Great album. Shame Billy Corgan is who he is.
Beautiful sounding if monotonous. I enjoyed it from start to finish, but kind of wished I was listening to a Tom Waits album. Wanting to listen to someone else is never a great sign for me.
Lots of fun!
Copyright laws should allow everyone to sample everything. Nothing means nothing.
At the age of 9 I tried to sell penguin facts to fellow students for 50c, so I speak with expertise here.
I don’t think these people have ever met a penguin.
This album is weird, and interesting, and feels at times like a group of people trying to see how many different sounds they can make. Which, all things considered, isn’t a terrible artistic endeavour.
I am glad I listened to this album. I probably won’t listen to it again.
I listened to this album when walking home from the pub. I was going to give it 2/5 because it didn’t interest me. Then, ‘the Sound of Someone…’ started playing. The slow, beautiful interplay of instruments nearly made me bump it up to 3/5. Until they started introducing beeps and boops into it. No need! Allow your melody to exist unencumbered by sound effects.
Maybe it’s still a 3. Who am I to give this a failing grade.
Thank God Dylan went electric. The three album run that begins with Bringing It All Back Home and ends with Blonde on Blonde are possibly the greatest 3 album run of all time, and this is undoubtedly their peak.
The more I listen, the more I feel that the success and driving force of the album is than tinny piano that flows through. It blends into the background when it needs to, or take the reins when required. Desolation Row, while epic, sorely missed it.
Lyrically, the man could do no wrong at this point. Even if some of the images add up to nothing, they still contribute to a wholistic and meaningful story told by a man the forefront of his movement.
Nice work, Bobby.
This was good.
There are some great great songs here (What’s Golden) and lots of other really fun, well produced songs throughout.
There’s not really a dud in the bunch but it also hasn’t grabbed me as something I want to listen to over and over again. Like it’s solid.
An impressive outing.
The lyrics are impressively bad. They seem to be the political ramblings of an angsty teen which in and of itself isn’t necessarily a terrible concept but they manifest in the clunkiest angsty metaphors. This, coupled with Mustaine’s voice make every time he’s singing an infuriating endeavour.
Musically, it is impressive, and I find myself enjoying the groove of it all when there’s no singing. During those times I can see why people enjoy this genre.
It’s hard to say if I like this more or less than the Metallica one. Musically, it feels better produced and less tinny but I’d still rather listen to the like 7 good Metallica songs than this again.
Interesting and fun musically and lyrically with enough range of style that I was entertained from start to finish.
I enjoy albums where people just tell little stories about different people and Dury has enough humour to go around and keep it interested. The problem is that many of these stories are not at all understandable or relatable to me given that I don’t tick the boxes of being a drunk, horny working class cockney in the 70s.
But, hey, that doesn’t mean it’s not good stuff. More songs should start by actively declaring that people are ‘arseholes, bastards, fucking cunts and pricks’
There’s a reason the Isley Brothers have been so successfully and consistently sampled in musical history and it’s because their consistent groove and soulful songs are timelessly good.
Nothing here feels aged or out of place. It’s just a really really nice, well produced album.
This is the era of music that feels it has aged the poorest. Overproduced drum beats become grating after a while, and a whole album of them is a bit much. It makes it difficult to differentiate songs and find value in them as individual tracks.
That isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy it, but I could have enjoyed it more.
The Parsons contributions to this album are its most important factor, and that’s not limited to the three songs he lends his voice to on the standard release. Both ‘You’re Still on My Mind’ and ‘Hickory Wind’ are particular highlights and form, along with ‘You Ain’t Going Nowhere’ the peaks of the album.
This both is and isn’t a Gram Parsons album. By all accounts, he helped lead the push towards this musical approach for the Byrds, but I think he’s well tempered by having a band of capable and successful musicians behind him. Whilst no harmoniser here can hold a candle to Emmylou, they do an admirable job and the album as a whole avoids the mawkish sentimentality that his solo work sometimes falls into.
