Knew about half of this already. Most of it is really good! Of the new-to-me songs, Witness is my easy favourite, and Yeah Yeah is the worst. Those Betty Boop samples are off-putting. I had to check I didn't have audio playing elsewhere on my computer when that started. Time After Time is the all-timer here, I think.
A classic, maybe a notch down in quality from the first two Kanye West records (which are, I think, the touchstones, for the obvious production similarities) but still a fantastic piece of work.
Jesus Christ, Tim, please try to have some decorum. I'm not sure I've ever heard a more flagrantly horny record. Shoutout to him for siring the great Jeff Buckley, but, yeesh.
Clearly accomplished, and Respect is incredible, but comes across a bit staid to me listening in 2025.
Not a fan. I have liked some of Metallica's earlier output, but this does nothing for me. Even worse, it actively puts me off. The singles -- Enter Sandman, Nothing Else Matters, The Unforgiven -- are the worst offenders, and feel responsible for the next 30 years of bad rock music.
I accidentally listened to Harvest Moon before realizing I actually drew Harvest. Harvest Moon is generally lesser Neil Young, but its title track is one of the most beautiful songs ever recorded. Harvest is an all-timer. Part of my life since I was in middle school. Heart of Gold was the first song I learned to play on guitar. Needle and the Damage Done is proto-Elliott Smith. Love it.
Listened to this, and Superunknown, and Ten, when I was 13. Have not listened much since. It's pretty good, but overlong and the grunge guitars blur into each other as the album drags on. Tough to imagine revisiting much, but it's clearly accomplished.
I -love- this album, the first generated by this site which I have a true existing connection to. Probably the second-best record to come out of the NYC post-punk revival scene - Interpol's Turn Off the Bright Lights being the only one better (I exclude LCD Soundsystem from this, just because they're not nearly raw enough even at their most stripped down). Even the throwaways here are great, like Man, which would be a top-tier White Stripes song. Maps is obviously unimpeachable. Rich, Y Control and Modern Romance are also part of my DNA.
Knew about half of this already. Most of it is really good! Of the new-to-me songs, Witness is my easy favourite, and Yeah Yeah is the worst. Those Betty Boop samples are off-putting. I had to check I didn't have audio playing elsewhere on my computer when that started. Time After Time is the all-timer here, I think.
Of course I'm an acolyte of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan: why else would I have I seen A Complete Unknown on Christmas Eve, opening day!! It would be one of the more laughable Best Picture winners of recent memory, if that upset indeed comes to pass. But what that movie gets right is that it does not attempt to crack the enigma of Dylan — the unknowability is the point, and that permeates the songs here, particularly the protest songs that define the record. A hard rain's gonna fall, and there's nothing any of us can do to understand it, let along influence it. "The executioner's face is always well-hidden," Dylan wrote when he was, stunningly, 21. "I'll know my song well before I start singing." I love the photo of Dylan and Suze Rotolo on the cover, such a stark image of him as this real, physical being. What an out-of-body experience it must have been for her to hear Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right for the first time. It always makes me think of Alvvays' Pharmacist: "You know it happens all the time/it's alright." I mean, the influence is everywhere. The Adam and Eve bit of Talkin' World War III Blues echoes through The Hold Steady's Cattle and the Creeping Things. You seen what happened last time they started? I heard things ain't been the same since. It's a bit frontloaded, and I lean towards the Highway 61/Blonde on Blonde sound. This record is still a miracle.
