Baby's first hip-hop album. I mean that literally since I think this was the first (non-christian lmao) rap album I purchased with my own funds (a $10 itunes gift card naturally.) Rick Rubin's production lends a great guiding hand here, the drums knock hard, and his electric guitar flourishes are an interesting touch that show an alternative vision of how hip-hop could have evolved. The Peter Piper beat low key still goes hard, but those humpty-dumpty ass flows are so dated. The drums on "perfection" are cool. I could not possibly care less about "It's Tricky" or "Walk This Way" due to years and years of overexposure. This album is an interesting case study, feel like the way in which this period of hip-hop is considered to be dated is a little oversimplified. Sure the flows are simplistic and rudimentary here but the interplay between vocalists is still exciting and feels fresher than say the Beastie Boys' fratty tendencies from this same time period. Plus the production on the back half is really good in a lot of places, and this stays crisp and lean at only 39 minutes. Compared to a lot of other so-called golden 80's hip-hop albums this works a lot better, and if you want an exemplar of early hip-hop's block party rocking origins you can do far worse, even if many of the touchstones of this sound have fallen away as the genre evolved.
What an interesting album--definitely not a great album, but a fascinating and intriguing one. Probably says something that I preferred diving down innumerable wikipedia rabbit holes about the album's inspirations, themes, characters, and the general lore and commercial/critical response & legacy over actually listening to the album.
Pink Floyd are already an indica strain, slunk into the couch sort of band, but my god is this placid and limp. Sedate but kind of breezy in it's pacing, it just plods along and on and on. Hard to accurately call something filler when it serves a place in the narrative structure It's kind of a great trojan horse that they snuck all their most commercial, pop leaning tendencies into an overwrought, pretentious double album with an overarching narrative framework. The Eagles' cosplay "Young Lust" wouldn't fit anywhere else in their discography, same with the squint and you might see Disco on the horizon #1 single "Another Brick in the Wall Pt.II" For all it's overexposure on classic rock radio "Comfortably Numb" still sounds fantastic.
When I was younger&dumber I held this in very high esteem, even if I knew better than to ever actually listen to the thing in its entirety. It's some sort of artistic triumph I guess, but outside of a couple moments, not something I really have interest in returning to--though given how cinematic and theatrical in scope this is I could see my opinions changing if I ever get around to watching the film version.
I’m not gonna be a pleb like everyone else and complain about the length because it’s senseless, this is music from a far different time and a completely different consumer strategy. The fact that it existed in this form, and that so many sides was the intended format is pretty monumental in and of itself.
Ella’s voice is outstanding here, as always, there’s a couple absolute classics as well as a number of intriguing curiosities present here. “Someone to Watch Over Me” is incredibly beautiful. This is a perfect album to tune in and out of cause you’re pretty much always liable to land on some interesting musical or vocal moment.
My main issue, and admittedly I’m probably wrong for thinking this, but the Gershwin sound here just skews too close to show tunes or like musical theater to my ear to really genuinely please me. That’s not the case for everything, there’s a lot of classic standards, but again to my ear’s much of this skews less jazz classics and more broadway. That’s my own personal hindrance, otherwise this is really pleasant.
"Bitch told me I'm the goat, I set a coochie trend. I got 6 hoes on the floor, I need a coochie plan." - YN Jay
"I'm gonna make you girls lead me by the hand, then the world will know the hoochie coochie man" - Muddy Waters
Really delightful live album, classic 12 bar blues which gives so much space for great soloing. Otis Spann's piano work here is outstanding, so lively. Same goes for James Cotton's harmonica playing and Francis Clay's drumming. Waters' band is so good here and they really imbue a lot of these songs with life and energy. Kinda feels like the guitars are a little subdued in the mix, like unless I actively focus on them I might forget, which is maybe the point for these song structures. I have no clue what is actually meant by putting "a tiger in your tank" but I know it'll get you sent to horny jail. A whole will and testament could be written in honor of this performance of "I've Got My Mojo Workin'" but I'll spare the time. Whole set is great, so much swagger, exuberance, and confidence, I really enjoyed this.
A lot of my favorite childhood memories were spent with my Dad driving to and from baseball games on the weekends, for most of my junior high and high school career we spent our Saturdays driving to the cursed land of Agoura Hills for scrimmages . A great deal of that time was devoted to my Classic Rock education. We'd trawl between Southern California's 2-3 classic rock stations, playing the game of who could guess the song the fastest.
