638
Albums Rated
3.51
Average Rating
59%
Complete
451 albums remaining
Rating Distribution
Rating Timeline
Taste Profile
1970s
Favorite Decade
Post-punk
Favorite Genre
other
Top Origin
Wordsmith
Rater Style ?
62
5-Star Albums
2
1-Star Albums
Breakdown
By Genre
By Decade
By Origin
Albums
You Love More Than Most
| Album | You | Global | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Scum
Napalm Death
|
5 | 2.07 | +2.93 |
|
Spy Vs. Spy: The Music Of Ornette Coleman
John Zorn
|
5 | 2.23 | +2.77 |
|
Vulnicura
Björk
|
5 | 2.79 | +2.21 |
|
Fromohio
fIREHOSE
|
5 | 2.88 | +2.12 |
|
Millions Now Living Will Never Die
Tortoise
|
5 | 2.88 | +2.12 |
|
Superfuzz Bigmuff
Mudhoney
|
5 | 2.94 | +2.06 |
|
Duck Stab/Buster & Glen
The Residents
|
4 | 2.03 | +1.97 |
|
The Colour Of Spring
Talk Talk
|
5 | 3.07 | +1.93 |
|
Henry's Dream
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
|
5 | 3.11 | +1.89 |
|
Tank Battles
Dagmar Krause
|
4 | 2.13 | +1.87 |
You Love Less Than Most
| Album | You | Global | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|
|
A Christmas Gift For You From Phil Spector
Various Artists
|
1 | 3.3 | -2.3 |
|
At San Quentin
Johnny Cash
|
2 | 3.8 | -1.8 |
|
Californication
Red Hot Chili Peppers
|
2 | 3.7 | -1.7 |
|
Songs For Swingin' Lovers!
Frank Sinatra
|
2 | 3.52 | -1.52 |
|
Butterfly
Mariah Carey
|
1 | 2.48 | -1.48 |
|
The Marshall Mathers LP
Eminem
|
2 | 3.48 | -1.48 |
|
Hybrid Theory
Linkin Park
|
2 | 3.39 | -1.39 |
|
Surf's Up
The Beach Boys
|
2 | 3.31 | -1.31 |
|
In The Wee Small Hours
Frank Sinatra
|
2 | 3.28 | -1.28 |
|
Scissor Sisters
Scissor Sisters
|
2 | 3.23 | -1.23 |
Artists
Favorites
| Artist | Albums | Average |
|---|---|---|
| Bob Dylan | 6 | 4.33 |
| R.E.M. | 3 | 4.67 |
| David Bowie | 7 | 4.14 |
| Aretha Franklin | 2 | 5 |
| Talking Heads | 4 | 4.25 |
| Björk | 4 | 4.25 |
| Miles Davis | 4 | 4.25 |
| Beatles | 6 | 4 |
| Bob Marley & The Wailers | 3 | 4.33 |
| Steely Dan | 3 | 4.33 |
| Yes | 3 | 4.33 |
| Neil Young | 3 | 4.33 |
| Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds | 3 | 4.33 |
Controversial
| Artist | Ratings |
|---|---|
| The Beach Boys | 5, 2 |
5-Star Albums (62)
View Album Wall
Popular Reviews
The Yardbirds
3/5
Good music, but the singing and lyrics don't work for me.
2 likes
Simon & Garfunkel
4/5
+100 for every word I never heard in the bible.
2 likes
Brian Eno
3/5
I felt less anxious while listening to this in an airport. But then suddenly became enraged as I was trapped in a dystopia.
2 likes
1-Star Albums (2)
All Ratings
Jimi Hendrix
5/5
I have been listening to this album since high school (since around 1980). I had heard various songs from the album on the radio and found them unique and interesting and so hunted down the album which serves up a broader experience than any single song. An excellent album.
Bruce Springsteen
4/5
Another fine album and it definitely sticks together thematically across the album as a whole. Although Springsteen is an excellent writer, I find that many of his songs fall into the same kind of stylistic form--definitely one that works but somewhat repetitively formulaic. His use of piano, saxophone and other horns and the melancholy of a working middle class that wants something more from the world it has been given, do capture a picture that is unique. He is solid in his abilities both lyrically and musically. But I'm not sure the emotions of the music and of the lyrics always tie together. There is a sense in which the music presents a repeated cycle of rising to a challenge in which it seems like there might be a break-thru but which in fact is never lyrically resolved by the characters. I find the guitar parts particularly excellent on this album and much more strongly in a rock'n'roll vein. Also I feel the characters of these songs are more solidly defined and less theatrical in their construction than those on Born to Run. A strong album for certain and one worth multiple listens.
Bob Marley & The Wailers
4/5
The Stooges
4/5
Joni Mitchell
5/5
One of the first albums I heard where the words, music, and singing all are solidly strong and tied together. This is what making art is truly about--finding your voice, your music, and a way to present it all--not commercially but because this is your work the way you want it. No throw-away songs. No relying on the tricks of music to build an anthem or to repeat a refrain so everyone can ignore the other lyrics. Beautifully built songs that flow like thoughts through a series of moments capturing what you feel. This is not the only way of being, but it is a great one and it captures you in the world it builds while you listen.
Lou Reed
4/5
Lou Reed's lyrics and delivery style were unique to me the first time I heard this album. There is a certain simplicity to the presentation of each song that works beautifully without needing to build to any kind of emotional crescendo. Lou Reed's lyrics are front and center in his songs--nothing getting buried behind a crescendo of sounds.
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
3/5
The opening song, "Beyond Belief" is great lyrics combined with music that builds and stretches the tension fabulously and I love the song. However, I have never become a strong fan of Elvis Costello. He is an excellent writer and musician but something about his general style does not attract me. Too much crooning? Perhaps. A lack of a convincing scream for Man out of Time? Yes, that too. And yet he does bring together a punk sensibility, some excellent ironic and stinging lyrics and isn't stuck in a simple musical genre where everything he creates sounds like everything else. Maybe it is the overly strong syncopation of the lyrics and music? I definitely check out his work as he creates some songs that are phenomenal. But I have yet to love an album as whole. And this one is no exception. Is this an excellent album. Yes. But I don't seem to be among those who it really reaches.
Lucinda Williams
4/5
Love her singing style and lyrics. Although some of the presentation has a country style to it, it works with the feel of the world the songs come from. I love the opening guitar bit on the song Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. It is a beautiful musical phrase. Like many albums on this list, it doesn't fit into a single genre but simply uses various styles like an artist uses colors when painting. I think Lucinda Williams could deliver a Lou Reed song and it would become more definitive than Lou Reed's version.
4/5
Oi, that is guitar playing. "I'm immortal when I'm with you." I love the way PJ Harvey changes her voice--singing lyrically, talking to the listener, shouting. Reverb, layers, echoes. Her use of Thom Yorke's voice for some of the tracks adds even more. Music and voice capture emotion in a rawness that many try to achieve but do not. Less dark than "To Bring You My Love", the soundscape is also broader.
Mariah Carey
1/5
Nothing I find very interesting. It is well produced and has all the slickness one expects from dance oriented pop (now with hip-hop styling added in). And it has the never ending message via innuendo that sex is a golden thing and perhaps even includes love and transformation. (Go away caterpillar. Come back when you are a butterfly. No--not a beetle!) The vaporousness of the lyrics really highlight how much the formulaic music methods try to make you feel something important is happening. Which is not to say that the music itself is entirely throw-away. It is heavily produced but has some phrases, beats, and moments that something more interesting could have been done with. The underlying theme that a woman is an object that needs someone else to validate her is both sad and terrifying. Could this music become the soundtrack to a a first person game of some sort that is not porn? I do not know. This sits squarely in a space where mass marketing grinds talent into granulated sugar, bags it, and sends it out to rot your teeth. Everything is behind a mask of sameness, nothing daring, nothing personal. God forbid one develop a pimple while listening.
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
3/5
Lyrics are good. Music is well-built and creative. But again, it has just never appealed to me. This is one of those times where you see a work of art but just don't click with it. As Elvis matures and begins seeking out more and broader kinds of sound, I start to like some of his works better. For instance, I truly love his album with the Roots.
Radiohead
5/5
Headphones on. This soundscape opens beautifully and builds layer on layer and then strips it back again. Thom Yorke's voice captures the human in among all the electronics even as it is itself manipulated. It is a journey into the head of someone who not only wants you to feel what they are feeling, but to be there with them. The opening bass line on Dollar and Cents is a quietly understated foundation. Strongly electronic, the music does not simply fall into tape loop of infinite repeats but overlays and underlays like a fabric of sound that shows a pattern. What is amazing is how seemlessly the various pieces are joined and interwoven. Listen once. Listen again. And then again. Different pieces ascend each time.
Tangerine Dream
3/5
I can haz synthezzizizzer? Sea gulls? Robot sea gulls? Flock of seagulls? (No that comes later). The eventual impact of electronic sounds is huge as can particularly be seen with Radiohead's Amnesiac which uses everything here and much more. There is a sense in this album and other early ones like it that people didn't really know what to do with things yet nor do they have a really good set of tools to start working with manipulated sound. This is interesting in the way that watercolor washes are and ambient sound in general is. It is interesting historically as well in terms of what musicians found they could start to do with things. But nothing particularly groundbreaking seems to be happening here yet. Huzzah for being on the cusp of something new. But meh for fully figuring out something awesome to do with it yourselves. Not a bad album but plenty of room for growth.
Radiohead
4/5
Someone really likes Radiohead. This too is an excellent album. But does Radiohead need two albums in the list? I would say the distinctions between the albums are not enough to warrant that for the average listener. The base test in my opinion is to queue up multiple albums by the same band and if the listener cannot tell where one ended and the next began, then one album should be all that is needed. On this album, "15 step" and "Jigsaw Falling into Place" are my two favorite songs. Would I have like to see broader experimentation? Yes, definitely. There is refinement here and change and experiment but at some point, the vocal delivery style is too fixed, the building technique too similar, the lyrics too much the same.
Quicksilver Messenger Service
4/5
It all starts with having fun. After listening to so many highly produced albums, this one comes across as organic. There is a sense that this is made to be performed live and never the same way twice. Although not the best lyrics or the most amazing music ever, this album holds up well and I enjoy listening to it. It is refreshing when bands broke out of the singles mold and started to make long songs and concept albums. Art freeing itself from the confines of making money.
