1001 Albums Summary

just not my thing i think! haven't really listened to blues for 10-odd years, and when i did i preferred it more acoustic, muddier (lol), deeper. this would be a killer kind of thing to see live but i don't get much out of sitting down and listening to it

as someone who came to metal through Deafheaven, Converge, and Holy Roar Records (remember them?) rather than the Big 4, this was such a fun first listen. the metal of 1986 feels more fluid, exploratory - it feels like this would be a thrash record with some serious qualifications these days, given the prog and goth and doom of it all. the open-road, shark-like velocity of tracks like Battery aren't dulled at all by the fact that chunks of Welcome Home just sound like the Cure - instead, they're colored by it, anger sharpening the pathos, pathos guiding the anger. in 2026, it's easy to hear this as a record made of its building blocks - speed and politics from punk, song structures from prog, soloing from classic rock, atmosphere from goth - but it's just So Fucking Fun to hear these guys putting those things together in at-the-time revolutionary ways. found this really illuminating and weirdly grounding as a piece of genre history - a feeling that is, in part, the point of a project like this - on top of being a good fucking time

had never really found My Bowie Record - a song here and there, sure, a few listens through Ziggy and Low after he died 10 years ago, but i've never been a proper fan. this thing, though, is just wonderful - title track obviously great but its precedent jam, Joe the Lion, an uptempo freakout about suicidal depression, is even more my speed. all of side a calls to mind the same face of the Walker Brothers' Nite Flights, another gated-drum and funky-bassline chronicle of life under fascism (although Scott and company allow themselves to get a little more pointedly political). unlike side b of that record though, which is Some Bullshit, the second half of "Heroes" is analog-synth brutalist-chic goodness, gorgeous crunchy greyscale ambient, the perfect soundtrack to finding a cold and ugly place very beautiful. and then there's the last track, which is, in tribute perhaps to Nite Flights, also some bullshit. down a star for that one, Dave

just really annoying, man. and i like the title track! that's not even the one i mean! that song is smarmy coming specifically from Lennon but is, as a sentiment, pretty affecting to me. but so much of the rest of this is shitty, bland blues-rock with horribly whiny lyrics. no clue what anyone gets out of the inside-baseball of How Do You Sleep? or Lennon breaking into his angry rock 'n' roll guy voice to deliver some of the dumbest lyrics he's ever written on Gimme Some Truth. the final two cuts are my favorites here - sweet, vulnerable, genuine - and even those have a line each that make me want to take this guy's lunch money. whatever, man, was always more into George anyway

he was twenty! it's hard to believe, but at the same time, it's so, so obvious. it is incredibly 20-years-old to be this direct, this naked. for all of your memories, real or invented - dead friends, gunfights, birthdays, nights spent doing genuinely nothing - to push up against each other, jockeying for significance in your young mind. when you're from someplace where much of the world tells you your life doesn't matter, it makes sense that, defiantly, every moment would start to burn a little hotter in your mind's eye what isn't very 20-years-old at all is just How Fucking Good this record is. it is just really explosively good. you could pick this thing apart, select a few lines that are throwaway or silly or repetitive, but Illmatic is an act of portraiture, and works best when viewed whole. you see the entire young man - one who sometimes lives dangerously, sometimes frivolously, sometimes reflectively, like we all do one way or another. that's not to say that the record doesn't work at the micro level at all. it does, fabulously, especially when Nas is in present-tense reportage mode. there are moments that feel like being grabbed by the scruff of the neck and being plunged into the ice-bath of a life that is almost certainly harder and more violent than yours. that second-by-second retelling of a stickup on N.Y. State of Mind, which reveals in one quick line that the whole story Nas has been so high he hasn't realized or cared that the building he's robbing is full of children? insane, terrifying storytelling. the production, too, gives you these little moments all the time. the "aren't i hot shit" beat switch on Halftime, that mournful, melting sax solo closing out Life's a Bitch, the blurred, staticky chorus of ghosts on Memory Lane. wonderful stuff, always so considered back to the age thing - there's a lyric i can't find now where Nas alludes to being a quarter of the way through his life. it really cracks this thing open for me - the gravity with which he treats the little things, the mental effort put into the rhyme schemes for bars about smoking weed or meeting girls. his childhood and adolescence were a significant chunk of his life! if you look at CDC data for life expectancy for Black men born in the 70s in the US, he would more accurately have been looking at a third of his years gone by. from that perspective, man....what a shame it would've been to not make this record. to be that age, and that fucking good, and not think the petty crimes, young loves, joint hits, friends gone (to the grave or the state) are worth writing about. what a damning, thoughtful, generous thing to do, bringing these things so vividly to life

biased, imperfect reviewer that i am, i think my impression of this record as whole is being colored by the presence of Arabian Knights, which is a monstrous song. that's not to say that religious fundamentalist communities can't be incredibly misogynistic, but jesus. we've seen, over and over again, since October of 2023 and many times before, where this dehumanization of Arab men gets us. it's a hell much worse than any foretold on this album the thing though is that this is a quite cool record, punchy and theatrical - i especially like Into the Light, which has a nice bit of Cocteau Twins to it, and Night Shift. i recently played in a band with a friend who loves Siouxsie, and now that i listen to her, it's cool to hear how much of this is in our music i know the actual review is slight, which might seem a bit bad-faith, but a lot of these post-punk/goth records will probably be similar like-not-love things for me. it's a sound i never have trouble with, but it's never a favorite either

front-to-back perfect pop music! endlessly catchy, brilliantly sung, wry and tuneful and very wise. i've loved this record for a year or two now and can't go a week without getting a song from it stuck in my head. "it's too 80s" "bad production" genuine skill issue you need to get more earnest now!!!!!

not opposed to disco in the Disco Sucks sense, but more in the sense that there are wires in my brain crossed a certain way as to make me enjoy grooves that are slower, more spacious, deeper. the rhythm section in these more uptempo songs is too quick, it glides along too cleanly along to really dig into anything a lot of this is context, of course - my kitchen with a glass of wine is the best way i'm willing to approximate a dancefloor on a sunday evening, but it's not the same. i'm sure Le Freak (burying the lede here - not a favorite!) goes nuts when you've mixed its plastic buoyancy with the sweat and skin of a crowd of beautiful people, and those Rodgers guitar licks are great absolutely anywhere pretty unreservedly in love with Savoir Faire (talk about slow, spacious, deep) and I Want Your Love, which uses the devotional aspects of gospel to make something hot and tense and desperate. otherwise, this is a respect-more-than-like situation, stunning musicianship without many songs i'd reach for day to day

i don't think many people would describe The Smiths' music as angry. they're stereotypically too po-faced, dour, depressed for anything that resembles a fire in the belly. but if not angry, then what the hell is this record? it's far from the histrionics found on occasion on their debut, but its social-issue songs weren't quite as sardonic and conceptual as they'd grow up to be - instead they're straightforward, plainspoken, very bitter and very very angry. as such, i think of this as the prickliest Smiths record, the one that lines up the least with a certain superficial perception of the band. there aren't really any great pop songs here, in the same way that the other three records have sprinkled on and the compilations contain in droves; What She Said is probably the strongest hook, and that song's dense, muscular swirl is fairly opposed to the breeziness of many Smiths hits. those highwire Johnny Marr guitar parts are here, but they're too slippery or too far down in the mix to stick in the head. bassist Andy Rourke gets what used to be Marr's spot, and fills the record with post-punk spikiness and muscular funk that aren't sprightly or pretty in the way the band often was these instrumental qualities do little to temper the record's sadness. this is a Smiths album, so we have to talk about sadness. it's here on Meat is Murder, and it's real. it's not particularly romantic, and it's certainly not cut with humor, completely upending the line so many defenders like to pull out - "you know, Morrissey's actually really funny!" and yeah, he normally is, but here he's telling us that jokes can be cruel, barbed, acidic coming out of the wrong mouth. he's recounting what might be a young girl's last words. he's gasping, dying, but somehow still alive, making the final stand of all he is - which admittedly, is actually pretty funny to say before continuing to live for at least 40 more years and being a huge weird bitch the whole time, but he certainly isn't joking when he sings it. on a lot of this record, as pointed out above, Morrissey's too angry to be funny OR sad, and despite what he'd claim on track 2 of his next record, it's a very righteous anger. it's on behalf of the defenseless, the innocent the small and frail: apart from the slaughterhouse-bound elephant in the room, he's angry on behalf of children. The Headmaster Ritual is just a beast of a way to begin a record, indicting the power and corruption rampant in English schools - corporal punishment is the oft-touted subject of the song, which isn't wrong, but its real, chilling bite comes from the sex of it all. Morrissey's always had a way with the sinister, more coercive side of sexual desire, and i think missing it in this song - "he grabs me and devours, kicks me in the showers" "the military two-step down the nape of my neck" - is to misread the severity of what he's protesting. things are no better at home, further down the tracklist, where the abuse is more narrowly physical but no less rampant, no more avoidable the final track is infamous, and look, i'm not putting it on for fun. i don't listen to it at all outside of this tracklist, but i think it's a natural extension of the callousness and brutality laid out in the preceding songs. from Headmaster to Barbarism to Meat is Murder, there's a clear line - how can our schools be civilized if our houses aren't, how can our houses be civilized if they gather around the meat of a slaughtered animal every night. it's the root of this brutality for Morrissey, which.........i don't know, man. i eat meat, but i get it. people like to close their ears to this one because Morrissey's annoying, but he's backed up by both highfalutin philosophers and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, so it's not like he's the only crank in the world like this. i think this gets under people's skin more than they like to say. anyways! that's The Smiths' second record, a couple fun rockabilly tracks surrounded by these brutally sad, very empathetic songs. if anyone's read this far, you'll have gleaned they're a very important band to me. i really relished the opportunity to return to this record, which was a bit too frosty for me to love during my high-school obsession phase. as an adult living in a world that often seems alienated and callous, i found its opposition to cruelty, violence, austerity, and close-mindedness to be incredibly moving. it seems required on this site to bring up what an asshole you think Morrissey is when writing Smiths reviews, and yeah, of course, but it's just horribly sad to me how someone writing such empathetic music could turn out that way. who knows, man, at least he gave us these songs

