1001 Albums Summary

I already knew this album well. Reflections on listening again today: The album really highlights the Stones’ reverence for American roots music. Delta Blues, some country, some gospel, some soul. Mick Jagger’s Dartford, Kent, accent often sounds incongruous as he strains to sound authentic. But on the highlight song, Gimme Shelter, perhaps not coincidentally the most original ‘Stones’ song on the album, his vocals are great, and the song’s a timeless classic. Underpinning the whole thing, even when they’re in genre-tribute mode, is the unmistakable Stones ‘groove’ which, regardless of vocals, always sounds brilliant.

Hmmm…I wanted to enjoy this but didn’t much. I often do enjoy rap, and I know the themes on this album came from a particular time and place. NWA’s Straight Outta Compton and the 2015 biopic of the same name (both of which are really good) are directly relevant personnel-wise and putting the history into some context. And I gather (plus it’s obvious by comparison to NWA material) that The Chronic represented a major musical and production style shift for hip hop that was hugely influential. But those groundbreaking innovations have long since become mainstream so they’re harder to appreciate now. And the lyrics and their themes and attitudes just feel dated (and often uncomfortable) now. Although of course I’m a million miles from the demographic that might have been in tune with this anyway, so maybe that’s unsurprising.

24 hours after grinding through Dr Dre’s gangsta rap, A Tribe Called Quest offered a much more engaging experience. The musical atmosphere is much more refined and spacey; the lyrics are live-and-let-live in outlook. I liked the clarity of the diction too. If I had a disappointment it was that - with the odd exception - the lyrics weren’t super-clever or thought provoking. I’m glad to have heard it, though.

I’ve spent a lot of time listening to this album over the years, not least as it’s a good one both while driving and while running/jogging. The Modern Age, New York City Cops and Last Nite are all great songs, but the whole album is really solid. Pretty sure I once read that Julian Casablanca’s raspy vocals are achieved via a microphone effect but, regardless, they’re distinctive and they work really well on these songs. I regret never having seen The Strokes live. They’d be brilliant in a small to medium sized venue.

I’ve spent a lot of time listening to this album over the years, not least as it’s a good one both while driving and while running/jogging. The Modern Age, New York City Cops

If this was an important album at the time of release I feel it can only have been as a contrast to whatever else was around, because in itself it’s highly derivative. It’s generally imbued with grungy sounds of the period, in the manner of Dinosaur Jr, Nirvana etc. But a number of the tracks are basically “that one that’s like the Ramones”, then “that one that’s like The Clash”. Some of the grabs are very direct (which actually I don’t mind if they’re being respectfully quoted) but there are so many of them! To the above, you can also add The Cramps and especially The Sonics - basic garageband stuff. Revivalist can be fun. Every generation hears historic music afresh and puts their own spin on it. I can see this album probably would have been exciting if you were 18 in 1990. But when its core content is something as basic as garage / punk rock, it feels hard to latch on to a revival (even one dressed up in grunge clothing) in retrospect.

When it boils down to it, I can’t really be arsed with heavy metal. But of course that’s a blanket statement whereas in reality it’s a spectrum, and for me Black Sabbath are at the end that isn’t too far removed from good blues-rock. They do have their Spinal Tap moments but Ozzy Osbourne’s lyrics and vocal stylings are relatively grounded and thus more engaging for me than heavy metal of a more grandiose stamp. Some of the riffs are pretty cool too. And the ballad Changes is Stones-ish and a nice song. Plus I have affection for BS songs like Paranoid and War Pigs (not from this album of course) that were part of the journey to punk rock in the 70s. And Supernaut on this album is a bit Hendrix-y, in a good way. Not really my thing though.

I simply missed Adele, ie knew who she was and had an idea of her style but never took the time to listen to anything. Having now heard 21, there’s definitely stuff to like here. I like that she’s a songwriter (or part of a songwriting team) for her own material. I like the authentic blues vocal inflections, which suggests she’s a student of that kind of music. I get some vibes of ‘Dusty in Memphis’ Dusty Springfield. Also some Elton John. And I’m generally a big fan of female vocalists as well, especially when they sing their own songs. My problem here is it’s ultimately a bit poppy for my taste. A lot of the songs start out bluesy and I find myself wanting her to double down on the stripped back bluesy feel - but instead she always heads off in the direction of pop, in the power ballad style. These are production choices and no doubt it reflects her own tastes too. But I can’t help wishing she had a hip producer like Amy Winehouse did with Mark Ronson. Her voice and her general vibe is great. I just don’t enjoy the finished product all that much.

