My 1001 Albums Journey

Album	You	Global	Diff
The Modern Dance Pere Ubu	5	2.48	+2.52
Penance Soiree The Icarus Line	5	2.5	+2.5
Movies Holger Czukay	5	2.71	+2.29
m b v My Bloody Valentine	5	2.73	+2.27
Yeezus Kanye West	5	2.76	+2.24
Roots Sepultura	5	2.78	+2.22
Chris Christine and the Queens	5	2.81	+2.19
LP1 FKA twigs	5	2.81	+2.19
69 Love Songs The Magnetic Fields	5	2.85	+2.15
Damaged Black Flag	5	2.86	+2.14

Album	You	Global	Diff
We're Only In It For The Money The Mothers Of Invention	1	2.46	-1.46
American Pie Don McLean	2	3.28	-1.28
John Barleycorn Must Die Traffic	2	3.17	-1.17

Artist	Albums	Average
U2	3	5
Beatles	3	5
Nick Drake	3	5
Bob Dylan	3	5
Radiohead	3	5
David Bowie	4	4.5
Stevie Wonder	3	4.67
The Velvet Underground	3	4.67
Van Halen	2	5
Green Day	2	5
Jimi Hendrix	2	5
Neil Young	2	5
A Tribe Called Quest	2	5
R.E.M.	2	5

Queen Latifah

4/5

Rap as a genre is maybe the hardest for me to hear with fresh ears. This feels like the pre-Renaissance wing of the museum, except maybe the Renaissance wasn't a 100% great idea in this timeline. All the pre-Chronic jazz-inflected rap feels like a vein that maybe wasn't completely mined before everyone moved on. "The Pros" goes for dub but just feels sluggish after the first five tracks, which is maybe a sign that the first five tracks bring a great energy. Energy changes in the back half but it all mostly works. I didn't expect to think the album was too short, but that's the sign of something good - "Inside Out" is a powerful closer. I guess what I'm saying is maybe don't skip straight to the Caravaggios.

War

U2

5/5

As I write this, a significant portion of the planet is attempting to decipher social media messages from the "leadership" (scare quotes intentional) of Israel, Iran, and the United States to try and determine whether we're going to have World War III or not. Alongside that endeavor are various attempts to propagate, detect, and/or guard against misinformation, scams, bullshit, slop, and flat-out stupidity of various kinds, any of which could conceivably push humanity materially further towards midnight on the doomsday clock. Mistrust is a reflex at this point. The trenches dug within our hearts, indeed. (I got bad news for the refugee being sung about on track 6 - the war may be slightly colder here in America but it isn't any less warlike.) Everybody who thinks Bono & Co. are just such damn pretentious blowhards for making rock music about the Big Issues of Life needs to explain why, when the Big Issues of Life are really weighing down, a 1983 album from the damn pretentious blowhards is a better and more honest listen than pretty much anything else out there. There are, after all, no atheists in foxholes, whether those foxholes be literal or spiritual or both.

Home Is Where The Music Is

Hugh Masekela

4/5

I have this constant feeling of being one or two music theory classes away from really understanding jazz. That said, as someone who doesn't Get It but is trying to, this is a vibrant and affirming set. The opener "Part of a Whole" and "Inner Crisis" are standouts but there aren't really any low points.

Power In Numbers

Jurassic 5

3/5

Live At Leeds

The Who

5/5

Revolver

Beatles

5/5

You know what's crazy? "She Said She Said" is a damn near perfect psychedelic pop song. It would be a highlight of any other pop album. Here it's, like, the eighth best song. Crazy, like I said.

Head Hunters

Herbie Hancock

4/5

Tea for the Tillerman

Cat Stevens

3/5

The first things that jump out to me are the abrupt dynamic changes; beyond just feeling quite foreign to me as an inhabitant of the post-Loudness Wars apocalyptic landscape, they reveal a deep insecurity that cuts through this entire collection - Stevens might be a Nice Guy but he still seems to feel like he has to get loud to be heard. (He's *not* shouting, don't accuse him of shouting.) And what does he have to get loud-but-not-too-loud about? The usual shit, mostly - rejection from girls, fake friends in the music industry, the requirement to fulfill his contractual obligations. Behind the veneer of Nice Guy-ness he's downright venomous - I hope the subject of "Wild World" feels like she dodged a bullet. No wonder John Belushi smashed this guy's guitar in *Animal House*. All that said, there's genuine talent on display here, which is part of what makes Stevens frustrating. I guess it's anthropologically interesting to hear the Sensitive Guitar Asshole template used by everyone from John Mayer to Billy Corgan being formed in real time. As a recovering Sensitive Guitar Asshole myself, I guess I should be more sympathetic - but my ongoing recovery is probably part of why I'm not.

At Folsom Prison

Johnny Cash

5/5

What can I say about this album that hasn't already been said, other than the "oh hell yes" I uncontrollably uttered when it popped up as today's selection? Everything that is good and vibrant about the American country music tradition is present here - empathy, longing, tragedy, murder, dirty jokes, gallows humor, family ties, faithless and faithful women and men, poorly behaved dogs, the erasure of the boundary between the speaker and the hearer. Most of all honesty, real as the beads of sweat dripping down the side of Cash's face on the album cover. There but for the grace of God goes he.

Sex Packets

Digital Underground

2/5

I suppose it's a sign of the art form's evolution that rappers, like their prog-rock brethren before them, could come up with a half-baked, interminably horny concept for their concept album and wrap a bunch of ponderous, overlong songs around it. If only they understood anything about what would actually be sexy - better rhymes, for one. To take just one example: the song with all the moaning in the background also contains an extended discussion of the technical aspects of soundproofing the room where you're doing the deed. We are not aroused.

Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not

Arctic Monkeys

5/5

One of the dirty little secrets of punk rock is that it's better when it steers clear of out-and-out nihilism in favor of pure raw desire - eros rather than thanatos. There's a reason Joey Ramone's favorite word was "wanna." And these guys wanna, whether it's ripping off Bowie's "China Girl" to end a song about people enjoying the Thin White Duke's favorite pharmaceutical or trying, over and over without much success, to get with that vain girl at the party who's bad news in a good way. All along there are great lines ("All the weekend rockstars are in the toilet /Practicing their lines," from the aforementioned coke song) to go with the tunes and the musicianship. (the closer "A Certain Romance" is downright beautiful.) The fake San Francisco call-out is telling - if you're gonna be a Northern Beat then this is the way to do it. Bonus points awarded for looking past Roxanne to see the dark satanic mill keeping her on the street at night.

Movies

Holger Czukay

5/5

Liberated from Can on account of his inability to keep up technically as a live player, Czukay takes the opportunity to leave live performance behind completely, playing instead with his new studio toys to build a realm of pure fantasy and play (in the childlike sense). And his imaginary world contains multitudes, from mislabeled origins (the guitar figures on "Persian Love" are clearly Spanish, then Caribbean) to cinematic touches (what's the Teutonic equivalent of a spaghetti western, I wonder). He thinks in phrases, not riffs; the whole thing, especially on the standout "Oh Lord, Give Us More Money," has the constantly shifting and moving feel of a living organism. And the synth tone palette is instantly evocative and futuristic - one imagines this album being played on repeat at the Capcom offices in the NES era. By the time he starts taking the piss out of Pink Floyd on the closer "Hollywood Symphony" it's clear he's onto something grand.

Achtung Baby

U2

5/5

Van Halen

5/5

Iron Maiden

3/5

I don't know what metaphor to use here: death's-head moth pushing out of its chrysalis? Swamp monster rising from the mud(dy production)? Rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouching towards Bethlehem to be born? All of the above? You can hear they're not quite there yet (Bruce Dickinson won't arrive for a couple more albums) but you can tell where they're going and that the trip will be exciting.

A Night At The Opera

Queen

5/5

The question of England, In All Its Englishness, was the subject of so much late-Sixties, early- to mid-Seventies British rock music - from the Kinks to Pink Floyd to Paul McCartney's post-Beatles work - that it's sort of odd to realize that Queen, known to most as the foot-stomp stadium-shout lads, were working in that same tradition. It's even odder to realize they might have done it better than any of the others, McCartney very much included. I know you're not supposed to try and remake Sgt. Pepper but they may have pulled it off here; witness the time changes on "Sweet Lady" (shades of Pepper's "Good Morning Good Morning"), Brian May's McCartneyesque vocals on "'39," the George Harrison-influenced guitar solos throughout the album. And "Bohemian Rhapsody," of course, a reminder that the Beatles were themselves trying to create pocket symphonies - and never made one quite as symphonic as this.

The Blueprint

JAY Z

5/5

Appetite For Destruction

Guns N' Roses

5/5

Axl Rose sings "Out Ta Get Me" like someone who knows exactly what he did and isn't sorry. Shit, he sings the whole album that way. In the pantheon of gifted rock-n-roll shitheads he might be Zeus - within a few tracks he somehow gets away with bragging about DUI, mooching off a one-night stand for some more booze, and composing the most brazen ode to heroin since the Velvets. And then he has the fucking temerity to demand that we feel bad for him. And you know the worst part? Having seen the end of his story, I kinda do.

I Should Coco

Supergrass

4/5

If Britpop was an attempt to recover the British musical legacy for a new generation then these Oxonians were mostly after the Sex Pistols specifically - affected snotty accents, lyrics about being outcasts, lots of cymbals from Danny Goffey. It mostly works, with occasional forays into Jaggerism (like on "Strange Ones") - even though these guys are too good technically to restrain themselves to simple onetofreefores (see the aforementioned "Strange Ones"). I don't know yet whether it signifies as anything beyond just competent flattery. Sometimes that's all you need, I suppose - "Alright" will be in ads long after we're all dead.

Dookie

Green Day

5/5

Things broken by Green Day, on or with this album: - Furniture, probably - Various commandments, most notably the one referred to in catechism as "onanism" ("Longview," "All by Myself") - The narrator's face on "Pulling Teeth," in what I believe may be the first meaningful discussion of female-on-male domestic violence ever in pop music - Taboos around queer male sexuality (the pronouns on "Basket Case" get all the attention but "Coming Clean" is one of the most touching coming-out songs you'll ever hear) - The floodgates for an entire generation of punk drummers, via Tre Cool's playing (the fills on "Basket Case" alone are revelatory) - Various and sundry rules about what charter members of the heretofore insular West Coast punk scene could and couldn't do, in a way that worked only because Billie Joe et al. had the hard-won credibility to withstand peer pressure - Punk itself, finally, irrevocably, into the mainstream, in a way that not even Nirvana had done a few years before - Generational divides, which I can attest to because my teenage kids love this album with zero prompting from me (great art has a way of finding the people who need it, when they need it) - Barriers, which is what all this is supposed to be about

Young Americans

David Bowie

4/5

Part blue-eyed soul swerve, part semi-requited love letter to his pal John Lennon (beyond just "Fame" and "Across the Universe," note, for example, the Beatlesque arpeggios on "Won"), multiple parts attempt to keep up with Lennon's Lost Weekend habits, with attendant consequences (the backup singers overpower Bowie on "Fascination" like he's losing a battle with the voices in his head). Come to think of it, this is perhaps the least Bowie Bowie album - the sound of someone tired of his old persona, trying on a new one, not sure who he really wants to be and fighting valiantly to keep the demons at bay. I play it less than Low or Ziggy but I think I respect it equally.

Beggars Banquet

The Rolling Stones

4/5

The Duality of Mick: on one hand, he's lazy, amoral, and unabashedly scummy. (The lyrics of "Stray Cat Blues" have probably been read aloud in a deposition at some point.) On the other hand, when he gives a shit he's downright inspiring ("Sympathy for the Devil," "Jigsaw Puzzle," "Street Fighting Man"). And how come "Salt of the Earth" hasn't been on a gazillion ads at this point? I mean, I know why - enough talk about the Brotherhood of Man and people might get the idea you actually believe in something.

Back In Black

AC/DC

5/5

"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever." --This Is Spinal Tap

xx

The xx

4/5

Mix one part peak Cocteau Twins, two parts early New Order (insouciance toward singing on pitch: it's not just for Bernard Sumner anymore!), one part Robert Smith at his navel-gaziest, one part Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game" (repurposed here for "Infinity," the standout track that imagines what happened after those two impossibly attractive people finally had to leave the beach and go back to the allegedly real world), one part Millennial post-everythingness. Bake while lying on the floor in your mate's flat for 38 minutes or until just kinda done with life. It's not that they're afraid of desire, it's that they don't quite know *how* to desire anything, not really. I see why it resonated - and why it still resonates.

Parallel Lines

Blondie

5/5

"I want to tell you something you've known all along," she sings on the opener, and then she proceeds to do exactly that, running through power pop that feels both fresh and timeless in a way that's both relentless careerist (Disco! From a punk-adjacent band! The horror!) and quietly revolutionary by virtue of it coming from her voice. I'd call it the sound of the hunter getting captured by the game except that it collapses the categories of "hunter" and "game" so thoroughly.

Public Image: First Issue

Public Image Ltd.

2/5

You won't believe who Johnny Lydon really doesn't like: religious people, psychiatrists, Malcolm McLaren, his former bandmates, the generic "you" of a million bad nu-metal lyrics a generation later, his record label (how dare they expect him to turn in a full album when he specifically contracted and was paid to do so!). I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say the average church would be better off without the sort of person who finds "Religion I" or "Religion II" (same stuff, just chanted in rhythm and a different cadence, with zero recognition of the irony) convincing. Shame about John - he's not terrible when he can get out of his own way ("Public Image"). But he's in his own way an awful lot.

There's No Place Like America Today

Curtis Mayfield

3/5

I love Jesus as much as the next refugee of James Dobson-influenced parenting, but I'm having trouble being convinced that Mayfield is really finding any solace in the Word. Honestly, I think he's having trouble convincing himself also - which in some ways makes him more credible (doubts are a part of the whole faith thing after all). Mostly my man just sounds exhausted from being a Black man in America, and I can't blame him.

A Love Supreme

John Coltrane

5/5

One of the most beautiful things humans have ever made, full stop, and on par with the Sistine Chapel as a work of Christian art.

Moondance

Van Morrison

4/5

It's sort of fascinating to listen to an artist who seems so focused on himself and his own thoughts, to the point of not necessarily caring who does or doesn't overhear what he's doing. (Contrast with someone like John Denver, who hits on a lot of the same nature/transcendence themes but seems to put a lot more effort into welcoming the audience.) At first I wanted to dismiss Morrison as a self-serious wanker, and he might still be. But this album sounds so damn good that I was seduced despite myself. There's a reason your mom warned you about boys with guitars.

m b v

My Bloody Valentine

5/5

Listen, if you don't find this riveting then I'm certainly not going to argue with you - Kevin Shields is an acquired taste and plenty of people don't acquire it and that's fine. But, speaking as a *Loveless* devotee for multiple decades, I could spend the rest of forever listening to Shields look for himself in the wreckage of his former self. Whether it's the haunting rhythmic figures on "she found now," or picking up right where *Loveless* left off on "who sees you," or using the church organ as an instrument of anticipation rather than bombast on "is this and yes," or the erstwhile Britpop throughout (I hear *13*-era Blur in there, which is a very good thing), Shields (and his bandmates!) are never less than intriguing. I don't know if I can adequately explain why this album matters so much. It feels like the indie-kid equivalent of Syd Barrett turning up for the *Wish You Were Here* sessions as if nothing had happened, only this time, rather than being a husk of himself he's actually ready to play. Standout track is "in another way," which scans like Shields' "The Private Psychedelic Reel" - all groovy and slinky before it mutates into something just plain gorgeous around the 2-minute mark.

Street Life

The Crusaders

3/5

Apropos for an album on which the title track has been appropriated for Tarantino's famous "hangout movie," this is hangout music; it's generally pleasant and it's reasonably evocative and it's totally fine if nothing much sticks in your memory afterwards.

Pearl

Janis Joplin

5/5

Calenture

The Triffids

4/5

I have to admit this album started out in the hole with me on account of it being less fun than INXS's Kick and less meaningful than Midnight Oil's Diesel and Dust, both of which came out of the Australian New Wave the same year and neither of which are included on this list. But by the time I got to "Holy Water" I was on the right wavelength to enjoy it for what it is. To use another 80s analogy, if Kick is Magic and Diesel and Dust is Kareem, this album is, if not James Worthy, at least Michael Cooper - reliable, maybe unspectacular, difficult to replace even if not essential.

Lost Souls

Doves

4/5

Live At The Regal

B.B. King

3/5

Guero

Beck

4/5

Maybe it's just that Beck's clown-prince reputation, gained semi-unfairly since "Loser," precedes him, or maybe it's just that this is album number nine and there's more urgency in asking the question, but I felt a need to determine whether Mr. Hansen was really signifying anything here - whether he was doing anything more than just showing off. Not that he isn't *great* at that - a little Tribe Called Quest here ("Que' Onda Guero"), a little Cornershop there ("Missing"), some erstwhile G-Funk wherever ("Earthquake Weather"), some mid-period Blur on the opener "E-Pro" just to prove he can still rock, some White Stripes (actual Jack White included!) on "Go It Alone" to prove he isn't afraid of his successors. But for a moment on "Missing" his voice sounds downright Cobainian (and not for the only time here - "Rental Car" skillfully pilfers Nirvana's "On a Plain"), and that was when it became clear to me what Beck is really up to - measuring whether his crazy quilt of influences and voices adds up to anything. This is an album of middle age, made by a 35-year-old new father (and wasn't Cobain a new father when he died?) staring over the edge of his life and trying to figure out what in the abyss of his soul gets passed on and what shouldn't be. Hence the downbeat, contemplative vibe that sets in as the album progresses - as shit gets real and the ability to impress wears off (the great thing about your kids is they don't give a shit how smart or talented you are). "The good in us is all we know," he sings on "E-Pro," and it's ultimately what walks him away from the edge and allows him to keep his hand on the plow on the bluesy, cautiously optimistic finale, "Emergency Exit." All in all, it's no *Odelay* but it would be wrong if it were.

Vol. 4

Black Sabbath

4/5

For an admitted Coke Album this doesn't feel like one, aside from, you know, having a song called "Snowblind" (they wanted to call the album that but some tightass at the record company objected). The songs are tightly written, suitably loosely performed, and all the right length. I'm not going to bat for the stuff (and it's sort of rich to hear the sentimentality on "Changes" knowing it's about Bill Ward trading his wife for the aforementioned stuff) but, you know, if you rock like this maybe you can get away with it. For a while, anyway.

