If you’ve heard a blues/hard rock record in your life, you’ve heard all this done better.
This album makes me want to pray, and I’m agnostic. If that ain’t high regard, I don’t know what is.
If you’ve loved any pop or R&B music made in the past 70-some years, you will find something you love here, I guarantee it.
Never surpasses the title track; but so does 99% of all things on this planet.
The most uninteresting Metallica record. At least with Lulu, I can laugh at how absurdly misguided it is, and at minimum, St. Anger has a fun story as to why it’s so scuffed. This is just Metallica selling their souls, put to tape.
All but 3 things in this life are uncertain: those being, death, taxes, and the mothafucking Wu-Tang.
If this was just 30-40 minutes, I’d love it. But it’s not, and so this is the highest I can give it.
Not just the best Beatles album; the most career-representative Beatles album. Everything each Beatle did before and after this record is perfectly exhibited here.
One of the most accurately named albums of all time.
Beginning to realize a lot of people on this site just hate fun.
Weird how the best musical depiction of pre-9/11, Giuliani and gentrification NYC, that isn’t Illmatic, is from an alt-rock album by a goddamned Brit.
I like some Thin Lizzy songs. This is certainly not a completely shit record.
But by God, how the fuck do they warrant me having to listen to an hour-long edited live album?
Booooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooring.
I feel like, if I was born in the 30’s, this album is what I’d be crying to, instead of being born in the 90’s and crying to Kid A.
These dudes rock harder than like 80% of current western bands combined.
The sorta neo-Krautrock songs on here are pretty good, and the more generic psych/indie pop songs just kinda fill space.
R.E.M. may be the most 4/5 band to ever exist. I’ve never been completely blown away by them, but I still always have a pretty good time nonetheless.
Yes, this is absurdly misogynistic, and Snoop is a apparently a MAGA nutter now, and I’m not here to defend any of that. All I’m saying is that Doggystyle more than deserves it’s spot as a hip-hop classic.
Jazmine’s a great singer, and the record touches on some topics I think are definitely important, but I just think the production is often boring, and it goes a little too far in it’s ambitions for it’s own good. Still had a nice time though.
The origin of life for death metal, and still goes hard as all hell to this day.
This would get a 4 for The Old Kanye producing the entire thing, if nothing else; thankfully, Common matches these beats perfectly. Then again, I never did too well in Math class, eh?
Putting my biases aside, it’s probably more of a 2, but I really want to just spite the bafflingly high amount of rock critics who think this isn’t just a boring, pretentious nothingburger of a record, so here goes.
What every indie rock band that came after this probably think they sound like. 90% of them are horribly mistaken.
The first of 6 Elvis Costello records this list is making me endure. I hope they aren’t all like this.
The poor man’s Peter Gabriel. Cliche at this point, but “Cars Are Cars” is possibly the worst written song made by a mainstream artist in the entire 20th century.
Dylan starts going electric, and starts getting good.
One of the most crushing feelings in the world: the feeling that you can tell, that so much effort was put into making something that just stinks like shit.
Y’know, starting this experiment, I thought that, in my first few weeks, that I was too nice, too forgiving. Thankfully, I’ve been able to disprove that in the past week or so, because I’ve been getting almost exclusively bad/mediocre records. And this, a torturous endeavor of trite, sloppy and annoying blues and 50’s rock pastiches, where the only acceptable song is a cover of a Robert Johnson song that I’d much rather listen to, might just take the fucking cake as the worst so far. The only positive is that it’s only 30 minutes, so I can be done with it sooner than later.
No band but Talking Heads could take a song as brilliant and profound as “Heaven” and follow it up with a song about believing all animals are in a conspiracy against you.
A decently enjoyable techno-house record, and I see how artists that I do like, i.e. Aphex Twin, Daft Punk & Justice, would be influenced by it. Same time, though, I’m not getting addicted to ketamine just for the sake of appreciating it more.
