1001 Albums Summary

First of all, "La femme d'argent" is an absolute classic. Sounded very different to anything else in the mainstream at that time. I'd forgotten how many great songs are on this album. Everything sounds quite 70s, even if there's a lot of electronica and vocal effects. The first half of the album has a pretty amazing 6 song run. Unfortunately, the second half is a bit low energy after that. No surprise that I'm less familiar with the songs in the second half - back in the 90s, I probably zoned out or bailed after "Remember". Still a really great album overall that holds up very well.

Meh. Every song is very samey. I really really liked the older Black Keys stuff like Attack & Release, but I feel like this album was the turning point when they pulled a "Kings of Leon" and watered down the rawness of their sound and became too bland.

This album always reminds me of Fat Freddy's pizzeria back in the early 90s. Someone who worked there played this album on repeat. So, in my head, that's what this is: inoffensive background music. I know I'm in the minority, but I could never appreciate Van Morrison, no matter how much I tried. I can understand that these are decent songs, the musicianship is good, and his voice is what it is, but it all feels very "beige" to me. On the plus side, relistening to this now in my old age, I did very much enjoy "And it stoned me" and the higher energy parts (like the end of the song "Moondance"). But the rest of the album remains as inoffensive background music in a pizzeria to my ears.

There's no easing into this album. The sound of Neil's double drop D distorted "Old Black" Les Paul guitar slaps you in the face from the very first second of Cinnamon Girl - it's one hell of a way to get your attention. The unpolished rawness of the guitar mixed with the very polished harmonies and melodies feels like Neil was laying down the groundwork for Nirvana. I can imagine Nick Cave listening to "Down by the River" for the first time, taking notes. Speaking of, that guitar solo is one of my all-time favorite things. Sticky, rough and clumsy in all the right ways, dipping in and out, and for such a long solo, not self-indulgent in any way, simply lifting the energy of the song and augmenting it in the best possible way. What more can I say about this, except that it's an absolute classic, that paved the way for so many bands, especially in grunge and alt rock.

I don't know if hearing this back in the 80s would have made it a different experience, but I never understood the appeal of Michael Jackson. Of course there are some great songs, but to call this a great album is a serious stretch in my opinion. Bland overproduced disco pop for the most of it. Thriller (the song), Beat It and Billie Jean are standout songs, and the only part of this album I could properly stomach. Not my taste, sure, but objectively I can't see how this is considered one of the great albums beyond the 80s hype.

I have to say, I didn't know much about Solomon Burke before today. Obviously, I immediately recognised "Cry to me", but interestingly I also recognised The Rolling Stones. I know they've covered him before, and even played live with him on stage, but it's moreso that I recognized the building blocks of that early Rolling Stones sound: the bright clean guitar soloing away as the singer continues, not waiting for a break, but working together; and the seamless switching between speech and singing; I couldn't listen to "If you need me" without hearing "Time is on my side". All that is a good thing. I'm a big fan of the Stones, and I can see why they're big fans of Solomon Burke. An amazing voice, great energy and fantastic songwriting. Happy to have discovered this.

Bank in the day, I was never a Pulp fan. I thought that Jarvis Cocker was a very funny and interesting guy, but I could never gel with their music. It felt too posh and full of itself. Having given this album another chance, I feel I get it a bit more now. Some very witty lyrics and a great run of songs from the start. I did find my attention waning towards the end of the album, and some of the "breathier" Jarvis vocals were starting to get a bit on my nerves. But, I have to say overall that I was pleasantly surprised by this album.

Peter Gabriel, the mad flower cosplaying loon. I'd never sat down to listen to this album in full. It starts off in proper prog rock territory with the madcap "Moribund the Burgermeister", and I'm instantly hooked. I haven't heard anything like this before, and I love it. "Solsbury Hill" might be hard to listen to without imagining a terrible romcom movie trailer, but the guitar work is stellar, and reminiscent of peak Simon and Garfunkel. This album keeps me on my toes. I really don't know what to expect with each song. It's so surprising and unique. "Excuse me", in particular gets my attention. It sounds like Randy Newman crossed with The Beach Boys, but with a theatrical madman at the helm. There are dips in the album, and they tend to be the more sane tracks. But all in all, I'm completely sold on this album. It got my attention from the start and makes me want to dive deeper into the rest of his solo discography.

Pretty impressive that Shuggie played almost every instrument on this album. I'm not really into this type of soul, but I can appreciate the musicianship and songwriting here. Some of these songs take unexpected, sometimes psychedelic turns, which makes for an interesting and enjoyable listen throughout. Overall, very enjoyable soulful album that feels like it's verging on experimental at times.

Quiet, calm but with bursts of urgency, it's Cat Stevens' voice that makes this album work so well. Some absolute classics here, musically augmenting both Cat's voice and lyrics perfectly. The last song on the album, the title track, remains one of my all-time favourite songs. It starts so small, with the fragmented piano piece. It feels like you're in a tiny room with Cat Stevens sitting at his piano right across from you, noodling, improvising, trying to figure out a new song. And then out of nowhere it swells into this huge, emotional burst. All in the space of a single minute. It grabs you straight away and then just keeps building until it suddenly cuts off, leaving you kind of stunned. Very close to 5 stars. Let's call this 4.5 stars.

Nick Drake is sort of timeless. While his sound is quite similar to Stormbringer! era John Martyn, it feels like it could have been released this year and fit in perfectly too. There's something about these songs that feel so genuine and real. It's like the songs are just pouring out of him. The tuned down guitar gives everything a darkness and a moody feel, but nothing on this album feels depressing. Some really great melodies and exceptional acoustic guitar playing. And that's all we get. Besides a tiny bit of piano in the title track, it's stripped back to just a voice and a guitar, but often feels like so much more. A timeless classic.

I've never been much of a fan of Justin's music. In fact, I've always said that he should have concentrated on comedy, where I think he is really truly talented. But, keeping an open mind while listening to this, I have to concede that he (along with the Neptunes) does indeed have some good songwriting chops. "Senora" is a very catchy tune, "Like I Love You" sounds a bit like something early N*E*R*D might have come out with, and "Rock Your Body" has some questionable beatboxing in it. On the better side of pop music, and at least it's not completely manufactured nonsense. The standout is "Cry Me A River". Catchy and intelligent songwriting, it's genuinely a great song. Unfortunately the rest of the album is filler. Justin is trying his best to emulate early Michael Jackson in a more-RnB-than-disco setting, and it all feels quite bland. It's the songs where he's not trying to sound like something from "Off the Wall" or "Thriller" that show some of the talent he has. But, ultimately besides a few decent songs, and one great one, I'm still hoping he concentrates on his comedy career.

"It's a lot of isolated people, who know how to control and operate electricity. They sneak a listen to American radio, and they get what's going on in Europe as well, and they kind of misunderstand it in a very beautiful way." Björk's description of the Icelandic music scene to Conan O'Brien, is a perfect description of the sound that The Sugarcubes introduced to the world. This album was very much an introduction to the Icelandic music scene. But, more than anything else, it was an introduction to Björk. The album, while not originally intended to be taken seriously, blends Krautrock, post-punk, electro and pop into something that sounded very fresh at the time. But it's mostly the fevered energy levels that hold all of this together. You can't listen to these songs without imagining Björk skipping (literally) around the stage, while the other band members switch between guitars, synths, brass and megaphones. Some of the more pretentious spoken-word heavy, Krautrock-inspired, post punk pieces haven't aged as well as other songs on the album ("Delicious Demon" and "Sick for Toys" I'm glaring in your direction). But, the songs that focus more on Björk, and her incredible, alien vocals, more than make up for it. It might seem obvious to jump on "Birthday" and "Deus", but it's hard to listen to this album and not concentrate solely on the massive talents of Björk. "Birthday" still holds up as an amazing piece of music. The instrumentation works so well to augment the absolutely mind-blowing vocal gymnastics that Björk unleashes on our ears. I still don't think there's a single voice in music that could come close to Björk's, both in ability and uniqueness. A fantastic album, with some flaws, but an important moment in music history, when the world was introduced to the beautiful misunderstandings of the Icelandic music scene, and more importantly, to the artistic brilliance of the crazy little pixie with the gigantic voice that we all know and love as Björk.

I fully appreciate the musicianship of this. The piano playing is exceptional. I also really appreciated how relaxed and confident a performer she was, dealing with moments waiting on the rest of the band with a cool charisma. But, this style of soft jazz isn't really my thing. I can imagine it would work better in the context of the 50s, but to me, it sounds a lot like something you'd hear in a hotel bar on holidays (think "Lost in Translation").

Sugar sound very nineties. Early nineties grunge rock to be more precise. So specifically early nineties grunge rock, that I can imagine Beavis and Butthead interrupting "Hoover Dam" to make "is this a god dam(n)?" quips. But I did really like this album overall. You can see the influence that "Nevermind" had here, in focusing on simple, punchy melodies, with bright distorted guitars. But, it lacks the originality and rawness of Nirvana. In fact, for the sake of this album, let's stop the comparisons there. "A Good Idea" could be a Pixies song. In fact, I think it is. It's called "Debaser" though. Still, the chorus distinguishes itself enough to not feel like a complete rip-off. Anyways, something that sounds like Debaser is always going to be enjoyable. "The Slim" takes off. Definitely the best song on the album. The building guitars tap into some frequency tuning in your brain, and it's fantastic. I really can't get enough of that song. The rest, well, verge into cheesy territory a bit too much for my liking. All in all though, a very enjoyable album, that feels very much of its time. I'd call this one 3.5 stars.

I had the wrong idea about Teenage Fanclub. They were always on the peripherals of my music taste, but I somehow never actually listened to them. I always thought they were a noise-rock, post-punk, shoegaze type band, a la Sonic Youth or the likes. Instead, they're bright and poppy rock, melody-focused with polished vocal harmonies. There are moments when you feel that the band I thought they were, start to show up, with the dissonant tones of distorted guitar noise creeping in. But it's always in the background of the very straight-forward poppy song melodies. "The Concept" is a really great song, and a great opener. I can hear the influence this band have had on Carseat Headrest, and in particular Ash. In fact, I hear Ash all through this album. "Satan" gives me the noise rock that I was expecting and I think for a moment that this album is going in a different direction. But it doesn't. Instead, it settles in for simple, polished, guitar-driven pop-punk. Some great, catchy tunes here, but knowing of the acclaim this album gets, I do feel like I'm missing something at times. Most of the album sounds like the positive cousin of the Jesus and Mary Chain. It all feels very young and optimistic. I guess that's the point. I don't mean to sound too negative about this album, because I'm not. I quite enjoyed it, even if it wasn't what I was expecting. Some great songs here, extremely catchy. A solid 3.5 star album.

So, totally not my taste in music. Big disclaimer. I did listen with an open mind though. Unfortunately, it didn't convert me to speed metal, or whatever this is called. I just don't fully understand the appeal. The positives? I feel like there might have been a good deal of irreverent humour in here. My favourite songs were "Jesus Built My Hotrod" and "Scare Crow". But, I suppose the main reasons being that both of these songs were the furthest from speed metal on the album. "Scare Crow" sounded a bit like a Smashing Pumpkins song (without the atmosphere), and "... Hotrod" sounded like a piss-take of a hillbilly/rockabilly ditty. Anyways, not for me, but I gave it a go.

Adele has a great voice. But she's a victim of being overplayed. I tried to listen to this album objectively, but it's hard when these songs have been played to death on every radio station, advert, TV show and as background music while you shop for groceries. Trying to get past all of that and treat these songs as if it's the first time I've heard them, the album starts off very well with "Rolling in the deep" and "Rumour has it". They both have a great Memphis blues feel to them. But, outside of that bluesy/souly sound, good chunks of the rest of the album feel very overproduced and unmemorable, opting to showcase Adele's voice over songwriting. "Someone Like You" finishes the album off on a very, very strong note. A simple song, with a simple melody and straight-forward lyrics, but it feels very genuine and real. And her voice is absolutely incredible in this song, working with the lyrics to lift the emotion of the song.

Scott Walker perplexes and fascinates me. Of course, I discovered him through Radiohead, but at first I couldn't quite understand how a 70s crooner could be such an inspiration on so much of the modern, contemporary music that I love. And then I heard "It's Raining Today", and I was frozen to the spot. We'll save that for when Scott 3 comes up on this list. This album doesn't seem like that Scott Walker. It feels more like "part of the Scott Walker origin story". Having listened to Scott 3 and Scott 4, this album feels like a stepping stone en route towards the more experimental work he'd do there. Sounding like a score to a 70s Hollywood movie set in Italy, the thing that makes the songs on this album stick out are the lyrics. They're quite risque and out there, talking very openly about encounters with prostitutes, STDs and sometimes brash tales of sexual experiences. The strings are pretty epic at times. "The Amorous Humphrey Plugg" and "Come Next Spring" in particular. The one song that sticks out the most to me on this album is "Plastic Palace People". This is a real sneak peak of the direction of what was to come. It feels like three songs stitched together with some pretty interesting transitions, and at times using either a delay effect or possibly overdubbing two separate (and different) vocal performances at the same time to create an unnerving and unique feeling. Overall, an enjoyable piece, that acts more as a milestone on the path towards those next two albums where the really interesting side of Scott Walker came out. In his own words, talking about this album: "Now the nonsense must stop, and the serious business must begin."

Brian Eno is obviously a musical genius. But he's also a lot more - he's a proper artist, equally as interested in the process of creativity, as the output. And that's very obvious on this album. Going into the studio with nothing, and using the restrictions of his "Oblique Strategies" cards to funnel creative exploration is a proper artist focused on the act of creativity. But that's not saying that the output captured in the studio, what I'm listening to right now, isn't something great. It really is. But it equally feels like it captured a moment of artistic creativity, rather than a predefined song represented in a recording. This entire act, using the restrictions of the Oblique Strategies, brings about some pretty unique sounds. I often can't tell what instrumentation is used, and I believe that's because so much of this is created using crazy techniques like guitar digital delay feeding back into itself, or playing string instruments with hammers or other madcap ideas in experimentation. What comes through in the album is a collection of brilliant moments in artistic experimentation. Every single song is completely unique, approached from a different perspective, very experimental, but always melodic and enjoyable.

The first Stone Roses album is the first time I heard dance music finally blending with guitar music in a decent way. You can hear the Madchester scene being born in real time on this album, and at the same time the early blueprints of what would become Britpop. There’s a real arrogance to it too. I mean, they literally tell us that "Waterfall" is such a good song that it works in reverse. The arrogance is deserved too. "She Bangs the Drums", "Made of Stone" and "Shoot You Down" are absolute classics, to name but a few in the album. "I Am the Resurrection" shifts gear at the end of the album into that brilliant, endless jam. And, that's followed by "Fool's Gold". It feels like everything has been building up to this - John Squire layers on guitar riffs on top of a groove and beat that works as well in a nightclub as it does on stage in an indie venue. They might not have made a lot more after this (shout out for the criminally underrated "Second Coming"), but the impact of this album is enough for the legacy of the Stone Roses to still be felt today.

I’m not really into this kind of music. Soul, R&B has never really been my go-to. But Al Green’s Let’s Stay Together is what I call an "exception" album. It’s like Beck’s "Odelay" - even if it’s not the sort of thing you'd normally listen to, it’s one of those albums that everyone seems to have in their collection regardless. Why? There's some great songwriting here for a start. Or maybe it's because of his incredible voice, shifting from smooth to raw to almost breaking apart, and it keeps you hooked. It’s no surprise Tarantino dropped the title track into Pulp Fiction. It has a real vibe of "cool" to it. I might not be a soul guy, but this one is in my collection.

It's fitting that this was released in 1980 because it sounds like a band transitioning from punk to new wave. "Pretty Green" has an Adam Ant feel to the verse, but a more punk rock feel to the chorus. "Monday" is a great song, and feels ahead of its time. "Set the House Ablaze" feels like blueprints laid down for Bloc Party. "Music for the Last Couple" feels like it's verging into ska. Then there are what I call "the Beatles tracks". Weller openly said that he was "inspired by" Revolver when making this album. Ahem. "But I'm Different Now" sounds like a Revolver track on amphetamines. That bass line is Macca on speed. It's incredible. And then there's "Start!", or as I like to call it, "Taxman". Come on Paul, there's inspiration and there's just taking a full Beatles song and renaming it. Regardless, these songs are all very catchy and enjoyable to listen to. "That's Entertainment" is by far the best song on the album. Clever, witty lyrics painting a picture of urban living, and an excellent, original song that's in a class of its own. Getting over the shameless pickpocketing of the Beatles, I was very torn between 3 and 4 stars for this, but on a few repeat listens, it deserves the latter.

Nope. I just don't understand this genre of music at all. I don't understand the appeal. The only song I could stomach was "Orion", and that's mainly because it didn't sound like the Metallica of the rest of the album. Not for me.

Weird choice to have this album on here. If this is here and "Back to Black" isn't, there's something very strange going on. I like Amy Winehouse. I think she had some really clever songwriting and brilliantly produced (thanks to Mark Ronson) songs on her next album. But this is a totally different Amy Winehouse. Scatting her way through some mundane, schmoozey tunes, this album seemed to go on forever. And not in a good way. I still remember the first time I heard "Rehab". Day drinking in London, it came on in a bar, and a few hours later we were singing it full volume in the street. The closest to that Amy Winehouse on this album is the song "Fuck Me Pumps", but that's still a loonnng way off. If I heard any of these songs in a bar, I'd probably be drinking up, to head somewhere else. Looking forward to seeing "Back to Black" come up on this list, but there's 1001 albums I'd prefer to be listening to over this one.

If the colour beige made an album, they'd call it "The Man Who". I feel bad shitting on Travis, because they seem like nice guys, but the music on this album is all very beige in colour. There's nothing particularly awful here, but there's nothing particularly exciting either. The best part of the album, is the "hidden" track at the end. Mainly because there's at least a bit of energy to it. Bland. Boring. Beige.

Absolutely loved this album. I'd never heard of The Pharcyde before, but as soon as "Oh Shit" came on, I knew I was gonna love it. This is the exactly the style of hip hop that I love. Brilliant, upbeat, melodic samples, which are at times quite jazz-influenced, big beats and rap that doesn't take itself too seriously. I love that this is from a time when rap albums had "skits" in between songs. These little interludes of nonsense somehow make this seem more like a concept album in a way, and less like a collection of songs stitched together. Turns out that I recognised a couple of songs on this album (thanks Beardyman), the best by far being "Passin' Me By". I can't get enough of this song - what a classic. Loved everything about this from start to finish. Already looking into the rest of their discography.

You know that scene in "School of Rock", where Jack Black as Dewey Finn (as Ned Schneebly) is running through the song he wrote for the battle of the bands, to a group of bemused children? We're not supposed to think it's good. It's over-the-top, corny, stadium rock nonsense. The character arc is that Dewey learns about creative compromise, and chooses the better song, written by Zach, one of the students (and sounding like peak AC/DC), instead of choosing his ego. Well, this isn't a review of "School of Rock", but this entire album sounds to me like Dewey Finn's songwriting in that movie. In fact, I'm pretty sure Jack Black was parodying Iron Maiden in that scene. Over-the-top, warbling, screeching, with repetitive riffs and lyrics about Vikings and demons, it's all very predictable nonsense. Feels like the type of music that Dewey Finn would have kept writing if he hadn't committed identity fraud.

Really unexpected blend of Latin music, salsa, funk, jazz and hip hop. Sounds like it wouldn't work, but it's actually pretty enjoyable stuff.

