1001 Albums Summary

Absolutely loved the album, the two MCs have amazing chemistry and are incredibly fun to listen to. Best part is it's all tied together by the great DJ.

It was an okay album with some major ups and downs. Wouldn't It Be Nice and I Just Wasn't Made For These Times were both 10/10 amazing songs, the rest of the album was anywhere from pretty good to rather boring.

Just some good, groovy '90s jazz rap. Not a whole lot to say other than the middle of it did lose some steam, but it picked it all back up in the end. I loved Luck of Lucien and Ham 'N' Eggs. The 4 guys are all awesome lyricists. Also shoutout to this album for making a song berating wife-beaters <3

Went in expecting some flavor of budget Radiohead given the discourse I've heard/seen regarding the album, definitely more than that. The lead vocalist has a really calming voice and it was a great wind-down album given how wild of a day I had when I listened to this. I could easily see this becoming a part of my regular rotation when I'm in the mood for some moody alt-rock :>

Absolutely love her singing voice, I mean, who doesn't? My one issue with the album as a whole is it lacks that edge that most soul music does. It was a little shaped to fit a global palette and it certainly worked. Otherwise amazing album. Also she covers The Cure, that alone adds a star.

Of all the Bowie albums, The Next Day? My first experience with this album was laughing at the fact that the album cover is literally "Heroes" with a big white square on it. Admittedly, that's the absolute worst part of the album. Past that it's a totally fine and serviceable record, but it's just that and not much past it. Not quite "You should listen to this before you die."

This just shouldn't be on here. The Wikipedia blurb this site gives me literally says the album flopped on the charts. He's just trying and failing to sound like Bob Dylan.

There are two albums my high school band director would always talk about, this one and Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, now I can see why. Definitely one of the better jazz albums I've ever listened to. This feels like a great album to relax to at night. Not to mention all the jazz classics and standards on this album like Corcovado or The Girl From Ipanema.

I love how unique this record is. The sampling and background vocals are my favorite part of the whole album, not to mention it's violently groovy. Also some people in the reviews of this album suck at masking their racism. To those people, you're literally the reason this album was made. Do better.

Just not for me, "Draining" is the first word that comes to mind. Even the better songs on the album like O'Malley's Bar just drag on and on for far too long. Not 1/5 because I listen to artists who were primarily influenced by this guy.

What a grand album, loved every song. The lead vocalist has an amazing voice and knows how to use it. Really glad that this was my introduction to U2.

This is definitely the punk album of all time, nothing beats it. I already listened to this one way before I got it on this list and loved it from the start.

Amazing storytelling paired with subpar vocals and instrumentals, solidly 50/50 to me.

I'm really glad I don't care about Game of Thrones or take public transport, thank you reviewers. Anyways the album's pretty good, I don't really understand why it's on the list though.

These guys are obnoxiously high. That drives the whole album, how drugged out they are. Sometimes it leads to greatness, other times it leads to "oh..." A totally fine album, just maybe a little too druggy for me.

Really cool listen. For how varied the album is, it feels incredibly bloated. Still an awesome listen and definitely up there when it comes to Led Zeppelin albums.

A lot of this album is fairly uninteresting to me, and then all of a sudden it hits The Sound of Someone... and I understand it. A deeply relaxing listen if nothing else, but one I'm unlikely to come back to.

I didn't expect a Dolly Parton album of all things to be this good. Filled with amazing stories and a really bittersweet tone throughout the whole thing that I loved from the start.

This is the most horribly chaotic and genuinely entertaining album I've listened to in a really long time. It's awful, but in the best way possible. It's fun, it's goofy, and by every religious being on earth is it a delight to sit through in one go. It takes as much stamina to listen through this album as it probably did to create it, but it's insanely worth it.

The first 4 minutes really were the best part of the album. The other 44 ranged from pretty good to mentally taxing. Ironic saying that since yesterday's was Trout Mask Replica, but I just didn't find this one as fun.

I feel like I should like the Beach Boys more than I actually do. I really liked this album but something just felt really off about it that I can't put a finger to.

Pretty interesting album, I loved the goofier cuts of the album and the serious ones met with it pretty well.

We don't tolerate cheaters in this household.

Really nice and relaxing listen, just started going in one ear and out the other towards the end.

I mean, come on, it's Public Enemy. they made two of the most powerful and influential rap albums of the 80s and this is one of them. Every song is great and they really did want to dig in their point in the most "we don't really care if you think the title '911 Is a Joke' is offensive" kind of way possible, deserving of all 5 stars.

This guy is Ronnie Radke for 90s goth kids. Past that it's a pretty okay album but I don't understand why it's on this list.

This site never misses with its jazz picks, I swear. It's a major compliment to a jazz artist/band to make a face like you just smelled moldy vegetables from their playing, and this whole album made me look like my tongue was about to go flying out of my head. Beyond amazing.

Those two opening songs made me think I was getting the best album I ever heard, the other 9 were just really good.

My parents always disliked Cat Stevens. I never really understood it. This album was 70s perfection and I loved everything about it.

I can hear these guys' influence in basically all of my favorite bands. Past that, it's a pretty good record that acted more like a history lesson for me. Not hugely likely to come back to it but it was pretty cool.

I don't know why I never bothered to listen to The Flaming Lips until now, this might just be my favorite album of the list so far. It's everything positive about psychedelic pop as a genre in one album. If I could give this 6 stars I absolutely would.

Nice and accessible. I'd give this to someone saying they want to get into metal and don't know where to start.

Bowie Album #2 out of 9 Totally fine, I really liked a few songs and the rest were fairly forgettable. Oh! You Pretty Things and Song for Bob Dylan were really good.

David Bowie album #3 out of 9, and definitely his best work to me. His regular songs on this are amazing, his ambient ones are interesting and really textured, just an all around amazing work of art.

The best part of this album is the two covers. Past those, it's pretty decent, just missing something I can't quite put my finger on.

How on earth did he manage to make Kate Bush sound boring? That's just plain impressive.

I, probably like a lot of y'all here, knew this woman from that time she ripped up the Pope's photo during her performance on SNL. Really glad to know her music carries that same energy. By the way, for anyone that needed to know, her name is pronounced like "shin-AID." spared you a Google search.

Might just be the most middle-of-the-road album I've listened to from this list so far. It's okay house music and I wouldn't be mad if I went to a gay bar or something and heard this album.

All around great album, my only thing about it is how similar some of the end tracks get. Past that it's worth anyone's time and then some.

Holy hell this woman can sing, had me standing up and everything. Scared me with the first note she sang. Might just damn-well be the most talented blues singer I've ever heard, and this might just damn-well be a 5 star album.

My dad always talked really highly about Bob Dylan. I can definitely see why. I'm a big fan of those "a man and his guitar" kind of albums, especially artists like Nick Drake, and this one ticked all the boxes. It's nothing but a good time for 50 minutes. Not to mention how adorable this man is with the way he sings.

This is 4 guys jerking themselves off onstage for 31 minutes and that description just about describes my favorite and least favorite parts of the album.

I got an ad, and thinking that the song I was hearing was a part of the album, I looked down and immediately got kind of upset that it just an ad. Semi-Jokes aside, the atmosphere was neat. I really liked that ambient track towards the end. Past that I don't see myself coming back to this one.

It's really fascinating that that's what pop music sounds on the other side of the ocean. I loved the guy's voice and the instrumentation. Some songs had some really kickass strings and others had some kickass synths. The one major problem that brings it down for me is how bloated it is. This album could've been 30 minutes long and be near perfect. Instead it's 78 and drags towards the end. Don't be me, listen to this in two sittings.

I feel like I've heard all I need to with Radiohead from their other two big records, OK Computer and Kid A, along with some of their more typical alt-rock stuff. As an album, it's good, albeit incredibly Radiohead.

I feel like Led Zeppelin is always a good time, this one is no exception. Some really heavy hitters on this one too. Something about That's the Way just got to me.

I genuinely thought I was listening to this for an hour, only to look down and see I was on track 3. It's a whole album of a guy making random sounds with the same 4/4 kick-hat-snare-hat pattern for the whole album.

Addressing the elephant in the room, the album cover alone stops this from being 5 stars for me. 3/4 of the people on the cover don't look human and it's just uncomfortable to stare at for 39 minutes. Anyways, the actual album is great. Lots of Freddie Mercury's trademarked theatrical singing, and even some good vocal moments from the guitarist. The highs on this album were incredibly high, but much like all Queen albums to my knowledge, this one has some extreme standouts. On this one it's Brighton Rock, Flick of the Wrist, and In the Lap of the Gods... Revisited (imo). The rest of the album was good, but nowhere near those 3 songs.

For the fact that I generally don't like psych rock, this was a really good album. It was really fun the whole way through and I like the more funky tracks like Mr. Skin.

"The only pieces of equipment Shadow used to produce the album were the AKAI MPC60 12-bit sampling drum machine, a pair of turntables and a borrowed-by-visiting Pro Tools setup from an early adopter of the technology, Dan 'The Automator' Nakamura." -Wikipedia I don't know what's crazier, that sentence or the fact that it sounds amazing.

I simultaneously love and hate saying Gay Messiah was the peak of this album. I have nothing more to say.

I guess you could say there Isn't Anything of note on this album.

Now THIS is some soul music I can get behind. I wish I could tell all the pretentious music nerds that Songs in the Key of Life and Innervisions aren't his only albums. What a gift to the world.

This was a lot more jaunty and entertaining than what I was expecting from an album cover like that. They make themselves look like The Beatles but slightly worse and kind of end up going in a different direction while still clearly being Beatles inspired. Regardless, it's just good fun.

This album doesn't make much sense to me. Everything about it should, in theory, be great. It's relaxing, the band knows what they're doing, and the vocalist does really well on his part. It's an incredibly well-done album that just doesn't have much in the way of real interest. The parts where the vocalist goes super high and strained with his voice sometimes work and sometimes don't, the suddenly more electronic instrumentation on The Petrified Florist was interesting for the fact that it's finally something different, but even then it feels like too little too late. Maybe it's the lack of risk-taking on this album, maybe it's how clean everything sounds, or maybe some third thing that I can't make out, but this album as a whole was just okay, but that seems to be exactly what it's going for.

The result of 4 guys finding out what ecstasy is and going "now what if we made music on this shit?" I'll tell you what, this music sure as hell sounds like 4 guys high out of their minds making drug music. The whole album is insanely psychedelic and weirdly groovy for how hard it is to get a hold of at some points. Regardless, I love psychedelic pop and this album is no exception. I have no clue how I haven't heard of these guys and only just recently found out about The Stone Roses, but Madchester is definitely a genre for me to look into moving forward. Nothing but a good time.

I've already listened to this album like 5 times before it came up on the list. My favorite Radiohead album by far. I've always loved really mellow, relaxing alt-rock albums and this one is top tier in that regard. Nothing but beautifully written songs with a great atmosphere, perfect for an evening listen like when I usually do these albums.

It was just so damn goofy. Lou Reed's really flat and out-of-tone vocal delivery fit much more to me on this album than something like The Velvet Underground & Nico. Also his lyricism ranged from goofy to neat and I liked both sides of it. Just an all round fun album for it's relatively short runtime.

I feel like the storytelling is simultaneously the best and weakest part of the album. On some songs it's great, and on others it's really "you you you you you." Past that, i'm never gonna complain about sax solos, and there are like 3 or 4 on this one.

I hate it when I find an album that's like "this is a 10/10, this is peak [insert band here] and nothing will ever beat this in the genre" and then the band makes a significantly better album that blows me further out of the water than the first one did. This is that album, and this album is perfect. this is one of those rare 11/10 if it were possible kind of records. Incredible storytelling, incredible instrumentals, incredible everything. Astounding beyond words.

I'm gonna join the masses on this one and say that this album is too repetitive to be listened to anywhere other than a club. That being said, there was the occasional really good song like Rollin' & Scratchin' or Rock'n Roll, but past that it's a moderately okay house album. I would've much rather had Random Access Memories over this. P.S. I totally agree with the guy that called this tippy tappy plinky plonky noises that go round and round for 74 minutes

Out of obligation: Rest in power, Mr. Osborne, your influence on music as a whole will never go unnoticed. It's metal with harmonica solos, that alone makes this album great. On top of that, it's a self-titled album with a self-titled song. It's just funny to say "Black Sabbath by Black Sabbath on the album Black Sabbath." Past that, it's an amazing metal record. For how early this was in the creation of metal as a genre, it's still pretty damn heavy, especially that title track. Only real complaint is how much the latter half of the album drags on compared to the first half, but it still ends great.

Why did they make her so quiet in the mixing? I swear this is the only time I've ever found production/mixing so poor to make a comment on it. Franklin's such a powerful singer but the damn audio engineer took all the power out of her. Past that the album's great, but it really needs a remaster.

These guys are so British. I like that in a British singer, for them to actually have an accent instead of it disappearing when they sing. The album itself is pretty good, I love their energy and overall sound. Bonus points for making a really good song about what cops can do to a person.

This was so simultaneously of its time and ahead of its time. On one had, this album came out in 1978 and that's insane. On the other, it's really clear that this album came out in 1978, mostly because of the slurs. My favorite song's title is a slur against people with Down Syndrome. For it's time, though, the song is surprisingly progressive, talking about how people with it are totally normal and have jobs and hats and stuff. That's the main word I'd use to describe the album, progressive. Both stylistically and lyrically.

I love finding new artists through this website that I would've never checked out otherwise. First Coldplay, now these guys. Everything about this album is so beautifully well-done. The instrumentals, the vocals, it's all a really nice experience.

This really is the most nothing Beatles record. Minus points for having a song that glorifies cheating.

I read "best selling [insert genre] album of all time" and assume it's either great or terrible, this one was definitely the former. The whole album has this incredibly dancey feel to it. Make it a challenge to try not to move around while listening to this, you'd fail in the first two songs. Not to mention those trombones, they were the best part of the album.

This is one of like two albums that Eminem is actually known for. Whenever anyone's talking about how good of a rapper he is, they're usually just gonna bring up examples from this album. There's good reason for that, too. Stan and The Real Slim Shady are some of his biggest songs for a reason. I'd especially call Stan one of the best songs in rap. As for the album as a whole, it's definitely better than I expected, but even then it sometimes got pretty grating and 72 minutes is unnecessarily long. It's the Marshall Mathers LP, not the Marshall Mathers Double LP. Also I'm definitely not the first to say it but I'll say it anyways, the skits were pretty bad. That one of the guy getting head genuinely made me gag.

Got both Supergrass albums of the list one week apart. While I prefer I Should Coco, this one's pretty good in it's own right. As an album it doesn't feel as consistent, though. I'm a really big fan of their overall sound and energy and this one has some really banging solos, I especially liked that synth solo in Sun Hits the Sky.

It's incredibly important to note that the lead vocalist, John Phillips, sexually assaulted his daughter, Mackenzie Phillips, for an entire decade. So these guys are The Beach Boys crossed with Fleetwood Mac. That's to say, shitty vocal group music combined with every band member getting into relationships with eachother, subsequently cheating, and then writing songs about it. Overall it isn't terrible, but there's a certain point where "Easy Listening" music gets too easy to listen to and it just fades into the background. That's this album.

This guy is like if Weird Al Yankovic decided he hates the US. He's a really good songwriter with an almost painfully witty since of humor that rides the line between being too corny for its own good and being too real for its own good. I love the really Vaudeville or Cabaret-ish tracks like Lonely at the Top or Political Science. The best part is how well the album aged despite being from 1972. Much like all punk, funk, or anything else anti-establishment, a 53-year-old message is still just as real and relevant as it was 53 years ago.

This album as a whole is really important to me. There were two albums that my high school band director always talked about, Kind of Blue and Birth of the Cool, both by Davis. He's moving to Illinois to take a job as the band director of a whole district this year, and I'm gonna miss him. He's the entire reason I've ever heard of this guy, and he's the sole reason I decided to major in Music Education instead of Law when I was really stuck between the two. He really created a home outside of home for not just me, but hundreds of people during his 19 years at my school. To you directly, Mr. Howell, even if you don't read this, I hope to be just like you in a decade. "The world is full of ignorant people, don't be one of them." -Page Howell, 2021.

I love these guys' flow and lyricism, everyone in the group is operating on the same wavelength and it really shows in this album. Nothing but great lyricism and flow from the rappers, and great mood and beat from the producers. I'm with the majority here that's never heard of this album and wish they did sooner.

I never realised that metal was always like this. Granted, I'm really not well-educated on Thrash Metal as a genre but regardless this was way crazier than I expected. That's the fun of it, though. These guys are all deranged and everything from the instrumentals to the lyricism screams edgy in the goofiest way possible to me. My only real issue is the vocalist. Sometimes his brain goes faster than his mouth and that paired with how fast everything is feels like it drowns him out at some points. Maybe I'm missing the point, but this was an incredibly fun metal record.

This is simultaneously the very first grindcore album and the epitome of the genre. It's pretty much exclusively fueled by raw anger towards god knows what half the time. They really let their rage guide the album, too. Nobody else was making half-second songs where they just shout "YEEEUUUGGGHH" and then move on. It doesn't take a PhD in data analytics to tell that this album is generally hated on this site, but I'd call it one of the rare examples of a genre-founding album also being really good.

First live album of the list, and of all of the blues I've listened to, this certainly is an album of it. I feel like compared to something like Pearl or pretty much anything by Aretha Franklin, this feels fairly basic by comparison. By no means bad, but incredibly middle-of-the-road for me.

Before this, I really only knew the Yeah Yeah Yeahs from that time the lead vocalist got featured on a song by Swans. Now I know that the one thing Dance-Punk was missing is women, as is the case with most kinds of dance and punk, and quite honestly just music in general outside of pop. I love the atmosphere of the whole album and the singer herself brings a lot to the overall sound. A good mix of some dancey stuff and some really nice, layered, artsy songs. Also this album's Runaway is significantly better than Kanye's runaway, fight me.

This has everything I'd normally like in an album from this era. Goofy parts, wild experimentation in an already experimental genre, a good groove, etc. The problem is that it all comes together to make some of the most annoying music New Wave has ever produced. It's only made worse by the fact that these guys have a second album on the list. The only interesting part is the cover, or I guess, case.

Everything about this album is so violently 80s, from the cover to the instrumentals. I love 80s music so that's not a problem at all. Lots of interesting influences on the album and they all lead to a pretty cool sound, especially on a song like Hallelujah. An all around pretty good album.

This one really wasn't doing it for me. Yet another band that my dad raves about and i'm totally neutral with. I like their vocal harmonies and they occasionally have interesting songwriting, but as an album it's very easy to tune out.

This is my favorite Kate Bush album. It's so wonderfully artsy and theatrical in a way that feels really unique to her. All the songs tell really great stories as well, especially All the Love, that one still kills me the third time around. All around her best work to me.

All around good album, but I can't help but feel like I've heard other bands do this really big, symphonic sound much better, i.e. The Who. Still, that opener is insane and the album rarely loses its intensity without good reason. I like how much the lead singer sounds like a dwarf/elf/other fantasy creature, it makes it sound like something from The Lorax or similar.

note: it's pronounced vul-nee-CYU-ra anyways, this album is absolutely beautiful. It sucks that artists' best work is always brought out of horrible grief and trauma, but it really does create some of the most unique works I've ever heard, even from artists who already have an incredibly unique sound, like Björk. I love the mix of strings with electronic production, and her really freeform vocal style fits perfectly above it, all with some of her best lyricism of her whole career. Not to mention those vocal harmonies, absolutely otherworldly. Sometimes it's uncomfortable, sometimes it's upsetting, and there are a few points in the album that are nothing but devastating, but at the end of the day that's what a divorce is, or a loss of any kind. Absolutely incredible in every way an album like this could be.

As an album it's definitely better than I expected. Just all around good fun, except Liberian Girl. That song is terrible. I didn't realise how many hits came out of this album, Bad, Man in the Mirror, Smooth Criminal, etc. They're definitely the best songs, who would've thought, but they're definitely hits for a reason, although The Way You Make Me Feel just feels uncomfortable with the context of MJ being a CP. That about describes the whole album, great songs that are made uncomfortable because of who made it.

Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JlmvtAHhnc Just wasn't doing it for me, much like the other harmony-heavy country rock bands I've heard. They're decent, but really the only amazing song is the one everyone and their grandma has been hearing for the past 53 years. A lot of it is that The Eagles sound like every other band to come out of Laurel Canyon in the early 70s. Not bad, just pretty forgettable.

That damn banana haunts my dreams, and it really doesn't get much better on my second listen. I can't think of many albums I've listened to that I feel got worse the second time around. It's really close between this and Rubber Soul by The Beatles for the most overrated album ever in my opinion. There are two or three good songs, but the album as a whole is an absolute slog and significantly more influential than it is good. Lou Reed's solo work is better in genuinely every way.