One lesson imparted on me across all those drives is how profoundly embarassing the 80's were for many bands. Creative bankruptcy and seismic changes to culture left many of the biggest bands of the 60's/70's in the lurch and their attempts to retain a cultural and commercial cache ranged from either flat-out cringe to just plain terrible.
Somewhere in the middle of that spectrum lies ZZ Top's Eliminator. A mid career, sign o' the times appeal to the commercial overlords. An album with a couple undeniably catchy songs that still get classic rock airplay, but also sounds so very sterile and mechanistic. Just about every element on this record sounds so dated and processed to all hell. These songs move at a quick tempo, but the use of drum machines sucks all the life out of them. The result just sounds comically overblown and even if a number of the songs are solid I'll just never be able to get behind this.
Not sure why I slept on this album when I was younger and going through the annals of music history and hip-hop history. For whatever reason I never made it past “It takes a nation of millions…” Clearly that was a mistake as this album is every bit as worthy. The production is so dense, claustrophobic, and hammering, Chuck D raps with force and a sense of purpose, even Flavor Flav gets his chance to shine on “911 is a Joke.” This definitely runs a bit long like a lot of hip-hop albums from this era, but it still stays fresh.
Willing to concede that maybe I just don't have the proper context for The Beta Band, and that diving headlong into a band's final album, one released shortly before disbanding is far from the proper introduction to a group's sound, ethos, and general schtick. But even given all that, it is pretty hard for this album to scan as anything other than dull, flat, and boring to me. I'm very open to a blending of somewhat disparate elements, acoustic & electronic elements intermingling, psychedelia-lite, its just that everything feels subdued and light here. Hoping to be surprised if & when I make it to the rest of their catalogue.
Pretty classic stuff here, new-wavey, power-pop goodness. The hits are familiar enough without being as over saturated as some other stuff from this era—especially “Our Lips Are Sealed” which shamefully I always knew but wasn’t able to place until listening here. But everything beyond the singles is great as well, fantastic bass and rhythm works, the leads are solid, great vocals, this is classic and rightfully so!
This starts off really strong, "Mama Said" is an absolute banger, and "You Don't Own Me" is great as well, but despite how fabulous of a voice Dusty has she can't save this from falling off a cliff. The middle section is a big nothing burger. Her cover version of "Will you Love Me Tomorrow" is miles away from the original, and there's just not much else to latch onto for me.
John Prine's music represents a big musical blind-spot for me, albeit one I never really knew was a blind-spot until the massive outpouring of online grief back in April 2020 surrounding his untimely passing. Despite seeing how many artists, writers, and acquaintances were waxing poetic in those days Prine's music remained something out there in the ether that maybe one day eventually I'd get around to listening to.
A brief digression, on critical reassessment. As an outside observer, but frequent follower of the Rolling Stone "500 albums" list it is fascinating to observe the leap this album made. From #452 to #149, regardless of anything to do with the songs, which are great I'll add, that sort of canonical shift and sea change over the course of 8 years is simply fascinating to me, it shows that the canon is so far from being fixed and will probably continue to change.
This is a great collection of songs though, Prine is a marvelous storyteller, has a real way with a turn of phrase without being too overwrought. Plainspoken when it fits, but equally capable of hitting on a beautiful melody. Type of album I wish I had grown up with and had nostalgic memories with, but one that'll stick around in the rotation.
Think I've always had my fair share of oppositional defiance when it comes to Led Zeppelin. Years and years of dudes telling me the full extent of their classic rock royalty status and that just never being met when I actually sat down to listen to them. Probably doesn't help that my two favorite Zeppelin songs are "Fool in the Rain" and "D'yer Maker" which are like the least Zeppelin, Zeppelin songs.
Having to start what will be a long piecemeal revisit of the band's discography with III is probably the worst place to begin. At the end of the day I don't care about how much of an alleged sex symbol Robert Plant was at the time, or even how much of a guitar G-d Jimmy Page was because Zeppelin was corny as hell. "Immigrant Song" ruins it's hammering blues-stomp with dumb ass viking imagery, "Gallows Pole" is an atrocity. At the very least they haven't gone full Tolkien here, but their pale blues imitation at times really doesn't work for me, "Since I've been Loving You" is about as close as I get and even then Plant's vocals take me out of it.
