1001 Albums Summary

It's hard to not read this album as one long suicide note so that clouds it for me. It's their most cohesive, but least hooky record. It always makes me feel the next Nirvana album would've been the one.

This album feels it was put together by record execs and it was one of the times they got it absolutely right. They didn't know what to do with Blondie so they did everything and it worked.

I always think Isaac Hayes is gonna be funkier than he is.

Perhaps the most glaring example of the Springsteen Problem - great songs undone by terrible arrangements

Heard this when it came out walking into a record store and started to ask what it was and the cute girl behind the counters just went shhh and sold it to me.

This feels like a vanload of ideas trying to be a band. I wasn't sure if it was for me until I heard the reggae number and knew it was not

This is the Black Sabbath album that belongs here.

This album would be four stars even without Sultans of Swing, one of the best songs ever. Mark Knopfler is one of the sliest of modernists, gently coaxing us into the (then) new wave.

I feel I am about to pay too much for these sunglasses listening to this.

I don't remember this at all but "Richard III" is a great track two jam. I would've been into this at the time.

perfect but loses a point for the line in Oliver's Army. He knew exactly what he was doing when he put it in there.

Actually been listening to this and Straight No Chaser a lot this week. TM is so great at making a broken melody sound complete

I get why people think Sufjan is too much but I love this and the Michigan album and Seven Swans all the way. "John Wayne Gacy" and "Casimir Pulaski Day" both can make me cry when I'm in a human mood.

Def not the Black Sabbath album I would pick. I was really hoping to discover the Smithereens' "Behind the Walls of Sleep " was a Sabbath cover but no dice.

I had "Promised You a Miracle" on a high school mixtape from an exchange student and the jam sounds as fresh today. The rest is OK.

I love this album with my whole heart, though I always think about the look they must have had on their faces when Bob Dylan popped in saying "Hey I made this painting for the cover! You guys like it? You can be honest with me!"

Charlie Brown Xmas music for the discerning Quaalude user.

The thing I like about TS is that when she's derivative (maybe always) she puts her whole self into it. It's literally not for me, but the people it is for get all of it.

oof. Let AI do 80's retro

You could hold you own discussing pop music from 1930-1970 having only heard this album. He created trop rock (Coconut) and hair metal (Jump into the Fire) on the same record in his bathrobe.

It's the greatest Lou Reed solo album and maybe the 3rd best David Bowie album

Pretty perfect

This album is an easy win, nearly perfect and even better for the places it isn't. A friend of mine formed a Television cover band and did this whole album live once and revealed the 70s boogie that lies inside those icy guitar lines, which only made me love it more.

I'm picturing a post-Tommy The Who marching across Mordor, triumphant with banners aloft, legions in their wake when there is a wisp of white smoke over a golden hill and Queen gallop in like the four horsemen of rock opera and cut through Townsend's flank like it's warm butter. Sure, the Who will win the war, but for a moment, this one unit had them by the throat. "Is that a sitar *and* a vocoder?" Cmdr. Townsend gasped as Freddie's Daltrey impression on "The Loser in the End" stole the actual Daltrey's girl even though he didn't really want her. Brian May is in full wizard frenzy, lightning bolts and whirlwinds. No one knows the names of the other two, heroes anonymously mourned by rhythm sections for time immortal.

I'm a Bob Dylan type, but on the fence about this classic. There are great rambly numbers like Stuck Inside of Mobile and Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat but dreary slogs like Visions of Johanna and Lowlands. Too much harmonica. If you hate his singing, wait 'til you get a load of his harmonica playing! Loses a star for Rainy Day Women 12 & 35 - the dumbest things he's done, including his boutique whiskey line. But gets it back for the hair/stare/scarf combo on the cover.

The third best album by the Band after Big Pink and Stage Fright. I'm a fan, but could get by in life without ever hearing The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down again. Across the Great Divide is a weedy beauty of a song. A lot of the rest runs together much like the cars in a demolition derby. I though I hated Up on Cripple Creek for years until I listened to it on purpose. The recently departed organist Garth Hudson really shines on this record.

Dolly Parton albums tend to be, erm, front-loaded with whatever her single was at the time and a lot of filler, but this is one of the exceptions. I love the one-two punch of a mother’s love in the title track and the high camp of her mama stealing her secret boyfriend in “Traveling Man.” “The Mystery of the Mystery” is country gospel existentialism of the highest order. “Early Morning Breeze” is a spooky beauty that could have been a Lee Hazelwood cut or even a VU b-side.

They are really putting you Dylan/Band haters through the paces. This is a classic I never come back to bc who needs to hear “Blowin’” ever again? It is laden and lugubrious with folk reverence and watching Bob develop his shtick in real time, but “A Hard Rain” and “Don’t Think Twice” are total bangers.

Produced by Charlie Daniels - that's his devil-trouncing fiddle on "Darkness, Darkness." It's an affable progressive folk-rock record, wide in its stylistic reach and expertly played and produced, but it doesn't really feel like even the band are that excited about it, which makes me wonder if they were on it or was this done by CD and session musicians. The "come on people now, smile on your brother" debut album is better and sounds like a band. I think you can safely die without hearing this one. "Ride the Wind" is lounge magic, though.

Weird choice for 1001 given that Primal Scream has two other legit decade-defining classic LPs in Screamadelica and XTRMNTR. Seems like it was put together to re-sell the Trainspotting single, which is mostly good for the Jean-Jacques Perry sample it is built on.

One of my favorite albums ever. A magnificent, ragged sprawl in answer to the well-mannered smorgasbords other bands were making at the time. Death of the sixties dirty bomb. The bit from "Rocks Off" - the sunshine bores the daylights out of me - is one of the best lyrics in music. You may think this album is a mess, and you'd be right, but Three-Ball Charlie up on the cover knows what's up.

"Rikki" is a pretty solid groove if you wish Wings was meaner. "Night by Night" is for people who wish Wings wasn't so funky. "Any Major Dude" is the about the eighth best Wings song ever. The rest of the album is on par with Wings' Venus and Mars. If comparing Steely Dan to Wings doesn't reduce your Dannist adversary to a stutter, substitute Styx in there.

Unstoppable banger. It sounds as fresh today. Sure, it owes pretty much everything to George Clinton, but I suspect George Clinton owes more back to this album for how its made his thing eternal.

There was a week there back then when I thought RatM was the second coming, but I was having a bad week. They were a little too alpha for me. Fugazi for skaters who would go into finance.

Unimpeachable. Best performance on a jug. Do not operate a forklift or other heavy machinery while listening to this album.

Any song I've ever thought was a great Suede single turned out to be by another band. That mixtape is 5*. Those songs actually by Suede, or perhaps just their press presence, always seem to project more cleverness than they actually have. A less-committed Smiths. Echo and the, well, just echo of better English bands from 10 years before. Probably sounded great in a bar in 93.

I wish Kendrick Lamar would take over the contemporary pop musical mantle from the Hamilton guy. This album feels like the soundtrack of one I'd actually want to see. He raps like someone executing a flawless parkour routine, bouncing off buildings and jumping off balconies and landing in a casual strut.

Not the Beastie Boys album I would pick nor really have ever gone back to. It has more of the weedy rock haze that I'd associate with Check Yr Head or Ill Communication than I remembered, particular the opening track. The longer songs feel endless, a purgatory spent in the New Style and not getting sleep til Brooklyn. "She's Crafty" came out a few months after Run DMC's "Walk This Way" and it felt like the whole world was sing song like this and like that. The deep cuts can stay there, the hits will be omnipresent as long as white people are still on earth. "Girls" still kinda cracks me up.

Another weird choice for a band who has a much more classic album, or at lease one that has their signature songs. This sounds like one of those later Squeeze albums - perfectly alright, they are pros, but you barely remember while you are listening to it, much less after.

Any plural-bird-name band without a definitive article is gonna be unfairly compared to Swans in my mind. Doves are no Swans. They remind me of the Mighty Lemon Drops, a perfectly fine band I saw open for three different touring acts one year in college: affable, nice texture, but if you stuffed any calendar page from their year into a CD player, 2002 in Doves' case, this is what it would sound like. I like the percussionless "M62 song" and "Where We're Calling From" the best, so maybe the drums are the key to their blending in to the woodwork. "N.Y." betrays a grunge inclination masked in synth strings, winding into a nice arpeggiated guitar. But a lot of nice, not a lot of wow.

"Connection" was omnipresent for a while, like it was put together by a marketing team for maximum impact in the bar 'n' grill background music sector for Q1 '95 , but maybe I never heard anything else by them. The rest of the album sounds like a much more fun band. The songs are barely formed in the best way, each consisting of a good hook, an expertly shoplifted Joy Division or Fall or Stranglers quotation, a cool noise and a sing-song swagger.

It is impossible to hear "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" with fresh ears, but the Teutonic march of much of the rest of the album still hits for me. Yes, "Shout" is ridiculously serious but they do it enough times to wear you down which is a triumphant twining of pop art's form and function. Yes there is a lot of sax in the non-hit recesses. Yes, they are not particularly fun but it was the twilight of the Reagan and Thatcher eras. Yes, it sounds like Yes did in 1985, with all the orchestra breaks. I don't know if I'm making excuses for them or for me, but it still sounds fresh for being so dated.

I don't know if you need to declare that, before you die, you must hear music that has never gone away. It's like saying "You GOTTA breathe this atmosphere while you are here!" Pretty sure every human hears "Smooth Operator" at least once a week during the process of being alive. And it is flawless. "Your Love is King" only slightly less flawless and thereby more interesting. I wonder if they have to pay Roxy Music's holding company for style royalties. I've always kinda dug the nagging persistence of "Hang on to Your Love", a ballad from a barnacle to a Nantucket whaler of a love. "Cherry Pie" is the secret subdued disco banger hidden in here. As is the audacious conga minute opening of Timmy Thomson's minimalist classic "Why Can't We Live Together." I want to hear that gliding around a roller rink on the moon.

This is a jam. There's points where I wanna say this sounds like disco or Talking Heads and realize, oh yeah, other way around.

This is one I've tried to get into over the years as it has been cited as a foundation document for a lot of the music I like, but I dunno. Like much new wave pop, the songs are one minute of a good idea dragged out to five. If "Rip It Up" was 2:30, it'd be perfect. Time and place, this honkylypso would have been an excellent antidote to very serious punk in 1982 Scotland but most of it hits me like the other songs on a Police or (English) Beat album.

Love the early drunken reveler Fairport Convention records. The best thing the Byrds ever did was convince FC to plug in their guitars. The slower ballads get a bit arch, but it's so good when they swing into gear. Some of the instrumentation (partic "Matty Groves") would not be out of place on the first couple of VU records.

What I want to hear walking in a bar or coffee shop mid afternoon. The kind of vocal jazz you passively listen to or actively ignore. I'm a little fixated on the R on the marquee on the cover. Was it just like that when they took the photo or did some art director have a brilliant idea right before or was there a transfer letter screw up?

Bangers all around. Even the tired ones you've heard 100 million times hit like a brick when you listen to them on purpose.

Love this album. This album has become something an indicator of an alt-country lifestyle choice, but it really is a beautiful record every time.

Hmmm, I’d say if you need a Janet Jackson album before you die, the one with “Nasty” and “What Have You Done For Me Lately” from a couple years before is the one with cultural impact. The video for the title track was better than the song.

I love Rufus Wainwright for his candor and wit as much for his voice, but this album has a little too much remove for it to grab me. Poses is the RW for me, particularly "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk", one of the best songs ever.

In my dream life, it would be southern California weather and we would all get around on roller skates and this album would be the default soundtrack being broadcast on transistor radios laying around everywhere.

