The kind of thing you'd probably like if you like that kind of thing.

Prog nonsense.

Technically, impressive and worth listening to, but at least on first listening I was not actually moved.

Well that was a lot of fun.

I don't understand what they mean, and I could really give a f*ck.

I will be singing Take On Me until the day I day. But I didn't need the album.

The kind of thing you'd probably like if you like that kind of thing.

I don't know if it's possible for me to "listen" to this again. I mean, I can play it, but (like Murmur or Rumours) it's already so loud in my head.

There was a time I would have tried to love this. But there's too much sawing and just not enough joy or enough anarchy.

Come on. The only way it could be better is if it were tusk.

Some really evocative moments - esp. 8:05 - but the whole time I kept thinking I was listening to a really adept pastiche/re-creation of that moment. A totally unfair perspective, I realize. I bet their shows were fantastic.

All the middle-school feels.

Love the horns, and the technical level is high throughout. But this kind of funk-rock has never really moved me, even if Spotify claims it is the lineal descendant of the ska that I once did love.

What's not to love about her voice? But I feel about this just as I feel about an album of jazz covers by Rickie Lee Jones - very nice, but not what I'm here for.

No thank you.

My son tried to get me into this a while ago, and I had the same reaction this time. It's fine.

Some of the classics of my youth that have popped up here - Rumours, Murmur - have instantly evoked nostalgia, amusement, or wistfulness. This one still gets me in a place that feels present, live, and meaningful. From the first chord on the album, I am engaged.

Not for me.

I had never listened to Chicago before in the context of an album - and the it's a good deal weirder and more interesting than I expected.

Hard to believe I once loved this kind of thing, though never this exact thing.

This album is a freight train. Heavy, not always so pretty (especially compared to the half-dozen records that preceded it), but jesus once it gets going I really remember why I loved it so much. I'm sitting here bopping to TVC15 like it's 1982.

This has been my favorite Beatles record for a long time. This time through did not change that.

5 stars? No stars? I don't know. Ask me to rate "Dayenu." My parents played this in the living room. My siblings and I listened to it a thousand times before we were teenagers. This has been burned so deeply in my brain that it falls into another category entirely.

I can't say I loved it, but as it played in the background I found myself responding to it with small smiles.

Nicholson Baker somewhere describes listening to a late-70s jam fade out at the end of an album track and thinking that the producer wanted you to have the sense that they were just going to keep playing all night. This is like that.

Renee's review nails it.

I think if I had discovered this during one of the late-adolescent periods when I was listening to After Bathing at Baxter's, I would have thought I had found the grail. Now it just doesn't have enough structure to keep my attention for very long, though I really liked some passages (and later tracks that Spotify pulled up after the album was done).

This one and Station to Station (which I think came up last month) were part of the second tier of Bowie for me - not the superheavy rotation of Ziggy, Diamond Dogs, Young Americans, Hunky Dory, Heroes, but just below that. Trying to listen with fresh ears, what I mostly hear is the machine-like insistence of Bowie's band, repeating almost loops, and here Eno's pop weirdness (some of which I also really loved during the same era - there's a lot of stuff that sounds like "Before and After Science" in the background here). It's great.

This is just one banger after another. Even the ones that don't grab me immediately remind me of what I love about Burt Bachrach. (Update: it turns out that this is because they were actually written by Burt Bachrach.)

I have come back to this a dozen times since 1985, trying to like it. Still no luck.

As background music goes, so much more satisfying than the Eno.

Love this so much, forty years later. So much weirdness, so much pop. Such great guitars.

There are moments when the record threatens to take off. But then it just sits down.

Help!

This Isn't Spinal Tap. Nor is it Otis Redding. There are some great moments, but I'm instantly hungry again.

There's a lot of Joni I love, and a lot of Joni I don't, and this is closer to the don't.

I'm never listening to this again.

To explain my response to this record I'd first need to summarize Andrew Hickey's 3+ hour podcast on the place of the Dead (in his "History of Rock Music in 500 songs"). And after that I'd be too tired to listen to "Friend of the Devil."

I thought I would enjoy the nostalgia much more than I did.

What was that? It made literally no impression on me beyond mild irritation.

Still so good.

Wanted to have a more critical reaction, but this still sounds amazing.

It's fine. It's not Big Pink, which is great.

This made no impression on me in 1987 and has exactly the same effect today. I'm sure I'm missing something important, but I suspect it's all affective context.

Wow, I just cannot get past minute 10.

This is so much my kind of thing that I am surprised I don't know it. This record led me to the second, Mighty Joe Moon, which I might like even better.

Definitely in my top 50 albums of all time, on the strength of the two incredible covers.

On paper should really like this.

I think this is still my favorite of hers. Somehow both a perfect time capsule (Thom Yorke!) and really moving.

I like the British invasion stuff a lot better after they start writing their own stuff.

I've listened to this a dozen times over the years - it never makes a huge impression on me, but it's always delightful in the moment.

There was some great work here, but also a fair bit of the not-so-focused noodling (especially lyrical) that has kept me from being a solid fan.

The top end of this is as good as anything in his catalogue. Like, "Trouble Man" good. But I forgot how much preachy meandering he stuffs in between the beauty.

I liked the first track all right but it got me singing the Roches’ “Married Men,” which has the same chord changes. otherwise unmoved..

Surprised how vibrant and tight this feels.

There are great moments but it washes over me exactly the way it did in the 80s.

I actually love some of their albums from earlier in the decade, but I never liked this one.

They do one thing very well but a whole album of it is too much.

Not my favorite Curtis album but still so great.

Some really wonderful stuff, and some of the stuff that kept me from loving him during a lot of that decade. I prefer rain, dogs, but I love some of this too.

I guess I forgot how fresh this sounded when it came out. I mean, what sounded like this? Kate Bush? It’s too much. I don’t like a lot of it. But that first track -what a way to introduce yourself to the world.

Not great but fascinating: a band I never literally listened to, flipped past a million times in the bins, and now can put in late-70s-ish context. Reminds me of the acts I did listen to that were fusing noise and melody - Mission of Burma, for one, though I don't like this nearly as much. Can't say I will listen to it again, but there were moments when I shifted it out of the background to find out what I was listening to (like the "chorus" in Caligari's Mirror). Kind of wild to listen to it right after the Velvets, who, at their least formal, seem like a direct ancestor.

How does a record that starts with such a (yes, cringey) banger go off the rails so hard?

Not my absolute favorite from the stunning run of albums in the 70s - that’s maybe Talking Book - but I love this.

I found this surprisingly listenable. But I will probably never do it again.

I may never have listened to this all the way through before. I like it. Clearly lanuched a thousand ships.

A couple of great singles. It’s hard to actually hear it as an album but that may be an accident of which U2 records I paid attention to back then.

I don't think I'd ever considered a Janet Jackson album before. A lot of sameness, relentless, but also infectious.

Goddam that's good. I listened to LR a little bit after listening to the first 30-40 episodes of "A history of rock music in 500 songs" but I don't think I appreciated just how good this is, or how revolutionary it must have seemed in the late 50s. I keep thinking about John Prine's lyric, "At the beach in Indiana, I was nine years old… I heard Little Richard singing tutti-frutti from the top of a telephone pole." Imagine being that kid.

I was surprised how much I liked some of this. Definitely a period piece but when it all comes together (especially when the lead vocals are on the money) it's pretty great.

Technically adept, and must have sounded great in 1992. But now as then I find the performance of hypermasculinity boring and depressing.