to sit down, engage with & understand him to the point of feeling his frustration at a palpable level, then congratulations: you’re probably going to like this album as a 50-minute audio rage room to let loose in & watch a man become suicidally feral, screaming at the top of his lungs the vast majority of the time, with a wailing guitar that feels like an earthquake in your ears, the most mind-numbing percussion you’ve heard in your life moving at 100 miles an hour, & a sense of perverse liberation from a deep dark place that most human beings’ brains will never sink to. I think that’s where I’m at with it, because for whatever god damn reason, I found myself really fucking enjoying this.
I can’t write anything about individual tracks here; I was barely paying attention to the lyrics as they were. I caught glimpses of lines, and caught a few of them in my ears, but this is an album that you’re meant to feel as opposed to comprehend. I’m not even sure this album would be enhanced with the lyrics, since there’s definitely a few over the top stinkers of cheesy lines, even for 1999. I think I felt this album the way it was intended, and while I am exaggerating that sense of “perverse liberation” just a bit (I’m assuming a good chunk of this album is intentionally over the top), I think there’s enough of a nugget of truth to the frustrations laid out on this album & those suicidal, self-harming tendencies, that the energy present on this album can’t really be faked, at least not that much. I can understand why this would’ve been worrying to a number of people in 1999, and why today’s more empathetic tendencies look back on this phase of music as an angsty regret… but I’ll be honest, I think letting that frustration out like this might be more of a necessity than we realize. That might be why I enjoyed it a lot, as a sort of vicarious release of stress, even without any of those tendencies in my brain (and I pray I never go that deep). Either that, or I just really liked his percussion a lot.
Overall, you just have to hear it & feel it. It’s not for everyone, and I’m sure at an earlier point in this list, I would’ve dismissed it as trite, overblown nonsense that’s far too edgy for its own good. As a visceral feeling expressed in sound, however, I think it captures the vibe it’s going for really, really well, even if it’s over the top to the point of parody on a handful of tracks. Ignore the lyrics, ignore the repetition; just give space for all of that mildly ear-piercing overblown soundscape & their screaming vocals. If you give it space, and let yourself really sit in it & digest it, I think there’s something here. If you can’t feel it & give this a 1 or a 2, then that’s fine. If you can feel it, I think the floor here is a 3 (it does get just a little overplayed by the last 2-3 tracks), and the ceiling could arguably be a 10, under the most extreme of circumstances. (Maybe seek help at that point though.) For my level of enjoyment, I’m at a 4.5 bumped up to a 5. It’s worth being on the list.
Willie Nelson
5/5
I’m at a 10. That's one of the best country albums I’ve ever heard in my life.
“Songs in the Key of Life” came out one year after this, and I’m struck by the difference in style; Stevie is bold, bombastic, & electric, with worldly music styles & some of the most complex production ever done to that point. Willie Nelson here, telling the somber story of this red headed stranger is… well, it’s basically his voice & a guitar, for the most part. Light percussion & piano, sure, and later in the album, some harmonica & other instrumentation that adds to everything, but overall, this is a very plainly told album. The difference is striking, just because they’re both equally as effective at speaking to the soul, at least to my ears.
The overall story here is simple: the red-headed stranger (who happens to be a preacher) was devastated that his wife left him, so he killed both her & the person she’s cheating with, a crime done out of pure sorrow. He moves away, taking his wife’s horse with him, and killing the first woman who dares to even touch it. He finds himself in Denver, where he falls in love again at a saloon, and lives out his life with this new woman. That’s it. At face value, it’s a tale you could tell in a single song, and yet Willie Nelson manages to stretch it out to a full 34 minute album, one that never feels like it’s padding for time. Every track choice is perfect, with a vast majority of the album being covers, yet ones that fit with the narrative in a way that feels seamless & original. The album feels vivid & cinematic, partly due to how it manages to incorporate motifs really well. It’s no surprise that this actually ended up as a movie, even if it’s apparently just sorta mediocre.
It’s an album that deserves to be listened to in one straight shot (with headphones in!), and one where I don’t think I can accurately capture it with words. At the very least, I certainly can’t capture how emotional of a pleading climax “Can I Sleep In Your Arms” felt like with words alone. That’s a track that needs the full buildup of every track before it to really hit, and it hit me like a truck. Granted, it might just be because I found myself imagining this whole thing playing out in my head, and Willie’s soundtrack to the pictures in my brain just fit perfectly. I really do think it’s one of the best country albums I’ve heard in my life, at least in terms of concept albums. There's probably an earlier one we’ve gotten that has more technically sound vocals or instrumentals or some other dazzling thing to it, but in terms of just telling a story… this is how you do it. This is a masterclass in storytelling. Anyone who claims to make “country” music nowadays needs to listen to this entire album, because this is the blueprint. I think it’s a 10.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
5/5
I’m at a 10. I’m a fucking mess right now.
Last year, a very good friend of mine that I’d known since high school lost her child at less than a year old. The one year anniversary of that death came around recently, and it’s the only thing I could think of while listening to this album. This album is Nick Cave’s chance to mourn his son Arthur, who died in 2015 at the age of 15. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that sense of grief & sorrow captured so fruitfully on tape. He'd be my exact age now, which makes this album feel all the more haunting, just imagining how my parents would've reacted if it had somehow happened to me.
I mean, I’m genuinely just an emotional wreck now, and I wasn’t even the one who went through it. I can’t imagine listening to an album like this after having gone through it, let alone creating one. I don’t have the words to describe how this album has made me feel, so instead, I will give the pen back to Nick Cave, who wrote the following in July of this year, reflecting on the 10 years since his son’s death:
“The pain remains, but I have found that it evolves over time. Grief blossoms with age, becoming less a personal affront, less a cosmic betrayal, and more a poetic quality of being as we learn to surrender to it. As we are confronted with the intolerable injustice of death, what seems unbearable ultimately turns out not to be unbearable at all. Sorrow grows richer, deeper, and more textured. It feels more interesting, creative, and lovely.
To my great surprise, I discovered that I was part of a common human story. I began to recognise the immense value and potential of our humanness while simultaneously acknowledging, at my core, our terrifyingly perilous situation. I learned we all *actually* die. I realised that although each of us is special and unique, our pain and brokenness is not. Over time, Susie and I came to understand that the world is not indifferent or cruel, but precious and loving – indeed, *lovely* – tilting ever toward good.
I discovered that the initial trauma of Arthur’s death was the coded cypher through which God spoke, and that God had less to do with faith or belief, and more to do with a *way of seeing*. I came to understand that God was a form of perception, a means of being alert to the poetic resonance of being. I found God to be woven into all things, even the greatest evils and our deepest despair. Sometimes I feel the world pulsating with a rich, lyrical energy, at other times it feels flat, void, and malevolent. I came to realise that God was present and active in both experiences.
These days, I am neither distrustful nor suspicious of the world, even though my heart breaks for it, and I am not despairing, depressed or embittered. Indeed, I see heartbreak as the most proportional response to the state of the world – to say I love you is to say my heart breaks for you, and this sentiment resonates within all things, bringing a clarity to both the world before us and the world beyond the veil. Sorrow becomes a way of life, part laughter, part tears, with very little space between. It is a way of conducting oneself in the world, of loving it, of worshipping it.”
I can only hope to find some level of newfound beauty & trust in the world, along with some level of newfound perspective of faith, should trauma at that scale ever come my way. I can’t express exactly what Nick Cave has done with this album, but I do know that it is one you must hear before you die. Numbers don’t apply to something that acts as such a potent expression of one’s bared, battered & beaten soul, but I suppose this is a 10. What a piece of art.
P.S.: I suppose I should address one aspect of the album, just so this doesn’t feel like a purely mopey bit of prose. The first track, “Spinning Song”, being about Elvis & his impact on the world almost feels disconnected on a first pass through the album, but I would argue it’s the perfect opening track, once the rest of the album reveals itself. Forget about Elvis himself – think about the way people *remember* Elvis. They worshipped that man. Hell, they still worship that man, given that we just had two movies based on his life in 2022 & 2023. “Spinning Song” uses Elvis as a metaphor for how much impact someone can have on your life. For Nick Cave, his son is his Elvis, and by putting his impact on his life to tape like this, it’ll live on just as long as Elvis’ records have. It’s a perfect opening track, at least for the context of what Arthur meant to him.
Crowded House
5/5
I’m at a 5.
I’ve been desperate for some nice ‘90s alt-rock to pop up on this list; that Matchbox 20 / Goo Goo Dolls / Third Eye Blind sort of vibe, and while this doesn’t go all the way in terms of getting to that style, I’m totally fine that it doesn’t. This feels like a good blend of that style to come by the late '90s, and the sort of base that R.E.M. & others set in the mid-late ‘80s, and it’s a style that works very very well for me. Someone else might dismiss this album as cookie-cutter alt rock, and that’s fine; it’s not everyone’s taste. For me, though, this album is scratching an itch that I’ve been wanting to scratch for a while.
I knew of Crowded House, but only in the sense of “Don’t Dream It’s Over”, which feels like a sort of quintessential cheesy ‘80s ballad. I’m very glad they showcased a lot more of their range here, and in a super fruitful way – lots of clever & witty lines here, with a lot of strong imagery in between to still set a tone, even if some references might jump past the head a bit. I think the lyricism on this album is at its best when it’s at its most earnest, like on “Fall at Your Feet”, “Four Seasons in One Day”, or “She Goes On”. Instrumentally, while it’s still pretty guitar heavy (this is a rock album after all), they find good ways to shake it up, with a sort of Phil Collins-esque variety at times, jumping from style to style yet still feeling coherent. A track like “Weather With You” can pull out some African influenced percussion, just in the same way that “As Sure As I Am” can break out an accordion, or a sort of Dylan-esque harmonica on “Italian Plastic” – they all fit within each track really well, and as such, they don’t feel like an abrupt shift in styles, which helps a lot. Neil & Tim Finn have great fucking vocals by the way. You just have to hear them harmonize to understand that, but there’s lots of fun vocal structures here that are infectiously catchy.
Overall, I just really enjoyed it. A little bit plain for some, and I can’t fault that at all, but this is a style I’m just a sucker for, & one that I think needs a little bit more representation on the list. There’s not a bad track here to my ears, though it is a little front-loaded on the singles, with much of the back half noticeably being less strong, but still good regardless. I feel like I might need to hear more Crowded House, to at least shake the perception of them as just the “Don’t Dream It’s Over” band. I’m glad this is on the list, and it’s a pretty strong 5 for me.
Black Sabbath
5/5
It’s obviously a 10.
That is the definitive blueprint for metal music, although I’m struck by how much this album leaned way more into prog sensibilities than I ever realized. Everything about the writing & supernatural aspects of this album pull away from the more demonic / satanic imagery of their debut album (save for a good chunk of “War Pigs” & “Electric Funeral”, and even still, they’ve got more of a religious bend with God punishing them by letting Satan loose on the damned), and lean a bit more into the surreal with an occasional sci-fi lean. “Paranoid” is probably the most ‘normal’ track here – that’s just a sad guy who wants to be loved. I’ve heard “Iron Man” before, but I’ve never comprehended it as a self-fulfilling prophecy brought about by societal neglect. “Planet Caravan” surprised the hell out of me with how serene & ethereal it was. “Fairies Wear Boots” is also sort of a drug trip gone wrong, but it’s a real diss track towards skinheads (in the non-racist sense, apparently), and it works well. “Hand of Doom” is a drug trip gone horribly wrong to the point of death, and a solid bit of commentary on how we occasionally treat our veterans.
Oh, right, yeah – War Pigs is an anti-Vietnam track. I suppose that should’ve hit me over the head years ago, but for some reason, it only really clicked this time around, perhaps with a bit of recent CCR in the brain. I knew it was an anti-war track, for sure, but the specific context of Vietnam has felt lost over the years, with how many ways it’s been repurposed for commercial usage, given the instrumental energy. I don’t think I need to touch on it that much – just a masterclass across the board, though like I said, much more of a prog lean than I realized, and for 1970, there’s still definitely parts here that feel like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones with a guitar turned up to 10, at least in terms of an instrumental rhythm. I’m a little surprised that the soundscape wasn’t sort of ear-melting all the time, like an AC/DC album might be, but I do like that choice, and for 1970, it works very well. “Rat Salad” hits that point, but in more of a dazzling drum solo sort of way. Ozzy’s vocals are great; maybe a tad nasally at times, but not in a way that ever detracts from the tracks, & his presence / power feels really strong here.
There’s really not that much to say; I’m just throwing out some thoughts people have probably typed a million times before. I know it’s good. Everyone knows it’s good. The only question going in for me, as someone who only knew the 3 big singles going into this, was simply if the rest of the album would hit the same high points to pull this all the way up to a 10, & it easily delivered in spades. This is about as good as it gets right here, and there’s not a single flaw I can think of. It’s a very easy 10. Once again, rest in peace, Ozzy.
k.d. lang
5/5
I’m at a 5 – maybe a little higher, even.
It’s just a deeply pleasant album, really. Yes, a lot of the lyricism here leans towards more somber tones of desire (a constant craving, if you will), both in the spiritual & carnal sense, but her voice delivers the lines beautifully. It shines as an instrument all its own, able to sell the emotions she wants to sell with each track whilst still projecting a sense of power that just feels impressive from a vocal standpoint. Her harmonizations on her longer held notes really stick out here, and the way she sort of quivers & clings to those held notes just felt sort of blissful to my ears.
Instrumentally, this thing feels well ahead of pace for 1992; it’s a nice blend of the “country music meets 50s soul/swing music” stylings of “Shadowland” with some of the quiet storm style of the mid-late 90s. A number of tracks reminded me of Sade, specifically in her (their) “Love Deluxe” period, both coming out in the same year ('92) – a track like “So It Shall Be” brings the same vibes as something as blissful as “Kiss of Life”, which I consider to be one of the finest tracks ever put to tape. (I hope someone put MF DOOM onto this album before he passed; there’s some great potential samples here.) This album sticks out in its more baroque-inspired instrumentation, with a lot of acoustic guitar, piano & accordion bubbling underneath a lot of the production, working in tandem with the more bombastic strings / percussion of the album to create a consistently satisfying vibe.
It might be overproduced to some people, but for my tastes, this is such an easy listen on the ears that it allows more room to comprehend the lyricism, which I think just enhances the tracks further. To me, they’re pretty straightforward; maybe a little flowery at points, but there’s always a line or two that really sells the spirit of the track. The only really confusing one here is “Season of Hollow Soul” with its fruit/grain metaphors, but it’s just a track about enduring the period that comes after heartbreak & trying to persevere through it. I do think some of these tracks exist in more abstract thought, which indicates more of a religious lean to me (especially in the opening track, “Save Me”), but that sense of spirituality in combination with the desires expressed on this album just adds an air of legitimacy / earnestness to her vocal performance that makes it all the more believable.
This is a lot of words to basically say that she sounds great, the instrumentals sound great, the lyricism is sad yet lovely, and as a whole, this is just a blissfully produced 41 minute album; one that punches well above its weight, liable to collapse under some of its bigger, bolder & bombastic moments, yet totally holds on & succeeds. “Miss Chatelaine” is probably my favorite one here, with “Constant Craving” a very close second, but all 10 tracks range from good to great to REALLY great, with their biggest sin being a few longer outros. It’s an album that aligns with my tastes, and I can’t find any major flaws with it. I really, really enjoyed this, and I think it’s a marked improvement over “Shadowland”, which is still a damn fine album in its own right. I’m at a 5, if not a little higher. Great stuff from k.d. lang, and since this is the last album we’ll get from her on the list, it’s on me to seek out more of her stuff.
Cypress Hill
4/5
I’m at a 4.
This is my first time hearing anything by Cypress Hill that’s not “Insane in the Brain”, and for the most part, I liked it. Lots of flows here that feel familiar / close to “Insane in the Brain”, sure, but the longer the album went, the less I felt compelled to compare it to my only point of reference. This album & these guys have their own distinct identity outside of that track, and it’s showcased very well here. Their Latin-American experiences shine through well, and it gives the album a little more flavor than some of the more generic ‘90s rap that exists out there. I think B-Real & Sen Dog have great rapping voices (especially B-Real), and their flows are super fun. They find a melody on most of these sample-heavy beats, excellently produced by DJ Muggs (especially for ‘91), and as a whole, I really like listening to them.
I wish it were easier to comprehend them, and that’s really where my single issue lies in the album, one that builds up over the course of the whole thing to pull this down to a 4 for me. A super fun 4, mind you, but one that just gets a little tiring by the end of it. B-Real & Sen Dog DO have great rapping voices, but the vocal filters they use on a number of the tracks start to feel overplayed by the end of it. Their flows are super fun, although for my ears, they’re arguably a little too fast to truly understand behind these sample-heavy beats, which are excellently produced, but not super well *mixed* – a lot of the time, the vocal filters mix with the reverb in the beats that sort of muddles the soundscape of both, eventually leading to an effect where it’s hard to hear the nuances in either. It wouldn’t be as big of a deal if it weren’t for these being very lyric-heavy tracks, including some with Spanish lyrics. It’s genuinely hard to follow along & capture the essence / basic intent of some of these tracks since they’re moving really fast whilst being pretty witty, and that includes the English ones, for the record. It makes each track feel fun in the moment, but for my brain, not as memorable long-term as it could be.
I understand that maybe for ‘91, and for an album that’s more of a smoker’s record to throw on while you do the doobie, the lyricism matters a lot less than how the soundscape makes you feel. I did generally get the *feeling* of each track, and I did catch a flow state a few times while following along to their flow to the best of my ability. This is a delightful 46 minutes to listen to; I just wish they had made it a little easier to truly *get* what they’re saying, and that’s why I think I’m gonna be at a 4 here. I do think the momentum of the album / super fast pace between tracks doesn’t leave much room for the listener to breathe, and that pace did catch up with me by the end of “The Funky Cypress Hill Shit”; that also plays a factor here. Overall, it’s a super enjoyable record, I’m glad it’s on the list, and it’s one I’d recommend. I hope it can get up to a 5 for me in the future, since there’s really not a bad track here. For now, I’m just at a 4.
The Prodigy
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
Well, I’m still tired from moving around for a lot of that album, but in terms of pure musicality, this isn’t quite as good as “The Fat of the Land”. It’s composed about as strongly (with some great sample work throughout), but the energy of their follow-up isn’t as prevalent here, with a lot more lull spots in the instrumentation. There are tracks that could’ve been trimmed down here, which I can’t say for anything on “The Fat of the Land”. Instrumentally, a lot of the breakbeat standards are still here (and for 1994, probably a REALLY welcome shift from the poppier UK house tones of the time), but it’s combined early on with more of a metal / guitar-driven identity that slowly fades out over the course of the album, with a sort of sci-fi vibe substituting it in the latter half.
I think there’s less beat drops here too? They’re still here, but they’re used to just transition in a sort of A to B, B to C, C to A, A to C, C to B sort of sense, as opposed to a stronger sense of constant progression that would keep each track fresh throughout. Again, “The Fat of the Land” does this better. It’s very hard not to compare the two, sorry. It’s easier to point out what this album doesn’t do as well in comparison, because otherwise, I’m not really sure I have that many active flaws with it. Yeah, it’s a little more stagnant at times, and not as “fresh” of a ball of energy as it could be throughout, but I’m still giving this a 4.5 bumped up to a 5 because I just fuck with this style of music enough that my little nitpicks aren’t affecting my enjoyment of this. It’s just not as good as its sequel, and that’s fine. It’s still REALLY good, especially if you have a taste for this style of music (sort of VGM-adjacent, as always) already.
Overall, while 78 minutes is certainly a bit long (22 minutes longer than “The Fat of the Land”), since I allowed myself to zone out just a little more than I usually would for this one, it never felt as prevalent in terms of the length while I was in the moment. Granted, I’m feeling that length a little more now, after the fact, but time flies when you’re… I dunno, bopping your head along a lot? If you can find that space to sit in, those 78 minutes won’t feel as long, & they may even fly by. It’s a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5, but I do understand the relatively big difference in ratings on the site (3.41 vs 3.07). It’s just not as good as its sequel, but it’s a good album in its own right, and its highest highs do feel pretty close to some of The Fat of the Land’s best tracks, ESPECIALLY “No Good (Start The Dance)”. I enjoyed it, at least.
The Allman Brothers Band
5/5
I’m at a 10. It’s probably higher.
Just go fucking listen to it. Seriously, there’s nothing I can say. I’m at a loss for words, and nothing I type would do it justice. That’s the best live album I’ve ever heard in my life. It’s one of the best *albums* I’ve ever heard in my life, period. Just go listen with headphones in. It's in the top 10 we've gotten, at least for my tastes, and we’ve gotten 706 so far. An unbelievably mesmerizingly technical masterpiece.
Bob Marley & The Wailers
5/5
I’m at a 5.
I gave both “Exodus” & “Natty Dread” a 4, and I stand by those. They’re great albums, but they’re not as cohesive front to back, even with the energy & the flow feeling nice throughout, with a vibrancy to them that I would probably appreciate more now after hearing the truly endless drivel of “Maverick A Strike” 3 weeks ago. Hell, I’ll even retroactively thank Finley Quaye for reminding me just how much reggae music needs its soul to truly work as a genre. I hate ripping even more on “Maverick A Strike”, but… damn, it really was that bad. For this one, our third & final Bob Marley album on the list, I feel really strongly about giving this a 5; not out of some obligation to give him one, but because I just think this is an incredibly relaxed album, and one that leans fully into what my perception of “reggae” is as a genre.
Yes, there’s some repetition here, but none of these tracks last long enough to make that repetition ever feel like too much of a burden. Lyrically, these are as straightforward as it gets, with Bob Marley’s societal gripes being plainly laid out (& with his lovemaking tendencies laid out too). Vocally, Bob’s voice stays at a pretty low tone throughout, one that’s just as relaxing as the instrumentals, creating a sort of island / beach vibe that feels vivid enough to transport to in the moment, especially if you ever just close your eyes and allow yourself to go there. Instrumentally… yeah, this is exactly what I expect reggae to be, really. Purely vibey, yet still layered with a depth that can go underappreciated in the moment – lots of guitar / organ / synth work that occasionally feels reminiscent of Stevie Wonder during this same time period, yet distinctly Bob Marley’s style all the same. The percussion & bass here *really* pop out, in a way that’s noticeable, enhancing each track to a strong degree.
“Stir It Up” really is that damn good, by the way. I don’t wanna go track by track here, since the music generally speaks for itself, but I got totally lost in that one. Super hypnotizing backing track, and it feels like a signature that defines not only Bob Marley’s career, but reggae as a whole genre. Sure, tracks like “Three Little Birds” & “Could You Be Loved” are more popular, but their success (& Bob Marley’s) probably doesn’t get to that same height without this one leading the way.
Overall, then, it’s a pretty easy 5 for me – I may need to relisten to Exodus to see if the first half holds up better than I remember, since that was my reasoning for giving it a 4, but regardless, I really liked THIS album as a full front to back experience on a first listen. Bob Marley’s music feels timeless, & I’m sad there’s not any more stuff from him on the list; I gotta hear way, way more. Time to go preach about no more trouble & all that.
The Yardbirds
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
It’s just a super enjoyable blues / rock album. For 1966, this is apparently way ahead of pace – I’m not sure if I hear that “revolutionary” sense to the same degree as other people, but I do think this album is doing it in a way that feels very unique. There’s more of a lean towards the technical side of things whilst keeping some of the aspects of psych rock of the era. Excellent guitar work from Jeff Beck, who we’ll get down the line with a solo album – hopefully, he’ll still shine there. This came out a year before both “Disraeli Gears” & “Are You Experienced?”, so if this album did set a bit of a blueprint for those albums to shine (especially the latter, which I pray we get soon), then it’s a pretty damn good blueprint to take from. I think it’s a pretty breezy 30 minutes overall, with some witty writing, great instrumental work, and good vocals throughout. Occasionally, its ambition falls apart a little bit under the technology of the era, with some layers getting muddied in the mix, but the spirit / vibe of each track is captured really well.
This is a chance to segue to my own mild hell with this album, in which I listened to the first 3 tracks of this in their stereo mix without realizing, before promptly switching to the mono mix and starting over. I think the mono mix is better, obviously, but I sampled a little more of the stereo mix to be safe – there’s some good parts in there (especially the long held note on “The Nazz Are Blue”) but there’s a lot of really awkward choices in there, with a lot of guitar work being mixed OUT of the tracks, including a really baffling panning choice on “Turn Into Earth” that destroys the track entirely. There’s a 2021 alternative mix on Spotify that blends the best aspects of both the Mono & Stereo versions, including an extra guitar solo unheard in either version, and I think that’s the version I might throw into my playlist, since the Mono mix muddies a little too much.
So, yes, it’s a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5, mostly because I just enjoyed it. The floor here is a 3, especially if this style is a little bit overdone for the mid-1960s, but it occasionally felt closer to the ‘70s and even a little bit of the early 2000s, which was surprising to me. I think it’s worth a listen, I’m glad it’s on the list, and I’m ready for that Jeff Beck solo album when it pops up.
Madonna
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4, though I’d MUCH prefer to leave it at a 3.5.
This is the first time in a while I’ve been totally frustrated with an album; not because this is explicitly bad or anything, but because this thing is absolutely dripping with potential to meet the same mark as the contemporaries that Madonna was trying to hang with at this time; Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, N*SYNC, etc. It is so close to getting there, and yet it finds ways to feel a little dated & falls short at the parts where it matters most. It’s never in Madonna’s vocals – she sounds really good throughout. It’s a little bit in her songwriting; I think a lot of this album is based in reflections of previous addictions to love, & while it generally works well, I think a few tracks just cover the same topic base a little too much (namely a perceived overlap for Amazing, Paradise & Gone).
It’s in the production. It’s *so* close to feeling as catchy as her peers, and while it generally hits something reasonable, it just doesn’t hit the same timeless marks as them. I know tracks like “Oops!... I Did It Again”, “What A Girl Wants” & “Bye Bye Bye” are cheesy as hell, but they’ve aged pretty well into 2025 because they lean into being explicitly catchy. Madonna & her team of producers take themselves more seriously here with more of an adult lean, so that does play a factor, but it’s not the underlying issue here at all. Mirwais Ahmadzaï & his ambitious production style, with a desire to feel unique & innovative for 2000… it just hasn’t aged well. It’s not that he didn’t see the trends that were soon to come in the genre; there’s a lot of tracks here that can tell where the tide is going, with production tricks that would be a lot more refined by 2003 through 2005. It’s just too early for them, and their use here feels deeply dated by comparison, creating a different air around the whole album that just lingers. It’s like early 1980s CGI trying to do the T-1000 effect in T2; it maybe could’ve been done, but it wouldn’t have looked as good.
Hell, I’ll even give Mirwais his credit – so many of his tracks are really close to being good, and I admire the ambition he’s trying for. “Music” is a fine opener, it’s just overproduced in a way that feels noticeable by 2025. “Impressive Instant” has a solid base for a track, but if it leaned even more into French house sensibilities ala a Daft Punk track, it could be REALLY good. “I Deserve It” feels like a dollar store version of “Drive” by Incubus, and if they had leaned a little more incorporating some extra electronica, it might’ve shaken off that perception. “Nobody’s Perfect” is drenched in autotune, in a way that feels even more egregious than Cher’s use of it on “Believe” just a few years earlier. Again, it’s just overproduced. “Don’t Tell Me” is good, at least. It’s just a stuttered percussion sample & some string work interrupting a guitar melody, but it’s well done. His simplest production job is his best; almost like he overproduced too much of this thing, you know? “Paradise (Not For Me)” would’ve been good… if it ended about 2 minutes sooner. Letting that track continue for one more useless lap just lessens the impact. It’s the story of the album.
However, the tracks where Mirwais isn’t the lead producer DO hit that sort of timeless point, which is where my frustrations with this album REALLY come to light. William Orbit’s production standards from Ray of Light carry over really nicely, and his tracks are great, save for the dreadfully strange cover of American Pie that I’m not counting in this little review. “Runaway Lover” is awesome, with a sort of Eurobeat lean that reminded me a lot of Sonic R and other ‘90s racing games of the era. Same thing with “Amazing”, which has a good punch to its percussion that really makes the track pop. “What It Feels Like For A Girl”, produced by Guy Sigsworth & Mark Stent (who both worked on Bjork’s “Vespertine”) is really catchy, even with a slight overreliance on the chorus. “Gone” (back to Orbit) is a fun closer with a slightly spiritual lean – I do think it doesn’t quite hit the “high” point it’s trying to achieve as a final track, but it’s a good track regardless.
So, with just 3 of Mirwais’ tracks hitting a reasonable mark for me, and everyone else really nailing their stuff, I can’t help but wonder if Madonna just made a mistake in letting him produce most of the tracks. It just seems like someone else could’ve handled it better. I’m going to bump this up to a 4, since that’s 7/10 tracks clicking well enough, and there not really being an explicitly bad track, but I’d much prefer to leave it at a 3.5. I don’t blame anyone for giving the rating it has on the site, and it’s certainly not as good as Ray of Light was to my ears. It’s frustrating that it’s dripping with the potential to get there & really hit the mark she was going for, but it ultimately doesn’t meet it. I do admire the swings though. I can only hope “Like A Prayer” will really be that timeless Madonna record whenever we get it.
Ali Farka Touré
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4.
Hard to really rate this one, since I never had any lyrics in front of me & I didn’t have a really good base of comparison to work with here (similar in DNA to some of the other African albums we’ve gotten, but it just felt different), so I’m just going off of a vibe, really. I enjoyed a lot of this album; really eclectic instrumentation choices with a good variety & pace throughout. There’s good vocals throughout with some really nice harmonies, & plenty of guitar work (perhaps a little too much), with an emphasis on bass / electric guitar to substitute for the percussion on a lot of the tracks, which didn’t feel as impactful & mesmerizing as some of the other African albums we’ve gotten. Of course, that’s all just production choices, so it’s hard to fault them at all.
If I can fault this album on anything, at least for my tastes, it’s just a little long, with a flatter sense of progression. I think a lot of the tracks here could’ve been trimmed down by at least a minute, since some of them just start to really settle into repetition in a way that halts the album’s momentum. When this album has that constant sense of progression, it feels really nice, though not as highly energetic as I was expecting. This is a relaxed blues album, one that’s meant more as background noise to settle into, as if you’ve shown up for a Tiny Desk Concert by accident, yet still find yourself getting really into it.
Ultimately, I think that sense of repetition & the lack of a more “dazzling” energy is gonna keep this at a 3.5 bumped up to a 4 for me, as opposed to something higher. It’s still a good album, and one hell of a vibe, but it’s one that falls apart a little easier compared to its contemporaries. Surprisingly, Ali Farka Touré has another album on this list, 1994’s “Talking Timbuktu”, so hopefully that one will click even better for me. This is a recommended listen, if only for the cultural trip of sorts, and if it works for you more than it worked for me, more power to you. It’s a 3.5 I’ll bump up to a 4.
Radiohead
5/5
I’m at a 5 – not a 10 like Kid A (retroactively) was, since it didn’t leave me as mesmerized, but this is still a really good album regardless.
Yes, a lot of these tracks are leftovers from the Kid A sessions – I found Kid A to be profound in its own way, one that I couldn’t describe at the time & one that I’m still not sure I can describe now. The best words I have are “aural dream therapy”, but even that’s too broad to truly capture the essence of Kid A. Here, that sense of “aural dream therapy” feels a bit more twisted, leaning into something more chaotic & slightly maddening, as if the therapy didn’t work. I have no idea where these tracks could’ve fit into Kid A, nor do I know if this album would really work as the second half of a double album, but on their own, as a package, I’d say they fit despite the lack of polished coherence. Since it feels more chaotic / maddening, this album is allowed to expand the boundaries that Kid A set for itself, one that’s occasionally more reminiscent of OK Computer & what would be to come down the line with In Rainbows. I think that’s still sort of profound in its own right, but since it’s not as tight & not as musically cohesive, this album never fully shakes off the “Kid A leftovers” label, at least to my ears.
It’s still very good, though. This album isn’t as overwhelming, nor is it as grand, nor does it use minimalism to the same general effect as Kid A does, but the things it does do, in terms of creating an atmosphere for Thom Yorke to wail over, in really lovely & musically complex ways, it does VERY well. It’s not fully shaking the “Kid A leftovers” label to my ears, but it creates a label all its own, since most of these tracks feel musically distinct. The way this album jumps from style to style creates a feeling of distance between each track, one that adds to the slightly maddening feel. A lot of these tracks are still incredibly cool to just sit in & soak up the soundscapes for, like the weird crushed techno beat on “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors”, the relaxed intro & subsequent open doors of “You and Whose Army?”, the weirdly hypnotic loop of “I Might Be Wrong”, & the stressful zen of “Dollars and Cents”. Lyrically, I do think this leans somewhere slightly political, but I don’t think the lyrics really matter here, with broad David Byrne-esque strokes being painted to supplement a theme as opposed to a tighter song structure. I certainly didn’t factor them in as much as I normally would.
Ultimately, it’s hard *not* to compare this to Kid A, but I think it really works as a collection of tracks all its own. It’s not trying to do the same thing, even though it’s from the same sessions, and while it’s not as tight, it doesn’t need to be. If you can indulge in these soundscapes and take them as they are, with Thom Yorke’s broader strokes filling in some light detail to the audio’s more stressful scenery, then you’ll probably enjoy this a lot. If you can’t get into it (and weirdly, I can understand not getting into this one more than Kid A), then it’s probably going to sit at a disconnected, weird, yet competent 3. To my ears, the uniquely ethereal tones that made Kid A work are there, though not as potent, and I think the way this blends elements of OK Computer back into the mix worked really well for me. I’m at a 5 – it’s not as good as Kid A was, but I think it’s highly enjoyable all the same.
Traffic
4/5
I’m right at a 4.
It’s been about 4 months since we got “John Barleycorn Must Die”, & that’s an album mostly written by Steve Winwood. A little indulgent perhaps, since it was sort of conceived as a solo record that got converted into a Traffic reunion out of a desire for a good backing band. This album is meant to represent more of the “real” Traffic, as this album includes their original guitarist / songwriter, Dave Mason. I don’t mind Dave Mason at all; his voice isn’t as technically sound as Steve Winwood’s, but it has a nice little shaky rasp that keeps his more folksy tracks grounded as a good contrast to the more bombastic stylings of Steve Winwood, and they both harmonize together well.
The only real miss on the album, at least from a writing standpoint, is “Vagabond Virgin”, which is a Dave Mason-led track. I tried really hard to parse these lyrics as something *other* than weirdly creepy, and I just can’t really do it. “It’s just a game, love, you can learn how to play” & “You just wanted to scream out my name” as it relates to love & a 13-year-old who’s clearly being exploited for money & cash? I’m taking a stab and assuming it’s someone forced into call girl service against her own real desires / will, but why would you even write a song that touches on anything remotely pedophilic in nature without a clear cut condemnation? It’s not that compelling, since the “story” is shallow & doesn’t say anything of note. It sounds nice, with a really calm instrumental & some wood block percussion that underlines some good guitar work, but lyrically, it’s fucking suspect at best & awful at worst.
Other than that miss (which is most of the reason I’m at a 4), there’s a few other little things that just made this feel less satisfying than it could’ve been; “You Can All Join In” feels a little bit TOO Beatles-y as an opener, in a way that feels… not really ‘cheap’, but too noticeably derivative. “Feelin’ Alright?” does that Beatles-y style better, and it doesn’t feel as derivative. “Don’t Be Sad” feels a little repetitive with the outro (and overall, repetition / looping lyrics is an issue throughout the whole thing). I think the soft/loud back & forth of “Cryin’ To Be Heard” is really nice, especially from an instrumental standpoint, but I can’t help but wonder if Steve Winwood would’ve gotten more of an emotional pull from the (pretty damn good) lyricism, since Dave Mason’s voice didn’t quite hit that mark for me.
I still enjoyed it though – not as dazzling as “John Barleycorn Must Die”, but that doesn’t mean it’s devoid of energy. I think Dave Mason & Steve Winwood’s approaches to music are fair, and their tracks (save for Vagabond Virgin) do work well & flow pretty cohesively here, mostly due to an instrumental style that knows how to give both their space. Seriously, really good instrumentals across the board here. I *prefer* Steve Winwood’s style, but I can’t deny that “Feelin’ Alright?” is probably the best track here. There’s one single miss (although it’s a REALLY bad miss), & along with a pile of small, but notable little things that don’t align with my tastes, has me at a 4. It’s still a good 4, and maybe if “Vagabond Virgin” wasn’t here, I might be a 4.5 worth contemplating over, but for now, just a solid, recommended 4. The floor is a 3.
My Bloody Valentine
4/5
I’m at a 4.
I mean, it just feels like a less polished version of “Loveless”. That’s my first & most immediate impression, but I’ll be fair to them, since this is their first album. “m b v” would probably get a 4 from me if I relistened to it nowadays, so I think this lines up just fine. A lot of the DNA of what would make “Loveless” work is here, it’s just not as refined – lots of louder, overwhelming instrumentation that feels closer to a poorly mixed version of a Sonic Youth track as opposed to the brand of shoegaze they’d make famous in ‘91. A lot of the ‘80s production quirks are still here, including some drum machine use & gated reverb drums, but those same quirks lead to a fuzzier & more “buzzy” sound overall, often too reminiscent of “Psychocandy”’s overused & overblown wall of sound, though thankfully not as bad here.
It is the production that ultimately drags this thing down, along with a litany of other little things that build up – a few middling intros, some overly loud outros (why the fuck did “Cupid Come” need to do that?), a little too much white noise at points, and a few moments where the emotional tone of the instrumental doesn’t vibe as well with the vocal / lyrical tone (most apparent on “Several Girls Galore”, at least to me). I’m still at a 4 because I did happen to enjoy a lot of this, and most of what I mentioned are things they would clean up more fruitfully by “Loveless”. Again, there’s a little bit of a pass since it’s a debut studio album.
The floor here is probably a 2 if those production eccentricities are too much of a boon, and I’d honestly call it fair. This is closer to a 3.5 bumped up to a 4 as opposed to a flat 4 for me, but I think it’s still enjoyable if you have some kind of acquired taste for shoegaze. I do think it’s the least polished of the My Bloody Valentine albums we’ve gotten, but again, it’s their first one. There’s 9 solid to great tracks here & 3 that outright didn’t work for me, but I guess 9/12 isn’t a bad mark to hit. Hence, a 4, and one I’d say is worth listening to (though it should definitely be after you hear Loveless, just to get a better feel for it). I dunno if it HAD to be on the list, but I’m not opposed to it being here.
Ice Cube
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I will bump up to a 4, but barely. Definitely one I’d rather leave at a 3.5.
I know, I know, “it just hasn’t aged well” is often used too much as a catch-all to try and cover all excuses without elaborating further on what’s been done to try & actually fix the parts that haven’t aged well, but in this case, I think it’s a little warranted. A big part of it is the misogyny (perhaps most exemplified by “What I need to do is kick the bitch in the tummy” on “You Can’t Fade Me”), but even still, I’m inclined to think Ice Cube is just portraying himself as a hyper-sexist here to give some proper buildup to him finally “meeting his match” on “It’s A Man’s World” (which is a great track, by the way). That said, willingly portraying yourself as a hyper-sexist is still a little too bold of a choice, even for 1990, and it’s done in a way that carries over the worst aspects of N.W.A.’s group work at the time. Ice Cube’s worst lines on “Straight Outta Compton” feel amplified here, but that’s just it: he’s amplifying EVERYTHING about himself here. Bigger, bolder callouts in his verses, more unique production (shoutout to the Bomb Squad), skits between tracks, and his vocal tone as a rapper really comes across well here. It’s a super technically sound album, & at its most compelling, it stands up pretty well with some of the other early ‘90s rap albums we’ve gotten.
The issue is that it’s only compelling about 75% of the time to my ears – never outright bad, but occasionally, I just don’t really believe in the tough guy act he’s putting on. Part of that is just modern day perception of the guy as someone who was acting in War of the Worlds & doing Minecraft ads on TikTok, so I can’t take his more violent threats here seriously. That said, I’m still willing to imagine his 1990 self, & when he’s got the proper conviction in his voice, I can feel Ice Cube’s frustration boiling through in a way that you can’t fake. It’s that level of conviction that makes & breaks this album, since it’s used on some really horrid lines & some really strong ones with a point to make too. That’s why it’s only compelling to me about 75% of the time, because the horrid lines just kinda pulled me out at points, though he generally recovered well.
Ultimately, I think it’s a good album that “hasn’t aged well” for a couple of big reasons, but it’s also just a product of its time that can’t be changed, and frankly, it shouldn’t be criticized on that mark. You gotta take this era as it was, for better or worse, & trying to whitewash that at all cuts out some of the edge that brought these guys their notoriety. I did like it, for the most part, but a lot of these tracks can’t really be played nowadays, at least not in full. It’s enjoyable for what it is, and probably did a good job at “modernizing” the rap album in the 1990s, given the skits & transitions & the general pacing. I just think other albums of the era do it better & without the baggage this album brings with it, hence, it’s a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4, even if I’d rather leave it there.
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
3/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump down to a 3, though I'd rather leave it at a 3.5.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s really not a bad album. It just feels like a less polished version of his mid-to-late ‘70s style, and while it doesn’t fall as far as Brutal Youth does in terms of feeling out of touch for the time period (given the slight lean towards a garage rock tone here), it’s a style that does show its age a little bit here. The Attractions do generally sound great, with a few tracks muzzling them to give way to Elvis’ vision for some moodier atmospheres at times. More than that though, Elvis Costello’s songwriting is mainly what’s starting to show its age here; the imagery & concise hooks he had on his poppier ‘70s stuff isn’t as prevalent, with a broader overview of things that paint muddled pictures. It’s been a while since we’ve gotten Brutal Youth, but this feels like the most… not “bland”, but disjointed / unfocused writing I’ve heard from Elvis since then. His vocals can still get them out well (if a little nasally), but in terms of capturing a precise meaning, I found myself baffled & not very compelled by a lot of the album, especially on the stretch between “Blue Chair” & “Next Time Round”.