Despite having seen this album cover my whole life, I'm just now noticing he's wearing a hoodie. Always something to discover in Bowie. "Sound and Vision" is one of his best songs, "Speed of Life" his best groove, "Be My Wife" a terrific song I forgot about, "Warszawa" a fully realized chamber piece, and "Weeping Wall" one of his most successful experiments. With all that, a lot of the rest feels a little unfinished, which is in its own right a brave move for a perfectionist, but I'd like to hear "Breaking Glass" as the juggernaut it wants to be.

I was hoping to die without listening to a whole Marilyn Manson album but life if full of little disappointments. Plus, I feel MM wants you to die listening to his music. Like the photoshop cover and word-burrito song titles, this feels like a pastiche meant to evoke a mood it doesn't quite deliver. He seems to be a horrible person, so maybe he should have dug into that. This is all strobe light and no chainsaw. I do see why guitarist John 5's picture is on the wall at my local Guitar Center, for what that's worth.

A lot wiggier than I remember this being. The last four minutes of "Don't Call Me..." could go, as could all of that fill-the-album-time-with-cocaine of "Sex Machine" but the rest are all hits for a reason.

My third favorite Pixies album after Surfer Rosa and Trompe L' Monde, only by narrow and situational margins. It took me a while to fully come around to the Pixies bc I was a snooty college DJ at the time of their ascendancy and suspicious of anything that other people liked. This group's lara7 and I picked up a tape of Surfer Rosa at a yard sale and driving around to that won me over. Years later I took a road trip with a friend who only brought two tapes - Trompe L'Monde and Blondie's Greatest Hits which cemented that one. But Doolittle is the right entry point, their catchiest, their most aliens-recreate-rock'n'roll-in-their-language.

Electric Warrior sits imperious in the perfect brilliant/stupid singularity toward which all rock music tends. His folkier music before this is delightfully ridiculous, his heavier music after this is as subtle as a werewolf howl on the moors but this record is a like a lit cigarette trapped in amber - perfect distilled coolness.

There's Bob Marley albums I like better, and reggae artists I like better than Bob Marley, but this is an OK one. Plus, it's good to listen him like this on purpose, outside of the omnipresence of his hits in every stoner-adjacent fast casual restaurant and dorm room. As a musician, I aspire to the ironically dead-ass organ sounds on "Lively Up Yourself" and it's impossible to not feel it will be when the "Everything's gonna be alright" repeats hit. Everything won't be, but it's a great template for compassion. There is non-insignificant quantities of filler on this record but "Bend Down Low" is a great party percolator I don't think I've heard before.

What a beautiful ridiculous band! Quiet Riot seems even more weird a phenomenon knowing that their hits were Slade covers. This album is so-so, but their singles are solid. They wrote the best rock'n'roll Christmas song ever but it's not on this album. If you are looking for glam rock you need to hear before you die, allow me to direct you to Mott the Hoople.

The presence of this and License to Ill implies that Check Your Heard is on the list, further indicating more Beastie Boys that you might need in one life where other hip hop exists. Side A - through "The Update" is so good, showing their range and command of a banger. The latter half kinda hits like a YouTube beat tape I'd put on to ignore get some work done.

This one-man jam session is a lot to take unless you are really invested in the nexus of jazz, minimalism, and new age as well as advances in recording piano overtones in a room. I bet 25% of the people in Köln that night had their life changed and the other 75% were looking at their watch and questioning the renewal of their season tickets. I'm into it, but I get why you aren't.

Six out of five stars for the Cars. "Let them brush your rock'n'roll hair" alone puts this album among the constellations and it's not even from the best song, which is "Just What I Needed" - the best rock song ever. If Buddy Holly hadn't died in a plane crash but instead fell into a wormhole to the future and came back to 1978 as Ric Ocasek to show us the way.

There is a Chuck Klosterman quote about the first Van Halen album being the perfect average rock record - anything worse than it is bad, anything better is good. Foo Fighters are the embodiment of the Hagar-era of that metric.

This is the Pixies record that never really grabbed me. All the brio and egregious reverb usage of the Cult, the lyrical inscrutability of extreme metal band and the no-eye-contact of a band that might open for Kraftwerk. There are some great hooky numbers like "Hang Wire" and "Dig for Fire" and "Is She Weird" - the best Violent Femes song they never wrote - but I find myself skipping a lot of the rest.

This album is catchy as a gill net and content-free as that same net pulled out of an unstocked lake. Practice frame for Oasis, who knew where the big fish were.

This album is good, but the Live: P-Funk Earth Tour album that came out of this material is the real must-listen Parliament record. The beat on the studio version gets monotonous, but with an entire 1977 LA Forum stomping along, it reaches the cosmic.

"Do It Again" is why audiophile stereos were invented, but then audiophile stereos are what gave us the subsequent Steely Dan albums which gave us the 80's Wall Street greed era which begat tech bros and Elon Musk. So despite "Do It Again" being a stone jam, one must gaze at the album through the dolorous lens of history and stall the waterwheel of unlearned-from mistakes. Let us not be the fools doing the Dan's dirty work. Plus the non-single tracks are so-so.

The side-two medley is the last gasp of their greatness, but a lot of side one is a tired sigh. Even in my most Beatle-adoring youth, "I Want You" gave me the ick, and "Oh! Darling" too saccharine. I've always wished they'd worked more, perhaps, collaborated with purpose, on "Come Together" which is a great song with dumb lyrics. "Here Comes the Sun" is perfect and "Octopus" and "Maxwell" are dopey and fun.

I love Prefab Sprout. A master class in mass-appeal idiosyncratic art-pop. Those synths are an anchor in the harbor of 1985, the only thing keeping this album from being timeless. I have had "Appetite" in my head since I saw the video in high school and I'm still not sure what its about. The only real digs I have against this album is how front-loaded it is and those gated drums, but it's how the world was back then.

This is still a beautiful, singular album, but damn those songs take forever. No wonder she's always late for her shows.

Masterful performance and recording but I cannot imagine a situation where I would not feel ridiculous putting this on, save being a ATF agent tasked with driving a doomsday cult from their compound.

Low-key one of my favorite Radiohead albums. I love the shaky rage, the introspection harmonies, the way the digital aspects flood in through the cracks of a rock band. Phasers set to melancholy. Also, the best album cover for a band that makes definitive album cover statements. It's not the Titanic-sinking iceberg that OK Computer or In Rainbows are, but I love how it looms out beside you in the fog.

This album will make you understand why the entire boy's club of early punk fell completely in love with Patti Smith. I go back an forth about whether this or Radio Ethiopia is my favorite - this is more feral, the latter rocks harder - but she was an electromagnetic rock creature radicalizing knuckleheads everywhere.

It's a pretty, breezy record but The Three EPs, made famous by the same movie that needlessly steered a generation away from the pleasures of Belle and Sebastian, is the one you need to hear.

I mean, c'mon. If you don't give this five stars, you are clearly not ready for star time

How did they not do a James Bond theme? Like a lot of trip-hop, it feels highly derivative in the best possible way, like an expertly filled plate at the buffet that makes your tablemates go "Ooooh, I didn't see the dumplings!". Alison Goldfrapp is a true songbird, the production is smart and in just the right part of her shadow. Great Theremin usage. This was a delightful surprise.

This was one of the records my mom bought after the divorce, along with a lot of Neil Diamond, so it is woven into my upbringing. It's a beauty of a standards collection. I was going to list the Willie albums I prefer, ones that lean on his original material, but then "Blue Skies" came on, and I thought why would I want anything else? It stops just outside the city limits of treacle, elevating the tiredest of songs with a weary, elegant resignation. It's making something out new of what's left. If you can't open your heart to his version of "All of Me" you may want to have a doctor confirm you have one. This version of "Unchained Melody" is what plays should our wretched souls ascend to heaven at the end. So yeah, essential. Produced by his neighbor Booker T (of and the MGs), recorded in another friend's house, with the harmonica recorded in a shower stall. Also I love that he insisted on keeping Susanna Clark's (wife of songwriter Guy Clark) signature on the cover painting.

It's difficult to listen to this as a thing unto itself with it being peak "rap older white people listen to and reference." But unzip that baggage, the energy and anger is still potent. It's a monotonous listen, but then that same-damn-thing-every-day-ness is what it seeks to express. I feel the singles are maybe more important to hear than the full album.

A feast for the headphones, especially "River of Orchids". XTC is one of those bands I wouldn't really recommend one album - I'd rather you sign up for my semester-long lecture series so we can discuss them at exhausting length. There will be field trips to Swindon and extra points will be awarded for throwing eggs at Todd Rundgren's house. That said, this is a good one, like glimpsing one last gallop of a unicorn before it disappears into the woods.

This kind of personality schtick jazz from the 50s strikes me as music for people who aren't really into music. It's like eschewing standup comedy to just see Gallagher smash the watermelon over and over. I'm sure Louis Prima was a hoot live, but I'd rather hear a Sam Butera and the Witnesses record. "Night Train" slaps.

I've often wondered what became of Einar, the spoken word guy the Sugarcubes - he didn't stand a chance once Björk warped the timeline. He served on the Reykjavik city council for a while, so that's good. This was a meteor killing off the dinosaurs at the time, but I hear a lot of Oingo Boingo, Go-Go's, 4AD roster, etc in it now. It has a sweet menace to it, feeling like it was inaccurately translated at some border checkpoint and made all the better for it.

Goofus banger. It’s been a quarter-century since I last listened to this one, but I could feel the anxiety that comes with attempting to be rational in an irrational world lift as the toilet humor pledge was recited.

Not the Cure album I would pick, but upon relistening - Elemental Cure. If you crack on them for being gloomy and mopey, it's right here. If you love the Cure for putting together excellent pop music with startling economy, also here. If you think their songs all sound the same, yeah ok. If the Cure makes you feel the feelings other people get from pop music, and your default dance move is to sway like there's a cigarette in your left hand, it's on!

I talked to John Zorn on the phone once for an hour as a prelude for an interview that, after I went out and bought the albums of his he suggested we discuss, elected not to do. Cold, but it's dog-eat-dog for an independent label owner. This was one of the albums he didn't want to talk about, that it had been talked about to death. I will say if you like this explosion of saxophone and drums and joy and rage, it's more of a gateway into Zorn's peculiar sonic world than it is Coleman's. If you plead for it to stop, than neither is likely for you. If you ever thought Oingo Boingo would sound better tumbling down a mountain, get ready!

In a more impulsive era, I cajoled a clerk at an incense shop to sell me the store’s copy of Ali Farka Toure’s The Source because I was so spellbound by it. This is more bluesy than that one but is nonetheless hypnotic.

The most fun and accessible Cocteau Twins record, if those are metrics that should be applied to them. I didn't really appreciate them at the time when their excellent posters adorned the apartments of the goth-adjacent (also I fell asleep at one of their shows), but my daughter and friends' daughters all have had a Cocteau Twins fixation that made me come around. This album is a gem that could stand a remaster to really makes it glow.

No matter how much you turn this album up it is still a whisper from a kid just trying to feel things. I suspect he was kind of adored to death after that Oscars performance, so this sweet document from right before is all the more precious.

Perfect disposable NYC lifestyle rock, the kind that the Strokes aren't really good enough to do and LCD Soundsystem are too good to do. I feel cooler when it's on and don't even notice when it leaves.

Siouxsie and the Banshees are the Jefferson Airplane of goth, not just because of an enigmatic female singer but also because their albums have one or two clear classics (Spellbound : White Rabbit) and the rest of the record is not quite at that level.

I like the ska-jazz... skazz, maybe? feel of the opening track, and the safari-groove on "Tuang Guru" but the rest sounds like "Yep. That's jazz alright." I say if you are gonna spend your 1001 token on him, the cinematic African Space Program album under his pre-conversion name Dollar Brand is a more rewarding, if more challenging, listen.