"What have I, what have I, what have I done to deserve this?" That's a quote from me halfway through listening to this rubbish. I never understood the acclaim that the Pet Shop Boys get. Neil Tennant's nasally voice is bad enough, but add in some terrible synth, jangly piano and flat drums along with the lifeless melodies. It's no wonder Tennant is yawning on the cover. But it's not just that it's bad. It's also incredibly cringe. Everything about it makes me embarrassed. Sure there's some social and political commentary here, and "It's a sin" has at least some intelligence to the lyrics. But everything else is just embarrassing.

Syd Barrett is a fascinating, but tragic story. Artistically brilliant and innovative, but lost to mental health issues exacerbated by heavy LSD usage. The stories are straight out of a Hollywood film: finding him sitting in a chair, staring into space with a cigarette fully burnt out from end-to-end in his hand. Going onstage, and standing motionless with a guitar hanging from his neck. Being replaced by his old time buddy David Gilmour, and when everyone thought he was lost to madness, coming out with the saddest, most poignant farewell song in "Jugband Blues". Disappearing for years, and turning up in the studio as Pink Floyd were recording "Shine On You Crazy Diamond", a song written about him. It's a compelling, but tragic tale. Syd was clearly an artistic genius, but unfortunately we're limited to just the contents of this one album (and a couple of songs outside of it) to appreciate the creative output of this madcap legend. Luckily for us, Piper at the Gates of Dawn is a masterpiece. There are two types of songs on the album. Long, sprawling, improvised jams, very experimental in nature. Songs like Astronomy Domine and Interstellar Overdrive are the peak of these. Then, the shorter, more quirky pieces like The Gnome or The Scarecrow. The rest, generally speaking, go from quirky to experimental. The whole album feels like sneaking a glimpse into Syd's mind, where quirky, clever humour meets untamed, swirling madness. The songwriting and innovation is just one part. The musicianship is another. Richard Wright's keyboard creates an eerie atmosphere throughout these songs. Roger Waters' bass grooves and flies to unexpected places. And then there's Syd's guitar. It's so much at once. It's layered, creates texture, it's percussive, it's bluesy, and it's often so experimental that it doesn't sound like a guitar at all any more. Truly pushing the boundaries of what a guitar can do, and opening the door for future guitarists such as Joey Santiago, Graham Coxon and Jonny Greenwood, to name but a few. The production of this album deserves a mention too. Capturing the guitar tones so crisply, while balancing the layers of overdub, keyboards, bass and drums with Syd's quiet vocals for this type of expressionist music is quite a challenge, but done so well (especially for something recorded in 1967). And then there's the pioneering use of reverb and delay. Bands like Radiohead and Osees are still using versions of the same technique based on the blueprints set out here. But back to Syd's songs themselves. Astronomy Domine is an absolute classic, so far ahead of its time, yet fitting in so well as a representation of what was going on in the UK underground scene at the time. Interstellar Overdrive is still as much of a mind-melter as it was the first time I heard it. You come out of it after 9 minutes and 40 seconds, head spinning, feeling as if you'd just dropped acid. The "quirky" songs somehow don't come across as twee, but instead charming, and always tilting towards some manic dystopia of noise. The madness of "Bike" makes you smile (the little piano tinkle when he sings about knowing "a mouse but he doesn't have a house, I don't know why I call him Gerald"), verses and chorus punctuated with a drum sound that smacks you in the face, before descending into noises and laughter that still unnerves me today, even after hearing it half a million times. "Pow R. Toc H." starts off with the craziest version of beatboxing I'll ever encounter. I still don't know how Waters makes that sound with his mouth, but it's a sound that's not of this earth. The rest of the song goes into a jazzy jaunt, until it inevitably descends into madness. "The Scarecrow" is a particularly gorgeous song. Extremely minimalist, with lyrics that seem very fitting for Barrett's mental condition. "His head did no thinking, his arms didn't move..." / "The black and green scarecrow is sadder than me, but now he's resigned to his fate because life's not unkind, he doesn't mind..." The song ends with a gorgeous blend of strings and rising folk guitar. This album is a classic. A masterpiece. Innovative, experimental, inspiring. Syd didn't have the chance to continue making music, but his legacy is still felt today thanks to this album. Shine on.

Dark. That's how I'd describe this album. Even on the most upbeat songs, there's a dark undertone to everything. A brilliant blend of guitars and electronica, a brilliant blend of dark bass and synth with upbeat melodies, it feels like a representation of a musical movement. There's lots of great stuff here, but it's fitting that the standout track is a tribute to Ian Curtis. "Elegia" is a brooding instrumental that feels like the soundtrack to a Western set on the surface of Mars. It's glorious, unique and perfectly the centerpiece of the album, both in placement and musically.

Most of the album feels like something you'd hear on Jools Holland's Hootenanny. It's quite honky tonk at times, and 50s doo-woop the rest of the time. Not that that's a negative thing necessarily. "Watching the Detectives" is the outlier, feeling something more like ska at times. Definitely the most interesting song on the album. Overall quite enjoyable, with some very catchy tunes.

I found the first half of this album very hard to get through. Quite cheesy/corny melodies, and not really my thing. It gets better in the second half of the album. Songs like "Streets of Kenny", "Cornish Town" and "Since I Met You" are decent enough. But there's not much interesting happening here overall.

"Some get stoned, some get strange, but sooner or later it all gets real, walk on." Takes of disillusionment, depression, breakups, death and vampires, fueled by drugs, alcohol and honey slides, written and recorded at times in bursts of instant creativity, it's an absolute classic. Raw and sometimes polished, minimalist and sometimes full-on, bleak with snippets of hope, bluesy and sometimes folky, it's a difficult album to describe. But Neil heading for the ditch is a compelling and brilliant listening experience.

I'm not really into this type of hip hop. I prefer the 80s/early 90s hip hop that was more energetic and used really clever samples. This isn't that. I liked the Fela Kuti tribute, and I feel there are some pretty hefty subjects being tackled here, but I just just couldn't get into it at all.

I'd somehow never heard of Ramblin' Jack Elliott before. I listened to the first four songs of this album, and immediately loved it. It's exactly the style of folk music that I love. Raw, bluesy and loose. I thought to myself, "this sounds just like early Bob Dylan". Then on song number five, Elliott introduced Woody Guthrie, and it all made sense. After reading up on Elliott, it's actually crazy that I've never heard of him. Of all the books, films and documentaries I've seen and read about Dylan, I can't recall mention of him at all. And he's such a big part of that early Dylan. And apparently he's a big inspiration for characters and references made in "A Mighty Wind", one of my favourite music parodies (and the second best Christopher Guest rockumentary). It seems Ramblin' Jack Elliott has been a big part of the music and movies that I've been listening to for the last quarter of a century, but I wasn't aware of it until now.

Kathleen Hanna is a legend. I've rewatched her amazing monologue about how she got blackout drunk in Kurt Cobain's apartment, and woke up to find that she had graffitied "Kurt smells like Teen Spirit" on his wall. And how that song, and its success, seemed to follow her around during some of her less successful moments, working as a stripper, while trying to get her band "Bikini Kill" off the ground. She's a brilliantly funny and compelling storyteller. But she's more than that. She's also a proper punk legend, essentially starting the "riot grrrl" movement with Bikini Kill. Le Tigre sound a lot different to Bikini Kill. They're bright, quirky, and very melodic electropop. But that same punk attitude, ethos and sardonic humour persists throughout the more approachable Le Tigre. This is where punk meets electropop. Everything is very politically charged, with expected themes of feminism throughout, but it's all masked in high energy, positive melodies. I'm actually surprised that this album came out in 1999. It sounds like it came straight from that 2005-2010 period, where this genre of indie electronica was so prevalent. Did Le Tigre lay the groundwork for the indie electropop movement of the early 2000s? I'm reminded of bands like CSS, MGMT, Hot Chip. Even LCD Soundsystem and The Rapture (although thematically they're a bit different). All that aside, this is a fantastic album. Brilliantly melodic, infinitely listenable, with high party energy. Some really clever loop sampling and lo-fi use of electronic beats, but with a rough punk edge to everything. At times, they sound a lot like the B52s, with "shouty" choruses and percussive guitars mixing with the electronica. And then there's Hanna's fantastic voice pushing the energy to another level. There's lots of fantastic songs on here, but I have to mention the obvious: Deceptacon. This song wasn't just my introduction to Le Tigre, it was my introduction to The Punk Singer herself, Kathleen Hanna. The simple, raw, distorted guitar riff drives, while the beats and synth groove, with some handclaps thrown in for good measure. But Hanna's voice takes off. It's like she doesn't take a breath for the whole song, voice switching between singing and screaming with ease - she brings a fevered energy to this song that I think is hard to match or be bettered by anything else. Big words. But it's a big song, one of the all-time greats.

I've said it before, but I'm not really into soul. With that disclaimer out of the way, I did enjoy this album. Curtis's voice is quite unique, almost falsetto, yet breaking into quiet screaming at times. That, on top of music that verges on funk and blues at times, makes for some enjoyable listening. Especially liked the song "When Seasons Change".

As soon as I saw Paul Weller and Peter Wilson on the cover of this album in dusty trenchcoats, I thought to expect a lot of "dusty trenchcoat music". Think angry new wave 80s social-political rants set to ska basslines. What I didn't expect to find was soft jazz. After hearing the first song, "Mick's Blessings", I was thinking that this was going to be a great album. Unfortunately, it was a false flag - everything after the first song is incredibly dull. Songs like "The Whole Point of No Return", "Blue Cafe", "The Paris Match" and the likes, have nice jazzy chords, but are soft, mundane and, essentially background music in an overpriced restaurant that has squeezed in extra tables for Valentine's Day. The livelier songs like "Me Ship Came In!" or "Dropping Bombs on the Whitehouse" add a bit of life, but only a bit. I still feel like I'm stuck in that restaurant, uncomfortably touching elbows with the couple at the next table. The most recognisable songs on the album, "My Ever Changing Moods" and "You're the Best Thing" are recognisable as songs that have always gotten on my nerves. Today, they continue to get on my nerves. Then there's the weird rap songs in the middle of the album that feel as if Spotify has glitched and accidentally served up some random 80s commercial pop/rap crossover album. I mean, I'm fully expecting a cartoon cat to make an appearance in the middle of "A Gospel" or "Strength of your Nature", to tell us about how opposites attract. The whole album feels like Vincent Adultman, from Bojack Horseman: a hodgepodge of different genres of music, perched on each other's shoulders, pretending to be something else, disguised by a dusty trenchcoat.

"Strange Cargo" is a good name for this. An odd collection of electronic soundscapes, with spoken word interludes, blippity blips and synth, that sometimes verges into hippy "tribal" music territory. At times I feel like I'm listening to music that you'd expect to find playing in a nightclub in The Matrix. People unashamedly wearing leather pants, dancing in show motion, probably in cages or something. Other times, it sounds like something you'd hear played in a backpacker river bar in Laos (full transparency: I stole that comparison from my girlfriend). And the rest feels like I'm listening to the score of a movie. Probably an early 90s Avant Garde movie that didn't do well commercially, but somehow launched the career of some now-big Hollywood name. With all of these comparisons, it sounds like I'm dissing this album, but the weird thing is that, despite all of this, I actually liked it. I mean, this guy produced 13 by Blur, one of my all-time favourite albums, so he's obviously got talent. I'm probably not going to hunt this out again, but I definitely enjoyed this strange cargo of electronica.

Nobody has made an entrance as epic as Black Sabbath. The self-titled song on their self-titled album announced the arrival of Sabbath with a slow, ominous, dark riff that eventually descends into a glorious bluesy jam. That's what I always forget about Sabbath: how bluesy they were. Sure, they laid the groundwork for heavier rock (and even metal), but always with a blues and rock 'n' roll core underneath it all. It works so well. The perfect example is, in my opinion, on the absolute best song on the album, "The Wizard". The use of the harmonica in The main riff is iconic, especially when used with those drum fills. It's one of the all-time great songs, and impossible to not make you smile. For all their satanic iconography and dark personas, the music is actually very upbeat and instantly lifts your mood. As I listen to this album for the first time in many years, I hear more similarities to Zeppelin than I ever did in the past. This is proper rock 'n' roll territory, and done perfectly. For example, during "Warning", Iommi seems to forget what he was doing, and goes into an 8 minute long solo, before returning to Ozzy's verse again at the end of the song. But every second of it is enjoyable. There are so many crazy, hilarious stories about the band, that it's easy to focus on that and forget that they had serious skill in both musicianship and songwriting underneath it all. I'm guilty of that - I always loved Sabbath, but I clearly didn't give them enough credit as a serious band, because listening back to this album, it's an absolute classic that deserves the same credit that we give to Zeppelin and other rock legends.

Cinematic, literary and melancholic, Scott 4 feels like the score from an existential Western. Full of philosophical musings, it's fitting that the back cover of the LP only has nothing on it but a single quote from Albert Camus: "A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened." It seems that this is what Scott has been working towards: trekking through Scott 1, 2 and 3, to find something artistically real, bringing him back to why he wanted to create music in the first place. And this album is all Scott. No more covers, everything written by himself, and even put out in his original birth name Scott Engel. I've mentioned in my previous review of Scott 2, how I came to learn about Scott Walker, and how "It's Raining Today" was the song that stopped me in my tracks. But I think the first Scott song I ever heard was in the Radiohead documentary film "Meeting People Is Easy", where "On Your Own Again" played in full to reversed footage of Thom Yorke packing/unpacking his suitcase in a hotel, showing the mundanity of the realities of touring. I don't know if it's because of this first association with the song, but it's one of my all-time favourite pieces of music. Just over a minute and a half, it's minimalist, slow and heartbreaking. Simple and perfect songwriting. "The Old Man's Back Again" is another obvious choice, but deservedly so. That bassline groove makes it, with the drum, guitar, choir and string layers building something triumphant on top of it, while Scott's strong voice drives the narrative along. Political and philosophical lyrics aside, Scott has created a really unique means of storytelling through his music. I mean, "The Seventh Seal" is largely built around telling us the story of the Bergman movie, framed around Scott's own philosophical musings on death. This form of musical storytelling definitely made an impression on Nick Cave, who carries the mantle today. This album has been an inspiration for so many of the greats, like David Bowie, Nick Cave, Radiohead, Brian Eno. This "crooner" style of music is not my usual taste, but there's something so pure and great in Scott's songwriting and musical performance, that I love every second of it.

What can I say about one of my all-time favourite albums? I listened to the shit out this album since my late teens. My neighbours have had to put up with my clumsy attempts to play along with every single song on this album on my Gibson Les Paul, a guitar I bought because of Jimmy Page, who is in my opinion one of the top 2 guitarists of all time (I flip-flop between himself and Hendrix a lot for pole position). Zeppelin exploded (pun intended) into the world of rock music with this album, mixing blues tunes (played to perfection) with folky numbers and heavier, darker sounds that became blueprints for heavier rock and even metal down the line. I can only imagine what it was like to hear Zeppelin for the first time back in '69. They took things to a new level. This is a collective of some of the best musicians of all time. Jimmy Page is, as I've mentioned, one of the best guitarists of all time (if not THE best). John Bonham IS the undisputed best drummer of all time. Robert Plant has one of the most powerful voices in rock history. And lets not forget the genius of John Paul Jones. With these four making music together, it could only be one thing: epic. The blues standards on the album are taken to a new level. Page's guitar is ready to burst to life at any given moment. It feels like he's trying to tame his guitar from taking off at any point during "I Can't Quit You Baby", and he eventually fails, and his guitar soars all over the song. Think of the build-up to his solo in "You Shook Me": we're treated to John Paul Jones' stellar hammond organ work, then Plant's fantastic harmonica (with added grunts), before Page takes over, and even his solo is a slow build-up to the explosion of energy it becomes. Then at the end of the song, we have the intense moment when Page and Plant start their vocal/guitar duel, with reverse echo, making it feel like we're hearing them battle instruments from another dimension. The rockier "riff-driven" songs like "Good Times Bad Times" and "Communication Breakdown" are instant classics. But Zeppelin show they can do acoustic too with the absolute masterpiece of "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You" and the witchy reworking of Bert Jansch in "Black Mountain Side". And there's a sneak peak at some of the folkier songwriting that will be more visible in later albums in the criminally underrated "Your Time Is Gonna Come". I really enjoyed reminding myself just how good that song is. "Dazed and Confused" is the centerpiece here. That main riff is so dark, it feels like it came straight from the darkest depths of Mordor. And then after an avant garde break for Page to bow his guitar, the song takes off at an insane pace. Again, I can't imagine what it must have been like to hear this in 1969, it still feels ahead of its time today. "How Many More Times" is a great way to finish the album. The main riff is catchy as hell, then we're given a glimpse of the "song-ception" that Zeppelin became so good at during their live gigs: throwing more songs into the middle of performing one of their own, making long, winding medleys. The middle section of this song goes into another extended bow part, before we're transitioned into another couple of songs, "Rosie"/"The Hunter", in the middle. When Bonham's drum comes in here, this is one of my favourite musical moments - what a beat, mixed with that riff, just amazing stuff1 And then it transitions further until we're back at the main riff again to finish the album off in style. A perfect album from start to finish. What a way to arrive.

Not for me. Positives: I did enjoy the first song "Penitentiary Philosophy" and the first 2 minutes of "Green Eyes". Negatives: The remaining 67 minutes of the album.

Imagine you're away on holidays. It's evening time and you fancy a drink, but there aren't too many options in the area you're in. You hedge your bets, and pop into a grimy pub full of locals. The walls have dusty posters of Ozzy Osbourne, Alice Cooper and Iron Maiden. The beer is watery, but cheap. It'll do, I guess. Then you see a handwritten sign on a blackboard behind the bar. "Live music at 9pm". You look at your watch. It reads 9:04pm. This could go either way. A group hop up on the stage area to a handful of claps. Big hair, clad in leather and denim, they start to play. But you can't figure out what they're playing. It's like they're a Van Halen or an AC/DC tribute band, but the songs they're playing aren't Van Halen and certainly aren't AC/DC. It's like they didn't have the rights to perform the real songs, so they just made their own versions to avoid copyright infringement. You drink up as quickly as you can. That's how this album feels. Like Judas Priest were trying to perform Van Halen and AC/DC songs, but it all lacks substance, originality and ends up sounding like a bad tribute band, playing their own versions of other people's music.

Nope. Terrible music from a terrible person.

It was my first time listening to Joanna Newsom, and it won't be my last. Really fantastic and unique sounds, both in instrumentation and vocals. Ignoring the timeline of releases, I'll instead cite comparisons to music I was already familiar with. I immediately felt a connection with Newsom's musical style, feeling similarities in structure, not style, to the likes of Lisa O'Neill or Junior Brother. Yes, I'm aware that I'm picking artists known for their unique and distinct voice, but it's more about how they form fragmented, sometimes staccato and polyrhythmic melodies around their mad-sounding vocals. I also see similarities to Kate Bush and Fiona Apple. Strong lyricism and free-flowing melodies that again seem to form around the vocals, rather than driving them. The entire album structure is a huge gamble too. With only 5 songs, ranging in duration from 7 to 17 minutes, it sounds like it'll require effort to get through. But it doesn't. It's immensely easy to sit through, very enjoyable, and keeps me on my toes the entire way through. Newsom's voice juxtaposed with the beautiful harp and orchestration is a perfect blend. Deserves a 4.5 star rating.

