⭐️⭐️ - Good protometal archival album, chugalugging blues riffs - good guitar instructional album. Fun guitar and keyboard tones. Smoke on the water is as kind of blah as I remember it, but Never Before is a decent stand out, calls back to their prog roots.
Was there a rivalry between Arcade Fire and The Decemberists? Maybe they’re just from the same time period, but I kind of lump them together as these two indie rock darlings unmarred by punk rock, and it was always evidence that The Decemberists were the victors in this. Arcade Fire is like chamber pop for corporate coffee house PA systems. Listening to this album is a big yawn fest that made me think “this is like the Coldplay to Wilco’s Radiohead.”
Perhaps the vital early Stones album. It’s a soul album. Cynical, dark, an echo from within the abyss, confirming just how dark it is where we’re all headed. Escalation fears. Out of time. High and dry. What a drag it is, getting old.
Clearly deserving of this list. An album that really has no equal and, despite some very 90s calling cards (the guitar tones on “Black Star”) I’m still enthused at the opportunity to play this album now, 30 years later.
Tight, orderly, dour punk album from a band with a core of warmth and vulnerability. I much prefer this branch of punk to the snotty California pop punk that would come to dominate the genre.
Paul’s most marijuana soaked contact high of a masterpiece is nearly 50 years old but it remains a marvel of studio wizardry. It’s both pitch perfect and loose. At points, it feel improvisational and yet the whole band seems to be of a single mind. That’s because they are, Paul plays almost everything on the album, with a few guest spots from Denny Laine, Ginger Baler, and Linda peppered in. Still stands as Paul’s greatest post-Beatles achievement and the album to flip any Paul dissenter. A true must have.
Is this what Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers would sound like without the janglepop influence? Just riffy southern rock swamp sludge? To be certain, this album does not hold up and does not belong on this list. Super one note. And yet, I hesitate to give it one star, because I don’t hate it. It’s fun and carefree and rocks steadily. Every song sounds the same, sure, but it’s a decent song. Maybe it’s the once teenage guitar student in me that thinks this would be a fun album to sit next to and learn to play, and it would be. But that and movie trailers is about all it’s good for.
For a someone battling for space in the teen market, Lorde takes a lot of risks. She sings songs that are not pretty, in a croaking voice, and that ask big, difficult questions. Her outlook is one of a sliver of hope peering out of a full sky’s worth of dark clouds. She rejects lighthearted fun in exchange for a fuller experience. Still, she employs so many 2017 tropes as to leave the songs feeling outdated within less than a decade of their release. And, worse yet, the music itself is unmemorable. You couldn’t sing one of these songs even 10 seconds after it ends. A worthy listen, would not bring it home.
Aerosmith more appropriately belong in the marketers hall of fame than the rock and roll one. They are a gimmick. An imitation of a rock band. They are skilled musicians, virtuosos in some ways, who understand iconography and anthemic sonography very well, and the instincts to show off their chops or create sub-Thuragood cliche rock clash on this album, with musicianship often losing. Why is it this Aerosmith album that we’re choosing to put in the time capsule and not Get A Grip or Nine Lives or something that more accurately portrays who they are when they stopped pretending they weren’t Beatles fans? Even this album can’t hide it with the harmonies on Sweet Emotion (the only stand out track) giving up the ghost and the horns on the otherwise idiotic “Adam’s Apple” clearly pinched directly from “Savoy Truffle.” It’s a juvenile record by people pretending to be more juvenile than they in a shrewd salesmanship maneuver.
Elvis Costello didn’t invent sardonic pop (it was Dylan, right?) but he did alchemize it into something that was too punk to be a Randy Newman-esque singer/songwriter take on it, and too singer/songwriter complex to be Clash-esque punk. He’s the more literate version of both and although at least two other albums are most frequently cited as his masterpieces (My Aim is True and Blood & Chocolate), This Year’s Model is the one where he really provides that thesis. You can’t have a record collection without it.
I guess the argument is supposed to go “well, without Slade you wouldn’t have Cheap Trick or AC/DC.” Of course, to accept that you have to outright ignore the existence of the New York Dolls, not to mention The Who. All four bands made much more fun and more musically pleasing versions of this. This wants to be fun, but in 2025, the bravado is the only thing that qualifies as a joke. It’s loud and crass, but not even in the way that KISS or Poison were. For some reason I keep seeing the word “glam” tossed around with this album, but it Lady Stardust did not bless this record.