1001 Albums Summary

Thank you RNJesus, because without Kashmir I would still be trying to find that unbelievable riff ten years from now.

Ubiquitous horny, romantic and sad staples all together on one album, therapeutic for Gaye and great stuff, but What’s Going On mogs Let’s Get It On entirely. That he was bold enough to name one song Let’s Get It On and another Keep Gettin’ It On, and both are fantastic, is amazing work and You Know How to Ball is absolutely smutty.

Tracey Thorn’s voice is wondrous and I am a slave to the beat, but the production is less eclectic and absorbing than their contemporaries (see: Massive Attack/Tricky/Portishead etc). Textbook definition of Fine.

A wonderful old favorite. Not a soul or a voice on this spinning earth quite like Joni.

Love 90s alternative rock/grunge, love the doom metal energy, love Chris Cornell and the slick time signatures on this. But… that’s all I’ve got. I expected to love this instead I can just barely differentiate it, a shame. The length is diabolical too.

Favorites: Love Her Madly, Been Down So Long (ish), Cars Hiss By My Window, Hyacinth House, Riders of the Storm. Mostly extremely fascinating despite not being my taste, but certain tracks I simply hate Morrison’s voice (The Changeling, L’America and again Been Down So Long).

it’s all downhill from the title track, which due to childhood indoctrination of classic rock radio I still enjoy… But the title track is track ONE. Ladies and gentlemen, the Eagles.

I love getting this album now, of all times. It’s actively one of my very favorites. When I went on a month and a half long dive into Bowie’s music in 2025 I had already long since heard Blackstar, having dug into it when the man himself died mere days after its release, after his birthday. That didn’t by any means stop me from returning to it again and again as I tore through his material I hadn’t previously touched. Blackstar insists on staying with me now, as if it is now one of my increasing grey hairs. I listened to it once more on its ten year anniversary, making it all the funnier to get it from the 1001 albums randomizer just over a week later. The title track basks in circling the sound and distance of finalities, of Death, of time. I have seen it often noted that one of Bowie’s inspirations for this final album was Death Grips but nowhere is this more apparent than in the fraught, dark cacophony and violent power of ‘Tis a Pity She Was a Whore. I follow Girl Loves Me around like a stranger I’ve known all my life but cannot speak to, the opportunity long gone to clarify the why’s and how’s. Dollar Days is melancholic, brittle yet contains a bold finality so frank in retrospect it sometimes pains me to tears. We are ten years on now from David Bowie’s death yet I Can’t Give Everything Away still feels like a final farewell I will never really be ready for, still feels like a fresh wound. Yet it’s laced with so much enigmatic kindness, an injury given with a gentle touch and goodbye. I am generally at war with myself over getting too attached to musicians and artists because generally they aren’t your friends or family, they are people who are capable of mistakes and lives lived at a distance from you, that possess talents that can touch us in indescribable ways. But it can’t be helped some days. Blackstar has always made that apparent. I do in fact miss him greatly still. I wasn’t ready for his goodbye. But I am glad he was able to make one. I’m glad it was this.

Good news: Shane McGowan is a poet Bad news: He needs lyrics/subtitles by default Good news: it’s a good album. Bad news: a little of it goes a very long way. I was burned out by track 8.

Promising for a first album, but still sounds like reheated leftovers.

Sometimes fine, most times a thousand years long.

A classic, an old favorite. How Halloween isn’t a literal holiday staple everywhere (and not just in my own personal rotation) is beyond me.

Enough potent imagery, poetic storytelling and frank intimacy to catch me falling madly in love with this man even after he’s long been gone. Like damn.

I respect it, but it just reminds me of music you’d hear in the background of a bar in the tropics when you’re on vacation and too often does it overstay its welcome.

Not remotely awful, but simply Not My Thing in any way.

Exactly as good as I wanted it to be after decades of knowing songs but never actually listening to a Daft Punk album, despite my enjoyment of disco and house. Every track was like crack to my ADD infested brain.

