[mid 2020s cultural critic voice] the repetitive anxiety-inducing refrain in the fourth track of the baritone sax panned hard left with the broad overarching rumbling overture panned hard right is sonically the most accurate depiction of a panic attack ever put to record
now i don't have much historical context for jazz or for this album itself but it's fascinating to me. on repeat listens the frantic and manic mood engendered by the album softened by familiarity into a warm sense of clarity that let me appreciate different performers, different instruments, different moments, etc. it was overwhelming at first in a way that felt cacophonic but there's an internal structure that is quite enigmatic. really enjoyed this. a great first album.
WOULD ESTROGEN HAVE SAVED NICK DRAKE!?
as a professional in the field of transgendering, i'm inclined to say yes. a flamboyant depressed man with an album like this? yeah buddy. seen it a thousand times. drake has a nice soft voice and there's some decent instrumentation between the mellow guitar and the flute which offers decent lift to an otherwise depressing album that makes this at least listenable, but it's largely forgettable mumbling that bounced right off me. something i've said before with art is that i feel like a lot of dead artists (especially young ones) have their work boosted posthumously because people ascribe inherent meaning to the fact that they are dead which i find frustrating.
my biggest problem with this album is that i'm not on coke at a club while listening to it because i think that's quite clearly the intended context. it's not that it's bad but it's just not something i can fully appreciate sitting quietly in my room as the highly repetitive weighed heavily on me. there's pockets of it that are good, such as the title track notably, lady cab driver, and DMSR (probably my fave), but there's so little progression in most tracks that i was itching to skip next after a little while. the blending of funk and synth is quite lovely conceptually though. it's groovy as fuck no doubt where it holds up, but the early synth usage feels primitive in a way that doesn't always endear me because some of the tracks are downright unserious. amazingly i've actually listened to literally zero prince in my life so this was intriguingly new, however my partner said "oh that's not even one of his good albums can i just play that for you instead?" lmfao.
this one is a head scratcher to me. i've know heard some of davis' work here and there, but nothing i can directly place. this album is kinda making me feel insane because i can't tell if i love it or hate it. it's no doubt deeply influential in the way that it is on the forefront of synthesizing modern electric instruments into the body of jazz from a legendary artist, but how do i feel about it as a listening experience? not a clue! to my ear the keyboard and the guitar feel so deeply at odds with the acoustic instruments and i do not know how to synthesize (hah) them. the arrangement of the players (side one in particular) made it feel like i had multiple tabs playing audio at once. it was wildly disorienting, even on a second listen. is it good, is it bad, do i just feel okay with it.... i don't know. normally i have words to describe my feelings on art from experience in doing so even when i lack useful context to make more articulate observations, but trying to parse this feels like asking for my opinion on a sentence said in chinese. i don't know man i don't speak chinese.
misogynistic british new wave slop by a man with an incredibly whiny voice. properly exhausting to listen to, start to finish. that costello maintains to this day that his songs are not misogynistic and that it's the listeners who are the problem? buddy. oh Buddy. his lyrics are so uninspiring and unfunny so it baffles me that he's an artist that people talk about as having good wordplay. it's nothing but whining. even the band itself sounds corny as can be with little in here that sounds better than a half hour of white noise. i'd choose the bear.
it's fine i guess. the singer is noteworthy for having a nice voice but broadly speaking it's forgettable muddy 00s glam rock before they invented parametric eq and mixing. it's really rough. i can't tell if it's the mixing or if the vocalist is just british but i could scarce make out more than a line here or there. the whole aesthetic and vibe of this album is "protagonist band in a high school movie who save the school from a nebulous outside bureaucratic force through the power of song". does that make sense? it kinda makes sense to me. tracks like "friday night" are toe-tappers that i'd hear at 20% volume on the store radio while standing in line at a coffee shop that charged me $7 for a basic latte. your dad probably swears this band is underrated for some reason.
extremely inconsistent. tracks like "if you don't want me to destroy you" and "long gone" are to me probably the most engaging sonically because it feels like they tried to do something interesting with dynamism and the violins that cut through the muddy wall of oversaturated guitars that plague most of the album. this feels like bog-standard forgettable britpop to me so it is bewildering that this is included on a Must Listen list, and given the wikipedia's article retroactive quote about how the vocalist was more interested in fame via a studio than actually making a good record, it seems like he agrees! i think i got baited by pulling mingus as the first album in this list.
pretty solid! i haven't listened to much from CCR but it's hard not to like their sound. i really love how distorted john fogerty's guitar is (well, the whole band, but him as lead) because it's just got such an energy to it and fogerty's got a very interesting voice too. swamp rock is good shit because i was bobbing my head along to pretty much all of it. i don't know if anything particularly stood out though? this was all just Good. "run through the jungle" is probably the most interesting to me. they're doing some crazy ass shit on that track.
metal is a genre that i consistently say that i like but don't listen to enough. thrash in particular is fun, so for an album that's nothing but riffs it's enjoyable. every song is too long though. like, way too long, especially with how much they don't grow or adapt or shift. the title track i genuinely thought i accidentally restarted it before seeing that i was 8 minutes in to the 10 minute track. the album gets monotonous as it goes on because of this lack of growth. the drums on this lowkey suck shit too because they're VERY samey across the album. they're so far forward in the mixes too which draws attention to how they aren't doing anything at all meanwhile the bass is nearly imperceptible. this whole album is an oddball to me in that they show clear capable chops ("one", "dyer's eye") yet it all feels phoned in, mixing aside.
fascinating that this is the album that people cite as what made the public take drum and bass seriously as a genre when to me this album feels like a parody of itself. perhaps it's partially a measure of distance and development in the edm space, but i can't imagine ever wanting to listen to this when breakcore exists ngl. even tracks like "hi-potent" that have Something going on drastically overstay their welcome without expansion. unserious vocals across the album as well.
the sampling of YMO's "lotus love" in "digital" for instance just made me want to go listen to that instead, but it's a great cut. i can't place the horns in "destination" but it's the same thing where there are glimpses of other (and better) records interwoven into The Same Generic Bassline for over 2 hours. "trust me" as an example feels like unchanging purgatory. i could've watched an a movie in the time spent listening to this instead of getting pranked by garbage. complete joke of an album. DNF in full.
