653
Albums Rated
3.39
Average Rating
60%
Complete
436 albums remaining
Rating Distribution
Rating Timeline
Taste Profile
1950s
Favorite Decade
Funk
Favorite Genre
US
Top Origin
Wordsmith
Rater Style ?
115
5-Star Albums
30
1-Star Albums
Breakdown
By Genre
By Decade
By Origin
Albums
You Love More Than Most
| Album | You | Global | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Kollaps
Einstürzende Neubauten
|
5 | 1.9 | +3.1 |
|
The Modern Dance
Pere Ubu
|
5 | 2.48 | +2.52 |
|
Cut
The Slits
|
5 | 2.71 | +2.29 |
|
Tago Mago
Can
|
5 | 2.79 | +2.21 |
|
Whatever
Aimee Mann
|
5 | 2.82 | +2.18 |
|
Live / Dead
Grateful Dead
|
5 | 2.83 | +2.17 |
|
I Am a Bird Now
Antony and the Johnsons
|
5 | 2.84 | +2.16 |
|
Gris Gris
Dr. John
|
5 | 2.88 | +2.12 |
|
This Nation’s Saving Grace
The Fall
|
5 | 2.88 | +2.12 |
|
D.O.A. the Third and Final Report of Throbbing Gristle
Throbbing Gristle
|
4 | 1.88 | +2.12 |
You Love Less Than Most
| Album | You | Global | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Thriller
Michael Jackson
|
1 | 4.22 | -3.22 |
|
Off The Wall
Michael Jackson
|
1 | 3.78 | -2.78 |
|
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
The Smashing Pumpkins
|
1 | 3.68 | -2.68 |
|
Blackstar
David Bowie
|
1 | 3.48 | -2.48 |
|
Eliminator
ZZ Top
|
1 | 3.38 | -2.38 |
|
Shake Your Money Maker
The Black Crowes
|
1 | 3.29 | -2.29 |
|
American Pie
Don McLean
|
1 | 3.28 | -2.28 |
|
Live Through This
Hole
|
1 | 3.28 | -2.28 |
|
Me Against The World
2Pac
|
1 | 3.25 | -2.25 |
|
Selling England By The Pound
Genesis
|
1 | 3.18 | -2.18 |
Artists
Favorites
| Artist | Albums | Average |
|---|---|---|
| Jimi Hendrix | 5 | 5 |
| Beatles | 6 | 4.67 |
| Radiohead | 5 | 4.6 |
| Pink Floyd | 3 | 5 |
| Beastie Boys | 3 | 5 |
| Talking Heads | 3 | 5 |
| The Rolling Stones | 3 | 5 |
| Elvis Costello & The Attractions | 4 | 4.5 |
| Stan Getz | 3 | 4.67 |
| The Beach Boys | 3 | 4.67 |
| Parliament | 2 | 5 |
| A Tribe Called Quest | 2 | 5 |
| Van Halen | 2 | 5 |
| The Kinks | 2 | 5 |
| Neil Young | 2 | 5 |
| Bob Marley & The Wailers | 2 | 5 |
| Led Zeppelin | 2 | 5 |
| Prince | 2 | 5 |
| David Bowie | 8 | 4 |
| Stevie Wonder | 4 | 4.25 |
| Bob Dylan | 6 | 4 |
| Johnny Cash | 3 | 4.33 |
Least Favorites
| Artist | Albums | Average |
|---|---|---|
| Michael Jackson | 3 | 1.33 |
| Genesis | 2 | 1.5 |
| Stephen Stills | 2 | 1.5 |
| The Who | 3 | 2 |
Controversial
| Artist | Ratings |
|---|---|
| Aerosmith | 1, 4 |
| U2 | 2, 5 |
| Black Sabbath | 5, 5, 2 |
| David Bowie | 1, 5, 5, 4, 4, 5, 3, 5 |
5-Star Albums (115)
View Album Wall
Popular Reviews
Jimi Hendrix
5/5
There's a classic game theory experiment where you agree to meet someone tomorrow in NYC but you don't discuss a specific time or location. The experiment has been repeated many times + overwhelming majority of participants end up successfully meeting (spoiler alert: they meet at the clock inside Grand Central at noon). My wife knows about this project and asked me what the album of the day was and I told her it was the greatest album ever made. She thought about it for a minute and said Ziggy Stardust. I told her this album is older than that. She thought about it for another minute and correctly guessed Electric Ladyland. She's not even that much of a Hendrix fan, too.
On the first Experience album Jimi asked Have You Ever Been Experienced? And here on the last Experience album he asks Have You Ever Been To Electric Ladyland? He really wants to know if have you ever been this or that! Electric Ladyland was a studio that Jimi built with his own money and then used to record this album. This whole album has a feel has a feel of a musical playground. It is unusually sequenced - very few albums would have a 10 minute jam on side one. Meanwhile, The pacing of sides 3 and 4 keep building and building and building. It's really quite incredible. If you've only listened to this record all the way through, suggest you give it a shot from the middle to the end sometime. It's really spectacular, not just the pacing of the tunes but how they all fit together and themes come back and forth, culminating in a performance of all along the watchtower that I dare say even its songwriter Bob Dylan would probably admit is far beyond and more compelling than anything Dylan himself could do. I have to also mention that the guitar playing on this record is outrageous. There are things he's doing on this that still no one has been able to reproduce. Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix, Jaco Pastorius...these are the rare stylists on their chosen instruments that are unique to the point that they practically create their own genres. It's a level of artistry I find incredibly inspiring.
Back at the beginning of the album, Jimi sings "Make love, make love, make love"...he means this literally and universally in a way very few people do. Did you ever hear about the Plaster Caster Girls? Groupie/Artists who made dozens of plaster replicas of male rock stars' penises. Legend has it that when Hendrix was given the mold he "made love" to it until, errr, completion.
Also, in concert he would describe his song "Manic Depression" as a story about a guy who wished he could make love to his guitar - given that he was known to sleep alongside his guitar fairly frequently, I am pretty sure it's straight autobiography. May sound strange but it's of a piece with the story of when his dad Al knew he should buy Jimi his first guitar - he asked child Jimi to sweep up their apartment while Al was at work and when he got back, the floor was covered in loose broomsticks because Jimi went wild playing the broom like a guitar. After he finished whipping Jimi, he went to the guitar store. Thank you, Al!
13 likes
Hüsker Dü
2/5
Crazy selection for 1001 albums. The Huskers deserve to be here but it should have been Zen Arcade and it's not even close. This might be the most egregious error yet on this list and I'm afraid that to the extent this list is influential, it may unjustly damage Husker's legacy.
Most fans would tell you Warehouse is not a bad album, some would, actually, but it's widely understood to be their worst and a terrible introduction. It's their last album when they weren't really getting along anymore and it's too long and self-indulgent and despite the major label budget it still has that incredibly thin, low budget sound. They may be the only band in history who's recordings got worse sound quality-wise as they matured and got bigger recording budgets. I never understood that.
So Husker Du was an awesome band but you wouldn't know it chucking this on the turntable. The best way to be introduced to Husker Du takes a little work, but it's totally worth it: what you have to do is take a bad acid trip alone wearing an Army surplus trench coat in a desolate junk yard on the outskirts of Minneapolis on a freezing overcast winter afternoon that's getting dark weirdly early during Reagan's first term, eventually crawling home to be inexplicably greeted by "Diane" from Huskers' Metal Circus.
On behalf of Husker Du fans everywhere, please accept my apology for this terrible mistake and try to put this entire day out of your mind. Thank you!
11 likes
A Tribe Called Quest
5/5
I want to live in the multiverse where the "Native Tongues" style of Tribe, De La, Monie Love and Jungle Bros ended up defining 90s hip hop instead of gangsta rap.
The ratio of great hip hop singles to great hip hop albums is roughly 4,080:1. It's very hard to do but these guys pull it off - on their debut no less, and the first of three great albums in a row for them - with self-effacing, creative rhymes delivered with a laid back flow full of youthful charm over clever beats that act like a tour of the pop culture my generation grew up with.
Also, pour one out for Phife Dog, the Five Foot Assassin who left us way too soon.
11 likes
Nitin Sawhney
2/5
This sounds like what plays endlessly in one of those hotel lobbies that has a water dispenser with cucumbers in it and has a house aroma, like W or some shit.
10 likes
The Rolling Stones
5/5
When you're on death row and they let you play one last Stones album as I assume is your basic human right in every nation, the album you select is very revealing:
12x5 - sad that you're still trying to prove something
Goats Head Soup - only child?
Some Girls - high on your own supply
Tattoo You - starfucker
Exile On Main St - a bit obvious
Beggars Banquet - almost
Let It Bleed - retrial warranted
10 likes
1-Star Albums (30)
All Ratings
Jimi Hendrix
5/5
3/5
Stan Getz
5/5
Fela Kuti
5/5
Bruce Springsteen
2/5
Parliament
5/5
The Mothers Of Invention
4/5
The Smashing Pumpkins
1/5
Electric Light Orchestra
3/5
The Lemonheads
2/5
These musicians always thought they were a little more special than they actually are
The Flaming Lips
3/5
Bob Dylan
4/5
Roxy Music
4/5
Devendra Banhart
4/5
Jimi Hendrix
5/5
N.E.R.D
4/5
1/5
I love punk but never got X. The sound of the two voices together makes me hate music.
Fred Neil
4/5
Great sounds and a cultural artifact of a proto-psychedelic album.
Beatles
5/5
Bonnie "Prince" Billy
4/5
It grew in me. Would rate it higher if I weren't on antidepressants.
Dusty Springfield
5/5
Wow! Everyone says Dusty in Memphis is the record to own but damn this set jumped out of my speakers!
The White Stripes
3/5
The hits are great but the sound gets boring after a while.
A Tribe Called Quest
5/5
Masterpiece
The Allman Brothers Band
4/5
Masters of their craft at the peak of their powers, but ultimately I find this kind of music more fun to play than to listen to.
I love this story about Duane I only learned recently:
http://www.voicesofeastanglia.com/2012/08/wilson-pickett-and-duane-allman-birth-of-southern-rock.html
Roxy Music
3/5
I think possibly every woman I have ever dated owned Avalon and that's how I got to know Roxy Music. So it was a bit of a shock the first time I heard this album, which to me sounded more like Pere Ubu than than the Roxy Music I was familiar with.
It's uneven but a lot of fun and I will always appreciate the role they played inspiring the punks.
Fiona Apple
2/5
Not a fan, sorry!
Never heard anything more than the singles in here before today. About halfway through the album she sings in a higher register and I received it like sweet relief from her normal singing voice, which to me sounds flat, both in terms of tone and intonation. She also sings with a "tough guy" attitude on some songs that feels unnatural to me.
I like all the vibes and marimbas throughout the record. The music is otherwise not all that interesting to me and some of her lyrics sound awkward. I guess you can tell I never understood her appeal.
Beatles
5/5
I mean, c'mon. If you can't find the delight and musicianship of early Beatles totally infectious than you are probably having a bad day.
But the idea of rating the Beatles is weird to me, like rating Da Vinci. I don't think this is their best - a little uneven tune selection toward the end - but I have a hard time objectively comparing it to Roxy Music or Fiona Apple.
Lately, I've been getting more into their covers, particularly of Motown tunes like "Please Mister Postman," in which John's vocal is more emotionally tortured than anything Detroit produced.
Yes
2/5
Not my bag, but I respect the players' chops.
Also:
1. Google a recent photo of guitarist Steve Howe and tell me he should have been cast as Elrond in LOTR.
2. I've been working on a joke review involving the word "incel" but couldn't get there. Still, I couldn't leave this review without using that word.
Rush
2/5
Out of the incel frying pan and into the fire!
There are Rush songs I like but none of them are on here. The best thing I can say about this album is, like my favorite dental procedures, it's over before you know it!
Slade
4/5
A delightful surprise! Never actually heard this band before - mainly just know them for Quiet Riot's cover of their "Cum On Feel The Noise" - I had a lot of fun with it.
A few reflections, Larry King style: Makes me want to drink 75 pints of bitters and get punched in the nose...this is what's playing in the background when Ray and Dave Davies are getting into one of their legendary drunken fist fights...they must've inspired AC/DC...the Joplin cover is aces!
Amy Winehouse
2/5
Another one where I appreciate the artist being on the list but not this album. To my ears, neither the material nor the production are worthy of Amy.
Waylon Jennings
3/5
I enjoyed it. Listened to it twice yesterday . I get the feeling like this album would grow in me but I'm not sure it's memorable enough for me to pick it up again. This album helped me finally realize that until now Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard were fused into the same entity in my mind. Now, they are separate (notwithstanding the fact that I had to check which one this album was when I was typing their names just now).
The Temptations
2/5
Disappointed. On paper, this is an amazing album, but while Papa Was a Rolling Stone is an awesome tune and well situated within this lineup, the rest of this doesn't hold up. This was made after Motown moved to LA and to me it's an example of what people mean when say that they lost something in the move.
3/5
One thing I love about this project is that it forces me to give things a fuller listen than I ordinarily would, like this.
I went through a HUGE Hendrix phase when I worked at the record store and Spirit's guitar player is sort of Jimi's preeminent disciple so my boss Pete Liberante and I tried to get into this album a couple of times and never could. Now I get the chance to hear side two and realize I was missing more than I knew.
Do yourself a favor and read all of Randy California's Wikipedia entry. It is very entertaining and after you give a listen to Taurus I want to know if you agree that this was SCOTUS's worst decision (to not take the case) since Bush v Gore - even more egregious than Dobbs, in my view.
Antony and the Johnsons
5/5
I had the most intense experience listening to this album that an album has put me through in a long time. At the beginning I was struggling to find something to latch on to, but by the time it ended I was so into it I immediately played it again, like the kid who survives the roller coaster and after disembarking sprints to get in line to ride again.
However, as amazing as it was, I have a funny feeling I may never listen to this album again.
Jimmy Smith
4/5
Jimmy Smith is one of the all-time jazz greats and this album cover is all-world tier one. How can you not like this album?
But love it? I say this as a person who owns this album and has played it in my home many times, but I notice it often ends up turning into background music for me. If I were making this list I would have selected two other albums of his (The Sermon and Root Down, if you're curious) but in the end I'm just happy he's on the list.
Simply Red
2/5
Better than I expected.
Lis is the only Simply Red fan I have ever met, and I always chalked it up to ginger solidarity, but this is the rare 80s record that manages to transcend the incredibly shitty production aesthetic that prevailed at that time.
I don't like it THAT much, though, and he lost points a few hours ago when I learned Money's Too Tight To Mention is a cover and that the original Valentine Brothers version is far superior.
Nina Simone
2/5
I really wanted to like this but couldn't get into it, despite how much I love David Bowie's version of the title track.
I generally prefer her small band work, especially live, and her original material, of which there seems to be very little on this album. I read later that it's a compilation of previously unreleased material and I wonder if that is why it felt a little meandering to me.
Emerson, Lake & Palmer
2/5
Sometimes this album reminds of what it sounds like inside a music store. Sometimes relatively quiet, sometimes a lot of sounds, in your face drums next to what sometimes sounds like someone testing each of the many settings on the synthesizer. Occasional strains of familiar melodies. When the musicians are playing together, abrupt stops and starts and stylistic changes on a dime.
The only throughline here is that the every musician uses every moment to beseech you to appreciate their chops. In fairness to them, I can hear the desperate psychology behind this music because I have been more generous than most in dedicating my youth to a similar cause.
Another take: the difference between ELP and the Allman Brothers explains the difference between UK and USA.
Thirdly: Where is the ELO-ELP supergroup?
Finally: I'm razzing them, but any band that has an album titled Brain Salad Surgery deserves some respect.
Steely Dan
3/5
Huge Steely Dan fan and I always found it odd that this is their "go to" album for many people, as I find the songwriting to be inconsistent and this is probably my least favorite of their various albums.
Deacon Blues, Black Cow and Peg are great tunes, but some of the others are completely forgettable (I Got The News, Home At Last) and the title track sounds like a long and boring mistake.
The Velvet Underground
5/5
And what will she do with Thursday's rags
When Monday comes around?
She'll turn once more to Sunday's clown
And cry behind the door.
Aimee Mann
5/5
Albums like this make this whole exercise 100% worth it.
"Voices Carry" was always a not so guilty pleasure at the karaoke bar, and I've read a lot of critical praise since about her lengthy solo career, and of course her long term personal relationship with Michael Penn makes them sort of latter-day saints of Laurel Canyon, but none of it got me off the dime to actually check out her work.
Masterful in every way. Immediately from the jump, just the basic sounds of it are interesting and well-considered in a way that betrays deep craftsmanship, care and, frankly, budget. But she knows how to spend that budget in a way few do. Compare the production to the flat monotony of Fiona Apple's album, for example. Or that of most albums on this list, for that matter.
Over the course of its tunes, the same depth of manicured mastery is revealed in the songwriting, both musically and lyrically.
This kind of well-rounded depth of talent is extra rare but as Charles De Gaulle once said, sort of, the cemetery is full of masterful albums made by talented people. And in the immortal words of Van Hagar, only time will tell if this we, this album and me, will stand the test of time.
All I can say today is that any album that can be this genuinely interesting the very first time you hear it deserves the highest praise.
Sex Pistols
5/5
(1) The pinnacle of my rock n roll career was closing our set at the EO Smith High School 1986 Battle of the Bands with "Pretty Vacant." We (my first band, The Jalapeno Tabernacle Choir, featuring Kevin Crockett on guitar) were unofficially disqualified because we were just about the only band to not perform "Crazy Train" that afternoon, which was heretical.
But anyone who was there knows who got the crowd on their feet and dancing and rocked that cafeteria the hardest. By the way, one of the other non-winning bands that day was led by future Bud Collins Trio guitarist and my eventual brother in law although at this time we were not on speaking terms Pat Guiney ("The Funny Hit Parade"). Another band had a rock star of tomorrow you know reverently playing "Panama."
(2) A couple of years ago, my son was getting into heavy metal and I felt compelled to pull him aside. I explained that there are two kinds of people in this world, metal heads and punk rockers, and that our family was a punk rock family. I felt like I was communicating effectively because I could tell that he could tell from the tone of my voice that he should take this conversation very seriously.
So this morning I told him that we got assigned Never Mind The Bollocks. He shook his head and with a judgemental tone cried something about the Pistols being "the first corporate plants" because they were sellouts from the beginning. Ha - I'm kvelling!
Björk
2/5
I was sorry to learn that I like the idea of Bjork more than the reality, at least of this album.
Pink Floyd
5/5
My favorite of the later Pink Floyd albums. The cover is amazing, and to me the tunes feel more personal and emotionally compelling than most of their other work.
Beautifully recorded, understated performances from the band at the top of their game. Also, 500 points to Ravenclaw for David Gilmour's elegantly expressive guitar throughout. Highly recommend listening with headphones if you can!
Nico
2/5
Good example of the influence your mood has on a listen. Heard this record for the first time a few weeks ago and hated it. Today I listened to it again and liked it a lot more. Still, probably unlikely to get a ton of airtime at my house going forward, and I'm not sure this would be on my list of top 1001, though it has some archaeological significance.
Sam Cooke
5/5
Great, great show but after you listen to the patter and other improvisations you start to understand why he might have been shot to death by a woman.
I wish I could find out the backing band here - this ensemble is pretty damn good!
Bought this went it first came out and would listen to it back-to-back with my Otis Redding+Jimi Hendrix at Monterey record. Brings back a lot of great memories listening and fantasizing about what these shows must have been like. 😍
David Bowie
1/5
WTF is this doing here? Provocative choice for this list but it needs another decade of maceration before it can be fairly evaluated.
This is Bowie's last album, made when he was terminally ill, though as I understand it he didn't disclose that to the backing band, which happens to be the one that jazz saxophonist and fellow Berklee alum Donny McCaslin was leading at that time when Bowie saw them play at a club and invited them into the studio.
Every time I listen to this record it sucks me in deeper, but putting stars on this feels weird. My 1 star is for the editors of this list.
Buena Vista Social Club
5/5
If everyone I ever dated owned a CD of Roxy Music's "Avalon" then I would also say the same about this album for everyone I dated since it came out.
Bob Dylan
4/5
Three random notes on what is probably my favorite Dylan album:
1. Fourth Time Around. Is this a musical middle finger to John Lennon's supposedly Dylan-inspired Norwegian Wood? Was Dylan singing to John when he sang "And I, I never took much, I never asked for your crutch
Now don't ask for mine?"
Here's what Lennon had to say about it in 1968: "I was very paranoid about that. I remember he played it to me when he was in London. He said, what do you think? I said, I don't like it. I didn't like it. I was very paranoid. I just didn't like what I felt I was feeling – I thought it was an out and out skit, you know, but it wasn't. It was great. I mean he wasn't playing any tricks on me. I was just going through the bit."
2. Visions of Johanna. Maybe the worst performance of this amazing tune. Shambolic, meandering and boring. I have read they had a hard time recording this tune over multiple sessions and they must've just been so sick of it so they just shipped this shitty version and washed their hands. The band barely knows the chord changes, bass player blatantly screws up multiple times...compare it to this version, which sends a chill up my spine every single time: https://youtu.be/awlrMmr9eNc?si=TtOJe4G_7nkx5m3A
My daughter is a big Swiftie and she agrees with my theory that Taylor was channeling "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" with the full-length "All Too Well" --- can you hear it?
https://youtu.be/sRxrwjOtIag?si=UX-5UzsRlek7595K
The Pretty Things
5/5
This record triggers a Pavlovian response to turn on, tune in and drop out. All-World Tier One psychedelic rock opera.
When I discovered this record, 30 years after its initial release, it made the world feel a little bit bigger in a very exciting way that something this awesome could escape my attention for that long. The Pretty Things are perhaps the best 60s British band that never really made it in America.
Maybe the very first concept album, and it's a bummer of a concept, which is impressive in its own way and may be why it never reached broader acclaim. I will take it over The Who's Tommy seven days a week. So many great tunes on here I don't know where to begin, except at the beginning and playing through to the end. SF Sorrow is Born!
Arcade Fire
3/5
Not as good as I hoped. I bet it could grow on me, as I like the newer stuff you hear on the radio, but not grabbing me by the lapels on first listen.
The Everly Brothers
4/5
Really fun!
If you were to reduce the Beatles sound to a formula, it might be something like:
Crickets rhythm section +
Chuck Berry guitar +
Everly Bros vox
The Offspring
2/5
Not in my personal 1,001.
Jay walked in the door as I was cranking this last night and as our resident historian told me that Offspring was the first "incelcore" band. 🤣🤣🤣 Didn't know that genre existed but I believe him!
Serge Gainsbourg
4/5
Instant classic! First time hearing it but it immediately feels like discovering a key piece to a jigsaw puzzle covering late 80s/Early 90s music, from daisy age rap in the US to trip hop in the UK. I'm retroactively embarrassed to not have already been intimately familiar with it. I also feel really stupid for not knowing about his work with Jane Birkin.
I was fortunate enough to listen to it on headphones and was richly rewarded - strong backing band, beautifully recorded. Great dynamic range, too, that pretty much doesn't exist anymore in this era of highly compressed tracks produced to sound good out of a speakerphone.
I have no idea what they are talking and singing about but I strongly suspect that he would be cancelled if this came out now and I might not even be able to listen to this if I understood it.
Funny how some things unexpectedly stay with you. I immediately recognized 'En Melody' from this minor De La Soul skit from back in the day:
https://youtu.be/FTMOTsL1YIE?si=VFusrpdIM8e-QyKN
Iron Maiden
4/5
Better than I expected. Respect!
Miles Davis
3/5
If you rank musical artists by the number of albums you know/own of theirs and the amount of time you spend listening to them then Miles Davis would be my #1 by a mile.
Not to sound like a jazz prick but Miles easily has 20 or 30 albums I would put ahead of this and I regret that the album title and cover art are so interesting it ends up being an intro to jazz record for a lot of people and unfortunately it doesn't work well for that.
This is still very early in his career - I think possibly these are his first sessions after quitting Charlie Parker's band when he was 22? - and he didn't really become a great band leader until he got his act together and kicked heroin 5-6 years later. He is still finding his style as a soloist and the arrangements feel cumbersome to me.
I also prefer my jazz combos - and most ensembles in any genre, actually - on the smaller side for more intimate interplay among the musicians. But this is a nine piece band, and once you get beyond about five musicians in a band, the improv tends to take a back seat to composition and orchestration.
Afficianados call this record "important," which it took me decades to have the self-confidence to realize is usually code for "I know I am supposed to like this but I don't." Unfortunately, this perpetuates the problem, as another generation gets lured into jazz from this record and leaves bored and disappointed or possibly even feeling inadequate themselves. It's not your fault - the critics are cowards!
Speaking of great Miles Davis album titles, have you seen this hilarious memo to record company execs from Miles's longtime producer, Teo Macero - first ballot Hall of Fame usage of "Please advise":
https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/this-is-my-favorite-memo-ever
Willie Colón & Rubén Blades
3/5
Pleasant but unremarkable 70s salsa, to my ears at least.
5/5
Just like how there are some albums that shouldn't be on anyone's list, Ziggy should be on everyone's list.
I knew I married the right person when once we got into a huge fight over who was the bigger Bowie fan (to be precise, this was only one of the times we've had this argument - even just telling her I was telling you this story prompted another debate) and she made her case with a perfect off the cuff acapella rendition of Moonage Daydream.
Thelonious Monk
5/5
Typical Monk: killer tunes superbly performed. I don't want to write any more because it would be 3000 words, minimum.
Steely Dan
5/5
One of my favorite Steely Dan albums.
Razor Boy>Boston Rag>Your Gold Teeth>Show Biz Kids is a helluva run of great memories tunes you'll never hear on the radio sandwiched between a couple of classic rock radio mainstays you may be tired of. Then you get Pearl of the Quarter and King of the World, the latter of which makes me want to wager that Dan has more songs about doomerism than possibly any other band to sell a million records.
About their lyrics. Today I noticed that all of the locations mentioned in the Boston Rag are in NYC, not Boston. Par for the course with these tricksters.
Also, I love it when lyricists give priority to the sound of their words over a direct literal meaning. The Rolling Stones and REM are two bands that are good at this. On Show Biz Kids, I think the backup singers are repeating something about "life's wages" but it also sounds like "Las Vegas" and in putting both ideas into your head at the same time, it adds a whole new dimension to the lead singer's words about a decadent LA culture, while better fusing the words and the music together.
This album was made when they still had a regular band and I think it benefits from the continuity. Denny Dias is a criminally underrated guitar player whose career never seemed to recover from Becker and Fagen's decision to stop touring and use more studio musicians. He gets more room on here than other albums and really makes the most of it. Worth listening to the entire record one time through just focusing on the guitars (Skunk Baxter is the other guitar player, and the two make a great team). It's stunning what's going on over there.
Public Enemy
4/5
I tuned out PE after their second album and realize now I was missing out. Doesn't cover much new ground musically but Chuck D and Flavor are on point and their messages are still relevant today, unfortunately.
The Isley Brothers
3/5
I love the Isley Bros - they are great players and I bet they put on a helluva show back in the day - but the songwriting is a bit inconsistent on here.
Le Tigre
3/5
I like Le Tigre but I'm reminded that it hasn't occurred to me to put a Le Tigre album on in nearly 20 years. I guess that's a problem with being so topical?
Donald Fagen
5/5
Solid late period Steely Dan minus Becker. Some people get turned off by the slick production of Donald Fagen's work, both solo and Steely Dan, and I did at first. But if abandon your preconceptions you will be richly rewarded with mostly excellent songs on this album that feel more personal than Fagen's work w Walter Becker as Steely Dan. Almost sounds like an autobiographical fantasy of a kid growing up in 50s NJ.
The production is immaculate - the instruments sound lush richly detailed.
I have probably heard this record hundreds of times and I still find it captivating.
Paul Simon
4/5
I laugh every time I see this album cover because it's so funny to imagine a contemporary top 40 singer appearing like this. Actually, maybe under certain circumstances a hip hopper could have a parka like this.
Wonderful songwriter, guitar player and singer kicking off a staggering run. Some accuse him of cultural appropriation, for example with the reggae of "Mother and Child Reunion" on here. I find the entire concept silly.
Electric Light Orchestra
2/5
I like that Mister Blue Sky song a lot, but generally ELO sounds to me like they were inspired by the wrong parts of the Beatles and Beach Boys. Also, it occurred to me as I was wading through this that there is something Meat Loaf-ish about this (and that is not a good thing).
Django Django
4/5
Delighted to be surprised with something I had never even heard of until now. Listened to it without any context and enjoyed it. In fact, as soon as it ended, I played it again - a rarity around here
Reminds me a little bit of 1990s-2000s psych like Olivia Tremor Control - I think they use the same sound effect during one of the breaks between tunes, which I like to imagine was a conscious tribute.
Air
4/5
Most 90s electronica sounds dated to me but this still sounds fresh. Never heard of this band before but thoroughly enjoyed the laid back vibes.
Justin Timberlake
1/5
Soundtrack to a wardrobe malfunction? I like a lot of the JT you hear in the radio and his SNL and Tonight show skits are great, so had high hopes.
Unfortunately, they were not met. The strangest thing happened to me with this album. Twice I put it on, was digging the opening sounds of Señorita, and then later on noticed that I had completely ignored the album like as if it wasn't on. It completely deflects my attention every time I try to to listen.
I wanted to like this more but when I could force myself to pay attention it was pretty terrible. Whoever wrote the lyrics to the last song, Never Again, should heed its title.
The Youngbloods
2/5
I wish this website would show the curator's rationale for including a given selection.
I found this album unremarkable. Maybe it's historically important - just a guess, because otherwise I don't get its appearance here.
Not a bad record by any means, but not remotely as interesting as other country/folk-psych bands like The Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service or even The Byrds.
Napalm Death
3/5
Great for what it is but in hindsight doesn't sound nearly as scary and intense as it did 30 years ago. Probably more historically important than great on its own.
Alanis Morissette
2/5
God only knows how many copies of this I sold when I was working at the record store, and I scorned every buyer, as is the record store clerk's wont, if not their duty.
I hated the sound of it then and it hasn't grown on me. I do appreciate Alanis's humor elsewhere. For example:
https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/weird-al-yankovic-tells-alanis-morissette-stay-in-lane-after-singer-tweets-pun-iconic-90s-hit
Christina Aguilera
2/5
It's telling that she has to tell us who inspired this album, rather than let our ears tell us.
Also, an easy way to make this record twice as good would be to cut half the songs. I wonder how many people who bought this in CD actually played the second disc more than once.
Bonnie Raitt
3/5
Her success is well deserved but I am not sufficiently evolved as a human to disassociate this with the Boomer nostalgia soundtrack that I resent for degrading popular music in the 1980s.
Radiohead
4/5
There must be at least 10 or 20 great debut albums for each great SECOND album. For me, The Bends transformed Radiohead from near-novelty one hit wonders ("Creep") into A Band To Be Taken Very Seriously.
This album still sounds powerful but at the same time there are a couple of odd songwriting choices that don't work as well for me, and a couple of borrowed cliches, too. So while this album showed huge growth, their best was yet to come. Come to think of it, it's staggering to follow the growth of this band's artistry across their first three albums (or 5-6 albums if you're so inclined).
I've seen them play a couple of times and the first time they were in their prime and I remember thinking "if I was a teenager I would be weeping with awe right now and possibly for the next few days." Pre-girlfriend teenager, if I'm honest. Are they an incel band? If so, they are one of the very best.
Def Leppard
2/5
Very popular album when it came out but not interesting to me in any way other than as a cultural artifact. I thought this list was more interesting than a popularity contest?
Primal Scream
2/5
Kinda boring? They had a big album about 5-7 years before this...I assume that's on this list somewhere. Otherwise, I don't get it.
Joni Mitchell
3/5
I ♥️ Joni. One of my favorite singer-songwriters of an era chock full of 'em, but never heard this one before. She may be the ultimate "musician's musician" - her music can be polarizing, and from what I can tell the fans tend to be musicians. I'm not allowed to listen to her music when my wife is home.
Not being familiar with it, I read a little about this album after listening to it fresh. What a strange time 1975 was that a record like this would reach the Top 40!
