1001 Albums Summary

9.1. What a groove (though Curtis still clears). Most underrated track: Think

Should have stayed buried

Oh great GOAT, the curse you gave us

riffs rip but i'm probably not going back to it

1001 albums that you should try to forget before you die

It still has kitsch charm and some inspired moments, but this hasn’t aged nearly as well as many of is contemporaries

I think part of me was always biased against wings because when I was a kid I knew a girl whose main point of conversation was “my dad was in wings with Paul McCartney” but she was annoying as hell so figured her dad and thus wings couldn’t have been very cool either. God was I right

If you don’t like this you don’t like music

Guy in hospice care finally listening to this album so he can cross it off the list: I could have died without this honestly

Less nostalgic and more a meditation in nostalgia itself

Not so sure about the “Love” bit

Id probably love to hear this live but didn’t need a record of it

Greatness isn’t perfection — it’s transcendence

I’m sure this hit hard at the time but does nothing for me now and felt endless. Not sure why Kinks same era same sound don’t evoke the same reaction

So in Love 🐐

This guy’s gonna go far

If I found out I was going to die I’d probably listen to bat out of hell again

Love her but not her best

Please sir can I have some mo’

Late night magic

Id rather listen to tom waits

Zero stars if I ever listen to this again I’ll know I’ve died and gone to hell

When you’re this talented even hot nonsense becomes profound

Yes. A thousand times, yes.

Music for my asses

Play it fucking loud

I’ll never get tired of this

a mixed bag, but the highs are essential cash

This would have made a great ‘lost album’. The mere idea of it would have been mythical. Sadly, the reality of it far less so.

Great document of the scene but never transcendent for me

A 40 minute version of that 30 seconds at the beginning of every Saturday Night Live right before the monologue starts

This challenge often feels like a time capsule, where you open it and think, how did they possibly think this is worth preserving?

I’m glad he’s having fun but I’m not really

A rock n roll au sec

I don’t think this will ever resonate with a version of me that’s not 13

I get it and I don't

I hope no one murders this dude

Oh hell yeah

Another great visit with my friends the band

I’m too sober for this

Vibes are right

He still had it, but it’s not anything you really need

Honestly, I should probably be less of a hater

Some good stuff here

I’ll give it another chance later

banger

Pop music high point

Hell of a groove

I don’t have the death in me

I’m probably being too harsh as I like this band

He’s got poetry in him

Definitely has its charms

One of the few double records to reach that white album magic formula where the sum is greater than its parts

This sounds like rock and or roll

Oceanic depths of spirit here

“the man gave us billie jean, you say he touched those kids?” Is one of the worst lines I’ve ever heard in my life but the rest is cool

Cut a few tracks from this and it's a five. Unfortunately feeling groovy and silent night are such corny misfires that they accentuate the corn of the rest of it. Still, often beautiful, with two next level complementary talents

Da Funk is so well constructed that you wonder why most of the other ones just never seem to go anywhere

If you can’t afford the name brand this basically tastes the same with only a slight chemical after taste

I wish they had kept making music this human and affecting and avoided the path of purposefully universally relatable anthems that corresponded to no actual human emotion within the artist they took from here on out

Party rap zenith

unquestionably changed it all but still sounds too much like the primordial soup it emerged from

Wah Wah Wah …

A delicious and hearty corn chowder

A frog in boiling water of brilliance

Maybe I like Queen now idk

man this dude must have been super charismatic

Very influential album. Before this came out gossip girl originally said “oo gossip girl” but then they added the xx after hearing Intro

10/10 drummer. Guitarist v good too. Cut Sting out of this and it might get a five.

So effortlessly good, such a natural blend of styles and skills, you can easily take it for granted. I’m tempted to rate this lower as a result, but I cant bring myself to

Wasn’t clicking, I’ll go back to it

🫶

Postmodern masterpiece

i wore a big fur coat and then dropped it at the “coast to coast, LA to Chicago, western male” part to reveal a beautiful gown and everybody clapped

Lots of interesting noises here

When asked why they read, literary critics often have described it a search for the sublime — the transcendence of form. Secular theophany. Music rarely reaches those heights, but it’s reached that here.

Too much jig music

An album exploring the disconnect between his desperate need for emotional intimacy and emotional unavailability. Some of his best songs and some throwaways, almost all produced and sequenced in such a way as to make the each track feel disconnected from the next

Clearly a master, but this particular recording didn’t blow my mind.

Gorgeous, gorgeous stuff

This includes a lot of their best stuff and also four or five songs that I can’t stand

My name is Weird Al Yankovic and this is the music I fuck to.