David Crosby’s solo debut—a little late to the party seeing as every other CSNY member had struck out on their own over the prior year—but well worth the wait. This is a gorgeous, hazy, foggy little slice of psychedelia-lite, with some folksy elements and jazzy undertones. This essentially functions as a communal creation and an album from a lost supergroup, rather than a straight-up solo album, as Crosby is backed for much of the record by members of The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. Jerry Garcia is all over this album with some fantastic guitar work. The jazzy little jaunt “Tamalpais High (At About 3)” is a particular highlight for me, though “What Are Their Names” and “Song with No Words” also standout. This is so unassuming and understated, and I shouldn’t be too surprised since I have an affinity for the Dead and the canon of stoned on a beach watching a California sunset music, but this is really sticking with me.
Far more interested in what this album represents than how it actually sounds. About as sheer of a 180 degree turn as a band can do, leaving behind (for the most part) the abrasive, avant-garde noisiness of their first two records to do summer of love folk rock, albeit in their own signature fashion. Really fascinated by the way a couple of these songs “Some Kinda Love” & “Beginning to see the Light” in particular prefigure Pavement’s whole brand of talky sardonic slacker rock. Though I’m far more interested in Lou Reed’s suite of religious, but not religious songs. “I’m Set Free” was the first song here that really hooked me, with its soft slow build, and themes of ambiguous, existential rebirth. “After Hours” is so twee and adorable, the pure innocence makes for a nice ending after the weirdo experimentalism of “The Murder Mystery.” Feel a little out of touch, for just not caring for “Pale Blue Eyes” though, which seems to be the song for a lot of y’all, but it does nothing for me. I enjoyed spending a good deal of time with this, but for as comforting an album as this is I'm just not sure if I see myself returning to it all that often.
Normally I have a visceral gut aversion to anything this glammed out or theatrical but somehow Pulp have never set off my alarm bells. Jarvis Cocker sells all his performances with such commitment, you kinda have to buy into what he's bought into himself. It also helps that "Common People" and "Disco 2000" are such absolute triumphs of songs. The way "Common People" in particular keeps ratcheting up momentum and somehow doesn't wear out that chorus despite repeating it like 8 times is pretty remarkable. This has a bit too much filler and too long a run-time to fully hit its promise, and I'm just too much of a sucker for Oasis to call this peak britpop, but it's a really enjoyable album.
First Beatles record consisting of all originals—pretty good stuff, but does feel a little less essential than the records that would follow. The title track is great, I love the weird opening chord. I am really enamored with the one George Harrison sung song here, which has a sound that prefigures a lot of the indie surf or like burger records sound pushed forward by bands like The Growlers. The frenetic strumming pattern and the weird chordal augmentation on the chorus are just really nice touches. These are pretty bog-standard pop songs in a lot of places, but there’s some really nice textural elements in the background. So much tambourine and interesting percussion work not to mention all the great harmonies. Again though, this just feels a little less interesting and less essential, but also I’ve been team Beach Boys over Beatles since birth and that’s not really relevant here but it is the big grain of salt that will season any opinion I ever have about The Beatles
The Byrds go full country, Gram Parsons in tow for this one, great album title and album cover. There’s a lot of pleasant honky-think arrangements but this feels wholly inessential to me. “One Hundred Years from Now” is great. Proof positive for the formula of combining a jangly psychedelic pop sound with a country twang. However everything else here is just a little too down the line and again feels entirely inessential.
This is a beautiful marriage of big band horns with afro-cuban rhythms and drums. The result is extremely successful, the horn lines are beautiful and take center stage with memorable melodies. The percussion work provides so much texture and supplies a great deal of frenetic energy. I’m a jazz neophyte, especially when it comes to anything outside of like hard-bop or the early post-bop stuff, but the big band style horn sections help ground this in familiar enough territory whilst still being a fresh expression of the genre to my ears.
Quintessential jangly, strummy 90’s alt-rock. Love the sound, love the simplicity that showcases a real songwriting talent. Big fan of the guitar tones, especially the rhythm guitars that sound like either an amplified acoustic, or an electric guitar meant to sound acoustic. Julianna Hatfield is great here, especially whenever she contributes some nice backing vocals. This is a clear touchstone that I’ve managed to miss out on over all these years, happy to begin rectifying that!