Axis: Bold As Love

Jimi Hendrix

5/5

Heroes

David Bowie

5/5

Green River

Creedence Clearwater Revival

4/5

Black Monk Time

The Monks

4/5

The story of the Monks feels like the setup for one of those lesser-known Hanna-Barbera cartoons: they're American GIs stationed in Germany who don monk outfits by night to fight back against the boredom and barbarism of their lives through the power of rock and roll! All of which is fun enough, but none of which would matter if their music wasn't also vibrant, from the antiwar shout-outs on the opener "Monk Time" to the basic, childlike, almost regressive lyrics of "Shut Up" and "Oh, How to Do Now" (no wonder Henry Rollins is a notable fan). I listened once through and immediately wanted to hear it all again. Also, it's worth seeking out a version with the bonus tracks as they're all actually worth hearing.

Pink Moon

Nick Drake

5/5

The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady

Charles Mingus

5/5

First thought: if you've ever wondered why people used to consider jazz to be lascivious and immoral music, well, this is why. The subtitle for the second track is "Hearts' Beat and Shades in Physical Embraces," which is a lot of words for a downright horny track that everyone will understand wordlessly. Second thought: and then the pathos sets in, with weighty tunes to explain why all the hedonism was necessary in the first place. Third thought: it all ends with a synthesis, the sex and heaviness and joy all stirred together in a bouillabaisse that feeds and delights. Fourth thought: freedom is freedom is freedom is freedom.

Second Toughest In The Infants

Underworld

4/5

Slower burning and more background-y than its peers - if you're used to the bombast of Howlett, James, Rowlands/Simons et al. then this may hit a bit different. But that doesn't mean it doesn't hit, and by the time we get to "Pearl's Girl" you can hear what the fuss is all about. Now, who's in the mood for some Wipeout XL and a can or two of Surge?

Melody A.M.

Röyksopp

3/5

I gotta say, starting off your downtempo album with a quote of the Prodigy's intro to *Music for the Jilted Generation* is a pretty audacious move. Too bad the rest of the album lacks any of that bravado, instead laying down the sort of turn-of-the-millennium Rainy Day Music that sells luxury cars and coffee. I recognize that this sort of music has its place, and this is even a good example of it as far as it goes. But I gave it two times through and still don't remember any of it. I don't know, maybe it's me.

Nevermind

Nirvana

5/5

I remember years ago the AV Club did one of their Undercover series where they invite different artists in to play a random cover and they had Rise Against come in to cover Nirvana's "Sliver." Now, let me be clear about this: Rise Against is a damn good band, and they played a damn good, faithful cover. But as I was listening to it I had the revelation that *nobody should try to do a straight cover of this band, ever*. If you wanna turn "In Bloom" into a Willie Nelson tune, go for it - but don't ever try to out-Kurt Kurt. You'll fail.

High Violet

The National

5/5

My initial thought was that these guys were chasing Nick Cave; somewhere around "Runaway" I realized they're actually chasing who Cave is chasing, which is Dylan. And as audacious a thing as that is to be doing in 2010, I'm happy to report that they've come as close as anybody in the 21st century to catching up to him. The production is simultaneously lush and unobtrusive - you can see how the Dessners ended up in such demand on that front - but the real story is, well, the stories. "The floors are fallin' down from everybody I know," Matt Berninger sings on "Bloodbuzz Ohio," and I didn't know until I heard it how much that line would haunt me. If I were ten years younger this album might have become my whole personality; as it stands it may still become some part of it.

The Joshua Tree

U2

5/5

Side One is one of the greatest collections of popular music ever made - by turns tender and fierce, containing multitudes. Side Two is less immediately rewarding but no less rewarding ultimately. With this band it is sometimes difficult to remember that all the hype was ever justified = but it was, and is, and this album is why.

Frank

Amy Winehouse

5/5

From the perspective of several decades later it's tempting to view the jazz standards era through the safe, gauzy Hays Code lens of black-and-white GI balls and *White Christmas* et al. So it's arresting when Winehouse steps up with a centerpiece song called "Fuck Me Pumps" about the travails of being a single woman inhabiting both the "hunter" and "game" roles, precisely because it serves as such an important correction to the narrative - *it's always been this way*. Not just on that song but throughout, she does what every great artist is supposed to do - however many chords and the truth. This album reclaims jazz as the grimy, lascivious, transcendent stuff your grandparents were warned about. And if you've ever wondered why the loss of Winehouse was such a tragedy, "In My Bed" is your answer.

The Soft Bulletin

The Flaming Lips

3/5

Moon Safari

Air

5/5

Gorillaz

4/5

In hindsight this feels like the next Blur album, if Blur had gotten really into Check Your Head-era Beastie Boys in the interim (Exhibit A: "Double Bass," which mimics the vibe and placement of "Something's Got to Give" on the Beasties' album). As a fan of both, I'm on board here; remember that the blues went from America to Britain and back to America before hip-hop ever did.

Moss Side Story

Barry Adamson

4/5

Seemingly everyone who reviews this album notes, correctly, how evocative it is of film noir and other soundtracks of decades past - which makes sense as that was what Adamson was clearly going for. What I don't see very often in the reviews is much discussion of how evidently influential this collection has been on soundtracks in a different medium - namely, gaming. I specifically hear so much of Uematsu's FFVII soundtrack in the industrial, synth-based palette being used here - if there's such a thing as steampunk jazz then this is it. I've only been through the album once but I think I'm falling in love a little bit.

Definitely Maybe

Oasis

5/5

Maybe it's just the reunion tour talking but if they aren't the World's Greatest Stadium Rock Band then the list of competitors is short. (Journey? KISS? Queen?) They're certainly the best of their era in any event. Transcendence like this wasn't supposed to be possible anymore by the 90s; it sure as shit isn't still supposed to be possible now, and yet here we are.

Dire Straits

3/5

S&M

Metallica

3/5

First things first, I would listen to all these songs in pretty much any format, and have for decades; if you have a choice between Metallica and no Metallica then the answer is pretty much always Metallica. And 15-year-old me (along with the rest of the low brass section in freshman concert band) specifically thought this album was proof that metal was The One True Genre and had swept all its enemies (Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys, mostly, at that point) under its feet. It was a different time and the Sux/Rulz TRL Wars were in full swing. If you know, you know. That said, in retrospect I question the setlist - seriously, no "The Unforgiven?" Only one track from *...And Justice for All*? - and in general there's not enough done with the orchestra to justify this project's existence (the opening to "Battery" is the exception that proves the rule). Which on some level I get, because teenage metalheads like Former Me couldn't be trusted to follow it, but still - opportunities have been missed here. So in summary it's cool, but inessential. But cool.

Let Love Rule

Lenny Kravitz

2/5

"Get me Jimi Hendrix!" "He's unavailable." "Then get me his non-union Beverly Hills equivalent!"

Harvest

Neil Young

5/5

Snivilisation

Orbital

3/5

I don't know that I need 75 minutes of this, but there are parts I find charming and interesting - "Kein Trink Wasser" is a highlight, and I think I hear the genesis of Korn's "Got the Life" in "Are We Here?". I do sort of question who this is for - it purports to be dance music but much of it doesn't really feel like it (at least not to my ear). It's been good "writing an appellate brief on Saturday" music, I suppose. Maybe it will reward me more on multiple listens.

A Girl Called Dusty

Dusty Springfield

4/5

Pretzel Logic

Steely Dan

4/5

Hysteria

Def Leppard

5/5

Jagged Little Pill

Alanis Morissette

4/5

Led Zeppelin IV

Led Zeppelin

5/5

How am I supposed to review this? More precisely, who am I to review this? I am but a mortal. Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord. Seriously, it's like being asked to review a monolith. Did Moses review Mount Sinai afterwards? Do people review Uluru? 'Cause Uluru don't give a shit about your review, man, just like Page and Plant and Jones and Ghost Bonham don't give a shit, they don't have to, they already made their monument. Where were you when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? I mean, I guess the answer is wherever you are when you hear any of these eight tracks, so iconic that the band's shirts just list all the tracks in order on the back.

Tusk

Fleetwood Mac

3/5

All happy bands are alike; each unhappy band is unhappy in its own way. This particular unhappy band is unhappy because, first of all, they're all aggressively using at this point (and not in any of the fun ways!) but also because Lindsey Buckingham, who does *not* want to just remake *Rumours* over and over (you succeeded there, bud) feels like freezing out his bandmates - especially Stevie Nicks - in favor of long stretches of ennui-fueled mid-tempo musings. Cruel irony (ironies usually are): his insistence on trying to be more front and center only makes us miss Stevie more - when she finally arrives on "Sara" it feels like a relief, to the point that she can get away with six minutes of meandering of her own, because hers feels like it's actually going somewhere. This all sounds harsher than perhaps is warranted; there's nothing *bad* here and there's plenty that would have been worth keeping on a pared-down single album, from "Sisters of the Moon" to "Beautiful Child" to the title track. (Gotta say, hiring the USC Marching Band is an all-time great Coke Album move.) But there's a heaviness about all of it; maybe that's the point, and maybe this album is a record of a party that's gone on too long. Maybe *Tusk* actually is what *Hotel California* claims to be - but, see, *Hotel California* is better.

Buenas Noches From A Lonely Room

Dwight Yoakam

4/5

All the handwringing over Yoakam's poser-ness feels downright quaint at this point, in the Year of Our Lord Thirty-Six A.G. (After Garth). Which means we can talk about how this album puts the "western" back in what used to be called country-and-western music; one can picture Dwight as Henry Fonda, threatening Claudia Cardinale to the tune of "What I Don't Know." He's Nick Cave with a twang, which suits the darkly funny, morbid, self-effacing persona he adopts throughout. And the sweet, misguided attempt to reclaim "Dixie" for some non-toxic purpose is offset by the pretty damn convincing White Boy Tejano (tejano gringo?) on "Streets of Bakersfield" and the title track.

Liege And Lief

Fairport Convention

4/5

Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

The Smashing Pumpkins

5/5

1999

Prince

4/5

Prince's seemingly endless appetites - for genre, for rhythm, for new sounds, for, uh, other stuff - make the most sense when you realize that the real target of his pursuit is Stevie Wonder's transcendent mid-Seventies run. He's swinging for *Songs in the Key of Life* (but hornier) every time out. But of course, he's not Wonder (who is?) - he's himself. And so what comes out instead is longer beat-driven instrumental workouts that reflect his disco roots ("Automatic") and eclectic pop confections that represent the closest he comes to Wonder ("1999," "Little Red Corvette," "Free"). And he's at his best when blends both ("Lady Cab Driver"). But fundamentally, Prince's gift and curse is that he can't imagine anything more transcendent than sex ("International Lover"). I mean, can you *imagine* him trying to write "Isn't She Lovely"?

Crooked Rain Crooked Rain

Pavement

4/5

The Band

4/5

Blood Sugar Sex Magik

Red Hot Chili Peppers

4/5

Wild Wood

Paul Weller

4/5

Shrewder critics than me have remarked on Weller's decision to make what is basically an early Seventies Traffic album - but there's been relatively little discussion of *why*, out of everything he could have made (and this is a guy with a lot range) he made an early Seventies Traffic album. What need is he attempting to meet here? I wonder if the answer is found on this album's eleven o'clock number, "Shadow of the Sun," where he sings "I plan to have it all while I'm still young" multiple times - first quietly, then with more force and up an octave - before launching into an extended coda that fades out, then rises again to a sublime little solo. He's hearkening back to the bloozy hey-baby-hey era of his youth, looking for a purity and clarity of purpose to guide him in middle age. (Insert Erik Erikson cross-reference here.) It makes sense, because Weller occupied for Britpop the same role David Coverdale filled for hair metal - the wizened bloke who knows how to do this, can see where the form is going, and is willing to show the kids how. (My own first exposure to him, like probably most people my age's, was via his guest turn on "Champagne Supernova.") Lyrically in particular, Weller frequently hits the sweet spot between directness and abstraction - I would have definitely scribbled some of these lines in a journal alongside my thoughts about a crush at some point. (I love Oasis with all my heart but even I'll admit the Gallaghers could have taken a few more notes on that point.) Obviously, you may not have the same enthusiasm for Claptonesque guitar figures that Weller does, and if so that will limit your enjoyment here. But I find this a worthy effort, and not just for the inspration it gave to the aforementioned kids.

My Aim Is True

Elvis Costello

3/5

Music in Exile

Songhoy Blues

4/5

I'm old enough to remember when the promise of globalization was that we'd get more art like this - an omnivorous blend of African rhythms and harmonies with (African-)American blues guitar workouts, all conveying the pathos of four guys who just want the sharia cops to leave them the fuck alone so they can rock. The energy here is always palpable, even on the slower stuff - "Petit Metier" is quiet but always insistent. Alternate band name: The Actually Black Keys.

Yeezus

Kanye West

5/5

Rap's *In Utero* - a brutal, ugly-honest, self-immolating record made by an artist who knows, on some level, that he is inexorably headed towards the end of things and can't make himself stop (and maybe doesn't want to). And it's *also*, under all the nihilism, a repository of pop songcraft by a master of the form. I don't know that I've ever heard the apocalypse on record like I hear it on "I'm In It." And "New Slaves" scans like a final airing of trenchant grievances against the modern minstrel show of Black American celebrity. All the sadder now that we know for sure that the light at the end of the tunnel ("Bound 2") was just another train.

Coat Of Many Colors

Dolly Parton

5/5

For someone who's known for the artificiality of her visual style, it's striking how effortlessly authentic and authoritative Parton's singing and songwriting voice comes across here (Porter Wagoner's contributions are strong as usual but I think Parton out-writes even him for the most part). It occurs to me that this album is her career in microcosm; the world has been in love with Dolly's image and hasn't paid enough attention to her soul, on display most particularly on the title track and the brassy "Here I Am." She's a walking parable; s someone as biblically literate as she is would surely tell us, man looketh on the outward appearance, etc., etc.

If I Should Fall From Grace With God

The Pogues

4/5

Not gonna lie, this one took me a bit, primarily because of the sonic sameness (which was not helped by the thin Eighties production). But once I made the effort to dig into what Shane MacGowan and co. are really saying here I could see the vision much better. "Gutter poet" is a cliche descriptor for MacGowan but that's because it's accurate, and his tales of being down and out in Ireland and New York are consistently affecting.

Rio

Duran Duran

5/5

Poptimism, like all -isms, has its good and bad points, but Exhibit A in the case for its necessity is the deserved critical rehabilitation of Duran Duran as one of the greatest bands of their era, full stop. Their prowess is in full display here, with John Taylor putting on an absolute clinic on bass every time out ("Rio," "Lonely in Your Nightmare"), Simon Le Bon turning in some of his best vocal performances ("The Chauffeur," "New Religion"), and the entire band, especially Nick Rhodes, coming together to compose some absolute pop classics ("Hungry Like the Wolf," "Save a Prayer"). Judging these guys by their haircuts, as a generation of critics did, is no less an error than judging the Beatles by their mop-tops had been, twenty years previous.

A Date With The Everly Brothers

The Everly Brothers

3/5

Unfailingly pleasant and polite, but the best stuff here has done better by others ("Love Hurts"), as has the worst stuff ("Lucille"). Mostly this is a reminder of why the Beatles were such a big deal.

The Wall

Pink Floyd

5/5

I could nitpick this plenty - I agree with David Gilmour that the Vera Lynn stuff doesn't really land, and the production sounds muddy and dated at times - but I'd be nitpicking and I know it. Truth is, making a legitimately great rock opera that tells a coherent story *and* maintains momentum throughout *and* contains a half-dozen or so certified classics of the genre is a damn near impossible task and these guys pulled it off. Everyone will have their own deeply meaningful tracks (mine are "Mother," "Hey You," and "Nobody Home"). Monumental. (Incidentally, I prefer the live *Is There Anybody Out There?* recording, which is worth seeking out for both completeness - it restores "What Shall We Do Now?" to its rightful place in the middle of Disc 1 - and for a superior production experience.)

Blood On The Tracks

Bob Dylan

5/5

A song cycle about a heartsick man who, having broken his love's trust, keeps trying to write different songs and inevitably just writes the same song over and over. I mean that as a compliment; this album is perhaps the greatest display of denial, guilt, and preoccupation ever recorded - all the more potent because Our Narrator, Nobel laureate that he is, remembers to show rather than tell his stories. The production is unobtrusive and intimate. And Dylan is so lonesome he could cry.

Band On The Run

Paul McCartney and Wings

4/5

Among other superlatives - more important ones, like Greatest Living Songwriter by resume - McCartney seemingly has suffered the greatest amount of critical disdain for the crime of Not Being His Former Bandmate (in this case, John Lennon). Thing is, I never got the feeling Lennon liked being Lennon all that much, and anyway we ought to be hearing McCartney for who he is and not who he's not. On this album McCartney is his usual excellent self - a rock hit here ("Jet," "Helen Wheels," and the title track), some mellow folky stuff there ("Bluebird" and "Let Me Roll It" - he always was the Beatles' biggest stoner), some Abbey Road-y combo of both, well, everywhere (but especially on "No Words" and the mini-suite "Picasso's Last Words"). And most poignantly, on "Mamunia," a sweet, hopeful rejoinder to his erstwhile friend Lennon, then attempting to drink and drug himself to death under dark clouds in L.A.

Born To Be With You

Dion

3/5

The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan

5/5

Station To Station

David Bowie

4/5

I don't exactly know what he's saying but he seems to be saying it rather well.

Cypress Hill

3/5

The Undertones

5/5

The pleasures here are myriad - the Nuggets-esque bell tones (Telecaster?) on the opener "Family Entertainment," the jangle of the opening riff on "I Gotta Getta," the psychedelic organ firing up on the same track, the vocal harmonies on "Jump Boys" (which I guess is the Northern Irish term for surfers?). And "Teenage Kicks" remains as great as its reputation. It's almost like they decided to write a bunch of pop-rock songs, but only the good parts (cut to a shot of young Robert Pollard in a basement in southern Ohio, furiously taking notes).

Stardust

Willie Nelson

5/5

Willie ran into Booker T. Jones on the beach in Malibu one day and the rest is, literally, history. The link between Tin Pan Alley and the rest of American music has rarely come through this clear - I hate to be the guy who tells you to focus on the notes that *aren't* there but, you know, *do that*. And I love the Eagles as much as the next guy but this album represents the real Road Not Taken for El Lay country - respectful, serene, centered, edibles rather than powder. "Blue Skies" sounds like a prayer. They all do, actually.

