1001 Albums Journey

Good songs, good performance.. docking points because not really an album so much as some songs thrown together

I think the worst song on this album is Electioneering and if you had a whole album of songs the same quality as Electioneering, it would still be one of the best albums of the 90s If you took Let Down and put it in the middle of an album of 7 hours of fire alarms and dental drills, the strength of that song alone would bring it up to at least a 4

I don’t hate Meat Is Murder but I’m trying to be somewhat objective. Were I to rank my favorite groups, I imagine The Smiths would rank rather highly. I own a graphic novel about them and also Morrissey’s autobiography, which is the most hilariously overwritten book I’ve ever attempted to read. Yet I am unbiased enough to recognize that THIS album belongs nowhere near a greatest of all time list, particularly when a cursory review informs me that their (much better) self-titled debut is not featured. There are exactly 2 songs here in any sort of rotation for me (Headmaster Ritual and That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore). The title track is one of the dullest songs in existence, though I actually admire when a message is so in-your-face that no thought or interpretation is necessary. The original US release closes with How Soon Is Now? which is actually good enough to make the whole thing worth listening to, but alas that is not the version we’re reviewing.

I fucking adore Bat Out of Hell. I wish with all my heart that we could bring back this kind of big dumb loud 70s arena rock music. It’s an artistic achievement in bombast, maximalism, and some third thing to keep the rhythm of this sentence going. Every word Mr. Loaf sings is THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE WORLD and he makes you feel that. The melodrama here is fantastic. An 8.5 minute epic about marrying someone to get them agree to bang in car? Whatever the fuck is going on at the beginning of You Took the Words Right of My Mouth? Give Jim Steinman a posthumous Pulitzer. This stupid album just puts me in such a good mood. There’s a very real part of me that says to award this album with more stars than there are stars in the universe—and the universe is infinite. But four out of five ain’t bad

My good mood from yesterday has been dashed. Nothing here grabbed me in any way and I wished for the album to be over within seconds. Indeed, had it gone on any longer then I fear I would have been forced to grind up a CD by whoever is the opposite of this (the Ramones, obvi) and mainline it into my bloodstream.

Enthusiastic about this one. Stuff like this is what I was hoping to get out of the album generator idea.

I like Metallica pretty well but they’ve always been more of a greatest hits band than an album band for me. There’s songs here I like a lot, always was a big fan of Sanitarium, but i don’t really feel the need to listen to it straight through very often, if ever

Expected to like this more than I did. First track kinda banged but overstayed its welcome. Didn’t know they had a vocalist before Bruce. Would have been better with Bruce.

Again, sonically, musically, melodically, rhythmically, I really dig these dudes. But goddamn that guy’s voice kills me

I'm generally more inclined to listen to New Order than Joy Division but still goddamn, dude. Unknown Pleasures is so so so so so so so so so so fundamentally important and influential on so much of what I love that came after. Disorder is in contention for best "album 1, side 1, track 1" of all time IMO. Love the production. Martin Hannett was a genius but also a monster. Things like spraying an aerosol can in time with the beat to create a "mechanical" sound on She's Lost Control, which in turn presumably caused Trent Reznor to spontaneously come into existence.

Listened to this twice, initially felt solid about a 3 but it grew on me. Coldplay frustrates me because their stuff I like, I like really like a lot but so much of it is forgettable.

“Horses tore my limbs off and put them back on in a whole different order. I was like: "Shit, yeah, oh my god!" then I threw up."” -Michael Stipe I’ve been listening to this album since I was like 14 and read Please Kill Me for the first time. Every time I hear it, I appreciate more and more just how special it really is. This time I listened with the lyrics pulled up, following along with every single line and, again, it hit me like never before. This album is like the big bang. You don't have to like it, but you can't deny it. This is one of the most truly perfect pieces of recorded media ever created. Horses was, I believe, the first album released by one of the resident CBGB artists and, for that reason, has a claim to being the first punk album. By blending "intellectual" influences and contemporaries like Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Television (Tom Verlaine is here!), and Talking Heads with the raw, simple, instrumentation of the Stooges, Ramones, and garage bands like the Kingsmen and Troggs, Patti Smith made a case for the NYC underground scene as something that demanded attention as it came to liberate us from the tyranny of masturbatory prog rock bullshit. There’s a reason she has been cited as an inspiration by everyone from Springsteen to Madonna (I'd argue there's a very direct line from the juxtaposition of sacred and profane in the version of "Gloria" on this record to that same trope being on display in "Like a Prayer") to Sonic Youth to Dua Lipa. Taylor Swift saying "I'm not Patti Smith" in the title track to TTPD was the closest she’s come to humility in the last 5 years. "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine" sounds like some edge-lord shit today but in 1975 it was a genuinely stunning mission statement. Such a simple declaration of autonomy and rejection of tradition. The storytelling here is visceral. You've got suicide, alien abductions, sex, drugs, rock and roll, religion. The lyrics to every song are like 10 pages long and sound borderline improvised and driven purely by emotion at points. It's like she's speaking in tongues.

Dude I’m a pretty recent convert to Missy Elliott (actually listened to this for the first time like a month ago maybe) but she’s pretty fucking awesome and has some of the coolest aesthetic choices in music videos especially. Timbaland is also great here. A chorus that’s just saying “I’m such a good rapper”??? Babe what? I love this. I will probably restate this a 5 later after a few more spins.

I like this album but have nothing to say about it beyond reiterating that Brass In Pocket is a perfect pop song.