really a scathing indictment of the list in this book that an album with such an impact was removed in a later edition. it's not my favourite album from kendrick but it's hard to say that this isn't one of the best and most cohesive hip hop albums from the 2010s. kendrick is such a good storyteller that even an album that is imo not his best is still an all-time GOAT contender. i love that it's billed as "a short film" because to me the emotion across the album feels like a perfectly paced narrative experience. it's reflective and introspective and dense. the kind of album you can always find new angles to appreciate because the songwriting is as sharp as it is layered. exceptional across all fronts.
god the singing here is miserable. nails on chalkboard tier, and the instrumentation does NOT help. the album experience of a bunch of drunk lads poorly shouting incomprehensible songs together inside a pub while you walk by on the sidewalk completely sober. it sure SEEMS like there's music going on, and you assume they're having fun, but you probably plug your ears and walk a bit faster. the garish cover art does this no favors either. feels like a prank album mocking celtic music rather than a revitalization of the genre such as is claimed but what the hell do i know when i don't even know when my dad's side of the family emigrated from scotland.
easy five. saw the genre was "psychedelic soul" and had the instant "oh hell yeah" reaction because this was fantastic start to finish. the hendrix-inspired stratocaster sound here is sublime. there's such an emotive body to it that gives a really strong base for kiwanuka's complimentary vocals. the string arrangements across this whole album are fantastic. like, listening to the violins take the front in "light" while kiwanuka's guitar slowly reverbs across in tandem with the background vocalists? that's what i'm talking about right there. genuinely pretty surprising that this album didn't blow up more. great stuff.
incel rock anthem. half-decent grunge instrumentation, but with the most whiny and angsty vocals i've heard in a minute that are absolutely dripping with misogyny. every single track is expressing entitlement towards woman as sexual objects, plain and simple. "you think i'm scared of girls, well maybe, but i'm not afraid of you" is a real line. cartoonishly bad songwriting. this album is described as being "about a toxic relationship" yeah it's about a guy who is transparently an abusive slimey gross piece of shit who should get a job and stay away from her. the most surprising part about this is when i googled "greg dulli politics" and found an article from 2022 where he (the lead vocalist and songwriter) described himself as a socialist. growth, i guess.
a classic of the bossa nova genre which is yet another genre i'm always saying i should listen to more. this is like a warm blanket to me. joão gilberto's soft vocals and stan getz' soothing saxophone are so comforting. what i find most interesting about the development of the genre is how it was in response to the development of microphones, yet only the lower quality ones available in brazil, so it was intentionally cut back, simplified, and arranged differently. the innovation through the magic of buying two of them giving equality clarity to the vocals and the guitar is a novelty as well. nothing really new to say about an album like this but it's one that deserves all the praise it gets.
it's convenient to not have to engage with the "well it might be a pedophile but at least he makes good music" mental gymnastics because i thought this album sucked. caetano veloso was a chief artist involved in the tropicália movement which was notable both for its contributions to brazilian pop music and also as cultural backlash against the US-backed dictatorship of the time, so objectively speaking this *is* a notable album, but to me the "artistic cannibalism" mentality of tropicália (which on its own is questionable imho) is on terrible display. the usage of the sitar for instance in "eles" which was topical in the west at the time because of the beetles sounds *so* bad here. points for historical notability but that's it.
i..... like this? i'm bewildered. on my first listen i had no clue how to feel about ANY of this because this singing style is baffling but i noticed i was tapping my foot to "talent is an asset" and "in my family" towards the end of the album. there is a LOT that is happening. once i got attuned to the energy, the second listen really grew on me a lot. it's fucking *weird*. incredibly forward looking for this to be a 1974 album in its whole construction. it's like the album itself has a learning curve. not every track hits and i think that's what holds me back from loving this more but this is perplexingly good.
an awkward album to review given the personal subject matter of the tracks and the unfortunate fate of multiple band members. to me though it's just okay. this album leans more on its heavy metal influences which i kinda like but it all feels very samey to me. could jump to any point in the album and not really be able to tell you what song it is. the thing about grunge is that even despite how absolutely fucked everything is rn i'm an perma-optimist *anyway* because the alternative sucks and is antithetical to my mode of being, so the apathetic angst and self-loathing always bounces off me.
a landmark album that if one were to rate solely on consideration of sociopolitical impacts particularly in the american context could very easily make the case for being one of the most important albums in the last 100 years, but you already know that. it's ray charles for crying out loud. that said, as always i rate media based on my personal enjoyment which is the subjective experience of Myself in My particular modern context, and this album is very Of The Times. charles has an incredible voice and it's no surprise why people lost their shit at hearing a bunch of classics covered in such a strong way, but it doesn't quite land for me with the same impact.
it's astounding that this album had as much of an impact on metal as it did when it's pretty much garbage. it all sounds like shit. one of the muddiest albums i've heard in my life so i can't even appreciate the energy of the riffs. the whole album sounds like i'm hearing it through the wall to my neighbor's apartment. it's unclear to me if this is a creative choice or a skill issue but it's nigh unlistenable. the lyrics are hilariously cringe so of course the biggest nazi dullards on the planet in norway took it and ran with it.
impossible to talk about this album without talking about phil spector who is A Right Bastard. just like, WOW, is he awful. i loosely knew of him prior to listening but i didn't appreciate the intensity of *how* evil the guy was, so of course he's widely influential on the development of pop because he figured out how to sell records. "what if we made the record sound like dogshit because we're targeting car radios" is maddening that it was effective because frequently people think louder = better, and boy is this loud!!! it's exhausting. it's quite literally wrong to listen to this on headphones, but either way it's an acoustic brick being thrown at mach 10 at your head. the frustrating thing to me about a cruel tyrant like spector is that i do not believe for a second that his sociopathic torturing of musicians was meritful to the creative or financial success of records he produced. it's all smoke and mirrors in purpose of mythmaking about his supposed 'genius' and the false necessity of suffering to produce great art. merry christmas.
