1001 Albums Summary

Solid listen but I prefer the second half to the first. Maps is the standout.

Just lovely. Dreamy without being soporific. Psychedelic without pissing me off. Grace Slick is a bit under-utilised despite being the coolest thing about the band.

Your enjoyment of this album may be contingent on whether you liked Take Me Out in 2004 and still like it today. Luckily, I did and do. FF's jaunty, spiky hooks are hard to resist and I find Alex Kapranos' twinkly-eyed innuendos and debonair affectations to be charming and fun. The album tracks are better and more interesting than I remembered.

Pleasant but largely indistinguishable and overly loungey. I found myself craving a bit more grit and vinegar in the music or lyrics to offset the very sweet, dainty vocals. The glimmers of heavier influence are tantalising but not quite enough to cut through the sugar.

A perfect crystalline voice and nice songs, though they're not as emotive and essential as some of her older work that I prefer. The last track is a horrible direct hit to the heart of my jazz aversion and almost retroactively taints the whole thing.

Just wonderful, not a bad thing about it. It has a bittersweet melancholy warmth that's so lovely to spend time in. Sidewinder and Ignoreland are insanely underrated to me, but they're up against some all-time heavy hitters. My first five stars, yay!

The Stones aren't my favourite of the big bands of their era, but I like them well enough and I quite like this album. The songs are solid throughout but there aren't really any towering standouts for me. The miscellaneous sprawling approach has its appeals, but ultimately eighteen tracks of Stones sleaze is far more than I ever need in one go. (I could've at least done without Sweet Black Angel, regardless of how people bend over backwards to explain that it's so cleverly political and well-intentioned and Angela Davis would've totally appreciated the condescension, actually.)

Super cute. Most of the songs are too brief and sedate to really be anything, but as a whole it's a feel-good listen with charmingly melodious vocals. Nice to have this as a short, sweet sorbet after Exile on Main St.

Most of the songs didn't do a whole lot for me, though overall I liked the warmly atmospheric instrumentation and touches of fretless bass. Coyote and A Strange Boy are lovely. I can't help preferring her earlier work – I think I just prefer those higher, brighter vocals.

The title track is dynamite and the rest offer diminishing returns, but I still enjoyed this. Good vibes and great vocals all round.

Not my flavour of rock at all. Pour Some Sugar On Me is irresistible dumb fun, but I couldn't find much good will for the rest. Love Bites and Hysteria are boring dirges for such big hits, and the album could've comfortably been two or ten tracks shorter. It's so sex-obsessed that it's unintentionally hilarious, though I prefer that priapic stupidity to their attempts at heartfelt balladeering or, God forbid, political commentary.

Initially sounds like a migraine, then gradually becomes sort of hypnotic and toe-tapping. Not often pleasant but perversely intriguing, and easier to follow on a second listen. Tracks 2, 3, and 4 are hard work and physically horrible on my eardrums, but the rest are more enjoyable and less antagonistic. We Fenced Other Gardens, They Don't Want Your Corn and Flow My Tears are good. I was thinking it's music I need to be in a slightly masochistic Kollaps-y mood for – then I saw their artwork for There's Always Room on the Broom and it gave me a big chuckle.

An album that had totally passed me by. It's novel and not unpleasant, but once I'd heard a couple of tracks I'd got the idea more than enough. The shine really comes off as the album goes on, and it's not something I think I'll revisit. Maybe you had to be there!

I absolutely love Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard. One of the most joyous little songs ever and I could listen (and have listened) to it on repeat for hours. The rest is nice and fine, but it ain't no Me and Julio.

A lovely album that's engaging and accomplished throughout. Great bass, great guests. No dud tracks, just not the highest rate of notable faves for me personally, though I had a smile on my face from the first weird accordion honk of The Boy in the Bubble.

I don't really know enough about this kind of music to judge beyond "it's nice"/"it grates" or "trumpet fun"/"trumpet bad", but I enjoyed this. Playful songs and energetic vocals with that great King Louie rasp. Worth listening just for the line, "When you're dead and in your grave, no more ravioli will you crave." Trumpet fun :)

I don't hate Coldplay but even at their best they're pretty dopey. Chris Martin's voice alternates between perfectly pleasant and a falsetto that should be classified as a bladed weapon (and he's not afraid to use it). The music is sometimes lovely.

