Just…why?? I can’t imagine putting this on a best of list.

Liked and could hear lots of influences, like Beatles and David Bowie, that weren’t obvious to me when the album first came out.

Still amazing after all these years. One intriguing song I wasn’t familiar with: “Keep the Customer Satisfied.”

Might just be a little too esoteric and experimental for me. I admire but do not love. The album’s opening is pretty iconic, though.

So smart, so prescient. I would need to listen to the lyrics closely and repeatedly to really get its impact. Besides the songs I already knew, I really liked “Burn Hollywood Burn” and “Can’t Do Nuttin.” “Fight the Power” will be forever linked to Do the Right Thing as one of the best film musical combos of all time.

Transformer was delightful, not at all what I expected. It’s playful and even fun. The instrumentation and arrangements are creative, and Reed has a wry sensibility (and crystal clear enunciation) that somehow I didn’t know about. What a revelation!

Meh, I missed this album when it came out and I don’t find it compelling now.

While Sinatra’s voice is amazing, the album felt monotonous. All the songs kind of blended together for me.

Mellow and enjoyable.

Honestly, I would never have listened to this album if not for this project, and I was so glad to be introduced to it. The songs sound modern and fresh, and the grooves are irresistible.

On paper this band is up my alley, but I failed to get into their music 15 odd years ago and still am not feeling it. I like “Islands” but the album as a whole seemed drab and unremarkable.

Genre busting brilliance. There’s a little bit of everything and somehow it all works together.

Good, with some standouts.

It’s hard to separate this album from me at 17, but it still sounds great. “You Are the Everything” is my favorite now, probably not back then.

Another one suffused with nostalgia for me, but it didn’t live up to my hype. A few songs are magical, and obviously the sound was super influential for Brit pop, but much of the album is forgettable.

5 stars for originality. 0 stars for accessibility and enjoyment. That averages out to a 1. 😂 Maybe I would understand and appreciate better with repeated listens, but I have no interest in doing that, I’m afraid.

It’s amazing that this was 1974–the production is immaculate and you can hear Fagen enunciate every single word. I love the smoothness and ease, but also the bitterness.

Started off strong (and the lyrics are super interesting) but eventually became a slog for me.

I loved this album! Almost every song is a winner. Jazzy and mellow a lot of the time, but also intense.

“We used to wait / Sometimes it never came.” Twenty years later, I still think this album captured something about how life was changing in the twenty-first century. It’s so coherent and listenable. Torn between a 4 and 5 but going with my heart.

Lots of classics here. Enjoyable, but I wasn’t riveted. (Shh, don’t tell Mike.)

I’m just not a huge Dylan person, but I admire the album. “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” is maliciously funny.

The first sentence of the blurb for this album on Apple Music reads: “No matter where you’re at in life, stepping into Pet Sounds can feel like stepping back into childhood.” That really resonated for me, even though my parents were definitely not listening to Pet Sounds when I was a kid. The hooks in “Sloop John B,” for instance, seem to be deeply imprinted in my subconscious. I also realized how deeply influential this album has been, decades later. Like, does Vampire Weekend or The Shins exist without it?

It was fine. I do like “Tangerine” an awful lot.

Some good/interesting songs here but I wasn’t blown away. We can go this deep into Radiohead’s catalog, but apparently we don’t have any women’s albums we can feature?? I know, we’re early in the 1001. Maybe today is the day?

Catchy.

OMG the misogyny, violence, and ugliness. But also: it kind of feels like we’re all living in Eminem’s world now. This is a pretty profound cultural document and piece of art. It’s not always possible to say when Em is expressing his own hate and when he is exposing it, and that seems like part of the point.

I’m sure it’s a personal failing, but I have never been drawn to the Blues, and this album did not sway me.

Oh yay, finally, a woman! 😂😂 But seriously, I thought this was charming and lovely. Her ad libs are so cool—I felt a little like I was in that club.

I forgot about “Thousands Are Sailing.” What a great song, along with others. Maybe it’s the extended version linked here, but the album started to flag for me after a while.

I liked but think The Suburbs is better.

Love the spiky, raw, but still kind of poppy qualities of many of these songs.

I only knew the hits off this album, and I liked this more than I thought I would but am not into the punk / hardcore / rapping thing that Kiedis does.

Still amazing after all these years. (Sorry for the bad joke.)

Just…why?? I can’t imagine putting this on a best of list.

Never heard of them and found album entirely unmemorable. I also made an executive decision only to listen through track 12 on first disc, since that was the end of the original album.