the bewildering britishness of robert dimery's 1001 albums you must hear before you die fascinates me endlessly to include an entry such as this, for this album is wholly unremarkable. it's dusty springfield's middling debut cover album of her favourite tracks, primarily black soul/pop singers, delivered to a british audience. it is not a strong showcase of her capabilities as a singer and it did not even sell exceptionally well either. the producer johnny franz was particularly inspired by phil spector's wall of sound style as suffered previously which to me seems like a blight across albums of this era.
i cannot describe how visceral the feeling of jarring disconnection was in my bones when when the vocalist started. just as i was enjoying the guitar and getting into the feel of the rhythm of the drums, here comes this rabid barking dog ruining the whole thing. no exaggeration i reflexively recoiled in disgust. i might as well have just cracked my window open and waited for my neighbor's dog to start howling once it hears a siren. the vocals on every track are *rough*. i don't know if it's partially based on how edgy the content is or if i just really hate this particular guy's voice, but wow. it was agonizing. metal songs always love to be like 20% too long too so that didn't help either.
an interesting fusion album. i'm a fan of plucked string instruments and a fan of the moog synthesizer, so i was immediately intrigued. if anything i think it could've leaned harder on the moog, but also harder on the sitar for what it is. many of these tracks sound like tracks written in a typical western guitar style, yet played with the sitar instead. the second half of "the ocean" is a highlight for me as once it starts going it starts GOING which kinda gave me a feeling of like, damn you could've been given me that the whole time!? so it's a mixed bag. not quite consistent enough for me to say that i enjoyed all of it, but it's cool for what it is.
i can't think of the last time i listened to the album in full as usually it's just "fast car" that gets airtime, but "baby can i hold you" is slept on i think. tracy chapman's voice is fantastic. even on the tracks that don't work for me as much as the others, her singing is exceptional. she covers a lot of ground here with tracks like "behind the wall" that are quite distressing. chapman carries strong emotion across the whole album, but with the instrumentation stripped back entirely it hits even harder. an album full of love and hope despite every reason to not have either. really great stuff.
this feels like a self-parody album. i mean i bet this probably went really hard if you had never heard music before and were high on novel drugs, but broadly speaking this sounds pretty horrible. the tracks are actively grating for most of the album and it doesn't seem like quality of any aspect was a consideration at any point. there's mediocre whiny singing with lyrics that are either generic 60s countercultural lines or actively low effort nonsense. run some guitars through distortion, poorly play an organ, and call it a day. exhausting.
this is a prank album. i think i am genuinely being pranked. the first song in this album, "people hold on", is a groover. house is a genre that tends to bounce off me, but this opens with a deliciously late 80s energetic track that would be fantastic to dance to in a club. after expectations like that, the rest of the album is "when do they stop tuning their instruments" tier garbage. worse yet, it's "your buddy's first attempt with a DAW" tier. i just want to know what goes into the mind of a person who thinks that this completely unremarkable forgotten english house album that does not exist anywhere except for a single 200 subscriber youtube channel with a big yoshi profile is not only Great, but *essential listening* for one to appreciate the entire body of modern music. madness.
forgettable background music in a low-budget spy thriller. the hacker is IN. i was forgetting this in real time. i'm half convinced that this album included repeats because i earnestly could not tell you a single notable thing about any of these tracks. i don't even know what to make of the weirdly orientalist vibe from the cover or how it shifted from vaguely techno scifi to an indiana jones temp score pillaging an ancient temple. if there's one thing you'd hope from ambient music, it's a good vibe, but the vibe here is simply terrible.
what is that guitar melody in "more than a feeling"? i'm not sure if it's the originator or if it is itself pulling from something else, but i just can't place it. tip of my tongue. given that this is all certifiable Dad Rock on every Top Classic Rock list, i figure i probably have just heard this more than i realize, but i found this monotonous and boring. it's sound that was playing for a little under 40 minutes. mentally while listening to this album i was standing in line at a theme park waiting to get on a roller coaster thinking about what i would have for lunch. it's cool how extremely clean and technically complex this is for something entirely self-produced, but to me it says something about an album when it's more entertaining to read about the sound engineering techniques employed rather than actually listen to it.
not my jam on this one. it's quintessential mid 2000s hip hop which tends to bounce right off me. i don't care for ghostface's rapping style. it feels one note here and largely kinda exhausting, so for a album this bloated in length, i was itching for it to end. could not appreciate the emotion in this at all. it's not Bad i just really would like to listen to anything else than this.
well even if one were to ignore that rod stewart is a racist tory bastard, which one should not, he also has a voice that sounds like RFK Jr with how strained it is. it is physically upsetting to hear his voice. truly a sensory nightmare. some people have a voice fit for miming and they just should not make music. even if i were to strain myself to put attention towards the rest of the production, it's simply not good. anyways again about the racism part which you shouldn't ignore, the title track includes some gross anti-asian racism. yuck. there is nothing redeemable about any of this.
"The majority of the tracks were composed on the spot in the studio, the lyrics not being written until Bowie stood in front of the microphone." BOY does it show!!!! this songwriting is so vapid and empty. the main highlight of this album to me is robert fripp's guitar and brian eno's synthesizers across the whole album, though even then the ambient tracks in the second half are quite uninspiring to me. it's frustrating that tracks like "secret life of arabia" or "sons of the silent age" have such lovely instruments that feel somewhat spoiled by the banality of the writing even if bowie's distant singing is expressive. the title track is the only thing even slightly memorable here.
precisely one note. it's a nice note, but it's one note. "soubour" is the highlight of the album for me because not only is it a very lovely song but by virtue of it being the first track i was not exhausted with the album yet. this is SO guitar forward it's hard to think about anything else. it's practically nothing but the very bluesy electric guitar. i'm not particularly familiar with the fusion genre of desert blues (and ofc it's always anglo-fusion albums here, never anything notable on its own cultural terms, only on anglosphere terms), but the guitar work here is to me the least interesting part, so it's unfortunate that it's so dominant on this album.
