Liked the horns, liked the dark lyrics, emotionally not really a hit for me
I'm not strong enough to resist Adele or a power-pop break up album! But the Lovesong cover just makes me want to listen to the Cure.
Ok, I’m 2001 when I was 16 I read about this album in Rolling Stone, saved some babysitting money to buy it Tower Records in Harvard Square, and then listened to it with Eva on her her Sony boombox sitting on the floor of her room. After that it became part of our regular CD rotation, but I was bored by it then and I’m bored by it now. Why so much vocal distortion? Why so little feeling? Why did I listen to this hundreds of times??
Actually when I finally listened to this last night I decided this album is amazing.
I’ve never heard this before and fell asleep listening to it on the couch and had the most vivid dreams about relationships and break ups and trying to help a drunk man who had lost his cigar and was worried it was going to start a forest fire. So a real sonic mind trip that I think has made me grow as a person.
Not really for me, but watching Kate car dance to Steely Dan IS for me!
This was weird and I liked it!
This was a mixed bag for me. At first I felt like I was really *learning* something about music history, but I don't think its something I'm going to listen to again. But I'm glad to have listened to it once and now I know the origin of Renegades of Funk so I feel like a smarter music nerd!
Wow. I think I want to be Marty Robbins and sing Cool Water and Utah Carol in all black cowboy clothes and make eyes at pretty girls across the saloon.
Morrissey and the Smiths are a real love/hate situation for me. I love Rush and a Push and Girlfriend in a Coma, but I HATE Death of a Disco Dancer, and after about 4 songs Morrissey's voice starts to annoy me. It's always going to be just mixtape singles for me with the Smiths I guess.
What even is this where is the GOOD MUSIC
So many songs!
I do like to think about Iggy Pop wriggling around in hot pink pants and no shirt smeared in peanut butter growl-singing “peneeeTRaaaaation”
I liked this more than I thought I would as a historic Neil Young hater. I still don’t love his voice but I did appreciate listening to this!
I like the drums, I like the synth, I like the bass, I like Isolation. I don't like Ian Curtis' vocals, but it's hard to listen to this album and not think about him and the sad story of his life and hear that in the lyrics.
I got so emotional seeing this as the album of the day! I loved this album so much and it’s such a time capsule for me. I listened to this constantly my senior year of high school, especially developing photos in my high school darkroom. This album smells like darkroom chemicals and feels like unrequited teenage love! My favorites remain Stars of Track of Field, Get Me Away from Here, and my ultimate favorite, Judy and the Dream of Horses. God I love that song! But really this whole album just speaks to me and all my feelings at a very particular point in time AND holds up!
Yeeeessssssssssss soooooo goooooood
Can't believe I've never listened to this straight through before!
I didn't know this band but they sound like Pavement and Dinosaur Jr and remind me of my know-it-all older cousin telling me I "had" to listen to Pavement to understand music in 1997 and I'm still not convinced. But some songs were good.
I wanted to like this but ultimately it was a little underwhelming
My favorite Christmas album!
I had never really listened to the Black Keys and I enjoyed parts of this, but probably won't return to it.
This was fun to listen to! Tom Petty's cover of I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better was one of my mom's favorites for driving around but I think I like the original even more. I like 60s harmonies, I like the Rickenbacker jangle sound, I like Chimes of Freedom better as a 3 minute song than a 7 minute song, sorry Bob Dylan.
I wasn't expecting this to be so jazzy and silly and good, it felt like a Jim Henson muppets broadway show about a naughty school boy with Animal in the title role. I was both rocking out and laughing at the lyrics on Public Animal # 9 "We aint never gonna confess/we cheated on the math test/we carved some dirty words on our desks." lol what that is too silly! Alma Mater was my favorite song and I want the Trash Heap from Fraggle Rock to sing it in the muppet version.
Edited to add that Alice Cooper actually already had this idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmewc2Uqon4
I'm now an Alice Cooper fan, but is this real music??
