I’ve never listened to an entire Blur album before. I knew the single, Song 2, as it was hard to miss at the time, but I didn’t care for Britpop then. It turns out that I still don’t! Or at least not this album. I hear some of their influences here—Pavement, Bowie—and it’s mildly interesting but I’d rather listen to that than Blur’s interpretation of it. I don’t hate it, but nothing grabs me enough to want to go deeper with it either. In all, it feels a bit light, don’t know if that’s just an ingrained dislike for the genre.
I’m not sure what I was expecting when I looked at the track listing on this one and saw the cover of the soft rock hit “Summer Breeze” but it certainly wasn’t a ripping fuzzed out guitar solo. I preferred the harder and funkier parts of this album to the more gentle and soulful bits, but overall it’s a really good listen, and a nice way to start a cold and snowy Monday morning in November.
The Who performed their rock opera Quadrophenia on two nights at GM Place in Vancouver in October of 1996. Commercially, it was a flop with lots of unsold tickets and empty seats. On the second night with a few friends from high school we took public transit downtown to try our luck with the scalpers. I wasn’t able to get a seat with my friends, but I did get row 14 on the floor for a whole twenty bucks. My memories of the show are vague: Billy Idol (already well washed-up) and Gary Glitter (before we knew he was a pedophile) had roles; the Who played some non-Quadrophenia classics after the opera; the boomers in the audience loved it. I think they were good, but like I said impressions are vague. What stands out more to me is the feeling of still being in school and getting that little taste of the world out there, without parents, and the freedom that comes with that. So I’m giving this album an extra star for bringing up this memory which is largely forgotten.
It’s hard to give a rating to albums like this because they carry so much weight. I’ve seen documentaries discussing the importance of the synth intro for leading song Baba O’Riley; some of the tracks, like Behind Blue Eyes and Won’t Get Fooled again I’ve heard countless times in countless contexts. If I try to step away from all of that and take the album as an album, it’s okay. Production values being what they were at the time, Roger Daltrey’s vocals are too high in the mix for me; the things that I’d like to hear more of, like Keith Moon’s often spectacular drumming, sit much lower in the background only hinting at the power they must have had in a live setting. Who’s Next is sandwiched between the rock opera Tommy and the previously-mentioned Quadrophenia, and the ambition to be more than a rock band comes across, but because it doesn’t resolve as a narrative, it sometimes feels meandering and lacking focus. Maybe you had to be there at the time.
Many years ago I was reading a collected volume of Leonard Cohen’s poetry that I’d picked up at a second hand bookstore late one evening while waiting for a metro at Place des Arts station. An older woman noticed what I was reading and began talking to me. It turned out that she’d met Cohen a few times many years ago because her late husband was friends with Leonard Cohen’s mentor. She recounted how the first time she met him she was feeling down and wasn’t very talkative; the next time they met she apologized for it, and told him that she’s not always so depressed.
“I am,” he replied.
Five stars.
There’s so much dumb, horny, disreputable swagger here. It’s great. Lust For Life doesn’t have the sheer force of Iggy’s work with The Stooges, but there’s plenty of energy here, and a bunch of great songs. “Neighborhood Threat” is particularly excellent. I gave this a few listens today.
I should note that some of this really hasn’t aged well though. I’m listening and writing this in November of 2025 with the Epstein files in the headlines and songs about lusting after teenagers is not it. Iggy Pop was far from the only musician writing songs that wouldn’t pass today, and as far as that goes, “Sixteen” isn’t among the worst of them. Still, even while acknowledging that music like this isn’t about having an upright moral character (and nor should it be!) it’s pretty gross.
Upon revealing this album my first thought was that I don’t like The Doors. After sitting down with this album, trying to put aside my biases and listen with an open mind, I still don’t like The Doors.
Taken out of the context of the reported importance the band had on the development of counterculture, this is middling blues rock with an above average frontman, but one whose importance is I think greatly overstated due to him dying young.
