1001 Albums Summary

The Isley Brothers, 3 + 3 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Album #7 and a new discovery for me. This is a great record, a really really enjoyable listen. I wasn’t very familiar with the Isley Brothers beyond Footsteps in the Dark and the fact that they’ve been sampled heavily in hip hop, Kendrick Lamar, Ice Cube, that sort of thing. I do really enjoy soul music, even if I don’t tend to gravitate towards it that often. The opening track here is an utterly smoking soul song with a cracking guitar solo at the end. In fact, there are loads of guitar parts across the album that I really really like. It feels like an album of moments. I don’t necessarily love every song all the way through, but there’s at least one moment on every track where I think that’s really fucking cool. It also turns out I already knew a few of the songs, including the opener and Summer Breeze, which I think is beautifully placed towards the end of the album. It really lifts things again after the middle sags a bit. Overall, I really really enjoyed it, and I’ll definitely be checking out more from this group in the future. Always nice to get a genuinely great new discovery

Metallica, Metallica ⭐️⭐️ Album #8. I cringed a bit when I saw this come up this morning. I’ve known Metallica all my life. I wouldn’t say I’m a fan. I like and borderline love a few of their songs, but they’re a small doses band for me. I was anxious at the thought of listening to the whole album. Turns out I was right. I have a few major gripes with this band, chief amongst them being their sound. Not the music, not the composition or the lyrics, it’s the fucking sound. Horribly compressed, like it’s playing from within a resonant box, sucking in on itself, completely devoid of dynamics. I hate it. This, to me, is not heavy. It doesn’t feel loud. It feels artificial in a majorly bad way. Secondly, it’s the rhythm section. Much of this stuff has been meme’d to death, but it’s still worth pointing out. The bass is so undefined. It’s just a low end splat in the mix. And Lars. Before today, I actually felt the criticism he gets was unfair. But my God. I’m sure these drum parts were meticulously crafted, but they’re played so rigidly. I’m a drummer myself, admittedly not part of a billion dollar band like Metallica, I’ve never made ten quid in music, but these parts are played so boringly and lifelessly that I feel you’d get more soul from a drum machine. What earns this album a second star for me is Kirk Hammett. His playing is class. His solos elevate every song on the album, particularly The Unforgiven, which is by far the best track here. One of the only songs with a real dynamic range, and where James ditches the trademark snarl and actually sings a bit. I also like some of the faster songs, like Holier Than Thou. I know this album is a departure from their thrash metal roots, so maybe I’d like the earlier albums more. I may get slated for this, but I don’t get it. By the end, I felt pulverised. Maybe that’s the point. I’ll probably never listen to it again.

The Who, My Generation ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Album #9. This is a strong three, and it could easily become a four with repeated listens. Of all the British Invasion bands, I’m least familiar with The Who, so I was delighted when this came up. They’ve always been more of a singles band for me. This is some heavy shit, heavy even by today’s standards. I can’t imagine what people thought when it was released in 1965. 1965! I don’t really care for the soul and blues covers. I totally understand why they included them, paying homage to their influences and introducing them to a British audience, but on a modern listen I’d rather hear James Brown or Muddy Waters do these songs. That said, Nicky Hopkins is pure class on I’m a Man. I also think Daltrey sounds a bit awkward on the covers. Their original tracks are far more compelling. My Generation and The Kids Are Alright are iconic and rank among the best songs of the 60s. As a band, though, holy shit. They sound fully formed here on their debut album. Crashing, smashing drums, chunky bass lines, and frenetic, ahead of its time guitar work. It sounds incredible. However music was recorded back then, it just feels like you can’t recreate that sound today. It’s beautiful. The slightly weak link for me is Daltrey, who sounds like he’s still finding his voice on this record. Overall though, really enjoyable.

Radiohead, Amnesiac ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Album #10. My first Radiohead album on the list, and probably one I’m least familiar with. I’m a big Radiohead fan and I love most of their music. I would question the inclusion of this album on the list, despite it being very very good, as it’s essentially an outtakes album from the Kid A sessions. It does feel like that in a lot of ways. It doesn’t feel as cohesive as some of their other projects, but why would it? It’s not really a full blown studio album in the same sense. It gets four stars because it doesn’t reach the level of consistency of their other masterpieces like OK Computer, Kid A, and In Rainbows. That said, it absolutely does reach those heights at times, particularly with Pyramid Song. This is as good a song as any I’ve ever heard in my life, and might possibly be their best ever. It’s a very top heavy album. The first half is absolute spectacular and includes a lot of their staples. Radiohead at their best. Funnily enough, this period is often seen as their departure from guitar rock, but this album actually has loads of guitar on it, and whenever it appears it sounds incredible and fits the tone perfectly. I Might Be Wrong has an absolutely crunching riff, and something about the guitar interplay on Knives Out reminds me of In Rainbows and even parts of The King of Limbs outtakes, like it was pointing towards where they’d go later. The second half undoubtedly drops off. I wouldn’t call it filler, because by definition it isn’t, these are outtakes. But anything from Dollars and Cents onward doesn’t really do it for me. Life in a Glasshouse is clearly a complete song, but it’s not a personal favourite, even though I know some people love it. Finally, this album is dark. Dark as a pitch black night. It’s probably their darkest record, even darker than Kid A. There’s no Optimistic here. It’s bruisingly bleak. I really enjoyed it, and I’m looking forward to more Radiohead as the list goes on.

Antony and the Johnsons, I Am a Bird Now ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Album #12. I did not expect to give this five stars when it came up this morning. I have a real soft spot for this album. I remember when it came out, and weirdly enough I remember listening to it the year it was released. Looking back, I don’t know how I got into this as a 13 or 14 year old, but I did. I think it was because of My Lady’s Story. My Lady’s Story is one of my all time favourite songs. I think it was the only track I’d heard at the time. I must have come across it on some compilation somewhere, and that’s why I bought the album. I’ve been listening to it on and off for years. I’m absolutely not made of stone, I love a good weepy film and a weepy song, and this one routinely brings me to tears. I don’t even relate to the subject matter at all. It has nothing to do with my life. But the composition, the performance, and the lyrics are just staggeringly beautiful. As for the rest of the album, I hadn’t listened to it in years. Looking at the tracklist beforehand, I recognised some titles and thought I could hear them in my head, but I was completely wrong. I didn’t know this album at all. It is so beautiful and so well performed. Antony’s voice is incredibly unique, I genuinely can’t think of another singer who sounds like him. Beautifully emotive. And the lyrics are even better. There’s not a wasted line on the whole record. Nothing feels off or out of place. The imagery is gorgeous throughout. The guest appearances are great as well. Boy George is fantastic on You Are My Sister. And it’s got Lou Reed on it, for fuck’s sake, that tells you all you need to know. I’m loving this 1001 albums exercise because it’s forcing me to re evaluate records I thought I knew. I did not know this album at all. It absolutely deserves your full attention, so when it comes up for you, sit down and really listen to it.

Motörhead, No Sleep ’til Hammersmith ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Album #13. I wasn’t fully sold on parts of this while I was listening to it. I think I’m a Motörhead fan more in principle than in practice. One thing that bothered me early on was how little I could hear Lemmy in the early to mid section of the album, but that seemed to sort itself out as it went on. I’m not usually a big fan of live albums, but this absolutely does its job, because it made me desperate to see Motörhead live. RIP Lemmy. It gets four stars because when it’s good, it’s fucking blisteringly great. Proper bruising punk metal. I love Lemmy’s crowd interactions, he’s just a funny guy. His interviews and documentary prove that. I especially loved the bit where he told the crowd to shut the fuck up. It’s one dimensional, but that’s barely worth mentioning. It’s a Motörhead album. And the dimension it operates in is fucking great.

Ramones, Ramones ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Album #14. What can you say about the pioneers of punk here. This is a great, short, punky album that predates the 1977 birth of punk itself, so respect has to be given for it being such a trailblazing album. Is it one of my favourite punk albums of all time? Probably not. It’s very one note and quite monotonous to listen to at times, but also quite enjoyable because it is what it is, similar to Motörhead yesterday. It just is what it is. It’s so groundbreaking that it has to be respected and taken on its own merit. While a lot of the songs do sound the same, the subject matter jumps around wildly, from Nazism to drugs to surprisingly tender moments like I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend, which is probably my favourite song on the album. It’s also very short and snappy, so it gets points for that too. I don’t really see myself listening to this much in the future. It doesn’t necessarily contain my favourite kind of punk sound. I much prefer Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, which I think took the formula of this and brought it to a different level, though I know a lot of people would disagree with me there. But yeah, the lyrics are great, the riffs are good, and it’s a short, sweet, punky album that was way ahead of its time and completely groundbreaking. It paved the way for one of my favourite genres of music, so it definitely has to be respected.

The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Album #15. I think in recent years this album has become underrated. I know Rolling Stone had it ranked as the greatest album of all time at one point, and now it’s somewhere in the 30s. It feels like it’s fallen a bit out of favour in Beatles discourse compared to Revolver, Abbey Road, and even Rubber Soul. I think this could very well be their best album. Conceptually it’s definitely their most sound album, and maybe one of the most conceptually sound albums ever made. The whole Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band idea is genius in my opinion. It was a great turn for the band to make, and I think they threw themselves into it. The tone and style are about 90 percent consistent with the concept. And it’s just fun. There are a lot of great songs on it. I think it might be McCartney’s strongest album. He’s all over it. While I wouldn’t usually jump straight into his more granny, sitting by the kitchen sink type songs, this probably has his best ones. She’s Leaving Home is great. I love Lennon’s vocal contributions too, even when McCartney is leading. And Lennon’s own songs are spectacular. It’s hard not to listen to A Day in the Life and think it’s one of the best songs ever recorded. My only gripe is Within You Without You. I don’t think it fits the tone of the album. Before anyone gets annoyed, it’s actually one of my favourite songs on the album on its own. I listen to it regularly. It just doesn’t fit the rest of the record in my opinion. It’s also Harrison’s only solo writing credit on the album, so maybe that’s just where he was at. I sometimes think about what it would have been like if Strawberry Fields Forever or I Am the Walrus had been on this instead. That would have been some tracklist. Look, it’s The Beatles. It’s arguably their most famous album and it’s just a cracker. I’m trying to limit five star reviews, but it’s very hard not to give this one five stars.

Charles Mingus, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Album #16. I am a total philistine when it comes to jazz. The depths of my jazz knowledge extend to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, which is probably the equivalent of someone only knowing Heartbreak Hotel by Elvis Presley. I don’t even know if that’s a good comparison, but that’s the level we’re at. It’s hard to review an album like this after one listen in one day. I usually listen to these albums first thing in the morning, but today I ended up listening to this while on a nighttime expedition to buy frozen broccoli. It turns out that might have been the perfect way to hear it. I like the dark tone and atmosphere. I really like how the whole album sounds. It’s sinister. My jazz terminology is poor, so I don’t really know how to describe individual parts, but I loved how the first track moves from sinister to sultry to freaky in a really subtle, smooth way. The second track felt pure cinematic. There’s also this weird bit where a trumpet sounds like a voice, I thought that was cool. The third track has an incredible piano opening. I don’t know if this album has been sampled to death by hip hop, but that section feels ripe for it. I started to lose a bit of patience on the fourth track, but I liked how it kept bringing back the main motif over and over again, and almost every time it returned it sounded uglier. That was really interesting. There are loads of moments that keep you on your toes, stabbing percussive tuba, random injections of flamenco style guitar, just strange choices that somehow work. The sound of the album and how cohesive it is is genuinely impressive. Why three stars? I feel like this might grow on me, and I’ll try as the list goes on. I am looking forward to more jazz. But as a genre, it often leaves me cold. It doesn’t really convey an emotional message to me in a clear way. When everything goes chaotic and mental, drums flying, saxophones and woodwind shrieking and billowing, I’m not always sure how I’m supposed to feel. I tend to feel very little. I prefer the quieter sections, they feel more meaningful to me. Maybe I’m just not smart enough for it. I’m sure this album is incredibly well thought out and composed, and I’m sure there’s meaning there, I just don’t connect with it yet. Maybe with repeat listens it’ll click, and maybe I’ll grow into jazz more as this list continues. For now, it’s a three star.

Jorge Ben, África Brasil ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Album #17. I’d never heard of this album until I joined this and started the 1001 album generator. I’d seen it reviewed a few times and people have really waxed lyrical about it, giving it five stars. For me, it’s good. At points it’s very, very good. It’s just not really my thing. I like African-influenced music — I’m a big fan of Fela Kuti — but I don’t really care much for samba or that style in general. I don’t hate it. I just don’t feel much towards it. The positives: the vocals are incredible. Some of the songs, like the opener, “Xica da Silva” and “História de Jorge”, are class. And the repetitive rhythms are something I usually really enjoy in music, but unless the rhythm really catches me, it doesn’t bear repeating, if that makes sense. It’s an interesting album. I gave it a few listens when I had the time, but it didn’t click with me in the way it seems to for most people. Just my opinion. That said, I’m looking forward to more stuff like this. It was a completely new discovery for me, and I really enjoyed that part of the experience.

Haircut 100, Pelican West ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Album #18. Another new discovery. Third in a row. A great new wave record. I’d never even heard of Haircut 100. It’s not necessarily my thing, but it definitely flirts with the kind of music I tend to gravitate towards. Uptight rhythms, lovely muted rhythmic guitar and melodic lines, and while the saxophone isn’t my favourite instrument when it shows up, it’s suitably camp and tastefully used throughout. It’s kind of the focal point in a lot of ways. The singles are the best songs here. They’re insanely catchy, especially Love Plus One, which has an amazing chorus. I could definitely see some of these songs making it into my general rotation, so this was a hit for me.

Muddy Waters, At Newport 1960 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Album #19. Big blues fan. I love the early blues musicians, especially the 1920s originators. Not so much this more modern version, but I’m still a big fan of this kind of music. I’d never listened to this album before. I don’t tend to gravitate towards Muddy Waters that much. He doesn’t necessarily have my favourite voice in blues, although I fully admit he’s a complete legend and incredibly influential. I prefer the growl of Howlin’ Wolf or the grittiness of Son House and Blind Willie Johnson. But we’re reviewing a Muddy Waters album here. It’s a class set. Amazingly well recorded and produced. I love how the crowd get more and more into it as it goes on. It becomes livelier and more exciting, and Muddy even loosens up towards the end, especially on Got My Mojo Working, which is my favourite track here. He’s almost just making noises at certain points. There’s something so sinister about this type of music. Singing about having your “brand” on someone is just nasty. His band is insane as well. The piano playing from Otis Spann is unbelievable. And I don’t think anyone does that slow 12 bar drawl quite like Muddy Waters. So yeah, this is a very strong four. As a product of its time, maybe it’s even a five. It’s so well recorded and just a really enjoyable listen if you’re into this kind of music. Another new discovery for me, my fourth in a row.

David Crosby – If I Could Only Remember My Name ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Album #20. And my new discovery streak ends today. I’m very familiar with this album. I’ve been a David Crosby fan since my teens, and this once ranked amongst my favourite albums, so it was interesting to return to it. Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way. I have a major gripe with David Crosby (RIP), and it’s his lyrics. As I’ve grown older and more cynical, I just feel they’re the epitome of hippie nonsense. A large portion of his songs are about how he doesn’t know what’s going on. From The Byrds to CSN/Y and into his solo work, David is always asking the question: what’s going on? In this modern and frankly scary world, I ask that question a lot too. But David provides no insight whatsoever. He’s a great singer with not much to say. He even keeps us on our toes with “Laughing”, which opens with: “I thought I met a man Who said he knew a man Who knew what was going on” Oh really, David? What did he say? “I was mistaken.” Right… more of the same, so. Musically, though, this album is gorgeous. He’s an exceptional musician, surrounding himself with other exceptional musicians. And occasionally he does break away from his lyrical restraints — “Cowboy Movie” is a class, light-Dylanesque story that turns into a Crazy Horse-style jam. And “Traction in the Rain” is such a beautiful song, arguably his best ever. On the whole, though, I feel there’s a bit of filler. The two closers, “Orleans” and “I’d Swear There Was Somebody Here”, aren’t the most compelling or fleshed-out tracks. It’s a good album from a period of music that I love, and I did enjoy revisiting it. If you’re into this kind of stuff, I’d recommend Linda Perhacs – Parallelograms or Alexander “Skip” Spence – Oar. Similar vein, but for me, more interesting.

The Rolling Stones – Let It Bleed ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Album #21 The second album in The Rolling Stones’ purple patch where they could do no wrong (except for Altamont and tax evasion.) This is a much stranger and more lo-fi record than I remembered. I hadn’t heard it in a while. It’s bookended by two of their most bombastic songs, both fantastic and absolute classics. Everything in between, though, feels more stripped back than I expected, and a lot more country. Not a complaint, just an observation. I don’t love this record as much as some of their others, but it has too many great songs not to give it a four. That said, there are a couple of tracks here that I think have better versions elsewhere. “Country Honk” isn’t as good as “Honky Tonk Women,” which is essentially the same song. And I much prefer the live version of “Love in Vain” from Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!. Also, and I know it’s a fan favourite, “Midnight Rambler” is a bit goofy. It never really did much for me! On the other hand, it’s probably got one of Keith Richards’ best vocal performances on “You Got the Silver.” I absolutely love that song. I’ll probably reserve my five stars for Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street. I don’t think this quite reaches that level, even though it’s an absolute classic. Great record all the same.

Album #22, Def Leppard, Pyromania ⭐️⭐️⭐️ We’re getting into a genre I couldn’t care less about. ’80s heavy metal isn’t my thing. I don’t know if this counts as hair metal, and I’m not that familiar with Def Leppard. But I’m leaving my bias at the door for these listens. It opens with “Rock! Rock! (Till You Drop)” and I thought, oh God, here we go. But you know what? It won me over. First and foremost, it’s loud. Properly loud. Everything is well balanced and clear in the mix. You can hear every instrument distinctly. The drums are absolutely huge. It’s full-on stadium metal. Whether you like the music or not, you have to appreciate a record that sounds this big. It’s headache-inducing at times, but it is what it is. It’s a great-sounding record. Song-wise, I don’t care for some of them. You have to take the corniness at face value and accept that it’s part of the deal. “Too Late for Love” does nothing for me. The songs about rock and roll are pretty boring too. “Photograph” is easily the best song on the album. There’s a cool effect on the melodic guitar lines, kind of a phased, reverbed sound, and I love it. Any track with that kind of melodic playing really benefits from it. “Comin’ Under Fire” is good. “Die Hard the Hunter” is too long. A couple of others are decent. I’m giving it three stars because, for what it is, I actually enjoyed it. It won me over. I wasn’t in great form today and thought this would drive me mad, but it actually cheered me up a bit. So I owe it that.

Album #23, Van Morrison, Astral Weeks, ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ This is a really difficult one to review. It’s such a unique record. I can’t think of another album that sounds like it. The closest comparison I can come up with is Spirit of Eden by Talk Talk. It feels like lightning in a bottle. If you sent Van in to record it again, I think it would come out completely different. It’s hard to explain, but it feels like pure music. It isn’t weighed down by obvious structure or form. It’s boundaryless and just spills out of the speakers. The songs feel almost improvised, like they’re being made up on the spot. At times they seem like they might fall apart, but they’re held together by Van’s voice, his lyrics, and the way he phrases things. He squeezes too many words into a line or stretches too few across a melody, and somehow it works. He pushes the songs forward. There’s momentum behind everything. The arrangements swell and shift in subtle, unexpected ways, with little melodic lines appearing and disappearing. It somehow feels both stripped back and incredibly lush at the same time, which is an impressive balance to strike. It’s a beautiful record and deserves all the praise it gets.

Album #24, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Natty Dread, ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ I’m a fan of reggae, even if I’m not that knowledgeable about it. I’m probably more of a greatest hits person when it comes to Bob Marley, but I was familiar with a good few songs on this. I think it’s a good album. Lyrically, he’s a great writer, and some of the vocal lines here are genuinely brilliant. There are songs about sex and revolution, and most of them are really strong. The title track is unbelievably catchy and perfectly placed in the middle of the album. I still think the live version of “No Woman, No Cry” tops the studio version by a fair margin. The album version is very good, but the live one is transcendental. I know this was the album where Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer left, and it does feel a bit more minimal than some earlier material. That said, the backing singers are fantastic and really fill it out. I’m not an expert on reggae, but I really enjoyed this. Looking forward to more.

Album #25, David Bowie, The Next Day, ⭐️⭐️⭐️ This was a hard one to review. I ended up listening to it twice. Not usually a bad thing, but I finished it the first time and struggled to remember what each song actually sounded like, so I gave it another go. It’s art rock, definitely, and it’s challenging in places. There are some good songs, but I wouldn’t call it a catchy album. Some of the chord progressions don’t do much for me, and there’s a kind of dissonance throughout. I’m sure that’s intentional, but it just doesn’t sound great to me as a full album. I’m also not a fan of Bowie’s double-tracked vocals on some tracks. I find them distracting and not that pleasant to listen to. That probably sounds more negative than I mean it to. It gets three stars because there are some very good songs here. “You Feel So Lonely You Could Die” is my favourite. It’s one of the moments where he doesn’t get in his own way with too many effects or segues. Some of the main riffs across the album are very strong too. Also, this is driving me mad: the riff in “Valentine’s Day” sounds like it’s lifted from another song. I don’t even mind that, I just want to know what it is because I’m sure I’ve heard it before. This is my first Bowie album on the list. I was surprised to see it included. I know it was part of the revised 2014 edition and came out in 2013, so maybe there was a bit of recency bias. It was a big comeback, but I don’t think it’s anywhere near his best work, and I’m not sure it’s one of the 1001 you need to hear before you die. Still, there are worthwhile songs on it. I just don’t see myself going back to the whole album any time soon.

Album #26, Bruce Springsteen, Darkness on the Edge of Town ⭐⭐⭐⭐ I’m not a Bruce disciple. I bow to the altar of Bob Dylan and Neil Young most days of the week. I do like Bruce and his music, but I’m not a fanatic. I have a soft spot for this album, though. About 15 years ago, when I first moved away to college, I was obsessed with it. I’ve no idea why it was this one in particular, and I hadn’t really listened to it since, so it was fun to go back to it. I’m not really a stadium rock kind of guy, and Bruce often strikes me as stadium rock. My favourite album of his, by a wide margin, is Nebraska, so that’s usually more my thing. You’d think this wouldn’t work for me, but it really does. Funnily enough, it’s the more bombastic songs I enjoy most. “Something in the Night”, “Streets of Fire” and the title track are my favourites. There are a few I don’t care for. “Prove It All Night” feels a bit disposable to me, like that traditionally weaker second-last track on an album. His lyrics are strong. It’s working man blues and romance all over the record. Great singer, great band, and powerful in places. Looking forward to more Bruce as this goes on.

