The pure sounds of 1970s cocaine. Manic, overstuffed, overwritten, overproduced, exhausting. 10/10, no notes.
Sorta samey sounding in 2026, but it must have absolutely slayed back in 1963. The best of it is still great: All My Loving, I Wanna Be Your Man, Please Mister Postman.
A bizarre mashup of John's thrown-off experiments and Paul's nursery rhymes, it's four album sides of earworms. Only the Beatles in 1968 could have forced this weirdo stuff into the consciousness of a generation.
Pure sound, total immersion, energy and mission. The pivotal album of the early 1990s. A masterpiece. Shame about the homophobia.
The most innocent of all sexy albums, the most lesbian of all hetero albums, or vice versa. I want to spread out and swim the backstroke on Dusty's voice. This album should be ten times as long.
One long song in twelve parts, but it's a very good song!
I was also an ironic asshole teenager in 1987 and probably would've liked this at the time. Some fun noise and tape experiments, some dumb smutty jokes, but it all reads mean, or cruel ("22 Going on 23"). Honestly I kind of like it nostalgically, but you're not missing anything.
Great melodies, great energy, the lyrics are absolute garbage and we all found Axl's twee vocal tricks ridiculous even at the time. It'll be in permanent rotation on radio until the end of time for all the wrong reasons. I'd erase every copy of Sweet Child O Mine before getting rid of Mr. Brownstone.
Enormously likeable, it somehow doesn't quite click with me. It's good, no question, and beyond that it's the sound of adulthood as heard by my childhood (I was 2 years old when this came out). But I appreciate it from a distance.
Pleasant loungey stuff. Odd that it should be keeping company with the most famous pop albums of all time, but I won't begrudge it. Listening to it calms me for an hour, and maybe that's enough.
What else can be said? The mythology of the band can obscure the music, and maybe the decades of listening to the music can obscure the music. But the music!
I never listened to it in the '90s, but somehow I heard it anyway? Good stuff, as Dave Grohl politely steps away from Nirvana (now and then sounding like Eels!), and opens the curtain on a fine new band.
Very much the kind of music that appears in Britbox crime TV series that I've never heard before and am intrigued by for about 40 minutes. I like it. Listen to it three or four times in a row and it becomes a sort of comforting rhythmic cage.
Somehow I overlooked this band til now. Good stuff, reminds me a little of a punkier Roxy Music. Motorcade is nice and spooky. Parade is good too: "It's so hot in here: What are they trying to hatch?"
Look, it's one of rock's greatest albums, but it's almost unlistenable in 2026. You can't go a day without hearing Purple Haze in the wild somewhere, and the other songs are nearly as ubiquitous. Strip away the encrusted mythologies and you've got some good guitar work, some mild psychedelic experiments, and a lot of Boomer macho sexual smugness. The bonus track "Red House" is awesome though.
Laurel Canyon sunlit gloominess, Maliblues. He put out a couple of the best albums of all time (Tonight's the Night, Rust Never Sleeps), and this was what he was doing when he wasn't doing that. The impulse toward Dylan-lecturing must have been strong at the time and behind every lyric is a tsk-tsking finger. Good music, but stop trying to grab the seagulls.
Foundational, impossible to dislike, even for those of us with tin ears who can only understand the rhythmic innovations academically, if at all. The sound of martini lunches, abstract expressionism, bored suburbanites having affairs with one another. Marvelous.
This is okay. The British folk stuff is seminal but the Americana is unconvincing. The sitar probably seemed like a novel sound at the time (thanks, George Harrison!) but adds an even more oddball international element to the songs. I know it's unfair, but every time I hear Pentangle I wish I was listening to Fairport Convention. Train Song and Hunting Song are hypnotic though (complimentary).
The birth of soul, the early days of an indispensible career with countless highlights. Everything's good, nothing's skippable, you'll not hear me say a bad word agin it. That said, I'm a heretic here and I prefer Sinatra's version of Come Rain or Come Shine from two years later.
Subject matter indefensible: I'm glad I don't know French. Maybe it approaches the psychosexual complexity of Nabokov? Seems unlikely. Musically excellent, but the sexy spoken word stuff can't overcome later decades of parody. The electric guitar is fantastic. All this talent, resting on such gross foundations.
All respect to Fugazi, absolute real ones. Anti-capitalist rhythm and noise, deprecated melodies. Do I love this album? I like it. It's basically perfect at what it's doing, but tbh I don't totally love what it's doing.
5/5 for Wild is the Wind, Lilac Wine, and Black is the Color. The other tracks leave less of an impression and Simone overindulges her vibrato throughout. Four Women is a minor masterpiece, but I never really feel like listening to it.
Probably my favorite of the early Gabriels, even if it doesn't have my favorite song (Here Comes the Flood). Consistently good, musically inventive, lyrically a little embarrassing (Family Snapshot). You can hear him permanently switch musical gears over the 7 1/2 minutes of Biko.
Indiscriminately horny without being at all erotic. A big theatrical rocky proggy mess. Every song seems to think it's the last number before intermission, what is even happening here? I love it.
Listenable, maybe a plausible plastic ripoff in 1998, but almost 30 years later it's just the sound of fash. Junk. Fuck nazis.