like if the make-a-wish foundation covered adult tracheotomy patients

nice little mood piece with a few very pretty songs, but kind of a silly inclusion on this list, even next to other records by the same band

i'm passingly familiar with music from Mali, so expected the ripping guitar work, which is great! like desert-blues breakout Tinariwen, this is just a little bit too shiny to really scratch the itch for me, but that doesn't diminish how talented the players are. doubt i'll be back to the album but man, these guys must absolutely smoke live

feels very dated in its conception of what's cool, what's edgy, what's rock and roll. honestly totally fine with the material here, besides some scattershot annoyance at the degree to which Jack White is Doing A Voice, but any media landscape that sees this as new, exciting, essential feels very far away. very sturdy collection of songs that will hopefully continue to inspire 12-year-olds to dig into guitar music, good for the background otherwise

i was fucking around on my acoustic a few days ago, and wrote the bones of a little song. hammering on and off the low e, a few more plaintive notes on the higher strings, a couple fingerpicked embellishments, but always a return to the warm, plumbing bass notes. it was gentle, it was propulsive, it was lovely, it was... Which Will. i'd just been fucking playing Nick Drake's Which Will, a perfect little song which has definitely been written and recorded before. but i think the fact that, for just a second, i thought i might've come up with the thing is a testament to the universality, the deep, old, essential nature of the best songs here. drake's guitar work isn't flashy or complicated, but it's nuanced and beautiful. every strum feels like he's digging a little deeper into the music, plumbing another depth. the vocals have a similar quality - hushed but purposeful, earthy, far older than any 26-year-old should sound. i've heard drake's lyrics described as cryptic or insular, and maybe i'll give you the latter, but lyrics like the aforementioned Which Will and Place To Be are incredibly plain, burnished and writerly but very clear. those two songs, in particular, are very genuinely perfect. dusty little jewels. as the rating reflects, i have to admit i'm not totally in love with every song on the record - even on something so short and spare, a few bits feel inessential. but i've always had a strange relationship with this one, where i know the first few songs hugely well but don't usually sit through the full thing, so with my increased familiarity, i could easily see this being a 5. for now, i'm off to learn his songs properly, and maybe stumble through one of my own, so communicative of the power of one voice and one guitar is this wonderful record

the first time an album on this list has cultivated, for me, that most special of all effects: it has invited me to listen more deeply. it's coy, and strange, and quiet, in a way that draws me completely into it. i have the urge to untie it and pick it apart i've known the title track for years, and it's stunning - there's a plainspoken decisiveness to all its lyrics that i find heartbreaking and warming at once. the rest of the record operates in a stranger mood, one that's hard to pin down, often drawn towards death, evil, misanthropy, but really funny and horny about the whole thing. even the lighter tracks are cryptic - especially Knockturne, a gnarled, imagistic take on the love song, sung very quietly and with a lot of sweetness felt totally beguiled by this record, and very sure of the many charms it will take longer than 24 hours to reveal to me. wonderful stuff!

never spent any proper time with Curtis Mayfield before today, grateful to have been given the opportunity! think i might not be the first person to have had this opinion, but what a fucking vocalist. so much vulnerability and tension in his voice, captured beautifully - you can really hear every bit of enunciation through the mix, and it really works. the political nature of this album has seen it compared to What's Going On, but Mayfield is so much less smooth a vocalist than Gaye (who I do love) - there's so much wonderfully audible effort. on the darker tracks, like my favorite When Seasons Change, it sounds like he's walking a tightrope, close to collapse or breakdown at all times and the band, man, jesus. should ask this record for a loan because it's got deep fucking pockets. the groove on Billy Jack is just immensely nasty, drum-tight but loping, elastic, alive. there are things here i like a bit less - plenty of others have mentioned Jesus as a lowlight and like, yeah, i can't disagree. i understand why, to Mayfield, it's of a piece with this record, but it doesn't hang as well together for a non-believer. the more down-the-line political tracks on the second half of the record also aren't quite as impressive as Billy Jack and Blue Monday People, which make the record's themes personal and visceral. still, though, just a fucking great piece of music, with a couple of new favorite songs in a genre i love but don't know nearly as well as i should. very happy to expand my education a bit and add a pretty stunning album to the collection

staggeringly great writing from one of modern lyricism's best. she's so cutting and conversational and smart here, so deft with perspective, both cynical and empathetic. hard to see how any Blue acolytes took this as an abandonment when it boasts lines like "and you were in the parking lot/subterranean by your own design/the virtue of your style inscribed/upon your contempt for mine" maybe it was the knotted, hard-to-parse argument-song Don't Interrupt the Sorrow, a track which any Joanna Newsom fan with a yen for exegesis should look up immediately. more likely, though, it was the jazz. the noodly, layered, ever-shifting jazz, way less shiny and straight-ahead than the likes of Steely Dan would ever put down. i think the proggy complexity of these tracks really suits Mitchell's lyrics, and does some fantastic meaning-making itself on tracks like The Jungle Line and Harry's House/Centerpiece, the latter of which uses the genre's semi-antiquated reputation to the song's incisive benefit and man, so much of this is just Gorgeous! the sighing horns on The Boho Dance, that repeated lyrics at the end of Sweet Bird, the Bound 2 gospel-eruptions of Shadows and Light - all stunning. masterful, complex record, probably my favorite Mitchell and one of the more perfect sets of words anyone's ever set to music

first real experience with Public Enemy and, like, hm. always thought i'd love them, and maybe Black Planet or Nation of Millions will click harder, but i'm not in love with this. it's a very angry record, which is fine, cool even, but there's a kind of haranguing quality to it when you combine the sentiment with its length that is a challenge, especially with my habit of listening to these multiple times to really wrap my head around them. Chuck D (wonderful voice, incredibly cool, genuinely really excited to hear more of him) has a real bitterness towards other Black people on this record that is certainly earned and complicated and really not my thing to dissect but it makes things a bit less righteous and more lecture-y. still, though, this is just a very cool block of sound. sampling's great, production is funky in a sort of loud, sweaty way, and when the lyrics are on point (which they mostly are) it's really easy to get caught up in the energy. also, just scrolling through their discography, and man, what an incredible set of album covers. just such a cool, cohesive, accurate-to-the-music set of visuals. anyway, that's not really relevant. i liked this! i think i seem negative because this has been a week of total heaters from the generator, and i expected this to be another one. oh well!

nice voice but i'll never really get along with these folkie adult-choirboy types (james taylor, when this list gets to you, it's on notice). i do genuinely like Everybody Loves Me, Baby - rousing, caustic Dylan-lite - and The Grave, everything else isn't worth much

really wanted to love this for nostalgia's sake, and for 9 minutes, i totally did - Jesus of Suburbia is a bratty, pathos-laden power-pop epic, incredibly confident and winning. but this doesn't last - the politics, though refreshingly bold today, wear thin really quickly, and then we're left with a lot of overwrought balladry and rock n roll with very little bite. i'm happy that this album once sounded dangerous and important, and you could do so much worse than lots of what's here, but i'm 28! I've moved on and that's fine

would be pretty easy to dismiss this as The Killing Moon and eight other songs, and like.....it's easy because it's true. but i just can't bring myself to not enjoy this kind of jangly, gothy proto-indie. just my kind of thing, man