There is a whole lot of Africa to listen to without including a second Ali Farka Toure forced date of an album with roots magpie Ry Cooder doin da blooze. The record is ok but, dude. Pass the aux cable.

Being the most turgid Pink Floyd album is an achievement unto itself.

I like hearing these dinosaur songs actually roam the earth as wild animals instead of the slick way blues is usually presented. It should be a strict prerequisite for blues jam participants to hear this version of "Everyday I Have the Blues" before they are allowed up there with their fedora and $2K guitar.

This album is mathematically and emotionally perfect. We, as a species, will likely never again reach this singularity point of longing and fear and make it this catchy.

It sounds like a good song playing at Walgreens.

This sounds like every other song playing at Walgreens.

I am saturated on Fats for this life, thanks. I do like the drums actually allowed in the mix along with that jackhammer piano.

The Killers are like a brightly, expertly papered wall with no hooks to hang anything on it.

This album gets cooking at the halfway mark, but the first six songs are a slog. I prefer Acme or Orange when they mostly shout "BLUES EXPLOSION" over slam-on-the-brakes rock. It's a limited technique but it works when they do it.

Never have understood the appeal of Janes Addiction. Did someone once put on three different Van Halen albums at 45 through cheap speakers and go "that's our sound" ?

Consistently delightful album for decades. Not a thing out of place, yet never tiring.

Al Green's Greatest Hits (the one with him shirtless on the cover) is the definitive Al Green record. The title track gleams from the Mt. Olympus of pop music for a reason, and "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?" is what you hear on your soul's transmigration to Purgatory. The rest of this album is reliably groovy and expertly crafted but not that memorable.

This is one of those records that is actually less than the sum of its parts, even though the parts, particularly Carlos Santana's guitar and his rhythm section, are excellent. The songs drift along like barges over-loaded with great musicians and then are gone. The surprise here is "Hope You're Feeling Better" with that red laser organ tone and hard Funkadelic groove. More of that, please...

This record totally holds up, even the ridiculous "The End." Any cracking on the Doors is well-deserved but the spooky, easy decadence of this record is infectious. Bubblegum gothic. Plus, I haven't heard the garagey non-hits like "I Looked at You" and "Take It as it Comes" since college.

I suspect LTJ Bukem would be unable to distinguish Level 1 from Level 13, much less justify why this particular trance compilation over the countless others form the 90s needs hearing before leaving the planet depicted on the cover.

The new wave anthems that sounded so good in my generic Walkman in 1986 like "Red Rain" and "That Voice Again" don't grab me anymore, but I am struck by what a grown-folks stone jam "Sledgehammer" still is. An updated remix of "Don't Give Up" would've been right on time with the recent Kate Bush renaissance. Peter Gabriel should have left "world music" for David Byrne to handle and just gone full R&B elder after this album.

I cut my chest up in a hot Detroit ballroom with five stars for Raw Power. Even for Bowie's original clunky mix but especially for the redline one Iggy did the early 2000s.

This album gives the fussy baroque of 1967 psychedelia the right kick in the bell bottoms. The non-hits were a treat, not having heard them for ages. Holds up spectacularly, which is not something I'd say for his other albums.

This is where he channeled his squirrelly energy and skills at preparing word salad into making narrative sense, a gentle counterpoint to the feral joy of the Basement Tapes that came out the same year. There is a lot of baggage that comes with liking or not liking Dylan, but these are some of his best lyrics.

What a surprise! I thought I didn't like this record because it's no Los Angeles - an arguably perfect punk record - but its not trying to be. They discovered hard rock melody and complicated grown-up feelings left behind in the practice space and are excited to share them.

Kate Bush is the new wave Stevie Nicks, the wise older sister/wild aunt a lot of people need in their lives.. "Running" deserves all the praise it gets, but "Cloudbursting" is the one off this record that still gets to me. Otherwise this album doesn't quite speak to me like it once did. It would probably make for a smash Broadway adaption.

Must we? "Man in the Mirror" is one of his greatest tunes, a rare moment of self-critique from the most profound ego of the 80s. I'm surprised to find "The Way You Make Me Feel" here - I thought it was from an older album or maybe a Stevie Wonder song. The rest of this album sounds and had always sounded phoned-in to me, hyperactive autopilot designed to fatigue a Solid Gold dancer.

This is one of those laser-guided missile Sinatra albums, equal parts wide-eyed golly gee, you're just the greatest, and eye-roll droll. It's interesting (to me, anyway) that this CD release cover was changed to have a more flattering portrait of old Blue Eyes in the background from the original album. That's focus, baby. "Old Devil Moon" is one of my favorite Sinatra tunes, and "I've Got You Under my Skin" is perfect. "I Thought About You" is a stealth banger. Also, this album title gets an extra point for inspiring Renaldo and the Loaf's "Songs for Swinging Larvae", a record nerd joke that makes me laugh every time I think about it.

All I'm sayin'... This album is a high camp delight. The ubiquitous hits "The Look of Love" and "Poison Arrow" are the peaks here and the only ones I'd heard before, but the strings and the breathless delivery throughout sell it. The final two tracks - a fussy orchestral "The Look of Love Part 4" and drunken cabaret version of "Poison Arrow" as "Theme from 'Mantrap'" is chef's kiss emoji good.

The Dandy Warhols have the thick, swirly neo-psyche sound dialed in perfectly and get that a sense of humor is what's missing in indie rock, but boy, do they need an editor. "Don't bore us, get to the chorus" posters should be put up all over their (I suspect) immaculate studio packed with pristine vintage gear.

So good! The two singles are unstoppable and "Skidmarks on My Heart" was a mixtape staple back then. I just read that Belinda Carlisle's tenure as the drummer for the Germs was cut short because she had mono - the most adorable LA punk anecdote ever!

Classic. Rush gets a bad rap for being nerd music for nerds (also a fair accusation), and Randian associations, but I suspect everyone on the planet gets at least a little fired up when they hear that intro to "Tom Sawyer." "Limelight" is built on on of the best guitar riffs ever, and a call to arms for theatre kids for decades. The merits of the pyrotechnics throughout the rest of the album depend on if you a connoisseur of such. And, looking at him, what did you think Geddy Lee's voice would sound like? Am I being defensive? Such is the lot for a Rush fan.

I loved Public Enemy at the time, but that time was almost 40 years ago. Like most hip hop from that era, this album just hasn't aged well. Fear of a Black Planet is a better album with more depth to it if you are adverse to listening to any rap music made after 1990.

Ugh. It gets one point off the bottom because I feel these guys feel whatever these terrible feelings being expressed are, but this kind of grooveless fight club music just doesn't do it for me.

This music probably sounds great while getting the wind knocked out of you on your cousin's poorly constructed halfpipe, but outside of that, the appeal is elusive.

I have a perverse love for squeaky clean vocal groups making their psychedelic record (see the Beau Brummel's' Triangle) and this, is the corny old Beach Boys trying to make sense in a time (the 1970's) that has passed them by. It half works. "Feel Flows", one of the first written by Carl Wilson, is low key one of the Best Beach Boys songs ever. "Disney Girls" also touches that place where my heart should be. The Brian tracks, the last three culled from the styled Smile sessions, stand out for his brand of lysergic pudding and the fairy-tale EP he insisted they add as a bonus single is a goofy pleasure. The rest is as cool as your parents trying to rap.

It's an impeccable slog, which sounds like one of the things money might described as being.

"Turn to Stone" and "Mr. Blue Sky" and "Sweet Talkin' Woman" are lines of pure dopamine on the mirror tray of the late Seventies. The rest of the album feels good like a massage or a fancy candle, inarguably pleasurable but doesn't linger. I used to hate ELO so much I received a merit badge for it, but I heard a Cajun band do "Hold On Tight To You Dreams" and my mind lit up like a jukebox bubble light.

I should love this. The players are great. The sound is great. The songs aren't bad. I love a B-team British rock band that never invaded the US. Great cover! But the record has never adhered to me. This is one of those rambly albums that was probably a more fun to make than listen to.

I love the hell out of this record. The production is crystalline and perfect, like the glass in a window of an abandoned house, letting the melancholy of the songs shine though like the morning sun. While it's not the strongest track on the album, their performance of "Not Even Stevie Nicks" at JazzFest one year made me a die-hard fan.

I like Little Simz as background for the naked beats and the percolating murmur of the vocals, but I don't know if this is even the best Little Simz record, much less for this list.

I listened to this album so much in high school it shows up in my fingerprints. It could use a re-master - it sounds thin by modern standards - but it is peak R.E.M. before they became beloved by regular people, unabashedly precious and jangly and teenage mysterious and despite that, kinda fun, which was a new thing for them.

This is the album where AC/DC got their shit together, integrated the targeting systems on their love/hate missile and reinvented rock music. I prefer Malcolm Young's vocals to Bon Scott's (who died shortly after recording this album) mostly because Back in Black and For Those About to Rock dominated my adolescence, but the corralled chaos of him makes this album largely perfect except for the blues drag of "Night Prowler."

I don't recognize a single ergonomically precise song on this album, making it a weird 1001 choice for the world's most known band, but I'm into it. The opener had me hoping this was the ABBA Krautrock album I didn't know I needed. The stifled disco cabaret of "Head Over Heels" is delicious enough to belay the disappointment that it was not the Go-Go's tune - close your eyes and imagine that. I miss the full endorphin flood of what makes ABBA ABBA, and the soft rock leanings get a little cloying, but still.

I don't want to love Daft Punk but I do. They deliver the goods sitting right there in previously delivered goods.

I forever lean on the Chuck Klosterman rating system: Van Halen's "And the Cradle Will Rock" (not on this album) is the perfect average rock song. Anything better is good. anything worse is bad. So in that spirit, I give this a 3, even though I think it's a little better than that but not much.

Break! This album is still fun as hell. When I go OutKast, I usually go to the more orchestrated Aquemini, but the sparse beats framing Andre3000's not-quite-outsized-yet persona is excellent. It feels like actual 2000 rap music, yet experimental in the right balance. A rare instance of great hip-hop interludes. Some of the guest-heavy tracks like "Snappin'" take me out of it, but otherwise, rock solid.

This is the Neil Youngiest of all Neil Young: ragged at points, nasal to the point of scheduling an ENT appointment, incandescent, too personal. He and the band are playing in the practice room in your dried up old heart and it's up to you whether you let it rock like a human or call the cops like a narc.

One hopes De la Soul and A Tribe Called Quest are on this list representing the Daisy Age, so I'm not sure this smart but monotonous excursion by fellow travelers is that necessary. I had this tape, but don't remember any of this except for "U Make Me Sweat" where he goes 'Diane DIANE?" Great cover art!

Aw, sweet young pre-electronic, terrible graphics Radiohead. The preferred Radiohead album of the all rig, no gig, pedalboard-obsessed guitarist. This is a good record, but just nowhere the Titanic-sinker that OK Computer is. "High and Dry" is such a beauty. It could've been "Creep"-level ubiquitous were we a more sensitive species. "Fake Plastic Trees" is a epic heartbreaker. The rest is a little like a U2 without the unifying ego or a Stone Roses who doesn't dance.

This throws down the gauntlet for how complete a "Complete Live at ____" record can be with the Star Spangled Banner and the committee chair spending too much time on his intros. I'm surprised it doesn't include orders from the concession stand. Once they get to the music, it's cool but not the best recording.