You know the 4-5 worthwhile songs on here by heart probably, everything else is caked with so much filler, that as an album this is wayyyy too bloated to actually be great. It's influence can't be understated and it gave us Snoop Doggy Dogg, but 2001 even though its also bloated has a greater ratio of hits to duds
Another shameful gap in my musical knowledge and a rare "W" for the 1001 albums list, this is mesmerizing, hypnotic, gorgeous, futuristic, nostalgic, kinda high-brow artsy pop-rock, that remains incredibly accessible despite it's experimentation.
Feel like I've been pretty lukewarm on Beck for all of my music listening lifetime and despite the acclaim for this album, my opinion just hasn't been swayed. There's a lot to be intrigued by here, "Devils Haircut" is a banger, full-stop, but when this album settles into its sort of slacker rock groove this becomes quite boring to me and I start to become disinterested. "Derelict" is interesting, the production on much of this is great, a lot of unexpected samples, textures, and sounds, but again it's probably my own issue that this just doesn't actually move me or interest me all that much. Plus, I might be in the minority with this opinion, but I find "Where It's At" to be extremely corny despite the really nice warm production.
Delightfully overwhelming with its sheer structured cacophony of sound and noise, but if I'm being honest I've always found this to be a tad redundant and boring at times. "Teen Age Riot" is perhaps the platonic ideal of this song but also casts a shadow that the rest of the album can never escape from. Sure it comes close at times, namely, "The Sprawl" "Candle" "Trilogy" but this is pretty long-winded at times. Hugely influential for sure, but I feel like publications and tastemakers have been yelling at me to love this album for years and I'll always just be a little lukewarm on it.
The old head who works mornings at the corner market I buy my coffee beans from is always bumping some Cat Stevens and 70's folk first thing in the morning, singing along, having a grand time. It makes me wish I felt so strongly about this sort of music, pleasant as it may be.
This is really nice singer-songwriter stuff, pleasing like a cup of chamomile tea with just the right amount of honey. There's just enough of a spiteful edge, and some cliche dynamics give a hard-nosed bent to what is mostly paper soft folk music. Catch me on the right springtime morning like today, or settling in to a nice road trip and these soft dulcet tones'll sound so nice.
Less a dance album and more of a collection of comically bombastic synths, beats and samples that function like a buzz saw through your cranium. An absolutely massive set of songs even if it's corny as all get out, but at the same time this is just pure pleasure seeking music--like if the bass line and vocals on "D.A.N.C.E," don't force you to crack a smile the I don't know what to tell you. Something I can really appreciate is just how heavy this sounds at moments, a few of the synth lines verging in the grotesque, I'm not well versed enough in the context but this seems like the axis point in which electronic music (along with Daft Punk) started aiming for colossal heights and aspiring towards stadium status having a dramatic effect on the evolution of the genre.
This is pretty good, nice and noisy, abrasive, weirdo, outsider indie rock. I think I still prefer Doolittle, what with its more prevalent moments of occasional pop bliss, interspersed with the brash freak-out moments. This has a really great energy though. What I appreciate most is the drum sound on this album though. Big and impactful, on some neanderthal shit, really helps a lot of these songs especially like "Bone Machine" and "Where Is My Mind?" in particular punch above their weight.
The Cure's first [i]good[/i] album, succeeds at creating such a sparse, introspective, and tense atmosphere although Robert Smith is maybe a little [i]too[/i] distant here for this to have a real emotional impact of any sort and the tone tends to be a bit too bleak. Nevertheless it's a step up over the debut and many of these songs are quite tight, with some interesting guitar and bass work. The whole thing is carried by some sort of grim, propulsive energy which at the very least makes you nod your head along even if this is too obtuse and vague to really get its point across. As a starting point and jumping off point for the band it is still a success.
Having known only the two big singles from this prior I found this album to be a pleasant surprise! Very poppy take on new wave, with enough charisma, personality and weirdness to carry it through and make for a really enjoyable listen. "She Bop" enters the great canon of songs about masturbation, "Witness" isn't a particularly great song but I appreciate the presence of a weird poppy dub experiment. Happy to further flesh out a little bit of my 80's pop knowledge.
God, the amount of times I uttered “hell yeah brother” or some variation on that utterance over the past couple days listening to this record is mildly shameful. This is so quintessentially classic it’s been a meme for decades now but a few things come to mind:
There’s no bad episode of [b]Freaks and Geeks[/b] but the episode centered around The Who concert coming to town has always been one of my favorites. In an episode that solely features Who needle drops it seems noteworthy to mention that almost every song on this record is dropped in that episode.