Fever to Tell was always my YYYs record, so this one was new to me besides the first two tracks - the second i'm a little bit tired of, the first is staggeringly good. with the rest, it's similar to that previous record in that they're a loud band whose best songs are quiet. most of the songs here are solid, but the quavering, vulnerable Soft Shock and, much later in the tracklist, Hysteric, a head-over-heels infatuation song which comes surprisingly close to capturing the lovely heartbeat-pulse of Maps. have never listened to the record in between this and the debut, but this is very much the sound of a band with legs to me - one that knows what makes them good and can transmute those qualities into directions that couldn't have been entirely predicted, especially back then. i think it'll endure in my head for a little while - it's hard not to be moved, ecstatically or sentimentally, by Karen O's wonderful voice, or the nakedness of some of these songs

have loved 21st-century Fiona for a long time now, so was very happy for the opportunity to go back to the beginning! i know people love this one, but to me, it's very much her first record and she was very young! stunning voice as always, and the run of tracks from Sullen Girl to Slow Like Honey is pretty inarguably great, but a lot of the others go on too long, and the jazz influence on display here is a little stale compared to what would come later. always listenable, always beautifully sung, just very much her first record

the generator's first Dylan! hell yeah dog. nearly half of these tracks are stone-cold all-time classics, and the comparatively throwaway ones are lovely - Oxford Town is a looser, more conversational take on protest music that loses none of its power for its attitude, and Bob Dylan's Dream is tear-jerkingly plainspoken and lovely. he does get a little silly with it at points, but i love it when Bob gets silly with it! he wouldn't be the same songwriter if he couldn't put Honey Just Allow Me One More Chance on the same record as Masters of War. love Bob so much - my first favorite artist, a fan from age three - and the genius of his early work, so quickly surpassed, is stupefying. can't wait to read reviews of this on here and get really mad about comments on his voice

as someone who hasn't had the urge to listen to zeppelin for about 15 years, i'm shocked by how much i like this! all the blues-rock i've been given so far has been middling at best, but i'm reminded why these guys are the best of the genre - big, heavy, dead-eyed grooves, played by a fucking massive rhythm section will always do it for me. there's a sweetness and playfulness to disc 2 that caught me off guard as well, and from the peak of Kashmir through the four following track might be the record's best stretch. it's kinda dumb, and it's not all essential, but there's purpose behind the spread here. Physical Graffiti feels wandering, searching, imposing, a band who could pump this shit out in their sleep looking for various ways to go further. good stuff!

don't like this at all! the vocal jazz/city-pop thing feels fake, and the 90s rock songs buried under it are dreadful

musical theatre for dumb guys. production's great, appreciably silly, overall good hang

genuinely quite tickled by this very earnest record, which uses dub as a launching point to access all sorts of music which exists in that deep, repetitious vein. perfectly reasonable mission, unfortunately undertaken by a white British guy with a signature hat. it's really silly, and doesn't feel like it's in particularly productive conversation with any of the genres Wobble's pulling from, but it's far from boring! flamenco, raga, Jez's terrible music from Peep Show - nothing's off limits here, and like. that's Not a Good Thing. but it's kinda fun anyway!

my best friend is a big Paul Simon fan - she'll come up again when we get to his solo work here - and i remember her playing America a lot the summer before our senior year of college. it was hot as hell, and we were kind of almost adults, and both our futures and the country in which we figured they'd take place seemed complicated and romantic and grand. now i live thousands of miles, a continent, a hemisphere away, and America just makes me feel sick. as a place, it seems flat, and small, and mean, and so does a lot of the rest of the world, and i'm completely unable to conjure up the romantic grandeur of what's undoubtedly the best track on this record the rest is just...a bit odd? lovely little vignette-y songs, often wistful, occasionally way too cute, sometimes jarringly experimental, though that bar is low for these guys. i really admire them both as songwriters, and love Simon as a singer, but the ping-ponging of this record between something more conceptual and songs about how it would be nice to go to the zoo (sure) or be a cornflake (what?) doesn't work for me all too well. this was a (very pleasant, very listenable) bit of a miss, and i'm looking forward to work by the duo that's maybe a bit more central between the poles of being labored and carefree

came for chungking express and a jens lekman sample-source, stayed for the wonderful vocals! the second half of the record is a bit more cookie-cutter, but it's all so well-sung and pleasant, and the good stuff is genuinely emotionally diverse and interesting. lovely!

fun, clever, surprisingly tuneful little record - it's easy to see how new wave grew out of bands like this when early punk was so arch and jangly. it's probably not gonna blow any minds if you're, like me, knocking on the door to your 30s, but these Adverts are good hangs! extra significance for being the first completely new to me artist so far - was fun to have no concept of what to expect

i feel like the Run DMC guys would appreciate, conceptually, keeping it real. and so: man, i fucking Hate the two big songs from this record. Tricky is the most annoying song in the world and anything involving Aerosmith sucks shit automatically. so, we're left with a bunch of Run DMC deep cuts, which are kind of okay. cool production, tolerable rhymes. maybe there's gold hidden after the first chorus of Dumb Girl but i heard it start up and just decided that track wasn't for me. highly influential and important but wow has this aged poorly!

wonderful, beautiful, very big music, earnest enough to meet the challenges of one's most difficult experiences but loud enough to drown them out if need be. the last four tracks are particularly great - long, unwieldy pleas for divine intervention or, barring that, getting totally obliterated on a million different drugs that's to say nothing of the record's infatuation with the earliest days of rock n roll, which i find very powerful. love how these guys elevate the sounds they grew up with into something blown-out and cosmic, like they're trying to impress upon listeners the outsize influence of those records. just beautifully sincere stuff, love this!

practically everyone on here's got at least one musical opinion that would make me say "what the fuck are you talking about" so here's mine for many of you: i just can't do it with Stevie Wonder. i've tried! i've tried so many times, and it just slides right off me. the vocals are too smooth, instrumentals too cluttered, songwriting too simple. i'm rarely upset by his music, but i just don't feel it like so many others do. and so, like songs in the key of life and innervisions, which i'll return to for this project, i think this is a fine record, well played and well sung, clearly very deeply felt, that just doesn't excite me at all. was really hoping to be made a convert, and i guess there's still time, but i think he's just not my guy :((

love this record, a consummate performer at the peak of his vocal power. the version of Bring It On Home had me fully in tears at like 11am

find it very hard to get excited about conscious rap which, as a genre tag, feels stuffy and moralizing, more focused on being an alternative to something else than anything in/of itself. it also immediately invites itself to scrutiny - i find the homophobia and misogyny here a lot harder to forgive when Common's positioned himself as a healthy alternative to hip-hop's regressive aspects. maybe he's only interested in the aspects that feel regressive for straight guys, i don't know. the whole thing of pretending there isn't any "consciousness" to Mobb Deep's street-level grindhouse, or Wu-Tang's comic book mythmaking, is so silly. but! i'm reviewing a record, not a movement, so i do have to say that this is pretty listenable as a collection of songs. it does sometimes get preachy, the awkward moments stick out really noticeably, and like so many potentially-good hip hop records it's just way too fucking long. but i just can't stay mad at the Dilla production, the lovely Soulquarian features (god, was D'Angelo a breath of fresh air) and the energy and inventiveness, which i have to admit to, of Common at the center. he's a sturdy MC with a kind of warm expansiveness to his lyrics - i can't say i find him too exciting, but you do get the feeling he was going for a real everything-record here, and i did find myself wrapped up in that. won't return to this, but it does seem like a really well-executed example of a certain thing that isn't entirely for me. looking forward to getting to Be, which appears more focused - here's hoping!

turns into a kind of pleasant much once you get past the first two tracks. fine songs, but just kind of insistent and loud, big simple drum parts and chiming guitars and not very good lyrics. it all glides right past me. that opener, though...not sure if anyone's ever come up with this take but that's a pretty good song!

monstrously produced, very well-rounded, hugely entertaining record during which i found myself hanging on Cube's words, wondering how sideways he'd approach the next line. the best stuff here uses that insane charisma to create a persona that still feels prescient - virulently angry, shamelessly prejudiced, a whirlwind of bad vibes that's loudly condemned and secretly revered by anything even approaching mainstream America. much has been made in the 1001albums comments of this record's misogyny, which is notable. far be it from me to be the Misogyny Arbiter, but it feels more like intentional (and poorly aged and clumsy) controversy-courting, as well as a part of Cube's general mistrust for nearly everyone. i don't blame anyone for being turned off by it, but between the man's 30-plus-year marriage and the fairly self-deprecating turn he takes on It's a Man's World, it goes down easier for me here than on other records. taken as a whole, i think this is a wonderful album of character work and a canny assessment of the place of hip-hop and Black men at the end of the American 20th century, AND it sounds good as fuck! i get what there is not to like, but also, man, what's not to like?

