It's pretty cool how they were going for a blend of hard rock/metal and hip-hop on about half of this album, but for the most part, it feels a bit underwhelming? They'd go on to better things over the next few albums, but "Fight for Your Right" aside, this one just doesn't have it.
Like most people, I know about half these songs from constant radio play back when I was in high school ("Someone Like You" was always my favorite). Unfortunately, the non-singles don't really add anything new for me. Still, it's always nice to revisit a few great songs I haven't thought all that much about in years.
No matter your age, race, gender, or even whether or not you like metal, we can all come together to say "hell yeah, I got Paranoid today," and I think that's beautiful.
Every song on this album sounds like it could have been a hit, and most of them were!
Like many of my age, American Idiot was my first exposure to punk. The singles from this were *everywhere* for the next year or so, which is an eternity when you're 7 years old! Off the top of my head, I can't think of another time that a punk band has had that level of cultural dominance. It's aged better than I'd have expected it to, too.
The late 80s always seemed to be the weakest stretch of R.E.M.'s discography to me, honestly. More straightforward than their earlier work, but without all the stylistic experimentation of the 90s. This one's probably the best of that stretch, though; the darker tone of the music works really well with the more overtly political bent many of the songs take. And let's be honest, even the worst R.E.M. album (with Bill Berry, of course) is still better than most bands' best albums.
First, you think "the lyrics of Imagine are actually so true", then you think "wait a second, it's actually really hypocritical of John Lennon to write those lyrics". But in the end, who really cares? Arguing about "Imagine" has got to be one of the least productive things you could be doing more than 50 years later. The real problem with this album is that just one year without Paul's granny music left John completely unable to write a decent hook!
Always thought this was a bit too gimmicky for its own good, though there's still a lot to like here. My favorites tend to be when they dip into country (e.g., "All My Little Words" or "The One You Really Love"), or the more Brill Building-ish songs (such as "Sweet Lovin' Man" or "When My Boy Walks Down the Street"). Luckily for me, both those types of songwriting get their own full albums, which I end up listening to a whole lot more. 3 hours is just too much! Listen to The Wayward Bus or Charm of the Highway Strip or something, don't listen to this one unless you're *really* dedicated.
All these songs start out like they're going to be on some dark post-punk album (sometimes even borderline industrial), but then after about 30 seconds they become a much lighter post-punk album. This one's gotta be the first (of hopefully many) great discoveries I make through the list!
The red-headed stranger: I'm going to kill my cheating wife! The red-headed stranger, 5 minutes later: I'm going to kill you for touching the horse that belonged to my wife, who I loved! Tommy Lee Jones: I don't care!
It's a perfectly serviceable alt rock album that probably wouldn't get quite as much good press if it weren't by Bob Mould. Not really much to say about it.
His voice kinda reminds me of Elvis Costello in places? It's all pretty well done funk-rock; I wouldn't turn it off if it came on the radio, but I probably wouldn't proactively decide to listen to him in the future, either.
It's extremely frontloaded, but how can you not love an album that gives you "Human Behaviour" and "Venus as a Boy"? Björk is an artist I've always respected more than liked; it's really impressive how she keeps reinventing herself and manages to sound unique the entire time. I don't really get her just yet, but every time I listen to Debut it feels like I get closer to being a huge fan of hers. I really hope it happens!
Despite the fact that so many bands I enjoy take at least a bit of influence from it, I've been pretty much entirely ignorant of reggae, aside from whatever Bob Marley songs come up on the radio or on TV/movies/etc. This album is doing a lot to convince me that that needs to be changed.
I always have high hopes any time I check out a new noise rock album. Like, I'm no stranger to guitar noise, and I'm always looking for more of it! But the problem is that most noise rock doesn't want to do noise in the way I want to hear noise. Like, there's distortion obviously, but instead of a whole lot of screechy feedback blanketing everything, they tend to want to play fast and loud and pummel the listener with sound in a different way. Plus, half the time they end up being an angular post-hardcore band, which is something I've never really learned to like so far. As you can imagine from me talking about that here, Yank Crime ends up being one of those fast, loud, angular post-hardcore albums that just leave me dissatisfied.
You're making me listen to an entire Mott the Hoople album? And it doesn't even have the one Mott the Hoople song that people actually *want* to hear? ("All the Way from Memphis" was kinda cool though, actually.)
Of course, I love "Personal Jesus" and "Enjoy the Silence" as much as anyone else, and the rest of the album isn't really a slouch either. But I still can't help but miss the less polished feeling of their earlier work like Some Great Reward. This one's not quite an all-time classic for me, but I feel like there's for to be something in their discography that is.
If I had a nickel for every time in the past week that the generator gave me a reggae album that got remixed to avoid scaring white people, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.
5 minutes in: These beats aren't so big. 10 minutes in: Is it just going to be like this for an hour? I'm over it. 20 minutes in: I am the beat, the beat is me. 45 minutes in: No, I'm over it again.
1001 Albums to Listen to with Buffy's Mom
Never really realized until just now just how great the bass sounds on this album. Brings it from good to great!
One of the worst trends in music in the late 90s/early 00s was all the artists who decided they had to fill out the *entire* length of the CD because it was there. This album is way too long for me, and I had an unfortunate tendency to start tuning it out when it felt like an album should be ending. The beats sound good though, and I like his voice, just I wish it had been about 45 minutes instead! Between 2 and 3 on this; I rounded down for Licensed to Ill and ever since this site has been convinced that hip-hop is the one and only genre I don't like, I don't think that's necessarily the case! So hopefully rounding up here will fix that.
Mostly, it's a bunch of spoken word over noises, sort of reminds me of some of the artsier moments of Huggy Bear's Taking the Rough with the Smooch. Except there, you're listening to stuff like "Pro No From Now" and "Prayer" because you know you've got "Herjazz" coming up. Here, the payoff is some rudimentary beats with more noise over the top of them. Now, I'm not disparaging rudimentary beats with more noise; the same description is true for Psychocandy, and that's one of my all time favorite albums! The problem here is that they're just not very good at it. This album falls somewhere between a 1 and a 2, giving it the 1 because everything I've read about them in Simon Reynolds' Rip It Up and Start Again makes them sound like unbearable edgelords.