I get the feeling when I see these lists of supposedly essential records with a heavy bias towards the 60s and 70s it’s just because these lists are largely written by white dudes who were around then and have the access to be published in magazines or in books. And this stuff just reflects the music of their youths, the stuff they were really into before the pressures of every day life, the careers, the families, the bill payments and mortgages took over too many waking moments. I totally get it, I feel the same way about a lot of the music that was around when I was younger and that felt formative in my development as a person, but I don’t think that gives any of it an objective value either.
At least Morrison Hotel isn’t very long.
This is likely going to end up in regular rotation. Catchy and accessible synth pop with a darker edge. I hadn’t heard this album before today, but this might be my favourite thing I’ve come across on here so far.
The White Stripes were inducted into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame a couple of weeks ago, and they’re included on this list, so clearly someone is hearing something I’m not.
I get the overall idea of the band, the stripped down garagey rock n roll that seems like it’s best appreciated in a small, crowded, and sweaty room, but it never comes together for me. Jack White has some interesting lyrics from time to time here, but overall I get the feeling of pastiche that’s filtered through the idiosyncrasies of a two piece band.
I appreciate that Jack White is a huge music fan and has used his platform to promote a lot of lesser-known bands, but that doesn’t make me like this any more.
The short review:
You had to be there at the time. And be on drugs.
The long review:
When I reflect on my music listening life, I sometimes have a twinge of regret that I missed out on the rave scene of the 90s. I had friends into it at the time so I was aware of it in the era when it was underground where the location was only revealed when you showed up to the meeting point. At that time I was going to punk and hardcore shows held at community centres, and if it wasn’t hard and fast and guitar-based, I wasn’t interested. As I’ve gotten older and as my musical horizons have broadened, I realize that I missed something that was interesting and unique, and that really only existed for a short period of time. When you’re young you think things as they exist will carry on forever, not aware of how fleeting it all is. And not that it was all good, because I remember friends feeling absolutely rotten on post-rave Mondays at school coming down from their weekend intake of ecstasy or ketamine.
And listening to this, assuming that this album made the list because it’s some sort of classic of the genre, I don’t seem to have missed anything musically either. I understand that music written explicitly to dance to in an unoccupied warehouse isn’t necessarily going to work in the context of listening in your car on your morning commute, but it’s just so lacklustre. Uninteresting drum programming, limp bass lines, blah synths. The hippy dippy rave culture lyrics are what they are, times have changed. I like electronic music, but this sounds lazy, like it’s a parody of the genre. Maybe I’d feel differently if I was high off my tits in some sketchy warehouse or field somewhere, but in the sober light of morning this is absolutely dreadful.
My first real surprise out of this 1001 albums project.
I didn’t like it at all at the beginning. As a rap album, it doesn’t really flow, it has a jilted and sparse production that sounds like it came out of somebody’s bedroom. And yet somehow about half way through the album I started warming to it. Because, somehow, completely implausibly, this laddish British rap opera works. The actual story here is mundane: guy loses money, guy meets girl, they break up because of mutual infidelity; themes and characters weave throughout the course of the album. It’s so sharply observed that it feels cinematic, the way that “Get Out of My House” ends with a domestic argument that grasps the exasperation when both people are just done, how in “Blinded By The Lights” the detail about going to the door of the club to get phone reception feels so real. You can imagine all of these scenes. There’s a truth in here.
In the first couple of minutes I thought this was going to be a one-star album with yet more questions about how this list was compiled, but I’m happy it’s so much more than that.
I understand the significance of this album, but it wasn’t really doing it for me. The band is super tight, the energy is great, but what was groundbreaking and massively influential in 1962 doesn’t have the same impact today. I preferred it in the background than as an active listen.
I’m not sure if there’s much to say about Zeppelin that hasn’t already been said. Despite leading this album with Immigrant Song, probably the hardest proto metal song they ever wrote, this is overall a quieter and more gentle affair than their previous albums but is by no means sedate. They’re bringing in the folky influences here, the Eastern flavours, and yeah there’s so much myth making about this band, but goddamn, they pulled it off and still have this kind of mystical aura around them despite being the most canonical of rock bands.
