There’s something in film school called “The When Harry Met Sally Effect”. Some younger students Dont understand what a big deal that movie is because of how heavily introduced every Rom-Com that came after it.
That’s what I heard when I listened to this album. It so clearly influenced so much I heard and loved later, it was almost hard to remember how it listened in the moment. Still, when I listened on my headphones, I was deeply impressed by the complexity of the instrumentation. There’s so much going on here that isn’t obvious at first. Delightful, I wish I had listened to it when it first came out!
Holy crap, that came out of nowhere. Soulful, sinful, absolutely delightful. Beats so heavy I could build on them, lyrics so thoughtful I'm still thinking about them.
I'm loving this project so much already - there's so much I never realized I hadn't heard. This was a total revelation. I'll be listening to it again.
Now that was interesting. I of course already knew MGMT from my youth - "Kids" and "Electric Feel" were everywhere when I moved to LA in 2010 - but I hadn't actually sat and listened to the album. The album itself has a remarkably different sound than the three headline acts (including Time to Pretend).
While those three have an electronic, indie-pop sound, the rest of the album is MUCH more accoustic, much more thoughtful, almost melancholy. Kind of a mix between shoegaze and folk. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure that it works cohesively - it feels like the band was shotgunning stuff at the wall to see what stuck. The result? Three all-time bangers and a full album that is never greater than the sum of its parts.
Holy crap. Holy CRAP. I'd heard the big singles ("Mysterious Ways") and I didn't realize just how STRONG that album was beyond the singles. Like, there are half a dozen songs on there that aren't breakout singles just because the singles are SO STRONG.
Partially it's my age (I just turned 40), but to me, this era of U2 is what ROCK is. Funky, hard but not metal or alt. Fun, intense. Loved this one to death.
I mean, it's The Boss. I was raised on this music by my father, who preferred "Born in the USA" and Springsteen's 80's/90's era stuff. I knew Thunderroad and Born to Run, of course, but it was that last song, Jungleland, that absolutely floored me. Sad, soulful, with the blues influence so thoroughly worn on its sleeve you couldn't possibly ignore it. Damn and a half.
Damn. Damn that was FUN. I'd sorta heard the singles, but never the whole album, and I have to admit, the album is incredibly well-sequenced. It paces out its massive hits, keeps everything sonically in check, and that freaking album cover. It's 70's rock at its finest.
You Want it Darker? Leonard Cohen is happy to oblige. Recorded as he was dying in his living room, because he wasn't well enough to move, this is the master of dark gospel meditating on his death. He's going to meet his maker soon, and his final gift to the world is to give us a peek in his mind as he's doing it.
I actually had to hunt this album down a bit, and I'm so glad I did. I don't listen to Leonard Cohen often enough; consider how much I love it when I do. He makes a man believe in God.
You know how you can look at a dish (say, a dark chocolate lava cake for me), and acknowledge that it is incredibly well made with great artistry, and still have no interest in eating it?
That's this album for me. I can tell the craft and care and artistry put into it, but this sort of album just isn't for me.
A sad, mournful, album about lost innocence. Obviously American Pie itself, but also Empty Chairs, Vincent, and The Grave.
By and large, I've been listening to these albums on Apple Music and I've come to really appreciate the "lyric" option, as it helps me truly appreciate what a poet Don McLean is. Not just the quality of his voice and guitar, but the intense feeling behind his words.
Gets a little more disjointed near the end - that song about why everyone likes him is kind of off-tone, but Jesus, the good works so well.
OutKast's sound is exactly as I remember it. Wild, fun, something you can truly groove to. Often with a little hidden edge in the lyrics - most obviously in Mrs. Jackson.
Sure, it's fun to dance to, but it's also a song about a guy apologizes to his girlfriend's mom for knocking her daughter up and running. The fact that it ends with the wedding march? *Chef's Kiss*.
If the album has a weakness, it might be one time made. I know Outkast's sound so well by now that at a certain point some of the songs started to blend together. I think around the time B.O.B. hit I started drifting off. Could have used a little variety.
I REALLY enjoyed this - there's a kind of 80's "in a venue" feeling albums that always speak to me. I had just been born when this album was released, and yet at the same time it made me feel like a teenager again. Up all night, when the night was filled with promise and possibility, and I knew things were wrong but didn't know how to voice it.
Meh? It wasn't bad, but I didn't' find anything particularly special in it. Nothing that gripped me like, say, "Take Five". Competent, but kind of boring.
Holy damn. The biggest, most fun surprise I've had in this journey. Soulful, sad, and way more racy for the 60's than I was expecting. Like, Wham Bam Thank You Ma'am explicitly being about one-night stands? The number of songs about men crying? Damn. So, SO much fun.
