My 1001 Albums Journey

Album	You	Global	Diff
The Modern Dance Pere Ubu	5	2.48	+2.52
Kilimanjaro The Teardrop Explodes	5	2.86	+2.14
Music Has The Right To Children Boards of Canada	5	2.91	+2.09
The Nightfly Donald Fagen	5	3.02	+1.98
Kimono My House Sparks	5	3.06	+1.94
Before And After Science Brian Eno	5	3.08	+1.92
Another Green World Brian Eno	5	3.12	+1.88
Trans Europe Express Kraftwerk	5	3.15	+1.85
Countdown To Ecstasy Steely Dan	5	3.28	+1.72
B-52's The B-52's	5	3.29	+1.71

Album	You	Global	Diff
Disintegration The Cure	1	3.86	-2.86
Siamese Dream The Smashing Pumpkins	1	3.82	-2.82
American Idiot Green Day	1	3.77	-2.77
Hot Fuss The Killers	1	3.73	-2.73
Pearl Janis Joplin	1	3.72	-2.72
Californication Red Hot Chili Peppers	1	3.69	-2.69
21 Adele	1	3.69	-2.69
Superunknown Soundgarden	1	3.65	-2.65
Queen II Queen	1	3.49	-2.49
Songs Of Leonard Cohen Leonard Cohen	1	3.38	-2.38

Artist	Albums	Average
Brian Eno	2	5

Artist	Albums	Average
Leonard Cohen	3	1
Sonic Youth	3	1.33
Kings of Leon	2	1
Common	2	1.5
John Martyn	2	1.5

Fugazi

2/5

Band can whip up a storm of energy, but each of the tracks feels less like a song than a series of disconnected riffs glued together. Doesn't help that the singing is monotonal and colorless either.

Infected

The The

2/5

The opening song "Infected" stomps but that's the only real standout track. Johnson's affected singing quickly wears thin across the span of the album. The overly-long and overstuffed songs wear out their welcome after a while.

Caetano Veloso

3/5

This is an interesting and diverse record with some beautiful harmonies throughout, though I wouldn't say that I found it to be compelling overall.

Stephen Stills

2/5

Right off the bat, Mr. Stills gets automatically docked a point for the gross sentiments of "Love the One You're With". ;-) He's certainly a competent songwriter and performer, but most of the tracks on this album don't rise above the ordinary (except for "Do for the Others" and "To a Flame" which show he's at his best when he dials down the rock 'n' faux-gospel bluster).

Want Two

Rufus Wainwright

3/5

Wainwright seems to be aiming for something grandiose on this album, but a lot of the songs are overcooked and have too many sections or parts, and the net effect is that they meander rather than getting to the point; some judicious editing could have helped tighten them up. The arrangements on this album also pile on instrument after instrument but paradoxically they make the songs more generic-sounding. At its worst, the overly-busy instrumentation is practically in competition with Wainwright's voice. (I'm looking at you, "Little Sister".) However, the two standout tracks on the album, "The Art Teacher" and "Waiting for a Dream", avoid both of those mistakes - the songwriting on these is uncomplicated and direct, and the restrained arrangements give Wainwright's vocals room to breathe.

Armed Forces

Elvis Costello & The Attractions

4/5

Brilliantly played and produced, *Armed Forces* is loud, direct, punchy and weird - it's everything a good rock and roll record should be. Many of the tracks are stellar and rank as the best of Costello's career. His wordplay and pointed observations are even sharper than ever on *AF* and his innovative arrangements (such as on "Green Shirt") expand on his sound in interesting ways. Not *every* track is a complete success, though. "Big Boys" is stuffed with too many songwriting tricks and struggles under its own weight. "Party Girl" has one too many sections; it's one draft away from brilliance. "Busy Bodies" and "Mood for Moderns" come across as generic new wave and don't stand up to the rest. "Sunday's Best" is a waltz-time outlier that would have been better as b-side material. None of these tracks are duds, but the fact that they fall short of the genius of "Accidents Will Happen" or "Oliver's Army" keeps this album from being a complete masterpiece.

Meat Puppets II

Meat Puppets

2/5

The vocals are wavering and out of tune at times. It doesn't help that the bare-bones production often highlights the flaws and occasionally sloppy playing. The country-inflected numbers stick to predictable chords and are largely forgettable. On such a short album, the numerous instrumentals (such as "Aurora Borealis") seem like lost opportunities. The frenetic singing on faster-paced tracks like "Split Myself in Two" and "New Gods" unfortunately reduce the vocal melody to a blur. However, the perfectly-paced "Plateau" pulls everything together and is the highlight of the album; the fleshed-out arrangement really does the song justice.

The United States Of America

2/5

Album cover says it all, looks more like five scientists conducting an experiment than a rock 'n' roll band. Almost every song is a car crash of genres, mashed together to...parody them? Is this a critique of American traditional music? Of sunshine pop? Of musicals? Of psychedelia? Just as soon as the band settles into a groove, it often gets sidetracked by some weirdo digression into discordant noise, such as on the first two-thirds of "Cloud Song" (which surprisingly has a lovely outro). I mean, do they even *like* the music that they are playing? The whole album is about as pleasant as twisting the radio dial for 37 minutes straight. Had the band dialed down the nuttiness (like they do on the relatively straightforward "Love Song for the Dead Ché") the album might have been a more musically appealing vehicle for their anti-establishment sentiments. These people are obviously accomplished musicians, just imagine what they could have accomplished if they had chosen to use their talents for good instead of evil.

Talking Book

Stevie Wonder

3/5

A marvel of multitracking, this album is more admirable than awesome. It must take an amazing amount of forethought to be able construct a completed song with yourself on nearly every instrument. Wonder also pushes the boundaries of pop and R&B music by using (what were at the time) cutting-edge synthesizers in place of conventional instruments, charting a course that would be followed by successors such as Prince and The Gap Band. "Superstition" stomps, obviously. The tight songwriting of "You Are the Sunshine" keeps it from being too lightweight. "I Believe (When I Fall in Love It Will Be Forever" is a minor classic. "Tuesday Heartbreak" is solid but not stellar. "Big Brother" gets a big lift from its interesting arrangement. Some of these songs are loosely structured (e.g. "You Got It Bad Girl") or overly complex (e.g. "Blame It On The Sun") which blunts their impact. "Maybe Your Baby" is a long mostly two-chord jam that sounds like it was more fun to make than to listen to. "You and I (We Can Conquer the World)" honestly would have been better as a straight piano ballad without the sci-fi synthesizer embellishments.

You Want It Darker

Leonard Cohen

1/5

Sounds more like an audiobook with low-key musical accompliment. What melodies there are vary little from track to track. Chord choices are pretty mundane, not a surprising moment to be found. (And yes, I know the backstory of this album but it still doesn't excuse what's in the grooves.)

Brown Sugar

D'Angelo

1/5

Featuring nonstop vocalizing over repetitive jams, this album wore out its welcome *fast*. There's so much going on in the vocals that there's no real focus to the songs. On top of that, the verses and choruses (within the same song) often share the same chord progressions, which robs these songs of any sense of forward motion and causes these already-long songs to drag on even longer. D'Angelo pulls off the one-man band stunt well, and the production and execution are well done, but ultimately this album seems like a stylistic exercise, an attempt to make something that *sounds* great. Too bad the same amount of effort wasn't put into fleshing out the songs.

Beauty And The Beat

The Go-Go's

2/5

This lightweight album is not rough enough to be punk and not weird enough to be avant-garde, but instead takes an overly-safe middle path. Aside from "Our Lips Are Sealed" (better done by Fun Boy Three), there's not much to get excited about here.

90

808 State

3/5

This EDM album is muscular and sophisticated at the same time. Immaculately produced, it *sounds* like a million bucks. Containing a number of top-notch tracks (such as "Cobra Bora" and the titanic "Pacific 202"), perhaps its greatest flaw is not being able to sustain that level of quality across the entire record. *90* opens with a couple of forgettable tracks but then ups the game with the propulsive "Cobra Bora", followed by the centerpiece of the album, the "Pacific 202" version of the group's hit "Pacific State" - a magnificent track that is both energetic and serene at the same time. Following that, "Donkey Doctor" is solid but displays its Kraftwerk influence a little too plainly. Penultimate track "Sunrise" heads into chillout territory and would have made for a fine album closer (though oddly that slot is given over the bizarro "The Fat Shadow - Pointy Head Mix", a brief and incongruous slice of clattering drums and sci-fi sound effects).

There's No Place Like America Today

Curtis Mayfield

2/5

The songs on the album are ok, but nothing here remotely approaches the quality of Mayfield's best work.

E.V.O.L.

Sonic Youth

2/5

*EVOL* finds the members of Sonic Youth bangin' and clangin' away on their respective instruments in an attempt to make some sort of manicured noise, but unfortunately the end product doesn't add up to much. Lead track "Tom Violence" starts to build up a head of steam but the loses focus by heading into a ditch for its middle third. Kim Gordon's subdued vocals on "Shadow of a Doubt" aim for an air of noir-ish mystery but instead sound affected. On "Starpower" her vocals are reminiscent of Nico's work with The Velvet Underground but flatter and less tuneful. The spoken-word "In the Kingdom #19" is also reminiscent of VU but comes across like undercooked beat poetry. "Green Light" has a steady pulse for a couple of verses and then pointlessly digresses into formless guitar noise. After a thumpin' and bumpin' first half that sounds like it was recorded in a warehouse, "Secret Girl" busts out a surprisingly pretty keyboard part and another overly-dramatic Gordon vocal. Not to be outdone, Thurston Moore takes a turn over-emoting in the subsequent track "Marilyn Moore". All is not lost though, because album closer "Expressway to Yr Skull" (aka "Madonna, Sean and Me") manages to sustain a full dose of rock 'n' roll energy for the majority of the song and actually earns its long atmospheric outro. It's also the sole moment on the record where the guitar excursions complement the song rather than capsizing it.

Selling England By The Pound

Genesis

4/5

Probably the high point of Genesis' career, (nearly) every song on *SEBTP* is fully-developed, and everything within the songs, even the long instrumental parts, keep the songs constantly moving forward. The songs span a wide range of emotions and musical directions, but album holds together as a whole really well. (The only thing that keeps *SEBTP* from being a complete masterpiece is the inclusion of "More Fool Me", a lightweight track with a tentative vocal by Phil Collins.)

Back to Basics

Christina Aguilera

2/5

The appeal of the tracks on album's first half (especially on those co-produced by DJ Premier) relies solely on the well-chosen samples that provide the backbone of those songs. Aguilera's grit-free vocals, however, wail over the instrumention but leave little impact. Every song seems like it's supposed to be a demonstration of her vocal capabilities, but not every techinque needs to be applied to every syllable. Had she dialed it down from time to time, it would have been far more effective. The last three songs on the first half of the album are Aguilera's observations about her career - they *want* to be bold and powerful statements but instead come across as self-absorbed. (Too bad there isn't a way to delete the fawning voicemail messages from her admirers on "Thank You (Dedication to Fans...)".) The singing on the second half of the album is more straightforward but the songs are largely genre exercises that don't break any new ground. 2

The New Tango

Astor Piazzolla

3/5

This live album of tango-based instrumentals is expertly played and flawlessly recorded, but the results aren't consistently good. Some of the songs seem like beds for improvisation (especially on the vibraphone) but these are the least interesting tracks; the ones that are more tightly composed are the strongest and most memorable ones. Opening track "Milonga is Coming" has a movie soundtrack feel to it but is too tame to be interesting. "Vibraphonissimo" has lots 'n' lots of soloing on the vibes (no surprise) but is a little too monochromatic. "Little Italy" is pleasant but not much else. The album finally starts cooking with "Nuevo Tango", a precisely-written and crisply-played track which dials back the soloing in favor of well-defined melodies. The following track "Laura's Dream" can't keep up the momentum, however. Fortunately, "Operation Tango" is another tight composition with interesting interplay between the instruments. Closer "La Muerta del Angel" keeps the tempo moving but clutters up the arrangement with overly-busy soloing. (There is also some really weird violin playing on this record, from scratchy staccato parts to sci-fi sounds to police sirens. Bizarre and a bit distracting.)

Maxinquaye

Tricky

1/5

With music as minimal as this (lots of static one- and two-chord jams), then the melody is going to need to carry the day, but on *Maxinquaye* there's not much to be found. Vocalist Marina Topley-Bird's hook-free vocals leave very little lasting impression. Tricky himself often talk-raps in the background, lending creepy counterpoint. Unlike his idols Public Enemy, Tricky's use of samples is hardly transformative. Instead, he repeats loops in an attempt to conjure up some sense of atmosphere but it doesn't lead anywhere interesting.

Os Mutantes

1/5

Featuring all of the groovy sounds popular in the late 60's (cheesy organs, ratty overdriven guitar, sound effects, etc.), this album is as dated as they come. It just seems...musty. The production on this record is slapdash and the songs are frequently corny. The abrupt changes within the songs and the heavy guitar effects are attempts at making a cutting-edge album but instead end up being grating on the ear. There's too much weird for the sake of weirdness on this record, had they played it straight these tracks might have been more appealing.

Blue Lines

Massive Attack

3/5

*Blue Lines*, the debut album by the Bristol trip-hop group Massive Attack starts off unpromisingly with a couple of repetitive jams that go nowhere, but hits its footing with third track "Blue Lines" where Tricky rhymes over a well-constructed beat reminiscent of A Tribe Called Quest. After digressing with a well-executed cover of "Be Thankful For What You've Got" (whose robust chord progression casts the lesser songs in an unfavorable light), the album heads back into hip-hop territory with the strong but overlong "Five Man Army". The album's centerpiece, "Unfinished Sympathy", features dramatic chords, a compelling lead vocal from Shara Nelson and a complex beat, all of which gels into a sophisticated whole. "Daydreaming" is a solid track has Tricky on the mic again, with vocal embellishments by Nelson. "Lately" finds the album retreating back into a repetitive groove that never reaches escape velocity. Closing track "Hymn Of The Big Wheel" takes an unexpectedly upbeat turn but feels misplaced after the darker tone of the rest of the album. 3

Ingenue

k.d. lang

2/5

This album shows flashes of adventurousness, but for the most part plays it safe. Most of the songs (such as "Save Me", "Outside Myself" and even lead single "Constant Craving") take very few risks and come across and tame and predictable. There a few exceptions: "Season Of Hollow Soul" is a bright spot, in which lang's voice is more expressive than on the other tracks and the songwriting is more dramatic. "Miss Chatelaine" and "So It Shall Be" are also a cut above the rest. On the whole, lang's voice is *technically* good, but her style takes a cautious middle path - it lacks any kind of much-needed grit on one hand, and on the other hand it is so stylistically limited that it sounds generic at times. (At least she sings the songs straight and doesn't overdo it.) The arrangements on this album are tasteful but rarely get interesting. It's well-played by talented musicians but along the way there are the occasional sparks that demonstrate that it could have been so much more.

Songs For Swingin' Lovers!

Frank Sinatra

2/5

Nelson Riddle's arrangements on this album are utterly hyperactive, with horns and strings cartoonishly jumping out in every direction, *seemingly* trying their hardest to steal the spotlight from Ol' Blue Eyes. Two things prevent this: one, Sinatra's voice is squarely up front in the mix, and two, he sings with absolute confidence and control. Lesser voices might have been overwhelmed by the barrage of instruments, but Sinatra is completely in charge. Even though most of the songs on this album are from the 30's and 40's, Sinatra's delivery is thoroughly timeless. What detracts from the whole enterprise though, is the ridiculous, gimmicky (and horribly dated) big band accompaniment which renders this album both tedious and exhausting to listen to.

Bone Machine

Tom Waits

3/5

On this album, Waits uses a range of different and distinct vocal styles, sometimes pushing his voice into unbelievably raspy territory. And yet it all works as a whole, as he deftly matches his vocal style to the content of each song (such as his bluesy wail on "Jesus Gonna Be Here" and his more straightforward delivery on the ballad "A Little Rain"). In addition, even at his most stylized, Waits singing stays solidly melodic, which keeps the songs grounded. The adventurousness in this album doesn't reside in the songwriting (which is uniformly good but not earthshattering) but rather in the wild instrumentation, in which Waits and his fellow musicians hold up a funhouse mirror to traditional American musical forms.

When I Was Born For The 7th Time

Cornershop

2/5

If a band's music consists of ultra-basic chord progressions and singsong melodies over simplistic, repetitive beats, they better have some secret sauce to compensate for that, but Cornershop doesn't deliver the goods. The album aims for a loose feel but comes across as unstructured, a hodgepodge of vocal and instrumental numbers with no rhyme or reason. There are a few decent tracks. "We're in Yr Corner" has muscle but overstays its welcome by a third. "It's Indian Tobacco My Friend" conjures up an eerie atmosphere with its vocal and strings samples over a beat laden with dub effects.

Pearl

Janis Joplin

1/5

A pale mimicry of established blues and soul forms, this regressive and backwards-looking record has little new to offer, especially in the context of the revolutionary transformations that were happening to soul and R&B at the start of the 1970's.

Fleet Foxes

5/5

An absolutely transcendent record, the beauty of this album is that it takes folk as its basis, but transforms and modernizes the sound of it without being glossy or overly polished. A gifted melodicist, lead singer and songwriter Robin Pecknold sings in a direct and clear voice without being flashly. Lyrically, the stories he tells through the songs on this album are vivid and relatable.

