1001 Albums Summary

shut up and play the hooks! Enjoyable, though not nearly as striking as Lennon's first major solo project. Got hit hard when it first released though fifty years of reappraisal have been kind, if not overly so, to it. McCartney's statement here is less "I'm my own musician" and more "yeah, those Beatles hooks you remember - those were ME" except that's only partially true. Softball effort sounds too mean but is spiritually true. When it came out, the word "mild" came to mind and sure enough both John & George's solo works were a great deal more ambitious (in fairness to lonely Ringo, I think few expected him to fire out a masterful solo work on the first volley) but there is an amiable simplicity which is endearing and suggests pathways towards McCartney's eventual return to energetic stadium pop. Thrown up against other contemporary singer-songwriters, McCartney is fluffy but is also supremely, undeniably gifted. Highlight track is Every Night. Other tracks like Junk, That Would Be Something and Maybe I'm Amazed remain steady hits. Paul's composition credentials are bonafide, no major missteps until the very end - Kreen-Akrore which must have been assembled as a challenge for himself. I've got a soft spot for it since it's indulgent in a way someone with better personal taste probably wouldn't have added to the final mix.

Starts off an all-timer and has ensconced itself into the hip-hop canon. I mean, perennial top 10er stuff. I reject a fifth star here mostly because for as long as I've been listening to this, I never feel as entranced by this album track-to-track as I am by a specific smattering of tracks. The hits - NY State of Mind, Life's A Bitch, The World Is Yours - are an insane run (opener The Genesis is excellent too.) One of the best three track runs ever, no debate. And that run actually does continue down to Track 7, One Love. But the highs of the album leave me wanting something more from the final three tracks. They're class but I'm always listening to them colder, worn out by the insane sprint. Nevertheless, a grower of the album. Dense stuff, icy, subtle. Crazy to think Nas was 21 when this dropped. Just thinking about that has me leaning towards a fiver on this fella but I'm early in this project, I'll be choosy.

This is more like it. Macca's back and this time he's been able to whip his band into sounding like a sequel act to The Beatles. Lacks the introspection of John's songwriting but makes up for it because it's wall-to-wall sheer craftsmanship. Pitch perfect pop music. The build-up throughout the album has this addicting ebb and flow, each songs pours into the next. As an album, a precisely made piece of however many songs, it's lethal. Each song building into the medley on Piccaso's Last Words, it's hot hot hot. On track highlights, it's Let Me Roll It or nothing. I say this was the caveat that I love Nighteen Hundred and Eighty Five and the title track but Let Me Roll It? Low down bluesy craic. Unless I'm feeling frisky and want to go to bat for Temporary Secretary, it might be my favorite non-Beatles Paul track period. Although, maybe if Monkberry Moon Delight sidles up somewhere in this 1001, we can challenge that.

Used to be my overall favorite Bowie album but over time it's slipped to being my least preferred of Bowie's late 70s output. The thing holding this back, if anything actually holds it back, is that V-2 Schneider is a wildly good instrumental track that perfectly synthesized the mood of the album but after its conclusion, the listener sits with some nice, appreciable soundscapes. This isn't so bad but on the whole, the Brian Eno compositions were more consistent and/or abrasive on Low.

hahaha this cover is awesome. Count Basie on his Jello Biafra shit or actually, Biafra on his Count Basie shit. Difficult for me to ascertain why some big band stuff would be better than others if it's at all listenable. I'm happy to have used this format to listen to it because otherwise, this would likely have never come across my radar. More than many other genres, this era of 50s big band/cocktail club music feels very transportative. It makes me want to install a recessed conversation pit into my shag carpet living room. I want to get a bar cart and keep it stocked with gin and vermouth. I want to throw out my entire wardrobe and replace it with pleated pants and starchy button-up shirts. I want to marry a woman I met in high school and live a domestic life that is most charitably described as "habitable" and I want a television with knobs with four channels that go off at midnight.

I was at the combination bookstore/record shop the other day when an Elliot Smith song came on over the stereo. The lady working the desk commented that she never really got into Elliot Smith because "I always knew someone who really liked him and it felt like they owned the experience of listening to him." I've felt similarly. Elliot Smith is one of those musicians who people are so attached to that getting into them feels like a statement. Early in college, I listened to each of his albums once or twice. Either/Or was the big one for me. That said, it's difficult for me to latch onto his music like others have. That's not out of distaste, rather a general sense that he is a musician who finds you at a time when you need/are searching for them. That time has either passed me by or has yet to arrive. Figure 8 is actually a weird pick for this assignment, I'd say it's probably his most obvious flirtation with rock stylings as opposed to his usual stripped down singer-songwriter thing so it's a poor indicator of Smith. These 1001 books came out around 2005 and this one seems like it's a cusper addition - like to get a better sense of Smith, you'd want to listen to Roman Candle lol. Anyway, it's still pretty good. Smith is a very good guitar player and the compositions on here are catchy. The opener track Son of Sam is a catchy rocker, good statement of intent stuff before being followed up with the more familiar and still great Somebody That I Used to Know. Stupidity Tries is the highlight of the album though, great stuff. Mixing on In the Lost and Found is horrid, not sure if this is just the streaming file on hand with Apple but it's real messy

Got some toe tappers on here but really slides off me. Like a lot of southern rock/blues rock worship, this is music for the grill which means that half a case deep, I'll love it and be convinced that it's The Truth. But listening to it intently and sober as an album, it's got diminishing returns track to track.