A "movie for your ears". Nobody can describe this frenzied madness better than the man himself. Madcap jazz fusion with a frenetic level of energy, layers of spacey soundscapes, with soaring guitar solos and dirty saxophones, the instrumentation only broken up once by the gritty snarls and shrieking of Captain Beefheart in the fantastic "Willie the Pimp" - if this is a movie, it's one that you can't eat popcorn during, in case you miss something while you chew.

A work of heartbreaking genius. The juxtaposition of those absolutely beautiful orchestral strings with fragmented and booming electronic beats is such a well considered and fantastic artistic choice. The randomness of the harsh beats breaking apart the softness of the strings is startling, and paints a musical picture of the emotional turmoil that is the subject of this album. "Black Lake" does it best. Those gorgeous strings are somehow some of the saddest things your ears might experience, mixed with long drawn out moments of almost silence, before the booming electronic beats come in, fragmented and disjointed. It's an absolute masterpiece of a song, and emotionally draining. That's the only problem with the album at times. It's operating on another level, and requires a lot of mental effort to listen through properly. Sometimes a bit inaccessible and often emotionally draining. I guess the album cover does the best job of describing the feeling of this album. Björk standing with open arms, surrounded by softness in a layer of feathers, with an open wound in her chest exposing her heart to the world. 4.5 stars.

Short, poppy, folky, jazzy tunes adjacent musically to Pavement and Neutral Milk Hotel, but only in their low-fi folky nature, not in artistic merit. There's a laid-back approach to polish in their songs that reminds me of the feel of Pavement's recordings especially. Switching genres every song or two, there are some catchy songs here, with some unexpectedly indulgent guitar solos, crazy drum fills, and the most rushed pronunciation of the word "Liberty" you'll ever hear. Decent enough, but nothing overly interesting.

Feed your head. Haight-Ashbury, 1967, the Summer of Love, paisley, and LSD. "Surrealistic Pillow" is a landmark album that captures that whole scene perfectly. But it isn't trapped there - it still plays fresh in 2025, almost 60 years later. From the opening track "She Has Funny Cars", with its spiraling vocal lines, and switching melodies, you're kept on your toes. Then "Somebody to Love" kicks in with that fuzz guitar tone that's become the familiar Jefferson Airplane trademark sound, with Grace's warbling vocals adding a dimension of folky texture to the bluesy instrumentation. Then time slows down. The softer, acoustic tunes are understated masterpieces. The dual guitar riffs of "Today" blend with the tambourine-driven beat, creating something that sounds like a looping sample, before Slick's voice takes over. It's hypnotic. As is the very simple "Comin' Back to Me": the repetition of the chorus, "I saw you, I saw you", with a long gap before the next lyric "comin' back to me", is almost trance-like. The (apparently controversial) use of layered reverb in the production adds a spacey vibe to the recordings. It makes it sound as if the music is being beamed in from another dimension. Then there's the big finale. "Embryonic Journey" is one of the most gorgeous pieces of music ever created. Simple, pure brilliance. And that leads into "White Rabbit". Hands-down the best build-up in any song in the history of music. Amazingly clever lyrics too, aligning the psychedelic drug-taking experience with C.S. Lewis literature. The bass line and Grace's vocals building in intensity, march us towards an absolute crescendo of a finish. Consider my head fully fed.

Green Onions (the song) is an absolute classic. Green Onions (the rest of the album) is very enjoyable too - mostly covers, some sounding even better with the organ than in their original form. But, Green Onions, what a song. That Hammond organ riff, that bass line and that fragmented guitar solo, drifting off into a sea of reverb. It's impossible to listen and not imagine yourself as the embodiment of a red setter, sprinting alongside a Bus Eireann bus.

"There might be accidents, accidents which will be more interesting than what I had intended." Eno's first solo album shows the early signs of his creative genius in artistic process. Madcap techniques like lyrics formed by free-association, throwing a group of musicians together who he believed were "musically incompatible", and using what sounded like interpretive dance to direct the musicianship of it all. Every song here is fascinating. Every instrument is layered with effects until it sounds like something completely alien, every vocal performance is nuttier than the last, and every composition is more unexpected than the last, often breaking in structure to something completely different at random. The ending of "Dead Finks Don't Talk", with its hardcore electronic breakdown, sounds ahead of its time in 2025, nevermind 1972. Eno had confidently announced his artistic brilliance to the world with this collection of musical accidents.

Knowing what was to come, L.A. Woman felt a lot like a swansong for The Doors. They were blacklisted from radio play, Jim had been convicted after losing his very public trial, and had cleaned up his act somewhat. His tone seemed more seemed subdued, almost as if he was preparing for his departure. Not that Jim's energy isn't present here. In the title track, during the breakdown and the gradual building back up of the song piece by piece, Jim's gravelly voice, sounding like an old delta bluesman, drives things forward with his shamanic chanting of Mr Mojo Risin' becoming one of the most iconic moments of The Doors legacy. There's a lot of wry humour here too. During the brilliant "Cars Hiss by my Window", where you'd expect a guitar solo to break, Jim instead gives us a masterful "mouth solo". In "Been Down so Long", you can feel the smirks as Morrison rasps through the lines "C'mon and set me free, Warden, Warden, Warden... C'mon and let the poor boy be". The whole album is a bluesy masterpiece, and nobody can do the blues like The Doors can. What a fitting end to their legacy to end with "Riders on the Storm". Some of the last lyrics sang by the mad poet and Lizard King: "Into this house we're born, Into this world we're thrown, Like a dog without a bone, An actor out on loan, Riders on the storm."

Felt like sitting through a big production rock opera. I liked the concept of the dual themed sides, and the orchestration of everything is very impressive. But, much like sitting through a full rock opera, it gets a bit much after a while. Especially when it's lacking the payoff of the melodies of some of the songs on the later albums.

Funk, stank, drum machines mixed with live drums, politically charged (and sometimes incypherable) lyrics, roaming bass-lines and screaming vocals, laying down the blueprint for funk, hip-hop and soul for years to come. A funky mess, and I mean that in the best possible way. 4.5 stars.

Not to sound like the old curmudgeon that I am, but I don't like the musicality of modern hip-hop and R&B. The rhythmic meter and booming bass is repetitive and boring. Insert "old man yells at cloud" Simpsons gif. There's some interesting moments in here, especially in the structure of the album as a concept, but the content still feels vapid to me. Sure, there's feminist themes, but there's no powerful insights, it's all reduced to old rap tropes such as sex and money. Grandpa Simpson disapproves.

Back in my 20s, a group of us were out on a "12 pubs of Christmas" pub crawl. Things had (expectedly) gotten a little drunken, and the whole group ended up having a serious shouty argument over whether Meg White was a good drummer or not. It got so heated that we split up over our differences, moved to different tables, glaring and scowling across the bar at each other, no longer on talking terms. Of course, we forgot about it all by the next pub, but for the record, I was firmly sitting at the "Meg is a great drummer" table. "Get Behind Me Satan" might not be as iconic as the previous two albums, but it still has all the energy and brilliance of a White Stripes album, this time with more piano and xylophone. And that energy has a lot to do with Meg's punk style drumming. The whole point of The White Stripes was to pair back music to three core elements (vocals, guitar/piano and drums), and this raw approach is what made their music so interesting, and, especially at a time of heavily polished and over-produced music, very refreshing. I could talk a lot about Jack White, his brilliant songwriting, musicality and, frankly, his genius, but this album in particular is energised and leveled up by Meg's symbol-happy drumming.

Big beats and weird little skits, with a wide range of samples from the likes of Cymande, kids TV shows, Steely Dan, Funkadelic and Kraftwerk (to name but a few)... this is absolutely my type of hip-hop. De La Soul never seemed to take themselves too seriously, and, like The Beastie Boys, that irreverence and comedy comes across as a fun energy throughout the album. But the quality of this music is serious. 3 is a magic number, but this gets 4.5 stars.

I really like Happy Mondays, and I'm a big fan of the Madchester scene. It was a perfect meld of guitar music and dance beats. And most of the scene's music holds up today, sounding just as good - Stone Roses, Primal Scream and a lot of Happy Mondays stuff still works just as well on a listen in 2025, over 30 years outside of the scene. This album is enjoyable, but it feels quite trapped in The Madchester era. You can really feel that the Mondays were enjoying themselves too much here (mostly due to Bez famously smuggling a load of pills into the studio). The result is music that would be absolutely brilliant craic to experience live in The Hacienda at 2am, but listening to as a standalone album outside of that context, it lacks a little bit. A harsh 3.5 stars from me.

Ambitious effort tackling some big social issues in a concept album peppered with confrontational "interludes", but ultimately it comes across as pretentious. It's hard to take anything here seriously when it's presented with synthesised drums.

Concept album aside, this is a fantastic collection of songs. The Kinks had really matured into a very interesting band here, with clever and very melodic songwriting. The concept album itself works very well too. It's just worth noting that almost every song here works just as well as a standalone song outside of the overall theme of the album. The Kinks had developed quite a distinctive sound at this stage, sounding somewhere between 60s rock 'n' roll and lighter folk (setting a template for future indie rock bands like The Shins). But there are lots of surprises in the music too (for example, "She's Bought a Hat Like Princess Marina" catches you off-guard halfway through), and more than enough to keep your interest right to the end. A very different sounding band to the those who sang "You Really Got Me" or "All Day and All of the Night" (two of my favourite songs btw), but that's why we're still talking about The Kinks in 2025, because they evolved over the 60s and 70s to create some very interesting music, and this album is a perfect example of that.

It's never a good sign when you have to check to see how long an album is. How much of my life do I need to spend enduring this nonsense? 38 minutes for the core album, or 57 minutes if I want to listen to the reissue bonus tracks. 38 minutes is long enough thank you very much. This very much signaled the beginning of a dark age for popular music in the early to mid 80s. Top of the Pops, dry ice, synthesised drums, bad miming, New Romantic fashion, nasal crooning and warbling, and frenetic dancing to the beat. Culture Club were front and center during all of this cringe, and this album brings you viscerally back to all of that with a shudder. Nope. Not for me.

I'm not a big George Michael fan, but there's no denying that Faith (the song) is an absolute classic. Sure, it's overplayed to bajaysus, but at its core, it's a fantastic song. Faith (the album), on the other hand is a bit meh. There's nothing particularly terrible, but nothing particularly memorable either. It's an easy listen, but after Faith, everything else is a bit bland.

Sweeping instrumentals, Avant Garde, mutating melodies, bass-heavy, post-rock, tracks ranging from 20 minutes to 2 minutes in duration. Yes, I am here for this music. Never heard of Tortoise before, but after my first listen-through, I instantly categorised them on my internal music shelf as sitting somewhere between Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Mogwai. That's hallowed ground.

Garbage seemed cursed. Shirley Manson went to first meet the band founder Butch Vig, famous for producing Nirvana's Nevermind, on the day that Kurt Cobain committed suicide. Their first promotional tour, supporting Smashing Pumpkins, was cancelled halfway through when the Pumpkins' keyboardist died. Later, their tour of the US to promote their third album, was cancelled, the day they were due to set out being 11th September 2001. Talk about bad luck. Pour your misery down on them. I went down that rabbithole of "what ever happened to Garbage" recently when the question randomly popped into my head by chance, so I was excited to see this appear. Garbage very much remind me of that mid-90s period of pop-rock, and it's probably because they were so instrumental in creating that sound. Imagine the privilege of Vig, getting fed up producing for bands like Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins and Sonic Youth, and wanting to do something in a completely different style. The result is something that feels intentionally over-produced. But I don't mean that in a bad way. It's a distinct sound that somehow elevates Garbage from being an average indie rock group to something quite unique that leans more towards pop and electronica than traditional rock. "As Heaven is Wide" is the perfect example. In the wrong hands, this could be a seriously cringe-inducing song, but in the hands of Butch's production, it ends up becoming a template for a lot of late 90s, early 2000s poppy/metal bands (Skindive, I'm looking at you). Not to completely focus on Butch Vig though - the band wouldn't have worked as well without Shirley Manson, a proper lead for the band, snarling lyrics, and bringing a sort of punk energy to the sound. Some great songs on here, and while they definitely feel "of their era", they still hold up as great songs today.

How do you out-Black Sabbath Black Sabbath (the song) from Black Sabbath (the album)? With War Pigs, that's how. If the guitar riff, accompanied by its unsettling bassline isn't enough, an air raid siren wails, warning you to get ready for something ominous incoming. War Pigs is followed by Paranoid, Planet Caravan and Iron Man. That's a hell of a four song run. Ozzy's vocal melodies, Geezer's basslines and dark lyrics, and Iommi's iconic riffs are held together by some criminally underrated drum fills from Bill Ward. The first album was a lot more bluesy, but Sabbath had settled into a much darker sound here. Besides the riffs themselves, coming from the darkest dankest depths, there are some really interesting pauses and moments of almost silence in between that creates an atmosphere of anticipation. There's some interesting choices in experimentation too, with the vocal oscillation of Planet Caravan, the tape speed change at the end of War Pigs, and the intro to Iron Man, where Ozzy apparently sang into a mic through a metal (unfortunately not iron) fan. It still hits hard almost fifty years later.

Ambitious effort, creating a concept album about nuclear weapons, but it comes across a little pretentious, and the musicality is lacking any real depth or interest. The exception being the nutty "The Conference", which is the first song on the album that really grabbed my attention. Pity it took until the second last song for that to happen. Overall, an interesting idea, but not executed very well.

I'm not the biggest fan of jazz, but I respect the genre a lot. I feel a lot of the experimentation and musical theory goes way over my head, and honestly, I would very rarely sit down to listen to even some of the more accessible greats, but I still have a high level of respect for these proper musicians. The majority of this album feels quite accessible. But it does border on experimental at times, culminating in a proper nutty piece of afro-jazz experimentation, the strangest children's song you'll ever hear. But overall, it's great. Will I sit down and put it on again? Probably not too often, and that's the only reason it's losing a star from 4 - because of my own personal preferences around jazz. But, I can respect that there's some great music on this album.

Public Enemy said it best in Fight the Power: "Elvis was a hero to most / But he never meant shit to me". As an angsty teen, this was my go-to stance on Elvis, and I was always eager to go on about it at length. In a time of segregation, Elvis was a commercially viable entity to bring rock 'n' roll and and blues music to a white audience. The core sound and spirit of which originally came from Black artists, many of whom never saw the same recognition or financial success. Elvis stole the limelight from the black artists who had actually created the music. To clarify though, I don't think Elvis the person was necessarily a racist or a thief himself - from what I've heard he was a big fan of the artists and music, and rather than theft, it was more from a place of respect that he wanted to play their music. But that doesn't change how Elvis (the commodity) benefited enormously from systemic racism in the music industry. He got opportunities that many Black musicians, often far more innovative, were denied. OK, we've gotten that out of the way. But it's necessary to understand my position on Elvis, and his legacy. Of course I like Elvis' (early) music, but for all of the reasons above, I could never bring myself to become a fan. Let's talk about the music specifically. This album is far from his best. It feels flat and dull. I know it sits as a key moment in "The Elvis Story", where he was transitioning more towards pop after his military hiatus, but judging this as a standalone album of music, there's nothing spectacular here at all. A lot of bland doo-wop tunes, and besides one higher tempo number ("Dirty, Dirty Feeling"), one bluesy number ("Reconsider Baby") and a strange cover of "Fever", it sits as background music, never interesting enough to fully capture my attention.

This is what I love about this project. I wasn't familiar with the Minutemen before this. Now I'm a huge fan. Double Nickels on the Dime is vast: a double album, made up of 43 songs, but served in bite-size nuggets, ranging in duration from just 38 seconds long to just under 3 minutes (although the majority of the songs are 2 mins or less). It means that you get a serious range of music, with instrumentation that is far more technically advanced than is usual for the punk scene. Are they punk? In attitude, rawness and vibes, definitely. But in music, I hear funk, jazz, folk, country, alt rock, as well as punk. I love absolutely everything about this. I was already raving about this long before I reached song number 19, and I can't describe the joy I felt when the opening jangly guitar riff of Corona came on. I think I just shouted "JACKASS!" to nobody in pure glee. I guess there's a reason the Jackass guys picked it as their main theme song: the Minutemen's music is just as chaotic, energetic and punk DIY as the show itself. This deserves a 4.5 star rating.

Picture the scene: it's summer time, you're cruising along the streets on your pink moped, sun shining, wind in your hair, Hawaiian shirt billowing in the breeze, Vice City cops on your tail. Mark Hollis is on the radio singing "Baby, life's what you make it, celebrate it". Good times. If you were making a movie (or a GTA game) and had a scene that was set in the 80s, the best way to let your audience know the era they're watching is simply by playing "Life's What You Make It" by Talk Talk. It's pure 80s nostalgia. The rest of the album, had some interesting moments that bordered on jazz at times, but a lot of less interesting moments too. The move from synth to instruments was a good one for Talk Talk, to modernise their sound, yet this still feels so of its time, that in my mind, it'll always be part of the soundtrack to Vice City.

I still remember when I first discovered the Pixies. As a teenage Radiohead and Nirvana fan in the 90s, they had been on my radar for quite some time, but I'd never gotten around to listening to them. Then late one night, I stayed up to watch a Motorhead documentary. Right afterwards they showed "Gouge Away", the Pixies documentary. I was blown away. Especially in comparison to the Motorhead doc, I couldn't believe the calibre of musicians who were talking heads in the doc, gushing about what the band meant to them: Graham Coxon, David Bowie, PJ Harvey, Thom Yorke and even a rare appearance from Jonny Greenwood. I went straight out the next day and bought Surfer Rosa. Pixies quickly became one of my all-time favourite bands. In the pre-Spotify days, as a broke teenager, you had to pick and choose your next album carefully. I got through the Pixies discography, but somehow managed to leave Doolittle until last. On a train to Belfast to see Radiohead, a college friend couldn't believe I was a Pixies fan who hadn't listened to Doolittle, so he handed over his Discman with Doolittle inside, and told me to rectify the situation immediately. I listened to the entire album from start to finish. I just couldn't stop listening to it. Pixies became a big part of my life. Playing Debaser on the streets of Galway at 2am with guitars borrowed from buskers. Obsessively trying to deconstruct Joey's guitar sounds. I once had an in-depth conversation with a stripper about the fueds between Francis and Kim. Having arguments with friends at parties about our favourite Frank Black screams in Hey ("If you go" vs "That the mother makes"). Watching "Un Chien Andalou" just because it's referenced in Debaser. Wrecking my neighbours' heads with my attempts to play along with "Dead" (Joey's parts of course). Knowing all the lyrics to "Hey", being the next best thing since knowing all the lyrics to "I've Been Tired". The album is more than a classic, it's monumental. Tame, I Bleed and Dead are the holy trinity of the "loud quiet loud" dynamics that fed Nirvana and Radiohead (and countless others). Debaser taking off towards the end. Joey's guitar at the end of Hey making you feel like your head is bending out of shape, much like the visual effect in the "Here Comes Your Man" music video. Lyrics about mutilation, prostitutes and old bible stories. Kim and Francis' voices going in completely different directions, but somehow working perfectly together. Frank's screams. I still can't listen to "Tame" without thinking of him talking about one of his proudest moments when a 75 year old member of the Sun Ra Arkestra said to him "Boy, you sure can holler!" I've been lucky enough to have seen them live now so many times that I've lost count, and I'll always go to see them whenever they play here. In fact, I'm going to see them again next year on my birthday. Back in my 20s, I used to listen to Pixies on my headphones on my way to a night out, to get my head out of a mental funk. Listening to them today still gives me goosebumps and puts me in a giddy mood. Raw, surreal, energetic, innovative, oddball, dark, witty, fun, and intensely weird in all the right ways.

