Very layered soothing accompaniments but overall an album where nothing particularly stands out and each song flows seamlessly to the next without much notice.
Superb and timeless. This album is musical melancholy with diverse styles of instrumental compositions that are few and far between in most of todays modern popular music releases.
I don’t think I have ever heard an album with worse sound mixing ever. It sounded like they recorded everything inside of a shipping container. There are also odd stylistic choices like recording backmasking for long lengths of track. Not a fan.
It must be encouraging to musicians everywhere knowing that, with a little bit of musical talent and a niche following, there will always be a place in western culture to put out albums no matter how far away from mainstream popular music they are.
Admittedly, I’m not the most familiar with Butthole Surfers’ music. Pepper has always been a gem, so when I got this album, I was eager to give it a listen. What I got was a journey through a lucid musical hellscape of heavy and up tempo riffs often jammed into short tracks. From reading music industry reviews, it was likened to a musical nightmare, which I have to agree with. It clicked then that the flux of short/long tracks, embedded spoken word recordings and overall macabre theme was not a collection of tracks to be considered individually. It’s a concept album meant to be viewed as one whole piece of music.
Still, every first impression I had with this album, from the title itself, to the album art, to the lyrics espousing Satan and sexual assault (among other intentionally unpleasant imagery) gave me the same thought: “oh, how edgy.” This is ultimately how I view what this album is about. It isn’t an exercise in creating memorable music, it’s a performance art piece to poke at the part of society that takes itself even a little bit seriously and feels a semblance of self importance. I guess that’s the essence of rock in roll though, right? F the establishment. Even so, I can regard this as much more than a novelty that is easily forgotten.
Duck Tales woo-ooh.
It felt like popular music in the 90s was unique in that instead of ballads and bravado from inflated egos we got songs full of angst and despair. Jagged Little Pill reflects that perfectly. There are definitely some subtle grunge influences on this album reflected in slower downbeat verses and a louder more prominent chorus. With 5 hit singles (You oughta know, Hand in my Pocket, Head Over Feet, You Learn, Ironic) this album goes down as a crown jewel, winning album of the year, for an artist who embraced her strife and channeled it into something amazing, but could never get close to the same success for the rest of her career.
Lounge music that incorporates too much of a freeform style to be enjoyable. It’s like they took the mid parts of the Vince giraldi trio’s Charlie Brown Christmas album and made an entire record out of it.
Im lukewarm about Steely Dan because a handful of their classic hits that come across classic rock stations are fine but none of those are on this album which makes me wonder how many more SD records are on this list.
When I first heard about 1,001 albums to hear before you die I thought, man over 1,000 albums seems like a lot but I bet there is still a ton of great music that will be left out, especially considering new music is made every year that would end up displacing other albums on the list. After listening to Haunted Dancehall, it appears to me that maybe the number of truly revered albums throughout history is smaller than I thought. I was flabbergasted listening to track after track of this wondering who would possibly think this is worth recommendation. I know people say things like this all the time and after often overstating their own abilities, but I could legitimately make the songs from this album myself with little effort if I had the right equipment. This honestly sounds like it was made on a 13 year olds iMac using the garage band app with its preprogrammed sounds solely for their StarCraft Twitch stream. I cannot fathom any other setting that this
Music would be suitable for. Not for waiting rooms or elevators. Certainly not for parties or listening on your commute. This barely goes above the threshold for corporate phone line hold music. In fact I think I’d prefer to hear the Cisco hold jingle on repeat for the length of this album before listening to it again. I considered rating this 2 stars because if this is truly a recommendation of an album I have to hear before I die then somehow there might possibly be something worse out there, but ultimately there is no way this deserves anything but the lowest mark. I hope future album recommendations do not sink this low or it’s going to be very difficult to get through these on a daily basis.
Delightful. One of those artists that if you didn’t grow up in the era they were popular in you still knew their best songs and didn’t realize it until listening to them again. There’s something about minimizing the filler on tracks and focusing on a primary piano sound with a little strings or percussion to accompany it that eases you into a song and feels refreshing.
You don’t have to know the language to enjoy the music. But I wish I did so I could have a greater appreciation of it.
One of the first albums I can ever remember listening to. Green Day always seemed to me like the bridge between the bona fide punk genre with the likes of Dead Kennedys and The Clash and pop-rock banks like Blink 182 and Sum 41. 90s rock definitely took a turn from the glam and pompousness of 70s and 80s rockstars to more of a slacker “burnout” vibe and Dookie embodies this perfectly in both musical tone and lyrical subject matter. The decade was the melting pot of music. Dookie is a great debut album for a band that has had decades of sustained success and refined their sound. Albeit, the track listing is a bit homogenous and you’ll swear you hear some of the same guitar riffs from Billie Joe Armstrong that were on previous tracks. Still, Burnout, Longview, Welcome to Paradise, Basketcase, and When I Come Around are such bangers that it’s disappointing to see that half of those don’t make the cut when the band plays a live set for Amazon Prime’s concert series. The remainer of the album is a bit lackluster though and brings the overall rating down to a high end 3 for me overall.
This album is really going to recycle songs with almost 0 variation onto disc two and act like it’s doubling its contribution? Lame
Joni Mitchell sounds like she took the smooth jazz that plays on your town’s public access channel with the slides of what’s going on locally that week and freestyled lyrics on the fly.
You can really tell the lack of songwriting talent from an artist when track after track are lyrics, both in single words or entire lines that just repeat over and over. Live through this has this in spades, especially the second half of the album. I had to google who wrote the bands lyrics to see if this was just another strike on the pop culture infamy that has come to be Coutney Love’s reputation and discovered Nirvana fans who had theories that Kurt Cobain wrote these songs. Now, I wouldn’t call Cobain's songwriting the pinnacle of the craft, but the guy was a poet even if his songs conjured up some bleak and bizarre imagery. Sorry Hole, but your focus on making a statement through music doesn’t beget a good product if your skills put into doing so are sub-par.