Picture this, you're a weird guy in Cleveland, Ohio. The year is 1977. The record shops are filled with AOR. Punk music trickles in here and there. Radio stations are still too conservative to even play the Stones before 7 PM. You fancy yourself an intellectual. Your father is an academic, you read the music magazines - especially the underground zines circulated by your fellow weirdos, even sourcing some from the Coasts. You've listened to avant-garde music coming out of France & Germany, it sounds like nothing you've ever heard. You're David Thomas & your name has not yet been seized in the public mind by the old fella who started Wendy's. You're your own thing - and you devise Pere Ubu. You and your collaborators draft up several series of songs. Your first release is The Modern Dance. It's got shouting, blathering, glass breaking, fuzzy guitar tones, simple chord structures, and choruses that reoccur through each of the album's ten songs. No one can really sing, not that it matters. What you've made is so strange, so of its time. Is it like The Stooges? A little. It's like The Stooges if those guys hated partying. Thomas feels like he fell out of a rain gutter. Every song on here have a pulsing intensity which has the twin, contradictory effects of pushing the listener away - it's just too awful - while also courting the listener back into the sound. Welcome to the Dance. Real deal Julia Kristeva hours.

Starts very strong but absolutely peters out by the end of the album. Admittedly a poor headphone album, the breakbeats and synth here is supposed to be listened to on a big stereo system with a heavy subwoofer. The album's real struggle is that in sequence, it's too long and is reliant on the same couple of (excellent) drum loops in all its major dance singles. New Jack Swing as a genre has that problem, generally which is part of the reason it's never experienced a revival, instead being incorporated as a sonic aesthetic into Remember the 80s/90s retro acts. But what's here is undoubtedly the best on offer from the genre. The major songs on here; Rhythm Nation, The Knowledge, Love Will Never Do, and Miss You Much and even some of the Interludes (like Let's Dance) are surefire hits on any DJ set. The emphasis on the industrial tinged New Jack tracks has a negative effect on the more pop/R&B tracks which fade (like Lonely) into the background. The balance is poor and suggests to me that the curators of the album - whether that was Jackson herself or company executives - had split loyalties between making an artistic work or making something that would have multi-market appeal. The title single "Rhythm Nation" is a barnburner - dance floor ready. The Rhythm Nation 1990 tour was probably one of the danciest sets of all time. The other songs all follow suit and the interludes are interspersed throughout so that the political consciousness of the singles are totally inescapable. It is fascinating that Jackson opts to include lines about child starvation, institutional racism, and escalating violence in the world in her complete jams. Jackson spoke often before and after the album's release about how she genuinely hoped that Rhythm Nation 1814 would change the world for the better, that it would awaken some sort of global humanist conscience. The major global socio-cultural topic on everyone's mind during the recording was the movement against Apartheid as well as the seeming unthawing of the Soviets - the optimism of the moment is reflected in Jackson's dream for the album. Needless to say, that probably was not going to happen but for a pop album, Rhythm Nation is a great document. It's an album swelling with hope and weighed down with heavy, focused bursts of noise - a poppier industrialism, dancing through the end of the world.

Master's thesis on rock style developed during the 1960s. Endlessly awesome guitar riffs on this. Down by the River could loop for hours and you would not realize it. And then he does it again with Cowgirl in the Sand. Not even the best Neil Young album!

Really strange album. Kool Keith is a total freak. This album (not under the Kool Keith name) exploded him into "guy who knows music" popularity and gave him the latitude to get a real deal recording deal with Black Elvis/Lost in Space but anything with Kool Keith is a freak object. He is a totally unconstrained artist shirking at anything resembling commercial or culturally acceptable. The beats on this are unshakably cool. The lyrics are goofy, nasty, juvenile. It's a direct rebuke of the street toughness commonplace in 90s hip-hop. "Earth People New York and California, Earth People I was Born on Jupiter." It's spacey - sonically and spiritually. Favorite songs: Earth People, Halfsharkalligatorhalfman, Blue Flowers least: alright i think A Visit to Gynecologist is a bad sketch funniest line "I will explain but you'd become more puzzled at the possibilities Earth ending trilogies, wacky stuff Like gas passing dinosaurs Morlocks drawing circles blindfolded Gave a lady some wrinkle cream out of rat poop" worth reading the notes on these verses, a lot of incredibly obscure 1990s joke pulls on it. A lot of grocery store checkout line jokes, as good of a document on the decade as a Art Bell Coast-to-Coast AM broadcast.

Favorite Tracks: Soldier Blue, If You Loved Me at All Cope cuts an interesting figure in the British music scene. One of the many skinny long-haired post-punk 80s figures who leaned more into the esoteric the further he grew away from the scene. His books are maybe more interesting than his music; his Krautrocksampler and The Modern Antiquarian books being massively influential in 2000s blog culture. I'm cold on the music though. It's quite long and split up across a few different sounds, none of which it sticks with for long enough for me to get the spirit. The best songs are Mancunian imitations; The Fall and Happy Mondays but not as singular. Soldier Blue, with its Lenny Bruce samples, and dark trippy sound is the album's highlight pulling on Cope's own exploding political consciousness and his love for history.