Spy Vs. Spy: The Music Of Ornette Coleman

John Zorn

3/5

As somebody who loves Glenn Branca and was raised on Black Flag, I feel like a hypocrite for not liking this album more. Maybe I'd appreciate it better if I were more familiar with the Coleman compositions Zorn and co. are beating the shit out of. As it stands I respect it. But.

Lost In The Dream

The War On Drugs

4/5

Indie Springsteen disciples have a way of proliferating like Marvel Comics variants - over here a Craig Finn, over there a John Darnielle, here a Jason Isbell. there a Katie Crutchfield. Adam Granduciel's particular formula is *What If...Springsteen Discovered the Delay Pedal and Pot?* And it's fascinating the lack of anxiety of influence he displays; he knows he's aping the Boss and he knows you know it and he does it anyway. He gets away with it mostly by avoiding Bruce's vocal affectations in favor of a clearer vocal tone, and by keeping his lyrics suitably impressionistic rather than concrete like the original's. But the real star here is the guitar work - J Mascis and Kevin Shields by way of *Stardust*-era Willie Nelson, lush and full while simultaneously stately and unadorned. I tried to follow along with a lyric sheet but realized by about "Eyes to the Wind" that I was feeling rather than reading.

Sincere

Mj Cole

3/5

Amnesiac

Radiohead

5/5

A rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouching towards the digital hellscape to be born. Where once its fractured, pixelated humanity felt prescient, now it just feels trenchant. "Life in a Glasshouse" feels like a jazz funeral for the future we were promised.

Music for the Masses

Depeche Mode

4/5

Everything Must Go

Manic Street Preachers

4/5

Surf's Up

The Beach Boys

4/5

Yes, it's uneven, and yes, the misses here miss wildly - I can't tell whether "Student Demonstration Time" is an earnest attempt at a Doors song or a parody. And the production and related turmoil swirling around the group is constantly evident here, for better and worse (I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that Van Dyke Parks remains a fart-sniffer of the highest order). But the meaning of the Beach Boys has always been, like the sport they represented but mostly didn't actually practice, in moments of transcendence, and those are present in spades here - all the more impressive for being carried out mostly in Brian Wilson's absence. And if there's such a thing as "hitting wildly" then "Feel Flows" does it.

Heaux Tales

Jazmine Sullivan

3/5

Finally, an album! By a female R&B singer! About sex! And relationships! I was prepared to hate this after the preachy intro. But Sullivan spends the next half hour examining the Problem (which might as well be her nickname for the hung dude she sings about on "Put It Down") from all angles in an honest, vulnerable, angry, self-deprecating way. I don't know that this album deserved all the ballyhoo it got at the time - if you come for the Miseducation, you better not miss - but it's good at being what it is, and that counts for something. I just don't know if I'll be back anytime soon.

Penance Soiree

The Icarus Line

5/5

Look, I have no doubt that these guys were a handful even by rock-star standards - Aaron North in particular seems to be chaos personified, and you don't have *this* many lyrics about heroin on an album without there being some, ah, active participation. But headaches or no, V2 refusing to promote this album at the time of its release was some stupid shit. Like, if you can't sell "Jet, but *actually* punk" to the world then quit your job already. Seriously, what a collection: Joe Cardamone's vocals slither all over the history of noisy music before hitting right in the sweet spot between Iggy Pop, Tom Verlaine, and Cedric Bixler-Zavala. The guitar work chases the same set of influences, with the occasional Albini ("Meatmaker") thrown in for good measure. The centerpiece "Getting Bright at Night" particularly feels like an attempt to update Television for a new generation - a worthy task if there ever was one. And "Spike Island" would have been a hit - Verlaine-esque vocals, suitably sleazy guitar, seedy lyrics, the works. The world was ready for this and I'm glad it survived, even if the band itself didn't.

Pictures At An Exhibition

Emerson, Lake & Palmer

4/5

Long before Alyson Hannigan became the world's most famous Freaky Band Kid, these psychos were at it, with Keith Emerson doing in his own way for the Hammond organ (heheh, he said "organ") what Cage and Branca were doing for the piano and guitar. Be patient with the slow start; once you hit "The Old Castle" it's nothing but speed and power and virtuosity from there on out. The encore turns the Nutcracker March into a demented dancehall tune for good measure.

London Calling

The Clash

5/5

Punks aren't supposed to be able to actually play. Punks aren't supposed to be able to actually write. Punks aren't supposed to be able to play in multiple genres and actually hang. Nominal punk music isn't supposed to have this kind of emotional range - tender and hurt and empathetic and hopeful in addition to the usual punk anger. Old-fashioned rock and roll isn't supposed to still sound vital. Isn't it refreshing to encounter something that's *better* than it's supposed to be? I can't remember the last time it happened, honestly.

We're Only In It For The Money

The Mothers Of Invention

1/5

I don't know, man, maybe this was really revolutionary in 1968 or whatever, but at this point the satire is unfocused and weak, the polemics are just as preachy as the stuff I think Zappa is making fun of, and the dirty stories are just dirty for dirty's sake. He has nothing to say and he says it in the most annoying way possible. Even the little bit of genuine artistry here - the collage on "Nasal Retentive Calliope Music" he has to ruin with a fart joke. It is a mark of my commitment to this project that I listened to this all the way through.

The Doors

5/5

Come Away With Me

Norah Jones

4/5

Innervisions

Stevie Wonder

5/5

69 Love Songs

The Magnetic Fields

5/5

Proust in musical form: a fey man on the Lower East Side sits in a gay bar and (mis)remembers every love song he's ever heard. In the process he manages to (mis)remember some of the best songs Jackson Browne, Cole Porter, Jonathan Richman, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Nicks, Bernard Sumner, etc. never actually wrote. A miracle.

Africa Brasil

Jorge Ben Jor

4/5

Ill Communication

Beastie Boys

4/5

As delightfully free-associative as Paul's Boutique was, I think this album - which seems to seek to draw a throughline all the way through American music, from jazz to funk to punk to hip-hop - might be even more ambitious. I also think it's not quite as good as Paul's Boutique (or Check Your Head, for that matter). But the highs are still incredible - "Sabotage" will be played at high school pep rallies for the rest of time (likely with the f-bomb intact).

Bad Company

3/5

Dig Me Out

Sleater-Kinney

5/5

Lady Soul

Aretha Franklin

5/5

Marcus Garvey

Burning Spear

4/5

A Northern Soul

The Verve

5/5

"Hey, these guys kinda sound like Be Here Now-era Oasis!" "Actually, I hear early Stereophonics." "I hear some Second Coming-era Stone Roses in there too." "And some Chemical Brothers, even." "There's even a little bit of early Coldplay in there." Truth is, all those bands sound like them. And when Richard Ashcroft says on the title track that he's gonna die alone in bed, he sounds more than a little like the Northern souls from down the road in Liverpool who they're all really chasing. Phony Beatlemania has rarely worked this well, both as elegy ("On Your Own," which feels ragged and Plastic Ono-y in the best ways) and as muted, half-shrugging optimism ("History," which doesn't outpunch "Eleanor Rigby" in the strings department but at least goes the distance). The Harrisonesque stretch-outs throughout the album only add to the ambience.

Out of Step

Minor Threat

5/5

Surrealistic Pillow

Jefferson Airplane

3/5

There's a reason you've heard "Somebody to Love" and "White Rabbit" a gazillion times in every form of media at this point: Grace Slick's vocals are unique for a White female singer from her era, with a just-right combination of bluesy earthiness and pure tone. Frustratingly, the rest of the band doesn't seem to know what they have on their hands with her, veering instead into more standard, period-reflective folk and soul led by Marty Balin (that's Jerry Garcia playing lead on "Today"). Which doesn't make the latter stuff bad - it's actually generally quite good. But it ain't special the way Slick's voice is. Feels like the musical equivalent of making Bill Walton play on the JV team for a year at UCLA.

Off The Wall

Michael Jackson

4/5

Disco Demolition Nights notwithstanding, there's a reason this particular flavor of dance music was so captivating to basically the entire world in the late 70s: perfectly comfortable grooves, lived-in, organic production, and an appealing emcee in Jackson. For years people have debated whether this collection is better than Thriller; for my money, the highs aren't as high here - there's nothing as instantly iconic as "Beat It" or "Billie Jean" - but the lows aren't as low either (nothing as clunky as "The Girl Is Mine"). Nevertheless, it deserves all the acclaim it gets - and now, after Everything With MJ (you know what I mean) it serves as a monument to all that was lost. Look on his works, ye mighty, and despair.

Entertainment

Gang Of Four

4/5

Among the multifarious progeny of this classic - the Minutemen, Black Flag, Fugazi, the Feelies - I want to call out Rage Against the Machine, simply because, whatever you think of the politics here (and I'm generally in favor of them) the playing on display is *incredible*. Andy Gill, Dave Allen, and Hugo Burnham may have a claim to the title of Most Valuable Rhythm Section (Gill included here because he's playing rhythm guitar and he fucking *plays* it). As far as those lyrics go, the verbosity is a blessing and a curse at times but Jon King's delivery makes it work. And I'm willing to excuse some Neo-Puritanism ("Damaged Goods") in exchange for a clear statement of class purpose - and "please send me evenings and weekends" on "Return the Gift" is about as pure as it gets.

Kid A

Radiohead

5/5

It's A Shame About Ray

The Lemonheads

4/5

I feel conflicted about rating this album, simply because I already love it and have nostalgic feelings about it and love the genre as a whole. At the same time, it feels sort of weightless - like it's wonderful but not essential. But the rapid-fire songwriting feels equal parts tossed-off and crafted (probably the exact effect Dando et al. are going for), and there are constant sugary pleasures here - most of these songs could be singles, or at the very least in the background of a Friends episode. And as far as Steinian statements about the slacker zeitgeist go, "ship without a rudder's like a ship without a rudder's like a ship without a rudder" is pretty damn good. I don't know if it's a great album but I like it better than a lot of great albums.

Elvis Presley

4/5

I question some of the choices of material (especially the ballads). I question some of the instrumentation and production choices. I question whether I can ever really hear this the way it must have sounded in 1956. I hear the iconic "one for the money, two for the show / three to get ready now go cat go" and I'm mesmerized. What was the question again?

Suede

3/5

I want to be snarky about Brett Anderson's understudy performance in the role of Queer Rock Star but I can't, simply because I remember what 1993 was like. But that being said, there's less happening here lyrically than it feels like there ought to be. And if anything here's going to make me question my sexuality it's Bernard Butler's effects box.

A Hard Day's Night

Beatles

5/5

American Pie

Don McLean

2/5

Don McLean is the Bucky Dent or David Tyree of folk rock - transcedent for a moment (the title track) in a way that ensures he'll be remembered forever, even if the rest of his body of work remains pretty pedestrian. It's sort of hard to grapple with how good "American Pie" is against the relief of how bland and cliched the rest of McLean's attempts at poetry are here. Sometimes one play is all it takes, I guess.

Real Life

Magazine

4/5

Dave Formula's keyboards absolutely make this band - shimmery and grimy and stately and wild and everything in between, as the mood suits him. The keys propel this slab of Tense Britannica with high energy throughout - even the lulls, as on the first half of "The Great Beautician in the Sky," have a purpose. "Shot by Both Sides" proves they can rock plenty. And while I'm not certain that Howard Devoto's thoughts are *quite* as original and insightful as he thinks they are, that doesn't mean he has nothing to say. "The smart ones understand how your heart bursts," he sings with veracity on "Burst." Think of this as a companion piece to the first couple Specials albums in the same way that a Matisse compliments a Picasso.

1984

Van Halen

5/5

There's a reason people still talk, 40-plus years later, about the end of the Van Halen/Roth partnership - these guys were absolutely peaking at the time. This album includes the most controversial (and correctly forward-thinking) instrumentation decision since Dylan going electric, AND the world's grand introduction to the double bass pedal (amazing that both Van Halen brothers have a repertory piece on their respective instruments), AND a half-dozen other flawless compositions, AND Roth's zenith as a vocalist. An absolute masterwork.

For Your Pleasure

Roxy Music

5/5

One Nation Under A Groove

Funkadelic

5/5

"We have been going to this same party every night for 47 years, and in no way is that pathetic!" That sounds like a joke but I'm serious: this may be my favorite funk album ever and a sonic building block for the last half-century of pop music as a whole (as well as a reminder that it was total bullshit to re-segregate pop music in the late 70s and thereby cut off the cross-pollination of genres on display here). Slash should buy Mike Hampton a house.

Destroyer

KISS

4/5

Debut

Björk

5/5

Describing an artist as "weird" always carries with it an air of judgment; "weird" artists are always either too out of it to know what they're doing (the Syd Barrett/Daniel Johnston outsider school) or else they're Doing It On Purpose, with all the fraught weight of intention that entails. Which is to say that, given Bjork's reputation, what's striking, thirty-plus years later, is how effortless this all sounds; casually inverting Byron on "Venus as a Boy," channeling - I don't know, Dinah Shore maybe? - on "Like Someone in Love," making the Eurodance subtext into text on "Big Time Sensuality." This album feels like an old friend taking you on a trip to a place she knows well and is excited for you to get to experience. Music of her mind, one might say.

The Slider

T. Rex

4/5

There used to be these ads for GMC trucks that said, "Do one thing. Do it well." Bolan does one thing really, really well here - finding great grooves and just living in them, for three and a half minutes that feels like it could go on forever. This is a Coke Album in the best way.

The Modern Dance

Pere Ubu

5/5

As much I hate to encourage the contemporary phenomenon of inceldom, David Thomas and co. made the perfect window into that headspace: by turns horny, abrasive, placid to the point of passivity, contemplative (which a nice way of saying too smart for its own good), and just downright weird in the best way. A perfect soundtrack for making DOOM .wads in your room. Alternate title: Songs About Not Fucking.

Graceland

Paul Simon

5/5

Strangeways, Here We Come

The Smiths

4/5

Knowing how close these songs were in time to the end of the band, it's easy now to hear hints of everyone's exhaustion. On the other hand, Morrissey's whole thing is that he perpetually sounds Over It, so I don't know how reliable an indicator that is. In any event, the production here is better than on The Queen Is Dead, which is both progress and an indictment; a lot of what makes the Smiths' early work so compelling for me is the rough-hewn nature of the recordings. That said, there's plenty of good stuff here.

Buffalo Springfield Again

Buffalo Springfield

4/5

I see why this band worked and also why it didn't; Young's guitar workouts are, to borrow a Cameron Crowe word, incendiary ("Mr. Soul," "Bluebird") but Furay gets too much airtime to say too little ("Sad Memory"). Stills seems to gamely be playing mediator here ("Rock & Roll Woman"), but the result feels disjointed rather than simply varied. That said, there's historical value in remembering how much psychedelia owed to the country and soul on display here. And "Broken Arrow" shows both how Over This Shit Young was already (at 21!) and where his restless ambitions would eventually take him.

The Real Thing

Faith No More

3/5

Play

Moby

5/5

I once became a vegan because of this album (for a week - my willpower didn't survive a spring break barbecue). I've been listening to it for more than two decades and it feels like I only just realized what Moby is trying to do here, which is call back to and synthesize pre-rock blues ("Honey," "Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad") with Seventies ambient music (the Eno-ism is especially poignant on "Inside") with modern sounds in disco and hip-hop music (complete with Gwen Stefani playing the Debbie Harry role on "South Side"). He's not just listening to Eno and Byrne and Pink Floyd and Scott-Heron - he's listening to the stuff they listened to. Which is why what he's made here contains multitudes - among them Wish You Were Here-esque lonesomeness ("Guitar Flute & String"), a "Dancing in the Street" for a new era ("Bodyrock"), and a spiritual call-out that, like all good spiritual call-outs, is really directed at the one doing the calling out ("Run On"). Also: if you were born to White parents between mid-2000 and early 2002, this album may be somewhat responsible for your existence.

It's Too Late to Stop Now

Van Morrison

3/5

Exactly what it sounds like: a Van Morrison live album. I'm not familiar enough with his catalog to say whether these recordings are better than the originals for the most part. I will say that Morrison himself sounds focused and committed (which I understand has sometimes been an issue with him) and that the compositions are better when they rely more on the horns and piano and less on B.B. King-style guitar impersonations. Your mileage will vary greatly - my own rating is probably in flux pending more familiarity with Morrison's work in general.

Doggystyle

Snoop Dogg

4/5

I'm fascinated by this. Snoop exists in a hedonistic haze, occasionally punctured by spasms of violence ("Murder Was the Case"). He is obviously uncomfortable with Shit Getting Real even though those songs are still well made. "Gin and Juice" and "Who Am I (What's My Name)?" are classics for a reason. The misogyny throughout is terrible even by rap standards. In short, it shouldn't be a surprise that Snoop became a mascot of American culture - he's escapist and lazy and crass and skilled and sometimes transcendent anyway. *Ecce homie*: behold the G.

Rage Against The Machine

5/5

The Revolution is already here - it just isn't evenly distributed yet.

Superunknown

Soundgarden

5/5

There is a very real sense in which the entire grunge project was an exercise in attempting to rescue the legacy of Sabbath and Zep from the hair-metal bozos - to return to the deep-in-the-cold-dark-ground *heaviness* those bands exemplified. Chris Cornell (on whom the Mandate of Heaven fell in the form of his Plant-ian vocal aptitude) and his bandmates come the closest of anybody to realizing that ambition here. It all works - suitably gentle-rough production courtesy of Michael Beinhorn, grooves that frequently lurch in odd meters but never in ways that feel unnatural, Kim Thayil's riffs moving at the exact speed they should move. Even the impressionistic lyrics work for them better than they'd work for pretty much anyone else, because Cornell's voice is operatic in the communicative sense - the notes he sings and how he sings them are more important than the words per se. I don't need to know what he's saying to *know what he's saying*. I miss him.

Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea

PJ Harvey

4/5

Bongo Rock

Incredible Bongo Band

3/5

At least two out of the three words in this group's title are accurate. A good palate cleanser - not sure whether it's more than that.

With The Beatles

Beatles

5/5

Kenya

Machito

5/5

Bayou Country

Creedence Clearwater Revival

4/5

Wildly inconsistent in that there are a couple just straight-up duds, but there are more hits than misses and the hits are great - "Proud Mary" (good enough for Ike and Tina to appropriate), "Keep on Chooglin' (good enough for Zep to appropriate - listen to that harmonica and tell me "When the Levee Breaks" ain't going for the same damn thing), and "Good Golly Miss Molly" (appropriated from Little Richard but I might even like it a *little* better than his version). Who cares if they're fake Southerners - Dickens wasn't an orphan either.

