Great album. One of my coworkers said that not only does it work with The Wizard of Oz, but also Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2.
Now I finally know what Rolling Stones tune Neil Young took for “Borrowed Tune,” so that’s cool. Neil did it better, of course.
This one really isn’t it.
Can you imagine if Moe Tucker had ever hit a cymbal hard? The world might be a totally different place.
A little piece of H. Land trivia: Black Hole Sun is my least favorite song, beating out Cotton Eyes Joe because it’s a full two minutes longer. When I saw the run time of this album, I slumped. But I made it through, and even turned it up real loud.
There were about 2 minutes of this that I really liked, on My Wave and I think Head Down.
Ranking this album is hard, because I’m just not into the sonic palette of grunge. Ultimately, it gets a two, because it’s definitely not worse than Aftermath, but I wouldn’t listen to either again.
I enjoyed this album throughout. Great rhythm section and guitar work.
I was able to listen to this one a few times today, mostly while shoveling out the driveway and hitting Walmart.
The music’s just so evocative of feelings, moods, places, weather, seasons. It works well as background music and also rewards close listening. It’s a music of movement and movements.
On the first listen, the front half of the album sticks out. The first track’s cinematic, 19th-century bombast trading bars with some strutting saxophone leads to a somber, snowy piano solo into another warm saxophone bop in “Strange Meadow Lark.” “Take Five” sounds like the stream of thought in a flow state.
The last four songs kind of blended together to me on the first couple listens (it took forever to shovel this driveway), but while I was putzing around Walmart I put on the second half and was surprised at how much is going on. It’s far more subtle, but there’s as many shifts in tone and tempo and the continued movement keeps it interesting.
Was initially gonna rate it a four, but this one won me over.
Is “Sob Story” in on the joke?
The Wu-Tang Clan Extended Universe is so fun. RZA’s production work creates the perfect mood and backdrop for GZA’s storytelling, pontificating, and shit-talking, while the features get on board too.
I usually don’t like the skits that populated rap albums pre-Graduation, but the ones on here don’t take too long, and it wouldn’t be a WTC album without the kung fu sound bites.
A maximalist masterpiece. One of this album’s core strengths lies in the Lips’ heady mixture of lightness and weight. It can be pure, candy fluff and the next second turn thick molasses. The Soft Bulletin gets heavy without ever being dark, gets lost in the clouds but always tethered firmly to the earth, and gets morbid without being morose.
It almost forces you to turn to Greek mythology to describe it. It is Proteus, constantly changing; it is Aeolus, windy and breathy and capricious. It is Apollonian and Dionysian in the Nietzschean sense of the words. Waitin’ for an Ubermensch.
“Buggin’” is a fixture of any summer playlist, a perfect song for driving through the heat with the windows down.
“Waitin’ for a Superman” wakes me up in the morning, and I still don’t have an aversion to it.
“The Spiderbite Song” is so sweetly empathetic. I used it for a project in grad school, and that led to the professor telling me she used to pal around with David Berman and Bob Nastanovich.
There’s an old Pitchfork Classic documentary on this album, and if you can still find it, it’s really great. Good interviews from the band members on how they put this one together.
I definitely had this, or Mitchell did, in the cd case back in the day. I listened to Americana, the one with the cockroach on the cover and Pretty Fly (For a White Guy), way more. There were a couple tracks here that triggered some recognition, but not many.
It took me a couple tries to get through this album, but the back half is a lot more fun. A little bit of humor and a self-deprecating narrator go a long way for me.
Also, Chelsea and I watched another 90s artifact a couple months ago, Idle Hands, which features The Offspring performing at the high school Halloween dance. That movie holds UP.
Also also, the singer’s got a pretty interesting Wikipedia page (for a pop-punk singer).
Man, hate to disrespect, but I never want to hear this again.
Looks like this was her final album before she died, and she sounds a lot older than 44. The circumstances of her death are wild and sad.
Ray Ellis and his orchestra at times sound like they’re making the most boring Bond movie ever. But, there are some moments that sound pleasant enough.
I have no idea how to rate this kind of music. Like, unless it blows my socks off, it’s hard to give it a bad rating because I’m sitting here listening to it in the car on the commute at seven in the morning or playing Zelda in a recliner.
Given the right kind of drugs I’m sure I’d enjoy this album a hell of a lot.
It’s such well put together music. So many earworms that are designed to get stuck in your head for days. It’s no Aja, but still fantastic.
Definitely a step up production-wise from “It Takes a Nation of Millions…” and Flavor Flav is more sidelined on this album. I like the bombast of it all, though it is a bit long.
Ice Cube being on that track about Hollywood and how it flattens black characters is pretty funny in retrospect.
I’ll save my thesis on Conscious Rap seeming to be a psy-op inhibiting class consciousness for another day.
