I loved this. The music, the banter, the announcements with inmate numbers, the laughing mid track, the lyrics, just all of it. I’ve somehow never listened to this despite always liking Johnny Cash, and it is such a great record. The recording it incredibly good for being recorded in what I assume is a prison cafeteria or auditorium. The singing comes through beautifully but none of the instruments are overshadowed. I rest can’t think of a bad thing about this. Really great.

This came out as Kanye was transitioning from big time producer and rapper to mentally ill bajillionaire I think? Maybe it was before that was becoming apparent, it's hard to remember when exactly Kanye went from being a real inspirational success story with a ton of talent to this sort of odious and obviously disturbed person he is today. The production on this album is stellar of course, there are some really iconic beats on here (All of the Lights, Power) but I still think it doesn't really get to the level of his early work. College Dropout and Late Registration are such incredible albums that this one seems almost too polished and too full of itself to relate to. I know this is supposed be his opus, but I really don't see it that way. The songs with a ton of features fall flat entirely, the ones with artists that aren't rappers might be even worse. I know that Kanye isn't just a rapper, he's a producer, so it's not weird to be shown up in the rapping department, but it has to be said Pusha T is the best rapper on this album. His verse saves "So Appalled" from being a total throwaway track, and his verse in "Runaway" is great. I've been talking like I dislike this album, but I don't. I still think it's close to being great, I just know Kanye did better before, and probably wont ever do better again. Outside of the big singles, which are all excellent, "Hell of a Life" has a great driving beat, lyrics, and the chorus "sampling" Black Sabbath is great. Real shame he's a piece of shit now.

What a interminable slog, Jesus Christ. "Death Don't Have No Mercy" was mostly a song after 45 minutes of musical diarrhea and then they follow that up with 7 minutes of literal amplifier feedback. I'm grateful they are dead.

I can’t say this album is bad because it’s decidedly not. The beats are infectious, the singing is clean and takes center stage, the production value is sky high and there is a decent amount of variation of moods throughout the album. I’ve heard so many of these songs so many times (my wife was a big fan the year this album came out, went to stadium shows and everything) but they’re still all listenable and fun for the most part. I can’t relate to most of the lyrical content as a middle aged man, but I’m obviously not the target audience. Of the songs I hadn’t heard before, I enjoyed “Clean” the most. You can hear Imogen Heap’s influence in it which is nice as I like a lot her work. The radio singles we’ve all heard a trillion times and they’re solid pop tunes. Taylor Swift also deserves a ton of respect for writing her own music. This particular genre is full of ghostwriters and committees and it’s cool that she wrote nearly all of this on her own. Biggest gripe is the “you could’ve been getting down to this sick beat” line followed by a very normal 8 measure 4/4 drum break. It’s not sick at all!

I thought I was going to hate this but this was way better than I expected. This is what Bob Dylan is supposed to be. The songwriting is not incredibly complicated but it's complex enough to be interesting; whether Nick knew it or not he was touching esoteric bits of music theory with his songwriting and he actually knew how to perform it, on tape anyway. You can hear the influence of classical music in nearly every song, with subtle hints to the Baroque masters like Handel and Vivaldi evident in the suspended chords and key changes. His voice isn't annoying like so many other singer/songwriters and you can feel the emotion when he sings. The incorporation of strings in to so many of his songs feels right and unforced. I liked this way more than I should have. I'll have to give his other records a listen.

The fidelity is really good for a live album; sounds like a studio recording really. I like a lot of jazz and fusion albums from this time period, and this one isn't an exception. What makes it stand out from the American, Latin, European and Japanese stuff is use of the traditional instruments, which after reading about Fela Kuti makes total sense. It's good, though like all improvisational based albums of the time, it gets a bit mastrubatory with some of the solos, particularly the final track.

One of the masterpieces of progressive rock, but obviously polarizing if you have negative opinions about the entire genre. For me, the only stinker is the ending of Moonchild, but even then the rambling second half serves to calm everything down before the big hit of the last track. Everything about the instrumentation in this album is so good. The harmonies, the absolute mastery of the instruments, the composition, everything. All timer.

Anyone who has ever listened to or made rock music owes a lot to this album, but rather than rehash that all it’s worth it to say that there are a few things that bring this down from perfection. Electric Funeral sounds like something my high school band of 16 year old burgeoning potheads would’ve written. Fairies Wear Boots could be a Tom Petty song if you turned off the distortion. Hand of Doom is two songs smashed together. If you ignore the 50 years of radio and pop culture saturation, the first half is a masterpiece of metal. This is one of those albums I switch out because I’ve simply heard it too much but that doesn’t change how good most of it is.

I’ve never heard, or been cognizant of hearing maybe, another Marvin Gaye song other than the title track of this album. He’s an immense singer and this album is the soundtrack to many a disappointing and comically short sexual encounter, but I just can’t really get in to it. Purely subjective; I can only take so many love songs of this style without them all blending in to each other. I couldn’t help but think that it must be so frustrating to be the rhythm section of the band. I can feel it at the end of the Please Don’t Stay where the drummer tries desperately to escape the 4/4 with some speed and it’s pulled off well. The bassist meanders too when they can, which is nice. Completely unrelated, I laughed out loud at the now ubiquitous sensual deep breathing woman sample in “You Sure Love To Ball”, but that ultimately was my favorite track because of the key shift in the chorus. Theres a great cut of a Mike Jones album which consists of just the times he says “Mike Jones”. It’s several minutes long. I think someone should make a “baby” version of this album.

Musically the album encapsulates a particular 80’s sound but that’s probably because Genesis came up with it earlier, and both are ahead of their time considering this came out in 1980. The drumming especially has a great tone, which is intentional if you read up on it. Not playing cymbals and still getting a full rock sound is not something I’ve considered before and it really sounds great. The synths and other electronic elements can be a bit much at times but that is part of the sound. “Games without frontiers” is a good example of leaning too heavily in to it for my tastes. On the other hand, it’s perfect for “Lead a norma life”. “I Don’t Remember” is great and Gabriel’s voice really makes it sound like he’s losing it, like he did in so many Genesis songs. “Family Portrait” is another good one about a pitiable guy who is plotting killing someone but ultimately it’s a cry for help or, explicitly at the end, attention. This is a good album of its time with some standout songs but it just makes me want to listen to Genesis in the end.

I had forgotten how weird the percussion on this album sounded with the 4 drummers, at least half of which are just banging on trash cans. It’s a good weird for sure, and there’s still nobody that sounds quite like Slipknot. There is no resting throughout the whole disc, it’s all very in your face and I like that about them. None of the six hundred guys was like “we need to slow it down and make a radio single”. It’s almost difficult to listen to the whole thing even though I like angry distorted messes of music; it’s just so in your face the whole way through. This is the first album I’ve had to take a break from in the middle. Teenage me was a big fan, but in my old age I can’t give it perfect marks. It’s just too much.

After listening to Paranoid recently, I feel like Sabbath sort of lost their "ahead of their time" attitude with this album. This is from the 70's and it very much sounds like it. I was trying to figure out if I'd actually heard any of these songs before and I have, especially "Changes" which is actually the worst song on the whole album! It sounds more like the worst of Ozzy's solo stuff than Sabbath really. "Supernaut" is the standout for me and it shows that the sound did develop from their previous albums in to something more complicated and less sludgy. Whether that's good or bad is subjective really. The latter half of the album is heavier except for "Laguna Sunrise" which sounds like a Zeppelin track (not a bad thing, just strange to hear). Overall it's pretty good, definitely a "put it on while drinking beer and doing something else" album.

I'd never heard of these guys and now that I have, my idea that the greatest Finnish export to the world is Kimi Raikkonen is unchanged. This album is the soundtrack to a minorly successful summer movie about teenagers in California in 1986, directed by a German man and filmed in pre-war Croatia. Not bad, just fairly forgettable.

I really enjoyed this album, despite not being able to understand a single word. The blues flow is great but the “desert” part of their self described style is what makes this a unique album. You can tell the band listened to a lot of traditional American blues and rock and it’s the framework for what is otherwise a heavily localized style. The meters for each song are complicated but still really listenable in the sense that you can tap your foot to it all without thinking too hard. The guitar work is excellent without being full of itself. The drums are precise without being mechanical. It’s just put together really well. Al Hassidi Terei is my favorite track; I love the odd time signature and the fact that everyone (I’m assuming) is singing.

Peace Dog has maybe the worst lyrics I’ve ever heard in a rock song. In fact if the singer, who has a great voice, just sang nonsense, the whole album would go up a star. This album is produced better than most modern albums I’ve heard. Everything is clear and the instruments have a very distinct tracking. After reading about it, it’s because Rick Rubin produced it. Remember when Jay-Z said “you crazy for this one Rick!” In 99 Problems? Same guy. He has a very particular skill and he’s probably the best at it. Anyway the songs on here are very much butt rock. The last two tracks are the best of them, in my opinion. It’s 80s hard rock, and it’s great at that but I just can’t take it seriously. I’d have to be on a particular mood to put this on again, and that mood involves shit beer and cigarettes. Honestly I can’t believe these are the same people that wrote “She Sells Sanctuary” which is such a good song.

I hadn’t listened to this whole album since I was in high school a thousand years ago. For an hour long, there really isn’t a lot of filler. It goes hard from start to finish with only a few breaks to showcase old school dj skills or throw in weird or funny samples. I had forgotten how good Public Enemy were at the style of rapping at the time, and obviously they had a lot to say. There are hardly any goofball bits, it’s 99% social commentary. You can see why so many bands and artist with a serious message always cite them, and this album in particular, as a huge influence. If there’s any criticism to this album it’s that rap has evolved so far from the fast beats and long samples that it sounds a bit dated. But the message is still relevant and the songs still hold up. One of the best.

The opening track is kinda promising and then the second track hits you with that horrible blindingly white kid indie falsetto in a shit attempt to grab some sort of "I listened to my parents cocaine music and now I'm cool" cred. It's the audio manifestation of the mustache on 40 year old guy riding a fixie and wearing a flat cap. It goes extremely predictably on from there. Given this came out in 2002, this is music for ipod commercials. Maybe that's why it's on the list given the amount of stuff that sounded like this that came out in the following decade. “A minha menina” is not a butchering of the original mostly because they abandon most of the Portuguese in favor of new English lyrics. After that everything is fairly boring, though I wouldn’t be terribly irritated if I heard the beginning of “lying in the snow” if I was five beers in on a sunny Friday. I’m mad about how bad this is.

I don't know where to start or end, but this is one of my favorite albums of all time. Every song is great, even "Fitter Happier" which I think about every time I go in to the office. This was the last album they did that was almost entirely pure rock music and while I enjoy their later stuff, this was the peak of Radiohead. I wont hold the fact that they're English against them.

I like mix albums in general and the flow of this one is nice. These guys did some great work with the samples and production in general. I remember this album being played a lot the summer before I left Europe; lots of good memories associated with it. It's not groundbreaking and I think it's not nearly as good as some of their genre "Pair of DJ's or one dude making anglo pop dance music" contemporaries (The Chemical Brothers, The Crystal Method, Moby, Fatboy Slim, etc) but it is a fun album. Unchallenging dance music for a good time.

I can’t say this album is bad because it’s decidedly not. The beats are infectious, the singing is clean and takes center stage, the production value is sky high and there is a decent amount of variation of moods throughout the album. I’ve heard so many of these songs so many times (my wife was a big fan the year this album came out, went to stadium shows and everything) but they’re still all listenable and fun for the most part. I can’t relate to most of the lyrical content as a middle aged man, but I’m obviously not the target audience. Of the songs I hadn’t heard before, I enjoyed “Clean” the most. You can hear Imogen Heap’s influence in it which is nice as I like a lot her work. The radio singles we’ve all heard a trillion times and they’re solid pop tunes. Taylor Swift also deserves a ton of respect for writing her own music. This particular genre is full of ghostwriters and committees and it’s cool that she wrote nearly all of this on her own. Biggest gripe is the “you could’ve been getting down to this sick beat” line followed by a very normal 8 measure 4/4 drum break. It’s not sick at all!

Lots of songs for drinking, some songs for melancholy moods and a few random Irish western movie soundtracks. I’ve heard a lot of the Pogues living where I do, and I still like them even with that. It’s kind of amazing this came out in the 80s because I usually associate Irish folk punk with The Dropkick Murphy, Flogging Molly, etc, who are more modern. Goes to show that they all ripped off The Pogues, or more charitably, carried on the tradition. A whole album of this style is a lot to listen to but it’s not bad. I like the beginning more than the end. I feel bad associating the whole style with drunken post - Bruins game shitshows, but I can’t help it. It’s not a bad thing, I swear. Big laugh at “Billys Bones” about a dude who joins what I can only guess is the UN expeditionary force in Lebanon and indiscriminately shoots everyone.

What a interminable slog, Jesus Christ. "Death Don't Have No Mercy" was mostly a song after 45 minutes of musical diarrhea and then they follow that up with 7 minutes of literal amplifier feedback. I'm grateful they are dead.

This is what a jam album should sound like, though I’m still not a huge fan of the endless meandering. Thankfully everything is in time and in key, it just goes on too long. I did like the old school blues covers. “Hot ‘Lanta” is a jam, and that’s about the length of blues improv can take. I know why they play so long, having played in bands with dead heads and the like, it’s fun to just jam over 12 bar blues and most of all it’s easy to sound good while doing it. The runtime is too long for me but I bet it was fun to be insanely baked or otherwise altered and be at this show. I’d put this on while doing something else no problem.

“I hang suspended” is great in the same way “if you want it, take it” is. The chord progression is interesting and made me want to listen to it a few times to really get it. “Leaves and Sand” is super 90s, just an overall great sound with hard dynamic switches and a not very apparent chorus and verse structure at first. The last set of lines has that dreamy distortion that’s so prevalent in 90s rock albums and I love it. “Barney (...and me)” is a good example of the parts of the album I find confusing. You can tell the band is trying some new, weird stuff but it kinda takes away from an otherwise really solid pop sound. I can’t hate on it because I get the artistic intent but it sounds forced. The flute, ok, but what is with the rest of the synth’d out glitch sounds? Weird for weirds sake. I guess that’s quintessentially of the era. Half of this album is pure strained radio rock of my teenage years, and the other half is the kind of experimental stuff that record labels were “allowing” at that time. I kinda love it. What a nice little surprise from his whole experiment, I had never heard of these guys and I thoroughly enjoyed this.

It’s a woman singing without auto tune. She’s good at singing, but I feel like this is an album for dentists offices or suburban shopping centers. Decent enough cover of “Lovesong” but again, pretty boring. I think the novelty of her voice in a sea of computer aided vocals was what made this popular but I don’t think it’s anything much more than well executed.

