4.5/5 - Great album, moodier/more fun than I expected and way ahead of its time.
I genuinely dislike Bat Out of Hell. The heart loathes what it loathes.
Good music, but not much to add. Very much of its time I guess.
Fine soul, and mighty-fine work Mr. Redding. Groovy.
Fun one - feels ahead of its time in a lot of ways. Clean lyrical delivery (clean as in 'clear', definitely not clean as in 'suitable for a bar mitzvah) and great sample flips (never realized Can I Kick It is repurposing Lou Reed!).
Probably can't be too objective about this review as it's so entirely outside of my usual wheelhouse (which is the point of this whole experiment, I guess), but I won't be listening again.
Easy-to-listen-to big band staples to get your grandma dancing to. Charles has such character in his voice and orchestration.
"It can't be helped," he said, nodding at the bulldog girl. "This is Lucy." He laughed distractedly. "You know -- like Lucy in the sky with diamonds . . ."
Funny that a band named for such a terrible colour band would make such a terrific rock band. No wonder Dad doesn't listen to new music.
Fav track: Hard Lovin' Man
Dusty has a great voice for what she does, but what she doesn't do is it for me.
Greatest contrast between album cover and track quality we've ever witnessed. Good work Maryland John Mayer.
Fav tracks: The Wind and The Dove, All Thoughts Are Prey To Some Beast
Lacking Substance, but otherwise I always welcome the New Order. Very much 'of its time' in a good and bad way.
Highlights of Lowlife: The Perfect Kiss
Wu-Tang Clan ain't nothin to fuck with, that's for sure. One of the OG hiphop supergroups coming out of the gate with a very good grasp of their own lyricism and catchy rhythms. Uncontroversially one of the finest west coast rap albums to come out of the 90s and it's aged far better than a few of its contemporaries (if you ask me, its slightly messy/dirty production and fluctuating quality between tracks gives it a lot of charming character and authenticity). Not a fan of the skits (as usual) but obviously very common considering the era. This one gets the money.
(Also I swear that Breathe by Prodigy samples the same movie sample as at the start of Chessboxin'. Wikipedia seems to claim that the popularity of the song is also what brought Chessboxing into the public conscious in the 90s which is very funny if true)
Best tracks: CREAM, Tearz, 7th Chamber Pt. 2
Jack White is still Jack White, but Blunderbuss is missing the crunchy, drowning, iconic alt-rock sound of the White Stripes, and that's to it's detriment. Without that frenetic, bassy energy this one's a little forgettable.
Fav tracks: Love Interruption
Legendary album that deserves its many flowers. Like any Nirvana project there's no misses in the tracklist, and it's doubly-so impressive for being one of the most iconic one-take live albums ever recorded. Love Kurt's raw intensity in his voice and delivery, Grohl's iconic drumwork, and Novoselic with one of the few acoustic bass performances that actually works. Really can't sing this one enough praises.
Favourite tracks: Where Did You Sleep Last Night, Come As You Are, The Man Who Sold The World
Pleasantly surprised by this one, since I'm not a big k.d. lang fan nor much one for Country in general. The cool, slow, stirring warble of the guitar is a bit of a one trick pony on the album but just avoids overstaying its welcome.
fav tracks: Busy Being Blue
One of the best to ever do it. Really, really dance-able.
fav tracks: Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough, Rock With You, Off The Wall
I'm going goblin mode for Depeche mode.
fav tracks: Sacred, Little 15, Pimpf, Nothing
the Chronic deserves every bit of praise it's received over the decades since it's release. The skits are a little annoying, especially upon relisten (DEEZ NUTS being an obvious exception) but otherwise
Dre can kick it.
fav tracks: Nutin' But a G Thang, Rat A Tat Tat
I observe the Sabbath and am mightily impressed. Weird and wonderful.
fav tracks: Wheels of Confusion, Children of the Grave
ZZ Top are not pushing the genre to any strange new places, but everybody's a little crazy for a Sharp Dressed Man. True to form it's classic, unpretentious, slightly-goofy 80s rock that knows what it wants to be and delivers it, even if it's pretty forgettable.
Fav tracks: Sharp Dressed Man, I Need You Tonight
Music to collect Secret Tapes to (affectionate)
Fav songs: Among The Living, Stuck In A Mosh
Nice listening but to my ear it sounds like we have Oasis at home.
Fav songs: Rob's Theme
A fun listen, you can hear the Dylan-esque vibes in almost every track. Hard to pin down genre-wise for better or for worse, but the interesting use of instrumentation keeps it feeling fresh. Seems like the kind of sentimental album that would hold up better after multiple re-listens on a cozy springtime car trip but unfortunately we have 1001 albums to get through.
Fav tracks: The Weight, This Wheel's On Fire
Fiona Apple has an excellent voice and a wonderful production underneath it - the (flattering) Bjork comparisons have been made many times before but it's hard not to taste it even in her debut work. While it's not a life-changer for me I can see how listening to this album a couple times as a depressed teen would make it somebody's lifelong favourite (it has that 'it' quality about it).
fav tracks: The First Taste, Criminal, Never Is a Promise
It's unapologetically Cat Stevens, folksy as it is. Like many albums of its acoustic-folk-rock ilk it suffers from having a few too many forgettable/unremarkable songs among its tracklist, but it's worth the listen for Father and Son alone which is a timelessly beautiful ballad to generational change so relevant at the time.
Fav tracks: Father and Son, Longer Boats
Endtroducing is a plunderphonic masterpiece. It's known historically as the album that truly legitimized the sample-flip on its own terms, but beyond that its legacy as inspirational and endlessly re-listenable can hardly be overstated. Endtroducing has been favourably called the Hip/Trip-Hop equivalent of a Velvet Underground or Aphex Twin and there's hardly a greater compliment.
Deep, rich, organic, and boundary-pushing, these tracks feel like deep meditations on sound and a love letter to music as a whole. We'll never get an Endtroducing again, not just because clearing all these samples would be a financial and logistical nightmare in the 21st century, but because this album was too far ahead of its time.
fav track: [all of them], Short Stem/Long Stem, Building Steam..., Midnight In A Perfect World
Kind of a hard album to like, to be totally honest. Very mom-and-pop radio station, 'school disco' music. Had a couple tracks I liked but overall the glam rock whiny-voiced schtick was (rightly) worn out decades before this dropped. There's some promise in the funkier basslines (Filthy/Gorgeous comes to mind as having that The Trammps sound) that get drowned out by overperformed vocals and uninspired instrumentation/composition.
fav tracks: It Can't Come Quickly Enough (actually really liked this one at least, even if it's a real tonal shift)
Pretty much a best-of Metallica album. The synthesis of an orchestra with the metal sounds (alongside the impressive length) makes the album feel suitably full and grand - they gel together pretty well. It being a live album is for once an enhancement to the sound, too, as it gives that 'crowded venue' feeling that suits the enormous scale of the thing.
That said, it's two straight hours of Metallica fanservice and doesn't really have much of interest to offer for anybody else.
An album deserving of its status and importance amongst the Rock canon. Endlessly re-listenable and hard not to enjoy. only really suffers mainly from something akin to the Seinfeld Effect, where the sound has been so over-replicated it's missing its originality upon listening half a century later.
fav tracks: Lazing On A Sunny Afternoon, Bohemian Rhapsody
Some of the most impressive, creative sampling/mixing to come out of the decade and very ahead of its time. A very impressive synthesis of a lot of genres, too. It's a pleasure to hear the kind of comedic, self-aware, creatively witty, cleverly crude lyricism in rap that pretty much died out. Has its peaks and valleys upon a relisten (especially in the first half of the album) but it's got some of the best peaks in hip hop. It's a little underdeveloped compared to their later stuff but this is guaranteed party music and genuinely capital-F Fun.
fav songs: Fight For Your Right (To Party), No Sleep Till Brooklyn
Hard to hate, but not easy to like either. Mostly unexceptional.
