It's Led Zep IV.
It starts With "Black Dog"
It has "Stairway to Heaven"
It ends with a cover of one of the first blues rock songs on record (Memphis Minnie's "When The Levee Breaks")
It has Plant, Page, Bonham and Jones.
It's a 5.
I'm going to have to listen to it for a second time when I get time.
First impressions are I liked the first (title) track.
Wasn't a fan of the second track (a version of "I heard it through the grapevine"), but that's my only minus point. I know some really like this version but I have never heard this album before so it really took me by suprise and not in a good way.
Did really like:
3. "Runaway Child, Running Wild"
4. "Love is a Hurtin' thing"
5. "Hey Girl"
6. "Why Did She Have to Leave Me (Why Did She Have to Go)"
7. "I Need Your Lovin'"
8. "Don't Let Him Take Your Love From Me"
9. "I Gotta Find a Way (To Get You Back)"
10. "Gonna Keep on Tryin' till I Win Your Love"
Not my usual diet but I have been trying to get more into soul music the past 10 years (Franklin, Flack, Simone, Supremes). Haven't listened to a lot of male groups but was intending to, but never been a fan of falsettos and male harmonies (only thing that impressed me before was the unwavering "The Stylistics" - even if not a fan)
That's a me problem, not a them problem though.
So, 4/5
I don't have this album but I know most of the tracks from the compliation CDs like "Sand in the Vaseline". I do have "More Songs About Buildings and Food", "Little Creatures", "Remain in Light", "Speaking in Tongues" and so on, inc Stop making Sense.
In fact the only albums I don't have is their first (this one), "Fear of Music" and True Stories". No idea why or how that came about.
I haven't listened to many of these old albums for a while though because when I feel like listening to some Talking Heads I just put on "Sand in the Vaseline".
So I'm already familiar with:
No Compassion
Don't Worry About the Government
Psycho Killer
Sugar on my Tongue
Loves goes to a Building on Fire
I Want to Live
I Wish You Wouldn't Say That
Anyway of this album, from the tracks I've never heard of before, I really like the different sounds (to me) from the band of:
"uh-oh Love Comes to Town"
"New Feelings"
"Tentative Decisions"
"Who is it?"
So 7 top well known songs I have always liked plus a bonus of discovering some funkier and groovier songs from their first album above.
5/5
This why I signed up on this website. Thank you, Thank you, Thank you.
I have never heard about this artist before because I stopped following the media or looking for anything new around 2010 because what I heard 2005-2010 or later wasn't interesting.
Love it. On the first listen I started paying attention and being extremely impressed by the third track.
I've Been Dazed
Piano Joint
Living in Denial
Hero
Final Days
Solid Ground
etc are all standout tracks.
First time I've honestly listened to anything from Adele.
Not my regular type of music but some of it was good. Started off very strong, made great first impressions. The middle of it was weak enough to lose my interest as it wasn't my style - and wasn't that good - but the last 4 tracks ended strongly and the first 3 were great too. Definitely worth a listen.
Another album I already have sadly. My brother put me on them 20+ years ago, how time flies.
The track "Freedom" got a lot of play back in the day.
Got to admit I have only listened to this album ~3 times in the past few years though.
I don't mind The Who, the have great singles and some really good tracks not ever released alone; but many albums, especially this one I feel like there's a lot of filler.
I can't deny the bangers, but prefer to listen to individual singles or compilations because when they miss, it's a big miss.
Maybe in this case it was rushed as they say, to capitalise on their singles success they felt the need to quickly put out an album.
in it's day it may have been considered very good, 4/5, but today I rate albums considering their cohesiveness and if it stand the test of time.
I rate this one a four+filler - not worth owning for maybe four good tracks if the rest is just filler material, look for a compilation ;)
There's at least 3 songs on this one that would ensure I'd never bother playing the whole album again, that's for sure. The highs almost equal the lows. 2.5/5
Good but not great. To be honest i have a lot of 90s stuff I just don't listen to anymore, including shoegaze. There's at least 1002 albums better than them.
Another old album I have bought new on CD back in the day. I used to really like them but I keep pointing out I rate albums on whether they can stand the test of time. Lets just say that I have 660 albums saved onto my PC and this isn't one of them - the CD is in the cupboard somewhere, maybe I ripped it onto my old desktop with 2TB of storage, but it isn't saved on my phone, tablet or laptop where I was more selective.
Agree with most others where I say the music was good, Drums are good, bass is good, guitar riffs not bad, not special but it was just normal for the period really.
Corgan's vocals was the worst aspect in some songs, on quieter songs that issue goes away, on the screamers it just wasn't a big problem back then because I was also a whiny teenager that hates the sound of my voice too, times have changed.