incredibly late 80s/early 90s, for better and for worse. it's distilled early 90s edm sound right here, so mostly worse. "what is love" is kinda fun because you can hear some origins of drift phonk here with the periodic synth bass melody floating throughout the song. "E.S.P" sampled ryuichi sakamoto which once again baffles me that this list does not include ANYTHING from yellow magic orchestra (but i digress). the hit single off this album, "groove in the heart", is really not that good. this whole album is somewhat unpleasant and frustrating. tracks like "who was that?" are cartoonish in the derogatory sense, and even rhythmically interesting tracks like "build the bridge" feel spoiled by the bizarre monkey (?) samples.
yeah this was a fucking headbanger. it's nice when an album highly regarded is actually good. the opening duo alone are incredible and that's before we get to rest of the tracks which are a tight 40 minutes of peak thrash metal. not all of them hit for me, "poison was the cure" for instance sounds oddly dry and "dawn patrol" is pure filler for instance, but this whole thing rules. the lyrics are kinda corny and i think in literally any other context i would really hate the whine in dave mustaine's voice, but here it works. the one other thing to note that is that the cod zombies album cover (as ana astutely noted) has a pretty racist caricature of the japanese prime minister which is gross.
coffee shop background music. nothing about this was good, but nothing about this was insultingly grating to my ear. it was just happening for 55 minutes. i actively forgot every track as i listened to it.
another acutely forgettable 70s brit rock album, but this time it's doing their best david bowie impression because for some reason bowie encouraged the band to keep producing shit. the opening track "all the way from memphis" is probably the most interesting on the album with its sax and piano which unfortunately gave me hope that this album would maybe be Something. everything else? distinctly nothing. i think it's a marvelous feat of illusion to trick the audience into thinking they're listening to music for 40-odd minutes where at no point could i focus on a particular moment that anything actually happened. pure dissociation fuel.
an interesting concept with really good singing, but even clocking in at a mere 33 minutes, this felt dreadfully slow. it's nice! but slow. maybe i'm just too much of a coastal-elite urbanist city slicker to appreciate outlaw country, but also even for as nice as wilie nelson's singing is, i do generally prefer female vocalists as a side note. this whole album is quaint and charming, but that's about it for me. my only real in roads to country, aside from country-influenced artists who i like (eg, faye webster), is my late grandmother's obsession with garth brooks. it all sounds nearly identical to me.
now i'm not just saying this because ana has me at gun point, but i enjoyed this a lot! i really love the guitar tones over the course of this album. they all sound fantastic, especially with those delicious synths in there too. it's the kind of album that makes me want to lay in bed with headphones on to appreciate every bit of the instrumentation so i appreciate how clear the mix is. i'm late to the game on an album like this so me saying "yeah this sure does evoke a strong mood" is another drop of water in the ocean, but hey so it goes.
historically notable, but woefully uninteresting to me. the aspects of this album that made it novel to audiences in the 60s are so trite in the modern era that it's hard for me to find any appreciation for this. it's quintessential early garage rock. it is exact what you think it is, nothing more and nothing less, for 30 minutes.
out of the twenty eight tracks here, i think "always crush me" might be one of the only songs that made my ears perk up because i *really* like the guitar tone which plays to the distorted strength of lo-fi. the rest of this though? absolutely miserable. some of the most grating whiny singing i've heard in a minute. this is basically a demo album. it's a disjointed scattershot mess of half-baked ideas thrown at the wall then discarded just as quickly. this is the unfinished rough draft of a maybe decent album that for some reason they gave to the famed mastering engineer bob ludwig to make any of this listenable. audio engineering is such an art and a skill. it's unfortunate that it was talent wasted here.
milquetoast forgettable bland britpop. there is at least one interesting track, "breakdown", the only one i cared to learn the name of which has a sense of epic scale to it that is enjoyable. the rest of it though? pretty rough. it's not aggressively bad it's just kinda Nothing, ya know? it's aggressively british though, that's for sure. brett anderson's vocals are just awful. that's probably why "breakdown" is the best track on here to me because he's at least trying to sing there instead of just whining and it takes a back seat to the generally solid instrumentation. but on the whole? i already forgot all of it.
the thing about the suburbs is that the suburbs are ontologically evil. how that precisely relates to this album is unclear, but this album is middling for me. it wallows in the ennui of "the feeling" as a reoccurring theme both lyrically and sonically for this is an album that feels like it is stuck in stasis. it is perfectly safe, it is unchanging, and it is seemingly endless. the sprawl of this album feels all-consuming. it's cookie-cutter melodies and emotionally flat repetition. i don't understand how they do so little with such a varied assortment of instruments, but the languid vocal style does no favors.
a real banger! look at that. i'm generally a fan of synthpop, but this was really fun start to finish. very late 2010s in its general style and production. the english and french version of each song is intriguing to me but i have to question why? perhaps a linguistic mirroring of the nonbinary vibes of the album and of rahim (he renamed), but it's nearly double the work to translate each track. the songs seem like they alternate between which was written with english in mind vs french, so i have to wonder why not just have it be a single bilingual album in the first place as i feel like it's drawing my attention towards the differences (or lack-thereof) between the two halves rather than appreciating the merits of the album on its own (plus it's double the length). i feel like most of the english versions hit a bit harder anyway. this whole thing rules though.
delightful easy listening jazz. this trio of bill evans, scott lafaro, and paul motian is fantastic. the first half of this album doesn't overly stand out to me other than as simply very nice to listen to, but "alice in wonderland" and "all of you" in the second half are sublime. easily the best on the album. the second half is so energetic i wanted to bounce out of my chair. the soft chatter background of the club is so delightful atmosphere too. deeply tragic that lafaro was killed in a car crash two weeks at such a young age after this performance because his talent is otherworldly. another note in the long list of reasons why society should move beyond the automobile.
if this were maybe half as long it might've been a three from me, but this is sixteen tracks of increasingly monotonous depressive indie rock. i had a headache by the end of it and feel like i just existed a fugue state. it starts okay with the most early 2000s sad guy mid-budget drama film opening montage type shit i've ever heard, but it really doesn't go anywhere from there. maybe it should've gone to get some estrogen, i don't know. i find elliott smith's singing to be deeply tiresome. the whisper softness and the way it's processed in particular very quickly started making my eye twitch.
