1001 Albums Summary

Funk from the future. Liquid, funky, aggressively digital with a human touch (even if the human touch is mostly sex-crazed)

Cute, if a bit lightweight.

Not unpleasant - but I'm a Bowie fanatic and even I would never think this is in any way essential.

this record was fun FUN! it really rocks ROCKS it's so diverse VERSE It blew off my socks SOCKS

Always surprised by how sprawling and laid-back the E Street Band sounds. Even at the height of their stadium power and sheen, they could be just as easily sweating it out in a dive bar to dancing drunken patrons, and that's infinitely compelling.

I grew up on Scrubs. I'm pavlov-trained to have Big Feels about Dreaming of You. it's like a secret government agent activation phrase for me. DO YOU HAVE AN IDEA HOW MUCH IT TAKES to make me hate a record that has this track on? THAT is the extent of this record's vileness.

Damn

Fun (at times)

Imperial Age excess and indulgence - with the tunes to back it up. It's easy to talk about the high points, as this has more belters than an average band's whole discography. The record also has obvious flaws - it's bloated, incoherent, poorly organised; another band with another producer would have concluded they had material for 2 solid albums, and a handful of b-sides to boot. But if you sit with it, it quietly turns those flaws into part of its strength: this is not one record, it's an overly ambitious, maximalist expression of a creative voice. Billy Corgan wants to show the world all he can do, and he'll leave no stone unturned in the process. Turns out, he can do a fair bit. Lush, emotional strings, fire breathing guitars, hazy layers of melancholy and urgency, beatle-esque winks and adolescent sneering rage. The sprawling incoherence of all this mashed together over two, long CDs could just be careless and boring, but it turns into an extended stay inside a pretty singular mind, in all its pretty and ugly facets; like reading through a year's of a messy, intense teenger's diary. But damn, this messy teenager can write a song.

Mature, well written, self-assured, richly produced - but lacks the edge and urgency that makes other Dylan works great.

Punk flash, rave energy, face meltingly unique.

Welcome to the Jungle is immediate 4/5 Most of the rest of the record is more on 2/5 Settling this with a very uneasy average.

For a band named after a sex toy, how is the music so flaccid?

This is the record with Highway Star and Smoke on the Water on it, and SOMEHOW it's still better than you expect it to be on that basis. Absolutely monumental.

It's Dolly, what can you say. funnily enough every time I found myself "what ARE these lyrics, Dolly", it was one of the Waggoner co-credits - how quickly she outgrew her mentor.

Both raw and complex, sounds incredible and hits deep. Really inspiring.

going by how many times I've put it on again, this actually wants a 4. Splendidly crafted pop with an earnest and restless heart.

great record, great sound, great all.

It's just much less interesting than it pretends to be.

Colorful instrumentation and creative arrangements can't redeem songs that would need a prodigious amount of drugs to be enjoyable.

Sounds impressive and wonderful - but a whole album of this with nothing really dynamically different (something louder or faster, something with instrumentation) falls a bit flat.

How does it manage to sound so fun and accessible, and so strange and quirky at the same time?!

Actually, better than Loveless

Man, some of the cats on this can really play

Lucky man? More like lacklustre man.

one of the first things article about this record tell you is that Young and his band were stoned out of their mind on a concoction of weed and honey when they made it, and weed and honey IS what this sounds like. The mellow sound, while great, makes the album a touch monotonous; Revolution Blues stands out over the bunch as the menace breaks through it uncomfortably.

A band that can do anything - and (mostly) decides to goof around

Excellent band - I was surprised at how dark and swampy this sounded.

Less refined and mature than the REM to come, a glare of moody post-punk inflected indie that I enjoyed way more than I thought I would.

A popstar who dreams of being a tradwife on Quaaludes who dreams of being Bonnie in Bonnie and Clyde. I'd say it's much ado about nothing, but it's really not worth disturbing Shakespeare for.

Great sounds and perfect arrangements trying to prop up lacklustre songs with little to say and even less urgency to say it.

This sounds like stoned people look when you're sober.

I'm actually a CHVRCHES fan, but I find this confusing. It's not a bad album, but I'm not sure I hear something in this that really hits like a generational statement, that makes this a record you MUST listen to before you die. Also, while this is their debut, their specific voice and creative vision comes through MUCH stronger in later records, especially Screen Violence. I think there's a much better argument for including that record in a list like this, rather than their debut.

Fun!

this is clearly a great album, with excellent musicianship; I would have enjoyed it more if it had been just a bit rawer, if it had just a bit more grit to it; as it stands,its defining feature - the incredibly smooth, refined sound - is also a bit it's limit.

