Sometimes sublime, sometimes derivative. One transcendent song does not a transcendent album make.
Brutal (except "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)," which merely sucked). Unwelcome visions in my head of 80s-era proto-incels slam dancing. The only essential question is how long this album will mess with my Spotify algorithm.
Starts weak (especially the insufferable "Teach Your Children"), but gets better as it goes along. I can't imagine listening to this album again, let alone being a member of the band and having to perform these songs for 45+ years. I know CSNY were all the rage in the Woodstock era, but I guess you had to be there.
An explosive lead-off single. But the rest of the album is mostly rock-ified blues, which is not my favorite genre.
I mean, I'm just not that into jazz, except, sometimes, when it's live and you can see the interactions among band members. This is fine as far as it goes, but it's no more than background music for a few seconds in a bar or nightclub in a period movie. Sorry, jazz aficionados.
Fine. 90s rock. This would probably be more meaningful to me if I'd been in high school or college in the 90s.
My favorite Beatles album, and one of the greatest records of all time. I listened to it front-to-back three times today. If there is a clunker here, it's "Yellow Submarine," which is ironically probably the most earworm-worthy track. The guitar licks are of their era and would be cliche now, but here they are still fresh after nearly 60 years. With "Revolver," we see the genius of which the Beatles were capable as they stood on the threshold of being liberated from the soul-crushing dungeon of touring live to screaming teenagers. We know, with "Tomorrow Never Knows," that we're entering an entirely new era.
Acceptable ambient music. Wouldn't go out of my way to listen to it again, even subject to that caveat. But wouldn't change the station, so to speak, if this came on during my workday.
Wasn't sure what to expect because I had only known Brian Eno as the producer of some of U2's best albums. This was really good--inventive, and with variety. It's astounding that this came out in late 1970s since it so cuts against the trends of that era.
Sometimes interesting, but not durably interesting.
I was too young for David Bowie’s first flourishing in the early 1970s. He was unapproachable cool in the early 80s in his “Modern Love” and “Let’s Dance” era. I can’t believe I’ve never listened to this entire album before. It is stunning.
It was fine.
Better than i expected.
Not big on jazz. But this is a classic.
Good, but great? I’ll have to listen to it when it’s not on my phone’s speaker while I’m cooking. I can see how this might be formative to someone in college in the mid-90s. But some of the songs ran together for me, and the sound mixing was spotty—at times too much guitar and not enough vocals.
I liked this a lot. Would listen to it again, and might give it a higher rating on a re-listen.
Wretched. I hope that the sell-outs at the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra lost money on this.
Well, it's a Christmas album, which is a strike against it. But it's good as far as Christmas albums go--some now-standards, and some otherwise interesting takes on classics. The sound is of its time. 3 stars because it's hard to imagine how a Christmas album could be better, i.e., this is no "A Very Special Christmas with Perry Como" or "Holidays Together with Josh Grogan."
Starts strong, but becomes a bit repetitive. A credible exemplar of its genre.
I know it's heresy to say this, but I got bored with this album a little over halfway through.
The blues is not my thing, but this was great.
This is easily the best album I've listened to so far that I hadn't heard before. I had always dismissed Nick Cave as the kind of artist loved by hipsters who, unlike me, were lucky enough to live near a college radio station in the 80s instead of drowning in REO Speedwagon and Billy Ocean. Shame on me. This disc packs an emotional and musical wallop. The Nick Cave button goes to 11.
Not knowing anything about this album other than the artist and date, I expected it to suck. But in fact it's very good--lots of different and interesting musical styles, and a couple of hits that I recognized. My only caveat is that I'm not that into the aesthetic of the early 70s sound.
I've never been much of an Elvis Costello fan. My only experience of him has been of live performances on shows like SNL and Late Night with David Letterman. He's an acquired taste, to be sure. I'm still not sure he's my cup of tea, but this album surprised me--interesting and creative. I'll give him a second look.
I told my son that my recollection was that this wasn't one of U2's best albums. It had been years since I'd listened to "War." I may have been right that this is a middle-of-the-pack U2 album, at most. But it's still spectacular. "Sunday Bloody Sunday" starts the disc with a wallop, and it introduced U2 to the wider American rock/pop audience. And "40" is as good a concert-ending totemic anthem as their is. "War" signified the last time that U2 could be regarded as largely an under-the-radar, post-punk alternative rock band.