Great album title and cover art. I didn't recognize a single song on here except maybe the first one. The songwriting gets uneven after the first few. However, the deep, rich tones throughout are aural catnip to my ears - begging to be heard loud on a 1970s tube stereo with gigantic speakers that make you feel like you're sitting on the bass player's amp. The hissing (and crackling) of Summer Lawns on vinyl FTW!
T. Rex
3/5
I feel like the idea of T Rex is better than the reality.
Travis
3/5
I liked it alright but I don't see myself remembering this a month from now. Woulda missed the last tune if I wasn't lazy.
Baaba Maal
2/5
The opening notes had me thinking Lion King, but (thankfully) it turned into something else. Still, not my bag. It's like it borrows the wrong parts of American pop music and injects it with the wrong parts of African jams.
Black Sabbath
5/5
This record wastes no time. The opening notes and the entire first song is based on the nastiest musical interval, the tritone, which has been (appropriately) known as the "Devil's interval" since the Middle Ages because it sounds so ungodly. Perfect.
The power of this music cannot be denied. Their goal may have been somewhat juvenile - basically a treatise on raising hell in all its forms - but they nail it so completely you have to respect the accomplishment.
No work will be getting done by me for the next half hour and it's taking everything I have to not put on a jean jacket and skip school to have a bad trip down by the river.
See you in hell!🤘
Kanye West
2/5
Exceptional rhymes and great beats but I can't listen to this without thinking about how much I hate this guy.
Elvis Costello
2/5
Elvis has easily a dozen albums that are more interesting than this one. I bought it when it came out and probably haven't played it in over twenty years.
The CD booklet did not contain any lyrics but one random line. My friends and I debated why only this one line and decided it was because he and his handlers were afraid his "anger" sounded like the n-word, a word Elvis has a disappointing history of using.
Van Halen
5/5
Where to begin? When the video for Jump made it's debut it was a shock to the system. Eddie playing keyboard?!? But where egregious keys had taken down other rock bands of the era, Eddie was so talented and revered that he emerged victorious.
Hot For Teacher ("I don't feel tardy") - smokin'est guitar and drums you'll ever hear
Panama - every high school metal band formed between 1984-1990 played this song
I'll Wait - the closest we'll ever get to hearing an introspective Diamond Dave and a soulful Eddie.
These are songs I'll pull over for.
As albums go, it's on the shorter side and the songwriting peters out toward the end, but the first 20-25 minutes are peak 80s. Not my favorite Van Halen album, but the one that should be in the Smithsonian for sure.
Kings of Leon
4/5
Very pleasant surprise. Love the swagger!
I had avoided these guys for years under the mistaken belief they were a southern rock jam band. Pretty psyched to be wrong, and a good lesson about what you might miss with mental shortcuts.
Don McLean
1/5
https://youtu.be/8V_hCqO6UQs?si=ZDhCgwdJU3Nb2S_c
Isaac Hayes
4/5
The beat on the opening track - an epic, almost cinematic reinvention of the Bacharach/David classic "Walk On By" - has been sampled so much it is nearly singlehandedly responsible for the entire Trip Hop genre.
Four stars just for that tune. The songwriting on the rest of the album isn't as interesting to me, which is surprising considering how many classics Isaac Hayes wrote.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
3/5
Wasn't that familiar w Nick Cave before so excited to check this out. Strong start, kinda theatrical sounding. Is this a rock opera?
Got less interesting over time but still enjoyable enough. However, immediately after it ended I was compelled to put on some Tom Waits, sort of to set the record straight or else the universe would be out of balance.
Fishbone
3/5
Fun artifact of the 80s.
One of the worst shows I ever saw.
5/5
Any album the begins with a tune as great as "Victoria" deserves five stars almost no matter what comes after. In this case, a damn fine Kinks album all the way to the end, and a great redemption of the frequently cringe-y rock opera format.
The White Stripes
4/5
A monster of an album. Whatever happened to Meg White?
Jimi Hendrix
5/5
When my big sister brought this record home, the fish eye photo scared the hell outta me. I was pretty sure that if I played this record when I was home alone, bad things would happen. I was terrified to become experienced.
It's not my favorite Hendrix - it's more of a singles collection plus extras than the albums he made when he had more experience, control and budget and could explore his vision in greater depth.
But this record does capture a 25 year old bursting with a creative explosion off a virtuosity and intimacy with his guitar unknown before or since. Charlie Parker and Jaco Pastorius are the only other musicians I am familiar with who may be in this category. He once described his tune "Manic Depression" as being about a guy who would rather make love to his guitar than to his nominal lover. He didn't describe it as autobiographical but I believe it was.
Speaking of lyrics, I noticed listening today how this record has some of my favorite rock lyrics - Wind Cries Mary ("the traffic lights turn blue tomorrow" absolutely shredded my tiny mind the first time I heard it), I Don't Live Today, and from the largely instrumental Third Stone From The Sun, the final spoken verse:
Although your world wonders me
With your majestic and superior cackling hen
Your people I do not understand
So to you I shall put an end
And you'll never hear surf music again.
Pet Shop Boys
3/5
Never heard this record before or any of its tunes but always had a soft spot for these fellas. Good songwriting and and I love this singer's voice - these mostly overcome late 80s / early 90s pop production style that I really hate, particularly the drum sounds.
Particularly liked the first tune. Used to think of them as a singles band, but this has me wanting to check out the albums with tunes I know, like West End Girls and Domino Dancing.
Songhoy Blues
3/5
WTF is it about guitar players from Mali named Touré? Ok, I couldn't resist and looked it up about four tracks in. I didn't even realize that was a thing until just now.
A lot of blues influence here. I wonder how the cultural appropriation police would feel about this?
I like the playing and the sounds but the tunes aren't that interesting to me.
Haircut 100
2/5
Let's clear the air: anyone old enough to visit a record store in the early-mid 1980s has made fun of this band. Myself included. I even had a band with a song that mocked them.
However, it turns out these guys can play their asses off. We are only discovering this now because it takes forty years to reverse an opinion.
Unfortunately, the songwriting isn't there. I kept thinking that the world missed an opportunity for a great band if only they could have been the backing band for a creative visionary who needed help. I can't give you any examples because the visionaries I am referring to never made it. However, many can be found at the end of the bar or other similar locale.
Echo And The Bunnymen
3/5
I like Echo And The Bunnymen but never heard this one. Sounds more raw and rockin' than the albums I was familiar with. Didn't really stand out on first listen, though.
Belle & Sebastian
3/5
Never heard this before. Only some of their later songs. This was pleasant enough but not as interesting, unfortunately. The cover kinda puts me off, too.
Radiohead
5/5
I remember exactly where I was when I first heard "Karma Police" and if I had sixty seconds to compile top 10 songs of the 90s, it might be #1.
The whole album shakes me to the core in a way that few do. It made me feel less alone in my head, which is about the highest praise I can give something, now that I think about it.
Basement Jaxx
2/5
Someone likes jams like this but not me. My favorite part was that it used some unexpected samples, like The Specials.
George Michael
3/5
Never noticed the symbols at the bottom before. The cross, a bass clef, British Pounds, star of David, and a heart with an arrow through it. I guess these are the things George has faith in?
I ended up listening to this on headphones and it sounded great. Somehow avoided the horrible production style of the 80s. Was seriously impressed to learn George produced this himself.
Super talented musician. The title track gives The Cure's "Close To You" a serious run for the money in the Best Bo Diddley Beat of the 80s category.
He's a great singer but most of the rest of the songs are not very interesting to me. Some make me cringe a little. I picked up my Mom in my car with this playing and I felt compelled to turn down "I Want Your Sex." In all fairness, there is a jazz ballad at the end that floored me.
Neil Young
5/5
Wow. Pleased to see this deep cut from Neil on the list. This almost makes up for Fiona Apple .
A+ album cover. Raw performances of some seriously dark and unsparingly depressing songs. The sound of a hippy waking up and realizing they failed to stop a war or any violence, really, their friends od'd, and the world went to shit. For some reason, these kinds of songs make me feel good. I guess misery really does love company.
The second guitar solo on the title track literally took my breath away. Neil is a unique guitar stylist: quasi-competent, cliche-free, crushingly honest, if I can say that, and this album has some of my favorite playing of his.
a-ha
2/5
I was expecting my review to be along the lines of "better than I expected" but I was wrong. I gave a second star as a gesture if respect for the Take On Me video. Otherwise, I was *shocked* to learn later they made multiple albums.
The Verve
4/5
Bittersweet Symphony is an instant classic I will crank 100% of the time it comes on the radio and I have no idea what they are singing about. 100 point demerit to Rolling Stones for being jerks about copyright.
Never heard rest of album before and it was good, but not sure it's interesting enough for me to remember to seek it out again. We'll see!
Van Morrison
4/5
It's a classic, filled with quality tunes and sounds great, but something about Van always rubs me a little bit the wrong way.
Little Richard
4/5
Very fun classics. The variety sound like a compilation of singles recorded over 1-2 years. Some tunes sound like possibly from when he was still developing aspects of his vocal style.
John Martyn
1/5
Defies the star rating system but I give it one for titling a song Big Muff, which may mean many things but happens to be the name of an obscure guitar effects pedal worshipped by guitar geeks. I like to think the title came to John from the guitar player he paid to play on this with a pile of cocaine so massive that the studio lobby coffee table resembled a diorama of Mount Fuji.
They say you have to listen to these albums, but not necessarily why.
Sounds like it was made by a wealthy bon vivant raised on an obscure Mediterranean island where he learned English from pop music radio. Listening to this I wonder if the word vapid can take a modifier, like as in \"incredibly vapid.\" Because I was slightly incredulous that I could spend this much time inside the head of another human and yet find nothing there. Was this made by AI, perhaps with a prompt of \"soundtrack for when it's 8 am and you've finished all the coke an hour ago and everyone left and you can't decide if you should make a sandwich or use the toilet?\" Actually, we know it's not because AI would have come up with better lyrics.
PJ Harvey
4/5
As opposed to many albums on this list, it only takes a few seconds to realize that this band is actually trying to express something. If I heard this when it came out I would have been a fan and probably would have gotten into their second album more than I did. I will definitely listen to this some more but not sure it suits my current lifestyle.
Bob Marley & The Wailers
5/5
A lot to say about this classic, but I will focus on the rhythm section: Aston "Family Man" Barrett and his brother Carlton on drums. Their minimalist grooves are unreal. I would be mesmerized by this record even if Bob Marley and Peter Tosh had nothing to do with it. Suggest focusing on the bass and drums next time this music comes on. It might sound simple, but actually leaving a lot of space in the music like they do is incredibly hard and requires an amazing sense of time.
My only complaint is that the Spotify uses the censored version of the album cover. Kinda off brand for rebel music like this!
Stevie Wonder
5/5
So much to love about this album! An explosion of creativity that rewards headphones. Stevie's convo with Jeff Beck's guitar on Lookin For A Brand New Love is really something. Stevie playing all of the instruments on Superstition is nuts.
To be clear on the rating. It's 8 stars for the music, minus 1 star for occasionally goofy lyrics and minus 2 stars for an album cover photo of a blind man playing in the dirt that could be considered a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
B.B. King
3/5
Never really checked him out before and I was delighted to hear a small but real influence he must have had on Hendrix 's guitar playing.
I generally prefer my blues raw and raucous but this is solid for what it is.
Pet Shop Boys
2/5
I like this band but this one couldn't hold my attention. Not in my top 1001
David Bowie
5/5
Harrowing. A bare knuckle downdraft into some seriously dark nooks. Not for tourists.
I listened to this record a lot during what I hope will be the worst part of my life and it wasn't comforting, but it was the only thing that made sense.
Both the cover art and the side two leadoff tune "V-2 Schneider" are tributes to Kraftwerk.
Fatboy Slim
3/5
The singles from this album and particularly The Rockafeller Skank and Praise You were absolutely huge in the very late nineties in a way that was really fun. The video for Praise You has to be one of the all-time greats.
Soft Machine
4/5
Never listened to these guys before but I really enjoyed it. Probably depends on my mood - not the kind of thing I listen to every day but when I wanna get weird in a hippy jazz sort of way, I am glad to now know these folks can deliver.
Fleetwood Mac
3/5
I like the sounds on this - super clean, with zero reverb on everything but vocals. Can only imagine how much cocaine it took to produce.
To me, the songwriting peters out about 1/3 of the way through. Also, it is very, very hard for me to pretend to listen to this fresh, as if the singles off this haven't been played to death already, but that's to the artists' credit, I suppose.
Hole
1/5
It was a chore to make it all the way through this, like being trapped in a hospital elevator with a malignant narcissist on her way to get her deviated septum fixed.
Seriously, please blow your nose. She sounds congested. I also wish she had taken some singing lessons - some people can get away with singing out of tune, but she is not one of them.
I also wish she sang with some vulnerability - I feel like she is trying to prove how cool she is, but that's not interesting for very long. And does every single lyric begin with "I" ?
I know they were a big band at one point but I still don't see the appeal. I worked at a record store when this record came out and every time someone brought it to the counter I wanted to surreptitiously swap it out for Bikini Kill.
Live through this? I'm dyin' ovah heah!
Brian Eno
2/5
Interesting to hear these sounds that I associate with other artists. Helps me understand his contributions to their records more specifically.
Sky Saw could be on Side Two of David Bowie's Low or Heroes.
Somber Reptiles could be on Side Two of Talking Heads Remain In Light.
So it's neat in that respect but ultimately this is not very interesting to me. Maybe he's better at improving other people's music than making his own?
4/5
What can I say - Loretta Lynn! Truly legendary. As a ten year old, watching Sissy Spacek in Coal Miner's Daughter when in the theater was a life-altering experience.
I enjoyed it, although I'm not a huge fan of the Owen Bradley sound, which is a weird thing for a guy with Nashville bona fides to say, and I make no apologies for that, and I think her songwriting and selection got better later on.
3/5
I love Cisco Kid and War's overall sound and vibe but most of the songs here are pretty forgettable. Like, I'm pretty sure I own a copy of this on vinyl but don't care enough to confirm.
Lloyd Cole And The Commotions
4/5
Never heard this before but it immediately registers as the absolute epitome of what we in the 1980s US knew as College Rock, which later came to be known as Alternative Rock, subsequently shortened to Alt-Rock and then abandoned for Indie Rock after the rise of the Alt-Right fascist political movement.
Anyway, I enjoyed this very much, like laying the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle. I had ALL of the surrounding pieces: Robyn Hitchcock, REM, Talk Talk, The Smiths, XTC, Graham Parker And The Rumour...Very satisfying in that respect.
Robert Wyatt
2/5
Had no idea people were still making these kinds o lf records in the 1990s. You can't say you've ever heard something exactly like this before. On the other hand, I can't say I really want to hear anything like this. I loved the playful spirit in which this record was obviously made, but ultimately the music doesn't move me and eventually got boring.
Fela Kuti
4/5
Zombie is a great, great tune. All-time classic. The rest of the record is very good but not as compelling. Recommend looking for video of a live performance of this era - tunes like Zombie make more sense when you can see what's going on.
Robbie Williams
2/5
This does not sound like music made by someone who has something to say. It's fine and well made but it's not emotionally compelling to me. I almost feel like I am missing something but it is a bit formulaic to me. I might like it if a tune randomly came in top 40 radio, or maybe not.
Boston
3/5
It's hard for me to get in the proper mood to listen to this as it was intended. For example, I haven't seen a Camero in ages, and the drug companies stopped making quaaludes even before that.
I understand the mastermind behind Boston is an MIT grad, and it was only after many years of studying quantum mechanics that I could appreciate this album properly and understood it's rating: it is not a 5 and it is not a 1, it is both a 5 and a 1.
Laibach
3/5
Am I laughing with them or at them? I think the former.
Dolly Parton
4/5
I love discovering an album of a legendary artist in her prime with 0 tunes I recognize. Fine album, and recorded at a time when country tried to sound modern by turning up the bass, which I always enjoy!
Brian Eno
4/5
If you love Talking Heads then this is a lot of fun. Otherwise, it might get boring.
Either way, Buster Jones' double tracked bass on "Regiment" is funky as hell and worth listening to with headphones on. That's one of those tunes I have to play twice before I can proceed.
Rahul Dev Burman
3/5
Strange choice. Good soundtrack but not sure what makes it so special?
Jimi Hendrix
5/5
One of my favorites. If 6 Were 9, Castles Made of Sand, Bold As Love, Spanish Castle Magic, Little Wing...are you kidding me with this songwriting?!?!?
The Experience's second album, but the first where Jimi was given a budget and allowed to play around a little. I think this might have been one of the first "stereo first" rock albums. Beatles and Beach Boys were all mono first and then mixed to stereo later, often by others. Anyway, Jimi finally has the budget where he gets to overdub himself on this record so among other things you don't lose his rhythm guitar when he goes to olay lead guitar, and it sounds amazing. Rewards headphones.
Grizzly Bear
3/5
Not bad but didn't grab me. Made me feel like this daily list has limitations, because some records you need to sit with for awhile before they deliver their payload.
Also, I thought this was going to be related to Animal Collective but I guess not?
Violent Femmes
4/5
A classic that I never really got into, but has some strong material and the band had a unique sound.
Willie Nelson
5/5
A gem of an album. Exquisite craftsmanship that reveals a depth of artistry the world didn't know Willie Nelson had (or Booker T Jones, for that matter). If this wasn't the album that enabled Willie to get stoned at the White House, it should have been.
Elton John
2/5
Uneven songwriting. Tiny Dancer and the title track were the only tunes I liked.
3/5
My first impression is if Queen grew up listening to Radiohead.
Teenage Fanclub
4/5
This album landed on American shores as a very welcome antidote to the "Negative Creep" grunge vibe that was dominating American rock n roll at the time. I wore it out then, as well as their previous album "A Catholic Education"
Unfortunately it was made at a time and scene where making the record sound shitty helps prove it's artistic authenticity. I'm glad we've moved in from that!
Muddy Waters
5/5
Instant classic. Can't believe I never heard this before today. The band starts out a little tentative and quiet but they get their mojo working soon enough and you can practically hear the Newport crowd's minds melt.
Frank Sinatra
3/5
Iconic for what it is but not really of interest to me. I prefer smaller groups of musicians with more room to express themselves than this kind of minutely arranged, large ensemble gloss. I'd rather listen to Frank's detours w jazz musicians such as his stuff w Count Basie Big Band than his mainstream pop music like this.
Deerhunter
4/5
Great example of how the mood you're bringing to the album totally determines how you hear it. I put this on earlier today while I was working and got interrupted by a phone call and didn't even think to come back to it, that's how little of an impression it made in me then. But put it on again later, in the eve after walking my dog, and it sounds awesome!
Soft spot for contemporary psych bands, and these guys have a unique sound, using more recent tones than classic psychedelic rawk dictates, like REM/Smiths chiming guitar riffs and cheesy keyboard but not in a retro or ironic way. Just part of their vocabulary. The sublime stemwinder of a jam at the end of "Desire Lines" sums it all up and I could rock it all day every day and twice on Sundays. Bravo!
Simon & Garfunkel
3/5
For the first time in my life, I put on a Bangles album today. I needed to hear their cover of Hazy Shade of Winter because it is so much better than the version on Bookends (those tiny trumpets!).
This album cover is a classic I would love to parody sometime. The material here is a bit uneven and gets pretty random after a bit and the production feels haphazard and dated in many respects. The highs are quite high (America) and the lows are low (whatever the name of the second tune is).
Michael Jackson
2/5
Not my style, and I'm over MJ.
The Pogues
5/5
Never heard it before but I always knew I would love it and I was right. Stupid I never checked it out before. Delighted by the very deep and direct musical connections it makes with American country music. A great punk rock record in the truest and best sense of the term.
Pixies
3/5
I like it but I like Doolittle better. I think that makes me a poseur?
MGMT
4/5
Good start, amazing hits in the middle w "Electric Feel" and "Kids" back-to-back, and then a little boring toward the end but still a strong debut from the best band from Connecticut ever, which is saying something coming from someone who has put in more effort than most trying to create the best band from Connecticut ever.
Recipe to cure a lonely night:
1. Listen to "Kids" 3 times in a row.
2. Listen to "Broken" by Lovely The Band 3 times in a row.
3. Go back and listen to "Kids" again, noting how Lovely The Band so thoroughly borrowed "Kids" main keyboard riff as the backbone of their (excellent hit) song.
4. Play "Broken" one more time, but as loud as you can and scream along with the lyrics.
The Divine Comedy
2/5
Not my bag. Kinda sounds like a soundtrack to a musical I've never seen.
Michael Kiwanuka
4/5
Really enjoy the old school sounds deployed on modern stylings. Also, knew "Hero" from the radio but never understood who did it until now, so that's nice.
Khaled
2/5
Not very interesting to me, sorry!
Aretha Franklin
4/5
Wow. Hadn't heard this one before. Rock solid, classic Atlantic session packed with hits!
David Bowie
4/5
Solid Bowie. Not my favorite but got a few classics and it catapulted Luther Vandross's career, so that's nice. Also, the groove on "Fame" is the only groove I have ever heard James Brown shamelessly rip off, so respect!
The 13th Floor Elevators
5/5
Desert island selection.
The Police
4/5
Love it! Outlandos D'Amour is the appetizer and this is the entree! What's always been most interesting to me about this album is that the instrumentation and production is very similar to Outlandos, but the tunes and tones are fairly different. To me, it feels like the band hadn't been around very long when Outlandos was made, and Regatta shows a band that has been playing together quite a bit.
The Cardigans
3/5
Better than I expected based on their 90s hit.
Pulp
4/5
Always loved Common People when it came on, surprised in hindsight I never checked these guys out more closely...90s Britpop really was a thing!
Adele
3/5
Absolutely love her voice with the tunes are not very interesting to me beyond the hits
Bob Dylan
4/5
Document of a musician in transition. Starts as strong as a record can, meanders for a bit, and then ends as strong as a record can.
David Bowie
4/5
It was only a few years ago that I learned about the "a lad insane" wordplay.
Sounds a little like a Ziggy Stardust fan club release. A big step down from that record in terms of songwriting ambition, but that's a bit like mocking a mountain for not being as high as Everest. Mt Whitney is a better analogy. Highest peak in the lower 48 but not even close globally.
So, not a top tier Bowie album in my view, but still very satisfying for those of us who felt Ziggy left too soon but absolutely wore out that album.
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
5/5
Love this album! Great intro to Doc Watson, Carter family, Merle Travis, Earl Scruggs and other old school country luminaries.
The Dandy Warhols
3/5
I like em ok but surprised to see this on the top 1000 list.
Manic Street Preachers
3/5
Better than I expected but didn't do it for me.
Siouxsie And The Banshees
4/5
One of the things I always appreciated about this band is that they had their own sound and unusual vibe during a time when most bands were jumping on the punk bandwagon. Their cover of Helter Skelter is one of the better Beatle covers you'll hear.
Red Hot Chili Peppers
5/5
Love/hate relationship with this band and particularly this album since the day it came out. I remember exactly where I was, day drinking at the record store where one of my best friends and guitar player in my band worked, and I recall being blown away by the huge step forward the record immediately represented with its bigger and more mature sounds and (sometimes, marginally) more mature songs.
The first and only full realization of their artistic "vision" and by far Rick Rubin's best work as a producer - more than anything he did up until this point, this is the album that cemented his reputation. He found their core essence and celebrated it in a way that only a great producer can, and this is why despite his ridiculous, Papa Smurf meets Freedom Rock look, he was eventually able to do the same thing for Johnny Cash and revitalize his career, hang with Paul McCartney, publish a mediocre book on Buddhism and art. This lineup of the band was also their best, w guitar player John Frusciante at the height of his powers and Flea's playing serving the songs more so than on previous records.
While the lyrics are unfortunately mostly consistent with the juvenile themes of their previous records - if I were filming a collegiate date rape scene it would absolutely have this album playing in the background - Keidis also gets emotionally vulnerable once or twice, which was shocking in its own way at the time.
I own some of their records but rarely if ever play them. I saw them headline a masterful performance touring for this album but only because the tickets were free. It's hard for me to put into words the great passions providing counterweights on either side of my delicately balanced ambivalence about this band and album. As much as I admire them, to me their music (though, importantly, not necessary the musicians) carries the unshakeable whiff of toxic masculinity, preceding the term itself.
Curtis Mayfield
5/5
Probably Mayfield's best album, which is odd to say about a soundtrack but there you go.
Nas
4/5
Fantastic. Great rapper with some good collaborators here. Thirty years later it still sounds good but more n bombs than I like was always my problem with Nas and hip hop of this era generally.
Hearing this again reminds how I never made the t-shirt for our hood:
illimantic
Dinosaur Jr.
4/5
Western MA's finest! Freak Scene is possibly my favorite indie rock tune of the late 80's and the rest of the record is pretty good, too. I always appreciated how they were one of the first bands of hardcore kids to take a step in a new direction. They were definitely not a hardcore band but they always had that credibility.
Led Zeppelin
5/5
Maybe you won't agree if someone says this is their best album - that's you're right - but you definitely won't disagree. Whatever you like better than this, you concur it's on par.
Feels weird for it to share a list with some of the other stuff on here...That this record was made basically live in the studio in between dates on their first US tour is absolutely insane. That approach doesn't tend to work all that well but they're the hard exception here. My theory is they were enjoying a massive creative explosion as a band so that every second the tape could be rolling the odds were good something amazing would happen.
They sing about some of the stupidest shit - that's how hard they rock, that they can make you cosign their ridiculous if unique lyrical mix of classic blues grifts, jr high double entendres, and even more Lord Of The Rings than you expected, often at the same time.
In the 80s I was a teenager babysitting for neighbors who had this on 8-track, which is the weirdest format ever and an awesome thing to discover when you're fifteen. 8 track sounded great, deep melting butter bass tones, but it has four sides instead of vinyl's two and these songs are so long it would randomly break in the middle of Heartbreaker, for example, and flip to Ramble On.
Around the same time I picked up the electric bass and some of the first songs I learned to play with my buddies are on this record (Whole Lotta Love, Heartbreaker, Living Loving Maid), and there are other songs on here I still can't play right this many years later (Lemon Song, Ramble On).🤘🤘🤘
Neil Young
5/5
I wrote an imaginary doctoral thesis on this album that hinges on a contrarian take regarding this moment in Neil's psychological and creative development, and in particular the Jungian archetypes inhabited by the album's various instruments, and specifically the recurring pedal steel guitar (voice of man) and orchestral strings (voice of god).
The Go-Go's
4/5
Not hard to pick out the singles but they are great!
Hookworms
4/5
Enjoyed it, but kinda sounded like something I might make with a long weekend and a new bong.
Bill Evans Trio
5/5
Desert island pick. Unless you're a jazz head, you have probably never heard this record before. I defy you to give it a fair listen and not be moved. Sublime.
Bill Evans had this incredibly intimate intensity as a player and the interplay among these three musicians is nearly pornographic, they are so far inside of each other. The audience sounds like the Vanguard is only half full, which in one respect doesn't match the quality of this music but then again with this particular music it does seem more appropriate than if we were hearing it echoing off Carnegie Hall's walls.
I think this was this band's final performance, too, as the (25 year old virtuoso) bass player Scott LaFaro tragically died in a car crash a week or two later. What might have been!
Finally, word to the wise: any jazz record titled "Live at the Village Vanguard" (and there are many) is pretty much guaranteed to be excellent and should be consumed without delay. Actually, same goes for "Live at the Lighthouse," too.
Stan Getz
5/5
A classic album I love, but admittedly easier to appreciate its nuances while enjoying a cocktail in a mid century modern sunken living room. Corcovado is a personal favorite.
Simple Minds
2/5
Clueless as to why this album is on this list.
Sleater-Kinney
3/5
Great sounds and solid rocker when you're in the mood, but the songs weren't that interesting to me.
Deep Purple
3/5
It was a chore to get through this but you gotta love the story behind Smoke On The Water, and respect that it's the first riff almost every rocker figures out how to play.
Red Snapper
3/5
Some nice sounds and beats but I didn't really connect with this. I bet it's the sort of thing where you had to be there.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
4/5
Don't know anything about this band before today but I like that song Maps, which I have heard on the radio over the years but never knew who did it or what it was called. On it, the singer reminds me of Chrissy Hynde a little. Otherwise, the band sounds like a fun live show but otherwise I will be surprised if this album really sticks with me.
Beatles
5/5
Not bad!
Peter Gabriel
2/5
Not my bag at all but Solsbury Hill is a classic.
Happy Mondays
3/5
I love the Happy Mondays but prior to their album Pills n Thrills n Bellyaches their best material was not on albums because it was other people's remixes of their singles. This is a very interesting album to a potential academic studying the "Manchester" scene but I don't think it shows the Mondays at their studio best. It does make me wish I was tripping balls at the Hacienda, though.
Crosby, Stills & Nash
4/5
Many classic rock radio staples on here but I never heard the entire record until now. Not a fan - these tunes were part of what to me as an 80s teen felt like boomer nostalgia crowding out and overwhelming our youth culture - but respect the work and its influence.
My favorite song was Pre-road Downs, largely because of the eminently humorous contrast of the lyrics with Stills' solo hit less than a year later, Love the one you're with. Both rely on gloves to make their points, too:
- Felt forsaken, you'll awaken
To the joys of livin' hand in glove
And then I will lend you my will
And your days will be filled with love
Pre-road Downs was then convincing their "old ladies" to remain celibate while the band is out in the road for a year, and Love the one you're with is the tale from the road - and possibly very same tour - where the band is like fuck it, I can't wait that long:
-Well there's a rose in the fisted glove
And the eagle flies with the dove
And if you can't be with the one you love honey
Love the one you're with
But back to CSN, and their very practical advice, which proved valuable to so many 70s kids:
Don't run, the time approaches
Hotels and midnight coaches
Be sure to hide the roaches
Marty Robbins
4/5
Fun!
Thundercat
4/5
A+ album cover and title. Fun and bizarre album from a crazy bass player.
LCD Soundsystem
4/5
High highs and medium-low lows. I wish I had seen these guys in their prime. My favorite song of theirs, Daft Punk Is Playing At My House, is not on here but some other really good ones are, like All My Friends and North American Scum.
Black Sabbath
5/5
First time I heard Iron Man, over at Brad Johnson's house when his older brother Seth put it on after their parents left, I was so scared I had to leave the room.
Frank Sinatra
4/5
Delightful session. The title track is one of my favorites.
Einstürzende Neubauten
5/5
Never was it truer that you have to be in the right mood but it's spectacular.
Missy Elliott
4/5
The beats are sweet and have withstood the test of time, unlike a lot of other 90s beats. Missy's voice has nice tone and excellent flow. Loved the rhyme "cheaper reefer" (cheepa reefa, technically), and "Izzy Izzy Ahh" seems to cleverly nod to ODB's "Shimmy Shimmy Ya," but too much gratuitous cursing, N bombs and vapid rhymes overall for 5 stars.
Dr. John
5/5
A Perfect Album. Truth be told I own a copy and probably haven't listened to it in 20 years but this weekend listened to it about five times and am enchanted in a way I wasn't before.
Every element of this all-time masterpiece is superlative, the composition, performance, production and even the packaging is all absolutely 10/10 wouldn't change a thing.
One technical aspect that might not be obvious to the casual listener is the use of reverb. reverb is an artificial effect that creates an echoing sound that makes it feel like the musician is in a large room and maybe on the other side of the room from you. on this album they use a lot of it. the vocals are fairly dry so the effect is it feels like Dr John is whispering in your ear while the rest of the band is on the other side of some voodoo shack out on the bayou.
The Beach Boys
4/5
Some classics on here. Dennis singing Do You Wanna Dance, Brian singing Please Let Me Wonder. Beach Boys are in hindsight a very weird band - intricately orchestrated music behind almost creepily adolescent lyrics sung by angels .
Meat Loaf
3/5
I was first introduced to this record when I was 8 or 9 and my big sister got it for Hanukkah. The cover looked wild and I was shocked, *shocked*, that my parents would condone something with the word "Hell" in the title. Jews don't have hell, but it still seemed wrong, especially for the holiday.
