Simon & Garfunkel are one of very few folk artists I don't just tolerate but actually enjoy listening to, even in this chaotic album.
I went into this album with my giant bag of skepticism. After all, I haven't listened to Iron Maiden in over a decade, and I've been off classic metal for almost as long because I was bored out of it. So, what could this dusty ol' record offer me, right?
Well, it turns out there is a lot to enjoy. One of the very few albums that deserve to be called genre-defining, The Number Of The Beast mixes Iron Maiden's propelling energy with its more progressive traits and delivers an explosive set of songs that are just fun to listen. What struck me the most this time around are the pop qualities of the record, the catchy melodies and thundering rhythm of so many of the songs.
It is also borderline funny how campy some of the lyrics are. I mean, it's all related to the proverbial beast, which is campy enough, but then you have some more demonic and wartime themes going on.
Great record, unless you truly hate any sort of metal.
Queen are a prime example of a band with awesome songs and pretty disappointing albums. You can't have Bohemian Rhapsody and I'm In Love With My Car in the same album, and you can't have the latter in any truly good album.
The highs here are divine, but the lows are trashy in a bad way. A lot of the album is uninspiring or outright boring and I wouldn't recommend listening to those songs outside of educating yourself about the band's catalogue. Cutting maybe half the album would've made it a timeless classic.
Of course, there's Bohemian Rhapsody and Love Of My Life, which are two of the greatest songs ever recorded. However, two songs are far from enough to save this whole album from being mostly a dud.
Certainly not the best from Led Zeppelin, but still one of the best debut albums in the history of music. What strikes me the most about this album is that it still sounds relatively fresh after all those years.
We've heard something like this album a thousand times by now, but very few people can match the energy of Muddy Waters. Even for someone who's certainly not into blues, this album is a rather easy listen.
I'd say the lyrics can sound a bit confusing and even disturbing at first, but doing some digging about the meaning of certain phrases makes them shine much brighter.
I've been meaning to dive into Dinosaur Jr. for quite a while, but I never got to it. I am both underwhelmed and excited about this album because it is apparently a groundbreaking record with an outsized influence. On the other hand, I've been into grunge and alternative rock all my life, so I didn't really heard anything that's new to me.
I’m too biased to give anything less than a five, and nothing can change my opinion.
It’s all vibes and lost momentum in this album. While the music is great, the structure is doing it a disservice by making the whole thing feeling dragged out
I can feel there's something great beneath the folk-rock surface of this album, but this is not the time for me to discover it. It's also not certain such a time will ever arrive.
I am very uninterested in swing so I never truly made the connection it has with jazz. This album served as an educational listen that also opened my eyes to the joy of music I was dismissing all my life. Leaving the outrageous album cover aside, the music is explosive and exciting which makes the retro vibe much less noticeable than expected.
Well, it's funk. You either like it or you don't, but if you're looking for something beyond a funk type of fun, you're likely to be disappointed. It's all vibes with this type of music, I guess.
Tracing back mumble rap's origins back to 50s ramblin' folk was not on my list of activities for the day, but it happened after all. I can't say I hated this album, but being only 30 minutes long is certainly among its best qualities.
It may sound outrageous but Enter The Wu-Tang is among the most punk rock hip-hop albums ever recorded. You get the raw energy and minimalist production that make it feel like an unfiltered expression full of humor and freedom. It is thematically hardcore, but it also bears the barebones spirit and liberty that are at the roots of punk culture. This is enough for me to be impressed, even if I don't feel specifically attached to the music.
Still, hearing this album made me appreciate how much Wu-Tang Clan have influenced hip-hop and pop culture over the last three decades. And how can you hate an album as goofy as this one?
3.5/5 rounded down because old-school hip-hop is not really my thing
Nick Cave is certainly an acquired taste and it has taken me years to start vibing with his music. This album certainly helped and it may be a great overview of what to expect for The Bad Seeds. It has the darkness all around, but it’s also very rock and roll, except when it’s pretentious and deep, which often feels even better. What can be a curse or a bliss, depending on your opinions about Mr. Cave, is the fact it’s a double album. You can splurge on it and get lost in the whole or try separating the experience. I personally enjoyed both options and that’s what made me appreciate The Lyre of Orpheus more. I’m still not completely overtaken by love for Nick Cave, but that was a nice first real date.
