This is one of those special albums right there on the cusp of something greater. While Nevermind would be the album that changed the world just a couple months later, without Mudhoney and Surfer Rosa by the Pixies, you don't have it at all. This is the purest look at what the folk up in Seattle were cooking at the tail end of the 80's glam rock and hair metal overindulgence and taking a page from the books of punk and alternative rock that fell right under the periphery. This is exactly the album that comes to mind when people want to talk about the whole Sub pop grunge thing.

Two brothers who didn't play around. Not the first or most influential glam, arena rock, etc band of the time, but Eddie's guitar skills are unmatched, much like Hendrix a decade before. While the albums after this one can be a mixed bag as a whole, this one doesn't let up for a second and is the kind of debut you want to hear. Running With the Devil is a solid start, but always felt like Eruption/You Really Got Me would have made a bigger statement for the band's debut, and the riffs across every track show he was a step above his contemporaries in play, while still writing songs with a blend of catchy hooks and technical prowess.

Getitawaygetitawaygetitaway now!

I hold so much appreciation for these formative albums. I feel like Raising Hell and eventually their contemporaries in Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, LL Cool J are better musically, but this album comes before all of that in time when Sugar Hill Gang and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five were first experimenting with this style, Run DMC shows the very foundation that would change the landscape of hiphop forever. Oh and right from the start with Rock Box sampling the guitar riff we saw what would eventually merge the genres together, which has always been a completion of the circle with rock and hiphops ancestral roots in jazz and blues music mixed with developing technologies of the 70's. Turntablism and sampling was a game changer with music and too many people sleep on just how important these albums are even if musically they may seem a lot more primitive. If we consider NWA's Straight Outta Compton the "Nevermind" of hiphop (in that it's an album that changed the landscape of the genre both artistically and commercially), then this album is closer to The Stooge's Fun House or MC5's Kick Out the Jams where you can link back to it as some of the most important albums that inspired the earliest generations of their styles and were already pioneering the definitive style of hiphop in this album years before most of their contemporaries.

First perfect score, and well deserved. What is there to say about this album? Talking Heads were innovating music in the 80's right from the start of the decade with this magnum opus that holds up 45 years later. It's complex, thought provoking, and resonant in ways that a lot of bands dream to be. Side A is a very technical display of polyrhythmic delights and an almost fluid stream of consciousness style where the band explores all sorts of themes and moods in their signature way before Side B kicks in with the band's two leading singles, one of the places where Talking Head's unique flavor stands out even among the radio hits as they challenge the listener with its experimental vibe and poignant lyrics over an otherwise upbeat 80's classic. I never grow tired of Once in a Lifetime just like I never grow tired of Psycho Killer or Burning Down the House from the following album.

Björk - Vespertine 3/5. Björk explaining how tvs work: 5/5

Driving 130km/h into the future. Fun fun fun on the autobahn.

25 years hasn’t let this age well. This album in its day brought a legion of angsty young white men to relate to an album mired in homophobia and misogyny. Stan is an all right track, but musically this does very little and lyrically it’s offensive.

Banger album from God herself.

Here’s the beef!

Is it normal to have an erection lasting the entire duration of this album?

Mom can we listen to the Beatles? "We already have the beatles at home." The Beatles at home:

“When I was a boy I was coming up through the 60’s and thought my adulthood was going to be the most radical years of my life, but when I got there it’s Pete Frampton in a kimono and I’m like cmon man.” - Mike Watt, Minutemen. American Hardcore documentary. I feel I can relate as someone coming up through the 90’s and when you get to that age you start exploring music and alternative culture this is what was happening. What a weird time. Incubus is one of those bands fondly remembered by those of us coming around in the turn to the 21st century as the thing to move forward rock music. Kurt Cobain died 5 years ago and all these alternative hard rock bands were coming up. You had the post grunge bands of Foo Fighters, Bush, and the whole lollapalooza thing going on. You had the nu metal and rap rock bands like Korn, Limp Bizkit, coal chamber, deftones. You had the funky rock bands like faith no more, Red Hot Chili Peppers, or sublime. This album is 1999 so Metallica’s already been stripped down to a shell of their former selves, cutting their hair, battling drug addictions and suffering the success of being the biggest hard rock band on the planet after still making #1 on billboard with the likes of Load and Reload. Creed’s first couple albums came out and we had Human Clay and the song Higher all over the place, so butt rock wasn’t too far off. Incubus didn’t fall comfortably into any of these and fell by the wayside. I feel like by 2003 or 2004 the band was pretty much forgotten as a relic of that period in the 90’s when gen x was of age, and the oldest millennials weee following along ready to take over their spot in the generational limelight just as quickly with their weird middle children of modern history and pop culture. Before y2k and the world was turned on its hinges. A time of peace and possible stability as humanity marches forward into the new climax of the species. But come on guys, this album didn’t age well in that regard and is one of the things that will go on to be a footnote once gen x and elder millennials let go of their nostalgia, and I get it. I heard Stellar and Drive on the radio a ton back then, my reminiscence of youth when my first girlfriend played the ballad “I miss you” when we weren’t hanging out and told me about it on our landlines. The nostalgia is ripe to be there but overall this album is a snooze fest and the songs aren’t particularly notable to me any more. This whole era of music was just a sterile facility of friendly enough rock bands that didn’t need to take a risk to sell albums and incorporate the most banal and mundane pieces of the grunge wave of the earliest part of the decade or creative works of Mike Patton. It’s the equivalent of Godsmack to me who took such a legendary band like Alice In Chains (who managed to escape a lifestyle as a washed up glam cover band and made a distinct style for themselves incorporating Black Sabbath’s riffs, harmonized vocals into the Seattle grunge scene to make it a bit heavier) and found the worst parts of their music to form their own career off of (honestly, even the song god smack off dirt is the one song I like to skip when I play that record). Linkin park was hot on their heels and would eventually out do Incubus with their debut album Hybrid Theory in sales and just being a more consistent vision, but you can hear the parallels. Some of the ballads, the rapping sections in a few middle the album tracks and even the DJ turntable instrumental that was basically copied by LP on their first album with Mr Hahn’s Cure for the Itch. Still, that’s not enough to save Incubus and this album while commercially successful wasn’t enough for this band to survive modern relevance and I think younger people won’t really find the appeal they had. Also the band name is probably one of the greatest missed shots in band name history. Incubus would be perfect for one of their 80’s goth rock, dark wave, industrial kind of bands, even taking note of the hit song from Xmal deutschland’s incubus succubus song, but alas it became the band that was a foot note in alternative rock and never really fit into any of the scenes burgeoning around them at the time, even lamented by the members who weren’t punk enough for warped and not metal enough for Ozzfest. One and done.

The tragedy of two stars shining bright and leaving us behind so early. His father, Tim Buckley passed away at the age of 28 from a drug overdose. Jeff said in interviews he had only met his biological father once when he was a kid. Jeff would pass away at the age of 30, a couple years after this album was released. What he left behind was a one and done classic in his own regard, singing melancholically but honest in the style of his predecessors, but also bringing forward the folk and rock music of the last few decades into a more modern style that could resonate with the millennials and Gen Z that would come after. A touching album throughout. His version of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah is absolutely beautiful.

Back in the day when I was drinking beer and hailing Satan, this album missed me. I heard their other album a while back and it got a solid 3 stars. This one however I see why the indie kids praise it as much. This album was very different going more into an art rock style and had a solid vibe throughout. Definitely one of the essentials.