Album #27, The Smashing Pumpkins, Siamese Dream ⭐⭐⭐⭐ One of my all-time favourite albums from my teens. Suitably so, as this is the band at their most angsty. I hadn’t listened to it front to back in a long time, only the odd track here and there, which I always enjoy. In my head, I held this in very high esteem. So it was revealing to go back to it. The good stuff: they’re a huge-sounding band. Smart alternative rock. Super dynamic. They earn the massive solos and instrumental breaks because they build in moments of quiet and beauty. You turn it up when it’s soft and get blasted when it explodes. It’s really well produced. Billy Corgan is really interesting because he gets away with complete and utter schmaltz. Take “Disarm”. He’s singing about being a little boy over all these fucking church bells and maudlin strings. On paper, I should be saying, “Fuck off, Billy. That’s bullshit.” But it somehow works. It’s genuinely moving. And I’ll be damned if “Spaceboy” isn’t still my favourite song on the album. However, that overwrought sensitivity doesn’t always land for me. “Mayonaise” is a fan favourite, but I find it cheesy. Very pre-emo, and emo isn’t really my thing. The reason it’s not a five anymore is the length. It drags. I wouldn’t call anything filler, but some tracks feel unnecessary. You don’t need “Rocket” when you have “Hummer”. You don’t need “Sweet Sweet” when you have “Luna”. It slows the momentum. You can already sense Corgan’s tendency toward excess and a future in rock operas. The arrangements can be a bit much. But they’re an intelligent band. “Soma” and even something as wild as “Silverfuck” are carefully constructed. So it’s a four now. I was surprised, and a bit disappointed, but I can’t give it five anymore. I still think it’s one of the most important albums of the 90s, and absolutely one of the 1001 you should hear. Still a massive fan. And yes, the bloat only gets worse from here with Mellon Collie and future releases. But that’s for another day!

Album #28, Isaac Hayes, Hot Buttered Soul ⭐⭐⭐ Right, where to start with this? This could be a two star on another day, but I’m giving it three because I’m in a good mood and it did kind of work for me in places. I actually knew this album already. I listened to it years ago, so I wasn’t going in blind. Let’s start with the bad stuff. There are basically only four songs. It’s a 45 minute album and that’s not a lot of material. Maybe that’s common enough for a soul or jazz leaning record from that era, but I don’t think it really works here. If you break it down, there are only a handful of musical ideas stretched across the whole thing, and I’m not sure that’s enough to hold my attention for that long. “Walk On By” is a good song, but it’s too long. It actually reminds me of “Suspicious Minds” where the best bit is the chorus, but a huge chunk of the track is taken up with a drawn out ending that doesn’t really build to anything. Same kind of issue here. “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” is basically the centrepiece of the album, but I don’t think the payoff justifies the long spoken intro. It’s a cool idea, and I respect it, but in the modern day of destroyed attention spans I found it hard going. Sometimes that kind of slow burn works. For me, this time, it didn’t. The positives, his band are amazing. “Hyperbolic” is an absolute belter. Proper jam. “One Woman” is decent too. Not one of the best soul songs I’ve ever heard, but solid. The musicianship across the album is the highlight for me. Isaac himself has a great voice, but I’m not sure I’d put him up there with the absolute soul greats as a singer. Maybe that’s not the point, but when you’re on a list with so many legends it’s hard not to compare. This came out in 1969, and I don’t know enough about the context to say how influential it was. Maybe it was groundbreaking and I’m just not appreciating that side of it. As I said at the start, this is probably a two for me on another day. But “Hyperbolic” is such a tune, and “Walk On By” has some genuinely beautiful moments, so it gets a three.

Album #29, Calexico, Feast of Wire ⭐⭐⭐ This is pretty close to my kind of thing. I like indie and alternative country like this. Maybe not so much Tex Mex, but I’ve never really gotten into Calexico or Los Lobos properly. Every now and then a song of theirs comes on and I usually enjoy it. This is the first Calexico album I’ve listened to in full. I’ve seen them live as well, but I barely remember it, which probably says something. I’m sure I enjoyed it at the time. It’s a good album, but there are too many instrumentals for me. Having seen them live, I now remember there were loads of instrumental sections there too, so I get that it’s part of what they do. It just doesn’t do much for me. Some of them sound like film soundtrack pieces, and I don’t really reach for that kind of thing. A few are cool though. Some have a trip hop feel, heavy drums and strange strings, which I liked. Not exactly trip hop, but in that territory. The best thing about the band is Joey Burns’ voice. There’s something about it that I really like. It’s understated and vulnerable, and it suits the music perfectly. I just wish there was more of him singing on this record. Not all the songs are that memorable either. The opening two tracks are very strong and made me think the album was going to be excellent, but I lost interest as it went on. It gets three stars because there are some very good songs here. My favourite was “Not Even Stevie Nicks”, which honestly sounds like a Wilco song and is probably the biggest outlier on the album. Maybe that says something. I think what I’d actually prefer is a more stripped back version of Calexico, or even a Joey Burns solo acoustic album. So if any fans are reading this, point me in that direction. More of him, less of the instrumentals.

Album #30, Miriam Makeba, Miriam Makeba ⭐⭐⭐⭐ What a treat. A genuine new discovery from an artist I’d never even heard of before. I didn’t know the name Miriam Makeba at all. A quick glance at her wiki shows she led a pretty incredible life, so I’m looking forward to doing a proper deep dive. The page for this album is sparse, but I know it’s her debut from 1960. I’m not very familiar with music from that time, especially anything coming out of Africa, so this felt like a proper discovery. The whole record is basically a vehicle for her voice, and what a voice it is. She’s funny, sweet, occasionally a little bit sexy, and genuinely beautiful throughout. The instrumentation is sparse, but it really suits the material. I’m not usually into flamenco style Spanish guitar, but it works here, especially on the more sombre tracks. The authentic African rhythms and vocals are the real highlight for me. Even more than her covers of traditional American songs like “House of the Rising Sun”, which I still enjoyed. I’m also a sucker for backing vocals. It’s usually female backing vocals I gravitate towards, but here it’s baritone male singers and it fits perfectly. This is exactly why I’m doing this list. There are bound to be gems I’ve never even heard of, and this is definitely one of them. Looking forward to hearing more.

Album #31, Violent Femmes, Violent Femmes ⭐⭐⭐ I’m anticipating downvotes. I was really excited when this came up. It’s been on my personal list for years and, on paper, it should be right up my alley. The good stuff is this. I love the uniform sound of the album. Frenetic, stripped back three piece indie rock. There is a sloppy but tightly rehearsed energy to the album. There’s great backing vocals too. It’s a homage to classic rock and roll and I love that. “Add It Up” is particularly mental. “Gone Daddy Gone” is great and “Blister in the Sun” remains an absolute classic, probably the best song on the album. “Good Feeling” is also a wonderful last minute change of tone and pace for the closer. The musicianship is top notch. It’s hard to play this sloppily. The bad is Gordon Gano. His voice grates on me. Something about his register really hits a nerve in my tinnitus stricken ears. Also, and I don’t really mind rip offs, but his whole approach is a Jonathan Richman rip off. A quick Wiki states that he was going for a Steve Wynn of The Dream Syndicate, but he’s not Steve Wynn, he’s Jonathan Richman, and something about it bothers me. I don’t find it sacrilegious or anything, it’s just that Richman reeks of cool because he doesn’t give a shit, but Gordon’s lyrics, (to be fair, written at 18 years old), portray an angsty teen that cares too much. Not that Richman didn't write schmaltzy songs too! But there was a satirical edge to all of it. With Gordon, the style doesn’t match the substance. It’s really hard to explain and I'm ill prepared for my rational to be torn to shreds. Overall I was disappointed. I had hyped this one up in my head for a while without ever listening to it.

Album #32, Black Sabbath, Vol. 4 ⭐⭐⭐ For context, my favourite Black Sabbath song is Planet Caravan. I grew up listening to their first three albums. Paranoid was one of the first songs I learned to play on drums. However, I never went beyond Master of Reality, as I felt and still feel like it was a step down from the first two, and I had an inkling they fell off after the first three. So this is my first time listening to Vol. 4. And like Violent Femmes yesterday, I wish I’d heard it twenty years ago. Because my tolerance for crunching heavy metal is limited these days. And what crunching heavy metal it is. Huge big fucking riffs with bells on. It’s Tony Iommi’s album through and through. I have to give them plaudits though. They try a few experimental things outside the formula. The samba bit on Supernaut, the lush Laguna Sunrise, and the stupidly simple FX, all of which I enjoyed. Then there’s Changes, which is tender, touching, and a genuine classic. What I don’t enjoy is the endless proggy segues. The way they stop and switch gears into another riff and beat is probably technically impressive, but there’s too much of it throughout, especially on Wheels of Confusion and Under the Sun. I prefer when they keep it dumb and simple, like on St. Vitus Dance. Two other things to note that aren’t necessarily criticisms, even if they sound like it. Lyrically, they are dirt simple. They’re not a thinking man’s band, and I don’t think they’re trying to be. But hearing Ozzy Osbourne sing through a maelstrom of guitars is as iconic a sound as any, the best example being Supernaut. Finally, the mix is very inconsistent throughout. Weirdly though, I think I prefer the muddier sound of Cornucopia. It’s almost proto stoner metal, a genre I probably prefer nowadays. I would have lapped this up in my teens. I do wish I’d continued my Sabbath journey back then. It’s a band I genuinely respect and admire.

Album # 33, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Born on the Bayou ⭐⭐⭐⭐ I was only delighted to see this come up this morning. I fucking love Creedence Clearwater Revival. They’re easily in my top 10 favourite bands of all time, and I regularly binge them throughout the year. I’ll probably end up on a bit of a binge now after listening to this. They’ve written some of my all time favourite songs. Run Through the Jungle, Born on the Bayou, Ramble Tamble. I regularly play these and never get tired of them. I just can’t fault this band. I love all the individual parts of them. Their guitar playing is class. Their riffs are so memorable. And John Fogerty’s voice is just iconic. One of the most unique and best singers in rock music, I think. I saw him live about seven or eight years ago and he still had it. Still great. Great lyricist. Wonderful songwriter. I love how danceable they are. No wonder they had such huge hits, because there’s such a groove to their music. On the longer tracks, like Keep On Chooglin’, you’ve got that repetitive rhythm in the back and you just get sucked into it. This isn’t their best album. That’s probably belongs to Cosmo’s Factory or Willy and the Poor Boys. But it’s still Creedence, and it’s still great. It’s got some iconic songs like the title track and Proud Mary. Some great deeper cuts like Bootleg. And Penthouse Pauper is just a gas tune. It’s funny and it makes you think. It does have a weak spot. Really only one, but it’s a long one. Graveyard Train is just too long. I get it, and it is a suitable change of pace, but for me it’s not very interesting. It’s their Muddy Waters blues jam, but it’s not the best of their long jams. Nor is “Keep On Chooglin’.” I wouldn’t rank that as highly as something like “Ramble Tamble,” even though it is still very good. Those two tracks take up a lot of the album, so that weakens it and probably takes a star away. But you still have John Fogerty absolutely ripping it, and for that alone it has to be at least four stars. If you don’t really know Creedence, I’d actually say start with a greatest hits. Even though the albums have great deep cuts, I’d argue they’re the best greatest hits band of all time. They were a hit machine and wrote some of the best singles of that era. So I’d seek out a compilation before diving into the albums.

Album #34, Sheryl Crow, Tuesday Night Music Club ⭐⭐ A 90s album with some of the worst 90s pop tropes. This actually starts off very strong. Sheryl has a good voice, her lyrics didn’t initially offend, and it’s a kind of heartland rock, Americana pop style that I was enjoying. The first four tracks really set the album up as a solid alt-country experience. She’s no Lucinda Williams, but it felt like it was heading in a direction I liked. Then Solidify comes on and it all deteriorates very quickly. Once the beats get bigger, the quality drops. Run, Baby, Run is a no, no, no. Sheryl is rapping on this and it just feels desperate. We have a slight return to her roots on No One Said It Would Be Easy, but the chorus is so unbelievably clichéd that it completely distracts from the emotional weight of the song. I’ll give her some props for What I Can Do for You. It’s a brave song, and the sleaziness of the character she’s playing genuinely makes me uncomfortable, so that one works. All I Wanna Do is okay. We’ve all heard it a million times, so I’m already jaded by it. My gym plays it constantly. I can understand why it was a hit, but it’s one of my least favourite forms of 90s pop, that white-rapping-trying-to-be-cool style. And then We Do What We Can, a foray into lounge jazz. At this point I just didn’t care for it. It feels like she’s throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. There’s a slight return to form for I Shall Believe, but by then all my goodwill is gone. Not for me, this one

Album #36, Yes, Close to the Edge ⭐⭐⭐ Prog. I don’t know where I stand with prog. I used to hate it. I probably still do. The closest I get to prog is Can and Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, two bands I absolutely love. I also like music that isn’t really prog but clearly takes influence from it, like Black Midi. But pure, on-a-drip straight into the veins prog, I don’t really know about it. So this was my first time listening to Close to the Edge. I’ve heard loads about it, and this is a review after just one listen. The good things are obvious. The musicianship is phenomenal. I know their bassist, Chris Squire, is considered one of the greats, and you can hear why. The rhythm section is spectacular. Some of the grooves they lock into are fantastic. There are also some really beautiful passages across the three tracks. There’s a lovely string section in the first track, and some cool guitar work in the third track. It’s hard to pick out individual moments, but there are definitely parts I enjoyed. I just don’t really care for this style of music. The constant segues into something else, the feeling of musicianship for musicianship’s sake. I need a bit more than that. I’m not saying the band doesn’t have more going on, but I just don’t get it. I don’t really get what the message is supposed to be or how I’m meant to feel listening to it. I don’t get much emotional weight from the songs. I’ve no idea what they’re about either. That’s fine in theory, but it just doesn’t resonate with me. I’m definitely more of a punk person. And to be fair to prog, we probably wouldn’t have had punk if it wasn’t reacting against this kind of music. So I do give it some credit for that. There are highlights on the album, but there are also a lot of moments that feel completely inconsequential to me. I don’t need a massive church organ solo appearing out of nowhere in the middle of a song. I just don’t really see the point of it. It gets three stars because there are some genuinely great moments. But honestly, I just prefer choruses.

Album #37, David Bowie, Young Americans ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ I’m glad Bowie lived to make the music that he did, but without meaning any disrespect, cocaine and Bowie seemed to go hand in glove around this period. There’s something interesting that happens when an artist makes music that’s very obviously derivative. The elements of the genre they’re borrowing from often end up exaggerated. It’s like they lean too hard into certain parts in order to make it work. That’s kind of what happens on this album. This is exaggerated soul. Everything is turned up to the maximum. The chord progressions are big, soulful progressions. The backing vocals are huge. The smoothness and slickness of the sound are pushed right to the front. Even the lyrical style leans heavily into the genre. It’s basically an exaggerated version of soul music, and I absolutely love it. I love the sound of this record and the feel of this record. I don’t really care if it’s derivative, and I don’t care that Bowie himself didn’t seem to look back on it as fondly as some of his more experimental albums. When I want a Bowie fix, I sometimes reach for this before albums like The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars or the Berlin-era records like Low. It’s probably not his best record, and it might not objectively be a five-star album. This is definitely a personal rating. But it’s one of the most enjoyable Bowie records to listen to. You can put it on in almost any situation and it works. This album and Station to Station, and Bowie’s short move into soul music generally, are probably my favourite period of his career. I love every song on it. It’s an album that works best as a full listen, even though the individual songs stand on their own. Just putting it on and letting it play is a great experience. Even the slightly strange inclusion of Across the Universe by The Beatles, which can feel a bit clumsy at times, still ends up soaring. The songs are quite long for what they are, but they draw you in as they go. They build gradually and they’re incredibly catchy.

lbum #38, Prince, Sign o' the Times ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ How could you not be bowled over by this? This is easily the best new discovery I’ve had so far. Outside of the album Purple Rain, I’ve never actually listened to Prince. So it was pretty eye-opening. This isn’t usually my kind of thing. I like soul, but I’m more of an old folky and punk kind of guy. But the quality of the music here, the inventiveness, and the consistency across such a diversity of genres and styles is incredible. I adore the minimalism. How he got such a great pop sound from so little on some of these tracks is beggars belief. It's all tied together by his voice. Is this the best use of multi-layered vocals in music? The way he sings and harmonises along with himself is just so creative. The one thing that isn't consistent is the mix, but I love the more lo-fi/demo sounding songs like Play in the Sunshine and It. It just works! The album moves through style after style, it goes from strength to strength. The last run of songs are the best on the album, but by the time I got there I was already completely won over anyway, so it really just sealed it. It deserves all its critical acclaim. I can’t get over this one. It's an 80 minute long album and I listened to it twice back to back. This is going to be in my rotation for a long time to come.

Album #39, Tom Tom Club, Tom Tom Club ⭐⭐⭐⭐ This might not be a five star, but it might be one of my favourite albums to listen to so far. I hadn’t really heard of Tina Weymouth or Tom Tom Club before, even though I’m familiar with Talking Heads. Maybe I’m just not deep enough into Talking Heads to have come across it before. This is just a great record. I’ve only listened to it once so far, and I imagine it will grow and grow on me. I love any album where the drums feel like the main instrument. The drums here are big, the beats are big, they’re repetitive and right in your face. Then you have all these melodic bass lines and arpeggiated synths drifting in and out around the rhythm. It opens with this kind of wacky rapping vocal, which I actually thought was great, but it did make me worry that the whole album was going to be sung in that low-talker, cutesy voice style. I wasn’t really looking forward to that. Thankfully that’s not the case. Tina Weymouth’s vocals are great across the album. She moves between childish, smooth, silky, slightly sexy, and even a bit sinister at times. A lot of the tracks actually have a sinister feel to them, especially Booming and Zooming and L’Elephant. Some moments are downright spooky. And then there’s Genius of Love. I knew that song straight away. I’d heard it loads of times before but never knew who it was by or even what it was called. That might actually be the best track on the album. I love how long it is too. It just keeps going and going, and they squeeze every bit of creative juice out of that groove. Yeah, it’s a great record. I’m definitely keeping this in my rotation. I think it’s only going to grow on me the more I listen to it.

Album #40, Neil Young, On the Beach ⭐⭐⭐⭐ I’m a huge Neil Young fan and always have been. I love his story, his style, the music he’s made, his lyrics, his singing, and his songwriting. I love all of it. This is the first Neil Young album to come up on the list, and it’s one of my favourites of his, maybe even my favourite. It actually got me thinking about his albums before this one even came up. While I definitely think On the Beach is an album you need to hear before you die, does Neil Young actually have a five star album? Does he have something like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or Blonde on Blonde? I’m not sure he does. He has so much music and such a deep, colourful discography, but none of his albums feel completely flawless or perfect. At the same time, nearly all of them are worth listening to at least once. So I’m even a bit surprised at myself for not giving On the Beach five stars, because it’s probably the closest he gets. Maybe that will change if more of his albums show up later. It’s a great album. It might even be his lyrical peak. Some of the lyrics here, especially on the title track, are incredible. Lines like “the world is turning, I hope it don’t turn away / I need a crowd of people, but I can’t face them day to day” are so affecting. If you don’t relate to that at some point in your life, you’re made of stone. He’s a genius lyricist. There’s some really transcendent music on this album. On the Beach, Ambulance Blues, and Revolution Blues are highlights. Revolution Blues in particular is one of the hardest hitting songs of the 70s. It’s just a bad motherfucker of a tune. And he’s got Levon Helm and Rick Danko playing on it, absolutely battering away. It’s a really unique sounding folk rock song. There are a couple of slightly weaker moments. See the Sky About to Rain is beautiful, but it doesn’t quite fit the album for me. It’s a lovely song, but it doesn’t hit as hard as some of the others. Vampire Blues is a great standard blues track too. Lyrically everything fits together and ties the album up nicely, but musically a couple of songs feel slightly less essential. Like the rest of what people call the Ditch Trilogy, the mix is rough and choppy, the performances are rough, and everything feels a bit ragged. But that’s exactly what makes it perfect in its own way. You never want Neil Young to sound slick or overproduced, and he almost never does. Slick just isn’t a word that belongs anywhere near his music. It’s ragged glory or nothing with Neil Young. One of my favourites of his, but it does make me curious what other people think. I’m a massive Neil Young fan, but does he actually have a five star album? What’s the real magnum opus? After the Gold Rush? Rust Never Sleeps? I’m genuinely interested.

Album #41, Tom Waits, Bone Machine ⭐⭐⭐⭐ I love Tom Waits’ philosophy on sound. I remember reading an interview years ago where he talked about how he knows he could push a button on a computer or a mixing desk to get a certain reverb or percussive sound, but instead he prefers to go out and actually find that sound himself, track it down and capture it. This album feels like that philosophy in action. Some of the sounds on this record are just crazy. It’s so raw. It’s stripped back in places but layered in others, and some of the percussion genuinely sounds like he’s kicking and battering furniture around a room. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if that’s exactly what he was doing. It’s a great record and I’m very fond of it. It contains three of my favourite Tom Waits songs: Earth Died Screaming, Jesus Gonna Be Here, and Goin’ Out West. It’s a heavy, nasty album in a lot of ways, but it also has some really tender moments. It almost feels like it’s caught between two moods. There are very delicate songs like A Little Rain, but the album overall is dark and pretty bleak in places. That’s fairly typical of Tom Waits though. He rarely sticks to just one style across a whole album. There’s a raw edge to everything here. His vocals are incredible throughout, which is nothing new. It’s one of the most unique voices in popular music. I love the album and I think it’s one of the best records of the 90s. It’s not quite a five for me though. There are a few weaker moments that drag a little, especially In the Colosseum. I’m not a huge fan of that carnival or festival kind of sound. Two other things stand out. I genuinely wept at the final verse of A Little Rain. It’s one of the saddest verses I’ve ever heard in any song. Absolutely devastating. And the introduction of that chainsaw guitar on Goin’ Out West is one of my favourite moments in music. That tone is incredible. One of the best guitar sounds ever recorded. I’d fight any guitar snob who says otherwise. Great album. Not five stars, but a very, very strong four.