There's something about the pedal steel guitar, as it's used in country music, that immediately turns me off a song. And unfortunately, it's all over this album like a rash. I'm not a hater of country music, but I'm not a big fan either. I prefer the more raw and energetic tunes from the likes of Johnny Cash or Danny Gatton, than what's here. Everything is very predictable. It's pleasant and all that, but I don't understand the appeal, and definitely don't understand this being in a list of 1001 must-hear albums.

Back when I was about 13 or 14 years of age, I was going to guitar lessons with a teacher named Mike Arrigan. I wanted to learn some Graham Coxon distortion noises from the album Blur, and Mike was not impressed by the dissonant sounds of Graham's guitar when isolated from the rest of the music. Instead, he started telling my about the song "Hotel California" by the Eagles. He'd do that. Sometimes, he'd go off on a long tangent about classic rock, rather than what you came to learn how to play that day. You might have left just as clueless about how to play that Radiohead or Blur guitar riff, but you'd have learned about some of the classic guitar moments from someone who felt it was their duty to pass it on. I'll never forget Mike going off on one about the solo, how the two guitars take turns playing against each other, before coming together at the end to play in harmony. And how most radio stations fade it out before the best part at the end. The Eagles always conjur up images in my head of a bank manager speeding along in his Audi A6, flashing his lights agressively at a Vauxhall Corsa that is doing 5 under the speed limit, listening to "Life in the Fast Lane", and probably queuing up "Money for Nothing" by Dire Straits next in his car stereo system. Not my type of music. But, as bland as some of the music they come out with is, there are moments of absolute brilliance, and that brings me back to the song "Hotel California" itself. My guitar teacher called it the greatest guitar solo in all of music. I don't know if I'd go that far, but thanks to Mike Arrigan, whenever it comes on, I always stop to listen to that solo properly, and make sure it doesn't fade out before the best part at the end.

I hated Morrissey before it was cool. Putting aside some of his awful views on immigration and the likes, I just could never understand the fascination with The Smiths or Morrissey. A lot of people who liked the same music as I did, were big into The Smiths, and I could never understand it. Well, in the spirit of broadening horizons with this project, I tried to give The Smiths another chance. Johnny Marr is an exceptionally inventive guitarist. Aside from his work on The Smiths, when he joined Modest Mouse for "We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank", he added a new dimension to their (already great) music and eleveted their sound to something epic. And he brings some interesting sounds to this album too. But, as much as I like Johnny Marr, I don't like him enough to endure Morrissey. His crooning and warbling, in his posh nasally tone, ruins everything that could otherwise be enjoyable about the music of The Smiths. He's insufferable, and as a result, so are The Smiths.

My dog Louie is a big fan of Leonard Cohen's later work, but that's mainly because older Leonard Cohen's voice sounds like a growly old dawg. Regardless, myself and Louie very much enjoyed listening to this quiet, simple, intimate, dark, striped-back and poetic collection. "The Partisan" is a particular highlight on the album. What a genius move bringing the French choir in at the end. 4.5 stars.

That opening chord. What an iconic moment in music history. I mean, what can I say? It's the Beatles. The first Beatles album that's come up on this list for me. Is it on par with the Beatles who made Sgt Pepper, Abbey Road or The White Album? No. But it's an early incarnation of the lads, one of the first where they were working entirely with their own songwriting, and a huge part of the Beatles story. It's hard to listen to this without conjuring up black and white imagery of the Beatles hiding from hysterical fans in slapstick setups: pretending to be on the phone, lowering a newspaper to reveal a poor disguise. The film is critically acclaimed, but rewatching it recently, it's nuts. Some really strange decisions made in comedy that in the context of today make the Beatles look insane. But back then it did something different - it made the world aware of the quirky, down-to-earth humour of the four. Huge moment for the Beatles. There's a good bit of filler on this album. But it also has "A Hard Day's Night", "I Should Have Known Better", "And I Love Her" and "Can't Buy Me Love", the latter being home to one of the most iconic guitar solos of all time. George was playing a 12 string Rickenbacker guitar for a good chunk of this album, which became a staple sound of the folky rock'n'roll 60s, but he was also a key figure in popularising that type of melodic guitar solo to the mainstream. Hard to believe that they're only 2 years away from Revolver and 4 years from the White Album here, but regardless, this is the poppy version of the fab four finding their feet, during peak Beatlemania, and writing some legendary songs in the process.

I dunno. I really like Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I loved Fever to Tell, and played the absolute shit out of Show Your Bones. Maps, Gold Lion, Mysteries, Date With The Night, Cheated Hearts... stellar stuff. Raw, punky, melodic with Karen O taking on an early PJ Harvey persona as the frontperson. But this is a very different Yeah Yeah Yeahs. They got a lot of acclaim for moving in this more synthy direction, but to me it felt like they'd watered down the sound that made them so good in the first place. The rawness was replaced with polish, and it felt a lot more poppy than punk. Case and point: the acoustic version of Soft Shock on the extended version of the album is INFINITELY better than the synthy version on the main album. I can't listen to Heads Will Roll at all without cringing. I'm being a bit harsh here, because there's some great songwriting present across the album. I mean, it's still Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Shout out to Skeletons in particular being a great song. But I feel this would have been a much better album if they'd dropped the synth.

Thankfully this isn't as cringey as The Number of the Beast, but it still feels very juvenille. The raw production values is what saves it. It has an almost gritty punk feel to it - something that you feel wasn't achieved on purpose. But the core Iron Maiden tackiness is still lurking under the grounded production sound: songs that feel like a first draft, guitars racing to the end of the fretboard because no one told them they didn’t have to, a lack of substance. It's not terrible, but it's not good either.

Chaotic. In the best way. Grandmaster Flash and Run DMC cuts beside jazz riffs and flute loops. Reggae moments from the likes of Lee Scratch Perry, mix with comedy stand-up routines, sheep sounds, and a dog barking "I love you" from a Little Caesars ad. The use of live instruments makes for a proper band energy. This was the ideal coming together of musical interests for me as a teen. Adam Yauch even learned the double bass, lugging it with him on a snowboarding trip to keep his practice up. We switch between hip hop, hardcore punk, funk, jazz and even Buddhist chanting. There's so much going on here, that Liam Howlett was able to create a whole Prodigy song out of a single line: "Oh my God it's the funky shit". Adam Yauch calling out misogynistic rap tropes, and a misunderstanding of their previous frat boy satire directly in the lyrics of Sure Shot, shows the Beastie Boys growing up. Then there's Sabotage. It still rocks with an insane punk energy that makes you want to slide across the bonnet of your car while wearing Ray Bans and short sleeves. It's also home to one of my favourite guitar solos of all time. Pure chaotic energy, perfect for the song. Seriously varied, chaotic, messy, unique, unpredictable and unexpected. Shit, if this is gonna be that kind of party...

Dark and minimalist. Feels like Burial years before Burial. Setting the blueprint for trip hop. You can feel the shadow of Massive Attack looming here too. The juxtaposition between Martina Topley-Bird's bright vocals and the dark, brooding and chaotic sounds and spoken word monologues that Tricky mixes in the background creates a unique sound. The hodgepodge of noises, percussion and melodies that Tricky is seemingly throwing together at random somehow come together to something that's completely out there, but also not a challenge to listen to at all. It's the sort of thing that you don't fully take in until a second or third listen. I still don't know why it works, but it really, really does work.

Led Zeppelin II is one of my favourite albums, so when a friend told me that his dad was getting rid of some old vinyl from his attic, back when I was in college about 20 years ago, I jumped at the chance to save a 1972 pressing of the Brown Bomber. As the old record crackles and pops on my turntable, I think to myself that this is truly the perfect way to revisit this absolute classic. Led Zeppelin II wastes zero time reminding you why it’s legendary. "Whole Lotta Love" builds itself brick-by-brick, guitar, then bass, then drums, into one of the all-time great riffs, when played correctly with the ringing out of the D string. And that crazy middle section? I'd never even heard of a theremin back in the day, so discovering Page playing something that sounded so alien without even touching it, blew my mind. They might be known for rock, but Zeppelin always pushed boundaries with experimentation. "What Is and What Should Never Be" is the sound of a more grown-up Zeppelin. Everything about it is great: JPJ’s bass grooving all over the board, Plant drifting from delicate to full roar, Page's smooth slide guitar, and that glorious ending signalled in by Bonham's gong. Then there's the madness of "The Lemon Song". Open strings ringing give the riff that unmistakable character. It’s provocative, mischievous, dripping with energy. Howlin’ Wolf and Robert Johnson reimagined by deviants. JPJ is unhinged during the "chorus", Page’s guitar is all bite, and the whole slow–fast–slow structure keeps you guessing. With an iconic "let's take it down a bit" moment: when Page bends the strings at the head of the guitar as he plays the hammer-ons at the end is an eye-widening moment for any aspiring teen guitarist. Such a clever moment of tonal invention. "Thank You" circles back to that more mature Zeppelin sound. Page's 12-string adds gorgeous texture, JPJ’s Hammond organ shines, and the false ending catches you out. Mischievous divils. Then there's "Heartbreaker". Every guitar player's Rachmaninoff - the impossibly hard piece everyone attempts, iconic and intimidating (like Piano Concerto No. 3 in the film "Shine"). A great riff, a great song, building up and up... and then suddenly everything strips away. Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Jimmy Page. Iconic. Awe inspiring. Messy and raw. And the follow-up solo after the band crashes back in? Criminally overlooked, building to a huge crescendo before snapping back to the main riff. It’s almost too much to take. "Living Loving Maid" might be the weakest track here, but only because everything else is so epic. It's still a great song with a fantastic chorus section in particular, Plant’s stuttering vocal delivery, JPJ's bass shining through again. Then "Ramble On" comes on. Maybe one of my favorite songs of all time. Literal goosebumps every single time that acoustic intro hits. I play that verse riff more than anything else when I have my acoustic in my hands. Even before you hear the Lord of the Rings references in the lyrics, it's hard to not imagine rolling green hills and little huts. JPJ's bass line hoping towards you like a Hobbit. That sustained harmonious solo. It's just beautiful. What's next? "Moby Dick". Ara stop. This album is TOO good. So much emphasis is put on Bonham's long drum solo in this song, that you might forget that it's home to one of the all time best riffs, and those guitar fills in between are EPIC. And then they hand the whole thing over to John, who does what only Bonham could do. At the end of the song, the guitar fills are replaced by drum fills. Nice. Finally, "Bring It On Home". The intro and outro are my favourite blues moments on record - that harmonica tone, that production. Then the verse riff kicks the door down: pure energy. The album finishes quietly after 40 minutes of mayhem - like a gang of Hell’s Angels kicking down your door, wrecking your kitchen, drinking all your whiskey, starting a brawl, lighting a small fire… and then slipping quietly out the back door.

The first time I encountered Mark E. Smith was when he tried to suffocate Joe Cornish with a plastic bag over his head on TV. He was joking of course, but was still kinda following through on it. "Vinyl Justice" was a segment on the Adam and Joe TV show, where Adam Buxton and Joe Cornish would arrive at a musician's house dressed as police, and call them out for crimes against music (embarrassing records in their personal collection). They arrived at Mark E. Smith's house dressed in protective riot gear. Because he's an unpredictable, dangerous lunatic. In "This Nation..." that sense of unpredictability is front and center. Chaotic, aggressive and wry spoken word from Smith is layered on top (or sometimes below) stuttering guitar and bass loops, sound effects and cymbal crashes. At one point during "Paintwork", it randomly cuts to an Open University lecture on red giants, apparently because Smith accidentally taped over part of the master tape at home and just decided to leave it in. There are tributes or references to Can, A Clockwork Orange, The Doors and The Twilight Zone thrown in the mix. At times it feels like rock, but other times it feels more psychedelic and experimental. But at its core is a real art punk energy, mostly down to Smith being behind the wheel. I guess that Adam and Joe segment is a good metaphor for this album. You start off prepared, dressed in riot gear, but by the end of the album Mark E. Smith has put a plastic bag over your head, is sitting on top of you and punching you in the ribs, all the while laughing his head off.

Radiohead are my all-time favourite band, and with a Copenhagen show on the horizon this feels like perfect timing to revisit Kid A. I've threatened my wife-to-be and our two dogs for years that I'd give a TED Talk on this album. Now's my chance. Kid A sits in my top three records of all time, just behind OK Computer and The Dark Side of the Moon, but in many ways it's the one that means the most to me. It wasn't the first Radiohead album I ever owned (that was Pablo Honey, bought as a kid because it was cheaper than the “Creep” single). It wasn't even the first Radiohead release to arrive while I was actively collecting music (that honour goes out to OK Computer). But Kid A was the first Radiohead album that landed at a time when I was a complete fanatic. I can't overemphasise the hype for this album. There were bootlegs flying around the Radiohead chat forums, there were the amazing animated "blips" that Stanley Donwood created, marketed through a website (one of the first websites that felt more like an art installation), and I was even at a launch party for the album in a local club named Cuba, which was bizarrely co-owned by Huey Morgan of the Fun Lovin' Criminals. The hype was there because this was the follow-up to the greatest album of our time, of all time, OK Computer. And it became the biggest left turn in modern music. For a lot of listeners, it was a shock: abandoning their guitars and diving into electronica. But, it never felt like a challenge to me. I already liked electronic music, but more than that, it felt like a natural progression. OK Computer had pushed guitars to their absolute limits, so the only place left was to go beyond. And even then, guitars never vanished entirely. "Optimistic", "Morning Bell" and "In Limbo" are still pushing the boundaries of guitars, and even the ambient weightlessness of "Treefingers" is built entirely from guitar samples run through the Ondes Martenot. Kid A pulls influence from everywhere. Charles Mingus, Aphex Twin, CAN, Talking Heads' "Remain in Light". But Radiohead filter those influences into something that doesn't feel like rock, electronica, jazz or ambient. It's its own beast. I'm convinced Kid A is a concept album. A protagonist, let's say Yorke for shorthand, feels disconnected from the world, experiencing it at a distance, like Kid A, the first human clone: conscious, confused, overwhelmed, and unprepared. The title song is an alien lullaby with half-human vocals filtered through the Ondes, with Phil taking over the programmed drums halfway through. It's as jarring as it is beautiful, and one of Radiohead's most underrated masterpieces. "The National Anthem" feels like that Yorke's first contact with reality: the pounding bassline as a heartbeat, the brass section spiralling into overwhelming sensory overload, the world happening far too fast. The emotional climax of the entire album arrives in “How to Disappear Completely,” one of my all-time favourite songs. Yorke has spoken about the out-of-body experience that inspired it, imagining his head floating down the Liffey during a Dublin gig, and I feel a strange national pride that one of Radiohead's most transcendent moments is tied to this country. That rising Ondes Martenot part, two notes of absolute clarity, is one of the most emotionally affecting passages in any Radiohead song. The strings are gorgeous, offering a moment of acceptance before the world (and string section) collapses again around him. No song has ever captured overwhelm and anxiety better than this. "I'm not here. This isn't happening". "Treefingers" feels like a complete emotional shutdown. After the painful dissociation of "How to Disappear", this is total withdrawal. Floaty, ambient, numb and peaceful. Then "Optimistic" brings Yorke back to earth with a momentary sense of clarity and perspective, though sarcasm and exhaustion soon creep in. "In Limbo" has him literally lost at sea: dark, brooding chords, that uneasy stop-start riff, the repeated plea of "don't bother me". It's yet another one of Radiohead's most criminally underrated tracks and its descent into madness at the end is pure perfection. "Idioteque" is the album's lurch into panic: climate disaster ("ice age coming"), political cynicism ("let me hear both sides"), technology overload ("mobiles chirping"), and the bleak hopelessness of protest ("we're not scaremongering, this is really happening"). For an entire generation of guitar kids, this was the gateway to electronica. It was impossible to ignore. "Morning Bell" plays like someone going through a divorce, but completely emotionally detached, suggesting they "cut the kids in half” as part of their settlement. But it's actually more about being divorced from reality itself. "Motion Picture Soundtrack" brings the album to a crescendo of an ending. That organ is gorgeous. Yorke seems to decide to leave the overwhelm of the world behind altogether with the line "I will see you in the next life". But, perhaps it's also Yorke deciding to go back to a moment of peace, accepting the world, as we get an ending of ambiguity with the ambient, weightless synth-string coda bringing us back for a moment, post-credits, to the calmness of "Treefingers". Every member of the band reinvents themselves here. Jonny Greenwood goes from one of the most innovative guitarists of all time, to one of the most innovative musical minds, full stop, bringing KAOSS pads, modular synths, the Ondes Martenot, sampling, and more to the mix. Kid A isn't a left turn. It's the sound of a band battling with the expectations of the entire world, the ensuing writer's block, and a disconnection from reality due to the surreal nature of public attention and relentless touring. And somehow creating one of the best albums of all time in the process. A true masterpiece of anxiety, overwhelm and disconnection. 100 stars.

Henry Hill's car screeches around the corner. He's paranoid, wired on coke, chauffeuring his family around, picking up guns and drugs, cooking pasta sauce, all while convinced a helicopter is following him. Playing over this scene, Mick Jagger screams "AMMA MONKEEEEEEY MAAAAN!" I became obsessed with that sequence of Goodfellas. And the main reason is the amazing medley of music that runs through it, one of the biggest highlights being "Monkey Man" from this album. I'm a big fan of all incarnations of the Stones. Early raucous 60s rock'n'roll Stones. Even psychedelic Stones. All of it great. But I particularly like this era of the Stones, when they concentrated on their blues roots, their biggest strength. I think this is my favourite of all the Stones albums. There's so much I love about this album. Merry Clayton's vocal crack in "Gimme Shelter". The slow burn of "Love in Vain". "Country Honk" being the better of the two honks. "Let it Bleed" with Jagger's inexplicable Southern twang. Keith Richards' guitar sounding somewhere halfway between rhythm and lead. The guitar tone and distorted harmonica of "Midnight Rambler", slowing down and building back up to the most epic part of the song - it's the ultimate blues jam. "You Got the Silver" showing Keef's singing chops and some great slide guitar too. Wyman's bass intro with those twinkly piano bits, before the drums and THAT guitar riff kicks in for the absolute tune of "Monkey Man". A proper groove. There's pure energy throughout this album. "You Can't Always Get What You Want" is the standout track in an album of standout tracks. The choir intro should feel ridiculous, but it actually works. The gentle acoustic build, the tambourine, the organ swell - the whole song gradually expands until it takes off. It's an absolute hero of a song. This is peak Stones. Blending blues, country, rock'n'roll and folk with lots of swagger and groove.