whiny misogynistic divorce-core trash. a little funny that from my initial read of "freedom at 21" was "wow, is *appallingly* misogynistic" which is what me listen closer so of course when i look at the wikipedia article jack white's response to this criticism was "no it's about *technology*". Sure bud. pretty much start to finish it's nails on a chalkboard singing over instrumentation that alternates between insipid and uninspired. shoutout to the pedal steel guitar on the title track which made me think of better albums.
turning in my woman card i guess because geez this was not good. i'm a little bewildered by the opinions that this is a great rock album or even contains particularly strong feminist themes. it doesn't help that i find her singing to be very offputting, but to me this is.... very second wave if anything. it's very cis, it's very het, it's very white, and very middle class. i don't know how else to put it. a stepping stone of the times but listening to it today it's not exactly pleasant.
i can't say for certain but this might've been worse than being waterboarded. i mean it probably isn't, and i do have to appropriately credit the ska revival movement's counter-cultural influence on racial tensions given the (white) nationalist trends in thatcher-era britain, but also this was pure agony to get through. i don't know how much i weigh historical importance against my personal enjoyment, but i know that i'm leaning on it pretty hard here. elvis costello, a man who haunts me, is a terrible producer. the misogyny in the second half is again tiresome.
there's a lot to appreciate musically about this album. i actually really like the inclusion of the flute in opposition to the complaints that flutes "aren't rock" or whatever. it's utilized well and helps vary the texture across these tracks which all sound pretty good. there's a little elephant in the room though in that despite a.... we'll say good-natured attempt at covering a variety of dark themes, it does not handle them well. it's the kinda thing that if i did not understand english i'd be throwing this on talking about how hard it slaps, but instead i listen to any of the lyrics and tug at my collar a bit. it's of the times, that's for sure.
a completely unremarkable album across virtually every metric beyond its baffling inclusion in this particular list. these vocals sound like gravel and broken glass. there is no standout track or notable distinction beyond the rest of the chaff in the 90s chasing the high of the seattle sound with seemingly zero innovation on the genre or creative expansion. it's firmly derivative and this might as well be white noise for 45 minutes. do i give points for baseline technical competency of playing an instrument? i don't think i do.
distinctly early 90s east coast hip hop, both good and bad. it's completely fine. i generally tend to lean more towards west coast hip hop since that's a lot more of what i've heard, but this is solid. the production is clean and i really like his flow. i don't think it's super notable if only because contextually i feel like he is overshadowed by his peers, but almost all of these tracks if i heard a friend play them i'd be tapping my foot saying "oh, classic". the main exception is "da bichez", which i really don't think i need to explain why "no i'm not misogynistic i just [vile misogyny]" is Bad.
grueling and physically painful. i feel drained. i do not know how to describe this in any way other than in varying degrees of agony. quintessential god-awful britprop is what this is. i don't even know where to begin. the singing? does this even qualify for such a word? it's somewhere between screeching and whining where he arbitrarily decides which vowel he is going to hold for far too long with inane lyrics that are entirely meaningless. the instrumentation is white noise. this is a national prank from britain, yes? surely it must be. i simply refuse to believe that this a real album that people think is listenable, let alone great.
misogyny moment. jack white sucks so much. he's just *whining*. that's all he does! it's either stupid lyrics ("i think i smell a rat") that he doesn't even deliver well, or it's pure incel nice guy bemoaning ("i'm finding it harder to be a gentleman"). insipid nonsense dreck. it'd be one thing if the instrumentation was at least to my taste but it's forgettable garage rock. nothing positive to say here.
i don't think this is very good. there's moments in "whole lotta love" and elsewhere that show sparks of something that enjoyable to me but mostly this was just There. it does not help that the singer's voice is pretty grating to me, so the lecherous lyrics across the album prompted a lot of "ICK!!!" which is unpleasant. i gave this one two listens just to see if maybe i needed to hear it again after the first listen washed over me, but by the second go around i detested it given the band's extensively noted pedophilia. historically notable for being proto-metal, but this was exhausting.
honestly i'm kinda surprised i hadn't listened to this before because i love ballads and her voice is sooooo nice to listen to. it's probably a little too self-indulgent in a way that becomes a bit samey as it goes on for about forty five years, plus this is sooooooo mid-00's in styling and there's only so much i can stand of that, but i really enjoyed the jazz and soul influences on this. it's all very well suited to complimenting her voice. it's all a bit het for me as well given how many songs are about men, but even still she carries a lot of emotion making it reasonably impactful.
a whole lot of Nothing. just nothing at all to report on this one. i started it, it happened for 40 minutes, and then it ended. i don't even like actively hate it because it's not objectionable it's just.... there. i gave it a relisten and even still i have nothing to say about this. it's like there's a antimemetic field surrounding this album. it's a bit of guitar noodling while he sings about whatever over top. i find the concept of someone saying "oh yes, That's my jam right there" to be baffling.
when i first was pulling this up it didn't immediately click in my brain as The Sex Album until i heard the opening notes. the most immediate "oh yup, easy five" in ages. it's basically a meme at this point just how sexual this album is, but it's pretty much perfect. incredible talent by marvin gaye to execute so precisely on the vision of this album in such a timeless way. even beyond the title track which i was already well acquainted with, every track on here is a standout track on its own. simply an all-timer, no notes.
this opens with a middling rock track with repetitive racist lyrics, and it really does not get much better from there. repetition is one thing, though i'd prefer it not be racist, but the repetition here isn't meritful. repetition is one thing, but the repetition here is basic and uninteresting without vocal delivery that makes it feel impactful. the instrumentation itself is Fine but there's little here that inspired any excitement from me. i bet my dad probably loved this before he killed himself.
precisely okay. mostly i think this is not something that overly interested me, or perhaps i was just not in the mood for it, as i can see why someone would enjoy this a lot. cohen has a nice calming voice over top very relaxing instrument. his lyricism and general style to me feels more evocative of poetry than traditional songwriting, such is how folk often leans. all of these broadly blur together in a way that makes me want to sleep, but it's Nice to listen to at least.