Album #42, Curtis Mayfield, Super Fly ⭐⭐⭐ I’d never really listened to Curtis Mayfield before. I would have assumed that I’d heard the odd song here or there, and I always thought that if I did a deep dive on him I’d probably be a fan. Now I’m not so sure. This is a soundtrack record to Super Fly, which I’ll probably never watch. Is the movie any good? Because of that, it isn’t really a full-fledged studio album. It was made as a soundtrack, so the album feels a bit jarring at times. It’s not something I’d usually seek out because I don’t normally listen to soundtrack records. Lyrically there are a lot of characters and bits of story and exposition. I assume that all makes sense in the context of the film, but on its own it isn’t that engaging for me. He raises some interesting points about drug addiction and things like that, and there are some good lyrics here and there, but overall it didn’t grab me. Musically it’s a sweet funky soul record, but it feels a bit more loose and jazzy in structure. The songs are more free-flowing and there aren’t many obvious choruses jumping out of the speakers. For this type of music I didn’t find the songs particularly explosive or attention-grabbing. There are some very good tracks though. Little Child Runnin’ Wild and Pusherman are great. Freddie’s Dead is great too, and Superfly is very good. The rest I could mostly take or leave, especially the instrumental pieces. They didn’t engage me that much, although I imagine in the context of the film they probably work perfectly well. Then there’s Curtis’s voice. I always thought I liked his voice a lot, but after hearing a full album of it I found it a little one-note at times. When the song is great, his voice works really well, and the breathy, whispering delivery he uses is a great trick. It’s very distinctive and recognisable. But over a full album it can feel like it only does one thing. Maybe that stood out more because this week I’d been listening to Prince and Kendrick Lamar, who do so many different things with their voices. Compared to that, Curtis didn’t impress me quite as much. So it gets three stars. I should also say I’m in awful form today, which probably influenced the review. On another day I might find this album more engaging. But today it’s a three. A light three.

Album #43, Dolly Parton, Coat of Many Colors ⭐⭐⭐ I’ve always been a big admirer of Dolly Parton. She’s written some absolutely amazing songs over the years, and a couple of them are on this album. As an album artist though, I’ve never really fully gotten into her. On the surface this is a pretty simple country record, but it does take a few little turns along the way. Most of it is straightforward country, but there are moments where it moves into other styles. The Way I See You leans much more into soul, and If I Lose My Mind moves into more traditional ballad territory. A lot of the album really comes down to two things: Dolly’s voice and Dolly’s lyrics. Her voice is pure gold. She’s a fantastic singer, and the little bits of colour and inflection she puts into lines, the way she bends notes here and there, is genuinely beautiful. Lyrically she’s very strong as well. She’s dealing with some pretty big ideas here. The title track, Coat of Many Colors, is a beautiful song and one of the best songs about poverty I can think of. It’s also one of her most personal songs, and it’s done really well. She can be funny too. Traveling Man is kind of gross when you think about it, but I did find myself laughing by the end of it. There are darker ideas throughout the album as well. There’s a song about a mother running off with her daughter’s man, which is pretty bleak, and If I Lose My Mind deals with a woman threatening to kill herself if she stays in the situation she’s in, admitting that to her mother. These are heavy themes. Later in the album she moves more into her gospel side. I don’t usually mind gospel music, even though I’m fairly agnostic, but her personal religious outlook isn’t something I really connect with. I actually found myself getting a bit annoyed at times. The Mystery of the Mystery feels like a song about willful ignorance wrapped up in religious belief. I respect that those are Dolly’s beliefs, but it’s not something I find particularly appealing in a song. The closer, A Better Place to Live, also has a few lyrical moments that rubbed me the wrong way for similar reasons. That said, it doesn’t take away from the fact that she’s a fantastic songwriter and a fantastic singer. Overall I didn’t love the album and I probably won’t go back to it, but it’s still a solid three stars for me.

Album #44, Jethro Tull, Aqualung ⭐⭐⭐⭐ I’m in an awful mood today. I’ve been fighting a bad cold for the last few days and on top of that I have to deal with a colonoscopy tomorrow. I’ve got a full day of prep ahead of me, something I’ve never experienced before, so I’m anxious and I feel like absolute shit. The last thing I needed today was a prog album. I wanted something easygoing, something familiar, something I knew was going to be a guaranteed five stars. Instead I got Aqualung, an album I’d never listened to before. I know it’s a classic, but it’s never been anywhere near the top of the list of albums I’ve been meaning to check out. Still, I said I’d approach everything on this list with an open mind. And you know what? I actually really liked it. I thought it was pretty great. I’ve only listened to it once and it feels like there’s a lot more to get out of it on future listens. First of all, I think it’s desperately uncool music. Whatever “cool” is supposed to mean, this album definitely isn’t it. But it also isn’t really prog rock in the way I expected. It’s much more like folk rock in a lot of places. There’s a fairly uniform sound across the album and the songs have proper structure. It didn’t strike me as nearly as pretentious as I thought it would be. I’m not a huge fan of the title track, Aqualung, but some of the other songs are very, very good. Locomotive Breath in particular is great. The riffs on that track are fantastic. I was expecting loads of flute all over the album because that’s what Jethro Tull are known for, but it’s actually used fairly sparingly. When it does come in it works really well. Ian Anderson’s voice is very good. The lyrics are a bit strange though. I’m not entirely sure what the album is about yet, but it does make me curious enough to go back and listen again to try to figure it out. In a lot of ways it feels like a proper 70s hard rock record with some beautiful guitar playing throughout, which I really didn’t expect going in. So yeah, this one surprised me. I’ve been bowled over a little bit by a prog-adjacent album. Who knew?

Album #45, Fiona Apple, Tidal ⭐⭐⭐⭐ I absolutely love Fiona Apple’s 2012 album The Idler Wheel…(etc). I’d nearly rank it among my favourite singer-songwriter albums ever. I first listened to it the year it came out without really knowing much about her, and I still go back to it all the time. Songs like Periphery and Anything We Want are among my favourite songs by female artists and singer-songwriters in general. So I’m a bit of a fool for never really listening to the rest of her catalogue. I tried the first few tracks of Fetch the Bolt Cutters at one point, but for whatever reason I had to turn it off and I never went back to it, even though I know it’s hugely loved. Other than that, I hadn’t heard a scrap of her music. She’s one of those artists where I’ve always had this feeling that I’ll probably love the rest of her work, so I almost kept it in reserve, thinking at least I’ll always have more Fiona Apple to discover. So this is my second Fiona Apple album and it’s so good. Someone should make a list of the most impressive albums ever released by teenagers. This should rank very highly. She wrote this when she was around 17 to 19 years old, which is mind-blowing. The maturity of every element of it shows a kind of wisdom and experience way beyond her years. Her voice is husky and beautiful, and the chord progressions and melodies across the album are just gorgeous. At one point listening to Pale September I genuinely felt like I was in a bit of a trance. The lyrics are excellent throughout as well. She weirdly reminds me of Jeff Buckley at times, another jilted chanteuse, but she’s even better. My favourite tracks are probably the three singles, especially Shadowboxer. There’s a bit of a trip-hop feel to them, which I love. Sleep to Dream really shows that more aggressive side of her voice. The drums and instrumentation are fantastic, and I really like how nearly every song expands into an instrumental outro where the band stretches the musical ideas out. So why isn’t it a five? Honestly this might be the strongest four I’ve come across. The middle section of the album, around Slow Like Honey to Never is a Promise sags a little for me. It leans more into straightforward singer-songwriter territory and some of the songs start to feel a bit melodramatic and less interesting. That stretch brings the score down slightly. But still, this album has genuinely given me another reason to live because now I have to go and discover the rest of Fiona Apple’s catalogue. She’s very obviously a genius. So yeah, an extremely strong four stars.

Album #46, The Pretty Things, S.F. Sorrow ⭐⭐ Yeah, this didn’t do it for me at all. Let me preface this by saying this is probably my favourite era of music. I love 60s rock. I love Canterbury stuff. And I’d never heard this before, except I actually had Baron Saturday in a playlist at some point. I must have liked it once, but every time it comes on now I just think, what the fuck is this, and turn it off. There feels like there’s a good album in here musically, but the mix is dreadful. It has some of the worst 60s psychedelic tropes in how it’s put together. The hard panning is brutal. Drums in one ear, guitar in the other, and it just kills any sense of power or intensity. I honestly think this would sound much better in mono. I get that stereo was still a novelty at the time, but it’s completely overdone here. The mix is also wildly inconsistent. Vocals too low, bass too loud, and then it flips the other way on the next track. I don’t need things to sound pristine or polished, I love lo-fi music, but bad mixing and poor decisions really annoy me. When you compare it to what bands like The Beatles, The Kinks, The Rolling Stones, or Small Faces were doing around the same time with psychedelic and conceptual records, this just sounds miles worse. It’s a bad sounding album. There are a few good songs. Balloon Burning, Death, and The Loneliest Person are all decent, but outside of that I didn’t really enjoy much of it. I get that it’s considered the first rock opera, which is important historically, but rock opera isn’t really my thing anyway. Maybe it was groundbreaking at the time, but on a first listen I didn’t really grasp the concept, and I don’t have much interest in going back to it. It’s probably the worst album I’ve heard so far on the list.

Album #46, Fiona Apple, Fetch the Bolt Cutters ⭐⭐⭐ I’m no mathematician, but what are the odds that I’d get two Fiona Apple albums in the space of three days? I was delighted to see this come up because I loved Tidal the other day. This, not so much. This is probably one of the most critically lauded albums of the decade so far, so I’m not trying to be contrarian here at all. This is just a personal reaction. I’d never actually listened to it before, even though I’d been meaning to do a deeper dive into her catalogue. Up to now, the only albums I’d heard were Tidal and The Idler Wheel. There are definitely positives. It’s a really inventive album and a big departure from her earlier work. It feels like it picks up where Hot Knife left off. The way the percussion is used is genuinely cool and creative. No two tracks sound the same. It’s a strange, interesting listen. Lyrically it’s very strong as well. The big moment on For Her genuinely shocked me, it really landed and was very powerful. There’s humour in places too, and overall it’s a great lyrical album, which isn’t surprising for her. What’s missing for me is her singing and those big, rich piano chord progressions. I don’t begrudge her at all for trying something different, but she spends a lot of the album in this kind of half-spoken, quick fire delivery, which I don’t love. Because the record is so focused on percussion, there’s very little piano, and very little of those beautiful chord movements that I loved on her earlier albums. I really missed that. My favourite track was Ladies, probably the most straightforward song on the album, which probably says something about my taste for her music. Because of this, I didn’t get much emotional weight from it. I never really had that moment where the hair on the back of my neck stood up. It just didn’t move me in the same way. That said, this album screams “grower”. Alas! With this whole exercise, there is rarely a day where I can listen to an album twice. I’ll definitely come back to it because I am a fan of Fiona Apple and I want to get to know her music better. But for now, I didn’t quite see what the critics saw in it.

Album # 47, Sufjan Stevens, Illinois ⭐⭐⭐⭐ This was a big album in my teenage years. I remember when it came out and all the talk about him making an album for every state in America, and how exciting that was because of how good this was, and also how good Michigan was as well. Two very good records. But he never really lived up to that promise, which in fairness would have been incredibly daunting and probably impossible anyway. This is a great record, totally deserving to be on this list. I’m quite familiar with it, I’ve listened to it a good few times over the years, but I do have to be in a particular mood to put it on. It’s inventive, beautiful, and lush. Genuinely joyous music, which is very hard to achieve. In a lot of ways it’s actually quite simple underneath all the arrangements. It does feel like a product of its time, that mid-2000s indie sound, kind of like Arcade Fire, and it also reminds me of Belle and Sebastian, just more bombastic. He has a great, very unique voice, he’s a good lyricist, though sometimes the overwrought sensitivity can be a bit much, and he just sounds like someone with a head full of ideas. I love the Choir-style backing vocals on some of the tracks, they’re beautiful and very unique. My criticisms are probably a bit unfair. I actually think objectively this is a five star album, but for me today it’s a four. I think it’s too long, and that’s something I tend to feel about Sufjan Stevens albums in general. There’s just a lot of material here. None of it is bad, but not every track hits the same level. There are a lot of interludes that feel Eno-esque, which are nice, but they add to that sense of overload. Listening to the whole thing in one go can feel a bit daunting, and by the time you get to “The Tallest Man…”, which is a great song in itself, it can feel like you’ve already heard a lot of those ideas earlier in the album. For me, the spine of the album from the title track through to “The Man of Metropolis…”. is spectacular, and it’s the part I go back to most. The rest of the album I could take or leave most days. I think I’d probably like Sufjan Stevens even more if he was a bit more of a ruthless editor. But that said, there’s no bad songs here. It’s a great album, and definitely one everyone should hear.

Album #47, Earth, Wind & Fire, That’s the Way of the World ⭐⭐⭐ This is going to be a relatively brief review for me. I didn’t love it. I didn’t really feel much towards it at all. I don’t think I needed to hear it before I die, but I did……and yeah! Nothing really stood out to me, and nothing really annoyed me either. I could tell there’s a big mix of genres going on. For example, on See the Light there’s that blend of jazz and African-style music, and across the album it’s mixing funk and soul throughout. It’s not straightforward music. It’d probably be more rewarding with multiple listens, but it just didn’t grab me in any way, so I think three stars is pretty fair. My favourite track was Reasons. I loved the falsetto on that. The vocals are great across the album in general. I didn’t think the lyrics were anything special though. I also really didn’t like the spoken word bit at the end of All About Love where he’s telling me to stop what I’m doing and think about things, such as love and life and this and that. I don’t have time to do that right now! But yeah, it didn’t do much for me. On to the next one.

Album number 48, Slipknot, Slipknot ⭐⭐ I hated nu metal when I was a teenager. It was the big thing at the time and it never, ever gelled with me. I’m not really a big metalhead in general, though I do like some metal. So this isn’t really my thing. A few years ago, a friend recommended Toxicity by System of a Down, and I ended up loving it. I thought it was brilliant, and if it came up on this list I’d probably give it five stars. So when this came up, I went in with an open mind thinking maybe I’d been wrong about this genre. And I kind of was, and kind of wasn’t. Starting with the positives, the production on this is great. I love some of the choices, like the turntable scratching, the drum and bass-style intro on one of the tracks, the squelchy effects, phasing, and all that found-sound percussion stuff. It keeps things interesting. Even though it’s about 49 minutes long, I can’t say I was ever bored. Musically, it is quite formulaic. Once the verses and choruses kick in, it’s hard to differentiate a lot of the songs. They do change things up a bit on tracks like Prosthetics and Scissors, but for the most part it sticks to that same structure and guitar tone throughout. That’s the genre though, so it kind of is what it is. The best thing on the album is the drumming. It’s outrageous. Absolutely spectacular. I genuinely found myself wondering how he came up with some of those parts. The fills, the sound of the kit, the crack of the snare, the weight of everything, it’s all incredible. The drums are nearly front and centre, and they carry a lot of the album. And that’s kind of the issue. Because what is actually front and centre is Corey Taylor. To be fair, he’s clearly very talented. He can do everything. The growl, the scream, the clean singing, even a bit of rapping. But I just can’t stand this style of vocal. It’s what puts me off every time. I find it really cringey. It’s just this solipsistic whining, moaning, and over-the-top angst. When I was a teenager and going through my own stuff, I never connected with this kind of thing. It just feels boring to listen to, and because he’s so high in the mix, you can’t escape it. I honestly think I’d enjoy this album more if the vocals were stripped out entirely. And it’s not even necessarily his fault, it’s just the style. It suits the music, but it’s not for me. Going back to Toxicity, there was always a bit of ambiguity in what Serj Tankian was doing. Here, there’s no ambiguity. It’s all very direct, very dramatic, very in-your-face, and I just can’t take it seriously. I found it cringey as a teenager and I still find it cringey now. So yeah, some great musicianship, especially in the drums, but the vocals completely ruin it for me.

Album #49, My Bloody Valentine, Isn’t Anything ⭐⭐⭐ Bit of a spoiler, but Loveless is, for me, the best album of the 90s. I’ll probably be very hyperbolic when that comes up. I love My Bloody Valentine, and as an Irish man I kind of claim them as one of our own, even if they’re more of a transatlantic band. They have to be one of the weirdest bands of their era. This album feels more like a proof of concept in places than anything else. It’s heavy on the dissonance, and a lot of the tracks are very experimental, but it sounds a bit cheap at times, like the production is letting the band down. I can kind of see why Kevin Shields was so obsessive about Loveless and the sound he was trying to achieve, even to the point of bankrupting the label, because here it feels like the production is holding them back. But it’s not just the production, the songs aren’t as strong either. It’s lacking the beauty that Loveless has. This feels like a debut from a band that would go on to do much greater things. That said, it’s not bad at all. It’s definitely worth a listen. I prefer the more straightforward tracks to the more experimental ones. Again, it’s very heavy on dissonance and doesn’t quite have the same payoff. The vocals are those lovely, dreamy MBV vocals, but I don’t think their voices are particularly strong on their own, and that wall of sound they perfected later suits them much better. So yeah, I’ve ended up talking about Loveless a lot here, but this is still a good album. There are some great songs on it, and it’s clearly the sound of a band on the way to something bigger.

Album #51, Boston, Boston ⭐⭐⭐ I tried to leave my rock snobbery at the door and, for the most part, it worked because I nearly enjoyed the hell out of this. It starts off so well. More Than a Feeling, despite being one of the most overplayed songs of all time, is perfect. It’s Monday morning, get-you-going music. I love the vocals and the huge guitars and those elongated notes that just ring out forever. Absolute banger. Same goes for Peace of Mind, and by the end of that I was properly pumped. But then Foreplay/Long Time goes on for a very long time and the momentum drops. The proggy organ excursions are all over this record and that’s probably the weakest part of it for me. The best thing on the album is the dual guitar sound. It really reminds me of my much beloved Thin Lizzy, and I’m an absolute sucker for that. Smokin' filled me with nostalgia as it is featured on GTA: San Andreas. The rest of the songs kind of range from good to shite. Rock & Roll Band is probably the worst offender, it genuinely sounds like stock rock music. The lyrics are super basic throughout, but it is a genuinely positive album, and I don’t listen to enough positive music, so it was a nice change of pace. I was also a bit shocked to find out that Brad Delp died by suicide. I never knew that, and it did take me aback. (Though I know he was not the lyricist). Not perfect, but at the end of the day this is a feel good album!

Album #52, Cheap Trick, At Budokan ⭐⭐⭐⭐ I went into this very blind. I’d never intentionally listened to Cheap Trick, and even checking their top songs on Spotify didn’t reveal anything I recognised. But this is right up my street. It sounds like a punkier version of Big Star, who I love. I should probably do a proper dive into their studio albums, because this is very much a live album. It’s hard to pick out every individual element of the songs, so it’s hard to judge how good they actually are underneath it all, but what it does have is energy and a really great live sound. I love hearing the crowd on albums like this. I feel that’s the whole point of a live record, and there’s loads of that here, though I do wonder if some of it is piped in. There are great guitar riffs, ripping solos, and class drumming throughout. The vocalist sounds weirdly English at times, like he’s doing a 1977 punk impression, but it works. The band it reminded me of most, though, not least because it was recorded in Japan, was Spinal Tap. That might sound like a dig, but I fucking love Spinal Tap. Really enjoyed this one, and I’d definitely listen again.

Album #53, Shuggie Otis, Inspiration Information ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Super unique summer album. I’d never heard of Shuggy Otis, but I spent the morning reading about him, and yeah, what a crazy “what could have been” story. He essentially stopped making music after this album, which was his third, but he also could have ended up being one of The Rolling Stones. Mad stuff. This is a really unique, strange album that seems really ahead of its time. It’s a mix of different genres, in particular R&B and soul, but blended with jazz, funk and psychedelia. The presence of the drum machine just makes it feel a lot more modern as well. What’s really interesting is how all these different melodic lines appear in the songs, and they just kind of drift off into different areas, most of the time really beautiful ones. It’s really well produced and just very, very interesting overall. If I had any criticisms, I’d say it can feel a little bit aimless at times, but that’s just the style. It’s not a particularly focused record, but I think that kind of suits it. My other reservation would be that he’s not a particularly strong lyricist, even though he’s a very good singer. The lyrics can be quite basic, but interestingly, as the album goes on, he sings less and less, so that sort of balances out. Even as an instrumental-heavy album, it really works because of the choices in instrumentation. So yeah, really interesting record. I’ll definitely listen to it again.

Album #54, ZZ Top, Eliminator ⭐⭐⭐⭐ I’ve seen this album panned on this subreddit, 1 and 2 star reviews every time I see it come up. Having never heard it, I feared the worst. I’m here to tell you that you are all wrong. This is class. A genuinely funny 80s rock album that doesn’t take itself seriously at all. It’s not an album that should even be critiqued. To think too much about it would be to miss the point. But let’s give it a go. This is Billy Gibbons’ album through and through. Though I do like Dusty Hill’s “I Got the Six” and his bass playing on “Thug”, the album is essentially a vehicle for Billy’s guitar, and what a player he is. It’s not flashy, it’s all tonal and it’s perfectly weighted. I don’t think I’d change a note that he plays on the whole album. He’s also a great singer. Understated for hard rock and a damn funny lyricist. The production is very 80s hard rock, which can be a bad thing on occasion, but here it works. It’s not over the top, it’s more like a sheen over the tracks that suits them perfectly. The one thing I’d say is it sounds mostly like a drum machine throughout the album and it’s very processed. I don’t mind drum machines or repetitive rhythms at all, but the drums can lack a bit of dynamism. Still, like the other choices on this album, it feels intentional and it serves the songs. Despite the silliness, I get the sense that all these songs were put together with a lot of thought and care, and it shows. Queens of the Stone Age haves cited them as a major influence and you can hear that swampy sound through a lot Josh Homme’s guitar work. For that alone, I am grateful.

Album #55, Funkadelic, One Nation Under a Groove ⭐⭐⭐⭐ I thought every song on this album was going to be about funk, but no…..there’s a 10 minute song about shit as well. I absolutely loved this album. It’s so fun, so inventive, so creative, and just really enjoyable. Despite a lot of the songs being very long, they never lose your interest. Just when you think it might drift, something new comes in, a melodic line, a great vocal, a searing guitar solo, or even just a lovely chord change, and it pulls you right back in. If you’re not into a track in minute one or two, you probably will be by minute four or five because they just keep evolving and grabbing your attention. Similar to ZZ Top yesterday, it’s not an album you need to overthink. You just need to feel it and go with it. It’s made for dancing more than analysing. I’m just really glad this album exists.