often guilty of reviewing the reviews on here, but jesus, you're all weird about sex! i'm sure many listeners claiming they have no way of relating to this album have had it, and if you haven't, you've wanted it, which gives you plenty to chew on regarding Heaux Tales. when it's not being had on this record, it's being desired, discussed, dismissed. which is, in my experience, like life! i'm not sure why we've collectively decided something so central to human experience isn't worth singing about especially when it's being sung like this, because good lord can Sullivan sing! she's got this agile, androgynous voice that bowls me over on pretty much every track. whether she's slipping into a kind of knotty, diaristic cadence on the opening track or belting through the closer, she always impresses. this does, to me, extend to the lyrics and stories. they're blunt, they're sexy, but they're layered, especially when you look at them across the record. i think the more straightforward tracks work well to show the absolute power sex can have over us, why it so complicates things, the high we're chasing - it makes the cynical use of sex on Price Tags richer, and the absence of connection on Lost Ones more devastating. the latter really deserves a mention - i was broken up with by the person i thought (and still, delusionally, graspingly think/hope) i would marry at the beginning of the year, for reasons completely my fault, so naturally this made me cry so hard i dropped a mug of tea all over my desk and had to tearfully, snifflingly clean off my laptop/phone/rolled-up Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie poster anyway! sex, love, power, self-worth - all essential, visceral parts of being alive, all worth writing about. can't wait to get back on this soapbox even more loudly when Marvin Gaye's Let's Get It On comes around

dylan returning from the wilderness but still on the back foot, dejected, wary, wandering around with his beating heart in one hand and a knife in the other. his take on the blues here is very warm, but in a blurred, spacious kind of way, and it's never raucous or vague like so many blues records can be. the lyrics, whittled down to their essentials, are gorgeous, so plaintive and naked in their hurt, anger, humor. one of his finest records, familiar sounds whipped up into a singular miracle

probably the single best way you could spend your evening at the time, but i don't feel like this works all that well as a record. the band is tight as hell, Brown sounds great, but the crowdwork, extended vamps, medleys etc just make it hard to dig into the actual songs. it's a very pleasant listen, but the live nature of it just makes things run together

somewhere in my heart, this is a perfect record. it certainly was when i was 15, and it has informed so much what i'm looking for in music. from mbv to Neurosis to Albert Ayler, i'm always looking for something with the dynamic range of Siamese Dream - its heart so firmly on its sleeve, the way it is either pummeling or floating, the totally fucking locked-in drums. but now i'm 28, and it's a bit too long, and the dumb-guy riffage on a lot of the back half isn't all that appealing. i also think it's easier to be embarrassed by this record given what Corgan's grown into - i try to not let that faze me, but it's not all that easy. the earnest sweetness still goes down easy for me, the angst not so much still, though. they put fuckin Today on this record! Mayonaise! motherfucking Cherub Rock! at it's best, there's little better. the guitar sound is as exacting as it is loud and smeary and wild, and when Corgan's anger is in check and the band is all rallying around that wall of noise, i couldn't be more thrilled. you could cut this down into a perfect record, but i think i would've bristled against losing some of the sprawl when i was a superfan, and i still would. the mess is part of the album, and it makes the peaks that much higher

agree with the consensus that this plays marginally better in French - for a non-speaker like me, it allows a more direct connection with Chris' lovely, powerful, calibrated-yet-smeary voice. when he lets his melodies breathe, slows things down, it's very nice. but i have to admit to finding this really anonymous - i've never been a fan outside of Twisted, and my senior year roommate People, I've Been Sad-ing her way through multiple lesbian situationships, and this confirmed that Chris isn't really an album artist for me. nothing bad, but nothing that sticks

i'd like to tell you about my friend Ricky. he started attending my school in 9th grade, and we were inseparable. where i was withdrawn, he was affable, unfailingly polite to every adult, hugely smart - but also mercurial. prone to impulsivity, anger. he plunged headfirst into things that seemed dangerous - fairly tame drug use, hardcore shows - while i looked on from the edge. there was a darkness in him that made me more comfortable with my own, and we built a secret language out of art that seemed to draw something black out of being alive, everything from Peep Show to Cormac McCarthy to, yes, Superunknown. i don't know who heard this record first. it feels like it just appeared in our lives, uploaded into our brains. the first memory i have of it is playing through Drown Me In on the drums, riding out that eternal Zeppelin-groove, bouncing and sticking to the bassline, deeply fucking in it. the other memories are much more communal, and consist often of Chris Cornell impressions, growling and wailing and purring through these songs in our own weak falsettos. what struck me upon returning to this record, for the first time in over a decade, was the lines i remember singing. for example: "the day i tried to win, i wallowed in the blood and mud with all the other pigs" "down in the hole, jesus tries to crack a smile beneath another shovel load" "shame, shame, throw yourself away, give me little bits of more than i can take" writing these out, reading them back, well. it's not poetry. and maybe we just sung that line about the pigs back and forth to each other because Chris Cornell sounds cool as hell when he sings it. but what strikes me is the way these songs verbalize moving through struggle, which we were both kind of always doing at the time because that's what it feels like to be young, and how nakedly we related to those songs. there was no question about whether we, too, felt like we'd fallen on black days, because why would we listen to it if we hadn't. i guess what i'm trying to say is that there's a memory-Superunknown that i thought i'd try to avoid review before leaping into it entirely, one that lives mostly in the b-side, that is expansive and gothic and really full of pain. it doesn't have a lot to do with Spoonman, it certainly doesn't include My Wave (that song sucks!), it is a slow and lumbering thing walking across an eternal desert under enormous weight. it is (or, personally was) a way for me, and my friend, and many other people to access a real earnest kind of darkness that was already living in us anyway, and to be buoyed through it. i can't pretend i still love Superunknown, the real 15-track 70-minute album. the sprawl - part of the appeal at the time, i think - and its pseudo-classic-rock dumb guy riffs hold it back for my current tastes. but god, do i love the record that lives in my head, earnest, heavy, comforting. i hope that teenagers haven't grown too online and cool to let this be an access point to challenging feelings, a way to learn to smother them in downtuned guitar until they go away, a friend

by no means a Bruce hater but this one just doesn't do it for me. what was once such a fluid, agile band feels flat and staid, and many of the lyrics here don't land. have also always thought the Boss sounds just awful on the title track, such a strained and ugly vocal from a beautiful voice. do love Dancing In The Dark - that "my clothes, my hair, my face" lyric has more feeling than much of the record - and I'm On Fire, which is a genuinely perfect song, so good that i'm bringing the record's rating a whole star up from what i planned on giving it

very effective imagining of cartoon-California, and i think an interesting way of engaging with Black music past - funk, obviously, but Snoop carries with him the almost-feminine slickness of r'n'b - but just not really my thing. i'm too much of an east coaster, art this Californian sets my teeth on edge, as perfect an expression of what it wants to be as this is

listen, i was 15 when this came out. it is therefore just genuinely impossible to overstate this record's impact, prevalence, quality. i think it's perhaps my first real-time encounter with a masterpiece, a feeling i chased for years, staying up on a school night for a first listen i was anticipating, wanting to react along with the internet to the emergence of something new and exciting. i wasn't early to this record - i think it took til end-of-year lists for 2012 came out for me to really engage with it - but when i did, it was breathless, comprehensive, filling up my ears and eyes and mind. 13 years later.......fuck, man, it's just as good. it is genuinely That Good. the most obvious analogue for Kendrick Lamar on this album might be a short story writer, but i think he moves more like a film director here - everything hangs together, true concept-album style, but he's so exacting about his framing, the voices he harnesses, the amount of a scene he needs to give the listener before he's out towards somewhere else. the use of perspective here is just insanely ambitious - the way the journey to see Sherane from the first track is recontextualized, quickly, casually later on, or how Backseat Freestyle becomes an entirely more self-conscious song with its little spoken word intro. i think, at 15, i was conscious of my status as a pretty casual hip-hop fan, as a young person, as someone maybe somewhat easily impressed. i think i wasn't entirely confident that this record was as good as it seemed. more than a decade on, with this album calling to me more often than many of my other most cherished records from that part of my life, i think my rapt, hanging-on-every-word first listen was just a fair reaction to a record that's fuller, more purposeful, more confident than most anyone's musical output. the mass anointing of Kendrick as a star is perhaps the most confident i've ever felt re: contemporary mainstream culture, and GKMC stands as an example of something very sophisticated and well-crafted wearing mainstream clothes becoming ubiquitous through sheer undeniability. towering 21st century masterpiece that, despite how foreign its content might be to me, feels deeply entwined with my adolescence and young adulthood. love love love

huge week on the generator for high-school-age me! i've loved the Beasties for a while, but i think even as a young person this one seemed a bit inessential compared to what would come next. they've got tons of personality, and it's pretty clear why they were such a sensation right away, but this just doesn't stack up to the next few records, and some of the lyrics have absolutely curdled in adult ears. it's prodigiously, charmingly annoying, but still annoying at the end of the day - can't picture ever putting this on over Paul's Boutique or Ill Communication

reminds me very much of pre-Tilt Scott Walker, which is obviously a huge compliment! wonderful playing (that rhythm section is wonderfully tight) and Bryan Ferry is hugely fun - wry, theatrical, self-lacerating. i can see how this would run together a bit for someone who isn't already predisposed to like the sound, but i am, so am quite tickled by the twists in the formula, and am also really content to just listen to the band in full glam-stomp mode. it's been hard for me to get a real handle on the lyrics, arch as they are, in so little time, but i'm looking forward to returning to this record (especially Out of the Blue, good lord) and getting deeper into Roxy and Ferry through this challenge!