Cash: entering the hallowed halls of Jeff Buckley and Alien Ant Farm as 'cover artists who unequivocally surpassed an already classic original'. Musically it's good, not exceptional, but Cash's voice has been refined to the perfect, smoky edge by this point in his career and it's practically unmatched.
fav tracks: Hurt, I Hung My Head
Great hip-hop and nothing but pure hip-hop. Some really... 'interesting' lyrics (like, goofy) that bring down the overall production but otherwise a fun album.
fav tracks: What You Want This Time
Trent Reznor brings us all Closer to God. Abrasive, spiteful, precocious, furious, nihilistic, political, libidinal, provocative and desperate - there's not much you can really say about one of this album that hasn't already been said in the last three decades. The industrial, noisy, experimental, and LOUD sound makes it a difficult listen on the first spin (as it did for me as a teen, years before the return) but it's a "turn-the-volume-up" classic for a reason.
The sound also holds up impressively well for something of its age: for better or for worse many of its contemporaries in the industrial/electronic space have this old-school vintage feeling to it. The Downward Spiral, on the other hand, sounds like the kind of album that could have come out yesterday. That said, the album is very much in the thematic line of that post-ironic post-modern 90s thing that you could only really capture in the last decade of the 20th century. It's pretty cheesy these days to over-mythologize it, but you can taste the same furious spirits on the wind of Cultural America that Cobain was struggling with. It's no surprise them that he took his own life a month after this dropped. NIN is in many ways the American cousin to Radiohead: where Yorke and crew tackle the pre-milennial angst of the new era and the hauntological spectres of the new-old with the cold bent of the British psyche, Reznor violently rebels.
Listening to it again now I can hear the nervous, darkly comedic, coming-to-self-awareness hiding behind the brash overconfident lyricism that I missed back when I was 20 and drowning in Lynx Africa and angst. Beneath the fear and loathing is Reznor as a deeply troubled, vulnerable character. You kind of have to peel back a lot of layers of edge to see that though, methinks. Listening on it again I reckon the pull-back to nothing but the piano at the end of Closer - going from this everything-against-the-wall tsunami of harsh noise immediately into a somber, deliberate, contemplation over a few echo-y orphaned notes - is probably my favourite track end in music history.
A top 5 album of all time for me and on re-listen that hasn't changed. The razorblade edgy angst of that part of my life has gone now, but I keep the fondness for that devil-may-care flipping-the-bird attitude.
fav tracks: [the whole thing], Closer, Piggy, Hurt
The Smiths are an acquired taste (I like them, though). Good album, but I still prefer Morrissey's lyricism over his voice. Some great bass guitar work too, especially that funky-as-hell riff on BBAH.
Fav tracks: This Joke Isn't Funny Anymore, Well I Wonder, Barbarism Begins At Home
Have listened to this album a few times and I'm convinced I'll never really 'get' it. I assume that in 1967 this was blowing people's socks off. Must be a 'me' problem since I believe the people who say it's so good.
It's good! Good flow, good production, good vibes.
"Making friends on the Disney Cruise by telling them I love Belle and Sebastian" - Ryan Letourneau
fav tracks: Like Dylan In The Movies
A good rock album. Chrissie Hynde has a great voice for this that might have benefitted from leaning slightly more in the punk-ish direction but it's already a great listen.
fav tracks: Tattooed Love Boys, Mystery Achievement
Half Sonic Youth, half Nirvana, 100% 90s angst. Have a nostalgia for a couple of these tracks from the Guitar Hero days and from drunken background-listening at early-20s house parties, but really the whole album has held up incredibly well in every aspect.
fav songs: Today, Disarm, Quiet, Soma, Geek U.S.A.
Fun acid house, if a bit cheesy in places. Loses some of its magic, by my ear, by being played through headphones on the way to the white-collar office job, rather than being blasted via ten foot-tall subwoofers in some filthy scouser club basement while off your face on mitsubishis.
fav tracks: Madrugada Eterna, The Lover's Side
Certainly not bad - it's well-produced, well-sung, and well-played - but there's really nothing of substance I liked here. Feels a little like lounge kitsch. Music for airports but not the cool ambient kind.
fav tracks: I've Got to See You Again
Legendary riff after legendary riff. Great hard rock album, and Eddie's masterwork on the guitar is pretty obvious from the start of their career. Not much variation on the tracklist, but why mess with a good thing?
fav tracks: Runnin' With The Devil, Eruption/You Really Got Me, Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love
Who doesn't love a little CCR? Supremely fun, danceable music. Not *quite* as good as Cosmo's Factory, but then again what is?
fav tracks: Born on the Bayou, Graveyard Train
This one's a classic banger for a reason. A bit inconsistent in parts with particular tracks not reaching the heights of its best in the first half (such as Hotel California, obviously), but it's great listening.
fav tracks: Hotel California, Life in the Fast Lane, New Kid in Town
Really stuck on whether I prefer this or *If You're Feeling Sinister*, which was only a couple weeks ago in this project, but they're both excellent listens.
fav tracks: Electronic Renaissance, Expectations, I Could Be Dreaming
So it turned out I listened to Throwing Muses' 2003 self-titled album instead of their debut as listed here. So I'll review that one instead.
This one is all killer. Deserved an immediate re-listen. Maybe I'm just a sucker for alt rock, and naming your eighth album as self-titled is crazy work, but colour me thoroughly impressed by minute one from a band I'd never heard of before.
fav tracks: Civil Disobedience, Mercury, Portia, Pandora's Box
We love you Fugazi. 'Repeater' adequately describes the sort of variety you'll get on the album but I love the hell out of it anyway. Very tightly written and performed for something in the hardcore/punk/thrash area of sound.
fav tracks: Repeater, Merchandise, Styrofoam, Break-In
I'll be honest - I don't get Joni Mitchell. This has to be a me thing, since by all accounts she has a beautiful voice and is well-respected by so many professionals, but I couldn't picture myself listening to this again.
fav tracks: Blue
The second-best album to have a pink and green typeface dominating the bottom-left corner and a guy in black and white with a guitar. Inoffensively fun listening music for the 50s with enough groovy staples to impress anyone and get them tapping their toes. I've never really groked on Elvis' warbling-twangy singing style but there's something timelessly beautiful about the 12 bar blues.
