1001 Albums Summary

first time listening maggot brain: haunting, gorgeous, lovely, dreadful can you get to that: spooky little intro bit perfectly transitions the vibe from the title track into the main riff which sounds like a cat napping in a sunbeam. love the beat, love those real low vocals, love a little lyrical dissonance hit it and quit it: organ goes crazy, love how loud the vocalist gets when he goes high you and your folks, me and my folks: yeah this album is an all-timer. there's some sort of reverb/echo(?) effect on the bass/drums(?) that i can't decide if i like or not super stupid: goes CRAZY back in our minds: WHAT is that instrument. all i can find is one youtube comment saying it's a flexatone and that seems to be it. love it wars of armageddon: BOLD USE OF FART NOISES #RESPECT. chaotic angry manic fat and funky EASY 5

really? in a vacuum i would give this a respectable if unremarkable and sometimes irritating 3. (i can only be made to hear about jack white's problems with women for so long before i start to resent it.) but because it has been presented to me as one of the most important albums of all time i have to give it a 2. presumably it was removed from the book once the contributor(s) recovered from mid white guy blues-rock fever #previously listened (partial)

i've loved a lot of tracks off this album since high school but haven't given the full thing a proper listen since then. there's some preachiness and a relatively conservative streak to some of the lyrics (the both sides-ism in doo-wop [that thing] in particular) that i've never cared for but the music, her voice, her lyrical craft is good enough i can look past it. some guys really are only about that thing though. no bad songs here but some are more memorable than others and the runtime is pushed a bit far. doo-wop, when it hurts so bad, i used to love him, everything is everything, tell him, are long-time favorites. lost ones, ex-factor, to zion, superstar, forgive them father, can't take my eyes off of you (fantastic cover of a song i've always loved) stood out on this listen. this album is so firmly a 4.5 to me but i can't do that here. i was going to give it a 4 but i've been listening to it all day and added it back to my library and i'm sitting here vibing to can't take my eyes off of you as i write this and i think i'm going to have to go 5. love. #previously listened

they called it U2 because "U" had to get "2" ribs removed to suck your own dick to be a member. they do get some brownie points from me for having a vaguely homoerotic song about judas (until the end of the world). mysterious ways is a pretty good car commercial song. quite like the guitars on acrobat. love is blindness is genuinely great. songs i didn't skip before they ended: zoo station until the end of the world the fly mysterious ways acrobat love is blindness

i want to be a hater but this album is undeniably pretty good. it's yet another mid-century white guy rock band appropriating the blues, but a pretty good one of those. jim morrison calling himself "mr. mojo risin'" because it's an anagram of his own name is genuinely insufferable. but the song he does it in is still pretty good. highlights: love her madly, been down so long, cars hiss by my window, l.a. woman, hyacinth house, riders on the storm could easily bump this up to a 4 or down to a 2 depending on my mood. #previously listened (partial)

it's good! highlights: aladdin sane, panic in detroit, cracked actor, time, let's spend the night together, lady grinning soul #first time listening

-cinnamon girl sounds like a parody of a classic rock song -title track is forgettable -round & round is lovely -really goofy little riff/guitar solo on down by the river. like it's giving middle schooler's first guitar solo at the school talent show. i would be proud of that middle schooler but this is an adult professional musician. song is otherwise forgettable and goes on forever -the losing end is forgettable -running dry starts with nice strings but now why are you singing directly into my ear neil. back up from the mic a bit. recording quality is just weirdly quite bad on this track. maybe it's a streaming issue? the violin is still lovely though. -cowgirl in the sand sounds like a child wrote the lyrics but the music is good some people have always been old and neil young (ha) is one of them. he sounds about 74 years old on this record. not a negative or a positive just a fact. i guess neil young is a Culturally Important musician and i respect that but i dont know if i needed to listen to this album. i probably won't listen to it again. it's pleasant background music but there's a lot of that in the world. #first time listening