I’m not sure who, in 2025, would listen to this unironically. So far my best guesses are guys who have a side hustle selling beard oil or Disney adults. Both groups give me the creeps, though there may be considerable overlap between the two.
Positive, funky, dancey Afrocentric rap. Descriptions of the album mention the house music influence which I hear in some acid basslines, which I think is cool. I don’t have any context or point of reference for this, so it’s interesting to read people’s reviews of this who understand it better, and note how this was a contrast to the gangsta rap that later became a dominant form in rap music. I find the album overly long, but it’s a good listen and something I don’t think I would have come across on my own.
I’ve apparently been living under a rock because while I was familiar with Frank Ocean’s name, I hadn’t heard any of his music to my knowledge, nor was I aware of the hype around him being one of the greatest musicians of his generation. And while this is fundamentally not my thing, as albums with songs about the ennui of rich kids tend not to be, there was more than enough here to keep me interested and listening, and the nearly hour-long running length passes quickly. Glad to be introduced to this.
One of the better things for me about getting older and not participating in music-based subcultures anymore is that I no longer had to pretend to like The Pixies. So it’s kind of a bummer to see this album pop up.
As a band, they’re fine! I understand their influence, but I’ve never really got why they’re THE touchstone. “Velouria” is a good song even if it sounds like a restatement of “Wave of Mutilation” to my ears (which, to be fair, have not listened to The Pixies in quite some time). “Is She Weird” has a neat Cramps-ish vibe, though it mostly makes me wish I was listening to The Cramps instead. Some good bits of melody here and there, but yeah, none of this is making me reconsider my opinions on this band.
I don’t know The Pretenders other than the hits that I would have heard, and Chrissy Hynde has been a huge character for as long as I’ve been paying attention to music.
I’m not finding much in here that particularly grabs me though. It’s all very competent, maybe even more than that because some of the guitar work here is very nice, but without knowing too much about the specifics of this band and the context they were recording and playing in, it sounds to me like they took punk rock as an inspiration, but kind of rendered it more palatable and thus toothless and less exciting. You kind of have the sound, not so much the attitude. It’s fine. Probably nothing I’ll revisit.
If you needed proof that music critics are bourgeois dweebs you can find it in Einsturzende Neubauten being considered to be “industrial music” even though the instrumentation here, jackhammers and angle grinders snd circular saws, belongs much more on the demolition site than in the factory.
This isn’t the EN album I’d choose if I was to only pick one (and they do absolutely belong on a list like this) but it’s in a way their purist expression of their approach to music or sound or whatever you want to call it. It still sounds harsh, verging sometimes into pure noise, is probably unlistenable to most people, and the forty-something years since its release hasn’t dulled it or made it any less abrasive, which is a lot more than can be said about a lot of boundary-pushing or transgressive music.
Self-indulgent and bloated, nothing here justifies the two hour running time. It would be too long at half the length.
There are moments of promise here, and songs like the album opener “Tonight, Tonight” hint at something more dramatic and theatrical than the post-grunge slog that makes up the brunt of this album. I’m not a fan of this band, obviously, but there are songs on Siamese Dream that still stand out after all the years; not so here. There are few memorable riffs, the quiet-loud thing doesn’t work because the guitar tones when it gets loud are so distorted that they don’t have any dynamics; the only thing that really stands out to me is how cringey Billy Corgan’s lyrics are. And that’s putting aside his whiny tone. It’s less angsty and more a parody of angst. Fucking awful honestly. If there’s an identifiable concept or theme running through this album to tie it together, I must have missed it.
You’d think that because Billy Corgan is such an egotistical gasbag that he’d at least be able to back it up with something musically worthwhile, but you’re not going to find it here.