This album sounds like Guitar Center on Saturday afternoon. Everyone in there has the spirit and two good ideas but it doesn't gel. Machine Head is the only Deep Purple you need and that is a stretch of the term "need"

In high school, I got sneered at by a cheerleader for putting on a Tom Tom Club tape at a student council Carnival Ball decorating meeting, and later in life, she became an assistant coroner and was on a short lived reality-cop show about my home town and came off seeming like a horrible person while I am a ray of sunshine, so thanks Tom Tom Club! BIT IT buh bah BIT IT forever!

Whatever you feel toward the Dead, Grateful or otherwise, is valid and earned, and the dead can take it, but this is their one legitimately great studio record. This one is about leaning into the songs and Jerry's folk and bluegrass proclivities as opposed to seeing where they can be stretched. I am into the live Dead, but I always wish there was more strummy acoustic like there is on this record. Their voices and harmonies are humble and sweet here as opposed to being shouted over a PA the size of the moon. Produced on purpose instead of relying on a stoned sound guy in a baseball stadium. Proves there is actually a great band up in there. I love it.

The kind of album the best high school band director in the Midwest conference would make. My band has been working up Satie's Gymnopedies so the opening was a surprise. Not sure it's a great surprise, partic the goofy Zappa-via-Sousa 2nd part, but a surprise. I have read that this album is one of the first big pop albums recorded on a 16-track tape machine, giving them uncharted layering territory to explore, but they could have ranged farther. David Clayton-Thomas delivers the goods as the Husky Voice of the 70s To Come on the hits, but then the other vocalist only serves to make this album sound like well-crafted and anonymous easy listening. "And When I Die" is much jauntier than I remember, making me wonder if another version polluted the oldies radio of my upbringing.

One of those that I think I never need to hear again, and yet every time I do, it sounds even better. How a band this loose sounds this tight is a mystery of record production. Also John Fogerty's raspy voice is one of the best instruments in rock 'n' roll.

It would get 5 stars if it weren't so subtle.

"My Name Is.." is 1999 incarnate. Aggressively commercial, obnoxious, funny in a Jackass way, smartest move possible. Super catchy. A clown horn honking a hope that we would do better in the next century and well... we kinda used it as a template instead, missing the joke. The album as a whole is one hit, all skit.

Stradling the line between between parody and terrible. They get points for being the goobs that inspired a lot of better NYC punk bands, and honestly liked it more than I thought I would given the sing titles, but not great.

I love this album so much. "Smash It Up" is one of the catchiest hooks in all rock music. Cinerama punk with a great sense of humor and killer playing. Perfectly produced. So happy it is punk week at 1001.

I don;'t hate it, but this strikes me as something made by committee. The only reason they had people do it is because AI wasn't there yet in the year 2000

The sound of hooking up with someone in the 90s. I don't remember the big single (by Spotify numbers) "Unfinished Sympathy" at all. It's loaded to say this is by the numbers trip hop because Massive Attack punched in those numbers. I like how they create thick atmosphere about almost nothing, but I get tired of the vocals in pretty much every song. Also doing a cover of a song using samples of that song ("Be Thankful") is a real feat of postmodernism.

Any time I think I have an idea that is too weird or unrelatable, I remind myself that every adult in my generation knows and will do "Rock Lobster" at the slightest provocation. Timeless record, because what conceivable time could this be from?

I was hoping the languid blues cold open was a continuation of a final fadeout on Masters of Reality, like a drugged-out Finnegans Wake or something, but Black Sabbath does what Black Sabbath does - fill the shadows of one's heart with a gothic potential and actually offer something different. The fathers of bleak metal were really a hippie rock band of the finest order and Vol. 4 might be the peak, album-wise., of that trajectory. RIP Ozzy, god of teenagers, scourge of uptight parents, most successful myth maker since the Greeks or at least Kiss, one of the greatest male singers in rock.

Yo shorty! Gonna pass due to the outsize portion of my life that 50 Cent has taken up simply by declaring it someone's birthday. He gets a point for continuing to publicly vex fellow has-been Diddy.

Alice in Chains woke some kraken in the American males of my generation that is still wreaking its havoc on our dwindling armadas. It is the oversized Ford pickup of hard rock. Sure, powerful, immaculate, unstoppable, but not the kind of vehicle that has ever helped an actual loser in any palpable way like a beat up Toyota Tacoma has.

Nile Rodgers is the master of the perfectly innocuous jam. Legit enjoyed listening to "Le Freak" for the first time on purpose instead of on a school bus speaker or in some boutique from which I would purchase nothing. "At Last I am Free" is total torture tape material - a Branch Davidian would surrender his child bride by minute 5. The rest is solid statistical median good music.

See my Massive Attack review from the other day and add a star. How Portishead never did a Bond theme is beyond me.

Not my favorite Traffic album, but I love this band. They put a soul groove into hippie excess in just the right amounts, accentuating the positive of both. Plus, Steve Windwood is a double threat of killer vocalist and organist. And I'm into the overuse of the flute.

This album kills. All the grunge records that came out around this sound like boys cosplaying as degenerate men compared to this. The melodrama is delicious the atmosphere oppressive yet, in a glimmer, uplifting. What a band!

Look! It's Miles Davis from jazz! This album is immediately appealing, well-mannered and restrained, none of which being I'm looking for out of Miles Davis or John Coltrane. It is gorgeous, but a little anodyne.

It's not my early Beatles go-to (that would be A Hard Day's Night) but the three-in-a-row "All I've Got to Do" and "All My Loving" and "Don't Bother Me" is pretty killer.

Billy Bragg's Back to Basics tape saved my life on an extended family vacation in my teens and Wilco was my new favorite band when this emerged. I don't know how much of an actual collaboration this was - the documentary portrayed this more as two factions in detente - but it is a beautiful, heartfelt album filled with great songs.

Reviled as the Nickelback of not being Radiohead, Coldplay is ok, if a little non-adhesive. "Clocks" is deserving of its 1B streams, a legit beautiful song. The rest hits like an unenthusiastic massage: thanks but it's not really hitting the spot and you can stop now. No need for this to go on for an hour.

Hell yes. The first full-length rinky dink foray from greatest weird band in the world. It's difficult to explain/justify the appeal of the Fall to the unsold because they are not all that "appealing", and I think there are better entry points to their endless catalog (Grotesque and Bend Sinister) but this is still quality mutant humanity asserting itself.

The second best Rolling Stones album after Exile. Problematic, open like an untreated wound, windswept, depleted, punching bag rock.

Recognizing this is heretical, I like Prince's persona more than I like Prince's music, particularly a whole album's worth. The title track and "Little Red Corvette" are brilliant. but much further in, I want someone to make him stop that drum machine and the keyboard stabs, and no one will. I do enjoy the fact that an album this big has a cover drawn with magic marker. See, that's a great Prince move!

A second surprisingly great record from Goldfrapp on this list! Delicious Beatleque production and sound touches on this without sounding necessarily anachronistic for its time. Great songs, if a little samey throughout, but it's a great same!

This album is great, and I'm glad she's being rediscovered, but I just got over having "Fast Car" stuck in my head for 30 years so gonna pass on actually listening to it again.

Killer. I have the Neil Young appreciation gene, so when people say they don't like his voice, I hear you, but I don't really know what you want from the world. I've listened to this album countless times and it still feels fresh and desperate and immediate, and full of romanticized Crazy Horse magic, which it was - the band had been together for about a week when they recorded it and Neil had a 103 degree fever when he wrote a bunch of the songs in one afternoon. That cover photo is the best pointillist painting ever.

It seems wrong to say this, but this album didn't really do anything for me. I recognize their importance in hip-hop's development and get what they are getting at, but it just feels like one bass note over a minimally divergent boom-bap beat for 48 minutes, with the raps so drowned in the mix they never reach the surface. Maybe if I had it on headphones in the subway or something, the context would connect and it would feel perfect.

Good: The guy "the Dude" from The Big Lebowski is based on was in town for a film festival and I got asked to take him out to a bar, where he did actually order White Russians and he dropped enough hints about who he was that people around us kept putting the Eagles on the jukebox to troll him into doing the "I fucking hate the Eagles" bit over and over. Indecisive: Eagles greatest hits is the only CD my dad ever bought. Not sure if he ever played it, or if he did, what in. Bad: Listen to the drums and rhythm guitar on "Hotel California" closely and realize in horror that they invented white reggae while inventing soft rock.

Such a great record. It doesn’t have the punch of Talking Book or Fulfillingness before it but has a wider cinematic scope and precise personal execution to it. I could get by without ever hearing “Isn’t She Lovely” again - it’s hard to express how omnipresent Stevie Wonder’s more saccharine hits were in a gen X upbringing - but it the one I tend to return to the most.

All killer, no filler. This was a very transformative record for me, one that made me say, "I should get a guitar" accidentally out loud in my cubicle, and the guy in the next one sold me his for $10 and it led me to who I am today. I can still sing every word of this thing, which made it feel personal when it was revealed what a scumbag normal old predator rock star he is. But, if you can separate the art from the artist (I manage to compartmentalize enough to still love the monsters that are the Rolling Stones) this record is a must.

It's cool that this album exists so that many a hapless guitarist can daydream about what pedalboard configuration will allow them to recreate that one swoon on "When You Sleep" while they waste hours at unfulfilling office jobs or socializing with people who are not guitars.

If, at the AI prompt, you typed: "soundtrack for jr high school locker room-themed bar n grill", this album would appear.

The Police's answer to Who's Next, or maybe those 80's King Crimson albums. The big ballad hits on side two sound out of place vs the weirder frenetic songs. The Breath/Pain/Finger adult contemporary block floats like a marshmallow in a gas tank.

The title track and cover photo collage alone should get this 5 stars. The removal of the "kick out the jams mf..." intro on "Kick out the Jams" on Spotify is a war crime and thereby loses a point. The rest of the album is so-so, losing another.

I dismissed the whole dream pop thing this band embodies as Bed Bath and Reverb until I watched Twin Peaks: The Return and it clicked. This is cinematic music, detached with purpose so that you flood in the empty spot next to where the pretty girl is singing, which is not what I usually want our of music, but I can dig it.

I feel for you Neil haters. They could at least spread these out a little more. Love this record. I've thought about or sung to myself "I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships flying in the yellow haze of the sun" at least once a week for the last 20 years.

Flawless. Just weird enough to stand out from most basic jazz classics, deliriously expressive, but still wholly accessible.

Pretty unstoppable record. A friend of mine started a Television cover band and leaned into the 70s boogie aspect under the famously angular surface of their thing and it made me love it even more.

They are topmost among those post-Smiths very English smarty bands that I feel I should like more than I do. The first two songs are five stars, but the rest struggle to stay in focus for me, and I feel I should apologize for feeling such a way, which is peak Britpop, earning this just above average.

I like hooty Latin dance music as much as someone who cannot do those dances can, but I felt jostled by this record, and am opting to just get out of its way. Plus, terrible cover!

I was super into this album sophomore year of college, one of the first I taped during my first show at the college radio station. I remember trying to sell some friends on it back home and realizing I was really parting ways with them. The strummy riffs of “Schizophrenia” and the waterless surf of “Catholic Block” are what comes to me first when I hear the name Sonic Youth, though now I think they have better, more fleshed out material. “Hot Wire My Heart” might be their most fun song.

"Clint Eastwood" is as dumb and perfect as anything Damon Albarn has done, proof-of-concept for a half- or maybe too-baked idea that really got rolling a few albums later. the rest is good enough but not enough good.

Nth generation Integrity Punk meets Meat Loaf in a suburban mall about to shut down. This would make a great musical for people who like musicals, and it did! If I had an aggressively normcore teenager who suddenly glommed onto this, it would warm my heart.

