Ground breaking stuff. Basically setting the standard for generations of (US) hardcore punkbands. And I appreciate the energy and aggression but musically there's not an awful lot for me personally. The riffs are more hard working and sturdy than sparkling and exciting. I prefer sparkling. And I find the vocals - the tuneless growling and wailing - quite hard going. I prefer hardcore you can sing along to.
Quite uneven. Although that's not necessarily Lou's fault. Some bits suffer because of overexposure. I don't think I ever need to hear Perfect Day or Walk On The Wild Side ever again. Other bits suffer because of fairly typical Seventies silliness. The last three songs are quite terrible (not really a fan of Make Up either to be honest. I don't think Lou Reed and a parping tuba is a winning combination). And then you're left with about half an album. Half a pretty good glamrock album - and Vicious is a terrific opener - but still just half an album.
This was such an important record for me and my friends in the late 80ies. It was punk. It was rap. It was a whole lot of fun to shout along to. Listening to it with 2025 ears is quite hard going. It is very shouty and brash and bloke-y and to be honest quite obnoxious. Some things are better left as nostalgic memories.
Strangely enough I still quite like the title track despite having heard it probably about a million times. The rest is okay, I guess. Very polite and polished countryrock. Country-ish rock. I just wrote my review of George Harrison's All Things Must Pass where I noted how much different that sounded than the early Beatles stuff, just 6 or 7 years later. Hotel California is 6 years later again and, well, doesn't sound that much different from ATMP. A bit shinier but it's got a similar vibe. I guess we were just treading water and waiting for punk rock to be invented...
I hate the blues but I quite like blues-y. This falls largely on the right side of that distinction for me. In songs like Brown Sugar and B*tch, Keith's licks are tight and to the point and brilliant and Mick is in great peacock strutting form. Wild Horses is terrific. To be honest the only real stinker is You Gotta Move. I've just replaced the word 'mostly' in the second sentence with 'largely'. I don't even mind Moonlight Mile that much.
Always frustrating if you have to check Wikipedia to see which tracks on the reissued/remastered/anniversary edition that's on the streaming services actually make up the original album. Took me about 5 minutes here (also because there seems to have been a bonus disc with the original release). Once it gets going it's, well, quite pleasant. It sounds rather seventies to me. It is hard to imagine we're only 6-ish years after I Want To Hold Your Hand. It sounds so much more grown up. It is a very long album - even without the bonus disc and the archive material and alternative versions - with long songs. Not sure if there quite enough ideas to warrant all that time. I like the longer songs if they've got a bit of a gospel feel (the Hey Jude fade-out is fun) but a lot of the songs are just the same chord progression and melody going around and around. Still, overall quite pleasant.
Sure this gives off more than a slight whiff of cultural appropriation but as an album I really enjoy this. The songs are fun and bouncy and the South African musical touches give it something unique and, well, exotic. It is very clearly a slick and commercial mid-80ies album but it still sounds pretty fresh - and yes, not un-Vampire Weekend-esque... - in 2025. The rubbery bass in a song like You Can Call Me Al never ceases to make me happy, even after having heard it thousands of times.
I know you're Paul McCartney and you've just left the Beatles and all that but you need to go back to the studio and finish this collection of half baked ideas properly before it's fit to be released kthnxbye
Not really for me this. I don't actually mind the slick and smooth - very slick and smooth - jazzfunk vibes but everything just has at least one difficult jazz chord too many and there is too much noodle-y display of expert musicianship. I don't care, man.
I remember this one quite well. All the prettiness came as a bit of a surprise. Until then I mostly new the Rev, as nobody called them, from their quite strange and noisy indiehits like Chasing a Bee and the one about the car wash. We really should have known; they've always had a knack for lovely otherworldly melodies. It's just that on this album they don't hide them behind swirling psychedelic walls of guitar. Doesn't meant it's all straight forward of course but that's what makes it so special. Not all the songs are a strong as Tonite It Shows or Goddess on a Hiway but really nice to hear again. There's maybe a bit too much theremin on here. All that wobbling is making me a bit seasick.
I am never going to be a big Jim Morrison fan but to be honest on here his mystic shaman act is not quite as over the top as on later records and there is some actual musicality to the songs. The rest of the band is not just there to provide a background to Morrison's convulsions and it is actually quite pleasant psychedelic 60ies pop with plenty of freaky organ work and lots of performative pseudo-spiritual woo woo stuff that only gets really annoying in the final track. Would happily listen to it again some day. Can't believe I am going to give this three stars.
