(1 of 1001) Undeniably iconic, nervous, gangly, twitchy, skronky and beautiful. Rock for girls. I still basically hate it because it's essentially the sound of terribly cool beautiful young people with no real problems getting loaded and having sex, circa 2001, and I was just out of step and not cool or beautiful enough for this to be my soundtrack, it always felt like it was for someone else, and it still does. The overall effect it has on me is honestly a bit depressing, due to my own history and hangups.
Yep, it's Green Day. Bright, brash, cheeky and tuneful, understandable why it was such a huge kerplunk into mainstream music. A ton of bands sounded like this, but like Nirvana, the world just needed an intensely polished and accessible verison of the style to go nuts over. Some of the lesser-heard mid-album songs are pretty good, I can't even hear the hits anymore due to overplay, they just sound like white noise. All things considered the world could have picked a worse band to elevate to their level (and often did).
My God, the influence and impact of this thing... Dr. Dre's entire career could be reconstructed from the first three songs! "We Want the Funk?" Frat brothers and schoolchildren will be singing that for a thousand years! Few bands can be said to have invented a language, fewer still set an indelible template in less than an hour of recorded sound. The definition of funk, the ultimate party album. Deeply black, and sripping with cultural and historical significance. Full of love and bawdy good times, enigmatic, effervescent, hilarious. And the playing! How did they do that shit?
Look, I'll always love "Peace Frog", and who can deny "Roadhouse Blues"? I had this in my blue plastic walkman at age 13 for probably a month, it's seared into my brain. Are the Doors a unique, important, lightning flash of a band? Yes. Is this album cornier than a Thanksgiving shit? Also yes.
Mayfield is an icon and a hero, and his tremulous voice sailing over a sparse funk track is always a pleasure to hear. As an album, there's nothing particularly earth-shattering going on here, but he only made so many albums, and this is indeed one of them.
I guess I just never connected with this band. It's not that I don't like Britpop, or dour indie guitar pop in general, I do. It's not that I don't respect Jarvis and his sexy takes on modern misery, it's just that none of this moves me, particularly, and I find the general tenor, vibe and flavor a little tiresome, a little... flaccid? Maybe if I were a Brit, I dunno. I grew up in the right time period, I like Blur, and I guess Suede is probably fine? Somehow I'm able to tolerate Morrissey, who is a monster, while Jarvis, who seems like a decent bloke, just sort of ruins the whole thing for me with his whispery come-ons? Maybe it's more of my inherent prejudice against music by, for and about beautiful people? It's a mystery, but Pulp does nothing for me.
I have to squint my ears real fuckin hard to get even a faint whiff of that eerie "dawn of rock / old, weird America" power off this knicknack drawer of cornpone cracker horseshit. I guess this was Elvis' first proper "studio album", and by extension the first real rock n roll album to catch fire, so it has profound historical significance, but it's still full of Elvis giggling and hiccuping all over a bunch of lightweight teenybopper garbage. I'm sorry! I feel bad for not appreciating it! It's fuckin' dull!
"Running With the Devil" is worth the price of admission, and there are several other iconic standouts here. The volcanic combination of EVH and Diamond Dave is nothing to be scoffed at, and this album undeniably left a big, greasy mark on rock history. Do I like all of it? Or even most of it? Can't say that I really do, anymore. It's a good object lesson in the difference between cheese and corn: this thing is deeply cheesy, but too genuinely sexy to be corny, even if the sexiness reads a little bit nastier with each passing year.
Impeccable beats from Timbaland at the height of his powers, with Missy reigning over the proceedings with swagger, presence, heart, humor, groove, and bars. Excellent guest features, and a solidly fun and futuristic vibe throughout. This isn't really my kind of music, but it's an easy album to like, no matter what you like.
She's clearly very talented. I have no interest in whatever is going on here, and disliked every second of it.
A sort of rollicking glam cabaret, somewhere between Bowie at his cheekiest, pub-fight T-Rex, a sprinkling of the Stones, and maybe even some proto-Sparks vibes? Awesome oh-so-British dirty-boogie guitar tones, audio clips of motorcycles and fist-fights, some proto-prog atmospherics, and a collection of really solid 70s cock-rock songwriting in a wide variety of moods, complete with shouty harmonies, piano balladry, and pure paeans to the power of almighty rock. Simultaneously quite silly and dead serious. What's not to like?
Of course Sam Cooke is one of the great immortal soul singers of all time, if not the very greatest, but honestly for all the excitement of this live set I've heard other versions of all these songs I just like better, and I'd rather listen to those.
No way am I listening to this band again. Fuck Win Butler. Zero stars.