It’s like hip hop but you can’t get truly offended by anything more than the silly lyrics. Though they’re sometimes offensively silly, it’s not all that bad. Still, I probably won’t play this album ever again.
It's surprising that I have never heard of Scott Walker before, but this is the type of album making this whole thing worth it for me. It's obviously pretentious, considering it refers to a Bergman movie with the first song and it's inspired by authors such as Camus and Sartre. While I found the lyrical contents nothing more than intriguing (a good thing anyways), I am in love with this man's voice and singing style. It's dramatic, oftentimes majestic and it feels equally classic and modern. I can clearly hear how everyone from David Bowie to Jarvis Cocker and Thom Yorke is influenced by him. I can't wait to dive deeper into his music!
Courtney Love deserves to be more popular because of her music and less popular because of her outrageous media persona. I had never paid much attention to Hole, but this album is a perfectly fine power pop record with several great songs and fewer duds than I would've expected.
There's a specific line between hardcore and punk where the two genres work really well for me, and I think Out of Step is a perfect example of the line. It's the OG hardcore record with all the energy and moral postures of straight-edge but that doesn't overshadow the punk part of it.
What I like about this album is that, contrary to popular believe, it's full of melody. It's well hidden behind the explosive anger and overwhelming rhythm, but it's there and it's giving the fun vibe I like to have even in my angriest punk rock moments.
This is especially obvious in songs like Think Again, where the bass line is as much of a rhythm engine as it's a melodic pause. Of course, even there it's all stripped down and basic, which is kind of the point.
Honestly, I don't think hardcore punk did something better after Minor Threat, but I'll keep trying to find it.
I thought liking Depeche Mode would mean I'd also like Japan (the band), but that wasn't the case. This is a dull album, which I don't plan to even try listening to again. I think that's the type of music that makes people say the 80s sounded horribly.
Apparently old-school hip-hop is not my cup of tea, and I can't say I enjoyed this album enough to even bother playing it a second time. It still had some nice moments, but that's all I can say about it.
Oh, it's the band with THAT song! I've always liked THAT song but I never knew who wrote it or performed it, but now I do, which is great. THAT song is great, but there's also a lot of nice things going in the rest of this album. I don't know why I've never listened to The Zombies before (except for THAT song probably), but the baroque pop aesthetic and the psychedelic vibes are connecting greatly.
I could hear they've been recording this album shortly after Sgt. Peppers was recorded, but I could also hear how Brian May had probably listened to before recording some of Queen's songs.
Surprisingly great album.
Listening to this album can explain so much of what happened with alternative rock music over the last 50 years that it would be blasphemy to dismiss it. Still, I could never fall for Siouxsie Sioux's voice, which is why I could never truly enjoy Siouxsie and The Banshees.
This time around, I tried to approach things with the most open mind possible and once again I loved the punk energy and the groundbreaking sound. It's gritty, it's dark, it's explosive, it's like nothing before it, and it's still familiar. It also still has Siouxsie Sioux's voice.
I'm still giving it 4 stars, because this album is brilliant. It has this version of Helter Skelter, and Hong Kong Garden, and the energy that reverberates everywhere from Joy Division to LCD Soundsystem.
Ali Farka Touré walked so bands like Khruangbin could fly (iykyk). I played this album with hesitation, expecting another insufferable attempt at making Westerners listen to non-Western music. Instead, I got an album that felt like the bridge between the blues and their African roots. This is the type of surprise I've started doing this challenge for.
4/5, but I'm giving it a 5 because of the joy it brought me.
Oh, now I get why they call him grunge grandaddy, and it fits him so well. I was never interested in Neil Young as I always connected him with Bob Dylan and I like Dylan as an artist but I don't enjoy his music almost at all. Considering Young has recorded over 50 albums, I can't say I enjoy his music, but I certainly enjoyed On The Beach more than most folk rock albums of that era.
