Imagine Status Quo crashed an Oktoberfest, put on platform boots and glitter, and recorded everything by shouting into a bucket. That's Slade. The music underneath is actually fine — simple, stompy, unpretentious party rock. But Noddy Holder's vocals, compressed and doubled into some kind of glam rock choir from another dimension, are either the best or worst thing you've ever heard depending on your mood. Without the bucket singing I could see myself enjoying this at a Volksfest. With it — 3/5, and that's partly because at least something is happening, unlike tomorrow's album.
I came in expecting "freak folk" to be some kind of unhinged banjo punk. Instead: a man whispering over a ukulele for 45 minutes. I have learned what freak folk actually means, and I have feelings about this. Devendra Banhart is undeniably doing something intentional here — it's just that the intention seems to be making me question my life choices one mumbled verse at a time. 2/5 — atmospheric, inoffensive, and somehow exhausting.
Kid A arrived at exactly the right moment. Months of limbo, displacement, chaos — and then this album opens with "everything in its right place." The pattern recognition started immediately and didn't stop. How To Disappear Completely (seen/not seen). In Limbo (was. not anymore). Optimistic. The album moves between electronic and organic — synth and glitch giving way to (acoustic) guitar and back — never settling in one place, but always purposeful. That's the thing: it sounds like controlled uncertainty. Which is exactly where I've been. Thom Yorke apparently wrote some of these lyrics almost automatically, not knowing what they meant. I think I understand them anyway. 5/5.
The songs are good. The vibe is good. The album is… all over the place. El Condor Pasa to Cecilia to the orchestral title track — they were clearly pulling in different directions, and this was apparently their last album together, which explains a lot. It holds together emotionally but not stylistically. A great collection of songs more than a great album.
More importantly: this album lives in my vinyl collection, currently held hostage in the dragon's den along with my vinyl player. When my daughter was two years old, the vinyl case happened to cover Paul Simon's face. She looked at the cover, looked at Garfunkel's hair, and yelled "Der Bart!" She was not wrong. It turns out this is a known phenomenon — people have been putting their thumbs over Paul's face for 56 years and discovering the same invisible moustache. vincetheprince sent me a review that rated the album: "5: The moustache. 5: The songs." My two-year-old daughter had apparently already written that review.
I saw this on the list and immediately looked forward to it. Childhood memories. And then it started playing and — yes. Still there.
There's a type of nostalgia that makes you wince a little. The Pokemon kind. Where you look back and think: okay, I was a child, that explains it. And then there's nostalgia that holds up when you actually test it. Hybrid Theory is the second kind. The songwriting is genuinely good. The dynamics genuinely work. And Chester Bennington — raw screaming into clean melodic singing, sometimes in the same breath — had a voice that objectively should not work as well as it does.
Rating this was hard. On a personal rotation scale — albums I actually reach for — this is a 3, maybe 4. I don't put on Linkin Park on a quiet Tuesday evening. But I don't think that's the right question for an album like this. There's a "human music" scale, a "does this define something" scale, and on that one it's a 5 without question. Hybrid Theory crossed over to people who've never heard of nu-metal. It defined a generation so completely that arguing about personal taste feels beside the point. 5/5.
Never heard of Gang Starr before this. Not really a hip-hop person either — so take this with that caveat clearly on the table. I listened twice, which feels like a meaningful data point: something kept me coming back.
I can't place it in context. I don't know where Guru's delivery sits relative to his peers, or what DJ Premier's production meant for the genre in 1991. What I can say is that it sounds purposeful and confident — like people who know exactly what they're doing. Whether I'm hearing greatness or competence, I genuinely can't tell.
3/5 — which in this case means: I think this is probably better than I'm equipped to judge, and I respected it more than I enjoyed it. Not a bad place to land.
The vocals are the whole point here — three voices stacking into harmonies that are, genuinely, impressive. For a song or two it works. For a whole album it becomes a lot. There's not much contrast, not much relief from the format. By the end it all blurs together into one long, pleasant, beige wall of California folk-rock.