She really just seems like a diet Fiona Apple with softer songwriting. Every song sounded nearly identical and it really started to become easy to tune out towards the middle. A bit of a relaxing listen, but still not good.

Totally love the genre-blending in this album, I think it's great how it'll just randomly pull from more electronic/EDM genres to create some needed variation. My favorite song of the album is something closer to Trip-Hop than anything from the general sound of the album. Sounds like if Pink Floyd and Ween got together and made a pop-ish album. Much like Pink Floyd, sometimes the songs can get a little too long or freeform, but still, an all around great album.

These guys are amazing songwriters. That title track is an all-around incredible piece of music that the whole rest of the album almost fights to keep up with quality-wise. It's wild that they named Frank Lloyd Wright of all people for a whole song, but granted, I'm not nearly as well-educated on Simon & Garfunkel as I should be. There's a real intimacy to this album that I find really interesting. I feel like it's an album that's easy to find comfort in, even despite it being the duo's final record together.

I feel like I was more impressed by the amount of languages this guy can speak than I was by the music itself. It does get better as it goes along, though, and I like the samples of speeches throughout the album. As a whole it's okay and I agree with the people that say it's mediocre Latin bar music.

It's really common for political songs to age well because they're about the American government not changing anything. This album aged really well because the American government never changes anything. It's 2025 and this album is more relevant than it was in 1988, from every single point the album makes. You'd think that some part of this album would've aged in 37 years, but nothing has. Not the instrumentals, not the lyricism, not anything. Behind the Wall is especially relevant today with how awful the pigs that call themselves "peace officers" treat assault victims, Talkin' Bout a Revolution is especially relevant because that revolution still hasn't happened, and this whole album is especially relevant because rampant fascism and equally rampant indifference keep it relevant. This is one of the best records of the 80s, not just for the music itself, but for the fact that the people at the top inadvertently keep it relevant by continuing to treat people beneath them like shit. Past my ranting, this album is also amazing musically. Tracy Chapman has an amazing and amazingly unique voice that's nothing but pleasant to hear for the whole album. Her songwriting is great even when it isn't incredibly political, like in For My Lover. This album comes to mind when I think "Albums you should listen to before you die."

The best part of the album was getting to hear John Lennon aggressively growl "COOKIE" in the middle of one of the songs. Anyways, it's pretty good. There are a handful of songs that make me think that I was doing more thinking than Lennon was when he wrote this album by thinking about that, but there were some great songs in there, too. I actually did enjoy the album. It feels a lot more personal than anything the Beatles could've made and it's pretty nice listen, albeit a pretty nice listen that's occasionally un-niced by John Lennon listing off things he doesn't believe in or out-of-place screaming, but mostly nice nonetheless. I don't have much nice to say about it that I can actually put into words, mostly because the bad of this album is pretty funny, but I swear it's good.

Hearing the Outlaw Country guy take songs from the Great American Songbook was certainly neat, but at the end of the day it was a country covers album. It was okay, but I've heard a few songs from this album covered much better, and the ones I've never heard before weren't particularly mind-blowing. I'm mostly indifferent to the album more than anything.

It was okay. 60s Funk has a lot to offer, and I feel like I've just overall heard better come out of the same period. Points for making a long instrumental track that sounds pretty good, though. I feel like they should've either leaned into the lyrics or the funk a little more. Instead they shot for both and couldn't do both well enough for either to be great outside of a handful of tracks.

Some of the least shocking shock rock out there. It feels like the soundtrack to a spoof version of Stephen King's IT, but way less interesting than that description sounds.

Finally, something to break up my seemingly never-ending streak of 3 stars. Reminds me a lot of Gustavo Cerati, just without all the electronics. There's always something about good Latin music that feels both really strong and really relaxing at the same time. This album especially feels like I could sleep-dance to it. Both singers have amazing voices in their own ways and the whole album is absolutely beautiful. I can see why every Brazilian grandma knows and owns this album.

This sounds like British people approximating what blues sounds like. They literally covered an actual blues song, Parchman Farm, and got rid of the second half of the song so they don't have to sing about a guy shooting his wife. It's pretty damn clear that nobody is feeling this as much as they should, considering the genre they're trying to recreate. That drum solo in What'd I Say especially screams "I think this is what a blues drum solo sounds like." I'm pretty carefully using every word except "playing" blues here, because this isn't blues. It's bordering on being a parody, and not even a funny one. Insert obligatory statement about Little Girl here.

Very rarely does someone get the chance to play a 10 minute long guitar solo with the only other backing being another guitar. The guy in the opener took that rare chance wholeheartedly and made one of the best guitar solos in funk, period. The cool part is they gave us a whole 26 minutes of bonus tracks following it. Jokes aside, the rest of the album is good, but that solo is transcendent. Power to the pussy.

It feels like the kind of music that'd play in the waiting room of a therapist's office or a cheesy 80s movie intro. It's polished almost to the point of feeling sterile and there's something off about the vocals that hardly makes them sound human. The #1 word that comes to mind is "Inoffensive," and that's just not where good music comes from.

All around a pretty great album. It feels like 70s concert energy as an album, crazy guitar solos and everything. The radio hits are pretty good, the deeper cuts are really good, and it was just really fun. Also the guitar solos are violently 70s in the most fun way possible, I know I mentioned them twice.

Funny enough, listening to this album turned into a really interesting research project for the future. Music preservation is a surprisingly powerful tool that allows us to listen to stuff like this. This album was released months after Cobain's death and it shows a pretty good side of him that isn't shown in his in-studio works. it feels a lot more stripped back and that brings out Cobain's singing a lot more. I pay more attention to the noisiness of Nirvana's works more than Cobain's vocals a lot of the time and this kind of environment brings out how unique of a singer he is. The covers were by far the best part of the album, really unique take on The Man Who Sold the World especially.

Crazy how these guys turned doing MDMA into an entire genre. It sure does feel like ecstasy, though, very light and sparkly in a way that's very pleasing to the ears. Kind of feels like what Isn't Anything by My Bloody Valentine could've been. At some points it gets a little samey and the album as a whole starts to get stale towards the end, but as a whole it was good.

Maximum horny jams, I mean this guy is feral in half of these tracks. I'll never complain about something being this violently 80s, especially since this is THE defining violently 80s record. Prince really is a character in every sense of the word and he struts that damn character around whenever he makes music. TL;DR the world's gayest straight man makes really entertaining sexy jams. In other news, the sky is blue.

Damn you, Kanye West. I may hate him as a person but he really did make some of the best beats of the 2000s. I loved style on this album and Lupe really does a lot with what he's given. The whole album has this really cinematic feel to it, like he's some larger-than-life figure, and the album cover helps with that. Granted, the album cover is the most violently 2006 cover ever, right down to the Nintendo DS in the bottom-left. Anyways, the non-rap influences on some of the songs were the really cool part to me, like the Soul and Latin inspired beats and singing in the latter half of the album. The whole experience is just that, an experience, and it's a great one. "The ink of a scholar is worth a thousand times more than the blood of a martyr" is one of the hardest quotes to ever show up in a rap song.

The bassist is the best part. It's crazy to ever say "man, that bassist really stole the show," but here I am. Man, that bassist really stole the show. He's the one part of the album that stops it from being any lower, because it really is the definition of background jazz.

Completely fine. I struggle to really find anything to hold onto with this album, and I feel like I've heard much better in every regard from other singers from the same decade, like Marty Robbins. The storytelling kind of hits all of the 60s stereotypes and you can get the gist of the album off of any one song.

I really need to re-learn how to have fun. There's so much going on in this album and it sounds like such a good time, but the energy of the album just isn't hitting me the same way it is everyone in the crowd. Sam Cooke seems like the kind of person to have every single woman in a 150 meter radius screeching like they just watched Jesus come down from heaven for the first time in thousands of years, and you can hear that at some points in the record. For me, It's way too bubblegum. It's a great album, and I wish I could feel it more, but it just isn't my kind of fun music.

My dad always said that when he was a teenager, you were either a Beatles fan or a Stones fan. I think it's pretty hard to pick, but if the rest of the Stones' discography is like this album, I'm leaning more towards their side. Granted, I have a soft spot for 60s folk rock. Bob Dylan and The Band are both great, it sure would be great if they made music together. Anyways, I feel like this album's proof that you don't need to completely reinvent the wheel to make a good album, as much as I love artists that do that. It's a good folksy album with really silly and well thought out storytelling throughout it. There isn't much that's needed in the genre past that.

Of all the things I was expecting with that combination of band name, album name, and album cover, Beatles was not anywhere in my top 5. I was expecting something closer to Jimi Hendrix's flavor of psych rock. It's fine, but really nothing noteworthy, or notable for that matter. I've heard this sound before in like 5 different bands from the same year. Changes was a good standout, though.

Stuff like this is why we need more women in rap. Little Simz is an amazing lyricist with an incredibly strong flow. I think the beats on the album were the best part to me, though. They were incredibly varied and all brought out a lot of different aspects in her rapping in a really cool way. Shoutout to the literal cartoon sound effects in the opener. Admittedly I liked Side A a lot more than Side B, but even Side B was pretty strong.

A massive step up from their debut. The only word to describe this album is powerful. Most of the songs are powerful in different ways from eachother, but they're all powerful. The opener and Broken Heart feel like a massive hug from space, songs like Come Together or Electricity are incredibly heavy on the groovier side of indie rock, and The Individual is an amazing soundscape that just washes over you for nearly 5 minutes. Who would've thought that a group of guys rambling about drugs and space for an hour could be so compelling?

I was expecting to like this a lot more than I actually did. It's okay, but it starts to get pretty samey pretty fast and a lot of the songs sound empty or hollow. Maybe I'm just too tired, but I don't have a lot to say past that.

No cymbals. You either notice it within the first few songs or you never notice it, but there are no cymbals. This was completely intentional. That describes the whole album, it feels very intentional despite how crazy and artsy the whole thing is. It's impressive how many influences and weird experiments he can throw into one album and have it come out great. The innovation of the album brings out a lot of really cool aspects in it and generally a lot more emotion compared to the other stuff I've heard from him, especially on songs like Intruder or And Through the Wire. This was also the first album to use gated reverb, so that's a plus. The best part of the album, however, is that it didn't make Kate Bush sound boring. I will forever despise So for not being able to do the same.

I wasn't expecting to enjoy this one, good to know I was wrong. What I've learned from this list so far is that I have a soft spot for earlier rap music. It wasn't particularly deep or meaningful, but it was just a damn good time for an hour. Lots of personality and some really fun beats.

I'm starting to think that every 60s pop record sounds the same. This one at least had a few cool moments, but overall I swear this sounds like the last five 60s pop records I've gotten at some point. Worst part is it's always the bands that I hear my parents talk really well about.

Kanye making a rap album inspired by 90s Electro-Industrial is the most surprising and most Kanye thing imaginable, double points on the latter for the album title. I love how socially conscious this album is when he isn't saying stupid stuff like "I keep it 300, like the Romans." Maybe he should've rewatched the first 15 seconds of 300 before writing that down. Still, I think this album has Kanye's absolute best instrumentals paired with lyricism that can get a little all over the place quality-wise. While I prefer Late Registration, I can't deny that this is one of Kanye's better albums by far.

Great country rock, definitely some of the stronger music from the genre I've heard. The guitar solos on this album all go insane and it has some pretty deep moments. I can't really understand why my parents hate this band so much since it isn't for the Florida trademark flavor of Southern Racism™, but I like this album a lot. Of course, it ends with Free Bird, so the album automatically isn't hateable.

Depression Cherry has been a really important album to me for a while now. Me and my boyfriend loved it since the first time we listened to it, I have it on vinyl, the whole thing. I'd honestly say that this is pretty close to Depression Cherry quality-wise, even if it doesn't have the same emotional connection for me. Beach House really knows how to consistently hit that really depressing kind of dream pop sound in a way that nobody else from the genre can.

This album is really good at making London Calling seem even more impressive. The fact that they went from this to one of the best punk albums of all time in two years is crazy. As for this album, it's okay. Some pretty good songs mixed in with some that really didn't do much for me. Nothing bad, but very little that's particularly great. Special shoutout to Protex Blue for telling teenagers in 1977 to use a condom, though. I'd much rather listen to Joe Strummer say it than my parents if I were alive back then.

These kinds of albums are why I do this challenge. Crazy how one guy singing like a weirdo can accidentally spawn a whole genre 5 years later. This weirdo is incredibly fun and knows how to compose a damn good song, so he should keep being this weird. The instrumentals on the album are amazing and really make a great pair with the vocals. Every member of the band is great at what they do and they all have great standout moments throughout the album. The whole thing comes together to make the most unseriously serious album I've heard in a really long time and I loved every second of it. Bonus points for the saxophone, that always makes music better.

It's pretty good, but also pretty hard to get through. Lots of really sparse improvisation in most of the songs. It has its moments, especially in Spanish Key and Sanctuary but as a whole it was fairly boring. The best part by far is the album cover, that goes incredibly hard.

Surprisingly good. Elvis has a voice that's really nice to listen to and he has a few really good songs throughout. That being said, take a shot every time he says the words "Love" or "Girl" if you want a free ride to a hospital. It makes In the Ghetto and Don't Cry Daddy stand out more than they have any right to, and the album would be way better if it focused on songs like that rather than the usual love songs that take up most of its runtime. Even those love songs are pretty well-performed. Key word is performed, he didn't write the majority of the songs. I don't hold it against him, most country artists were doing that in the 60s. Bonus fun fact: Elvis has a version of In the Ghetto that he did at a sound check where he replaces "As the snow flies" with "As the shit flies" and proceeds to laugh about it for a minute or two. Good to know me and Elvis have one thing in common, a twelve-year-old's sense of humor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bq0Cwd41c1w

This album is more than a breath of fresh air after all of the mediocre pop I've gotten from this same decade so far. I don't know why I'm all of a sudden getting some of the best music from the earlier decades of the list, but I'm completely fine with it if it means I get more music like this. It's like Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, but 30 years earlier and a lot more improvised. I wonder if there's a version that doesn't have all of the overdubbed instruments, since Morrison himself said he didn't want them in the album. My own hunt for it showed nothing, or else I would've done that version. As it stands, this is still an incredible album. He's a real wordsmith with some deeply touching storytelling and a very unique voice to support it. The really cool part of the album is that it's mostly improvised, obviously outside of the overdubbing.

A mix of perfect music and songs that are exclusively there to pad the runtime of the album to fit on an LP, and it's perfectly clear which is which. There can even be runtime padding inside of the really good songs. Still, it's one of the most well-known albums ever for a reason, and the parts that aren't 3 minute stretches of nothing are amazing. As always, bonus points for the saxophone.

I'm both deeply surprised and happy to know that Wonderwall is not the only good song on this album. The guitars feel really overwhelming in a way that only 90s British ecstasy addicts could do for some reason. That and the vocals make the album uniquely Oasis while still sounding like the stuff that inspired it. Maybe it's the fact that I haven't listened to the radio in a pretty long time, but I think this album was one of the bigger surprises so far from this list. I am now contractually obligated to say "anyways, here's Wonderwall," so anyways, here's Wonderwall.

Pretty cool jazz. I don't have a lot to say about the album but I really liked it. Lots of good standards came out of it like Boplicity.

If this list has taught me anything, it's that I really should put more thought into trying LSD or Ecstasy at some point. It's very clear that I'm not the target demographic for a lot of the albums on this list because I've been sober for 19 of the 19 years I've been alive. That being said, it's a pretty good album. The parts that deviate from the DnB/Jungle kind of style especially stand out. The actual DnB songs are pretty good, too. I like the really high energy that the style brings, and I especially like what the singer does with it. To reference my favorite review I've seen on this website so far, this album is full of tippy tappy plinky plonky noises that go round and round for 113 minutes, and it's great.

I saw the number of features on this album and got a little scared that they were gonna drown out Missy Elliott on her own album. Glad to know that really isn't the case here. She sings and raps really well and it brings an album that's as good as it is varied. Always a big fan of the really driving soul feel that the album and others like it have.

The fact that this was picked over Demon Days and Plastic Beach is criminal. We can shave off a few Bowie albums to fit one of those in. This album is pretty good and has some absolute classics on it, especially Clint Eastwood, but the album as a whole struggles to add up to some of the ones that come after it. Some pretty annoying voices throughout along with a fairly similar feel between songs made this hard to get through at some points. The parts that were good were really good, but everything else ranged from fine to rough.

These guys are like a slightly more modern Simon and Garfunkel, but they say "years" in a really brain-tickly way so they're better by default. Anyways, turns out 1990 had the best synthpop. The fact that this and Depeche Mode's Violator came out in the same year is wild. I should stop comparing these guys to other bands I like and just talk about the music. The music is crazy and adds some good LGBT+ representation to this list that isn't wildly flamboyant bisexuals. One of those "I never would've guessed but it makes perfect sense that he's gay" type situations. Really nice for relaxing nighttime listening, despite how funky a lot of the songs are. Great writing in all areas and definitely one of the best 90s albums of the list so far.

I can't hate this. As much as I want to because of all the weird stuff Morrissey said, I really like it. He has some interesting and insightful things to say when he isn't yapping about how Chinese people are subhuman. I like that the album keeps the Jangle Pop roots of The Smiths' discography and turns it into his own thing. Unrelated fun fact: Morrissey wrote a 50-page rant about the British government in his autobiography.

Roland really is responsible for every good electronic genre. These guys named themselves after the Roland TR-808 Drum Machine. Anyways, this album is great. I love the really distinct TB-303 synth sound in house music, makes it sound goofier. The music goes pretty hard, too. I especially like the more aggressive parts of the album like Cobra Bora and Donkey Doctor. They sound like music for an old Flash game that I would've randomly found on NotDoppler like 12 years ago.

Probably the single most T-shirt-able album cover ever, equally as simple and iconic as The Dark Side of the Moon but a lot better-looking in my opinion. As for the music, it's pretty good. Sure sounds a hell of a lot like it's cover. There's something about the instrumentals that always sounds a little too empty to me, but they do use that emptiness well in some parts of the album. The singer's voice is really satisfying to listen to and fits perfectly with the instrumentals. Definitely flawed, but the album plays into its flaws enough for it to not really be an issue.

I swear a lot of the positives I have to say about this album get ruined as soon as I start to think positively about the album. My number two pet peeve in music is pop artists swearing just once or twice per song to seem hard or strong or something. It's just annoying and it shows up constantly in this album. I guess she says shit more than twice in Homemade Dynamite, but it's really only to get us to say it along with her in the chorus. Some of the harmonies are cool and I did genuinely like Liability until I saw that there was a part 2 (speaking of which, why did she think that two songs were good enough to warrant a part 2?), but as a whole this album feels like every other pop album I thought I was going to like until I listened to it and realised that it sounds like every pop album I thought I was going to like. For the record, I can also swear exactly once in what I'm writing to prove an imaginary point to myself.

I love the little fun fact in the Wikipedia blurb for this about him recording two albums in the same session and wearing the same shirt in both, adds the kind of continuity that isn't at all necessary but makes the guy a lot more memorable. Anyways, good Jazz. It's really upbeat with a lot of good lines throughout and I love Jimmy Smith's tenor tone. I'll definitely be Back at the Chicken Shack more often.

Minus points for the fact that this album is significantly longer than 17 seconds, unforgivable. Anyways, I love The Cure's specific flavor of Gothic music. It still has the sparse lyricism and cold, empty instrumentals that makes the genre what it is, but unlike other bands in the genre, it isn't so empty that it starts to sound like it's lacking something. Pair that with great instrumentals and even great fully instrumental songs and it makes a really good album.

Shoutout to the guy that called this band Slint if they weren't incels. I wholeheartedly agree and this album is much better than Spiderland and about equally as influential. Influence is a stupid way to measure quality so I'm just gonna talk about the quality of the music itself, and the music itself is absolutely quality. Some of the best post-hardcore out there next to Big Black and Unwound (really upset that there's no Unwound on this list). Incredible energy, even in the slower songs like Luau. The opener is especially insane, and gets bonus points for being mostly in 5/4, the objectively best time signature. While I wouldn't call it the best album to come out of the post-hardcore movement, it gets a very, very strong second place. The best one isn't even on this list, so it's at least the best on the list.

What I've learned from this list is that artists should really stop trying to cover Bob Dylan songs, unless you're Warren Zevon. Anyways, I feel like I can tolerate the singer's voice a lot more than most people on this list, but I'm also used to really out there voices. As for the music, it's an album of okay country covers. I loved the opener, but I feel like nothing quite reaches its level.

The very first sound on this album is a didgeridoo, peak music. This is one of those albums that you have to listen to while standing up, no sitting down for this one. You need your whole body working to get the full experience. For crying out loud, he's literally telling you to in the lyrics. Special appreciation for the bassist, Stuart Zender. I feel like bassists in general are pretty overlooked in most genres of music, but this guy's pretty hard to miss. He does nothing but lay down these incredibly technical and funky as hell basslines throughout the whole album. Much like all good jazz and soul, underneath the crazy amounts of groove is a real message of hope despite every political challenge and a need to keep the earth clean. Maybe I'm way too easily impressed by good grooves, but it's also damn hard to keep a good groove for nearly an hour, especially one that's so varied.

