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.

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!

I mean they’re just all bangers

Like, this shit is DEVOID of substance, bro First album I’ve encountered where I genuinely can’t understand why ANYONE would believe it belongs on this list. I don’t even know if I can say that I hated it because it wasn’t even interesting enough to hate. But I definitely can say that every tedious second all of these dull repetitive thudding/scraping/gurgling/beeping sounds played for was a second I spent being keenly aware that I was never going to get to have that time back to spend on listening to music that feels like it might actually speak to someone’s human emotional experience. Not a pleasant way to spend an hour and seventeen minutes (!!!) of my afternoon. One star experience, in fact. Sorry

Second day in a row I’ve gotten one of the twenty albums listed under “lowest rated” on the global stats page? What are the odds. Actually I did the math. Taking into account that I had 1089 - 27 = 1062 albums to go before this occurred the odds were (20/1062)*(19/1061) = ~0.034%. I guess I did get one of the *top* twenty albums a few days ago so maybe it’s only fair. Well anyway. I hate to be basic and follow the crowd, but, like, yeah, I didn’t really enjoy this one any more than yesterday’s, so, in my opinion there's a pretty good. reason they're both down there in the rankings. At least this one was half an hour shorter than Haunted Dancehall? I would say, at least it had vocals and should thus have been a little more interesting to listen to than Haunted Dancehall's aimless beeping, but actually the vocals might have been my least favorite part of this album. I had a Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds album just this past Saturday that I enjoyed (Abbatoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus), so I know that the guy is capable of producing vocalizations that don't make me feel like joining in on the other side of his one-way screaming match, but he really didn't do it for me here. :/ One star again. Sorry. I can only pray the next one I get is a little more fun. Maybe this is just the cosmic price I have to pay for getting to spend last Sunday with Ziggy Stardust (#8 highest rated in the global stats, also for good reason)? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

…. are you even FUCKING serious right now lmao Okay, context. I spent much of my review of Thursday’s album complaining about how my Wednesday and Thursday albums were two of the twenty lowest-rated albums on the global stats page (and justifiably so, in my opinion) and concluded with a wish for something more fun. And after a brief, admittedly fun interlude spent with A Tribe Called Quest on Friday, my Saturday album is the lowest-rated one in the entire book. I’m starting to feel that my generator isn’t really being entirely random with me right now… did I offend the Music Guy gods when I called Since I Left You “fanfiction by and for men who spend too much time on Pitchfork”? Is this some attempt to force me to get with the Pitchfork program? This album has a 9.5/10 on that website, incidentally, which is a fact that only makes me more convinced than ever that the people who run and frequent it are more interested in the idea of themselves as Cool Enlightened Music Appreciators than they are in the idea of actually appreciating music. I’m sorry but I really do find it hard to believe that anyone puts this kind of thing on and just, like… enjoys it. But I guess I shouldn’t say these things in reviews anymore lest I have to deal with some even crazier shit tomorrow. RIP All that said. I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t hate this *quite* as much as I hated the Wednesday/Thursday double whammy? There were a few moments. Maybe two or three moments. Probably all of those moments happened on AB/7A. The thing about this album is that any rave reviews it gets are all applauding it for being So Very Fascinating (no one, of course, is brave enough to commit to the obvious and objective lie that the music is Good) but I just don’t see it, really. What’s fascinating about overhearing your neighbors to either side having barely-intelligible conversations with people through the walls (Valley of the Shadow of the Death)? What’s fascinating about the ramblings of a six year old layered over a crying baby and some vague synth noises (Hometime)? I am willing to concede that Hamburger Lady is pretty notably repulsive if you listen to it closely. But that’s mostly down to the lyrics, and the band didn’t even write the lyrics—they took them from a letter written by some other guy. My overall impression of this album: a series of vaguely creepy soundscapes that get a little creepier if you start thinking about them a little harder, but, like, why would you bother. You could spend the time doing literally anything else. If I don’t get something I can feel justified giving at least two stars to for at least the next two days in a row I am going to scream and bang on things for forty-five minutes, record it all with my shitty laptop microphone, add some synth, release it on vinyl, and eagerly await my well-deserved critical acclaim. Please. I am one month into this project. By all rights I shouldn’t have had to deal with this much shit yet. Have mercy

Certainly nothing to complain about here. I love having an excuse to end up on the Cole Porter Wikipedia page. Good stuff

Debated with myself a bit on whether to go two or three stars on this one. If it was half the length it is I would probably have been debating between three and four. I didn't have strong negative feelings about any individual track (and on most of them I skewed positive-of-neutral) but 130 minutes of this stuff... it's a lot. But I get that they were going for the whole campfire-evening-with-the-band vibe, and I respect that—it makes sense for the kind of music this is. Earns the three from me in the end.

Can I make a confession. Can I say something that’s going to make some people very mad. I don’t like Imagine. The track, I mean. The rest of the album’s fine, or better than. Crippled Inside? Banger. Oh Yoko!? Banger. How Do You Sleep? Jesus Christ but I’d hate to be Paul McCartney listening to that one. Banger, though, for better or worse. Jealous Guy? Jesus Christ but I’d hate to be Paul McCartney listening to that one, for an entirely different reason. Doesn’t it just tear your heart out? (Yes, I am a “Jealous Guy is about Paul” truther. While I’m out here saying things that are going to piss a certain kind of Lennon fanboy off anyway I might as well get that one off my chest too.) Isn’t that piano just the most beautiful thing? …But Imagine? Like yeah I mean personally I don’t think he deserved to die for it but those lyrics from his voice at that point in his life… they do grate. They wouldn’t even be good lyrics coming from anyone else, to be honest. Some “Karl Marx for two year olds” shit we’re all supposed to pretend is profound. And the melody and instrumentation are not interesting. Sorry! It would bother me a lot less if it weren’t for the entire rest of the world deciding that it’s his masterpiece and playing it twelve thousand times. But as it is… I just don’t get it. I say enough! Stop it with that song! So I’m knocking off a star for that. Still, it does earn the other four, though, I think. My feelings about John Lennon at this point in my life are much more complicated than I have time to get into right now (maybe whenever John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band turns up in my queue I'll give that particular topic its due. Or maybe when I get Rubber Soul…) but I can and will say: I do respect him for being brave enough to so often put the ugliest and most vulnerable parts of himself out there into the public eye for us to pass judgement on. Probably he shouldn’t have done all that, to be honest—I don’t think it was any better for him than the primal scream therapy, in terms of actually leaving him in a mental state conducive to leading a healthy and productive life during much of his last decade. But it means I get to listen to Jealous Guy, so for me it's a win.