CCR were incredible lol. Burned crazy bright for three years, released six albums that mixed original material, standards, and jam sessions into a big ol' gumbo, each one of them an immediate classic. Someone big upping Cosmo's Factory might say that it is CCR at the peak of the powers but the truth is that the peak of CCR's power was 1968-1970. The talent here is indisputable. Some of their catchiest single tracks, some of the funkiest jams (opener Ramble Tamble's a sweater and that's without getting into Heard It Through the Grapevine), and no fewer than four original songs that rocketed into the American consciousness. Sometimes a band is just on fire - Creedence Clearwater Revival was one of them. It's almost irresponsible of them to be this consistent, how were any of them supposed to follow this up? Circling back to Heard It Through the Grapevine, a shortlist contender for greatest song of all time. Nearly every version of it is impeccable; Gladys & the Pips, Marvin Gaye, The Slits, and CCR all recorded versions that rank among their best songs. If you started a band, your version would probably be one of your best songs too. The bones on Heard It Through the Grapevine are so defined, you could use it to teach anatomy. Creedence's version is (likely) the longest recording of it by a major artist and the way the band stretches out the song's elliptical rhythms is hypnotic. I said on my Everybody Knows This is Nowhere review that you could listen to Down by the River for five hours and not realize it - the same is true of this cover. Around the six minute mark, it sinks into a groove so deep & mellow that it explodes the possibilities of the original composition. I don't think you get The Slits version (my personal favorite) without this one first. Best Tracks: Heard It Through the Grapevine (duh), Ramble Tamble, Lookin' Out my Back Door, Run Through the Jungle

Best Tracks: Tarkus (ii. Stones of Years, vii. Aquatarkus), Jeremy Bender insanely funny to emphatically rhyme "lose" with "six million Jews" in a line about God allowing the Holocaust and then roll into a fucking insane keyboard solo. that one's off a b-side track (the only way - a hymn) but that and the armourdillo are what I'm walking away from remembering. Title track is an occasionally interesting seven-part song but the verb "plunking" came up too many times while I was thinking about it - i.e. "he's really plunking on the keys here." Not a good sign. Jeremy Bender is a really good after-dinner mint though.

Really gorgeous and intricate laurel canyon stuff. Takes the baseline stuff that the Byrds were working on throughout the 60s and tinkers with it. Really good addition to the scene, takes the roaming goalpost of "cosmic country" that Parsons was always rushing for and makes it happen. Strength of Strings into From a Silver Phial is when it moves from reliable Canyon Rock to something distinctive. Kind of unbelievable I had not listened to this whole thing before. Need to give Some Misunderstanding a listen on a better set of 'phones, begins to blur together on my tinny work speakers. Favorite tracks: Life's Greatest Fool, No Other, Strength of Strings.

I don't believe in guilty pleasures even with stuff like jazz fusion which generally runs contra to most things that I like in music so I must declare that Heavy Weather is on its face, good without qualifiers. Weather Report, like other jazz fusion heavies, has that sort of smooth, pleasing sound that is just about Hold Muzak ready but Heavy Weather deviates from the Kenny G-ness with some lively tracks that are, as the kids say, a bop. Birdland is the no-duh classic on here - just a out of the park home run first track. Pop that shit on in the morning and your day's recalibrated. Other tracks like Teen Town presage trip-hop and if I had to wager a guess - no research conducted here, all off the dome - was sampled in some 90s hip-hop. Just cool shit. The slower tracks don't do it so much for me but whenever the band picks up the speed, I cannot deny the appeal. Even then, the slower tracks have a drifting coziness to them that wins me over. Incredible stuff for a coffee shop (positive.) There's no denying that the longer the album runs, the more "same" it feels but Birdland & Teen Town alone gild that A-side. A major influence on one of my favorite aesthetic categories, 90s feel-good fusion. This album always makes me think of shows like Early Edition, a mostly forgotten 90s television show about a journalist who can see a day into the future. Its opening rhymes with Weather Report and it's not alone in that category. Something about Heavy Weather registers as nostalgic though I don't believe anyone I knew was playing it when I was a kid. My parents weren't jazz fusion types! https://youtu.be/pfWVwx3Y32U?si=FQRmk8kJoz0jjraq Favorite Tracks: Birdland, Teen Town

The best live albums are the ones that feel the most immersive, the ones that put into the concert (or concerts as is the case here...and often). This puts hard rock at a decisive advantage because it sounds so fucking good when you play it loud. These albums are even better when the music itself is good and if I can say anything about Thin Lizzy, the songs kick ass. Whole first half up to the end of The Boys are Back in Town is just classic stuff. Awesome stuff. Favorite Tracks: Southbound, Rosalie/Cowgirl's Song, Massacre, The Boys Are Back in Town, The Rocker

"I'd like to tell you a little story now if I may" *from the crowd, one guy* "Okay!" Reliably good blues standards or soon-to-be-standards. Plenty of good banter here, lively crowd, and a good sound. Live albums were still in their infancy here so there's undoubtedly a bit of overdubbing going on to help capture the sound. As with a lot of blues stuff from the era, the actual musicianship on display cemented what modern audiences would think of as the correct or best way to play the blues. That is sort of antithetical to music, live music especially, but I won't begrudge B.B. King and the band for being incredibly good and setting a new bar for people to clear, mimic or ignore. Favorite Tracks: It's My Own Fault, Woke Up This Mornin'

All Tom Waits stuff is pretty knee deep in cariacature. I like Nighthawks At the Diner, especially Better Off Without A Wife and Big Joe & Phantom 309, but the general take on Waits is that his best stuff is yet to come. This early jazz stuff is fun but kitsch even for him. I prefer his stumbling drunk evil clown stuff from the 80s. The actual jazz band here rocks and the appearance of a live set is well tweaked here. It's a great concept and Waits executes it really well but it's sleepy by design. By the end, you're drifting off which makes sense - you're supposed to be eight beers deep. Favorite Tracks: Better Off Without A Wife, Big Joe & Phantom 309, Nighthawk Postcards