The backing band (the Attractions) are the best part of this album. The drumming in particular is really good. The repeated riff on “Pump it up” is one of those guitar licks you hear all over the place; I now know where it came from. Maybe even more recognizeable when it’s the organ/keys doing it. This album is fine. Its the kinda stuff you hear in a brewery or a bar you like to go to after work. It's not bad and you can hear the influences it has on later records in the future. That could be why I didn't rate it higher, the whole concept has been done a lot better by what would come.

First three tracks are great, particularly "Something Wicked This Way Comes" which I knew I had heard before. It's on the Lost Highway soundtrack apparently. That whole soundtrack is actually kinda similar to this album, including the presence of Atticus Ross, the guy you know is in Nine Inch Nails but couldn't pick out of a lineup. Anyway that's the end of the good bits. Apparently this artists whole deal is to make soundtracks to films that don't exist. The tracks with the vocal samples/takes are weird to the point of being disturbing ("It's Business as Usual" and "Dirty Barry" on top of that list). I see what he's going for but it would make a lot more sense if there was a film to attach to all of it. I think that's a good thing but I certainly don't want to listen to those types of tracks more than once. The whole middle of the album is mostly just this type of thing. The ending is slightly better, but the lounge singer with what sounds like some sort of a Korg sample backing track in "The Sweetest Embrace" makes me think of some really forced scene out of a Tarantino or Lynch movie. Again, it belongs in a film, so I guess it works. This is an art piece, not really an album you want to sit down and listen to for its musical quality. It absolutely achieves the feel of a soundtrack. I've been rating albums based on the criteria of wanting to listen to them over again, and I have no desire to listen to this again really. It gets an extra star for accomplishing what I assume is its goal.

The main thing I got out of this album was either the (obvious when you think about it) debt that Caribbean music owes to African (Congolese specifically) or that , this artist, if he sang in Spanish, mightve been an equally big deal in Latin America as he was/is in Africa. I wish I spoke some French or any of the other languages he’s singing in to pick up those bits because I’m sure he’s got some lines. Think I caught some Portuguese in there too unless “Obrigado” means something in another language. This music is fun, absolutely not the style I listen to regularly, but it’s a good time. I wonder how much of the backing is programmed vs performed; I bet seeing a band perform this live would be cool. I put this on while working and it ultimately faded in to the background. Not necessarily a bad thing. Album cover is top shelf.

Never heard of them before, which is cool. I like the idea that they all write and perform all of the instruments, but one or maybe two of them are much worse than the other(s). This album goes from good 90's indie/rock to just atonal messes of bad shit. Songs like "Sacred Attention" are awesome, give me an album worth of those. "Fantastic Disaster" is true to it's name I guess. It's literally hard to listen to because it's all out of tune. If you ignore the turds (and there are a lot) this is a pretty good album. I've always liked guitar/bass/drum trios and this is no exception. Jut tell the one guy to get his ears checked.

Im not a huge Beatles guy but I like most of their stuff. Maybe at the time this was revolutionary but to me it just sounds like a nice, uncomplicated album of pop rock. “Love you to” is the only oddity since they use a sitar and some effects. “Tomorrow Never Knows” could also be described like that. Otherwise very straightforward songs we’ve all heard a billion times. I finally looked up the meaning behind “Dr. Robert” and it is supposedly a real person who prescribed famous people amphetamines. lol.

I got exposed to this album a long time ago by some guys I knew in high school who took it incredibly literally. I imagine a lot of people still do that, though maybe Newman doing all that Disney stuff made people read up or at least think about the content of this album. It's still a bizarre listen, even if you know that it's supposed to be satire/social commentary. I don't actually like the genre, and Newman's voice has always seemed to belong to some big footed, gigantic headed cartoon character rather than an accomplished artist, but the songs are well written musically and the concept is interesting. So in the end, the idea is a good one. The technical execution is good. The songwriting is good. Unfortunately the whole style is just something I can't enjoy. To me this is like if someone wrote an incisive and biting commentary on America's foreign policy to be played entirely on a hurdy gurdy and a slide whistle and sang by Yogi Bear. Even if the message was conveyed well (big if), I can’t take it seriously.

It's not exactly country and not exactly folk and not exactly rock, and that ambiguity makes it widely accessible which is something quite a few albums on this list haven't been. The title track reminds me a bit of a Radiohead song that I can't put my finger on, but that is very much a good thing. The acoustic 6 and 12 strings throughout the album give it an nice expansive sound that I think is sometimes let down by the singer. He goes a bit too hard on the Eddie Vedder enunciation and vibrato, though (old man voice) That Was The Style At The Time. Starting at "Soft Wolf Tread" it got a bit slow and too country for my tastes. I did enjoy hearing about handicams again in "Stars N Stripes”, it's been decades. If they just kept going with the momentum from the first half I would’ve liked it a lot more, but it lost my attention half way through.

I had a girlfriend a thousand years ago that took me on “the clash tour” in London where she lived. It was mostly shitholes where people claimed Joe Strummer had done something wacky or where the idea for a song came from. I’m sure 99% of it was made up but I have a lot of fond memories of this album because of that. It’s clouding my judgement of the clash as a whole because I still remember the shitty British day we spent splitting a single set of earbuds listening to this and Combat Rock over and over. It’s been a while since I listened to the whole thing though. Classics like “London calling”, “death or glory”, “the guns of brixton”, I remembered fondly and they still hold up. I rediscovered “Spanish Bombs” and “Train in Vain”. Even some of the more silly sounding things like “lost in the supermarket” and “wrong em Boyo” are good if you drop the veneer of being hardcore for a few minutes. I love this album; one of the few double albums I can go through without skips. Timeless.

Another absolute classic from Radiohead. I don't enjoy it quite as much as OK Computer but every song is good. The moods change drastically and cover a wide range of emotions and sounds. I do find it weird that Street Spirit and High and Dry are among the most played songs off of this on Spotify as I think every other song is better. The intro to The Bends is one of my favorites, the vocal change in the chorus of Bullet proof is one of my favorites, the slow build of Fake Plastic Trees in its entirety is one of my favorites, etc, etc. Every song has a particular element that I really enjoy in addition to the song as whole. Just great.

Raw noise rock that is better than it should be. It’s a loud mess but somehow it all works. This is not a taking it easy album, and honestly I think it’s too much even for a workout, but if you listen to it maybe one song at a time with space in between it’s pretty great. I’m not really a fan of the genre but I’ve seen a few noise bands live and the energy is through the roof. I bet these guys were fun as hell live. “Crown of Storms” and “Dracula Mountain” were my faves. I absolutely don’t want to listen to this frequently but I didn’t hate it.

OI LOIKE YEW MOSTLY LATE AT NOIGHT A BWA BWA BWA BWA WA WA WA WA WAAA This would be a lot better without the vocals. He's not a particularly good singer and the lyrics, when you can understand them (and they're played forward instead of reverse) are pretty dumb. The instrumentation is good, and as much as the keys wander in some songs they do form a cohesive pattern eventually, which is satisfying when it ultimately gets to that point. I listened to this at work and kinda regretted it. I feel like I should be laying down and highly medicated to "get" it, and I'll probably do that at some point, skipping some obvious parts. One listen really isn't enough, kinda like hearing "Music For Airports" by Brian Eno, which is one of my favorite albums, and I didn't really like the first time I heard it. That's probably not a coincidence since Wyatt is credited on at least one track there. Anyway I'm saying too much about an album that is 6 tracks, 3.5+ of which are mostly unlistenable squeals and rambling repeated lyrics about nothing in various British accents. The first “Little Red" track and "Alifib" are things I'll revisit. The rest couldn’t even be saved by bong hits unfortunately.

I love how you can tell which songs were singles by looking at the spotify play counts. Tracks 3-6 all have "only" double digit million plays vs the triple digit million for everything else. Once you listen to them you know why...they're not very radio friendly or, you know, good. There isn't much to say about this album that hasn't already been said. It's a pop music classic, if you were growing up or an adult in the 80's or 90's you've heard it whether you wanted to or not. I honestly don't know if this sound was invented or perfected by this album or rather, Jackson's army of producers. It does sound pretty dated though, either way. Like a really good midi file, intentionally or not. The computerized sounding basslines which were ultimately played by real bassists are impressive though. The triple slap runs in "Speed Demon" are sick. This didn't pull in the nostalgia like other radio music albums did for me. It's not bad it's just that I've heard most of this before and I don't really need to revisit it.

Talking Heads’ music has always been a well performed mix of weird shit, great riffs and phrases, and serious commentary. David Byrne’s voice really rides the line between comical and impressive, all the time. This album really encapsulates that combo. The singles are the standout tracks (I Zimbra, Life During Wartime, Cities) and they walk that path the best. Songs like “Air” are too bizarre sounding to have that serious message the lyrics push, to me anyway. That's not a detriment to it, I think, because the dedication to a soundscape is there and it's not like the song is a missive to a government or something. I'm not sure if this album heralded the beginning of the 80's sound but it had to be close if it didn't do it by itself. Just the guitar work alone, on the production/fx end, is like nothing else of the time that I know of. The final track, "Drugs", is the oddest of all and is a great closer. It's experimental but not arhythmic and finishes with a simple volume fade, simple yet complicated. This was a good album.

After reading the description I thought I was gonna hate this. There's really only 3 or 4 tracks out of the 19 that are just noise noodling, and they are mercifully short and fit in to the rest of it well enough. I feel like if I asked an AI to generate 70's rock/pop it would come up with something like this, not in a disparaging way either. This is a perfectly listenable album to have on as an active listener or the background. I wasn't particularly paying attention to the track names as they went by, and I couldn't really recall any one specific track if anyone asked me, but I enjoyed the album as a single work. It felt much shorter than it's hour runtime and had plenty of change in feels, tempos, keys, genres even, etc to keep it interesting. Overall pretty good! I would listen to it again on a lazy day I had to myself.

I'm really not a country music person but this the kind of country I'll happily listen to. I like that the whole album is a story, Nelson's got a distinct and capable voice, and the songs are simple and performed well. Really nothing to complain about here. Good stuff.

I would love to know if the sample in “It’s Nasty” is the first known use of that in a hip hop song. I always associate with Mariah Carey but man is that everywhere. “Scorpio” is a good example of a song that does something cool but just overdoes it. The robo voice is cool but it ruins the whole song because it’s too present and too loud over the rest. The lyrical content and styles date the album but for the time period I imagine it was revolutionary. Still a good listen with solid work from all the rappers and producers involved.

The vocals are obviously the stars of this album, and the three and four part harmonies are great. Some of them sound like a chorus pedal, some sound like an a cappella group, but they’re all great. The instrumental work, it’s a backdrop for the singing in all the songs except Carry On, imo. This album is extremely full of hippie-isms, which is fine because it was peak hippie time, but I laughed through Woodstock because all I could think of was that episode of South Park where they’re all stuck on the front of a festival. It’s a great song but I’d never listened to the lyrics that closely before; it’s super festie. I kinda got bored by the end as the songs all start to be a bit more slow and folky after “Our House”. Overall it’s good, but I’ll stick to the singles.

This seems a bit like a worse version of yesterday's CSNY album, and that makes sense because it's 1/4 of it (and apparently featuring a ton of other people of that era/genre). It's missing the great harmonies that made Deja Vu a good album and it's unfortunately full of more aimless meandering. Cowboy Movie feels way too long for what it is, though Tamalpais High redeems it pretty quick by being a much better jam track. Unfortunately "Song with No Words" brings it back to being more tedious. I don't know, I don't want to give this a 2 but it's decidedly worse than the Crosby's work with his supergroup. If I could give this a 2.5 I would.

What a dull listen. All the songs sound the same and the breathy vocals do nothing but just add tiny layer of humanity to it. Music for entry level luxury suv commercials. It’s not performed poorly or badly done it’s just boring as hell.

I liked Parklife more than this, though I'm not sure I've actually ever given this album a full listen through before today. That isn't to say I didn't like it, I enjoyed it quite a bit even, but Parklife has a better overall sound to it than this one. Song 2 is still the best one between the two of them, as silly as it is. The great thing about Blur is that they've always straddled a bunch of styles on their albums. This particular one has too many generic sounding songs that don't really take advantage of the band's weird capabilities. Songs like "Theme from Retro" and "Country Sad Ballad Man" are just too out there compared to the rest of them and kinda wreck the vibe of the whole thing. I realize this is probably intentional but for whatever reason it doesn't really connect with me. Other than that, the other songs are great. I enjoyed the majority of this album and it's a fun reminder that the 90's wasn't just grunge and boy bands.

This is a fun album, not the kind of stuff I usually listen to, but I couldn't help but tap my feet along to it. The musicianship is stellar, not a single note off or misplaced but definitely full of feeling. The style of the album is fairly uniform but the songs are catchy enough to really keep it interesting. I had to look up the story of "Pedro Navaja" after hearing "Smith and Wesson" in the lyrics and it's pretty brutal! Not the story I expected from the music. This was a great listen. Perfect timing for a Sunday of housework and taking it easy.

The Band is a weird one for me. A friend of mine came back from his first year of college with a huge newfound fandom for them, and one summer our entire soundtrack was one of their live albums. His band covered "Long Black Veil" and I actually think his cover is better than the original. In any case I have a certain nostalgic relationship with them that affects my ability to objectively judge their output. I think this album is good, it's not as good as some of their others, but at least there are less references to the confederates in this one. I wouldn't call it revolutionary or particularly great but The Band are good at combining that lazy country style in to rock music, more so than the Allman Brothers and others of that persuasion. They're less polished and seem more authentic I guess? For me that's a good thing, for others it's a detraction. Long Black Veil, The Weight and I Shall Be Released are the picks for me, but the whole album is decent.

SONGS ABOUT FUCKING I know and enjoy most of these songs but I think the last time I heard Darling Nikki it was just the first half. I love the double bass drum bit at the end, what a weird and satisfying addition. This isn't Prince's best guitar album but it's still virtuoso playing. It's hard to say he's underrated but I feel like he does get lumped in to lists where he is by far the best player. The songs on this album sound like you imagine the cover does. Like there is nothing more "Purple Rain" then this album blasting in the studio while Prince poses for that shot on the motorcycle. It is an exact pairing of audio to visual. Just perfect. All that said, this isn't a 5 star album for me. It's got just enough of what has become cheesey to my ears that it's a 4. But it's a high 4 for sure.

Bob Dylan is one of those artists that I never really enjoyed. He wrote some good songs and I feel like every time I hear his original performance of them, it’s worse than the version I heard before. His voice, while distinctive, is not for me. I was hoping I could be turned around by this, but not this time. Maybe when we inevitably go through his older stuff it’ll be better.

Too all over the place and German for my tastes. The dudes voice comes across as clownish and the music doesn’t really contradict it. I wonder if this supposed to be a soundtrack to a made up film like that other album. Maybe it works that way but eh.