How to review this album? On the one hand, it's groundbreaking, and it's musically and lyrically catchy. Some of the songs are spectacular. On the other hand, I'd be hard pressed to find a more misogynous album. And can we please stop with the rapping about male gonads?
I'd rate it higher if I didn't find the substance of the lyrics to be too often juvenile and offensive. I guess that makes me the only man telling the kids to get off my lawn.
I don't even know what to say. Brave? Foolhardy? Delirious? Delusional?
Seems self-indulgent.
Okay, so I'm not a fan of heavy metal, and I was not looking forward to this after recently enduring two farcical albums by Metallica. But this record is great--as good as heavy metal gets other than peak Van Halen. I'd forgotten how many tunes off this album made the charts when I was in high school. If you're going to listen to music at the left end of the FM radio dial and to the right of NPR, Def Leopard's Pyromania is so much better than most of its ilk, e.g., anything by Stryper.
I might rate this higher on a re-listen.
This is the third Metallica album that has popped up for me in my first 20 days. The first two were beyond awful, sounding more like a cliched attempt to spoof Spinal Tap itself rather than a good-faith attempt to make interesting music.
This album's actually pretty good. It has some standard heavy metal numbers, but it also has a lot of variety, and it held my attention. I'd listen to it again.
I had never heard of this band and had no idea what to expect. The album was entertaining--large swaths of a more edgy mid- to late-70s The Eagles and Little River Band sound, homages to Disco, and early 80s funk. A pleasant surprise and satisfying listen.
This was kind of fun--old school NYC rap. A bonus: relatively speaking, it rated fairly low on the misogyny-ometer.
I wish I could give this 2.5 stars. Replacement level 90s rap, with the bonus that it has also rap in Spanish (but not as good as Mellowman Ace).
Can see how it would have been a revelation at the time. In 2025, just okay.
So this album typifies the great divide in the late 70s/early 80s music world. Hipsters and kids with access to college radio, plus the extremely disaffected (a slightly younger version of Winona Ryder from "Heathers,' say), were listening to this album. I, on the other hand, like the bulk of kids in my lily-white suburb, was imbibing disco and yacht rock. It wasn't until Billy Idol broke through on the pop charts that I was even aware that punk/industrial rock really existed.
Too bad for me. This album is great--inventive, interesting, varied. Now I get why people like punk. I will certainly listen to it again. It's just a shame that, instead of my limited brain cells being devoted to this kind of music, they've been squandered on more Air Supply lyrics than you can shake a stick at.
When the gods reached out and touched the voices of women country musci artists, one of the first whom they commissioned was Emmylou Harris. A beautiful album. What's not to love?
Apostasy, maybe: Tommy Jones's joke in "Men in Black" about having to buy The White Album again when a new gadget replaces CDs, this is my least favorite latter-stage Beatles record. It has one sublime song ("Blackbird"), and a number of good to great tunes (e.g., "While My Guitar Gently Weeps"), but a lot of it is, frankly, self-indulgent. Sorry, fanboys.
Interesting as an artefact of its time. Otherwise not.
Would rate this lower if it weren't the ur-album for the yacht rock genre. Lots of smooth hits that were the AM radio soundtrack of my 1970s youth.
I can see why a Jerry Lee Lewis live performance in Hamburg, Germany would be thrilling. I'm not much of a Lewis fan, however, and in 2024 it's just "meh."
I mean, the intro of Tubular Bells is the music for the closing scene of "The Exorcist," and that's one of the greatest uses of music in any soundtrack. But the rest of this album is bizarre.
She was in the David Bowe zone of unapproachably cool. A great album. Inimitable sound.
Another album that I could have been listening to in 1979 instead of the Doobie Brothers and "Sharing the Night Together." I mean, yacht rock is comfort music to me--but why wasn't I exposed to this? And "Brass in Pocket" isn't even the best song on the album!
My father had an album of a Harry Belafonte concert at Carnegie Hall that featured Miriam Makeba singing "The Click Song," and my older brother and I, despite years of effort, could never generate one authentic-sounding click.
She is a classic. As with many albums from that era, this was more impactful in the early 1960s than it would be now, but it remains a great listen.
OMG this ACTUALLY HAPPENED. Effing brilliant.
Blech. I try to make it through every album. With this one, I couldn't.
