Def Leppard is a band that made a career out of sounding like a Rocky III/Rocky IV soundtrack. The 80s were a strange time. I remember liking the song Rocket as a kid, not so much anymore, but it's still probably my favorite Def Leppard song. Seriously, this could be the soundtrack for Rad. There's the perfect combination of rock and rock ballads to last through a 90 minute movie about a kid who just wanted his dad to accept that he wanted to be a skateboarder rather than a mine worker while he falls in love with his rival's ill-treated girlfriend only to win the big race at the end and have his dad hug him at the finish line. Love Bites is terrible. Which song has been played at strip clubs more, Pour Some Sugar On Me or Panama by Van Halen? I had friends in the early 90s who still loved Def Leppard, hard to believe this lasted when so many other bands have gone by the wayside. This whole album is very dated. I liked Pyromania better, too many power ballads on this one.
This is Blondie's favorite album. The arcade noises on What in the World are not a welcome addition. They sound like sped up King Hippo noises. Just when I think I'm liking this album more, it has a track like Warszawa and I feel differently. I get the video game noises now. Art Decade could be the score for Final Fantasy VIII. These mostly instrumental sides on Heroes and Low just aren't great. The whole second side is like an emo video game soundtrack.
Random yelling right off the bat does not give me a good feeling about this album. This is too much like Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Scuzz rock is not for me I think. This genre of music could more aptly be described as garage rockabilly. It's like if Brian Setzer went to prison. Dynamite Lover is good, like if Chris Isaak decide to rock. R.L. Got Soul is the best track on the album.
Perry Farrell's voice is one of a kind. This is very different than I was expecting, more rock than alternative. The Ted Bundy recording is an odd choice. I thought I was getting an album of Caught Stealing...this is much better. There has maybe never been a better example of someone writing a song of just whatever they were doing than Standing in the Shower...Thinking. At this point, I like the music and the vocals are kind of distracting. May distracting isn't the right word. His voice gives every song a similar quality. Jane Says is the hit.
Led Zeppelin is awesome. I recently watched Becoming Led Zeppelin and you realize how fortuitous it was that four super talented musicians found each other to make this band. Almost any other band would kill to have as many great songs in a career as Zeppelin has on this one album. Every song but Four Sticks gets airplay on Classic Rock stations. I hate that I came of age in the era of singles radio rather than album radio, music is worse for the change. The big hit, maybe their biggest hit, Stairway to Heaven might be my least favorite song on the album. This is literally better than almost any other act's greatest hits album. Are there 20 bands that have a better greatest hits album than this? Four Sticks is the least famous song and it's amazing! When the Levee Breaks is possibly the greatest cover of all time.
What the fuck am I getting myself into? 3 hours and 15 minutes is a box set not an album. She has a lovely voice. Let's Call The Whole Thing Off is one of my favorite jazz standards. (I've Got) Beginner's Luck is really good. Oh, Lady Be Good is beautiful. Some of these lyrics are ridiculous. Just Another Rhumba's torturing of standard pronunciation to rhyme is ridiculous. How Long Has This Been Going On? is good as well. One disc of six done. My god, this is going to turn into torture. This is not meant to be listened to in one sitting. A third person self-reference in By Strauss. Someone to Watch Over Me is a great song. The Real American Folk Song is terrible, rags are not my cup of tea. The lyrics are like what a ten year old would write, My Cousin in Milwaukee is so bad. People in the early part of the 20th Century had a lot to contend with, but the Gershwins' lyrics might have been one of the worst. Disc two, done. I wonder if Nora Ephron or Gary Marshall just listened to this album and stole their movies from it...because I would believe they did. There's just too many songs. They could have made on amazing double album; four sides, six songs each. Instead, it's ten sides. Treat Me Rough is about rough sex and I'm here for a swinging, jazzy Closer. Two of the bigger songs in this back to back in They Can't Take That Away From Me and Embraceable You done well by a genius. There's a lot here and you realize that she's more talented in her way than the Gershwins' are in theirs. Her performance is spot on every song, even when the material leaves something to be desired. They close out the Ella portion of the album with I Got Rhythm which is way overrated. An album of showtunes and now a bunch of intermission filler and overtures. What is the point of tacking these on at the end? One on each side I get, but six in a row on their own record?
