I was hoping to discover some hidden gems here, but the less familiar songs on this record are pretty missable. Still, it has more than one all-time bop, which I'm going to say meets my criteria for four stars.
What a fuckin masterpiece
I'm operating on the assumption that it's ok to lean heavily on my own idiosyncratic tastes for ratings, because otherwise I'd have to give five stars to all kinds of "objectively great" music that I hardly listen to. This is a five star album, for sure. But it happens to be the best version of a kind of rock that isn't my fave.
Could you even imagine seeing Sigur Rós play live in Reykjavik in 1998? My brain would have melted.
This is the first record on my list that I hadn't heard before (I hadn't even heard *of* it). It's... ok music, but completely out of place on any list of must-hear albums. Go listen to a Nuggets compilation if you wanna catch a better and more authentic version of this vibe.
This is the first heavy metal record on my list, which seems auspicious, as I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. I still think the two singles from this album are corny, but I can't say if that's due to the tastes of rock fans in 1970, or idiosyncratic associations I've made over the years. War Pigs absolutely rips though, and I enjoyed several other tracks here. A couple of new bands are turning me around on metal, finally. I came up in a post-Black Album world (which was a sound that couldn't do it for me), but there are sonic ideas present here and absent in that scene that are still being honest by bands I'm just learning about.
This album is to blues what the yacht rock is to jazz. I have warm feelings for Dire Straits because they're a favorite of my father's, but I can't say that the music really does it for me.
I like sample-based instrumental music, and that includes a ton of trip hop. But this isn't even my favorite trip hop record from 1995! I don't think this should be on the list if DJ Krush and DJ Spooky aren't on it.
A perfectly ok record. It was fine. A couple tracks were catchy but I'm unlikely to revisit this one.
Man, rock critics sure do love Elvis Costello. This record is fine, but is it "needs to be one of Costello's SIX albums on this list" good? Probably not.
I'm looking forward to My Aim Is True and This Year's Model though.
A brilliant album, but—idk—maybe a bit uneven. The opening track is heavy duty stuff and the others don't quite match the vibe. Apparently they were barely even able to record the former though, so that's probably why.
Ugh, my appreciation for this record is offered grudgingly. I was living in Urbana Illinois when this came out, so it was pretty unavoidable. That whole mid-aughts indie oeuvre wasn't my jam at the time (that was around when I was just coming to accept that I really, actually, quite like house and techno), but this is the best record to come out of that. And it's a fuckin masterpiece. I can't play Illinoise without experiencing intense feelings; those mid-aughts happened to be a period of intense loss and growth for me personally, and this record seems to be, like, shaped at my emotional resonant frequency.
The title track presages what's to come, and I appreciate how this record serves as a missing link between 60s rock and 70s metal. But overall it's pretty missable. I had Paranoid on my list a couple days ago, and it's definitely the stronger record.
Not sure that I'd ever heard these songs before.
I've heard this record a lot because it's another one of Dad's favorites. Listening to it with fresh ears, it feels a bit uneven.
Pretty groovy record with some stand-out tunes. I hadn't heard this one before but will play it again.
I'm reviewing the original version of 1989 (not Taylor's rerecording), since that was the work that was listed here. But I would recommend that people purchase and stream the latter—at the end of the day, artists are more important than labels (even extremely wealthy artists).
It's hard, without multiple decades of perspective, to review an album that generated multiple singles which received near-constant airplay.
When you're old, pop music is the background music of the most mundane moments in your life. As a man in middle age, I can't hear these songs without imagining specific interactions that I had in the grocery store or at the gym (I set what is certain to stand as my lifetime deadlift PR to "Blank Space").
But when you're young? It's a totally different game! I can't imagine how people born between, say, 1994 and 2002 must feel about this record; even if you hate it, a record this big becomes a part of your life. Frankly, I wish more people understood this about their own taste in music (I'm looking at you, Boomers).
So here's a four star rating that should be taken with a tablespoon of salt. To my ear, Carly Rae Jepsen's Emotion is the more interesting mid-teens pop record, but that album wouldn't have come to be if not for Swift's work. Let's see how people talk about it in ten years.