People weren't kidding, every AC/DC song sounds like every AC/DC song. Even if they wrote one song eleven times, it's one damn good song and it was a good time. Not really much to say past that.

I've been eating good this week with this list. First I get Drive Like Jehu, then Jamiroquai, now these guys. What a beautiful album. A great mix of that British kind of indie rock with really nice strings and keys. I always love finding bands I've never heard of through stuff like this and coming out with masterworks. That's what this is, a masterwork. The instruments, the singing, the lyrics, the flow, the everything. Masterful.

Very dreamy for a prog album. Reading that a guy made this album after becoming a paraplegic is insane and I wonder how much of that pain was put into the making of this album. I loved how flowy and almost disjointed the album feels at times, like lots of parts are being thrown at the same thing and they happen to line up really well. Some of the songs on this sound straight-up ominous in a way that I feel like I haven't seen any other prog album/artist attempt. I really fail to see how this is the 18th lowest rated album on the site.

I feel like this is an album that's definitely going to grow on me, but as it stands it's okay. I wasn't expecting a song with parts in 15/8. That was interesting, took a second for it to even register. Still, not a whole lot stands out to me about this album compared to other New Wave bands of the time like The Clash or Devo. Perfectly fine, but not much more.

This album never calms down, just pure 90s rap energy for almost an hour. I love all the features and backup vocalists and stuff throughout the album. I never knew Snoop had actual talent since all I've seen him in for the past 10 years is T-Mobile commercials and baking shows. Crazy what one good album can do to your career. He does make good mac and cheese, though. Anyways, excellent album. Definitely one of the best I've heard from the 90s so far.

The fourth of nine Bowie albums, and this one's more proof that nine is excessive. Ziggy Stardust, Blackstar, and either Low or Heroes is really all you need to get the full idea of Bowie. If you want to listen to more before you die, he made twenty-six albums. Three is a fine sample. Maybe it's the fact that this is the sixth overall Bowie album of listened to in my lifetime (iirc), but I'm running out of things to take note of in these albums. TVC15 was good, I guess. Of the 4 I've gotten so far, this is the least noteworthy. Heroes and Blackstar were incredible, Hunky Dory and The Next Day were bad, and this one is somewhere in between. A perfectly surface-level review for a perfectly surface-level Bowie album.

Man, Brown Sugar sure is one of the songs ever. I felt emotions when listening to it, none of which I liked. That has to be the single worst song the Stones ever put out. The rest of the album is great, so it's fine. I think they're the only British band that can consistently do Blues Rock well to any capacity. Side note, the guy on this album cover is the same guy on The Smiths' self-titled record. Massive peenus on that guy, that's impressive stuff. Anyways I'm tired and getting all over the place, back to the music. I prefer Beggar's Banquet overall, but the standout tracks of this album stand out a lot more to me, like Can't You Hear Me Knocking. Really good solos all throughout, but the ones on that song are particularly good. You Gotta Move as a song makes this album for me, it's just so goofy. I don't know why they randomly decided to throw in a wind section in the second half of the album, but the only reason I'm complaining about it is because it isn't in the first half. I'm gonna cut myself off before I ramble my way into doubling the length of the longest review I've made to date.

This is making me realize that I've never heard an Arctic Monkeys song in full, let alone a full album, before this. They're like The Strokes but less fuzzy and more fun. More than anything else, this album is a damn fun time. Not particularly deep, but I'm scared of the idea of the cross-eyed guy smoking a cigarette on the cover making deep music, so it's fine. I guess he's no longer cross-eyed or smoking because I said he is, and whatever I say he is is what he isn't. Anyways, the music. Good fun, I really like the majority of the tracks. This band seems pretty good to throw in a party mix of some kind. Much like party music, I started to tune it out at some points, though.

Immediately started with "Who are these guys? Oh, I know this song." And it was the best song on the album. I feel like this music was designed for people who would still drive the car on the album cover in the modern day. I drive very comfortably in my Kia, so I didn't really get much out of this one. Most of it feels pretty uncomfortable. The lyrics paired with the instrumentals feel like the kind of music you'd vaguely listen to for the feel of it and then tune into the lyrics and awkwardly turn down your radio. Sadly, I can't really uncomfortably turn down the music because the 1001 Album Gods gave me this and I must listen.

Pretty fun album, can't say I was expecting a harpsichord in most of the songs. My big issue with a lot of the 60s bands on this list is that they all sound exactly the damn same. Quoting a review from this site for a Mamas and the Papas album: "Most 60's groups had three choices: copy the beatles, copy the beach boys, or sexually abuse minors." These guys chose to copy The Beatles, but actually did their own thing with it, and by that I mean they used a harpsichord. Jokes aside, most of these songs are good. I especially like Rosy Won't You Please Come Home and Rainy Day in June. Lots of interesting lines and a fun feel no matter what direction the music itself goes in. Definitely one of the more creative albums of the 60s.

This is such a strange album. It has Bohemian Rhapsody and Death on Two Legs on the same album as I'm in Love With My Car. Granted, that's just Queen. They really were never album people, more "produce as much varied music as possible until the public picks something up" people. That something was Bohemian Rhapsody, so this album is 4 stars at a minimum by default. I really like most of the songs on this album, though. The Prophet's Song and '39 are incredibly overlooked and the whole album feels very Queen in every way, sometimes for better, and sometimes for I'm in Love With My Car or God Save the Queen.

There's this band called Shellac, no albums on this list for some reason. My favorite thing about them is the time they said that every single song they've ever written was about one of two things: Baseball or Canada. Even if it's an offhand mention of one of them, it always comes back to Baseball and Canada. I really wanted to know if every Talking Heads song was similar, and I even started thinking of ways it would be connected (take Listening Wind being about blowing up a building). I am very sad to announce that very few of these songs are about buildings or food. You should go to Remain in Light if you want songs about buildings, though. Still an amazing album, but if that career-spanning idea came true, it'd be one of the best albums to come out of the 70s, if not, the entire 20th Century.

My major weakness: One Man, One Guitar. Every damn time. Elliot Smith (kind of), Nick Drake, now this guy. Maybe Springsteen should stick to this and not pop rock. It sounds like he's telling stories around a campfire, really nice feel. Most of the songs are absolutely heartbreaking. Kind of struggling to find words for this album, but it was amazing enough for me to tolerate the Faux-Southern accent. That's saying a lot.

I found that my new favorite kind of 70s music is people singing weirdly with funny rock beats. Thank you, 1001 Albums List. I like these guys for the same reasons as a band like Roxy Music, just these guys are a bit more directly punky. The dichotomy of 5 guys in drag makeup screaming and making punk-before-punk style music is the real fun of it. Frankenstein and Subway Train in particular are really fun. Granted, this whole album is really fun, and really good. Really really good. Side note, I would so dress like the guy on the far left.

A review for this album makes me wonder what The Weeknd covering a Violent Femmes song would sound like. Probably awful, but it would at least be funny. Anyways, what a classic album. Never would've guessed this came out in 1983. I really like the singer's voice and the whole thing has a great parody kind of feel to it. Why can't modern incel music be like this?

Normally, I only really listen to live albums if they use the base music in a super transformative way. Take Rock Dream by Boris With Merzbow or literally any live Swans album as an example. Ridiculously long solo sections are absolutely enough for me to call this transformative, and it's damn awesome. The minutes-long drum solo in The Mule was particularly awesome. I wanna do that. Really my only issue is how boring the closer is.

How are you gonna call an album Sex Packets and then wait until the album's three quarters of the way done to introduce the thing you named the album after? Also, every song on this album is 3 minutes too long, except the two 30 second interludes and the title track. Fun ideas and a somewhat fun delivery, but this album could be cut down to 5 tracks and not lose much.

Much better than the other Jimi Hendrix album I got. This one's really fun and has some truly otherworldly parts. Voodoo Chile is incredible and really justifies its 15-minute runtime. Sometimes the album does just get too drugs for me, much like Are You Experienced. Making this a 2LP means that the drugs guy does what drugs guys do and just wander around sometimes. Still a great album, but the poor guy really should've gotten sober way before the release of this album, then we'd maybe have more than 3.

What I've learned is that these guys like naked women and just-off-pitch singing. 90% of my issues with this band are the singer, honestly. He's like a slightly higher-pitched and more repetitive Fred Durst with equally as little charm to his vocals. There were a few songs I almost liked before he opened his mouth. The instrumentals aren't really interesting either. I spent a lot of time having them go in one ear and straight out the other. It really doesn't help that every song on the second half of the album is beyond tedious. Just listen to literally any other alt-rock record that came out in 1990.

Of all the bands/groups/artists whose biggest song is a cover I've already heard, I never knew Run-D.M.C. was one of them. Apparently their cover of Walk This Way got so big it out-charted the original. Anyways, I love this duo. They're beyond fun at all times and have some wildly entertaining beats to carry their energy even more. Also, their chemistry together. I'd pay someone $15 to find me a group of two people who work better together onstage. All of the passing back and forth inside and between lines is great and adds to the fun even more. If you can't tell, I think this album is incredibly fun, and proof that all rap is improved by real guitars. Bonus points for the saxophone in You Be Illin'.

I love the winds on this, and Al Green has an amazing voice that he uses really well. The songs themselves are pretty basic, but it's pretty hard not to have a good time with it with how damn infectious the whole thing is. The title track is completely out of this world, too.

We need more Alt-Rock randomly deciding to not be Alt-Rock for a bit. That's this album. Stays in an Alt-Rock kind of framework but does everything to not completely fit itself in said framework. Some Country here, some Rap there, just random stuff. I love random stuff, so I love this record. Bonus points for the saxophone.

Whoever called this Garage Rock for Britpop fans was onto something. I mean, it's literally Oasis but a little more Garage-y. That being said, I like Britpop, so it's fine. It's not a massively groundbreaking album (again, basically Oasis), but for what it's worth it's a pretty enjoyable album.

Interesting to see some Riot Grrrl representation on the list. Good pick, even if it's weird that this was picked over any Bikini Kill album. It has a really good DIY sense to it with all of the really cheap electronic sounds, along with somehow still managing to be pretty dancey. Also I love the singer's vocals, really fun along with the pretty satirical and goofy lyricism of the album.

This guy's got one hell of a voice, just wish he'd use it for more than singing about a bunch of women falling in love with and/or leaving him. It'd probably be a much better album if I were alive in the late 1950s, but there's only so much 12 Bar Blues I can take in one sitting, and this one's pushing it. I can't be too harsh, though. All of the songs were at least fine, some were pretty good.

More than 100 days late listening to this album but I got around to it eventually. It's great but I think making this album the full length of a CD did more harm than good. A lot of the songs run a little long and there are a few songs I wouldn't keep on the album. Past that, a lot of the songs are great. All of the little tributes and nods to historical stuff like jazz artists and movies were really nice and Common always has a really uplifting feeling to his music. The features make a lot of this album for me, like Femi Kuti in the opener or Slum Village showing up on Thelonius. A Song For Assata and is an incredible heavy-hitter at the end of the album. Reading about her lead me to find out she died recently. For anyone that doesn't know who she is, it's very important to learn about her. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assata_Shakur

If your song parodying a group of people is picked up by said group of people and becomes their theme song, this means one of two things. Either you're so good at parody that the people you're parodying think it's talking about them positively, or you're so bad at parody that the people you're parodying think it's talking about them positively. Neither option matters. Republicans are too stupid to think critically enough to know that the title track, along with every song on this album, is making fun of them. I guess this is what happens when you ban books instead of reading them. The album's fine, I just really wanted to dedicate this message to the people who voted to fuck over me and the millions of other trans people in the US. Shoutout to Non-Binary people, and Binary Trans people. You guys/gals/others/everythings are cool. All trans people get love, unlike Republicans. They get empty bedrooms and statistically higher divorce rates like they deserve.

I blame Gustavo Cerati for getting me into this exact flavor of electronic music. It's very relaxed, but still has some nice energy to it. Sometimes the sound of the album starts to feel pretty similar, though.

In terms of Diet Radiohead™, I'm more of a Coldplay fan, but this was surprisingly good given what I've heard about Muse. Citing Depeche Mode and Lightning Bolt as influences was certainly a choice. I hear the Depeche Mode, but definitely not the Lightning Bolt. If they actually combined the two influences and made an overly sexy noise rock album it'd be the easiest 5 stars of my life. Sadly, we do not live in a perfect world. What we got is still a great album, though. Maybe overly derivative, but at least they did enough with it to be their own thing. The Latin influence in City of Delusion and Hoodoo alone is enough to show that.

Feels like this whole 2LP passed by in an instant, in a good way. I love how clearly passionate about Brazil this guy is, even if he's from the opposite side of the world. It brings a very clear love and intention to making the album and really allows him to break new ground with whatever genre it's trying to Latinize, sounds very Acid Jazzy. For it being effectively a Samba/Bossa Nova album that throws in some electronics, it's very innovative. About as innovative as it is relaxing, very easy to get lost in everything and just let it all go around you. Everything is pretty varied, but it's all excellent.

The intro game was an interesting idea, and I actually did catch a few things he mentioned in this album, like the hissing sound in a few parts (namely Song of the Viking, albeit very faintly) and a few areas with editing mistakes (also namely Song of the Viking). Maybe it's a ploy to keep me engaged and treat mistakes as something interesting rather than a mistake, but it worked, so I don't care. I'm also absolutely going to start doing this with other older records on the 1001 and on my own time.

Man, these guys did all of the drugs. Songs like You Shook Me or Dazed and Confused sound like it'd be easier to test their alcohol blood level than their blood alcohol level. Still great. I hope I can sing that well when I'm high/drunk. I prefer the more Hard Rock-adjacent sound of Led Zep IV compared to this album, but this is still great, albeit, so very drugs.

Sounds like the kind of music that'd play in a therapist's office lobby, but good. It's still really hard to really tune into and give any kind of opinion on. Nice and relaxing, but not a whole lot past that.

Pop in the 80s was just different. Granted, I get my taste in pop from my mom, who grew up with this stuff. This album is proof that I have my mom's taste in pop. I love that really jazz/soul-inspired Pop sound and it's really fun to see bands like The Weather Station reviving it as of recent. Anyways, this album is amazing. Really smooth, really catchy, pretty much everything that makes this genre great. Also, it has Smooth Operator. Enough said on that front. Bonus points for the saxophone, of course.

Why couldn't I have been introduced to Nick Cave through this album instead of Murder Ballads? This is much better. Kind of sounds like it's designed for some weird musical. Granted, I feel the same about Murder Ballads, this just does it better. Anyways, I like the energy of the album. It's a pretty long album but he actually uses the runtime pretty well, never particularly gets boring. Maybe I do like Nick Cave after all.

I really like the whole Indie/Punk Revival kind of scene from the 2000s, and while this is definitely one of the weaker albums from the whole scene I've listened to, that's more of a testament to Post-Punk Revival than it is something against Franz Ferdinand. I like the album calling back a lot to the CBGB Club kind of sound from the 80s, especially in Tell Her Tonight. The band sometimes gets a little too early Arctic Monkeys, but the album as a whole is at least a good time and at most incredibly fun.

I like the guy that called this landfill indie. That about describes it. Not bad, but not really anything, either. The track lengths of every song spontaneously getting cut in half on Side B makes it seem like they really wanted it to be over, or maybe they wanted to cram in as many songs on the back end as possible. Either way, eh.

You could just tell that this guy was in a creative rough patch when he made this album. He left Genesis and tried to make his own sound, which happened to be 9 different sounds thrown together on a record in the hopes that one of them would stick. For crying out loud, he made a damn Vaudeville tune. It's still early Peter Gabriel, so nearly every song is still great, especially that Vaudeville tune.

I think I prefer this over his stuff with just him and a guitar. I didn't know that this guy had this kind of music in him. I loved the piano songs thrown in there, and the bigger-sounding songs than what he normally makes, and the softer ones, and just this whole album. Even despite the fact that he has an entire backing band in this one, he still manages to make his music sound really intimate like his older stuff. Also, all of his songs have these really interesting chord progressions, I don't really know how to describe it well, but it really makes his already fairly unique sound really come out. Beautiful album.

It's gay, it's so gay, it's so unfathomably gay, it's so impossibly unfathomably gay. How do you put this amount of 2000s urban gay into one rock record? I'm gay, maybe not the flavor of gay that these guys are, but I'm gay enough to have heard of these guys before getting this on the 1001 list. That being said, this album is almost too gay. For crying out loud, they gay-ified a Pink Floyd song. That's dedication to the gay. I love it. This album deserves to be on a list titled "1001 Albums You Should Listen To Before You Die" literally just so people can understand how gay an album can be. I love this band. I'm gonna spend 3 hours tomorrow ranting to my incredibly gay future husband about how gay this band is and how much I love it. I said gay fifteen times in this review. Divide that by 3 and you get the number of rainbow stars this album gets.

I love life. After getting home from one of the most annoying performances I've ever been in, I get to forget about it and listen to ambient music. "As ignorable as it is interesting" was a really good way to describe this album, thanks Wikipedia. Music For Airports is a really bland-sounding idea but it really goees in some excellent directions. I love the repeated piano lick in 1/1, especially.

Kind of wild how Kanye made some of the absolute best and absolute worst rap music out there. This one lands solidly in the middle. It has some amazing songs, but it also has Runaway and Blame Game. Still probably his best produced album, if nothing else. The majority of the beats on this album are insane. I'd like this album way more if it wasn't totally full of Kanye-isms (i.e. the "I sent this bitch a picture of my dick" verse in Runaway or All of the Lights in its entirety). It's good, but so incredibly overrated.

Add this one to the list of reasons why 1969 was the best year for music. I love the energy of this album and that singer's got one hell of a voice. Makes me want to keep on chooglin' through the rest of this record. speaking of chooglin', it's such a good word. I'm going to put it in my vocabulary to annoy people with later. Anyways, This album's just really fun. All of the shouting and blues and whatnot is fun, the word chooglin' is fun, it's all fun. Say it with me, chooglin'.

The reviews for this album got me thinking it was going to be bad. It shows its influences a little too much and it's pretty simple, but it's nowhere near bad. Dare I even say that the 85% of people who listened to this album and called it 1-3 stars don't know what good 80s music sounds like. Maybe I just really like music that's violently 80s, but I'm gonna go against the grain and say that this is pretty good. It's pretty fun, really cinematic, and just a really good time.

A former Beatle tries to sound like The Beatles with a different band. The results are below average. Not even the saxophone bonus points can really do much for this one.

Kind of weird for an album to be so backloaded. I can only think of a small handful like that. All of the B Sides are incredible, especially his cover of Hallelujah. Can't say the same for Side A. The title track and Mojo Pin are great, but the other 3 on that side leave a lot to be desired. Anyways, talk about a man that really feels what he's singing. I swear he jumps seven octaves whenever the big parts come around. Double anyways, I'm still upset we only got one album from this guy before he died.

Feels a lot more straightforward than something like Tommy. I read somewhere (pretty sure it was the Wikipedia article for Live at Leeds but I could be wrong) that the band didn't like the way Tommy sounded, so maybe it's a good thing they switched to this style instead, but I'm just not feeling the sound change as much. Way too much "you did this, you did that, you you you you you" in just about every song. Baba O'Riley is great, but it promises so much more than the rest of the album gives.

I think I just like 2000/2010s pop when it isn't white people making it. This was excellent, especially the opening and closing few songs. It loses some steam in the middle, but even then it gets it back really quickly. Also her voice is incredible, much like the saxophone bonus points this one gets.

I started understanding why people like this when the album was almost over and now I feel bad for not liking it for the first 25 minutes. It sounds like the kind of music I'd enjoy when I was 14 and into the most Tumblr Gay™ music imaginable while inexplicably being really homophobic, but I'm now non-binary and not really Tumblr Gay™ anymore, just regular gay. That's to say, this is music for closeted 14-year-olds. If you're homophobic and reading this, I know you're probably hiding the fact that you really want to kiss a dude to an MGMT song, and that's okay. I very un-secretly want to as well.

It's like Geordie Greep's The New Sound, just way less mathy and about 30 years earlier. I love that album and I love this one. Albums that parody creepy weirdos by acting like the creepy weirdos are always entertaining. This guy plays the creepy weirdo a little too convincingly, but in a good way. He clearly convinced some people on this site that he's a creepy weirdo. That's the kind of parody we need more of in the music world, parody so good it actually tricks people into thinking it's serious.

