There's this indie karaoke bar I go to sometimes, and all the other women there are always so cool that I'm too intimidated to even consider talking to them. But one time, I sang "One More Hour" at the bar, and one of those really cool women came over to tell me how cool she thought I was. If that's not 5-star worthy, I don't know what is!

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.

Killer Queen is probably my favorite of their songs, as someone who only ever really listened to Queen on the radio. Always assumed this album was just going to be Killer Queen and friends, but it turns out that might not even be the best song on here!

I don't really think about the White Stripes that much, other than maybe as that band whose song gets played at every sporting event I've ever been to. But every time I listen to them, they're a lot better than I expected! Not sure I see them as all-time greats, but certainly in the "if I had to listen to the modern rock station, I would be so relieved to get this instead of yet another post-grunge band" tier.

It's only 8 am, but I'm grooving in my seat right now. Kind of a shame I got this one on a work day, you know?

This cover looks like a forgotten late-90s screamo album that your friend is inexplicably obsessed with.

Thanks to the magic of modern recording technology, you no longer need to commit crimes to hear Johnny Cash in concert!

Surprisingly good for about 15 minutes! Unfortunately, there's still 40 minutes after that...

Being someone who doesn't always pay the most attention to lyrics makes it a bit difficult to really fall in love with a lot of folk albums, for which the lyrics are a big deal. Of course, even *I* know a perfect song when I hear one, and this album starts out with two of them.

Every time I hear "Panama", I think it's "Everybody Wants Some", which of course means that I'll be spending the day thinking of John Cusack and his anthropomorphic hamburger friend.

Always thought these guys were Irish for some reason, so mostly this album is just making me think of the Commitments. It's fine, but why wouldn't I just listen to classic soul instead?

A strong contender for the most frontloaded album of all time. We've all heard those first three songs a billion times before, but every time I listen to them again, it's like the first time. I've come to realize that they're actually pretty mindblowing, and can't imagine what they must have sounded like at the time. The rest of the album is fine, not really anything special, so overall it falls short of being an all-time great, but you can't beat that beginning.

Never really thought his version of "Walk On By" beat Dionne Warwick's until literally this listen, but yeah that's an all-time great. Unfortunately, I don't really care for the cover of "By the Time I Get to Phoenix", which sucks because it's almost half the album.

I mostly only knew of Al Green for the Talking Heads cover of "Take Me to the River" and the Orange Juice cover of "L.O.V.E. Love", honestly. As it turns out, I'm not a huge fan of him. There's nothing *wrong* with this per se, it's just that the songs don't stick with me at all.

Why do I keep getting triple albums on the days I've got the least time to actually listen to them? Anyway, George Harrison looks like a gnome on this, which makes it disappointing that it's really not all that whimsical. Plus, Nina Simone makes the versions of "My Sweet Lord" and "Isn't It a Pity" on this completely and totally obsolete with her unsung classic Emergency Ward! Probably like a 2.5, but I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt because the aforementioned Nina Simone album is so good it justifies all this excess.

This one pretty much blew my mind hearing it for the first time many years ago, and for a while it was one of my all-time favorites. Revisiting it for this, I'm noticing just how much it relies on a great opener and great closer. Other than maybe "Mama Roux", everything in between that is more or less forgettable. But that first song and last song are totally perfect, the way that the backing vocals feel like they're ghosts rising out of the swamp is *still* eerie!

I mean, *duh*! You've got Paul's granny music at its absolute peak, you've got John doing freaky circus music, you've got Ringo being his endearing self, and George is there too (sorry George, your album was Revolver!) What else could you possibly want?

We have the Kinks at home

I always tend to underestimate how good "Smoke on the Water" is, and it's almost enough to make this album worth it. But that and the amazing line "could we have everything louder than everything else" are sort of immediately undercut by a drum solo that goes on way too long. I've never particularly cared for Deep Purple, and this doesn't really get me to reconsider.

That was actually better than I expected, as someone who didn't like the other Spiritualized album she heard! I don't remember any of it immediately after listening, but it was really pretty and went by way faster than I would have expected for an hour-long album.

