you don't actively seek out wonderwall. wonderwall finds you. wonderwall will find you when you're drunk off your tits and you remember how much you love your friends. wonderwall will find you when a guitar is put in your hands and your fingers move of their own accord. wonderwall will find you when you're walking down a certain university city's high street and the busker that's there every day belts out the only song he knows. wonderwall is like mathematics - was it invented by humans, or is it an inherent truth of the universe that oasis simply uncovered in the mid-90s?

this shit is the future

not particularly exciting tbh. struggling to even find anything to say about this album. fleetwood mac never really caught my attention and this has failed to remedy that

wow, Janis Joplin is incredible on this. she completely steals the show. I had no idea this was a fake live album until i read about it - it certainly adds to the atmosphere it's trying to create, with the raw vocals and long jams, but it's too unpolished to be as conceptually astounding as, like, court of the crimson king. ball and chain is ridiculously good. easily my favourite. bluesy, full of heart, engaging throughout. Thoroughly enjoyed this album!

the epitome of "i gotta hand it to him"

no hotel californina on this album whats even the baka point this is the type of music that plays in a corny american film and gets switched off right before the bar fight kicks off. "boy I'm glad we got outta that one!" typa music. car fading into the distance on highway 51 typa music. gonna go listen to hotel california again though

the first song was perfectly nice and pleasant, the rest was a complete drag of 60s folk rock pleasantries. not a bad album per se, it's perfectly nice even, but why the hell was this included on the 1001 albums list? it's like including [tries to come up with a milquetoast album from my early teens] fun.'s Some Nights in the 2010s category because people were listening to that type of music i guess. docking a point just because it pissed me off.

i had fun with this one. this was clearly ahead of its time. i asked my dad if he knew this album (he was a punk back when everyone was a punk) and he didn't. not UK enough for him. some of the more... distasteful lyrics harkened me back to the days (last week) when i got an album featuring the one slim shady. provocative violence to Make A Point sells, i guess, but this one was slightly more tasteful.

i need to find some tie-dye

this is corny as hell but i'd be having an excellent time if i heard it in a gay bar

[kendall roy i am interested in becoming a meth head voice] i am interested in becoming a metalhead

some nice easy listening :) i think i prefer this type of jazz to the experimental stuff, I'm not quite there yet

As I write this, the evening shade has given everything the same melancholic blue tinge as the album cover. I’ve been feeling weirdly emotionally stunted recently - I want the release of a good cry but the tears refuse to come out. I was walking along the street on one of the first warm spring days of the year and I basked in that beautiful steel guitar melody on California: “Oh, it gets so lonely / When you're walking / And the streets are full of strangers”. I was hit with that feeling of sonder; all of the people walking around me have lives I wouldn’t ever be privy to, and I was all alone, and I allowed myself to have a little cry. Everybody walked along unaware. I was so excited to see this album pop up because it was literally just put back up on Spotify a couple days ago and I’ve been listening to it nonstop. This is the first and only Joni album I've heard so far and I want to really absorb it because it's just mesmerising; her fluttering voice combined with some timeless guitar and piano work. I'm sure this has been covered well elsewhere but it almost feels insulting how flippantly some reviewers refer to Joni's womanhood. The first review here claims they "understand women now". Other reviews jokily call her a bitch, or call this "menopause-core" (she was 27 when she wrote this). Both sides of this coin feel a little trivialising. Obviously you don't have to enjoy this or think it's worth listening to. Just have some class? That being said, to remove this album from the context of her womanhood - of her experience of giving her child away, of her relationships with men, and her influence on a generation of female songwriters - would be doing this album a disservice. On All I Want, she sings "I wanna be strong, I wanna laugh along / I wanna belong to the living / Alive, alive, I wanna get up and jive". I can't help but think of that timeless Sylvia Plath quote: "My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...". 20 years later, Joni goes on an adventure to search for that same freedom and instead finds herself yearning for the love and familiarity she left behind.

groovy, catchy and very danceable. a great disco album but not something I'd return to.

