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!
Definitely a classic, but not one that fully clicks with me, unfortunately. I love a few of these tracks - Can You Get To That is the cream of the crop, for sure, and not just because its sample is the backbone of a certified indie pop by Sleigh Bells - but others, like the title track and its meandering solo, don't have the same punch. Three stars is underrating this, for sure, but I think this is a round-down from 3.5 record.
He wants to be James Murphy so bad, and he simply is not. This is usually pleasant enough that it's not a one-star album - though there are some one-star songs, like the atrocious Drop the Pressure - but it is completely disposable. Of course Pitchfork gave it BNM in 2006.
It's exactly what it says on the tin, so I can't fault it for that. A dull, uninspiring listen nonetheless.
Dull, except for a brief jolt when La Grange kicks in that dissipates once you realize that the warmer reception you gave that song is just your synapses firing thanks to recognition from the Guitar Hero 3 songbook.
Pure schmaltz, but at least it's high-quality schmaltz. The singles - Movin' Out, Only the Good Die Young - are clearly great, with the latter's conceit hilarious given the song's straight-laced demeanor. A lot of the rest makes me roll my eyes, including the interminable Songs From an Italian Restaurant. I like that he looks kinda like Chris Elliott.
A colossal achievement: four perfect, convention-defying songs that in 1973 saw decades into the future.
Genius is apt, I think, even if it comes across as a bit staid to me, 65 years later. I prefer the big-band bombast of the A-side to the other half's sentimental balladry. I indeed feel a pang of recognition with much of it, particularly the great standard It Had to Be You.
One of The Doors' better efforts, I think, which just shows they're a low-ceiling band. The title track is the best thing on offer here, as a propulsive, electric mission statement.
I'm 95% sure that this album is not on Spotify, and that the link to it offered on this website's top review is not actually the album in question but is in fact a different self-titled album by Throwing Muses, released 17 years after their debut but to substantially less critical and cultural import. It's like if R.E.M.'s Murmur was the listed album, and then the majority of participants instead heard R.E.M.'s Reveal. Anyway — this is the full album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1Xd2jY3zWQ
I resent that the em dash has emerged as a shorthand detection method for AI-generated prose. Per ctrl+f on my reviews page here, I've used one 17 times in 75 reviews, and you will not catch me dead using AI.
The album is solid, but I can see why it's been largely forgotten compared to The Breeders or Sleater-Kinney or similar. Happy to have had a chance to listen.
An early conclusion I'm drawing from this experience is that straight-down-the-middle punk rock is a genre I can largely do without. I already knew I didn't care for London Calling aside from a choice track or two, and I feel the same way here. Repetitive, and not in the fun, settling-into-a-groove way.
Very tempted to give this a 5. This is a New York album — maybe the single quintessential New York album — the way, like, After Hours or Do the Right Thing are New York movies. It also feels like such a landmark turn-of-the-century record (and was, fittingly, released Jan. 1, 2000). This and its predecessor, Is This Desire, probably represent the PJ Harvey sound I best connect to, a midpoint between the earlier grunge sound and the art rock tendencies that later took over her work. Fantastic opening run of tracks, but it's the closing songs that are the true all-timers here. There's Horses In My Dreams, in conversation with Belle & Sebastian's similarly themed closer to If You're Feeling Sinister, and also evocative of Michael Clayton. And then We Float stands as a career high, with such a massive, life-affirming chorus. What a beautiful album!
This list's British bias has gone way too far: it made me listen to an English Evanescence.
This is, unquestionably, the worst of the Jimi Hendrix Experience's three studio records, in the same way that, I don't know, John Lennon was the worst songwriter in the Lennon-McCartney partnership? It's a brilliant album, one that runs laps around its contemporaries — it's staggering to contrast this to The Doors records on this list, which are contemporaneous in release date only. If 6 Was 9 is so far ahead of anything Morrison could have dreamed. I was thinking about Hendrix, guitar aflame, during that beautiful, pivotal scene in Sinners: to be possessed by talent in such a way that can flatten time.
Surprised to see this here. R.E.M. lite, from the ashes of the Minutemen. These sketches of songs don't always coalesce, in the way that something semi-contemporary like Frank Black's Teenager of the Year does, but it's a more-than-noble effort.