Album #56, Lynyrd Skynyrd, (Pronounced ’Lĕh-’nérd ’Skin-’nérd) ⭐⭐⭐⭐ I have a special place in my heart for “Simple Man”. This is going to sound like a brag, but it’s just a story from my teenage years, and it’s one of those things that feels like it should only happen in a movie, but it actually did happen. I was a drummer in a punk band at a show, and just before we went on, the drummer for the band that was supposed to play before us dropped out. They were a covers band doing rock songs. “Simple Man” It’s one of the only songs I really remember us doing. I ended up getting the gig with that band off the back of it. It didn’t amount to anything in the long run, but it was fun time in my life and that song always reminds me of it. I think Skynrd our a great band. They’re surprisingly not as heavy as you might expect. I’d always thought of Lynyrd Skynyrd as quite a hard-hitting rock band, but this leans more towards ballads and country. The strength of the big four songs alone, “Tuesday’s Gone”, “Gimme Three Steps”, “Simple Man”, and “Free Bird”, is massive. These are songs that have been played to death and still stand the test of time. Ronnie Van Zant is a great singer for this style, really soulful, and the more country-leaning tracks like “Mississippi Kid” feel very authentic. Every song brings a slightly different element to their sound, which keeps things interesting. It’s not my favourite album in the world, but I’d still give it four stars because it deserves it. I like Lynyrd Skynyrd, and I like the bands they influenced as well. I’m a big fan of Drive-By Truckers, and there’s no way they exist without Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Album #57, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Déjà Vu ⭐⭐⭐ This was a favourite album of mine when I was a teenager, and it’s been a long time since I listened to it. It’s kind of mad that this is the best-selling album in Neil Young’s catalogue, even though he’s only on it in a fairly limited way. Maybe I’ve just grown out of this group over the years, but I think it’s quite a mixed bag now. Funnily enough, the tracks where they come together as a full group are the weakest. “Carry On” is pretentious hippie bullshit to me. “Everybody I Love You” is less pretentious, more of a rocker, but still doesn’t do much. Their harmonies are obviously beautiful, but they can feel glossy and overused, like more of a display of ability than something that actually serves the songs. That’s a strange criticism for a band known for their harmonies, but sometimes it just comes across as a bit over the top. “Woodstock” is another one. Their version doesn’t come close to Joni Mitchell’s spooky original. And the title track “Déjà Vu”, which is the ultimate nonsensical David Crosby song. It has some lovely moments, but overall it just feels like a kind of folky prog thing that doesn’t really land for me. “Country Girl” is a strange Neil Young track, more like his Buffalo Springfield era. Interesting chord progression, but it’s over-arranged and not as direct. A weak Young song in a period where he wrote virtually none. On the positive side, the songs that showcase the individual strengths of the group are stronger. “Helpless” is a beautiful Neil Young track, one of his best.“Our House” is very twee, but it’s also a lovely, catchy English-style pop song from Graham Nash. “4 + 20” is a simple, sombre Stephen Stills track that really suits his voice. And then there’s “Almost Cut My Hair”, which is easily the best David Crosby song. It’s direct, powerful, energetic, soulful, and has great fucking lyrics. All the things that can be missing from his music at times are there. I remember Crosby himself saying those were the most juvenile lyrics he ever wrote. No David, they were the best! That’s kind of the album in a nutshell. Track for track, it’s just a mixed bag. I’d probably take their debut over this. It feels more focused, more tuneful, and the harmonies don’t burden the songs.

Album #58, Arctic Monkeys, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not ⭐⭐⭐⭐ I’m just about old enough to remember how big a deal this album was when it was released. Lad culture was crying out for its new sound and this fit like a glove. But I never really cared for what the lads were listening to at the time, so I’m trying to take this on its own merit. It’s very good. It’s absolutely a product of its time, a proper mid-noughties indie album. A lot of music sounded like this back then, but there’s a sophistication here. You can hear the influence of Gang of Four and The Jam, and in the heavier moments there’s a hint of Queens of the Stone Age and The White Stripes. The musicianship is excellent throughout, but the obvious star is Alex Turner. He’s funny, witty, charming, incisive, and above all else, romantic. His accented singing and phrasing is what really sets them apart from their peers. Most of the songs are great. It’s hard to review tracks you’ve heard so many times, especially ones you’ve almost heard by force because they were everywhere, but they’ve stood the test of time. The only one I don’t like is “Still Take You Home”. Even allowing for the fact it was written by a teenager, the misogyny is hard to ignore. It’s a manky lyric, though I’d say the lads loved it. Was it overhyped at the time? Maybe. But it came out in a period where there wasn’t much better happening in indie and guitar music, so it makes sense. I’m not their biggest fan, but I do appreciate how they’ve evolved over the years. I even like the whole lounge singer persona that Turner has leaned into. It suits the old romantic. Still, this is probably their best album.

Album #59, 50 Cent, Get Rich or Die Tryin’ ⭐⭐ I used to be a huge hip-hop fan when I was younger, but I never really listened to 50 Cent, so this was my first time hearing this one. Yeah, it’s okay. It’s your typical gangster rap, super-rich bling rap, which I was never really a big fan of. I like gangster rap and I like excessive violence in songs, and he definitely leans into that, but the whole being rich thing, I just can’t relate to. Nothing really grabbed me. The singles are probably the best tracks. “In Da Club” is one of the most recognisable songs ever, in my opinion. Everybody knows it, and it’s very good, it gets you pumped up. But I’m not really convinced by his voice. He has a good flow and he’s an okay lyricist, but there’s nothing that really made me laugh, think, or feel intimidated by his braggadocio. I wouldn’t call him a great lyricist. His voice can be quite monotonous, and when he tries to sing or switch it up, it just sounds a bit weak. It’s not a particularly strong voice. He feels more like an image than anything else. I get why he was such a big star, he’s very marketable, but musically I don’t really see why this album is on this list. I’ve fallen out of love with hip-hop a bit over the years, especially because of the misogyny, and a lot of this kind of stuff just hasn’t aged well for me. I kind of cringe now thinking about how much I used to listen to and rap along to this kind of thing. That said, if I put on something like Illmatic or The Infamous, I’d still say they’re amazing albums. I just don’t think this is anywhere near that level. So yeah, it’s a two star for me.

Album #60, Tupac Shakur, Me Against the World ⭐⭐⭐ Another gangster rap album two days in a row. This one is far superior to 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’. Tupac is a proper MC with a great voice, great intensity, and he’s a much better lyricist. I swear I am a hip hop fan, but I never really listened to Tupac. He’s just one of those artists I never got around to, so this is my first time hearing this album. I don’t love it. It’s a real mixed bag. When it’s good, it’s very good. In a weird way, even though this is a West Coast hip hop album, I don’t really like the more West Coast elements of it. The meandering synths and some of the production choices just don’t do much for me. At times it sounds a bit rough, like the samples and backing vocals aren’t particularly well chosen or performed. It’s when he leans away from that style and into more old school 80s hip hop that I like it most. “Old School” is easily my favourite track on the album. That’s the kind of sound I gravitate towards. The best song on the album is “Dear Mama”. It’s genuinely touching, even if I think it runs out of lyrical ideas a bit towards the end. The worst song by far is “Temptations”. For someone with his history, that song just doesn’t sit right with me at all. I’m not against sexy hip hop, but this one feels off, and some of the lyrics are just poor. I don’t fully get the hype around Tupac. I understand the mystique and his importance culturally, and a lot of what he stood for is admirable, but purely as an artist, I’m not completely sold. That said, this is a solid album overall. Not amazing, but definitely not bad either. If you’re going to include a Tupac album on a list like this, this is probably a fair shout.

Album #61, Silver Jews, Bright Flight, ⭐⭐⭐⭐ I’ve been intentionally avoiding looking at the full list to keep things surprising, so this was a big surprise. I was delighted, but couldn’t believe that there were two Silver Jews albums included. Then I checked and realised American Water isn’t on the list, which is honestly a travesty. If you’re going to include a Silver Jews album, that’s the one. It’s easily in contention for best album of the 90s. That aside, Bright Flight might not be his best album, but it could be my personal favourite. I consider David Berman one of the great American songwriters. No one does sardonic quite like him. He can make you laugh and make you cry with ease. This is his most depressing record. It's the sound of a man who is about ready to pack it all in for good. The album is very much a vehicle for his lyrics, though there is one cracking instrumental track too. The instrumentation is soft, understated country throughout, and it’s beautifully done. There are also these little jerking chord changes that I love, like the shift before “I can dance real good” on Room Games and Diamond Rain. It’s a dark album, but it’s full of character. It never feels overly self-pitying or completely dour. There’s always humour in how it approaches the heavy theme of death. It’s probably not for everyone, but if the 1001 album generator is your first exposure to Silver Jews and it doesn’t click, I’d strongly recommend listening to American Water. It’s a much better entry point and one of my all-time favourite albums.

Album # 62, Prince, 1999, ⭐⭐⭐⭐ I was excited to see this come up. I gave Sign o’ the Times five stars. it’s one of the best albums I’ve ever heard and the best new discovery I’ve had on the list. This isn’t on that level, but I still enjoyed it. It’s less inventive and a bit more straightforward pop, and he doesn’t cover as many genres, so it’s not as impressive overall. That said, it’s still a very, very good pop album. It’s fun, it’s danceable, and even though each song is very long, the grooves and repetition actually work in its favour. That feels like the whole point of the record. He keeps things interesting too, throwing in guitar solos and strange production choices, and oddball tracks like Automatic and Something in the Water (Does Not Compute), which are just really interesting. It’s kind of a weird protest album that’s also massively about sex. When he’s not singing about saving the world, he’s singing about sex, and sometimes it’s a bit much. International Lover is basically him narrating his orgasm, step by step. And in Lady Cab Driver he lets out all his frustration through the act of sex on a cab driver. He just loves sex. He’s mad for the ride. It can be a bit much sometimes. But the musicianship is undeniable. His singing, his playing, his overall ability, he’s just phenomenal. One of the most impressive musicians I’ve ever listened to. His band are great too. I don’t think I’ll come back to this as much as Sign o’ the Times, but if anything this whole exercise has made me a big Prince fan.

Album # 63, Tori Amos, Little Earthquakes, ⭐⭐⭐ I’m going to level with you, I didn’t listen to this under the best circumstances. I was travelling, driving in stormy weather, with my toddler in the backseat, so it was hard to focus or even hear everything properly. I couldn’t exactly blast it the way it probably needs. I did go back and listen to a few of the standout tracks again afterwards though. I thought it was okay. This is the kind of album that should be right up my alley, but it just didn’t really land with me. That said, I do think there’s more to it, so I’ll definitely give it another go. It starts strong. Crucify and Girl are both really great, but after that it dips a bit for a stretch. There’s a lot of overwrought sensitivity on it, and at times she sounds a bit like a poor man’s Kate Bush. Mother was a real highlight, and Me and a Gun is genuinely powerful. It’s an incredibly impressive piece of songwriting, and the fact it was released as the lead single is kind of amazing. That’s easily one of the standout moments on the album. But overall, I found it a bit meandering and not especially focused. There are beautiful passages, but there are weird, out of place moments too. Precious Things was a low point. It felt like a proto-emo track, almost like Evanescence, and that’s not a sound I have any interest in. It’s also a very serious album, which didn’t really help given the circumstances I was listening in. I do think that affected my experience a lot. So yeah, I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt. It could easily be a two or a four star, but I just don’t know so, for now, it’s a three.

Album # 64, Gorillaz, Gorillaz, ⭐⭐⭐⭐ I have a soft spot for Gorillaz. I saw them live a few years ago while I was on acid, and even though the memory is a bit foggy, it was one of my favourite concert experiences. One of my earliest musical memories is the release of Clint Eastwood back in 2001 when I was about 9 or 10. As a big gamer at the time, I was fascinated by this computer game band on MTV. It actually took me until the last few years to properly get into them though. I really love how they sound like a bunch of people in a room just messing around and having fun, and that definitely comes across here. It’s a fun album, but it’s a lot more lowkey than I remembered. It leans into that trip-hop style, quite sparse and minimalist at times, and it’s all tied together by Damon Albarn’s vocals and songwriting. You could definitely question why this is on the list ahead of Demon Days or Plastic Beach, which I think are both better records. Maybe it’s because this was the debut and felt more groundbreaking at the time, even if the image was more innovative than the music itself. Still, it’s a great album and one I’ll always have a bit of nostalgia for.

Album #65, The Rolling Stones, Beggars Banquet, ⭐⭐⭐⭐ This is the first album in the Rolling Stones’ purple patch. That said, I do like a lot of what came before it, and plenty of what came after as well. Having also reviewed Let It Bleed and gave it a four, I think this is the more consistent album overall. No song hits the heights of Gimme Shelter, but as a full record it’s probably a stronger four-star album. There’s no influence from Brian Jones and more of that Americana, honky-tonk, country influence that defined the era. Mick Jagger still feels like he’s finding his footing with that style though. On a few tracks it comes across a bit forced, like he’s leaning into it a bit too much. He definitely refines it later on with songs like Dead Flowers and across Exile on Main Street. The unsung hero of this album is Nicky Hopkins. His piano playing elevates everything he touches here, especially on No Expectations, which is my favourite track on the album. When that piano comes in, it just lifts the whole song to another level. It’s a great album, but they still had better to come. For me, Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street are both five-star records. But, this is the beginning of their best period.

Album #66, Steely Dan, Pretzel Logic, ⭐⭐⭐⭐ The only Steely Dan album I know is Can’t Buy a Thrill, which I like. And, as an Irish man, I have a nostalgic love for Reelin’ in the Years. If you know, you know. So this being my second Steely Dan album, I really like it. It’s a strong four, but I think there’s a lot more to discover here. It feels like one that will really open up on repeat listens. It’s a rare band that can move through so many different styles and still sound completely like themselves. They go through country, soul, blues, funk, rock, all these different styles, but it always sounds like Steely Dan. It actually reminds of Rain Dogs by Tom Waits in that way. The guitar work is phenomenal. The licks, the riffs, the solos, the intricacies, it’s all just so, so good. It’s quite an eccentric album, and maybe a bit too eccentric in places. I think especially in the second half it loses me a little bit. But again, it feels like a repeat listen album. I love how short it is as well. It packs a lot into about 33 minutes, and I really appreciate that. Favourite track is Rikki Don’t Lose That Number. I know it’s their big hit, so may be a bit of a basic choice, but it’s just such a great, catchy song. The chord progressions are brilliant. Final note, having just reviewed Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Steely Dans harmonies are better. I think they are an underrated band.

Album #67, Peter Gabriel, So, ⭐⭐⭐ I’ve never really listened to Peter Gabriel before, partly because he was in Genesis, and they just don't seem like my kind of band. So this was all pretty new to me. It’s good! Not bad. It starts off really strong with Red Rain and Sledgehammer, both class songs. It’s a pretty interesting album, very unusual. The production is super 80s, but I do like that Daniel Lanois sound. It reminds me a bit of the style he brought to Dylan’s Oh Mercy and Time Out of Mind, that kind of reverb-heavy atmosphere. My issues are more with the lyrics and the overall tone. Peter Gabriel clearly has a great voice, loads of range, very expressive, subtle and technically brilliant. But it’s one of those voices that can drift into pretentiousness quite easily, and I struggle with that. There are two tracks in particular, Don’t Give Up and In Your Eyes, that lost me. I just find that whole “trying to save the world” schtick hard to take, especially today. I’m probably just too cynical for it. Don’t Give Up is helped a lot by Kate Bush, who’s great on it, but the lyrics on both songs just don’t do it for me. The rest of the album didn’t grab me either. There are definitely beautiful moments, the chord progressions are nice, and the rhythms and percussion are really interesting. But overall, it’s not something I see myself coming back to. Not a bad album at all, just not really for me.

Album #68, Laibach, Opus Dei, ⭐⭐⭐⭐ This was a serious change of pace. When I first put it on, I thought, oh my God, is this going to be an hour of fascist-sounding military march music? I figured it couldn’t actually be that, or it wouldn’t be on the list, and reading into it as it went on, it’s clearly anti-fascist, anti-authoritarian and anti-nationalistic. I’ve never had an album win me over like this one. At the start, it sounds like Eurovision music. Not my thing at all. It’s got that big, trashy synth sound, and I was thinking this would absolutely clean up at Eurovision. I wasn’t really enjoying it, but there were moments that stood out, like on the opening track where this distorted, scratching guitar comes in. It felt like a strange choice that didn’t fit, but I really liked it. Then there’s their version of One Vision by Queen, which is my favourite Queen song. I liked that, but I was still leaning towards a two-star review at that point because that Euro synth sound just wasn’t landing with me. But when the title track comes in, that’s where it started to click. It’s in the same style, but it felt powerful and uplifting. After that, the album shifts. It gets more industrial, more avant-garde. Tracks like Trans-National and How the West Was Won are much heavier, more aggressive, more distorted, and it starts to move away from that euro-pop feel. From there it just gets weirder and weirder. By the end it’s deep into sample-based territory, almost like a Steve Reich kind of approach. The last couple of tracks are genuinely creepy and I love music that scares me. It’s eerie and unsettling. Even though it’s about an hour long, it never felt boring. It moves through so many moods and ideas that I actually ended up stopping what I was doing just to sit and listen properly. I know this is one of the lowest-rated albums on the list, and I get why. And I’m not trying to be contrarian here, because this isn’t the kind of music I’d usually even admit to liking. But I found it really interesting, and I genuinely enjoyed it. It reminded me a bit of Scott Walker’s Bish Bosch, another album I love but wouldn’t exactly throw on in front of anyone. But, when World War III comes around, this is definitely going on the playlist.

Album #69, David Bowie, Heroes, ⭐⭐⭐⭐ I don’t love this album or hold it in the same kind of reverence that a lot of Bowie fans seem to. With the Berlin trilogy, and especially here, it feels like Bowie is more interested in the sonics and soundscapes than the actual songs. It’s quite a messy album to me. There’s a lot going on, and while I know the recording process was spontaneous and experimental, it feels unfocused. But, that’s probably the point! That said, I do like it. It’s a four. I just don’t think it’s one of the best albums ever made, or even one of the best of the 70s. The positives are that some of the songs are very good. Not all of them, but a few really stand out. Obviously Heroes itself is incredible. Not just one of the best Bowie songs, but one of the greatest songs ever recorded. It’s such a huge track that it kind of dwarfs everything else on the album, and almost does the rest of it a disservice. I also think the tracklisting is a bit off. I feel like Heroes should have opened the album. If it did, everything after might have benefited from that momentum. As it is, Joe the Lion and Beauty and the Beast feel a bit lost with Heroes sitting third. From Heroes onwards, I actually think the album improves. Sons of the Silent Age is great, and V-2 Schneider is a really fun, quirky track. Then it moves into the ambient side of things. I’m not a big ambient music fan in general. I do like Brian Eno, but more for his earlier, vocal-led work and Roxy Music rather than the ambient stuff. So the second half doesn’t do much for me. Moss Garden is lovely, but Sense of Doubt feels very basic, not in a good minimalist way, just not that interesting to listen to now. Maybe it was more impressive at the time, but it doesn’t really land for me. I feel like I’ve been quite negative, but I do still think it’s a four. It’s still Bowie. His voice is amazing, the ideas can be strong, and you’ve got Robert Fripp doing really inventive things on guitar. I just wish the songs were a bit stronger overall. It’s an album that could do with a few more hooks. I actually think I prefer Lodger to this, and definitely Low. And I’d take albums like Station to Station, Ziggy Stardust, and Blackstar over the Berlin trilogy. In fact, my favourite album of the “Berlin trilogy” is The Idiot by Iggy Pop. That might be a bit sacrilegious, but that’s just where I land on it. Still a four, just a light one.

Album #70, Nine Inch Nails, The Downward Spiral, ⭐⭐⭐⭐ I’ve never listened to Nine Inch Nails before. The only Trent Reznor stuff I’ve ever really listened to is his soundtracks for movies like The Social Network, which I think are always amazing. This has always been high up on my list of albums I’ve been meaning to listen to, so today was my big push to finally give it a go. I loved it. What an amazing sounding album. A huge, big colossus of complicated noise rock. It’s so layered and dense and textured and powerful, and everything sounds so clean and crisp and clear and measured. deeply impressive production on this thing. What I would say is that while I think it sounds great, and I love the dynamic range of it, I do think that the lyrical tone and vocals are something that thankfully I just don’t relate to anymore. I don’t really care that much for existential angst anymore. There would have been a time in my life where I would have really related to this, but thankfully I no longer do. I suppose that’s a good thing. So this kind of singing style, it just doesn’t really do a lot for me. I think it’s all a bit over the top. But in a way, this is some of the best existential angst I’ve heard. It’s far better than Slipknot, who I reviewed a few weeks ago. This is done much better and much more engaging and much more listenable. My other big gripe with it, though, isn’t to do with the music at all, but actually more the recording process. Something about recording this album in Sharon Tate’s house where she was murdered, and singing about piggies and this and that just feels really distasteful and really disrespectful. I haven’t read too much into Trent Reznor’s rationale behind that decision, but I would struggle to rationalise a decision like that. But maybe somebody could explain it to me, maybe I’d come around, but I don’t know if I would. So yeah, not a gripe with the music. I think it’s an amazing album. I could totally understand why some people would give this a five star review. For me today, it’s a four. I was pretty much blown away by the sound of this thing. It’s huge.

Album #71, Paul Weller, Wild Wood, ⭐⭐ This is going to be a harsh review for a decent album, but I just don’t get it. I like Paul Weller, or at least I respect him anyway. I really like The Jam. He’s a legend for his work with them. But could somebody some context? Was this a big album? Was it a significant album? I’ve read online that it was his comeback, but I kind of just feel a little bit like, so what? It’s not a bad album, but it’s nowhere near as good as other albums on this list. There’s nothing particularly interesting about it. I can hear the influences. I can hear Van Morrison, Neil Young, Eric Clapton. I can hear The Band. But I just don’t know why I wouldn’t rather be listening to them than this. Very little of it grabbed me. It’s too long, and it commits the mortal sin that’s pretty much unforgivable. It bored me. I was quite bored throughout, and looking back on it, I don’t really recognise or remember any of the songs. The only one that really dug its hooks into me was “Pictures on the Wall”, which I thought was a lovely tune. Paul Weller has a good voice, very soulful, and it suits the music well. Songs take little turns into jazzy territory and there are a few small electronic touches throughout, but more or less very little interesting happens on the album. Maybe I don’t know enough about his solo career to understand if this was a big shift from The Style Council and The Jam. I’m just not sure about the context behind it. This is the first time I’ve really questioned an inclusion on the list. Even albums I didn’t like, like Get Rich or Die Tryin’ by 50 Cent, I could understand why they’re here because they were cultural phenomena. This one, I don’t get. I hate awkward silences. When I have people over, I always stick on music in the background that’s easy to ignore, just so the room never goes dead quiet. I usually go with Bill Callahan, who I really like, but I’ll keep this one in my back pocket because it’s perfect dinner party music that nobody has to pay attention to. To steal a phrase from The Simpsons, it’s a perfectly cromulent album. But it’s not an album I felt I needed to hear before I die, and that’s not what I got into this for.

