Well. Another album of rock and roll that is just the same song over and over, same vocal effect, same guitar tones, same beat, chords, and "melodies." I get that this is basically an album recorded live, but then make a live album. When you have the time and space available to you in a studio, just setting everything up the same way and pressing "record" seems like a waste. Is this is the most important Strokes album? I hope not, for their sake. The most interesting bits? The bass line in the verse in Is This It? is fantastic and had me hoping for more, but alas the rest of the album is just dododododadadada, eight to the bar with a few variations here and there The feedback at the beginning of New York City Cops was probably the most interesting thing on the album. Lo and behold it even had a guitar solo for a second there. So does Take It Or Leave It, but I generally consider a guitar solo something exceeding five different notes. Maybe a phrase or two. And speaking of strokes, they should have called this "The Stroke" because, with the exception of the syncopated rhythm on The Modern Age, it's all just the same driving downstroke. Am I generalizing? Yes. But I'm not going to spend a full 35 minutes trying to find tiny pieces of interesting minutae on an album of sameness. It's all white noise after a while. As they say in "Take It Or Leave It," enough is enough.

Tasting this like a fine wine. Its alright. Hints of Prince and Bowie to come. A dry mix and a fuzzy soft guitar tone with Bolan’s vocals set in a dreamy bed. Nothing too remarkable on the album. Nothing too inventive to these ears that have been raised on its legacy. Im not sure how much glam Bolan embodied in his music. He wore glitter and was bisexual and those became traits of his heirs but musically what is he doing? A kind of strut and sneer and quite a lot of hand percussion. Not much to work with sonically. Just some chords and riffs and lines of song. Nothing that blues musicians weren’t really doing at the time: shuffles and grooves. Perhaps his influence was in being a cross over artist who brought psychedelic rock and fantasy folk to more bluesy settings. I dunno. However, I’m in this for the music not necessarily the cultural significance of the artist of the album. Does this still hold up 50+ years later? It does, enough. But pretty much back ground music at this point. Bolan’s lyrics teeter on the edge of parody. Is he saying anything? Not really. But one gets the impression that he doesn’t really give a fuck. Just wanted to make a good album. Mostly succeeds but I’m not adding it to the library.

That was unexpectedly fun. I feel like this is the kind of band that would come out local pub and get a great turnout because everyone loves them live. And you walk in and go “who’s this?” And then you’ve discovered a cool new band. 3.5 not quite a four.

Meh. Your heads weren’t so interesting to me.

When you listen again to this album you realize that what Hendrix did was take the blues apart. It’s almost like an analog form of sampling. Riffs and runs and parts of chord progressions form the spine of the music and then he dismantles the rest of the genre by pushing techniques further than they had ever been pushed before. Hendrix was a true blues man.

I took me a focused listen through this album to hear how the Smiths melodies work harmonically. Never really resolving on roots, moving between sixths and thirds and that gives them a constantly unresolved and modal feel to all their songs. Johnny Marr’s guitar tone is so clean, you can in again that with distillation and dirtiness and a slightly faster tempo all these songs could be punk tunes.

Amazing to hear this album again as Black Sabbath discover what is possible with fuzz distortion, blues scales, riffs and lyrics exploring a million tragic ways to die young and unfulfilled. a great review at Pitchfork here: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/black-sabbath-paranoid/ and Henry Rollins really captures the aesthetic of the album when he says: that this album is a sketchpad. "They're realizing their strengths, And there's not a lot of music on the Paranoid album. That's not a put-down: I'm saying there's a lot of space, and that's where the album gets a lot of its power." https://www.npr.org/2020/09/18/913974144/50-years-ago-black-sabbath-found-its-sound-and-took-metal-worldwide I'm struck by how dry the mix is. Hardly any reverb on the guitar (except on Jack the Stripper) and the drums are super dry. Ozzie's voice is heavily reverbed and that makes his singing dreamy and distant. It's a really simple album, by all complex life starts that way

First time I’ve listened to this whole album. The hits are justifiable and Rolling in the Deep is a very special song , melodically, and in terms of the texture that captures the simmering rage of the singer. Adele’s voice is unparalleled. But I found the songs on this album to be an extended examination of her in relation to another person, an approach and avoid kind of unresolved infatuation with another person. I found myself just screaming “fucking let him go!” The arrangements on the album are overdone and feel mixed in such a way that they are just a flat wall of sound. Adele’s vocals sit back in the mix and everything feels very compressed. So, a couple of important tracks but overall, not a great album.