A year or two before that I was first introduced to Meat Loaf as a celebrity in a Cracked magazine centerfold he shared with Leif Garret ("Meet Leif! Meat Loaf!"). Then again a few years after that Hanukkah, watching Rocky Horror at the late night picture show.
None of any of these encounters prepared me for this record. I don't love piano-driven rock generally (sorry, Little Richard!) and these tunes and arrangements are schlocky but I bet would be great fun to sing along to at a dueling piano bar. I can also imagine this album is a teenage touchstone for many.
But what's most interesting to me here is Ellen Foley, making her debut here as Meat's singing partner on Paradise By The Dashboard Light. She did a lot more singing and some acting and eventually went on to have a recurring role on Night Court, but the most improbable but verifiably true bit another is that Mick Jones of the Clash wrote Should I Stay Or Should I Go? about her.
Elvis Presley
3/5
Not a huge Elvis guy but Suspicious Minds, c'mon. Nice backing band on this one, too, and they do a great version of John Hartford's "Gentle On My Mind," but not good enough to make up for the ridiculousness of "In The Ghetto."
Pulp
2/5
Not as interesting as the previous Pulp album on this list. Maybe it grows on you?
Jorge Ben Jor
4/5
The first song is killer diller, and I would credit it for single handedly reviving David Byrne's career (after he put it as the lead-off track on a Brazilian music compilation he put together that got a lot more attention than his solo records had up until then). The rest of it is very good, too, but that first track - apparently about a soccer player? - is kick ass.
Note also the melody of Taj Mahal - Rod Stewart must be a fan! 😅
Johnny Cash
5/5
Literally the invention of outlaw country taking place in real time. I assume in some corner of some Smithsonian museum there is an interactive exhibit that recreates the electric scene at this show.
When he makes the guard get him a glass of water, I like to think he wasn't actually thirsty as much as he wanted to juice the prisoners.
Truth be told, my favorite Cash jailhouse rock is his version of Shel Silverstein's Boy Named Sue on the San Quentin record but in any case this is a fantastic performance featuring a fabulous duet with June on Jackson, among other highlights. An essential American artifact. Fun fact: Luther is Carl Perkins' brother.
Al Green
5/5
Two drummers, no waiting.
Soundgarden
3/5
Never was a fan but respected them more than most of the other grunge bands. Not sure why, honestly. Not bad but a bit monotonous. I feel like my garden would have more variety.
Peter Tosh
4/5
Classic
Calexico
3/5
Star-crossed relationship with this band ever since their EP w/ Iron+Wine slid behind my built in record cabinet, sending it to the depths of Mordor before I even got to listen to it five times.
They do a really good job of evoking the American southwest, from their name to the instrumentation to the lonesome sounds that remind me of epic drives across a desert landscape.
I prefer their instrumentals to the vocal tunes as to me this is essentially mood music and the words get in the way, as Gloria Estefan once sang.
The Dave Brubeck Quartet
5/5
If you are a white person from a reasonably affluent family in the US born after 1940, this is the first jazz record you fell in love with.
But don't knock it just because of its privileged fans. It's not Dave's fault. This is a fantastic creation, made at a time when jazz still had new frontiers to explore. Paul Desmond's airy alto sax is delightful.
It's best to listen to on vinyl if you can, because it will help you better appreciate the tour de force that is side one. I bet during the vinyl era side one got 10x the plays of side two.
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
5/5
This guy was at the beginning of a creative explosion to where for many years he was practically farting out absolutely devastating tunes all day long. They are pretty much all very negative, desperate and cynical. Pissed at the world, pissed at himself, pissed at his ex (current and future), often all at the same time and all told incredibly cleverly, like a modern Cole Porter.
I think this is the first album with The Attractions, Elvis's amazing backing band for an incredible run of perhaps half a dozen albums over the next 6-7 years, all produced by Nick Lowe, a legend in his own right.
This run of records stands out as one of the truly great musical accomplishments of the twentieth century, in my opinion. I mean that seriously. Maybe I am forgetting someone but I would say maybe only the Beatles and Miles Davis had such a consistently fertile and productive period.
Sounds like very few if any overdubs on this. Very straightforward production and arrangements. Just a basic capture of a sick band playing kick ass tunes like their lives depended on it. You can hear their youth in how far on top of the beat every song feels. I bet if they re-recorded this today every song would be 10 beats a minute slower. Lipstick Vogue is a young player's tune, for example. You don't hear midlife people writing or performing such fast, high energy and emotionally desperate songs.
I think this is EC's second album? His songwriting has really tightened up here. He sounds like you don't want to piss him off or else you will be permanently eviscerated on wax in a cleverly biting way. But no one hates themselves as much as Elvis hates himself. He's the GOAT of cynical self-loathing.
I dont want to kiss you I don't want to touch.
And while we're at it, I don't wanna go to Chelsea, either!
This record could have been named (almost Seussically) All The Things I Don't Want To Do.
And I'm here for all of it.
All the buttons of my overcoat
They have fallen off one by one
You wouldn't even like me if you'd never had a drink
You wouldn't even like me if you never stopped to think
Standing in the shadow, turning wives to widows
Don't you know, big tears mean nothing
You can count them as they fall
Big tears mean nothing
When you're lying in your coffin
Tell me who's been taken in
Tell me, who's been taken in
Tell me, who, me or yous been taken in
Tell me, tell me, tell me
Hüsker Dü
2/5
Crazy selection for 1001 albums. The Huskers deserve to be here but it should have been Zen Arcade and it's not even close. This might be the most egregious error yet on this list and I'm afraid that to the extent this list is influential, it may unjustly damage Husker's legacy.
Most fans would tell you Warehouse is not a bad album, some would, actually, but it's widely understood to be their worst and a terrible introduction. It's their last album when they weren't really getting along anymore and it's too long and self-indulgent and despite the major label budget it still has that incredibly thin, low budget sound. They may be the only band in history who's recordings got worse sound quality-wise as they matured and got bigger recording budgets. I never understood that.
So Husker Du was an awesome band but you wouldn't know it chucking this on the turntable. The best way to be introduced to Husker Du takes a little work, but it's totally worth it: what you have to do is take a bad acid trip alone wearing an Army surplus trench coat in a desolate junk yard on the outskirts of Minneapolis on a freezing overcast winter afternoon that's getting dark weirdly early during Reagan's first term, eventually crawling home to be inexplicably greeted by "Diane" from Huskers' Metal Circus.
On behalf of Husker Du fans everywhere, please accept my apology for this terrible mistake and try to put this entire day out of your mind. Thank you!
Eagles
2/5
Never heard this before today. Lotsa radio hits on side one, but side two struggled to hold my attention, not unlike an unsuccessful mindfulness meditation session. Never been a fan of their sound or hits but grudgingly respect the tune Hotel California. There is a small lyrical fight going on in it that amuses me - "They stab it with their steely knives" was apparently a reference to Steely Dan, to get back at them for their "Turn down the Eagles, the neighbors are listening..."
I would love to learn the story of how Joe Walsh joined this band for this album. When I listen to the James Gang I do not hear anything that suggests he would be a good fit for this outfit.
Pink Floyd
5/5
See you on the dark side of the moon!
Raekwon
3/5
My neighbor has a truly delightful lawn sign this election season:
"Presidents Come and Go, but
Wu-Tang is Forever!"
I prefer GZA's Liquid Swords but this is pretty good, too. Not always in the mood for this many N bombs, but then again not sure if grey haired suburban dads isn't Raekwon's core audience, or maybe just on weekends?!? 😅
Elvis Presley
2/5
Classic album cover, lionized by The Clash's London Calling.
This was made before albums were really a "thing" yet, and this was definitely not recorded as an album. More likely a combination of all the tapes they could find to capitalize on Elvis's early success.
I never liked his warbling vibrato and by my time all of the original versions of tunes he made famous were readily available and generally preferable. There's nothing about listening to this now that is changing my perspective. My favorite aspect of this album is its brevity. And some of the guitar playing (Some. If that's Scotty Moore on Blue Suede Shoes, it's his worst work I've heard. Can't seem to keep up with the tempo!).
I think you had to be there.
I grew up mainly after he died and I and my friends knew Elvis mainly as the image of celebrity excess and a cautionary tale told by a huge velvet painting of a late period bloated Elvis stuffed into an Evil Knievel wannabe jumpsuit with a tear streaking down his cheek hanging over our favorite booth at Mama's Pizza.
There was a kid in my 1980s high school who would wear a t-shirt with the cover of that "50,000,000 Elvis fans can't be wrong" album on it and whenever I would walk by him in the hallway I would obnoxiously yell at him "yes, they can!" In retrospect I am surprised no '80s hardcore band swapped Hitler into that image. Missed opportunity.
1/5
If I see another bullshit selection on this list I am quitting.
David Bowie
5/5
One of my very favorite albums by one of my very favorite artists.
I misheard "Changes" when I was a young child and thought he was singing "Don't let them grow up in Olivette." Olivette is a suburb of St Louis, Missouri and I was amazed that this British bloke would get so specific. Like he was singing just to me. Bowie has somehow managed to maintain that intensely personal intimacy with my soul, even when he is singing about Mars, a place where I've spent much less time than St Louis.
Beck
3/5
Missed opportunity to title it Mellow Gloom. I like "Lost Cause" every time I hear it on the radio but an entire album like this is a bit much for me most days. I liked the subtly unconventional songwriting and his voice has more technique and range than I expected, but I'm still not fully recovered from overplaying "Loser" at the record store where I worked when it came out almost 30 years ago (yeesh!).
Neil Young & Crazy Horse
4/5
I love this album but would almost never recommend it to someone interested in learning more about Neil. While it has a coupl of his very best tunes (Powderfinger is a personal favorite and I cannot play this record with out listening to that tune at least twice), it also has some very odd and not great tunes as well that are mainly of interest only to academics (did I tell you that I chair the Neil Young Studies program at UC Santa Cruz?). If this list is supposed to be about unusually interesting records, then it's a great add, but I would not consider this in Neil's top 5 or possibly even 10 records so I probably wouldn't be adding it to a list of top 1001 records.
My understanding is that this album was a reflection of how seriously and challenging Neil took the punk rock movement. Hey Hey My My observes a changing of the guard, with Elvis dying and Johnny Rotten rising. I love both versions of that tune but even more interesting to me are the lyrics to the overlooked (understandably, the music is not very good) Thrasher, where I feel like he is making fun of his musically stagnating hippie friends like Crosby, Stills and Nash ("they were lost in rock formations"). Overall, I think punk woke him up in a way and sent him on a strange path of making some pretty weird records for the next 10 years. RUST NEVER SLEEPS!
Beastie Boys
5/5
Most illingest B-boy, I got that feeling
I am most ill and I'm rhymin' and stealin'!
This album was kind of a shot heard 'round the world for suburban teenagers in the mid 80s. They were ridiculously obnoxious and would probably describe themselves even as stupid, but they were OURS! And they could rap surprisingly well and their rhymes were often hilarious with a variety of cultural references that hinted at a depth that said they were not your typical Adidas and Kangol bboys, nor your typical teenage idiots even. I still have my Volkswagen hood ornament medallion and would not hesitate to drop everything and bust it out if I saw the bat signal go up.
The first time I heard "Girls" was at an unofficial cast party for our high school production of "Grease" and a girl put it on and when I saw all the girls dancing to "Girls" I intuited that the adult complaints about Beastie misogyny just didn't get it. That was also probably the first time in my life that I chose to dance.
My only complaint is that it's a pain in the ass to be confronted with this on a Monday morning, as happened to me with this project, because now I have to blow off work and shotgun a six-pack of Bud tallboys and chase it with some of that funky monkey! NO SLEEP TIL BROOKLYN!
Hanoi Rocks
4/5
Wow. Now THIS is a great justification for this list. A band I heard of but never heard. Instantly the best glam metal band I have ever heard and the only one I have ever liked. Their story is somewhat intertwined with Motley Crüe's, and I mistakenly lumped them into the same bucket so very pleased to be corrected now. Much more creative and interesting than Crüe, to me at least. I am looking forward to checking these guys out further.
Small Faces
2/5
Disappointing. Small Faces were one of those bands I should love in theory but it hasn't jelled. This sounds like people playing at being psychedelic without actually being psychedelic.
The Vines
3/5
Good but not particularly memorable
Radiohead
5/5
Saw them on this tour, playing in Jersey City's Liberty State Park w Beta Band ("Dry The Rain") opening and Statue of Liberty and lower Manhattan as a backdrop. Beautiful late summer night and truly a magical show, and as it happens, just a couple of weeks before 9/11.
My mind has rearranged events, to where this show was the night before that absolutely gorgeous late summer Tuesday morning I was walking to work across downtown Jersey City and turned the corner onto Montgomery St, giving me a direct view of World Trade what must have been moments after the first plane hit, staring at the fireball atop the World Trade Center just across the Hudson river and rationalizing that it must be some kind of extreme window cleaning before noticing that everyone was stopped in their tracks, staring at it in bewilderment, too.
Post 9/11 NYC was a weird place to be and this album made it feel more normal because it preceded the tragedy but still had a lot of emotional relevance. In its own way it helped me believe that what we were going through was not unprecedented and therefore survivable and surmountable. To be sure, I was superimposing my own trauma on it but it worked.
Definitely better on headphones, where it feels like a very personal soundtrack through a surreal, isolated landscape. Listening to "Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box" on a subway crowded with other quietly traumatized commuters. "You And Whose Army?" with the sound off on a TV showcasing our "commander in thief" (to borrow from the title of the next album Radiohead made after this) making a tragically obsessive, nonsensical case for invading a country that had nothing to do with our situation and would solve no problems. The dreamy anxiety sleep sequence of "Knives Out" immediately followed by "Morning Bell/Amnesiac" immediately followed by "Dollars and Cents" and so on, eventually ending with a bizarre jazz funeral of "Glass Houses" - felt like the perfect soundtrack to my and the entire region's (nation's?) sleepless shuffle through the following spring.
So no, I can't listen to this and review it with any pretense of objectivity. I gave this record a lot more meaning than probably even Radiohead did. In fact, I think I read somewhere the lyrics were somewhat randomly generated. But sometimes only nonsense makes sense. That is the genius of surrealism and dadaism in my view, and so it's no surprise that it was a an artistic movement birthed by war.
Twenty years later, I was making small talk at a conference cocktail party with a woman from Iowa who unprompted told me a long story about her 9/11 trauma as she raced across Des Moines to get her kids from a daycare center located near the interchange of two nationally significant interstate highways, I-35 and I-80, convinced that intersection would be the next place the terrorists would hit. As I was listening to her I realized that here are no tiers of trauma. And I found myself laughing, I think mainly at myself, and it was very long overdue.
The Band
4/5
Not a huge fan of the Band, but this album has a great feel that can't be denied. I'm struck it came out as early as it did - ahead of its time 3-4 years in terms of its sound. I also love it when rock n roll bands start an album with a ballad. It's perverse and I love it.
Can also hear how other bands I love were influenced by this - for example, play Steely Dan's "Pearl of the Quarter" immediately after "In a Station" and you'll know what I mean. Also, this album kicked off the whole concept of a "band house," a musical collaboration and production style these guys pioneered, as well as a slacker lifestyle that served many quite well.
Led Zeppelin
5/5
Feels a little silly writing a review of this, so all I'll say is that in case you weren't aware, "When the Levee Breaks" is one of the most sampled beats of all time, for example on fellow 1001 album lister Beastie Boys' Licensed to Ill (Rhymin' and Stealin'). It's one of the hugest, heaviest grooves you'll ever hear, mainly because John Bonham is has a devastating sense of time that makes him one of the funkiest drummers ever and people will continue to borrow his beats for many years to come. Go listen to it again right now if you can, focusing on the drums. Magnificent.
Listen to Black Dog, for example. The guitar and bass are playing these ridiculously complicated riffs and Bonham cuts through it all like Alexander The Great slicing through the Gordian knot, with an incredibly simple beat that takes great maturity and musical instinct to conceive, and immaculate sense of time to execute so effectively, and provides a powerful contrast to the busy strings.
People tend to get distracted with the fiery guitar and Lord of the Rings references and blues thievery but for me at least, Bonham is the most interesting and probably most influential musician in this band and this album is a tremendous showcase for his talents.
Talking Heads
5/5
One of the first albums I bought with my own money because my big sister had Talking Heads 77 and I really got into that but it felt silly even to a 10-year-old to buy another copy of a record we already had under our roof.
Absolutely adore this album and it completely blew my mind it was profoundly influential for me as a musician. So I was a little surprised not all that long ago as I was really getting into African pop music of the 70s to notice that a lot of the ideas and sounds here are directly lifted from those tunes. I mean directly. I don't mean that as any sort of criticism because every musician is inspired by the sounds around them, and it certainly something Talking Heads have discussed openly.
The lyrics are of course sui generis, like all Talking Heads. I particularly love the lyrics to "Seen and Not Seen." As a tween I used to ponder them endlessly and wonder if that's what lay ahead for me. For many years I regarded it as fantasy but now I've reached a point where I see it's more true than not.
There's not enough talk in this world about the musicianship of this band. Tina Weymouth on bass particularly stands out as one of the most interesting and, at least to this bassist, influential electric bass players. I heard David Byrne was a total dick to her and constantly wanted to replace her which is really unfortunate and misguided if you consider that her playing and singing on Tom Tom Club's "Genius of Love" (side project made a little after Remain in Light) might be the most sampled and ripped off bass line in the history of music.
I'm kind of at the point where I can't listen to this record anymore I played it so many times so instead what I like to do is go on YouTube and search out this one particular show they played in Rome in 1980 promoting this album. it's about an hour long will absolutely shred your mind. What an incredible band!
Bauhaus
4/5
Enjoyed this a lot more than I expected to, having spent a considerable portion of the 1980s making fun of their "hit" song "Bela Lugosi Is Dead" and goth in general. Now that I'm old and crusty, I have developed a soft spot for goth and am looking forward to checking out Bauhaus and giving them an honest listen.
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
3/5
I liked it as a novelty but it didn't really hit me.
KISS
2/5
When I was a little laddie, the Hawkins brothers up the block had a Kiss record. I think it was the double live "Alive II." This was 77-78. Everyone picked their favorite guy and since I went last I had to take drummer Peter Kriss (the one with the decidedly un-macho feline face), whose big tune is the exceptionally shitty ballad, "Beth," the original studio recording of which is on here. It was pretty hard for me to find a way into that tune as an eight year old, and I am very sorry to report that the many intervening years have not made it any easier.
Two stars only because the badass song title "Detroit Rock City." Otherwise, I would prefer to listen to Spinal Tap.
Lou Reed
5/5
Great tunes made even better by David Bowie and Mick Ronson. A great way to appreciate their contributions is to listen to the version of Satellite of Love available on the expanded version of VU's Loaded, where it was originally recorded but not released. Night and day.
Duke Ellington
5/5
I wrote an imaginary doctoral thesis on music production technology's influence on popular culture and this album was at the center of it. It's hard to translate the energy transmission that occurs at a great musical performance but a technical accident necessitated overdubbing a sax solo that had originally riled the audience to new heights and to drown out the sound of the original sax solo, the producer cranked up the audience track, making an excited audience sounds downright riotous. The show helped revive Duke's career among the cognoscenti at the show, but the album with the frenzied audience elevated his standing in the broader culture to new heights.
I don't like big band music too much, but when I do it's either Duke Ellington or Count Basie, and this album gives you a little of both, in that I understand that Papa Joe Jones (drummer for Basie's best band but look him up; possibly the most influential drummer ever) was on the edge of the stage, beating time with a rolled up newspaper and I understand was one of the voices shouting encouragement and celebration. That's damn cool.
For more information, I refer you to this delightful article I cited in my dissertation: https://www.csmonitor.com/1985/0923/upres.html
Mott The Hoople
1/5
Deeply disappointed, to where I started getting angry on behalf of all the talented people who never got any support from a record company while these guys apparently floundered for half a dozen albums. As far as I can tell, their only great work was whatever Bowie and Ronson had left in the tank after Ziggy Stardust and Lou Reed.
Charles Mingus
3/5
I like this ok but not in my top 5 Mingus records. Since you asked, they are (in no particular order):
- Mingus ah um
- Tijuana Moods
- Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus
- Blues & Roots
- The Great Concert
The Hives
4/5
A great rocker w 'tude for when you're in the mood.
Caetano Veloso
2/5
Huge Caetano Veloso fan but never could get into this record. Sorry!
Stevie Wonder
3/5
Great sounds and singles but overall a step down from the record before it, Innervisions, and to me the songwriting is inconsistent. This was like his 15th or 17th album in less than 10 years as a recording artist, a pace few artists could keep without possibly running low on things to say, and I think he would have benefitted from a little more time off to recharge the batteries before he made this one.
Pretenders
3/5
I like the Pretenders as a singles band a lot, but their albums tend to get boring for me.
Rage Against The Machine
3/5
I was working at a record store when this came out and I scoffed at it - Rage Against The Machine, brought to you by Epic/Columbia/Sony. The machine is profiting off you raging at it. So I guess actually the revolution will be televised after all? Although ironically (tragically?), Gil Scott Heron's record label was eventually acquired by...wait for it...Sony.
I have enjoyed a handful of experiences that made me consider making a movie because they would make a great scene. One was at about 3am on a weeknight in Miles's basement apartment in Willimantic. We were cranking tunes, as you do, so loud we could barely hear the cops pounding on the door, to where they were pretty irritated by the time we finally opened up.
The front door opened into the kitchen and the tunes were cranking from the adjacent living room. The music happened to get quiet just as they were lecturing us. I figured Miles or Mike or Lori had turned it down while the rest went to the door.
We were completely acquiescent and apologetic and they bought it. You could tell they didn't want to be there and didn't see enough worthwhile in busting us idiots. Maybe that's white privilege, I dunno.
I was looking the lead cop right in the eye as we were saying our final apologies when all of a sudden there is this voice screaming from the next room "NOW YOU DO WHAT THEY TOLD YA!!!" repeating louder and louder, over an increasingly intense beat somewhat reminiscent of Red Hot Chili Peppers' BloodSugarSexMagic (which came out the year before).
My eyes were still locked with the cop's but at the same time I felt like I was having an out of body experience that could have lasted a second or a week, or both, like Interstellar when they go into the black hole.
Suddenly, everything snapped together and I found myself a step or two behind my friends sprinting for the volume knob.
p.s. I read somewhere that former GOP Speaker of the House Paul Ryan likes to crank RATM when he's working out.
Pearl Jam
2/5
Led Zeppelin is to Aerosmith as
Nirvana is to Pearl Jam.
You can like both but if you even for a second think they are in the same league, you're outta your mind.
I'm impressed that I recognize so many of these songs, especially since prior to today I think I've only heard enough of them to recognize it and change the station...not my bag, sorry!
The Stone Roses
3/5
Somewhat uneven album but a game-changer for everyone suffering through the underground rock n roll scene of the late 80's, when college rock was played out and we were all waiting for the next big thing. With all respect to my friends and loved ones from the Pacific Northwest, there is no doubt in my mind that the world would be a better place if Manchester had defeated Seattle for epicenter of new rock n roll in late 80's-early 90's. Put differently, a culture dominated by people high on ecstasy is better than one built on heroin.
For me, this album was also the soundtrack of another cinematically perfect encounter with the cops:
Miles was doing a study abroad program in London and I picked him up at JFK when he came back for winter break. It was late at night in December 1989, and this album had made big waves in the UK but wasn't on my radar at all. Miles popped the tape into my car stereo and pulled a couple of beers out of his duffel bag. The beers were hysterical because they were branded with a generic "BEER" a la Repo Man. I lit a joint I had brought for the occasion and we got on the highway back to Connecticut, cranking The Stone Roses and fighting about if it was the most important record ever made. Being a contrarian, I was trying hard to hate it but actually I was digging it, so relieved to discover that the Next Big Thing was more melodic than heavy, expansive instead of intense, even if at one point they seemed to be doing a weird riff on Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme.
Traffic was moving pretty well on I-95 until very suddenly we were at a standstill. The cops had set up an impromptu checkpoint for some kind of a manhunt but we hadn't realized what was going on until I belatedly noticed a state trooper so close to our car his wide brimmed hat was practically touching my window as he was screaming at me to roll down my window. Based on how angry he was, I think he must have been shouting for a fair bit of time before I noticed him. Shocked, having gone in a moment from doing perhaps 70 miles an hour down the interstate to a screaming cop in my face, I immediately turned down the music and rolled down my window, which had the unfortunate effect of enveloping the trooper in a massive cloud of weed smoke.
"What the fuck is your problem?!?" etc etc - Lots of anger radiating from this guy. You sensed he wanted to beat us with his flashlight but had bigger fish to fry so instead he shined it in my face while screaming nonsensically and then all three of us, the cop, me and Miles, followed the flashlight's beam as it traced the trail of joint ash that led down the front of my parka to a can strategically positioned between my thighs. "What the fuck is that?!?!?" I obediently lifted the can but inadvertently in a way that exposed the word "BEER" directly at him, almost in his face, in a way that was so comically perfect I managed to push out an involuntary chuckle even though I felt only partially in control of my bowels for being possibly moments away from getting beaten to death with a flashlight on the side of the highway.
"ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!?!?!?" Filled with a rage like I have only seen a couple of times in my life, he grabbed the beer out of my hand and threw it over his shoulder, where it miraculously hit the front wheel of a fast moving car on the other side of the highway and shot off into the night, spraying that car and everything else around it with beer.
It was miraculous because it managed to catch the attention of our friend's superior officer, who yelled at him something to the effect of stop fucking around with these dickheads from Connecticut while there's a manhunt going on. The trooper looked me dead in the eye with a seriousness reserved for such occasions and told me that I was the luckiest person in the world and to get the fuck out of here right now if I knew what was good for me. I wordlessly concurred, rolled up the window and hit the gas, while Miles cranked the tunes back up and fished a replacement beer out of his duffel bag for me.
George Harrison
4/5
Its understandable if you take this triple-LP's title and cover photo together to suggest a meditation on constipation played out in real time, and it's certainly understandable if George approached this project feeling a bit backed up, having spent the previous decade being allowed only as many songs on those records as Ringo, which as much as I love Ringo is kind of insulting.
Less than 5 minutes in he kinda fucks himself by accidentally ripping off the melody of The Chiffons' He's So Fine for My Sweet Lord. I blame Phil Spector, the album's producer (a man whose morals seemed to be caught in an ever-escalating duel with his hairdo, until he eventually died in prison for murdering his date), for not speaking up about it more than I blame George, actually. There is a certain thing that happens sometimes to musicians where it feels more like an act of discovery than invention, if that makes sense, and that can be magical but it it's like tuning in a radio station and sometimes you dial in the wrong signal. You can be assured this would NOT pass if it were a Beatles album.
Still, this is a beautiful-sounding album, if a little boring at times. But it creates a sweet vibe, and certainly a long enough one that it could be the soundtrack to half a pretty good day.
Jeff Beck
2/5
Beck's a baller but I never really liked Rod Stewart's singing voice, and that's Truth.
The Rolling Stones
5/5
There should be a special sixth star because there's a lot of albums I gave five stars to that don't sit anywhere near this album. Should be on every short list, and I wouldn't quibble if this was going to be the one rock and roll record you were going to put in a time capsule.
Jigsaw Puzzle is one of my very favorite Stones tunes.
Stevie Wonder
4/5
Fantastic album title and some great, great tunes here and there but long but then again I could listen to his drumming all day long. I think Innervisions was his peak for what I like about Stevie.
Van Morrison
3/5
There is something about Van Morrison that rubs me the wrong way. Something about the image of his roly poly body frolicking in the green grass behind the stadium with a young coed that permanently puts me off. Plus, not sure why but he just seems like a dick. However, this is a lovely album, especially good when played on a sunny summer afternoon lawn.
Madness
3/5
Why wasn't this ever released in US? We got a different album with same singles but different album tracks. This is better than that one, too. Madness is probably my #3 second wave ska band, behind Specials and English Beat. I bet they put on a helluva live show, but their albums don't have a lot of depth to them.
David Bowie
3/5
Amazing mindfuck of an album title and cover art. The music is actually pretty good ("actually" because it came out a good 30-40 years after the next oldest Bowie record I own and most pop musicians seem to run out of ideas long before then) but you have to be a lot more patient than most attention spans permit.Emotionally, I would say it traces similar ground as previous Bowie, with a paranoid tension overlaid across the top. I love the video for The Stars Are Out Tonight and who can't relate to I'd Rather Be High?!?
Ravi Shankar
3/5
AITA because I kept expecting the music to break into The Beatles' Within You Without You?
I appreciated Shankar's explanations and his musicianship is amazing but ultimately I don't see myself playing this record very often.
Rod Stewart
3/5
I almost refused to listen to this when it popped up as my daily album and that would have been a mistake. I really like the first song a lot - heard it before on the radio but never gave it any thought. The rest wasn't that interesting to me but a lot better than Rod's 80's work led me to expect.
Van Halen
5/5
Great Rorschach test of a record: if you hate it, there's something wrong with you. Hopefully it's a temporary condition.
I'm not much of a "cock rock" fan but this is a great record that transcends genre. It also lays out the blueprint VH would perfect with albums like Diver Down and 1984. They perfected it, but not necessarily improved it, if I may say that.
By "blueprint" I mean that this album truly hits all the key points you want from a most satisfying VH record (in no order):
Skull-crushing guitar solo (Eruption)
Diamond Dave (Ice Cream Man)
Pensive Dave (Little Dreamer)
Mean Mistreater (Jamie's Cryin')
Mister Mischief (Runnin' With The Devil)
Kinks Kover (You Really Got Me)
Hot for ___ (I'm The One)
They throw off a really unusual mix of talents and vibes but that's what made them better than KISS and everyone else on the scene before and after. Maybe AC/DC is the only other cock rock band in the same league.
What makes this particular album stand out from the rest of their work is that it sounds like they are playing live in the studio with maybe only some vocal overdubs. There are maybe two songs I don't like that much but otherwise this is lights out.
Television
5/5
This is one of those records where I only have the vinyl; the jacket was lost to the four winds long ago. It's also beat to hell, having been the soundtrack for many, many after hours shenanigans. "I don't listen to Marquee Moon often but when I do, so do my neighbors."
Great guitar and fantastic lyrics: "I fell right into the arms of Venus De Milo"
My band used to play at a bar in NYC that was run by Tom, an old punk who most nights would drink a case of Rolling Rock and regale us with stories about the good old days. My favorite was the time at CBGB's he finally got up the nerve to approach Patti Smith to sign the book of her poetry he always carried with him and Tom Verlaine was sitting in her lap.
Manic Street Preachers
2/5
Did not do it for me. I suspect you had to be there...
Soul II Soul
1/5
For the record, Holdin On is one of the worst songs I have heard in a long time. Terrible lyrics poorly delivered.
Also, this record suffers from the shitty drum sounds that pervaded (perverted?) early 90s dance records. It didn't have to be this way but it was. Hip hop, acid house, freestyle all had much better drum sounds then.
This 1001 list must have been made by a British person, because Soul II Soul wasn't so big over here...and there is nothing about revisiting this today that is making me regret ignoring it when it first came out.
The Who
2/5
Haven't seen this album cover in a long time and for the first time I'm wondering are they pissing on Stanley Kubrick?
I can't really listen to this, for much the same reason I can't drink rum anymore. In fact I think it's very possible I picked up both allergies around the same time, now that I think about it. Can I recuse myself? Is there a mercy rule I can invoke? Like an infield fly rule, but for tunes? Giving it a two, as the average of 5 and 0, rounded down.
Barry Adamson
2/5
Clever but not particularly interesting to me. Not a huge fan of programatic music. Also not a huge fan of the correct spelling of programmatic, apparently.
Moby Grape
3/5
Never heard it before today but found it unremarkable. Sounds a little bit on the wrong side of history when it comes to sixties counterculture, alongside The Mamas And The Papas perhaps.