Obviously there's gallons of ink spilled over Elvis' right - both artistically and ethically - to sing these tunes but from a purely musical perspective this one's great.
fav tracks: Blue Suede Shoes, Tutti Frutti, Blue Moon
Third time listening to this one all the way through, and I'll admit it didn't really capture me at all the first couple times. I was expecting this run to not be any different. But it really clicked this time! It's pretty much wall-to-wall classics. Beautiful composition and lyricism and just about as good as songwriting gets, though admittedly like Dylan a lot of the covers in the proceeding 50-ish years have done slightly better with her material (which I guess is more a respectable testament to King's legacy).
fav tracks: I Feel The Earth Move, It's Too Late, A Natural Woman
Sorry Adele, I didn't know your game. Some surprisingly impressive production on this album that veers into the unexpectedly fresh.
fav tracks: I Miss You, Send My Love (To Your New Lover)
Bob Dylan continues to cook. Despite much listening to his catalogue over the years I'm still not a big fan of Bob's folksy vocal delivery but besides that this one's always excellent. Songwriting talent worthy of the many accolades piled onto his shoulders over the decades-long career.
fav tracks: Shelter From The Storm, Idiot Wind, You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go
Great listen. There's something about the warm, nostalgic tone of the Hammond organ, which Jimmy Smith plays with such playfully light fingers here, that feels like a cold glass of iced lemonade on a hot summer day. At times on the album it feels like the bright brassiness of the sax drowns out Smith's playing, but I'm really just being pedantic. Will run through again.
fav tracks: Minor Chant
I fucking HATE Vic Rattlehead. That fucking skull-skeleton asshole fills me with the burning rage of Lucifer. God I want to deck the freaky little fucker with the force of a thousand suns. I hate staring at his smug-ugly fucking toothy grin every time I want to listen to Dave Mustain's fat chugs. Put the 'thrash' in thrash metal. I want to cave in his cranium with a hammer so fucking bad. This fucker has haunted my nightmares my whole life and I am glad he is long dead (I hope it was painful).
fav tracks: The Punishment Due, Hangar 18, Dawn Patrol
Dad rock, but *good* Dad rock. There's this broad, epic scope to each of these tracks that just feels so rich and meticulous.
fav tracks: More Than A Feeling, Let Me Take You Home Tonight
Surprised by how new wave-y the earlier discography of U2 seems to be. You can hear Adam Clayton's chuggy bass lines and compressed, treble-y bass tone taking a lot of inspiration from Peter Hook of Joy Division, for example. I prefer U2's later stuff (Joshua Tree is an all-timer) but it's a shame U2 seems to have fallen from stardom as far as they have. The album's a bit hit and miss with its tracks, but otherwise a great listen.
fav tracks: Sunday Bloody Sunday, New Year's Day, Two Hearts Beat As One
Clear as water, smooth as velvet and hard as diamonds. Thank the lord for music like this, as it must have been the only thing making running boats up and down the Mekong bearable. Bonus points for Ramble Tamble being this fun, experimental, trippy exploration of sound that gives goosebumps. This swamp-rock sound, so expertly done, makes the colors of the world feel more vivid when listening through.
fav tracks: Ramble Tamble, Lookin' Out My Back Door, Run Through The Jungle, I Heard It Through The Grapevine
I once saw The The were selling tickets for roughly $150 to a world tour show over a year early. I've liked their music for a long time (particularly this album) but I found this a bit much for an indoor gig. Wish I'd gone now but I was never going to pay that. Also I get the band name is sardonic but it's a little too new-wave for my tastes.
Nonetheless this is a really good album. Post-punk with a lot of groovy synthetic flair and a lot of lyrics about feeling guilty about wanting to kill yourself. This Is The Day in particular is a banger and I like the more experimental looping you get, especially out of the latter half.
fav tracks: This Is The Day, The Sinking Feeling
I mean, OBVIOUSLY this has to be here on the list. It's be weird if the most commercially successful artist of the millennium (probably) wasn't. You can't really go into an artist like T-Swizzle with fresh ears. I'm pretty agnostic on Swift and didn't really come in with much bias except that I expected to be mildly amused, and wasn't surprised (especially considering most of the songs were already familiar enough). I'm not the target audience though, so I'm not exactly shocked either.
Swift's first proper foray into pop is an overall pastiche of/love-letter to 80s romantic pop, but it feels like it misses its ironic depth of substance. On the plus side, it's a sound so clearly stapled to the mid-2010s and that fading sense of pop-optimism (poptimism?) that the era represents that it feels nostalgic looking back. You can see why she sold a gazillion albums - it's clean, listenable, inoffensive and ultimately easy radio music that's fun and familiar. 'Style' in particular was pretty great. it's great that Swift writes her own music and there's plenty of good hooks here.
But it's not very *interesting*. Maybe it's an unfortunate time to be exploring this era in the back catalogue - too soon, perhaps, when the trends of a decade ago are always considered dorky. To badly paraphrase Guy Browning: "Your old coats and sneakers will come back into fashion only just after you've thrown them away". But 1989 also suffers the double-whammy of being so over-replicated since its release as well to the point that the sound lacks its verve to a modern listener. I once heard somebody say "Taylor Swift is life-defining music to the kind of people who don't listen to much music", and while I think it's a little harsh I can't imagine this one sticking out in this list at all. Then again, maybe elevating uniqueness on a pedestal is against the whole point of why we're here. The songs are a little catchy but I never found myself tapping my toes. Is it uninspired? is it cheesy? Maybe. But it's nice. And it certainly sells.
I've tried, earnestly, with Swift over the last few years and I still don't get it. I *can't* hear what the hordes of fanatics are hearing and I'm not sure what I'm missing. The most clear 3/5 there could be. And just not for me, clearly.
fav tracks: Style, All You Had to Do Was Stay, Wildest Dreams
Pour one out for the thousands of people that must have assumed their CD was scratched up after listening to the end of track one.
This is definitely one of those albums that probably benefits from multiple relistens while in the right mood. Chugged through this one three times today and ended up appreciating what it was going for a drastically more on each relisten, but it only gets that privilege because their debut album Dummy proved that the juice is worth the squeeze.
I really like the Bjork-style vocal delivery you get on tracks like Magic Doors that suits the experimental triphoppy strangeness they're aiming for. It's a good album and I like that they're having fun playing with audience expectations and deliberately subverting that familiarity, especially when it finds its groove in the latter half of the album. But it sometimes feels like it's doing too much. Like, I've always hated the abrupt end to Silence, otherwise my favourite track on the album.
I do still reckon Portishead peaked at Dummy. But I wouldn't rate Portishead below 5.
fav tracks: Silence, Plastic, Small, Threads
What's Dylan Grillin'? Because he definitely cooked on this one. Not quite as good as Blood On The Tracks but what is?
fav tracks: Subterranean Homesick Blues, Mr. Tambourine Man
I'd drive with this driving crooner, baby. Nice songs for ethical non-monogamists. Also very funny there's a song about how having sex makes babies that was a chart-topper in 1956.
Not much variety between tunes, but I'm not a jazz/swinghead so I'm probably missing something. The album lacks the dizzying heights of Sinatra's prior Wee Small Hours but this one's still great listening. As is often the case going through earlier albums it's refreshing with the shorter, more punchy track lengths here and the rich smoothness of the sound makes this feel like warm liquor on a cold evening.
fav tracks: You Make Me Feel So Young, Anything Goes
I'm usually impressed by the Sir's work but this one was less exhilarating than his other albums. Still some very impressive writing/performing chops on display but there's a few too many forgettable tracks. That said, this one's still pretty great.
fav tracks: Goodbye, Tiny Dancer, Indian Sunset
Great album. Janis Joplin's vocals are absolutely top class and overflowing with verve, and thankfully cut through an often (unfortunately) muddy mix and inconsistent sound. An energetic set of music to jam to, basically. I actually really liked this one and would definitely listen again but I found it a little too fickle (whatever that means).
Not that it's a direct influence on the sound, per se, but the signature Robert Crumb art is also incredibly cool and distinctly of its era.
fav tracks: Piece of My Heart, Ball and Chain
> Trouser Press described Kollaps as "one of the most shocking visions ever committed to vinyl."
Yeah, sounds about right.
