There are a few interesting melodies throughout and it's not bad as an ambient background track but nothing stood out. Some parts felt unfinished, others just uninspired. Nothing really objectionable, I just don't see any reason to revisit it. The bass clarinet part was neat.
Pros: fantastic 90s R&B + hip-hop, good use of skits, a couple great individual tracks (Doo Wop (That Thing) if nothing else), fantastic vocals throughout (if a little overdone).
Cons: repetitive lyrics, over-reliance on the same style of chorus. Most of the songs have a refrain that's repeated over and over with an oversung call and response. It wouldn't have bothered me once or twice but it got pretty samey pretty quickly.
Solid R&B album, just not quite my taste. The album is very focused on his vocals and he's a capable singer but not my favorite. Clever songwriting, generally good production.
(I hate to say it in 2025 now that we know the full extent of Kanye's problems but there are a couple moments/production elements that feel like there were lifted from 808s or MBDTF)
If I found this on a different day I might have liked it better. Lost is the standout track for me.
Very simple, clean production, good variety across the tracks. I don't know if it's going to enter my regular rotation - I'm honestly just not a big fan of Elliott Smith's voice - but it sorta feels like a rosetta stone for all the later indie bands I do listen to. Definitely deserves a more thorough listen later on.
A perfect album
I liked it a lot more than I expected. I feel like if you can describe something as dreamy French alt pop, I'm either going to love it or hate it for entirely arbitrary reasons.
I loved the instrumentals and vocals all throughout. Some songs are definitely more memorable than others but they're all good.
I will be exploring this more in the future.
Note to self: learn the bass part from Beatrix
I've tried a couple times with this album and I just can't get into it.
I'll admit I'm probably giving this one short shrift but I wasn't super impressed. Papa Was a Rolling Stone is an all-time classic and a couple other songs were kinda nice but this was far from The Temptations at their best.
I'm probably not the best person to comment on it but Run Charlie Run feels like a really clumsy approach to the topic, and from what I'm reading it seems like the Temptations never wanted to do it in the first place.
Papa Was a Rolling Stone is a 5/5, the rest is probably a 2 or 3.
Living After Midnight and Breaking the Law are obviously great but the rest of the album's a little forgettable. One more memorable track might have kicked this up to a 4 but I'm gonna have to go with 3/5
It's pretty good
A very fun album. Lots of energy throughout, plenty of variety. I had a hard time taking some parts of the album seriously but I don't get the impression Beck really intends me to.
It's always a little disappointing for me when the first track is the best, you spend the rest of the album waiting for something else as good as E-Pro to pop up. Oh well.
Pretty good
It's one hell of a sample of Chicago blues. From a modern perspective it's easy to hear pentatonic jams over a 12 bar blues and think it sounds cliched, but it would be silly to listen to one of the founders of the genre and complain that he fits too neatly into the genre conventions. This probably won't go in the usual rotation but I'm sure I'll pull up some Muddy Waters again if I find myself in the right mood.
I'm probably being unfair because I only listened all the way through once but I didn't really hear anything other than the singles that I cared about. Sunday Bloody Sunday and New Year's Day are great, almost enough for me to kick this to a 4 on their own, but I don't think I can justify more than a 3 for the whole album considering the rest kinda just washed past me without making much impact.
The Weight is solid but the rest of it all blended together for me
Parts of this are incredible, other parts are kinda weird and forgettable
I don't know that this holds up very well 30+ years later. The vocals and production (both innovative at the time, I'm sure) both feel pretty dated and a lot of the lyrics are kinda dumb. I'd go higher if I were scoring for historical relevance.
Figured I'd go song by song for this one
Taxman has fun music but really dumb lyrics - taxes bad!
Eleanor Rigby is a genuinely beautiful song, no complaints
I'm Only Sleeping is fine, neat reverse audio effects
Love You To - yay it's sitar time! I just wish George Harrison would get out of the way, he sounds bored
Here, There, and Everywhere - a little saccharine but it's a nice little love song
Yellow Submarine is stupid and I hate it
She Said She Said - I like this one, the plain lyrics shine a lot more here than in some of their other songs
Good Day Sunshine - it's not exactly for me but this is at least a good Beatles pop song
And Your Bird Can Sing is pretty solid
For No One - I like this song but it feels like it's building to something and never gets there. The bass is good but the little trumpet solos feel tacked on.
Doctor Robert - it's a fun little song about drugs I guess. I don't think there's anything more to this than "this dude will give you drugs"
I Want To Tell You is fine
Got to Get You Into My Life - a point of light reminding me that the Beatles do occasionally make something I like
Tomorrow Never Knows - I'm not sure the instrumental noise fully works for me but they're doing something interesting with it. This feels like one of those Beatles songs that launches a genre. It's a more interesting use of eastern instrumentation than Love You To, which just had George Harrison lazily chanting over sitar music
I feel like they could have reordered the album, some of the song transitions are jarring (both sides of Eleanor Rigby for instance). Overall I liked it well enough but I don't think I'll ever see what everyone else seems to see in the Beatles. Probably won't listen to it again.