Back when I was in my early 20s, and a smoker, I used to carry around a Rolling Stones "Hot Lips" zippo lighter that I named Charlie, after Charlie Watts. Charlie would often slip out of my pocket during a night out, but would always somehow make his way back to me. Those lips are so instantly recognisable as representing the Stones. As a designer, I tip my hat to one of the greats of logo design. That this iconic visual was first introduced with this album, yet was overshadowed so massively by the album artwork itself says a lot. Another of the records that I rescued/nabbed from a friend's father, who was inexplicably dumping his vinly collection when I was younger, is an original 1971 pressing of Sticky Fingers, complete with working zipper and inner sleeve of underpants stamped with Andy Warhol's name. It just goes to show what the Stones are capable of when they have full creative control: one of the most innovative and iconic album covers of all time, and one of the most recognisable logos in the world, all in one release. And we're still just talking about the artwork - we haven't even gotten to the music yet. I stand by my previous claim that Let It Bleed is my favourite Stones album, but Begger's Banquet and Sticky Fingers are very close behind. What an album run! It's acutally pretty weird that the 1001 gen algorithm served me Let It Bleed yesterday and Sticky Fingers today. I'm looking forward to Exile on Main St. tomorrow. Sticky Fingers carries on the "return to blues roots" Stones era that Banquet introduced and Bleed perfected. There are some iconic Stones classics on here, like "Brown Sugar", "Wild Horses" and "Bitch", but some of the real gems are the more stripped down blues tunes, like the absolutely brilliant "You Gotta Move". The Stones always bring a very unique and raw sound and energy to the blues. Long, extended jams often break out, like on "Sway" and "Can't You Hear Me Knocking", showcasing just how tight a band the Stones had become with Mick Taylor settling in nicely. Iconic cover art, iconic logo, and a record that matches the attitude of both.

The reverb-soaked, echoey sound of a Memory Man pedal feeding back on itself is the sound that opens The Bends, and ushers in the first proper era of Radiohead. To me, Pablo Honey was more like of a collection of songs to supplement "Creep" than a proper Radiohead album. I always think of The Bends as their first real album. I remember when Radiohead played my hometown of Galway while touring The Bends. I was too young to go, but I could hear most of it drifting over from the venue into my back garden. Since then, I’ve seen them (properly) six more times across Ireland, along with the various side-projects (Jonny’s orchestral work, Junun and The Smile). And now, in less than a week, I’m off to see them for a seventh time in Copenhagen. This is the second Radiohead album 1001 has served me in the last week, so here’s hoping the next six days line up neatly with the remaining six. I've listened to this album so many times that I know it inside out. The underdog of Planet Telex with its echoey riff and Colin's distinct bass holding it together. Jonny's inventive guitar work adding texture to Bullet Proof. High and Dry's bright acoustic riff and solo. Seeing The Bends performed on Jools Holland gave me a whole new appreciation for the song. Jonny pulling the string off his guitar entirely to make the craziest noises, before the whole band comes together in a moment of pure energy towards the end of the song, as Thom sings: "I wanna be part of the human race". Street Spirit was the song that you learned on guitar as a teen to show off to your friends. A gorgeous piece of music. It also had nuns prancing about in slo-mo in the black and white video. Then there's the centerpiece of the album. (Nice Dream) > Just > My Iron Lung. A serious contender for the best consecutive three song run in any album. (Nice Dream) eases you in with some gorgeous verses and chorus before Thom's singing turns to a snarl, signalling in the nightmarish solo. Textured soundscapes build up in the background towards the end, making it feel very ethereal (hello Space Echo!) Then Just's acoustic guitar kicks in, and Johnny's guitar takes off. What can you say about Just except that it's a perfect song from start to finish. What an amazing chorus. Then Jonny's guitar seems to just keep climbing and climbing until all we're left with is that single high pitched note, sounding a bit alien thanks to the Whammy pitch-shifter. Before it all crashes down. A moment of peace before it that epic solo takes over, Thom screaming "You do it to yourself!". Literal goosebumps every single time. Plus, I can't hear that song without getting a visceral mental picture of a load of people lying perfectly still on the footpath. My Iron Lung became another reason to buy a Whammy pedal. Ed's textures in the background create atmosphere while Jonny's alien-sounding riff is distinctive enough to not need any lyrics for the chorus. Jazzy chords that have no business in rock music, make the verse sections complex and interesting. Thom snarls his way through sarcastic and sardonic lyrics. And of course that shift left, when the song takes off. This album reinvented guitar music, something Radiohead would do several times in their career. There really was nothing like it at the time. But it wasn't all music academia - they did it in a way that was a lot of fun to listen to. Radiohead announced themselves as the most interesting and innovative band on the go with this album, and suddenly became a hugely important part of many people's lives, myself included. In My Iron Lung, Thom sings "this is our new song / just like the last one / a total waste of time". You couldn't be more wrong, Thommy boy.

What are the odds? 1001 gen randomly serves me Let It Bleed, then the next day it gives me Sticky Fingers, so I write "I'm looking forward to Exile On Main St. tomorrow". And what comes up the following day? The Bends. But then the day after THAT? Here we are with Exile On Main St. What a great album. It's a pretty epic four album run from Beggars Banquet to Let It Bleed to Sticky Fingers to Exile On Main St. The Stones had fully found their groove across these previous three albums, and they're still at their peak here. The cover of Exile is fitting. A photo collage of outsiders, misfits, and Americana. This whole album feels like a collage of blues, gospel, country, and ragged American rock & roll. We have the "classic Stones rock" tunes. Songs like "Rocks Off", "Tumbling Dice", "Happy", "All Down the Line", all bring me back to standing in a mud pit in a very rainy Slane Castle, watching Mick strut about the stage like a possessed rooster. Keef's bright treble-heavy guitar tone ringing out on every chord, starts to become an iconic Stones staple across these songs. Blues tunes like "Rip This Joint", "Shake Your Hips" (where Jagger seems to channel John Lee Hooker), "Ventilator Blues", and too many more to mention, are the Stones at their best. There's only a few bands who can put a unique stamp on the blues, and the Stones are one of them. There's plenty of folk, country-bluegrass, and gospel woven through it all too. Then there are the more "laid back" tunes like "Torn and Frayed", "Sweet Black Angel" and "Let It Loose", showing a more mature side to the Stones. "Let It Loose" is now forever entangled in my mind with visuals of Frank Costello introducing himself to Billy Costigan at the bar in "The Departed". Scorsese and Robbie Robertson always used the Stones' music so perfectly in his films. "Sweet Virginia" is the masterpiece of the album. Sounding somewhere between Dylan, Young and old-school delta blues, it's a masterful blend of folk, country and blues. Rough, authentic and just perfect. The fact that these songs were mostly recorded in a basement on a mobile recording studio while the Stones were in exile themselves, after avoiding their tax bill, is nuts, but also maybe part of what gives the album its unique sound.

"Yaa yaa, feelin' good on a Wednesday..." Hard to believe this all started with Randy Marsh singing in a bathroom. Autotune. Outside of the world of South Park, I always liked and respected Lorde from the little I’d heard, mostly "Royals". So I was happy to dive into Melodrama when it popped up. But honestly, I think I liked Lorde better when I knew less of her music. I do appreciate the concept. A whole album structured around a house party is clever, and I can definitely see why people love this. But I just couldn’t get into it. The musicality never grabbed me. I was waiting for something as innovative and catchy as "Royals", but it never came. Sure, this isn't my type of music, but Billie Eilish isn’t my type of music either, and I love her stuff. So I don’t think it’s a taste-barrier issue. It just didn’t click with me. I admire the idea more than the album. It was grand, but I wouldn’t rush back for a re-listen. Sorry Randy.

This feels more like an art installation than an album of music. Something you'd stumble across in a white room in a museum of modern art. You sit down on a cold, uncomfortable bench, and listen to the absolute utter madness of this patchwork blanket of dialogue, sound effects, skits and satire. People stroke their chins in contemplation, while sped up chipmunk vocals, coughing and telephone conversations play in the background. You really have to remind yourself that Zappa didn't do drugs. Which makes this collection of sounds even crazier. Scathing satirical takedown of hippy culture - well, more of the hypocrasy of "mainstream" hippy culture, and the phoniness of those wanting to portray the image of being a hippie. In "Who Needs the Peace Corps", he captures it perfectly in the lines: "First I'll buy some beads, and then perhaps a leather band to go around my head, some feathers and bells, and a book of Indian lore. I will ask the Chamber of Commerce how to get to Haight Street and smoke an awful lot of dope". All of this is set to genre-jumping music that sounds very familiar to anyone who listens to music from that cultural era (The Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, The Byrds, etc.) It's a very interesting album. That's one thing you can say about it. It's absolutely batshit crazy. That's another. I love the concept, and the balls to release a whole album that doesn't care about music, but instead is 100% concerned on hitting you over the head repeatedly with its message. A tough one to listen to, but crazy enough to keep your attention at all times.

I'm a fan of Guy Garvey. But mostly because of his fantastic weekly show on BBC Radio 6 Music, where every Sunday afternoon I tune in to listen to the great music that he curates. His taste is nearly identical to mine. But, oddly I was never a big Elbow fan. The one song of theirs that got my attention when I first heard it was "Grounds for Divorce". That bluesy slide guitar riff, the vocal melody and the guitar and bass doubling for that epic chorus drop are all recipes for an absolutely top notch song. The rest of the album is a lot more subdued than I expected. Very atmospheric and light, reminding me (predictably enough) of the band Doves. Northern indie bands must share a sound I guess. The opening four songs are great, but it's let down a bit by the rest of the album. 3 stars feels a bit harsh, so let's call this 3.5.

The album opens with "Shout", and it's great stuff. Very dark synth, reminding me of Gary Numan or Depeche Mode. "Head over Heels" is another great song. Although I wonder my judgement is clouded with nostalgia. I first heard this song in the movie Donnie Darko, so I have good associations with it. But the rest of the album, including the most famous song, "Everybody Wants to Rule the World", feels quite dated and a bit "too 80s" for my taste.

I remember when Hey Ya! dropped. It wasn't just a big single, it was a cultural phenomenon. It was completely unique and seemed to come out of nowhere. Everyone was shaking Polaroids, asking people to lend them some sugar, declaring themselves as neighbours. I was fully swept up in it. I absolutely loved it. I'd play it at parties, quote it constantly, and I even created a medley on guitar that started with Hotel Yorba and would segue into an acoustic version of Hey Ya! It was the ultimate crowd pleaser ("crowd" being the 2-5 people actually listening to me play). But underneath all the pure joy of the song, is something really dark. Hey Ya! is one of the most upbeat songs ever written about how love isn't permanent. André literally tells us what he's doing, and we somehow don't notice, maybe because we don't want to - I guess that was his point: "Y'all don't want to hear me, you just want to dance". It's a brutally honest confession about love falling apart, people staying together for the wrong reasons, and how we avoid confronting hard truths. Hiding the message in the lyrics of a song that was so catchy and energetic, and playing on the trope of romance and love in pop music, is genius, and living through that hype while slowly realising what the song was really saying felt like André pulled off the ultimate magic trick. That track set the tone for The Love Below, André 3000's half of the double album: a psychedelic, jazzy, funky, 70s-soaked, musical-theatre fever dream where he leans fully into eccentricity. It barely resembles hip hop at all. It's lush with Prince-like falsetto, spoken-word interludes, theatrical storytelling, jazz melodies, and basslines full of stank. And it's FILTHY! It was bold, strange, theatrical, and completely unexpected for an Outkast album. Back when the album came out, I used to skip Speakerboxxx and go straight to André's side. Big Boi's half felt like the "other one", and I was there for André. But, Speakerboxxx is a really strong album too. It's dense, funky, and full of intricate, complex and layered melodies. Big Boi pulls in Funkadelic-style textures, and interesting samples and blends them perfectly with hip-hop. It's more in line with the classic Outkast sound, sure, but it's still complex and great. It never stood a chance, when sitting next to André's horny cosmic jazz opera. It was always going to be overshadowed. It was a really strange move to release separate albums in a double, and it was another angle of something unique and interesting that they were doing creatively. For me, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below will always be tied to that moment when Hey Ya! was everywhere, blaring from radios, at parties, on TV, while quietly saying something heartbreaking that most of us didn’t notice. We just wanted to shake polaroid pictures and borrow sugar.

I don't know WHAT I just listened to. Suba has thrown bossa nova, heavy experimental sounds, acid house, new-age hippie music, and down-tempo electronica into a blender, and weirdly, it's kinda great. Definitely one of the more out-there albums I've listened to recently, but it feels like a layered and complex love-letter to São Paulo and its mashup of cultural influences. Very interesting and unique collection of sounds.

The Undertones have always had this Ramones-like contradiction about them. On the surface they look and play like scrappy, leather-jacketed punks with loud guitars, shooting out two-minute bursts of punk rock. But then you listen to the lyrics, you realise they're singing about girls, chocolate, cousins, awkward crushes, and the very innocent chaos of teenage life. They sound less like snarling anti-establishment outsiders and more like five lads your parents would happily let you hang around with. I came in through "Teenage Kicks", of course, the gateway drug for most Undertones fans. And once I had a chance to see them in my hometown, with Paul McLoone fronting, I dove into the back catalogue. "Hypnotised" has some great hooks: short, bright, unpretentious. The guitars are still doing that ragged, three-chord punk thing, but there's a lot of colour here, feeling surfy, bubblegum and a bit garage at the same time. Feargal Sharkey sings like he's somewhere between crooning and yelping. It sounds strange to describe it, but when you listen to The Undertones, it all just clicks perfectly. They just wrote short, perfect songs and played them like they meant it. As a side note during that hometown gig, a friend of mine, in a moment of pure impulsiveness, stole guitarist John O’Neill’s performer lanyard straight off the stage and used it to get backstage to hang out with The Dirty Three, The Frames and Buddy Guy. And that's a lot more punk rock than any of the Undertones' lyrics.

A group of lads in Wrangler straight-cut jeans, brown leather shoes and white checked shirts, tucked in, with too many of the top buttons opened, jumping around the dancefloor of a soulless nightclub, sloshing their pints of cider and Heineken around the place. That's the image you get when you hear Mr. Brightside or Somebody Told Me. Absolute rubbish. It's mundane, over-produced swill that is presenting itself as some sort of artistic masterpiece. "Somebody told me you had a boyfriend / Who looked like a girlfriend / That I had in February of last year / It's not confidential, I've got potential / A rushing, rushing around." Move over Bob Dylan, give Brandon Flowers that Nobel Prize for literature. The songs on paper shouldn't elicit such intense feelings of hatred in me. If anything, they should mean very little to me, because the whole album, and the whole discography of The Killers is mundane, beige and uninteresting. But, there's just something about the sound that they create that causes me to grind my teeth to the point of causing dental damage. And posing as some sort of "high art" is the part that really makes my blood boil. And I haven't even gotten to the "profound" outro of All These Things that I've Done: "I've got soul, but I'm not a soldier". As Bill Bailey pointed out, on the surface it sounds alright. But then you analyse it and realise it's meaningless rubbish. It's as profound as saying "I've got ham, but I'm not a hamster".

I only really knew "Cranes in the Sky" going into this, and I did like the album, but it’s just not really my thing. It's refined and subtle, and there's a real calm, crafted feel to the whole thing. But for me it stayed more in the "I respect this" zone than something I'd come back to a lot. "Cranes in the Sky" is still the standout, and hearing it in context does make it hit a bit harder, but the rest didn't fully click with my tastes. Really well made, just not quite my scene.

Warm harmonies, a laid-back sunny hippy vibe, at times a bit rockier (like in "You Better Run"), and occasionally drifting into psychedelia. Mostly it's just easy, feel-good, hippy vibes spread across a bunch of catchy tunes. A perfect soundtrack for groovin' on a Sunday afternoon dog walk.

This album sounds like Bowie is lurking just off to the side, smoking a cigarette in a silver jumpsuit, giving the band a small, satisfied nod. I mean, "Whizz Kid" is the most Bowie-sounding song since "All the Young Dudes" - so much so, I had to look it up to see if he also wrote that one. The Bowie comparison isn't a bad one. Mott sounds like peak Ziggy Bowie, which can only be a good thing. It lacks the substance of Bowie, but it's top notch glam rock. 3.5 starman stars.

I still vividly remember the first time I listened to "Seven Nation Army". I can't remember exactly how I first got into the White Stripes, but it was either through hearing the songs "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground", "Fell in Love with a Girl", or maybe after seeing the video for the latter. Regardless, I was hooked on White Blood Cells, so when I heard Elephant was coming out, I bought it on the day of release. I couldn't wait to get into it. Literally. I was 19 years old and working in a supermarket hot food counter. I bought the album on my lunch break and couldn't wait until the end of my work shift to listen, so I nipped into the bathroom with my discman. Not the most glamourous setting for the first time I heard "Seven Nation Army", but my mind was absolutely blown. I went back to work, and somehow made it to the end of the day. Anytime anyone spoke to me, it was like the adults in Charlie Brown. Trumpets. Muffled wah-wahs. My brain was busy replaying that riff. The album became a soundtrack to my late teens and early twenties, the music perfectly matching the chaos of that time. Some albums bring you back to a particular time in your life, and Elephant is one of them: every listen pulls me straight to the smoky dancefloor upstairs in Cuba nightclub, to clumsily hammering out "Ball And Biscuit" on guitar in my childhood bedroom (much to my neighbour's despair, I'm sure), to laughing with friends about the cheeky humour of "It's True That We Love One Another". When I lived in Greece for four months, the album came with me. We used to blast "There’s No Home for You Here" at full volume to not-so-subtly evict an overstaying house guest. For a band that famously brought everything back to basics, The White Stripes still found ways to innovate within those restrictions. Jack White made all of us bedroom guitarists go wide-eyed when he introduced a fake "bass guitar" switch through his Whammy pedal, "Seven Nation Army" and "The Hardest Button to Button" being the prime examples. Then you've got the lurching slow-down/speed-up madness of "Black Math", the glorious, unhinged Whammy-drenched solos in "Ball And Biscuit", and their creatively raw reworking of a Dusty Springfield classic, complete with that jarring, buzzing guitar stab at “I need your sweet [blarrrng] love [blarrrng].” Then there were the music videos for the singles. "Seven Nation Army" caused dizzy spells with its infinite zoom around triangles and optical illusions. "The Hardest Button to Button" out stop-motioned Michel Gondry's previous White Stripe stop-motion masterpiece of "Fell in Love with a Girl", and then there was the jaw-dropping black and white Kate Moss pole-dancing video for "I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself" (insert eyes emoji 👀). Their dedication to that red-white-and-black palette, the stripped-back musical style, and all those inventive videos just added to the whole White Stripes mythology. Elephant is where everything - sound, visuals, attitude - came together perfectly. Their masterpiece.

Feels like one of the seminal records of punk, right alongside the work of Iggy and The Stooges, but there's still a lot of bluesy grit and some slightly unhinged, experimental moments in there too. It's raw, loud, with a real political fire behind it. Also, I was halfway through when I realised that Fred “Sonic” Smith is in MC5, someone I know of through another punk legend, his partner and namesake, Patti Smith. 3.5 stars

I was never really into Wu-Tang Clan, or this style of hip-hop in general. I did enjoy this though - Method Man's rap style, some interesting choices around structure (the "sparring match" of Meth vs. Chef, for example), and RZA's great beats and samples really elevated it. Ultimately, I liked this and respect the work, but it's just not really my scene.