Here's a story: There's an infamous legend about a performance of controversial composter Steve Reich's minimalist work 'Four Organs'. The 16-minute track, an extension of Reich's boundary-pushing experiments with (then-novel) synthetic music and atonal harmonies, features a quartet of electronic organs accompanied by a single, unyielding maraca. It's a wall of droning noise, slowly building layer-upon-layer of extended notes in an often bewildering and highly unusual arrangement. It was the tail-end of the Swingin' Sixties, and Reich was pushing the boundaries of classical chamber-hall music the same way that bands like The Grateful Dead, The Velvet Underground and Captain Beefheart were doing in the rock/band scene during the same era. Jazz, of course, had been doing so for even longer.
So the tale goes, there was one particular 1973 performance of 'Four Organs' at the prestigious New York Carnegie Hall where it went weird. This wasn't the first time the piece had been met with mixed reception, but this show is said to have been particularly contentious. There was "yells for the music to stop, mixed with applause to hasten the end of the piece... one woman walked down the aisle and repeatedly banged her head on the front of the stage, wailing 'Stop, stop, I confess.'" Such is often the fate of the avant-garde.
It's really no secret that Kollaps isn't the kind of album you throw on during polite company or at the work Christmas party. It's unapologetically and unabashedly harsh and abrasive. It's the sonic equivalent of banging rusty pots and pans together while running a jackhammer; sometimes it's literally this. It's crude, and unrefined, and so raw you can still hear the cow mooing. The songs often end abruptly, or have inexplicable long stretches of silence. It's intentionally provocative with titles like 'Schiess Euch Ins Blut' (Shit In Your Blood), which sounds like a man trying to pass a kidney stone at a busy construction site. it's nihilistic and angry and all that true-punk chaotic industrial noise that could really only exist like this in its era, anti-commercial and unconcerned with lofty concepts like 'prestige' or 'vision'.
So by all accounts, the album achieves with an impressive clarity exactly what it's set out to do. It's just what it's trying to do is weird and scary and ugly. But it's *this* kind of thing that going through this list is made for. What drives a Steve Reich, or a Milton Babbitt, or a Einstürzende Neubauten to do what they do? Maybe these people are the alchemists of music, drawn to boundary-testing like moths to the flame, doomed to failure and yet persisting in spite of it.
Kollaps is a difficult album to capture, because the emotion it evokes in me is primarily just... disgust. This is not a common emotion we look to art to achieve, and yet it's there. This album gives that feeling you get when looking at something by H.G. Giger or Cruelty Squad: dread and fear. I remember the emotion far more than the sound of any particular song, which is lacking the usual milestones we use to tether ourselves to reality. It recontextualizes itself as it runs, never letting you rest, and it's a dizzying effect. And in doing so, ironically, it leaves a mental impression far deeper than the easy-to-follow pop music that it was surrounded by.
I'm really not trying to be a pretentious contrarian here, because I can tell this is the kind of thing that'll turn most people off. I'm not saying it's some misunderstood masterpiece or anything (I enjoy most modern music as much as anybody else). I do believe, wholeheartedly, that this is not good music and I didn't actually like listening to it. But this thing really grabbed me in a way that disturbed me yet left me with plenty to think about, and I mean that totally sincerely. I like that it tried something profoundly different, even if it mostly failed, and those little glimpses of something genuinely unique were worth the squeeze.
Perhaps in the end, Kollaps is musical Surströmming. It won't have me banging my head on the stage, or banging my head up and down, but at least it's willing to do things so interesting that I don't really understand them. And that means it's worth chewing on afterwards, which is more than you can say about most radio music.
I can't really be very objective about The Joshua Tree, because it's an album with an enormous amount of sentimental value from my childhood. Thankfully, I don't even have to worry about the effect of the rose-tinted glasses because this album is a banger anyway. Best U2 album and one of the best to ever do it.
fav tracks: Exit, With Or Without You, I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For
Admittedly I'm not usually a fan of the 'typical country artist with an acoustic guitar' sound that's been driven to death, but this one stands out on its own. Only ever heard its most famous track, but the whole album is full of Fast Cars. Beautiful, expressive vocals over excellent songwriting.
fav tracks: Fast Car, Why
Dennis Wilson's expression mirrors how I looked while listening to the album. Nah, I'm just joking: this one was a good-enough listen but nothing to write home about. Lots of production talent and I liked the varied soundscapes between the tracks. I'm not super well-read on the Beach Boys discography though so I'm probably the wrong person to ask.
fac tracks: Dreamer, You and I
At first looking at the album length, I was a little worried. Then I listened and it all came together. Each track is doing something interesting and never outstays its welcome, always giving you something to groove to. You can feel the fun, Dead Kennedys-esque feeling of a group of professionals who love what they do coming into the studio and killing it (a Beastie Boys if they were 50% more capital-p Punk). There's just SO MUCH to like, both in quantity and quality. Also, imagine my surprise when I heard the Jackass theme of all things randomly in the middle of this album.
fav tracks: Kind of hard to pick one out, it's all good
At first I was worried this would end up being generic 80s indie/alt-rock (a common theme on this list) but the introduction of strings and varied instrumentation here and there was nice. I mean, it IS generic in that way, but in an inoffensive way. The lead is one of many trying to do the Depeche Mode/Morrisey thing which works well enough, but it's weird hearing it in an Aussie accent (which I say as somebody also down under).
fav tracks: Streets of your Town
It's the man, the myth, the legend. What more needs to be said?
fav tracks: Juicy
Good album, sounds ahead enough of its time. Maybe I'm not giving it a proper shot since this list is full of early new wave-y stuff (crazy how pop-punky this feels for an album from the 70s) but it wasn't really that fun or interesting to listen to. Hard to hate, but it's a 3 from me.
fav tracks: Lipstick Vogue
This one was pretty good. Looks back at the sounds of the 80s with fresh eyes and modern sensibilities (there's even a Dylan-inspired track!), with a few more experimental-y bits mixed in. It all just sounds very deliberate. Could see myself listening again.
Fav tracks: Under The Pressure, Suffering
Some damn fine Drum & Bass and a welcome reprieve from the usual rock staples on this list. Wasn't familiar with Roni Size & Reprazent before this but I liked their sound here a lot (reminds me of the demo disc days of the 90s). Not sure how influential the album has been since publication, especially outside of the UK, but it's good listening.
Obviously the album goes long, but it's D&B; you're meant to be listening to it in a context where you're just immersed in the vibe. Like most of its genre it doesn't really suit the kind of sit-down listening and is best enjoyed on your feet or on drugs (or both).
Fav tracks: Brown Paper Bag, Change My Life
I've always had this idea of Incubus as a 'douchebag' band - the kind of band beloved by goatee-stroking, Coors-swilling, cap-backwards types whose backyard sheds are plastered with WWE promos and pinups of topless women on vintage motorcycles. So maybe I was wrong, or maybe I've evolved into a douchebag myself, but this album was wall-to-wall excellent. The introduction of more synthy digital-production in a kind of NIN way definitely elevates the material beyond your typical 90s bro-rock.
