1001 Albums Summary

not my favorite R.E.M. album but it's good. Scott Litt some rough choices (from the 80s). 'Welcome to the Occupation' is my favorite. IT"S OK

I had this CD when I was a kid and I think even then I only ever listened to the first two songs and 'Add It Up' which I can no longer stomach. This gets same-y even at 35 minutes but it's fine .

They are stuck in midtempo boring land here. They also sound very tired. I don't understand why this is the Big One for this band and I don't really like them in the first place. There will occasionally be a cool riff but then there'll be a really boring one.

"BLUE BLUE ELECTRIC BLUE 🔥🔥🔥🔥" This was the original review of this album that I did not write nor did I rate it (the original rater gave it a 3). How did you get into my account .......... Whatt ....... Anyway I love this album, it's beautiful, great textural exploration, thank you for your time.

Few songs I love on here and there are a few that I don't think are that good. I'm sorry Pixies... Some of these could have used some more cooking...........

This one is interesting, I like some of the material a good deal but some of it reflects the tidbit about it on the Wiki page where the producer just kind of let the tape run the whole time they were in the studio and picked up whatever.

Beautiful, sounds like cyberpunk racing games for the N64 / PS1, it stays varied enough that it's easy to take even as an album but almost all the tracks are great individually I think.

First three tracks: Great. Next four tracks: I don't care . Last track: Randomly fantastic.

UGH, I want to LOVE this album but as it is I only LIKE it but I think one day I'll be really into this band. Really interesting songwriting and arrangement choices abound but I just can't help but find it all a little sleepy at this time. It must grow on me. Everyone watch The Last Waltz RIGHT MEOW!!!

Mostly pretty solid, it's kind of crazy this came out in 1980, but the second side feels like every song could have used a few more passes, they all have some issues . But it's a fine album.

OK, I understand, this shit is pretty off-putting and I am close to a 2 on it, but I think enough of the guitar work and the weird arrangement shit on here is interesting that I will give it a light 3.

"Starship Trooper" is so unbelievably ahead of its time and beautiful the entire way through, it weds like Byrds-esque jangly arpeggiated guitar lines with like proto-"Space Rock" atmosphere(??). "Yours Is No Disgrace" is also one of their best songs. In fact all these songs are good.

The lyrics are so depressing . This is all good. They sound like a Shibuya-kei band. THANK YOU.

What a great record, the production from Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis is legitimately unbelievable especially for 1989. They're making sounds I was not even aware you could make especially on tracks like 'Escapade' and 'Lonely' and the title track, which is a perfect layered piece of art. The album ends with three 5-6 minute ballads which is an odd choice but they're all so good that it doesn't matter.

Great survey of ways that Funk music could go at this time .

As has been said 4 billion times the production on this is unbelievable and makes this such a fun album to listen to. My favorite moment is when you hear 'Mississippi Queen' for .5 seconds in 'Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun.'

I am confused by why this is on here. Even Mr. Tom himself is like "yeah this didn't all work but I needed to do it to get to where I was going." It starting with the title track which is really weird and fades out like in the middle of a chorus into a 4 minute instrumental that is very loose and shaggy is so funny. It's fine but surely we could have put something else here, there's already like 5 other Tom Waits albums in here, WHY!!! AND I LOVE HIM!!!

Pretty cool, great guitar work , the blues has always been an area where I am very not educated and it was nice to hear an album from Mr. Muddy Waters (65 years old here!).

I like this album but I've always felt like their next two albums are huge improvements. The next one takes this sound and perfects it then the one after that creates a whole new thing. (Then the one after that is good too!) I'm waffling between 3 and 4 but I'm going to go with a 3 because I want you all to know my 3 star ratings still mean I like it .

I was hoping I'd love this but for the most part I just liked it. OH WELL!! I don't know if this is sacrilegious but I kinda wish the arrangements had more variation. I liked the songs where there was more going on. Maybe this'll grow on me.

I didn't like this the first time I heard it. I am a fool. I will take all of that you've got Neil. He is shredding .

You can tell how much reverence these guys have for all the genres they're cribbing and the performances are all great. This one is the most country / blues / folk forward of the ones from their GOLDEN PERIOD and I like it a lot but it still places #3 of 4. This is great stuff though from one of the best bands at the peak of their powers.

This didn't do much for me at all. Production was occasionally OK and occasionally slightly janky sounding. Not bad but I'm being slightly more harsh on here because most of the stuff is good for some reason. My 2 is like an "Ehhhhh."