A full-out masterpiece. There's a great New Yorker profile about the unfiltered creation of this album. The best moment of the title track, where Apple shifts up — "I thought being blacklisted would be grist for the mill" — is improvised, she says. From the profile: "She knew that it was good, because it was embarrassing." There's a lot of deconstruction here, both musically and personally. There's an outright repudiation of the image of the young (female) artist as muse, a box she had been placed into with her relationship with Paul Thomas Anderson. The making-of Magnolia doc is revealing; that movie is a singular achievement, too, but it cuts through Anderson's brilliance to see him, the same age I am now, coked-up, conceiving of himself as a great artist, his proximity to Apple seemingly a show of status and sway. "You're working out your psychoses on everyone else's": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVt2oYUu5jQ Endlessly catchy and inventive. Hard to pick favourites: the aforementioned title track, Drumset, Cosmonauts, Newspaper, Heavy Balloon, and especially I Want You to Love Me, which has, I think, the thesis statement, on wanting what one wants: "I know none of this will matter in the long run, but I know a sound is still a sound around no one." Alongside Phoebe Bridgers' Punisher, released a couple months later, I think this is the decade-defining album to date.
This is the first artist generated here that I have seen perform live: Park 96, Calgary, 2007, about 1.5km as the crow flies from where I'm sitting writing this. I was 11. I remember feeling like something cool was happening! This won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 1970, notably beating The Beatles' Abbey Road. The album's highly proficient and deeply inessential. I'm a sucker for Satie's Gymnopédie — maybe the most beautiful melody ever composed — but, come on.
It's way too long, and I say that while also thinking two slightly longer records (Joanna Newsom's Have One On Me, Cindy Lee's Diamond Jubilee) are among the best ever. But when it hits, wow, there's nothing like it. This is maybe my fourth listen all the way through over the years. Cupid de Locke into Galapagos is a career high. 1979 is obviously amazing too. Tonite Tonite, etc. I could see myself loving this if I were willing to regularly spend this much time with Billy Corgan. More of a 3.5
Loved it, shockingly, given there are few words that spark more skepticism in me re: music than 'celtic'. The first two tracks and Sweet Thing are all so great. I felt moved to tears at times.
No thanks. Helter Skelter scratches this itch for me. Paranoid works for me, a bit. This doesn't really.
Better than Astral Weeks by a mile, in my book. That isn't the album up for review today, but I was struck listening to The Waterboys' cover of Sweet Thing the other day for this (and a few times since) and thinking, oh my God, there's a bona fide song in here. It's so beautiful! Where was Morrison hiding it?? So I came into Moondance, which I had heard before and largely dismissed, with the idea that there is majesty here that just needs unearthing. Caravan hits like a, uh, caravan, and strikes me as the obvious highlight here, one that I've always loved when watching The Last Waltz. The album version isn't quite as strong without The Band's bombast behind it. I like it in the grand tradition of rock songs that position the radio as a holy item. Joy Division's Transmission, The Hold Steady's Stuck Between Stations, The Modern Lovers' Roadrunner. "I'm in love with the radio on." Much of the rest doesn't connect like I wish it did, but when it does, I do have the sense it's a special album. Two big points against Morrison: 1. He is Irish, not Welsh, despite what my father told me yesterday. 2. His singles chart on Rateyourmusic's mobile site jumps directly from Moondance (1977) to No More Lockdown (2020).
More like The zz. Sorry, cheap shot, and also I made that joke in 2012 (!) in what is Coexist's top review on Rateyourmusic.com, so maybe it's time to get some new material. How about..... the band formerly known as TwitterTwitter. I've only seen 15 albums on this list, but I've got to think this is about as inessential as anything gets here. I am kind of bewildered that it could be considered by anyone an album that you must hear before you die. The two listens I've given this add up to 79 minutes in which I could have been listening to, I don't know, Blue Rev? Pet Sounds? Songs in the Key of Life? I increasingly think it's a bigger sin for an album to be boring than to be bad, and that's what's going on here. Completely inoffensive. I like I Dare You, and I can't in good faith call this is a one-star album. I have a sneaking suspicion that The xx's self-titled debut will be on this list, if their middling third album is as well, so I'll save most of my thoughts, except to say that that record produced several songs I listen to to this day, and that actually make me feel something. VCR is a perfect aughts pop song. The band's sound probably shouldn't have left the 2000s.
A couple of almost catchy tunes, but this is by-and-large tripe. A very long 40 minutes.
