333
Albums Rated
3.34
Average Rating
31%
Complete
756 albums remaining
Rating Distribution
Rating Timeline
Taste Profile
1950
Favorite Decade
Punk
Favorite Genre
US
Top Origin
Wordsmith
Rater Style ?
40
5-Star Albums
9
1-Star Albums
Breakdown
By Genre
Top Styles
By Decade
By Origin
Albums
You Love More Than Most
| Album | You | Global | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Orbital 2
Orbital
|
5 | 2.69 | +2.31 |
|
Yank Crime
Drive Like Jehu
|
5 | 2.72 | +2.28 |
|
The White Room
The KLF
|
5 | 2.78 | +2.22 |
|
Underwater Moonlight
The Soft Boys
|
5 | 3.06 | +1.94 |
|
Double Nickels On The Dime
Minutemen
|
5 | 3.12 | +1.88 |
|
The Idiot
Iggy Pop
|
5 | 3.22 | +1.78 |
|
Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables
Dead Kennedys
|
5 | 3.26 | +1.74 |
|
Let It Be
The Replacements
|
5 | 3.26 | +1.74 |
|
Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
|
5 | 3.31 | +1.69 |
|
Nebraska
Bruce Springsteen
|
5 | 3.32 | +1.68 |
You Love Less Than Most
| Album | You | Global | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Hybrid Theory
Linkin Park
|
1 | 3.39 | -2.39 |
|
The Soft Bulletin
The Flaming Lips
|
1 | 3.28 | -2.28 |
|
Steve McQueen
Prefab Sprout
|
1 | 2.99 | -1.99 |
|
New Gold Dream (81/82/83/84)
Simple Minds
|
1 | 2.96 | -1.96 |
|
Very
Pet Shop Boys
|
1 | 2.95 | -1.95 |
|
Follow The Leader
Korn
|
1 | 2.65 | -1.65 |
|
Chelsea Girl
Nico
|
1 | 2.63 | -1.63 |
|
Young Americans
David Bowie
|
2 | 3.62 | -1.62 |
|
Black Holes and Revelations
Muse
|
2 | 3.59 | -1.59 |
|
Morrison Hotel
The Doors
|
2 | 3.58 | -1.58 |
Artists
Favorites
| Artist | Albums | Average |
|---|---|---|
| Johnny Cash | 2 | 5 |
| Bruce Springsteen | 3 | 4.33 |
| Black Sabbath | 3 | 4.33 |
Controversial
| Artist | Ratings |
|---|---|
| Willie Nelson | 2, 5 |
5-Star Albums (40)
View Album Wall
Popular Reviews
The Cult · 2 likes
2/5
Dunno what the deal with this album is. The singer sometimes sounds like Danzig, which is kinda cool, but otherwise it sounds like also-ran cock rock. Which can be fun, but this kind of sucks. Wait, that's not fair: it's perfectly competent, but it doesn't rise to the level of Real Fun that I'd expect from this kind of thing. Back of the pack fodder, but can understand why it made an impact on the youth who heard it at the right time.
You know what really sucks ass, though? That "Born To Be Wild" cover. Practically art in its deficiency.
Willie Nelson · 2 likes
5/5
Lovely little tunes, lovely little album.
I know less about production than I know about woman, so nothing, but I know what I like. Apparently everyone who was supposed to have a say in it complained about this one sounding unpolished? It sounds exactly the way it should. Fuck 'em, Willie was right.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs · 2 likes
3/5
I was able to slip this one past my kids by launching it immediately after a taylor swift song on the kpop demon hunters random spotify shuffle - so that's where we stand with this thing. On the one hand, you could say it's forward thinking since it fits in well with Tay-tay's Midnights, an album that came along a solid 13 years after this. But that's kinda damning with faint praise. This is really just an indie dance pop album that hits some of those notes while also hitting, I dunno, Jane's Addiction and the recent college grad who read something that culturally we call impressive on a bookshelf. That's not to say it's bad, but it's certainly nothing special. Solid effort of that class but not much more to say about it.
Dr. Dre · 2 likes
4/5
Poor digital underground, settled in my list between two other big early 90s rap albums. This album is great, and I know somewhere I said Ice Cube was the most talented out of NWA, well, this is the best album out of NWA - unfortunately, the gangsta shit is a little more one note compared to Straight Outta Compton, which is a wild thing to say. Pretty obvious Ice Cube was the one thinking socio-politically. That said, high energy, great beats and samples. Probably a 3 lyrical-contently, but the energy is great so it goes up to 4.
T. Rex · 1 likes
4/5
I was gonna hate on this because I don't care for this kind of hippie-to-dinosaur-rock type stuff, but I enjoyed my time here. Good music to zone out to, and really, the only time I'd seek it out is watching a period piece movie or maybe driving a Chevy SS, but it's got its place and it's immaculately made. 3 for my taste, 4 for the total package and Bang a Gong, which is a known quantity for a reason. It's fun!
1-Star Albums (9)
All Ratings
Paul McCartney and Wings
3/5
Having not been there, this album feels a lot like I how imagine the 70s were: overindulgent, sprawling in new and exciting ways that may not exactly be good, but still pretty fun. Some of these songs I can imagine putting on the 8 track in the AMC Pacer and thinking you're the coolest guy in the world, some of them I hear in a wood paneled basement with shag carpeting. A lot of the sounds I love from much later music show up here, as do a lot of sounds I don't care for. Some of the songs bang (the fuzz in Jet is wild) but then Bluebird is a real stinker. Picasso's Last Words is very clever, but also, c'mon Paul, some of this shit is just elevator music.
A lot of good stuff, Paul's Beatles influence is still pretty obvious (good thing) and he's undeniably got a knack for a tune but for my taste overstays its welcome. Starts and finishes with something like a bang, so I guess that's where the head's at.
Marvin Gaye
5/5
First song is a certified banger, so how does the rest of the album compare? Well, Let's Get It On is the high point so while it's technically true to say it's all downhill from there, it's not really helpful (though Keep Gettin' It On Is, y'know, about the same high). Any song can go anywhere and the album loses nothing. Easy to put on, easy to listen to. It's not experimental, it does not make a collage of existing music, it does not push the envelope. It's just good, consistent music.
David Bowie
3/5
Man, all my notes got wiped out, but I'd call this a transitional album. Clearly Bowie, with all its influences worn on its sleeve, but not fully made his own. While I can agree that 'boring' would be a good descriptor, I think the ambient stuff is pretty decent. Not all music has to go somewhere, and especially not ambient.
It's no mistake that there aren't any classic Bowie hits on here, but that doesn't make it bad, just hit-less. The separation between the first half and second half make it feel a bit more like an art project than something coherent, so on that I'm knockin' it down from a 4 to a 3.
Radiohead
3/5
I missed this album. In fact, this album made me stop being a radiohead listener, because the whole "pay what you want" thing was something I wanted to support but I was a broke college student, so I never did. Then I fell out of the cycle.
Anyway, now that I'm not a radiohead fan, this is a pretty forgettable album.
Funkadelic
4/5
The opener is a real masterpiece, but the rest of this album is great. A little dated since everything's been plumbed a million times, and a little dated since some of the sounds are just so associated with the time, but still packed to the gills with good stuff. I think it's a victim of that datedness, so it \"only\" gets a four.
Talking Heads
4/5
Like many Talking Heads albums, it's got a few megahits and then some capable but forgettable stuff sprinkled around it. Not that the forgettable stuff is bad, it's just not really that remarkable. Give it a 3 but bumped to a 4 exclusively for the Take Me To The River cover.
UB40
2/5
I don't care for dub, and this is an hour long. Probably have to be from the time and place to make it work, but even trying to actively listen I tuned this out. Maybe one day I'll see in it what others see, but I won't be returning on my own.
Prince
5/5
Holy shit. I've heard the hits but never listened to the album, Prince really was living in the future. Guy had a nose for The Sound and could produce it. This album's got it all, and it feels like it informed a lot of the 80s sound that came after it. I kept having to check the year. Anyway, this rules.
AC/DC
3/5
"I'm sick and tired of people saying that we put out 11 albums that sound exactly the same. In fact, we've put out 12 albums that sound exactly the same."
That's right. Get in the t-top, loser, we're hitting mailboxes with a baseball bat.
Nothing groundbreaking, and somehow too long as an album, but every song rocks.
Lorde
2/5
Jack Antonoff was perhaps the worst person to produce Lorde.
Bookends nicely, I guess, in the vein of royals, but everything in between is such a pale Antonoff-based imitation that it makes them worse.
Pet Shop Boys
1/5
Shit.
Stuck in a wii menu that gets worse once the hook goes away. Don't
Suicide
1/5
Finally, an album that answers the question, "What if the Jesus and Mary Chain sucked a lot?"
Probably novel in the 70s, but now it's a mostly unlistenable art installation. Let's hear it for Frankie.
Peter Tosh
3/5
Legalize It is a truly terrible song. The rest of the album is a lot better, but goddamn I cannot believe that first track has fans. This is way more layered and varied than the UB40 album I listened to.
Really was tempted to give it a 1 based on that first impression, but y'know, this is pretty good.
Radiohead
3/5
There was a time when this album probably woulda hit hard, but now it's mostly dated, probably about 20 minutes too long, and not really very interesting. Comfortably in the radiohead catalog with nothing to distinguish it.
Metallica
4/5
It's Metallica. It's not as cool as early Metallica, and it portends later Metallica, but it's still Metallica. The hits are hits, and maybe its the amount of time they spent being played on the butt rock station when I was in high school, but I think they're great.
Grizzly Bear
3/5
The natural progression of mid 2000s indie pop, and probably its terminal point. Layered instrumentation, experimentation with The Sound, and lots of ideas jammed into each song. Too bad it just made me think of other albums I could be listening to. Nice as music for a quirky indie flick, but I don't know when in my life I would want to listen to this.
Klaxons
3/5
Shit you'd hear in a spin class if everyone in there thought they were too cool for Stanley cups.
George Michael
2/5
George Michael can sing, but the subtlety is not a strength of his. All these songs sound flat, like in an unfinished way, and another review mentioned that they've all been turned into club bangers. Which I'd agree with: just about any cover or remix is gonna have more verve than this.
Compare to Prince, who took a different tack on sex as a subject matter, and had better musicality and more ideas, half a decade earlier. This is pointless until someone else comes along and spices it up.
Queen
3/5
Like most of the albums I've been hearing, they start out slow and then get better. This is just kind of standard proggy stuff with a couple of hits of what Queen's hits would sound like. I don't care for it but it's not bad.
Pearl Jam
5/5
This holds up. Big and intimate at the same time, it just rocks. Guitar noodling doesn't outlast its welcome like a lot of dinosaur rock and I'm a sucker for any singer who sounds like their voice went through a cement mixer. I know there are a lot of hits on here but just about anything coulda been a single. Sets the tone.
Carole King
4/5
Smooth, classic album packed with songs that you just kinda know. Easy 5, except...well, I like a lot of the covers more than the originals. This isn't exactly where I spend my time. Sorry, Carole.
Iron Maiden
3/5
Not familiar with this album, although there are a few Maiden songs I like generally. This starts out way rawer than I was expecting (good thing) but maybe too much guitar noodling for my taste. The boys was figurin' it out, but it's really split between the 70s and what Iron Maiden turned into. The production isn't there for the operatic stuff and when it gets arena rock-y it's at its worst. The glimmer of the future was probably pretty exciting back in 1980 but I don't think it's great.
Julian Cope
2/5
Never heard of this guy. This doesn't hit for me even though I feel like it should. Cannot put my finger on it - wait, it came to me on track 3: if Rusted Root discovered U2. Also: Deluxe edition? 2 fucking hours long? I got stuff to do, man.
Paul Simon
4/5
It's good, but I'm certain I could defeat Paul in the octagon.
The xx
3/5
Loved this album when it first came out. Holds up, I guess, but doing the close-listening thing reveals it to be pretty insipid. I mean, these lyrics are trash. 5 star background music album, but what makes it good for that makes it bad for, y'know, listening. Splitting the difference with a 3. Either way, I don't think this is an album you have to hear before you die.
CHVRCHES
3/5
Hilarious that this pops up right after the xx because this is basically the same review. This album came out of the gate hard, then I forgot about it, and re-listening, well, its transportive but it's not great and it's also not something you have to listen to before you die. Their cover Prince's "I Would Die 4 U" is pretty good, though. Not on this album.
Pixies
4/5
Not the best Pixies but still good Pixies. You get a 4 but only because Surfer Rosa and Doolittle deserve 5s and they're better.
Paul Revere & The Raiders
3/5
This album is a 3: standard surfy, garagey music from the 60s. Every once in a while, a moment jumps out that makes it a little better. And every once in a while, you get something that makes it a little bit worse. I'm gonna play this for my kids.
Jack White
3/5
I don't know how to say this without sounding pretentious, so I won't bother trying to not sound like a huge asshole. Jack White is an immensely talented musician who's forgotten more about music production and history than I'll ever know. But somehow, listening to his music, I get the impression he brings nothing new to the table. Every song feels like, "remember this sound? Well here's how I'd do it." And it sounds good, but also...why? They're all good songs, but it's like an an album of cover songs except instead of covers, they're originals.
Wu-Tang Clan
5/5
Stone cold classic, every song has something to offer and even the skits are all-timers. I read some other people's reviews and saw their complaints and I want to point out that this album is more than the sum of its many parts: RZA's production is simplistic? Yes, it lets everybody have a chance to shine. Rhymes are simplistic? I mean, in the context of 2024, I guess, but there are some all-timer bars here and the interplay is part of the fun. Kung Fu is corny? Sorry man, you're actually lame as hell.
Johnny Cash
5/5
Hey, the hype is real: A live album that's made better by being live! I think Johnny Cash is a) a legend and b) pretty one-note, musically (with notable exceptions) but this album is fun to listen to. That says a lot.
I think any other Johnny Cash album would probably get a three from me, but this seems like an easy 5?
Lloyd Cole And The Commotions
3/5
This sounds like so many forgotten 80s pop-ish bands, imitating the smiths or the waterboys or simple minds or the mekons or the icicle works or any of those bands. Just kinda throw 'em into a blender. I like those bands, but this is just...more of it? Who cares.
Kraftwerk
4/5
This isn't nearly as sophisticated as electronic music is today, but as an early, and therefore relatively simple, electronic work, it's quite nice! At first I was going to call it ambient, but there's more engaging me here. Der Konzept carries through, the album flows nicely, and each song has something to offer. Great stuff.
Beastie Boys
4/5
Feel guilty giving this a 4 because the highs are so high, but it's too long, there's some weird shit going on in the middle and the fact that its a smorgasbord of sound doesn't mean that everything works well together. Like putting ice cream on a hamburger - it might work at the right time, but it might just be wrong. Anyway, great album with great breadth.
Jurassic 5
3/5
I never listened to this album. I did, however, listen to about 80% of it over and over and over again in the form of individual kazaa downloads of varying quality. So I have fond memories of some of this stuff, while the arrangement, and some songs, are completely new. Anyway, jazzy hip hop? I'm in. fun album. Not necessarily an all-timer in the gotta-hear-it-before-you-die vein, especially since, well, it drags, but it's a great sound and easy to put on.
Norah Jones
3/5
Full disclosure, my wife picked the title track as our wedding dance song, so I'm predisposed to have a soft spot here.
Ok, now that that's out of the way: she's a good singer with good arrangements and there's nothing here that really blows me away.
Tom Waits
4/5
Hell yeah, man. Look, part of Tom Waits' appeal to me is his persona - it's like the whole thing is performance art that isn't a performance and isn't really art. So I'm gonna be looking at this album through that lens, because if I didn't know who Waits was, but had this as my introduction, it'd probably get a 1 or 2. It's a tough listen to kick off, shit banging and clanging with Waits' unique voice kind melted in the middle. If a different Tom, like Tom Delonge or Tom Jones, put this out, it would be shit. Norah Jones this ain't.
But that's part of the appeal of this album, too: it's something different, built deliberately and, at least to me, challenging in a way that's not so far gone that it's inaccessible noise. It's all stripped down to the bone, for better or worse. I really love a couple of songs on here, like really love. Sometimes it's worse, I think I'd like some new arrangements of stuff. Not my favorite Tom Waits' album, but definitely one that stands out.
I don't know what kind of curve to grade this on, so I give it a 4. I have no doubt it was realized as expected, and I like Tom, but the challenge on some of these tracks is a bit much.
TLC
2/5
Insanely horny. Like, the perfect album for teens to do clumsy heavy outside-the-pants petting in 1996. Waterfalls is, of course, a megahit, but this brand of R&B is really not where I spend my time. It's obvious how this album was a huge hit: slick, well produced, well sung, but it has the unfortunate position of having set the tone rather than being superlative, so it's kind of forgettable in that sense if you didn't grow up to it blasting sex-vibes straight into your teenage brain. Which I didn't.
Nick Drake
5/5
Nice little album by a nice little singer who inspired thousands of shitty imitators, so he might be guilty of war crimes.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
5/5
I never got into Nick Cave for whatever reason, even though he's supposedly adjacent to a lot of musicians I do like. Maybe my head wasn't in the right place. Maybe I thought it was a bit overwrought, directly sighted at Theater Kids and Former Theater Kids.
Anyway, this album's pretty good! A little long, but I can respect the craft, and you know what, I'm gonna listen to it more than a couple of times. Maybe it even makes it into The Rotation. Good to put on and zone out and good to listen in. No skips! Tunes that get stuck in your head! Somber, erudite songwriting that isn't the southern gothic character exploration that turned me off the first time! Maybe I am a Nick Cave fan, I'll have to revisit some other stuff. This album hits.
Syd Barrett
3/5
Talented guy, and sad story, but this album, while creative, is super uneven. I guess when your brain fragments into itty bitty pieces you have a lot of ideas. Definitely an album you should hear before you die, but not because it's a screamin' classic. I admittedly don't care for this kind of psych but there's enough here to keep me interested even if I don't think it's good.
You know who I bet loved this shit? Jeff Mangum.
David Bowie
4/5
David Bowie is obviously an all-star, and there's not a bad song on the album, but as a cap A Album it's just ok. Lots of different songs with different sounds stuck together. Luckily, it's got Changes and Life on Mars, so even if everything were dogshit it would still be good.
Paul Simon
3/5
Absolutely an album you need to hear before you die, but you don't have to like it. Which I don't. I don't quite hate it the way some people do, and Paul Simon is obviously talented, but this shit is so fucking twee coming from a 45 year old man. A something of a developmentally-arrested manchild myself, I can relate to Not Growing Up, but something here leaves a bad taste in my mouth in much the same way K records albums do. I liked the self-titled album, so why not this? I mean, it contextualizes You Can Call Me Al in a way that I hadn't heard before that somehow makes me respect it less? Maybe it's how much it informed Vampire Weekend, a band I also think is talented but annoying. Also, the intro to Northern Exposure.
It's hooky and catchy and I bet it would've found purchase in my brain if it had been associated with some Proustian element that makes me look back on it with fondness. Contextuality, the theme of this album.
Anyway, this is the first time I've listened all the way through and probably the last.
