1001 Albums Summary

I used to think I really disliked this album, but it’s actually mostly the fact that I dislike Tom Sawyer a LOT and that bled into the rest of it. I think all of the big prog bands fared poorly in the transition to the 80s, but Rush probably holds up better than the rest of them. The six non-Tom Sawyer tracks are all bangers.

Damn girl, are you Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth by Killah Priest, because you are a weird and unwanted bonus ruining an otherwise perfect situation

I don’t know if it’s a full five because I find the acoustic side to be kind of meandering but damn if every song on the first side isn’t an absolute ripper.

Hot damn, this is the first album on this list I have never heard of and am genuinely shook by how good this is.

The endless wars to determine who the best British Invasion band was is dominated by the conflict between The Beatles and The Stones. Fans of The Who and The Kinks continue their guerrilla war from the bushes. Yet the fear that unites us all is those fighting for The Zombies, and the small but real chance they might be right.

The second album I have never heard of before taking this on, and an almost lethal dose of British-ass whimsy. I have no complaints, but it's easy to see how many better artists built off of this framework.

I liked it fine enough but there it deserves credit for how it made me, a degreed homeowner and parent who was 8 when it was released, feel like I am getting away with something I shouldn’t over three decades later.

This one in particular doesn’t do a ton for me, but I will always appreciate that there is something about AC/DC’s guitar tone that makes it sound like hell music for absolute perverts.

A very pleasant and previously unheard compilation of fusion-inflected samba music. Frankly, this project could use a few hundred more entries like this instead of just being every Brit-pop album released between 1965 and 1998. I know what Blur sounds like, give me what the other 95% of the world listens to.

Look, it’s not that I don’t get it, I just genuinely do not like it.

Look man, sometimes these albums don’t really need reviews. I’m not saying critics always got it right, but we have 52 years of evidence saying this is one of the greatest albums of all time and I think they nailed it in one.

It’s funny that this is what most of Mould’s solo material sounds like now.

Obviously this is great but I am always going to associate this album with my friend who really wanted to try a raw egg cracked into a Newcastle like Keith Moon drank in the movie before abusing Tommy. Unlike this album, the drink was awful and in no way a seminal moment in prog rock.

Alienating everyone in my life with my sincerely held and deep-seated belief that Dusty Springfield is Buffalo Springfield’s husband.

We need to remove every UK music writer's contributions to this list until we figure out what is even happening over there.

A problem with the original version of this book being released in 2006 is that every awful dudebro indie group that got popular in response to nu-metal was still fresh on people’s minds and as a result I have to listen to Kings of Leon 18 years later.

Putting a late career solo album by a Canterbury Scene veteran on this list was almost as baffling as the album itself. Filled with great compositions ruined by bloviating vocals and run times, I don’t think anyone needs to listen to this before they die but at least it’s fascinating.

Another unreviewable album. If you have any interest in music made in the last 70 years, it’s worth a listen to compare where it came from.

I resent being made to listen to any album where the best song is American Pie by Don McLean

The fact that this is the only Earth, Wind & Fire album on this list but there are two by Kings of Leon should put both this project and the concept of ranking things in serious doubt.

I get how this is Important and maybe even Good but you have to understand that I am the exact age where this album and everything it influenced has just become the soundtrack to payday loan commercials my entire adult life. Also, why does Fatboy Slim look like a lost member of Whose Line Is It Anyway in any picture

Look, my most prolific internet presence is posting screenshots and video clips of PlayStation 1 & 2 games. You cannot play the amount of early PSX games that I do and still give this album an unbiased review.

At the time of writing this, Toby Keith has been dead for less than 48 hours and the story where Kris Kristofferson says what Keith did to country music is what pantyhose did to finger fucking is making the rounds. Appropriately, the debut album by Kristofferson’s protégé is a pure example of going commando and getting right in there.

It’s fun when you listen to something for the first time and immediately realize this is the album all your favorite artists glommed onto when they were weird teens.

License to Ill is no Paul’s Boutique, but it’s my understanding that most albums aren’t.

Did you know the guys from all those SalesForce conferences and podcasts used to have a band?