Liz Phair
2/5
This was a big record if you worked in an indie record store in early 1990's. I was immediately interested because of her connections to one of my favorite bands at the time, Urge Overkill. Specifically, the album title is a mash-up of a great Stones album (Exile on Main St) and a great Urge Overkill song (Goodbye to Guyville). Phair also hung around the same Chicago indie rock scene as UO and I think maybe they helped her get her start. She used to tell people the album is a song-by-song response to Exile on Main St, but I think that was a red herring intended to get more people to talk about and listen to it.
Also, for many years I harbored a conspiracy theory that Liz Phair is the little sister of UO's Nash Kato (look them up - they look a lot alike, no?). I have spent an irrational amount of time unsuccessfully researching this and still feel unsatisfied that I haven't been able to prove it....yet.
This record was a big part of the early 1990's wave of women indie rockers and in that respect she was a bit of a pioneer. Unfortunately, the songs aren't very interesting and her singing is unappealing to me - always feels like she is singing in too low of a register and that she has about a 3 note range. Is this like the Elizabeth Holmes thing where a trailblazing woman believes she needs to artificially lower the pitch of her voice in order to be taken more seriously? Also, there is an emotional distance in her voice that reminds me a little of how when you're a teenager sometimes it's cool to be apathetic. The weirdly low tones and too cool to care attitude remind me a little of Courtney Love, and not in a good way.
The record was also a big part of the early 1990's wave of lo-fi indie rocker movement - essentially, people who make records that sound like they were recorded in their apartment while their roommate was sleeping - but at the same time unfortunately the sounds aren't all that interesting, to my ears at least.
I think there are people who will tell you this record was greatly influential on them, but it was a 'you had to be there' kind of thing in my opinion. Although she still makes records, I doubt she has acquired a new fan since 1995, and once these people die this record will be forgotten. Ozymandias of indie rock?!?
The Smiths
3/5
US=REM
UK=The Smiths
3/5
Never heard this before. The guitars sound fantastic! This record demands volume. To play this at a normal volume feels like driving a race car under the speed limit. I bet she's a powerful live performer.
I feel like there's this tradition of New York albums, and this is definitely one of them.
Harvey is a decent singer but the songs themselves are not particularly catchy and I don't know if the awesome guitar sounds are enough to get me to invest the time to learn to love them despite the lack of hooks. Ask me in a year.
Black Sabbath
2/5
Fairly steep drop-off from their first three albums. They sound bereft of ideas and the album is too well produced to still have an edge.
Arctic Monkeys
4/5
♥️ Arctic Monkeys but never heard their earlier records...is this their debut? This rocks a lot harder than the stuff of theirs I do know. Amazing how much they've evolved. Go listen to the opening track on their most recent album - There'd Better Be A Mirrorball - also great, but in a very very different way but one that feels like they come by it honestly as reflective artists twenty years older than before. This album gives a feel like a young band with a huge chip on their collective shoulder made up of talented players who know each other well and are playing the sh*t out of these tunes. This album sounds like the band left it all on the field, as they say in sports about players who give it their all.
I should know the singer's name but one thing I like about him is the Bowie influence. I also love the unselfconsciously unfancy British accent - goes well with his attitude and as opposed to most of the records we've been getting lately, Artic Monkeys sound like they actually have something to say. Something that needs to get out. And I'm very glad it did. One of my favorite bands of the millennium!
3/5
I like the idea of Devo more than the reality but Uncontrollable Urge is pretty great.
Genesis
1/5
I tried but it didn't take five seconds to be reminded why I hate Genesis. To give them credit, they find new ways to be irritating with every album.
Arrested Development
1/5
This selection is one of the ones I find revealing about whoever made this list. If the only hip hop you listen to is what ends up on pop radio then maybe this sounds like a record you need to hear before you die. I don't think there are many serious hip hop fans who would second that view.
This record isn't terrible, but the sounds and rhymes are unoriginal to my ears, sorta sounds like if Public Enemy made a De La Soul tribute album. Meanwhile, this list is missing desert island essential LPs like Boogie Down Productions' Criminal Minded. Disappointing. Hip hop's a weird genre for this list because it's mainly a singles game so not many essential albums but still I don't see this one as being important or even interesting and the fact that some super important albums are missing suggested the editors of this list don't know much about hip hop.
Frank Zappa
3/5
Not a big Zappa guy but I think this is one of his better ones. I love his collaborations with Captain Beefheart, like Willie The Pimp.
I don't know many - or any, actually - Zappa fans who are not males musicians. It's weird because when people say, for example, that Rakim of Eric B and Rakim is your favorite rapper's favorite rapper, that makes you want to check out Rakim. But when they call Zappa a "musician's musician" it has a negative tinge. It's explaining why you might not like it, where I guess the thing about Rakim is explaining why you need to check him out more.
The Good, The Bad & The Queen
2/5
Amazing lineup of musicians but I found it boring until the last tune, which I liked a lot. Should have been a single instead of an album.
Turbonegro
3/5
I tried really hard to not like this album but failed miserably. Not my style and not terribly original but very well done and fun.
Cocteau Twins
3/5
Pleasant 80s indie guitar jangle with nonsense lyrics. What's not to like?
Dennis Wilson
3/5
Waaaay better than I remembered. Goes to show how hard it can be for me to listen to something with an open mind.
Guns N' Roses
2/5
No can do i
Love
4/5
1966 seems fairly early for a record this far out. Impressive!
R.E.M.
5/5
I was a late arrival to REM because when they first hit my girlfriend hated them. She said they were unattractive and even worse, they mumbled their lyrics. Years later I worked at a record store where my boss Pete once shared a nightclub urinal with guitarist Peter Buck and took the opportunity to tell him "I can play everything you ever wrote!" to which Buck replied, as he was (likely hurriedly and possibly prematurely) zipping his pants, "I'm sure you can."
Once I did listen with open ears I fell hard. I would say from their debut EP Chronic Town to this, their first album and the next two albums are golden. There are many great live bootlegs of them around this time now available on YouTube. Pretty much any show you can find from 1982-1985 is going to be lightning in a bottle. Things start to get hit or miss after that, in my view.
Peter Buck is a criminally underappreciated guitar player. His chiming riffs are to me the essence of what makes REM great and basically formed the backbone of what 80s jangly college radio sounded like. Pete my boss taught me the guitar parts to many of the songs on the early REM records and I learned a lot about the guitar and songwriting both from that experience.
If lyrics are important to you, you will probably find REM a frustrating listen. I have no idea what Michael Stipe is singing, and I'm not convinced he is, either. I think he's more into the sounds of the lyrics than their meaning, like as if Mick Jagger sang lead for The Cocteau Twins. Some of my respected songwriter friends feel this is a copout, to make songs with nonsensical lyrics. Hence my girlfriend's "mumbler" complaint. And she was right about their looks, too.
One more thing that's important. In high school in uptight mid 80s Connecticut, the first step toward coming out of the closet was wearing either an REM or a Smiths t-shirt to school. But one friend of a friend was a fan of both bands and it felt like a bridge too far and I think maybe he screwed himself by doing that because all I can say is that I've never once seen him with a love interest in the forty years I've known him since. Poor guy!
Depeche Mode
3/5
I always thought of DM as more of a singles band than an album band but this one has Policy of Truth and Personal Jesus, so immediately makes it one of their more appealing records to me.
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
3/5
I'm slightly surprised I've never heard this album before today. Certainly heard many of these songs and I have to say this is already the best CSN(Y) I've heard. But I still find their singing irritating and for that reason have a hard time getting into it.
The Roots
5/5
I'm not saying I wouldn't be married to my wife if not for this record, but I'm also not not saying that. When we were dating we had the best time seeing The Roots on this tour at the Roseland Ballroom. One of the best shows I've been to, and I've been to many.
To me, this record is head and shoulders above their others, not the least because of their borrowing of Cody Chestnutt and his instant classic "The Seed."
Carole King
5/5
One of those all-time classic albums. Wouldn't change a note.
Lynyrd Skynyrd
4/5
Every middle school dance ended with either Freebird or Stairway to Heaven. Respect!
But really I don't like their music very much - it's very good for what it is, but I'm not a huge redneck rock head and if I had to, I'd rather listen to Charlie Daniels or Allmans or ZZ Top. I understand their name was borrowed from their high school gym teacher, which is pretty great. I also liked the way they responded to Neil Young's Southern Man and Alabama. And I realized this is the first time I've heard one of their albums - everything I know is from either classic rock radio or middle school dances.
Funnily worded sentence in the Wikipedia article on this album: "As of March 2023, all the band members pictured are now deceased." As of? Like maybe if we periodically check in again we might find some are no longer deceased?
Dire Straits
3/5
This was a really, really big album when it came out but in retrospect after the third tune it falls off a steep cliff. Also, the production is peak 80s and not in a good way - fake reverb on the drums, shitty keyboard tones, etc. But ultimately have to respect Money For Nothing and you have to respect Knopfler's guitar. You have to!
Weather Report
5/5
I can't imagine what this music sounds like to normal, non bass playing, people. Do you like it?
Lauryn Hill
5/5
A highlight of the 1990s that holds up very well. I would love to see an unauthorized Lauryn Hill biopic - seems like a real character.
The Byrds
2/5
I like The Byrds and I like Graham Parsons but this combo is kinda boring to me. I think this album sorta invented the Country Rock genre and in that respect it's "Important" historically but that doesn't mean we have to listen to it.
p.s. I think The Byrds covered Dylan more than anyone but Dylan himself. Kinda weird.
Queen
3/5
Better than I expected.
Gillian Welch
4/5
I don't know how many Gillian Welch albums are on this list but I would have guessed 1, and that it would have been her debut. She and Dave Rawlings have enjoyed one of the great musical partnerships of the past several decades and this is a fine example of it.
Blondie
4/5
A gem of an album. Infectious attitude and hooks over a cool late 70's American poppy new wave sound. Comes out of the gate strong with Hanging on the Telephone followed by One Way or Another, and then later on side two you get another 1-2 punch with Sunday Girl and Heart of Glass.
This band must have been so much fun to see live!
Suzanne Vega
2/5
Shocked that there would be a Suzanne Vega album on here that didn't include the song "Luka." Does that mean we're in for multiple Suzanne Vega albums, because if so that seems odd?
Deep Purple
2/5
For starters, points for an album cover that directly influenced Spinal Tap.
That's why this gets two stars. Beyond that, there is little of interest to me here and I have no idea why this made the list.
Beck
4/5
Enjoyed it! This is the second or third Beck album I have heard from this list and they make me feel like I should listen to him more.
Aerosmith
1/5
Aerosmith has a role in top 1001 LPs but this is an insulting selection. Rocks is legitimately a classic of American rock and roll. Bootleg, Toys In The Attic, self-titled debut and even Night In The Ruts (aka Right In The Nuts) are all leagues beyond this piece of shit.
I have a feeling I would not get along well with whatever twat made this list.
Parliament
5/5
One of my all-time favorite records. From the opening line "Good evening. Do not attempt to adjust your radio" to the grand fadeout of baby talk on Night of the Thumpasaurus Peoples and everything in between, this is a great example of an album that is greater than the sum of its songs.
Once upon a time called now!
The Smiths
2/5
Not as good as their previous records, with generally weaker songs and too much Morrissey and not enough Marr.
Bob Dylan
4/5
Simple Twist of Fate is one of my very favorite tunes to listen to and to play. Lots of other good material on here but I don't know this record as well as I should....yet.
PJ Harvey
4/5
I like it but this list needs only one PJ Harvey.
New Order
4/5
Whenever I hear these guys I think about their incredibly unlikely and greatly inspiring journey from the tragic suicide of their singer and creative visionary when they were the super dark proto goth band Joy Division to the absolutely massive club hit "Blue Monday" - still the biggest selling 12" single of all time - only 2 years later. Even just that part of their 40 year story would make for a great biopic; until then, we can get glimpses of it through a handful of scenes in "24 Hour Party People."
Very 80's sound, but they kinda originated it so perhaps that's why it sounds better than most. I couldn't explain why I like this but dislike Depeche Mode. Maybe the Joy Division connection confers a certain credibility?
Ultimately, this YouTube's user comment on the (awesome, J Demme directed, 10 minute long) "Perfect Kiss" video says it all:
Its impressive that New Order has a singer that don't sing, a bassist that thinks he is the guitarist, a drummer that don't know more than one way to play and a synth player that plays a frog solo mid song and still is one of the most amazing bands of all time.
Finally, if you were a teenage musician in the 1980s and weren't in a punk or metal band, it's highly likely that your band aspired to sound like a cross between New Order and The Cure (whether you knew it or not, as in the case with the our band that was exactly as good as you might imagine when I tell you our name was "Lesbian Sinecure"). For the fifteen year old rocker, the main difference between the two bands is whether the guitar player uses chorus and flange pedals (The Cure) or the bass player does (New Order).
The Notorious B.I.G.
3/5
It's hard to explain how monumental biggie smalls was in his day. His flow was just so unique and his rhymes so creative if gruesome and profane.
Unfortunately it doesn't hold up very well. This may be a more recent thing but hearing Puff Daddy whispering stuff in the background puts off a different vibe than it did in 1993, and frankly the stuff he's wrapping about is kind of boring and juvenile.
The back in the day I used to be a buyer for a record store that prided itself on an excellent hip hop selection the kids would travel from all around for it. The first time I heard of Biggie was when some of the hardcore hip hop heads started asking about him. None of our distributors knew the name, but within a few weeks he started showing up on some of the underground dj mix tapes we carried.
Improbably, about 12 years later I inadvertently found myself gentrifying the very hood Biggie rapped about, Clinton Hill. It might have been the same place, but in name only. Still, it felt good to occasionally walk by the building he grew up in and fantasize about the childhood that developed this unique style we barely got to know before he was murdered. RIP.
The Yardbirds
4/5
Best Yardbirds album? A really fun listen. Any band that had Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page in it has to be taken extremely seriously, but ultimately they land on the wrong side of the demarcation that goes down the middle of 60s rock, alongside The Mamas and Papas and other paragons of 60s hip that didn't survive the summer of love (culturally, if not technically). Those individuals achieved escape velocity but they each had to jettison the band to do it.
ZZ Top
1/5
These guys deserve more credit than they get but it's their own fault because of albums like this.
I would vote for Eliminating this from their catalog. I am more of a Tres Hombres-Deguello type fan, when they would sing about how Jesus just left Chicago on his way to New Orleans, where on this album the timeless winking roadhouse weirdo vibe is replaced with more of a lecherous redneck with money feel that hasn't aged well. But somewhere in the difference between La Grange and Legs you can hear the difference between 70s and 80s culture.
The Beach Boys
5/5
As I am listening to this, I love imagining what it was like for 24 year old Brian Wilson to have all of these resources at his disposal to explore these sounds and ideas.
Tom Waits
4/5
"I'm so horny the crack of dawn better be careful around me!" 🤣🤣🤣
I used to be dismissive of Tom Waits for being a faker but after about 50 or 60 years of sticking to his guns you have to wonder if maybe it's the rest of the world that's faking It.
10cc
4/5
Never really checked out these guys before and now I don't know why. No natural fanbase in US maybe? Anyway, fun stuff and I look forward to getting to know them better.
N.W.A.
4/5
Four stars for being groundbreaking. Unfortunately the ground they broke wasn't that interesting and inspired a lot of rappers to drop a lot more n-bombs than the world probably needed.
Eric Clapton
2/5
EC has a long history of being a horrible person and I could barely listen to this for that reason. But I did listen to half of it before my rage took over and found it's not too bad - if you're into mellow 70s rock like Fleetwood Mac and The Eagles you might like this. The tunes themselves range from classic to terrible and sometimes manage to be both at the same time (Willie And The Hand Job). Still, I leave this with the same basic feeling I had going in: I won't mind if I never hear his music again.
Astrud Gilberto
2/5
Why is this on the list? I have no idea.
Pere Ubu
5/5
One of my favorite albums. Probably listened to hundreds of times. The tunes, the sounds, the pacing...all excellently conceived and executed out of the cultural cave that is Cleveland. Gets to places no other record does.
Years after I got into this album I saw the 1973 Terrence Malik film "Badlands" (w/ Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen) and recognized that the dialogue must have inspired some of this album's lyrics, specifically "my baby says that when the devil comes, shoot him with a gun."
The Black Crowes
1/5
Never got the appeal of these guys. There's about a dozen Stones albums and half a dozen each of Allmans and Aerosmiths that should be on this list before this album.
Emmylou Harris
3/5
Emmylou Harris is an amazing singer - an American treasure to my mind - but her material is rarely worthy of her and this collection is unfortunately no exception.
Norah Jones
2/5
I'm not saying that Norah Jones is personally responsible for the existence of the $5 cup of coffee but this album has a lot to answer for when you think about how many overpriced lattes have been served in countless mediocre cafes while it has been gently lilting in the background.
My favorite aspect of this album is the opportunity it gave me to look up the definition of anodyne to ensure I would be using it properly to describe it.
Jah Wobble's Invaders Of The Heart
3/5
I wish I was Jah Wobble - great bass player on the scene at an amazing time, even better stage name - but this reminds me too much of those Bill Laswell albums from around the same era where the credits listed some of the most incredible musicians so you had to buy it but then you brought it home and played it once, possibly never even getting to side two. I liked this more than that, but by the end I was forgetting what I heard at the beginning - couldn't hold my attention. I liked hearing the underappreciated Sinead O'Connor stretching out, though. Extra star for that.
The Rolling Stones
5/5
When you're on death row and they let you play one last Stones album as I assume is your basic human right in every nation, the album you select is very revealing:
12x5 - sad that you're still trying to prove something
Goats Head Soup - only child?
Some Girls - high on your own supply
Tattoo You - starfucker
Exile On Main St - a bit obvious
Beggars Banquet - almost
Let It Bleed - retrial warranted
The Doors
4/5
The first record I bought. Fantastic in many ways, but a little inconsistent songwriting.
Pavement
4/5
Pavement was the ultimate American indie rock bank of the 1990s, and this one has some classics, like Cut Your Hair, Gold Soundz and Range Life. Such a Gen X touchstone that I actually know two different people who titled their blogs "Range Life."
Back in the day I was so enamored of the LP before this, Slanted and Enchanted, that I avoided listening to this one for several years for fear of being disappointed, which was not easy to do working in a record store. Once I could approach it with some emotional distance I grew to really love it.
I have a feeling that they will get lost to history, but to a certain set of lonely nerds, they touched a nerve.
Steely Dan
4/5
This is probably the best 4 star album on this list. 4 stars only because their vision wasn't fully realized when they made this debut album and it's fair if you're sick of Do It Again or Reelin' in the Years. But the filler here is quite filling.
Perhaps the last couple of tunes aren't on the same level as everything else but Only A Fool Would Say That is my personal go to prescription for bad days. That song turns my frown upside down 100% of the time. 100% OF THE TIME. That song is undefeated against depression and its writers, performers and producers deserve the Nobel Prize for mental health Rx.
Brooklyn, Midnite Cruiser, Dirty Work - these would be other bands' best songs. Denny Dias's and Skunk Baxter's guitars are unusual, virtuosic and intense.
Dion
2/5
It's weird how long musicians wanted to work with Phil Spector.
Scissor Sisters
4/5
Really fun, if contrived.
k.d. lang
3/5
A great singer who seems to have a hard time finding the right material. I think this is probably her finest outing (so far?). Constant craving really great tune top to bottom if I can't get over the idea of using it for some pharmaceutical commercial.
Wu-Tang Clan
5/5
The best thing to ever come from Staten Island. A little more profanity than I care for but the sounds and rhymes are great.
Björk
4/5
Beautiful, if you're in the mood. Irritating if you aren't.
Orbital
4/5
Some boring and irritating stuff in the middle but overall this is much much more interesting than most acid house albums (more of a singles format). Makes me feel remiss for never having checked these guys out more.
Simon & Garfunkel
3/5
I used to be on Team Simon all the way but starting to feel myself switch sides to Team Garfunkel....or maybe even Team No Thanks! Also, I'm surprised the cover art doesn't consist of a basket of herbs.
Britney Spears
1/5
Not good or interesting.
Nightmares On Wax
1/5
Makes me feel exactly how I feel every time I grossly overpay for a watery vodka soda from a Russian bartender wearing too much Hai Karate in a lightly peopled lounge in the meatpacking district in the late afternoon of a sunny late fall day with sticky floors and a slight Lysol smell that make me nervous about availing myself of the enormous black velvet chaise longue in 1997.
Beatles
5/5
It is not hyperbole to say that this album offers what is possibly the most influential musical ensemble of the 20th century at the peak of their powers. The lyrics to "Run For Your Life" have sadly not aged well but damn the rest of this is lights out in every way. I can't pick a favorite Beatles album but would be a fine choice.
It's funny this album should arrive today, because somewhat randomly I recently became obsessed with Paul McCartney's badass bass playing on "The Word." It used to be hip to give these guys shit for not being better players but eventually hipsters realized that there is more to life than wanking on your axe. Or at least eventually this hipster realized that. But the wanker in my heart still gets off on his aggressively groovy bassline here. Give it a listen, preferably at a suitably high volume.
Finally, I always recommend the mono versions of early-mid 60s pop records like this. That's what these artists actually produced - the stereo version was done later by studio hacks who were waaay too enamored with the concept of stereo separation, which accidentally fucked my skull as an early 80s tween when I got the "red" Beatles compilation from the library and taped it by putting my sister's boom box next to one of the speakers, not understanding the implications of recording only one channel of a stereo mix. My parents had just gotten a beater of a Peugeot but it had a tape deck in it and I didn't often get to use my sister's boom box so that car was my main place to listen to a cassette and I will never forget how seriously it fucked with my head when I got my Dad to play my tape for me and all I could hear were like horns, snare drum and backing vocals. And then the next tune would be just like lead vocal, harmonica and bass. Every time we played it! For months! My Dad was not really in to music and never appeared to notice, which made it all the more surreal. I thought maybe something was wrong with the car, an unfortunately highly plausible explanation, given our family's history with cars. It really twisted my melon. It was only years later - probably more years than I should admit - that I figured out what was going on. 🤣
Fela Kuti
3/5
I ♥️ Fela, to where I would gladly listen to him suffer extreme intestinal distress so long as Tony Allen was backing him up on it. However, I don't know his discography well and yet would be surprised if a non Boomer, non British (ie, has no reason to give a shit about Ginger Baker) critic would cite this as a top pick of Fela's recordings. It sounds good enough but feels like a loose jam session more than an intentional musical statement we need to pay close attention to.
It is also true that within five minutes it became my all time favorite thing Ginger Baker ever did. Hilariously, I looked at the credits and Ginger hadn't even yet appeared on the album when I rendered that judgement! 😅
Fleet Foxes
3/5
Indie folk-rock that explores the intersection of pastoral and somnolent. Like a lot of things, how much I like it depends on my mood. I loved it today but could totally see myself smashing the OFF button with glee if I were a little more stressed or cynical.
My son said it sounded like Lord of The Rings Holiday music. More specifically, like what you might hear at a Dwarven Castle Keep.
The Waterboys
3/5
Enjoyable but irritating that my streaming service offers only the two disc collectors edition, virtually guaranteeing I will never play it again.
Bruce Springsteen
3/5
Is it possible to both acknowledge something as a classic and also not like it?
The big production sound and overwrought singing are not for me. I generally I prefer my rock n roll with too much guitar and not enough piano but this LP is very much the other way around. And whoever is playing piano should have been asked to record all of their tracks with a closed fist. Their constant arpeggios are distracting and irritating.
Feels like this record might have inspired Meatloaf's sound. Born to run into the bat out of Hell. Anyway, I would rather hear Patti Smith or even Manfred Mann do this material.
Eminem
2/5
Loved "My Name Is" when it was on the radio (and funny twerpy video) but never heard the LP until today and unfortunately the rest of this is quite shitty. Juvenile rhymes over boring beats.
Otis Redding
5/5
I love Otis Redding but 99% of the time I am listening to his live recordings, which tend to be higher energy and more emotionally urgent than this is.
Still, this album has a fine array of tunes and as always his backing band is stellar, notwithstanding that the intonation on Steve Cropper's guitar sounds a little off in a couple of spots.
But who cares about pitch when you got soul and this album gives you lotsa soul. I love hearing Otis cover Sam Cooke, too. Still, if you like this? Do yourself a favor and check out his Live in Europe and Monterey Pop Festival recordings - that's where the real heavy sh*t goes down!
OutKast
4/5
Amazing in many parts but really two albums, not one. There is one five star album in here and two 3.75 albums.
Stevie Wonder
5/5
My favorite Stevie Wonder and one of my favorite albums of the 1970s.
Lupe Fiasco
3/5
Credit for being unusual, but nothing really grabbed me.
Pere Ubu
4/5
Very different from their first album. Feels more experimental and improvised. Classic situation where a band has years to write material for the first album and a lot less time for the second?
Either way, you are unlikely to hear another record that sounds like this, but then again it fits alongside contemporaries like PiL and Talking Heads. I'm also fascinated by the lack of articles about Pere Ubu. Not easy to friend writings about them, leaving it entirely to your instincts. Boy that sounds swell!
Bob Marley & The Wailers
5/5
The fade-in on Natural Mystic is one of my very favorite album beginnings. Amazing band in top form playing some classics and near classics. Side one is in the streets and side two is between the sheets.
The Libertines
2/5
Not sure the world needs another rock n roll party animal album. Sounds good but not really standing out just being reminded of Pete Doherty's tragic inability to get off heroin despite all the resources stardom has provided him really bums me out and makes me fear that I will never get my own shit together. So this is a lot more depressing for me to hear than I think its creators intended.
Metallica
3/5
Not a fan but appreciate Enter Sandman, especially as someone who lived in NYC when Mariano Rivera was the Yankees' superstar closer and would walk on to this song.
Funkadelic
4/5
I love rock albums that start slowly, quietly and strangely, and it doesn't get any slower, quieter (initially at least) and strangely than the title track of this album. Eddie Hazel's guitar on this track is worth a close listen - at least as close as George Clinton's interstellar mixing permits - a real musical masterpiece.
This album has its shortcomings but the other thing I love about it is the social consciousness. What's Going On came out roughly at the same time, and songs like You and your folks, me and my folks make Marvin Gaye sound like a social tourist.
Circle Jerks
4/5
Can't believe I've never heard this before. I mainly knew these guys from their iconic performance as a lounge band in "Repo Man" when they do a mellow version of their 80's defining "(We all gotta duck) When the shit hits the fan."
Short and sweet powerhouse rocker. I like the version of Wasted on here better than Black Flag's. I never fully understood the evolution from 70s punk to 80s hardcore, and I feel like this is a bit of the missing link.
AC/DC
4/5
A classic that simultaneously defines and transcends cock rock. Some of these lyrics haven't worn well, but if you're noticing the lyrics you aren't rocking.
What makes this band great is the Young brothers' absolutely massive guitar riffs. That they were sampled so much by 80s hip hoppers indicates that their adolescent majesty holds universal appeal, to where now the opening chords of Back In Black will make the pimply, jean jacketed virgin in all of us to raise our horns in brotherly love. 🤘
Lambchop
3/5
Very cool but got a little boring.
Various Artists
3/5
Solid collection from a time before Phil lost his sh*t.
Jeff Buckley
2/5
I tried many times but still don't really like this man's music. He was hot and had a good voice and he did what is possibly the definitive version of the insanely overplayed Hallelujah, but if he wasn't the son of a famous musician he wouldn't have had this record deal and if he hadn't died young, no one would have bought this album. To me, this sounds a lot like a million other mediocre albums by mid '90s artists who haven't really figured out what they are all about yet.
The Band
3/5
Can't put my finger on what bothers me about these guys but anyway this is one of their better records.
Underworld
4/5
Very good for what it is but not something I would listen to sober in my home.
Isaac Hayes
2/5
Isaac Hayes was incredibly talented and not sure he ever fully got his due. However, this is mostly a straight movie score and I find it boring for that reason. Black Moses, Hot Buttered Soul, Live at The Sahara Tahoe, Wattstax are all much better albums and more appropriate for this list.
Jurassic 5
4/5
Delicious hip hop comfort food. Like a big bowl of chicken soup - very fulfilling, if in a predictable and unchallenging way. And sometimes that's just what you need. I am permanently attached to it because it came out at a time when I needed a musical hug like this and I was lucky enough to buy it on a whim, sight unseen, or hearing unlistened, I guess.
Highly skilled rapping over some funky old school beats and tight group work offer an alternate reality, as if NWA and Dre never happened and The Funky Four were the only band that ever mattered.
What's Golden is golden. If that song doesn't get you moving then I can't help you, and if you didn't get a chance to focus on it the first time through, do yourself a favor and give it a close listen before you move on. And the freestyle from the legendary Kool Keith on DDT is a real treat.
I would like to like the Faces but I don't seem to, no matter how much I try.
Doves
4/5
Wow. Never heard of these guys but was very impressed. One tune about 2/3 of the way through really irritated me but the rest was superlative downer rock.
Björk
3/5
There was a brief period in the early 2000s when we all wondered if Bjork was the most important artist alive. Turned out not to be the case, and so to us now it seems silly that she would have so many albums on this list.
Blur
4/5
I love Blur now more than ever. Oasis was a joke in comparison. And Song 2 - instant classic!
Morrissey
2/5
On his best day, I'm half a Morrissey fan, half a hater, and this album wasn't made on his best day.
Arcade Fire
3/5
Ok, this sounds more like the kind of timid, self-deprecating indie rock music I expect from a Canadian band than their later stuff, which until now was the only AF I had heard.
Pretty good overall but didn't grab me.
The Doors
3/5
Listening to this sober I feel like a busy sex worker who's all fucked out but still has clients to get to.
Lyrics like "Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding...ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind" go from being gloriously ridiculous to just being regular ridiculous.
It says it right on the cover - "Passenger Loading Only" - if you aren't loaded, you're on the wrong trip.
The La's
4/5
Your favorite Brit-pop band's favorite Brit-pop band. The most interesting thing about the La's is how influential they remain even though they only made this one album 35 years ago and then disappeared.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if this is the album that inspired this entire 1001 project.
"There She Goes" has to be one of the catchiest earworms of all time. I hate it so much. No, I love it! No, I think I hate it. I give up.
Doesn't matter. This album is like the Mona Lisa in that no one gives a shit if you like it or not - that's entirely beside the point - but you must check it out before you die. Or else!
Metallica
2/5
Credit where it's due: this is 1,000,000x better than I expected.
Ordinarily, rock band + orchestra collabs are a big turnoff for me (and the ladies, too - fellas, take note) - not saying it's impossible to pull off but maybe the musical equivalent of a 4.8 degree of difficulty dive - and I almost skipped it entirely but I feel guilty about blowing off a few daily selections recently (sorry, Coldplay!).
It's a bit soundtrack-ish, which they seem to be aware of, with the Ennio Morricone intro and all. No vox was a very wise choice. I do wish there was more guitar shredding. It feels like a fail to put on a Metallica album and not feel a bit shredded by the end. Instead I feel like I just sat down to an audio-only rendition of a David Copperfield magic show or possibly a laser show in a second tier planetarium. That sounds harsher than I mean but I won't take it back.
TV On The Radio
3/5
I started out not thinking this had anything for me but it grew on me. I saw these guys play around the time this came out and thought it was a little pretentious and unmusical so I never paid attention to them after that but listening to this makes me think they're better in the studio than live?
The Mamas & The Papas
3/5
After I heard this excessively mellow version of "Do You Wanna Dance" I had to stop the album and play the Ramones version just to make things right again before I proceeded. The musical equivalent of a dental spit and rinse. I want to dance with the Ramones, or even M+P's contemporary Beach Boys make me want to dance with Carl Wilson when he sings this, but I do not want to dance with these guys at all. But, M+P were incredibly rock n roll in their own way:
The dichotomy between John Phillips' decades of unspeakable debauchery and the sweet tones of his band is staggering.
Another huge one is how unhip they sound now and yet there was a time when they were the hippest band in the world, staging the Monterey Pop Festival, etc. But they were their own undoing because after Hendrix hit the stage at Monterey, these guys lost their cultural relevance like a switch flipped.
Silver Jews
4/5
Someone forgot to take their lithium! This album should come with an 800# for the Samaritans on it.