The best hip-hop record of the '90s, endlessly creative and exciting. That transition from Building Steam into The Number Song is pure electricity. Stem/Long Stem does the GY!BE angry-man sampling better than GY!BE. The second What Does Your Soul Look Like track is the pinnacle, particularly when that opening sample breaks into the drum fill. It is happening again.
I cannot believe that working at a student newspaper as a stupid 18-year-old gave me the opportunity to interview this guy, a true musical genius, and got me on the guest list for his show. I have been chasing that level of cool ever since.
You hear human voices, but they're only echoes.
This is probably, to me, a five, because of how personally impactful it feels. I remember vividly, at age 17, playing, and singing, the title track for my first girlfriend, who is also my wife. I thought to myself: I want a daughter, with you. Or, God, if it be your will, send us a son. Toute ma vie est avec toi.
I grew up in the suburbs, and I think I romanticized this record such that I felt as if I grew up in -it-. As Deep Blue played at the end of Boyhood, the year after I entered that relationship, I thought, this is my life on screen. When I lost my first job, working the floor at Target Canada before its demise, I peered into the locked windows of the store and thought to myself: dead shopping malls, mountains beyond mountains, no end in sight; this is how the world ends. It helps, too, that perhaps my definitive concert experience at that age was Arcade Fire at the Scotiabank Saddledome, at which they covered Leslie Feist's I Feel It All. I would call it unimpeachable, if not for the fact that Arcade Fire, or rather Win Butler, have regrettably tarnished the legacy of this band and therefore this record (which did, somehow, win the Grammy in 2011). All that doesn't change the fact that this, and the wasted hours — wishing you were anywhere but here! — that it laments, is great, and beautiful.
As much as I like some later Aimee Mann work — the Magnolia soundtrack, particularly — this didn't do much of anything for me. Very whatever.
Thank you to the album generator for producing a certified banger, like emptiness in harmony. I love how silly these two guys are. A Simple Desultory Philippic is that at its peak, a Subterranean Homesick takedown that's in the pantheon alongside, like, How Do You Sleep? as a work of venom. The album's more traditionally Simonean/Garfunkelian cuts flit between winking self-satire and pure sincerity. (Exhibit A: "Can analysis be worthwhile?"/"Is the theater really dead?". Exhibit B: "No deeds to do, no promises to keep.") It does, at times, get to be a bit much; the opener/title track, much like the one on Bridge Over Troubled Water, makes me thing, alright guys, you've made your point, and the newscast-slash-hymnal closer is several degrees too heavy-handed. I think I go, Thyme > Parsley > Rosemary > Sage, but I also am struggling to recall what sage tastes like.
My expectations weren't exactly high for a post-'60s Beach Boys solo record, but this is truly atrocious, and not even in the way that I would have anticipated. At its most overtly soulful, it's a bad Peter Gabriel pastiche, and it's not as if Peter Gabriel — the most loathsome figure in contemporary rock — is an especially worthy figure to emulate in the first place. At its most trite, you may as well not be listening to anything at all.
I deeply dislike this style of Sirius XMU-core indie rock, which thinks it can capture the magic of a band like Animal Collective through — and I'm sorry to use this word in two consecutive reviews — pastiche. Some versions of this, like Tune-Yards or Dirty Projectors, are obviously dated but still have melody and soul behind them. This has nothing. Its inclusion here can only be explained by recency bias, as a misfired attempt to identify what might one day be part of the canon without the benefit of it having been canonized.
This is more like it: a blistering record that's as good as any metal I've ever heard. Such a tight album, with no downswings across its 40 minutes, though the highs of a track like Hangar 18 are hard to compete against.
Fabulous record, and probably as good as I've ever heard live jam-band music sound. There are some breathtaking moments throughout this, particularly during its best cut, You Don't Love Me.
Overlong and not a strand of hip-hop that resonates much with me, unfortunately. Very dated.
An rating principal I've settled on is that if there is a song on a record that I genuinely love, then I cannot assign the record one star. This album pushes the limits of that standard, because for as much warmness as I feel for You're My Best Friend, the rest of this is completely unbearable. I only could sit through this one once.