Granted, I’m not opposed to being baffled if the tracks sound good enough; “Tokyo Storm Warning” sounded like a Bob Dylan-esque masterclass of just yapping into the wind with a broad outline of something, but it sounded really good, so I liked it. I am a little baffled by a lot of the tracks, actually, including a lot of the first half too. I have no idea what the fuck “Uncomplicated” is doing here as an opening track, and it set a really awkward tone. A few tracks felt a little long, a few tracks felt unclear (I dunno if there was murder or not on “I Want You”), there’s a weirdly mild homophobic air around “Honey, Are You Straight or Are You Blind?” (though I think that’s just the ‘80s stigma talking), and ultimately, the whole album feels weirdly disconnected despite feeling so familiar to his usual fare. I don’t think it’s a bad album, because I am at a 3.5, and I’d rather leave it there, but this never finds a consistently strong set of tracks to warrant going up to a 4, hence the bump down to a 3.
No more Elvis Costello on the list for us – doing the math (a 3, a 4.5, a 4, a 5, a 4 & this 3.5) adds up to a solid 24/30 in terms of personal rating, or what averages out to a 4. That feels about right, honestly. I do think 6 albums is overkill; at the very least, I don’t think this album or “Brutal Youth” need to be here, because his best 4 albums paint a pretty complete & compelling picture of his musical stylings. It’s a good showcase of ‘70s new wave with a pop/rock lean, and I do genuinely like the guy a lot. I don’t blame people for getting tired of constantly seeing him on the list, but I think it’s worth giving him a fair shake. I enjoyed his stuff, at least. Still a good slice of pizza & all that.
Stereolab
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4.
I don’t really know what to make of that as a cohesive album experience. I mean, honestly, it’s not even really THAT cohesive. I’m not sure that’s the point, nor am I sure that matters too much. Look at the name of the band: “Stereolab”, and I’d put the heavy emphasis on the “lab” there. This is experimental rock, one far more reminiscent of the alt-rock of the era, yet bringing in lots of extra bass, percussion & synths to coat it in a way that jumps all over the place. This album never settles into a definitive style, going from weird Portal 2-esque vibes, to Kraftwerk / Daft Punk-ish tones, to a sort of Katamari Damacy energy, and that’s just from the instrumentals. Vocally, our lead singer here shifts from French to English on a dime, and I like how she sounds in both languages, especially in French. Lyrically, a lot of these tracks have a slight political lean; sometimes explicit, & sometimes far more subtle. The constant shift in styles & languages happening throughout the album is pretty noticeable, but for the most part, they handle all the different combinations well. When this album finds a captivating spot to sit in, I think it’s pretty engaging, in a sort of hypnotic way that’s hard to explain but easy to feel.
I think this album just pulls the listener out of that hypnotic space too often for it to feel consistently good though, and that’s where my big disconnect with the album lies. These are tracks rooted in repetition to find that hypnotic effect, but once you start to feel that hypnosis fade away, the tracks lose a luster in a way that doesn’t fully take you out of it, but leaves you ready for the next track sooner than they’re anticipating. I think the pacing of this album would be improved if a lot of these tracks got cut down by a minute, in order to minimize the loss of that hypnotic feel. A few tracks can’t really be salvaged from that repetition though; I think “Emperor Tomato Ketchup”, “Motoroller Scalatron” & “Anonymous Collective” suffer from it the worst. They’re not bad, but I got pulled out way too quickly.
The best tracks on this album either know how to keep that repetition entertaining (like “Metronomic Underground” & its sense of progression), avoid the repetition entirely (“Cybele’s Reverie” rules), find a really nice vibe to sit in where the soundscapes keep you engaged no matter what (“Spark Plug” & “The Noise of Carpet” apply here), or just find a really compelling subject matter (“Monstre Sacre” & its take on grief, & “Slow Fast Hazel” with its dismissal of eternity as paradise). Ultimately, the reason I’m bumping this up to a 4 is because other than the 3 “unsalvagable” tracks I mentioned, I think the rest of the album sounds good, and with tweaks to their length, they’d be great.
This isn’t an album that’ll work well for everyone, and it certainly lost me at points. It’s far from boring, since it’s constantly doing something new, but one’s enjoyment will come from how captivating these soundscapes feel to their ears. That’s true for every album, but it feels especially true for something that’s blended as weirdly as this one is. I’m meeting it with a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4, since I think the more experimental nature appeals to my sensibilities, but I can’t blame anyone for going as low as a 2 if it just doesn’t click or if it comes across as too much background noise. I think it’s too “flawed” to reach a 5, but if someone gets there, more power to them. Regardless, I enjoyed it, flaws & all. I dunno if it NEEDS to be on the list, but I’m not complaining that it’s here.
Suede
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
Not bad at all for the “first ever Britpop” album, as they’re seemingly calling it. The DNA for the genre is here in spades, though obviously not as bombastically & cinematically refined as other bands would make it seem down the line, with a lot more of the late 80s lingering here. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. This is the first of two Suede albums we’ll get on the list, and I’m pretty impressed. In terms of the soundscapes, there’s strong hints of The Cure, The Smiths (yes, very small praise for Morrissey here, ew) & David Bowie, which are mixed with a little bit of an acoustic grunge flair to create a good base for future forms of Britpop, yet one that sticks out pretty uniquely for 1993 all the same.
Lyrically, I’m impressed by just how androgynous this album comes across as for most of its tracks – if you’re paying close attention, there’s never really an applied gender to the protagonist on a lot of these tracks, which lines up with the relatively ambiguous album art. Even one like “Metal Mickey”, where it clearly takes place in a strip club, could just as easily be about a woman impressed by the lady dancing in front of her (though his/her/their dad being there with them is awkward regardless). “Pantomime Horse” is a real standout in terms of the androgyny, with that line “Have you ever tried it that way?” acting as a plea to give a same-sex relationship a shot. For 1993, I just like how much of an openly forward thinking album this is, and for it to have sold as fast as it did in the UK gives me some hope that genderlessly applied love can come back into vogue someday.
Vocally, I think it’s alright; maybe the “weakest” part of the album (relatively), but Brett Anderson is still good, occasionally bringing to mind a higher pitched Bowie, knowing when to turn up the intensity & when to just follow the slower wind. He never has a moment where he sticks out in a sort of dazzling way, but he never feels like a hindrance, so he’s clearly doing something right. So, why a 4.5 then? Just a few longer outros & occasionally repetitive bits, that’s all. “Animal Lover” didn’t click for me, but that’s just because it feels more like flash than actual substance, given the nature of the track. Other than that though, the rest of this album is genuinely great, and I enjoyed it a lot. I really hope “Dog Man Star” is even better as a followup, but as far as this goes, it’s a 4.5 that I’ll easily bump up to a 5. Just a super fun listen.
Sonic Youth
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 & I think this album does just enough to bump itself up to a 5.
I don’t know why, but something about the eerie tones of this album just clicked for me really well. From a purely musical standpoint, it’s not super appealing, at least compared to their other albums, which are already kinda hit-or-miss, but from a sound design standpoint & how it uses its dissonance & uncomfortability to create an atmosphere, it’s highly effective, at least for my brain.
As the title would suggest, a lot of these tracks are thematically linked to backwards ideas of love, in their insecure, misaligned or fucked up ways. “Tom Violence” didn’t click to my brain on a first pass, but I think it’s about someone daydreaming about an abuser as a sort of perfect lover (even with the apparent Tom Verlaine references). “Shadow of a Doubt” appears to be a pretty clear “Strangers on a Train” reference, with the twist of that shared lust for violence being a catalyst towards love itself. “Starpower” sounds like it’s about getting seduced by fame itself, no matter how much of a trainwreck that could be. “In The Kingdom #19” is a tribute track to a friend in a car wreck, yet it’s giving equal emphasis to the car itself & a little animal that survived. “Green Light”, at least to my brain, feels like being hypnotized into enjoying a truly bad relationship, which would line up with the extremely dissonant guitar chords on the track.
“Death to Our Friends”, being fully instrumental, sort of breaks the pattern, but I think the slight glowing tone at the end implies pain inflicted out of some kind of weird religious psychosis. “Secret Girl” is… tricky. Personally, I’m of the mind that it’s about a boy going through gender dysphoria, & trying really desperately to suppress those thoughts (hence the several slamming doors in the soundscape). It’s ambiguously uncomfortable, and while that’s a little disappointing, I think it’s an honest struggle for self-love for 1986. “Marilyn Moore” is based around a real story of a serial killer who murdered prostitutes on “orders from God”; she survived, but that’s another weird sense of love in a fucked up way. The original vinyl version ends on “Madonna, Sean & Me”, where it apparently locked itself so it looped forever. Lyrically, I think it’s loosely about finding pleasure from murder, but I just enjoyed the guitar solo a lot, I dunno. “Bubblegum” is a bonus, and I think it’s just a straight cover, so I’m not factoring it in too much. I liked it, though.
Out of the 9 core tracks here, 7 of them hit well for me on a first pass, with “Tom Violence” feeling a little too cryptic as an opening track & “Green Light” feeling too dissonant to really get into it from a musical standpoint. Neither are bad tracks, though. The main reason I’m at a 4.5 is because for as strongly as this album executes on its theme, I do think there are a lot of lull points in these tracks that just use sound as filler; when it’s done well, it can add to the tracks, but some of the time, it just comes across as padding between verses that can feel sonically uninteresting.
However, this album presents itself strongly enough that I feel inclined to bump it up to a 5. It’s not for everyone; you do have to buy into this album a little bit, and I understand why it’s the lowest rated Sonic Youth album on the site. I just admire the way they were able to give each track a presence & identity, molded by the sound design & dissonance present throughout. It’s not a breezy 39 minutes, but it’s worth sitting in & just feeling the tracks out; if you can make the mental pictures I did, you might like it in the same way. If you can’t, it’s probably a 2 or a 3, and that’s fine all the same. Ultimately, I think it’s worth being on the list.
Depeche Mode
5/5
Well, that’s obviously a 5, if not higher.
See, THIS is the Depeche Mode I was expecting on “Music for the Masses”; still moody, still heavy on the synths, still rhythmically pleasing as hell, and vocally gliding on all of these electronica-influenced pop beats, but done so in a way that leans towards the UK house scene of the early ‘90s whilst blending in eerier & haunting tones reminiscent of the late 80s bands that laid the groundwork for the grunge to come. This album is a very last gasp of the Kate Bush style of ‘80s production, refined & blended to a point where it feels like the first true album of the 1990s. Hell, it came out in March, so it may as well be. If I’m struck by anything, it’s that the production work here, especially in the percussion, feels like it could be just as common in 2025, with a surprising amount of tracks feeling sort of Jack Antonoff-esque.
A lot of my praise from “Music for the Masses” still applies here, in the sense that all of the instrumentals are still crafted like hip-hop beats with the ability to shift the momentum of a track on a dime. The vocals are still monotone yet great & that spatial awareness I praised is even better here, so maybe this isn’t the “Depeche Mode I was expecting”, as opposed to the version of Depeche Mode I’m most familiar with. It’s probably due to my adoration for “Enjoy the Silence” & “Policy of Truth” as examples of pure synthpop dopamine. Seriously, two of the best instrumentals of this style / era of music put to tape. I wasn’t as familiar with “Personal Jesus” until the Johnny Cash cover we got on “American IV”, but hearing the original here, I’m just stunned they were able to translate it so well for Johnny’s version. Of the other 6 tracks here, they all clicked REALLY well, with “World In My Eyes”, “Halo”, & “Waiting for the Night” as my favorites. “Blue Dress” stands out as the only one a little out of place, but it’s still well done in its own right.
I’m a little bit pressed for time, so I can’t gush about these in the way I want to, but they’re all hypnotically good, & the ambiguously moody tones this album takes creates a great atmosphere that feels unique for its time – a darker version of Eurythmics would be the easiest way to describe it, but I pictured it like a noir movie in a dance club, and I just felt captivated by it the whole time. It’s a breezy 47 minutes that’s impossible to not find a groove in, and I think it makes for a great album. Hence, a very easy 5, if not higher. I really wish there were more Depeche Mode on the list, but I’m definitely gonna listen to more of them in my own time.
John Cale
4/5
I’m at a 4.
I mean, I’ll just get right to it: it’s because of the lyrics. I just don’t understand a damn thing here, except in really broad & loose strokes that paint enough of a picture to feel visible, yet not visible enough to feel vivid in the way that I wish they were. John Cale’s musicianship is great here, with a nice blend of baroque / artsy pop standards that feel far from the heavier tones of the Velvet Underground, fully leaning into a style that’s Beatles-adjacent, yet distinct enough to feel fun. In terms of the pacing of the tracks & the energy they all bring, His voice blends in a lovely way when the tracks take a more serene tone & they blend in a harsher way when they take a more hard rock tone. He sounds great, the band sounds great, and compositionally, I really have zero complaints. It’s all in the lyrics.
I just wish they were more clear. That’s literally it; they don’t even have to be that much more clear – I love a good ambiguous track, but the way John Cale writes his lyrics is less of an ambiguously interpretable approach, but more of a stream of consciousness that’s all loosely connected by some idea that only he seems to have in his mind. There are some tracks with more obvious allusions & allegories, such as “Paris 1919” obviously being about the fallout of World War I & the subsequent Treaty of Versailles negotiations, but for the most part, they’re still just not as clear as they could be, at least for my tastes & sensibilities. I can’t even say they’re badly written or anything; these all paint decent enough pictures to see *something*, but it’s just too blurry to grasp.
It’s extremely frustrating because I *love* the way everything about this album sounds; “Hanky Panky Nohow” sounds like how a soft chocolate melts in the mouth in the most savory way, but other than some vaguely loose bureaucratic references (maybe to the music industry??), I do not comprehend anything about the track’s lyrics. It’s like falling in love with food & having no idea what the hell it’s actually made out of, with no recipe to cite. I feel like I always need some kind of recipe, and being unable to grasp a full list of ingredients here is just mentally pulling me down.
Hence, a 4. A lovely 4 that I’ll recommend to the people who don’t need that list of ingredients to enjoy music, or who don’t care about it as much. I think it’s a really dazzling album in its most cinematic moments, especially with the presence that the percussion & strings have. Hell, it could still go up to a 5 for me in the future if I'm less anal about this whole recipe/ingredient stuff; this album made me feel something in a good way, so clearly the broader & looser pictures still had an effect. I just don’t know how to articulate that in a way where I can justify giving this a 5, because I never felt like it got there, almost solely from my mindset about the lyrics. It is, however, a breezy 30 minutes that does everything right from a technical standpoint. Whether it’s too technically sound in a way that gives off a plain 2 or 3, or something so technically sound that it just naturally feels like a 5, I think I can hear it either way. For me, it’s a 4.
Common
5/5
I’m at a 5.
It is a long album. That’s basically the only knock I have on it; there might be a few things that could be trimmed around the edges to flow a little more smoothly (personally, I might’ve cut “Heat” & “Thelonius”), but overall, I think this album makes the most of its 78 minutes to say everything it needs to say & more, behind some of the very best rap production of the late ‘90s / early 2000s I think I’ve heard. J. Dilla was in his fucking bag & earned his fucking bag on this one, man. There are some all-timer beats here, and Common flows on them wonderfully.
OK, well, there is ONE other knock; for as socially conscious as Common generally comes across on this album, & for as much as he gives his love to the ladies (especially on something as wonderful as “The Light”), even he’s not immune to being a little too horny at times, a little misogynistic in how often he’s still using “broad”, “ho” & “bitch”, and pretty blatantly homophobic a few times. He’s gotten far better about it since, and the rampant homophobia of the era is prevalent across all of rap, so I’m not holding it against him too much. However, it is just a sudden surprise when practically everything else about this album holds up to modern standards 25 years later.
It’s really hard to go track by track here, but my biggest standouts are “The Light”, “Funky for You”, “The 6th Sense”, “Geto Heaven Part Two” & “A Song for Assata”. The last of those, in particular, just captivated me deeply; Common is a great storyteller when he needs to be, and I think he captured everything about Assata’s story well. Assata Shakur (yes, loosely related) just passed away in September, and I’m sad we didn’t get this album before then. I might have some further reading to do.
Ultimately, it’s an album that needs to be heard to really capture how good it is; eclectic soundscapes across the board, lots of great lines (& a few obviously bad ones), stellar production, smooth flow, and an all-star cast of features & contributors, all led by Common. I do think “Be” is still the easier casual listen, but this is probably a better overall album for my tastes & sensibilities (and it’s Kanye-free, which is a bonus nowadays). It’s a very easy 5 for me, though I can see the floor being a 3 if this thing’s length & occasional flaws just feels like too much of a burden.
Buffalo Springfield
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Less of a CSNY & more of a SYFM – I didn’t even realize Stills & Young were a part of Buffalo Springfield, let alone that Stephen Stills had lead vocals on “For What It’s Worth”, which isn’t even on this album. That’s one way to sneak them both in again. Frankly, I’m glad they did; I really liked this album. Granted, it’s more of a collection of solo songs (with Neil Young doing his own weird side thing throughout), but somehow, they flow cohesively together for a pretty strong 34 minute package. For 1967, the Sgt. Pepper of it all is lingering here a bit with how cinematic & bold Neil’s tracks come across, but his ambitions are peppered with Stephen Stills providing some pretty grounded tracks & the rest of the band doing their own country/rock hybrid thing, which is sometimes brilliantly solemn.
For some reason, I really want to point at “Good Time Boy”, which needed a little more of a vocal clarity in the mix, but otherwise, sticks out as a sort of Little Richard-esque track, with Dewey Martin somehow managing to find a quick stage presence in his one vocal lead on the album. Not bad for the drummer. Out of all the tracks though, I think “Bluebird” & “Sad Memory” struck me the best as two sides of the same coin; the former is about acceptance of grief in losing a partner with big bombastic orchestral work, & the other is about the inability to cope with the grief of what’s ultimately a poor relationship muttered through a soft guitar lead. It’s a good sharp contrast between the band itself, and maybe it can even be seen as an allegory for the ambitions of their careers, given that Richie Furay went on to become a pastor.
Ultimately, I really liked it. I think the music speaks for itself pretty well here (although the whole “losing your shot” metaphor of “Broken Arrow” might need some explaining). If you’re used to Neil Young or Stephen Stills’ style of music, their tracks more than carry the weight here, although I’m surprised that Richie Furay’s tracks clicked as well as they did. If you’re not as used to their style, or you’re just totally sick of seeing Neil Young come up a billion times (kinda fair), then maybe this has a floor of a 3. For my tastes, I think it’s got good songwriting, good ambition, & I can’t really find a flaw with the album or its pacing. It’s just a strong set of 10 tracks. Hence, a 5.
The Incredible String Band
5/5
I’m personally at a 4, but for the sake of the site, I’m gonna give this a 5 because you’re all fucking cowards.
*This* is the 8th worst album on the site? This weird, medieval-influenced piece of avantgarde music with incredibly loose lyrics, strange sitar work, oddly long held monotone notes, and plucky guitars & harmonica that all feel like they’re on the verge of collapse at any given moment? OK, if I wrote it like that, I might actually get it a little bit, but… that’s different from listening to it.
Giving this album a chance reveals a very strange effect, one that I can’t fully explain, but one that I can mentally comprehend: these tracks all start off with some coherence, before the blend of his longer held notes & the off-kilter rhythm to the instrumentals sort of makes you lose your place & your focus, sweeping you into its weird pacing. While you’re scrambling to find your place & your own rhythm, the loose lyricism present here, with vague allusions that the mind can sort of conjure yet not really comprehend, lingers in the air, since his vocals have a constant presence. This album, through that sense of induced confusion, forces you to interact with it in the exact way that the Incredible String Band intended because of its avant-garde nature; sure, it’s not the most melodically pleasing or the most orthodox style, but I’ll be damned if it’s not strangely compelling, if not hypnotic at times.
I mean, I really can’t tell you a *single* thing about the meaning of these tracks, or if they connect in any kind of fashion other than the soundscape that loosely unites them. I also don’t know if it really matters. This album feels like an instrumental album, but with lyrics written after the fact & vocals taking the place of something else. I think if you can meet this album where it’s at by allowing them to take control, the weird hypnosis of it all will click a lot better than if you try to engage with this as an album meant to be comprehended. This is an album where you *feel* these tracks out, with whatever little of the lyrics you catch meant to supplement the trance of the soundscape. For my tastes, something about it clicked. I can’t really explain why, and normally, I would be more frustrated by that inability to grasp it, but for some reason, that gut feeling is acting as a positive. I *like* this album.
I dunno, maybe the “acid” part of acid folk is carrying a bit more weight here than I thought, but regardless, it’s a very intentionally designed 49 minutes. If it clicks, it clicks, and if it doesn’t, then it doesn’t. I understand the 2.15 to a degree, but I think it’s entirely formed out of cowardice towards the strange. I think it’s an album that manages to find an incredible sense of freedom for its time just by being so different. Granted, I don’t really hear how the fuck Led Zeppelin modeled their debut after this at all, but more power to the Incredible String Band for having some kind of influence on them. Apparently, Paul McCartney really liked this album too? If the musicians got “it”, whatever that “it” is, then I think I’m justified in giving this a 4. For the sake of the site, just to try and pull this average out of a bottom 10 hell, I’m gonna give it a 5.
Guns N' Roses
5/5
It’s a 10. It’s probably way higher.
I mean, “Welcome to the Jungle” is just so ubiquitous in all of pop culture that it’s easy to forget it’s the very first song on a debut album. It might be the greatest first track on a debut album ever. It sets such an incredibly high bar that the rest of the album feels like a challenge to top it, and somehow, by the very end, it feels like they’ve managed to go to the moon. We’ve gotten a good chunk of hard rock albums like this where I’ve entered a total zen state, fully in sync with the band, and yet I’m convinced after a first listen that this is the very best of those albums.
“Highway to Hell” was probably the gold standard going into this, and given how much this album shares its DNA with that one in terms of keeping up an insanely paced energy, I’m not surprised at how similar it felt. The difference between this & “Highway to Hell” is that there are 3 incredible all-timer tracks that I already knew about going into this; somehow, hearing them & their placement in the album as a fully structured & paced out project with two distinct sides elevated them all even higher. “Paradise City” as the closing track to the first side of the album works hand-in-hand perfectly with the thematics of “Welcome to the Jungle” & all the tracks in between, showing just how much of a bitch city life can really be. I guess I should’ve paid more attention to realize “Paradise City” is more of a “get me back to God’s country” sort of thing, but they spell it out in spades when you’re actually paying attention to these lines.
The back half of the album is all love songs, to a degree, and they all flow perfectly. I don’t think I can praise “Sweet Child o’ Mine” enough as the climax to the whole album, but the way it contrasts its flowery prose-filled representation of beauty in love works really nicely with how straightforward “Think About You” is right before it. OK, well, I guess “You’re Crazy” is a hate track, but I do kind of love a confrontational track being placed in the middle of all this. The fact that the whole album ends on a track where Axl Rose literally has recorded sex (don’t check what “Axl Rose” is an anagram for) before doing a whole speech about devotion is pretty funny, honestly. He’s totally earnest too.
It’s a brilliantly structured record, given the “G” side & the “R” side being thematically distinct yet all blending together via their soundscapes & energy. Since each track feels like it’s doing its own thing, it all sticks out more memorably as a full set of tracks as opposed to the total ball of energy of “Highway to Hell” as one long blended kick-ass thing. I really can’t praise this album enough, but any more words I type would just be repetitive. Ultimately, it’s one hell of a Christmas present to get this. The whole album is a front to back masterpiece of hard rock, and I can’t imagine we’ll get one in this style that surpasses this, at least for ones that I’ll end up in total sync with. It’s a 10, if not way higher.
Buck Owens
5/5
With a lot of bias, I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
When I was a kid, one of the things I distinctly remember involved my dad playing old Hee Haw reruns on TV. Hee Haw is an old country music variety show, with a lot of probably poorly aged skits, but it was WILDLY popular when it was running, with just about every country music star of the era making at least one appearance. It was like SNL for country stars, and honestly, I feel like I should go back and watch an episode after listening to this. Buck Owens was one of the co-hosts of the show for a long time, so I knew I recognized his face from something when this album popped up.
However, I kinda just remembered him as a TV host more than anything. I’m pleasantly surprised to find he wrote a lot of these tracks, many of which would go on to find later success when other, more established artists (such as Ray Charles) would cover them for their own albums. Buck Owens doesn’t have a great singing voice, but he does have a great voice for this old style of country music, where the lyrical imagery is a little bit exaggerated to enhance a comedic or sad effect & to conjure up more fruitful imagery in the brain. Buck Owens is more of a singing narrator here, with the instrumentals (including a lot of lovely steel pedal guitar) carrying most of the tone, though I do think Buck sounds really nice on a couple of these tracks. His lyricism is pretty good here, with only an occasional pitfall of repetition. I do think a lot of these are just sad country songs, but there’s no shame in that style for 1965.
Ultimately, it just worked for me. If you’re predisposed to like this style of country music, or just the soundscape of this era, you’ll probably enjoy this one. If you hate it, or you’re just sort of bored by Buck Owens’ slightly exaggerated twang, then the ceiling for this is probably a 3. Personally, it’s probably closer to a 4, but just because this conjured up some nice memories for me (& because I don’t think there’s actually a bad track here), I’m gonna bump it up to a 5 with a lot of bias. I just had a really nice time listening to it, and I think it’s a fine example of this “Bakersfield” style of country.
Wu-Tang Clan
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
Just a total flow state for a lot of that. We managed to get every single solo Wu-Tang album here before getting this one, so while it’s a little weird coming at this from a backwards perspective, I honestly think hearing all of their individual styles fleshed out more on their own projects helped this album come across even better, in an Avengers-y sort of way. Since a lot of the references on their solo albums all eventually come back to tracks here, I feel like a lot of this album’s charisma was already prevalent in my brain, but that didn’t stop this from being a super enjoyable experience. It’s hard to really dig into individual tracks for me here (save for “C.R.E.A.M.”, which is just as good as I’ve always hoped it would be), but they were fucking flowing across the board here. I don’t think there’s a single wasted line on this album, and certainly not a wasted verse.
So, why a 4.5 then? A lot of little things; no explicit flaws, just some quirks that build up in a way that just pulls the album down a little. I think the mixing of the album is just a little bit awkward; the instrumentals themselves are great & the movie samples feel classic, but I think the actual members of the Wu-Tang Clan are mixed a little lower here, leading to a quieter, muffled effect. It helps on a few tracks in a way that maintains a sort of vibe, but there are a few tracks where it just sticks out, especially on some of the softer & more simple beats. It’s not bad at all, but it feels less polished. Maybe a remaster would help, I dunno. There’s a few moments where instrumentals and outros go a little long, but those are pretty rare. I think having two solo tracks here is a little strange, but Method Man’s fucking ruled & “Clan in da Front” has some nice energy to it. I think my biggest thing is that the album ends on a remix of “Wu-Tang: 7th Chamber” that does nothing other than change the beat. I knocked Limp Bizkit for it, I knocked George Harrison for it, I knocked Marvin Gaye for it, & damn it, I’ll knock the Wu-Tang Clan for it. Sorry.
Still though, none of those issues pile up in a way that would ever make me consider a 4, and as a whole, it’s a very free-flowing 58 minutes that just kills it across the board. Wu-Tang Clan ain’t nothing to fuck with indeed, & this is as stylish of a debut as there’s ever been in hip-hop. I do think that in terms of the East Coast sound, “Illmatic” might still be the gold standard for production of the era, but this is certainly up there, at least for some of the novelty & tricks RZA pulled here. Every member shines well, and it’s easy to see how they all managed to get solo albums out of this one. If this is the last time we’re getting the Wu-Tang Clan at all, it’s a hell of a way to finish them out. It’s a very easy bump up to a 5.
Marilyn Manson
3/5
I don’t really know how to rate that.
Thematically, I think it’s a fascinating concept, and while it takes far too long to start moving along as a plot, the idea of someone who openly rejects fame before receiving it in spades, and using that influence & power to bring about the end of the world as he knows it, trying to usher in the delusional revelation of a new existence without the boundaries of life & death as they’re perceived… well, hold on, I think Marilyn Manson accidentally retold Neon Genesis Evangelion, actually. That’s a bit awkward.
Jokes aside, I do think it’s a fascinating album. I just wish it wasn’t a Marilyn Manson album. By all accounts, the man is a rapist, Nazi-adjacent, & just a powderkeg of controversy that’s never been controllable. His use of the N-word here, with a hard R, is somehow surprising & not surprising at all. However, listening to this album, & taking it as it is in a way that tries to separate the man from the music, no matter how autobiographical this seems to come across as… I dunno, I’m just stuck somewhere in the middle on it. Instrumentally, it’s a lesser imitation of “The Downward Spiral”, even if a few tracks get a bit close to replicating that album’s downtrodden vibes, especially with Trent Reznor’s production work. Vocally, I think he’s trying too hard, with a simultaneous rasp in his voice & a pitch that feels like shock for shock’s sake. Lyrically, I think this album provides the very case study for “stand for everything, believe in nothing”, with so many of Manson’s lines drenched in such cynical irony that it’s hard to empathize with his sincerity or truly engage with his thought processes.
And yet, despite all of that, I find myself drawn to the visceral honesty this album presents itself with; not in the sense of Manson being a pariah for some kind of counterculture that rejects life & death as we know it, but in the sense that his convictions are laid out here in a way that is authentic to himself, in his own mind. This album is not commercially appealing, nor is it sensibly written, but it is, for better or worse, one hell of a case study into the psyche of Marilyn Manson. Someone who feels freed from the boundaries & restrictions of a traditional life/death structure, while presenting that vision in such an auditory way, is fascinating to hear. While I don’t think I would find myself willingly going back to this album, I do think it’s an album worth listening to, if only to capture a sense of whatever small cultural zeitgeist this album may have invoked.
For the record, Marilyn Manson as a person can go fuck himself. I can’t give this a 5 in both good faith & from an album standpoint. I can’t give it a 4 because for as much as I’ve given this thing some praise, I find the first section of the album a little redundant, & the middle section of the album to drag along whilst he lays out the process of this “worm” taking him over & eating him alive to become the “Antichrist Superstar”. Ultimately, this album takes too long to get to its most interesting parts & that one use of the N-word is egregious.
I do, however, feel like I can give this a justifiable 3. I think there’s a small amount of tracks that do have some appeal outside of the full album, and I think the overall tone of the album shares that appeal, in some weird, weird way. The concept has legs, but I can’t help but wonder if another, less controversial artist could’ve tackled it with the respect it deserves, in order to feel like it’s worth engaging with more fruitfully. I don’t think I’d listen to it ever again, but I do feel like I’ve gotten something out of listening to it once, which is more than I can say for truly useless albums like “Devil Without A Cause” & “Haut de Gamme”. If someone wants to give this a 1 or 2, I’d totally get it. Hell, I thought I would give this a 1 or a 2 going into it, and I’m still very willing to go back down in the future. For now, though, I think I’m at a 3.
Joan Baez
5/5
I’m at a 5.
I don’t think there’s too much to be said here; it’s lovely folk music arranged with some good guitar melodies & a silky smooth voice coming out of Joan Baez. Sure, it might all blend together if you’re not paying attention, or if you’re not too inclined lyrically, but I think these tracks are pretty straightforward, with maybe “Mary Hamilton” as the only one with a bit more historical context needed to understand the Scottish royalty slant of it all. Even still, I think that track comes across pretty clearly.
Enjoying this album is a matter of how much you like this brand of folk music, and while I understand those who aren’t huge on it, I just think these all tell very nice stories. Joan Baez sounds great, with her held notes & vibrato feeling like an operatic Dolly Parton at times. She knows when to be softer & when to turn up the power in her vocals, and it adds the emotional depth the lyrics need. The instrumentation here occasionally has a bit of a country lean, and since it’s all driven by guitar (with no percussion to be found), I think it’s music in a very pure form. I do think it’s a little long of an album, but for the most part, each track captivated me, so I never felt that length bear down too badly.
All in all, I just happened to really like it. I can’t understand why people might give this a 1; that’s just total rejection of the music, which feels unfounded. The very bottom floor here is a 2 if you’re just bored by the whole thing, which is kinda fair. I’d say the more reasonable floor is a 3. Personally, I’m at a 5 – her voice just stuck with me really nicely, & while that operatic flair does blend a little bit, the delivery of each track & the storytelling present here clicked for me. This is the only Joan Baez album on the list; I don’t know if she’ll show up in any other remaining albums we have as a feature, but it would be nice if she did. As far as this one goes, it’s just a nice simple 5.
PJ Harvey
5/5
I think I’m at a 5. A slightly muddled & hard to explain 5, but I’ll try to get there.
Everyone has those occasional thoughts that pop into the head for just one moment; some deeper part of the psyche that buries itself 99% of the time, and yet that 1% creeps through to suggest something that feels unlike yourself. This album, to me, is what happens when the 1% tries to influence you more & more; it’s what happens when one's deepest anxieties & unspoken thoughts try to coexist with a carnal feeling of innate desire. PJ Harvey wrote this album after suffering a nervous breakdown, going through a breakup, gaining an eating disorder, and getting effectively kicked out of college. It is a perfect cocktail for those thoughts to creep in, and instead of letting them "win", I think she managed to distill their essence into this album.
These are all written from a feminine perspective; not an explicitly feminist one, but a lot of those themes go hand-in-hand on this album, with those deeper thoughts probably acting as a subliminal hatred of patriarchy & male expectation. Granted, sometimes it’s pretty blatant, given that “Legs” is about her murdering a boyfriend by fully cutting off his legs, but I digress. A lot of the album is rooted in a conflicting desire for both love & revenge, probably inspired by her own relationships of the era. It’s kind of bipolar, in a very understandable way. For as much as she takes pleasure in seeing this pain inflicted to other people, she also seems to reach out and beg for forgiveness. It is hard to reconcile with the idea that one’s attempt at healing might just involve pulling other people down, but it’s captured perfectly here, with those snapshots of regret coming through just as quickly. I can’t say I’ve heard that cocktail of emotions captured so potently in audio form.
The other aspect of desire is explored in other ways than just love; “Missed” is directly about missing out on the fruits that other people find in religion, wondering how a God so big can be so hidden to her eyes. Even the cover of “Highway 61 Revisited”, for as strange as it may seem, has a place here; it’s a track that’s all about seeking approval, whether it’s Abraham seeking it from God, Mack seeking approval to place all his scattered bullshit on the highway, or the family members seeking approval from their parents. Didn’t think I’d get a Bob Dylan song through PJ Harvey’s interpretation, but here we are.
I want to really specifically point at “Man-Size Sextet” & “Man-Size”, which may end up getting away with being the only example of a remix on the main tracklist actually working to the benefit of an album. The “sextet” version has more instrumentation, with an eerier tone to it, as the strings piercing the soundscape bring to mind the shower scene in Psycho. I see it as a representation of multiple voices in the head, blurring the expectations of the night to come in a negative way. The other version forgoes the full sextet to just let one person try to pull off the whole song. There’s an emptiness to it, and one that comes across as more clear, but more desperate, since a single person can’t carry a melody by themselves. The emptiness is really potent, and it shifts the entire mood of the track. It somehow works, and it didn’t leave me mad.
All of the intent aside… how does it sound? You can have a great concept for an album, but if you don’t execute it with the respect it deserves, you end up with something like “Antichrist Superstar”. Thankfully, this album’s high concept doesn’t need intense ambition behind it, or at the very least, PJ Harvey makes it feel effortlessly executed. Her compositions / structures here give a lot of space for her vocal power to breathe, along with giving each instrument a sense of intrusion that makes each track pop that much more. Steve Albini’s production work here is as good as I had hoped it would be; he uses a sense of space & volume for each track that fully grabs the ears every time. Whenever a major drop happens, or a silence washes over, it adds a living atmosphere to each track. In a way, I’m reminded of “The Downward Spiral”, but through the lens of rock bottom angst instead of pure rock bottom depression.
All of my yapping aside, I think it’s an album where you have to hear it & buy into it to grasp what it’s going for. I don’t think it’s one where everyone will grasp that, or feel it in the same way that I did here. I admire the hell out of it though, and I think it deserves all the critical acclaim it gets. There are spots where the execution feels a little anti-album; a few longer outros & intros and some repetitive moments, but for the most part, it’s a 48-minute snapshot of emotions of all kinds captured in a way that I’ve never really heard before. It kept me really captivated, even if it took a bit to get there. I think it’s a 5, and for the last PJ Harvey album we’ll get on the list, I think this is one hell of a way to get rid of her.
Overall, then, for someone who I’d never heard of going into this whole 1001 albums thing, it’s a hell of an impact. I really need to relisten to “Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea”, which I gave a 3.5 bumped down to a 3, but everything else was a 5 or higher. That’s a 4.625+ average, and that speaks to her versatility. I think she’s a damn fine artist, and I certainly need to seek out more of her stuff. Good job, PJ.
Gang Of Four
5/5
I’m at a 5.
That felt a bit ahead of schedule for 1979, at least in terms of the instrumental work; really strong panning for everything to give it some depth, especially in the percussion & bass. The bass is *so* good here. The guitar work feels like it’s from 2002 as opposed to ‘79, which is to say that this plays kinda like the garage revival of that time, with elements of early ‘90s grunge pulled in along the way. Vocally, there’s just a nice flow to everything, even if the vocals themselves don’t quite find a flow – it’s a very weird paradox, but somehow, everything falls into place in a pleasing way, even if it takes a bit to get there.
The soundscape dominates a lot of the album, and just from a technical standpoint, this is enjoyable enough to just listen to, with the lyrics feeling kinda secondary. I would argue that the lyrics are honestly just as important, or at the very least, helpful to getting the point of the album. Everything here is framed under the lens of life as a marketplace, whether it’s love, sex, jobs, or time itself. Even the news is framed with a sort of cynicism; class warfare is entertainment & political assassinations are fodder for selling ad space. Gang of Four are firm on their anti-capitalism views & other political stances on this album, and honestly, I think they make their case pretty well. The lyrics don’t need to be fully understood to enjoy this album, but I think leaving this album without at least gathering some kind of small political take means you didn’t really soak it in to the extent that you could.
Kurt Cobain listed this as one of his 50 favorite albums, and I can totally hear that influence throughout. Seriously, the guitar work here, for as awkward as it gets at points (especially on “At Home He’s A Tourist”, though I understand the intentional disconnect there), is really well done for the era. Even past the guitar work, there’s just a lot of clear production / compositional choices that give the instrumentals as much of a voice as Jon King & Andy Gill. Other post-punk bands of the era weren’t doing this stuff. I’m not sure I’d classify this as a post-punk album – this feels way closer to grunge with a slight funk lean, with aspects of rock music throughout that other bands would refine throughout the 1980s & beyond to come. There are points here where this album feels as much like R.E.M. as it does RHCP, Arcade Fire or Nirvana, and that’s just a testament to being this far ahead of the curve.
Ultimately, the only real knocks I have on the entire thing are that “I Found That Essence Rare” has a little less bite than the other tracks & that “5.45” probably should’ve closed out over “Love Like Anthrax”. Regardless of that, it’s a super enjoyable album, & I think it deserves all of the critical praise & acclaim it gets. I’m glad it’s on the list, because I probably wouldn’t have come across it. I think it’s a super easy 5, and maybe with time, it could grow a bit higher. Pretty damn good album to end 2025 on.
TL;DR: I’m entertained!
Led Zeppelin
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll easily bump up to a 5.
Yes, it’s because “Hats Off to (Roy) Harper” is sort of a weirdly unsatisfying closing track, but the other 40 minutes here range from really good to fucking incredible (with “Since I’ve Been Loving You” hitting the “fucking incredible” side of the scale). It’s a little different from Led Zeppelin I, II, and IV, but the 596 albums we’ve gotten since our last Led Zeppelin album have prepared me for those differences. There’s just more of a folksy lean here, really. The percussion has scaled itself down a bit (save for “Since I’ve Been Loving You” going nutty), but everything else is pretty intact, just with more intention to it. Robert Plant’s vocals carry the emotion of the lyrics pretty well, focused less on energetic flash & more of the substance he’d really flesh out by Led Zeppelin IV. The guitar work here is just as good as ever; I can’t say there’s a super killer guitar solo here, but the consistency of the energy is infectious. The bass in particular gives these tracks a good funky rhythm, & the organ/synth work lifts each track up just a little bit more.
There are a few times where the direction of each track feels a little muddled with the instrumentation; I think “Friends” has a weirdly eerie guitar despite the positive tone, the slight cynicism of “Celebration Day” feels unnoticed, the outro to “Gallows Pole” feels a little long, & obviously “Hats Off to (Roy) Harper” is doing… whatever the hell it’s doing. I think if it weren’t so weirdly panned, with a little more presence in the drums, I might like it more. These are all nitpicky though – I think this whole album, while slightly different from the rest of their initial tetralogy, has held up pretty well in the 55 years since. A track like “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp” reminds me a lot of Cage the Elephant & other bands from the late 2000s/early 2010s, which tells me they were thinking forwardly with this album as an attempt to expand their soundscape. I’d say it didn’t play well with the critics of the era, but history has been kind to a lot of these tracks, especially “Immigrant Song”, which has endured the entire time.
Hence, a very easy bump up to a 5. Not a dazzling 10, but a very good album regardless. The only Led Zeppelin album we have left on the list is “Physical Graffiti”, which is the worst rated Led Zeppelin album on the site with a… 3.91. I’m looking forward to it. As far as this one goes, it’s a 4.5 bumped up to a 5, & a good way to start the final year of the randomizer with; it’s a terrifying reminder that I’ve been doing this shit for 2 years now. Jeez.
David Bowie
5/5
I’m at a 5.
It’s not the most “structured” David Bowie album. There’s definitely some spots around the middle where the album feels disconnected from its most intimate moments, especially with two of the tracks here being re-recordings from 2014 & with “Girl Loves Me” being confoundingly cryptic with the Clockwork Orange references, but… none of that matters.
David Bowie died roughly 10 years ago. I remember hearing about it, but I never had a deeper sense of his music or a connection to it. I do, however, vividly remember the image of Bowie, blindfolded, with two little dots where his eyes should be. I never watched the full music video for the title track, and even now after listening, I just think it would muddle my own perception of what I think it means. It is, however, a testament to David Bowie’s flair for the dramatic that even I, a decade ago, who had never heard anything outside of his monster hits, could still be so struck by something so visually simple. In a way, that’s David Bowie’s legacy. He was always there, making art. You just had to find him first. Those who found him at his earliest got the honor of experiencing it in real time, and those who found him at his latest would have struck the gold that everyone else had known about.