This album has had staying power for a lot of people, but I was soft on it then and softer on it now. Her voice is thin to the point of emptiness and becomes grating the more she layers it to cover for that, the production is slick but lacks the impact and spirit of its influences such as Jai Paul, Erykah Badu, D’Angelo etc. This is propped up at least in part by a parasocial cult or Knowles celebrity, I feel.

I’m gonna moan now. mmmmmmmmmmMMMMMMMMM.

Incredibly cool album. Far more than a Bowie/kraftwerk acolyte — the rhythm section adds a propulsive post punk/art punk aesthetic that elevates this from having a floating down the autobahn quality into its own thing. And unlike all the new wave synth albums that followed it, it doesn’t feel tethered to that scene. It would have sounded equally as cool released in 2006 amidst wolf parade and tapes n tapes.

This feels like buying one of those giant bags of jasmine rice at costco but for gershwin

John Frusciante coming into his own is really what elevates this material, and both Flea and Chad Smith are incredible musicians. But I don't connect with the the Kiedis scat-rap antics, songwriting and early funk dna like I did growing up. That made the majority of this album more grating and skippable than I was expecting upon revisit, so can't give this a great score. But it's not a 3 of mediocrity, it's a 3 of high highs and low lows.

It started with S&G, but what I love about Simon you can really start to hear here. Yes, he’s an inspired songwriter and evocative lyricist, but he always seems to feel claustrophobic within his own aesthetic — always pushing the boundaries and pulling from disparate genres and cultures — and it’s that tension within himself and within his music that stopped him from becoming another static singer songwriter type, and often elevates the material, and at the very least provides enough contrast so that he’s never boring. Plus, he’s funny.

Shut up and sing, Tom.

Some of the best songs ever written and also some songs where he imagines calling the president to tell him what European actresses he wants to fuck. Flawless.

One all timer here, the rest throwaway. Also, isn’t it kind of crazy that when Papa John Philips’s daughter wrote in her 2009 memoir that her dad had groomed her into a ten year physical relationship, the media reported it as a tawdry but consensual affair? I guess Monday, Monday is pretty good too, but I prefer Neil Diamond’s cover.

Timbaland and the Neptunes do such inspired work here that it made this dude seem cool for like a decade and a half.

Gesamtkunstwerk

She’s only transcendent at a bossa nova tempo for me but I like her enough to 4 the record where she does marching band music and duets with a small child too I guess

Too unpretentious to demand respect but deserves more of it than most we give out

I was going to give this a 3 because Back to Life is a stellar groove but the proper version isn’t even in the actual album and without it this is fine, unremarkable, the kind of pleasant slightly innovative in context product of its time I’m fine forgetting where we left it

Perverse, reference laden, narratively oblique, full of words that don’t mean nothin, like luptid? Welcome back, James Joyce.

Lou’s voice is such a powerful thing. He’s a great writer when he wants to be, but even if he’s singing the most mundane pop lyrics his delivery can imbue them with layers of meaning — menace, detachment, ennui — that make them feel profound or affecting. Oft imitated never bested.

The faces as a band were better than this rating suggests, they just weren’t reflected well through their album output. I really like several of these songs but they’re weaker in this context, but come alive for me on the five guys walk into a bar box set, which sadly didn’t make it to the streaming era.

For all these inspired Kanye beats, I can’t really get past common himself here, who seems to be trying to make the Bush era To Pimp a Butterfly (derogatory) and the best writing he can do amounts to stuff like: “So many raps about rims I’m surprised fellas ain’t become tyres!”

After this dropped everyone had to sell their dulcimers and switch to acoustic guitars because they knew they could never compete

After this dropped everyone had to stop going electric and switch to acoustic guitars because they knew they could never compete

A blown vein of emotion, no wonder everyone thinks it's autobiographical

Grunge’s greatest fuck you. Its reassessment is a fuck you to the haters, but regardless of where the consensus has now landed, the work itself is a fuck you to a lot of things: a misogynistic culture, to her peers and her riot grrrl feminist contemporaries, to herself and her own failings, to her marriage, to the world itself. Courtney has far more to say than any of her peers, and i think she’s the one that got kurt to be more direct in his own lyrics. But it’s complex and informed without being too pretentious — she’s literate in a way that normal people really aren’t anymore. She’s a hugely flawed person and her own ambition led to her outsized celebrity which led to the backlash, but we more easily recognise the artistry of male artists in that predicament, and it clearly exists in spades here.

