The songs are all bland and forgettable and, unfortunately, what i think of every time I think of Beatles music. Even though I KNOW they get better later on. The fact that the fans like this is keeping the band from ever beating the "grossly overrated"allegations
A very good album but she sounds just enough like Ella Fitzgerald for me to draw the comparison which isn't fair because Ella's probably one of the top 10 greatest performers of all time
Never listened to one of their albums before. It was fine. The drumming was great, some of the lyrics felt cliche but i don't know if that were cliche when they were written or of that are now because the band influenced so many people.
Overall it felt like gospel music for people who didn't grow up with gospel music
This is a guy who put all his skill points into lyrics.
The music is pleasant.
Sometimes his words grab something inside of you and twists out before gently letting go.
The second half of the album is especially good.
The last song is my favorite.
If i have to hear the boys o f beast
Reusing flows, the same 4 beats
For 44 minutes on repeat
I'll drive my car straight off the street
It's not the kind of music i usually like at all and i don't know how to explain what i liked about it, but it was nice
Aside from the fact that I Feel The Earth move sounds like a cover of a 60s girl group, this album sounds like THE 70s! When i think of what 70s music sounds like, it's basically Curtis Mayfield, ELO, Donna Summer, and Carole King. Every song is like a mid-movie montage happening.
Everything about this is hard for me to listen to.
The, what is that, guitar? Sitar? Electric dulcimer?tone hurts my head.
The lyrics are not clever
The performance has a certain quality that makes me want to punch everyone involved.
It's like the worst of the Beatles
I hear a lot of the 80s music i don't like in mick jagger's singing
I'm wondering if they influenced every band ive ever hated.
Is this where it started?
I quit 3 minutes into the 11 minute "I'm going home". In tears. I can't do this. It got old after one minute.
I'm not strong enough.
I can't.
This album is assault
The US version starts with their one good song because of course it does
And obviously i got suckered into the uk version which is longer and worse.
Rolling stones Aftermath(uk) showed me what a 1 sounds like in a way that makes it hard to rate anything else as low. That album caused me physical pain to listen to and She's So Unusual wasn't that but it did dry hump the line.
I didn't enjoy a single second. And it's not like i don't love a lot of music where the singer isn't good at singing. I MAKE music where the singer isn't good at singing! This album was more than that. Some of it is certainly my bias of hating 80s synth sounds and 80s drum machine sounds and 80s melodies and 80s lyrics and this was a VERY 80s pop album, but my brain couldn't even register most of it as music. To me it sounded like if you explained music to someone who's never heard it and they were like "oh so it's like this?" And you were like "not really," and they were like "how about this?" And you were like "i guess that's closer"
Maybe I'm just a hater, i don't know
No thank you.
This is not for me I'm any way
Long ago, i had a crush who loved Elliott Smith so i got a few songs from Limewire and was bored. But clearly, i should've listened to a whole album because a lot of these songs are beautiful.
Musically it all kind of sounded the same to me and it's not really a genre I'm into but the story telling is great. I really liked 25 minutes to go and flushed from the bathroom of your heart
I hate that this is criteria i have to consider, but it gets 2 stars for sounding like music made by actual professional musicians.
But i hate 80s music as a general rule. I could give you a mirror and Jennifer were almost enjoyable and I've learned to tolerate the title track through exposure, but I'll be happy but to listen again.
It's a well known fact that most of the artists in the gangsta rap era were but actually affiliated. Ice T, though is allegedly one of the rare A.G.s(authentic gangsters). And i know Ice T had a lot of influence and a lot of his lines on this album and others get quoted and referenced to this day with a lot of us not knowing where it came from so this is an important piece of history.
But that doesn't matter because all the tracks in the first half or so sounded very much like a put on caricature of hood life made to sell records. And it felt corny. Almost like a parody. A lot of that is, for sure, the early rap style and hour basic it sounds to 21st century ears but i couldn't get past it. The second half of the album leaned more into having a message about civil rights, overpolicing, poverty, etc. but a good message never impressed me much in music. I need it to be music first.
I did like the storytelling in midnight and The Tower was about on par with any of Johnny Cash's songs from Fulsom Prison. I can't give half stars, so I'm rounding up to 3
This reminds me a lot of early Beatles music in that they're a band of mediocre White guys taking songs by Black American musicians, covering them, and making them sound significantly worse.
At least when the Beatles did it, it would be half of the album, but the sonics went the extra mile and gave us nothing but bad versions of someone else's songs.
So then, the blaring question is "why the eff is this one of the 1001 albums you MUST hear before you die?" Why can't i just listen to Chuck Barry and go on living in the bliss of not knowing this cover band from Tacoma Washington ever existed?
I'm at the point where I'm pissed off at the very idea of this list and the fact that some babyboomer from England decided he had the best music taste in the world and he should publish a book about how much everyone should listen 1001 albums worth of it.
When i was in high school, i remember stumbling upon this album in a Barnes and Noble and being immediately intrigued. I couldn't afford to buy it, but when I went home, my sister and i read about Captain Beefheart's whole life story and how meticulously planned every note on this album is even though it sounds random and everything was so weird and interesting, i told myself "I'm about to listen to this and make it my WHOLE personality" so i downloaded it and started listening and i wasn't disappointed in the music, i was disappointed in MYSELF.