His vision for country rock inspired leagues of pale imitators, but still to this day none can match his voice or vision. the Byrds weren’t overly comfortable with this, and re-recorded many of his tracks. Who’s to say if they were right.
This album owes a lot to 70s soul and funk, and is certainly fun to listen to, but I don’t think it offers me anything new.
This album’s brilliance lies on three levels.
First is the utterly silky smooth production of Booker T, who arranges these songs beautifully and with incredible attention to detail.
The second is Willie Nelson’s voice, which while not the strongest all the time, just has enough sickly sweet qualities to make these songs his own.
The third is highlighting just how impressive the songs of the Great American Song Book are. Together, Nelson and Booker T do a phenomenal job emphasising how incredible this songwriting is.
Brilliant!
I have absolutely no idea what’s going on.
I don’t dislike grunge or 90s alt rock, but this album is neither nostalgic to me nor interesting to listen to with modern ears.
Jack Antonoff feels like the Russo Brothers of music in that he will make silky smooth crowd pleasers that don’t actually scratch any itch.
Listening to this album, I’m never offended or put off or anything but I’m also never listening to something that mean anything to me.
This is fantastic. You can hear the alt rock explosion of the 90s ten years before it happened, and with a fun country twist.
I think it should be highlighted that Meat Puppets actually do have quite a nice sense of melody, and some of their calmer, country influenced songs are really quite sweet. Conversely, they’re not scared of straight up punk wailing.
‘nothing at the top but a bucket and a mop and an illustrated book about birds’ is one of the all time great lyrics.
Arcade Fire suffer because they inspired a truly insufferable wave of bands that followed them and were worth less than nothing. This style of indie late 00s, early 10s folkish rock once sounded great and groundbreaking but has been left woefully behind and sounding, frankly, naff.
Arcade Fire were the best of these types of bands and this was their last worthwhile output but half the songs sound like they’d go well beyond a mobile phone ad and the other half sound whiny.
Sprawl II is great though. Great enough to bump up the album to a 3/5.
This is really impressive musically in a way that frankly I just can’t appreciate as well as I think the musicians deserve. Feels hard to give it an honest review when I haven’t got enough musical theory knowledge to know if what they’re doing is truly great or not.
I enjoyed this more than I thought I would. The singles and hits are obviously catchy and boppy but the rest of it felt slightly empty. You could see why Duran Duran were as big as they were, and hear how they influenced a certain rock-pop sound in this era. Or were they influenced by it? I don’t know enough about them to distinguish.
Rio’s fun. Probably won’t listen to it again.
Psychedelic rock is great and these guys are great at it. A beautiful blend of country, blues and proto-hard rock that never stays in one place long enough for you to get bored. Sometimes this is a bad thing, and you want music to explore concepts more deeply but these guys know what they’re doing, so every song is just enough.
What strikes me most about this album is how much I enjoyed the smoothness of its production. It has instruments coming in at all times, but nothing ever overwhelms the core, the focus, the funk.
White boys play the blues adequately with more than one blatant John Lee Hooker knock off.
Great driving music, in that the riffs are loud, basic and frenetic. The singing doesn’t really match the subject style for me though.
It’s good. It’s good and it’s enjoyable and it’s a genre that sounds fun and familiar and if I had it on vinyl I’m sure it would find its way into rotation because it’s nice for music in the background or to cook to.
But I don’t think it’s my go to. Maybe I need more than the day to sit with ‘the The’ albums but I honestly wouldn’t be able to differentiate any of these songs off the top of my head.
This is arguably one of the worst of Creedence’s albums and yet it’s still phenomenal.
And I say arguably because the degrees of separation between Creedence albums is so low that it’s conceivable for anyone to love any of them more than this.
The fact that they released 5 all time great albums within a 2 year period is a sign of something; either they’re inauthentically churning out songs to match the swamp rock vibe they’re emulating, or John Fogherty is a genius.
I choose to believe the latter.