Really wish I connected more with this. I've tried it a few times over the years, because I love the music of so many of her contemporaries. It falls flat with me, though, minus a few that stop me in my tracks (Fuck And Run, Divorce Song, Never Said).
Some nice grooves here. This gets closer to classic Zeppelin than I would have guessed. I don't have a lot of time for '70s hard rock, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy it. This is an -exceptionally- heavy album for coming out in 1970.
Loved this when it came out, have fallen off with CHVRCHES a bit since. I'd consider this one of the better pop records of the decade. The Mother We Share is the obvious standout, but it keeps the momentum up.
Probably more of a 3.5 stars, which feels patently ridiculous to say: this record, among the Stones' opuses, led off by one of the most chilling rock songs ever put to tape... 7/10. To one's own self be true, however. I've never understood how Beatles vs. Stones was ever even a remotely interesting debate. One wrote half of the pop canon by 1970. The other is the recipient of the 2025 Grammy Award for Best Rock Album, whose bassist, by the way, is (quoting from Wikipedia) "his own son's ex-son-in-law, the father-in-law of his ex-mother-in-law, as well as the stepgrandfather of his ex-wife." But what do those extratextual details matter? The album starts with Gimme Shelter and ends with You Can't Always Get What You Want! The seven songs in between vary in quality, but those bookends are enough to make it an unimpeachable classic.
Undeniably brilliant, and much more resonant to me than the first Franklin album I drew on this generator. I can't imagine myself going back to it much, but it's clearly masterful.
I need a few more listens to this to fully digest, but I was blown away, in a way I never had previously been with Gaye's music. Pure venom. Uncomfortably raw.
Maybe I'm just too young to find this fun, or interesting. I mostly have affinity for this era of rap as scene-setting — I'm thinking about the Kurtis Blow in Armageddon Time. Can't take it seriously in 2025. I appreciate their fast food shoutouts.
I actively dislike Peter Gabriel, and disliked this listening experience. No need to belabour that.
This is the first true surprise I've had on this list, an artist I had never heard of doing something squarely outside of my wheelhouse that I nonetheless thought absolutely ripped. This is a great record. I thought the proggy stuff worked best: At The Farm, Anvil Everything the biggest highlights. Closer to 3.5.
Ain't that the truth, Curtis. Strange timing to listen to this on the grimmest day for my country's relationship with the U.S. in decades.
Incredibly, you get through Bitter Sweet Sympathy — a marvel of a song, in conversation with Don't Look Back in Anger or Common People or I Wanna Be Adored — and realize there is somehow a full 70 minutes of album left. There is little of interest in the balance of the record.
The best thing I can say about this Traffic record is that it put Jimi Hendrix's Crosstown Traffic in my head. The music is dull in the way only an English psychedelic rock in 1968 can be. For some reason I thought the Traffic guy was in Traveling Wilburys. He's not — he's actually in Blind Faith. Traffic is even in the B-tier of supergroups!! Two stars instead of one star because there's nothing to dislike here, on account of there being nothing here period.
What a record. It's one of the first that I heard — per Last.fm stats, at age 15, logging my first listen in the month I started high school — that felt truly revelatory, realizing that music can do *this*. Spectacular, unmatched atmosphere. I tried to get into some other trip hop records after hearing it but it's so head and shoulders above the competition that you end up just wanting to put Dummy on again. Glory Box is a legitimate contender for best song of the '90s, and a singular, deeply weird achievement. Like, it's Bjork's Joga, and it's that. Even songs that I might think of as B-side cuts (It Could Be Sweet, It's a Fire) are leagues better than anything Massive Attack has ever conceived. I prefer Third, which is a top-five album of the 2000s, but this is obviously also a masterpiece.
Put off listening to this one on account of it being disco, which is ridiculous, because I kinda like disco? And if this is the disco I'm being served, then I really like it. Good Times is a masterpiece. The rest keeps up the energy. I have nothing bad to say about this. Didn't realize this was Nile Rodgers!