Incredible voice, safe as houses album and lyricism. Just not interesting or particularly exploratory. I spent at least half the runtime wishing I was listening to Amy Winehouse instead. That Lovesong cover is quite good though!

Jailbait is completely rancid song, but otherwise most of this bleeds together into a lot of nothing too terrible.

Nothing less than the best for Marvin.

Outside of the absolute jumpscare that is that first track alone, it’s like giving a Muppet a full time job at a piano bar. I respect the wit and bite though.

Better than I’m currently willing to give it credit for because Alanis’ shrill nasal vocals drive me completely up the wall.

Huge shame how utterly vile Kanye has become, but it’s a good album. Way too damn long though.

Occasionally fun. Never earthshaking and kind of forgettable outside of learning where Alright came from and who sang it. How much Brit pop is on this list again?

The most free space album you could give me up to this point. I adore this one. I went way too long (years ago) only knowing Kate Bush because of Placebo’s cover of Running Up That Hill and there was a brief stupid time where I thought the cover was better than the original. Ha! No. Not even remotely true. I know up through Waking the Witch (which is in lovely argument with Cloudbusting, The Big Sky, the title track and Running Up That Hill for which is my favorite song off the album) much better than I do Watching You Without Me into The Morning Fog, but this is an great excuse to revisit a mild blind spot.

Decent! Didn’t realize Brian Eno has producer credits on like six U2 records. Not much my thing though and even now I still have difficulty taking Bono remotely seriously and his melodramatic vacillating voice doesn’t help that.

Filed under I certainly respect and I recognize the talent and craft involved but don’t have the patience for it. Peaches in Regalia is excellent. Willie the Pimp is great until you’re four and a half minutes in and He’s Still Going at that solo for another four. The Gumbo Variations desperately needed to End. Not the audience on this one.

It may have came out in 1977, but it sure feels timeless as hell.

Unironically good until Axl Rose’s “cat’s tail being stepped on” vocals kick in, every single time. Except when he wails, he’s rather good at that.

I can hear and respect the talent on wild display. I can understand and even appreciate why so many love jazz like they do, but frankly I just don’t particularly enjoy it. This is no exception. Stay tuned.

The closest a britpop album ever got to me in my life. One everyone knows. And despite or because of Wonderwall, Noel’s whiny vocals nothing overstays its charm and who else has Champagne Supernova or Don’t Look Back in Anger?

“I can't sleep at night, when you're on my mind Bobby Womack's on the radio Saying to me, "If you think you're lonely now" Wait a minute this is too deep (too deep) I gotta change the station” Thanks Mariah. Frankly his batshit deranged personal life is far more interesting (and unsettling) than this album is but the music is smooth yet distant and not absorbing. Not interesting. It’s left my mind as quickly as it entered it.

Calming and strange and occasionally the vibes are very reminiscent of Portishead. I dig.

I am begging for more respites between all the jazz. I don’t ask for much.

So much better and fully formed than LA Woman it makes the latter feel like an aberration. Except for Riders on the Storm. That one still goes. Best: Break On Through, Soul Kitchen, Alabama Song, Light My Fire, End of the Night, The End.

Ska was never my thing. Reggae either. And unfortunately they still aren’t, folks.

The most relaxing thing the generator has given me so far.

Better than what I’m about to say suggests, but such a precursor and inspiration for nu-metal that it isn’t even funny.

Not as bad as all that, I still sooner prefer him and Garfunkel together over this and as much as I do enjoy Mother and Child Reunion it is the whitest piece of reggae adjacency I’ve ever heard.

Boring and completely goofy at the same time, well done!

A beautiful,bygone and ravaged voice. The orchestra is a bit syrupy at its worst, smoky and atmospheric at best.

It’s and probably too long but also by turns fragile and brittle and frustrated and a band all up in their feelings about each other and everyone around them. It’s my shit. I do love Fleetwood Mac.