"...Southern Rock Opera either imagines, or filters, every topic through the context of legendary Southern band Lynyrd Skynyrd." -Wikipedia Now if that doesn't justify this album being on the list, then nothing will. I can think of about 20 more justifications for this record being here but I'll condense it so I don't stay up all night ranting about rednecks writing about other rednecks. To start, holy hell is this album fun. It's 5 (at least, I think it's 5) guys singing about sociopolitical issues through a story about Lynyrd Skynyrd, of course it's going to be fun. The idea somehow turns out being way more fun than that sentence, though. From all of the violently southern guitar solos to Three Great Alabama Icons as a song, it's so much fun. This album's also very forward-thinking. The singer's trying to redefine the idea of the racist southern guy by being an anti-racist southern guy instead. Lots of songs about racial tensions and one where he straight up says "To the fucking rich man all poor people look the same." I also learned something by listening to this, which is always a positive. I never knew how much George Wallace was to blame for southern stereotypes. Granted, I also had no idea who George Wallace was until about an hour ago. I also didn't know that I needed a southern rock opera in my life, but I'm definitely glad to have listened to this before my death.

Never heard this album in its entirety up until today, but I swear I went through this album like "I know this song, wait I know this one too, wait I heard this one yesterday." For all that, my favorite song of the album was one I've never heard before, Electric Funeral. Anyways, I wasn't expecting 70s metal to be so hard. It feels really reminiscent of modern Doom Metal in some parts. I love Doom Metal, and I also happen to love this album. Obligatory RIP Ozzy Osbourne.

Jack White could be on the right side of The White Stripes breaking up and it could all be Meg's fault, but he makes it so incredibly damn hard to care, let alone take his side. He sounds like he's poorly emulating The Rolling Stones. At least the Stones had some redeeming quality. All this amounts to is piss-poor breakup music, or should I say, a piss-poor attempt at gaslighting paired with annoying amounts of "woe is me". I don't feel bad for this guy in the slightest.

This list really does give you the whole history of Post-Punk through stuff like this. First you get the stuff that started it like Roxy Music, then you get early Post-Punk like this album, and then you get the stuff when the genre became fully established like Talking Heads. I feel like this one is especially a good history lesson that gets written off for being way too experimental for most people. Granted, most of the bottom 25 on this list is in the bottom 25 because it's too experimental for most people. I'm not most people and I love Post-Punk, so this was great. It's a lot messier than most Post-Punk, but that's a part of the fun. Reminds me a lot of No Wave music from around the same time as this album's release like Swans' self-titled EP or No New York.

You could tell me that Opus 40 and Goddess on a Hiway are Flaming Lips songs and I'd probably believe you. This album feels like it's missing something to make it good. Maybe starting with the strings. The synthesized strings this album uses sound off, I guess out of place is more what I'm looking for, but I don't know really how to describe it. Anyways, speaking of The Flaming Lips, this album sounds like it's trying to replicate Clouds Taste Metallic, just replacing a lot of the whimsy with more direct meaning and strings. When it works, it really works, especially on Opus 40, but it doesn't work too often.

The Rolling Stones, now with 110% more southern influence and saxophones. I feel like this is the best of the 3 Stones albums I've gotten so far, mostly because of how much more Rolling Stones this album is. It really feels like they're letting loose on a lot of these songs and it adds a lot of fun. It also adds a hell of a lot of saxophone bonus points.

Normally, when music critics unanimously agree that an album is one of the greatest albums of all time, it ends up being somewhere between okay and great, but not greatest of all time material. Abbey Road is great, The Dark Side of the Moon is great, Rumours is great, but they don't really come to mind when I think "perfect albums." This thing, on the other hand, is perfect. It's just so damn emotional the whole time. Every song on the album is full of feeling, regardless of that that feeling is, and it really goes through a range of feelings, really complex and hard to write down feelings at that. The best part is that she makes it so captivating. Her voice has this quality that draws all of the songs what she's saying. I feel like I said that horribly but I don't know how to say what I'm saying. Anyways, this album really does go beyond incredible, or what incredible even could be. For once, the critics were right.

It's really interesting how nostalgic Frank Ocean's music can feel. I don't even kind of relate to his music, but something about the feel of the music and the lyricism feels like remembering old times. Also his voice is wonderful, I could listen to him sing about anything. Give me a Frank Ocean album about fighting pink robots and contemplating how short life is and I'd listen to that all day. Anyways, I feel like there's only so much "I did drugs that I shouldn't have with people that I shouldn't have" and different words for breasts you can fit into a double LP before it starts to run a little thin, and it definitely does towards the end of the album, but it's his voice that really keeps me going. That and the pretty cool instrumentals.

I have a strong bias towards incredibly 80s bands, bands with funny names, and saxophones. Apparently my bias ends at the band that fits all 3 of those categories at the same time. It's okay, but it sounds a lot like a lot of other bands from around the same time. The singer especially reminds me a lot of Depeche Mode.

Bristol really is an interesting city. It made probably the best electronic genre out there. That's also the only thing Bristol is known for. Anyways, somehow the Bristol sound made its way to the US and gave Moby inspiration to make this album. Good thing it did, this was great. Really made an hour go by pretty quickly. Don't ask Moby fans about his memoir about Natalie Portman, though.

Experimental Rap is the best rap, change my mind. Don't, there's no point. We have M.I.A.. The groove on this album is really unlike most stuff on this list. Really hard and carries a lot of interesting influences that tie back to M.I.A.'s ethnicity in a cool way. I especially like the South Asian percussion in songs like BirdFlu. Good politics, bringing attention to things going on in Africa. The whole album is really interesting to me. One of those "how did you stumble into making that sound?" kind of albums. I live for that kind of music, so this is great.

I feel like House music as a whole is just too long. I know why it's that long, it's to have a lot of jumping off points if you want to transition into other songs or to have a lot of time to build, but House just generally doesn't work in album form. Despite that, it was still a pretty neat album and I liked a lot of the influences on it. I'd still probably like this way more if I were in a rave or something.

Now THIS is weird. I love weird. this is like some weird Caribbean-Soul-Folk-Whatevertheheck hybrid. It's also proof that "I'm too high for this" is just a mindset. I've never done nearly enough drugs to explain what compelled anyone on this album to do what they did, and that's the fun of it. It doesn't need explaining, it's just cool as hell and probably influenced by enough heroin to kill an elephant. It's like Captain Beefheart for people who haven't fully opened their third eye.

This album is like Disintegration but better. I guess Disintegration is Low-Life but not as good since it came out 4 years later, but that's besides the point. It's just really good Pop music, that's the point. I really like the instrumentals. I feel like "gothic" is the word I'm looking for to describe them, but something about it feels different from the notably very gothic synth-heavy bands from the same decade, especially with Elegia. I feel like the album trails off a bit after Elegia and generally I wish there would be more songs like Love Vigilantes that get away from the same kind of breakup lyrics, but it's still better than Disintegration, so it's pretty good.

The amount of people I see in the reviews for this album saying "I'm not a fan of reggae, but this was great" kind of speaks for itself with this album, so I'm gonna draw attention to something else. The bassist on this record needs some more people talking about him. He's great. I love how bouncy all of his stuff is throughout the album. Bass mention over, now to the music. Great music. It makes me want to find the nearest group of people and make a hand-holding circle and sway around for an hour and a half.

Today I learned that Jeff Buckley's Lilac Wine was a cover. I now have another reason to dislike that song. This version is way better. Granted, hers is also a cover, which makes Jeff Buckley's version a cover-cover. Nina Simone has the best version. Nina Simone also has the best everything. The album cover doesn't lie, Four Women is unforgettable, along with What More Can I Say, Break Down and Let It All Out, and really any song on this album. It's all magical and I wish every song was twice as long. Damn you, early fade-outs.

I swear I went through this whole album saying "wait, I know that song" like 15 seconds in to every song. I blame my mom, like I do with my taste in 80s pop. She always liked, in her own words, "women that aren't alto singers that sound like every other alto singer." I'm pretty sure I already heard this entire album before I got it today because of long car rides with her autoplaying random songs. Good to know I already liked most of these songs before going into the album. The ones I haven't heard already like Mary Jane or Forgiven ended up being weaker than something like You Oughta Know, but You Oughta Know is also one of the best songs ever, so that's like comparing the calorie count of a chicken wing and a chunk of uranium. I'd still just keep the really spiteful energy of the louder songs of the album compared to the softer ones.

I'm just confused by this one. What on earth does Nick Cave have to do with any song on here? Is this entire album just "look at how many famous people I can get featured on my album!" for an hour? Why do I see Philip Glass everywhere? Lots of unanswered questions. The questions are much more interesting than the music, though, so I don't particularly feel like looking into any of them. I feel like I'd care more about this album in general if it didn't seem like she's flaunting all of the big names she got on her album and not doing a whole lot else. That and the incredibly strange way of talking about sex. Someone perfectly said what I was going to say so I'm just gonna quote him. "I fully believe the lyrics were written by a teenager making their first attempt at erotic fan-fiction and you cannot convince me otherwise." -1001 Review Guy, 10/13/22

And you may find yourself listening to this album, And you may find yourself in another part of the world, And you may find yourself having the time of your life, And you may find yourself asking to give this album 6 stars, And you may ask yourself, "how did I get here?"

I lump Motörhead in the same kind of group as AC/DC or Rage Against the Machine. They all write one song over and over, but it's one pretty good song, so there isn't a whole lot to complain about in that regard. You don't really listen to any of those bands expecting something the variety of something like Ween or Mr. Bungle (Side note, I'm very upset that neither of them made it onto the 1001 list). Anyways, I've found that my taste in metal is 50% stoner and 50% grandfather, so I quite enjoyed this one. Bonus points for having a self-titled song on this album, I love those.

What I appreciate the most about this list is the fact that it'll randomly throw an album at me where my immediate reaction is "what on earth even is this?" and that feeling stays for the entire thing, and that feeling is usually positive. If it weren't for this list I would have no idea who The Pogues are, let alone feel interested enough to listen to this album, and yet, I just spent 45 minutes listening to the most incredibly Irish sounding rock music ever. I would love an entire list of 1001 albums where all of them are as unusual and different as this one is instead of Beatles Clone #45 or the nine different David Bowie albums. Hell, give me another Pogues album on this list. Either way I'm certainly gonna be checking out more from these guys, this was fun.

I love it when metal bands bring in some elements of where they're from into their music. Alien Weaponry making a lot of their music in Māori is an example and it's awesome. The problem is, much like Alien Weaponry, they hardly lean into it. Most of the album is pretty basic and I largely only like the parts that put their Brazilian roots (you know, like the name of the dang album) into the music. Even when the Brazilian stuff is there, it's usually just there to end the song or as a weird interlude in the place of a chorus. Basically, I need more songs like Ratamahatta.

Leave it to The Pharcyde to write a 4 minute song of nothing but yo mama jokes and have it be one of the better ones of the album. The lead guy has a really nice flow, especially on Otha Fish. The only problem is it's too dang long. This could've just as easily worked as a single LP. Granted, adding skits and interludes was just what you did in a 90s rap album. Still a great album. Everyone has a great sense of humor and it's easy to tell that they're all having fun with it. Also, I saw a bunch of reviews calling this album super dated. Yeah, that's the fun of it. Old rap is fun.

I never really know what to do with bands that have bad people in them. When I already like the band, I tend to be like "aw man :(" and then forget about it in like a month, but when it's a band I've never heard before, I feel like I shouldn't bother listening to them. I kind of have to listen to these guys because I got them on the list, though, so I just went into it with the well horribly poisoned. That being said, the sexual assault stuff could've never happened and I'd still find this album pretty boring. This album sounds very dated, and not in a good way like 80s Pop or 60s Psych Rock. I feel like the singer doesn't know how to convey emotion through music so he makes the music sound massive to get you to feel something. It almost works in some parts, especially in the opener, but I also feel like it only works because it's the opener in that case. For all that, there were a few okay songs. The one with the French women was fun until the singer opened his mouth and I sort of liked the instrumentation on No Cars Go. It's not quite a 1 star album, but it's almost there.

This album is everything good about experimental music in its early days. It's really hard to make music that sounds this genuinely unnerving, and I think that's what draws a lot of people away from this album. It's the lowest rated album on the entire site right now, after all. It's a wonderful album, dare I even say one of the best ones on the list so far to me. The variation in everything is my favorite part. The noise sections are great, the more ambient songs like Hamburger Lady or E-Coli are really interestingly done, and then there's an acoustic song thrown in the middle for the hell of it. More than anything, it's a varied album, and an album that does every varied thing really, really well. It's stuff like this that I look for in a list like this. That being said, this review also gets Kid Rock one step closer to having the lowest rated album on the list. Bazinga.

I get the feeling that these guys aren't feeling this album. It's like the Happy Mondays, just a little more bored. The music itself isn't boring, but I'm really struggling to remember anything about this album other than the absolutely glorious saxophone bonus points it receives.

I really don't try to do any of that art-artist separation crap unless it's an artist I already really like. I have zero reason to like Phil Spector as a producer or a person. The music is great, all classic covers of already good Christmas songs, I just really wish that anybody other than Mr. Serial Rapist/Murderer made it. The knowledge that Mr. Spector did what he did totally taints this album for me. It still gets saxophone bonus points, sadly.

This album is 75% the greatest album of 1985 and 25% pretty good songs from 1985. I only ever heard the two really big hits before going into this one and was pleasantly surprised by just about everything. Shout and I Believe especially were really good. This is also up there with the Prefab Sprout album on this list for the most mid-1980s sounding album on this entire list, to its benefit. I love overly 80s music. Head Over Heels is a good song, but I feel like sticking a love song right after six songs about war feels a little forced and I'm not too big on the closer. Like I said, 75% greatest album of the year, 25% pretty good.

I sincerely do not care that he covered Hurt by Nine Inch Nails because he covers Bridge Over Troubled Water and Personal Jesus on the same side of the album. That being said, the vast majority of the songs on this album are covers. That's besides the point, other than the fact that I feel like a few of the covers are more for novelty than anything else (namely, Personal Jesus and Hurt). The majority of the album is really good. I've always been a fan of albums that artists write when they know they're dying, like Blackstar by David Bowie or The Wind by Warren Zevon. This album is no exception, although I think it's weaker than those two. The backing vocalists don't really add much and like I said, some of the covers are more novel than good. His version of Danny Boy is incredible and it was a good idea to cover Bridge Over Troubled Water. This is a very emotionally heavy album, that's something it does better than Blackstar. More than anything, the fact that he can still write albums this good when this was his sixty-seventh is really something to behold with him.

I swear I've heard this exact sound from 5 other bands on this list, just this one has a narrator with an extremely thick accent. Really all I thought during the runtime of the album was "that guy has a funny voice" and "I'd really rather be listening to The Who right now." I would love to listen to a whole audiobook of the spoken word parts extended really far, though. The funny part is that I have absolutely no idea what he's saying half the time, his voice just sounds neat. That being said, the music itself is completely unnoteworthy. Sounds like every other psych rock band from the late 60s.

I feel like praising "production standards," as Wikipedia puts it, is really shallow. Granted, I hardly care about production in an album and never notice issues that other people talk about on "poorly produced" albums. I can only think of a small handful of albums with production decisions that were bad to the point of making the album worse, like Aretha Franklin being the quietest thing in the mix on I Never Loved A Man. This is to say that this album just isn't that good. It's very, very flat, like Smooth Jazz that's so Smoothed out that they lose the Jazz. I liked the drum solo in the opener and saxophones will never take away from an album (lots of saxophone bonus points for this one), but past that this album is a bunch of nothing.

I can't believe I didn't like this album when I first heard it. There's a kind of warm and familiar sense that carries the tone of the whole album, especially on songs like Barely Legal and Hard to Explain. Apparently this album got sanitized for the US release so I had to spend 15 minutes looking for how to listen to New York City Cops because god forbid we make a song with New York City in the title after the September 11th Attacks. The US really is a heavily propagandized country and most people don't even notice it. Anyways, it's a good record and I do prefer the US album cover to the international one, but New York City Cops is so much better than When It Started. I'm now going to close this review by joking about the thing I just ranted about. What's the difference between 9/11 and a cow? You can't milk a cow for 24 years.

I feel like "mind-numbing" is a good word to describe this album, just in that good turn-your-brain-off kind of EDM way. Really interesting sample work from this album, especially in the first half. I'm definitely gonna have more than half of the hooks stuck in my head for a while. I've been singing "California is druggy-druggy-druggy-druggy" over and over again while writing this. I'm sure the fine specimen on the cover would agree with me saying that this is a great album.

I feel like I need one of those party light things that spin around to get the full experience of this album. I sadly don't have one of those but I had plenty of fun messing around with a flashlight on my car keys in the dark while listening to this. This is my kind of EDM right here. Maximum funny sounds with the feel of the soundtrack to an early 2000s flash game like The World's Hardest Game or something similar. Normally I'm not huge on EDM for the length of the songs, but this manages to hold my attention much better than a lot of what I've heard.

I really don't feel a whole lot listening to this one. I felt uncomfortable from Dancing Queen randomly feeling a need to say that the character in the song is seventeen after they just did a song about a teacher kissing a student in front of a geometry class. Past that, the really really big hits of this album were okay. I've heard them all before, never been particularly huge on them. That's about how I feel about the whole album. I've heard it all before and I'm not big on a lot of it. Saxophone bonus points for one of the later songs, though. I will never not be huge on saxophones.

I remember spending a month tracking down the BBC Sound Effects Volume 1 record, and now I get to hear a record that references that record's cover. On top of that, the title uses that as a play on words. The guy who did all of the album art needs to be paid more. The music itself is fine, this list has a lot of New Wave and Post-Punk on it, so a lot of it is bound not to stick out as much as others. This would be wild if it referenced the BBC Sound Effects in more than just the art, though.

The entire process that brought this record into existence is incredibly weird. The guy beat up the other Moby Grape members, went to a hospital, and then recorded demos without the producer even being there because the poor guy thought he was being a distraction. This same producer guy then hands over the practically unedited demos to Spence's label, only for said label to hardly talk about this album and then get rid of it like a year later. I tend to like commercial failures, so this guy at least found his audience at some point. It's a great record and surprisingly psychedelic in some parts, more than what's usual in 60s records, especially with War in Peace and Grey/Afro. I like his songwriting style a lot. I can imagine the fact that every song is a demo adds to that, but a lot of the music feels very personal in the same way that something like Pink Moon by Nick Drake does (really hoping that's on the list too). I'm surprised this one is rated as low as it is.

Bowie album number 5, this is getting a little ridiculous. This is one of the two or three that I'd actually put on this list, but that doesn't get rid of the fact that this is the fifth album from this guy I've been given so far. Anyways, It's a good album, even if I prefer his more artsy stuff like Heroes or Blackstar. I like that songs on this album randomly become relevant again every once in a while, like Starman becoming a meme in 2024. As always, saxophone bonus points. I'm struggling to find stuff to say about this one, honestly. It's great, but not eighth best album of the list great.

My opinion on this album is influenced a lot by me getting Astral Weeks first. I guess he got used to the extra instruments somewhere down the road. I can guess he's much more okay with extra stuff on this album since it wasn't nonconsensually overdubbed into his studio album, but I find his early folksier music more interesting. It's clear he's feeling it, though, and his backing band sounds good. I can't even really say I disliked it, I'm just confused by how this came out of the Astral Weeks guy.

Blackstar is a rare opportunity. Very few artists get a chance to write an album knowing it's going to be their final one before their death, and nobody used that chance better than Bowie. He used his last chance to do whatever the hell this is, inspired by Kendrick Lamar and Death Grips, according to Bowie himself. For how much I said "I can't hear the Death Grips in this" for a while, I feel like I can on re-listen, mostly in the lyricism. The lyricism of this entire album reminds me of the kind of lyrics in the latter half of Jenny Death. Anyways, I feel like the one word that comes to mind when I listen to this album for a second time now is "ominous." The way Bowie talks about his own upcoming death makes it feel like he's just waiting for it to happen. Lazarus sounds like it's written from the perspective of an already dead Bowie. What's really cool about the album is the amount it pulls from his older works, like the two songs that were redone for the album or the harmonica solo sample in the closer. I have way more that I could rave about with this album, like the Nadsat passages in Girl Loves Me or the insane music theory in the title track (seriously, that's the best use of parallel fifths I've heard in a song, and also the only use of parallel fifths I've heard in a song), but I'm gonna cut myself off before I spend all night writing this. It goes without saying that I think this is Bowie's best album, as much as I love Heroes. What a wonderful goodbye to the world, almost as wonderful as the sax player on this album. So many saxophone bonus points.

I remember my high school theatre troupe used Vincent as the intro to a play for a competition, probably my Junior year. We used the title track as a song for warmup exercises pretty regularly in marching band the same year. I guess my school's performing arts department was feeling Don McLean in 2022. Anyways, I like the non-singles a lot more than those two songs. That's saying a lot, especially with Vincent being the second single of this album. Ending with Babylon was an interesting choice, it has a weird controlled chaos kind of feel that fits well after The Grave. That's the fun of the album, he'll decide to do something a little random every once in a while and it just works out.