3.5/5 rounded up because I love weird singing, mellow vibes, and surprising joy.
Honestly, this album containing a sample I have always thought to be exceptional, alongside a lyric that namedrops medulla oblongata, and being just four exceptional songs was something I didn't expect. I can definitely say it's something I'm glad I've heard before dying, and I'll keep listening to it.
I'll also play this specifically to one friend of mine who made fun of me for listening to a 13-minute Car Seat Headrest song once. He said if someone can't say what they want to say in a normal-length song, maybe they shouldn't write songs at all. While the Phoenix song could survive a trim, this whole album is proving him and all the folks whining about long songs wrong.
See, this is not so much about sending a message. I mean, it's cute to sing about medulla oblongata, but that's nothing compared to the vibes that riff at the 40th second of "Walk On By." It's exquisite, groovy, ridiculously sexy, and even 60 years later it is fresh in a way modern music just isn't.
I didn't know who Isaac Hayes was before this popping up, but I can't imagine him topping this masterpiece.
It's the easiest 10/10 I've given an album from an artist I've never heard before.
I have to give it to Kacey Musgraves, some of her lyrics made me smile, but not because they were funny. Still, I can easily believe she was tripping while writing some of these songs.
all the yt folks being mad because some black folks are singing is the reason this album needs to exist and has a place on this list
it's also the blackest i felt ever since Beyoncé made me realize I had a flawless black woman in me, even as a pale eastern european man
When an undoubtedly great artist gets a little carried away, they do something like this album. Even before reading the details around its release, it is obvious that the whole thing is brimming with ideas and there was nobody to trim it down and put it in an order. That makes the album feel all over the place in a rather jarring way, making the whole experience disengaging and confusing.
That's a pity, because this album has some truly magnificent moments, and I'm not even talking about the opener Sign O' The Times, which is apparently considered among Prince's greatest songs. Songs like If I Was Your Girlfriend, Slow Love, Hot Thing, It's Gonna Be A Beautiful Night, are all great on their own, but put in the whole are lost.
Don't get me wrong, I don't necessarily want a streamlined/boring album that chooses a vibe and sticks with it for 80 minutes. On the contrary, I like music to go places and surprise me. My issue is that the journey here feels like chaos and I'm not enamored with Prince enough to enjoy it as it is. I mean, on top of the multiple characters, you also have some live recordings to add to the variety.
All in all, that's a horrible entry to Prince's universe, but I don't regret spinning it a few times.
Honestly, this album containing a sample I have always thought to be exceptional, alongside a lyric that namedrops medulla oblongata, and being just four exceptional songs was something I didn't expect. I can definitely say it's something I'm glad I've heard before dying, and I'll keep listening to it.
I'll also play this specifically to one friend of mine who made fun of me for listening to a 13-minute Car Seat Headrest song once. He said if someone can't say what they want to say in a normal-length song, maybe they shouldn't write songs at all. While the Phoenix song could survive a trim, this whole album is proving him and all the folks whining about long songs wrong.
See, this is not so much about sending a message. I mean, it's cute to sing about medulla oblongata, but that's nothing compared to the vibes that riff at the 40th second of "Walk On By." It's exquisite, groovy, ridiculously sexy, and even 60 years later it is fresh in a way modern music just isn't.
I didn't know who Isaac Hayes was before this popping up, but I can't imagine him topping this masterpiece.
It's the easiest 10/10 I've given an album from an artist I've never heard before.
I don't like the Stones, and this album just reaffirmed my opinion. There are some fun moments, but they're overshadowed by the excessively misogynist lyrics, even for a 60s record. I can still appreciate how that's their first album full of original songs and how their music related to the moment, The Beatles, and all that. Still, this music just doesn't connect with me.
This is the hip-hop I can stand by and enjoy thoroughly because it's fun, it's different, and it's extremely smart and fun. Where Wu-Tang were just absurd, and De La Soul were like a kindergarten version of the genre, A Tribe Called Quest are well aware of their prowess both in terms of producing jazz-influenced beats that rip and flow together flawlessly well. They don't shy from jokes, wordplays or social commentary, which is great.