I have bandmates who proclaim this their favorite Bowie record but they also love Tool and Queensrÿche and wish our fun little psyche garage band was more like Tool and Queensrÿche, which tracks. It's interesting, uncompromised, very much feeling like this was his vision out at the rim of the abyss, but like a lot of eras of Bowie (that whole techno decade), it's not what I go to Bowie for.

This music sounds like I am about to pay too much for sunglasses at a place next to a Chipotle.

This is a great snotty rock record, rife with swagger and longing. The rare UK tabloid fodder rock that actually delivered on the hype.

This album feels like it was almost recorded clandestinely just as the real weird bird that is Bob Dylan hopped out of the folk music nest. Three of his greatest songs up in here.

Yes, Amy Winehouse can sing like the best ever girl at karaoke and was had an electromagnetic, tragic persona, but outside of "Rehab" (not on this album), her music feels pretty by-the-numbers R&B

Magical. From what I gather, he recorded these spare with just guitar and then the jazzy arrangements were dubbed in after by the producers and it was the best idea ever. If you only know him from the saccharine hits and the loutish clown he has recently become, get ready to fine out why Van was once the Man.

I like plenty of metal in its various alloys but Metallica albums sound tinny to me. Leaden. Ore something. I could go on. I don't dig them, but the pleasure of making metal puns is all mine.

I, narcotic lightweight, ate a THC chocolate espresso bean at a party once that had me feeling like I was on an endless rollercoaster ascent and nice people were trying to talk to me about nice things but all I could think about is WHEN ARE WE GOING TO GET TO THE TOP GODDAMMIT and experience a similar feeling with this record, which I suspect was influenced by slightly harder stuff. I do like staring at the cover. Sung Tongs is the AC record for this AC.

I was wishing they'd just leave that old man alone by the time this fourth installment of forced life-support came out, but then I heard the heartbreaker that is "Hurt" and then "Personal Jesus" and thought maybe Rick Rubin really is a genius like they say. "In My Life" is almost unfair how poignant it is in his ragged voice, and they even managed to find a decent song inside "Desperado." Docking one point for all the sub-par apocalypse movie trailers the excellent title track has inspired.

It seems weird to say now, but Depeche Mode were very important to me as a budding small-town new-waver in the 80s and this album seemed a disappointing populist turn. "Personal Jesus" was their "Shiny Happy People" to me, except about heroin. If you read "Shiny Happy People" as a heroin song, maybe it's a better song. I don't hear what I used to hear in their early albums so the Depeche Maginot line is less defined. The hits are giant, but airless. They don't have the same gothic romance or musique concrete elements to them as Some Great Reward and Black Celebration, which is probably why people like them.

The album that launched a thousand marching band directors! My view of Chicago has softened in my dotage - I no longer seek a window to jump out of when they come on. I even kinda liked “Does Anyone Even Know” for the first time listening to it on purpose instead of over a loudspeaker at a public pool. It still stands as a less-than-satisfying complicated answer to a simple question, which seems an apt synopsis of Chicago. Struck me that there are a lot of numbers in Chicago titles. I’m sure some an horn player has somewhere broken the code.

I feel like there is always someone in music circles trying to sell you on Todd Rundgren they way we were led to believe people in trenchcoats in big cities would try to sell you a watch. I don't hate watches, am kinda dazzled by their intricate mechanism sometimes, but I quit wearing them at the advent of cell phones, and feel a same "Impressive, but don't really need it" toward Todd Rundgren. I do love when he produces other people's records (XTC Skylarking, Patti Smith Wave, New York Dolls debut)

What I like about this is how loose it is, which is also what I tire of with this album. The album goes on for-evvvver, like watching a spark inch up the fuse to a dud firecracker. The two singles are covers or largely covers ("Ready or Not" borrowing heavily from the Delfonics original) which struck me at the time as an old record company move - have these fresh faces do stuff from the catalog. The version of "No Woman/No Cry" is dumb, a warning against giving Wyclef Jean too much latitude. The deep cuts like "Zealous" the "The Mask" hit harder for me, paving way for the inventiveness and lack-of-editor in Lauryn Hill's career. Overall, the stoney, self-care vibe is a balm against the blatant self-promotion plaguing 90's hip-hop. It was a turning point that groups like Outkast took up and ran with.

I like the heaviness of this album. It's the one where Bob meets the gravity which is placed upon him. But also, I really like the vocoder/talkbox touch in the one of those endless repeats of "Movement of Jah People", which I've never heard before despite having been a white guy who once lived in a college dorm.

LCD Soundsystem nail that hipster shrug I want in NYC rock and yet somehow sneak in actual warmth among the beats and drugs and this is them at their peak. Each song on this album evokes a scene I'm sure I'm not cool enough to be invited to, but I am there. "All My Friends" is the sweetest minimalist song ever.

Actively listening to this album, esp a 20+ minute opener, is a big ask. We should be hearing 30 seconds of this in the underground warehouse club scene of a cop procedural, caged go-go dancer looking on as a guy in eyeliner is shook down for information. Or on the apartment stereo of a person who is taking too long to sell you these drugs. What I'm saying: this is situational music, and the laptop in my office is not the situation.

This album is not for everyone - certainly was not upon its release - but the way Miles Davis and his band cut themselves loose from the polite tether of the jazz that made him famous is thrilling unto itself, and the music is a real step toward the interstellar.

"When You See a Chance" is the template for every major network theme song since its release, but I don't know if he gains or loses a point for that.

It's amazing how well this holds up. An alternative to the macho posturing that comprised(s) a lot of hip-hop also without being a mirror-gazing affirmation session. De La Soul feel like real actual people you would know or even be on this record. Their sampling is peerless, even all these years later. Great skits, infectious beats, amazing flow, funny, smart, warm, real.

It's taken a lot of soul searching and abandoning the biases of youth to accept Creedence into my life, but I am richer for it. This is not the album I'd pick - I feel we did Green River already - but its still a good one. No one can make a recording studio sound like a tin roof chicken coop the way CCR does.

Not having listened to this since maybe high school, I'm a little floored. Guitar, yes, of course, but goddamn Steve Winwood again, on organ on "Voodoo Chile", takes it Valhalla. The variety on this record! 60s baroque pop vs blues workouts vs Tom Waitsy-hipsterism vs studio interstellar excursions. I love an album that feels like it could be a radio station. And "All Along the Watchtower" deserves every play it's ever gotten.

Adorable bangers most of the way through (the clunky ones like "Contact" are at least interesting. I kinda wanna cover "Does Everyone Stare") and a fleet of dreamboats on the cover! The Clash and PIL and Specials laid all the reggae-punk-pop groundwork before them, but the Police really made it blossom into its own thing.

This and Shoot Out the Lights (their marriage crumbling in real time in the studio with the latter) are staggering advancements in portraiture of complicated people living complicated lives and finding tragedy and beauty in it. The Lord invented the electric guitar so Richard Thompson could one day play it on the opening for "Calvary Cross" and how you don't fall in love with Linda on the title track is beyond me.

Maybe "How Soon is Now?" was on the cassette I had on that last night of the fair when this album created me, and it seems one star less without it. Otherwise, every squirmy teenager needs this record and the warning fable that is Morrissey today to keep a hand on the tiller.

Typical of their great run of albums between Aftermath and Exile, this is a hodgepodge of what they do best. I never get tired of hearing the cosmic "Gimme Shelter," the goofy "Let it Bleed" and the arid "You Got the Silver." "Midnight Rambler" feels like filler - when the Stones get dismissed as a blues cover band, this is evidence it's not their strongest suit. Capping off an album built on self-pity and resignation with "You Can't Always Get What You Want" is a piece of track sequence poetry.

I have a soft spot for the M's & P's, some of the sweetest music to come from terrible and terrorized people, but I don't know that they are really an album band. A greatest hits would probably do you better. A great undersung (though likely offensive by modern standards) album to come out of their poisoned honey universe is John Phillips The Wolfking of LA.

'Immigrant Song" is a great thesis statement, "Out on the Tiles" their struttiest, "Tangerine" a sleeper great tune that makes me happy every time I hear it. The maypole folk songs are good, but not what I board a heavy dirigible for. A lot of the rest is nice enough bluesy soundtracky mood pieces I've publicly thought might be Pink Floyd until the vocals hit.

I know I should like Joni Mitchell records better than I do but I like them exactly as much as I like them

I love Neil Young and even I'm feeling, "Enough with the Neil young already"

I like this album, better than Blackstar, to be honest, and it feels like that actual final statement of the David Bowie I loved over the years, though of all his catalog, its not one I'd put on this list.

Giant Sand exists in their own pocket universe, which is my favorite kind of band. Haphazard but weirdly precise about it and mood all the way through the eerie desert night. Glad to see this on here mostly because it takes the pressure off of me handing out flowers at the airport, trying to get people to listen to Giant Sand.

Here's what I want out of this list! Knew nothing about David Holmes but liked it a lot. Right up in that Fatboy Slim era where DJs were crafting great cinematic songs that can exist outside of the club. Makes sense that he became Steven Soderbergh's go-to soundtrack producer. I find a lot of DJ-ish things a little ephemeral (my own bias) so I don't know how crucial this is, but I quite enjoyed it.

Being a stubborn jouster of the ever-revolving pop music windmill, I'm surprised to like this. More organic than the icy "Sexyback" material with which I'm more familiar, kinda like a pre-Thriller Michael Jackson, it still feels over-caffeinated for these weary ears. I might feel different if it was 2002 and I was 23 on the prowl.

As jazz goes, it's a little square, but as musicality goes, it is an celestial geodesic dome that can fold down into something you can carry in a shirt pocket.

This is a staggering beauty of a record - reverent classics mixed with dreamy little vignettes, sounding like it was recorded in a motel room on an answering machine. One of my favorites.

This is one of those psychedelic albums with a much better title than music. I expect more than a congenial choogle from the nightmare realm of Dr. Sardonicus.

I remember them mostly for the ubiquitous feel-good singles but there is a lot more Public Enemy-level swagger and sonic density to the album than I would've guessed. Dig it.

5-star album cover on a 3-star Bowie album. If he'd done the lightning bolt thing for Scarry Monsters, it'd be perfect. Otherwise, it's the most Springsteen Bowie album, even though it came out before most Springsteen albums. I suspect time travel was involved.

This album is fully coded into my genome so I may not be the most unbiased opinion when I say it's why electricity was invented.

Listened to this a couple days ago on a gorgeous day, windows down, coffee in hand, etc. One of the best records ever made. The perfect balance between vibe and virtuosity, neither getting in the way of the other.

I'd say I hate it, because I do, but I wanted to be open minded. Than the scratch DJ showed up.

New Order called and would like their whole deal back. Scritti Politti is on line two.

This might be their best, right where a gig-hardened super-tight Beatles give way to the hermetic studio alchemist Beatles. The catchy idiots ("Beep beep! Yeah!") transition into armchair existentialists ("Making all his nowhere plans for nobody"). Even the cutest boys in the world become gruesome on the cover and that typeface launched a thousand psychedelic posters. It's the Panama Canal lock and dam complex of 1960's popular music.

Despite "Seven Nation Army" being THE White Stripes song, I don't know this is the album I'd pick. I'm partial to Get Behind Me, Satan and White Blood Cells is the foundation document, but really any album of theirs is good. "Girl, You Have No Faith in Medicine" is a highlight deep cut on this.

Great vibe in a Khruangbin, non-specific jazzish/exotica/orchestral soul way. I like how the poppier beats give way to something more introspective as the album goes on. This kind of thing doesn't really stick with me, but I dig it while it's on.

Imagine being a tin-eared poet who says, sure I'll record something, and you drop a thermonuclear song like Suzanne to start your album and career. The whole thing is like a new continent surfacing in the ocean just as you are contemplating a move.

