I've been listening to Led Zeppelin for 30 years.. They just aren't my thing. There are sparks of good things on here, Immigrant Song is OK. Tangerine is one of my favorite LZ songs.
Mostly though, these songs could possibly be really good if Robert Plant didn't screech all over them.
I hate to give this star one album. From Warren Zevon to the Mountain Goats, I love a lot of music that is folk adjacent. I love Hallelujah. But this album was a tough listen for me.
Where music I'm not loving can sometimes slip into the background of my attention, this album kept my focus on itself, but that was not a good thing.
I actively disliked listening to it.
I'd heard half of this album on the radio over the years, but this whole album is fantastic!
The Police aren't my favorite band, I've only ever heard the radio hits. This was my first time listening to an entire Police record.
This wasn't a bad time. It won't be elevated to a spot where I listen to it all of the time, but I enjoyed it enough for the duration.
This album is obviously Bowie trying something new. The results are middling. But the album is bookeneded with radio hits that are pretty good.
An obvious classic. Aretha is an amazing singer, and the songs are powerful. This album is more like a time capsule than something I'd be interesting in listening to often.
I imagine that this album sounded like the future when it was released. But this album is a stack of cold, digital sounds that attempt to be a facsimile of music, while never really getting there.
There was one track, perhaps Seconds, late in the album that had a warmth of decent modern electronic music. Otherwise, the rest of this album, including Don't You Want Me, is an easy pass for me.
This album was way better than I was expecting! I thought it was going to be old hippie noise, but this was a really good group of songs!
I was also surprised when I recognized This Will Be Our Year, a song I recognized now is a cover by OK Go.
I was familiar with Carol King, but I had never listened to all of Tapestry until now. I vascillated between 4 and 5, but landed on 4.
These songs have a lot of heart, and have a timeless quality to them, even as the production has a dated early 70s feel to it.
I remember hearing this album when it was new, the Bucket was one of my favorite songs that summer. This album is solid, but it's a little underbaked. By the release of Because of the Times, Kings of Leon will have their sound down, and their next several albums are at least 4/5 efforts.
The talent and creativity of Jimi Hendrix guitar playing is readily evident all across this album. While Hendrix is never going to be favorite style of music, listening with fresh ears, these tracks can really light a fire in me.
This album is full of hits I have heard before on radio and films and several of the album tracks I wasn't previously familiar with were also quite good. However, I feel the album was too long by a few tracks, and I was happy to be through it when it was over.
I didn't expect to like this album enough to warrant 4 stars, but this album was able to surprise me.
I had never listened to this album before, but I am glad that I have now. This album was very easy to listen to.
I expected an album to sound like a time capsule of it's age, but it has a timelessness that makes me want to add to it my collection.
This the the first time I ever sat down and listened to an entire Elvis record. It was a mix of songs that sound like the soundtrack to an Oceans 11 style "cool" movie, and some croony songs.
I don't see myself adding this to the regular rotation, but I had a decent time listening to this. Suspicious Minds is a classic.
I get this is an important, historic album. But it wasn't something I'd look forward to revisiting.
Several years ago, I listened to Aja because a friend told me it was great, and I was experimenting with albums from the "all time great" lists. I did not like it.
I wasn't expecting much from Pretzel Logic. But after Rikki, which I knew from radio play, this album was easier to listen to than I expected.
The music is technical. I can easily how this album would reward repeat listens, gaining familiarity and anticipating little things. Unfortunately, I would find that somewhat difficult to do. The lyrics are, to be charitable, profoundly stupid.
I assume the lyrical content was some mix of inside jokes, some.weird early 70s brand of "cool" that does not translate to a modern listener, or the result of the very specific drugs of the era (does doing quaaludes make Steely Dan appealing???)
The overall package is music that isn't actively offensive. At 33 minutes, this album doesn't wear out it's welcome. I could stand if this music was playing in tbe background with friends or something. But this didn't convince me to seek out more Steely Dan into my musical life.
I hit play on his album in Spotify without looking at the track list to see what I was in for. Unless I am mistaken, I had never heard I Ain't the One on track 1. Then, it was immediately followed by 3 staples of classic rock radio, all of them huge hits. The next three tracks were also new to me, then the record closes with Free Bird.