Simon & Garfunkel
4/5
Melody. Simplicity. Storytelling. Harmonizing. A bit of sentimentality but generally balanced with humor, irony, and some cynicism. Good song writing goes a long way.
Brian Wilson
4/5
Voice front and center. This is a flawed album in my opinion as I think the tools that Brian Wilson wanted/needed were not available to really build what he wanted. It would be very cool for someone to rebuild this album using the latest software. Still, this is an amazing album in how it spins off into its own world. It is like the birth of ballet by making special rules for how one stands and moves. The music builds on known methods but asserts its own rules. The layers are amazing. The lyrics are almost throw-away in terms of any meaning as it is more about the flow, cadence, melody, sound and not a specific meaning of language. A very cool album that opened a door for many people.
Sonic Youth
3/5
Kendrick Lamar
4/5
Storytelling. A language of bragging, raw description, violence, everyday anger and threat. Looking for the money tree, the escape. Born in a car crash, in a shooting, in a drug haze, in the sex scene, already buried. You got to dig yourself out. What you are and what you want to be. If this was made up, it would be dark--like a story of vampires--a fiction to learn something from. But it isn't. It is description of the world that is found when you wake up and when you go to sleep that some are born into and that is part and parcel of a larger world no matter how much this smaller one skews to its own reality. This album is solidly built in a place and time--captures it, accepts the world and wants more: Ain't no city like mine. And I think that is true--it spins up when you start to play it. And stays even after the songs are done.
PJ Harvey
4/5
Blues meets grunge in a back alley. This captures a raw energy and sound that kicks you in the teeth. Can't say that I know what the songs are about but really the sense is more in the tone and delivery than the words themselves. Sexuality, anger, pain, aggression all rolled together. Not dropping out of the world--kicking back. There is something very alive about this--a capture of an actual performance--happening now.
Terence Trent D'Arby
3/5
Good opening and opening song. There is potential here but overall the album does not click for me. I like parts of this quite a bit but it also includes parts that I entirely do not like. Great voice. For example "Sign your name" lyrically and musically just isn't interesting to me. The same with "Rain". There is a sense to me that this pulls together a lot of tropes musically and lyrically but does not really do anything truly new and interesting with them. Rain, butterfly tears, returning -- lyrical vagueness in a poetical form. There is a breadth of materials here pulled from a previous history of music -- but it has not been assimilated and joined into something truly his own.
5/5
Future nostalgia. The brain is a warehouse filled with images and emotions. Bowie hits it just right with the lyrics--a blend of real images and strangeness. The way "Five Years" builds is amazing and it hits that right blend of storytelling and mystery to allow you to build on it. Five years of what? prison? to live? till you grow up and become unable to experience the world as new and amazing? We all expect some kind of apocalypse. The guitar rhythms and leads are great. Love love love this album. Is this a concept album? Not really in my opinion. It has a kind of relationship among many of the songs and ties to the Ziggy Stardust persona/avatar. Good energy. Good hooks.
Metallica
4/5
Heavy metal cello is an awesome thing. I certainly like the combination of a full orchestra with the band. The integration is still imperfect in that the orchestra is very much an addition/wrapper to the songs, but it sounds great. The future would of course be to see an electrified orchestra actually take lead on some songs and not just be an embellishment--a flugel-horn melody, more clarinet, etc. Jethro Tull truly integrated some flute into their sound. Jean Luc Ponty violin was used by Zappa to some effect. Rock and pop have stuck for the most part with a very small range of instruments and tend to be very drum and bass driven. This kind of work begins to open the door to a broader sound and hopefully will light up the minds of those future musicians with the breadth of skills to turly integrate an orchestra.
4/5
Simply built songs. Lyrics important to the aesthetic. Speed. The sense that anyone can make a song, an album, be in a band. Punk brought a new aesthetic to music.
The Cult
3/5
Right ear...Left ear. Guitar front and center. Pretty straight forward rock 'n' roll capturing the guitar sounds and licks of other earlier bands. Solid voice for the style and enjoyable. Not the best of lyrics but good enough.
N.W.A.
5/5
Attitude. Anger. Identification. These voices and this style are created/invented out of a real world that is broken. It is PTSD used to make art and protest. Politics in action. There is no simple way to tell what is bravado, what is the mask, and where the real people begin and end. This is an amazing album for what it creates, what it accentuates, the rage it contains within it. You can perhaps imagine this as a dystopia, but it is not just imagined. It ties with reality by making it if it doesn't pre-exist. Musically, this brings rhythm to the front where the voice is an active beat in conjunction with other rhythms. Electronic sounds and repetitions are core building blocks; any voice and sound fragment can be a beat. Trashtalk reaches a new all-time high since Shakespeare's time.
Stephen Stills
4/5
Love the one you're with is a fantastic song. Great lyrics bonded to great guitar work. This is generally a uplifting album without being saccharin. A melding of an acoustic folk and blues sound with electric and rock sensibilities. Actual singing is important rather than just a style of vocal delivery. The opening to Black Queen is straight blues styling and some excellent playing. I don't think the singing on it is quite perfect but it is pretty good. I'd love to hear it re-interpreted by some modern bands.
Beatles
5/5
Hooks. Lyrics and music solid. Historically weathered ongoing changes in musical styles and improvements in electronics. Sounds great. Solid. Memorable. Catchy.
Mudhoney
5/5
Dude, I think your guitar is broken. But man it sounds kewl. Punk into grunge. Pretty music is out. Crooked sounds. Energetic tempos. Off-kilter is the new normal. I'm sick (but don't you wish you were too). Subversiveness is required. Irony. Incorrectness. Society might want to cast us out but we've already left. Attitude must be expressed at all times. This is where we stop making electric guitars try to sound like acoustic ones. Fuzz, wah, feedback, elctronic fracturings are part of the desired sound and being used as core music components. Disaffection as a way of being in the world.
The ultimate in dropout from "standard culture." Get drunk. Get wasted. Get fucked.
Ray Charles
3/5
Big band and swing sound. Performance oriented. Danceable. Excellent voice and delivery style although not what I enjoy the most. Music was more strongly ensemble work--there was a singer, an arranger, song writers, multiple members of the band with highlighted skills and solo opportunities. Everything is well-crafted. Ray puts his own imprint on standards and moves out beyond the styles of Sinatra. "Don't let the sun catch you cryin." and "Let the good times roll" will be re-interpreted by others but this album sits at a crossroads of pop music starting to ascend along with rock, smaller groups becoming common, and a change in energies. A bit of crooning which I find mostly annoying. But overall a solid album--just not something I like.
fIREHOSE
5/5
punk influenced folk with a jazz form? Have never listened to Firehose before. First listen -- pulled in. Gave the album my phone number. It called back for a second listen. Excellent the second time through as well. Beautifully ushering the listener into a world where pop jingles and verse chorus verse are sent to rehabilitation to be something more interesting. A gateway album to better sound.
Q-Tip
4/5
A very different flow to the voice. Long sinuous phrases. Also a different way of incorporating samples, loops, and scratches and longer musical phrases from recordings. Strongly syncopated but melodic breaks. Wider range of sampling. Smooth. Lyrically, I like this quite a bit for how the voice parts are created.
The Police
4/5
A study in rhythm with vocals attached. The Police definitely carved out their own sound. I could entirely live without the lyrics to Mother. Overall, the album lyrics are generally interesting, have some excellent phrases and images, and work well but they also have some major weaknesses. The heavy use of an aaaa or aabb rhyme scheme is countered to some extent by the use of partial rhymes and various voice combinations such as throwing in a non-rhyming refrain or the use of a kind of call and response or switching between single and group voices. Tea in the Sahara seems to be a very weak song overall. Murder by Numbers picks up a stronger jazz styling than other songs but the lyrics don't seem to fit in with overall flow of the other songs--it seems out of place. The saddest part about this album is that it doesn't capture the energy of their earlier work. It has a dryness to it that Stings solo works carry on to their detriment.
Talk Talk
5/5
Opening track bass sounds great. I can hear the strings bending and vibrating. A chorus of children. Horns. Music as a texture of interwoven sounds. Beautiful album covers as well +500 extra points. Complex music with layers.
Sheryl Crow
3/5
This is an excellent album which, in my opinion, mostly highlights just making music very well. It is like finding a really well-written sonnet that hits the spot within its genre. Nothing groundbreaking going on--no experimentation or pushing of limits. Just solid song-writing, playing, and creation of an album.
Merle Haggard
2/5
Not of interest to me. Unconvincing lyrics delivered in a crooning manner. The concept of a lovable/redeemable rough guy just doesn't appeal and comes across as exceedingly contrived. It is a pose, an affectation, a lie, a contrivance. Additionally--strong problems of paternalism embedded in the lyrics. It's ok for a man to be rough and rowdy and economically untrue, but he owns his woman none-the-less.
Jeff Buckley
5/5
Floating in the atmosphere. Great voice. Definitely knows how to hit the emotional layer of a song. Also got a sense that Thom Yorke and Radio Head made notes on how this was built. Excellent singing range and mix of vocal variations. One of the issues I have with groups like Radiohead and Coldplay is how much they use falsetto such that it becomes annoying or at the very least a drawback to listening to an album as a whole.
Badly Drawn Boy
4/5
Strings, horn, melody opening. Acoustic nostalgic tinged with sadness trying to be happy. Very well crafted songs. Love the vocals and their prominence. Gets more experimental with various songs. "This song" hurts to listen to in headphones. A good stretching of the sounds available for building music. Has a bit of a Beatlesque feel. Thematically the more experimental sounds work with the "bewilder" part of the album title -- a certain confusion in defining who and what we are even as we look back at ourselves. Good album. Well worth listening to. But doesn't quite hold together as a whole for me.
5/5
Speed jazz. I'm pretty sure that at least one of these is just someone tripping over the drums and falling into the saxaphones. Squigley. Definitely squigley. I really like this quite a lot. It seems sort of like concrete poetry to me where there is a slab of language all working at the same time to do multiple things. It is amazing how the brain takes a pile of noise like this and follows different parts looking for patterns and recognizable things.