super inconsistent in a way that made me extremely unsurprised to learn this was made in a cocaine fugue state, but i actually kinda like it. most of this bounces between Kinda Nice and Existing, though on a second list it grew on me a lot. the title track is unquestionably the standout, but i like "word on a wing" and "wild is the wind" a lot too. i don't know if i'd ever seek out putting this record on, but i enjoyed listening to it. the note that i've been given about bowie is that even if you hate one era you might like another because he's all over the place so i can see glimpses of that here. musically, this is a wild mess of influences, and that's something i appreciate.
a real certified Classic right here. it's been a while since i've last heard it, so this was relatively fresh to me. "genesis" is an astoundingly good opener track which is such a clear inspiration for a lot of other electro house. can't say i love every track though! i completely forgot "the party" or "DVNO" existed for instance, both of which i dislike. i don't think the addition of a vocal track works to the same degree that it does in something like "D.A.N.C.E" which to me feels more in harmony. outside of the opener and maybe "waters of nazareth" (LOVE how distorted it is), "stress" might be my favourite because it's kinda giving drakengard 1 OST. strong praise there. it's aptly named because i really love the frantic paranoid energy carried through. dare i even say it's kind of horny? maybe that says too much about me. anyway, this album slaps.
a bit middling. much like jared leto tron ares, i also like depeche mode, but primarily through the lens of their popular hits played at clubs or via whichever trans person i am hanging out with who has control of the aux. in other words, i've never actually sat down to listen to an album in full outside of maybe their seventh album "violator", and this is precisely Okay. it's enjoyable to listen to yet at the same time it's just.... There. i don't know if there's anything that really stands out here to me. i'm a fiend of 80s synth but i don''t think this has aged overly well, all things considered.
solid. this is the kind of record that i think i might be able to appreciate a little more if my knowledge of musical theory was more refined, particularly in the sense of how this plays around with its time signatures. i recognize it and acknowledge it, but i don't think i have a sophisticated enough understanding of jazz to enjoy this beyond just liking it. the sax is probably the highlight for me across this as it often is because damn if i don't love a good saxophone. this feels like quintessential relaxed cool jazz which i suppose is self evident given that we're talking about the dave brubeck quartet after all.
oh hell yeah. i gave another record from metallica a middling rating and people assumed that meant i hate them despite my enjoyment of metal, but this one slaps hard. i actually don't know if i've ever listened to it in full. some of the tracks are probably a bit too long as it tends to be with metallica, but this is pretty electric the whole way through. the title track is just great. "disposable heroes" is another great one with how much it chugs. delicious stuff. they carry the energy well here in an album that very easily could feel too samey after a while.
not to my taste very much. the vocals here by margo timmins are absolutely gorgeous to listen to, but that's kinda it for me. this whole thing is SLOW. i like a lot of slow music, so maybe i was just not quite in the mood for it here, though everything was all is in service of the vocals which mean there was little elsewhere to look. her voice is pretty angelic, don't get me wrong, so i can definitely see the appeal. just on the whole this wasn't doing much for me. it all kinda blurred together into background noise.
significantly stronger instrumentation than the previous album i heard of theirs. i still don't think i love it but there's much more to appreciate here. most of my attention is towards the drumming of john bonham as i really like what he's doing here. the guitars are good and flashy, but i don't think they'd work without how punchy the drums are. on the other hand, i still really do not like robert plant's vocals. i find him to be deeply offputting. the opener tracks and the closer "when the levee breaks" are probably the highlights. bit of a lull in the middle.
this was honestly really forgettable which i was not expecting. i've heard d'angelo here and there so i'm familiar with how lovely his voice is, but this album felt repetitive, samey, and simplistic. like his voice is *so* good and he's so smooth, yet there's little that stands out to me here. these songs just feel under developed. it doesn't help that he doesn't particularly vary his vocal style here either leading to a number of tracks that to me are missing any dynamism that might make them stick more. "when we get by" for instance is the same refrain for 6 minutes with little deviation across any channel. it's tiresome.
well they've got a nice aggressive kick drum that makes me want me to nod along for 30 minutes. that counts for something, right? nothing about this feels particularly novel or original though, so it's largely forgettable, but it's got a strong energy that almost makes me think i'm appreciating something more noteworthy. i find the arrogance of a compilation release for their third album to be obnoxious though. maybe this is a hot take as i've not really thought too hard on it, but i feel like "best hits" albums are entirely commercial in a way that makes them antithetical to art. a necessary evil (this album exists to target a UK audience), but re-releasing tracks without new performances or reprises or extras or anything is just so *boring*. the creative equivalent of beige paint.
who LISTENS to this? it's kermit the frog singing over an acoustic guitar about how sad and lonely he is. "a man needs a maid" a man needs to get a job and stay away from her!!!! this is practically white noise to me. it's rambling drivel. some of them are almost decent to my ear in terms of their instrumentation, but i cannot get over his voice. nails on chalkboard. the highlight of this are the extended instrumental sections such as on "words" where i could listen to music.
my issue with a jam album like this is that i feel like it's pointless to package into an album? i don't think i feel like this about live albums in general because i think different performances of a song can have a lot of artistic merit. an album like this though feels meandering and unfocused. it feels like background noise. to me the primary value as jamming for an audience is the experience of *feeling* live music in a way that you fundamentally cannot get while sitting at home. it's not even that any of this outright sounds bad to my ear and more that it feels like nothing.
something i appreciate about prog rock is that it's incredibly indulgent. that's an aspect that can most definitely be a negative sometimes, but you have to appreciate and respect the attempt at creating an epic. an album like this just makes me want to sit back and let it wash over me. the pianos, the woodwinds, the synths, the drumming, the extensive range of guitars, etc etc. it's all so Much, but i gotta admit i enjoy it a lot! it helps that everyone here is an incredibly talented musician. the chorus to "i know what i like" sounds great to me and is where i knew this was gonna be a banger after the killer opener, but all of "firth of a fifth" is pretty much gold. i appreciate the general whimsical nerdiness of the thematic topics, but i'm a real sucker for the grand orchestral feeling evoked.