Love this one. Would have been fascinating to see where they went from here. It is just an incredible album . Beautiful atmosphere.

This started strong and was more varied / interesting than I was expecting, but the second half becomes a bit more sedate and boring, but it's not all bad.

It is crazy that this is my fourth favorite album from a band because it's so good. This is the only one in this book which is criminal but check out Love Deluxe and Promise.... If you guys haven't.......... And you want to...... Jess and I played Wii Sports Resort to this and it was weirdly fitting.

This was one of the first more "ambient" albums I ever got into, and I will always have a soft spot for it for that alone, but luckily the music is beautiful and sounds like an ice cavern so it is incredible regardless. My favorites are 'Svefn-g-englar' and the title track. If you guys like this I would highly recommend the follow-up which is called ( ) and is also great. Rest of their output is a bit spotty . IMO .

Vague atmosphere in this I guess ? That's about as much kind as I can say about it and it's an atmosphere I don't find pleasant so.

I'm not going to give this lower than a 3 because I am sick so they might have just been pissing me off but I still do think this is probably the weakest of their last four albums, just too much dicking around .

It was OK ! Honestly I have heard better from this time period...... Some of the renditions were not super great . The 10 minute song is sort of baffling. But most of it is solid.

This starts out okay in that I like the first song but this album is proof that you can have good Van Dyke Parks arrangements but it doesn't matter if all of your songs are like 1 bpm and your voice is 3,000 times louder than everything else. By the end it gets frustrating .

I should have listened to this so long ago. It's like they married their wonderful ear for melody to the sounds of all the British dance music that was blossoming at this time. I read that they were specifically inspired by video game soundtracks here too which comes across well. The production is so dense and layered and beautiful that it makes me very sad to see it reduced to just being "dated" in the eyes of many reviewers ..... It's good when things sound like something you can put your finger on honestly (sometimes).

Houses of the Holy and this one are their peak for me, and I wish we had gotten a bit more of them in this mode (or these modes I guess, they are all over the place) before they get not as consistently good. But I should re-listen to Presence... So many great songs on this, the production is immaculate and so heavy, and it's lots of fun to hear them break out and try so many different styles. They are also all at the peak of their instrumental powers here. Great record.

Decent atmosphere but I wish I connected more with the songwriting which didn't really stand out to me but I also wonder if this is a grower. Either way it's solid but not my favorite at all.

This is an album where I sincerely think if you're seriously interested in music as "art" and you think it's terrible and irredeemable and not important then you should just give the whole thing up and try something else. SORRY!!!!! Simon Reynolds's writing on this is really fascinating and has informed how I think of this album, as an even further splintering (or maybe even shattering ?) of rock music, like from Sex Pistols who already have reduced it quite a bit to this which strips it of choruses or really even instrumental ability or like, legible production. The result is this very erratic and occasionally frightening thing. Jah Wobble is the only guy who can play his instrument. It's so good and eerie and feels like textural exploration in a way rock music does not always feel.

This has never been my favorite band, but I'm glad they stopped trying to do things like 'Electric Feel' and 'Kids,' because I don't think those songs are very good. This whole album is patchy but Fridmann's production is really good, I adore 'Time to Pretend.' 'Of Moons, Birds & Monsters' was the one that stood out to me this time around. WEIRD ONE!!!!

Lemmy on bass........ This album is good but this is an entirely too large dose of this stuff at least for me in my current life .

I had never listened to this band before. It's funny how the other big Manchester band from this scene is The Stone Roses, who are amazing and their first album has like 10 perfect songs on it at least. Meanwhile this has like 0.75 songs on it in general. At the same time I kind of get why this needed to happen and there is something about it that has an allure. Martin Hannett great dense production even though it is rather uhhhh late 80s sounding.

This one feels like it has some bloat compared to the last two (excellent) albums by this band, but I could see it growing on me with more listens. A strong 3 but this website doesn't have HALF STARS!!! So I must go with that. It's like a perfect 3.5 to me.

At first I was like why is this the one that's on here of their first three records ? And while I still think Songs for the Deaf should absolutely be here this album is still great and does a good job at encapsulating the appeal of their early stuff. It has the riff-y faster songs, it has the slower sludgier jams, it has some weird shit. It's All Here.

Fantastic!!!! How can you write these songs when you are a teenager.....

I remember liking this one a little more than I did this time around. SAD. It's solid though.

