LOL it’s my first day using this app and I have to talk about “Dark Star” I like the Dark Stars that are more spooky sounding personally. This one has a lot of energy and veers off in cool unexpected directions but not the “definitive” one for me. I like Dark Star when the next song feels like you’ve emerged from a spaceship on some new planet (“Stella Blue” or “El Paso” for example), and I don’t get that here. Jerry’s voice in the early days has a nice Roky Erickson-ish twang to it. “The Eleven” goddamn, that stood out the most to me this time. The late 60s garage/blues version of the Dead isn’t my favorite, but that track is really loose and unstructured and exciting in a way that’s unique to this era.

The way this band was imposed on the general public back in 2006 left me a little whatever about them, as a teenager craving music with a little more intensity. This album has aged well though. Arctic Monkeys are a classic case of a kick-ass drummer's ability to elevate an otherwise-just-fine band. Most of these songs just sound like riffs that any garage band from those years could have made up, but the band itself is really tight and has practiced a lot and the chemistry and energy is obvious. I probably would’ve thought the lyrics were deep when I was a teenager if I had paid attention, but I'm never going to sit down and pore over an Arctic Monkeys song on Genius or something. Idk it's still just Pretty Good Rock Music to me. Spotify says they’re the #36 most-listened to artist in the world as of mid-2025 which seems insane, but it doesn’t offend me that they’re one of the most popular bands in the world.

This type of music is generally Not My Thing so this is easily the most I've ever heard of Amy Winehouse, but yeah her talent is pretty undeniable here. She's got range, she's got attitude, she's got a unique point of view. The production's nice too, there's some modern touches but mostly seems like pretty traditional jazz/soul, without the pop lens that Mark Ronson brought to her music later on. "(There Is) No Greater Love" has its own vinyl cracking sounds which is a little on-the-nose. "In My Bed" has this spacey boom-bap thing going on, and I cocked an eyebrow when I saw how long it was but it really works as a centerpiece to the album even though it really only has two parts. My main nits are that the songs are not super strong hook-wise (the melody of "Fuck Me Pumps" got annoying) and a few too many songs reach the 4-minute-plus range for my liking. But yeah I see why people were so excited about her and why so many singers mention her as an influence still. I would imagine if vocal jazz is your thing then you might consider this a No Skips type of album.

What was in the water in 1968? White Album, Big Pink, Nashville Skyline, Sweetheart Of The Rodeo. Everyone started trading their acid for low-potency weed and fashioning themselves as earthy and traditional. With the exception of the White Album, this album is better than all of those IMO. What a treat to be given a reason to revisit this one. Village Green is a stone cold classic. It takes a lot of balls to veer into this direction and take such an anachronistic point of view. It shouldn’t work, it shouldn’t have aged well, but oh man. Even on the title track, for how arcane the references are, the feeling and the desire to save the obscure ephemera of one’s youth from disappearing is real and timeless. I can live without a song or two but nearly every track just puts a smile on my face. Like, how funny is it to be in a rock band in the late 60s and write a song called “Animal Farm”, and it turns out to be a sincere song how sick it would be to live a simple life on an animal farm. Britpop wouldn’t have existed without this one IMO.

Five stars, no skips. I feel this shit in my soul. Darkness On The Edge Of Town is my favorite Bruce album, which makes it one of my favorite albums of all time. Sure, Born To Run is so theatrical and romantic and ambitious by comparison, but Darkness has all the themes that define Bruce to me: Daddy issues! Cars! Fatalism! Class consciousness! Existential dread! Repentance! Desperate horniness! Optimism in the face of it all? Every song on here has a lyric that you think to yourself “that is the most Bruce Springsteen-ass lyric I’ve ever heard”. He just communicates the ideas he’s trying to get across so directly, and I get why it feels melodramatic to people but screw it, he invented this aesthetic and he owns and fully fleshes it out here. Musically it’s an E Street Band album. You get the triumphant sax solos and the blues-adjacent guitar wailing and that twinkly piano, and a few borderline-dirge ballads that have these moments where the song just hangs there in a thick empty space and I find myself holding my breath. The soundtrack to driving alone on an empty highway smoking cigarettes and trying to figure out why your dad is the way he is, and if there’s any hope for you to turn out differently when you grow up. Or so I hear!

The older I get the more I realize that Joni's music deserves to be as celebrated and obsessed-over as any other singer-songwriter in modern history. She was operating at a higher level of complexity and sophistication and ambition than anyone else in the 70's. This album is my least favorite of the handful of records of hers that I've heard though. I really like the stretch of music in the middle of the album, especially the first half of side two, but overall the jazz-pop aesthetic of it all borders on cheesy / easy listening for me. I do think the last song is charming even though it seems like a lot of people think it's cringe.

Oh hell yes. I've had a blind spot on this album forever. I loved "Lovefool" then and I love it now. There's nothing at that level of pop perfection here but this is still very satisfying. There's a very unique aesthetic going on here that sets it apart. The diminished chords. The vocal effects. The almost-complete lack of distortion. The swedes know what they're doing. Even though I was alive through it, it's hard for me to wrap my head around this strain of alternative music in the late 90s that was loungey and spacey and eclectic. Hard to pinpoint where it started (Stereolab maybe?). I guess having a flute on a rock song was probably considered cool around this time. LOL this "Iron Man" cover. Such a 90s move. I'll definitely be coming back to this. Great album title too!