Bringing It All Back Home

Bob Dylan

3/5

No wonder people got mad when Dylan "went electric". The first half of this album (the so-called "electric side") is bookended by the great "Subterranean Homesick Blues" and the energetic-but-bizarro "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream", but in between those two songs it's a hard slog. Dylan mostly sticks to repetitive blues structures, and his backing band plays in a ramshackle, rudimentary style that frankly borders on amateurish. Arrangements are nowhere to be found, it's just everybody-playing-all-at-once-all-the-time, reducing everything to featureless mismash. The "acoustic side" (featuring Dylan mostly alone on guitar and harmonica) fares much better. Here he branches out beyond basic blues chords, which gives each song its distinctive stamp. "Gates of Eden" has moments of tension and release, which give the song a dramatic character. "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" has a sophisticated decending chord progression at its heart and features some of Dylan's most potent lyrics. An unnecessary bass part intrudes in "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" but it's not enough to derail a song that serves as a fine album closer.

Legalize It

Peter Tosh

3/5

Perhaps the most outstanding thing on this reggae album is how the complex, intricate arrangements and the sharp, expert playing combine into a propulsive sound with a lot of character. Tosh is a confident, expressive singer, and this record contains some terrific songs ("No Sympathy", "Why Must I Try" and "Till Your Well Runs Dry"). On the downside, many of the other songs rely too much on repetitive structures, consigning them to the "also ran" category: for example, tracks like "Burial" and "Brand New Second Hand" are content to amble across a single loop of chords for their entire duration, dulling their impact. "Igziabeher (Let Jah Be Praised" and title track "Legalize It" reduce things down ever further, resulting in simplistic two-chord jams (with the former almost redeemed by an dramatic piano part and the latter containing dubious health claims about a certain controlled substance 😀).

BEYONCÉ

Beyoncé

1/5

R&D team-created corporate product masquerading as personal statement.

Bug

Dinosaur Jr.

1/5

Dinosaur Jr.'s third album has everything: distorted guitar chords strung together with no real direction, flat vocals, lackadaisical melodies, barely understandable lyrics, nothing resembling an actual riff or a hook... Frontman J Mascis is in the producer's chair for this album but somehow manages to oversee an absolutely *terrible* mix in which the submerged vocals sound completely disconnected from the instruments. (This album *might* would have benefitted from an outside producer who *possibly* could have been able to sort out this record and deliver a decent mix but we'll never know.)

Like Water For Chocolate

Common

2/5

The beats are competent. The production is solid but isn't anything exceptional. Common's flow isn't particularly distinctive and his lyrics aren't memorable.

Trans Europe Express

Kraftwerk

5/5

An amazing marriage of (subdued) pop melodies and sequenced electronic sounds and rhythms, this groundbreaking record sounds as fresh as it did as it was originally released.

From Elvis In Memphis

Elvis Presley

2/5

Elvis' vocal prowess is in full force on this record but, aside from a few exceptional songs ("Gentle on My Mind", "Any Day Now", "In The Ghetto"), his titanic voice overmatches the largely run-of-the-mill material. Perhaps in an attempt to keep up with The King's vocals, the production on this record is often over the top (such as on "I'm Movin' On" and "Long Black Limousine", the latter of which has multiple (!) ascending key changes), with the results being more Vegas than Memphis.

I Should Coco

Supergrass

2/5

This album isn't groundbreaking in any way - it's fairly easy to draw direct lines from this record back to The Kinks and The Jam, two obvious forebears. In addition, the singer's voice isn't particularly distinctive and the arrangements don't vary much from song to song, so sonically nothing really stands out. There are a few decent songs scattered throughout ("Caught By The Fuzz", "Strange Ones", "Time") but overall the record suffers from being too much of being an imitation of other, better bands.

Rings Around The World

Super Furry Animals

2/5

Proof positive that the shadow of the Beatles looms large over British rock music, the first half of this album takes its cues not only from late-period Beatles albums but also from post-Beatles progeny like ELO, without building on either of them in any significant way, though. As the record progresses, it trades the Beatles influence for other touchstones from pop and rock history. "No Sympathy" steers towards Blind Faith territory (albeit with a bizarro electronic coda). "Juxtaposed with U" is a string-heavy number that swipes its lush arrangement from Philly soul. This is obviously an ambitious record, but to pull off an enterprise like this, you need more ideas than to just stripmine British rock from the past few decades. If singer Gruff Rhys at least had an interesting voice, it might have provided a solid center to these songs, but absent that, the record comes off as hollow.

Chemtrails Over The Country Club

Lana Del Rey

2/5

Del Rey is in fine vocal form on the album but co-producer Jack Antonoff torpedoes the proceedings here. He does his best to approximate the sound of previous LDR records but his songwriting contribtions fall grossly short of the mark. Nothing on this record approaches the sense of mystery or weirdness found on *Born to Die* or *Ultraviolence*.

Bummed

Happy Mondays

3/5

First off, the production on this album is fantastic. The bass-heavy mix (with trebly guitars riding over top) is peculiar, but it works. The playing is also top notch, especially that of drummer Gary Whelan who holds everything tightly together. Vocalist Shaun Ryder talks, raps and chants over the pounding, repetitive (but hypnotic) music, with only the barest melodies showing up here and there, making him the somewhat far-removed cousin of The Fall's Mark E. Smith. Like Smith, Ryder has an anti-charisma that makes him compelling to listen to. This is an upbeat, weird and occasionally obnoxious album by a band with an idiosyncratic vision. It's certainly not a major masterpiece, but it does qualify as being a minor classic.

(What's The Story) Morning Glory

Oasis

2/5

Some of the songs on this album are decent ("Wonderwall", "Don't Look Back In Anger", "Champagne Supernova") but nearly everything on this record is performed in hamfisted, overblown way that it becomes exhausting across the 50 minute running time. The graceless, dynamics-free mix also pushes the guitars *way* up to the front on many of the tracks, to the detriment of the other instruments.

Manassas

Stephen Stills

2/5

Utterly inessential (which is made even worse by its 71-minute running time). On side 1, Stephen Stills sings the blues over competently-played but unimaginative songs. Side 2's tracks are country and bluegress genre exercises (in which Stills' voice somehow mysteriously acquires a twang). Side 3 ventures into laid-back rock territory with no discernable direction ("Move Around" does have some groovy synthesizer sounds though). Stills toughens his voice up once again for the mostly forgettable blues-inflected rock songs on side 4, though the band does manage to whip up some actual rock and roll energy on the latter half of "The Treasure (Take One)".

Amnesiac

Radiohead

3/5

*Amnesiac* is the sound of Radiohead trying hard to not repeat itself in the wake of *OK Computer*. This album turns the band's sound inside-out, empasizing what used to lurk in the background and eschewing many of the elements that made up their mid-to-late 90's sound. The aim of this album seems to be to use the most minimal amount of instrumention as possible and yet be able to convey some sort of emotion or feeling. The vocal melodies are less conventional also, almost as though singer Thom Yorke is using his voice for texture rather than serving as the focal point of the songs. The results, however, are often more admirable than enjoyable. The album as a whole conjures up an atmosphere of mental dislocation, but because the individual *songs* are so skeletal, not many of them have a strong emotional impact when taken on their own. Only the more fleshed-out songs (such as "Pyramid Song", "You And Whose Army?" and "Knives Out") come close to having some distinct emotional punch.

First Band On The Moon

The Cardigans

2/5

Grating, chirpy indie pop with totally unnecessary strings 'n' flutes layered on top. A mostly predictable retread of British indie rock and pop from the 80's, there are very few surprising or innovative moments on this album (unless you consider randomly aping Black Sabbath riffs groundbreaking). In addition, the poor mix reduces vocalist Nina Persson's voice to thin whisper most of the time. In the midst of all this, there a couple of standout tracks. "Step On Me" actually has some muscle and a decent chorus. "Losers" has a solid melody and a dramatic arrangement that thankfully ditches the twee sound that plagues the rest of this record. 2/5

Bubble And Scrape

Sebadoh

3/5

The three members of Sebadoh split songwriting and singing duties on this album, leading to wildly uneven results. The Lou Barlow-penned and sung tracks are top-notch. His vocals are heartfelt and the songwriting is thoughtful and nuanced. The production on these songs also really makes them shine. The contributions of the other two band members aren't up to the same level of quality, though. The Eric Gaffney songs are wacky sub-Devo semi-hardcore numbers that sit incongruously next to Barlow's more sophisticated songs. The Jason Lowenstein tracks suffer from Lowenstein's undistinguished vocals.

Getz/Gilberto

Stan Getz

3/5

This album of Brazilian music might have been eye-opening to an international audience in 1964, but because the sound of bossa nova has been absorbed into not only American culture but also other cultures (such as with Japan's Shibuya-kei sound), its capacity to surprise and intrigue is somewhat diminished. The musicianship on this record is solid but everything on this album is played in such a low-key way that on the whole it's more pleasant than truly engaging. (The mix also drains away a potential source of energy by shoving the drummer all the way over to one side and turning his parts way down.) The moments where Getz' saxophone takes center stage are the high points because they inject some much-needed excitement into the songs.

The Age Of The Understatement

The Last Shadow Puppets

2/5

This album is competently played and well-produced, but basically consists of 60s soundtrack clichés layered on top of run-of-the-mill songs.

Rapture

Anita Baker

1/5

Anita Baker has the pipes and all, but the music on this album is a toothless, gutless version of R&B that's unlistenable.

Stand!

Sly & The Family Stone

3/5

On the plus side, this is a progressive, visionary and forward-thinking record. The vocal and instrumental arrangements are innovative and interesting. Standout tracks include "I Want To Take You Higher", "Everyday People" and the album's title track. On the minus side, there's *way* too much repetitive jamming, the worst offender being "Sex Machine", a 13-minute track that takes up an entire third of the record and left me wondering how to pull the plug.

The Only Ones

2/5

Certainly not a terrible record, but often invokes the ghosts of other, better albums. The vocalist in particular sounds like he's aping Tom Verlaine on some songs and Howard Devoto on others. The tracks have lots o' rock & roll swagger but aren't particularly groundbreaking.

Heaven Or Las Vegas

Cocteau Twins

5/5

This album finds Cocteau Twins at the height of their powers. The band's sound (which is practically in a genre of its own) reaches full flower on these glorious and mesmerizing tracks.

The Idiot

Iggy Pop

3/5

The music on this record is often stripped down and minimal, and to the degree that this album succeeds, it does so largely on the strength of Iggy Pop's personality. "Dum Dum Boys" is the high point of this album, a track in which Pop looks back on his days with The Stooges.

Casanova

The Divine Comedy

4/5

These are well-crafted and interesting songs. The production is very good, though sometimes the overly fussy arrangements are off-putting. Vocalist (and songwriter) Neil Hannon is singing in character on this album, which mostly works but is a little too mannered on some of the tracks.

Surf's Up

The Beach Boys

3/5

A "too many cooks" record, the 10 songs here pull in a number of different directions, leaving the album with no cohesive center. There are a couple of terrific Brian Wilson co-written tracks ("'Til I Die" and "Surf's Up") and pair of Carl Wilson co-written tracks ("Long Promised Road" and "Feel Flows") that represent a step forward for the Beach Boys sound. On the other hand, it also contains a number of clumsy attempts at social commentary (including the bizarre 50s-ish throwback "Student Demonstration Time") and some corny tracks that should have stayed in the vault ("Take A Load Off Your Feet", "A Day In The Life Of A Tree"). The band deserves credit for trying to move forward but this album contains just a few too many missteps.

Chore of Enchantment

Giant Sand

1/5

Dull, pretentious talk-singing over uninspired musical backing. The dry production on the vocal makes it all the more insufferable.

Metal Box

Public Image Ltd.

4/5

On *Metal Box*, Public Image Ltd. retain the anger and anarchic spirit of punk but pursue an entirely different direction musically, a fusion of dub-inflected basslines, Krautrock-influenced instrumentation and John Lydon's unique approach to vocals. A solid rhythm section holds down the bottom end, leaving space for Keith Levene's guitar and synthesizer experimentation. While most of the tracks are exceptional, not all of them are entirely compelling, and the instrumentals (with the exception of "Radio 4") aren't terribly essential. On the whole though, this is an audacious album that shows the strength of the band's vision.

The Dark Side Of The Moon

Pink Floyd

4/5

Deserves points for managing to be a compelling album despite having a number of tracks that aren't conventionally-structured songs. On the other hand, at least two tracks are outliers that don't fit in as well as the rest: "The Great Gig In The Sky" and "Money", the latter of which breaks from the other songs thematically and musically sounds like it wandered in from another album.

Superfuzz Bigmuff

Mudhoney

1/5

Congratulations boys, you've managed to take the worst aspects of both punk and hard rock and distill it all down into a singularly unpalatable brew. Good job!

The Slider

T. Rex

2/5

Sounds like something you'd listen to in order to tide yourself over until the next Bowie album comes out.

The Next Day

David Bowie

3/5

Energetic rock reminiscent of the singer's late 70's / early 80's work. Bowie sounds forceful and committed on these tracks and the playing is top-notch. Many of the songs are short on melodic and instrumental hooks though, leaving them somewhat less than memorable.

Skylarking

XTC

4/5

This is a beautifully-done record with oodles of melodic invention and immaculate arrangements. The songwriting on this album is uniformly very good, though a few of the tracks (like the jazzy number "The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul") are stylistic outliers that, while solid on their own, sit strangely next to the more pastoral cuts that dominate this record. However, as good as this album is, the lack of percussive punch on this record keeps it from attaining the heights of other XTC albums like *Black Sea* and *English Settlement*, both of which paired acoustic guitars and powerhouse drums to better effect. *Skylarking* is like a pleasant stroll in the garden, but lacks the thrills and intensity of the busy world outside the garden walls.

B-52's

The B-52's

5/5

When Cindy Wilson sings "Why won't you dance with me? / I'm not no Limburger" on "Dance This Mess Around", it's both hilarious and cuts right to the bone at the same time. It's emblematic of this record as whole in that underneath the fun there are darker, more tense undercurrents, both musically and lyrically. A quintessential New Wave record, this visionary debut record is tight, crisp and sharply-played, topped off with terrific, personality-filled vocal performances by all three singers.

Clandestino

Manu Chao

1/5

Boring, predictable chord progressions. A real snooze.

Music From Big Pink

The Band

2/5

The songs on this album mostly consist of rambling melodies over nondescript chords, gussied up with fake Americana. Only "In A Station" and "Chest Fever" provide any spark of surprise.

Are You Experienced

Jimi Hendrix

3/5

Some decent rock tunes here, undercut by the swampy production and a drummer who can't calm down.

Felt Mountain

Goldfrapp

3/5

This album contains a number of beautifully-written and arranged songs, but the weird mix often does a poor job of meshing Alison Goldfrapp's close-mic'd and treated voice with the orchestral instruments behind her. (And I don't know what's going on with "Deer Stop", but she sounds positively spitty on that track.) The glitchy synth effects that also appear throughout are an interesting idea that's successful only some of the time. A promising but uneven debut.

The Suburbs

Arcade Fire

4/5

Co-produced by Arcade Fire and Markus Dravs, the band concocts a big, anthematic sound on this record but also manages to sneak in some weirder sonic elements. Doesn't break a ton of new ground but the performances are convincing and the songwriting is solid.

Strange Cargo III

William Orbit

1/5

Generic electronica. Contains only the thinnest of ideas, all needlessly stretched into 5-7 minute tracks. Best thing that can be said of it that the production is pristine.

Low

David Bowie

4/5

This album is sonically groundbreaking, but the fractured songs on the first half of the record are somewhat uneven. Tracks like "Breaking Glass" and "Always Crashing In The Same Car" are stunning in their originality but others like "What In The World" are disjointed experiments don't always gel. Bowie's decision to devote the second half of the album to moody, mostly wordless instrumentals is a gamble that largely works. What's remarkable about these tracks is that they still have the imprint of Bowie's personality even though his literal voice is mostly absent.

Sweetheart Of The Rodeo

The Byrds

2/5

Though it's often called a country rock album, *Sweetheart Of The Rodeo* leans heavily towards the country side of the equation, and in doing so doesn't bring much new to the table. Only "One Hundred Years From Now" comes anywhere close to a country/rock fusion (and is the most successful track on the album).

Youth And Young Manhood

Kings of Leon

1/5

Colorless, melody-free alt rock with an insufferable lead singer.

Who Killed...... The Zutons?

The Zutons

3/5

This garage rock/roots rock-inspired record is reasonably well-played and the production is sharp. It has a couple of standout tracks ("Havana Gang Brawl" and "Nightmare Part II") and it gets a bonus point for having a saxophone and some decent vocal harmonies. In general though, it doesn't have much else to distinguish itself from the great number of albums that covered the same musical territory in the early 2000's.

Superfly

Curtis Mayfield

3/5

Some of the songs on this soundtrack album have a certain amount of dramatic intensity (such as "Freddie's Dead" and "Pusherman") but the rest of them don't have as much impact outside of the context of the movie.

La Revancha Del Tango

Gotan Project

1/5

This album tries to mix traditional tango instrumentation with modern production techniques such as dub effects and sampling but doesn't end up accomplishing much of anything.

Halcyon Digest

Deerhunter

3/5

As is the case with many of their other albums, Deerhunter creates a complete sonic world on *Halcyon Digest* with fairly simple ingredients. On their best tracks the band delivers solid pop songs in a post-punk style without lapsing into the clichés of either genre. On this particular record the songwriting is somewhat inconsistent but the high points (including the epic "Desire Lines") are stellar.