Great fully fleshed pop rock album. Recorded partly at Abbey Road and it bears a McCartney baroque pop influence. His ambitions meet his realizations, especially in the schmaltzy piano songs. Great albums by suicide victims is a weird, grim genre. If you can divide this from his tragic trajectory, this album is a timeless classic. Otherwise , it will leave you scouring for clues as to what went wrong.

This is a big one for me, a frequent flyer in the CD player of our Corolla for the first years of my marriage. The production feels dated but the songs still hits like a guardrail. Funny, irreverent and heartbreaking. "Someday" still chokes me up a little at the chorus.

This is a turgid oldies airwaves filler that earns its keep because it gave way to "White Room" on the next album after it. I do kinda dig "Tales of Brave Ulysses" as it cobbles a song out of all the good ideas Cream had, seeing a prog epic through in under three minutes.

I had a snobbish eschewal of Pixies having been a college DJ during their ascendancy, but one Saturday, Lara7 of this group and I picked up this tape at a yard sale and it made me a convert. It was our practice to buy a tape at the first garage sale and listen to it for the rest of the day rummaging through people's detritus, and that day we struck gold.

Nice surprise! This album never made it to the US despite "Our House" being an omnipresent hit (it and a number of the songs from this were included on the self-titled album from 1983) the one that showed everyone this clown car of a band had more depth to it. I really love Madness. This ambitious album encapsulates English slapstick and eccentricity laced with just enough English melancholy and class struggle and every once in a while you are reminded they were tight as hell. I was gonna say this isn't the Madness album I'd pick, but I'd never heard it before.

Mott the Hoople is like a David Bowie who might also help you move to a new apartment. What I want out of BIG ROCK - swagger betraying vulnerability, knuckleheadedness laced with insight, Olympian inaccessibility woven in with "That could be me." "I Wish I Was Your Mother" is one of the weirdest conceits for a great love song. This and Brain Capers are two of my favorite rock albums ever.

(I'm) tempted to say you are a contrarian who needs their list-making credentials revoked if you pick this over their classic (I'm) Stranded, but it's a great record with a lot of stylistic range.

If you worked in a bookstore from 1997-2007 or have a partner who has, you may be entitled to compensation from the Buena Vista Social Club. Outside of that, this is still a great record that makes me smile and sway every time I hear it.

Holds up.

I didn't care for this at the time despite being a DM superfan in high school, but it has grown on me, esp "Never Let Me Down Again." Assuming this is about Dave Gahan's then burgeoning addictions, it's poignant and a little heartbreaking. "The Things You Said" and "Behind the Wheel" lean into Kraftwerk territory to great effect, and "Little 15" brings all the eldergoths to the yard. There's a lot of the experimental-y musique concrete stuff I liked them for, so I'm not sure what my deal was. I think it was that regular people liked "Strangelove" and had to rectify that one of my favorite bands was actually popular. (Cue "To Have And To Hold" as I close my yearbook and put it back on the shelf.)

The “French sex comedies” of ubiquitous thrift store records. I like Ray Charles. I like country music, at least the era of it he is mining. I like modern sounds! A deficit of the sum of its parts.

Aww this sweet ol record with the oddball intros and the open hearted sophomore poetry workshop lyrics and sound effects still sounds great. Makes me want my old bike and busted Walkman. REM was at their best when they could just barely reach the music in their heads. So many great tunes but the one I always come back to is the wistful “We Walk.” It has a hold-hands-in-the-parlor romance to it.

Layers like a patisserie croissant, equally buttery.

The big radio turning point for my then favorite band. It made me so mad - REM was the rare Southern cultural entity that wasn't an embarrassment - but a more enlightened me can see this record is solid power pop, a natural progression, and the radio bent toward them instead of vice-versa. I even kinda like "Stand" now - all those key changes! I saw them on this tour and at one point Michael Stipe sat at the end of the stage in a lotus position while the band attempted a version of Cameo's "Word Up" so yeah, they were still on a journey.

OK I listened to the wrong The xx album since they all kind of have the same cover. I liked the one I listened to first (2009's xx) a lot and give it 5 stars. This is less for adding more to the deal. The former makes the scene and doesn't exist at all. This: meh pop music.

ELP wants to give you a wizard battle. Yes, at its heart, wants to please people. King Crimson wants people to do math problems. I like it, but I imagine the wonkiest album by the wonkiest band is a big ask for a lot of people when there are those great Adrian Belew-era King Crimson albums out there.

I had to check that The Number of the Beast, the album where Iron Maiden became Iron Maiden, was on here, because if not, you are hailing the wrong Satan, friend. This a fun record, like Thin Lizzy in Halloween costumes, but why listen to them crawl when you can witness them running to those hills two years later.

I generally like Arctic Monkeys when their music passes through me like neutrinos. I am as equally ultimately unaffacted after, but I'm like, that was kinda cool. They have excellent song titles.

Never a more apt album title. This album is requires a particular mood but when you are there: dehydrated physically and emotionally, it echoes out of the dusty cave of your heart and scares those blind moles who live there.

I have Pavemented myself out at least three or four times over the years, but it's been long enough and I have carefully avoided the cloying movie thing about them from last year. I like them best when they rock, like on the opening track. The undulating indie thing they largely invented wears on me now, but even in those polite environs, they hit overdrive occasionally. "Cut Your Hair" is a still a jam. "Range Life" might be the best song they ever did, short of "Passat Dream" off Brighten the Corners. I know that's a rare one not by Stephen Malkmus, but what could be more Pavement than picking that one.

"Rolling in the Deep" is a legitimately great pop single, but "Rumour Has It" is the disco blues stomp jam that made my jaded ear open up to her. The rest of this leans into the greeting card balladry she's great at, but doesn't do it for me. I only want to hear "Someone Like You" again sung by a girl in a bridesmaid dress at a talent show (or even better, a boy in a bridesmaid dress), and I don't really want to go to a talent show, so...

All the Nick Drake albums are lovely, but Pink Moon is the crucial one. This album strikes me as grasping for something that he can better attain without the saxophone and strings. Still good though.

This is the one where they really became Talking Heads and indicated where they were going - the grind and repetition of "Angel," the slice of life in "Artists Only", congenial discomfort of "Warning Sign", the blunted funk of "I'm Not in Love" even the nascent highlife affectations in "The Good Thing." Such a great record. The grid of Polaroid closeups is their best cover art.

I'm a bigger fan of the later charming heartbreaker Replacements material than the class clown hardcore side so this one is a mixed bag for me, but "I Will Dare", "Androgynous", and "Answering Machine" are among their and anybody's greatest songs. "Seen Your Video" is a hoot I'd forgotten all about. I wish some former college DJ had snuck into the Kennedy Center sound booth and played their version of "Black Diamond" when KISS stood up there with Sylvester Stallone getting medals the other night. That would've been very Replacements. BTW, the b-sides and outtakes CD on the deluxe edition is excellent.

I came into this rolling my eyes, but each of these pieces build in interesting ways while drifting along in the background. So much electronica forgets that you can actually make a song out of loops and beats and the occasional diva vocal. I dig it.

Look, I am not harboring hostages in a compound for religious and/or anti-government purposes, so why do they keep trying to put on this torture tape music?

I read up on the cover design bc what else is to be said about this album besides that it is a magnificent nuclear-powered riff machine? "Ramble On" sounds like two of the best songs ever being played at the same time to make a Voltron of rock. One could make the best beat tape ever with just samples form "Moby Dick." From: https://www.tumblr.com/girlofthemoon75/185684110716/led-zeppelin-cover-artwork-part-2 Designer David Juniper says the flight crew was adapted from a shot of the Red Baron (removed) and his Flying Circus, airbrushed with beards and to include the band, Miles Davis and Mary Woronov. I'm betting that's Lemmy up top.

Packed melancholy beauty of a record. The big songs are classics for a. Reason, but it’s “Fitter Happier” in the middle of all this very human music that make the record exhibit the screen glow.

I know from experience that this album sounds great at someone else's swimming pool, three High Lifes in, but outside of that situation, it's ok

The sound of a cute bouutique that has nothing I actually want to buy in it at Christmas.

The title track is a gem I never tire of. The rest is a mixed bag like most of his solo albums. The bluesier numbers are a reach. "Crippled Inside" is either a Paul stylistic diss track (much of the album is) or a belying of the myth that Paul was solely responsible for the cornball side of the Beatles. "Jealous Guy" is the gorgeous disingenuous admissions of a monster. "Oh Yoko!" is the sweetest song Cat Stevens never came up with.

I like the idea of the Butthole Surfers (Texas transgressive smartass dada racket) more than I actually like listening to the Butthole Surfers (Texas transgressive smartass dada racket). There was a point in my 20s where their noisier side meant a lot to me, but now Sweat Loaf and Human Cannonball are more my speed.

The album where I and a lot of people fell in love with Lucinda Williams. The production is a little dated but the songs hit like a target shooter. Plus if you have feelings for Louisiana, specifically if you are the rare bird with warm feelings for Baton Rouge, it is particularly poignant.

I think this album is flawless. The precise amount of despondency with a glimmer of joy. Its cool as a favorite pair of sunglasses.

So earnest! U2 has weirdly been on my mind/algorithm lately, I suppose for "New Year's Day." This album meant a lot to me as a broody teen, but seems a bit much to this broody adult. But I do think they meant every little shriek and pant. I am liking the deep cuts like "Surrender" and "Seconds." I want to work up a bossa nova duet version of "Two Hearts Beat as One."

There are better Styx records

The most overrated album that actually deserves the praise lavished on it. It languished in obscurity when it came out and withers in the spotlight now. Alex Chilton reigned in against his self-sabotage instincts + Chris Bell before the full breakdown is one of the greatest partnerships in music. Because I am insufferable, I've wondered: what if the Eagles were as good a songwriters as Big Star/Big Star had Eagles money behind them, but I think the desperation of recording this in off hours on leftover tape stock, Chilton having seen how the sausage is made with the Box Tops and Bell seeing Jesus in the VU meters is what stirred up the magic in this record. It's good.

The record is monotonous in a good way, creating a haze similar that that which I suspect inspired it. I knew "Stir It Up" and "Stop That Train" but surprisingly, there's a lot of Bob Marley I somehow haven't heard.

This does no-oh no-oh no-thing for me.

Peak Elton John. Still in the thrall of The Band, the deep cuts are consistent in tone and quality with "Tiny Dancer" and "Levon." On the verge of bombast (that to his credit, he's good at) and not yet suffering the allure of doing stupid things like "Crocodile Rock" for radio play.

The evidence of what a game-changer this was in 1996 is by how pedestrian this sounds now, bending a lot of the ensuing decade's pop in its direction. It's still fun and loose, but I liked Beck better when his life fell apart and he made Sea Change and when he went high brow with Song Reader.

It's a good record, but Funeral is (appropriately) the one album by them you need to hear before you die, if that's how you want to go out. Neon Bible is you need a second.

Unimpeachable. I'm a fan, but I'll admit Brian Eno is over-beloved, But, this album along with Here Come Warm Jets and Apollo are all necessary records in my mind.

Devendra Banhart hit me at the right point in the early 2000s, a new father full of that vulnerability and having a bit of a nervous breakdown and just learning guitar and filling my mind with John Fahey and the pre-electric T.Rex albums and folk blues CDs from the library. He went in some embarrassing directions after this, becoming a minor indie It boy, but these early homespun records still sound like they are broadcast by some kind of wicker spaceship.

This might be my favorite PJ record. Just ragged enough an edge but also has a glow radiating from it. The Patti Smithisms are unhidden, but why would you hide it if you got it?