was excited to spend a first listen with the notorious Mael brothers, but i found this to be.....well, i don't know. the complexity and frippery of it all pushed me away more than it drew me in. i liked Amateur Hour quite a bit from the jump, and after a few listens, that's still my favorite track - the rest is so ornate and busy that i can't really make heads or tails of it. i think i like it, think i'll be back to it, but the barrier to entry was a lot higher than i anticipated for a band i feel like anyone with taste adores

site deleted my whole long ass review so :((((( love outkast, love the early stuff more, this is a little too long and somehow at the same time not quite as full as their last two but it still rocks!! best rappers of all time, insane that this is their 3rd best album

sometimes it really does feel like this

just a fantastically moving record, and as frank and naked a final statement as anyone could aspire to. Cohen has always been renowned as a great lover of both God and women, and it's that quality, as ever, that makes this such a rich experience, the making personal his relationship with God and the rich, textured doubt/devotion towards a lover. the title track gets a lot of buzz, but to me, it's Treaty that's the highlight here - a song of great longing for peace, reconciliation, simplicity. to proclaim, after so many songs of struggle, lapsing faith, love gone sour, "I do not care who takes this bloody hill" - astounding. the other songs here reckon with loss and God and death with similar warmth and gravitas, but it's that one that leaves me tear up as i type out a review. but the whole thing is great, much like my newly-beloved Time Out Of Mind in its confidence and its vulnerability, and a wonderful record

i implore anyone listening to this record to forget "piano for study" ai-generated spotify playlists and yoga lesson background music, to leave aside their presumptions and step into the world Eno allows us to inhabit. this is a record of great textural beauty, warm yet removed, intimate yet stately, a synthesis of very acoustic sound - finger on piano key, vibrating vocal cord - with the mechanical grandeur of tape loops. Eno intended this to be functional music, which sounds like a dirty word these days, when you think about vibe-based playlists and AI smooth jazz, but this has none of the anesthetizing qualities associated with its most craven offshoots. it's music that heightens, not flattens. i find it invites me to lean into my emotions - if i feel calm while listening to Ambient 1, i might breathe that much more slowly. if i'm happy, i'll be attentive to the music's liquid warmth. if i'm sad, the feeling contained within might be near overwhelming. in this way, spending time with Eno's ambient is a meditative practice, a canvas upon which i can put my own feelings. this may be functional music, but its function is to amplify, reflect, engage. i can't overstate how different contemporary music would be without this series of records, and how glad i am that they exist, a gift to anyone really dedicated to the foundational processes of listening

producer: hey Van, loved the last record, you gonna give us one that's kind of like Madame George or Sweet Thing? Van: no actually, every song on this one is gonna sound like the worst song on that record producer: right Van: there's one where i say that it's a fantabulous night to make romance producer: huh, okay, well.....what about your voice, then. will you be wrapping it round your allusive, narratively rich lyrics with a real sense of dynamics and a strong connection with your band? Van: well, there's one quiet tune. otherwise really just yelling producer: ......yelling? Van: aye. about sex and lines of trucks producer: great. people, inexplicably, are going to love this Van: i don't care about that at all. they put a microchip in the jab, you know? and the jab comes out of your smartphone

found it really satisfying to be introduced to something i had never heard of - enjoying this was really just the cherry on top after a run of largely wonderful but very familiar records. i don't love Ladd as an MC - sometimes he gets the tongue-in-cheek sci-fi thing just right, but that's a hard thing to maintain, and he often ends up too earnest (the closing track) or too crude (encouraged by the Company Flow guys on the one they feature on). the production here is wonderful though - dusty retrofuturist music, electronic sounds brought over from Europe and the UK and retooled to fit a very NYC record. i don't think this is the best example of this sound - something from El-P/Company Flow themselves, or Cannibal Ox, would tick the early-2000s east coast dystopia-rap box a bit better - but it was really fun to dive into this thing unawares, and when Ladd goes full head-blown electronica mode, it's pretty great

insanely evil album! soundtrack to being a shark, the evil dead camera-spirit, or something else that has to keep moving/killing or it will die

truly just one of the worst bands to ever do it. no idea what anyone over the age of 12 sees in this gauche, tasteless bullshit

hugely brave of me to relisten to this album - including So Long, Marianne and Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye! - for the first time since the dissolution of wonderful relationship with a massive LC fan. i'd hoped to be taken back to the wind-raked Minnesota winter when i first listened to this instead of to our sunny Auckland kitchen, making dinner together, but oh well. it's still nice to be wrapped in Cohen's poetry, and to listen to this so close to You Want It Darker. it made me more able to locate in this severe, stentorian work the soul of quite a young man, someone with a whole lot to prove, who could imagine himself into a stage of life that's older and more experienced very well but hadn't actually reached it yet. i love the heart-on-sleeve simplicity of the two songs mentioned above, and the excoriating (self?) portraiture of The Stranger Song even more, which casts upon a male manipulator type a supernaturally evil shadow. it's all still wonderful, despite the circumstances and the perspective and the gorgeous weather outside, which admittedly might be coming together to bring my rating down a number. the kind of thing that could've made a legacy had he recorded it and promptly disappeared, but we're very lucky he was able to move on towards warmer, funnier, funkier provinces

i think rock from this era can be interesting in how close to its roots it remains. there's lots of blues in this, but also so much funk and soul - had never really noticed how Purple Haze sounds like Otis Redding made sinister. however, the appeal of a genre in its infancy can be kind of limited at the same time, and i don't think this record, almost 60 years later, holds anything close to the kind of power it did upon release. the band is very fine, but the songs don't add up to all that much - occasionally the minimal nature of it all feels primordial, but it's more often underdeveloped. i do like Hendrix-as-bluesman on Hey Joe, and the fairly naked nature of Manic Depression and Love or Confusion, but i struggle to connect with the rest too much, and that's before Foxey Lady, which sounds like the ur-text for hundreds of godawful sex rock songs. i don't know, i think the guitar is more interesting to me as a studio tool, mbv-style, than a live proficiency vehicle, and without a huge amount of interest in Hendrix's playing, i can't find much to hold onto here. it's all very well-performed and mostly pleasant but this just feels a bit stripped of its urgency by lots of subsequent (and even some antecedent) guitar music

undeniably perfect object that i don't have much nostalgia for and, thank god, has become almost wholly impossible to relate to. wonderful receptacles for teenage feelings, but only a few of them - Blister In the Sun, Add It Up, and the totally forgotten-by-me Good Feeling - remain truly unfuckwithable as songs provided you weren't that into them at age 14

Nina is one of The Vocalists for me, someone who seems so intimately familiar with the nooks and crannies of her own voice that every line feels like a gift. it's because of that affinity for her voice that this isn't my favorite record of hers - i prefer her sparer, more unaccompanied, more naked. it's very hard to argue with her in ballad-mode though, particularly the steady, spacey pulse of Lilac Wine, one of the places i find her band to be really special rather than a bit distracting. Black Is The Color..... is also stunning, though it's hard to think of that song as anyone's but Patty Waters'. still though, nothing short of a rich and unending pleasure to listen to Nina sing, and i hope Little Girl Blue is on this list so i can really gush

apologies for the sentimentality, but aren't Beastie Boys albums all about the beauty of having friends? about concocting a shared language - what makes you laugh, what sounds tough, what you value about each other - and then finding a way to make that language universal? well, yes, they are. they're about inventing a way of looking at the world with your boys, and believing in it so wholeheartedly you have to show the rest of us what it's all about. it's mostly because of that premise that i just love Paul's Boutique. it's also because of the samples, and the jokes, the endless quotable bars, but it's primarily about spinning all those things into a dizzy collection of alternate-universe hip-hop tropes that have a lot to do with hitting people with eggs and Bob Dylan, sold so confidently they just make sense. it's so beautifully, immediately fully-formed, it's like a magic trick. at 14 or so, when i discovered this album, it was mostly just great fun - now, there's a diamond-cut wackadoo clarity to the whole project that makes me genuinely very emotional. there's a reason my two best friends and i went as these guys for Halloween one year - they were a unit on an aspirational level, so tight, so eloquent, so funny and so sure. i'm thrilled to return to this record and find it completely singular and wonderful, its reverence for hip-hop tradition coupled with its dedication to rulebreaking in perfect balance. love these guys so much. off to eat some eggs for lunch

pleasantly bananas industrial pop, made more so by the mixing - most things melodic fairly normal, 10 seconds in BAM loudest drum machine of all time, before you have time to think the choir made up of every single person on earth kicks in and you're just off to the races for like nine minutes straight. probably euphoric if you're on the right drugs, but i found myself a little desensitized to it after not very long. the proto-darkwave Flood duo, slightly more tempered with very cool surrealist lyrics, are probably my favorite things here. hard to complain about, about as hard to feel passionately

plenty to like about this tight little record! the band is unfussy and very tight, a clear product of John Fogerty's infamous work ethic, and Side B in particular has some wonderful songs. the country-goth workouts of Bad Moon Rising and Sinister Presence have more than a little to do with heavier bands from Maiden to Suicide, and Fogerty's plaintive vocal on Lodi is just lovely. they lose me a bit in the bluesier numbers, which blend together a bit and aren't helped by Fogerty's hillbilly yowl seeming a bit put-on. it's fun to hear a full statement from a band i only know from compilations and movie soundtracks - can't say any of it surprised me, but their ubiquity certainly makes sense!