Still, this being a hip-hop album, it is not something I connect with easily, but it is a bop and I can imagine myself playing it multiple times.
RIP Dolly Parton. I like your voice, I don't like your music, but I love your soul.
This is a rather bleak album, which should be made obvious from the cover showing Candy Darling on her deathbed, but there’s also a lot of beauty in it. I love ANOHNI’s voice and even if the vibrato may feel overused, I think the emotional power of the songs is only amplified by the sheer talent of the singer. It’s not an easy listen, and I’d argue this isn’t even ANOHNI’s best album, but it certainly deserves to be on this list.
James Brown is simply a legend, but I can't get overly excited about a live album, even a live album by one of the greatest showmen in history. Listening to this made me realize James Brown is probably a good example for having parts that are better than the whole. Any James Brown song is fantastic on its own, but when seen together something's lost. Maybe I should've been born a few decades early and go see him live to really appreciate it all.
This feels too much like someone listened to Sgt. Pepper's and thought they could do just like The Beatles but a little crazier. As intriguing as all the electronic effects are, especially for the time, this album feels like someone just wanted to do something weird. I admire when artists achieve their goals, but weird is not always good, and here it's often appalling. Some song feel like specifically made to play before a clown's show starts in a circus. Others are simply boring acid rock era songs.
I still think listening to this album is a good idea, mostly because it tries things that are done much better by better musicians later in history. I mean, we all need to think "oh, this can be nice if I do it better" about something every now and then, right?
I've never heard of Billy Bragg before, which is why this record took me by surprise. In between the folksy simplicity and the leftist political takes, you can hear the British post punk wave bubbling. I've always loved music that is not punk, but has punk sensibility, and this record fits the description perfectly.
Songs like 'Levi Stubbs' Tears' are the thumping heart of this album, tackling a serious issue with precision and care for the human heart that's unusual and admirable. Other songs are much less exciting, but add to the deceivingly simplistic nature of a record that's surprisingly precise in how it treats its themes.
Beyond "Candy Says" there's very little special about this record. I may be biased because I'm certainly not a big fan of Lou Reed, but this album didn't really make me change my opinion.
Yeah, no. I truly like only one song from this album, and Peggy Lee sings it much better. The rest is just Elvis Presley being Elvis Presley - an old time legend.
I knew I See A Darkness as a Johny Cash song, which I always thought was one of his best. I also knew it as a Rosalía song, which is oh so different but still beautiful. Hearing the original, and the whole album made me appreciate this song even more.
It is a dark album, the title says it, but it's absolutely brilliant. It's something I'd play to anyone who tells me they don't want to listen to Radiohead because it's too depressing. It also shows me once again that melancholy can be very liberating if you hear the right thing at the right time. This album deals with grief, sadness, and existential dread in a way that makes the burden feel shared, and somehow lifted me up. Maybe I'm weird, I don't know.
Anyways, one more amazing surprise from an artist I haven't heard before.
The Iggy mix is much better, and I just learned where the whole classic metal comes from. Great album!
If you have ever asked me about Le Freak by Chic, I'd probably have given you a puzzled look and said I know nothing about it. That would've been a lie, of course, because this song is one of the symbols of the Studio 54 era, but I have never connected it with a specific artist or an album. Listening to C'est Chic made me realize that as much as I enjoy disco, I have never truly listened to it in a very invested way. I know who are the major stars of the genre, I can tell you a bit about Studio 54, but that's it.
This album demonstrates why that's the case. It's all vibes, no substance, but that's not a bad thing. If you're looking fro something more than having fun and dancing, you probably should look elsewhere, not into disco. Songs like Le Freak, Happy Man, and I Want Your Love will make you smile, dance, and maybe even horny, but they won't put into a contemplative mood about the depths of humanity and art.
The good thing is that the fun is of high quality with this album. It's a very easy listen, and there's a high chance you'll want to dance a bit, and maybe wear something sparkly. The production is impeccable, making this album sound better than many recent records. Overall, a great album!