I've always thought this album cover is inexplicably hilarious. Unfortunately, nothing after "And It Stoned Me" really catches me at all. It feels sort of like he's trying to combine soul with folk, which I appreciate the effort at, but he doesn't really do a very good job with it.

It's the weakest Fairport Convention album of 1969, but I'm never going to say no to listening to Sandy Denny. I've never really understood why people think of "Who Knows Where the Time Goes" one of her best songs, though "Percy's Song" is a highlight of the band's discography. I also like the party atmospheres of "Si Tu Dois Partir" and "Million Dollar Bash" a lot, though I think most people don't! Anyway, if you're reading this, make sure not to miss out on What We Did On Our Holidays. It's their first album with Sandy, back when the band still sounded like the British Jefferson Airplane, and it's definitely my favorite of theirs. Too bad it didn't make the cut here!

This might be the best Iommi's guitar has ever sounded, but they don't quite have the songs to match. I think it's an improvement over the overrated Master of Reality, but not really as good as the first two. Still pretty good though!

I hate handing it to Kanye for obvious reasons, but the production on this is a fairly big improvement over Like Water For Chocolate, and I thought the production on that one was already pretty good! Unfortunately, the songs still don't really stick with me, which prevents this from being as good as it could be.

I only knew about Take On Me coming in, but I really wanted to like this. Unfortunately, no matter how much I really want to like synthpop in general, it never really works for me.

One of the easiest 5s I'll ever give on this website, I've loved the Byrds ever since I got into music, and this is certainly their most ambitious album. It's got this amazing blend of psychedelic rock and country that no one else can do quite like them, like every time I hear a steel guitar and phasing at the same time I fall in love all over again. Unfortunately, it's a Byrds album, which means it ends with a bunch of nonsense. Space Odyssey is the clearly weakest song on here, even as it's probably one of their better closing tracks. Doesn't hurt that it maybe has Gene coming back to do backing vocals on it (that might be him you're hearing in your left ear! I go back and forth on this myself).

I gotta be honest, this one just blew right by me. Usually, even if I'm listening while I work, *something* is going to stick, good or bad, but that didn't happen here. As wallpaper music, it's fine, I guess?

Very familiar with this one, so I decided to change things up today by listening to the Closet Mix for once. I don't think the difference is quite as drastic as some people make it out to be (with the obvious exception of "Some Kinda Love"), but it's nice to have a change of pace every once in a while. The more intimate songs are my favorites by a long shot, the rockers just don't work quite as well with this new, meeker sound, though I still do quite like "Beginning to See the Light". I guess it's the two songs between that and "Murder Mystery" that really hurt the overall strength of this album. Those are just too slight and wouldn't work on any album.

There's this indie karaoke bar I go to sometimes, and all the other women there are always so cool that I'm too intimidated to even consider talking to them. But one time, I sang "One More Hour" at the bar, and one of those really cool women came over to tell me how cool she thought I was. If that's not 5-star worthy, I don't know what is!

We all start out by being disappointed when we think we're going to hear "Walk on the Wild Side" and instead it's "Can I Kick It". But then we grow up, and we learn that the proper order of things is to hope for "Can I Kick It" and be disappointed by "Walk on the Wild Side".

Yeah, this one's the best Kinks album. Listen to it when you're in a nostalgic mood (college graduation, first big move, significant birthday, etc.), and it'll blow you away. One of the fun things about it is that it's both genuine and ironic at the same time, much like how we make jokes about our own anxieties regarding the passing of time.

I know for sure that one of the first albums I bought when getting into music was Cheap Thrills, which makes it a bit weird that I don't think i've really thought about Janis Joplin in several years. Even "Me and Bobby Mcgee" here feels unfamiliar, despite having heard it a billion times. In all, I guess this album just made me want to listen to Kris Kristofferson, honestly. It's not all that psychedelic either, not sure what that genre is doing here.

I never have anything worthwhile to say about reggae, but I always think it sounds pretty cool. It was also pretty neat to read about how this album was mostly recorded in a bedroom, that kind of no-fi origin is the kind of thing I love to hear about!