A pretty pleasant listen, and it’s got some out-&-out classics here, like the title track, “Jet”, “Mrs. Vanderbilt”, & “1985”, but it gets a bit repetitive, especially on the second side, and it’s very much not comparing to the Beatles’ prime era of innovation & achievement that this (and the far superior “RAM”) came off of.
Surprised at how good this was. Tight tracklist, some great grooves, absurdly catchy, and not as dated as you’d assume a disco record to be.
What more can I say about this record that hasn’t been said a million goddamn times already? It’s Highway fucking 61! This is like one of the biggest cultural touchstones in all of 20th century popular music, you don’t need me, of all people, to tell you it’s good!
Longest wait for “Free Bird” I’ve ever had to endure. -1 star, partially because I’m just irritable today, and partially for proudly supporting one of the most repugnant and embarrassing failed attempts at a nation-state in the history of man. Never forget that the Confederacy only lasted for 4 fucking years, and was an enormous economic and domestic disaster for all states involved. Anyone thinking that it’s something worth celebrating is not just an ignorant white supremacist, but also a historically/politically illiterate moron.
It’s rare for an album to be equal parts sincere, intelligent, weird and just completely ridiculous, but Neneh pulls it off. Props for separating itself from a lot of the forgettable new-jack swing of the era by incorporating more from jazz, trip-hop (before it really became popular, mind you), synth-pop and African music, and while the production does bring it a bit down, it’s still a great time.
The first Byrds album I’ve ever heard. I… have no clue why this is on here. I don’t hate country, to be clear, in fact, I enjoy a fair bit of 50’s-70’s country. But this is just not very remarkable country. I’d take a Cash, Merle, Nelson or Cline record from this era any day over this. Maybe it’s influential, maybe it’s not, but whatever the case, it’s not enough to make me care.
When you think about it for a bit, “Electric Ladyland” was kind of the point where psych-rock started to go prog. Jimi’s guitar virtuosity already spoke for itself, but here in particular, it’s coupled with the complex compositions, more metaphorical and abstract lyrics, wild jazz-inspired improvisation and ridiculous song/album length that makes it a lot more like what King Crimson or Yes would be doing, not long after this record’s release, than much of any psychedelic band at the time. (Fun fact I found after listening: Hendrix was originally supposed to be apart of the jam session that lead to Emerson, Lake & Palmer, so I think my theory holds up to scrutiny.)
Of course, none of that would matter if it wasn’t good. But it really is a sublime experience (pun intended)! For me, I’d say it’s actually Hendrix’s best work.
If country was more like this today, I’d take back every joke I’ve ever made about it. Very simple on the surface, but such a captivating and emotional listen from front to back. Just what I needed, since the only two country albums I’ve gotten so far, I haven’t liked much. Bonus points for fitting 14 tracks in ~30 minutes.
Not even being clearly technically impressive, and having a fun story behind it, can change the fact that it’s still a whole hour of improvised piano.
So-so indie pop that occasionally tries to become the worst heavy metal you’ve ever heard (I swear, something must have been in the air in Scandinavia in the 90’s that just compelled all of them to take a crack at metal). Still trying to decipher whether or not the vocals are bad, or if they just aren’t utilized as well as they could be.
This. Fucking. Rips. An excellent example as to how repetition can be used as a stylistic choice in music; you notice and feel the more subtle changes /because/ there’s not many, if any, big changes. Moreover, it’s the perfect dance music for cyberpunk dystopia, so I’d argue it’s aged very well. Also, that album cover is golden. 10/10, would get addicted to ketamine to appreciate more fully.
Better than the actual Lynyrd Skynyrd album on the list, at least. Still didn’t need to be a double album, though.
Doesn’t match up to Paul’s Boutique, but it comes real close.
Take off “Living Loving Maid” and there is not a track that doesn’t reach excellence on here. Even if it packs itself to the brim with rock cliches, LZII still does those cliches better than almost any other record, and in a lot of cases, the cliches wouldn’t /exist/ without it! Crazy that it’s not even the best Led Zeppelin record…
Damn, with this right after Led Zeppelin II, I think I’m on a roll!