As important as Britney Spears is for the millennial experience and modern pop music, I can't stand most of her songs. Here, it's because they're a stream of childish bubblegum pop that's so overproduced I can't even think anyone with an actual human soul worked with it. In other records its for different reasons. I also grew up on grunge and metal, so I barely feel any nostalgia for any of the songs, which could've made it at least bearable.
Still, I like ...Baby One More Time (the song) because it's always funny when it plays around people my age.
This is one of my favorite albums of all time, and I think it's the pinnacle of grunge and maybe even 90s rock in general. Eddie Vedder's lyrics may not be the best on their own, but his delivery is so wholehearted that it's impossible not to be moved by it. Between the hits, absolute bangers like "Once," "Why Go," and "Oceans" may get lost, which only shows the overall quality of the songs in this album. I know I am biased, but this record runs laps around Nevermind, and you can talk to my lawyer about it.
I have several issues with this album, and being a rap album is the least of them. Apparently, I'm not all that much into hip-hop as I may have thought, but I'm even less into "a homicidal, extraterrestrial, time-traveling gynecologist and surgeon" who's rambling about so many things he may not be qualified to discuss at such lengths.
In the song where he repeats "Earth People, I was born on Jupiter" an unnecessary high amount of times, he lists yellow, black and red, and green, and purple as five colors. This was extremely disappointing because a scientist would know black is not a color.
Name dropping Microsoft, Hasbro, Richard Gere, Michael Jackson, and various others brands and celebrities also felt unnecessary.
Overall, I won't listen to this again.
Apparently, Pixies are a band of vibes. This album doesn't seem to have too much of a substance when it comes to the lyrics, or they're so stream-of-consciousness and surrealistic that you'd need an out of body experience to truly get them. However, sonically, this album is simply special.
You can hear why everyone says that Kurt Cobain was strongly influenced by Pixies and where the harshest type of grunge comes from. On the other hand, there's a strong surf rock vibe throughout the whole record, with some punk rock sensibility. Overall, it should be captivating, but somehow it's not.
I'm not a Pixies fan, and this album won't make me one. I appreciate the stylistic power, but I played it multiple times over a few days, committing to the idea that it needs a bit more time to work for me. It never did. I can't imagine the moments I'd feel like listening to this record, outside of educating someone on what shaped the sound of early 90s rock.
This has all the qualities of an Elvis Presley record. It's fun, poppy, and well sung, but it's only covers that haven't aged all that well. If you're into the 50s pop sound, but performed by a white British woman, you'll have a great time.
I'm not a huge fan of Paul Di'Anno's voice, but musically this is probably the most raw and explosive version of Iron Maiden. These are also the words I'd use for this album, which is even more fun than I remembered.
Unlike most of the band's later albums, this one has an edge that later influenced much heavier and faster metal records, and makes it a highlight for the band.
Background rock music with 90s flavor that's as bland and innocent as possible, perfect for playing in a supermarket or a gas station. I don't know what this album does in this list, but I'm glad I learned why my association with the name Sheryl Crow wasn't very positive.
It’s like The Who have met The Doors and The Rolling Stones in a jazz bar owned by a bunch of folk and blues legends where everyone got high on their preferred substance and wrote an album. I don’t think I have ever heard of John Martyn before this album popping up as my daily listen here, and I feel I wouldn’t have appreciated it as much if it wasn’t for the music I’ve discovered over the last two months.
This record is a bit all over the place, a chilled out mix of quite everything that was happening in popular music in the early 70s. It’s folksy, but there’s a lot of jazz bass and some saxophone bits, a lot of mumbling that would fit in blues records, and some rock ’n roll energy that exudes the best from The Stooges. What was particularly fascinating were the acoustic guitar bits that somehow fit with the psychedelic sensibility of so many of the songs.
Surprisingly, this is just the type of chaos I appear to love.