I think Dusty has better collections of songs as overall projects, particularly as some of these songs fall into the space of overt corniness that has not aged that well.
You can hear the influence of Phil Spector all over this, which is a good thing. She does these pop songs very well, and is particularly adept at interpreting Bacharach.
Nobody can really do a bad version of ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow’, but I can’t say that Dusty’s is my favourite. She lacks the restraint of the original.
There’s a lot to love about this album.
I appreciate a singer that keeps their accent prominent while they sing.
I love that you never know what instruments will come next. On an ostensibly folk album, you have enough going on sonically that you never feel quite so bored with the classic ‘vocals and guitar’ combo. There’s accordions and horns flying in to keep different songs interesting.
Some of the songs feel like they never get out of second gear sometimes, but that feels deliberate. Why would you want to distract from the beauty of Linda Thompson’s voice?
Feels like something from the Bronze or from Kat Stratford’s car or any other place where you’ll hear angry girl music of the indie rock persuasion which makes me nostalgic for a time I wasn’t really conscious for due to being a baby.
But this is fun and angsty and even though, based on my one day of listening, I couldn’t differentiate many of the songs individually, I’d be happy to listen to them again.
I think that this was kinda surprising and not what I was expecting and weirdly there’s a lot of Bruce Springsteen in this - Nebraska owes a lot to it stylistically.
Its ludicrous simplicity is both its saving grace and downfall. Melodically and instrumentally, the repetitive drone grows on you. However, I think these men thought they were being deeper than they were.
The Who are the least interesting of these legendary British rock bands and they’ve aged the worst.
There’s nothing technically wrong here but good god man, shut up!
No instruments sounds quite so beautiful as many harmonised voices.
Unfortunately the songs didn’t overly interest me and I struggled to differentiate between them.
There’s no way this man could’ve shot Mr. Burns.
The first 30 seconds of Reggae songs I’m alway like ‘sick! This is great!’ And then the rest of the song happens and I’m no longer inspired.
Sounds good though just not that interesting to me.
You can get away with a lot using only like 3 chords and some simple lyrics.
The only thing that really matters is the energy you bring. 90s rock was the best.
There’s some really really nice sounds going on here and I thoroughly enjoyed experiencing them.
Everything feels kind of understated and scaled down a notch which, combined with the fact that I don’t speak Icelandic, makes this really lovely ambient music to work to.
Ignore the period typical misogyny and there’s a decently fun collection of songs here. I was grooving. I was laughing.
Given that these were the songs NOT picked for the excellent Kid A and therefore can be thought of as cutoffs (I know that’s not how they’d think of it but still), this is a pretty great effort.
Radiohead are at their best when they lean into this mish-mash of different genres and they were at the peak of their powers during this era.
God damn I love country music and George Jones is one the best.
In a way, it’s a good thing that John and Paul were such Beatles tyrants who refused George songs on the albums because it meant that he could put his efforts into this absolute masterpiece.
It’s not John’s, or Paul’s, or even Beatle George’s.
It’s George Harrison’s, doing what he wants and does best and no solo Beatle ever managed to do anything quite so complete ever again. Sure, it’s long and there’s a whole LP worth of jamming and he may have stolen the melody of My Sweet Lord but holy hell, when it’s good, it’s GOOD.
An easy 5.
Proof you don’t need the strongest or sweetest voice to create a masterpiece.
One of my most sincerely held beliefs is that I hate Bernie Taupin and his dumb lyrics.
The hit songs here are really good but there’s just too many other things that aren’t really good.
Double albums are rarely worth it! They lack the appropriate editorial restraint!
A seriously melodramatic album featuring such hits like ‘god why don’t women like me’, ‘I’m a terrible alcoholic’ and the quite repetitive ‘he’s got the whole world in his hands’.
Thought it was great.
Not Bruce’s best but contains some of his best songs. I think Born to Run and Nebraska are better generally but this is still an iconic album for a reason.