I miss when record-scratching was still a thing.
fav tracks: Drive, Privilege, The Warmth
Pretty classic Johnny Cash hits, all in one place. You'd hardly know he was barely familiar with half the tracks. The crowd banter and funny little asides that show Cash's charisma and character were also pretty fun and gave it a very intimate listening vibe, though I'd imagine it'd make it less re-listenable. June Carter's performance on Darling Companion was a surprising standout, making it my favourite track of the album (although hearing the reprise on San Quentin was pretty excellent too)
fav tracks: Darling Companion, I Walk the Line, San Quentin
*This* is the album that got me really to understand the broad appeal of folk. Old Man has been gently squatting in a corner of my cranial cavity for years. Harvest is worthy of all its flowers.
fav tracks: Old Man, There's A World, The Needle and the Damage Done
I'm not the world's biggest fan of the Genesis sound, so this album didn't really impress me either. Some good hits here and there (especially in that Kate Bush feature), but even breakout hits like Sledgehammer aren't the same without the music video.
Fav tracks: Sledgehammer, Don't Give Up, We Do What We're Told
Fela Kuti and The Africa '70: Such a lively, energetic sound on these tracks that makes it hard to sit still. Gooooood stuff.
Fav tracks: Egbe Mi O (Carry Me)
Noise-rock in the typical camp of 'just because you can doesn't mean you should'. Credit where credit's due: I appreciate that the album has a strong vision and is trying something new. The lack of focus ends up wrapping around into making an album where each track feels very unique. Plus the atmosphere is cool in a lot of places.
It's an interesting sonic experiment and I'm usually a big fan of anything esoteric that's really taking the roads less travelled but this didn't hit.
fav tracks: Hold Hands and It Will Happen Anyway
It's Rubber Soul - what possible novel praise can be written about this album 60 years after its release? On my umpteenth listen here I was surprised that it's not quiiiite as great as I remember it being - it's definitely better than Sgt. Pepper's, but can it compare to Abbey Road? But that's probably not a fair comparison for any band, even the Beatles themselves. In either case at a tight 35 minutes though Rubber Soul maintains a strong energy and a fun, upbeat vision that I adore.
This one's full of fun-loving hits, from the raja-infused semi-satirical Norwegian Wood (which lent its name to a pretty good Murakami novel) to the pre-Bowie Bowie-esque navel-gazing of Nowhere Man. Girl is probably just beaten as a personal favorite by Michelle, only because that teeth-whistling noise in the former drives me nuts. Actually, maybe You Won't See Me is my top pick: I like the catchy harmonies. Drive My Car is also a head-bopping classic - really, they all are (or mostly are, those last three tracks are a little forgettable compared to the heights of the A side which admittedly is a high bar). It's great music and delightfully re-listenable.
fav tracks: Norwegian Wood, Michelle, Girl, You Won't See Me
Some catchy tunes from one of the OGs. Who's surprised? First time going through The Who properly and it's been a good listen.
fav tracks: My Generation, The Good's Gone
Thoroughly meh. You can tell an enormous amount of effort has been poured into the album but for what end? Hysteria is all dull hair-metal, forgettably bland lyrics and underwhelming riffs - perhaps the title is ironic. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
fav tracks: Run Riot
Me and my best buddy have an long-ongoing, languorously-laborious argument over whether or not Weezer is a good band. I'm very much of the unshakable opinion that Weezer sucks (and not in the 'Primus Sucks' kind of running-joke way). Weezer's compositions, their performances, Rivers Cuomo's lyricism ("god damn you half-Japaneeese gurRrlsz"): it's all this kind of unpolished, unabashed dorkiness. There's really only one sound they can do on each album. And despite this, I LOVE Weezer. I've seen Weezer live (a quasi-religious experience) and would do again. Because despite that, the music has this fun, almost cheeky scrappiness about it. Their Blue album is a desert-island record for me - it's refreshingly shitty.
Foo Fighters isn't as shitty a band - I think Grohl has enough polish and talent in everything he's ever thrown himself into, and this album is almost 100% Dave - but it embodies that same alt-rock sensibility as Weezer. For one, 'Foo Fighters' is an inherently dumb name, even without Christopher Walken's hilarious delivery. Something like self-titled Foo Fighters isn't going to impress the nose-upturned snobs at the gallery, but it's supreme alt-rock that knows what it wants to be an executes perfectly on that vision. It's music to skate to and smoke weed in distressed jeans and flannel shirts, and it's honestly hard to believe it was put together almost entirely by one guy + his mixer. It's shitty (endearing), like your favourite, most sentimental old band shirt from your first big gig.
The album is pretty much the same sound from the front to the back - hardly a unique criticism for a post-Nirvana 90's alt-rock album - but I appreciate that it continually executes on that premise. These grungy fried guitar distortion effects, those beat-the-shit-out-of-them drums, those blown-out Grohl-ly vocal deliveries. Everybody was holding their breath to see where the legendary Nirvana alumni would go, and I think it's safe to say the legacy has been carried well by the Foo Fighters. It's all good. Only thing this one is missing is the real stand-out singles you'd get in their later discography.
This probably wouldn't be the FF album I'd pick for this list in a world where (this album's follow-up) The Colour and the Shape exists, but I'm optimistically chalking it up to some weird anachronism about how and when the list was written.
fav tracks: I'll Stick Around, Oh George, X-Static, Wattershed
Don't have too much to say about this one, to be honest.
fav tracks: What'd I Say, It Ain't Right
This album has a pretty magnificent backstory, so thankfully the music is pretty damn good too. Incredible the kinds of sounds that Jarrett can coax out of an out-of-tune piano and a pair of deft hands. The sounds coming out of that baby grand feel so natural underneath Jarrett's mastery that it just sweeps you away. It feels like a natural extension of his body. It's lounge-back background music that simultaneously demands your attention.
They have their reasons for not putting more classical and old-jazz adjacent works on this list (not that this is 'traditionally composed' like most orchestral pieces by any stretch of the imagination - it's still improvised jazz, even if the 'jazz' label feels a little iffy) but it makes me long for more of this sort of conventional hall-style instrumentation in the 1001 marathon.
fav tracks: Part I, Part IIb
Appetite For Destruction deserves its many flowers (Roses, to be specific). Hard not to like, even for somebody not particularly into its brand of hard rock/metal. Like Accadacca or KISS before them there's not really any unsafe boundary-pushing tracks here (and thank god it's not glam), but what it lacks in novelty it makes up for in sleazy, mischievous reliability. Half this album is stuffed with tracks that every person and their dog has heard a million times on store radios over the last four decades and it's still got some good legs.
fav tracks: Out Ta Get Me, Paradise City
Certainly not the sort of thing I'd usually be caught dead listening to, but it's an interesting listen. There's a thick cultural American-ness to this era of Country music that's a bit difficult to those of us who weren't there, either geographically or chronologically. It's all this white-Christmas picket-fence nostalgia that never translated properly overseas. Like, I can't get over how *weird* this flavour acoustic honky-tonk sound gets. Buck is very much an epitome of this here - that country-man warble, singing a collection of half-funny, half-depressed staples to play at the hoedown.