This album is that last vein of gold. In its most rocking moments, it’s a triumphant example of the ongoing shattering of boundaries that everyone was experiencing in the 2010s. Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp A Butterfly” was apparently a big influence here, in terms of expanding the soundscapes of any given genre to mold it into whatever an artist intends it to be. I can certainly hear it. At its most honest, it’s a snapshot of facing mortality with the gravitas it deserves. You can’t write tracks like “★” or “Lazarus” or “Dollar Days” or “I Can’t Give Everything Away” without that fear of limited time creeping into your mind. Despite that fear, it all just feels like quintessential David Bowie, with that gravitas allowing for insights that other people might never think of. When terminal illness can be boiled down to just a candle going out & when Heaven becomes nothing more than a place for you to lose your cell phone, one has to ask if David Bowie truly feared death, or if he simply feared that death would represent the inability for people to continually find him.
I know this: I’m glad I found him. If anything, David Bowie’s legacy is secured by this album, at least for a long while. One day, that Blackstar will inevitably fade out. There will be no artists influenced by his work, no musicians to carry on the torch with the instructions that he left behind on the title track. The world may just be gangstars, filmstars, popstars, marvel stars, porn stars & wandering stars. However, it’s been 10 years, and I don’t see that Blackstar fading anytime soon. David Bowie’s influence may last as long as the sun itself, and I pray that’s the world we end up in.
This is a very easy 5 for me; even when the tracks don’t make any sense, or even if they feel disconnected from the others, the musicianship that’s here is just too mesmerizingly fun to ignore. As a coda to a career, “I Can’t Give Everything Away” is an unbelievably strong closing track, and I can’t think of any other musician that could stare death in its eyes with something so poppy. Had David Bowie lived on, maybe we’d all just see this as an artsy concept album about the life & death of some star in space; a metaphor for a retirement that wouldn’t have come for a while longer. His death, however, is inextricably linked to this album, and I think it’s all the more potent because of it. It’s one hell of a way to go out. Rest in peace, David.
Fairport Convention
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I think I’ll bump up to a 5, just because I really liked it.
British folk rock, or as some might call it, “not quite the Beatles”, though their DNA is scattered here a little bit, at least in the feel of the instrumentation. These are folk songs, but the extra rock instrumentation gives them a kind of contemporary depth that just feels super nice in the ears. Their additions don’t do anything too crazy in terms of solos or technical stuff, but they enhance the atmosphere in ways that can still build and release tension. It’s super effective, and hearing that instrumentation blended with traditional stuff like the fiddle or violin makes this album feel like it’s from out of time, in a cool way.
Sandy Denny has a lovely voice, occasionally reminiscent of Emmylou Harris; she really does glide on a lot of these tracks. The only thing I can knock her on is some occasionally confusing vocal structures (namely on “Tam Lin”), but even then, that might just be a carryover from how these songs were performed. Sandy Denny, by the way, is featured on Led Zeppelin IV’s “The Battle of Evermore” – that’s a track perfectly suited for her talents, given a similarity in styles, and she gets to showcase those talents across a whole album here, which is really nice.
The only reason I’m at a 4.5 as opposed to a flat 5 is just because “Farewell, Farewell” didn’t really grab me lyrically & “Tam Lin” feels a little bit disjointed in terms of blending its storytelling, instrumentation & vocals, compared to how smoothly the other 7 tracks do it. Past that though, it’s music that speaks for itself. I think the floor here is a 3, and it’s one I’d understand, especially if the slower storytelling style doesn’t feel as gripping, or if the extra instrumental flair feels like it’s trying to dress up some perceived mediocrity on these traditional songs. I thought it was enjoyable enough to sit at a 4.5, and I think it’s just aligned enough with my tastes to bump it up to a 5 – it could go back down to a 4 if these tracks don’t click as nicely on more casual listens, but for now, I feel pretty safe bumping it up. I’m glad it’s on the list.
Megadeth
5/5
I’m at a 5. Perhaps a bit higher.
Just like “Peace Sells… But Who's Buying?”, that is a total ball of energy, though this time, it feels written with a bit more purpose. A lot of the more demonic energy of that first album is replaced with some political / anti-war sentiment, some aliens, some medieval magic, some drug usage, some ghosts in the basement, some broken hearts, & seemingly a bit of nuclear warfare. The variety of the lyrics here makes for a more engaging album past “really fucking sick guitar / percussion work”, but those are both still here in spades. This album finds a really good balance between lyrics & energy, and it maintains both pretty well to keep it up for the full 40 minutes.
I guess if I have any minor nitpicks, it’s that the flow of the album feels a little off despite the more focused tracks; I’m not saying there had to be transitions or anything, but some tracks really draw out their endings while others just kinda hard stop, & that push/pull feels disconnected at points. My other super small nitpick is that Dave’s vocals feel… weirdly, too noticeable sometimes. I’m not saying he should blend in & have zero presence, but his voice occasionally sticks out when he’s in a higher or lower pitch than normal, and it draws the attention towards him. Sometimes it really helps a track (“Tornado of Souls” comes to mind), & other times, it just sort of took me out of the rhythm for a brief beat or two (notably on the last track).
Overall, there’s not a single miss in the whole 40 minute runtime here, & it’s certainly one of the best thrash metal albums we’ve gotten so far. It’s definitely a 5, if not higher, but I’m not quite at a 10 with it on account of occasionally losing that rhythm / sync. Needless to say though, this could easily get there someday. The acclaim is justified here; this is a very, VERY good album, and its best tracks feel like they’re in a pantheon of sorts. Whatever metal albums we get next have a higher bar to clear after both Megadeth albums we’ve gotten – they’re that good, and I’m very glad they made the list.
Dinosaur Jr.
5/5
I’m at a 5.
I think it's a really good follow-up to "You're Living All Over Me", which was already a pretty damn good album. I also think it’s a concept album. It’s certainly loose, and there’s not really characters by name or anything, but these all feel connected, telling a story about someone slowly losing a grip on their friendships, relationship, & reality until a total breakdown.
“Freak Scene” is about wanting a relationship, but just knowing it won’t work based on either an established friendship or an established reputation. It’s shockingly honest in its last verse, and I think the texturing of the guitar sets the instrumental tone for the album well. The nonchalant vocals to start the entire album here only make the vocals in the last track punch that much harder.
“No Bones” is just that – it’s the protagonist’s spinelessness coming through, with his inability to establish that relationship he really wants. The guitar here does a good job of showing that mental struggle, even if it overstates its point by going way too fucking loud. It bounced off of me on a first pass, but it does thematically fit with the album.
“They Always Come” is a little bit hard to parse, but I think it’s about a deeper, darker, more sinister self that comes out whenever the influence of alcohol comes to roost. The lines about “drying for it” & how a “mound of smack” won’t satiate something, along with “all the steps taken to hide me”... it sure reads like someone whose demons will fully consume them if allowed to come out. They sure seem like they’re out by the end of the album; they always come. The guitar work here does a really good job of showing the emotional push / pull.
“Yeah We Know” feels like it’s an effort to really make that relationship from earlier stick, given the line “got to find a way to mend”, whilst acknowledging that the longer it goes unreciprocated, the more those demons might come out, with lines like “Feel the skin begin to scar / Can't really pull it together / About to crack”. Instrumentally though, it’s just kind of a vibe.
“Let It Ride” strikes me as an attempt to get back in the good graces of someone after a lot of beef between them, asking them to let it slide & to let their friendship ride. Whether or not it’s about the primary romantic relationship at hand here or another friendship, I can’t say, but it’s a good conflicting emotion to showcase on a track. I’m not sure if it succeeded or not, but that ambiguity in the air lends itself to a sort of paranoia that helps the unhinged spiral continue. Instrumentally, I think it just sounded really good.
“Pond Song” feels like the full & proper rejection of the romantic relationship. He’s insistent about giving it “my last crack”, asking her to jump on the wave, and all of her hesitations about it lead him to realize her feelings are way more complex. When he says “needs a way to keep it simple”, he decides he has to turn down the relationship himself, rejecting that last “reach in”. The percussion gives the track a nice indie tone, and one that feels a little ahead of pace for 1988.
“Budge” is a drug song. They’re doing weed & speed and everything else; whether or not the two people in the track are him & the friend on “Let It Ride” or the “other self” from “They Always Come” is irrelevant – he’s doing drugs again. It’s only a matter of time. The stoner-y vibe to the vocals & the instrumental energy gives a weird sort of Malcolm in the Middle vibe that I just vibed with.
“The Post” is an alcohol song. He’s drinking again. He eyed it (the bottle), he dried it, he untied it, he chilled it, he spilled it, he refilled it, he paced around, he traced it (redid his drink), & he erased it (threw away the bottle). They always come. The overblown guitar really gives off a nice sense of the depression present at this point.
“Don’t” is visceral. It’s very discomforting, but in a way that’s super fascinating, with the sound design of the guitars & percussion & the underlying demonic growl in his voice releasing a frustration into the world that not even Trent Reznor was able to reach on “The Downward Spiral”. There’s a point at the 4:30 mark where all the guitars disappear, to just leave him to his own thoughts, before devolving into utter chaos for the finale. I think it works incredibly well. As an album closer, it feels depressing, yet inevitable. They always come.
“Keep The Glove”, however, feels like it could work as an ending all the same. It’s a bonus track, but I choose to interpret it as a dream that comes after the alcoholic events of “Don’t”, one in which the romance he was looking for is still about to end (probably through cheating), but at least he was able to experience it, & asking her to remember him. The last minute being a total cacophony though feels like the dream melting away, & it just feels like a heartbreaking ending. They ALWAYS come.
The thing that elevates this album even higher, at least from what I’ve read, is that these tracks are meant as an allegory for the band’s deteriorating relationship at the time. Dinosaur Jr.’s initial lineup would split apart by their next album, with their bassist, Lou Barlow, leaving the band. If this album is meant to be a sort of therapy session between the group, then it makes the ending tracks of the album hit even harder, knowing that the simple, vital question of “Why don’t you like me?” would stay unanswered.
I understand that my interpretation isn’t definitive, but it feels like a really strong framing device, & there’s certainly at least a loose connection between all of these tracks. I think the floor is a 3 if it just hurts the ears from an instrumental standpoint (entirely understandable), but I’m at a 5 because… I dunno, it just feels like an extremely cohesive album, written & created despite some kind of deep-seated pain, ala Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours”. I might even be higher after writing all of this out, though I don’t think I’d get to a 10. I really enjoyed it, and I’m glad it’s on the list; they certainly shut me up after wondering why they had 2 albums here.
Nina Simone
5/5
I’m at a 5, if not a little higher.
This is the only Nina Simone album on the list, which feels like a real shame, because I absolutely adored this. Yes, it’s a little bit one-note in terms of most of the tracks being sad love songs with a slightly clingy atmosphere to them, but Nina Simone’s voice shines as brightly as the sun here. I can’t remember the last time someone’s vocals struck me so nicely; the closest analog I have is Aretha Franklin, and that’s really high praise.
Her vocals are melded beautifully by the instrumentals here, ranging from orchestral backing, to intimate nightclub vibes, & occasionally, nothing more than a piano to texture her voice further. Every track has the right tone & mood to it, and when they work in a perfect harmony, like on “What More Can I Say” or “Wild is the Wind”, it feels otherworldly. As far as the lyrics go, Nina Simone pulls about every ounce of emotion she can get out of them; occasionally, she overdoes the vibrato on her held notes in a way that feels a little overdramatic, but those moments are quickly bandaged by some glittery piano or string work. There’s not a single “bad” moment here.
The only reason I’m not at a full 10 here is because I don’t think the tracks fully flow together as an album experience; there are some tracks where their fadeouts feel unsatisfying after nailing it 90% of the way, which wouldn’t stick out as much if not for the other tracks with big flourishing finishes nailing them with a surgical precision. I felt really cheated by the last track having a fadeout; if it were me, I would’ve swapped the last two, since “If I Should Lose You” just felt really lovely to my ears, and it would’ve been a great bookend to the opening track.
That said, it’s still easily a 5, and probably higher. It’s 39 minutes you need to hear before you die, with its influence feeling immeasurable. I felt like I heard the entire future of female-led soul music come to fruition while listening to this album, and the tree of influences spreading from that has to be huge. There’s moments where Nina Simone somehow sounds like both Elvis Presley, Whitney Houston & Amy Winehouse at the same time, and I have no idea how the hell she did it. It’s really a shame this is her only album here, because it feels like she needs at least one more. If this is the best one though, I’m certainly glad to have heard it before I died. A super easy 5.
Public Image Ltd.
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I wish I could leave there, but I think I’m going to bump this down to a 3. For the site though, I'll give it a 4.
I feel a little bad, honestly. I don’t think I gave “Metal Box” a very fair shake at all. It was the 15th album we got, my brain wasn’t very inclined to deal with an album that had a 2.42 rating, and I wasn’t even really sure I wanted to commit to doing the entire list. My original goal was just to listen to an album every day in 2024, and I was willing to skip albums on the list to fulfill my quota for THAT goal. I think I initially skipped Metal Box, in terms of a focused listen, only giving it a half-hearted shot as background noise that I truly don’t remember anything of. By all accounts, I need to go back & truly listen to it, because I only wrote 8 words the first time around: “i liked it better when he wasn’t singing”, before slapping it with a 2 & moving on.
I couldn’t even be fucking bothered to realize that “he” is Johnny fucking Rotten, & Public Image Ltd. is his post-Sex Pistols project, now going under his real name of John Lydon. Given the 723 albums we’ve gotten since then, and my own slow appreciation for post-punk, shoegaze, post-rock, or whatever multitudes of genres & artists we’ve since gotten that fall into the same metal box as this album, I figured I would probably appreciate this a little more, and I did. When this album is at its best, it’s rolling in a way that if nothing else, creates a cool atmosphere. It’s just not the best at consistently hitting a peak, and that slightly bumpy roller coaster is most of the reason that I’m stuck at a 3.5.
“Theme” is pretty cool, honestly. It feels like an attempt to do what shoegaze bands of the ‘80s would come to truly realize, but with the technology of 1978 not really allowing for atmospheric sound design in that overblown way, it feels like more of a novelty. It’s like Nine Inch Nails without any pretense lyrically (just straight up saying “I wish I could die”), and it feels like the wiggly warbly awkward guitar is a compromise for being unable to capture texture in that way. I thought it was cool, and somehow, the 9 minutes didn’t bother me.
“Religion I” is nice – it’s just a good poem about the woes of religion. It’s when you get to “Religion II” and its awkward panning / mix that the album hits its first big snag. I didn’t hate “Religion II”, but it’s incessant in a way that just feels like a rehash with awkward drums & bass put behind it. It’s not very compelling or super pleasing, plus it’s just melodically inconsistent. An unnecessary track.
“Annalisa” is good, though. It’s based on a real girl who suffered psychological torture due to undergoing intense exorcism rituals, eventually being practically starved & paralyzed to death. As a song, it’s a bit padded in the runtime, with the cool ending of the “demon” inside of her breaking the instrumental down being undermined by that length. If it had shaved about a minute or so in the middle, it would’ve flowed really well, but it’s still a good track regardless.
“Public Image” is just a really good release of frustration about the Sex Pistols. The instrumental feels like a mid-80s track, the vocals are good, & the lyricism is damning in a good way. It’s the most played track on the album for a reason, and it’s probably the best one here.
“Low Life” is another diss, seemingly aimed at the lead manager for the Sex Pistols, Malcolm McLaren. I think the higher pitch of the track is intentional, to place him higher than the person he’s talking about, and that’s an example of good witty production. It’s a little bit long for what it is, given the repetition in the vocals / lyrics, but overall, the track works.
“Attack” is fine – it’s likely a frustration being released over the public outcry following “God Save The Queen” back on “Never Mind The Bollocks”, but as an actual track, I think the sense of progression doesn’t feel as good as it could, with the track teasing a faster percussive tone that never comes to fruition. I liked it, but it needs a bit more work to make that progression feel better.
“Fodderstompf” is… well, it’s not useless, at least not for the first 3 minutes or so. The experimental nature of the instrumental, bringing in a little bit of an electronica / Daft Punk vibe is pretty cool for 1978, and it does feel like it could still be sampled today. The pussyfooting around with a goofy admission that it’s a track made to pad out the album, along with the sort of goofy deranged grandma voice that John does, feels kinda charming for the first 3 minutes. And then it just keeps fucking going. At nearly 8 minutes, it feels like watching a comedy act lose its novelty in real time, and it just leaves a really sour note to close out the album. If it had stopped after the first 3, I’d probably be willing to bump this up to a 4, just for ending a good comedic note, but it’s just incessant by the end. It doesn’t need to be 8 minutes.
With all of the little issues combined & the 2 bigger snags of “Religion II” & “Fodderstompf”, I just feel like I have to bump this down from a 3.5 to a 3. Make no mistake, though; I did enjoy this one. If those two tracks weren’t there (or just mixed better / trimmed down), I’d easily be at a 4. This doesn’t quite get up to the range of a 5, but it’s a genuinely enjoyable album in its nicest moments. All that said, I don’t think this is an album so bad that it deserves a 2.43 on the site, & I probably need to give “Metal Box” a fair relisten, with my tastes growing much more since then. Despite my belief that this is a 3.5 bumped down to a 3, I want to give it a 4 on the site, just as a vote of confidence & as a bit of atonement for only giving “Metal Box” a 2 despite barely engaging with it. I think it’s earned that.
In closing, I liked it better when he sang this time. Good job, John.
Magazine
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Between the two 1978 post-punk albums we’ve gotten on back to back days, I can safely give this one the nod. This is a really good album. I can’t say I’ve heard of Magazine before this, but some of their members went on to do big stuff with other bands (namely Siouxsie & The Banshees and Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds), so their talent level combined here makes for a pretty cool set of tracks, especially for 1978. Straight out of the gate with the buzzy & bassy intro of “Definitive Gaze”, the album never really hits a lull point instrumentally, managing to mix together some Kraftwerk-y synth use, some Bowie-esque guitar work, a bit of prog influence & just a touch of grunge / metal to come, for an eclectic mix of styles that holds up really nicely. It’s hard to fully classify this as post-punk, but whatever it is, I liked it a lot.
Lyrically, I think this album tends to be pretty strong; there’s a few times where the metaphors / intentions feel really loose, but parsing them feels like it’s meant as a satisfying bonus. Truthfully, you can get away with ignoring the lyrics on this album, save for whatever manages to catch your ear, which is usually pretty intentional. I don’t want to type a bunch of paragraphs about what I think each track means, but I do want to specifically point at “The Great Beautician in the Sky” – I think the idea of God as a beautician, pampering people with makeup (religion) as a sort of society-approving temptation is a really fascinating bit of imagery. The song doesn’t really spell that out, but that’s what I took it as.
Vocally, while I do think it takes a bit of time to get used to the slightly nasally tones of Howard Devoto, once you settle in, his vocals do end up sounding alright, especially by the back half of the album. It is still the weakest aspect here, but it’s not THAT bad. There are points where he overdoes some of the scratchier / aggressive tones, but that’s just a quirk to get used to. If nothing else, he’s usually got the right mood in his voice to get the emotions of the track across. I know vocal control to indicate tone should be second nature, but there’s a lot of post-punk albums we’ve gotten where the vocalists just feel sort of samey throughout, so even a bit of exaggerated emotion is better than sticking to a default setting.
Ultimately, I think they all blend together well. The witty songwriting covers for some of the odd vocal moments, and when the songwriting itself feels a bit too clever or confusing, the instrumental energy of the album more than covers for that. It’s a super satisfying 41 minutes if you just kinda loosen up & let yourself get into it, with a lot of variety across the board. After you get past the slightly long outro of “Burst”, the album really opens itself up, with the final 4 tracks being my favorite ones here. I love an album that feels bigger the longer it goes, & this fits the bill nicely. Hence, a 5, and a pretty strong 5 at that. It certainly feels like a seminal post-punk album, and I’m glad it’s on the list.
David Ackles
5/5
I was at a 5, then “Montana Song” punched it all the way up to a 10. My goodness.
I mean, it doesn’t start perfectly. I think it takes a moment to get used to the shifting tempo / pace of “American Gothic”, which isn’t the best way to start an album, but once you settle into this album’s more cinematic / Broadway-esque tones, that push & pull feels extremely dynamic, and give each track way more of a gravitas than initially expected. “Love’s Enough” might’ve been the more trusty opener, given that it has a sort of Nick Drake vibe to the instrumental, & it just feels lovely overall. If this album had started with “Love’s Enough”, I think it’d have much higher than a 2.48 on the site.
The only real minor misstep here is “Ballad of the Ship of State” – not that it’s a bad track, but it’s the most lyrically confusing to me, just in the way its structured. Instrumentally, it feels really bombastic in a striking way, but I couldn’t exactly piece together the plot here – obviously there’s some abandoned soldiers (presumably for World War II or the Korean War), and people who stumble upon them, but I don’t know if they went with the people who found them, if they took over their ship to leave them to the same fate, or ultimately decided to stay where they were since their country had already abandoned them in their minds to begin with. If the track’s plot were as clear as the 8 tracks that follow it, it would be even better than it already is.
After that, the album just glides brilliantly. It feels like a mix of Nick Cave, Scott Walker, & Todd Rundgren, with aspects of who he inspired (Elvis Costello, Elton John, Phil Collins, maybe a few more) popping up along the way. “One Night Stand” is somber, yet plain, and it just feels really nice. “Oh, California!” has a sort of Toy Story vibe to it, with a kind of whimsy that just gives off a happy & bright energy, like the sun he keeps praising in the track. “Another Friday Night” just feels like a working class anthem, with a sort of plucky underdog vibe to it that feels like a Broadway track. The lift of the instrumental, along with the “Rocket Man” vibes around the 2:30 mark just struck me really nicely.
“Family Band” feels really relatable – I’ve grown out of faith to a degree, but sometimes hearing the gospel music I grew up on brings back a calming vibe, and this track just spells that out in a way that clicked for me. “Midnight Carousel” is intimidating in the best way, with the religious people around the protagonist scolding her for chasing after this one true love. The ambiguity of the relationship itself gives the whole track a super captivating vibe, and whether or not she’s truly been seduced by the devil (or the “man in red”, whoever he is), she’s clearly pleased & satisfied either way.
“Waiting for the Moving Van” is beautiful. The way the lyricism slowly reveals the nature of his homelife, his relationship with his kids, and the pain of a 10-year marriage falling apart, all whilst being forced to focus on the immediacy of his move, while the somber piano tries to occasionally lift itself up… it feels like a Pixar track, in the best way. It just struck me really nicely, since it felt so vivid & lived in. “Blues for Billy Whitecloud” is a fun blues track, with the crazy twist of Billy building a fucking bomb & destroying his school at the end. I can’t blame him, given how they treated him.
“Montana Song” could be a play unto itself, and it’s the reason this album is getting a bump up all the way to a 10. It’s a track all about finding those connections in person, with the protagonist traveling to Montana just to find his grandparents’ graves, getting mentally swept away to the past to see how they lived, with the tragedy of his grandpa’s sons just leaving him & his family farm behind for the hustle & bustle of city life in the early 20th century. He died practically alone, with almost nothing. The little details of the track make it feel so incredibly lived in, especially the detail of a presumed daughter who stayed being the one to write out the note of the grandpa’s death. My dad was a very big believer in ancestry, finding one's roots, & trying to get as good of a feel for the past as he possibly could, and while those records still exist on the computer I’m using to type this, they’re buried under passwords I don’t know & software that’s incompatible with modern operating systems. In a way, I wish I could be in touch with my ancestry as this song is, and the cinematic / Broadway-esque tones of it just clicked wonderfully for me. I think it uses all of its 10 minutes as effectively as possible, and it’s a great capper to an 8-track stretch that elevates this album all the way up to a 10 for me.
It is an undiscovered classic, and while I understand that the shakier start to this album makes it easier to give up on it, seeing it through & truly *feeling* these tracks as they are reveals something deeply enriching. I think it’s a fantastic discovery, proving that even 740 albums in, there’s some superb diamonds left to find. It’s not going to click this nicely for everyone, but for it to have clicked with so few people that this only has a 2.48 on the site is utterly ridiculous to me. It’s at least a 3, bare minimum, and for me, I simply have to give this a 10. It’s just that good.
Roni Size
4/5
I'm at a 3.5 that I'll generously bump up to a 4.
I gave this one a listen in some unusual circumstances; first & foremost, there's a 2008 remix / remaster of the album that significantly shaves it down, so I chose to listen to that mix, eliminating the 4 new tracks added to the 2008 version. I also happened to listen to it as more of a backing soundtrack while I did some studying / reading, since DnB albums have usually fallen under mostly instrumental tones. It surprised me immediately when the first song had vocals, but I still chose to keep it mostly as a backing soundtrack.
It's a pretty good backing soundtrack, honestly. It caught my ear a number of times, distracting me to the point where I got sucked into the energy of some of the tracks & oddly enough, finding more focus in my reading because of it. This album excels in those moments, even if I might just be used to it due to my predisposition towards video game music. There's a handful of tracks that made me REALLY pay closer attention, namely "Share The Fall" & "Beatbox" – the former for its '90s racing game vibes & the latter for doing a mostly acapella DnB track, which is super cool.
I'll fully admit that if I had listened to the original 1997 mix, with much longer tracks & probably painfully long repetition, I probably wouldn't enjoy this as much as I did. I'll also admit that if I had paid closer attention & not just used it as a background album of sorts, I probably would be lower, on account of this not really being "focusing" music. However, the 2008 mix just really worked as a vibes thing, and while I couldn't really tell you the major differences between tracks, I was keen enough to notice the really strong flow between tracks, transitioning in a way that feels like a genuine DJ set, giving this album a lot more character & personality than some of the other pure DnB albums we've gotten.
Hence, it's a 3.5 that I'll generously bump up to a 4, mostly as a vote of confidence for being a great soundtrack, and because it really was just a fun vibe to listen to. I don't think it would ever get up to a 5 on account of just being what it is, but it's still a good time regardless. If you already like VGM or this style of music, you'll enjoy it, and if you don't... yeah, I wouldn't blame a 1 or 2. It's not for everyone. For me, it's a 4, and I liked it. Definitely not "better than OK Computer" in terms of the Mercury Prize though.
Basement Jaxx
4/5
I’m at a 4.
Out of the 15 tracks here (yes, that includes interludes), I liked 11 of them, with two of them being just kinda flat (“U Can’t Stop Me” & “Being With U”) & two of them being outright awful (“Yo-Yo” & “Same Old Show”). When this album hits those awful lows, it’s a *SUPER* low low, and one that would drain the energy out of any nightclub you might try to play this album in. It’s not a surprise some of the worst ones here involve TEMU Britney Spears. However, when this album lifts itself from those lows, especially when it’s something as fun as “Red Alert” or something like the excellent “Bingo Bango”, it feels super fun to listen to, with a really nice energy that genuinely feels reminiscent of the club circa 1999. The mixing here does a really good job of emphasizing the bass & drums whilst still giving the occasional vocals / other instruments time to shine. Overall, most of the 57 minutes here should give at least a little energy boost, and I think it’s a fun listen, with or without headphones in.
I know 11/15 is 73%, and that this should probably be more of a 3.5 because of it, but I’m at a flat 4 just because I fuck with this style of music – again, video game influences were flying all throughout my brain here (& perhaps the SiIvaGunner MAGFest rave yesterday played a part in my enjoyment), but I think it genuinely holds up as a competently produced & free-flowing house / electronica album. If the really low lows leave a bad taste (which I wouldn’t blame, given that one of the awful tracks is literally the second one), I can understand a 2 or even a 1. Those awful tracks will probably hold this off from ever being a 5, but I think it caps pretty nicely at a 4, which is where I’m at. If nothing else, it makes for good background music. I dunno if it had to be on the list, but I could certainly hear out a case for it.
Franz Ferdinand
5/5
I’m at a 10, with maybe just *one* little flaw.
I only knew “Take Me Out” going into this, as I imagine most people would – maybe one of the other singles is in there somewhere, but their biggest hit is “Take Me Out”, and it stands as a ubiquitous anthem / representation of the 2000s. It’s an all-timer of a track, and thankfully, it’s supplemented by 10 other tracks that are either at the same level or just a step or two below that same level of quality, making for a fucking killer debut album. If the “worst” one here is only as bad as it is because nobody really wants to have a track about being a cheater in their playlist (& because the album tackles it a bit more tastefully with “Tell Her Tonight” earlier on), whilst still kinda rocking in its own weird way, then you’ve got a stellar lineup going.
The music more than speaks for itself, with every track finding a super infectious groove – the bass is awesome, the guitar riffs are sick, the percussion has a good punch / pace to it, and Alex Kapranos’ lead vocals have a range that feels like it can channel David Bowie, Chris Martin & Morrissey (for once, as a compliment) at the same time, whilst still being able to hit higher pitches & quirkier tones that feel kinda like David Byrne in the “More Songs About Buildings And Food” era of Talking Heads. His vocals don’t carry the album, but they do elevate it, which is kinda rare for an album that feels so instrumentally driven.
I don’t really want to go too deep track-by-track here, so I’ll just quickly explain what I liked about my favorite ones, even though the whole album was great from top-to-bottom. “Jacqueline” is a really good (& kinda morbidly funny) opener. “The Dark of the Matinee” feels like an Arctic Monkeys cut in the best way. “Auf Achse” has a fun dichotomy between the funky mood & the sad lyrics, whilst reminding me a lot of The Human League. “Darts of Pleasure” feels like a Talking Heads cut in an awesome way, & “Michael” fucking rules as an explicitly erotic track with a super catchy vibe.
The *one* little thing I mentioned is in the track order; I think “Come on Home” should’ve ended the album. I think it just makes more thematic sense after the implied suicidal thoughts of “40’”, and the melancholic tones feel like they’d make for a good bookend with “Jacqueline”. Regardless, “40’” is still a pretty good closing track, and as a whole, the entire album just fucking rules. I’m mad at myself for not listening to the whole thing until today, but I’m glad to have rectified it, I’m glad it’s on the list, and it’s easily deserving of all the acclaim it gets. It’s a 10, and it’s right up there with “Hot Fuss” as one of those timeless albums of the era. 2004 was pretty good for rock, huh?
White Denim
5/5
I’m at a 5.
I mean, normally I’m one to harp on lyrics, and I do think I got a decent chunk of them here, but… the lyrics really couldn’t matter less, for once. Some of them help to set up an emotional mood, but this is an album where they are wholly unnecessary. This is a southern psychedelic prog rock album, with instrumentals somehow reminiscent of Genesis, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Neil Young & The Beatles all at the same time, taking cues from the ‘60s & ‘70s era of rock whilst blending it with the indie sensibilities of a band like Cage the Elephant to create a vibe that’s undeniably cool as hell.
You could literally listen to this for the full 37 minutes, not pick up a single lyric, and still be mesmerized by the musicianship at hand here – when this leans into its more prog-esque sensibilities, the guitar / drum work just pulls you in, but it’s equally as mesmerizing when the harmonies of the vocals hypnotize you on this album’s slower tracks. When this album hits on a perfect transition, it feels seamless, keeping up the energy in a way that feels like a live jam session. I honestly can’t think of many early 2010s rock albums that do transitions super effectively, so it’s really welcomed here. James Petralli and friends just know how to fucking rock out here, man.
It’s an album where the music speaks for itself; yeah, the lyrics have some poignant moments (the immigration allegories of “Burnished”, the classist nature of “Street Joy” & “Bess St.”, the mysterious allure of “River to Consider” or “Keys”), but parsing those too deeply would take away from just vibing along & letting them take you for a ride. I’m pleasantly surprised this was as good as it was, and I’m very glad it’s on the list. It’s a really easy 5 for me, and I wanna listen to even more of these guys. Pretty damn good for an album with absolutely horrid SEO. (Seriously, just Google “D album”. It’s dire out here.)
The Kinks
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
That’s just good ‘60s psych rock, what can I say? Pretty tightly written, pretty well-sung, pretty well-performed across the board, with a really nice instrumental flair that bends some of the baroque tones of the era with a bit of Beatles-y vibes. It’s also an album where you don’t really need the lyrics as much, with the instrumental vibes just carrying it along, though a lot of tracks feel really elevated by those lyrics. These are smartly written, with just a bit of political bite to them that gives the album some needed depth. It’s frustrating that some of the complaints of 1966 still feel deeply mirrored in 2026, but the more things change, the more they stay the same & all that.
I think the music speaks for itself, so I don't really need to type out too much. I’m mostly at a 4.5 due to some little things (a few bits of repetition, some occasionally weird mixing, some overlap of subjects, a rather one-note final track), but it’s a pretty easy bump up to a 5 from there. I think this is the best Kinks album we’ve gotten so far – granted, the 621 days since we got “Something Else By The Kinks” (literally the title of the album) might have something to do with that, but I do think it’s an improvement over the two we got super early on. It’s not the most impressive album, but it’s a consistently strong 38 minutes without a bad track here, and I’m glad I heard it before I died. Hence, a 4.5 bumped up to a 5.
Incredible Bongo Band
5/5
It’s obviously a 10.
Just go listen to it. That’s fucking electrifying. You can’t possibly hear that & come out of it feeling angry or disappointed unless you just hate music. That’s 33 minutes of some of the best instrumental music I’ve heard in my life. They are incredible, and it’s a super easy 10.
The The
5/5
I’m at a 5.
I’ve heard of The The before this, but I didn’t realize they they were a post-punk band, let alone that they were this this good. I think the whole album is pretty well sung & pretty well-written, with a lot of eerily relevant lyricism on some of its more politically-driven tracks (namely “Heartland” & “Sweet Bird of Truth”), but the instrumentals sell the album a lot. I’m not sure what the hell “post-punk” is anymore, because to me, this just sounded like a traditional ‘80s album with a little more of an aggressive lean to the guitar. That’s not a complaint either; I love the way this album sounds. Lots of heavier deep bass, a good mix of the gated reverb / pre-programmed drums, some fun synth work (making for effective walls of sound with much more clarity than the 60s/70s), and as a whole, the entire album sounds really good.
If there’s one small issue I have, it’s that the pacing of each track itself is a little stretched out for time – a lot of these hang onto bridges, refrains, or instrumental breaks for too long, and each track could’ve easily shaved around 30 seconds to a minute if they had just hung on a little less. It is noticeable in the moment, but the impacts coming out of those breaks sort of wash it away, since they know how to push the energy right back up. Other than the length, I really don’t have any complaints about the tracks themselves. I think “Infected” is a stellar opener that sets the tone really nicely the rest of the way, & the album never fails to keep close to that energy. It does start to go down just a little more by “Twilight of a Champion”, but not by that much.
Ultimately, I just enjoyed it, and I really don’t understand the 2.92 on the site. This album’s most egregious sin might just be sounding too quintessentially ‘80s, and if that ‘80s soundscape is a turnoff… then yeah, I guess the floor here is a 3, but I feel like the average should be a little higher. For me, I’m at a 5; it’s 41 minutes that should probably be closer to 36 or 37, but they still knock it out of the park here. I’m pretty impressed, and I’m ready to get the the other The The album on the the list. Great stuff.
Lambchop
3/5
I dunno, a 3? More of a 2.5 bumped up to a 3, I guess, but… I wasn’t really feeling this at all.
I have genuinely no idea how to approach writing about this album, mainly because I never found a good way to approach listening to it. I’m a person who really likes dissecting lyrics, or at the very least, I like lyricism as a route to help paint an overall picture; the lines should generally be the colors that allow the brain’s paintbrush to get to the author’s intended destination, or at the very least, a satisfying interpretation. This is an album where the soundscape acts as the colors; I’m not opposed to that sort of thing, as long as the lyricism helps in some way.
It didn’t help me a damn bit here. I don’t understand what any of these tracks are about, save for incredibly loose imagery that didn’t grab me as potently as it tried to. That’s sometimes fine though; there have been really good albums where the lyricism gets confusing or hard to parse at points, but where the vocals can pick that up and provide the emotional lean the tracks need to help the paintbrush find its way there. The issue here is that I cannot fucking understand his vocals, both from a literal standpoint (too quiet at times, too pitchy at points, too mumbled under the instrumentals) & from an emotional standpoint, as he sometimes feels like Bob Ross trying to sing, Elmo trying to sing under his breath, or Miss Piggy in a starring off-off-off-off-off-off Broadway role. I couldn’t grasp the emotions out of his lyrics or his vocals, meaning that this is mostly an instrumental album to me. It succeeds as an instrumental album to a point, but these tracks are all far too long, in a way that noticeably overstays its welcome, no matter how lovely & nice they all seem to sound.
Without that sense of emotional connection to anchor me along the way, I’m left with an album that tries to say a lot, yet leaves no memorable sticking point to grasp onto. I hear parts of the acclaim here, and to a degree, I get how this might’ve felt fresh & innovative given the state of music in 2000 & the band’s apparent work up to this point, but for 2026 standards… I just don’t really get it. I think it sounds good instrumentally, but his vocals don’t add anything, often dragging some tracks down by being too noticeable whilst having nothing to actually say, given the loose stream-of-consciousness lyrics, which I couldn’t grasp to save my life. I’m stuck at a 2.5 that I’ll bump up to a 3 on account of each track never having an actively bad moment, but this was really close to being bumped down to a 2 on the sole account of “I just don’t fucking understand what the intent of the album was at all” & being utterly frustrated by that.
It probably didn’t need to be on the list.
Dolly Parton
5/5
I’m at a 10, with one very small nitpick behind it.
I knew this was gonna be good; my bias for old country music said so, and my appreciation of Dolly Parton also said so. This is my first full solo Dolly Parton album though, which feels vaguely criminal. We got “Trio” a while back, and while that album was great, this one just feels excellent. It’s super tight at just 27 minutes, and it doesn’t waste a single second of that time. I’m impressed by the variety in the instrumentals as the album goes on, revealing more influences from the rock bands who had themselves been inspired by country music; iron sharpened iron here very nicely, with some of the bassier / percussion-driven tracks on the album feeling as cohesive as the more typical country fare. Of course, Dolly Parton herself is the star of the show – it takes just a moment to get used to her very light vibrato, but once your ears settle into it, she’s just as dazzling as one would expect. “She Never Met a Man (She Didn't Like)” might be the best vocal showcase of the whole album, but her power is on display the entire time. Between her vocals & her songwriting chops, along with the instrumentation, I can find next to zero flaws.
The single little bit that’s biting at me is the last two tracks of the album ending on fadeouts; it’s not a big deal, but they do feel less effective after the preceding 8 tracks wrap each bow up so concisely. It’s not as big of a thing on “Here I Am” due to the Beatles-y vibe to that track, but I think it feels different with “A Better Place to Live” – it’s the closing track of the album, and I just think a proper ending there would wrap the whole thing up better. Regardless, it’s an extreme nitpick that only my brain could remotely care about. I think this is a fabulous album for classic country music of the era, & it impressed me beyond my already highly hopeful expectations. I do wish there was more Dolly on the list overall, but I can’t say this was a bad pick to represent her solo career. It’s a very strong album, and for me, it’s a super easy 10. I loved it.
Shuggie Otis
5/5
It’s a very nice 5.
The Wikipedia page for this album mentions some positive comparisons to Stevie Wonder & Marvin Gaye, and while I don’t quite hear as much of Stevie, I certainly hear a bit of Marvin. The funk & groove this thing gives off feels like a softer version of what Marvin was doing on “Let’s Get It On”, but it still contains just as much soul behind it. The first half of the album feels really nice, and even though sometimes the lyrics get a little strange, the vocals more than lift them up to help sell the mood. It’s made me get even more frustrated by that fucking “Nixon” album we got the other day, as this album succeeds brilliantly at letting its instrumentals guide the mood of each track without some cumbersome vocals getting in the way. Shuggie Otis, who I’ve never heard of before today, played just about every instrument & composed every song here, along with taking lead vocals, & his talent shines through really nicely. His only crime is that his vocals are just a little quiet at points, but I feel like that’s an intentional choice.
The back half of the album is almost entirely instrumental, and it’s in those moments where this album’s full ability to capture a vibe reveals itself. They fly by wonderfully, and they all sound as satisfying as a good night’s sleep. My only real nitpick with the back half is that I think the album should’ve ended on “Pling!”, as it could have kept going for another 2-3 minutes without missing a beat. “Pling!” feels like modern day vaporwave, which is kind of impressive for 1974, and it really is just a delight to sit in. “Not Available” didn’t feel as satisfying by comparison, though it’s still got a good funk to it.
Ultimately, it’s an album that you just have to hear to really get it, and I’m very glad that I did hear it. It’s a shame that Shuggie seemingly got in his own way after this album & has only made one since, given the attempts to success handed to him on a silver platter that he apparently just kept turning down. I mean, seriously; a chance to tour with the Rolling Stones & have an album produced by Quincy Jones at his peak, and you turn them BOTH down? That’s financial malpractice. Regardless, I’m glad this is here on the list for it to get some well-deserved flowers, and I think it’s a pretty easy 5.
Solange
5/5
I’m at a 5.
This is, much like “Untitled (Black Is)”, an album about black positivity, black excellence, and black affirmation. I am a half-Filipino, white-passing male. I once again fully acknowledge that I can’t ever fully relate to this album, or the black experience, but I can continue to listen and do my part to make this world a better place, and that includes lifting up albums like this that so deeply acknowledges what it is to be black, both in the positives & the negatives, and share a better understanding of that experience.
It does a pretty good job of expressing that experience – while it doesn’t feel as vividly & as dazzlingly painted as what SAULT did, this takes a much more confidently feminine approach, portraying a sort of softer simmered anger about the day-to-day microaggressions that simply come with being black in this country. It’s not going for the jugular here; it’s just asking to be heard out, and it’s more than worth hearing out, from both a messaging standpoint & a musical standpoint. It’s certainly worth hearing out from a production standpoint; Solange is not her sister and it shows, with this album drawing more from the indie hip-hop scene of the 2010s, with a touch of TPaB’s jazzier influence in there. The synth / bass / percussion work that underlines a lot of these tracks is quintessentially 2016 to my ears, and with the recent trend going around, it does feel kinda nice to go back to this style.