I get it—Rahim Redcar is, like, real cool. But this record hits like some slightly-above-average synthy pop music. Had it come out only ten years earlier I'd evaluate it differently, but on my first listen I don't feel like it's bringing a lot to the table in 2018.
I've kinda loved this record for a while. Multiple bops, good sense of humor, and peak 70s singer/songwriter pop music aesthetics. The opening track runs through my head, unbidden, during much of the time I spend getting ready for work, and has done for years.
Definitely a good record, but overrated. I don't buy that it was as much of a game-changer as critics like to claim, and while some of the tracks are good plenty can be safely ignored.
This is thr first record to come up on my list that I already had in regular rotation.
A lot of hack critics have compared Rap music to Rock. Let me join them.
You can do worse than comparing the development of each generation, separated by about 25 years. Raising Hell is from Rap's "pre-invasion" era, it promises great things to come, but it's not quite there yet. The beats, rhymes, flow, turntablism just aren't in the same league of records that will be recorded just five years later (Low End Theory and De La Soul is Dead both come to mind).
Also, this album helped give Aerosmith a second act that the world didn't need.
Queen is too corny for me. But this album is just so earnestly committed to the bit, and the execution so flawless (that Freddie Mercury could sing ok) that I feel compelled to offer a begrudging 4.
This is another record I know well from my parents, but I don't think I have it in me to be a Dylan fan. If you took my favorite stuff from his first three "electric" albums and put them together, that would be a five star mix tape for sure, but there's too much stuff here that I don't love. I actually listened to all three today to pick a favorite album and I couldn't even do that. Gonna give this one a 3 and Highway 61 a 4 when it comes around; that feels right to me.
I was only gonna give this three stars but then they closed with an absolute BANGER in King Harvest (Has Surely Come).
I'm embarrassed to admit that I've never sat down and listened to one of Dolly Parton's records from beginning to end. She's a great singer, a brilliant songwriter, and (afaict) a class act. Dolly is a Real One.
I'm surprised by how much more I liked the younger folkier Dylan than Blonde on Blonde Dylan (which was on my list quite recently).
I was aware that his fans felt betrayed when "Dylan went electric" but I'm surprised to learn how few years passed between this album and Bringing It All Back Home—less time than a kid spends in high school!
A pastiche of different sounds that failed to come together into a coherent whole. I want to love an album that's a little psych, kinda jazzy, country rock-ish, but this isn't the one. This would be a mid-tier mixtape.
This strikes me as a record that wouldn't be on the list if 90s British Music wasn't over-represented here. But I also dig it; a bit uneven but definitely something I'll listen to again. I say "three starts by the skin of its teeth".
Many people misunderstand the crime of "cultural appropriation". The issue isn't "white people can't do things non-white people do". In a society where racism didn't exist, there would be nothing wrong with guys like Mick Jagger becoming millionaire celebrities by performing their own version of music pioneered by Black people. But we don't live in that world; ours places powerful barriers to Black people reaching the level of celebrity that White people are able to access. Perhaps things are better now than they were when the Rolling Stones started performing music (years before the Civil Rights Act was law in the US--i.e., when it was PERFECTLY LEGAL to OPENLY discriminate against people because of their race!), but even today too many talentless musicians make their careers by whitewashing art from other cultures, because the people who invented that art aren't allowed to do it themselves.
You can't be a serious music fan and not recognize this shit, and you can't be a person of conscience and not be bothered by it.
So with that being said: Exile is one of my problematic faves. I would be a cooler and better guy if I could rattle off a dozen blues albums that are more important than Exile on Main St., but I can't. And that's because I didn't grow up surrounded by the blues, but I absolutely grew up with the Stones on the hi-fi. This may be the last good record that the Rolling Stones recorded (and the 1001 album list seems to agree), but it's a fuckin banger.
I'm not the biggest Steely Dan fan, but I feel like their earlier stuff was edgier, their later stuff was smoother, and this just missed.
I'm not a G-funk fan, but Snoop's flow is legendary. Still, it's messed up that the album list has both this and The Chronic, but snubs All Eyez On Me? I'm gonna stay mad at how they do rap.