Songs Of Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen

4/5

On one hand, Cohen's tunesmithing is best described as "uncommitted," and I can't tell whether he really *can't* sing or just isn't trying hard enough. Just like his characters, he has to make everything hard for himself. On the other hand, what characters! Cohen's poetry cements him as an heir of the Beats - tales of addicts, vagabonds, ladies of moral turpitude, boys who fell in with the bad crowd, all seesawing between depravity and ecstasy. No wonder this album has been a mainstay of bohemians (actual or aspiring) for half a century now.

Parsley, Sage, Rosemary And Thyme

Simon & Garfunkel

5/5

Low

David Bowie

5/5

A Short Album About Love

The Divine Comedy

3/5

Reviewing this so soon after 69 Love Songs is revealing. Stephen Merritt proves that brevity is the soul of wit; his observations land because he sticks and moves. Neil Hannon, on the other hand, lingers and languishes; he feels like he's wallowing in it, which makes his lyrics feel a bit banal rather than incisive. More than that, though, Merritt feels like he's in on the joke of being a lovesick worm; Hannon feels like he thinks he's in on the joke but actually isn't. Insert Vonnegut's observation about how we are what we pretend to be, so we must be very careful what we pretend to be.

Nebraska

Bruce Springsteen

3/5

Y'all, I've tried with this one, several times, and I think what I'm concluding is that I'd rather read this album than hear it for the most part. The stories are all at least pretty good and usually much better ("Used Cars," "My Father's House") but this is music and there's sometimes a dearth of it - only "Atlantic City" really feels like it rises to the occasion. I know Bruce is going for this solemn, hushed tone, and I know how influential it's been for plenty of other artists I like. But I just come away with the feeling that *he* thinks he sounds more profound than he actually usually does. Still worthy of the canon based on the lyrics alone, but yeah.

Homework

Daft Punk

4/5

This is the calm after the *sturm und drang* of Big Beat: fun, inviting, accessible, subtly innovative, and sometimes transcendent (I'm thinking of the guitar sputtering to life on "Fresh" like a futuristic rocket engine turning over after having sat for a while). Your tolerance for blippy shit may vary, of course, but I think it's a great bridge between the Planet Dust of the mid-Nineties and where dance music was ultimately headed in the new millennium.

Deep Purple In Rock

Deep Purple

4/5

When I was a child - growing up in a deeply religious household where anything heavier than Seventies soft rock or country was verboten - I imagined that "heavy metal" sounded like the opening of "Speed King": energetic, cacophonous, brash, everything I wasn't and wanted to be. In my head it sounded like freedom. Now, thirty-plus years later and in real life, this album sounds just like that. *You know what, fuck it - everybody gets a solo*. And if you're ever wondering why people care about Ritchie Blackmore, the middle section "Child in Time" is your answer. (Not enough people ask about Ian Paice, but if "Flight of the Rat" is any indication then they should.)

Songs In The Key Of Life

Stevie Wonder

5/5

Vanishing Point

Primal Scream

4/5

O.G. Original Gangster

Ice T

2/5

The only thing really noteworthy here is that the production is reasonably evocative of Peak Gangsta. Otherwise, the rhymes are fine, the subject matter is cliche (he's *not* being misogynistic, see, he calls men "bitches" too), the album is *so fucking long* (Nineties Overlong Album Disease is officially epidemic by '91), and the whole experience is consistently unpleasant in a way that I assume may have signified at the time but that I have no desire to experience again. Ice is understandably preoccupied with the violence around him but if you're going to be obsessed with something then you need to have something meaningful to say about it, and he doesn't really. Transitioning into acting was a good move.

Gentlemen

The Afghan Whigs

3/5

Greg Dulli seems to be running the J Mascis playbook, only with more text as opposed to subtext. He can't play quite as well as J and he sings about as well (which isn't exactly a compliment), but I can live with that. I'm less sold on the less subtext, more text thing, and not just because Mascis's inability to articulate his feelings is part of what makes him signify. Dulli doesn't have that problem but here it feels like he's trying to guard himself against accusations of misogyny by accusing himself first. Thing is, self-awareness about your cad-ness doesn't make you any less of a cad (see, e.g., a long tradition of scuzzballs dating back at least to Byron and Shelley). Yelling at your ex for her not getting off, as Dulli does on "When We Two Parted," is downright ugly, ironic distance or not (which is a shame, because the Allmanesque lead on that song really works). And if he's going to be more articulate then he needs to at least be poetic - there are lots of good riffs here but too many clunker lines. He isn't an idiot but this is nonetheless full of sound and fury that I'm not sure signifies.

The Score

Fugees

5/5

Maybe it's just the knowledge of where the protagonists all ended up - Pras in prison, Lauryn on the edge of sanity, Wyclef giving keynotes at meetings of the Legion of Doom or some shit - but the tragic notes in this album feel especially tragic now. Perhaps that's to be expected as we all age (speaking as someone who grew up with this album). And perhaps it's an expression of what I hear more than anything else here - the paradox of youth, of being both incredible artists at the height of their creative powers and simultaneously powerless to transcend the personal and social circumstances that cultivated those gifts. I guess I can't do anything more than look back with some sadness - and gratitude that "Family Business" still slaps, "Ready or Not" still feels vital, "No Woman, No Cry" still wrestles the original to a draw. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, I guess.

Two Dancers

Wild Beasts

2/5

Insouciant indie-rock riffs and Russell Mael-style vocal histrionics - two great tastes that...don't work that well together, unfortunately. I appreciate the attempt to do something different but this blend ain't hitting for me. And the lyrics - what in the faux-fey arrested development is going on here.

Tragic Songs of Life

The Louvin Brothers

4/5

There's an old Chappelle routine about how you can get away with saying whatever you want if you get a pretty White girl to sing it for you. I think maybe that also applies if you can get two close-harmony country singers to sing it for you - witness the senseless violence on display on "Knoxville Girl," for example. Sonically it's a lot of the same thing so you're either going to like this sound or not; I personally feel my Scots-Irish by way of Appalachia heritage rising up in me so I'm in favor.

Born In The U.S.A.

Bruce Springsteen

4/5

Hunting High And Low

a-ha

3/5

I assume you're familiar with "Take On Me," one of the all-time great moments of Eighties pop - an undeniable synth riff matched with a soaring falsetto vocal from Morten Harket that immediately cements the song in the Don't Even Think About Attempting That At Karaoke Hall Of Fame. Unsurprisingly, the rest of the band's output on this album doesn't reach those same heights (what could?). But the other singles - particularly "Love Is Reason" and the "The Sun Always Shines on T.V." - showcase much of the same easy, upbeat charm. I'm not sure there's anything deeper than that happening here, especially on some of the more downbeat album tracks, but the collection is mostly fun if nothing else.

Club Classics Vol. One

Soul II Soul

3/5

Feels more important for what it represents (the flame of the British soul tradition being kept alive and transmitted into hands of original pigmentation, plus a launching-off point for Massive Attack et al. a few years later) than what it actually is (varied, perfectly serviceable, well-produced late-Eighties R&B that more than anything reminds me how much I like Blue Lines and that one Lisa Stansfield album). I suppose it's possible I'm not familiar enough with where the genre was before this to see this as particularly revolutionary, but at least it's energetic.

Cut

The Slits

3/5

As late-Seventies White Guy Reggae goes (this time with White Girls) I feel like this beats most of the competitors (which isn't all that hard, honestly), but I was left with the feeling that I didn't quite connect with it on as deep a level as I could. Probably worth another listen with a lyric sheet in front of me. I will say "don't take it personal, I choose my own fate" feels like a good motto to take away from the proceedings.

It's Blitz!

Yeah Yeah Yeahs

5/5

I've never really asked any of my peers about this but I suspect that for many of us who came of age during the Great Recession the term "recession pop" is never going to be cute or funny or ironic on account of the sheer fucking horror it invokes - your upcoming internship vanishes, then your evening/weekend job cuts everyone's guaranteed pay and just goes straight commission, then you wander into a job fair where there's exactly one (1) employer hiring for non-engineering majors and it's fucking Allstate Insurance, then your dad calls and tells you he got laid off again, and at some point you just wander, dazed, back to your shitty apartment down the hill from campus (stopping at a pre-med advisement seminar along the way because you can pretend to be anything for free pizza) and hope somebody's throwing a party tonight. *We're going nowhere so we'll just dance 'til we're dead.* *It's Blitz!* isn't strictly a recession-pop album (although there are feints in that direction, most notably on "Heads Will Roll") but it's maybe the best representation of what that exact time felt like - the Yeah Yeah Yeahs camped out in Tornillo, struggling to find inspiration, writing and rewriting and tearing up their progress and rewriting again, spending money they don't have on a record that'll never make back what they owe. "Skeletons" feels like the sound of an entire generation marching towards its own funeral. And when Karen O sings "Run, run away/ No sense of time" she's modeling our collective coping mechanism. It's the soundtrack of a life spent forever in the red. I love it and it also hurts to listen to.

People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm

A Tribe Called Quest

5/5

I don't know what you were doing at age nineteen; I definitely wasn't making a masterpiece that combines the extant history of popular music (Beatles, Lou Reed, Stevie, P-Funk, and Cannonball Adderley among others sampled) and pure rapturous verbosity into a solid hour of bliss. The album begins with the sound of a baby crying and contains the joy of being young and alive on every track. Life-affirming.

Hot Shots II

The Beta Band

3/5

Honestly, I turned it on and forgot I had it on. Nothing here is done badly but nothing here is done significantly better than average either.

3 Feet High and Rising

De La Soul

5/5

I bob my head, always halfway amazed, when they lay down "The Magic Number" in rapid fire. I laugh out loud when they compare losing your virginity to playing "Chopsticks" at your first piano recital on "Jenifa Taught Me." I reach temporary enlightenment during "Eye Know" (that Otis Redding sample was worth waiting 35 years to clear). I hear the fountain of so much of what hip-hop is, and was, and could be again, on "Potholes in My Lawn." I daydream about how much time was wasted on D.A.R.E. courses when I was a kid that could have just been replaced with playing "Say No Go" for the kids and then walking out. I can't listen to "Me Myself and I" without my White ass shaking semi-voluntarily. Can't help it - I'm powerless against something this good.

The Velvet Underground & Nico

The Velvet Underground

5/5

From a certain perspective, I am not the sort of person who should be enamored with this album. I'm drug-free and have never tried heroin. I'm not into S&M. I don't pay for...any of the things being bought or sold on this album. I'm not preoccupied with clowns like Reed apparently is (seriously - check the lyric sheet). So why do I love this album so much? Because it encapsulates *freedom* in the purest artistic sense, because every note of it - the reclaimed Sixties girl-group ones, the folky ones, even the off-tune ones from Nico and the dissonant ones from Cage - testifies to the fundamental truth that *you can do whatever you want*, as long as you do it with your whole chest. And that truth has saved my life, over and over again.

Winter In America

Gil Scott-Heron

4/5

Slavery in America was fundamentally an institution of familial destruction - of obliterating the natural bonds between parents and children and spouses and lovers, selling human beings as livestock to highest bidder at any moment, negating all sense of identity those essential bonds create. *For in the last days men shall be lovers of their own selves, blasphemers, without natural affection.* So it is unsurprising that Scott-Heron, prophet that he is, is so preoccupied with the loss of family here. On nearly every track he gropes for something or someone to hold on to - brothers, fathers, uncles, cousins, sons, sisters, first loves - and all elude him. And when he confesses on "The Bottle" - after recounting the tales of covetous winos around him - that he himself is one of the hopeless husks hanging outside the liquor store, we understand that the chains were never really broken but rather just changed form.

Frampton Comes Alive

Peter Frampton

3/5

One's mind tends to wander while listening to jam bands, which is a feature and not a bug. Beyond just taking this in - it's all at least pleasant although it drags a little bit at times (as jammy stuff tends to do), and the good stuff is mostly the stuff you've probably already heard, plus "I Wanna Go to the Sun" - my mind wandered to how odd it is that this album exists at all, much less that it became a cultural phenomenon. Like, Frampton was never *that* famous before this - his previous album had topped out at #32, he hadn't had any real successful singles, and his previous band Humble Pie hadn't done much of note either (besides purchase Penny Lane from Stillwater for $50 and a case of beer). There's nothing here that's really mind-blowing - even the talkbox had been done already by Stevie Wonder and Jeff Beck among others, and these compositions just feel like pretty standard live-era classic-rock fare. Point is, Frampton wasn't doing anything that Zep or Bad Company or Steve Miller or a thousand other bands weren't also doing at the time. And yet these recordings show he was playing to sizable crowds who were clearly into his music. Like, what cultural itch was being scratched by *Frampton Comes Alive!* - were people really just that desperate to vicariously experience some mid-tempo, vaguely proficient rockin' out? Was it just a fad, like Pet Rocks or Sea Monkeys? Was it better high, like *Fantasia* or *2001: A Space Odyssey*? I'm fascinated by it even though I only kinda halfway get it - maybe *because* I only halfway get it.

Rust Never Sleeps

Neil Young & Crazy Horse

5/5

Blood And Chocolate

Elvis Costello & The Attractions

3/5

I feel like I should like this more than I do - it's evocatively composed throughout, and Costello's novelist eye remains on display. I guess the stories themselves just feel so depleted - emotionally exhausted and same-y. Hurt people hurting people, forever and ever, worlds without end. I don't feel like I have the right to demand more optimism out of an artist but I do wish for at least a broader psychological palette than the one Costello is painting with here.

Zombie

Fela Kuti

4/5

I was unsurprised to hear a vibrant, aggressive set from Kuti complete with a fanfare piss-take aimed at the jackboots running his country at the time. I *was* pleasantly surprised to realize how much of the 8-bit chipcore palette was made in an attempt to recreate the sound of the title track. In any event, I'd hate to have this guy disappointed in me.

It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back

Public Enemy

5/5

Rap is maybe the hardest genre to hear in context, and this album is no exception; the Farrakhan shit has aged like milk, for example. But the context cuts both ways, and *my God* has this album been so incredibly foundational to the sound of hip-hop for the last three decades-plus since it was released. Seriously, the samples that have been used by other artists fly by like bullet train scenery, too fast to even begin to catch all of them. The production remains first-rate - clear, punchy, aggressive (you can hear what all those RATM albums were going for). And Chuck D's lyrics remain more relevant than they should, in multiple senses. Do believe the hype about this one.

Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire)

The Kinks

3/5

I'm starting to think there's less to these guys than meets the ear. Ray Davies' singing is indifferent, his band's playing is competent, and his tunes range from fine to occasionally great ("Australia" is a fun bit of Brian Wilson homage, and Dave Davies' playing on the title track is light and wonderful). Nothing offensive but nothing to write home about either. But here, Ray Davies is trying to play in the concept-album sandbox with *Sgt. Pepper* and *Tommy* and the big boys. And the problem he encounters is pretty basic: this is a rock opera by someone with little of value to say. According to him, his protagonist is prosaic, miserable, inferior, and justly forgotten - which just reveals Davies himself as lacking in emotional depth. I'm sure his wife and kids really appreciated his diss of the institution of family life on "Brainwashed" (although one figures they were used to it by 1969). And what's he getting at with "Mr. Churchill Says" - that Britain should have just capitulated to Hitler instead? I can see why the squares all hated these hippie assholes. Fundamentally, the trials of poor Arthur Morgan just come across as mean-spirited and mocking rather than insightful; the perfunctory attempts at empathy ("Young and Innocent Days" and the title track) are too little, too late. I wanted to like this and was disappointed.

Roots

Sepultura

5/5

For all the ballyhoo about the melange of influences on this album, the best thing I can say about it is that nothing - not the Fugazi-inspired power-chord riffs, not the funk rhythms, not the occasional shred solos, not the timbale figures, not the tribal chants - feels the least bit out of place. All of it is different but it all sounds like it belongs exactly where it is. Metal Cubism. Bonus points for being an all-time great Weight Room Album (time your mid-workout cooldown for "Jasco").

Boston

5/5

Sheer rock perfection. The people who complain about it being *too* perfect sound like the Emperor of Austria telling Mozart his music has too many notes.

Five Leaves Left

Nick Drake

5/5

Drake's personal mythos tends to portray him as sui generis - the lonely genius composing tender ballads behind his locked bedroom door. But this collection reveals how much he, like Van Morrison and Page/Plant among others, was engaged in the common capital-R Romantic project of trying to recover a mythical, pre-industrial British Isles - from the hillbilly tones of the opener "Time Has Told Me" to tales about river men and light among the trees. And he comes as close as anyone to conjuring the dream of Albion here - the deep green of the album cover is apropos. All the pale (pun intended) imitators of this album are at least imitating the right masterpiece.

Aqualung

Jethro Tull

4/5

I'm increasingly intrigued by the microgenre of what I'll call Observational British Rock - albums made by British bands consisting of sketches about the various eccentrics, squares, and human marginalia one encounters in society. Ian Anderson's particular vignettes are enhanced by his willingness to go full Leopold Bloom in terms of gritty detail, as on the famous title track that combines both disgust and empathy for a dirty old man on a park bench. It also helps that the guitar work is first-rate throughout - Anderson's acoustic virtuosity is persistent, and Martin Barre's fat riffs arrive precisely when you start to worry the momentum is dragging (as on "My God"). And prog gets a bad name for songs that go on too long but Anderson's compositions are generally enhanced by shorter runtimes that keep the pace moving. I'm not sure I would call anything here *truly* transcendent but it all works way better than you would think if I just said "proto-metal plus acoustic folk plus a little English dancehall plus a large dose of flute."

Shalimar

Rahul Dev Burman

3/5

I can surmise that this is on the list because it represents a fusion of traditional Indian music styles with then-contemporary funk and disco. Nothing stood out to me but it was fun and fine.

Sign 'O' The Times

Prince

4/5

Chris

Christine and the Queens

5/5

The first time through, half-distracted and without a lyric sheet in front of me, I was tempted to label this as an *E-MO-TION* knock-off, only more French/queer/smutty - interesting and engaging but nothing more than that. And then the second time through I realized what Chris is saying and *good Lord*, the honesty here - the tenderness, the anger, the confusion, the despair. He's done something far more than just simple electro-pop confections, melding these sugary textures with a potent cocktail of deep feeling worthy of Robert Smith. The kaleidoscope of intimate situations and emotions here is staggering - the snarl at being misgendered by the object of his lust on "Girlfriend," the spoil for a fight to prove his manliness on "The walker," the puzzlement of being in love with a conservative on "Feel so good," the plain old fuck-me frustration of "Damn (what must a woman do)." "I am done with belonging," Chris sings on "Comme si," and we are all better off for it.