Almost gave this five stars. A classic that I didn't come to appreciate until after the 80s were over.
Is "Don't Stop Til You Get Enough" Michael Jackson's greatest song? Was the "Off the Wall" era the latest time he was genuinely happy? Of its time in many ways, but a classic.
A much less interesting take on the Beatles.
I mean, it's Ravi Shankar--what's not to like?
Why?
A master class of a pop music album.
Some interesting stuff her. But OMG way too loooooooooonnnnng.
It's better than, say, Metallica. But, notwithstanding Steve Tyler's good voice, it's just kind of boring.
Like most Gen-Xers, I know Buck Owens almost exclusively from his co-hosting "Hee-Haw" in the 1970s and 1980s, which I used to watch with my grandparents. Not someone I ever took seriously.
I was wrong. This album is first-rate, and I know now what is meant by the "Bakersfield Sound." Lots of catchy tunes, and a surprising take on the old chestnut "Streets of Laredo."
I was going to give it four stars, and then I realized I'd already listened to it twice, so five.
My wife and I, of course, each brought our own Thriller LP into our marriage. Listening to this front-to-back for the first time in years, I am re-astounded at just how great it is. There are some admitted weaknesses, e.g., "The Girl Is Mine," but if you chose "Wanna Be Starting Something" over "Don't Stop Till You Get Enough" as Michael Jackson's best song, I wouldn't argue.
Hard to overstate the seismic impact this had on early 80s American pop culture, particularly on previously lily-white MTV. My high school best friend still has his "Thriller"-esque red leather jacket, which he says he wants to be buried in.
Check your hipster goggles at the door and don't pretend that you're too cool for this record.
Can't recall it three days later, but wasn't bad.
This album raises the Leni Riefenstahl problem. She was a gifted German filmmaker in the 1930s. Her most significant work was "Triumph of the Will," a mesmerizing depiction of Nazi rallies in Nurnberg that was, above all things, a propaganda triumph for Hitler. She never repented of her work.
Comparing people to Nazis is usually a pointless way to end reasonable discussion of an issue. But here, West is now a self-confessed Nazi. So the comparison seems apt. How does one assess his work in light of the fact that he is a thoroughly odious stain of a human being?
Musically, it's got a lot going for it. But I can't get over the artist's moral depravity. Maybe this would be a harder call for me if it involved a morally problematic artist from my own youth such as Michael Jackson.
A dazzling variety of love songs in a cornucopia of musical styles and voices. Madly creative, with loads of tongue-in-cheek humor--and true to the subtleties of committed, loving relationships. "The Book of Love" is one of the great love songs, but I'd never listened to the rest of the album until now. My bad.
Why does anyone listen to this crap? How did this album make the list of the greatest 1001 albums of all time--what album did it knock out? Every song sounds exactly the same, except part of the last one. Somewhere the members of this band are wasting away in Margaritaville right now, flabbergasted that they got rich out of churning out this noise.
Tom Waits is an acquired taste. I think I've finally acquired it. But not for this record. I dislike live albums generally, on the theory of "I guess you had to be there." I guess you had to be there.
Few albums equal the breathtaking opening sequence of songs than on disc one of this album--maybe "The Joshua Tree," "Sgt. Pepper's", "Purple Rain"? The best of the post-Beatles solo albums by the Fab Four. Loses momentum towards the end with the jam sessions, but George Harrison was letting off a lot of creative steam after feeling like his songs weren't making it into the Beatles' later albums.
I go back and forth between whether "Achtung Baby" or "The Joshua Tree" is U2's best album. The album is a total surprise that resurrected U2 from a stylistic rut. The grating electronic rock of the opening tune, "Zoo Station," signals such a break from the arguably pretentious "Rattle and Hum period, followed immediately by another anti-Joshua Tree song, "Even Better Than the Real Thing." And "One" is a transcendent song. U2 at the top of its game.
Just can't come close to competing with "All Things Must Pass."
Every song sounds the same.
Well it sure was a lot more interesting than heavy metal. But not interesting enough to listen to again.
Some classic songs here, but doesn't rise as a whole to greatness.
Was going to give it four stars, but a paradigm of its genre, and I feel like I'd get more out of the album if I listened to it while driving instead of as background noise while working. "Killing Me Softly" is unbelievable.