Secondly, criminally under appreciated TV show [b]Joe Pera Talks To You[/b] has many great moments, but besides the perfect breakfast bite I find myself thinking about “Church Announcements” on a weekly basis. The premise being that culturally illiterate protagonist Joe Pera hears “Baba O’Reilly” for the first time and is so awestruck and swept away by the wonder of the song that he binge listens to it for a whole weekend and is still so overcome with passion that he scraps reading the actual church announcements to preach a sermon on the power of Rock & Roll to a mostly bemused audience who all know and take for granted the song most people think is called “Teenage Wasteland.” Joe’s comedic timing and sheer naivety carries the episode, but the point stands! “Baba O’Reilly” is a great fucking song, it’s a marvel!!!
And the thing is there’s like 6 other amazing songs here! They’re cliche big platitude big sound classic rock songs in its finest form. Roger Daltrey’s vocals are so powerful, John Entwistle was the quintessential underrated bass player, Keith Moon has such a particular timbre with his drum playing and sounds but he contributes so much to this album. One of those albums that makes me sit back in my chair and think “hell yeah, music is cool as shit.”
Futuristic funk blasted, soulful, rappity ass rap music, probably not my [i]favorite[/i] OutKast album as I kinda prefer the youthful energy of their debut and the liquid soul beauty of Aquemini, but damn this shit sounds like it’s in another league compared to a lot of rap albums from this time period and the hits are titanic.
Naturally I have to ding this for being the length of a short feature film and having a bunch of pointless, useless interludes, but that was the fashion at the time. Otherwise though I feel like this holds up and helped continue to set a standard that I don’t think many if not [i]any[/i] outside of [i]maybe[/i] [Kendrick Lamar] have reached.
Really, really don’t get what people see in this… willing to chalk some of it up to Spotify audio quality reproducing a poor mix, but this is just muddy as hell. Feels like one of those cases of self-martyrdom and influence giving something a much higher stature than its quality demands. The basslines are sick as hell I will say, and it’s good they all sobered up just long enough to put out an album length statement but I just can’t stand this much of Darby Crash’s constipated wailings. There’s nothing here that wasn’t done better by either the bands whose sound they were deconstructing or the bands they inspired who went on to refine this sound and make it palatable. I’ll keep trying, I just don’t believe this still carries the weight this website gives it.
Mesmerizing, inventive, winding, jangly psychedelic pop music that belies a real sicko’s sensibilities under the hood. Feels like the skeleton key that unlocks a greater understanding of much of the music that I love without feeling dated, or like the stuff it influenced outright surpassed it. Like this was doing 60’s folk revival a decade before The Stone Roses, and sultry lounge lizard blues 30 years before The Growlers. I can tell what will keep me coming back to this is the tension between lovingly crafted pop melodies and surrealist lyricism. This is an absolute gem and probably the first new worthwhile thing I’ve been turned onto by the 1001 albums list.
Album goes incredibly hard. Sees WAR stretching their limbs out a little more heading into some real expansive jazz/funk/soul jam territory. Personally I love the extended jams on like “City, Country, City.” Think I honestly prefer "All Day Music" ever so slightly, but anytime I listen to WAR I’m left thinking they’re one of the best bands the American experiment has produced.
Stone-cold classic, mind-boggling how precisely every melody hits, every guitar line, texture, think I wrote this off for a long time unduly but have come around to it the past couple years. This thing just exudes assuredness and because it was already retro-looking it honestly still sounds great today. It’s clear to see it’s slipped a bit in stature over the years but it deserves its status as a classic, just an absolute joy to listen to.
Ahhh, that sweet, sweet falsetto. Carries a great deal of the enjoyment of this record. Maybe a tad underwhelming compared to Mayfield's most classic records and hits, but this is patient music that weaves and slowly unfurls. "Billy Jack" has a funk-lite angle to it, "So In Love" is sweet and soulful, the gospel overtones of "Jesus" and "Blue Monday People" surprisingly don't irritate me too much, and the spiritual and political undercurrent remains poignant years later, especially in regards to "Love to the People." Honestly though I wish this cut loose just a little bit more. These songs are nice and the vibe is silky smooth, but this needs some sort of edge to really connect and that's missing from this record.