The four 'filler' songs sounded exactly like Skynyrd, but were also somewhat forgettable. It leaves me struggling to figure out how to rank this record. This is only my 23rd day of this challenge. I've heard a few really good albums, several kind of good albums, and a bunch that were ok at best. But the four songs are all time greats.
I'm of the opinion that Free Bird is overrated. But it's still a pretty great song. So is Tuesday's Gone and Simple Man. Gimme Three Steps is a staple of classic rock radio. The strength of these songs alone raises the bar and makes this album an all time great.
What the hell did I just listen to?!?
Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band's album Trout Mask Replica isn't some avant garde experiment. It isn't anti-art music to shed light on the pretensiousness of artists of the era. It is crap. Two albums, four sides, 80 minutes of crap. It is noise. It is nonsense. It is stupid.
I hated every minute of this album, and couldn't wait for it to be over. Unfortunately for me, it is a super long double album, so it felt like it took forever.
I could find no redeeming feature in this utter slog of a listen. I hated myself while I was listening to it. This album doesn't take long to show how completely terrible it is. Maybe it was by the third track, a ditty about Nazi Germany's death camps. Maybe it was the five minute "instrumental" cacophony of noise on track five. Somewhere after the one hour mark, I lost all hope that I could ever hear music again. I thought I should abandon all hope and puncture my own ear drums.
I actually sat down and pondered who, in the era that this crime against humanity was published, would have actually taken the time to listen to this album the whole way through side 1, then willingly flip the album over to side two and resume play, then, in some act of sheer audacity, change the record to the second disc, and listen to that entire side of music before making the concious decision that they had to flip the album over to really see how this thing ends up? That wasn't hitting play on an iPod and zoning out. This was actual effort! For this album?!
I thought I liked some weird ass stuff. I read the wikipedia article where some interesting people count this album as a masterpiece. I read the opinion that after 7 listens, you really can "get" this album. I can promise you that I will NEVER EVER subject myself to this nonsense another six times to reach any understanding with this.
I hated every second of the eighty minutes of this album.
This is a hard album to review. On one hand, it sounds like a Randy Newman album. If you like his musical stylings, this album is in your wheelhouse. On the other hand, it's a concept album about racist southerners told from the perspective of the racist southerner.
There's not a lot of replay value to an album that begins by so casually dropping hard N words right out of the gate. Even getting what he's going for in this album, it still feels ichy.
Steve Earle attempted a similar feat by recording Ghosts of West Virginia about people he didn't agree with politically. He succeeded in making an album that you don't feel the need to wash off afterwards.
It's weird to compile a list of a thousand albums. There's bound to be lots of albums that not everyone is going to like or click in with. That's how this album lands for me. This record would have never landed on my Now Playing list without this.
It's not a bad listen, but it's not my wheelhouse. So I don't know how to rate this fairly. It's a 2-3 for me because I don't have the skillset for R&B msuic in general.
I had never heard of Ride before, but this album was very good. It will be a repeat listen for me.
I've been doing this album challenge for about a month now, and it was only a matter of time until I got the Beatles. Here's the thing, the Beatles are overrated. Sure they have a lot of good songs, but man, some people worship them.
That that, this album has some good stuff on it. There's a ton of radio hits on this album, and some of my favorite Beatles songs on here. Buffalo Bill, Rocky Racoon, Revolution, Helter Skelter are really good.
There's some real stinkers on here too, though. Some songs that are just bizarre, or long and indulgent. It makes the album too long and by the end, it was really hard not skip some of the tracks as they dragged on. Revolution 9 was over eight minutes of noise.
It made an album that ballooned to 90 minutes. If they had more restraint, there could have been a better overall album.
I don't have a sophisticated palette for jazz, but I liked a lot of this album. I liked how it slid from orchestral, big band, flamenco guitar, and jazzy elements. Sometimes the sounds blended into a cacophony that sounded very much like noise. That was the point.
Often times, I rate these albums by how much I enjoyed the listening experience, and I think about how much I would want to listen again. I would like to think I'd give this one a listen again.