I'm glad I first heard this when I was young enough to be influenced by it, because boy oh boy was RAtM right about... everything.
I love raucous psychedelic garage rock. It's one of my favorite genres, and probably my favorite type of rock music.
But here's the thing: this is not LP music, it's 45 music. I wanna hear the 13th Floor Elevators on a mixtape, I don't want to listen to 11 of their songs in a row. This is probably the secret to the success (well, influence anyway) of the Nuggets and Pebbles compilation series.
This is a three star album full of five star songs, so I'm gonna split the difference here.
I dismissed 90s Britpop as "boring music" when it was happening, but maybe it's time for a critical reappraisal? I'm a wiser dude than I was 30 years ago (I hope). However, this fist of what I suspect will be many albums from that whole scene hasn't convinced me that I was wrong.
I love this record, it's an absolute masterpiece. But listening to it now, ten (!!!!) years later, it's kinda bittersweet. It seemed like hip-hop—and the whole world—was heading in a certain direction in 2015, and it sure did swerve in 2016. You hear this on Damn, I think, and I suspect it's part of the reason that we never got a Black Hippy record. The world changed that year, for the worse, and we're still living in it.
Don't get me wrong, K.Dot is still at the top of his game, but TPAB is a bittersweet listen.
I want you to understand that, at one point in my teen years during the 90s, I was a huge fan of the Beastie Boys. But a critical reappraisal of their work can't ignore the fact that *they're not very good rappers*. They have worked with great producers and musicians, and there are definitely tracks on this record that suggest some of the greatness that better rappers would go on to achieve in hip hop. But all these songs would be better if you replaced the Beasties with better MCs, or even just rocked them as instrumentals.
Hey is this the band that made the theme song to "Friends"?
This just seems like boring, missable generic music to me. I'm keen to read more reviews because I don't understand what makes this noteworthy enough to include here.
Here we have a 90s British band with a couple hit singles that failed to materialize much of a career after their first record. A perfect recipe for a completely missable 1001 Albums entry.
Except here's the thing: this whole album is a bop! It's weird to call a record that quickly set sales records "underrated", but I don't see Elastica (the album or band) get talked about the same way Suede (the album or band) does today—which is a shame, because to my ears this is clearly the funner listen.
Is this my favorite record from the 1980s? No, definitely not.
Is this my favorite "eighties record"? Yes, 100%.
This is a good record but it's just a bit too smooth for me.
Perfectly listenable album; I like it better than a lot of the stuff on the list but I suspect that it was included more because of the documentary about the musicians than this being among the most un-missable albums from 2015.
I normally ding a record that hops around subgenres as much as this one does (303 beats? Disco punk? Jangly guitar indie? 2 Tone? Afrobeat?!). But I quite enjoy almost all the songs on this, and there's not one dud to my ear. I still wish there was a whole record that sounded like the title track (the only song I'd previously heard from this album), but what we got is just as good. Gonna keep it in rotation and keep my eye out for the LP.
Exactly what it says on the tin. It's really a coin flip whether this is a three or four star record for me. Wait, I'm a nerd. I'm gonna start breaking ties with an RNG. Let's see...
Wow, what a charming performer! What perfect vocal control! That vibrato is almost TOO good. Dang.
Half (or more) of these records' ratings reflect their association with my dad. But this is one of Mom's faves. And it's a classic.
Of all the late 60s country rock this list has managed to throw at me in only 10 weeks, this album is my favorite.
When I was a tween at the dawn of the 90s, I didn't care for new jack swing. At all.
But I've grown sentimental in middle age, and have enjoyed revisiting a lot of the R&B tracks that were popular in my neighborhood back then. Some of them are guilty pleasures, but some are just brilliant. This album is full of the latter; I love it, and I should listen to it more often.
My first wife was really into Wainwright around the time we broke up, so you can probably imagine that I don't love to hear his voice even 20+ years later. That said, it's an objectively good voice, and he's a clever enough songwriter. Just happens to be something I'll probably never choose to listen to for personal reasons.