I used to hate them for the omnipresent zombie of their moms' 80s tape collections that is "Electric Feel" but to be honest, it's a great album and sound. It's got some emotional depth for an album largely about taking drugs on the weekend.

The least cigarette-after (or during)-sex Portishead record which sorta defeats the purpose of listening to Portishead, but also I kinda dig it. They should have done a Bond theme.

I love them all, and it feels heretical to say, but this is probably my favorite VU record. At least the one I listen to the most. They lose the camp without Nico, the abrasiveness without John Cale, the cachet without Warhol, but really tap into the sweetness about hard living when they focus on songs. They sound more like a band on this record than on any of the others. "What Goes On" and "Some Kinda Love" are the best grooves they ever came up with and "Candy Says" and "Pale Blue Eyes" are as pretty a songs as there are.

Ugh. The Funky Dumb Boy Nineties will seemingly never go away (I harbor a conspiracy theory that our current political embarrassment has its origin in it) so I'm not sure we need to archive it. I was going to grant it an average 3 because, like much of this music, it does sound better at a party, but then "Cold Beverage" came on and the horror came slouching back like an college apartment neighbor who's fresh out of weed.

The fun little band that got big the right way. This album still sounds fresh and sparky, like a Buzzcocks or Cheap Trick record.

Super solid, perhaps the tightest of those early Attractions records.

Elvis albums are typically a mixed bag, but this is a solid one, done after his decision to quit doing movies and on the heels of Elvis in Hawaii. "Suspicious Minds" is easily my favorite of his tunes, "In the Ghetto" and "Don't Cry Daddy" are peak Elvis-camp/drama and "True Love Travels on a Gravel Road" is E at his most Lynchian.

The only Thin Lizzy album you need to hear is Jailbreak. Jailbreak might be the only album you need to hear, period. This is good. Most of their records are, but c'mon.

I mean, yes, Marvin Gaye has a beautiful voice and could sing the phone book, but this divorce/label revenge record is pretty slapdash except for possibly "Time to Get It Together" and "A Funky Space Reincarnation" which really is a better title than song.

It's good, but sanitized for the delicate souls at Newport. It's like he is applying for the position of being your hoochie-coochie man rather than informing you with confidence of his role in hoochie-coochie matters.

Contender for the best Stones album (which is Exile) with "Sympathy", "Street Fighting Man", "Stray Cat Blues" and "Factory Girl". Each song is a haymaker swing. If I ever start a Stones cover band, I'll call it Taco Thighs for the graffiti next to the ankh. Alternate name is Snack Time. For a bonus, watch the Godard film about making "Sympathy" and seek out the Johnny Cash version of "No Expectations"

I love an album-as-radio-station, broadcasting the disparate visions of a group. I even like the throwaways like "Wild Honey Pie," "Why Don't We Do It in the Road" and "Birthday" and the accursed "Ob-La-Di." If it was an album of just that, it'd be a different story, but to place those between jewels like "Blackbird" and spacy epics like "Happiness is a Warm Gun" is a triumph in programming.

"What is Life" is the best solo Beatle song and I'll write that in tofu strips on Paul's kitchen counter. The first half or so of this epic is so good. Definitely through the staggering "Beware of Darkness." After that, he loosens up and kinda loses me. I get that he had something to prove with this, and he proves it, but he could've used an editor.

This is one of the rare ones on the list that I really think you should be forced to listen to. And you may be forced, because Joni Mitchell can be a lot. And really, if all your Joni-tolerance will allow is to listen to "All I Want," that'll do.

I think there is a period of one's life where Nine Inch Nails speaks to you, and I might have aged out of it. What I once thought was pop genius processing metal, industrial, sci-fi into a zeitgeist cyborg sounds a little pedestrian now, but perhaps we have finally caught up to Trent Reznor's dystopia leanings. Were I 17 just hearing this, I might blast it from my battle tank, but in my golden years, it didn't grab me from my Honda Civic.

Fully unfamiliar. I love hearing a new-to-me bossa nova singer. I don't know if this is canon Latin music, which is what the premise of this list implies, but it's the kind of record someone who love it will press on you, which is the best kind of recommendation.

There was a moment around the early 80s where punks and punk-adjacent made second-hand hip-hop/afropop records (Mick Jones' Big Audio Dynamite, Captain Sensible's "Wot", much of Joe strummer's solo output) of varying degrees of quality and authenticity. I'm not sure Malcolm McLaren was even in the room when any of this music was assembled by Thomas Dolby and Art of Noise. Like the aforementioned, though, it is undeniably catchy stuff. I want to hate it, but I will have "Buffalo Gals" in my head for the rest of the day.

Like Gary Numan fronting the Beta Band, missing the good parts of either. I liked bits of the songs but unfortunately they were surrounded by endless stretches of those same bits. Probably good treadmill music but I'm not sure I'd be into this otherwise.

You could spread these out a little, 1001. The US and UK versions have a different big songs. This UK version (4 stars) is more classic sixties Stones opening with "Mother's Little Helper" while the US version (5 stars) offers the the electromagnetic "Paint It, Black." Despite having mostly the same other songs, "Paint" sets the album on more of forward thinking journey that continues through Exile, which in my mind is as great a run of albums that any band has every had. Regardless, "Under My Thumb" is one of the coolest songs they ever did.

Assuming At Folsom Prison is on this list, there is no reason to require one to listen to a fine, but secondary, Johnny Cash in prison record to fulfill this 1001 album sentence of life. Seek out the Freddy Fender at Louisiana State Penitentiary (Angola) where he actually did time or Buck Owens at the LBJ White House instead.

Kinda always have thought of the Cure as goth Muppets in the best possible sense,, satirizing the thing while revealing a humanity inherent to the thing. The first two songs are a bit much but when they settle into the pop drama groove they do so well, it is delicious.

I would probably be a happier person if I could hear the greatness others hear in Metallica but I am deaf to it. To me, this album the musical equivalent of hearing someone pound on your neighbor's door. It's not for me but somehow I am involved.

Slightly Colder-play.

I mean, c'mon

Amy Winehouse had a great voice, electromagnetic look/persona, tragic story and Rehab is a legit great song but otherwise, it feels like a schtick. Not that a or this schtick is bad, but the appeal is situational.

The Velvet Above-ground! With private entrance and all amenities! Easy to crack on them, but the Strokes deliver the goods on this first record. It's got a lightweight insouciance that I love. They aren't trying to sell you on being cool. They were NYC hip kids in great clothes and make fun little rock in their idle time. They are cool. The only thing I don't like about this record is the corny cover. They could've done better.

Loses a star for over-exposure. I feel there are deaf people who have heard this album too many times.

We'll have the death, thanks.

Miles Davis (from jazz) hears a different kind of silence. Imagine what his noisy is like! I love this skitter-scatter dream of a record. A firetruck just passed as I was listening and it could've been part of the record.

I liked this more than the generally beloved Modern Sounds in Country Music, but I still think his music is better when it is not drenched in genius syrup. When guy can play piano and sing like Ray Charles, why do you want to add anything to it?

I have gone hot and cold with Tom Waits over the years, but I'm back hot again. I love the full embrace here of the hobo poet hipster mystic that is so acute, New Orleans quit fighting and emulated it right back.

Great record! It's ramshackle in all the right ways, held together by rhythm guitar just tight enough to let everything else flare out as it will. Jeffery Lee Pierce wants to be a punk Jim Morrison or something so badly it makes his shortcomings all the more poignant. He's the greatest bad singer of the era.

This rackety percussion album is a cool move on from the ingenue rock she arrived with or the cabaret feel of the album with the long name, while still giving her space to smolder. Maybe not as immediately catchy as the others, but, great.

I'm not sure club records like this are meant to be "listened to." Each of these tracks is built around one great idea/sample that gets beat into the ground. The first 30 seconds of each is great, but the remaining 5 minutes of each is a slog

It's the kind of pretty indie music I'd wish they would turn down/off in a hip coffee shop.

Might be the best hip-hop record of all time. Full emotional range, beats and production meet Nas' flow like interlocking gears. Blunt at points, spacy at others.

I thought I hated the reggae style drag of "Mother and Child Reunion" but nope, total banger. Honestly, the whole album is and the younger me would be appalled at how genuinely great I find Paul Simon to be in my crippled dotage.

Eh. "Good Times Bad Times" is evergreen brilliant but my attention drifts through much of the rest of this album.

It's pretty good but I don't have the will to listen the Doors.

The title track and "Fame" are so good, transcending the cliches they are mining, but the rest is pretty much filler to these ears. I bet any of those songs in the right movie might sound brilliant, but on their own, not so much.

I rather liked this. More of a minimal instrumental electro pop than edm. Most of the songs were built around a good idea but each could have been half as long for twice the impact. Worst cover art so far!

I have gotten "Kill the Poor" stuck in my head at least once weekly for decades. The most reliable earworm in punk.

The public deterioration of Kanye is up there with Morrissey's alt-right turn in musical persona disappointments. I like his records up through The Life of Pablo, with this being the most challenging among them. Lou Reed sang this album's praises at the time and Nick Cave has said he wants "I Am a God" played at his funeral, but the open rage valve along with "New Slaves" and "Black Skinhead" titles mapped against the unconscionable things he embraced later make this a dodgy listen now.

Solid gritty performance but dunno if it is essential listening

A hint at the greatness that is Tom Petty. This is not the album I'd pick but it's hard to beat "Breakdown" and "American Girl" and the rest of the record is solid enough

My favorite Zappa album or a tie with Over-Nite Sensation. Skewed pop sensibilities in full effect and his sense of humor hadn't fully soured yet.

It's one part Tommy, two parts Nebraska. In the best way.

1981!? Surprisingly spartan and icy, not far off from their industrial music roots despite containing the rightfully ubiquitous pop banger "Don't You Want Me" and the slightly less ubiquitous "Love Action." I dig this in a vintage Soviet synthpop way, dour-faced with too much make up, glowering over synthesizers. I like to imagine them dragging an audience unwillingly through "I Am the Law" before bopping into the hit.

I don't know how necessary this album is compared to Slim Shady. I listened to it a lot at the time but it seems leaden, over-macho and kinda no fun to me now.

I once had the pleasure of telling Gordon Gano at length that I have never met anyone that knew this record and didn't like it, no matter what kind of music they were "into."

Springsteen is a bit of a line in the sand, esp if you grew up under the, regime of "Born in the USA." I've lived on both sides of that line, currently cautiously renting a place near E Street. It's a close boardwalk fight between this and The River being THE Boss record. Darkness edges things out (doesn't it always?) for the one-two punch of the heart-panic "Candy's Room" and the spectral "Racing in the Street" cutting into the big grandiose Boss business. This also has the dubious honor of being the best album cover in a career of terrible album covers.

This album gets its stars just for unleashing Marc Almond into the world, but mostly holds up. Everyone should have to struggle to get "Sex Dwarf" out of their head at least once in their life. "Secret Life", "Bedsitter", "Seedy Films" go beyond the camp to create a life you can step in for a moment and "Tainted Love" might be the best new wave single there is.

On paper, I should love Randy Newman (leads with humor, weird voice, old timey, songwriter's songwriter) but I just do not have what it takes. The demo version of 'Marie" I liked, so maybe its the arrangements and the persona he puts on his voice, I have a problem with. Whatever it is is a deal-killer.

Damn, I love every phase of the Who. Knuckle-duster R&B-mode with the guitar tone of a fallen angel. They sold the blue-eyed blues better than the Beatles, Stones or Kinks did, and then quickly moved on.

"La Grange" is a perfect song, but the rest of the album skews toward a less-cocaine/more weed KISS. I suppose those beards are a mask of sorts.

The vibiest vibe record ever to vibe. I'm glad I don't understand French because I suspect it might break the spell.