Curtis Mayfield
4/5
Smooth. Funky. Great singing. A little too heavy on the strings for me overall but this is a soundtrack so it gets the full james bond workup and sounds great in a large space. Socially conscious lyrics.
Aretha Franklin
5/5
What a great performer! These songs have burned themselves into the consciousness of a large part of the world.
Steely Dan
5/5
jazz inflected rock/pop. Who knows? This has been one of my top ten albums for listening to for years as it is just so well put together. Steely Dan definitely created their own place in the world of sound and again show what amazing craftmanship can do. Lyrics can be obscure but have some excellent lines and wry humor as well.
Ian Dury
4/5
A bit of this, a bit of that. The music on this album picks up a good bit on the punk aesthetic. But there is also a mix of sounds that make it unique. In particular, there is a sense of fun in the lyrics and play.
Beatles
4/5
post-modern fragments joined. Lyrics don't have to make sense particularly if they have a good sound hook. One finds nonsense, humor, and bits of what are probably political commentary spread throughout. Some beautiful pieces of music. Some bits of showing what you can do with new sound equipment on revolution 9--a pastiche with intent of some sort. To me, this is very much a turning point where art overtakes commercialism but still manages to be commercial. The album cover is interesting in its absence of everything except the band name embossed. In both the world of art and commercialism, the "signature"/band name/branding is, in one sense, more important than any content. And in another sense, the recording is more more important regardless of who created it.
The Smiths
5/5
Very British. Great drums and guitar. Vocals that are sinuous and extended. Hooks. More hooks.
Red Hot Chili Peppers
3/5
A no to all the rap/hiphop style songs. Lyrics just don't work for me. The music itself is interesting and the idea of a blend is also good. But to me, they are all failures. They fail to capture any real lyrical play, lack an indepth call and response and on-the-fly interplay of voices. Overly stylized and comes across as in-authentic, non-personal, topical or thought to be commerically sellable. The songs that cross from an acoustic to heavy electric rock sound work better although they can fall into a standard rock trope--like a stairway to heaven format.
Talking Heads
5/5
Polyrhythmic funk meets punk art rock. Fantastic sound and lyrics. The live versions of many of these songs are even more interesting as the Talking Heads had people like Adrian Belew adding to their performance.
David Bowie
4/5
Honky tonk space opera. Saxaphone! The lyrics on the edge of falling to pieces but always catching an edge of reality. Some great guitar riffs.
TV On The Radio
4/5
Loops and loops and loops and loops. TV on the Radio creates their own unique sound.
The Band
4/5
Great name for a band. And historically quite interesting how they formed. Their albums are all topnotch examples to what a group of people with excellent music skills can do when they hang out together. They tie to a country/folk sound in which a band was really about performing live for a group of people for entertainment. Without being throwbacks to the 1800's they capture a sound, a style, and story-telling that is mixed with rock and modern times.
Crosby, Stills & Nash
5/5
Crossing between folk and rock sound with excellent guitar playing, melody, singing, and overall solid lyrics. This is a warm album, bright, with a sweetness that avoids becoming saccharine. In particular it showcases the effective use of harmony and a combination of acoustic/electric sound that is truly great.
Pixies
4/5
Energy and rest--a good mix. Down to the Well seems to have nearly copied the guitar riff from David Bowie's the Man who Sold the World. Although I like the music and the album, I don't really connect with most of the lyrics. They have a strong punk repetitiousness and are certainly odd enough to be interesting.
Frank Sinatra
2/5
Tried it. Didn't like it. Not a style I enjoy. Gave it to Mikey. He tried it too and spit it back out.
Cocteau Twins
5/5
Not earth. That voice. Love this album. Language on the edge of a nervous breakdown becomes fully an instrument in its own right without having to have meaning encapsulated in words. Music can have intent and meaning outside of language.
George Michael
2/5
This was a departure from the earlier dance oriented pop and George Michael can certainly sing and make music. He has some good lyrics but the overall presentation of the songs fails for me. Freedom, for instance is constructed like an anthemic dance song and falls into a string of phrases that don't stick together into any coherent whole. Lyrically, he seems unable to just tell a simple story and instead makes general pronouncements and tries to imbue them with feeling. His singing style is interesting but never comes across as natural but rather always as a kind of display/costume. There is no real sense that any of these songs are personal.
Yes
5/5
From opening to close it is truly fantastic. The bass really comes into its own on this album. And Jon Andersons vocals are unique. One thing I do dislike though is that all the "extras" on the new releases become repetitious. It is nicer when you can listen to the original (or the remastered) songs as they were on the original album.
k.d. lang
3/5
Although not a fan of the country music tropes and styling, KD Lang is nonetheless amazing. Lock stock and teardrops is a beautifully crafted song. The singing and style of this album has a very strong throw-back sound to a lounge/dancing/crooning era and captures it quite well. But overall it does not appeal to me.
R.E.M.
5/5
Strange lyrics that somehow work. Great guitar playing. Jangly in a good way. Lyrical layering; multiple voices. Uses the verse chorus verse setup to great effect with strong hooks on the choruses. Inventiveness abounds.
Primal Scream
3/5
I don't get a sense that the band thinks about an album as a whole but rather produces the songs they want and then brings them together. There are bits and pieces that work well, but they don't really hit the sweet spot for me for any of their songs. They bring together a good bit of different sounds but they really seem to need someone like Brian Eno who really knows how to take an ok song and make it better. "If they move, kill 'em" has a good groove, but doesn't seem to know where to go or what to do and just fractures pointlessly. Overall, ok music and I like it generally.
The Stone Roses
3/5
A warm album moving into a kind of twee pop sound. I like the overall sound but find it somewhat lacking in energy and overall lyrically weak. The music is well worth listening to multiple time and I think grows. But the lyrics, don't. There is a kind of nostalgia and a looking backwards to the music as well which to me is too strong, derivative and not fully getting created into something new. Some shades of Simon and Garfunkel hanging about in various phrases. "I am the resurrection" has some some fabulous jam music after the singing stops. Perhaps an all jam album would have been better?
The Beach Boys
5/5
Definitely an art piece in full. From the head of the creator to the groove of the lp, this was carefully constructed with a specific sound in mind and it definitely shows. Although overly sentimental, it manages to overcome that perhaps by the sheer baroqueness surrounding it. This to me is also part of the birth of the artist as being in control of their art and not getting shelved just because it is possibly not going to be economically successful. One cannot deny the perfect success of lyrics and sound of "God only knows".
I do wish Heroes and villians had been on this album.
The Boo Radleys
3/5
ok.
Underworld
3/5
electronica. possibly just filler. mostly innocuous.
Adele
3/5
Another great singing voice. Unfortunately, her lyrics are uneven and tend to reach for the sentimental and for general tropes when they could have done so much better. For instance "Send my love (to your new lover)" fails to walk through the full emotional range of the situation and is staged like an ordinary love song when it is in fact about a jilted lover possibly jilted because of age. And "I miss you" is just not lyrically doing anything other than throwing around standard tropes, although how it is sung is interesting. Most annoying with this album is its constant looking back from a point of being older at a younger self. I myself released an album when I was four looking back at the time when I was three and all the hardships of that time but I forgot to release it.
Dusty Springfield
4/5
schmaltz but oh so convincingly sung. Thank you Dusty.
Dennis Wilson
3/5
interesting but no. I look forward to "River Song" getting remade by Spiritualized.
Pavement
4/5
distortion obligatoire; a certain lugubrious distance from involvement with reality
Prince
3/5
An amazing musician who sadly mostly writes lyrics that I find uninteresting topically.
Motörhead
3/5
Loud and fast. Just the way I like my coffee. Fun but not particularly essential or remarkable.
Dolly Parton
2/5
unremarkable.
Madness
4/5
delovely
Muddy Waters
4/5
Excellent album
Public Image Ltd.
4/5
Who doesn't love stream of consciousness lyrics with heavy base accompaniment? A fine album.
Butthole Surfers
3/5
somebody is hurting the chickens and it is making me sad. Kudos on making the music they wanted to make but the underside of their design seems more angry, dark, and lost than funny or even ironic.
Pixies
3/5
Good album.
Simon & Garfunkel
4/5
+100 for every word I never heard in the bible.
Billy Bragg
3/5
+100 for an excellent album title
Cypress Hill
2/5
+100 for Spanish and English vocals. But in general I don't like the style and don't find the lyrics or music that interesting. Comes across as cartoonish.
Ray Charles
3/5
Hmm. Not sure country and western means what you think it means.
Neil Young
4/5
Neil Young is king of the emotive single note. Although his lyrics sometimes need more work, they are solidly built overall and the combination of the music and his singing usually hit the spot for resonating with the listener as they are often very story based rather than abstract or obscure. It is always interesting to me how he bridges a kind of Folk/Americana bringing in banjo, violin, harmonica, and often a strong blues influence, all surrounding an awesome sounding guitar that can really rock when he wants it to.
The Rolling Stones
3/5
I think this fully answers the question of whether the English can do the blues. Yes, they can.
Songhoy Blues
3/5
Beautiful music.
The Sensational Alex Harvey Band
3/5
Less sensational than I was led to expect.
Neneh Cherry
2/5
hi hat...some good musical bits and singing voice. But nothing particularly earthshaking going on. Lyrics all come across as run of the mill.
Duran Duran
3/5
Competent pop music.
Beck
5/5
Exceptional hooks. Odd lyrics and humor. A re-invention. Kudos.
Madonna
3/5
A solid dance/pop album.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
5/5
I am afraid now.
Elvis Presley
3/5
Historically interesting but rather a hodgepodge as an album.
System Of A Down
3/5
Definitely interesting and really makes use of the extremes of loud and quiet as well as noise/structure, and tempo shifts. Not sure I particularly like it lyrically but I do find some of the construction of the songs, the political commentary, and the varied voice (scream, whisper, normal talking, voice-in-a-drain, overdrive, singing, shouting, etc) engaging. Definitely have carved out a distinct style.
The Charlatans
3/5
Awesome guitar. Energy.
Television
5/5
Sweet. This album hits the spot.
Fleetwood Mac
5/5
ZZ Top
3/5
The Flying Burrito Brothers
2/5
Nirvana
5/5
well whatever...nevermind.