Kimono My House

Sparks

4/5

These guys understand the first rule of camp, which is *fucking go for it*; everything they do is in all caps, from the soaring falsetto melodies to the drama-queen lyrics (witness the cad who hates Christmas because it's the only day he can't go out and tomcat it up). Hearing this album feels like finding the missing link in the fossil record between ABBA, Queen, the Smiths, and, hell, Weird Al while we're at it. Staying at the album's emotional fever pitch for the whole duration can be a bit exhausting but it's worth it. Bonus points for "Falling In Love With Myself Again," a cheeky masturbation anthem that puts to shame all the self-serious 2010s pop-diva odes to the same subject - somebody oughta just cover it (Ms. Roan, looking in your direction).

Trafalgar

Bee Gees

2/5

I read a review of *Sgt. Pepper* once in which the author claimed he didn't dislike the album per se but considered it "a bad influence" on rock music because it led to a bunch of pseudo-intellectual pretentiousness among artists. After listening to this album, with its Gilbert and Sullivan-style vocal solos by singers who can't sing Gilbert and Sullivan, its ponderous production, and its dearth of excitement, I can kinda see the point. Like so many bands in 1971, these guys were trying to be the Beatles; so were, say, Badfinger, but Badfinger at least sounded like they remembered how to play "I Wanna Hold Your Hand." The rare bright spots (like the title track) aren't worth sitting through the rest of it.

Franz Ferdinand

4/5

The Man Who

Travis

3/5

I looked it up and there were twenty million or so antidepressant prescriptions filled in the UK in 1999. Maybe that number doesn't mean anything (obviously it's higher now) but it's the sort of thing you find yourself wondering about while listening to Fran Healy's laconic vocals - I can't tell whether his flat affect is a symptom of depression or a side effect of the meds. I can hear why this bummed-out collection resonated so much at the end of a century in which, to misquote Thatcher, the decline of a great nation was semi-successfully managed (the "No Surprises" glockenspiel rip on "As You Are" is a dead giveaway). And maybe I have no right to talk as an American watching my own country do more or less the same thing, only louder and stupider and on a slightly different timeline (as is our wont). But it's telling that it's only on the hidden track, "Blue Flashing Light" - a tale of drunkenness and domestic violence that spills out onto the lawn - that the boys sound like they give a shit.

The Atomic Mr Basie

Count Basie & His Orchestra

3/5

Do you like big band jazz? Here is some big band jazz for you to like. I admittedly don't have enough familiarity with the genre to really be able to hear what was allegedly revolutionary about this but it's consistently fun and that counts for something.

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

Wilco

5/5

Celebrity Skin

Hole

4/5

Isn't it interesting how none of the Gen-Z Disney Channel refugees who ape Courtney Love's aesthetic ever, ever, *ever* want their actual *voices* to sound like hers? How they never want to go to any of the downright *ugly* places she goes vocally, at great cost to herself? Don't let the glossy Michael Beinhorn production fool you here - inside the candy shell there's pure poison. The handwringing over the sonic slickness at the time was, and remains, misplaced - this album rocks plenty hard, and Love herself has always been clear about the El Lay influences she felt, from Nicks and Buckingham on down. Nothing here stops her from writing some of the most haunting lyrics of her era ("Love hangs herself/ With her bedsheet in her cell" is an all-time great opening line). The truth is that everybody wants to remake this album but nobody *really* wants to remake this album - nobody wants to really go where she's been, describing utter physical and emotional and spiritual abandonment on "Northern Star" so matter-of-factly, like she's giving directions to someone from out of town, before she finally goes up an octave and shreds her vocal cords like only she can. Well, could - she can't anymore, having given everything she had to the music her critics always claimed wasn't hers to begin with. Better to burn out than fade away indeed.

Face to Face

The Kinks

3/5

Maybe this was overhyped for me but I feel like they're not quite there yet on this album; the tunes are mostly good, the production is good enough for the era, I get the droll vibe, and yet something leaves me cold. I have never understood the hype for "Sunny Afternoon." Honestly, the expanded edition with all the singles from the era was revealing because most of those are better than most of these album tracks.

A Christmas Gift For You From Phil Spector

Various Artists

3/5

Am I the only one who hears something sinister in all those key changes in the Ronettes' "Sleigh Ride" - in hearing Ronnie's voice straining at the top of her range, only to be pushed higher and higher and higher, over and over again? It's like Phil Spector found the perfect union of his two greatest interests - technical musical brilliance and abusing women. God, that poor girl.

On The Beach

Neil Young

5/5

I don't want to christen this the King of the Entropy Albums without some serious thought, but it's definitely a strong contender. The strung-out compositions feel apocalyptic, and Young may be at his lyrical best here (which is to say he's at his lowest). So many great lines about the feeling of everything falling apart: "Sooner or later it all gets real." "Good times are comin' but they sure are comin' slow." "Though my problems are meaningless, that don't make 'em go away." "I'm deep inside myself but I'll get out somehow." "An ambulance can only go so fast." "You're all just pissin' in the wind / You don't know it but you are." And "Revolution Blues" is the epitaph the hippie era deserves - the Manson murders in aural form, long before Trent Reznor set up shop at 10050 Cielo Drive.

Raw Power

The Stooges

5/5

One of the preeminent aesthetic tasks of any punk musician is learning how to teeter right on the edge of the stage without falling off. This album, with its famously muddy and inconsistent production that enhances rather than detracts from the decadent atmosphere, is Iggy mastering that task in audio form. Monumental.

The World is a Ghetto

War

4/5

It took me a while to find my footing with this album - the world in which it was Billboard's Album of the Year in 1973 seems, if anything, even more foreign to me than the days when showtune soundtracks would win that award. The key lies in understanding that this is the trap music of its era, in both senses of the term - frequently hazy druggy, and inert, but also fundamentally about the sense of being *trapped* in your circumstances, with escape available only in your mind. That's why the lyrical compositions - imagining oneself as a cowboy (based on a TV rerun, naturally) and confronting the reality of literal and interpersonal jail on "Four Cornered Room" - hit the way they do. And it's why the title is inverted in relation to the actual movements on "City, Country, City" - when these guys are in one place they are always dreaming of the other. I don't know if I love this album but I find it fascinating to think about.

Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs

Derek & The Dominos

4/5

There's a hypnotic quality to Clapton's playing here, and his backing band is excellent - you can see why everyone was so fascinated with him circa 1970. Most of this album is a nice slab of the sort of bloozey classic rock you probably associate with truck ads at this point, made all the better by the fact that I don't think I've ever heard any of these tunes in a truck ad. That said, I don't know that Clapton has much to say other than what you've heard a million times already from the classic rock catalogue - I need you baby, I'm lonesome, etc., etc. And the only really transcendent thing here is the title track, as you'd expect. But it kicks Bad Company's ass all over the place, which is worth something (and I don't even hate Bad Company).

Here Are the Sonics

The Sonics

3/5

The reason this is here is almost certainly "The Witch," a proto-punk blast that continues to resonate (Sublime, for one, ripped off the main riff for "Date Rape"). But the whole collection is good semi-clean fun, although it suffers from the same issue as a lot of work from its era (lots of non-definitive covers). I don't know if these guys could do better but they could certainly do a lot worse.

Are You Experienced

Jimi Hendrix

5/5

*In the beginning was the Guitar, and the Guitar was with God, and the Guitar was God.* Seriously, I don't know how to talk about this album as anything other than just a fountainhead of pure creation, dropping entire genres like stray seeds throughout the musical cosmos. Everything everyone says about how groundbreaking and continually rewarding it was, and is, and remains, is true. Bonus awarded to Chas Chandler for, among other things, getting Hendrix and Mitch Mitchell together.

Dry

PJ Harvey

5/5

Robert Christgau once pointed out that, for certain artists, the way they sing a particular word or phrase encapsulates something really essential about them. For Joey Ramone it's "wanna." For Robert Smith it's "never." For Billie Joe Armstrong it's "care," as in he doesn't. And so forth. PJ Harvey sings the word "lover" like she's addressing God. Throughout this explosive song cycle she worships and begs and rages and self-flagellates at the feet of her deity, twisting and swirling like a frenzy of ancient legend. The Earth Mother figure showed up in female-led Nineties rock in a million different ways but never as compellingly as it does here. And we often call rock music "wild" but rarely do we hear it like Harvey makes it - feral, instinctual, fecund, consumed at all times with a gaping maw of need and lust. *Fuck*.

Pornography

The Cure

5/5

I dare say this is the closest anyone came to replicating Joy Division's *Closer" - a fact that I suspect spooked Robert Smith himself, to the point that he essentially disbanded the band and went and played in Siouxsie and the Banshees for a bit after this. Capital-G Gothic as all hell (literally - the narrator of "The Figurehead" sounds like he's telling off Beatrice from the ninth circle), positively literary in its ambition, obsessive and addictive, full of lust and guilt and shame like a Victorian penny dreadful. My best attempt at an emotional analog is Bacon's *Figure with Meat* - raw humanity splayed out in all its gory glory, simultaneously too existential to bear and too truthful to deny.

LP1

FKA twigs

5/5

How did I miss this the first time? The obvious reference point here is Portishead - twigs has the purest vocal tone since Beth Gibbons. But where Gibbons has always seemed asexual on some level, twigs is unabashed - "When I trust you, we can do it with the lights on" is equal parts come-on, defensive posture, and mission statement. She wields the production equally deftly, choosing to conceal and reveal strategically (erotics again). And although reviewers have pointed out the genderfluidity, for my money the real binary being crossed is dominant/submissive - although how submissive can you really be if you're telling your partner exactly what you want them to do to you? I don't know yet but I'm about to listen again to try and figure it out.

Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes

TV On The Radio

4/5

You could be forgiven for being skeptical of the idea that there might be anything even slightly new-sounding about rock music in 2004, and yet here we are, with this noisy, punky, and yet hypermodern-sounding collection. Not everything works - some of the lyrics are "young" as in immature rather than just "young" as in idealistic - but all the ingredients are here for something great. And "Staring at the Sun" is a worthy addition to the trip-hop canon (which I initally misspelled as "trip-hope" and that's entirely appropriate).

The Modern Lovers

4/5

It's fascinating to hear a new musical stock character - the Hyperverbal Overeducated Beta Male Rocker - being birthed in real time. That alone makes this collection worth hearing - everyone from Morrissey to Gordon Gano to Stephen Malkmus to Craig Finn was taking notes. And yet nobody can do this *quite* like Jonathan Richman does it - with just the right mix of sonic novelty and Fifties boppiness and Velvets-y over-it-ness. Some of these tracks could be shorter but that's a minor quibble. Also: crazy that most of this was recorded in 1972 given how late-Seventies punky it sounds in a lot of places.

Ingenue

k.d. lang

3/5

I respect lang's personal and musical identity crisis here - it's never easy to figure yourself out, much less as a lesbian in 1992. But she never quite feels comfortable in the chanteuse costume, and she usually isn't doing enough lyrically to signify on that front either. She's better off when she ditches the jazz-pop in favor of letting her Christine McVie flag (and voice) fly - "Tears of Love's Recall" and "Constant Craving" in particular feel like they would belong on *Tango in the Night*, which I mean as a compliment.

Kind Of Blue

Miles Davis

5/5

I had a great AP English teacher in high school who used to burn a CD for each of his students at the end of their senior year. He gave me this one. It had exactly the melancholy, mind- and soul-expanding effect I think he intended. One of my biggest worries in this world is that there seem to be fewer people like that around to do things like that for my kids. Listening to this again makes me want to be a better person. Beyond just that, it definitely puts me in a mood of receptiveness to the universe (hint: play it louder than you think you need to). Wouldn't change a note.

My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts

Brian Eno

4/5

You know how, when you're walking through the early Renaissance wing of an art museum and you get to roughly the Giottos and you can appreciate how different they are from what came before but you still can't quite fathom exactly how revolutionary they are because it's really just that all the sudden all the people and perspectives just kind of start to look *right*? That's the experience of hearing this album in 2026. These rhythms and techniques are now so embedded in all of pop music, from pop to rap to country to EDM to whatever's left of rock, that I suspect I'm missing a good deal of the exhilaration that a listener in 1981 would have experienced. Which is another way of saying this is all still quite good and feels like it belongs - and its influence is everywhere, from Timbaland to Uematsu.

The Queen Is Dead

The Smiths

5/5

I don't know when Morrissey's line of credit is going to run out - how many more canceled shows or cancel-able comments he can bear before everyone is just finally done with him. After listening to this gem of an album once again - with its throbbing rhythm section (the title track), its endless supply of lyrical bon mots ("Cemetry Gates" alone could feed families), Johnny Marr's Platonic ideal of lead playing that manages to be muscular and angular without any hint of cock-rockery ("Bigmouth Strikes Again"), the best coming-out song this side of disco ("The Boy with the Thorn in His Side," and I don't care how many times Morrissey lies about its meaning), and an eleven o'clock number for every yearning kid of any age ("There Is a Light That Never Goes Out") - I suspect he'll keep getting away with it forever. What a bastard.

American Idiot

Green Day

5/5

So much more than Millennial protest music, although it's obviously great at being that ("Holiday" and the title track). It's also perhaps our best chronicle of the experience of being alive in the mid-2000s and becoming aware that there are no grownups in charge (i.e. that the moms and Brads are away) - and that, despite how much you claim you don't care, you really do ("Wake Me Up When September Ends"). The closer "Whatsername" is a genuinely moving emo tune from a band that was never even emo. All in all, this is punk's answer to *The Wall* and a statement of purpose for anyone, from Anaheim to the Middle East, who intends to survive the Anthropocene with their heart intact. America: fuck, yeah.

Gunfighter Ballads And Trail Songs

Marty Robbins

4/5

This is Western music, not country music per se; it's also a lot of the same sound to do in one sitting, so perhaps not totally well suited to this album-based exercise. But everything here is at least pretty good, and the best stuff - the title track, "Big Iron," "The Strawberry Roan" - is some of the best of its era.

Fulfillingness' First Finale

Stevie Wonder

4/5

Stevie Wonder is frequently such a font of exuberance - even when telling off a president ("You Haven't Done Nothin'") - that him being bummed out, as he sounds on about half this album, could feel like a disappointment. And on first listen that was exactly how I felt - like I was being deprived of something. The second time through, with less entitlement, I heard the mournful sounds and rhythms on "They Won't Go When I Go" (which Hozier may or may not have pilfered for "Take Me to Church") and understood better what was going on. Not his best but justly regarded as worthy of his Seventies hot streak of great albums.

Every Picture Tells A Story

Rod Stewart

3/5

I was not looking forward to this - I've long considered Stewart overrated and a bit of a buffoon. So I was pleasantly surprised to find that, beyond just "Maggie May," there are other worthy efforts here - the lush guitar work on Dylan's "Tomorrow Is a Long Time" and Stewart's own "Mandolin Wind" are particularly welcome, and Stewart's Faces' version of "(I Know) I'm Losing You" stands up to the Temptations' original. But the clunky moments are particularly clunky, whether its Stewart's ode to a "slit-eyed lady" who doesn't believe in birth control on the title track (Orientalism much?), or a version of "Amazing Grace" tacked onto "That's All Right" that feels deeply out of place. Still, this was better than expected, although I continue to think he's overrated and a bit of a buffoon.

Natty Dread

Bob Marley & The Wailers

4/5

If you don't like reggae, this won't make you like it. Also: if you don't like reggae, *why not*? The word "vibe" was meant for this sort of album - steady, positive, sometimes strident ("Them Belly Full (But We Hungry)"), always soothing in the best ways. And for as many live versions as I've heard of "No Woman No Cry," the studio original, with Jean Roussel's Hammond organ, will always be my favorite. Also: we need more Biblically literate rock stars who don't suck at being rock stars - is that too much to ask? (Yes, Mr. Hewson, I see your hand up.)

The Last Broadcast

Doves

3/5

We are firmly in the echelons of the Lesser Britpop Diaspora here - not at all a bad place to be but there's no reason to include this on the list over, say, *Word Gets Around* or *Comfort in Sound*. That said, it does plenty of things well - "N.Y." would fit right in on *Urban Hymns*, for example, and "Satellite" is a warm slice of turn-of-the-millennium wistfulness. But there weren't quite enough lyrics that really grabbed me to bump this up any higher (although "in and out of love and institutions" is a bar).

California

American Music Club

2/5

Mark Eitzel feels like a Great Value Evan Dando - an actively bad singer (significantly worse than Dando), an unremarkable poet (for an alleged songwriting genius he breaks meter way too often), a stuck-in-neutral composer for the most part. He seems to think all his mid-tempo, out-of-tune bleating is signifying the ragged tortures of his soul, when really it's just signaling that these songs feel a lot like a first draft that could have used a lot more polish. The highlights (like "Jenny" and "Western Sky") only prove that he's capable of doing better if he really wants to. My high school English teacher would have handed this one back with a bunch of redlines and a sticky note on top that just said "REVISE PLZ."

Seventeen Seconds

The Cure

4/5

I'll put my cards on the table up front and admit that I generally prefer the Cure in pop mode, where they serve a spoonful of sugar to help the doom medicine go down. I even really like the band's early post-punk era, even though Robert Smith doesn't really seem to. Which is to say there's not *quite* enough tunefulness here for me to rank this with the band's absolute best (especially in that mid-album lull). But when the tunes are there, they're incredible - "A Forest" is one of the best tracks of this era by anybody, full stop. Justly influential.

Damaged

Black Flag

5/5

Dananananananananananananananana dananananananananananananananana da nana nana unda nana nana un Admit it, you sang the opening riff of "Rise Above" too just now. This album is foundational, raw, and real.

Like Water For Chocolate

Common

4/5

Common's cool-professor aesthetic has always stood out, even among his fellow Soulquarians, as claiming a spiritual and intellectual high ground for his music. And the flip side of that is that, like professors everywhere, he has always seemed the most susceptible to believing his own bullshit about the revolutionary nature of the (legitimately great) work he's doing. He brags on the opener about being a piano player in his last lifetime, but the false notes here sound particularly false - "A Film Called (PIMP)" goes for some profound statement about Black masculinity but just comes off clunky, as does the saccharine "A Song for Assata." But there are way more strong moments than weak ones, from "The Questions" (with crucial contributor Mos Def) to "Payback Is a Grandmother," a much more convincing tale of the streets. Not a bad dissertation, ultimately.