This is their peak to me, all the styles they do well are at their apex here. 'Sway,' 'Can You Hear Me Knocking,' 'Dead Flowers,' and 'Moonlight Mile' are all among the greatest songs ever made by human beings in my estimation.

Interesting to read about this band both coming from the Aussie pub rock thing which sort of explains their incorporation of like Northern soul / British R&B / the blues into their sound, and also interesting to read about their disillusionment with the "conformity" of the London punk scene that they emigrated to. I like this album on first listen, definitely see room for this band to grow in my esteem though.

I had only heard this one once before so I'm glad I went back because I liked it a lot more. All these songs are good .

2.99 on this website..... Lol..... I'm (pleasantly) surprised this one is in the book instead of Red to represent this period of King Crimson as I always thought that was the big one. And maybe it still is. The title tracks on this are mind-blowing and honestly would be fairly mind-blowing if they came out today but in 1973 I don't know how it's even possible. black midi must love this one. And you know what, so do I. Every track on this is perfect, both the improvisation-heavy ones and the more melodic / "pretty" stuff. I'm also surprised Discipline isn't in here. That one is heavily reminiscent of Remain in Light-era Talking Heads so if you guys are curious to hear that..... Check it.... It's real good.

'Inner City Blues' is CRAZY. Whole album is great. We love it.

I had a big Elvis Costello phase / "Clicking" last spring but I had never heard this one. It may reignite my phase.... I thought it was excellent, perfectly acidic in the way most of my favorite stuff of his is, great raw production.

I love this album, and I love the next two albums of theirs even more. But those aren't in here... This album does have a pretty fantastic and hard-to-replicate vibe though. The cover does a lot of work on that front.

I always think of this as the weakest of the 3 Experience albums but I think that's just because I've heard half of these songs a bazillion times. When you actually listen to them all with distance though it's like , yes, these are all fantastic. 'Third Stone From the Sun' in particular is just a crazy thing to exist.

Well I get why they took this one out. For one it is a transitional album, they get properly weird on Icky Thump for the whole thing (still a very patchy and goofy album that I don't like). This one lays their influences barer and I like that idea in theory but the songs are just not there. This isn't even a band I like but I want there to be electric guitar if I'm going to listen to them and a weird amount of songs here don't even have THAT .

When this one came out I was at peak Tapped-In-ness with SiriusXMU and Pitchfork. So I remember a number of these songs. I LOVE the first two then they get really inconsistent. The sound design of the synths is really great all the way through but it's not enough to make it something I love a lot .

I like the arrangements and the production. I do not like when the man gets overly silly though. And it gets a bit sleepy at this length. The first song sounds kind of like it is channeling Sufjan and Van Morrison, who I both like! Mixed bag.

I like this album! It is good . Bob Marley has never been a huge favorite of mine but he is good .

This one is crazy to have been recorded in 1965 but not my favorite thing but it's still good.

I'd never heard this one before but it is really cool and unique and works great. The mix is weird (produced by the guy who would go on to do all the late weird Scott Walker stuff... and Heyday by The Church) but I think it basically works since the vocals have less emphasis on melody than some of this stuff tends to and more emphasis on ethereal dreamy stuff. So it's great. Some synth sounds I have never heard before too.

Sorry but this is very not interesting, I'm sorry to this very important band and recording but I feel like this is not really an Album in the way that many albums were in 1962.

The common ding against this album is that it is over-produced but no it's actually not. The only choice I don't like is the gospel choir on 'Poor Boy.' Everything else is basically perfect. I love how the melody in 'Hazey Jane II' sounds like a melodic line that would start a horn solo in a jazz song. This was produced by the guy who did a bunch of Fairport Convention and Richard & Linda Thompson albums (and Five Leaves Left) and it sounds pretty immaculate. (He also produced Fables of the Reconstruction!) 'Fly' makes me die.

1977...... How in the world.... I love how insistent the drum machine is on this album, it's like the same sound the whole time (except for 'Girl' which is kind of bossa nova-y). I love how it comes in on 'Rocket USA,' like the hi-hat is a split second ahead of the bass the first time. Massively influential on so many things and the mood struck here is unlike basically anything that came after.

Lush and nice production. Songs are of wildly varying quality. Honestly this is a step away from other sophisti-pop stuff that I love so I'm trying to stay humble.

Not my favorite thing in the world but I was honestly expecting to find it more annoying than I did. The band has a good sound maybe entirely attributable to the guitar tone.