“But the salient feature of the absurd age I was at – an age which for all its alleged awkwardness, is prodigiously rich – is that reason is not its guide, and the most insignificant attributes of other people always appear to be consubstantial with their personality. One lives among monsters and gods, a stranger to peace of mind. There is scarcely a single one of our acts from that time which we would not prefer to abolish later on. But all we should lament is the loss of the spontaneity that urged them upon us. In later life, we see things with a more practical eye, one we share with the rest of society; but adolescence was the only time when we ever learned anything.“ -Marcel Proust
I got this album when I was a freshman in high school, and every few months I return to it. The lyrics and arrangements perfectly express young, dumb, naive, adolescent love and yearning.
One of the biggest knocks this album has to its name is that Brian Wilson didn’t know how to end a song, so they’re all fade-outs. Man, these songs are eternal. Are you telling me there’s a satisfying way to end “God Only Knows” or “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”?
“Sloop John B” is a fucking banger and one of the most illustrative examples of the fact that The Beach Boys like, aren’t world-class singers? Sure they’ve got range, but it’s the way B. Wilson arranges those voices into this wall of sound that is stunning.
That bass harmonica coming in like a moose in “I Know There’s an Answer” is one of my favorite moments in all music.
The few down-tempo tracks are suited for the content: Of course you have to slow down for a song called “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder).”
An all-timer, up there in the GOAT conversation, one of the easiest 5s I’ll have.
It’s hard to separate how much I generally liked the musicianship and how grating I found her voice a lot of the time. Sometimes I dug it, kinda sounded like FKA twigs at times, but often it was shrill. After the first couple of songs I thought I would like this more than I ultimately did.
2.5 but rounding down for the three minute a capella song near the end.
Record Exec circa 1993: “This Beck loser is really climbing up the charts. It’s nonsense to me and the wife, but our kids love it. We need an answer to this, maybe something a little friendlier for the whole family. Find it!”
*one week later*
Talent scout: “I found the perfect band, and they even sing a song about basketball for the urban audience.”
Record exec: “Sign them yesterday.”
Seriously though, as much fun as it will be to shit on this album by just quoting it or its Wikipedia page directly (the album “nearly went gold”), I enjoyed it despite myself.
Solid album held up by some world-conquering singles. Will I listen to this again? Probably not. Will I throw it at Penelope when she goes through a bad breakup? Absolutely.
Everything about this album seems like it was designed in a lab to be a punchline in ‘Arrested Development.’
It’s kind of mind blowing that a song like “Holding Back the Years” was the number 1 song in America for a time. The Reagan years were even bleaker than I thought.
Overall, fine, but no stand out songs for me, maybe the first one. Otherwise kinda meh.
First of all, an extra star is awarded for the total non sequitur sample of “All I wanted was a Pepsi” at the end of “How I Could Just Kill a Man.”
Second of all, I really like whatever this style of production is called, heavy on the samples, a mix of genres, heavy bass lines, idk. Ultimately I like De La Soul’s version of it a bit more.
But, the lyrical content was pretty repetitive, and the flows were all kinda the same. I ended up listening to this a time and an half and liked it a lot more on the second run through.
Much like “Smash” had Joe and Mitchell questioning the entries on this list, this one has me going down the conspiracy rabbit hole. Dexys Midnight Runners is a one-hit wonder band, so much so that even though I’ve heard “Come On, Eileen” as many times as any other person with three decades on this planet, I’d never even heard this band’s name before. So it’s completely baffling that there’s not just one, but THREE albums of theirs on this list!?
My current explanation is that the maker of this last had these three DMR albums on record growing up in Britain. He loved them. He played them every day. And as he got older and became a music journalist, he grew resentful that people laughed at his love for DMR at industry parties. And so then, he set out to make this list and get it published in a book, so that Dexys Midnight Runners could take their rightful place beside The Beatles, John Coltrane, and The Offspring.
Anyway, 2 stars because “Come On, Eileen” is great.
I appreciated the tonal shifts throughout the album. It wasn’t all real heavy, and the lyrical content, evocative of a diseased London full of iniquity, matched the shifting mood of the music.
I particularly liked “Locomotive Breath.”
As with most any Bowie album, the musicianship and the arrangements of it are fun, interesting, beautiful, and powerful. The mood of this album is fairly straightforward rock n' roll, some avant garde piano breakdowns aside. We get a classic Bowie "persona" in Aladdin Sane, but it never overshadows the music.
Ultimately, I appreciate Bowie much more as a producer, arranger, tastemaker, and mainstream boundary pusher than as a singer, lyricist, and performer himself. To my knowledge, as a curator of different trends in music, he is unmatched in popular music. Even though I like everything that's going on, most Bowie ends up leaving me cold. There's an intentional distance he keeps from his audience, and I usually don't bridge that gap.
Solid, easy going music. I put it on in the car yesterday on the way home and the kids didn't think to ask for Alvin and the Chipmunks, so that was great. I spent a lot of time last year listening to Getz/Gilberto, but that's also on this list, so I'll save my thoughts for when we get to it.
The Boss throws a last ditch desperation heave at rock immortality and connects. Bruce empties the clip and every shot from the E Street Band hits its mark. Bad Scooter revs his engine and peels out toward glory or death, his girl behind him and the boys around him.