Album #72, Ray Charles, The Genius of Ray Charles, ⭐⭐ I kind of feel bad for this review because I know he’s a bit of a legend, but I just can’t lie, this album did nothing for me. It came and went through my speakers and it didn’t touch me or make me feel anything at all. I’m just not that big into big band stuff. The big smacking horns on some of these tracks were actually giving me a headache. I appreciate that the arrangements are varied and complex and some of the chord progressions are quite nice, but I just find the sound to be a little bit obnoxious at times. As for Ray Charles, his voice is phenomenal, but every song is kind of the same. Not necessarily musically, but they’re all about the same thing, being in love with someone who either loves you or doesn’t love you back. That’s 90% of the album. Now! That is also 90% of popular music as well, but I just got bored with this. I don’t really have much more to say than that. I liked the quieter tunes, songs like “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying”, “When Your Lover Is Gone”. “Two Years of Torture” would probably be my favourite, it leans more into blues. Any Ray Charles fans out there, help me with this. I’d love an album that’s more stripped back. Just his voice and a simpler arrangement. These big band backings just don’t do it for me. It just is what it is, and I’m sorry if that offends anyone, but it’s two stars all day for me and I don’t really have any desire to give it another go.

Album #73, Sigur Rós, Ágætis byrjun, ⭐⭐⭐⭐ What a beautiful album. I never listened to Sigur Rós, despite them being pretty massive on the festival circuit when I was going to festivals all the time. I never once went to see them. That’s a shame, because I would have loved this when I was younger. I suppose today is the next best time to hear them. If you’ve never been to Iceland, I highly recommend it. But if you can’t go, this album is the next best thing. This literally sounds like what Iceland looks like. Monolithic landscapes, slow pace, violent weather. Totally beautiful. For me, I only really care about how music sounds. I don’t care too much about the technical side of music making. If a sound moves me, I genuinely don’t care how it was created. So post rock should be right up my alley, as it’s all about that. I like post rock, but I wouldn’t be an aficionado. Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden would be one of my favourite albums, and any time Mogwai comes on, I tend to love it, but that’s probably not scratching the surface. This is, for the most part, right up my alley too. I’ve rarely heard an album that starts as well as this. The first 35 minutes or so are incredible. It’s genuinely stunning. But it does lose me a little bit towards the end. As can happen with this genre, it’s too long. It gets its point across early enough and I feel like it runs out of ideas near the end. But it is a stunner of an album, and a slightly edited version would have been an easy five. As it is, it can feel a bit bloated and a bit daunting to come back to, so for that reason it’s a four.

Album #74, Gene Clark, No Other, ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Gene Clark is the co author of one of my all time favourite songs, “Polly”, by Dillard & Clark. He’s got one of my favourite voices in music. Just beautifully mournful, but powerful and stern. Not necessarily the most versatile voice in the world, but just a great sounding voice. It kind of reminds me a little bit of Bill Callahan in a way, though it’s also totally different. Despite all that, I’ve never really done a deep dive into his music. I am very familiar with the first half of this album because I’ve tried to listen to it multiple times and for one reason or another never finished it. But it was not because I disliked the music. This is a very weird album. It’s feels like what Gram Parsons was talking about when he described cosmic American music. It’s a mix of all different types of country, roots, Americana, rock and soul. It pulls from so many places, and it feels quite messy and rough around the edges in places, not from a production standpoint, but more from an ideas standpoint. I don’t love it, and I’m really giving it four stars because I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt. I can tell this is the kind of album that will grow on me. Some of the songs are great. Some of the lyrics aren’t. I’m not the biggest fan of the more grand, worldly advice type songs. The weakest track is “Some Misunderstanding”, which is over eight minutes long, so that’s a fairly big dip. But the rest of the album is strong. Favourite track is “From a Silver Phial”. I was really interested to read about how poorly this was received at the time. I’m very surprised. It is a strange album, probably as strange as anything that was being made by the ex-Byrd’s at the time, but I think it’s also one of the better records to come out too. It doesn’t really have any big hits, which probably didn’t help, but I’m glad it’s been reappraised. Good album, very weird for what it is.

Album #75, Rod Stewart, Gasoline Alley, ⭐⭐⭐ Good little album, this one. Big fan of Rod Stewart, especially in Faces. I think he’s just got one of the best voices ever. And this album kind of proves it. He can do that bombastic, swaggery rock style, but this really shows he can handle the sensitive, soulful, folky stuff as well, arguably even better. He’s a good songwriter too, though there are a lot of covers on here. His own songs are strong, but the album leans heavily on other material as well. It’s all suitably raggedy and rootsy, and I really enjoyed the overall feel of it. I’m only giving it three stars because, to be honest, no song really grabbed me. There’s no “Maggie May” or anything of that level here for me. But I would still recommend it. It feels like the kind of album some of my friends would really like, especially people who haven’t come across it before, because I hadn’t even heard of it myself. Big fan of Faces, so I’m hoping some of their albums show up later on the list.

Album #76, Billy Joel, The Stranger, ⭐⭐ Ah look, this is not my bag at all. I’m sorry to any Billy Joel fans out there. This just is not my type of music, this easy listening soft rock stuff. Some of these songs I know, and some of them are actually pretty iconic, but the only one I can say I liked afterwards is maybe Vienna. Even then, I would have no desire to ever put this kind of music on. I was talking to my wife about it, saying that I do really like Elton John, so maybe I should like Billy Joel as well because it feels like the same kind of style, but she disagreed. She thinks they are totally different. I do not really know. Maybe Elton John just has better songs. Maybe it’s a bad comparison. It is technically very good. The musicianship is excellent, and the songs take interesting turns here and there. He is a great singer. But singing about Italian restaurants and what type of wine you want to drink, I am sure there is meaning behind it all, but I just could not be bothered with it. It is not for me. So this is a very subjective two stars. For others it might be a four or a five, but for me it is a two all day. I am just not that interested in it, so I am sorry.

Album #77, Christina Aguilera, Stripped, ⭐⭐ Woke up with a cringe seeing this one this morning, but one of the reasons I’m doing this list is to listen to music I would never normally choose. So today was the day to give it a go, and I went in with an open mind. I remember how big Christina Aguilera was when I was younger. She was a phenomenon, and I remember this album being everywhere, so on that level alone I can understand why it’s here. But what an absolute mess of an album this is. It really feels like throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks, and most of it is just shit. She moves through so many different styles and genres with no real focus, through line or consistency. The first quarter sticks fairly close to R&B, and I think the more low key tracks like “Loving Me 4 Me” and “Impossible” are actually quite strong. She has an excellent voice for that style, and the production there is more understated and tasteful. Technically she’s clearly a very strong singer, but she needs the right setting. A lot of the other styles just don’t suit her at all. She dips into hip hop, big Disney ballads, and then the rock side of things is the worst of it. “Fighter” is not great, but “Make Over” is genuinely one of the worst songs I’ve ever heard. It’s just shouting and grunting. The production doesn’t help either. She’s so far forward in the mix that everything else gets buried, and when you do hear what’s underneath, it’s often not great. It gets an extra star because I liked some of the R&B material, but overall it’s incredibly messy, even thematically. You go from overtly sexual songs to something like “Beautiful”, which is actually quite good, and then to very heavy material about abuse. The tonal shifts will give you whiplash! But my God. The length is the biggest issue. This thing nearly as long as Sign o’ the Times by Prince, which I gave five stars. That album earns its length. This absolutely does not. It feels like it exists to squeeze out as many singles as possible, which was probably the thinking at the time. It actually reminds me of Prince in how many styles it tries to cover, but it takes a special kind of artist to tie that all together, and she just doesn’t manage it. There might be a really good shorter R&B album buried in here somewhere, but as it stands I never want to hear most of it again. Final note, looking back now, the early 2000s were rough in terms of how women in pop were presented. The hyper sexualisation around artists like Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears has not aged well at all, and it leaves a bit of a bad taste. It’s not a one star, there are redeeming qualities, but this is probably the worst album I’ve heard so far on the list. I could really do with a five star album right about now.

Album #78, Eminem, Slim Shady LP, ⭐⭐⭐⭐ I hate shock humour where people signpost it and say, “oh, you’re going to be offended by this,” or “this is going to offend you.” I remember there was a band when I was in school, not even sure what kind of music they made because their name was so annoying, called Does It Offend You, Yeah?, and I just could never take anything like that seriously. I think when it comes to the artist, it’s not up to them to decide what you’re going to be offended by. You just lay it out there and people take it however they take it. So there are too many parts of this album where there are public service announcements about how offended I’m going to be and how awful all this is, and oh my God, this subject matter is so terrible, to the point where I was thinking this was really ruining the experience. But it didn’t. I used to be a hip hop fan years ago, but I never actually listened to Eminem. I find most everything after this album to be too self-serious, self-referential. I hated all the relapse and recovery stuff and his desperate attempts to recreate this kind of thing later in his career. So this is actually the first time I’ve listened to this album the whole way through, even though I was very aware of it and what I was going to get. I find it pretty impossible to be offended by any of it, even the misogyny, because the Slim Shady character is so ridiculous that you can’t take it seriously in any way. And the album is all the better for it, because it’s a goofy, stupid, occasionally funny album. It’s too long, like pretty much every album, and there are probably too many skits, but the humour is very much aimed at young teenagers. I can see why it spoke to them. It didn’t necessarily speak to me at the time, but putting that hat on, I did genuinely enjoy this. He’s a great rapper, he’s funny, and some of the more focused tracks like “My Fault” are genuinely hilarious. I think if he wasn’t a rapper, he could have been a screenwriter. But he’s not the star of the show for me. The production from Dr. Dre is. The beats are perfect. they match the tone, they’re goofy, sinister, loud, and in-your-face. The little ad-libs and asides layered into everything are just so well done. It might be one of my favourite hip hop albums purely for the beats. “Role Model” probably has my favourite one. And the fact that “My Name Is” was the first thing they recorded, for Dre to land on that sound immediately for Eminem is a sign of a genius. I’m not the biggest Dr. Dre fan overall, but he’s absolutely on top form here. Might be his best album! So yeah, I was surprised by this. I’ve been quite hard on hip hop on this list so far, but this was really, really good and I enjoyed it a lot.

Album #79, Guns N’ Roses, Appetite for Destruction, ⭐⭐⭐⭐ As most young boys who loved hard rock, I loved this album. It was probably one of my first real musical obsessions. They were singing about sex and drugs and using curse words, so what wasn’t to love at that age? And at the time, they felt properly heavy. I hadn’t really gone back to it in years, so I was curious to see how it would hold up. It’s a great record, it really is. The riffs are brilliant. It’s very hooky throughout, especially the singles, which are all iconic. There are a few forgettable tracks like “Out to Get Me”, which I think is poor, and “Anything Goes” doesn’t do much for me either. I also think the chorus of “My Michelle” is a bit weak. But everything else is pretty great. The two stars of the show are obviously Slash and Axl Rose. Slash’s guitar playing is just incredible. I don’t know much about the technical side of guitar, but it sounds so precise and powerful. But the real standout is Axl Rose. His voice is unbelievable. He has to be one of the best singers of his generation. The range, the control, the multiple voices, it’s all there. Some things haven’t aged well, though. On one hand, I do think the lyrics are strong in terms of storytelling. There are loads of little vignettes about down and out characters and addicts. That side of it works really well. But it’s hard not to take some of the misogyny at face value. Unlike the Slim Shady LP, which I reviewed yesterday, where it clearly feels like a character, here it feels more like this is genuinely coming from Axl Rose. That does leave a bit of a bad taste. Also, “Rocket Queen” is one of the best songs on the album, but that sex scene in the middle is just cringey and creepy and has aged terribly. It kind of ruins what is otherwise a brilliant track. The best song on the album is “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” It’s a bit of an outlier compared to the rest of the record, but it might just be the perfect rock song. The riff, the solo, the melody, the vocals, everything is absolutely spot on. I don’t find it cheesy at all, it’s just a genuinely great love song, even if it feels a bit at odds with the rest of the lyrics on the album. Was great to revisit it!

Album #80, Traffic, Traffic, ⭐⭐⭐ Some solid 60s psychedelia here. I’d never heard this one before, though I was aware of Traffic and their place in that scene. I’m going to be honest, I don’t really love it. I’m giving it three stars largely out of goodwill. With this project, I’m usually only getting one proper listen to albums I’ve never heard before, and some records need more time than that. This feels like one of those. If I was being brutally honest on a first impression, it might be closer to a two, but I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt. It’s a real mixed bag. The positives are mostly in the first half. It’s more tuneful, more song-focused psychedelia, with good guitar playing that feels a bit Jimi-esque. The vocals are strong, the lyrics are decent, and overall it has a nice rootsy/folky feel early on. Around the time you get to “Vagabond Virgin,” which I have to say feels a bit creepy and off to me, the album takes a turn. From there it drifts more into proggy territory. The organ and flute start to take over, the guitar steps back, and it all becomes a bit too feathery and lightweight for my taste. That said, I can see how this might be a grower. There could well be more depth in that second half that I’m just not picking up on yet. I’ll definitely give it another spin at some point. For now, though, it’s a very light three.

Album #81, The Modern Lovers, The Modern Lovers, ⭐⭐⭐⭐ What a great record this is. I was really happy to see it come up. I’m a huge fan of The Velvet Underground,. They completely changed my life. I’ll probably get into that more when one of their albums comes up. But it feels like Jonathan Richman and the band had their lives changed by that sound too. This is such a brilliant take on that style. It’s funny, tender, cool, geeky, and just pure rock and roll. It’s been a while since I’ve given something five stars, and I’d love to give this one five for what it represents. But I’ve never quite loved it in that way. It’s not the aesthetic, it’s simply that some of the songs don’t fully grab me. Tracks like “Astral Plane” don’t really do much for me, so I don’t think it’s flawless front to back. And, As much as I like “Roadrunner,” I actually prefer Joan Jett’s version of it. She does a great cover, if you haven’t heard it. That said, some of the songs here are incredible and I come back to them all the time. “She Cracked” is probably my favourite. I love that motorik, Velvet-style beat. That kind of rhythm genuinely changed how I hear music, and anything with that propulsion always pulls me in. “Girlfriend” is another highlight. The charm of it, even down to spelling the word wrong in the chorus, I’ve always loved that. It’s one of my favourite love songs. So yeah, it’s a great record. Not quite a personal five, but I can completely see why it would be for someone else.

Album #82, Missy Elliott, Supa Dupa Fly, ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Fuck. I didn’t see this one coming at all. Missy Elliott was a bit before my time. By the mid 2000s she’d kind of stopped releasing her own studio stuff, and the only track I really knew was “Get Ur Freak On.” I knew Timbaland more from his huge commercial run with Nelly Furtado and Justin Timberlake, which I never really cared for. But this is the kind of music that got him there, and I had no idea it was this good. The beats are incredible. They’re sparse but still complex, glitchy, spacey, and just very cool. It sounds like Southern and New York hip hop colliding in a really seamless way. Add in the vocals across the album and you get this brilliant kind of neo-soul feel. If this came out today it wouldn’t sound out of place at all. It makes a lot of its contemporaries sound really dated. Missy herself is great. She avoids any kind of Female MC stereotype and approaches everything with a sense of playfulness. It’s fun, it’s cool, but there’s also a seriousness to it when it needs it. “The Rain” is the standout. That track alone has shot right up into my personal list of the best hip hop songs I’ve ever heard. This was heading towards a five, but it’s the same issue I have with a lot of hip hop albums. It’s too long. It sags towards the end and feels very top heavy. Funnily enough, one of the last tracks, “I’m Talkin’,” where she’s bragging about being so good at rapping, is actually one of the weaker moments. Still, I was genuinely delighted by this. I never would have listened to it without doing this project, and it’s a great discovery.

Album #83, Tracy Chapman, Tracy Chapman, ⭐⭐⭐⭐ The only song I really knew going into this was “Fast Car.” Outside of that, I had no real familiarity with Tracy Chapman at all. So this ended up being a bit of a delight. It’s a really strong singer-songwriter album, and it feels quite unique in its sound. She’s a great singer, very hook-oriented, with loads of memorable moments throughout. There’s something about her melodies and those simple guitar patterns that just stick in your head straight away. It starts strong and ends strong, and I especially like the more straightforward love songs on it. The only issue for me is the middle section. Tracks like “Why?” and “Mountain O’ Things” lean a bit into being preachy. I respect the messaging, and It’s definitely a powerful album in terms of its themes, especially around poverty and social issues, but that stretch can feel a bit heavy-handed. That said, I don’t want to dwell on that too much. It’s a great singer-songwriter record and I’ll definitely be coming back to this one.

Album #84, The Jam, All Mod Cons, ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Great, great album. Other than the big hits, I’d never really done a proper deep dive into The Jam before. What’s immediately clear is just how strong they are as songwriters. It’s not really a punk album in the way I always assumed it would be. I’d associated them with punk and the mod scene, which I don’t fully understand if I’m being honest, but this leans much more into pop. It feels like a real homage to classic rock and roll, and you can really hear The Beatles all over it. That influence works massively in its favour because the album has such a strong pop sensibility throughout. I’m not sure how big this was commercially at the time, but it feels like it should have been huge. There are loads of songs on here that could easily have been hits. I’m not even going to single out specific tracks because the quality is just consistently high. Some songs are better than others, but there’s nothing here I’d call weak, and a lot of it is genuinely great. Big win for me. I’ll definitely be coming back to this one, and I’ve already added a good few tracks to my rotation.

Album #85, k.d. lang, Shadowland, ⭐⭐ “Constant Craving” and her androgynous look are all I really knew about k.d lang. I didn’t even realise she was this deep into honky tonk. I don’t love it. This is a very subjective one, because I can’t really fault the execution. It absolutely achieves what it sets out to do, and it genuinely sounds like it’s from another era, largely thanks to Owen Bradley and that classic Nashville production style. Lang herself is a great vocalist and does the style justice. The problem is that very few of the songs grabbed me. I do like honky tonk in general, but the pithy nature of these tracks started to wear on me after a while. Even though it’s a short album, it felt like a bit of a slog to get through. The only tracks I’d come back to are “Western Stars,” “Down to My Last Cigarette,” and the brilliant Honky Tonk medley at the end. This is another one where I’d question its inclusion on the list. It feels more like a homage to the genre than anything particularly innovative. It’s a well done covers album, but it doesn’t really add anything new. I’d be hoping there are other albums on the list that represent honky tonk in a more distinctive way.

Album #86, Pere Ubu, Dub Housing, ⭐⭐⭐ I’m a huge fan of The Modern Dance by Pere Ubu. I would say it’s consistently in my top ten favourite albums, which would fluctuate all the time, but that one is probably one of the most rock steady in my list. It just feels like a mesh of all my favourite kinds of music with a kind of punky energy. I listen to it regularly and rarely skip a track when it comes up. But I’ve struggled big time with their follow-up album, Dub Housing. It was released the same year as The Modern Dance, and it kind of feels like more of an outtakes album. I don’t think that’s actually true, but that’s what it feels like. Virtually every song pales in comparison. On its own merits though, it’s still good. It’s very, very weird. It’s like a less tuneful Talking Heads doing a few Can covers. Again, it’s a mix of styles, Beefheart, post punk, sea shanties, krautrock, and of course dub. It’s just odd. Some tracks are good, but it lacks hooks. The Modern Dance had a certain pop sensibility, but this doesn’t. I struggle to remember a lot of the tracks. But there’s a great drunken, chaotic vibe to the whole thing, and it does sound ahead of its time. It doesn’t hold a candle to its predecessor, but it’s still a unique and worthwhile album.

Album #87, Carpenters, Close to You, ⭐⭐ Sorry folks, this did nothing for me. I don’t really like easy listening music, and while I don’t mind people like Burt Bacharach, and I know some of these songs are stone cold classics that I’ve heard loads of times before, they’re just not songs I tend to gravitate towards. It’s another one of those albums where the execution is pretty great, so I can’t really fault it on a technical level. The musicianship is strong, the vocals are very good, but the style is just so twee and light and airy that it doesn’t have the bite, grit, or emotional heft that I look for in music. No more so than on one of my all time favourite songs, “Reason to Believe”. I’d never actually heard Carpenters do it before. I love Tim Hardin’s original version, and I especially love Karen Dalton’s version. It’s a particularly sad song with a bleak lyric about being led on by a lover. The Carpenters do a nice arrangement of it, but there’s just no emotional weight to it. It feels too light for what the song is trying to say, and I actually ended up disliking this version quite a bit. That kind of sums up my issue with the whole album. It just feels too soft, and I don’t really get anything out of it emotionally. So it’s a two star for me. It’s clearly well made, but it just doesn’t connect with me at all.

Album #88, The Zutons, Who Killed…… The Zutons?, ⭐⭐⭐ Kind of a pleasant surprise of an album, this one. I didn’t think much when it came up. I mostly knew The Zutons for “Valerie”. I remember hearing that long before Amy Winehouse’s version, which obviously became enormous and is still played everywhere now. That was pretty much the extent of my knowledge of them. But they sounded like a decent indie pop band, and that’s pretty much what they are here. It’s a better record than I thought it was going to be. Again, it’s one of those bands that mixes a lot of different styles while still staying true to themselves. They always sound like themselves, even though there are a lot of different influences and sounds going on throughout the album. They’re mainly indebted to 60s and 70s British rock and roll. The two bands I hear the most are The Rolling Stones and a bit of Britpop, but especially The La’s. A lot of that is probably because the lead singer sounds a bit like Lee Mavers from The La’s. His vocal is probably my favourite thing about the whole album. I think he’s a great singer. I don’t know if I’d say he’s a great lyricist exactly, but the lyrics are grand and the album is packed with little hooks and catchy songs. I think it starts off stronger than it ends. Funnily enough, I think it gradually dips in quality with each passing song. But none of it is bad, apart from maybe “Dirty Dancehall”. At the same time though, none of it really blew me away either.

Album #89, Queen, Queen II, ⭐⭐⭐ Queen are a funny one for me. I was heavily influenced by my brother and my father when I was very young to not like Queen or listen to them at all. They both hated Queen, so by extension I never really got into them either. When I first got into hard rock and was loving bands like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, I kind of shunned Queen and turned my nose up at them. At first I didn’t really like songs like “Bohemian Rhapsody” or a lot of their big hits, partly because of that sheep mentality of feeling like I wasn’t supposed to like them. But as I got older, I grew out of that kind of thinking. I don’t really care anymore what people say about music. I’ll either like something or dislike it on my own terms. So over time I’ve come to accept Queen, but I’ve also never really listened to them properly outside the hits. I know the big songs and I actually do like a lot of them. I even like some of the big pop stuff they did in the 80s. They’re a great greatest hits band for me, but I’d never really sat down with one of the albums before this. This was a first listen for me, and it’s a generous three stars. Straight up prog rock just isn’t really my thing. I think the album starts quite strong though. It’s suitably heavy and much more song orientated in the first half. What I really like about it is that it’s not focused purely on riffs. It’s much more about texture and layering. There’s a huge amount going on sonically. The guitars aren’t just there to hammer home riffs. There are loads of overdubs and little details all over the place that make the whole thing sound rich and noisy and interesting. “Someday One Day” is probably the best example of that. You can almost hear the influence this kind of stuff might have had on bands like The Smashing Pumpkins. It’s a really intelligent guitar sound, and Brian May is probably the star of the show throughout the album for me. But as it goes on, it slips more and more into prog territory, and I just don’t really care for that style. I’d genuinely love to know why so many hard rock and heavy metal bands became obsessed with fantasy themes around this time. All the stuff about the Black Queen, good versus evil, kings and queens and magic and all that kind of thing just makes me cringe a bit. I actually love fantasy in books and games and films, but I kind of like to keep my fantasy separate from my rock music. I admire the sound and the layering, but overall it’s not really an album I connected with in a major way.