Sometimes Bruce Springsteen is the best lyricist and sometimes he’s the worst. Depends on your mood!
These people aren’t exempt from ACAB.
Knowing only Hotel California (the worst of the classic 70s epic rock songs), I went in thinking the Eagles were a naff 70s rock band.
I stand corrected.
They’re much worse than just being naff. How these people became one of the best selling bands of all time is beyond me.
This is a fantastic concept album by an incredible lyricist.
His Randy Newman style of singing means that sure, the sounds all sound similar but he makes up for that with simple, beautiful country-rock arrangements.
He does a wonderful job exploring both the ugly and beautiful truths of Southern America, with enough respect and care given so that southerners aren’t the butt of the joke but rather well fleshed out characters.
This is fine. They’re good at what they do but others have been better. I don’t think it’s particularly aged well, frankly.
He’s not my favourite pop star of this era. I’d much rather listen to Prince or Madonna.
But there’s no denying he was the best at what he did. This is silky smooth, fun and engaging from start to finish. For anyone else, every song could be a hit single and for him, they’re just album tracks.
The slow ballads don’t hit as well as they might’ve back in the 80s, which is strange because he has good ballad chops (Ben? Singing to a rat? Iconic), and this isn’t his best work by a million miles but it’s still damn good.
I quite like a lot of this and then find a lot of it not quite there.
Let’s look at the pros:
- I love both the shoe gaze and bluesy elements PLUS the classical elements. More modern rock should have wailing harmonica tracks OR white noise and feedback OR orchestras
- when it’s mellow, I’m very zen!
- when it’s loud, I’m along for the ride!
- sometimes it just becomes very pretty!
However, cons:
- the man’s voice doesn’t inspire me. Sorry to that man.
- the fluctuation between these two genres doesn’t quite hit right for me all the time. There’s better shoegaze and there’s better blues and certainly better classical and you’re not doing a good enough job blending them into something unique in order for me to feel like I couldn’t be listening to someone else do either of them better.
I enjoyed my time here, I think. I won’t be back for a while.
The problem with Pink Floyd is that everything they do is so carefully crafted that it’s devoid of feeling (with the exception of the excellent album Wish You Were Here)
There’s no passion anywhere in it and that’s fine when you’ve managed to create a masterwork like Dark Side of the Moon but when it’s a politically laced double album??? I’m bored!
There are some good songs here. It’s certainly well produced. They’re very good at playing their instruments and arranging their sounds but about a quarter of the way through I’m ready for the next album.
I really like Kelela.
When this album came out it was new and unique and felt like the next big thing in the neo soul boom that was happening.
It didn’t really turn out that way and is a bit dated by that fact but still quite beautiful.
Fantastic.
I’d listened to Nillson before but not with this much attention to detail.
He flies between genres at breakneck speed but never feels out of place in any of them.
Plus he’s a great singer.
Blondie are great, and this is largely because Debbie Harrie has such an insane level of aural charisma that she can carry some pretty basic instrumentation and take it to a whole new level of performance.
The first half of this album is so good that the second half suffers because of it.
Yeah wow.
Maybe we’d evaluate this differently if he hadn’t died two days after releasing it but for mine it’s still fantastic regardless of context.
Perfect.
Maybe one of the top 5 albums of all time.
The greatest singer of all time at the peak of her powers.
The all time great diva.
Once she’d covered your song, it wasn’t yours any more. It was hers and there’s no point pretending otherwise.
Karma Chameleon is good because it has a sick harmonica riff.
The rest of these songs do not have a sick harmonica riff and therefore are not good.
Beneath the three chord songs, these guys could write a hook.
The man just doesn't have the charisma
War Pigs good
Paranoid great
Iron Man is no Smoke on the Water
Of the original Big Three Metal Bands, Black Sabbath was always the weakest overall for me but also I admire their enduring legacy and this is a pretty good album. They lose me in psychedelica which I don’t think is their forte and instrumentally they’re nothing compared to Zeppelin but I had fun while it lasted.