I think Arcade Fire is one of the most overrated bands but I do like the title track. This album is better than Neon Bible. Do I maybe like Arcade Fire? This album is about the lead singer's childhood in The Woodlands...rich kid complains about being rich. There's like a modern Cure feel to this album. In thirty years when they reboot Stranger Things for the 2000s, Arcade Fire is going to be all over the soundtrack. Month of May is as punk as a post punk band is going to get. We Used to Wait is good. This album threads the needle on continuity and variation across the songs.
I'm firmly in the Jeff Buckley camp through the first song. This is like dime store Dr. John crossed with the poor man's CCR. Abraxas called, it wants its sound back. It's not bad to sound like Santana, Get on Top feels like a rip off of it though. He sounds like a blend of absolutely everything happening in the 70s: Outlaw Country, Psychedelic Rock, Funk, the Sexual Revolution, Drugs, Civil Rights. Tim Buckley's favorite musician was Jim Morrison, I have no doubt.
You Are The Sunshine of My Life is a great song. Maybe Your Baby is a really funky song. It's about as far from You Are the Sunshine of My Life as possible while still being by the same artist. You And I reminds me of another Stevie Wonder song I can't place, vaguely Lately but not. Maybe I'm imagining things. Superstition is the other hit, good stuff. Big Brother is the worst song so far. The longer the album goes, the worse it gets.
Piano Joint (This Kind of Love) is the hit. I feel like it was in something but I can't place it. Ted Lasso, but I had to look it up. I like this album. It would be good to have on at a low volume. As the kids say these days, it's low key good.
God do I hate New Wave music. I hope Henry Mancini got every dime they made off this album for stealing the Peter Gunn theme and turning it into New Wave crap. This is a novelty band, there is no way the belong on this list. Rock Lobster could be the theme for a cartoon, and even then it wouldn't be particularly good. Rock Lobster is the worst song on the album, certainly the most annoying. Every other song on the album is better than it is. That being said, this album is not good, but it is at least short. I bet Courtney Love is a huge fan of the female lead singer. She's 1,000 times better than Fred Schneider's talk-singing. Downtown is one of the worst covers I've ever heard.
I would have thought I liked Shuggie Otis more. Maybe I only like the "hits". Or maybe just Sweet Thang? Aht Uh Mi Hed sounds like video game music with lyrics over it. Happy House is worse though. This is not a good album.
I love the album cover, it's like 1980s hip hop Village People. Tom Tom Club nailed it with Genius of Love. Scorpio is more like a techno track than hip hop, great beat though. Dreamin' is a little creepy. There's a difference between liking Stevie Wonder and fantasizing about him. Hip hop side, I like. R&B side, I do not. The Message is a seminal moment in hip hop, great song and a...well, you know. It also spawned another awesome song, Ice Cube and DAS EFX's Check Yo Self. I'm not sure which one I like best.
I don't get improvisational jazz. Part II is superior to part I. Jazz makes me feel stupid because I absolutely do not understand most of it, this included. This is what is on at a snobby, rich young New Yorker's loft during a party in a movie. I can't imagine real people listening to this even as background music on a day-to-day basis. I feel about the saxophone the way I know many people feel about the harmonica in Bob Dylan's or Neil Young's music. I think I'm just more of a standards and jazz trio kind of person.
This is like the Garbage Bond theme for an off-brand film. Nothing like some theremin (maybe theremin-adjacent) noise to add to the enjoyment of an album. Goldfrapp heard Portishead and thought they could do that. This is the score to a neo-noir film set in Paris. The theremin is back! I bet Zach Braff heard this and wanted to find a place for it in a moody sci-fi relationship on a spaceship film. I get the label "cinematic" when referring to an album now. Why wouldn't you add yodeling to your electronica, natural fit. A circus music interlude feels about right.
This came out in 1982, I would have thought later. Does Rio sound exactly like Hungry Like the Wolf or am I an idiot? Why did they put the zebra stripes all over the girls in the Rio video? Or was that the Hungry Like the Wolf video? New Wave music is terrible. They could have added one hit of the Bond theme and no one would be able to tell the difference between Rio and A View to a Kill. Hungry Like the Wolf is their biggest hit. Every song sounds exactly the same. I've heard electronica that sounds more different from song to song. This could be a Stranger Things soundtrack and kids (and adults who should know better sadly) would go crazy for. Save a Prayer has more plays than Rio and I've never heard it before this moment.
