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.