Honestly kind of a perfect album, dare I say timeless?
Yesssss before listening to this I only knew Human Fly and this album was so fun. Teenage Werewolf kills me. Maybe a little long, maybe a little repetitive as a whole album but I loved it.
Oh no, this was not for me at all. So dramatic! So much synth!
This gets 5 stars for Nasty Naughty Boy as a Song I Want to Have Sex To, minus 2 stars for 2 discs of over produced 90s pop, plus 1 star for Xtina having a very impressive vocal range and a charming dedication to her fan base, minus 1 star for being kind of boring. 3 stars??
I like the idea of shoegaze and the wall of sound in theory, but in practice I can't stand listening to this music. I can really get into an atmospheric sonic trance experience, but there are so many more actually enjoyable examples of that. This music hurts my ears and reminds me of stoner boys from Connecticut in college trying to convince me to get high at 2:00 pm on a Tuesday and listen to this stuff.
I've never heard of this band or any of these songs. I listened to the ten song version of this and liked parts of it, other parts not so much. Did not like Old Pervert at all, but overall this was weird, there were good beats, harmonies, and chunky guitars, all things I like! I Wanna Destroy You and Tonight are my favorites, but why are men so creepy?
I loved this. Staralfur was the stand out song for me on the first listen, I'm going to need to go on a Sigur Ros deep dive after this. Wow music is cool!
This was so good, I really don't know Leonard Cohen except from The Hottest Sex Playlist, and this was a great introduction. So Long, Marianne really is a perfect love song.
This was pleasant, jazz for me is at best pleasant and at worst deeply irritating. It's nice and easy to listen to but the emotional landscape for me is just cleaning the house on a Sunday morning with a lot of coffee. Which is not bad!
I was initially fatigued by the idea of listening to more British punk, but actually I loved this. Short! Tight! Hot! Now I know that Elastica lifted the riff from Three Girl Rhumba for Connection. Surgeon's Girl, Mannequin, and 1 2 X U are so good. Ok I love British punk.
I love drinking coffee and listening to jazz and thinking about the way the light hits the trees and feeling content in just experiencing that moment
Well, I wanted to like this because I do love Freddy Mercury, and some of it was enjoyable. But I guess I just really don’t like ROCK GUITAR SOLOS and there was a lot of that here.
Yes yes yes! I love this album, it was one of my most played in high school. Debbie Harry is too cool, and there are so many fun songs. My favorites are Picture This, Pretty Baby, Fade away and Radiate, Sunday Girl….actually the whole album is amazing. Can you even imagine what it must have been like to see Blondie play at CBGBs in 1978???? Damn what a hot time to be young
I’m a long-time Radiohead hater, but I tried to give this a full listen with an open mind. It’s better than I remember in some ways but I still can’t stand Thom Yorke’s voice and how pretentious it all is.
Hadn't heard of this band or any of these songs and found them pretty cheesy and boring. Deckchairs and Cigarettes really made me cringe, such self-conscious music with actually so little to say. I guess the music was technically good? Really did not enjoy the singer's voice though.
I’ve always been a little put off by Dire Straights, they’re a little too groovy and smooth and noodly guitar solo for me, and “Sultans of Swing” has always felt deeply corny to me. But actually I enjoyed listening to this whole album and the lead singer’s voice is pretty fucking sexy. I just don’t like rock guitar solos!
This one really Bjorked me. At times great at times impossible to listen to at times Bjork is moaning in my ear and I liked it.
Made it through 2.5 songs, then started skipping around. True 80s synth schlock, I was too bored to finish. Take on Me is too overplayed to even appreciate on its own terms at this point.
I listened to this on the train back from Boston looking out the window having existential thoughts about life, relationships, the demise of society, raising children, the inevitable implosion of the earth into the sun, and it was a surprisingly good soundtrack for that. I may have listened to Long Promised Road 10 times but who’s counting. I had always avoided The Beach Boys and now I know I was wrong. 5 stars for conversion!