I ❤️ Silver Jews. Sad country and sad indie are two of my favorite styles and so this is like Reeses peanut butter cups for my ears: two great tastes that go great together! But they are also the GG Allin of low-fi country rock because you can tell it's going to end badly, in fact they're telling you directly, and it's hard to look away.
Hadn't heard this one before but played it three times in a row, I loved it so much. This album, like the others I have heard, would make a great test of a psychotherapist's professional ethics: how many songs does it take before the shrink is compelled to intervene?
Also, "I want to be like water if I can...because water doesn't give a damn" - what a great line! Their lyrics jazz me up to where it's distracting. Unexpected rhymes are good times! I can't wait to read what my poet sister thinks of them.
The Monkees
3/5
I understand this is the first album the band members wrote and played on. I like the playing and the record sounds really good but unremarkable Beatles wannabe. The songwriting is not great, especially the predictable lyrics.
Willie Nelson
4/5
Lovely album. Can't believe I wasn't familiar with it, but I look forward to making up for that!
The Doors
2/5
To me, this album has one great tune, Riders On The Storm, two good tunes, LA Woman and The WASP and the rest is filler. Not worthy of this list. I will admit , however, that this is one of my very favorite Morrisonisms:
Out here on the perimeter there are no stars
Out here we is stoned, immaculate - one of my favorite Doors lines.
"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom" seems to have been Jim Morrison's operating philosophy, but these late period Doors albums make me believe that the palace of wisdom isn't as much fun to listen to as may be to inhabit.
After the disappointment of this album I went and listened to "When The Music's Over," the 10 minute beast at the end of "Strange Days." It was like night and day in terms of creative energy. Cancel my subscription to the resurrection! Yes, please!
Joni Mitchell
4/5
Like a lot of Joni Mitchell's music, I choose to like this album. She doesn't always make it easy for me to like it and in other hands a lot of these sounds and pretensions would seriously irritate me. A lot of these songs have parts I really like and parts I really don't like, often right after one another. I share a home with one or more people who seriously hate her music. So I have to be strategic about when and where I listen to it. In fairness to my housemates, Joni Mitchell's a bit of a musician's musician, I think, and that you'll hear a lot of people like Jimmy Page waxing poetic about her amazing guitar playing, but not a lot of non-musicians waxing about her. I think that's part of why she largely been forgotten over the last 20 or so years.
Free Man In Paris is supposedly about David Geffen, who was her manager at the time and during a trip to France together was bitching to her about having put up with random calls from temperamental artists at all hours but in Paris where no one could reach him he was finally free and could relax a little. That's one tune I like all the way through without any major irritations. But my favorite story about Joni Mitchell and David Geffen was the time when he drove her to Woodstock and they got stuck in traffic and ended up just camping out in a motel room and watching the festival on TV where she wrote her song Woodstock that her boyfriend Graham Nash made famous with CSN a year or two later.
Herbie Hancock
5/5
Desert island selection. One of those records where every note feels celestially preordained. Herbie Hancock is an American treasure, though people like me who first encountered him when "Rockit" became a hit may understandably require some convincing (BTW that has aged better than you might have guessed).
The problem with records like this is what they spawned in terms of horribly inferior imitators. Definitely should have come with a DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME warning label for other musicians who picked it up.
The Kinks
5/5
❤️❤️❤️. Part of why I moved to the town where I live is that they have a centuries-old Village Improvement Society and so I assumed they continuously broadcasted this album on loudspeakers everywhere. Turns out I was wrong. Missed opportunity!
The Kinks are sort of The Beatles for life's losers. People like me and perhaps you. Their natural posture lyrically is to sing from the perspective of little people with very little agency over their lives and with a focus on how helplessly desperate they are. I think this is a big part of why they have for 6 decades now held a lot of appeal to punk rockers and cultural subversives generally, despite their super Britishness that you might think would limit their appeal to the UK.
I assume NY Doll and punk rock pioneer Johnny Thunders got his name from the song on this album. Also, in the only song written by underground guitar god Peter Laughner that escaped into anything close to the mainstream, Pere Ubu's "Life Stinks," they sing:
Life stinks
I'm seeing pink
I can't wink
I can't blink
I like the Kinks
I need a drink
I can't think
I like the Kinks
Life stinks.
Van Halen made hits out of two Kinks songs (You really got me and Where have all the good times gone). Now, admittedly VH was the opposite of underground - in fact they kinda defined above ground rock n roll for a good while there - but they do have the other thing that links all of these artists: deep alcoholism. The Kinks are great drinking music, and they were legendary drinkers themselves. Perhaps still are...
Anyway, this album is peak Kinks and if you don't love it then you should be pleased with what a well-adjusted person you are. Bravo! I am happy for you. But get the fuck outta here - your smile is bringing me down. And be a good chap and buy a round before you go, pls. Cheers!
Elvis Presley
2/5
Not really a fan of Elvis and this big budget and slightly souless production didn't change that. The move away from rock n roll did not serve him well, in my view.
Neil Young & Crazy Horse
3/5
A fun romp with old buddies and a strategically valuable album if you worked in a record store in 1990 and you needed a psychic cleanse after your boss who inherited the store by accident and didn't even like music played the new Celine Dion.
However, it's not even in the top 1001 Neil Young albums, let alone worthy of serious consideration for this list. But I do love Why Do I Keep Fucking Up - who among us hasn't asked themselves that?
Ray Charles
3/5
To me, it's hard for large musical ensembles to produce compelling music. I much prefer small groups.
Genesis
2/5
My favorite Genesis album and I can't make it all the way through. Carpet Crawlers and the title track are my favorite tunes but this is not my jam, sorry.
Dolly Parton
4/5
Fun album from 3 legends backed by an all-star band. I'm sorry I was too busy to listen to it all the way through before the day ended.
Bruce Springsteen
3/5
I try and I try and I'm still mystified as to why Bruce just doesn't do it for me. This was his best shot - I love intimate music and he's clearly talented but it almost always misses my heart and hits my spleen instead. It wears me out trying to get something special out of his music. Next!
Jimi Hendrix
5/5
There's a classic game theory experiment where you agree to meet someone tomorrow in NYC but you don't discuss a specific time or location. The experiment has been repeated many times + overwhelming majority of participants end up successfully meeting (spoiler alert: they meet at the clock inside Grand Central at noon). My wife knows about this project and asked me what the album of the day was and I told her it was the greatest album ever made. She thought about it for a minute and said Ziggy Stardust. I told her this album is older than that. She thought about it for another minute and correctly guessed Electric Ladyland. She's not even that much of a Hendrix fan, too.
On the first Experience album Jimi asked Have You Ever Been Experienced? And here on the last Experience album he asks Have You Ever Been To Electric Ladyland? He really wants to know if have you ever been this or that! Electric Ladyland was a studio that Jimi built with his own money and then used to record this album. This whole album has a feel has a feel of a musical playground. It is unusually sequenced - very few albums would have a 10 minute jam on side one. Meanwhile, The pacing of sides 3 and 4 keep building and building and building. It's really quite incredible. If you've only listened to this record all the way through, suggest you give it a shot from the middle to the end sometime. It's really spectacular, not just the pacing of the tunes but how they all fit together and themes come back and forth, culminating in a performance of all along the watchtower that I dare say even its songwriter Bob Dylan would probably admit is far beyond and more compelling than anything Dylan himself could do. I have to also mention that the guitar playing on this record is outrageous. There are things he's doing on this that still no one has been able to reproduce. Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix, Jaco Pastorius...these are the rare stylists on their chosen instruments that are unique to the point that they practically create their own genres. It's a level of artistry I find incredibly inspiring.
Back at the beginning of the album, Jimi sings "Make love, make love, make love"...he means this literally and universally in a way very few people do. Did you ever hear about the Plaster Caster Girls? Groupie/Artists who made dozens of plaster replicas of male rock stars' penises. Legend has it that when Hendrix was given the mold he "made love" to it until, errr, completion.
Also, in concert he would describe his song "Manic Depression" as a story about a guy who wished he could make love to his guitar - given that he was known to sleep alongside his guitar fairly frequently, I am pretty sure it's straight autobiography. May sound strange but it's of a piece with the story of when his dad Al knew he should buy Jimi his first guitar - he asked child Jimi to sweep up their apartment while Al was at work and when he got back, the floor was covered in loose broomsticks because Jimi went wild playing the broom like a guitar. After he finished whipping Jimi, he went to the guitar store. Thank you, Al!
Billie Holiday
4/5
Lovely
Frank Sinatra
2/5
No idea why this is on this list. To my ears, both Sinatra and Jobim come out diminished by this disappointment.
Massive Attack
3/5
Had a Pavlovian response to the opening groove. Haven't heard it in 30 years but still subtly makes me want to overpay for a haircut (ie, sounds like something you might hear in a hip salon in 1991), but also a little boring and occasionally pointless-sounding. It's funny that a record this laid back could be something of a shot heard 'round the world, but it was the first "trip hop" record for many of us and it put Tricky on the map, too.
"Five Man Army" uses the same killer Al Green sample that Eric B & Rakim used on "Mahogany" - my friends and I used to drool over that sick syncopated beat - and then they layer cool dub reggae ideas over it. That's pretty much trip-hop in a nutshell. Anyway, I totally forgot about that tune - thanks to this project for reminding me, but if I'm honest, it's unlikely I will remember to play this album a week from now.
Fairport Convention
3/5
I started out very pleasantly surprised and loving this record - finally I found some Richard Thompson that I liked! But by the end the songs started sounding the same and I was sick of Sandy Denny's voice. It's not entirely their fault, however, as I noticed the version I was listening to had 2 extra songs tacked on the end. Perhaps without those it would have ended before it wore me out.
As a side note, this part of the wikipedia entry is like the opposite of a humble brag: "It was voted number 254 in the third edition of Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums (2000)." - - - I mean, third try's the charm and all but what was so special about the first two editions that it didn't make the cut?!?
Dirty Projectors
4/5
In America we have this expression that comes from baseball: "out of left field" which means from an unexpected place. I wanted to write just a four word review using that phrase, but I hate it when people use sports metaphors and so I felt I should provide a little context for anyone who would find that expression to be, well, from out of left field.
A Tribe Called Quest
5/5
I want to live in the multiverse where the "Native Tongues" style of Tribe, De La, Monie Love and Jungle Bros ended up defining 90s hip hop instead of gangsta rap.
The ratio of great hip hop singles to great hip hop albums is roughly 4,080:1. It's very hard to do but these guys pull it off - on their debut no less, and the first of three great albums in a row for them - with self-effacing, creative rhymes delivered with a laid back flow full of youthful charm over clever beats that act like a tour of the pop culture my generation grew up with.
Also, pour one out for Phife Dog, the Five Foot Assassin who left us way too soon.
Shuggie Otis
3/5
Feels like they missed their calling and shoulda been jazz fusion band.
Sonic Youth
3/5
Some high highs but overall to me, Daydream Nation is an awkward and sometimes ponderous transition from the underground era that ended with what may be my favorite SY album, Sister, and the major label period that began with the excellent Goo. I would have given this more stars if there were fewer tracks between the classic "Teenage Riot" and humorous ZZ Top tribute "Eliminator, Jr" that bookend this album. This didn't need to be a double album.
In any case, I don't think SY is going to age well, because they make so much more sense as live band than on these records. You lose a lot of the sense of humor and it's replaced with a smartass rich kidz from Connecticut type vibe. Also, you have to play this super duper loud to fully appreciate the nuances of the guitars and who is really going to do that?
Beastie Boys
5/5
I have to laugh every time I put this album on because I'm reminded how I had them on such a high pedestal that when this came out I couldn't help but be disappointed. I was disappointed because their previous albums took huge and unpredictable leaps from what came before and this is more or less an extension of the ground they covered on the album just before it, Check Your Head.
I cannot relate to that feeling at all at this point. I don't require anymore that my favorite musicians break new ground every time out. Now all I ask is that their music is good. And the tunes and jams on here are damn good.
But how does that translate into stars? Check Your Head, the album before, is a clear five star album to me. This album is not quite as intense. I think the songwriting is not as catchy and I don't like all of q-tip's n-bombs on his guest appearance on the title track, which felt at the time to me like a desperate nod to the gangster rap that had taken over.
On the other hand, that would make this by far the best four-star album in this 1001 list. Fuck!
Country Joe & The Fish
3/5
"Important" but not very good. This list better include Easter everywhere by the 13th floor elevators because that record actually is important to the history of psychedelic music and it is good.
Grateful Dead
3/5
One of the better studio albums for The Dead. But they aren't really known for their recordings...I had some time so ended up doing a tune by tune rundown as I was listening to it:
It's sacrilegious to say this - pour one out for Phil, playing great bass and singing awfully here, I'm told about his recently deceased father, which I guess makes this even more poignant given his recent passing - but I don't like Box of Rain. They played this one of the two times I saw them and my friends made it clear I was supposed to feel blessed for being so lucky. Nah
Friend of the Devil is a hauntingly beautiful theme song that captures Jerry's tragically tormented spirit better than probably anything else he's done.
Sugar Magnolia is a great tune but this version feels flat compared to any of the hundreds (thousands?) of the kickass live performances you can find in about ten seconds in YouTube. Also, Bobby sorta creeps me out after an old friend claimed that he hit on her backstage when she was tripping balls at 14 or 25. She would lie sometimes but she was also a huge Deadhead and seemed seriously conflicted about it decades later. I don't know if I believe her or not but if you look at Bobby and imagine he's a pervert his moustache takes on a whole new resonance.
Operator doesn't really do it for me. Another case where the studio version feels flat. In this case it's Pigpen, in what I imagine must have been one of his last studio appearances.
Candyman is great but again, more interesting live, when they would stretch out in interesting ways. Jerry's guitar solo (I think pedal steel, possibly through an organ speaker?!? Not sure tbh) is awesome though. What a tone!
Ripple. Aww! How can you not love this hippie anthem? The best thing Jane's Addiction did was a killer cover of this. Hard to fuck it up if you mean it. https://youtu.be/ibfykjinvh8?si=yYKd5pUAZhlz6WCD
Brokedown Palace. Another tune you're supposed to like but bores the shit outta me.
Same with the next two.
And Truckin's a classic. Don't even try to pretend. I liked to imagine it was a tribute to Hunter S Thompson. The band sounds really good - loose and groovy - and the singing doesn't ruin it.
Solomon Burke
4/5
Never really checked out Solomon Burke before and now regret not having done it sooner.
The xx
2/5
Listened to this without any context while cooking with my spouse and by the end we were both making fun of it.
Dead Kennedys
4/5
Classic! Though I do hate Jello Biafra's weirdly warbling voice and he's way too loud in the mix.
Creedence Clearwater Revival
5/5
Great album, with unexpected depth if you always knew them as a singles band.
Goldfrapp
3/5
Better than I expected but I could easily name 100 albums not on this list that should be ahead of this.
Derek & The Dominos
2/5
Heard the radio hits but never the album tracks before. After one listen I'm ready to call this my favorite Clapton record.
Duane Allman rips this apart and seems to inspire EC, too. Key To The Highway was probably my favorite because Duane really stretches out and seems to drive EC to new heights as they trade solos.
The cover of Hendrix's Little Wing severely bummed me out - they sound like they're trying to do something monumental but it comes across as heavy handed and hysterical where Jimi was light and loving. Guys, it's LITTLE wing, not gigantic wing. Their wing is enormous and leaden and there's no way it could ever catch air.
And they were very smart to put Thorn Tree In The Garden last. It is truly terrible. I'm rooting for his ex-lover to come back and thorn him to death. On the other hand, it is aptly titled because the sweet relief when it finally ends is reminiscent of removing a splinter.
Cee Lo Green
2/5
This isn't even in the top 1001 albums Cee-Lo Green is on! Ok, I'm exaggerating, but this feels like a totally random pick. I would have gone with Gnarls Barkley's St Elsewhere for my Cee-Lo selection.
Prince
5/5
Listened to it twice, then went back to 1999 and then found a live recording from the tour promoting Purple Rain. Turned into a Prince day, and it was a better day for it!
I think either this or MJ's Thriller have to be the #1 album of the 1980s, and while Michael arguably came out of the gate harder, P.Y.T. just doesn't sound the same anymore.
And Thriller was borderline schlocky and cool kids were dismissive. But nobody dismissed Prince and Purple Rain. When MJ wanted ripping guitar on Beat It he called Eddie Van Halen. When Prince wanted some shredding on When Doves Cry or the title track, he just grabbed his axe. MJ wanted hits, whereas Prince had a vision and it was so distinctive and so fully realized that it sucked you in. MJ went to the mountain, but Prince made the mountain come to him.
The Sabres Of Paradise
3/5
In the first few seconds I was terrified. This is a novelty album but over time it became better.
Radiohead
5/5
Soundtrack to a fever dream. This is exactly what it sounds like every time you find yourself hurtling down the highway crazy fast late at night and then rolling over into an empty dawn at the very bottom of Monument Valley, just you and the sun and the towering rocks, and then the sand in your hand turns into the change you are desperately counting for train fare before it leaves the station.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that early am solo wake-n-bake with this on headphones is a real trip...if you want it to be. I think people who aren't infatuated with this band might be confused about why this album they maybe never heard of with no songs they recognize is even on this list. But the mood it creates and the way the sounds are almost thematically organized - not the melodies but the tones and techniques - and builds its own self-contained world. This is possibly the only rock album that I would be interested to hear a symphony orchestra perform. Weird Fishes/Arpeggi is the standout track for me that kinda summarizes the whole thing, but this entire album is best heard as a single piece of music if you can. And stoned alone with headphones is a good approach.
I paid $0.01 when this came out because they offered it as a pay what you wish and I still feel a little guilty about it. Sorry, fellas. Ya done good with this one!
Sade
3/5
The urtext of the Acid Jazz movement.
Sexy stylings but boring enough that if you didn't make your move before the end of side one you might miss out.
Mike Oldfield
2/5
Listening to this as a standalone piece of music as it was intended, my mind wanders into questions about how much technology has changed music and our perceptions of it. In the early 1970's when it was incredibly expensive to record and distribute music, this kind of a random epic fantasy from a precocious teen was incredibly rare and widely celebrated. Now, with low cost digital recording technology and youtube, it's ubiquitous.
The contemporary version of Mike Oldfield is perhaps Bo Burnham, and I prefer Bo, because when you're creating in land of great abundance of readily available music such as we live in today, the challenge shifts from production to marketing, and the only way to gain attention is to make great use of the attention you are already receiving, typically by offering worthwhile content (literally, worth the listener's while).
Also, any pretense that Tubular Bells rises above pure novelty is shattered about 2/3 of the way into side one, when a quite pleased with itself voice starts introducing each instrument as it reappears. Hey, Mike was a teenager, and lord knows you don't want to hear what I was doing at his age so we cut him some slack. But we don't have to keep listening to it, let alone revere it.
p.s. The second star is for the truly excellent use of excerpts of this in the terrifying movie, "The Exorcist."
Kendrick Lamar
3/5
No doubt he's a super talented lyricist with some very interesting ideas and collaborating here with some solid producers, but every time he says bitch or nigger my soul takes on more water. Great pacing to this album, but ultimately this music is inside baseball to the extreme, made for people other than me.
Malcolm McLaren
2/5
A very UK-centric pick. Maybe the album was more important in the UK and I do believe that a case can be made for Double Dutch or/and Buffalo Gals being on a list of singles to hear before you die. They were "important" enough 12" singles that I remember selling them when I worked at a record store several years after they came out, but I don't recall ever carrying or special ordering the album. I do like the cover art, though.
Terence Trent D'Arby
3/5
(1) Lord, I hate 1980s pop production styles. The sound of these drums makes me want to smash a pair of Oakley sunglasses.
(2) I discovered as I was searching for this recording that the artist eventually went back to his birth name. I feel like that is a positive sign about our progress as a species.
Talking Heads
5/5
I'm looking forward to reading the reviews of people who gave this fewer than five stars, because I wonder what it was like discovering this record from some source other than growing up with an older sibling who owned it and played it a lot? Surely able to listen to it more objectively than I can.
I can't help but think about the tween who fantasized about one day being old enough to to find my own city to live in, and who was shocked by the idea of heaven being a place where nothing ever happens, and who was truly terrified by the sound effects on "Drugs" (confession: when I was home alone, I would usually pick up the needle after "Electric Guitar" because like The Beatles' "For The Benefit of Mr Kite" and Black Sabbath's "Iron Man" and Jimi Hendrix's "Are You Experienced?" this tune scared the shit out of me and even though if you asked me I would tell you that I didn't believe in the devil, deep down I was pretty sure that playing one of these songs at the wrong time could open the gates of hell and summon a demon right into our living room. In any event, certainly not worth the risk.).
If you asked me which Talking Heads studio album was my favorite, I would likely say either '77 or Remain in Light. However, upon reflection, this one somehow pulls off a wild balancing act of sounds that are experimental and yet catchy, paired with lyrics that are somehow weird and also relatable.
Big Star
3/5
I feel like this record is celebrated mainly because it was made during a low point in Alex Chilton's somewhat unfulfilled artistic life and that people like to romanticize his struggles, sort of like admiring Bukowski for his drinking. People want to hear something punk or avant garde in this record but really I think it's just an incomplete project that the record company pieced together after the musicians abandoned it. I'm not sure it's even appropriate to call it a Big Star album - I think that was something the record company did for marketing purposes.
Ok, now that all of that is out of my system, I'm listening to this more today than I ever had combined up until now and enjoying it. I wonder why Chilton abandoned it and what it would have sounded like if he hadn't. The songwriting feels unfocused and maybe uninspired - hence the numerous covers, I suspect. I do like "Take Care" a lot, though. That's one of those haunting tunes where I feel like I heard it and loved it before but have no idea when or where. A cover by someone else, or the cosmic unconsciousness, or maybe I've listened to this record before and forgotten about it?
Alex Chilton's an odd cat. A sort of a cautionary tale to me - there is an expression in the business world, "value will out," meaning that eventually, if something overlooked is valuable, it will eventually get discovered and get its due.
Not so with art. Art is contingent. The cemeteries are full of potentially great artists we've never heard of, because of the circumstances they were born into or perhaps because their own self-destructive tendencies got the better of them before they could fully express themselves.
Or other reasons. Who knows, but as they say the bird is on the wing, so I must stop procrastinating and end this review and get back to whatever it is I'm supposed to be doing.
Def Leppard
3/5
I feel like this record has a lot to answer for in how influential it sounds like it must have been on 80s hair metal. I didn't want to like it but "Photograph" is pretty good. Not as good as Ringo Starr's song by the same name but still respectable and I love it that in both the singer is essentially making the same complaint.
Is their name a tribute to Led Zeppelin?
p.s. If this record were made after 9/11 I doubt they would have gone with this cover art.
Kate Bush
3/5
Better than I expected but still not my bag. I want to like Kate Bush but her music doesn't let me.
The Police
4/5
A guilty pleasure. Possibly the most pretentious #1 album of all-time?
The last track, Murder By Numbers sounds like a line in the studio one take wonder that back in the day few people knew about because it was only on the cassette version. That was back when record companies had so much power that they'd f*** with you on format to get you to buy the record on tape and on CD and on record. Aholes. Anyway, great tune that showcases their chops.
Kelela
3/5
I don't want to take her apart and I didn't listen to the whole thing but what I listened to was ok but not as interesting as I'd hoped.
Nitin Sawhney
2/5
This sounds like what plays endlessly in one of those hotel lobbies that has a water dispenser with cucumbers in it and has a house aroma, like W or some shit.
Beastie Boys
5/5
The growth these guys display here from the adolescent joyride of Licensed To Ill is stunning. Off the top of my head, I can't think of another band that grew this much from one album to another. Beatles grew maybe even more in a similar timeframe but they recorded so frequently that to our ears now it's a more gradual evolution over 5-6 albums. Paul's Boutique was literally the next recording project for da Boyz.
They're still twerpy goofs but one (small) notch more mature and with a broader view of the world. The beats are HARD and the layers of samples on top of samples were very different from how DJs put beats together prior to this. They weren't the only ones heading in this direction - De La Soul's densely delightful debut was right around this same time - and Paul's Boutique didn't make the biggest splash when it first came out, but eventually it got its due as one of the very most creative and, over time, influential hip hop albums ever.
It's also worth mentioning the growth from this album to the one that followed it, Check Your Head, was similarly stunning. That's a 1-2-3 punch I would put right up there with any band or recording artist ever in terms of sequential artistic development. Behind all the jokes and hi jinks are 3 fellas who took their work a lot more seriously than it sounds!
Laura Nyro
3/5
I tried so hard to love this and I can hear her influence in what came after but it just didn't connect with me. This album is a good example of how sometimes I wish we could give each album a week instead of a day. Then again, we might not make it to the end of this list before we die, so there's that...
OutKast
4/5
I love their singles but their albums never really hold my attention.
Paul Simon
4/5
In 1988 I took an excellent songwriting class at Berklee College of Music. It was taught by Pat Pattison:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Pattison
We spent a weird amount of time on this album. I had never heard it or even of it prior to the class but it was fun to be forced to focus on it so intently. So nostalgic for me to listen to this now but also what I like about this is that it was made in a weird gap period that has been pretty well overlooked but nevertheless he was still reaching and producing even though relatively few people gave a shot at this time and I respect that. My favorite tunes are The Late Great Johnny Ace, Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After The War and the title track.
Jefferson Airplane
4/5
Your friends, they treat you like a guest...That actually sounds pretty good to me!
Shows how much our society has changed that back in the day being treated like a guest was a bad thing. Now I wish any of my friends would treat me that well!
I like side two more than side one. Never been a huge fan of this band but Jorma is a helluva finger picking guitar player (see: Embryonic Journey) and I dig Grace Slick for being a freak for like 80+ years now.
I can't think of her or even this band without think of a random line from the Camper Van Beethoven song "Turquoise Jewelry" : "Take off that jump suit - you look like Grace Slick!"
Stan Getz
4/5
I would say this is the only 1960s jazz bossa nova record you need. If you had a collection of 50 records, this would be a fine one to have in there.
Stan Getz was one of the all-time greats. He was as hip as they came and was known for his uniquely beautiful tone, which was somehow both rich and breathy at the same time.
And Charlie Byrd is sounding really good on guitar here with some cool interplay with Getz, on Desafinado, for example.
Love this album! I command you!
Destiny's Child
4/5
Somehow I never heard the whole album before and maybe now this is my favorite Beyonce?
On the first song, it sounds like the backup singers are singing "I farted" - that's pretty funny. Adequate BeeGees cover later on. I like the anthems way more than the ballads.
The Byrds
2/5
I don't like this very much. They Byrds were more IMPORTANT than they were GOOD, in my opinion, especially in these pre LSD years.
Happy Mondays
4/5
Gives me an ecstacy flashback listening to this. Shaun Ryder at the top of his game.
The Undertones
4/5
Best Irish punk band ever? ONLY Irish punk band ever? Either way, hard not to like.
3/5
I salute this but don't really like it very much. Also, seems like the censored version is the one that made it to the streaming era...is nothing sacred anymore?!?
Thin Lizzy
4/5
Reaching middle age and the self acceptance that hopefully comes with it is what changed my take on Thin Lizzy from a guilty pleasure to a proud pleasure. The Boys Are Back, baby!
Marvin Gaye
3/5
Not his best, in my opinion. Boring at times
Stereo MC's
3/5
Great breath of fresh air when it came out but a little boring to today's ears.
Leonard Cohen
4/5
Listening to this makes me want to develop a unified field theory for male singer-songwriters of the 60s-70s. I am envisioning a Venn diagram with circles for Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and Townes Van Zandt. Although I have to admit that where the three circles overlap is an area I don't like very much. I guess what I am trying to say is that all three of these guys are irritating to me in the much the same way - bad singing, obscure lyrics and occasionally odd musical settings. The kind of artist that you're told you're supposed to admire, and often I do, but music that requires explanation or backstory is fundamentally flawed.
Animal Collective
3/5
Animal Collective was really big when I was busy having kids and going to school while working and I have always wanted to check them out and was excited for this opportunity.
I generally real soft spot for this type of psychedelic rock-pop but this one didn't gel with me. Sometimes music takes more than one listen for me to get it so I will try again...probably. Am more likely to try other AC records first.
Slint
3/5
For some people, this is an incredibly important record. I'm not one of those people, but I do appreciate their appreciation of it. I always loved this album cover for reasons that can't fully explain on the music to be pretty interesting, but not quite where my soul is at these days.
Marianne Faithfull
4/5
The xx
4/5
Lovely! No context for this one but none need.
Sly & The Family Stone
4/5
One of my favorite Sly albums, capturing a trail blazing band at their peak. Their Woodstock performance a few months later is one of my favorites and makes a great companion to this.
Fun Lovin' Criminals
3/5
Better than I expected but also eminently forgettable
Shack
3/5
Pretty good but I already have enough of these kinds of records and this one didn't do enough to stand out.
Björk
2/5
This series is souring me on Bjork, sorry to say.
5/5
This was the album that turned me into a Dylan fan. The version of Visions of Johanna is absolutely haunting in a way that was never captured on Blonde on Blonde or anywhere else, at least to my ears. Listening to that with headphones and closed eyes is sublime.
Public Enemy
4/5
I had kinda tuned out of PE by the time this one came out so I'm pretty psyched to have this chance to revisit it. Holds up better than most early 90s hip hop. I read a Chuck D interview in The Source probably a few years after this came out and he said their ambition when they were first starting out was to be The Clash for hip hop. I would say this is their Combat Rock - has a couple of undeniably great singles (Fight The Power, 911 Is A Joke, Brothers Gonna Work It Out) but mostly felt at the time like they had jumped the shark and yet in retrospect that was a bit unfair and this is better than most bands' best album.
Random anecdote, not really relevant but I can't help myself: Around the time this record came out, I found myself catty corner from Flavor Flav as pedestrians at an intersection in Santa Cruz on a random sunny weekday morning. It was impossible to not instantly recognize him because he was wearing a bright yellow Abe Lincoln-style stovepipe hat and had a large matching wall clock hanging from a gigantic chain around his neck. I almost involuntarily shouted at him and he gave me a big jolly wave consistent with the vibe of his outfit as we were both crossing the street. He was heading in the opposite direction so unfortunately our meeting ended there, but I always admired his commitment to his role as well as his eagerness to engage with civilians like me!
Killing Joke
4/5
A+ album cover and great band name. Post Punk is one of the greatest rock subgenres because you get the anarchist spirit but you can dance to it. They sound a little like Gang Of Four playing Cabaret Voltaire covers. Dare I say it but this drummer gets wobbly sometimes, though I guess that's part of the charm.
The Pharcyde
3/5
Lots to like here from some really talented musicians but like so many hip hop records of the early 90s, too much graphic and juvenile bs for me. I like all the references to other hip hop bands, like BDP, PE and De La Soul. These guys have good taste!
p.s. it was only from listening to this just now that I fully recognized that The Pharcyde and Insane Clown Posse are two unrelated bands. For the last thirty years they have inexplicably occupied the same cubby hole in my mind.
Adam & The Ants
3/5
Played this album a thousand times in my bedroom. It's always very interesting when musicians who ate their own world and sing about it like ant music and Dirk wears white socks. It's good, but I'm pretty sure I could have lived the full life without having ever heard this album.
However, seeing him live was a formative experience but not how I expected. It was on the don't drink,.don't smoke,.what do you do to her at the Springfield Civic center during hockey season so they had these giant plywood boards down over the ice. The Romantics opened up and they won me over even though I wasn't a fan of the stuff you heard on the radio particularly.
Like any self-respecting teenager, I was very committed to getting a tour shirt to wear the next day to school to brag to all my buddies. Unfortunately, the only shirts they had available were of a naked torso of adamant writhing in a very promiscuous way. At that point I decided it was more important to me to be seen amongst my jr high peers as being hip then as being heterosexual. And I've never looked back but it may explain why it took me so long to get a girlfriend....
New Order
2/5
I want to like New Order but this record didn't help the cause. I found it a little boring.
Santana
4/5
A classic, recorded a few months after this bands' thrilling Woodstock set featuring their teenage drummer in all his glory. It also gives you a sense of the power of interpretation to consider that Black Magic Woman was originally a Fleetwood Mac tune.