I really enjoyed this one. I’ve covered a few more famous Kinks songs with a band I was in a long time ago but I had never heard this album for. The lyrical content is a quaint little take on what I would imagine suburban English life was at the time: unimportant and pretty banal things that even those of us that grew up elsewhere and in different circumstances can follow along with. Some are direct (Picture Book, Sitting by the riverside) and some are more abstract (Big Sky). I read that this is supposed to be a take on the way the bands life used to be and what it meant for England to get more globalized at the time. If you listen to it with that in mind, some of the songs become a kind of call out on boring weirdness, but if you take it literally they just sound like a sing a first grader would write. It’s a bit of weird way to straddle the two ideas and I’m not sure they pull off the more intellectual side of it. Lyrical content aside, this is musically a pop rock album. It’s cleaner and in my opinion more listenable than a lot of the other British stuff coming out in that era. That doesn’t mean that it’s particularly interesting though. Again, I’m not sure how I’m “supposed” to hear it. It’s s fine enough album but I bet the Kinks have much better ones out there. Maybe we’ll hear them later.

Motörhead rules. This was a great listen while fixing the stupid car I was driving today, I just wished that it was the studio versions of all the songs. I really don’t see how live albums are in this list; they’re almost always worse than the recorded stuff. There were a few songs I hadn’t heard before that I’ll have to listen to later on the studio albums. Except “jailbait”. For fucks sake Lemmy.

The only Air album I had heard before was “Moon Safari” which had a few good songs but wasn’t in the same elevated sphere as other pop electronic like Groove Armada, Zero 7, telepopmusik, and others. This isn’t as good of an album for the radio but I think the composition as a score is great. I haven’t seen the film in ages but the dialogue included in some of the songs on here reminded me of the disturbing plot. This was a good thing for tone setting, though I can’t imagine wanting to hear it with the movie fresh in your mind. This kind of music seems stuck in that era of mid to late 90’s to 2005 or so. Other than Massive Attack, who haven’t put out an album in forever, nobody really does this anymore. It’s a shame because it’s one of my favorite styles to put on to unwind, and this album is a great example of it. I would give this a 5 but the spoken dialogue in some of the tracks kinda takes away from it. I wish this was just a plain score with no vocals.

Man there’s a lot of folk music in this book. The standout on this album is the first track, which is a traditional melody so while it’s a classic, they didn’t really write it. And maybe if you were high enough on 60’s dirt weed the idea of placing a news report over silent night seemed deep. I don’t get what’s supposed to be so great about this record. It’s fine? It’s short and the songs don’t go on too long either. It’s not bad it’s just not that good either. A perfect 3, or really a 2.5 but I do like the first track, like I said.

If Tom Petty sucked at writing songs and Bruce Springsteen didn’t suck at performing them it would be this guy. I really don’t like this era of country music at all and this is no exception. Trucks, the ridiculous Texas accent, my pretty baby, the good old boys, granddaddy, highway, my git-tar, this shit sucks. One extra star for not being out of tune and proficient lap guitar playing. Everything else is bad.

I didn't think I was going to like this as much as I did. It reminds me more of artists like early Bonobo or Morcheeba than the singles I had heard from her. Some of the songs are samey and her voice, while distinct and cool, does get a little weird at times. The instrumentation is spot on, and I love the groove the backing tracks pull. I liked the first half more than the second, which is like the reverse of the spotify plays. This isn't something I'll play all the time but I did enjoy it!

What a nice change of pace; I played so many of these songs when I played the trumpet and to hear the real og's play them again is a treat. "Take the A Train" and "Dimnuendo/Crescendo in Blue" are my favorites and there is some real improvisational mastery on display from Ellington himself on the piano, the trumpet, and saxophone players. "Festival Junction" (both versions) also has a lot of great soloists and playing. Didn't expect to hear a drum solo ("Skin Deep") but that was pretty cool too. Jazz and other improvisational styles are the only live albums worth listening to, I think, though this one is particularly marred by the endless talking of the hosts. I don't mind a bit of intros from Duke Ellington himself but everyone else is just unnecessary. The recording quality isn't bad at all and the studio versions of most of these songs dont sound much better since the tech wasn't really there at the time to do deep mastering and mixing like we do today. It was a bit disappointing to not be able to hear the double bass work as clear as I would like, particularly in "Newport Up", as that is always better in a studio recording. I appreciate whoever did the remaster adding the bits where Ellington had to calm the undoubtedly extremely drunk and extremely rich Newport crowd down. Woodstock for the polo grounds, as it were. I do feel like the last half of the second disc in the remaster was recorded in a studio because everything comes through a bit more clear and that the audience interactions were spliced in; I'd have to look in to it but regardless it does sounds slightly better. I liked this a lot, I hope we get more jazz and fusion records on this list.

“Candy Says” as an opener got me hyped up for something a bit more interesting and it only really paid off at the end with “Murder Mystery”. And that wasn’t particularly good, it was just interesting. The stuff in between is nice enough. Sad boi songs for thinking about girls you have a crush on. I think this would’ve appealed to me more when I was younger. It’s a pleasant listen, but not the stunning art piece that people make it out to be. VU is said to be a band that only really became appreciated after they put out a ton of work. I’m wondering if it’s because the market was kinda saturated with bands like this during the 60s and 70s and they ultimately had more staying power than the other bands due to persistence, money, or both. That isn’t to say they aren’t good, I like the style, it’s just not really a standout for me. Maybe I need to listen to more of the heroin albums.

This album is plagued by the very dated sounding instrument kit used. The synthetic bass and drums and the horn stabs are really a product of its time and were wisely abandoned years later when the sound went out of style. Jackson's singing is excellent but the songs really aren't there to overcome the sound for me. I realize it's subjective but I just can't get over it. The first half of the actual songs are overrun with it. That said I thought about this in the scope of modern popular music, and I'm sure that lots of albums we listen to now are going to sound like this to people in the future. What I can say is that the lyrical content is refreshing for a pop album. An equivalent artist of Janet's popularity is not writing songs like this now. It's not insanely deep or anything but it covers ground that is limited to less successful commercial artists these days. I appreciate that. The love songs on here are the Janet Jackson I'm more familiar with but they also suffer from the dated sound. It's not a bad sound at all, it's just so weird sounding now. I can't deal.

This could be a very normal album by a celebrated good time group but the lyrics are some of the weirdest shit I’ve ever heard. Maybe it was different back in the day but “people say I’m mean and treat her bad” followed by “they just know what they see” is some weird shit. Don’t tell people to kiss your sister. I never realized “Help me Ronda” is about a rebound hookup. “Please let me wonder” is confusing…is this guy an incel or is he having second thoughts? I can’t figure it out. A lot of other artists could get away with this but the whole point of The Beach Boys is the singing and the clear enunciation of every word. The musicality (is that a word?) is classic beach boys. But yikes.

Everything I know about The Smiths I mostly heard reading Morrissey jokes on twitter. I know he's a turd but this is kinda good. Incredibly pervasive emo lyrics aside (I know that's a trademark), the riffs on this are pretty good. The Headmaster Ritual" opening riff is weird enough to catch your ear and then they start going all over the place from country style to rock and mixes in between. There’s a lot of talent on display (ironically, to me, Morrissey himself is the weak point, he sounds too goofy a lot of the time) and all the instrumentalists have a good amount of range. “That Joke isn’t Funny Anymore” is my favorite of the bunch. The content and the instruments fit the voice perfectly, built to a nice crescendo by the end without fumbling half rhymes and unnecessary poetry in the lyrics. I really enjoyed that track. “Barbarism Begins at Home” is another good one, similar to the aforementioned track in that there isn’t too much wobbly lyrics and the groove is good. There’s probably several 60s bands that sing about the problematic nature of eating farmed meat but the tone and lyrics (and animal sounds) really drive the point home in “Meat is Murder”. I actually wonder if all of the band members were vegetarian. That might be the saddest song on the album. Anyway I liked this more than I thought I would.

So this is where the Rapper's Delight sample comes from, wild. The bassline from there is so iconic that I didn't think it would get much better from there but nearly all of the more upbeat songs (My Feet Keep Dancing, My Forbidden Lover) definitely have that same good groove. They also sound like a lot of fun to play, even if they do get repetitive. Other than "Good Times" I'm pretty sure I've heard something from "Will You Cry" in some more modern rap songs. Particularly the strings, though I can't remember what it is. The song itself is pretty good too! The songs all seem to go on too long, but I get that. Remember this stuff was being played in clubs and you don't want ot change the song every two seconds while everyone is having a good time and needing more and more cocaine. You're just gonna need to ease in to the next one and let the groove go for a while. I enjoyed this, despite the songs going on a bit the album as a whole wasn't terribly long and I never really felt like skipping anything. The basslines really make the whole thing, but I'm biased.

This is the very essence of “landfill indie”, a term I really enjoy because it describes that mid-late 2000’s British sing song rock revival that all sounds like this perfectly. It’s entirely forgettable but not offensively bad. The instruments are played well enough, the songs are 90% 4/4 at a moderate tempo. The lyrics might as well be a bunch of phone numbers. The definition of average. 3 stars because I like the goofy saxophone and some of the one string riffs are good. Really it’s a 2.5.

I thought I was going to hate this but this was way better than I expected. This is what Bob Dylan is supposed to be. The songwriting is not incredibly complicated but it's complex enough to be interesting; whether Nick knew it or not he was touching esoteric bits of music theory with his songwriting and he actually knew how to perform it, on tape anyway. You can hear the influence of classical music in nearly every song, with subtle hints to the Baroque masters like Handel and Vivaldi evident in the suspended chords and key changes. His voice isn't annoying like so many other singer/songwriters and you can feel the emotion when he sings. The incorporation of strings in to so many of his songs feels right and unforced. I liked this way more than I should have. I'll have to give his other records a listen.

I've heard the phrasing and cadence from "Pusherman" so many times in rap songs that I didn't realize it came from anything other than guys actually being pushers. I love finding stuff like this out. This is an album that sounds exactly like you would expect it to, and that's a good thing. I wonder if this or the Shaft (the original, not the Samuel L. Jackson redo thing) soundtrack is considered the real zenith of the genre. This isn't a bad thing - I like the sound and it definitely gives off a very specific vibe. The only thing I can complain about is that the songs do sound a bit all the same to me. The two instrumentals are a bit different but the full fledged songs sound a lot alike. That's probably me just not being tuned in to the genre though.

First thing: this shit is just way too long. This could have been two albums, especially at the time. The contents are actually not bad - I think she’s always been one of the better actual musicians in the sea of pop music from the mid 90s to the late 2000s. That said it is still fundamentally an album written and produced for mass market appeal. The standout tracks are all the singles, which makes sense. “Drrty”, “Beautiful”, “Fighter”, etc. The other tracks seem average to fine with nothing particularly bad in it. Just kinda boring stuff that doesn’t resonate with me, the absolute opposite of the intended audience of course. You could do a lot worse for a pop album. You could do a lot worse than Scott Storch as a producer of the time too, which for various personal reasons is still hysterical to me.

Radiohead’s discography started to fall apart for me around “Hail to the Thief”, which had some good songs but not all of them were winners, or even that interesting. It took me a long time and many listens of “Kid A” and “Amnesiac” to really appreciate them both but I I got there and they were worth the multiple listens. I didn’t do that to try and understand the albums, I did that because they were genuinely good and improved listen over listen. Unfortunately, this album doesn’t feel that way. There are two or maybe three different styles of songs on this album. The fast tempo with experimental instruments, the Thom Yorke odd ballad, and “Videotape”, which is the best track in my opinion. Radiohead has way more range than this album lets on, and it’s intimately a disappointment. The songs are all listenable and even pretty good in some cases but as whole this album is a let down to me. I expect so much more. It’s really not up to the standards set by literally every album before it.

Pretty standard 70’s rock-folk with clear singing and good instrumentals. A lot of the songs blended together for me, but that’s his dedication to a style and nobody does it quite like him. The title track is famous enough that I’ve heard it in multiple places as an instrumental, including what I swear was broadcasts of an old Italian news program my parents would have on back in my youth. It’s an ear worm for sure. For someone in to the soft rock or pop jazz genres this is probably a masterpiece. For me it’s kinda pleasant background music.

I could listen to Bootsy basslines all day, the man is just a machine of effortless mastery. Every one of these songs has such an incredible drive and rhythm. I'm not sure it makes me want to dance, but it really makes me want to smoke a gigantic blunt in a room with blinky lights. I think it's impossible to feel bad while listening to this. The lyrics are mostly self referential nonsense, so there's nothing to process other than having a good time. Even the solos just kind of blend in to the groove, you barely notice that more than a few of them go on for minutes. I was mad this morning for various reasons and this picked me right up. What a mood booster. I didn't even want to skip the vastly overplayed "Give Up The Funk".

Right in the nostalgia glands. Incubus was a sort of bridge between the rap rock bands and the old grunge bands at the time; not quite stupid enough to be nu metal but not quite soft enough to be indie. In a way they kinda dragged rock in to the 2000's on the radio at least. They still have a fairly unique sound. The guitarist sure loves his sitar emulation and delay, the drums are clean and the drummer has a good ear for dynamics in his snare hits. The bassist is probably too good for this kind of music and when he goes off you can tell. The singing is perfect for the sound, a bit overwrought some times but whatshisface has a large vocal range and doesn't strain himself to reach anything that would sound bad. More bands should emulate that. The lyrics are fairly terrible but that's ignorable. The DJ, well, he's there Because 1999. This is still a good album but there are some stinkers on here, as there always was. "Consequences" has such a weird chord progression in the verse that I always ended up skipping it because it wasn't "heavy" enough. It's actually a clever sequence but I still don't really like it. It's not even that bad of a song, I just want it to do something it doesn't. I've grown out of "I Miss You", a song that is so blatantly written for ex girlfriends, and kinda sounds off compared to the rest of the album. It seems like it should be a totally different album. "Drive" suffers from being overplayed and not being that good in the first place. The rest of the songs are awesome. I miss this level of distortion and feeling in rock music. It's just complicated enough with varying time signatures and progressions (Stellar, The Warmth, Pardon Me) to be interesting without making me feel like I have to put everything down and pay attention. The mixing and mastering is that clean sound without too much experimentation that I really like. All the various parts shine in their own way. A good album that captured the sound of the 90's and went just far away from it to be a standout in its own way.

I think I've always appreciated David Bowie more as a person and public figure than as an artist. This album doesn't really change that. The biggest compliment I can give it is that he is true to himself and the songs are distinctly Bowie. Unfortunately, his style never really appealed to me. He's the rock and glam version of a folky singer/songwriter that I don't care for most of the time. I'm surprised that this album appeared on here given his lengthy discography - is this really one of his top 5 ones? I'm sure we'll get more but this is pretty forgettable. It's not a bad album, I just immediately forgot each song after it played. I know they vary in tempo, key, etc, but they could all be the same, I wouldn't remember. I'd Rather Be High too, David.

