Great example of a cleanly engineered album. Sparse arrangements that don't have the impact a 21st century listener may be accustomed to. Paul Simon is a poet and sometimes that's to his detriment. There's a single hit here for a reason.
It's loose, energetic, and rootsy. A good reminder that punk is an attitude and not an aesthetic or sonic palette. For the space that it occupies, it's good, though meanders in the back half. I wouldn't mind more music like this getting made, but I don't feel gripped by this record in any vital way.
Considering the differences in recording quality, it's not surprising that the hits are the hits and the rest are not. Some of the mixes are just bad and hard to listen to. How they managed to nail it in some places and whiff it elsewhere is beyond me.
Lyrically, however, the hits are no greater than the others. Run-DMC is all about the boast, and that's what Hip Hop was about in the 80s. It does eventually lose potency. It's an important album for the sake of music history but not one that holds up as a classic to keep in rotation.
Maybe I’m more forgiving of Rock. There’s a lot of good tonal ear candy in here. Some of the songs are surprisingly emotional and reflective, some are meta-critical of entertainment, and others are all sound no meaning. But nothing felt strange or too underbaked to me. Good overall.
Does it take its time? Yes.
Is it loosely a concept record? Kinda.
Does it extend Led Zeppelin's penchant for colonizing blues? Sure, but less so than how it started, which is now well documented in its theft of material.
What's inarguable is the quality of the arrangements and performances across the album. The Bonham drums are ferocious. The Jones bass is rock solid. The Plant vocal is soaring. The Page riffs are ringing. Also, one of the absolute best track sequences. Side A starts hot with odd rhythms, rides an arc, and finishes smooth. Side B starts hot with odd rhythms again, rides an arc, and finishes strong. Listening to just a couple tracks on their own misses the point.
Duran Duran might be written off as an example of the time in which the music was produced and not exactly timeless. But the musicality is undeniable, the songs are essential pop, and the deep tracks are actually as good or better than the hits, artistically speaking. I wonder how these songs would hold up if they were arranged differently.
Dark, thick, spacious, narrative -- though sometimes the story is too thin or vague to evoke what it may mean to. The meme that Eddie Vedder is impossible to understand, though I find it's more true on the songs that are overall not as strong, while the tunes that have become part of classic rock canon are pretty clear as far as 90s alt goes. On the whole, this is a key milestone on the long walk of rock history, and like many such entries it has a few lazy indulgences by the artist that make clear why the hits stood out.
The recording is so good. Everything is so articulate and clear, it makes me want to buy better speakers. The musicianship is excellent, and this is an example of "they just don't make records like they used to." But there were some pretty muddy records made at the time, too. Sadly, I'm not really a fan of Mark Knopfler's singing, and I'm indifferent about the writing. It's not bad, but it's not necessarily artful in my opinion. The best parts are when the band is just vamping and Knopfler plucks along.
Stevie Wonder is one of the greatest voices and musicians in pop music. He's also a legendary songwriter, though that's not consistently apparent on this album. I get why this album won a Grammy for engineering. I wish there weren't so many forced rhymes, but they're gracefully masked by that voice.
I dunno man, Neil Young is cool, this is good, loose west coast rock. It’s worth listening to and understanding this artist and this period. It just doesn’t really do anything vital for me.
The beats are great, but repetitive. It’s early hip hop, and it has that classic hip hop scratch and loop style that you can just bop to for an hour. But the raps are just so monotonous and the rhymes are sometimes forced. Feels like it was not yet established what it meant to have artful flow.
Quick and punchy punk. Has "that" sound. But it feels more like a stylistic choice than a philosophical one, since the songs themselves don't seem to have much to say. Some tracks are just amateurish. Not sure why I had to listen to this before I die.
There are some delightful, if overcooked, pop songs. This is an album that sounds like its cover art, in a way; futuristic and floaty but also elegant and of its time. If John Lennon and Stevie Wonder made a collab record with a sci-fi concept, this might be what it sounds like. Jeff Lynne could have done less but then it wouldn’t be ELO.
I mean...I guess? But why is every track so long? And why is the whole lyrical point to be repetitively gross?
Spotify shows credits now, including mixing engineer where available. Since there is a mix engineer credited on some tracks, I am sure the ones without such a credit simply didn't have one. Some of the levels here are bafflingly severe. The 2022 remaster is sonically better, but there's only so much that can be done to this production.