must i? i mean honestly, must i!?? i don't think i like elvis from the little i've heard generally, but i especially do not like him here. i don't like how he sings. the way he garbles out the lines is off-putting to me. maybe his earlier records are tolerable beyond the hype, but for a 1969 album, this feels dated by 10-20 years at least. this is his 10th studio album yet it is This generic creatively? like what are we doing here? he's just kinda hooting and hollering over some incredibly basic instrumentation. he went to memphis seeking the southern soul sound, but Where Is It, elvis? it ain't here!
i do not get reggae at all. every track of this sound indiscernibly identical to me. the raggae beat, played straight or shuffled, is maddening. every track is an obnoxious slow beat with a bit of strumming here and there. the album is not catchy or interesting; it's just endless repetition. "concrete jungle" is the closest i got to liking a song, and that was just the opener! points for being politically radical i guess, but this was miserable and headache inducing.
solid. i think i could go up or down depending on my mood, but this was solid. it's peculiar, most notably his mumbling style of singing, but i think the genre-blend atmosphere created here is interesting for the most part. the parts of it that felt like they were plainly folk rather than leaning on the jazz or psychedelic influences were the dips for me. "dreams by the sea" for instance is pretty good, so i could see this album warming up for me over time if i ever happen to throw it on in the future.
the thing about this is that i actually like a fiddle in the right context. i kind of expected this to be completely unlistenable because of how bad the production is and how bad of a concept this album is ("punk rock country" jfc), but somehow the instrumentation isn't the problem. it's almost good at points even for strangled everything sounds, except for one tiny glaring issue: the vocals. i'm convinced they just recorded the audio from whichever piss drunk blokes they found at their local pub that were bellowing nonsense. genuinely headache inducing. incredible work.
i listened to this earlier today, completely forgot that i even did, listened to it again, and still have nothing to say. it's just There. the lead vocalist has a voice like sandpaper and there's nothing musically that feels noteworthy to me. maybe this hits more for the british listener because to me this is the most typical and forgettable british new wave that i could imagine. i have listened to this twice and i honestly cannot recall a single track. i don't know how they do it.
britpop is rarely good in the best of times, but a band with a lead singer whose wikipedia page has a "Personal Life - Views" section is never a positive sign. once again though it's nice that i don't even have to weigh that against the quality or content of the music because this just sucks. it's monotonous. technically speaking, the psychedelic rock (read: reverbed to hell unpleasant guitar tones) found in this album is the precursor to britpop, but it's all so identical it's difficult to spot the difference. it's an indictment of british music that this is pointed to as one of britain's best albums of all time.
pretty good! i feel like bossa nova can often sound very stagnant stylistically, but it's not a bad style by any means so i am not complaining. when your dad is the guy who pioneered the genre, you've got a free pass anyway. gilberto's voice is delightful to listen to, with the title track and "bananeira" probably being the clear standouts to me. i love the energy here and the soft electronic inclusions across the album because it is deeply relaxing. part of me does have to wonder why this particular album of hers is considered noteworthy beyond its commercial success, though the tragic death of the producer in a studio fire is very unfortunate.
i detest the dearth of creativity in an album like this. this is derivative trend chasing with nearly zero originality. four bozos who heard the beatles and thought "fuck, we could do that too!" who produced this. simplistic garage rock guitar instrumentation with mediocre psychedelia elements in a broadly unappealing attempt at soul. throw in some flutes and an organ too because why not. it's not even that this album is technically subpar or that they can't at least sing decently, but i hate everything that this represents. this is not an album in conversation with its contemporaries; it is an album that merely echos the innovations of others. had i heard this released today i might've assumed it was generated by suno.
i enjoyed none of this, but i do find it interesting entirely for its production. not because the production is good, heavens no, but because it's so bad. i think music production (and audio engineering in general) is a topic that can be broadly nebulous in its meaning because it covers so much but also because without some level of knowledge or experience it's quite abstract to the listening experience. here, it's a great case study in poor production given the album's notorious rushed original job, but also the 20 year later remix. to me each mix showcases something different: the former demonstrates the ample time needed for the technical skill required, and the latter demonstrates that it also takes a significant amount of creative skill that not all possess. i just think that's neat. also, iggy pop is a pedophile and pedophilia is bad.
"motorcrash" is incredibly goofy but that's fr how it feels to be a cyclist. welcome bjork to the war on cars. anyway, i've actually listened to very little bjork somehow, but she's the standout here to me. she's just fun to listen to. even in the tracks like "birthday" which lyrically are !?!?!?, her range and flair are really enjoyable. the other guy's vocals? no offense to him but the comparison is not favorable to him. musically this feels pretty standard late 80s alt rock with a bit of an abrasive edge that works well for bjork's voice, so even if this album wasn't even meant to be a major artistic statement from the band, i think it holds up alright. enjoyable, if uneven. key takeaway is that i guess i need to listen to bjork more.
i don't really know how to feel about an album this varied across its style as it is simply Weird. this feels like less a genre blend and more a genre cacophony because as an album this does not exactly flow or congeal together in my view. tracks are wildly hit or miss for me depending on whichever particular musical leaning they opt for. unsurprisingly i dislike the ska-tinged tracks, but the funkier tracks like "bonin' in the boneyard" with its disgustingly good bassline or the eclectic tracks like "one day" with its delicious guitar tone are a delight, though the repetitiveness of much of the lyricism does weigh on me over the course of the album. on the other hand, i appreciate how thematically forward it is in terms of its social commentary, so on the whole this is a very mixed bag.
it's not terrible, but it's formulaic and repetitive in a way that is highly revealing over the course of its arduous double length. it's 82 minutes of gospel music where over top a very bluesy instrumentation nick cave morosely meanders through biblical reference after biblical reference with a generally conservative slant about society layered in with a choir. every song broadly follows the same structure which grows tiresome by the end. to his credit there's decent poetics in his song writing, enough that it's a little difficult to dig into fully on a first listen, but i can't say i'm exactly eager to when they feel broadly aimed at ostentatious pretension with he overall framing of this. plus i just do not give a shit which jesus boy thinks about morality or art.
