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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