Yes. Hell yes. The stupid ass slide whistle in “Runnin With The Devil” is the greatest circus instrument interpolation of all time. This albums pulls a ton of legendary Eddie playing in to the same lane as some of the greatest 80s (before they even happened!) nonsense ever produced and it manages to make a record far greater than the 7 brain cells it took to write all the songs combined. Every single song is just background noise for a huge riff and a huge solo, and it rules. The guitar is unmatched; just completely raw and unproduced. The rest exists to elevate the playing and it does so exactly adequately. I love it.

This is like a slightly more interesting Beatles album. “Care of Cell 44” sets the tone for a lyrically more challenging album than the usual britpop dreck. I don’t think it fully realizes that but I really liked that song and there was more than one where the content wasn’t just about being hippie style fucked up or being happy, Butchers Tale being another standout there. Despite being easy to follow, I think a lot of the vocal (and instrumental) harmonizing is complicated and well thought out, more so than a lot of the stuff in this genre. The first track and “hung up on a dream” are good examples. There’s also a theme of not over utilizing the organ and keys in here though featuring them in a big way. They never overpower anything despite taking center stage in many songs. The more I think about it the more I like this more than the beatles releases we’ve had. I don’t think either are really worth the status they’ve got in popular music but this is a good album that is different enough to make a mark. A nice surprise!

Nick Cave's voice is ridiculous in this. I don't really like him to begin with but he sounds especially absurd in this context. The whole album sounds like it was recorded in a corrugated steel hut, which I guess is intentional if you read the wiki. I like the idea and I've heard lots of punk music that sounded like shit but Cave's voice and the fairly bad songwriting in general ruins it. When you make an album like this the songs have to have more energy and they have to be good. This is a difficult album to listen to. Songs that might have been decent if someone else was singing: "Hamlet (Pow Pow Pow)", "Big Jesus Trash Can", "Kewpie Doll" "Release the Bats" is what actually good, but that's it.

The title track would be a good jazz number if Martyn didn’t mumble his way through the whole thing. It’s apparent he can do it from the other songs, why fuck this one up? It’s otherwise a good song! He does the same thing in “man in the station”. This album seems a bit divided about what it wants to do. It’s kinda jazz/lounge and kinda folk. I actually like the former but I could really do without the latter. I figured the whole album would sound like “Over the Hill” and I’m glad it doesn’t. Once you get over the first two songs which are the prime examples of the two styles, it does start to fit together a bit better. Beth Orton does a cover with “don’t wanna know about evil” with William Orbit that is way better than this one, but I feel that way about many covers of 70s singer/songwriter tunes. It’s a good song regardless. This isn’t a bad listen but I doubt I’ll put anything on it on a playlist other than the first track for drugs purposes. I was expecting a lot worse.

I love the PS2 and street fighter sound effects in the beginning of the album, then “Thinking bout you” is such a good song that the following tracks seem like a bit of a let down. “Super Rich Kids” comes close to that high then we get to “Pyramids”, which is better than it has any right to be at 10 minutes long. What a bizarre ass feature of John Mayer in “White”; it completely works as a break before the last third of the album. This album goes on a sinusoidal path of great songs to not so great songs and back. The lows aren’t even that low though; it’s all good stuff. There are a. Couple of skips for me toward the end but by and large this is great. Really good sunny day driving album, and on multiple listens the lyrics are great too. Really enjoyed this one.

I swear I didn’t realize Fats Domino was a real person until today; I thought it was a made up name from various 80s sitcoms and cartoons. A cursory look at Wiki shows that Fats was doing this well before Elvis and I think Elvis ripped him off wholesale. And he’s worse at it. I’m a Fats Domino truther now. I think it’s a bit of a cheat to use a greatest hits album in this list but I liked every track and it was mega short so hard to complain really.

The sample work absolutely out does (and probably hides some of the inadequacies of) the lyrical content and style of the whole album. What a masterpiece of beat manipulation, and I guess it suits the three styles that the actual Beastie Boys have. The dust brothers must’ve spent an eternity creating this stuff, and it’s really great. Their rapping style is a real “you like it or you don’t”, but I did find it growing on me, like it does for all their other albums. It always takes me 2 or 3 songs to get in to it. I do love how they pass off the mic to each other within the verses rather than trying to do individual ones like so many other groups do, and they’ve always done it this way. “Car Thief” is my favorite here, and in addition to the way they rap it, the best lines are in it too (“The godfather of soul in the belly of the beast/smokin that dust at St. Anthony’s feast”). The B Boy suite might as well be a different album, and I feel like it’s the cuts they didn’t want to make in to a full song but were too good to drop. I like “Hello Brooklyn” the most out of it though the fast paced nature of it makes it all good. None of it feels over cooked for that reason. Fun record to revisit.

This is an album that is going to appear in a ton of critics' top 10, let alone top 1001, so its inclusion is not a surprise at all, nor should most of the content be if you're older than 30, maybe even 20 if you had a certain kind of parent or still listened to terrestrial radio in 2012 or whatever. I know it's a classic but having listened to a ton of pink floyd in my life I don't think this is their best album, or even second. The thing it does really well though is be a concept/opera album without being overly up its own ass about that fact. It's still full of great standalone tracks that are tied in to the story without having to rely on full songs worth of context to make sense of them. It speaks to Waters and the rest of band's songwriting ability and storytelling prowess. Being able to pull a musical theme down through most of the first disc without ramming it down your throat the whole time is what film composers and classical composers do - it's rare for a rock band to pull this off. I think the second disc is better than the first, by a lot even. When I'm in a mood to listen to this album I usually skip the first disc entirely. It's an obvious pick, but I think if I could only listen to 5 songs for the rest of my life Comfortably Numb would be one of them. The harmonies, the carefully picked effects on the guitar, the instrumentation, the lyrics, it's just all great. It being on the same album as Hey You, Run Like Hell, Another Brick in the Wall pt X, and Mother is really something. I can't give this anything but a 5; I'd give it a 4 knowing their other work but I've given lots of lesser albums 4's and it wouldn't do it justice.

I was prepared to be disappointed but within a few seconds of “Hail Bop” I realized that it was on the FIFA 13 soundtrack and FIFA soundtracks are always full of bangers. “Waveforms” is a good one in the same style. I wouldn’t quite classify this as landfill indie but it’s close. The production is too good for that and the songs are too interesting. Speaking of the production, I love the guitar on this album when it’s not just piped from acoustic. It’s super compressed and distorted to the point that it sounds like an electric twelve string. It’s been done before but I really like it. The vocal harmonies are also executed well, though I’m not sure if the singer is double/triple tracked or if it’s all of them. Either way it’s good. The second half of the album kind of lost me. Starting with “Wor” everything got a little derivative and simplistic. “Skies over Cairo” is literally just 12 bar blues but harmonic minor. Lazy! I think this is one of the better modernish albums we’ve heard but it is let down by a bunch of filler tracks that don’t distinguish themselves from anything else.

I love Boards of Canada and this might by my second favorite release by them. I first got in to them relatively recently, during 2020, when I was looking for songs and bands that wouldn't make me mad or really force me to do too much thinking. I found them cruising around various Spotify generated playlists with the term "ambient". BoC's sound isn't really what I would call ambient, but I get the tag. They have a real talent for layering instruments and sounds, building appropriate dynamics, and resolving long running phrases in a satisfying way. This album has some really stellar examples of that in "Turquoise Hexagon Sun", "Roygbiv", "Open The Light" and "Olson". At the time when this album was released I remember a small scene of burgeoning "downtempo" groups, but none of them were as creative as Boards of Canada. They were really doing something ahead of their time with this album, and I'm kind of annoyed it took me so long to find them. The biggest complaint I have about this album are the short track interludes (Olson excluded because I think it could keep going for much longer), but even those are good bridges between songs that vary in tempo and sound. It's obvious that the album is not just a collection of songs but meant to be enjoyed as a whole work and those tracks are just connections. I could listen to this for a long time (and I have, multiple times). The "Trans Canada Highway" EP is still my favorite work of theirs but this might be next. Music that will forever be associated with a shit time in my (and many others) life, but in a good way.

The wiki about this album says it’s the first of the hardcore punk albums out of LA and i expected a really shittily produced noise record. While it is noisy, the production is clean and you can hear every instrument and vocal clearly. Big points for that. As for the content, I really liked about half of this album or so. Communist Eyes, Lexicon Devil, Strange Notes and We Musst Bleed are all solid punk songs of the angrier and non pop variety. The back half of the album is pretty lousy and the final 10 minute track is just bad. As far as hardcore punk albums go this is a decent one but it doesn’t upstage things that came later for me. Also lol Pat Smear taking a leading role here, man gets around.

This is not the best daft punk album. This is not even the second best daft punk album, yet it’s still a very good daft punk album. Listening to this brought me back to sweaty evenings in big room clubs in Italy smoking furiously and being assaulted with that droning 4/4 and constant layers and dynamic changes in one or maybe 2 samples. Really nobody was doing it like Daft Punk at the time and even at the infancy of their style it still sounds distinct. The beginning of this has all the old hits. I could probably do without a couple tracks in the middle on this, but once we get to “Oh Yeah” it all picks back up brilliantly to the awesome buildup destruction of “Alive”. Even with the songs I don’t enjoy in here this is still a non stop, no bullshit album. Great stuff.

There was a time when the chili peppers were considered good and. It just Anthony Keidis’s California boop we doop skabadaboo band, and it probably started with this album. Make no mistake that it has plenty of that shit on it but they had plenty of good ones on here too. You can’t talk about this band or this album without mentioning Flea and the bass work, which is as usually one of a kind and expertly fitted in to the music. The opening track is a perfect example; it’s a completely bass driven track and it works. The singles on here are classics. Hard to dispute that but I’ve heard them so many times that I ended up skipping them. As for the less played songs I liked “power of equality” and “naked in the rain” the most. The rest were fine I guess. I really can’t deal with the goofy lyricisms and Kiedis’s voice as an adult. My hot take is that One Hot Minute is the Chili Peppers best album even though everyone hates it.

I rather liked this, it's great working music. I imagine it's also great doing drugs music but it's a weekday and it's day time soooooo. I particularly liked the more mellowed out tracks (Song of Life, Original, Melt). Overall this is pretty good. I do wonder if this was the first popular "progressive house" album, before that was a name of a subgenre. That would explain the inclusion on the list. Nothing earthshaking, but definitely a good album for clubs and repetitive tasks. The only thing track I actively disliked was "Open Up" and that was just because I didn't care for the endless vocal loop of "BURN HOLLYWOOD BURN".

I was ready to dislike this. Pictures At An Exhibition is one of my favorite classical suites and it’s a live album, so I figured it would just be odd and sound like shit. I was right about it sounding a bit like shit (though not anywhere near as bad as it could have) but the interpretation of the work is really quite good. Adding lyrics and singing is always a risk when you’re using someone else’s music but it’s kept to a minimum and the singing is good, which I should’ve expected. There is a bit of what I would consider an overuse of the piano/synth/organ but you can’t just do everything on a guitar as much as I would like that to be the case. That said, the organ in the various calls to the promenade theme get more powerful as the album goes on (as it does in the original piano composition) as they go on and by the last one in the beginning of “The Great Gate of Kiev” brings it all home beautifully. The three part interpretation of “The Dancing Hut of Baba Yaga” is a highlight of this for me. All three of them shine technically throughout it and the timing of such a technical piece is constructed incredibly well without sounding robotic. The dissonance at the end of the middle section matches the original which is cool. I never knew this existed before today and I’m glad I got to hear it. What a turnaround from expectation to reality. Bit of a laugh at the last track which is not part of the suite but is another (goofier) interpretation of Russian classical music. I wouldn’t have put this on the album but otherwise it would’ve been really short so I get it.

I generally like the MGMT songs I hear on the radio or in bars/restaurants. I think they have a pretty unique sound without being inaccessible. With that said, I think maybe I just only like their big hits. Time to Pretend, Electric Feel, Kids and maaaaaaybe Of Moons, Birds & Monsters were all good songs. I've heard the first three before and I like them. The last one was just "heavy" enough for me to like it. The songs on this album that are moodier or quiet don't really appeal to me. They turn the interesting voices and instruments that are their hallmark in to whines. It sort of makes me want to listen to some of their later stuff to see if it's the same. I like a few tracks off of "Little Dark Age" but if it's more of the same filler as this album then maybe it's not worth the time. This album is here for the uniqueness of the sound (which spawned a lot of garbage copies, I'm sure), which is good. It's an excellent combo of indie, electronic, disco, pop and lots of others. I can’t personally have a whole album of this though.

I love Massive Attack in general, and this album isn’t an exception. I sort of prefer their later stuff with less vocals but these songs wouldn’t really work with no singing. The vocals are part of the instrumentation, especially when the male singer is involved. His style just works with the beats. “Safe from Harm”, “Daydreaming”, and “Blue Lines” are my favorites but really they’re all pretty great tracks. I could probably live without “Be Thankful for What Youve Got”, it’s got that wackiness that makes it sound too much like a disco song. “Unfinished Symphony” is like that too but the backing track is so good I can forgive it. Other than that, they capture that late 90s euro lounge style without being cheesy like so many other imitators are. There’s obvious rap and reggae undertones as well, which all work excellently. Perfect music for having a drink in the dark with a good friend. The only reason this is a four is because I really do prefer the later stuff; when I put on Massive Attack it’s gonna be Mezzanine, 100th Window and even Heligoland. This album definitely holds its own though.

The second album I ever bought with my own money. Every track is an absolute hit. The line and melody of “Let’s nuke the bridge we’ve torched two thousand times before” has lived in my head for 30 something years. “Welcome to Paradise” being cleaned up from the version on “Kerplunk” was a great choice from whoever made it. The rare instance of a redo being better than the original. There are a million highlights to this album. Every song has something special. Musically this isn’t a difficult album to play but each of them plays really well and you can tell they’re all actually pretty talented. It’s not “real” punk but it’s the purest form of pop punk ever put to vinyl/tape/optical/etc. There is an obvious nostalgia element for me in this album but even as my tastes have changed and evolved this whole album is still really good. No skips - even on the CD where there’s a pile of negative time before the last joke track.

The singer sounds like someone heard David Byrne and said “what if this was uninteresting”. Or Bob Dylan and thought “no songwriting but marginally better singing”. With that out of the way the actual songs aren’t terrible. Was this the genesis of this era of British pop/rick music? If so then it’s a good beginning but I don’t know enough of the genre to know when and how it really started. You could say this is a great example of it anyway. It might be derivative of others but I don’t know what came first. The production and mastering/mixing is good. I like the clean guitar sounds and there are even bits of strings in some songs that make them more engaging. It isn’t unlistenable by far but it’s just kinda there. Background music for a movie set in the 80s or a modern grocery store. Really don’t understand why this is on here UNLESS it’s the first album of its kind, I guess.