The Who went in a strange direction from where they started off. In the early days, there are moments where they basically stumbled into punk without knowing it: the power chords, the frantic tempos, the sense that Keith Moon was trying to physically outrun the song. It was raw enough that you could imagine shaving a few minutes off each track and ending up with an early prototype of The Ramones. But instead of leaning into that, The Who veered off into a half-avant-garde, half-doo-wop detour. It's like they couldn't decide whether to smash their instruments or write a rock opera, so they did both. I've never been a fan of live albums, with a few big exceptions, and Live at Leeds… isn't one of those exceptions. The production choice to strip away almost all the audience noise to make the band sound crisp and isolated, makes sense on paper. But in practice, you get these bizarre pockets of dead air after songs, or during Pete Townshend's between-song rambles. It's eerie and disjointed, like someone muted the crowd, and it absolutely sucks the atmosphere out of what was clearly a roaring venue. I'd imagine being in that room in 1970 would've been epic. Listening to the album, though, doesn't quite give you that level of excitement. But the musical performance itself mostly overcomes the production quirks. The "My Generation" medley is a monster. "Magic Bus" is ridiculous in the best possible way. When they hit their stride, the whole thing works well enough that you CAN start to imagine what it might have felt like to be in that crowd. Is this one of the greatest live albums ever? No. Does it sit up there with The Last Waltz, Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged, or Dylan Live ’66? No. But as a musical performance, with some amazing medleys, it's a great showcase of The Who at their peak.

They should prescribe this album as medication to remedy stress. As far as shoegaze goes, these songs feel much warmer and more optimistic than a lot of the genre - definitely less raw and aggressive than the "punch you in the face" distorted guitars of My Bloody Valentine. There's something very calming about listening to this album. But it's never uninteresting. Every track is layered with unexpected sounds and effects, creating textured melodies that take subtle, unexpected turns as they flow into each other. That seems to be the point of the synesthetic colour-coding of the songs into groupings. Rather than standing alone, the tracks blend together to create broader soundscapes, each with its own feel, represented by colour. Repetition swells and builds slowly, becoming almost trance-like. By the time it ends, everything just feels a bit calmer. 4.5 stars

That iconic album cover. A figure in darkness, cigarette glowing, something half-hidden. It sets the tone visually - quiet, mysterious, detached - and gives you a sense of what you're about to experience. Almost. Deserter's Songs didn't really sound like anything else around at the time. It felt unearthed rather than recorded. There's a crackle and pop to the production that makes everything feel like it's come from another time, like a time capsule left somewhere damp and forgotten. The otherworldly atmosphere of BioShock comes to mind, like a relic from a different world. "I Collect Coins" and "The Drunk Room" especially sound like recordings that have survived some kind of apocalyptic event, echoing in a huge, empty space. The heartbreak at the core of the album hits hardest on tracks like "Holes" and "Tonite It Shows". Fragile, wounded songs that feel permanently on the verge of breaking down at any point. The emotional backbone of the album comes from the strange, aching instrumental textures everywhere. At times it sounds like a saw weeping. At others it's barely even music, just atmosphere breathing around the songs. The unusual collection of instruments creates some seriously gorgeous, sweeping and cinematic moments, especially in songs like "Endlessly" and "Opus 40". I'm fascinated by how different this sounds to The Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin. The two bands were sharing studio space at the time, often using the same instruments and equipment. Mercury Rev recorded during the day, The Flaming Lips came in at night, saw what was lying around, and began experimenting themselves. Same room, same tools, but completely different results. Both bands reinvented themselves, just in completely different creative directions. "Goddess on a Hiway" is perfectly placed, turning up just when the album needs it. It was the track that first caught my attention, along with "Holes", but coming back to it now, the album clearly works best as a complete piece rather than something to dip in and out of. Deserter's Songs isn't exactly something you'd throw on at a party. It works best late at night, lights low, left to run its course. Not unlike the image on the album cover itself.

I've never been a fan of Tom Petty. I know I'm likely in the minority here. I play guitar with a group at my partner's family reunion every October, and I remember the look of absolute shock and horror on her cousin's face, when I dropped the bombshell that I didn't know how to play any Tom Petty because I wasn't a fan. He couldn't compute it - "But you play guitar, how do you not like Tom Petty?" To be clear, it's not that I don't like his music, although I'm definitely not a fan of Free Fallin' or Learning to Fly (don't @ me!), but to me, his music is just very middle of the road. And that goes for everything I heard on this album too. "Rockin' Around (With You)" is the song that I liked the most, and the rest of the album was enjoyable too. But, to answer my partner's cousin, it's not that I don't like Tom Petty, it's all fine - it's just nothing particularly special to me.

It'd be so easy to just give this a one-word review: "Bad". But I'll rise above the temptation. I've already said before that I was never a fan of Jacko, even before the abuse stories came out. 80s pop just grinds my gears, and he was the undisputed king of it. The 80s in general were a weird time, where being "bad" simply meant wearing studded leather jackets and repeatedly telling everyone how bad you were. By this stage, Jacko was so famous and so insulated from normal life that he was completely unaware of how cringey some of his songwriting actually was. Let's try to be objective about it all though. The title track "Bad" IS a good song. Cheesy, nonsense, and deeply cringey, sure, but it's grand. "The Way You Make Me Feel" has all the hallmarks of an awful 80s song: processed beats, processed bass, layers of synth. But the melody does a lot of heavy lifting and ultimately saves it. On the other hand, tracks like "Just Good Friends", "Another Part of Me" and "Speed Demon" lean fully into the 80s excess, with "Speed Demon" throwing in some absolutely unhinged keytar for good measure. "Liberian Girl" is peak late-80s Jacko cringe. It's hard to listen to without shuddering in pure cringe. But the second half of the album is hard for even the biggest Jacko haters to argue with. "Man in the Mirror" is cheesy, yes, but it's undeniably catchy and shows off the strengths of his voice, with plenty of "shamons" and "hee-hees" thrown in for good measure. "Dirty Diana" and "I Just Can’t Stop Loving You" keep things going, before "Smooth Criminal", which is genuinely a unique and interesting song. "Leave Me Alone" is a very solid way to end the album too. So is it Bad? In the way Michael Jackson meant it - badass, tough, cool? No. In the true sense of the word, in terms of quality? Begrudgingly, I also have to say no. It doesn't deserve the untouchable pedestal it's often put on, but there are enough strong songs here to test even the most committed Jacko hater.

I can understand how Bob Dylan fell asleep when he was played this album. I'm a fan of Joni Mitchell, and the reality is that it was just Bob Dylan being very Bob Dylan - but to be fair this is a very, very mellow album. There's a lot of soft jazz bringing the energy levels down here, which results in tamer stuff than I expected from Joni. There are some great songs on here all the same. "Help Me" is a classic, and title track "Court and Spark" has some really gorgeous piano. It's far from "Blue", but still enjoyable. "Raised on Robbery" finally wakes myself and Bob up with some high tempo rock'n' roll, but we're already at the last 3 songs of the album at this stage. "Twisted" is a jazzy number to end on, and the double bass groove will have you snapping your fingers before you realise you're doing it. Joni's vocal performance is fantastic and varied throughout the song. As the album comes to a close, I find myself wishing there had been more of this earlier.

As someone who was learning to play guitar in the mid-90s, it was a requirement, not an option, to learn "A Design for Life". Even if you weren't a fan of the Manics. Like it was part of a curriculum. And I wasn't a fan of the Manics. Listening back to this album now, nothing has changed. Bradfield's singing voice still really gets on my nerves. The rest of the makeup of their music is the embodiment of a shoulder shrug, or the word "meh". They put themselves forward as edgy and profound, but they're neither. The disappearance of Richey Edwards hangs heavily over this album. They may have gained a lot more success post-Edwards, but their sound had become a lot more watered down and less interesting than in the days he was around. The arpeggios of "A Design for Life" are the most interesting thing about the music on this album, and after learning to play them, they weren't even worth the effort.

Amnesiac suffers from one big problem: it lives in the shadow of a masterpiece. After Kid A, the anticipation was massive. I remember living on Radiohead forums, downloading bootlegs from gigs, dissecting rumours about "Big Boots", "Nude", "Follow Me Around". Then a leaked version of "I Might Be Wrong" surfaced and suddenly there it was: guitar. Not that the move into electronica was ever a bad one for Radiohead, but the thought of Jonny Greenwood, quite possibly the most innovative guitarist of all time, plugging back in again was a moment of serious excitement. The physical release of this was particularly special. That "lost book" edition, with the CD acting as the library book card, was such a perfect artefact for the music inside. Paired with Stanley Donwood's artwork, the crying minotaur, the labyrinth, the constellations - it alone dispelled any thoughts that this was going to be a collection of Kid A b-sides or leftovers. This was a proper album. What still blows my mind is this: imagine your biggest creative block producing so much extraordinary material that you not only make Kid A, but still have enough left over to build Amnesiac. Having songs like "Pyramid Song" or "You And Whose Army?" in your back pocket, and thinking "nah, these aren't good enough for the album" is absolutely nuts. And yet, somehow, it's still criminally underrated. Let's go down into the labrynth. "Pyramid Song" is one of Radiohead's absolute best. That impossible-feeling time signature, the drifting gorgeous piano with all the textured sounds around it. It's a top-tier Radiohead classic. Ditto for "You And Whose Army?": that sharp intake of breath at the start, the muted, muffled descending jazz chord progression. The fragile, calm tone in Thom's voice juxtaposed with the defiant taunting of the lyrics. It's absolutely cinematic. You can visualise a hero who appears to be knocked down, knowing something his enemy doesn't, quietly confident. And then that epic refrain of "We ride tonight / Ghost horses." Seriously. Synth pulses signal something incoming, Jonny's drop-D riff locks in with Colin's roaming bass, and "I Might Be Wrong" kicks off. And remains kicking, the rawness of the distorted guitar mixing with the metallic electronic beat - a real trademark of this "new" Radiohead. Until everything fractures in that stunning middle section, one of the most gorgeous moments they've ever recorded, the familiar descending hiss of a Memory Man feeding back to infinity, building atmospheric dread. I'm going to say it: the better of the "Morning Bells" is on here too. The single for "Pyramid Song" had two versions, with different b-sides on each, so of course I got both. "The Amazing Sounds of Orgy" is one of the most unique songs that Radiohead have come out with. It didn't sound like anything else they'd ever made, and it remains criminally hidden and largely unknown in their backlog of b-sides. Similar could be said for the fantastic "Trans-Atlantic Drawl", "Fast Track" or "Kinetic". "Dollars and Cents" is born of those same recordings, when Radiohead started to come out with some really atmospheric songs centered around bass. These songs are a side of Radiohead that verges almost on shoegaze - live instrumentation making music that behaved like electronica. "Hunting Bears" is another unique moment. The "Fitter, Happier" of this album: nothing but guitar string squeaks, a simple repeated riff, a keyboard drone, and yet somehow emotionally devastating. "Like Spinning Plates" might be Radiohead at their most experimental. Reversed, re-reversed, alien, unsettling. Thom's voice sounds like it's being transmitted from another dimension. Hearing the piano version live in Copenhagen recently only reinforced how beautiful the song is beneath all that abstraction. And then there's "Life in a Glasshouse". A genuine masterpiece. The jazz-inflected verses swelling until the chorus slaps you on the face with a trumpet. The brass is everything here, and Thom's final screams, “only, only, only” are the sound of the album peaking. I've seen so many forum lists ranking Radiohead albums into S-tier piles, and it genuinely baffles me that Amnesiac so often sits near the bottom, barely ahead of Pablo Honey. I honestly don't understand how this record isn't universally recognised as top-tier Radiohead. Listening to it waiting around in a hospital today, covered in wires and sensors, felt oddly appropriate for an album like Amnesiac. Despite the setting, the album creates a sense of familiarity that completely displaces where you are. It makes me feel at home. Underrated doesn't even begin to cover it.

The John Martyn I know is the Stormbringer! folky-bluesy John Martyn. One World is something else entirely. This is jazz-dub Martyn: echo, delay, and space doing most of the talking. Where folk, jazz and dub meet is in atmosphere rather than structure. Songs hover instead of progressing. "Big Muff" is a nutty oddball. I don't think anyone expected that putting Lee Scratch Perry and John Martyn in a room together would result in lyrics inspired by teacups shaped like animals, but here we are. The real centrepiece, though, is the absolutely gorgeous "Small Hours". The guitar barely sounds like a guitar at all, instead turning almost synth-like, endlessly delayed. Minimalist, refined, and perfect. One World is ambitious and fascinating, but for every moment that works, there are also moments that drift without really justifying themselves. Interesting, brave, and uneven. 3.5 stars.

I was 11 years old, when Brian, the slightly unhinged kid who sat next to me in class in primary school, asked me if I listened to the Prodigy. When I said I'd heard of them but not given them a listen yet, he started going on about the song "Poison", giving me a not-far-off impression of the weird vocals that made the song so distinctive. It was enough to convince me. The Prodigy never felt safe. They were always edgy to the point of scary. There was a serious darkness to everything they came out with, almost like the music equivalent of a horror movie. Liam Howlett is a genius. I've spent entirely too much time watching videos dissecting entire Prodigy albums, breaking down the samples that make up each song. And it's nuts. To have that vision, to piecemeal this alien-sounding music together, out of bits and bobs of funk, soul, hip hop, rock, jazz, clips from TV and movies... I can never get my head around it. Their music had an energy and belief in itself that that brought all of those madcap samples together to make something pretty unique and special. I think what worked so well for the Prodigy was that, even though we're firmly in the ground of electronica here, the songs often feel like they're coming from an underground punk rock band. It has that same energy and rawness from punk that wasn't common in dance music back then. Besides that, it's Liam's massive constructed beats that elevate things. They kick in at just the right moment, they drive things forward, and they're always HUGE. The middle section of the album is epic. "Voodoo People" to "Poison" to "No Good". "Voodoo People" brings jazz flute, Nirvana, Led Zeppelin and rave beats together. "No Good" is, right now, the perfect Xmas Eve soundtrack. It might not be Christmassy, but it's a great one to clean the house to, in preparation of visitors. Then there's "Poison", the song that got me here in the first place. That unnerving, jangly melody (if you can even call it that), the disturbing pitch-shifting vocal effects making Maxim's voice sound terrifying, and then that booming bass as the beat drops. It's as scary sounding as it is amazing. One of those songs that defies proper description. "Skylined" is a sign of what was to come later with the likes of "Mindfields" and "Climbatize". Hard to believe that "No Good" and this song are on the same album, or even that they're by the same band! It's a mature, cinematic soundscape, something you could imagine scoring a European arthouse movie set in Germany. My classmate in primary school was a bit of a wilding. His dad was in the army, away from home, his brother was in and out of prison, and he was acting up as a result. He'd shave his head bald one day for no reason, and start fights after school, just because he loved fighting. I had very little in common with him, but we ended up being mates for a while, because of the Prodigy. Music is the ultimate social leveller, and the Prodigy were making music that really connected groups of people from different circles, the jilted generation I guess you could say - which is a weird thing to get out of a song like "Poison".

Every Christmas I used to make a background playlist for the chaos: preparing vegetables, debating whether the ham was actually cooked, stress levels steadily rising as the planned serving time approached and parents and in-laws arrived hungry, helpful, and offering far too many cooks in our small kitchen. The easy part of the playlist was around the classics I already loved, or knew had to be on there: John & Yoko's political classic (also produced by Spector), Mike Oldfield's unhinged guitar workout, Mariah wanting everything, and more recently, Paul McCartney's strange synthy money-maker, which I've gotten a recent appreciation for, after seeing it performed live last year by Macca himself and a choir of schoolchildren. But the playlist would always run out. I'd be nowhere near the stereo by then, too busy rescuing the brussel sprouts or checking the cooking schedule (and checking it twice). Spotify would take over, the Christmas songs would keep coming, and before long things would get repetitive. Well, I realise now that all I had to do was put on this album to save myself a lot of effort. With only a couple of exceptions, one of them a spoken thank-you message, every track here is a Christmas classic. I'd already heard them everywhere: soundtracking the Late Late Toy Show, turning up in TV Christmas specials, blaring from tinny supermarket speakers. These songs have been part of the Christmas atmosphere since childhood. I just never realised they all came from the same album. Giving traditional Christmas songs an early-60s doo-wop Wall of Sound treatment was an inspired move. It works so well that almost every track went on to become a seasonal standard. As we listened, each song after another an undeniable classic, we kept joking about how obscenely rich this album must have made Phil Spector. Of course, it's impossible to listen without thinking about the darker side of him: the gun fired into the studio ceiling during the John Lennon recording sessions, Ronnie Bennett effectively imprisoned in her own home, putting a gun to Leonard Cohen's neck, telling him "Leonard, I love you", to which Cohen replied "I hope you do, Phil", keeping Dee Dee Ramone from leaving a studio session early by, you guessed it, pulling a gun on her, and ultimately the murder conviction. So when Spector speaks over "Silent Night" at the end, it leaves the album on an unsettling, uneasy note. But let's forget about the madness of Spector, and concentrate on the album itself. I mean, it's Christmas after all. The music here speaks for itself. "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" stands as the lone original, yet became another eternal Christmas song. More than that, the doo-wop sound itself is now inseparable from Christmas, largely because of this album. Next year, I won't be stressing over playlists. I'll just put this on and let it do the work. Happy Christmas everyone! 🎄

There are two BIG reasons to like Dolly Parton: her selfless funding of the COVID vaccine research and the earnest lyricism of her music. Sometimes, on this album, Dolly ends up sounding like Alison Krauss, the type of country folk that I'm fond of, "My Blue Tears" being the perfect example. But other times, it drifts into the type of country western that I can't stand. You know the type: overly polite melodies, syrupy sentiment, and that mournful pedal steel guitar sound. The kind of thing that always seems to be on TG4 when you're skimming TV channels, skipping quickly past. But for some reason, I find myself overlooking my contempt for country western in favour of Dolly. There's something undeniably genuine about her - warm, sincere, and bright - and it comes through in her music. "Here I Am" captures that best on this album. I still don't like country western. I probably never will. But Dolly's songwriting is sincere enough that, if she happened to be on TG4, I might actually stop and watch for a bit.

I came into this as a Marilyn Manson hater. Back in the late 90s, Manson was weirdly everywhere. Not exactly who you would have expected to be the TV-friendly darling of MTV, but somehow he was plastered all over our screens for a while. The hysteria definitely helped to fuel the media prominence. The schoolyard rumours of having a rib removed for self-pleasure had been passed from Prince to Marilyn Manson. People were incorrectly telling others that he was "the geeky kid with glasses" from The Wonder Years, in a sort of "look what could happen" kind of shock statement. Some parents were hysterical about rumours of Satan worship, self-mutilation and suicide promotion. There was an aspect of homophobia about the androgynous nature of Manson too, for sure. The media jumped on it all. I wasn't a fan. I heard all of this frenzy, didn't buy into any of it, and wrote Manson off as someone feeding off this circus, with little substance below the surface. Also, to be completely honest, in my music circle of Britpop, 60s and 70s rock and roll, and alt rock, it was very much NOT cool to like Marilyn Manson. Industrial metal, or whatever it was called as a genre, was enough to dismiss an artist, even before stacking on the whole "acting up for attention" feel to their music. I have to admit though, I did absolutely LOVE one of their songs. I had heard "The Dope Show" (from their next album) on a "Best of 1998" CD that came free with Q Magazine. It wasn't what I had expected at all. More 70s glam rock than industrial metal, and with a chorus that was absolutely brilliant. I mean, it was one of my favourite songs of the year, if I'm completely honest. I'd tell people about it, but only with a series of disclaimers about how I didn't like Manson, and how the rest of their stuff was nonsense. I did an eye roll when this came up as my album of the day. After the first song, I was already wondering how I'd get through the hour plus of this. But, in the middle of the metal, faux gothic horror stuff that I still roll my eyes at, I started to notice some pretty great guitar riffs, some glam rock and even moments that were, dare I say it, Bowie-esque. I'm still not a fan of Manson himself, the 90s gore-horror aesthetic, the antagonistic lyrics, and the industrial metal parts, but when all of that is juxtaposed with the bright, melodic distorted glam rock riffs that come in so unexpectedly, it actually works really, really well. I mean that second half of "Cryptorchid" caught me so off-guard, with the fragile mellotron and affected vocal harmonies. If I'd heard it in isolation, I would have never guessed it was a Marilyn Manson song. "Tourniquet" is genuinely a great song from start to finish. "Wormboy" has a pretty great main riff. Even "The Beautiful People" has that 70s sounding descending guitar riff, more than making up for the rest of the song. It turns out that it wasn't a chore to get through an hour of this at all. It was actually enjoyable, waiting to hear what unexpected direction the next song would take. Just like when I would recommend "The Dope Show" to friends, I've added a tonne of disclaimers to this review. But shit, it's actually not a bad album at all. 3.5 stars.