Fun weird prog rock. Breakfast in America is the better album from Supertramp but I appreciate the excuse to listen to one I haven't heard as much. Dreamer isn't their best work.
Hell yeah. This one drifted past me on the first listen but I loved it on the second time through. It's not my usual genre so I don't know how often I'll come back to it but I'm definitely glad to have checked it out.
I hate to keep giving 3s but this is such a perfect blend of good, meh, and bad. Message in a Bottle is good but we've all heard it a million times. On Any Other Day is terrible. Walking on the Moon is great until Sting starts singing. The instrumentals are the main thing keeping this above a 2.
2 star lyrics over 4 star music makes a pretty clear 3. I mostly knew Paul McCartney as the poppiest Beatle so I was genuinely impressed by the variety in the music.
I had a good time with this album but I have to question if this really deserves a spot on a list that's supposed to be 1000 of the best of all time. I think this one could grow on me if I listened to it more, or if I got into the band when I was younger
I was hoping I'd listen to MBDTF and realize we were just on some weird shit back in the day and it wasn't actually that good. I'm very reluctant to admit that it holds up. It's inconsistent, flawed, controlled chaos, however you wanna say it, but if we're fully ignoring the Kanye problem this is like a 4.5. Might be a 5 without the Chris Rock skit at the end of Blame Game. Edit: eh, it probably does deserve the 5.
Fuck Kanye West and everything he stands for.
I like some metal but I've never gotten into Pantera, at least partly because they all seem like assholes. They used confederate flags in their stuff for years, they've had tons of racist incidents (Dimebag Darrell using racial slurs, Phil Anselmo shouting about white power, etc), and honestly just their macho scumbag vibes rub me the wrong way. They even have a song on this album addressing racism, and while the message is ostensibly one of unity, it directly conflates klansmen and black militant groups.
All that said, you can't deny they're an incredibly talented and influential band, driving the transition from thrash metal to death metal. They feel like such a perfect middle point between Metallica and Slipknot. I always had the impression that Pantera was a little sloppier and noisier than this but I was pleasantly surprised multiple times.
The album as a whole is sort of a wall of sound, but they do a good job of mixing up the tempo/vibe just often enough to keep it moving. There are times when Anselmo's vocals verge on cartoonish and I can't quite take him seriously but it works 95% of the time. He can even sing clean sometimes!
Best track: This Love
This is absolutely unfair because there are similar albums that I would rate much higher. My usual approach would be to say "this seems like a good version of a thing I'm just not into" and score it higher but I'm giving in to subjective enjoyment. I didn't have a good time listening to it.
It's such a weird mix of britpop and long jazzy instrumentals. Every time I enjoyed something it would either end too soon or outstay its welcome by several minutes. I think a creative editing pass to fix the pacing would go a long way but then they'd have to write more than 20 minutes of music (padded out to 45 or whatever with the long jammy tracks)
Ultimately I did like listening to it enough to give it a decent score but it could have been a lot better.
Coked-out David Bowie invents a weird Nazi character and does a bunch of interviews in that persona, people spend the next few decades mythologizing him as a brilliant performance artist. Cool. Meanwhile, it has almost nothing to do with the music on the album beyond a vaguely desperate disaffected vibe.
The vocal performances Bowie puts in on this album are similarly baffling, both in the lead and backing vocals. Melodic and tonal choices are weird all throughout (in a mostly bad way).
The lyrics are a mix of dumb (TVC15) and inescapably pretentious (the rest of it).
Stop repeating "scheme of things"
The best track is the cover at the end of the album because he sings like he actually knows what he's doing. Parts of it remind me of Jesus Christ Superstar - not a value judgment, just an observation.
Some really cool instrumentals occasionally interrupted by slightly boring vocals. I don't think I gave this one enough time for a thorough review but I enjoyed it enough for a 4. Worth a revisit.
I have no doubt that this would be an awesome live experience, and there's some great instrumental work, but long meandering jam band stuff isn't really for me.
The music is good and Marvin Gaye's voice is as great as ever, but this is a deeply uncomfortable album. It's very direct and unpoetic in the lyrics, which are all a repetitive mess of complaints about either his ex or their divorce. If I caught even a hint of self awareness or reflection from him, this could have been a fantastic album. As it stands, he comes off entirely as a villain trying to paint himself as the victim.
Obviously it sounds good. He's Marvin Gaye. It's Motown Records. They know what they're doing. I just think it's artistically bankrupt.
There are almost enough bad tracks for me to mark this down to a 2 but it deserves at least a 3 for the better ones.
I enjoyed it but I'm never gonna get that excited about down-tempo ambient stuff
It's good music, not exactly essential listening.
