1001 Albums Summary

Wall of sound made lyrics indecipherable. Slower songs were fine.

"Hang on to Yourself" is a bop. I don't really follow the story here, but the songs slap.

omg boring af

The highs are extremely high. The lows are meh, because Paul Simon can sometimes be a lazy lyricist. The production is overwrought but that's okay.

John Prine starts a song with "I am an old woman" and you believe him.

First half was pretty good - surprisingly sparse and post-punk when I was expecting something more noisy. As the album went on it got more and more oblique musically and less enjoyable.

This album is fine for what it is. But I'm not sure why an album of Southern folk and blues covers by a New Yorker who didn't write any of them made the list. If you want more authentic or interesting, listen to Woody Guthrie. If you want better performances, there are certainly others. Hm.

Much better than I was expecting! Everything in between "Aqualung" and "Locomotive Breath" sounded like it was coming from Fairport Convention.

“Cities” was fine. Most of the rest was similar-sounding babble.

“Good Enough” was good! Surprising harmonies. But very repetitive.

No interesting lyrical content and no variety song-to-song makes for a boring experience.

Nice enough, but not a lot of GREAT songs.

Great album. Fantastic production. Lots of great and innovative songwriting that the Beatles had never attempted before.

I liked a few songs, but kind of lost my interest about halfway through. That's still probably more than most rap albums, I think. A lot of interesting musical things happening throughout.

Some good songs, but I realize that Van Morrison only has the effective vocal range of about 3 or 4 notes.

What a great album by someone I had never heard of. The instrumentation was pure, like, 1976 bliss, with refreshing lyrics. I'm a fan, whoever this person is.

There were only two (2) songs about statutory rape on this album, which I suspect is below average for the genre. These guys are apparently only capable of one riff, too. Imagine going through all the work of recording 11 songs but you actually only had one to begin with and just played it 11 times in a row.

Better than Fear the Music by a lot. Some good groovy post-disco songs.

Not the worst thing in the world, but I was.... bored by it? Also, there were some really weird stylistic shifts between songs and the vocal performances that were offputting to me.

Cool album! Very eclectic.

Despite the heavy subject material, I thought this album was pretty entertaining. It was funny (though probably only with 30 years hindsight and my white privilege), lyric-forward, with interesting loops and the newsreel inserts were also good.

Had no idea these were on the same album. Good writing, thematically cohesive, but musically diverse.

I liked this album more than I expected. I guess the cliches for CCR are spread out amongst their albums. Some good bass riffs, too.

It's definitely a different album than Folsom Prison. They are not the same album. It's good to hear a clip of Cash live and the cool stage banter, but I'm not sure what it provides beyond that? Is there something intensely musically important? American V seems like a better choice.

Vapid and boring

I've heard worse albums. It got more boring as it went along, I think? They need more songs that go somewhere.

This shit wasn't even in English

This album managed to be both loud and boring.

Outside of "Wild World," I actually didn't care for a lot of the songs on this album as much as I expected to?

Cut out the Euro dance trash and there was something here.

Meh.

What a fuckin' banger.

And that was the day grunge was born.

Good stuff.

Absolutely fucking awful.

Eff Eric Clapton but I really liked this album. Light on the blues and instead lots of boppy rock.

There are so many good songs on this album offset by garbage.

It fell off a bit in the second half a bit but the pure rock and roll numbers are pure bangers.

Solid enough.

I liked this! Both the slower and faster numbers. A really good lo-fi feel throughout, good songwriting. Would listen to it again.

I'd call this avant-garde, but the number of different letters in the term "avant-garde" makes it way too diverse a term to apply to that drivel. That was 41 minutes of utter nonsense.

Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13 year old cousin.

If you listened to this 3 times, you still wouldn’t find anything exciting enough to even lean forward for.

I didn't care for this one much. Two songs I liked, and the rest were pretty boring.

Cool stuff. Such a ‘90s jangle pop vibe.

I hated how good this was.

This was definitely jazzy bossa nova, I guess.

I was expecting more variety in everything. Lot of extended weird guitar jams that lacked structure and cohesion.