I wish I liked this more, but there were some highlights and overall it was enjoyable.

I found this one fascinating and weird and went down quite a rabbit hole reading all about Gene Clark.

Not quite what I expected. A lot more classic rocky.

Not more Brit pop! I never realized exactly how overrated the genre was until I started this project. I did re-appreciate “Lucky Man,” and “Bittersweet Symphony” is canonical, but that’s about it for me.

I love how you can see Metal and punk coming out of this. Pretty irrepressible spirit.

Wow, so this is where alt-country comes from! I’m embarrassed that I always just dismissed the band because of its name. These songs are amazing—I’m between a 4 and a 5.

Some gorgeous melodies here, like the somewhat disquieting “Thirteen.” I wasn’t quite as taken by this as our last couple from the same era, but I can see the innovation and influence of Big Star.

I’m a big fan of what I consider ELO’s signature sound. It’s so Beatlesque (Kinks, Beach Boys) but also so forward looking. I do think this album needed an edit; it felt a little baggy.

Probably really a 3.5, but I’m rounding up because “Down by the River” and “Cowgirls in the Sand” are epic.

Looking forward to Nic’s comments (his 33 1/3 book on this album comes out in 2026!!) but I love this one as much as I did when I first started hearing it around the dorms in the late 80s. Are there are any mediocre songs? Not to my ears. It’s raw, jagged, desperate, angry, melancholy, sometimes ugly, but also buoyant, silly, and sexy. It sounded and sounds completely distinctive, instantly recognizable.

There were some moments when I got really into this, but other times I lost the plot. That might be partly a lack of cultural context on my part.

I owned this on cd but haven’t listened to it in decades. She’s doing some pioneering work fusing rap, funk, soul, and pop, especially as a female artist with a strong lyric point of view, but disappointingly, the production sounds dated and some of the songs are mediocre.

I don’t own the album but know most of these songs—it really is packed with classics. Robert Plant’s voice is insanely good. One star off for the mean anti-woman stuff.

I saw we were back with the Blues and my heart sank a little. But actually I ended up really enjoying this. The music just moves, and it has a New Orleans (Delta?) kind of jazzy vibe in places that is awesome, as are Waters’ vocals.

There are a couple of beauts, and I just rewatched the video for “New Frontier,” which is sublime. I can’t believe the assortment of music that I watched on MTV in those early days. But most of the album did not impress me.

Not my thing, but I like that the “random” generator paid its respects to Ozzy, and there was more diversity to the music than I was expecting.

More muted than I thought it would be. Somehow the live atmosphere didn’t come through for me.

I think this holds up well. They sound both very identifiable as a turn of the century band and very much just themselves.

Oh generator, I don’t have time to listen to 6 discs, amounting to more than 3 hours of music. However, I wish I had that much time because the songbook is spectacular. Fitzgerald’s voice is smooth and silky but also so powerful, the lyrics are often genius, and the melodies are gorgeous. Plus the arrangements and instrumentation. This is definitely going into my permanent rotation.

Hmm, there were some moments I could kind of get into, but this felt too much like the Muzak of my childhood.

You couldn’t have paid me money in 1998 to listen to this, and I just did it for free and enjoyed much of it. 😂 Twenty five plus years later, I can appreciate that there is craftsmanship here and that he’s bringing together genres in ways that have since become standard. Plus, some of the songs are just good!

Perhaps not the epochal album it was heralded as at the time, but still sounds tight and was fun to listen to. Between a 3 and 4 for me, but rounding up because it ends on such a high note with “Take It or Leave It.”

Not a big fan of their sound, though how could you not appreciate Grace Slick’s voice, and of course the two big songs here deserve to be classics.

This was truly weird, mostly in good ways, though some of it did not land for me. I can see the influence on Prince and others.

Fun listen. He’s so exuberant as a vocalist and trumpet player, and I love the big band inflected jazz. The songs did get repetitive after a while, though.

My hopes lifted after the first song, which was catchy, but they quickly settled back down. Mid, as the kids say.

Now we’re talking. These songs purr, crackle, groove. Each one is worth listening to in its own right. What a talent Badu is.

Too much mediocre Brit Pop!!

I’m interested by how ground-breaking their sound was but also how you can hear affinities with less “cool” rap of the time.

Oh I really loved this. I’ve listened to plenty of her songs but had not made my way through a whole album. The songs are gorgeous and often moving (you can hear the Jack Antonoff of it) but avoid the obvious pop choices for more surprising ones.