Joe Ely
4/5
More than any other, this album explains why The Clash hired Joe Ely to open for their London Calling tour. What a show that musta been!
This album is about 10 years ahead of its time with its sounds and rhythms and genres. Ely and the other Flatlanders alumni like Butch Hancock and Jimmie Dale Gilmore deserve more recognition. I will complain that this version of their classic Tonight I Think I'm Going To Go Downtown is not nearly as good as when Jimmie Dale Gilmore sings it. Still, glad to see this album on the list.
Heaven 17
4/5
Heard of 'em but never heard 'em until today. Delighted to read about them and learn more about the roots of Human League.
Overall I like this very much and it's much better to me than most synth pop from the early 80s. However, it's weird to have this much bass virtuosity front and center for the first third of the album and for the bass player to be some random studio musician who was not considered a part of the band. I call this The Doors problem, where technically the band does not have a bass player but they have a session musician play some bass parts on their records and they end up being important to the music. Heaven 17 seems to have this problem worse than The Doors, however and it's also amateurish that it sounds like it's presented in the order it was recorded, and that they ran out of money for session guys after four tunes.
I like it better than most 80s synth pop but it's not an accident that Human League is remembered better.
Robert Wyatt
4/5
First time hearing. This you definitely have to be in the mood but if you are it's pretty cool. Top notch 70s British hippie psych.
Not sure what I can really compare it to but it is very much of its time. People don't make music like this anymore. Mostly that's actually a good thing if I'm honest, but when people do this well, it's really cool.
More than anything else, with this album, so deep into their careers, Bono definitively proves that he defeated Sting as the preeminent single-name white Celtic rock singer to emerge from the punk's wake.
The first two tunes are impossible not to crank up on your car radio and sing-along to at the top of your lungs.
Unfortunately by about the 4th or 5th tune, this album starts sounding like a parody of U2.
I have no idea why this record is on this list. I like U2 best when they're singing about Catholic shit I don't understand. War, definitely. Boy, Under a Blood Red Sky, Unforgettable Fire, sure. Maybe even Joshua Tree if you're of the persuasion. After that it's hard to argue they were anything more than an inconsistent singles band.
Side note. It's interesting to me how many of the lyrics of their songs are second person scolding. I wonder who Bono thinks he's singing to?
Fatboy Slim
4/5
Maybe the best DJ album ever? Not saying a lot cuz DJs are usually much better at producing singles than albums, but still, this is much more musically entertaining than your typical DJ album. I could totally see if from a certain place and time finding this to be the soundtrack of a delightfully misspent youth.
The Afghan Whigs
1/5
I remember when these guys were indie darlings and this record was particularly celebrated. The cover always stood out but I was focused on other things and never checked them out until today.
Was expecting more of the jangly ironic installectual indie rock I love, not this post grunge wannabe emo. Not my bag at all.
I actually turned it off about 20 seconds into the second song when he sang "Cause she wants love, and I still want to fuck." Not on my dime, asshole! Slamming the off button was pure reflex and felt very good to do, like removing a splinter, but after a while I decided I owed it to this 1001 project to go back and listen to the whole album.
This is very much not my kind of music. I am actively rooting for harm to befall the protagonist of these songs. I am also a little bit afraid he's going to slip a roofie into my drink. Apparently this is a breakup record? Well, all I can say is I know whose side I'm on.
Postscript: Every time my mind wanders and I forget that I am forcing myself to listen to this, I turn it off. Three times now I have had to remind myself I am supposed to play this pile o shite album. I can't do it. I probably made it halfway through before I decided life was too short and no can do I.
Ramblin' Jack Elliott
4/5
Heard of him but never heard him. A real treat for fans of the American folk tradition. I do wish he had tuned his guitar between takes! ;)
Portishead
4/5
Not the one trick ponies I thought they were. Impressed!
Tim Buckley
3/5
Wow, I thought I hated Tim Buckley but I am digging this! Get On Top almost feels like the intersection of Steely Dan and Pere Ubu.
Drive-By Truckers
1/5
Didn't make it all the way through, the lyrics bothered me so much. The music was boring and broke no new ground, but my biggest problem was their tired takes on The South. I had to listen to Southern Culture On The Skids to clean my mind after.
Motörhead
5/5
The sound of extra chunky meth crystals cutting up the inside of your nose.
There is nothing in this world more ROCK N ROLL than this album. This album is the most ROCK N ROLL an album can be. This is the summit of Mount ROCK.
I dare you to play it quietly. I dare you to try to do something mundane while this is playing. We're only halfway through side one here on a sleepy Sunday afternoon and already I've been compelled to snort a line of bleach and put my fist through some drywall.
You know I'm born to lose
And gambling's for fools
But that's the way I like it, baby
I don't want to live forever
And don't forget the joker
Motorhead is the motherlode of the satanic deathwish vein that has run through rock from its first pickings. Playing Chicken with the devil. Lemme's living to 70 forced particle physicists to revise their Standard Model. Usually people who collect Nazi memorabilia piss me off, but Lemme is the exception that proves the rule. It would be disappointing if he didn't collect Nazi shit.
Another town I've left behind
Another drink, completely blind
Another hotel I can't find
Another backstage pass for you
Another tube of superglue
Another border to get through
I'm driving like a maniac
Driving my way to hell and back
Pass the superglue and all hail a TRUE ROCK GOD!
Dr. Octagon
3/5
I want to love Kool Keith's music more than I actually do. I'm glad he's in my world and hip hop would be a million times better if he wasn't such an outlier but I don't play his records very often if I'm honest.
Rufus Wainwright
4/5
I need to check this dude and this album out more. I had time to listen to this once and it was very late at night but I was fascinated by it. A little bit of a throwback to the '70s singer-songwriter approach and his voice sounds a little irritating to me at some times. Bud, it seemed like he had some really interesting ideas worth exploring further.
LCD Soundsystem
3/5
I dig LCD. Not my favorite of theirs but it's still pretty good. Would have been four stars but the last tune should have been half as long.
Still, I have a spiritual problem with this band that makes it hard for me to fully commit. I recall the day probably ten or more years ago when I opened the New York Times Styles Section and read how the frontman committed a Crime Against Rock ... he built a hipster hotel with fancy pants restaurant in Williamsburg. That's not something that someone who hopes they die before they get old does when they receive a windfall. Jimi Hendrix built a recording studio in Greenwich Village and then practically moved in. Keith Moon bought antique cars and drove them into his swimming pool. We don't even know what Keith Richards did with his money, and neither does he. THAT'S how you're supposed to do it! Not this "invest in your future" bullshit. I think I read that Wilco refurbished an old resort hotel in the Catskills. Oy vey!
The Killers
3/5
Mr Brightside is a classic guilty pleasure but the rest isn't particularly interesting to me.
Wilco
5/5
If you got in my car between 1996 and 2001 there was a 40% chance this album was playing. I have had so many formative life experiences while this was blasting in the background that they compete with each other when I close my eyes and reminisce. So no, I cannot review this objectively.
My favorite Wilco album and "important" in the sense that it showed a non grunge way forward for indie rock. Probably also one of the first and best of the "alt-country" subgenre - if you can't hear its striking originality it's only because it is a Rosetta Stone of Americana music. Also, the very rare double album that uses the expanded format effectively, giving its sonic playground a depth very few attain.
Depressed about being a self loathing, self medicated loser, where their later albums are about having survived and learning to like themselves. I prefer the former. Also, you get multi instrumentalist Jay Bennett at the peak of his powers before his tragic downfall.
A record store friend gave me a promo copy when this first came out and I knew of their previous bands and work but never got into it that much. And the first song on here irritated me because I hate people crying about being misunderstood but the rest of side one quickly makes up for it and then some. By the time you are on side three you start wondering if you should find a way to put this on an infinite loop.
The Slits
5/5
Classic og punk reggae. Nothing to do with the four to the floor, chugging guitar-style of punk but then again they almost make the Ramones sound reactionary. I get the impression their performances were ecstatic.
From the second you see their name and the album cover you know that these guys are very weird. It always caught my eye as a tween at the record store - breasts! - but it's sort of a trap because you look closer and there is nothing sexy about the photo and actually it's sort of menacing and you wonder WTF they are up to. Are they in a cult? Is this a still from a never-completed o.g. Star Trek episode where they get beamed down to an Amazon planet? Am I going to get hurt?
The visuals are very much of a piece with the scratchy guitar, randomish piano, heavy dub drums n bass and pitch optional Teutonic vocals that maybe could be described as Niconic and Ono-informed and within which the entirety of Bjork's career can fit into an insignificant corner. Often I don't really know what's she's singing literally but I feel like I know exactly what she means and I'm like fuck yeah!
While at first you're struck by how it sounds so loose and live and quasi competent as to maybe have been improvised by amateurs, this album actually rewards close repeated listening. The creative energy and youthful gumption is fantastic. I think singer Ari Up was 17 or 18 and others were even younger.
We really need someone to make an Ari Up biopic. Go read her Wikipedia entry if you aren't familiar with her story. She was Johnny Rotten's misbehaving step daughter, for G-d's sake! No one writing or reading my review here lived a life 1/100th as interesting and uncompromising as Ari Up. Very much consistent with this music.
Finally, we have to discuss how part time Slit Neneh Cherry is the step daughter of legendary free jazz pioneer and frequent Ornette Coleman collaborator Don Cherry. You are surely familiar with her massive global hit maybe ten years later, "Buffalo Stance" (based on a sample of "Buffalo Gals" - the unlikely club hit from Malcolm McLaren, the one-time manager of Ari's stepdad Johnny Rotten's Sex Pistols. Weird how everything here is so closely connected! And what's with all the musical step dads?). Neneh was like 15-16 on this record. Anyway, I always related to free jazz and punk rock in similar ways and so these threads coming together seems fitting if not inevitable.
Bert Jansch
4/5
Not familiar with him before but very impressed.
Harry Nilsson
4/5
We used to sit around in our bathrobes, smoking weed and drinking coffee and speculating that on the cover Harry is holding in a hit he just took from the pipe in his left hand.
This is the album that got Harry invited to co-pilot John Lennon's 18-month Lost Weekend of 1973-74. I shudder at the thought of how many Brandy Alexanders this record has to answer for.
Credit where it's due: A+ title and A+ cover art. Strong backing band.
Quentin Tarantino immortalized Coconut in Reservoir Dogs. Jump Into The Fire, with its excellent extended bass flatulence, and Gotta Get Up, with its get up and go, are really good, too. Don't care for Without You at all but so it goes.
Fugazi
2/5
13 Songs is the only Fugazi you have to hear before you die.
The Psychedelic Furs
3/5
I like the Furs but never felt like this one held up as well as the records before it or after it. Also, am I the only one who felt like John Hughes should have listened to the lyrics closer before making a movie around Pretty In Pink?
Tito Puente
4/5
Have yet to hear a bad Tito Puente album
Femi Kuti
3/5
Way better than Julian Lennon and not as good as Sean Lennon. Not bad by any means but just made me want to play a Fela Kuti record.
Flamin' Groovies
4/5
When he sings "You gotta mow your lawn if you wanna get along" is he singing what I think he's singing?
Too much of this invites unfavorable comparison to the Stones but it's pretty great. If I were the Black Crowes I would have quit when I first heard these guys.
Radiohead
4/5
You either love it or you hate it. The choice is yours. I pretty much ignored it when it came out but then listened to it on headphones years later and was blown away. The song titles add a lot more for me than they do with most albums.
They recorded this at the same time they recorded Amnesiac, which is a lot more accessible, and I suspect the combo reissue where they combined it all into Kid A Mnesia is where it's at.
The Fall
5/5
I would love to see a biopic of Mark E Smith. I ♥️ The Fall and I could hardly be later to the party.
Great album. I love this kind of shit. Cynical Manchester drunks whose lives were changed by rock n roll. Punk rock, to be specific.
Never heard this particular album before now and am retroactively embarrassed. Love it!
Tom Waits
4/5
I feel like this is right at the bridge when his records went from down and out to just out, which I love but acknowledge isn't for everyone and I think he perfected it a few years later.
JAY Z
4/5
Incredible rhymes over mostly excellent beats
The Fall
4/5
I love this kind of stuff. A+ album title, too
The Flaming Lips
3/5
I love the drums sounds and the cover art
Taylor Swift
4/5
I dare you to commit suicide while listening to Shake It Off
Run-D.M.C.
4/5
Hard to hear the innovation now. Now, a lot of the beats sound the same and the rhymes simplistic. Back then, this was revolutionary. Listen to Kurtis Blow's version of Hard Times from a few years prior and then listen to this one and you'll appreciate what I mean.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
3/5
I liked this world better when I didn't realize that Nick Cave and Nick Drake were two different people
Q-Tip
2/5
I love Q-Tip but I bet even he would be hard pressed to make the case for this album on this list.
John Cale
2/5
Good for insomniacs.
The Cure
3/5
What a weird record! I was into other things when this came out but somehow ended up with some kind of cd ep that had Lullaby on it and was absolutely captivated by it. Even still now. How this wasn't the big song off this album escapes me.
Can
5/5
In my preferred multiverse, Can occupies the same space in the firmament that in ours universe was held by Yes. Can you imagine what a wonderful world that must be?
I love this kind of shit. Freakout but with a beat. Yes, please!
Ride
3/5
I like my shoegaze with longer songs and less clarity
Booker T. & The MG's
4/5
Classic vibe record, if that makes sense.
At a certain point, Twist and Shout started sounding more like REM's Stand. I know they were big fans of 60s rock and pop so I would not at all be surprised if this infected their minds.
Ian Dury
4/5
Ian Dury's charming working class accent and ribald rhymes over a surprisingly groovy backing band - what's not to love?
The Rolling Stones
5/5
Thank the Lord this selection arrived on a Friday, for I don't listen to Exile On Main Street often, but when I do, so do my neighbors.
If my life depended on correctly guessing the one album that appears on more "desert island selections" than any other, Exile On Main Street would be my guess. A+ album title, A+ cover art, ample selection of gutsy performances of well-written songs captured with truly magical atmospherics.
Recorded in the dank basement of an otherwise sweltering villa Keith rented up the hill from the Cote d Azore. You can hear the dankness, which plays to the Stones's benefit. Nellcote, the villa is named, and to this day Stones fans make their pilgrimage. A modern holy site if ever there was one.
Also, you don't hear many double albums with so many good songs. Mick:s lyrics can seriously irritate sometimes but "the sunshine bores the daylights out of me" is undefeated. And every time Tumblin' Dice comes on you remember that you, too, are all sixes, and sevens and nines..and everyone needs some kind of ventilator - Don't Fight It!
Peak Mick Taylor, the Stones' best lead guitar player BY FAR. Bootlegs from this era confirm that they truly were once The Greatest Rock And Roll Band In The World. Seek them out and the movies.Cocksucker Blues and Ladies and Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones if you can.
Cornershop
3/5
Brimful of Asha was an instant classic back in the day but the rest of this is a little boring. My wife and I also spent a long time feeling like this wasn't the definitive version of this song but couldn't find another one that sounded right. We probably listened to 4-5 different remixes and they all sound wrong now and I don't know if it'll ever sound right again.
The Specials
2/5
Possibly the most disappointing follow up in the history of albums. Creatively exhausted and not nearly as well recorded as their debut.
Leonard Cohen
3/5
I liked it a lot but the odds I will remember it are low.
Rush
3/5
Remarkable musicianship but a cautionary tale about allowing the non singing drummer to be the primary lyricist.
2Pac
1/5
He says it's Me Against The World, and so if he's asking me to take sides, I'm taking the world.
the beats and rhymes on this album are nondescript, and I mean that in the most damning way. If you can rock the mic then I'll give you a lot of latitude (see: Biggie Smalls), but this just sucks and is such a disappointment for we who first heard him guest-starring on Digital Underground tracks.
Sorry but not even close to my top 1001.
The Sensational Alex Harvey Band
4/5
Not my type of thing but I love the energy and attitude.
Blur
4/5
♥️ These are my boyz, what can I say ♥️
Same town, same time. I didn't know Damon or Graham well but at Stanway Comprehensive we played in rival bands and they made it and obv mine didn't and if I'm honest it hurt then...Still, hat's off and God bless.
To my ears, Damon Albarn is the vocal love child of Ray Davies and Paul Weller...and when wouldn't that be delightful? If The Jam never broke up and maybe took in some members of XTC this could very easily have been their album from 1994...and there ain't nothing wrong with that!!!
A++ cover art (holy shit that dog), A- title (to Americanos - perhaps A+ for Brits), B+ tunes (not much here past the mostly excellent singles), A+ sounds.
N.B.: yes, that's Phil Daniels speaking on the title track. You may know him for his role as the mod at the center of the movie Quadrophenia.
Jazmine Sullivan
3/5
Mostly fresh and different, which you can't say about a lot of contemporary R&B. Still, just because it's your truth doesn't mean you should share it. Ultimately I found it a bit boring but appreciate our editors branching out a bit.
Big Star
4/5
Won't you tell your Dad to get off my back?
Tell him what we said about "Paint It Black"
I spend an unusual amount of time, too much, probably, speculating about what Alex Chilton fancies these thirteen year olds said about Paint It Black and why they think it would mean something (exculpatory, presumably) to her Dad.
Big Star was a star-crossed band led by damaged, self-destructive people who never stood a chance in this world. You get the impression that on this album, without a doubt their best, but still best enjoyed as the first half of the two-fer reissue along with their next album, the name of which escapes me but contains September Gurls, a tier one all-world track, we are only getting about 40% of their potential, and the people who worship them are willing to put in the imagination to appreciate what might have been.
Kate Bush
3/5
This selection is revealing as to the demographics of the list editors. I am guessing white Gen x men from UK.
It's not bad, just boring and time has not bolstered it's stature, let's just say.
Cocteau Twins
4/5
Could have done without the thin 80s drum machine but the rest was great.
The Byrds
4/5
I wrote two reviews, before and after I listened.
Before:
This is more interesting to me sociologically than musically. The Birds are boring, but they did three very important things for popular culture:
1. Translate Bob Dylan's music for pop ears.
2. Introduce the electric 12-string guitar to rock and roll, and with it the chimy sound that inspired jangly bands like Big Star and REM.
3. Give Gram Parsons a platform.
But their sound was on the wrong side of the sixties, the Mamas and Papas side, not the Hendrix side.
After:
Only heard this once and already my favorite Byrds BY FAR. I love it when my priors are forcibly adjusted and looking forward to playing again.
Stephen Stills
1/5
Hearing the words Like A Rose In A Fisted Glove the first time permanently damaged my sense of decency and I doubt Stephen Stills's standing could ever recover in my pantheon. For example, I didn't even listen to this. Maybe it's amazing. I'll check it out some day but I need to become a more enlightened soul before I can give this a fair listen.
Giant Sand
3/5
No context for this and mostly liked it a lot. Sometimes very much the opposite but mostly enjoyed its goofy explorations.
The Cure
4/5
Classic Cure at their goth best. If you don't like this, you can be confident you aren't a fan of the band.
The Charlatans
3/5
Not bad by any means but not covering enough new ground to stand out from all the other 90s British invasion bands.
The Beach Boys
5/5
Coincidence this appeared the day after Brian Wilson died?
I don't know how to rate this. This album has some of the very best Beach Boys tunes - songs that are so emotionally intense for me to hear that I would approve any of them to be played at my funeral (Surf's Up, Feel Flows, Til I Die) - and yet also some of the worst tunes that I can't stand to listen to and may permanently damage your sense of aesthetics in music - I mean, A Day In The Life Of A Tree can't be unheard, so tread carefully here.
Feel Flows is a super strange song, I have no idea what Carl Wilson is singing about. I understand the words phonically but I do not understand them literally. Yet somehow the goofy synthesizer sounds hit just right and overall this tune has what I can only describe as a spiritual quality that can bring me to joyful tears. My eyes get watery even just thinking about how this tune makes me feel. Also, it was used to great effect at the end of Almost Famous (great movie!).
'Til I Die, the lyrics are pretty clear. Also, I believe this is the only Beach Boys tune Brian wrote all of the lyrics for? Apparently a straightforward articulation of a shattered man staring down a lifetime sentence of having to live with himself. Devastating, and with gorgeous singing all the way around.
Surf's Up is probably the peak of Brian Wilson's songwriting talent. His magnum opus. Probably the peak of anyone's songwriting talent, actually. Again, no idea wtf they think they are singing about. Columnated ruins domino? What?!? Brian struggled for years to get to a point with it where he felt it was "done" and actually I don't think he ever felt it was done. Fun fact: the middle part where it's just Brian singing and playing piano was recorded live in Brian's living room as part of a TV special Leonard Bernstein made on him. Bernstein is I believe sharing the piano stool with him. Can you imagine?
I think nowadays the Samaritans or some other anti suicide group would sue to keep this album from ending with the devastating combo of Til I Die and Surfs Up.
I am giving this five stars because the three good tunes are to my ears some of the most powerful and emotionally compelling music ever made, at least ever made by humans, and on this five star scale easily merit 10 stars.
However, I have owned this vinyl for at least twenty years and possibly never once played it all the way through because the shitty tunes are so shitty they merit no stars. So when I average them out, we get to five stars.
The Blue Nile
2/5
Not very catchy and I have a hard time imagining that anyone who isn't British and born in the 1960s would include this on their top 1000 list.
The Beta Band
4/5
Hadn't heard this one before. Honestly, I thought the Dry The Rain album was their only one - delighted to be wrong!
Baaba Maal
4/5
Tranquil is the word that comes to mine. Pleasantly relaxed. A little monotonous at times but I dig the vibe.
I feel like the only thing separating these guys from The Spacemen Three is where they're from. And maybe where they're coming from, too, in that I suspect these guys don't necessarily think of themselves as psychedelic explorers. but that's how I am hearing it.
This also sounds like what you might hear at daytime rehearsal during the (occasionally considerable) interval between when we've tuned up and when our drummer arrives. But our weed was never good enough to sing in this language. Excelsior!
Dusty Springfield
4/5
The Shamen
1/5
No thanks.
UB40
4/5
You want to dismiss them for being posers but they're too good at what they do. Songwriting was never their strong suit but the concept works and a great vibe.
Also, a reasonable argument for one of the best debut album covers of all-time. A marketing masterclass in getting you to like the band and believing in their cause without any other context.
Portishead
4/5
Might be a "you had to be there" situation but this got a lot of airplay in my orbit back in the day. Using funky Isaac Hayes samples to get down wasn't new. What was new was using them to get down in the sense of getting depressed, not to get down as in dance your ass off.
Sebadoh
3/5
For over thirty years now, I've been wanting to live Sebadoh. But I don't and I should begin to accept that I am the kind of person who doesn't totally get Sebadoh, try as I might.
Daft Punk
3/5
The first third was brilliant but then it got monotonous.
Beck
3/5
Solid. Good tunes and sounds but less interesting and unusual than it seemed when it came out.
Rocket From The Crypt
1/5
I always resented and avoided these guys for their attempt to overwrite the memory of the legendary Rocket From The Tombs, a short-lived mid 70s band in whose wake was formed two of the best bands of the punk era, Pere Ubu and The Dead Boys. 'Tombs lasted maybe a year but originated many of the songs that Ubu and Dead Boys would later use to save the souls of countless punks, losers and creeps, like Sonic Reducer, Life Stinks, Final Solution, 30 Seconds Over Tokyo, and more.
If you are going to steal the name of one of the all-time greats of the underground, you better be lights out. Like Omar says in The Wire: You come at the king, you best not miss.
They missed.
It's not terrible music. I even might have liked this album if they hadn't fucked themselves and me with their bullshit name. Overall, the sounds are tight and I like the way they use horns - much better than how most rock bands use horns. But the singing is uninteresting and the tunes tend to be derivative (e.g., Come See, Come Saw lifts its melody over the verses directly from Smokey Robinson's Get Ready) and ultimately I can't get over their dare to compare to some of the most musical misanthropes Cleveland ever produced.
Fuck no. Fuck you for even putting it out there. And fuck whoever made this list for perpetuating this violence on the soul of rock n roll. Rock n Roll isn't Hall of Fame-able. Rock n Roll is a lifeline for the lonely from someone who's been there.
This is a serious hassle because in order to cleanse my soul and make things right again, after I finish typing this up I have little choice but to crank my 'Tombs bootleg, sniff some glue, pointlessly vandalize something, get in a terrible fight - preferably with my significant other - and wake up in jail. I had other, more respectable plans for this lovely summer weeknight but it won't feel right until balance is restored in the universe. Fuck - what a pain in the ass!
Japan
4/5
Never really checked these guys out before and wow, had no idea how much Duran Duran was inspired by them!
As a bass player, I love this guy's sound.
The songs don't do a lot for me, but their version of All Tomorrow's Parties is among the better Velvets covers I have heard.
Was amused to learn that British frontman David Sylvian lived for a decade or so in the woods quasi-reclusively not too far from me in southern New Hampshire at a dormant ashram he purchased! I had a good time going down the rabbit hole of figuring out his life.
Discovering this band, their body of work, and the members' unusual lives has been a treat. Prior to today, my only exposure was seeing their albums in a friends' collection in the late 1980s (I recall making fun of my friend for their look and specifically Sylvian's hairdo make it easy for me to be dismissive). I am looking forward to digging in.
Having heard more of their catalog in the last 24 hours, I might have selected their final album as Japan, Tin Drum, for this list. The songs aren't catchier but that doesn't seem to be their objective anyway and the band sounds more confident in what they are doing and the album is better for it. Definitely a band and musicians worth getting to know better and a perfect example of why I like this 1001 project.
The The
4/5
Only just now did it enter my conscious mind that The The and Talk Talk are two entirely different bands.
Never paid attention during their initial run but enjoy this very much in retrospect. No idea what Matt Johnson is singing about but he sounds like a kindred spirit. Talk Talk is good, too, and now that I am aware they are entirely different projects, am looking forward to revisiting both of their discographies with clearer ears! 😅
The Soft Boys
5/5
I love all of it. A great British rock n roll band captured at the peak of their powers. Sort of a band out of time, in that this kind of almost neo-psychedelic rock was very much out of style. But you can hear them soon after in REM, Camper Van Beethoven, Dream Syndicate, Replacements, Pavement and other 80s bands.
The leadoff I Wanna Destroy You and the title track are both perfect peaks to a captivating series of songs that grab you by the ears and do not let go. And they nailed all of the peripherals : killer band name, killer album name, killer cover art.
The title tune's melody borrows liberally from Donovan's There is a Mountain but it's in service of a beautiful turn of tune you can't fault them.
Robyn Hitchcock is in danger of being forgotten and he's a true genius. This is only one of several five-star albums he's made ... so far. The lead guitar player Kimberley Rew went on to make a mint with Walking On Sunshine. But Underwater Moonlight is when the stars aligned and everything hit.
Frankie Goes To Hollywood
2/5
Very confident that you could die without having ever heard this and still get into heaven first try. Its inclusion on this list says more about the list's editors than anything else.
Soft Cell
2/5
This record will clear a room within about 7-10 minutes
3/5
My brother and his frat buddies were once caught goofing around in there woods and charged with "conduct that serves no useful purpose" and I feel like this album could be indicted on the same charge, if for slightly - and maybe only slightly - different reasons.
King Crimson
3/5
Fairly silly album but cool cover and I love Easy Money and all of side two, really. Funny this would come a day after Yes's Close to The Edge because if I am not mistaken this album was the very next recording session for drummer extraordinaire Bill Bruford, jumping prog rock horses at just the right time, given how much more intense and purposeful this record is as compared to the amiable ambling and rambling of Siberian Khatru and the rest of Close To The Edge.
Still, as prog rock this album is inescapably geeky in an incel sort of way. Perfect soundtrack to an epic game of Magic The Gathering. Definitely not the album to play to impress your date.
John Lennon
3/5
The good songs are great but the filler's not killer and overall I think John was never the same after the Beatles. He seemed to put less effort into the craft of songwriting and used songs more to express smaller ideas. I prefer the sparse production of his first solo album to this one. All I want is the truth!
Miles Davis
5/5
It's almost silly how many people have been profoundly altered by this record, myself included.
I'll just let the music speak for itself, Blbut I will ramble a bit on what a spectacular year for jazz 1959 was, and in the spring of NYC in particular. Just two weeks after recording Kind Of Blue, tenor saxophonist John Coltrane led a session to record his "Giant Steps," another desert island masterpiece that in so many ways is the complete opposite of this record.
Meanwhile, as Coltrane is recording Giant Steps across town, Charles Mingus was in the studio Miles and Coltrane had used for Kind Of Blue to record his magnum opus, Mingus Ah Um.
Three unique masterpieces recorded more or less at the same time in the same places. Some of the same people but not coordinated, very different from each other, and purely happenstance.
Another fascinating thing these three records have in common is that each is the rare jazz record that in its own way is unusually approachable for the lay person. A lot of the people playing jazz today were initially turned on to it through one of these three albums.
A few weeks in spring 1959 in two nondescript midtown Manhattan office buildings. What a world! I wish we knew more about it. We should send Ken Burns in to investigate...
The Human League
2/5
I enjoyed listening to this but the quality gap between the singles and filler is enormous.
Slipknot
1/5
This was the record that caused me to bully my son from being a metalhead. I didn't make him go to Hebrew school, I was incredibly generous when it came to picking sports teams to root for and I never tell him what to think about politics.
But music is much more important than these other topics and I couldn't leave it to fate. I sternly told him there are two kinds of families in this world, metal families and punk families, and we're absolutely a punk family. I don't regret it for one second.
Saint Etienne
4/5
Maybe you had to be there to appreciate it but this album was a million watts bright light in the dark tunnel that was early 90s pop music. Brought out my inner mod, which had been in remission since Paul Weller bleached his hair a few years before. The tinny drum machines sounded dated even then and some of the tunes are a little boring/irritating but coming out of the gate with a radical reimagining of a Neil Young deep track was a clarion call for sanity in a sea of acid house, gangsta rap and grunge. I am so grateful I bought subsequent albums of theirs, and liked them, too! Thanks, guys.
Franz Ferdinand
4/5
Take Me Out is a jukebox gem that savvy bartenders know can sell rounds of shots in just one play. The rest of this is good but not great. Excellent band name.
Adele
3/5
Intense cover photo. Overall not as strong as the album she released immediately before, with Rumor Has It and Rollin In The Deep and generally a cool throwback vibe a la Amy Winehouse with shades of Dusty Springfield and Lesley Gore.
This album is less stylized and more generic sounding. And how many breakups does it take to write an album's worth of her tunes? And I can't pretend to hear Hello objectively, after my youngest became obsessed with it. But I respect her musicianship and I bet we can all agree that as a singer Adele has some serious pipes!
Jerry Lee Lewis
5/5
Holy shit this is incredible! How have I never heard of this before?!? I thought I knew something but I guess I don't and it's delightful to be proven wrong.
Madonna
2/5
Still recovering from the wedding I attended 20 years ago where the bride and groom processional was to an a capella group performing Like A Prayer.
This album falls off a cliff after the second song and never recovers. But in fairness, I'm like Mister Blue in Reservoir Dogs: I I like her early stuff. You know, "Lucky Star," "Borderline" - but once she got into her "Papa Don't Preach" phase, I don't know, I tuned out.
The War On Drugs
4/5
Great band name.
I only knew the first two tunes before today and loved them both and his no idea they appeared sequentially on one album. So pretty strong start. The rest holds its own pretty well mostly charting the space between those first two tunes. But that's ok. This music creates a great atmosphere.
Grateful Dead
5/5
There are two kinds of dead albums and this is very much the other kind. It takes a special kind of crazy to open an album with the side-length epic Dark Star - especially in 1969 - objectively very possibly the most unusual opening track to a major label rock n roll album ever - and I'm here for it. All of it.
Chicago
4/5
Very entertaining album - covers a lot of ground, but I suspect it's more appealing to musicians, especially young male musicians, than it is to lay people.
CHIC
2/5
Le Freak was a big enough tune in its day to capture the attention of a clueless 9 year old, so that's saying something. I also remember seeing this album cover and fantasizing about how rich they must be to live in such a nice house with such fancy clothes.
