1001 Albums Summary

Mate got me onto this scheme so let's see if I stick it out. Pretty decent first shout to be fair, I was dreading Captain Beefheart or some shite. This is where MJ goes stratospheric, the 2nd of one of surely the best trilogies ever. Sold quite well, they tell me. As an MJ fan as a kid in the 80s (bedspread the lot), I had this and Bad on vinyl so this is obviously all very familiar. Yet somehow I still laughed out loud walking down a busy street at the throwaway "Yer a vegetable!" line. There'd be complaints these days. The production is lighter than you'd remember at times, quite tinny in parts. But that only serves to raise the profile of the two monsters Beat It and Billie Jean, obviously both stonecold classics. And every other song here has been sampled by someone somewhere along the line. I was expecting to be writing here that The Girl is Mine is trash, but nah even that's good, let's face it. Human Nature has always been a personal favourite, invoking a dreamy nocturnal Manhattan skyline vibe (he moves from referencing vegetables to apples here). The tracks are indisputably in the correct order, like all great albums should be - the unappreciated closing track ending us in style. So yeah, a classic and must be one of the best albums of the era. Bad nonce, though. High Point: Eddie Van Halen letting rip in the middle of Beat It Low Point: Disgusting sex noises in PYT

Day 2 of my 1,000 albums challenge and I've struck lucky with another classic! The debut offering from one of my favourite bands. Once is a perfectly serviceable opener but gives no indication of what is to follow with Evenflow, Alive and later Jeremy and Black which delivers four great standouts hard to match among any rock album, let alone the grunge era. These are dark and morbid tales of relationship breakdown, homelessness, child suicide and the father Eddie Vedder never met, yet are so powerful and heartfelt they have translated to become stadium classics. There may even be more well rounded Pearl Jam albums to follow as they aged gracefully, but the high points of this simply get better with age and 30+ years on holds up in a way a lot of their peers do not. Most of the album tracks became anthems too, with Release a personal fave. Classic. Listen loud. Best bit: Tough one. I'll go with the outstanding layered vocals and moans as Jeremy builds to a crescendo and then finally fades out. Worst bit: Why Go feels a bit 'by the numbers' and maybe more in keeping with Vs. than Ten

Never knowingly listened to this band before. I thought they would be along the lines of Kraftwerk but the first half is really ambient akin to Air or Spiritualized 25 years later, then it just goes all punk out of nowhere on 'Hero' with Johnny Rotten style vocals, before Johnny Rotten was a thing. Really interesting album and whilst there isn't much what you would call great songs individually, it has an excellent sound to it and is really interesting. Liked it!

The second Beatles album. It might actually be the worst of their studio albums as not much of a progression from their debut. But set in the context of 1963 and not knowing what came later, let's take a look A lot of it is early Beatles by the numbers, "It Won't Be Long" rings through with teenage optimism and there's no doubt a lot of mushy sentimentality here - "All I've Got To Do" being quite throwaway stuff really. But when it hits it works well with "All My Loving" still sounding a classic and of the few cover versions the gorgeous "Til There Was You" shines through as the pick of the bunch with its simplistic beauty, one of McCartney's best vocals of the early Beatles era. Most of the other covers here have been done better, not that it's a crime to fail to do Roll Over Beethoven as well as Chuck Berry, like. By the next album onwards it would feel that every new release shifted them up a gear, but even the Beatles weakest work is still a pretty good album.