I wasn't cool enough or weird enough to enjoy this album. So i was hopeful that now after so much time and experience I'd grown enough to hear what i couldn't hear before and it's still a no for me.
I appreciate what it took to make this album and i love that there's space in people's hearts for something this unique and experimental but i don't have what it takes to listen to it. I'm giving myself 2 stars
It's 80s, it's punk. Not a good chance i was gonna like it from jump.
And i didn't.
At this point I'm not sure how i ended up loving the dead milkmen and violent femmes. Who i heard similarities to in a couple of the songs, like tv party.
This album got me thinking about how if i was a teen or young adult in the 80s i would've been insufferable. And how I'm glad that my earliest memories basically start in 1990
There are few things i know about David Bowie. I know he's in that 80s movie i will never watch unless under duress, i know he's in that Christopher Nolan movie i like, i know he had a Nazi phase that everyone decided to forget about, i know i like the Steve Zizzou soundtrack by Seu Jorge, I know a lot of people like his music and he's from England because back when i was learning my music taste as a young'n, i learned whenever a lot of people like music and i don't there's an 80% chance they're from England. I don't know why. I assume ancestral trauma?
But i just want to acknowledge that all of my reviews come from an anti-british bias before i start.
The first two songs, i really like compositionally but i don't like his singing. I don't think Bowie has a bad voice, i just don't like what he's doing with it. I would like them more if someone else sang them which explains seu jorge.
Moonage Daydream is a cool song, the lyrics are nonsense, which I like, but that sax solo sounds like an 8th grader played it.
Starman is a great Earthbound villain, not a song i like.
It Ain't Easy sounds A LOT like him doing blackface and i feel like too many of the albums I've listened to so far have that in common for at least one song. Mostly the British ones. I wish it would stop.
Lady Stardust sounds a lot like an Elton John song, i do like Elton John but half way through the song it starts feeling bland and played out like it should've either been shorter or he should've done something different
I hate Star but i like the bridge
The next few songs are OKAY
And i enjoy the last one.
I would give it 2 and a half stars but i can't, so 3?
The music was really pretty but SO BLAND. I feel like if i was the kind of person who liked music as background noise or fell asleep to white noise,i would like it.
I oscillated a lot between "this sounds really cool" and "i don't like this" but ultimately i can tell a lot of music i like was influenced by music that was influenced by this band and i think if i heard them in college, i probably would've listened to them a lot
Finally some good music.
Hearing the original Heard it Through the Grapevine really highlights how crazy Marvin Gaye went on that track.
Runaway Child was pretty funny.
Lots of simp anthems
Not the Temptations best, but I liked this a lot
It's British and it's 80s so there's not really a chance for be liking it. I love goofy, silly, whimsical music and the last song is akazoo song so i think it didn't have those other problems, i would like it but i really didn't. It just felt tedious and it was the Spotify one so but even the full album. There was a sign i kind of liked not i can't remember which.
I am shocked.
We've established i tend to not like British music and I'm also not a metal guy. I love nu metal and the occasional metalcore but straight up metal? Not my jam. But i REALLY liked this album. Even when it was stupid like silly lyrics and goody drum fills, it was stupid in a way i like. I love that they have an anti-robot stance and see Iron Man as a villain, I love the storytelling fantasy/scifi lyrics I'm shocked that i can understand Ozzy's singing more than his speaking, i LOVE the composition and the musicianship. I'm surprised and impressed that sometimes it got jazzy and sometimes it got funky. This is the first album i feel like is a SOLID 4, not graded on a curve. Maybe 4 and a half. Not 5 because I'm not sure I'll ever listen to it again but if i do, i won't be mad at it.
Unfortunately I'm not a punk fan. But that left me pleasantly surprised when i found out how melodic Bad Brains songs are after the intro. I liked i against i, house of suffering, and i think reignition after that it all started sounding very 80s. And i wish i could analyze what it is about 80s melodies i don't like but i just know i don't like it. After that, i thought sacred love was good. But as a personal preference thing, it's overall not for me. Shout out to my fellow dreadheads in genres where the demographic is unrepresented though.
I never finished Catcher in the Rye but I am a John Lennon hater.
I love that jealous guy gave us the donny Hathaway cover that gave us chance the rappers juice, but i hate that imagine gave us the worst part of the covid pandemic and everything else about this album.
This is my first time listening to Elvis Costello since high school when i decided i didn't like Elvis Costello and, let me tell you there's a lot i didn't realize. Like i had no idea he was English, and i didn't realize this was an 80s album partially because it doesn't sound 80s to me until crimes of Paris and partially because I thought he was one of the guys who died in the place crash with buddy holy. it turns out, despite not being able to tell these things i STILL really don't like Elvis Costello i almost liked Tokyo Storm Warning for it's groove but just like the rolling stones Going home and John Lennons i don't wanna be a soldier mama, it felt like it went on way too long and insufferably.