An extraordinary album, and one I feel nostalgic about while listening, as I have hardly done since I was in high school. It's still deeply familiar and endlessly rich. A real treat to listen again. I will remember to add it to my instrumental-music-to-listen-to-when-I-need-to-get-written-work-done rotation.
This is very important, landmark record, but it's of a place and only occasionally successful. Deceptacon is as good as it's always been. A lot of the other stuff - do not cancel me - feels very undergraduate (and even Deceptacon, to be honest). I mean, What’s Yr Take on Cassavetes?, lol. Anyway, I've read Girls to the Front, I can say this stuff.
I was annoyed to see this come up on the generator, because it's a) progressive rock and b) the brainchild, at least in part, of Peter Gabriel, perhaps the most insufferable figure in 20th century popular culture. And that was before I saw the 90-minute runtime!! So, I'm loathe to admit that I actually liked this record a decent bit. It's tight throughout, with some blistering highs, which I actually think come when it sheds the prog and embraces Gabriel's pop sensitivities (!). The Carpet Crawlers is a true marvel, a song that I can only imagine could mean anything to anyone, but to me, means that the only way out is through ("We've got to get in to get out"). The album's definitely too long for my taste, but I did go back and listen to it a second time before logging my review, so that's worth something. I hate finding out that my biases were misplaced >:-(
One of my best friends is a War On Drugs diehard, and I wish I were able to access the same level of passion for this music. It's very polished, but I think I wish it extracted the interesting parts of Bruce Springsteen's music (like, say, The Hold Steady) instead of what it settles on. Which is not to say that I don't like this album, because I certainly do, particularly the great one-two punch that starts it off. But it's hard to be too enthusiastic about it.
"We're nothing, and nothing can help us," Bowie strains, at what should be the height of triumph, as he reaches the climax of what might be the greatest song ever written. "Maybe we're lying." That song's one thing, six minutes of unexplainable alchemy. But then you get Blackout, V2-Schneider, The Secret Life of Arabia. How do you explain that? Not my favourite of the Berlin trilogy (that'd be Low, buoyed by Sound and Vision, which, despite what I said above about Heroes, is without question my favourite Bowie.) Still a monument.
Listened once to Taylor's version, listened once to the original. Sorry, Taylor. Not exactly my speed, but I still enjoy this. Wildest Dreams, Style, Blank Space are my favourites (the latter two I knew before this listen). I am giving everything here a fair chance! When this was coming out (2014) I was graduating from high school. Some friends were driving to Edmonton to see her. They invited me, but I turned it down because the tickets were too expensive at $80. Knowing what I know now, I wish I had gone.
What a record! I probably never would have listened to this on my own, despite loving multiple Pixies records, because I find Francis kinda obnoxious. (Like, I've never heard a solo Morrisey album either.) This is definitely weird, and neurotic, but not in the way I would have expected? It's somehow both self-effacing and completely void of any self-consciousness. This is a guy born Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV who decided to call himself Black Francis, and then he's a founding member of Pixies, and then he makes -this-? I need more time with it than the two listens and a few extra plays of a few songs, but my instinct is that this is an all-time great power pop album.
It's not even a top-five Beatles album. (He's not even the best drummer in the Beatles!) But how could I put this at anything other than a five? It's completely paradigm shifting for pop music, overflowing with creativity and tenacity and beauty. It is very easy to see how this made Brian Wilson go insane, like Salieri obsessing over Mozart. Lennon and McCartney were 26 and 24 when recording this, respectively. It doesn't even begin to make sense. 1. A Day In The Life 2. Good Morning Good Morning 3. Getting Better 4. Lovely Rita 5. She's Leaving Home 6. With A Little Help From My Friends 7. Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds 8. Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite 9. Fixing A Hole 10. When I'm 64 11. Within You Without You 12. Sgt. Pepper's/Reprise
This is so flat, with none of the dynamic energy that makes New Order or Depeche Mode (if those are indeed Pet Shop Boys' peers?) so great. The best I can say is that it is inoffensive. Every song sounds the same. Two steps away from Muzak.