Engineered for radio and pop metal longevity even though the band broke some ground with this recording I could never escape the idea that Welcome to the Jungle was just GNR’s version of Queen’s Let Me Entertain You. Slash’s style is clear but my focused listening to this gave me a new appreciation for McKagan’s bass lines that are ripped straight out of punk. I loved hearing his energy on this album. You can tell he comes by that style honestly. Axl Rose doesn’t excite me much and ending the album with a porn film vocal track is…a choice.

Interesting to hear Clapton on his Les Paul which lends a sound that certainly becomes the sound of blues based rock and roll for a decade. But it doesn’t quite sing the way Clapton on the Strat does. It’s a dirtier sound and heavier. Clapton must have been born talented because I’ve never heard him play a throwaway line. Mayall’s harmonica and commitment to the genre make up for his lightness in the vocals. This is certainly not my go to album for an evening of blues listening, in fact a great evening would be to listen to the albums from which these songs are taken. That alone tells you how tasteful Mayall and Clapton are. Their choices of repertoire to cover and the ability to faithfully interpret and add something a little personal makes this a great album. Its longevity and influence cannot be overstated. Suddenly, blues and rock became wedded at the hip and an entire cultural trajectory was born.

Eddie Van Halen is one of those guitarists who inspired me to play but humbled me in everyday. He and Brian May were such a seminal influence on my love of rock and roll. Eddie's virtuosity right of the gate speaks volumes. I had never heard anyone play guitar like him, so expressive with impeccable phrasing. He and Brian May are masters of the phrased solo, and while he can clearly riff and lick like the rest of them, his playful interaction with David Lee Roth on this album is incomparable. I always thought of his playing as fundamentally joyful. When you hear this debut album against the Guns and Roses one from a few days ago, I think this one shines with so much more identity and personal expression. The GnR album seems manufactured, but this one seems PRODUCED. It sounds great, most of the songs are terrific and it's more than just a vehicle for a rock and roll image. Van Halen was trying to do something different with the genre, and they nailed it so completely that the album still seems new 45 years later.

k.d.lang’s voice is a national treasure but great as this album is, it’s not the one. It isn’t Ingenue. It is a bridge between her cow pioneers and her torching reinvention. We are missing Ben Mink’s artistic direction and the selection of tunes to cover isn’t great. The Honky Tonk Angels bit is a testament to Lang’s pull and respect in Nashville. Surely Ingenue is amongst this list somewhere so even though I adore k.d. Lang, this one is only a three. One listen and move on. Ingenue has been in my rotation for 30 years.

I don’t know quite what to make of this. I liked it. It wasn’t what I expected. It’s not something I’m going to sit down and listen to. I did actually like By The time I Get To Phoenix. Isaac Hayes.

I think it was Linda Ronstadt, who sang on this album, who described Neil Young as "a sketch artist" and that's a really apt description. His songs seem like fragments of images and ideas distilled and lifted from longer stories. Many of them are eminently singable and have stood the test of time in cover versions and campfires. Needle, Heart of Gold, Old Man... Between the solo acoustic, the grunge blues jam track, the orchestral backing and the intimate band sound, this album captures all of Neil Young's personalities and traits. Wistful vocals, always reaching for the nostalgic turn, for this idea that a better situation exists just out of reach, the simple riffs, the dirty guitar tone. Neil Young made this album and then just kept making it, really.