I think I'm just not an Ozzy Fan outside "Crazy Train". RIP, Ozzy, you laid the groundwork for music I love, and for that I will always thank you.
I'll be honest, hip-hop was a huge blind spot for me growing up. Like, all hip-hop. So I'm coming to this kind of cold, which is kind of awesome. I get to rediscover amazing things - like this album. The beats are unbelievably fresh, the lyrics are still relevant (especially now that I'm married to a black woman from just outside of Compton). I'll never totally get it but...
I do get it now.
The first album in this project I already knew cold. The first five or six songs are etched indelably in my memory. We can tease the Red Hot Chili Peppers for every song being about California (and it does feel like every song on this album is about that), but my God, the good ones on this track are stellar. Even ones like "Around the World" and "Parallel Universe" that aren't as well known are stone-cold classics. Strange tone poems to the powerfully felt but poorly understood emotions.
When I first joined up with the project, it was specifically because I wanted to listen to more ALBUMS, and not just singles. The Wall is the perfect example of why - it feels cohesive, all around the central theme of the Wall and how trauma and pain causes us to hide. Haunting guitars, mournful lyrics, brilliant work.
It's a LITTLE bloated (I took this long to write this for a reason) which keeps it from perfection, but when you're that damn close, who cares?
This isn't bad, because there is no such thing as a bad Prince album. He is Prince. The Purple One. His worst albums are still bops that you can dance to.
However, I am slightly spoiled. My first Prince albums were Purple Rain and Batman, two of his undisputed masterpieces. And this isn't QUITE as good as those two, I'm afraid.
Woof. Some things just aren't your cup of tea, and the vocal style of this band is one of them. God bless you if it's yours.
I got my bad habit of only listening to the same singles over and over again from my father. This album is proof of that - he listened to this album CONSTANTLY as he drove me around, but basically only Hell's Bells and Back in Black.
(To be fair, 85% of the other songs are about sex, but that never stopped him from playing "Big Balls" all the time).
I'm so glad I listened to the entire thing, because holy crap, does this album ROCK. It's strange to say - Bon Scott was such a unique presence and energy that made AC/DC what it is - but is it possible that Brian Johnson perfected what Bon Scott made?
Just not my cuppa tea, to be honest. I appreciate the skill invovled, but... eh, not for me.
I think what I'm learning on this album journey that I didn't realize before: I actually really love the beats of 90's hip-hop. I didn't even realize this IN the 90's, when I was alive!
(Although hip-hop had a lot of different connotations back then, especially in the South where I grew up.)
It's the Beatles, they don't have a bad album. But ironically, I don't think this is one of their best albums. The best songs (Sgt. Pepper's, A Little Help, Lucy in the Sky, Mr. Kirk) are unquestionably some of the Fab Four's best. Hell, A Little Help is my favorite song. But the back half is a little uninspiring. I like a more well-balanced album.
Still, they are the Beatles.
Definitely not my cup of tea, acoustically. A little all over the place, and although I respect the courage to experiment, just not for me.
I didn't think I was going to enjoy this album when I started it, but the more I listened, the more I dug it. It was such a fascinating insight into where so much of modern music has come from - even something like video game music from the 8 and 16-bit eras.
This album helped me realize that post rock just isn't my thing. I can recognize the technical and experimental virtuosity going on here. I'm just not interested in it.
Man. The Boss is the Boss for a reason. Anchored by three of his all-time bangers (Born in the USA, Glory Days, and Dancing in the Dark), this album weaves the story of the crumbling of rural America and the factory towns that dotted the Northeast.
It's shocking how we're still living with the effects of that, that sense of a promise to a generation that may not be kept. I listen to this now as an adult with worried very differently than as a child.
Interesting, like all of Bowie's work, but to be honest, he has many more interesting albums than this.
In my youth, I was not as musically adventurous as I am today and could be prone to ignoring anything I thought was "mainstream". (The irony about Jack White being this is not lost on me).
So I'm really enjoying the chance to go back and find music I would have loved had I listened to it then. It makes me feel young again. Or maybe it's just my mid-life crisis talking. Either way, this album is a banger, and often captures the feeling of being young and in love. Confused, stupid, and passionate beyond all reason.
I love learning where songs I've always loved actually came from. Also, never before has a piece of album art so perfectly matched the tone of the actual album. Fun, punk-y, and inventive.
I love metal, and music inspired by Metallica. But I think I'm starting to realize I'm just not a fan of Metallica itself. Like, it's not varied enough for me. It's a very strange thing to realize.
Goddamn. I was too young to really appreciate this album when it released, although its singles have followed me my whole life. It really is a masterpiece of moody, mid-90's pseudo-gothic alternative. The guitar work, the rawness of the vocals? Perfect.