The drummer was annoying. Get a second move that isn’t 4-8 rapid hits on that drum. You’re no Bonham.
Well written pop-punk songs with good hooks but a voice that irritates the shit out of me.
I can appreciate it. Whatever.
I generally like Bruce but he has a tendency to be mawkish and sentimental so doing an album in response to 9/11 just becomes like an unlistenable slog after a while. There are only so many inspirational narratives I can hear here before getting bored which might make me a bad person but oh well!
Yeah man I can see why weird assholes worship this dude.
Jazz makes me feel dumb I think that sometimes it requires more technical knowhow than I have but it does sound pretty sometimes.
Dude clearly thought he was way cooler than he actually was
The thing is this man kinda sucks but he’s also so good. If I met him in real life I’d projectile vomit before he’d finished the first sentence but the music is phenomenal.
This has a certain energy which comes both from an exuberant live performance and also just having a sick backing band. The only song that didn’t grab me was, interestingly, Into the Mystic which I usually highly rate. Just feel like it had more energy in the studio.
These guys could play their instruments well and they certainly ‘jammed’ but my life is no better for having heard this.
Thin Lizzy have 1.5 good songs if I’m being generous.
Dancing in the Moonlight is a fantastic song. One of the best songs of all time.
Shame they couldn’t transfer that skill to other songs!
By the 70s, all of these musicians who grew up on Chicago Blues jumped at the opportunity to do an album with the legends that inspired them.
Which means you’ve got not only talented but inspired musicians.
Muddy Waters is the peak of these blues musicians so you can see why everyone here plays with such reverence.
Muddy himself is in fine form and this is a great collection of blues songs.
Not all of them are my favourite iterations of these songs, and sometimes being good at your instruments removes some of the chaos that should be inherent in the blues but this is still a damn fine album.
Beautiful, gorgeous, stunning. The folk influence is strong and it works well as they started doing introspective storytelling. In My Life is a little too cheesy for my liking and Run For Your Life sucks. 4.5/5
So this is impressive and obviously requires great talent. There’s a fun conversation happening between the three instruments that’s made more impressive by the explanation at the beginning.
Unfortunately it doesn’t really sound good to me and that’s ultimately what I’m judging here.
I enjoyed this way more when actively listening than when having it as background.
These people are great instrumentalists and it’s better to listen to them grooving together than pretending I want something to dance to.
As a collection of songs, this is probably Simon and Garfunkel’s most complete and strongest selection.
The Boxer is their best song by a country mile. Only Living Boy in New York would be any other bands best song.
Sometimes this steers too far into ‘cheese’. Bridge Over Troubled Water is too cheesy for its own good and doesn’t register as one or Paul Simon’s best to me. Maybe when Elvis turns it into a completely camp, smoking mess, but not when ol’ Art here is singing with as much sincerity as he can muster.
Great stuff. Fun production. Good lyrics.
I quite like the concept of the album and trying to piece together a plot for a crime movie in my head based on the sounds but also it didn’t grab me that much.
She’s not a great vocalist but I don’t think that precludes her from being a great singer.
She’s emotive and expressive and there’s something about her harsh German accent that blends so well with this beautiful folk backdrop.
Also the Royal Tenenbaum’s is a great movie.
This is just about the best thing anyone’s ever done. It’s hard to talk in enough superlatives about how great it is. I adore all of it and will listen to it again and again and again.
I love PJ Harvey and she has a great ability to reinvent her sound but for mine this gritty, grungy sound is her best.
Steve Albini produces the three piece band perfectly, emphasising their simplicity.
Harvey is lyrically in great form and I almost constantly have the double chorus of Rid of Me running through my head.
4.5
Sex Pistols might be fake and created by someone else and might have had little to no musical talent but I don’t even believe that first statement and it doesn’t matter because this album is phenomenal. Prog rock largely sucks and is awful and these guys were a big part of coming in and making the world realise how shit it is!