I like 'Kinky Afro' and 'Loose Fit' a lot!!!!!! Tends to be more up my alley when it is house-ier .

Pretty impressive document of music here. For a live album from 1970 it is recorded in a way that is incredible. The 'My Generation' medley is wild.

I find this vERY difficult to care about even though it's only 33 minutes long. It gets old after like 7 minutes. I respect that that guy's voice is weird as hell though. I just am like, what am I doing here.

Billy Corgan is forgiven for all of his crimes because in the 90s he made like 200 songs and probably 100 of them are fully great and 60 more of them are good. I don't understand how nearly every single song on this is fantastic. He just had THE TOUCH. I also think this album is paced really well despite being very whiplash-y ('1979' into 'Tales of a Scorched Earth,' lol). My favorite album by one of my favorite bands (up through Machina, at least).

Really nice A side! I'm glad I listened to this but it does suffer from a similar thing to other 50s albums like this where it is heavily inconsistent. But good fun and good .

This is pretty good! There are other drifty arty rock albums like this from around this time I prefer but I've also only heard this once. Thank you Holger! Everyone listen to his album Plight + Premonition with David Sylvian for beautiful ambient music .

I'm so sorry , but I find this album a little too inconsistent to consider it "GREAT." Maybe more listens are required. I'M SORRY.

I prefer Ragin', Full-On (which I was listening to when I had a stomach bug like three years ago so I associate it with that despite liking it), this one feels a little more ramshackle, but I still like their sound and they're great instrumentalists.

This one is great!!! What do you want me to say!!! They get fully dreamy here.

Hard to say if this is still my favorite VU album but it's the one I have the most sentimental attachment to. I've been listening to it forever. John Cale's departure (WE LOVE YOU JOHN CALE) opened them up to chill out a little bit like Lou Reed wanted and this is the platonic ideal of that before Doug Yule gets a bit more input on Loaded. I like Loaded but it's by far the worst. ANYWAY, great album to listen to sitting in your room at night, this one. Great production. Twinkling guitar .

In the past I would have said this is my least favorite of their classic 68-72 run but now I don't know! This is the most I've ever enjoyed it to the point where I'm confused as to what my hangups were.

Without a doubt their worst of the five albums, but I understand why it needs to be here. Honestly I would put every single one of their albums here but I'm biased. I think I prefer Speakerboxxx just because I don't think all the experiments on The Love Below succeed, but I really admire that Andre tried them all.

I think I only knew of his collaboration with Charli XCX before this, but I like this pretty well! Sounds nice. Nothing too standout in the realm of late 2010s synthpop BUT that's fine .

Far from my favorite Beck album, but there's some good stuff on it and the production is often fun. I do think it sort of sounds like car commercials now, which isn't its fault.

I really wasn't expecting to like this as much as I did but it's really creative, well-performed, excellently produced, hits a few different styles of 70s rock in ways that are good and feel slightly ahead of their time (I never realized how good 'No More Mr. Nice Guy' is, I think I took it for granted because I'd hear it on the radio all the time but melodically it feels like something power pop bands of the late 70s and early 80s are aiming for all the time). 'Generation Landslide' was my sneaky favorite pick.

I'm So Sorry, but this is my least favorite Steely Dan album. They are a band that I love a whole lot but I find this one to feel a lot like a debut and also it's fairly inconsistent to me. But this is all kinda stupid because it's all good and totally pleasant anyway. There are three other albums by them and the book and I handily prefer each of them and can't wait to get em.

A lot rawer than other things like this from the 60s. And noisier. I like The Who. LOL!!!

Really solid stuff and reading about her career was interesting. It sounds like a very good 70s singer songwriter album .

Wow, the beginning of the last track feels really ahead of its time and beautiful. I like all of the last three songs quite a bit.

This is one of my favorite albums of all time. It feels like every song is its own environment which is particularly wild to me because a lot of these are song-y, like they're not purely ambient pieces at all. But Eno is the best at this in so much of his solo work and we love him for it.

One of my favorite albums of all time. It is basically a work of architecture. Another Green World is like 14 different pastoral / rural environments and this album is like 1 giant slab of urban architecture.

I like a lot of this a good deal but it is simply too inconsistent (on first listen at least IN MY EYES) to be truly great. But Timbaland and Missy both have some excellent material on this.

Pretty Cool !

Always liked this album but never loved it outside of the first two tracks .