falling into the lake drowning submerged and buried under sediment hit by a rock floating in the dark washing up onto the sand dancing in the light rain destroying and rebuilding yourself mourning and moving on just incredibly gorgeous. ingenious production and arrangement. had my jaw on the floor on multiple occasions. bjorks vocal performance is beautiful and powerful and versatile as always. lyrics raw and intimate and complex in their simplicity. a beautiful interlocking living mechanism of an album. it's really just that good the most truly perfect 5 so far. i want to go back and rate everything else lower #first time listening

first listen had me a bit underwhelmed ("i guess you had to be there?") but it grew on me. walk on the wild side in particular is dated but a genuine classic. highlights: vicious, andy's chest, perfect day, hangin' round, walk on the wild side, make up, satellite of love, i'm so free, goodnight ladies. so most of it. #first time listening (mostly)

finally got an album i've never heard of in my life! wasn't expecting much and was very pleasantly surprised. just a little corny in a way that really works for me. when they started talking about fantastic prisms in the magic hollow and shit that's when i knew for sure it was a 4 star album. it's also like the platonic ideal of summer music. highlights: are you happy, only dreaming now, nine pound hammer, magic hollow, the wolf of velvet fortune (SWIFTLY!), old kentucky home (fun little satirical number) #first time listening

very late aughts-early teens adult alternative radio. music for guys who say they like "anything but rap and country" but all they listen to is bands that sound like this. white dad on the brink of divorce blasting this in his prius in 2009. generally pleasant and inoffensive but it's not for me. not in 2026. one of those tricky cases where nothing on the album is really "bad" and i kind of feel like a dick giving it a 2. but i resented having to listen to it when i could have been listening to anything else and it felt like it just kept going on and on and on. 2 stars because it made 54 minutes feel like 2 hours. #first time listening

already like this better than the last neil young album i got (everybody knows...). much more consistent, much better production quality. lyrics are generally less cringey (when you dance, i can really love is a notable exception but the song is still good). truly lovely harmonies throughout -- i could take or leave young's voice on its own but it really shines with others. southern man rules. highlights: only love can break your heart, southern man, don't let it bring you down, birds, when you dance still too many forgettable tracks to justify a 4 star rating but it's a much more solid 3. maybe 3.5. bonus points for pissing off lynyrd skynyrd. #first time listening

a couple of great songs, a few good songs, one of the worst songs i've ever heard (she's out of my life), and the rest is filler. theres a kind of insubstantial sound to this album as a whole, even on the good tracks. never been a huge mj fan outside of the big hits but he's always been an interesting figure to say the least. reading about him always leaves me with something new to feel sick and sad about. listening to this album while doing so had me feeling weird

i had never listened to steely dan and just assumed they were one of those bands who are really lame but whom some people insist are "good, actually" just for the sake of being contrarian. turns out they are pretty good, actually! highlights: bodhisattva, the boston rag, king of the world, maybe more if i listened to it again but my power went out

i have little patience for straight man divorce music but this is such a spectacularly melodramatic work of divorcedness i can't help but be fascinated by it. also the music itself is very good, no surprise there. the album art has me cracking up in disbelief every time i look at it. a real piece of work. of course it's all fun and games and until you read more about how gaye treated the women and girls in his life and it all gets a little too real. can't in good conscience give this more than a 3 but it certainly is something to behold.

not even his best album!

great!

YUPPPPPPPP

the good here is very good, some genuine classics, but it's about half filler. i might have been more impressed if it weren't so prestigious but the curse of high expectations had me feeling a bit underwhelmed. definitely deserves its place on the list for cultural importance but i probably won't listen to the full thing again highlights: spanish castle magic, little wing, if 6 was 9, castles made of sand, one rainy wish, bold as love. no surprises here would be an easy 3.5 if we could do half stars

nothing but respect for ms. mitchell but this album isn't doing much for me. pleasant music, lovely vocals, well-written if a bit quaint and sometimes corny lyrics, in one ear and out the other highlights: help me, car on a hill, raised on robbery, trouble child

you know what it is

i don't think he should have been within 500 feet of a high school hop. really going crazy on the piano though. i was going to give this 2 stars but all the crusty white boomers slobbering over it in the youtube comments have forced my hand