A stone-cold classic, obviously. "I don't know how to start this shit" into -that- verse is a GOAT level hip-hop moment. A few songs don't hit the same highs for me, so it's a 4 as a matter of personal taste (I take ATCQ over this).
A classic, maybe a notch down in quality from the first two Kanye West records (which are, I think, the touchstones, for the obvious production similarities) but still a fantastic piece of work.
This doesn't do a whole lot for me, even though sophisti-pop is something I like a lot, in the Destroyer/Prefab Sprout/Julee Cruise vein. This is too lounge-y, too atmospheric? Closer to a 2.5.
I remember Lana got heat for this album title when it came out, but I think it's elite. She's forever been a one-album artist for me, but that one album (Norman Fucking Rockwell) is a defining record of the 2010s, and has the decade's best song (The Greatest). So it's a bit odd that I didn't even bother listening to this when it came out? Unfortunately, I don't think it recaptures what made NFR so great, as a true lightning-in-a-bottle product, but it does have a lot of merit, particularly at the start (even if there are some vocal choices in White Dress that are completely baffling). Happy enough to have heard this, but it's not going on any kind of rotation.
Jesus Christ, Tim, please try to have some decorum. I'm not sure I've ever heard a more flagrantly horny record. Shoutout to him for siring the great Jeff Buckley, but, yeesh.
There's only one song on this album, but at least it's a good one. Also buoyed by the best variations on the theme being the first and last tracks (Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World especially — what a title, what a tune). All-in, another one for the more-important-than-great pile.
Passable, even enjoyable, first-wave British punk. More dynamic than the Ramones, that's for sure.
Hard to extract much in terms of melody from the dissonance. Still, it's more my lane of punk than the last two records I had (Ramones s/t, Crossing the Red Sea w/ The Adverts). Minor Threat/Black Flag is inseparable in my head from the Freaks and Geeks episode where James Franco tries to go punk. I've read Our Band Could Be Your Life, I understand the significance of these bands and this scene, but in 2025 it all feels just a bit like caricature to me.
Peak middle-school album, for me, with direct memories linked to Jeremy (on the radio in my Grade 7 math teacher's class), Even Flow (Guitar Hero III all-timer) and Black (feeling as if I understood being heartbroken). The whole first half of this album is unimpeachable. The B-side is merely very good. I'm not going to pretend this doesn't rip.
Love it. A key great-album-to-put-on-while-writing entrant to put back into the rotation.
A minor blind spot for me in the extended Beatles library, maybe because it feels like such a minor release as well? It's very interesting to contrast this with All Things Must Pass, a monument of creative output. McCartney (I) is skeletal. Half the songs are just sketches. The songs that are fleshed out - holy cow. Junk is the one, for me, a song so good it would be an upper echelon track in the Beatles library if it hadn't been left on the cutting-room floor for the White Album. And then, Maybe I'm Amazed, which Hey Jude wishes it could be. Consider, as well, that Another Day fit in this era as a non-album single. That all notwithstanding, this mostly feels like a warm-up lap for Ram.
Thought this was great, groovy, an IDM album that was great for working and walking and reading. It's such an easy record for such a low score on here.
I connect with this much less than Funkadelic, unfortunately. The funk grooves feel a bit one-note to me. I clearly don't have the ability to chill with the best of them. Not a record I can see returning to.
This gets a bit self-parodic, especially in the opener ("We are the robots," repeated ad nauseum over Kraftwerk's most bleep-bloop palette, is exactly how The Simpsons would have done it (and it is a little surprising that they never did it, given how easy a target Kraftwork would have been — simpsonsarchive.com lists only the Germans-buy-the-powerplant-episode and a throwaway line in "The Curse of the Flying Hellfish" as making only passing reference to the band — but perhaps this is precisely because Kraftwerk had already by this point adequately skewered themselves with the release of The Man Machine)). All that to say, this is still a good album that just feels a tad trite after the great successive triumphs of Autobahn and Trans Europe Express. Perhaps der komputermann cyborgs have compiled too close to the sun.