So influential it’s a struggle to hear this with fresh ears, but if you want to try, focus on how intimate this sounds, even with a nine-piece band, and then you’ll start to hear the unique brilliance that’s still potent in these tracks, and why it still stands on its on feet even compared to where these artists grew from here.

the thing about being a conscious rapper is you'll get ecstatic five-star reivews from the british press and be shortlisted for every prize and then six years later your biggest contribution to culture is a guest spot on a late-stage koombaya coldplay song

I can appreciate it in moments with the right mindset, surely. But do I ever want to listen to this again?

If you want a kid to discover the joys of music, play them some AC/DC. Eminently accessible, surface level rock. Maybe skip the song where they describe an assault though.

This album took decades and multiple generations to even be appreciated, let alone taken for granted as American pop’s pinnacle. But even now, it remains singular, the rare work of pure ambition and crazed inspiration that actually achieved its vision. But it wasn’t attempting to unite the world or fill stadiums. Listen to the lyrics – these are intimate, personal, tortured and conversational. The music reflects the multitudes, the overwhelming spirit, contained in those everyday yearnings. It’s a man searching for his own limits by seeing how far he can push music itself, and forging his own pathway to get there that no one else could dare follow. Anyways it’s pretty good, check it out. If only for a love song that starts with the lyrics: I may not always love you.

Jamie is still carrying the other two, but in trying to reach his level they've actually regressed. While I appreciate the craft, I wanted this to be over for most of it.

The most interesting thing about Neon Bible for me has always been its namesake, a novel written by a 16-year-old about a boy trying to escape the suffocating repression and hollow religiosity of his small town with only one kind person in his life as respite, a book which was rejected by publishers at the time. A similar fate befell his follow-up, A Confederacy of Dunces, as well, the frustration of which led him to end his own life. His mother pushed for it to be published after his death, and it became a cult classic, with Neon Bible seeing publication in 1989 against her wishes due to a legal dispute from their money-hungry extended family. But with this album, I’ve always felt that Arcade Fire bit off more than they could chew. The ingredients are so compelling – written and recorded in an abandoned church that the band had bought and fixed up, tackling those same themes of social alienation and fighting to escape an oppressive small town life only to find a world equally if not more disappointing, corrupt, empty, co-opted than what you had just run from – ending on a note that what you’re imprisoned in now is your own flesh. But as much as you can intellectualize it, I just don’t think it does that ambition justice. Musically, it only hits the highs it promises on a few tracks – first of which is Ocean of Noise, still gorgeous though I prefer the Calexico cover they released as a b-side, Intervention, and Windowsill. The rest, though memorable, still falls flat for me, never reaching the sublime highs they found on that first record. 2000s indie might have hit the mainstream here, but it was never going to stick around if this is the best we could do.

Lever street is almost a vibe

A pleasant enough place to pass through even if you’re checking your watch after 20 minutes but there’s no reason to come back

You may be tempted to say, 'if you just cut this down to the best songs, you'd have a perfect record.' And I'm with you – no one wants to listen to this all the way through each time they go back to it. But if you cut it down, even to just non-stop bangers, you’d make a worse album. With Melancholy the messiness is a feature, built in from before they even started writing. They were inspired by the Beatles’ White Album, firing the producer who had just made a masterpiece with them to force themselves into new creative territory. And they pushed and pushed, exploring the backrooms of their sound – there were around 60 songs that came from those sessions, nearly all worth hearing, with 28 making the final cut. The sprawl is the journey. The highs are high, and they’re usually all I go back to, but I was struck upon revisiting this how good the stuff I usually skip over is, and how little the contrast clashes. Even when it’s shit it’s brilliant.

I can’t think of a greater chasm between singer and band than this. There’s some really interesting, groundbreaking work here, but hearing it is like trying to focus on a piano recital with a car alarm going off.

*PSA: The Spotify link is to the wrong album. They made another self titled album in 2003. You may be able to find it on the first ten tracks of 1998’s In the Doghouse, but If can’t find it on streaming, find it on YouTube. It’s worth it* What a revelation this album is. I’m more than 100 in, and this is my favorite discovery of the challenge so far. Both melodic and discordant, with songs that careen off the rails into new directions at any moments and then find their way back again. Lyrics that feel like someone’s confessing something to you in plain language but you can’t quite grasp what they’re telling you. Better each time I spin it.

A truism of music so true it’s banal itself is this: the more influential something is, the more hackneyed it seems when you go back to it. And Chic has many layers of that — you know the hits best from a playlist you first heard at a discount shop, you’ve heard the melodies interpolated into hip-hop and r&b, you resent this sound because it was done worse by the big musicians that recruited Nile Rodgers to do it for them to diminishing returns. Or maybe you just think disco sucks, a hand-me-down opinion that had some partly racialized and homophobic roots. It’s the simplicity of their sound, however, that proved most influential — whittling down funk to its most basic ingredients and innovating techniques to capture its effects with less. That allowed so much space in the mix, which fueled pop music the world over, for better and for worse. But, strip all of that away, and this is still joyous, inspired stuff. Musically, the follow up Risqué is better with grooves that build and expand, but this is still a party of its own — opulent, elegant, both aspiring and aspirational.