I don't want to hear Mick Jagger doing a bad faux country accent like he does in Country Honk and Let it Bleed. The whole album (with two major exceptions) feels like an English guy faking an American blues/country vibe.
Gimme Shelter is a masterpiece and You Can't Always Get What You Want is a fantastic song, the rest just don't do enough to pull the album past a 3.
Ehhhhhhh
The generous interpretation is that this is a fun Halloweeny exaggerated take on metal themes, and it has a genuinely interesting punkish vibe I haven't seen in a lot of other metal.
The less generous interpretation is that it sounds like self-parody, and while it might have been influential enough to give a name to black metal, it mostly sucks.
I really enjoyed this one. Not every track is a winner, but they're all at least interesting. I always roll my eyes when someone describes a band as being ahead of their time, but this really feels like it should have come out 5-10 years later. Just some great alt rock.
This is an important and influential album but it's also deeply unpleasant to listen to. It's mostly well-executed. I'm glad they inspired other (better) bands.
I just can't stand listening to this smug nerd moaning into the mic for an hour.
I don't know why it took these guys half an hour to play Who Do You Love, George Thorogood pulled it off in about four and a half minutes.
Abrasive, weird, and experimental, but still genuinely fun. So many artists use "experimental" as a cover for stuff that's just wonky and unpleasant but I genuinely enjoyed listening to this, especially after I calibrated my expectations a bit. Definitely gonna revisit this one.
I'll probably like the other Depeche Mode album more than I liked this one. I enjoyed it well enough, it was pleasant to listen to, but nothing really stood out that much.
White Light/White Heat - A little more 60s than I expected. The contrast of the slightly cheesy vocals against the fuzzy guitar and explicit drug talk was fun.
The Gift - I liked the backing track but I just didn't care about the short story and John Cale's not a terribly captivating speaker.
Lady Godiva's Operation - John Cale's not a terribly captivating singer either, apparently. The alternating vocal thing is abrasive in a not-very-fun way.
Here She Comes Now - It was fine.
I Heard Her Call My Name - Lots of rough distortion, lots of feedback, but mixing technology hadn't progressed far enough to make noisy lead guitar sound good yet, or if it had, they chose to make it sound like shit. Aimless sloppy shredding for most of it.
Sister Ray - Not as pointedly unpleasant to listen to as the previous track but they came close. A long song about a drugged-up orgy where they murder a dude.
Transgressive, obnoxious, barely music at times. I understand that the Velvet Underground were pushing boundaries and experimenting. I understand that people were still figuring out what rock and roll was and this is a very important, influential album on the road from psychedelic rock to punk and basically any genre that starts with "alt". Alas, it sucks shit.
I like this album but it's not super essential. I'm looking forward to getting Yoshimi later - same vibes but a little more substance.
It's a little too rough for me to really get into it. I love the bands that played alongside these guys and the bands inspired by them but this doesn't quite do it for me.
There are a bunch of other bands I'd put higher on a list of my favorite classic rock bands, but at the same time, Boston might be the perfect 70s rock band. Every track on this album is memorable, and every one has had significant radio play for a good reason. There's not a weak spot on the album. Fantastic vocals, great interplay of guitar and keys, excellent writing. Nobody does this style of rock better.
Not exactly a new observation to say that the album is really front-loaded and the back half is a little forgettable
That said, the first 3 songs are fantastic and the rest of it is still pretty solid. I've always sorta rolled my eyes at U2 but this reminded me I do really like a lot of their stuff.
It's so very twee. It's interesting and fun and I'd even say I round up to enjoying it. The good parts are enough to make me ignore the cringy stuff. Tina Weymouth is a much better bassist than singer.
Their cover of Under the Boardwalk sucks but I'll ignore it because it's only on some releases of this album.
It sure is some Christmas music. Good renditions, a couple of which are in eternal rotation on every Christmas station, but it's still a bunch of covers of Frosty and Winter Wonderland and whatever.
Phil Spector is a monster
Hell yeah
Not quite perfect but we got Baba O'Riley, Behind Blue Eyes, and Won't Get Fooled Again out of it.
A lot of good, some bad. This isn't my favorite flavor of Guns n Roses, a lot of it is kinda dumb and trashy... But at the end of the day I still kinda love it? Maybe I'm just in a generous mood today.
No matter how hard it tries, this album cannot convince me that JT is either cool or sexy
Parts of this are cool, other parts are just worse Bowie. The best parts of the album are probably only about a 3.5 for me anyway?
I'm rounding down a bit because I'm annoyed that we have 5 albums from Iggy Pop/The Stooges on the list
Call this a high 3. A little more variety would have made it a 4.
This is the closest the list has gotten to a 5/5 from an album I've never heard before. I don't know exactly what would tip it over the edge - honestly it would probably get there if I had some nostalgia wrapped up in it.