Some cool songs, I suppose, especially the more political songs. Dragged on way too long, though.

I wish I were dead

Better than the first one. There were some exciting songs here!

Not bad, actually. The synths add a lot to make it palatable and less "look at me play guitar." The songs are short enough to not feel self-indulgent. The subject matter is pretty meh.

Pretty okay, I guess?

This was a guy noodling around playing chords and arpeggios and thinking it's high art.

Oh, my god, he's lost it, he's totally lost it.

I think this was mostly fine, but the songs sounded a little too samey to me.

Absolute piss

Oh my god this week is garbage

Did not care for this one like the other one we've heard. Too much blues.

Pretty poppy - I expected stuff more like Nirvana. But very samey?

Wildly good.

A couple of okay songs, the rest was screamo. They were better when they tried to be pop, I know.

I said that I'd give something 3 stars if I thought there was something worthwhile for an album. The instrumentation and arrangement is pristine. It's too bad the lyrics are mind-numbingly boring and there's no energy to anything.

This is probably a well done disco album, but the songs were way too long and sounded mostly the same. So it wasn’t enjoyable.

Based on the acoustic guitar intro to the first song, I thought I'd like this, but I did not.

Yeah, this is pretty good shit.

Okay, I know this is an Important Album. The sounds are cool, but I think it can only do so much amidst the asinine lyrics. It's good. But I didn't love it, trying to listen with an open mind.

Okay. Songs too long and too much annoying English talking.

Beginning and end was pretty good - love the prog country sound. The middle part drug.

A lot of good songs! Too long.

This might be closer to 5 stars without the jams.

I was surprised to hear banter from The Who.

Pretty, I guess. Not a lot else.

I thought this was bad.

This was fine. I had no idea the "I've got soul but I'm not a soldier" song was them.

I actually liked this! The lyrics were better than the first album, and there was a pretty wide range of style and sounds.

Fine, I guess? I liked "Heroes." Better than the one with Fame on it.

This was pretty good.

Holy Nashville Sound, Batman

Pretty nice? I really didn't understand why this album was called this because I never thought that Ray Charles was country. That he was doing classic country songs in an R&B format makes so much more sense now.

For the time, this seems like it was a pretty banger album.

This is really good! I'd almost call it too short.

Is there really anything lyrically valuable here?

I'm not sure I've ever really been able to put Aerosmith is a genre. The stuff I know from the '90s is so poppy. This sounded like glam metal half the time. I didn't care for it much.

This sounded like a modern-day Beach Boys except for the weird song that sounded like it went with an establishing shot from Aladdin.

Pretty wild, musically, but I liked it.

I thought the back half of this album was excellent.

Not really my thing, but this was still a fun listen.

This is the best Bowie album by quite a bit. This is excellent.

I get what he was trying to do - this sounds a lot like a concept album. I think too many of the songs were similar to each other.

NOTE: I listened to Taylor's version. Fuck. I didn't think this "era" would be my thing, but fuck, it's really good.

I had very little opinions about this.

Man, this was really great. "New York City Song" and "Your Own Back Yard" were excellent.

Less good than Modern Sounds. Pretty boring, overall?

Look mommy, I can make a hip hop album

I knew it was a mistake letting this guy out of prison.

I thought it declined as it went along.

It took like 4 songs for this album to get good, but it was solid after that point. Really nice sound and textures, even if the register of the lead singer's voice was annoying.

There were surprisingly a couple of okay songs on here, but a lot of carnival organ and blathering other than that.

The sounds were cool. I never thought I’d say this, but not every emotion needs to be a song.

This is some really good progressive shit.

A harder, but even more banal Ramones

One of the most childish records I have ever heard, that is nonetheless really good in its own way.

This is good! Pretty classic rock and roll.

This is a bunch of R&B covers, but there’s an obvious proto-punk energy to it all that makes it worth listening to.

This was very good.

I thought that half of these songs were going to end up being "Kool Thing" because they all sort of shared the riff. I think if you see it as a motif it's cool, but you could also see it as not having many ideas. This is a better album than the other one we listened to.

