The ambition is apparent. A pagan fever dream about witch trials and hysteria. I respect it more than I want to play it. Art score = 4. But here we go 2.
Tie for me with Dice Clay as best Rick Rubin production of '91.
Timeless. The product of collective genius. Imagine being in the room, hearing those first takes with Coltrane, Evans and Cannonball???
Forgot how much he was leaning into being an insufferable gink at this point in time...and he just kept going, huh? But damn the album is strong end to end.
28 minutes of intricate guitar work, faint piano, and Nick Drake's voice. Listening to that elemental palette never quite gets old.
A six-part jazz ballet with liner notes by his therapist...in 1963?! Thank you, KING MINGUS, for this symphonic séance of self-dissection.
Brings me back to the days of Kaiser Chiefs and Razorlight. Franz always felt a level sharper than those chaps, but once Arctic Monkeys landed a couple years later, they stole the whole scene. Franz just missed it for me. Maybe a bit too prancey.
Official rating is 4.55. I really do cherish Schmilsson and that vaudeville charm. Eccentric, funny, and yet still heartfelt...Nilsson that offbeat pop master at his absolute best.
A guy waltzed into apartheid-era Johannesburg, jammed with some of the best musicians on the planet, and came back to the States with an Album of the Year and one of the most beautifully built records of the decade. So vivid and radiant.
Tough spot here...already gave Kind of Blue five stars, and Bitches Brew isn’t far behind. Gotta respect how it made the jazz establishment clutch their pearls. Helps when you marry someone twenty years younger who turns you on to Hendrix, Sly, and psychedelia. Miles heard the future and plugged straight into it.
Blur always edged out Oasis for me - more art-school mischief, less pint-glass bravado. When they veered into American indie territory, chasing Pavement and Sonic Youth, things got deliciously strange. Still, Britpop never fully caught me until The Libertines showed up and set it on fire with poetry and ruin.
Dookie was the first cassette I ever bought, so Green Day will always hold a grain of nostalgia for me. Even then they felt like punk with a stylist and a press kit, and American Idiot sealed it, where every chorus could score a Super Bowl ad.
Wild timing...Brown Sugar hit my queue the same day D’Angelo died. Someone at HQ scripted that, right?! The record is all glow and silk, a slow exhale of soul and smoke. It shows the promise his later work would fulfill, but he’s still coloring within the lines here. Reverent to the past (Marvin, Stevie, Prince) without yet transcending it.
Ice Cube breaks off from N.W.A. and just goes off. Props for jetting from LA to New York to link up with the Bomb Squad and their wall-of-sound chaos. It’s powerful and furious, more mission than melody, and opposite of subtle.
A blister pack of pure polish and airbrushed joy. Arrival is the national anthem of a fantasy world where everything sparkles just a little too brightly...a place so perfect it’s almost creepy.
Steve Howe's first album with Yes, and everything levels up. That Gibson 175 conjures a majestic cathedral of tone. Quite crisp, indeed...yet in need of some grime, a little danger, a shake of chaos to disturb all this cosmic order.
I'm part of the faction that slights this one as Radiohead’s hangover record. Considering what Kid A and Amnesiac were, it’s understandable. Brilliant in fragments, yet blurred as a whole. It’s more collage than cohesion, and to me, that doesn’t hold a candle to the immersive worlds they’re so skilled at building.
These days I need at least a trace of listenability in the noise I intentionally consume. I’m getting old, ok? I look towards other mediums for that type of transcendence. So sorry, D.O.A., you might have created here the blueprint for industrial and noise, but I still say, ciao bella.
Throw on Miss Judy's Farm, or sure, Stay With Me...I might nod along. But I've done the calculations and have a roughly 5-minute threshold for Rod Stewart yips and yaps.
My childhood soundtrack was my dad’s car cassettes: either James Bond scores or Frank Sinatra. So this one hits pure nostalgia. Nobody from the crooner era touches Sinatra’s effortless tone. Hard to believe Columbia dropped him, only for him to return and conjure something this smooth with Nelson Riddle. Every line is silk, every phrase perfectly timed.
Funny coincidence that Songs for Swingin’ Lovers was my last review, where I mentioned that Sinatra cassette always played by my dad on car rides. For many of my friends, Billy Joel was their fathers’ chosen prophet. I never caught the bug back then, never really listened. Maybe I wasn’t old enough. Now, in the era where stillness carries its own charge, I finally hear the appeal. Vienna is a revelation, and The Stranger holds together like a great novel. Melodic, wise, and self-aware in all the right ways.
Political and sonic sophistication meet in perfect collision. The Bomb Squad conjures a chaos so intricate it becomes order, a mosaic that shouldn’t work but swings with purpose. Chuck D transmits like a prophet behind the mic, calling out the FBI, COINTELPRO, and the media decades before “surveillance state” or “fake news” became household terms. It's the sound of rebellion mixed, mastered, and made immortal.
Didn’t expect to see this one pop up on the list. I remember it well and always thought The Thrills were West Coast kids. But no, they were Dubliners weaving Irish melancholy into Laurel Canyon daydreams. Smooth listening that still works with its half sunshine, half homesickness.
Serve me up a cup of this bayou swamp water. A tip of the cap to Dr. John. He gets his finger shot off and somehow channels it into the birth of voodoo funk. I think I’ll take the moss and mud of this psychedelia over the peers of the time chasing sitars and outer space.
Nobody else could’ve played San Quentin State Prison in ’69. The connection between Cash and the inmates pulses through every song. You can feel the tension, the humor, and the shared defiance in the room. Hard to think of a moment like this ever happening again. Pure, raw American myth captured on tape.