*Insert Principal Skinner "No, it's the children who are wrong" meme* I think I largely have fairly middle of the road takes. Usually, when things are highly regarded, I like them. I don't try to force myself to enjoy things that are popular, but I also don't try to be contrarian; the only thing worse than liking stuff just because other people like it is hating stuff just because other people like it. With that preface out of the way, I submit to you that Pink Floyd is not so much a band to me as they are a t-shirt brand. To me, Pink Floyd's entire career is like a concept album where the concept is "boring as shit" and every lead vocal sounds like it's being wheezed out by one of those cartoon wizards in a blue robe covered in stars and shit. Of all the albums that show up on every single "greatest albums" list, there is none that I find more alienating than this one. You cannot find me a thing I have attempted to listen to more while enjoying it less. Flashback to less than a week ago, when I gushed over Patti Smith for, as I put it, "liberat[ing] us from the tyranny of masturbatory prog rock bullshit." This album is incapable of penetrating my consciousness. I've heard the whole thing 900 goddamn times and cannot hum you a bar of a single song that didn't get overplayed on classic rock radio. I want you to imagine my brain as the prism on the album cover and this album is the light... Except rather than going through the prism and making a rainbow, it just bounces right the fuck off. I almost just wrote 😴 and called it a day. I guess if I had to pick a favorite song it would be the one where David Gilmour tunelessly moans like a ghost in the world’s most apathetic haunted house. I almost gave it a 1/5 but then I remembered that King Crimson album exists and I do like this album dramatically more than that one, in the same way that I'd like having all my teeth pulled out by a dentist dramatically more than I would hate having all my teeth knocked out by a UFC fighter. I also remembered I'm probably going to have to review a Rush album at some point (such review will read, in its entirety, "fart sounds + jack-off motions") so I can’t let my scale bottom out just yet.

This album is a pretty interesting time capsule for the state of play in British music circa 1990. Let’s set the scene. We're a couple years past the post-punk/new wave era but a couple years ahead of the Britpop era and everyone is either really sad, doing a lot of ecstasy, or both. Lovable Scottish coke fiend Alan McGee has stacked Creation Records with a pretty stellar roster of indie acts including, most relevantly to this discussion, the Jesus and Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine. Ride, the then-new kid on the Creation block, is clearly pulling from both of those bands but with more of a pop music sensibility. Most shoegaze/no-wave/noise rock groups had an ethos opposed to classic pop rock bands (The Beatles, et al) but Ride clearly has a reverence for that style of music. All of the dream-like soundscapes and heavy distortion but with much more focus on melody. More than fellow shoegazers, the influence that I hear most on this album is actually the Stone Roses which, again, makes sense given that they were the hottest commodity in British music for a very brief and beautiful flash in 1989-90. Turn down the fuzz a bit, mix the drums a bit lower and the vocals a bit higher, then like half these songs could be by the Roses. “This sounds like it could be by the Stone Roses” is about the nicest thing I can say about music. Special mention to the bass line on Seagull, the guitar tone on Paralysed, and every second of Vapour Trail. If I can borrow from the Tipton system, I’m gonna give this 4.5, maybe even 4.75. Like the Missy Elliott album, there’s decent odds I re-rate a perfect score in the future.

I liked this well enough. "Must hear before you die" feels like a stretch but it is a good album.

I'm older than everybody on this cover art and that's pretty fucked up. And I think the title is in the Twin Peaks font. CSN(and sometimes Y) are interesting because they're a supergroup that is arguably more popular than its predecessor bands. Like, I'd definitely call them more popular than Buffalo Springfield or the Hollies and probably the Byrds. David Crosby and Graham Nash are about as good at harmonizing and melody-crafting as anyone this side of Lennon/McCartney. And Stephen Stills is the second best songwriter/guitarist from Buffalo Springfield who subsequently joined this band. Neil Young is his own beast but he’s not here yet. One time I saw Graham Nash at the Lexington Opera House and he introduced every song by telling the story of what inspired it and like half the time the story was just the lyrics of the song. I don't even think it was intentional but it was really funny and for that reason, I will always love him. This album is a breeze to get through and there's always something pleasant or at least interesting going on. Vocal layers, lyrical complexity, the token “after a nuclear war” song that every single folk adjacent 60s singer had in the arsenal. Probably best enjoyed in an environment other than “in my office at work” or “in my kitchen cooking dinner” but that’s what I had to work with. If I'm being nitpicky, and I am being nitpicky because there's not a goddamn thing you can do about it, I'd prefer this to be structured a little differently. "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" is so fantastic that there's nowhere to go but down from there, so I wish it came way later in the album after some build, where it can be the "centerpiece" that it is. As it stands, I think the centerpiece honor goes to "Helplessly Hoping," which is admittedly their most streamed song on Spotify so maybe they’re better at this than I am. If I'm being extra nitpicky, and I am being extra nitpicky, because who's going to stop me? Kellen? I hate that part in "Wooden Ships" where they're talking about the purple berries. It’s annoying. But like this is still a no-skips album, no matter what order it's in and no matter how many berry-based diatribes there are. So, I don't know. Something I strongly believe is that you can never fully appreciate anything on a first listen, even if you immediately fall in love with it, and this is a good example of that. I’ve had the album on repeat all day, really since last night, and it’s grown on me more each time. I was pretty well locked in on a 3 on first listen then a 4 then up to a 5 then back down to a 4 (because of the berries. It’s always about the berries). I’m gonna give it the softest possible 5. Like when I took my driver’s license test those many years ago and the lady made a point of telling me I only passed by 1 point. Hoping for Neil Young soon

I wrote up a whole long thing and then I erased it because I don’t think I need that many words to say this album fucking rips and Neil Young is the greatest.