This is not normally my thing at all, but I really enjoyed this album. Really good singing and all of the synth work produced really good sounds.

I think too many songs that are all a little too similar.

If judged on the ear-worminess of their synth hooks this would be 5 stars, but the back half of the album is pretty boring.

Absolutely not.

Fine, I guess.

Really good! I'm not the biggest fan of the "loose" production, but the songwriting was great, in the gloomiest possible way.

I liked the first few songs on this album, and then the super long ones started and it fell into an inescapable ditch.

A lot of really cool beats and styles. I'm a fan.

Maybe this is sacrilegious, but I found the beats pretty similar for an album this long. Biggie's voice is hard to understand. I wasn't really a fan.

I know it's the Beatles. But if this was anyone else playing mediocre covers of songs by Black artists, then this album (their worst) would be an afterthought.

The highs of this album were 5*. Really great production and lyrics. The lows were like 2.5 when it got too wall of soundy. So that’s 4, I think. I’m impressed.

You can see some cool psychedelia and that classic 12-string Roger McGuinn guitar. But the performances? Not great?

Okay, I guess.

Yuck.

This was pretty good. The acoustic songs were better than the super heavy ones.

I think I liked this a bit more than To Pimp a Butterfly.

I thought the vibe got a little old, but this felt like a more accessible and fun Sonic Youth, kind of? Idk, I liked it.

I’m not sure if it’s his voice I find boring, his songwriting, or his desire to exist.

Idk who these guys are but it slaps like hell

I have no idea when one song ended and another began. I’m sorry, God, I don’t like jazz.

This is better than most of the jazz albums we've listened to. But 2 hours? TWO HOURS OF THE SAME SONG?

David Bowie but good.

Love the wall of sound. The lyrics are repetitive, but the instrumentation (sax and trumpet) and energy is fantabulous.

The production and Fitzgerald's voice are all fine enough, but 3 hours of the Gershwin brothers writing exactly one type of song 30 times is nauseating.

Okay, I wasn't expecting much, but this album was pretty fun beginning to end.

Love it!

So overwrought. Like someone tried to make a full album of “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”

Sue me but this was boring

On one level, this isn’t at all my thing. But there’s an underlying level of care for the music and something creative guiding it all. Maybe this guy should write scores?

Fine, I guess? I don’t know what the Pixies sound like. I thought the extended conversation between John Pixie and Kim Deal was happening on the street and thought I should intervene.

A ginger slaps his name on a bunch of work by black artists. Got it.

You could have played the first five seconds of most of these and expected a banger 1964 protest song to come out.

As appreciative as I am of the positive messages of most of these songs, half the album was spent introducing themselves and one of them telling us several different times that his last name was not McDonald's. That's a little weird. But "Tricky," "You Be Illin'," "My Adidas," and "Dumb Girl" were all pretty good.

"Birdland" and "The Juggler" were both good. It's jazz fusion, but there's a mellow groove emanating here that makes it much more listenable than most jazz stuff.

Nothing of real value here.

This is like one step removed from Right Said Fred. Next.

This got boring a lot faster than I expected.

Not as good as College Dropout. Better than Yeezus.

Some things shouldn't exist.

This wasn't very enjoyable.

Far dorkier than I thought.

The rapping is immaculate and there are some good songs. But oh my god, the immaturity that permeates throughout every track - you don't need to say 'I don't give a fuck' and 'I give people the finger' four times every song. And that doesn't even deal with the violence aspect, which we can say in hindsight was actually problematic.

Why in the ever living fuck is this murmurcore elevator music here? MULTIPLE ALBUMS?

Not as good as the last one.

Better than most Tom Petty, mostly in the first half.

Meh? Better than what came later but nothing standout.

This is absolute garbage.

This band stopped being interesting 3 entries ago.

Imaging having this little to say but making 72 minutes of lyrical and musical feces anyway. Being a heroin-addicted rapist doesn't make what you have to say deep or interesting. Everyone associated with this should be in Guantanamo Bay.

Boring?