This isn't really a diatribe about the album, but I was hoping more exposure to Country via this list would help appreciate it more, but it just makes it sound more alien. And these Buckaroos embody this feeling more than anything. It's an interesting parcel of love letters to a world that I am not privy to, and it's worth delving into by that right, but I wouldn't find myself tossing this album on for fun.
fav tracks: We're Gonna Let the Good Times Roll, Streets of Laredo
This album would have gone CRAZY in the early 90s. Very steeped in its era of alt-rock and it's a good listen.
fav tracks: Alison's Starting To Happen, Mrs. Robinson
This one kicks ass. Stuffed front-to-back with that post-ironic 'fuck the world' angst of the 90s that, in the greatest irony of all, ends up feeling a little quaint. Thematically and lyrically this reminds me of that feeling of being eighteen, punching darts in the back of my shitbox old Commodore, blasting alt rock music and feeling that melancholic sense of directionlessness that comes from having the whole, terrifying world laid out before you.
fav tracks: Drunken Butterfly, Shoot, Sugar Kane, Purr
Some great hooks and a very forward-thinking UK-ish sound for a New York band. Can't imagine how much this must have slain back in the day. Took a little while to grow on me but there's some really catchy tracks here.
fav tracks: Friction, Marquee Moon, Torn Curtain
I must have been the last person sleeping on Arcade Fire, because as a first run this one is incredible. I usually try and give each album on the list a couple listens to get a better feel for it ('try' being the imperative word there, time-willing) but this was a zero hesitation replay. I usually find that the folksy twee style of indie rock in that 2000s era to be a little dorky, but it works perfectly here.
fav tracks: Neighborhood #2 (Laika), Crown Of Love, Rebellion (Lies)
Was surprised to recognize a track of this album ("Two Weeks") as Grizzly Bear has never been anywhere near my radar. A decent album of good indie tunes, though nothing particularly exceptional.
fav tracks: Two Weeks
Some really good music, it suits being chucked on in the background and just enjoying the mood. Very much of its era but a good change of pace.
Fav tracks: Remind Me, She's So
I was doing some similar going-through-the-classics-list listening before signing up for this site, so this marks my third try at Odelay. On paper, Beck seems to be right up my alley - prominent baselines, some weirder experimentation with sounds, that alt-rock feel. The first couple times, however, I ended up walking away feeling underwhelmed by Beck generally. Couldn't say why, but it didn't live up to the hype.
Well here we are, third listen and it's firing on all cylinders. NOW I get it. It's got that 90s irony without the navel-gazing self-seriousness. All those electric Rhodes pianos and fuzzy pedals make for a ln album jammed with character. It's the album equivalent of that super-charismatic weirdo stoner guy you knew in high school.
Fav tracks: Devil's Haircut, Novacane, The New Pollution, Where It's At
Pretty great britpop, which sets itself apart from a lot of the list by the regular usage of string samples. The Verve are no Oasis, but who is? Extra points for opening with Bittersweet Symphony, a track that's still a really good listen despite near-constant radio play these last three decades.
fav tracks: Bittersweet Symphony, Sonnet, The Rolling People
There's a joke in The Good Place where a character, being quizzed over his mortal sins in an attempt to determine his true place in the afterlife, is asked about the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Apparently 'seeing the Red Hot Chili Peppers in concert' counts against your 'score' and gets you one step closer to the terrible below. I don't know. I couldn't think it'd be that bad down in hell if it means getting to listen to Flea hit those slappy bass licks at knee level for eternity.
I'm a big fan of the funk-rock cheeky style of RHCP, and have listened to an enormous share of their tunes in bits and pieces over the years, but I found upon listening front-to-back on this album that I found the sound getting pretty old by about halfway through. That said, I have a massive adoration for the general vibe and feeling, as well as a handful of really classic singles (Under the Bridge, easily). Overall the album could have really been a true five-star if the track list was put under the knife of a talented sadist, but I'm still happy with how it came out. It's missing a lot of those more thoughtful elements that would end up coming more into play later in their careers (thinking of Californication specifically) where I think the Chilis really come into their best work, but this one's clearly trying to be fun and taboo-breaking mischievous in that way that was still very boundary-pushing back in its era of release.
Found out that this album and Nevermind came out on the same day: September 24 1991. Obviously RHCC have been massively influential in their own right, but it's interesting to imagine a world in which this album was the one that would kick off and define the sound/style for the last decade of the millennium.
fav tracks: Give It Away, Under the Bridge, Apache Rose Peacock, Sir Psycho Sexy
Very trip-hoppy, bass-heavy world music in the Morcheeba/Smoke City/Thievery Corp vein, which I suppose makes this really ahead of its time (ahead of 'trip hop' as a label, I would suppose, because I'm not sure this feels particularly 'world' as a genre). Usually this kind of sound is my jam but I was overall whelmed by this album outside of a few tracks. Some impressive work by Jah Wobble on the bass at least. The best work is being done by the female vocal performances, some of which appear to be done by Sinead O'Connor which makes sense.
fav tracks: Everyman's An Island [though I'm pretty sure Donne would disagree]
There's something so charming about these warm, cheesy old synth riffs of this era. Must have felt so futuristic at the time, and now it feels nostalgic in the opposite direction. Lots of direction taken from Zappa (not just musically - I mean, look at the dude on the cover) and there's some interesting and varied sampling here, even if at times it lends the album an uneven quality.
Not the kind of album I can picture listening to again, but an interesting experiment regardless and a great feature on this list.
fav tracks: Persian Love
Didn't like it. Seems to cement my (admittedly controversial) opinion that the piano does not belong in rock.
Fav tracks: Aqualung
I am thoroughly convinced that Nevermind is the best album to release in the last 50 years and this umpteenth listen has not dented this take.
I'm a bit biased in that some of my earliest, fondest memories were listening to scratched-up Nirvana tapes in the back of a paddock bomb on bucolic summer days, whittling the world away while cutting my teeth on what is undoubtedly one of the best tracklists to build taste to.
One of the most interesting things about going back into this early 90s, early Seattle grunge era of undistilled alt-rock angst is they have this scrappy nihilistic vision of the state of the world. It's this deathwish vibe. An apathetic response to a society where a voracious, unthinking commercial consumption has finally choked out the public subconscious. Nirvana was a direct, rebellious, and churlish epitome of the growing rejection of that all-encompassing consumerism. Just look at the deliberately provocative album cover! Apparently it was meant to be a photo of an underwater birth, but the labels obviously considered this far too uncouth. ""I'm so ugly, that's okay 'cause so are you" - the gross out industrialized aesthetic would end up defining the entire look of the era.
People often say that mainstream horror themes of a time are reflections of what society fears; I think you could say the same about the book-burning fears of dystopian lit of the post WW2 era, the anti-nuclear flowery hippie movement, and finally the distressed jeans and cheap flannel of the 90s. In the same way that the modern concept of the 'teenager' evolved out of the relative economic surpluses of 1950s America, the specific du jour flavour heading into the last throes of the millennium was this foolhardy angst. Irony became the watchword of the 90s. The world was on the precipice of the drastic introduction of the internet, and the death wail of this neo-punkish fuck-you attitude was the first real movement into twenty-first century lyrical modernity. Literary scholars and critics often credit Wordsworth with being the original 'modern' poet, in that his introduction marked the shift from poetry as an exploration of the external world to the internal one. While not the first, Cobain isn't interested in re-excavating the love ballads of the hair-metal era. Instead he digs up the navel-gazing self-loathing of the new wave artists like New Order or The Smiths, except with the ironic detachment that would quickly become the iconic masthead of the radical 90s youthquake.
Unlike the hippies before them (which had by this time long since donned the silk noose neckties that once disgusted them) or the spiky-haired anarchists in leather jackets that made up the 70s punks, alt-rock politics was lacking the real political drive. It was a movement of simple sabotage, their idols the slackers you would later see in Clerks or Office Space. The lyrics in the chorus of the iconic opening track 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' embody this idealized detachment with a careless nonsense: "A mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido!". the album is literally called 'Nevermind'. Nothing matters and the rockstars are all self-annihilating heroes. Success becomes an idiot game, where the only way to escape the unsatisfactory samsara of commercial society is via the hypochondriac Bartleby's firm old maxim: "I'd prefer not to." The American future died on the vine. In this way Nevermind is an intensely hauntological album, and I think it's that difference in tone that makes this album so different to its most obvious audiological predecessors (thinking of The Pixies in particular.)
