A completely cohesive album that tells a story with an ambiguous ending. Comments on humanity's fascist tendencies throughout society, school, motherhood, the courts, etc. Musical themes perfectly set the mood and match the lyrics. At times, mostly near the end of the album, the lyrics get a little too on the nose, but that's a minor quibble. Excellent album.
Great riffs abound on this album. It's wonderfully lofi, low tech, and high energy. The album sounds as though they just put a single mic in the middle of the room and let them play. Mistakes in Jack White's playing crop up, but they just add to the live feel of the album.
The songs are very simple, but the songs are so great that you never get bored. This is helped by the fact that the songs average out to 2.5 minutes each.
If this were just guitar and drums for the entire album, that could be tiring, but there are songs with organ and piano mixed in throughout to keep things interesting.
This is a FUN album that can be listened to over and over again.
The first half of this album (through Kids) is incredible and then it falls off. All filler in the second half, but the first half of the album is nothing but perfect pop hooks.
This was ok. Sex machine was great, but outside of that I found myself to be a bit bored.
A lot of good songs that are enjoyable to listen to. Little to no rock and roll on here. A very bluesy album. I anticipated not liking this, but was pleasantly surprised.
Despite owning and enjoying much of his catalog, this album is boring. The only thing that caught my ear was his use of a riff from “Apache” during “How Does the Grass Grow?”. Completely forgettable otherwise.
Excellent artistry at work. The musicians stretch their creative muscles without ever losing the song’s backbone. Plenty of weirdness that reminded me of Zappa. I will be able to list to this many times without hearing the same thing twice.
An incredible tour de force, lyrically and musically.
You can see why so many artists cover his songs. Full of emotion and excellent songwriting. Interesting lyrics and hooks. Great album.
I can see why this is on here. I can hear the influences on later recordings, but not having heard it at the time it was made leaves it sounding extremely dated to my ears.
Sounds like Coldplay if they ditched the piano abd played the same drums every song. First few songs are solid though.
Everything they say about Sade is true. I was surprised though that the songs would be so enjoyable. A must-have album.
I can see why this is popular and considered to be great, but I don't like this album very much. It's just a musical with distorted guitars. I don't typically like musicals so this doesn't do much for me. That said, Meat Loaf is a vocal tour de force and the songwriting is good.
Right up there with Blood Sugar Sex Majik. No misses throughout the entire album.
Fantastic soundscapes from front to back. I haven’t watched the movie, but this score (including the narration in thr final track) make me want to check it out.
Holds up surprisingly well. Probably in large part due the emphasis on great vocals feom Chuck D and great work as always from Terminator X. Songs have a lot going on without losing the foundational beat driving the song.
An all-time great album. Every song is well-written and performed. The recording itself has a bit of live edge to it, while sounding well-produced. Very warm-sounding. The opening track is incredible and it maintains a very high level from there. If there’s a better Stones album, I haven’t heard it yet.
I found this to be above average throughout, but not really a “great” album. I enjoyed hearing the song from the Clueless soundtrack and overall enjoyed listening, but it was immediately forgettable outside of “Alright”.
Singing is atrocious. When it's just music, it's mostly interesting and good, but the vocals are really really bad. I understand why it's on here - they were influential to bands who became very popular, but the 'singing' is really hard to get past.
Music and vocals balance the cringey lyrics throughout the album. If you don’t listen to the lyrics, this is a good album. With them, it’s average.
The opening track is a masterpiece and steals the show. The rest of the tracks don’t come close to touching it, but are still above average.
Exceptional album. Mildly dated with some of the music, but only slightly. The vocals especially are very 80s, but are still great. Lyrically, there are several memorable moments even after only one listen.
Has a lot of good and interesting elements and was fun to listen to. The second half suffered from what Bat Out of Hell suffered from - it just sounded like a musical with distorted guitars. Not my cup of tea. It's also lacking any ear worms, which is probably why there aren't any hits on this album. It's a solid album, but not one I feel would be necessary to have in my collection.
This is a solid, above average album, but not something that would probably approach a top 1000 list for me, personally. There may be some 'it was great at the time' bias here, but I'm not sure. It kind of sounds like a lot of psychedelic stuff out around that time - it basically sounds like the Kinks version of Sgt. Peppers..
Phenomenal album. Never a dull moment. Interesting and catchy tracks throughout. The album flows as one full piece.