None of the songs are bad and most are well above average. But, prescient politics aside, it's just nothing special and feels like Radiohead going back and seeing what worked before (albeit in a mix-and-match manner), which, for better or worse, is an impulse that they generally resist. Basically taking Kid A(mnesiac) style lyrics and combining them with more OK Computer style instrumentals. The album is entirely too long and could have used some editing. I don't think there's too terribly much individual identity on these tracks. It's one of those things where I know every single one of them but can't match the titles to the songs. Just pick 3 to cut and it's a better album. Any 3. According to Wikipedia, "In 2008, Yorke posted an alternative track listing on Radiohead's website, omitting "Backdrifts", "We Suck Young Blood", "I Will" and "A Punchup at a Wedding,"" which would have knocked this down to a lovely 39:17. So, I removed those tracks and re-ordered the album per Thom's suggested alternative. It was an overall better experience. I just can't really tell you a situation outside a random album of the day generator where I feel inclined to sit down with this and listen front to back. Also the last Radiohead concert I went to had a very HTTT heavy setlist and I found it boring.

Godfuckingdamnit this is how it's done. Up there with the likes of The Byrds, Townes Van Zandt and Gram Parsons as far as being forebears of what we would now call alt country, John Prine is the embodiment of what hackish music journos would call a "songwriter's songwriter." He might not have been the biggest mainstream star, but pretty much anyone in the country/folk/Americana sphere with any sort of cultural cache will sing his praises endlessly. Bob Dylan once compared him to Proust—a stark contrast to that one time Bob Dylan got angry at me in 2019 (But at least he thought about me. ) Anyway, what John Prine is best at (and maybe is, in fact, THE best at), is crafting entire worlds within the span of a 3-4 minute song. There's so many songs out there that purport to "tell stories" but are effectively meaningless until you've been told what they're about and they become retroactively clever. But John Prine's songs don’t require explanation or close reading. They are effectively full on studies of characters who feel real, fleshed out, rounded, without needing to engage in too much interpretation. By the time Sam Stone dies of that overdose, you know him. There’s an image in your mind. You know things about this man that the song never tells you. But you know him. Excluding choruses, "Angel from Montgomery" is 3 verses, 12 lines. And yet, again, you can envision the subject and understand basically everything about her just from that sparse description. I've always interpreted "Hello In There" as a companion song, the perspective of the husband/old man/child that’s grown old/cowboy from "Angel from Montgomery"... just two sad people whose lives didn't go how they always thought they would. I’m not smart enough to read Proust but I can definitely apply some of that Hemingway iceberg shit to these songs. And the older I get, the more I can relate to some of these ideas. "Blow up your iPhone" doesn't sound as good as "blow up your TV" but the sentiment is the same. Just unplugging and living a real life. I dig that more and more every day. Growing up in an area that has basically been demolished by coal mining, "Paradise" is really personal to me.. I also used to play against Muhlenberg County's Quiz Bowl team and they were nice people. When I’m president, “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore” will be the national anthem. I love John Prine. I love this album.

This is a bit hard for me to grade because it detours at times into holdcore (a term I just invented for the music that plays when you're on hold with customer service) and pretty much any given 10 seconds could be the "welcome back" stinger to a public access talk show. But I liked it well enough. Not something I’m putting on during a road trip or anything but it’s pleasant. Good album art too. And good Jaco Pastorius.

meant to rate this a 4 initially but it was 3am and i wanted to see the next album whoops

At a certain point a few years back, I decided that it was no longer worth my time follow new releases as closely as I did in the past. Anything worth hearing, I resolved, would make its way to me eventually but there was no need to rush. That, unfortunately, led me to become fairly insulated, only listening to the same stuff over and over ad nauseum, and it got boring. But I still wasn’t willing to put in the effort to look into every hyped up new release. So, my compromise was to dig into the past, exploring the already extant discographies of artists from yesterday. Sure enough, this has been pretty damn fulfilling for me, as I've found a veritable treasure trove of awesome shit that has just been sitting there for decades, waiting for me to find it. Weirdly, most of it was British and from the 90s. If I remember 2025 for nothing else, I will still think of it as the year I got, like, super into Britpop (my eventual Definitely Maybe review is going to be LONG), finding what came out of the UK in the early-mid-90s to be the first "movement" to match my love of what came out of CBGB in the mid-late-70s. Even before that, though, Supergrass had existed on the periphery of my awareness for quite some time. I first heard "Alright" after it was sampled by, of all people, Travie McCoy on that album that I had on iTunes for some reason back in 2010. Aside from that tangential connection, these dudes truly came onto my radar a few months ago and my immense enjoyment of this album was probably the single biggest direct factor that led me to pitch doing this project. I think it’s a pretty regular occurrence when talking about rock music (particularly older rock music) to hear about how impressive it is that x artist recorded y album when he was “only z years old” but it’s pretty fun to hear an album that unmistakably sounds like it was recorded by a bunch of young people and could only have been recorded by a bunch of young people. Gaz and his goofy sideburns were 17 when they started recording and you can tell; it's just got that energy, exuberance, hopefulness, feeling of invincibility, whatever you want to call it. It's infectious; Steven Spielberg saw the "Alright" music video and offered to produce a Monkees style television show, a veritable Sliding Doors moment if ever there was one. Over on channel.WAV, circa 9/12/2025, I said, "Supergrass has a remarkable ability to make me feel nostalgia for things that had no part in my own childhood." I don't know if that reads like as high of a compliment as I intend it to be, but I can listen to this thing and capture fleeting glimpses of feelings I haven't had since I was a kid. That's something truly magical. But, fleeting is the key word. The back half of the album sees whimsy give way to wistfulness and songs that have more of a melancholic vibe. I Should Coco is all the feelings of growing up packed into 40 minutes.