I wish I liked this a little more! In comparison with the other neo-soul pioneers I feel like his influences are just a little too worn on his sleeve and the songwriting is just a little too sleepy. But it's still really nice and I could see myself raising the rating on this with time and more listens.

As good as the arrangements and production and performances are, it feels like half of these songs are just not that good on first listen at their core, but many of the others are great, so I'm hoping the rest eventually grows on me .

This band is an interesting fulcrum in how they get us from hair metal to the alt / nu metal that is going to take over the latter half of the 90s and I can also hear plenty of the DNA of other great southern metal bands like Acid Bath et cetera. But there's basically a lot of stuff that is influenced by this (or that influenced this) that I vastly prefer because it rises above the meathead mid-tempo chugging that this album so frequently settles for.

I find this album a lot more consistently good than Deja Vu and a lot less, uhh, edgeless. Or maybe that's just the lack of any songs as corny as 'Our House' and 'Teach Your Children.' 'Guinnevere' is fascinating and I love David Crosby .

I like this album and think a lot of the songs are great but there is something that is still embryonic on this one to me and I'm not sure if it's because I read that one of the main collaborators on this album is one of the main collaborators on Eminem's Recovery. Confirmation bias ? No, because I think this album is quite good but doesn't quite hit the heights she will reach on the next one.

Curious choice for the book considering that, for instance, The Jesus Lizard does not make an appearance in here. No complaints on the quality of the music here although it does sort of all blur together after a point. But produced nicely!

I have had every conceivable opinion on this album at one point or another in my life but I hopefully am now settling on firmly thinking that it is indeed great and I should stop trying to resist albums like this because I'm not a teenager or college Freak anymore, I don't have to be EDGY!!!

One of my favorite albums of all time. Feels truly like I am traveling through time and space when I listen to it. I adore King Crimson and I think they get to more interesting places that predict entire styles of music but this is still a very unusual example of late 60s British prog, like it's kind of insane that they go to the places they do and get as heavy as they do. God I love it. I LOVE IT!!!!

Pieces of a Man isn't in here..... That one is a little less mellow than this but it's just as great so I would recommend it. This album was great. I only knew 'The Bottle' and that song is great. iT'S ALL GREAT.

I cannot handle hippies or the Grateful Dead I'm sorry .

CLASSIC.

Little long. I could see this increasing to a 4 in time though.

I really love this album , it is produced so beautifully. The comparisons to Bjork strike me as fairly reductive but also I understand the impulse.

This album is when the car drives off the road and then Dangerous I'm assuming is when it goes off the cliff and whichever one after is when the car hits the ground and explodes .

I thought this was good and nice! I should listen to it more attentively.

I find the fact that this album got as big as it did very fascinating because it's a very difficult and depressing album. The second half especially is strange and purposefully off-putting. I think some of it works and some of it doesn't.

I think this might be her strongest front-to-back album..... she is far from one of my favorite artists but I think the songwriting and production and performance is here and it's more varied than I remembered it being. Maybe in like 20 years when we're (hopefully) not still over-saturated with her it'll be easier to listen .

This has never been my favorite album but I know it had to happen and the attitude is strong .

I have been meaning to listen to The Divine Comedy forever (two albums in this book....) because I think I'd like them. This doesn't feel like a super representative survey of their talents -- BECAUSE IT'S NOT THEIR ALBUM!!! I pulled out the Tom Waits songs immediately, he has a distinct style. The Scott Walker track is my favorite thing here and very wild. Overall it's OK.

Impossible for me to rate this one objectively because it was such a massively defining part of my adolescence. It's very difficult to listen to now that Kanye has become what he has become, but I love it dearly.

The big Cat Stevens stuff I knew going into this I was hit-or-miss on, and the album as a whole felt the same way, and his annoying British hippie mysticism shit was beginning to annoy me, but the arrangements and production are solid.

Two good songs (the two big ones), like eight songs that are meh to bad by Korn's standards (I am no great Korn fan to be fair), and then three or so of the worst novelty songs you have ever heard in your life . Should've been their first album on here, I think this is my least favorite of their first four and again I am no big Korn fan.

This is difficult because I find Eminem so off-putting and a lot of his shock value stuff is just tiring but then sometimes there is a song like 'Kim' that is so reprehensible and insane and yet this guy was like one of the biggest artists in the world for a minute. It's just very fascinating to me. He certainly has skill and the production is OK sometimes. And his vision of the world is so depressing. I have no idea how to square all this with a number rating.