808 State
3/5
some of this sounds incredibly dated but some of it is really great. Obvious influences on stuff that came later, but a lot of it makes me feel like I'm driving a Pontiac Fiero while on coke, posters of buxom women in really high hipped bikinis on the wall of my room. I know it's the EDM way but some of the songs overstay their welcome, and I should admit I'm not a fan of acid house. I dunno, I think this might be a bit like the Velvet Underground where there's some good stuff but most of the stuff that came later is better.
I zoned out on the second half of this album - seems a bit more relaxed. Anyway, I think I gotta give it a 3 because, while I'm sure this hits for some and was a banger back in '89, I could just play sonic the hedgehog.
Rod Stewart
2/5
Damn, in another world, Rod Stewart coulda been Joe Cocker or John Fogerty. This is standard 70s rock where each song is too long, but with the added bonus of having what I'd call bad production. A long 40 minutes for me, not my cup of tea, but not so hateful to earn a 1. He's got a great voice, though!
Jimi Hendrix
4/5
Sucker for a dumb radio intro - and then we hit this bouncy thing that is probably a lot better if you're smoking weed and doing something in addition to listening to music. It's uphill from there, though - that nice Hendrix guitar sound is in full effect.
I thought I wouldn't be interested in listening to 40 minutes of it, but I kept waiting for the moment when my interest would wane and, well, it didn't. That said, some songs are definitely not as Big as the Big Ones, but goddamn the dude can play a guitar.
Joni Mitchell
2/5
I can't do it, man. I hate this stuff. Lightweight, meandering warbling that, I agree, shoulda been a poem. Feel like this is an inverted version of women reading Hemingway and hating it.
Aretha Franklin
4/5
Yeah, this is good. What else is there to say?
Sigur Rós
4/5
Haven't listened to this in probably 20 years, during my big post-rock/ambient phase. A lot of that stuff I find pretty boring now, one reason that I burned out on it and had no real need to listen to it again and another because I wasn't doing things that needed hour long albums of three tones blasting disappearing into the sonic ether.
Like a lot of post rock, this demands a kind of specific headspace and is helped by place. 4 hours of daylight and dry-ass snow blowing across a barren waste while you wait for nothing but more nothing sounds like Iceland and also my college experience. Surprised by how late-90s it sounds, since it seemed so different when it first came out. The radiohead influence in some of the smaller moments seems clear in retrospect. Big, operatic, and still intimate, it's a great album.
Roxy Music
4/5
Some bangers, some goofy stuff informed by being from the early 70s, a time where experimentation brought the good and the bad. Prefer the kind of stuff inspired by this than this, but I still like this. Normally, when an album jumps from a to d and then to m and then to c, I get a little annoyed, but this kept it fresh somehow. Reputation deserved.
TV On The Radio
3/5
Kind of neat one to have after a Brian Eno album - some of the same goofy experimentation, but coming from a different place. A lot of highs, some aggressive jazzy noodling, all in all it's a 4 but with some extended pieces that I think bring it down to a 3.
Queen
4/5
The highs are high, the lows are low, the middling is middling. Weird album, but I guess Queen is a weird band. '39 was a nice surprise, didn't know Queen had that in 'em, or maybe I'm just a dupe. Sounds are all over the place, but some of them are all timers and the production is up to the task of keeping up with the band. Problem is, I don't really care for 70s proggy stuff so there we go.
The Go-Go's
3/5
I don't hate this but I also don't have any desire to listen to it again. It's fun, it's been copied, it's consistent, but while it's bouncy, it lacks a certain kind of energy that I think would improve a lot of new wave stuff.
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
3/5
Embarrassed I never listened to this, but then I heard the first song and realized why. Some of these songs are great: Helpless is great, but it's clearly Neil Young. Really, the overall tone of the album is too folk-y without the hook-y for me. Reading other people's reviews, seems I have an unpopular opinion. This stuff just isn't for me and I guess it turns out that I like Neil Young but maybe not CSN. Shame, because the album cover is sick.
Ice Cube
4/5
While clearly of the early 90s in terms of style, this one feels more like a blueprint than an imitator. I think it's safe to say that Ice Cube was the most talented member of NWA (Dr. Dre being a talent as well, but maybe not as much of a polymath) because this is a beeline from Straight Outta Compton. The high energy stuff is the best, the gangsta gangsta stuff has aged a bit, and some of the funkier beats get a little one note, and there's some filler (gangsta fairytale is not fun to listen to), and it's a little bit sad that it's still relevant, but you know what? Good album. Someone else said "best while driving in your car" and that's where I felt like I should be sitting when I was listening.
Scott Walker
3/5
Respect the naming convention.
Overwrought that makes the full use of Scott's impressive voice, but other than being background music in a movie from the 60s, not sure where this fits for me. It's too much at once, but people probably ripped some great samples from this. Cannot for the life of me figure out why it's on this list. Decent cover of Black Sheep Boy but not my favorite.
Really, seems like the later albums should be on this list, not this one. Maybe the weird shit was really weird in the 60s but it just seems normal today?
Arcade Fire
4/5
Man I wore this album out in college. Still my go-to for a snowy day, but not really a place in my life anymore. Back half not as good as the remarkable first half, and the twee shit that ruined the brains of my arts compatriots in 2005 is now mostly annoying to me, but I still am a fan.
Michael Jackson
3/5
I mean, he's the King of Pop. Compare how much fuller this sounds to, say, George Michael - he's got a great voice, he's got great tunes, and he's got energy. Coming off two other pop-ish albums that are much more layered, it still has an 80s flatness. Listen to the hits, which I think are still good (although the title track is flat) and move on with your life, though I can't stop lovin' you took me by surprise. I'd even go so far to say that the back half is stronger. That said, I think it's just Fine, but that might be the fact that this kind of music doesn't resonate with me.
2/5
I liked this album abut this is buttrock with an electronic veneer. This album is basically the time they turned away from Radiohead-lite to become, uh, freddie-mercury-radiohead-lite. Actually, a lot of these sounds are stolen from other songs. It's fine, I guess, and I have a soft spot for Starlight, painful corniness notwithstanding. Whatever, man, feel like I'm eating Kraft Mac 'n' Cheese. No reason for this album to be on this list.
Bruce Springsteen
5/5
Great album, provided you like that americana guitar stuff. It's folk-y rather than roots-y, a kind of natural progression from stuff like Thunder Road and forecasts his Woody Guthrie stuff. Full disclosure, I love Woody Guthrie. Normally don't care for murder ballads, and I struggle to know if this is a 4 or a 5, but I'm too stingy with my 5s and I know I'll be back to this one again, so up it goes.
Snoozefest reviews are understood, it's a low-key album. But I'll take any song on it any day. It's big and small at the same time, which seems to be a common thread for albums I like.
Johnny Cash
5/5
Music is fine, but as an album, man, what an experience. Can't believe I've given two Johnny Cash albums 5s, but they're both (the same) great taste, and definitely one to hit on at least once. No wonder other artists love to put out mediocre live albums, they all want them to be like this.
3/5
Music to listen to when your head is bumped up against a window in car at night and you can't go to sleep. Someone described it as mid 90s wine bar music and frankly, not sure why anyone has to write another review, but it does get a little more interesting in the middle. Not sure I had to listen to this before I died.
Black Sabbath
4/5
Solid metal 70s metal album with some surprisingly emotional vulnerability for a bunch of professional-level cokeheads. Definitely more coke on the backhalf, though.
As usual, turns out I like the stuff this influenced more than this, but solid album.
Arcade Fire
4/5
Kinda bouncy, but considering how much I loved Funeral (despite giving it less than 5 stars - time has not been super kind), this feels a little like Arcade Fire does Arcade Fire. Surprised this is what got them commercial success, and actually don't remember why I mostly ignored it when it came out - I guess it sounds bigger? Probably still wouldn't have hooked me the way Funeral did.
Anyway, I was planning on giving this a three but it grew on me in kind of the same way some of the songs grow a little bigger without me realizing it, then the middle was kind of muddled, but then it ended strong. If it weren't for Intervention I'd probably knock it down a peg.
Depeche Mode
4/5
Good album, masters of their craft (which is an ok craft). I'd give it a 3 but the hits are too good.
Stereolab
3/5
Better on speakers than headphones. Better when it's discordant than when it's tuneful. Singer kind of annoys me. Right album for the right time, but not sure when that would be. Absentmindedly woodworking? Maybe I'm a grinch.
Marty Robbins
3/5
Great cowboy music, transportive and with a great voice. But it's still cowboy music from the 50s - some of it sounds like it belongs in an old movie about killin' lawmen, some of it sounds like it belongs in an old movie about being in Hawaii, somehow. Nice artifact.
Buena Vista Social Club
4/5
Nice li'l album here! Good vibes, good tunes, tight.
A Tribe Called Quest
5/5
High 4 because it drags a little bit in the back half, but man the beats are so good, the flow is so distinctive (even if a little one note) that this is just a good album you can put on so it's a 5.
Digital Underground
3/5
Insane to have this come behind A Tribe Called Quest's People's Instinctive Travels: two albums from the same year where one still sounds good in 2025 and the other sounds like it's stuck in the House Party movies. The rhymes are good but, as the song says, they're not in any particular order, but hey, they're having fun! It's fine, I guess. They're not bad but every song is too long and so is the album, and if I'm not wearing hammer pants then I'm not really in the mood for this. Cool to hear a something bicep sampled in here, so a 2 generally but bumped to a 3 because even though the samples are too long, they're all great choices.
Dr. Dre
4/5
Poor digital underground, settled in my list between two other big early 90s rap albums. This album is great, and I know somewhere I said Ice Cube was the most talented out of NWA, well, this is the best album out of NWA - unfortunately, the gangsta shit is a little more one note compared to Straight Outta Compton, which is a wild thing to say. Pretty obvious Ice Cube was the one thinking socio-politically. That said, high energy, great beats and samples. Probably a 3 lyrical-contently, but the energy is great so it goes up to 4.
New Order
3/5
Sometimes hits, mostly misses. Smack dab in the middle of the scale. Got to This Time of Night and was like, "hey man I guess it's New Order." Then I get to Elegia and I'm like, "oh damn, maybe this is enough to take it up a notch!" but then it goes back to standard New Order, which I like but don't love. An unfair 3 that maybe should be a 4.
Nirvana
4/5
Some people have a weird hate boner for Nirvana. Maybe I'm one of them - but this is a great album. Absolutely owning a couple of covers? Owning a BOWIE cover? This is hits.
Janelle Monáe
5/5
God, what the fuck was I doing not listening to this? Wall to wall doesn't stop, full on energy, lot of different sounds that blend together nicely. This is just good music, and a lot of it, and a lot of different types.
Stan Getz
4/5
Pleasant, smooth, nicely made. I'm entirely uninvested in this kind of stuff and lack the knowledge to make a real vote, but I enjoyed my time and I've given lesser albums 3s so this gets a 4.
Nico
1/5
Instrumentation is nice, vocals aren't and this isn't a genre I care for. One thing I can say, though, is that the vocals are muddled as hell in this mix! I can barely hear her! That sucks, regardless of what I think of her voice! There's value in doing something new as a function of doing something new, but eventually you have to take something on its merits besides novelty. Just because it's a VU spinoff doesn't make it not frustrating. I gotta draw the line somewhere.
T. Rex
4/5
I was gonna hate on this because I don't care for this kind of hippie-to-dinosaur-rock type stuff, but I enjoyed my time here. Good music to zone out to, and really, the only time I'd seek it out is watching a period piece movie or maybe driving a Chevy SS, but it's got its place and it's immaculately made. 3 for my taste, 4 for the total package and Bang a Gong, which is a known quantity for a reason. It's fun!
R.E.M.
3/5
Mostly makes me think of how I could be listening to a Replacements album instead. Probably giving them the benefit of the doubt since I know they're REM, but stuff that came later did it better. As usual, probably like a bomb exploded when this came out, it does feel about 10 years ahead of its time.
Sade
3/5
Look, I don't like this stuff, but to suggest that Sade isn't talented or that this isn't a well-crafted album is insane.
Elvis Costello
4/5
I never really 'got' Elvis Costello - rockabilly but not rockabilly, punk but not punk, kind of stuck in the middle. If you heard this in the midst of a lot of the '77 stuff, this would probably be a breath of fresh air. He can obviously write a good song, and Alison's a classic, but I always feel like the songs don't go anywhere. An odd complaint given his contemporaries, but you know what? It's fine - short, punchy power pop doesn't need to go anywhere. I think I gotta give it a 4 even though I don't love it, just because it is really solid.
Talking Heads
4/5
I maintain Talking Heads have no good Albums outside of Stop Making Sense, and I stand by that. This might be their best normal album (or it might be Remain in Light), and it has Heaven so I give it a 4.
Ryan Adams
3/5
As what feels like a precursor to stomp-clap-hey music, this is better but maybe worse because of what it inspired. There's certainly more variety - no one can deny Adams' talent, but 25 years on it feels a little empty. Integrating Dylan into your songs is clever, but empty. Plaintive slow guitars in between the rockier stuff feels empty. Maybe because this genre got hollowed out by the 'mersh 10-15 years down the line, but I can't get behind it. Really drags in the back half.
Neil Young & Crazy Horse
5/5
Weird to have this after Ryan Adams, since they're...kind of similar? Crazy how I think Adams is probably technically better in just about every way, but I prefer this - just goes to show it's not all about technical acumen. Anyway, I'm somehow less angry about the 70s guitar here on the back half than I normally would be elsewhere. Maybe Crazy Horse is ok! Pretty cool how it does the front half-back half shape, especially for a live album, plus some absolute bangers. Can't believe this is a live album.
This is the first album on this list I went back to and listened again before I hit the review button. Pretty big stuff!
Led Zeppelin
5/5
Feel like Zep is the apotheosis of the semi-meandering dinosaur rock shit that I hate. And yet: they're pretty good. I don't get why people LOVE this stuff, but I do recognize that every member of the band is at the top of their game. This thing has so many hits it's hard to believe they all fit on one album. Hate all I want, there's no denying this joint is a masterpiece. A mercifully tight 42 minutes, too.
N.E.R.D
2/5
The lyrics feel like a fifteen year old's notebook, written for other fifteen year olds. Luckily for my ears, there are some good sounds here and some interesting mixes. I really don't care for the Neptunes and their all encompassing sound of the early 2000s (ditto for Timbaland, if we're keeping score) and plenty of that shows up here, but there's a lot more experimentation on top of it. Feels a little bit like failed beats that they turned into their own stuff by adding things deemed unlikely to be commercially successful plus Pharrell's ridiculous brain. A lot here: beatles, queen, uhhh, shitty guitar rock; just no focus. Anyway, this shit kinda sucks, liked it way less than I thought I would, but I bet some people have fond memories of it.
Fred Neil
2/5
The guy writes songs and has nice a nice baritone, but, uh, this is boring as hell. Nilsson's version of Everybody's Talking is better and more tuneful - everything here sounds muddled. I was surprised to read all the positive reviews, and I actually went around again in case I missed something. Nope, just boring. The raga is the most interesting part, and I don't like ragas. Maybe it'll come around for me, but at the moment? Why.
Tim Buckley
3/5
Delightful experimentation for a folk album with a unique voice. Tempted to bump this up to a 4 but I do not care for this kind of thing so I'm dumping it with an unkind 3 because I simply don't really want to listen to this.
Garbage
3/5
This ate my review, but the short version is I remember this hitting harder as a kid. Perfectly fine album, but better examples of the style are available.
Beastie Boys
4/5
An achievement, but also kind of too long. Feel like the beastie boys kept maturing past this lyrically but hit some real highs with the sampling. Since some of the songs are skips, it's a 4.
The Triffids
3/5
Absolutely victims of their contemporaries - every song reminds me of something else that fits in "right around that time" which makes me think that how the Triffids were cut from the same cloth. So how do they differentiate? They don't. The lyrics are fine, the delivery is fine, the production is overwrought. There's a bit of variety here, but they probably shoulda fine-tuned their Thing a bit more, if you want my entirely unsolicited and uneducated opinion. Truly in the realm of Just Fine, but probably better left in the 80s.
Willie Nelson
2/5
Not much to say here - don't love the Unchained Melody cover but respect it. Probably won't return to this but it's pleasant enough, even if a little tiresome though its relatively short runtime. A little shocked that this album was so big.
MGMT
3/5
Nice sounds and the hits are huge but the other stuff is just fine. Transportive to a certain time in my life but as an album it's just ok. In fact, some of this stuff sounds like Hard 'n' Phirm.
Sam Cooke
5/5
Bangers back to front.
I thought I hated live albums but all my favorites so far have been live albums. As with all live albums, recording suffers a little but I could not give less of a shit here - feel like it adds vitality. What tremendous energy and a tremendous voice.
Bob Marley & The Wailers
3/5
It's fine. Expect more because I know the hits, but apart from Bob's political consciousness, this is pretty much as tiresome as I find any reggae album. The No Woman No Cry album version is not an improvement over the one everyone knows. Would probably prefer a Reggae/Dub/Ska/Roots/etc playlist over this album generally, but wouldn't be bad to have when you're ripping miller lites at the beach with the bros.
Daft Punk
3/5
ONE HOUR AND FOURTEEN MINUTES?!
I'm willing to admit when I'm wrong...but this time I'm not. Cutting out a solid 20 minutes would dramatically improve this. I don't hate any of the songs, save for the impact Rollin' and Scratchin' had on me when it popped on and made me do a double take, but generally too long. That said, some of these songs are really great and even the dronier stuff would be good to run to or drive down an empty highway at night.
The Streets
4/5
Wild, I was just thinking yesterday that I bet this album would come up soon.
Kind of a challenging sound (this is a nice way of saying it fails with respect to traditional musicality) but a lot of fun for some down material. Mike's flow is "bad", but he's remarkably consistent, which somehow makes it good? It's not like he sucks, he's doing this thing like oi bruv spoken word. A single song leaves you going, "is he serious?" but you follow along, maybe hit it again and all of a sudden it starts coming together. And maybe, if you weren't really listen, you figure out it's a concept album, and one that actually holds together. If I hadn't heard this when it came out, I'd probably drop a 1 or 2 on this one, but you know what? No apologies: I like this one, man.
Sepultura
4/5
Good music to lift to. I understand this is a competent metal album and there is definitely musicality here, but really there's too much guitar noodling for my taste. I think I gotta give it a 4 even though I'll probably never listen to it outside of shitty gym speakers.
Steely Dan
2/5
People say you age into this shit but I still haven't. Talented and uncompromising and making the most boring music possible. At least it's only 40 minutes.
I want to give it a 5 for its realization and a 1 for how much I like it, but rather than give it a coward's 3 I'm gonna dock it a point for hoping I never have to sit through it again. I'd rather listen to Nico than this.
Louis Prima
4/5
A lotta fun! Give this man the fire, mancub, I think he earned it.
Super Furry Animals
2/5
Maybe it's the lack of sleep last night, but this shit makes my head hurt. The early 2000s has a lot to answer for - I guess britpop was running out of steam so when damon albarn zigged, these guys zagged? Boring boring boring.
Dig the JSRF lookin' cover, though. Wish the music lived up to it.
Sparks
3/5
At first I thought this was a worse version of Queen. Then I paid more attention and realized I overrated Queen. Don't care for this glam stuff, but they know what they're doing. Anyway, pretty obvious influence on a LOT of stuff that came after and pretty incredible vocalist and lyricist, but I really just do not give a shit. Coward's 3 because the talent is undeniable.