This just isn't a hateable album. I'm yet to find anyone that hears the name Marvin Gaye and says "I hate that guy." Hell, it's hard to find someone that dislikes his music. Half the time when his name is brought up the response is "He's a great songwriter, love his stuff." It's am amazingly relaxing listen more than anything, just something about those strings. The lyricism is amazing as well, backed up by one of the best voices in Soul. Marvin Gaye could sing a Terms of Service page and make it sound like prose. Lastly, of course, saxophone bonus points.

Surprisingly enough, I've never heard of this band before despite this so being my kind of music. Thank you, 1001 List. Anyways, it's a pretty good album. It reminds me a lot of something like The Dark Side of the Moon, just more indie. I like how soft the guy's voice is, although sometimes he gets hard to understand over the pretty big instrumentals. The stuff he says isn't really a whole lot to note either way. The instrumentals are great, though, and the vocals add a lot in a good few songs. Sampling Siouxsie and the Banshees adds a star, that was wild.

I feel like this album would be much better if they just used the latter half of it. The first half has a few good parts, but as a whole it feels like everything else from the 90s. The second half is amazing by comparison. It jumps a lot from idea to idea and all of it works pretty well. The last handful of songs is especially great, just sucks that I had to wait an hour to get there.

Almost a quarter of the way into this list and I finally got the first Elvis Costello album out of six. It's not great, hopefully he has better. A lot of my problem with this album is the guy's singing. His really overly nasally voice gets pretty grating after 45 minutes. Every track starts to blend into the same love song with the same awkward rhyme scheme about halfway through, and him repeating the same line over and over at the end of every song sure doesn't help fix that. Lipstick Vogue at least breaks up the sameyness with a pretty interesting groove, but past that I feel like London Calling did this sound much better about a year later.

Anthony Kiedophile or whatever his name is can go find someone else's music to cover, the original Higher Ground is much better. Red Hot Chili Peppers, more like Lukewarm Bell Peppers. Anyways, Stevie Wonder just isn't a hateable artist. Nobody's going to say "I hate Stevie Wonder's music." It's just not possible unless you hate fun, pianos, amazing chord structures, social commentary, great singing, or some or all of the above.

This album isn't New Wave, literally unplayable. Anyways, another band for the AC/DC club of making one really good song over and over again, just now they sound like Oasis but a little darker. They have some great lyricism, especially in the first half of the album, but the instrumentals really start to get samey by the halfway point. It'd be funny if there was some actual New Wave in this, though.

This list has taught me a lot, but what it's most recently taught me is that I love this kind of sound, artists like Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, etc. This is no different, just a little more rock-focused than those two. Neil Young has a very interesting voice to me, almost like The Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne with the register he sits in when he sings. I feel like some songs really stick out to me on this album as better than everything else, especially Southern Man and Only Love Can Break Your Heart, but everything in this album is pretty good at a minimum. The best part is Neil Young writing a protest song that pissed off Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Britpop is probably the second most overrepresented genre on this list, behind New Wave. You could realistically shave it down to five albums to get the full idea of the genre. Personally I'd pick What's the Story (Morning Glory?), Everything Must Go, Blur's Self-Titled, Different Class, and this one. I'm really not big on albums that stick the one song they made the album for right at the start, but this one still manages to be good by putting actual effort into the 13 other songs. Really the only thing that makes Bitter Sweet Symphony the song that the album's obviously designed around is the fact that it sounds like a lead single with the strings that sound like they're made to be put in a Nike ad. The whole album is great, though. Very spacey in a really appealing way with a driving feel to match it that makes it sound really unlike any other Britpop on this list.

This kind of metal is a total 50/50 for me on whether or not I like it. I love bands like System of a Down and Deftones, but I can't stand Limp Bizkit or Three Days Grace. That being said, this is surprisingly good. Maybe it's the guy making the dog sounds that's winning me over, but this album's pretty fun. That being said, All in the Family is awful. Because of course Mr. Bizkit comes onto this album to say the f-slur three times. It's definitely a negative outlier, though. The rest of the album is really good. Freak On a Leash is a classic and there were a few songs I've never heard before that surprised me like My Gift to You and Dead Bodies Everywhere.

I hate that death and near-death experiences make artists' best albums. So many of my favorite albums would never have happened without somebody dying and I hate having to acknowledge that. Injury Reserve, David Bowie, Warren Zevon, and so many others made amazing albums where they couldn't even live long enough to see how much their music affects people. I guess getting shot really makes you realize that life goes fast. The whole thing really must've made him look inwards because he reached inside himself and pulled out a real masterwork. Really heartbreaking stuff on this album and showing a side I haven't seen come out of him. Crazy that Mr. "You claim to be a player, but I fucked your wife" is the same guy that said "I'm hopeless, they should've killed me as a baby." The whole album is like that, and I feel like Rap is really the best medium for stuff like this to be said. Huge focus on lyricism with a lot more space to be wordy than other kinds of music. He uses that perfectly in the full hour-ish runtime of this album, not a wasted line anywhere. Special credit to this album's producers, they add to the weirdly reminiscent feeling the album has incredibly well. This album also got a ridiculous amount of awards when it came out, from being RIAA Certified 2x Platinum to being put in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and it really deserves everything it got. There will never be another rapper like 2Pac.

It's really worth noting that I got an album that Bowie himself describes as "Plastic Soul" on MLK Day after getting a much more fitting for the album for the holiday literally yesterday. That being said, Bowie is surprisingly good at making Soul music, but being a sax player makes you innately soulful, so he only gets half-points. He still gets the full share of saxophone bonus points, though. I read another review on this album that brought up a good point, that this album, quote, "[shined] a light on music that hadn't reached white suburbanites before - at least not in a way that could have been considered acceptable at the time." With that kind of frame of mind, it's a pretty good album, especially for what it does, although I'm glad he moved on to the Berlin Trilogy immediately after this album. I see this as more of a love letter to Soul than something he could've made a career continuing.

This sounds like the kind of music that South Park's Chef sings whenever he thinks about getting 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓴𝔂 with women, down to actually saying "sweet lovin'" a few times. Chef's probably more 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓴𝔂 than Marvin Gaye, but I swear he sounds like he's about to burst out of his clothes when he's singing half of these songs. Maybe this album's cover his him right in the middle of him throwing his pants behind him. You can't prove it isn't, the cover only shows the waist-up. Anyways, maybe it's the fact that this just isn't my kind of 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓴𝔂 music (granted, I don't get 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓴𝔂 to any music), but I feel like the amount of 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓴𝔂 on this album gets in the way of me enjoying it sometimes. I prefer socially conscious Marvin Gaye to 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓴𝔂 Marvin Gaye.

Totally nails the super relaxed feeling it's going for, with some great lyricism to boot. It's like those NPR Tiny Desk Concert videos, but turning that feeling into a whole 70-ish minute album. The best part is that it just keeps getting better as it goes. I'm especially a big fan of her duet with Stephen Marley towards the end, wonderful back-and-forth between them. It's probably important to say I've never heard Baduzium, but Wikipedia calling it's lyrics more cryptic than Mama's Gun probably means it's better that I got this one. I like how open she is on this album about a lot of things. Speaking of Wikipedia, whoever called her a female D'Angelo was spot on.

My dad would probably be incredibly pissed to find out that The Allman Brothers Band only got one album on the list, and then probably say "at least they got that one on there." Anyways, if there's one thing I love in a live album, it's a 23 minute jam session. I really only tend to like live albums if they do something different from the studio version, and a pretty easy way to fulfill that is to stick a jam session onto a whole side of a record. It really helps that these guys are incredible improvisers, maybe even up there with the Grateful Dead. Bonus points to the song that's just jamming. Not even a song to lead in, just a 13 minute jam. Maybe I'm easy to please (I absolutely am), but this album really hits the right part of my brain in a way that only a few bands have.

After getting Rubber Soul, all I can think when I get The Beatles on the list is "crap, The Beatles." Apparently, all they were missing was LSD. To be fair, I feel like most artists would do at least a little bit better if they did a little LSD before writing their songs. Not everybody can be Frank Zappa. This is the album that finally makes me understand why The Beatles are so popular and critically acclaimed and whatnot. Maybe it's the music nerd in me going crazy about the fact that Good Morning, Good Morning has a bunch of time signature changes, or just how generally experimental the album is, or just the fact that it isn't Rubber Soul, but this is the one Beatles album I've found so far that I honestly wouldn't call pretty overrated.

I think this is my second album I've gotten that isn't on streaming anywhere, ended up finding a YouTube video of the full album since the YouTube link brings you to a playlist with two unavailable songs. Anyways, women in any kind of punk or metal or anything like that is always great. I'm noticing that women are more likely to experiment with punk music, like Bikini Kill creating Riot Grrrl music or this band making Post-Punk that's a lot more Post- than Punk. Sometimes they leave post-punk entirely and make something closer to Indie Rock territory. Pretty interesting stuff.

This is some incredibly British rap music. It reminds me a lot of BGMedia back in the mid-2010s. That was some quality, Afghan Dan especially had talent. He put out an album about a year or two ago called Relic that's pretty good. He also made a diss track against one of the features on this album, Wiley. Crazy how everything comes full circle. Anyways, the album definitely has some issues. That "Bang brrrang dang dang" bar was funny, but definitely in the top 5 whitest bars I've heard come out of a black guy. The whole album is sprinkled with random bars that require a double-take to make sure they're actually that bad, and they usually are. That and the skits throughout make the vocals a drag going into the latter half. The beats are awesome, though. Really driving with some good Drill and Garage influence in them. The guy's voice at least matches the beats pretty well, even if the lyrics don't.

I prefer Morrissey's solo work, but this isn't bad. Calling a song "Unhappy Birthday" is much funnier than the band probably intended, but that just makes it even funnier. I feel like this album just gets drowned in a sea of 80s albums that sound exactly like it. Past that, I don't have a lot to say. It's certainly an 80s album.

I've been meaning to listen to this album for ages, good thing this list finally forced me to do it. These guys have the songwriting style of a Grindcore band. "Let's just throw some lines together and put a beat to it." 1-2 verses, 90 seconds, done. Repeat 43 times and you have this album. Honestly, I keep seeing more and more Grindcore connections the longer I think about it. There's the incredibly on-the-nose song titles, like Political Song for Michael Jackson to Sing, or Shit from an Old Notebook. There's the really unstructured lyrical style that's closer to a stream of consciousness than songwriting. The really big one is the song length, though. I'm pretty sure I've actually listened to Napalm Death songs that are longer than most of the songs on this album. Anyways, enough rambling about niche metal genres. This album is great. You can't say any song overstays its welcome because they practically say goodbye right as you meet them. Every song tosses you in a totally different direction, too. Sometimes they don't even talk, they just throw crazy stuff at you, like whatever You Need the Glory is. It's that kind of total randomness that makes the album great. You never know what's coming next.

I see a lot of people describing this album as "college rock." I was sitting here like a dingus thinking "I'm a college student and I've never heard any other college student talk about R.E.M." and then I realised it's what alternative music was called before it was called alternative music. Anyways, I'm definitely missing something here. This album almost reminds me of a Cocteau Twins record. I feel drawn to the vocals because of what the guy's saying, but then I listen and have to ask "is he just saying random words?" Apparently the singer actually had no clue what he was saying in the chorus of Sitting Still, so yeah, random words. The instrumentals are much more understandable, but they're a little too one-note a lot of the time. That seems to be a common problem with this kind of music, I feel the same way about The Smiths.

This band's singer reminds me a lot of Bon Iver's Justin Vernon with his inflection. The music itself is pretty funky, so this is basically like Scissor Sisters and Bon Iver making an album together. I love both of those bands and they apparently come together pretty well. It's kind of hard for me to talk about this album without mentioning a litany of other bands because this really does sound like a bunch of influences coming together into something interesting. It doesn't entirely sound like any of its influences, though. It's definitely a unique thing, and a pretty good one.

Funny enough, I got a 2Pac album a week or two ago. Between the two big 90s guys everyone knows and talks about, 2Pac is significantly better, at least between their respective albums on this list. Biggie is like a walking encyclopedia, though. The random references to other songs, and even non-music things like TV shows and movies, were my favorite parts of the album. 2Pac has him beat in every other respect, but that doesn't make this a bad album at all. The beats are good, he's a pretty on-par lyricist, and the album has some incredible moments, but as a whole it's very mixed.

This is a part of a very specific genre of music I call "Guys will look at this and say 'hell yeah.'" It's mostly a subset of 70s/80s Metal and Hard Rock, but really all that's needed to make it a part of this subgenre is the ability to make your average guy say "hell yeah." Stuff like Rising by Rainbow or Paranoid by Black Sabbath. My favorite part of this album is that the band changed singers after the death of their original one and still made the exact same album as they did the past six times. I have to respect it, this one even has their biggest songs on it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

The big problem with me occasionally having to do these albums at night is that I'll randomly be thrown a 135 minute-long 2CD and have to stay up until midnight. At least it's only the third longest album on this list, to my knowledge. Anyways, separating the two and putting their works on the same album is a very strange choice that's probably at least 90% motivated by money (kind of in the same way that Brendon Urie making 3 more albums as Panic at the Disco despite him being only member left was probably a 100% money-based decision), but I like it. Big Boi clearly wanted a more straightforward rap album and André wanted to drink a green half-caf decaf mint mocha latte out of a flower pot with foam at the bottom, so just giving them both a CD makes sense over having them fight over how normal their album is gonna be. Speakerboxxx feels more like an OutKast album in a lot of ways, but still throws in some really interesting songs. I like the EDM influence on GhettoMusick and all of the weird directions that side sometimes takes. Even the more regular parts of the album are pretty strong. The album takes a total turn going into The Love Below. It's hardly even a rap album, there's a lot more Funk and Soul thrown in than anything. I feel like "unrestricted" is the first word that comes to mind to describe that half, like an album André wanted to make for a while and totally went crazy with when he finally got the chance. It's pretty hard to say which side is better overall, I just like the musical whiplash between the two more than anything. Saxophone bonus points for The Love Below, along with my new favorite cover of My Favorite Things.

This album just doesn't have a whole lot to listen to. There are some songs where I feel like my brain is tying to forcibly tune it out. Even when that isn't happening, the interesting songs are fairly short. that song about Paul McCartney is the exception, that one was wild. He clearly has a lot he wants to say, but I wish he stuck with the style he said it with on the album before this one.

Much better than the Smiths album I got last week. This one had a lot of energy to it while still keeping the over-mopiness that Morissey is known for. Cemetery Gates was a really good standout to me, I just liked the instrumentals. Much like the other Smiths album I got, I don't have a load to say about it, but this one was pretty good.

For the fact that these guys have a member that calls himself The Edge, they really did lose their edge. It's weird to think that this is the same band that made Sunday Bloody Sunday, or just War as a whole. The songs are all passable, but nothing's moving. When they're referencing political movements and issues, it lacks the power it did on War. When they're not, it's a whole bunch of nothing set to fine enough Oasis-ish instrumentals.

What is it about LSD that makes everyone talk about drifting and stars and whatnot? That seems to be a common thread between quite a few of the albums I've gotten on this list so far, along with other albums I've heard that aren't on here. Anyways, this is pretty good. I wish they did more with the dancey stuff like they did at the start, but the amount of variation makes this album pretty fun. It sounds like they let the drugs take them wherever and they just tried to make it work. They even managed to sneak in a few saxophone bonus points towards the back end of the album.

I'm incredibly 50/50 with Elliot Smith's music. I'm totally indifferent to his self-titled album and I love Figure 8. I'm somewhere between with this one. It's a lot more pleasant to listen to than his self-titled, but I prefer his music after he got signed to a big label and got a backing band. There were some hints towards his sound change on this album that I liked, it's like a perfect middle ground connecting his self-titled with Figure 8.

In the undying words of a Mamas and the Papas review I saw ages ago at this point, you have three choices as a rock band in the 60s: copy The Beatles, copy The Beach Boys, or touch kids. I can't find any source on anyone in the band doing that last one, but my ears are definitely enough of a source on the first two to say that these guys are, in fact, just like the other 60s Pop Rock bands on the list. For crying out loud, "Beach Boys" and "Beatles" are the second and third most commonly used keyword in reviews of this album. Anyways, sometimes they sound like some other guys, I guess. It's kind of hard to form an opinion on them because of how many damn bands on this list sound exactly like this. Half of my thoughts on this album are just exhaustion from the amount of "let's copy the Beatles/Beach Boys!" We have seven Beatles albums and three Beach Boys albums, that's enough.

Must be one humble guy. If this album's just OK, I'm scared to know what an album called "Pretty Good" would sound like from him. I like all of the south Asian influence on this album, it gives it a character I haven't heard before in this kind of music. Pretty slow start but it's great once it gets a few songs in.

Even when I escape Bowie, I can't escape Bowie. I thought I was hallucinating his voice on The Passenger until I looked at the Genius lyrics page and saw that Bowie does backup vocals. Scared me half to death. He also wrote and produced this album, and did backup vocals on a couple other songs. I'm going insane. The two songs about loving young girls and the one where he's high out of his mind and screaming about black women isn't helping. Must be Lusting for Life in prison.

I feel like I've said it a few times, but THIS is what I signed up for when I started this list. Throbbing Gristle, The Flaming Lips, Roxy Music and all of the other totally insane stuff thrown in among the 60s Beatles clones and nine Bowie albums. There are three things I love more than anything in music: niche music theory that I can spend an hour and a half looking into, albums that sound like absolutely nothing on this earth, and saxophones. Especially saxophones. There isn't a single album on this earth that's made worse by a saxophone player. Now imagine my surprise when I find out that there's an album dedicated to my favorite jazz saxophonist, Ornette Coleman, sitting in the bottom 10 albums on the list. Now imagine my double surprise when I find out that it's heavily inspired by Grindcore and other hardcore punk scenes from the end of that decade. This is all to say, this album makes Captain Beefheart sound like Herb Alpert. I don't think you can get more chaotic in jazz without foregoing rhythm entirely and just saying "fuck it, make sound until you pass out." And under that is some serious thought. The sax in isolation sounds like he's playing a normal song, he's just getting buried under the two drummers simultaneously playing their hearts out. I could gush about this album for an hour and a half, but I have sleep to get. In short, this is the best jazz album I've ever heard, and I hope Ornette Coleman heard this before he died.

This is incredibly high-energy compared to the other Pet Shop Boys album I heard from this list. I don't know if I like this sound more than the other one, but I certainly don't like it less. I like the contrast between the big sound of the album and the guy's really unenthusiastic singing, gives a very uniquely Pet Shop Boys sound to the album. I also love the way the singer says "here." It's like him saying "years" (or should I say, "yeeahs") in Behaviour, he just says words ending in -ere syllables in a funny way. Saxophone bonus points along with the funny sounds, of course.

Women and saxophones in punk, enough said.

I'm totally failing to understand why we need three Arcade Fire albums on this list if we have the more string/piano-focused songs on this album. These guys even have the crappy singing, but Billy Corgan's voice is at least interestingly crappy, unlike Mr. "my wife left me after I sexually assaulted four people that were half my age on tour." Arcade Fire hate aside, this is an amazing record. It's always impressive when 2 hours of music manages to stay good for its entire runtime. It has some really amazing songs and the album as a whole feels like it gets better as it goes on. I like all the random directions the album follows. There are some acoustic songs, followed by some metal, even an industrial rock song thrown in there somewhere, and it all sounds great.

Perfect timing, an album about cheating and breakups on Valentine's Day. I was gonna listen to this album today anyways for the hell of it, so good to know my sense of humor is random enough to agree with a random number generator. Anyways, as much as I hate cheaters (and especially artists singing about their cheating), the writing process of this album was so damn funny I can excuse it. "We all hate each other right now, so let's just write songs about how much we cheat and make the cheaters sing them." Peak revenge. I couldn't imagine how many other bands thought of that but broke up before they could do anything with it. The worst part is that this whole album is amazing. They really put all of their anger into their songwriting and it worked. There's a rawness to a lot of this album that you just don't hear in most other pop music, and a lot of that comes from the idea that everyone in the band is singing about each other, not some random unnamed ex with no defining traits outside of what whoever says they did. With all that, Songbird and Oh Daddy really stand out to me. All of these "I hate you, you cheated on me and screwed me over" and then there are two songs that say "I love you" and "it's my fault." Crazy stuff.

There's something about Silver Jews' sound that just gets to me. It takes forever to hit, but it's that kind of sound that sticks in my head for the next few days at the end of an album. It's fascinating to see how the singer put his struggles into the album. His singing reminds me a lot of Lil Ugly Mane's later works. It's weird to think that the guy who made this is dead, makes it feel like reading a suicide note. Maybe it was that,I feel the same way about Timothy Very, the drummer for Manchester Orchestra, who died yesterday. He didn't kill himself or anything, there isn't even a confirmed cause yet, it just feels the same way. I don't even really like that band, but reading the news that the drummer died really got to me, and this album reminded me of it. Death always affects the way I listen to music. I hope anyone here who feels any kind of suicidal thought finds a way out of it and feels better. Maybe they could even write an album about it. Life is too short to cut it even shorter. I'm gonna shut up before I make myself cry.

