I feel bad rating this album as low as I am, but man this is just way too maximalist for me. Every other second there's some random studio sound effect or vocal delay or distortion or harp or chimes or 128-track harmony that it's just exhausting to listen to. At times it feels like listening to a kid fuck around in garageband and I'm begging the album to just stay still for 2 seconds.
Because I am a person with ears, I've heard Bohemian Rhapsody about a million times, and it's still a great song, but when almost every song on your album is Bohemian Rhapsody levels of elaborate it gets very tiresome very fast. I'd also argue that the reason Bohemian Rhapsody is so good is that there's some level of restraint to the studio effects.
Speaking of, my favorite song on this is actually '39 - I really like it when Queen put away the studio equipment and let the song speak for itself.
I realize that telling Freddie Mercury to have some restraint is like telling a bird not to fly, and it completely misses the point of his appeal, but this is just really not my bag. I totally get why people would enjoy this and rate it so highly though.
If you want to hear the missing link between hard rock and metal, you could do a lot worse than this record. Thick, meathead riffs combined with genuine virtuosity keep this album interesting while still being fun. This is a really great album to listen to if you want to dip your toes into metal.
'Speed King' is of course a classic, but 'Flight of the Rat' is a particular standout for its wonderful interplay between the drums and guitar, and its almost funky beat at times. You rarely feel the length of the longer songs and Deep Purple never lose sight of the riffs that hold their music together. It's surprisingly heavy for 1970, which makes it all the more impressive.
Half a point off for your typical 70s hard rock/metal cliches, such as occasional falsetto abuse, guitar solos that get a tad bit overindulgent, and the orgasm vocals at the end of 'Child in Time' (yes dude, we know you have sex, good for you). But none of this is enough to really affect my enjoyment of the album. Logically I know that because of the above issues, this is more like a 4-4.5, but in my heart it's a 5.
Great album, historically important to the development of metal, absolutely deserves to be on here.
Blows my mind that people hate Octopus' Garden, what a fun song.
Anyways it's hard to rate albums this famous. I've heard the hits from this album about a million times growing up, so I can't really look at them objectively.
That being said I was pleasantly surprised to notice the use of Moog synthesizers that I never picked up on as a kid, neat to hear electronic experimentation by a band that's worshiped by the kinds of people who hate electronic music, lol. It's always done in a tasteful way and is never overbearing or gimmicky. The drums throughout are amazing, especially on songs like 'Bathroom Window'.
The mixing is beautiful, all the songs feel incredibly lush. The medley was mesmerizing to listen to. Also pretty poetic that the last two songs the Beatles ever made feel like echos of their early career, with The End starting off as more straightforward pop rock and Her Majesty being an unabashed lighthearted love song.
I genuinely can't really find anything to criticize, I mean even Maxwell's Silver Hammer is weird in a funny way and not an annoying way (at least to me). Just a really pleasant album.
This album is extremely 2007. Given I'm not a huge fan of 2000s indie rock this wasn't a good thing. I do like the church organs and the grandiose feel of a lot of the tracks, which gives the album a distinct sound and feel, but the album sometimes collapses under the weight of the hipster rock tropes it unfortunately applies far too often.
I also never understood this era's obsession with slathering a shit-ton of reverb over the vocals. It makes it hard to understand the lyrics for no reason and just makes you sound miserable and distant, but beyond that, it deeply annoys me for reasons I can't explain.
Speaking of, maybe I would connect more with this album if I grew up in a suffocating religious environment, but since religion was a non-issue in my childhood the lyrics kind of just remind me of all the obnoxious new atheists clogging the internet 15 years ago. More of a me issue than an issue with the album itself though, I imagine this would connect a lot more if you did grow up in that environment.
Cool album cover though. 2.5/5
Great production and sampling, great features, but its a bad bad sign when the weakest part of a rap album is the main artist's rapping. This is not helped by the fact that a lot of Kanye's lyrics are laughable now that he's gone full mask-off. Even with that the album's still pretty good. Not good enough to justify a 10/10 Pitchfork review, and certainly not good enough to justify why we all collectively decided to put up with Kanye for however long, but still.
Dysfunctional relationships never sounded so good
Never listened to this before but it might be one of my favorite albums now. Somehow both cynical and warm, finding beauty in what others would consider ugly.
'Perfect Day' would sound insanely corny coming from almost anyone else, but this love song sounds a lot more sincere when you know it comes from the same guy who wrote 'Walk on the Wild Side'. You know when someone who never smiles laughs at a joke, and it's more meaningful than hearing someone laugh who laughs at everything? It's like that.