“Oh my god what is that horrible song they’re singing” is a great self reflection. “I feel like I’m living in a city with no children in it; a garden left for a ruin by a millionaire inside of a private prison” is one of the worst sentences and maybe the most tortured metaphor I’ve ever heard. “The Sprawl” is like if Radioheads “exit music for a film” was run through a Christian content guard website and was also shit. The music is good enough. The fast songs are just how many downstrokes on a guitar can you do. The slow songs are teenage poetry put to odd time signatures (which is at least better than regular time signatures) or something that sounds like a modern military march. It’s simple but gets the job done. I did like the post-rock style buildup in “The Suburban War”; made me want to listen to more of that though rather than the rest of this. I can see why they’re successful; the music matches the moods of the songs and it’s got a groove most of the time. The lyrics and the singing really throw me off though. They really ruin the whole thing. Ultimately if I’m going to listen to this kind of rock I’ll probably put on The Strokes, and lyrically I’m probably just a shitty old man that doesn’t get it.

I wasn't super in to this until "These Chains" which reminded me of the electronic dance pop music I liked back in the day. The songs before that were pretty forgettable for me. I guess the notability of this album is the return to mixing what is now called "EDM" with pop music and rock instruments. It's been done before certainly, and like I said there were bands and individuals making tracks like these well before 2000. I enjoyed "These Chains", "Night and Day" and "Ends of the Earth". I think the tempo in all three cases makes them more appealing to me than the rest. I wouldn't call this groundbreaking or anything; it's pretty good. Just not great.

Another live album, but I enjoyed this one and it captures a live feel more so than albums that just happened to be recorded at a performance but were otherwise indistinguishable from a studio recording aside from worse quality. I’d never heard of Sam Cooke before this (at least by name) but he has a powerful voice that kept going til the end of the album. He’s a great singer and I like how he engages the crowd. From the start I thought of the band from Animal House and then “Twistin the Night Away” came on, which justified it completely. A great rendition too. This album was fun. Not a bad track on it and the “live” part of it is finally a plus rather than a detriment.

I think this is better than the album we got a few days ago (Suburbs) but it still suffers from my personal grievances with the singing and lyrical content. The reverb on the singers voice that makes it sound like its inside a sheet metal structure and the sometimes inane and "so stretched as a metaphor it comes back to the literal interpretation" lyrics continue to bother me. I did enjoy the "neighborhood" suite, particularly #3 ("Power Out"). I liked the almost electronically consistent drum beat and the rhythm section in general. Given that's half the album, we're already doing better than last time. I think the appeal of Arcade Fire is this expansive, almost post-rock, epic sound, but mixed with that mid-late 2000's mustache and suspender instrumentation of unmastered pianos, fiddles (they would never be referred to as violins) and the occasional banjo. They do have it if you've never heard a band that does it really well do it before, and that's completely fine. I'm sure when I say 90's bands were doing brand new stuff people the age of my father would say "well these other old bands you've never heard of were doing it 20 years before that". After two albums I think I understand what's going on with them. I still don't particularly care for it but I get it.

The huge first track of this album is considered a masterpiece of prof rock. It has all the parts of one for sure - complicated rhythms, technical instrumentals, metaphorical lyrics, a central musical theme, LENGTH. I think I would have to listen to it multiple times to really appreciate it. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it and it didn’t feel like 18 minutes at all, I just think there’s more there to understand, as there is with all of Yes’s big epics. It’s not quite as digestible on the first run like Crimson or other contemporaries are. I only listened to the first three tracks because that’s what’s in the original album and I wanted to stick with that. I think I liked “And You and I” the most out of all three tracks. The keys and voice work are classic Yes. The final track “Siberian Khatru” is the most straightforward part of the whole album. It’s a fun track, and the guitar is great in it. I want to give this a 3.75 so I’m going to round up. It’s a bit up its own ass but not more than any prog album should be.

This is a good example of an early post punk album. You can see the beginnings of 80's rock in here with some of the riffs and melodies. It sounds a bit like if David Bowie was more average, or if the Clash were less punk. It's good, but it's not very unique The mastering and production is great; I liked the guitar tones and levels especially. It's front and center without taking over. The bass is clear and punctuated, the drums are even and the cymbals aren't overbearing. "Shot by Both Sides" is the best track on here, it sounds like a faster and tighter Clash song, which I like. I also enjoyed "Recoil". In general the faster and more aggressive the song was, the better it sounded. On the other end I don't need literal circus music on "The Great Beautician in the Sky" at all, ever. The final track, "Parade" was also a bit of a stinker. An average album with some highlights and some turds. Good enough!

This was an interesting album; this is real psychedelic rock instead of something inspired by it. It’s cool that it’s in Portuguese, and you can hear some of the more Brazilian string and percussion instruments in the interludes between tracks and in the sound tricks that are played in production. This must’ve sounded insane at the time. My father in law has a great collection of Brazilian music including plenty from this time, and it doesn’t sound like anything else. I don’t know the exact timelines but it reminds me of the Beatles more out there stuff, just more raw and excited. The last track is the most “traditional” sounding one and even then it’s still very much their own sound. Anyway I liked it; not sure I would play it again but it was fun to listen to and was for sure groundbreaking in South America if not elsewhere.

I loved this. The music, the banter, the announcements with inmate numbers, the laughing mid track, the lyrics, just all of it. I’ve somehow never listened to this despite always liking Johnny Cash, and it is such a great record. The recording it incredibly good for being recorded in what I assume is a prison cafeteria or auditorium. The singing comes through beautifully but none of the instruments are overshadowed. I rest can’t think of a bad thing about this. Really great.

The lyrics to “Turn Blue” and “sixteen” make more sense after you know that Iggy was a bit of a weirdo sex pest. Moral objections aside, I didn’t particularly like this album. How many songs can you make out of 3 chords, chorus and verse included? There’s good three chord rock and then there’s this. It’s pretty boring and repetitive. I know Bowie is involved in this a bit and you can sort of hear it but the big difference is that Bowie writes interesting music and Iggy just kinda writes music. It’s really forgettable, especially given the real punk stuff developing around the late 70s. Also he sounds too much like Jagger of Jagger could produce more than 2 notes with his voice.

This is an album I listened to a lot when I was younger but I wouldn't say I really love it. There are some absolute screamers in here like the title track, Battery, and Orion and the rest of the tracks, while not as good, certainly hold up. The only track I don't like is Leper Messiah, which despite having a great title, goes on too long and has some not so great musical parts (descending chromatic order and then the odd vocal key shift in the chorus drives me insane) and key changes. I wish James and Lars weren't such absolute tools in real life. It really sours my attitude toward the band in general. For me this is the last truly great Metallica thrash album. The Black Album is a huge departure from the style and it's good in it's own way but then they went and changed everything and their latter stuff is mostly disposable commercial rock. I could go on but treating this album in a vacuum, it's great. It's a lot to listen to in one sitting and it does feel a tad dated away from the three tracks I mentioned earlier, but you'd be hard pressed to find a better and more perfectly executed example of the genre at the time. This is a defining album in metal in general.

Just looking at the cover I was expecting to hate this. It's not great but it's better than I expected. I enjoyed "Super Bird" which is just shitting on LBJ, and I can always respect and laugh at dumping on a politician. The first two tracks are pretty catchy as well, and they have that whole jam band/psychadelic aspect down easily. It's not a genre I ever really want to listen to, though. The rest of it is largely forgettable. There's nothing particularly standout for me on the majority of the album. It's an American record from the 60's, and it sure as hell sounds like one. That's really it.

The best part about this album are the simple yet interesting beats. Then her rapping, then her accent and lastly the singing. The singing is bad. The rest of this kinda rules. I have to get back to the beats because they’re just so well done. There’s no falling asleep 4/4 here, yet the whole thing is done with what I can only guess is a single sample set with an fx pad. The jungle, reggae, garage, dance hall, and rap influences are all evident and not pandering. Some of the lyrics are pretty out there but there’s a running theme of resistance, the state of refugees, revolution, etc. If I didn’t know about her already I would’ve been really surprised. Not the kind of message you expect from this kind of album. I liked “Bucky Done Gun”, “Bingo”, “10 Dollar” the most but the whole thing is a good time.

I wanted to like this more than I did. The percussion and rhythms throughout the whole album are awesome; and you can feel the influence they all took from Fela Kuti and his contemporaries. In the wiki article it’s mentioned that the band didn’t want to make this another David Byrne and friends album, which I feel they accomplished, other than the massive “once in a lifetime”, which is one of the most iconic Byrne songs ever. The second half of the album is the letdown for me and ultimately makes me not really want to revisit this more. “Listening Wind” and “The Overload” are such a drag compared to the first 4 or 5 songs. I get that you want to vary the tempo over an album but maybe the track ordering got lost in the grander plan. I actually wonder if I would’ve liked it more in a different order. Anyway it’s still a good album, it’s just not great for me.

Jurassic 5 gets unfairly lumped in to “old school” or “conscientious” rap without taking the fact that they’re more than the sum of those parts. This album is a great example of staying true to a style without sounding stale or dated. Nu-Mark and Cut Chemist really take this to heart; they've got plenty of skills but they know to keep it simple and let the three MC's really shine (Acetate Prophets excluded of course) I think “A Day At The Races” is a great example of executing their perfectly enunciated and technical style without sounding like something out of the 80s or preachy. The following track “Remember his name” perfectly blends in to the early 2000’s radio rap but without following that overproduced trend that was prevalent. "One of Them" is one of the few boasting/dissing "anyone else" tracks I've ever thought wasn't corny. There’s a reason J5 have been around as long as they have: their albums can only belong to them and they’ve never deviated from what they’re good at so far as to sound forced. On this one, the features fit right in; even Nelly Furtado which I thought might be a train wreck. Leaving Kool Keith as an acapella was a brilliant idea. Overall really excellent.

The highlight of this album is definitely Headliner. The DJ skills and beats are all great, even if some of the songs get boring after a bit, it’s not due to the backing track. The rapping is good too, and the occasional singing, but I really like the DJing. The content is wholesome without being cheesy, yet with an angry-ish message. I wish we hadn't heard that Jurrassic Five album yesterday because I think I would've liked this more if I didn't have a better example of what this album is presenting fresh in my mind. This isn't a bad album at all, it's just comparatively not as good. The messaging is almost too literal, though I guess that's the point. "Tennessee" might have been the first hip hop song I listened to intentionally. I remember hearing it on the pirate radio station back in my youth, right after a Rage Against the Machine track. In a weird way they occupy the same "agenda", though I hate using that word. Hope for a better world, decrying the system and what it's done to everyone. This is good and it undoubtedly influenced a lot of hip hop later down the line. It's got some filler, though, and it didn't grab me nearly as hard as it could have.

"ooooo I'm nick cave and I sing in a forced low voice and write bad poetry and then me and some other guys put it to shitty music ooooooooo smoke cigarettes!!!!" I never got the hype around Nick Cave. This didn't change my mind. We get it you're gloomy and spooky and want to say "suck my dick" in to a mic, write a metal album instead of whatever this is. This is like if teenage horror fanfics was a musical genre unto it itself. I get that each one of these is supposed to be a song about a murder but if you want that there are a million old country songs and a million rap songs and a million emo songs, etc. that are all better than this. At least the instrumentation and playing is good. Saves it from being a 1.

It’s hard to describe what I really liked about this album. The songwriting speaks for itself. Elton John’s work is more than the sum of its basic instrumental parts. The progressions, structure and composition of each song is very listenable but not simple. The sheet music for nearly every song on here must be a trip to read. I think that’s what made it appealing to me, because I’m not really in to the singer/songwriter genre in general. It does get bizarrely repetitive despite the songs not fundamentally sounding like each other. Maybe it’s just the production where all the tones and dynamics are pretty much identical that makes it seem that way. This largely holds up for being written 50 years ago, except maybe “Indian Sunset” which has some lyrics which are questionable today, though tells a good story. It’s a shame because the music is great, maybe my favorite on the album. I don’t know if I’m gonna listen to this again but I’m glad I did. This is long lasting and timeless pop music.

“Look out honey cuz I’m using technology”: I had no idea that was a stooges line. Nice. Also “your pretty face is going to hell” also coming from this is news to me. I love learning about this stuff. Musically this is much more my jam than the solo Iggy album from a week ago. I like the raw punk style and the unrestricted guitar noodling. The songs all sound pretty similar, which is fine because it’s short. It’s all energetic with no bullshit. Even “I need somebody” is crunchy enough to not really stray from the main thematics. Overall quite good for the era and the genre.

I think I'm confusing ELO with ELP which are much more serious and less poppy than this. This is like if prog rock got mixed up with some hippies or the Beatles. It's not bad it's just way more pop music than I expected. The production is very high level and it has to be for all the instruments involved. It sounds like they are running a full orchestra (heh) on some of these tracks. "Across the Border" has a goddamn mariachi band in it. Also sounds like twelve string guitars, a billion synth modules, etc, etc. It's all very expansive in terms of the playing and instruments. It's quite long. And by that I mean about twice as long as it should be. This could've been two albums (and it is a double, after all). It could be that I'm not listening hard enough but I'm not really getting a lyrical thematic element that requires a double album to get across. I guess the songs are all similar sounding, but thats more of a detriment really. Like if Tom Petty was actually 3 Tom Petty's and wrote the same song a bunch of times with 300 different instrumentalists. Even "Mr. Blue Sky" which has 990 MILLION plays on spotify is only remarkable because of the vocoder. My favorite on here is probably "Wild West Hero"; shame it took an hour to get to it. I think the biggest feeling I got from this is that it feels like a record company made this specifically for radio. Very strange given that it's this big rock band putting out a long album. It's not unlistenable, it's not poorly made (in fact it's excellently recorded and mastered from what I can tell), it's just kinda boring to me. Music for shopping malls in the 80's.

This album is a lot more refined than Paul’s Boutique which is good in an easier to listen to sense. The best songs on here are the ones with crisp or unique samples - Sure Shot, Root Down, Sabatoge, Sabrosa my fave of the instrumentals) etc. I don’t think there are any particularly hidden gems on here. The rapping hasn’t really evolved; in fact I think it may be more basic to introduce more melody to the songs. One of my favorite parts of this album is MCA playing bass. Some of the lines are so slick and using a standup bass is next level. Making your own sample is great work in general, for all the tracks where the instruments are original. I think that’s what makes this album a move forward in many respects. In general the beastie boys were in their own space between genres and I think this album was the first sign that they’d keep doing that for a while. I would rate this a 5 but I got sick of a few tracks that went on too long, and the punk tracks were not great, so 4 it is. I really loved the instrumentals (even the throat singing one), they weren’t long enough!

This was a pleasant listen. I don’t think it’s as good or interesting as “The Village Green Preservation Society”. It the songs are the right length for easy consumption and performed well. There’s a couple of genre shifts (“No Return” sounds like a British person throttled a samba song) which is appreciated. Other than that it’s kind of unremarkable. I don’t hate it. I don’t love it. It’s a solid 3-.