It's interesting, then, that the cultural legacy that came out of this era of thought was essentially this post-post-ironic detached cynicism to any sense authenticity. It's the ultimate irony that a record like Nevermind, fit-to-bursting with honest and candid self-reflections on intensely vulnerable topics like suicidal ideation and depression, became the quintessential example of detached 'irony'. It's the dark comedy of depression - of hating yourself more than you hate the world - that I think makes the special sauce in Cobain's lyricism and prevents it from becoming some lazy pulpit-preaching about bare misanthropics. Obviously, there's a lot of mythology surrounding this album, much of it hearsay. But I think it's a pretty beautiful time capsule of a mood, a rebellion, that no longer exists.
fav tracks: everything (except On A Plain and Endless Nameless)
Whelming album. I do like Neil Young and to be fair I think his music is the sort to build appreciation of over many listens, but I'm a braindead zombie zoomer (zoombie?) with no time nor attention span.
fav tracks: See the Sky About to Rain, Vampire Blues
Surprised by how knee-bouncing and toe-tapping this album ends up being. Buckley's playing has this real effervescent energy to it.
fav tracks: Get On Top, Hong Kong Bar
I actually really like this one - more than the banana album at least, which I could never really wrap my head around. I even enjoyed the absolute sonic trainwreck of a closing track; I unironically love how absurdly kitchen-sink chaotic it is. There's this sense of beatnik poetry deliberate senselessness to the entire album, right down to the off-kilter panning.
Fav tracks: The Gift, Lady Godiva's Operation, Sister Ray
Pretty much as good as a Christmas album can get, which is to say the peak of mediocrity. Not a bad listen overall but nothing I've ever come back to outside of of this particular holiday week. There's just something too sappy, too inauthentic, too uninspired by the modern era of Christmas music that traded worship songs for smybols and commercialism.
Fav tracks: Sleigh Ride
I think Bruce Springsteen is like Nick Cave: you kinda just had to be there.
The two big hits off the album (the title track and Dancing In The Dark) are pretty great though.
Fav tracks: I'm Goin' Down, Dancing In The Dark
OK Computer this is epic
Radiohead is kind of like jazz: Ever met somebody who's really into jazz and DOESN'T also play an instrument? Every massive Radiohead fan I've ever met owns an electric guitar. Discussing this band's discography is practically the lingua franca of 20/30-something hipster-types. You can sort of build up a taxonomy of fanatics by their favourite: OK Computer tends to be the 'default' choice in that it's Radiohead at their most neurotic while still maintaining that danceable rock sensibility, and outside of maybe The Bends is usually the virgin listen. I mean that in a complimentary way, too; nobody's throwing on Amnesiac for the family road trip. OK Computer just has this well-deserved mythology surrounding it that still sounds just as fresh, just as interesting, and just as sweet three decades later.
OK Computer is pretty much perfect front to back, and stands to be listened to basically endlessly. it's that 90s alt-rock sound distilled to its most unadulterated form: angsty, overdriven, and instantly nostalgic. There's just so many iconic heart-thumping moments on this thing: Thom's vocal delivery on Karma Police, the incredible breakdown in the latter part of Exit Music, those opening chords on Airbag... What kind of novel praise is left to give this record? Would hardly change a note on this thing.
Time to reorganize the Radiohead tier list again. Sorry Kid A.
fav tracks: Airbag, Paranoid Android, No Surprises, Exit Music (For a Film), Karma Police, the rest of the album
Not much to say on this one - it's Aerosmith at their usual Aerosmith-y.
fav tracks: Last Child
Pretty good album from a band I've never heard of before and probably never will again - it gives strong Slint vibes but doesn't quite reach those Spiderland heights.
Fav tracks: Here Come The Rome Plows
If I ever rate a Radiohead album below a 5 then you can reliably say I've been replaced by a simulacrum (unless we're talking about Pablo Honey lmao).
Hail To The Thief isn't their best album by any stretch - it's held up by its strongest singles in songs like '2 + 2 = 5' and 'Sail To The Moon', whereas before this they had a pretty stellar track record for no-skips. That said, I'm all over this one like a rash.
fav tracks: 2 + 2 = 5, Sail To The Moon, There There, Myxomatosis
It's almost as good as El Camino (affectionately).
fav tracks: Howlin' For You, The Only One
Upon relistening to this album again, for the umpteenth time yet almost a decade since last time, I found myself underwhelmed compared to the internal mythology I'd constructed around it.
Revisiting to the most influential music of 10-15 years ago for this project always ends up in some disappointment - we're almost one generation removed from these albums, which upon release revolutionized music in one way or another, and their long shadows end up giving the sound on these tracks a worn-out feel. In 2026, the flavour of Frank Ocean's soft R&B delivery dominates top 40 charts and has become the de facto sound for the constant flood of over-produced one-hit-wonder TikTok-viral Drake wannabes. In this context, Channel Orange feels less 'fresh off the tree' and is stuck languishing in this gunky genericism that will need another decade or two to wash off.
It sucks because this and Blonde were the soundtrack of my earliest years of adulthood. Sitting around in undermaintained university dormrooms, broke and optimistic, blasting Tame Impala and Frank Ocean while chatting about girls and drinking cheap booze. So many of these lyrics are still tattooed across my heart from those halcyon days - Lost, Super Rich Kids, Pyramids, Sweet Life - and yet now looking back, it feels less nostalgic and more adolescent and juvenile. Perhaps there's a bitterness in that melancholy for a youth wasted, that Channel Orange has that maudlin quality of unearthing a lost optimism. Part of this must be deliberate, right? Between the bright vintage pianos and voyeuristic samples the album invokes this abstract, out-of-time and out-of-place poetic sadness. The album is saturated with this sepia-toned attachment to lost loves and a sentimental yearning for summers passed. In Welsh they have this term calle 'Hiraeth', a homesickness for a place to which you cannot return, or perhaps never was: a fitting enough word to describe Channel Orange I think. or maybe I'm just pretentiously projecting.
Ocean is a sensitive loverboy caught up too much in his own head. It's somewhat of a story album, best listened to in its original sequence, but has a good selection of singles that still rightly see radio play.
fav tracks: Lost, Super Rich Kids, Pyramids, Sweet Life
It is indeed a cool album. Some really good R&B smattered with some really good classic hits.
fav tracks: Waterfalls, Red Light Special, Creep
Surprised by this album - initial impressions from the album art (I know, 'don't judge a book by its cover') left me assuming that this would be some generic 90s electro britslop but there's some really fun sound here. Not quite eurodance, but there's this brimming UK optimism to the sound that's very intoxicating.
Not really brimming with tracks I'll remember by next week but this was worth the time.
fav tracks: Connected, Step It Up, Pressure, Chicken Shake
Gang Of Four oozes that old-school prodigal (post?)punk sensibility, with that unabashedly abrasive, unabashedly political, unabashedly loathing sound. The greatest tension of the album is who is vocalists hate more: Margaret Thatcher, or themselves. There's thick shades of The Clash, of Sex Pistols, of the Buzzcocks and Velvet Underground. You can see the influence it had on those coming afterwards, too: where would RATM be without the unsubtly political lyrics and front-and-centre crunchy bass tones? Where would Minutemen be without the bottom-heavy groove? Where would Franz Ferdinand be... full stop? Of course, music is a massive cosmic gumbo of rhizomatic influences to and from, but there's no denying the impact this had as a debut album.