Mildly ashamed of myself that this band has remained a blank slate in my musical knowledge and listening over the years, when their sound--at least on this first album of theirs I've heard--is so clearly in line with a lot of my tastes. Really great songwriting, spritely, lively early post-punk, a lot of catchy choruses and packed to the brim with fantastic basslines and interesting guitar lines and progressions, the sorts that the genre would quickly come to be associated with. There's so many bands you can tell were inspired by this and its really just great song after great song. "But I'm Different Now" brings to mind The Replacements, and "Start!" and a couple other songs just sound like clear-cut inspirations for the current wave of UK post-punk bands, only with a far better and far more charasmatic frontperson. Again, just really good stuff that has me excited to hear more in time.
Outside of "Road Trippin'" this takes a sheer plunge off a cliff after the title track but I'm not go and front and act like this doesn't have some bops nor will I try to hide my nostalgia for all the singles as they were alt rock radio STAPLES growing up, like trying to make it through 24 hours without hearing the title track or "Otherside" or even "Scar Tissue" over the lengths was and still is nigh impossible. And honestly I still have a lot of love for those songs, "Parallel Universe" had me low key geeking earlier, the chili peppers are permanently corny, but at least the hits were good songs.
That being said listening to this on even a half-decent pair of headphones is a painful experience, gonna agree with everyone here begging for a remastered version. Also they [i]really really[/i] should have cut the gas and not Anthony Kiedis cook when he started pulling out the "ding dong dang dong" bullshit ruining what should be a perfectly fine funk rock song on "Around The World."
Damn near close to perfection, maybe the most replayable rap record due to its concise length. The ledger is full when it comes to writing about this one, but it's pretty damn outstanding. Having a hard time believing this one is 30 years old already as it feels like yesterday I was at Coachella watching Nas perform this album in full for the 20 year anniversary, but time truly does fly. My favorite fun fact about this album is part of the hook sample for "Memory Lane" "Now let me take a trip down memory lane..." comes from a Biz Markie (R.I.P.) song about picking his nose and having a particularly memorable booger.
This is serviceable, but doesn't fully connect. A little too rootsy for much of its running, needs a little more energy or maybe a little more grit. It's clear Sheryl Crow showed up on the scene as a fully formed songwriter, her talents there evident, however I think her vocal performances would get stronger with subsequent releases. I don't know, I guess I wish this was either more songs like "All I Wanna Do" that have a little boogie in them, or that this went like full country and actually [i]rocked[/i] a little bit. Promising debut, properly rated.
Lovely little album, I was decidedly late to Fleet Foxes, but this is a gorgeous album I love returning to once or twice a year, preferably on a nice road trip. Robin Pecknold has such a distinct and pleasing voice and the pastoral, choral harmonies are pretty unmatched. If anything you could say this leans too much on a classic sound, but over the years I've come to appreciate this as opposed to the obfuscated, murky sound of like Bon Iver's debut. "White Winter Hymnal" is rightfully seen as a classic.
The quintessential cultural text from the 2004 Bush/Kerry election, probably the coolest rock and roll album of all time if you were between the ages 10-12 when it came out. Really it's a bombastic, grandiose, kind of milquetoast record that is quite long in the tooth. "Jesus of Suburbia" is by far the best thing here, an epic, anthemic song chock full of amazing earworm melodies and interesting ideas--it is dated and partially ruined by a regrettable use of an ableist slur that was [i]way[/i] too prevalent in the lexicon around this time--but it is what it is. The singles from this are rightfully seen as pop rock classics, even if in the case of like "Holiday" they're definitely a little cringe. This definitely overstays its welcome and despite how good of a songwriter Billie Joe Armstrong is I have no time or interest for most of the back half of this album, but when this hits its peaks though it's still pretty great.
Really really solid stuff, though not quite their best, though does help me understand why one of my old theology professors always talked about S&G as political folk singers. This album is inclined towards the poetic for most of its runtime, but is so deeply concerned with making an observation about the state of the world, which just runs counter to the prevailing curmudgeonly, asshole legacy someone like Paul Simon has today. The Bob Dylan parody pisses me off, though I imagine it was more prescient in its original context, but other than that one misstep this is just wall to wall hits. Beautiful songs, great melodies, impeccable harmonies, really happy to have a copy of this one now.
A really solid, if not a little inconsistent album, that in some ways have aged [i]really[/i] poorly. There's more transcendent jams here than clunkers, but man there are some absolute [i]stinkers[/i] on this record (Sierra Leone, Pilot Jones) and a couple highly rated songs that just sound so narcotized and bland a decade plus on (I'm looking at [i]you[/i] "Super Rich Kids"). The light conceptual structure of this album, with it's commercial jingle interludes and start-up sounds contributes absolutely nothing.