New Wave

The Auteurs

3/5

Being an American who's been into Britpop since I was a kid is a bit of a weird experience, simply because there's always essential context that has gotten lost somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic. For example, the stranglehold Oasis had on the British popular consciousness when *Definitely Maybe* came out makes a lot more sense when you know what sort of mannered mid-tempo preciousness was serving as the backdrop at the time. Luke Haines thinks the whole Bolan whisper-sing thing is a lot more arresting than it actually is, partially because Bolan didn't use it *all the time* or even as his default. And the general vibe here is...sedate, which doesn't match at all with what I suspect this band's self-image was. There are a few upticks in alertness, most notably "Early Years," but mostly this is just part of the furniture, as I'm told they say across the pond. I don't hate this but nothing about it grabs me.

The Bends

Radiohead

5/5

I guess it's odd to call an album that's nominally about numbness "emotionally honest" but I'm going to do it and I 100% stand behind it. There's always been a sort of remove between Cool Britannia and this band and I think it's exemplified by the "cool" in the appellation - it is not, and never has been, cool to genuinely ache and despair the way Thom Yorke does all over this record. Yorke understands the difference between shying away from emotion and explaining *why* people shy away from emotion - between disassociating and documenting the disassociation. If anything, Radiohead portray the exact opposite here - the full weight of the world crashing down on the shoulders of the cracked polystyrene people Yorke sings about, the drunks and thrill-seekers and plastic surgeons and senior citizens and rageaholics and housewives who populate our culture of plentiful famine. There remains a section of fandom who all still swear this is the band's best album; the competition is fierce but I might agree.

Isn't Anything

My Bloody Valentine

3/5

This is the equivalent of looking at early Picassos or Pollocks - the drive towards something entirely new (in this case *Loveless*) is definitely there, but sometimes the results are either too formless or too formal ("Soft As Snow (But Warm Inside)" somehow manages to be both). And yet, as badly as some of the experiments fail, there are still plenty of diamonds to be mined here. This is a different experience from *Loveless* - pricklier and rawer, wearing more of its antecedents on its sleeve (Jesus and Mary Chain, Dinosaur Jr., and Sonic Youth predominantly). Whether that's a pro or con is left as an exercise for the patron - after all, some people really dig the Blue Period.

Joan Armatrading

4/5

What if I told you this album is what Dave Matthews, by his own admission, has been trying to remake for thirty-plus years? It takes a couple tracks to really get going, but the blend of acoustic and electric guitars, polyrhythms in the rhythm section, and funky vocals hits particularly strong on "Love and Affection" and "Join the Boys" - odes to pleasure that actually sound and feel pleasurable (too few of those in the world). And every one of Dave's guitar tricks is in evidence on "Like Fire," the best of the acoustic-driven tracks here. Peter Wood's contributions on the keys are crucial throughout. Consider me a fan.

Darkness on the Edge of Town

Bruce Springsteen

4/5

Steven Hyden considers this Springsteen's best; I'm not sure yet where I come down on that question but it's definitely a contender, with some of his best songs front and center ("Badlands" and "The Promised Land"). And there have been various complaints about Jon Landau's production over the years but I think there's a punch to this that is sometimes missing from other of Bruce's studio efforts. And even the car-centric nature of the album doesn't bother me like it especially does some UK critics, although maybe that's because I'm from Dallas rather than Devonshire or wherever. It's not perfect - there are a couple clunkers, plus one good song that nevertheless goes on too long ("Racing in the Street," which is better live) - but it's as good a distillation of this particular flavor of American music as you're likely to get.

Faust IV

Faust

4/5

There is something exhilarating about listening to an album and being truly unsure what you're going to hear next. For something this scattershot, it's a given that not everything works, but so much of it does - the drone brilliance of the opener "Krautrock," the back half of "Giggy Smile" (which redeems the front half), the Cat Stevensesque launchpad provided by "It's a Bit of a Pain." I undertook this project for the purpose of finding albums like this.

A Rush Of Blood To The Head

Coldplay

4/5

Chris Martin is the Greg Maddux of frontmen: a guy with no fastball and the charisma of a furniture salesman who *somehow* manages to throw strikeouts over and over. Beneath Martin's anti-aura exterior there's a steely confidence that separates him from his post-Britpop peers - witness how often he goes back to the well of unadorned acoustic guitar or piano, using the negative space to great effect ("Green Eyes," "The Scientist," "Amsterdam"). It's also why he's unafraid to address, in his own oblique way, the uncertain post-9/11 world around him, from the chilling opener "Politik" (written while watching the Towers fall and recorded two days later) to the little spikes of dissonance in "God Put a Smile upon Your Face." Everybody's favorite Coldplay album is the one they heard right before they found out they were supposed to hate Coldplay, which for me is *X&Y*. But the legions who consider this their best effort are onto something.

The Scream

Siouxsie And The Banshees

5/5

Siouxsie Sioux did everything Ian Curtis did for post-punk, except backwards and in high-heeled leather boots. That includes documenting the persistent crushing numbness of suburbia ("Suburban Relapse"), diving into dehumanization ("Carcass"), and retelling "Helter Skelter" from Sharon Tate's perspective. I could listen to the world end through John McKay's guitar forever.

The Chronic

Dr. Dre

3/5

Um, is this album...overrated? I mean, the singles are great - I know every word of "Nuthin' but a 'G' Thang" and frequently use that knowledge to embarrass my children - as are a smattering of other tracks ("Stranded on Death Row" and "Bitches Ain't Shit" are a strong one-two closer). But the skits are inessential at best, and there are some pretty draggy stretches on the back half of the album especially. More fundamentally, listening to a full hour of Dre gets wearisome, simply because, as good as he often is as a producer, he seemingly has little to say. If Snoop is the eternal adolescent as back-of-the-school-bus grinning stoner then Dre is the eternal adolescent as insecure, over-the-top belligerent - Andrew Tate's spiritual Compton forerunner. He threatens violence, brags about violence, swears in his wrath that violence will ensue, and yet rarely manages to sound anything more than banal. The times when Snoop shows up in earnest only throw that contrast into sharper relief. The weaker posse cuts don't help either - "Lyrical Gangbang" is a decent beat wasted on B-team rhymes from the Death Row bench players. You can take the singles and leave the rest of this.

Leftism

Leftfield

5/5

Why doesn't every *other* progressive house outfit just make an album comprised entirely of nothing but note-perfect singles that build and breathe and release, with vocal performances (like Toni Halladay's and John Lydon's in particular) that mesh perfectly with the tone palettes being employed? Are they stupid?

Opus Dei

Laibach

2/5

This was really difficult to rate. Purely sonically, it's always at least intriguing - the more abrasive textures are abrasive in a way that mostly works, and for a bunch of late Iron Curtain-era industrial it's surprisingly funky in places. But the other half of the equation is the *Triumph of the Will*-style vocals and, arguably, lyrics - somehow these guys made a Queen song sound like an honest-to-God fascist anthem. And yeah, maybe they're joking or trying to be satirical, but if they are it's *bad* satire in that it's not clearly readable as satire. And if they're joking then that joke is in poor taste given the neo-fascist hellscape into which we're all actually, rapidly backsliding. Call me uptight but I got no patience for that particular flavor of edgelord shit anymore.

Lust For Life

Iggy Pop

4/5

Everyone will correctly hear Bowie's fingerprints all over these tunes - witness Ricky Gardiner's Ronsonesque lead on "Success," for example - but the real reference point here is the Velvets, and not just because of the subject matter. Iggy (and Bowie) refine Lou Reed's trick of co-opting the structures and melodies of the Sixties - doo-wop, Motown, psychedelia - into funhouse-mirror versions of themselves. "Tonight" turns the intro of Cream's "White Room" into a twisted tale of overdose. "Turn Blue" becomes a demented girl-group ballad that desperately refuses to end (with Bowie playing the role of the girls harmonizing). This is the real successor to Bowie's *Young Americans* in a way that illuminates and goes beyond that album's reach. Pop (the genre), the opiate of the masses. The affectations of one kind or another continue before Iggy finally lets loose on the forward-thinking eleven o'clock number, "Neighborhood Threat" - proving that, underneath it all, he's just a normal fucked-up guy from a normal fucked-up neighborhood, a truth scarier than anything else he describes here. I certainly won't blame you if you don't want him stalking your neighborhood but his very existence I find endlessly fascinating.

Heaven Or Las Vegas

Cocteau Twins

5/5

Hell, I don't know how they're doing it either, and I don't know what Elisabeth Fraser is saying (other than that it contains longing and confusion and admiration and joy and sorrow), and I don't know how Robin Guthrie and Simon Raymonde manage to get the exact right tone combinations on every track (other than just some sort of deep communion with the unspoken universe), and I don't know how they're pulling off the musical equivalent of post-Impressionism, and I don't know why nobody else can seem to get this blend exactly right even though a million artists have tried. I don't know what to tell you.

The Low End Theory

A Tribe Called Quest

5/5

I think this might be my favorite hip-hop album of all time - the apotheosis of the form, with jazzy samples, perfect beats, some of the best lines ever put to record ("I got more game than Parker Brothers" from Phife on "Butter" will always be my favorite), and, in "Scenario," a posse track for the ages. No wonder the whole Native Tongues thing struggled after this - what the hell are you supposed to for a follow-up? This album gives you the feeling of hanging out with your two smartest, coolest friends and a bunch of their equally smart and cool friends. If you haven't heard this you really owe it to yourself.

Bat Out Of Hell

Meat Loaf

4/5

Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached Peak Theater Kid - melodramatic compositions, operatically performed, as part of an imaginary rock musical existing in the mind of America's favorite singing defensive lineman/*Rocky Horror* refugee and his psycho(-sexual) songwriting buddy. Producer Todd Rundgren allegedly thought this collection was a parody of Springsteen, and maybe he's right - at the very least it's an *exaggeration* of Springsteen, taking all his self-serious tropes (sex, motor vehicles, sex in motor vehicles) and cranking them up to eleven and seeing what comes out. And what comes out is surprisingly genuine fun, irony, and heartache - or maybe that's not so surprising if you're at a good show. I feel tacky for loving it but I love it anyway - that's probably the frustrated Theater Kid in me talking. (Hint: play it *loud* for best results, and maybe in the car or the shower where you can sing along at full volume.)

Neon Bible

Arcade Fire

5/5

Harold Bloom has a disparaging term - "period piece" - for works that signify in their own time but don't transcend the specific context in which they were made. But what happens when you're stuck in one particular period indefinitely, and the work that was topical at the time won't quit being topical no matter how much you wish it would? What if history actually *did* end, except instead of ending with a wall falling in Germany in 1989 it ended with two buildings falling in 2001 and now we're stuck in an endless cycle of fear, suspicion, mistrust, aggression, recrimination, hatred - forever? How do you say "you had to be there" - as is so often the case with Arcade Fire, that most Millennial of bands in tone, sound, lyrics, meaning - when it's twenty years later and *we're still fucking there*? These are the things I think about when I listen to this album in 2026 - the constant use of Christian-soldier imagery by the powers that be to make the world darker and meaner ("Intervention," "(Antichrist Television Blues)"), the experience of living in a society that chops me up and sells me back to me, Pahlaniuk-style ("Black Mirror"), the desire to opt out of said society completely ("No Cars Go"), the persistent sense that *I* must be the problem if I want to opt out ("Windowsill"), the ultimate realization that there's really nowhere else I can go ("My Body Is a Cage"). And goddamnit, they're the same things I was thinking about when I first heard this album in 2007, when a different, slightly more socially palatable cabal of ignoramuses, zealots, war profiteers, and Spartan cosplayers with daddy issues were busy careening my country into every obstacle they could, just because they could, because what the fuck are *you* gonna do about it? I wish I didn't need this album anymore, but as long as I still need it to try and make sense of this planet then I'm glad it's here.

The Who Sell Out

The Who

3/5

One of the many tricky things about making a concept album is deciding how closely to adhere to the concept; a lot of the best concept albums (*Sgt. Pepper* chief among them) are quick to discard the framing whenever it proves inconvenient, while worse ones stick to the concept too slavishly. I think Townshend & co. mostly navigate that tension pretty well, although I acknowledge that I'm naturally not going to be able to get the same effect from the fake commercials, etc., as somebody culturally closer to the time and place of the album. The bigger issue here is that there's one transcendent song - the majestic "I Can See for Miles" - and several other perfectly fine but less memorable songs. And while Townshend's gift for genuine lyrical pathos is present here (as on the wistful "Sunrise"), more than anything this album confirms for me that the meaning of the Who is, and always has been, primarily communicated through what they're doing musically - Moon's drums (he's only really let off the leash on "I Can See for Miles"), Townshend's searing guitar tones, Daltrey's pleading voice. They're meant to be felt as much as heard, and there's not quite enough feeling here to for this to rank with their best. I can't believe I have to tell a band with Pete Townshend and Keith Moon in it that they need to be *louder* but here we are.

Viva Hate

Morrissey

3/5

I sort of hate to feed into the narrative about Morrissey's downfall - from his career-defining work with the Smiths to his progressively less and less essential solo work - but that narrative exists for a reason and it starts here. This collection is at its best when it functions as Smiths Lite, as on the singles "Suedehead" and "Everyday Is Like Sunday." And don't get me wrong, much of this is quite good and worthy of the attention of Smiths fans. But "Bengali in Platforms" is a wholesale misfire - an attempt at ethnic sensitivity that falls utterly flat, thereby revealing Morrissey's persistent narcissistic inability to solve the other-minds problem - and at least a few other tracks here feel tossed-off and lazy. On the whole it isn't bad but you can feel the wheels loosening, harbingers of their eventual coming off.

Murmur

R.E.M.

5/5

I won't pretend to be an authority on Michael Stipe's lyrical intentions - according to the man himself there may not *be* any authority - but I do want to argue that his Southern-ness is an under-theorized part of what he and this band are all about. What I hear here is a sensitive man in the process of waking up to the world - hearing about, and trying to make sense of, feints towards freedom around the world ("Radio Free Europe"), the Church's checkered history and present, both personally and globally ("Talk About the Passion," "9-9"), his own heretofore unexamined biases ("Moral Kiosk") and the ways in which they've been transmitted to him ("Catapult"). And maybe I'm projecting but it seems to me there is something particularly Southern about that - about trying to figure out and be true to yourself, including your heritage, when you're from a place (the heart of the Confederacy) where the term "heritage" can have all sorts of particularly repugnant connotations. So Stipe looks beyond his immediate environs to the world beyond; "We Walk" reimagines David's *Death of Marat* as forbidden erotics, the "betrayal" being Stipe's approach of his bathing lover - and the jauntiness of it revealing the relief of release he feels at finding a place to feel at home. Of course, on some level all this theorizing utterly fails to address the rest of what makes this album so compelling, which is the *rhythm*. Peter Buck's intricate and energetic Rickenbacher figures have been justly lauded, but for my money Mike Mills is equally a star here - his McCartneyesque bass licks on "Laughing" and "9-9" are highlights on an album full of musical highlights. And Stipe's mournful baritone blends with Bill Berry's piano to crystallize the heartbreak on "Perfect Circle" - "Who might leave you where I left off?" has been punching me in the gut for decades now. Every one of these songs is perfect musically - propulsive, angular, and yet full and inviting also. The influence of this album is simply awesome; to take just one example, Pavement made an entire career out of remaking the short coda on "Shaking Through." Some part of me worried that, on hearing this again, it would have become prosaic in the interim, like Shelley's metaphor of the old coin worn from continued use. But instead it sounds as fecund as ever, an old friend who I have loved and missed dearly.

Nixon

Lambchop

2/5

I genuinely don't understand what it was about this album that apparently captured so many critical hearts at the time it was released. The singing is bad (especially the falsetto), the lyrics are faux-profound, the music is forgettable, the energy is low, the songs are almost all too long. If nobody had told me this was some masterpiece I'd have had no idea. Still have no idea, actually.

KIWANUKA

Michael Kiwanuka

4/5

You've heard a million mediocre albums like this - warmed-over neo-soul calling back to Marvin and Stevie but clearly not able to hang with either. So what is about Kiwanuka that makes him able to make that same album, but *way better*? One thing is that he seems to have a preternatural sense of pacing - he plays everything at exactly the *right* tempo, not a beat faster or slower, and so his compositions breathe and move organically. But maybe it's just something as intangible as *confidence*; this music isn't a pose for Kiwanuka, it's who he is, and so he approaches it without anxiety or the need to keep up appearances. It's the difference between looking at a painting by one of the Old Masters and one by someone trying to emulate them; with the former you know that particular brushstroke is there because it's *supposed* to be, you know it means something. The effect is enhanced by what I hear as white-knuckle sobriety poetry evoking the best of Curtis Mayfield, from "phantom pain in your arm, tryna make a mark and change" ("Rollin'") to "it's not enough just to cause a reaction" ("Living in Denial"). Kiwanuka dresses like a king on the album cover; it's not boasting if it's earned. I haven't heard this enough yet to award it a perfect score but I reserve the right to revise that.

The Köln Concert

Keith Jarrett

5/5

Writing schmaltzy jazz is easy. Writing avant-garde jazz sometimes seems like it might be even easier. Writing jazz that runs parallel to both tracks but never crosses either - that is sentimental without being cloying, clear without being cliché, complex without being unreadable, exciting without being desperate, masterful without being arrogant - seems like it ought to be utterly impossible, and yet Jarrett does it here, and on an empty stomach and a dubious piano to boot. There are multitudes here - among others, I located the genesis of Wilco's "At Least That's What You Said." Jarrett said he wished everyone would move on from this album, but shit, can you blame us?

good kid, m.A.A.d city

Kendrick Lamar

5/5

Our American Dickensian hero, equal parts *Oliver Twist* (street urchin of diminished noble parentage), *Great Expectations* (inheritor of the gift and burden of being West Coast rap's Next Big Thing), and *A Christmas Carol* (sinner who mends his ways after being shown visions of what his life will be if he doesn't). Lamar begins with the Sinner's Prayer and proceeds to show us why it was necessary in the first place, running through the sins of lust ("Sherane"), sloth ("Backseat Freestyle"), greed ("Money Trees," which borrows story beats from Oliver, Fagin, and the Artful Dodger), gluttony ("Swimming Pools (Drank)"). At a critical moment ("Sing About Me, I'm Dying of Thirst") he rejects wrath - and then, on the positively sentimental "Real," he asks his beloved, "What love got to do with it when you don't love yourself" - Pip realizing that he isn't the problem, Estella is. By the time Dre officially hands him the baton on "Compton" it's clear we're in the presence of an essential literary voice. And the raps are fucking glorious, because of course they are.

