they're the best thetre is at what they do, and what they do sucks

i've been walking around shouting "THIS IS RELIGION!" in a johnny rotten voice all day. my wife is annoyed, my cat worried. has got to be one of the worst songs ever recorded; the spoken word version doubly so. a real twat, this guy. the guitar on annalisa and public image is interesting enough to elevate the album to a 2, which really just means i'd take it over most 70s prog.

my favourite beatles record. the red canadian version was one of my first lps. this version has more songs, unfortunately including "you can't do that," one of john's spousal abuse anthems.

take a drink every time there's a chord change

PLONK PLONK PLONK PLONK PLONK

doesn't even have "Boris the Spider" on it

never been a fan but i dig the mood of this album. "Agent Orange" is great.

pavement were my favourite band in jr high so this was fun

i get that jaco pastorius was the best bass player in the world. wayne shorter's 60s solo records and work with the jazz messengers are some of my favourite jazz albums. but goddamn if this isn't some of the worst shit i've ever heard

lifelong bowie fan but this wouldn't even crack my top ten bowie albums. doesn't do anything ziggy didn't do much better.

full of little surprises that reward close listening. "space odyssey", set in the far-off future of 1996, is the only misstep, and it's too goofy to hate. great album

i know she wrote 'em but there's no world where i would listen to these versions over the shirelles or aretha.

not as much fun as i remember jethro tull being. kind of a drag.

always psyched to see something outside the pop/rock sphere on this list. i only knew tito puente from his brief stint as music teacher at Springfield Elementary. this is good fun.

maybe not my thing but its creative and weird. some big hooks and wild beats. "jezebel" sucks tho

was psyched to find something completely new to me (never heard of it!) but it just reminded me of better things (country feedback, evan dando's gram parsons obsession).

one of his great "____'s G_____ On" records. this one's a concept album about a guy who likes to fuck. i like to imagine the look on the faces of the guys behind the console when marv dropped "stop beatin' 'round the bush." the title track remains funny, horny, ecstatic, unimpeachable, even after so many bad movie needle drops have turned it into a cliché. funnier and hornier still is the reprise "keep gettin' it on" at the end of side a, reminding you that he is, indeed, still gettin' it on ten minutes later. fucks my shit up everytime. love the drums at the end of "please don't stay." love the little red toque. love the pacman-ass typeface on the cover. last record he told us "god is love" and here he tells us sex is love. law of commutativity. we're all sensitive people with so much to give.

loved it.

despite years of recommendations from big boi and my friend jack, i've never latched on. still, i dig the invention and the self-consciously weird stuff even when the worst bits feel like performance poetry. and who could dislike a song about falling in love with a computer program from 1989?

side three is pretty good. the rest sucks.

the talking guitar parts are corny as hell, but my heart sank even more when he pulled out the acoustic. how has he managed to convince us this was a rock record for 50 years? who can explain the staying power of this record? was it the wayne's world joke? lisa bonet and big mountain? spotify tried to sell me frampton comes alive keychains and throw blankets.

try as i might, i've never been a fan. he gets a lifetime pass for his half of "shipbuilding" tho. reading contemporary reviews of this record is a real lesson in how poorly we can predict what will become a classic. oh well. "a man out of time" and "you little fool" are among his best, i figure.

not sure why kendrick has such a problem with this guy he seems chill

you just know he suggested calling it "stingchronicity" at least once. andy's always been the star member for me, and he's got some cool guitar parts here. some fun synth across the board. "mother" is great and makes me wish the guys had let themselves had a bit more fun sometimes.

i grew up in the napster/st. anger era so i've never known a world where these guys were anything but corndogs. coolest thing they ever did was help raise the alarm on the west memphis three, but it took the dixie chicks to find the real killers.

kim thayil's a cool guitarist and i dug some of the psychier songs, but the rest is mid90s dross.

yeah this is a lot of fun

timbaland drops an all-time worst guest verse on the last song

i've been walking around shouting "THIS IS RELIGION!" in a johnny rotten voice all day. my wife is annoyed, my cat worried. has got to be one of the worst songs ever recorded; the spoken word version doubly so. a real twat, this guy. the guitar on annalisa and public image is interesting enough to elevate the album to a 2, which really just means i'd take it over most 70s prog.

there is no conceivable universe in which this is essential listening

the beginning of a pretty incredible 70s run (don't skip the live album or the ep), even if it is the baroque outlier. this was my first time listening to the whole album in ten or fifteen years, and it was even better than i remember.

they're the best thetre is at what they do, and what they do sucks

i had their poster up in my bedroom as a teenager and i loved Sister and Daydream Nation, both of which are better than this record (i also had Goo, which is probably worse). now i figure they're kind of a buncha jerkoffs. one of us hasn't aged well. either way, i'll never forgive 'em for being bullies to Nardwuar.

there was one summer i listened to this on my discman on repeat. i met a girl at summer camp who also loved it and she was the first girl i ever dated.

produced by mutt lange, so every song is a fiddle away from shania or a synthesizer away from loverboy. at least they sang about relatable things like being a woman or working for the weekend.