struck by the deep well of loneliness running through this record, its slow, steady night-drive crawl. it starts melancholy and drifts further downwards, towards something loose and strange, a different kind of night. not every song here sticks for me, but even throwaway tracks are very well rendered by Neil's emotive, elastic voice, an instrument he can calibrate perfectly, never oversinging. there's something focused about the atmosphere of this record that makes it stand out to me, especially for the era - it feels cohesive and considered, a long dark night of the soul in miniature. wonderfully moving stuff!

oscillates between a kind of gleaming, alchemical highway of hillbilly krautrock and total boring twaddle - not from song to song, but more based on whatever's in the air for me. there are individual moments that work wonderfully but this bores more than it inspires me unforch :((

oscillates between riding a great gleaming slipstream towards a kind of awe-inspiring, Old Testament beauty and being very very funny. just great! can't wait to dive into this band's catalogue

less an album of songs and more a sound collage of Black history wrapped around a runaway freight train. given the driving, consistent tempo, it's hard to tell the songs apart, and the vocal sampling (real and put-on) make it hard to know who's rapping them. it feels almost non-musical in that sense, more like a news broadcast, a manifesto, a montage - its primary object is conveying information. luckily this is done primarily by Chuck D, one of the great voices in terms of aesthetic listening pleasure, and the Bomb Squad, who are just relentless in their tempo but at the same time very funky and fun. the whole project is genuinely unlike anything i know in its overwhelming forward motion and vocal polyphony - it feels like a dance remix of a record that doesn't exist, or a plunderphonics album made in reverse. and if i'm making the record sound prickly, well, it is. i found August 91.... hard to love, and this the same, though bolstered by sheer originality. but at the same time, it's wonderful that listening to Public Enemy still feels like grappling with something, contending with anger and animosity and incredible noise. records like this make me feel like we're all still catching up to them

there's a sturdy timelessness to these songs - you can hear them being sung by Ella Fitzgerald or Carole King, singers who can turn tropes and standards into something wrenching and personal. fortunately, though, and no disrespect to either, they're sung by Loretta Lynn instead! she has a warm, gorgeous voice, that vibrato used to convey both power and vulnerability, often in very close proximity. to trot out a cliche with a lot less finesse, i could listen to her sing the phone book. that's a good thing, because, well. "sturdy timelessness" was the nice way of saying they get a little boring after a while. i'm pretty susceptible to the tropes here, but i understand the impetus for some reviewers to want to shake her by the shoulders and shout at her to just leave that bad guy, and the b-side suffers from overfamiliarity. though at the end of the day, it's hard to stay mad at a voice like that

some of the least exciting music in the canon to me. it's hard to argue with Little Wing (though I could manage it if I were having a bad day), and the heavy psych-stomp of Spanish Castle Magic is pretty satisfying, but this is really boring otherwise - unless you count the other song about castles, which is execrably bad. oh well. at least there's only one Hendrix album left to go!

certainly the cohesive, all-cylinders-firing Springsteenian vision it's lauded to be and full of wonderful canonical songs. i hadn't listened to this in forever, and though i loved it pretty full-heartedly as a young person, i now wonder if all those cylinders really need to be firing that continuously - the last two tracks, with their West Side Story getups and working-class bellowing, are a bit much. still, though, come on. you can't listen to Thunder Road and not feel like you're floating! you can't hear she's the one and not want to sweep some soda-counter waitress into your arms at the sock-hop the boys are holding at the Knights of Columbus hall or whatever the fuck! if there is room in your heart for exuberance and kinetic energy you Will be moved by this breathless, barreling, deeply cheesy music. i know i am, at least!

well, if there's no intelligent life up there on the moon and my broken relationship can't be mended, Heaven 17 coming back doesn't seem like the worst consolation prize! this has a pretty great head to hips ratio in terms of the part of you it's trying to move - the first two tracks in particular are funky enough to make the agitprop go down very smooth. it's not all quite so memorable, but the hooks and choruses stay strong and the production wonderfully off-kilter

unfortunately struggle with this glammed up kind of power-pop - think many of the things that people love about this are the things that don't land at all for me. the ultra-dry production, the angularity, the over-the-top harmonies - all just not for me. even Just What I Needed, a song that in theory i love, that i can see as a perfect object, i can't bring myself to love. recognizably influential and incredibly crafted, just not my thing!

can't imagine just how fucking GOOD it would feel to have written these songs. did they seem like classics? did they know they were drug-inducedly riffing their way towards a new genre? fucking surely. can't imagine writing something like Iron Man and not being certain of its longevity anyway. maybe not, as confidence is not this record's lyrical forte. what's always been striking to me about this set of songs, especially placed against the genre it helped spawn, is that these aren't songs of anger, or despair, or determination - the primary register for this record, true to its title, is abject fear. fear of war, of industry, of insanity (drug-induced or homegrown), of fear itself. it's a vulnerable thing to write such muscular songs about being so scared. the thundering drums, smothering guitars all start to feel a whole lot less like weapons and more like armor. i think it helps that that music, heavy as it is, never feels like it's quite going for Evil. maybe it did in 1970, but now, it feels so close to the classic rock of the time, just played by a band with real clarity around the darkness of the blues and the hedonism of the rock n roll lifestyle. in this way, Paranoid feels as honest a followup to Robert Johnson as anyone else - apart from the large blues influence on the songs, there's a prophetic, doomsaying quality to the lyrics that assesses the difficulty of being alive in then-modernity, with personal troubles given way to the ambient hell of just being alive. anyway anyway anyway. wonderful record! works equally well as a real Issues Album and as a piece of total Halloween-schlock, as fun and as horror-movie catharsis. it's an incredibly delicate balance that Sabbath make look like the only way you could ever play this kind of music, which is why they're one of the best to do it

listen man, it's blood on the tracks! i was like four years old autistically requesting tangled up in blue to be replayed ad nauseam on the car stereo! i once stopped in ashtabula, ohio only because it is mentioned on this record and saw a bald eagle fly over a covered bridge and it is maybe the only time in the last ten years i've felt proud to be american! i genuinely think You're A Big Girl Now is one of the top ten most beautifully sung songs of all time! this shit Lives in me, it has been running through my veins longer than any other record. every song on it is the best song on it, and i'm going to tell you why. Tangled Up In Blue - "we always did feel the same, we just saw it from a different point of view" Simple Twist of Fate "people tell me it's a sin/to know and feel too much within/i still believe she was me twin/but i lost the ring/she was born in spring/but i was born too late" You're A Big Girl Now - "i'm going out of my mind/with a pain that stops and starts/like a corkscrew to my heart/ever since we've been apart" Idiot Wind - "i can't feel you anymore/i can't even touch the books you've read/every time i crawl past your door/i been wishing i'd been someone else instead" You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go - "situations have ended sad, relationships have all been bad/mine have been like Verlaine's and Rimbaud's/but there's no way i can compare/all them scenes to this affair/you're gonna make me lonesome when you go" Meet Me In The Morning - "honey, we could be in Kansas by time the snow begins to fall" Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Heart - "and Rosemary on the gallows, she didn't even blink/the hanging judge was sober, he hadn't had a drink" If You See Her, Say Hello - "sundown, yellow moon, i replay the past" Shelter From the Storm - "not a word was spoke between us, there was little risk involved/everything up to that point had been left unresolved/try imagining a place where it's always safe and warm/'come in' she said, 'i'll give you shelter from the storm'" Buckets of Rain - "i've been meek/and hard like an oak/i've seen pretty people disappear in smoke/friends will arrive, friends will disappear/if you want me, honey baby, i'll be here" better than i ever could've put it, bob. thanks for the record.