it's a little funny that this is the type of shit conservatives had a moral panic about when it's incredibly tame. i detest christian fascists. on the whole i like this, though it's not without faults. it feels dated but that's primarily because it's so clearly a blueprint for a lot of albums. a poor decision for them to choose "gangland" instead of "total eclipse" on the B side since the latter is Simply Better. it's all pretty solid, but to me the undeniable standout is "hallowed by thy name". what a great track right there. i love how melodic the guitar is. bruce dickinson's vocals are broadly good here and they're Very Good on that track. thematically the album is mixed with a track like "run for the hills" is explicitly decrying the genocide of native americans by european settlers, meanwhile there's "22 acacia avenue" which is an exhausting screed against prostitution. give me a break.
precisely okay to me. i've not heard little simz before but i can see her talent, even if this didn't work that much for me. the immediate thing is that her flow is really pleasant. across the album her delivery is consistent and well-paced. i have to wonder if this is an album i would warm to on future listens because "sherbet sunset" is an immediate standout. i respect the vulnerability on a track like that. "flowers" as well featuring michael kiwanuka whose self-titled album i recently gave a five too is just really nice. probably will keep an eye out for simz in the future.
if this were a video essay about the architectural style this would be an easy five but nooooo it's music. i didn't really know what to expect going in (ana thought i'd hate it), but it's not bad. "the passion of lovers" is really interesting. the way that track opened with the bass made me raise my eyebrow for the rest of the album. "in fear of fear" might be the best to me on here because that bass is *very* nice to listen to. it's all pretty back and forth between songs that have some groove and songs that just Don't. i kinda love how much this sounds like shit too tbh. the vocals are terrible and they know it so they throw it in the back of the mix and cake the whole thing in enough reverb that it sounds like he's singing through a can and it somehow kinda works? bizarre. ZERO clue why there's a random reggae track though.
ana noted to me that because it's sung in her accent, i might be one of the few US listeners who can actually understand what the lead singer is saying, and you know what? i could! completely intelligible to me lol. did i like the music though? now that's a whole other question. it's completely fine. to me every song sounds the same. it's a fine sound with a good aggressive energy, but it's the same sound for forty minutes, and that's about it. toe tapping at points but not something i'm liable to seek out because it all blurred together.
being a talking heads fan is hard because on one hand you've got some of the best albums ever produced, but also half the band Fucking Sucks, and even david's a union buster so you just can't win (though his extensive cycling advocacy... i'll give him a pass). tom tom club with the half of the band that sucks, it's really average. you entirely have to consider it in context of talking heads' albums because this was at the time a side project, and it just does not hold a candle to remain in light (1980) or speaking in tongues (1983). it's painfully average, frankly. there's no spark to it. i have "genius of love" in my playlist, specifically from the stop making sense (2023) remaster because that version is drastically better than the studio recording, but that's it. only "wordy rappinghood" has anything else to offer with this album. the rest of it is hot air.
an album lost at sea with no direction of what it wants to be. there's glimpses of something maybe okay, but it's turn of the century british rock that tries to hit on every genre under the sun, so what is there to expect? it's such an uninspired time in music. there's a million albums like this where you could exchange any song across any rock album from around this time and the average listener would be none the wiser. the idea that this is an important or notable album in any capacity is such a joke.
pretty forgettable noise rock, seemingly only buoyed by occasionally pleasant guitar work. the immediate issue to me here is that it's just not *interesting*. you've got the classic american shouty-wailing angsty type rock vocals especially popular around the early 2000s singing about nothing, largely uninspired simplistic bass/guitar/drums instrumentation (barring the brief sax on "white devil" that gave me false hope), and a lot of bog standard distortion drenching the whole thing. it's just so unbelievably boring. i'm on occasion a fan of noise-oriented genres (i'm a trans woman after all), so even if we're talking about this album in historical context rather than as a standalone today, it's not even remotely representative or noteworthy.
i know the point of this is to be low tempo and chill but i bet this would go hard nightcored. this album is simultaneously pleasant background music and also incredibly boring. it's nice to listen to, but nice in the "it's better than no music and i wouldn't want to turn it off but i wouldn't seek it out either" way. it's inoffensive is what it is. you could throw this on at low volume in a lot of different contexts and nobody would have any issue with it, but i also don't think they'd ask what's spinning. it's not that its forgettable; it's simply not something to be focused on.
two weeks ago when i listened to nick cave's "abattoir blues" i primarily noted that it was boring, repetitive, pretentious, and i disliked cave's transparently conservative views in his songs. in this album seven years recorded seven years prior, 'ole jesus boy lays it on even thicker with even worse singing. there's some decent piano instrumentation, but it's astounding how off key he is for seemingly every line. i feel like unpleasant vocals are a particularly common gripe of mine (given that i generally prefer a woman's singing and this list is absurdly male), but this genuinely nails on chalkboard tier. the way cave talks about women on this is so gross. get a job and stay away from her, weirdo. misogyny moment.
y'all mind if some goofy white boys get a little funky with it? the sampling is *really* interesting here in a way that feels drastically ahead of its time and i enjoy how the three of them bounce off each other, but at the same time every song sounds the same. the delivery across every track is identical such that it all broadly blurs together. i find it a bit exhausting. i can see why someone would like this, though not really as a full album. the flow is so samey that i feel like you could cut any of these tracks together and the listener would be none the wiser. fun in bursts, at least.
this album fucking rules. start to finish, nothing but bouncing-off-the-wall energetic bangers. i WOULD insist on poorly dancing to this at a function, i'll have you know, and i'd be right for it! it's hard to pick a favourite because it's all exceptional, but the title track might be it for me. it's electric. i really love the vocals from rubén blades who has a fantastic voice for a genre like this and is complimented wonderfully by these trombones. i'm a big fan of the piano montuno rhythm too because even when it's de-emphasized in the background it carries the momentum so well. really catchy in a way that i find doesn't get stale. fantastic album.