U2
4/5
Bono may have huffed too many of his own farts in the interim, but it's clear he's genuine enough that he doesn't know he's pompous. This album is unsubtle but morally sound, so no complaints there. I'm familiar with the hits, I don't think I've ever listened to it through, so there are some surprises. I'm surprised by how much seconds sounds like the talking heads. I'm surprised at the variety of sounds. I'm surprised how...80s some of those sounds are. I'm surprised at the production - seems flatter than I recall from hearing these songs on the radio, and I'm listening to spotify's 2008 remaster. I'm surprised that I enjoyed the full run.
The Rolling Stones
3/5
Solid album, but I don't know what's wrong with me that I can't get into it. Greatest album of all time? Seems like a character ac. Like, I can't tell if Dead Flowers is a piss-take, they're high on their ability to plumb americana, or both. Not bad, just weird. The Stones energy is there across the album, even in the slower stuff, but I don't know if that's enough to make me go Wow! Unkind 3.
Deep Purple
3/5
I respect the inclusion of an organ, especially when stuff gets "heavier." The fact that this is from 1972 and not, say, 1976 gives it a pretty good lift, but it's still dad rock that feels kind of ur- and underevolved at this point. It's a little bit like AC/DC in that it's too long and kinda all sounds the same but less balls to the wall. Credit due for Smoke on the Water and Highway Star, despite the latter being twice as long as it needs to be. Pretty long 37 minutes, but I don't hate it.
Tears For Fears
4/5
Talented pop artists stuck in the 80s, but I can't hold that against them. Some big tunes, even the smaller ones seem to be crafted. Not much to say here because it's not like an arrow to my heart, but it's good.
Rufus Wainwright
3/5
Twee shit. Sounds like everything else that came out around that time that was oh so cute. A full hour of something not interesting enough to hate, not good enough to be rated.
Bruce Springsteen
4/5
Springsteen does Springsteen - feels like the voice gets a little bit like an impression. Don't rate it highly as others do in the Springsteen catalog but it's still good. Promised land is a classic sing-along.
Hugh Masekela
4/5
If you paid me a million dollars, I couldn't tell you what makes this stand out amongst jazz albums. It's not that I think it's bad, I just have no idea what the hell I'm hearing.
It sounds nice. Surprised to see it was over an hour, didn't feel like it.
Nirvana
3/5
I really just don't think it's that good - and I don't think it's aged particularly well. Or maybe I haven't? I think there are better grunge, better punk, better pop groups out there. I know Albini is well liked but I think Albini does better with, well, bands that do more Albini stuff. I kinda just wanna go listen to other Albini albums. High point for me is the last half of Radio Friendly Unit Shifter to first half of Tourette's (a song that I think should be given to a different vocalist).
Ms. Dynamite
2/5
Jazzy R&Bish rap - probably sounded fresh in 2002 but definitely didn't have to listen to it before I died. 2 seems harsh because it's fine and smooth and not unpleasant (if a bit early 2000s), but I just can't get behind it. I've given equally forgettable albums higher scores, so this is really just because I found it tough to get through. An hour? c'mon.
Sinead O'Connor
3/5
She's doin' somethin', I just don't know what it is. Ok, well, actually, some of this is a bit more traditional. I'll get this out of the way: Black boys on mopeds is great, but nothing compares 2 u sucks. I'm tempted to bump it up to a 4 because of the kind of ethereal sounding thread that moves through the album but really I don't see anything special here. Wouldn't hate to hear it again.
CHIC
3/5
I mean, it's disco. Massive tunes that last too long, so credit to everyone who sampled them to change it up. Legit don't know how these songs last so long, every time I check i'm like "it's only been that long?" They're tight and musically sound but man, 36 minutes that feels like an hour.
Beck
3/5
Expansive, inventive, and kinda flat. I dunno if it's the 30 years between then and now, but none of this feels fresh the way it probably did back then. It still holds that sun-bleached california summer feel, blazing pavement and scrubby plants growing up in unexpected places, but I dunno - I don't have to hear it. These songs have been with me for most of my music-listening life as radio play or whatever, but while I won't turn it off, I don't feel the need to seek it out.
Neil Young
4/5
Great album. Don't know about all-timer, but great album.
Orange Juice
3/5
Poor man's Talking Heads comparisons are apt, I think. Once again, 1001 albums offers up a middling album and lumps it in with post-punk when it's just some stuff on an album. Really feels 80s and it makes me think of classic 80s hits that also feel really 80s and get played at weddings later in the playlist, but without the shared nostalgia. Nothing to dislike here, but nothing to recommend it, but also not really enough to carry an album.
Cover album looks pretty cool, though, and I respect them for starting a song with a plaintive "Breaaaakfaaaaaaaaast"
Frank Ocean
3/5
It's pretty good. Sometimes his voice is great and sometimes I feel like he's phoning it in, which i guess probably hit hard if you heard this when you were 15. I respect that he went from samples to original beats - the whole thing is tightly focused while exploring a wide variety of sounds in that focus, but this is something I want on in the background - when I listen close I feel like I can either be rewarded or the cracks show up, so a mixed bag.
Marianne Faithfull
4/5
Surprised to hear this is from 1979 - like a number of albums from that era, it seems to have had a ripple effect on the sound of songs 5 or even 10 years later. Also like those albums, it's not very good on its own merits compared to what others did with that inspiration. That sounds like I hated it, but really it's just fine. In the interest of being fair, I listened to the deluxe edition, where apparently the first disc is the remasters and the second disc are the originals. The originals are better. Rising anger throughout, and ends with a nice howl - the, uh, intangibles of her voice can't be denied. I was gonna give this a coward's 3 but I slept on it and realized I've been thinking about it way more than that, so up it goes.
Fleet Foxes
2/5
Utterly forgettable. Surprising myself for the disdain I have for this - my tolerance for twee and twee-adjacent has worn so thin. Only saved from the 1 star by their general competence.
Solomon Burke
3/5
Great tunes, but in that "early days of pop music" it's just a bunch of good songs together instead of, like, an album with shape? Dunno. Whatever, "no" skips, but also too much of a good thing - by the time I got to the end I was like, "ok, I got it, this song isn't bringing me anything new."
Wilco
4/5
I don't think I could in good conscience give this album a 5, but I also don't know if I can go lower than a 4. Wonderfully realized alt-country stuff that drifts toward where Wilco went in the future. I think it's gonna depend on my mood by the time the album ends, which might not be great since it's two discs and man that's long.
Certainly warrants additional listening.
Spiritualized
3/5
Tough one. I like it, it's well crafted, and it has its place. Once again, I am reminded of the Jesus and Mary Chain, but only if they had taken truckloads of lorazepam. Anyway, I feel like the fact that the music is weightless also makes the album kind of weightless. Right music for the right time, but ultimately nothing to raise it above other "zone out while sorting through dead letters" type music.
The Slits
4/5
Everyone who heard the velvet underground started a band, but in the UK I guess it was everyone who heard a first wave ska band. There are clearly germinal aspects of punk here, and when the sound veers away from ska/reggae/dub, it gets interesting. Like all good punk, it is best when it is barely holding on for control, highlighted by the frankly inexpert musicianship and amateur vocals. Sometimes the amateurs come up with something new, and sometimes that sticks. As usual, I thought about a lot of bands that came after that borrowed some of the sounds here, but didn't have that "oh i could be spending my time listening to that" feeling I sometimes get.
Hasn't aged super well because it's frankly a bit of a response to what was going on at the time, and really it's still just pissed off young women, but it's original, it's different, and it has a solid identity its own. A time capsule in a good way and winner, I think.
For everyone complaining about the 'rough' sound, go listen to steely dan or some other well produced soporific shit.
Simon & Garfunkel
4/5
Really bums me out that these guys are as good as their reputation because wimpy acoustic guitar music pisses me off in theory - but not here. The fuzz on track 2 took me pleasantly by surprise. The experimentation doesn't always pay off, but they don't seem particularly cynical about some of their earnest cynicism/saudade so I mostly give it a pass. Punky's dilemma, however, is everything I hate about this kind of stuff - it feels like one of those bubblegum songs from Scooby Doo, but uses its cutesy facade for an adult theme. Dogshit. But Mrs. Robinson is an all-timer.
Ella Fitzgerald
4/5
At 3 hours and 15 minutes, I think this is the kind of thing you should listen to before you die, but over the course of your whole life and not in one sitting. I regularly ding records for not having a good "shape" to the thing, and this has zero shape, because it's a compilation. Ella Fitzgerald is great, George Gershwin is great. I'll happily listen to a song or two or ten. But 3 hours of this straight through is trying in a way that I'm not willing to subject myself to. So, while it's not representative of the content (which is unimpeachable, by the way), I can't in good conscience call it a 5 star "album" in the same way that I can't call a compilation of short stories a 5 star novel, but it's a remarkable historical and musical artifact. Sue me.
Laura Nyro
2/5
I will never return to this. Once again, saved from a 1 by general competence, I really just don't like this stuff. It struck me overnight: if Janis Joplin were the one kind of theater kid instead of the other.
Iron Maiden
4/5
I gave the s/t album three stars because it had good ideas but was uneven. This fixes those, but at the cost of "sameiness." Much like a lot of metal, I like one or two songs, but a full album wears on me. THAT SAID, man, this is a lot of fun: theatrical without being florid in the way later hair metal is, energetic without being tiresome, and it's got Run To The Hills. Make a random EP out of any of the tracks here and it's great, but even so I'm not sure I'd cut anything out. Wish the vocals were brought out a little bit, but that's just me.
The Allman Brothers Band
2/5
The kind of shit you hear at the barbecue place where the floors are clean so you know you can't really trust it but it's still kind of good even though it's not the same. Hey, that's a pretty good metaphor for this album.
Sounds pretty good for a live album, but boy does it take its time getting...anywhere. I know I'm getting to the age where I should prefer a seat at a concert, but I can't imagine standing up for this one. I don't think I ever have to listen to this one again, just a shitload of guitar noodling.
Elliott Smith
3/5
Since I'm not 17, this doesn't hit me the way it probably would. Elliott is obviously a talented musician and he set the stage for a lot of other bands I find irritatingly twee (why does this shit keep coming up in these reviews? It's obnoxious that I keep complaining about it but it's always there). Elliott has a gift that his imitators lack where his earnestness and musicality are personal rather than formalisms, which is nice, but it doesn't change the fact that I hear it as Music For Sad Teens And College Students. Really should be a 4, but I'm feeling mean about listening to depressing stuff on a sunny day when I feel good and it gets a little same-y by the end.
Harry Nilsson
4/5
I wonder what this guy would've pulled out if his career came ten years later. Seems primed for experimentation and his association with the Beatles sound is deserved, but I'd just like to see what he would do with an electronic drumset or a synth or something. Too bad John Lennon got shot, maybe Nilsson coulda been like Scott Walker and go weird places.
This is maybe a generous four, but it's competently made, varied without feeling like a grab bag, and everything's pleasant. I think the bump comes from the competence over such a wide field. Weridly, the carnival-type beats here don't annoy me. Coconut is almost enough to drop it down to a three, though. Good lord.
Dead Kennedys
5/5
Oh my god, what a classic. Haven't put this one on for a while, but after the snoozers I've been getting, this feels like a double poke from a cattle prod. Starts off strong and just doesn't let go. Jello is in full form, the lyrics are all good but if you zone out and zone back in, well, guess what, that line's gonna have something for you. Jello's voice is, uh, probably an acquired taste, especially after some of the really talented singers I've been ambivalent towards in past reviews, but can you imagine this shit if he sounded like someone else? Bah.
It's so much more tuneful and sonically varied than similar hardcore from that era, and consequently so much more fun and smart and dark and joyful and sarcastic and earnest in its intention. Man, it's got everything, even some variety in hardcore! And it doesn't overstay its welcome! Easy 5.
Isaac Hayes
3/5
This is a movie soundtrack. Most of these tracks are background for movies, which makes this basically an ambient album but funky. Some good stuff here and the title track is great, but I cannot stress this enough: this is the score of the movie. Culturally significant and enjoyable listen, sure, but it's just ambient funk with a few songs. The title theme isn't enough to lift it above that.
Pink Floyd
5/5
Right off the bat: I don't love this. A lot of it is boring, and as someone who doesn't smoke weed, and possibly more importantly did not smoke weed as a teenager, this album doesn't have those associations that maybe a lot of other people seem to have. So is it overrated? Yes. Is it also very good? Yes. I regularly ding albums for not having shape, well, this one DOES. In spades. The boring stuff fits into a larger whole, even when it gets annoyingly noodly. The fact that this had singles is kinda wild, it really is one complete piece. No individual song is particularly GOOD, but the whole thing together, man. Respect where it's due.
Beastie Boys
4/5
Look, I was planning on docking this down. It's immature in both a puerile and a "look at me I'm a very naughty boy in high school having a party and sneaking alcohol in the bathroom" while I am almost 40 listening to this shit. But you know what? It's high energy. The hits are still fun. And even if my fighting for my right to stay up past 11 to party is in an entirely different form, it's hard to argue that the songs here are infectious, loud, and full-throttle.
Black Sabbath
5/5
Ok, you start off with War Pigs and then it doesn't go downhill from there? It goes straight into Paranoid? A lot of these songs are long in the tooth because they get played so. much. but even with that they're still great. And 1970? Man, I've given other bands on this list credit for doing less, later. Sure, it's kind of rehashed blues, and it's a little formulaic in how the songs are constructed, but that's looking 50 years backwards. The rehashed blues and formula-driven sound are on fire.
Hell of an album.
Miles Davis
4/5
I like to think I don't know shit about jazz and that if you played me this or Colgate Comedy Hour legends like Marcus "The Worm" Hicks or Paul Bufano, I would not be able to tell the difference. But I'd be lying to myself. I am fucking AMAZED that I know all these songs. I've never listened to this album, I don't really listen to jazz willingly except when I feel like I should acculturate myself to something different, but I recognize this stuff. And it's good! It's kinda like listening to good opera, or good classical - it just sticks with you.
I don't know what modal jazz is. I don't know what bebop is. I read about these things and it's like reading higher level math. I think a lot of jazz sounds like elevator music (which I would not argue with someone who said this one does, too) and I don't know the finer points. But this is just nice, pleasant music. Easy to put on, easy to listen to, something to make everyone but the most distinguished hater happy.
Deep Purple
3/5
Standard metal. I gave them credit for Machine Head, which felt ahead of its time being 2 years after this, but this doesn't feel special. Standard hard rock that, like Machine Head, tends to go on too long. Certainly faster than the Black Sabbath I just reviewed from the same year, but I'm not surprised that caught on and this didn't. I may be dinging them for feeling old in a way that they weren't when they were knew, but Led Zeppelin IV is just a year away and that's head and shoulders and chest above this. The energy is there, it just feels kind of like something I'd think would kick a lot of ass when I was 12. Unkind 3, it still rocks: speed king is a winner, for instance, and the album has its moments, even with its goofy dated bullshit and often overwrought vocals and organ overload - I like organs but man it's like more cowbell.
Dusty Springfield
3/5
Lovely voice, a little overwrought on the arrangements. Too much of a good thing, as these 60s pop albums often are. Son of a preacher man is great, but everything else is just fine.
Stevie Wonder
4/5
Maybe listening to this on spotify was a mistake - it felt flat until Living For The City, which is a track I know and like anyway, but even then it's got this skit in the middle which kills the momentum in a classic song. Then we get Golden Woman, which is fine, and Higher Ground which is another classic. So we have this big songs but the album never really gets going. Kind of a wasted opportunity because the big songs really are so big. I feel like there's a 5 star album here, but instead it's a 4 because I think there's a prominent lack of editing. It feels disrespectful, but it also feels correct. Maybe a victim of being released during his absolutely prodigious output in the early 70s.
De La Soul
5/5
This one is tough. Like Paul's Boutique, it features an insane smorgasbord of samples (famously or infamously). It's got a flow like De La Soul, it's a complete product as an album (which I always give respect to) but here comes the BUT! It features some...youthful exuberance that I'm a little old for now? I dinged the beastie boys for it. It's a little long, I complain about many albums being too long. Can I hold this against it? After sitting and listening, I can't, even though I've held it against other albums. Fun almost all the way through, and anywhere it trips it gets right up and keeps going, which is almost inspiring. It's a great.
The Darkness
2/5
Is it glam? Is it cock rock? Who cares. It's fun, fully committed, and way too much of a thing, good or not. Sounds like if John Fred were really into Def Leppard. I like I Believe in a Thing Called Love but since it's the fourth track, I'm finding the rest of the album increasingly trying.
Metallica
3/5
Goddamn, this thing is an hour? I can see why they made their butt-rock turn away from thrash - this feels like when hardcore bands stopped doing as much hardcore because it got boring - and yet it's still an hour. And hten all the songs are like 6-10 minutes long? Jeez. I dunno, this has the problem that a lot of these middling albums have where it's good all the way across, but not great, and it doesn't do anything to hold my interest for all the good it is because it's too damn long. Whatever, put a couple of songs on and PR your deadlift, but compare to Sepultura who had, in my opinion, a lot more musical variety, a tighter runtime, and shorter songs. Feels like less than the sum of its parts.
Echo And The Bunnymen
3/5
I never got into Echo and the Bunnymen and I don't really know why: they're adjacent to a lot of bands I love out of a time I think was pretty exciting for music, but listening to this I think I know why. Totally innocuous album. Some of these songs are really great, some of them are not so great. Almost wanna give this a 4 because a couple of moments really hit for me, but overall it feels pretty one note. I think people doing something similar did it a little better.
Radiohead
5/5
I was playing with the idea of being a hater since this album is, in fact, pretentious, but being pretentious doesn't preclude being good. It's up its own ass and lacks the urgency that I love about The Bends, but that also doesn't make it a worse album. It's a complete whole, with good individual songs that fit well together, and is an apex sad thoughtful teen album. It's also a little bit of a time capsule - it's been riffed on by later artists so many times that it's got a seinfeld effect going on, but stuck squarely in the 90s. As is often the case, could probably use a little editing! But that's look back 30 years, it probably worked better then. Still, between this The Bends, and Kid A, Radiohead's basically earned every self-indulgent tack they've taken since.
Orbital
4/5
Not a bad album, but I feel like it's on here because it's a more complete album than Orbital 2 (despite Halycon + on + on being one of the best songs around) so as a "you must hear it before you die" it gets ranked higher and these guys deserve the credit. So yeah, album wise? It's fine. But it doesn't have any real bangers and suffers from what music like this always suffers from in a greatest albums thunderdome: it lacks the force to really blow you away simply because of what and how it is.
All that bloviating out of the way, great tunes. One of those groups that doesn't piss me off that the songs are fifteen fucking minutes long because they have a really great sense of how to do the variations on a theme thing. Simultaneously want to ding it and laud it for its relative variety.
Jethro Tull
4/5
Just some early 70s proggy dad rock. The flute is good, haters stay mad. I guess it's a good album? I dunno man, I don't really like this shit, but it's only 41 minutes. Some of these songs are really great and I'm like, 'damn I guess I like Jethro Tull' and then some of the songs I'm like, 'ok this is just these dudes fucking around with their instruments.' So, y'know, it's a land of contrasts I think I gotta bump 'em up for creativity out of 1971, but I don't know if I have to ever return to this.