I’m want to reserve my 5 star votes for what I consider to be bona fide classics. Surfer Rosa is a cast-iron 5 star album. It sounds raw and chaotic but they’re an absolutely tight band (they’re incredible live, even now, even without Kim Deal on bass), with a drum sound that feels like it’s coming from the corner of your room. It has the Pixies’ trademark surreal lyrics, mainly delivered by Black Francis in his one-of-a-kind vocal style, that are sometimes disturbing and often really funny. There are even some hit songs on there, eg Gigantic and Where Is My Mind. This was an album that loads of artists cite as a favourite and/or an influence. There’s an old documentary on the Pixies in which Bono says that when he first heard Surfer Rosa he told the rest of U2 (then the biggest band in the world): sorry to have to tell you guys, but we’ve just become out of date.

I had no knowledge of this album and none of the artist either, except for her name. I found it hard to understand why this is on the 1001 albums list. It’s pleasant enough but mostly it feels a bit bland. I guess it must have stood out in some way when it was newly released? The main feel I get from it musically is of Dionne Warwick singing Bert Bacharach songs. Which is a compliment as a comparison, since those are great songs, beautifully arranged and very well sung. But this album doesn’t have anything like the wow factor of Dionne and Bert. I was hoping Anita Baker’s voice might be a new one to love, but it didn’t really speak to me and sometimes I found her inflections over-ornamented. The best track, I thought, was the jazzy one, Been So Long. I didn’t hate it but this one won’t be on my playlist.

I had never heard of this band. The album seems designed to be listened to in a shared student flat while everyone smokes weed. Fair enough…there have been some great albums you could say that about. I didn’t love it but it did grow on me as it went along. I hadn’t registered until after I’d finished that it was a 2010 release. I assumed it must have been a late ‘90s album because parts of it sounded so similar to Spritualized (whose ‘Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space’ album must surely be on this list?) but Spiritualized were over a decade sooner. Also wasn’t sure where they were from while I was listening: if you’d have told me they were Scandinavian that would have sounded plausible. Baltimore, Maryland, as it turns out. The tracks I preferred were those with the female vocalist. I liked the last track Take Care best. I won’t mind if having played them for 1001 albums purposes means a track or two of theirs pops up in my algorithmic playlists now and again.

This was interesting. I didn’t find it quite as mesmeric as perhaps I’d hoped, but I did enjoy listening to it. It also caused me to do a bit of research. I learnt for the first time what raga means as a style of music. That was really fascinating. And fun fact of the day was hearing the song Bageshwari (the penultimate track) which revealed to me exactly where the iconic long musical outro on The Who’s great song Baba O’Reilly came from. It’s well worth listening to the two tracks side-by-side (and, in each case, in full). Especially towards the end of Bageshwari (recorded 1968) it’s almost identical to the end of The Who’s song (recorded 1971).

I really liked this album. Supercool 70s soul. This album defines the difference between generic soul music and music that’s totally hip. The band is impeccable, as are the song arrangements, and the production is completely crisp. The lyrics are rooted in their time as well, which I enjoyed. If I have one minor negative comment it’s that I prefer a soul voice in the mid-range but can occasionally reach falsetto, whereas Curtis’s voice lives in the high tenor/falsetto range the whole time. But that’s just a small thing.

Ray Charles being Ray Charles. It’s nice but I don’t have too much to say about it.

A definite 5 star album for me. One of those life-soundtrack albums, and I still have my vinyl copy from when it was first released. Love the idiosyncratic lyrics and vocal style, and the grizzled pub-rock band with funky bass provides the perfect backing. I still listen to this album fairly regularly even now.

I half-knew this album. Do It Again and (especially) Reeling in the Years are classic songs and it was good to hear them again. As to the rest of it, I liked its general vibe/groove but mainly I found it a bit too middle-of-the-road for me. As a side-note, one of my favourite artists of the last 5-10 years is St Vincent, and she’s a huge Steely Dan fan; she name-checked them a lot when launching her brilliant album Daddy’s Home a few years ago. It was interesting to hear bits on this album that translated into her work nearly half a century later.