This goes pretty hard, and was a pleasant surprise when I was expecting the treacle of Chicago's later work. I rode the L Train in 2023, and it didn't sound half as cool as this (I would wager I was about 50 years late).
This falls ever so slightly behind the great New Order albums of the era, for me, but it's very close. It does contain one of the 10 or so best songs ever written in Enjoy the Silence, the kind of pop perfection that makes an artist immortal. Personal Jesus, while not my personal brand of synthpop, is also an undeniable masterpiece. I thought Policy of Truth was a deep cut, but it has the most plays on Spotify of anything here? Perfect song. Blue Dress is the true deep cut, then, making more explicit than elsewhere on the record the deep sense of regret that permeates the whole thing. What an album.
This is, regrettably, simply too French for me.
A long-time favourite, and the best Coldplay record by a mile. The Scientist and Clocks are a dazzling one-two punch of pop songwriting, but In My Place might be better than either, in spite of (or thanks to?) its Ride apery. Green Eyes and Warning Sign are staples of eighth-grade heartache; the title track is a staple of present-day heartache. Amsterdam reminds me of R.E.M.'s Find the River as a pained, earnest epilogue. "Start as you mean to go on." :'-)
Listened to this four times over a couple weeks before settling on a 3. I was familiar with the album from my junior-high listening days, and a couple tracks stuck with me, but it mostly felt like a new experience. The shock I experienced — please do not cancel me — to learn that the lead singer is Black was only topped by the shock I experienced a few days later to learn that the singer for Bloc Party is also Black, which really makes me, uh, confront the image I had in my head of those bands as two of the whitest indie acts of the 2000s. Lover's Day and Halfway Home are incredible bookends, the former rivaling the greatest outbursts from Broken Social Scene. DLZ, obviously, is eternal.
Really wish I liked this more, considering that I view both Loveless and the more contemporaneous You Make Me Realise EP as masterpieces. But it feels shapeless in a way that those two releases don't. I can still appreciate the fuzz, and it's certainly better when turned up loud. A good record that is more important than it is great.
What an electric record, Monae leaning into what could have been the most obnoxious Prince/theatre kid idiosyncrasies and somehow creating a singular pop epic. The first act is particularly stunning, a string of perfect songs running into one another. Even the stuff that doesn't work as well is such a bold swing — none moreso than the Of Montreal song that appears 50 minutes into the record — that you have to respect it. The first seconds of Cold War are as good as pop songwriting has been this century, the urgency of Outkast's B.O.B. maintained but its paranoia morphed into jubilation. Oh, Maker.
Side A (the acoustic side) approaches five-star quality, peaking with the stunning Thrasher. Those five songs are the best of Young's career.
Maybe the contrast is an integral part of what makes the record great, but I can't help but find the B-side to be a let-down, as virtuosic and forward-looking as the proto-grunge work on it is. But man, does some of this stuff rip, right before hitting you upside the head. "I just turned 22/I was wondering what to do/And the closer they got, the more those feelings grew."
This is one of those albums where I'm shocked by the negative reception it has on this site. To me, this is an obvious 4+ star lock, one of a few dozen key records in the rock canon. Never would have guessed it at 3.52 on here.
An aside: this made me wonder whether Neil Young was the first to do the acoustic/electric dichotomy thing with a centrepiece song on an album, as he does with Out of the Blue/Into the Black. Yo La Tengo's Big Day Coming jumps out. Mistress by Red House Painters.
Rust Never Sleeps > Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere > On the Beach > After the Gold Rush > Harvest
After a spectacular run of albums, I dreaded seeing this record pop up, another '70s psych rock (?) record from dustbin of history. Turns out it's not bad! Really breaking barriers by being a white band that Zeppelin ripped off.
The fifth-best album of the 1990s, by my accounting, and the best album I've yet had from this site. Flawless from the first spindly notes. There may not be a trio of better songs on any album of the decade than Breadcrumb Trail, Washer and Good Morning, Captain. (Bee Thousand? Echoes Myron, Gold Star, Peep Hole??) That riff on Washer, in particular, is so stunning. One of those records that was responsible for the rewiring of my brain chemistry when I first heard it at age 15.