The main 12 tracks here are all pretty good; Solange’s vocals shine through like a star, occasionally pretty comparable to her sister in its most tender harmonies. The lyrics are great, and I don’t think there’s ever a dull moment of repetition like that; it’s constantly moving forward, much like she is on “Don’t Wish Me Well”. All of the features here kill it, even if I wish some of them had more to them (Andre 3000 on “Junie” is criminally underutilized & Q-Tip feels barely present on “Borderline”), but the whole album flows really well with Solange as the star. I’d be remiss to not mention the interludes at some point – sure, it’s a little strange for Master P’s life story to take over most of them, but I think it works as a good contrast to show a bonafide success story, & with his own relationship to the family, it fits pretty well in the context of the album. I do think there might be a few too many interludes in a way that messes with the pacing of the album, but it’s never egregious. They certainly don’t ruin the quality of any of the main 12 tracks, with the transitions between them usually flowing well.
Ultimately then, I’m at a 5. It’s not a super dazzling cultural phenomenon of a 5 like her sister dropped earlier in 2016 (it is criminal that “Lemonade” isn’t here given some of the hand-in-hand themes at play here), but it’s a tightly written, tightly composed album that still shines uniquely in its own way, & one that I think is worth being on the list. It’s a super strong album without a single miss throughout the 51 minutes here. The floor is a 3 if you just don’t vibe with it musically.
MGMT
5/5
I’m somewhere above a 5, though not quite a 10, even though it’s damn close.
Obviously, I knew the big hits going into this one; “Electric Feel” & “Kids” are platinum as hell, with “Time to Pretend” slightly behind them (yet still just as good). Those 3 tracks feel like cornerstones of not only the 2000s, but just hallmarks of an entire millennial mindset present in the lead-up to Barack Obama’s inauguration all those years ago. They’re the standouts of the album still, but they don’t paint the full picture of this album’s intent, and what emerges from the entire thing is even more potent & vivid as a complete package. It feels like starry-eyed optimism by today’s standards, but the adventurous feel of this whole album, as if it was prepared for both a potential utopia & a societal nightmare at the same time, rings even more deeply true nowadays. A track like “Pieces of What” just feels brutally shattering, especially with all of the hell that’s been going on the past few years, yet a track like “The Youth” still feels like something worth striving for, even with the disheartening turns as of late.
Despite the starry-eyed optimism of the lyrics not really working in the way that most people probably imagined, I think this album’s soundscape is what lifts it up to a point of stellar energy throughout, both in the complimentary & the space-y sense. The production work here feels really far ahead of 2007 to me, with practically the entire album sounding like it could have been made in the 2020s without missing a beat. I’ve said that “channel ORANGE” was the sound of hip-hop for the 2010s & that “21” set the tone for pop for the 2010s, but somehow, this album feels like the start of something else, in a way that’s still kind of reverberating today for indie rock & beyond. The synth / bass work here is what makes the album really pop, & in combination with the ‘70s-styled guitars, the throughline from MGMT to bands like The 1975, Foster the People or acts like Tame Impala feels pretty clear. Even beyond that, I think the funk & the rhythm of these basslines extends its way into other facets of modern hip-hop production, so its influence goes far & wide, and music is arguably all the better for it.
Ultimately, I think it’s a super easy 5 & higher – it’s a breezy 40 minutes that only occasionally falters with some harder to parse lyrics, but with an energy that feels deeply infectious to this day, still glowing with the hope of a generation (even if it hasn’t fully come to pass yet). I’m not at a 10 on a first pass, though it’ll probably get there with time; part of it is the lyrics feeling just a bit too optimistic right now in this moment, and part of it does come from the album feeling just a *little* bit same-y towards the end of the album, but those are just nitpicks for my brain. This is the oracular spectacular they claimed it would be, and I’m very glad to finally give this one a full listen. It was that good.
The Who
5/5
I’m at a 5.
I mean, it’s not the best album we’ve gotten by The Who, but it’s still pretty damn good in its own right. Conceptually, this is much easier to digest than Tommy (though obviously not as strong); it’s just a silly radio station, with the band choosing to pastiche some of their contemporaries & slightly poppier soundscapes of the era (obviously, the Beatles & the Beach Boys are the clear inspirations here), supplementing it with some ridiculous ads along the way. Yes, their poppier approach can feel a bit grating & a bit less compelling than their more seriously-driven rock work, but… just listen to a track like “I Can See For Miles”. That track alone proves they gave a damn about this album, and were invested in it to the same degree as their other work. It’s not as polished, but part of that is just the technology of the era – the mixing on this album is a little harsh at times in the mono mix, but if this were even just a few years later, they’d have enough room in each channel to make these tracks sound as full as possible. Even for 1967 though, this sounds pretty good in its own right.
Since the music speaks for itself (great harmonies / instrumentals / fun lyrics), I think it’s best to just leave it there, without going too deep into each track. I do understand why this has a flat 3 on the site; if you wanted an album by The Who, but wanted a more serious effort, then this isn’t quite the album to look for. However, I think the pastiche-heavy (yet respectfully done) musicianship at play here & their earnest attempt to play it straight works really well. I don’t think there’s a bad track here for the 40 minutes (though some of the “commercials” are just there), and while mileage may vary, I think they sold me on their ability to sell out effectively. I really liked it, and I think it’s just worth giving a 5 to.
The Coral
4/5
I’m at a recommended 4.
For the most part, Mercury Prizes nominees have worked really well for me on the list, and this is yet another one to fit the bill. With the Wikipedia description of a “neo-psychedelia and folk rock album”, I expected this to be something a little more stuck up & serious. I’m very glad they proved me wrong by the polka-esque shift on “Shadows Fall” – this is neo-psychedelia & folk to a degree, but I would say this is far more of a blended mixture of a bunch of different genres, somehow working cohesively together. There’s elements of ska, polka, rock, doo-wop & Americana, bringing to mind everyone from Nick Cave to Bruce Springsteen to Billy Joel to Elvis Costello to the Pogues. It’s an eclectic album, & one that feels sort of Zappa-esque in nature, though without the bigger eccentricities of his earliest works.
For as eclectic & genre-bending as it is though, there are some tracks that feel like they hit a wall of ideas on & just sort of padded them out with instrumentals / ending choruses, and those moments are pretty noticeable. This album is only 34 minutes (roughly 40 if you count “Time Travel”, oddly not on streaming), but it feels a little bit longer due to that padding, which does sort of mess with the pace of the album. Most of these tracks are at a faster tempo, so while they bring up an energy really quickly, that energy can feel stagnant once those walls are hit, and it does hit them decently often. Granted, I don’t think it’s a big deal – the energy of the tracks is strong enough to begin with, & there’s only a handful of tracks that really FEEL like they overstay their welcome (“Waiting for the Heartaches” probably chief among them). Past that, there’s just a few tracks that didn’t hook me in all the way, even though they’re really fun to listen to (“Skeleton Key” & “Wildfire”, in this case).
Those are the reasons I’m at a 4 here, but it’s a 4 that I do recommend. I think people giving this a 1 or a 2 are just turned off by the soundscapes here, and I can understand that to a degree. Those who are dismissing this just because it’s some plucky band from London that they’ve never heard of feels like a dismissal of the entire purpose of going through these albums. I’ll admit, I’m a little hesitant to say this is an album you MUST listen to before you die (certainly a lot ahead of it), but that’s not a reason to slap this with a 1. Putting it on its own merits, it’s a really enjoyable set of tracks that blend a lot of genres together with some “innovative” (what’s old is new again) production for the era. I think it’s a fun one, hence a pretty strong 4. I’m glad it’s on the list.
Simple Minds
3/5
I’m at a 3.
Ultimately, it’s just fine. I don’t really feel like I have much to type about this album because it just never fully hooked me into what it was trying to do, or even really reveal what it wanted to say / do in the first place. These are inoffensive, occasionally catchy synthpop tunes, and it succeeds as a showcase of the style for the era. I think I just have more issues than notable positives here, but I don’t want to get overly negative about the album. It just disappointed me a lot more than I was expecting, based on the strength of their other big hits like “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” & “Alive & Kicking”. Those are tightly crafted synthpop tunes that feel closer to a Depeche Mode / Eurythmics style, whereas this feels like an undercooked Cocteau Twins album. I’m not opposed to the style if it’s done well, but this is… well, it’s just not done THAT well, sorry. I guess I do have stuff to say after all.
My immediate first thing comes in the overall mixing; I think the vocal filter muddles the emotional tones meant to come out of Jim Kerr’s vocals. I know he has good vocals, because they do occasionally shine through the filtering / reverb here, but they’re not showcased in a way that helps to sell each track. Past that, I just think the instrumentals themselves aren’t super compelling, with many going for longer than they need to, overstaying their welcome, and suffering from that “first minute” syndrome I so often mention; when you can go from the first minute to the fourth minute and the soundscape feels EXACTLY the same, then your tracks just don’t have a good sense of progression, and I’m saddened to report that this album just doesn’t have that. I think it needs more structure behind it; surprisingly, I’m complaining about this album not having a typical verse / chorus / verse formula, but it really would’ve worked in its favor here.
I wouldn’t be super mad about either of those if the lyrics had something more concrete to say, but this is where that “undercooked Cocteau Twins” comparison comes in; I don’t have a fucking clue what most of these songs are about, given that the lyrics just don’t feel very vivid, other than the loose moods / vibes they’re trying to evoke. I think the moods are achieved well, but just capturing a mood doesn’t do enough for me if the other aspects of a track are weak. It’s like going to a haunted house with the most eloquent decorations possible, but having all the ghosts be sock puppets. This album just fails to stick the landing on a lot of its tracks despite some really strong first impressions on them, & that persistent sense of being underwhelmed leaves an air of disappointment that slowly builds across the 46 minutes for this album’s runtime.
Hence, a 3. A solid 3, but an unremarkable one that just doesn’t feel like it needs to be on the list. I’m sure there’s other great Simple Minds albums out there; maybe “Once Upon a Time” (with Alive & Kicking on it) would’ve been the more refined album to pick, but that might just be a copout with a popular track on it. I don’t HATE this album, but it just never picked up in its energy in a way that made me care about it. I’m just disappointed, that’s all. Sorry.
Os Mutantes
5/5
I’m at a 5.
I figured it was gonna be good, given the usual track record for Brazilian albums on the list, and I’m very pleased to report that it’s great. It’s a little fuzzy / buzzy / loud at points, but for 1968, what can you do about that? These are really good psych rock compositions, though blended with a bit of Brazilian flair – not so much that it becomes the identity of the album, but enough where the cultural influences still bleed in really nicely. This album can portray really strong Beatles-y energy for one measure & then immediately bring in some ghostly vocals, cool percussive styles & flutes in the next measure to keep everything fresh & on its toes. Combine that with some genuinely compelling storytelling (yes, even when untranslated, due to how nicely the vocals sell the emotions) & you end up with 36 minutes that flow really nicely together. I do wish this album had at least one transition, but I’ll settle for most of them having definitive endings. That fakeout on “Senhor F” actually got me though.
I guess if I have any nitpicks, it’s that “A Minha Menina” goes about a minute too long & that “Tempo no Tempo” could’ve ended the album over “Ave Gengis Khan”, but that’s just personal preference for me. I just think it’s a really fun listen, & even if you don’t understand a word they’re saying (or bother to translate a word they’re saying), the instrumental / vocal energy just sells the album really well, with some especially catchy solos & vocal structures in there. Hence, a pretty damn good 5.
Lloyd Cole And The Commotions
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Once this album gets past some of its most Dylan-y inspired growing pains (I think 3 of the first 4 tracks have some issues, save for “Rattlesnakes”), the album just finds itself really nicely by “Forest Fire” and glides all the way to the finish line. The new wave soundscapes here feel really mature for 1984, and while I know “sophisti-pop” has a negative connotation at times, I think the label here is accurate, in the sense that these feel really smoothly fleshed out for the era, often sounding much closer to the early ‘90s (or in the case of the last track, maybe even the mid to late ‘90s).
That mature “sophisti-pop” label also applies to the lyrics, though in a good way – given this came out the same year as Prince’s Purple Rain, I think the way both albums approach the labor of love is worth a comparison. Prince’s take on love is idealized, overtly sexy, a bit flashy, & while it appropriately matches the bombast of the album, it does feel unrealistic if you were trying to approach it from a more grounded standpoint. Granted, anyone who tries to tell Prince to be “more grounded” would be as futile as asking Stevie Wonder to produce a Slipknot album.
This album fills that “more grounded” gap; love is portrayed as messy. It’s not as sexy, it’s usually circumstantial, and it takes a lot of work to even get a relationship off the ground, let alone maintain it. There’s one track here that feels like an idealized love (“Charlotte Street”) and even then, it’s appropriately acknowledged as a kind of dream scenario. The track immediately following it (“2cv”) is one where it falls apart immediately, due to one shared interest, ending in a whole lot of nothing. This album’s glue, however, and what keeps it as a coherent piece of work, is that the DESIRE for love drives the whole album, with a few tracks lyrically blending into each other to create a more cohesive world. All of these tracks are either in the process of maintaining it, trying to salvage it, trying to start it, or being prepared to end it. They’re all really personalized snapshots, and more than that, they feel realistic. I think it’s a really fresh attitude to have in an era of music where every singer seemingly got the girl (or boy) in all of their love songs.
Lloyd Cole’s vocals are… I mean, they’re not super flashy or THAT charismatic, but they do their job nicely. His talk-singing approach can feel a little worn at times, and I do think some of these tracks could use a little more of an elevated emotion from him, but I never once saw his vocals as a negative. There are times here when he does lift up just a bit, and it does energize the track. The way the instrumentals build themselves up around his performances help too, with a timing sort of reminiscent of R.E.M. at points. The only track that kinda fails at this is “Down on Mission Street”, with the chorus feeling too different from the rest of the track, but even still, it’s just a stylistic choice I disagree with.
Ultimately, I really liked it. I think it’s good to be grounded sometimes, and this album just feels grounded in a really nice way, whilst still giving a lot of energy to the instrumentals. The percussion & guitar in particular really drive a lot of these tracks, keeping everything from hitting any duller points. It does feel like a sort of underrated new wave gem, and while I can understand bouncing off of this album early if “Perfect Skin”, “Speedboat” & “Down on Mission Street” are just a little too lyrically confusing or Dylan-y for one’s tastes, if you can get to Forest Fire & beyond, the whole album elevates to a really tight 35 minutes, and one that feels a lot more lived in than the empty room of the cover art would suggest. I definitely think it’s an album worth listening to before you die, and I think it’s a strong 5.
The Cult
3/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump down to a 3, even though I did enjoy a lot of this.
It’s just too safe, really. I appreciate an album that knows what genre it is, what strengths they have, and how to consistently execute it. Hard rock just requires a little more variety behind it, and unless you’re AC/DC and can get away with it in dazzling fashion like on “Highway to Hell”, it needs a bit more variety than what’s present here. I do like all of these tracks, don’t get me wrong, but as an album experience, the level of focus needed to enjoy this album is rather minimal, which is the same amount of focus put into the lyrics. They’re practically useless here, acting as a gateway for the vocals. The vocals are good, but Ian Astbury never really leaves his specific range, leaving each track just too similar by the halfway point of the album. The guitar & percussion work are good, but there’s such a minimal focus on extra flair (driven by Rick Rubin’s production choice to cut out every effect other than the wah-wah pedal) that each track feels a bit more devoid for ‘80s rock.
I mean, it really does just boil down to feeling “too safe” – if you’re not throwing a little more at the wall, all you’re doing is spinning the wheel. I’m not opposed to spinning the wheel, since not EVERYTHING has to feel reinvented, but if 90% of your album is spinning the wheel at the same pace without even a slower track involved (or a hyper-fast one), then you’ve accidentally just made a Merry-Go-Round. It’s a fun ride, but if you’re on a merry-go-round for too long, the appeal will fade, and unfortunately, it fades here to the point of dropping down to a 3. It has all the potential in the world; cut a few tracks, be a little riskier here & there, or just do literally anything different, and it’d probably be a strong 4. It just doesn’t do enough to make itself feel like a classic, and ultimately, it doesn’t do anything special enough to feel like it’s worth being on the list. I did enjoy it, but… yeah, it’s just a 3. A higher 3, mind you, but just a 3.
The Black Crowes
5/5
Honestly, it’s a 10.
The only thing I really knew about the Black Crowes going into this was the name of their lead singer, Chris Robinson, due to the Jeopardy cluewriters having a weird affinity for the guy. I didn’t know what genre they were in (though rock seemed like a safe guess), & I just assumed they might’ve been a popular-ish ‘90s band that made for decent trivia fodder. I did not fucking expect the best ZZ Top album I’ve ever heard. Hell, they kinda mogged both the ZZ Top albums on the list, at least for my tastes. I think it’s one of the very best blues rock albums we’ve gotten so far.
With the last album we got, I did some big analogy about spinning the wheel as opposed to reinventing it, yet trying not to keep such a pace on the wheel that it feels like a stale merry-go-round. This album, by comparison, feels like a fucking roller coaster; it’s not reinventing the wheel in terms of aggressive blues rock with a harder tone in the guitars, but it’s taking that energy and naturally ramping it up in a way that just feels extremely energetic. These tracks build up slowly & then release with big guitar solos & punchy drums that feel earned, feel patient, and feel cathartic. When you look at the surrounding grunge of the era, a lot of the tracks are constantly at that higher level throughout, making the times when they elevate feel less effective. With this album, every time it elevates just FEELS strong as hell, never once feeling overdone or tired. Chris’ vocals lend to that nicely; he’s got a great control of the emotion in his voice, knowing when to add the extra grit to really sell the faster portions of each track, and when to pull it back in its softer, more acoustic moments. His ability to push & pull with the same intensity as the band keeps everything in sync, and just elevates the whole album itself even further.
There’s a handful of standout tracks here. “Seeing Things” swirls up and finds an almost Aretha-esque energy to it, with Chris’ vocals feeling passionate in their delivery. There’s the Otis Redding cover (“Hard to Handle”) which I thought was just fucking incredible, and the surprisingly well-written “She Talks to Angels”. Anticipation of death in that manner feels haunting, & even with the way the soundscape just swirls through the whole time, it never really loses focus on the storytelling as the key to the track. I really liked the church-inspired ending of “Stare It Cold”; the only thing missing to tie it all together is just a choir there to respond.
This was recorded at the tail end of 1989, releasing in early 1990, and I would say it’s a hell of a way to ring in the decade by having an album with absolutely no trace of pre-programmed drum machines on it. It must’ve felt fresh for the time & I think it’s aged pretty well into today. It’s 45 minutes, yes, but the way this album paces each track makes it feel longer than it is, in a good way. It allows the digestion of every soundscape, it makes every drum hit that much more potent to stomp your foot or bop your head to, and it makes the guitar solos really stick out when they do. Combine that with some well-written tracks & some pretty well-delivered vocals, along with a sort of infectious energy that you can’t really teach, and you just get one hell of an album. I feel ignorant for not biting the bullet every time Jeopardy asks about these guys, because they were onto something. I think this is an easy, easy 10, and much like Depeche Mode’s “Violator”, one of the first albums that can truly mark the start of the 1990s. Just stellar stuff.
Joe Ely
4/5
I’m at a 4.
I didn’t have a lot of hope after the first 5 tracks of this album – only two of the tracks had really clicked (“Boxcars” & “Jericho”), neither of which were written by Joe Ely himself, but his bandmates instead. “Cornbread Moon” is a fun listen & a good instrumental tonesetter, but I think it’s a little loose lyrically. “Because of the Wind” felt like it was stalling for time on what’s already a pretty stretchy metaphor. “Tonight I Think I'm Gonna Go Downtown” just felt too ambiguously written to capture the intent / mood of the track. Batting at 40% had me a rather middling 3 through the first half.
Thankfully, the second half of this album really picks up the pace, simply by going back to basics on the imagery & vibes, evoking much more of the ‘80s era of country (George Strait, Randy Travis, etc) in its production style, though with a little bit of bombast that’s slightly reminiscent of some rock / punk bands of the time. If you want a weird fun fact, Joe Ely did some of the backing vocals on “Should I Stay Or Should I Go” by The Clash, & even toured with them a few times. That explains some of the genre-blending here, & it’s done pretty well in the back half of the album, even letting the occasionally baffling choice of an accordion to shine. The songwriting tightens up, his vocals get looser (in a good way), and the whole thing just feels more confident. There’s not a track I’d skip in the back half of the album; I might trim down “West Texas Waltz” by a minute or so, but overall, I’d say the final tracks here elevate this album up to a pretty competent 4.
It does make me wonder though; why Joe Ely? By all accounts, he didn’t seem as successful as his peers at the time, & it doesn’t seem like he’s very remembered. I’m glad this is on the list, to throw him & his legacy a bone, but if this is here, why not also throw in some other ‘80s contemporaries in the country space, to really represent this era of the genre better? There’s gotta be at least one George Strait album worth throwing on here, right? Regardless, I did happen to enjoy it, and I’m glad it recovered from a totally fine start to become an album that is worth hearing out before you die. Sure, it might not click, but this is a good representation of the midpoint between mid ‘70s and early ‘80s country, while foreshadowing a lot of the genre-mixing to come. It’s a fun listen, it’s worth your time, and it’s a very solid 4.
Hot Chip
5/5
I’m higher than a 5, but I don’t think I’m QUITE at a 10. I’m shockingly close though.
I had a feeling this would be a little more unique than “synthpop” of the early 2010s would describe, but I wasn’t expecting to feel that enthralled by all of the tracks here. This is masterfully done stuff, updating the production styles of the 1980s with more modernized synths, blending them with a touch of William Orbit-esque electronica, & coating them in a similar sort of paint as MGMT. All together, it creates an eclectic type of indie rock that I’ve never really heard come out of this era, & while some may dismiss it as overly derivative, I think it’s just catchy as a motherfucker, man. I dreaded this album’s length going into it, but the way each soundscape builds up & naturally progresses over time makes these tracks fly by far quicker than expected, making the 57 minute runtime here feel half as long.
A lot of that comes down to two things: really strong instrumentation (duh), & a really good vocal performance, complimented by some well-written lyrics across the board here. These aren’t flowery, thankfully; they’re just there to capture the mood, with some occasionally really strong lines that just sell the track as fruitfully as possible. “Ends of the Earth”, for example, has the line “I just want you to feel the belief of a man”, and that struck me REALLY nicely. Not the touch, not the love, not anything else – just the BELIEF alone should be enough of a plea to bring back this relationship, and it sells the slightly somber & desperate tone of the track just as much as the synths do. This album is scattered with lines like that, but this album works just as well if you don’t catch a single one of them, mostly because the instrumentals are THAT damn good.
Granted, I wouldn’t say this album has one specific super standout track (though “Don’t Deny Your Heart” comes damn close), & I do think that lack of a really timeless track that stands on its own merits, without feeling like a throwback, is what’s keeping me from going at a full blown 10 here. It makes up for that by being at a really consistently high bar of quality, and one that it never goes lower than an inch from. Believe me, this is a great album. I think it’s the only album where comparisons to Portal 2, Fatboy Slim, William Orbit, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Gloria Estefan, the Pet Shop Boys, Justin Timberlake, Prince, Capital Cities, the Beatles, Porter Robinson, Lionel Richie, Hall & Oates, the Police & Steely Dan are somehow all warranted at the same time.
Yes, I did somehow write down references to all of those artists while listening, which isn’t really doing wonders for the whole “derivative” thing, but I think it says something that they were able to capture all of those vibes at points throughout the album. It’s got great variety behind it, and that variety keeps the album a lot fresher than it has any right to be. I think it’s wonderfully produced, composed & performed. I’m really glad it’s on the list, because I don’t think I would’ve ever found it otherwise. It’s certainly higher than a 5, and hell, maybe one day, one of these tracks will feel “timeless” enough to me to bump it up to a 10. I really, really enjoyed this one.
Echo And The Bunnymen
2/5
I’m at a 2.5; I’d prefer to keep it there, but I’ll bump it down to a 2 on account of me being utterly desperately bored by the end of it.
Here’s the good news: I think there's only one actively bad track in "Happy Death Men". Here’s the bad news: there is one actively good track in “Pride”, and I would maybe extend that out to 3 at most, with “Stars Are Stars” & the title track loosely clicking to my ears. The other 8 tracks on this album are… well, I genuinely don’t remember a damn thing about them other than that they sounded kinda nice. I have notes I wrote while listening, sure, but most of those notes end with “that was OK” or “that was alright” or “it sounds good but it just never hooked me”, or some variation of words that sugarcoats what I was trying to avoid feeling throughout this album: bored. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s THAT boring, but… it does get pretty damn boring by the end. This album hits a quota of “it sounds kinda nice” on every single track, and just coasts on that quota for the most part, never elevating at all. Even in the tracks themselves, there’s a painful amount of repetition to the instrumentals that sticks more and more the longer you listen to it. It doesn’t help that a lot of these tracks are just way, way too loosely written, trying to capture vibes that sort of exist, yet never really gather the imagery to feel anywhere near as compelling as they want it to be.
It’s frustrating, because I think “Ocean Rain” IS compelling, and while I’m willing to give some leeway on account of this being a debut album, this just doesn’t fucking do anything to stick out. Instrumentally, I can praise “Ocean Rain” for having a lot of musical prescience & sounding way ahead of 1984 at points, but this album is only loosely ahead of its time, slowly reverting back from the R.E.M. vibes it has early on to typical late ‘70s / early ‘80s post-punk fare, with just a touch of instrumental work that at least feels a little unique. If the lyrics aren’t hitting, the instrumentals feel stale, and the vocal work just sort of bounces off for the vast majority of an already kinda long 38 minutes, then I can’t in good faith bump this up to a 3. I don’t think it’s as low as a 2, but this album genuinely never hits a higher gear to justify it, no matter how much I’m trying to find something. I don’t think it’s THAT bad in terms of individual tracks, but as one collective album, it just drags on. The ceiling is a 3, but I’m stuck on a 2, and one that I can honestly say might not be worth being on the list.
P.S.: Maybe I should’ve just listened without regard for the lyrics, but that’s just against all of my musical sensibilities. Besides, I still think that for as nice as the instrumentals feel, that sense of stale repetition would’ve still bitten at me deeply. I really just didn’t vibe with it, man. My first 2 since “Maverick A Strike” in November. Alas.
Elliott Smith
5/5
It’s a 5. Probably a bit higher.
It’s just a very humanizing album, that’s all. We’re all trying out here, but we all fuck up, we all feel lonely, we all need some friends, and we all just need to acknowledge that those feelings are normal. Those things DO happen, and you’re not wrong or different for having experienced them. You are human for having gone through it. Music is often a fun escapism, but music that reflects such an earnest shadow back at its listener can be really effective when done right, and this album does it VERY well. The lyricism here is just really strong; I can’t really go track-by-track with it on account of a lot of it hitting closer to home than I’d care to admit, but there’s a LOT of really good, biting & brutally honest lines here that clicked with me well.
It also helps that this album’s recording / production feels so homely. There’s nothing overproduced here, nor is there any kind of CD-era fluff or flair. It’s mostly his guitar, his voice & some percussion, and whatever extras arrive with them, they never really overshadow that simple base. Even in his vocals, they don’t feel like they were recorded in a studio, creating a vibe around the whole album that adds to how relatable it all feels. I think it’s an album where the music mostly speaks for itself. It’s certainly one where I can’t type anything more about it, because it did just hit that close to my own thoughts at times. I’m very glad it’s on the list, I think it’s beyond deserving of the acclaim it gets, and I think it’s a very easy 5, if not higher. Just a great album.
P.S.: I didn’t realize Chris Elliott died via a presumed suicide in 2003 until I finished the album, which I suppose is a testament to his songwriting abilities. Sure, a lot of the demons he sang about here may have piled up & contributed to his death in some way, but this isn’t an album defined or enhanced by it. It’s an album to take from, to try and feel the struggles he so vividly goes through on each track, digest those feelings, and then do your best to just… lift yourself up & live on afterward. That’s all you can try to do. It’s a tragedy that Chris couldn’t.
Pink Floyd
5/5
It’s something higher than a 5, though I’m personally not quite at a 10.
I’ve never heard this album in full. I’ve never even gone out of my way to look up a track from the album. It just seemed like a monolith that I was always too scared to tackle, on account of the near-universal acclaim. Of course, it’s inescapable. Every track here had something I had heard before, whether it be from SiIvaGunner rips, online edits, or just catching them occasionally over the years on the radio. As a full project though, I’m stunned at just how coherently it all flows together, with lots of audio callbacks throughout. This feels more akin to an audio drama as opposed to an album, but the sound design is the glue that keeps it all together. The instrumentals feel as potent (if not moreso) than the vocals & lyrics, which are already really well-written & performed. “Time”, “Money” & “Us and Them” in particular are the obvious lyrical standouts, but they also contain fantastic instrumental sections that overshadow those lyrics. I don’t even have to say anything else about “The Great Gig in the Sky” as a track – it’s just that good on its own.
Ironically enough, since it’s such a strongly flowing 43 minutes, I find it hard to really focus on this as a track-by-track album and just more of a 43 minute experience. In a weird way, that might be why I’m not at a 10 with it? Part of that is because I just don’t think it’s as good as “Wish You Were Here” & arguably not as good as “The Wall”, which both feel like equal or better Pink Floyd albums to me. Of course, comparing any of these 3 albums to each other is like picking between 3 different gold watches – there’s literally not a wrong answer. However, as a fully connected album experience, I found myself… not “unable” to catch the vibes, but I think on a first pass, I was too intent on trying to “get” the album as opposed to naturally letting them come to me. That might just be the overwhelming expectations I set for myself going in, and I’ll probably be a lot looser on future listens (because it’s certainly good enough to warrant many more).
Of course, there’s not a “correct” answer for how to interpret Dark Side of the Moon. It just comes to you, and while the intent of a life from start to finish is there, everyone has their own way they digest this album. That’s part of the prism of the album cover. For me, I think I was expecting some grand magnum opus far ahead of its time that influenced everything for years to come (and it honestly probably is), but ultimately, what I think I’ve ended up listening to is just a fantastically flowing set of tracks (“just” doing some heavy lifting here). For better or worse, I’m just not as totally blown away as I thought I would be, like I have been at the end of some other albums on the list, and I think that’s where I’m holding myself back from a 10. As it stands though, it is easily deserving of its acclaim, and it’s probably a top 15 album of the 1970s, bare minimum. It never once falters, it never finds a bad track, it never hits a lull point – maybe a bit self-indulgent at points with some solos or whatever, but the entire experience flies by brilliantly. I think anything lower than a 4 is criminal, and I’m certainly still higher than a 5 on a first pass. I’m glad to finally have listened to it, and I really want to listen to it more.
Randy Newman
3/5
I’m stuck on a 3, though I really do think it's worth listening to.
I appreciate the attempts at satire on this album; loosely, Randy Newman’s messaging & political stances come through well, even if the actual messaging used can range from batshit methodology (never let the Toy Story guy drop the N word with a hard R ever again, please) to decently earnest pleading. I think Randy Newman tackles the subject matter on these tracks with a decent amount of tact for the time, when white southern audiences were still legitimately speaking like this, for better or for worse.
However, satire is only effective to a certain point when you’re speaking to a primarily white audience – I think this album disregards the black perspective just a bit too much, with Randy ironically falling into the trap he satirized really well in the 3rd & 4th verse of “Rednecks”. I have to imagine some of that disregard is intentional to sell the southern ignorance that’s meant to be portrayed on these tracks. I just think there’s too much of it; take a track like “Louisiana 1927”, where the disregard & the ignorance is a driving factor. There’s no pushback on the character’s isolated perspective at all, leading to a disjointed focus that hides the messaging of the track a bit too deeply, especially since a lot of it earnestly focuses on the suffering of that flood. Randy Newman’s writing is sharp, yes, but it lacks the same direct wit as someone like John Prine, who often made himself unmistakably clear.
Past that, I just don’t think a lot of the tracks here are super musically compelling. “Sail Away” was able to get away with some softer, out of the way instrumentals, but this album’s orchestration lends itself to a sort of homogeneity, where every track ends up feeling the same despite a decently robust attempt to add some variety in styles. Since the lyricism doesn’t have the full bite to make up for it, and since Randy’s dryer vocals don’t feel as potent because of it, then the entire album suffers & feels longer as a result. This is only 33 minutes, but it doesn’t really fly by like that.
Hence, a 3. Not a bad one, and one I could fully understand going as high as a 5 for if the lyricism has that bite for someone else that it didn’t quite have for me, or if the instrumentals just click more nicely. However, it's also one where I fully understand why it has the rating it does. Randy Newman doesn’t get a pass for using the N-word like that, even with some decently guided intentions, but even if he had censored himself, I just think the rest of the politically-driven tracks on this album are comprised of observations that other people would satirize better & make much more potent & lasting tracks out of in the future. Sorry, Randy. It’s just a 3 for me. I do recommend it though.
3/5
It’s a 3.
I mean, if you’re looking for a decent Latin electronica album with some light jazz elements, this’ll fit some kind of bill. It’s not very compelling as a full 61 minutes though, mainly due to a complete stagnancy that emerges in the percussion, making the tracks kinda go on endlessly without a real sense of progression. It drags down the entire album, relegates it to unfocused background noise, and ultimately, it just kinda overstays its welcome, even on just a casual listen. I like a lot of the atmospheric vibes of these tracks, and I’m willing to put a lot of these into a shuffle on a playlist, but as an entire front to back album, it just grows really tiring. With a lot of lyrics unavailable online, it’s hard to catch any emotional vibes, so the soundscape has to speak for itself, and it just kinda stalls like a speech without a teleprompter.
Suba is the producer for Bebel Gilberto’s “Tanto Tempo”, which I really liked. He died due to smoke complications after successfully recovering that album from a fire. Tragic, really. I really liked his production work there, but I was concerned this album would feel more stale over the course of the whole thing, and sadly, I was proven right. This doesn’t have the same tightness & audience focus as “Tanto Tempo” does, nor did it have a familial expectation from its last name to put the very best possible foot forward. You could convince me it’s on the list as a matter of filling it out with some connections between albums, as opposed to an album that really gets here on its own merits, and that’s disappointing. I do think it’s not bad, and on a good day, as looser background noise, maybe it could go up to a 4, but it’d have to be an Ice Cube-esque good day, and I don’t see this album having one anytime soon. It’s just a 3.
Tina Turner
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
This is the most ‘80s-sounding ‘80s album there could possibly be. That is a dealbreaker for some people & a selling point for others; thankfully, I’m “others”. Yes, it’s absolutely over the top at points, overblown on occasion, deeply overdramatic at times, and constantly feels like it’s an instrumental break away from being in a Rocky training montage, but part of that weird adrenaline is what sells ‘80s production like this for me. Somehow, this feels like a blend of Prince’s pop sensibilities for the time with a touch of Depeche Mode involved, and with Tina Turner’s 45-year-old vocals belting out with a sort of feminine anger that can only be wrought upon from her history with Ike, the entire album’s bombast works hand in hand, where you can tell it’s really cheesy at points, yet done so earnestly you can’t help but play along with it.
Of course, “What’s Love Got To Do With It?” plays itself more subtly (& with the least subtle fake harmonica put to tape in the decade), and perhaps that’s why it was the biggest hit on the album. Either that, or it’s just legitimately that catchy with the slight reggae groove & it endured for that very reason. (It is that catchy, by the way.) Every other track hits that slight bombast, and while a lot of them do crash into a “really stale outro” wall because of it, the variety of the album saves it from ever feeling like a big issue, at least for me.
Ultimately, I do think the enjoyment here boils down to “how much do you like ‘80s production?”, and if you like it a lot, you’ll like this album a lot, even if it’s reliant on covers for the entire back half, due to the refreshed ‘80s bombast on them. “Let’s Stay Together” might be a little egregious, & “Help!” might be a bit overdramatic, but the rest work well. If you don’t like ‘80s production, you will probably not like this, since Tina Turner’s vocals will feel “wasted” on crummy drum machines that remind you too much of Sussudio & have you yearning for real pop/soul music like Aretha Franklin. (This is where I would recommend looking up Aretha Franklin’s 1980 cover of “What A Fool Believes”, which is incredible.) I think it’s a good album, and while it certainly has flaws, something about the weird adrenaline rush of ‘80s production just appeals to me in an infectious way. It’s a 4.5 that I’ll bump to a 5.
Orbital
3/5
It’s a 3.
I mean, I did genuinely like it. The issue with this album is that whenever it hits the peak of “vibes”, it just keeps going for twice as long as it needs to. Electronica is paced at its best when you can put the listener in a really nice spot, and then go to the finish, leaving them simultaneously satisfied & yet wanting more. The issue with actually giving them more is that, unless you’re a master of knowing how to really keep progression from feeling stale (like say, a Fatboy Slim, an 808 State, a DJ Shadow, etc), then it’s very easy to come down from that “really nice spot” and just feel sort of bored by the time any given track ends. That’s this album’s fatal flaw; it flows really nicely between tracks, with good starts & good finishes, but for the vast majority of the album, the actual middle/core of each track just goes on for far, far too long. This is an issue Orbital would largely avoid on “Snivilisation”, save for the last track there, so I guess they learned from this album’s faults.
Past that, I think it’s just a little too obviously dated to 1993; with a lot of these tracks lacking vocal samples & some of the same vibes as their UK house contemporaries, the MIDI synths here are left to carry the load, and they just don’t carry them that well. There’s some good melodies & moments here, occasionally feeling like a really good base for a Fatboy Slim instrumental, but without the extra heft & energy (see: rock elements) involved, they just never reach that higher point that electronica requires to put the listener into more of a fever pitch. As I said though, I liked it, and I do think a much more trimmed version of this album that cuts the fat would flow really nicely; if they could get this down to 40-45 minutes (probably possible), I really think it would be more warmly received. As it stands, it’s just at a 3 for me, and that’s probably its ceiling.
At least Worf was here. That was kinda neat.
Supertramp
5/5
I’m at a 10.
I mean, it’s just because “Crime of the Century” feels like a perfect closing track for the whole thing. The entire album’s crusade against authority with Rudy leading the way, only to realize that he was alone in that crusade the whole time, with everyone else upholding the status quo in their own ways… it’s really well done, and “Crime of the Century” as a sort of dour closing instrumental with a lot of weight behind it, built up brilliantly over the course of the album, makes its somber little sax solos & percussive drops feel like punches to the gut, in a good way.
I’ve only ever really known Supertramp as the “Goodbye Stranger” band, and I was fully expecting to see “Breakfast in America” on the list, given the acclaim it has. I’m very glad the book’s editors picked this one (although “Breakfast in America” could’ve probably still been in, I dunno), as it’s a really strong showcase of some Pink Floyd-esque prog rock. It’s not as conceptually tight as “Dark Side of the Moon” is, given the loose tissue connecting these tracks & a minimal amount of transitions, but it more than makes up for it with some clever writing & allegories. “Bloody Well Right” feels prescient as hell in a world of incompetent nepo babies & evil billionaires, and the monologue that starts “Crime of the Century” feels especially apt given some recent revelations about online astroturfing in a certain set of files. The strength of the writing just really makes each track that much better to me.
It also helps that these are fantastic instrumentals. Sure, there’s not a crazy sick / iconic guitar solo I can point to here (though there are some really good piano / sax solos), but this album knows when to lift up instrumentals & drop them perfectly, in a way where the pacing of each track feels more thought out & intentional at points. Getting that push/pull right in a way that gives the listener some heavy dopamine is something a lot of ‘70s albums have struggled with, and thankfully, it’s something that most prog bands seem to get right. In this case, with Supertramp, it’s honestly comparable to Yes’s “Close to the Edge”, though on a smaller & less bombastically technical scale. Ironically, this album is longer than “Close to the Edge”, but that’s just a testament to how good Yes is.
Of course, I’ve probably overanalyzed this album in my own way, as it never takes itself THAT seriously while listening, which is honestly another point toward the album. “Dark Side” isn’t pretentious or anything, not by a long shot, but that feeling of “art rock” never fully shakes itself, especially with the reputation it has. This is just really fun prog rock with loosely serious theming behind it, but relatively lighthearted tones throughout. When it wants to feel deeper, it knows how to reach that point musically; it never stays in it for too long to feel obnoxious, and it always lifts back up to touch the soul in just the right way.
Ultimately, I think it’s an album that knows what it wants to say & says it very well. I’m more inclined to enjoy things that feel definitive & answered, and perhaps that’s part of the reason while I feel more inclined to give this a 10 as opposed to Dark Side getting a “something above a 5”. Dark Side has a million different interpretations within its framework of a life well lived, but this album seems to have a pretty clear one: overreaching authority sucks, try to fight it the best you can, and even if you feel like you can’t truly win against it, someday, if everyone is listening & trying to fight it, maybe there’s hope to get it done in the future. Past that, it’s just a really fun 44 minutes, and I can’t say there’s a bad track here. The floor is a 3 if you just don’t like prog to begin with, but for me, it feels like a deserved 10. It just clicked with me really, really well. Thank goodness it’s on the list.
Lupe Fiasco
5/5
It’s a 5. Hell, it might be higher.
Putting aside the 12 minutes of practically bonus track filler that is “Outro”, that is a tight, TIGHT 60 minutes that never once misses a beat. Fantastic production across the board from everyone involved; a cavalcade of producers, really. Out of all the beats here, “Kick, Push” is probably the most ‘classic’, just by virtue of the song’s popularity, but I think the best beat is on “I Gotcha”. Something about the Neptunes’ production just clicked for me there. It’s a little overproduced, maybe, but something about the bombast of each track feels like a hallmark of this era of conscious rap, trying to blend the sophistication of the lyrics with appropriately ‘sophisticated’ production. It’s something that a lot of artists have maintained into the modern day, though with more electronica thrown into the mix. It’s a shame some of the lyricists haven’t quite kept up, but some of them are trying out here.
Obviously, beats are only half the album, and the other half belongs to Lupe’s lyrics & flow. I’ve only known Lupe Fiasco from his biggest hits, and those big hits undermine just how fucking good he is as a writer, my goodness. These are all cleverly written with some wordplay in spades, but they never stray too far into the realm of complexity to not get the core of the track & what he’s trying to say. The only time he gets a little too cute with it is on “Pressure”, but when you’re on a track with JAY-Z, you kinda have to match the energy. When he’s absolutely flowing, and the lyrics can match just how catchy that flow feels to listen to, it’s easy to enter a zen state where following along feels extremely simple. I think “Hurt Me Soul” might be my favorite one in terms of the lyrics, but every track here has at least one killer line that sums up the whole track nicely. I do think “The Instrumental” might be a little repetitive, but that’s part of the Linkin Park-esque charm of it all, somehow.