The Smashing Pumpkins had one of the stronger runs of any group in the 90s (before“they” disappeared right up “their” own ass) and I don’t think I ever hear anybody who isn’t a critic talk about it. Some of that is through no fault of the band but most of it owes to one William Patrick “Billy Pumpkins” “‘90s Morrissey” Corgan being like the biggest dick head in music (non-actual-criminal division) and doing shit like spending the last 30 years complaining about that one time Pavement was mean to him. In regard to the parts that are not the band's fault, there is a weird tendency to lump them in with the 90s post-Nirvana also-rans of the world, which is odd to me. They're not particularly pulling from the same influences and, whereas it was trendy in the 90s to be apathetic, Billy Corgan is not, by any stretch of the imagination, an apathetic person. It's hard to be aloof when you're so whiny. The laziest folks in the world will jump to point to Butch Vig's production of this album as evidence of the Nirvana coattail riding, despite Vig having also produced The Smashing Pumpkins' wonderful debut album, Gish, which came out 4 months before Nevermind. Billy Corgan will never let anyone forget this as long as he draws breath, but it's one of the few legitimate grievances he has with the world. Anyway, sonically we are cribbing from a neat mishmash. Billy loved him some shoegaze at this time and you can hear the influence of My Bloody Valentine and the Jesus and Mary Chain in the heavy distortion and vocal stylings. That's the biggest thing here but there's also some Black Sabbath in the riffs, some Queen in the bombastic arrangements, a sprinkle of The Cure and Prince in the production, and, very unfortunately, Rush, from whom elements of "Cherub Rock" were very blatantly lifted. This is a testament to the greatness of The Smashing Pumpkins because "Cherub Rock" is amazing while Rush is the musical equivalent of a 12 page single spaced book report about the ingredients on the back of a box of graham crackers. The production of this album was a bit of a nightmare. Billy wrote the songs in tandem with therapy sessions while dealing with suicidal ideation, which really comes through in songs like "Today." He also composed one of the most beautiful songs ever written and called it "Mayonaise." (Sic) James Iha and D'arcy Wretzky were in the midst of a breakup while recording and apparently had to be kept apart--the dysfunction led Billy Corgan to pull the legendary dick move of personally re-recording the bass and guitar parts. Iha and Wretzky are both credited on the album, but apparently neither of them actually play. Elsewhere, drummer Jimmy Chamberlin was staying true to his jazz roots by hitting rock bottom in his heroin addiction and disappearing for days on end. He also refused to use a click track when recording his parts and, yet, he's still the best goddamn part of this album. There’s a reason the drum roll on “Cherub Rock” is the first sound you hear on this record. I always see Jimmy called the Smashing Pumpkins' "secret weapon," which just isn't true when everyone in the world is saying it. Can you really be underrated when literally everyone with ears agrees that you're amazing? My question now to myself is whether this album is better than Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness, and I think it is. While Siamese Dream doesn't quite reach the same highs ("1979" has been my favorite song for as long as I have had a favorite song), it is also dramatically more consistent and doesn't suffer from the bloat of being 2 hours long. Remarkably in my travels, I’ve managed to come across a piece of writing that I feel perfectly sums up the Smashing Pumpkins experience. The following is an excerpt from an article (about Soundgarden) that originally ran in Spin in April of 1994 and which I think is a perfect microcosm of the Smashing Pumpkins. I have lightly edited the excerpt for clarity. “In the lobby bar of one of the tallest hotels, [Chris] Cornell and [Kim] Thayil are settling back with a couple of beers when Billy Corgan from Smashing Pumpkins wanders through, and decides to join them for a strawberry margarita. Corgan chatters about the pain of his life, the supposed incompetence of his band (everybody rolls their eyes), the lifesaving virtues of Jungian therapy, bands that suck. Cornell gets up to leave. Corgan tells Thayil how important Soundgarden used to be to him, and he baits him by saying that the Pumpkins sometimes do a cover of Soundgarden’s “Outshined” that segues into a Depeche Mode song or something. “I’m think of making my next album really new wave,” Corgan says, “like ’83-’84 new wave, not like Berlin. I spend all my time doing things that may be a bit tangential, but I think I’m going to go back to the core, the heart music. Echo and the Bunnymen.” This is standard stuff to anybody who has read even a single Billy Corgan profile, the basic curriculum of Pumpkins 101. But Thayil isn’t buying. He’s sore. “Don’t you see,” Thayil says, “you’re this incredibly talented guy. People like your music. You have a good band. You sell a lot of records. You don’t need all this…stuff.” “What sign are you?” Corgan asks. “What do you mean, what sign am I?” Thayil says. “What difference could that possibly make?” “C’mon,” wheedles Corgan, “when is your birthday?” “All right, goddamn it: September 4th.” “Aha!” Corgan says. “A Virgo. You’re argumentative.” “Damn right, I’m argumentative,” Thayil says, and takes a long, angry pull at his beer, “which you should know because I’ve been arguing with you for half an hour, not because of any sign.” “I’m a Pisces,” Corgan replies. “We pick up on those things.” A minute later, Corgan, still probing, finally finds the key to Thayil’s heart: “I hate how in magazine pictures, they always stick me somewhere in the back.” Thayil explodes: “What do you mean? You write all the songs, and you do all the interviews. You play the instruments on the album. You control the band to the extent that most people think of Smashing Pumpkins as the Billy Corgan Experience, and all you care about is some photography?” “But I hate it,” Corgan says, “it means they don’t think I’m the cute one.” “Ooh,” Thayil says a little too loudly as Corgan walks away, “I’ll bet he’s going to call his therapist in Chicago, wake her up at four in the morning, and tell her about that big, mean bear who made fun of him.” The next day at the Big Day Out festival, Thayil is talking to Kim and Kelley Deal in the Breeders’ dressing room when Corgan walks past wearing a long-sleeved Superman T-shirt like the one your four-year-old nephew probably owns. “You hurt me deeply,” Corgan says, touching the giant S on his chest and pouting. “You hurt me deeply in my heart.” The Pumpkins go on to play the best set anybody has ever heard them play…” In sum, Billy sucks, but the Smashing Pumpkins deliver.