I don't think there's another song that hits as hard as the title track (which is the only one I knew before this listen) but I enjoyed it all throughout. Maybe Parasite or Free Ride?
The sparse production makes for a really interesting mood - if it weren't executed so well it would just be coffee shop music. The writing is interesting, the guitar work is great, his voice is incredibly smooth. The guitar is frequently a little rough in the right ways (the buzzing and percussive plucking sounds you hear on tracks like Free Ride) and occasionally unpleasant (the exact same effect in Know).
I'm going to listen to this more and there's definitely a world in which I come back and bump this up to a 5.
This isn't going to go into my usual rotation but I listened to it 3 or 4 times today, went back multiple times to listen to some tracks again, had a great time. Hell yeah, King Louie.
I don't even know how they made this so cheesy and boring when the underlying music is so good
I liked it and I get the appeal of the band but it just didn't quite click for me. I see the potential, maybe one of their later albums will be a little more appealing.
This album had a lot more going for it than I expected. I thought it would just be Time After Time, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, and a bunch of filler.
There's a lot to like and I assume a lot of this was new in 1994 but at the end of the day I don't get that excited about electronica without vocals
I can't decide if this is bad or if I just don't like it. I'd be much more into it if the singer would drop the stupid affected voice and if the album weren't so bloated with spoken word conversations about nothing.
It's so close to being a 5 but it's just not quite there. It's very good though
s'alright
I was tempted to rate this higher on my first listen through but it's really just a couple standout songs. The cheesy 80s production starts to get grating very quickly.
Tina Turner's singing is fantastic, she's just let down by the instrumental portion and the songwriting.
It's just a matter of personal taste but I can't really get into it. The music is all really good and the singing is fun but none of it adds up to anything I care about.
So Far Away and Walk of Life are both great blues-pop songs, and Money for Nothing is fantastic (ignoring some questionable lyrics). I can't help but get pumped up when the guitar kicks in at the beginning. None of the other tracks on the album get me all that excited but they're all good.
Knopfler's guitar work and the rest of the band are great throughout. The singing suits the style even if it's not classically impressive.
This isn't in my top ten or anything but Dire Straits bring something unique to the table and I'm glad for the excuse to dig a little deeper into their work.
The good songs make up for Man on the Moon, which I find viscerally irritating. I even like Everybody Hurts!
This is the sort of album that I could get a lot out of if I get back to it outside of the album-a-day pace.
Loved it. We've all heard Green Onions a million times but I'd never put a name to it or given it much thought.
I love the sound of a Hammond Organ and the guitar was really nice throughout. My main critique is I think the instrumentation sounded kinda thin on some songs, which is hard to ignore when it's all instrumental. It works well in some songs, not as much in others.
Good, fun, catchy, just not quite impressive enough for a 4.
I'm tempted to rate this higher - it's all very good, Sinatra's singing is buttery smooth, it's thoroughly pleasant to listen to - but it's basically 15 of the same song over and over
I rated the other Cocteau Twins album a 4 and I'm giving this one a 3. I don't know that I actually prefer the other over this one - it probably benefited a bit from novelty, as I didn't know the band coming into this - but the average between the two feels right .
This isn't the worst thing I've heard but it still sucks
Dolly gets away with some stuff I would find annoying from other artists - sing-talking story songs, maudlin lyrics, a specific style of classic country I'm not otherwise super fond of - through a combination of incredible talent and natural charm. Good times.
I like it, don't quite love it
I can see why she got popular off of this one but I don't know if it needs to be here in addition to Back to Black
Weirdly sophisticated hooligan rock
I wanted to like this because I genuinely really like Don't You Want Me but the rest of it is roooooough. Even for a new wave band, the synths and drum machines are really cheesy, and the lyrics are too dumb for such a vocals-focused band. This might be a 1 if not for the final track.
Parts of this work but 80% of it is kinda insufferable. I had relatively high hopes during the first track but that faded very quickly. I think my opinion of the album got progressively worse with every track.
A lot of the lyrics, especially in Moving the River and Desire As, are too clever in the way where you can tell the writer is really proud of the turns of phrase.
It's perfectly fine music but the too-earnest vocals, too-clever lyrics, and cheesy music all add up to even less than the sum of their parts.
I've probably given worse albums higher ratings but this one just really annoys me.
It's all perfectly decent but kinda forgettable rap. The skits are bad and their attempts at writing pop hooks are all pretty weak. It's not bad, I just don't really understand what it's doing on this list.
The production was interesting enough to pull this up to a 3 but I wasn't blown away
PSA 2000 - stupid, childish
Kill You - stupid, wildly misogynist even by Eminem standards, might appeal more to a particularly shitty 13 year old kid
Stan - probably the most interesting thing Eminem has ever put out. I like it but I don't know if it'll be enough to redeem the rest of the album.
Paul - why bother including this?