Now, full disclosure, I’m a late millennial, and a high-schooler when this came out, so this record was basically inescapable in when it released; everyone I knew was bumping “Bitch Don’t Kill My Vibe”, “Backseat Freestyle”, “Swimming Pools”, “m.A.A.d. City”, “Poetic Justice” and “Money Trees”. From the popular kids, to the hipsters and hip-hop nerds, to the radio. Can’t blame them for all but one of them (coughcough “Poetic Justice” coughcough), those are great pop-rap songs that still make space for some very clever writing for Kendrick. But for me, the deeper cuts really stand out to me. The cinematic detail of “The Art of Peer Pressure”, the sheer emotion of “good kid”, the earnest beauty of “Real”… and don’t even get me started on “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of First”, words just don’t do that song justice!
There’s times where I feel that this is better than TPAB. I’d say today’s one of them.
Ok, should this be in the list of “Albums you /need/ to listen to before you die”? Yes, of course! This basically brought hip-hop to the (white) mainstream in America and allowed it to be taken seriously, both through controversy and actual quality (compared to where hip-hop was at the time, where even worse-aged nonsense from the likes of Kurtis Blow & the Fat Boys was still what a lot of people genuinely thought it was all like).
That being said, this has aged pretty poorly in a lot of regards. Most obviously, the misogyny and homophobia, as was very typical of hip-hop at the time, but this also applies to a lot of the musical elements too. The flows come off as being stilted and even a bit awkward compared to stuff released just a few years later, and the beats, while obviously revolutionary for the g-funk genre, have been outdated even by Dre’s later work like “The Chronic” & “Doggystyle”.
Funny enough, this came up on my generator a day after reviewing Kendrick’s “good kid, m.A.A.d. city”, another classic from a Compton rapper; while Kendrick’s career obviously wouldn’t really happen without “Straight Outta Compton”, looking between the two, I can only really compare this unfavorably to GKMC.
Nevertheless, there are still some true blue classics on here, like the title track, “Fuck tha Police”, “Gangsta Gangsta” & “Express Yourself” that do warrant listening, and some underrated tracks like “If It Ain’t Tuff” and “Quiet on tha Set” that deserve appreciation too. All in all, if you can just take it for what was at the time, and not what it is now, you’d probably have a pretty good time; but for me, that’s just not as easy said than done.
I cannot give an accurate rating of how I really feel about this record. The closest I can approximate is that it’s in superposition of a 1 & a 5. What I do for sure know, however, is that cooking Easter dinner to this fucking thing is a horrible mistake, and I have no one to blame but myself for that blunder. Most stressful cooking session of my life, and I wasn’t even doing anything too big.
Anyways, have a 3 I guess.
Biggest issue here is inconsistency; you’re not exactly starved for good songs on an album with “Born on the Bayou”, “Proud Mary” & “Keep On Chooglin”, but nothing in between those songs really compares to them. I suppose it’s better to have a good beginning and a great end with a mediocre middle than to just be equally decent throughout, but hell if I’m not gonna complain about it anyway. And no, I don’t really like “Good Golly, Miss Molly” as much as some people on here do, for the record.
As unoriginal and forgettable as it gets. There is no reason to listen to this over any Strokes, Arctic Monkeys or Franz Ferdinand record of the time, and I frankly wish I never bothered to put it on. The things I subject myself to for this generator…
I really wanted to love this album, it’s undeniably influential and important, and the title track, “Father Figure”, “One More Try” and “Monkey” are all-out pop/RnB classics, but two things really hold me back here:
1. “I Want Your Sex” could’ve been up there with the aforementioned songs, if it didn’t go 4 minutes (or 8 if you count the bonus tracks) past what it needed to, &
2. The second half, while not bad, really doesn’t hold a candle to the first.
Even still, I had a good time, and if you were ever curious about what an 80’s Prince album would be like if it was more gay, I can’t point to you a better album.