Album #90, Leonard Cohen, Songs from a Room, ⭐⭐⭐ The slightly ugly middle child in Leonard Cohen’s pretty legendary opening three album run. Though, as an aside, my personal favourite Cohen album is New Skin for the Old Ceremony, which came directly afterwards. This is still a good album because it’s still Cohen, but it’s kind of undefined compared to the records around it. I don’t really know how to define this album, to be honest. When I think of his debut, I think of something lush and beautiful and genuinely pretty. When I think of Songs of Love and Hate, I think of one of the bleakest albums ever made. Songs from a Room just kind of feels like one of the albums ever made, if you know what I mean. It doesn’t really have one defining characteristic outside of being very sparse. It only really has a handful of truly great songs on it for me, namely “Bird on the Wire”, “The Partisan” and “Seems So Long Ago, Nancy”. The rest range from decent to forgettable. I’ve probably listened to this album about fifty times in my life, and I still look at the tracklist sometimes and have absolutely no memory of what “The Butcher” sounds like. One other negative is that I think this is probably one Cohen’s weakest album’s vocally. His voice just isn’t great on some of these tracks. He comes across as a bit too dour and emotionless at times, and I honestly think if this was someone’s introduction to Leonard Cohen, they’d probably be put off exploring the rest of his music. I think it’s far from his most accessible album. That being said, it’s still Cohen. He’s a lyrical genius, and to use a Silver Jews lyric, “all my favourite singers couldn’t sing”. I love Cohen’s voice regardless. I love his guitar playing, and I love the atmosphere he creates more than anything else. He’s one of the great kings of atmospheric music making. A dark, candlelit kind of record. And while I definitely think it deserves to be on the list because it forms part of such a stellar trilogy of albums, its the weakest of the three for me.

Album #91, Linkin Park, Hybrid Theory, ⭐⭐⭐⭐ I hated Linkin Park when I was a teenager. I’m not even fully sure why. I think maybe nu metal just didn’t resonate with me at all, and I was probably a bit of a musical snob in my early years as well. I didn’t like how popular they were, so I kind of dismissed them outright. I obviously knew the massive singles because they were completely unavoidable, but outside of that I never really listened to them properly. So fuck me, I feel like I’m about twenty five years late to the party here, because this is a fucking great album. Like, genuinely great. I didn’t expect that early 2000s nu metal sound to sound this brilliant. The production is incredible. Everything sounds huge and clean and sharp. The details throughout are great too. The heaviness of the riffs, the vocal melodies, the turntable scratches, all that stuff still sounds futuristic in a weird way. Not ahead of its time exactly, because it sounds very much of its time, but that whole style still feels like a futuristic take on rock music. I didn’t connect with this when I was younger, even though I probably would have related to a lot of the themes at the time. But listening to it now from more of a distance, I can appreciate it a lot more. The best thing about the album is their ear for choruses. Every single track sounds like it could have been a single because the choruses are so banging. Every song has a huge hook that feels earned through the verses and the build-up. The songwriting is just ridiculously catchy throughout. I also really liked the interplay between the rapping and Chester Bennington’s vocals. Before listening, I honestly thought that would be the thing I’d hate most and that it would sound really cringey. And while some of the sensitivity is definitely a bit overwrought at times, that kind of comes with the territory. For the most part, it actually works really, really well. If I had any criticism, it’s that the album is very formulaic and pretty one note. But to be fair, it’s a fucking great note. The style works because the songs are just so well written and catchy. Every track is an earworm. One funny thing I noticed is that the final song, “Pushing Me Away”, sounds almost exactly like “Numb” from the next album. The vocal melodies, the structure, loads of it feels really similar. I looked it up afterwards and saw that their second album got criticised for sounding too much like this one, and I can totally understand that criticism. It’s probably one of the reasons I don’t know if I’ll dive much deeper into their discography. Still though, this is apparently one of the best selling albums of all time, and I guess all those people weren’t wrong. Turns out I was the one who was wrong. A really great surprise.

Album #92, Emmylou Harris, Pieces of the Sky, ⭐⭐⭐ My first solo Emmylou Harris album. I know her well as a collaborator with some of my favourite musicians on some of my favourite albums, people like Bob Dylan, Gram Parsons and Neil Young. So I was excited for this one. And after listening to it, I really have very little to say. It’s a pretty standard country album with a few folky flourishes. She’s a good singer and she picks the right songs. My favourite was probably either “Queen of the Silver Dollar” or “If I Could Only Win Your Love”. None of it really blew me away. I’ve heard from comments on this sub that this was the wrong Emmylou album for the list, so do let me know which one I should listen to next.

Album #93, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, The Message, ⭐⭐⭐ It doesn’t get much more old school than this. I can’t really think of any hip hop albums that came before it, though someone will probably correct me on that. I’d never actually listened to this album before, despite being a big fan of hip hop in general, so this was a really interesting listen. For one thing, it’s a lot less fun than I thought it was going to be before I put it on. It’s actually a pretty serious album with serious themes for the most part. It’s also much more of a soul record than I expected. Especially those two tracks in the middle, “Dreamin’” and “You Are”, the former being a soppy love song to Stevie Wonder, and the latter basically being a soppy love song to Jesus Christ. They’re alright songs, but they kind of derail the momentum and the overall style of the album a bit for me. I imagine those tracks are probably more Furious Five than Grandmaster Flash. The album does finish very strongly though, with the title track, which is by far the best song on the whole thing. It absolutely deserves its place on this list. You can really hear the future of hip hop in it. You can hear all the different directions the genre would eventually go. Even though the themes are heavy, musically it’s not a particularly heavy album. It’s very much that early 80s hip hop sound. And while I’m really glad I heard it, and I do think it’s an important and worthwhile listen, I don’t really see myself going back to it much. It feels like a blueprint or a proof of concept more than anything else. And while we should all be grateful that it exists, hip hop evolved very quickly afterwards into something much more engaging, much more tuneful, and much more interesting to me personally.

Album #94, Ray Price, Night Life, ⭐⭐⭐⭐ I think I gave k.d. lang’s Shadowland a fairly rough review a couple of weeks ago. I’m not entirely sure what I disliked so much about that record, but I remember saying that I hoped there’d be a better representation of honky tonk on the list. I wasn’t waiting very long to find it. This is just a really conceptually sound record. It’s a pretty standard honky tonk country affair on paper, but because it’s so thematically focused, it really holds itself together. All the songs revolve around loneliness, drinking, heartbreak, and staying out all night. It’s just exceptionally well curated. The real star of the show is Ray Price’s voice. He has the perfect voice for this genre. I genuinely wouldn’t change a note. It’s soulful, mournful, warm, deep and versatile all at once. He’s backed by a brilliant band as well, including Willie Nelson on bass, who also provides some really beautiful backing vocals. Their harmonies together are honestly some of the highlights of the whole album. I just loved the atmosphere and mood of the whole thing. I listened to it first thing in the morning while playing with my toddler on the floor, which probably isn’t the ideal setting for this kind of music. This is definitely more of a late night, tears in your beers kind of record. But even in that setting, it still completely worked for me. Really, really enjoyed it. I feel like I’m absolutely swimming in country and honky tonk music on this list at the moment, but this was a really welcome listen today. That being said, I would absolutely love a change of pace now. Give me some filthy, dirty electronica album next. Something nasty. That’s what I’m hoping for.

Album #95, Willie Colón and Rubén Blades, Siembra, ⭐⭐ From what I’ve reviewed so far on this list, albums like Buena Vista Social Club, Jorge Ben, and now this, I can safely say that Latin music just probably isn’t for me. If this is considered one of the best salsa albums ever made, then the genre is probably just wasted on me personally. No offence intended by that either, because this is obviously completely subjective. Technically, it’s a very good album. I like the 70s feel of it. I like the Shaft-style horn sections and the cinematic feel throughout. It’s complex, jazzy, energetic music. But once the vocals and verses kick in, it all just starts to blur together for me. Maybe context matters more with this kind of music. The tracks are long and, for me, they really overstay their welcome. But I can totally imagine this making much more sense in the right environment, like dancing somewhere or drinking in a packed bar late at night. Sitting in my sitting room while working though, it just did absolutely nothing for me. Maybe I’m the problem. I hate hot weather, I hate beaches, and I’m not even a big fan of the food salsa, so this album was probably doomed from the start.

Album #96, PJ Harvey, Dry, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Although she’s never really associated with the genre, I personally think her first two albums, Dry and Rid of Me, are two of the finest grunge albums ever made. I don’t really know how you define grunge exactly, whether something consciously slips into the genre or whether it’s just alternative rock, but this, to me, is as grungy as it gets. I adore PJ Harvey. She’s one of my all-time favourite musicians. I love her whole discography, I love how deep of an artist she is, all the different sides of her music. I probably have a crush on her too. She’s just fucking phenomenal. And I absolutely love this period of her career, the heaviness of it all. This was one of Kurt Cobain’s favourite albums as well, it was in that famous top 50 albums list from his journals. And listening to it today, is it just me or can you really hear In Utero in this album? That muddy heaviness, that gnarly timbre to everything. I’d genuinely never made that comparison before, but today it really stood out to me. And considering In Utero is one of the best albums ever made in my opinion, that’s a very welcome comparison. This album is just so heavy and nasty and sinister. It’s full of these catchy choruses that sneak up on you, unique rhythms, filthy slide guitar and this crazy intensity running through the whole thing. But it’s not just PJ Harvey herself that makes this album great. The rhythm section is unbelievable, especially the drums. The drumming on this album is absolutely outrageous. It could so easily have been a lesser album with a different drummer or a different level of intensity behind it, but the drumming completely pushes it into the stratosphere. I’m a drummer myself and years ago I used to play along to albums I loved, but I could never properly play along to this one. I could never work it out or keep up with it. It’s just such an explosive and well produced drum performance. And although I really love Rid of Me, and I love what Steve Albini did with the sound of that record, he’s probably my favourite producer of all time, I actually think Dry sounds even better. It’s not necessarily my favourite PJ Harvey album overall, that’s probably still Is This Desire?, but this honestly might be her best album. And for a debut, she just got so much right immediately. My first five-star album in about fifty albums as well, so this was welcome.

Album #97, Big Star, #1 Record, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ If it wasn’t for the distribution issues with their record label, I genuinely think we’d all be sick to death of hearing about Big Star in the same way we hear about The Beatles or The Rolling Stones. I honestly think they would have become that ubiquitous. And they should have, because this album is on par with any of those classic records in my opinion. Every song sounds like a single. Every song is unbelievably catchy. They had absolutely everything going for them musically. Great harmonies, great riffs, great songwriting, great lyrics, great vocals, great looks, brilliant instrumentation, brilliant production. The whole thing just sounds so slick and effortless. So yeah, I hold this album in extremely high regard. As much as I wish they’d had the reputation they deserved during their lifetime, the reality is that because of the issues with the label and the way things fell apart for them, they ended up making this very strange and broken third album, Third/Sister Lovers, and I honestly don’t think that album would exist without all the struggles they went through. And funnily enough, that’s actually my favourite Big Star album. I absolutely adore it and would recommend everyone listen to it. I’m not sure if it’s on this list, but it definitely should be. Along with Radio City, which I also love. I just love Big Star. Without them, we probably wouldn’t have bands like R.E.M. or The Replacements, two of my favourite bands ever, and for that alone I owe them a lot.

Album #98, Sam Cooke, One Night Stand! Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963, ⭐⭐⭐ You get an absolute vocal masterclass from Sam Cooke on this album. He’s just got an incredible voice and unbelievable charisma as a performer. Even through the recording you can hear the showmanship and stage presence. He really keeps the audience engaged the whole way through. It’s a three-star album all day for me because while it’s very enjoyable, it’s not really the kind of record that leaves me with loads to ponder afterwards. It’s more of a party record, a good time album. But that’s not necessarily a criticism either. Sometimes you just need an album with a great vibe, and this absolutely has that. It’s energetic, loose and really fun to listen to. It just isn’t terribly interesting beyond that for me personally. Still though, really enjoyed it, and on to the next one.

Album #99, Aerosmith, Toys in the Attic, ⭐⭐⭐⭐ I am, for all intents and purposes, a bit of a music snob, especially when it comes to my dear old rock and roll, though I am trying hard not to be these days. So when something like Aerosmith comes up in the generator, I kind of cringe a little and instantly come in with a dismissive preconception. Super successful, ultra-popular rock band who I’ve actually never listened to… why would I be interested in that? What a stupid thought. Turns out these bands are popular for a reason, because they’re actually really, really good. This was much, much better than I thought it was going to be. Outside of the big hits, I’d never really listened to Aerosmith before, and this wasn’t nearly as stock rock sounding as I expected. They actually come across as a bit of a chameleon band here. They can slip into all sorts of styles. They can do Beatles-esque, vaguely Canterbury-flavoured English pop rock. They can do Rolling Stones swagger. They can do the good time blues. They can do heavy riff-driven hard rock. And they manage to mix all of that together while maintaining a really strong atmosphere and tone throughout most of the record. It’s pretty much all very good, with a couple of exceptions. Sweet Emotion is an absolute belter, a belter to end all belters. One of the best hard rock songs I’ve heard. And when it’s followed by the Stones-esque No More No More, which is also brilliant, the album genuinely starts to feel a little transcendent. I was thinking at that point, this thing has just gone from strength to strength and will take off for the finale. Unfortunately, it fumbles quite badly at the end for me. Round and Round is exactly the kind of stock rock tune I thought the entire album was going to sound like. I found it pretty uninteresting. And then the closer, You See Me Crying, feels like they’re aiming for that huge, emotional English rock closer, something in the vein of A Day in the Life or Moonlight Mile, but for whatever reason it just doesn’t quite land. It lacks the hooks that the rest of the album has in abundance. Also, maybe this is just me, but does the production quality dip on those last two tracks? The final stretch sounds noticeably weaker to my ears, to the point where it actually made me question the rest of the record a little bit. But I’m going to give it the benefit of the doubt rather than immediately relistening, because I genuinely enjoyed so much of what came before it. I think this is a great record. Great riffs, great atmosphere. I also really like how Steven Tyler is relatively low in the mix. Even though he’s a great vocalist, it makes the album feel more like it’s about the whole band rather than just him, and the riffs really get room to shine because of that. So yeah, very surprised, very happy, and I really enjoyed this one.

Album #100, The Smiths, Strangeways, Here We Come, ⭐⭐⭐ The timeline of the life of The Smiths always freaks me out. This, their final album, was released just three and a half years after their debut. And what a discography they left behind. One of the best of the 80s, and for my money they’re one of the greatest bands of all time. I know there are other Smiths albums on the list, but this is a peculiar inclusion because I think it’s their weakest. I think if they had continued making music together, this probably would have been seen as more of a transitional album, and the next one would have been more cohesive and probably extremely strong. The band really expand their sound on this album. There are more effects and instrumentation throughout. Horn and string sections are used much more heavily, and there are more studio and FX tricks in play too. Morrissey, who by any metric is already a pretty eccentric singer, ups the eccentricity even further here. The grunting on I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish, for example. Some people can’t stand Morrissey, but I love him. I think he’s a genius lyricist with a completely one-of-a-kind delivery. But the real star of the band is Johnny Marr. I’ll save my full adoration for him for the other Smiths albums when they come up, but he’s my all-time favourite guitarist. The problem for me is that this is probably his least riff-oriented album, and because of that I rarely come back to it. Whereas their debut feels pretty timeless to me, this feels much more rooted in the 80s sonically. Especially on the bigger ballads like Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me. None of this is really a complaint though. My main issue is just that it lacks bangers. The other Smiths albums have amazing songs stacked on top of each other, whereas this one only has a handful of truly great tracks for me. Still, when it’s good, it’s The Smiths at their best. I’ve always loved Girlfriend in a Coma. I love how you can interpret that song in multiple ways. It can feel tender, melodramatic, or completely cruel depending on how you hear it. But I’ve always found the delivery of the line “I know, I know… it’s serious” genuinely hilarious. That song kind of sums up The Smiths perfectly for me, constantly balancing tragedy and comedy at the same time. And that’s 100 albums. Time’s absolutely flown by.

Album #101, Bruce Springsteen, Born in the U.S.A., ⭐⭐⭐ I like Bruce Springsteen. I always enjoy listening to him, but I virtually never reach for him when I’m listening to music unless it’s a real conscious decision. This is a pretty great album, but today it didn’t do a huge amount for me. It felt a bit too long and repetitive. I feel like it gets its point across early enough. He’s a great songwriter, but he does seem to write the same kind of song over and over again. It’s a great song, but I grew weary of it towards the end. With the negatives out of the way, the positives are that this is a much more raggedy sounding album than I thought it would be. The instrumentation is a lot looser and messier than singles like Dancing in the Dark would have you believe. Not a complaint at all, I really liked that about it. Speaking of the singles, this album has a bunch of bangers on it too, and they’re all good. I love the aforementioned Dancing in the Dark, I’m on Fire and the title track. But deeper cuts like Downbound Train are very effective too. Not much more to say really. The three-star reviews are the hardest ones to write. I don’t like it as much as Darkness on the Edge of Town and not nearly as much as Nebraska. Still, a worthwhile listen.

Album #102, The Mothers of Invention, We’re Only in It for the Money, ⭐⭐⭐ I’ve read a lot more about Frank Zappa than I’ve ever listened to him. I’ve seen interviews, read his views and listened to his opinions while having only ever really heard parts of Hot Rats and Apostrophe. His discography always felt quite dense and a little confusing to me. So this was my first full album of his and, as the title suggests, it’s one of the most cynical albums I’ve ever heard. It’s as cynical in its own way as something like The Downward Spiral. It’s a bleak, depressing album. The Mothers of Invention completely tear the flower power movement to shreds. Despite liking a lot of hippie-adjacent music, I don’t really care for the movement itself and would largely agree with Zappa’s take on it. I also feel a lot of the social commentary is sadly still very relevant today. That’s the politics out of the way, what about the music? I don’t love it, but I appreciate it more than I enjoy it. It’s very avant garde and eccentric and quite orchestral in places. There’s not a ton of what I’d call “songs” on it. There are loads of sound effects and bits of people talking over the phone and all sorts of weird little interruptions. There are beautiful passages of music in it too though, like the opening of Absolutely Free. I think it’s very cool and was probably hugely influential, but it’s not a listening experience I feel especially keen on returning to. I’m looking forward to more Zappa as the list goes on though, and hearing more of the music behind the man.

Album #103, Kanye West, Yeezus ⭐⭐⭐⭐ I have a gripe with this album. It has less to do with Kanye West or the music on it, and more to do with the reception and reputation around it. People at the time were acting like this album was unbelievably groundbreaking because Kanye moved into a more experimental, electronic and aggressive direction. And to be fair to him, I commend him for doing that. I think it was a really bold move. But I don’t think this album is groundbreaking at all. There was loads of experimental hip hop around at the time already, and honestly, a lot of it was more interesting to me. Artists like Death Grips were already doing this kind of abrasive industrial hip hop sound. They explored this kind of thing in much stranger and more challenging ways. So I don’t really see Yeezus as revolutionary. It feels more like a mainstream artist taking influence from more underground scenes and filtering it into a huge pop record. With that out of the way, I do think this is a great album. It’s arguably my favourite Kanye West album. I don’t think it’s as experimental or as heavy duty as it thinks it is, but it is still very catchy. Kanye is an amazing producer. He’s able to get massive hooks out of the simplest sounds and synths, for example ,On Sight. He’s a pop star through and through in that regard. As for his rapping, he’s not the greatest rapper of all time technically, but his lyrics on this album are fucking outrageous. Some of the lines on this thing are just nuts. As I said, it’s a really bold album in every regard. My favourite thing are vocal contributions from Justin Vernon and Frank Ocean, especially the latter on New Slaves. That’s probably the peak of the album for me. There’s only a couple of songs I don’t really like, such as Hold My Liquor. I also think it sags a little bit towards the end. Blood on the Leaves kind of takes a bit of momentum out of it, even though I still think it’s a good song. But the first half of this album is exceptional. So yeah, not groundbreaking. probably overrated, but still a good album.

Album #104, Derek and the Dominos, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs ⭐⭐⭐⭐ First time listening to this gem, despite it always hovering around my radar. Eric Clapton has never really interested me. I feel like I know more about his racist views in the 70s than I do about his music. I do, however, love Cream and know their discography very well. Everything after that though is pretty blank for me. So, bar Layla, this was all new to me, and what a fantastic record this is. It’s much more of an ensemble record than a showcase for Clapton’s guitar playing. The whole band are shining on these tracks. It’s got a great jam feel to it. It’s bright, soaring, and the songs take really interesting turns for the most part. The twin guitar playing between Clapton and Duane Allman will keep me coming back to this. It’s so interesting and well balanced. And the vocals are so good. I never knew Clapton could sing this well. Amazing vocal performances across the whole thing. The only negative for me is very subjective. I love blues music, but I like some styles more than others. I’ve never been that big into that Chicago-style strict 12-bar blues sound as much as I am into Delta blues. This album has loads of that Chicago blues style on it. The songs are long and they just don’t always hold my interest, despite being technically great. The original tracks like Anyday and Tell the Truth are much more engaging to me. So yeah, a super strong four stars and one that I’ll definitely return to time and time again.