I was probably the last person on Earth to have never heard the title song before, but that's all over now. I like the pounded-out piano riff on the chorus a lot! The rest of the album is done well enough, if a bit unmemorable. Probably not something I'll be coming back to, but yeah, I definitely had no excuse for not having heard the hits off it before, so I'm glad I did finally.

One of the first cool albums I ever fell in love with when getting into music, even if I ended up preferring Fear of Music for a long time. I've always loved songs with overlapping vocals, and I'm sure this is a big contributor to that. Also love how their "let's try to sound like Joy Division, who we have never heard" song is approximately a thousand times better than Joy Division.

Two albums in one day? Feels like cheating, but okay... I've heard OutKast's other albums, but I never got around to this one because I didn't quite like them enough to want to listen to two hours of them. So basically, I only knew "Hey Ya" off this album, which led me to assume that The Love Below was the main draw of this album. As it turns out, I was wrong; Speakerboxxx is actually great! Production sounds so cool, and I fall more in love every time I hear those horns. Also, it turns out that I've almost certainly also heard "I Love the Way You Move" and just never realized it (are we *sure* the hook there isn't sampled from somewhere? It feels like it should have always existed!) It's maybe a bit long, but still an easy 4. As for The Love Below: It's fine, I guess? Everything sounds fairly nice, but the songs lack memorability outside of the aforementioned "Hey Ya". I was feeling like it was starting to drag well before it even finished. Honestly, it's probably a 2? So that averages out to a 3 for the whole album, obviously.

I really love soul music, and literally everyone likes Marvin Gaye, so you'd think I'd be a big fan of his, right? Unfortunately, for whatever reason, his music has never really connected with me; it's typically good, but not great. Even more unfortunately, this album is 75 minutes of divorce songs (including one about having to pay alimony) that just aren't very good.

Some great songs on here obviously, but everyone except Ringo ("Yellow Submarine" is a good song, I don't care what everyone says!) also kinda has a dud too. Sorry, but you can't convince me that "Good Day Sunshine" and "Doctor Robert" aren't phoned in to pad the track list a bit! I go back and forth on if I like "Love You To" or not; right now the answer is no, but sometimes I actually really enjoy it! In any case, even in situations where I think it's a bit of a bust, this is still George's breakout album, with "Taxman" and "I Want to Tell You" both being highlights for me. And then there's "Tomorrow Never Knows", which everyone except me seems to think is an all-time classic. I've always hated it; it's tuneless experimentation for the sake of experimentation. I'm not totally opposed to experimentation for its own sake, but the underlying song has to be good first! But obviously, I can't rate the album with "Eleanor Rigby", "I'm Only Sleeping", "Here, There and Everywhere", and "She Said She Said" in addition to the aforementioned songs i really like anything less than a 4. I'm just contrarian, I'm not stupid!

When he tries to step out of soft rock (whether it be blues like "Steamroller" or folk like "Oh Susannah), the results are pretty dire. As long as he's sticking to soft rock, it's fine enough, but mostly it makes me wish I had gotten Tapestry today instead. Oh well, at least this has "Fire and Rain", and Carole King playing piano.

I tend to think of this one as a solid, if unspectacular, alt-country album. But for some reason, it's really working for me this morning. I never realized just how good a song "Misguided Angel" is! The album also sounds so so desolate, which dovetails nicely with my current mood of "it's been weeks since the last time I saw my friends". The only issue is that I've never liked their version of "Sweet Jane" nearly as much as everyone else does, and also their cover of "Walking After Midnight" isn't quite Patsy-level.

Sorry, but I've never really gotten the appeal of the title song here, which works much better on Brian's version of Smile as a culmination of a movement than as a standalone song. The attempts at writing political songs tend to fall flat too, either being way too corny like "Don't Go Near the Water" or actively reactionary like "Student Demonstration Time", which seems to be blaming the students at Jackson State for the police shooting at them. I do like "Disney Girls", though; Bruce is a pretty underrated singer for the band. But overall, this has got to be the weakest of the albums that get a good bit of critical acclaim, despite maybe having their best cover art.