Elis Regina
4/5
Ĉi tio estas bela.
Emerson, Lake & Palmer
2/5
Not a bad a album but overall a failure to really do something new.
Lou Reed
4/5
Lou Reed has always been a story teller and this album captures that very well. He also comes across as authentic -- there is a real experience to the stories and a connection.
R.E.M.
4/5
Orange is the new green.
Todd Rundgren
3/5
I think I made this same album once on a bender but unlike Todd, I forgot to hit record.
Oasis
3/5
Guitars. I think the guitars themselves have guitars. Solid style. Really good guitars. Good drumming too. But have I mentioned the guitars? In terms of lyrics, it would be great if they broke out of the verse-chorus mode. Or maybe they just need some more guitars. One can forgive a lot with enough guitars.
Creedence Clearwater Revival
4/5
Sounds amazing similar to every song they have ever done. ;)
Nina Simone
4/5
Beautiful. Powerful.
Paul Simon
5/5
Fantastic performers bringing their best together. Most importantly, all the performers got recognition. This isn't just Paul Simon but he brought together the ensemble.
Peter Gabriel
4/5
Fantastic album. The era of awesome drums.
Elton John
4/5
Top of his form and showcases the full range of his skills from rocking out to ballads and story telling.
Gene Clark
4/5
Excellent lyrics and singing and a progressive music experience overall blending multiple genres effortlessly. There is a sense in which this album is mostly looking back to earlier styles where there is just an overall solid skill at performing rather than the more modern singles and hooks approach. Strong country feel reminiscent (to me of CSN, Eagles, and the Band) but definitely its own makeup overall.
The Chemical Brothers
3/5
I repeat myself when I repeat myself when I repeat myself when I I I repeat myself myself self self I I I repeat myself when I repeat myself when I repeat myself
Thelonious Monk
4/5
Angular as one would expect of things with corners.
Portishead
3/5
Good album but not nearly as interesting as their first.
Daft Punk
3/5
tub ti ekil i
5/5
Funk. Jazz. Social commentary. Fantastic.
Louis Prima
3/5
Less wild than expected but fun.
Grant Lee Buffalo
4/5
Somewhere between Bob Dylan and Neil Young.
Cornershop
3/5
Interesting musically with the broader instrument range than standard rock.
Otis Redding
3/5
Enjoyable listen and Otis Redding has a great voice.
Bob Dylan
5/5
Fantastic album where the lyrics are wonderfully odd and the music is solid.
Jefferson Airplane
3/5
Good songs overall but lacks cohesiveness as an album. The group never really coalesced into a whole that was greater than its parts.
Morrissey
3/5
Solid lyrics overall embedding social commentary along with stories, humor, and pathos. Knowingly (for the most part) tends to the maudlin and aims to stomp on societal norms and sanctions often for the purposes of irony. But musically not as creative as The Smiths were.
Pearl Jam
5/5
Once upon a time I could control myself. Good lyrics. A gorgeous heavy sound and voice that can shout/scream and sing. Elvis Costello could never shout/scream like this.
Black Sabbath
4/5
Showcases the heavy metal sound but also showed a breadth of sound with Laguna Sunrise and Changes. Supernaut is an excellent song. Ozzie's voice definitely because a classic sound in its own right. Lyrics are not bad overall but overall are hit or miss for me.
Brian Eno
3/5
I felt less anxious while listening to this in an airport. But then suddenly became enraged as I was trapped in a dystopia.
Nirvana
4/5
As a stripped down and live album, highlights the real time musical skills of the performers and re-injects the idea of music as performance into a new generation. The band also highlights music by other groups which they perform.
4/5
Acid jazz good.
Carpenters
2/5
Production schmaltz ruining some otherwise ok songs. Music like this was really only needed to fuel the outrage for other groups to re-invent the recording industry. This kind of album is manipulative like a Disney movie trying to enforce a certain emotional state via musical tropes and manipulations rather than actually letting the content work. The philosophical term "inauthentic" was created for things like this. I look forward to NIN re-recording this.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
4/5
Art, meet death. Death, meet art.
B.B. King
3/5
Guns N' Roses
3/5
Solid but not doing anything particularly new.
Dire Straits
4/5
Dire Straits has always had awesome guitar playing.
CHIC
3/5
disco was most certainly a series of musical tropes that allowed the creation of massive amounts of songs that all sound very very similar. Being dance oriented, the lyrics are really repetitive, silly, and throwaway. Various tropes: the whistle, spelling a word, feeling the rhythm, having a good time, the song being about the song or about dancing. Upbeat but tending to the saccharine, sentimental, effusively cloying. Prone to attracting serial killers in the late 70's.
The Magnetic Fields
3/5
Although conceptually great and well carried out, it comes across as somewhat self-indulgent at a certain point without quite enough variations lyrically and musically to sustain it overall. The sheer number of songs and the variety are impressive and thematically it works, but it could have been more interesting.
Hüsker Dü
3/5
I think this needs to be even louder.
The Cure
3/5
I feel better now.
Bill Evans Trio
4/5
It was like I was there.
Gotan Project
3/5
I am moving to Argentina on the force of this album alone.
Caetano Veloso
4/5
musical dissidents get my vote.
Sade
3/5
Beautiful voice and musical style. Lyrically stuck heavily on love songs which are good but not amazing.
CHVRCHES
3/5
synth pop dance sound that is somewhat a throwback. doesn't quite reach me.
Kacey Musgraves
2/5
sadly fenced in
The Chemical Brothers
3/5
it did what the title says.
Dire Straits
4/5
slow guitar sticks like honey
Amy Winehouse
3/5
I can haz soul jazz about bad relationships.
Pentangle
4/5
who doesn't hanker for folk sitar?
David Bowie
4/5
Certainly a unique soundscape to an album.
Radiohead
3/5
another fine album. begins with great energy, but kind of fades.
Elvis Costello
3/5
clever lyrics as usual. But not engaging to me.
Culture Club
3/5
pop-wrapped social commentary. let's dance while the world falls apart! some very good songs. some very boring ones as well. so very uneven. But I will give +10 points for the spelling of "Colour"
Dolly Parton
3/5
The songs in general lean on sentimentality too much and lose much of their strength because of that. But in terms of lyrics and music, this is a well built album which I think captures what Dolly Parton wanted to express. She is an excellent artist, but not one that appeals to me. Well worth listening to and she definitely shows thoughtfulness in her songs that I admire. Her themes of relationships are sometimes very run-of-the-mill, but more often, she creates a narrative that is hers with her own insights.
Randy Newman
3/5
Another artist with good lyrics, his own sound, and great skill. But not that appealing to me overall.
Astrud Gilberto
2/5
Light, breezy. Perfect for lying on a beach.
Yes
4/5
Sweet spot of progressive rock where obscure lyrics and music come together into an awesome sound.
Dwight Yoakam
2/5
Is anyone else bothered that the title song is about murder?
The music has some creative sparks, but the lyrics are what I would term the "religion" of country music--tropes without introspection or any depth. At least half the songs are about how women have done the singer wrong. No real story telling. Just an overall maudlin or patriarchal point of view. And what is deal with the album cover? Lacks depth.
Everything But The Girl
4/5
A beautiful exploration of being wounded in love. A favorite album for years in that it is carefully understated. Not maudlin or angry. An excellent blend of music and voice with thoughtful lyrics that all set an atmosphere.
Talking Heads
3/5
Some classics.
AC/DC
3/5
For having distilled a sound and swagger and a highschool level lyric ability this is a must to listen to. But do you need to listen to all their albums when any one will generally do?
Radiohead
3/5
Too many Radiohead albums on this list. They are very good at what they do and there has been some progression to their music. But really, they don't need to be represented so many times.
Blur
3/5
A likeable album but not "where its at" these days.
Coldplay
3/5
A fine album. But uneven.
Grateful Dead
4/5
I like this album far more than the studio ones I have previously heard. The Grateful Dead certainly carved out their own niche in music.
Don McLean
3/5
Excellent song writer. A bit too much sentimentality overall, but quite well crafted.
Steely Dan
4/5
Joan Armatrading
4/5
Beautiful sound and very expressive. The way she builds her songs both lyrically and musically is her own style.
4/5
Buzzcocks
3/5
good punk pop
The Cure
3/5
After listening, I was cured.
The Yardbirds
3/5
Good music, but the singing and lyrics don't work for me.
Genesis
4/5
Interesting.
Beastie Boys
3/5
Although not a fan, the acid jazz portions I found quite good and the style is interesting.
Rush
4/5
Huzzah.
The The
4/5
Walks the line between art and pop accessibility quite well.
Frank Sinatra
2/5
He certainly nailed the style. Some good song writing. But the music generally doesn't do anything interesting.
Pretenders
4/5
Wonderful debut.
Orbital
3/5
Definitely worth listening to and highlights a new type of song construction that comes with greater electronic manipulations. However, there is a strong sense in which this style created a set of tropes which most of the music created falls into. Needs more experimentation.
Ms. Dynamite
3/5
Interesting. In particularly like her voice. But something is missing from this album as whole to make it really work.
The Only Ones
2/5
Not working for me.
Public Enemy
4/5
Bob Marley & The Wailers
5/5
Excellent music.
Joni Mitchell
3/5
Moving from a kind of pop sound to something more open.
Tears For Fears
4/5
The rise of synth pop and its changing sounds.
Silver Jews
4/5
Definitely a different approach than many use to creating songs.
Ministry
2/5
Speed metal, industrial and some interesting mixing of sounds. But lyrically fails entirely for me.
2/5
Not without skills but the anger, puerile lyrics, and approach to humor all fail for me.
Linkin Park
2/5
The multiple voices and cuts between them are interesting. But the lyrics are not of interest. Part of the issue with the album as a whole is that every song does the same kind of thing in terms of voice/sound movement. They seem unwilling to actually play with noise/sound disintegration so there is a certain neatness to the parts that are in the screaming/yelling end of the spectrum that undermines them by containing them as a style rather than an edge.
Sonic Youth
4/5
This is what I am talking about. Fractured songs. Noise. Loud and soft. Interesting lyrics (for the most part). Pushing the sonic range of electric guitar and bass.
Bob Dylan
3/5
Johnny Cash
2/5
Needs work. Seems like a lesser repeat of other materials.