The starry personnel and proto-whatever status don't add up to a particularly memorable or impressive result. At worst it's horribly grating and at best it's just fine. Rod Stewart's voice overwhelms whatever else might be going on; he sounds much better on the tracks where he reins it in. Greensleeves, You Shook Me and Ol' Man River are good songs but they can't take much credit for those.

It took me a while to warm to Martin Fry's prim gold-suited shtick, but I've since grown to really appreciate this album. For a debut effort, it glides out of the gate totally complete and self-assured in its campy lamé vision. The sparkly synths and fat disco bass are a dated but irresistible combo for me, and the flourishes of sax and brass add another layer of fun. Show Me, Poison Arrow, Tears Are Not Enough, and The Look of Love (Part 1) are pure shiny joy, but there's not one song on here that's slacking off. You can hardly move for earworms and every track goes an extra mile over the top. Perhaps it's too suave and doing too much, but it's a too-much that delights me.

To me, there are two camps of prog rock: guys with keyboards (geeky, no fun, sexless) and guys with flutes (cheeky, fun, horny). I'm all for the latter. ELP are exhaustingly the former. Nut Rocker did put a smile on my face, which was much needed after the rest of this album.

Nicely encapsulates the duality of Neil Young sort of being raw, gritty and nasal but also melodious, gentle and lovely almost by turns. Sometimes overly loose and rambling, but it has a pleasingly ragged immediacy and there are no bad songs on it.

Finally, some women who aren't Joni Mitchell! R&B isn't a genre I gravitate towards but I enjoyed this. The three members sound great together and individually. There's a lot of filler but also a lot of personality. Catchy, naughty, vivacious fun.

Once your ears accustom to the gleeful noise and nonsense of it, it's full of joyously catchy songs. There's never a dull moment amid all the weird hooks and curveballs. I love the off-kilter instrumentation, impenetrable lyrics and Eno singing like a posh old witch. It's whimsical and artsy while still having strong, enjoyable songs that reward multiple listens. The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch, Baby's On Fire, Blank Frank and the title track are my favourites. Glam-era Eno might also be the most beautiful anyone has ever looked, despite or even because of his completely fucked haircut, and I think that's wonderful :) x

This hasn't been one of my go-to New Order albums (maybe because the cover photos are so lame and put me off) but perhaps that can change? I enjoyed this a lot. The A-side, at least, I thought was golden. Love Vigilantes, The Perfect Kiss and This Time of Night are wonderful, and Sunrise is thunderingly good. I was less enamoured with the B-side, though it's still a solid listen. It's such a testament to the strength of New Order's songs that they're largely unimpeded by Bernard Sumner's almost total lack of vocal ability. He starts the album sounding bad and ends it sounding actually in need of medical help. The guy might be worse than Anthony Kiedis in the "couldn't sing his way out of a paper bag but it didn't stop him" rankings, but at least Sumner's got other musical talents and isn't a complete dog. A good album!

I hadn't heard a full Kendrick album before but I enjoyed this even with that limited context. It's overlong and kind of lost me in the middle, but it's eclectic, clever, and dense with detail. My favourites were King Kunta, The Blacker the Berry, and i. Not really my scene but I'm glad I heard it!

The album starts out with the sex-pesty Wake Up and Make Love with Me, which I quite liked the music for, despite everything else. I thought if the rest of the album was catchy pub-rock fun, I'd be able to look past some icky lyrics and Ian Dury's one-trick-pony vocals. But by the time I got to the monotonously annoying Billericay Dickie, I was no longer having fun. When I got to If I Was with a Woman, I was less certain that Dury was "playing a character" and that he wasn't just a fucking abject worm (see also his relationship with Jane Horrocks, so generously described as "tumultuous"). By the closer, which just sounded like a drunkard shouting racial slurs in the street, I found myself feeling wistful for the charm of that first track of Dury rubbing his boner on you and muttering that you'd better wake up. Two stars because I often really enjoyed the music itself, and I liked Sweet Gene Vincent and My Old Man. But too much of this album was irritating, one-note, and slimy.

What do you mean Trafalgar and Odessa are on the list but not Main Course? Not an actually fun, memorable Bee Gees album with bangers on it? I have a lot of love for the Bee Gees but what do you MEAN? The vocals are mostly fine – apart from some bizarre noises that are just unintentionally funny – but it's all so fusty and low-energy. If we're going for lame Bee Gees albums that haven't stood the test of time, I'd rate One and Still Waters over this, but maybe I'm just a sicko for loving their really late-career stuff.