Once you get over whatever notions you have over the synth kit(s) being used it’s easier to appreciate this album. Some might never get over the sound, and that’s fine obviously, but then this album isn’t going to be for those people. The songwriting isn’t particularly incredible, it’s got singles (Cars, M.E.) that are great and songs that are more filler. The good thing about all the songs is of course what Numan does with the synths. There are no guitars on this album but you could’ve fooled me before I read that. There are “strings” but they’re obviously really processed too. The overarching sound of whatever moog model he’s using is like the sound of the 80s to me. Everything after was born of that synth sound. I will say that because of the dedication to one set of kits and probably only one or two actual keyboards the songs do sound a bit too similar. It drags on by the end because the songs are all basic 4/4 pop songs with varying moods at their core. Regardless, they are good pop songs and the uniqueness of the sound is what makes this album an important one. A fun listen and you can see why even the industrial rock that came later all cite him as an influence.

The first four tracks of this are so good that it kinda makes the rest of it seem kinda average. After hearing the openers tracks like "Perfection" and "Hit It Run" sound really dated; they are missing that spark in the samples and turntable work that make the other tracks work. Those openers, though, those are all timeless. Sure the rapping is dated but for whatever reason I can't explain in those songs it doesn't sound that way at all. "Raising Hell" and "You Be Illin'" come close to that with the saxophone/guitar and scratch hits, but it's not quite there. This gets an extra star for how good the beginning is, otherwise it'd be a 3.

I forgot what The Band album we had before this one, but this is the one with the "Big Hits" on it. "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" and "Up On Cripple Creek" being those songs. They are far and away the best on the album. I wrote in the last review that the lazy country/rock combo is what makes The Band a bit unique among other rock bands of the time. It holds true in this album, maybe even more so than others. Unlike "Music From Big Pink" though they lean heavily in to it on this one, and I think that actively makes it worse. Too much twang and too much accent for my liking. I compared The Band to The Allman Brothers in the last review and this time I think the roles are reversed - the Allman Brothers are more interesting in everything other than the two singles I mentioned. This isn't a bad album, but it's not my style because I don't live in a saloon in Alabama.

This is great and its an obvious influence of the more modern punk bands of my youth (Rancid, the Ramones, nofx, etc). It’s high energy the whole way through and it doesn’t sound like total shit in the recording. I realize this is a bad thing for a lot of people, but I like it The lyrics shit on everything including themselves, which is an important part of punk music. Only real miss is “Submission” since the tempo is so slow relative to the rest of the album. The lyrics in “New York” would probably cause a shitstorm today, but different times and all that. The rest of it is perfect. Sure it all sounds the same but who gives a shit. It’s fine that they’re the record labels idea of an edgy band; they got it right for once. It doesn’t matter that other bands did it better or first. It’s dumb and it’s loud and I love it.

Not much to say about Muddy Waters that hasn't already been said. He and BB King are the absolute zenith of the blues in the 70s/80s/90s. What I like about this album is that it's not just the guitar that gets a pile of solo time. There's harmonica breaks, piano breaks, drums, etc. It keeps it a bit fresh. A lot of people put Muddy Waters in top 10 guitarist lists, and I can't say I disagree. He's very good at this particular style of playing where the feeling and progression matters more than the chops. like a lot of blues albums, this sounds very sameish all the way through. It just blends in to itself for the better part of 30 minutes. Doesn’t mean I didn’t like it, but when the chord progressions are largely identical it gets a bit stale. Overall it’s a good blues album but I wish there was a bit more variety.

This is uhhh...very much not the style of music I listen to. It's produced extremely well and Annie Lennox's singing has a ton of range but it's just so goddamn 80's all I can think of is a John Hughes movie. Gary Numan's album the other day had the same sort of "stuck in a time period" sound but somehow this is less engaging. Fine for background music but that's it for me.

Everyone knows the first three tracks, and they are all pretty great. It turns out the whole album is pretty great. The style is simple pop rock infused with that bit of new wave that keeps it interesting. "In touch with your world" is the only truly weird track and even then it's completely fine as an album cut, just not a radio tune like pretty much the rest of the album. "Just what I needed" is my favorite, but "Bye Bye Love" is probably the second. The hooks in both are just perfectly built through a tiny bridge section of a few bars and they both have a sweet synth in them that keeps it fresh. I really enjoyed this. It'd be a 4.5 if I could do that.

The amount of samples out of this album powered the diddy crime syndicate for decades. It’s fun listening to these older disco and r&b classics and trying to place what rap song I heard the two bar guitar lick in. Other than the entertaining sample game this is a straightforward disco album. It’s a good one, and a lot of it is catchy. It kinda fell off after the first four tracks (I skipped the title track because if I never heard it again it would be too soon). Great dancing music, well executed, not really my jam but you simply have to respect it.

Imagine if the most annoying person you know forced you to go to an off broadway musical they produced. This is the soundtrack. The best thing I can say about this is that "Straight to you" sounds like an old Hootie and the Blowfish song. I don't like Hootie and the Blowfish.

This is classic 90's rock, and you can feel the transition from the late 80's to the very start of grunge in here. "Blueprint" in particular seems to be the proto version of every radio rock song of the decade, funnily enough. The whole album is hard enough to fit in to the aggressive mindset of the grunge trend but not so over the top that it goes in to metal and hardcore of the same era. It's angry, but not too angry. It's a really great blend. "Shut the door" is a good example of the musical tropes that would continue for other bands later. Namely the extremely quiet bassline and drums to screaming vocals and heavy guitar. Obviously not unique to a style, but the ending reminded me so much of "The Wind Below" by Rage against the Machine. "Merchandise" has such a weird chord major chord progression and the switch to the chorus is so different that it knocks you backwards; it's cool songwriting. Another review mentioned that this is music to actively do something to, not just to play in the background. It's true, this album makes me want to throw my idiot computer out the window and go fuck around outside, and I always appreciate an album that does that.

I swear the only thing I hear in "Subterranean Homesick Blues" is Cartman singing "ME AND ARTEMIS CLYDE FROG GO SAVE SELMA HAYEK". I just can’t get over his voice. He’s like a less ridiculous Randy Newman. I know the songwriting is supposed to be the highlight of the Dylan experience, and there must be something to that because there are covers of these songs that I do really enjoy, just not these. Dylan’s performance style just doesn’t sit right with me; every lyric is half a step late and as a result everything sounds rushed and squashed together. Maybe his live stuff is different? I don’t know. Folk/singer songwriter stuff rarely gets me excited and I can’t say this did either. I know he’s a classic and revered and all that but not for me. Extra points for good songwriting.

This album absolutely rips. Sure, there's a lot of noodling, but unlike a lot of other noodling albums most of the wankery on display here is good; great even. Jimi's a guitar legend for a reason and this album is a perfect example, though I would argue some of his live stuff is even better. The tone and feel he gets out of that guitar is really unlike anyone before or after. He doesn't have the best chops, he doesn't have the cleanest riffs, but none of that matters. It's all just, exciting maybe? I can't think of a better word. It certainly helps that the other two core members are also absurdly good musicians. The fact that the rhythm section is so frantic elevates the guitar to another level. I can't really have an objective review of this from nothing because I've been listening to this album since I was a teenager. The only songs I repeatedly skip is "Burning of the Midnight Lamp" because the harpsichord drives me nuts, and the second half of "1983" because pretty much nothing is going on. I love every other song; maybe not in their entireties but there is always something cool about to happen with either the drums, bass or obviously the guitar. The last two tracks being the last two tracks is simply unfair to the endings of other albums, and one is a cover for fucks sake. Never has an album finished as strong as this. I'd give this a 4.75, but I'm going to round up because of all the memories this album holds for me.

There are some total bangers on this album and a few boring first dance wedding songs. The funk songs (“Maybe your baby”, “superstition”, etc) are incredible. The instrumental work and the vocals on those style tracks are killer, especially the synth/electric keys. The love songs leave me a bit bored to death though. The big hit of “sunshine” is fun enough to keep it going but the ballads just drag on for me. The singing is great technically, regardless. One song that seemed real out of place was “Big Brother”. Great message in the lyrics but it sounds like a Simon and Garfunkel tune. Really bizarre inclusion but it shows that Stevie has quite the range. Gimme a whole album of Stevie Wonder funk songs, instant 5. The rest I can do without.

I really wish the band would take the time to either re-record this, impossible now I'm sure, or to remaster it properly. The biggest detriment to it (and there are quite a few) is the recording quality. There is way too much reverb and echo. I'm not sure if that's intentional or if it's just the way whatever studio they did this was set up. The songs are pretty standard thrash metal from the 80's but it seems that Venom kind of invented or at least mainstreamed the genre. It really does sound like a shitty Megadeth record; like if these were the "parents garage" sessions, with lyrical maturity to match. I liked the title track, "Heaven's on Fire" and "Don't Burn the Witch". "Teacher's pet" is pretty absurd; like if Hot for Teacher by Van Halen was, well, this. The album did start to grow on my once I got over the sound quality. It's not stellar or anything but it's a solid "I'm mad and everything sucks!" album. I didn't bother with any of the bonus tracks, wasn't feeling it enough to bother with another albums length of it. The style has evolved and been made muuuuuch better. An extra point for originality at the time.

I'm assuming this album must be in here for historical reasons rather than pure musicality. It isn't bad; it's well played, the songs are well written (and musically interesting even), and it's not too long. I can't put my finger on what's supposed to be remarkable about it though. It sounds like standard 60's folk music album. I wont lie, the songs all blended together. There's nothing standout about this. I would give it a 2.5 if I could for being exactly in the middle, but lets round up because it isn't actually bad.

"lads, what if we make a punk album, but take out all the distortion and add a midi keyboard." I get part of the punk aesthetic is not being in time (or in tune), nonsensical lyrics and aggressively pushing your individual self over the song you're playing, but when you take out the loud noises and leave everything to be recorded on toy instruments, it sounds fucking awful. This is borderline unlistenable. Just awful.

I think Muse were/are truly the last good pop-rock band. They songs are better than the usual diatonic chord progression stuff that most bands put out and they keep the instrumentation and singing complicated enough to be more than just background noise. That isn't to say they aren't also a bad pop band too - songs like "Starlight" and "Supermassive Black Hole" could be Coldplay songs, and I don't mean that in a complimentary way. I've always liked that Muse writes their heavier songs in some sort of double/triple time throughout the 4/4 with either the drums or bass hitting 16th or triplet note runs throughout verses and chorus sections. "Knights of Cydonia" is of course the biggest example with that killer bass run that, while "basic" musically, is really great to listen to. "Map of the Problematique" does it with the drums and bass and "Take a Bow" does it with keys. It's fun, I know it's cliche but I really do like it. Songs like "Soldiers Poem" and "Hoodoo" are their much older song "Unintended" just written again, in my opinion. It's not necessarily a bad thing but I'm not too fond of them knowing that the band is capable of better and more engaging songs. Ultimately outside of the heavy hitting tracks which are great, this album is so so; it's about half the album. I want a full album of songs like Knights of Cydonia, Invincible, Glorious, and Assassin. This has always been the issue I've had with Muse - they are so close to being a really fantastic band but they keep cranking out these (popular for sure) songs that sound like if Radiohead were married to a house song and three instruments. It's hard to blame them when that's what sells, I guess. The heavier stuff carries it's own sound (you could argue it's derivative, and probably be right) and I do enjoy it.

Prior to this I only really knew the big singles Thin Lizzy had, but it turns out their other stuff is pretty good. "Emerald" and "Suicide" could be songs by The Sword, which is awesome, "Massacre" is fast and sort of technical which I like. I thought "Dancing in the Moonlight" was gonna be a cover but it isn't, just shares a name with a very popular song to cover. In general the more the singer slams words in to sentences like in "The Boys are back in town" the more I like the song. He manages to make something I really normally can't stand sound just right. The wiki reveals that at least some of this album is studio overdubbed, which explains why the levels on all the instruments are even throughout and it doesn't sound like shit for the most part. That's a good thing, I think, but it is absolutely not a live album. To me it's a bonus - live recording tends to be garbage. I could do without "Still in Love with You" and "Baby Drives Me Crazy" which are boring and nearly 8 minutes long for some reason. I also think you could cut out a lot of the second half of this album without much lost. If it was 45 minutes or so it would be great. Overall I enjoyed this a lot more than I thought I would, though; a pleasant listening of what would become 80's butt rock.

This might be blasphemy to some (heh) but I've always considered Ministry to be the shit version of KMFDM. I think I've seen Ministry live about 6 times, never as the headliner and never totally on purpose. They were good every time, don't get me wrong, but they never really were on my rotation as someone I followed. I've never actually listened to this album all the way through until today. The first thing I have to mention about this is that it is repetitive. The songs go on longer than they should; great for a mosh pit, bad for listening. The opener is a perfect example - there's an extra minute of the driving riff for no good reason really. And then it just keeps happening...nearly every song goes on for too long and doesn't provide a lot of variety. You better like that 8 bar phrase, is all I'm saying. "Psalm 69" seems like the most musically interesting track because it has more than one scale of notes in it! Favorites on here were "Just One Fix", "Hero", "Psalm 69", "Corrosion" and the classic "Jesus Built My Hotrod". I guess that's half the album so maybe I like them more than I'm letting on. I obviously enjoy it, this is absolutely my style, but please just use the whole fretboard guys. There are a lot of notes to play. I know you can do it!

This was an enjoyable listen if a bit repetitive. I can't help but compare it to the Willie Colòn album we had a while back which was really good. This is obviously earlier and maybe a progenitor, but it's not quite as dynamic and exciting. Standouts were the marimba or vibraphone solo in Hong Kong Mambo, which was cool from a novelty of instrumentation perspective. The Opener El Cayuco is probably the best track of them all. It's a fun album but it didn't keep me nearly as engaged as some of the other Latin music albums we've had.

This is a classic 90's album that everyone had in their big CD bible in their car at the time. I don't know if it deserves the reverence it gets, but it is really surprising how well these songs translate from the original versions in to acoustic ones. Some are obviously going to be fine (About a girl, Come As You are, Something in the Way) and others less so (Pennyroyal Tea, On a Plain), but they all manage to work in their own way. The covers are great, especially The Man Who Sold The World and Lake of Fire. Since this is effectively a live album and Kurt was always a shitty guitarist (technically, certainly not musically) it's funny to hear the random mistakes and mis-hits occasionally. The recording quality is good, and as it should be because this is a "quiet" set, and the production/mastering is good too. Not a lot to complain about here. I'd rather hear the original versions most of the time but there is something endearing about some exec deciding to just rip out all the distortion from these songs for kicks and them all still working and sounding great.

