Great album. Forgotten how good they were. Middle of side 2 is a bit weak otherwise would be 5 stars.
It’s massively self indulgent hair metal. The type that birthed a million shitty spandex clad 80s American rockers. It’s probably quite impressive guitar playing but they’re like an author who needs a good editor. It’s telling that the best song on there is a kinks cover.
Really good. Not my usual thing at all. Great beats and musically very different to what I think of as rap. Bit repetitive maybe which is why I didnt give it 4 stars.
Obviously some legendary songs on this, but I was surprised by the amount of filler
Too long- lessens the impact
Good album- made me revisit Brodge over troubled water too as I think I was too harsh on it. Need a 3.5 star rating really
Really pleasant surprise. Had. Ever heard of the band or album before. Chilled.
A stunning, brutal album that leaves you feeling battered by the sheer ferocity of it.
A criticism; endless nameless was so bad it almost dropped the whole thing to a 4 but given that it’s a hidden track I’m just going to ignore it.
It’s alright. Decent rock but a bit bland really. The lyrics and stories aren’t as clever as they think they are.
Loved the pounding, urgent beats and the musical complexity. Enjoyed it far more than I thought I would.
Passed me by at the time; I was Oasis over blur in 1994. Blue got better, oasis got worse. This has some great tracks on it but overall is too art-rock for me and most of it is a bit bland or isn’t very memorable.
What a surprise. Great album
Liked the music, didn’t like the singer- like axl rose doing a Bruce Springsteen impression.
Catchy but ultimately meaningless anthems.
I’d give it 5 stars for eclipse alone. The whole thing is just incredibly immersive. It’s 50 years old but still sounds amazing. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to listen when it first came out.
What a surprisingly great album. I’d only ever heard come on Eileen before but I really enjoyed this.
Bland, earnest music for church or a coffee shop. How could anyone love this?
5* Album. Despite not previously being a Beatles or McCartney fan this record brings me great joy every time I listen to it.
Aside from the obvious tracks I love Mrs Vanderbilt and Let Me Roll It.
Meh. Middle of the road 90’s rock. Nothing wrong with it, nothing great about it.
Particularly enjoyed planet caravan and a couple of the others I’d never heard before. On some songs you can really hear the Led Zeppelin influence.
Disappointing. The music is good but repetitive and becomes dull. The lyrics and the singing are poor. I struggled to see what the point of it was.
Just a phenomenal album. Early REM were fantastic. What I like about it is that it hits a sweet spot where it mixes both their country and their rock influences perfectly. I love automatic for the people and I love new adventures and monster but this is like having the best of all of them.
I thought this was gimmicky and lightweight. I can see for miles was standout but the rest was forgettable and I hated the “adverts”
A lovely surprise. No standout track but a chilled and laid back folksy album that I will listen to again.
The greatest punk band. Not yet what they would become but the seeds are definitely there.
Listening to this album is an act of self harm. It doesn’t work on any level and has nothing whatsoever to recommend it.
Good music. I can see how if you were 15 and in Manchester in 1990 this would become your entire personality.
Perfectly fine folksy girl singing. Good background music but not much more than that.
The skits are dreadful. The first couple of tracks are garbage but it picked up after that and overall was a decent listen. The drug and guns schtick is dull now (wasn’t it always?)
Loved this. Never heard of him before but really enjoyed the upbeat funkiness.
Best hip hop album so far. Musically complex and clever lyrics.
Musically nice but weak lyrics and singing make this a forgettable album overall
Good album - you can hear it as the bridge between the early pop and the later psychedelia…
Surprised how much I liked this. Upbeat, funky and insanely catchy dance tunes. Insubstantial maybe but great in the moment.
Classic. Full of great songs.
Perfectly acceptable prog rock noodling.
Pretty good. It’s a sin is the standout.
Great album. Heavy, bluesy. Sounds a couple of years later than 1969. Would have been 5 stars but some of the songs are overlong.
It is a dead eyed, soulless album. She cannot sing. There is a thread of dreadful, sanctimonious “earth song” lyrics running through it and it is overproduced and polished to death. An empty product.
This album feels like reward for all the shit you have to wade through on this epic thousand record journey. I’d never heard of them before and wasn’t expecting much but this is pure ground-zero straight from the source gold. I’ve seen it described as Proto-everything and that’s a great description but when I listened to it it felt like I was getting a Syd Barrett style insight of what it’s like to live in the mind of a disturbed genius.
