⭐️⭐️ - 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.

Showtune music without a show (and mixed like one too). Full of vamping, crooning, and bellyaching. It’s only 7 songs long and I kept checking to see if it was almost over. “If you were a horse I’d clean the crap out of your stable.” What this album is trying to do, Magnetic Fields’ “69 Love Songs” (released two years later) did so much better it makes Divine Comedy sound like a retroactive imitation.

I wish I had listened to this in 1996. It bears so many classic rock calling cards, (psychedelic-era Beatle chord changes), while still sounding very 90s (in a good way). It’s certainly more rewarding than any Oasis album, which is just pastiche, or Brian Jonestown Massacre, which just sucks. You can see Screaming Trees on a grungier bill, but they’re creating more complicated pop here, and bringing in 12-string guitars, mellotrons, envelope filters. But the real star of the show is Lanagen’s vocals. Some rawk tropes pollute the album (including this misplaced funk groove) but worth a few listens.

It takes a pretty special band to make a live performance have just as strong an impact on newcomers as it does for their longstanding fans. Almost no one can pull it off. For Thin Lizzy, it’s no problem. They’re one of the few bands with a vocal and songwriting approach interesting enough to set free my inner guitar hero fan. It’s not wankery if it’s supported by rich melodies, complex harmonized guitar lines, and Phil Lynott’s soulful wailing voice.

It’s hard to believe this album is from 1981. Did Siouxsie see the future or did the future imitate her? She balances the urgency of the punk that broke 4 years earlier with the gloom and drone that would come to define goth. This album defines goth. It’s a flagplanter record. Still sounds both modern and out of time.

I knew of this band, but had never listened to them. I can’t believe how much an album I never heard could sound like an old friend. Sure, there were a lot of midtempo, Americana bands of this time, but unlike a lot of trend jumpers, Calexico avoids tropes and relies on solid songwriting that is too big for banjosploitation and decorative accordion. This is more in the realm of Bob Dylan, R.E.M., and Wilco than the depression-era reenactors who littered the early 2000s landscape.

For such an undeniable classic, it’s tough to reckon with how many throw away songs are on here. This whole record is Bowie’s bridge from folk singer/songwriter-type to Glam Rock Extraterrestrial. The drag, the drama, the voice, interplanetary metaphors, even Mick Ronson were already in place (as was Rick Wakeman whose piano dominates the record). And yeah, Song For Bob Dylan and Kooks are kind of slogs to get through, but if this whole album was Life On Mars, Pretty Things, Changes and Queen Bitch, it’d be enough to catapult it into legendary status, even if it Bowie’s career ended right here instead of soaring straight out into the cosmos for another 45 years.

Classic soul pop sound, but if we’re being honest, the whole record floats on Dusty’s vocals (although Aretha’s bassist, Tommy Cogbill is the other standout on this record). Is it dated to 1969? Yeah, it’s the definitive “this is the sound of 1969” album. Those strings did not hold up. The horns did. It’s the kind of album a cynic might point to in a contrast to Blonde on Blonde or the Velvet Underground, without any appreciation for the undeniable probability that Lou Reed and Bob Dylan probably both loved this record. Are there better albums doing what it does? Sure, Aretha herself, for one. Is it great, an all time classic, a necessary part of any collection? Can’t be denied.

I always want to like Jack White better than I do, but it’s hard to avoid the fact that every song sounds the same. Cool grooves, great guitar tones and playing, passionate vocals, but a monotonous listen. This wasn’t the case with the White Stripes. What happened?

I like to think of Nirvana as the musical equivalent of a body horror movie. One of those exploitation films with too much blood to the point where it’s gone past realism and to the point of ridiculous. A chainsaw in plunged into a woman’s torso and 75 gallons of blood comes shooting out drenching the walls and leaving a puddle an inch deep around a school gymnasium. Doll steak. Test meat. I travel through a tube and end up in your infection. Extend the metaphor: Radiohead’s a whole different kind of terror. A Kubrickian nightmare. Paranoid androids. A Clockwork Orange kicking your ribs in. Who’s gonna stop them, you and your cronies? A Space Odyssey, taking home movies for the folks back home of all these weird creatures who lock up their spirit, drill holes in themselves and live for their secrets. And therein we have the connection. Like Kubrick, Radiohead’s music isn’t actually about homesick aliens or dystopian ice ages, or wealthy New York sex cults, or black-eyed angels. It’s about how humanity fails us, and the human capacity to overcome those failures and persist. Think of Radiohead that way and you start to see it everywhere “we” (the faceless, the anonymous crowd) “are hungry for a lynching.” “Stay in the shadows, cheer at the gallows”. “I” (the individual) “used to think there was no future left at all,” Thom mumbles over the hypnotic riff of “I Might Be Wrong.” Every few songs we stop and remind ourselves, “Phew, for a minute there, I lost myself.” Amnesiac is the pinnacle of this. The end of the second act of the movie. HAL has decided to kill us. Living in times we can’t stand it. Take the money and run. Women and children first. We’re singing in the rain, my droogies. The wolf’s at the door and, of course I’d like to stay and chew the fat, but we ride tonight. Ghost horses.

Fun grooves. Really liked it. Surprised I missed this band when they happened.