I knew A Tribe Called Quest for the hits and it turns out that those hits I knew aren't on this album. Still this is quite pleasant. The beats are what I would call 'old school' (my theory is that people's definition of 'old school' depends on when they started listening to hiphop, in my case that's the nineties). Boombap-ish drums. Jazzy samples. It's got the same looseness as the hits I was familiar with but musically it's a bit more understated. It's still quite playful but decidedly less flashy. I can see why it didn't really break through in my little corner of the world back then but happy to have a chance to spend some time with it now.
Don't mind a bit of reggae but it's not a genre I am very familiar with. This sounds pretty nice and it's enjoyable to have it on in the background but the songs also sound quite same-y. The title/opening track jumps out but after that it's pretty much a case of diminishing marginal returns for me. I am not a big Bob Marley fan but his songs by and large seem to have a bigger and more immediate appeal.
A classic of the scratchy, sort of funky in an angular way post-punk era. I think I have cd-copy somewhere. Was very hip in the 2000s when bands like Franz Ferdinand were breaking through. The hits are great, the Stones cover is so much fun but as an album I find it maybe a bit too much. It is quite hard to ignore the 'look at us being all quirky'-ness of it all. I wish I could give it 3-and-a-half stars...
I have lots of fond memories of the pop music from the late '90s, early '00s. Destiny Child's. Neptunes. Timbaland. Missy Elliott. Kylie's Can't Get You Out of My Head. It was often much more exciting and forward looking than the so-called 'alternative' music that had been my natural habitat for a while. I assumed that I could have put Britney in this list as well but having listened to her debut album I have to make a u-turn on that. This is terrible. Hit Me Baby is still great. The rest is all filler and slop. Cheap, unimaginative r&b-pop with some cheesy ballads. The second best track is a totally superfluous cover of The All Seeing I's The Beat Goes On.
This is a lot heavier than I expected. For me, when I think of the Temptations I think of poppy vocal harmony stuff like My Girl first. I should have known there was more to them. Of course I was familiar with the song Papa Was a Rolling Stone I just never explicitly realized in a way that was the same Temptations. And it does feel a bit weird for a group of just singers - no instrumentalists - to make a heavy funk album like this (with some sexy ballads as well). Having adjusted my expectations of the group, I really enjoyed this.
Depeche Mode is one those bands that I enjoy the hits of but never felt the need to seek out an album from. Listening to Music for the Masses hasn't made me rethink this approach. This seems to hail from their High Goth period and I don't think that's my favourite Depeche Mode era; I much prefer the early synthpop days and even the later druggy rock material. This kind of feels halfway but missing the good bits of either. It's at the same time quite tinny and lumpen and dreary. By the way, even if you are not into this kind of stuff I highly recommend Jeremy Dellers' artpiece/documentary Our Hobby is Depeche Mode. It's on Youtube.
This is very dull. It's sort of jazz-y slow country. But the songs are quite dreary (and the selection of songs they cover very uninspired, even their version of Sweet Jane is boring) and the main attraction seems to be the polite guitar noodling in the background. The only thing worse than regular guitar noodling is polite guitar noodling. Barely made it to the end of the record.
I know this is one of those 'cult' albums: ignored at the time but rediscovered and endlessly praised and mentioned as influence by more recent artists. I don't immediately see what's so special about it. It's very European - Morriccone, Brel etc - with lots of dramatic strings. I guess it's supposed to sweep me away but it doesn't. It feels a bit too studied and detached. My favourite bits of the album are probably the songs where the bass player gets to do his/her thing, like on The Old Man's Back Again and Get Behind Me. Actually, the second half is quite nice in general. It all gets a bit 'sexier' towards the end...
REM is very much a hit or miss kind of band for me, even on an intra-album level. There are some classic songs on here (End of the World, One I Love) and quite a few just nice ones but at least one song has a terrible sax solo and towards the end there is a sort of attempt at funkrock that doesn't work at all. Also, more general, the 80ies drum sound gets on my nerves quite quickly. Nice to have spent some time with it as part of this project but unlikely I will return to it any time soon. Two-and-half stars rounded up.
Couple of half-baked song ideas somewhat pointlessly dressed up with too many florid, try-hard musical arrangements and general productional shenanigans. The guitar riff in Sixteen Saltines would make a great Hives song and the clarinet in Love Interruption is lovely but I have no idea why this ended up on a 1001 Albums You Need To Hear Before You Die list.