I quite liked the laid back “funkiness” of most of it but at times the verbal ‘hook’ was repetitive and overall it was a touch overlong and samey. I can never really follow the lyrics to hip hop on a first listen but most of them didn’t seem particularly dexterous to me although there were good moments. My overall gripe with guys like BIG and Tupac remains valid- rapping about gangs and guns loses its lustre after that life has killed you dead- and for nothing. Rather lifts the veil on the tawdriness of it all.
I did enjoy it more than Ilmatic or notorious BIG but not as much as Be by Common.
Nice but bland country music
Hated this on the first listen. Liked it on the second. Not sure what I expected from ELP but this reminded me more of King Crimson than anything else.
Just a 4 by the skin of its teeth as a result of the strength of the obvious songs. There’s a lot of gimmicky shite on here though
Love the guitar tone, great record. Maybe gets a bit samey.
I enjoyed this. Never heard Bragg before but these songs were jaunty.
Funky. Great upbeat songs and immaculate production.
Unmemorable. No skits though so that was good.
I can see why people like it but it’s not for
Me. Repetitive.
I’ve seen other reviews along the lines of “I want to love this but it just doesn’t quite land with me” I agree with them.
Enjoyed this very much. Old fashioned rock n roll and blues
I was just the wrong age for Prince. My formative years were when he was doing his “artist formerly known as” oddness. We all just thought he was a weirdo.
How wrong we were. That pint sized purple pervert was a bloody genius.
Couple of decent tracks but overall very dull with little to recommend it.
Bit disappointed with this- it just sounds like elevator music to me.
Perfectly fine middle of the road modern rock.
It’s alright, some good moments, nothing more.
The is a really good album. Great songs carried by a phenomenal voice.
Enjoyed this. Not what I was expecting. Ambient and immersive.
Jaunty but deeply repetitive. I’ve heard magowan described as a poet but I can’t tell what he’s saying so I don’t know.
Nice harmonies but overall a dull novelty album.
Turns out I really like reggae!
I liked this chilled out ambient vibe.
Didn’t like. Dissonant and empty.
Jazz noodlings. Pleasant but no force.
There’s something there but it is crushed by being over long and massively repetitive.
A legendary album. But you can’t make me cringe as hard as I did during the McCartney/Jackson banter and get five stars.
Not as bad as I feared. It was surprisingly ok. As yet untitled was nauseatingly pretentious but other than that it was a reasonably easy if unmemorable listen with a couple of really good tracks. He’s basically Prince but without he sex and humour.
I loved these songs as a teenager and still it’s John Lennon and everything but as an adult I had surprisingly little sympathy for his relentless self pity and the navel gazing at his trauma. I know he was damaged goods and his childhood was fucked up, but Christ you were a beatle for ten years John, how bad can it fucking BE?
Fun album. Enjoyed it a lot. Never heard any of their stuff before.
Whiny shouty screamy American nu metal. Not for me.
Really enjoyed this. Had never heard of him before.
It’s nice but it’s coffee shop music.
I loved these songs as a teenager and still it’s John Lennon and everything but as an adult I had surprisingly little sympathy for his relentless self pity and the navel gazing at his trauma. I know he was damaged goods and his childhood was fucked up, but Christ you were a beatle for ten years John, how bad can it fucking BE?
I liked it and can appreciate the skill displayed here, but I didn’t love it. I think perhaps Cohen isn’t suited to the quick fire listen-once-and-make-a-snap-judgement nature of this 1001 album journey. It’s probably a slow burn that needs multiple listens to unwrap fully.
On the dull side of ambient.
I liked it but it didn’t grab me.
Boff! How sophisticated am i, i thought as i drew upon my gauloises and sipped my Pernod. Merci jacques et merci 1001 albums generator for that feeling…
Joyous. Unexpected. A pleasure.
It’s good but it lacks the shit kicking raucous intensity of Nevermind. It’s also not fully acoustic…
Plinky plainly outdated country shite.
This is one of the worst things I have ever listened to. She can’t sing; the lyrics are facile and vapid. Shit in a silk stocking, the manifest inadequacies of the material are to be buried under expensive production but end result sounds little better than europop.
High voltage rock ‘n’ roll.
Louche: smooth but a bit sordid. I enjoyed it.
Didn’t like this at first but grew into it. Sounds surprisingly modern. One criticism is that this album feels like lots of ideas each of which had potential to be developed further but aren’t. St Elmo’s fire is the standout.
The deluxe version of this is over two hours long and I did not mind one bit.
Timeless high quality country. You can hear why she’s lasted so long. She’s a cut above.
Liked it but nothing grabbed me like other the cure albums ive had.
Interesting cultural impact of this. I hadn’t heard of the xx or this album. Yet I knew many of the songs. It’s very good.