Here we have arguably the greatest "indie" band of the 1980s and 1990s, with their tighest, fiercest, cleanest, most impressive collection. For this general genre of music it doesn't get a lot better than this. I was struck this listen by the abundance of powerful rock riffs, which one doeesn't always first think of when mentioning Fugazi, as well as their more signature qualities, like the intensely groovy rhythm section and the wild freedom of the mangled dual guitar sonics. Fugazi were my favorite band for many, many years, and I still love them very much. This is probably their best album (I would put In On The Kill Taker second, 13 Songs third, and Steady Diet fourth, but that's just me).
You certainly can't fault this album for consistency of mood and subject matter. Dr. John is the baddest witch doctor in the swamp, and he's going to spend the whole record telling you all about it, over a deeply eerie bed of orchestration that sounds like it was recorded in a rotting juke shack, or possibly on a flatboat off a bayou sandbar. For pure character and vibe, it scores impossibly high marks. The songs may not all be particularly special, but the grooves spool out like clouds of herbal smoke, while languid solos, bird songs, hand drums, and tolling bells drift in and out of the murk. There really isn't anything like this out there, as far as I've ever heard - it's a cinematic character portrait of a true American oddball original.
Fun as hell. Attitude for days. Ground zero psychobilly. Puts me in the best kind of mean mood. Viva la Cramps!
The real shame here is that this doesn't contain either of the two sides of the monster single "Peggy Sue" / "Everyday", recorded the following year. If it had those two songs, this album would contain every Buddy Holly song you'd ever need (well, I guess there's also "It's So Easy"). What is my point? I guess this one of those "almost but not quite a Greatest Hits" albums, and there are really only about three or four songs on here I really love, out of twelve, so, just considered objectively as an half hour's listen to Buddy Holly it leaves me a little frustrated, but that's not really a valid knock against it as an album. It's hugely important! He's an immortal early rock legend!
I had to sit and listen twice because this was so beguiling. One of the only country concept albums, masterfully painted by a true songwriting genius, in a manner that feels utterly effortless, it just flows out of him. Willie is another of those all-time great singers, and this may be his greatest sustained achievement. A masterpiece.
These are some impeccable harmonies, some high-toned chicken-pickin and greasy pedal steel, and some indelible outlaw vibes. Authentic as a faded blue denim button-up shirt and a can of Lone Star beer. A lovely high lonesome voice when he's sad, and a strange giddy joy when he steps forth in that proud dirtbag persona with something like "Drink Up and Be Somebody".
This is I guess what we used to call "college rock", of a particularly anglophonic jangle pop variety... frankly there's not much rock to be had. It's an ambitious collection, with a very British traditional sensibility, they seem to come from the Kinks school, but with a gentle and feminine cast, lots of "sha-la-la"s and "bap-bap-ba"s, and they aspire to a kind of regal Sgt. Pepper / White Album psychedelia, with the English horns and clarinets and phase-drenched passages, but they're also unafraid to make some really confrontational noises with guitar feedback, and there I hear some real pre-figuration of Radiohead in various places. They also touch on those obligatory faux-dub and faux-rave sounds that were making the rounds at the time - down that road lie the Mondays, and further on you have your Inspirals, Soup Dragons, EMF. It all kind of evokes that general era to me. It's not my thing really but I can't say it's unpleasant or poorly constructed, it's quite a nice record.
I got through about four songs. This stupid fucking thing is 75 minutes long! Zero stars. The thing about the "no redeeming qualities" charm of punk rock is that there actually are a lot of redeeming qualities, they just fly in the face of conventional taste, and appear juvenile to those outside the target audience. If this has any redeeming qualities I couldn't begin to tell you what they are... and I was young when this came out, so I feel entirely qualified to say that this sucks ass.
A truly beautiful and unique album, but a very difficult listen, partly because of the disturbed darkness of the sonics and the subject matter, but mostly because it thrusts me back mentally to the days of its release, one of the darkest times in my life, when I listened to it obsessively and it brought me no solace. This was my first full listen in probably 20 years, and I kind of doubt there will be another. Some things are best left behind.
This is another one I had to listen to twice, in a (vain) attempt to absorb it all, the experience was like trying to eat a rhinoceros between two slices of bread. You can see all these threads coming together in this band, in their specific time and place: the full flowerings of prog and glam, with both drifting deep into the theatricality of Broadway and vaudeville, plus the nascent emergence of what would become the 1980s template for arena-friendly butt-rock, a genre that Queen would own thoroughly within a few years. Mostly I'm struck by just the wild imagination on display here, in harmonic choices specifically but also in song structure, instrumentation, choice of subject matter... they aren't really "for me", I find their everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach tiring and their overbearing high-drama exhausting, but how can you not respect them for their towering musical skills and absolute uniqueness as a band?