Okay, I thought this was pretty good. I was expecting something grungy, but it wasn't that at all. Just pop-forward alt rock?

This was a bit…. Rougher around the edges than the studio performances I’ve heard. But the audience is into it. It’s fun.

See, I thought this was pretty good.

Because I need to leave a detailed review: (1) This is very boring music. (2) "Backdrift" features a full minute of a drum machine solo for no reason. (3) If this was supposed to somehow be topical, nothing in the 7 decipherable words had anything to do with anything recognizable. (4) Maybe this kind of music is groundbreaking and experimental, but I've heard minor inversions before, and experiments often fail. (5) There's just nothing exciting in any of this.

I thought this was pretty good - some of the songs were quite a bit too long. I didn't know they sounded that way in 1974 - it feels definitely more of a 1978-9 sound.

Nothing engaging here.

This is the iconic version of "Mary Hamilton."

I knew two songs from this album, and I think liked them less than the rest. It’s too long.

I think we all need to be honest that blues music is actually boring. An album's worth of the same melodies over and over again is objectively exhausting to listen to.

Okay, I thought this band was supposed to be entertaining? But it was a 23 minute song of noodling.

This is harsh on it, but half the songs sounded like War Pigs. I know War Pigs came after this, but I can't reduce that album's ratings.

Slightly more interesting than most of the jazz music we've listened to so far.

I think this is about Sticky Fingers level.

I thought this was really good. Funny, with a storyline, and all the rapping was top-notch.

Preposition preposition rural noun.

I didn't really care for this like I did the other one we listened to.

There were enough good songs on this record for me to give it 3*. It's a lot of listening with a lot of similar production, though. A regular album would have been a better album.

Cartoonishly immature drivel.

This is so, so, so boring.

- I thought the mixing was off, especially on the first song - Not a fan of the guy's voice - Everything else was really good

All the technical ability in the world can't produce music that has any heart, soul, or emotional or intellectual depth. It's just a bunch of forgettable notes.

So, this strikes me as harder than Born to Run, but the songs just… aren’t as good? There isn’t anything groundbreaking here. The topics are basically standard BS-fare. Which is fine, but not outstanding.

The Eagles are shitty, but there are a few good songs here. "Last Resort" was surprisingly so. Too much Henley lead vocals.

Boring

I didn’t love this album, but the musicianship was top-notch and the bass lines were great.

I know this is a classic, but 5 songs and no interesting lyrics?

This is fine, but why this plus San Quentin?

I haven't left many substantive reviews lately. This is a 4* because it's a 5* first half of the album followed by a 3* back half. But, maybe as close to a 5* without being one. The best thing that REM ever did was making sure people could hear what they had to say.

I.... didn't really find this fun to listen to at all? It was just loud. But didn't hit me anywhere in any feels. The songs felt like a slog. Not really what I was expecting.

Two straight days of boring ambient garbage

I thought it fell off really hard in the back half.

There were things I liked about this album. It's very ironic and strange coming from them. Does that make it sound inauthentic? The song about a riot was pretty bad.

Not terrible, I guess?

1001? Really? The shrieking shtick got old really quickly.

What a splendid album. The pitch-perfect production, and the retooling of songs ("Natural Woman," "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?") that previous artists had had monster hits with.

Lousy and boring.

Sonically brilliant. Lyricslly and themstically very, very silly, pulled up to 4 by the Harrison compositions.

This is not music and people should feel bad about liking it. Good lord.

This was very well produced. But it sounded like a pastiche of better music from the ‘70s, and the lyrics were comically cliché.

This is…. Totally uninteresting electropop?

I think, on the whole, I enjoyed this less than Fear of a Black Planet. There were more songs that just didn't really hit all that hard.

This is the stuff that gets pre-loaded onto keyboards at Circuit City in 1996.

I think it's possible this is better than the other Talking Heads albums we've done so far, but because they insist on putting this many of their albums on here I don't even know how to differentiate them.

There is a lot of good playing on this album, none of which comes close to producing anything resembling an emotion. I hate to take it out on what are surely very talented musicians. I just don't get it.