I'm pretty sure I didn’t hate this album but the "Summertime Blues" cover is one of the least tolerable pieces of music I've ever heard. Like... I'm being pedantic but taking out the end of the verses to replace with instrumentals kinda detracts from the whole point of the song. It's some kind of Hendrix meets Peter & The Wolf meets Peanuts nightmare where all the grownups are replaced by instruments. You called your congressman and he said, quote, "*drum fill*"? What did Eddie Cochran do to deserve that? The rest of the record is still a bit “jammy” for my liking, but is just controlled enough that I can find some sounds that I dig. Also, anything with this much fuzz and distortion in 1968 is probably pretty influential on a lot of the stuff I am into. On a lark, I googled “Blue Cheer Iggy Pop” and was unsurprised to learn that they and the MC5 (<3) had played together in 1968. Prooooobably not going in the rotation but I don’t regret listening and am not opposed to revisiting tracks 2 - 5.

The short version: I don't like this album at all. The long version: What I’ve learned today is that I would much rather listen to music in a genre I hate that is done well than music in a genre I like that is done poorly. I went into this with pretty high hopes (the genres and the influences ticked the boxes for me AND it's a band I've never heard of) and in return received an album that goes for “deep and mysterious” and sticks the landing hard on “teenager in a Che Guevara shirt who always talks about “neoliberalism” and does his damnedest to pivot every conversation to ‘yeah I do weed now.’” Listening to this, in between bouts of wincing at the lyrics, I was transported back in time to a particularly dreadful night in college that I spent in the company of a poor misshapen soul I dubbed “The Revolutionary.” I’ll bet that guy loves this album, wherever he is now. Based on these lyrics, whoever wrote this shit (apparently his name is Sonic Boom) seems to think he’s the first person to ever conflate drugs and religion. So profound. Oh wow a song about starting a “revolution” because… he’s mad that drugs are illegal. I said surely there’s more to this. So I went to Genius and saw the following explanation, written by some neckbeard who thinks this album is in any way intelligent: "Sonic Boom is upset and disapproves of having those in power determine if specific drugs are acceptable in today’s society, leaving those who use illegal substances feeling like outsiders, and being looked down upon by others. Even in a society where drugs like alcohol is socially accepted with similar if not worse effects to other popular illegal drugs." Fuuuuuuuuuuuck off. Knowing nothing else about this group aside from what's on this record, I’m comfortable with saying I hate them irredeemably. I always try to listen to these albums at least 2-3 times (hence my disdain for the longer ones), and way more if we count the times I let them play in the background while I’m doing other stuff, but I gave this one spin and got what I needed to get out of it. When coming up with ratings, I always try to consider “what does this do better than other albums?” and the answer in this case is “irritate me.” I almost rated this as “did not listen” in a desperate and vain attempt to try and manifest a world in which I did not.

True generational talents. I hope the person who decided every hip hop album needed “comedy” skits during the 90s and 2000s is having a bad day.

I like Blur quite a bit but I’m not sure I think they ever made a true no skips album. I was literally thinking about it yesterday in terms of them never making an album worse than a 3 or better than a 4. This is me, again, saying some variation of "album too long" and also readily acknowledging that, as much as I enjoy Blur, I will readily acknowledge about 20,000 reasons to find them annoying. Blur requires a bit more active listening than their contemporaries, because their real strength is in the lyrics more than anything. Damon Albarn is pretty much head and shoulders over all the other britpop folks as a lyricist, other than Jarvis Cocker and maybe Brett Anderson. Parklife was Blur’s third album and their last as the unquestioned and unquestionable biggest British band before the Battle of Britpop circa 1995 and Damon subsequently spending the remainder of the 90s taking a series of Ls (getting into heroin, getting dumped by Justine Frischmann, getting bullied by Gallaghers) that culminated in him deciding to make music as a cartoon character instead of himself. And I tend to think that when/if his legacy is being discussed by future generations, there will be more discussion of Gorillaz than anything else. But Blur remains a stadium act in the UK so maybe that's just me not fully appreciating their popularity outside the US, where their last concert was a disastrous Coachella gig. As far as the album itself goes, we're right in the thick of Blur being as aggressively British as possible, which began on Modern Life is Rubbish and continued on The Great Escape (The so-called "Life" trilogy). As in the other Life albums, the big defining feature here is these Ray Davies-style songs about these super mundane things like bank holidays and civil servants and annoyance with US-centrism. Sonically, there's a good amount of variation here; "Girls & Boys" has some pretty gnarly disco guitar, is catchy as hell, and is also probably my favorite song in the world to listen to while running. "Bank Holiday" is a punk song that is mercifully the length of a punk song. Elsewhere, we've got waltz timed oompa-"chimney sweeping music" on "The Debt Collector" and an almost Bond-esque sound on "To the End," alongside something approaching space rock on “Far Out,” some new wave on “London Loves” and, yes, straightforward ‘90s alternative rock on "End of a Century" and "This Is a Low." That refusal to have any set-in-stone sound would later become a cornerstone for Gorillaz, but it's been part of Damon Albarn's work from very early on. It's wild to me that the title track is a thing that was released as a single; I cannot fathom the notion of hearing that song on the radio during my morning commute, even though when you think about it there's really not a better time to hear it? It's sort of the thesis statement of the album and would probably make more sense as the opening track to provide an overview to what the album is going to be about, but I also understand that would be pretty alienating to a new listener. But at the same time, watch them play it at Glastonbury 2009 and see how wild that crowd gets. The key thing here is that most of these character studies feel very "birdseye." Blur is not talking about the mundanity of modern life because *they* can feel it but because the *listener* can. "Tracy Jacks," "London Loves," "Magic America," and "Jubilee" feel voyeuristic and damn near anthropological, rather than relatable. Damon is rocking FILA tracksuits, a gold tooth, and a cockney accent. He's playing a character like the theater kid he’s always been at heart. Again, an interesting prelude of things to come. The best songs on here are the more sincere ones, that feel more intimate and less theatrical. "End of a Century," "To the End," "Clover Over Dover," and "Badhead" all show an honesty and vulnerability that wouldn't really be found elsewhere in Blur's canon until their sad boi era later in the decade. "This Is a Low" is, ironically, the high point here and is the perfect marriage of these two concepts. It's emotionally resonant and intimate, while also being inspired by, of all things, a shipping forecast. Great album. I like it more than I did this morning. “Clover Over Dover” has especially improved in my standings, a tune that never really stood out to me one way or the other but is now one of my favorites on the album. But it could use some trimming (cut: Bank Holiday and Lot 105 for sure. Maybe The Debt Collector and Far Out), and I'm not ready to give it a perfect score.