New Order
3/5
Not a bad album. Not a great album. It does seem unrelentingly happy though.
Magazine
4/5
post-punk comes alive
3/5
Not successful in being the Kinks.
Arcade Fire
3/5
The Specials
3/5
Lyrics not bad. Use of horns good. But not that strong of an album overall.
Ladysmith Black Mambazo
4/5
It is great to see the development of a unique style and how it is blended across the world with other music.
Neil Young
4/5
Excellent lyrics and style overall. His guitar work has feeling.
Everything But The Girl
2/5
Comes across as overly sentimental.
Kate Bush
4/5
The only way this album could have been better was if it had included David Bowie.
Sonic Youth
5/5
Love this album.
Iggy Pop
3/5
Better lyrics than I expected. And some interesting bits.
Fishbone
3/5
Horns good. Music variety good. But I don't feel a connection with any of the songs.
Dagmar Krause
4/5
Politics and commentary in a cabaret style. This is an excellent reminder that music and songs have an embedded and often implied social structure and are part of social ideas as a whole. We are constantly building and re-enforcing a world view with our music and songs.
Al Green
4/5
Fantastic voice and awesome styling. I, for one, will listen to Al Green sing anything, whether it be a shopping list, a dictionary entry, or everything you need to know about love.
Screaming Trees
2/5
Lacks the promised screaming.
John Coltrane
4/5
I could feel the love.
SAULT
3/5
Definitely worth listening to.
Fleetwood Mac
4/5
Well written lyrics. Multiple voices. Energetic.
Tracy Chapman
4/5
Fantastic debut. Excellent lyrics. Social consciousness and good music.
Waylon Jennings
3/5
Excellent guitar work and lyrics. Good singing voice. Definitely helped forge a classic country sound.
Ella Fitzgerald
4/5
clever lyrics with excellent singing; the music is not that engaging to me but in terms of a popular style, it was a core classic form and worth having heard.
Saint Etienne
3/5
Bright, warm. pop love songs with electronica. You could dance if you wanted to. Or relax with a fruit flavored drink of some sort. Could possibly help relieve you of any paranoia developed from listening to other more cutting edge music. Well done overall but do watch your sugar levels.
The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
4/5
Songs on the edge of exploding or in the process of exploding. Elemental. Required listening especially if such a demand starts a fight.
Iron Maiden
3/5
Skillful but not that distinct or interesting to me.
Taylor Swift
3/5
Anthemic positive dance songs. Well crafted.
An overly strong belief in the lyrics that problems are being solved: e.g. "I know places" proposes the fox escapes the hunters; "Shake It Off" proposes that one can psychologically overcome the bullying and dissing of the masses with a dance song in ones head.
Although the lyrics come across as a kind of confessional and biographical style --here is an event that happened to me and how I've learned to handle it--they really fall into stylized tropes and fantasies rather than any actual introspection into what went wrong or how to actually resolve issues and be strong. A good bit of "borrowed/learned" forms of lyrical phrasing and musical style that are lifted from other groups. A strong feel of having borrowed quite a bit from Lorde especially on Bad Blood and from Lana Del Rey. But without the edge that people like Lorde and Lana Del Ray seem to have.
Blondie
3/5
The Psychedelic Furs
4/5
Isaac Hayes
3/5
Another album well worth a listen and certainly doing some experimentation, but also rather flawed: lyrics in particular still stick to a certain kind of sentimentality that I find annoyingly inauthentic. Still, some amazing creativity going on.
Moby
4/5
With the progression of tools allowing more ease in sampling and re-use of other recordings, this album highlights some of the possibilities. At the same time, it raises the issue of attribution of those artists and recordings that one is lifting information from. I look forward to the future of samples being taken from albums like this to become sample of samples in future music. Art sits on the back of art--and its art all the way down.
Queen Latifah
3/5
Queen Latifah has an amazing flow to her lyrics and a fantastic voice. This is a positive album and I would hazard a guess that she had fun making it.
OutKast
3/5
Music interesting. Style is certainly well developed. Lyrically a no.
Jethro Tull
4/5
Somewhat more riff oriented than other albums but a fine example of combing electric, acoustic, and flute with strong lyrics. A fine album.
The Cure
3/5
Another fine album by the Cure. Definitely like the way they build their songs, find their lyrics interesting, and they really create some solids hooks.
The Allman Brothers Band
4/5
5/5
Clever. Catchy. Contagiously happy.
Ramones
4/5
Aretha Franklin
5/5
Still top notch over the years.
4/5
Kind of like an icecream truck hitting a jelly bean filled van with the Beach Boys explaining how it all went down.
Bob Dylan
5/5
His long lyrical phrases are amazing.
The Who
3/5
The Mothers Of Invention
4/5
Joni Mitchell
4/5
Another astonishingly well-made album from Joni. Although I like Court and Spark better, this is an equally great album.
Foo Fighters
3/5
A good album but does not strike me as that much of a progression from Nirvana and the general grunge soundscape.
The Smashing Pumpkins
4/5
Bruce Springsteen
4/5
I felt like was in Nebraska.
Led Zeppelin
3/5
Another fine album.
Ravi Shankar
3/5
Education is a good thing.
Ash
3/5
Led Zeppelin
3/5
Another excellent album. Might consider this one slightly more "folksy" than the earlier ones.
Beatles
4/5
+1 for George.
Robbie Williams
2/5
Nothing I found interesting happening here. Competent work but not groundbreaking or moving in any way.
Giant Sand
4/5
Oddly interesting.
David Bowie
4/5
I too have a TVC15 and know exactly what he is singing about.
Os Mutantes
4/5
Climbing the mountain I learned I had wings.
Neil Young & Crazy Horse
3/5
Bob Dylan
4/5
Burning Spear
4/5
Van Halen
4/5
Perhaps the true beginning of hair metal. Perhaps not. Has a kind of gloss to it that never seemed as true as the energy of punk rock. But it has its moments and no denying that Eddie Van Halen can play.
Led Zeppelin
3/5
Marvin Gaye
4/5
Motown sound supreme. What an amazing singer.
Fela Kuti
5/5
Robert Wyatt
4/5
Another unique voice and approach to music as an art.
Santana
5/5
Awesome guitar work.
Leonard Cohen
4/5
Cohen is an excellent lyricist and creates an interesting stripped down music.
LCD Soundsystem
4/5
Dance rock? Art rock? Trip rock? Rolling rock? Not-a-rock? Can become overly repetitious but lyrics generally make up for this.
The Beta Band
3/5
Like the music a good bit. Unmoved by the lyrics. Perhaps it all just needs more beta testing...?
The Residents
4/5
odd and interesting but as with many "experimental" groups it is not always clear what is actually experimental about it and what is perhaps just an intention to be annoying. It would help a lot if experimental groups always made a manifesto even if they never followed it.
Jimi Hendrix
3/5
More love, but less bold overall.
Alexander 'Skip' Spence
3/5
Another interesting album I had not previously heard of.
Iron Maiden
3/5
Sly & The Family Stone
4/5
Jimmy Smith
4/5
Madonna
2/5
The first couple of songs were slightly interesting in how they were built. Lyrics all kind of throw-away and obviously the whole album is aimed at danceability. But then track six came along and just stomped on everything downgrading the overall status. Madonna can be a competent and creative artist but this as all the hallmarks of having no driving reason to be other than for cash from the market.
The Incredible String Band
4/5
The beginnings of freak folk. I thought they could use some more string though and maybe a bit of brass.
Radiohead
3/5
Too many radio head albums on this list. Sorry, but they are not all unique enough to have so many here.
Lenny Kravitz
3/5
Lenny somehow can make a 70's album any time he wants to.
Bob Dylan
5/5
Nailed it.
George Harrison
4/5
George is awesome.
Queen
4/5
Sufjan Stevens
4/5
Paul Simon
4/5
The Strokes
3/5
Randy Newman
4/5
An interesting overall concept album (or at least strongly themed as one in its original release) that both presents a picture and makes commentary on it.
Chicago
4/5
Fun album. And who doesn't love horns?
King Crimson
4/5
A good beginning but later albums like Starless and Bible Black really capture them better.
U2
4/5
A solid performance with a strong theme and social commentary.
Gram Parsons
3/5
The National
4/5
A Tribe Called Quest
4/5
Isaac Hayes
3/5
A fun album and well worth a listen.
Stephen Stills
3/5
Some very good songs here. Stephen Stills was certainly a very good guitarist and creative. However, I would not say that there is enough innovation on this album to set it distinctly apart. The various Crosby Stills and Nash albums capture much of the same creativity as does Buffalo Springfield.
Carole King
4/5
It is interesting how much I find that other people made a more definitive version of a song written by Carole King. At the same time, I love listening to multiple versions of the same song performed by different artists. Part of the beauty of the art is creating something that can be interpreted by others in their own ways.
Garbage
3/5
Album is not holding up particularly well over time. I think it is the lyrics that truly need more work.
Tom Waits
4/5
Textures and stories. Evocative. Solid.
Joni Mitchell
4/5
ZZ Top
4/5
This is a fun album and highlights what a band can do when they are just plain good at making music of a specific style. They combine their own sound on a very classic blues genre and create their own songs which are built solidly on storytelling. You don't have to go off the rails entirely into experimental art to make a solid album. Do what you know and do it very well.
The War On Drugs
3/5
Interesting but overall too much of the reverb. Definitely worth more than one listen. Also I was expecting more war and more drugs.
Michael Jackson
3/5
Michael Jackson, Like Madonna, is a consummate performer. But his works are also chronically overproduced and stylized in ways that to me make them seriously flawed. The music of this album covers a range of pop, rock, funk, and R&B. Michael is definitely presenting himself more aggressively and trying to make his voice more textured, but the end result is still just a kind of tin foil. It glistens but lacks depth and authenticity. Note that this is the same problem Mr. Rogers had when he recorded an album of covers of the Ramones.
The Adverts
3/5
Wilco
4/5
The Crusaders
3/5
Baaba Maal
4/5
David Bowie
3/5
Dinosaur Jr.
3/5
Kate Bush
4/5
Green Day
4/5
Punk pop on the rise.