2/5 — technically accomplished, occasionally lovely, and about 35 minutes too long as a full listen.
Moon Safari doesn't belong to a specific time. Some albums are chapters — you listen to them intensely in a period and then whenever you return, you're back in that room, that year, that version of yourself. Moon Safari isn't like that. It's been there consistently, without rhythm, without a particular season. More like furniture than a photograph.
A dear friend introduced me to this one, and I've been grateful ever since. Every song works. The whole thing is calm without being boring, warm without being sugary, electronic without being cold. Air found a temperature and stayed in it for 44 minutes.
"You Make It Easy" is the one that hits hardest right now. There's a person this song makes me think of. Someone who actually does make things easy — who showed me that things can be joyful and light. The song doesn't explain that. It just feels it.
5/5 — and it's not even close.
Flashbacks to SingStar. That's where this album lives in my memory, and revisiting it doesn't change the address much.
The reputation is bigger than the content. A lot of it sounds the same, doesn't stay, and within songs it's repetitive and predictable. There's also something about the delivery — the singing especially — that reads as arrogant. Not necessarily intentionally, but it sounds like a band that thinks it's very cool while making music that is, fundamentally, quite simple. If the attitude matched the reality — "hey, we make fun dance music, enjoy" — I'd probably like them more. The gap between the pose and the product is the problem.
"Take Me Out" is the obvious standout, and it earns it, repetitive as it is. But the real highlight is "Darts of Pleasure," specifically the moment it switches to: "Ich heiße Superfantastisch, ich trinke Schampus mit Lachsfisch." For about thirty seconds the whole cool-guy act collapses into pure absurdity, and the album is much better for it. More of that, please.
2/5.
A choir. Zulu harmonies, no instruments, a tradition being documented rather than an album being made. I finished it, which feels like the right data point — it held enough to keep going, even when it drifted into background noise.
Parts of it were genuinely pleasant. Parts of it were grating, the way any unfamiliar ritual can be when you're not initiated into it. I don't think that's a flaw in the music so much as an honest account of the distance between me and it.
Is this a defining album? A genre-shaping statement? I can't really say — I don't have the framework to judge it on its own terms. On the list's terms, I understand why it's here. As a listening experience for someone coming in cold: 2/5 — respectfully.
Came in expecting rock. Got something quieter, more American, more country-adjacent than the genre label suggested. Wilco sit in a space I don't have much reference for — alt-country, roots rock, whatever the label is — and Being There is a long album to spend in unfamiliar territory.
It was fine. Nothing grated, nothing grabbed. Some moments had a nice melancholy to them. As a double album it probably asks for more investment than I could give it cold. The kind of record that might reveal itself over time to someone with the right entry point — I just don't think I'm that person.
3/5 — inoffensive, occasionally warm, ultimately forgettable for me.
Every review of this album is wrong, including this one. It's not a collection of songs. It's a single 43-minute arc — tension, release, dread, beauty, back to tension — and trying to pick it apart undoes the thing that makes it work. "Money" is a great track. "Time" is devastating. But listening to tracks is not listening to Dark Side of the Moon.
I came back to it after years. It arrived differently this time — slower, heavier, more inevitable. The way it builds and breathes and collapses into itself. The heartbeat at the start and end. The cash registers. The clocks. The voices at the edges. All of it part of the same thought.
Masterpiece. 5/5. That's the honest review. Everything else is just pointing at it.
Know REM from the hits — Losing My Religion, Everybody Hurts, the later polished era. Murmur is earlier and stranger: jangly guitars, Michael Stipe deliberately mumbling so the voice becomes texture rather than meaning. It's an interesting idea. It just didn't land for me.
Nothing stayed. Nothing grabbed. Atmospheric in a way that passed through without leaving a mark. I can hear why it mattered — there's something genuinely different about the approach — but different doesn't automatically become compelling on first contact.
2/5 — respectfully unaffected.
Not my genre. I came in with low expectations and left having listened to it several times — which is the only review that matters, really.