When you are young and preoccupied with letting everyone know you have a certain taste, you dismiss things out of had for the stupidest reasons. For example, I never got into R.E.M. becasue I hated the jingle jangly sound of Rickenbacker guitars. Around the time the bands recordings started making their way to my ears I was into Prog Rock and heavier sounds, and so I dismissed them. As a result, although I had many friends who were devoted followers of the band, I don't think I ever listened to one of their albums. I knew their songs through radio play only. But what is hilarious is that this album contains all kinds of elements of the aesthetic that I actually did like. Stipe's lyrics and delivery were match by Gord Downie. The guitar sounds on this album are much richer and heavier and there are even tracks like Sweetness Follows - which I have never heard until today - that could have been recorded by Emerson Lake and Palmer. So this project of listening to these albums before I die has paid dividends with this one. It's going straight into the library. It is a fulsome, artistic, poetic collection of stories, images, rants and music. Tasteful orchestration, perfect production and, in retrospect an incredible collection of bangers. If I'm honest and you had told me this was a Greatest Hits album, I would have believed you. A single album. A coherent vision. Super tasty. Perfect.

This is an album of its time and if it’s scene. It’s an album of a particular present moment. And it’s a notable album in the VU catalog because it represents a break with their sound documented on the first two albums. But is this really an album I need to hear before I die? I appreciate that 1001 is a large number but I have other things to do before I die. If this was your scene and your time I bet this album is deeply memory inducing and meaningful. However I would much rather listen to Ethiopian jazz or Braziakkian pop music if the time made by much better musicians who were rooted in something other than a journey of self-discovery that has reached a dead end and from which one needs to turn around and reset.

What a fantastic album. The first tracks have one foot firmly in the punk world of the 1970s, except there is some real virtuosity in the writing and playing. 7/4 time signatures, Chrissy Hynde's don't give a shit vocals, and the transition to the easy confident sound of The Pretenders with doses of The Police, some ska, and art music thrown in for good measure. Not a perfect album, but a stunning debut. Close enough to a five for me.

This is NOT my field at all, but this album was endlessly fascinating. It has incredible tasty samples and beats, fierce delivery, and almost cinematic scenes. Listening to this album was like watching a movie that starts and ends by zooming in on a group of people in a busy conversation about their lives. I miss hip hop like this, raw and real but incredibly well crafted loops samples and rhymes. For a genre I know so little about, this was a surprisingly engaging listen

Well, that was mostly unlistenable. Spinal Tap was satire, lads.

Okay. I think I’m getting the point here. 1001 Albums is A LOT of albums and that is going to cover a lot of music that isn’t necessarily my jam. Clearly The Charlatans had a following and they obviously have a body of work and this all in is tinged with some tragedy and sadness. But I’m going to be a lot more conservative here. I reckoned will end up with 100 5s, maybe 200 4s and the rest will be 3s unless there is something truly dreadful. Liked the organ. Liked some of the base lines. Appreciated the scratching. But look, if you are going to just make songs based on riffs and recycled chord changes you better have really good lyrics. Especially if you have no melodies or solo virtuosity. You’re a Big Girl Now is probably my favourite for the open guitar tuning. But guys, your melody is not going to set you free. You’re only barely flirting with the idea of melody. The best I can say about this album is that it’s toe tapping. Lovely and upbeat. I could put it on and read and I would not be interrupted with a surprising moment of delight. Good on a road trip although not much to sing along to.