Birth Of The Cool

Miles Davis

3/5

Everything here is good at being what it is - fun, upbeat, pop jazz - and at the same time it's obvious why Davis got bored with it. The gulf between this and *Kind of Blue* is just a little too much to bear, as unfair as maybe that is.

Only By The Night

Kings of Leon

3/5

I respect the effort here, which I realize is not a promising first line of any review. Caleb Followill is trying to do something incredibly difficult, which is write an honest-to-God Tomcat Rock Album - a *Back in Black* or a *Destroyer* or a *Double Vision* - within the strictures of 2000s indie-adjacent rock, complete with his very own "Christine Sixteen" ("17," which I guess counts as progress if the age of dubious consent is inching upward) and his own "Hot Blooded" ("Sex on Fire," which belongs in the starting five of the Came Up With The Title First And The Song Second All-Stars). And yeah, the more I think about it the more Foreigner feels like the right comparison, not just in terms of intent but execution; this band, like that one, aspires to poetry but has always really been less about generating meaning through lyrical content and more about locating transcendent sonic moments. Thing is, Followill doesn't have anything the caliber of Lou Gramm's voice to work with, so the star instead has to be his brother Matthew's guitar tones, which are way better than you realize if, as I suspect may be the case, you've only ever heard these songs on the car radio or over the PA at Target. But all that said, the fit between all the swnging-dick lyrics and the fundamentally anti-macho structures of this era of indie is always at least a little awkward to my ears, like they're using the wrong tool for the wrong job. I liked it more than I expected but I still don't quite get it, and I'm not sure there's really all that much to get.

Raising Hell

Run-D.M.C.

4/5

I owned this album for years and rarely listened to the back half on account of all the hits being front-loaded. Looking back I can see why that was - there's a tough little mid-album lull, and the hits are all hits for a reason ("It's Tricky" in particular is a propulsive classic). But the whole package is worthy, especially once your ear (if it's like mine) gets onto the spare, patient wavelength of Jam Master Jay's minimalist beats and Rick Rubin's patient production. Justly regarded as a landmark for the genre; "Walk This Way" gets all the love but for my money the title track is an equally good fusion of genres.

Exit Planet Dust

The Chemical Brothers

5/5

I've loved this album forever but I don't know why it took me so long to really grasp what Rowlands and Simons have been after all along, which is to make modern dance music that recreates and cultivates the communal, centeredness-seeking, even holy spirit of the Sixties. And yeah, that's a tall order in a culture in which "the Sixties" as an idea has been chopped up and packaged and sold to us in a million different ways for more than a half century now. But these guys succeed in that endeavor here, from the promise that the brothers gonna work it out on the opener "Leave Home" to the wistful Eastern vibes of the closer "Alive Alone," and every point in between. The beats will shake you (*did not our hearts burn within us?*) and the rhythms will move you (*praise Him with the timbrel and dance*). It's easy to make fun of people who seek transcendence while standing in a field but we've been doing it successfully as a species since at least the shepherds in Bethlehem, through to the hippies at Woodstock, and here once again at a rave somewhere outside of Manchester.

A Nod Is As Good As A Wink To A Blind Horse

Faces

3/5

"These guys are just a bunch of boozy, lazy, carpetbagging scumbags who brag about using and abusing women and then expect us to feel bad for them when they're inevitably lonely. They're not clever, they're not lyrically meaningful, they're not any different from a million other second-rate British acts of the time. How are they getting away with it?" *Ronnie Wood plays opening riff of "Stay with Me"* "Nevermind, I see how they're getting away with it."

Phrenology

The Roots

5/5

Allegedly this is a more difficult and uncommercial album than its predecessor *Things Fall Apart* (which is a formative album for me and an inexcusable omission from this list), yet I don't know where that reputation comes from. Black Thought spends this entire collection making a damn compelling argument that he belongs on the Mount Rushmore of MCs (and I genuinely mean that), while ?uestlove cements his status as hip-hop's musical conscience, with perfect beats, riffs, and collaborators. And all of it is energetic and vibrant and compelling; the only even potentially off-putting thing here is that this a full seven-course meal of music, and even then the energy never flags. The opener "Rock You" references both A Tribe Called Quest and "California Love" within a few bars of each other, as if gathering steam from the past to urge the entire genre forward.

Stankonia

OutKast

5/5

*I met a critic, I made her shit her draws She said she thought hip-hop was only guns and alcohol I said, Oh hell naw! But yet it's that too You can't discrima-hate cuz you done read a book or two* Everybody knew when this came out that it was a classic; now, after a quarter century, it's clearer exactly what *kind* of classic it is. This album is nothing less than a defining album in the canon of What It Means to Be Black in America - a *What's Going On* or a "Songs in the Key of Life* or a "Sign 'O' the Times* - but for the 21st century. Big Boi - focused, aggressive, forward-thinking - amps up the BPMs and the EDM influences ("B.O.B," "Humble Mumble," "?") whilst enlisting first-rate collaborators (that's a young Killer Mike on "Snappin' & Trappin'"). His compatriot Andre 3000, having named himself after the future and eager to leave rap behind completely, still condescends to spit classic verses ("I'll Call Before I Come," "Xplosion") before expanding the palette on the album's back end to prefigure the Soundcloud era, more than a decade early. "Ms. Jackson" is of course the best-known classic but "Toilet Tisha" is a benchmark that the rest of the rap world spent more years catching up to - futuristic and altered and heartbreaking, a "Brenda's Got a Baby" for a new millennium. And I haven't even *really* conveyed the ways in which the vastness of this album's breadth signifies - the reclamation of damn near all of American music as Black American music that's signaled by the wah-wah guitar on "Gasoline Dreams" and "We Luv Deez Hoez," the horns on "Spaghetti Junction," the lyrics and rhythms on "Red Velvet" that reach past Run-D.M.C.'s "Peter Piper" to Fleetwood Mac's "Gold Dust Woman." To take all of that and shove it ahead in time - to insist that the Culture *must* move forward because in many ways it began with a six-week act of erasure over the Atlantic, because it is always in danger of further being erased or stolen or scribbled over, because forward is the only direction it *can* go - is a heroic act. Superheroic, in fact - specifically, Green Lantern, who can create whatever he can conceive of. And it's that sense of pure creation that we are all still chasing whenever we play this album, to this day.

The Renaissance

Q-Tip

4/5

Q-Tip is rap's Billy Pilgrim, the Man Unstuck in Time. He croaks out his first verse on "Johnny Is Dead" and it's gasp-worthy, simply because he sounds so *old*, and wunderkinds aren't supposed to ever get old or sound old. And he knows it, and leans into it, with a clever aging-veteran sports metaphor ("Won't Trade") and beats and rhymes that wouldn't have been out of place on *Midnight Marauders*. It's like he went to space for a decade and then came back like nothing happened, only *everything* happened, including the rise and fall of the neo-soul movement he helped will into existence. And yet he's still here, older and just as wise as ever, soothing and emoting and wearing his heart on his sleeve like he's never worried about being hurt for it ("WeFight/WeLove"). So it goes.

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

Elton John

4/5

If I asked you to name a postmodern rock concept album, I bet it would take you a lot of tries before you ever got to this one; in fact, I bet it wouldn't even be the first one you'd name by a British solo artist in 1973 given that Bowie's *Aladdin Sane* came out that same year. And yet there are enough layers, enough fractures of (un)reality here to make Baudrillard blush - an album full of Little Richard throwback tunes, presented primarily for White audiences, about the experience of being (not really) seen as a capital-R Rock Star, with lyrics about heterosexual relationships that probably didn't happen, written by a Cyrano figure who does no actual performing, sung and played by a closeted man who may or may not bear any resemblance to the Rock Star in question. No wonder so many of the songs are about media itself - about Hollywood starlets and TV cowboys and the fine line between prostitution and performance, the ways in which the logic of perpetual audience-focused living eventually immiserates the people doing it. In their own way John and Taupin have made a deconstructed glam-rock album here; it's not *quite* as good as the best glam but it's a lot of fun to listen to and think about.

Highway 61 Revisited

Bob Dylan

5/5

The Gnostics had (have?) a set of ideas about the fundamental untrustworthiness of the image of the world as commonly perceived via the senses. They conceived of a false reality - ubiquitous, brash, forever distracting, forever entertaining. And underneath that reality, the true one - quieter, fuller, hidden and yet insistent. To me, *that* is what Dylan is about, and he's about it most fervently on this album full of juxtapositions, illusions, ghosts, charlatans, entertainers (same difference). *Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones.* Yet beyond and underneath the various veneers - of conformity, of convention, of certainty - there is a real world, and the people who inhabit it are desperate and wounded and bent and broken and strong afterwards in the broken places. Desolation Row, we might call that place, and its chronicle is eleven minutes long, and it could be eleven more and I'd keep listening.

Ritual De Lo Habitual

Jane's Addiction

4/5

I knew rating this album would be complicated and it is. Perry Farrell's twin legacies - harbinger of the alternative revolution and Patient Zero of the heroin epidemic that came along with it - are inextricably intertwined here. The former's influence can't be overstated; by reaching back past the pageantry of hair metal to recover music that actually *feels* the way Zep and Sabbath felt - mysterious and yet inviting, sexual but in a vaguely feminine way, capital-R Romantic - they charted a path for multiple generations of beautifully damaged artists. Farrell's lyrical stabs in the direction of social freedom ("Stop!," "Obvious") and his laments at man's inhumanity to man ("No One's Leaving," "Of Course") are cliches at this point, but that's because they work so well as statements of bohemian intent. But what goes unsaid in, say, Farrell's ode to shoplifting ("Been Caught Stealing") is that this whole belief system is subordinate to, and a justification for, the incessant need for drugs. *Ain't no wrong now, ain't no right - only pleasure and pain.* Which brings us to Farrell's second legacy, and the question of poor Xiola Blue. When I was a sheltered teenager I thought "Three Days" was the greatest song ever made. It had everything: sex, passion (which is different from sex), religion, death, transcendence, the best guitar work of its era courtesy of Dave Navarro. Now, as a less-sheltered adult, I find Farrell's exploitation of Xiola horrifying - and more so because he clearly *doesn't* find it horrifying. I hate taking this position with art because the wrongs aren't mine to right, and because Xiola herself is long dead, and because the present trajectory of Farrell's life is its own sort of karmic payback. But I cannot be okay with this with the same sort of abandon I once had. And yet the bastard still has it in him to break my heart; after "Three Days" comes "Then She Did," a painfully poignant recollection of Farrell's mother, who died by suicide when he was a young child, and all the sudden I can, if not excuse him, at least understand the wound he has spent his entire life trying to fill. And that feeling carries over into "Classic Girl," in which he screams "YOU KNOW, FOR US THESE ARE THE DAYS!" with enough gusto to launch a rocketship. I don't suppose I'll ever totally make sense of Farrell; perhaps it's enough to admit I can't deny him.

Olympia 64

Jacques Brel

3/5

I know almost nothing about French music from this era, so I feel very unqualified to evaluate this, other than to say that Brel's voice is pleasant and expressive and the instrumentation is correctly unobtrusive to avoid taking the focus away from him. The opener "Amsterdam" is a highlight but the entire package was enjoyable.

Whatever

Aimee Mann

3/5

I see the appeal here: Mann has made a Cubist divorce album, viewing the demise of the relationship from every possible angle, cycling through every stage of grief, analyzing every nuance of emotion involved. She can't help but be psychologically accurate with this much observational data to work with. And the tunes are always at least decent and sometimes better - as on the soaring highlight, "Mr. Harris," in which Mann falls for an older guy on the rebound who reminds her of Jimmy Stewart. And I can definitely respect how influential this blend of MOR alt-rock with a vague country twinge has been (Sheryl Crow, for one, basically copied this sonic template for her first two records). But I can't shake the sense that something isn't landing; this may be one of those "you had to be there" works that resonates best when your personal circumstances match Mann's (romantic and professional breakups, specifically). I guess I should be grateful that I don't get it just now.

Bryter Layter

Nick Drake

5/5

The most baroque of Drake's trilogy of albums; you might think that would make it the brightest (brytest?) of the three, and purely sonically you'd be right, as Drake makes good use of the ersatz wall of sound available to him (particularly Robert Kirby's orchestral arrangements). But on another level this is the saddest stuff Drake ever made, because it represents his fullest attempt to connect with the social world, and that attempt ultimately failed. His trepidation is all over the lyric sheet - forests full of predators, cities full of blank faces, missed opportunities both romantic and just simply human. Even the ecstasy of "Northern Sky" codes as tragic now, with the knowledge that the romance it conjures was always a figment of Drake's imagination. Breaks my heart every time.

Quiet Life

Japan

4/5

Where have you been all my life, David Sylvian? Seriously, I can't believe I've been listening to Duran Duran for decades without being aware of this very obvious precursor to one of my favorite bands' early work. Slyvian's smooth vocals prefigure Simon Le Bon's (albeit with a little less range), while his lyrics cover much of the same ground also - the jetset life, adventurous and simultaneously rootless, full of beauty made all the more precious by its fleetingness. I don't know how much the name of his band played into Sylvian's compositional instincts but I feel like I hear something like the idea of Japan, the place - sleek, futuristic, mysterious in a vaguely Orientalist way. Edward Said would've had a field day with the synth-driven cover of the Velvets' "All Tomorrow's Parties."

John Barleycorn Must Die

Traffic

2/5

I feel bad for rating this so low, because the idea of it is perfectly fine - Steve Winwood and some session guys get together to play some jazz-folk. But the songs are barely songs for the most part, the lyrics feel trite, and the extended jams are just not doing anything for me. I've been through this twice in a row and made it halfway through a third time before giving up. I feel like someone needs to tell me what to listen for, which is a sign this album isn't going to work for me.

Let's Get It On

Marvin Gaye

4/5

It took me multiple days to psych myself up to listen to this on account of my conservative religious upbringing seizing me in a way I didn't anticipate, and that I'm still trying to make sense of. I mean, this is a significantly less sinful album than, say, Motley Crue's Dr. Feelgood, which I listened to last week without any trepidation. But then again, that album, like so many others, basically accepts the societal framing that sex is something dirty and shameful (Vince Neil and the boys just happen to like dirty, shameful things). What I think I'm perceiving in reaction to Gaye - what feels dangerous about him - is that he rejects that framing entirely, instead portraying sex as something to be affirmatively celebrated rather than just surreptitiously engaged in, a naughty little itch that needs scratched every so often. Once I realized this, the spiritual dimension that Gaye intended for this album - which I had previously been suspicious of - opened up to me, and I could glimpse some of why he found the making of this album so liberating. I don't expect everyone who hears this to have that experience; for many - maybe even most - it will be enough that the title track still signals amorousness like nothing else in Western music, and that "Come Get to This" is beautiful and fleeting, just like physical ecstasy is and should be. And forget the moans, the saxophone on "You Sure Love to Ball" may be the sexiest sound on this album. Relax, rejoice, and if you want to tell yourself the whole thing is a Song of Solomon-style metaphor for God's love for the Church or whatever then I suppose you can. I'm still not quite liberated enough to put this into my regular rotation but I will happily deploy it strategically.

Lam Toro

Baaba Maal

4/5

I have no idea what the lyrics mean - a translation doesn't appear to be available, and even if it were I'm sure it wouldn't do the original justice - but I do know I quite enjoyed this Senegalese collection. Maal's powerful, expressive voice is a wonderful vocal instrument that he flanks with impressive, layered fusion figures. Even when it threatens to teeter into more standard jazz, Maal pulls the proceedings back into focus with an exciting rhythm or interesting phrase. I'm pretty unfamiliar with worldbeat as a genre, and I'm sure it isn't all this good, but this is a strong introduction for me.

Bone Machine

Tom Waits

4/5

If Bob Dylan is the Alfred Hitchcock of American music then Tom Waits is the Tobe Hooper: rawer, scarier, less subtle, more inclined toward the use of power tools. And - equally capable, on his best days, of making something utterly compelling. I'd heard stories of how difficult a listen this would be, and it is, for some values of "difficult"; it's obviously going to sound different from both traditional folk and "traditional" industrial (is "bedpan percussion" a thing? It is now, I guess). The mix doesn't help, sometimes muddying a crucial lyric at a crucial point (the problem with recording your album in the boiler room is that it sounds like you recorded in the boiler room). But once you get on Waits's wavelength, as I did after a couple tracks, the cacophonous, abrasive stuff starts to signify, to the point that it's actually the sweeter, more traditional-sounding tracks that feel like overplays of his hand - like they're giving you a respite you haven't quite earned. And the lyrics, which seem to place our American Dante all over the American backwoods, backroads, backcountry, backstreets, etc., in search of a Beatrice who may or may not exist and may or may not have been murdered by the man now carrying her torch. It's arresting to hear an artist tackle his anxiety of influence head-on like this; Waits really does attempt to match Dylan line for line and succeeds about as well as any mere mortal can expect to. Listen carefully and you'll find at least a few lines that explain yourself back to yourself (my personal favorite, from the closer "That Feel": "You say that it's gospel but I know that it's only church"). This is still very much an acquired taste but it is absolutely worth acquiring.

Younger Than Yesterday

The Byrds

4/5

The sound of a band figuring themselves out - including figuring out that David Crosby shouldn't be in the band - at the exact moment when the rest of society was also trying to figure itself out. That explains some of the inconsistency (Crosby's "Mind Gardens" is a genuine misfire) but also a good deal of the youthful energy on display here. "So You Want to Be a Rock 'N' Roll Star" is exactly the right amount of catty, and the gorgeous "My Back Pages" is rightly regarded as a classic of this era. As a whole, this is not quite up to the best rock of this period but that's a high bar; it's probably among the best of the second tier.

Green

R.E.M.