This is an unusual cocktail. At its core, this has the bones of early aughts coke-snot rock, a la Strokes, Arctic Monkeys, etc, but instead of drawing an aesthetic from the Lou Reed / Television NYC art scum world, this band instead takes their style (at least to my ears) from 60s re-hashers like Trip Shakespeare, Dukes of Straosphear, and the whole Paisley Underground set, with some extremely direct nods to origin acts like the Doors, the Byrds, and improbably, quite a bit of Beefheart. It's hard for me to read this as anything but kitschy pastiche, and I have to wonder who, apart from the band members, was interested in this exact stylistic collision... but the they do go at it with some gusto, and they keep things in a well-defined space with an overall nautical theme to the lyrics and a tremolo-drenched guitar sound. Good for them, I guess.
This is kind of impossible to hear objectively with the decades of accumulated layers encrusted over it, from Fugazi and from the various punk movements it inspired and influenced. It's deep, earnest self-righteousness is a little eye-rolling to me now, but that's not really fair. It was a massive (sub)cultural moment at its release, even if it's a little baffling today. Still has an unstoppable energy and sounds like a shot of undiluted youth, which I suppose it is and always will be.
This is a tough one to rate, it comes out of the gate swinging with "Tiny Dancer" and "Levon", two absolute all-time killer songs, and then the rest is... just fine? I mean, he and Bernie weren't writing any clunkers in this era, and "Holiday Inn" is pretty nice, but to call this top-heavy or front-loaded would be a bit of an understatement. Three stars I guess?
Another album that has become completely inaudible due to a virtual Pompeii of layered memories, thoughts, feelings, and experiences over the decades. Is it good? It has to be, to me, I guess, since it was so instrumental in the shaping of my aesthetics. Beyond that, who can really say?
It pains me to call this a three-star album... the title track and "Mercy, Mercy Me" are two of the greatest soul songs ever written and recorded, and the entire album has such a chill, sweet, spiritual, peaceful, joyous vibe... but the other songs are just largely not doing much for me. Kind of sounds like they just continued to play the "big" songs for another few minutes and Marvin vamped in some lyrics on other topics. These also-rans would surely be highlights for a lesser artist, but there you go, for me this is a couple of jaw-dropping singles and a bunch of filler.
Maybe it's hindsight being 20/20, but I hear the doom in this. An absolute comet from the blue, of re-imagined music from another age, delivered with unearthly power and haunted by addiction and loss. Where was there to go from here? Was there ever any chance of her settling into some version of "My Way" and enjoying a career maturity?
You know, there was a very specific window in my life when this could have been a really significant album for me, somewhere around age 27-29 when I was obsessed with "authentic modern country" like Steve Earle, Alejandro Escovado, Fred Eaglesmith, all that No Depression stuff... feels like a lifetime ago, and now I can only give this a sort of genial thumbs up and admit that I don't give much of a damn about this genre anymore. I guess this is actually pretty remarkable for coming out in 1978, it feels very much like a mid-90s alt-country thing, more on the milder, rootsier, Tex Mex end of that spectrum than the rockin end.
Not since Fetch the Bolt Cutters have I been so bored and annoyed by something that is so clearly a work of genius. At least I made it through this one, and there were at least a few enjoyable moments on here for me; Bjork has wonderful pop instincts even at her most willfully abstruse.
I mean, what can one say? Is this the greatest rock album ever made? Quite possibly.
You know, it's funny. I vividly remember a late 20s obsession phase with this album, but somehow it's only now that I really clock what's happening: a Clash-era britpunker is doing a full-on pastiche of Phil Spector malt shop greaser jukebox sock hop doo wop. It's not even subtext, it's about as subtle as blackface! It's Rocky Horror! The joke, though, is that the twerp doing it is actually a genius broadsheet raconteur, so he's able to sort of indeliably pickle this cultural moment in a way that echoes out forever. "Watching the Detectives" is a perfect cultural wrapup, now we have that Jamaican wave breaking over the chip shop horn rim checkerboard business, innit?
What strikes me about this collection, now, or one of the things, is that here you really see John and Paul emerging as their early personas: Paul as the impish charmer with a gift for rhythm and melody (a la Can't Buy Me Love) and John as the tortured, jealous self-styled Brando, James Dean Lothario womanizer type (on some really brutal tracks like You Can't Do That) and it's such a schism of mood that it allows young George to come peering through the cracks here with a song or two... this is a moment where you can really see what thrilled and terrified the culture, this biblical choir with raw teen horniness at the root, angels with dirty faces, the band becoming themselves.
The greatest use of two electric guitars by a single band, at least until the advent of Fugazi. A beautiful, dark, mesmerizing, gritty work of downtown art-damaged genius, never to be equaled in this world or any other. Seminal, foundational, iconic, all that and more.