Ultimately, it’s such a densely composed album that I think it’d be tough to go through track by track & really dig into why this is as good as it is. It’s literally just an album you need to listen to understand, and even on a first pass, it feels like a hip-hop classic that my brain missed for whatever reason, even with “Kick, Push” being in my orbit for at least a decade. I’m kicking myself for not having listened to it (or any full Lupe album) until now, & I certainly need to go listen to “The Cool” at the very, very least. I think it’s an easy 5, if not a bit higher; honestly, if “Outro” wasn’t here, it could legitimately be a 10. It is THAT good. A dazzling debut record, a modern classic, and something you definitely should listen to before you die. I really, REALLY liked it.
The Dictators
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that, surprisingly, I’ll bump up to a 5.
I mean, there’s definitely flaws. I think “The Next Big Thing” feels a little bit vapid as an opener, since the album hasn’t really established its overall tone yet, so it feels like it’s trying to use a voice that doesn’t really work out of context. After that though, the weirdly intense shift on the cover of “I Got You Babe” that adds an awkwardly funny tone to the whole thing reveals this album’s modus operandi: it’s an album full of mockery. Granted, some of that mockery in & of itself has some tracks that aren’t as tactful as it could be; “Back to Africa” is a mockery of the “white savior” concept, but the lyrics read as almost fetish-y at times. I think the track works, but it’s not one you can really throw into a playlist nowadays. “Master Race Rock” has the baffling opening line about “picking a slave”, but it’s also a complete mockery of white supremacy & overt toxic masculinity, and that makes itself very clear by its final verses, so it doesn’t feel as painful.
After that though, the album glides a lot more, both instrumentally & without some of the earlier lyrical missteps. “Teengenerate” feels like a loose mockery of fake tough guy teenage angst, underlined by the usage of “heck” – some of the backing vocals give a Beach Boys vibe that helps the track. “California Sun” feels pretty earnest, honestly. Certainly a little goofy in the lyrics, and that Beach Boys comparison feels warranted again for the subject matter / verse repetition, but the guitar solos make it work. “Two Tub Man” is just weirdly chaotic yapping that reminds me of some old batshit insane ‘80s wrestling promos (certainly helped by the Verne Gagne mention), and I just admire the absurdity of it.
“Weekend” is genuinely just a good track with some loose Alice Cooper vibes to it; maybe one misstep with the “Beatin’ up the kids from Spain” line, but the whole track is full of drug-induced absurdities that I can look past it as a goofy overexaggeration. “(I Live For) Cars and Girls” is the biggest pisstake on the Beach Boys that the whole album has. The other tracks at least do them some justice by talking about something of substance, but it really is just a full blown lyrical mockery of their “Surfin’ USA” era of music. There’s a Zappa-esque quality to it, helped by the fact that they play the track itself totally straight, even pulling together some nice vocal harmonies to make it work.
All in all, I genuinely did enjoy it. It’s just a good bit of ‘dumb’ punk rock, & one that’s keenly self aware of that fact. Even with the early missteps, I can chalk it up to not really getting the vibe of the album in full & a different era of humor in 1975. It is punk rock, yes, but I don’t think it’s “punk rock” as the Sex Pistols & Ramones would later run with. This doesn’t have the same bite to it, yet somehow, I think it works all the same. The vocals aren’t super melodic, but they don’t have to be when the instrumentation genuinely holds up really well for the time. It’s a lot catchier than I expected, and that clear DNA of the Beach Boys & the Beatles is still influencing these tracks in a way that makes them feel appealing. Yeah, it’s dumb, but it’s the fun kind of dumb that I just fuck with. I think the floor is a 3 (or a 2 if those early lyrical missteps feel THAT bad), but for my tastes, but solely on its ‘dumb fun’ vibes, I’m feeling generous enough to bump this up to a 5. I’m glad it’s on the list.
Aerosmith
5/5
It’s something higher than a 5. I’m not quite at a 10 with it, but… hell, maybe someday.
I mean, look, everyone knows “Walk This Way” & “Sweet Emotion”. I can barely tell you what the latter is even about (it sure seems like a groupie issue though), and I can unfortunately tell you exactly what the former is about, but those tracks exist in perpetuity on the strength of either their choruses or their intros, feeling far ahead of 1975, unique for their era, & enduring all the same because of it. Yes, “Walk This Way” is juvenile as hell & it’s certainly a little awkward for a 26-year-old Steven Tyler to sing about high schoolers getting pussy but… that’s rock & roll for the era. Besides, let’s not act like there aren’t certain 26-year-old superstar singers right now asking about “house tours” & “getting wet at the thought of you” & all that. The purity test is dead, long live the purity test.
So, with those two tracks casting a monstrous shadow over the whole album, the rest of the tracks have to keep up, and thankfully, they all do. There’s not a misstep here to my mind, & they all hold up well. “Toys in the Attic” is about… something, but it just sounds like it kicks ass. “Uncle Salty” could play the child neglect topic with a bit more tact & emotion other than an ‘aww, that sucks’ kinda vibe, but I think the blues-y instrumental sells the sad tones well. “Adam’s Apple” is a fellatio-driven retelling of Genesis, & the instrumental energy drives the track really, really well. Probably the big standout of the first half that isn’t “Walk This Way”. “Big Ten Inch Record” might be some people’s breaking point, but for 2026, completely goofy double entendres are all the rage, so it’s somehow aged pretty well, especially since it’s a cover from *1952*. Besides, we already ripped away all pretense when Da Vinci’s Notebook dropped “Enormous Penis” in 2002. The purity test is dead, long live the purity test.
“No More No More” has a really fun structure – the lyrics do feel like they’re not super cohesive, implying cheating on the road at the same time as having a loving wife & home life, but apparently, it’s just a smorgasbord of road stories Steven Tyler threw together and called a track. The guitar is the star of the show here anyway, with Joe Perry absolutely fucking ripping at the end. The whole thing feels loosely like a Boston track, and that’s a big compliment. “Round and Round” is Aerosmith doing a metal track about a struggling relationship & the inability to cope with all the changes going on, and while it spams the chorus & goes a touch too long, I just fucking love the vibe of it all. “You See Me Crying” is one hell of a closer, feeling like a progenitor of all the ‘80s hard rock ballads to come (looking at Bon Jovi in particular) whilst foreshadowing Aerosmith’s own biggest hit roughly 20 years down the line. The scale & scope of it all is just really impressive, especially for a band that roughly 20 minutes beforehand were singing about “kitties in the middle” & doing a ragtime track about a 10-inch… record. The purity test is dead, long live the purity test.
Ultimately, the whole thing just kicks ass, and if you can’t really feel that after listening to it, I don’t know what to tell you. Go have some fun out there, maybe. I do think the vast majority of my compliments being about the instrumentals & less about the actual substance of each track is what’s holding me back from being like “wow, holy shit, what a 10”, but it’s certainly higher than a 5. Between this album & “Pump”, I think I really, really like Aerosmith. We have one more album of theirs after this, “Rocks”, which I’ve genuinely never heard of, but it also has a spot in the Rolling Stone 500. I can only hope that one kicks as much ass as this does, and as far as this goes, this is a super, super easy 5, and certainly higher.
Marianne Faithfull
4/5
I’m at a 4.
It did take me a little bit to really get into the album; I thought “Broken English” was sort of a catchy, if one-note ‘first minute is the whole song’ type of opener, even despite the pretty killer bassline. “Witches Song” felt a little better, but the lyrics felt strange & the instrumental progression didn’t really hit like that. With an unremarkably fine start through the first two tracks, I had a real fear it would stay at that pace for the rest of the album.
Thankfully, I think this album finds a bit more focus by “Brain Drain”, just because it’s such a straightforward track about what drugs can do to a person, & with the worn tone in her vocals reflecting that exact struggle she went through, it just clicked really nicely. I’m surprised it has the second least plays of any track on the album on Spotify. “Guilt” got really funky by the end of it, and while it does feel like a track centered more around greed & desire than guilt, I think the track just really clicked for me, with Steve Winwood’s keyboard work giving the track some bite that Marianne’s vocals matched. “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan” is a pretty damn good cover, and one that probably relates to her struggles well, though I can’t help but think it needed a solo or something to shake the instrumental up just a little bit.
There’s a small misstep to my ears with “What’s the Hurry”, though it’s not because it’s a bad track; it just doesn’t really do enough to stick out more memorably. The instrumental has a good tempo, the lyrics are fine, but there’s just something missing. I dunno what though. The final two tracks recover quickly: “Working Class Hero” is a fantastic cover, and the slow anger that builds up in Marianne’s voice over the course of the track really sells the lyrics. I’ve never heard John Lennon’s original version, but we’ll get to it whenever we get “John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band” down the line.
I’m going to make the bold claim that “Why D’Ya Do It” is a great closing track – not because it’s the most fitting track to end on, but because it’s so funny in its subject matter (a valid crashout over a cheating husband, yet done in such a Karen-y obnoxious way you can’t really blame the guy for cheating to begin with) & so fucking funny in the lyricism ("Every time I see your dick, I see her cunt in my bed" feels Shakespearean), that I just think any track that could’ve followed it would’ve been overshadowed. You just kinda have to end on that, really.
With just 5 of the 8 tracks really clicking at a deeper level for me, yet with no bad tracks overall, I’m pretty safe with a 4 here. I think the floor is a competent 3, so I sort of understand the 2.89 on the site, but at the same time, when you have the second highest review here saying that it “sucks on a visceral level” & calling it an “awful, godforsaken wreck”, I just can’t help but see the average score as a result of hyperbolic underrating. It’s not THAT fucking bad, people. While I can’t say with my whole chest that it NEEDS to be on the list, I’m not gonna call for its removal anytime soon. I enjoyed it, and I think it’s a pretty solid 4.
The Darkness
5/5
It’s a 10.
I mean, they just fucking killed it, what more do you want me to say? I thought glam rock like this passed away in the ‘90s, and was long dead by 2003 with the garage rock revival, but this is PURE glam rock, done as close to perfectly as you can do it, updating the ‘80s sound with a little bit less drum machine & a lot more fucking punch behind it. Their guitar solos sound like the synth solo on “Jump” half the time, they’re as juvenile as Aerosmith or Bon Jovi, they’ve got the energy of AC/DC or Motorhead, & they’ve got the falsetto of a Freddie Mercury undergoing puberty. Combine all of that with a technical proficiency reminiscent of Van Halen or even some prog rock bands like Genesis, Yes, or Rush, & somehow, someway, the cavalcade of influences & styles that are cherrypicked from history to create this album paint one of the most cohesively entertaining debut albums in the genre I’ve ever heard.
That’s about it, really – I can’t write paragraphs about this because it’s an album where you just have to fucking feel it, and when you feel it, you’ll know exactly how goddamn good it is. I got as in sync with these guys as I’ve gotten with any of the other high-intensity glam rock/grunge/metal bands we’ve gotten, so I loved everything about it, including a very welcome rediscovery of “I Believe in a Thing Called Love” for myself. I’ve been looking for THAT track for years & years, and I could never find it because I always thought it was an ‘80s song. It’s gonna feel great to finally throw that into my playlists, goodness. It’s a super, super easy 10, and I’m very glad it’s on the list.
Aerosmith
5/5
I’m at a 5, although I do think this might be the “safest” of the 3 Aerosmith albums on the list.
I dunno, the cheesy ‘80s vibes of “Pump” & the bigger energy on “Toys in the Attic” just clicked with my sensibilities more. That’s not to say this is bad at all – it’s still really, really good, but it does feel like the drug use present while making this album somehow left it a little bit sterile. I think the lyrical quality is kinda close to “Toys in the Attic” (though not as strong), but Steven Tyler’s vocals don’t come in with the same battering ram energy, feeling more focused, but less excitably stunning. Instrumentally, I think the same applies; a lot of the bombast of “Toys in the Attic” isn’t quite here (or at least, not as constantly present in a ‘holy shit’ way), but they’re still as technically sound as they could be. This album feels like it relies a little more on the vibes as opposed to everything else, and I never got quite as into the vibes as I think they wanted me to get.
That’s not to say there aren’t standout tracks: “Back in the Saddle” is an awesome opener, “Rats in the Cellar” has all of the bombast I was looking for, & “Nobody’s Fault” feels like a deeply underrated track. Besides those 3, I think the rest all range from good to great, though never elevating to something higher. “Home Tonight” in particular feels a little too on-the-nose as an album closer, almost as if it’s slightly phoned in. I do like the entire album, but I just never got THAT much higher, the same way I did with “Pump” & “Toys in the Attic”.
It’s still a 5, but it’s the “safest” 5 of the 3 Aerosmith albums on the list. I don’t personally hear any kind of comparison to “Toys in the Attic” in terms of a top to bottom project, and I’ll be super frank in saying that if we had gotten this first, I would’ve given “Toys in the Attic” a straight 10. It probably still deserves it, honestly. Regardless of that, this is still Aerosmith near their peak, and this is still a great 34 minutes that deserves some high praise. I think the floor here is a 4, but my ceiling is right at a 5, and not anything higher. It’s enjoyable as hell, I’m glad it’s on the list, it does deserve to be heard before you die, and I’m gonna throw every track here into my big playlist. Pretty good stuff, even if it didn’t personally click quite as much.
Eric Clapton
3/5
Individually, I’d say the sum of these tracks would earn this album a 4. As a complete front to back experience, it is so dreadfully similar throughout I feel inclined to give this a 3.
Eric Clapton is a gigantic asshole. We all know this. As I’ve said though, good music can be made by gigantic assholes, and this is, for the most part, good music. Unlike his efforts with Derek & The Dominoes, John Mayall, or Cream, though, this is… I mean, it’s just lacking in any fucking variety whatsoever, my god. I do like every track here, but we’re rating ALBUMS here, not individual tracks, and whoever on Eric Clapton’s team decided this album should entirely be slow, downtempo blues needs to be shot out of a fucking cannon. There’s no dazzling guitar solos to save his racist skin here, trading them out for lots of slower, stranger covers of little known blues songs (I mean, “Motherless Children” is just such a baffling topic to write a song about, you know?), and a few of his own compositions, some of which do try to boost the energy up a bit, but never really succeeding, except for *maybe* “Let It Grow”.
I mean, I kinda just lost focus of the album after “Let It Grow”, with the final 2 tracks feeling nice, but with no fanfare or actual album structure behind them. “Mainline Florida” feels like it has its ending thrown into the middle of the track and then just sort of fizzles into a fadeout to close the entire album out, and it just feels like a microcosm of the entire album’s entirely too safe approach. In shuffle, all of these tracks would hit nicely, and I do think if you were to sum them up, this album would be at a 4 in isolation. As a total group though, it’s equivalent to having too much candy directly after trick-or-treating; how many times is a fucking KitKat bar going to feel satisfying after you’ve eaten 8 of them in a row? The longer this album goes, and the more tracks there are that follow the same downtempo formula with soft, unremarkable (yet totally fine) vocals from Eric, the less they feel satisfying, until you’re kinda just over it.
Hence, a 3. I guess more of a 3.5 bumped down to a 3, but still. It’s not because Eric Clapton does bad here at all; I really do think all of these tracks are good, even with him naturally butchering part of the political message of “I Shot The Sheriff”. It’s just because the album is the same fucking thing for 39 minutes, even with every attempt to disguise that. I do wish it had some extra variety to maybe justify a super loose bump up to a 4, but it doesn’t earn one at all. It is the weakest thing we’ve gotten with Eric Clapton involved (though still good), and if we’re lucky, it’ll be the last. Maybe he’ll sneak in some guest appearance on another ‘70s album somewhere, but this is the final album we’ll get on the list with Eric Clapton as a member of a band or as the main artist. I do think he’s an asshole, but I do think he makes good music, and his place in that sense of the musical canon is decently established. I wouldn’t have given those other 3 albums a 5 if I didn’t like them. Overall, an 18/20 is pretty strong. Good job, asshole.
Missy Elliott
4/5
I’m at a 4.
Missy Elliott’s debut, and honestly? A pretty damn good debut. Timbaland’s production is really on point here, occasionally jumping ahead about 5 years in ways that feels really ahead of everyone else in 1997, most apparent on “Beep Me 911”, which is probably my favorite track here. Missy’s rap flow is just as good as it was on “Under Construction”, as is her singing voice, and she never puts in a bad performance.
Her lyricism hasn’t quite caught up though, and between that & the album losing a lot of its steam after “Izzy Izzy Ahh”, that’s where I’m stuck at a 4. This album does roll really nicely through its first 12 tracks, but once “Friendly Skies”, “Best Friends” & “Don’t Be Comin’” kinda hit a one-note topic for all of their runtimes, along with “Izzy Izzy Ahh” rehashing some of the “Me & Timbaland are REALLY good together!” topics that were already touched on earlier in the album, the cracks fully start to come in with “Why You Hurt Me”. I do think it’s a good track, but it’s an unbefitting track, and one that feels needlessly mean for an album centered around black female empowerment. I understand warning the ladies not to get too promiscuous to the point where it hurts your image, but affirming it by calling Loosie Booty an “ugly bitch”, along with the ‘chicken’ & ‘cotton-pickin’ lines feels like a direct antithesis to everything Missy has preached about on the album to that point, even if it’s just used as shock value for emphasis. It derails the whole thing to me.
“I’m Talkin’” is… well, it’s just “Izzy Izzy Ahh” again, really, and nowhere near as catchy. It’s the same thing that plagued Queen Latifah’s debut album where the entire track is just about herself, and we’ve kinda done that already. If you have to sing “I’m such a good rapper” in your chorus, it feels a little off, you know? “Gettaway” is fine, but none of the 3 verses really connect at all, making the track feel incomplete. Since it’s the closing track of the album, it’s a really weak way to finish off the whole thing, especially with Busta Rhymes talking about a “whole emotional rollercoaster” right after.
If this album had ended at “Izzy Izzy Ahh”, or even ended on “I’m Talkin’” with all the shoutouts at the end, I might be inclined to look past the slow stumble and bump this up to a 5, but I can’t do it in good faith. I think it’s still worth listening to, don’t get me wrong, but it is frustrating that this got hit with the CD bloat curse. It’s certainly influential, and deserves a lot of the awards it got for its individual tracks, but there’s a reason the album dwindles in plays on Spotify the longer it goes – the later tracks are just that much weaker. It’s still definitely a 4, entirely on the strength of the first 12 tracks, but that’s kinda where the ceiling sits. It just doesn’t finish satisfyingly as a full album, even when it gets 80% of the way there. I did enjoy it though, and I’ll definitely add a lot of these to my big playlist. Really fun stuff, for the most part. Just a 4 though.
Portishead
5/5
I think I’m higher than a 5. I might be at a 10 on another re-listen or two.
“Vespertine” is about the carnal feelings of love. “The Downward Spiral” is about the carnal feelings of depression. This album is about the carnal feelings of anxiety, panic & paranoia. This album feels like it’s tackling the self-doubt that consumed the band over the course of their 11-year hiatus, and applying it to a more human condition. It feels like every track here is loosely connected; whether it’s in a plot-driven framework or not, I can’t say, but the general thematics of tension, the inability to love one’s self, and yet the desire to persevere despite the anxiety causing deep internal struggles… it’s all very human, in a way that only a few albums so far have captured. You'll need headphones in to capture it, but it's there.
I will say though; it’s not really in the lyricism. It’s definitely there, and it’s very well written, but it’s more so to set up the mood that the instrumentals deliver on, as well as Beth Gibbons’ more Bjork-inspired vocals. The lyricism is sparse, letting the pulse of the synths & percussion & reverb/effect heavy guitar / other instruments sell the anxiety of the album more. I think it fully exposes itself & its intentionality around the 4 minute mark of “We Carry On” – there’s a natural panic that emerges, and while I do think it’s a little hard to focus on her vocals & lyrics because of it, that oddly enhances the song further. Her vocals carry a determination to keep pushing forward, but it’s counteracted by the sort of machine gun percussion & militaristic tone sort of forcing her to push forward, whether she had the determination or not. It makes the struggle of the track feel more real. That balance between emotion & intention, where desire & the circumstances surrounding you might not line up, is something this album captures really nicely, and it’s where all of the anxiety stems from.
Ironically, the top review on this site nails the tone of the album correctly, but they gave the album a 1. I don’t know whether it’s because they didn’t like the music, or if it was too close of a reflection to want to give it a higher number out of… I dunno, some other circumstance. I think this album being the soundtrack to anxiety is its perfect strength, and that’s why I’m currently at something higher than a 5. I love albums that can capture specific moods so well, or capture the human spirit in a way that feels deeper past the music. Obviously, I won’t blame anyone for dismissing this as trite electronica that it thinks it’s bigger than itself in a super artsy sense, but for my tastes, I just happened to really fucking dig it. Between this and “Dummy”, consider me a fan. Really, really good stuff.
Steely Dan
5/5
I’m at a 5.
I mean, it’s Steely Dan, what am I supposed to say? If you like “Can’t Buy A Thrill” & “Countdown to Ecstasy” (or if you’ve gotten “Aja” by now, unlike us), you’ll enjoy this. All my same praises apply here, with Donald Fagen’s vocals especially sounding even more refined here, and the band’s technical skill being showcased a bit more. I don’t think it’s got the same consistent stream of hit after hit like “Can’t Buy A Thrill” does, but this is still a super fun album in its own right. As with “Can’t Buy A Thrill”, I really have no complaints, and only nitpicks; I think the lyricism isn’t quite as tight as I remember from the band (though still pretty good), and I think it could’ve had a more definitive closing track than “Monkey in Your Soul”, which doesn’t really feel like it wraps up the album satisfyingly. It’s a good track, but it feels like it’s building to something more.
The length is surprising here; at just 34 minutes, it’s the shortest one on the list, and I do think that makes the quality / pace of the album suffer just a little bit, in a way that’s almost too fast to appreciate the variety the album is going for. I’m not saying they had to pad to make it 40-ish minutes, but I think just a little bit more room to explore some solos & soundscapes further would give each track a little more weight to appreciate them with. All in all though, I’m splitting hairs – this is another great Steely Dan album, and I think it’s about on par with “Countdown to Ecstasy”. I’m glad it’s on the list, and I really, REALLY cannot wait to get Aja at some point over the final 310 albums. Hopefully that comes sooner than later, but as far as this album goes, it’s a very nice 5.
Sigur Rós
5/5
I’m at a 10.
Something about Icelandic production really works, huh? The lyricism here is fantastically vivid when translated, giving each track the framework needed to really understand the emotional pull of each track, but even without them… I mean, it’s just a brilliantly produced album. It’s cinematic in scope, left for the imagination to paint a lot of the picture that the lyrics only loosely carry. They’re like a screenwriter’s notes for the director to try and make sense of, with the soundscape being the scenery in which to film in. It’s very hard to describe this album’s impact, because ultimately, everyone will be painting different scenes out of these lyrics, yet ones that are all vivid in the same way. A few tracks are more direct, namely the title track. It’s a lamentation over the band’s first album being a critical / commercial failure, yet looking at the bright side of life with it. They treated it as a good beginning, and they certainly lived up to their vow to make something better for this, their second album.
I have to give credit where it’s due to the vocals here; Jonsi Birgisson does a remarkable job of letting the vocals guide the direction of each track, & they feel equally as important as all of the orchestration & guitar / synth work that permeates this album. It’s very hard to describe how easily it all comes together, because it’s so flawlessly done that it just passes by without thinking too deeply about it. This whole album is entrancing in that sense; 10 minute pieces can flash by in an instant, yet each individual segment of each track feels like an adventure to explore or a glimmer of a lifetime one won’t experience. It genuinely sounds like how a dream feels, except without the waning memory that so often happens when you wake up.
I think the most fascinating piece here is “Olsen Olsen”, which is a track sung entirely in Fake Icelandic. Bjork used the same “language” on one of her albums, but only sparingly & in transitional phases, like missing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Here, since it’s the entire track, it’s fully up to the brain to fill in the gaps, and I think people’s responses to that track in particular will express the full range of the album. At one point, I wrote down that it sounded like the dopamine hit of watching the sunset over a horizon on a summer day, with a wistful energy that tries to capture a magic that one rarely feels as they get older. The crowd bustling around at the end just felt like everyone’s shared experience ending as day turned to night. Of course, that’s just my take on it.
That track encapsulates the whole album, and I think it’s a remarkably rewarding one. It’s certainly one that I’ll come back to if I need a burst of inspiration, or if I just want to hear the fantastic orchestration on “Starálfur” again. You could do studies around the psychological impact of this album, even among the people who find it to be dull & trite, possibly exposing a lack of imagination or a differently wired experience that won’t allow music like this to connect to the brain so fruitfully. I think the entire thing is beyond worth listening to before you die, and I think it’s a 10.
(P.S.: I’m stunned that something like this was able to be produced in 1999. Even now, it feels incredibly fresh. Over in the U.S., we were listening to Smash Mouth, you know what I mean? No disrespect to All Star or anything, but the difference is striking.)
Astor Piazzolla
5/5
I’m at a 10. That was delightful.
I mean, look, if you wanna call it elevator music, go ahead; it’s some of the best elevator music I’ve ever heard in my life, if that’s the case. If you can somehow go through this entire album and not move your hands around at least once like you’re following along with a little orchestra, you’ve never had the joy & whimsy it takes to really feel out this album. Either that, or you just didn’t have headphones in to catch all the little intricacies, and that’s your fault. To my ears, I’m predisposed to enjoying a lot of this because it feels like a direct parallel to the Professor Layton games, as other people have noted. The vibraphone, the bandoneon, the violin, the piano – all of it just feels fantastic to my ears, & it swept me away to other worlds in the brain.
The sense of adventure here feels a bit more grand than a Layton game though, with the structure of each track progressing really nicely minute by minute to keep the whole thing moving, almost as if it’s the soundtrack for a little stopmotion movie. There’s points in here where you could sync these songs up with a Pixar-esque flair, and they’d probably fit perfectly. At the same time, there’s moments where it feels like you could be transported to a boulevard in Paris, just watching the people go by from a bench. Those moments blend into each other in such a way that every track feels like a new adventure, sometimes with whimsy & sometimes with panic (“Nuevo Tango” is incredible for this) and if you allow the imagination to take you where these songs want you to go, it’s a deeply fulfilling experience. I’m even more stunned that this is a live album; for 1987, it feels crisp as hell, and the band’s precision & sync feels otherworldly. It’s very easy to forget it’s a live album until the applause of the crowd comes in to pull you back just a bit, and even still, they’re in such a silence that it feels earned every time they come in.
I just can’t fathom why this has a 2.88 on the site; it feels like an unsung masterpiece of whatever genre it’s in, and while I’d make the argument that it’s much more “jazz” than it is “tango”, the blend of both makes this feel like something bigger & beyond itself, yet one deeply familiar to my Layton-loving ears all the same. I’m very, very glad this is on the list, and hopefully, people can scrounge enough info about the creation of this album to get it a damn Wikipedia page in the future. I think it deserves one. To my ears, this is a super easy 10, and just a delight to listen to.
Lightning Bolt
3/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump down to a 3, but I do genuinely think that with another listen or two, I could bump up to a 4 someday.
It’s honestly really not that bad of an album. I’d even go so far as to call it good. There’s proper melodies & riffs & structure here, with a loose prog rock feel that just so happens to be surrounded by a gigantic wall of sound encapsulating most of the soundscape. Obviously, it’s abrasive & it is indeed a challenging listen (as the Wikipedia article says), but I liken the whole experience to a magic eye photo. You know, the ones where you had to cross your eyes to see the picture hidden inside. The structure that emerges out of the noise is that picture in the magic eye static, and if you can train your ears to focus on it, using the wall of sound as less of “pure noise” and more of an actual white noise to supplement it, I think the tracks do come out pretty well. There’s genuinely great tracks, with the highlight probably being “Crown of Storms” as the most traditional prog-style track, but everything from “Dracula Mountain” onward ranges from totally fine to legitimately great, and even then, I’d say there isn’t actually really a bad track here. Again, abrasive, sure, and if you want to dock this album for that, I get it, but I think it’s hard to dismiss this entirely off of its production choices.
So, why would I bump it down to a 3 if I don’t think there’s actually a bad track here? Well, it’s just in the overall pacing & direction of the album, which is to say that the album does stray a little bit directionless at times. Individual tracks can sometimes feel stagnant, repeating a pattern for a minute longer than it needs to & stalling the momentum / progression of each track. It doesn’t happen super often, but it happens often enough that it becomes noticeable, and it does make the album’s 42 minute run time feel a bit weightier. Past that, I do think some tracks don’t pace out the chaos / calm very evenly – for example, the transition from “Wonderful Rainbow” to “30,000 Monkies” is really, really funny at first, because it’s such an abrasive shift that you can’t help but laugh, but then it stays in that chaos for way too long to feel effective, and it just makes the track have a lot less staying power because of it. That lack of staying power kinda lingers at multiple points in the album, and while I do think they’re all good at providing bursts of energy, sustaining that energy for the whole album just doesn’t quite happen. They do a great job of trying though.
Hence, a 3.5 that I’ll bump down to a 3, though I do genuinely think that if that “great job of trying” converts to something a little more fruitful on another listen or 2, with my brain a lot more attuned to what the album is going for, it could get up to a 4. I think it’s not as bad as the 2.29 on the site would suggest, and I do understand some of the more critical acclaim here. That said, I understand a lot of the critique too. I think the whole album is genuinely worth a listen, even if it’s just to see if you can stomach this style at all, and if you can’t, that’s fine. I don’t know that bouncing off of this would fully warrant a 1, but c’est la vie. I certainly was able to stomach it, and I think it’s a really solid album. It’s at least a LOT better to stomach than “Spy vs. Spy” was from a while ago, sheesh.
Beck
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Who even is Beck, anyway? I thought “Sea Change” was depressingly lovely when we got it 630 days ago, but it’s clearly far, far different from the guy’s more standard fare if this album is anything to go by. I knew “Loser” was sort of a loose rap track with some acoustic flair behind it, but somehow, my brain never parlayed that into it being his whole shtick, with some wild genrebending in between, including some plunderphonics / sampling throughout that feels reminiscent of the Beastie Boys. It’s a shtick that I like a lot, and one that feels innovative for ‘96, at least in terms of reaching the mainstream.
I also find myself struck by how the lyrics come across; a lot of this feels like total nonsense with a tight structure, and the confidence of the delivery & flow somehow makes them feel compelling all the same. There’s a review on the site that compares his style to Anthony Kiedis, and I honestly hear it. The Red Hot Chili Peppers can cover it up with great grooves, and Beck does a lot of the same. Yes, the Peppers are a bit catchier & a bit easier to sing along to (and at least, on this album, I can’t say there’s a catchy chorus like “Loser” has), but something about Beck’s up & down approach clicks really well. “Where It’s At” does the filter trick where Beck is practically screaming into a mic layered at the end of the chorus, and that dichotomy between being really chill & being kinda manic just keeps this whole album on its toes, in a really positive way.
That said, I can’t help but wonder if the album could’ve ended at a much safer spot on “Where It’s At” – I like every track here, but it does feel like diminishing returns start to come in immediately afterwards, with “Minus” feeling a bit plain afterward, “Sissyneck” being a little goofy (in a good way), “Readymade” being cool in concept but a little safe in execution, and with “High 5” being a little bit of a proto-Limp Bizkit in a fun but strange way. No complaints about “Ramshackle” though; that’s a great track. The last 5 tracks didn’t wear me down or anything, but they don’t exactly keep the album gliding with the same momentum it had through the first 8 tracks. If that’s enough to bump this album down to a 4 for some people, I think that’s valid. If “Computer Rock” did it though, that’s just petty.
Ultimately, I think it’s still a pretty strong 5 for my tastes. I can’t tell you half of what Beck was talking about, but I can tell you how cool the production work is & how charismatic Beck comes across, even in his sort of lackadaisical way. I just think it’s a fun album, and while it could’ve been a SUPER tight 33 minutes (or 38 minutes if you want to add “Ramshackle”), I think there’s no shame in the full 52 minutes here. It’s pretty enjoyable throughout, and I feel like I have a way better sense of who Beck is as an artist compared to “Sea Change”, which was already pretty good. I really hope we get “Guero” soon, just because I’m very intrigued to see what he does with 2005 tech. For this album though, it’s a pretty strong 5.
Fugazi
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Not that much to say; that shit just kinda rocked. I’m really stunned that’s from 1990, honestly. It felt like a complete snapshot of everything in the decade to come in the rock / grunge space, and I can hear everyone it might’ve influenced within it (and it seems like that’s a lot of people). The bass work in particular feels way, way ahead of schedule, the transitions are on point, & some tracks have an angst to them that makes them feel like they’re from the back half of the decade, in a good way. The percussion brings in a ridiculous energy on a lot of these tracks with some really fun fills, the vocals are strong enough to carry melodies without ever feeling like they’re in the way of the instrumentals, and overall, I really can’t find a single flaw with this album. I guess I could nitpick and say “Two Beats Off” goes a little long, but besides that, it’s a really satisfying 35 minutes.
Lyrically, I do think it could be just a bit tighter; that’s not really a flaw, just a personal thing. The anti-capitalist / anti-consumerism sentiments are welcomed here, but they do touch on that well a lot without really saying anything too differently from track to track. It is still pretty relevant, though. Overall, I think it’s a really good 5; certainly surprised me for a genre name that feels as loose as "post-hardcore", but maybe I'll need to find more of this stuff. I’m very glad it’s on the list.
Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
I didn’t really know what to expect going into this, other than some early synthpop efforts, but color me surprised at how effectively atmospheric this album comes across as, at least with the technology available to these guys in 1981. It’s definitely dated to those early efforts, and bands like Depeche Mode & Eurythmics would take the general blueprint this album provides and run with it to really high highs, but for such an early shot, they set a REALLY strong blueprint up. There’s parts here that feel like Cocteau Twins as much as they feel like Kraftwerk. Sure, the percussion doesn’t feel as effective as later punchier gated reverb drums would be, but it does its job of setting a good tone. The keyboard & synth work really enhances that tone further – lots of deeper held notes give each track an anticipation that keeps the progression from ever feeling super stale, and while it does get a little self-indulgent at times with some longer sections, I never found it to be super distracting. The same goes for the vocals; lots of loose imagery with these lyrics that don’t feel super complete by themselves, but the delivery gives each track the final step for the emotional pull to really come through.
So, why a 4.5 instead of a flat 5? I just think the pacing of the album could use a bit of work. Yes, those longer sections aren’t super distracting, but when they build up multiple times over the course of the album, you start to feel them a bit more, with “Sealand”’s extended segments being the biggest ‘offenders’ (loosely used) here. Those longer sections also lead to my other small issue with the album; a lot of these tracks are kinda cramped, never quite giving the listener some moments to breathe & digest in some of the songs. I chalk both of those up to early synthpop efforts & this being from 1981. I really can’t say there’s a bad track here, and while the production being so dated to that era might be the catalyst for a very fair 3, it just doesn’t bother me like that. I sort of wish I could keep it at a 4.5, but I do think it’s worth bumping up to a 5; I just really enjoyed it, and I’m glad it’s on the list.
Joanna Newsom
5/5
I’m above a 5. Not a 10, but… wow.
I mean, look, I’ll admit; I’m as lost lyrically as everyone else. I do think I have slightly more of a sense of what these tracks are all about, with some family / relationship dynamics in play, explored with the flowery language of an early 20th century poet describing things with a mind’s eye that feels lost in the modern day, or at least, something that feels more innately human at its core as opposed to such recent wordsmithery as “Spongebob Big Guy Pants OK”.
The lyrics do help, to a point, but they help in the same way that reading a Shakespeare play will only help you understand the meaning – a true Shakespearian performance is just that: the performance. The lines mean something, but the actor’s delivery, body language & clearly shown passion for the role they’re playing has to tell the story most effectively, and Joanna Newson’s approach to this album lies in the same range. Sure, her vocals can feel shrill at times, sort of like Bjork with an Amy Winehouse twang, but after the first track showcases the ‘worst’ of it (which is simply her out of the rhythmic structure), it becomes far easier to fall in love with her delivery, as she hits these lines & rides on the instrumentals with the precision of someone doing Hamlet.
I do think one’s enjoyment of this album will come in the tolerance of that – this is an album that requires patience, for the stories told within to build up and slowly reach the climax she wants, yet without the instrumentals always matching that same sense of climax. The catharsis is not the same as a big beat drop (though there are some moments where the instrumental intensity picks up in similar ways), but rather, just little releases of tension that guide the album from section to section. The longer it goes, the more your ears will feel used to the pace & language she’s speaking with, so if you can get past the earliest bumps of “feeling out” the album, then I think it’s well worth it. If you don’t have the patience for longer tracks, or for storytelling that takes this much time, or the tone of her vocals or the looser “medieval” feel to the instrumentation, then you will probably bounce off of this album. I wouldn’t say bouncing off of it means you have to give it a 1, but it is what it is.
Ultimately, if you can find the grace for it, or if you just have a fun penchant for this sort of soundscape / overall style, what emerges out of it is a delightfully strong album. I do think it’s a bit too cryptic to really warrant a 10 like that, & any album that feels like it needs a Genius caption for every single line might be just a little too flowery for its own good. However, I’m certainly above a 5 with this – I think it’s a lovely, lovely album, & even in its most flowery & confusing moments, I found myself just mesmerized by it, with a sort of pageantry that I can’t explain. I’m glad it’s on the list, and even if you bounce off of it, it’s certainly worth giving a try before you die.
I'm pissed this isn't on Spotify.
Pet Shop Boys
5/5
I’m above a 5 again, though not quite a 10. It might get there someday though; that’s my favorite (favourite?) Pet Shop Boys album we’ve gotten.
I mean, that’s just a wonderful way to send off ‘80s drum machines & ring in the start of the ‘90s, huh? You can literally hear it over the course of the album – early on, it feels very driven by that drum sound, and from track to track, more & more of the MIDI instruments & House vibes that would come to define “Very” work their way into the soundscape. Ironically, for as cheerful & danceable as a lot of these tracks are, lyrically, it might be their strongest & most somber work, and that just enhances this album even further for me. “Being Boring” immediately sets the tone as a track about the AIDS epidemic & Neil Tennant losing so many of his friends to the disease, yet it’s backed behind a catchy, layered beat that feels almost as rhythmic as Depeche Mode (yes, “Violator” was an inspiration for this album, & they DO get as rhythmic as Depeche Mode at points).
That somber tone is there throughout the whole album, and it comes across more effectively than “Actually” did to my ears nearly 700 days ago; “Actually” is still a great album, but their songwriting skills weren’t as sharp as they are here. Neil Tennant’s vocal delivery on a lot of these tracks feels more potent too, adding some extra weight to the instrumentals. Hearing this album, it makes it more clear that “Very” was a direct pivot to go full UK House mode & create the more upbeat album that they wanted to make with this one – I still love “Very”, but I think I prefer the variety this album has. “Very” feels poppy & vibrant on every track with Sonic CD orchestra hits throughout, but this album can go from the Sade-inspired sounds of “To Face the Truth” to the Bobby Brown vibes of “How Can You Expect to Be Taken Seriously?” without missing a beat, before practically just doing “Vogue” on a track like “The End of the World”.
I truly can’t understand the 3.08 on the site; unless people just have a deep disdain for the very tail end of ‘80s production, it feels lower than it should be. I’m not saying this is as good as “Violator”, but it feels like it’s close to the realm of conversation, and that album has a 3.7 on the site. I know “Policy of Truth” fucks (& the lead synth on that track is used on this album a lot), but still. My best guess is the other Pet Shop Boys albums not clicking as well & creating a predetermined disdain towards this (either that, or the really loose Phil Collins-era Genesis vibes that permeate a lot of this album), and that’s unfortunate if so. For my tastes, I think it’s the best album out of the 3 they’ve got on the list, and I can safely say I’m a fan of them. It’s a very easy 5 for me, and a bit higher. Maybe even a 10 someday. I need to seek out more of their stuff.
FKA twigs
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Once again, a Mercury Prize nominee has come through for me on the list. One of the earliest notes I wrote down while listening to “Lights On” was “maximalist Vespertine” – when you listen to the production on that album, it’s full of microscopic precisions to fill out the soundscape. This album just zooms in on that microscope more to make those precisions feel bigger, elevating this just a bit past the trap-driven electronica that would come to define R&B during the back half of the 2010s. For 2014, I’m not sure if this is SUPER innovative (The Weeknd, for example, already had his Trilogy out by this point), but it feels like it’s doing something to progress the style further. Normally, I would say other people refined it better, but I’m not necessarily sure that’s true with this album. Sure, you can point to an album like “ANTI” by Rihanna & say that it integrates trap into her soundscape in a really fruitful way, but that’s not the same as “refining” it. That’s just adjusting it well to her style. This almost feels like a blueprint that others chose to follow.
FKA twigs has a *wonderful* voice here, & while it’s certainly filtered at points, the natural tones of her voice still manage to break through that. This album is defined by glitchier production, with occasional skips, some loose effects at the ends of lines, some fuzzier bass & synth work, but it all stays within a really consistent rhythm. FKA twigs uses the production of this album as a pathway for her own vocal confidence to shine through and steal the show whilst working hand-in-hand with it. It’s hard to describe exactly what this is – I keep calling it trap, but it’s almost like trying to box in Prince as just an R&B artist. It’s rooted there, for sure, with occasional elements of everyone from Bjork to Prince to, oddly, Justin Timberlake at points, but there’s something more to it that you can only really grasp if you hear it. At the very least, it’s rhythmically hypnotic, in a way where you can zone out & not even realize it.
Speaking of Prince, I feel like I have to point out that this is probably the most objectively horny album we’ve gotten since “1999”, though with a much more modern & complicated lens to the whole thing than Prince was providing 45 years ago. It’s an album centered around sex & intimacy, but the act itself takes a backseat to the emotional complications surrounding it & how much it truly correlates to a healthy relationship. I suppose it’s only fair that the whole album ends with her getting her own “kicks” and finding comfort in herself.