I've never warmed to The Doors as much as some of their peers. I think if you're not really allured by the myth of Jim Morrison as a sex-god-rockstar-shaman-poet, they don't have much appeal left. He had a good voice, a lantern jaw, and died young. And...? It's rare that a baritone in leather trousers leaves me completely cold. Plus I'm rarely in the mood for much Manzarek – the guy just goes on and on, and I don't know why they let him. I think I prefer The Doors when they keep it brief. I ended up enjoying a simple cover like Back Door Man, which at least knows how dumb it is, more than the meandering indulgence of Light My Fire and The End. As a huge Depeche Mode fan, I have no high ground from which to mock Morrison for rhyming "west" with "best" and "snake" with "lake", but I will because the guy's held up as a messianic poetic talent.

Sonic Youth are a big weird gap in my music knowledge. I hadn't heard an album of theirs before. All I know is that Kim Gordon is in the band and Thurston Moore is really tall. This album is way too long and not hugely up my street in terms of song structure, but it's got mood in spades and a cool fuzzy rock sound that feels way ahead of its time. Teen Age Riot is lovely and strikes the best balance of sprawl and catchiness for me.

Too much one-dimensional machismo for me – too long and repetitive, too many skits, too much homophobia. But I really liked the Black Ivory sample used in Criminology, and Wisdom Body was a welcome change of pace.

I'd only really heard Imagine and Jealous Guy before, which never had me rushing to hear the full album, though I like the Beatles a lot. I enjoyed this most when it leaned away from piano ballads. How Do You Sleep? is a good time if you ignore the lyrics, which make Lennon sound like a seething mad weenie. I Don't Wanna Be a Soldier is a groovily hypnotic standout for me, though it doesn't do much lyrically. Oh Yoko! is wonderful – sweet, catchy, and probably my favourite.

I love almost every permutation of Nick Cave: the manic demon, the preacher man, the piano crooner, the moustachioed lecher, the avuncular sage, the reflective father. I think, if you like his voice as a baseline, he's probably done something you'll like at some age or another of his career. He's not for everyone, especially early on, but I love his sonorous, imperfect voice and his Gothic vignettes of outcasts, killers, and ne'er-do-wells. Not many people could deliver the phrase "warm arterial spray" with enough theatrical vigour to get away with it. Henry's Dream is a blast on the grotesque end of the Cave spectrum, with thunderous ravings and murderous intent aplenty. Straight to You and When I First Came to Town are two gorgeous slower songs that stand out for their difference. The Good Son would've been my pick for an early-90s Cave album that's more well-rounded, but this one's still a treat.

I love Led Zeppelin, and some of my favourite songs of theirs are on this album, but it's just too damn long. It's an absolute scorcher of an eight- or nine-track album, spun out to fifteen. In My Time of Dying, Houses of the Holy, Trampled Under Foot and Kashmir probably form the best run of tracks on any Led Zeppelin album. In My Time of Dying (that slide guitar!) and Trampled Under Foot (that clavinet!) are among my most played Led Zeppelin songs. I have a lot of time for Robert Plant's ecstatic wailing, though it's sometimes like being serenaded by a randy tomcat. Bron-Yr-Aur is a lovely singular gem in their catalogue. The rest is pretty disposable for me, which makes this album one I rarely listen through in full.

I hadn't heard this album and only knew a couple of LCD Soundsystem songs beforehand, but my overall impression is positive. It's an album of nice but overlong tunes that sometimes sound reminiscent of the late 70s and early 80s. A bit David Bowie, a bit Talking Heads at times. I found the first half stronger than the second. My main complaint is that almost every song feels a minute or two longer than needed. They often have a sameness that doesn't benefit from being drawn out. It's an enjoyable listen but doesn't feel hugely consequential – likely one of those picks that's coloured by a rosy comeback-album glow. Despite those reservations I'd happily check out more of their work.

I think I'm too much of a Radiohead casual to be really into this album, but I can appreciate it as a bold creative move that sets a beautiful if depressive soundscape. It's not an album I reach for but the songs are good and I enjoy being immersed in it like a big fuzzy bath.