Masterpiece, first three songs are all as perfect as music gets. The whole album is just one long begging the question of "How the hell did they get the guitar to sound that way."

I like the A-side more than the B-side. I didn't know he was lime in the coconut guy.

Legendary first half of this album. I like the rest too but those songs, WOWIE !!!!

'Birthday' is one of my favorite songs of all time but I'd never heard this before because I thought it was going to be ... exactly like it was.

Perfect arrangements and performances all around .

Better than I was expecting!

I adore this album but there should be like 7 XTC albums in this book. 2.83 on the website, you people, WHAT ARE YOU DOING !!!!!

I was hoping I'd like this a bit more and there is certainly a distinct time and place where this hits but I do find everything about it just kind of ....... fine. But that's OK! IT"S GOOD!!!

I listened to this whole thing over the course of a few days and NOT at one time. And it's really great and solid all the way through and I'm glad I listened!

Feels like one of the only hippie Summer of Love albums that feels ahead of its time instead of woefully of its time. The dreamier stuff is all really fantastic and interesting here... then the band breaks up never to make anything else. The bassist, who is great, has 0 other credits I think. Or at least I read that. Really good one!

I mean, the sampling is cool sometimes I guess but other times it's really stupid sounding ('Longue route') and also the guy needs to stop singing.

Eddie Van Halen is BY FAR my favorite of the classic GUITAR GOD hard rock guys like Slash Et Cetera (even though Slash comes later, I KNOW), and it goes a long way for this album, which I like.

You've got to ignore some of the lyrics, but I really loved this one this time around. Absolutely immaculate production and songwriting here I would say .

This really needs a remaster but it doesn't even matter because the arrangements themselves are great and the songs are beautiful.

Re-listening to this today, my middle school self felt very vindicated, because I do feel like this is a particularly creative example of this kind of music.

The no bass, the increasingly knotty compositions, the generally darker tone, it being their last album before the Black Album, all of this is interesting in theory, but I find the album (outside of the bookends) just..... slightly boring.

Love all the genre bending on here. Licensed to Ill being the big one (kind of) gives a very skewed perception of what this group was actually capable of.

I prefer most of the pre-first-breakup runs of their albums to this one, but those first three songs are completely undeniable and the second half has lots of fascinating Eno stuff. For Your Pleasure is still somehow an unbelievable level up despite the fact that this is incredible stuff by one of the best bands of all time.

Fairly undeniable, but I honestly do think like half the songs are way better than the other half!!!

Incredible production. 'I Love U' is an all time classic .

UHhhhhh, not terrible, he's an interesting songwriter, but awfully inconsistent.

Very tight band. The guy kind of gets annoying though. Sorry Ian.

Really awesome singles, I really like half of the album tracks, the other half of them all kind of blend together BUT solid record.

Sounds like you're in a field that was created in a computer / lab. 'Pacific' is one of the greatest songs of the 80s.

I think this is their best album from an "atmosphere" standpoint. It feels like 11 different rooms. I hardly recommend John Darnielle's writing on this album that I don't know where to find right now BUT I'm sure you could google it if you wanted to.

I like CCR but Cosmo's Factory to me stands head and shoulders over everything else I've heard. Maybe one day that will change.

I do not care for this band but I begrudgingly occasionally have to hand it to them but also maybe I should give this a 2. Actually I'm giving this a 2 because I think it is "ehh" rather than "good."

Totally pleasant stuff! I wish I liked this more. I'm interested to hear more music from this guy especially because he intersected with like , Duke Ellington and then later people like Don Cherry and and Ornette Coleman and Pharoah Sanders.

Everything after track 8 just get rid of, but I am a big fan of most of the first half of this album in both its spacier / shoegazier moments and its more POWER POP NOISY GUITAR HOOKS moments. Which I honestly wasn't expecting.

This one feels a lot darker than my memory of Breakfast in America. Some of it feels like it's repeating its own ideas a little too much ( I don't know how to phrase this) but I like it. 'School' is fantastic.

Very important album in my life. Upon going to play it tonight the CD was missing from its case so I think it was in my first car's stereo when it died. Anyway, it's perfect.

This coming out in 1986 is genuinely a marvel. I don't think anyone's really made guitars sound like this in the 40 years since this came out.

I like some songs on this album a great deal!!!! Please do not kill me U2 fans!!!!!!!! Might just require more listens for me to lock in to most of the B side. But I still like the album overall.