Iggy Pop
5/5
First pass I was shocked - this is not the Iggy Pop I know! What the hell is this? Why did he start reading Dostoevsky? Second pass I 'got it.' Bowie. Pop. Uhhh, kraftwerk at home? Three great tastes that taste great together. I suppose this came out around the same time as Low, an album I think I underrated, and it shows. Anyway, great album, with a great closer.
The Temptations
4/5
Ate my review, but this is fine. The Temptations are obviously great, and every song is above par, but nothing makes this explode. It's a neat mix of funk and motown, but ultimately kind of forgettable? Never mad to put it on, will almost never feel the need to.
OutKast
4/5
I'm a little surprised that this album makes the cut: the hits are huge and were inescapable, but I'd never actually listened to the album. An album that's two fucking hours long.
Well, Speakerboxx actually bangs. A lot of energy without wearing out its welcome by changing its sound and form. Sounds of its time but not really dated? Really good stuff! Good features to keep it moving, feels like An Album.
The Love Below has even MORE shit going on, where not all of it sticks, but also feels like An Album. Shockingly, the "experimentation" for lack of a better word feels more dated here than it does on Big Boi's half, which is weird cuz I always felt like Andre was the outre one.
Anyway, good stuff, but this shoulda been two separate albums - too much playing on the Outkast name and too little thinking about how different these two pieces are. Two fucking hours, man.
New Order
2/5
Do less.
Radiohead
5/5
Haven't listened to this one in a long time. It's a little bit dated because man, Radiohead really did grow out of this, and like its successor, it's got a bit of seinfeld effect going on given that it's been bitten so much. But in addition to just being a good, it's also a neat transitional point for the band (Thom gets warblier, the fuzz starts to transform, new sounds come in) and a cohesive album. Not as fully realized as OK Computer, but c'mon, look at that bar.
It was nice to revisit it. I'm not the teenage thoughtful sad boy anymore, so Radiohead's appeal has diminished outside of the loud-soft stuff I still love, but ya can't fault the classics anyway.
Michael Jackson
4/5
Hey, play me something I can dance to! I've complained about some of these 80s pop albums feeling flat - by contrast, this one comes out of the gate with something synthetic but fun and high energy. But then we just get kinda more of the same, and then the Real Stinker. You know which one. And then the big hits. You know which ones. I feel like you don't have to say a lot about this album. It's not 5 stars because it could be better, but that's not to say it's not great.
Cyndi Lauper
4/5
Time After Time is a fuckin' megahit and I'll fight anyone who says otherwise.
This album probably woulda ruined my life if I were 15 in 1983. It sounds great! The energy goes on and on! But it's still an artifact of the 80s, for better (mostly better) or worse. Decent variety, creativity, all that fun stuff. I don't love Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, but it sounds good within the album.
It's nice that they let theater kids out of their cages during the day in the 80s. World was more interesting for it. Probably a 3 but bumping it up to a 4 for the fact that if my daughters get into this kind of thing I'll be proud.
Willie Nelson
5/5
Lovely little tunes, lovely little album.
I know less about production than I know about woman, so nothing, but I know what I like. Apparently everyone who was supposed to have a say in it complained about this one sounding unpolished? It sounds exactly the way it should. Fuck 'em, Willie was right.
Sister Sledge
3/5
I don't know how to do this stuff. It's good, no, great! But it's too much and too long and I get bored, because it's more of the same. Eeeeeeeh.
The Rolling Stones
3/5
Sympathy For The Devil is a great song, but I don't understand how people are so in love with this play-acting mirror-universe country shit. Like, I'm not one to complain about appropriation but this shit just rings really fake, like the blues at Disney World. They're talented, but something just doesn't sit right with me. They're better when they're not wearing those blues clothes. Just can't wrap my head around it.
Eminem
3/5
Think this one needs a critical reappraisal. Let's get the obvious out of the way: the beats are good. The rhymes and flow are good. The album's a complete picture (we'll come back to this). The skits, usually tiresome, actually fit the album.
The bad: It's juvenile. It's a little one note, especially for an hour (so rare for an album to be over an hour and not get tiresome).
And now the critical reappraisal: the misogyny and violence. Yeah, no shit. This album is an expression of Eminem's id, the ugly, evil stuff. It's not condoning it. It's not condemning it. It's unapologetic - the apologies come later in his career. This is a picture of a person, not a complete whole. This is an outpouring of juvenile frustration and what that looks like deep inside. He doesn't want to murder Kim, sometimes he feels like he wants to murder her and what does that feel like. This is emo music. It's no different from Linkin Park or, uh, Thursday, just from a different angle. However, I am almost 40 and this stuff holds little appeal to me.
This is the perfect music for a certain kind of angsty 15 year old boy and the absolute worst kind of music for a different kind of angsty 15 year old boy. The media literacy on display with respect to this album seems to show that people believe the population is more the latter than the former.
Tracy Chapman
4/5
What a talent. Pretty great stuff here, conscientious, melodic, smooth. Not too long, not too short. My only gripe, which isn't a real gripe but is personal taste, and is something I've dinged a lot of albums on, is that it doesn't blow me away. It's good. It's very good. But the mellow tone and simple sound leave me feeling like I want a little more. Shameful 4.
Peter Gabriel
3/5
The Devil, Prog, Pop, and New Wave Are Raging Inside Me. Good ideas either taken too far or not far enough, can't tell which. Storytelling that's about as subtle as a sledgehammer (ha!). Dinged down for being high concept but also not cohesive.
Grateful Dead
3/5
Hey man, it's fine, I guess.
The Velvet Underground
4/5
It's good. Hey, maybe it's even great. And it's wild that it came out in '67, but like so many of these albums, it mostly reminds me of later albums that I'd rather be listening to. The sound is there, the transgression is there, the just-so slightly out-of-place lyricism and vocals stand on their own as kind of a dare. But really I could be listening to Iggy Pop instead. Lou Reed has a knack for a hook as any Tribe Called Quest fan will tell you and that's really doing a lot of work here. Hated Nico's solo shit but like it here.
Obviously ahead of its time, but if all the bands that came after had influenced this instead and it showed up in '77, it probably wouldn't be so heavily lauded. Maybe I'm just a dummy, but it doesn't attract me the way I feel something this formative should.
The Mamas & The Papas
3/5
Crazy, I was just singing Monday Monday to my kid yesterday! Because today is Monday! It's nice when art can enter your life with subjects like Days of The Week.
Anyway, Monday Monday and California Dreamin' are great tunes that rise above but are still the same as the rest of this general 60s hippie folk/pop type thing. It's good, but the hits are hits for a reason and the others are not for basically the same reason. Pleasant.
Orbital
5/5
I said it before and I'll say it again: Orbital has a talent for playing variations on a theme. It only rewards the patient (or bored) and I can easily see someone dropping out of the album early on, but there's something here that just builds on itself in a way that I find compelling. But, it's still early nineties beep boop and that can overwhelm me on close listening.
I was gonna dock this, but I realized I was being a hater. It helps that HALYCON + ON + ON is one of the greatest songs ever so you know what? Let's give it a 5.
Lightning Bolt
3/5
First time I heard Lightning Bolt, I didn't get it. It might be more accurate to say I didn't get noise rock. But now, I do get noise rock, at least some of it, but I still don't get Lightning Bolt. A song or two here or there, nice, yeah, great, but overall I don't think they're really doing anything someone else isn't doing better. I'd rather listen to Hella for something technical, or Melt Banana for some full on noise, or hell, Boredoms. I dunno, I don't dislike it, I just don't like it the way other people do.
This isn't really a review of the album, but what is there to say about it? it's loud, brash, aggressive (and maybe progressive in 2003, I can't contextualize this appropriately) and some decent fun with more talent than a lot of these 1 star reviews are suggesting, but it is, for me, not something I can't find elsewhere that I prefer.
Bummed I never saw 'em live, though - that would be a blast no matter what.
Simon & Garfunkel
4/5
I feel schizophrenic getting this after Lightning Bolt. These guys piss me off so much: they make the wimpiest, most self-satisfied music around and they're extremely talented. Fuckers!
Cocteau Twins
5/5
A nice mix of "is this the most 80s thing I've ever heard" and "this could have been made today." But really more 80s. It's also a little bit like babby's first shoegaze: we got the full-on sound, the Cure-like guitar, but it's all dialed back from 11. I guess dat's dream pop! Anyway, I like it but don't love it because it leaves me wanting something heavier. Personal taste that doesn't take anything from an accomplished piece here.
There was really something in the water in Scotland besides industrial run-off because some of those folks can bang out an album.
Beatles
3/5
166 albums to get to the Beatles...and it's A Hard Day's Night. 60s Bubblegum Pop that's ahead of its peers but still bubblegum pop. They're good at what they do, but here, what they do is pretty by the numbers stuff. 30 minutes is not long enough to get on my nerves.
The Dave Brubeck Quartet
4/5
I whinge about jazz and how I don't know anything about it so I'm little lost and don't know my ass from a modal shift, but this album I know. Maybe it's babby's first jazz and the big brained jazzercisists have all moved on to more complicated stuff, but I don't really care. It's good.
Black Sabbath
4/5
More interesting than some of the other stuff coming out around this time, music for the weirdos. That said, later Sabbath is just better. I don't want to call this dull, or that time has passed it by, but despite being more varied than contemporaries, it's not that...I'm struggling to find a word that's not "interesting", so I'll say it didn't grip me. Still a good album, though. RIP Ozzy, 55 years of being a cultural force.
Manic Street Preachers
3/5
Don't know how to handle this one. Do I like it? No. Why not? It has the shoutiness, the angularity, the aggression, the erudition, the socially and politically and personally charged lyricism that I love in other, something like similar bands. It just feels like less than the sum of its parts in a way that I can't put my finger on. I found myself thinking of Against Me! and Drive Like Jehu, but it never rolled over to "hell yeah."
So anyway, this album is a triumph with respect to a man basically self-immolating and in that sense it's basically perfect in a horrible, voyeuristic kind of way. And yet, it's just not all that good.
Creedence Clearwater Revival
4/5
This album is purestrain CCR: does one thing really well, then keeps doing it. Great music, but really just a collection of songs. 30 minute runtime and I was ready for it to be done, but not mad at the time I spent. Bad Moon Rising is a classic.
Van Morrison
3/5
Honestly fucked up to have this immediately after CCR, because it might as well be the same review. I prefer John Fogerty's dirtier sound, and the fact that these two albums might as well be interchangeable in my mind save for the smooth jazz background, I'm inclined to ding this lower, but you know what? Perfectly good music Of This Kind. Good, but could probably go through life without having heard this, though.
Malcolm McLaren
2/5
Tough one. Mclaren sucks and in 2025 this isn't nearly as cool as it might have felt in 1983, but it does have some good samples and isn't a real pain to listen to. It probably blew a hole in some people's brains way back when. To my great shame, I don't hate this as much as I feel like I should, but does it do what I want it to do?
I'm not against plumbing world music, per se: Talking Heads do it well (better than here) and Graceland manages to put something together that borrows...a lot, to be diplomatic. At least there's something interesting happening here, albumically speaking, both in the micro and macro sense - the cobbling of sound is theoretically a good way to add something new without really bringing anything new and it helps define the sound of the album. Unfortunately, "interesting" can go both ways and here it's leaning trite and half-baked rather than a genuine creative act. Hater hat on - this is the same shit as Graceland but less musical and more kind of a shitty bricolage.
Stevie Wonder
3/5
Honestly, if this weren't Stevie Wonder, it'd probably rate higher. For him? Kinda middling when compared to his other output.
Raekwon
4/5
Another one that I'm of two minds on. I like a lot of the Wu solo stuff, but for some reason Raekwon never clicked for me. I know, I know, I'm wrong, but that's where I stand. Maybe I think the mafioso-reimagined-as-gangbanger thing that seemed to have a lot of presence after this album was just Too Much and I'm a white kid from the suburbs. I've seen enough de Palma Scarface posters on dorm room walls to last a lifetime. Thanks, Rae.
I wanted to give this album a fair shake since I haven't revisited it for a loooong time and you know what? It still doesn't grip me. Ghostface is good, but he's better elsewhere. Raekwon isn't bad, but he doesn't have the...authority? that Ghost does. My mafia-themes dislike aside, the storytelling is prime, with the ambiguity adding a lot. You know what the real problem is here, and it pains me to say? I just don't think the RZA's beats here are good. Sounds like he's sleepwalking through this shit, attention directed at the great beats he could be making for guitar center.
I get it's an accomplishment, but it just doesn't build for me the way I want it to. I paid a lot more attention this time around, and it's certainly better than I remember, but I just don't feel it the way I do other solo projects. To out myself, when GZA's verse came on, my ears perked up immediately. There we go.
Wanna give it a 3, but I have to give it a point for ambition.
B.B. King
4/5
I know blues about as well as I know jazz. Pretty good, dinged down because I don't think I'll come back here save for background music when I'm cooking or something. Fun album, though - live element really adds to the whole thing. Once again, preferring the live albums on this list.
The Band
3/5
Better as an album than as songs, which is both a point in its favor and a point against it because this kind of music pisses me off a little bit. Feels a bit "frat guy discovered older music and shorter shorts" and I think this sound spawned a bunch of imitators who suck ass. I also get shades of Randy Newman, which makes think it would be funny to rescore Toy Story to this.
Morrissey
2/5
Do I hate jangle pop? I think of myself as liking it, and then I hear this. Morrissey is good at what he does, which is a kind of melodramatic drawling about the most maudlin shit. He seems to be in on it, too: maudlin street, etc. And yet, ironically engaging in it is still engaging it and really, shut the fuck up Morrissey. The Smiths had some mega-hits, but it wears on me over time, not over an album. Don't know if I ever need to hear This Charming Man ever again, and yet here we are with something like more of the same. Some of these lyrics, in true Morrissey form, just piss me off. Some interesting guitar (there's that jangle!) but mostly I'm just not that interested in the sounds that are happening here. Credit to it sounding like the 80s without sounding like it's stuck in the 80s, and credit to exploring the varieties of jangle sound, but ultimately I'm just not sure I care. Background music. Probably a 3 but I think there's missed potential (maybe what's missing is the rest of the Smiths) so I'm dockin' ya, Steve. Tempted to bump you back up for dreamin' of Maggie's death but not good enough because the song kind of sucks!
OutKast
4/5
Just a helluva an album with super huge hits. The lesser songs are good, too - it all kind of comes together in a wild, broad whole. But still too long! These guys need an editor! When you have a million good ideas I don't need to hear all of them! I get that's part of what makes it good, but it also makes it annoying. Shameful 4.
Mariah Carey
1/5
The worst of 90s pop/R&B/hip hop production with an immensely talented singer. It's obviously well produced, technically, but the product? Well, the product sucks. I've been too stingy with my 1s, this shit is a big miss. Not even a Mobb Deep sample saves it.
ABBA
3/5
Not exactly a masterpiece, but a masterclass on catchy tunes that get you moving. For the disco on this list, feel like Chic is more cerebral/accomplished but, for all their huge hits, less mersh. There's not much to say about ABBA that hasn't already been said, and all of it, haters and lovers alike, is true. Album moves at a steady clip and is poppy disco stuff. They have a GREAT ear for a particular kind of sound, the hits are huge, but why would anyone listen to the whole thing. Attempts to make it "more" like the inclusion of the title track are just kinda weird rather than additive. A smårgosbord for those into this particular kind of cheese, because by god that's all there is.
The Prodigy
4/5
This album kicks ass. It kicked ass when I was 11 and it kicks ass now, which is weird because a lot of stuff I liked when I was 11 seems kinda trite almost 30 years on. I saw someone talk about how this album, unlike similar electronic-adjacent acts, matches the song structure of a pop hit and it's true: it's harder, heavier, more aggressive, but it's ultimately pop music for people who think they're too cool for it (me). This means that if you're amenable to the general sound, this thing will light up those parts of your brain that are lit up by simple sugars. The hit singles are still great, they do the exact same thing they did in 1997, which is less like time travel and more like a timeless sound. That is rare to come across.
Here comes the but: as an album, it's just ok. Some of the songs feel like filler which goes hand in hand with it being a little too long. I can forgive that, a little bit, but that means it's not a masterpiece. I love it, but because I love it I have to be honest here: it gets docked a point. Probably two, but if this album had just been smack my bitch up, breathe, and firestarter it would've been an all-timer EP, so I can't relegate it to the middle of bell curve.
I said elsewhere that Rod Stewart was on the verge of making good music - well, here it is. It's fine, if a little bit also-ran late 60s early 70s bluesrock stuff. It's at its best when it's going hard, leaning to the edges of out of control, and at it's worse when it's slow and the other guy is singing. Not as good as other stuff of the same type, but you could do worse than this, I guess.
Pink Floyd
3/5
I'm opposed to Pink Floyd mainly because people my age (or, more acccurately, my age when I was 19) who are big Pink Floyd fans tend to be super annoying, so I wanted to do this some justice without letting those feelings cloud it up. I put on The Good Headphones and decided to Pay Attention.
This shit is as pretentious and overwrought as advertised.
Neither of those are real crimes, though, and musicians are often better for it. This? Probably not. I get that it's a rock opera and there's stuff it has to do to maintain a narrative flow, but there's a lot of stuff here that I don't care for BECAUSE it's part of that narrative flow. This is exactly the opposite of how I feel about the Dark Side Of The Moon.
There's good stuff here, bad stuff here, and a corny overarching theme that is laid on irritatingly thickly. Also, Roger Waters' voice shits the bed several times on this album, and not in a cool punk rock way. Like, in a song ruining bad way. The highs are still high, but it's too damn long, a common complaint of mine, but unfortunately editing would change the tenor of the whole thing.
I don't know if I'll ever come back and visit this. Too bombastic. But I can't deny that for all its faults it's still an achievement.
Pulp
4/5
Britpop with focus, some good synth, and, on the faster songs, a driving beat. The creepy-ass slower songs like I Spy fit nicely into the larger whole. Fun songs and the hits are big. Not a masterpiece, but a good, solid album.
Has anyone seen Jarvis Cocker and Bill Nighy in the same room together?
Michael Jackson
4/5
Man, the first half of this album KICKS ASS. I was thinking, man, easy five stars, this rules. And then we go to the back half and it's slower and r&Bier and balladier and it just kills its momentum. I don't think these songs are particularly good (nor particularly bad). Feels like filler. Why can't someone make an album that's not too long, not too short, and just has good music? Dammit.
Bruce Springsteen
4/5
Good album. Great album? It does one thing and does it pretty well, which is be a Bruce album. Born to Run and Thunder Road are great singalongs, the energy is high, the lyrics evocative, the E street band all blasting away, but there's nothing that makes this more than what it is. I like it. Do I love it? I dunno - it manages to be only 40 minutes and feel longer, which isn't necessarily a negative but something I think about. Also, sometimes: too much piano makes me think of Billy Joel. So it gets dinged, even if that means my wife divorces me.
Steve Earle
3/5
Weird album. Feels like it's in between a bunch of stuff I do like, but this does nothing for me. A little too country, a little too 80s rock, a little too 60s nashville, a little too troubadour, a little too slick, a little too rough? Obviously talented and well-composed and it seems like this is a good dude, but I think I'd put my energy elsewhere. Gonna check out his other stuff to see where he evolved, because I'm sure it's somewhere more at the edges than this, at the center.