Call of the Valley

Shivkumar Sharma

3/5

The quieter passages of this album have a low-key ambience that's appealing. The fact that the music is often centered around single notes or repeating melodic structures gives the pieces an often-hypnotic sound and allows to more complex instrumental passages on top to really shine.

Damaged

Black Flag

1/5

For members of Black Flag, niceties such as vocal melodies must have seemed like concessions to The Man, so they're nowhere to be found on this album. Henry Rollins rants 'n' chants his way through these tracks while Greg Ginn aimlessly riffs on guitar. The rotten mix and overall shoddy production doesn't do the material any favors either. One of aims of punk was to reinvent rock and roll, but on *Damaged*, Black Flag's mission of discarding everything that seemingly stands in the way of "self-expression" is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Bryter Layter

Nick Drake

3/5

Nick Drake was a gifted songwriter with a distinctive voice (and terrific guitar finger-picking skils) but the songs on this record would have been much better served by pared-down arrangements rather than the overly-busy ones here. The arrangement on "Hazey Jane II" (especially with its cheesy horns) is directly at odds with Drake's guitar and voice. On the otherwise-beautiful "At The Chime Of A City Clock" the sax player incessantly tries to barge into the spotlight. On "Poor Boy" it sounds like the backing musicians are playing an entirely different song than what Drake is singing. There are good songs here but a lot of this album seems like a lost opportunity.

Juju

Siouxsie And The Banshees

3/5

Siouxsie And The Banshees were responsible for an outstanding string of singles, but their album cuts unfortunately don't live up to that same standard. *Juju* is no exception. This album contains two exceptional songs (the magnificent "Spellbound" and the hypnotic-but-lyrically-bizarre "Arabian Knights") but the remaining tracks are fairly generic post-punk that's long on atmosphere but short on hooks.

Music For The Jilted Generation

The Prodigy

1/5

Copy-and-paste bloop-bleep music with an aggro "edge". *Might* have been revolutionary at the time, but now sounds like something a 14-year-old with pirated copy of Ableton could crank out in an hour.

Woodface

Crowded House

2/5

The Finn brothers' songwriting here lacks the spark or magic of their previous efforts in Split Enz. Most everything here is oh-so-pleasant (not a good quality for a rock record) with the exception of "Fame Is" which manages to bust through the blandness. Mitchell Froom's hyper-crystalline production also robs the songs (even the few tougher-sounding ones) of any kind of punch. The chimey guitars on this record come across as toothless. (Dude also has no idea how to properly mix the drum parts - does the snare *really* need to be louder than the singer?)

Nowhere

Ride

2/5

This album is the obvious result of a number of very specific aesthetic choices, the apparent aim of which was to upend a number of rock conventions such as having clearly-delineated lead and rhythm guitar parts, and having the lead vocal as the central element of the song. Fair enough. But does it work? Well, the trouble is that those conventions came into being because they're *effective*. If you rip up the rulebook, you better bring something else to the table, but Ride fails to do so on *Nowhere*. Compared to albums like *Psychocandy* and *Loveless* which *did* break with rock's norms (the former with its wall of feedback, for example), Ride's debut record seems like a half-step towards well, nowhere in particular.

Ten

Pearl Jam

2/5

It's "Alive"! For all of the talk of grunge being a fusion of punk and hard rock (not that that was a particularly good idea to start out with), there isn't anything resembling punk rock on *Ten*. Instead, this album is Frankenstein's monster of 70's classic rock moves, all competently played but without making any improvements on the source material. Unless a band is going to take an existing genre and infuse it with something new (see *Separation Sunday* or *Pack Up The Cats*, for example), it's going to be little more than a retread. (And then, after it's almost all over, there's an awesome, atmospheric hidden track with a fretless bass part that pays homage to Mick Karn. More unexpected elements like that would have made for a much more interesting record.)

Purple Rain

Prince

3/5

One absolutely outstanding track, a few reasonably good numbers, some weird stuff that doesn't really gel, a track with an annoying keyboard riff that quickly wears out its welcome and (lastly) a bid for arena rock immortality that sees Prince dumbing down his considerable songwriting skills.

xx

The xx

1/5

This album is so allergic to the idea of emotional commitment that it can barely bring itself to use actual chords, instead substituting single-note guitar lines that could have been written by someone with a week's worth of guitar lessons. The no-effort, monochromatic vocals additionally emphasize the emotionally-neutered nature of this record. The drum machine programming is so minimal here that it probably took an hour, tops. Really, if you can barely muster the energy to write and record your tunes, why bother at all?

Hejira

Joni Mitchell

3/5

Mitchell sings with absolute confidence and is in total control of her remarkable voice on this record but her jazz-inflected vocal melodies here are so elaborate and complex that they render the songs hard to relate to. "Song For Sharon", perhaps the best track on this album, is not coincidentally one of the most melodically straightforward tracks. More power to Mitchell for following her muse but keeping up with her on this trip down narrow and winding roads is a rough ride.

Destroy Rock & Roll

Mylo

2/5

Yet another album of copy-and-paste-and-paste-and-paste electronica. C'mon y'all, repeating a 2- or 4-bar loop with minor variations for 3 minutes does not a song make. (The track "Destroy Rock & Roll" is good for a laugh though, so Mylo gets a bonus point for that even though the preacher sample is doing all of the heavy lifting.)

Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim

Frank Sinatra

3/5

Sinatra is in fine form here and the tasteful arrangements do the songs justice but the album suffers from having nearly every song at the same sleepy tempo.

Green

R.E.M.

3/5

Even though R.E.M. were supposedly trying to reinvent themselves with this record, the music here doesn't break much new ground, as much of it has the same simple guitar strumming and picking patterns common to a lot of other R.E.M. songs. (Even when Peter Buck switches to mandolin, he's still in default mode.) Additionally, on a lot of the tracks Stipe's vocal melodies don't mesh well with the music ("Pop Song 89" and "Stand" excepted, where he keeps it more straightforward). The acoustic tracks are a mixed bag - "The Wrong Child" is overcooked, for example, but on "Hairshirt" all of the pieces come together perfectly.

The Man Machine

Kraftwerk

3/5

The core concept of this album is about the mechanization of human activity, but the application of this idea to the music itself renders a lot of it lifeless or inert. The electronic percussion, for example, serves as little more than a metronome. This is not to say that the songs themslves aren't good (for the most part), as is evidenced by the superior versions of the *Man-Machine* tracks that appear on *The Mix* and *Minimum-Maximum* (especially the transcendent version of "Neon Lights" on the latter) but the deliberately flattened performances on this record often don't make for engaging listening.

The Cars

5/5

Outta the gate with a hell of a collection of songs, this expertly-produced record has only one drawback: everything is played *so* precisely that it's just a li'l too stiff-sounding at times. A minor quibble, though.

White Light / White Heat

The Velvet Underground

2/5

With a distinct absence of decent songs, the VU goes off into the ozone on the their second album. The throw-it-against-the-wall-and-see-if-it-sticks approach flops in nearly every case and results in some singularly unpleasant stuff, including the quease-inducing tracks "The Gift" and "Lady Godiva's Operation", and four pointless minutes of guitar feedback on "I Heard Her Call My Name". The trash production values on this record only seal the deal, with just "Here She Comes Now" and "Sister Ray" (barely) managing to rise above the muck.

You Are The Quarry

Morrissey

2/5

The music on this album is just plain boring - there's no sense of surprise, no magic, no spark whatsoever. Morrissey's longtime musical collaborators, Alain Whyte and Boz Boorer, have once again provided the singer with the blandest of backing tracks (all played in a simplistic sub-glam rock style) and even though Morrissey is a gifted melodicist, he can't breathe any life into these plain-vanilla numbers (with the exception of "I'm Not Sorry", the only track on this record that distinguishes itself).

Sister

Sonic Youth

1/5

SY's fourth album is more let's-make-weird-noises-with-guitars racket that sounds like it was more entertaining (?) to make than to listen to. The tortured-psyche lyrics on this record are also delivered in such a ponderous way that they're more laughable than anything else.

Paranoid

Black Sabbath

3/5

The musicianship and the craft that went into this record are exceptional but the subject matter and the tone of it leaves me cold.

My Aim Is True

Elvis Costello

4/5

Pretty damn good for a debut album but not perfect. The singles from this album ("Zero"/"Alison"/"Red Shoes") plus "Welcome To The Working Week", "Mystery Dance" and "Waiting For The End Of The World" are all knockout punches, full of stunning wordplay and inventive song structures. However, the also-rans on this album (like "No Dancing" and "I'm Not Angry") are shadows of other, better EC tunes and can be skipped without missing out on much.

Microshift

Hookworms

1/5

Utterly pointless Arcade Fire rip-off. C'mon guys, let's try a little harder next time. (Oops, guess there won't be a next time.)

Live / Dead

Grateful Dead

1/5

Jeez, this is some dire stuff. "Dark Star" is a 23-minute track in which everybody forgets they are supposed to be playing a *song*. On "St. Stephen" the multiple colorless vocalists are no substitute for one good one. On "The Eleven" the everyone-soloing-at-once adds up to absolutely nothing. The band suprisingly manages to put together a coherent riff at the beginning of "Turn On Your Love Light" before it devolves into a mess of cruddy singing and drum improvisation. It's on this song that the Dead commit the biggest sin - they drag out a snappy two-and-a-half minute number into an insufferable 15 minutes. That ain't rock 'n' roll, boys. Let's see, where were we? Oh yeah, side 4. "Death Don't Have No Mercy" and neither do the band as they plod through this track with lots o' go-nowhere noodling and poorly recorded vocals. The penultimate cut on this already self-indulgent set is "Feedback" which is a non-song consisting of (yes, you guessed it) guitar feedback. In the hands of someone like Neil Young or Jimi Hendrix this might have been an exciting idea but here it just flops around like a dying fish.

Court And Spark

Joni Mitchell

3/5

"Help Me", Free Man In Paris" and "Raised In Robbery" are the high points of this record, and it's no coincidence that those are the tracks that adhere most closely to conventional song structures. The other cuts on this record mostly avoid choruses and refrains, much their detriment - they're sophisticated and jazzy, but because they don't have solid hooks they aren't very memorable. (Nice cover of "Twisted", though.)

Water From An Ancient Well

Abdullah Ibrahim

2/5

Best I can say is that the musicianship is competent and that the overall mood is "pleasant", but otherwise this jazz album is barely more than wallpaper music.

Here, My Dear

Marvin Gaye

2/5

Average-sounding R&B with hideous, artless lyrics (by Gaye) griping about his divorce proceedings. No thanks, my friend. Is only entertaining when Gaye stops yammering on about attorney fees and lets the sax player do his thing (such as on "Is That Enough"), moments that are few and far between.

Very

Pet Shop Boys

3/5

A well-crafted record that at times operates more like a machine on autopilot than anything else. Contains a handful of above-average pop songs (but nothing really compelling), a lot of generic PSB stuff and some goofy songs that aren't much more than throwaways.

They Were Wrong, So We Drowned

Liars

3/5

With layers of rhythmic vocals over drum-heavy backing and peppered with electronics and skronky guitar, this album wanders around in the expanse between dance-punk and experimental rock. On the tracks where the band settles into a groove (such as "There's Always Room On The Broom" and "They Don't Want Your Corn, They Want Your Kids"), their bizarre vision takes flight. "Read The Book That Wrote Itself" is an intriguing near-ambient piece and the final track "Flow My Tears The Spider Said" is a tranquil number that brings the album gracefully to a close. However, in between those songs are noisier, less structured tracks that aim more towards the experimental but never really gel.

Another Green World

Brian Eno

5/5

Absolutely smashing fusion of avant-garde experimentation and pop sensibilities. Everything on this record is sure-footed and purposeful, even as Eno and his fellow musicians are pushing at the boundaries of rock music.

Music for the Masses

Depeche Mode

3/5

Two of the singles off this album, "Never Let Me Down Again" and "Behind The Wheel", are pulse-raising stompers, perfect marriages of melody and kinetic energy. ("Nothing" also gets honorable mention.) The rest of this album doesn't reach those heights though - too many of the other tracks are overly stiff and/or overwrought. The earnest singing on a lot of these songs also bogs down the proceedings.

Bongo Rock

Incredible Bongo Band

2/5

Worth hearing for the oft-sampled track "Apache" but you can pretty much lift up the needle after that (seeing that the rest of the album is corny 70s horn-driven pseudo-cop show soundtrack instrumental rock).

Gris Gris

Dr. John

1/5

A ramshackle mishmash of various American musical styles that sounds more like a field recording than something that was done in an actual recording studio. Central to this collection is singer/songwriter Mac Rebennack's alter ego "Dr. John", a persona (verging on stereotype) who isn't compelling enough to carry a single song, let alone an entire album.

In It For The Money

Supergrass

4/5

Unlike the band's debut album, which tried to get by with just attitude and volume (and fell short), the songwriting on their second record is more complex and sophisticated, but without losing any rock & roll punch. The Beatles/Kinks/Jam roots are still evident, but this record is a big step forward towards establishing their own identity.

Third

Portishead

2/5

Does a reasonable job of generating a mood of doom 'n' gloom out of simple repeating patterns but nothing really rises to the level of a memorable hook. Vocal melodies seem practically interchangeable from song to song.

OK

Talvin Singh

1/5

When a voice at the beginning of this record declares "the world is sound" over New Age flutes 'n' synthesizers, it's a clear sign that this is going to be some pretentious drivel and *hoo boy* is it. Content-wise, it's little more than repetitious one- and two-bar drum loops with random samples (and flute noodling) on top. Would be fine if it were a demo reel designed to show off Singh's skills with Pro Tools but otherwise has scant entertaiment value.

Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret

Soft Cell

3/5

Working with what by now would be considered fairly primitive synthesizers and drum machines, Soft Cell at times makes some startlingly original music on this album, including the stupendous "Bedsitter", the titanic "Say Hello, Wave Goodbye" and the global smash "Tainted Love". Those tracks are in the sweet spot of this record - however, the remaining tracks are less successful, either because of cluttered, overly-busy arrangements (like on "Entertain Me") or dull, minimal backing tracks that rely too much on vocalist Marc Almond to carry the show (such as "Youth").

The Joshua Tree

U2

2/5

Listening to this record, it made me shed a tear...for the loss of the dynamic, forward-looking version of U2 that made *Boy* and *October*, fantastic albums that sounded like nothing that had ever come before. By contrast, the grossly oversimplified arena rock lunkheadedness of *The Joshua Tree* is unforgiveable. Every song sounds like it was designed to get those lighters in the air. Oh, and the emoting. So much emoting.

Moby Grape

1/5

Contains the worst that late 60s rock had to offer: ratty guitars, earnest folky harmonies, bloozy faux-tough lead vocals, thin reverb-coated drums - all in service of songs that are strictly also-rans. Stick this one back in the time capsule.

Dirt

Alice In Chains

2/5

The one bright spot of this album is the innovative use of lead and harmony vocals on a lot of the tracks - it's an interesting contrast against the distorted guitars. However, the music itself is a fairly textbook set of metal riffs that don't serve to distinguish the band from any of their contemporaries. Dragging out the songs to 5 or 6 minutes doesn't help either.

Arc Of A Diver

Steve Winwood

2/5

Winwood is a talented singer and songwriter whose skills shine in other settings (e.g. Traffic, Blind Faith) but there's no justification for using those selfsame skills to make this glossy, bloodless pastiche of R&B. The production on this album is state-of-the-art (or at least it was for the time) but confuses the notion of "sounds good" with "is good".

Smash

The Offspring

2/5

Taking its cues more from hardcore and metal than first-generation punk, *Smash* cranks up the tempos at the expense of tunefulness. Only "Gotta Get Away" has anything resembling a melody - most everything else seems like a technical exercise in playing at high speed, with the vocals never really meshing with the high-velocity chord changes underneath.

Trout Mask Replica

Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band

2/5

Sounds *exactly* like an album where the songs were composed one or two bars at a time and stitched together Frankenstein-style. Shifts gears within the songs faster than any prog band would ever dare. The net result is that there are barely any grooves or hooks to latch onto, because before the band can settle into any pattern, they've already moved onto something else. (The big exception here is album closer "Veteran's Day Poppy", with its repeating guitar figures - it's the least abstract and most effective cut on the album, made even more so because of its brutal lyrics.) This album is admirable in its intent and execution, but not particularly entertaining to listen to.

Bluesbreakers

John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers

1/5

Wow, twelve-bar blues over and over and over again. On top of that Clapton does his thang with not a memorable lick to be heard.

Lam Toro

Baaba Maal

3/5

Lots of atmosphere and subtle, graceful arrangements, but short on memorable tunes.

Screamadelica

Primal Scream

2/5

One-third of this record consists of regular rock tunes, albeit third-rate all-style-and-no-substance pastiches of 70s-era Rolling Stones. The other two-thirds has dance music producers remixin' and deconstructin' the band's thin material in order to make it funky. Out of the latter, only "Loaded" succeeds - the rest is a borefest of baggy beats and clattering percussion that leaves no impact.

Feast of Wire

Calexico

2/5

Musically competent mishmash of folky alt rock and various south of the (U.S.) border styles. A lot of care and craft was obviously put into the recording of this album, but the purpose of all of this isn't really evident in the grooves.

Veckatimest

Grizzly Bear

3/5

2000s folky indie rock that draws from the same well as Fleet Foxes and ends up with similar results, although with more rustic, echo-heavy production. The songs here are adventurous, with complex structures and interesting chords. Not every song hits the mark though, as some are a little too abstract. In addition, the aforementioned production choices unfortunately make the album sound a bit amateurish at times.