But then it got to I Want You and i don't know what happened, but that song goes hard. I started to think maybe i do like Elvis Costello. I like the writing and the composition of it a lot but felt like a different arrangement/performance would fit better so I started looking up covers and Fiona Apple has a great version and there's one Elvis did with the Roots that's pretty great too! Oh my God, that song
After that it got bad again. Turns out i don't like his music.
I'll give it a 3 though
I feel like I'm supposed to like Tracy Chapman because I've heard so many talk about how unquestionably great and important her music is and one time i played a comedy show and the guy who went up after me was like "give it up for Tracy Chapman everybody" and like 4 people including me laughed. But i don't
I just feel like her melodies and chord progressions are so boring and static and there's no dynamics it's like the music wasn't written so much as noodled around with and then called good enough. I was too bored to pay much attention to the lyrics but i guess they're about important stuff but subject matter isn't good enough. Why? was one that was musically interesting enough for me to tune into the words and then it was like this mess don't even rhyme! Plus i feel like if you wanna do 28 barely musical songs about economic struggle, inequality, and corruption in America why not just write essays instead? These songs didn't need to be songs in my opinion. But that's just standard me hating the 80s i guess.
I hate this.
I don't even know what it is that makes me hate this but my head hurts and i can't wait for it to be over. I might give up at Aftermath in honor of the worst album I've heard in this project
Traffic, Traffic, lookin for my chapstick
This is like of you fed AI 1000 hours of white boomer music and made it do an album based on that.
Some of the lyrics were so corny it pissed me off
Songs for more listenable toward the end
I'm never beating the anglophobe allegations
When i started the album, my first impression was that it was that it was an easy 3, no big complaints, no big praises just some 90s butt rock, then really quickly the cringey gen x edgelord lyrics started to come out and the music started getting worse every song til i couldn't believe how bad it was. They didn't have to make "it doesn't bleed, it doesn't breed" a repeating motif through the album but l, by God they did and it sucked
What Wes Anderson movie is this?
I feel like this is the most middle of the road, inoffensive, unremarkable, basically palatable, music possible. Another one of those musicians that makes me wonder why a musician was seen as so much more important than the pioneers of the genre who made more original, more exciting music.
It's not bad, it's just bland and i don't know if that makes it a 2 or 3
The one thing everybody who doesn't know me is MOST sure about is that i love reggae music.
But i don't. Ska, yes. Dancehall, yes. Reggae, boring and I'm sorry. There were a couple of interesting moments but i forgot them
For a 2014 album this sounds very 80s to me. I don't know if it's the tibres or the cords or the eq but something in the music made me feel uncomfortable? Tense might be the right word. And I'm sure for normal people listening to this is probably relaxing but as i listened to it i kept thinking "what is that" and "why do i feel so uneasy" before remembering it's the music. like having a random rock in your shoe.
I think the way i don't like this is like the difference between eating bad food and food you're allergic to. I think I'm allergic to whatever's in this
This is fine. There were some songs that shocked me with how much i liked them and some that shocked me with how much i didn't like them.
Which Wes Anderson movie is this?
Yo, did he start Boogie on Reggae woman with "i like to see you boogie"?
I'm a little biased i think because when i was a baby learning what music was, Stevie Wonder was one of the main features.
But to me, listening to this album, his composition is up there with Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, lyrics on par with the Psalms and Rumi, performance maybe just under people like Ella and Mike. The greatest to ever do it. And no matter how much praise he gets, it's not enough. This isn't even his best album, these aren't even his biggest songs, i hadn't even listened to this one before but I'm amazed.
The idea that, out of the 1001 albums you MUST listen to before you die Elvis Costello is on the list twice, seems far fetched. Even dubious.
Maybe Stevie Wonder put me in a good mood, but this album was actually fun to listen to for me and i don't know how to feel about that after i hated on him so much. And I'm the topic of why he deserves to be here again, this time i heard some Weird Al in his singing (who's entire discography should be on the list) some Billy Joel who i guess isn't an influence but a contemporary, some of The Matches (who have at least one perfect album), and a few other bands. So i get it.
I guess it also makes sense that i like this Elvis album more than the other one since it's not from the 80s.
I think it's not quite a 4 but i consistently enjoyed it. I should've given the other one a 2
This was groovier than Natty Dread
This makes me feel like I'm in a smoky, dimly lit, bar where everyone's calling me slurs.
I'm not finishing this
I was really curious about whether this project would introduce me to music i would give 5 stars and what it would be. And i guess i knew about Fiona Apple before. I've heard Criminal, I've seen the first Shrek movie several times, she had that really good cover of that Elvis Costello song i like. I knew i would like her music, i guess but i didn't know i would like it this much. I don't even know if i have the words for it. It's so cool, so groovy, dark clever lyrically. I feel like early-to-mid 2000s Jason Mraz who's live shows I've listened to copious amounts of and who inspired me to start writing and playing music was highly influenced by her.
I wish I'd heard this album sooner, listening to it took me to a different place. I like it.
They are British. But these songs make me feel so happy. Jungle is kind of racist, but in a very innocent, they had no idea kind of way. It reminds me of a time when i was young and the world was still beautiful