Well. Another album of rock and roll that is just the same song over and over, same vocal effect, same guitar tones, same beat, chords, and "melodies." I get that this is basically an album recorded live, but then make a live album. When you have the time and space available to you in a studio, just setting everything up the same way and pressing "record" seems like a waste. Is this is the most important Strokes album? I hope not, for their sake. The most interesting bits? The bass line in the verse in Is This It? is fantastic and had me hoping for more, but alas the rest of the album is just dododododadadada, eight to the bar with a few variations here and there The feedback at the beginning of New York City Cops was probably the most interesting thing on the album. Lo and behold it even had a guitar solo for a second there. So does Take It Or Leave It, but I generally consider a guitar solo something exceeding five different notes. Maybe a phrase or two. And speaking of strokes, they should have called this "The Stroke" because, with the exception of the syncopated rhythm on The Modern Age, it's all just the same driving downstroke. Am I generalizing? Yes. But I'm not going to spend a full 35 minutes trying to find tiny pieces of interesting minutae on an album of sameness. It's all white noise after a while. As they say in "Take It Or Leave It," enough is enough.

The best part of this album’s the arranging and both of the big hits Monday, Monday, and California Dreamin’ are quality. The harmonies on the rest of the songs are lovely, and the orchestration is great too. This is folk music, making raised to a high standard by vocal and orchestral arrangers who know what they’re doing and singers who can pull off this work with ease. The chord choices colour the otherwise simple songs and the use of chromaticism adds colour that takes this album out of the rock-folk genre and puts in a class of its own, while staying rooted in simple music Between The Mamas and the Papas and the Beach Boys, This kind of lush harmony really took off in this time. If there is a fatal flaw on the album, it’s the heavy use of reverb which actually muddies the musicality and dates the material to a particular era. Even so, they hits from this album, are timeless. Drugs, sex and longing never sounded so sunny.

Tasting this like a fine wine. Its alright. Hints of Prince and Bowie to come. A dry mix and a fuzzy soft guitar tone with Bolan’s vocals set in a dreamy bed. Nothing too remarkable on the album. Nothing too inventive to these ears that have been raised on its legacy. Im not sure how much glam Bolan embodied in his music. He wore glitter and was bisexual and those became traits of his heirs but musically what is he doing? A kind of strut and sneer and quite a lot of hand percussion. Not much to work with sonically. Just some chords and riffs and lines of song. Nothing that blues musicians weren’t really doing at the time: shuffles and grooves. Perhaps his influence was in being a cross over artist who brought psychedelic rock and fantasy folk to more bluesy settings. I dunno. However, I’m in this for the music not necessarily the cultural significance of the artist of the album. Does this still hold up 50+ years later? It does, enough. But pretty much back ground music at this point. Bolan’s lyrics teeter on the edge of parody. Is he saying anything? Not really. But one gets the impression that he doesn’t really give a fuck. Just wanted to make a good album. Mostly succeeds but I’m not adding it to the library.

There is a place for minimalist music and a place for ambient music. It's not really to my taste anymore although it does relax my brain to have something like this on in the background while I'm doing something else. But if that's the reason for making an album, you might as well just create an algorithm to produce this kind of music. Western music is characterized by tension and release. there wasn't much of that here. That is perhaps by design, but there are other ways to disrupt Western music conventions. I'm not sure this band was trying to do that, although it appears they were trying to do something. What that is is unknown to me, but I hope it made them happy. They call it “post-rock” because it uses rock instruments in new ways. But honestly I’d rather listen to musicians use their instruments the way Tricot and Primus do. If you are going to break rock conventions and make a stylistic statement do it with virtuosity, not blandness.

Oh delicious. Sweet Hendrix, sweet, expansive, thoughtful, expressive Jimi Hendrix. And Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell. Up From The Skies, right off the bat we are doing jazz. Mitch tastefully brushing his kit, a little swing and a whimsical judgement on the future of humanity. Spanish Castle Magic. What a solo. Jimi's phrasing and the ease with which he plays outside while Redding keeps a steady harmonic bed for the solos to go anywhere. The end of the second solo has a little scream from Hendrix first on his guitar and then from his throat, and you know they are one. Wait Until Tomorrow. That clean tone is just pure ASMR, and he doesn't miss a note, everything is so perfectly placed. The groove is so lithe, I can literally hear his right wrist moving.