Real Life

Magazine

4/5

Sharp, forward-looking post-punk from one of England's best. Full of melodic hooks and instrumental color. Couples top-notch songcraft (including Howard Devoto's pointed lyrics) with tight, sure-footed performances. Track after track is exceptional (with the minor exception of "Recoil" which seems more like a jam than a complete song).

Tago Mago

Can

1/5

This album consists basically of long-form tracks that only loosely qualify as songs and instead serve as jumping-off points for a lot of barely-structured jamming. The improvisation here never rises to the level of compelling listening. Gets increasingly ridiculous as it progresses, which is remarkable considering its haphazard start. Sound quality is equally cruddy, with brittle-sounding guitars and poorly-miked drums.

Femi Kuti

2/5

Some really top-notch playing here from a superb band (and excellent sound quality) but a lot of time the music is just two-chord structures that don't really develop into anything interestiing. Kuti is a talented saxophonist and a charismatic singer but that can't compensate for the weak material.

Graceland

Paul Simon

3/5

Middling Paul Simon album with some mildly interesting songs *but* with the added novelty value that he was backed up by someone other that the usual crew of jaded LA/NY studio hotshots. Most of Simon's vocal melodies on the record are fairly loose and lack the punch of his best work.

Come Away With Me

Norah Jones

2/5

I am trying hard not to write the words "wallpaper" or "soccer mom dinner party background music" so instead I will just say that Jones' voice is pleasant and her singing is solid but the material here is not particularly risk-taking or adventurous.

New Boots And Panties

Ian Dury

3/5

On one hand, Dury's band on this record is sharp as a tack and they do a stellar job with the variety of punk rock / new wave / music hall (!) tracks on this record. Dury also himself has a lot of personality that shines through in these songs. On the other hand, the material is uneven - the cuts co-written with guitarist Chas Jankel are the strongest (especially the slick and sophisticated "If I Was With A Woman", despite its bizarro lyrics) but the remaining tracks are more forgettable.

Play

Moby

3/5

The brightest spots on this album are the ones where Moby layers samples of folk singers over electronica, setting the their vocals against new chords and arrangements. The tracks where *Moby* is singing are far less successful (especially the ones where he does some spoken word shtick). What's left is a grab bag of EDM, hip hop and downtempo tracks of varying quality.

Rubber Soul

Beatles

4/5

On this album the Beatles don't make any quantum leaps forward but they do continue to refine and expand their songwriting and sound. A third of the tracks are excellent/iconic and the rest range from great to merely good. In addition, the clean and uncluttered production on this record keeps it sounding as fresh as the day it was released.

White Light

Gene Clark

2/5

Dull and unchallenging album where every chord change is telegraphed far in advance. (Only "Because Of You" manages to distinguish itself.) Clark's singing is awkward and stilted also, overenunciating his way through these tracks when a more laid-back approach would have better suited the folky/country rock style of this record.

Gold

Ryan Adams

1/5

Adams wanted this to be a double album but dude doesn't even have enough decent material for single album. Or an EP. Or a single. Or a ringtone.

Fear and Whiskey

Mekons

2/5

The off-kilter rhythms, post-punk instrumentation and intense Englishness of this record make it sound like a little like the output of The Fall, but with a much less interesting vocalist. It's track after track of warped country- and folk-based music that has some bizarre internal logic but which still remains inscrutable even after multiple listens.

Kenya

Machito

2/5

If the main thing you want from a record is EXCITEMENT, this album delivers it in droves, via intense 'n' furious percussion, a punchy brass section and wild sax and trumpet improvisation. Trouble is that EXCITEMENT is the *only* emotion that this record has to offer - otherwise the tracks don't have much depth.

One World

John Martyn

2/5

A peculiar mix of disparate elements that doesn't really gel. Martyn uses that faux-tough gruff vocal affectation common to 70s rock singers on top of music that is a mix of folky guitars, soft rock electric pianos and dated synthesizer sounds. A few of the tracks build up a head of steam (such as "Dealer") and others experiment with dub production techniques (such as "Smiling Stranger") but that none of that is enough to elevate this album out of mediocrity.

Nighthawks At The Diner

Tom Waits

2/5

Album gets off to an unpromising start with a string of cuts that all sound the same - monologues over basically the same descending bassline. "Better Off Without A Wife" is the first track that resembles an actual song. Then it's right back to talk-singing over expert-but-nondescript jazz backing for nearly the entire rest of this double album ("Nobody" excepted). Waits has a lot of personality and his backing band is top-drawer but this album is little more than a curiosity compared to his more straightforward, song-oriented albums (such as 'Rain Dogs').

Out of Step

Minor Threat

1/5

Hardcore usually consists of: a hyperactive drummer, a guitarist whose main talent is being able to keep up with said drummer, a rotating cast of bass players, and a shouty guy telling you to make better life choices, all while riding around in an unheated van and surviving on pizza. On this album, Minor Threat blasts through 9 melody-free non-songs at record speed, only deviating from the template by doubling up on guitarists and by focusing the lyrics a bit more on soured relationships than the usual haranguing of the listener about their bad habits. (MacKaye can't resist a li'l of the latter on "Out Of Step", though.)

I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got

Sinead O'Connor

2/5

O'Connor's performance of Prince's "Nothing Compares 2 U" is stellar as she powers through a set of lyrics that are simultaneously sublime and dopey. The rest of the album is mostly generic alt rock ("Jump In The River", "The Emperor's New Clothes"), peppered with some dull acoustic guitar tracks, the odd percussion 'n' vocals experiment ("I Am Stretched On Your Grave") and the tedious album-closing a cappella title track. Guest musicians on the album include key post-punk figures like Marco Pirroni and Jah Wobble, to little sonic effect, though. Lyrically, O'Connor engages in a lot of sanctimonious finger-pointing gets tiring over the course of the album.

The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady

Charles Mingus

4/5

Jazz bassist, pianist and composer Charles Mingus' 1963 studio album is a melodically rich and harmonically complex work, with the pieces linked together by recurring motifs and chord progressions, but which also moves through a variety of moods and styles before reaching its conclusion.

Nebraska

Bruce Springsteen

3/5

Springsteen once again delves into the subject of moral complexity, but this time with considerably darker material than on his previous releases. Also, in contrast to more maximalist Springsteen works like *Born To Run*, the music here is radically stripped down, reflective of the starkness of the words. It's an admirable effort that doesn't completely work though, as the plain-vanilla acoustic guitar 'n' harmonica backing is so musically primitive that it's frankly kind of boring, leaving little distinct impression from track to track.

The Köln Concert

Keith Jarrett

5/5

The live performance captured on this jazz album is mezmerizing, made all the more impressive by the fact that all of it was improvised by Jarrett (who was also in a position where he had to perform using a piano that was not fully functional, making him have to compensate for things like pedals that didn't work). This is a masterwork by a highly accomplished musician at the top of his game.

Darklands

The Jesus And Mary Chain

2/5

Not wanting to be a one-trick pony (it seems), the JAMC shed the screeching layers of feedback of their debut album in favor of gently-distorted guitars on this, their second album. In place of the wailing guitars however, did the Reid brothers bring any new elements into their sound? Not really, which places the focus squarely on the songwriting, which (unfortunately) relies on a lot of fairly tired chord progressions. The shapes of the vocal melodies don't vary much from song to song either. The JAMC might have been aiming for a Phil Spector-ish classic pop sound with *Darklands* but the songwriting chops weren't strong enough at this point to pull it off. Lastly, this album is a more polished record than its predecessor (drum machines, anyone?) but it's the anarchic spirit of *Psychocandy* that makes that record a more thrilling listen.

Siamese Dream

The Smashing Pumpkins

1/5

"Don't cross the streams" -- Egon Spengler An unpalatable fusion of Billy Corgan's hamhanded alt-rock songwriting and co-producer Butch Vig's lunkheaded production, this record takes most generic aspects of metal and hard rock and reduces them down to a formula of monochromatic power chords and aimless soloing, broken up only by the occasional overwrought acoustic guitar 'n' strings number. In addition, Corgan's singing is thin and his vocal affectations get old very quickly.

The Sensual World

Kate Bush

2/5

Musically, there are some interesting instrumental passages here and there but no single song could truly be called compelling. The record loads on layers of orchestration but all of the instrumental color can't compensate for the unfocused, meandering material. Also, Bush's thin, airy voice generally needs as much production help as possible to have an impact, but the weird mix on this record goes in the other direction, practically disconnecting her voice from the instrumental backing.

Dust

Screaming Trees

3/5

Decent neo-psychedelic rock record that at times sounds vaguely reminiscent of late-period Echo and the Bunnymen (although with a distinctly American singer). It's at its best when it opens up and lets the arrangements breathe ("Halo Of Ashes", "Traveler") and at its worst when it slips into hard rock/grunge clichés ("Dying Days", "Witness"). Mark Lanegan's voice isn't all that distinctive in general but he sings with a fair amount of grace and subtlety on this album and does a good job of matching his tone to the material.

Berlin

Lou Reed

3/5

An ambitious song cycle about a doomed couple, *Berlin* has Reed moving into new musical territory with big arrangements and complex musical passages. Some of the production choices don't work well though - at times his vocals are too dry and upfront, and they don't mesh well with the music. In addition, Reed's tendency to talk-sing on some of these tracks makes them sound less like songs and more like dramatic recitations with instrumental backing.

The Nightfly

Donald Fagen

5/5

Steely Dan co-founder and vocalist Donald Fagen's first solo album is a stellar blend of sharp and witty songwriting, crisp production and excellent (but not showy) musicianship. The songs on this album often mix upbeat rhythms with harmonically complex chord progressions which keep the music moving forward in interesting directions. In addition, in contrast with the sometime sunny surfaces of these songs, Fagen often ventures into dark and ironic lyrical territory, such as on "New Frontier" (about a party in a bomb shelter) and "The Goodbye Look" (about an expat who was wandered into a perilous situation in some foreign location). Fagen put out numerous other solo albums of varying quality but this is the crown jewel in his discography.

Electric Ladyland

Jimi Hendrix

2/5

This double album contains exactly one straightforward, catchy rock tune of any merit ("Crosstown Traffic"). Nearly everything else is a lot of meandering experimentation, sound effects, needless sub-prog epics, loose 'n' casual vocals and lead guitar panned from left to right and back again (like wow, man), none of which gels into anything interesting.

Henry's Dream

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

2/5

Musically, Cave doesn't stray far from folk music as the basis of his sound on this record, even if it's filtered through second-generation sources like Dylan and the Band. As a result, there's very little that's sonically inventive here (despite the rocked-up arrangements on some of the songs). Cave's stylized, rapid-fire delivery also spits out yards of lyrics but at the expense of melody, with very little that resembles an actual vocal hook. He's got personality, but that's not enough to compensate for the lack of memorable cuts on this record.

Nick Of Time

Bonnie Raitt

1/5

Eleven lightweight genre exercises intended to touch all the bases without going so far as to make a statement in any given one of them. Made to *sound* good without any effort to *be* good.

Ctrl

SZA

1/5

Bunch of post-melodic fried 'n' compressed vocalizing that sounds like it was made up on the spot and then autotuned to fit the key of the backing track that a raft of producers (including The Donuts, LoveDragon and Scum, of course) cooked up. Lyrics are an unmediated first-draft craft-free voice-to-text brain dump that probably came straight from the Notes app (and sung with phone in hand in the studio, most likely).

Hypnotised

The Undertones

2/5

During the time when Feargal Sharkey was their singer, The Undertones put out a stellar string of singles, from their beloved debut track "Teenage Kicks" all the way through their 1986 swan song "Save Me". Their albums, however, are much spottier affairs, and *Hypnotised* is no exception. It's fifteen tracks worth of competent pop-inflected punk that's just a little on the ordinary side, with only a few tracks like "Tearproof" and "Wednesday Week" standing out from the pack (and pointing the way towards the more "pure pop" direction the band would pursue after this album).

Arrival

ABBA

3/5

I had high hopes for *Arrival* given that "Dancing Queen" and "Knowing Me, Knowing You" are perfect slices of pop (and "Money, Money, Money" is no slouch either), but the rest of the tracks on this album are nowhere close to those songs in terms of spark or inventiveness. Some of them are just awkward ("When I Kissed The Teacher", "Dum Dum Diddle") and others are unimaginative throwbacks ("Why Did It Have To Be Me?") but the bigger sin is that none of them are memorable even after multiple listens.

New Wave

The Auteurs

1/5

No effort was put into: writing memorable hooks; using anything except the most garden-variety chords; coming up with interesting arrangements; sounding like anything except warmed-over mid-tempo glam rock (except for the times when they sound like third-rate Beatles copyists). Sounds like the product of a dude who thought his lyrics were so exquisite that the music was little more than a secondary concern (as is the case with a lot of British alt rock from this time period.)

Autobahn

Kraftwerk

3/5

An interesting but not exceptional album from Kraftwerk, most notable for side one's 22-minute musical interpretation of a trip down the autobahn. This track is both groundbreaking and "fun fun fun" but after about 15 minutes it made me hope someone would come and take their keys away. (The version on *The Mix* does the job just as well in half the time of the original.) The remaining tracks are a mixed bag, with some muscular synthpop that points the way to later bands like OMD, but also with some spacey numbers (with flute here and there) that don't amount to much more than proto-new age music.

Californication

Red Hot Chili Peppers

1/5

Los Angeles has produced a number of important and influential bands, responsible for the most vital rock records ever made, especially: X, The Byrds, Los Lobos, The Doors, The Go-Go's, Buffalo Springfield, Minutemen, The Beach Boys, The Runaways, Van Halen, The Mothers of Invention, The Mamas and The Papas, Sparks, and Crosby, Stills & Nash, just to name a few.

All Things Must Pass

George Harrison

4/5

2 LP's worth of solid songwriting in which Harrison gently pushes the boundaries of rock music on each cut. At the same time, he keeps everything here relatively straightforward, avoiding the gimmickry that plagued the final few albums of his previous group. The third LP in this set is a lot of jammy stuff that is definitely optional listening but that doesn't mar the overall quality of the album as a whole.

Shaka Zulu

Ladysmith Black Mambazo

2/5

More admirable than interesting. The technical skill required to sing in close harmony like this is astounding (especially without accompaniment) but the material itself isn't compelling - the songs seem to blend together over the course of the record.

Before And After Science

Brian Eno

5/5

Exceptional album that deftly weaves together pop and experimental threads into a seamless whole.

m b v

My Bloody Valentine

2/5

The warped guitar sound of MBV is always fun to hear and there's lots of cool chord changes on these tracks but...man cannot live on cool chord changes alone. These cuts *superficially* resemble songs and hint at having verses and choruses but never fully commit to the idea (though "New You" comes close). As a result, a lot of this sounds like unedited first-draft material that could've used a couple rounds of tightening up

Solid Air

John Martyn

1/5

Dull folk- and jazz-inflected soft rock with affected hippy-dippy singing. Detours into some heavy post-"Tomorrow Never Knows" grooviosity on "I'd Rather Be The Devil" but for all of its bluster it leaves little impression.

Abraxas

Santana

2/5

Do you enjoy endless guitar noodling and pointless keyboard excursions? If so, then ask your doctor if ABRAXAS® is right for you.

Welcome To The Pleasuredome

Frankie Goes To Hollywood

3/5

Fun but inconsequential album most notable for Trevor Horn's maximalist production. Contains the hits that initially propelled FGTH to stardom, also a bunch of unnecessary cover versions ("Born To Run", anyone?) and nearly an LP's worth of stuff that's sounds like Kajagoogoo b-sides. Worth a spin to hear Horn's gleaming synths at work, but no one will blame you if you bail out after the end of LP #1 of this double album set.

The Last Broadcast

Doves

2/5

There are some interesting instrumental ideas and production touches on the margins of this British alt rock record; had those elements been foregrounded (and the generic U2-esque guitars pushed into the background), this would have made for a more intriguing album.

Junkyard

The Birthday Party

1/5

Where The Birthday Party's debut album had noisy songs, their follow-up *Junkyard* abandons the "song" part and focuses on sheer noise. No attempts at hooks or melody are made here - guitars are unpleasantly reduced to distortion-producing devices, above which Nick Cave tunelessly wails about god-knows-what.

Floodland

Sisters Of Mercy

1/5

All spectacle and no substance. Dragged down by a dull, thudding drum machine, this record is chock-full of predictable chord changes and singer Andrew Eldritch's unsuccessful attempts to imbue his bland lyrics with some sense of theatricality.

Rock 'N Soul

Solomon Burke

3/5

Burke is an undoubtedly talented and expressive performer capable of embodying the wide range of emotions, but unfortunately the songs on this record aren't much more than garden-variety mid-60s R&B.

Fever Ray

4/5

Experimental pop record that relies heavily on atmosphere but still remembers that chord progressions matter. Against sparse synthpop backing tracks, singer Karin Dreijer weaves complex but hooky vocal melodies into a compelling whole. Only misstep on this record are the pitch-shifted vocals which appear here and there - they come across more like a gimmick than an innovation.

Being There

Wilco

3/5

This alt rock record is a mixed bag of styles, some of which work a lot better than others. The uptempo tracks sound like kind of stuff The Replacements did back in their heyday, but out of these only a handful of songs really stand out. The slow-tempo country-flavored numbers are routine and/or sleepy. Only the weirdo cuts like "Misunderstood" and "Red-Eyed And Blue" are truly interesting. What's frustrating about this album is that the offbeat tracks show that Jeff Tweedy is capable of pushing his songwriting in innovative directions but for most of this record he sticks to pretty conventional forms.

