I liked the second track - interesting beat. (Jungle Line) The jazz influences on Harry's House / Centerpiece are nice too; overall this is an interesting track - lyrically as well I really like the vocals on Shadows and Light - the way those harmonies kick in! GREAT ending track

I didn’t think I was at all familiar with this album beyond having heard the name Van Halen before and then Jump started playing. Evidently I was very mistaken. It remains to be seen if I know any of the other tracks as well. Neutral on Panama. Don’t hate what’s happening in the guitar but this one word chorus is pretty cringe Honestly I think the above remarks could characterize a lot of my reactions here Gotta say I don’t love this one about the legs Yeah on the whole I think it’s okay. Certainly it’s not bad but I don’t think I’d revisit most of the tracks. Some of the instrumentation is impressive (as I guess you’d expect from a band named after its lead guitarist) but some of it’s kind of tacky

Another one I'd heard before... and am happy to listen through again! My current favorites are Chicago, John Wayne Gacy Jr., Predatory Wasp of the Palisades, and Casimir Pulaski day, but we'll see if anything else stands out to me on another run through it Update: I really like The Tallest Man, The Broadest Shoulders! Love the switching time signatures punctuated by the clapping. Whole album really hits as an Experience when heard start-to-stop: I don’t do that enough with this music (or music in general really - though my 2025 goal has been to work on that, hence partially this 1001 undertaking!) - usually I just listen to the four songs I cited above within various appropriate playlists

Okay I guess I finally have to learn what Brian Eno sounds like… one of those things I’ve felt I should do forever and have never actually wanted to get around to. Well this is what the project is for I suppose. Here goes. Actually I have definitely heard this first track before and honestly? It’s a bona fide banger. Not sure where I know it from… it sounds like something that would have been in a soundtrack. I’ll look it up. This second track is kind of interesting too actually. I think the electronic beeping breakdown section in the middle is a little over the top but I’m not ENTIRELY opposed… I like the third one too! Yes even with that vocal delivery - I think it’s working here! The ambient sounds are really adding a lot as well. I can imagine a totally different arrangement under this same vocal track that would have been much more straightforward and less moody but this is better. Found track 1. Velvet Goldmine. Which totally tracks; I was literally thinking about how a lot of songs have that vibe. I’m surprised I remembered it as I’ve only seen that movie once… but it is a great song so I guess it made an impression on me! Honestly all these songs are great. Why was I expecting this to be insufferable noise music??? Is it just because I’ve seen his name next to the Velvet Underground a bunch of times and I’m also unfairly biased against that band because I hate the sound of Nico’s voice so much? Is this really as much ambient as people can handle? Are his later albums drastically less melodic or something? WHY wasn’t I on top of this album earlier…. Okay I didn’t love the one about the dead finks but it has its place on the album/is way more interesting than annoying and the richness of the layered vocals in the next track won me right back over. I’m listening to the last one now and oddly enough the instrumentals remind me of nothing so much as walking to the exit of Space Mountain after riding the ride… a feeling of satisfied post-climax and the same sort of technofuturist optimism you get walking past all those outdated sci-fi “postcard from another world” displays… I looked it up and Space Mountain opened in 75, one year after this album was released, so I’m not crazy/I am in rec connecting dots here (<- not connecting shit)… Okay finished! Five stars! I’m glad this one came up early for me!

III was the first Led Zeppelin album I ever listened to start-to-finish, and in some ways it’s still my favorite, even though I have listened to IV since then. There’s just not a bad or boring track on it, and yes, I’m including Hats Off in that assessment. (The vocal effects!) Immigrant Song is a classic, Gallows Pole and Bron-Y-Aur Stomp are proper romps, Since I’ve Been Lovin’ You has that great moody atmosphere… Great stuff. I was happy to see it turn up.