Sonically I love the idea of this, it’s a slick type of sound I’m often entirely into…. Except it’s much too long and circular. Nearly every song could benefit from 1-2 minutes being sliced off.

Willie injecting melancholy and humor and his personal style and making every supposed cover his own in some small and memorable way. Great stuff.

Occasionally has snatches of something great but otherwise is buried three deep and seventeen tracks in tedious shoe gaze .

Can’t really give any album with Seven Nation Army less than this, honestly.

For better and worse, and it’s not like the album was trying to hide anything, but it’s fascinating just how insidious and pervasive Kanye West was just as a producer. Not to completely ignore Common here (and J Dilla, RIP) of course, Be is an excellent album with every contribution. It’s just Common isn’t quite the most interesting thing about the thing. This generator has given me two Kanye albums now, where I had only heard one before this (TLOP ten years ago), and you don’t realize his grasp on sampling and production and how impressive and unmatched it is until you spend time listening to his music, which I never really did. It’s good. Shame he’s a complete lunatic.

Like this more for the spirit of Woody Guthrie’s lyrics and wit than the actual execution of them behind it. Ah well.

Like being escorted in a rowboat on a bitter cold lake through the thickest fog by a sometime depressive contralto that will either haunt you or sing to you sweetly.

As the years pass my opinion of Jackson has only waned and degraded into being rather glad he’s cold in the ground but in the end? Thriller is still Thriller. 7 out of nine tracks were hit singles for gods sake. My mother loved this album, and I can’t say she was wrong for that. What am I going do, say it doesn’t completely rip front to back simply because he was a terrible person? I’m not that delusional and this isn’t an instrument in a morality play. It’s good stuff, despite the everything of the person that made it.

Apologies Mister Hayes, for I only knew you as Chef from South Park and thus was not remotely familiar with how excellent your game is.

Just so very boring.

Beautiful, sad, angry, crass, wonderful album. One of my favorites and it’s a shame to be without her, a shame that the album feels so ominous in retrospect.

This felt like finding the precursor to Tool, Swans and Xiu Xiu all in a day. Excellent album.

So what you’re telling me is I just like depressed Beck (Sea Change for the win) better than I do whatever this eclectic but annoying bucket of songs is. It’s not a terrible album but it feels like one full of intentional ticks and quirks meant to hide a complete lack of personality and while it kind of works (I do largely love what the Dust Brothers are doing), it ends up being more irritating than fascinating and much too long and I don’t have the patience for such quirked artifice.

I have been meaning to get to this one after Skeleton Tree took me out behind the shed a couple years ago but until now it hadn’t happened. I didn’t even know Ghosteen was a double album, nor that it is by and large lyrics that run closer to spoken word poetry, albeit over a very ambient and haunted production. It’s fascinating and drenched in alternating hope and sorrow, but it’s no Skeleton Tree where the grief was very audibly at home, front and center in his voice and his head and engraved in the melodies despite the album already being written before the loss of his son. There’s grief here too of course (It lives on in perpetuity if you let it), but it’s on the other end of time that has allowed it to be processed and reflected while the album was written. Which isn’t bad of course, it allows for clarity of feeling that Cave is trying to get across. One is him immediately suffused in grief. The other is a man wanting to talk to his son across the afterlife. They’re both immense records. But this just doesn’t hit as immediately across the board. It’ll grow on me whenever I come back around to it, I’m sure. Spinning Song, Bright Horses, Galleon Ship, Ghosteen Speaks, Leviathan and the title track are all immaculate.

Could almost be decent, but I cannot stand his voice at all.

The reviews on here I swear. I’m guilty of this too at times, and it’s not going to be everyone’s taste (which is fine), but are we serious? God forbid a voice be unique, especially in how it gets its pain and sorrow across. WEAK. Anyway I knew this was a five before we reached it but definitely by the time Fistful of Love needed to be replayed three times over. What an immaculate and sorrowful album.