Ultimately, I do think the act of listening to this will be far more fruitful than trying to describe it – the production work is truly hypnotic here if you can allow yourself to get into it, and what emerges from it is a really tight 40 minutes that only ever really feels “cookie-cutter”-ish near the end (“Give Up”). Once the beats pull you in, her voice will carry the tracks the rest of the way, and she’s got enough emotional range to really sell these tracks well. If, however, the first track sets a bad tone (it is a little harshly mixed & feels a bit out of tune with the rest of the album), then I can understand bouncing off of this a little bit. It took until midway through “Lights On” for me to really vibe with the album’s direction, and it never stopped from there. Personally, I’m at a 5 – I just kinda fuck with this style a lot, and I really enjoyed it. I feel like I’ve been missing out for 12 years.
Living Colour
5/5
Oh, easy, easy, EASY 5. Hell, maybe a 10.
That shit just rocks, man. Yeah, the top review here says everything after the opener feels like “a lesser tier of Huey Lewis”, but the joke is on them; I like Huey Lewis already, so that’s just a positive to me. This album feels like a mix of just about everything you can think of, executed to a really, really strong degree. Hell, just look at the Wikipedia article for it: “hard rock, heavy metal, funk metal, alternative metal, & funk rock with elements of soul, jazz, pop, rap, arena rock, punk & avant-garde jazz”. That is practically all of known music to that point, so you may as well just call this album’s genre whatever the fuck you want. No matter what, the answer is that it fucking rocks.
It’s also a distinctly black album, no matter how much Corey Glover starts to sound exactly like Phil Collins in the back half. A lot of these songs are implicitly written from a black perspective, with tracks like “Open Letter (To a Landlord)”, “Funny Vibe”, & “Which Way To America?” standing out as the most consciously aware ones. I think it’s fair to say that the heavy metal / glam rock era of the ‘80s didn’t have a lot of Black voices behind it, so this is a really welcome change of pace. It also helps that they can fucking rock out with the best of them; Vernon Reid put himself into history the moment he ripped that second, insane guitar solo on “Cult of Personality”, and every single solo & riff after that point is the equivalent of LeBron currently making himself uncatchable on the NBA’s all-time scoring list. His guitar work defines this album’s musical direction, with the bass & percussion (also insanely good) following the path he lays out. They work in an incredible musical harmony here, and while it’s easy to compare them to some bands at points (again, Genesis & RHCP come to the forefront of my mind, with a touch of Megadeth in there at points), I can’t possibly think of many other bands in the ‘80s doing it like this at such a highly blended level. No, Huey Lewis & The News were not ripping it like this either.
Ultimately, I think you just have to hear it to get it, and I just liked every single track here – “Glamour Boys” might be the only one where it feels a touch ‘basic’ by the end of it, but I still liked it, & they’re all ranging from good to great to fucking fantastic (Cult of Personality is an all-timer, & that’s not just the wrestling fan in me talking). I’m annoyed at myself for never hearing anything past the opening track. I need to hear even more of Living Colour. I’m very glad this was on the list, and I think I’m at a 10 here; it’s just something that hits with all my musical sensibilities, and I’m adding everything here to my big playlists. That was rad.
Afrika Bambaataa
3/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’d like to keep there, but I’ll bump down to a 3, though I do think it could get up to a 4 if it hits a little nicer on another day.
Off the gate, I’d be remiss to not mention Afrika Bambaataa’s sexual abuse allegations; they suck, he REALLY sucks, & the whole thing is sad & deeply disappointing. That said, I’m judging the music & not the man, and for as much as he sucks, this does feel like it probably introduced a lot of production tricks into hip-hop that would permeate & evolve throughout the decade & beyond, so as a piece of musical history of sorts, I can’t in good faith just slap this with a 1 because of one guy’s horrific stuff. Besides, he’s one of just 5 people on the album, so I’m willing to give the other 4 their due instead of him.
As far as the album itself goes, this is sort of a time-traveling journey from 1982 to 1986 with the tracks that are on here, and a genuinely cool look at how production in the genre shifted over such a short time. If you listen to “Planet Rock”, for 1982, it’s probably kinda revolutionary. However, it feels very tame by modern standards, with party vibe lyrics, a solid drum beat & some 808s involved. There’s some really empty segments in there where the soundscape is JUST the percussion, and those moments of emptiness stick out when so much of rap is about filling the soundscape at all times. As the tracks move forward in time, those production quirks start to fill out & feel more modern, and by “Go-Go Pop”, there’s genuinely early elements of New Jack Swing being integrated into the mix. It’s just really cool to listen to.
It’s also just not as compelling as I’m making it out to be; the novelty of the tracks here comes in hearing the production shift over time, and while there are some good tracks here (I think most of the first 5 tracks are pretty good, save for “Frantic Situation”), they overstay their welcome in ways where you’re kinda just left stranded with the beat & a sort of loop to the flow with a different flavor in the lyrics & vocals. They don’t really bother me, but the 5-7 minute runtimes on a lot of these tracks feel unnecessary, made to pad out the album. Obviously, I get it; I don’t think these were made for radio consumption if being played on a cassette or vinyl or a CD. They’re made for actually partying to, and that means making these the extended versions to fill time & fill the air. I do think it suffers as an album experience because of it, though.
Hence, the bump down to a 3 – it’s really not a bad album, and for as much as I’m giving it, I do think it’s worth listening to just to hear some fun production shifts over time. I can understand people going as high as a 5 here, and while I don’t think I’ll get there, there’s a decent chance this album could hit a 4 for me someday if some of the later tracks click a bit more nicely.
Run-D.M.C.
3/5
I’m at a 3.5, & I’m going to barely bump it up to a 4 despite my desire to keep it at a 3.5 & this album very nearly crashing itself down to a 3 out of boredom.
This album comes out of the gates really, really nicely through its first 6 tracks; only “Jam-Master Jay” didn’t really click with me like that, and while I did think “It’s Like That” got a bit repetitive near the end, I was digging everything about it. They were both flowing, the pacing was great, the verses were hitting, and for 1984, it felt like the sort of super important rap album people generally call it.
The final 3 tracks here really fucking killed the vibe for me, man. It’s not that they’re bad tracks, but my god, the pacing of the album crawls to a gargantuan halt. You can see it in the Spotify plays here too – people willingly do not listen to these tracks. “Wake Up” is good in its messaging, and I did like it, but it has more break time between verses than it does actual time listening to people rapping, which is antithetical to the whole genre at this time, I think. “30 Days” is kinda fun, but the soundscape between verses is just synthetic & hollow, with nothing to fill out the soundscape in the same way the guitar did on “Rock Box”, and it just kinda drags on because of it. “Jay’s Game” ups that synthetic level even higher, acting as… I mean, it’s something. It didn’t bother me that much, but it’s a structureless attempt at a dance track that barely keeps a consistent rhythm, and goes on way longer than it needs to.
If it weren’t for the strength of the first 6 tracks, I’d be far more inclined to fully bump this down to a 3, and honestly, if you had caught me on a different day that wasn’t right after we got “Planet Rock: The Album”, I might’ve done it. However, I feel like I owe Run-D.M.C. just a little bit of grace for not giving “Raising Hell” a bit more attention, given that it was the 6th album we got. I at least owe it a relisten, because I don't remember it ever getting as dire as the last 3 tracks here did. Hence, a 3.5 that I’ll barely bump up to a 4; a 66% hit rate normally doesn’t earn that, but both “Rock Box” & the Krush-Groove beats just kinda rock hard enough where I feel fine doing so.
Edit: Yes, a rare usage of the edit feature here to say that I have relistened to "Raising Hell" only to discover that it does, in fact, get that dire around the halfway mark. Between that, and giving this album one more relisten to see if the pacing is still a nightmare (and yes, it is), I feel like I genuinely need to edit this to rectify it. I'm sorry; it just isn't that strongly structured of an album. Those tracks I mentioned are still good, but as an album experience, it's worth bumping down from a 3.5 to a 3.
Elliott Smith
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
It’s not quite the dazzlingly human experience of “Either/Or”, but it’s a pretty good album regardless. Part of it is the length; this album is 16 minutes longer, and I’ll be the first to tell you that it’s too long. I don’t think there’s a bad track here, but I do think there’s some tracks that feel unnecessary, adding a little bit of bloat to an album that’s already kinda hard to parse at times, and one that usually leans towards the downbeat & the dismal. I wouldn’t necessarily classify it as a sad album, but it never gets that happy. That’s the other part of it; I just don’t think it’s quite as lyrically tight as “Either/Or” was, or at the very least, it feels like it only reveals its themes closer to the end of tracks, making it a little bit harder to connect emotionally to what Elliott’s going for here.
All of that said, I still think it’s got that humanity to it, but it’s rooted in much more self-doubt. A lot of these tracks seem to touch on the black hole of fame; an inability to really reconcile with being known by so many, yet unknown by the people that he lets in the closest to his life. Whether it’s about his mother, an ex-girlfriend, closer friends, his music label, or just any of the other shit on his plate, this album feels like it’s most directly a plea to be seen by those people, made for the world to hear, yet only for THEM to listen. Unlike “Either/Or”, there’s not as many moments here that reaffirm that it’s OK to go through this stuff, but just sort of an acknowledgement that it’s happened, and just a hope that the right people will reach out to comfort him. It is human. It’s just not as palatably hopeful, nor is it a mirror to the public. It’s a mirror towards himself. That’s partially why this album just feels a little harder to digest, and why I started to sort of drift away from it around tracks 11-13. They’re not bad, but they’re steeped in metaphor that feels tougher to touch on. Thankfully, the final 2 real tracks of the album are both lovely, and really redeem this thing back up to a 5. “I Better Be Quiet Now” is probably my favorite one here.
Hence, a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5. I don’t think I can really go track by track here in good faith, since I don’t think I quite got each track, but it’s worth trying to perceive them & come to some kind of reading about what they’re about. Elliott Smith’s imagery in its finest moments still shines here, and while the soundscapes are a bit more fleshed out than “Either/Or” in a way that takes away some of that intimacy, it still sounds pretty damn good throughout. I really liked the album, bloat & all. I’m glad it’s on the list. Rest in peace, Elliott.
UB40
5/5
I’m at a 5 if we’re talking about just the first 10 tracks. I’m at a 4.5 bumped down to a 4 if we’re including the final 3 tracks, which were originally included as a bonus EP. I’ll split the difference and say it’s a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
Yeah, that’s confusing, but it feels like the most fair way to split it; out of the first 10 tracks here, I really enjoyed all of them, with the exception of “25%” as a slightly dull instrumental. I think the socio-political lyricism fits really well, the integration of all the synths & effects do a good job of keeping the progression of each track up, and they’re all engaging tracks that both say what they want to say & have a really smooth reggae groove to them. If we’re going by just the first 10 tracks, it’s a really tight 44 minutes that shows why UB40 got on the map really quickly. It’s a genuinely great album.
If we’re throwing in those last 3 tracks though… yeah, I just didn’t vibe with them as much. “Madam Medusa” is fine, but it doesn’t need to be 13 minutes, with the entire back half of the song spinning more wheels than Pat Sajak ever did. It just doesn’t go anywhere meaningful after it’s said what it wants to say, so it feels like a bit of a drag. The “Strange Fruit” cover is fine, but I just wasn’t pulled into it or as captivated by it as I was hoping to be, and while it tries to match a lot of the Billie Holiday’s version vocal style, the instrumental choices take away a lot of that atmosphere. “Reefer Madness” is good, but the sense of progression there just isn’t as strong as the other instrumental tracks on the main album. Overall, it’s a solid enough EP, but if we’re including them as part of the main tracklist, it does pull the album down for me.
So, with that split in mind, I think a 4.5 bumped up to a 5 is the safest call here. The floor, at the very least, is a 3. These guys aren’t necessarily Bob Marley or anything, but this is probably the best non-Marley Reggae album we’ve gotten on the list, and they’ve captured the spirit of the genre well. At the very least, it’s a marked improvement over “Maverick A Strike”, my goodness. I’m glad this wasn’t just “Red Red Wine” 13 times over – it’s a really fun cover, don’t get me wrong, but it’s very cheap reggae. I’m happy it’s on the list, and I think it’s a very safe bump up to a 5.
Tim Buckley
3/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump down to a 3, though I'd prefer to stay at a 3.5.
I mean, it’s definitely not a bad album. I don’t even know if it necessarily has a bad track. I just don’t think it’s the most compelling album in terms of buying into what Tim Buckley is selling here; the wit of his folksier stuff is gone, euphemism is dead, & frankly, it’s just kind of a horny album. One’s enjoyment of this album will center around how willing you are to buy into it, and I…
I don’t know, I guess I rented it? A lot of these tracks set their soundscapes in stone really early, and don’t progress too much afterward – something like “Sweet Surrender” seems like a prime example. It’s a 7 minute track, but it kinda settles into itself about 3 minutes in & just stays around that vibe, never building up too much higher. If you’re not sold on that track by then, you’re just kinda stuck for the ride. A totally fine ride, and one that’ll get you to your destination without bothering you, but it’s not one you’d glowingly recommend. That’s my experience with it, but I can understand people loving that one. On the flipside of it, you have a track like “Hong Kong Bar” which literally never lifts past its acoustically driven start, but for my tastes, I bought into it even though I thought the pacing was slow & the instrumentation could use a little more to it. It’s just solid storytelling.
All of those rentals leave me with an album that I kinda like, but not one that has me convinced to truly spread the word on it. I don’t think it’s as clever as his folksier stuff, and while I like the energy on a lot of these tracks, his vocals are prominent enough that the horniness of lyrics does directly impact that energy, in ways that both bring it up & down throughout the album. I don’t think there’s a bad track here, but there’s never a consistently strong throughpoint to keep the album as compelling as it wants to be & as it tries to make itself sound. Hence, a 3.5 that I’ll bump down to a 3. It’s probably my weakest Tim Buckley album here, which is a shame given how much I liked his other 2 albums on the list, but I really don’t think it’s that bad. It just didn’t click as much for me personally, and if anyone wants to go for a 4 or a 5, I wouldn’t blame them at all. For me though, just a 3.
Sabu
2/5
I’m at a 2.5 that I’ll bump down to a 2.
I mean, look, it’s not BAD. It’s just boring as hell. So many of these tracks are culturally specific, so without the inroads of understanding why these tracks are so important (think Ravi Shankar’s ‘tutorials’ during “The Sounds of India”), a lot of them just feel very, very similar. Since the lyrics aren’t really online for a lot of these, it’s up to the vibes, and sadly, the vibes just aren’t really there. I don’t know if the style this album is going for directly forbids horns from being involved (it certainly seems to love & rely on the bongos / conga drums), but they felt DESPERATELY needed on a lot of these tracks. Past that… christ, they’re just too long. So many of these tracks could be finished after 2 or 3 minutes, but they all just go on for too long in a way that doesn’t work together as an album experience.
Hence, a 2, though it could bump up to a 3 in the future if even just one more track clicks a little better. I just wasn’t that impressed, & ironically, the most compelling tracks here are the ones without any vocals to begin with, so maybe the instrumental approach would’ve worked better? It certainly worked for “Kenya”, which was released the very same year as this, and felt like a bolt of lightning compared to this. There’s just nothing here to hook onto meaningfully, and while it’s really not that bad, I can’t in good faith say it’s an album you need to listen to before you die.
Elvis Presley
5/5
Would you believe I’m at a 10?
It’s been 555 days since we last got Elvis Presley, which is crazy to say. I remember his debut decently well, & given the 13-year gap here between albums, I was hoping his musicianship would’ve jumped leaps & bounds. For as much media as there is out there about Elvis, trying to create the definitive narrative around his life, I’ve just never really engaged with it. To my mind, he did some pelvic thrusts that made teenagers swoon & made parents furious, he parlayed it into a big movie career, and then he lost control of himself before dying in 1977. Roughly, I think that’s how most people know Elvis.
I didn’t know this album though, and my goodness, it’s a real delight to hear Elvis with what could sincerely be called “modern” production for the time. Sure, it’s no “Abbey Road” or anything, but the Memphis soundscape & the percussive grooves that underline this album & guide Elvis’s vocals along the way certainly feel far better to listen to than the stuff from 1956. Elvis himself just delivers these tracks like he wrote them all along, & while there’s not a single thing he penned here, he’s taken ownership over all of them. It also helps that, for the most part, he’s covering white artists on this album. My earliest nitpicks here were simply that tracks were fading out, but I got more used to it as the album went along. There are some tracks that I think might service themselves better with a definitive ending (especially so on “After Loving You”), but it’s a nitpick. My other one is that “I’ll Hold You in My Heart” is a little long, but it’s whatever.
Once this album hits “I’m Movin’ On”, and the extent of the Memphis soundscape starts to REALLY integrate itself into the album, it never once looks back. It was already pretty good before that point, but afterwards, it just absolutely soars to the finish. Elvis’s charisma & charm just elevates as high as the instrumentation takes him, & with every track being really well-written, the overall musicianship just feels like listening to a guy at his peak, & “In The Ghetto” feels like a perfect closer to the whole package. Even though this album doesn’t technically include “Suspicious Minds”, I’d be remiss to not talk about it – it only takes one listen to hear the acclaim on that track, and while I’d never paid closer attention to it until now, something about Elvis’s delivery throughout just oozes confidence, even on a track centered around the pain of doubt. It’s a great track, and the fact that it’s not even part of the main track list here just kinda proves how good the album is overall.
Hence, a 10. I’m surprised I’m at a 10, but there’s really not a single miss here & I enjoyed the hell out of the whole thing. Sure, others might dismiss it as cheap country fare that occasionally gets a cool drum beat behind it, but for my tastes, it just feels like Elvis modernizing his sound in a way that feels natural. At the very least, it’s probably an attempt to prove he can still hang in there even while four dudes in England were revolutionizing the world, and I think he hung in there pretty damn well. Sure, it’s no “Abbey Road”, but it’s not trying to be. It’s just Elvis in Memphis, and he sounds great. It’s a 10.
Stevie Wonder
5/5
Much like Innervisions, I’m somewhere above a 5. Hell, I’m probably at a 10. (Innervisions is also a 10, by the way. Songs in the Key of Life is somewhere off the number scale; another star, if you will.)
Until today, the only track I’d ever heard from this album was “They Won’t Go When I Go” – maybe I’d heard a few other tracks in passing over the years, but I only ever added that one to my playlist. I still think it’s the tour de force of the album, and one of my favorite tracks of all time, but the entire package here is a real delight. I gotta tell you, it’s great to hear “new” Stevie Wonder music to my ears.
It does take a little bit to get into this album’s more spiritual / grounded vibe, but once you accept that this isn’t generally gonna have the big showstopping numbers like Innervisions or Songs in the Key of Life does (though “You Haven’t Done Nothing” is practically just Superstition 2), its sense of intimacy feels uniquely qualified from all the Stevie Wonder albums on the list. In a way, Stevie’s speaking to his own soul here, & we’re just along for the ride. It’s a ride that’s definitely worth taking.
“Smile Please” is just really uplifting, especially in a time where it feels especially hard to find the strength to smile through… well, all of this shit. It’s no “Love’s In Need of Love Today”, but it’s still a great opener.
“Heaven Is 10 Zillion Light Years Away” is Stevie’s gospel side coming through in an even more potent way than “Have A Talk With God” did 2 years later, and I’d argue it’s an even better track. Something about his delivery on “we’ve got so far to come” just feels great. It’s probably my second favorite track on the album.
“Too Shy to Say” is a good one, but I do think it’s the weakest track here. It just feels more like it was written for a movie than it does Stevie talking to his soul, and that disconnect makes it stick out from the rest of the package. I still like it, but it needed a little more of a wistful bite to it, and it’s a bite Stevie definitely gets later in the album.
“Boogie On Reggae Woman” is just a good love track, & Stevie’s ever so slightly horny side peeking out with this track is a surprise. Perhaps a little long for what it is, but the funky production is what makes it, especially with the harmonica solo near the end. I enjoyed it.
“Creepin’” feels like a Michael McDonald track, in a really good way. It’s got that wistful bite I was hoping “Too Shy to Say” would have, yet delivered in a way that still feels like it’s romantically driven towards Stevie’s soul. Minnie Riperton’s backing vocals really glide with Stevie’s, and their harmonies along with the synth work just make the track feel smooth as silk.
“You Haven’t Done Nothing” is… well, like I said, it’s Superstition 2, & apparently, a track directed towards Richard Nixon. It does feel like a track more so directed at the people who only make promises & never do actual action, and it’s one that feels especially relevant in a world where online activism gets more engagement than real community activism. The Jackson 5 do a great job with their backing vocals, and while I wish they would’ve had something of their own to say (though I can’t imagine a 16-year-old MJ would have that much wisdom in his words), the entire track works. I really liked it.
“It Ain’t No Use” once again has the extra wistful bite that I wish “Too Shy to Say” had, and it’s driven by an amicable breakup (or at least, an attempt at one). The backing bass & choir really add to the atmosphere, and Stevie’s ad-libs for the entire outro just made me enter a zen state that I haven’t gone into in a while. It’s a really nice track, especially once Stevie gets a bit more grit in his voice.
“They Won’t Go When I Go” is fantastic. If any musician on the planet can brag about their faith & so boldly & confidently claim that he’ll be looking down at them from Heaven, it’s Stevie Wonder. His conviction & delivery makes the track, and it’s impossible not to feel the bubbling righteous anger that comes out of him. George Michael’s cover is great, but Stevie’s version is incredible, & it’s one of my favorite tracks of all time.
“Bird of Beauty” is a really energetic lift back up, and the Brazilian rhythms that drive the track feel like a direct foreshadowing of what would come by “Another Star”. Structurally, it feels close to “Golden Lady” from Innervisions, though without the same consistent lift at the end. It’s just a track about finding a natural high from simply seeing the beauty the world has to offer, and while that’s ironic coming from a blind man, it’s still advice worth taking. It’s a fun track.
“Please Don’t Go” really works as an album closer; obviously, I might’ve ended on “They Won’t Go When I Go”, but just look at the titles of each track. It thematically fits really well for the man who was so confident about the world he’d leave behind to feel shattered at the prospect of someone leaving that world. That wistful bite I keep talking about really hits an apex here, and just makes “Too Shy to Say” really feel like the weak link. The way Stevie glides, lifts & elevates on the piano, the passion in his vocal runs, the way the choir compliments him, & the funk of the bass & shaker percussion all come together in a more gospel-y driven way to end the album. It’s a great closer.
It really is a fantastic package, and I’m glad that this album got its due on the list. I might’ve listened to it in full someday, but that might’ve been a lot longer, & I was already overdue to hear the rest of it, based on the strength of “They Won’t Go When I Go”. Stevie Wonder is the GOAT, and I’m glad he took us on this trip through his soul. This is an easy 10. Save for a singular weak link, it’s just as good as Innervisions, and I can’t wait to get Talking Book down the line for our 4th & final Stevie album on the list. Stellar, stellar stuff.
Dexys Midnight Runners
4/5
Perhaps miraculously, I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4, just like their debut album.
Is it weird to say I might’ve liked this one a little more? “Searching For The Young Soul Rebels” entirely survives off of a vibe – Kevin Rowland’s vocals are incomprehensible but endearing, their instrumental energy is good, if a bit reliant on flash, and somehow, all of its flaws don’t sink it too badly, due to a weirdly infectious energy that just makes that album feel nice. As a developed project though, I find this album’s more casual tone & more intimate vibe sort of refreshing, in a way that’s very unique for an era generally defined by flashy music videos & gaudy showmanship.
Granted, much like their debut album, there’s still some flaws here – I think “The Occasional Flicker” kinda falls flat as an opening track, if only because it doesn’t really make its meaning super clear; the burning passion of his past are now nothing more than what the title suggests, but between a dull instrumental that doesn’t pick up too highly & a vocal performance that gets mixed down in a way that lessens the impact (& believe me, THAT is one of the bigger mixing problems here), it just doesn’t set a great opening tone. It’s not a bad track at all, and it does serve as a thematic entry to the whole album (lost passion & lack of self-importance due to the other struggles of the world, namely the ongoing Troubles in Ireland at the time), but as a musical beginning, it does set a bad tone, & one that probably turned a lot of people off.
“This Is What She’s Like” as a 12-minute followup probably shut the door for a lot of people, as on its very surface level, it is just Kevin yapping & blueballing his way out of describing the girl he’s with, but for some fucking reason, at least for my sensibilities, the whole thing reminded me of a Smiling Friends type conversation. You know the ones; Charlie & Pim just go on some weird aside that feels unnatural to a flowing TV show, yet would feel very natural in an actual controlled setting. This track is one of those weird asides, one that feels unnatural to the flow of the album, and yet, as an actual conversation & a loose attempt to describe indescribable love, it just kinda really hooked me in. Somehow, it fills up its 12 minutes well, and it worked for me.
“Knowledge of Beauty” is good. It reminds me a little of “Thousands Are Sailing” from that Pogues album we got a bit ago, if only for the emotional hook led on by love for one’s ancestors. The pacing is a little slow for a 7 minute track, but ultimately, I found myself compelled by what Kevin was talking about, even if his vocal delivery isn’t super compelling. “One of Those Things” is just “Sweet Home Alabama” but with Kevin’s frustrations over similar sounding music & anger at flippant dismissals of Ireland’s ongoing crisis behind it. It’s not a bad track at all, but it just never really hooked me in.
“Reminisce - Pt. 2” is alright. It’s just him doing some reminiscing, & while I question the decision to put a sequel to the B-side of a single from your last album onto the main tracklist of this one, it just feels endearing. “Listen To This” is pretty solid, with the whole regret over never saying “I love you” enough pretty potently expressed. Once again though, they REALLY needed to boost Kevin’s vocals in the mix to give it some of that emotional oomph, as without it, the track feels a lot flatter & not as effective.
“The Waltz” works as a closer; much in the same way that I could barely comprehend him on their debut album, I can barely comprehend the meaning here (apparently, it’s still a protest towards the UK’s involvement in Ireland). Much like their debut album though, Kevin’s vocal delivery sells the track & the sort of righteous anger that boils up throughout it, along with a slow swelling of a still casual (yet important-feeling) instrumental hit just the right nerve for me to enjoy the track. I don’t think it needs to be 8 minutes, but I wasn’t really opposed to it in the moment. It’s a good capper to the whole thing.
All of that said, it’s a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4. I don’t think it’s a super duper underrated gem or anything, but I see what they were going for with this album & I respect it. It’s obviously not the same ball of energy as their debut, and while we haven’t gotten “Too Rye Ay” yet, I imagine that album isn’t like this either. I kinda like that it isn’t though, and sticking out so beigely in a super flashy world & just wanting to speak your own truths to an audience that may or may not have given a shit, even sacrificing commercial success for it, is kind of admirable. I do think it’s a good album if you can allow yourself the patience to hear Kevin Rowland out, and for my tastes & sensibilities, I think it’s worth bumping up to a 4. I’m glad I heard it out, at least, and I’m glad it’s on the list.
Spiritualized
5/5
I’m at a 10.
Believe me, I’m just as surprised. When we last got our lead singer here, it was for Spacemen 3’s “Playing With Fire”, and that was an album that I gave a 2.5 bumped up to a 3. This is so, so far sonically removed from that album that I can hardly believe this album & its vision came from that band’s ashes, yet somehow, I also don’t find it extremely surprising. For as flawed as “Playing With Fire” is in terms of its execution, its strength comes in managing to find places for the soundscape to settle & find sweet spots for the listener’s ears, even in its most awkward moments. If you take their ability to find those sweet spots & use it on actually sweet, forceful & emotionally driven soundscapes that actually resemble traditional music, then you get an entire album of sweet spots, somehow rooted in the same ever-present chaos that bands like Can used on “Tago Mago”, along with the serenity they found on “Future Days”, yet blended with the shoegaze-y nature of “Playing With Fire”.
It also helps that there’s a loose narrative here around the perils of drug addiction, how it acts as a black hole on your life that gets everyone in its orbit sucked into your troubles & trauma, and how even when you try to make genuine efforts to clean up & get yourself out of it, that black hole will come back to haunt you. Practically every track here is either based around the enjoyment of taking drugs, trying to kick the habit, having to deal with the consequences of it on one’s relationship, finding the mental clarity to free yourself from it long enough to get the people you care about out of its orbit, or in the case of “Cop Shoot Cop…”, being dragged back into that hell, feeling the consequences of it, and being too emotionally drained to recognize there’s no hope left. This album enhances the little things that build up, puts them under a microscope, and makes them feel monumental because of it.
I’d love to gush more & more about the instrumentation here, the brilliance of the pacing & how it tries to emulate the adrenaline rush of shooting some heroin into your system along with the cooldowns that follow once the high wears off, the great punch to the bass & percussion that ties the whole thing’s energy together, the serenity of the orchestra & choir & the horror of the overdriven guitar & the distorted flutes… but it’s just an album that deserves to be heard to capture the full extent of the constant emotional whiplash present here. It is brilliantly performed, especially with headphones in, & for 1997, the mixing job is just remarkable. In closing, I’m just blown away. There are some nitpicks I’d have here & there throughout this album, but they barely affect the visceral nature of the production. It feels like listening to a grand tragedy play out in real time, and for as cheesy as it sounds, I feel like I’m floating in space after having heard it. It’s a 10.
Beatles
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
Ultimately, it’s just a less polished version of the soundscape they’d really flesh out by “A Hard Day’s Night”. John & Paul’s songwriting skills are solid, but they aren’t quite there yet, which is totally fair for 1963, so this album relies a lot more on covers. To be fair, they’re pretty good covers, but I don’t think the Beatles can quite pull off the Motown style with the same natural swagger as the original tracks probably did.
I mean, look, this is the earliest one they have on the list. It’s naturally going to be the weakest, even if it’s still good. It might be a bit closer to a 4, but I can’t really find a reason to justify bumping it down to a 4, since I was just kinda charmed by almost every track here. It’s a solid 33 minutes with a good energy throughout, and while they’re still clearly trying to figure out the dynamics of the band & who should sing which track & what instruments work & which ones don’t, it still results in a good album. Not a great album, at least by the historical standards most people remember them by, but a pretty good one for 1963. I liked it, and it’s a 4.5 bumped up to a 5 for me.
Neil Young
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
It’s a little strange to hear a Neil Young album that’s so intentionally rough. Usually, he’s really deliberate about everything, so it’s definitely jarring. Obviously, it’s not super rough, otherwise I’d be way lower than a 4.5, but the intentionality of it sometimes gives way to a more “amateur” feel that just takes me out of the intended vibe of the album, which, to my understanding, appears to be sort of a live funeral for his friends & a bit of an open frustration session for himself. Neil Young’s exhaustion feels noticeable & somewhat palpable, & channeling that exhaustion into a 44 minute album that practically boils down to “shit is tough right now, I need to vent, sorry” is an interesting choice, especially as a commercial release.
There’s only really 3 tracks that don’t quite fit into that frustration; “New Mama”, “Lookout Joe” & “Tired Eyes”, with the first 2 being a sweet interlude about the joy of raising a kid & the very different world a Vietnam vet might have come back to, & the latter being… I dunno, a really sleepy guy’s inability to recall a murder scene? It’s a very blurry track, and probably my weakest one here because of that. The other two are good though. Realistically, I don’t think there’s a bad track here. I’m mostly at a 4.5 because I do think the rawness of this album can feel just a little too amateur at times; obviously, it’s no “The Madcap Laughs” in terms of leaving stuff in that feels intrusive & almost negatively parasocial, but for a Neil Young album where his standards are usually as high as they are, it really does just feel off at times.
I’m obviously bumping it up to a 5, and figuring out exactly why is something that I can only really answer by saying “listen to the album”, but I do think there’s aspects I can point out. I admire the way this album tries to dance around directly complaining for as long as possible; part of it is probably just Neil Young’s self-awareness that even with his own struggles, he’s in a far better spot than most people would be. In the same vein, the way this album chooses to dance around grief while portraying the exhaustion of trying to appear OK is done really well. It’s obviously all there, and it’s done REALLY well on “Tonight’s the Night - Part II” with all the little pauses throughout. At the same time, I can fully acknowledge that a lot of these tracks do end up sounding kinda similar, and even for as much as I liked this album, I found myself zoning out at points. With Neil’s approach putting less importance on everything, it’s very easy to feel less invested, and that does hurt the perception of the album.
Regardless, I think it’s a really interesting take on grief, & I did like practically every track here, save for “Tired Eyes” (& even then, it’s not that bad). I don’t know if it’s an album you can really go back to & play multiple times like that, but I do think it’s worth giving a listen to before you die, even if it’s just once. Something about it feels captivatingly sad. Hence, a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
The Stooges
5/5
I’m at a 5.
It’s a bit surprising that it took 802 albums to finally get something from The Stooges, but I had pretty strong expectations based on Iggy’s solo stuff. Granted, those expectations were based around assuming this album would be more like his solo stuff. Instead, we’ve gotten an unapologetic taste of what The Stooges were, loud guitar solos (good shit, Ron), manic percussion (good shit, Scott), strange sax solos (good shit, Steve) & flailing vocals and all. I gotta tell you; I fucking loved it.
This album’s slow road from some tightly crafted punk rock before destroying all sense of typical structure, ending on… well, whatever the hell “L.A. Blues” is meant to be is just fascinating to hear. I can’t say there’s a bad track here, with lyrics giving way to vocal structures & guitar / percussive energy as the key enjoyable stuff. The lyrics are there, and they help guide the emotion a little, but they barely matter. This is practically 36 minutes of Iggy Pop vocalizing to some heavier punk rock, especially for 1970. The pacing might be a little slow at times, but this album is practically going at lightspeed compared to other bands of the era. It does feel WAY ahead of pace for 1970, in a way where you can hear practically its entire tree of influence. As far as my favorites go, I’m probably tied between “T.V. Eye” & “1970”, with the latter getting an ever so slight nod for the sax.
Ultimately, while the slight repetition in style might be a turnoff for some people, I just think the album lines up with my sensibilities, & if nothing else, it’s fascinating to hear this style done SO well for 1970. Iggy Pop & friends might be far more innovative than I ever realized, and now that we’ve gotten a taste of the Stooges, I can’t wait to get their other 2 albums on the list. As far as this one goes, it’s a very easy 5.
Mike Ladd
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4, practically on the strength of the final 4 tracks really hitting a great stride to end the album on.
I mean, I’ll be really blunt; this barely qualifies as a rap album. It’s not because Mike Ladd doesn’t have decent vocals or decent wordplay, but it’s because he’s doing slam poetry. If you’re coming into this expecting a rap album (and believe me, I was with one of the top reviews inciting MF DOOM comparisons), you will be turned off within the first 6 tracks, and nothing this album does afterward will save it, especially with the abstract instrumental choices that take some time to get used to. There’s no “riding the beat” here, and there’s no rap flow to slide on & appreciate, at least in the traditional sense. This feels like experimental trip-hop with a lo-fi lean, though that doesn’t really explain the style well at all. It’s got elements of electronica & D’n’B in there, but it’s just an amalgamation of ‘futuristic’ production choices meant to capture a vibe. It can feel a little pretentious at times, but once you get used to it, it’s honestly kinda strong. From a performance standpoint though, you have to meet this album where it is, and after the first 3 tracks, it can be very hard to give a damn.
I personally nearly gave up on this thing after “No. 1 St.”, which is just slurred to hell (speech-wise), and never really captures whatever vibe it thinks it’s going for. It made me think of the Dr. Octagon album we got a while back, and that was truly its lowest point. After that though, the vibes of “To the Moon’s Contractor” just clicked really well with me, even if it’s about 3 minutes too long. That track is the hand that leads to the second half of this album, which finally kinda hits a stride of sorts. “I Feel Like $100” is abstract as hell, but it just gives off an [adult swim] vibe that I liked. “The Animist” never really hooked me like that on account of the beat, but there’s something about his vocal delivery that I admire.
The final 4 tracks finally hit a consistently strong stride; “Red Eye to Jupiter” is so aggressive about space that it loops around to being fun (I mean, what other track has “outer space motherfucker” in its chorus), and the chaotic nature just worked for me. “Welcome to the Afterfuture” has a loose Kraftwerk vibe to it, at least with the intent of feeling like you’re on some kind of transportation, and I enjoyed that ride. “Wipe Out on the Wave of Armageddon” is just a really good instrumental track with a great vibe & great progression, and “Feb. 4 ‘99” does a great job of setting the stage with all these visions of beauty & peace in the world, contrasted by his rising anger & the swirl of the instrumental as it drops the precision strike of “Off duty demons in denim” to cap off the juxtaposition of the ugliness of police brutality. His delivery feels like listening to a civil rights leader in classic form, and his passion comes through in a way that’s undeniable.
It’s the track that caps off a run strong enough for me to bump this up to a 4. Granted, I totally understand the 2.57 on the site – the lyrics aren’t really online like that, the instrumentals are abstract, and coming in with the wrong impression can easily sink the album. It’s also a rather long 62 minutes, and one that isn’t very consistently satisfying. However, those first 3 / at least 6 of its final 7 tracks, along with a steady stream of at least interesting vibes (far more than I can say for something like the Dr. Octagon album we got a bit ago) just made it so this album never sunk for me. I don’t think it’ll ever get to a 5 for my tastes, but I feel very safe with bumping this up from a 3.5 to a 4. I am glad I heard it, though it does just kinda make me wish MF DOOM were actually on this list so people wouldn’t make such boldly wrong comparisons. Still though, even if it’s not DOOM, it’s a good vibe all the same, and I did like it.
John Lee Hooker
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll just barely bump up to a 4 due to the last 3 tracks clicking nicely. This did have some issues though.
For most of the first 7 tracks, I do feel like John Lee Hooker is just adding some color & taking a backseat to a lot of his collaborators. Part of that is in his delivery; he takes more of a spoken word approach, never lifting up his voice too much to add some additional power to sell some of the emotions of the track. Part of that is in his rhythm; this isn’t a Muddy Waters sort of thing where he’s consistently hitting on the beat, but he’s just sort of playing around it. It’s an approach that has some merit, but it does make it hard to get a real feel for the vibe of the track.
The biggest part of it, at least to my ears, is in the repetition of the instrumentation – the 1989 production standards that plagued part of Bonnie Raitt’s “Nick of Time” are here, mainly in that a lot of these first 7 tracks suffer from the “first minute” syndrome that stalls progression deeply. Between some unconventional delivery, a looser rhythm that doesn’t fully jive with the instrumentals, & some solid if stale instrumentals, it was hard for this album to really pull me. Out of the first 7 tracks, I only really enjoyed “The Healer”, “Think Twice Before You Go” & “That’s Alright”. There’s not really an outright bad track, but the other 4 just didn’t click for me.
Those final 3, though… they clicked really, really nicely. John’s spoken word delivery puts him up close, & it feels a lot more forceful due to the more intimate tones of each track, allowing his age & sense of wisdom to carry more of a mood that helps the tracks out a lot. The rhythm is a lot easier to follow as well, since the instrumentals don’t hit the same ‘stale’ point – maybe the percussion on “My Dream” is a little sterile, but besides that, John’s approach to just kinda whacking all over his guitar feels more raw & authentic, and more distinctly like the blues he’s more famous for. The lyricism is strong, the vibes are really nice, and since they’re just easier to follow along & vibe to in a way that doesn’t feel as incessant as the looping instrumentals did earlier, they’re more fulfilling.
Those final 3 tracks take this album from a competent, if flawed 3, to a competent, flawed, yet earnest 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4. I do think it’s worth a listen, and if those first 7 tracks click more consistently for others, I could understand a 5 here. If they hit even worse than they did for me, I could understand going as low as even a 2. For me, just a 4 – while I do wish one of his earlier albums were here, just for a comparison point, I am glad both he & this album are on the list.
Keith Jarrett
5/5
It’s obviously a 10.
It’s just beautiful. I’m not really sure what else to say. To put together a performance like that on a piano that’s different from what he originally wanted to play on, and to craft something so lovely out of a flaw, persevering forward to make something that might be universally described as art… man. It’s just a remarkable piano performance that will evoke anything in anyone, and the wide variety of pictures it can paint feels as endless as the sky itself.
Just go listen to it. It’s incredible. A masterpiece, even. It’s a 10.
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
5/5
Surprisingly, I’m at a 5.
Traditionally, religious music, at least from my experience, has been so drab & dull. Yeah, the words have meaning, and with the right voice, they might make you feel something loosely spiritual, but for the most part, whenever I was dragged to church, they just felt like an exercise in “praise” that didn’t mean all that much to me. With these songs though, in a faith I’m only very loosely familiar with in a language I don’t know & lyrics I didn’t even bother to translate, I kind of felt the communal spirit of religion exist in a really potent way. There’s just a gravitational pull around these tracks in a way I can’t really describe; the instrumental loops would feel more bland if it weren’t for an incredible vocal energy that constantly morphs & shifts around each track to give it a sense of progression that comes from thin air. Their vocalizations & harmonies evoke the scat singers of the ‘50s & ‘60s who could just do anything with their voice and it would sound kinda magical.
I’m really shocked this only has a 2.58 on the site, as it feels like it should be higher than that. I’ll be the first to tell you that if I were paying more “traditional” attention, I might’ve tossed this aside as an album that ‘goes nowhere’, ‘never evolves’, or ‘is just the same song for 45 minutes’ – that might be true to a point, but it undermines the shared experience that’s meant to come through these tracks. You’re meant to ride off of their energy & just feel it, whether or not you can understand it. I don’t think this is an album meant to be looked at with a super critical eye, but just an album to explore another culture with. Obviously, the music being great helps a lot, and I could easily see myself coming back to these & just vibing out, regardless of religious context. Is it an album you need to hear before you die? In terms of critical acclaim or a “mandatory” piece of work, then I dunno, probably not. However, I’m very glad I heard it; it made for a good 45 minutes where I got kinda hypnotized, in a very positive way. I’ve never really seeked out Pakistani music before this, and yet I find myself wanting to hear more. Hence, a surprisingly strong 5.
The Waterboys
5/5
You know what? I’m at a 10.
I’ll be the first person to tell you that this album’s length is its achilles heel – I think it would be a far more definitive 10 if it trimmed down just a few of the tracks & had a little more variety in the soundscape, but I simply enjoyed this far too much. It feels like the Pogues with more of a Springsteen-ish lean, allowing a lot more of the U.S. rock scene’s influence in the ‘80s to shape the album’s direction, while distinctly managing to keep a very Irish / Scottish feel to the whole thing.