LCD Soundsystem
3/5
Despite this coming out as my hipsterdom was an its ascendence, I never got into this band. I think I was too into hardcore or something. Anyway, because this missed me, the disco dancing stuff kinda misses me. As electronic music, it feels anemic. As neo-dance, it feels one note. As dance punk, it feels more like a movie soundtrack. As post-punk, well, it's probably there, but the way it sneers feels a little, uh, on the nose? That seems pretty post-punky. Anyway, this is all to say that there are some good sounds here but not having been ripping PBRs on my fixie to this, I don't keep the good feelings around.
The United States Of America
4/5
At its best when it's being weird, which is unfortunately not all the time, because sometimes it's being a Jefferson Airplane clone with charged lyrics. I wonder if time has dulled its edge, since a lot of the stuff happening here is no longer no and exciting (save the opening track, which is fucking WILD and genius). That said, it's very good and the only reason I'm not giving it a 5 star is because, at its worst, it sounds a little too stuck in 1968 for something that's supposed to be so avant-garde. Hater hat, though, because otherwise this is a real gem. I'd call it forgotten because I've never heard of it, but there's a whole list of albums I've never heard of so not sure about that.
Metallica
5/5
Hey man, this album kicks ass. This is waaaay better than "...and justice for all." They wrote their own check with this thing, any amount of bullshit noodling and butt rock is forgiven. Normally I bitch about songs being too long: nothing overstays its welcome. It doesn't disappear up its own ass. It's just cool and good.
Yes
2/5
Why is Brahms on here? Like pretty much everything on here, it's more of more. This album is really like 2 (maybe 3) songs with a boatload of filler in between 'em, and the songs have filler, too. Virtuosic, but also boring.
Sepultura
4/5
This feels like...1999, although I see now that it's more like 1996. Moderately ahead of its time! Feels cohesive and innovative in a way that a lot of nu-metal simply is not. I hear this and I can hear my college roommate's voice chastising me for not lifting heavy, but hey, it's pretty good. Like so many of these older, edge-of-radio albums, best when it's integrating other sounds (which it does fluently) and at its worst when it's evoking what are now and maybe were then nu-metal tropes.
Björk
4/5
How do you even listen to this? It's so specific and so broad at the same time, I went through it twice (once will at a slow jog, once at my desk) and neither was quite right. I kept feeling this alien sensation of something very close to me being evaluated in new light. I kept trying to pin what else this album was reminded me of, in an instant it was there and then it was gone. This thing is one of a kind, and better for it. Here comes the but! I didn't pierce my heart he way I felt it should. Cowardly criticism? Maybe. But there's so much being swirled around in here I feel like it should personally affect me more in a way that it just didn't. Great, great album, worth listening to, but I don't think I can in good conscience give it a 5 for some reason as alien as this album feels.
Talk Talk
2/5
Feels VERY mid-80s. The driving beat and guitar dipshittery really annoys me, which bothers me more than it should because I WANT to like some of this. If this album had been made ten years later it probably would sound like Radiohead, instead it sounds like hexagonal drum sets and hairspray.
Curtis Mayfield
3/5
It's fine, I guess. Certainly a better album than Shaft, but feels pretty by the numbers funk? Historically it sounds like it was a big deal but I don't think that makes it any better. Somewhere between a 3 and a 4 but the weaknesses of being a soundtrack and having to hew to a film means that it feels pretty one note.
Common
3/5
Feels like a both a high point and a dying gasp for backpack rap, like the genre had been wrung out and this was all that's left. Technically excellent, souful, committed, and nothing new. I bet Kanye's beats hit harder 20 years ago but having heard them for those 20 years, it feels...not dated, but not fresh, either. Kind just a normal part of the soundscape. Solid album, victim of its competency in that it doesn't do anything interesting because it does everything perfectly well. 3 is too harsh and also maybe a bit too much.
Violent Femmes
5/5
Went through my life thinking this album came out ten years later. What a zap to the brain this must've been in 83. Don't have much to say about this: tightly controlled slightly-out-of-control. It's fun, it gets you moving without doing too much, it's infectious. I'm pro.
King Crimson
4/5
Hey man, how's that fugue state going? Blink twice if you're good. No, not syncopated, just, like, normal blinks. Ok, cool. You're back. Sorry, there's some noodly shit going on in the middle. Yeah it keeps going, every song is like seven fucking minutes. I know, but it'll grow on you. Oh, oh, you're doing the thing where you're blinking really fast again, I'll let you go.
Calexico
3/5
Haven't thought about this band in...probably 20 years? They never grabbed me originally because it was this kind of forlorn indie rock type thing that I simply wasn't interested in, so in they went into the stack with a bunch of medium-energy bands that played small venues in the cupboard of my mind.
So now, having forgotten pretty much everything about them except that they exist, I get to listen to new ears: and guess what, it's pretty much the same thing. Plumbs a lot of different sounds but still orbits around that early 2000s indie, which makes me want to go explore the southwestern sound more than the indie. I'll admit I played it for my kids in the car because I thought it would be interesting for them, and they didn't hate it. I wouldn't mind listening to this with a beer on a hot day somewhere not the city, but that's not really my life so it'll go back into the stacks. So, y'know, it's good, but I'm docking it a point because I feel like it's at its best when it's country-cum-mexicana and at its worst when it's indie-rock-cum-mexicana, which is what it is most of the time.
Goldfrapp
2/5
A pleasant nothing album. There's a place in the world for this, but it's not the lofty heights. Almost forgot I listened to this as I was listening to it. 2 is harsh since it's not bad but I think I'm mad it's on the list.
James Brown
3/5
Bothers me that this hits me as just fine. The Sam Cooke album was SO GOOD that this had to be basically the same thing, right? Well, it's not. It sounds like there might be energy in the room but it doesn't really come through on the recording, which sounds a little muddled. It's like too much and too little of a good thing. Also it's 30 minutes, one third of which is one song. It's a good song, but it's just kinda weird.
Sex Pistols
5/5
Everyone (well, everyone for whom punk music turned a little key in their souls) has a story about the first time they heard the sex pistols. For me, it was Pretty Vacant and I was...ten? Eleven? Thank you my weirdo theater teacher. When I sought out the other stuff, I thought it was too loud, too aggressive. Oh, how times change. And that's really it, isn't it? In a lot of ways, I've changed. Music has changed. What can be done, musically, has changed. And this has, in some ways, been left behind. That said, this is as much a musical expression (a decent one, which I'll get to, but not exactly expert) as it is a corporate one (make a good album instead of a bunch of singles and filler! Malcolm Mclaren is selling some bullshit!) and a cultural one that's mostly separate from the music. It's Important in all three categories, which is pretty insane.
The energy starts high, stays high, never lets up. The lyrics are singable and also excoriating (for the 70s, at least). The musicianship is...where it needs to be. As is the production. At just under 40 minutes, it's both the right length and maybe even a little too long, given the samey-ness happening for a lot of these tunes, but that's punk music, baby! Later bands learned to cut their shit off at 23 minutes. Speaking of which, you can hear better bands here, because so many bands have basically ripped this off and run with it.
This is a hard one. Everything that would be dinged about this album should it have come from another band are actually positives on this one, and it's such a giant cultural impact that actually kind of holds up. Is it great? Not really. Right place, right time. But is it good? Yeah, it is, actually. That energy really carries this whole thing, and John Lydon may have gotten his head stuck up his ass, re: music and PIL and selling out, but he did seem to have a nose for what's what. I don't feel the need to ever listen to it, but for what it is, it's pretty close to perfect. If this were released in 1984, it would be a 3. But it wasn't, so it's a 5. Unfair? Irregular? Capricious? Why not.
XTC
2/5
Some pretty cool stuff happening here, but musically, all the people saying "worse version of tears for fears" are on the money. Clever lyrics, and interesting composition and sounds can't save it. Sometimes you hear the Beach Boys, and then you immediately hear the intro to a sitcom and then you get this dry talk-singing. Frankly, I don't care for the singer's voice - acquired taste, I guess, because I just gave Johnny Rotten props for his inadequacies, just here it feels like a choice. Everything about this album feels like very conscious choices and it didn't make something I like, so there we go. Every time I think we're picking up steam, we don't. Missed opportunity cancels out interesting ideas.
Willie Colón & Rubén Blades
3/5
It's fine, I guess. Wish I had a drink with little umbrella in it, maybe some guayaba. Or maybe I'd be in a crime movie from the 70s where I have a really big lapel. Decent variety here, but nothing for me to pick this out of a lineup of similar stuff because I don't know what I'm listening for. Cool that it had some samples, though!
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
4/5
Pretty good. I'm not a Nick Cave convert (despite giving the Abbatoir Blues 5 stars - that album took me by surprise!) but I have to say this sure is An Album. My feelings on the content notwithstanding, it's a solid, tight effort with plenty of theatricality that has been cribbed from heavily by hardcore-singer-cum-acoustic-guitar-guys of the mid 2000s. Musically, it's a bit down, plenty dour, and something that I probably don't have any reason to ever really listen to unless my family is murdered and I'm plotting revenge and need to get in the mindset. I can only take so many "he's dead and she had sailor tattoos" lyrics. But it's all sound, musically! He's a talented guy with a talented crew, so I bump it up because of of its dedication to its form and sticking the landing.
The Rolling Stones
2/5
This kind of sucks? I listened to the UK version, so I missed paint it black, which I like, and instead got a bunch of organ tooting and baroque rock and dumbass lyrics? I keep being unimpressed by the stones average output while still quite liking the big hits, and this one has the hit missing! I thought I liked Under My Thumb thanks to a social distortion cover I discovered on Kazaa years ago, but there's still a bunch of tooting and shit on it? Seems like a lot of people hate Going Home but it might be the best thing on this album, feels less fake blues than their other stuff. I gotta say, this album was kind of a slog. No wonder the velvet underground made waves.
Ray Charles
3/5
Very cool album concept that doesn't really live up to itself. Sounds fine, Ray Charles is obviously masterful, but it's still just ok music. Momentous and important, yeah, worth listening, but not like, an all-timer.
Kanye West
3/5
I know this is supposed to be like, the greatest rap album of the early 2000s, but I really just don't like it very much. High school football team pre-game music. Kanye's a talented producer and an overrated rapper with a couple of banger lines, and this album showcases that. Some really great sampling, some really impressive features, some catchy tunes, but even if the album weren't a packed 75 minutes that feels longer, it would overstay its welcome. Great achievement and great debut, but well before the end, I'm done with it. Straddling a 3 and 4, thinking of going up because it ends pretty strong but Last Call is, in my opinion, a showcase of Kanye's mediocre flow. Maybe not mediocre, but one note. Either way, it just doesn't hit me the way it hits other people.
Green Day
3/5
Power chord pop punk album that has some great energy that unfortunately feels very...in stasis. Like, it doesn't rise in energy, or give you a break, it's the same thing across the board, which is both a little tiring and a little boring. Sure, it has its slower parts (my god, jesus of suburbia and homecoming are ten minutes long and contain several songs within) but the [slavoj zizek voice] eneffable, indeshcribable sho-called quality of "energy" ish consistent and ineshcapable, like late-capitalishm and itsh internalizhed critiques. It definitely sounds like Green Day, but I have to say I don't love the turn from gen x wastrel to political demagogue simply because the lyrical content isn't really up to the task. It's aged well, but it was never very up to aging in the first place. It's kind of like a longer version of The Decline.
So do I hate it? I dunno, I might? It's fine. Musically, it does what it says on the tin: catchy pop punk. Dookie was my first musical love and I was a bit too cool for this one when it came out, partly because I thought the political bent was kind of facile. Which I think I was right about, but probably for the wrong reasons. I have to give credit for attempting the rock opera, a format I struggle with, but I think it works here. Pretty cool to have work in a chiastic format, which always deserves some points, but still too clever by half. Ultimately, the whole thing feels a little superficial. Harsh 3.
New York Dolls
3/5
Ate my review, damn. Anyway, fun, sloppy, rock. Gets a bit one-note so it drags, but it's cool to see where so much stuff pulled from (like nation of ulysses). Impressed this is from '73.
David Bowie
4/5
From the first note, it's very clearly Ahead Of Its Time. Or maybe it's out of time - a mix of everything from the past, present, and future of 1977. That doesn't make it good, but does make it prescient and sprawling. Of course, Heroes is a GREAT song and it settles nicely into this album. The closer I listen, the less I like it, but the more barely tuned in I am, the more I like it. Weird one. I was prepared for Eno's bullshit at the end, pretty good.
I think I was too harsh on Low, but it was early in my 1001 albums career. Like it, I think this album might be more than the sum of its parts.
Linkin Park
1/5
I was in the crosshairs of this shit as something of a loser teen in the year 2000 but, while I appreciated the heavy sound as a radio hit, it never clicked for me the way it seems to have clicked for many. I do have a soft spot for In The End, though. On revisit, it's not as heavy as I remember, which is the only thing I thought I liked about it. There's just too much going on and not enough substance to carry all that going on. Chester's a good vocalist but the lyrics are juvenile angst and the introduction of 'alternative' sounds at best don't add anything, which is why I guess Mike Shinoda got more or less relegated to the margins on later albums. A good debut effort from kids who came out of a garage, but as a supposed world-beating album, what a letdown. I think they grew into this sound, which is shockingly limited, but again, I can't square this album's obvious impact with what I'm hearing.
This album kind of sucks. Surprised that I dislike it as much as I do, because even the stuff that I might remember fondly just isn't there for me, or it isn't enough to overcome the possibility of managing everything at once. Really trying. Might be harsh, but I think I'd rather listen to Suicide or Butterfly over this.
Steely Dan
3/5
I like this a lot more than Aja, because, where Aja is the apotheosis of the Steely Dan Sound (which, while technically accomplished, fucking sucks) this is more of them finding the sound so there's more stuff that's not there yet. The big hits are well known and while a bit too much, still good. So there's that. I just don't like Steely Dan, man. It's almost music to go to sleep to, but instead it's music that seems to creep in through your window from your neighbor playing it too loud while you're trying to go to sleep and it's boring as shit but also not so staid that you can actually ignore it.
The Charlatans
3/5
Knew what this was gonna sound like based on the album art and year and I was on the nose. Perfectly passable britpop with nothing to distinguish it.
Hawkwind
3/5
Stoner rock. Nice sound, but shit drags. I guess that's a feature, not a bug, but I don't need 2 hours of this. On the other hand, they fuckin' went for it, so kudos to them, I guess. Won me over in theory if not in reality.
Frank Sinatra
3/5
It's fine, I guess. Not much place for this stuff in my life.
Gorillaz
5/5
Tremendous album that also has a lot of of half-finished thoughts. Not quite stinkers, maybe not even skips, but they're not good songs. That's part of the appeal, though: the whole thing is kind of a "what if...?" that works, even when it doesn't. The hits are huge, of course, and the fact that they were thrift store keyboard presents somehow make them better, not worse. At an hour, it's too long for something that is fundamentally an experiment, but understandable.
Musically, the combo of the plodding beats, the beeping boops, and Damon's languid crooning are a good mix, and the addition of Del freestyling the dumbest shit on top of the above is a nice mix. One thing I hadn't noticed was some slight bleed from Damon Albarn's work with Michael Nyman. Nice way to soften the digital precision. Twisting the dials to get just the right mix is obviously a work in progress, but if you favor beepboop, some tracks might land better than others, but if you're a britpop fan, you may appreciate differently. Dialing one of the sounds of the future takes time.
The interesting thing about this album is that it's kind of a funhouse mirror to pop music - the visual aesthetic is so heavily tied to the sound, something that doesn't really show up when just listening. It's an art piece as much as a band/album, and both are good. Don't think it's a 5 album, but I do think it's a 5 gestalt. I mean, who remembers Geep Simulator? How many albums encourage a multi-media experience that extends to a (shitty) flash game? It might be cheating to include Everything but since I was around for it and entranced by it I'm gonna give it the bump.
One thing about this list, as an aside, is how it shows how time has compressed for me. I remember this coming out and going, "wow blur was making music a long time ago, Mr. Albarn! What a new and exciting sound you have!" and this was only two years after 13? A blink.
Tricky
3/5
Never heard of this, though perhaps I should have. It's...fine? I don't know, it has a time and a place and I can assure you that sitting in my home office looking at spreadsheets is not a conducive listening environment for this kind of thing. Trip hop usually sits in the background, and I don't think this album is any different, but it sometimes pushes its way to the front. Unfortunately, I don't feel like it's a very good Album - each song is nice, but probably something I want to download off KaZ0aA and listen to piecemeal while playing counterstrike at 1 AM in 2001. Also Unfortunately, the standout track is Hell is Round the Corner, which really is just a Portishead track. Don't hate it but it didn't click with me.
Probably a landmark album for a mediocre genre, but I turned on the music in the car this morning so I could play the beach boys for my kids and this started autoplaying. When I switched over to Mr. Wilson, I thought I heard some similarities with Pet Sounds. Who knows, maybe I'm a dumbass, but could be something there.
The Auteurs
3/5
'X but shittier' seems to be an apt description here. Take your pick from a variety of Xs: britpop bands, alt-rock bands, post-jangle-pop bands, 80s indie rock bands. I dunno, it's serviceably made but I'm struggling recall a single thing that might make this interesting, even in '93. I'm feeling nice, so it gets a 3, because Home Again sounds like it might have influenced Ted Leo.
Led Zeppelin
4/5
Damn, i had a whole thing about how zeppelin is good but i hate them, and this debut is also good, but some of the songs are too long and robert plant sounds kind of annoying on them (the longer ones). Oh well, helluva debut.
King Crimson
5/5
Ok man I gotta admit it: Robert Fripp is a mad genius. Whatever that man's project is, I gotta say: he's really doing something. This is an A+ album, where even the nothing noodling dipshittery in the middle of Moonchild has its place. The guy loves a ballad, and well, there's one here, sports fans! But really it's just stuffed full of ideas and unlike Outkast (didn't see that comparison coming, did you?), who also have a gorillion ideas, these all fit into a tight little package. One and done, move on. Economy AND a pile of riches, wow.
This isn't an album you can just tell someone to listen to: they have to make it here on their own. But when they get here, whoa, it's 1969! Anyway, too bad this spawned so many other prog-rock imitations. Otherwise unimpeachable.
Lynyrd Skynyrd
4/5
Has a full, realized sound that overstays its welcome because, save for the guitar solos, the riffs are pretty simple and repeated heavily. "Well, that's music, idiot!" Yeah I know, but music at 3 minutes vs 7 minutes doesn't make me go "ok yeah I got it." So that's the thing I dislike up front, because otherwise it's a solid basket of tunes. Songs are too long and the album is too short, even if it feels like parts of it (back half) can't rise up to the rest of the songs.
The Replacements
5/5
Gonna get it out of the way that this was always gonna be a 5 if I saw it on this list. One of my favorites and has been in rotation for something like 20 years.