Who Knew - more edgy bullshit, more stupid hooks
Steve Berman - bad acting, stupid script
The Way I Am - at least this one has a good hook. The version of Eminem that's at war with mainstream media is a lot more interesting than the obnoxious Slim Shady bullshit where he just shouts the most offensive thing he can think of to get attention.
The Real Slim Shady - the overplayed anthem of the worst people I knew in middle school. I almost like it now that I've got a little more distance from it.
Remember Me? - mid gangsta rap
I'm Back - forgettable. It's been like 2 tracks since you said something weird about your mom, better fix that.
Marshall Mathers - oh no it's so hard being famous. Time to shout slurs and talk about your mom again. Cool bass line, bad singing, stupid lyrics.
Ken Kaniff - The only thing more embarrassing than beefing with ICP is that the most creative thing he can come up with is calling them gay.
Drug Ballad - forgettable
Amityville - more of the same schtick. Bad hook.
Bitch Please II - it's a pretty decent Snoop song until Eminem shows up
Kim - man fuck off
Under the Influence - the worst hook yet
Criminal - okay
It's weird hearing Iron Maiden without Bruce Dickinson. This is a really solid prototype for their later work.
I didn't find this viscerally irritating like their other album but I need this man to understand that he is not sexy and he is not David Bowie, no matter how much he insists otherwise
Really solid blues rock but nothing blew me away. Not a big Rod Stewart fan.
I'm having a hard time with this one because it's very good, undeniably important, influential, etc, but it's pretty dated. Most of the old school rap that holds up is the stuff that doesn't take itself super seriously, and this one takes itself pretty seriously.
Metallica at their very best.
If John Denver is too spicy for you, Gram Parsons is your man. Emmylou Harris sounded great though.
Good noise, dumb lyrics. Steve Albini's an asshole.
I liked this a lot more than our last Steely Dan album but it's still really cheesy. The album gets off to a great start at least.
Hell yeah
I'm probably being a little generous here, and I'm definitely giving in to a certain amount of nostalgia.
Getting a couple critiques out of the way:
The band's shift to a more arena rock sound is mostly a lateral move. I really miss the active bass lines and rawer sound from their earlier work
The lyrics and the whole Saint Jimmy story are a little on the cheesy side
That said, I love this album from start to finish. Most concept albums have a really hard time finding good singles that still fit the surrounding storyline, but this one does a great job of balancing those needs. The writing, the execution, and the vibes are all excellent.
What if ELO sucked
Honestly a couple upbeat tracks would probably save this album. It's just an onslaught of slow, maudlin melodrama. I normally appreciate a singer who takes big swings but stuff like Lion in Winter is pretty rough.
I wanted to like this album.
This is exactly what this list is for. I didn't love this album, but it's something I would never have heard otherwise.
Positive - her voice is super smooth and just pleasant to listen to. Most of the music is nice. Fair amount of variety.
Negative - it was all a little safe, a little plain. Parade is dumb. You Didn't Have To Be So Nice is kinda cute once but I don't want to hear an untrained child sing.
Overall, not in love with it, but it was kinda nice to listen to a couple times.
It's a great album showcasing a lot of the best things that Van Halen had to offer. I do think David Lee Roth's cheesy showmanship is more of a pro than a con, but he's not my favorite.
Van Halen's always been a singles sorta band for me and this one has a lot of their best singles so I really can't complain.
I'm in a weird place with this album because I mostly like Lynyrd Skynyrd's music but it simultaneously rubs me the wrong way for a reason I can't quite place. It's probably partly their politics, probably partly that it's been overplayed, probably a little bit because my dad always kinda hated Skynyrd. Or at least learned to when he lived in Georgia for a year or so. They were still some of the best that southern rock had to offer.
I Ain't the One, Tuesday's Gone, Gimme Three Steps, Simple Man, Free Bird - all great tracks that I've heard a thousand times before. The other ones didn't really impress me much but it's a rare album that has 100% hits.
Apparently I listened to the censored version initially - I didn't notice until I saw other people talk about Fucking In Heaven in their reviews. The explicit version is marginally less annoying than Illing In Heaven but it's still the weakest track on an otherwise great album.
Praise You and The Rockafeller Skank are the standout tracks, no surprise there, but the whole album is fun and infectious. Some tracks rely a little too much on a single repetitive sample, a lot of it feels pretty dated almost 30 years later, etc, but I can't help but move to it. Acid 8000 was probably the best track I hadn't heard before. I would probably shuffle through a couple different favorite tracks if I sat with this album long enough.
I don't think I can express how much I like this album and how much I get out of this album in any eloquent manner. Easily in my personal top ten. 6/5 stars.
It's AC/DC, I don't know what else to say
I see what they're going for. I genuinely like most of the music. That said, while a singer doesn't have to be classically trained or even talented to be good, this is a couple steps too far. In the right mood, this might be a 4, but there are definitely days where this would be a 2.