Booker T. & The MG's have two kinds of tunes: funky grooves that go hard, and cheesy jingles that you'd expect to hear the ballpark organist play. The latter are outnumbered by the former, but their presence hurts their LPs. Another top-tier 45s band with just okay albums.
Sometimes I just play the album in the background and only give it partial attention while I do other things. I tried that with Low, and after the record finished, I wasn't sure how I felt about it. It was certainly "good", but was it "great"? Are we talking about a solid three stars or five stars?
So I listened to it again. And again. And then a fourth time. Holy hell, this is a good record. Wow. I'm, like, familiar enough with David Bowie, but this wasn't full of hits, just Sound and Vision pretty much? But it's a brilliant album, it sounds years ahead of its time. I love this record!
Ok, so, I was one of those nerdy kids who discovered "underground" and became "cool". I tried way too hard, and was not nearly as cool as I thought I was, but by 1996 I was a teenage punk going to shows at all ages venues and people's basements. It was a good year for me.
I was way too fuckin' cool to listen to Marilyn Manson.
So while I've been exposed to some of his/their songs on the radio, I've never given this a listen. It's... fine? The productions are often dope af, but that makes sense when you look at the liner notes. The lyrics are way too corny if you pay attention to them, but they also got the Christian Right all hot and bothered, so mission accomplished I guess.
I would genuinely enjoy an instrumental cut of this album, or a version with Manson's contributions replaced by a cool lyricist and good singer.
This feels a bit too uneven for me to rate more highly. The funky bits can hit hard, but there are turns that just feel too... AM radio? for me.
This one's my favorite Pixies record. Surfer Rosa is, like, objectively cooler? But this one is a better vibe.
Feel kinda let down by this one. With about 10% more swagger it would have been a banger.
These aren't my favorite Bob Marley & The Wailers tunes but it's still a fine record.
This is one of my least favorite types of rock music.
This is a five-star hip-hop album dragged down by the Beasties' MC skills. You need to understand, I LOVED this record when it came out, but that's because I overlooked some of its contemporaries. Whenever I revisit it now, I'm just disappointed that the Boys didn't become better rappers.
There's no denying the virtuosity on display here, but I just can't get into this record as much wish—and I've tried several times over the years. Just isn't a vibe I usually go for.
Unassailable killer:filler ratio here
I think this is an important album to include on the list, because it marks an important turning point for rock music. When Foo Fighters was released in 1995, it was clear even to my teenaged self that "alternative rock" was cooked: there was nothing alternative about the sound anymore. Crunchy guitars no longer signified anything subcultural or rebellious.
This is just what rock music sounded like circa 1995. And it's pretty much what most non-hyphenated rock music has sounded like since. It's inoffensive, occasionally catchy, but mostly boring as fuck.
This one's pretty meh for me. I wish they subbed this with the Breeders on the 1,001 albums list. It's not a BAD early 90s indie record.
I didn't hear anything here that caught my attention or interested me.
I already have this album in a fairly regular rotation.
It took a long time for me to divorce my feelings about Funk from Hip Hop's G-Funk era, and the period ca. the late 90s and early 00s where white hippies were proclaiming a love for funk (I mean, the hippies weren't wrong, but those dudes were so corny it was off-putting). But I got there.
Some of Steely Dan's all-time bops plus a little filler. A solid record.
Ugh. Ok. So here's the thing. Maybe the Beatles are overrated, like, in some absolute sense? But man, look.
There is not a song on this record that is not great.
Even the silly parts are FUN, and the serious parts LAND. Those boys could write and perform a pretty good song! And what they accomplished in like six years is frankly kinda mind-blowing.
I'd never heard of Prefab Sprout before this, and it took me a couple listens to figure out how I felt about this one. I think I dig it; there are little moments in the songs that I quite love, but it doesn't ever quite come together perfectly into any song. This is a high three for me right now. I'll probably come back to it later.
Hill is such a complicated figure. It's hard to be a music fan and not look back at the decades that have passed since Miseducation with a sense of disappointment. But we got this record, and even just one nearly-perfect album is more than enough, right?