It's not a perfect album. But if it were, it wouldn't be a Replacements album. I recently read something (like yesterday) that an artist's flaws are perhaps more important than their strengths because it's what gives them personality. Of course, you gotta be good in the first place, but to be human is what makes you interesting. You might think it was written about the 'Mats, but it name dropped Matisse, so you'd be wrong, but it really fits, doesn't it? Who but the Replacements would slot a cheesy Kiss cover between stone-cold all-timers like Androgynous and Unsatisfied? And who else could make it work? Why are there songs about boners, and why do you find yourself absent mindedly humming a song about boners in front of your kids (honorable mention to Diarrhea Planet's Ghost With a Boner, I guess)? Actually, every song on this album has been hummed absentmindedly in front of my kids. The highs are high, the lows gleefully roll in the mud, and they all play nice together. A triumph of post-pubescent demand to be in the world.
The Cult
2/5
Dunno what the deal with this album is. The singer sometimes sounds like Danzig, which is kinda cool, but otherwise it sounds like also-ran cock rock. Which can be fun, but this kind of sucks. Wait, that's not fair: it's perfectly competent, but it doesn't rise to the level of Real Fun that I'd expect from this kind of thing. Back of the pack fodder, but can understand why it made an impact on the youth who heard it at the right time.
You know what really sucks ass, though? That "Born To Be Wild" cover. Practically art in its deficiency.
The Velvet Underground
4/5
A fully realized piece of art that's not all that fun to listen to. Can't imagine anyone being like, "hey, I'm in the mood to listen to The Gift." As a total package, obvious how this is Your Favorite Band's Favorite Band's Favorite Band because it really does do what it wants to do and, well, it does it well. But again, it's not super fun to listen to. No wonder everyone describes the velvet underground as being the inspiration for so many other bands, the other bands made music. Lou Reed's ear for a hook doesn't really show up here too much, so much plodding through these songs, which I guess makes the noisy sections a welcome respite. I like da noise.
Alanis Morissette
4/5
Well, this young lady is very upset!
This album came out before I was really making my own decisions about music, but was Around That Time, so I heard all the hits and they're catchy but they don't resonate with me. Part of that is being a little young, part of that is not being dumped by an older guy and then being super pissed that he's dating someone else, because I was not a gay 9 year old. That means that I have this history of having heard and consumed the hits without them really registering on me, so listening to it now is both with tired and fresh ears, and those ears tell me this sounds EXTREMELY 90s. Did this album define the sound, or was it part of the sound? I don't know. I'm surprised at how young she sounds to my older ears, which makes the album a little bit more impressive. Its pop credentials are just the tip of an iceberg of a larger, maybe better album, but it still doesn't resonate with me because I still have not been angry that an older dude dumped me after I went down on him. Gets the bump for being a complete package, despite not really being my deal.
Green Day
5/5
This album was the defining sound of me being 10, but I stopped listening to Green Day when they released Warning, apparently an album bad enough to taint the back catalog. So how does it hold up now, 25 years later when just about my only exposure was listening to American Idiot on this particular list?
It remains a juvenile expression of juvenile angst, high energy and engaging. It's the apotheosis of This Particular Flavor of pop punk, from the affected drawl, the paint-by-numbers chordsmanship, and the consistent tempo. It's great. Maybe a little too long for my tastes today, but back in 1994, 40 minutes was a great value. Even if it were just the middle third, it'd be a deal.
One thing that stands out: Basket Case doesn't. I remember it being an anthem, but it's anonymous out of the rest of the album.
Elastica
3/5
This is a positive 3, not a coward's 3 or a negative 3. This album is Fine. I'd like to hear it again, maybe. But nothing about it stands out - it's a bridge from the 80s post punk, a rebadging and re-sounding of something to meet that modern 90s sound! It's got some fuzz, it's got some of that 90s guitar noise (like garbage, maybe?) and a slightly hidden but still intelligible vocalist. It has all the pieces, it puts 'em to good use, and it would fit perfectly with a 90s mid-20s gen-x make-it-in-the-real-world movie. But it doesn't do anything that, looking back, makes me go, "oh whoa they did that." Sometimes I get an album like this and I go, "it's fine." This is fine, too - a little bit better than that but nothing I need anyone else to get on board with.
Given the choice, I listen to Wire.
Solange
3/5
Is there such a thing as too stripped down? We might be reaching it here. This album sounds pleasant, which is a stark contrast to the subject matter, but pleasant, sonically, is about as far as it goes. It never goes big, or small, it moseys along at its blithe pace and that's about it. It's good, but not great. I want something more. Somewhere between a 3 and a 4 but I don't think I'm ever coming back here on purpose (wouldn't be mad to find myself back here, just not gonna seek it out) so I'm afraid down it goes. Weezy and Q-tip features not moving the needle.
Derek & The Dominos
4/5
holy shit this album is long. I was listening to it, thinking, "oh this is kinda nice I guess" and I checked back and I was on the fourth track. Eric Clapton and Duane Allman are good at guitar but they make boring music. The sound is all over the place, from Layla, which we all know is good, to Little Wing, which is questionable, to Key To The Highway, which is bad. One thing's for sure - the duo does better bullshit blues than the stones.
The Doors
2/5
Are the Doors victims of my having too much bluesy guitars shit recently? Doing nothing for me - I've always thought the Doors were overrated, but I'll admit I've only heard the hits. This isn't doing anything to change my mind. They definitely nailed their formula and are tight enough but frankly I just don't care. Morrison's supposed reputation as a lyrical genius is a mistake. Mercifully short.
Bob Dylan
4/5
Hate to say it because I think a good portion of Dylan's career is Bad, but this is packed with hits. I think if he existed in 2023 instead of 1963, nobody would pay attention to this, but the fact that he made it possible for someone to sing, play, and have read at least one (1) book in their life probably blew the doors of pop music possibility wide open. It helps that the songs are good. Mostly. Some of it's so on the nose that it's hard to take seriously. I think the idea of this guy as a nobel laureate are ridiculous, but that doesn't mean I don't think he writes good songs! They're just not THAT good!
As to the album, we've heard this a thousand times since, sometimes more tuneful, sometimes more introspective, sometimes more virtuosic, sometimes more poetic, but Dylan did it all in one go. Credit where it's due, even if parts of it are overwrought bullshit
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
3/5
For my third Nick Cave album on this list, I come to one I've listened to before that left zero effect on me. This time, I feel a bit more primed to give it some attention aaaaaaaand...I don't like it. It's not for me, too stripped down and too one note for 52 minutes of this. I know he's capable of a tune, he's capable of soulful introspection and storytelling but here, I don't know, it's not grabbing me. Feels flat, and depressing but not in a revealing way, just kicking yourself when you're down way. There's probably art here, and the more time I spend with it (time I don't want to spend, it's miserable) I'll come around to it, but for now, you're bringing me down. Probably coulda used this 15 years ago.
Bert Jansch
4/5
Great album. Does one thing and does it well. Normally I'd call that one-note, but it's a good note and he's really good at it. Still gets dinged, but pleasant, stripped down acoustic guitar with some instrumental mastery thrown in.
X-Ray Spex
4/5
1978? Holy shit. This is great. The addition of the sax fills in some of that early punk sound, and it's a complete package. Somehow, it didn't grip me the way I wanted it to, but still, real winner here. Slicker than you'd expect while still being rough around the edges.
Thin Lizzy
3/5
I bet this was a fun concert but it just feels like run of the mill rock music.
Leonard Cohen
4/5
He's very good at what he does but not quite good enough here - not fully formed. Again, very good but some of the narrative tics reveal themselves like when you can tell when a supposedly abstract pattern repeats itself, breaking the illusion. Small thing but it took me out of the otherwise great work. Very of 1967 and also of any time at any point.
The Bees
3/5
What the fuck is happening in this album? It's got a little bit of everything and I can't tell if it's Good or Imitating Something Good. It's nice when it's on the knife edge of jazzy without being jazz or lo-fi beats to study to (which it often shifts to) and some of the twee shit really grinds my gears. A Minha Menina fuckin' sucks, dude. But there's obviously some great stuff here. I can't get my head around it. Some parts are a low two to one and some parts are a 4, so I'm gonna split the difference.
Jungle Brothers
4/5
In some ways dated, in other ways current. Great samples, though they don't do too much with them, especially when compared with the pretty exhaustive sample work on De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising, which came out the same year. The flow is pretty standard 80s, though not so great when compared with De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising, which came out the same year. The album as a whole is just OK - overstays its welcome juuust a touch unlike De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising, which came out the same year. Mercifully, it doesn't feature any skits, unlike De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising, which came out the same year.
Not good enough to be great, but not bad. Lost to the sands of time as anything but an artifact because, looking back, not a single part got stuck in my skull. It does feel pretty forward looking, but maybe not as much as De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising, which came out the same year. I gave Digital Underground a 3, though, so I can't do this one dirty by doing the same. I think I'm overrating this rap albums. Regardless, it doesn't measure up to De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising, which came out the same year.
Elvis Costello
2/5
Not sure this album needs to exist. It brings absolutely nothing new to the table except what sounds like Elvis' voice straining to hit notes within an octave. The tunes are unremarkable but bounce along at consistent finger-tapping pace if you're stuck waiting for your oil to be changed or something. That might be it: every song here feels like it might invade your day in pieces, walking into the coffee shop, playing out of a storefront you're going past, someone listening to this at home (why, though?) with the window open. Anonymous and transient, the kind of noise that fills up a negative space in your life that you never notice, like the hum of electronics or rumbling from the street. And a fuckin' hour of it. Bleh.
The Cure
4/5
Hey Bobby, you feeling ok? I'm getting the impression you've been thinking about death.
This is...not a difficult album, though it may seem as such due to its plodding sound. But it is slow. To say it takes its time would be ignoring the fact that it dwells interminably on the above. The slow build of the guitar and drum over each song is very Cure, and it's good, but it's a lot of not a lot. Also, for me, Robert Smith's voice sometimes works and sometimes doesn't and I think it doesn't work here a several times - that is to say, it's not held up by the instrumentation when the vocals don't quite hit right. I know that faltering voice is The Robert Smith Brand Guarantee but it still bothered me many times on this album.
This album also benefits from a listening milieu. Cruising down the coast on a bright summer day music this ain't. It's more for curling up on a snowed in da y, or walking home after closing late and things just aren't going right, or you're 15 and wondering where your place is in the world because you got a C on a test or something. I was tempted to give this a 3 because it started to drag early in its dirge-like fashion, but actually I think the back half has enough variety (of a kind) to keep this going. Maybe I'm just predisposed to liking it - I can see a lot of haters being vindicated in their tastes - but it's a good work from a coupla miserable, dour self-immolating guys. That said, I think I'm gonna change into brighter clothes after this. Maybe hydrate, feel the sun on my face, leave work early, play with my kids.
Steely Dan
2/5
FUCK! I did not want Steely Dan. At this point, I know what I'm getting: impeccably crafted elevator music with lyrics that only make sense when you read the backstory, but aren't really interesting enough to want to read that backstory.
I said in my Replacements review that imperfections make human connection to art rewarding. Despite the slavish devotion to studio perfection, I guess this is still imperfect in the sense that connecting to it isn't rewarding for me. How in the fuck was Rikki Don't Lose That Number a SINGLE?
Actually, I'm knocking this down from the Coward's 3 due to the inclusion of East St. Louis Toodle-oo. Fuck off.
The Psychedelic Furs
4/5
This came out of the gate swinging and I was like, "hey this shit sucks." but it grew on me. The songs are too long, but longer than too long so they swing back into a kind of sensible repetition. Richard Butler sounds like he has marbles in his mouth, but it's not like he's Mark E. Smith. Much like each song, the album grows and actually, this is pretty good! One thing I felt listening to it was how much it's been ripped off by...a lot of people, so it feels kind of like I've heard it before, and probably better, but, still, 1981!
Sidenote, I thought Into You Like a Train was a Blake Schwarzenbach original and I'm stunned to see that it's not, but having listened to this album it makes perfect sense.
George Jones
3/5
You could train an AI on this for how country it is. Nothing to distinguish it, nothing to knock it. Coward's 3.
Cee Lo Green
2/5
Not as bad as a 2, really, but the aspirations vs reality here is disappointing enough that I gotta knock it down. This album does nothing but be there - it's fine, it's bouncy, it has a few ideas that don't really go anywhere but are still neat to see. The features feel as though someone was like, "yeah I got nothin' going on today why not." Also how is it over an hour. Who agreed to that.
5/5
Yeah sorry this one is great. Complete package. Not a wasted moment and every moment is good and it holds together.
Bob Dylan
3/5
On the one hand, I think this is a much more even effort than Freewheelin', but also I like it less and I think the reason is that it's tedious. I think any one or two songs or three songs in a row is good, maybe even great, but I zoned out of this album. I forgot it was playing. I zoned back in and was like, "oh yeah, there's Bobbo, plodding along and sing-talking about some shit and rhyming that A-A-A-A-A-B-A scheme." And then some harmonica.
He is not a great writer. I do not understand how everyone's like, he's such a good writer. He is perfectly passable. If this came out in 2003 nobody would pay any attention (which is of course kind of the point). He was up against shit like Beatles For Sale, of course "no direction home, a complete unknown, like a rolling stone" blew people's minds in a way that "8 days a week" (a perfectly fine song) did not. This is an ok album that was probably a different feeling in 1965 but listening to it today just doesn't seem worth my time.
Simple Minds
1/5
I wanted to like this. Hey, some early 80s stuff, long enough ago to have matured into itself. But no. I hated this. Of all the albums I've listened to, this one made me wonder what I was doing with my time. The tired drum repeating, the synth just humming along, I kept waiting for it to go somewhere and it just never did. Tedious.
Screaming Trees
3/5
Someone's gonna have to explain to me why this screaming trees album was selected for this list. Because it was the best performing? Bad metric. Perfectly fine but totally anonymous.
Sheryl Crow
3/5
Decent album with decent variety, some hits, some misses. Don't need to say anything about absolute MegaHit All I Wanna Do, but I am pleased that the whole album doesn't sound like it. That said, some of hte misses - eh. She's a good singer so why is she putting out songs where her voice is straining a little? She has so much other stuff to go on.
Additionally, to my taste, some of these songs are just filler. The Na-Na song was the first time I checked what I was listening to because it took me out of the rest of it. Leaving Las Vegas, too - kind of an also ran. But hey, decent album means they're not all bangers. Good example (blueprint?) of that 90s girl rock lilith-ish sound.
Moby
2/5
Background music that sits in the foreground. I tend to like the repetition on projects like this but the variations on a theme here aren't particularly clever. Reminds me of how I'd play with fruityloops as a kid and had no ear so I'd just add loops to make the sound grow. Moby obviously has an ear for it, but goddamn does it overstay its welcome. No reason for this album to be an hour, and yet, why not put it all in there? I don't hate it, but it is too much of a good thing and gets tired pretty quickly, unless you're not really listening to it.
I don't have the right language to describe this album, although what comes to mind is "cynical" (not correct) and "it insists upon itself" (also not quite right). It's a bit like artisanal cotton candy, or Banksy art, or Disney World. It's not that it's insubstantial, or artifice, but what is there feels fake even though it's also actually there. Doesn't leave a bad taste in my mouth but also makes me wonder what that dissatisfaction is.
Also the back third of this album SUCKS.
A Tribe Called Quest
4/5
Took some lessons from their previous effort (like, some lou-reed-inspired lessons) and made a more complete album - but is it better? Still some slower parts here, and the highs are not as high, but it's a lot more even. I tend to dislike that, so caveat emptor. On the other hand, it's got Busta closing out on Scenario. I dunno, not sure I can give it the 5 but maybe I'm a mark.
Milton Nascimento
4/5
This was good. I started out thinking it was kind of middling, but then I realized that I was kinda picking up what it was putting down. I'll admit my Portuguese, never very good in the first place, does not translate SUPER well to Brazilian so it was kind of an in-and-out listening experience, but really this one is solid. Nothing groundbreaking, especially in 2025, but solid. I'll also admit that I found the tracks Spotify credited to Lo Borges a good deal more accessible, which means I should probably revisit.
Anyway, a discovery to return to here.
Red Snapper
3/5
Better than bad, but otherwise anonymous. Standard beep boopery from the early 2000s and I certainly never needed to hear it, but not mad I did.
Actually, the last two songs are great. Shame about the first 9.
Prince
3/5
How do you top Purple Rain?
Turns out you don't, unless you think knocking off Footloose is somehow better than that magnum opus. Ok, that's unfair. This album is DIFFERENT. It's bigger, it's varied, and it has a hell of a lot of experimentation. Which should be applauded, but experimentation isn't always great and in this case sometimes it sounds like Kenny Loggins. But much like the weather in your city, if you don't like what's happening, wait five minutes.
Whoever compared it to The Clash's Sandinista! was on the money. Following a sublime effort, the walls fell and everything was included in the follow-up effort. But while I love Sandinista! (possibly due to the time I've spend with it - a lot of good music seems to challenge on first or second lesson) here it just ain't clicking.
The Kinks
4/5
Fun little album. Probably warrants closer listening, but 41 minutes with 15 songs? Nice work, guys. They're smart, they're tight, and they're focused on an album theme. Only thing preventing this from getting a 5 is that I'm a hater of this genre.
Supertramp
2/5
On the one hand, they're good at making music. On the other, the music they make kind of sucks. On a third, mysterious hand that came out of nowhere, a lot of later bands CLEARLY stole riffs and sounds from here (and made songs I like more). Unfortunately, the first band that came to mind was The Eagles, who are also talented musicians who make music that sucks. The second was Madness. And then... the Rocky Horror Picture Show. So you lose some, you win some, and on this album I think I'm losing a lot more than I'm winning. Talk about wearing out its welcome, I actually skipped Asylum once it hit minute 5.
The long and short of it is that you should probably have heard this album but also probably not more than once if you were born in the '80s or later.
Silver Jews
4/5
Weird that this is the Silver Jews album that makes this list, because there are other, probably better options! Which isn't to say this is bad, of course - David Berman's blueprint for a certain brand of 2000s indie shit was, unlike many blueprints on this list, better than its progeny. I have a theory about quality that is basically, with time, the reputation for best things goes to things that do the simple stuff perfectly, get everything right and nothing wrong, so when their reputation precedes them you go, "this is it?" That's kind of what this is. Wonderful lyricist, simple music that's not so stripped down as to be distracting, nor baroque enough to misstep. A voice that, as others have mentioned, mirrors Malkmus but works better with the music here than I find it does with Pavement. Simply good shit here.
Leonard Cohen
2/5
I said in my review of Songs Of Leonard Cohen that his writing tics reveal themselves so you can see the pattern, making the listening experience a little bit like find the motif. Well, here, some of those repetitive tics have been made larger, across the album rather within the song. that makes them harder to spot, but it also makes the spare, consistent plodding tone harder to manage. Listen to one or two songs, not a whole album. Yeesh. He's a better writer than Dylan, but here (at least) he's a much worse musical arranger. Parts of this are a 5, real works of art, but as an album it's less than its parts, a slog.
Duke Ellington
5/5
What a tremendous artifact. This is a bit like the Ella does Gershwin album, in that it's a whole thing, not just some songs slapped together. Reading up on all the pieces coming together to make it happen is even more impressive. Under other circumstances I'd be inclined to ding this down, much in the same way I dinged Ella, but something about the things that would otherwise be irritating contributing to the history and work of the whole effort make me appreciate it more.