To Pimp A Butterfly is not what I expected hip-hop to sound like. It's a jazz and funk record at its core — live instrumentation, complex arrangements, something that breathes like a band rather than a beatmaker. The Miles Davis comparison isn't a stretch. If you told me some of these tracks were outtakes from a 70s session I might have believed you.
The language still reads as image-building — the deliberate badassery of the form. But underneath that there's something genuinely vulnerable and searching. It earns its ambition.
4/5 — surprised me. That counts for a lot.
The first song sounded like a 45rpm record playing at 33 — Ray Davies has that kind of voice, slightly flattened, very English, almost accidental. Once I confirmed it was playing at the right speed, I settled in.
Arthur is a concept album about the decline of British working class life. It has ambitions. It also sounds, for long stretches, like Status Quo at a slightly slower tempo. The theatrical moments are there — occasional bursts of something more interesting — but they keep getting interrupted by perfectly competent rock songs that don't quite earn the concept they're supposed to be serving.
Easy listen. Nothing stayed. 0815 — which is a German expression meaning "completely unremarkable," and I think Ray Davies would understand it even if he hasn't heard it.
3/5 — fine, Arthur. You're fine.
Their first show under Andy Warhol's management was at a psychiatrist's convention in New York. Warhol had been asked to give a lecture. He showed a film instead, and The Velvet Underground played. By most accounts, nobody really noticed.
That image stays with me. Not a dramatic confrontation — just radical music, largely ignored, in a room full of people trained to notice things. And yet everyone who bought this album, Brian Eno famously said, started a band. The influence arrived decades late, but it arrived.
The album itself is stranger and more varied than I remembered. Lou Reed and Nico trading lead vocals — her deadpan German weight against his Long Island drawl. "Sunday Morning" as a lullaby opener, then "Heroin", then "Venus in Furs". Dark subject matter made strangely accessible. Raw by design, not by accident.
4.5/5 — and the half point is just honesty. The rest is unmistakable.
Björk is undeniably Björk. The voice is one of those things that exists in a category of its own — not quite like anything else, not quite what you'd call conventionally beautiful, but completely unmistakable. I don't know if I like it exactly. I know I'd recognise it anywhere.
Debut is her most accessible album, apparently. Electronic pop, some jazz, some dance music, all filtered through that voice. A few songs landed — the rest passed through pleasantly without leaving a mark.
3/5 — distinctive, occasionally wonderful, not quite mine.
Neil Young's voice is one of music's great polarisers. High, nasal, fragile — some people find it deeply moving. I find it deeply Mickey Mouse. I tried. I listened to the whole thing. The voice didn't grow on me.
After the Gold Rush is apparently the softer, more acoustic side of Neil Young. Which means if the voice is the problem — and it is — there's nowhere to hide. The songs underneath are probably fine. I couldn't get past the delivery to find out.
Honest rating: 1.5/5. Filed under 2 for rounding purposes.
Know the hits — "Personal Jesus", "Enjoy the Silence" — they're unavoidable. Violator holds together better than a hits album would suggest, darker and more cohesive than expected. The synths have real weight, the production is meticulous, Dave Gahan's voice suits the material perfectly.
But nothing surprised me. The hits are the peaks and the rest is good without being revelatory. A very well-made album in a genre that isn't quite mine.
3/5 — solid, dark, accomplished. Just not mine to keep.
The title promises to destroy rock & roll. As someone who has nothing against rock & roll, I approached with appropriate suspicion. The album does not destroy anything. It samples everything — pop, disco, house, dance — chops it up, and reassembles it into something genuinely fun.
Never heard of Mylo before this. "In My Arms" turned out to be something I recognised without knowing where from — that kind of track, the one that gets everywhere. The rest of the album holds up around it. Upbeat, playful, unpretentious. Does exactly what it sets out to do.
3.5/5 — filed under 4. No genres were harmed in the making of this review.
Loud, melodic, guitar-forward alternative rock from 1992. Bob Mould knows what he's doing — the songs are well-constructed, the energy is there. Nothing offensive, nothing remarkable.