Aside from that, my favorite parts were the instrumental sections. 15 albums in, I am realizing the point of the 1001 Albums journey is not to hear 1001 great works of timeless art, but to become well versed in the difference between good and bad music.
This joke has probably been made already, but...."We have David Bowie at home." Listenable and inoffensive but sounds a bit like what AI would make now if you asked it to make a David Bowie soundalike, given the forced rhymes and corny subject matter.
Groovy and smooth. A sound often imitated but never replicated. I like this a lot more than their hits.
It's that classic Clash sound, but it's not really the classic Clash songs -- that's another album. It's fine but not going in rotation.
Alright, Bob, you like the blues, don't ya?
Of all the great songs Bob Dylan has ever written, only one or two of these sound like the real deal rather than some ideas he wanted to play around with. And the performances of those one or two feel a bit like he'd rather be playing the other ideas.
Pretty exceptional writing and production across the album. Some mixing issues, some repetition, some novelty that hasn’t aged well, but damn, “Love and Anger” is a hell of a track.
Some of the jazz from the 70s just has undeniable groove and soul. Each track made me imagine some grainy b-roll footage of a city with boxy cars, flared pants, and swoopy hair. I won't mark this as a 'perfect' record but definitely enjoyed and glad to have learned of it.
I'm a little surprised by how divisive this album seems to be. I'm also a little surprised by how literally some seem to be reading the lyrics, with no sense of narrative social commentary. Personally, I think it's a stunning work of art.
They’re poets, sometimes when they shouldn’t be.
A strong debut from a band that would eventually become great, but hadn’t yet. In the meantime, they really liked Eagles and Grateful Dead.
After listening to this album, I am now sure of one thing: it was made by Snoop Dogg, and after enough repetition of saying so across tracks, that is now impossible to forget. I am secondarily assured that Snoop Dogg does, in fact, get bitches. Other than that, I am not positive of any further information.
As many others have said, it's a vibe. It's a little loose and doesn't seem intent on being too poetic or musically intricate. I didn't know about this album but from the very top I had a sense of what I was about to hear, just from the cultural relevance and prevalence of this sound -- thanks in no small part, I'm sure, to Manu Chao himself. But I'm not sure I'll remember having heard this album, given time.
Do you enjoy Revolver/Sgt Pepper era Beatles and also Pablo Honey era Radiohead? Then you might find this listenable like I did. Otherwise I could see this getting boring. But, like, it's neat, I didn't dislike it.
It may never cease to amaze me how narrow minded so many listeners can be. I read the low score reviews and find cherry picked lyrical complaints or hand waving of the genre as a whole without any further credence to the fact that Kendrick Lamar is a Pulitzer Prize winning artist (though, in fairness, not attributed to this album). It’s as if complex thought is a foreign concept to so many self described music lovers.
This album is a masterpiece and history will most certainly record it as such.
At times personal and plaintive, at others scathingly political, but at no time musically gripping—even on the famous hit, which is somehow better performed by just about anyone of note paying tribute.
Noisy and energetic, but not musically stimulating. Except for “Maps,” of course, which is the first non-distortion-laden track on the album and feels like a sentimental breath of air.
I thought I had previously dealt with depression but clearly not, if this is what depression sounds like.
A neat sound I don't think I've heard much of anywhere else. It does seem a bit like the songs were written from a place of real emotion, and then later recorded once the feeling had completely passed and Gray simply couldn't be bothered to tap into that emotional space to give us something sensory. I could see this being really good background music in a coffee shop of the same era that doesn't have takeout cups and the sofa in the center of the room has an impression from someone who sat there for three hours reading a book and not actually hearing what music was on.
There will never be another voice quite like Frank’s, and that voice should probably not have sang this record. Let this be a reminder that bossa nova had a fad period and standards singers used to make paycheck records.
Like the artwork suggests, this is the kind of music which I would want to soundtrack a luxury shopping experience that descends into a trash fire. Two hours of audio art is a lot to ask of the observer. On approaching the first hour's end, I've sort of lost track of time. I think I may just not finish it.
The sound hasn't really aged well, but now a quarter century later it's certifiably retro, in the way my high school class thought about J. Geils, Billy Joel, or Donna Summer, but not with nearly as much musical depth or historical value as those, I think.
