1001 Albums Summary

I don't know much about jazz, but I know this album and I know it's great. Scores of people smarter than me have explained why.

David Bowie has some great albums, but I don't think this is one of them. It got a lot of attention on release for the big genre swing, but in 2025 it mostly sounds like Bowie doing R&B not nearly as well as the artists who helped invent it. "Fame" is great, but I could do without most of this album.

This is going in the "not for me" pile. I appreciate the craft behind these songs, and I recognize that this is some of the best pop music of the time. But I'm kind of allergic to that 80s pop sound.

I guess I had no idea what The Temptations sounded like, because this is much funkier than I expected. Songs in the second half like "I Ain't Got Nothin'" and this group's version of "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" are closer to the soul vocal group that I think I was expecting. But songs like "Papa Was a Rollin' Stone" and "Funky Music..." have much more going on instrumentally and are more jam-oriented than I would have guessed. I especially love the live opening track, which really highlights what an incredible band they were.

Physical Graffiti find Led Zeppelin at the height of their success and (maybe) their musicianship. But this album is also the beginning of the end of their creative streak. There are great songs on here, arguably some of the best they ever wrote, but the album is also bogged down by its excess.

This is one of those bands I think I'm supposed to like, but it doesn't do anything for me

Great songwriting combined with uncompromising experimentalism make one of the greatest albums of all time

Not my personal favorite Beasties album, but probably their most important one. They abandoned the ironic frat boy rap/rock of their debut (which much of their fandom didn't realize was ironic) and, with the help of the Dust Brothers, produced a sample-heavy masterpiece. Chuck D says that when Public Enemy heard it, they realized they needed to seriously up their game.

I was kind of meh on this one until the final track

I was about to chalk this up as more well-crafted 80s pop that I just don't have a taste for, but then "Mother" started. I had to check that I was still listening to the same album. It sounds like it would be more at home on a Birthday Party record than here. It at least made me think I should listen to this album a little more closely to see if there are any other interesting surprises. There were not.

I felt like I had put a fair amount of time in this album, heard several impressive guitar solos, a lot of high-pitched wailing, a couple slower sections, definitely enough to get the overall feel of the album. I was getting a little bit bored with it, though, and checked to see how much was left before I can move on to something else. I was still on track 2 3 Stars UPDATE: I got to the part on Strange Kind of Woman where the singer starts a call and response with the guitar, so I'm downgrading this to 2 stars

If Portishead ever made a mediocre album, it might sound a little like this

They lost me the moment the jaw harp came in on the first track. The rest of the album played out as a series of similarly cringy hippie noodlings on quirky instruments with little substance

What really struck me about this is how many of the songs I already know by heart. Like, all of them. And not just the songs but these specific recordings. I guess I've just absorbed them all from hearing them over shopping mall speakers and over the end credits of Christmas movies for my entire life. They've always kind of been cultural wallpaper, but it's clear now that this album is basically the boomer Christmas music ur-text. Any time a movie director needs to evoke a universally pleasant modern Christmas atmosphere, they'll pull something from this record. None of this I mean as a criticism. There's a reason that these recordings are so enduring. They are extremely well performed and produced, and I'm sure I'll be putting this back into rotation each Christmas when I need some comfortably familiar holiday music.

Because I enjoyed A Different Class so much, I gave this album several more listens than I normally would. But even after my fifth time through, I feel like nothing really sticks. Whatever moments of earnestness existed in their previous album are completely absent here, replaced with Jarvis Cocker's dull ennui. He sounds as bored singing these songs as I feel listening to them. The music sounds pleasant enough, but it all kind of blends into a kind of sonic wallpaper

I can't leave zero stars, so I'm just going to say the one star goes to "God of Thunder" because it reminded me of "Big Bottom" by Spinal Tap.

It's hard to explain why this is my favorite Fiona Apple album. For starters, I don't think she knows how to make a bad album. But this one stands apart from the rest of her catalogue for its exciting and audacious experimentations. I love the manic piano and all the wild percussion across this record. But at the heart of it is really good song craft with melodies and lyrics that are genuinely catchy. It's just a lot of fun to listen to, and, as another reviewer put it, I hardly ever turn down a chance to listen to it when I scroll past it in my library

Now this is what I signed up to this website for. An excellent album by an artist that seems to have been largely forgotten by the listening public, despite a long career and multiple award nominations. The first track immediately grabbed me with its catchy melody, steel guitar, and soulful vocals. The whole album doesn't quite follow through on what that first track promises, but there's enough here to keep me coming back

According to last.fm, I've listened to this album all the way through about forty times. 18 years after its release, I still put it on when I stumble across it in my library and it still feels fresh and exciting. Every Portishead album is a perfect five for me, but this one still somehow stands apart from the others. Coming a full decade after their sophomore album, it feels like a true evolution in their sound, moving from trip hop to more diverse range of electronic influences. Much of it sounds harder and more driving than their other works, but at the same time it's still unmistakably and inimitably Portishead. Who knows if we ever get another album from this group. But it's hard to imagine a better swan song than this