I always really liked Please Forgive Me. I liked Babylon less. Upon listening again though, it's better than I remembered. Five singles off a ten song album is crazy. That's like Jagged Little Pill level. I will say the album tracks are not at the same level as the singles, but they aren't terrible either. This Year's Love was the biggest song off the album and my least favorite song so far. The two hits to start the album are better than the three big songs to close it out. Say Hello, Wave Goodbye deserves more credit than that. it's better than This Year's Love or Sail Away. This is like slightly less good Coldplay.
Eleanor Rigby is one of my favorite Beatles songs. God, it is depressing though. The use of sitar would be an issue of appropriation today. I don't get the hype. Five albums in and they have two great ones and three (so far) average ones. I know it's a goof and Ringo is the silliest Beatle, but Yellow Submarine is the second best song on this album. Good Day Sunshine sounds like something from Sesame Street. Their output is absolutely astonishing in terms of volume though.
On some songs, I have no problem understanding his lyrics...others he might as well be speaking Mandarin. The live version of No Woman, No Cry is infinitely better than the studio version. Bob Marley is unequivocally better live than in studio.
The Overture is a dumb into but the two songs after it are good. This feels both futuristic and like a throwback to 60s R&B at the same time. You can hear the Outkast influence throughout the album...beyond just the Big Boi guest spot on Tightrope. Tightrope is a great song. I'm really liking this album. You really realize what a pretentious ass Robert Christgau is when you listen to this album and read his review of it. At the start Oh, Maker had me thinking it was the beginning of a downward slide, I was wrong about that. But starting with Come Alive (War of the Roses) and Mushrooms & Roses has me thinking I was just one song too early. The overtures feel like a nod to this being an "art&B" album more than an integrated part of the album. The balk half of the album is not as good as the first half. It's hard to get 9 songs right, let alone 18. Also, concept albums are almost always, hat tip to Ziggy Stardust, an annoyingly contrived restriction on quality rather than an invitation to tell a compelling story. Say You'll Go is an improvement. An almost 9 minute closing effort...I do not understand why artist after artist insists on having an irrationally long final track on what in some cases is already a long album.
One of the earliest albums on the list, it feels very out of place with most of the other albums. There's nothing wrong with Sinatra, his voice is good, but this doesn't feel exceptional. It's hard to believe, but the lyrics of popular music in the 50s were even cornier than the lyrics of today's pop. I don't hate this, but it's not really interesting to me either. The cool, swinging, jazzy good times just wear smooth after a few songs. I always liked the song Anything Goes...probably has to do with Kate Capshaw's rendition at the beginning of Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom.
Oh my god, this sucks. I've said it before and I'll say it again, New Wave music sucks. This is unbearable. This is like a William Shatner album with this guy just talking over Cure music expect people took this seriously. Interzone is the best song on the album.
This list has too many 90s Britpop acts. British bands love ska. There's nothing like some annoying noises at the end of a song to improve an album. This isn't terrible, but it sounds like 100 other albums that came out in the mid 90s. Oasis, Pulp, Blur...a bunch of bands that came out around that time or immediately after just sound the same and so much of it is just "meh". British bands love to weigh in on American politics. This album sounds like 1993. In the 90s, America gave us grunge and gangsta rap...great Britain gave us Britpop and it apparently won based on the albums on this list. Ridiculous. It doesn't help that this album is over an hour long. It just keeps spiraling down. This is too much music for an album for anyone except the really great artists. You don't have 17 good ideas for an album. I bet Ludwig Goransson listened to Spun Around before he started writing the music for the Mandalorian. Some backwards talking, sweet. The album swings between generic 90s British pop-rock and terrible 90s British pop-rock. This is one of the least interesting albums on the list so far. God, this album drags. Run My Way Runway is just a jumble of stupid sounds and stupid lyrics. The repetitiveness of The White Noise Revisited is grating.
I hate prog rock. I honestly don't know if I have the patience for this review. One minute in and I'm wishing there was more Britpop on the list. A twenty minute opening song is not a good way to kick off an album. It's half the run length. All I can think about it when it will be over. I bet these guys get along famously with Jethro Tull. This album is terrible. I think it's better than Pictures at an Exhibition, but just barely. At least it's relatively short.