Bruce himself talks about this as a guitar album, it’s right there on the cover, but guitar is like the last thing I think about when I listen to this. From Roy Bittan’s keys to open Thunder Road to Clarence’s sax solo on Jungleland (which Bruce apparently hummed to him note by note), this album belongs to the band, and they bring the energy to match Bruce’s stories of young hope and despair.
The four songs that open and close each side of the record, Thunder Road, Backstreets, Born to Run, Jungleland, are perfect and epic singalongs. Kinda like Dark Side of the Moon, this album feels a lot longer than its runtime, but in a good way.
In between those tentpoles we get some self-mythologizing in Tenth Avenue Freeze Out and a classic Bruce working-man cosplay in Night. The second side’s middle tracks might have been embarrassing, but Bruce and the band lean so far in they become endearing.
I’ve been lucky enough to see Bruce play Thunder Road live both with the band and alone on his acoustic when he was rallying for Obama in Charlottesville in 2012.
I love that song, I love this album, I love the memories I have of singing these tracks on runs with Bill, me and Joe’s cross country teammate who turned me on to Bruce in high school. Easy 5, loved to have an excuse to listen yet again.
I put this on in the classroom while the kids were doing independent research. Not one complaint, question, or request for something else. One kid said it sounded like video game music (complimentary).
Another genre I don’t know how to assess though. I’ll give it a four but it could easily be a five idk
Logan said in his review of The Band I think that he doesn’t really like the organ sound in rock music, but it gets me going. The band does great work here, but I think they get even better with time, peaking at the end with all of L.A. Woman.
Jim Morrison obviously has this incredible, hypnotizing presence. I dig this, but there are a couple of more minor tracks.
It rips from beginning to end. I got a little worried when the second track started slow, but they seemed to anticipate this and picked up the tempo midway through. The album doesn’t look back from there.
On my first run of albums I got Iron Maiden’s debut, which had a different singer. It was okay, but this is awesome all the way. Maybe if I had listened to more stuff like this growing up I’d have ended up a better guitarist.
Also, listening to “Run to the Hills” like IRON MAIDEN WAS WOKE!?!1?1!?
Parts of this were deeply unsettling. I didn’t exactly like it, but it succeeded in extracting the emotions it intended to.
There’s a phenomenon specific to the NFL where a player can play themselves out of the Hall of Fame. A previously great quarterback will overstay their time in the league by a few too many years, and the lasting image is of a washed guy, down three possessions, taking too many sacks trying to throw their team back into the game. Russell Wilson is currently doing this.
That’s how I felt listening to these songs. I liked them, then I waited for them to go somewhere, and they all just kinda stalled. That’s fine for “Ambulance Blues” or “Desolation Row,” when they’re outliers on the album in terms of length. But all these were a few minutes too long. Highlights were the opener and “True One.” 2.5/5
This man’s voice, the way he plays guitar, and his melancholy melodies are all sublime.
I like the acoustic first half and electric back. I could listen to Neil sing the phone book.
The first three songs had me pretty excited. The rest were good and with plenty of great moments, but largely tipped a bit too much into the Cranberries side of the alternative spectrum.
Calling that song “Not My Idea” where they crib the opening guitar riff from “Soon” is diabolical. But a lot of what I liked about this album seemed inspired by British indie pop of the 80s and early 90s.
‘To Pimp a Butterfly,’ the apotheosis of Conscious Rap. Which begs the questions, what is this album conscious of? What type of consciousness does it try to inculcate in its listener?
The thesis of the album seems to be that becoming famous, revered, and rich alienates you from the very community that you built that fame on. There’s survivor guilt here, and also exploitation guilt. We most often get a sense of this guilt from the various bitter characters (I’m glad Kendrick hasn’t felt the need to take on acting yet) berating Kendrick for leaving them behind, or from Kendrick just making the subtext extremely explicit.
How does Kendrick reconcile this? Pretty much textbook self-help and the soothing ideas of the prosperity gospel. He loves himself, and God put him in this position for some reason, and if you would accept God’s will and love yourself, you may get rich and famous too, or at least stop being mad at Kendrick for it.
I may have some qualms about the ideology of TPAB, but if ideology is keeping you from recognizing, appreciating, and enjoying the artistry here, you’re doing too much. I’m speaking just as much, if not more, about the musicians on the tracks than about Kendrick’s obviously prodigious technical skill.
But also, when it came out I thought it was a perfect album, and then didn’t listen to it in full again until now. I just never felt the need. Not many other albums like that.
It's hard to give a rating to such a foundational album like this, and it's funny we got it right after 'To Pimp a Butterfly.' To say hip-hop's come a long way is an understatement.
Their album 'Raising Hell' is sometimes credited with kicking off rock-rap due to the collaboration with Aerosmith on "Walk This Way" and Rick Rubin's production, but you can hear it here on "Rock Box."
It's all pretty corny and simple. You could see a lot of these lyrics go on elementary school motivational posters. 2.5/5
It’s like the Arctic Monkeys got asked to do the next Bond soundtrack.