Oh god, it’s these guys. Rio used to get stuck in my head all the time when I was a kid. Also every time we played the Rock Band video game we’d end up doing Hungry Like the Wolf. God I hated Rock Band. I was so bad at it and it made me so mad because I was supposed to be a Music Kid (choir, piano, etc.). I don’t even know why we always picked that song. I think we just thought “juices like wine” was funny. Anyway those were the only two songs I knew from this album until today. Okay, confession time, I started typing this while Rio was playing fully prepared to get snarky starting in this sentence - something along the lines of “I don’t know if I was missing out on all that much” - but Hold Back The Rain is playing right now and I’m unironically having some fun here. Like, hang on, I have to actually give a fair listen to the rest of this album before I can say anything else. Okay, we’re back. Yeah I mean to be honest most of these songs are bona fide bangers. Those synth soundscapes/xylophone solos are really doing it for me here. The Chauffeur has got a great melody. The 80s have never been a decade I’ve ever felt any kind of media-manufactured nostalgia for, at all (not even at the height of the mania for Stranger Things, a show I have watched and enjoyed) but listening to this… I kind of get it. It’s never going to be my thing exactly, but it’s kind of awesome for what it is nonetheless. That’ll teach me not to knock these things until I’ve tried them

I went into this completely blind. I’d never heard of this album or of these people. I don’t know what I was expecting exactly based on the cover art but it really was not this. Granted, I don’t know how I fairly could have been expecting this. I didn’t realize that you were, like, ALLOWED to Frankenstein this many samples together. Like, legally. It is surprising to me that an album like this could ever receive a mainstream release. It is surprising to me that apparently they’ve even been allowed to make some MONEY off of this. The whole concept feels like a reinvention of fanfiction by and for men who spend too much time on Pitchfork. Let it not be said that I’m opposed to the existence of fanfiction or that I don’t think it has its place as a form of creative expression, but is that place really on widely cited and respected lists of “Best Albums Of All Time”? Apparently. You can get away with a lot if you’re a man I guess It’s not terrible. (Not all of it is terrible. Some of the beeping/record scratch noises were really annoying, and whatever the hell that tinkling on the high frequencies of the opening/title track is was legitimately, physically painful to listen to, to the point where I thought that something had to be wrong with my headphones/debated quitting the whole thing then and there.) There are some good moments and decent grooves buried under the avalanche (ha) of unnecessary repetition and too much random noise. If it was playing in the background at a party or something I wouldn’t walk out of the room. But to me that’s pretty much all it’s good for, effectively—background music you don’t think too much about. The guys at Pitchfork can go on and on about how intricately woven this tapestry of sound is (this album sure did find its target audience there) but the thing about creating an album that’s an intricately woven tapestry of sound is that all the weaving in and out of so many tiny fragments of different tracks means that there’s just not much of actual substance to hold onto. Every time something interesting starts happening, it’s played out before I feel like we’ve really explored what’s interesting about it. And every time something interesting starts happening, I think about how I could just go and listen to whatever track they ripped it from in the first place. Ahead of its time, sure, but only in the sense that it predates AI-generated music cobbled together from bits of the existing musical corpus by machine rather than man by a solid twenty years. 2 stars feels a little generous. But again, there are some good moments. And objectively it’s an impressive work of audio engineering. I’ll give it that much, just for that.

I think perhaps if I were an alien creature from Jupiter who did not have any command of the English language or any understanding of human sexual politics I would enjoy some of the beats on this. However in real life I'm a female Earth Person, so, you know. It's not like I'm coming to this exercise expecting to hear a whole lot of respect for women from every album in the compilation but the lyrics on this one are just flat-out *gross* in addition to being dehumanizing. Not a pleasant listening experience. Redeeming qualities? That organ vamp on Earth People? The fact that it (eventually, finally) ended? I don't know. Final verdict: a strong piece of evidence in favor of the theory that the world might be a fundamentally better place for women if men were forbidden from making music. And possibly from practicing medicine as well.

It’s fun! No complaints!