Album #105, Shleep, Robert Wyatt ⭐⭐⭐⭐ I have a soft spot for Robert Wyatt, as he was the former drummer of Soft Machine, whose debut album I love, though that’s mainly because it’s the only album they ever had fronted by Kevin Ayers, (who is criminally underrated). As for Wyatt’s solo stuff, I’ve only heard a handful of songs before this, including Heaps of Sheeps, which opens this album. Probably the thing I most associated Robert Wyatt with before this was the fact that he became paraplegic after an accident. So yeah, this was a new one for me, and I’m going to be honest, I’m giving it four stars despite not really getting to grips with it. I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt. It’s a complex album. It’s kind of a mix of jazz, but also low-key English Canterbury singer-songwriter stuff. The reason I’m giving it four stars is because I’ve rarely heard an album scream “grower” as much as this one. I feel like there’s loads to unpack here. Despite it being really complex, I only had the chance to listen to it once today, and it was a bit of a disjointed listen. But I could tell it absolutely oozed charm. It’s a really charming album. It does feel a bit like a mixed bag at times because when it’s good, it’s extremely good, but when it loses me, I really lose interest with it. Still, I feel like if I give it more listens, I’ll come around to it even more, and probably justify the four stars more strongly too. There’s some downright beautiful music on here. Maryan is an absolutely gorgeous song. Just stunning. Free Will and Testament is great too. I also loved the bluesy, subterranean-homesick-blues rip off on Blues in Bob Minor at the end. The album it reminded me most of was Another Green World, so it was interesting to see that Brian Eno was heavily involved with it. Nothing on it seemed bad to me. And weirdly enough, as someone who has a toddler at home and listens to an endless amount of nursery rhymes, it was kind of cool hearing him subvert one on The Duchess. You’d think I’d be sick of that kind of thing, but I actually thought it was really clever. The whole album just reeks of creativity and charm. I definitely think this is one I’ll keep coming back to. It’s another 1997 album, and I genuinely think 1997 is one of the greatest years ever for music. This is another really strong addition to that list.

Albums #106, The Pleasure Principle, Gary Numan ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ I remember being in a band years and years ago. We had a MIDI keyboard and wanted to create a synth sound, but we could never decide on what sound we wanted, and we ended up falling out over it in the end. I wanted a Gary Numan synth sound. I was right. One of the great synth albums of all time. Some of the riffs and licks on this thing are so memorable. That crunching synth lead on M.E. is as good a riff as you’ll hear on any instrument. The whole thing owes a massive debt to the genius of Brian Eno, which I’m all for. That’s two albums in a row for me now that feel heavily influenced by him. But the two other elements that really make this album work are Numan’s vocals, which are perfectly robotic and emotionless for the genre and atmosphere, and the rhythm section, which gives the songs these really distinct grooves. There are hypnotic bass lines and really interesting drum patterns all over the album. The first half of this thing was cruising towards a five-star review, but after M.E., the album seriously runs out of ideas. It starts to feel like all the sounds you’re hearing have already appeared earlier on the album, just rearranged into different songs. It feels heavily recycled at times. It does pick up again for the classic Cars, but by then the damage is kind of done. Still, it’s a great sounding record.

Album #107, Sea Change, Beck ⭐️⭐️⭐️ I don’t know, man. When your high watermark is something as impressive, interesting, fun, and endlessly replayable as Odelay, I expect a bit more than fairly basic, earnest singer-songwriter stuff. I’ve looked into the history of the album, I get it. It’s a breakup album. He went in a different direction. I would never bash an artist for trying something new, but for Beck, this just feels a bit too simple for me. It’s not the kind of music that I come to him for and I don’t really see why I’d come back to this when there are other artists who I think do this style a lot better. Bill Callahan, Tindersticks, Nick Drake to name a few. It gets three stars because there are definitely some really strong songs on it, especially at the start. The Golden Age and Paper Tiger open the album really, really well. My favourite track is Around the Bend, which reminded me of my beloved Scott Walker. The strings are nice, but it can be a bit dreary. I was never big into The National and this veers too close to that. It kind of turns into background music sometimes. It’s too long as well. I will say the production is excellent. When you really tune into it, it sounds fantastic. But I just found myself losing interest as it went on. So it’s a light three for me. It’s got none of the humour of Mellow Gold, and none of the weirdness or unpredictability that makes Beck so interesting to me in the first place. It’s totally competent and well made, don’t get me wrong, but I do think this is maybe an example of an artist having too many albums on the list. He already has Odelay (a masterpiece) and Guero, which I’ve yet to hear. Surely there are other artists with albums you need to hear before you die that deserve a spot over something like this. I suspect this will be a negatively received review, but it’s my review nonetheless.

Album #108, Sail Away — Randy Newman ⭐⭐⭐ I’ve never really listened to Randy Newman. He always struck me as an artist that I would really like, but having listened to this, I’m not 100% sure anymore. The main reason is that I just don’t really care for this kind of piano-led, cabaret, drunken late-night-at-the-jazz-club style of music. It’s more the music than anything else. I think he’s a really unique vocalist and I think his lyrics are great. There’s a tone to unpack with them. But I just don’t care for some this style. It’s There is also some movie soundtrack-type songs, which I don’t like either. The more straightforward songs like the title track and Burn On are great. I also never knew that he wrote You Can Leave Your Hat On until today, and I was really pleasantly surprised when that came on. It’s also a much more sinister song than I realised. My favourite track was probably the painfully relevant Political Science, which I thought was brilliant. So yeah, it’s more the music than anything else holding me back here. I’m not a fan of Billy Joel, and while this has way more substance than Billy Joel to me, the sound of it sometimes veers a little too close in that direction. That’s probably a massive insult to Randy Newman, but it’s just the comparison my brain keeps making. So overall, I think it’s a great album, but it’s not really an album for me. A strong three stars.

Album #109, Third/Sister Lovers, Big Star ⭐⭐⭐⭐ I have very strong feelings towards Big Star. I reviewed #1 Record exactly two weeks ago and gave it five stars. I said in that review that I genuinely think they should have been one of the biggest bands of all time, or at least one of the biggest bands of the 70s, if it wasn’t for the distribution issues with their record label and the fact that hardly anybody heard their records at the time. They should have been huge, but they were a horribly mismanaged band. Despite this album not getting five stars, this actually might be my personal favourite Big Star album. It’s a funny one, because I don’t think this album should exist, at least not in the state that we hear it today. It’s essentially the sound of Alex Chilton having a mental breakdown or at least losing interest in his own music career, due to their lack of success. It has a pretty mad Wikipedia page, and it’s debatable whether it was ever even supposed to be a Big Star album or more of an Alex Chilton solo album. But for all intents and purposes, this is the third Big Star album. It’s a fucking unfinished mess, no doubt about it. Totally all over the place tonally and atmospherically. You can hear that the ideas were never fully realised, and I think the band were drifting away from the more commercial sound that should have made them successful in the first place. This is far from commercial music. It’s clear they were going down some kind of baroque pop or chamber pop route. There are string sections all over this album and they’re absolutely gorgeous throughout most of it. It’s very far removed from the power pop sound people usually associate with Big Star. You can also hear the influence from the sweeter side of The Velvet Underground, which is obvious considering they cover Femme Fatale. It’s a really beautiful record in a lot of ways, but not necessarily a beautiful sounding one. It’s lo fi, rough around the edges and often feels fragile, but the strength of the songwriting stands on its own. Some of the songs on this thing are unbelievable. Stroke It Noel, Nighttime and Take Care are all beautiful songs. The most beautiful song on the album for me is probably For You. I genuinely think it might be one of the simplest love songs ever written lyrically, but the string section is staggering. Any of their heroes at the time, especially The Beatles, would have been proud of those arrangements. Then you’ve got little rockers like Kiss Me and Thank You Friends, which are much closer to old school Big Star, but still feel different from their earlier work. This album really doesn’t sound like any of their other records. It’s not a five star album because not every song works for me. I think Holocaust is basically an exercise in writing the most depressing song of all time. That doesn’t necessarily make it a great song. It probably is one of the bleakest songs I’ve ever heard, but it just doesn’t emotionally connect with me. It almost overdoes it. And tonally, it really is a total mess. I also think if you came to this album completely blind, you’d probably wonder what the fuck you were listening to. I think you almost need to know the story behind it to fully appreciate it. It’s a cult album through and through. As I said though, it’s a personal favourite of mine. It’s just a real shame that this band didn’t get the chance to make more music together. They should have been huge.

Album #110, Aladdin Sane by David Bowie ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Yeah, I’m 110 albums in now, and this is my fourth Bowie album. I actually felt a little bit jaded when this one came up. As much as I think Bowie is probably the greatest artist of the 1970s, I do think he’s overrepresented on this list, and if I was rewriting it myself, I’d probably cut a couple of his albums. This might honestly be one of them. I don’t think this is one of his most essential records. Ironically, I think the most iconic thing about it is probably the album cover itself. That image has become bigger than the music on the record. That being said, it’s still a really strong rock and roll album. You can hear Bowie starting to move toward the soul direction he’d explore after The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. It’s got some absolute stone cold classics on it too. Watch That Man has one of my favourite Mick Ronson riffs. Cracked Actor is brilliantly sleazy and disturbing. His cover of Let’s Spend the Night Together is great too. You can really hear the influence of The Rolling Stones all over this album. It’s got that kind of British take on swaggering American rock and roll running through the whole thing. And then, of course, you’ve got The Jean Genie, which is probably the catchiest thing on the album and one of Bowie’s best hooks full stop. Look, it’s a great album, but for me it doesn’t hold a candle to its predecessor, Ziggy Stardust. When that album comes up, I’ll almost certainly be giving it five stars. Still though, four stars is four stars. I just feel a little Bowie’d out at the moment. I know these albums pretty well, and I’m looking forward to something a bit different coming up in the generator. I don’t think this is top tier Bowie. Probably not even top five Bowie for me personally. But even lesser Bowie in the 70s is still pretty damn great.

Album #111, New Wave, The Auteurs ⭐⭐⭐⭐ I had never heard this band before. I thought I had when I saw the name come up, but I was either confusing them with The Adverts or Autechre. So this was a completely new discovery for me. There’s a lot to like here. It’s very hard not to make the lazy comparison with Suede because there are just too many similarities to ignore. For one thing, Luke Haines sounds remarkably like Brett Anderson at times. And they seem to write about similar things too. Fame, boredom, glamour, mundanity, all that kind of stuff. But The Auteurs are less glam than Suede. There’s still a bit of that Bowie style glam influence hanging over the album, but it’s much more understated. The whole thing is really dominated by Luke Haines. His vocals, his personality and especially his lyrics. I thought the album was genuinely funny in places. I’ve only listened to it once so I definitely haven’t fully gotten to grips with the lyrics yet, but my first impression was that he’s a really unique songwriter. The instrumentation is great throughout as well. It’s subtle and tasteful in a way that reminded me a little bit of Belle and Sebastian, though definitely not quite as delicate or twee as them. It weirdly felt a bit like Ween too. I actually found this one hard to review, but I enjoyed pretty much every song on it. Showgirl is probably my favourite track and a brilliant opener. I was reading on Wikipedia that some people consider this album a kind of blueprint for Britpop, but honestly I don’t really hear Britpop in it all that much. Maybe there are flashes of Blur here and there, but to me it doesn’t fully fit that label. Maybe that’s just me though. Either way, this was exactly the kind of discovery I wanted from the generator today.

Album #112, Palo Congo by Sabu Martinez ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ I’ve been pretty harsh on Latin and South American music so far on this list. I feel like I’ve had a lot of it already. I listened to Siembra, which people call the greatest salsa album ever made, and it did absolutely nothing for me. I gave it two stars. That whole style just doesn’t really connect with me. Now obviously Latin and South American music are enormous umbrellas, and it would be ignorant to assume I’d dislike all of it. Turns out, whatever Cuban rumba is, it’s fucking awesome. This 1957 album is primal. It’s incessant. It’s rhythm on top of rhythm on top of rhythm. The vocals are frenzied, the percussion is completely relentless, and when the electric guitar comes in, it’s so syncopated that it almost sounds like a mistake. The songs are long and they really dig their hooks in. I’m an absolute sucker for any kind of music where the drums are the main instrument, and that’s this album in a nutshell. The percussion completely dominates the mix. Behind it you’ve got these wailing, chaotic chants and vocals that just make the whole thing sound wild and ritualistic despite also being incredibly minimal. I don’t really have much of a point of reference for this music outside of Fela Kuti, because this definitely feels deeply rooted in African rhythms, which I love. Other than that, my only comparisons are the other Latin albums I’ve heard from this list, stuff like Buena Vista Social Club or Jorge Ben. This absolutely blows those records out of the water for me personally. I rolled my eyes when this came up in the generator this morning. They rolled right back around into a five star review.

Album #113, Nixon by Lambchop ⭐⭐⭐⭐ I’ve seen this album get some pretty harsh reviews on here, and it has a fairly low score on the generator, so I’m here to sing its praises. I am a bit surprised by the reception it’s received. I’ve known this album for a very long time. I remember listening to it when I was quite young, so I definitely have a bit of a nostalgic attachment to it. I’ve always been a fan of chamber pop and baroque pop, so by extension I tend to love lush string and horn arrangements in pop and rock music. I just think it’s a great combination. And this album is one of the best examples of it. It’s not really the music itself that seems to get the criticism though. From what I’ve read, it’s mostly aimed at Kurt Wagner, especially when he moves into falsetto. One of my favourite R.E.M. songs is Tongue and I think that might be where my love of male falsetto singing started. I don’t know what it is about that vocal style, but it just hits something for me. And I love it here as well. There’s something really cool about a band like Lambchop, who are fundamentally an alternative country group, leaning into this almost soul-influenced vocal approach. Kurt Wagner is essentially roleplaying as a kind of female soul singer. It’s unconventional, and arguably not even very good. But it’s unique and I find the charm of it completely undeniable. It’s not quite a five star album overall, but it absolutely has five star moments. In particular, You Masculine You, which is without exaggeration, one of my favourite songs ever. I come back to it constantly, which keeps this album in rotation. That track in particular feels like it contains four or five distinct musical ideas that another band would stretch across an entire EP, but here they’re all folded into one cohesive piece. The moment near the end when the slightly distorted guitar comes in and Kurt Wagner sings “don’t follow me” is one of my favourite moments in music. So yeah, I think this album deserves a bit more appreciation than it gets.

Album #114, American IV: The Man Comes Around by Johnny Cash ⭐⭐⭐ I love the concept behind the American Recordings series. The idea of taking this aging musical legend and putting him back into the studio for one final creative burst, while playing to his strengths and giving him these unusual, unexpected covers, is just brilliant to me. When I think about these albums, I always end up thinking about other artists I wish had been given a similar late-career reinvention. Johnny Cash really got an enviable ending to his career. You could argue that this late period became the defining music of his life in many ways. That being said, I think I’m more of a fan of these records in principle than in practice. It feels almost cruel and crass criticising an elderly Johnny Cash’s singing, but it is honestly the part I struggle with most. Obviously he’s a legend, but his voice here can feel very monotonous to me, and these albums are long enough that I sometimes find it difficult to move past that. This is also an album that’s as serious as a suicide note. It’s morose, spiritual, heavy with themes of death and faith and regret. That absolutely suits the material, but at times it can drift into outright dreariness. The positives are that Rick Rubin chooses fantastic covers, and often really unexpected ones. Hurt is obviously iconic at this point and completely deserves its reputation, while Personal Jesus is also brilliant. The collaborations are great too. Fiona Apple appears at one point, and every time Nick Cave shows up on I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry it catches me off guard because his voice is so unmistakable. Then I remember Johnny Cash recorded The Mercy Seat, and suddenly that collaboration makes complete sense. Funnily enough, despite all the famous covers, my favourite moments on the album were actually the Johnny Cash originals. Give My Love to Rose and especially Tear Stained Letter. Tear Stained Letter in particular gives the album a rare moment of energy and movement, and honestly I kind of wished there was more of that throughout, despite it being at odds with most of the material. I think this is one of those albums where your mood massively affects how much you connect with it. Usually this kind of dark, reflective music is exactly my thing, but today maybe I just wasn’t in the right headspace for it. So it’s a three star from me today. Sorry to any Johnny Cash diehards.

Album #115: The Kinks — The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Despite only getting four stars, this is a personal favourite of mine. I absolutely adore this album. I just don’t think, objectively, it’s a full five stars. But I also think The Kinks are vastly underrated when compared to bands like The Rolling Stones and The Beatles and the other contemporaries of the time. I think they were nearly every bit as creative and inventive as those bands, but here I am underrating them again as well, so it’s funny like that. It’s a concept album about a quaint little English village and, while I’m Irish, our villages tend to be kind of similar in terms of quaintness and modesty and all those kinds of manners and little everyday characters. Culturally they’re obviously very different, but there are similarities there too. So this is actually a very relatable album in a lot of ways. The whole quaintness of it is given over to the music. It’s never bombastic. It’s all very subtle and quirky. It depicts different characters you might come across in a village and really it’s kind of giving an album to the everyman. It’s like if Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band wasn’t written about a fake band, but was instead written about ordinary people you’d meet out on a walk. What I love most about it is how catchy it is. Lovely melodies, quirky funny lyrics, every song really short but memorable. Chugging rhythms all over it and there’s never any big solos or attempts at showing off. There’s no real sense of the garage band they started out as. From a musical perspective it feels like a really thoughtful, carefully constructed album. I think as the album goes on it just gets weirder and weirder too. Songs like Wicked Annabella delve into psychedelia, but not in the overt way of someone like Jimi Hendrix. It’s a very English kind of psychedelia. The weirdness is there, but it’s understated. It’s actually quite difficult to review because I’m not entirely sure how to describe why it works so well. I just love it. I love the title track, Picture Book, Monica, Starstruck, Last of the Steam-Powered Trains. I think the rhythm section in particular is amazing throughout the album. Everything just kind of chugs along in this strange, uniquely English way. Where The Beatles explored Indian music and The Rolling Stones rooted themselves in American blues, this feels completely English to its core. Honestly, this might be the quintessential English album. It’s just full of charm and character. Pretty much every song is good. As a side note, I’ve only been listening to the original versions of albums for this project, not the deluxe editions or expanded cuts. I’d never get through the list otherwise. But my favourite song from this whole era of The Kinks is actually an outtake from these sessions called Misty Water. If you haven’t heard it, I highly recommend it. It’s my favourite Kinks song full stop.

Album #116, The Doors, The Doors, ⭐⭐⭐⭐ If you were giving someone a listening history of rock and pop music, I think you’d have to include The Doors. They’re such a unique sounding band. I genuinely can’t think of anyone else who sounds quite like them. Even bands influenced by them don’t really sound like them. I think a lot of that comes down to the organ replacing the bass guitar, but also just the individual playing styles and the boogie-woogie foundation underneath all their music. The clash between boogie-woogie and psychedelia here is just really interesting. It’s a dark, mysterious, provocative album. Coming out in 1967, it must have sounded completely ahead of its time in terms of how sexual and unsettling it is. It’s a real freaky-deaky record. The whole thing is dominated by Jim Morrison. He’s just an incredible vocalist. Completely domineering. Deeply masculine. Even if you never saw a picture of him, you’d know instantly why he became such a huge sex symbol. I’ve been a bit harsh throughout this list when it comes to “hippie bullshit lyrics”. For me, he’s on the Mount Rushmore of Hippie Bullshit, his lyrics can feel a bit empty or pretentious. Despite taking a lot psychedelic drugs myself, his poetry has never really moved me in the way it seems to move other people. But! That’s more for their later albums. It actually really works here. I actually think the more poetic and atmospheric stuff suits them better on this record. Break On Through is such a sinister, searing opener. End of the Night has unbelievable atmosphere. One of the great nighttime songs. It genuinely sounds exactly like its title. On that note, the album cover looks exactly like how the album sounds! As well, for a 1967 album, it has a lot of the production tropes from the era that can sometimes ruin records for me, especially the hard panning. But it works perfectly here. The stereo mix is really balanced and the whole thing sounds great. And then there’s The End. On paper, this is exactly the kind of song I shouldn’t like. It’s way too long, self-indulgent, pretentious, and full of itself. And yet it’s probably my favourite Doors song. It’s just so dark and hypnotic. Morrison completely lures you into it. My favourite moment is the “come on baby, take a chance with us” line. The way he emerges from all the silence and space in the song with that lyric is really powerful. Still, not a five star album for me personally. There’s definitely a bit of filler on it. Not every song on the album is amazing. Some of the more straightforward tracks like 20th Century Fox don’t do much for me. But the highs are very high, and it’s one of the most atmospheric rock albums I can think of. Side note: I actually prefer X’s version of Soul Kitchen from their debut album, if anyone wants to check that out.

Album #117, Teenage Fanclub, Bandwagonesque, ⭐⭐⭐⭐ What a blast from the past. I genuinely hadn’t heard or even thought about this album since I was about 18, when I went through a period of listening to it constantly. So this was a real nostalgic wave today. Over the last 30 albums I’ve reviewed two Big Star albums, so there’s a massive elephant in the room here. To my ears, Teenage Fanclub are basically a poor man’s Big Star. But even a poor man’s Big Star is still better than most bands. Their sound is so obviously indebted to Big Star that it can actually be a little distracting at times. There are moments where they seem to lift entire moods, vocal melodies, chord progressions, even little lyrical turns straight from them. Listen to December and tell me there aren’t sections that sound exactly like a Big Star song. There were points where I was tempted to open up a DAW and compare tracks side by side. But honestly, I don’t really mind because I absolutely love this kind of music. And to be fair to Teenage Fanclub, they do bring their own spin to it. There’s a fuzzier, more guitar driven quality to the whole thing. It’s like bubblegum grunge. They also love a good guitar solo, and so do I! Song’s like The Concept just let those wandering guitar sections drift on and on, and I’m an absolute sucker for that kind of thing. There’s also something about Scottish lead singers that always works for me. Whether it’s Belle and Sebastian or Teenage Fanclub, there’s just a warmth and softness to those voices that suits melodic indie music perfectly. Really enjoyed revisiting this. It’s a pop rock gem.

Album #118, Amy Winehouse, Back to Black ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Never listened to this the whole way through before. Obviously I knew a heap of songs off it because this was, and probably still is very ubiquitous music. You don’t go far in the world without hearing Amy Winehouse somewhere. She deserved all the hype and all the plaudits that she got. This is a masterpiece. It really, really is. It’s a great soul record. It’s lively, it’s entertaining, it’s got a great pop sheen, but it’s also just a solid classic soul album. The differentiating factor that makes it unique is Amy Winehouse herself. She’s obviously got an amazing voice. There’s no disputing that. But her lyrics are really funny and really interesting. She’s got these little stories and vignettes laced in and out of the songs. Great use of language throughout too, including foul language. The use of the word “fuckery” was very entertaining and I really enjoyed it. I know there are co-writing credits, so it’s always difficult to tell how much someone wrote lyrically, but I’m going to assume she wrote most of these herself because the voice feels so consistent throughout. I think they’re great lyrics. They’re unique songs covering different topics that you don’t always hear. You get the obvious love songs, which are all great, but then you get something like Rehab, which is a really interesting topic to build such a huge pop song around. It’s also a short album, which I think works massively in its favour. It packs a lot into a relatively short running time. The songs are short, snappy and memorable. It’s not five stars for me personally, though, and I don’t think it’s necessarily a five-star album when I compare it to some of the very best records on this list. My main issue is the final song, Addicted. I don’t really like it. I think it’s actually quite juvenile compared to the rest of the album. I understand why it’s there. You get Rehab at the start and Addicted at the end, which gives the album a nice symmetry, but I just don’t think it’s a particularly strong closer. Everything before it, though, is great. So yeah, an absolute crying shame that she didn’t get to make more music and that she didn’t have a better life after this record. Because after an album this good, you can’t help but wonder what she might have gone on to do next. A hugely talented artist and a record that more than deserves its reputation.