Someone told me once that Richie Blackmore doesn’t repeat solos, everything is improvised as he plays. I suppose in the age of the internet this would be an easy enough thing to fact check, but it’s also the kind of thing, given that he’s an uncontested guitar hero, that feels like it’s true regardless. The thing with Deep Purple is that they’re all virtuosos who, critically, could write and play great hard rock/proto-metal songs. Which mostly makes for a great listen here, because they’re a super tight heavy and energetic band in fine form here, but sometimes I’d rather not be reminded of how impressive the musicianship is when it’s being displayed over lengthy solos. It’s the kind of thing that I’m sure would have been amazing to see and hear if you were in the room with them while this album was being recorded, but when a drum solo is long enough that I could take a long piss break and still have plenty of time to spare before the rest of the band kicks in, ehhhhh. I generally think that punk rock’s rebellion against the excesses of stadium rock was a dead end, but I kind of see the punks’ point here.
I can only imagine how many bongs have been ripped with this album playing in the background.
It’s not just that this is an album with no bad songs, it’s that the songs are across the board excellent. Fantastic album.
I’m not able to contextualize this, so it’s interesting to read what other people who are much more knowledgeable than me have said about it. It’s a decent listen, I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t one of those albums that immediately grabbed me and that I had to listen to again. I guess part of the problem with this project is that with a new album every day, if something doesn’t have an immediate impact, it’s probably not going into rotation so that I can grow with it. Oh well.
Long songs aren’t a problem for me, the problem is when an already long song feels like it’s dragging on forever, which is the case here. The jazzy aspects here were interesting at times, and there were moments I found myself enjoying, but they felt accidental, because they never resolved or built to anything. I’m sure there’s some context here that I’m missing as to why this album is significant enough to merit inclusion on this list, but I’m not hearing it. A real slog.
Interestingly, this album and Feeding of the 5000 by Crass were recorded at around the same time. I looked this up because John Lyndon’s spoken word track “Religion I” made me think of the track “Asylum” that leads off the Crass album, both being spoken pieces highly critical of religion. Seems like there wasn’t any influence in one direction or the other if we’re going on timeframes. Listening to them side by side though, the Crass one gives me shivers even though I’ve heard it countless times; the PiL one, on the other hand, affirms Rotten’s/Lyndon’s snarling “terminal boredom” at the end of “Theme” just before getting into his anti-religious tirade. Which, as compared to Crass’s and its railing against Christian gynophobia and warmongering, is largely about money. Because of course it is. It’s provocative, sure, or at least was at the time, but it all feels like a boy pushing buttons out of boredom to get a reaction. And yeah, I get it, punk rock, but cynical nihilism isn’t the only path here. Which is a shame because when PiL is good, they’re really good. The song “Public Image” is excellent. Overall, I much prefer the bass and drum led rhythm heavy approach of PiL to the rock n roll of the Sex Pistols, just too bad both had a crappy singer.
Maybe it’s pedantic, but this is a compilation drawn from the band’s first two albums plus an EP, so it doesn’t properly belong on this list at all. It sounds like a compilation too, with the music from each recording represented here sounding fairly different. If you have to choose a sort of “best of” album as a representation, maybe the band doesn’t belong on here…
Anyway.
In the earlier part of the 2000s I read an interview with Jim O’Rourke in aMAZEzine where he lamented the subsidies that European musicians were getting. I disagreed with him then, because if we’re paying taxes, why shouldn’t we use some of that money to support art and culture, but in my advancing years, I kind of see his point. There’s a certain way that European bands that play the festival circuits sound. They’re polished, they appeal to masses of people crowded into a field in the daytime. I’m sure it’s a good way to make a living, and when I listen to this so-called album, it sounds like festival music. It’s competent and catchy garage rock, except that it’s meant for big stages. And that doesn’t work for me. I like this stuff when it sounds like it could go off the rails at any time, that it sounds like it’s made by people with day jobs. This isn’t that. I’m not sure why of all the garage bands of the era this particular band made the list, but I’m not digging it.