If it's good enough for the hundred-something women screeching at the top of their lungs whenever he breathes in their direction, it's good enough for me. He's saying the same ten things over and over (seriously, take a shot every time he says "I love ya, baby"), but he says them with a voice that could make a goulash recipe sound like it came straight from gospel. The band behind him gets into some incredibly funky antics and I was too distracted by the saxophones to realize he was saying the same ten things over and over until about halfway through the album. Basically, a good voice and a couple saxophones worth of saxophone bonus points can carry a record for me. Anyways, fun fact: you can hear someone faintly say "James, you're an asshole" about 14 minutes into the album.

This album has brought me to a realization. This album works so well because Soul and Country come from the same common ancestor. I feel like that's why there's such a split between people saying it's clearly country and people saying there's no way these were originally country songs. I'm in the middle. There isn't a lot that jumps out as country, but I feel like all of the songs are pretty clearly country covers. Anyways, I said the same thing yesterday about James Brown, but this guy could sing a Terms of Service page and make it sound like Pavarotti. Really the only negative to me is that I feel like the slower songs all start to feel the same after an hour, but everything else is great. Saxophone bonus points, of course.

I definitely needed something more straightforward today, so this album really did it for me. Not a whole lot more than a fairly classic Hard Rock album, but that's really all a classic Hard Rock album needs to be.

I have a really deep fascination with music like this. Stuff like An Evening with Wild Man Fischer by Wild Man Fischer or Speedin' Bullet 2 Heaven by Kid Cudi. Music that's written and performed by someone who's clearly incredibly unwell and still tries to make relatively normal-sounding music despite that. Sometimes it brings out some pretty interesting music that I feel wouldn't have been made if it weren't for those circumstances. For all I know, Syd Barrett would've written this album if he was 100% stable, but there really is a feeling that he's barely being held together and I feel like that adds a lot to this otherwise pretty inoffensive album.

I'm noticing that Mr. 1001 List Guy has a real affinity for female solo folk artists. Works for me, this list introduced me to Joni Mitchell and I will forever be grateful. I've now been introduced to two I hadn't heard of before starting this challenge. She has a very interesting style, very folksy but almost in a funk context on some songs. I love her voice, as I do with a lot of this kind of artist on this list. I feel like this is one of the weaker albums in this kind of genre I've heard so far from the list, but that's more of a statement towards how good every singer like her (including her) is than anything.

I never knew that this was the first ever Prog Rock album. Putting it in that kind of frame makes me like this album a lot more than I already did. I honestly wish more bands did the whole "songs within songs" thing that this album does. A lot of prog bands still do it with multi-part songs, but I just think it's funny to see a really long title that says (including "[like 3 extra songs]"). Anyways, to weigh in on Moonchild, since I see a bajillion people talking about that song in the reviews and I want to join in, I like it. I wasn't too major on it when I first heard the album, but it's nice. The album definitely has a stronger A Side than B Side as a whole, but this is surprisingly well-done for the first ever Prog album.

This is the type of music that makes me wonder what it would be like to introduce an early 50s jazz singer to modern experimental music, like imagine showing this guy Death Grips or Lingua Ignota. Anyways, the music's pretty fun. He's clearly having fun with it at the very least. I knew exactly one song from this guy before this list (Pennies from Heaven) and now I know that the majority of this guy's songs sound like it. Pennies aren't even a thing anymore, so somehow that song has become outdated. At least his stuff is the fun kind of dated where you can act like you're dancing around at a just-below-standard bar after your fifth manhattan. I'm very bad at staying on topic. The music's great, lots of saxophone bonus points.

Jesus Christ, Chef, save some strings for the rest of us. This could damn-well be one of the most timeless albums ever. I listen to this and think late 70s, not late 60s. This album came out the same year as Abbey Road. Anyways, I don't know what it is with soul singers and making the most creative covers out there, but that man put more than his soul into Walk On By and By the Time I Get to Phoenix. That second one nearly takes up a whole side all by itself and most of it is a pretty neat story he made up. The best part is that he got a whole orchestra's worth of instruments to back him up.

I feel so idle listening to this album. I was definitely listening to it, but I wasn't really feeling anything. It took an incredibly long time for literally anything to catch my attention, other than the songs changing. Release Yo' Self is the real standout of this album, but it's also 8 songs in and I really only liked it for the feature and slight energy boost compared to the rest of the album. It got slightly better after that song, but I feel like this guy's whole style was done much better with the Gravediggaz 3 years later. That same kind of dark, spooky-ish beat style with the sometimes overly gory lyricism, just taken thirteen steps further than Method Man did here.

I don't know if I've gained an appreciation for Cocteau Twins somewhere down the line, or if it's just this album, but the vocals aren't as intolerable as I remember them being on this album. Maybe I'm finally understanding this band after a year of occasionally listening to them and being like "yeah, they're fine, I guess." Lots of interesting songs with a really nice atmosphere. Now I just need that bumper sticker that says "stop honking, I'm trying to figure out what Cocteau Twins are saying."

1996 was a wild year for indie music, apparently. I know Modest Mouse and Neutral Milk Hotel both put out their debuts in 1996. Compared to those, I don't see a whole lot with this album. I can hear its influence in a lot of bands I listen to because I grew up listening to gay Tumblr music, but I'd still rather listen to Tally Hall or Lemon Demon over this band. It had its moments, though. I was a big fan of the instrumentation in Expectations and We Rule the School is a wonderfully emotional song, but as a whole the album is decent. My inner Tumblr Gay™ can absolutely appreciate this album's place in history no matter how I feel about it and it'll probably be one of those albums I forget about and come back to a year later and think it's a masterpiece. Totally unrelated, but why did they decide to make the woman on the cover completely naked except for her watch? I don't know why that's what caught my eye on the album cover, but it's just weird for a watch to be the only thing on her.

These guys are what Steely Dan could've been if they bothered to make interesting music. There's some actually fun songwriting and some really strange experimentation in some parts. For crying out loud, Mother sounds like it could've been written by Xiu Xiu without much change to it. The whole albums really manages to set itself apart from a lot of other 80s rock despite having the most stereotypically 80s rock sound they could've had in 1983. It's fun, pretty varied, and even uses weird time signatures at a few points. They should probably get rid of the most stalker-y stalker song ever, though.

He's having fun with it, clearly. I can appreciate that about it. It takes a bit to actually get good but the little fight scene after Gutter Cat vs. The Jets was pretty funny. With most things, it actually gets good around the sax solo. I'll take it to my grave, saxophones never make an album worse. Even if an album sucks, the sax solo is the least sucky part of it. Anyways, this album is theatre kid music. There's a song referencing West Side Story and everything. That, the concept of the album, and some of the instrumentation is very theatre kid and I like that.

I wasn't expecting an 80s country album to sound so 70s, but then again that's literally the point of the album. For crying out loud, this guy was called "too country" in Nashville, Tennessee. That's just impressive. The album itself is also pretty impressive. I like the really clear Mexican influence on a lot of these songs, although the lyrics drift into "please stop talking" territory in a few parts of the album, like in What I Don't Know or I Sang Dixie. Past that, it's a great album. Nice storytelling, really fun instrumentals and instrumentation, and a really genuine country feel. This kind of music, sometimes questionable lyrics and all, is what I think of when I think country. and I can give this album a great deal of respect for it.

Man, Iggy Pop really fell off in the late 70s. This is so much better than Lust for Life. Fun fact, it was also Kurt Cobain's favorite album. I can certainly say I see where he's coming from, even if I wouldn't call it my favorite. When he's making punk-before-punk and not singing about 16-year-old girls, Iggy Pop is a pretty fun songwriter. It's pretty hardcore for the early 70s and it's pretty easy to hear how this album influenced damn-near everybody in the 80s and 90s.

I feel bad for anyone doing this list that thinks Bohemian Rhapsody is a long song. The opener is 3 and a half Bohemian Rhapsodies long. Personally, I love it. A 7-part song that takes up an entire side on a record is what Prog is all about. The hardest thing for a Prog album to do, though, is match the energy and quality of a really long opening song for the rest of its runtime and this one has mixed results. The guitar solos are still awesome and I really liked A Passage to Bangkok and Something For Nothing, but I wish they continued the story for the entire album instead of leaving it to the first song. Better yet, just pull a Jethro Tull and make a one-song album. Side B is still a bunch of really good Hard Rock songs, but nothing beats that opener.

This is 100% gay sex music. Anyways, fun fact time: that's a real soldier on the album cover and his helmet originally said "MAKE WAR, NOT LOVE" on it. I quite like both slogans. I also quite like how gay this album is. Tell me with a straight face that I Want the One I Can't Have isn't gay. You can't because it's gay. It's also really atmospheric, more than their other albums. I can't quite say it's gayer than their other albums but it's definitely more atmospheric. Anyways, now that I've gotten all 3 Smiths albums on this list (+1 Morrissey solo album so far), I can't tell if each one is better than the last or if I just like The Smiths more than I used to. Both are equally likely. Either way I had a very gay time listening to this album.

I love rock operas. I don't really understand how anyone couldn't. It's fun and whimsy, the genre. Literally if anyone listens to The Wall and says "that was boring" they didn't listen to The Wall. This one even throws a random 7/8 song right in the middle and has a bajillion instruments. A lot of the reason I love Prog so much is the "why not?" energy the entire genre brings by existing. It's a genre that started and continues by not a whole lot more than amphetamines and forgetting what rules are, because absolutely nothing other than submission to our capitalist system and a lack of imagination is stopping people from writing 8+ minute songs. This is all to say I love this album. It feels so unchained from expectation. "Let's write the unsexiest song about sex we can think of," "let's throw in some existentialism right here," and whatever other random ideas made it onto this album all really make it what it is: way too much fun.

This album has the two things that makes all 80s metal good: excessive guitar solos and excessive amounts of guitar solos. I'd give this album 5 stars if it were purely instrumental, the vocals are just a bonus. Phantom of the Opera alone has like three guitar solos back-to-back-to-back and it goes directly into an instrumental, which then transitions directly into another guitar solo. They certainly know what they're good at. The amount of guitar soloing would probably be an issue if this weren't an Iron Maiden album, but it's an Iron Maiden album, so I have nothing to worry about. Best part is it has a self-titled song on a self-titled album.

That drummer is incredible. Any time he gets any measure to himself, he makes it damn clear that's his time. Everyone else is great as well. I think everyone does really well with the time they have to themselves. It's a very low-key album overall but it has some great energy in some parts. It's good music to go on a nature walk to, which is what I did with the first half of it with my dog. I like psychedelic stuff and some jazz when I'm walking down a canal path. I don't have a whole lot to say about it, it's just some really good jazz. Saxophone bonus points, of course. It's jazz.

I only ever knew Tim Buckley by his two REALLY experimental albums, Lorca and Starsailor, so I was pretty confused to see that three of his albums made it onto this list and none of them were those two. Apparently he's just always been like that. This was a lot more psychedelic than I imagined it being. Anyways, he's a pretty good singer, reminds me of Don McLean in a lot of ways. He has a lot to say and a lot of different ways to say it, too. I liked the random carnival-ish song thrown in there and the really medieval song, even if that one ran pretty long.

I'm not one to mention "production" on albums when I'm doing reviews like this, but the first few songs are mixed pretty poorly. It does fix itself around the third or fourth song at least. The guitar tone sounds super weird at the start of the album, though. Anyways, the solos are great. It's a Deep Purple album, so that's pretty inherent, but they're still really good soloists. the verses lose me a little, as does the latter half of the album as a whole. Basically, I don't really know how to feel about this one.

This feels like a very toned-down version of Double Nickels on the Dime by Minutemen. That's also on this list, funny enough. instead of 40-ish songs in 70-ish minutes, this is 20 in 30. I feel like the album as a whole is much more influential than good. I can hear where a lot of Post-Punk bands come from in this album, along with the general shortness that defines bands like the Circle Jerks. I feel like it's a lot more "blink and you miss it" than that Minutemen album. The really similar sound between every song and the same general song structure outside of a few songs draws my attention to when every song ends moreso than what's actually in the music itself. The really different-sounding songs like the title track or Strange stick out to me in a better way, though.

It takes a lot of nerve to cover three songs from the same Bob Dylan album. It takes even more nerve to cover a fourth Bob Dylan song after deciding that isn't enough, and then follow it up by naming the album after a Bob Dylan song. Past all of that, the album is just really boring. They're trying too hard to be every happy love song group from the same decade and it's just as uninteresting as a lot of the others. I feel like practically no 1960-1967 albums can get more than 3 stars from me because of that. It's all the same "I love you and you love me, let's go make a family" type stuff. Maybe the occasional "man why don't you love me anymore >:(" but either way I just get so bored of love songs really fast, especially 60s ones.

I'm so used to all the Kanye-isms and overly jerk-off-y decisions that come with the average Kanye album that all of that being gone surprised me more than how damn good this album is. There's still the occasional "why would you say that bar," but it's still surprising how few and far between they are. It's like everything good about Late Registration and Graduation but with this undeniable hunger to it, like he's throwing his entire weight into this album to make sure something sticks. Good news for him, everything in this album sticks like it did in 2004.

If this were a "1001 Album Covers You Should See Before You Die" list, this would get 1 star, that album cover is really bad. It looks like he has really short arms and doesn't know how to make a sexy face. Thinking about a guy with no sexy face knowledge and really short arms singing this does make the album a lot better, though. There isn't a lot to hold onto with the music itself. All of the songs get pretty samey halfway through with how big and poetic every song tries to be. Just get Springsteen out of here and replace all of his verses with the sax guy. I could listen to him all day.

I've been in the mood for some good African music for a little bit today, so this was what I needed. Some great singing and some really interesting percussion on some of the songs. A lot of these songs have a really hypnotic feel to them that made the album as a whole go by surprisingly fast, given its runtime. I don't have as much to say with this one because of how far out of my normal listening range this album is, but it's pretty good.

The Band is by far the best name these guys could've picked for themselves. First, they were Bob Dylan & The Band, but then they stopped working with Bob Dylan. Some member (probably drunk) probably looked to the other guys and went "Well, no more Bob Dylan. Guess we're just The Band now" and everyone loved it. They really stuck it to Bob Dylan, too. As much as I love his music, he probably wishes he could do stuff this good. The Band has this really emotional yet infectiously fun feel that only they can nail as well as they do. Just the fact that Long Black Veil and Chest Fever are right next to eachother on this album shows what I'm talking about. A really sad story into a really kickass organ solo. That's ignoring the other 9 songs on this album. They're all incredible and as incredibly varied as that pair.

I feel like this is one of those albums like The Dark Side of the Moon or Abbey Road where I can see exactly why everyone loves it but I really struggle to call it an amazing album. It's a great album, one of the better Goth Rock albums of the late 80s, but certainly not one of the best albums of the 80s. The atmosphere on the album is great, though. I love the crazy amounts of reverb on the drumset and the synths give the album a really spacey feel. Really my big thing about it is how much the album trails off the further it goes.

Albums like these make me want to find out how many Bob Dylan covers there are on this list in total. I think I've found at least 10 so far, four of which are from the same crappy Byrds album. The version of Amazing Grace at the end of one of the songs is great. I feel like the album as a whole is doing a lot with a little. Most of the songs use a 12-Bar Blues progression or similar, they're pretty much all of the songs are love songs in one way or another. Some of the songs are really dragged down by that, like I though Maggy May was gonna be a really unique folk tune, but it just turned into something similar to the other stuff on the album. Mandolin Wind finally did something different from the rest, until the last 30 seconds when they needed to give the song a big ending for some reason. The album should really dare to be different for more than 30 seconds like it did in the first 90% of that song. All of my favorite parts of the album were when some of the instruments got taken out and left the song with just a few guitars.

I'm very glad Mr. 1001 List Guy has such an affinity for this kind of folk music, if nothing else because it shows how much of an influence Joni Mitchell had on folk music. She really did inspire a whole generation of women to pick up their guitars and make music of their own. With that comes some artists that inevitably aren't as good as the rest. Not everyone can be Tracy Chapman. Really my big issue with this album is how damn monotone she is. It's all pretty flat and unexpressive. The instrumentals are okay and she does write some pretty good lyrics, but I just wish she would do more with her voice. Honestly I really wish she kept that poetry thing she did in the opener.

There's a really weird feeling I get when I listen to stuff like this. Somebody killed themself after writing this. It's such a weird thing to conceptualize. I could go out to my local record store (shoutout to Wax Records in Vero Beach, FL :D) and buy a dude's final words to the public on a plastic disc, put it on my record player, and hear them as many times as I want. It's horribly morbid to think about. The album is horribly morbid as well. It's like a bunch of guys grooving to a suicide note being read aloud. It does make for some really interesting music, but "at what cost?" really understates how I feel.

Not a whole lot to complain about with this one. It's got a whole string section, for crying out loud. It's some good music to relax to with a classic at every obnoxiously white party right in the middle of it. Sometimes the album was a little too easy to tune out, especially with the lyrics, but it was a great album. Past that I don't have a lot to say.

[Epic guitar intro] "I wanna fuck George Harrison's wife" [Epic guitar solo] "Oh, baby, I need George Harrison's wife" [Epic guitar solo] "Oh, George Harrison, I'm gonna fuck your wife" [Epic guitar outro] (Repeat for 76 minutes)

I read "Third is a live and studio album..." on the Wikipedia blurb and knew I was gonna be in for an interesting time. It was a pretty good time, too. I liked all of the weird experimentation on the opener and the really long sax solo in the second song. The guy's singing got a little much on Moon in June but the song was still fun. I liked the part where he was singing the organ part in the start of that song and did little embellishments with the organ whenever he got to a held note. The soloing in general on this album was great, so good thing it took up 90% of the whole runtime.

Kind of interesting to think about these guys' place in rap history. In the same era of rap as Run-D.M.C., Public Enemy, and Eric B. & Rakim, you have four white guys sampling The Beatles. I still prefer all 3 of the former, but it's not a super distant 4th place. What these guys have over all 3 of them is how dang creative they are with the beats. Nobody else was making 12 minutes worth of throwing random records on a turntable and making it work in one song in 1989. I feel like they were going for recognizability in the sample choices over anything else, but that could very well be because they're white and their record collection reflects that so it's all they had. I loved the samples in Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun, it was Rage Against the Machine-like for when it came out. The lyrics in basically all of the songs weren't really much to write home about, but I liked the three guys passing the bars around a lot.

The mid-60s were weird. Only in 1965 could you see someone cover Sam Cooke and The Rolling Stones in the same album. Other than that, it was a decent album. A lot of this kind of soul covers the same three topics in the same three ways, so it did get old by the end, even despite its really short runtime. It's not bad, just pretty forgettable.

It feels a little weird for him to say he can't remember his name and then put his name after an uncomfortable amount of periods....but that's besides the point. Also besides the point, he has some beautiful eyelashes in that cover. Anyways, the music. It's certified Hippie music. My dad was a hippie for a while and is getting back into politics now that we have a mango with the IQ and situational awareness of a mango running our country. What Are Their Names feels incredibly relevant today, speaking of that. Anyways, it's a pretty relaxing listen. I loved the instrumentation, surprisingly psychedelic for how folksy the album is. It's also making me realize how much CSNY there is on this list, but it's not a huge problem.

The first thing I learned about this band was that the singer was the bassist for Public Image, Ltd. and I immediately was thinking "this guy was involved in the creation of one of my absolute least favorite albums, this is gonna be awful." Metal Box is beyond awful, and I'm saying that as someone that loves experimental music. I'm happy to say that this is infinitely better than Metal Box, and anything PiL is capable of making. I could never guess where this album was gonna go next. On one song there was some Dub-inspired stuff, and then in the immediate next one there was some Spanish guitars, and then it went Middle-Eastern. It's like a really weird plane flight around the world where I have to spin a wheel to find out what country I'm gonna land in next. I loved everything about that flight and would get back on in a heartbeat.

Good to know they were always this weird. I can always appreciate that about this band. I feel like they didn't really reach maximum weirdness until Remain in Light, but they were always weird. Early Talking Heads has this goofy charm to it, though. It's just some happy, upbeat music about social problems and socially anxious serial killers. Normal happy topics. I got totally jumpscared by the saxophone in First Week / Last Week. I don't think saxophones when I think Talking Heads, but it works surprisingly well. Of course it does, it's a saxophone. The band only gets 10% of the credit. It gets 110% of the saxophone bonus points because I feel like it.

