As a hardcore Bowie fan, I've always found this to be his most overrated album. With the exception of "Life On Mars?" this mostly feels schmaltzy and inauthentic, like Bowie doesn't know if he wants to be Elton John, Bob Dylan, or Lou Reed, and settles for an uninteresting combination of the three. The strings bring a sense of cheesiness to most of the songs that they're on, and others like "Fill Your Heart" are just bad on their own. This is one of the few Bowie albums I don't own, and I don't think I'll ever buy a copy. It makes sense that the one other album where he takes a similar approach, 1999's 'hours...', is another one of my least favorites of his. If this were another band it would be one of their better albums, but I expect more from Bowie.
Murmur Is an album that I've really familiarized myself with over the last couple of years due to seeing Michael Shannon and Jason Narducy performing it live a couple of years ago in San Francisco. It has one foot firmly planted in the post-punk movement and another one planted in jungle pop and because of that It ends up sounding like something completely unique. It doesn't have the coldness generally associated with post-punk But it isn't as poppy and catchy as something like The Smiths or mid-80s Echo and the Bunnymen. It's something truly unique, the kind of album that most other bands wish they could make.
Of all of the albums by Stevie Wonder from the 1970s that I've heard, this is the one that is most consistently very good but never breaks into truly great territory. Which isn't to say that it's a bad album, it certainly is very good, but there's no specific song on here that I think outdoes any of the others. It's an incredibly consistent listen and I love when Stevie goes into full funk mode, but I was still left wishing that there was more excellence on display here.
I'm sure that this album was revolutionary and a breath of fresh air when it came out, but it's hard for me to put myself in the shoes of somebody who hasn't been exposed to this kind of music before. There are definitely other albums where I can listen to it and hear how revolutionary and ahead of its time and cutting edge they were, but I just can't with this one. As it is, the songs are mostly good but there's nothing here that sticks with me once the album has finished.
I'm so glad to finally be given an album that wouldn't necessarily be viewed as part of the traditional Canon of popular music. And gosh, what an album this is. Kelela's voice is smooth and demanding throughout this album, and it pairs with the sometimes avant-garde production perfectly. While the album does go on a little bit too long for my taste, it's an incredibly enjoyable experience and an album that I probably wouldn't have heard had it not been for this list.
Yeah, the vocal harmonies are sometimes amazing, but I can't imagine anyone finding any of the songs here exciting or even interesting. It's just middle of the road dad rock of the blandest variety.
I feel the same way about this album as I do so many other prog albums: yes, the playing is technically on another level, but there's no emotion here.
Just a solid country album. I was familiar with the title track but the entire record had me engaged and smiling ear to ear. I wish that there was a bit more meat to chew on with this record, as it lacks emotional depth, but as a surface-level piece of art it's good!
I feel the same way about this album now as I did the first time I heard it a couple of months ago: pretty solid funk album, has some amazing covers on it that the band makes their own, and the musicianship on display is impressive throughout. Truly a great album.
Another joyous and jubilant funk album. This is the kind that you put on and it immediately makes a smile go across your face. Earth, Wind & Fire reach beyond the boundaries of pure funk on this album and sometimes are able to go straight into more progressive territories with an ease that should be marveled at. It's a fantastic record.
Even though Bob Dylan would release more albums in the 1960s, Blonde On Blonde feels like the culmination of everything that he was working towards in that decade. There's the bombast and electricity of Highway 61 Revisited, the stripped back material you would find on Another Side Of Bob Dylan, and songs that sound like combinations of the two. About sixteen years ago I went on a pretty hardcore. Bob Dylan kick and this was an album of his that always stuck out to me, the double album that doesn't feel like a double album. Every song seems perfectly constructed and in its right place, and there's not a bad moment on here, with Dylan's lyrics arguably at their peak on this record. It's a masterpiece.
I saw a lot of reviews referring to this album as background music, but I think to do that would be to dismiss the artistry and musicianship on display here. Each song has its own unique flavor and style and there's enough variation that goes on not just over the track listing, but on each individual's song that I think warrants attention. Honestly, I'm glad that this list introduced me to this album, even if I expected the music contained within to be a bit more intense based on the name Nightmares On Wax.