I preferred this to To Pimp A Butterfly in terms of lyrics and storytelling, and being a leaner album overall. There are some long tracks but they earn their length and kept me engaged. The sequence of Good Kid to Sing About Me, I'm Dying of Thirst is particularly good.

I've never heard a QOTSA album, only the big singles. They've never appealed much, as I'm just not interested in Josh Homme's voice – it sort of slides over my ears without making much of an impression. Here he sounds a bit like a worse Chris Cornell, whose voice (sacrilegiously, I know) I'm not crazy about either. This album didn't do much to change my mind on the band, though it passed time pleasantly enough. There are some good sludgy riffs, and fair play to Homme for doing two or three guys' worth of work on the instruments, but I'm not sure why this was chosen over an album with some hits on it.

Perhaps their best album, but on a revisit I had a few more reservations than I thought. Half of it's perfect, but I can take or leave the middle four tracks. The Battle of Evermore is Robert Plant at his silliest, caterwauling about ringwraiths – though Sandy Denny is much appreciated – and I find myself actually not crazy about Stairway. Still, the album's great. Black Dog would be any other act's best opening track, but for a band who also have Immigrant Song and Whole Lotta Love, it's just a Tuesday. When the Levee Breaks might be the coolest they ever sounded. Perhaps it's just too soon since rolling Physical Graffiti!

I feel like I manifested this after wishing Robert Plant would pipe down a bit in The Battle of Evermore yesterday! A lovely album with two great highlights in Who Knows Where the Time Goes? and A Sailor's Life. What a voice Sandy Denny had – clear as a bell. A good listen with no particular low points, but I do prefer Liege & Lief for leaning fully into the traditional ballads and folklore.

A type of music I don't gravitate towards and know diddly about (for now!), but the smooth beauty of Sinatra's voice is pretty much a scientific fact. Change Partners and The Girl from Ipanema are my highlights and the rest blends pleasantly together.

Thunder Road, Born to Run, and Jungleland are colossal, and I love the sweeping escapist fantasy and urgent neck-exploding passion of them. The other tracks are evocative pictures but can't hold a candle to those big three, and mostly don't try. Eight tracks seems just right, otherwise it'd get a little much. Love the piano, love the sax. Love that I only understand about 25% of what he's singing. I don't need to hear the details, Bruce, you've convinced me! We WERE born to run!

I didn't love the faster tracks (made me feel like a stressed-out cartoon mouse being chased) but the slower ones were alright (made me feel like a cartoon mouse going on a big dinner date). It's a type of music that I can hear that is good and skilled, but it's not my thing; I don't have much stamina for it and it makes me feel insane very quickly. I think I need vocals as a mitigator between me and brass.

ZZ Top only really have about three songs and about three themes – women (or parts of), cars (or parts of), and good times (general) – but they do them well, with such growly, groovy panache that I can't get too annoyed. I thought this was a fun, slight album with a strong opening, a weak middle, and one sizzling hot classic in La Grange.

Please no more brass. Trumpets and trombones are murdering me. Please, 1001, give me some synthesizers or something to keep me alive? A little shot of post-punk before I wither on the vine? I'm absolutely dying here. God, it's over 70 minutes? Of trumpets? Please, no! Let's take a sound that's only tolerable in small doses and make a double album of 6-minute tracks! A debut double album? Who do you think you are? Wikipedia says this is "jazz rock". What is that? Why would anyone do that? Oh, it looks like Chicago are one of only a dozen defunct and washed-up bands who ever tried to chalk that cheese. I wonder why? Oh God just let it end! It won't end! Every honk kills me a little more. Even the song titles piss me off. There's a nearly 7-minute track ominously titled Free Form Guitar and it's somehow even worse than what it threatens on the tin. South California Purples is the only track where the infernal chimera of "rock and roll band with horns" really works. A real day-ruining 1001 roll. To whoever picked this: rotten work, you monster.

This was a such a healing balm after the swagless monstrosity of Chicago Transit Authority yesterday. It's a bit slow and lovey-dovey, though – the album's at its best when it funks it up, Superstition being head and shoulders above the rest. I Believe (When I Fall In Love...) strikes a better balance between being sappy and funky than the other slow tracks, and feels about twenty years newer than in it is.

I consistently enjoyed this. It's catchy and cohesive, and I liked hearing a British rapper on the list. Skits are always lame, but even with those the album doesn't overstay its welcome. No Rolex timepiece, no Hublot kettle!