This is the definition of utilizing pop sensibility to change another genre to an extend that may spark controversy. It would be madness to deny Bruce Springsteen that he's a rock artist, but this rock sounds way too concerned with being pleasant to the ear. It's all simple rhythms, soft melodies, and "easy" songs, which was why I groaned when I saw that was my album for the day.
See, guitar music is my jam, I was born and raised with it, and as much as I love all sorts of music, rock is where I feel most at home. But Bruce Springsteen has always been some sort of rock adjacent pop artist who's too American for my European taste. Him being the favorite of so many older people with questionable dedication to some of the most boring rock bands on the planet never helped me even try to explore more of his music. Not that I hated it, but similar to bands like U2, I felt like I was tricked into liking this pop music with guitars.
However, I'm here to truly listen to these 1000+ records, so I dug deeper, which made me feel very stupid. It is indeed a pop album with guitars, but that doesn't take away from the value of so many of the songs here. The opener is widely misunderstood, but then you have songs like Bobby Jean, Glory Days, Working on the Highway, and My Hometown and it kind of clicks. Below the "boring" sound, there's an artist who's dissecting their own country in a way that feels timely even 40 years later. That's something.
So, yeah. I may start liking pop rock, dad rock, or whatever this album is.
It's such a pity to have this Wild Beasts album here because it's certainly not their best. They were one of the less popular indie darlings in the late 00s and early to mid-10s, and I think their sound evolved greatly record after record, with Present Tense being their best.
On the other hand, Two Dancers is probably their most fun record lyrically. There's a lot of shoes and boots in it, it's very class-conscious, cheeky, and sexually charged, and that's why its most "serious" moments hit quite hard.
The falsetto that seems to bother so many people here is part of the fun for me. This is especially true on songs like "All The King's Men," where singer Hayden Thorpe's shriek and bassist Tom Fleming's deeper voice don't only compliment each other but play a part of the story.
As for the sound, this is so unmistakably an early 21st century British indie rock album. I grew up loving this music, so I am extremely biased into liking it. Still, I think it's a generally fun album that has a lot to offer. Not sure it will last the test of time to remain an indie album you need to hear before you die, but I won't be mad if it does.
I honestly didn't know what to think about this album even after several listens. It wasn't an outright bad album, but it felt a bit dull at first. It was like a punk-ish rock album that was a very smart version of college rock more than a groundbreaking demonstration of musicianship.
Being recorded in the early 70s, this is obviously an outrageously influential record, with some of its songs covered by the likes of David Bowie and Sex Pistols. If you pay attention, you can hear how some of the ideas here have been reverberating through rock music for decades and are still influencing guitar music today. Or maybe those were someone else's ideas that just started reverberating with this record?
In a way it felt like listening to the Pixies, because I can't say I enjoyed it all that much, but I like that artists that I love have listened to this music and then executed some of its best idea in a way that works better for me. In a way, that's the curse of the classics, right?
I kept listening, and I realized this was like a stripped down The Doors ripoff with a less talented singer. It felt like The Modern Lovers were listening too much to The Stooges and The Kinks while being massive fans of The Doors.
Then I felt like I had to check if this was recorded before or after Talking Heads, and it turns out the keyboardists Jerry Harrison was in both bands.
This journey made me appreciate this album much more. I doubt I'd ever name it as an album I love, but it made me realize how my idea of modern music is changing thanks to this list. Even a couple of months into it, I've already explored parts of music history that allowed me to understand why this album is on the list.
It's a 3.5/5 but I round it up because of the journey.
I never understood why this type of music exists, and I'm even more baffled why would anyone put it in a list of music I need to hear before I die. I mean, I heard it, but I don't feel it added anything to my life.
I'm certainly more emotionally invested in a 90s pop rock album about a woman trashing her ex than most of the other variations on the same topic. What blew my mind this time is that I couldn't stop hearing the influence Alanis Morissette had on Shakira's early rock albums. I know it's the other way around, but I couldn't stop thinking this is just Shakira trashing Pique in English.