incredibly cool and sexy, beautifully sung, about 4-5 tracks too long

very cool little record, at its best when vocalist Gerry Roslie is harnessing a kind of sweaty, possessed soul-man energy, actually using his lovely, purposeful voice instead of screaming his head off. Do You Love Me is the best example of this, and the other songs that revolve around love and sex are similar highlights - it just fits the steamroller sound of the band, panting, chasing, vibrating, a 1965 incarnation of Conner O'Malley's guy who's so horny his stomach hurts however, i've said it about plenty records before and i'll say it about plenty after, every song here just sounds the same. you really only need one. it's a fun song, maybe even a great song in a primal, essential rock'n'roll way, but you could just pick one off the tracklist and maybe come away more satisfied than if you'd listened to essentially the same song 12 times. this widens the gap between good and great, but it's cool to see how the seeds of punk were planted so early, and i bet these guys blew the fucking roof off live

swings and roundabouts on this very famous, well-regarded record that i've never cared much for. i am perhaps the only person on earth who doesn't like When Doves Cry, and i'm loath to hand it to Tipper Gore, but man, is Darling Nikki overbearing and unpleasant. the good: title track is undeniable, the first two tracks are canny interpolations of classic rock'n'roll and motown beamed in from an alien planet 1000 years in the future, and I Would Die 4 U is genuinely perfect - short song that fizzles and pops against its own compactness, sexy and uber-serious, desperate and divine. overall mixed things for me - I've never really gotten Prince fully, and this wasn't the revelation i'd hoped for

wanted to love this pretty badly - my parents are both big Mann fans, and i heard her songs all over growing up - but i think this particular record is pretty anonymous, and the Brion production is way too busy for songs this literary. I've Had It - spare, delicate, diaristic - is by far the best thing here. it's too bad this is her representation on the list, i think she's a wonderful songwriter and deserves to have her more sophisticated, better-written songs be more widely heard

very cool how the Velvets use the same drugged-out, two-chord caveman rock to all sorts of ends here - the vehicle for insane sexual desperation, the relatively straightforward backing for two short stories, a gateway towards amphetamine-nirvana. it's like they're playing six different covers of the same song, six variations on the same dental-drill theme. as such, this isn't an easy record to love, even if love for noise-rock comes easily. i, who can get down with all sorts of nastiness, am totally filtered by Lady Godiva's Operation, the world's most horrifying song that is perhaps played as a joke. but it's an easy record to feel awestruck by, awe in the proper old sense where you're sort of stunned and repulsed and terrified. the band, even more than their previous outing, turn their debaucherous lives into an aural horror-movie. it's not the fun kind, but it's the kind that lives under your skin after the last bit of Sister Ray finally fades, still there keening along to the tinnitus you've given yourself by blasting it

are there any good non-zeppelin blues-rock albums? just one?

hard not to get a bit misty about this record for many of the same reasons it's hard for me to fully love it these days: the reason being, man, we were Young! i was young, and the Arctic Monkeys were young, and they were just out of reach, a few years and an ocean away, and they just fucking Got It. they were so good at being snotty, pretentious upstarts with just enough rakish charm, at being crass but clearly incredibly intelligent, at sounding just new enough to convince the nme readers they were hearing something they hadn't heard before. and, like, yeah, they were! they were hearing a band that's incredibly sui generis, wonderful songs, so much energy. i loved these songs because it felt like i was hearing something new too, what people told me punk rock sounded like instead of what it actually was, smart and fast and hard. i don't want to be cynical about this precociously talented group of guys who i once loved, but i think it's easier now for me to see the difference this band very successfully split, the elements of their sound and lyricism that got them so quickly in with the old guard and beloved by cool young dads everywhere. it's easier too to feel that the lyrics can be too precious, the songs overcranked, it all feeling a bit eager to please - a thing that, whatever else you might be able to say, you cannot say about the current incarnation of the band. they sound, in other words, young, and that's not a quality i love in music these days. but when they pull it off, on ...Dancefloor and several others here, you gotta think that god, they were young, but they were just so goddamn good at it

always feel at a loss for words with this one. like it's pushing beyond borders we haven't even seen yet into a kind of Pure Music, intuitive, searching, deep. nothing like it!

just wonderful, vibrant playing from front to back. the way the record comes back to those bass-and-piano pulses, a kind of menacingly earthy anchor for the other, more sinuous instruments, is wonderful. also maybe the first time on this list where an album's live-ness adds to the pleasure of it - so cool to hear people genuinely hooting and hollering for this involved, deliberate (but very stylish and beautiful) music. maybe overrating this but like fuck it! talent and composition on display are without fault and i would so much rather listen to a genre of music i've never properly gotten to know than another blues-rock record from the 60s and 70s

when the guy started singing i said "fuck you" out loud

i got in plenty little digs about Van's white-boy soul in my Moondance review, but the songs are given some much-needed breathing room here, played by a cracking band, and sung by a the most crowd-pleasing version of a notorious old crank. warm, rolling, lovely stuff, but never entirely without depth or bitterness

hugely exuberant soundtrack-record, flitting shamelessly between funk, disco, samba, Bollywood torch-song, the James Bond soundtrack. it is a whole hell of a lot of fun to listen to and also probably not something i'll return to much - when it comes to this kind of thing, i prefer the music more direct and less grab-bag-ulous, so it stands to reason that the Lata-ji track is my favorite thing on offer here. still a delight, and representative of some genuinely wonderful singing and songwriting that should get much more credit on the world stage

drunk as hell and romantically entangled you know this record is hitting!!! worst d'angelo record by several miles but still deep, wide, beautiful

unfortunately kind of unmoved by this record's bluesy sprawl - very much feels like a band figuring it all out. the style is here, the heavy fear-drowned blues, but i don't find the songs and lyrics all that memorable. the band's never unpleasant to listen to, and the title track is iconic, but the rest of this is kind of drawn out and weak

first two tracks are premium Dan but I overall prefer them stranger, more nocturnal - very necessary record in their evolution as a band but not my favorite!

bullshit

it's hard to think of an album that feels more like a rite of passage for young listeners than Unknown Pleasures. it comes to you early, in whispers and t-shirt designs, ubiquitous but somehow still secretive, beckoning you towards something dark, strange, real. given the album's status, i think it's easy to be disappointed by it. i was at first, but privately - at 13 or 14, it felt hugely important to not let on that i was held at arm's length by the record's mechanical chill. the record wouldn't meet me where i was at, and it required a bit of dedication to enjoy the alien drum sound, the raw, shaky vocals. now, though, this thing goes down incredibly smooth. it's never too far away from the robot-groove of new wave or the basso-profundo caverns of doom metal, never too austere to not genuinely rock. the middle stretch of New Dawn Fades/She's Lost Control/Shadowplay is a very clear encapsulation of the record's strengths - theatrics, then hooks, then menace - and one of the best 3-song stretches i can think of. like i said earlier, i don't think i ever Fully Loved this record. i've only come back to it recently, when a bassist in a band i was playing in started ending every practice with a fuckaround runthrough of Disorder. it struck me just what a great hook the song had, how easy it was to start drumming along even though i hadn't heard the song in ten years. i came back to the record and the feeling persisted, how funny and kind of magical it was that a record renowned for its austere darkness is full of songs that hit like standards. it's maybe a strange kind of subculture to have this album as both initiation ceremony and Great English Songbook, but i'm happy to have entered into it, and i'm happy to return to a classic and find it vital and powerful, but well-worn too, like any good relationship with any old friend

incredibly cool how this album's sweaty, nicotine-stained fingerprints are all over so much music i live - trip-hop, post-rock, Tindersticks, Pulp, things which feel so genuinely sui generis, can be traced back so cleanly to one French pervert. there's a real balance here between things loose and jammy and very exacting arrangements that keep the orchestrated moments feeling like they could fall out from under you at any moment do not begrudge anyone wanting to keep away from this due to its lyrical content, but i do think that feeling of vertigo, and the lecherousness that people seem to think is an accident or just French - those are intentional! that's not to say Gainsbourg can't find something romantic in all this, conceived as it was in partial tribute to his young wife, but it's certainly provocative and uncomfortable-making by design. mileage will vary, as it will with anything. personally, i think this is far too musically electrifying and morally muddy to write off. if you want to listen to something truly disgusting that hates women and lusts after young girls over music of absolutely no consequence, there are three new Drake records that just came out waiting for you!

i already know how this is gonna go! Before Today, a bold, vulnerable, gorgeous song, is going to sit in my brain for weeks, i'll return to this record and peel back its layers of dnb/downtempo (things i'm pretty averse to) to find the warm and wounded hearts of all the songs. i mean, Tracey Thorn's voice - what a wonder! a 3 for that voice? yeah, i know, it's stupid. but for now, the productions a serious roadblock. these sound like bad 90s remixes of wonderful songs, and while i am very enamored by many of them in a way, i can't embrace them fully. as with "dated" records i love by bands like Prefab Sprout and the Blue Nile, this one will reveal itself to me in time, but for now, a 3 :/

functional!