This isn't really an "album" in the contemporary sense, though it certainly bridges the era of literal albums-of-78s and the format that was perfected in the 60s. It needs to be here, however. The signature Verve-style arrangements are a little to schmaltzy to my ear, but Ella is perfect and this songbook is rightfully canon. I don't think I'm going to rip through the whole six-disc set in one sitting ever again, but I'll definitely revisit these tunes often.
I never vibed with Radiohead, but overall I think I liked this record. Once again I think it'll take some more listens to have a fully-formed opinion here, but I'll revisit this for sure.
Ah, Patti is so cool. This drags in places just a little bit too much for me to keep this in heavy rotation but it's a phenomenal record.
This should have been a bigger part of my early-mid aughts experience when I had bands like Hot Chip in heavier rotation. I don't know how I missed it then, but I'm glad I heard it now. Good stuff!
My ONLY complaint is that I wish there was a record that combined the energy of this live recording with the audio fidelity of James Brown's studio recordings (which, to be fair, have an energy density approaching that of the core of a yellow star).
I'm surprised to see this on here. It's anachronisms probably sound cheesy — "cheugy", even — to anyone who wasn't just the right age in the year 2000. But damnit I like this kinda stuff.
I prefer Black Cherry to Felt Mountain, and Koop to Goldfrapp, but I'll frequently cue up albums from this niche; it fits a particular mood.
Wow! I expected a record full of "pop standards" to sound cheesier than this. I think a combination of Nelson's earnest singing and Jones's production and arrangements counteract this. It is 100% charming—definitely a record to pick up when you see it at the thrift (and you probably will, given its sales numbers).
Some of the lyrics and flows have NOT aged well, but the productions are more sophisticated than a lot of 80s hip hop and there are more than a couple all-time tracks on here.
This is a Good Album, and I appreciate what XTC is doing here, but it's a little slow and navelgazey for my tastes.
(Incidentally, this was the first thing to come up for me that wasn't available on Spotify. I'm hanging onto my subscription in large part to get through this project, so if this starts happening a lot I'll cut it loose. But 77:1 is a good ratio for them, for now.)
How fun is this music?! I just listened to this with my three year old, and the little man "gets" it. Many albums from the 50s and earlier feel dated, but this one's a time capsule.
This was cool and fun. I always knew that Bjork was in the Sugarcubes before her solo career, but I never sat down with one of their records before.
I remember hearing this for the first time. It was as funky as I thought it'd be, but I did not expect it to SHRED so hard.
There's a sort of, idk, "sparseness" to the sound here. I suppose it might be haunting, but I feel like this is just missing something.
Whoa, this is dope. Love the dual altos and general sense of barely-controlled chaos.
This list has really exposed me to some Desert Blues. I think this is my favorite record of the bunch.
Apparently, "the kids" love dream pop, and it definitely seems like the genre has seen a recent resurgence. I'm grateful for this because in the past few years I've taken a closer look at many albums I've slept on. Of these, Heaven Or Las Vegas stands above the rest, a masterpiece of texture.
This is relevant context for many of my reviews, and I’ll probably mention it more than once. But basically, a combination of genuinely difficult life circumstances, arrogance, and naivete resulted in me being completely out of the loop of pop culture for years, starting around ’97 and ending finally around ’04. I’ve filled in some of the gaps since then, but this was my late teens/early twenties, when my cohort were laying down Important Memories, and I totally missed out on that stuff.
So I still haven’t seen Good Will Hunting, and until now I never got around to listening to any Elliot Smith.
But wow, I definitely missed out on this one. Honestly, I’m glad I only heard it now because I doubt I’d have appreciated it, but I’ve already listened to this a few times in the past couple days and I see it staying in rotation for a while.
I've never played this record, even though I've heard its hit a billion times—and even like it. It's fun stuff! A cool 3.5 that I'm arbitrarily choosing to round down.
This is cool but I don't love it. I'm not sure if there's a better Siouxsie record for me, or if I'm just a poseur who only appreciates the hits.
I'm not sure if I like it or love it, but I think I land on four stars here.
Solid album with a perfect title track.
I understand that Rush does a good version of the thing that they do, but the thing that they do just isn't for me.
Absolute classic. One of the best rap albums released pre-91. D and Flava had such a good thing.