An indie rock classic for good reason; truly all killer and no filler, with the plus side of it showing up to save the rock landscape from the horrors of nu-metal (even if that did create its own issues later). I’ve listened to this a genuinely countless amount of times over the past 18 or so years, I’d be lying to give it less than 5 stars.
Also, “New York City Cops” >>> “When It Started”.
Never surpasses “Tiny Dancer”; then again, how exactly do you even do that?
Ohhhh, this was probably the first genuine let-down I’ve had on the generator so far. I had already listened to Common’s previous record on the list, “Be”, which I adored, and so I came in very much excited; that said though, not only is this a less ambitious and varied album than “Be”, but, despite it only being five years older, being vastly more dated in it’s homophobia and misogyny.
Normally, I could just note and disavow such lyrics and move on, given the album’s age, but here, not only does Common’s more laidback and softer sound not complement this at all, but it’s often just straight up hypocritical. All in all, “Like Water For Chocolate” is mostly just a documentation of Common’s growing pains as an artist, still trying to figure out what his style and themes are; and like most albums in that vein, it’s just kind of a gimmick album looking back from who that artist is now.
Also, it’s way too fucking long. When are the non-punk musicians gonna get the hint that an 1hr+ album runtime should be used very conservatively? ‘Cause 90% of the time, you /really/ don’t have enough you can do to warrant that.
Smart music deliberately done in the dumbest way possible. Nice to see the state of shitposting back in 1966 was the exact same that it is now.
Every bad r&b trope you can imagine, all of them, they are all here, and done by a guy who clearly thinks he’s a way better singer than he actually is. There are far better/more influential, and more over, actually interesting neo-soul records out there in the world, e.i. D’Angelo’s “Voodoo” & “Black Messiah”, Cody Chestnutt’s “The Headphone Experience”, Bilal’s “Love for Sale”, and Hiatus Kaiyote’s “Choose Your Weapon”, to name but a few, so why /this/ got the part is beyond me. Y’know what, -1 star for being a completely wasted spot in the list, to hell with it.
More panning on this album than a restaurant specializing in fried eggs, and the average Robert Christgau review, combined.
(Placeholder review. I don’t have all of the words I’d need to do this album justice, and I’ll have to come back to this when I do. Just know, this is a top 10 album of all time for me, and one I’d recommend to literally anyone with ears.)
Hard to go wrong with a premise like this! While I do think it can get a touch repetitive at times, and I can’t say every cover Otis undertakes is an improvement on the original (most obviously “Respect”), but if the title is something you’d like, you’re in for a good time.
Does quite well at keeping the medieval folk vibe, without ever really gimping itself from how inherently dated or potentially corny that sound can be. Not my type of music, generally, but if this was playing at the D&D session, I wouldn’t complain.
Unrelentingly dark and continually simple, yet never getting unbearable or boring. All this is owed to Smith’s songwriting, being a true “warts and all” painting of his life; he examines his flaws, sure, but at no point does it feel like there’s no hope.
Definitely my favorite Doug Walker album.
And so, with this, Jeff Buckley’s “Grace”, and Elliott Smith’s “Either/Or”, I have completed the “sad white boy with a guitar” holy trinity in no less than 5 days.
Gotta say, while I did love all of them, I’d really like a break from these sorts of albums, at least for a week.
First 3 tracks are good… and then “Since I’ve Been Loving You” shows up, pisses in the punch bowl, and the rest of the party never recovers.
I believe that this, right here, is what the kids nowadays would call, “serving c*nt”.
When are rock critics ever going to realize that Clapton was only ever tolerable by way of Jack Bruce’s writing?
I’d hazard to guess, never.
Like, come on, I get that he’s a talented guitarist, but an album, he simply cannot make. And besides, by that logic, couldn’t you have taken out one of his dozen or so albums that are on this list, and given them to Buckethead or Dream Theater? At least their albums are more interesting displays of guitar-wankery.
Aretha Franklin for retail store playlists; the term “plastic soul” has never been more applicable. That said, I will say that “Water Under the Bridge” and “Send My Love (To Your New Lover)” are still good songs, no matter how overplayed they are.