This is such a high-variance album. The opening tracks are god-awful. But there are also a few great songs, such as "Allison." So it ends up in the middle.
I have an emotional antipathy to The Replacements. They were the paradigmatic cool-kids bank when I was in high school (that I didn't even hear of until well after high school). While the kids smoking clove cigarettes were listening to The Replacements, I was listening to Billy Ocean.
In any event, this was just okay. I can see how a disaffected teenager in 1984 would have loved it, particularly compared to the bulk of music on pop radio at the time. But not earth-shattering.
Fine--not his best.
About as good an 80s pop-rock album you can get. Three massive hits, plus several other good songs. "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" is one of the best pop-rock songs of the 80s (including a bizarre but mesmerizing video).
Bleak but compelling. Makes me question whether I should have given five stars to some other albums, which aren't as good as this one.
Basically Muzak.
How did this album make it onto the top 1001 albums of all time? I want to see the underlying data.
Fun.
I'm a bit too old to love Green Day. But this album was fun enough.
Tedious.
I'm not a heavy metal fan. But if you're going to do it, this is the way to do it. This album was actually kind of fun, and not every song sounded the same.
Lots of hits here I'd forgotten about. And I know this view is unpopular, but it's David Lee Roth as a frontman who takes late 1970s to mid-1980s Van Halen to 11.
I can see why boomers love her, but not my cup of tea.
The music is good and varied, but who cares what the songs are about?
Better than I expected.
Nothing memorable.
Interesting to decide what genre this album fits into. Fine.
I mean, I just don't care for jazz. One tune I'd heard of. Pleasant enough as quasi-musack backround music.
I struggled with whether this merited four or five stars.
Stevie Wonder is a musical genius, but I don't have all of his albums. I did listen to the first episode of the NYT podcast series "The Wonder of Stevie," which I found to be a bit overblown and performative. Not Stevie's fault, however. And sometimes it's hard to forget his middling early 80s output (looking at you, "I Just Called to Say I Love You").
Having said that, this album is a pleasure. Lots of stylistic variety among the songs and, while this is an album of its time, Stevie succeeds in transcending the cliches of the early to mid-70s.
And how many songs, really, are better than "Superstition," which I could easily listen to on repeat for hours at full blast on my headphones? If that song were the total of Stevie's legacy, the mark he left would still be impressive.
On the one hand, this album could be the soundtrack of a Get Smart or Austin Powers movie--which really isn't its fault, since this sound hadn't yet become cliche when the album was released. On the other hand, I might have liked this more on a re-listen. Donovan has a Don McLean-ish voice.
Has mid-60s rock vibes, but also early punk. Didn't love it; didn't hate it; liked it more than I thought I would.
Proto-Muzak.
Not a blues fan . . . but this is as good as it gets.
There weren't many things out there like the Go-Go's in 1981--trust me, I was there. A fun album, with a great lead-off song,, "Our Lips are Sealed."
I guess someone thinks this is spectacular? I couldn't even get through it.
Some fun stuff here, but basically the dream album of a White teen or an incel/cryptobro. Plus the fact that Kid Rock is a stain of a human being.
If you're going to do hard rock, this is how it's done.
I was preparing to say that this album was overrated, more of a reflection of 21st Century nostalgia, post-Stranger Things, than of inherent quality. I was wrong. It's definitely an artefact of the 80s musically, but it's also novel.
Liked this a lot.
Peak 80s rap. What's not to like?
Reggae is not my thing, but if it is your thing, this is is.
Well, I thought I would hate it, but it turned out to be pretty good.
Kind of groovy, but would I listen to it again? No.
One good--the titular--song. And I'm still resentful, 46 years later, of the wives of the Pittsburgh Pirates dancing to this song on the top of the dugout as the Pirates eliminated my beloved Cincinnati Reds from the NLCS.
I'm a little to old for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Started out strong, then fell off, with a few glimmers of excitement.
As an evangelical kid who believed in Satan, I thought I would burn in hell if I listened to something like Black Sabbath, so I never tuned in. If this is the soundtrack to hell, sign me up--this turned out to be great.
Did not know this existed. The Go-Gos on steroids/acid. Liked it a lot.
Total crap that is insulting even to other albums that are total crap.
I mean, this is great, but I've heard so much of it before, and it's just so long, that I didn't love it as much as I could have.
Why?