Kanye West
4/5
Mudhoney
3/5
A good overall album but not as good as their first EP. This has a lot more of what I would call a kind of classic punk styling with some grunge additions.
Turbonegro
3/5
Ticks all the punk boxes: offensive, loud, sarcastic, obnoxious.
Lorde
4/5
Next gen pop with competent lyrics and a style of its own.
The Young Rascals
2/5
Bits and pieces of interest but nothing that made me feel it needed to be on this list.
The Temptations
3/5
The Temptations covered a large amount of musical ground and have some excellent songs. But from an album standpoint, they tended to pick up on trends and styles but not be the creators or inventors of the sounds.
Sam Cooke
4/5
A superb singer, writer, and all around performer.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
4/5
The Divine Comedy
4/5
I have rated this high not because I particularly like the album, but because it certainly is a different kind of music and thus has its own peculiarities and style.
The Dictators
3/5
The Rolling Stones
4/5
Rock and blues with swagger and their own style. A well made album.
Kanye West
3/5
Björk
5/5
Goldie
3/5
Peter Gabriel
5/5
Adele
4/5
Excellent singing.
Eminem
2/5
I find the lyrics on this album overly violent and problematic. Eminem most certainly has a style that he has developed and this is worth listening to. But it is far darker and less introspective than others that I like more.
U2
3/5
Pixies
3/5
Leonard Cohen
4/5
Miriam Makeba
4/5
Cyndi Lauper
4/5
Let there be pop!
The B-52's
4/5
Goofy energenic fun built on surf rock but claiming its own. Truly infectious (there's a cream to relieve the itch).
MC Solaar
4/5
Prince
4/5
Less purple than expected. Less rain then expected. And why are there doves on the elevator?
Eagles
4/5
Somewhat too much balladry for me. But excellent music overall.
The Fall
4/5
Punk and post-punk promised repetition and this sticks to that. Interesting and fun.
Japan
4/5
Although sounding very Roxy Music, this holds its own in various ways. "Despair" interestingly makes me think of the them for the TV series, Westworld.
Charles Mingus
5/5
Awesomness. Frogs at a waltz on vespa scooters. And then cats in pajamas enter from the left. Totally unexpected and amazing.
Miles Davis
5/5
Definitely a move in a new direction and as interesting as the previous music.
Depeche Mode
3/5
Interesting but seems rather locked into a specific range of sound. Lyrics were hit or miss.
My Bloody Valentine
4/5
Album takes off like an airplane in the distance.
Definitely its own wall of sound.
The Zutons
3/5
The zutons are not dead. The zutons are fun. Everyone like the zutons.
The Who
3/5
David Bowie
5/5
Although the lyrics are generally more opaque than Low and earlier albums, there is both a continuity and ongoing change in the music and overall sound that keeps this interesting.
Tortoise
5/5
Less a language and more a way of just being in the universe.
Dizzee Rascal
2/5
Didn't work for me. Definitely a distinct style but not one I found interesting or successful.
Nine Inch Nails
3/5
Joan Baez
4/5
The interpretation of other people's songs is a fine skill to have.
808 State
3/5
techno/dance/acid - well built
Leonard Cohen
4/5
Great lyrics overall.
Public Enemy
4/5
Michael Kiwanuka
4/5
Grizzly Bear
3/5
Some very good parts.
Sarah Vaughan
4/5
Gary Numan
3/5
An interesting sound for a couple of songs. But hard to make it through the whole album in that vein.
Simply Red
2/5
Beatles
3/5
Prince
3/5
Music interesting. Lyrics not that much.
4/5
Odd and intriguing and annoying like a good punch in the face that you needed.
Beatles
3/5
Competent.
Portishead
5/5
An atmosphere that cannot be denied.
Nick Drake
4/5
Black Sabbath
4/5
An excellent album from a group that helped create the metal genre.
The Thrills
3/5
OutKast
4/5
Fats Domino
5/5
First! Captures the energy and style that everyone would eventually want to have.
Miles Davis
4/5
The Byrds
3/5
Definitely some noodling going on with the moog. But also the group was definitely not all in on recreating their sound. Not really any major moves away from their previous sound. One album is really enough to get the idea.
The Who
3/5
Loud - check. Crazy loud - check. Not just a reproduction of previously recorded music - check. Live crowd sounds - check. As a way of getting an idea of what a live Who concert is like, it's not bad. But in terms of overall quality of music, interesting variations on songs, technical skills in a live stage show, nothing that grand. A nice piece of history nonetheless.
Joy Division
4/5
Arcade Fire
3/5
Scissor Sisters
2/5
Disco pop mix. Music not that interesting and lyrics weak.
Rod Stewart
4/5
Mandolin, check. Raspy sandpaper vocal style, check. Fun album. And definitely more interesting than when Stewart moved into more mainstream albums of ballads and pop.
The mix of music keeps things interesting. He definitely settled into a certain style overall but it is a good sound overall allowing him to do rock, blues, folk, country, and soul blends of various sorts.
The Notorious B.I.G.
3/5
Björk
4/5
Art meets music. Amazing voice. Interesting lyrics and ongoing experiments in sound.
Eurythmics
4/5
Yet another great voice.
R.E.M.
5/5
Jangly guitars get louder! Obscure lyrics, you bet. I do love this album.
Kraftwerk
4/5
The first 90 minutes are incredible. The second 90 minutes are dazzling. It is not until the third 90 minutes that you start to suspect time has stopped.
Moby Grape
3/5
Way less Moby than expected (I guess he just stole half the band name later in time). The grape is exactly what you would expect. But wait, is that some lemon in the mix? Another fun album but comes across very much as one with its time rather than creating its own sound.
Nico
3/5
I agree with Nico that this would have been much more interesting with guitars and drums and not strings and flute all over the place. It is a shame that she couldn't have put forward more of here own musical vision.
Dr. Dre
3/5
The Cramps
3/5
Elvis would have been a lot more interesting as a punk rocker.
Tricky
4/5
Morrissey
3/5
Nothing particularly new here. Morrisey blends crooning, snark, and a generally dark view of the world on top of interesting music. But he has been doing it since the Smiths, so just listen there.
Frank Ocean
3/5
Rufus Wainwright
3/5
Le Tigre
4/5
Nice!
Harry Nilsson
3/5
A great voice and excellent song writer overall.
Black Sabbath
3/5
And on the 13th day, there was heavy metal darkness. And then came the satanic harmonica, the most fearsome of sounds especially when played in the dark. Frightened, we trembled and fell having no upright bass to hold on to. +one star for kind of creating their own genre.
Tom Waits
4/5
Waits has developed his style, his music, and his writing over the years and continues to produce excellent music. Poignant, funny, melancholy, maudlin, boisterous, rousing -- he builds strong characters and gives them a dignity in the world they inhabit.
Drive Like Jehu
3/5
Sonic assault with additional kicking. Truly amazing how you can look down at you own body as it is being beaten and think, I kind of like the way this sounds.
Talking Heads
4/5
Neil Young
5/5
Ryan Adams
3/5
The Rolling Stones
3/5
Leonard Cohen
3/5
Cohen wrote some really great songs, but I would say that pretty much any one of his albums covers that. Having him appear multiple times on this list is unnecessary as both his lyric style and music remain fairly constant. He was not about re-inventing himself lyrically or musically each time he released an album.
Kings of Leon
3/5
Enjoyable. Like the musical style. Not particularly grabbed by any of the lyrics.
Maxwell
2/5
Nick Drake
3/5
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
3/5
Justin Timberlake
2/5
Canned.
The Doors
4/5
Although at bottom taking blues riffs and building songs from them, the Doors invigorated their sound with a hypnotic power that pulses through. The album is a bit uneven overall but captures their style and skill splendidly.
The Zombies
4/5
A fine album that doesn't just sound like it is copying whatever the Beatles were doing at the time.
Sex Pistols
4/5
The rise of punk! A good beginning.
The Byrds
4/5
Excellent group. But not that varied from album to album. One of their albums is more than enough to cover their skills and style.
Elton John
4/5
The cry of the madness is there.
The Prodigy
3/5
As a type of music, this is a great example album and worth listening too. It has a significant amount of energy, but the lyrics are all rather throw-away, and the constant repetitiousness of each song definitely degrades it. Songs like "Smack my bitch" pick up on the not uncommon theme of violence and misogyny in various genres of music. Why you would want to dance to that, I do not know. Should you listen to it? Yeah, sure, at least once to get an understanding of what is a highly active genre of music.
Mekons
4/5
A fabulously oddball album.
Massive Attack
3/5
Metallica
4/5
At last thrash metal somewhat grows up. Better than average lyrics and thoughtfully built. Technically quite accomplished.
The Who
3/5
Good album but nothing particularly groundbreaking or new here.
Rahul Dev Burman
3/5
Definitely has the "soundtrack" style. The mix of music is quite interesting and fun but not particularly amazing. It has gotten me thinking that someone should be creating a sitar-funk fusion band.
Green Day
4/5
punk meet pop. pop meet punk.
Sleater-Kinney
3/5
Good music and songs. They do however all kind of blend over the course of the whole album. Needs something to really mix it up.
Stan Getz
4/5
Talking Heads
5/5
Awesome wrapped in an enigma surrounded by a tortilla.
Pet Shop Boys
3/5
Very positive overall. And a lot of albums over thier history. I personally would not have chosen this one as the example album, but it does capture their sound.
Meat Loaf
4/5
Help! I have fallen into a rock musical cabaret and I cannot get out. Fun album.
Air
4/5
Ethereal, exquisite, incorporeal.
Suicide
3/5
An interesting album but I would say hugely flawed by poor lyrics. The minimalist sound definitely sets an atmosphere and although some of the lyrics hit home, others come across more as puerile or shocking just to be shocking. Well worth the listen and definitely an influence on others who saw some of the strength in what is shown here.
Billy Bragg
2/5
Ali Farka Touré
5/5
World music blues; multiple languages. What is there not to like?
Bill Callahan
4/5
Interesting album.
The Black Keys
4/5
I thought black keys were a piano thing but maybe they finally got them on guitar and bass now.
Adam & The Ants
4/5
Another fun album and its own kind of outlier. Kind of pop but not standard pop sound. Kind of punk but not standard punk sound. Odd lyrics. Odder sounds.