At it's best this is wry, disaffected commentary on the cultural and social cesspool that is Los Angeles, but having not lived in California for almost 8 years now that speaks to me less and less with each passing day. Except in the case of "Sweet Life" which just reminds me more of the ignorant folks I still know from CA who ask things like "Whats it like living in [i]the south[/i]?" even though my city and community is far more diverse and interesting than their wholly gentrified neighborhoods in like Highland Park or where ever.
There's no questioning how much of an event the release of this record was and I have vivid memories of listening to this upon it's midnight release and immediately understanding how much of an impact this would have. It's better than [Album7630705], which I am due for a revisit of but is an album I recall as being one of the most boring highly regarded records I've ever heard, which my be more of a signposting of shifting generational trends.
There's also no questioning how much Frank Ocean's laissez-faire take on celebrity has chipped away at the mystique of these records. I got to see Ocean perform live once in the lead-up to this record and he was never a strong live performer to begin with and then every cancelled festival set (FYF 2015) or catastrophic appearance (Coachella 2023) didn't help the reputation.
At the end of the day I'm pretty sure I'm just being needlessly critical and salty, this is still a really nice album I just don't think it shines quite as bright as it did on release, time has allowed a fair bit of rust to set in.
Doesn't reach the euphoric heights of their other albums quite so often. This is noteworthy for its excellent use of more somber tones. Feels burdened by the weight of crisis even as many portions of the rave scene were dancing to forget the pain. Alas, a couple songs here are so incredibly dated it's hard to pin this anywhere else than slightly below their 80's peak but it's still pretty solid.
Little bit of a mixed-bag this one. There's a few stone-cold, bluesy, psych freak-out, classics, but there's also a lot of moments where Jim Morrison and his whole lounge lizard schtick wears real thin. There's a lot of gritty and gruff moments which I like, and I can't get enough of that organ sound that pops up on a number of these songs, there's also a few moments like "Alabama Bar" that really grate on me. This is still a little bit better than I expected, pretty enjoyable overall. Also cannot help but think of Tony Hawk's Underground 2 whenever I hear "Break on Through" which always creates a positive nostalgia loop.
The most overrated, overhyped, over-lauded, boring canonical rock album of all time. I've always hated it. I've hated it since the day I got the Rolling Stone 500 greatest albums coffee table book in like 2005 and set about understanding the shape of the cultural critical consensus canon, and subsequently wasted $15 on a remastered CD copy at my local FYE CD shop. I grew up on classic rock radio where this record got no burn, outside of maybe the occasional spin of Sgt Peppers --> With a Little Help From My Friends, and the even more occasional late night run of "A Day in the Life" which really are the only worthwhile things here. I maybe have a little time of day for "Getting Better" but just about everything else here is like audio melatonin for me. These sonic, studio experiments feel entirely like cerebral exercises and there's little to no emotional heft, weight, or impact in the music. Which is maybe why I actually kind of like "When I'm Sixty-Four" which despite all it's twee, cutesy-ness actually manages to express a cute sentiment. Magical Mystery Tour is superior in my mind, and since I've always been one to take sides in binary musical debates this album can't hold a candle to Pet Sounds.
Really doesn't matter how many Clorox Clean Wipes or Swiffer Wet Jet advertisements "One Way or Another" has soundtracked, nor does it matter that you could go to dinner at 5 different restaurants on 5 different days in most any gentrifying downtown city center and you'd probably hear "Heart of Glass" on the playlist at all 5 of them, these songs are among the most played out of the pop canon, usually out of context and yet somehow they don't suffer!
Predominantly kind of punky, poppy, new wave music with the occasional wrinkle, oddity, or fun experimental moment interwoven for texture. These songs just consistently opt to do something weird rather than just go for the expected. "One Way or Another" is a journey of a song, "Fade Away and Radiate" starts as a slow-burning ballad before it explodes with a short, blistering guitar solo, and ends on a faux-reggae fade away. The main riff on "I Know but I Don't Know" sounds more like it could have been written by Rush than any of the new wave bands. "Sunday Girl" is like early 60's rock with a bit of ironic posturing. This was a big time case of thinking I had a conception of what a band was like and thus ignoring them for a long time, I was pleasantly surprised when I finally sat down and listened to this a couple years ago and found my prior conceptions were pretty far from the truth.
Weird, squiggly, fun, albeit very basic!