deeply unspecial music that, for some reason i genuinely can't grasp, people celebrate for how unspecial it is, straightforward good old-fashioned rock'n'roll pints down the pub lads lads lads absolute horseshit. regressive, stupid, less than nothing - anyone could make it but it takes a real notable kind of stupidity to think it's worth releasing. imagine being proud of making this?? ugh. highlight is the way the singing Gallagher brother says "sunshine" which is actively vomitous instead of just anglo-fascist and boring

hip-hop selection on this list largely canonical and stellar but i find this one pretty annoying, sorry :(

first, Cosmic Dancer - a perfect song? very likely. in the tradition of great rock'n'roll nonsense-mysteries, a bullshit lyric that acquires a kind of singular profundity through repetition and its surroundings, Bolan's vocal halting and beautifully, the whole thing spiralling upwards towards some gorgeous amber plateau. i can't put it on without tearing up in the first 10 seconds most of the rest of this is wonderful too - sexy, idiosyncratic, zigs where so many others would zag. the horned-up blues numbers are great, but i'm a softie, and the ballads are where i really live, so it's the gospel choir on Monolith and the Monet-dotted funeral-jazz horns on Girl that i'm here for. a hugely wonderful record, tough yet tender, brash yet vulnerable, by a band i'd put off for far too long

they're all good, dynamic players but good god dude. you just cannot be serious with these vocals and lyrics

16 tracks of this coffeehouse-Springsteen, self-important, edgeless, humorless sensitive white boy horseshit Ryan Adams suck my ass!!!

i really wanted to like this, as a fan of potentially-undersung jangle pop and proper-noun song titles, but god it's a shame about the production. Comedy has the structural grandeur to pull it off, and Re-Instated is stripped down and lovely, but the rest just feels like it's drowning in bad choices. there are more tracks here that have the sturdy, commendable bones of a Flying Nun band or a Go-Betweens song, but the songwriting is so consistently shouted over by horns and strings and two million guitar tracks that it all turns to mush. sad, was pulling for these guys for some reason :(

i quite like Parklife conceptually, in that it reflects the bizarre hodgepodge of too comfortable middle class end of the century Britain directly back at the listener, always playing with several levels of irony and remove, but it's just a bit of a drag to listen to. there's so much Concept behind every bit of it that there's just not much in the way of songs. for the most part, instead of hooks, we get genres or accents - the punk one, the oom-pah one, the one with some french in it. some of those songs are quite good, but the majority of the record had me wondering if it wouldn't have been better off as a short story collection. a completely fine amount of Brit, but only when mixed with adequate levels of pop - this misses the mark, unfortunately, though i do quite genuinely respect its efforts

hmmmm just a bit too U2 big-issues kitchen-sink-80s-rock for me unfortunately! the first three tracks work well, even if Don't Give Up is really just made bearable by Kate Bush, and Mercy Street is quite beautiful if you allow yourself to feel earnest enough about the whole thing. i just can't really get with Gabriel lyrically though, it's all so staid and po-faced and Important which really drags some of the more sonically interesting tracks down. Sledgehammer, the big single and a manic sex-rock workout amongst big issues songs, is by far the highlight. bummed! i always thought Peter Gabriel would be my guy for some reason! don't think he's my guy!

pretty much completely charmed (if very much not in love with) this deadly serious, very silly record. it is very tempting to see lots of it as a piss-take, but i don't know, the political nature of the record is very earnest and it feels like it approaches jazz, funk, and hip-hop from a place of real reverence. the songs in these genres aren't always great, but they're interesting and honest, and they surround My Ever Changing Moods, a simple, shining pillar of wonderful songwriting. don't love it, happy i've heard it, happy it exists

genuine horror-movie music! i am shaken by Jim Morrison and his full-throated embrace of hard drugs and forcible sex, kept on edge by the rinky-dink carnival organ, drawn into a kind of minimalist darkness not entirely unlike the one conjured by Miles' fusion band, who are probably the best group of players ever to share a room. call me gullible, puritanical, whatever but i am kind of repulsed by some of these songs and pretty delighted to feel that way. i'd always heard Morrison treated as a bit of a joke, but being a Nick Cave fan i'm very willing to follow him through quite a few boneheaded lyrics, and the band behind him - lithe, skeletal, sinuous - is always satisfying, even when he's not. overall thrilled to come to this band and find them this good, this potent, this tangible, something i can't say i was at all expecting. no wonder people thought this shit was evil! it kind of is!

barely thought about this as i listened due to how written on my brain it is. idk man it's Ok Computer, it's probably pretty good? Let Down - what a song! Lucky - very beautiful! the rest is there too! on to something less obvious i hope!

just astonishing, man. i think there is very little music so feelings-forward as Spiritualized, so guileless and naked and huge. massive waves of pain and euphoria, filtered through krautrock hypnotism and oldies/classic rock radio, the whole meaning of rock'n'roll compressed into a pill. there are many vices and means of salvation on Spiritualized records, but they are all made of rock'n'roll, the Real Fundamental Thing that God and smack and love are all reaching towards. the title track is a cover of Can't Help Falling In Love, but it is also ABOUT Can't Help Falling In Love, how that song makes Jason Pierce feel, the experience of listening to it filtered through one man's heart and distilled. and speaking of hearts, man, Broken Heart, my god. one of the truest, simplest, most obvious lyrics there is. i love this record, hugely and unabashedly, which is i think the only way you can really love it. if you have ever been sad, been high, been in love, and/or heard music, and you are open to being incredibly earnest about any/all of those experiences, this record is here for you, and thank god that it is

kind of an overwhelming thing to get one's head around in 24 hours but luckily you've got Shakey Dog right out the gate, announcing to you that you're listening to something hugely special. bursting with detail, electric, Ghost's raps somehow even bigger than the massive beat, sticking out at wild, electrocuted angles. a brief survey of other things i love: the posse cuts, the tenacity to just rap over a straight-up unedited r'n'b song on Big Girl, the way Beauty Jackson just dissipates into the wintry air, Whip You With A Strap's nostalgia-poison, Momma's jazzy, mournful rawness, and the attempted invention of a new subgenre (underwater rap) in Underwater

not the Costello hater many here are but this just doesn't feel like a particularly strong record, caught between the brashness of his first two and something a bit classier. The Attractions' newfound polish neuters the political barbs quite a bit, and a couple wonderful melodies and EC's always-great singing and writing still can't stop things from running together some

the song of a still-warm, just-falling summer night, pulsing and crackling with potential energy but never coming to a head. the playing is so playful and curious, but it still feels like the end of something. this is another fusion Miles album i kind of lack the words for due to loving it so much - there's a whole world in this record, and living in it makes me feel more connected to my own. one of the very finest records anyone's ever made and a genuinely perfect sound-object - there might be nothing else this good, and i'm sure there's nothing else this good in the exact same way

obviously hugely influential to so much music i love but unfortunately just sounds bad and is stupid

sharp, well-sung little songs, kind of a companion to Parklife in its short-story approach to class and mundanity in Britain but subtler and more cohesive than that record, to this one's benefit. nothing that blows my socks of but there is real sturdiness and craft here, hoping to be wowed by the Davies crew a bit more next time but not complaining!

more like it, Elvis! massively satisfying power-pop record, using old genres and models to sexual, contemporary, curdled ends. tracks 1 to 7 in particular just hit after hit after hit, brilliant melodies used to sing about pent-up and unbecoming horniness, EC sputtering and swaggering his way through them in such a way to make desperation and vitriol sound like the coolest things in the world. next record is maybe just a bit sharper but this is just immediately, explosively good stuff

this is for me!! this is my kind of shit!!!

i quite like the idea of Billy Bragg, this gruff commie-poet of the masses who leaves aside subtlety for a kind of gleaming directness, but it's these lovely qualities that also inform the worst parts of his songs. there are clunky lyrics, boring tunes, the same themes warmed over and over - but god, when he's good, that earnestness and steadfastness will bring a tear to my eye quicker than most things. many of the more personal songs are lovely, and then there is the Power that one can find in a Union, a song that is so diamond-cut and eternal i genuinely thought it was a standard. to me, in the circles i run in, maybe the last genuine folk song. not my favorite record by a guy i wish i could love more consistently, but man, when it hits it hits!

really fascinating look at the state of rock music pre-grunge, a combination of the earnestness of 80s stadium music with things rawer and heavier, as well as the genre's Black music roots. the band takes a lithe, driving approach to social-issue songs, and while some can drown in their own riffage, the highlights are incredibly purposeful and clear. the songs do get a bit samey after a while, and it's too bad that the genre experiments don't work quite so well given the band's funk roots. i've heard subsequent releases are angrier, more raw, and i'm intrigued by that, given the very genuine fury of this record's closing track - i wonder if the band finds their own weird outsider path, smashing the mirror they here hold up to friendlier rock music of the era. i hope they do!