There's definitely a 5-star album spread throughout this thing. I liked every song on it, but I think an editing pass to bring it down to the 10-12 best tracks would be an improvement for this album as a singular piece. As it stands, I'm giving it a 4, but it's a really good 4.
I already loved this album and my opinion only improved from a closer listen on this revisit. It's easy not to take The Flaming Lips very seriously but there's a lot of depth in the music here. Do You Realize and Fight Test are particularly great, though I also love a lot of the kinda cinematic tracks throughout the middle of the album.
It's wild to me that this is rated so much higher than their third album. This album feels like a prototype. I really like this style of indie dreampop whatever but this whole album is a little too bland, a little too sparse, and a little too samey. Not every electronic band has to be maximalist or fun, but give me a little more to work with.
I'm probably going with a 3? I'm tempted to rate it lower just because I think I See You is a much better album and the differences between the two really highlight what I find frustrating about this album.
And I like The XX but honestly I don't know if they rate inclusion on this list, especially not twice.
RHCP have elements of 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 stars throughout their work. This album is great. This album also sucks. I don't know what to do with that information.
This probably deserves better. Or worse, I dunno. I liked the first couple tracks but it just couldn't hold my attention through the rest of it, and after 3 or 4 attempts I'm gonna give up.
Kendrick's stuff doesn't always work for me - I have to be in the right mood - but when he hits he hits
A bunch of unfinished notes app demos. There are some cool ideas in here but few of these tracks feel ready to be released.
This isn't exactly for me but it's perfect for the people it's for. If there's any version of the Beastie Boys that clicks for me, it's this one. I'm slightly rounding up just because of how hard Sabotage hits when it comes in.
Roundabout is practically a 5 star album on its own but the totality of Fragile comes just shy for me. Still a fantastic album overall.
Shades of things to come - I hear elements of Patti Smith's voice in Debbie Harry, Sharon Van Etten, Kate Bush, all sorts of other fantastic musicians. Ultimately I didn't think the album itself was particularly memorable, but I could see it growing on me given enough time.
They got as far as saying "I bet you could make music with weird experimental sounds" but never bothered to actually do it.
The tracks with vocals are the worst part of this, and I'm not usually an instrumental sorta person. Maybe one or two tracks of vague British sounds run through a spooky filter would be interesting but they keep dipping back into that tainted well.
I don't hate this - it's not just a series of stupid noises like a lot of the reviews say - but I certainly don't like it. I'm only rounding this up to a 2 because it came out in 1978, when this would have actually been something new. If this came out today it would be an immediate 1.
On paper this should be right up my alley but I just don't vibe with it and I can't really say why. I like it well enough but for every track I get into there's one that kinda annoys me. Something about the tone, the cadence, the word choices. I just can't quite get into it.
The idea of a full album of murder ballads is cool, and even within a very specific musical style and subject they do a good job of finding variety in both the music and story. I like the theatrical style and the serious execution on a fairly Halloweeny concept.
Every la la la la la leeee or la la la la liiie loses this album a couple points of good will and I'm vaguely annoyed by the number of songs where the refrain is basically just a name.
Borderline 3/4 but I'll round up for the parts of the album I did like
One of the greatest rock bands of all time with all the edges sanded off. I don't know why you would take a band known for big arrangements, lots of harmonies, memorable hooks, and strong emotional content, and then just not do any of that.
There are some decent songs on here but it's all a little forgettable - the best songs on Tusk are about on par with the worst songs on Rumours (still quite good). There aren't nearly enough good songs to justify the double album format.
I think I'd like this more if I hadn't heard the originals he's covering here - or in the case of Respect, the superior version from Aretha. The front half of the album is fantastic, the back half all suffers by comparison. Still essential listening and Change Gonna Come genuinely made me tear up a bit so it earned the 4.
It's not bad but why is this on the top 1000 list?
Every double album is a failure in editing
I'm glad I listened through this once but I think Smashing Pumpkins are going to stay a singles band for me. There are a lot of good singles, both from this album and their others, but they're sort of an abrasive flavor of rock. Needs to be spaced out a bit more.
This would be a really solid 4 if it were the 5 singles + 5 other tracks. Instead, consider this a low 4.
I get that this was super important to rap history but maaaan it does not hold up
I can't tell if I'm more annoyed by the tongue-in-cheek bullshit that makes up the bulk of the album or the parts that are actually trying to be sincere. Every time it started to work for me, the singer would find a new way to push me away. That said, I get why this works for somebody. Just not me.
I'm probably never going to listen to this again, and I'm as annoyed as everyone else at how it falls apart in the middle, but the good parts of this album are good enough to warrant a decent overall score.
I was not expecting to spend today learning to love Peter Gabriel.
I have tried and failed to make myself appreciate this but I just don't like it and I can't get around that. So much of the album is built around featuring their harmonies and I don't like any of their voices.
This album starts very strong and each track is just a little less exciting than the one before. I think I'm rounding up a bit on the rating but the highs are high.