Time Out

The Dave Brubeck Quartet

4/5

Groovy jazz quartet deftly makes its way through some tricky time signatures and rhythms. Sax player blows some great melodies over these tracks. Album is a li'l front-loaded, though - the big hits are on side A and the cuts on the flipside are just a bit less memorable.

Signing Off

UB40

1/5

Sounds like what you'd get if you pressed the "Reggae" button on a Casio keyboard (and then turned the volume down so as not to wake the neighbors).

Cut

The Slits

3/5

Across these tracks The Slits break reggae and pop music into fragments and reconstruct it (much like Captain Beefheart did with the blues on *Trout Mask Replica*), arriving at a post-punk sound that often leaves jagged edges and sharp corners exposed. Some of the time the results of this experimentation really click, like on "So Tough" and "Typical Girls", but for other songs the outcome is too disjointed to be effective.

Synchronicity

The Police

2/5

Two days ago it was the cookie-cutter reggae of UB40, yesterday was the fractured reggae of The Slits and today brings The Police, purveyors of a rock-reggae fusion that yielded terrific tracks like "Don't Stand So Close To Me" and "Walking On The Moon". The needle settles down on side one of *Synchronicity* but something is terribly wrong. Two songs go by and there's not a hint of reggae, just mechanical, synth-driven rock. The riddim finally appears on the third track "O My God" which sounds like a warmed-over track from the *Ghost In The Machine* sessions. Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland then each offer up one oddball tune each, after which Sting retakes charge for the straight-ahead and not-terribly-inspired rock of "Synchronicity II". Hmm. Maybe some of The Police's old magic will show up on side two. No such luck. From the first notes of "Every Breath You Take", it's clear that we are going to be getting a sanitized version of the band, with all of the reggae bleached out of their sound. On this track Andy Summers picks out an routine arpeggio on the guitar over a standard rock chord progression and the usually dynamic Stewart Copeland is reduced to little more than a metronome. On "King Of Pain" the production turns the band into a generic new wave outfit. Sting then rattles a series of trite and/or pretentious rhymes in "Wrapped Around You Finger" which hints a *tiny* bit at dub but for most part is another bland and glossy number. More pretentious nonsense follows with "Tea In The Sahara" and then this thing is thankfully over. And it sold zillions of copies. The musically oversimplified and dumbed-down version of the band is what became phenomenally successful. The three musicians in The Police are extremely talented but it's alarming to see them weaponize those skills to crank out a such a whitebread record.

Let's Get It On

Marvin Gaye

2/5

Look, I get it. When you're alone with that special someone, maybe you don't want to be jolted by weird chords, avant-garde arrangements or atonal guitar solos. Maybe what you want is something smooooooth. But in the cold light of day, it's a different story. That same devotion to keeping everything smooth is this album's downfall. The musicianship here is world-class and Gaye is an excellent singer, but the musically risk-averse material doesn't exactly cry out for repeated listenings.

Buffalo Springfield Again

Buffalo Springfield

3/5

Another slab of country rock from this multi-songwriter outfit. The Neil Young-penned and sung tracks are exceptional, especially the album-opening and closing pair of "Mr. Soul" and "Broken Arrow". Stephen Stills' "Rock & Roll Woman" is a decent track with great harmonies but the rest of his contributions are just average. (The less said about the Richie Furay tracks the better.)

Be

Common

1/5

Generic, personality-free rapping about mundane, overdone subject matter.

A Love Supreme

John Coltrane

5/5

Over ever-shifting and rapidly-moving chords, Coltrane weaves intricate but compelling solos. The sidemen on this album also provide a solid foundation for Coltrane, especially phenomenally talented drummer Elvin Jones.

1999

Prince

3/5

The *sound* of this record is unlike anything else that came before, with its blend of synthesizers, trebly guitars and Prince's trusty Linn drum machine; the whole thing still sounds as fresh as the day it was released. Song-wise it's a mixed bag, with the cataclysmic title track and the blush-inducing "Let's Pretend We're Married" as the high points. Everything else would serve perfectly fine as party music but doesn't have the same spark as Prince's best work.

Something/Anything?

Todd Rundgren

2/5

On this double LP, three sides feature songs with Rundgren on every instrument - ambitious certainly, but ultimately yielding little more than a string of sub-Beatles pop rock tracks, with no real magic aside from "I Saw The Light". Side four sees him working with a rotating set of musicians and contains the excellent "Hello, It's Me", along with several *really* regrettable choices. When working with other bands (like XTC and The Tubes), Rundgren has shown himself to be an excellent producer, but perhaps having someone else in the producer's chair for this record might've made for a much tighter single LP.

The Seldom Seen Kid

Elbow

1/5

Another Mercury Prize winner, which pretty much guarantees it's going to be a stinker. Singer's voice is nondescript and the music is a Xerox of what Radiohead was doing roughly a decade prior, but without any of the magic that Thom Yorke & Co. were able to conjure up.

MTV Unplugged In New York

Nirvana

2/5

The "unplugged" aspect of this album provides a glimpse into the bones of Nirvana's songs absent the bludgeoning production of their studio albums, but with mixed results. Avoiding the hits for the most part and mixing in a liberal quantity of covers, the band performs the songs in simple, folky renditions that aren't particularly illuminating. The song choices too are lacking; Kurt Cobain is a gifted melodicist but the deep cuts selected for this set often don't reflect that side of his work very well. In addition, on these performances Cobain continues to lean into the bloozy faux-husky vocal style that was the scourge of 70s hard rock records. Punk and new wave opened the door to a wide range of new vocal styles, but Cobain sticks with regressive vocal affectations that should have been permanently put to bed by the end of the 70s.

Hot Rats

Frank Zappa

1/5

This mostly instrumental record is a mix of overly-fussy and overcooked compositions on one hand and ordinary rock jams with extended soloing on the other, neither of which makes for compelling listening. Zappa's guitar noodling never goes anywhere in particular *and* takes forever to get there, making *Hot Rats* a real test of patience.

Sheet Music

10cc

1/5

10cc is responsible for some fantastic singles like "Rubber Bullets" and "I'm Not In Love"; when they dial back on the wackiness they can crank out some fairly terrific tracks. Unfortunately on *Sheet Music* they show no such restaint, instead stuffing the prog-flavored pop rock numbers on this record with gimmicks, constantly interrupting the flow of the songs with ridiculous digressions and goofball arrangements.

Olympia 64

Jacques Brel

3/5

The no-holds-barred intensity of Brel's performance on this live album shows his absolute commitment to his art. However, not having any familiarity with this particular genre, it all sounds overly theatrical to these ears, but griping about that might be akin to complaining that opera singers sing in high-pitched voices.

The White Album

Beatles

4/5

On this album, up is down, left is right and inside is outside. Perhaps tired of the conceptual weight of the *Sgt. Pepper* and *Magical Mystery Tour* Technicolor extravaganzas, the The Fab Four intentionally put a perverse twist on their sound, embracing parody and pastiche, and putting ironic distance between themselves and their material. Only a few of the tracks, like "Dear Prudence", "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and "Blackbird", are played straight; nearly everything else is warped, fun-house mirror style. Regardless, the band remained committed to presenting these songs in the best light possible, even on near-novelty songs like "The Continuing Story Of Bungalow Bill" and "Rocky Raccoon". As a whole, it has a very specific character different than the rest of the band's catalog; however, 90-plus minutes of deliberate weirdness can be a bit much for one sitting.

Chris

Christine and the Queens

1/5

Given that there's no real substance to these tracks, the singer tries to infuse the thin melodies with some sort of emotion by employing every clichéd vocal mannerism from the handbook of modern pop.

The Genius Of Ray Charles

Ray Charles

3/5

Charles' performances on this album of pop, jazz and blues standards are exceptional, even when he's up against ill-chosen material ("Alexander's Ragtime Band", really why?). Competing against him on the first half of this record are the overbearing and corny big band arrangements, the stiffness of which runs directly counter to the natural ease of Charles' voice. The effect is jarring to the point of distraction. Side two is a vast improvement in that the blare of trumpets and trombones is replaced by strings and backup singers, allowing the intimacy of Charles' vocals (and his piano playing) to actually be heard. The beauty of side two's tracks is they have a timeless feel to them, whereas side one's cuts are now unlistenably dated.

Surrealistic Pillow

Jefferson Airplane

2/5

This 1967 album sports two terrific rock numbers, the punchy "Somebody To Love" and the spacey "White Rabbit", both sung with aplomb by Grace Slick. The rest of this record is fairly undistinguished folk rock with wimpy vocals by the other group members (sorry guys).

Off The Wall

Michael Jackson

3/5

*Off The Wall* has tremendous energy through its first half; from "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" to "Off The Wall" it's a non-stop party, with muscular grooves rockin' the joint (even if the songwriting is occasionally thin). The latter half of the album is spotty though, with weaker songs and drippy ballads dragging down the proceedings. The Stevie Wonder-penned "I Can't Help It" and album closer "Burn This Disco Out" do their best to remedy the situation but it's too little, too late.

Fever To Tell

Yeah Yeah Yeahs

2/5

Nick Zinner makes funny noises on guitar and thinks it counts as songwriting. Karen O theatrically overemotes, avoiding vocal melodies at all costs. The fact that they and drummer Brian Chase were able to put together one coherent song ("Maps") is akin to a blind squirrel finding a nut.

Heroes

David Bowie

3/5

Middling effort from Bowie - the transcendent title track is a rock landmark, and a few other cuts like "The Secret Life Of Arabia" and "Joe The Lion" (the latter sporting some cool guitar treatments) are noteworthy, but the rest of the album seems stuck in second gear. The instrumental tracks near the end of the record may have been attempts by Bowie to flex his compositional skills, but they end up sounding incomplete instead.

The Stone Roses

2/5

There must've been something in the water of Manchester that produced amazing bands like The Smiths, Joy Division, The Fall and Magazine. By 1989 however, that magical chemical must have evaporated because The Stone Roses' debut album from that year is a dull affair that can't hold a candle to its predecessors. Ian Brown's vocals are colorless and his melodies are uninspired. John Squire's guitar playing is basic at best. Except for some funky parts in "I Am The Resurrection", nothing particularly interesting happens in these semi-psychedelic sub-Beatlesesque songs. (The flat production doesn't help either.)

Disintegration

The Cure

1/5

This album features loads of plodding, overly-long numbers played in a lazy generic-Cure style that barely wavers from track to track, as though the band had calcified by this point. Nearly every song has the identical chord-change-unfailingly-on-the-downbeat structure that makes listening nothing less than tedious. Robert Smith wanted to make some kind of monumental statement with this record and ended up with a bombastic, overblown snoozefest that lacks any of the humor or spark of the band's more upbeat work.

Back At The Chicken Shack

Jimmy Smith

3/5

Not gonna lie: the Hammond B-3 organ is one of my least favorite instruments; it always sounds dated to me, regardless of who is at the helm. Jimmy Smith certainly knows what he's doing, but aside from the moments where saxophonist Stanley Turrentine busts out a solo, the rest of this record is just a little too dusty-sounding.

At Fillmore East

The Allman Brothers Band

2/5

Oh boy! A Hammond B-3 organ! Twelve-bar blues repeated ad infinitum! Extended soloing! Gruff faux-soulful singing! Tracks that take up the entire side of an LP! Duane Allman and Dickey Betts both have great guitar *tone*, but like Santana, Clapton and the numerous other guitar slingers that show up on this list, the soloing doesn't have any real direction and ends up just sounding like texture. Spread that over a 22+ minute song and it's a bit much.

Strangeways, Here We Come

The Smiths

5/5

For a band that was nearing the end of its lifespan, The Smiths' final studio album is still a top-notch effort that finds the band continuing to expand their sound and push in new directions. Somewhat looser and more experimental than their previous records, *Strangeways* finds them incorporating elements such as found sound and drum machines into the mix, and on the opening track Johnny Marr completely abandons his guitar in favor of keyboards and chromatic percussion.

Green River

Creedence Clearwater Revival

4/5

On this record CCR delivers nine succinct songs that draw from the roots of American music while avoiding the hokum that plagued other Bands working that same vein. Their rockabilly-inflected tunes, for example, have the same energy and punch as their predecessors from the 1950s, but still have a modern feel. Lyrically, John Fogerty's songs are full of vivid imagery without being verbose; his writing is direct and straight to the point. The crisp playing, along with the intensity and urgency in Fogerty's voice both give *Green River* an edge that keeps it fresh-sounding even today.

Beyond Skin

Nitin Sawhney

1/5

With the screaming dude on the album cover and the subject matter about nuclear weapons, I half-expected some industrial clatter instead of South Asian-inflected pop. Fair enough, but is the pop music that's on this record interesting or moving in any way? Does it have any emotional weight? Not in the slightest. On this album all of the eggs were put in the production basket and little attention was paid to actual composition or songcraft. For an album that centers on such a heavy topic, the whole thing leaves no impact whatsoever.

Let It Bleed

The Rolling Stones

3/5

A wildly uneven record with weird sequencing, *Let It Bleed* mixes some of the Stones' most adventurous and forward-looking songs with undistinguished genre exercises. The album kicks off with the tense and potent "Gimme Shelter" but then immediately downshifts into a (mildly out-of-tune) version of Robert Johnson's "Love In Vain". The string of loose and tossed-off songs that close out side one don't bode well, either. Flip the record over, then in comes "Midnight Rambler", "Monkey Man" and "You Can't Always Get What You Want" to save the party (interrupted only by the inessential "You Got The Silver"). All of these songs rank with the band's best work, including the sometimes-overlooked "Monkey Man" (with its terrific intro). One can only wish that the entire record had gone in this direction rather than including so many throwback-sounding tunes.

Debut

Björk

3/5

On this record Björk and producer Nellee Hooper cook up some decent dance grooves throughout but the many of songs themselves are oddly constructed, seeing as they place complex, detailed vocal melodies against fairly simple and somewhat repetitive chords, with inconsistent results. "Come To Me", "One Day" and "Human Behaviour" do perhaps the best job of getting the balance right, but the further Björk's melodies edge towards the abstract, the less impact the songs have. (The bizarre production choices in the inexplicably recorded-on-location experiment "There Is More To Life Than This" also ruin what could been a winner.)

Here's Little Richard

Little Richard

3/5

Tough call. One on hand, this record contains twelve cuts of archetypal rock 'n' roll that check all of the boxes: the performances are loud and energetic, the songs are short and to the point, the lyrics are direct and relatable, and lord almighty there's a sax solo *in every song*. All performed by a charismatic singer/pianist who essentially brought the genre into being. And yet in the other hand, here in 2025 I never find myself searching out this record or even actively seeking out any kind of 50s rock, even though I admire these performers a great deal and can see the influence of their sound on successors as varied as The Beatles, CCR and The Cramps. Hearing a Little Richard song in passing is great, but a whole album from him (or Elvis, Chuck Berry et al.), with its primitive recording techniques and over-reliance on the same twelve-bar blues progression *in every song*, seems a bit like a museum piece rather than something that has the ability to thrill six decades on.

I'm Your Man

Leonard Cohen

1/5

Imagine a Pet Shop Boys album but instead of Neil Tennant singing, it's Neil's gravel-voiced grandad on vocals, talk-singing his way through the numbers while struggling to keep pace with the rhythm. Also, instead of Chris Lowe's snappy synthesizer hooks, it's just a series of bland chords strung together. Toss in a trio of backing vocalists to try to prop up grandad and voilà, you've got Leonard Cohen's does-not-work-on-any-level *I'm Your Man*. (You can also tell this album is self-produced because Cohen's voice is *way* out in front in the mix, and apparently no one at the label had the guts to tell him "no".)

Electric Warrior

T. Rex

2/5

For an album called *Electric Warrior*, this is some of the most restrained rock 'n' roll ever committed to vinyl. Electric guitars are kept safely in check and, aside from the closing track "Rip Off", Marc Bolan's vocals are essentially sedate throughout. This hushed approach *sometimes* works (especially on the stronger numbers like "Get It On" and "Jeepster") but on the weaker tracks it doesn't conjure up a mysterious or seductive mood (or whatever they were aiming for), instead it ends up sounding narcoticized.

Fear Of Music

Talking Heads

3/5

The Talking Heads' third album again finds them trying out new ideas, often with exceptional results but with a few misfires along the way. At the risk of making lists of songs, "I Zimbra", "Cities", "Life During Wartime", "Memories Can't Wait" and "Drugs" are all stellar. At the other end of the spectrum, "Animals" and "Electric Guitar" are awkward; Byrne sounds like he's deliberately trying to be weird and both of those are clunky as a result. The remainder of the songs are just OK; the sonic treatments on these songs are interesting but the writing isn't top-drawer.

Crime Of The Century

Supertramp

5/5

Supertramp's third album finds the band hitting their stride, delivering a confidently-executed rock record that contains exceptional songs which incorporate progressive elements while keeping the pop hooks ever-present. Rick Davies and Roger Hodgson's songs are sophisticated and smartly-constructed - even when there are long instrumental passages, they serve the songs well. Their lyrics are vivid, relatable and pack an emotional punch. In addition, the crisp production on this record is a perfect match for the songs and sounds fresh even today.