I only knew Captain Beefheart et al for Trout Mask Replica, which wasn't my cup of tea, so I was pleasantly surprised by their humble beginnings on this quite normal blues-rock album. It's actually at its best and most interesting when it leans into being a little odder - I really like the vocals, which start out nicely gnarly and just get more goblinoid as the album goes on.

Seeing This Much I Know to Be True in the cinema was an experience. It opens with the triple whammy of Spinning Song, Bright Horses and Ghosteen, which had me weeping so much I was worried I might be physically unable to watch the rest of the film. Bright Horses is one of Cave's most beautiful songs but I can't listen to it too often. Ghosteen Speaks is a tearjerker and I can't even articulate why. This whole album is a gorgeous sad dream. The main criticism I could level at Ghosteen is that it's so relatively sparse it feels like it should barely count as a Bad Seeds "band" record, but what it does do and gain in terms of pathos and atmosphere is so wonderful. The soft, synthy instrumentation feels spacious and ethereal and otherworldly but also terribly intimate. The album makes you feel like an eavesdropper on a parental grief so immense you almost want to apologise for intruding on it. I generally prefer Nick Cave when he rocks a little harder, but Ghosteen is such an emotionally powerful milestone in his catalogue that I can't begrudge anyone who holds it up as his best work. It may well be. I rarely listen to it because it's not a casual undertaking, but when I do, I'm in it – I'm in that radiant Edenic garden on the cover and I'm crying. Music very rarely makes me react that way, which is what nudges Ghosteen towards full marks over Cave albums that I might like more according to catchiness or play count. Now I've got a bit of a cry-headache.

In a list full of old creeps and stupid bastards, I guess I've got to draw a line somewhere. There's a fair degree of art-from-artist separation I can do if someone sucked in the 1970s, but Heil Hitler was last year. The album's good but it's not getting further kudos or even Spotify's pathetic revenue from me. On to the next!

Always kind of assumed I'd heard this but slowly realised I hadn't. It's really good. Just a big mood-lifting dose of pure Paul fun, worth it for the first two tracks alone. The returns diminish a little but it's a good time throughout and ends well.

I'm not generally the biggest fan of this kind of Ramones-y punk rock; I'd rather be shouted at by an English punk than an American one. Still, this album is good cheeky fun and rocks for the whole of its short but sweet runtime. All the tracks are catchy and amusing (though the tongue-in-cheek racial ones are a bit distracting, if well-intentioned). The dictionary definition of "rollicking".

I've been a serious slacker on the Blur front; I really like some of their songs but whenever I've had a go at their discography I've just not found myself in the mood to pick up what they're putting down. I think this project will finally redress that, though, because I enjoyed so much of this beyond the hits I knew. It's catchy, witty, eclectic, fun, and sometimes beautiful. The little fluff tracks are really annoying – and even without them the album would be a bit long for me – but it's largely good to great. Plus the black dog's face on the cover makes me smile :)

I love that Dexter Holland has a PhD in molecular biology and a successful hot sauce, but his voice is so bad. It's a one-trick pony voice best enjoyed in single form, not on a full 45-minute album. It flattens every Offspring song into essentially the same thing. I have a nostalgic soft spot for a few of their hits, and liked a handful of tracks on this, but it was otherwise a tough listen. It's bad news when an album is so samey that two minutes of ska-punk are a welcome break.

I last had a go at this album in 2012, when I went through a months-long unhingement and listened to everything by ELP, Yes, King Crimson, Van der Graaf Generator, et al, to see if I liked prog rock. Conclusion: not much, apart from Jethro Tull, because I was charmed by the leggings. I just prefer prog that's a little more warm-blooded – long noodly keyboard bits don't do anything for me. I really wish I liked the music, though, because a kaiju-adjacent armadillo-tank fighting a manticore is so hilariously fantastical and fun. Manticores don't get the appreciation they should. I'll give it kudos for that lore and for being a more listenable album than Pictures at an Exhibition.

It's just OK. I've heard all their studio albums (don't ask) and they're just... fine, two-dimensional, sometimes a bit shit. Not unlistenable, just not a sound I have much interest in or emotional resonance with. NWOBHM in general just has little appeal for me. The most fun thing about Iron Maiden's discography is the ever-changing, ever-ugly Eddie artwork – just aesthetically repulsive in a strangely compelling way. They're better with Bruce Dickinson but it's not a bad beginning.