This is the musical equivalent of plain mayonnaise on white bread

I feel like I just listened to the same bland song on repeat for 67 minutes

Obviously this is not going to be for everyone. The band goes far out of its way to be abrasive and alienating. Through texture, rhythm, and an uncompromising aesthetic they create a whole other world for you to feel uncomfortable in. This is what I signed up to this project for, not to hear Hotel California for the thousandth time

The Jimi Hendrix Experience formed in 1966. They released two albums in 1967 and a third, Electricladyland, in 1968. Just two years later, Jimi Hendrix was dead. Jimi Hendrix is universally praised as one of the greatest and most influential guitar players of all time. What is really astonishing, though, is how he established this legacy through a handful of albums released in the span of just a few years.

This album was seen as a huge creative leap for Radiohead on its release. Given what the band would do be doing just 2 years later on OK Computer or 6 years later on Kid A, The Bends now sounds downright conventional. But this is where Radiohead began to mature as a band and develop a sound distinctly their own. "Fake Plastic Trees" and "High and Dry" are probably responsible for people assuming they just make boring sad songs, but there are also some genuine rockers on "The Bends" and the incredible "Just." Radiohead's defiance of easy categorization and tendency to push themselves into new territory start in earnest here

For most of my life I've argued that there are no bad genres of music. Within any genre you can find brilliant artists creating great work. It's just a matter of distinguishing the great artists from the bad and putting in the time and effort to appreciate their work. After hearing this album, I think ska might be the exception

I think Dark Side of the Moon caught Pink Floyd at just the perfect moment. In their earlier albums they were a band keen on psychedelic experimentation, but a lot of their songs are sketches of ideas rather than fully formed compositions. After DSotM they would move on to either more theatrical and heavy-handed work (The Wall) or longer multi-part compositions that displayed impressive technical prowess but with less grounded ideas and song structures. But on Dark Side of the Moon all the parts are, for a brief 42 minutes, working perfectly in unison. Every song is terrific on its own but is also inextricable from the conceptual whole. When it's done t leaves you wanting more, yet if anything else were added, it would ruin the tight perfection of this album

Wow. I really did not expect to give this a 5. Years ago I heard Alice Cooper explain how much of the band's live act (like being guillotined on stage) was stolen directly from old vaudeville acts. So I knew that there's a very self-aware theatricality to this group. But that still didn't prepare me for the big genre swings they take on in this album. As pretty much everyone else has pointed out, the deceptively dumb title track quickly gives way to a wild tour through psychedelia, musical theater, prog rock, lounge music, Beatle-esque pastiche, and more. The juvenile humor keeps you from taking it too seriously, despite the undeniable musicianship and ambition involved. I always bought into the media's image of Alice Cooper as some kind of shock rocker, but clearly at this moment they had more in common with Frank Zappa. I feel like I'm actually discovering Alice Cooper for the first time, and I love seeing that so many other people are too.

This is a very pleasant sounding album. The sonic textures are rich and calming. It's something I might put on as background music while I write or while my students are working on a project. But what makes the album so chill and unobtrusive also makes it largely forgettable.

Fun Fact: Madonna recorded "American Pie" as a parody of Weird Al's "The Saga Begins." This is largely seen as an act of revenge after their relationship fell apart and Weird Al survived Madonna's assassination attempt

I didn't care for the Smiths album I listened to, so what are the chances that I'm going to like a solo Morrissey album? Okay, just finished it. Musically I enjoyed this a bit more than the Smiths album. Lyrically I'm still not impressed. There are a few decent songs when Morrissey quits whining about how nobody understands him. But about half of his lyrics are just insufferable. I honestly don't understand all the fuss over this guy. The general consensus seems to be that he's some kind of musical and lyrical genius, but people get tripped up by his problematic political views. Did you have to hear him in the eighties to feel this way? Because coming at him for the first time in 2026 I find his music to be pretty uninteresting and his lyrics not particularly clever. I guess the plus of it is that I don't have to struggle over whether or not it's "okay" to listen to him.

Bjork is easily in my top ten favorite artists of all time, so why is it that I can't get into The Sugarcubes? It might be because, in her solo work, Bjork's singing voice has never been the main draw for me. I love her for her experimental electronic music. Her true voice is in her inimitable approach to musical composition and the way she constantly pushes the boundaries of what pop music can sound like. And I don't hear any of that on this record. Instead, what we have here is an okay late-80s band with elements of New Wave and Post-Punk. What they were doing doesn't sound particularly innovative or interesting, as scores of other bands had been doing this kind of thing for much of the decade. Bjork's vocals alone are not enough to make this stand out from the crowd.