5/5

In hindsight (and maybe even at the time) this record marks the moment R.E.M. the band started becoming “R.E.M.” the media entity, a transition that would continue through *Monster*. On a major label for the first time, Michael Stipe & co. responded in the most indie way possible - by screwing around a bit. “Stand” is a gentle piss-take in the direction of inane pop that ended up being a signature hit for the group (no wonder Kurt Cobain looked up to Stipe so much). “Pop Song 89” treads much the same ground, seemingly questioning why the world would deem this collection of weirdos from a college town in Georgia to be worthy of such a huge stage. Elsewhere, the band calls out to some fellow indie heroes, most notably on the opening to “I Remember California,” which sounds like Peter Buck had been listening to *You’re Living All Over Me*. And yet, beneath the more surface-level touches, Stipe and his bandmates remain able to get serious, even profound. “You Are the Everything” might be the most unguarded thing Stipe had written up to this point as he begins with a confession, “sometimes I feel like I can’t even sing / I’m very scared for this world, I’m very scared for me.” “World Leader Pretend” speaks in metaphor but is no less sincere, a thematic update of the back half of *The Wall* with the (literal and emotional) volume turned down several notches, speaking simply at the dinner table rather than shouting. And “The Wrong Child” reaches back even further for a heartbreakingly poignant portrait of the artist as a young gay shut-in - Boo Radley, closeted child. I agonized a little about the final rating for this one, simply because ranking a great band’s third- or fourth-best album is prone to raise questions about how to reflect the gradations between albums. Then again, my fourth-favorite Beatles album is *Rubber Soul* and I’m not going to have any trouble giving that one a 5-star rating. So maybe I’m overthinking this; nevertheless, I will say that, as a cohesive artistic statement, *Green* is a half step below *Murmur* and *Automatic for the People* (and *Monster*, for that matter, although I’m less a fan of that one). But as simply a snapshot of R.E.M. doing Good R.E.M. Things it’s worthy and wonderful. And as a snapshot of a band Making the Leap it’s unparalleled.

White Light / White Heat

The Velvet Underground

4/5

In which Lou Reed and John Cale take nearly the entirety of late Sixties pop up to that point - Motown (the title track), Flower Power ditties ("Here She Comes Now"), British Invasion fuzz-rock (most of the rest of it) - into a back alley and beat it over the head with a crowbar. "Sister Ray" out-Morrisons Morrison (Jim, not Sterling), but the real star here is Reed's wicked sense of humor - "The Gift" and "Lady Godiva's Operation" are both laugh-out-loud funny in a way that allegedly serious artistic music isn't usually allowed to be. That said, much of this is meant to be respected rather than liked, which is another way of saying it's abrasive on purpose in a way that you may not want to necessarily listen to often. And I absolutely think they could've gotten to the point sooner with some of these. But as a standard-bearer for MoMA rock you could do a lot worse.

...And Justice For All

Metallica

4/5

This album does a lot of things wrong, the most (in)famous being the near-erasure of Jason Newsted's bass, for reasons the guilty parties have been trying to explain for decades but never seem to be able to account for in any sort of satisfactory way. Beyond that, James Hetfield is a graduate of the Neil Peart School of Way Too On-the-Nose Socially Conscious Lyric Writing; the clunkers fly freely here. And yet. And yet. The ultra-dry, bass-less mix, combined with Lars Ulrich's insistent drumming, has a hypnotic effect; you are constantly hearing the *absence* of something, which is how this ends up signifying musically in a way that a "better" sounding album wouldn't. Similarly, the failure of the lyrics to rise above smoke-break bitching makes them *accessible*. There's functionally no metaphor, just blunt declarations of the way the world is. *No justice, no peace*. So where does that leave us? For me, this is thrash's *Raw Power*, a deeply flawed album that draws its meaning from the way it wears its flaws on its sleeve. Metallica certainly haven't done anything this artistically unified since (which is different from saying they haven't done anything of value since). And it helps that this is a pantheon-level Weight Room Album, whatever else it is. Calling it "perfect" would be wrong but it's good at being the rough beast it is.

The Velvet Underground

5/5

The exhausted yin to *White Light/White Heat*'s stormy yang begins with a question Lou Reed has Doug Yule sing for him: "What do you think I'd see if I could walk away from me?" And at once it's clear what Reed's fundamental dilemma is: no matter what he sings or writes or ingests or injects or fucks, he cannot escape the burden of being himself - ever needy, ever inflamed like an exposed nerve, ever learning, ever consuming, and never able to come to the knowledge of any truth that will save him. That realization slows him down, tempers the frenetic pace at which he burned through himself on the previous album; this isn't "dream pop" as that term has come to be defined but these songs have a dreamlike pop quality about them - volumes turned down, production spare. "Pale Blue Eyes" tells the truth about our Don Juan - he constantly seeks to fill the hole left by the one he really loves and can't have. In that light, when Reed does want to get noisy and avant-garde ("The Murder Mystery") it makes more sense; that intense, hyperverbal part of him is a defense mechanism he throws up when his desires go unrequited. Everything Reed ever did in his career was to some degree a dissertation: *On Desire and Its Consequences*. Here, shorn of the need to shock (he wants Candy because he wants her, not because he's enamored with the idea of what it means that he wants her), he makes perhaps his purest statement of who he is.

Live At The Star Club, Hamburg

Jerry Lee Lewis

5/5

Jerry Lee Lewis's gift and curse was that he was an eternal teenager - frenetic, brash, horny, uninhibited, narcissistic, invincible until he wasn't. At age 28 and in semi-exile on account of what's euphemistically referred to in his Wikipedia entry as his "turbulent personal life," he played this ferocious set at one of the Beatles' old haunts in Hamburg. And I mean "haunts" in both senses; Lewis sounds here like he's trying to exorcise demons - of the changing trends that were passing him by, of his own broken career, of his own bent self. And what he conjures is a vision of the rock-and-roller as schoolyard bully. His "Money (That's What I Want)" shoves the Mop-Tops' version to the ground and takes its lunch money, while his "Hound Dog" goes toe-to-toe under the bleachers with Elvis's version and comes away with at least a split decision (one imagines Lewis, seething at the piano at how nobody ever canceled *that* fucker). And of course the material he made famous sparkles - "Great Balls of Fire" is wild and uneven and raw like it should be. By the time he staggers into an exhausted, wobbly version of "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" he's given everything he physically has to the stage. If you've ever wondered why rock and roll was such a force - why it led to the youth of the world convulsing in a spasm of thrown chairs, thrown panties, thrown voices - start here.

Different Class

Pulp

5/5

If Oasis are Britpop's rockers and Blur are its stylists, Pulp are its academics; seriously, I could *think* about this album forever. The more straightforward polemics here are straightforwardly excellent - "Common People" and "Mis-Shapes" have had me pumping my fist in the air for decades with as much ferocity as any Rage Against the Machine song. And Jarvis Cocker's tales of rootless mischief in pre-Millennium England are never less than exhilarating ("Sorted for E's & Wizz," "Bar Italia"). His chip-stained lothario persona is consistently more appealing than it has any right to be; he's wry when he's getting some ("Pencil Skirt") and achingly familiar when he's not ("Disco 2000," "Underwear"). The latter tracks in particular were a balm to me as a teenager in the latter category; they capture the very particular modern dilemma of the sexual underclass - bereft of companionship in an allegedly liberated world, starving while everyone around you seems to feast. But the real of meat of this album is the combination of those ideas - the fusion of economic class consciousness and sexual class consciousness hinted at on "Common People" and "Pencil Skirt" but explicated for real on "I Spy," the thorniest track here. Cocker's narrator spins a maybe-fantasy of wrecking a wealthy home, of getting "revenge" on a class-traitor ex-friend from the old neighborhood by holding his wife's body and "mak[ing] it sing again." He sounds dead serious, and yet Cocker the writer undercuts him, positioning him as a malicious daydreamer accused of sitting on his arse all day. He's Jethro Tull's Aqualung if he took a shower and started chasing MILFs instead of their daughters - more capable of concealing his malice but ultimately no less of a leering creep in his own little world. Which tracks - treating sexual status like it's a scarce resource being hoarded by the ruling class is basically inceldom in a nutshell (which this narrator may ultimately be, depending on how seriously we take him). In any event, it's downright frightening - I always find myself asking, *did he who made "Something Changed" make thee?* And even more critically, it's ultimately *impotent*; even if Cocker succeeds in swiping this guy's wife, she's never going to love him in a way that will fix him. Hell, she'll probably go back to him, and he'll take her back; they'll never fail like common people. Faced with this ugly maw - with the reality that the unfairness and inhumanity of the world is everywhere and will continue no matter how much one rages against it - it's no wonder Cocker retreats from it, into the usual refuge of the working class: smoke-break bullshitting. Seriously, it's telling how many of these songs live in Cocker's own head, somewhere other than the present - memories of school, relationship what-ifs, chemically altered states, paranoid thoughts about what your crush is up to. Even his actual encounters can't puncture his solipsistic running commentary ("F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E."). He tells himself stories about being alive to distract from the disappointing reality of being alive. And when reality peeks through anyway, he, like all of us, retreats to the nearest bar or hookup or record shop - *move, move, quick, you've got to move*. How very modern of him, and us.

Here Come The Warm Jets

Brian Eno

4/5

The artiest of the art-rockers does a self-consciously art-rocky thing here - taking various of his friends (members of Roxy Music, King Crimson, and Hawkwind, and Memphis bassman Busta Jones among others) and throwing them together to jam out something or other. Eno cautioned against assigning the results any sort of literal meaning, disclaiming any lyrical intentions while admitting later, under duress, that he'd accidentally written a Bryan Ferry diss track ("Dead Finks Don't Talk"). The whole thing feels like it's going for a preverbal quality that it achieves at least at times, especially on the opener "Needles in the Camel's Eye" and the closing title track. He's made something very interesting and enjoyable that nonetheless doesn't quite signify like either his Roxy albums or much of his later work (both solo and with his expanse of collaborators). But the genesis of all that is here, especially his triumphs in Berlin with Bowie (can't spell "krautrock" without "art-rock"). To return to the museum metaphor: this belongs about a quarter of the way through the retrospective, with a description saying it "charts the course for where Eno would later go in earnest."

Paranoid

Black Sabbath

5/5

I don't know, man, maybe my mother was right and these guys really *did* make evil seem cool. The contemporaneous reviews all dismissed this as basically inferior to the more technically inclined rock that was in fashion at the time; by comparison, Ozzy & co. were slower, dumber, more literal. But that's where this album's undeniable power comes from - the fact that you *feel* every note, because you get the chance to. And the lyrics are smarter than you remember, notwithstanding the rhyming of "masses" with "Masses" on "War Pigs"; the title track is casually harrowing, while "Hand of Doom" is even scarier, making heroin use sound like the end of the world. Thing is, it simultaneously makes the end of the world sound totally fucking awesome. Same with "War Pigs," a nominally antiwar song that makes you want to kick everyone's ass (or at least lift a bunch of heavy weight). Likewise, "Fairies Wear Boots," a description of a bad trip that sounds like a good trip. The result is a masterpiece of deniability: "no, Mom, they're *against* that stuff," you can say, while throwing up devil horns when she turns her back. On behalf of sheltered kids everywhere: Iron Man lives again.

John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

John Lennon

4/5

Having blown up his band and in the process of blowing up the rest of his life, Lennon made this primitivist, ugly-honest song cycle addressed to the Absence - his absent parents, the absent God, the hole in himself where a sense of who was should have been. There's not a lot in the way of tunefulness here - tunes were a thing he did for other people, and this album was for him. What is here in spades is a series of plain, almost declaratory monologues about the experience of going through the world as an exposed nerve. A great album that I do not listen to very often but am glad to have heard today.

This Year's Model

Elvis Costello & The Attractions

4/5

A.K.A. *A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Walking Erection*. Teenage me was enamored with Costello's frustrated libidinousness; he spoke my language. Middle-aged me has a lot less patience for his needy bullshit while simultaneously being able to appreciate his songcraft. "Sometimes I almost feel just like a human being," he sings on "Lipstick Vogue," and yeah, that's what being an obsessive creep feels like. It's sort of disgusting how much he gets away with - pays to be charming and talented, I guess ("Pump It Up," "(I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea").

Hard Again

Muddy Waters

3/5

Perfectly good 12-bar blues. If you want some good 12-bar blues, that is what you will hear when you listen to this. It is nothing more or less than that. (Also, I wonder what the deal is with the album title and Waters' weird pose and grin on the cover.)

Post Orgasmic Chill

Skunk Anansie

4/5

For whatever reason I missed out on this when it came out (1999 was a Metal Year for me if I recall correctly) and so, coming to this now for the first time, I did this album totally bass-ackwards - reading the lyric sheet first, coming away unimpressed, and steeling myself for an unpleasant hour spent with Skin, Cass, Ace, and Mark Richardson (how come the drummer doesn't get a cool nickname?). As an Oasis fan I should definitely know better than to judge a book by its, uh, book. (I'll listen to *Be Here Now* as penance during my workout later, I promise.) And then I heard Skin's voice - ferocious, raw, and yet technically controlled in a way that *maybe* only Dolores O'Riordan could also pull off in this era - and now I'm a believer. Turns out those endless choruses are a feature and not a bug when it's *her* singing them; on the centerpiece "Secretly" she approaches what I imagine a female Kelly Jones would sound like, which is about the highest compliment I can pay to a Britrock singer. And her bandmates pull their weight also, whether racing forward ("On My Hotel T.V.," "The Skank Heads"), rocking out ("Cheap Honesty," with a riff that would be right at home on *Superunknown*), or finding a perfect midtempo Britpop groove ("Lately," which feels like if Alanis Morissette fronted Feeder). The occasional electronic touches are a bit period-piece-y but never out of place or distracting. Like Elizabeth Bennet, I'm glad my first impressions were wrong about this one.

The Healer

John Lee Hooker

3/5

It's tempting to refer to this as *Let's Save John Lee Hooker's House* (which it did, apparently) - a star-filled attempt to give an old-school artist a deserved hit or two. In that sense this is basically the same formula that Santana's *Supernatural* would follow a decade later: classic compositions decorated with a revolving cast of younger, hipper guest artists (Santana himself among them). And there's nothing wrong with that, obviously - Hooker is still talented as a singer and player, and he absolutely deserved better than the music industry had given him up the point when he made this album (cut to shot of Page and Plant, looking uncomfortable). More broadly, I respect this for the same reasons why I always rolled my eyes when my friends in Intro to Music Theory would complain about having to listen to Gregorian chant - because I recognize that a proper sense of history is a critical building block of modern musical understanding. But I don't really listen to Gregorian chant these days either, and I think it's unlikely I'll come back to this.

Sound Affects

The Jam

4/5

In which Paul Weller, in the proper English tradition, measures out his life in coffee spoons. Or rather, as he puts it on "Dream Time": "my love comes in frozen packs." Weller captures the peculiar feeling of life in a consumerist culture - of having a vague understanding that you're *supposed* to be important (else why all the advertisers trying to influence you?) and yet knowing deep in your bones that you absolutely aren't. I started to chastise them for burying the vocals too deep in the mix on "Set the House Ablaze" but then kept listening to the insistent rhythm figure that *really* signifies and thought better of it, because *of course* you can't hear the guy trying to talk class warfare in the pub. Seems like the best you can do is live in your own little delusional world of self-importance ("Boy About Town"). And "That's Entertainment" feels even more prescient now that literally everything has been collapsed into a form of amusement - *circenses et circenses*. Bruce Foxton's bass is a star throughout. Almost perfect.

Eliminator

ZZ Top

4/5

When I was in high school, my school had a tradition where, every year during the drill team spring showcase, the dads of the drill team officers for that year would dress up in their daughters' uniforms - sparkly top, cowgirl hat, high-heeled boots, the whole bit - and perform a high-kick routine. Well, not actually their daughters' uniforms - larger uniforms sized specifically for this occasion. (Somebody had thought this through.) The five guys would line up and start dancing the routine, and the auditorium would roar with laughter and approval, and they'd all look really uncomfortable, as expected. But the really interesting thing was that they'd all look uncomfortable for different reasons. There'd be one or two of them who clearly didn't want to be there at all and had been harangued into this by their daughters or the drill team coach or whoever, and they'd just sort of half-ass the whole thing. And then a couple others who weren't any less awkward but were trying to be good sports about it, putting on a brave face and at least trying to get the choreography right. And then there'd inevitably be one of them who was actually really into it but had to act like he wasn't, lest he be thought gay or something. (This would be the same guy who shaved his legs ahead of the performance, not having gotten the memo that the others definitely weren't doing that.) So you'd have this motley assortment of middle-aged White Texan men in bad drag, dancing on stage in front of several hundred people (many of them the most virulent homophobes you will ever meet), with varying degrees of enthusiasm, and getting the loudest reaction *by far* that any of the performances would get all night. The song they always danced to was "Legs" by ZZ Top. Anyway, this is a fun album. Maybe someday I'll figure out what it's about.

Arular

M.I.A.

4/5

Maya Arulpragasam is an easy person to accuse - of a lot of things, but most acutely of being insufficiently committed to whatever leftist ideals she claims to hold. And it isn't difficult to see why; here are what appear to be a series of revolutionary discourses, delivered via bouncy hip-hop beats and worldbeat samples, by someone obviously capable of pop superstardom and not at all interested in the enforced humility we demand of would-be Robespierres. In this she reminds me of nothing so much as Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?"; we aren't hearing from the oppressed peoples of the world, we're hearing from their coolest, smartest, prettiest, most talented, most privileged un-representatives (and make no mistake, charisma is a form of privilege). This dynamic threatens to make M.I.A.'s entire shtick feel like, well, a shtick; witness "Bucky Done Gun," where she appropriates the language of warfare in the service of seduction. Or, more broadly, the toy-piano and similarly childlike production on the beats throughout, as if the whole thing is no big deal. And then we get to "Amazon," in which Arulpragasam seems to reveal having given in to sexual coercion to ensure her own survival, and in an instant the whole thing snaps into a different kind of focus. The playfulness isn't privilege - it's a defense mechanism, a way to avoid the crushing psychic load of whatever shit has happened to her. And that gives the entire project a particularly resonant sort of realness; for someone for whom this threat is commonplace, why *wouldn't* it be something to play or joke about, the way crime scene investigators joke about blood splatter patterns? M.I.A.'s realness throws into contrast the posturing so many of her male rap and punk colleagues engage in. Without saying it directly, she points out how much easier it is to bang your head to Johnny Rotten shouting "no future" over and over when you've never had to, say, turn to prostitution to earn enough money for a visa, like the women Arulpragasam sings about on "10 Dollar." Or, similarly, that nobody *really* thinks Dr. Dre is gonna force Eazy-E to suck his dick. Turns out the truly revolutionary thing about M.I.A. is not the trauma of the Sri Lankan Civil War but the trauma of simply existing as a woman in a world where men take the things they want. No wonder the streets of London feel just as scary as those of Jaffna. (Incidentally, if I had a nickel for every time Lynn Hirschberg wrote a hit piece aimed at a female recording artist that ended up defining the artist's public image and career forever, I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot, etc., etc.)

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