Who's Next

The Who

3/5

Starts off with a bang with the revolutionary "Baba O'Riley". Drifts into generic Who territory for five songs. Finally picks up steam with "Going Mobile", a prelude to the one-two punch of "Behind Blue Eyes" and "Won't Get Fooled Again" which close out the album.

In Utero

Nirvana

2/5

There are two gems here, "Heart-Shaped Box" and "All Apologies", where all the elements (melody, performance, arrangement, production) come together into a sharp and coherent whole. The rest of this album sounds like a reaction to Cobain's success with *Nevermind*, both lyrically and sonically, but that approach yields spotty results. Much like the navel-gazing of *The Wall*, listening to a rock star grouse about how the course of their life has changed after going platinum puts a lot of the lyrical content outside of the realm of the relatable. Musically, *In Utero* tries to distance itself from *Nevermind* by stripping away a layer of gloss but it's only a tentative half-step. The more abrasive songs here have flat non-melodies, as though Cobain wants to avoid the pop elements that catapulted the band to fame. Trouble is, these anti-songs are little more than formal exercises. (Worst offender on both of the aforementioned counts: "Radio Friendly Unit Shifter"). A few times Cobain apes the sound of *Nevermind* but tries to invert it in some way (lyrically or sonically) but these funhouse incarnations live in their shadow of their predecessors without being revelatory.

The Yes Album

Yes

4/5

Yes' third album finds them putting all the pieces together and contains four titanic progressive rock songs that represent some of the best that the genre has to offer. The introduction of guitarist Steve Howe to the group was key for Yes' development as a band as his contributions keep the music constantly shifing and moving forward, but while still managing to keep everything firmly grounded in rock. Only two things hold this record back: one is the inclusion of two short songs, the fun-but-inconsequential solo guitar piece "Clap" and the trifling "A Venture", both of which do not benefit at all by placed in the company of the four monumental songs of this record. The other issue is that this record is very dry (reverb-wise) which does not suit the otherwise organic sound of these songs. (The next two studio albums, *Fragile* and *Close To The Edge*, are afflicted with the same problem; the subsequent live album *Yessongs* fortunately presents many of these songs with an ambience that benefits the songs better.)

Blackstar

David Bowie

3/5

Tough call. In each of these songs, there's a lot going on - they certainly have breadth and depth (perhaps moreso than on other latter-day Bowie records like *The Next Day*). It's reminiscent of records like *Station To Station* in its mix of the experimental and the familiar, and also in that he gives the songs room to stretch out. However, there isn't anything here that really rises to the level of compelling. It's a work that's more admirable than absorbing.

Innervisions

Stevie Wonder

3/5

Stevie Wonder's albums from his "classic period" (in the early 70s) are weird affairs. On one hand, they contain a number of innovative and untouchably great pop/rock/R&B/funk tracks - in this category *Innervisions* boasts "Living For The City", "Higher Ground" and "Don't You Worry 'Bout A Thing", all of which are brilliantly composed and performed. However, the remaing tracks are either jammy workouts (e.g. "Too High", "Jesus Children Of America" on this record), loose numbers that are aiming more for mood than hooks ("Visions") or middling pop tracks ("Golden Lady"). Wonder might have been trying to expand the frontiers of pop and R&B but the less-hooky numbers seem underdeveloped.

Talk Talk Talk

The Psychedelic Furs

2/5

I like this band. I really do! I've seen 'em live and everything! But *Talk Talk Talk* is one of their weaker records. It's a transitional album between their dense, swirling debut (terrific) and the crisp, poppier sound of their third record *Forever Now* (also great), making a tentative step away from the former towards the latter. However, the noisier, more chaotic numbers that make up the bulk of this record sound like retreads of songs on the debut; even the vocal melodies sound recycled. *Talk Talk Talk* also contains a few pop-oriented tracks in "Pretty In Pink", "She Is Mine" and "All Of This And Nothing", which are the highlights of this record. One can only wish they would have gone in this direction for the whole album (but you have to wait for *Forever Now* or better yet *Mirror Moves* for that).

Countdown To Ecstasy

Steely Dan

5/5

Where Steely Dan's debut album *Can't Buy A Thrill* saw the band in the process of trying to define themselves (with sometimes awkward results), by the time of their sophomore effort *Countdown* the band had found their essence, infusing their solid pop/rock songs with sophisticated chord progressions that consistently gave the songs direction and emotional pull. Donald Fagen, by now the band's sole lead vocalist, delivers the vivid, precise and occasionally caustic lyrics (co-written with Walter Becker) with confidence and personality. In addition, the production on this album is clear and uncluttered, the arrangements are perfectly tailored to the songs and the playing is expert (especially the guitar solos, which consistently have drive and direction, propelling the songs forward). All of these elements add up to an album that is not only one of the best in the band's catalog but also in terms of 70s rock in general.

american dream

LCD Soundsystem

2/5

One of this band's great talents has been to take a minimal groove and make it work for long stretches of a song, layering shifting and moving elements on top of it and keeping it engaging throughout. ("All My Friends" from their second album is perhaps the best example of this, making the barest of chord progressions into a thoroughly engrossing song.) That minimalist approach has it pitfalls though, and on *American Dream*, the band flubs it on a grand scale - on these songs the grooves are so basic and the basslines so generic that the songs are static to the point of being nearly lifeless. The first half of the album is a slog through dull, dreary songs that have little to offer, and frankly LCD head honcho James Murphy sounds like he's in a bad mood. Only on track 6 ("Tonite") does some light enter the proceedings but this too sports a first-draft bassline that Murphy didn't bother to try to improve upon. "Call The Police" has some energy but sounds like little more than a Psychedelic Furs b-side. After that it's back to the slog with the tedious waltz of the title track followed by two more repetitive-and-no-fun jams to close out the record. Coming after two untouchable five-star studio albums, *American Dream* is a real bummer.

The Queen Is Dead

The Smiths

3/5

Take the tracks from this album and split them into two five-song EPs: EP #1 - "The Queen Is Dead", "I Know It's Over", "Bigmouth Strikes Again", "The Boy With The Thorn In His Side" and "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out" EP #2 - "Frankly, Mr. Shankly", "Vicar In A Tutu", "Never Had No One Ever", "Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others" and "Cemetry Gates" One EP contains some of the most dynamic, innovative and moving rock and roll ever made. Johnny Marr's music is outstanding, the playing from he, bassist Andy Rourke and drummer Mike Joyce is sharp and powerful, and Morrissey's words, melodies and singing are some of the best of his career with the band. The other EP contains a pair of what are essentially novelty songs, each of which is as about as sophisticated as "Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour (On The Bedpost Overnight?)" or "Tiptoe Through The Tulips", as well as couple of throwaway tracks that have the thinnest lyrics Morrissey has ever committed to vinyl. As a lyricist, he can at times take a handful of lines and spin them into something with real emotional weight (e.g. "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want") but here he falls flat on his face. (The remaining track, "Cemetry Gates" is...just OK.) EP #1 is a keeper. EP #2 goes straight into the bin.

The Good, The Bad & The Queen

1/5

Whatever the reason was that brought this so-called supergroup together, it ain't in the grooves. There's nothing interesting going on here; it's just track after track of nondescript songs topped off with Damon Albarn's artless singing.

21

Adele

1/5

48 minutes of Adele ranting at the top of her lungs about a bad breakup. About as fun as sitting next to a deranged person on the bus.

Take Me Apart

Kelela

1/5

Modern-day R&B that thinks that vocal mannerisms are an acceptable subsitute for actual melody.

Young Americans

David Bowie

2/5

"Young Americans" and "Fame" are standout tracks, but those two are the only ones that have any distinct sonic character. The rest of the tracks are generic soul and R&B backing tracks with not-particularly-interesting vocal melodies from Bowie. (The less said about the ill-advised cover of "Across The Universe" the better.)

Atomizer

Big Black

3/5

This intense art-punk record from 1986 is a li'l too abrasive for my tastes but I'll give them credit for having actual songs and not just chains of disconnected riffs. The guitar treatments also give their sound a unique character.

Movies

Holger Czukay

1/5

The former bassist for Can is mostly a one-man band on this record but proves himself to be a master of none here. "Cool In The Pool" gets this record off to a terrible start - it's a sloppy and poorly-recorded jam with random vocal and instrumental bits layered on top with little rhyme or reason. Second track "Oh Lord, Give Us More Money" is super-loose prog-ish rock that wanders around for a considerable amount of time without really going anywhere. (Recording tape must have been cheap in Germany in the 70s because *man* do the members of Can like to use mountains of it.) The bits of "sampled" dialogue that appear throughout the track also don't add up to much of anything. On "Persian Love" the taped-off-the-radio vocals are ill-fitted to the chirpy (and repetitive) backing track. Closing track "Hollywood Symphony" isn't much different than "Oh Lord" in that it rambles in a haphazard fashion for 15 minutes before finally (and thankfully) conking out. This album is supposedly one of the first rock records to incorporate found sounds but the whole thing is so poorly executed that it hardly matters.

Daydream Nation

Sonic Youth

1/5

Two things strike me about this record (and Sonic Youth in general): #1 It sounds like the band puts their tracks together by first jamming, then gluing pieces from the jams together and calling it a "song". Those jams might have been fun to do, but the results never sound like thought-out pieces - they just sound like people randomly scrubbing away on guitars, with vocal melodies tacked on as an afterthought. #2 For all of SY's so-called experimention with alternate tunings, etc., the guitars on these records sound practically unadorned (aside from some fuzz), as though adding any processing would ruin the SY "aesthetic". The bare-bones sound of cheap 'n' tinny pawn shop guitars gets old very quickly though. (Same goes for things like vocals, it's as though the band thinks a decent well-miked and properly treated vocal would sound inauthentic somehow. *Trouble is* that the raw quality of the vocals on this record sounds like the product of incompetent engineering and production rather than something "genuine".)

Suzanne Vega

2/5

Vega's brand of modern folk music has the usual formula of 'prominent acoustic guitar plus tasteful backing tracks', but her twist on the form is that her vocal melodies are far more abstract and progressive than your typical folk fare. It's not much of an improvement though - if anything, it just makes the songs harder to follow. Aside from "Marlene On The Wall" and "Neighborhood Girls" (the only tracks here with any muscle), Vega's scattershot approach to melody and lyrics means that very little here has any lasting emotional weight (especially since the overly-tame music also lacks any sense of drama).

Live 1966 (The Royal Albert Hall Concert)

Bob Dylan

2/5

Dylan sticks with his acoustic guitar 'n' harmonica for the first half of this live album - sonically, it has a real "you are there" quality but otherwise it's a long monochromatic stretch of songs with similar chords and melodies, differentiated only by the lyrics. Second half of this record sees Dylan plug in his Telecaster and bring out his backing band for some electrified rawk 'n' roll. The increase in energy is welcome (even if caused some grousing among certain audience members) but the songs aren't much better than those on the first half. Dylan relies on a lot of blues-based chord progressions for these tracks (e.g. on "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat") to which the band applies the same basic arrangement to each time, resulting in a lot of same-sounding songs. Only "Ballad Of A Thin Man" and "Like A Rolling Stone" distinguish themselves (especially with Dylan's spirited performance on the latter), but 95 minutes is a long way to go to get to those gems.

NEU! 75

Neu!

2/5

On their third album Neu! once again dishes out their idiosyncratic brand of minimalistic rock (which in turn was an inspiration for certain strains of British post-punk) but the end product itself is a little primitive compared to the things that it influenced. Side one is mostly soft and gentle songs that are heavy on atmosphere but are somewhat repetitive. By contrast, side two consists of drum-intensive rock songs with rough, (proto-)punky singing and simple chord progressions somewhat reminiscent of The Stooges. The relentless *motorik* beat of these tracks does gets a little tiring due to the extended length of these numbers, all of which could have benefitted from some editing - "Hero" takes 5 1/2 minutes to get to the bridge! All in all, this album is important for its historical value and influence but its shortcomings often diminish its actual entertainment value.

Face to Face

The Kinks

3/5

On this album Ray Davies' songwriting ranges from good to great and covers ground from straightforward rockers to more music hall-inspired fare. His portrayal of the characters in these songs is sharp, vivid and imaginative and the topics he touches upon are relatable. The band's performances are solid and energetic also. However, the production on this record is unfortunately fairly cruddy and at times sounds no better than ratty garage rock. That might have been fine if this was the type of band that was merely pounding out three-chord numbers but it doesn't do justice to Davies' increasingly sophisticated and detailed songs.

Truth

Jeff Beck

1/5

Not long after the needle hit the groove on side one, I was scratching my head wondering how (and why) this record came into being. It's got guitarist Jeff Beck's name on the cover but vocalist Rod Stewart's voice is front and center most of the time. Beck's guitar playing, when it *does* take the spotlight, is remarkably unspectacular here. The choice of material here is also befuddling: covers of "Greensleeves" (?) and "Ol' Man River" (??); a rehash of Ravel's "Bolero"; some Willie Dixon tunes, and (worst of all) some existing twelve-bar blues numbers rewritten by Beck and Stewart and passed off as "originals". Beck and his cohorts aren't doing anything that's terribly revolutionary here (except to heavy things up a bit); the mishmash of material doesn't help either. Beck made much better records down the road (such as the jazz fusion-ish *Blow By Blow* from 1975) but *Truth* is a pretty rough start to what turned out to be a much more distinguished career as a guitar slinger.

Celebrity Skin

Hole

1/5

Ah, the 90s, the era where everybody thought that all you needed to make a record was a bunch of crunchy power chords and a layer of glossy production. *Celebrity Skin* follows that formula to the letter, resulting in generic and monochromatic record, utterly devoid of memorable hooks, riffs, or really any distinct sonic character at all.

Central Reservation

Beth Orton

2/5

Right off the bat, the exaggerated style of singing on this album is off-putting - it just reads as melodramatic. Powering through that though, are there any decent songs here? "Couldn't Cause Me Harm" has a solid groove and decent melody. And that's about it.

After The Gold Rush

Neil Young

4/5

This album highlights Young's songcraft, which is strong enough to counterbalance his thin (but distinctive) voice and his at-times primitive guitar playing (a Neil Young guitar solo sounds like absolutely no one else's). His melodic and harmonic sensibilities infuse these songs with moments of drama; in Young's hands here a single melodic phrase or chord change can be gripping. The production on this record is somewhat stripped-down (especially on the more acoustic numbers) but that actually complements the emotionally bare nature of these songs. A couple of weak tunes (like "Cripple Creek Ferry") keep this album from being a complete masterpiece but the majority of these songs are among the best of Young's career.

Crossing the Red Sea With the Adverts

The Adverts

1/5

Ho-hum UK punk rock from 1978. Singer T. V. Smith lacks a distinctive voice, putting him in the company of the dozens of anonymous punk rock shouters of the time. The band's sound is also pretty generic three-chord distorted rama-lama with no memorable tunes or hooks.

Histoire De Melody Nelson

Serge Gainsbourg

1/5

Ah, a tender album about a middle-aged man and the teenage girl he seduces. I am sure that we are supposed to step back, take a drag off a cigarette, and approach this record with a sophisticated and continental worldview, seeing this as an album-length meditation about the fleeting nature of existence and the pain of lost youth. Only a narrow-minded cretin with outdated bourgeois morals would view this as being nothing more than a creepy set of songs about a sexual predator.

American Idiot

Green Day

1/5

This is punk rock glossed up to the point that it has about as much sonic character as a Toto record. The songs themselves are strings of dull metal-leaning power chords topped off with affected singing that sounds more like Broadway than the Bay Area. And really, so many words with so little of substance actually being said.

The Hissing Of Summer Lawns

Joni Mitchell

2/5

Pleasant enough to listen to due to the clarity of Mitchell's voice and the jazzy accompaniment behind her, but the songs are so abstractly structured that they never sink in. It's as though she so adamantly wants to avoid pop hooks that she forgets those are often the most enjoyable parts of listening to an album.

Faust IV

Faust

3/5

To pull off long one-chord jams like the ones that appear on *Faust IV*, it's essential to keep the elements within moving and shifting throughout, and on tracks like the opening number "Krautrock", the band successfully pulls that off. Droning and pulsing guitars set the direction in the foreground, but behind that synthesizers, bass and drums weave hypnotic melodies and rhythms. The album also has a few songs (like "Jennifer") that successfully merge pop/rock elements with the avant-garde leanings while still maintaining a coherent whole. It's not all successful though - closing track "It's A Bit Of A Pain" is an uneasy mix of the two, especially with its at-times abrasive sonics. Also, the jokey pop songs on this record like "The Sad Skinhead" (!) try to inject some humor into the proceedings but instead break up the mood of the album.

The Specials

2/5

British ska revivalists The Specials have some killer singles in their catalog but unfortunately none of them appear on this (their debut album) which honestly sounds like a bunch of b-sides. Only "Too Much Too Young" manages to distinguish itself from the pack (but it certainly didn't need to be 6 minutes long). This album *is* lively and upbeat and it would make for decent party music, so it's not entirely without merit. The band also has a lot more personality than, for example, the godawful UB40, but nonetheless the songs on this record lack the melodic sense or inventiveness of say, fellow two-toners like Madness or The (English) Beat.

Fly Or Die

N.E.R.D

1/5

The music on this record is mildly interesting though mostly derivative pop/rock in the same ballpark as Lenny Kravitz (who shows up on a couple of tracks, unfortunately). However, the villain here is the dreadful, off-key singing which, combined with the no-effort lyrics, totally torpedoes this ship.