This is an incredibly frustrating album, because when I read the lyrics, some of them are actually heartbreakingly beautiful, like 'Already Dead'. But Beck does this 90s/2000s indie rock thing of refusing to enunciate anything clearly, so the lyrics just turn into 12 tracks of sonic mush. Great poetry collection, terrible album. Fuck you for pairing such great lyrics with such garbage music.
Amazing album, make sure to listen to the complete version released in the 90s that restores a lot of the original concert.
I did not have high hopes for this album, given that I have exceedingly little patience for 'quirky' indie pop/rock and my tendency to dislike whatever RYM is slobbering over at the moment, but I actually kind of enjoyed this?
There were some surprisingly clever lyrics and the rhythm of the album was super fun to listen to. I'm a sucker for weird percussion and this tickled my brain funny, so sonically the album was very enjoyable.
I do feel like some songs went on for far too long (about 5-10 minutes could be cut out of this album and I don't think anything would be lost) and some of the lyrics felt like listening to my friends rant about their shitty ex-boyfriends and it got tedious to listen to after a while, but overall it was pretty good. 3.5 but I'm rounding it to a 4 for the weird percussion.
Incredibly stupid proto-hair metal. I think it speaks volumes about the genre that these people barely spoke English but I wouldn't bat an eye at these lyrics even if I didn't know that. Pretty fun in places though.
Like prog and new wave had a hideously deformed child. The first half of this album might have the most actively unpleasant songs I've listened to so far. The back half is better but marred by lyrics that sound like they were written by a high schooler trying to be deep. Overall I think I'd enjoy this album a lot more if I didn't know English.
King of Pain is still a killer tune though.
Hard for me to rate this. Much more of an ambient, kind of drone thing than what I was expecting. Genuinely really beautiful in parts, could really do without the ASMR in Bamm Bamm though.
Much more funk and RnB than I expected. Terrible couple of middle songs and it gets kinda corny in parts, but damn most of these songs are still great listens. The Message is worth a star alone. I'm kind of a sucker for early analog synths so I actually loved Scorpio and the general production of this album. Love the ending track too and how all the samples bleed together.
This sounds like a British version of grunge.
Rush did the impossible and made an actually good prog rock album. Lyrics are kinda goofy but whatever, I had fun.
Very solid country album, enjoyed this a lot more than I thought I would. A bit more on the 'sappy love song' than I would've preferred, but the title track is really a standout.
Not a bad song on this album. Love 70s art-punk stuff so this was an easy five for me. Somehow combines both poppy melodies with a sharp edge and cryptic lyrics, and that combination doesn't feel disingenuous in the slightest. Amazing drums on this by the way, what a standout.
This is the kind of stuff I'm on this list for - albums I never would've heard on my own but open my ears to new genres and sounds that I was completely unaware of before. Wonderful music that blends several genres seamlessly.
This is like the platonic ideal of rock to me. If aliens came down to Earth and asked me what rock music is I'd give them this album. No sappy ballads, no guitar noodling, just straightforward, no-nonsense rock. Incredibly sharp, tight playing. Lyrics are sometimes goofy but that's to be expected.
I went into this album totally blind with no context for what I was about to hear. Apparently it's the #1 salsa album ever and somehow I have never heard of it, which is why I'm doing this list in the first place.
I find it really hard to rate albums from genres I'm totally unfamiliar with, and even harder to rate albums that aren't in English since I'm missing a huge part of the album's appeal, so take my rating with a grain of salt. I enjoyed listening to this album on a purely sonic level but feel like I'd enjoy it more if I was fluent in Spanish. That's my fault and not any fault of the album though.
It's really hard for me to rate classic rock albums since I grew up listening to them and I sort of end up taking them for granted. I appreciate a lot of the song quality on this one but man Fogerty's voice grates when you have to listen to it for an entire album, and besides the 2 big hits none of the songs really grabbed me. 3 feels too low but I feel like I'm too familiar with some of these songs to get any new enjoyment out of them. 3.5
I was expecting some sort of indie rock thing based on the band name but this was much more interesting; I liked the electronic mixed with RnB thing this album had going on, very good album to relax to.
Sometimes the music feels a little too slick at times, especially in the first half, but I liked how the beats picked up a bit more in the second half.
I really don't know what to say about this one. It's one of those albums that would be far better if it was purely instrumental, because I love the drums and bassline in this but holy god I do not enjoy hearing Kiedes' corny white-boy rapping.
