1001 Albums Summary

I enjoy industrial music but, for me, this is not it. The concept is interesting but over forty minutes the vocal affect becomes extremely irritating.

Too repetitive and too muzak-adjacent for me. I like a bit of edge in my trip-hop and I doubt even an altered state as per the title would make this sound any less cheesy to my ears. Even for 1995 this sounds out of date. It's a year after Massive Attack did some cutting edge things with a very similar sound palette on Protection, so I can't even really see the appeal of this historically.

3.5/5 Catchy melodies and a slightly noisy, thick sound. Feels a bit too slight.

Zappa's Mothers of Invention for the 80s and beyond. I can't hear this band without thinking of their late drummer Teresa Taylor's appearance in Richard Linklater's Slacker and how perfectly she encapsulated a kind of New Weird America represented by celebrity worship and droll descriptions of gun violence. This album is essentially a bunch of kids playing around with new, exciting toys to see what outrageous and funny sounds they could make, but there's also a real sense of disaffection and contemporary urban malaise. It's the kind of music you might make if you were just fucking around with some friends, but because of that it's so uncompromising that there's a kernel of the sublime to it.

An album that sounds like champagne tastes and just as bubbly. Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards' production is just as pristine as the best Steely Dan records but they don't fucking go on about it! These grooves have so much space and light around every element that it feels like you're in a marble discotheque.

The transition from Chump into Longview is the point at which I came around and realised that Green Day's song craft on this record is actually really solid. This isn't my style of music and it definitely passed me by in my adolescence, but I can definitely appreciate what a tight and often inventive band they are on this album. Mike Dirnt's bass lines are often the magic ingredient.

What a snooze.

3.5/5 I love Ike, but to me this doesn't quite function as an album and the incidental music is interesting but not something I particularly want to return to.

3.5/5 It's easy to see why this became a late-career highlight for Beck. It feels like an amalgam of all of his previous highs, with the post-modern blues of Mellow Gold and the irreverent pop craft Odelay meeting the downcast mood of Sea Change. A few tracks feel far too slight, like the catchy but forgettable "Hell Yes" and the plodding "Go It Alone". Overall, a solid record, but not one that's really transcended the moment of its release like some of Beck's other work has.

Ever since I got this in a CD two pack back in high school (with I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You), this was my Aretha Franklin album of choice. This is such a solid selection of songs with so much grit and funk, alongside the handful of ballads. It perfectly encapsulates the range and power of Aretha as a performer.

The rhythms are nice but this is melodically a bit too trad for my tastes.

He's such a dweeb and this album is woefully uneven and unfocused, but I have a special place in my heart for the record that opened my mind to electronica and ambient music 20 years ago.

Originally got this about 20 years ago the same day as I got the band’s previous album You’re Living All Over Me. That record blew me away while this one left me a little cold (“Freak Scene” notwithstanding). Now on revisit I have a new appreciation for the low-slung bass lines, the morphing rhythms and the absolute overwhelm of this record that verges on sludge metal. Some songs still feel a little overlong with melodies that don’t quite connect, but overall this is a really interesting development for Dinosaur Jr. in terms of song craft and texture.