I hadn’t heard this whole album before. There were a lot of good album tracks that I’d missed. Particularly into the sound of hetfield’s voice at this time.

Nice but fairly unremarkable live jazz album. I enjoyed the improvised lyrics on the last track though!

Can’t believe I’d never listened to this one. The opener was a big surprise, more like listening to pink Floyd. Love the chaotic energy, very listenable but always sounds like it’s about to fall apart.

Only gave it one listen. A few alright songs in there but can't imagine it challenging my preferred Velvet Underground albums (the debut w/ Nico, and loaded).

The chat was good and i liked wreck of 97 and boy named sue but other than that I didn't really enjoy it. It felt more like a historical artifact than an album i'd want to listen to on the regular. I think i'm just not really a fan of the man in black.

Enjoyed this one. Not totally my bag, as I've never been a huge fan of his vocal tone and melodies, but there are some great lyrics and solid songwriting. Enjoyed how this album is more pianocentric too.

Finally an album I’m familiar with! This was so nearly a 5 for me. The production, mix of tones, use of harmony and simplicity is amazing. Great to come back to this banger.

Didn’t do much for me. There’s none of the raw edge they had in the best parts of their early work. The first one that really felt like it didn’t belong in the top 1001 albums, regardless of personal taste.

I enjoyed this album. I wouldn’t normally listen to jazz by such a big ensemble but I do like a bit of cool jazz this was really nice.

Omg i loved this album so much. Some crazy dark stories on this album (particularly struck by the lyrics in If I Lose My Mind). So much good bass playing on this album, and I love how high it is in the mix. Early Morning Breeze wouldn't be out of place on Folk is a Four Letter Word. Great harmonies on my blue tears. Love the bass breakdown at the climax of Travelling Man. I will be listening to this album for a long time!

This feels like such an important album: you can hear its influence in so much 90s and early 00s British music especially bands like the Coral, Big Differents and Yeboah. It also feels like a real exercise in pure songwriting. However, I just didn’t find it that interesting. Maybe I wasn’t in the moo, but I can’t imagine listening to it much in the future.

Clearly an influential album and an incredibly successful band, but not really my thing. I struggled to get through it tbh.

A good album that I think warrants further listening. I particularly like the jittery style in the more staccato numbers, with plenty of space in the composition between the instruments. That’s where the funk lives.

EC always struck me as likely an insufferable wanker in the same vein as Bono. I find his voice incredibly annoying and put on, which is hard to look past: he sounds like he's trying so hard, which gives an insincere, inauthentic impression. I did enjoy the music on the more angular punky tracks and felt i was able to look past his vocal on some: particularly the Beat. Tracks like Hand in Hand and Little Triggers are everything I find annoying about him. I think you can hear quite a lot of the pop punk that was around in our youth in this record. It's a genre that similarly suffers from try-hard whining vocalists.

Fairly unremarkable album with some nice toe-tapping numbers. Just doesn’t feel spectacular or significant.

Nice album! Even slightly weak tracks like O Plebeu have plenty going on in the background to keep you interesting. I particularly enjoyed the back end around A Historia de Jorge and Cavaleiro do cavalo imaculado.

I had completely forgotten how much I listened to this album when I was younger and how ingrained it was in my mind. Absolutely banging production and lyrics with very distinctive themes running through the production, skits and rhymes. Flow can be a bit clunky/basic but I was loving listening to this again and will definitely be putting it back on regular rotation.

This palette of sounds just automatically turns me off. Sometimes i worry that this means that good albums pass me by, however i'm not too concerned in this case. The lyrics fell short of the cutting social commentary they intended i think: "This is the place where pensioners are raped; And their hearts are being cut from the welfare state" particularly stood out.

I'd never heard it and was pretty impressed. I like the soundtrack vibes from the orchestral arrangement. I thought it would be a gimick but it adds a lot. Hetfield's voice really stands up in the bigger fuller sound of the orchestra, which i was impressed by. However, sometimes the precision of the orchestra does make the musicianship in Metallica sound not so tight.

I enjoyed a couple of tracks (guitar town was a good start) but not much after that. It’s a style that just doesn’t do anything for me.

I got quite excited that this would be a gothy moody album taking me back to my days in the Cookie Club in my first year of uni, however i was disappointed. The quality in the tracks just wasn't there.

I instantly thought i'd be giving this 5, and a listen yesterday confirmed it. Brimming with absolute bangers, so much variety. Some is genius, some is dumb fun, so many different moods and energies captured, such iconic production (like the weird different mic sounds on do the dog). Every little skit adds to the overall product. Truly a legendary album. Should have been in my top 5 of all time.

Good stuff. Some nice tracks on there with some great stories in them, some of which I'd heard before. El Paso was not good enough to appear twice on the album though!

This was the first album I ever bought, because I liked their cover of "Go West". I remember finding their use of the word "naked" quite scandalous. I'm not sure how much I enjoyed listening to it then, but I find very little to like in it now. It is tolerable when it borrows sounds from acid techno (different point of view) but otherwise I can't see the value.

Took me a while to get through this one. It's very dense and you can't really listen to it in the background while doing other things! I really enjoyed it, which I haven't had with a Public Enemy album before. Harsh but intricate and distinctive production. Would listen again when I have the space to devote my attention to it properly.

Steely Dan caught my attention recently when i realised what a banging track "dirty work" is. I can't say this album thrilled me as much of that. Maybe I should have paid more attention but it seemed pretty unremarkable.

Didn't think i'd be giving this a 5 as it just doesn't have the dramatic moments of the albums that followed it, but it got so many spins when i was a youth and didn't disappoint on relistening now. Particularly the opening and second half, but it's such a coherent and complete album with an incredible palette of sounds and outstanding vocal performance.