I spent a whole hour waiting for something interesting to happen. The Cure surely had appeal as a cultural phenomenon, something relatable for teenagers as we went through some existential shit. As a band, on this recording, they show a remarkable commitment to a single approach to songwriting: Robert Green is sad and all we do is play little phrases four times between his earnest yearning. At the same tempo. In the same key. With the same timbre. I can't believe there are 12 songs on this album. If it was a police line up, I'd throw my hands in the air and say "Fuck it, let them all go free". There is no way to tell which is which. I never got into The Cure and I wasn't sure why until now. Now it's clear that I just didn't notice them.

Bit of a mixed bag here but some really lovely tracks especially the ones that I’ve never heard before. Clean is very dark and powerful. Waiting For the Night is haunting and key changes and harmony and flirtations with chromaticism make it perhaps the most interesting track. It does super interesting things with the bass synth line offering weird little intervals. I think it is playing a minor third against the major tonality of the line. It makes the whole thing viscerally disturbing. Really good stuff.

I remember when this album came out. It was all over The Village Voice and other alternative media. It was not played on the radio, and I never got a copy, so it has taken me 31 years to finally listen to it. That's a good way to judge an album like this. Does it stand the test of time? Yeah. So never really knowing much about Liz Phair other than she was a big deal in the early 1990s when she appeared out of nowhere, for some reason I thought this would be a punkier album than it is. I love a songwriter with things to say and a variety of ways to say it. A few weeks ago, I reviewed Adele's album, and while she has a great voice, the album was a whole set of tracks about a weird attract/avoid relationship she was having, and the songs were much of the same. This is not the case with Liz Phair, who is much more in her power, and explores different sonic landscapes to do her thing. Dance of the Seven Veils and Shatter reminded me of Billy Bragg's first album, Solo Guitar (with a drone on Shatter, but still). Some of these songs approach the grunge formula of the day, and I kept expecting Fuck and Run to have a big grungy drop in it somewhere, and the fact that it didn't was a bit of a letdown. Flower is really the kind of song probably none of us had ever heard before. It predicts the anti-folk movement. So, an interesting album. Not quite Nirvana, not quite The Pretenders, not quite punk enough, not quite Billy Bragg, not quite Riot Grrrls. But it does what it says on the tin. I liked it.

I really liked this album a lot. It combines intimate production with open, expansive sounds, samples and loops galore, terrific instrumentation, and a fantastic devotion to rhythm. The string and synth beds and organ sounds are fantastic, lush, and whimsical, but serious politics pervades the lyrics. What a fascinating album. Adding it to the library right alongside Zero 7 and some of those other early 2000 loopmeisters.

The tiniest echo of early Pink Floyd. It’s the pounding bass lines and the heavily reverbed vocals. I wanted these tracks to go on and on…they seemed to fade out just as they were getting started.

This is just such a beautiful album. I am unashamedly biased for Neil Young, but that doesn't mean he doesn't issue clunkers from time to time. However, After the Gold Rush is one of his best, showing him alone in his sketchy, poetic, contemplative mode, and also showcasing the best of Crazy Horse. Southern Man rage, Tell Me Why word salads (I think think it's about selling your would to the Devil, even though Neil Young can't remember what he was trying to say!) One of the underappreciated things about Neil Young is his time feel. You think he's a kind of loose, easy-going guitar player, but his sense of rhythm is fantastic, like a metronome and it provides a beautiful foundation for exploration on top. Rare for a singer-songwriter and something many of Young's heirs should study.

That was unexpectedly fun. I feel like this is the kind of band that would come out local pub and get a great turnout because everyone loves them live. And you walk in and go “who’s this?” And then you’ve discovered a cool new band. 3.5 not quite a four.