So happy that I don’t live in Boston in my mom’s house and I can listen to this in my apartment in New York making dinner exactly how I want with no one to boss me around!
Maybe I fell asleep listening to this because it was so good but I’ll never know because I only made it through 4 songs.
Oh THESE guys! Is anyone with boomer parents able to listen to the Beatles objectively? Norwegian Wood, Nowhere Man, Think For Yourself, The Word, Girl, all make me feel icky. Run For Your Life is obviously atrocious. Actually I think this might be my least favorite Beatles album, I don't like John Lennon's songs on this album I'm SORRY I just don't. I do like I'm Looking Through You and If I Needed Someone. Ok I'm a Paul and George fan.
This was pleasant but a little forgettable. I did like Streets of your Town quite a bit.
5 stars for bringing the 90s gay realness. 1 star for actual music quality, I could not listen to this. Ok 2 stars for the epic anthem Goooo WEST!
Damn don't judge an album by it's absolutely ridiculous cover! I thought this album was awesome in its raw, dirty, growling insanity. Dead Joe what a song yell it at me!!
Yeah yeah yeah!!!
Wardance is cool, I got bored by song 7 and had to move on. I do like a chunky industrial guitar though.
I've heard a lot of these songs but the only other time I've listened to the album was on Kate's floor on 12th Street and I was too distracted by the makeout at the time to pay attention to music properly. This time I did and wow what a work of art! I didn't make it all the way through but this is one I will be revisiting.
FINALLY A DIVA!!
I wish I could have select amnesia just to hear Respect for the first time. Do Right Woman, Save Me, A Change Is Gonna Come, there are just so many phenomenal songs on this album.
huh. maybe its all the time I spent as a child listening to my dad's ambient soundscape creations but I actually quite liked this and thought it would be great as a score for that movie that was never made. I wouldn't listen to this casually in one go again but I don't think you're supposed to. pretty esoteric sound nerd stuff to include in this project though.
oh god no. this is why I don't do drugs. ok the drum solo whatever is good I guess but I still hate everything about this.
absolutely not for me. this reminds me of being stuck in traffic with my step father making us listening to Led Zeppelin and feeling car sick except I'm stuck in traffic forever and this shrill man won't stop yodeling and it's actually hell.
Pleasant but not memorable, a bit of a bland wash
I missed this as a thing in 2013 and maybe it would have been a good fit for my last-year-of-law-school-taking-the-bar-in-love-with-a-someone-who-pees-in-a-yogurt-container-being-lonely-in-the-east-village year, but for a first listen now it was just pretty much just ok?
Like Aretha I wish I could hear these songs for the first time again and again.
Honestly this album is kind of all over the place but I just love everything about who Prince was and his energy in the universe and I would give this 5 stars just for starfish and coffee
Better and more fun than I was expecting from a band that has always felt so generic boomer party time to me
I knew the first song on this album and wow it really brought me back! This was a great album to listen to while driving on the Teconic looking at the leaves as the sun set directly into my eyes and melted my brain
Jurassic 5 reminds me of my college roommate and the smell of pot and coffee at 7:00 am. It kind of washed over me at that time but I really enjoyed this as western mass driving music
I don’t understand who could listen to 2 hours of this, I did because I was driving on the teconic and need BOTH HANDS ON THE WHEEL and FULL CONCENTRATION and I did not enjoy it. Unfortunately this came on for the last 2 hours of my drive so it will forevermore feel like traffic on the FDR having to pee
whoooaaaaaa I had completely forgotten about this album but I did in fact buy it in 1999 and listened to it on repeat on my boom box in my bedroom to draw comics. and OMGGGGGGG the WBCN clip to start out Rockafella Skank "who's your fahvorite ahtist?" has there ever been a more Boston moment in the history of Boston?? I cannot objectively review this album because it is apparently, somewhat embarrassingly, integral to my self hood.
I know Check the Rhime of course, but had never listened to this whole album. Rap is not really a go to for me because I can't work or read to it, but listening to this intentionally was great, and is a different kind of listening experience for me. It didn't move me, but it still felt gooooooood in a smooth way.