Kings of Leon are, most likely, the absolute fucking worst band in the known universe, lest it be found that there’s a band on goddamn Alpha Centauri that is, in fact, less listenable. They’re certainly the shittiest band on Earth, at least. And accordingly, this is one of the worst albums I’ve ever heard, indeed, probably the worst that the generator’s given me (… so far), and know, dear reader, that that’s no small feat.
If I am to throw Kings of Leon a bone, it’s that they almost give me hope that I, one day, can make it big in the music industry, because I can easily make something better than this any day of the week. And this album, to it’s credit, also gives me perspective on what really good albums are like, with that being, more or less, them doing the exact opposite of what “Only by the Night” does.
Since I cannot give an accurate description of the experience of listening to this album without devolving into screeching gibberish like a fucking monkey, I invite you to picture the following:
Corporate bigwigs attempting to reconstruct the Strokes by just going off of Pitchfork reviews, and never actually listening to their music.
Rule-abiding rebellion.
The worst Mercury Award nominated band you’ve heard in your life: American edition.
Christian rock if you removed all of the lyrics about Jesus, and, with great effort, replaced them with even more moronic ones.
The music the type of guy who puts up a Confederate flag in public (including in states that weren’t Confederate/didn’t own slaves!) listens to.
The heaviest song that your local Applebee’s store playlist would ever include.
Your creepy high school gym teacher’s new “hard rock” band.
Arctic Monkeys if they were the product of two cousins liking each other too much.
Hillbilly Coldplay.
Music for people who hate music.
Put all of these together, and you have a close approximation of the inhumane torture session, that is “Only by the Night”.
If I could give this 0 stars, I would. If I could give this negative stars, I would. I suppose until then, a 1/5 will suffice.
And the worst part is, on the generator, there are TWO MORE FUCKING KINGS OF LEON ALBUMS JESUS CHRIST FUCKING KILL ME.
This is, bar none, Kate Bush’s most uncompromising work; as such, I can only seriously recommend it to those already seasoned in experimental music, or die-hard Kate Bush fans.
Thankfully, I’m both, so I had a great time. +1 for making people who I think are knobs angry, as well.
As much as I would’ve liked this sort of genre-hodgepodge indie experiment if it had gone right, I think this is really just too overambitious and inconsistent for me to recommend (that, and it hits my biggest musical pet-peeve of going on for way too long). That said, I can’t say I’ve listened to psychedelic-noise-orchestral-punk-ska-jazz-britpop-shoegaze before, so I for sure see why this was included; I’ll also give it that this was probably insane for ‘93, considering this is the type of album you’d find after scrolling Bandcamp for too long in 2026.
Poorly aged in quite literally every department.
For a millisecond, I thought I had gotten a /Celine/ Dion record. Really wish I did, in hindsight. Would’ve at least not put me to sleep.
OK, I’m gonna run you through a quick and simple hypothetical situation, and you can tell me what you think…
Imagine, for a moment, that you are given a list of over 1000 albums that you must go listen to. There are many mediocre albums in that list, shit, there’s even some truly horrendous ones.
You, naturally, would be not happy with this arrangement! So many boring, unoriginal and flat-out unnecessary albums, that no one should be forced to listen to.
So imagine, and I know this may be difficult, that instead of taking issue with any of those albums, you instead level that anger towards one of the most influential, experimental, and important albums in the entire canon of Western music!
Listen, I’m not gonna tell you that this is accessible, or makes for an easy listen. I’m not that far-gone, at least yet, and more over, that’d be missing the point. There are rhythms and melodies on here; but they are hidden like a thief concealing his loot. You have to, y’know, /actively engage/ with it to fully understand what’s really going on because at first glance, it really seems just like meaningless cacophony. But that is merely how it gets you through the door.