Now, as a still clueless middle-aged man, I appreciate the potent musicianship behind this band and I also have a soft spot in my heart for bands that sing about themselves.
But the songwriting is not very good on this album, unfortunately. One great tune, three fair-good ones and then junk. I think maybe these guys were more of a singles band?
Pavement
5/5
I don't know where to begin. When Trigger Cut came on the radio the first time I almost crashed my truck. I had to pull over like as if I had been blinded by the sun. This was early '90s coming out of an '80s where the radio was absolutely dominated by Boomer nostalgia that felt very alienating to me. I was living out of my pickup truck and a kind of sad sack driving around, trying to figure out where to park it for the night, being short on friends at that moment in time. But at this moment when I really could have used it the goddamn radio delivered. The unironic play on Trix are for kids? The weak sha la la la las like they're a shitty Shirelles? Killed me. They were at best quasi competent great singers and players but they somehow use it to great effect here.
I got the album maybe the next day and this whole motherfucker split my skull. Zurich Is Stained with its sad out of tune slide guitars was I think the next one, and then they all fell like dominoes soon after. Loretta's Scars? In The Mouth A Desert? Are you kidding me with these?!? How can they break my heart in such unusual ways?!?
I don't want to waste your time going on like this so I'll just say I love their unusual and yet for me very relatable and meaningful songwriting, thoughtful guitars that add a lot of emotional depth to basically a garage band approach with 70s singer-songwriter melodies and almost laughably sounding like it was recorded in someone's basement for a case of beer one afternoon.
I bought a second copy, just in case, which is something I never do, especially when I am homeless. I guess it's a desert island selection for me. Actually, it's more than a desert island selection. It's a go-bag selection. Like it's this album, a few passports, a couple of visas, smith & wesson, phone charger, a foil blanket like they wrap runners in, water purification tablets, $10000 in Krugerrand and a Mars bar.
Amy Winehouse
3/5
Rehab was an instant classic, and I have to credit this album for turning me on to the Dap Kings, which led me to the treasure trove that is Daptones records.
The title track is also great, but I will never get over my irritation with Tears Dry On Their Own, and how it's basically her singing a new melody over a backing track of the Marvin Gaye and Tami Terrell classic Ain't No Mountain High Enough. Her new melody is not very good and doesn't fit the track and it reminds me of my worst karaoke moments (by that, I mean that I was relatively sober, a terrible state of mind for karaoke!).
Stupid decision and it really mars this album for me. Also makes me feel they were desperate for songs to record.
She had a great voice and style and requisite tragic backstory, but not the most interesting songwriter and I think this album would have been a lot better if its makers recognized their shortcomings and brought in more songwriting talent to help them out. Credit to Mark Ronson, a prolific hit maker of a producer - I think this was the first of many times I clocked his name.
1/5
These people don't know shit and after over 500 albums, it's really starting to piss me off. Please do yourself and John Zorn both a favor and listen to his Naked City album instead. That's the Zorn album that should be on this list and it's not even close. Not. Even. Close. This record shouldn't be in even the 10,001 list.
In the often bleak years between "Ford To New York City: Drop Dead" and Giuliani's broken windows cleanup campaign 15 years later, when the lower east side looked like a war zone, John Zorn almost singlehandedly kept NYC the leading edge of experimental music with everything he did downtown at the original Knitting Factory.
Much love to him for that and he deserves a wider audience. But this album is a silly joke along the lines of that Marvel Comics series, What If? That's Zorn's schtick pretty much, a hipster musical version of the What If? comics. Only instead of what if Spider-Man joined the Fantastic Four, it's what if the double quartet on Ornette Coleman's landmark 1961 Free Jazz album were a hardcore punk band. A musical joke that doesn't stay interesting for even one set.
And how the fuck can these idiots have an Ornette tribute album on their list and yet somehow not have any actual Ornette on this list? WTAF? Fuck these idiots
Dexys Midnight Runners
4/5
Great band at the top of their game. You get the feeling that you'd dance your ass off at one of their shows around this time.
I regret not giving these guys their due back in the day. This and especially the album before it are a unique blend of familiar pop/soul/mod/ska ingredients worked to great effect.
Side note that the strings on this album are especially well integrated into the core band - it's not like they layered some violins on top like you usually hear. I don't know if they were part of the core band or not - they don't appear on the record prior, so I assumed not - but they really sound like it.
I'm in!
Paul Revere & The Raiders
2/5
Never took these guys seriously and nothing about this album suggests that I should regret that except the trivia that the Monkees didn't originate Stepping Stone (not that these guys did either).
Gotan Project
4/5
Pleasant surprise!
Ali Farka Touré
3/5
Love the sounds but got a little boring if I'm honest.
Tom Waits
4/5
I hadn't actually sat down and listened to this heard before and I was stunned that I've been playing Jockey Full Of Bourbon in jam sessions going back decades and never heard the original recording or even realized it was one of his. What a great tune and very fun to play.
This album sounds like it's just over the crest of his transition from Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter to whatever the hell you call the uniquely crazy jazz he and his wife have been concocting these past 40 or so years. The crazier he gets the more I like it, and so to me this is probably a good point of entry I would recommend to civilians.
Sonic Youth
4/5
I don't listen to Sonic Youth often but when I do, so do my neighbors.
You're not supposed to like a punk band's major label debut but this is one of their best albums. Still, they are like the Grateful Dead in that it's only when they're playing live that their music truly comes alive and their records get tiresome pretty quickly. Next time you are in a used record shop, compare the wear of the grooves on side one of any of their records and I bet it will be quite worn and ground down and then flip it over and side two will look new by comparison. So, as is the case with most of SY's albums, here I enjoy the beginning the most.
The guitars on Dirty Boots are epic and a brilliant summation of the overtone heavy guitar army approach they learned coming up under NY No Wave maestro Glenn Branca and then brought to the mainstream (relatively speaking). This is the essence of why they were so much better live. To truly "get it," the music has to be loud enough so the interplay of the overtones of the droning and chiming from the unusually and usually repetitively strung and tuned (eg, six high e strings) guitars can come to the foreground. Unless you have a death wish and a crazy stereo, when you're listening to their albums at home the legitimately innovative guitar disappears and you're left focusing on the more traditional aspects of rock n roll like the singing and the songs and both are very hit or miss with these guys, unfortunately.
The other great song in this album appears immediately after, Tunic. SY's voices sound ironic by default and I can't blame them, because suffering a 1960s childhood with the name Thurston will harden anyone a la boy named Sue. And a tribute to the uber white bread Karen Carpenter might seem like fertile ground for skewering American culture, but you realize a couple of minutes in that this is entirely unironic and actually a harrowing and very sad song from the afterlife. Tunic is maybe the one SY song where the lyrics matter as much as the music and they come together to great effect. Actually, to correct the record, Kim Gordon, not Thurston Moore, handles the vocals on this one and she "sings" more tunes on Goo than usual and that is another thing that makes this album better than most.
Tower Records was still a going concern when Goo came out and I fondly recall their East Village store's windows papered with a gigantic tryptic extending this killer cover art by the great Raymond Pettibon (look him up). It was one of those things that made New York feel vibrant and exciting to a sonically inclined youth wandering the big city, trying to get all the cool to seep into his skin through repeated exposure. Sonic Youth is credited for bringing Nirvana to Geffen, and their pulling Raymond Pettibon up from the underground along with them was an equally beneficent mitzvah.
So, even if you never saw them live - and to be sure, they could put on a helluva show right up there with the best of them as the many Neil Young fans will tell you when they opened for his Ragged Glory tour the year after Goo - you can still get a chill up your spine if you can get a copy of this on vinyl so you have the big cover you can hold and stare at while you crank up side one to a level that will inspire a wellness check from your neighbors.
Donovan
3/5
I didn't want to give him that third star but he earned it whether I want to admit it or not.
I like the hits Sunshine Superman and Season of the Witch and their playful spirit but I don't think he and I are laughing for the same reasons. Fat Angel, which hiply name checks Jefferson Airplane and the title of which I just read is a reference to Mama Cass (😂) is by far the best of the rest to my ears.
But still, SILLY is always the first word that comes to mind when I think of Donovan and this album doesn't change that. Props for being ahead of the psych curve, though.
Badly Drawn Boy
4/5
Heard of but never heard before now. The British lovechild of Sufjan Stevens and Jeff Tweedy maybe?
I had a really strange end to my day yesterday, when within the span of a few minutes I went from washing dishes to urgently driving an injured hawk to a wildlife rehabilitator a couple of towns over. I was trying to think of music that could relax the hawk - Beethoven's piano sonatas maybe? - and because I had been streaming this in the kitchen, it came in again after my phone paired with the car and I decided to let it ride. The hawk arrived alive, so I guess this must be a pretty good album!
Beatles
4/5
What a band! I love these early albums because you're basically getting them live in the studio with maybe some handclaps or a doubled lead vocal added after. These are the days when they would record five or six tunes before lunch. The music may sound basic but there are very few ensembles of any kind who could crank out performances like this, one after the other.
Whenever I play this record I skip immediately to Please Mister Postman and then go back and listen to the whole album from the top. For me it rivals the original, with John's pleading hitting harder than the Marvellettes could ever muster.
On the intro of Roll Over Beethoven, George's lead guitar is pushed to what sounds like the absolute outer limit of his chops. I like to imagine he stayed up all night practicing, knowing they were going to record it the next morning.
Some days this is a five for me. Today's it's a four.
Queen Latifah
3/5
Fun blast from the past but outside of De La and ATCQ, Native Tongues posse didn't age all that well. Makes me want a Kid n Play hairdo and don a gigantic clay medallion.
The Who
2/5
Not a fan of this album at all and it's not only because Heidi stood me up at the College Twin and I had to process that while suffering the searing experience of staring at a twenty foot closeup of Roger Daltrey imploring me to feel him and touch him.
Astor Piazzolla
4/5
A delight! Great combo of two artists who usually aren't presented in the best setting for my taste but this brings out the best of both.
The Jam
4/5
Their 3rd album in maybe a year or so, this is the one where they flipped from trendies trying to navigate punk to trailblazers, singlehandedly establishing and simultaneously transcending a mod revival that persists. Their punk roots are funny - chronologically, they were legit enough to be name checked by Bob Marley on Punky Reggae Party, but at the same time an awkward enough fit to be mocked by Joe Strummer on The Clash's White Man In Hammersmith Palais.
But this album is the creative breakthrough for Paul Weller as a songwriter, where he was experienced and confident enough to spark a creative explosion that over the next 6+ years across The Jam and The Style Council produced a body of work that I would put up against anyone's. Anyone's. And he didn't have a partner to lean on and make him better.
I am not sure what the 1990's Brit pop explosion would have been like without The Jam. They are the throughline that connects The Beatles and Kinks et al to Oasis and Blur and the rest. This is why the 1990s music press began referring to Weller simply as the Modfather, an honorific still in wide use to this day.
Cover photo is super awkward. I've spent hours and hours starting at it, wondering what they thought about it. Very possibly the first question I might ask should I ever meet Paul Weller or Bruce Foxton (sadly, the brilliant drummer Rick Fox died a few months ago, tragically having never reconciled his bitter split with Paul Weller, who is already expressing deep regret about not trying to patch things up and not even speaking for over twenty years - let that be a lesson to the rest of us).
But c'mon. Down In The Tube Station At Midnight? Classic! and Bruce Foxton's bass playing - oh my! In the Crowd, and To Be Someone? Makes me feel seen, even now.
It's funny they cover David Watts, a perfectly serviceable tribute to the Kinks at probably the low point in their career, considering that Billy Hunt is already sort of a tribute to it. I like to imagine that they added David Watts as a confession.
Unfortunately, Spotify uses the original UK version. The US one is not only sequenced better, it contains The Butterfly Collector, which adds an interesting dimension to the album.
My only complaint - and it's bad enough to cost this album a full star - is the awkward and pretentious use of "she" instead of "her" in English Rose, which has irritated me to the point of distraction for going on 40 years now. But what can I say about an album and a band that made at least one 80s teen in the quiet corner of Connecticut buy a UK military surplus parka and cover his bedroom wall with mod regalia. I would do anything to get that parka back.
Joy Division
2/5
I was an 80s kid and I ignored these guys because goth kidz were into them and even though I lived in a small town and us weirdos had to stick together - some of my best friends were Goths, I swear! Indeed, once I could drive and hang with weirdos in other towns I joined every weirdo band I could find, including an epically named goth band, Lesbian Sinecure. On my own time, The Cure was about as Goth as I could go and still respect myself, and that was mainly because my girlfriend was into them.
Ever since the dust settled on my adolescence, I've circling back on my (very long) list of possibly worthy shit I deemed myself too cool for back in the day. I've steadily worked my way through accepting REM, Tina Turner, late period Talking Heads, Bob Dylan, Mozart, The Smiths, everyone named Marsalis, to name but a few. Lately I've been working on Joy Division. In fact I've been trying to get into these guys for a few years now, and they defy me at a every turn.
I know that Closer is supposed to be a classic but I find it boring and all it makes me think about is how much more boring it would be if not for Martin Hannett's unusual production style. Its not nice to speak ill of the dead but Ian Curtis's monotonous tone wears me out and the music behind him is not interesting. Would this album be remembered if Mr Curtis hadn't pulled the ultimate, if one time, act of rock n roll record promotion?
But I will keep trying. Not ready to give up yet. I am still willing to believe it's me, not them. Maybe I don't do the right drugs. Maybe I read the wrong screeds. I dunno but the search to make room in my heart for Joy Division continues...
U2
5/5
Album of a generation? Certainly in the conversation...
This was the album that put U2 on the map in the mainstream culture. I probably listened to it 1000 times. At one point or another, I bought it on probably every single format except 8-track tape and open reel .
This is the album where the power hinted at in their earlier work all fell into place.
The Edge is arguably the most innovative and influential guitar stylist since Jimi Hendrix and this is the album where his sound blossomed. Bono's passionate protester persona (about what, we're not sure, but it doesn't really matter, just keep waving that white - blank? - flag and we can project our own causes onto it) is in full effect and the bass and drums hold it all together in a very simple and powerful way.
Being 12 when this album came out, it probably took me 6 months to hear about it. I don't even remember how I learned about it, but I was so into this album that me and my friend camped outside the Hartford Civic Center all night to buy tickets for the follow-up album's tour even though it hadn't come out yet. I went with my friend and her little sister and her little sister's friend and about 30 years later my wife and I realized that she was my friend's little sister's friend!
Steve Earle
3/5
Steve Earle is great. Maybe an icon of contemporary American music. A living legend for sure, and a legitimately deep inspiration for fuckups the world over.
Unfortunately, most of his albums are not so great. 80s and 90s mainstream country production styles did not serve him well. He would have done better in the underground, but he was born too soon - there was no Alt-Country or Americana genres when he was coming up, even though now he's revered by those camps. The record he put out after he got out of jail is very strong and although I lost track of his career after that, I suspect his work ever since does a much better job of putting his songs into the musical settings they deserve, as opposed to the overproduced, thin sounds of albums like Guitar Town. I get the impression that serving time released him from the stifling constraints of the Nashvegas celebrity machine. Prison freed him, funnily enough.
Despite that, on occasion his superior songwriting shines through, as it does on the title and a couple of others in this, his debut album.
Talking Heads
5/5
A great second album is a very rare thing. One with a hilarious and self-aware title is even rarer. These guys don't get enough credit for their sense of humor.
A lot of reviewers will focus on Brian Eno but I also hear a more confident Jerry Harrison contributing more, where '77 sounds a lot like the original trio did.
Found a Job plays a prominent part in many life choices I make and the circular guitar/keyboard line at the end is to me a programmatic representation of the virtuous cycle that comes from a well balanced life. That may be a bit overboard but also purely as a matter of music it consistently captivates me over the 40 or so years I have been listening to it. Artists Only and Stay Hungry are other ones that have and continue to shape me. Reflecting back, it's odd how often I notice myself singing Stay Hungry to myself, especially considering that this is the likely most I have ever discussed the song.
Do the work you want to do. Actually do it. Don't get obsessed with the consequences, for if you consistently approach it sincerely and with the beginner's mind, the outcomes will take care of themselves. Those are the life lessons a teenager got from this album, obviously from the lyrics but also in hearing a band not afraid to go deeper into what makes them weird - zero other bands were doing what these guys were doing - and just get better at it and don't look back.
Also, Tina Weymouth is the most underrated bassist in rock n roll.
Nirvana
3/5
Many amusing memories of when this was big and I was playing in a very much not grunge band, basically a middling Camper Van Beethoven wannabe band, practically living out of a van and not letting our lack of popularity stop us from touring the country.
Playing a show at American University to a handful of cafeteria workers on break because Nirvana was playing across town at a place far too small for how big they had gotten so fast and even the students who booked us went to their show instead, unapologetically, I might add...and checking in to a motel outside of Cincinnati, can't remember where we were coming from but to stay awake for the all night drive we split the ice cream generously doused with acid a fan had given us and having a quasi religious experience transfixed by the Come As You Are video playing on the lobby TV. Not technically related, but felt like a continuation of the same series of events, maybe 12-15 hours later we opened for the great - and still active - Southern Culture On The Skids at a combo laundromat/bar, where we were paid in washing machine tokens and a warm case of Coors Silver Bullet. Don't recall where we were playing next but do recall us drinking the warm Coors around a campfire at the trailer park we found in the middle of the night, doing our favorite nighttime campsite activity: watching the fire channel, as our roadie Buckles described it.
I haven't heard this record in a long time and was sorry to be a bit disappointed by it. The singles still land but the rest is either repetitive or just bad. Meanwhile, my tween daughter and her friends wear Nirvana shirts believing it's a lifestyle brand. Thinking back in what I was doing when they were big, I guess they were more of a lifestyle brand for us, too.
Jane's Addiction
3/5
The first few tunes are great but for me it runs out of steam and it's hard for me to evaluate this independent of what losers the people behind this grew in to, especially recently (2025).
PJ Harvey
4/5
I did not expect to like this but was rewarded for trying to bring an open mind. Especially loved the lyrical reference to Summertime Blues...the line about bringing my problem to the United Nations. That probably permanently converted me to being a fan.
System Of A Down
4/5
Not my bag but respect where it's due. This is 99% better than any other heavy metal I have heard since the 1980s.
The Zombies
3/5
The first song, a Beach Boys derivative that is weirdly upbeat given that it's a song for a lover in prison, is fantastic. Ridiculous and I love it.
I shouldn't have been surprised because The Time Of The Season is one of my most favorite ridiculous tracks ever. I mean, which one is it, the time or the season? And the lyrics to me sound like the soundtrack to a date rape.
Anyway, not particularly original music but very much of its time and amusing, if unintentionally.
The Young Rascals
2/5
Interesting and talented band I would like to check out more but this particular album would not be in my top 1001.
Iron Maiden
3/5
This band always had a great visual style. Not only entertaining but its consistency and cartoonishness told you a lot about them and their music before you ever listened to it.
So even though I never dug metal I always had a soft spot for these guys because their album art told me that they didn't take themselves too seriously and were never going to be too demanding in terms of getting overly ambitious.
Anyway, so I never heard this before today but was prepared to like it ok even though I am pretty far from the pimply headbanger I imagine to be their core audience. And I did!
Miles Davis
3/5
I don't want to have to give this record a rating. I own it and I've listened to it a gazillion times but I'm honestly not sure how much I like it.
Miles is in my top tier upper echelon favorite. Most listened to most influenced by musicians but I'm still working on getting a handle on this phase of his career. Few years before this he was making some of the most profound music ever and a few years after this he settled into something pretty special, but this particular. In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew and the albums on either side just doesn't totally do it for me. Feels a little transitional and even tentative, which is ordinarily kind of the last word I would ever use to describe Miles and even now I'm wondering if I'm misinterpreting what I'm hearing.
If I were in charge of this list, it's very possible that Miles would have the most albums on it of anyone but I don't think this is a good album for this list. There's a good half a dozen records from his first quintet that I would put ahead on that list, and a similar number from his second quintet I would put on there. And then a few in between and before those quintets that may be worthy. and then even some stuff from when he came out of retirement a decade after this album. All of that may be worthy of this list but not this.
The Fall
3/5
The Fall is an emotional Rorschach test for me. How I feel about any one of their records is more a reflection of my mood at the time than the music. Today I felt like I liked the spoken word stuff more than the singing and regretted every time he went from the former to the latter.
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
5/5
The self-loathing across this entire album was so thorough and intense to my malleable tween mind that repeated exposure might have permanently damaged my own sense of self-worth. Overall, the album is uneven - side two can get a little slow and the production is overwrought at times - but when it hits, it is landing right into the center of my forehead. To be fair, I honestly cannot say at this point if it found the sweet spot of my soul or if I developed the bulk of my personality around its sentiments.
Beyond Belief still haunts me even after 40+ years of excessively close listening. Incredibly, when you break it down, there is very little to this song but put the pieces together and its a highlight of 20th century songwriting, performance and production. There is no other song like it, either - not only is it unique to Elvis's catalog but I mean that no one else ever made a song like this as far as I know. There is no chorus to speak of, it sounds almost like a stream of conscious ramble that steps on its own toes as it builds toward a final line that is repeated a few times. Fuckin' weird, man! but it works.
People don't talk enough about how Elvis Costello might be the most sophisticated songwriter since Cole Porter. Maybe even more sophisticated. And they also miss that he is one of the finest pop singers you will ever hear. That is why more of his tunes aren't standards - they are too goddamn hard to sing!
Side note: can we discuss Bruce Thomas's bass at the end of Shabby Doll - and really over this entire album? It's bonkers. The work of a mad genius. Despite their eventual acrimonious falling out due to Bruce's slagging Elvis in his tell-all memoir, his devout musicianship was so essential that Elvis permanently renamed his backing band from The Attractions to The Imposters, even though everyone else remained the same.
Everything about Man Out of Time slays, but the exceedingly clever word play always shreds my mind, even after what has probably been 10,000 plays.
Who's nerves are always on a knife's edge?
Who's up late polishing the blade?
Love is always scarpering or cowering or fawning
You drink yourself insensitive and hate yourself in the morning
Those four lines still send a chill up my spine every time. It is possible that I have never heard that song and not immediately replayed it. But is scarpering even a real word? I was too young to drink when I first heard these lines but I lived them for many years. Like I was saying before, I don't know if Elvis is observing the human condition or directing it.
The other song we absolutely have to discuss is the closer, Town Cryer. Where self-loathing meets self-pitying and they jump off the cliff together.
Fuck me!
The Who
2/5
The Kids Are Alright is possibly my favorite Who tune. My Generation is a classic. The rest of this debut album sucks! I bought it in the 1980s when I was a jr mod wannabe and the only version I could find was an import version I had to pay a lot for and I was so disappointed. But I didn't have the self confidence to dislike it, so I tried and I tried and I tried. A lot of wasted time. They hadn't written a lot of tunes yet and too many of the few they had have some weird racist shit that didn't age well at all, but may be authentic to where they came from.
I like it that back in the day apparently Pete and Roger determined who would be lead singer with a fist fight. Makes me wish Pete was a better pugilist because he sings his stuff with a lot more soul than Daltrey does. Roger is a waste of space as far as I am concerned. A bully singing about getting bullied. Who needs that?
Drive Like Jehu
3/5
It's not bad, I just don't know why I should listen to this instead of the thousand other records that sound exactly like it.
The Icarus Line
3/5
I can't tell you how these guys stand out from the sea of 1990s "post-hardcore" bands but they do and I dig it.
Aretha Franklin
3/5
Her albums during this period are fairly interchangeable. My favorite is probably Aretha Arrives. I like this one for Do Right Woman, Do Right Man, Let the Good Times Roll, and A Change is Going to Come.
Creedence Clearwater Revival
3/5
I love these guys and I feel like they don't get their due but this album was a little bit boring. If I had to choose one CCR album for this list it would have been Cosmo's Factory.
Taylor Swift
3/5
I like Taylor but this one's a bit somnolent for my taste. One of my roommates is the biggest Taylor fan maybe in the world and she told me she likes this one but doesn't listen to it often. I asked her to rank Taylor's albums and this one showed up last. So it's not just me, so there!
Duran Duran
4/5
Better than I expected?
The Avalanches
2/5
Started out refreshing and interesting and within 10 minutes I forgot it was even on and left the room while it was playing. When I would remember to listen I liked it, but it kept deflecting my attention, which has to cost it a star or two.
The Crusaders
3/5
Not really my kind of thing but well done. I would prefer all instrumentals and I generally blame them for helping to push 70's jazz into "Weather Channel" territory. I prefer their earlier records, where they aren't as smooth.
But I can't listen to these guys without thinking about how their sax player Wilton Felder - an unremarkable horn player - was also a tier 1, all-time great electric bass player....and that there are not many Crusaders albums where he plays bass at all. I think he plays bass on three of the tunes on this album, which is more than most.
You probably never heard of him on either instrument, but you know his bass playing. For example, go put on Jackson 5's I Want You Back right now and tell me he isn't a huge part of why you love that song - and wasn't always, whether you were aware of it or not.
As a bass player who didn't put a name to those amazing bass lines until just a few years ago, I find the unfortunate allocation of his time and interest somewhat destabilizing. It's almost like knowing of Albert Einstein as a shitty violin player, only to discover years later that he was the dude behind all those physics. How much other greatness will the world never discover, due to weird priorities, bad judgement or just unfortunate circumstances? This is mainly what I think about when I'm listening to the Crusaders. Maybe we would have found peace and cured world hunger by now if everyone did a better job of identifying and pursuing their greatness...
The Young Gods
2/5
Not my bag. I guess I like my gods a little older....
Tricky
4/5
The high water mark for the Trip-Hop genre. Very good album that's still somehow isn't too dated sounding, but at the same time bears responsibility for a shit ton of mediocre records that it inspired.
Fugees
2/5
The Killing Me Softly cover is golden and Ready Or Not and The Mask are good but the rest sounds like a greatest bites of 90s hip hop. Rather unoriginal.
And the world REALLY did not need a cover of No Woman, No Cry. Rating reduced by one star and I take time off from work to crank Dr Octagon in order restore my chi afterward.
The Verve
3/5
Not bad but not particularly special to me.
Prefab Sprout
4/5
I liked this a lot. Heard of em but never heard em, and was happily surprised.
Janis Joplin
4/5
Solid album by an exceptional singer who died way too soon.
Jane's Addiction
3/5
If Grunge was Punkers under the influence of Metal, then Jane's was Metalheads under the influence of Punk.
These guys won me over instantly - before I ever heard their music - with the Velvet Underground reference/tribute in "Jane Says" - not that it sounds like VU, but VU had numerous songs with the same title concept - Stephanie Says, Candy Says, Caroline Says. In the context of an American rock scene dominated by LA bands like Guns N Roses, a band coming out of that same LA scene but borrowing from the VU was huge deal for all of us who didn't have the hairdo necessary to be a metalhead.
And in the years between when Nothing's Shocking came out until Nirvana's Nevermind came out, it was impossible to find an open mic where Jane Says wasn't played at some point, often probably more than once. If you wanted to be the cool guy at an open mic, you sang Jane Says.
And between inventing Lollapalooza, which provided a generation with its own Woodstock, and the fact that it seemed like every band formed between this album and when Nevermind came out had a two word name where the first word was a woman's name, you have to give these guys credit for being hugely influential on American culture of the late 1980's-early 1990's. Which is impressive when you consider that they only had a few above average tunes and that they were widely known for being truly monumental pricks. For example, as I type, they are at risk of being sucked up into their own assholes, as they have all sued each other for millions of dollars for perceived slights that literally no one else gives a shit about.
T. Rex
3/5
Pretty good but my take on this band was permanently damaged by the memoir of the album's producer, Tony Visconti, who was also David Bowie's most significant collaborator over the same years. Marc Bolan, the creative force behind T Rex, comes off as a petty bitch, especially in his relationship with Bowie, who seemed like a class act. More importantly, Bolan was always chasing what he thought the kids wanted to hear, while Bowie was expanding the kids' understanding of what they could want to hear. It's unfortunate but it seems like Bolan couldn't ever mature into a fully formed artist, fame and riches notwithstanding.
Orange Juice
4/5
Funny these guys should show up on this list now. A year ago I would have told you I never heard of them, but recently the algorithms that govern my existence decided that I needed OJ in my life.
And they aren't wrong! Give this round to Skynet, I guess.
GZA
3/5
One of the very best Wu Tang albums - maybe the best, certainly in the convo - but it's time to confess I'm not the biggest Wu Tanger.
Steve Winwood
2/5
Couldn't give it a fair listen all the way through for fear it was retraining Spotify's recommendation algorithm.
What I heard was not appealing to me. I like that Spencer Davis Group tune "Glad" and some Traffic is cool and Steve gets credit for playing on Hendrix's Voodoo Chile. But also some Traffic is very uncool and I have no faith in Blind Faith and by the 1980s, I really wanted this guy to stfu and make way for fresher talent.
The Temptations
3/5
The Temptations getting psychedelic is funny and awkward but mostly enjoyable. But Motown is really more of a singles operation and I would not have put this or any Temptations album on this list. They had some great material but there are no hidden gems on their albums. You already heard everything they did worth a close listen.
Jethro Tull
2/5
At the record store where I worked we took turns playing music, and there was one kid who was into Jethro Tull and I worked enough shifts with him to where I feel I should never have to be asked to listen to them again.
But even without that, when I seek injunctive relief from the courts over The Rock N Roll Hall Of Fame's existence, Exhibit A is going to be the fact that the inaugural Grammy award for heavy metal in 1989 went to these jokers. WTF
My Bloody Valentine
4/5
Great band. I would have picked Loveless for this list but no worries!
The The
3/5
The first song really sucks but the rest mostly makes up for it enough to push this up to "average" level
Tim Buckley
3/5
One of those albums I'm supposed to like but never do.
Gorillaz
4/5
When they're on, they're my favorite
Roxy Music
4/5
I won't deny I spent a considerable amount of of my teenage record store fiend time with this album cover. The music is pretty good though. I especially like Out Of The Blue.
I think of the period between Altamont and Ramones as something of an interregnum where weirdos basically had Roxy Music and the New York Dolls to tide them over and that's about it. It's quite something how many first generation punks and new wavers took inspiration from Roxy Music.
Hat's off, guys. Thank you for your service.
Ananda Shankar
3/5
I was delighted initially and for a little while thought I might end up taking this seriously but then I got bored.
The Byrds
3/5
Not bad for the Byrds but Jesus the cavernous gap in songwriting quality in the tracks between So You Wanna Be A Rock N Roll Star and Dylan's My Back Pages is something to behold. Pretty much the only thing to hold your attention between those two is the relatively bountiful use of backwards tracks.
Buddy Holly & The Crickets
4/5
♥️ these guys but the song selection could have been better.
Spiritualized
5/5
Wow. I am a fool! I was too much a Spacemen 3 purist to listen to their solo records and I am gobsmacked by the magnitude of my mistake. This is a brilliant album, heard it 3 1/2 times today so far, and that isn't enough.
Reminds me a lot of what I love about The Brian Jonestown Massacre - dopey, trippy - and I have to assume this was an influence on them. Magnificent and a good reminder to be less of an idiot when I can.
Lana Del Rey
2/5
Not a fan.
Throbbing Gristle
4/5
Never heard this before but I love this kind of shit. And credit where it's due: Genesis P-Orridge was consistently one of the very weirdest people and best interviews ever. Ever.
Funkadelic
3/5
Here's our chance to dance our way out of our constrictions...feet don't fail me now!
I hereby pledge a groovallegiance to the funk, The United Funk of Funkadelica!
I get misty-eyed imagining what a wonderful world it would be if the title track to this album were in fact our national anthem. Actually, all of Side One of this album operates as a utopian manifesto that is guaranteed to make you smile while you're dancing your ass off. Unfortunately, Side Two starts out pretty stupid and only partially redemms itself. So it goes.
Do you promise to funk? The whole funk, and nothing but the funk?
Bob Dylan
3/5
Great sounds. Ok songs.
Crowded House
3/5
This made me depressed. It doesn't have their pop perfection masterpiece Don't Dream It's Over. It sounds entirely forgettable in a way that made me very sad. So much time and money put into something no one will ever care about.