Lots of experimentation with stereo panning and other effects in the studio. From a recording perspective, this album SOUND amazing, even without considering the music itself. The drums and bass are hot for some tracks, but it works, much like LZ II. Fortunately, the music itself is fantastic so you can hear every instrument's contribution to each composition. The songs on this album have more complexity than the songs on 'Are You Experienced?' without having any feeling of just going on unnecessarily long.
Sounds like they dipped their toe into psychedelic music in parts of this album, especially with the second track, "Patterns". "Scarborough Fair / Canticle" has a mix of psychedelia with old English folk music, making for an interesting piece. The harmonies here are wonderful. "A Simple Desultory Philippic" pays homage to Bob Dylan musically and lyrically. The final track is a great dichotomy with the singing of Silent Night combined with the reading of the news of the day that emphasizes the chaotic upheaval of the times. On first listen, many of the songs sound out of place with one another because of the genre jumps from song to song, but additional listens allows them to start to meld together in a cohesive unit.
The only thing I can think of that would put this on the list is that it was lyrically dark and, for the time, obscene. But none of that is shocking anymore. So what we're left with is a series of sentimental singing with an overabundance of vocal vibrato throughout. This was difficult to get through. I hated all 43 minutes of this album. I'd rather listen to Richard Cheese.
I wouldn’t say this is a great album, but it’s clearly important. Playing hardcore like this in 1979 is wild. That said, I DO like it - it’s just not something I’d want to listen to often.
The country rock album against which all country rock albums are judged. So easy to listen to. As with many genre-jumping acts, they made a ton of country fans upset that a bunch of hippies were playing 'their' music. But they showed what was possible and created the path for bands like the Eagles to become hugely popular.
Great album front to back. Great rock album with the rawness that he usually puts out. Spends time jamming, but Neil Young's jamming is always emotive and never makes me feel like he's just showing off technique. Case in point - Down by the River is 9 minutes long, but feels like 3 or 4 at most. Ends with Cowgirl in the Sand - a tour de force in guitars sounding like they want to punch you in the face. I'm sure Young's voice is divisive, but it fits his music perfectly.
Terrific fun. Really captures a live feel in the performance throughout the album. Prima’s voice is unmistakably unique. Several songs went on to have second lives as popular covers showing the quality of the songwriting.
The hits on this album are very good. The rest of the album is above average, but I found myself getting bored as I listened. Not as many hooks as there were from albums like White Blood Cells. I think the issue is that the songs were longer without much added complexity. It's still something I would listen to, but fails to live up to previous albums by them.
This is the first time going through these albums that I've skipped through songs. There have been albums I haven't liked and have even given one star to. But this is aggravating. Just because a pop star makes an album that isn't completely saccharin, that doesn't make it great. There were some hits on this album, but nothing on here, including those hits, are particularly memorable. Songs like Make Over might end up being memorable due to how awful it is. Aguilera is certainly a talented singer, but these songs are awful. I can't believe this album is on this list. There's nothing wrong with pop or even unserious music. Something like Justin Timberlake's Justified is a great example of a pop album that's great. This is not that. This is just plain bad.
This album suffers from being a product of its time. It has a ton of 80s tropes throughout the album. Fortunately, for much of the album, the quality of the song-writing overshadows the heavy synths and over-reverberated drums. The opening track was everywhere when it was used in Stranger Things. Despite the exposure, the song is still a great listen. The next two albums made me wonder whether she was going to continue to sing in that same style for the whole album. Because of the lack of change in vocal style, those two songs (Hounds of Love and The Big Sky) were fairly boring to me.
The rest of the album is a good listen. Standouts for me were Mother Stands for Comfort, Under Ice, and Jig of Life. Waking the Witch has some Pink Floyd vibes to it with some background dialogue and finishing with a helicopter sound, evoking memories of The Wall.
Overall, I'd give this a 3.5 if half scores were allowed, but since they aren't, I'm rounding down just due to the number of 80s ballads on this album that are one of my least favorite types of songs.
Neil Young doing great Neil Young things. Southern Man feels a bit out of place on this specific album. It sounds like it should be a Crazy Horse song, but it's an incredible song. So many memorable songs on here and at only 34 minutes, it's over way too quickly.
Great songs throughout this album. Lyrics drip with sarcasm as they lay out many of the negative aspects of the female experience. There's a tinge of punk throughout, musically as well as any time Love releases a guttural yell. There are radio hits scattered throughout, showing that Hole can write a great hook to go with their interesting lyrics and music with an edge. There is a little bit of filler on a fairly short album, preventing it from getting a full five stars, but excellent nonetheless.