You've Come a Long Way Baby

Fatboy Slim

1/5

When an album contains not one but *two* entries from my "Most Hated Songs Of All Time" list, it's already going to start out behind the eight ball. The rest of this record is the same shtick, with tracks that repeat a vocal sample ad nauseum (while Fatboy Slim congratulates himself along the way). This copy-and-paste stuff might have seemed revolutionary at the time but it has since been eclipsed by others who took sampling to new heights, leaving kindergarten stuff like this in the dust. (Hell, Double Dee and Steinski did more with razor blades and tape than Fatty Boy could ever do with a computer.)

Crooked Rain Crooked Rain

Pavement

3/5

Pavement isn't doing anything radically new on this record but they do pull together a lot of threads of rock music in an interesting way. Chief songwriter Stephen Malkmus pushes his songs in somewhat off-kilter directions, but it's never weird-for-the-sake-of-being-weird, and it keeps his tunes from lapsing into cliché. Malkmus' voice also has a lot of character, and he can move through a range of emotions within a single song without coming across as theatrical or artificial.

Slanted And Enchanted

Pavement

3/5

On this record Pavement vocalist Stephen Malkmus pulls off the neat trick of being able to sing with conviction *but* without sounding earnest. I haven't the slightest idea what he's singing about (given the obtuse nature of the lyrics) but whatever it is, he sounds 100% committed to it. The music is tightly-structured (even though it appears scruffy on the surface) and is full of hooks and riffs that are integral to the songs.

Southern Rock Opera

Drive-By Truckers

1/5

Theoretically there's some sort of postmodern narrative about the American South in the middle of all the Lynyrd Skynyrd cosplay on this record, but because the band doesn't do anything transformative with the source material (i.e. Southern Rock), all this amounts to is a second-hand version of music that ain't particularly interesting to start out with. Just because they slapped some ironic lyrics on top of it doesn't make it any more compelling to listen to.

Pet Sounds

The Beach Boys

3/5

The rock tracks on this record ("Wouldn't It Be Nice" and "Sloop John B") are the high points here, along with the stately "God Only Knows". The balance of this album is restrained chamber pop with kitchen sink production. Brian Wilson uses some interesting chord progressions and sophisticated melodies here but those same songs are sometime undercut by cluttered arrangements that dilute the energy of the cuts. (For example, tracks like "That's Not Me" and "Here Today" bury the rhythm section in the background on what could have been solid rock and roll numbers.) One of the biggest culprits is the technical limitations of the time - multitrack recording was still in its infancy - and these limitations put a damper on Wilson's ambitions. The original mono mix smashes everything together and flattens out the nuances that Wilson sought to include. The stereo mix from the 90s is an vast improvement, though it doesn't solve every issue with this record. Original mono version: 3/5 Stereo version: 4/5

Hot Fuss

The Killers

1/5

Warmed-over U2 with utterly predictable chord changes, monotonous eighth-note basslines and strident, colorless singing. Everything is played loud in a vain attempt to compensate for the lack of imagination.

The Modern Dance

Pere Ubu

5/5

On their debut album Pere Ubu expertly layers David Thomas' avant-garde vocals and Allen Ravestine's unconventional synthesizer playing on top of a solid and sure-footed rock rhythm section, with Tom Herman's often-jagged guitar snaking its way through the middle. Together all of these elements create a variety of potent atmospheres and moods on this album, sometimes whimsical but at other times capable of cutting to the bone. In addition, even though Thomas's lyrics often have an aburdist slant, the songs are still infused with genuine human feeling due to his expressive singing.

Little Earthquakes

Tori Amos

1/5

Regardless of the experiences that informed this record, the end result is pure melodrama. The vocal stylings are straight out of an overwrought Broadway musical and the music is bombastic enough to rival a Meat Loaf record. I get that the artist wants to make a point but a little subtlety goes a long way.

The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter

The Incredible String Band

1/5

The Wikipedia entry for this 1968 album labels it as "acid folk" but what it really sounds like is the work of someone who went to one too many Renaissance fairs and decided to pick up a dulcimer to impress the damsels. If that ain't the reason, then the purpose of this album is baffling. There's nothing here that's aesthetically pleasing: the singing is stilted, the melodies are archaic, the lyrics are overwritten and the song structures are all of the place.

Station To Station

David Bowie

3/5

Another ambitious set from the Thin White Duke that has its share of hits and misses. "Golden Years" is outstanding; "TVC 15" is good but a little tame (do yourself a favor and seek out the SNL performance of this song, which provides the muscle this version is lacking); the title track is also good though it takes a bit of time get up to speed. The material on the rest of the album is not particularly compelling, despite the fact that the performances by Bowie's backing musicians are uniformly solid throughout.

Rising Above Bedlam

Jah Wobble's Invaders Of The Heart

1/5

If you're the former bass player for Public Image Ltd., one of the most iconoclastic and groundbreaking bands in rock history, surely on your solo album you're going to continue to be a trailblazer, right? No? You say that you want to leave the doom and gloom behind and keep it mostly light 'n' breezy? Jah Wobble and his fellow Invaders Of The Heart do exactly that here, cranking out one Carribean-inflected number after another on this record. It's also dull as dishwater. There's nothing challenging or even intriguing about this record. The best you can say is that the grooves are tight, but the "songs" are just repetitive loops of overly-familar chord progressions. (It doesn't help either that Jah Wobble's singing voice isn't particularly distinctive.)

Music

Madonna

3/5

Madonna's eighth record has her primarily working with producer Mirwais Ahmadzaï and, among their collaborations here, the most interesting are the those that push the furthest into experimental territory (such as "Impressive Instant"). Ahmadzaï's fractured production techniques keep the songs moving (even on tracks that consists of basically one chord). In addition, when Madonna uses less obvious vocal techniques such as hushed vocals or spoken word sections (such as on "Paradise (Not For Me)"), it works remarkably well. The more this album aims towards the conventional however, the less compelling it becomes. The tracks co-produced by William Orbit are especially guilty of this - they are the blandest and least memorable cuts on this record.

A Christmas Gift For You From Phil Spector

Various Artists

3/5

The vocalists on this record belong on the "nice" list, as the singing is terrific (especially The Ronettes' spirited performance of "Sleigh Ride"). The producer of this album belongs on the "naughty" list for his claustrophic "Wall Of Sound" production which reduces the backing music to a fuzzy, cluttered mess.

Blood On The Tracks

Bob Dylan

2/5

The storytelling is lively but the folk-inflected music is not particularly inventive.

Blood And Chocolate

Elvis Costello & The Attractions

3/5

There's nothing really wrong with this 1986 release but it feels like an attempt to try recapture the feeling of Costello's first few albums, especially after a string of then-recent digressions and misfires. He tries out a few new ideas (like the extended lengths of tracks like "I Want You" and "Battered Old Bird") but many songs on this collection seem like lesser cousins of his tighter, stronger numbers. Side 1 has a few standout tracks like "Uncomplicated" and "Tokyo Storm Warning" but side 2 is a letdown, full of forgettable numbers. In addition, the arrangements on most of this album's tracks are plain vanilla and don't really give the Attractions an opportunity to shine, either - the backing music could have been played by any set of competent musicians and one might hardly notice the difference.

Untitled (Black Is)

SAULT

2/5

Most of this album consists of loosely-structured tracks where the vocals are repetitive melodies/lyrics or spoken word bits, neither of which make for compelling listening. Very few of these numbers coalesce into actual songs, though the ones that do are effective, like "Monsters".

Triangle

The Beau Brummels

2/5

This late 60's psychedelic pop/rock has a few interesting moments here and there but in general it doesn't have enough of a distinct personality to distinguish itself from the dozens of contemporaneous acts who were also mining the same vein. (In addition, singer Sal Valentino sounds like Dylan doing a Anthony Newley impression - not a good combination.)

Songs Of Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen

1/5

Too refined of an artist to include something so pedestrian as a *chorus* in his songs, Cohen mercilessly piles on one verse after another like some medieval bard telling the tale of how St. Olaf slayed the dragon. Also, like many other folk singers of the 60's, the music itself is little more than an afterthought, serving only as a bed for Cohen's overly earnest lyrics.

Superunknown

Soundgarden

1/5

Refried Led Zeppelin with nothing new to offer. The whole album is unremittingly monochrome; even the one spot of color ("Black Hole Sun") gets swallowed up by the gray goo after about 60 seconds.

Millions Now Living Will Never Die

Tortoise

4/5

All-instrumental band Tortoise may be from Chicago but their music has clear antecedents in German rock bands from the 70's like Neu! and Can, as is most evident on the opening track, the 20-minute epic "Djed". Other influences like Eno, King Crimson and Steve Reich can be heard on this record, but it does maintain its own idiosyncratic identity, which is especially on display in the lyrical guitar melodies and lush textures heard in the tracks on side two. The record does drag in a couple of spots and there are a few less-than-stellar tracks but for the most part this album works well as a cohesive whole.

Morrison Hotel

The Doors

3/5

This album has two terrific songs, "Roadhouse Blues" and the sometimes-overlooked gem "Peace Frog", both of which are tough, punchy and innovative rock 'n' roll tracks. The rest of *Morrison Hotel* doesn't follow that same blueprint though - a lot of the other songs are pop rock numbers (of varying quality) that border on the psychedelic, such as the moody "Blue Sunday", the peppy "Ship Of Fools" and the bizarre "Land Ho!", along with a few fairly unimaginative excursions into the blues ("You Make Me Real", "Maggie M'Gill"). Despite the uneven material, the band plays solidly on this record, especially guitarist Robby Krieger, whose playing on "Peace Frog" is electrifying.

Born In The U.S.A.

Bruce Springsteen

2/5

On Springsteen's seventh album his considerable songwriting talents are weaponized to produce missiles aimed at the top of the charts. Gone are the complex chords and dense (but potent) arrangements of previous albums like *Born To Run*, here replaced with simple strumming, shiny synthesizers and a snare drum set to "stun". Also, unlike those past albums, the tone shifts erratically across the tracks here - *BITUSA* opens with the rage of the title number and then two songs later it's girl-chasing time down in "Darlington County". It's not all dumbed-down Springsteen-lite though. The aforementioned title track unleashes apocalyptic fury, with the anger palpable in Bruce's vocals. "Bobby Jean" has enough of the Springsteen drama of yore to raise goosebumps. "Dancing In The Dark" has a simple synth hook but enough drive to lift it above the rest. The Boss' batting average back in his glory days was a lot higher, though; the .250 average he sports here is barely above the Mendoza Line.

Ramones

3/5

Super-exciting, makes-you-want-to-jump-and-down punk rock, the sheer *sound* of this record is exhilarating. It blasts out of the gate with three thrilling uptempo songs, and then slows it down a bit with "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend". From there, the rest of songs are reasonably good but don't have *quite* the same impact as the opening salvo.

Freak Out!

The Mothers Of Invention

2/5

Amongst the ridiculous singing on this album there is actually some decent and well-orchestrated rock 'n' roll. (Some of this might sound like early Steely Dan if you took away the kazoos and the absurd vocals.) But Zappa ain't gonna let you ignore the vocals - the purpose of this record is to foreground his message (i.e. conforming to social norms = bad, "freaking out" = good) and the bizarro singing is meant to emphasize that Zappa is SAYING SOMETHING IMPORTANT HERE SO PAY ATTENTION. *Freak Out!* is not a put-it-on-in-the-background-and-go-about-your-day record, by design. In small doses, this approach might be effective. But 60 minutes of being pummelled by this stuff is a bit much, especially when the record devolves into weirdo vocalizing and sound effects in the last third.

Electric Prunes

The Electric Prunes

2/5

Of historical importance if you want hear state-of-the-art recording techniques for psychedelic rock (circa 1967) applied to third-rate pop rock tunes and garage rock numbers where the band tries a *little* too hard to sound tough. If not, feel free to lift up the needle after opening track "I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night)" - you won't be missing out on anything.

In Our Heads

Hot Chip

3/5

Decent, well-produced synthpop album with personality. Sometimes relies a little too heavily on predictable chord progressions and familiar arpeggios, though. Also lacks a standout track like "Over And Over" or "Ready For The Floor".

Lady Soul

Aretha Franklin

4/5

Franklin's voice is an amazing combination of power, control and finesse on this album. The backing musicians are also in excellent form across these tracks. Probably the only weak point on this record is the sometimes weak choice of material, including an ill-advised and unnecessary cover of The Young Rascals' Groovin'".

Goodbye And Hello

Tim Buckley

2/5

Some reasonably decent (but not exceptional) songwriting here, but Buckley's earnest delivery makes the most of the tracks seem like dusty museum pieces.

Kilimanjaro

The Teardrop Explodes

5/5

*Kilimanjaro* is an absolutely stellar pop record: it's got strong instrumental hooks, great vocal melodies, interesting lyrics, terrific vocal performances by lead singer Julian Cope, punchy innovative arrangements and tight playing.

Gentlemen

The Afghan Whigs

1/5

Generic grunge-ish alt rock that puts all of its chips on the over-the-top vocal performance of singer Greg Dulli. Unfortunately his hyper-emoting comes across as ridiculous and does little to compensate for the dull melodies and unimaginative music on this record. (Seriously, if dude wrote better songs he wouldn't need to try to act them out in order to get them to work.)

Five Leaves Left

Nick Drake

3/5

The highlight of Nick Drake's debut album is the evocative "River Man", a 5/4-time signature marvel with lush-yet-haunting strings. The rest of the album has decent but relatively unadventurous songwriting, relying a little too hard on established folk forms (and with some tracks like "Thoughts Of Mary Jane" practically medieval-sounding). Still, Nick Drake's voice has a lot of personality and the acoustic guitar-and-strings arrangements are often beautiful.

Kimono My House

Sparks

5/5

*Kimono* is a visionary pop record stuffed full of catchy melodies, countermelodies and hooks. Russell Mael's high-pitched vocals are meshed perfectly with rockin' backing tracks that are alternately guitar- and keyboard-driven. In addition, Ron Mael's ability to write interesting lyrics about basically any subject is on full display here.

The Stooges

3/5

On their debut record The Stooges have tremendous rock 'n' roll energy, attitude and scorching, distorted guitars. They also have a truly original lead singer in Iggy Pop. The only thing they're missing is actual *songs*. These two- and three-chord jams (some hastily written before the recording session) are beds for Pop to howl and wail upon, but absent his vocals, they're as minimal as you can get. Still, this nihilistic anti-music represents an important break from the more conventional rock of 1969 and its echoes are evident in 70s punk rock and no wave.

Odessa

Bee Gees

1/5

Maybe the Beatles made it look easy. Stack up some vocal harmonies, throw some orchestral arrangements on your songs and you too can have your own *Sgt. Pepper's*. However, as ambitious as it might seem on the surface, *Odessa* has no real magic, no spark and no innovation. It's dreary and earnest (not a great combination) and lives in the shadow of much better, more free spirited pop of the late 60s.

The Lexicon Of Love

ABC

3/5

This ambitious early 80s pop record sounds like a million pounds, utilizing not only cutting-edge (for the time) synthesizers but also sophisticated orchestral backing. Trevor Horn's co-production pushes the music into maximalist territory and the spectacular singles from this record like "The Look Of Love", Poison Arrow" and "All Of My Love" benefit from this widescreen approach. Unfortunately, many of the album cuts sound like inferior copies of those selfsame singles, rendering stretches of this record redundant.

Exile On Main Street

The Rolling Stones

3/5

With its extended running time and its low-key, offhand mood, *Exile* is practically an ambient Rolling Stones record - you can put on in the background and listen to or ignore it as you like. There's no track on this album that's going to reach out and command your attention like "Satisfaction" or "Gimme Shelter" would - it's just Mick and Keef and Co. in default mode, easing their way through 18 blues-, R&B- and country-inflected tunes and eschewing big musical hooks. Ironically though, nothing really seems like a throwaway here, because each of the songs plays an integral part to overall tone of this record.

Wild Gift

X

2/5

As a native Angeleno, the music of X (and Van Halen, Oingo Boingo and The Doors) is in my blood. So it pains me to say that this is a subpar effort - it's a classic sophomore slump record. (You can tell when a band re-records both sides of their debut single for their second album that they are woefully short of material.) The great harmonies between Exene and John Doe are there but the underlying songs are mostly dull and unimaginative, lacking the radical punk vision of their debut album. There are some bright spots ("Beyond And Back", "White Girl" and "We're Desperate" / "Adult Books" combo from their debut 7") but for the most potent version of this band, look elsewhere.

Haunted Dancehall

The Sabres Of Paradise

1/5

Just dreadful. The faceless, by-the-numbers techno on this record is devoid of any real substance. (Or you may need to be on substances to enjoy it.)

Smokers Delight

Nightmares On Wax

1/5

Having listened to a number of DJ-as-musical-artists throughout my time doing the challenge, one thing has become clear: the music they turn out is purely functional. That function might be dancing, or getting high, or doing the horizontal bop, but what this music is *not* designed for is close listening on earbuds. In that context, it becomes readily apparent that there's no meat to any of this, no heart to it at all. Unlike the music of Motown (for example) which was danceable *and* had deep emotional pull, this stuff is hollow and dull.

The Infotainment Scan

The Fall

4/5

*Scan* sees the band centered around the guitar/bass/vocals axis of core Fall members Craig Scanlon, Steve Hanley and Mark E. Smith, providing pulse and drive to mostly-uptempo songs that touch upon dance music without getting lost in that genre's clichés. Chock-full of potent post-punk riffs throughout, this album delivers one punch after another, and MES sounds alive and invigorated here (well, as invigorated as person full of vinegar can be 😀.) An otherwise-excellent record, *Scan* does lose a star for the inessential and momentum-busting cover of "I'm Going To Spain" and there's-one-on-every-Fall-album self-indulgent weirdo track "Light/Fireworks". Skip those and you've got a killer disc.