Quite inconsistent but the attitude and playing takes it a long way and the good songs are very good.

I liked this more than I was expecting mostly because the arrangements and production are good. Half of the songs do not really even feel like songs but that's fine.

On first listen it gets a touch samey but I think going back to it would probably reveal more and I still like it.

I love the Bruce Dickinson iteration of Iron Maiden too but these first two albums are killer. PUN INTENDED !!!! They have a great punky energy here compared to some of the other big heavy metal groups around this time that I am aware of (i.e. only the big ones).

This band's sound is a synthesis of so many different things, like 70s jazz fusion and minimalism and like Internet 1.0 dial-up sounds (??) and Louisville post-hardcore and Chicago pastiche-y technical whisper-y post-rock(??) but it all becomes this one thing that is so recognizably theirs. I love this album but their real masterpiece is TNT, which I absolutely adore.

I'm sorry, but we could have used a different batch of songs here . The songs are not there .

'That Lady' and 'Summer Breeze' are totemic all-time genre greats and somehow the rest of it is great too even if it rarely reaches quite this highs. But what a sound, what a band, what voices.

In fairness to Devendra I don't think this has aged well for me because of how many people did this vocal style terribly in the mainstream like 10 years later. But I mean there's nothing else that I like .

Incredible creativity on display here, 'Water' is fantastic. The production is incredible and so punchy. Slumps a little in the last third but not enough to make it not great .

SORRY, I'm going to be 5ing almost all of these Radiohead albums. 'A Wolf at the Door' is probably my favorite song of theirs, also.

This is so much better than Live / Dead, for instance, which I can't remember if I did but I hope I gave it a 2 , just because the interplay is spectacular between all the members and the ways jazz is shoved to the forefront are great as is the two drummer setup. It's still something I struggle with a little though just sort of innately. But it's undeniably good.

First two songs are FANTASTIC and I really like the atmosphere and texture on a lot of the other ones too. It's good!!! But a lot of it slid off me ON FIRST LISTEN.

It's crazy how this band's music could genuinely move you to tears when it wanted to. McGowan was such a fantastic lyricist. 'A Pair of Brown Eyes' is genius. There are a couple weaker songs but oh well. Nice production from Mr. Elvis Costello as well-o.

I'm going to need to listen to this one a little more because a lot of the stuff on the second half slid off me on first listen, but there is some fantastic material here. They were a great band.

'Drowned World' is my favorite Madonna song. The whole album is spectacular. William Orbit takes the weaker songs a long way and the strong songs are already great. (Obviously.)

This is like completely average UK neo-soul that is now a funny curio because this artist never went anywhere .

I like this album and think the renditions are very good. Am I insane in thinking that Otis needs to chill it down a touch though. Like listening to 'Wonderful World' he is screaming a lot and compare that to Sam Cooke's version which is mellower and I prefer that version. But still, great band and great force of nature.

I had never given this one the credit it deserved maybe because the very early Cure stuff had never really clicked for me but this time around I really loved it. This winter I will listen to every album by THE CURE.

Bizarre that this is in here (knowing nothing about the band). It's like the most westernized version of Latin music that they possibly could have tossed in here. It's produced well but it doesn't do anything for me for the most part.

Sonic Youth is one of my favorite bands, but this album wouldn't even sniff my top 5 from them; a couple songs feel like retreads of earlier stuff and a couple of them are just sort of not that interesting, but it's a testament to how incredible this band is that I still think the album is fully great regardless of that.

Some of these songs especially in the first half are OK and I like when he does weird guitar stuff but I need him to stop singing and it's even worse when he's trying to do "faithful" blues / country / soul stuff.

Fully great album with some of his best material and a real step forward after Dirty Mind (which I honestly slightly prefer but the ambition and scope is way up here). 'Something in the Water (Does Not Compute)' gets this Prince album's award for "craziest song."

I'm pleased that they have the next two of Joni's albums in here along with this one! That's my favorite stretch of her catalog for sure. This album is just incredible, a perfect synthesis of her earlier folksier stuff and the stuff that comes after this that becomes more meandering and outwardly jazz-influenced.

This sounded so weirdly empty to me and I don't know why. Like it just sounded like they removed tracks. I was not moved.

It's crazy that an album this weird gave them the most commercial success they'd had to this point. I think it's a clear step down from the last two (which aren't in this book????), but it's still really great and fascinating.