I’m really glad this album is on the list because I’ve never really listened to the Grateful Dead and I know more about their history (through the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) and their scene than their actual music. Glad this album is on the list because now I know just how bad it is. What was Christa’s thinking when he called this incredible rock improvisation. This is bad noodling. As a guitarist I get why it’s fun to make music this way. But there are sex acts that are fun to do too that one should not preserve for posterity or charge people admission to. Musically it’s bad. Uninventive. Individualistic. Dark Star is the worst. It’s starts nowhere and goes nowhere. In comparison Yes’ Takes From Topigraphic Oceans has four sides with songs at least as long and there is at least a concept there, some development, some ideas that are being worked. This stuff is lazy. I think The Dead can be good when they tighten up into a proper rock band with that folky edge to them. But then they do this shit. Blech.

Astonishingly beautiful album. Michael Kiwanuka has an incredible mind for production and sound. His voice is easy and his conceptualization of the musical containers for his lyrics are spot on. A completely unusual take on this album is this: since the pandemic I’ve been looking for art that has made sense of the experience that we’ve been through as human beings, both locally and globally. I found that some of the best pandemic art including books were created in the years just prior to 2020. And this is the first album I’ve really found that captures the varieties of experience of that time. This album has stories of doubts stories of rescue stories of fear and redemption. It’s an album that captures a spiritual journey, but it’s also one that can stand for the common human experience that we can refer to having lived through the pandemic. Kiwanuku is an absolute gem. This album deservedly won the Mercury prize and plaudits from around the world. It’s an instant addition to my library and that makes it an automatic five. This might be the first album I’ve heard in this exercise for which I’m grateful.

Interesting and engaging. This album sounds quite contemporary and the range of guitar sounds is intriguing. This album anticipates so much alternative music and more mainstream moves in rock and roll. 1986. I don’t remember anything remotely sounding like this back then.

The musicians are good on this album, but what are we doing here? Any idea? Me neither.

I have never listen to this album but I know intimately his version of Hallelujah, which is one of my favourite songs. It’s a gem, that song, and it’s amazing to hear it in context here, in the middle of an album that wraps around it. It puts the song in context both musically and lyrically. Production is great, arrangements suberb. The band is great and Buckley’s voice is perfect for this material. Added to the library.

When I was in high school in 1985 one Wednesday morning math class started really slow and sluggish. Our math teacher asked why everyone was so sleepy. “Echo and the Bunnymen played an all ages show last night” was the answer. Mr. Hammond just started at everyone. “Oh Mr. H.,” said my friend Nick with his eyeliner smudged from the night before. “Everyone loves Echo and the Bunnymen.”

Associated with European music, there is an aesthetic that evokes pastoral scenes or mediaeval towns and an ancient kind of urban village life. But Kraftwerk came along with this album, Europe was still recovering from the second world war and the scale of development was beyond human. I was surprised listening to the tracks on this album just how bleak they actually are. How they capture a rainy November day on a train travelling through the industrial outskirts of Paris or Düsseldorf or Vienna. Not the romantic or poetic Streets of European urbanity, nor the past gentleness of mountains and forests. Just the simple functionality of an industrial estate and train the flies across the countryside desperate to arrive rather than to journey. This album represents a sort of dystopian interregnum between the hell scape of the second world war and the rapid development that was started in the 1980s. That was the Time in Europe, that felt most bleak, most angular and most cold. This album captures those moments and that epoch. I find it completely devoid of optimism and history. It looks forward to nothing but a few fragmented ideas of vision. It seems to have emerged from a place that has buried the violence and the passion of the previous decades. If ever there was a moment when Europe was waiting, it was 1977 and it felt endless.

Dust and sunlight. I missed grunge when it came around as my musical attention was elsewhere in the jazz world and so this is the first time I’ve heard this album. Two gears here. Clean guitars with open tunings and ringing chords and heavy distortion. The bass cuts through everything and is some of the most interesting musicianship on the album. Vedder’s voice was the template for strong reserved rock singing. It makes his strained phrases so much more effective that he spends most of the time sitting in a restrained and thoughtful roar. Nothing too flashy here. The departure from late eighties metal was the addition of space and clean toned sections. And lyrically the subject matter is real, not fantasy which makes it more interesting poetry than the teenaged misogyny of the hair bands. I have no affinity for the band and have never seen their legendary performances. But they are an important part of American music and the is a banging debut in a new subgenre.