I really like the orchestral music combined with Tom Waits' voice on this album. Yes to soaring feelings music and dirty whiskey voice! Excuse me while I go weep in a dive bar.
oooookkkkkk Skunk Anansie! I've always avoided listening to this band because I (unjustly) lumped them in with the corny, 90s slickly produced metal scene of Creed and Evanescence and the like, and the first track was a little bit in that territory. BUT I WAS WRONG. this is soooo much cooler and maybe like the real deal and not the watered down radio edit that those bands were? Anyway I wish I was cool enough in the 90s to have been into this because FUCK YEAH CLIT ROCK I'M SORRY I DIDN'T APPRECIATE YOU SOONER.
truly terrible album cover though.
Beautiful and tragic and such an outstanding album. Love you Amy
I get why people think this is good, but I just don't enjoy this. Its corny, it reminds me why I don't like pot or hanging out with people who like pot too much.
It's 6:00 pm June 1995 and I'm 10 years old, we're at my lesbian aunts' house in the Catskills, all the adults have had a least one cocktail and are smoking cigarettes on the deck, I'm eating as much cheese and crackers as I can because it's still at least 3 hours until dinner. Miss Chatelaine comes on over my aunts' outdoor speaker system and I go and find the CD jewel case for Ingenue and stare at k.d's picture for the next hour. The gay feelings swell inside me - do I want to be k.d? I do, but only for the smoldering butch realness. The music is for the lesbian aunties.
I'm pretty uneducated about Jazz and this was one of the reasons I was so excited about this album generator - tell me what to listen to in a genre I don't know how to access! I've heard Take Five, but never in context. This is great. This is a mood I want to live in.
I was biased from the start because I sneaked a peak at your review before listening to this and it was the cutest ever. I haven't made it all the way through this but what I have I loved, I loved the horns squawking in my ears, I loved this as a record of a specific time and place and imagining what it was like to see this live, I loved thinking about Kate listening to this in Las Vegas on a bus, I love the way Kate can appreciate a mood and a moment and how the right music at the right time can capture all of that.
Well this was fine. I understand why this is on the list given the insane cultural impact of We Are Family and I always appreciate a sibling musical outfit. But I think at this point the hit is too ubiquitous to listen to objectively, and the rest of the album kind of fades into a disco haze.
This is the kind of music my parents were too cool to like and so I absolutely love it for the campy musical theater of it all and annoying my cool kid music snob parents. I've never understood if Meatloaf if supposed to be taken seriously, or it's all a big cheesy joke? I guess I don't care, because, yes. I do want to drive a convertible across the desert signing along to this album at top volume.
I tried to listen to this I really did. But I stand by not liking Radiohead, Thom York’s voice makes my skin crawl.
This turned out to be really great music to fold laundry to on a chilly November afternoon! The horns are sexy. Maybe we should watch Shaft?
well this is silly, I'm not really hearing the soul in the soul machine
I thought I wasn't feeling metal today but turns I am feeling metal today! Breaking the Law Breaking the Law Breaking the Law!
Fully biased review of my step-father's favorite album: this album makes me think of Sunday afternoons in January in our triple deckah in Jamaica Plain, feeling cold with 2 sweaters on because we weren't allowed to turn the heat up past 58, the plastic wrap on the windows wafting in the breeze from the poorly fitting windows, and trying to do 9th grade Latin homework in my bedroom while this was blasting in the living room. ugh, hate this album.
I would absolutely have sex with you to this one (side one only though)
About as exciting as doing laundry, and sadly now spotify thinks I want more milquetoast with my breakfast
This kind of music sounds goofy as hell to me, its truly hard to imagine that anyone took this seriously. If it's a joke I like the joke, but I would never actually listen to this for like, pleasure or to feel things.
This is all over the place, so many different tempos and feelings in each song! I kind of liked it but it also made me feel like I was crazy and wanted to get off the jazz-showtune rollercoaster?