One of those albums that's never not been a part of my life, such that I probably don't remind a time when I didn't know it. The earliest memory I have is watching a video of Lindsey Buckingham plucking Never Going Back Again with my dad, entranced. Watching that again now, I'm still dumbfounded at the way he makes that guitar sound. Now, I associate it most as the album I put on my record player to calm my dog down. I don't know if it actually works, but it's a good excuse to listen to it.
The most enduring song, and for good reason, is Dreams. Its chorus is wonderous, of course, fortune-cookie wisdom punctuated by that great syncopation. But its the poetry of Stevie Nicks' words leading into it, evoking Poe, that continues to pierce me: "The heartbreak drives you mad in the stillness of remembering what you had and what you lost." That's never not going to hurt!
Side A of this album is a monster, starting with five undeniable bangers. Even the B-side, which I have at times dismissed, absolutely kills. The Chain might have the era's greatest guitar solo?
I never went deep into the drama of the band, and the whole Daisy Jones & the Six thing didn't land for me. (David Mitchell's Utopia Avenue, an adjacent piece of fiction, works better, but I'm ultimately not so sure that rock star foibles are as rife for narrativization as you'd think, perhaps with the exception of Almost Famous, which works because it's told through the eyes of a dumbstruck and then disillusioned outsider.) But damned if all that didn't create one of the greatest records ever.
These Welshies have a seemingly bottomless well of hooks, making for a great power pop record with a disposition closer to Ween across the pond than to its britpop contemporaries. There are no fewer than four perfect pop songs here. Give me more time with it and that number will go up.
Like Ween, Super Furry Animals seem to be the epitome of the 'this band could be your life' band.
A surrealist freakout, lampooning every facet of American popular (counter)culture until Zappa decides to flip the switch into a not-so-desultory philippic about the Watts riots. Watch the rats across the floor. But what makes the record buzz as well as it does is that you feel a real kinship to the heart-stricken, sad sack caricatures Zappa creates. How could your heart not ache alongside the loser in You Didn't Try To Call Me? There's a universality in Getting Over It. Strangely, the album's modern reference point might be 69 Love Songs, earnestness breaking through something disguised as an intellectual exercise.
The tightrope act falls apart with the D-Side sound collages, avant garde experiments that, I don't know, get the spirit but lose the feeling? I'm sure the Suzy Creamcheese bit was enlightening for John, Paul and the gang after a few tabs of LSD, or an especially good meditation session with the Maharishi. A little harder to connect on a Monday afternoon at my office job with only acetaminophen and caffeine currently working their magic.
Whereas I view the Beatles as three-and-a-half savants practising alchemy, I've always thought the supernaturalism of The Beach Boys came more in the form of possession, or perhaps a deal to the devil made by Brian Wilson as he sat on the floor of his room listening to Revolver for the first time. His reward was 12 months and two albums (one of which wouldn't see the light of day in an office capacity for 44 years) of absolute creative dynamism. This record, unfortunately, predates the selling of his soul.
This record is, at its best, a sandpit for Phil Spector, whose same wall of sound that so flattened The Beatles on Let it Be makes Wilson et al soar here, particularly on the stunning opener Do You Wanna Dance?, which is a Be My Baby-tier piece of Brill Building architecture. Unfortunately, that daring production can't overcome the teenybop qualities of this record, even when a great riff (Don't Hurt My Little Sister) or an immaculate harmony (She Knows Me So Well) try to provide some much-needed scaffolding.
I think you've got to respect the inclusion of Bull Session With "Big Daddy" to cap it off. Its 2:13 runtime brings this album to a respectable, saleable 28:55.
Before I turned 13 and discovered Guided by Voices and Built to Spill and Yo La Tengo, I would have called this my favourite album, my tastes informed (and my social coolness hindered) by my blind fidelity to my father's pop culture persuasion. The Beatles were the focal point of that influence. There are worse things you can instill in your kid.
