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.