I liked some of this! I like Edywn Collins' voice and I have a real weak spot for this kind of 80s dancey post punk. Some boring tracks, but Rip it Up, A Million Pleading Faces, I Can't Help Myself were all hits for me.
nope!
I like REM in theory and Orange Crush is a good song, but this album was never did it for me.
boring! corny! songs for bad TV
I do really love this album, and I have a bit of soft spot for Sufjan Stevens just based on the fact that one time I had a dream that I was taking a shower with him and it was romantic and sexy and maybe I was in love with Sufjan or maybe I was Sufjan???
sounds like a track suit, addidas shell toes, a pack of newports, and an affinity for parkour
this is actually horrible.
One of the interesting things about this project is reading other people's reviews and getting a sense of the really varied responses to certain music. It's not really about how "good" or "bad" the music is on a technical level, it's about that inexplicable quality that music has to reach something deep inside your emotional core and activate your essence and connection to the world.
Reading the reviews for this album so many people have a visceral reaction to Bob Dylan, complaining about his voice, the harmonic, the length of the songs. But those things are the things I love about Bob Dylan, and for whatever reason, his music hits my emotional core every single time. Why do I love Bob Dylan so much but I can't possibly listen to Crosby Stills Nash & Young or basically any prog rock or shoe gaze? It's not a logical response, it's purely emotional and intrinsically linked to time and place.
Listening to this album I can feel my uncle's scratchy living room carpet, the heat of late August in Iowa, and smell the raw silk on my aunt's loom. I remember this album as the first album that I really thought about lyrics, and every time I listen I sort of fade in and out and catch something different. It's not even my favorite Dylan album, that's Blonde on Blonde. But its true, this is an album that I needed to hear.
Fitting name and imagery for a band that embedded it's little nu-metal prickers into my brain for all time through the power of FM radio even though I never liked these songs not even one little bit. I think a major contributor to my miserable adolescence was just the ubiquitously terrible alt-rock music that was popular in the late 90s/early aughts. The kids today are so blessed with their streaming platforms and cornucopia of good music!
Ok this is a really good example of the point I was trying to make in my review for Highway 61 Revisited. I simply cannot connect with Pink Floyd. I know I know I know this album is a masterpiece for many people, and I kind of want to be able to enjoy this like other people seem to, in the same way I'm vaguely envious of people who love smoking pot. But to me this album feels oddly soulless. I think that's the best way I can describe my reaction to this. It's immediately forgettable to me, the songs just don't sink in.
What is the mystery of the soul connection with music? Do different people just vibrate on different frequencies and the genius of music is connecting with your particular existential frequency at the right time and place? Is it just that my father hates prog rock ("too many notes, too much instrumental technique, there's no accounting for taste and this tastes like throw up to me") and so I too must shun all prog rock and instead crave the mournful sounds of foghorns across a dark and dreary New England coastline?
In any case, I didn't hate listening to this, but I won't ever listen to it again and I already forgot the songs.
I got this album on the same day I really started listening to Rosalia's Lux, which resulted in me levitating outside of my body, ascending to a higher plane, and finding god through music. I did put Hotel California on for a few songs, but honestly the best part of getting this album today was reading all the 1 star reviews ripping it apart and then feeling appreciative of all the actually good music I get to listen to.
Don't listen to these guys, blast Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti out the open windows at top volume and know that GOD IS REAL GOD IS ACTUALLY REAL I WOULDN'T JOKE ABOUT THIS as my boyfriend Cameron Winter says.
Sounds like mud? I want to like this but I just don’t really. 2 stars I guess because I think I want to like this
I listened to this on a cold and grey December park run this morning. The progression from Thriller to Beat It to Billie Jean is pretty incredible and made for a really peak running experience. This album also reminds of basement keg dance parties in college in a fun way. I will always want to dance to PYT. Yes not everything holds up but still what an album! Minus 1 star though for The Girl is Mine.