Distinct lack of thrills here, in spite of the name. Reading up on The Thrills, it seems like their inclusion here was more based on hype than anything; they showed up in the original 2005 version of the book on the back of a huge amount of success with this album and were not included in any subsequent editions. Kinda reminds me of 2012 when we all thought Gotye was the next big thing. I'm not going to call it great and I still don't like this dude's voice, but I can settle in on "okay." Basically, I wouldn't be mad at you for playing it in the car but I'm not going to put it on myself. There's just too many other places I can get a better version of the same thing.

You cannot find me a more discouraging feeling than listening to this for 25 minutes and then finding out that you’ve been on shuffle and having to start over.

A collection of great songs but not necessarily a great collection of songs, ya dig? Basically not sure I get anything from listening to all of these songs in this exact order. "Nothing Compares 2 U" is often called one of the greatest songs of all time but I'd also shout out “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” "Black Boys on Mopeds" and "Jump in the River" for mixing up the sound a bit.

I am, historically, an Eagles hater, not so much because I hate their music but because I have literally 0 respect them as artists. Overall, I find them (Don Henley in particular) to be an exercise in deep cynicism, chasing trendy sounds rather than paving any new ground. Especially ironic to me that Don Henley went on to write “The Boys of Summer” and lament seeing a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac. But that’s what this whole goddamn band is. Just a bit Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac. A shiny commercial product that insists that it’s cool and countercultural. So it’s truly insane to me how the prevailing opinion on the internet seems to be that people only hate the Eagles because of a movie line. I’m sure that’s true of someone out there but, like, the line exists for a reason, ya dig? He specifically hates the Eagles; not The Byrds or The Band or CSN(Y) or Gram Parsons. The Eagles. It certainly worked out for them; I imagine if the band was told to choose between my (and, I guess, the Coen Brothers’) personal respect and their solid gold yachts powered by burning $100 bills and bricks of cocaine, there would not be much thought. Anyway, on to the album. I think I listened to this once the whole way through previously just to say that I did it but never really took it in. I hate "Life in the Fast Lane" with like every fiber of my being, but it's the only song on the album that I actively dislike. But I dislike it a whole lot. I’ve never enjoyed it but I don’t think I understood just how intolerable I found it until spending a day listening to this album on a loop and getting to the point that I started wincing when I heard that first riff. “Life in the fast lane surely make you lose your mind” indeed. I hate Don Henley’s voice (didn’t realize it was possible for a vocal timbre to sound like Reaganomics), I hate the lyrics, I hate the chorus, I hate the tune, I hate that it exists, I think it might be my least favorite song ever. You could swap it out for any Spacemen 3 song and it’d be a lateral move at worst. The rest I'm neutral - positive on. "Try and Love Again" is a very nice song and the little "woop" during the "Hotel California" guitar solo (you know the one) is sufficient to justify the entire existence of this band. I prefer the earlier, more country-ish, stuff but this is acceptable.

I recently got into The Kinks, which puts The Who at a distant 4th place in my British Invasion power rankings. Maybe even 5th because I really like the one Zombies album I’ve heard. I'm way more a fan of this earliest incarnation of these guys than I am the rock opera enthusiast version or the recent version who spent the middle part of this year firing and rehiring Zak Starkey. Maybe that will change as we get further along the generator but, as it stands, the period of my peak Who fandom lasts for exactly 371 days between the releases of this album and their second, A Quick One. Music moved really fast in the 60s, didn't it? How the fuck is this less than 3.5 years before Tommy? The Who are just wee lads here; Keith Moon was 18 when production started but he and John Entwistle are already an all-time great rhythm section. Maybe THE greatest (many’ll throw their support to Jones/Bonham, but I’m partial myself to Mills/Berry). Title track and "The Kids Are Alright" are incredible songs. “Much Too Much” also stood out to me this time around. Interestingly, some quick research shows that the whole album was originally supposed to be R&B covers and that idea was only scrapped after the planned track list got leaked by a magazine, leading Pete Townshend to just, like, crank out a bunch of songs. Another Sliding Doors moment. If you enjoy punk rock, heavy metal, rock opera, or CSI, I guess thank the good people at Beat Instrumental. The original concept for the album lives on via 2 James Brown songs and 1 by Bo Diddley. I think overall these covers are redundant and do nothing to reframe the originals. “Please Please Please” is still excellent. “I’m a Man” kinda sucks. “I Don’t Mind” is somewhere in the middle. Based on the approximately 4 trillion bonus tracks this album has on Spotify, they probably could have swapped them out for something original and had an overall stronger debut album. but we're still in that awkward period in the mid-60s where artists putting out full albums of original songs is still somewhat novel and not the expectation. Rubber Soul didn't come out and change that until... the same day. Of the original tunes, the only one I don’t really vibe with is “It’s Not True” which was kinda giving me VeggieTales energy, as I expected ol’ Roger Daltrey to say that he’d never been to Boston in the fall. Overall, this is another one of those albums that I really appreciate but don't love. That said, the influence on later stuff that I like way more is very obvious.