Tom Waits
4/5
Stories. Humor. Captures an atmosphere.
Belle & Sebastian
4/5
Twee chamber pop. Certainly there is a strong theme of sentimentalism that runs through these songs like butter and sugar. But what makes this album stand out is the pure strength of the melodic lines that stretch like cats throughout the album.
PJ Harvey
3/5
Hanoi Rocks
3/5
A fine album but musically not all that amazing in and of itself. Glam rock really hyped up the stage show and the concert as visually interesting. However, for a person who just listens to the music itself, that gets lost.
The Divine Comedy
2/5
I found the style of this album to be annoying having a kind of Tom Jones throwback sound that is awash with grandiose sentimentality.
Mott The Hoople
3/5
The balance of both mott and hoople in this album is regriverously splifarridous and circumambulates the ultra violet quiznality of many auditory forms. The later separation of mott and hoople on separate albums lacked zandaka. But certainly up to All the Young Dudes, they were the nazz and justly worshipped as hemitheos.
Weather Report
4/5
The weather was exactly the amount of jazzy reported. Astounding!
Basement Jaxx
2/5
There was dancing. There was mixing. None of it bad. But I think this has been covered by others in often more interesting ways.
TV On The Radio
4/5
A certain angularity of form, laid down in a cool space that asks for ears. You have mine.
Depeche Mode
3/5
Sisters Of Mercy
3/5
David Bowie, Peter Murphy, and David Byrne all meet in a dark bar. Like the style.
Elliott Smith
4/5
Deep Purple
3/5
Not as a deep as I remembered it to be. But definitely purple as advertised. As a live album, this does an excellent job of capturing the sound and overall performance.
Goldfrapp
3/5
This would not be my first choice of a Goldfrapp album to include on this list. This one is warm and folksy overall without the strong dance sound of other albums. It is a fine album. But not as inventive or overall as interesting as some of the others.
Beyoncé
2/5
Lyrically tends to be throwaway inuendo more often than not and falls into a slickly packaged pop-dance frame. A few bits of music/beats that are interesting. But too stylized without much to really say.
Kings of Leon
3/5
Kind of more of the same. Not bad. Not overly demanding.
Neil Young & Crazy Horse
3/5
Some very good songs. and lyrics but overall as an album, not sure there is anything that makes it significantly better than a number of others. Like any prolific writer/musician, Young produced a number of fine albums and this is certainly among them and contains some popular hits as well, one of my favorite being "Down by the River". But do you need to listen to all of them before you die? Well--you probably should if you are a big Neil Young fan. More importantly, if you are a guitarist, you should study how he plays as he definitely makes some notes far more expressive than other bands do.
Lana Del Rey
3/5
Another fine lyricist with interesting music. This is a good album but not as interesting as Born to Die. The main issue I have is that Lana Del Rey tends to sing in a high register quite a bit and there is a certain sameness to that form that pervades many of her songs and albums.
The Dave Brubeck Quartet
5/5
The Rolling Stones
4/5
Gimme Shelter and You Can't Always Get What You Want capture the limelight, but this is a solid album.
Slipknot
2/5
Needs more autotuning. ;)
I do not find this even as interesting a pure noise rock.
When they got to asking "What did I do to deserve this?" I realized nothing and moved on.
The Damned
3/5
Jungle Brothers
3/5
Rush
4/5
He found a guitar and then made this album! Amazing. No idea where the drums and bass come from though.
Bad Company
3/5
David Ackles
2/5
Definitely a unique album and well worth listening to. I think the theatricallity and sentimentality of the music as well as of the singing voice don't work together the way they should. There is a sense in which all the stories are pushed away by how they are presented as a thing to look at and be heard rather than pulling you in and experiencing the events. In short, the album fails to overcome its own stylization and fights against itself.
4/5
The Beach Boys
2/5
An inconsistent album that doesn't really tie all its songs together in any way. It does capture bits of the Beach Boys sound but lacks solid lyrics and focus overall.
Buck Owens
3/5
Classic. Can't run away fast enough.
Einstürzende Neubauten
3/5
Definitely on the outer edge of the listenable. +1 for actual industrial noises. +1 for making their own instruments and incorporating found sounds. -1 for just yelling. +1 for offending people through destruction of property.
Arctic Monkeys
3/5
Girls Against Boys
3/5
Booker T. & The MG's
4/5
More proof that giving instruments and recording studios to people can lead to fine albums. +1 for the how this album came about.
Bonnie Raitt
3/5
Dexys Midnight Runners
3/5
A good listen overall but more subdued than previous albums. The influences of soul, celtic, and other sounds all show through. The voice carries a Bryan Ferry emotive style that to me doesn't always work.
Thin Lizzy
3/5
Solid rock and rock with decent lyrics.
Anthrax
3/5
Aphex Twin
3/5
JAY Z
3/5
Music interesting. Lyrics are occasionally interesting but not overall remarkable. Seem to fall into a common set of topics and style.
Marilyn Manson
3/5
Competent music and lyrics overall. Not interested in the stylistics and persona.
Jah Wobble's Invaders Of The Heart
3/5
World music dub is interesting.
Venom
3/5
More grey than black. Perhaps as a template for future black metal, speed metal, and the various subgenres that people have created, this is important, but it comes across as pretty standard.
Janet Jackson
3/5
Bauhaus
4/5
The Go-Betweens
3/5
Orbital
3/5
Erykah Badu
5/5
Solid voice, lyrics, and music.
Wilco
3/5
Rather long and not really capturing their experimentation. The opening song, "Misunderstood" has some edge to it. Not a bad album but not the one that should be on a list like this.
Supergrass
3/5
Germs
4/5
All hail the punk movement on a crash course to its own destruction.
Brian Eno
4/5
Eno captures otherness with his lyrics and music.
Jeru The Damaja
2/5
Alice Cooper
3/5
Christine and the Queens
3/5
Can
4/5
Gorillaz
4/5
Hits to spot.
Solomon Burke
4/5
Digital Underground
3/5
Well built music and a flowing style that I generally like. But song lyrics and topics of songs are very run of the mill and not interesting to me.
Queens of the Stone Age
4/5
Successfully hits the spot.
The Clash
4/5
Bruce Springsteen
3/5
A fine album but not as good as some other Springsteen ones and un-necessary on this list. I feel that Springsteen's lyrics are at their best when he is working with specific characters. The lyrics here, although not bad, have a very generic feel to them. Similarly the music is fairly cut and dried in how the songs are built and delivered. Not enough experimentation to warrant yet another Springsteen album on this list.
Hot Chip
3/5
Dance dance dance. Nice mix of songs and sounds. However I found the lyrics and style of a number of the songs were rather annoying. For example, Don't Deny Your Heart lyrics were just blah to me. And the same for Look at Where We Are.
M.I.A.
4/5
Although neither the music nor the lyrics are the most creative in the world, it is M.I.A.'s voice which sets this album apart and how the songs are built and presented. It is good to see the influence of hip hop but at the same time, even more importantly, how it shifts when it is subsumed by other cultures.
Slayer
3/5
Kind of a punk format speed metal. The lyrics are all throw-away to me. The sound is interesting for about one song but nothing really seems to change with it stylistically.
The Pretty Things
3/5
Definitely worth listening to and some good songs and music. As a so-called rock opera, it is a general failure in the sense that the overarching story is not that interesting and does not really come through via the album. (I have found this to be true of all the rock operas I've listened to -- the idea might work well for the writers to create a group of related songs but getting the songs themselves to all stick together and be good music and be interesting lyrically is asking for an awful lot). More interesting to me for this album is way it blends blues, rock, and various prog rock styles together.
Björk
4/5
The human voice is the instrument. This album certainly does not fit into standard pop music. But the experimentation with voice is engaging and is creating a new vocabulary.
Keith Jarrett
5/5
Elvis Costello
3/5
Another competent album from Elvis Costello on this list. Totally unnecessary.
George Jones
2/5
I find the lyrics and style oppressive.
Def Leppard
3/5
Straightforward power rock pop. Big hair, check. (Wait--what's with the bald guy?) Two guitars, check. Generally avoided a collapse into being a ballad band that befell other groups. Would have been even better if they had been Australian as they no doubt are in an alternate universe somewhere.
Scritti Politti
3/5
Lacks a decent political submessage.
The Smiths
3/5
If meat is murder, what is plant?
The Cardigans
3/5
Music is ok. Like the Iron Man cover.
The White Stripes
3/5
Some very good songs and some that don't quite hit the spot. But overall a solid album.
American Music Club
3/5
Interesting album having a blend of music styles.
Laibach
2/5
+1 for singing in three languages: English, German, and Slovene. The trappings of totalitarianism are problematic as there is no clarity as to whether it is a parody, irony, or what. I find the music rather monotonous over all. There are bits to it that are interesting but most of it collapses into a rather plain pastiche. with a kind of pop sound to it in many cases. Needs work.
Jamiroquai
3/5
Funk music is good and has some interesting bits but seems to keep pretty much to the tried and true. Lyrics are ok but generally not that interesting.
Steve Earle
3/5
Fun album. Sits somewhere in that rock/country music mix.
Curtis Mayfield
4/5
Another fine crafter of albums and lyrics.
William Orbit
4/5
k.d. lang
4/5
k.d. lang really knows how to use her voice well. Unlike many other writers and singers, she somehow avoids the pitfalls of over-sentimentalizing things or just plain falling into often pointless firework style vocalizations. Her ability to create her own music as well as present covers of other people's is solid in every way.
Dexys Midnight Runners
3/5
Rambunctious to a fault.
Destiny's Child
3/5
Shiny. A lot of throwaway lyrics. But one can dance and the production is slick. Not particularly inventive. But it has the slick plasticity and sexual airbrushing that sells well to a lot of people. As music, meh. As advertising and illusion, I'll give it a run of the mill 3. It does represent the commercial style well.
Duke Ellington
3/5
David Bowie
4/5
A musical chameleon changes its sound.
Faust
3/5
I have no idea what they are up to. It is interesting to me that punk rock which often told its audience to go fuck itself is more inviting than experimental music.
The Black Crowes
3/5
The KLF
2/5
As an art collective making critical commentary, they are interesting. As a force of music, not nearly so much.