The Who's one undeniable masterpiece, starting on an incredible high and hardly letting off the gas for the runtime. Baba O'Riley and Won't Get Fooled Again are great bookends, obviously, but Going Mobile, Bargain, My Wife, The Song is Over, Getting in Tune in the middle are all 10/10 bangers. And that's pretty much the whole album! Anything less than a 5 would be disingenuous.
I've always wanted to like this more than I do, but it's never fully clicked for me, even when I was right in its crosshairs, when I got my hands on a CD copy of it at age 12. Basket Case obviously rules. I wish I could get excited about much else.
I dig this a lot more than I thought I would! My dad introduced me to it when I was 12, I'd guess, and I remember a few of the songs well. Others didn't register at all, including the excellent, proto-Primal Scream Generation Landslide and Mary Ann. There's a lot more tonal variety here than I would have guessed. Nice to have my expectations challenged.
Occasionally interesting, but hour-long-psychedelic-rock-album-from-1966-that's-also-a-rock-opera is an impossible bar to clear.
Lowest common denominator music. Only listened to it once, where I've tried to give every record here two shots. There's no point, and no additional value I could gain from more time spent with Angus and the crew.
This is the best album that's come across my feed to date, both an objective masterpiece and a record that has felt extraordinarily meaningfully to me personally. I can remember listening to Pictures of You in junior high, feeling shattered, and it's a very easy memory to conjure a decade later because the song still makes me feel the same way. And Untitled is an even more visceral attack: "Now the time has gone." This is both an album that I've played as a comfort when falling asleep, and one that I've found too haunting to have on while trying to sleep. The insinuation from the top review — that someone who loves this will consequently love the films of Tim Burton?! — is deeply insulting. You could credibly argue it's the greatest album ever written.
"This is what's happening, and it's freaking you out." This is on the shortlist for the greatest late-era indie record. Indie, past its prime, wrestling with its own mortality, and by extension the mortality of its creators. Which, to be fair, was James Murphy's entire schtick dating back to his band's lead single in 2002 (!?). Time ticks on. The whole record is great, but the run of singles stands above, particularly Call the Police, which is pure peak-U2 bombast and momentum. Black Screen may be the explicit Bowie eulogy, but it's an earlier line that's more evocative: "It moves like a virus and enters our skin/The first sign divides us, the second is moving to Berlin."
Don't mean to sound like a prude, but this is pretty sophomoric. It's nice Mr. Octagon is having fun. Some of the skits made me laugh.
A real jumble, quality-wise, and more evidence to me that Beck, while capable of producing some truly great songs, is simply not my bag most of the time. Highlight is E-Pro, killer groove, great wordless chorus a la some of its contemporary alt rock hits (Song 2, Wake Up, etc.), a few seminal Beck-isms ("talking trash to the garbage around you"/"hammer my bones on the anvil of daylight"). Lowlight is Go It Alone, which is so NHL 08 core it hurts to listen to, and which may have committed the unforgiveable sin of inspiring the careers of The Arkells and their legion of talentless peers. On balance, that's probably worth three stars?
This kinda goes? It's obviously bargain-bin Bowie, but the songwriting is solid enough to hold up for 40 minutes. Hymn for the Dudes, Ballad of Mott the Hoople were highlights. This band has records called: Mott the Hoople; Mott; and 'The Hoople'.
This just works for me, much as something like The Fiery Furnaces does, with full acknowledgement that it's obscenely pretentious and naval-gazing. It's hard to deny the melodies here, particularly in Stillness is the Move, Useful Chamber and Cannibal Resource. Enjoyed it so much on this rediscovery that I put it on for a third time back-to-back-to-back.
And I thought Tim Buckley was bad. This Ian Dury guy is a sex pest, and, worse, an Englishman. Some of it's pretty funny, but it's ultimately several shades too ribald for my taste. I blush to even think about it!