It’s very cool to hear music so vibrant and exciting while simultaneously knowing that it influenced a list of artists so awful that it should be framed and put on public display in The Hague.

I signed up for this project to expand my musical horizons and I gotta say that unfortunately giving an album with a seven minute long bongo-centric cover of In a Gadda da Vida is pretty par for the course for me.

Its a small but important distinction to note that it’s called 1001 Albums To Listen To Before You Die, not 1001 Albums To Enjoy Before You Die. Three stars.

A very good album that becomes even better when you hear David Thomas’ vocals and your broken brain transports you to a world where the entire album is being performed by Muppets. Four stars.

This is the first album on here that I’ve given three stars where it feels like it is a failure of imagination on my part.

This is the most British-ass thing I am giving five stars, except for all the other Genesis albums I’m going to give five stars.

Utterly beautiful music that does absolutely nothing for me.

Sure, it’s an evolutionary dead end for hip-hop but evolutionary dead ends can be super cool. Just ask the platypus.

I know this album is perfect, you know this album is perfect, so instead of wasting your time I want to give a shoutout to the user that wrote a cover article length treatise on why you should watch the Chris Elliot sitcom Get A Life for their review instead. Five stars.

I try to save a 5 star for something that was truly transformative for me but this music has been in the background since I was born, who am I to say it wasn’t?

Actually, you know what? I already listened to music before I came over. Yeah man. I’m good, really.

I was 19 when this album came out, and obviously it felt like the most important piece of music ever recorded, as things released when you are 19 tend to do. I really resent who I was at the time so I expected to hate this, but it brings me no pleasure to announce I am incorrect and misty-eyed while listening to it in my driveway. Five stars.

Not for me, but that’s fine.

It was extremely brave of Madonna to release an entire album of PlayStation 2 boss fight anthems a full three years before anyone on the west had access to a PlayStation 2. Four stars.

It's weird that the powers that be chose a live album but at least it's an absolute banger of one.

I don’t know if this is an album to listen to before you die but it definitely feels like an album you’d have to listen to while you die at the hands of the most chinless white man in a fedora to ever exist. One star.

The good: I just met this hot girl and she wants to take me to a rave? The bad: They put blood in the emergency sprinklers? How do you even keep it from coagulating? The good: Oh hey, is that Wesley Snipes? The bad: Why does he have a katana? Two stars.

Ironically, this album would have been an easy five stars before this project jumpstarted a love of soul music inside me. It’s still good I think, but the self-imposed “plastic soul” descriptor is incredibly apt. I love Bowie, but I don’t see myself coming around for this one all that much. Three stars.

Fucking fine. Four stars. Whatever.

I don’t know if the worst Pixies album from the original lineup is really essential, but I guess it’s fine to say people should really hear an album where they are very good but also kind of boring.

Honestly Bob, I could have done with a lot more structured wheelin’. I generally enjoy Bob Dylan and can understand why this was a landmark album, but I struggle to enjoy this 62 years later, especially over some of his later material.

Another 4 star classic I have nothing to say about. It’s good!

Its extremely fun to know the studio versions of all these songs having absolutely face melting guitar parts left off the singles.

I get why people who know and care about how music is produced love this Phil Spector-backed album, but the only real enjoyment I got out of it was imagining people’s shock when they looked at the cover and then found out that it was actually the guy in the liner notes that was a murderer.

This album gets so much worse when someone besides Janis does vocals

Perfectly fine.

Lives up to the name

You know how the British press lost its mind for like a half decade because Pippa Middleton had a visible ass which was seen as manna for a starving nation? Including this album on the list is the blue eyed soul equivalent. One star.

Obviously this is five stars. Come on.

The Flaming Lips were one of the most perfect bands of the 90s, releasing a string of all-timers from 1990’s In A Priest Driven Ambulance to 1999’s The Soft Bulletin. Eagle-eyed readers may notice that this overproduced and cloying album was released in 2002.

Obviously great, and a fun companion piece to all the whinging people do about basically any remotely challenging album in the reviews.

You do not need me to tell you this is five stars.