A high 3 because I like her music, have sought her out live, and think she’s singular. Definitely a landmark album that still gets me dancing. But since I picked this up 20 years ago, I never feel like jumping into the full album.

I can picture a scenario, in a new york cub in the 50s, in which I really enjoy this. But I’m not here to rate hypotheticals.

No album better captures the psyche of the English man at that time, and perhaps no album should.

If your view of this band is burdened by the baggage of over-familiar singles from their peak, this is your way in to discovering their true magic — a debut with its front man Michael Stipe still finding his voice, pushed back in the mix with the drums brought up front for an unmistakable, inscrutable sound that draws you in and never lets go.

It sounds like the walls closing in on you, but the walls have never sounded better.

This isn’t bad music per se, and I was hoping I could hear it with fresh ears, but unfortunately it’s not good enough to overcome the baggage of its immense success and outsized presence in my life against my will when it came out.

The DIY classic that influenced so many others, most notably Prince. Todd Rundgren had grown bored of basic 60s and 70s pop, and bored of himself, and before he abandoned both completely with his next album, he pushed the form to its limits here, playing every instrument himself (teaching himself any he didn’t already know) and producing too in the days when creating something this meticulous and complex in its arrangements took insane skill. And then by side D, he got bored of that too, and assembled a band in New York to record songs in the studio as messily as possible. This is pop music teetering on the edge, reshaped in an image of a guy with no interest in what its success may bring him, who abandoned the audience this brought in within a year of amassing it. The whole here is greater than the sum of its parts — a jukebox possessed with a fit of mania.

Waiting room music at a sexual torture dungeon (complimentary)

Far more vibrant and compelling than her peers

No one on this earth needs to hear a sitar cover of the doors at any point in their life, but side 2 made me a believer

With every album, prog moves closer to the heart.

No song better defines the appeal of Kanye West than Through the Wire, written and recorded in 2002 with his jaw wired shut after a car accident. He’s a force of will — rejected by the establishment and his peers, but fighting through until he was the rap star he envisioned himself to be. And while he may not have the poetic prowess of his forebears, his plain delivery and honest, messy lyricism have the rare effect of exposing a man’s heart and soul. His layered and intricate production here changed hip-hop at the time, but it was the intimacy he offered that changed it more in the long-term — and the naked humanity he offers is why, even as his worst impulses have taken him places impossible to defend, I still can’t quit him.

Perfect pop broadcasting from another dimension

Melt and 21st Century Poem worth hearing, the rest has aged like egg salad

it’s got a great clean sound, is consistent and adventurous, and is also bold and confessional — what’s not to love? Also hugely influential on artists like Courtney Barnett and Phoebe Bridgers.

I enjoy enjoy the silence but I enjoy the silence after more.

When they do rock, it’s the peak of the form, a singer-guitarist pairing so electric they’ve rightfully cast a shadow over the entire genre ever since, inspiring pale imitators who can never hit their heights. But when they do blues, they’re boring. I always feel like I don’t like blues listening to bands like this do it, but then I put on muddy waters and realize it’s only boring when rock bands do it — however technically impressive they may be.

The cover is so striking and inviting it makes you think this will be just as accessible as Ziggy but it’s a far weirder album. Lady Grinning Soul, a song Bowie never played live, is the highlight for me here — strange, unknowable and transcendent.

Man, they’re boring. Uninspired production, 80s flow. Kool Keith shows up for an interlude and you’re reminded what talent sounds like.

I’d only pretend to like this to impress honky tonk women.

They keep asking me to kick out the jams. How do I kick out the jams. What does that mean. Where do I start

Love this, have returned to it at a regular clip since the songs first leaked. Nothing else scratches the itch the same

Don’t judge this until it really kicks in. The first few are just a warm up, then Duane Allman comes alive.

It may have been a break through internally, but this is seemingly the last time ever Tom sounded uninspired

Is this the best album ever made? Ask me as a teenager and I’d have said yes without hesitation — the first Beatles album that felt unburdened by overfamiliar singles, the first that made me see the forest for the trees. The first that felt like mine. A couple decades later and it’s hard to name one album the best when my tastes have expanded out in so many different directions, but this is still the album to which I’m measuring all the rest, and the only one that doesn’t make me wince to see named the best.