Sure, it can get a little tiring when almost every track has such a confident & jig-worthy energy, but if you can maintain the stamina to not get tired of this soundscape, I think you’ll really fucking enjoy this. Is it a little top heavy? Oh, absolutely – “We Will Not Be Lovers” fucking blew me away, and you can argue the album quite literally peaked at track 2. Thankfully, the descent from that peak is minimal, with maybe only “Has Anybody Here Seen Hank?” standing out as the black sheep of the track list. It’s not bad, but Mike Scott just doesn’t really have a country twang in his voice like that. Besides that, I really liked everything here. I think the lyricism is usually great, the instrumentation is consistently strong (& occasionally really dazzling, especially with that damn violin), and even if Mike Scott doesn’t have a country twang, he’s got a great voice otherwise. His delivery really ties a lot of these tracks together.
My stamina after listening to this damn thing feels a bit shot, so in lieu of going track by track here, I’ll just cut to the chase – I think this is a REALLY great album, and I feel almost as blown away as I did after getting “If I Should Fall From Grace With God” back in October. I’ve never heard of The Waterboys before this, and apparently, their earlier stuff had way more of a “grandiose” rock lean behind it, which I kinda wanna check out for myself. It is a 10 for me, albeit one where I can see it possibly dropping down a little bit without that “first listen glow” behind it, but regardless, it’s somewhere above a 5, no matter what. This is a delightful discovery for me, and I’m very glad it’s on the list.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to listen to “We Will Not Be Lovers” about 10 more times.
Isaac Hayes
5/5
I’m at a 10, though I do have one little gripe here.
I mean, look, Isaac Hayes is in remarkable form throughout this thing. Say what you will about a soundtrack album making the list & any frustrations that might stem from this being a mostly instrumental album, but… my goodness, these compositions are fucking awesome even without the context of the movie. I’ve never seen Shaft, but goddamn, do I want to now. The funk present here is in top form, especially for 1971, and Hayes’ ability to capture a mood on so many of these tracks, with almost nothing but the titles alone to go off of, is incredible. There’s not really a dull moment here – points where you can easily zone out, sure, but it’s never in a way that leads to boredom. It’s zoning out in a way where the groove naturally glides its way into your ears & you can just feel it, even if you’re not paying attention to the chord structure or some of the prettier background details. This whole album never takes away from that energy, and it succeeds as both an instrumental album & as a movie soundtrack. I’m not sure if there’s many other soundtrack albums in history that have been nominated for an Academy Award & the GRAMMY Album of the Year. Even after trying to Google it, I can only really find a handful of examples (surprisingly, “Star Wars” & “Beauty & The Beast” among them).
So, what’s the gripe? For as much as I really like “Do Your Thing”, I do feel like the 20 minutes stall at a certain point. That’s not to say I wasn’t captivated by it, but unlike a lot of the other tracks where the groove glides & you never feel the weight of the length bearing on the track, it definitely hit more on that one. Between that & the sort of ear-splitting outro with the guitar deciding it wanted to go as loud as possible, it didn’t leave me as satisfied as I wish it had. That said, for the vast majority of its runtime, it’s still a pretty damn good track, and it barely takes away from a stellar soundtrack otherwise. It is the sort of thing that makes this a slightly shakier 10, as it might hit me a little differently on another future re-listen, but regardless, I fucking loved this. Isaac Hayes must’ve felt on top of the world in the early ‘70s, man. I’m very glad this is on the list, and for me, it’s a 10.
Ali Farka Touré
4/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump down to a 4.
It’s an inoffensively groovy album, which is a strength & a curse. It’s a strength in that I don’t think there’s ever a bad track here, and if you allow yourself to get into that groove, these tracks will generally pass by without incident & hit you in a really nice way. It’s a curse in that if you can’t get into that groove, these tracks will feel far longer than they are, and their looping patterns & melodies will feel incessant. For me, I can’t say the curse ever hit me too badly, but there are moments where it pops in & just kinda leaves me more critical of the lack of progression at some points. It’s easy to say “all of these tracks are the same”, especially with the acoustic / percussion work, but that undermines the fact that each song has different melodies & rhythms, and that each is sung in one of four different languages – there’s variety here, even if it doesn’t really feel like it at times.
Ultimately, since it’s hard to go track by track here, my rating is entirely based on a vibe. I think there’s some really good tracks here, a few mediocre (yet nice) ones, and only one that really had the length of the track / monotony of the loop strike me in a less appealing way (“Amandrai”, the longest one here). As with the Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan album we got a few days ago, I can’t really say that it’s an album you need to hear before you die in terms of critical acclaim or a “mandatory” piece of work, but as I said when we got “Savane”, I think it’s a recommended listen, if only for the cultural trip of sorts. This album did do more for me than “Savane”, and honestly, on a good day, it might even bump itself up to a 5. I think it’s a really enjoyable project for background noise / vibing to, and while I’m bumping it down to a 4, it’s still got a vote of confidence from me. Good stuff.
Sonic Youth
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
This is the 5th & final time we’ll get Sonic Youth, and out of all the albums we’ve gotten from them, this one feels like the most traditionally shoegaze-y of the bunch. It’s a natural step right between the eerie tones of “E.V.O.L.” & the slight heavy metal / grunge influence present on “Daydream Nation” – that applies to everything from the lyrics to the soundscape itself. I think the lyricism here doesn’t matter as much as it did on “E.V.O.L.”, but they still have enough purpose behind them to help really set a tone on each track, unlike “Daydream Nation” & its more sonically-driven approach. That’s not to say “Daydream Nation” doesn’t have good lyrics, but I don’t think they matter as much to the enjoyment of the album.
This album’s soundscape leans far more into the overdriven guitars as a backing ambience / wall of sound, sort of like a much softer version of what The Jesus & Mary Chain did with “Psychocandy”, without absolutely burying the rest of the mix underneath it. It also does the “Daydream Nation” thing where the soundscape drives a lot of the tracks, but in the traditional shoegaze-y way where the overwhelming nature of the wall is meant to open up the imagination. It’s still loud enough to feel, but not loud enough to distract, and that’s where this album succeeds in a way that “Psychocandy” didn’t.
“Psychocandy” also had pretty drab delivery in its vocals, and while Thurston Moore & Kim Gordon aren’t exactly lifting themselves up that much higher, they at least have a more natural charisma in their vocals where their dry delivery fits for the songs. They also know how to lift up in a way that plays around the chaos of each track (or come in directly after the chaos to provide a good contrast), so their vocals have a really defined presence in each track that helps tie the songs together. Honestly, I can’t say there’s a bad track here, at least for someone who’s listened to enough shoegaze-adjacent stuff now over the past 809 albums.
So, why a 4.5 & not a flat 5? There’s just a few moments where the structures of some tracks feel a little repetitive, a few times where the soundscape doesn’t feel as interesting as intended, a moment or two where the tension just never released in the right way, and at least for me, I think the last two tracks could’ve been flipped around. “Cotton Crown” just feels like it would be a way stronger track to end on. That said, I still think it’s worth bumping up to a 5. It’s a really tight 37 minutes, and honestly, if you want a quicker hit of Sonic Youth than “Daydream Nation” nearly doubling this album’s length, this might be the one to go to. I enjoyed it.
So, out of the 5 Sonic Youth albums, it’s a 3.5 (Dirty), a 4.5 (Goo), a 5 (Daydream Nation), a 4.5 (E.V.O.L.), and a 4.5 (Sister). Lots of rounding up, if you couldn’t tell. That averages out to a 4.4 per album, and honestly, that feels about right. They’re consistently strong, but only Daydream Nation managed to get a flat 5 out of me. Perhaps I owe “Dirty” another listen just to see if that’s first-time jitters or if that score still holds up. Regardless, I’m glad to have been introduced to them, I think they’re definitely worth checking out, and I hear all the acclaim.
Sugar
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
When we got “Warehouse” by Husker Du a bit ago, I made it a very specific point to say that Bob Mould was the better of the two featured vocalists. Color me surprised to find out that this is Bob Mould’s follow-up band, following a series of lesser-received solo albums. Color me less surprised to find that what results is a pretty good album; one clearly riding the wave of grunge at the time (with a bit of shoegaze in there), & occasionally feeling sort of ‘performative’ because of it. Regardless of how ‘performative’ it might feel, I think it’s very easy to enjoy these tracks – Bob Mould’s writing is really smart (really smart, really smart!), & a lot of these tracks do seem to be capturing the tail ends of relationships (relationships, relationships!) in really potent ways. “The Act We Act” is a strong tonesetter for most of the album, and while the thematic connections do seem to fade away by “Man on the Moon” (no, not an R.E.M. cover), I just think the album is consistently strong in the writing department (department, department!).
If it isn’t obvious by now, part of the reason I’m at a 4.5 is Bob Mould’s insistence on repeating almost every fourth line in his delivery (delivery, delivery!). It’s not a huge deal, and occasionally, it helps keep the energy up during a track in a way that blends nicely with the instrumentation, but when you’re doing it as often as possible on “Changes” (Changes, Changes!), it does feel like the sort of quirk that might sink a less patient listener very early on. He does get better about it throughout the album, and by the end, it does feel a little more endearing. The other big reason I’m at a 4.5 comes in the audio mixing – this thing is just consistently loud, man. There’s no fade-ins to build up energy, so each track comes in red hot; wouldn’t be a bad thing if each track didn’t have the guitar so overly mixed that it punches itself in way too loudly. The guitar here is sort of like what we just got with “Sister” by Sonic Youth, but it doesn’t maintain the same control. It’s not as effective as a wall of sound because of it, but once it gets past the initial punchiness of each track, the ears do adjust & settle into it. This whole album could definitely use some tweaking though. Maybe a 35th anniversary remaster next year?
Ultimately, when this album is hitting, it’s really hitting – after some early jitters / adjustment periods through the first 3 tracks, I found myself fully in the vibe of “Helpless” as a sort of heavier R.E.M. (yes, Bob Mould is still a diet Michael Stipe here), and by “If I Can’t Change Your Mind”, I was pretty sold on the album. The weirdly angelic imagery of “Slick” followed by the mysteriously upbeat “Man on the Moon” is a good 1-2 punch to end the album on. I think its flaws are apparent, and occasionally bleed through in repetitive ways, but as an entire 45 minute package, I enjoyed this a lot. I think it’s definitely worth bumping up to a 5, and I’m glad it’s on the list. I feel vindicated for liking Bob Mould more.
Sebadoh
4/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump down to a 4.
At first, I really wondered what this was doing on the list – I’ve never heard of Sebadoh, so at face value, this just seemed like another random indie rock pick for the ‘90s. As it turns out, one of the founding members of this band is Lou Barlow, the former bassist for Dinosaur Jr. who left after the release of “Bug”. That connection does reframe a few of these tracks on this album to my mind, especially so on “Cliche”, which feels like it might be about his choice to leave Dinosaur Jr, though that’s a slightly loose link.
Even without that connection though, which I didn’t realize until “Cliche”, I was definitely into the album. I enjoyed most of the first 6 tracks, save for “Telecosmic Alechemy”, the first of a couple of intentionally ‘drunk’ songs on the album, at least to my ears. It’s not a bad track, and it’s certainly interesting – the looser instrumental approach & the disjointed nature of the track piques the interest, though for my tastes, I think it’s just not a very appealing track from a musical standpoint. I think there are 4 ‘drunk’ tracks on the album; “Telecosmic Alechemy”, “Elixir is Zog”, “No Way Out”, & “Flood”. They all stick out as fitting within that looser style, and I do think being drunk is mentioned in all of their lyrics. Out of those 4, only the last one really clicked for me musically, and it’s just because it feels like a super open & free way to end what’s mostly a sadder album.
Of the other 13 tracks here, I enjoyed 11 of them – all of them seem to be centered around relationship issues (both for family & romance), chronically cheating, the perils of drug use, or the struggle to maintain a relationship in the healthiest possible way. Some of these tracks feel like they’re centered around the dopamine of getting ‘revenge’ after a breakup, which feels even more potent in a social media era where those moments are more commonplace. The only two tracks I didn’t really vibe with were “Emma Get Wild” (just super short) & “Bouquet For a Siren”, which just feels like it tackles the same subject matter as “Forced Love”, though much less care & morality behind it. Everything else ranges from good to great, with my biggest highlight here being “Think (Let Tomorrow Bee)”. The acoustic approach just really worked for me.
So, why bump it down to a 4? Well, 3 of the 4 ‘drunken’ tracks, for as much as they serve a narrative point towards the more spirally side of a messy breakup, just don’t feel as put together & as musically pleasing as the rest of the album. Past that, from the other 13 tracks, there are points where the lyricism seems to make no sense, some rather abrupt fadeouts, & for as much as I like the soundscape as a toned down continuation of Dinosaur Jr.’s more aggressive style, I can’t help but feel like it settles into instrumental breaks just a little too often. They serve to fill out the album, & they’re not a big deal, but you do start to feel them the longer the album goes. To put it another way, this album just doesn’t flow as cohesively as I’d like it to – I understand that the chaos & the ability to jump from calm to manic on a dime is part of the “bubble & scrape” of it all, but in actual execution, the album just feels a little too disjointed as a complete start to finish package.
Hence, a 4.5 bumped down to a 4, but one I’d still gladly recommend. It could definitely go up to a 5 on another day, especially if the ‘drunk’ tracks click a little more nicely & flow a bit better to my ears. I’m certainly glad it’s on the list, and I really disagree with the 2.65 this thing has on the site. It’s a quality album, even if it is a bit disjointed.
T. Rex
5/5
I’m at a 5. Perhaps a touch higher.
I remember “Electric Warrior” as the first 5 I gave in 2025, following 2 middling albums to start the second year of this project off. I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed this one even more – this feels like an improvement to my ears, cleaning up all of the little issues I had with “Electric Warrior” (more consistent vocals, less fluff, better sense of progression, better harmony to everything) & just elevating itself higher because of it. It makes for a really good album.
Marc Bolan’s approach to this album is a little less varied than it was there, but he’s tightened it up in a more consistent way whilst adding a bit more pure rock to the mix – the biggest comparison here is obviously David Bowie, but to my surprise, this album came out only a month after “Ziggy Stardust”, so I doubt it had much influence here, despite what’s likely to be a pretty similar tone & soundscape. It seems like Bowie was inspired by Bolan & not the other way around anyway, so now I’m REALLY intrigued to get to “Ziggy Stardust” down the line. Beyond the Bowie comparisons, the more direct influences here are the Beatles & Led Zeppelin, with just a touch of Buddy Holly-esque ‘50s delivery on some tracks. You can really feel all of those influences on the stretch from “Baby Boomerang” to “Telegram Sam”.
Surprisingly, I can’t really tell you what any of these tracks are about. The lyricism here is stream-of-consciousness poetry, able to conjure up unique imagery in a way that sort of tells a story, but without the more direct substance that I tend to lean towards. For whatever reason, Marc Bolan’s vocal delivery & the sort of hypnotizing tone to the instrumentation sort of washed that aside – the lyricism feels like it doesn’t matter as much as a result, & while there are some great lines that help set a tone, you can largely go through this album & hook yourself onto the vocal rhythm as the driving piece that makes the album work. The only times on the album where the lyricism feels noticeable are on “Rabbit Fighter” (just a bit repetitive) & “Main Man” (just sort of confusing), and the only time where the delivery is lacking a little bit is on “Main Man” (I just think it should’ve been acapella instead of the weird filter).
Regardless, I think it’s a super catchy 45 minutes – if it had some extra ‘substance’ to it & just a little bit more of a structure to the whole project to give it some more connecting tissue, there’s a chance I’d be up to a 10 with this thing. Even as it stands, I still think it’s just a little bit higher than a 5. It’s a really, really good album, and for 1972, it feels well ahead of pace. Perhaps David Bowie will give me that extra kick whenever we get to his alter ego, but for now, Marc Bolan & friends have done one hell of a job here. It’s an easy 5. Consider me a T. Rex fan.
P.S.: Special props go to the production work as well; between this & his David Bowie collaborations, Tony Visconti just knows how to fucking do it, man.
Tom Waits
5/5
Well, I’m somewhere above a 5. My goodness.
I might be just a bit taken aback by how lovely “Ruby’s Arms” is as a closing track, but I just thought it was a fantastic closer to a really strong overall album. Tom Waits’ songwriting skills feel pretty damn vivid here, & even on this album’s more confusingly written tracks (i.e., ones that snapshot parts of urban life without a clear narrative throughline), those snapshots still feel very lived in, giving each track the kind of worldbuilding that feels like it could only come from a seasoned author. I’m just surprised at how seriously Tom Waits takes himself on this album; I’m used to him leaning into the absurd & prose-y at times, but this album is consistently grounded. I think it leads to the best songwriting we’ve gotten from a Tom Waits album – “Soldier’s Things” might still be a gold standard for me personally, but there’s some fantastic tracks here that evoke the same feelings; “Jersey Girl”, “On the Nickel”, & “Ruby’s Arms” among them. I think going track by track would be far less effective than actually listening to it, so I won’t even bother.
I think this has some great instrumentation behind it – a few lull spots & some annoyingly abrupt endings (with “‘Til the Money Runs Out” being the worst offender here), but for the most part, the strings, guitar & percussion just glide along with Tom in a way that hits a really nice harmony. Of course, Tom Waits’ vocals are still the X factor here, and it might be hard to accept him sounding like Bruce Springsteen doing a Louis Armstrong impression on some of these tracks. This is the 4th time our group has gotten him, so I’m used to it by now, and I honestly find his delivery charming on the vast majority of this album. There’s a few times where he goes just a LITTLE too deep in a way that muddles & slurs his voice a bit, but that’s what the instrumentals & lyrics are there for. If you just can’t really get past his vocals, then I don’t think this will quite hit the same way.
For my tastes, it’s very, very close to being a 10 – if “‘Til the Money Runs Out” had clicked a little more nicely for me, I’d definitely be there. No matter what, it’s certainly above a 5, and I think it’s the best Tom Waits album we’ve gotten so far. We’ve only got one more left after this, and it’s one quite literally recorded in a live jazz club. I’ve come to really enjoy the mental image of Tom Waits singing in a seedy little bar, so having that actually come to life will be fascinating. As far as this one goes, it’s a very, very easy 5, and someday, it will probably reach a 10. It’s worth listening to before you die, for sure.
Massive Attack
4/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump down to a 4.
748 days since we got “Blue Lines”, and I’d say it was worth the wait. Obviously, I’ve heard a lot more trip-hop since then, so I’m more attuned to the genre, and this is some GOOD downbeat trip-hop. Right out of the gate, Tracey Thorn sets the tone with a great track in “Protection”, and almost immediately after, this album starts the shaky slope to slowly pull itself to a 4. It’s not that “Karmacoma” is bad at all; I actually like it, but it’s too long. “Three” is actively just kinda mediocre, as the progression stalls early. It’s not bad though. Honestly, this album’s shaky slope doesn’t necessarily come from any bad tracks (although we’ll get to that “Light My Fire” cover), but just mild production choices that stack up over the course of the album.
“Weather Storm” is a fantastic groovy noir track; no complaints about that one. “Spying Glass” is once again too long; either that, or it just needs a vocal reprise to help fill out the back half better. “Better Things” is lovely, and Tracey Thorn continues to make me wonder if Everything but the Girl has better albums that aren’t on this list. “Eurochild” is solid, & I like the beat, but Tricky’s lyricism lacks a cohesion to really glue the track together. He never goes “Maxinquaye” mode here, thankfully. Both “Sly” & “Heat Miser” are great, but the instrumental-ness of it all just kinda suspends the album into a specific mood, one that’s not paid off at all by the “Light My Fire” cover. It’s the biggest stain on the album, and much like how Tricky kinda butchered “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos”, they just don’t do the original song justice at all. It’s a bad closer to what’s otherwise a really strong album.
The “Light My Fire” cover is kind of the nail in the coffin – I’d be willing to look past the little pile of production stuff on account of some very high highs here & what’s generally a really nice groove, but choosing to end on that just doesn’t feel satisfying at all. It is what’s bumping the album down to a 4, but regardless of that, I do think it’s a really strong set of tracks. I can come back to almost all of these (maybe not “Three”) & still vibe out, and maybe on another day, the really high highs here will still manage to override the little issues that built up for me. For now though, it’s a 4.5 that I’ll bump down to a 4, but a good album regardless, & one that should be heard before one dies. I enjoyed it.
Peter Gabriel
5/5
I’m slightly above a 5.
It’s a little weird to get Peter Gabriel’s debut last in terms of his solo stuff, but I’m almost kind of glad we did – the man’s ambition after leaving Genesis feels like it’s on full display here. It’s not as dazzling as “So”, nor is it as consistently thematic as “PG3”, but the variety on display here is a testament to the man’s ambition. A lot of the late PG-era Genesis DNA is still here, but supplemented with things that musically would’ve never really fit on either “Selling England by the Pound” or “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway”. That’s especially true for stuff like “Excuse Me” or “Waiting for the Big One”, both of which are nice, but also feel like Peter Gabriel doing his best Randy Newman impression.
When this thing is rolling, it’s ROLLING. The first two tracks are both great, and “Solsbury Hill” in particular is a real standout. “Modern Love” is nice, though the lyrics could be a little more concise. “Humdrum” has a great groove behind it, “Slowburn” is space-y & lovely, & the two-track finale of “Down the Dolce Vita” & “Here Comes the Flood” is overproduced in the best way possible, sounding way more like the mid-80s than 1977. I really don’t think there’s a bad track here; some stick out as “better” more than others, but they all range from good to great to REALLY great, and for a solo debut, I don’t mind the lack of musical cohesion. Peter Gabriel’s job was to just explore the music he wanted to make by trying a bunch of shit out, and while it definitely leans towards rock, the amount of styles he touches on keeps this thing constantly unique.
I do want to very briefly point at this as a solo debut compared to “Face Value” by Phil Collins, if only because the comparison feels a bit warranted; I do think this is about even with Phil’s solo debut, but I do prefer “Face Value” just a touch more. It could just be because of “In The Air Tonight”, or my doo-wopy tastes aligning a little more with Phil’s stuff as opposed to Peter’s, but regardless, they’re both great solo debuts. As far as this album goes, it’s a great preview of what’s to come on both “PG3” & “So”, and the highest highs here are fucking awesome. I really, really enjoyed this, and I think it’s a bit higher than a 5. I need to listen to PG2 in my own time, I think.
Echo And The Bunnymen
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5, despite a weaker second half.
Despite my shortcomings with “Crocodiles”, I had a feeling this album would be good. 3 years is enough time to hone in some musical talent, & the biggest issue with “Crocodiles” was just an inability to elevate each track to something more memorable, with a lot of tracks just settling into themselves. This album feels like it’s found that energy that was lacking, & while it’s not as ‘zen’ as “Ocean Rain” was, the arrangements here just feel great to listen to. If “Ocean Rain” is a bridge between R.E.M. & the Britpop to come, this album just feels like their R.E.M.-esque era, and they do a great job with it.
Lyrically, I don’t think it’s as tight as “Ocean Rain” was, though it’s certainly an improvement on “Crocodiles” – lots of flowery language & metaphor here that is a little confusing to parse at times, but with a lot of these tracks centered around relationship issues & the constant ‘thorniness’ of maintaining a sense of bliss (probably where “Porcupine” comes from as a title), there’s always a line or two to center the track in a way that gets across a good meaning. My favorite one is probably “Smiling equates with happy, but I know they're miles apart”, but there’s a lot of smaller gems here. Vocally, I do think the range in Ian McCulloch’s voice gets some emotional pull across better than “Ocean Rain” did at times, though it’s more consistently strong in the front half of the album than the back half. Instrumentally, I like these a lot – my only issue stems in a lack of perceived variety. These are all good unique compositions, but a lot of these tracks don’t really stray too far instrumentally outside of some Indian-influenced soundscapes at times, so there is a slight homogeneity that builds up over the course of the album.
As I’ve been saying, the back half is the weaker half, but only because I found more little nitpicks to me – a repetitive ending, a longer track, a track that could use some trimming, and a slight mismatch in vocal / instrumental energy that feels kinda noticeable, but those are all smaller issues that don’t really hurt the core of each track, which is still usually strong. “Heads Will Roll” has none of those issues, and it’s probably in my top 3 for the whole album. It’s just consistently more polished in the first half, at least to my ears. Overall, it’s not a big enough pile of issues to make me bump this down to a 4, as I did enjoy the whole runtime here. I think it’s a good album, and for our final encounter with Echo & The Bunnymen, it’s a strong one to go out on. It just makes me wonder why “Crocodiles” is here, really. I’ll bump this up to a 5 – I think it earns it, and if nothing else, I liked it a lot.
Michael Jackson
5/5
It’s a 10. We all know it’s a 10. I’ve been intentionally starving myself from listening to anything from this album ever since starting this list 818 days ago, and while the wait was long, it was very worth it.
Around 13 years ago, I decided I wanted to listen to music. Not just hear it, but really listen to it. I had a Pandora account years ago where I was just letting the radio run, and it was my first real dive into music. At a certain point, I decided I wanted to listen to albums, and the first guy I wanted to dive into was Michael Jackson, who had died just 4 years earlier. I wanted to listen while lying down on the couch, but I didn’t have a phone or an iPod. Instead, I had a crummy little Wii U with its internet browser, a pair of headphones, and I was listening to music on the Gamepad while checking lyrics online. Surprisingly effective, I can’t lie. Obviously, I started with “Off the Wall”, just because that feels like the accurate place to start. It’s a fantastic album, and since we’ve gotten it again on the list, I’ve come to appreciate it more & more recently. After that was done, I got to “Thriller”.
“Thriller” made me fall in love with music. “Songs in the Key of Life” is the greatest album ever made, and I won’t dispute that. “Thriller”, however, is the most important album to my own musical development. It’s very weird to say that given that I first listened to it in full 31 years after it came out, but I need to rewind it just a little bit. June 25th, 2009 is when Michael Jackson passed away. I know the date vividly because my mom burst into tears when the headline popped up, and I’d never seen my mom cry over a celebrity death before. I very loosely knew who he was, but only as a figure & not for his music. That night, I hopped online and found the music video for Thriller. It was enthralling, to say the least, and a little bit spooky to see the full zombie makeup when it happened in the video. John Landis did an incredible job with that video, & it immediately made me realize the reverence people had for Michael was probably warranted, even though I was quite literally just 9 years old. I found the videos for Billie Jean & Beat It soon after, and a whole slew of other MJ songs. (The one for “Remember the Time” is awesome, by the way.) I didn’t listen to the full album, just because it was 2009 & I wasn’t smart enough to find out how to, but the music videos hooked me in, and they planted a music-loving seed that has now come to fully sprout many, many years later.
I don’t need to go track by track here – everything on this album is ubiquitous from start to finish, each with their own iconic moments that shaped the direction of pop music irrevocably for years to come. Whether it’s the chanting at the end of “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’”, the driving percussion of “Baby Be Mine”, the lovely orchestration behind “The Girl Is Mine”, the creaks & howls of “Thriller”, Eddie Van Halen’s immaculate guitar solo on “Beat It”, the bassline of “Billie Jean”, the TOTO-penned lyricism & lead synth of “Human Nature”, the pitched-up vocals of “P.Y.T.”, or the sensuality of “The Lady in My Life” that’s been causing Bruno Mars to chase a ghost for his entire adult life, every track feels like it’s pushing music itself forward. The influence this album has had on the entire industry is still felt to this day, & this is the best-selling album of all time for a reason.
That reason is on the cover of this album, with his signature written in gold, the most sleek white jacket you’ll ever see, and for whatever reason, he’s got a fucking tiger cub next to him. Michael Jackson’s vocals drive this album; he soars with such a dynamic range that it’s impossible to not admire them at least once while listening. If you can somehow get through “Human Nature” without doing so, then I don’t know what to say. Quincy Jones’ production works wonders here, feeling so far ahead of everyone else in the pop space for 1982 that it split the line; either you were chasing Quincy’s style, or you were doing your own thing. Prince, obviously, chose to do his own thing & it worked out great for him, as he ended up making classics that feel like the LeBron to MJ’s… well, MJ. The vast majority of pop artists tried to chase Quincy’s style for a bit, and a lot of them found success. They just didn’t find Michael’s success. He became the single most famous man in the known universe, after already becoming a superstar as big as the sun with his brothers. If you had ears, you’d have heard of Michael Jackson. Even now, if you have ears, you’ll have heard of him, even if it’s through a silly remix on TikTok, or your parents / grandparents begging you to put on Billie Jean instead of FE!N.
As I said when we got “Off the Wall”, to address the elephant in the room: Michael Jackson was weird as hell around children in terribly awkward, uncomfortable & insensitive ways at best & a genuine serial sexual predator at worst. For better or worse, his work as an artist is so monumentally crucial to both my own journey for truly enjoying music when I was younger & the entire landscape of the industry at large that I feel like I can separate the art from the artist in a historical sense. In this specific case, without this album, without the music videos that stemmed from it… hell, without Michael Jackson, I don’t know if I’d be as musically savvy as I am these days. This is the 818th album we’ve gotten in this list, and that’s probably more albums than most people will listen to in a lifetime. I certainly wouldn’t be 80% of the way into this without that seed being planted. I don’t know if it’s THE best album of the 1980s, as this list has introduced a number of contenders to me (namely “Purple Rain”) but it’s still certainly up there. It’s probably the most important one of the decade. For me, it’s still a total thrill to listen to, & an unbelievably easy 10.
Madonna
5/5
Once again, I'm at a 10.
I’ve been waiting for this album to come up; the other two Madonna albums we’ve gotten on the list are both good, but to my mind, the version of Madonna I’m most familiar with is based on her ‘80s stuff; “Lucky Star”, “Like a Virgin”, “Borderline”, “Papa Don’t Preach”, et cetera. “Vogue” is 1990, but throw it in there too, just for fun. Basically, if it’s in “The Immaculate Collection”, that’s the Madonna I’m most familiar with. Since this is from 1989, it always felt like this was the album I’d gravitate to the most whenever we got it. Besides, this album’s title track has stuck with me for a long time. However, since I heard it through Pandora years ago, I never really bothered to seek out the full album for whatever reason.
As has been proven multiple times throughout this list, the younger version of myself that was too lazy to seek out full albums was a total idiot – this is fucking fantastic from top to bottom. I’ve come to learn that I really love that phase of 1989/1990 production, when people had mastered the art of the drum machine, were starting to incorporate MIDI sounds in more polished ways, and were blending real instrumentation back into their albums. Much like “Behaviour” by the Pet Shop Boys, “Violator” by Depeche Mode, or “The Sensual World” by Kate Bush, this album feels like a natural sendoff to the ‘80s, and it may very well be the best album Madonna’s ever put out. The production work here is fantastic, & Madonna’s vocals just glide on a lot of these tracks. The songwriting feels perfectly introspective, setting up the stage for a more honest approach that artists like Christina Aguilera would later run with. It’s also surprisingly sweet at times, at least more so than I would expect from the image of Madonna I have in my head; tracks like “Express Yourself”, “Cherish” & “Dear Jessie” are poppy, upbeat anthems that stand out among the crowd here.
Really, if I have any minor nits to pick, it’s the repetition on the lyricism – these are very well written, but the lyrics do loop a bit without the vocal variance to keep them fresh. Granted, that’s covered up really, really well by the production work – Prince, in particular, manages to make “Love Song” feel hypnotic, with an approach reminiscent of “Sign O’ The Times” mixed with “1999”, and somehow, that hypnotism waves away a lot of the repeated lyrics as just flirting. The sense of repetition does permeate the album a bit, but the different styles & tempos this album goes with gives it a really dynamic push/pull that keeps it fresh. Take “Keep It Together” & “Spanish Eyes”, for example; the former is just New Jack Swing that could fit onto “Rhythm Nation 1814”, but the latter feels like a Peter Gabriel track with a slight samba lean, & Madonna’s frustrated vocals evoke Kate Bush in a great way. Same goes for “Dear Jessie” into “Oh Father”, with the former being a My Little Pony-esque wonderland of escapism, and the latter being a harsh reality check about the lack of emotional support after her mother’s death. That push & pull really sells the album, culminating in “Act of Contrition”, acting as a mirror to “Like a Prayer” in that her frustration with religion has totally fucking boiled over & she’s sick of it.
It’s a great closer because of it, and the structure to this album as a complete top to bottom piece of work feels extremely satisfying. Sure, you can write some of this off as Phil Collins-esque cheese if you really want to, but for my money’s worth, it feels like an album she poured her soul into. When you treat music with this much care, people will notice, and as a culminating piece to her run of ‘80s singles & hits, it feels like a great way to wrap up the decade. I think it’s a fantastic album, with 51 minutes that fly by & no skips involved – maybe “Act of Contrition” if you don’t like Madonna screaming about a computer at the end, but even still. I’m at a 10 with it, and I feel really glad this album lived up to the expectations I had for it. Remarkable to get this & "Thriller" back to back.
As a whole for Madonna’s 3 albums here, it’s a 4.5, a 3.5, and a 5, so I guess 13/15 ain’t bad at all. I do feel like at least one more ‘80s album could be here, but regardless, I admire her even more than I already did. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m running back “Like a Prayer” at least 5 more times. That song fucking rules.
Scott Walker
4/5
I’m at a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4.
Scott Walker’s vocals are as good as they were on “Scott 2”, albeit with a little less of a Disney vibe in there. The production work shares much of the same; not as bombastic as the ‘Disney baroque’ of before, but the slightly emphatic folksy lean still has a good sense of gravitas behind it. This album doesn’t really have any bad tracks either; frankly, I liked most of them. What exactly is it that has me at a 3.5 bumped up to a 4?
It’s the lyrics. OK, well, it’s not JUST the lyrics, but for the most part, it’s the lyrics. I know lyricism doesn’t matter as much, but at least for me, I like gathering a sense of what each track is about, to better understand the emotional pull of it all. This album succeeds at finding emotion, but with the lyricism as flowery as it tends to be, it feels like the equivalent of a… well, a Disney movie that you’re just not as into, I guess. I hesitate to say ‘forced’, but I was never as sold on these tracks as much as I think Scott was intending here. It’s really prevalent by the last 2 tracks, which especially could use some additional clarity, but the vast majority of the album mildly suffers from a sort of expository curse in its writing – Scott describes these things with a sense of grandeur, and his delivery & the production matches that, but since it’s so hard to parse, it’s just never that effective.
Beyond that, even though this is a 32 minute album, I just have a pile of little nitpicks that comprise the ‘not JUST’ of it all – a few tracks are a little too bare instrumentally, some of them aren’t super compelling, & some feel slowly paced in a way that creates a sort of ‘first minute’-ish effect. It’s only 32 minutes, but it feels longer than that, and that’s not really a good sign, I think. Ultimately, it’s a remarkably technically sound album, and one that I did enjoy, but its shortcomings build up in ways that stop it from gelling together as a full project. That “emphatic folksy lean” does start to feel a little similar by the end of it, and Scott’s vocals don’t feel as shiny as they did at the start. Hence, a 3.5 that I’ll bump up to a 4, if only because my enjoyment & the lack of a truly bad moment here feels like it keeps this thing afloat. I do wish I could leave it at a 3.5 though.
Hawkwind
5/5
I’m at a 5.
It took a bit for this album to start clicking with me; something about the vibe felt off, and in particular, the mixing of the first real track had me worried – all the reverb, wind, & the spatial sense of everything made the vocals feel muffled, in a way that kept me too distracted towards catching the energy of the rest of the instrumentation. It didn’t click with me on a first pass, if only because I was expecting a bit more clarity. After that point however, once the more hypnotic feel of “Down Through the Night” kind of worked its way into the ears, this album really started to find itself for me & the sci-fi monologue directly after gave me a sort of Star Trek vibe that I just kinda fucked with. After that point, the album settles into a phase of lyrics that loosely tell a story, but actively choosing to let the instrumentation sell the tracks, and once that hierarchy is established, this thing feels remarkable to listen to. A bit long, obviously; 90 minutes before the 11 minute instrumental encore on top, but if you can allow yourself to zone out to this thing, these tracks are great. The “mixing” issues I mentioned earlier become a massive strength of the album, as the space-y stuff blends in way more nicely once the intensity of the instrumentals go up. The muffling is still a factor, but it’s far less of one, since the vocals become less prevalent as well.
It’s frankly impossible to go track by track here; there’s a loose plot somewhere involved, and there’s elements of each track I liked, but for the most part, this is practically a 100 minute concert that one has to just feel out. If you’re already attuned towards science fiction technobabble or high-concept alien civilization stuff, then all the monologues here won’t feel as nonsensical as they might – even still, I think the delivery on them is authoritative / varied enough that they add some good campy flavor. Obviously, the instrumentation across the board does a great job, but in particular, Simon King on drums & Lemmy on bass guitar REALLY steer the direction of each track, & this album would feel a bit more lost without them. The guitars do a great job too, especially when they go full blast. If I have any minor complaints, it’s that a few instruments get more muffled in the mix (namely the flute/sax), though I do think some of that is intentional.
Ultimately, I really enjoyed it, though I fully recognize it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. In particular, if the mixing choices early on feel too stuffy & the science fiction aspects feel too cheesy, it will be very easy to bounce off of this album & disregard the rest as trite, over-indulgent nonsense that’s making noise just to make noise. That’s the harshest scenario, but it probably happened to at least one person who gave this a 1. To me, the grandeur of this album that reveals itself over time manages to win out, & the atmosphere behind it becomes just as much of an instrument as the band’s stuff. I think it is a little long for what it is, & since the crowd isn’t super audible throughout, it would have been possible to overdub a lot of this in the studio. That said, doing it live & as proficiently as they do it feels like a testament to all of their talents, and that would also undermine a lot of the stage show aspect of this that goes unseen. As an album experience, I think the clarity of the mix to capture all the intricacies of the bass / drums / everything else WHILST retaining the space-y wall of sound in a way that doesn’t feel overly intrusive, is kind of a miracle for 1973. I really enjoyed it, and I’m glad it’s on the list. I can’t say I’m surprised by the 2.69 on the site, but it does deserve to be higher.
Billie Holiday
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I'll bump up to a 5.
It did take me a bit to get into this though; my problem early on was focusing on this a bit too musically as opposed to simply feeling each track. Billie Holiday’s vocals here aren’t as crisp as one may expect, though they’re still very good. The orchestration is lovely, but a lack of solos / instrumental breaks early on doesn’t let them feel as dazzling as they should. Since it’s a cover album, I can’t exactly critique the lyrics much. Overall, for a bit there, I just wasn’t totally into it despite each track being really technically sound.
All I had to do was close my eyes. It really is that simple – just closing the eyes & filling in some of the atmospheric blanks my brain wasn’t concocting from just the music alone really gave each track some additional space that made it feel more lived in. Billie Holiday’s ‘less crisp’ vocals suddenly felt fragile in a way that elevated each track more. The orchestration got some more time to shine, and as a result, the flow & blend of her voice felt like it was working more hand-in-hand than earlier; less of a slight wall of sound & more of an active participant in each track. It’s hard to go track by track here, since a lot of these are straightforward love songs (and a few were previously covered by Frank Sinatra on “In The Wee Small Hours”), but since they’re so straightforward, it’s just a matter of finding that mental imagery that these songs are trying to attract. It took me a bit to find it, and once I did (& once some of the early kinks of the album cleared up), the whole experience opened up.
I do recognize that since the general structure of each track here feels kinda similar, it’s probably easy to bounce off of the album, or at the very least, it still might be hard to get into it as a full project. Those 44 minutes do feel a bit long at times, especially with the slower pacing on these tracks. For me, it would’ve taken more 'flaws' to consider bumping it down to a 4, but I also have more tolerance than some people. I do think it’s a 5, if only because the stretch from “You’ve Changed” to “Glad To Be Unhappy” felt undeniably strong (ESPECIALLY “But Beautiful”), and there’s not a single bad track here. I do wonder if there’s a ‘better’ Billie Holiday album out there, but this is a good pick regardless. I enjoyed it, and I’m glad it’s on the list.
Wilco
5/5
I’m above a 5.
These are the same guys who did “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”? Are we sure? The guys who sounded like “American Radiohead” are out here doing an alt-country album 5 years earlier & doing a damn good job with it – color me surprised that this is what Wilco’s original style was like, as it’s somehow both way out of left field & right down my alley. I enjoy country music when it’s done well, so this album doing the genre justice as well as it does, while integrating soft portions of the grunge of the mid-90s in a way that doesn’t really too harshly one way or the other feels like a miracle. This sounds like ZZ Top at times, the Rolling Stones at others, Matchbox 20 on occasion, and yet, it’s all pretty cohesive. For Wilco, at least from what I thought I knew of them, I’m just really surprised.
I’m also surprised this thing is as consistently energetic as it is; despite so many of the tracks here being lyrically somber or snarky in some way, a lot of these tracks have faster tempos & a really vibrant approach to the soundscape. The guitars are always doing something fun, the percussion knows when to kick into gear, and the supplemental stuff (fiddles/banjos/piano/etc) fits in perfectly. It also knows when to slow down that energy and let the lyricism breathe. These are pretty well written, but Jeff Tweedy’s delivery makes some of the more mundane / repeated lines feel fresh. His voice is an underrated instrument here, and it does show aspects of what he’d REALLY push forward by “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”.
Going track by track here would be a fool’s errand – this is a 19-track album, and that’s just too many to cover all at once, especially since I liked all of them. My favorites are probably “Monday”, “Outtasite (Outta Mind)”, “I Got You (At the End of the Century)”, “What's the World Got in Store”, “The Lonely 1” & “Dreamer in My Dreams”. The last one in particular, closing out the album with a suicide song wrapped in a bluegrass bow, is, at the very least, the most fascinating one here to me. Its message is in plain sight, but I didn’t perceive it that way until the very end. I just assumed all that “swinging” was optimistic energy awaiting his son’s birth & the future to come, so I clearly got suckered into the happy vibes of the instrumental.
Why exactly is it not a 10 like “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” if I liked every track here & had a number of favorites, then? Frankly, it’s just a bit long. This is 25 minutes longer, and to be totally frank, I don’t think it uses all of its 76 minutes as tightly as it could. For as good as these tracks are individually, there is a slight lack of focus that starts to kick in after “Someday Soon”; not in the writing or delivery, but just in the pacing of the album. It starts to meander a bit, retreading on some themes & instrumental styles that’s definitely noticeable. It didn’t affect me too badly, but it is something that might bite on any future relistens. I don’t know if any tracks NEED to be cut here, since they’re all good, but some of them probably could’ve been trimmed out. It’s not my place to decide which ones though. Regardless, it’s still somewhere above a 5, at least for my tastes; this was super enjoyable, and I think they did a great job. I’m very glad to have heard country Wilco, & I’m very glad this is on the list.