That said I feel nostalgia for a lot of the tracks - Quite, Today, Hummer, Mayonaise, Disarm. A lot of girlfriends at the time really liked Luna too.
Definitely encapsulates the 'mainstream' alternative rock sound available to you back in the 90s if you weren't into pop, brit stuff, rap or grunge.
3.5/5 as I like almost half the songs and it was personal in my life back then, regardless of what I fell about Billy Corgan these days.
This is a good 'primer' for anyone not familiar with 1930s music.
So if you have no other music like this then this one is reasonably polished and performed well enough to be worthy of exposure.
But I'm a big fan of old music, I love some Louis Armstrong, some Ella, some Duke and their collaborative albums are all the better.
Louis Prima here with Keely Smith covering old standards just has too much of a 'rehash' vibe already for me. It's bright, it's flashy,
This album is just playing the usual standards I've already heard - but not better than what I've heard. If it was highly rated when released then I suppose it was done late enough/at the right time to catch on.
If anyone really likes this, likes this style of music then go find some Ella Fitzgerald collaborations. Personally I like her with Louis Armstrong for their duets and alone on vocals with Joe Pass or Duke Ellington.
I love this album, it's one of my all time favs.
It is a rock opera album about the rise and fall of "Ziggy Stardust" so it is part story and part 'real life' end of his alter-ego.
On the Ziggy Stardust track he literally breaks character, and the following two tracks (Suffragette City and Rock 'n' Roll Suicide) are performed way different - especially Suffragette City - in the sound the next album is going to take in the Alladin Sane era. IE it ends similar to how the next album with 'Alladin Insane" starts, in that it's more similar to "Watch that Man" than anything on the Spiders Album, so it really was The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars.
5*****
And of course when the tour for this album ended he made it clear it's all over. While Ronson knew it before it suprised the rest of "The Spiders From Mars" band there playing (Woodmansey and Bolder).
You just had to be there, it was one of the best albums in this era. I'm too old for this shit now. I don't have it on rotation but it was a product of it's time.
Bjork does Bjork.
I didn't hate it - used to listen to her 20+ years ago occasionally - I liked the first track on this album, didn't like the 2nd or 3rd. After that it kind of grew on me but it's not something I'm ever going to seek out.
I really love this album, it got a young punk like I was at the time really interested in some traditional music. Still to this day I love hearing some tin whistle, bodhran and strings.
Of course that made me hang out at Irish style pubs that played that kind of music too much and start drinking heavy like McGowan though too. It lead to other unfortunate things like giving Flogging Molly a go.
This album is king.
4.5/5
I'm loving this. Glad it's listed here because I'm ashamed to admit i have never heard of Hugh Masekela.
I only looked into jazz during a short period of my life, back in the 2000s when you could try anything, the internet was at your finger tips and not full of garbage, and everything was accessible *somewhere*.
Charlie Parker, Brown and Roach, Duke Ellington, plus the usuals like Coltrane, Mingus, Davis and Monk.
I got a heap of stuff I was merely casually interested in hassle free from oink and other file sharing sites, but when those sites shut down or lost reliable supply I didn't bother looking further. I've since just occasionally played what I managed to get way back then.
Anyway, this album is a real suprise and it's awesome - if you're into this sort of thing. "Inner Crisis" is playing as I type this and I'm having a blast.
4.5/5
I've never really bothered listening to Van Halen, though I did grow up with this sort of rock music in the 1983-1992 era.
It's cool that Van Halen were doing this first in the 1970s, and Eddie Van Halen is extremely talented, but It's just not music I enjoy any more.
Wow, another artist I've heard for the first time here. It was a great experience to be able to hear this album and it's mix of very different music styles and different vocalists.
So this is a thematic album based on nuclear war, specifically I suppose between a nuclear armed India and it's neighbours.
Very unique, pretty cool. An extremely talented artist giving me a blend of Indian styles, flamenco styles, electronic music and more.
1. "Broken Skin" I loved the first track that drew me in because it was intriguing.
2. "Letting Go" was just OK
3. "Homelands", has to be my fav.
4. "Pilgrim" is a rap that's OK, not my thing and even if it was not anything other than OK.
5. "Tides" a nice piano instrumental that probably goes on for too long by about a minute imo.
6. "Nadia" is another electronic music track that's pretty good if you're into that.
7. "Immigrant" is back to the piano this time with vocals and fairly well done but not captivating for me. I was unable to find who did the vocals anyway.
8. "Serpents" was more attention grabbing for me than track 7, but they're very different things.