my favourite beatles record. the red canadian version was one of my first lps. this version has more songs, unfortunately including "you can't do that," one of john's spousal abuse anthems.

some cool production

https://youtu.be/t5Tg_-LDyfg?si=3b8QVwn8z2yul-c_

coulda sent this up with the voyager spacecraft instead of those gold records. it would have served the same purpose. timeless but frozen in the seventies. universal but swedish as hell. even at their corniest ("the tiger," "dum dum diddle") they've got more hooks than a barrel of monkeys. if i had written "knowing me knowing you" i'd retire and die happy.

these guys would call the cops if you offered them a joint

i wish i could play this record for my the cure- and my bloody valentine-loving 16 year-old self.

he's got skills but you'd swear he invented internal rhyme according to the hype. the best rapper of all time if you've never heard rap before or you don't listen to black people. if only he'd used his powers for good. instead we get more gay jokes about nsync over some of the weakest beats in hip hop history. shit sucked when it came out and its just embarrasing now. best moment is the LFO parody.

shit sucks

one of the first cds i ever owned, but this was the first time i've listened to it in maybe 20 years, and though i'd reach for murmur, new adventures in hi-fi or up most days, i can't deny this might be their best set of songs, and the band never sounded better. but what struck me this spin was how formative and album this was for me in the late 90s. it not only acted as a gateway to lots of indie and college rock, but michael stipe offered a model of masculinity i could relate to and hadn't seen before. so yeah, maybe i am who i am in part because of this record.

easily their best album

years ago i heard jack black say he loved the idea of the show Battlebots but was bored to death watching Battlebots. i love the idea of lightning bolt, love the album artwork, love the song titles, but whenever i sit down to listen to it i'm bored outta my mind. i'll give it three stars cause the drumming's great, and i always hope some day i'll come around on it, and its abysmal ranking here bums me out when its still a million times more creative and fun than a lot of the records on this list.

ps1 racing game-ass music

so much of the 90s sucked in this exact way

this shit was everywhere when i was in junior high - it's honestly much worse than i remember

"all my friends" is fantastic. the rest feels like a joke i'm not in on

hated every second of it

sags a bit after runaway, but it wouldn't be the best album of whichever decade it belongs to if we lost "yeezy taught me." an incredible album all the more because of its flaws, meanderings, and self-indulgence. he err... reupholstered the game with this one.

kicks off maybe the strongest five-album run of rock history

"rednecks" is still scathing, and "louisiana 1927" feels more prescient than historic in the wake of katrina. light-hearted and furious, often in the same song. human kindness overflowing.

a few interesting moments but it doesn't do anything that a truckload of other 90s albums didn't do better

goth elrond

remember that scene in high fidelity where two green-haired teens start a shitty band called the kinky wizards and their music blows john cusack's mind to the point that he reconsiders his entire life? this album sounds like the kinky wizards.

didn't think compilations and archival recordings like these would make it on the list. the bootleg (just a name) series has a number of bright spots i'd take over bobbadee's studio albums any day - the isle of wight concert on vol. 10, the piano demo of "i'll keep it with mine," all seven drunken hours of the basement tapes. this one is a good way to spend an hour and a half but won't set your world on fire.

were we a serious nation, we'd put rick danko's face on the loonie. "give me five timbits for a danko," we'd say. "sour cream glaze." levon got an elton john song, manuel got the stick shift, robbie got his screwdriver. garth got a twofer with the river AND wayne's buddy. it's only fair.

a game i like to play with double albums: cut it down and resequence it to 45 minutes. any singles, demos, outtakes from the recording sessions are fair game. here's my tracklist for the white album: 1. Glass Onion 2. Martha My Dear 3. I'm So Tired 4. Sexy Sadie 5. Don't Pass Me By 6. Julia 7. Revolution 9 8. Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me & My Monkey 9. I Will 10. Cry Baby Cry 11. Why Don't We Do It In the Road 12. Happiness is a Warm Gun 13. Long, Long, Long 14. Hey Jude alternatively cut "revolution 9" into a few short tracks and put it in between tracks, rap skit-style. if you won't let me have "hey jude," replace it with "rocky raccoon" 3 times.

set your strats to "quack," boys sure, some people miss that "money for nothing" is in character, but that doesn't change the fact that it's just a rich asshole making fun of working class people. at least the weird al version had a message we can all get behind (that beverly hillbillies was a tv show that existed).

classic wu tang clan.

i bought this the day it was released, same as i did with funeral (not so much a brag as evidence of my being a dyed-in-the-wool pitchfork-reading piece of shit.) it was my 18th birthday. i remember being disappointed by Neon Bible at first but i still played it on repeat for months. at least it had a better version of no cars go than the original ep. listening for the first time ages, just a few weeks shy of its 18th anniversary, i gotta stand by my gut reaction. no cars go might be their best song but the new material doesn't do anything that Funeral didn't do better. their records go downhill pretty hard after this one. years of the band's insufferable cornballism and rock star bullshit have revealed them to be as shallow and phony as every other rock band that came before them.