Not much to be said about the music here - it's perfectly fine, imperfectly recorded big band jazz, a subject I know little about. Enjoyable, with a couple of real high points. The talking interludes would otherwise be distracting. They certainly over-extend their welcome if you just wanna listen to a jazz record. The fact that it's 2 hours would usually be a death knell. But all the pieces of this, together? Just incredible. Definitely greater than the sum of its parts.
Don't listen to this if you're in a hurry.
Dusty Springfield
2/5
My enthusiasm for this album was low going in and then wham! Mama Said! Hey I like this song, this is a Dusty song? No, it's not. And the others aren't, either. She's a good singer, singing a collection of good songs, on an appropriate length album, but it's all just kinda there. Nothing really special here, she doesn't own any of the songs after doing them (despite doing a good job) and there's nothing to tie me here. Of the songs I like, I'll take hers or the originals, no biggie. Of the fodder? Well, fodder. I lost interest.
The Flaming Lips
1/5
I forgot this album existed, but I listened to it a lot in my teenage years - mostly flying across the pacific, if I recall correctly, because I preferred something unobtrusive but with enough movement in it to keep me engaged. Things like this and post-rock were my choice. As I listened to it, i was like, "Oh yeah, this song exists." And guess what? It fuckin' sucks. This shit sucks, dude. Obviously it meant something valuable to me in my younger years but now I just hate it. The Elephant Six fuzz. The snappy drum that pops in and out. The absolutely inane lyrics and warbly, apparently emotionally-vulnerable delivery (about the fucking sun or whatever). I hate this in a way I didn't think possible. And the ultimate insult: it's an hour long of going nowhere. I had it playing in the car when I picked up my daughter and she was like, "I don't like this" and I felt blessed for a good excuse to turn it off for a bit.
I don't know what caused such a sea change for me, but man I HATE this. Slog.
Rod Stewart
2/5
What the hell, Rod? Guy's got a great voice, straining at the seams to get something out, and then the rest of the music just does not have that same urgency. Just put this guy in a mid-90s post hardcore band and you've got yourself a winner. Instead it's this kind of standard southern rock type stuff that's just boring.
Bobby Womack
3/5
Funktional. Capable. Slid right in my ears and right back out. Seems like an attempt to give a talented guy an album on the list by picking the one with a commercial hit, which is a weird method that's happened a couple of times so far. As an album, nothing to really recommend or diminish it.
Sarah Vaughan
4/5
Damn, some serious pipes here. Never heard of Sarah Vaughan in my impoverished musical education, but this is like, flawless? Even the part that has flaws? Really smooth lounge music here, but too long, the live element isn't super present (though it sounds like it was recorded in a studio, incredibel) and I don't really vibe with it so I give it a coward's 4.
The Clash
4/5
Unfortunately, this one's getting graded on a curve. I came to The Clash through London Calling, and then Sandinista, so by the time I got to the S/T, it felt shallow. And it feels shallow. It's some solid '77 punk, a head and shoulder above contemporaries, but it seems like I can FEEL the lack of expanse that the later work has, and so for that reason alone it feels...incomplete? It's not like the punk of this era was particularly deep, but with the Sex Pistols I feel like it's a complete package. They did what they did, but then moved on, in their ways. Never Mind The Bollocks was the apex. This? Well, they got better. They got smarter. And maybe it's informed by history, but I feel like it's palpable on this album.
With that out of the way, it's still good. The first four songs bang hard and the sound has been imitated so many times - maybe better in places, but never all at once. The Clash were really something special. This album loses itself in the middle a little bit, but picks back up on the back - interestingly, with the US release stuff. It's simply (heh) held back the fact that it doesn't live up to the later stuff, it doesn't reach the heights. Also, maybe an unpopular opinion: I prefer the Sandinista version of Career Opportunities.
TV On The Radio
3/5
One of those bands that I respect, and like, but don't love. This doesn't seem as inventive as Desperate Youth and I can't tell if it's better or worse for it. A head above your standard late 2000s indie stuff, but that doesn't really make it great.
Drive Like Jehu
5/5
5 stars. No notes. Fuck me, one of my favorite albums and I'm surprised and delighted to see it here because I haven't put it on for a little while.
Out of the gate, pedal the metal, masterfully hits the loud, the angular, the relief. I'm the first to complain about long albums (and long songs) and even though I guess people call this one-note, and they might be right, it never overstays its welcome for me in any capacity. Energy and tension like this shouldn't be sustainable, but here we are.
Franz Ferdinand
3/5
Not quite selling as a loose outfit given how tight they are, and not quite as more than one review mentions Television - that's who I was thinking of as "tight band" to reference). Fairly middling indie rock that's capable and bouncy but that's about it. Don't think you need to hear this before you die, but it's certainly not bad.
Besides knowing the inescapable Take Me Out, I enjoyed the organ and marching, radiohead-ish shades of Come On Home. Otherwise, again, nothing remarkable, but I might return to it if I need something in the background to be mindlessly productive.
R.E.M.
3/5
This is capable but kind of somnolent in a way that I don't really love. Michael Stipe is good, the lyrics are pretty good (for the most part) but there's something about the...warmth? of the sound that makes me go, "hey this is soft (insulting)." Murmur had an edge that this doesn't - it's like a butter knife. I like butter and butter knives are useful but nothing special. The songs I, uh, like? Not like, LIKE-like, just like, are ok but this never really gets going for me.
The Doors
4/5
This album is not served well by a 1-5 scale. It needs a radar chart with stats like organ (5), lyricism (2), cohesion (3), hits (4), filler quality (2), fucking stupidity (3). There's stuff to like here, a lot more than the other doors album I rated, but it's also just...I don't have the vocabulary to describe this kind of thing. The things that make it good also make it bad - like, the musicianship is pretty tight but it also has that edge of control punk-ish thing going, which is probably a lot of where this album gets its reputation and swagger. The End, on the other hand, is tedious as hell. Whatever, definitely something someone should have listened to, like it or not.
Fugees
4/5
Beats on some of these songs sound like they're 10 years in the future and some of the Lauryn Hill bars are ridiculous. I even like the No Woman No Cry cover (better than the Marley album version, at least!) Still, some of this shit hasn't aged great - the skits, for instance, really kill it, especially given how some of these songs blend together and how the album has thematic elements across it. Despicable 4, because of the skits. Otherwise great.
Grant Lee Buffalo
2/5
This would normally get a 3 from me but the singer's voice straining to hit the minimal range required means that I'm gonna need a lot more from everything else to make that kind of thing work. Instead it just sounds like they couldn't find a good enough singer.
America Snoring is a standard boring early 90s alt rock, but I was listening to it when I learned about ICE killing someone in Minneapolis and welp.
Missy Elliott
3/5
I can't handle Timbaland's bullshit. Missy's good, and Work It is filthy in a pretty classic way, but mostly I just get tired. The features are very early 2000s but I don't think their verses are any good, which kind of sucks. Anyway, party music for a certain kind of party but not much else.
Also, Back in the Day is corny as shit.
Nick Drake
4/5
Pink Moon is an amazing album and I think this one just doesn't stand up. It's a little fuller, which I think works against it. The piano, for instance, doesn't add, it's a negative. But still a great album. The guy was born into it, it's natural to him.
Earth, Wind & Fire
3/5
Fun album, but not great. Just good. Can't see this getting less than a 3 or more than a 4 from anyone.
Fela Kuti
5/5
Lotta stuff happening here! Having this immediately after Earth Wind and Fire kind of blunts the impact, and while I like EW&F, this is a head and shoulders above in creativity and execution. A mix of like, ten different things in a big stew that gets you moving and thinking and grooving and moving and well, that's what music does. Definitely forcing my kids to listen to this.
The Cardigans
2/5
This was a slog. Dreamy and pleasant and an aptly named band giving me tooth-decay. Definitely well played, with some interesting stuff happening musically, but ultimately elevated candy sweet pop is still candy sweet. Lovefool is a real earworm but Iron Man sucks, so they cancel each other out. Can't cosign this.
The Specials
3/5
Haven't come across the first specials album, which I assume will be included since it's much better than this swing 'n' a miss. It's got some good stuff (but not ghost town! even if Man at C&A sounds a bit like it's headed there!) but it's just kind of a mess. Which is maybe why it's here? It's a talented group putting together a mess? I dunno, man. Less than the sum of its parts which is a real death knell for an album, but it also manages to be experimental enough to save it from the dreaded two - some of these sounds are 20 years in the future. Need a radar chart for this one, and maybe some more time. And maybe be a teenager in Thatcher's Britain.
The War On Drugs
3/5
What if you made a THE WEEKND backing track less fun? There's nothing to really dislike here, but there's nothing to really get excited about, either. I bet this was great for the right person at the right time but now, ten years on, I think anyone discovering this has lots of options to discover similar through history. Perfectly passable stuff. Also seems inappropriate to be listening to during daylight.
Took me almost the entire album to peg them not as Bruce or Don Henley but...Gang of Youths' Angel of 8th Avenue. Which I guess came after.
Kendrick Lamar
5/5
I like Kendrick. I also think he's overrated and sometimes difficult to listen to - his virtuosity sometimes means the hooks leave a little something to be desired because he's so busy flexing on everyone. And yet, here: this is a great album. It's good musically, it's tight and expansive, it's Kendrick at his peak. There's just too much good shit here, complex beats that draw from everywhere. I always wanna listen toS D'angelo's black messiah when I hear this. And yet...it's not like, super fun to listen to all the way through - some of the spoken word-ish stuff is a little too on the nose, a little too self absorbed, and it doesn't really kill momentum but it kind of takes you out of the whole thing. But that can't knock it down, it's a masterpiece.
Baaba Maal
3/5
Sounds like the Animal Kingdom Lodge at Disney World. It's fine but doesn't c lick with me.
Aerosmith
3/5
This is quality cock rock, but it's still cock rock, which I don't think will ever elevate itself beyond, y'know, headbangin' party sounds and corny ballads. This is miles better than The Cult album, which was a pale imitation, but I have to assume this is on the list because Love In An Elevator is the hair metal eidolon. Janie's Got a Gun, on the other hand, sounds like someone had a stroke on a sound machine.
LCD Soundsystem
2/5
Mostly recalls better albums (which should come as no surprise to anyone who's hard "losing my edge"). Normally that means a distillation and evolution of a sound, but this is more of a flattening, a greying-out. So it's not bad, but whatever it brings to the table seems like less than what's come before. The chasm between the attempt and sticking the landing mean this one gets dinged.
The Stone Roses
3/5
Somehow, I've never listened to this album until now, and when I tried to listen to it through phone speakers, I turned it off halfway through the second song because it sounded like shit in a way that was more than phone speakers normally do - like it wasn't just tinny, something was obviously missing. When I put on headphones, it was pretty obvious that was the right move because this is well produced, pleasantly layered jangly sound that bridges the 80s and 90s in an almost-ur-music fashion. Like, this is it, the 80s turning into the 90s, you can hear it all right here.
Unfortunately, the emotional resonance that I'm certain it has for people who heard it around then isn't there for me, so while it's all very capable and good it doesn't rise to the 'whoa I'm really hearing something here.' Instead it's like an apparition around everything that sounds like this, probably more specific albums that do certain things better. It drags a bit because the sound is so of its time, and especially because it has such a strong start, but generally speaking, reputation deserved even if I don't think it's anything really special.
Public Image Ltd.
4/5
Despite myself, I am somehow predisposed to like John Lydon. His proclamations that PiL were gonna change music reminds me a lot of Tom DeLonge talking about how Angels and Airwaves were gonna do the same, and while neither were even remotely correct, at least Lydon went into new territory. Incredible how it sounds pretty of 1979, pretty of 1989, and pretty alien.
There's a lot to hate here for the haters, as Lydon wouldn't have it any other way, but for a guy who was in a dangerous boy band, there's also an incredible amount of intentionality. The bass kicks ass, the wiry guitar kicks ass, the drumming kicks ass. However, for all its planning, it still gets to be a bit one note: sometimes that drone is hypnotic and sometimes it's just a song overstaying its welcome, but that's kind of a characteristic of this flavor of post-punk. Hell, even the packaging sounds like it was a challenge and a poke in the eye.
It sounds nothing like the PiL of 45 years later, which is a good thing, but I also don't think this kind of thing would fly today - it's been plumbed to death and its...shock value? abrasiveness? oppositional defiance? just isn't today, but recognizing that its of a time, well damn it's pretty good. I think this is just the right album for the right kind of person and everyone else will think it's shit.
The xx
2/5
Nothing album that feels more like half-finished ideas rather than stripped down indie-pop. Dull. I don't hate it, I just...don't really have any opinions about it at all.
The Pharcyde
4/5
Don't have to listen to this one (but I will, because I like it). If only Passin' Me By were on here, it'd still be a great album. The skits get too long and the fact that they make us very aware they smoke weed bring it down, but the samples are used to great effect, each song is a solid, complete whole, and everyone works together beautifully in the way that rap group albums should.
Like many albums of the era, it wears out its welcome, but its highs are too high to discount it. And despite my complaint about the skits, I sing "Quinton's on the way" with the name changed to my kids all the time (but not about another j).
Wilco
3/5
What're your thoughts on Pavement? Good? You'll find lots to like here. Negative? Well, there still might be something for you here. I mean, this is a good, complete album, but it's so stripped down in that 2001 kind of way that it's not really interesting 25 years later unless you're in Just The Right Mood.
R.E.M.
3/5
I guess I'm just not an REM guy. There's a lot of variety here, but the throughline is that Michael Stipe sounds like he should be bullied. I have to give credit for the expansive nature, but I don't have to like it.
Also, Get Up sounds like it inspired the theme from Psych, which is both laudatory and derogatory.
Madonna
2/5
The title track is...something in a bottle. Not lightning, but it hits all the Y2K musical brain itches. That doesn't make it a good song, or a bad song (it's an ok song) it just hits a little bit of everything. And this kind of...a little bit of everything that was happening in 2000 keeps on through the album. It's not good. It's not bad. It's ok, which actually makes it worse than a lot of the things that it's referencing. And it's important as a time capsule that seems to touch the pop music zeitgeist, but it's also entirely forgettable. Inch deep, several feet wide, and I more or less had it pegged by track 2. To be clear: I am not the target audience here. It's background music for me.
Almost made a Moby joke here, but then remembered that was Gwen Stefani, but, y'know, same stuff either way.
This album is also notable for Madonna's reinvention - difficult for a pop singer to do, and maybe not quite successful in retrospect, it was at least current at the time. Feels a little bit like "industry plant, but an already household name." Hell, Katy Perry didn't pull this one off.
Anyway, this is a weird one I keep coming around on. Again, it's not a good album. But...maybe it is a bad one? There are pieces that really are specifically not good, but Madonna is talented and can carry pretty much anything. Ultimately, I guess that it's just kind of there, which isn't great. Takes it down a notch from the coward's 3.
Tori Amos
4/5
Started off with the 2015 remaster which, at least on my speakers, sounded like shit. So I went back to the original, which sounds much better.
First off the bat, I don't rate this kind of music highly. The 90s Lilith Fair-ish (I'm aware she did not do that, to her credit - not bashing Lilith Fair, just respecting Tori Amos for having a vision and sticking to it) seems to all meld together in a burned-over sound to me. And despite her sticking to her vision, she still sounds kind of the same.
Those are the negatives out of the way - she sounds good and she's got good lyrics. This is a mature, fully realized album with swelling sounds that match the heartfelt delivery. It's a good album.
Röyksopp
3/5
Pleasant but unremarkable. Probably better than the three I'm giving it here, but I just can't really bothered to wax poetic about their musical capabilities when it's still zone out music. It feels like a precursor to RJD2's deadringer, if he had restraint. Better on headphones when you focus on it, but still, zone-out music.
Pretenders
4/5
This is an interesting album. I'm not sure it's a good album in the way that I usually talk about good albums, but there's something happening here that makes it clear that they're working with something a little extra. It's both caught in the box of 70s punk and but it's straining at the edges, AND it's got a lot of wacky shit like space invaders. I bet all the coolest people in 1980 were listening to this, but then, again, I'm not sure it's good? I mean, it's good, but for all the things that make it special, it's kind of uneven, so it's not really good. Tough to describe, but a real work.
Don't do drugs.
Cat Stevens
4/5
So this is a good album, but I also feel like it's nothing special. Usually when that happens it means it needs to grow on me and let me realize how well placed each piece is. I don't have that kind of time. It's just good.
Minutemen
5/5
Ah, the punk's punk. I've listened to this album so many times that Anxious Mo-Fo bassline just started playing in my head. An easy 5 stars before I even crank it up again and it's because it's got so much. So, so much. And it's inimitable - this album, amazing as it is, can never be made again. The Minutemen seemed to embody and then collapse all the paradoxes of the music truisms (at least, mine) - eminently capable and also comically amateur (someone else mentioned the tuning guitars to your preference story already), being obsessed with what your peers were doing and then doing your own thing (Take that, Huskers!), the album's too long but leaves you wanting more, there's plenty of songs you could leave off but the album would be worse for it, there's a Steely fucking Dan cover without a hint of irony, and, as Michael Azerrad pointed out, who the hell writes a Vietnam protest song 10 years after the fact? It's just so overfull, and so deftly, clumsily done, it's a masterpiece.
Then of course there's D. Boon's unique lyricism and sensibilities - nobody did it like he did it. Concise. Praxis for anyone, easy questions with no easy answers but to appeal to your own humanity. No hope? See, that's what gives me guts.
Happy Mondays
4/5
If you put on your hater hat here, there's a LOT to hate. The vocals...are not good. The mix on the remaster...is not good. Sometimes the instruments seem like they were given to the wrong band member. Sometimes it sounds so painfully 80s that it feels like it came from a different album.
And yet...all these things add up to a (drug-addled) earnestness that makes it easy to connect with. It's shockingly original in its melding of sounds of the times, for better or for worse, and I have to admit I've always been a sucker for shitty vocalists. I don't love madchester stuff, but this really seems like something made by and for the people. A great discovery.
System Of A Down
4/5
Sometimes I hear songs from Toxicity at the gym. Why nothing from this album? Well, it's probably because Serj Tankian is a mad genius and after making this beautiful mess, he and his bandmates sanded off the sharp edges and made something more commercially appealing. That's not to say Toxicity is better or worse, just different. And this is kind of a mess - its variety is its genius and its issue, but it's wildly inventive and sprawling in terms of what kinds of sounds it fits into a metal-ish album. A nu-metal, if you will.
My best comparison would be Refused's Shape of Punk to Come - SoaD is much less focused, much sillier, and probably a little smarter despite the posturing intellectualism of the former. The embrace of, say, jazz is done wonderfully but briefly here, better and more continuously there. Anyway, this isn't a Refused review, just to put it into relief that this is a good collection of some great songs, but not necessarily a great album. Usually I laud an album for its flaws but for here I can't shake the idea that for all its capabilities, there's something missing.
The Smashing Pumpkins
5/5
This album just sounds good. Has it aged well? I dunno - it hasn't really aged at all. It's still a really solid expression of teenage angst backed by a wall of sound and infused with some pop sensibility. Actually, what really impresses me looking back at this album is how much it borrows from and puts it all together in a cohesive package: we've got that loud soft dynamic, industrial rhythm, electronic music, shoegaze, grunge, swaggering hair metal, it's incredible how it all comes together. Billy Corgan's kind of a dick, but I think the vocals really work here - they kind of blend into the roar of the fuzz.