I remember seeing a review of Fetch the Bolt Cutters that complained about the singer dropping F bombs every other line and I have to wonder if they accidentally listened to this album. I don't want to sound like an uptight prude but man some of these lyrics are very 'I HAVE SEX!!!!' and most of the time I don't feel like they add anything to this album.
Oh well, maybe this is something I'll enjoy more with a relisten.
Enjoyed this less than I thought I would, unfortunately. The appeal of disco for me is its strong beat and energetic rhythms, and the fact that a lot of the songs on here were much more low-key made it much harder to listen to. Le Freak is still great though.
This album seems to come from the school of thought that the more actively unpleasant you make your music the deeper it is. Just when you think the music becomes tolerable Holger inserts some stupid sound effect or squealing noise for some fuck off reason. The only halfway listenable track on here is Persian Love (which not coincidentally is also the only track without his 'singing'), and even that barely rises above the level of cheap orientalism.
'Oh', you may say, 'It paved the way for sampling in music!' So what? Check out Buchanan & Goodman's break-in records from about 2 decades before this was released; they use extensive sampling, and they're a lot more funny and interesting to boot.
I started this list partially so that i could challenge my preconceptions about certain genres of music. One of those preconceptions was that Radiohead sucks.
My preconceptions were strengthened after this album.
You can sometimes hear the band working desperately in the background to try and give this album any semblance of sauce but their efforts are sucked into the whining, mewling vortex of Yorke's insufferable tennis-ball-in-mouth singing. The guy sings like he was castrated and is now *really sad* about it. I've heard death metal vocalists more understandable and pleasant to listen to.
'But the lyrics! They speak to modern man's alienation!' Maybe they speak to modern man's alienation from enunciating clearly, but what lyrics I was able to understand I was not impressed by, mainly in 'Fitter Happier' (since that song mercifully uses a TTS). It's some I'm-14-and-this-is-deep bullshit: being a happy, healthy, well-adjusted member of society is lame and stupid, I guess. As someone who was not that for a while, I can tell you that it's much less romantic and cool than this song implies. Rather be a pig on antibiotics than someone constantly on the verge of killing myself or assaulting somebody. I didn't bother to try to look up the lyrics to most of the other songs on this album because if you don't sound like you care about what you're saying then why should I?
The band's playing is actually good on songs like Airbag, Electioneering, and Paranoid Android (which is the only song where the music and singing seem to express an emotion besides 'wah'), so realistically this is probably closer to a 2. However, I'm giving it a 1 out of sheer spite for all the music critics and self-important hipsters that have spent the last 30 years slobbering over the dick of a band that is ultimately just another mediocre indie outfit.
Stupid, inane, overproduced, a godsend!
I would probably be a bit harsher on this album than I am right now but after listening to the sonic equivalent of oatmeal I'm grateful for this album having things like 'decent singing' and 'song structures'. If I was a teenage girl in 1982 I would definitely have a Duran Duran poster in my bedroom.
I wish they laid off the synthesizers a little bit and let the songs breathe, but the hooks and hits are there. I appreciate that the back half of the album starts to get weirder with the synths, especially in 'Chauffeur', and I wish they explored that a bit more. Some of the non-singles sag a bit but overall I had fun. Kind of forgot how stalkery some of the song on here are though.
Edit: I think I was a bit too grumpy when I listened because actually this album is awesome. Such a fun time, and I don't know if there's a bad song on here.
Hmm. On the one hand, extremely historically significant. You can hear the seeds of all the myriad genres that 50's rock and roll would inspire, and you could argue that these later genres simply choose to emphasize different aspects of rock that were already here on this album - you can hear the twangy hippie country-rock in the hillbilly elements of this record, the thick, bluesy sound of many later British Invasion bands, the energy that would later spawn garage and punk.
That's obviously not to say that Elvis singlehandedly invented rock and roll, or that his career was not artificially bolstered by the racism of the recording industry and of the US in the 50s more generally, but I also don't think it's true to say that he simply pilfered the sound of black musicians wholesale and did nothing new except sell it to white America.
White people had been singing rock and roll years before this record, but the difference between someone forgotten like Pat Boone and Elvis was that Elvis was the first white guy to actually be good at it. He has genuine talent and energy that stands out among the incredibly lame cover songs of many white rockers of this period, and while I prefer Berry I still think Elvis can go toe to toe with him and other black artists. Elvis also introduced a lot of country elements to rock and roll, which you can hear clearly on this record, so it's untrue to say he simply copied homework.