i hope everyone involved feels bad about what they've done

he's got better songs but iunno if he's got a better album. great musicianship from Clover and spunky production from Nick Lowe. two cost'lo records down, only four to go.

this was great! i could see it growing into a five star record for me over time

i'd give this five stars for "all tomorrow's parties" alone. that song is a black monolith and i'm just a buncha stupid apes

if you like speakerboxxx check out big boi's first proper solo album.

woof

Jesus built you a hot rod and this is all you've done with it?

bought this record on a whim as a teenager, falling for the original artwork and the title, and having a basic idea of who the guys were. i'd still put it in my top 3 of the talking heads extended universe. it's still funny, danceable, and surprising after however many years. newer pressings have cut one haram track but it's not a major loss. cultural appropriation was always the point. hindsight is what it always is. if the "psychedelic african" guitar hooks you, check out King Sunny Adé, who is shamefully omitted from the list to make space for three kings of leon cds, i guess.

sounds like 2004, for better or worse

i usually skip pre-bruce maiden but this was great. the production's not as bad as its reputation. most of the songs hold up, but charlotte the harlot sucks.

some headbangers and some buttwigglers

"chocolate cake" is one of the worst songs i've ever heard. and they made it the opening track and a single. unfortunately the rest isn't much better.

cracks me up when plant gets all i'll-have-what-she's-having mimicking page's guitar. corny shit!

this was famously a simon and garfunkel reunion album until paul erased art's bits and claimed it for himself. hard to tell who came out on top there; maybe garf saw the writing on the subway wall. but there's a few high points: the magritte song is lovely and it's always great to hear nile rodgers pop up. cars are cars is stupid as hell.

a great album, more fun than they say and not as big a leap from his overlooked early 2000's work as they'd have you believe (compare "where are we now" to "heathen (the rays)" or "valentine's day" to the one about uncle floyd). overshadowed by blackstar, maybe. not a difficult record, but one that takes a few listens to unfold. sideman david torn returns with some excellent guitar work. i dig the artwork too.

too many skits, too many songs. but the highs are some of the highest of the decade.

bowie's best

the only drug they're gonna take off the streets is ambien. at least daft punk had the smarts to bring in nile rodgers to lively up their retrofetish horseshit. they worship a guy who said "don't look back" but make some Lot's wife-ass music.

take a drink every time there's a chord change

a blast

consider the third lp as bonus tracks (do the same for Sandanista)

a document from a beautiful moment that seems like an alternate dimension now. the posse cut here is much better than the single version. but what good is a posse if they don't stop you from rapping lines like "her breast provides the nutrition for growth"

this album was inescapable in the late 90s. it was fun to revisit it.

i dunno if this site will ever make a real fan out of me, but this was the most enjoyable of the three costello records i've heard

for gods' sake man, put on a shirt

i was introduced to belle & sebastian the proper way: a mix tape from a weird goth girl a grade ahead of me in the early 2000s. i liked salinger and mcsweeney's and wes anderson so this shit was catnip to me. unfortunately they never had the good graces to give it a rest; they grew into a parody of their worst tendancies and we just grew up. "we rule the school" is the high point here, but the real dorks know their EPs were always better than their albums.

came for 0-3-5 but found jesus. lament the dearth, er, death of heavy metal organ.

helpless is great

some cool diy production can't save it

kind of astonishing that you can have the most interesting guitarist of the 90s alternative rock scene, an incredible bass player, and a guy who looks like will ferrell and still be the worst band in music history. everything kiedis touches turns to trash.

give the people what they want

a big part of growing up is learning it's ok to not give a shit about sonic youth

i get how this woulda been cool in the 80s

title track holds up, the rest is mostly fine. but that across the universe cover is a war crime.

always psyched to see something outside of the anglosphere on this list. this was fun, but unfortunately the late-90s-ass production really holds this back. it's introduced me to raï music though, and i'm looking forward to digging into the genre.

i got this on the 55th anniversary of paul quitting the band. beep beep; beep beep yeah there was a time this was frontrunner with critics for best record of all time. not sure how Abbey Road of all records made it to the top on this site, but i guess the people want "maxwell's silver hammer." either way, some crackerjack tracks: "norwegian wood," "nowhere man," ringo's tune. love the sitar, the stratocasters, and the harpsichord. and it inspired at least one murakami novel and a short story. but paul is in an exceptionally corny mood, and john is particularly vindictive (i still reject the reading that he burns down the house though). that sharp inhale in "girl" is the kind of sin only someone bigger than the beatles could forgive.

this sucks guys

"Too Much to Dream" is an essential single from the wild west era of psych rock. Underground is probably the better album from these beleaguered boys, who remain a cautionary tale of record label meddling. Those unconverted to goofy-ass early psych are best served by Nuggets or uh... the pack-in CD from the June 2003 issue of Uncut, both excluded by the list's bogus no-comps rule. It's worth checking out the two lysergical, er, liturgical albums credited to the band but mostly performed by studio musicians, if only as a curio. They swap the late 60's silliness for late 60's self-seriousness, to a detriment. Free the Prunes!