Miles Davis
5/5
Fiona Apple
5/5
Complex lyrics, great voice, and style.
John Lee Hooker
3/5
I don't feel this album shows off the full skill of John Lee Hooker.
Napalm Death
5/5
Although not a perfect album, it does ultimately capture the way many feel about computers, current politics, and kimchi that has gone bad.
I can truthfully say that through musical inception, this album fully captures everything I feel about it while I am listening to it! Superb!
2Pac
3/5
Johnny Cash
4/5
Snoop Dogg
3/5
Certainly his own flow and sound and definitely some humor. Storytelling approach to the songs is interesting. But the stories themselves and the general topics are meh.
The Birthday Party
4/5
Demonic fury, disintegrating blues rock, and a darkness falling over everything. (pow, pow, pow, pow).
Lupe Fiasco
4/5
Ride
3/5
Even vaporous music can be beautiful.
Khaled
4/5
World music in multiple languages +1.
Björk
4/5
With Debut, Bjork begins to open her exploration of voice and sound, crossing genre's and experimenting as she goes. This is an excellent first album and foreshadows her ongoing growth with later albums.
The Go-Go's
4/5
Unfortunately more pop than punk but still a fine album.
Jurassic 5
3/5
Not experimental enough to really push any bounds. Good use of multiple voices.
Miles Davis
3/5
Tori Amos
4/5
The Monks
3/5
Good album and definitely some proto-punk styling. Well worth having on this list.
Traffic
3/5
I would definitely listen to this in my car.
G. Love & Special Sauce
3/5
Interesting style.
John Grant
4/5
The Byrds
3/5
Well crafted but no. Not an interesting style overall. I'd toss this from the list. The Band and other bands cover this sound much better.
The Blue Nile
3/5
a-ha
3/5
Does one say Oslovian? Too poppy-sweet for me. But well-crafted.
Roxy Music
4/5
Opening song is excellent. Definitely other shiny bits and pieces.
Heaven 17
3/5
Dance pop with some political commentary.
Stevie Wonder
4/5
Cocteau Twins
4/5
Having reached the ethereal phase, the Cocteau Twins are unquestionably off into their own strange territory. Let your ears speak of it to everyone.
The Shamen
2/5
Incredibly bland lyrics and delivery style with a very standard sound overall for a dance/rave aimed group. There are more interesting choices out there.
Tim Buckley
3/5
Competent but very slow and somewhat lugubrious overall. I am guessing this never really filled the dance floor.
New York Dolls
4/5
Nailed it.
The Waterboys
3/5
Milton Nascimento
4/5
Pet Shop Boys
3/5
Serge Gainsbourg
4/5
The Kinks
3/5
Dusty Springfield
3/5
An amazing voice give mostly crap to sing. Some of it is fun but it comes across as a corporate designed advertising campaign to try and produce a vinyl girlfriend for the masses.
The Sabres Of Paradise
3/5
Also know as: "Ambient music to sharpen knives by." I myself now have a very sharp pocket knife.
Queen
3/5
Malcolm McLaren
3/5
World music influenced and musically very early in introducing both world music and some hip hop style to the more conservative world.. Defines the word eclectic quite well. The use of multiple vocals is interesting. The use of the radio station bits I found annoying overall. Lyrics are fairly bland overall.
Christina Aguilera
3/5
Yet another amazing voice. Strongly upbeat and positive anthemic pop. Very well built music.
Haircut 100
3/5
Jorge Ben Jor
4/5
Awesome addition of the sound coming from Brasil.
The Hives
4/5
The Pogues
4/5
Frickin' awesome.
The Kinks
3/5
The United States Of America
3/5
I found "Do you follow me" to be an excellent song and liked the lyrics of a number of the songs. The music itself however, was uneven at best. I found it interesting overall, so I think it is worth having on the list.
Willie Nelson
3/5
Antony and the Johnsons
4/5
Although the singing style may be an acquired taste for some people and could probably be better balanced out with additional voices and delivery styles, the passion behind many of the songs is striking and strong. An album like this definitely deserves to be heard as it is not only an artistic statement, it is one about core human identity.
CHIC
3/5
John Lennon
3/5
Not sure if art or a therapy session. Working Class Hero is an excellent song.
Bon Jovi
3/5
Some good riffs and bits. But rather run of the mill in many other ways.
Boston
4/5
In the days of big hair and arena rock, there were loud guitars, upbeat songs for 30 thousand or more people to shout/sing together, and neverending joy. Here is a slice of that time.
Fleet Foxes
3/5
Definitely a polished style and carefully crafted. Probably belongs on a list like this.
Johnny Cash
4/5
On the cusp of his own demise, Cash creates this album with the skills of his years of artistry to make these songs his own. This is a heartfelt album and even if some of the songs he has chosen are lyrically burdened with sentimentality, he delivers them in his own way giving them all a simple sincerity that only someone looking back at his own life really can. An excellent album.
Bob Marley & The Wailers
4/5
Alice Cooper
3/5
Certainly a classic Rock and Roll album and an influential one.
Kate Bush
4/5
Buena Vista Social Club
4/5
2/5
The Police
4/5
Barry Adamson
3/5
Hugh Masekela
4/5
Ice T
3/5
Dr. Octagon
2/5
The idea of a a sci-fi, comic character, rap persona is interesting, but this album, alas, was not.
Led Zeppelin
5/5
Cheap Trick
3/5
Michael Jackson
4/5
Method Man
3/5
Steely Dan
4/5
Arrested Development
3/5
Stevie Wonder
4/5
Nightmares On Wax
3/5
Gillian Welch
3/5
Barry Adamson
3/5
Finley Quaye
3/5
The Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy
4/5
Although this is not a perfect album, I think that its combo of jazz based samples, raps, and spoken word make it distinctive from many others so I gave it four stars. I definitely like the way the music is put together. But I found the lyrics/words very uneven.
Peter Frampton
3/5
Slint
4/5
Works for me. Have you tried turning your copy off and then on again?
AC/DC
4/5
I wish they had done more colors. Back in blue. Back in pink. Back in plaid....
Iron Butterfly
3/5
Needs more iron, less butterfly.
Nanci Griffith
3/5
I wanted to believe.
Missy Elliott
2/5
Every track is exclusive! (your sarcasm meter should read 100%). Liked the flow and the beats but the lyrics for me were hit and miss with most falling on the miss side. In general, this album is fine but it really does not do anything to distinguish itself.
Elbow
3/5
Run-D.M.C.
4/5
The Specials
3/5
Fun for the first 10 minutes. Less fun for the next 10. Somewhat annoying for another ten minutes. And then outright animosity thereafter.
Van Morrison
5/5
A favorite since before time began and until it ends.
Megadeth
4/5
Music was a good example of speed metal. Lyrics were ok/
Primal Scream
3/5
I expected way more screaming into the void. Somewhat disappointed.
Pink Floyd
5/5
On continuous play.
Lambchop
3/5
The Human League
3/5
The next step having removed actual drummers and guitarists is to remove all humans! I for one will welcome our future AI generated "music"
The Doors
4/5
Although largely blues-rock based, the Doors were able to build a musical space that owed a lot to ecstatic worship and snake handling. And the spoken voice was always front and center in their songs not only telling stories, and performing poetry, but itself another instrument of repetition and trancelike formation
Anita Baker
4/5
Soul II Soul
3/5
Great percussion and beats but lyrics are missing the mark much of the time.
Alanis Morissette
5/5
Clever, emotional, dramatic, and an earfull.
Todd Rundgren
3/5
Well put together but did not interest me. It has no grit.
Dirty Projectors
3/5
Interesting. I think a unique sound/style overall. Was not greatly moved by it but parts ere intriguing.
Michael Jackson
3/5
Competent but not really doing anything that I find interesting. And you already have thriller on the list. Either one is fine but not both.
Kings of Leon
4/5
Paul Weller
4/5
Marvin Gaye
5/5
Coldcut
4/5
Deee-Lite
2/5
Morrissey
3/5
Definitely stronger rock sound overall--the music is quite good although some of it sounds like it was borrowed. The failure is that Morrissey sounds like, well, Morrissey. He is not able to take on a persona that really distinguishes this. Good but not different enough or convincingly so.
Sigur Rós
5/5
Ice.
Land.
Iceland.
Astor Piazzolla
4/5
This album is going to be my ring tone! It must play in full before I answer.
Ute Lemper
4/5
Alice In Chains
3/5
Music good. Singing style is interesting but a no for me.
The Fall
4/5
fryworks dockness bundting bright.
Tina Turner
4/5
Elastica
4/5
John Prine
5/5
Deep Purple
4/5
One can only imagine how much better this would have been with cowbell.
Gil Scott-Heron
4/5
Jazz and Poetry seem a lot like peanut-butter and chocolate.
Dr. John
4/5
Richard Thompson
4/5
That would officially be Richard and Linda Thompson. Richard Thompson is an amazing guitarist. His lyrics are good as well but always seem to be missing something to me--or maybe its just his overall delivery. Linda's voice adds some better variation to albums (as opposed to the ones that are truly just him).
Bad Brains
4/5
Sugar
3/5
Flamin' Groovies
2/5
The Bees
3/5
Led Zeppelin
4/5
The xx
3/5
The Killers
3/5
Mj Cole
3/5
Construction of the music is interesting. Lyrics are lacking overall.
Billy Joel
4/5
Intelligent lyrics. Well built music. Definitely crosses between rock and adult contemporary genres which can be disturbing to those who want to only listen to rock and roll. Also is perhaps more sentimental than it needs to be. Still, a fine album.
The Sonics
3/5
Sparks
4/5
Red Hot Chili Peppers
2/5
Not successful.
Ali Farka Touré
4/5
Kelela
4/5
Various Artists
1/5
Slipknot
3/5
I was baking and (screaming voice)ALL THE COOKIES BURNED! (growls) THEY WERE DEEEEELICIOUS (harmony voices). (Lead guitar) Won't give up my cookies. No. No. No. No. I look forward to making cheesecake next with armageddon cellos.
Little Richard
4/5
Iggy Pop
4/5
Creedence Clearwater Revival
3/5
Siouxsie And The Banshees
4/5
Sly & The Family Stone
3/5
Beastie Boys
3/5
Solange
4/5
N.E.R.D
3/5