I've never really been able to get into vocal jazz in general, unfortunately, and nearly 3 and a half hours of it is too much. I listened to this as I worked, and a lot of it gets tuned out, but every time my attention gets drawn to it, it's pretty nice. Plus it doesn't actually feel like 3 and a half hours, somehow! Almost certainly never listening too this again, but I will be listening to one of Ella Fitzgerald's shorter albums soon. Maybe she'll be the one to finally get me into jazz?

Kinda crazy that their debut isn't the pick here, honestly. But I won't complain, because I don't actually care for their debut, and this one's new to me! Anyway, on to my thoughts about I Against I: I didn't expect it to be metal! I kinda like the bass here, but the guitar feels too clean. The vocals are pretty good and not what I'd usually expect for metal, but the songs don't really leave an impression on me. In all, it's one of those albums that I don't really care for, but getting to hear a whole new side of Bad Brains is something I really appreciate.

Not quite pinched enough to be part of the Possessed Doll Voice pantheon (Cranes, Lisa Germano, Stina Nordenstam), but closer than I expected from PJ Harvey! The arrangements sound cool too, can't really put my finger on what they sound like to me though. Maybe a less agoraphobic Lisa Germano? None of that really helps anyone who doesn't already know Lisa's whole deal, but it's not like anyone is going to read this anyway, so whatever.

I'd already heard too much bad blues rock before listening to Muddy Waters for the first time, so he comes off as more rock to me than is probably historically accurate. The songs are pretty good, but as someone whose ear isn't really attuned to blues nuances, they all sound more or less the same to me. But I'm sure others would say that about some of my favorites. Between a 3 and a 4 on this one at the time of writing, though I suspect I'll give it the 4 because otherwise I'd feel bad about implying that Disraeli Gears is on the same level.

Like any sane person, I really do love "September" but unfortunately, that's not on this album. These songs never really rose above the level of "fine" to me; nothing really stood out or gave me any reason to think about returning to this album later. Sorry guys, but maybe I'll check out one of the other albums sometime!

The atmosphere of this one's not nearly as much of an asset as At Folsom Prison, I guess because maybe it had to be cleaned up more for television than for just an album? But on the bright side, it gave us "A Boy Named Sue", and honestly might have a better song selection if not for playing "San Quentin" twice back to back?

The Soft Boys are basically all my favorite bands' favorite band, so why do they do so little for me? I guess part of the problem is something like "I Got the Hots" sounds like one of the throwaway tracks Guided By Voices would do for 30 seconds, but it's nearly 5 minutes long! The quality control here isn't very good, and even the good songs feel directly ripped from the 60s (for example, the verses of "I Wanna Destroy You" are basically just the Who's "Much to Much"). As a contrast to the Soft Boys, I'm gonna leave you with a band that proclaims themselves to be the "genuine original hard guys": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cGKaoL_kws

Doesn't have the atmosphere of Some Great Reward or the songs of Violator, and so it doesn't do much for me. It's fine, but not much more than that.

Sorry, I just don't get this kind of electronica. It doesn't really go anywhere or do anything interesting; I find it really hard to figure out what I'm supposed to be listening for in it. Probably I'd like it more if I were the type of girl to go to raves, but instead I'm the type of girl to sit in her room and listen to homework assigned by the 1001 Albums Generator.

Landfill indie that manages to do the impossible and make me wish I was listening to the Strokes instead

When I was getting into music, the popular wisdom was that this was *the* all-time best hip hop album. It's really hard to argue with that! Most of the time hip hop hooks don't really work for me, which leaves me thinking "these beats are kinda fun" and then having nothing else to do on, which means I tend to respect the genre more than I enjoy it. But this whole album works for me! Like yeah, maybe it is the greatest album of all time? I'm not quite there yet, but it's certainly up there.

This is just here because the author wanted Nuggets, but was prevented by his own rules, right?