I think I have to give this bonus points for sounding like this in 1974. Not something I'm putting on for pleasure but it's actually a really interesting vibe. I'm pretty sure that with the combination of the right drugs and the right high end headphones, this could maybe unlock some forbidden knowledge. Recently I took an edible that was significantly stronger than I realized and I was convinced I had figured out time travel and maybe I did actually figure out time travel, I have no way to prove or disprove it. This stirred similar feelings.

Don’t listen to as much rap these days as my younger years. Wasn’t particularly enthused about this one going in, hence my Northern Boys comparison. But I liked this quite a bit.

This album is fucking brilliant and it's a shame it's borderline impossible to even find it. It's like it slipped through the cracks of history but, in a weird way, that makes sense. There's a tendency to try to modernize old works and the audacity of releasing a cabaret-style album in 1988, land of synthesizers and overproduction, intrigued me off the bat. The best way to live forever is to exist outside time. That's easier said than done but Dagmar Krause pulls it off effortlessly here. Dagmar Krause fits comfortably in the style of artists like Tom Waits and Laurie Anderson and Bjork, who just make shit that they personally find interesting and if you enjoy it, that's just peachy. Trying to categorize into genre is useless and so we apply one of those annoying catch all terms (avant garde) just because everything has to go in a box. Krause's vocal range is on full display here-- Wikipedia calls her an "acquired taste" but I acquired it pretty quickly. Another tendency is to take voices who don't sound like they just came from choir practice and label them as "bad singers." The aforementioned Waits is an example. Bob Dylan is the other classic example of someone who is just universally accepted not to be "good" at singing. But, at least to me, singing is not just about hitting notes. To say otherwise, again, is to reduce art to a science. If it were that simple, every yahoo who makes it through the auditions on The Voice or American Idol could rise to superstar status. To me, great singing is about channeling a message, whether it is your own or not, and making the listener feel the meaning. So often, we hear that a singer "sounds bored" or "robotic" even when there is nothing technically wrong with their performance. What's missing there is the unquantifiable feature that we call "emotion." Nobody can call this performance robotic and there is no shortage of emotion. Whether you can relate to the message or not (if you're reading this, you can't), you feel it and you understand it. Similarly, I've only recently gotten through a longstanding barrier of mine, where I turned up my nose at singers who didn't write their own lyrics. Dagmar Krause is not a performer, she is a conduit. These songs feel lived in. There’s brief flashes of post punk angularity but overall the material is treated with reverence. And, quite frankly, some of these lyrics are pretty relevant no matter what the year. Hanns Eisler, likewise, is an artist with an incredible story. He studied under Schoenberg, was a lifelong collaborator with no less a towering figure than Bertolt fucking Brecht (who wrote many of these lyrics), got exiled from Nazi Germany, got blacklisted from the US during the Red Scare, and went on to compose the national anthem of East Germany. The recording of this album, by a West German artist, is a true sign of the times. While the record was released beneath the shadow of the Berlin Wall, within a year the Wall would fall. East Germany would be no more. These songs are dispatches from a world that, literally, no longer exists at all. They aren't treated as curiosities, as kitsch, or camp, but as pieces of history that matter. Because they do.

Talking Heads are the only band/artist/whatever whose entire discography I own. They're kinda like the Seinfeld of pop music, right down to the sick bass lines and all the subsequent rip-offs that make them feel less revolutionary to the uninformed. Furthering my war on asinine genre classifications, I want to question how this can be considered post-punk / new wave right in the middle of the first wave of punk; this album predates Never Mind the Bollocks by a month. There's some early installment weirdness in 77 in that they haven't yet adopted the funk/African sound that made them into icons. The lyrics are still the same type of thing that David Byrne would be putting out years later up to and including his most recent album, but instrumentally for all intents and purposes, this is a pretty straightforward rock album that actually makes sense as having come out of a CBGB band. "Psycho Killer" gets a ton of love obviously but my favorite on this album has always been "Don't Worry About the Government." So much of the appeal of this band is the lyrics about mundane shit, like buildings and food -- explorations they would further in their second LP, More Songs About Buildings and Food.