I wasn’t enthusiastic about this one coming up on here after getting 1971’s Who’s Next early on in the project and feeling lukewarm about the artier aspects of it. The Who seem to have been a better live band than a studio one, there’s just a lot more power behind the songs in a live setting. Keith Moon’s powerhouse drumming is higher in the mix as it deserves to be; Roger Daltrey’s inter song banter gives a nice feel to the recording, and gives you a sense of how engaging the show was live. Not something that’s going to go into rotation for me, but a good listen.
Don’t let the triumphant-sounding synths that kick off Born in the USA fool you, this is perhaps the bleakest album that has ever achieved such massive levels of success. It’s a collection of tales about dying towns, deindustrialization, job loss, broken relationships because of not having work, the kinds of villains who live and prey on the margins. There are flickers of hope here, though it never seems to work out for anyone. Personally, though I like Springsteen, the bombastic 80s production values of this album turned me off and I’ve preferred other of his albums to this one; I’ve been missing out because this is a phenomenal album, and the sound of it works here (even if it ends up sounding dated now) because it gives it a subversive edge. Springsteen is one of the greatest songwriters of all time, no question.
Gothy post-punk. A classic.
Got this one on Christmas Eve so it was a busy day, not one for serious listening. So this ended up being background for a bunch of other things, and it’s a good, fun album. It sounds like they enjoyed making this. I never got into De La Soul despite having plenty of friends who love them, so I’m bumping it up an extra star because I’m sure I’ll like this more with additional listens.
Really good up until the point Phil Spector beefs it at the very end by coming on the record and wishing us a Merry Christmas and thus not allowing us to try to forget that he was involved with this.
This album isn’t available on the usual streaming services, so I had to listen on YouTube, which isn’t ideal, and gets at the problem with everything going digital: if music isn’t on one of the major streaming platforms, it’s almost like it doesn’t exist. That’s particularly a bummer with this because everyone should listen to more Funkadelic. There’s the funk here, yeah, but lots of fuzzed out psychedelic rock, surrealistic lyrics. It’s a lot of fun. This band was tight.
There’s some bonus material on here, which normally I’d skip, but when the bonus is a live version of “Maggot Brain”, the most face melting song ever written, well, I’ll happily make an exception.
Not sure if there are other Metallica albums on here. I understand why this one would be on here if there’s only one, because it was their big mainstream breakthrough album that showed their transition from a thrash band that could pack stadiums to the heavy rock juggernaut they later became. Influential, absolutely, and that a few of the songs on this album still get fairly heavy airplay shows the impact the record had. But their best? Not a chance. Their slower ballads are the stronger songs on here, when they speed up and get thrashy, they did it much better before. Overall, I find the album plodding. It’s far better than what came after it, but not close to as good as the ones that preceded it.
Gary Numan looks like he’s auditioning for Kraftwerk on the cover of this album, and that’s not too far off what’s going on here, though with more pop leanings. I like this era of electronic music before MIDI was introduced; I think the music and the instruments lost something when everything started to be able to communicate in a standard way. There’s this neat vibe to it all that still feels futuristic, that makes me think of a lot of illustration of the era about the technological promise of the future with flying cars and cities built in orbit, when instead we ended up, well, where we are now. Where I’m less enthusiastic about the album is that while I only knew it from the single “Cars” prior to this, I’m not sure the album as a whole brings out many more ideas than those that are expressed in that song. Interesting listen overall.
The world doesn’t need one more word written about this album.
Four stars.
Not to sound old here, but I remember when indie rock bands didn’t write music meant to be used in advertising campaigns.
Ella Fitzgerald is a fine singer but nobody, absolutely nobody, needs three and a half hours of this “you say tomayto I say tomahto” dogshit. I didn’t finish listening to this because I would rather do literally anything else.