This is such a classic album. The crazy thing is that it was already a ‘classic’ when I was first listening to it c1979 or 1980 (and feeling like I was hearing something very retro) whereas it had only been released about 12 years earlier! It’s now closer to 60 years old… Break On Through, Light My Fire and The End are incredibly well-known of course. It was nice to rehear some of the tracks that pop up less often in popular culture today. I always disliked Alabama Song and that feeling has survived half a century! Reading Joan Didion’s accounts of the band (in her essay collection The White Album) when they were young and white-hot in Summer of Love era San Francisco brought them to life for me in the context of when this album was being conceived and recorded - highly recommended.

We’ve been on a run of albums I know very well lately. Psychocandy is another great one. Shoegazy powerpop with an overlay of white noise and feedback. Very influential, and every time you play it in full it always sounds…exciting. Songs like Just Like Honey, Never Understand and The Hardest Walk are very well-known, of course. But the whole album has stood the test of time really well.

l do sometimes listen to techno/sampling dance music (eg Fred again) but this Avalanches album was nothing special. It sounded really dated and quite cheesy. A thumbs down from me.

I didn’t know this album, nor actually anything much about Foo Fighters music except a vague impression based on who they were (ie Dave Grohl’s band). It was more poppy than I’d expected. I don’t know if that’s their typical sound. Unsurprisingly given the artist’s background in Nirvana there are strong flavours of grungy rock, but on the lighter side comparatively. A few times I was reminded of the Lemonheads who are at the poppier end of that genre. It’s a very American sound. It was fine but at this distance it felt quite generic.

EBTG are great. This one’s from their electronica phase and features the usual good songwriting to go with Tracy Thorn’s lovely and characterful voice.

Didn’t manage the full album but from what I heard it was the type of groovy beat-driven hip hop that De La Soul used to do. Clear vocals, hip, but not especially deep. I can listen to this sort of stuff quite happily.

I’ve tried Tim Buckley before. I want to like it, or at least to feel that I get why so many later artists namecheck him as an influence, but it’s way too fey and fussy for me. The lyrics are very much of their time, or one strain of that time, with fantasy-folk tropes (“Oh whither has my lady wandered?”) that set my teeth on edge. I also don’t love his undeniably big voice: it’s ‘impressive’ rather than enjoyable. The whole thing just sounds quite pompous and pretentious to me, even allowing for the spirit of the age it was released into.

I really enjoyed this, partly due to the language difference, and having little Spanish but no Portuguese. I listened ‘blind’, without any research but I did know it was Brazilian and from 1972. Artists that came to mind as I listened were Roddy Frame and Paul Simon. I found myself hoping that these lyrics would be as considered and witty as those two always produce. Given the subtleties of the sounds, my guess is they probably are. For example the song Dos Cruces looks (from its Portuguese lyrics) and sounds like a murder ballad! Or at least a very dark lament. Musically - production-wise - it’s really interesting and beautifully done. Much more than just ballads over strummed guitar, which is what I initially guessed we’d be in for. It’s a hotchpotch of genres. Some is folky, but other bits are Beach Boys or Beatles-ish for example. One of them (Nada Sera Como Antes) is basically a Gilbert O’Sullivan song! I’m going to guess GOS borrowed from here rather than the other way round. “If you know you know” probably applied in the early 1970s like it still does. But who knows? There seem to be two voices/artists. Who is Lo Borges?! In the end, I totally bought the idea of this being a loved/revered album. I downloaded it and I will be listening again.

Jaunty powerpop from the mid 90s made mildly interesting by the way it overtly places itself in the Kinks-ish, punkish, new-waveish English canon.

It’s kind of a cool sound but I only needed one song, not an album-full!

Nothing very remarkable or interesting about this, at least at this distance.

I was pleased to see Neil Young come up on 1001 albums because After the Gold Rush is an album I’ve been wanting to listen to properly for years. I’d tried it now and again but never really enjoyed it. And yet some artists I love (eg Thom Yorke of Radiohead) are avowed fans of NY and this album in particular. But…I still don’t really get it. I don’t care for his voice and I didn’t find the lyrics particularly insightful nor the music particularly interesting. The song Southern Man is pretty good. And the song When You Dance…ditto It was also nice to hear Only Love Can Break Your Heart again, as a reminder of what a fabulous (and fabulously different) cover St Etienne did of that song in the 90s.

So….Rumours. It’s such a revered and enduringly popular album. I’ve dutifully listened to it again trying to find the spark I’ve always missed. Unfortunately, I still didn’t find said spark. It’s mainly bland, country rockish, and plodding as far as I can tell. Maybe some of the lyrics are inspirational if you’re interested in self-affirmational content. The iconic guitar break at the end of The Chain is an honourable exception to that sweeping statement. And Gold Dust Woman at the end of the album is a nice song. But for me that’s about it.