Others will say that it’s soulful, deep and dark. I just thought it was shit. At times I felt like I was listening to a parody.
This is a cut above every other hip hop album I’ve had
Really enjoyed this as a curiosity. Swinging!
Despite the juvenalia that is integral to this album and which really put me off, it was more interesting musically than I thought it would be.
4* but only just. I found the acoustic side weak (with the exception of hey hey my my) and it was rescued by Powderfinger et al.
They were as good as the Beatles until the Beatles took music to new places.
Incredible energy. My ears are bleeding. Just as Lemmy intended.
I don’t like waits much. This is mostly crap, but there are moments of real beauty too, so 3
I can see how some people would love this but I found it a bit too ambitious for their talent. It never really settles into a style which I thought problematic rather than transcendental. It just didn’t land with me.
But lightweight in places and overlong/samey but I did enjoy it. Electro prog pop
Good energy. Not much more though.
Decent ambient stuff but writing this the day after I can’t remember any of it.
I had forgotten that once, before they became too preachy, too samey, too bloated, too old, they were very very good.
Good energy and a historical curiosity but the songs are a bit weak.
Mostly forgettable but I did like the cover of my back pages
I found this enigmatic and frustrating; the music is engaging and interesting and he clearly has a poetic eye for a lyric. However the narrative and theme of the album and songs was weak and a bit juvenile. You can be too enamoured of your own wit. It’s also overlong.
I was left feeling like this guy had betrayed his talent by creating a novelty piece when he’d actually be capable of something quite profound.
I didn’t like it. Too much dissonance and too long.
Lovely album- really enjoyable listen
Raised to 4* by one song and despite the other!
Some legendary tracks on this and the rest aren’t bad either.
It isn’t knowing, daring, funny or ironic. It’s just shit.
Some beautiful moments but overall not enough here to really grab me.
Some absolutely brilliant tracks but quite a lot of aged filler. Fantastic voice though.
This was a good surprise - very different to what I expected from a guy i associates with punk savagery.
It’s not bad- still a bit lightweight for me.
Some great tracks on this
I had a hard time deciding whether this was shit or not bad actually. I came down in favour of it and the idiosyncratic charm of its weirdness but you couldn’t get away with making this today, it’s far too lightweight.
I don’t like the genre but this is at the top end of it
I enjoyed this more than I thought I would. It’s pretty good. All the political stuff was lost on me though.
Just what you’d want and expect from Jack White
This is just unmemorable crap. There’s nothing in this album at all. I cheered when it ended. ITS SO BLOODY LONG and you feel every fucking second of it.
Really enjoyed this. A surprise.
Bit noodley and aimless but not bad
It’s very skillfully put together but Jesus is it overlong.
Never heard of this guy but this album was really quite beautiful. I enjoyed it immensely and have been enriched by it.
Good energy and humour but a little one note and repetitive.
A magnificent album from objectively the least likeable beatle. Beautiful.
Just a bit bland and dull really.
At first I thought this was decent though very middle of the road and “safe” but it’s actually pretty joyous.
Better than their first- a great step on the road from bluesmen to rock deities.
Ok- the political stuff was lost on me though.
Lets face it, although they’ve become their generation’s U2- it’s cool to dismiss them as MOR pretentious dullards- if you just listen to this on it’s merits it is pretty good.
It’s alright but a bit samey and very maudlin. Cheer up Frank!
This was a fun surprise and I enjoyed the energy and crass humour immensely.
I loved this- a pleasant surprise
A favourite from my youth- I’m biased. JDB’s voice is great on this.
It’s very good but I didn’t *love* it
An interesting diversion for a single listen but ultimately forgettable.
This album is not just high quality heavy metal- it has surprising range and some songs are quite beautiful.
Funky upbeat pure 80’s synth pop gold.
A great album from a band I really like. Happy to have discovered them through this list.
Shite. What on earth is it doing in this list? Beatles-ish psychedelia 25 years late. And so fucking self indulgently over long.
I really liked the second side in particular.
Nice, perhaps too nice. But California Dreamin gets it a 4
Not a bad album at all; it just invites comparison to Nirvana and it isn’t in the same league.
This is background music. I’m not going to give it more stars just because she swears.
I like the white stripes but this is the weakest album of theirs i have had. It feels under done and half complete.
There are some classics on this - but overall it is pretty dated and forgetable. The American version with paint it black is clearly superior to the Uk version.
I was never a fan of Green Day and I don’t like American Nu-metal or shite college boy punk. But I really enjoyed this- there are some great songs and enough variation to lift the whole. Good surprise.