A solidly good album that I enjoy the more I hear it. I like the combination of downbeat unease and a wide sonic palette that's rather lovely, even pretty and ethereal, which they do so well. House of Cards is probably my favourite track here and a gorgeous example of that interplay. It's a shame Disk 2 doesn't count because I listened to Last Flowers a lot at the start of my first year of university (I guess I must've really needed to lower my morale or something).

I briefly dabbled with the Dead years ago and just didn't get it. I still don't get it. I liked the parts that were more distinguishably songs and not just long sprawls of sound that happened to be recorded. There's no one minute of any one track that I can really point to and go "that sounded bad and I didn't like it" because it's all just kind of nice and easy to have on. Except for Feedback, which sucks from start to finish and ends an otherwise pleasant album on a visceral sour note. Having suffered through Chicago's 7-minute track of guitar feedback just two weeks ago, another one starts to feel like a targeted attack by the 1001 gods. Within moments I'd gone from "I guess that album was OK" to "that album was shit on a plate". I do admire the band's prolific live-album output and how they were the blueprint for Pearl Jam's "official bootleg" scheme and diligently archived live culture. But I'm just not enough of an old stoner to really love this music. It seems like a fun cult to be in but it's not for me.

My Björk intake has been pretty spotty; I'm never sure whether I really like her voice or not, but she's always interesting. I was so sure I'd heard this album before, maybe piecemeal, but maybe it was just the hits. Either way, I enjoyed listening to it properly. It distinguishes itself less in the latter half and the 90s electronics get pretty samey, but it's still a good listen overall, with a sweetly weird and enchanting atmosphere. Besides the big singles, I was delighted by There Is More to Life Than This and the immersive ambience it gains from being recorded in a club toilet. There's a non-toilet version but I don't want it.

Reliable sources inform me that this is Good Jazz, but when it gets down to the brass tacks of "are these sounds that I would choose to hear of my own volition", the answer is generally "no". I think I have, despite medium-sized efforts, a simple-minded need for bangers; I don't have a ton of patience for music where bangers are not apparent. I have jazz homework to do, but also, like, under what circumstances would I ever truly want to listen to this? When I'm pretending to be in a posh café? The Spotify tracklist for this album is completely trashed, which didn't help, though I re-listened in the proper order to make sure I still didn't like it much. My main takeaway from all this is that Bill Evans looked insanely handsome and cool. What a debonair dude! Wish I liked jazz...

I was so happy to get a crumb of late-70s/early-80s New Wave/punk action, I didn't even mind that it was an album I'm not crazy about. There's a lot of posturing, aggro and sleaze on this one, sometimes in a fun way and sometimes not. Jean-Jacques Burnel's bass is great, the grimy jewel in the crown of their early albums. The twiddly organ tempers a bit of the album's dumb pugnacity and is an aspect of the Stranglers that I like for being a little unusual, along with Hugh Cornwell and JJB's sharing of lead vocal duties. It's a good album but they're better off getting out of their edgelord phase (which, to their credit, they do quickly).

Mercifully free of skits and chatter, with a dark, murky mood that's pretty cool. I didn't dislike it but neither did I really like it. It's a bit monotonous but I preferred it to Cuban Linx, the other Wu-Tang solo album rolled so far. You could say it didn't tical me.

I've dipped the odd toe into Costello's oeuvre but hadn't heard this album before. It's consistently good, sometimes great, with no particular weak tracks for me. For 1986 I think it's aged really well – I really like the rough-edged liveness of it. No reinventing the wheel, just good, catchy, witty rock songs. I love music! 🕊️

Maybe three big standout tracks for me – Gigantic, River Euphrates, and Where Is My Mind? – but for most of the rest I just veered between "I guess this is fine" and "shut your whiny gob and let Kim sing". Perhaps I'm just not in the mood today, but it's one of the rare albums so far that I've enjoyed less and less upon re-listens. There aren't enough good and substantial songs here to warrant the level of cocksure abrasiveness. I actually really like Doolittle, which just works for me, but this one's too grating and manic.

What a lovely album for a sunny Saturday morning! This was so nice. Having a good time with a genre and artist I hadn't tried before, away from my comfort zone and usual frames of reference – 1001 can be joyous! It's a long album that gets quite samey – you could lose three or four tracks and still get the idea – but I really enjoyed the ride.