Sugar
3/5
Solid effort. At the time it felt like a innocuous grunge era cash grab from one of the kings of 80s punk and doesn't feel any more important now than it did then. I like Hoover Dam the best.
Miriam Makeba
2/5
Not my bag. Slightly interesting version of the song known as The Lion Sleep's Tonight but otherwise I found this entirely forgettable other than a remarkably mean-spirited duet toward the end that I hope to never hear again.
Blood, Sweat & Tears
1/5
Not a fan at all.
Sufjan Stevens
5/5
I adore this album. I have never heard anything like it before or since, other than his other records. Very much its own thing but always tuneful and you could drown in its earnestness. Some people could have a hard time with that. The few lyrics I can understand are unusual. I love the crazy ambitious orchestration - incredibly beautiful acoustics of often large and unconventional ensembles - for what otherwise might be filed under twee mumblecore.
It's not crazy to hear strains of The Cure. Or Aaron Copeland. Or Minimalists like Steve Reich or (Chicagoan) Philip Glass. Or Wes Anderson. Or even The Great Gatsby. This album is possibly making a claim to be The Great American Novel.
He promised (threatened?) to make an album for every state but as far as I am aware never got beyond Illinois and Michigan. I wish he would get back and finish what he started.
Can't tell you why but I get the feeling he had an unusual childhood, like he grew up in a cult or something. How else could someone make music that is as unusual and familiar at the same time? Also, disarmingly vulnerable lyrics with absolutely no trace of irony.
I will always have a soft spot in my heart for this guy because seeing him live was our final cool act just a day or two before parenthood. He had been commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music to produce this multi-media piece honoring the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. He had easily 20-30 musicians on stage and as I was reading the program I noticed that one of them was a childhood friend on vibes! They were great.
More, please!
Patti Smith
5/5
Heard this album a million times but only today for the first time I noticed she ends this album with a line from one of my very favorite Jimi Hendrix songs, 1983 (A Merman I Should Turn To Be), "It's too bad that our friends can't be with us today."
Prior to noticing that, I was thinking about how it's the covers Gloria and Land Of 1000 Dances where she and the band really shine.
Creativity takes many forms and in purely sonic terms this album can underwhelm but if you can appreciate it for what it is, its peaks are brilliant.
I love this album and I think people will be talking about the scene in New York she helped to define for a long time to come and she was a meaningful part of that. But also bigger than a scene, in terms of rock n roll, she was a musical Magellan, charting the course forward out of Altamont, leading us ultimately in to Never Mind The Bollocks. God bless Patti Smith! More than a national treasure, she deserves a special designation from the UN, like Stonehenge.
The Flaming Lips
4/5
Do You Realize is one of the more intense top 40 songs you'll likely ever hear and I always had a soft spot for these guys but literally every time I have tried to play this album I ended up listening to Cat Stevens, who (whom?) I don't even like very much.
Afrika Bambaataa
4/5
Planet Rock and Looking For The Perfect Beat are legit classics and I don't know if house, techno or freestyle would have existed in the forms we understand without them. AND this is the rare singles compilation that actually works as an album. I would be very happy throwing it into a 1980s time capsule....right up until I learned just now that Afrika was a serial rapist. From there, I mainly just feel bad and would like to move on. Next!
Talvin Singh
2/5
Ok is not Ok. I was only 2 minutes and 10 seconds in when I first questioned if I could make it all of the way through this album. The answer turned out to be no.
John Lennon
4/5
Let us first stipulate that Mother is an absolutely bonkers way to open an album. The first 120 seconds of this album will never not freak me out.
Klaus Voormann is a very interesting fella (both made the cover art for Revolver and decades later produced that new wave hit "Da Da Da") and together with Ringo backs John admirably here but the songwriting peters out after side one.
Also, I really, really, really wish Working Class Hero didn't end with his declaring himself a working class hero and telling us to follow him. I am reminded of that hilarious photo of John and Yoko in their lux hotel bathrobes unironically waiting for the maid to change the sheets during their famous bed-in demonstration around this same time (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/john-and-yoko-maid-pic/). Go fuck yourself, asshole. Imagine that!
Screaming Trees
3/5
I liked it but I can't help but feel skeptical this is their best album, coming so late in their run. However, it wasn't interesting enough for me to invest the time to dig into their discography. Maybe someday!
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
5/5
One of my favorite EC albums, thereby making it one of my favorite albums in general. Its appearance today made me laugh at my attempt to take yesterday's selection seriously. Fucking great album and US version closes with the definitive version of Brinsley Schwartz's What's So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding, a brilliantly earnest call for sanity in times of darkness that will make even the most cynical punk cry.
Method Man
2/5
I want to like Wu-Tang more than I actually do like Wu-Tang. This one is particularly dated-sounding. Very 1994. I guess I prefer him as a guest or teaming up with Redman than as a front man on his own.
Alice Cooper
4/5
This is why I love this list - forces me to listen to something I've unfairly dismissed for decades.
My teenage son and I were driving around together when this was playing and he said it sounded like their goal was to make a record that didn't sound like what you expect an Alice Cooper record to sound like. And he's right!
I never would have listened to this but for this list but now I know I'm an Alice Cooper fan. Who knew?
The Cure
4/5
Had to laugh when this came up because I swear I don't listen to the Cure often but literally yesterday I found myself deciding "A Forest" is my favorite Cure song (Spotify DJ mode had tossed it into the mix).
This album provides everything I like about them - minimalist sounds, unusual riffs, paranoid vocals. It has a "small" or almost intimate sound they abandoned later, to my regret. Have you ever noticed when you're in a snowstorm in the woods and the ambient sounds are smaller or more "closed" than the same woods in fair weather? That's like the difference in production here v most albums, even 80s goth albums. You haven't heard another record like this, and yet it's an epitome of something, somehow, and I can't put my finger on it exactly but you know what I mean. Also, at some point in this review I have to make my joke that only Fred Armisen would appreciate - that the main difference between The Cure and New Order is whether every song has too much chorus effect on the guitar (Cure) or the bass (New Order).
The Cure have done yeoman's work erasing Killing An Arab from the streaming platforms - fucking 'fraidy cats - but they can't erase how important it was as a disaffected teenager in the 1980s to read Camus while listening to it, preferably doing so as conspicuously and as dangerously or at least as mysteriously as possible. I will embrace the adolescent pretentiousness that I never entirely gave up and argue that Seventeen Seconds is more of a Kafka album. The riffs are unsettlingly chromatic and repetitive enough and the sounds and moods across songs are similar enough that the whole thing has a quality of a circular fever dream of a lost soul whose interactions with other people only increase the sense of loneliness and alienation. A bad trip that never ends, like Escher's stairs. The forest they are singing about is the wintry wood K is walking through as he approaches The Castle. I love this shit! Gotta go...where's my copy of The Plague?
Johnny Cash
5/5
Classic and listening to this should be a part of any decent American grade school curriculum.
Prince
5/5
My favorite Prince album and it still holds up quite well. Back in the day it was great enough and big enough that I expected the actual end of the millennium party to be much bigger and better and purpler than it actually was. Oh well, gives me a reason to stick around to see if we get it right next time.
Dexys Midnight Runners
3/5
Better than I expected but didn't jump out at me. Will revisit but not ready to commit a fourth star.
Johnny Cash
3/5
These Rick Rubin albums were a big deal when they came out but I never really checked them out at the time so am glad to have the chance to hear this one now.
Funny to get served this just a couple days after San Quentin, where I noticed some reviews complained about his shitty voice, because he sounds so much worse here and yet no one seems to mind. Time and age change expectations, I suppose.
Listening to this encourages me to cynically imagine Rick Rubin pimping out Johnny Cash to all his musician friends having their own superstar fantasy camp opportunity to sing a song with him or hear him run through one of their tunes. Even when I'm not feeling so cynical I have a funny feeling that we're hearing here everything they recorded and that pretty much everything was done in one take....still, it's The Man In Black, and that's worth something.
Sounds like a fun project to be a part of but didn't do a lot for me as a listener, certainly not approaching the altitude of his 1960s work.
Neneh Cherry
4/5
I'm never not going to like this - she's hipster royalty! Jazz legend Don Cherry's daughter, teenage dancer with punk legends The Slits, and then when Buffalo Stance samples Malcolm McLaren it leapt out of the radio speaker like a bat signal saving us from otherwise shitty 1980s pop music - help is on the way!
But I am pretty sure I actually like this. She clearly has a fantastic record collection, because they pick some gems to sample - lots of DC go-go, for example - and the production is so much better than whatever you would have heard before and after this on the radio. I'm in.
I would love to see a movie about her life, partly just for the incredible mix of very interesting people floating through the background, but also I'm just curious to know where she's coming from and what she's been up to.
Ella Fitzgerald
5/5
First, let us stipulate that I expect there some place in the Smithsonian where this is playing on a loop 24/7.
A box set feels like cheating for a 1001 Albums project.
Good Gershwin selection but if I were to pick one Ella Fitzgerald album for this collection it would not be this because it's such a narrow slice of her talents. If I had to pick one Ella, which really isn't fair but still, it would be Ella In Berlin. Check it out if you aren't familiar.
My one criticism of this almost approaching comprehensive collection of these two brothers' magnificent collaboration - possibly the greatest songwriting duo we've yet seen - Isaac Newton to Lennon-McCartney's Einstein - is that many of these arrangements are played slower than is typical, and it gives this already drawn out set a soporific quality that by two hundred minutes in almost gets downright stupefying.
Slayer
4/5
Very good for what it is but not my jam. Sorry.
Janelle Monáe
5/5
Never heard of this before today and was pleasantly surprised. Locked Inside borrows a chord change from Stevie Wonder's 'Golden Lady' and it's driving me crazy but the rest of this is quite enjoyable. I will definitely be checking out more of her music.
Tangerine Dream
4/5
I'm not sure which review to print:
This is either an amazing album or I accidentally left the wet vac going in the basement fifteen hours ago. Eventually this album ended and the sound continued, so I think it was the overextended wet vac I was mostly grooving to.
Or
Did they make another Exorcist movie and I missed it?
Sepultura
4/5
Had a girlfriend whose little brother woulda given his left nut to be in this band. His band was called Disenchanter. Great name, but unfortunately accurate with respect to my feelings upon hearing them.
Sold a trillion copies of this at the record store. For many people, this was the only record that mattered. I am not one of them. The brain cells I use to hate this kind of music as the same as the ones I use to hate professional wrestling. But I respect it and I like it more than a lot of their ilk.
Pink Floyd
5/5
...Lime and limpid green, the sound surrounds the icy waters underground...
I love this shit!
The sound of being the low man on the totem pole at the record store and always being scheduled to open the store on Sunday mornings. I might be not be entirely sober, either from the drugs a few hours before or the all-nighter drive from a gig somewhere farther away than a normal person would drive back from, or both.
The store had a copy behind the counter for some unknown reason and it usually was the only thing that made sense in that mental state and that me and my co-worker Reiner, who more often than not was in a similar headspace, or maybe it was just because we would take turns getting high behind the dumpster in the parking lot, and we could easily agree on. We might play it 2-3 times in a row, until the owner came in around lunchtime and would make us play normal music that regular people and/or potential customers might like.
Interstellar Overdrive. Lucifer Sam. Bike. Astronomy Domine. The Gnome.
This is where it's at. This is the only Pink Floyd actually led by their leader, Syd Barrett, who still had his shit together enough to participate. Barely. Anyway, this is the sound of swinging psychedelic 1967 London - lightning in a bottle. Enjoy!
Stephen Stills
2/5
Not my bag. This fucker is so insufferable he basically ruined Elvis Costello's career (look it up).
Milton Nascimento
4/5
Hands down the best Milton Nascimento record I have heard. Very much enjoyed it. Great cover art, too.
Minor Threat
5/5
Classic!
Love
4/5
I love this for what it is but there are a lot of things going on here that are excusable only because this album was made in the time when it was, if that makes any sense. I also excuse some of the silliness because they sound like pioneers to me. Can't imagine what the Doors would have sounded like without these guys showing them the way, for example.
Sonic Youth
4/5
Probably my favorite official Sonic Youth studio album. A lot of SY albums have a killer leadoff tune and then fall apart before the end of side one, but this one starts with a killer 1-2 punch - Catholic Block has a rockin riff and is a perfect 2-3 minutes or however long it is - and even side two is mostly good. This album also has a better sound/production than most of their studio recordings, which tend to lose the ferocity and generally don't rock hard enough.
I think this is the third SY album on this list, which is probably 1-2 more than they deserve, and none of the ones selected are their best recording, the legendary The Walls Have Ears live bootleg from their Bad Moon Rising tour 1-2 years before Sister. They were really more of a live act and if there's one SY record to listen to, that's it, and I believe the band even finally officially released it recently. That recording is what should go into the Smithsonian/space capsule. Go listen to that instead of this. You will like SY more for having done that.
Michael Jackson
1/5
Too soon.
The Triffids
2/5
With this band name and this album title, I was expecting something much more experimental.
Not bad but I got distracted and forgot to come back and finish it, which is a bit damning.
Kacey Musgraves
4/5
I'm pretty out if it so while I had heard of her, I never consciously heard her before. What a delight! I'm in.
Scritti Politti
2/5
Better than I expected, but I cannot abide that 80s production.
De La Soul
5/5
I remember the precise moment I first heard De La Soul. I was refinishing my parents' kitchen cabinets and looking at the clock above their oven when Eye Know came on the radio.
It felt like salvation. From many things, not the least of which a decade where popular music was dominated by boomer nostalgia. It's ironic perhaps but they were sampling Steely Dan, a boomer band if there ever was one, but to say something completely new. Genius.
Simply one of my very favorite records. The kind of out of nowhere creative explosion that created an entire sub genre that would have consumed all of hip hop if not for the dominance of gangsta rap. So far out on a limb they had to kill themselves off with their next record, De La Soul is Dead.
Took sampling to such an insane extreme that it took the lawyers over thirty years to clear all of the samples, so it couldn't debut on streaming platforms until 2023. Sadly, Trugoy (Yogurt backwards, for some unknown reason) aka Plug Two, one of the greatest rappers the world will ever see, died a month before.
Anyway, I can't tell you what it felt like to hear so many cultural touchstones from my youth brought together in one place. In the very first song you get Schoolhouse Rock and Johnny Cash. They were making funky and funny tunes out of Hall and Oates! They combined all of these nuggets to create an entire world with its own vocabulary. Like other truly great albums it takes you on a journey to a place you've never been.
The Promised Land, in this case. Maybe it was the drugs, but for the roughly two years between this album and De La Soul Is Dead I literally believed that the D.A.I.S.Y. Age was going to transform the world and bring humanity together to usher in an enlightened era. That's what I was working toward. That, and getting more drugs. Anyway, incredibly creative album and powerful statement on the promise of youth and positive energy unlike anything before or since.
I don't like those "best of" lists - music is not a competition and making it a sport diminishes its magic, but I wouldn't have a problem if you came with Three Feet High And Rising as the greatest album ever made and I will be sorely disappointed if it isn't one of the very highest rated by the 1001 community.
The Only Ones
3/5
Will try again later. Didn't really stand out this time, contrary to what their name might lead you to expect.
The Cramps
4/5
I would have selected Gravest Hits but this is very good, too.
I would love to see a movie about these guys and particularly Poison Ivy. She doesn't get the credit she deserves and she's always been a bit of a mystery to me. I worry about her since Lux died - is that ok? Pilgrimage to Glendale!
Fats Domino
4/5
Short and sweet. Some classics on here!
Aerosmith
4/5
Truth In Advertising right before your eyes, because this fucker ROCKS.
We are back in the saddle, ladies and gentlemen, and you can start it at any volume you like but I promise that by the end of the first track you will be at 11. By the end of side one you will have snorted an eight-ball of blow, untucked your swashbuckler shirt, picked up chlamydia and peeled out in your Camaro off into the sunset. By the end of side two you will collapse, exhausted, satisfied and sanctified.
There is something about the sound of the guitars on this album that epitomizes 1970s rock n roll and gets me all jazzed up. I can't put words to it. The mix is perfect, too - you cannot understand most of the words in the literal sense but they come through loud and clear in a more profound way.
I was never really a big fan of cock rock but I got into Aerosmith by way of avant garde "composer" Glenn Branca by way of Sonic Youth, the guitar players of which met as members of Branca's Guitar Army. I read an interview where Branca described a life-altering experience stumbling upon an Aerosmith rehearsal at an empty theater as a college student in Boston in the early 1970s. Even nerds must rock, and I concur with this list's editors that Rocks is truly an album you must hear before you die. I just hope you have the good fortune to survive it.
Scott Walker
2/5
The music is stupid and the lyrics are ridiculous. What's not to like? Next!
Frank Ocean
3/5
Kinda bored me but cool Mitch Mitchell drum sample from Jimi Hendrix's Little Miss Lover on Crack Rock.
Nirvana
2/5
This is a tough one to rate. The sound is ferocious at the times when it should be, so that's good and hat's off to the band's performances and Steve Albini's production.
Too often, the songwriting lacks the hooks and humor of their first two albums and the lyrics frequently irritate the shit out of me - I hate listening to rich people complain. Go fuck yourselves.
In fairness, the band got a lot bigger than they ever expected so it's fair enough if they were unprepared and resentful to be spokespeople for a generation. Then again, it's not like they were forced to sign with David Geffen. Plenty of artists choose to not deal with Mammon and go one to have fulfilling careers.
It is too bad Kurt couldn't get over himself but this record was greatly anticipated and didn't meet the moment and I can't help but feel they handled the opportunity somewhat irresponsibly. At the time I didn't want to admit it but it sounded like a dead end to me, and as surprised and sorry as I was that Kurt offed himself, it did sort of seem like the band had run its course.
Jacques Brel
3/5
I want to like this more than I actually like this. I want to be known as the kind of person who is super into Jacques Brel. But sadly I am not that person.
Bruce Springsteen
2/5
No, DO shoot the piano player. Bruce would be so much better if this tinkling motherfucker would step away. So annoying. And maybe take the sax with you, while you're at it. Cease and desist! Maybe modern technology can remove them for me and then I can actually give the boss a fair listen.
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
3/5
It's funny that the time I have given his first 8 or 10 albums can be measured in thousands of hours and yet somehow I never once listened to this one all the way through.
This album is on the other side of the mountain. The side where the trail leads back down to earth. Maybe he got his personal life in order or his drinking more under control, but it sort of feels like he doesn't have as much emotionally gripping music to make.
I Want You and Blue Chair are much the best here and worthy additions to the cannon. Home is Where You Hang Your Head is pretty good, too. The rest of this is kinda ponderous to me.
A lot of songwriters feel compelled to put out new material on a regular schedule whether the material merits it or not. It has the effect of diluting their overall impact and damages their place in the firmament. I think about this a lot because if I get into the regular habit of writing then I will definitely write more than if I don't have a habit, but if I put myself into a situation where I have to produce on any kind of a deadline then while I will have more finished songs, few or even none of them will stand the test of time. Or worse yet, you accidentally re-write other people's material, as appears to have happened here with Tokyo Storm Warning basically being a poorly disguised Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown.
Anyway, I love Elvis but this album should not be on this list and makes me question the person who put it on there. Get Happy!, Trust, This Year's Model are only the first three examples of EC albums I would have put on here before this one.
Merle Haggard
4/5
Solid Bakersfield sound right here. Hadn't heard this one before but I like it. No issue with including this so long as this list also has some Buck Owens on it somewhere, for he's the real king of Bakersfield.
Death In Vegas
3/5
Pretty good but there's a non-zero chance I will never remember this.
The Replacements
4/5
Unsatisfied has to be one of my very favorite tunes of the 1980s. So fucking good, and I say that as a firm dissatisfied user. I'm even not sure unsatisfied is a word. That's how good this tune is. I can't imagine a better soundtrack for a lonely young person freezing in Reagan-era Minneapolis who is working on their cirrhosis.
I Will Dare and Answering Machine are also up there, too.
This is supposed to be your favorite Replacements album but if I'm totally honest my favorite is Pleased To Meet Me, even though it was made on a major label and after Bob Stinson left the band, which makes me less cool for liking it the most.
In any event, this is one of my very favorite albums titled Let It Be.
Madonna
2/5
Made the mistake of starting it on the last track. Hell no. Second star because she must be my lucky star
Keith Jarrett
5/5
A movie about the young woman who put on this concert just came out and I'm dying to see it.
This album is a perfect selection for this list. There was probably a certain kind of smug turtleneck wearing mustachioed prick in 1978 who would prominently display this record when his dates came over, but there's a good reason why he thought this was a good marker. Simply a fucking brilliant performance by an amazing musician at the peak of his powers.
AC/DC
3/5
These guys put Australia on the map back in the day but after the kick-ass opening title track this record kinda falls off in my opinion. All I'm saying is if Highway To Hell is on this here 1001 list then Back In Black and maybe even For Those About To Rock both better be on this mother fucker then, too.
Paul McCartney and Wings
4/5
Band On The Run is one of his very best tunes and Jet is pretty good but it slows down after that.
The Mothers Of Invention
2/5
'66? That's impressive.
I just read they were signed and produced by Tom Wilson. He is one of the more interesting music people you never heard of. Check him out. Be sure to find a photo, too. Here's a good teaser from reddit:
Talk about having an ear for greatness! Knowing who to put together was his super power. I did not know he did the overlay of electric instruments for S&G's "Sound of Silence" and that they had already broken up as a duo and came back together because of his version. Launched their career. Launched Dylan's electric period. Put it on the line for Zappa's debut. Velvet Underground, Soft Machine, etc. The list goes on...! Not to mention his humble Jazz beginnings with Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor & Donald Byrd no less. Woof
The Black Keys
4/5
An album I enjoyed greatly back in the day. It grows on you, though, so probably underrated in an album of the day setting where most people have time for one listen at most.
One thing I don't like so much anymore is all of the references to girls when I'm pretty sure - I hope - they are singing about grown women.
Also, is it me or is Danger Mouse the most important musician of this century so far? Discuss amongst yourselves...
The Byrds
2/5
Eight Miles High is a 4-star tune and in my book the best music either David Crosby or Roger McGuinn ever made but the rest of this album is groping for 2 stars at best. It's unfortunate for them that Jimi Hendrix also did a version of Hey Joe because the difference between them emphasizes how uncreative and uninteresting The Byrds are most of the time.
Kraftwerk
5/5
Slightly flabbergasted I never heard this before. How the hell did I miss this gem?!?
I knew The Model, but admittedly via Snakefinger. The rest is somehow new to me and it's amazing. It's just as good as you could hope the album between Trans Europe Express and Computer World would be.
Also, instantly recognized the title track because it was sampled by The Fearless Four back in the day:
https://youtu.be/XOHvOhADAic?si=ETUV8YlVhCBtPUwj
John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers
3/5
Not really my kind of music but I respect that it's well done.
Mj Cole
2/5
Would like to understand better why this is on here. Sounded total nondescript to me and after a while the people I was sharing a room with kept turning it down lower and lower.
Brian Wilson
1/5
This really fucked with my head and I am going to do everything in my power to ensure I never hear this again. I don't like pretending that Smile was a completed concept that just needed help in the execution, when the opposite is closer to the truth as I understand it.
It's sad hearing Brian's diminished voice, and I can't comprehend the decision to not include the other Beach Boys. How does that make sense? And the new passages the producers composed to tie things together not only contradicts the premise that Smile's concept was coherent and just needed help in execution, in the case of Surf's Up their new material caused them to re-write part of the main tune, and in so doing what was once a great work that could bring the likes of Leonard Bernstein to tears is now basically a parody of its former self. Similar treatments with Cabinessence, where you lose the stray syllable that caused generations of Beach Boys fanatics to argue whether Mike Love subverts it to "Over and over, the crow shits, uncover the cornfield."
Ok, so maybe I can appreciate why Brian might not want to include Mike Love on this, but if nothing else, lost albums carry their own magic and this is a crime against rock n roll and a condemnation of the culture that celebrates it.
Michael Jackson
1/5
Too soon
Jamiroquai
4/5
Love/hate relationship with these guys - Hey, I have that Stevie Wonder record, too! But ultimately my heart welcomes any kinship in our cold and indifferent universe. Any port in a storm.
I stumbled across a recent performance by the singer and it made me feel bad to watch grandad huck n jive. But maybe I'm just uncomfortable with my own aging and fuck the haters! But really, the ridiculous hat that is glorious on a post adolescent doesn't look as good on top a mop of gray hair.
I think you're supposed to like this album the most but I am ready to admit that I find the next one, something about a non-Steve Miller space cowboy, to be better.
Bobby Womack
3/5
Masterfully produced, arranged and performed but the songwriting is a little dull and I wish it was more centered around his fantastic guitar playing. Among the best soul records of the 1980s that I have heard, but that's not saying much. Exceptionally shitty decade for soul music.
If you want a wild ride, go read his personal life section on Wikipedia, and then click over to the death section of Sam Cooke. Crazy shit!
David Bowie
5/5
Jesu Christo! I just finished my review of a middling soul album and then we get this beast and I convulsed an LOL because of the enormous intensity gap between the two albums.
Maybe it's just me and the role this record played during an exceedingly difficult time in my life but fuck me, this is a heavy album. It's an L-shaped one way ride to and through a place most people should never have to visit if they can get and keep their shit together. For the rest of us, well, songs like Always Crashing In The Same Car can make me cry just from the relief of knowing you're not alone in being a fuckup. I'm not above admitting I paused in the middle of the last sentence for a quick cry. Anyway, and the desperation in Be My Wife? Harrowing. Sound & Vision? Blue, blue. Breaking Glass? Fucked up. I don't even want to know what David did to the carpet.
Side two's lack of lyrics gives you a shot a putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. His words on side one brought you to the brink and now you get a few minutes to step back and reflect and try to get it together enough to face the world and hope that maybe this time at least it'll be a different car that you crash in. Maybe.
Ray Charles
4/5
A great album starts with a great title, and this one has a great title. I can't believe some hipster band hasn't ironically borrowed it, like when Galaxie 500 took Ornette Coleman's This Is Our Music.
This may be the only '[singer] does country' album where the musician doesn't try to play country music but rather rings country songs in his own, 'regular' style, and it's much the better for it. One of the better Ray Charles I've heard, though I would have liked it better as a single album v double.
Megadeth
3/5
I like to pretend this album is a response to Neil Young's Rust Never Sleeps, but that may be wishful thinking.
Excellent cover art, and while I'm not a thrash guy, I have to admit this is an impressive onslaught. I don't like it as much as I respect it, but should the mood strike, this is one I'll be reaching for.
Grant Lee Buffalo
2/5
Ok, so Buffalo Tom and Grant Lee Buffalo are two entirely separate bands?!? Had no idea, but after listening, I realized I am more of a Buffalo Tom guy, apparently.
2/5
Started cool but got kind of boring in waiting roomish after a while.
The Incredible String Band
1/5
I must be on the wrong drugs because I found this really irritating. Tune your fucking guitar, asshole. I hope for their sake this album was entirely improvised in one take.
Still, I can't deny that I will be checking out their other albums. Like a moth to a flame, I love weirdos, what can I say?
Billy Bragg
4/5
Levi Stubb's Tears. What a tune! I feel a sinful pride (is that redundant? If so, let's just say weird pride) that I first discovered that song via The Redskins, who were simply the greatest and most criminally underappreciated socialist skinhead soul band, if not also the ONLY socialist skinhead soul band. In fact I can't continue without listening to it and so must you:
https://youtu.be/Sqf6fyZxevU?si=AaSGLaOpAuxyOvpZ
That performance is so powerful it can make me cry and I've watched it possibly a hundred times. That's the thing about Billy Bragg, his version, the original, is great but still, if he's sort of the British Bob Dylan then the Redskins' version of Levi Stubb's Tears is to Bragg what Hendrix's version of All Along The Watchtower is to Dylan. If you asked an alien, they would tell you the cover version is the definitive version. Another way he's the British Bob Dylan is that you will never, ever mistake his voice for someone else's.
But Bragg was never (yet) big enough for a lot of people to cover his material. If I were a performer I would definitely raid his catalog - huge opportunity to make novel hits without having to write anything.
But yeah, listening to this is just reminding me that today is a great day to play The Redskins' one and only album (the truly great Neither Washington Nor Moscow - speaking of albums that SHOULD be on this list...) on permanent rotation until my family begs me to take it off. Until then, Keep On Keeping On!
Culture Club
3/5
Better than I expected. I can certainly appreciate better why my wife as a 10 year-old would dress up like Boy George for Halloween. I believe I also caught one of the songs making reference to their previous album, kissing to be clever. How it is that I knew that that was the name of their previous album is between me and my priest , but in any event, I dig it when songwriters are self-referential.
Also, Black Money doesn't sound right in 2025.
Mylo
2/5
Sorry but it's gonna take a lot more than a remarkably uncreative sample of Betty Davis Eyes to destroy rock & roll. You can't destroy rock & roll from your dentist's waiting room as Mylo seems to be suggesting with this bland collection.
Judas Priest
2/5
Breakin The Law is pretty cool but that's about as far as I go w these lads. Sorry, not my bag.
Beatles
4/5
My sister had this album and one time I put it on when no one was home and Revolution Number 9 scared me so much I was afraid even to turn it off so I ran out of the living room and hid under my bed, terrified.
I'm not going to argue that this is the best Beatles album. It definitely isn't. But if I can only listen to one Beatles album for eternity, it's likely to be this one.
It's got a lot of tunes, so you get quantity. I mean, I'm definitely not bringing Please Please Me, which maybe clocks in at 30 minutes.
It's also got some soul crushers. As a child, Rocky Racoon used to make me cry. I felt so bad for poor Rocky!
While My Guitar Gently Weeps is another crusher and probably George's finest work. The story of how it was recorded is crazy - John and Paul were such douches they wouldn't take it seriously...until George brought his pal Eric Clapton in to play lead guitar and John and Paul were so starstruck they got their shit together and played the hell out of it. I mean, Paul's piano bit at the beginning is mind melting. George also done good with Savoy Truffle.
And then you've got a lot of John tunes right when his creativity was still voluminous and expanding and he comes up with a set of tunes I can only describe as avant garde. Happiness Is A Warm Gun - Are you fucking kidding me? Dear Prudence, Glass Onion, Sexie Sadie (I understand the original lyric was "Maharishi, You Fucking Twat" and the band had to convince him to not be so direct). Revolution is a classic and interesting given the times. And if Julia doesn't make you weepy when you think about his mum he lost young then yes, you're the asshole. Tack on I'm So Tired and Cry, Baby Cry and I think it's fair to say we are catching John at his peak.
There are some other food tunes on here. Blackbird is one of Paul's best, like Rocky. Otherwise, if I'm honest Paul doesn't necessarily have his best outing in this album. Especially next to John's heavy shit, Paul's tunes in here can come off as lightweight.
The Damned
4/5
A+ album title. It was so frustrating trying to get into the Damned in the US in the early/mid 80s as it seemed really hard to find their records. They were always super expensive imports so the only one I could get was an ep with New Rose, Neat Neat Neat and their other early, Nick Lowe produced bangers.
Not that I'm complaining, but it was that and that (awesome) Captain Sensible disco song "Wot?" and from just those things it was hard to get a sense of what The Damned was really about. Machine Gun Etiquette hung out there like a tantalizing, impossibly expensive import mystery. So I'm glad to finally catch up.
The first couple of songs could almost be Black Flag or Minor Threat. It's like a key missing link between British punk and American hardcore. I'm curious if this album was as directly influential on the first generation hardcore bands as it sounds.
I don't love the productions. Too much reverb, especially on the drums, is washing things out. This album would be more intense with less reverb.
Still, I liked it a lot and it will likely be a launching point for me to finally get into the damned Damned!
Elastica
3/5
Monster bass sound on the first track! I would love to know how they got that sound!!!
I feel like the third track is used in a lot of TV commercials or something. Definitely heard it many times before. Very catchy guitar part.
Overall, these guys are covering well tread ground but doing it very well. I bet they were a great live act. Cynical/disaffected British singers always get me going and I could listen to just the sound of this bass guitar all day long.