9. "Anthem Without Nation" back to the drums and trad. singing that has a lot going on. Vocals are Indian style but the drumming was more African, clue was in the title of course.
10. "Nostalgia" 90s style UK trip hop track that has a high level of replayability, again aptly named.
11. "The Conference" Monty Python transcribes another culture having a meeting plus ethnic music? Bizarre.
12. "Beyond Skin" Oppenheimer -revised and/or edited - inteviews. "A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.'"
3.9/5
Way back then in the early 1990s I had 2 separate groups of mates, those into techno like this and those into metal.
People like me sick of grunge already had to choose one or the other because rock was dead at the time and we needed something high energy to keep the parties going.
So I kind of got into Prodigy with the "Experience" album, it grew on me when out partying.
Music for the jilted generation was ok. The fat of the land was good at the time either at the club, or a drive to a bush camping spot or up the hills, or at 4am when my mates pizza shop closed and we all got stoned in the carpark.
But after those years I stopped listening to prodigy altogether. We got old, we stopped having decent subwoofers in our cars, we all moved on, stopped seeing each other.
Prodigy just became irrelevant somehow. It's not nostalgic, it's not anyone's roots. It just was.
It was silly junk food back then so doesn't stand the test of time.
Wow, I'm pretty suprised as I've never heard this album before. The only Beck albums I've heard is Odeley and Guero and I haven't listened to them for 10+ years.
This album is very different, starts off like a Neil Young track. The music is well done, Beck's lower range suprised me. There's talent here.
The album is an impressive work of art so I can see why it was highly appraised by the critics, but not re-listenable for me to justify keeping it.
"Golden Age", "Lost Cause" and "All in Your Mind" were standouts for me. Miserable but bright notes or interesting music.
"Lonesome Tears" and "Round the Bend" were next best I guess.
"Guess I'm Doing Fine" was OK, but needed to be sped up a tiny bit.
"Already Dead" starts off sounding like a slowed down Blind Melon - No Rain to me. I can't get over that - even if I'm wrong I feel like brightening myself up and going to play that instead by this time in the album, so this is where I'm over it.
That said I do like 'Sunday Sun' and 'Side of the Road' so I persevered.
Pros: Personally I like the change in direction Beck took.
Cons: listening to a whole album of melancholy gets a little tiresome to me these days.
I usually listen to music to learn something new, or to lift myself up as gone are the days when I'd seek out music to match any sad mood I had because that's a bad habit. This is new to me, but fails on the second point.
A rating of 5 means I have to have it and will listen to regularly, a 4 means I want it and will play it every so often, a 3 means I can appreciate it but maybe it's not for me. Anything less I question why it's on the 1001 albums list.
This is a 3, because I'm done with break ups and melancholy about them.
First impressions
1. Good intro. New to me album and band.
First two tracks brought me back to the 1980s.
Next tracks late 90s vibe to "suffering", starting to get some Petty vibes and I could go on more about that, but on the first half of the album I'm giving it a pass due to initial enjoyment.
While listening to the first half I read some of the negative reviews. It seems obvious influences are well covered (pun intended).
The reviews go three ways - neg from people that don't like anything that sounds like old stuff, "Dad rock". Neg from old music fans that feel they're too derivative of the old stuff, and lastly positive reviews by that can appreciate new takes on music they loved.
Because I like the old 70s-80s stuff myself and they have declared influences was on the fence.
Then the 5th track starts. Oh boy, now I see what others were talking about
Disappearing most like a Don Henley track for sure.
Eyes to the wind - making a joke with Dylan of course. How could anyone have 'wind' in the title of a song trying to sound like Dylan?
-1
When reviewers mentioned Springsteen I wasn't seeing it early on. Yeah, now I have to be brutal. "Burning", there it is. 'dreaming, bridge, answers, dark, heart, man...'
Again the music is good, a sound they can work on, but that middle of the album is too derivative.
-1
That said, some good stuff here, even those worst offenders show good musicianship by the end, the worst offenders almost seem like a cover band.
I liked the first 4 tracks.
I want to like the last track "In Reverse" too as it seems like they smashed more of the obvious influences all together convincingly enough to not be called out a cover.
Verdict:
If this album was released 30 years ago it would never be on a top album chart, it would forgotten just like a heaps of 80s and 90s stuff I have that were mid range but good enough to buy, though eventually were never played again.
It was only either nostalgia from critics etc, or ignorance from the youth that that didn't know half of it sounded like a cover band that was powering it to high reviews back when it was released.
First 4 tracks being good means it's worth at least 2.5, and I mostly round up.
Not my fav album, it's not even my fav Butthole Surfers album.
It's OK.