P.S.: Whenever we get “Mermaid Avenue”, I’ll be very intrigued to see how they handle Woody Guthrie lyrics. Those are from a totally different generation, and putting those to music in their style feels like it could be very strange. I hope it's good though.
Jimi Hendrix
5/5
I mean, it’s obviously a 10.
I just don’t know how Jimi Hendrix & friends did this in 1967. It feels like listening to the next 20 years of rock music, if not longer, develop in real time. Jimi’s talents are one thing, and the obvious driving force of the album, but the percussion is on an insane level for the time, managing to be just as dazzling as Jimi’s guitar work at points. The pulse & pace of this thing feels incomparable; we’re two years before Led Zeppelin arrives on the scene, & I don’t think the Rolling Stones were quite there yet. The only guys even remotely close were The Beatles (in terms of innovation) & Cream (in terms of even remotely close guitar talent; that said, fuck you, Eric Clapton), and even still, they weren’t going for it like THIS. This is a top-to-bottom stunner of an album, managing to take blues as it was known, turning that Spinal Tap dial up to 11, and just going to fucking town. Lyrically, it’s pretty good too, but I’ll be honest; I barely cared about the lyrics past a certain point. Jimi’s delivery is super strong throughout, and his ability to lift his vocals up on each track spices the energy up in a really effective way.
As far as the track list goes, I personally went with the U.S. release & then threw on “Red House” as a bonus, just because it has 73.5 million plays on Spotify & it felt appropriate. Every track here is great; I feel going track-by-track would be worse than just listening to the damn thing, but I want to especially gush over the title track itself, since the backwards soundscape & the reverb tricks feel so far ahead of pace for the era. Throughout the whole album, there’s production that everyone would bite down the line, even going as far as feeling shoegaze-y at points. I cannot stress enough how much this album needs to be heard rather than read about, because it just feels ridiculous that this is from 1967. The only giveaway is just the vocal panning at times, & even then, it never gets egregious.
It’s a 10. It’s really that simple – I was not experienced with this album before going into it, and now I certainly feel experienced. Between this & “Electric Ladyland”, I’m just blown away. Jimi Hendrix fucking rules, & I cannot fucking wait to get “Axis: Bold As Love”.
The Black Keys
4/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump down to a 4, though I did really enjoy this.
This is an album where the only track I knew going in was named “Tighten Up”. It’s a good track, and I like it; partly from early 2010s nostalgia, and partly because I just think the pulse of the track is pretty nice. This album, if you want to be rather cynical about it, is “Tighten Up” done 15 times, with not too much variance behind it. That’s the cynical approach; one that I won’t necessarily dismiss, because it’s true to a point, but one that takes away the nuances of this album & the very intentional choice to limit the soundscape as much as it does. This is a very direct album, made clear by the choice to declare the band name & the album’s title so plainly on a black square on that cover art. It’s direct in its lyricism, it’s direct in its vocal approach, & it’s direct in its percussion. The only thing that’s not super direct is the guitar work, and even then, that’s just because it’s doing pretty direct blues tropes that blend well with this album’s ‘softer White Stripes’ approach. It’s a very slight tweak of the garage rock era of the mid-2000s, blended with some of the future ‘pop rock’ tropes to come from bands like Imagine Dragons & a touch of the slower pacing that Tame Impala would ride with down the line. It’s a consistent approach, no different from some blues albums of the ‘50s & ‘60s where you can make the same cynical ‘every track is the same’ claim, but as a result, it’s not really a fair claim. It is, however, true enough that it’s partially why I’m bumping this down to a 4.
For as much as I love dissecting tracks & lyricism & the whole thing, since this is such a direct album, I think it’s a little hard to do so here. It’s not because ‘every track is the same’, but it’s because this album’s lyrical themes of family relationships & romantic dynamics feel rather obvious. These tracks overlap a bit; not in terms of direct references to other tracks, but there are ones that touch on being lusty or being lonely a little often. They’re written well enough & shake up the melodies enough that it’s not too much of a bother, especially in the moment, due to the grooves & pulse that drive this album, but when you’re done with the album & really reflecting on it, like I am now, they just kinda bite you after the fact. The other thing that’s really biting at me, and what’s most inclining me to bump this down to a 4, is simply the lack of a definitive ‘great stretch’ of the album. This is a consistently good one, and it lifts up to ‘great’ on a few tracks. There’s just never a definitive stretch where this album is REALLY rolling like that, at least in a way where my brain can point it out. A truly great album has a stretch that kills it & really gets you engaged. The closest thing here is “Tighten Up” through “The Only One”, but even still, I just thought “Howlin’ for You” & “Black Mud” settled themselves into ‘good’, and not ‘great’. This album just never REALLY hits that defining, elevating point, even though it never hits a bad one.
Hence, a 4.5 bumped down to a 4, though one I still really recommend. Realistically, my bump down is just a bunch of minor nitpicks about ‘safe’ songwriting coming to roost, and if someone wants to give this a 5, I wouldn’t even bat an eye. All of the people giving this 1 or 2 are overreacting in my mind; they’ve got valid points, but they’re intentionally not meeting this album where it is out of the expectations for something ‘bigger’ relative to its popularity / acclaim, and that’s just not this album’s modus operandi. I think it’s a strong album, and when it’s at its best, it’s very good. Perhaps if this album were trimmed just a bit to remove a little bit of the filler (some of the last 5 tracks didn’t fully hook me in like that), I’d be more inclined to bump it to a 5. Hell, it might get there on another day. As it stands, I think it’s a really good album; I hear the acclaim, and it’s deserved acclaim. Auerbach & Carney do great work together, and while they don’t have the same cultural pull as they once did, this album’s place as a landmark of sorts to usher in that early 2010s approach to blues/pop rock feels warranted on the list. I liked it a lot.
Frank Sinatra
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Not too much to say; it’s Frank Sinatra doing great bossa nova, in collaboration with the original songwriter / composer of “The Girl from Ipanema”, Antonio Jobim. This album, as far as its inclusion on the list, is probably meant to represent him more than Frank, but 'two birds, one stone' & all that. It’s 7 of Mr. Jobim’s tracks, & 3 “American Songbook” standards in a bossa nova style. It’s a tight 28 minutes, Frank’s vocals glide as always, and the orchestration / instrumentals here are lovely. It’s fascinating that this came out the same year as both “Sgt. Pepper’s” & “Are You Experienced” – it’s a very classic Sinatra album, in the sense that it’s practically just his voice & the music at hand, without any extra flair to it. I’m not sure where Frank Sinatra’s cultural status was at the time, but this just feels like a guy who’s still confidently at the top of his game. His voice still comes with a type of confidence that feels like it could pick up any woman willing to listen, and it blends really well with the orchestral bossa nova here.
If there’s any real nitpicking, it’s just that it’s a lot of love songs & not much else, though that might just be a slight indictment on Antonio Jobim’s songwriting as opposed to anything else. It’s a short, safe album that just knocks it out of the park, combining the easy listening of bossa nova with the flair of Frank Sinatra, and it just works, simple as that. For me, it’s an easy 5. I’m glad it’s on the list, but I am sad this is the final time we’ll be getting Ol’ Blue Eyes. I have a lot of love for his style / era of music, and I feel like I need to search out a bit more of it.
Steve Winwood
4/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump down to a 4.
I like Steve Winwood a lot. I like ‘80s production, even when it’s this cheesy & synth heavy. I also like Phil Collins, whose lack of a solo album here baffles me a little bit; not even “Face Value”, just for “In The Air Tonight”? I bring up Phil because… well, Steve Winwood sounds a lot like Phil Collins here, as many people have pointed out, especially so on the first two tracks. Put all of that together, along with Steve’s solid (if cheesy) songwriting & his innate musical ability (he played EVERY SINGLE instrument here), and you end up with a pretty damn good effort across the board. I enjoyed all the tracks here; there’s a good funk behind tracks like “Second-Hand Woman” & “Night Train”, some great guitar work both electrically & acoustically (“Slowdown Sundown” on the latter especially), and when this album wants to break out real drums to go with the synths, it just makes me wonder why so many artists in this decade chose to pair drum machines with synths. Granted, Steve is just as guilty of drum machine use here, but it still sounds nice. Overall, while it’s certainly cheesy at times & EXTREMELY dated to 1980, it’s the sort of cheesy style that’s directly attuned to my musical tastes, for better or worse.
So, why the 4.5 bumped down to a 4? Well, even I have my limits / critiques. This album settles into its starting groove a bit too often, leaving these tracks in a state of limbo that you will either tolerate because it’s surrounded by little synth hits & melodies that try to keep it fresh, or you will despise it because the synth hits just feel like bandaids for an endless loop. The truth is somewhere in the middle; I think these do a decent job of maintaining a groove & an energy, but not enough tracks shake things up meaningfully in a way that gives the track good progression. That’s combined with repeating lyrics & an overt reliance on choruses that starts to feel really noticeable towards the end of the album. “Arc of a Diver” is guilty of that chorus reliance, “Second-Hand Woman” desperately needs a bridge in there to shake up the rhythm, “Spanish Dancer” does as well, & “Dust” is just overly guilty of the repeating lyrics, in a way where it’s a weaker album closer. The best track here is a tie between “When You See a Chance” & “Night Train”, as neither really hit on those tropes.
That pile of issues along with the same ‘consistently good, never hits a stretch of great’ thought process that I threw at “Brothers” is why this is getting a bump down to a 4, but as with “Brothers”, I still really enjoyed it & I still do recommend it. Obviously, since I have an affinity for this style & a bit of tolerance, I don’t see all of those issues as huge sinking deals, but for people who already don’t really like this style, I sort of get & understand the 1’s & 2’s. Personally, I think the floor is a 3, but regardless, I think it’s still got a place on the list. It’s certainly on the chopping block, but I’ve heard much, much worse before. It’s a 4.5 that I’ll bump down to a 4.
Beck
5/5
I’m at a 5.
Who even is Beck, anyway? That’s what I asked when we got Odelay near the end of February, and I think I now have my answer. Beck is someone who does whatever the fuck he wants based on whatever mood he’s in, and somehow, it just works, every time. This album’s variety expands even further past “Odelay”, taking full advantage of the extra technology available & taking some inspiration from other acts that had popped since “Sea Change”; Jack White, in particular, gets a co-writing credit & a bass-playing cameo on “Go It Alone”, which is really cool. This album does feel like Beck’s own take on the garage rock revival of the early 2000s, but with his own flair behind it & an eclectic mix of instruments that create something unique for the time, sticking out in a way that feels ahead of pace for 2005. Just listen to something like “Earthquake Weather”, which feels like a Thundercat track through & through, yet still retains the neo-soul vibes of the late ‘90s that Thundercat was inspired by. It’s a great melding of what was & what was to come in the music landscape, and that general vibe permeates the whole album, with the mixture of grunge elements & electronica throughout that somehow fit cohesively together.
It is harder to go track by track here, just because each track feels really instrumentally different in a way that is best experienced by listening to it rather than breaking it down, but I do want to give some love to the lyrics here; unlike Odelay, which felt largely like an afterthought that fit melodically, this album’s dichotomy between its generally poppier / upbeat instrumentals & the constant poking towards loneliness, heartbreak & death in the lyrics feels very intentional, and it’s consistently strong throughout. It’s obviously not as explicit & downbeat as “Sea Change” was, but a lot of these tracks feel like Beck’s expression of an identity crisis. The final 3 tracks in particular really work in tandem for me; “Farewell Ride” seems to be about an outlaw preparing to defy death despite its inevitability, “Rental Car” seems to be about someone actively seeking it out, and “Emergency Exit” is about someone who wasn’t prepared for it. It’s a good 3-track stretch to close out on, and it wraps up this album nicely.
Ultimately, his was just really enjoyable; I think this is my favorite Beck album on the list, especially with the matured songwriting & variety in production present, and I’m glad it’s here. Unlike what that top review is implying, this was well worth a listen & it certainly was entertaining, at least for my tastes. I can think of at least one artist on this list who has 3 or more that are less deserving than Beck (their name rhymes with “Snorissey”). It’s a good trio of albums to put here, and I certainly want to listen to more of the guy. As far this album goes, it’s a 5, if not a little higher. Damn fine stuff here, Beck.
5/5
I’m at a 10.
I mean, fucking hell, color me surprised for 1969. If “Are You Experienced” was a blueprint for rock music over the next several years to come, it sure feels like this should’ve been the blueprint for punk rock for years to come. I can’t believe that was 1969, let alone a live debut album. You gotta have stones to make your first album a live one, but the energy emanating from both them & their crowd felt infectious in a way that only a live album can really capture like that. Obviously, the technical skill behind it is one thing, especially to stay as in sync as they were, but beyond that, just managing to fill their atmosphere with such a natural charisma across the board that it can come through as if you’re actually there… seriously, it’s remarkable for the time.
Lyrics barely matter here, save for their use as a path to let Rob Tyner control the pace of each track / the emotion of the venue, and he does fantastic work, especially once the crowd is bought into what MC5 are selling. There’s a specific moment during the slower point in the halfway mark of “I Want You Right Now” where it feels like everyone, including the band, is hanging onto his every breath, and I haven’t felt a sense of control like that since Kurt Cobain’s literal deep breath back on the MTV Unplugged album. Obviously, the guitar work here from Wayne Kramer & friends is fucking unbelievable; just listen to it, if you somehow haven’t.
Ultimately, it’s just a stunner, top to bottom. I can’t type anything else about it that would do the 40 minutes justice – it’s a fantastic debut & it feels like the blueprint to follow, even now. I don’t know what has led this towards 35% of people on the site giving this a 1 or 2, but those people are dead wrong. Kick them out in the same way that MC5 kicked out the jams, motherfucker. It’s a 10, and thank goodness it’s on the list.
Minor Threat
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
21 minutes and 40 seconds of lightning fast punk rock. It’s snotty as hell, thoughtfully angry, unapologetically loud, and it’s right down my fucking alley. This album feels like a preview of the more manically paced / experimental albums that would emerge through the rest of the ‘80s & would be especially refined by the ‘90s. The only reason this is at a 4.5 is just because it’s a little same-y in terms of the actual soundscape (aka insanely fast drums & guitar riffs for miles), but it’s got a lot of variety within it to keep it fresh. Ian MacKaye’s vocals work well here; he would obviously go on to greater success with Fugazi, but his venom-filled disdain gives this album an edge that really makes it work, anchoring & channeling all the nearly off-rails instrumental chaos into a package that manages to be concise & tight.
There’s really not much to say; everyone plays their part & their instruments perfectly, and since it’s such a short album / EP, it’s just worth fucking listening to it compared to whatever I could type about it. I’m glad it’s on the list, it’s deserving of the acclaim, and it’s an easy bump up to a 5. Really, really fun stuff.
The KLF
4/5
I’m at a 4.
It’s a solid album; definitely a good blend of house / acid / trip-hop / electronica for the time, and the closest thing we have to a full early ‘90s DJ club set in the atmospheric sense. A lot of these tracks do feel like the type of obscure tracks you might stumble upon looking for deeper dives. They’re decently cohesive here, even if the glue is just faux crowd noise for most of the tracks. It’s pretty well paced too, until you get to “No More Tears” & the album’s momentum just freezes in place. That track is mostly the reason why I’m at a 4 – there are some repetitive spots, some lacking lyrics (namely on “The White Room”) & the last track doesn’t meaningfully divert from the first track too much, but “No More Tears” is… well, it’s just too damn long, really. If that had been trimmed down & paced a bit better, I might be closer to a 4.5, but it just stalls the album in a bad way. If 22% of your album is devoted to one track & it kinda flops, that kinda justifies any sort of bump downward.
Even with one track of woe, I think my biggest point against this album is that it never really finds what it wants to do as a full project. Electronica albums can usually evoke a sense of adventure, in some kind of way; at the very least, they find an atmosphere to build on & make the brain really conjure up stuff. This album sort of starts that way with the crowd noise, but once it strays away, it’s just tracks that find a mood, but not a consistently engaging mood. I did enjoy this though; it’s well-produced for its time & most of the tracks here are good. It’s just not a strong top to bottom album experience; my appreciation for this genre has me at a 4, but I understand if people would go for a 3 or even lower. It’s an album made for people who already like the genre, and if you don’t, then you just don’t. I am glad it’s on the list though.
Madness
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I'll bump up to a 5.
The only track I knew going into this, as I imagine is the case for most US listeners, was “Our House”, which continues to be in the middle of their street. I didn’t realize Madness were as big as they were in the UK, since that track just kinda defines their legacy over here. Based on the ‘ska’ labeling that Wikipedia gives them, I was more so expecting the mid-90s brand of energetic, horn-driven ska. Instead, what I’ve just listened to is slightly darker new wave with some horns thrown in there, and it turns out, it’s a style I quite like. This is really well-produced for 1982, managing to let the eclectic, weird & occasionally chaotic instrumentals feel clear throughout, giving each instrument its own space to work. The pacing of the album is nice too, with every track (save for one) clocking in at 3:40 or less, so when a track starts to feel a little busy, it doesn’t overstay its welcome. That pacing gives them room to explore, & they cover a pretty good variety of styles & topics that keeps the album fresh.
Lyrically, I’d say it’s pretty good – occasionally a bit repetitive on some outros, or not as clear as it could be, but for the most part, they’re written well. I’m too American to understand the possible overtly British patriotism present here, but I will choose to live in a bit of bliss if it’s more jingoistic than I realize. Suggs’ vocals are good here, with a strange variety that somehow feels like Peter Gabriel at times, Sting at others, and yet entirely his own thing at the same time. At the very least, he’s good at inhabiting the spirit of each track & all the characters present in each. There’s not a consistent enough line to call this a real ‘concept album’, but it’s an album with concepts, at least.
Since it’s an album where the instrumentals drive the energy more than anything else, I find it a bit useless to go track by track here; if you’re inclined towards slightly experimental new wave stuff at all, you’ll probably like this. There are times where it can feel a bit busy, and while it didn’t overwhelm me, I can see how it might be a little too much for others. For me, I’m just impressed by how much personality each track manages to have & how cohesive it still somehow feels (including the very strange & probably racist “New Delhi”). I also just happened to enjoy the instrumentals a lot, & each track made my head sway around a bit. I think it’s a good album, I’m glad it’s on the list, and I think it’s worth bumping up to a 5.
Sinead O'Connor
5/5
I’m at a 10. That one got me really fucking good, man.
I have sat here for 10 minutes pondering this album & how potently Sinead O’Connor lets her emotions pour out of her, and it has left me with one question that I think this album tries to answer – What does an angel sound like when it’s been abandoned by God? I think Sinead O’Connor is a woman pleading for answers throughout this album, and while I’m not sure if she ever finds them, it almost feels like a privilege to hear someone else ask the many angry questions that I have never been able to put so forcefully into words. Sure, her struggles are related to familial & romantic relationships, many of which I can relate to, but at their core, they express a distrust with life itself & the inability to reckon with struggle in a way that doesn’t fundamentally change you as a person. I do not know what an angel sounds like when it's been abandoned by God, but I know that Sinead O'Connor has come as close as anything I've ever heard with this album.
That’s genuinely all I can type. I think it’s a deeply rewarding experience if you just listen to her, especially with headphones in. I found myself just closing my eyes often throughout this album, just to lock in on her even more. At worst, there’s some longer outros, but they barely matter in the big picture. This is an album you need to hear before you die. It’s that potent. It’s a 10. It might be higher.
Robert Wyatt
5/5
I’m at a 5.
It's very hard to apply a specific vibe or genre to this one; the most I can give you is “Peter Gabriel doing a Radiohead album”, “The Dave Brubeck Quartet as composed by Pink Floyd”, & “Brian Eno producing Bob Dylan”, and even then, that doesn’t fully cover the vast variety of styles that this album is constantly jumping through. A lot of this album is instrumentally driven, and while it’s full of instruments that shouldn’t work on paper, it somehow manages to feel cohesive despite itself. Robert Wyatt’s same eccentricities from “Rock Bottom” are here, but channeled into more fulfilling soundscapes; there’s good percussion & guitar throughout this album, and each track manages to capture the exact atmosphere it’s going for, even if it’s done through elongated ambience that might feel hit or miss after long enough.
It really does feel hard to go track by track here. I have lots of scattered notes, but they’d barely fit together in a pile. There’s stuff like “analog MGMT”, “he sounds very meek”, “this feels like it fits in Twin Peaks”, “sounds like an old PBS montage”, “that poor dead bird”, & more. This really is an album that jumps all over the place, and as such, it’s probably just better heard to capture the full palette of musical colors it attempts to paint its pictures with. I enjoyed it a lot, & while I get the 2.51 on the site, I feel like it’s people quickly giving up after the most eccentric stuff on “The Duchess”. This album finds its most consistent voice afterward, and it feels a bit rewarding if you can get into it. I certainly liked it, and I think it’s a 5. Pretty damn good stuff, Robert. I feel like I really owe “Third” a re-listen.
Ozomatli
5/5
I’m a little higher than a 5.
It might just be my love for early 2000s Pharrell-style production talking, but I REALLY enjoyed this. The aspects of it that others might see as weaknesses (too Black Eyed Peas-coded, corny record scratching, too much fusion with Latin elements, ‘bootleg Santana’) are precisely the exact reasons I liked this a lot. I enjoyed every track here, all of which brings something fun to the table, whether it’s in some strong rap verses (shoutout to Chali 2na), some great lyrical / vocal delivery, but I especially loved when this thing hit more of an energetic & danceable vibe, most exemplified by “Déjame en Paz”, which might be my highlight of the whole thing. If you can’t feel the rhythm of that track, you genuinely have no joy.
I do have my nitpicks; I think the first 2 tracks are a little stagnant at times & go for just a bit long, in a way that could easily create some worries about the overall pacing of the album for a first-time listener. With some trimming & some extra spice to them, those tracks could punch just a little harder. By “Street Signs”, it flows a lot better, up until “Santiago”, which does kickstart another wave of tracks that go just a little long / get a little repetitive. It’s never in a way that kills the energy of the track or the momentum of the album, but it is in a way where your ears catch that repetition lingering for just a bit long. Those nitpicks, however valid they might be, are cancelled out by the remarkably high highs of this album; the stretch of “(Who Discovered) America?” through “Dejame en Paz” is a fantastic 5-track run that carries its momentum as strongly as any album we’ve gotten so far from the early 2000s, & “Cuando Canto” is just a great album closer. Even with all my nitpicks about the early / late stretches of this album, their instrumentals are still great & the infectious joy & energy that they’re bringing to the table just feels like a net positive with all the current hell around us. Is it ‘millennial-coded optimism’ that hasn’t aged as gracefully as they would’ve thought back then? Yeah, probably. It’s optimism I don’t mind revisiting though.
Hence, a little higher than a 5. When this album’s at its very best, it feels like a party, and I haven’t gotten that sort of effervescent musical high in a bit. I think it’s a great album, I’m glad it’s on the list, and while I sort of see why people would be over this style of music, I’m just a total sucker for it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to jump around to “Dejame en Paz” at least 5 times in a row. It’s good exercise.
Belle & Sebastian
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
I think someone’s enjoyment of this album, for the most part, will come in the desire to understand its lyrics. For people who aren’t big on the lyrical side of things, this album will probably pass over the ears with some solid, occasionally lispy delivery & some traditional mid-90s post-grunge instrumentation behind it, with slight elements of shoegaze & a loose ‘lo-fi ska’ feel behind it. Enjoyable for its 41 minutes, but not as satisfying as it could be on just those parts of the album alone. That’s where the lyricism really enhances this album. I’ll be the first person to advocate for lyrics a lot of the time, especially when there’s effort put into them, but even I can admit this album in particular is a little too lyrically-driven. However, I do think they’re rewarding as hell if you can pick up on what they’re going for. It’s a little flowery at points, but they do try to make the meanings as clear as they can without explicitly spelling it all out.
Whether it’s an inability to be sexually comfortable with one’s self, a half-closeted / half-open gay relationship, a defiant spirit towards an older generation, the pick-me vibes of a girl walking through the woods, a plea to get out of a lonely slump, a hopeless romantic finding their victories in literature, the insidious nature of religion as it relates to suicide, someone waiting for an ex to be single again for a second chance, the desire for something more intimate than a surface-level love, or sex in one’s dreams being better than the real thing, this album’s ability to find & capture elements that navigate the complexities of the teenage years, at least as written by a chronically fatigued track runner, feels remarkable. That’s where the lyricism elevates this album – the pictures painted build up really well from verse to verse, & the choruses feel like flipping a page just to paint the next part of the story. Is it a little too “YA novel”-coded? I mean, probably, but as with the last album, I’m just kind of a sucker for these things when they’re done well.
So, with all that praise, why a 4.5 bumped up to a 5 and not a flat 5 or something higher? Again, it’s just because it’s a little too lyrically driven to cover up some occasionally flatter instrumentals; that, and I don’t know if it’s necessarily structured super well as an actual album experience. The push & pull of these tracks from a musical standpoint isn’t quite as dynamic as their lyrics are, so there is a slight sense of homogenization that underlines some back-to-back tracks on this album. That said, it’s an incredibly easy bump up to a 5 for me, just because I fuck with everything this album is going for. Stuart Murdoch’s one hell of a songwriter, and if “Tigermilk” is supposed to be even better than this, I can’t wait until we get it. I’m very impressed, given that this is by a band I hadn’t heard of until today, and for me, it’s a bump up to a strong 5.
4/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump down to a 4.
It’s not exactly the superstar version of Blur that would come to pass by their self-titled album, but it’s a pretty good album nonetheless. It’s just not one that really hooked me all the way through – these are all solid to great tracks, but this album’s connective tissue feels like a band still trying to find its identity & its musical niche. The foundation for what would come down the pipeline by “Parklife” is there, but it still really needs to be molded. Damon Albarn’s vocals are solid here, lining up with this album’s “regular guy trying to make it in this godforsaken country” approach to its storytelling. The problem is, that very quaint vibe that the lyrics & vocals give off doesn’t necessarily mesh with the instrumentals a lot of the time. These are energetic, with loud guitars, pulsing percussion & and some dynamic shifting that keeps each track fresh. To my ears though, as a full cohesive album, it just relies on that energy a little too much as its driving factor towards each track. I’m not saying these are poorly written, because there are some great lines in here, but that disconnect of the quaint lyricism / delivery & the instrumentals just becomes too apparent when EVERY track does it.
That disconnect creates a sense of repetition that permeates into lots of other aspects of the album; there’s a lot of “la la la” segments, a lot of longer outros, a handful of repeating choruses, & a lot of repeating guitar effects that feel more noticeable every time they pop up. When they’re done well, they’re done very well, and this album usually does them well, making it easier to ignore it while you’re in the moment. It is, however, noticeable enough throughout this album’s hour-long runtime that it leaves each track on its own island after you’ve finished the whole thing.
That’s mostly the reason I’m down to a 4 – not because of any individually bad tracks (although “Turn It Up” has the laziest lyricism I’ve ever heard from Damon Albarn), but because this album just never gains a sense of cohesion that hooked me in as consistently as they wanted it to. I can’t sit here and say there’s a great run of tracks that all fit together; there are runs of tracks that all feel good to listen to, and the entire album works well enough, but the flow of the album itself feels interrupted by all the little bits of repetition that pile up. Obviously, I can excuse parts of it for being from a band’s second album while they’re trying to find their musical identity, but it’s too persistent. It’s the type of persistency that warrants this being the lowest rated Blur album on the site, although not by much.
Hence, a 4.5 bumped down to a 4; the individual strength of all of these tracks still certainly warrants a listen (if nothing else, “Oily Water” is cool as hell), and perhaps if it were re-edited to let the album flow more naturally, I’d be inclined to look towards a 5. As it stands though, it just never flows well enough for me to get there. I admire the swings & experimentation here, a lot of which helped to shape their style & refine it down the line, and I think this album’s warranted to be on the list as part of the growing pains that make their later albums hit as hard as they do.
P.S.: I’m starting to think I need to give “Parklife” a revisit, because I probably underrated that quite a bit. It was super early on though, so can you blame me?
Jane's Addiction
5/5
I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
Honestly, not too much to say about that one. I’m not sure if I hear all of the “most important alt rock releases” or “one of the greatest albums of the 1980s” hype after listening, but it’s a really strong album regardless. Maybe I’m just a bit desensitized after hearing a lot of highly influential alt-rock stuff that goes just a little harder for my tastes, or maybe I’m just not as mesmerized by this album’s pre-grunge / glam metal approach to everything. Perry Farrell’s songwriting & vocals are both good, but Dave Navarro & friends really steal the show here instrumentally. The basslines are great, the guitar solos are slick, and while the percussion never gets a huge moment, the power & the pulse of it feels strong throughout. It’s a tightly composed 45 minutes with some good variety throughout & not a bad track here.
So, why a 4.5 and not a flat 5? I think I’m just thrown off by the mixing more than anything else; it’s got a super dynamic range to it that emphasizes certain instruments over others on each & every track, and while I’m not opposed to the style at all (it does a great job of creating certain ‘distance’ on some tracks that enhances them), I just can’t help but feel like certain things got TOO de-emphasized in the mix, most specifically, Perry Farrell’s vocals. They take a back seat on a lot of the mixes here, and as such, it’s harder to connect with the lyricism in a way that doesn’t feel super satisfying to me. If you can’t grab the singer’s emotions, it just feels like he’s along for the ride, and I think that’s a bit of a disservice. Past that, there are times where tracks just feel a bit too muffled or quiet overall; “Had a Dad” feels like it suffers the most from this, but it pops up often enough that it just leaves a slightly hazy cloud over the whole album.
Ultimately, everything here is strong enough to warrant bumping this up to a 5; I’m not quite as dazzled as I hoped I’d be compared to expectations, but I’m impressed enough that I’m looking forward to whenever we get “Ritual De Lo Habitual”, especially if it cleans up some of the mixing nitpicks I had about this one. I hear all the bands they influenced, at the very least, and it’s a great ground floor for a lot of ‘90s bands to work from. It’s a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.
Soul II Soul
3/5
It’s just a 3.
I like R&B. I like house music. I like both when it’s done well together, like Janet Jackson’s “Together Again”, Robin S’s “Show Me Love”, practically anything from the cheesy as hell Sonic R soundtrack, & this album’s very own “Back to Life” (the non-acapella version). This album, sadly, does not do them very well together. This is titled “Club Classics Vol. One”, and I would make the argument that there are perhaps 2 classics at most. Realistically, this album is “Club Classic” & then a bunch of other tracks that occasionally feel better than others, but for the most part, just kinda disappointingly fizzle out after strong starts.
The other classic in contention here is “Keep on Movin’”, which lines up given Caron Wheeler’s involvement. She’s got a great voice. You know who doesn’t? Jazzie B, whose spoken word approach on the majority of his tracks has absolutely no tonal match to the instrumental energy at hand here. He’s out of place, and while something like “Holdin’ On” is a bit endearing for the first time you hear him, but after that, the lack of melody & flow in his approach just wears out its welcome. He becomes a hindrance to a lot of strong beats, and his presence feels like a net negative by the end. You know who’s got a decent voice that feels out of place on this album? Do’reen, who sounds like she’s doing the Alanis Morissette vibrato at the end of every single line she does. Alanis got away with it on “Jagged Little Pill” because she used it sparingly & it felt like it was viscerally coming out of her. Do’reen… well, “Feel Free” is probably the most boring track here, so if you want an example, just go listen to that. You’ll hear what I mean. Not worth typing out anything about it. She’s a little better on “Happiness”, at least.
This album would be at more of a 3.5 (albeit still getting bumped down to a 3) if the instrumentals had a little more spice / progression behind them, but this album’s fatal flaw as an attempt to blend R&B & house music together is that it finds its peak of each track way, way, way too early, and just settles into that for most of the track. It speedruns the layering & progression that house music is supposed to have that keeps a listener engaged, and as such, a lot of these tracks just flatten out. The persistency of instrumentation that feels like it’s not moving is a constant throughout this album, and it makes those 45 minutes really drag on far longer than they should, especially with longer tracks here. The vocals (save for Caron Wheeler’s) don’t have enough behind them to save it, and the lyricism flattens out just as quickly as the instrumentals usually do. It’s a recipe for… not disaster, since this album never hits any kind of egregiously bad point, but it feels like going to a restaurant where the food peaks at the first bite every single time. It’s just not savory / satisfying enough to really justify itself, despite being a decent meal. “African Dance” does rip though. Maybe this album just needed more instrumentals, I dunno.
Hence, a flat 3, and that’s probably where the ceiling lies here for me. If someone wants to go for a 5, I wouldn’t side-eye it that much, but they’d clearly have more of a palate for this album than I did. It’s not bad at all, and on a good day, these tracks could click way more nicely (or perhaps in a club), but I still don’t think the entire package would ever go higher than a 3 for me. I can’t say you NEED to listen to it before you die. At the very least, “Back to Life” (non-acapella) will do the trick.
Waylon Jennings
5/5
It’s a 5.
Waylon Jennings is one of the country artists I definitely grew up on; even if I can’t remember a single song the guy has done, the name is famous to me, & his reputation in the world of country music feels monumental. It certainly feels reflected with these tracks; even if he’s not the primary songwriter here (I feel like I need to look up more from one Billy Joe Shaver), Waylon’s voice brings them all to life in a way that probably only a few other country artists of this era could really capture. The band around him does a great job as well (as always, I love that steel guitar), occasionally bringing a loose breakbeat energy to some of these tracks that adds just a touch of Beatles-y flair that spices up the album nicely.
It really is just a smartly written album, & the instrumentals behind each track elevate them more, with Waylon’s voice painting all the right strokes. It’s a super tight 27 minutes that touches on everything from reliving faded musical glory, to cheap lifestyles, to the natural high of traveling, the law-filled streets of California, the freeing lawlessness of Mexico, and a couple of love tracks, whether they’re about devoted love or constantly leaving. If I have a nitpick, it’s that I do think it’s not structured quite as tightly as a top to bottom album, with a few fadeouts that feel a little cheap (I would’ve ended on “Black Rose” instead), but it doesn’t matter that much. It’s still a very easy 5 for me, and it’s the type of country album that’s right down my alley. Good fucking stuff, Waylon.
Fairport Convention
5/5
I’m a little higher than a 5. I’d be at a 10 if those last two tracks were flipped.
Well, consider me impressed by the versatility of Fairport Convention. I enjoyed “Liege and Lief”, but this is an even better album. The mixed rock instrumentation that was present there takes on a more prog / psychedelic feel here, though still combined really fruitfully with fiddles, violins & dulcimers to create a soundscape that feels more energetically driven than “Liege and Lief”. It also helps that with just one traditional track here (“A Sailor’s Life”, which is fantastic), a lot of these tracks feel way more contemporary for the era, enhanced by having a few tracks from the pre-eminent songwriter of this generation in the tracklist. The Bob Dylan covers that are here (including one in French!) are really well done, and I’m most deeply impressed by “Percy’s Song”, which feels like the highlight of the entire album to me.
Every track here deserves some kind of love though, as there’s not a single bad one here. “Genesis Hall” does a great job of making you feel the ‘I’m on the wrong side, aren’t I?’ tension in the air, driven really well by the percussion. “Si tu dois parti” has a great energy behind it, and Sandy Denny sounds great in French. “Autopsy” is really well written, especially as a live autopsy of someone’s confessional nature & how it’s affecting their relationship. “A Sailor’s Life” does a brilliant job of matching her heartbeat’s despair with the percussive pulse of the track, & the instrumental section that closes it out is just a total jam. It’s my second-favorite track here.
“Cajun Woman” has fantastic fiddle work behind it, and the story of a mother’s lost influence on her bible-thumping child being everyone’s downfall is just fascinating to me. Richard Thompson, who we got over 400 albums ago on “I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight”, wrote both it & “Genesis Hall”, and they’re both very well done. “Who Knows Where The Time Goes?” is just a lovely track, reminiscent of say, Penelope waiting for Odysseus or Fry’s dog waiting for him. Sandy’s vocals really shine there.
“Percy’s Song” is… well, it’s just Bob Dylan crafting one of the most vivid pictures I’ve heard from the guy, enhanced DEEPLY by the instrumentation of the band & their harmonization. The constant turning feels like being forced to relive mugshots tainted with guilt, while his friend’s pleas for some kind of leniency (& the growing intensity of the instrumentation) fall on deaf ears due to the obvious nature of the crime at hand. The way everything layers on top of each other makes the track feel dynamic as hell, and overall, it’s a super captivating track that feels like it should’ve ended the album. “Million Dollar Bash” as a light critique on the idea that you HAVE to be seen as a status symbol by attending all these big fancy parties with meaningless cavorting is a good track, but it’s just not as effective of an album closer as “Percy’s Song” would’ve been, or “A Sailor’s Life”, or even “Who Knows Where The Time Goes?”.
If this album had ended with one of those 3 as a much more definitive finish, I think I’d be at a 10, as everything here just hit a remarkably strong peak for me. This album blends its songwriting talents with great production / instrumental work, and at its highest highs, it’s just really enthralling. I hope Sandy Denny somehow pops up at least one more time here as a feature on another album. As it stands, it’s higher than a 5, and it might still get up to a 10 one day. It’s REALLY fucking good, man. I’m very glad it’s on the list, and I think I need to seek out more of Fairport Convention on my own time.
P.S.: I really did not think I would be this captivated by an album with a cover that just seems like two grandparents posing in front of a gate. Could've done a bit more, guys.
Shack
2/5
I’m at a 2.5 that I’ll bump down to a 2.
Eh. That really is the word to sum up the album for me: “eh”. This is just mired in mediocrity. Mediocre songwriting, often creating a feeling that the song has started at its halfway point with no context or buildup to create the emotional tissue each song is desperately trying to capture. Strong instrumentation that unfortunately loses all luster because all of its glitz & glamour feels unearned by the structure of each track. Once again, because the songwriting doesn’t really know how to paint pictures that lead up to the emotional release of the chorus as fruitfully as they’re expecting, the big solos here just feel like forced lifts as opposed to natural crescendos. They sound good, but without the investment towards the track, it’s impossible to really get into it.
The real issue this album has, beyond the songwriting / structure of each track plaguing the emotional pull, comes in the production itself – listen really closely to this thing, and tell me; do you hear an ounce of natural room tone at any point in this album? It’s not there. There is no natural warmth in any of these tracks; whether it’s the wall of sound that permeates a lot of this album’s guitar work & muddying it up, or the reverb placed on the vocals & harmonizations that creates a bubble effect that compresses & insulates them, this album just feels artificial. It’s part of the reason why the instrumentation doesn’t work as well as it’s executed – the bubble around everything feels unnatural to the ears, and that cascades its way to the vocal delivery & the lyricism. There’s no connective tissue that makes this album feel as alive as it wants to, save for maybe “Comedy”, “Lend’s Some Dough”, & “Captain’s Table” as the only 3 tracks that really clicked with me on a first pass here.
I just spent the vast majority of this album trying to get into it and never really clicking with it at all. If I only enjoyed 25% of the album on a first pass & can barely muster up even a loose admiration for certain aspects of some tracks past “it’s fine”, it’s just not worth bumping up to a 3. I do understand why it might click for other people, especially if some of the more localized references in the lyrics make more sense, but it really is just mired in mediocrity to me, and it doesn’t feel like it stands up with the other Britpop-adjacent albums on the list. For 1999, it feels like it’s 10 years out of date, if not a bit longer. It just did not click for me at all, and I feel inclined to bump it down to a 2. It’s not so bad as to earn a 1 but… damn, it just doesn’t feel like it needs to be on the list.
Eh.
The La's
5/5
I’m higher than a 5.
The only track I knew going into this was “There She Goes”, as it’s just sort of a ubiquitous track that everyone’s encountered at some point or another. It’s just a remarkably simple track; find a couple lines, hit a good guitar rhythm, and just sing it like you’re talking to someone you’re in love with. At its core, it’s a fundamentally sound track that just knows exactly what to do to keep everyone involved engaged. The singer gets to have fun, the guitar work is easy to learn & fun to build upon, and for the listener, whether they’re the one being sung to or just someone casually enjoying it, it’s got its own delights in one way or another. This entire album follows that “fundamentally sound” nature to a really nice extreme, and one that really works for me.
By “extreme”, I simply mean this album’s execution is tight as fuck, both in the cool way & the literal way. There’s not really many wasted vocals, lines or riffs here, & when this album needs to turn itself up, it nails it behind some consistent & strong percussion. It’s an album that’s so technically sound that it’s kinda easy to just take it for granted & hear it as plain or boring. I think that’s a somewhat valid take if you’re not listening with intent or find some of the rhythms a bit repetitive, but it undermines just how crafted this thing is from start to finish. It feels like a natural update of the ‘60s soundscape with contemporary sensibilities, one that loosely predates Britpop & yet sits in more of an R.E.M.-adjacent space. Each track is a bit rhythmically repetitive at points, but it stayed engaging because of everything surrounding it, at least for me.
I’m just full of praise, really. The pacing of this album flows really nicely, with only 1 track going past 3 minutes (the last one, which uses all 8 minutes effectively), and I just kind of appreciate an album that’s willing to not waste too much time. Past that, I think these are smartly written, able to set up the premise of each track without it feeling hamfisted or forced. Realistically, I’m just stuck thinking about yesterday’s album, “H.M.S. Fable”, & how utterly devoid of warmth it felt compared to this album. Even on the one track here utilizing a wall of sound, the guitar work & vocals aren’t drenched in reverb, so it all retains a natural tone to it. “H.M.S. Fable”, despite being 9 years later, felt artificial & overproduced, yet this album, despite the technical prowess surrounding it, just feels warmer & more authentic. It’s striking for 1990, especially without a single drum machine in here.
It’s genuinely just a charming album to me that hits all the right notes, figuratively & literally. Am I praising it a little much just because yesterday’s album was a resounding “eh”? Maybe, but I do stand by enjoying every track here. If nothing else, I can understand why Liam Gallagher is quoted as saying “Oasis want to finish what The La's started”, as what’s here does feel like a super fruitful tree of influence towards bands in the Britpop space & beyond. I really do think it’s higher than a 5, though not quite a 10. It’s certainly close, though. I’m very glad it’s on the list.
P.S.: For a band called “the La’s”, it’s surprising that they didn’t say “La” until the 5 minute mark of the last track.