But did I enjoy this a whole lot? I enjoyed gaining more context for music history, but I just really do not care for love ballads from rock musicians of any era, and this record is full of that kind of filler. 50's rock is one of those genres that is really best experienced through singles in my opinion. The fact that these songs are so ubiquitous now, and seem so basic in comparison to what came later, also makes it hard to judge. In that regard I actually feel a similar way about Grandmaster Flash's album 'The Message'. Incredibly revolutionary for its time but when these songs have been done to death it's hard to feel that same excitement. 5 for historical importance, 3 for my personal enjoyment.
Hard to rate this one. I appreciate how weird and earnest it is, and how it's an early example of psych music, but the playing is frankly terrible a lot of the time, and not terrible in a punk way, terrible in a 'we have no idea what we're doing' way. It's an album I respected more than I actually enjoyed.
Didn't know what I was headed for and I was bracing myself for more depressed British men, but I was extremely pleasantly surprised by this album. What a fun listen, poppy without being bland and sonically interesting while still launching an eye-popping 7 singles.
I wish some of the vocals could be sharper and that they showed off a bit more of their dance and electronic influences on this album, because honestly I don't really hear them, but these are fairly minor issues for me overall.
American Idol audition music.
One thing I like about British rock bands is that they seem a lot more willing to incorporate electronic influences into their music, whereas (outside of some new wave bands) American rock seems to be allergic to the concept. I blame Disco Demolition Night.
Anyways, I feel fairly mixed on this album - there are a fair few turgid songs on here but some very exciting ones as well, and I respect how weird and varied the album gets.
It feels physically wrong to give this album anything less than a 5, Simon and Garfunkel are way too formative to my music tastes for me to do that. They get away with things I would never tolerate in another artist simply because they are that good. Are their songs sometimes a tad maudlin? Are their lyrics sometimes a bit goofy? Yeah, but I don't care, they're fucking Simon and Garfunkel, they can sing about being cornflakes if they want.
Save The Life Of My Child and America is one of the greatest one-two punches you can have on an album, but all of the songs here would've been the highlight of most other artists' careers.
Good road trip music. idk, there's really nothing I can say about this album that hasn't already been said.
I recognize that there's a lot of talent behind this album, but I just do not care for this smooth, artsy sort of jazz music. It feels like background music, never something I would deliberately play myself or pay much attention to. I'm just too uncultured to appreciate this I guess.
Holy crap was I not expecting this. Take the introspective lyrics of indie and post-punk and make it not only listenable, but danceable too. Both atmospheric and visceral. This might be one of my new favorite albums now.
For the longest time I thought I hated punk because I was under the impression that the entire genre was either pop punk or hardcore, neither of which I particularly cared for. This led me to brush off any music that had the misfortune of being under the same label as Green Day, and missing a lot of cool stuff in the process.
I credit this album with opening my eyes to the concept that there is good music labeled as punk, that it could be vibrant and actually interesting to listen to, and forcing me to broaden my horizons from the classic rock stuff I grew up with. Given that I can't really give this anything less than a 5, even though if I'm completely objective it might be 4.5.
What struck me upon a relisten is how joyous a lot of this album sounds, which is particularly strange given the context this music was made in (check out the documentary NY77 for some background on the environment New York punk was operating in). And people might find the quote unquote 'quirkiness' grating, but I think it's 100% sincere, David Byrne is genuinely that weird of a guy.
This album somehow threads the needle of being genuinely interesting social satire while not becoming a slog to listen to. I'm a sucker for baroque pop and you can see on this album the Kinks transforming from another mid-60s pop rock band to something much more unique and creative. It's very evocative of its time and place in a music landscape that often tried to be as broadly appealing as possible.
I'm not the biggest fan of groove metal but this album goes way beyond that. It blends together these genres so effortlessly that it never feels like a gimmick or distracting. Ratamahatta is transcendent. and an excellent example of what I'm talking about.
Guys, it's Roots.
Feels like hitting up the club underwater.
Enjoyed this a lot more the second go-around, every song on here feels like a hit.
Disgustingly slick. This is why perfectionism is bad kids.
This is an album I respect more than I enjoy. I'm terrible at understanding lyrics, and that's the major appeal of this album, so a lot of it went over my head, but what I did understand I enjoyed. Something that will probably grow on me with another listen or two.
I'm sorry but I can't. I can't with this guy's voice. I can't with the tweeness. I can't with yet another white guy with an acoustic guitar. There are some genuinely really good songs on here and I feel like I should like this more than I do, but until someone manages to pitch drop this guy's voice I'm prevented from truly enjoying this. 2.5
Enjoyed this way more than I thought I would. I've discovered that I can actually enjoy experimental music if they maintain some sort of rhythm that prevents it from becoming totally untethered. Each song feels like it comes from a different album, but Faust IV's drone-ish, industrial sound maintains a strong presence in each song.