I've always liked Sheryl Crow. Fun fact: she created one of my favourite Bond themes in the often forgotten Tomorrow Never Dies. The movie deserves to be forgotten, not the song. It's no secret that I'm not a fan of country music, but this falls more into something you might call "Americana". There's a folky, bluesy feel to everything. I'm particularly fond of those sharp 7th notes that she throws into her music. Overall, I enjoyed everything I heard on this album. "Run, Baby, Run" hurts my head with vocals that seem to be running asynchronously to the melody (has anyone else noticed this, or is it just me??), but it's catchy as hell. There's a great run from the opening track through "Leaving Las Vegas", one of the most 90s sounding songs of the 90s, "Strong Enough", with its laid-back folky atmosphere, "Can't Cry Anymore", defying you to not get it stuck in your head, "Solidify" sneaking in a bit of funk, before the nutty "The Na-Na Song" channelling Subterranean Homesick Blues Dylan vocal stylings. The front-runner is obvious though. "All I Wanna Do" was everywhere when it first came out, and deservedly so. Perfect melody, instrumentation, and lyrics. Songs like this only come along every so often, and when they do they usually become victims of being overplayed to bajaysus. But for some reason, this is one of the few songs that doesn't end up getting on your nerves after the millionth listen. It also wins the prestigious award for being a song with prominent pedal steel guitar that somehow doesn't get on my nerves. For how enjoyable the music is here, I do still find myself questioning why it won so many Grammys, or why it's held in such high regard. These are really solid songs, very easy to listen to, consistently good, but nothing here feels particularly bold or innovative. I enjoyed listening to this, and I'd happily return to it. Not ground-breaking, but very easy to like.

Beards, blues, and black suits. Every song on Eliminator immediately makes me think of 1980s MTV. Glossy neon graphics, bad effects, dramatic lighting, wind machines, sunglasses at night, smoke machines. The songs are cheesy as hell and mostly nonsense. But somehow, they're still likeable. I don't think anyone really takes ZZ Top too seriously. They're great musicians, but there’s a self-awareness to all of this. In my head, they sit in the same space as The Darkness: over-the-top nonsense, but enjoyable nonsense all the same.

I come for the funk, but I stay for the guitar solos. Michael Hampton, or "Throbbasonic Funkgeetarist Kid Funkadelic" as he's credited, plays insane guitar solos throughout the madcap funk on this album, some that could even rival Hendrix. Seriously some of the best guitar work I've heard in a long time. I once saw George Clinton and the P-Funk All-Stars live at Electric Picnic, and I still talk about how nuts it was. There was so much happening on stage at all times. A big dude dancing around in a diaper. At one point, a tall guy dressed like a swanky pimp was introduced to the crowd - he walked on stage left, waved, swung his cane, and promptly exited stage right. At any given moment there were maybe 15–20 people on stage, some playing instruments, some singing, the rest just contributing to the vibe. So, it's not surprising that a lot of this album is completely nuts. For example, "Promentalshitbackwashpsychosis Enema Squad (The Doo Doo Chasers)" is about as normal as its name. Multiple spoken word conversations take place over the music and singing, before the guitar solo silences everyone. And somehow, despite the madness, it's a seriously good song. You get the impression that Clinton throws ideas together without much planning and just trusts that it'll work out. The truth is that he's just operating on a completely different level to the rest of us. His instincts, no matter how crazy they are, are always right. Much like the onstage madness at the Electric Picnic, there's just so much going on all at once throughout this entire album, but it never feels overwhelming. It just always works.

Superfuzz Bigmuff sounds like the Seattle grunge scene being born. I'd never actually listened to Mudhoney, but I knew them by reputation, mostly through being a big Nirvana fan. These songs don't have Nirvana's melodies, but the shared DNA is obvious: the irony, the humour, the rejection of 80s polish, and that anarchic punk attitude toward rawness over perfection. This is scrappy, distorted, and deliberately rough. At times it veers into The Stooges territory, but on tracks like "Need" you can hear that familiar grunge guitar tone taking shape: blown-out fuzz, half-committed vocals, sounding like they might trash the stage at any moment. The standout is "If I Think": quiet–loud–quiet dynamics, fragile, non-committal vocals giving way to guttural screams, and a guitar solo that sounds like it was played blindfolded. It's messy, uncomfortable, and brilliant. It's fitting that the record closes with the "we wanna be free..." sample from "The Wild Angels", the same one Andrew Weatherall famously used for Primal Scream's "Loaded". But where "Loaded" turns it into an optimistic call to action, Mudhoney use it more ironically, less a manifesto than a shrug - cynical, sarcastic and very Seattle. 3.5 stars

"California Dreamin" is still just as great nearly 60 years later. It's become an iconic representation of a musical era, and it's built on perfect harmonies and an instantly memorable melody. The verse sections are often overlooked, with John Phillips' gruffer vocals giving things another dimension. One of the greats. "Monday, Monday" is the other clear standout. Despite how well known it is, I definitely had forgotten just how layered and good a song it is. "The In Crowd" is worth calling out too, bringing a bit of 60s groove into the mix. The harmonies are consistently excellent across the album and are easily its defining feature. Outside of its best-known songs though, the album never really reaches the same heights, but it still remains a very enjoyable and culturally significant listen.

At the Electric Picnic music festival in 2006, the excitement had gotten too much for me. I was a bit "worse for wear", but as soon as PJ Harvey came out on stage I immediately snapped out of it, sobered up by her presence. It wasn't the first time I'd seen PJ Harvey live. We saw her earlier in 2004 at Oxegen, striding across the stage in a bright yellow dress with her full band. But the Electric Picnic gig was particularly special because Polly played solo, with just her electric guitar and piano. It was intimate and huge at the same time, one of the best concerts I've ever been lucky enough to attend. She's truly an exceptional artist. She first came onto my radar because of this album and the buzz surrounding it, but also because, as a Radiohead fan, I kept seeing mentions of the Thom Yorke collaborations on this album being passed around on forums (along with UNKLE's "Rabbit in Your Headlights"). I used to read Q Magazine as a teenager, back when it still felt like a serious source of music journalism, and in 2001 they featured PJ Harvey on the cover. I was *ahem* quite enamoured with the photo. Polly was wearing just a t-shirt, underwear, heels, and a Gretsch Broadkaster, held up against her like a shield. Her arms were raised behind her head, hair pulled back, with the lyric "Lick my legs" emblazoned across her shirt. Below the guitar, her legs were deliberately foregrounded, presented for licking, the image becoming a visualisation of the line itself. It was provocative and mischievous, but with her eyes locked straight into the lens, she had a look that made it clear that she was entirely in control of the narrative. There was no sense of sexual exploitation here. It was a striking image, one that always reminds me of Patti Smith in the suit on the cover of Horses: different imagery, same refusal to be framed passively. This was the first PJ Harvey album I bought, and I was an instant fan. "Big Exit" is a huge song. That guitar riff, what an album opener. It builds with a driving drum rhythm, Polly's spoken-word (or should that be "shouted-word"?) verses pushing it forward before everything crashes into the chorus and that crescendo of an ending. The punk poetry of the song reminds me again of Patti Smith, someone Polly consistently brings to mind, which makes it feel fitting that they share a space together in the "P" section of record shops. "Beautiful Feeling" is haunting and minimalist. Thom Yorke sits somewhere in the atmosphere of the song, but it's essentially just Polly and a single electric guitar, letting the song itself do the heavy lifting. "This Is Love" is built around one of the all-time great riffs. It's so simple and minimal, but so effective. Coupled with Polly's snarling vocals, it's pure punk perfection. Then we get to "Horses In My Dreams". Like "Beautiful Feeling" before it, it's quiet, simple, and gorgeous. Again, I feel similarities to Patti Smith here, so it seems relevant that she's singing about horses. That closing repeated chorus of "I have pulled myself clear" is one of the most beautiful refrains in music, full stop. I don't think I fully appreciated the song until I saw Polly perform it live, alone onstage at the Electric Picnic: just herself, her guitar, a single spotlight, and a red lampshade resting on a piano in the background. The crowd silent, in awe. Years later, I still hear the album through the lens of those live performances - the noise of Oxegen, the quiet of the Electric Picnic. Together, they sum it up perfectly, juxtaposing loud punk energy with moments of quiet intensity. 4.5 stars.

A really nice blend of acoustic melodies and subtle electronica, Seventh Tree was a clear change of direction for Goldfrapp, but one that worked very well. While living in rented accommodation with friends back in 2008, we were getting ready for the Electric Picnic, where we'd see Goldfrapp play the main stage, second billing to Sigur Rós. We had this album on heavy rotation. Listening to it now, it brings me back viscerally to that time again. Songs like "Caravan Girl" and "Cologne Cerrone Houdini" show how Goldfrapp's disco electronica works just as well as a more pared-back sound. "Little Bird" into "Happiness" is the album high point though. The former starts simply before gaining momentum when the beat comes in. "Happiness" is just a perfect song. The instrumental bridge after the chorus would lift even the darkest of spirits, and the video leans fully into that feeling, making you want to hop around the streets. Pure happiness in song form. 3.5 stars.

Buffalo Springfield Again feels more like a compilation album of three individual artists, rather than an album created by a band working together. It pulls together Richie Furay's light folk numbers, Stephen Stills' more complex and sometimes jazzy songs, and the two sides of Neil Young: snarling, messy, distorted rock tunes alongside the quieter, more laid-back folk rock that would become one of his signature sounds. "Mr. Soul" is a serious tune to kick the album off with. This is that snarling Neil Young: a grooving riff, a driving drum beat, messy guitar solos smothered in sticky fuzz tone - and then that shift in the middle to country rock, which is as unexpected as it is brilliantly inspired. You have to remind yourself this is 1967, not the mid-70s. It feels like a sneak peek of the Neil Young to come. Throughout the album, you can hear the birth of future musical ventures outside of Buffalo Springfield: Neil Young's solo career in "Mr. Soul" and "Expecting to Fly", or early hints of Crosby, Stills & Nash in tracks like "Hung Upside Down" and "Rock & Roll Woman". While the album can feel disjointed at times, there are moments where all of their strengths come together perfectly, most notably on "Bluebird". "Bluebird" is a unique song. Young's distorted electric guitar battles with Stills' acoustic, and Stills wins this round with an insane acoustic solo. Then, not content with keeping you on your toes enough already, the song switches to banjo and takes off in a completely different direction altogether. Speaking of different directions, "Good Time Boy" feels like Spotify has skipped ahead to a different album entirely, serving up a slice of upbeat soul-rock that sounds more like Sam & Dave than anything else here. It's a strange fit, and one of the few moments that really feels out of place. And let's not dwell too long on the batshit craziness of "Broken Arrow". All in all, for how "taped together" the album feels, we're still dealing with some fantastic talents, especially in Stills and Young. They'd go on to bigger things that loom larger in their legacies, but it all started here. When it works, it works brilliantly - and it works more often than not.

My fiancée describes Sigur Rós as sounding like a band of whales who have come together to make music. Huge, epic, wailing sounds, like something you'd hear somewhere under the surface of the ocean. Everything is dreamy and hypnotic from the very start of this album. The "Intro" serves up a double-reversed melody to ease you into the ethereal magic of this album. Otherworldly sounds form and float off in the atmosphere. "Svefn-g-englar" starts off with a repeating sonar-like ping. It always paints a visual in my mind of the band performing on an abandoned, rusting shipwreck or oil rig, surrounded by an empty grey Icelandic landscape. Whether that's based on a memory of a live performance that I saw or not (I'm sure they must have played somewhere like that at some point), it's an image evoked by their music, based solely on atmospheric texture and a repeating pulsar note. The organ comes in next. And then the bowed guitar. Wow. Jonsi's guitar bowing is incredible. He bows in two styles: as tonal texture to build the atmosphere of songs (the start of "Flugufrelsarinn" is the perfect example of this), and in more of a "lead" capacity, providing the main melody of pieces. Both are inspired ways of adding emotional weight, that is unmatched by any other instrument. Back in 2002, Sigur Rós played St. Nicholas church in my hometown Galway, a gorgeous and perfect setting for such epic soundscapes. Having only discovered them shortly before that, I unfortunately missed out on tickets, but I often think about how amazing it would have been. If I'm remembering correctly, it may even have been the posters for this concert that first led me to them. Seeing a photo of Jonsi bowing his guitar was enough for me to dive in. () was my first album, but Ágætis byrjun came right afterwards. I'm trying my best to not misspell anything in this review, and that's a real struggle when talking about Sigur Rós. Try telling a friend to check out "Viðrar vel til loftárása", and you'll see what I mean. Weirdly though, I often find myself singing along to their lyrics in gibberish English. In my head, the chorus of "Svefn-g-englar" will always be "It's you..." The epic nature of this album doesn't let up. You're just recovering emotionally from "Svefn-g-englar" when "Starálfur" kicks in with that amazing piano loop, hitting you like a punch to the gut. At one point during the song, everything strips away to just an acoustic guitar, and then silence. When you think it's all over, the song kicks back in again in full. Another gut punch. It's not just epic, it's emotionally massive. There's something so sad and beautiful about every single moment in this album. But what else would you expect from a band of humpback whales?

I didn't pay enough attention in French class in secondary school. Which works to this album's advantage. If I could understand what Serge is saying, I feel it would only go against this album, and its incredibly creepy concept. So, I'll stick with ignoring what he's singing about and concentrate on the music instead. The opening track "Melody" is absolutely brilliant, and by far the best on the album. The orchestration works so well with the fragmented, stabbing guitar playing, sounding like something from a 2000s alt rock record. In fact, to be more specific, sounding absolutely identical to Beck's "Paper Tiger", which is, it turns out, no coincidence. Despite being released in 1971, this feels like an album well ahead of its time. You can hear its influence lingering, and not just with Beck. The blend of beats, guitar and orchestration brings Portishead to mind. Serge's breathy spoken-word vocals were clearly an inspiration for Jarvis Cocker. Then there's the guitar sound. Vic Flick's guitar work doesn't just feel like it's inventing a genre of "alt rock" 30 years in advance, it feels like it could have been released in the late nineties to early 2000s and would fit right in. I'm not fully convinced that he didn't actually travel back in time to play on this album. I hear aspects of Johnny Greenwood, Adrian Utley and Mick Harvey in the use of guitar across these tracks: scattered, raw, and at times just doing it's own thing. It often acts as percussive texture, bringing frenzied energy to the compositions, rather than a more traditional solo melody. For all its brilliance, Histoire de Melody Nelson is not an easy or comfortable listen. Its deeply unsettling concept lingers in the atmosphere. But musically, it's brilliant: influential, innovative, and decades ahead of its time. Just make sure your French is as bad as mine.

That iconic album cover. You can't talk about Aladdin Sane without starting with the photo that represents it. Bowie never looked more like a being from outer space than here: eyes closed, pale silver and white skin, red hair, the lightning bolt going through one eye. I'm convinced that this was Bowie's true form, and he'd cover the lightning bolt with makeup to appear more human. It's the most iconic image in a string of iconic images that represent Bowie over time, and potentially one of the best album covers of all time. This album finds Bowie in a transitional period, with Ziggy's era coming to an end. And that's what makes everything so interesting. There's a schizoid feel to the songs here: glam rock meets avant-garde jazz. Bowie brings in elements of experimentation to deliberately derail rock 'n' roll standards. It kicks off in proper glam rock territory with "Watch That Man" making it obvious that Bowie was listening to a LOT of Rolling Stones at the time. Tracks like "Panic in Detroit" and "The Prettiest Star" keep that glam rock swagger going, before "The Jean Genie" arrives and completely steals the show. Bowie starts to mess with things early. Even by today's standards, the title track is quite out there, and Mike Garson's famous piano solo shows that Bowie was already leaning fully into freeform jazz. "Drive-In Saturday" is a proper Bowie classic. Blending sci-fi noises, doo-wop, jazzy brass, and retro futurism, it sounds nostalgic and alien at the same time. "Cracked Actor" is massively underrated. The chord progressions feel strange and slightly wrong, giving the song an uneasy sharpened edge under all the bluesy swagger. You never see this listed in "best of Bowie" compilations, which is a serious crime. And then there's "Time", which might be the album's weirdest and best moment. Full-on piano cabaret, slowly building until Mick Ronson's guitar comes crashing in. That guitar sound is amazing: a sinister sound that mimics laughing, almost feeling like it's mocking us. Only Bowie could turn a madcap song like this into one of the highlights of the album. It all adds up to something far more interesting than a simple glam rock record. Bowie invites chaos into rock by incorporating elements of the world of avant-garde and jazz directly into the core of these songs. The image on the cover tells you what you're getting into. Glam rock on the surface, something stranger and much more interesting underneath.

In the late 90s, Norman Cook was everywhere. He was all over the charts, with radio stations playing his music on repeat. And not just songs released under the Fatboy Slim moniker either: if there was a song dominating the charts around that time, chances were that he had something to do with it. He transformed Cornershop's "Brimful of Asha" into a hit, he made Wildchild's "Renegade Master" 1000 times better (and what a tune that is!), and even elevated The Shadows' "Apache" to something that's arguably better than the original. Everything he touched turned to gold, thanks to his frenzied, magical remixing and sampling. And those samples are the key to what made everything so fresh and brilliant. Bringing 60s and 70s soul, funk and gospel samples to big beats was an inspired move, and a big reason why it was such a novel sound. He was one of the firsts to do it, but more importantly he did it so damn well. People were going around chanting "Check it out now, the funk soul brother" as a mantra for a while when this first came out. The "Rockafeller Skank" started all of this for Cook. He gave "Sliced Tomatoes", a 70s surf rock tune by the Just Brothers, the big beat treatment, and played it in sweaty underground clubs, quickly realising that it struck a chord with the ravers. It was a genius move. But what really makes Fatboy so great, is that he doesn't ever just leave it there. He can strike gold, but always brings his songs to weird and interesting places along the way. Things never get boring on this album. The "Rockafeller Skank" slows down before changing gears, "Gangster Trippin" swaps between melodies while keeping the vocals consistent. Breaking songs apart before building them back up again. It's a DJ at the top of his game. "Right Here, Right Now" kicks things off calmly with a building synth. But once that beat kicks in, the album doesn't let up. Every song on the album is top class, but the first four song run is the stuff of legend. After "Right Here, Right Now" and "The Rockafeller Skank", "Fucking in Heaven" takes over. It's as juvenile as it is brilliant. What a tune. And then we go straight into "Gangster Trippin", arguably the best song on the album. I can't decide which of the interchanging melodies is my favourite. It's an inspired soup of samples making something completely unique. "Soul Surfing" deserves a mention too. It's one of the most unhinged yet fantastic songs you'll hear, and it somehow slipped under the mainstream radar. "Shakato, Shabbo" indeed (I don't care what the actual lyrics are). It's crazy and amazing at the same time, like someone having great craic during a mental breakdown. Then there's "Praise You". As great as the song itself is, it'll forever be linked to the amazingly creative Spike Jonze music video. The Torrance Community Dance Group "flash mob" dancing around outside an L.A. cinema, with no permission, has become one of the most iconic music videos of all time, and it reportedly cost only $800 to make. There's just something so great about seeing Jonze and crew dance about like loons to the music, and it fits the song so well. "You've Come a Long Way Baby" is a masterclass in sampling and mixing. Cook was at his peak here. This is big beats done to perfection, and still one of the most fun albums of the decade. 4.5 stars.