This is a rough one because I understand how important of an album this is, the members of Pearl Jam seem like genuinely good people, and I can understand how structurally this is supposed to kick ass, yet this album does absolutely nothing for me whatsoever.

Obviously an unimpeachable classic but I get even more enjoyment out of imagining what this sounded like to conservative parents in the late 80s. If it sounds like the album was made with a suite of dental tools to us, it must have been like a Victorian child exploding after tasting Doritos.

The most annoying album I’ve given four stars to.

A quintessential two star album for me. I get why it’s Important but dear lord what a slog.

With all due respect to Boy George, an incredibly brave individual who did incredible work in normalizing queerness in a time notoriously unfriendly to the concept, this album is basically unlistenable.

I did not enjoy this but at least it was over 2 hours long.

Wish I liked it mate.

Imagine devoting your whole career to essentially making multiple demo reels proving you are the perfect band to make the opening song to a James Bond film and yet you remain unselected. One star.

Easily my favorite of the 800 or so britpop albums on this list, which only sometimes feels like saying “this pebble permanently lodged in my shoe is surprisingly smooth”

A perfectly for. Album and maybe one of the first punk albums by a pure nepobaby?

Obviously five stars, I don’t have anything else to say about it.

A difficult thing for me to reconcile has been how so much of the music from the late 70s and 80s that I love was a response to the prog and hard rock from a few years earlier that I also love, but relistening to this bloviating mess has been shockingly helpful.

Not the best album from the 90s to get five stars from me, but it is the most album from the 90s to get five stars from me.

An invaluable lesson I’ve learned from this project is that pop music will never be hornier than it was in the fifties, as evidenced by this album where you hear King Louie from The Jungle Book achieve orgasm no less than a dozen times over 32 minutes. Five stars.

Imagine how much more fun our world would be if instead of the opening movement, The Exorcist instead used the section where a guy makes monster sounds over a wailing guitar solo for its main theme. Four stars.

This album is a lot of fun, but as always the real treat when listening to one of the vanishingly rare world music albums on this list is reading the racist reviews from nerds apoplectic that they had to leave their comfort zone of Metallica or Blur or whatever.

This is pretty good but if you are anything like me and this is the first album by The National that was released after you stopped keeping up with new bands, today’s selection also acts as a friendly reminder to schedule a prostate exam and/or mammogram.

I went back and took an edible and this album still couldn’t do it for me.

Move over Peter Gabriel, we have a new champion for Most Annoying Album I Awarded Five Stars

Somewhere there is a wretched man rending his dri-fit polo over the fact that the White Stripes started using a bass in this like some sort of Millennial Dylan going electric.

I went back and took an edible and this album still couldn’t do it for me.

Dude I don’t want to listen to this. Why is it important? How does this possibly reflect the zeitgeist of 1967? Who cares 57 years later? If it is not necessary to eat at a mediocre Italian restaurant where the owner plays accordion while maintaining eye contact on slow nights before you die, then I should not have to listen to the music he’s playing along with.

Very by Pet Shop Boys is an easy five stars because not only is it an album that brought me near to tears upon my first listen but did so while sounding like the unreleased soundtrack to a Sonic the Hedgehog game.

I used to hate The Eagles but in the dotage of my thirties I am coming around on them. The Eagles are the crisp light beer of rock. Pleasant enough, and that’s what most people are probably looking for in music. I don’t love it but I’m glad this album makes people happy.

I absolutely get why this is on the list but it’s not for me.

I absolutely get why this is on the list but it’s not for me.

It brings me no pleasure to share the realization that as The Arcade Fire is to millennials, The Pogues are to generation x. Four stars.

Why is she pressing the button on her utility belt on the album cover? Is she about to emit a smokescreen so she can escape and listen to something that doesn’t sound like a plastic donut tastes? Why did she not give us the same option? One star.

Why is it that when a bunch of British indie pop stars want to cosplay as The Kinks they get to release an album but when i do it i just get supervised custody and a sharp reminder of existing restraining orders from the office of Dave Davies? Three stars.

Obviously this is five stars. I’m not happy about it and like to pretend I’m not a Fleetwood Mac fan but I also didn't build my entire personality around contrarianism.