Sleepy. Spacy. Pretty good.
I was less annoyed by Mustaine's voice in this than I usually am
Great music to be depressed to
I wanted to like this but there's something fundamentally boring about the entire album that I can't quite place. Even the parts that made me move a bit felt hollow somehow.
I would like this a lot more if they had fun on even one track. I'm not saying they need a dancy pop hit or anything, it's just hard to take the oppressive melancholy of the album seriously when there's no respite from it. You need a couple highs to appreciate the lows I guess?
Since they've clearly listened to a lot of Peter Gabriel, I'll just say they need a Sledgehammer.
I knew a few of these songs coming in and I probably would have recognized Carole King's name but I had no idea what I was in for. Excellent songwriting and great, subtle production. I loved it.
Another instance of The Rolling Stones doing one or two good rock songs and a bunch of jangly blues in between. I wouldn't mind jangly blues if it were coming from a different band but I just can't take the Stones seriously in that space. Mick Jagger's definitely the main offender there - the band sounds fine otherwise.
Sympathy for the Devil is great, Street Fighting Man is fine, not fond of the rest.
The title track is an all-time great banger. The rest is fine. I think I'd have a great time at a Springsteen concert but the energy doesn't quite translate to the record for me.
this is almost certainly a three of an album and I'm being overly harsh but it caught me in the wrong mood and I found it deeply annoying
The parts of this that work for me work really well and the parts that don't are easy enough to ignore. I'd probably rate this lower on a different day but after a few listens it really grew on me.
It's a weird, disjointed album that thrives on chaos just as much as it suffers from it. That feels like a trite summary, partly because the same thing could be said about most of Kanye's career, but it's really exemplified on this album. Most of the tracks on this album have at least one really abrupt shift in tone or tempo, which I don't normally like, but Kanye at least always does something interesting with it.
Any Kanye work after this album really isn't worth caring about and part of what makes this album interesting is that he was clearly starting to step into that next era when he made it. If MBDTF was when the roller coaster was at the peak of the hill, this is when you're staring down and speed's staying to pick up but you haven't fully dropped yet.
This should go without saying but Kanye is a bad person and he doesn't deserve your money.
This probably should have been a 4 but Coconut is so god-awful stupid I can't stand it
This is a real borderline 4/5 for me. It's a classic, it's charming, it has a couple really great standout tracks, but overall I don't think it quite kicks over into that top tier. I'm very happy to finally have a reason to sit down and listen to this in its entirety and I will definitely come back to it later.
Edit: I listened again and I tilted the wrong way, it's a 5.
I don't think this is objectively bad, to the extent that that's even a real concept, but I just don't like anything about it. I don't like the writing, the performance, the mix, any of it.
This album is the equivalent of a sheet of paper filled edge-to-edge with text that's all the same font - no white space, no ups or downs, no real hooks, just a consistent melange of vaguely musical sound. I shouldn't have to work this hard to pay attention to music. I like 2000s indie pop, so it's not just a genre mismatch.
I honestly considered giving this a 1 but I only give 1 star reviews to albums I feel strongly negative about; I don't care about this enough to hate it.
I Can See For Miles is a pretty good song but against the rest of this album it becomes a verdant oasis, a light in the dark. An album criticizing consumerism and examining music's place as yet another commodity would be intriguing but they did absolutely nothing with it. They could have at least committed to the concept/message and tried to incorporate it into the "real" songs. Instead it's just a jumble of unrelated songs with a few fake ads in the first half. It's dumb.
For better and worse, this album really captures the feeling of noodling on a guitar in your bedroom. It feels like writing a song. Unfortunately it also feels like they never finished writing those songs and just kept droning on the same idea for way too long.
There's absolutely somebody out there for whom this is The Jam but that somebody is not me.
I don't know what to do with this album (see every other review) so I'm giving it a 3
What a cool fuckin album
Candle in the Wind -> Bennie and the Jets -> Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is such a great sequence of songs. I'd argue there are a couple tracks you could drop to get this to a standard length album (Jamaica Jerk-Off for instance) but this is just an amazing album. I need to spend more time with it later but a couple listens today were plenty to convince me this is an easy 5-star.
I'd probably rate this higher if I'd never listened to any other trip-hop but everything interesting about this album was being done better by their contemporaries
Detroit Rock City is solid, Shout It Out Loud is fine, and I have a weird fondness for Beth. The rest is terrible. I thought God of Thunder was going to be a weird outlier on an otherwise decent album but man it just doesn't get any better from there.
Bad lyrics, annoying hooks, repetitive song structures, mediocre writing and execution across the board. I wanted to like this.