I enjoyed it while it was on. The moment it stopped, it was gone. Sometimes that's just how it goes.
2/5 — pleasant enough, remembered by no one, including me.
Never knowingly listened to bossa nova before. I recognised the style — that gentle, warm, rhythmic thing — but didn't have a name for it. Two songs in I already loved it.
Tanto Tempo is the perfect warm evening album. Garden, beach, someone you'd like to spend time with. Romantic without being sentimental, calm without being boring. Bebel Gilberto's voice sits exactly where it needs to — unhurried, close, like it's not trying to impress anyone.
It turns out bossa nova is Portuguese. Brazilian Portuguese. I didn't know that either. Everything about this album felt like a small discovery.
4.5/5 — filed under 5. New favourite genre.
John Lennon and Paul McCartney apparently called Harry Nilsson their favourite American artist. I mention this not to disagree, but to establish that reasonable people can land in very different places on this one.
Nilsson Schmilsson jumps between styles — piano ballads, rock, pop, something that sounds like a German cabaret — without much holding it together. Individual songs are fine. As an album it feels like a playlist someone compiled by accident. "Without You" is genuinely great. The rest is a lot of genre-hopping with varying results.
2/5 — more of a collection than an album.
Rumours was made by a band falling apart. Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks splitting. John and Christine McVie divorcing. All of them still showing up, still recording, turning the wreckage into something. The result is one of the most hit-dense albums ever made — "Dreams", "Go Your Own Way", "The Chain", "Gold Dust Woman" — almost every track landed.
I listened to it in the car, driving my daughter to daycare and back from a Familienfest. When "Go Your Own Way" came on, she said: mama always listens to this song. Then she wanted it on repeat. A song about a painful split, my kid in the back seat, a family event at the end of the road. I didn't say anything. What would you say?
The patterns keep finding me. 5/5.
I have now listened to two Neil Young albums. The voice remains high, nasal, and fragile. It remains, for me, deeply Mickey Mouse. "Heart of Gold" is genuinely lovely — probably his most accessible song, and it earns it. The rest of Harvest follows the same pattern as After the Gold Rush: well-crafted songs I couldn't quite get past the delivery to fully appreciate.
Apparently I own a Neil Young vinyl. It's in the dragon's den. It can stay there.
2/5 — consistent.
Johnny Rotten, post-Sex Pistols, has decided that music is the problem and sets about fixing it. The solution: remove the music, add beats, and talk complainingly over the top in a voice like a kettle that's given up on boiling. Bonus points for being anti-religion in 1978, which was very brave.
I respect the artistic intent. I do not respect my ears enough to sit through this again.
1/5 — avant-garde, which is French for "I don't get it, but I'm also not sure I'm wrong."
Sepultura are a Brazilian metal band who decided to incorporate their indigenous roots into this album. The idea is good. The execution is mango ice cream with tomato sauce — each element fine on its own, but served together in a cone, which as my daughter would say, is so ein Quatsch.
The metal sections are heavy and competent. The indigenous sections are interesting. They don't talk to each other. They just take turns. Where you might expect something genuinely hybrid — the two things bleeding into each other, like Kendrick folding jazz into hip-hop until you can't tell where one ends — here you get a metal song, then an indigenous interlude, then a metal song. The seams show.
2/5 — good ingredients, wrong recipe.
Five listens in and still going. That's the review, really — but I'll elaborate.
Brothers came out in 2010, which matters: it's upstream. The same raw, blues-rooted fuzz that runs through All Them Witches, King Buffalo, The Murlocs — The Black Keys were already there, doing it with just two people making far more noise than two people should. Dan Auerbach's voice, the minimal approach, the honest dirt of it. You can hear where a lot of what came later learned to walk.
It's also the album I'd put on for someone I want to introduce to my taste without hitting them in the face with a heavy bong in a mosh pit. The entry point. The thing that gets you to the door before you find out what's behind it.
5/5 — belongs in my world.