I enjoyed this one a lot more than I was expecting. Quite diverse styles across the record. Particularly enjoyed the closing track.

Interesting stories behind this album. PS had had a couple of bad albums before it, and was supposed to produce an album for a singer songwriter called Heidi Berg. She gave him a tape of South African music that she wanted her album to sound a bit like. PS then took the tape and made an album based on it himself with SA musicians, breaking the cultural boycott against apartheid in the process. Obviously a hugely significant album and there are some really nice tracks on it, but it ends up sounding a little middle of the road to me and also has this vibe of something fairly insipid and white leaning heavily on the contribution coming from another culture for all the innovation. Net positive tho, it's a good album.

I was pretty keen at the start with the pallet of sounds borrowed from drum and bass and jungle, but there's no getting around that this album is boring and samey. I don't have a problem with weak voices if they come with interest, variety or emotion, but this vocal performance has none of those.

Starts super strong but i got a bit lost in the later tracks. Decent though.

Meh. Such an unremarkable and dull album. It’s the most vanilla rock that doesn’t generate any emotion in me whatsoever.

You can hear how significant he is in the writing and overall style of the pixies. I liked the album a lot and there's plenty of variety. Two reelers has Sam McK vibes. I don't like the synth sounds much; they sound cheap. Deserves further listens. Weird cover art, which I like.

Very nearly a 5 star album but there are a couple of low points for me (often the tracks i enjoyed the most as a youth, like Come Out And Play). Nothing else they did touched the heights of this album. Alongside dookie this album represents the best of a certain wave of american punk that inspired a lot of rubbish (including further offerings from offspring and greenday).

I really loved this one. You actually get some idea of why people love this guy from this album; his vocals are incredible and the sound of the band is so energetic, fresh and iconic. The one thing that stopped this troubling the five starts is the really annoying echo/reverb on the vocal on some of the tracks (e.g. I've got a woman, I'll never let you go). It sounds so much better when you get a dry vocal (e.g. one-sided love affair) and you can really hear how he uses his voice as an incredibly versatile instrument that still sounds unusual even after all these decades of his influence on others.

Rolling in the deep is a definite banger that utilise her impressive voice well, but it feels overplayed even though I don't think I've heard it a ridiculous amount. The basic percussion doesn't help, and I find a lot of the percussion across the album sounds oddly dated. There's a lot of cheesy filling across the album that is not nutritious. I won't be listening to this one again. "He won't go" was decent, sounds like a poor man's Winehouse, and it picks up for a couple of tracks from there. Someone like you: again showcases her banging voice but it still lacks complexity that undermines its value for repeat listens. It just doesn't feel like there are many ideas in there. I do like the close harmony though.

Certainly seems to deserve further listens; it definitely hooked me more than the other Bowie album, but I think it can only be a grower. I don't feel like i have it cracked.

I hadn't heard of this band at all. I didn't find the album particularly remarkable except that it seems to be quite ahead of its time: it sounds like a fairly average album from the 90s rather than from 1986.

Typically this kind of sound palette would put me off but I loved this album. Totally took me by surprise. She's a great MC as well as powerful singer and spans genres between pop and early hip hop with her vocal style, which is mirrored by the production moving between synth pop and hip hop collage of beats and samples. Then the lyrics are a total surprise, particularly the track about The Next Generation, talking about the uniting trials facing parents and the importance of their work. Plus it had a real sense of humour; the end of the original album (My Bitch) left me laughing as it faded out, with its ironic acknowledgement of how weird it is for a swede and a brit to be adopting these American accents.

This album has the dubious honour of being home to the fuckboy national anthem that is "Free Bird", but the tracks are all decent jams that make for a pleasant listening experience that has failed to make a major impression on me.

So wild that tiny dancer is the first track! I would have expected it to be the finale on an album or something. There are some other decent tracks on this one. I'm not a big Elton John fan but sometimes one of his tracks will hook you; tiny dancer had definitely done that, and i think some of the others on this album have the potential to. I particularly enjoyed Levon.

Another great Pixies album. I really regret not giving Surfer Rosa 5*, to distinguish that it is better. But, this is still a banger with quite a distinct cohesive sound rather than particular stand-out anthems. Velouria was the first pixies song that I downloaded on Napster, so holds a special place in my heart.

Reminds me of how much Brighton Rock stands out as a weird track on the otherwise seamless and varied soundtrack of Baby Driver. It's a good track, but just sounded so bizarre over the final sequence of that film. Queen really seem like such a unique band. They are massively popular and everyone knows of them but I really can't think of any bands that truly sound influenced by them. Anyway, it was an alright album. Didn't blow me away but maybe needed more concentrated listening, with some real bangers.

Rock done right. Lots of variety, amazing vocal performance, exciting and interesting bass lines, lyrical genius that captures angst without sounding immature; it can't be anything other than 5 stars.

I think this must be in here because Papa Was A Rolling Stone is such a stone cold soul anthem. I found the rest of the album pretty unremarkable. "Do your thing" was pretty cool. The one that was ripping off The Flamingos' version of I've only got eyes for you just made me pine for that track instead. Still, listening to the full version of Papa was a joy as always.

Some good tracks and at times a great vocal performance, but there's a fair bit of filler on here and some of the tracks are a real mess (yeah yeah).

I'd only ever really listened to the self titled album. This album benefits from much better production and starts really strong. The title track and re-ignition are standout tracks. There are a few bits of filler in there, but generally a good album from an iconic band with an important place in the history of east coast hardcore and black punk generally, often name-checked by the Beastie Boys.