Unrelated to this 1001 albums listening project, I came across a list of the greatest bands of all time earlier today. Unsurprisingly, The Beatles were at the top of it. I don’t think this is at all controversial, but it’s also kind of the bummer with these kinds of things, because at least when it comes to rock and pop music, I can’t see anything else having close to the impact that The Beatles had either musically or, maybe more importantly, culturally. All of which is to say that everything Beatles carries a huge amount of weight. And in the case of With The Beatles the significance of their later albums I think has led people to maybe hold their earlier ones in higher regard than they strictly deserve. Half of this album is covers, which serves to highlight how good of songwriters they were on their original tracks, but they don’t quite feel fully formed as a band here yet. The best was still a couple of years off for them yet.
One thing that surprised me a little about listening to this album is how many memories it brought back for me. I remember The KLF getting radio airplay, hearing them in the car with my parents and liking it, though it took quite a few years from that point for me to become casually interested in the group, and that was mainly for non-musical reasons. As for the music, it's dated and sounds like the early 90s, and maybe this is where the memories kick in, but I find it pleasant to listen to. It was always commercially-oriented, the kind of electronic dance music that got mainstream airplay and wasn't relegated to the club or underground rave scene, and maybe it's this commercial aspect--the acid baselines, the way that songs build up--that helps it to work musically better than some other things of this genre.
Where this album merits inclusion on this list though, and I absolutely believe it does, has as much to do with the music as with what The KLF were. They were pranksters, a subversive force in music that when I think of parallels, the only thing that really comes to mind is Throbbing Gristle. And of course Throbbing Gristle wasn't getting airplay on Top 40 radio. This is a group that wrote a book on how to have a hit record without any money or musical talent...and they actually did it. They had the grindcore band Extreme Noise Terror playing alongside them on stage at the Brit Awards. They famously set a million pounds, money that they’d made from their music, literally on fire.
The streaming version of this album is different than the original release. Which all seems to make sense in a way. I listened to the original on YouTube.
Definitely one of the more interesting groups on here. I enjoyed revisiting this.
I listened to this both on the way to work in the car, as I often listen to things, and also while at work while I was working the canning line. I think this is relevant because the thing with this album is that it’s dance music, and the things that work for a dance floor aren’t necessarily the same things that work for listening. And so I liked it better while hearing it while doing a repetitive task. I’m not much of a dance music person, but I’ve long preferred drum n bass to other styles: the breakbeats, the deep bass, the synth pads. This tends more towards the jazzy/funky/soul side of things, but I like it, particularly where it veers into the more abstract, like it does on tracks like “Matter of Fact”. Still, I’m not sure it holds up as an album like other classics of the genre like Goldie’s Timeless.
Throughout this listening project I think there are always questions of why a particularly album made the list, and I’m not sure if this one should have been included. It feels a little too niche. Still I’d probably rather listen to this than some overrated classic rock album.
There's no question that Little Richard deserves to be on this list. If it wasn't for him and his influence, a very substantial chunk of the albums on here would sound very different. As an album worth listening to, as an album that is significant, absolutely five stars.
With that said, even at a little under half an hour, this album felt long to me because it's so repetitive. The music is largely twelve bar blues, enthusiastically played, but the real star here is Little Richard and his wild enthusiasm. It's just that once you've heard the album opener Tutti Frutti, you've kind of already heard how the rest of it is going to go, barring a couple of slower numbers. I once heard someone (who didn't know what they were talking about) say that there was nothing musically interesting in the development of rock music. Which, beyond being wrong, also underestimates how important the cultural aspect of rock music is. And I think Little Richard exemplifies this: the music itself isn't that special, but it's his delivery, his energy, his charisma that turns this into something else.
This is the all time greatest debut album by any band ever. Yeah, there were heavy-ish things that came before this…Deep Purple, Blue Cheer, “Helter Skelter” by The Beatles…but that opening, the sounds of thunder with a church bell tolling in the distance, then Tony Iommi coming in with THAT riff. I’ve often wondered what it would have been like hearing this when it first came out in 1970 and there being nothing remotely like this that existed before. Because fifty five years later (!) it’s still spooky. The riffs, the atmosphere, one of the greatest albums ever written, never mind the massive influence it had and continues to have.