OFC, given that it’s the internet, people hate actually attempting to analyze the media they consume, and instead just flock to the lowest common denominator. Hence why this magnum opus is one of the lowest rated albums on the site, with it being under such atrocities against sound as Kings of Leon’s “Only by the Night”, and the Libertines S/T. Thinking, after all, is scary, and those records will give you fucking nothing to think about for their entire duration. I know caviar may taste odd if you’ve been eating fast-food burgers your whole life, but that’s not so much a failing on the part of the food, but rather a failing of both yourself, and society for allowing you to be like this.
At least, consider that so much obviously unimportant filler is on the list, that this album, which has been incredibly influential to experimental musicians to this very day, deserves to be here far, far more.
TL;DR: A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous.
On one hand, it’s not my favorite Bowie record.
On the other, it’s still Bowie.
Expectations: Some fun but not really exceptional synth-pop, that’s on here because they had a massive and iconic hit.
Results: What the Velvet Underground would probably make, had they stuck around to see the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the rise of neo-conservatism, and Roland drum machines.
Rock music is like a human body; it should probably have organs.
HOLY. SHIT.
I am genuinely awestruck at this album in a way I have only been a scant few times in my life. I have heard of Rundgren before, but the fact that I haven’t heard of “A Wizard, A True Star” before is insulting. Not only towards society as a whole for not considering this as a rock masterpiece, but to me, for the fact that I have claimed to be a “music nerd” who hasn’t listened to this.
Truly, this is everything I ask for in music.
It’s catchy, without ever sacrificing artistic merit. It’s technically impressive in composition and play, but still emotional and fun enough to turn it from just being proggy guitar wankery (as was the style of the time.) It’s gut-bustingly funny at times, but knows when to be sincere. It’s chaotic and diverse in sound, yet every decision Rundgren makes has it’s own twisted logic, that just *click*s into place when it happens (“Yeah man, follow up that diss track against John Lennon with a weird synth experiment! That’ll show him!”)
The production is epic, nearly cosmic in scale, yet it’s still so obvious that it’s all being made by one guy on drugs with a pretty low budget.
Apparently, this came out on the same day as Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon”, and got clobbered by it in sales, predictably. And I do mean predictably; it gets nowhere near the levels of insanity and chaos this album does, which obviously appeals more to a mainstream audience. While DSotM is obviously a great album, having listened to both of it and “A Wizard, A True Star” one after the other, as a rock fan would’ve back in that faithful day of March 2nd, 1973, it’s hard for me to say that AW,ATS doesn’t blow it out of the water in most regards. Is it recency bias or just my personal tastes, I’d say it’s partially so. But still, this record is truly something that you’ve never heard before, and will probably not hear after. I would recommend this to everyone with working ears. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna have to listen to the entire Todd Rundgren discography now, and that’s gonna take a long fucking time.
If I had a son, and he, at age 15, was making something like this, I’d be fairly proud.
If that son was making something like this at 25, I’d disown him.
Ideally listened to in a crackhouse.
Great album, but whoever told Elton John and Bernie Taupin that making a reggae song was a good idea should probably be put in a cell for the rest of their life.
Liked the album as much as the president.
The fact that this is so low in score is proof that a goddamn lot of people on this site are dinosaurs, mentally if not physically. Yes, there are, in fact, pop albums on here not made by white guys from the 50’s-70’s. Maybe, instead of just bitching about that, you could maybe talk about the actual music.
So with that said, Beyonce’s S/T is no masterpiece. Ironically, I’d say that the post-release singles are the weakest links here (especially that fuck-ass Drake verse on “Mine” that completely ruins the song), at least in the way of that my favorite songs on here, e.i. “Haunted”, “No Angel” and “Superpower”, tend to go a more experimental route. “Blow” is entirely exempt from this though, that song is well worth the hype. I’m also a sucker for a visual album too, and I’d say that the videos for the record are a cool way of representing the record’s themes.
“Sundown, yellow moon, I replay the past
I know every scene by heart, they all went by so fast
If she’s passin’ back this way, and I sure hope she don’t
Tell her she can look me up. I’ll either be here or I won’t”
Dylan’s last masterpiece.