A very "band" way to do electronic/dance music, but dunno. I think if I'd been 14 when this came out, it might've meant the world to me, but Prodigy never hit me the way it reached a lot of folks.

I have come to a deeper appreciation of Kraftwerk over recent years through my daughter. The deal with them has always been on their embrace of technology, but she grew up in an age where that's the norm. She finds a relatble anxiety and warmth in them that I get as well. That said, this is probably my least favorite of their records. Still good, but a little too on the nose. Not sure why so many people have covered "The Model" when they have better songs. Computer World is the Kraftwerk album you need.

This may be heretical, but it's the Pogues' best record, and not just because of the inclusion of "Fairytale of New York." It's also the whirlwinds of the title track and "Bottle of Smoke" and the grandeur of "Thousands are Sailing" and the killer instrumentals as well. Just a beautiful band at the perfect point.

Through everything that has happened outside of the band and with the members, this album completely holds up and still gets to me. It's a culmination of precision and abandon, of melodrama and careful craft. Gladiolas for everyone!

1001 has got my number this week! The loose throb of this record is muzack for living. I've woven through a very busy airport with this in my ears and it turns low-drama human chaos into a petri dish observable from the confines of a mental lab with recessed lighting and a fresh coffee.

I like them fine but I'm not sure any album by them is essential. This one is particularly hodgepodge. "Mr Soul" is a good song, but feels like it cuts off mid thought at the fade out. I thought "Expecting to Fly" was maybe a Pink Floyd song, but I might be confusing it with their post-Waters song. Turns out it was all session musicians and Neil Young who had intermittently quit the band.

I swear, my newsfeed is continually occupied by soundbites from Shirley Manson of Garbage, an outsize presence from a band that had one of two adequate alt-crossover bar-n-grill muzak hits 30 ears ago. Her PR team is peerless. Cool guitar sounds in semi-tuneless tunes. Carefully punctuated stop-starts in case you missed the subtle points.

Greatest of the early Beatles records. Alternating a freight-train rhythm section against the tender numbers like "If I Fell" and "And I Love Her." Some corny moments like "Tell Me Why" take me out of it but the title track and "Any Time at All" drag me back in.

Made hip-hop a cross cultural thing, giving white guys the "deez nuts" joke. For many, it's the only thing they have. The groove is still pretty infectious, but I feel lyrically, it hasn't aged well.

No one needs to listen to this record who hasn’t already.

I love this album. Staggering reach, treating melancholy like a cut gem that reflects a different shade with each facet. One of the albums on this list I have actually foisted onto people.

Still tight as a tripwire and infectious as a dystopian biotoxin. Devo forever!

I prefer the pop music-er side of Rush to the rock cencerto side. It's good, moments of brilliance, but I kind want it to be over most of the time.

Unlike most 80's new wave pop, I think Duran Duran has aged rather well. I would have never guessed at the time. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple used DD to rather poignant effect. I did a country-ish cover of it, meaning to be ironic and came to find I love the song.

I was prepared to go the muso route and smugly declare Searching for the Young Soul Rebels and Don't Stand Me Down to be better records, but now I'm not sure. There is a remix/remaster from 2022 that gives the album a little more heft and the songs really glow. The singles (Celtic, Jackie Wilson Said and Come on Eileen) are unstoppable as are the fiddled up Rebels tunes but the vibe throughout is winning me over. They are like what Queen might have done if unburdened with being awesome. I am surprised this predates the Pogues by a couple of years - I always thought they copped the soul urchin thing from them. I wished they'd taken the next step and revived The Threepenny Opera in this configuration before moving on to their next era.

I had to hightail it to a riverboat casino ballroom at 6am this morning to set up a power point for a regional realtor conference and this seemed appropriate soundtrack. I suspect it’s what they had in mind.

Rattle and Hum is the line where U2 stopped being a maintained concern for me. The album is fine, set the template for a lot 90s alt-rock bombast for which they will have to answer when they meet their god. "One" is still a great song, maybe one of their best. "Real Thing:" and Mysterious Ways" are affable songs that don't know when to end. The techno-ish ones like "The Fly" have me reaching for the swatter.

Eh. Biggie's voice sounds like its struggling to be heard over the repeat-o-matic beats and when he does come through, I'm not sure he has that much to say.. He's an excellent avatar for hip-hop, looks great on a t-shirt, but he never quite grabbed me as an artist.

I recently watched the movie for the first time since college and it still hits with the same heavy-handedness. The album contains some of their best melodies - Goodbye Blue Sky, Numb, Vera, Mother - along with rest of the surreal bombast (which now sounds a bit like the Residents with a bigger budge- "Waiting for the Worms" in particular) everyone knows, but it, along with Dark Side, is a bit of a slog.

In 1977, miraculously using twinkling synths to create a place of pastoral calm from a future we still haven't reached. I could ride this train forever. The only hitch is 8 minutes of Hall of Mirrors. They could have nailed it in 2.

The Pink Floyd of Britpop, in that they persist losing their troubled, magnetic singer a few albums in and get huge. They have the wordplay cleverness of Squeeze, the political brio of the Clash and the firepower of Oasis. Love them.

Eh. I assume Faith is on the list which is the George Michael album you need if you need one. I always appreciated him more as a public figure, esp the way he navigated the aftermath of his arrest, than I resonated with him as an artist. The piano ballads feel unfinished while the anthems seem overbaked. "Freedom" is infectious in both a good and bad way.

We haven't done this one? It's the TH album I go back to most often. "Memories Can't Wait" might be their greatest song - Zeppelin-heavy with a brilliant resolution in the chorus. "Life During Wartime" is forever salient as "Heaven" is moving. Love it.

This album has some of my favorite Prince songs on it - "Starfish and Coffee" the title track, "U Got the Look", the gospel wigginess of "The Cross" - and the dubby, vacuum-of-space production was peerless for the time and still sounds great. The record is a lot and gets mired in some of the ballads, but it's among his best. Maybe second after Parade for me.

I feel this was an album more for him than it was for us, and it seems to have done wonders for him. Glad it was made but not one I'd put people onto.

I'm tryin, I'm tryin, I'm tryin' I'm tryin' to find fault but, nope. I still love this, rickety songs and crap recording and all.

This album is a cool vibe, better than the Shaft soundtrack, but Curtis is the foreground Curtis Mayfield album you need.

It's a good record, Kendrick Lamar is a game changer, but Butterfly and/or Damn are the ones to hear, and really, just Butterfly.

I love and hate this album. It was a groundbreaker in pulling jazz back into R&B and funk and music that regular people like and it is a flawless groove. Also I like the audacity of synthesizers here (that should be their venery term.) The bad part is, it put a full stop on a lot of musicians. They can never get past this and we are flooded with sub-HH funk forever

I can't decide if I like this or not, which might be the highest praise art can receive. It wouudl get a 5 if I could decide I did.

This album was a revelation of cheap fuzzy tone and dead stare rock pose at a time when, ironically, everyone was kinda trying to be messianic. Word got around my high school that one dude had this tape and we all sought him out to make a copy. It still holds up. Perfect album cover.

eh. I do remember being really into this album for a minute during a short Stephen Still obsession but I don;t hear what I heard then. It's good, much like all the supergroupish things in the CSNY universe, but it doesn;t touch on the vulnerability of his better solo work

Why would anyone whose been in a drugstore in the last 30 years choose to listen to "Lovefool" on purpose? It will be on next time you need Valentines candy or a phone charger.

I am friends with the guy who hooked Paul Simon with the zydeco musicians who played on this, in fact heard him regale the story this weekend. So my view is colored by that but beyond that, the album is impeccible. Paul Simon bypasses any notion of cultural appropriation with his blatant love for the music and musicians integrated in this amazing brace of songs.

I don't believe in guilty pleasures, but I'm not exactly proud of how much I love Oasis, particularly this and Morning Glory. The hits are overplayed for a reason, they hit consistently. The production is flawless, the swagger incandescent. I have thought about "Supersonic" at least three times a week since this album came out.

Imagine happening on this sparky, cocky record in 1979, bopping around to "Precious" and "Tattooed Love Boys" and having a good time and then the heartstring puller "Kid" comes on and THEN the best song ever written "Brass in Pocket" shows up right near the end. Gonna make you, make you a fan forever. One of the all time best band cover photos.

Morrissey, the solo act and attending band, didn't gel until the ironclad Your Arsenal four years later. "Everyday is Like Sunday" is a great lyric, especially "Come Armageddon, come." "Suedehead" has that brilliant guitar riff that is the limit as x approaches Johnny Marr without reaching it and has all the trappings of the Smiths without coalescing. It's not terrible, It was just not quite there yet. This album sounds to me more like he's doing guest vocals like Chemical Brothers had people do. Did he ever do a Chemical Brothers song? I'd rather hear that.

I never really need to hear "Sunshine" again, and need to hear "Superstition" every time it comes around. The rest is a master class in vibe and texture, even when it isn't exactly catchy.

Situationally brilliant album that, not in the situation, sounds ridiculous. I'll bet this album sold a lot of R&B synthesizers

It's not my favorite of theirs, but still a great example of how sonically adventurous they can be. "Cecilia" could be an Animal Collective song. To me, this album leans too much on the anthems and syrupy harmonies for me, which implies that maybe I don't love them for what they are best at.

The punk x reggae x fuck it x girl power of it really works when it gels and grates when it doesn't, which means it also worked then. I keep wanting someone to rein in Ari Up's pitch, which places me as part of the problem the Slits were remedying. I'm glad she prevailed, because it would be a dull listen had it been smoothed over.

I'm a sucker for rinky-dink psychedelic organ so this hits my buttons, but the bloozier numbers take me out of it.

Pretty unstoppable record, at least side A. I don't know that I've ever heard anything on side B, and don't really have to again.

With the exception of the Queen is Dead, the Smiths compilations (Hatful and Bombs, in particular) were more essential to their greatness than the proper studio albums. This has some good songs mostly on side one, but "Stop Me" is the only one that feels like the Smiths. "Death at One's Elbow" sounds like a leftover from the first album. The rest points more to initial uneasy steps of Morrissey's impending solo career. "Last Night" wins a special prize for being their dreariest ballad and "Unhappy Birthday" for their most petulant line "Cuz you're evil and you lie, and should die".

Each song is ok except for that one sonic decision that makes me want to wave my hands and make them stop that part.

The only plausible explanation for Limp Bizkit is that someone went back in time to take out Trent Reznor and this album is what happens when the timeline tries to correct itself. Each timeline gets worse and worse as they try to remedy it until we end up in an AI nightmare future with a cartoon villain as a president and people stop believing in science. Too dumb to be a psy-op.

I feel confident in saying Elvis Costello has never made a bad album and deserves marks for forever moving forward. This album supports that thesis. The band is tightly wound in that perfect Attractions way, Elvis is about to pop out of his skin half of the time. Dreamy Steve Nieve keys. I don't know if it's essential but it dispatched me on a journey of listening to all those EC records I never got around to so thanks!

This album did the trick. Three people who came into my office did a little shuffle when they heard it. I want wallpaper of the border on the cover.

Perfect rock album.

They get a bump over average for the wisdom of releasing a 90-second rock hit. I like the rest fine enough, probably fun live.

I love the mournfulness of his chimey electric and his poor-man's Roy Orbison-croon, his loungy country-loser delivery. I hear as much early VU in this as I do Greenwich Village, both happening on different blocks in NYC at the time. It makes for a bit of a melancholy bummer befitting the bus ride in Midnight Cowboy where Harry Nilsson songbirded up "Everybody's Talkin'" I like it a lot.

I should like Pulp more than I do. I am their prime demographic. I think I'd rather be in Pulp than listen to Pulp.