Allow me to be insufferable about R.E.M. for a moment. In their prime, they were one of the rarest breed of band, where each member was truly in-expendable. The band was run as a democracy, all 4 of them contributed something distinct. All songs were credited to all 4 members. All money was split 4 ways. I think with the vast majority of bands, there’s one or two central figures (usually a vocalist and/or a guitarist) who end up surrounded by a rotating cast of characters. There’s obviously exceptions to that rule (The Beatles are the obvious big one), but R.E.M. is a band with 4 members who straight up cannot be replaced. Michael Stipe is an incredible singer. Bill Berry and Mike Mills, as I said in my Who review, might be my favorite rhythm section of all time. Mills is at the very least my favorite backing vocalist of all time. Peter Buck is not a stellar guitarist but his love of rock music put the band together and we love him for it because passion > proficiency and Buck is a jangle icon. He's the working man's Johnny Marr. When Bill Berry left the band in the mid-90s (he had an on-stage brain hemorrhage and decided to retire from music to become a farmer), they didn’t even try to replace him and spent the last 15 years of their run without an official drummer. They also felt that whole time like they were going through the motions. While there’s some standout tracks, that era is basically consigned to history. I recently read a book about REM that spent 43 chapters on the 16 years that Bill Berry was in the band and 4 chapters on the 15 years after he left. Peak R.E.M. (Murmur - New Adventures in Hi-Fi; the Berry years) , is maybe the most consistently great American rock band of all time. They just flat out did not miss for 10 albums in the span of 16 years. I don't know that I've seen that replicated. All that said, this ranks pretty low in my peak R.E.M. ranking and is definitely my least favorite thing they put out in the 80s. But it has not 1 but 2 bona fide classics, so I get it. Everything else is solid, but the fact that you know exactly which 2 songs I'm talking about is proof enough that those songs are carrying. I think I could nail "It's the End of the World As We Know It" at karaoke if I was drunk enough.

“Every instrument is a drum.” -James Brown My ratings are generally based on 2 things: 1). Did I like it?; 2). Is it influential on things I do like? James Brown is in that upper echelon of influence, like shit that you need to know on day 1 of being a pretentious pop music snob. He is an inspiration to artists ranging from Iggy Pop to Michael Jackson. He’s the most sampled artist in hip hop. He basically invented funk. He’s also kind of a monster if you read about him. If I'm judging a live album, I think the most important criteria is "Would I like to have been there?" and the answer here is a resounding yes. But at the same time, so much of James Brown's appeal is visual. Watch clips of this dude performing and he's an absolute madman on a scale that has only ever successfully been replicated by Michael Jackson. So, the question is whether the performance can really be conveyed to the listener through audio and audio alone. For that, I asked Wayne Kramer from MC5. I subsequently was informed that he's been dead for like 2 years, so I found a quote from him about it: "Our whole thing was based on James Brown. We listened to "Live At the Apollo" endlessly on acid. We would listen to that in the van in the early days of 8-tracks on the way to the gigs to get us up for the gig. If you played in a band in Detroit in the days before The MC5, everybody did "Please, Please, Please" and "I Go Crazy." These were standards. We modeled The MC5's performance on those records. Everything we did was on a gut level about sweat and energy. It was anti-refinement. That's what we were consciously going for." “Anti-refinement” and “gut level” are maybe a stretch here. This band is pretty damn precise. So precise that I assume James Brown pointed a gun at at least one member of the Famous Flames daily.

There is something about Bob Dylan that appeals to a part of my psyche that no other artist has ever been able to touch. I can tell you right now with certainty that I can remember the first time I actually recognized that I was listening to a “Great Song” (as distinguished from a song that I personally enjoyed), that song was “Like a Rolling Stone.” This performance is a document of one of the very last shows of the era that most would first imagine when told to visualize Bob Dylan. If told to “do a Bob Dylan impression,” most people’s instinct is to adopt a nasally voice, use that distinctive enunciation style, accentuating weird syllables and elongating the shit out of vowels. A Bob Dylan Halloween costume probably entails sunglasses, mod suits, and frizzy hair. That period, while iconic, is also fleeting, lasting under a year. 10 days after this show, Dylan would conclude his last tour for 8 years (by playing at the ACTUAL Royal Albert Hall, no less. That concert is also available on streaming under the title “The Real Royal Albert Hall 1966 Concert). If during this concert he sounds like he’s on the edge of a complete collapse, it’s because he is, and it wasn’t getting better. I hate to quote a Reddit comment but someone there said that the difference between this show and the Real Royal Albert Hall Concert is that during the latter, “Dylan is 10 days more unhinged, 10 days closer to a break down, 10 days madder at the audience.” The next month, he released Blonde On Blonde and a month after that he was (allegedly) in a motorcycle crash that (allegedly) saved his life by making him step back from public life for a while. The show itself is a great showcase of Dylan’s contentious relationship with his audience, which is very much still on display today. The fans wanted a classic acoustic set. Dylan knew this. He gave them a 7 song acoustic set, but with the caveat that 3 of those songs hadn’t yet been released. And of the remaining 4 songs, none were from his folk era. No “Blowin In the Wind” or “The Times They Are A-Changin” or “Don’t Think Twice” or “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” to be found. The first half of this album is pretty spellbinding to me. Dylan’s vocal is at the forefront, accompanied only by his guitar and occasional bits of harmonica. Every word is clear and, while you probably don’t understand the meaning, it’s hard not to believe that the man himself does. The meaning, the feeling, is contained in the voice, not just the written words. The versions of “Visions of Johanna” and “Desolation Row” on this album are probably my favorite recordings of those songs. During that first half, Dylan is also at his most Dylan, sounding at times like the exact type of impression that I just described and playing harmonica parts that can best be described as “picking a note and holding it until ready to move on.” So, in short, the most Dylan form of Dylan is angry at the audience and on the verge of a total mental collapse. The second half is where this thing really comes alive, as Dylan is joined by his live band (who would later become The Band, though Levon Helm had bowed out of the tour by now) on a mission to play as (fuckin’) loudly and aggressively as possible. There’s something so primal about listening to Dylan shouting at the top of his lungs backed by a wall of sound so distorted that it’s damn near impossible to pick out the individual instruments. This is such a contrast to the perfection of James Brown’s band from yesterday. I don’t know if it’s the microphone placement or what, but I don’t know if even Keith Moon ever hit drums this hard. This is probably not a pleasure listen if you’re an audiophile or otherwise not a big Dylan fan, but for me it hits like nothing else.

The word “butthole” is appropriate for the group that produced this poop.