The fact that the best track on this album was “Mrs. Robinson” says everything about how I felt about it. And it wasn’t even on the original release. It’s a good, tight, energetic band but their writing isn’t the best here. Not much more to add.

I have never been much of a fan of Bob Dylan, mostly due to the fact that he can’t sing and his back band was never recorded well on these albums. It’s such a thin and tinny mix. But what he lacks in musicality he more than makes up for in poetry. Dylan is a beautiful songwriter. His lyrics are full of imagery that evokes both folk symbols as well as religious stories. Somehow he creates a scene that lives just on this side of some of the more extravagant fantasy worlds that later came to materialize in rock ‘n’ roll and metal. His rhyming schemes have always been a little bit unusual for a pop musician, fond of using triplets rather than couplets and sprung rhythm and internal rhymes. Something like a Gerard Manley Hopkins set to American musical forms. This album stretches, blues and country music and does create something different. But it’s not timeless. In many ways, perhaps Dylan wrote songs for a new American songbook , and I feel like so many of these pieces are covered in such better ways by other musicians. Here it is. Blonde on blonde. Dylan’s rock and roll masterpiece with the Hawks behind him and a whole bunch of folks trying to wrestle his vision onto a record.

Totally new bands to me totally new album. The thing that catches my attention right away is the persistent drum Shuffle rhythm that goes through most of these tracks. I didn’t really resonate with a lot of the lyrics. But musical.ly not bad at all.

Meh. Your heads weren’t so interesting to me.

A beautiful album right up my alley. It’s hard to overstate the significance this album had on the traditional music scene back in the day. It was met with scorn and derision by many and yet turned an entire generation of Romantics on to the literature of their tradition and culture. The musicianship here is too rate with Richard Thompson’s guitar and Sandy Senny’s string, controlled voice being backed by Dave Swarbeck’s fiddle. It’s a perfect marriage of traditional aesthetic and electric 1960s sound. You can hear the band trying to figure out how to work with this music behind the lyric. Thompson was the gift that made this all work. His little guitar fills and harmonic designs made the bridge possible and the band made the journey complete.

What a fun album, if that can be said about an album with themes of addiction, anxiety and alienation! But a collaboration with Bowie is probably what makes this album seem so timeless. The production is magnificent. It allows you to listen at volume and hear all of Pop’s feelings from whimsy to pain to clear headed observation. What a ride.

Lovely to hear significant music that never made the pop charts. The first time I heard Ali Farka Toure was in the late 1980s and his music so securely cemented the thread of the blues as a West African music that my first listen of him continues to resonate. The moment I saw this album come up, I knew it was a five. But why? There is nothing performative about this music. Toure at this point in his career knows what he has and knows what he is doing and his commitment to the fidelity of traditional forms is deep and authentic. He is a brilliant guitar player and singer, and his music is soaked in feeling and reaches into history to source what is to come. Always a spiritual experience listening to him.

A profound album of sadness and pain and resilience and power. Tori Amos is some writer, and this album is her vision fully realized - a dark story that gets the full treatment of an orchestra, soaring vocals, intense breaks and an uncompromising commitment to a sonic landscape that hosts her story. She sings with her full body and full heart. All the comparisons that were trotted out to pigeon hole her when this album was realized are only critics trying to make sense of this offering. All men. They only saw her as a more intense Kate Bush. She was and is a singular presence and this album was a singularly powerful piece of art.

A beautiful album. What an important album. I've had this album in my library for quite a while as it was one of the albums of the year on many lists in 2016. Around that time there were several albums that were released in the R&B world that had this extended narrative structure to them that felt more like a DJ set then 10 or 15 different songs. I really appreciated these albums that came out because it allowed the artists to tell a story and to dive more deeply into a series of narrative threads. This album, particularly, with its attention to empowerment, liberation, resilience, and boundaries, is such a powerful commentary on self-worth and the Black experience. It feels like a generous invitation to sit at Solange's feet and listen to her experience through her own singing and the voices of Lil Wayne, Sampha and Master P. The craft and imagination and creativity behind the music are so rich and sophisticated. As a white man, I can find myself in this music invited into a call for healing understanding and empowerment while respecting the stories and words are sourced from deeply within the Black experience in the United States.