I feel like this is just everything I don't want in an Alt-Rock album put in an Alt-Rock album. I feel like a lot of the 5 star reviews saying it felt like they were reliving their high/middle school days shows that people only think it's good because they can associate it with something. I had one vague conversation about Incubus with my boyfriend half a year ago and totally forgot about them until I got this album tonight and had to listen to it, so without the nostalgia, it's just really shitty Alt-Rock. It's just way too clean. It feels like Panic! at the Disco learned what swears are and wanted to show their friends. When they're not doing that, it's just Deftones without any of the interesting lyrics, experimentation, Shoegaze-inspired guitar effects, or anything that makes Deftones worth listening to. There's at least a pretty funny irony about the most submissive-sounding rock singer I've ever heard telling everyone to "get out from under them" in the last song. That and a turntable, I guess.

I was talking to my granddad today about albums that are definitely only on this list because the bands that made them are British, and this is a leading example of that. It's fine, but nothing special. three of the top five keywords being other Britpop bands kind of shows the issue with records like this on the list. If "these guys sound like the other guys" is a good enough reason to say you need to hear it before you die, then you could easily pad this list to a ridiculously large number like 1,001 by putting in a bunch of Beatles clones like The Byrds or The Mamas and the Papas. Oh, wait.

I'm violently partial towards Prog. A lot of my all-time favorite albums are Prog. Any era, doesn't matter. As early as Genesis or King Crimson and as new as King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard or The Mars Volta. If I had to pick any genre as my absolute favorite, it would probably be Prog. At a certain point I thought it would turn into me having really high standards for the genre, but I'm 312 albums into this god-forsaken list and I've only become more partial to the genre. If it has ridiculous storyline, ridiculously long songs, ridiculous time signature shenanigans, or a combination of the 3, it's basically a minimum of 4 stars. Anyways, this gets the bonus points of being the most whimsical album about a homeless pedophile I've ever heard. That and the absolutely wild flute solo in Cross-Eyed Mary. Woodwinds in rock will never not be a great thing. If you're saying "man, I really wish there wasn't a flute in this song, it's really killing the vibe," consider the following: 1) you're probably not saying that. 2) if you are, please stop talking and let me enjoy my flute riffs without your negativity. Thank you for your time and consideration of the following.

This is an album that can't be described as anything less than an important moment in music history. I'd even argue an important moment in history in general. People were singing Alright in Black Lives Matter protests, for crying out loud. It brought together so many different influences, themes, and emotions, and that brought together so many people. I could probably write a seven-page essay on every reason why I think this is easily a top 10 album of all time, but I'm just gonna focus on one thing for this review: how positively charged this album is. It's not a purely positive album. Songs like The Blacker the Berry and Institutionalized are incredibly angry, much angrier than any other song he's ever made, but it's all aimed towards a positive endpoint. The album has a very clear theme of empowerment. Fighting negative thoughts, learning to love yourself, reminding yourself that everything's gonna be okay, and a lot of other similar themes have entire songs dedicated to them. That energy was definitely reflected in its listeners. Again, Alright was a protest song for a while. It's hard not to want to get up and do something after listening to it. I always feel excited and angry right with him when I listen to this. It's hard not to. There's even saxophones in it. So many saxophones. All the saxophone bonus points to this one. Godspeed.

I never thought I'd say "This 60s Medieval folk song reminds me of Schism by Tool" but here we are. The opener uses the Schism 6/4. Anyways I'm genuinely surprised something like this came out in 1969. More proof that 1969 was the best year for music, I guess. I loved everything about it, from the weird time signatures in the opener to the Irish chorale song towards the end of Side A to the singer's really interesting use of her voice in Hunting Song. The woman singer in general is my favorite part of this album. She has a really nice voice that adds to the really whimsical medieval feel of this whole album. I had at least five moments throughout the album where I looked down to see the title of a song and went "shit, this was 1969." I really don't know what to say past that. This was incredible.

I love the 12 Bar Blues progression. It's such a simple progression, and yet you can still simplify it further. There are a good few songs where Mr. Dylan basically drones on the starting I⁷ chord until he feels like changing it. Music theory aside, this is an amazing album. It's equal parts really bluesy and really reminiscent in a neat way. He's a great lyricist and harmonica player, and I really don't think his voice is as bad as I've seen people say it is. Maybe The Byrds should've found a different album to cover 3 songs from.

It's like Nirvana without the stuff that makes Nirvana interesting, but also like Alanis Morissette but kind of sad and bitter instead of angry and spiteful. I feel like "a little too clean" is a criticism I give to way too many of these albums but she really could've benefitted from taking from her boyfriend a little. It's totally passable, and I really liked Northern Star because it felt like she was finally breaking new ground, but I feel like I'm gonna wake up tomorrow and struggle to remember anything from it.

I thought they would've put their other self-titled album on this list but this one was a decent surprise. It's like if early Swans tried to make Cut the Crap by The Clash into a good album. I love the 80s kind of gritty Post-Punk sound that bands like this were going for back then. It pulls out a range of emotions with everything going on in any given album. I also love that they had to make at least one instrument per song sound like an industrial paper shredder. It adds character, if nothing else.

Possibly the most 2001 rap album ever. I'm a pretty big fan of the early 2000s rap sound, though, so it's not an issue. Putting a song like Takeover right at the start of an album is a crazy decision and I'm all for it. I could only imagine hearing Jay-Z going after two of the most high-profile rappers of the time and then watching planes hit the most high-profile building in New York City on the same day. Anyways, the only feature on this whole album totally missed the Capitol. "oooo everyone thinks I'm so evil and stuff, please feel bad for me" or whatever. You'd think George Bush would've sent a drone to his house by now with how much he talks about being demonized. The rest of the album is good, though, doesn't sound like it came out too soon at all.

It's interesting that this is now the second album I've gotten from a folk artist that has a lot of overdubbed instruments the artist didn't approve of. There are some songs, especially Hazey Jane I, where it barely even sounds like the overdubbing fits. It makes me want to listen through all the overdubbing stuff and try to hear it how he originally wanted it. If I had the choice of leaving this album unrated and just writing this review, I'd do that instead. It's so far removed from Nick Drake that it's hard to even say it's his album, let alone something to hear before you die.

Mr. 1001 Guy has decided I need more Worldbeat in my life, I guess. I like the really sample-heavy turntable songs and some of the more ambient stuff is nice, but I prefer that Jah Wobble album I got a little bit ago to this. The bulk of this album takes pretty heavily from Southern African music, and while it's neat, those sections started to lose me towards the end. That one really high-energy Latin song towards the start of the album was pretty neat, though. It's like 50/50 great and boring.

This album has two incredible songs and ten passable ones. TC and Honeybear reminds me a lot of some other really hard-hitting Indie ballads like Alvin Row by Animal Collective or Forgone by Quadeca. Caramel is incredibly touching and makes me wish the other love songs on the album were structured like it. The rest is fine. The very religious elephant in the room is better for shock value than anything else but I like the sentiment behind it. The final quarter of the album feels like it's a totally different album that got tacked onto this one. I don't know where the synths or overt gayness came from in that part, but I like both. We need more overtly gay music on this list, damnit.

I'm not major on any kind of drugs, so I'm definitely not the target audience for an album literally called Legalize It with a picture of Peter Tosh smoking weed in the middle of a bunch of weed plants, but it was a great listen. I always love how much is going on in the bass on Reggae albums. Everyone else is swaying along to the music and the bassist is bouncing off the walls half the time. Anyways, some of these songs are definitely about Bob Marley and it's pretty neat. I wasn't expecting to wake up and hear a Reggae diss track.

I've always thought it was interesting that the two camps of people I always see talking about LCD Soundsystem either think this album and their debut are better, or that This is Happening is better (the objectively right option tbh), and then everyone forgets about American Dream and 45:33. Fair enough, American Dream just sort of came and went and 45:33 isn't even 45 minutes and 33 seconds long. Anyways, it's still a great album. Despite definitely being weaker than This is Happening, it has my favorite song in their whole discography, All My Friends. It's like a Strokes song if they actually knew what reminiscing sounds like. There are a lot of good songs on this album past that, and the whole thing has a great energy to it. I always like music that slowly adds instruments into a beat and let everything build. The closer is always weird to me on this album, though. I like it, but I feel like it doesn't fit well with everything else.

I don't know how people can dance to Disco. I just find it really relaxing. It's one of the few overly polished music genres I consistently like, mostly because of how relaxing it is. This one really doesn't stray too far from the norm for the genre, but it also does it the best out of any Disco album I've gotten on the list so far. Special credit to that bass player, he's doing twice as much as anyone else at any given time and it's fun to listen to him go off in the background on every song.

It sure is groovy, and it's definitely more balanced out than Maggot Brain, and I definitely appreciate an entire 11 minute song about poop, and I can more than definitely appreciate how out there they are with all of these songs. It's ridiculously layered, sometimes to the point of getting way too complicated, but the second half clears itself up a lot. Speaking of the second half, I don't know where the metal guitars came from in Lunchmeataphobia but I wish they did that a little more throughout. It came totally out of left field. It's one of the many albums I can think of that could grow on me with time, but even right now I can say I quite enjoyed it.

I've been on a huge jam band kick for a while, and I've recently been getting into Jazz Fusion and the like, so this is exactly what I needed. Just some incredibly high-energy soloing for 40 minutes. This album feels like everything that came out of late 60s experimentation put into Jazz, and the results are amazing. I love that all of the really experimental 60s bands looked at a saxophone and went "yeah, that's probably experimental" and then went totally apeshit on some random song, really adds a lot. It's astonomically rare for a saxophone to make a song worse, so sticking a sax player in every song and giving him 80% of the runtime makes the album way better, especially with all of his honking on The Gumbo Variations. I was honestly scared the entire album was gonna be way worse than Peaches en Regalia, given the fact that my dad never shuts the hell up about that song and how the school played it at his graduation a few times, but the whole album carries its energy and does a lot with it. Like I said, nothing but high-energy soloing for 40 minutes.

I'm nearly a full year into this list and this is the first piece of trans representation I get. I'm gonna take some time to shout out some trans artists and bands before I actually get into the meat of my review. Here's a good few, mostly consisting of bands and artists I either really like or found really recently. -Underscores -SOPHIE -Cavetown -Dazey and the Scouts -The Cliks -Liturgy -Daedalus -Backxwash -Uboa -Schmekel -LustSickPuppy -Throbbing Gristle -Ryan Cassata Thank you for your attention to this matter. Back to the review. I feel heard, to a degree. It's weird, I feel like I have less and less of a tie to gender as a concept the further I go down my gender journey. Gender is totally meaningless to me. Despite that, I feel heard listening to this. I didn't even know I was waiting for an album like this because I didn't even consider a trans artist making this list because of how overwhelmingly 1970s and British the whole thing is. Right between Frank Zappa and whatever I get after this is this queen pouring her heart out for 30 minutes. To think that the top few reviews are calling her voice annoying. Hell, the top one doesn't even call her a her. Her voice is as wonderful as it is expressive, and it sure is expressive. In other words: you go, diva, show them cisgenders.

I don't know what this flavor of Alt-Rock is that Mr. 1001 Guy keeps trying to get me into, but it isn't working. This kind of stuff is incredibly boring. It's like a Shadow the Hedgehog monologue spread out across a whole album, set to the same bassline and drum part eleven times. If I were this guy's ex and I came across this album, I'd be like "okay, and?" My Curse was at least an interesting change of pace and there's definitely worse alt-rock on this list, but that second part's mostly because its competition is Incubus and Jane's Addiction.

"Alright, now hear me out. What if we white-boy-ified Getz/Gilberto?" Mr. Sinatra confidently asked, probably drunk. "Sure, why not? You are Frank Sinatra, after all," his manager confidently responded, probably also drunk, "just make sure you throw in that Irving Berlin song about convincing a woman to cheat on her husband." They then drunkenly shake hands and walk home, assumedly calling Antônio Carlos Jobim at some point. I was -39 years old when this album comes out, so I'm very knowledgeable on how people in the late 60s talked. I also don't believe for a goddamn second this album came out in 1967. The Velvet Underground & Nico and Are You Experienced came out in the same year as this. Jokes aside, it's a great album. I prefer the Getz/Gilberto versions of a lot of these songs and Change Partners aged like Frank Sinatra's lungs, but it's a still a great album. Frank Sinatra is a fairly competent Bossa singer and I enjoyed most of the album.

I feel like Gordon Ramsay in that one episode of Kitchen Nightmares. "Finally, some good fucking food." After all the Incubus and Afghan Whigs and Jane's Addiction, I finally get some alt-rock that isn't incredibly boring. There's some really neat sample work and a nice variety to everything about it. It's a really mellow album, too. Nice to sway along with during a 10 hour car ride back from a concert.

I'm surprised this guy could find enough movie soundtracks to say that there are any you need to listen to before you die, let alone two. I was thinking it'd be cool to see some TV show soundtracks on the list as well, but the only one I could think of that's "you need to hear before you die" levels of good is the soundtrack to Twin Peaks. Maybe throw in some video game soundtracks for the later verions of the list, I don't know. The album's fairly decent for background music, but trails off a lot towards the end. There were some pretty funky sax solos throughout, though. I feel like I'd probably like it more with the movie, but by itself it isn't bad.

I feel like I shouldn't be surprised by the general lack of LGBT representation on the list but an LGBT artist showing up always catches me. I'm pretty sure k.d. lang is one of like three lesbians on this entire list. Anyways, it's pretty good for an album of country covers. I especially liked the extremely non-country saxophone that showed up in some of the songs. You really can stick a saxophone just about anywhere. The actually country songs are pretty good, especially Once Again Around the Dance Floor. This album is also absolutely made better by k.d. lang being gay, gay people do everything better.

Thom Yorke really did show up in the most random places in the 2000s. He did vocals for a Flying Lotus album a few years later. Him being on two songs here is fine, although I never want to hear someone with Thom Yorke's voice say "lovemaking onscreen" the way he did ever again. Anyways, this album doesn't do much for me. All the songs sound pretty similar and I can't think of much of note with the album.

For how much I tend not to like Pop Punk and stuff like it, this album was pretty fun. They're like Arctic Monkeys, except like 20-30 years before Arctic Monkeys were a thing. Maybe a few too many songs, but they keep it fun the entire time and I like the guy's singing.

Opening an album with a classical counterpoint composition for a bunch of guitars might just be the most Queen thing they've ever done and I love it. This entire album is also the most Queen thing they've ever done and I love it. It's like they heard Tommy and went "let's do that, but, like, WAY more gay." They certainly succeeded on that front. There's no shot a straight guy could make The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke. Anyways, Side B of this album is the best thing Queen ever did and Side A isn't very far behind. I'm already incredibly partial towards 70s Prog. Queen doing it really brings out the best parts.

Do you ever listen to an album and think "yeah, this guy's a snob"? This album. At least he's a goofy snob, though I don't know if I'd like the vocals more or less if I listened to this album again. I feel like I was tuning out the instrumentals a lot and doing a lot of focusing on this guy's singing. That's mostly because everything but the weird synth they use is pretty quiet. I had to go back and listen to a few songs to remember whether or not there was a guitar present on the album at all. There is, but it's not really memorable. Granted, the vocals are really the only memorable thing about the album.

I feel like Nirvana is one of those bands that really shouldn't work. Kurt Cobain isn't a particularly great songwriter, plenty of bands were already doing their sound before they did (Dinosaur Jr., Flipper, etc.), and one of the biggest songs on this album recycles the guitar riff from their #1 biggest song. Despite that, it just works, and In Utero really is a testament to that. It's a ridiculously fun listen that really never gets old for me and has some really interesting moments throughout it. The best part is Kurt Cobain laughing at the drummer doing something stupid in the middle of Milk It.

Fun fact: this guy used to be in a hardcore punk band. Anyways, it's always neat to hear artists that write a bunch of short songs instead of a normal amount of normal-length songs. It has the unintended side effect of making a lot of the songs pretty unmemorable, although this is definitely an album that's made to be experienced as an album instead of individual songs. The album sounds like his inner monologue with jazz chords and I can't really decide if I like it or not. Sometimes his singing gets a little too Steely Dan for me, though. Some of the songs were fun, but I really only came out of the album thinking "that song in 10/8 was neat, I guess."

Good to know Randy Newman said the n-word on television about 34 years before the South Park guys did. He certainly nailed the shock value of it as well. It's like the point that The Drive-By Truckers were trying to get across on Southern Rock Opera, just WAY more direct and with 100% less Lynyrd Skynyrd references. The problem is that the guy tries to go for the exact same thing four or five times throughout the album, just without the flagrant use of the n-word. He does slip it in one more time right at the end of the album, but after saying it at least 20 times in the opener, it's hard to do anything but shrug.

Bowie goes to Germany and learns how to make funny sounds on synths, Part 1. The first seven songs are fine, they feel pretty standard for Bowie other than the funny synth sounds. The ambient half, on the other hand, is some of Bowie's best music. Genuinely my biggest complaint about this album is that Bowie made me wait about 18 minutes to listen to Warszawa and Weeping Wall. This album also has a pretty interesting relationship with Heroes to me. Heroes has significantly better non-Ambient songs and Low has much better Ambient songs. Heroes is still by far the better of the two, but damn it I'd pay for an entire album of outtakes from the Ambient half of this one.

Remember, kids, pop music is only good if it's from the 80s. I don't make the rules, these guys do. They also predict the future, apparently. I don't think Cookies were a thing in 1987, so how these guys could've predicted data brokers is beyond me. I'm probably also just really stupid. Anyways, I'd kill to know how people in the 80s felt hearing It's a Sin for the first time when the AIDS crisis was at its peak. It's probably the gayest song I've ever heard come out of the 80s. There are a few Bronski Beat songs that come pretty close, though. The album as a whole has significantly less competition for the the best 80s pop I've heard.

I forget how much I love Breakbeat music until I listen to it every once in a blue moon and remember it's the best EDM genre out there. Maximum funny sounds. This one adds a rapper to it and makes it the even bester EDM genre out there.

I can't help but wonder if there's some alternate universe where Nostalgia Critic's The Wall is on this list instead. It's absolutely an album to hear before you did, if nothing else just to hear how bad parody music can get. Anyways, I love this album. We need to bring back Rock Operas. Also the film is great, I don't know what The Nostalgia Critic is on about.

Rage Against the Machine is the AC/DC of metal. They made a career out of making the same song over and over and over again. I really don't have a problem with it, though. There are definitely much worse 90s bands that got away with doing the same thing. These guys at least have the courtesy to make the same really good song over and over again. My only issue, funny enough, is that they actually tried something different on Settle for Nothing and ended up making the worst song on the album. Among all of the shouty choruses and all the "BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF ALL THE COPS!!!!!! NOBODY CONTROLS YOU!!!!!! STAND UP AGAINST YOUR OPRESSORS!!!!!!" there's a song about the vocalist's personal issues, which still has the shouty chorus in it. It's fine, but it feels so far removed from everything else in the album. The rest of the album is awesome, though. All of the songs are painfully simple, but they really use that to their advantage. You can probably remember most of the hooks from this album, and if you can't, you can definitely remember Killing in the Name. It does what all good punk music does better than most punk music: it gives you something anyone can shout at a protest.

Apparently I already heard more than half of this album before now without even knowing it. I swear I went through the first half of the album going "wait, I know that song" over and over. Keeping the pattern of every album like that for me on this list, my favorite by far is one I actually haven't heard before, Everything Will Be Alright. I love the way they do slower music. Anyways, I've always loved similar "let's take this basically dead genre and Indie-ify it so it's no longer dead" kind of bands like Interpol and Unwound, and now I found a third one to enjoy. This is definitely a lot less deep than the other two, but they really make up for that in their energy. The whole album is a big range of emotion and it's really fun the whole way through.

The sax player's really carrying this one. The album feels pretty run-of-the-mill for mid-60s music. There's even the mid-60s staple about how the singer's almost-definitely underaged lover left them. The rest of the songs range from the usual 60s garage rock stuff like women leaving them and whatnot to an admittedly pretty funny song about drinking rat poison, all to the same rock and roll beat. This apparently influenced punk music, but I don't really hear how. If it's because the guy yells, then I guess you could say Little Richard also influenced punk music. Maybe the future punks of the 70s and 80s should've brought some saxes if this album influenced them, because if there's one thing this album isn't lacking, it's saxophone bonus points.

Jesus, you go girl. I guess she put all of her anger into this album. It's like equal parts 90s Alt-Rock and 70s Punk Rock, both put through one of the absolute worst things that could happen mid-performance, short of that one time Metallica's lead singer burst into flames. "Uncomfortably real" is the best way to describe this album. She talks about everything from domestic abuse to getting assaulted after stage diving into a particularly horrible audience. Kurt Cobain could never.