This came out as Kanye was transitioning from big time producer and rapper to mentally ill bajillionaire I think? Maybe it was before that was becoming apparent, it's hard to remember when exactly Kanye went from being a real inspirational success story with a ton of talent to this sort of odious and obviously disturbed person he is today. The production on this album is stellar of course, there are some really iconic beats on here (All of the Lights, Power) but I still think it doesn't really get to the level of his early work. College Dropout and Late Registration are such incredible albums that this one seems almost too polished and too full of itself to relate to. I know this is supposed be his opus, but I really don't see it that way. The songs with a ton of features fall flat entirely, the ones with artists that aren't rappers might be even worse. I know that Kanye isn't just a rapper, he's a producer, so it's not weird to be shown up in the rapping department, but it has to be said Pusha T is the best rapper on this album. His verse saves "So Appalled" from being a total throwaway track, and his verse in "Runaway" is great. I've been talking like I dislike this album, but I don't. I still think it's close to being great, I just know Kanye did better before, and probably wont ever do better again. Outside of the big singles, which are all excellent, "Hell of a Life" has a great driving beat, lyrics, and the chorus "sampling" Black Sabbath is great. Real shame he's a piece of shit now.

This album is a product of a feeling that desperately needed to return to rock music at the time. It's a fun album, it's a party album, it's a simple album, all of which were things lacking at the time. I'm not even sure I liked it that much when it came out; sure I enjoyed "Last Night" like everyone else that owned a television or a radio, but that might've been it. I probably thought these guys were pretty lame. Since then I've become less of a teenager and more of an old man and hopefully less quick to judge. The Strokes sound like the Strokes and that's what's great about them. They pick a style (little to no effects, minimalist recording, 1 or 2 tempos, etc) and they do it perfectly. I don't really even care what they're singing about, it's a good time and it makes you want to smile. I don't know if I can pick too many tracks out of this album to single out as wanting to listen to over and over, because they're all pretty similar, and in a way that's a good thing. That's surprising to me because I usually dislike that kind of thing in an album. The only thing I can hate on is that this album spawned absolute shit like Franz Ferdinand and the Killers, who are so full of themselves musically that they lose the whole spirit of this style. Otherwise it's great. Also lmao that America got an alternate cover.

Backyard summer beer drinkin music. Not as good of a record as Can't Buy a Thrill, but it's still very much a Steely Dan album and that's good enough for me. All the hallmarks of that jazz/rock style they're famous for are there: the odd key changes, the technical keyboard, guitar, and bass parts, the offbeat instrument thrown in here and there. Highlights are "Night By Night", "Any Major Dude Will Tell You" (what a ridiculous and great title, btw), "Monkey In Your Soul", and "Pretzel Logic". I could very much do without "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo" which sounds exactly what you think it sounds like. For a weirdish band, this is a remarkably short album. I think that works in their favor though; the album as a whole isn't nearly as complex or put together as Aja or the aforementioned Can't Buy A Thrill and it's good that they didn't try to stretch out anything to make a long record for no reason. I wish I could make this a 3.5, but I'll round up because I like them.

This album is painfully 90's, which isn't a terrible thing. The songwriting is actually clever and diverse with lots of variation. The singing is a bit off to me; she's not bad but she's got a weird twang in her voice that seems like it would've been shifted to pop-country if it came out a decade later. Throw in some lap guitars, jingoistic lyrics, and a cowboy hat and you have country music radio now. This album as a "must listen" might be true if we're trying to explore musical stylings of every decade. This is a time capsule of the 90's singer/songwriter. It doesn't have the edge of Alanis Morisette, or the terminally sad and emotional sounds of Ani DiFranco, or the whatever the hell Sarah McLaughlin was doing, it's just squarely in the middle. It's not bad but it really, REALLY, just fades in to the background after a while. It's the kind of music you hear in a cafe that has more than 1 location but less than 5. It isn't bad or performed poorly or mastered in a crazy way, it's just outdated. It's fine. Really just fine.

Another 90s as hell album but I am not complaining at all. Screaming Trees is a band I knew about mostly through their various members (Josh Homme, Mark Lannegan) and that one minor hit they had “Nearly Lost You”. I’m glad this came up because I’ve been wanting to check them out forever and this is a perfect reason. Turns out I’ve been missing out. This album hits all my old nostalgia buttons. Basic guitar-bass-drums-singer composition, great solos, aggressive sometimes but plenty of feeling, lots of key switches and riffs, etc. It’s a proto grunge album that somehow got written during the peak of grunge. I can’t say I disliked any of the songs. The whole album is great. It makes me want to go to the train station to buy cigarettes to hide from my parents. To make mixtapes for a girl I have a crush on. To bang out shit covers of songs we liked with my unreliable garage band. To sleep until 2pm on a Saturday and stay out all night bullshitting with my schoolmates and throwing rocks off a bridge in to a river. Yeesh.

AC/DC wrote 1 song a thousand years ago and have been rewriting it since. It's a pretty good song. Back in Black Versions 1-10 of it on this album are pretty solid.

A classic, not much more to say about it. It sounds a bit dated but the style itself isn't cheesy or anything, it's just it's own thing that nobody really does any more. This whole era of rap birthed an entire generation of pearl clutchers and I'm glad of it. People need something to be mad about I guess. I could do without some of the skit nonsense and other spoken word elements, which are hidden in the songs at this point rather than being separate (and most importantly, skippable) tracks. I would consider that part of the album cruft, as I would for nearly any other rap album of the time. Anyway, this is undeniably one of the most important albums in rap. The G-Funk style was perfected by Snoop, Dr. Dre, and Nate Dogg (and Warren G of course, who has the absolute anthem for this) and nothing else really sounds like it. The uniqueness of the beats, the drum/effects kit, the cadences and the occasional singing, all of it is great. Snoop's voice is so distinctive, and it elevates this album above nearly all of the other ones (maybe not The Chronic?) of the era. One star off for the skit stuff. Otherwise a great listen all the way through.

This is sang extremely well and performed excellently but I still can’t really bring myself to get in to this genre. Everything sounds the same to me.

Oh boy, this album. This is one of the cases where you can say "yes, my parents were right, this guy is an irredeemable piece of shit" but not because of his music! It just turns out he's a garbage person, which maybe you could guess from the music and aesthetic but whatever. Thematically this album fit a niche that really was only mega popular in the 90's. A real "I fucking hate everything and I need to be extremely shocking but not so much that it gets me banned from too much." The lyrics pretty much all refer to violent or otherwise edgy sex acts, various blasphemies, body horror, etc. None of it is really profound, and none of it is necessary but it fits the image Marilyn Manson was cultivating. I imagine this is like what Alice Cooper or Ozzy was like to parents in the 70's. Musically it's more listenable to the lot of the real "extreme" music of the time. It's actually pretty good industrial/metal crossover. Like a more guitar driven and (much) less intelligent Nine Inch Nails a more rock oriented Frontline Assembly, a more machine based Slayer. Maybe it's nostalgia (I did listen to this in high school after all) but I actually like quite a bit of this album. Just have to ignore what I would now consider cringey lyrics; I know at the time I was like "wow cool!!!!!!". In general I think the album shines a more when the tracks are guitar oriented (The opening 3 tracks, Mister Superstar, the title track, 1996, etc) . The more industrial or less metal tracks just make me want to listen to a real industrial band to be rid of the mental image of Manson himself mostly naked and contorting himself in a video with half second cuts of worms eating a dead bird or something like that. Ultimately it's extremely difficult to separate the aesthetic from the music, which is a testament to what Marilyn Manson was doing at the time. I still find it hard to believe he's as edgy (though he definitely is as disgusting) as he pretends is/was, but he did a real good job of marketing himself and aligning pretty much everything in to this one style. I like this probably more than I should. I kinda want to like it less if I’m honest.

I guess this is where singer/songwriting was in 2001, when I had absolutely zero knowledge or desire to know about it. I mostly found this album to be too country for my tastes but there are a few gems in there. "Revelator" and "April the 14th pt 1" were both enjoyable and stayed away from twangs and banjos. Despite the intense length I liked “I dream a highway” as well. That’s what a sad song should sound like. The rest of these tracks sounds like something out of a 60's revival western or similar setting, which I didn't really enjoy as the message was too generic to get me to pay attention. While her singing is great from a technical perspective, her guitar playing is pretty trashy, even the title track which I liked had some really poor timings and (purposeful?) discordant bits. I didn't find either of these aspects to be particularly noteworthy. I've heard artists in bars at open mic nights that are just as good, to be honest. Maybe it’s the songwriting; it’s mostly simple but poignant on the good tracks. I’m giving this a 3 because the 3 tracks I mentioned are good. I’m sure the rest is someone’s style, but it isn’t mine.

I enjoyed this, maybe not as much as Cash’s mostly original works, but he and his producers did a great job of making the covers fit with the guitar and voice style that cash is famous for. The “Hurt” cover got overplayed and I still prefer the original but this is a great cover. “Desperado” is similar. “Give my love to Rose” might be better than the Hank Williams version but maybe not better than Cash’s own version earlier in his career! It’s a great song anyway. There are a couple tracks I think didn’t really work. “Personal Jesus” just doesn’t hit outside do that 80s synth feel; the background piano makes it a little hokey. The Nick Cave duet is pretty bad because Nick Cave. This is a great legacy album for Johnny Cash to leave; its even more impressive when you read about how he could barely function while this was being recorded. It’s not his best work but it’s still good.

This is an underrated album, and one of my favorites to come out of that 90s era of British pop rock. “Alright” is probably the song most people know from it due to it being in various tv ads and films, but I think almost all of the record holds up and is fun to listen to. This album has all the energy of a punk band without too much of the angst, and really excellent musicianship. The songs vary among a bunch of different rock sub genres, though none so deviant from the root style that it seems off. The difference between “alright” and “strange ones” is pretty stark stylistically but the core of the sound is there. That’s ignoring obvious ones like “we’re not supposed to” as well. My favorites are “Lenny”, “sitting up straight”, and “caught by the fuzz”. I love the frantic feeling this album has (minus the last few tracks) yet how well put together each song is. A total classic.

Kind of an unremarkable samba/lounge album. The standout bits are the electronic/computerized flourishes in the beats that appear occasionally. The singing is good, and she sings as well in English as she does in Portuguese. I’m not sure this would be in this list if her father wasn’t João Gilberto, who is one of the biggest musical figures in Brazil. It’s fine but I’d rather hear his stuff to be honest.

This is the second album we've had by The Fall on this list and I'm not sure I understand why. It's better than the previous one (Live at the Witch Trials) largely because the whole tone is angrier and there is more distortion and aggressiveness to the tracks instead of wandering keyboard interspersed with yelling. The singing is still terrible but at least it's drowned out most of the time. Actually, you know what, this sucks. There are maybe 2 tracks on here that aren't just a single riff repeated over and over inside of a tin can with a drunk guy shouting in to a pair of headphones acting as a microphone. This is shit and I turned it off halfway through it's incredibly unnecessary 1 hour+ runtime. If there's something in the back half worth listening to I will never know.

I hate saying that you have to listen to something in a certain way to really get it but this is one of those cases where it’s true. You have to listen to the whole goddamn thing in order. It’s a performance of a play, it doesn’t really make any sense any other way, and honestly there are no real standout tracks other than pinball wizard that you’d want to revisit in a vacuum. As a whole though, it’s a masterwork. There is a whole range of feelings in here that just aren’t present on so many other great albums. Sadness, depression, joy, anger, hope, etc. Songs rarely make me mad but boy do I want to beat the shit out of Cousin Kevin and Uncle Ernie (“Fiddle About”). I love the double meaning of “Amazing Journey” and the very literal interpretation of “Acid Queen”. “Underture” is a top 10 rock instrumental easily and it serves as a great pause in the middle of the album. Starting with “Sally Simpson” the album and the story get more grandiose as Tommy becomes this messiah and then a cult leader, and the emotions become more hopeful and confusing. In any case the whole thing has such a wide range, it’s quite a journey. I don’t know if it’s the remaster that did this but the audio mix is brilliant. Moon’s drums constantly shift between left right and center in the channels with different parts of the kit in different ears. The production in general is sky high. All of that is to say that I really enjoyed this, but if you have to listen to something in a certain way it’s not really something i can refer to as the best of anything. It’s a 4.5.

I don't think this is as good as the previous Smiths album we had, but maybe it has better individual tracks. "Stop me if you think you've heard this one before" is my favorite of the lot, but "Death of a Disco Dancer" is also really good. Morrissey does the thing where he says too many words per line a few times, but for whatever reason it comes off better on this album. The song themes are all typical Smiths depressing, sad, and mopey thematically, but the music is surprisingly upbeat. This is pretty much their whole deal and they don't deviate too much from it. I liked it, less than Meat Is Murder, but still pretty good.

This whole album is the soundtrack to a film about high school in the 80s. It’s certainly listenable and it isn’t too long. The singers accent provides both interesting new ways to pronounce stuff and songs where I don’t understand a word; it’s kinda great to listen to, and the singing is more than good enough to compliment the dreamy/wandering music. I think it’s mostly a good listen, but the style would get old fast with any more time spent on it consecutively. By the end I was thinking this was Enya singing over rejected REM songs.

More like meh meh mehs

What a strange album, but not in a bad way. I don't know anything about Tango music in general, but apparently this man (Piazzolla) is the absolute king of it. It's a pretty avant-garde (for the time) album that I would very loosely categorize as Jazz. The accordion like instrument that Piazzolla plays doesn't sound like much more than an accordion, but it seems deeper pitched and with a much wider range of notes. The Marimba/Vibraphone is also pretty cool, and surprisingly the two oddball instruments fit well together. Given I have nothing to compare this to I can't really rate it up or down on the average line on anything other than the listen I gave it. It's thoughtful music, maybe something you'd put on to seem sophisticated with a very specific crowd. It's not bad to listen to, just a bit strange. Almost like a film score.

The tone of this album is insane. It goes from melancholy sadness to joking about Ripley killing xenonorphs to spewing slurs (I get the point but man that is quite a set of sentences). The bizarre New Orleans parade instrumentation in “Silver Platter Club” is comical, but is it supposed to be? That’s what I don’t get about this album. Musically it’s actually kinda great. I was prepared to hate this but the singing and playing is really excellent and the composition is fun. The lyrics go from normal lyrics to teenage poetry, but again that might be intentional. This is a weird but good album. I wouldn’t turn it off if it was on.

I think this album is on here because REM were such an influential band to so many acts that would come later and this is the first real definition of their sound. I don’t think it’s their best album but it’s still a great one. To think this came out in 1983 is crazy; it sounds right out of the early 90s, probably because so many bands releasing music then grew up listening to this. I’ve always had a gripe with the way Stipe sings. His lyrics are sometimes confusing which is fine, it’s the way he pulls his words together and sings with a disaffected drawl vs when he talks. In any case, he stuck with it and it’s part of their songs now. The rest of the composition has their own distinct way of doing things. The guitar never uses too much distortion, and the bass is really clever, using the whole fretboard in every song. It’s that kind of stuff that makes REM who they are - 4 distinct parts that are really more than the sum. This album in particular has a much more upbeat tone than some of their later stuff. The opener, “radio free Europe” sets the speed and feel for the rest of the album. The only stinker in here I think is “Catapult” which is almost too pop for me even though this album is very much guitar pop. This is a foundational rock album for the music to come in the following decades. It could come out today and still be relevant.