I know this album pretty well and I’ve played it plenty of times over the years. I got into the album after reading that PJ Harvey (who I love) is a massive fan of Captain Beefheart and of this album in particular. I really like it. It’s such an eclectic mix of styles but particularly based on Delta blues which I always enjoy. The rhythms and percussion is really mixed though and bits far from being ’just’ a blues album. The lyrics are very “other” and often amusing in a weird way. Beefheart’s voice is expressive and sometimes comical. It’s very much a product (and a contributor to the feel) of the mid to late 1960s but it was surely an oddity even for its time. Listening now, it’s clear how the album (Beefheart’s debut) influenced concurrent and later musicians, and in my mind the album and the band form part of an eccentric grouping including the likes of Dr John, Frank Zappa, the Velvet Underground, the Modern Lovers and a good chunk of what later became punk rock. The best tracks for me are the more blues-oriented ones, particularly Korn Ring Finger.

An all-time classic: if this list was 21 albums…rather than 1001, Horses should still be on it. The Van Morrison/Them cover to open the album, plus the title track Land:Horses, are highlights but it’s strong all the way through.

I never really got into Coldplay. This is very…competent. But it doesn’t do much for me. I was interested to listen for clues that they channelled about from Radiohead in this period. There are definite signs of that, but I don’t think it’s egregious.

After getting several rap albums in the last few weeks, I’m coming to the conclusion that they don’t age terribly well. This particular one, though, is pretty good. Missy Elliott is clearly a strong personality and the backing music for these tracks is more interesting than on most rap albums.

I’m really surprised never to have heard of Blue Cheer. It seems like they were very much part of the the mid-late 60s West Coast ‘scene’ and it also appears they were considered to be, to some degree, innovators. Although heavier than I really enjoy, they sound pretty good even now, and their cover of Summertime Blues is great. The song Out of Focus also stands out. So it feels odd that they aren’t at least on the radar when bands like the Doors, Jimi Hendrix Experience, Stooges etc are so much part of the rock canon. I’m glad to have learned something.

I have mixed feelings about David Bowie. Some of his material is timelessly brilliant; yet I’ve never really bought into the cult-like worship of him that some seem to hold. Having seen documentaries about him in the years since he died, I warmed to his personality (despite the silly fascist-flirting period he went through in his drug-ruined 1970s, around this time of this album). It seems to me he was a very well-read, thoughtful, and essentially generous person, with a quick sense of humour. He took himself less seriously than many took him. But quite a lot of his music/lyrical content is inward-looking and not especially penetrable. Station to Station falls in that category to me, but I thought it sounded better (and, to be fair, more accessible) on this listen than I’d recalled from back in the day.

This was great. I hadn’t heard it before. It was like listening to contemporaneous commentary on the hippy 60s, skewering both pro- and anti-flower power sentiments. A Pythonesque flavour to parts of it.

I’m not a huge fan of country music, especially when it’s a full album of same-sounding songs like this. I did enjoy reading about the Louvin Brothers though. Interesting stuff about the music and their use of “close harmony” singing style. But the best snippet about these committed Christians (who had an album called “Satan Is Real”) was this: “Their songs were heavily influenced by their Baptist faith and warned against sin. Nevertheless, Ira Louvin was notorious for his drinking, womanizing, and volcanic temper. He was married four times; his third wife Faye shot him four times in the chest and twice in the hand after he allegedly tried to strangle her with a telephone cord. Although seriously injured, he survived. When performing and drinking, Ira would sometimes become angry enough on stage to smash his mandolin when he was unable to tune it, and – when sober – glue it back together.” The album cover for “Satan Is Real” is a classic too - it’s surreal, and apparently much-parodied by other artists in later years.

Brian Eno has been involved in so much great music over the years, from Roxy Music to Talking Heads to Fred Again (to mention just a few). A true artist, and an intellectual. And, this album Ambient 1 is ultimately an intellectual exercise about music and its role within varying spaces (physical and mental). It’s an interesting piece of work in that light…but it’s not especially interesting to listen to. Which is partly the point, I know. But I’ll only listen to this as a late-night sleep aid.

Some of these tunes were familiar, and I knew the album was regarded as a classic, but I’d never listened to it as a single collection. It’s…‘modern’ jazz. And really nice too, but always feel like I ‘should’ enjoy jazz a little more than I actually do.

Love this album and I know it very well. As close as The Fall’s outsider art ever came to being mainstream art.