As fun as all this is, this album is, well, old. It is more 90s than than me, and we were both born then. That's not necessarily bad, but for me it means I'd only listen to it for the nostalgia. Problem is, I don't feel nostalgia for this record or any of the songs in it. Not because they're bad, just because I never got into Alanis Morissette when I had to.
I'm starting to feel bad about rating hip-hop albums here. Apparently, I don't like old school hip-hop all that much, even if it's considered super important. Similar to several other rap albums I've got to listen here, this one was too simple, too repetitive, and mostly unexciting.
The production is fine, the rhythms are good, but it's all quite basic and the samples are not all that intriguing. Basically, the sound doesn't stand the test of time and it sounds dated in a bad way.
Lyrically, the album feels like an hour of boasting that Guru is the best possible person in the universe and beyond. As good as his flow and rhyming are, the contents were mostly annoying to me. The few exceptions didn't help the overall experience.
I'm now officially wary of hearing more old school hip hop.
Flute Zeppelin or maybe even Flute Zabbath, who knows. Either way a surprisingly fun album, and I can fully understand the "concept album" debacle between the band and everyone else.
I don't think there's anything I could say that hasn't been said about Jimi Hendrix and this album in particular. It's one of the reasons I feel like I was born at the wrong time, because in my delusional brain it would've been great to go to Woodstock and rock out high on acid or whatever was available, and yell like a schoolgirl at Jimi's face.
The only thing I could say about this album is that I don't really like it all that much as an album, but the pieces in it are the foundation of almost everything I like in music.
Having this album here is absolutely perplexing. The Cult's previous album is so much better and recognizable, while this one is quite boring. It feels like an aggregated version of every 80s hard rock band you can imagine, and I hate this. Rick Rubin is to blame as he was hired to rethink the band's sound and make it more pop. He did a good job with this, but that's how the band lost something and turned into just another rock band. I'm giving it a two because I like Ian Astbury's voice, but it's an otherwise listenable bad album.
This was one of the more difficult albums to listen to, honestly. I feel like I'm not in the mood for this music, even after I found out it was not country. Those are songs I don't really know because they were pop music even my grandparents were too young to hear when it was new. I'm also not American, so this emotional connection is completely lost.
Willie Nelson may be one of the greatest country singers ever (I honestly have no idea, nor I want to know), but he's not exactly the most exciting singer out there. This is a problem because his versions of these songs I'm not attached to are rather simple and lacking. I tried finding other versions of some of the songs, and it appears there are Ray Charles, Ella Fitzgerald, and even The Righteous Brothers songs that make Willie Nelson sound... Well, boring.
All in all, great background music and nothing more. Giving it a little extra because it wasn't country.
After several 90s hip-hop albums, I was starting to worry that the whole genre is just not for me. As fun as Wu-Tang and De La Soul could sound, their albums just didn't click with me neither lyrically, nor sonically. Then came Jurassic 5. I was dreading listening to this record for a few days, but when I finally did play it, I felt such a relief. Hip-hop is actually nice when done well, and maybe I'm just not into 90s hip-hop.
The production here is much better and fun. The beats are super fresh, the samples are well placed and add to the vibe, and the rapping comes with a nice balance of boasting how great Jurassic 5 are and deeper topics. Songs like 'Thin Line' and 'Remember His Name' are just the type of rap I like to listen to as they're telling some good stories, mixed with personal details. Then there's 'High Fidelity' and 'A Day at the Races" which felt more about the flow and rapping prowess of the group.
What a banger, even though the Jurassic 5 were a six-piece.
Imagine that these are the leftovers from her previous albums...
The audacity to call this 78-minute, 22-song-long mess 'Back to Basics" can only be excused because of Christina Aguilera's fantastic voice.
This album is the bridge between the old-school hip-hop apparently I don't like and the more modern version I enjoy because it slaps. I guess Q-Tip (of A Tribe Called Quest fame) is to blame because I like his beats, and I didn't vibe with Gang Starr's DJ Premier work.
What makes this record stand out is the mix of intriguing lyrics and excellent delivery. Listening through the hip-hop albums here, I start to truly understand why rap fans talk about flow so much, and Nas has it perfected.
3.5/5