Foo Fighters

2/5

Dave Grohl's look-ma-no-sidemen project alternates REM-influenced strummy stuff with punk/hard rock hybrids, neither of which really floats my boat (though I'll grant that the former is marginally more interesting than the latter). The more he varies the arrangements, the more engaging the songs are, but too often he relies on fuzzy undistinguished guitars that cause a lot the songs to blend together after a while. Grohl's voice is also fairly colorless but his (mostly) clean phrasing and tone at least helps the vocal melodies shine through. As a whole, it's all competently done but there's nothing here that's hooky enough to make me want to return to this record.

Your Arsenal

Morrissey

2/5

Morrissey's melodic sense is as sharp as ever on this record but the backing music is dismally subpar. Guitarist Alan Whyte, Moz's main musical collaborator on this record, is a third-rate composer whose work lacks any kind of spark or inventiveness. (Too bad that Morrissey cut ties with Stephen Street, whose bright and lively music gave the singer's debut album *Viva Hate* so much personality. Oh well.)

2112

Rush

2/5

Lyrically, the 20-minute track that opens this album gives off some serious "I'm 14 and this is deep" vibes. Musically, it sounds like a bunch of disconnected riffs without any real thread holding it together. ("Close To The Edge" it ain't.) The not-particularly-memorable tracks that make up the balance of this album show that Rush was in the process of finding their voice; it'll still be 3 or 4 more years (and a few more albums) before they start to turn out songs with the distinctive Rush stamp. (Literally also, Geddy Lee was still a few years from finding his ideal singing voice - the difference between the timbre of his vocals on *2112* and say, *Moving Pictures* is like night and day.)

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

Beatles

4/5

What can you say about this record that hasn't already been said? It's got color and personality, it's overflowing with melody and inventive harmonies, and it stands head and shoulders above the crowd of psychedelic wannabes from the late 60's. The bizarro mix that pushes the vocals into one channel or the other can be forgiven (given the technical constraints at time) but one glaring thing cannot: the stinker called "Within You Without You" that sits smack dab in the middle of this album. It doesn't hold a candle to the other tracks on the record, it doesn't fit in with tone of the album and George Harrison was certainly capable of so much better.

Architecture And Morality

Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark

3/5

OMD is capable of turning out fantastic, melody-laden pop tunes - however, at the same time their records are usually half-filled with experimental tracks that are far less compelling. *Architecture* is no different. For every outstanding pop tune like "Souvenir" there's an experimental track like "Sealand" that bogs down the proceedings. Perhaps the band was using *Low* or *The Man-Machine* as models, but each of those albums holds together well as a whole, even with the experimental excursions. Stick with OMD's greatest hits and you won't have to keep lifting the needle.

Country Life

Roxy Music

3/5

Like nearly every other Roxy album, *Country Life* is frustratingly inconsistent, half-stocked with some absolute jewels and...some second-rate stuff. After the experimental leanings of their first two records, the band's sound on their fourth album is somewhat more conventional, and as a result, the songs live or die on the strength of Bryan Ferry's songwriting. Half of these tracks, including "The Thrill Of It All" and "Out Of The Blue" are stellar - they have tremendous rock and roll punch but still retain Roxy's characteristic out-there flavor. The remaining tracks are *too* conventional however, as though Ferry and the band are pulling back on the reins a little too much.

Ray Of Light

Madonna

1/5

William Orbit's repetitive bloop-bleep production is the millstone around the neck of this album, dragging it down to the bottom of the ocean floor despite Madonna's best attempts to keep it afloat.

Horses

Patti Smith

1/5

Smith was one of handful of New York musicians trying to create a new form of rock and roll in the early 70s but when the resulting aesthetic consists of hypertheatrical poetry readings over cruddy garage rock backing, it's pretty much dead on arrival.

Moon Safari

Air

2/5

An OK record if you don't need to pay too much attention to it. Many of the tracks consist of little more than repetitive grooves with keyboard noodling, goofy sound effects and/or featherweight vocals on top. Fine for relaxing in your space age bachelor/bachelorette pad but a li'l boring for close listening.

Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)

Eurythmics

1/5

By-the-numbers synthpop with stiff, mannered singing. Musically, it lacks any of the edge that more innovative groups like Soft Cell or Yaz had.

Oracular Spectacular

MGMT

4/5

This indie pop/rock duo busted through in the late 2000s with a number of distinct and quirky singles ("Time To Pretend", most notably) but the remainder of this record also contains other terrific variations on their unique psychedelia-infused vision. The tracks on this album are full of melodic hooks, unique synthesizer tones and oddball lyrics. (The double-tracked vocals do get a little tiring after a while, but that's a minor complaint.) Not every song sticks the landing, but there are more hits than misses here.

On The Beach

Neil Young

2/5

A collection of ordinary and mostly dull rock songs, lacking the distinctive songcraft of *After The Gold Rush* or *Harvest*. (When three of the song titles are "Revolution Blues", "Vampire Blues" and "Ambulance Blues", the outlook for any kind of inventive rock and roll is pretty dire.) Only the title track conjures up any kind of atmosphere (though the lyrics are typical rock star navel-gazing.)

For Your Pleasure

Roxy Music

3/5

Roxy's second album has four top-notch slices of kickass art rock weirdness mixed together with four other slowish and mostly overlong tracks that keep derailing the momentum of the record. "Do The Strand" and "Editions Of You" are two uptempo stompers that set a high standard for this album, equalled only by the apex-of-oddness epic "In Every Dream Home A Heartache" and the moody and regal "Beauty Queen". The remainder of this record isn't what you would call *bad* but it basically consists of lot of just-OK ideas stretched thin across extended track lengths.

Queen II

Queen

1/5

Queen's second album is full of power chords, grandiose pianos and over-the-top vocals but is ultimately about as rock and roll as a Gilbert and Sullivan musical. On top of that, dude's singing about ogres and fairies, so thanks but no.

Eternally Yours

The Saints

2/5

The punky tracks on this Australian band's album from 1978 are fairly ordinary, with lots o' loud guitars but no memorable hooks to speak of. Better are the new wave / power pop tracks like "Memories Are Made Of This" and "A Minor Aversion" which are more melodically developed than the nondescript punk numbers that make up the majority of this record.

I See A Darkness

Bonnie "Prince" Billy

1/5

This folk-ish album would have been a lot better if the dude didn't sound like he was about to cry on every track. There are some interesting chord progressions here and there but the quavering vocals just kill the whole thing.

Led Zeppelin III

Led Zeppelin

2/5

With a few rare exceptions, whenever I hear any Led Zeppelin, my immediate inclination is to go find the "isolated drums" version of the song on YouTube and listen to that instead. The muted tone of most of the tracks on *LZ III* result in some of Bonham's least spectacular playing, so aside from "Immigrant Song" and "Out On The Tiles", there's not much here that holds any real appeal.

Green Onions

Booker T. & The MG's

2/5

In which a bunch of top-notch session players get together to tackle some rinky-dink rock and R&B tunes, to not much conseqence. (Title track is cool, though.)

Only By The Night

Kings of Leon

1/5

Unredeemable garbage.

Hounds Of Love

Kate Bush

2/5

The tightly-constructed numbers like "The Big Sky" on this record are decent (if overlong), but the further Bush strays from conventional song structures (as she does on the entire second side), the less compelling the tracks are. In addition, the mix of acoustic and electronic instrumention on this album consistently feels...off. These missteps in the arrangements chip away at the effectiveness of the songs: for example, the nagging synth hook of "Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)" sounds out of sync with the drum track, which itself sounds muffled and flat at the same time. The use of sampling on this album is equally unsophisticated, like the clumsy faux-industrial percussion that contributes little to "Mother Stands For Comfort".

Machine Head

Deep Purple

3/5

Deep Purple's sixth album has a couple of landmark hard rock tracks and a fair number of also-rans. The pulse-raising, uptempo opener "Highway Star" has a lean arrangement that (mostly) keeps the excess to a minimum - ditch the organ and guitar solos and you practically have proto-punk! "Smoke On The Water" with its iconic riff, catchy melody and lyrics *literally about its own creation*, is a titanic rock and roll track. The slower and more blues-oriented numbers that make up the balance of this record are competent but not exceptional.

Trio

Dolly Parton

1/5

I recognize that there's some excellent musicianship going on here, not only in terms of the vocalists. but also the instrumental backing. That being said, this record did not move the needle in terms of my opinion about country music, which is: ain't my bag. (And here's why - country music is perhaps the most *musically* conservative form of comtemporary popular music. The writers and performers don't take risks in terms of melodic or harmonic development; it's just the same I-IV-V chord progressions over and over again. *Trio* is no different - it might be gen-u-ine American music but it totally plays it safe, there's no sense of adventure about it at all.)

White Blood Cells

The White Stripes

3/5

Guitarist/singer/songwriter Jack White is a decent melodicist with a distinctive voice, but the music on *White Blood Cells* often treads on too-familiar ground (Zeppelin-esque blues rock / garage rock / uptempo folk). He does strike gold a few times with the tough "Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground", the hyperactive "Fell In Love With A Girl" and the heartfelt "We're Going To Be Friends" among others, but the rest of the songs aren't uniformly good, and by about the 3/4 mark I feel like that record has said everything it needs to say (and it's also where my tolerance for listening to Meg White smack the crash cymbal runs out).

Pump

Aerosmith

1/5

70s-era Aerosmith had a couple of good tunes here and there but this is ear pollution. It's lunkheaded hard rock with skeezy lyrics that sound like they were written by a guy who hangs out in the park wearing a raincoat and nothing on underneath.

London Calling

The Clash

3/5

Had The Clash kept this to a single LP featuring only the better cuts from these sessions (e.g. "London Calling", "Train In Vain (Stand By Me)", "Lost In The Supermarket" and "Clampdown" among others), it would stand a good chance at being a five-star record. As it is though, this double album is bogged down with b-side quality stuff (pretty much all of sides 3 and 4), diluting its overall impact and dragging down its average. (Yes, the band was expanding its sound on this album but a lot of this turned into little more than genre experiments rather than true innovation.)

Deserter's Songs

Mercury Rev

4/5

This album from 1998 has roots in 60s chamber pop but brings a freshness to the sound that keeps it from sounding like a relic. Singer Jonathan Donahue doesn't exactly have a rock 'n' roll voice but it is well-suited to the material. The vocal melodies are well-developed and the chord changes are sure-footed. The bigger-sounding, more epic tracks are the best on this album - when the band downshifts into the more pop-sounding numbers they lose some of their impact.

One Nation Under A Groove

Funkadelic

2/5

The grooves are there for sure, but the majority of these aren't really songs per se - most of it seems like a jam session committed to tape. 2/5

Duck Rock

Malcolm McLaren

2/5

The hip-hop track "Buffalo Gals" is an amazing collaboration between clothing store owner Malcolm McLaren and former Yes lead singer Trevor Horn but the rest of the album is off-brand Afropop that'll make you wish you'd bought the real thing instead.

Oedipus Schmoedipus

Barry Adamson

2/5

This album by former Magazine bass player Adamson is conceived as soundtrack to an imaginary film, but the diversity of styles on this record makes it seem like more a showcase of "look at all of the things I can do". Unlike an actual film score, there are no motifs or musical threads holding all of this together, to the album's detriment. It's all competent, but absent any real hooks, it's not memorable.

War

U2

3/5

U2's third album has a decent clutch of songs, but it's lacking the experimental spirit that animated and elevated their first two records.

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars

David Bowie

4/5

*Ziggy Stardust* is a fairly stripped-down and bare bones record sonically, so it lives and dies by the strength of the songwriting. The singles from this album-length meditation on what it means to be a rock star are uniformly excellent, but many of the deep cuts are solid also, giving it one of the highest hits-to-misses ratios in Bowie's catalog.

Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots

The Flaming Lips

2/5

The songwriting and production here is competent but the neo-hippie/post-psychedelic vibe of this record doesn't ring my bell, nor do the moon-eyed and/or bizarro lyrics (in "Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, Pt. 1", it sounds like singer Wayne Coyne is just reading a list of bullet points). It also doesn't help that Coyne has a thin, colorless voice that doesn't do much to sell these songs. There are some pretty instrumental stretches here (especially in the closing track) but they're not compelling enough to make me want to spin this album again.

Music From The Penguin Cafe

Penguin Cafe Orchestra

2/5

Kind of like subdued prog rock with some wobbly singing here and there, this mid-70s album from the UK is pleasant enough but lacks both the strong melodies or the experimental flair that would make it memorable.

Head Hunters

Herbie Hancock

4/5

Hancock and his band of hotshot players weave some startling melody lines over complex grooves on this jazz fusion record from 1973. Production is clear as a bell, also. Special kudos go to drummer Harvey Mason whose dynamic and intricate playing provides the essential pulse driving these tracks.

Slippery When Wet

Bon Jovi

1/5

Rock and roll is supposed to have rough edges and jagged corners - in part, that's where the thrill of listening to the Cramps or the Minutemen or The Jesus And Mary Chain comes from. Bon Jovi's third studio album is the antithesis of that - it's a collection of tracks that have been compressed, slathered with reverb, and EQ'd to death, in order to make the disc as "radio ready" as possible. There's no trace of Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones on this record, instead it's the spiritual heir of Boston, Foreigner, Journey and the glut of hyperprocessed junk food rock from the 70s.

The Real Thing

Faith No More

2/5

For album called *The Real Thing*, this sounds like a goof, gluing together asymmetrical chunks of metal, hip-hop, funk and symphonic rock for giggles and topping it off with some weird, nasally vocals that alternate between supposed-to-be-ironic (?) rapping and singing that sounds like a parody of hard rock vocal tropes. The bright spot in the middle of all of this is the work of keyboardist Roddy Bottum whose melodic sense and sharp playing provides the substance that keeps the disparate pieces on this record from completely falling apart. (Docked a point though for the excessive use of slap bass, which after a while was like a burr under the saddle.)

Ananda Shankar

3/5

Not gonna lie, the sitar is not *exactly* my favorite musical instrument and the tracks on this mostly-instrumental album where the sitar was predominant were the least appealing. Better yet were those that mixed that instrument with the Moog synthesizer in equal measure - the interplay between the two made for interesting listening.

Music Has The Right To Children

Boards of Canada

5/5

An absolute masterpiece of sampling, synthesis, sequencing and signal processing, this instrumental album from Scotland's Mike Sandison and Marcus Eion stands head and shoulders above typical 90s electronica. The beauty of this record is how it sounds unquestionably modern and yet at the same time taps into the eerie vibe of the kind of soundtracks that accompanied things like 70s educational programs and wildlife documentaries. (If you are of a certain age, "Roygbiv" will transport you back to a time where you'll practically be able to smell the faint odor of a filmstrip projector in a dimly-lit classroom.)

Violent Femmes

2/5

On The Femmes' debut record, their reliance on acoustic instruments to perform their punky tunes frankly comes across as annoying shtick. There are some solid songs here but this is a ratty and ugly-sounding record.

Darkness on the Edge of Town

Bruce Springsteen

4/5

I have this theory that, at his core, Bruce Springsteen is a fundamentally weird dude and that his "working class guy" shtick is only partly a reflection of his Freehold, NJ upbringing but mostly a persona he adopts to be able to reach out to normal humans. *Darkness* is the last record in which Springsteen lets his freak flag fly - every subsequent album sees him moving towards "normalcy", turning his back on his weird side. Take "Something In The Night", which stars out as a tale of private desperation and escalates toward personal apocalypse, with its images of violence, cars set on fire and the heroes left "running, burned and blind / chasing something in the night". From the first bars, Springsteen throws himself into the song vocally like a man possessed - he wails wordlessly even before the first verse has begun, so consumed with emotion that it has to be let out one way or another. He hardly lets up in the song itself, singing with white-hot intensity throughout. It's an unparalleled performance, the likes of which you'd never ever hear from other so-called "heartland rockers" (like Bob Seger or John Mellencamp) - it comes from somewhere else, from the core of Springsteen's fundamental weirdness. "Streets Of Fire" has that same intensity, as does "Candy's Room", the latter with a near-spoken word vocal juxtaposed over a furious drum part. Much of the rest of *Darkness* ranges from good to great (though the less said about the dreadful "Factory" the better); however these other tracks see Springsteen aiming towards the middle of the road, keeping the intensity of the songs in check and making the lyrics more relatable. On subsequent records Springsteen fully settled into the "voice of the working class" role, keeping all traces of his inner weirdo hidden from view, and the payoff was multiplatinum albums like *Born In The U.S.A.* and stadium shows. But his true self is still in there somewhere though (even though we will likely we will never see it again)

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

4/5

On his debut album Tom Petty keeps his rock and roll songs relatively lean and to the point (10 tracks clocking in under 31 minutes) but even with that direct approach he and his crack band give the individual songs depth through their sharp playing and inventive arrangements. Petty also has a lot of personality (and even displays some swagger on a few of the tracks), which makes the better songs on this collection even more memorable. Most of this record ranges from very good to great - the singles like "Breakdown" and "American Girl" and terrific, as are deep cuts like moody "The Wild One, Forever" and the proto-New Wave "Rockin' Around (With You)"; a few of the other numbers though (like "Hometown Blues" and "Mystery Man") are not much more than run-of-the-mill genre exercises.

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