Listened to the expanded edition since I couldn't get enough of vaughan's voice. The entire show plays at a low simmer but it's not that it's dull or flat - the performance is incredibly warm and inviting. I'd say "perfectly pleasant" though that is sort of a backhanded compliment (i.e. "your boyfriend was perfectly pleasant") so in search of better praise, I've landed on graceful. Given the hesitation expressed at the beginning of the album as to how a live recording will turn out, At Mister Kelly's is a relaxing and immersive listening experience. Could see myself throwing this on regularly because it's so confidently settled in and Vaughan & company have such an easy mastery of these songs that when she starts goofing around on her version of How High the Moon, the improvs are funny and refreshing. They affirm how great the rest of the album is, a full-course meal with all the desired flavors and textures. Favorite Tracks: How High the Moon, Thou Swell, Willow Weep for Me, Embraceable You

When it comes to the 80s British post-punk stuff, The Smiths are the accepted favorite. Go to a Mexican wedding and ask for their thoughts on morrissey. As far as the most important groups of the era go, the Smiths are solidly my least favorite. New Order, The Cure and The Fall all clear. Morrissey and Marr make for a great duo, Marr is able to support Morrissey's singular lyrics and even cover up some of his indulgences with riffs that nest in your brain. Of course, Morrissey is a grating presence due to the events outside The Smiths (racist gay contrarian; common, exhausting type) though this doesn't really seep into the lyrics here so I'm able to partition Morrissey (Smiths) from Morrissey (autobio). That said, The Queen is Dead is really sharp, it's just not my thing especially relative to the rest of the era & genre. It's obvious to me why this one exploded the way it did - it's a great mix of a refined/mastered jangle pop sound by way of Johnny Marr while moving away from the more aggressive, dancier, and angular sounds of its contemporaries. While I like Marr's sounds a lot, I've always held that this causes The Smiths to have the least ambitious sound of the major bands. This might be part of the reason that every Smiths album loses my attention for six/eight minute stretches. That's not to say dictator Morrissey's sound changed all that much after splitting. On Morrissey, he's a really good songwriter. Funny, cutting, good visual imagery, well-read and clever. Of course, the Fall's diss track on him C.R.E.E.P. Is one of their funniest and cuts him down to size portraying him as a trend-chaser who thrifts personality from others; "His oppression abounds, his type is doing the rounds He is a scum-egg; a horrid trendy wretch" There's probably some truth to that but hell, he can cover for it well enough here.

It's pretty sick that Brazil was getting into psych at the same time as Britain and America. This wasn't super unusual - there's a lot of psych rock that came out of Cambodia, Singapore and Zimbabwe as well. The appeal of the fuzz couldn't be denied. Melding its psych influences with the pre-existing tropicalia and bossa nova sounds of Brazilian music has helped Os Mutantes self-titled stick out over the decades. Of the 60s bands it's modeled on, I think Os Mutantes reminds the most of the Monkees. They both feel specifically curated for television but the quality of the music exceeds that sort of "made for television" band like idk the Coswells/Partridge Family. The gothic album art feels misleading, looking at it, you'd think they were beating Black Sabbath to the punch, but on listening to the album, I get it. One of my favorite undercurrents of the 1960s counter-culture aesthetic was how people would source Universal and Hammer horror films as shorthand for freaking people out. This is what Os Mutantes is doing. The music itself is pretty benign and pleasant but it is also a degree stranger than what was playing on Brazilian radio and in record shops at the time. The best tracks are those that lean into the psych-pop and bossa nova stuff the most. Like a lot of experimental psych rock of the time, I'm not sure how much of it has aged particularly well. A lot of it is just noodling around on a Hammond organ or inserting nature sounds. But Gawrsh, A Minha Menina is easily top 50 tracks of the decade. And Bat Macumba. Just toss that one around in your mouth a few times. Bat Macumba. Bat Macumba. Bat Macumba. Favorite Tracks: A Minha Menina, Bat Macumba, Baby

i mean, it's OK Computer. You asked anyone on the internet what the best album of all time was from 1998-2014 and you'd get four answers; dark side of the moon, abbey road, in the court of the crimson king, and if they were under 35 - OK Computer. I've listened to this album countless times, it was a major high school album for me. I hadn't listened to it since 2023, aside from the random plays of Let Down and Electioneering that show up in my last.fm profile. Getting to re-listen to it for the purposes of this game (this is no fucking game to me) was a treat. Throw on the first track Airbag, fit like an old sweater. Ran through the album twice. Still thinking "oh, this is one of the best albums of the decade." But then I thought about what my other favorite albums of the decade were and I realized that OK Computer actually isn't one of my favorite albums of the decade even though it's essentially canonized as one of the best. There is a slight difference between "favorite" and "best", to which I explain by saying the Beastie Boys' Hello Nasty is one of my favorites of the decade...but it's certainly not better, in like a historical sense than OK Computer. OK Computer is genuinely seismic in tone, sound, lyrical content, and overall craftsmanship. Its adoration is maybe, perhaps slightly, a touch overblown but I think about listening to a song like Paranoid Android in 1997 - the digital age is ascending. TIME Magazine is writing on how the internet will dramatically change our lives for the better, Tony Blair's awful visage is doing its best to contort into a smile while his American counterpart makes the neoliberal fire sale look easy, this company called AOL keeps sending you CDs in the mail because you hit a checkmark on some obscure survey you filled out nine months prior. There's a lot of optimism around this new technology which presently seems expensive and obscure but capital F-uturistic. And here comes this mopey British guy whose album is framed around technology and has the gob to suggest that technology not only won't fix the world, it'll actually exacerbate its problems. It's little wonder its pessimism resonated with the miserable music journalists and disenchanted Gen X'ers of the time and it's unsurprising that it holds cache to today. The iciness of a song like Electioneering, one of the more explicitly political and (imo) most underrated songs on the album, is almost entirely borne out of turn-of-the-century angst over the failure of British Labour project. That said, I do find Thom Yorke increasingly unbearable. Part of this is his politics and how he presents himself. He's such a fucking pariah. And this weepiness is all over OK Computer. It has to be, right? One song I've unfortunately never been able to enjoy is Karma Police. This is mostly because it's used as repeated punchline in an old DERRICKCOMEDY sketch that I watched well before I listened to OK Computer. In the sketch, the aggrieved Kevin uses the song to melodramatically drive home how "hurt" he is over his girlfriend cheating on him. The sketch's decision to use the song is clever; Karma Police, like their previous major hit Creep, is vindictive and it prostrates itself far too quickly - taking a vulnerable position in order to be crueler when it's inevitably forgiven. I really don't like that aspect of Thom Yorke and it shakes out throughout a good chunk of OK Computer. You hear it on Subterranean Homesick Alien and No Surprises too. The songs themselves are really strong, they are incredible tonal achievements but the more time The Culture has me spend with Yorke defending playing in Tel Aviv at length, the less grace I'm willing to grant him for his annoying martyrdom. Climb off your cross, those aren't even nails, they're thumbtacks! Favorite Tracks: Let Down, Electioneering, Paranoid Android, No Surprises associated DERRICKCOMEDY sketch: https://youtu.be/Rcx4_CszaDI?si=J2xgOY_EKGzrieFy