This kind of album is the template for pretty much all of the Jazz fusion that came afterwards. The music that Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis, Donald Byrd, and other such musicians at the time were making still has relevancy and still sounds exciting over fifty years later. There are only four songs here, but each one has its own unique flavor and style. I never get tired of listening to this one.
If there's one thing I've learned about my own taste recently, it's that I don't like contemporary R&B all that much, case in point here. The instrumentation tends to be pretty great throughout the songs, but none of them deserve to be as long as they are and while D'Angelo has a great voice it's wasted on some truly insipid lyrics on here. The song "Cruisin'" should be an all time classic, bit it's let down by everything wrong about this album.
I prefer earlier Aerosmith when they were still leaning into their blues influences. As it is, this album is absolutely fine, and has a few of the band's biggest hits, songs that I've heard a million times in various contexts. This isn't my favorite Aerosmith album, but it's as solid as an album like this can be.
The Stone Roses are a band that I should fully love. They're they're jangle pop influences are present on nearly all of their songs, but despite most of their music sounding good, there are just too many songs on here that I can't fully get on board with. Not horrible, not even bad, but there's just something holding them back for me.
When I discovered this album in 2009 it felt like a revelation at the time for me. There were periods where I would listen to it, not just multiple times a week, but multiple times a day. It's arguably, the single most beautiful album I've ever heard, with some songs sounding spacey and like they're floating on the beautiful strings that make up the instrumentation, and other songs are relentlessly dense and claustrophobic, creating a sense of dread that is always overtaken by the beauty of the rest of the music before too long. It's always a treat when one of these lists throws in a curveball of an album that I already have such a strong emotional attachment to, and that is definitely the case with this record.
I've always felt that this album is just as important to the post-punk genre as something like Unknown Pleasures, but instead of the tight instrumentation and songs found on that record, here the songs are seemingly infinitely expanding outward and have a controlled aimlessness to them. That might not be everyone's cup of tea, but for me this style of post-punk hasn't been bettered than it was on here. A phenomenal and important record for the genre.
Here Roxy Music is still a bit rough around the edges and have more of the looseness that made their first album such a joy. This is my preferred version of the band, before Bryan Ferry turned the band into a lifeless polished shell of their former self for him to croon nonsense over. Here the band still does the occasional freakout, and they show they can make a dark or atmospheric song as good as anyone else. I wish they had continued on in this style forever.
Continued proof to me that The Rolling Stones have never made an album that's enjoyable from start to finish. There are a couple of good moments here, sure, but they're just that: moments that exist between some of the most hollow fake swagger I':be ever heard put to tape. "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" has a killer riff, but everything else on here is skippable.
When this album came out in 2004 I was obsessed with it, and even though I hadn't listened to it in years nearly all of the songs came back to me once I put this album on. The band is definitely indebted to the 1970s and the music that came out of it: there are elements of disco, funk, glam, even Italo-disco, but they blend it all together in a truly unique sound that hasn't been done this well since. The album definitely dips in the middle, with the more Ana Matronic-heavy songs being the weak link here, but damn does Jake Shears have an amazing voice that truly elevates the rest of the songs. It's interesting to look back and realize that so many of the bands that I was listening to around this time were priming me for where my future music tastes would go (Scissor Sisters, The Darkness, Franz Ferdinand, etc.).
While I think that Laibach's shtick has gotten a bit tiring and formulaic over the years, this album still sounds fresh nearly forty years later. The layers of the various interpretations that are found on this album of both military and pop music makes this album stick out from the rest of the burgeoning industrial records that were coming out at the time. There's a simplicity to the arrangements that gives each song here a unique sound, and this is an album I can see myself revisiting many times.
It's a Ray Charles album. I'm not really sure what else to say here! His songwriting is good and his voice is distinguishable, but at the end of the day this isn't my preferred kind of music.