I do not enjoy Nick Cave but I know enough to understand this is a skill issue on my part.

We get it Beck, you ARE a little stinker.

Unfortunately this album completely rips ass.

This is one of my top five albums of all time and another listen didn’t change that.

I do not mean any disrespect for the dead but I really have to wonder if this album would be on any kind of lists if Jeff Buckley didn’t have the good business sense to die after releasing it. Two stars.

I wish I liked it more!

The problem with this list is that there are hundreds of fantastic albums that don’t rate more than 3 stars to me.

Wish I liked it!

Do you ever think about how almost immediately after Meat Loaf died Andrew WK re-emerged to take the throne of making piano heavy operatic rock that is horny on an almost spiritual level while also being a weird libertarian? Nature always finds a way. Five stars

This album was so big that contemporary music writers were calling David Gray the 21st century Bob Dylan, a claim both a) incredibly stupid and b) true in a way that speaks much more to the quality of this century then the talents of the asshole responsible for “Babylon” One star

Look, this is obviously an unimpeachable classic and five stars, but I started to skip the skits after learning that we only have a limited amount of time on earth and you don’t strictly have to use it listening to what teens in the gifted and talented program thought was funny 35 years ago.

I bet if you have gone your entire life without seeing or hearing Alice Cooper that everything about this album would seem like an elaborate gag from Achewood. Two stars.

Five stars, and I’m not just saying that because as a 38 year old white person I am legally obligated to believe this is one of the greatest albums of all time.

I think a lot of people question why this is on the list, but I question why the list isn’t more like this instead of being full of the entire discographies of any Britpop band with a single domestic violence charge between them.

Oh boy, another mid British rock band I’ve never heard of! :/ Oh hey, there is a connection to Joanna Gruesome’s vocalist Lan McArdle. That’s one of my favorite modern bands! :) Oh no, the connection is that Lan made some extremely credible sexual assault allegations against the vocalist of Hookworms public! :(

Another Nick Cabe album, another three stars from someone who doesn’t really get it.

It’s been thirty years and that is enough time for us to acknowledge how altruistic and brave it was for Frank Black to break up Pixies and immediately release a double album proving how inessential his talents were to their success. Two stars.

I don’t think I’m going to listen to it again any time soon but it is pretty much perfect

Average reviewer on this site: The guy from Traffic released an extremely plastic sounding yacht rock album 🙄 Me, a paragon of taste: The guy from Traffic released an extremely plastic sounding yacht rock album 😍 Four stars.

It’s commonly accepted that 1986’s Dragon Quest was the first role playing game to feature distinct boss music when fighting The Dragonlord, but most people don’t know the genre was accidentally invented 15 years earlier when ELP performed a prog interpretation of Mussorgsky’s Pictures At An Exhibition

A five star album that gets two stars knocked off for revitalizing Aerosmith’s career and one added back for being indirectly responsible for SSX Tricky.

Absolutely perfect

Absolutely perfect

Maiden is one of my favorite bands of all time and while this is a five star experience, it’s a bit baffling that this is the only Bruce Dickinson album on the list when it’s arguably the worst of his eighties run. The highs are as immaculate as ever, but both Invaders and Gangland are kind of bad in a way the band avoided for the rest of the decade.

Absolutely perfect

Look, I was 15 when this album came out. Kid A took ten million elder millennials by the throat and made us an order of magnitude more annoying. I am not socially or biologically capable of giving it less than five stars.

The seventies were such a powerful time for albums about dirtbags you know.

Congratulations to the late Alex Harvey for making the horniest album thus far.

Look, I am 39 of god’s own years old. This album is Quadrophenia for people in my cohort and we aren’t allowed to give it less than 5 stars. Still, I feel vindicated in this relisten in thinking as a contrarian 18 year old that Speakerboxxx is the much better half as I listened to it on computer speakers in Foobar2000.

Thinking fondly about when Neil Young released the Pono, a $400 FLAC device shaped like a prism to listen to his music at the highest possible fidelity as I rock this album on my iPhone speaker in a loaner beater that’s vibrating so hard that it can travel across dimensions. Five stars.