I'm not really into soul, which is a hurdle I had to get over here, before anything else. That said, The Isley Brothers make a decent case for themselves early on. The phaser-soaked guitar of "That Lady (Pts. 1 & 2)" grabbed my attention straight away. There's some genuinely great lead guitar work throughout, and that phased tone is class. I actually liked this song a lot more than I remembered. From there though, the album settles into a lot of schmoozey, low-tempo R&B. "Listen to the Music" and "Sunshine" are welcome exceptions, injecting a lot more energy and funk into the mix. "Sunshine" in particular is a standout, carried by strong grooves and some real nice guitar solos. I actually can't listen to "Summer Breeze" properly anymore. It's a victim of being overplayed to death and just gets on my nerves now. Overall, 3 + 3 works best when it leans into funk rather than smooth soul. There are flashes of brilliance, but the remainder is filled with too much low-tempo soul for my personal taste. The album title feels appropriate: 3 songs I really liked + 3 stars from this review.

Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young are the kings of vocal harmonies. It's the CSNY signature, and they're flawless across this album. There are so many classics here. Songs like "Carry On", "Teach Your Children" and "Our House" are CSNY at their folky best. "Carry On" is a great opener with those vocal harmonies, an acoustic guitar that gets the bajaysus pounded out of it, and then an unexpected shift to a different keyboard-heavy melody halfway through. It's a strange move, but it works, and it sets the tone for how varied the album can be. That variety shows up in the tracklist too. "Almost Cut My Hair" sounds completely out of place compared to the rest of the songs here, but it's a fantastic song. Crosby's growling voice, Nash's organ work, Stills and Young's guitars pushing and pulling against each other (with Neil very much going off on one), giving the album a raw edge. "4 + 20" goes in the opposite direction. It's quieter and simpler than most of what surrounds it, but it's a really strong song and another reminder of how many different voices are at work here. And all of that is without even getting into "Helpless" or "Country Girl". Rather than feeling especially tidy, Déjà Vu works because of its range, moving between familiar folk rock and something looser and rougher, feeling more like four great songwriters leaving a lot of great songs in the same place.

An image of Elaine Benes from Seinfeld pops into my head. She's jerkily dancing around in front of her bemused coworkers, an undignified routine that George Costanza describes as "a full body dry heave set to music". That music, it turns out, is the opening track of this album, "Shining Star". I recognised it immediately. The song, and the album, kick things off with some seriously funky soul with great guitar solos to measure. This is the type of soul music I love. Songs like "Yearnin' Learnin'" keep that funk going strong, but there's a lull in the songs in between. When the tempo drops it's easy listening, but too easy: there's nothing too interesting happening when the funk stops. The album does, however, end very strongly with two almost experimental songs that blend soul, funk, jazz and afrobeats. "See the Light" leans into jazz harmonies, before dissolving into a frenzied improv session. "Africano" brings jazz flute to afrobeats and funky soul, and it's brilliant. For how enjoyable it is, there's not a lot that's properly exceptional. I'd definitely throw this on again, especially "Africano" and "Shining Star", and if I do, I'll dance to the latter like a full body dry heave.

As a youngster, I was a huge Fugees fan. I was 12 when "The Score" came out, and it was huge. Everyone in my primary school had a copy, and it was a regular topic of conversation. But weirdly, even though I know a lot of the songs on Miseducation very well, I think this is actually the first time I've listened to Lauryn's album the full way through. I love the concept. A classroom discussing love in between the music, and it works really well at creating a narrative thread through the record, bringing discussion points to the table without ever sounding pretentious or peachy. The songs themselves are great too. Blending genres seamlessly, I'm hearing bits of reggae, soul, folk, flamenco, jazz, doo-wop and of course hip-hop throughout. The use of live instrumentation makes a big difference here too, helping the music feel more human at a time when hip-hop was leaning toward the synthetic. The interpolation of "Bam Bam" into "Lost Ones" is inspired, feeling like a clever and unique homage to Sister Nancy's much sampled track. The same technique for turning The Doors' "Light My Fire" into "Superstar" is less effective, but it's a rare misstep in this excellent collection of tunes. Standout tracks are "Ex-factor" with those swirling harmonies, bluesy soul vibes and fantastic lyrics; "To Zion" with Santana's intricate Spanish guitar work; "Doo Wop (That Thing)" for its mix of hip-hop with 60s doo-wop (it's in the name I guess); "Every Ghetto, Every City" for its superb Funkadelic inspired stanky funk. But for all of its genre hopping, homage paying and direct interpolations of other artists' tracks, every song ends up sounding "very Lauryn Hill". I think that's what's so great about this album: as varied as the music is here, it still maintains a consistent voice and identity from start to finish, something only Lauryn Hill could do.

I have a friend who has very similar music taste to me. We became friends because of a shared obsession with Radiohead, we were into 60s and 70s rock, folk and the alt rock scene mostly, and over the years he introduced me to some of my favourite bands like Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Talking Heads. I'd usually pay attention to music that he'd recommend. So, I was quite surprised when he suddenly turned into a hip-hop fan, harping on about Kanye. We were in a late-night casino's smoking area, on a Christmas night out back in 2011, when my friend got into a rap battle with a group of strangers, winning hands-down by rapping the entire song of "Power" perfectly. I was confused. This was Kanye, the guy who jumped onstage at the MTV awards, drunkenly shouting about Beyonce in front of a bemused Taylor Swift. The guy who did that awful "Jesus Walked" song, and destroyed a classic Daft Punk song. He wasn't on my radar at all, he just seemed like another vapid rapper in the vacuous pop music scene. But hey, I could have missed out on Talking Heads if I hadn't listened to my friend back in the day, so I had to see what the big deal was. It didn't take long for it to click. I think what's fascinating about Kanye is this duality of being that he exists in. He is exactly what I mentioned earlier on: vacuous, materialistic, and narcissistic. But also, completely self-aware, honest, and analytical. He raps about his pitfalls and shortcomings in a shockingly honest and open way, without ever vilifying himself fully. It's weirdly vulnerable, but also boastful. His lyrics are like a Freudian hypothesis on narcissism, told by an unapologetic narcissist. It's honesty in its purest and most shocking form, and its amazing. On top of all of that, Kanye is a creative musical genius. As a producer, he is one of the all-time best. He collects, curates and transforms the music and ideas of others into something completely new, in a similar way to sampling legends like Liam Howlett of The Prodigy, or the Beastie Boys. The musical influences that lay the backbone of this album are as varied as they come, but Kanye morphs even the best-known sample into something completely new every single time. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy plays out like a hip-hop opera, a "hip-hopera" if you will (thank you very much, please hold your applause until the end). Starting off with a snarling recital of Roald Dahl's "Cinderella", surrounded by autotuned gospel choirs, opening track "Dark Fantasy" sets things in motion with refrains of "Can we get much higher?" Yes, we can. This is only the beginning. The album is made up of moments. It's a kaleidoscope of epic moment after epic moment. The gorgeous orchestration and piano of the intro to "All of the Lights" breaking into frenzied horn samples; the fuzz tone of "Hell of a Life" paying homage to Sabbath's "Iron Man"; "Blame Game" bringing Aphex Twin to the masses. And, of course, "POWER". King Crimson reimagined with tribal chanting, as Kanye muses on the pitfalls of fame, with the iconic line "No one man should have all that power". "Runaway" is the highlight of the album. It's the climax of the hip-hopera. It's also the one song everyone can play on piano. From such an intentionally simple riff to what it builds up to, musically, it's a work of art. Add in Kanye's confessional lyricism on top of that, which starts off as an apology and ends up as a warning ("Run away fast as you can"). Then all language collapses into sound with that amazing extended coda at the end of the song where the vocoder takes over. It's mesmerising. This is the song that changed my mind about autotune, when I heard how it could actually be used creatively. Kanye is an enigma. Let's not even get into the spiral that he's gone down in recent years, except to say that the guy clearly needs help, but is too removed from reality by fame to get the intervention that he needs. Fame can do a number on you, especially if you're already in a fragile mental state. This album came out of a time when he removed himself from that world for a period of deep reflection and creativity. It's a capsule of unapologetic, brutal honesty. A rare moment of vulnerability in hip-hop. A masterpiece. So yeah, I guess my friend was onto something.

Hot Chip once caused us to crash our car. Well, "crash" is a an exaggeration, but we did hit a rock with our wheel, burst a tyre, crack an alloy and have to be towed back home. We still blame Hot Chip because we were blasting "Over and Over" in the car when it happened. That tune was so good that it caused an accident. Out of curiosity I looked up Hot Chip's listing in 1001, and was very surprised to see that this is the only album on the list. No sign of "The Warning" or "Made In the Dark". Those albums were the soundtrack to a specific time in our twenties. Songs like "Careful", "Boy from School", "Out at the Pictures", and of course "Over and Over" soundtracked house parties and road trips aplenty. I wasn't too familiar with "In Our Heads". It starts off very strongly with "Motion Sickness". Hot Chip always do great openers. "Flutes" is another really great song, reminding me of Hot Chip's heyday. But the rest of the album is... fine. It's decent enough, and there are moments that are great, but if I'm honest, it's a struggle not to glaze over and lose attention. Outside of the two songs I mentioned, there's just not anything particularly mind-blowing. Definitely not music that would cause a car crash.

I think I first became aware of Donovan through D.A. Pennebaker's documentary "Don't Look Back", filmed during Bob Dylan's 1965 UK tour. In one scene, Dylan notices a newspaper headline about Donovan, who at the time was being framed as "the new Dylan", a folk singer who had modelled his look and sound closely on Dylan himself. Curious, clearly irritated by the idea of a clone, and likely high on amphetamines, Dylan arranges to meet him. The atmosphere is awkward. Dylan seems less interested in Donovan the person than in mocking the very notion of his "successor". Donovan plays "To Sing For You", and Bob's response, "That's a good song, man!", seems very genuine. But then there's a moment when Donovan asks him to play "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue". The line "the vagabond who's rapping at your door / is standing in the clothes that you once wore" makes an awkward situation even more awkward. It's a line which could be referencing the folk purists he'd outgrown, or people following in his wake, wearing the style he'd already shed. Sitting directly across from him, his clone. Regardless, poor Donovan was caught up in a moment, and ends up looking a little embarrassed, while also incredibly starstruck. I don't know if this series of events was the cause of it, but Donovan did shift his image, and his music, away from folk towards psychedelia and a richer, more interesting sound. And some of the first examples of this "new Donovan" in full flight is on this album, Sunshine Superman. Title track and opener "Sunshine Superman" sets the tone. The iconic bassline that starts things off is quickly smothered in a blanket of instrumentation. What struck me the first time I heard this song was the lead guitar punctuating the verse, sounding like it was beaming in from another dimension. The whole song comes together as a cacophony of sound, and somehow the melody stays coherent and present. It's an absolute classic. A jarring sweep of orchestration slaps you in the face before "Legend of a Girl Child Linda" starts up. At first, it sounds as a return to the folky nature of earlier Donovan, but unusual instrumentation and orchestration start to build and swirl around the song, giving it a psychedelic feel. Donovan's vocals sound a lot like a mix of early Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed here. "Three King Fishers" dives headfirst into Eastern influence, with bongos, modal melodies, and extended sitar passages. You have to remind yourself that this was 1966, early days for psychedelia, and it must have sounded so strange and unexpected to fans expecting the folky Donovan. "Ferris Wheel" continues the exploration, using feedback and electric violin textures before circling back eastward. "Bert's Blues" is another standout track. The descending guitar and bass meet some fantastic, bright organ playing. Donovan's voice works so well with this type of music. The orchestration and harpsichord breaks are glorious, which only heightens the guitar and bass when they come back in again, this time with added sax. These songs are so varied in musicality, you really didn't know what to expect next. And just as well, because next up is the highlight of the whole album, "The Season of the Witch". I was lucky enough to see Robert Plant perform with Saving Grace in my hometown, Galway. Before playing a cover of this song, Plant was gushing about how Donovan had been at the gig the night before in Cork (where he now lives apparently). Honestly, it's one of my all-time favorite songs. Dark, bluesy, and weird in all the right ways. "The Trip" continues the bluesy feel to side two of the album, sounding a little, dare I say it, like electric Dylan 😬. A really great song, and catchy as hell. "Guinevere" moves towards medieval folk. And this was before Syd Barrett was doing similar. Donovan may not have been alone in this territory, but he was certainly among the earliest explorers. "The Fat Angel" keeps blues as its core while surrounding it with sitars and psychedelic ornamentation. Side-note: calling someone a "fat angel" may not be the compliment that Donovan thinks it is, and likely not the homage that Mama Cass wanted. But, different times, different times. "Celeste" closes the album in a wash of blended instrumentation, all merging into a single, luminous sound. It's a great finish to a great album. This is a very different Donovan to the one in that hotel suite with Bob Dylan and his cronies. It's a much more diverse and varied Donovan. Not "the new Dylan", instead stepping out of Bob's shadow and becoming something much more interesting. 4.5 stars.

"Fear of Music" is dance music. Themes of fear, paranoia and dystopia transformed into rhythmic motion. And when you tap into the rhythms, it's impossible not to get completely immersed in it. We always said that we were going to get ridiculously fit, just by copying David Byrne's dance moves throughout "Stop Making Sense". The art rock fitness routine. His energy and movement just doesn't let up for the whole gig. Much like this album. "Fear of Music" is an album of rhythm and texture. Every song brings something unique to build this rhythmic force. "I Zimbra" brings Afrobeat, Fela Kuti vibes, and guitars acting as percussion. "Mind" brings layers and layers to a simple melody. "Paper" brings frenzied guitars that get more frenzied as it goes on. "Cities" goes so hard that Byrne's voice breaks down at the end. "Air" brings b-movie sounds to dystopic topics. "Animals" brings a mix of unease and release to dissonant sounds. "Electric Guitar" brings Eno-esque, nuttiness. "Drugs" brings experimental vocals and atmosphere. "Memories Can't Wait" bring Heroes-era Bowie influences. It's dark, brooding and then morphs into that incredible ending. "Life During Wartime" brings the energy, with that relentless unbroken beat, and the incredible shift from verse to chorus. "Heaven" brings a genius concept. The concept of heaven, this place of perfection, being incredibly boring. What's interesting about going to a bar where nothing happens? "Fear of Music" seems more interested in rhythm than melody, but everything is somehow still catchy as hell. It's a masterpiece, the stuff of genius. By the end of it all, you feel like you've gone through a sort of religious experience. Like you've been to one of those megachurches. A preacher screams in your face, you start convulsing, speaking in tongues, and everyone starts screaming and dancing around the place in excitement. You're wrecked, but cathartic. Like the demons have just been expelled from your body through a strange and brilliant shamanic ceremony of rhythm.

Imagine opening an album with what is arguably the greatest song ever written. As tired an opinion as that is, it's very hard to argue that "Imagine" isn't a perfect song in absolutely every way. A simple and beautiful piano melody, with a simple and beautiful message. Lennon described the song as "anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic, but because it's sugarcoated it's accepted ... Now I understand what you have to do. Put your political message across with a little honey". It became an anthem for the idealists of the world, a mantra for atheists, but ultimately, it's a simple message of peace and optimism for the world. Most of the rest of the album shows a more introspective side of Lennon, than a politically charged one. "Crippled Inside" is a jaunty country rock number with a more sinister subject matter dealing with external success not equating to inner peace or happiness. "Jealous Guy" is an apologetic reflection on fear and insecurity. "It's So Hard" mixes sexual innuendo, depression and the blues. "Oh My Love" is a delicate song of quiet gratitude and vulnerability, sandwiched in between songs of anger. "How?" is an existential crisis, questioning how to live well, stay honest and strong when the world seems out to get you. "Oh Yoko!" is Lennon focusing on his devotion to Yoko as the answer to all of this. Outside of introspection, Lennon couldn't resist taking a very public dig at Macca. "How Do You Sleep?" is as blunt as you can get, and is certainly not served with a little honey. I was always more of a fan of John's contributions to the Beatles, but I've really gotten to like Macca's earlier solo work as I've gotten older (predictable or what?). Regardless of your stance on the rifts between John and Paul, this is a great song, even if it's full of spite, anger and hate. The political side of Lennon is here too, and not as "sugarcoated" as the title track. "I Don't Want to Be a Soldier" is a hypnotic declaration of rejecting assigned societal identities as a form of self-preservation, listing the negative outcomes that come as a result of assuming these roles: death, lies, depression. It's a rare album where a song as brilliant as "Gimme Some Truth" isn't even the best track on it. It's one of my all-time favourite songs. Lennon attacks lies, media spin, political doublespeak, and moral cowardice. The song is fast and angry and Lennon's quick, snarling vocal delivery is matched by George Harrison's fantastic slide guitar, forming something truly special. It says something that the song is still so relevant in the post-truth dystopia of today, 55 years later. "I'm sick and tired of hearing things / from uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocritics / all I want is the truth / just gimme some truth". In a way, Imagine works as its own argument. It opens with an almost impossibly perfect ideal, then spends the rest of its runtime testing that ideal against fear, anger, jealousy, doubt and contradiction. But for all of the existential uncertainties of Lennon's introspection, and the politically charged anger punctuating it, this fractured self-portrait ultimately comes across as optimistic. The world is messy, and self-reflection brings more questions than answers, but cutting through the lies and noise leaves space to imagine something better.

I'm a big fan of Queens of the Stone Age, so I had heard of Screaming Trees, because of the Mark Lanegan connection. But I'd never listened to them before. To be honest, I had expected them to be much heavier. They're often spoken about as early grunge, in the same breath as Mudhoney, so I was expecting a lot more fuzz and rawness, but instead "Dust" is quite polished and refined. It's not a bad thing, just totally not what I was expecting at all. The songs are simple, catchy and melodic. A few tracks stand out in particular: "All I Know" sounds remarkably like "Scorpio Rising" by Death in Vegas. Somebody's got some 'splaining to do. Well, Death in Vegas do, as their song came out 6 years later. I love "Scorpio Rising", so it's no surprise that I love this song too. The layers of guitars building around the simple melody really makes it. "Dying Days" is another standout track. At times I'm reminded me of Cream at their peak, at other times more of Soundgarden. Overall, "Dust" is full of tight songwriting, catchy melodies, layers of bright guitars and memorable songs. That 90s Soundgarden sound is all over the album. Not what I was expecting at all, but very enjoyable and definitely something I'd throw on again. 3.5 stars.