Works OK as background music. The tracks with vocal features are the worst.

This album was massively important to me when it came out as it was the first "event" hip hop album I was aware of after finally starting to like the genre and then it came out and it was this good. I listened to it so many times and still know a lot of it by heart. It still holds up and it's weird to think now that the production sounds so distinctly 2012; it gives me a weird sense of time passing.

'Cry Baby' is so annoying and is basically what I expected all of Janis Joplin's music to sound like, but the rest is relatively toned down. I think her voice is just a stumbling block for me though and this album was meant as a showcase for it so. But it's fine.

Nicely produced and performed! A little inconsistent songwriting-wise but I still dug this. He toured with The Clash ?

Reminds me of American shibuya-kei. I love this album. I bounced off Beck for awhile because I thought he was alternately too zany and boring and I still SOMETIMES think that but this album is fully great. 'Jack-Ass' is a perfect song.

What the hell is this. Makes sense this was only included in the 2005 edition. They go back to swing revival a couple times. One of the songs, I don't remember which, sounds like 'Zoot Suit Riot.'

What a fascinating and great album. Sting is kind of a lot to handle but the lyrics to 'Synchronicity II' make up for everything. Also the production is absolutely perfect.

I like the last couple tracks that take things into a moodier and more abstract (and honestly rockier.....) dimension but most of the middle is just acid jazz background music but not unpleasant?

I had this CD from the library when I was a kid and I remember loving 'Inside,' and that is still my favorite non-'Porcelain' song here. The blues with trip hop drums thing is just an awful idea. Most of this would have sounded like shit in 1994, much less 1999.

Somehow I'd never listened to this one before despite loving 'Son of a Preacher Man.' I struggle to even pick a weak link! It's a mellow soul record for sure, like it feels more along the lines of the Brill Building stuff from a few years prior than contemporaneous huge soul artists, but it's perfectly arranged and produced and performed.

You have to imagine Damon Albarn and company like this album a lot. The first half is really interesting, great songwriting, but the second half is a little too stupidly conceptual for me to fully love, which is a shame, because I like a lot of the stuff on here!!

This is like the platonic ideal of a 3 star album on this site. It's totally pleasant, really nice arrangements, decently engaging songwriting, just solid.

Arcade Fire were a massively important band to me when I was in middle school, but even then I think most of the middle of this album made no impression, and it still doesn't. And now they have, uh, devolved. But I like the first 4-5 songs a good deal still.

Absolutely fantastic songwriting for this kind of music, wonderful performances and production, incredible Lyric and personality.

I find this probably funnier than they were hoping but I still think it pretty much rips .

One of my favorite albums of all time. The guy on here who currently has the second highest review sounds like the worst human being on the planet, do NOT read that review.

The production on this is so warm and fuzzy, the perfect complement to Al Green's voice. I need to listen to him more.

My only exposure to this band was 120 Minutes playing them and getting annoyed that they're not playing something better. But this album was OK. I like how all-over-the-place stylistically it is while still retaining a recognizable identity. Some styles work better for them than others though.

Totally good stuff! I need to listen to it more before it jumps up in my brain, or maybe there are just some weaker selections than others.

It's not TERRIBLE but it does feel like a pretty blatant attempt to rip off bigger bands and I don't like that what I can discern about what makes this different is that it's bluesier.

I like LZ more when they start incorporating more styles around III but I found myself more in tune with the extremely loud guitar and drum production on this this time. There are still too many instances of Robert Plant moaning bluesily.

I really liked the first song, which felt a bit jazzier / more disco-heavy than the rest, which I like but am just less familiar with these styles so would need more listens to open it up I'm sure. But it would be worth doing because I liked it.

I always let this one get overshadowed by the next several for some reason, but it's a really really strong debut album and it has amazing and interesting songwriting just like the rest of them.

Pretty solid stuff! What do you want me to say! I prefer the other one in here though.

I like the moodier and sparser stuff but the more soul influence they add into the equation the less I like it. I've never really liked the title track either. 'Love Is a Stranger' is excellent though.

This album simply does not hold up even though it was vitally important and basically birthed electro and a bunch of techno / hip hop things. So there's that. But listening to it is not fun.

I like how on every song he's trying to be a different singer from a British band that was contemporaneous to him. I know nothing about this man because I am American but seems like a good rabbit hole.

As an album experience I find this a little lacking because the songs fall into like one of four archetypes but the good stuff is good.