I did not enjoy this and do not think it belongs here, but I’ll give it two stars because of the scene in Stealth (a movie about a jet that becomes sentient and downloads every MP3 on the internet so you know it’s a bad guy) sets fire to a bunch of people while Pardon Me plays.

Look, if I skipped every album written by an abuser I would be listening to two albums a month but this one is too close to home. One star on principle, fuck off Ryan.

Before this I had no idea that The Bee Gees had a pre-disco career. Now I understand why that fact evaded me.

If you ever wanted a case study in just how joyless and incurious 60% of 1001 Albums Generator users are, check out the reviews for this classic. Page after page of “waah, this is too long and weird and funky!” Like that isn’t the point you stupid motherfucker Five stars.

My biggest complaint about the list of 1,001 albums you have to listen to before you are allowed to die is that 80% of it consists of every single British pop rock album from 1965-1995, but I have to admit they really nailed it in this one case. Five stars.

They were not.

I wish I liked Pink Floyd. It feels like I am breaking a major Dad Law by just not enjoying it.

There are only two Iron Maiden albums on this list, which makes this one a baffling choice. It’s not BAD, but it’s also not at all indicative of what the band would become. If you really wanted to represent the pre-Bruce Dickinson era, Killers is a legitimately good album. This is perfectly fine but I can’t imagine it’s anyone’s favorite.

Look, most of the music I love basically boils down to a British person jerking off with their guitar yet I still could not hang with this absolute slog. One star.

Grime really isn’t for me but I can respect that this is a pretty good example of it. Plus, it’s a great opportunity to read stunningly racist 1001 Album Generator user reviews, which is one of my favorite ways to while away an afternoon. Three stars.

I wish I had any strong feelings about this.

Two thoughts that should not be controversial but are: 1) The Beatles are my distant third favorite British Invasion band after The Who and The Kinks 2) The White album is an unimpeachable 5 star classic and an all-time great, but it can be very annoying.

In 2007 I spent so much time at house parties where this album was in constant rotation that I ended up in a psychiatric hospital. In 2024 it made for a perfectly pleasant soundtrack to my morning jog. 3 stars for a grim reminder that time comes for us all.

Another five star album i am not in a hurry to listen to again.

I was in high school when George Harrison passed and remember all my friends in bands saying something along the lines of “The Beatles are dying in the order of their talent.” Having since listened to John Lennon’s solo career since then, I can confirm he would have lived forever if that was the case. One star.

Absolute all-timer.

For how much he talks about it, I hope George Michael finally got to have sex at some point. Four stars.

While my main issue with this book is that someone thinks it’s vital that I listen to every single brit pop album released before I die, a close second is that came out when it was released seem to be picked solely on the pitchfork buzz they had rather than actually feeling important or vital. Two stars.

It’s a real shame that William Patrick Corgsn released this and Gish, two basically perfect albums, and disappeared never to be heard from again. (Takes a huge sip of coffee and checks Wikipedia) Oh. Oh no. Five stars.

Finally, torch music for perverts fucked up on ketamine stolen from a police horse.

Christmas music… to DIE for Five stars.

I’m beginning to think this Humpty guy fucks. Three stars.

I am of the exactly correct age to vividly remember PCU, a 90s college comedy which culminates in P-Funk playing a frat house rager to save the day, playing on Comedy Central roughly twice a week after school, leaving me with both specific feelings about Jessica Walter and an inability to give a George Clinton album less than 5 stars.

What saves this from being a one star album is the fact that I was 13 when it came out. I was obsessed to the point that I had the lyrics printed out and would pore over them like holy texts until my dad found them one day and sold my entire cd collection, using the credit to buy two used Stryper albums so I could have heavy music that honored God.

If you are like me (and I pray for your sake that isn’t true), putting this album on will induce a Proust-grade flashback to using Xtal as the menu music for the unusably slow SNES emulator on the Dreamcast with a Teletubbies splash screen in 10th grade. Five stars.

All I wanna do is (Gunshot) (Gunshot) (Gunshot) (Gunshot) (Cash register sound) Kiss Luigi