I've always been a hater but I have to admit that this record is basically flawless. Yeah, I'll pick up a copy if I see it in the bin at a thrift shop.
I don't think Small Faces are particularly well-known here in the US. But in the 90s I had fallen in with Mod revivalists, and those kids LOVED this band. I can see how Ogden's is the more interesting record, but their self-titled LP is more fun to me.
I love this record and keep it in regular rotation, but I think Daft Punk only had one five star album in them and it came right after this.
I fashioned myself a punk as a teen, so OF COURSE I hated the Dead. But that was a long time ago, and you know what? They're fine. Some of their songs are good (some are certified bops, ngl), none of them are particularly terrible. I'll choose play this very record sometimes when I'm driving with my lovely wife, who fashioned herself a hippy as a teen.
I feel guilty panning things sometimes. Like, this is probably some guy's favorite record right? Maybe even a few guys? But this is just such dull Gen X Man Rock to me. The Replacements were more fun and Pavement was cooler.
It's not offensive but I doubt I'll ever play this record again.
What can I say about this record? It's like being asked to rate the Sistine Chapel. "You gotta check out that ceiling!"
I can confess here that I'm a jazz dilettante; bebop, hard bop, soul jazz are my bread and butter. This record is more complex than those sounds usually are, but it doesn't lose me the way that more radical jazz styles often do, flinging me off like an overclocked carousel. Instead I can enjoy this ride and its subtle thrills.
This is pretty much the Beatles at their corniest... and if you can manage to trick yourself into listening to this with fresh ears, it cannot be denied that every song slaps.
Whoa. I'm not a Wilco fan (I'm a bit of a hater if I'm gonna be real), but I loved this.
There are some things in here that I really like, but it just doesn't come together for me on this listen.
I'm sorry but this, to me, is basically the First Great Hip Hop record. Low End Theory was record that made this a real genre and ensured that rap music wasn't going to wash out as a fad. They absolutely had important antecedents, don't get me wrong, but this changed everything.
I still think that Midnight Marauders is their masterpiece, but this is an EASY five-stars from me.
Only the Beatles' run through the 1960s is as impressive as what Stevie managed to accomplish in the 70s. This isn't even my favorite album from this period of his and it's still, basically, perfect.
I've been stuck on this album for a while man. I wasn't that familiar with Rundgren, so this album came out of nowhere for me. Sometimes it feels like a three star record ("I appreciate what he's trying to do, but the execution doesn't match his ambitions"), other times I want to give it five ("this predicted the course of SEVERAL genres of music that I happen to love").
I need to just rate this and move on, so I'm giving it four stars, but TBH I'm not convinced that this is the right rating. However, I can say that I've listened to this a dozen times in the past two weeks, and I haven't done that with a record in a long time.
The beat-making on this record is a little uneven; some of the tracks are backed by a pretty unimaginative boom-bap, but there are some real gems. The rhymes are tight throughout.
I was too quick to write off this era of Marley's work because of secondary associations due to how the music was being used in my childhood. Honestly that's a problem with a lot of the music I've listened to in this project. But here it's particularly unfair.
I was (still am) the target demo for LCD Soundsystem. When the whole DFA oeuvre crashed into my awareness, I was finally able to connect the dots between the parts of me that tore up the pits at punk shows and the parts that danced all night at shady parties. James Murphy made it all make sense, and when Sound of Silver dropped, there he was with the Sad Dad energy that had also become a major part of my life by 2006.
I can't argue that this is, like, a masterpiece. But it's five stars from me.
Deep and soulful vocal + breakbeats is a winning combination for me, every time. 4.5 stars TBH.
Just a classic. When this dropped it was perhaps the best rap album ever recorded. Prince Paul's beats still sound good and the corny nursery rhymes of earlier rap records are replaced with flow and lyricism.
Creedence is one of Dad's favorite bands. They feel a little bit too much like an R&B cover band to me, but I'll always have positive associations with this music you know?
Morrissey is a Fascist. I'm not gonna listen to this trash.
I've slept on Nick Drake, but this record is phenomenal. Maybe my reckoning with it is biases by a spate of gloomy weather, but it's still a five for me.