Album #119, Deep Purple, Deep Purple in Rock ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Outside of Child in Time, which I knew from a Deep Purple compilation I listened to when I was a kid, this was basically all new to me. I know a handful of the famous songs like Smoke on the Water and Black Night, but that’s about the extent of my Deep Purple knowledge. Let me just start by saying that the first 45 seconds of this album is the best opening to any album I’ve ever heard. It is absolutely face-melting. Then the organ comes in and I feared the absolute worst. I thought I was about to get another proggy heavy metal album because, for me, the organ so often betrays a band’s intentions. The second I hear it, I start bracing myself for forty minutes of fantasy lyrics, endless classically trained solos and pretentious nonsense. What you actually get instead is one of the heaviest hard rock albums ever made. This thing sounds absolutely incredible. It’s got such a live sound to it, and when I looked into it afterwards, that was exactly what they were aiming for. They wanted to recreate their live sound in the studio. You hear bands say that all the time, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard it achieved this successfully. It genuinely sounds like a live album that’s somehow been perfectly recorded. The bass is ridiculously loud, fuzzy and front and centre in the mix, exactly like it would be in a live setting. It gives everything this huge low-end weight. The whole album feels massive because of it. The organ was the biggest surprise. I expected Rick Wakeman style prog excess. Instead it’s less King Arthur and more Sister Ray. It’s often used almost as a percussive instrument, just hammering away underneath everything. On tracks like Flight of the Rat which is almost proto-punk, it’s aggressive rather than decorative. Richie Blackmore is staggering throughout. The guitar tone is incredible. The riffs are incredible. The solos are incredible. Everything just sounds so immediate. The lyrical themes are mostly the usual hard rock fare, but honestly I don’t care because the sound of the album is so good. It gets away with absolutely everything through sheer force of execution. The one moment where it does lean into something more proggy is Child in Time, but it completely earns it. It’s a rare thing. A prog song that I like. I’m trying to be fairly conservative with five-star ratings, but there was no avoiding it here. I headbanged my way through the whole thing.

Album #120, AC/DC, Back in Black ⭐⭐ In my opinion, one of the greatest opening songs on any album ever is…….not Hells Bells, but John Lennon’s Mother on The Plastic Ono Band. But, both songs open with the Angelus church bells. I never really think anything is sacrilegious in music, but hearing those same bells open this album rubbed me the wrong way a little bit. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because I find this album far inferior, but it’s also also a stupid comparison. Anyway, Hells Bells is still a pretty good opener. It sets the tone well. This album is probably suffering from bad timing. Yesterday I reviewed Deep Purple in Rock (five stars!), which occupies a fairly similar genre. But, the difference in sound between the two albums is absolutely enormous. I’ve never been much of an AC/DC fan to begin with, but I’d also never actually listened to Back in Black from start to finish before. What struck me immediately is my biggest gripe with a lot of hard rock and heavy metal production: compression. This thing is just a wall of sound. A brick. Nothing feels like it breathes. Nothing rings out. Nothing reverberates. The drums sound incredibly flat to me. The guitars crunch away constantly. Everything feels compressed into the same sonic space and, as a result, I don’t actually find it heavy. That’s always been my issue with this style of production. People describe it as loud, but to my ears it never feels loud because there’s so little dynamic range. I don’t think this applies to every heavy metal album. Taking ones off this list as examples, Def Leppard’s Pyromania sounds fantastic. Deep Purple in Rock sounds huge, expansive and alive. But then you’ve got albums where everything is crushed together into one big block of noise, like Metallica’s Black album. AC/DC sit much closer to that end of the spectrum for me. Songwise, the riffs are undeniably great. I can’t really argue with them. It’s also less one-note than AC/DC’s reputation would suggest. They do vary things up more than I expected. That said, it’s still essentially built around one central idea. Maybe not one note. Maybe two or three notes. And to be fair, they’re pretty good notes. The album is also quite funny. It’s dumb as fuck in places. It’s grossly sexual, but unapologetically so. There’s a certain charm to that. The problem is that after a while it becomes monotonous. At only 42 minutes it’s hardly a long album, but it felt long to me because so much of it occupies the same sonic territory. The standout track by an absolute mile is You Shook Me All Night Long. It’s one of the few moments where I feel genuine depth and texture in the production. The instruments arrive in layers, you can actually hear the song building, and it has a sense of space that most of the album lacks. It also helps that it’s got one of the greatest riffs in rock music. So I don’t really have an issue with the songs themselves. I just hate the sound of this album. It numbs my ears after a while. However, this is the second best selling album of all time, so I’m obviously wrong and my opinion is moot. Still, in my opinion today, it’s two stars.

Album #121, Metallica, And Justice for All ⭐⭐⭐ Either the generator is sentient and playing tricks on me, or I’ve angered the metal gods, because I can’t believe this album came up today. Literally the day after I slated AC/DC’s Back in Black and used Metallica as my go-to example of the exact production style that I dislike. I’m not a Metallica fan. I’ve gone over this before in my review of The Black Album, and yesterday I probably spent far too much time ranting about my dislike of certain heavy metal and hard rock production styles. For me, Metallica are the worst offenders. I just think their music sounds artificially loud as opposed to actually loud. It sounds like a brick wall of noise where there’s almost no dynamic range whatsoever. Listening to a full Metallica album is honestly quite daunting for me because I find that sound so exhausting. But this one surprised me. Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way first, because the bad stuff is very, very bad. There are sections of this album that genuinely sound like some of the worst-produced music I’ve ever heard. I studied sound engineering in college, although that was fifteen years ago now, and I haven’t worked in audio production for a very long time. So I don’t fully understand what’s happening technically, but take Blackened as an example. The moment that main riff kicks in, there’s this horrible scraping, tearing, distorted fuzz that sits right at the front of the mix. It’s heavier than the guitars, louder than the drums and impossible to ignore. It’s almost like every production mistake has been amplified and pushed to the foreground. I don’t know if it’s compression, bad EQ decisions, the infamous lack of bass, or some combination of these, but it sounds dreadful to me. The absence of bass seems to create this strange void in the mix that’s filled with harsh guitar frequencies and distorted noise. Everything gets crushed together into this ugly wall of sound that feels like somebody scraping sandpaper directly against my eardrums. Blackened is probably the prime example. I think it sounds absolutely awful. I’ve got nearly 900 albums left to hear on this list and I’d honestly be surprised if I encounter many songs that sound worse than that. Thankfully, the mix is inconsistent because that particular issue isn’t present throughout the whole album. But whenever it does rear its head, it’s downright diabolical. To think this album cost serious money to make is kind of amazing. It proves that you can’t buy taste. With that rant out of the way, let’s move on to the positives. Because musically and lyrically, this is actually a really interesting album. The songs are long, winding and packed with ideas. It’s a lengthy record, but it never actually felt that long because there are so many twists and turns throughout. One thing I really loved is how dark it is. This feels much darker than the other Metallica material I’ve heard. The performances are also fantastic. Obviously poor Jason Newsted gets erased from existence in the mix, so I can’t really comment on his playing, but I’m going to assume he’s doing a great job underneath all the nonsense. Everybody else is excellent. Even Lars, who I thought was pretty dreadful on The Black Album, plays really well here. The guitar playing is intricate and relentless, and James Hetfield attacks every song with a great level of intensity. The whole thing feels intense from beginning to end. There are also some gorgeous melodic guitar passages scattered throughout the record. Every song eventually crashes back into thrash metal, but there are moments of real beauty here. Not a word I would associate with Metallica. To Live Is to Die is a great example, and One remains my favourite Metallica song. Shout out as well to the terrifying music video for One. That thing haunted me when I was a child. So ultimately I think there’s a phenomenal album buried somewhere inside here. The songwriting is excellent. The performances are excellent. The atmosphere is excellent. But the production choices are so damaging that they constantly undermine the music. It’s a light three stars from me.

Album #122, The Police, Regatta de Blanc ⭐⭐ I’ve never really given The Police a fair shake. I’m only really familiar with the big singles, which I actually quite like. But they’ve never been a band I’ve had much interest in, even though they come from a period of music that I usually love. That late 80s intersection of new wave, post-punk and alternative rock tends to produce a lot of music that really clicks with me. This, unfortunately, didn’t. I feel like I just don’t get this album. There’s a lot about it that doesn’t work for me, but the main issue is that almost every song feels like it’s stuck in second gear. I don’t know whether that’s down to the performances, the songwriting, or a combination of both, but everything feels like it’s building towards something that never arrives. There’s no real payoff. There’s no euphoric chorus. No huge crescendo. No moment where a song suddenly takes flight. Most of the tracks have a decent groove and there were definitely moments where I found myself nodding along, but they rarely develop beyond that. They just sort of circle the same idea for three or four minutes and then end. For me, the combination of reggae and rock is where the problem lies. I love reggae. I love rock. But I don’t think the two are helping each other here. The reggae elements seem to strangle the energy of the rock songs, while the rock elements stop the reggae grooves from really settling into themselves. Both styles end up constraining each other. To my ears, it’s a failed experiment. I know plenty of people would disagree, but it just doesn’t work for me. That’s not to say there aren’t positives. Stuart Copeland is fantastic throughout. The drumming is easily my favourite aspect of the album. There are also some lovely guitar textures scattered across the record. Sting, on the other hand, doesn’t do much for me as a vocalist. I also find a lot of his lyrics pretty silly. Then there are a couple of tracks that I actively disliked. On Any Other Day, which is actually one of the more straightforward rock songs on the album, there’s a vocal performance that sounds like a Frank Zappa parody. I’m assuming it’s Stewart Copeland. Maybe it’s intentionally goofy, maybe that’s the joke, but I thought it was dreadful. So yeah, this is a brutal two stars from me. I didn’t hate every second of it. There are moments of good musicianship and a handful of decent grooves, but the songs themselves just don’t go anywhere interesting enough for me. I know The Police have other albums on this list, and I’m hoping one of those clicks a bit more than this one did, because based on Regatta de Blanc alone, I don’t really have much desire to seek out more of their music.

Album #123, Bruce Springsteen, Nebraska ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ My third Bruce Springsteen album so far, and my favourite of his by some distance. I think it’s the best album I’ve heard him make. I’m not the biggest Bruce Springsteen fan in general, but this is very much an outlier in his discography. Releasing a solo acoustic album was a brilliant move because it showcases his greatest strength: songwriting. Stripped of the stadium rock bombast of the E Street Band, which can be a bit hit and miss for me, the songs are left to stand on their own. He’s not Bob Dylan, but he’s comfortably in that next tier of great songwriters, and that’s pretty elite company to be keeping. It’s a great collection of stories. Murders, drifters, life on the road, desperation, small-town America. The usual Springsteen subject matter is all here, but the acoustic setting makes everything feel much more intimate and personal. It really allows the lyrics to shine. I also love the production on this record. People always talk about how rough and impromptu it was, how it was essentially built from demos, but there’s a lot of thought in the presentation. The overdubs are fantastic. Little cries and vocal textures creeping into songs, distant harmonica, bright flashes of guitar, subtle mandolin parts. Take Atlantic City for example. The way everything is mixed and balanced creates this haunting atmosphere without ever overwhelming the songs. It’s a great sounding record. A few of his best songs are here. The title track, Atlantic City, which still raises the hairs on the back of my neck no matter how many times I’ve heard it, and State Trooper, which was supposedly influenced by Suicide. The idea of Bruce creating what is essentially an acoustic Suicide song is just really cool to me. The lyrics are full of all-time great lines too. “I guess there’s just a meanness in this world” and “winners and losers, and don’t get caught on the wrong side of that line” are the kinds of lyrics that stay with you. There are nice changes of pace as well. Open All Night feels like a classic 1950s rock and roll tune dropped into the middle of all this darkness. I can understand why some people find the album monotonous in places. Songs like My Father’s House are almost hymn-like in their pacing. But on a different day I could easily find myself loving those tracks too. My only real criticism is a minor one. Having already mentioned Bob Dylan, this album occasionally highlights just how incredible Dylan is as a vocalist and phraser. Bruce’s delivery here is often very Dylan-esque, but sometimes he struggles to fit all the words comfortably into a line, or stretches shorter lines awkwardly. Dylan is the absolute master of making uneven lyrics sound effortless. On songs like My Father’s House and Highway Patrolman, Bruce can sound a little clumsy by comparison. But these are demos at heart, and maybe some of that would have been refined had the songs gone through a more traditional recording process. That’s a very small complaint though. This is a fantastic album and an easy five stars for me. An absolute cracker.

Album #124, Cocteau Twins, Treasure ⭐⭐ About 10 years ago, I was completely in love with and obsessed with Cocteau Twins’ Heaven or Las Vegas. I loved the dream pop sound, which wasn’t a genre I’d really been familiar with up to that point, and I loved the languageless singing of Elizabeth Fraser. I thought it was wonderful and totally unique. There was a period where I listened to that album daily during a pretty tough period of my life. I was making music at the time, not very good music, mind you, and I became obsessed with the idea of making dream pop songs because of that album, even though I never actually got around to it. Despite that, I never really got into Cocteau Twins beyond that. The only other song I knew off the top of my head was “Lorelei” from this album. Turns out I was wrong. Turns out I had listened to Treasure years ago. Turns out I remembered disliking it. And here we are again. This was a really unpleasant surprise this morning. Maybe it’s because I’m older now. Maybe it’s because I’m no longer smoking weed daily and being stoned off my gourd all the time. Whatever the reason, this music feels pretty meaningless to me now. I no longer find Elizabeth Fraser’s glossolalia-style singing charming, beautiful, or mysterious. I find it lacking in substance. She has a very good voice, but for me it feels more like a vocal exercise than anything emotionally meaningful. I also think the production is a major problem. The album is extremely lo-fi. I don’t have an issue with lo-fi music generally, but in a style like this, I think you need lush production to really bring out the beauty of what you’re trying to create. Instead, this sounds cheap. It sounds underfunded and undercooked, and whether that’s because of budget limitations or creative choices, it doesn’t work for me. The production actively diminishes the music. The music itself is an issue too. This thing is so twee that I feel like it might collapse under the weight of even mild criticism. After a while it all blends into one mushy haze. I remember Heaven or Las Vegas feeling much more shoegaze-adjacent and much more song-oriented, whereas this feels more like Kate Bush on sedatives in a nursing home. The funny thing is that I’m now almost afraid to revisit Heaven or Las Vegas. It was such an important album to me at one point that I don’t really want to discover that it no longer connects with me either. There are a handful of songs I liked. “Lorelei” is still lovely, and the closing track “Donimo” was actually one of the stronger moments on the album. That said, when I saw that it was over six minutes long, I genuinely groaned because by that point I was so fed up with the record. Thankfully, it turned out to be one of the better tracks. I suspect this won’t be a popular review. Cocteau Twins are one of those bands people hold very dear, and I completely understand why. But this album did very, very little for me. I’m hoping Heaven or Las Vegas survives the revisit when it eventually comes up, because Treasure certainly didn’t.

Album #125, Ananda Shankar, Ananda Shankar ⭐⭐⭐⭐ And now for another long raga……Ananda Shankar. Totally new one for me. The extent of my Indian music knowledge is basically The Concert for Bangladesh and the opening half hour where Ravi Shankar plays. Despite loving that whenever I’ve heard it, I’ve never really gotten into Indian music. So this is probably one of the first full Indian albums I’ve ever listened to. I think it’s great. More than anything else, I just think it’s an amazing sounding record. The instruments are so interesting. They produce such unusual, distinctive sounds. The drones, the sitar, all the different textures. I don’t really know the names of half the instruments, so apologies for that, but it all just sounds fantastic. It’s a great new experience. The original compositions and the traditional tunes are the highlights for me. The covers I could maybe take or leave. They’re interesting enough, but whenever the album is doing its own thing, that’s when it really comes alive. One thing I’ve tried very hard not to do during this project is look at the list itself. I want the generator to surprise me. I don’t want to know what’s coming up next. I like discovering albums as they arrive. That said, I did look up whether there were many other Indian albums on the list. I was disappointed to discover that the only other one seems to be Ravi Shankar’s The Sounds of India. That’s a famous record and one I still haven’t heard, but it annoyed me a little. My criticism isn’t really aimed at this album. It’s more aimed at the list itself. Because what you’ve got here is an album introducing listeners to Indian music through a mixture of traditional influences and covers of well-known Western songs. It almost feels like the list is holding the listener’s hand and saying, “Don’t worry, here’s some Indian music, but they’re also doing versions of songs you already know.” Do we really need that? Couldn’t there be room for more albums that fully commit to the tradition without needing the familiar reference points? Not that the covers are bad, and not that I don’t think this album deserves its place. But it feels symptomatic of one of my biggest issues with the list as a whole. I know primarily from this subreddit that there are artists with eight or nine albums included. There are entire countries and genres represented by one or two records. I’m doing this project to discover new music, and to be fair, today I absolutely did. I’m delighted this album came up. I really enjoyed it and I’ll definitely return to it. I just wish the list gave more opportunities to discover even more music from places and traditions that don’t already dominate the canon.

Album #126, Fatboy Slim, Better Living Through Chemistry ⭐⭐⭐ This could be the most 90s sounding 90s album I’ve ever heard. Also, this might be the first electronic album I’ve gotten on the generator so far, so this was a real welcome change of pace. I liked it, but context matters when you’re listening to this kind of stuff. This isn’t half as interesting or innovative as some of his contemporaries at the time, like Aphex Twin or The Prodigy or DJ Shadow, for example. But it’s also not trying to be. This is rave music. It’s made for dancing, and I’ve seen Fatboy Slim live multiple times, so I do really enjoy it. It’s a three-star album when you’re sober. It would be a five-star album if you were on ecstasy.

Album #127, Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin II ⭐⭐⭐⭐ One of the formative albums of my youth. I think everyone who wants to start out as a rock and roll fan should look no further than Led Zeppelin as an introduction. One of the greatest bands of all time. What really surprised me today is the fact that I haven’t listened to this album in maybe 15 or so years. So it was almost like a new experience because I’d forgotten an awful lot of what it sounded like. The first thing that struck me is how weird it is. Whole Lotta Love is a great song, but it’s got that weird section in the middle with all the droning, sexual guitar feedback. It’s just an odd track when you think about how popular it is. An unbelievable opener anyway. The whole album ranges from great to exceptional. Looking at the tracklist beforehand, I was expecting certain songs not to click. I vaguely remembered The Lemon Song, but I didn’t actually remember that it’s one of the most smouldering versions of, what is essentially, the Killing Floor ever recorded. It rivals Jimi Hendrix’s version in my opinion. On that note, this is one of their bluesiest albums, and definitely the bluesiest album they made until Physical Graffiti. It’s definitely there most sexual and masturbatory, for better or worse. I’m going to reserve my five stars for later albums. I know that’s a little unfair because I’m judging it against what came after, but I think their creative peak was at least two albums later with Led Zeppelin IV and the records following it. I think those albums top this one by a good bit. It’s a slight mix bag. Ramble On is arguably the best Led Zeppelin song there is. But, there are also a few tracks that I could consider filler. Well, nothing is really filler exactly, but filler for Led Zeppelin. Living Loving Maid is a bit of a silly song in a lot of ways. It doesn’t hit as hard as the other tracks, and the closing track is a pretty weak note to end on. Also, and believe me when I tell you this, John Bonham is the reason I became a drummer in the first place. I owe an awful lot to John Bonham and I still love him. That said, I do think the album version of Moby Dick pales in comparison to the extended live versions. You almost need to be watching The Song Remains the Same to see how spectacular it all is. The album version just isn’t as impressive. It’s got a great riff from Jimmy Page, but in the interest of brevity and pacing I think the album could probably do without it. But yeah, fantastic stuff throughout. A strong four stars. And look, I’m sure Led Zeppelin will show up again later on the list with straight five-star reviews from me.

Album #128, Suzanne Vega, Suzanne Vega ⭐ “It’s a one time thing, it just happens a lot.” From that opening lyric, I knew we were in trouble. Not that it’s a particularly bad lyric, but that delivery. My God. I’m not the biggest fan of this kind of speak-singing style. I think it can sound a bit pretentious, a bit too cool trying to be cool. When you build your entire folk album around it though, it just starts to sound like poetry set to music. Well, this thing is just a vehicle for bad poetry. These song’s feel like poor, solipsistic, self-obsessed, ponderous poems written by a teenage hipster in her coffee shop. The album is completely devoid of humour, devoid of light, and devoid of anything particularly interesting to say. And the way these poems are delivered is just awful. It’s not really singing. It’s just spouting out stanza after stanza in a stupid staccato rhythm. It sounds like she’s trying to be Joni Mitchell, but Joni Mitchell has an incredible voice. Suzanne Vega is just speaking. It’s basically slam poetry. There is a complete lack of edge or emotion in both the vocal and the music. I don’t think the arrangements are great. I love folk music. I love folk rock. I love alternative folk music. Freak folk! Anything folk, I’m usually right behind it. So I’m genuinely shocked that I’ve given a folk album a one-star review. I’m 128 albums in now, and I’d been wondering if I’d even hand out a one-star review at all. Up to now I’ve generally been able to find merit in almost everything, even if it wasn’t for me. I’m not saying this album is without merit, and I’m not saying somebody couldn’t write a convincing five-star review of it. I could probably read it and understand their reasoning. But what I am saying is, for my own ears, this is one of the worst albums I’ve ever listened to. Worse than some of the other albums I’ve strongly disliked on this list, including Stripped by Christina Aguilera and that Slipknot album. At least those album did something. Had something to offer. This did nothing for me. It didn’t move me. It didn’t make me think. It didn’t make me feel anything. It just made me wonder how bad my review was going to be by the end of it. Towards the end she starts singing about queens and soldiers and all this stuff that I think is trying to say something grand about life and death and war and peace. But the album is so lacking in weight and substance that it never earns those moments. There’s no grit behind it. No energy. Nothing driving it forward. Nothing lifting it up. Not once does her voice push for any kind of emotional delivery. You can’t make meaningful statements about those subjects when the foundation underneath them feels so flimsy. I hated it. I’m sorry. I listened to it twice because I couldn’t believe I was about to give an album one star. But it’s a one star review and that doesn’t happen a lot.