This is by far the most "guys will look at this and say 'hell yeah'" live album I've ever heard. Metallica with a live orchestra, what a concept. It's kind of funny that I got back from performing at a police memorial in a Catholic church and the first thing I hear is a band from the most un-Catholic genre performing with an orchestra about the size of the band I'm in at my college. The performance at the memorial was fine, I didn't really feel much of anything. I'll never complain about being able to play for a while but I didn't really care for the memorial itself. I definitely felt a lot more listening to these guys, although the length is a little ridiculous. I feel like I'd be a little orchestra-ed out by the time the show was over if I were born 15 years earlier and actually went to this show IRL, but it was a pretty good time and a good cooldown from an hour and a half of trying to act like I care about police officers.

I feel like this is an album that's definitely made to be experienced than listened to. I say that about a lot of albums I feel really strongly about, but there's so much going on before, after, and even completely outside the music in a lot of these songs. The most immediately noticeable example is the feature list they tacked onto the left side of the album cover. Mother Maybelle Carter, Doc Watson, Jimmy Martin, and all of the others are massive names in Bluegrass, which leads me to my favorite part of this album: the little conversations before most of the songs. It adds some interesting context behind a lot of the songs, like Mother Maybelle Carter saying she never played Keep on the Sunny Side on her autoharp before. That and everyone coming together in the closer in a really bittersweet moment really makes this album memorable, and one of the best country albums I've ever heard.

While I definitely don't think it's necessary to have two albums of a three album run from the same year, it's also CCR. This list has helped me find out that I have my dad's taste in Country despite him never listening to Country around me and very rarely talking about what Country bands he actually likes, outside of never shutting the hell up about Bob Dylan. I got a Nitty Gritty Dirt Band album yesterday and he comes into my room and goes "now where did you find this one?" and went all crazy about there being an album from them on the list. Half my family loves CCR and the other half hasn't heard of them, and I'm definitely a part of the former half. It's pretty hard not to have fun with an album of songs like Commotion and Wrote a Song For Everyone, and John Fogerty's voice is recognizable from the other side of a continent. He's pouring 75% of his soul into his singing and he saves the other 25% for his guitar.

I'm working towards getting a PhD in Music Education, and I'm not going to use my degree to justify broadly hating an entire genre because it isn't Prog Rock. I could absolutely use my degree to rant for 48 hours straight on why Polygondwanaland by King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard is one of the most complicated (and one of the best) albums of all time, but that's not on this list. This album is pretty okay, but there's definitely better 2000s rap on this list, including the other Common album. I love a lot of the beats on the album, especially stuff like The Corner and It's Your World Part 2, but I feel like it's really obvious that Kanye produced this album. To a degree, it almost feels like he's trying to re-create The College Dropout for most of the runtime and it drags the album down for me a little. The rapping is pretty okay as well, but I feel like he said a lot more interesting stuff on Like Water for Chocolate.

What I've learned about 50s and 60s music from this list is that influence is completely random. I swear I've heard like three other bands do what these guys did two or three years before them and yet these guys are considered the progenitors of Heavy Metal. Sure, I guess. Anyways, this album sure is fuzzy. I'd fully believe that these songs were demos if somebody told me. Bonus points to these guys for actually saying all of the lyrics to Parchment Farm instead of doing that stupid thing The Bluesbreakers did where they got rid of the part about killing your wife and just sang the part about picking cotton on a farm. I really hate Eric Clapton. Anything he touches becomes worse. Be more like Blue Cheer, they can cover a song by a black guy without sanitizing it until it loses the meaning.

This is an album of The Rolling Stones' most boring songs and Paint it Black, and that song isn't even on the UK release of the album. They had to cut down the album and give us an actually interesting song for our short American attention spans.

Way to open the 1990s, with an album that sounds more violently 1980s that some actual albums from that decade. I'm a big fan of all things violently 80s, so it's a lot more than fine. This is one of my favorite pop albums out there. It's like everything I love about 80s pop mixed with some really interesting stuff from Gothic music. It's like the Pet Shop Boys if they got into their mom's makeup drawer and stole all of their eyeliner. It made some truly great songs as well. Personal Jesus and Enjoy the Silence are incredible hits and the other hits aren't very far behind, as goofy as the "when I need a drug in me / and it brings out the thug in me" couplet is from Sweetest Perfection.

I think The Grateful Dead is the only band where I'd be totally fine if their only representation on this list is live albums. Their studio work is fine, but it's nothing compared to Live/Dead. This album doesn't do a whole lot past proving that. It's fine enough, but I really can't find anything of note enough to talk about.

I don't know why I was expecting something higher energy, but I loved the really ambient feel of this album. It feels like good music to take a really long drive while listening to it. The intro and outro were pretty interesting as well, I liked how the two samples getting further away from each other interacted. Anyways, it's just really good EDM. It reminded me a lot of Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works in some parts, and that's one of my favorite electronic albums out there.

The Faux-Jamaican accent really bugs me on this album. The music itself is on par with any other Police album (which is to say, pretty damn good), but I really wish he would just sing like a normal person. Granted, the album is literally called White Reggae in a weird Anglified French kind of thing. It feels like they heard Talking Heads do Afrobeat and were like "I can do that too!" I guess Remain in Light came out the year after this album, so Talking Heads heard this album and went "We can do way better at stealing from black people than that." To be fair, David Byrne blesses anything he touches, but that still doesn't mean that The Police's attempt needed to be this ridiculous.

Let me get this straight: these guys start a concert with the sole intent of putting some of their older songs in a new style, and they spend an hour doing Tommy in its entirety EXACTLY the same way they did it in the studio? I can't even be too mad about it, Tommy is one of my favorite rock operas out there, but I really wanna know what it would be like for a song like Fortune Teller or Sparks to be played in a style closer to Who's Next.

Despair has the most beautiful tenor sax tone I've ever heard in a song. That alone makes it 5 stars. They couldn't have just stopped at having a sax player, they had to go above and beyond and have Mick Karn creaming all over the studio for two minutes straight. The best part is how much saxophone-ing there is on this album. Every band needs a dedicated sax player. Enough about the sax player, there's also a damn orchestra on two of these songs. There's also also a surprisingly good cover of Lou Reed's All Tomorrow's Parties, despite how much I dislike the album it's from. I like the really minimal feel of the album, mostly because they really enjoy pulling everything away to let the sax player continue his creaming. It goes without saying that this album gets all the saxophone bonus points.

I feel like I've always struggled to get into Cocteau Twins as a band. The vocals were always really distracting to me and it made it difficult to enjoy their music up until pretty recently. Now that I can get past the non-lyrics, I kind of get it, although I definitely prefer stuff like Just for a Day by Slowdive or Loveless by My Bloody Valentine from around the same time. That being said, it's a great album. It's a very relaxing listen and I love how dated the album sounds despite how ahead of its time it clearly was on release. It seriously couldn't have come out in any year that isn't 1990. While I still have issues with the vocals on some of the songs, especially Iceblink Luck and Frou-Frou Foxes..., the band as a whole has definitely grown on me.

I'm so glad that the album is as good as the cover art makes it look like it's gonna be. There's definitely a visual aspect to music that gets ignored a lot despite how much it can influence the listening part of music. One of my favorite recent memories was seeing By Storm in concert (incredible band, check out their new-ish album, My Ghosts Go Ghost) because of the lighting. All of the lighting came from under them, I noticed it damn-near immediately. That and the fog machines they used had this insane visual effect to it, like they're playing in a void. Even the more innocuous stuff like the color of a record has an effect on the listener, especially now that black records aren't the standard like they were when this album came out. Speaking of the cover art, fun fact: the artist refused to take any money from Columbia Records for the art, saying, and I quote, "I don't want Columbia's filthy lucre." What a badass. All of this isn't to discount the actual music, by the way. The music is incredible. For crying out loud, Janis Joplin is the lead singer. That's like an automatic 5 stars. I wish I could put half as much energy into anything as she does into her singing. That and those insane instrumentals. That guitar tone at the start of Ball and Chain had me tearing up. Damn thing goes beyond the Blues Stank Face™, it nearly made me fall out of my chair. It feels like one of those rare albums that not even the band that made it could replicate if they tried. It's incredibly hard to find an album that's this perfect on this many different fronts.

It's like they used seven too many guitar pedals and wanted to see what would happen. The answer is they accidentally turned themselves into LSD and the Search for God if they were 5x more British, about 50% more comprehensible, and 90% less aggravating.

This album's like if Swans had 10% of the budget they did when they made Filth, just slamming on whatever's nearby and screaming about random stuff. I like the song that they start by messing with a power drill for 30 seconds. That really sets the tone for Industrial music as a whole, "look at the funny sound this thing makes! Let's stick that in the song somewhere!" Between the two industrial albums that found their way into the bottom two of all time on a list of 1,089, I definitely prefer the number worst album of the whole list, but this one isn't a very distant second.

This album cover makes me incredibly uncomfortable. Jesus, woman, Back up a little. Also, where is her neck? Why do I have to stare at a floating head staring back at me with those totally vacant eyes for 48 minutes? Why did her floating head need to be close enough to the camera for me to be able to count the individual pores on her face? The cover raises way too many questions that probably can't be answered. I at least need to know why she decided to wear a black turtleneck for that headshot. Anyways, enough about the damn mugshot. The music is fine. It definitely gets better as it goes on, but I'm probably just saying that because I found out that I can get through the album by looking away from my PC. Hello is a perfect pop song, though.

I love one-man bands. There's always something to appreciate about one guy doing absolutely everything on an album. Granted, Foo Fighters was a one-man project for like a week, but it's still neat to think that this was made by one guy. It's also definitely a better attempt to radio-ify Grunge than something like Celebrity Skin. I like the inspiration the album took from Shoegaze and that whole section of Alt-Rock. Some of the songs are surprisingly noisy for a Grunge album. I'd still say I definitely prefer the more traditionally punky songs like Weenie Beenie, but I wasn't expecting to like this as much as I did.

Fun fact: the sample in the title track is saying "since I met you," not "since I left you." I still remember when I found that out and felt ridiculously gaslit. Anyways, I feel like it's not super farfetched to say that this is one of the most creative albums on this whole list. A ridiculous amount of different samples from a bunch of different decades came together to make this. I saw another review saying that the number was somewhere between 900 and 3,000. It really puts into perspective just how crazy this album is. This is 21 songs of 100% recycled music. There are definitely albums, other albums on the list, that did the same thing that these guys do here, but the big difference between The Avalanches and somebody like DJ Shadow or J Dilla is that these guys didn't limit themselves to Rap. This album throws itself across a bunch of different genres and makes some of the most fun music imaginable in all of it. They really do throw some incredibly wacky stuff around as well, especially with Frontier Psychiatrist. I feel like it could be a fun challenge to track down every sample in that song and listen to/watch whatever it's connected to. Anyways, incredible album, if nothing else for how ridiculous it is as a concept and how well-executed it turned out. I love this album more every time I listen to it.

I'm a pretty big fan of this kind of electronic music, so this was pretty good. It also definitely gets better as it goes. Those last few songs were incredible. The songs with a guest vocalist were the neatest part, they all added something that the other ones didn't and it put some much-needed variety into the album. That and the strings in some of the later songs made it stand out a lot from some similar releases on this list.

I was in a jazz band for literally my entire time at high school so I heard the entire first half of the album 100+ times before listening to this. It's fine, along with the whole album. Birdland and Teen Town are classics but the album as a whole feels very directed towards high schoolers in jazz bands. Maybe I'm biased. Shoutout to my old band director, Mr. Howell. He moved to Illinois about a year ago. Hope he's doing well at his new job.

This guy's voice is incredible. It makes the whole album feel like a movie. The crazy orchestration really adds to that feeling. One day I'm gonna find out what was in the water in 1969. I swear every moderately large artist put out their best album that year. This one manages to stand out by not sounding like it's dated to 1969. It sounds more stereotypically late 70s to my ears. Every song would fit almost perfectly in the Titanic soundtrack. Anyways, the opener and its narrative about playing chess with Satan was neat. It's all neat, that's the word of the day for this album.

I will forever be pissed at Green Day for not doing the "don't wanna be in the MAGA agenda" thing at the Super Bowl. What a bunch of cop-outs. My gripes with this band aside, this album is atrocious. It's so painfully basic in a way that punk music shouldn't be. It's kind of hard to call it punk music at all. It's alt-rock that sometimes insults George Bush or suburban neighborhoods, I guess. The music is all chord progressions I've genuinely heard in nursery rhymes with some of the most bland and unmotivating lyrics I've heard in an album that's trying to be whatever unmotivating isn't. I don't even care that half the album is overplayed, I haven't heard half of these songs in a year or two and I like them LESS than I did then. Special bonus points to Holiday / Boulevard of Broken Dreams for managing to ruin an almost good song by tacking a boring radio hit to the second half. That's how the entire album is, although "almost good" is a stretch for anything that isn't Holiday by itself and the latter two parts of Homecoming. I swear the only reason this album got anywhere near as popular as it did is because they tried to make the most un-punk punk album imaginable, and they sure as hell succeeded. Genuinely one of the worst albums I've had on the list so far.

It's always a coin toss whether the major one-hit albums have significantly better or significantly worse songs than the major hit. This one lands closer to the latter. I like the 80s gay bar feel of some of the songs in the first half and the softer stuff towards the end. It's an album that pulls from some totally random things and makes it all work incredibly, mostly thanks to the singer. That woman can SING and the one major hit off this album doesn't do her nearly enough justice.

I have to appreciate anyone that has the balls to say that they're the only Black Metal band in existence. Imagine looking at a band like Bathory or Mayhem and being like "you guys make that poser Death Metal stuff, my song about jerking it in front of my teacher is the real trve kvlt material." I can't appreciate the music as much. There's much better Metal on this list, although I can't really say that there's better Black Metal on the list since it's the only Black Metal album on the list. The title track is great and there are some good songs sprinkled about, but I'd rather be listening to another Slayer album instead.

The way that the two singers pronounce words annoys the crap out of me. They don't pronounce their Ts or Ds enough and they end up coming out as this annoying "ts" or "dz" sound every time in words like "daytime," which they say more like "dzaytsime." Having to hear that for the length of an album is incredibly distracting. Outside of the way they pronounce words with Ds in them, their singing isn't much to write home about either. It feels like the kind of music I'd hear in a Burlington. Anyways, I appreciate them throwing Fantasy right in the middle of the album. Only took like 20 minutes to get something vaguely interesting. That song brings me to the other guy in the group, Jamie xx. Not to dismiss the secondary guitarist, but I actually knew who this guy was before this album because of his solo stuff. Somehow I never made the connection between that and this band, despite the name. His work as a producer here is mediocre, but I feel like it's more him being held back by the other people in the band than something in his control. It's all boring and low-energy to the point of making me feel tired by the end of it. In a word, yawn.

Sometimes it's way too easy to call all experimental music dark, angry, anxious, or at the very least, uncomfortable. Even back when experimental rock was finally becoming a thing, Captain Beefheart came into the scene flinging every bodily fluid onto every vaguely wall-looking thing near him. You can go into the worst-rated albums on this website and see Trout Mask Replica proudly standing just outside the bottom 10. As of this review, it's in 11th place on the worst list, and I really doubt that it's moving from there any time soon, as much as I love that album. This album is like the anti-Beefheart. It's soft, wonderfully emotional, and genuinely a perfect album to give to someone who wants to ease themselves into experimental music, rather than throwing themself straight into noise rock acts like Sonic Youth and Swans like I did. It's the kind of music that would soundtrack a walk through a path by a canal I take sometimes when I feel like taking a ridiculously long walk through a nice nature-ish setting. I always find neat stuff on my walks through there. One time I took home a beat-up drum. I'll think about this album whenever I decide to use that drum in the music I want to make one day. It gave my arm a horrible rash for a day or two and it'll almost definitely sound terrible, but terrible is all relative. That's the ethos of experimental music as an art form. Music like this makes me spit out whatever random story comes into my head. I just felt like leaving it in. Anyways, Brian Eno is one of those artists I never realized I look up to until recently. This guy managed to make an album titled something as innocuous as "Music for Airports" sound like a masterpiece, and this is no different. That's the word I'd use to describe a lot of Eno's music: innocuous. Something you could completely miss if you're too busy doing something else, like hurrying through an airport terminal or speeding to work. Life moves too fast sometimes, and this album, along with Music for Airports, is a reminder to slow down and appreciate something you might've otherwise missed. Remember to breathe.

This is the second album I've gotten this week with a song fetishizing teachers. As a future teacher and former horny teenager, there are hundreds of hotter professions than an overworked and underpaid woman dealing with two hundred horny teenagers. Therapists are right there, guys. That being said, songs fetishizing teachers are also usually funny as hell, and Hot for Teacher is no exception. Something about the guy yelling "TEACHER!!!! I BROUGHT MY PENCIL!!!!!" completely out-of-time especially got to me. It's beyond low-brow, but so is the rest of the album. It's music that's pretty explicitly aimed at horny teenagers that want to rebel against their parents. It probably served that purpose well in the 80s, but now that we live in an era where endless pictures and videos of people in any amount of clothes you could possbly want to see are about 15 seconds away at any given time, it's just an incredibly entertaining listen. It has a violently of-its-time sound that I always love to hear, the synth work throughout is amazing, and it's just an all-around classic.

In case you need further evidence that Eric Clapton is a total jackass, he formed a band out of the backing band for this album and wrote songs about wanting to have sex with George Harrison's wife, and then actually went and had sex with his wife soon after. What a way to thank the guy letting you be the lead guitarist on the longest album he's ever made. It sucks that his guitar sound is so prevalent on this album, too. These are all really nice and bittersweet love songs Harrison wrote for his wife, and it's weird to look at retrospectively, knowing that they didn't last very long past this album. I still love the way this album sounds when Clapton isn't shoving his overly thin and tinty guitar sound into the mix, and he thankfully only plays in a few of these songs. Anyways, there are other people on the album and I'm sick of talking about Clapton. This is a great album. It sounds wonderfully reminiscent and a few songs towards the start had me getting a little emotional. I don't know what it is about If Not for You, but that one especially got to me. I also really like the approach to the track listing. Every side of this album has its own sound to it, like the folkier sound of the first few songs or the bigger sound of some of the songs in the middle and the end. The sheer amound of tracks on this album is great as well. Adding a whole disc worth of jams was a great idea, along with two whole discs of songs that are much better than a lot of the Beatles' main stuff.

This band is like Coldplay if they actually understood what having fun means. I always have to appreciate a band that's around just to have some fun with an otherwise pretty same-y genre, as much as I love a lot of Britpop artists. The majority of the album is infectiously goofy, especially the higher-energy songs like the title track or Girls & Boys. Then there's a song that I feel I can only describe as a early 20th century waltz, followed immediately by a song about random stars, both of which are thrown right in the middle for the hell of it. Despite that, they decided to put This Is a Low right at the end. It's a really weird tone change that works incredibly. It's all the weird risks that make this album what it is, and what it is is one of the best albums of its kind on this list.

Finally, my ninth and final Bowie album. I feel like the sheer amount of Bowie says more about Mr. 1001 List Guy than it does about Bowie's discography. He's a great artist with a surprising amount of really strong albums, but after hearing all nine, I'd say it'd be better to condense it down to three for this list: Ziggy Stardust, Heroes, and Blackstar. It avoids the really similar-sounding albums (i.e. the two Berlin Trilogy albums or the two post-2000s ones) while still showing his progression in his sound. This one barely doesn't make the cut to me, but that's mostly because its competition is two of the best Art Rock albums ever made and Ziggy Stardust. This is still a great album and a really fun listen front-to-back. I like the heavier songs in the back half, along with the completely out of nowhere soul-ish song he did for the closer. I feel like this album as a whole is the most fun of the nine on the list, and definitely in the better half out of all of them.

To the surprise of absolutely nobody that clicks on the little blue "author" hyperlink at the bottom of my review and pick an album from the 1980s at random, I really like this exact flavor of pop music. It's one of the only flavors of pop music I like, mostly because people making it were fully willing to getting weird with it. Cindy Lauper's voice reminds me of that character that makes into every musical with the ridiculously nasally voice that everyone gets tired of halfway through (i.e. Little Red Riding Hood from Into the Woods), but in a good way, if that makes any sense. Past that, the little Vaudeville thing they did towards the end of the album was a really neat addition and I'll never complain about a saxophone being thrown in for the hell of it in the last song. Also, does anyone ever notice that the big hits on an album are always either the best or worst songs?

I don't know how the hell I'm going to describe this album to my boyfriend but I know he absolutely needs to listen to this album before he dies. Industrial Rock, but make it Cabaret. What a concept. It's like Trent Reznor and Tom Waits had a violently French child who smoked cigarettes every day since he was 13. I haven't heard a theatre kid-centered song as creative as La fille de la mort in a while. Even the not-very-theatre-kid stuff still radiates fun. It's also made much more fun by not knowing what on earth the guy's talking about. I took French classes in high school for two years and only learned enough words to ask a local French guy how to bring my baby to the nearest gas station and not understand any answer they could possibly give me, so I can say I just focused on the overly exaggerated way this guy makes his vowels sound. He's probably saying something of note.