A couple really high highs among a sea of meh
I don't like it but I get it
Dude has no sense of pitch or rhythm, the backing tracks sound like cheap keyboard presets, and the writing is like a bad student film about nothing
The features are even worse
The rhymes are simultaneously obvious and forced
They constantly put the emPHAsis on the wrong syLLABle to fit the awkward meter
Dictionary Corner-ass flow
At its absolute best this album hits an occasional 2.5 but it's endearing in a weird B-movie sorta way
Okay fine
Franz Ferdinand fits into a specific niche of poppy alt rock that I really enjoy. I'd probably put Tonight on here instead of the self-titled album but whattya gonna do
Shoulda been Folklore
I feel like I should like New Order, and I've tried a few times, but it just doesn't click for me. I don't think it's bad, I just don't personally like it very much.
I stand by my usual stance that double albums are inherently bad, self-indulgent, bloated, etc
And on principle I don't want to just give every Led Zeppelin album a 5 because that's probably not correct, even as much as I love the band, but I'm having a hard time talking myself out of it for this one.
This would be a confident, unqualified 5 for me if they had trimmed back the track list to the best 10-12 songs. In My Time of Dying + Houses of the Holy + Trampled Under Foot + Kashmir + In the Light + Ten Years Gone + The Wanton Song + take your pick of a couple more to fill things out - that would be a fantastic album. I know they were limited by the length you could fit on a vinyl record and it would have been a shame to cut anything from the first half so I kinda get it but it really feels like they just packed in whatever they had left for the end rather than developing a fully realized double album.
Whatever, I'm just rambling at this point. I'll stop trying to talk myself out of it.
It's not bad, I'd probably listen to it again. It's like Keane and Radiohead had a baby that never really lived up to either parent's legacy. Not something you Must Listen To Before You Die.
For the first 3 tracks I really had myself convinced we didn't give Korn enough credit and that we were too fast to throw them out with all the worst nu metal bands. I was contemplating a 4/5 star rating. Riding high!
Then the rest of the album happened. Freak on a Leash and Got the Life saved this from a 1 star review at least.
If this singer had any real friends they would have stopped him from publishing this as soon as they heard his bad Miss Piggy impression
All the droniest parts of The Deftones with none of the excitement. Even when the tempo picks up it's repetitive enough that it kills the energy. Not my jam.
I like this album more than several I've rated a 4 but I know realistically it's a 3. It is a very good 3 though.
I've listened to The Love Below several times in the past and love it but always kinda wrote off Speakerboxxx as more commercial and boring because of the single. I didn't realize that without Andre around, Big Boi would be the weirdo in most rap circles. I loved both of them this time through.
Each half of the album is individually a 4 and the project as a whole almost adds up to a 5 somehow but ultimately falls just short.
This album is CCR at their very best. Seven amazing tracks, three pretty good album fillers, and also one very bad Ooby Dooby for some reason.
Man I don't even like the Beatles and I know this is a 5
A lot of this is really good but it just doesn't quite grab me. I had a good time listening to it but I can't picture myself seeking it out later even though I like some similar acts.
In a vacuum I'd like this a lot but it's just an inferior version of At Folsom Prison. Same concept, same energy, worse set list, and worse execution.
If I had found this as a kid I probably would have latched onto it and learned to love every track on it but coming into it new I'm not super impressed. Some great tracks, some middling.
The album starts with Respect, which is a perfect song. It never quite gets back to that same high but it's really solid all throughout.
Rounds up to a 4. It starts strong and kinda trails off over the course of the album.
I'd probably like this way more with different vocals. He loses me as soon as he starts crooning.
I'll trust people's assertion that this album was very important and influential but at the end of the day I just don't like it.
Unfortunately it's the Beastie Boys at their Beastie Boysiest. I might be a little more generous to this if the list hadn't given me all 3 of their albums in the last couple months but it would have taken a lot to pull this above a 2.
They really buried the hits in the middle of the album. Fight For Your Right isn't exactly a masterpiece but at least it's worth listening to.
Jesus Christ you've introduced yourselves like 80 times already you don't have to "my name's Mike D and I'm here to say" multiple times per track
I'm not opposed to blast beats, sludgy guitars, harsh vocals, or even intentionally difficult music, but this is just stupid. The brief glimpses of actual music, the occasional intelligible riff here and there, make the rest of it more frustrating.
I'm tired of giving pity points to albums just because they're influential or novel. There are so many extreme metal bands out there that have made real music with the same ingredients.
I almost feel bad that my reaction to U2 is that they're just blandly pleasant. I don't mind hearing it, and they even have a few great songs, but Bono takes things so seriously and I just don't really care.
I thought I would rate this higher but it just doesn't grab me
This is my 4th Neil Young album this month, 5th overall. Still one to go, and that doesn't count any CSNY or anything else he might be involved in.
I like Neil Young. He has some great songs. None of them are on this album.
I'll take this version of The Rolling Stones over the jangly faux-backwoods blues they often pretend at but I'm not excited about it. Not a single hit on this bloated double album.
This is cheating because it's basically a Greatest Hits album and it drags on too long but come on