https://youtu.be/sSOK59KEHC0?si=IfuPBPYYZBE9wlUO This is what 1970s manchester was actually like. Dark and foreboding, forward thinking in a way that completely reset the trajectory of British punk music (they called it "post-punk" after this.) Curtis' voice is so unique, no one has ever been able to quite match the quivering deepness he puts on. Listening to She's Lost Control in high school was like getting kicked in the head. The whole album has this oppressive atmosphere, meant for a dingy nightclub - max capacity 30, overstuffed to 250 but everyone there's rail thin and swaying, the biggest thing on them are their Doc Martens. Pulsating rhythms coming atcha from all directions, music to drown in/to. Favorite Tracks: (all of em); Disorder, She's Lost Control, Insight, Interzone,

Yuppie new wave stuff. Reminds a lot of Oingo Boingo but without that band's frazzled energy. Still energetic but does feel like it's trying to sell me real estate.

Philadelphia representation but at what cost? Terribly Port Richmond coded. Listening to this felt like being pelted with hackeysacks. The bluesy backing has a nice tone to it but the rap-rock beatbox scat stuff was never ending. Beck did a little bit of that on Loser & Odelay but that's chill because he goes into it - this is trapped in that one mode. Fascinating that this is even listed in the 1001, which critics argued for its inclusion?

It's impressive on a single-to-single basis but the form of the album had not really been firmed out just yet for rock-n-roll. The album format worked well for jazz & folk in the 1950s but the crash-boom-bang sound of early rock music was ill-suited for the LP. I hold firm on this, rock music didn't slot in well to the LP format until about jeez, Rubber Soul? Live albums notwithstanding, the way that labels structured albums didn't account for the unique contours of rock music, thinking of it like pop music. Much of the appeal of this early genre stuff is how outrageous and in your face it is and when stretched out across ten to twelve songs, many of which are good but many of which also match each other in energy and content, they all begin to blend together, ears only perking up at now legendary tracks like Tutti Frutti or Long Tall Sally. To be clear, near every track on here has its merits and Little Richard's stage dynamism is second only to The Killer Jerry Lee (surpassing it in some ways, the two ran about neck and neck) but the difference between how Little Richard sounded as a single - a disruption in the sea of sound - versus how he sounds when he's the only game in town for thirty minutes is striking. And that's without even getting into the real anarchy - Little Richard Live. But Here's Little Richard does do an admirable job of communicating the appeal of Little Richard. The songs are frantic and horny as hell. His voice is awesome, scratchy and able to hit all sort of strange abject marks - it's only partially trained and when it cracks because he can't quite hit the note, it sells the emotion that much more. Here's Little Richard does its work admirably - as a record. It does a good job of selling me Little Richard, I want to see him play live. But do I think it hangs together as one piece of cloth? It's about on par with the Elvis releases around the time - that is, good primer but real heads know to dig in. It's undoubtedly one of the better rock 'n' roll albums of the time, especially given that most of its competition was either dropping compilation albums or were nipping at Presley's heels. Little Richard was clearly his own thing and holds his own against Presley. If anything is his undoing, it's the way the industry placed limiters on the potential of rock music. Favorite Tracks: Tutti Frutti, Baby, Long Tall Sally, Jenny, Jenny, Oh Why?