Public Masturbation: The Album. Horrible human being aside, I can recognize Clapton’s talent. That’s easy. I can also recognize how furiously he’s beating his noodling, jam banding meat across fourteen tracks for over an hour and I’m not impressed.

Fascinating, but more homework than fun. Title track goes hard though.

For all that I’ve ever been unimpressed by Bruce Springsteen and heartland rock adjacency, this is impressively worse. And boring. And safe. Sorry, Tom.

Man. Going to bed but I wanted to plug today’s album one more time. I profess I mostly know their singles far outside Surf’s Up, but this album ranges from kinda boring (A Day in the Life of a Tree), to not good (Take a Load Off Your Feet and Student Demonstration Time) and a mix of pretty and forgettable. There’s also surprisingly little Brian Wilson to it and I feel that can’t be a coincidence.

Yeah he’s a pedo and that’s absolutely hideous but I don’t do automatic negative reviews based off the person alone. I try to find something redeemable to the material, even when he isn’t. But this was just some boring easy listening adjacent dross. Pretty easy to bin it.

The behind the scenes drama in the making and promoting of this album is more interesting than the music itself. Strong Enough still really goes hard though.

Not enough albums have a song as time eatingly good as This Corrosion. First half of the album is nothing but jams, loses a lot of my attention by Flood II. But still! For Corrosion alone…

America is an all time great song. For that song alone this album is maybe worth it. I blame Almost Famous’ use of it embedding itself in my brain. Bookends Theme, Mrs. Robinson and Hazy Shade of Winter are decent but nowhere near as good and the rest still is pretty forgettable.

Far more predisposed to enjoying this than something like Culture Club’s Colour By Numbers. George Michael/Wham! >>>>> Boy George/Culture Club. I don’t make rules I just know how I feel about it. I also know who keeps getting weird jukebox musicals made from his body of work (Last Christmas, Eli Stone), work that I never realized was comparatively lean and mean compared to his contemporaries. Only five solo albums, three Wham! albums. That was all! This album is nice! I do love Praying for Time, Freedom 90, Cowboys and Angels and Soul Free. Most of it leaves my ears the instant they end but his singing is so nice I immediately want to forgive him that. An okay album buoyed by a lovely voice. There are worse things!

Man if you’re going to put glam rock on this list it should at the very least be GOOD. You know, that one necessary criteria? This is polished but boring as hell.

Feel like it says it all that my favorite Adele song is her Bond theme for Skyfall and almost nothing from one of her albums. Send My Love (To Your New Lover) comes pretty damn close though, and Water Under the Bridge is fine. It’s broadly inoffensive. She’s still the milquetoast white girl ideal of pop soul, which means she takes zero risks and gets a hell of a lot of reward.

Gorgeous but not compelling. Didn’t understand a word of it but that’s a me problem and I’m never against listening to something that is on many levels out of my comfort zone

Kickass cover but. Man I won’t even call it boring or not catchy because I see why it’s so beloved just off guitar work alone, but it is an album at its best when the lyrics don’t show up. Like if you told me a horny fourteen year old boy wrote this I would entirely believe you.

Yet more jam band dross, yet another live album filled with noodling. I can hear the talent from outer space and I don’t mind the lack of structure but I do mind the unending public masturbation.

Need a show of hands, who expected the title track to be a thirteen minute prog-esque synthpop experiment??? I didn’t. I like it. A shame the covers that take over the midsection of the album bring things screeching to a halt.

I LOVED this album in high school. Particularly Take Me Out, The Dark of the Matinee, Auf Achse, This Fire, Darts of Pleasure and 40’, and while I’m somewhat nostalgic about this album still I won’t lie and say that I think it’s held together. It wasn’t an all timer even back in 2004.

Impeccably front loaded. Every single big hit is hitched to the front of this album, every one of them a solid banger. A shame I lose interest once we move past Emit Remmus but it’s no slouch. It’s just the alternating gimmick of sex plus addiction/depression and Kiedis sing rapping has worn itself out long before Road Trippin’ arrives.