This would have benefitted from taking more risk on the instrumentation - I liked the harmonica and the electric guitar on "no body, no crime", for example, but it built to the repeating chorus with the same drums and guitar as all the other tracks. The drums I especially dislike - really flat. I wonder if I would like her live versions of these songs more. Some of these songs are just itching to be stripped down and have some guitar string noise or piano thump. At least "closure" woke me up - it bursts in with an odd time signature and some folktronica pots-and-pans noise. Interesting. Sounds like an "Age of Adz" knockoff. And then - sigh - a soft piano ballad starts to compete with it. It kind of works, but taylor doesn't have enough edge to push-and-pull with the production. Fascinating that they got BJ Burton, who did some excellent production on Charli XCX's hyperpop banger HIFN, to co-produce this. I want more of this, but judging from the streaming numbers (it's the least popular song by a pretty significant margin) it's a creative risk that the fans didn't appreciate. I think it's hard to comment on a taylor swift album without also indirectly commenting on Taylor Swift, the cultural phenomenon. this album is very taylor swift, lowercase. I like that she's put such an emphasis on songriting into the pop landscape - her conversational singing style is front-and-center here. I find the lyricism a little too unsubtle, adjective-laden and clumsy in parts. "Tell me when did your winning smile start to look like a smirk", "lost in the current like a priceless wine", "if the shoe fits, walk in it till your high heels break". It just doesn't have the passion and subtelty of other modern singer/songwriters like adrianne lenker, joanna newsom, fiona apple, pj harvey. Disappointing and pretty tame for what I was expecting to be a compelling foray into the "indie-pop" sound. I wasn't expecting Evermore to grate on me so much that I'd write so much about it.

you don't actively seek out wonderwall. wonderwall finds you. wonderwall will find you when you're drunk off your tits and you remember how much you love your friends. wonderwall will find you when a guitar is put in your hands and your fingers move of their own accord. wonderwall will find you when you're walking down a certain university city's high street and the busker that's there every day belts out the only song he knows. wonderwall is like mathematics - was it invented by humans, or is it an inherent truth of the universe that oasis simply uncovered in the mid-90s?

My first 5-star for a first listen. This is just oozing in style and personality. It’s got a mild camp factor that Lou Reed turns up a notch in Transformer. I already knew and liked a couple of these songs - lust for life obviously, and the excellent Bowie-Tina Turner cover of Tonight - and they’re even better in the album context. Turn Blue was a new favourite, earning its 7-minute runtime with its turbulent vocals and emotional gut-punch lyrics (“Mama, what colour will the lights be? / will they turn blue on me?”). Despite some of the dark subject matter, this gave me some zest for life on a gloomy spring morning. New favourite!

This is well-made and the guy clearly went through some shit but it's just wrong place, wrong time for me to get any enjoyment out of it. This is sorta pre-pop-punk, and any interest I had in pop punk died when i was 15

couldn't really be bothered with this. not my jam at all. +1 for the lady Di reference

i feel like i'm being pranked but the prank is just some excellent music

This is one of those albums that I really want to like. The Rip is such a transcendental song and an all-time favourite - the gentle whisper of "wild, wild horses, they will take me away...", that steady build of the drums and synths, you just never want it to end. There are some other really good songs on here - the dark, clashing noise of Silence, the onomatopeic Machine Gun. I've never really given Small a chance and enjoyed the buildup on that one too. But there are other songs that are just a chore to listen to. Beth Gibbons' voice becomes just slightly too discordant, the atmosphere is just slightly too uncomfortable, like on "nylon smile", or with the grating bleeps on We Carry On (basically machine gun but... worse). I can appreciate this as a work that deliberately moves between uncomfortable and sweet, mechanical and atmospheric. +1 for the experimentation, even if I prefer the more classic style of Dummy

i greatly preferred this to the GZA album i got a while back. love his flow, catchy beats, excellent storytelling and atmosphere. not a huge fan of skits in general but they were okay here.

this shit is the future

she rhymes "monkey" with "spelunking". nobody is doing it like her. this type of complex orchestral music often has this air of taking itself very seriously, but there's so much playfulness and whimsy in this album. it feels like a child staring in wonder at a rabbit crossing a field, or gazing up at the night sky. some of the lyricism has a certain feel to it that i only see recaptured in, weirdly enough, rappers like MF DOOM. there's something similar in the complex internal rhyme schemes and cryptic, nonsensical on-the-surface but internally consistent lyrics. the orchestration ebbs and flows with her storytelling and it's just beautiful, especially the harp and the strings. "C'mon, will you dance, my darling? Darling, there’s a place for us; Can we go, before I turn to dust?"

Thinking about when I was walking through the Kraków modern art museum last year and I could distantly hear a distinctive thumping drumbeat. As I got closer I realised it was the distinctive thrum of “Venus in Furs”. I entered the room to behold an explorable reconstruction of Andy Warhol’s famous studio, complete with industrial metal walls, grimy pink chairs, lewd videos playing on CRT screens, graffitied walls, and pinned Polaroids. I must have spent at least 20 minutes there, enjoying the atmosphere, “Venus in Furs” blasting on repeat the whole time. What a way to experience that song. No wonder everybody wanted a piece of that.

pick your favourite elaborate, over-the-top, ambitious album from the 1960s-1980s. this album is just that but with all of the 90s injected into it