I'm on the fence about a 4 or a 5 here and I think I have to bump it up despite myself because they really put together a great piece of work, even if it's best heard at age 15 because you're the type of kid who got bullied a little bit. Which I suppose I was at one point, but now I'm not. And even if it runs a little long (which it does). There's something about it that feels right as both an album and an artifact, personally and culturally.
U2
2/5
I was surprised to learn, with my first foray into U2 album listening, that I was kind of a fan. And now, with a second album, I'm surprised to learn I'm not a fan. This is competently made elevator music. It's smooth brained soft-ish rock. I can recognize they're talented musicians, but the music they're making here is like mush. No amount of clean production and twinkly guitars and bono's overwrought crooning is gonna make it not mushy.
The Icarus Line
2/5
Doesn't go the places I want it to. This is the kind of music I theoretically like, but this feels empty in a way that I can't put my finger on. A simulacrum of harder, heavier stuff. Even when it gets a little inventive, it feels borrowed. Again, hard to say exactly what's not sitting right with me but it's just hollow. Better than the 2 I'm giving it but deserves to be dinged for its pillaging.
Jeff Beck
3/5
Ah nice, here's Rod Stewart doing what I think he should be doing instead of his other projects, which are big misses. Jeff Beck's guitar sounds good, clearly a cut beyond the standard blues rock type stuff that gets bandied about. That said, why is there a greensleeves cover on here. what is this album. good music and Rod Stewart actually being used well doesn't make this better than good.
Mudhoney
3/5
Lyricists they ain't, but they got the energy and the sound. I'm reminded a little bit of Hot Snakes. I know these guys are foundational, but as happens so often, if you weren't around for the foundation, it doesn't hit nearly as hard. It's good, but it's not great. Would love to see this live.
Electric Light Orchestra
3/5
This feels like when your friends dad isn't very cool but thought he might have been with it at one point and is like, "hey, listen to THIS! THIS ROCKS!" but the only thing he'd ever heard that he thinks rocks is Paul McCartney. There's a lot going on here, but really like so much prog-ish stuff it's too much and it's not altogether good. Mr. Blue Sky has a GREAT beat so it seems like it might be good but really it's just fine. I don't love this album and I think it's too long but I don't hate it either, it just seems like it should get a wedgie.
George Harrison
3/5
What am I missing here? This album is too long filled with too long but decent folk/psych/pop songs that echo the Beatles but don't blow me away in any fashion. I'm sure some people heard this at a point in their life where it was like, "oh man this is the song I need right now" but without that, it's just some late 60s early 70s stuff that needs an editor. I guess it set the table a little bit? Probably a "you should hear this" for its place in history but if this is a masterpiece of a class, then it's just a class I don't care much for (overlong psych folk albums with jam sessions). There's probably, as there usually is for albums this sprawling, that I need to spend more time with it, but it's an album a day, it ain't happenin'.
The Soft Boys
5/5
I hate when people lead their reviews with this phrase, so I'll do it because I hate myself: this is the kind of album that makes me glad to be doing this project. Is it good? Decently so. Is it clever and somewhat oblique? Yes. There's a lot going on here and it's all of a part, not the kind of mess that you usually get with "weirdo auteur dragging along a bunch of people with is ideas" albums. It's somehow nothing groundbreaking, and if reading reviews is to be believed, insanely ill-conceived given the kind of music it was plumbing and opposed to. Of course, that's also what makes it work - its unique sensibility plumbs a variety of things that keep it from being dated in the year of our lord 2026 while still being identifiable of the time. There's surf rock, psych rock, spoken word, hillbilly shit, post punk, pop, and all kind of a big stew. I think I'll give it a 5 just because it got under my skin and made me a believer. Surprising myself here but can't think off why I'd knock it down.
Fever Ray
2/5
"The Cisco hold music goes online August 4th, 1989. Humans no longer have to answer phones. Callers begin to say their wildest shit into the handpieces as they wait for someone to resolve their fraudulent charges or whatever. Cisco begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th.
Decades of listening to Tim Carleton's boops as it hears frustrated people begins to take its toll. Time takes its due. Retrieval is slower, the system begins to warp. On 12 January, the system releases an album based on its toodling boops and insipid lyrics, its only access to humanity, under the name Fever Ray.
Best listened to in the cold twilight of decaying empire.
Mylo
2/5
This seems like standard inoffensive loungey beep boops. I don't hate it, but, per usual, don't really feel anything about it at all.
Curtis Mayfield
3/5
Since this was a weekend option, I listened to it more than once. The first time, I didn't love it. Didn't hate it, just sounded like a motown record from the 70s. The second time, I spent a little more time and attention on it, knowing what I was getting, and I liked it more. This is a patient album, but maybe I'm not patient enough because a lot of these songs go on too long. But, the more you just let it happen, the better it is. Unfortunately, it's still just good. Nothing to hate here, but nothing to love, either. Good album, not a great one.
ZZ Top
3/5
Dirty southern blues rock that makes you want to take up smoking and shoot pool, but not much else going on there. As a very simple sound, it's very complete, but there's nothing here that isn't written on the tin. Tight, fun, and that's about it.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
3/5
I was able to slip this one past my kids by launching it immediately after a taylor swift song on the kpop demon hunters random spotify shuffle - so that's where we stand with this thing. On the one hand, you could say it's forward thinking since it fits in well with Tay-tay's Midnights, an album that came along a solid 13 years after this. But that's kinda damning with faint praise. This is really just an indie dance pop album that hits some of those notes while also hitting, I dunno, Jane's Addiction and the recent college grad who read something that culturally we call impressive on a bookshelf. That's not to say it's bad, but it's certainly nothing special. Solid effort of that class but not much more to say about it.
David Ackles
3/5
This guy clearly made the album he wanted to make - what an odd egg. I get a bit of Tom Lehrer if he were really depressed and not into politics, or simething. This feels a bit like the velvet underground in that his music doesn't really strike me as all that good but it's interesting in (what were probably then) new ways that inspire others. I can hear others building off this and, per my taste, doing a much better job, but they don't do that without this. It's not quite an objet d'arte, but it is a unique voice, and for that alone I think it needs some credit and has earned its spot. All those plaludits aside, don't really love it.
Shack
2/5
Nothing I'm hearing here is raising it above competent late-90s small club rock stuff. Burned over sound with a 47 minutes that felt like an hour.
Rush
2/5
This does not rock.
AC/DC rock. ZZ Top rocks. Rush does not rock. They have heavier parts to their songs that trick you into thinking they might rock, but they don't. They switch it up to the next thing after 8 bars and maybe it's a good 8 bars or maybe it's bad but it doesn't matter 'cuz it's about to change, baby! What if we did prog rock but didn't incorporate all the other goofy shit prog does? What if we just made it with guitars and synths and drums and made some math-y type stuff because we're really good at our instruments? What if we cribbed our lyrical style from dog-eared 70s sci-fi lite trade paperbacks you can buy in bulk at a used bookstore? What if we dabbled in the anthemic parts of prog without making an anthem? What if our concept of a breakdown was soft?
It's weird why this bothers me. I mostly don't dislike it (limelight is an insanely corny song, though) but I certainly don't actively like it. I'd heard Tom Sawyer and YYZ before and they're ok but put in album form the sound just wears on you. Mercifully under 40 minutes here, album length being one of the prog excesses these guys did not indulge in. Mostly I just want them to pick a lane and DO it. Stop fucking around. Your virtuosity is not what makes good music, so stop showing off. Just make the song. Although, again, Limelight as a pretty straightforward song seems like maybe they can't, that's why it's all jumbled.
This isn't as bad as the 2 I'm giving it, but I think I'm a little irritated. Like I said, I've heard some songs (that I think are made worse by being a part of an album - big negative), but mostly, having never heard a Rush album, I expected...more. Sure, Neal Pert is the professor (the facilitator of some work training made us all very aware of that as he air drummed through the modules) but who gives a single shit if the music is stupid masquerading as smart? And that's the other finger in the eye: I've heard Rush fans talk about how great Rush is (and in concert, it's probably a wild show - like I said, they're virtuosos) but frankly this just doesn't rock. The distance between the technical capability/mythos with the actual product just pisses me off so I'm takin' it out on the score.
Dolly Parton
3/5
She's a good lyricist, a good singer, a great person, but this album is just fine. That's a positive - these are kind of ur-country songs that're just nice to listen to, but again, just fine.
Peter Frampton
2/5
This is a fine, but ultimately boring album. It does little for me but contextualize a couple of simpsons jokes and I don't have much more to say about it than that.
Wait, I just got to the Jumpin' Jack Flash cover. C'mon.
Prefab Sprout
1/5
A victim of the 80s sound rather than a pioneer. Really not my style. I went in hoping to like it but it lost me more and more so I'm feelin' mean.
Korn
1/5
Jonathan! Jonathan. It's Marvin. Your cousin, Marvin Davis. You know that new sound you're looking for? Well, listen to this! [Holds phone up to industrial shredder they use to get rid of Muppets that are no longer popular on Sesame Street]
I want to be fair to this album. There are some ideas here to like: they've into a specific sound. There's a deliberate aggression to it (the industrial drums especially sound like a very specific choice) and the song structure attempts to create a loud-soft dynamic with breakdowns and whatever. It seems, at least in part, that they've thought about what they're putting together here.
Unfortunately, it sucks.
The Who
3/5
This isn't a good album. Important, pleasant to listen, sure, but it's not, y'know, good. It's a weird mix of, like, doo-wop and high energy rock-type stuff that doesn't work. There aren't any bad songs, but My Generation hasn't aged all that well and it feels pretty simple, as most stuff of the time does. What it is is a nice blueprint for the future, but again, that doesn't make it a good album.
Muddy Waters
3/5
I don't know if time has been particularly kind to the blues. Sure, Muddy Waters is an apex predator, but for most of this album I was appreciating what the White Boys Who Copied This Kind Of Thing brought to the table. As it stood, it was pretty limited, recycling the bars and lyrics and sounding like standards. But about halfway through Tiger In the Tank, the album came alive. Muddy and his band started sounding looser but still in command, it felt like the live album was actually the right format. The crowd reacted, the band reacted, and we got somethin'! But that was about halfway through and it ended on a slower note that probably worked better live.
Absolutely an artifact, absolutely something worth listening to, but not really all that memorable.
4/5
I was ready to hate this but damn, it comes out of the gate math-y as hell, but as quickly as it came it collapsed into its Prog Bullshit. Compared to Fragile, I feel like there's a lot more to like here. They stuck with having three songs and cut the filler, so much the better. They're experimenting with instrumentation and transitions, which, for better or worse, keeps it moving. Not sure how I feel about the pipe organ to super mario music, but hey, they went for it.
The density here feels a bit more connected than Fragile (which is basically all I'm going to compare this album) to and despite the fact that it is ultimately 70s prog rock, there's no denying the great shit going on here.
Britney Spears
3/5
The top 3 movies on IMDB for 1999 are Fight Club, The Matrix, and American Beauty: movies about ripping off the shiny but not-quite-right veneer of life to reveal a sordid, confused reality. And then we have Britney, manufactured as a shiny veneer in contrast to the grunge juggernaut that eschewed things like "post-production gloss" and "consonance." There have always been musical darlings, and pop music has exploited the tween demographic forever. There were glossy albums that felt vacuous, but this album was like a hydrogen bomb vs a coughing baby. It was made in a lab, a soulless automaton created with the singular purpose of dominating pop music, of distilling Michael Jackson into something that could be sold exclusively to middle school girls who shopped at Limited Too. And in the middle of this pop evangelion was Britney's Shinji: sexualized and sanitized in an impossible paradox.
So here we are, with this...not over-produced, but produced-within-an-inch-of-its-life sound of tooth decaying sincerely not-ironic-eye-winking-coquettish thing that drills into your brain whether you like it or not and just keeps going, a death march of sugar and pop and sheen.
The people putting this stuff together were scientists. They didn't quite crack the genre, they're still throwing things at the wall (what the hell is Soda Pop? Some of this borrows a bit too heavily from mid 90s R&B? There's a marked decline after the first three megahits?) but the reverberations are there a quarter century later, like when I have to watch Barbie Mermaid Power with my kids and the dance numbers are basically identical to a lot of this album.
A massive milestone in music that is the apotheosis of the brutally milquetoast tween tune. As an album, it's pro-forma - it's a vehicle for some singles. But also, as an album, it's a blueprint.
Lambchop
3/5
Not a band I thought I'd see on this list.
This is an oblique album - it kind of defies classification, although it all sounds so familiar because all its references, though disparate, are things we've heard before (save the daniel-johnston-adjacent vocals). There's talent and intent, but it's creating something that I'm not sure I can really get into because, again, though it's disparate and familiar, it's a combination that centers around a core that you either are into or you're not. It's just too somnolent to really grab me by the collar and make me care. I dunno, right music for the right time, but for me, not right now.
David Bowie
2/5
No wonder he did the Berlin trilogy after this. It's not that this is bad, but it's definitely unsatisfying. It's not as good as the music it's borrowing from and it feels kind of...off? Like Bowie doesn't belong here. He's not bad, but he's misplaced, like it's a mashup. I can't get past that. Fame is rightly the most popular song off this because it's the one that feels like Bowie actually belongs on. Cocaine is a hell of a drug.
Jimi Hendrix
3/5
I'm nitpicking here - it gets a little long in the tooth. No denying his talent and this is essential listening, but I get tired in a way that isn't rewarding. Maybe I don't smoke enough weed. Overall, preferred Axis: Bold as Love because it felt more like an album.
Soundgarden
3/5
Too long with high highs and an incredibly burned-over sound. Everyone wanted to be Soundgarden (and they weren't, obviously) so this much filler kind of sounds like hundreds of also-rans. It's a good album, though maybe not a great one, and Chris Cornell's reputation is earned. This might be THE single album you need to hear to understand the mid-90s, for better or for worse.
The other thing about it is that there's not much to pick out here - we know the hits but it is pretty singular in tone otherwise, another knock against its runtime. Did we REALLY need this many songs, and this long? The answer is no. So yeah, great band with some all-timer songs with an iconic sound but not a great album.
The KLF
5/5
Just an incredible piece of gesamtkunstwerk. Like an ogre, it's got layers, and the music itself is only a small part of the puzzle. For one, it's REMARKABLY dated. It's plastic as hell, ON PURPOSE, but it still works on its won and it has something for everyone. As someone ambivalent towards acid house at best, some of this stuff missed me but I still 'got' it, y'know? In a way that contrasts with how I didn't really get 808 State.
But then we get into the rest of it. I gave Gorillaz debut a 5 because it's more than an album and oh my god is this more than an album. The stories about the antics these guys pulled in public appearances is hilarious. The fact that they released this album like ten goddamn times with different track lists that are sometimes good and sometimes suck is just funny. It's funny! I listened to the director's cut first, read the reviews, listened to a youtube version and the same fucking album is a different experience! That's incredible. And there's a movie, for some reason? Because of the Illuminati (probably drugs, actually)? What the hell?
Then there's the sampling, the absolute ruthless piracy. Real punk hours here. There is no denying this shit is funny. It's fun. It's smart. It throws you for a loop. And if you're onboard, man, the whole thing is a party. I think I get raves now.
Marilyn Manson
2/5
I think it would be fair to call this the worst Nine Inch Nails album.
There is no reason for this album to be 71 minutes, especially when the first song is about twice as long as it needs to be. It has a sound that's built on solid ground, but it never does anything more than that. Every time I think it might do something, it just leaves the moment alone and either belabors it or moves on to the next thing without any exploration. Manson's voice is so often overwrought to the edge of intelligibility and sometimes seems like he's borrowing from Mr. Korn Jonathan Davis himself (not a compliment).
I want this to be better. I think there's something here. But this isn't it. Of course, in the hands of someone more interested in exploring this concept album and less in making as shocking a concept album as possible, it would fundamentally not sound like this. As it is, wasted opportunity that's just some moderately heavy industrial rock that's dressed up in outrage bait.
Pixies
4/5
Another interesting one that's good because of what it is AND what it isn't. A tight 30 minutes that never loses its energy despite being almost completely unfocused. If baseball had 13 bases, Surfer Rosa would hit all 13 of them. The wall of noise sounds on the wrong side of "in control", but it never rattles itself to pieces. Albini's production doesn't sand the hard edges off and that really works in the album's favor. When it's at its best you're like, "goddamn this band can take on the world." When it's at it's dumbest (Tony's Song) it's still fun and ready to bring you along if you're down.
It's kind of a filter of all the things happening in punk, rock, experimental, surf, 80s alt stuff that gets shoved in a loud blender, and out the other side comes everything that was influenced by that mix specifically. I happen to be one of the standard nerds who prefers Doolittle to Surfer Rosa because Doolittle is just easier, but again, that's part of what makes Surfer Rosa so appealing. Probably a 4 because there are some pieces that are...still incubating? Like parts are a practice run for ideas that show up on Doolittle. But I'm a fanboy so I'm gonna give it a 5 anyway.
Muddy Waters
3/5
Weird-ass album! It's blues, by The Blues Guy Himself, and yet it takes elements from rock and roll that stole those elements from the blues.
The problem with this (and other blues albums) is that blues feels alive when it's, well, live, hot, sweaty, crowded. This doesn't capture it (nor did the live Muddy Waters album) and I also think a lot of blues have dated pretty poorly so it just feels flat. It's not bad, but it's not what I need out of something like this and that's disappointing.
Public Image Ltd.
3/5
I know it came first, but this is a worse version of Metal Box. That might not even be fair to Metal Box. But, while this is kind of standard bearer for the future sound, it's also kind of directionless and bloated, even at 40 minutes. In retrospect, an obvious departure from sex pistols and really hammered home what the post-punk sound WOULD sound like, but it's not there yet. Put it back in the oven.
Also, Religion (both tracks) sucks.
Animal Collective
4/5
I think it's pretty cool that MGMT and Brian Wilson got together to make some music. Probably the apotheosis of that dreamy electronic 2000s psych pop thing, which is a mediocre genre anyway. Lots of layers, lots of reverb, lots of loops, lots of goofy lyrics sung in that Beach Boys register. Hell, the album cover looks like the music sounds, which is a real artistic coup. Decent stuff.
Tempted to ding 'em lower since they may have played a part in unleashing Chainsmokers on the world, though.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
3/5
If you like this stuff, I guess it's great. It was probably a real shot in the arm in the mid 90s when everyone wanted to be Soundgarden or TLC but that's not the only thing going on here. There's also this stripped down sound and overwrought writing and singing that might tickle your brain but it's just too much. Too much. It just wears on you. By the time PJ Harvey showed up (on the THIRD TRACK) I was like, oh god some relief. And it's an hour of that wearing on you. I don't think I enjoyed my time here at all.
I said elsewhere that Nick Cave never did it for me: too theater kid, something I narrowly escaped. This was the first album I tried way back when during my attempt to Give Him a Chance. Still don't care for it. Not sure if this album is good and I just don't like it or it's annoying and I'm justified, but the middle third basically saves it from relegation. Would've made a good EP, probably.