This is one of those albums where if you don't like it I think we just have fundamentally different music tastes and on some level I will never understand you.
Morrison's voice is certainly an acquired taste, but I at least respect someone whose singing is this passionate. Ultimately a bit too rambling and hippie-ish for my tastes. However, when I went on a walk in the evening while listening to this album, I got as close as I will probably ever get to 'getting' this album. This is something you're meant to be listening to when you're sitting around a campfire with friends smoking pot and the sun is going down. All other contexts don't work for this album, at least not for me.
At points the singer has the vibe of a guy who became a hippie and learned to play guitar so he could get laid (I believe the youths would call this a 'performative male'), but Astral Weeks still reminds me of my friends who would like this music, so I can't really hate it.
Another pleasant surprise from this list. Really fun, weird fuzzy alt-rock. Definitely want to explore this album more.
Just a really solid album. If you like the White Stripes you'll like this, and I like the White Stripes.
Really cozy album. Feels like napping in the afternoon sun. In my opinion this is the only album from any Beatles' solo career that can really go toe to toe with the best albums of the Beatles era. Some filler, to be sure, but I Dig Love is probably the only actually bad song of the bunch, which is pretty impressive for such a long album.
Really fun, energetic album but I have to listen to this in chunks or else it gives me a headache lol.
A lot of UK punk leaves me cold but I love these guys. You can really see the seeds of hardcore emerging here, but they also balance out the energy with some more 'slow' tracks: Plan 9 Channel 7 is genuinely beautiful to listen to. This is music that makes me want to dance.
Thank god punk came around and killed this garbage. I played Brahms when I was forced to play piano as a kid, it doesn't suddenly make you deep guys. Long Distance Runaround is the only tolerable song on here because it's the only one where the artists managed to pull their heads out their asses for a song.
If I wanted to listen to guys noodle around on their guitars I'd just listen to the Grateful Dead or some other hippie rock band, at least those guys sound like they're having fun instead of thinking they're creating the next 1812 Overture or something.
This is like a caricature of punk rock. This sounds like they got 4 guys who had never heard punk before, made them listen to a couple of Ramones and Richard Hell songs, and told them to make an album, which is more or less what actually happened in reality.
Punk has a very annoying obsession with 'authenticity' and having a message over whether the music actually sounds good. I don't particularly care all that much that the Sex Pistols are basically the punk equivalent of a boy band, but I do care that half of the songs on this album sound identical to each other. It feels like a step backwards compared to what a lot of other mid 70s bands were doing at the time. There's only so far you can go with playing 3 chords really fast and saying 'fuck' every other verse. It's a musical dead end.
There's even a pretty pathetic attempt on here to start a beef with the NYC punks, which as far I can tell was more or less ignored. Johnny Rotten can call them faggots all he wants, but the fact remains that the Americans did punk rock first and did it better, I will die on this hill. Pretty Vacant is such a downgrade from Blank Generation it's insane.
Stuff I do like:
- Rotten's line delivery is hilarious. I can't understand what he's saying half the time but it sure is fun to listen to.
- This album has some of the most obvious ragebait lyrics ever. They were very deliberately trying to provoke people and get banned from the BBC and it shows. It's really funny.
- Holidays in the Sun and EMI are surprisingly good? I really liked the guitar solo in EMI especially.
- Also very funny is the fact that an entire subgenre of punk was spawned from people actually taking their shock lyrics to Anarchy in the UK seriously.
I would probably be harsher on this album if not for the fact that I had to sit through a Yes album yesterday. I'll take even second-rate punk rock over prog any day.
All in all it's fine but I have no idea why this has been upheld as the archetypal punk album when there was far better music being made at the time. Good publicity I guess.
Based on the album cover and opening song I thought this was going to be a much more interesting album than it actually was. It's fine but nothing particularly groundbreaking in my opinion.
It's difficult to sound vulnerable and like a total badass at the same time, but Willie Nelson threads that needle here. Less is often more, and the sparse instrumentation and the simple yet evocative lyrics make a great pairing.
This is hard for me to rate because I appreciate how influential James Brown is but a lot of 60s RnB doesn't really do much for me. But those vocals, wow! They really carry the album.
Sonically this feels like generic 90s alt rock for most of the runtime, although it starts to get a bit more interesting near the end. Lyrically it's stunning. With albums like this where there's such a huge gap in quality in the different elements, my default is to just rate it a 3, but I feel like I'll come back to this one.