Mostly marvelous album. Tori’s wordplay is fascinating and abstract, she plays that piano like it owes her everything, her vocal choices draw me in and push me away in equal measure. The Neil Gaiman reference has unfortunately aged quite poorly but that couldn’t have been foreseen. But Precious Things is so good I had to play it six times over on my second run through this album before I let Winter play twice!

I kinda love Queen. I wasn’t too sure when I only know the big hits (as so many do) so I wondered how boring an entire album from them could be. But no, it’s delirious right from the beginning. I should have known better.

Shocking absolutely no one that knows me, no. I Don’t Like Aerosmith. The best they had from me for awhile is that despite their best years being behind them i didn’t hate their terrible nineties output growing up. But that was a long time ago and this repetitious, slimeball, underage creeping, should be on a watchlist album didn’t help my opinion of them whatsoever. Joe Perry’s guitar playing is mostly innocent and Sweet Emotion is catchy despite everything gross that it contains. I wouldn’t miss anything about this thing.

I love Lana Del Rey, been on her merry go round for about a decade now but! I just want to have a talk with the list creator that put THIS over Born to Die, Ultraviolence, Norman Fucking Rockwell or …Ocean Blvd. I like Chemtrails, but it had to grow on me. Especially with White Dress being the first song you hear, which also had to grow on me but I still don’t particularly love. I do enjoy the rest, Lana’s sound and lyrics are always very easy to get swept up in the cinematic energy of. The Joni Mitchell cover is fantastic. But once again I find myself wondering how they come up with what does and doesn’t make the list. Because there’s only one Lana Del Rey album on this list and there’s four others that serve so much better as entry points to her work and are better examples of her quality.

Boring, obnoxious AND a compilation. Groundbreaking choices here on the 1001 albums list…

There’s moments where Elvis Costello’s lyricism for once overrides his absolutely diabolical voice, like Tokyo Storm Warning and I Want You. On the other hand… whatever he’s doing on Battered Old Bird is particularly heinous.

The grilled cheese made with Kraft singles bonafide of arena/dad rock! Harmless, not especially interesting but brief! I’ll take it. More Than a Feeling is still fun.

They are so insistently middle of the road they’re going to cause a crash in an intersection.

If you’re going to be over an hour long, being this frenetic, poppy and genre surfing is the least you can do. And thank gods, Jeff Lynne came through with gusto…

Diminishing returns after a decade but remains an excellent debut album and the first half still goes incredibly hard.

Occasionally fascinating but I really do draw the line at albums that sound like they recorded it in a bathroom.

Unfocused but ambitious and it never languishes into indulgent noodlings. Plus they just sound like they’re having a blast! You’ve Made Me So Very Happy is a mint classic rock radio gem.

Well made but I don’t like 90% of it. You can put this under albums i wish were less committed to The Bit, because the persistent ads and jingles and general goofiness make me want to eat roofing nails by the fistful.

Starts out promisingly. First three tracks are fascinating in their way. But this ends up being not too far removed from elevator music. Milquetoast but relaxing folk/jazz.

I love The Next Day still and I appreciate getting something I already know so I can almost relax. It was the first album of David’s I heard in full so naturally I’m very fond. I was a very casual fan of Bowie and he dropped it after keeping to himself and giving up nothing for ten years, how does that not compel you to listen?

Love this album, love the big hits on it. I can take or leave The Youth, Weekend Wars and Pieces of What. But also Little Dark Age effortlessly clears this album in every way that matters, if anyone wants a much weirder MGMT album…

I appreciate how much fun Adam Ant seems to be having, dressing like a pirate and singing like he does but it’s not particularly interesting past that information.

The Rosetta Stone to nineties grunge and alt rock/metal is right the hell here, like holy crap…

Easy listening country! Nothing to really differentiate the songs on an individual level but it was all so relaxing I really didn’t care.