It's quite repetitious and has an ersatz sheen to it, but it's an upbeat, feelgood listen that sort of disarmed my most churlish impulses towards it. Connected is great and the returns diminish from there, but it's still a fun album for a laid-back, nostalgic party vibe.

The first time I've ever heard someone casually namedrop the medulla oblongata in a song. Insanely suave and timelessly cool, and the long tracks fly by – until the 8-minute monologue that grinds proceedings to a halt. I don't think anyone's quite smooth enough to get away with that. You'd think the 7-minute single edit would cut the monologue out, and you'd be dead wrong, which is hilarious.

Not my favourite Beatles album taken as a whole – some of their best songs are on here, but also a whole lot of filler and some of the worst sounds they ever made. Double albums are always on thin ice, even coming from the Beatles. How do you rate a 30-track album that has Helter Skelter and Blackbird on it alongside Wild Honey Pie and Revolution 9? Still, I was happy to finally roll a Beatles record. And for my sins, I love Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da and am not accepting feedback on this opinion – I'd replace ten of these tracks with more Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da and feel no remorse 😭

I hadn't heard a Mamas & Papas album before and didn't know much about them besides Cass Elliot's untimely death. Now I've heard an album and wish I knew much less about John Phillips. Still, the music's lovely, with great summery harmonies by four singers working in total synergy. Gentle, feelgood and folky but not boring. I'm maybe a contrarian in that California Dreamin' has never done much for me, certainly not enough to check the band out further. But there are plenty of songs on here that are equally good or better!

It's finally my time! An album I know so well I don't even need to hear it! But I'll play it anyway because I love it! This is a great era of Depeche Mode – the tipping point between their sometimes clumsy industrial tinkering of the mid-80s and the immaculately Corbijn-styled cool of the 90s. It's the sound of a band finally shaking off the last of their puberty and rising to inhabit their calling as global ambassadors for harmless oddballs who are into leather. Never Let Me Down Again and Strangelove are two of their greatest singles, for my money, ably supported here by some of their strongest album tracks, plus a couple of weirdo moments (Little 15, Pimpf), because why not. MFTM's combination of clear, chilly synths with intense, murky, sometimes creepy sensuality is one of my favourite Depeche modes. Analogue synthesizers lend themselves to music about the abstract and cerebral, but DM are a synth band who marry that cold precision with concerns that are obsessively interpersonal and flesh-and-blood. They're very heart on sleeve (sometimes dick on sleeve) in a way that's so over the top, I can't help but find it endearing. This is the strongest and most rounded of their pure synthpop records, before they began warming into a hybrid synth-rock sound that became their template for everything since. I love those later works, too, but there's something about this crisp, clear, towering British synthpop sound that's so utterly invigorating. It sounds deceptively minimalist but it's dense with layers of vocal harmonies, distorted mutterings, and creaking, clanging, rattling DIY samples that have rewarded countless listens for me. It's a wonderful album if you can get on board with Martin Gore's penchant for lyrics about domination, sacrilege, corrupted innocence, pain (good), pain (bad), and grandiose apocalyptic love, rendered in earnestly banal vernacular. I think he's a genius, and his perfect synergy with frontman Dave Gahan is one of music's great yin-yang marriages, but I can't deny his shtick can be stupid. Yet it all just works for me. Depeche Mode's four-album run from Black Celebration to Songs of Faith and Devotion is one of my favourite things that ever happened. I just love Depeche Mode. They're one of those bands I know too much about, where I've heard all their B-sides and solo projects and can identify the year of a photo by their haircuts. I just adore them. I love their whiplash-inducing escalation from sweet teenyboppers to bondage-harnessed weirdos. I love that it took them five or six albums to learn how to look cool and have any kind of visual brand. I love how Dave Gahan isn't even the best singer in the band he fronts, and sort of makes up for it by dancing. I love how he understood that if your bandmates are all standing behind keyboards, what they need is someone who loves to get out there and shake it and shout "AW YEAH, LEMME SEE YOUR HANDS" with comical gusto. I love his rather limited, nasal baritone harmonising with Martin Gore's warm, angelic tenor. I love Alan Wilder's musical skill and Andy Fletcher's complete lack thereof. I love the eccentricity of their lineup and their joyous disregard for conventional band instrumentation, at least for the first decade of their career. A four-man band with two guys on synths, one guy on showmanship, and one guy on clerical duties? They just make no sense! I love that the lyrics are so straightforward that they kind of make you wince but sometimes strike pure iconic gold. I love the acutely heightened emotional space this band inhabits, where there are no small, normal feelings – everything is sweeping, menacing, biblical, fetishistic, and all-consuming. I love that they're the lyrical equivalent of someone saying "I don't do small talk" and then whipping out a rhyming dictionary. I'm completely inured to everything that's off-putting, silly and strange about them. I love them even when they suck. Anyway, whoever reads this far should go and watch the live performance of Never Let Me Down Again from the Depeche Mode 101 concert film. It's a perfect song but it's even better with the Aggro Mix break in the middle of it, fog machines, and a sea of waving arms.