Had a whole thing written up and then I closed the tab. I'll bang out what I remember - incredible showcase of Cale's interests, influences, and talent. So impressive that it'd actually let him coast throughout the 1980s while he indulged himself. The variety on the album is wonderful - moving from VanDyke Parks/Brian Wilson style pop orchestration to Gary Glitter style rockers like MacBeth. The stark difference between songs helps to accentuate the strengths of the baroque pop tracks. The songwriting is so literate as well, the title track is really incredible - totally flush with historical allusion and suggestive of a general feeling of jubilation and anxiety over the end of the first World War. It's an incredible achievement. Graham Greene is like a Kinks song, so British. Favorite Songs: Child's Christmas in Wales, Paris 1919, Andalucia, Graham Greene

I've always wanted to like lost Bush daughter, Kate Bush more than I do. Incredibly interesting sounds - sonic textures that were wholly unique to her. Laurie Anderson was doing something similar around this time but in a different direction. Bjork bit off a lot of Kate Bush stuff. Hounds of Love is the most beloved of her albums & I can understand why - it sounds unlike anything else in the world. A hodgepodge of styles but I find myself drifting in and out of it with each listen. There are some songs that I find so capturing and immediately affecting but they're tempered by stuff I could really take or leave. Bush's music is really indulgent and that works to her credit occasionally. She's certainly better than say, Bill Nelson (not the florida senator), and I say that as a Bill Nelson booster. Sometimes these opinions shake out as facts. It hits a sweet spot with Waking the Witch through Jig of Life where it briefly teases something perfect. I think part of my dissatisfaction might owe to the way the album's structure is fragmented on streaming or on CD. Initially split into two parts; side A - Hounds of Love and side B - The Ninth Wave, that split is still distinguishable but would feel a heckuva lot more important if I had to flip a record. I digress though, good album. May it grow in my estimation but for now...three. Favorite Songs: Cloudburst, Waking the Witch, Watching You Without Me, Jig of Life

Fun solo flexing from Jack White after jettisonning White Stripes. Love the genre shake-ups on this, keeps it interesting throughout and was a good tact to take given that White had doing blues-rock at a higher level than anyone else for almost fifteen years at this point. Some excellent single tracks on here, just more proof that when he's on a hot streak creatively that he's one of the most reliable dudes working. There are some lulls in his discography, Blunderbuss ain't one of them. Lots of awesome organ work on this one and a lot of the verse-chord structures lean on his weird yips and yelps in a way I find endearing. His voice is strange, his cadence makes it so that words tumble out of his mouth. I like listening to its amateurish quality contort itself to match the locked-in blues rhythms of his songs. It lets his often goofy lyrics get by me without complaint. Favorite Tracks: Missing Pieces, Blunderbuss, Hip (eponymous) Poor Boy, Take Me With You When You Go

"Eminem" was an experiment conducted by the US Army to help recruiters identify & select pliable high schoolers for military service. Thank You For Your Participation in The Marshall Mathers Project. DMX does the shock-jock horrorcore thing with a bit more verve but The MMLP has its place on the podium. The further Eminem in real life gets away from the persona, the stronger the album is. It's always been intended as a meathead meta-commentary on violence in culture & music, it's explicitly responding to critiques on violent music WRT Columbine while also intentionally encroaching on the hostility and violent imagery found on DMX's stuff or in Southern Hip-hop. It's not doing an egghead critique on it, and some of that misogyny/homophobia is real but the characters of the album are so heightened and offensive that it all comes across as the Grand Guignol interpretation of the popular alternative aesthetics - sort of like Gravediggaz a few years prior. It's not much different than like, Crass. It's goading and wants you to clutch your pearls, real Howard Stern stuff, but it's funny. The characters are roundly pathetic and Eminem creates enough distance between himself and his characters that I think it registers. The beats are also hot, the features are good. It's a strong effort for something that is unambigiously pretty juvenile. I get being annoyed or frustrated at the music if you were a high schooler in 1999-2009 and had to listen to your classmates bump this constantly & also totally miss the album's generally ironic character but it has kept its teeth sharp with time which goes to prove that it is a big flex with real talent underneath. Favorite Tracks: Stan, The Real Slim Shady, Remember Me?, Under the Influence

Rock With You - the most glittery disco track ever? Immaculate stuff, a window to the future of 1980s pop music while also being firmly rooted in the strengths of 70s disco and funk. Jackson's voice sounds unreal here. The singles off this aren't chart toppers, they're chart devastators. World wasn't ready for Thriller. Favorite Tracks: Don't Stop Till You Get Enough, Rock With You, Girlfriend, Burn This Disco Out

Indulgent late 60s symphonic prog pop that I was under the impression I was going to dislike but found myself enjoying. "Bee Gees" solid color album has all the hallmarks of an album you find in the 99c bin that smells like grandma and there's little on the album to dispell that impression BUT it's good. The title track has beautiful orchestration and the harmony work is affecting. Great stereo tracking. Painfully English at points but it was always able to pivot to something I thought was interesting (or in the case of Marley Purt Drive, stealing something I like i.e. The Weight.) Some of the songs are just damn solid Beatles riffs like Melody Fair while others borrow from Kinks borrowing from american country rock (Whisper Whisper). It's a grab-bag of styles from a band that was notoriously good at reinventing themselves, interesting stuff. Favorite Tracks: Odessa, You'll Never See My Face Again, Melody Fair, Whisper Whisper

This one's really stripped down, not as much as a rambler as his 70s stuff usually is. It's a unique approach for Willie and it does sound like it's recorded privately for a small audience which has its appeal. But even though Willie was not in the habit of doing this, it wasn't particularly uncommon for country, folk or adult contemporary artists to try it out & the songs on this are a lot hokier than Townes Van Zandt, for example. The Apple Music write-up name drops McCabe and Mrs. Miller in a feeble attempt to appeal to me specifically but that movie notably uses Leonard Cohen & with all due respect to Willie, him and Leonard are quite different. What Red Head Stranger reminds me more of is the Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid soundtrack, which - despite having Knockin' On Heaven's Door - is not one of my preferred Dylan albums. Favorite Tracks: I Couldn't Believe It Was True, Red Headed Preacher, Can I Sleep In Your Arms, Bandera

ZZ Top is one of my dad's favorite bands and I'll never forget what he told me about them. He said ""ZZ Top only has three songs that they do over and over again. Thankfully, those are three pretty good songs" One of those songs is La Grange.