A giant parody album. It's funny, and it certainly does a great job deconstructing love songs. The genre leaps keeps it from being boring, but it is just entirely too long. Even with most songs hovering around 2 minutes long, this is just obnoxiously long. Additionally, none of the songs are particularly memorable. I'm glad I heard it once, but it's unlikely that I would ever listen to this again.
It was funny to see so many extremely high reviews of this album, but if you think about how many music critics want to be the smartest person in the room and tell everyone else that they just don't understand an album with bad singing and that they're just too much of a mouth-breather to be willing to sit through a three hour album, then you start to understand why there are so many positive reviews. The idea of this album is funny and the execution is even quite funny. I enjoyed a lot of it, but if the length and lack of hooks makes it so I never want to listen to it again, how can I say that it's good?
Sounds like the film score to an incredible indie film. Music and vocals that draw you in and envelop you. The soft whispered vocals could be seen as melancholic and sentimental with someone else, but it works really well here.
Love this.
A solid album. Not as good as Songs of Love and Hate, but a solid album. As with most Cohen songs, the songwriting is better than the performance, but he holds his own.
The radio hits to open the album are stellar and then it’s just a bunch of filler.
Interesting album for sure. Very experimental. But not something I'd really want to listen to again as listening to it a second time became less interesting and more tiresome. I can see why people like it, but it's a bit too unstructured for my tastes.
First five tracks are all good to great. After that, it trends downhill - a lot of that is probably due to me not liking ballads at all. Only half of the album is good, but that half is awesome, so it gets a 4.
The hits are great fun. The rest of the album is bad.
Has plenty of solid songs, but has plenty of songs that don't have much to them. Middle of the road album to me.
I understand people who like it, I guess. But generally I don't want my music to feel like homework. It sounds like if you took all the weirdness of Zappa's songs, and none of the catchy parts. There are parts here and there that sound more 'normal', but those come more as sweet relief. I don't mind weirdness. I own a lot of Zappa albums and, interestingly enough, Bongo Fury, an album with Captain Beefheart, is one of my favorites. But this is all dissonance with not resolution. I feel that sometimes if something is complicated and anti-pop, some people declare it to be genius based simply on that. Reviews of music like this so often seem to be a way for the reviewer to show off their knowledge of barely known groups within sub-sub-sub-sub genres. It's certainly hard to write about music (Zappa famously said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture), but so often compositions like this are described as 'challenging' and other words that suggest that if you don't also like it, you lack the intelligence to 'get it'. I don't hate this, but I certainly don't like it. I can appreciate that the instruments all seem to create a unified thing, despite seemingly playing completely different songs. However, the atonal nature of nearly every instrument in every song makes this exhausting. The 80 minute runtime doesn't help with this. I'm glad to have finally listened to it, but I don't particularly ever want to hear it again.
There are plenty of toe-tapping songs on here. The simplicity only makes the songs more fun to listen to. The album does suffer from many of the songs sounding very similar. However, it's too enjoyable to knock it too much for this. Obviously this was a pioneering record, so it's 'important', but unlike many albums in this vein, this is actually something I'd want to listen to.
Sounds like a film score. Evokes feelings of unease, serene calm, and excitement at various points throughout the album. Masterpiece.
Fewer hits, but much better as a whole than Brothers in Arms. Fantastic guitar work and song-writing throughout.
While the Metallica purists consider this an abomination, it's hard to take them seriously when they were equally as vocal about Load because the band members cut their hair. All bands evolve. The passing of Cliff took from Metallica their best musician - and thus a lot of the more interesting bits of music. The Black album is much simpler and accessible. That doesn't make it bad, though, it's just an evolution. If this had been a different band's first album, the reception from metal fans likely would have been different. The songs do get a little old after a while so I'm giving it a 4.
Spectacular from start to finish. An ever so slight modern edge to what otherwise is a classic soul album. Vocals are great. The lyrics and the delivery of them just drip with sexuality - which is done in an interesting way. I'm surprised I haven't heard this album before given all the accolades. I think I just assumed the praise was in the same vein as Aguilara, who is vocally talented, but musically terrible.
This would be a great album to experience live and in the moment. On an album though, the songs feel too long. Moments are very very good and it would be a great driving album, played loud. But to sit and listen, most songs feel a bit tedious by the end.
There are plenty of good songs on here, but the album is far too long as much of this feels like filler. The album as a whole suffers from this as much of the material is fairly forgettable.