Part of me regards the American Recordings with some scepticism – the cushy spectacle of ol' Johnny Cash covering surefire hits and cool songs younger people will like. But he covers them well and, damn, he got me – I do like those songs! Crossing over with younger alternative artists is a nice thing for the progenitor of "Gothic country" to have done, and the American Recordings are load-bearing pillars of that genre, which is one I really do like. So I guess the fan-servicey premise ultimately works on me, though it can be a little cloying. If you like Cash's leathery growl, you can't go too wrong here. He sounds really old and tired, but that – and knowing now that this was his last antemortem album – gives it some gravitas beyond the novelty. I'm not going to rag too hard on a guy for sounding knackered on his 67th album. I don't think the production does him any favours, though, which means it must be absolute dogshit because I rarely notice that stuff. The title track is the best on here for me. I'm maybe an outlier in that I much prefer the originals of Hurt and Personal Jesus, but I do think these are great versions for what they are – good covers with a different mood and a weighty, grizzled voice. The second half loses a bit of steam but of course I'm happy to see my bestie Nick Cave pop up.

An OK album that had no reason to be an hour long or on the list really. I don't think I'd heard Dy-Na-Mi-Tee since 2003, and it's still very annoying, though nostalgia goggles gave me a fondness for it that I didn't have back then. Put Him Out is a better song and I loved the attitude. I genuinely enjoyed the first half of the album but towards the end it sounds like she lost interest, and so did I. Song titles were all like "Spelling 2 Hard 4 U" back then, weren't they?

Irresistible fun even though I don't know what the fuck is going on. Adam Ant dressed for the catwalk, but also for the Crimean War, yodelling about ants and pirates and cowboys over tribal drums. A band having two drummers is delightfully silly but made for a great defining sound. While Prince Charming and Stand and Deliver are my Ants hits of choice, this is a much better album than Prince Charming. What's ant music for sex people? What's sex music for ant people? Who knows, but I love it. It's a unique glam-punk cocktail that's completely absurd, but the songs are also just good. And nobody ever had a cooler look than early-80s Adam Ant.

A really good album. It could have done with one or two more tracks on a par with One Way or Another and Heart of Glass, but it's a good mix of catchy, fun, and intriguing tracks that I consistently enjoyed, and probably their most well-balanced album in terms of style. It's punky and poppy and pleasingly quirky. After hearing so many albums with songs that don't know when to end, it was so nice to listen to something where every song felt exactly the right length with no arsing around. Debbie Harry rocks and I love the range of things she can do with her voice, from smooth and aloof to cutesy and playful to gremlin snarls. Plus the best cheekbones in new wave, the most zygomatic genre. She had it all!

Good songs with a bad voice, though that's hardly a new take. Sometimes it's a perfectly apt voice that I quite enjoy, other times it's really annoying – just like the harmonica is sometimes a perfectly good instrument and other times is like being tortured with a dental drill. Quite funny that this record was ever controversial and had people baying for Dylan's blood – I guess you really had to be there! I much prefer the electric side, though Mr. Tambourine Man's a classic.

I know it's their landmark album, but I'm sort of neutral towards most of it. It's not my teenage nostalgia album (With Teeth) or my now-age taste album (Pretty Hate Machine). Musically it still sounds timeless to my ears, though the obnoxious edginess is of its time. A Warm Place through to Hurt is a fantastic run of tracks that outweighs the first half, which I'm mostly indifferent towards. I can't think of many albums that don't really get cooking until the second half! Closer's great, of course, but I can never hear it with the same ears after Neil Cicierega's Rollercloser.