Everyone who worked on this is really talented. You probably should be if you're working with Aretha Franklin. Sort of a "no duh" heater. Favorite Tracks: People Get Ready, (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman, Good to Me As I Am To You

Really fresh fun sounding punk music that parallels Blondie but with distinctly British touches. Poly Styrene's voice is one of my favorites, wish she had recorded more music. There's a direct line from this to Sleater-Kinney right down to the cracking, fractured vocals and heavy sax use. There is a sweet spot for saxophone use in English punk and Germfree Adolescents hits it right before it becomes too ska-like for my liking. I could play Warrior in Woolworths on an endless loop and never get sick of it. So many fun songs on this one. Favorite Tracks: Warrior in Woolworths, Identity, I Am a Poseur, Germfree Adolescents

Caught Jim lip-syncing to the second song... Side A is great but I'm here for Sex Machine. What a jam, goddamn. Favorite Songs: I Want To Take You Higher, Everyday People, Sex Machine

Have listened to this one a lot. Celebrity Skin is unfortunately such a strong opening track that the rest of the album suffers but there are still real heaters thrown about here. Still, you're not beating the "hooker/waitress/model/actress/oh have you ever felt so used up as this?" bit. The whole thing has a generally agreeable 90s riot girl sound to it that is amenable to my ears. This is a regular throw it on and eventually it'll be over. Highlights: Celebrity Skin, Reasons to be Beautiful, Hit so Hard, Nothern Star

Of the major BritPop acts, Oasis is pretty solidly my least preferred but sometimes the Gallaghers latch onto undeniable hooks. The pop craftsmanship here is real. Even if you've grown bored with Wonderwall, there's still like six other serious hits on this including Champagne Supernova which I've yet to grow bored of. My main grievance with Oasis has held firm over the years which is great hooks but if the Gallaghers write a song under four minutes, thirty seconds, they break out in hives. Their peers were very good at flash in the pan songs interspersed with longer tracks. Oasis songs are all crazy long and their hooks can't all survive the length (like Roll With It which has a great chorus but exhausts me the further it strays) Favorite Tracks: Hello, Morning Glory, Champagne Supernova

Patti Smith alternates high & low with some high highs and low lows. Part of it is that you really need to indulge yourself in the scene, right, like her whole mileiu. And that stuff can be really annoying when it runs too long or feels too indulgent. That's definitely the case on Birdland. But Land? That's the best song here! The shorter stuff is roundly good, taking its cues from the VU with some dashes from the 70s singer-songwriter school. Favorite Tracks: Gloria, Redondo Beach, Kimberly, Land

"Well, the girls would turn the color of avocado when he drove the street in his El Dorado" The Modern Lovers is great for a lot of reasons. Recorded in 1971 and 1972 by a 19/20 year old Jonathan Richman, released in 1976 by a 25 year old Jonathan Richman - the album is shifty, a document of Richman's transition from adolescencent fanboy to real musician. His next albums would keep the sonic fundamentals but almost entirely change their subject matter. It's undeniable that The Modern Lovers is pretty fucking nasty towards and about women. Richman is slighted and wounded and venomous on like half of the songs - like Hospital - but given that he was a teenager when he wrote the songs & that he moved away from being so nasty to writing songs about how much fun it was to go on roller coasters, I think we can cut him some slack. The sound of The Modern Lovers is also really shocking given when it was recorded versus when it was released. There just...was not much else like The Modern Lovers in 1972. Pure Velvets-influenced rock & roll. Grimy fundamentals, two or three chords, nothing else. It's the exact inverse of what was big at the time - prog and glam rock. Now, this wasn't released until 1976 when this sort of sound was starting to gain some traction but someone had to come to the party early! I'd wager that the continuing appeal of this album relative to some of its 1976 punkish contemporaries, really what makes it stick out from the Ramones or the Dictators is that Richman made the decision to slow down how the band was playing the songs. Everything runs at a slack tempo which better fits Richman's voice. There are still notions of that faster rock-n-roll style on the album, like She Cracked, but Richman's most comfortable moving at the speed of Pablo Picasso. These slower tracks let his acerbic, funny lyrics lope toward the listener at a pace that allows the joke to breathe and opens space for Richman to improvise. Worth looking into the making of the album too. Very impressive, considering that Richman went from following Lou Reed around show-to-show like a puppy to working with John Cale, Kim Fowley & Gram Parsons within like four years. You never know where life's gonna take you! Favorite Tracks: Roadrunner, Astral Plane, Old World, Pablo Picasso, Hospital, Modern World, (+ Government Center)

There's a few songs on here I like but - and I'll give it to American Music Club, they presaged a lot of the bands I was thinking of - it mostly feels like a worse version of a band I already like, especially REM & Red House Painters. Some Nebraska era Springsteen vibes on here too. Songwriting is good on an individual level but this doesn't really hit together as an album. They seem like a singles band...or a college radio band. Actually definitely the latter. Favorite Songs: Firefly, Laughingstock, Western Sky

Stripped down mostly acoustic set that is just genuinely pheonomenal. All the Nirvana live stuff is great, this is no exception and it's mostly just Cobain playing covers of songs he really likes. It's a great switch up. Releasing it shortly after Cobain's suicide gives the album this haunting quality since the energy that's present in their albums and dring thier usually rambunctous live shows is consciously absent. I think there was generally a sense that Cobain wanted to move away from the harder rock elements after In Utero and MTV Unplugged is a good glimpse into what that project may have looked like. It looked awesome. Favorite Tracks: About A Girl, Dumb, Plateau, Lake of Fire, On a Plain