I remember this being a very big deal when it came out because it pushed the boundaries of soul, r&B, hip hop, and a bunch of other genres and it was especially big because a woman was doing all of that. I really prefer the songs where she's rapping vs just singing as I don't think her singing is particularly great (though it is perfect for her style). What I can say is that if this was made today the producers would absolutely ruin everything by digitally "correcting" her voice, which would take away quite a bit of this album's appeal. The way Lauryn Hill sings matches the instruments and beats really well precisely because it isn't perfect; it's a grittier type of singing set in songs with instrumentation that would traditionally require a much more r&b type sound. I guess that's credit to her and her producers for coming up with it. Has a few of those ever present 90's skits in it but there have been much worse offenders than here and they're sort of themed at least instead being a voicemail recording. Annoying that they're embedded in to the tracks though. I general I think this is a solid album and a good capture of the innovation going on at the time in the r&b and hip hop spaces. The second half drops off a bit (though maybe in terms of pure musicality I like Every Ghetto, Every City the most out of the whole album), but overall it's very listenable today and carries an important message.

This is like if the Strokes and that one band Jet made a subpar group together and recorded an album while drunk. I really can't stand the singer's voice and cadence but the guitar, drums, and bass are all fine. The songs are really generic, though the faster ones are better. I don't know why this album is on here; it's pretty boring radio rock from the early 2000's. It's ok I guess. I would give it a 2.5.

This is a pretty standard singer-songwriter album. It’s not really standout in any way, though she is a great singer. I think the first track might be the best one. The supposed single, “Love and affection” is pretty average and could be sang or performed by anyone to the same effect. Joan Armatrading’s voice is the unique feature here and even that doesn’t really do it for me. Sure, it’s performed well and she’s got a great alto/near tenor tone but that doesn’t save it from the bang average songwriting.

It's hard to say anything that hasn't already been said about this album but I'll give it a whirl. It's a masterwork; a completely unique sound in the rock world that very few have been able to really replicate. My favorite bit about zeppelin, especially the early stuff, is that everything sounds like it's barely in time yet is perfectly in time, every time. The drumming in particular can sound like rocks being thrown at the kit and yet every rock is hitting the heads at exactly the right time. The same goes for every other instrument, even the voice, but it's so apparent in Bonham's drumming. There are a lot more bluesy songs on this album than there are in later zep works; depends on if you like blues guitar if that would be a good or bad thing. There's nothing very innovative about "You Shook Me" for example, except the fact that it's them playing it, which gives it a whole new feel. These are all vague platitudes, but it's hard to explain. The solo, for example, isn't a blues solo, it's a rock solo in a blues song and does it ever work. The biggest complaint I have about this album is that "How Many More Times" goes on for too long without a really interesting bit in the whole thing. Sort of related, but "I can't quit you baby" is just a basic blues song without the same greatness as "You Shook Me" has. You can do better boys. Other than that, it's a brilliant album. I’ve given much lesser stuff 4s so 5 it is.

Jeff Buckley needed to be in a band. This would’ve tempered his tortured and over performed singing a bit and let some of the genuinely good songwriting shine. “Grace” (the song) sounds like a smashed up version of an old Radiohead song, and I kept thinking that if he just toned it down a bit it could be pretty decent. Unfortunately for the rest of the album a lot of it doesn’t even have that exciting and interesting writing that the first two tracks have. Compounded by Buckley’s unnecessary operatic vibrato it makes for a pretty lousy experience. The lyrics are over the top and the songs end up being parodies of themselves. I liked this less and less as it went on, not to the point of hating it but just being bored of it. If I never hear fucking “hallelujah”, performed by anyone, again it’ll be too soon.

Springsteen is one of those guys that I get why people like but I can't relate at all. I grew up very America-adjacent and this type of music never really meshed with me because I never experienced any of the kind of stuff he talks about either directly or through my parents. And that's before you get to his voice and singing which I don't like in the first place. The execution of all these songs is fine; the only thing really performed badly is the ending of "Something In The Night" and it's entirely Bruce being unable to hit the right notes. I could do without the saloon style piano and sustained off key notes overall. Musically Springsteen has his own style that includes those things and still has countless imitators, I just don't really enjoy it or find it that interesting. As far as "pretend working class dude that is insanely from Jersey" goes I'll take Bon Jovi over this.

This is pretty good, I only really know Blondie from their singles and occasionally confusing them for Goldie, who is absolutely not the same style. It's like if Devo was fronted by a woman and was less, well, Devo about things. Fun 80's style pop-rock without any over reliance on 80's staples like synths and drum machines. I thought the opening track, "I know but I don't know" and "11:59" the picks of the rest. It's funny that they're different from the big hits; they're almost like new wave punk songs without any of the grime of the actual punk movement. They're better than the singles in my opinion! I didn't think I'd like this as much as I did. Good time.

I didn't realize this came out in 1988; it's such a 90's album that I guess was pretty ahead of its time. It's more than proto-grunge, it's straight up grunge but it's unique in the genre. Perry Farrell has a divisive voice, but I always though it fit perfectly with Jane's Addiction's heavier tracks, which most of this album is. Even in "Jane Says" I think it works, works great even. Dave Navarro's guitar work is just right. He's got enough of a funk feel in his playing that it fits with the syncopated drum and bass work without sounding just like someone through an electric guitar at an 80's band. I know he's a weirdo (and so is Farrell) but I've always liked his playing in any band he's been in. I like that "Standing in the Shower Thinking" is like the alpha version of "Been Caught Stealing", which is basically the same song but better and cleaned up. I think a lot of people attribute that particular style, sort of a weird grunge/ska/funk mashup, to Jane's Addiction in general. It's less funk than RHCP while still having a good groove, and Farrell is a better singer than Kiedis. That's not really all of them though; immediately following is "Summertime Rolls" which drags on a bit like "Ted Just Admit It" but it displays the range of the band well. "Mountain Song" is what I really like about the band in general; heavy ass groove with Farrell going nuts on the mic - it's where his voice really matches up with everything else going on. I think Jane's Addiction is underrated as a formative band of the grunge era, maybe because Perry Farrell is an egomaniac and Navarro was probably better known for being the "worst" guitarist for the Chili Peppers and being on reality TV. I've liked this album for a long time before realizing how old it actually is, and that makes it even more impressive for me.

I don't know enough of the Police discography to know what songs are on what albums but there is no way this is their best one. There are a lot of good songs on here (both Synchronicity tracks, and basically the back half of the album) but the first half kinda lets it down, culminating with "Mother" which is just hard to listen to. Sting's "desperation" voice is like a shit version of David Byrne with none of the charm. Reading the wiki reveals that the song, along with "Miss Gradenko" which is also kinda bad, weren't written by Sting, and it shows. The back half though, wow. Everyone's heard "Every Breath You Take" a trillion times, but it is a fundamentally good song, so I'll gloss over that. Synchronicity II is the kind of song that makes you realize how talented the Police are at playing their instruments. While it's not quite the basslines that Sting came up with earlier, it's still great, the drumming is mega crisp and the guitars and keys are present without being overpowering in the way the classic reggae inspired Police songs have always been. King of Pain is the same way. Murder By Numbers is a bit of a letdown after the interesting arrangements in "Tea In The Sahara" as it's a bit bland, but still a good song and very much in that Police style. I guess this is supposed to be their best album but I think I like the older style a bit more now that I've researched what songs are on what. A couple of absolute bangers doesn’t save the whole thing though.

This was way more enjoyable than I expected. It’s still very much not what I listen to day to day but it’s hard to deny what a great singer she is. I like that she deviated from the usual r&b/pop a bit by doing a Spanish/jazz guitar backed song and even something with what sounded like live drums (When We Were Young). The only song I fast forwarded was “River Lea”, which was was uncharacteristically bad. It’s unfortunate that it’s the only non love song. The themes are a little stale after a while.

The range on this album is obscene. From tracks that are really just poetry with an ironic backing (village ghetto land, black man), straight funk songs, jazz fusion, r&b, Spanish language, it’s great. There’s even what sounds like synths in here, though they just be super processed keys or guitars. In any case, the variety is really high here. This being a double album is not necessarily the best thing, though. The content is mostly really great but it has a run time that feels just too long, especially given how many songs devolve in to jams by the end. I’m not saying jams are a bad thing, especially the ones on here, but they do seem like filler at a certain point and a double album really shouldn’t have too much filler. I think the second disc isn’t nearly as good as the first just from quality. Other than “As” and “isn’t she lovely” it’s like a whole album of b sides. This is a pretty big work but I think the length and the amount of non hits sort of diminishes it. The best tracks on here would make a 5 star album easily but there’s just too much.

I just can’t with this man.

Man, are all their songs just on this album? Did the Black Crowes just put out one album in 1990 and ride that for eternity? I mean more power to them, just crazy that every song I've ever heard from them is on this album. The singles are all great; they're like if Skynyrd wasn't a mess or if Corrosion of Conformity weren't a hard rock band. For once the piano and organ don't feel out of place in a 90's album. I prefer the faster songs than the ballads, but that doesn't take away from the feel of the whole thing, and if it was all uptempo it would be too manic. Of the songs I hadn't heard, "Struttin Blues" was my favorite. Just a good fun time, played well and not too long. I really liked this! It's wild to me that nearly half the songs on here are genuine hit singles. What a way to blow your load early.

I have a lot of respect for prince and his earlier albums are very good but this kinda sucked. It’s just distilled 80s electronic sounds with Prince’s (excellent) voices behind it. The songs are generic and it goes on forever. Really disappointing for what is supposed to be his best work.

As far as soul singer albums go this is pretty average. She's a good enough singer but I don't really see what makes her stand out among the crowd of other soul singers of the time, and maybe before and after as well. "Son of a Preacher Man" of course is a big hit, but that's the songwriting doing the work. Her performance is certainly fine, good even, but it's not like someone else couldn't do the job on that song. I liked "The Windmills of Your Mind" the best. It was also the only song not in a basic major key, I think. Easy listening. Short, not bad, not really memorable.

I like that this album kinda runs around multiple (rock) genres without ever losing the key Pixies sound. There are pop songs, punk songs, proto-grunge songs, etc. Since nothing is super long, if you don't like one you could just keep listening because it'll end soon enough. I love the bassline and drums in particular in their sound. They're always so crisp and interesting, never just there because they have to be. I'm not as much of a fan as the vocals as others are but they work just fine here. Musically this is really great. Not much to complain about at all. I enjoyed this.

I absolutely loved this and I had never heard of this guy before. It’s pure synth fantasia, evolving from soundscapes to recognizable popular song structure then devolving back again in to a soundscape and experimental manipulation for the ending. I didn’t want it to end. Some of the “high level” solo tracking sounds the tiniest bit dated, I can’t figure out why but it does, but that doesn’t take away from it. To think this was made in 1976, it’s incredible. This could come out today on a niche label and you wouldn’t even have to label it “retro”. I need the vinyl for this yesterday.

My mom used to belt out “oh lord won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz” whenever I asked for something expensive so I’m well aware of Janis here. I didn’t expect to enjoy this as much as I did; I have to admit I figured her for much more of a folk singer than a rock singer, and she is very much the latter. I won’t say too much about her singing, which is powerful and unique in a “I smoked so many cigarettes between now and 2 hours ago” way. I mean that as complimentary as possible. The band though, that’s what makes this record. The sound they produce matches her voice perfectly. It’s never all put together but it’s so smooth at the same time. The instrumental blues track was probably my favorite though “move over” is also great. A nice surprise from something I groaned at when I opened the page this morning to what it actually is.

The cover of this album and the title on it makes me laugh. The word “erotic” combined with these two guys is close to parody. I have to say the same thing about the music. It’s peak 80s synth in the bad way. The singers voice isn’t bad but he can’t control it properly and his lyrics are pretty bad. The instrumental backing is either noodling woodwinds or generic beeps and boops. Tainted Love is the best track and they didn’t write it (though they made it in to the hit it is with the synth work, so credit due there). I looked up the original track listing to make sure I didn’t actually have to listen to an hour+ of this, and thankfully the original ends after 10 tracks. This is not very good. 2 stars for tainted love and sex dwarf (somehow the best original with the best name and insane topic).

Somewhere in here there’s a great album. I can pick and choose bits of each song that I really like but they often go on in a weird direction or otherwise fall apart. I’m not talking about saxophone noodling or instrumental breaks, I mean completely changing the tone either via the actual key or the instrumentation. The first track is a great example, the first five minutes and the last minute are great, but what is that weird thing in the middle? Unnecessary. The same happens at the ends of a few other songs. Things I really enjoyed: the songwriting and the drums. Man, the drums. Whoever that is did amazing work. Crisp jazz/rock beats that go beyond keeping a rhythm and in to tonal music all themselves. Bowie’s vocals are good as always but a bit uninspired. There are some points where I felt that he was warbling over the scale for no reason. Overall pretty decent. Wouldn’t turn it off.

I love the album from Folsom Prison, and this one is similar enough in style that it's almost as good. The banter, the boos at mentioning the warden, and the story about Cash's 36 dollars are all great and there is a good variety of songs on here. I like that the setlist is "fluid" in the sense that he asks what the crowd wants to hear and it's actually coordinated enough that he plays the suggested songs in addition to the "planned" ones. Only complaint is that it's a bit short! It could definitely be longer. I'll have to watch the TV recording of it as well, I bet it's great.

There’s one thing that really lets this album down, and it’s the vocals. The dude just can’t sing and stay in tune. It’s the one time I’ve thought “auto tune would improve this a lot”. It works on some of the more energetic tracks like “sunshine” but otherwise it’s almost annoying enough to make me stop listening. Thankfully there are plenty of long instrumental breaks to keep it from being a disaster. And those instrumental breaks, they’re really great. The programmed or effects covered drums and the guitar tones are my favorite bits of this. The instrument production is super high level and creates a really enjoyable 80s rock sound tinged with synths and electronic music. I would easily listen to an album of their instrumentals. The singing lets this album down and I’m annoyed by that because it could be really good.

uuuwhat good, is sitting, alone in your room? Come here the music plaaaayyy! Life is a cabar-oh fuck me! What were you just doing? What? Nothing! Oh no, don't tell me nothing, you were just singing a show tune! You're crazy, I'd never do that. You can't be suicidal if you're singing show tunes! I am suicidal. You're not even depressed! Of course I'm depressed, look at me! I'm very fucking depressed! You fucking poser! Hey man, I'm not a fucking... You're not even British!

I’m glad Iron Maiden stopped making songs about showing your dick to women on the street? Is that what prowler is about? Fucks sake. The rest of it is very “early thrash”. I liked “phantom of the opera” because it was weirder than the rest but I enjoyed the whole thing for the most part. Bruce Dickinson is a better singer than this guy; glad he ultimately joined. “Transylvania” skips over the singing and it sounds a lot more like than the Maiden I’m familiar with. Everyone else sounds great, the bass lines in particular are relatively simple for this kind of music but they work really well.