At 28, I spend less time with Abbey Road and the Fab Four's other greats, but it feels no less monumental to hear. I listened to Side A at work this afternoon, struck by the way Paul wails through the John-ish Oh Darling! (which also has a fair bit of Zappa pastiche in it), by the imposing nature of She's So Heavy, by the yearning in both Harrison's voice and guitar in Something, and the pang of desire and grief that charges its middle-eight, the best of the Beatles' discography. Then, on the train, I put on Side B, and felt like I heard anew the lushness of Here Comes the Sun and the magic of the Moog synth that comes into it late. And that melody, Christ. The way Paul absolutely belts through Golden Slumbers, the orchestral reprise of the You Never Give Me Your Money hook. That back-to-back-to-back run of Mean Mr. Mustard-Polythene Pam-Bathroom Window... no wonder I fell so hard for GBV.
Not my favourite Beatles record, and, come on, can you -really- say that an album with Maxwell's Silver Hammer on it is perfect, but what else could this be but a five-star masterpiece?
Rewatched the film in addition to my listens. It's great, and the Air soundtrack is a big part of that. (Collaboration is a certain artistry in itself, of course, but the centrality of the music to a degree diminishes Coppola's achievement, in my mind. Like, the Ce Matin-là montage of Lux Lisbon makes you fall in love with her too, but are you really just in love with the song, in love with that French horn? Maybe that's unfair.) Suicide Underground is awesome — almost feels like watching the movie. The motif in Playground Love is so great, and the Phoenix collab really works.
”She was the still point of the turning world, man.”
"The Beatles when they were shite," the top review on this site writes, immediately outing themselves as a ghoul without a soul. Is a song like All I've Got To Do melodramatic and juvenile... yes? Is it two minutes of pure soul, 22-year-old Lennon belting like he's Smokey Robinson? Hell yes!!!
This is obviously still studio-driven early-era Beatles, but it's not like they couldn't pump out bangers. All My Loving is worth the price of admission on its own. The covers - The Music Man into the Marvelettes into Chuck Berry (!!!) is a generational run - are incredible, and were a real portal for me. Tell Tchaikovsky the news.
I could never -objectively- look at a record like this. I can practically see the cartoons in my head when I hear Hold Me Tight. This is a borderline masterpiece. It presages the singular creative output to come.
Light on bangers! Live Forever, Rock 'n' Roll Star, Slide Away are true greats. Runs long. I still would have seen Oasis in a heartbeat, if I were in Cardiff.
I'm unqualified to evaluate this record, which I found at times pleasant and at others discordant.
Fantastic record! Electric energy. Tucker and Brownstein have such an ear for melody. Guitars that one may call angular. A song like Little Babies - not a particular high point on the album - is such a step above their riot grrl peers. Title track is my fav. Jenny is an uninspiring closer, but I like it in contrast to Big Thief's similarly named song.
Fun, highly competent, very unserious punk. The stuff that doesn't work doesn't last very long, but neither does the stuff that does work. More of a 3.5!
Good record! I had an unfair aversion to Iron Maiden before listening to this. A tightly performed and very fun album. Self-titled tracks are a flex.
This is the first record I've drawn that can rival The xx's I See You in its inessential nature. I had not heard of this band, and was unsurprised to learn they are from Leeds. The is Alt-J, except Hookworms can't coast off two good hooks. (I had to laugh, upon looking up Alt-J, that I found they are also from Leeds!) Even the Hookworms name annoys me. Are you doing a Beatles play? Are you suggesting (wrongly) that your hooks are earworms? They all credit themselves only by their initials, lmao. And they're cancelled!! What a bizarre inclusion!
Has never stood out as an S-tier Bowie record to me, but it's clearly fantastic, and I might be underrating it with my four stars here. Title track might be a career high, but Wild Is the Wind comes close as well. "It's not the side effects the cocaine/I'm thinking that it must be love." If anything, Golden Years may be my least favourite cut here, which is remarkable. Bowie's best album cover?
More my wavelength than Husker Du. Incredible guitar tones throughout this, but I love the whir in the verse of A Good Time especially. Fantastic power pop record. Candy floss.
Pleasant enough, but not dynamic enough musically to compensate for not having any lyrical value for me, a dumb anglophone. (The flip side of that is that I was able to study while listening to this, which I can't do when listening to anything in English.)
Profoundly uncool music, made by and for those for whom Pink Floyd is too conventional. It is nonetheless pretty good, particularly in its bookending epics. I am stunned to learn that Red House Painters' Long-Distance Runaround is actually a Yes cover.