Great one to get while I'm at work because listening to any variation of Smile sends me down a Wikipedia wormhole about Smile & Brian Wilson, who is for my money, one of the single most interesting and complicated musicians ever. I can't even really say that I love Smile track-to-track or grasp Brian's vision but it is rewarding to know that he finished a variation on Smile that he was satisfied with. The Smile project is one of the strangest in recorded music, engaging with it is like looking at a fractal. There are so many ideas thematically and musically that it's difficult to even know where to start thinking about it. I think this 2004 version has a level of polish to it that makes it feel a bit too close to "product", the version of Cabinessence here is still good but the version on 20/20 has a sinister edge that this one lacks. A lot of 2004's Smile has the edges sanded down, which probably has a lot to do with Wilson mellowing out between the 1960s and 2004. Favorite Tracks: Heroes & Villains, Old Master Painter/You Are My Sunshine, Cabin Essence, Mrs. O'Leary's Cow, Good Vibrations

I like Damon Albarn a bit, Blur is my favorite of the Britpop stuff, Gorillaz is great, most of his solo is class. This is a bad project though. Supergroups often flatten each members' individual talents and this has got that going on in spades. It's basically the same song for forty-four minutes with slight variations on the drum fill or keys arrangement. But I found it wholly tedious. I thought I was mildly enjoying it for the bulk of it but during the last song, I heard my phone ring & I was so excited to just hear a new noise for the first time in 40 minutes that I realized I did not enjoy this one at all. One of the curious additions to the book that make you realize it's mostly written by British critics. Remember "Danger Mouse"? Favorite Track: Behind the Sun

The start of the Talking Heads' Golden Age (unless you're a big More Songs About Buildings and Food guy which, fair play). Byrne was starting to bring in more performers to the fold so that he could play in the world music sandbox & his first go-around with the idea is the dark, brooding, jagged but nevertheless still pretty poppy Fear of Music. Relative to some of the other punk and new wave works, it's a real line straddler. It's not abrasive but it isn't fully formed to say, the poppy sheen of Blondie. Byrne's voice doesn't catch or travel like any other vocalist's but the songs are built around his unique atonality. When a song does venture towards something more traditional, like Life During Wartime, it helps to highlight how angular songs like I Zimbra are. I've always found the movie to have this sort of marching, militaristic quality to it. Animals in particular has this punchiness to it. "Fear of" suggests some anxiety and the album does have this anxious register to it, it's very good music to navigate a crowd to. I read a really annoying 33 1/3rd by Jonathan Lethem about this album maybe around eight years ago. The framing device he used to talk about the book. There was a chapter dedicated to each song but every other chapter would be a rhetorical question designed to explore David Byrne & the Talking Heads more broadly. This led to the immortal chapter title "Is Fear of Music an Aspergers' Album?" I don't know Jonathan, you tell me. The entire chapter is just Lethem playing armchair psychologist on Byrne which seems like a reductive way to analyze Fear of Music. Talking Heads occupy such an interesting position in the post-punk scene and Fear of Music (and its follow-up Remain in Light) give them serious Manhattan Sad Lad credit despite the reality that they were much more suited to the lighter, art-school crowd & that Byrne was mostly putting on the SoHo dress to suit the time when he was really interested in making funk music. Favorite Tracks: I Zimbra, Life During Wartime, Memories Can't Wait, Animals

One of the stranger albums my dad recommend to me as a teenager, probably the strangest. Not that the content of the album is outside of my zone, actually an unusually savvy read from my dad, but still, he big upped Sex Dwarf. I think I've come around big time on this album. I used to be pretty negative on it, thought it was a little thin and overly long with Tainted Love being the obvious highlight. Recently though, I've felt more attached to this album. Its sound has this nasty polish to it similar to Cabaret Voltaire. I think Americans might have a harder onboarding with this album than clubbier folks across the Atlantic. Here's the thing, British & Irish music writers (and people generally, anecdotally) love to talk about Soft Cell and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Both acts are so influential on their understanding of electronic pop music. And with an ear tuned closer to the speaker this time around, I have to admit that I'm a big fan of synth thumps here. Even a white boy can suss out the 2s and 4s here.

Watched Trainspotting too much as a teenager to give this any less than 5*. Bowie puppeteers Iggy Pop to do the best work of his life.

There are seven Bob Dylan albums in this series and I will have to give at least one of the ones I adore fewer than five stars just to be severe but it won't be this one. Starting bars of Like a Rolling Stone...world changing. Favorite Tracks: Tombstone Blues, It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train To Cry, Queen Jane Approximately, Desolation Row

Still can't shake the feeling that reggae isn't for me. I listen to John Peel radio broadcasts every once in a while and I appreciate the dub and reggae tracks that play, I like them in conversation with the other genres that I like more. On an album, it all just kind of runs together. Sounds good, is interesting, not really my bag.

It's Rumours. And that's great. But that's not Tusk. Favorite Tracks: Second Hand News, Never Going Back Again, The Chain, I Don't Want To Know

You can critique Van Halen for a lot & you'd probably be right to do so but there is something elemental about their guitar work and drum work. 1984 adds some futuristic zest to it with a ton of synths and drum machines but the backbone of the music is really strong. Panama, Jump & Hot for Teacher have all been played to death but there's a reason that they've loomed large in the public consciousness and it's not just payola. Listen to the structure of Panama, it's a furious song. The lyrical content of Van Halen might be cock rock swagger but when the craft is there & it is funny to have a song about wanting to bang your teacher. Aren't you guys like thirty?