It’s not a bad album. But it’s far from their greatest. This album sounds rushed. And when I was looking up the history of this record, it seems like the writing and recording was squeezed between a massive amount of live appearances and broadcast obligations.. The production choice to put the vocals in the right channel and the instruments in the left channel too much of the sloppiness that the band exhibited in the sessions. The fact that there are cover songs here as well as what we might call transitional Beatles pieces means that the record is somewhat disjointed, but I can see how it might be a reflection of their live appearances at the time. So, we’re definitely with the Beatles here, but we’re not completely consumed by them yet.

Ah fuck off with this trash.

A brilliant reimagining by the perfect heir to Woody’s aesthetic. This album remains current, vibrant and fun.

I enjoyed this chaotic romp!

Just a perfect album. It still astonishes me that this band along with their friends and George Martin were capable of such consistently great song writing and arrangements. They were never the best musicians but this stuff is absolutely timeless

Boy the hits on this album are a class above. Generally fun - never expected to hear a song with “midget” in the lyric. What a band. What a joy. You’ll probably never see a group this big and tight touring anymore. The economics of music have reduced this kind of stuff to samples, and mores the pity. Still, an absolute classic.

Not much here to be honest. Probably a good band to see live in a small club. High energy nonsense. Drumming is pretty good

I remember when this album came out almost 30 years ago and critics were calling Oasis the next Beatles. I can see why. This album has a number of tracks with skiffle chords and sunny melodies and lovely harmonies. What’s different is that they have the dynamic range of the Manchester City teams of the 2010s. Just full on relentless intensity, singing every song with a swagger and a volume that never waivers except as each tune drifts away at the end. There are not very many misses on this album, and even hearing it again after so many decades it still stands up. I’ll give it a five it’s more like a 4.7 only because a couple of tracks are rushed, but the hits are powerful.

I’ve always had trouble with the sound on this album which is so flat and reminds me of an AM radio. Perhaps the band on the run can only send us a compressed message from the desert. Of course the recording co Dutton’s in Lagos didn’t help. But things like the out of tune clams on Bluebird do t do much to recommend and album that was written with a whole band in mind and recorded with only those who were left after the bickering subsided. It’s…not great?

I kept waiting for something to happen. Anything. A hint of melody. A variation in the beat. She travelled the world and this is what she came back with? She obviously didn’t hear any singers in hear journey.

Yeah flat out classic. Enjoyed it. Some of the piano chords were quite weird. Changes is such a powerful song to hear again and especially during pride month.

Steely Dan is a musicians band. It took me ages to appreciate them because I grew up wanted my rock music heavy and theatrical but the community of musicians that gathered around Steely Dan - a kind of artistic slime mold - were and are some of the best and most gifted studio musicians of all time. Only musicians of this quality could render Becker and Fagan’s vision perfectly. Let the boys take care of the long side eye lyrics and give over the real music making to the best in the business who could carry the snide lyrics on grooves of impeccable quality. This isn’t the best Steely Dan album by a long shot. And it’s still a pure five out of five. Listen carefully to it. Not a single note out of place, constant turns of phrase and musically ideas floating in the interregnum between jazz and rock without becoming a fusion reduction. Its amazing to think that from HERE they only got better at every aspect of recording and songwriting.

That was just a funky ball of fun.

Genius personified. And it’s not even Keith Jarret’s best album.

Instant classics on almost every track. Harris find traditional music and weaves in into country and the emerging folk-rock scene to creat Americana.

Loved this and had forgotten many of these original versions. They have an urgency to them that I had forgotten about.