Pretentious lyrics, bad singing. Complex mixing with interesting choices.
Basic hymnal structure, folk style instruments, repetitive and boring.
Strange mix with vocals too low. Cobain's repetitive style has not aged well. Love his guitar solos though.
Pretentious lyrics, bad singing. Complex mixing with interesting choices.
Band sounds good, especially guitar. Can't stand Morissey's sense of melody. Repetitive and awful, same from song to song. Could not get through even half before I ragequit.
Historically important but very predictable 70 years later. All 12-bar blues progressions. Great performance though.
Total shit. Awful singer, boring songwriting. Did not make it through two songs.
A landmark concept album in hip-hop. Lamar combines lyricism, storytelling, allegory, passion, and high-fidelity production in this masterpiece.
The first song is a 1-4-5 chord progression, the most common in Western popular music. Second song is a 1-4. Third song is a 1-4. Fourth song sounds like a 5-4-1. Ok, the songwriting is crap, got it. How about the singer and band? Middling and lousy. An amateur production all the way down. I wondered why I hadn't heard of this album. Now I know why. Lazer Guided Turd.
A strangely flaccid band, as if some accountants and librarians decided to make some music but didn't want to be too loud about it. Listening to them is like writing your name with a wet noodle. You can do it, but why would anyone want to? Their rhythm is constant and busy, the recording is thin and trebly, Stipe's singing is weird and morose. But it's a strong debut record for its originality, even if I don't like what they do. I wish they had maintained this experimental spirit as they went on, instead of moving into a more mainstream-friendly sound.
Bizarrely distant, high gloss production does not match the singer's confessional point of view. Rough lyrics and frankly lousy speak-singing throughout. This might have been a solid album with a more natural, intimate sound. A few good moments but totally forgettable.
A very clean and sanitized recording of reggae compared to what is produced in Jamaica, but it's a timeless sound with Marley's beautiful voice and spirit animating the songs.
What a beautiful voice. Very unusual to hear a woman singing with men providing the background vocals.
This album has aged terribly. It was huge when it came out, but it sounds so small now. Weak melodies, safe chord progressions, busy bass guitar, passionless guitar, and Bono singing like a drunken hack at karaoke night. I'm surprised at how amateur the band sounds, even though they had long been professionals by this time. Boring and nearly talentless.
A pastiche of 90s sounds here. Some moments are clearly Sonic Youth, or Nirvana, or Pixies, sometimes in quick succession. But the core sound is a low-talent college band. The singer is especially under-accomplished. Not impressed at all by this album. Why wasn't a better band given this opportunity?
Solid debut by a blues rock band that hadn't found its style quite yet. There are a couple zingers here, but their best was yet to come.
Flaccid, self-absorbed, inoffensive. This band does nothing for me. They have a distinctive sound; I'll give them that. But it's a whiny, jangly sound I don't want to hear.
Boring and safe, with nothing risked. It sounds like the hardest and most interesting life experience for this band was that time they came in 3rd at the county fair Battle of the Bands, only because the mayor's son was in the band that won and his friend was in the band that placed second. Boring music for boring people.
Beautiful, impressionistic piano from a jazz master. The trio has an almost telepathic connection. Doesn't swing like Thelonius or Garner, but it's a gentle, soothing sound. A great entree to jazz for someone new.
Other than the title track, this album is forgettable. It sounds like a pale imitation of Motown combined with some lousy folk music. The songs are spent after one minute and don't go anywhere else. I'm annoyed before the end of each one. Guess you had to be there.
The singer couldn't be arsed to go to the studio, so someone held a phone up to the microphone. And he phoned it in. The songs are too similar. Tempo, texture, and the constant, busy, busy, busy rhythms combined with monotone singing. This band was part of the early 2000s glut of plural-noun-named bands trying to reinvent The Kinks. Not much to see here. Just go listen to The Kinks.
A few moments of interesting noises scattered throughout 45 minutes of crap. It's as if an art student turned in their sketchbook for their final project. How and why is this an album?
Brilliant pop from the 1960s about coming of age in a more innocent and puritanical time. Complex harmonic structure and melody are combined with unusual instrumentation. Unfortunately, Brian Wilson's bizarre, perpetual falsetto has aged poorly. To modern ears, it's a weird affectation. Still a great album.
Very impressive album for its time. Ambitious song structures and complex instrumentation. I think this is the earliest I've heard double bass drum, which would become a staple of metal about 10 years later. I can forgive most of the far out sojourns and weird free jazz parts here and there. Alas, I have to deduct a star for pretentious lyrics and over-long songs.
Beautiful harmonies and voices from a close-knit group. It's nice to remember people used to carry a tune without using software or going hog wild with melisma. The mix is very odd for being in the early days of stereo (all the drums on one side, all the singers on the other, for example). The songs are well-crafted and executed.
Full instrumentation with a funky '70s sound. The songs are structurally simple and repetitive vamps. Best consumed in small doses, not as an entire album.