Other than "She's Not There" and *maybe* "Tell Her No", nothing the Zombies did before this album is really worth your time. And then they broke up before this one came out, so there's only a couple lackluster partial reunion singles to compare it to. But then, this is one of the all-time great psych pop albums; it comes off favorably against the best work of anyone you'd think to compare it to, even the Beatles. Not sure how they managed it, but this might be the greatest flash-in-the-pan album of all time.

This is like if one of those annoying skronky bands from C86 (MacKenzies, bIG fLAME, the Shrubs) was actually good! All the hate this gets on here is mostly because of his voice, right? It's not even that bad, and there's not really anything else on here that feels too hateable.

I really enjoy The Bends and OK Computer, and I'm slowly starting to get the appeal of Kid A, but this one leaves me cold. I guess they're trying to show that they can still be a rock band, but unfortunately all the best songs they had must have already been used for Kid A, because nothing here is particularly memorable. Apparently I've still got 5 Radiohead albums ahead of me? Not looking forward to all that tbh.

I feel like I remember hearing many years ago about Buckley's Starsailor as being one of the weirdest things ever to be released by a major label. So I guess I was expecting something more experimental than this, though maybe it took him a bit to get all the way out there? Still pretty comprehensible as a folk artist, though there's bits of jazz coming in there at times. Luckily for Buckley, folk is one of the few genres where I've got patience for *multiple* 10+ minute songs. It's pretty enough, but it's probably not something I'm ever going to listen to very much after this.

Really wanted to like this one, since the idea of adapting classical music to rock like this is a neat one (albeit I'm admittedly a philistine who doesn't have the patience for most classical music). Unfortunately, it kinda ended up sounding like a generic prog jam? And as someone who's jam-averse, that obviously doesn't work for me!

Everyone talks about this album as if it's mostly lyrics (and don't get me wrong, the lyrics really are *that* good!), but I love Cohen because he writes such good songs in every other aspect too, and that's something people rarely talk about! In particular, I think the arrangements on this album are so pretty and just so perfect for his voice. This album (and especially her backing vocals on "Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye") even made me go out and look for Nancy Priddy's solo album many years ago! (It's not really worth it, unfortunately.) Plus, "So Long, Marianne" is great accompaniment for dancing around the kitchen!

A bit more repetitive than I usually like, but the harmonium always sounds pretty cool. Towards the end I started getting more hooked in, and the repetition started to get hypnotic.

I've been doing some thinking, and I've got some ideas to improve the album. One: Ray Manzarek needs to be louder, angrier and have access to a time machine. Two: Whenever Ray Manzarek's not playing, all the other members should be asking, "Where's Ray Manzarek?"

I had a friend in college who was really into these guys and Bob Dylan, so I'm pretty familiar with this album. But I never loved it the same way he did; I've always been more of Neil Young and the Byrds, when it comes to folk rock of that era. They're like totally serviceable and everything, but the Band doesn't really do anything that stands out from the pack for me. "Up on Cripple Creek" is my pick for a song from this album, but even then I mostly remember it from seeing a live video of Bobbie Gentry singing it once! Now *that's* someone you ought to hear before you die.

Thanks to having a taste in music that runs far noisier than most, my main reaction to most of the canonized metal albums is "was *that* it?" Like, the riffs are fast, and I guess they came off as loud and dangerous to the average listener back then, but I'm not the average listener. Unfortunately, Iron Maiden is a victim of that same dynamic; I'm sitting around listening for it to get scary and it just... never does? I know it's not even just that I'm unfairly judging it according to the standards of noise rock, because Motorhead managed to do it right around this same timeframe! That being said, I'm convinced by Bruce Dickinson as a really good vocalist for the band, so maybe listening to more will get me there someday. Just not today, and not with this album.

Sometimes the production sounds a bit more artificial than I'd like to hear from soul, but I guess that's because it's a new wave soul combination? I guess the songs don't really stick with me too much, but it's a totally pleasant listen (though that's the case with like 95% of sophisti-pop for me).

I'll be honest, I can never remember the difference between Rod Stewart and James Taylor. They're basically the same type of guy to me, even though they don't really sound the same. I guess actually Rod Stewart is significantly better, but he's still not anything that feels like I've been missing out on over the 28 years I've been around.