Solid record, great beats, stellar attitude, often funny (in a way that still holds up) and the list of guests is a real who's who. possibly a touch long, would have benefited from a little more trimming.

It takes guts, vision, and a whole heap of sheer musical talent to take these components - primitive beats, noises that are truly industrial, shouted spoken word vocals - and have something emerge that is clearly and recognisably music.

There's an explosive energy to Neil Young live, where his amp is on the verge of bursting into flames and he himself is not far off either. Every time with his records I expect to find that, and tantalisingly, it peeks out of numerous songs; but the laid back folk wins out most times, and leaves me wanting more.

If I have to see one more of you morons talk about Johnny Cash I swear to god

If the rest of britpop had more songs about poppers and ill-advised gay sex,I could maybe like britpop.

Heard bone-crushingly loud at 2AM, covered in other people's sweat, this may well be a life-changing record. As a headphone listen, it's just a waste of everyone's time.

This is the foulest, most embarrassing, most ill-considered attempt at a record I've had the misfortune to listen. It's so bad that it taints the rest of the Beach Boys legacy by association. Because of this record, I now think that Pet Sounds is just about Ok. Robert Dimery owes me money for having me listen to this.

Wanted to give this a 4/5 for the absolutely incendiary guitar work, but while the riffs and solos were excellent, I think the record suffers a bit from Mustaine's mediocre vocals, which fails to tie all the fretboard firework into coherent songs; also given the album's length, a bit more variety in terms of tempos and dynamics would have been good. Still, cool solos man.

Absolutely exceptional. A triumph of craft, care, detail, a million tiny choices adding together to beautiful, impactful music.

it's fun and sometimes impressive, but a bit too clever for its own good and not quite the sum of its parts

It's rock'n'roll, it's vaudeville, it's Broadway, it's huge fun.

the first 4 songs are a solid 4, then it dips a bit 5/5 to Eno on the production.

This would be a 3/5 easily, but knowing the rest of John Cale's career I found myself irritated by how pretty it all is. It's beautifully, impeccably crafted but felt a bit... safe? I couldn't help but think that the music Cale was doing 6 years before with the VU sounded like the future, while this sounded like the past.

If this didn't have the unhinged comedy voices (which maybe don't always work, but I can't hate), you'd all be talking about it as a pioneering masterpiece in New Wave and Electronica. Stop being cowards and enjoy your Semolina.

This is where the cultural gulf between when this came out and now makes it very difficult to hear what made this record special. However, one can hear that seeing this live would have been a blast.

It's funny just how garagey and sketchy it is, but the stripped back approach soon reveals its limits as well. Not an unpleasant album, but falls short of better efforts.

Doesn't capture some of the most compelling stuff the band has done, and ambles a bit too much into a Cure pastiche.

Ah yes, let's take everything that made a great band great, toss it to the side, and replace it with plodding folk vignettes and poor attempts at other music styles.

Another songwriter, armed only with an unhealthy fascination for the Midwest, would not be able to find emotional ballast to ground the whimsy and grandeur of the (wonderful) arrangements; fortunately, Stevens has a deeper well to draw from. TERMINALLY CLOSETED/10

This kind of punky, primitive, rock'n'roll songwriting needs to be lifted by a real urgent, raw, immediate energy in the attitude and the performances to really work. on this, it's sorely lacking.

There's more jazzzzzzz here than I'm equipped to analyse, but some really thrilling stuff too.

This is, at its core, not a bad album. It's quite listenable and I can imagine having it on my rotation in other moments of my life. But also... it's to a certain extent a nostalgic pastiche coming out in 1990, launching a cult career that, outside of a certain type of American radio and ofJam Band circles, mostly gets noticed for that time Jimmy Page joined them and they did a bunch of Zep covers. What about this MUST be listened to in my life?

People usually say that, of a specific style or artistic current, the future will remember two: who did it first, and who did it best. This record, unfortunately, is neither; it packs every cliché of late-00s indie and delivers them with little life and panache.

An ok record, with a fun strut and occasional sense of drama. Could do with a bit more rhythmic diversity.

quite nice and sonically varied. Enjoyed the soul samples and lush sounds.

Music of no consequence.

No Amount of scuzzy fuzzes and organs can make up for the complete lack of energy and groove.

The Nazz Are Blue alone flirts with a 5/5, the rest of the record settles on a more sensible 3. Even at their most confused, their orientalist psychedelia was more lively and edgy than many of their tepid, limp contemporaries, which counts for something.

I like this a bit less than I used to in my 20s, but it's an undeniable 5/5. The Intimacy and escapism of the lyrics, the songwriting, the dense and soaring arrangements, it's all generational stuff.

A tall glass of ice-cold coke on a hot day. Perfect, fun, and you just want more.