When I first started taking 'listening to the musical canon seriously' in 2023 (years before discovering this site), this album was my pick of the year (along with Damaged Goods as my favourite single). Pleased to say that upon re-listen this holds up so well. 'Damaged Goods' is the clear standout in particular, with that swelling it-all-comes-together at the end. That punchy, bouncy bassline is solid as hell. The album benefits immensely from letting the bass sit at the front of the bus and it shows in the very rhythmic delivery of the entire instrumentation - even the lead guitar feels comfortable sitting back in the groovy rhythm with the rest, and it lends the album a genuinely danceable cohesiveness for something so ostensibly radical.
It's somewhat refreshing coming up on an album that's as completely committed to being a musical project as a political/philosophical one. The hint's in the song names and the album art, and the lyrics have nothing to hide about where they sit on the spectrum. King namedrops a suite of high-concept names (even Baudrillard gets a mention) and theories across the album, obviously preceding Morello by more than a decade but with the same angsty university-grad zeal. Gang Of Four gets to join a prestigious and revered list of artists banned off of BBC radio due to the content of their lyrics, alongside their usual punk contemporaries, and the political bent is just as jagged as its noise.
Sadly Entertainment! has to settle for being the second-best album to talk about guns and butter (hard to compete against The Prodigy). If you had to nitpick you might say there's a couple tracks that aren't lighting the world on fire (like Glass). Still, five stars no problem.
fav tracks: Natural's Not in It, Damaged Goods, Guns Before Butter, Love Like Anthrax
Listening back over the big four, it's hard not to be supremely envious of the young metalheads crushing themselves to a sweaty half-death in some stanky mosh back when this was the generational sound du jour.
There's something fair to be said about thrash really only being variations of the same general song over and over again. Of course, that's true of many genres. It's hard to deny that Metallica are pretty much the best at writing that song, anyway. Not sure how controversial this take is but I think Metallica's at their best when they're in those moments where they let Ulrich's drums take centre stage and pump this up and down bass-thumping heart-beating rhythm, rather than the flashier bright guitar riffs.
fav tracks: One, Blackened, Harvester Of Sorrow, The Frayed Ends of Sanity
A much weirder album than I could have expected. Between the massively popular radio-play singles (Ms. Jackson in particular was always destined to be certified platinum). It's a pleasure going back through the annals of this era of hip hop/rap and seeing the artists with DJs still genuinely experimenting with the weirder sounds in the early digital VSTs, giving Outkast this thick psychedelic funk sound that feels like a fresh take on the old-school pre-electro roots (this kind of new-millennium experimental thinking bridging the gap between Andre 3000 and Deltron 3000 of the same year).
Could definitely have done without the interludes and comedic skits but that's kind of a lost cause with rap albums of the era. The concept can be done well enough, I guess (De La Soul's debut, 36 Chambers, some of The Chronic, some bits of Doggystyle etc.) but Outkast's Stankonia is today's dead horse.
fav tracks: Bombs Over Baghdad, Ms. Jackson, Spaghetti Junction, Xplosion
Without being coy, I feel like listening to one of these 90s sample-heavy Big Beat/acid house/electronic albums front to back kind of misses the point. Like, I've done so many times before, even with Fatboy Slim albums and collections in the past. But this is the kind of music made for, and best suited to, being mixed into live sets and dancing to (particularly under conditions alluded to in the album's title). It's long, it's repetitive, it's (usually) predictable and full of filler - all very intentional choices for the kind of music played for pinger rats at venues where you stare at pretty lights for a few hours through black-hole pupils. This is all covered in the Big Beat Manifesto: "Big beats are the best, get high all the time".
It's just an unfortunate side-effect of a daily-listening list of this type doesn't really suit this kind of album. There is occasional flashes of more experimental excitement here and there throughout the album, but it's mostly that classic basement 90s club sound. Loops for the loopy.
As far as the actual album goes, I'm an easy mark for this kind of sound and have been a big Norman Cook fan since before I could walk, so this one's an easy recommend. This is the platonic ideal for PLUR-happy key-sniffing better-living class of 90s rave music, unapologetically rich with 4/4s, 303s and 808s and all delightfully digital. It's finally looped back into fun and funky territory as of 2026.
The high-resonance squelchy 808 acid sound is definitely an acquired taste, kind of like drinking lemon juice, but it's used to good effect here.
fav tracks: Going Out of My Head, The Weekend Starts Here, Give The Po' Man A Break, First Down
Finding out Eno was tied somehow to this album was the least surprising part of MFTPC after listening. Similarly, 'occasionally reminiscent of composers such as Philip Glass' is an understatement, with the way the instrumentation dances and intermingles in these slow, wave-like lethargies. What did surprise me during listening was how chill, laid-back, semi-experimental and ambient it was. I'm absolutely enraptured by the beachside minimalist vibes; it's almost muzak, but with that touch of raw passion and artistry that infuse the soft electric pianos and droning strings with an beautifying bent.
Overall I was much more impressed by the more typical, more orchestral stylings of the non-Zopf tracks. I appreciate the more atonal experimentation there but it's a hollow core surrounded by some truly memorable and timeless pieces of classical(?) minimalist(?) jazz(?). One of the most impressive albums I've heard in the list so far from a band I've never heard of before.
Fav tracks: Penguin Cafe Single, The Sound of Someone You Love Who's Going Away and It Doesn't Matter, Chartered Flight, Hugebaby
"we have Simple Minds at home"
Simple Minds at home:
Nah, it's just standard-fare UK synth-saturated post-punk new-wave. Vocalist like Morrissey meets Dolby without the charm, forgettable melodies, utterly unremarkable drum beats. Gives a whiff of "only on this list because it was compiled in Britain in the late 90s" à la Dexys. It's fun in parts and I don't really think it's *offensively* bad; just utterly unremarkable.
fav tracks: Gloomy Sunday, Skipping, nothingsomethinginparticular
Very, very good. The kind of album this list was made for. It's music to dance to in dusty juke joints, but it's also good for a deep sit-down listen with the headphones clamped on. Really the kind of music this list was made for since it's something I would never otherwise stumble upon. Album also has a pretty cool backstory behind it (discussed extensively elsewhere I won't retread it) that makes me wish I could understand the lyrical content. Honestly there's been some really cool rock coming out of Africa this last decade or so to keep an eye on.
fav tracks: Jolie, Irganda, Al Hassidi Terei, Nick
Kinda disappointed by this one, to be honest. I'm usually a big White defender but this was just a series of forgettable rock tracks strung together by a couple passable singles.
Fav tracks: My Doorbell, The Denial Twist
Fuck, this album is so good. Portishead in an alternate universe where they went way harder on the orchestral parts. Basically every track on this album would make the perfect addition to a Brosnan-era Bond soundtrack. Something about the way Goldfrapp's Billie Holiday-esque voice runs over these long strings and these quirky distorted electronic sounds massages my brain.
First album in 100+ by an artist I have barely heard of that gets an easy five stars. Immediately earned itself a second listen right after the first. It's a really interesting kind of electronic trip-hop sound that breaks up the cavalry of rock staples flooding the list.
Fav tracks: Lovely Head, Pilots, Deer Stop, Felt Mountain, Oompah Radar, Utopia, Horse Tears
This one's real good! Funky as hell.
Fav tracks: Pusherman, Think, Superfly
