I’ve been getting more and more into big band/jazz over the past few years but hadn’t gotten the chance to listen to this one yet. Really a solid effort with no HUGE standouts but no skips
A classic, a legend, and honestly someone I haven’t listened to enough. But today, after her passing yesterday, was a fitting time to give this one a chance. An excellent collection that shows why she is known as one of the greats.
Has a place in someone’s rotation, and I can recognize the artistry, but I don’t think that rotation is mine. It does have a strong finish with Saturday Sun though.
I’m not even a Metallica fan but even I have to admit they struck gold here. One of the best metal albums of all time.
Not sure how to describe this one other than a globalized indie-soul fusion and honestly I dig it. I’ll definitely give this one more time in the future.
So evidently the dark moody stuff is the only thing I can stand by the Smiths. There are a couple of passable songs here but it’s overall too whiny for me.
One of the all time greats. Not a skip on this album. Amazing that this is their first.
An overlooked rock band of the 70s, ethereal and Bowie-ish. Prominent pianos, violins, choirs, and guitar riffs modulated into an almost kazoo-like quality along with some shredding and wailing that seems to come out of nowhere at times. What a band.
Ask me to put this one in a box and I’ve got nothing for you. There’s some Herbie Hancock here, and some early west coast hip hop, some global instrumentation.. not necessarily my thing but I enjoyed the listen. Soweto is getting added to a playlist for sure. Also apparently Malcolm McLaren is a white British dude?
I just wanted to keep poking this album and telling it to do something. Jah Wobble drives this whole thing though. Does Albatross really need to be 11 minutes long?
I’m a Smooth Oper-hater so this one got off to a rough start. The whole first half of the album really just lives in that same area but around when we get to When Am I Going to Make a Living it really starts to find a better funky rhythm. Then it’s slips back into Smooth Operator territory a bit at the end. Glad I gave Sade a chance but this album is always going to be a skip a good chunk for me.
I’ve spent a long time not really caring about The Doors, mainly from listening to their most popular stuff. The opening of this album changed my feelings a little bit. I think it’s really just Jim Morrison that I’m not a huge fan of. Put somebody as the lead of this band and I think you may have one of my favorites. The funkiness of this album just doesn’t jive with Morrison’s vocals, which always seem like he’s forcing it a little too hard. He wants to be soulful and spooky but instead he just comes off as a try-hard. Been Down So Long is about the only place he hits for me, I guess because the bluesiness fits him a little better than the funky sex magic rock they try the rest of the album. Still solid but Morrison just really drags it down.
One of the first instances I remember of “smart rap”. This one led to me listening to a lot more in the family of Childish Gambino, J Cole, etc. Love the sampling and wordplay. 3 stars for the music, 4 stars for the influence it had on my musical taste.
Not my favorite Talking Heads album but even second rate Talking Heads is better than most albums.
I had never really heard of this one before and the first track didn’t give me a lot of hope. Generic 90s alternative rock and nothing more. Then Jupiter and Teardrop opens up and it’s like I’m listening to David Bowie meets peak Bon Jovi or something. The next few songs try to fight it but it slowly starts to creep back into that mushy generic alt rock sound until we hit America Snoring and the vocals start to soar and break us out of the rut. We finish with Grace which almost devolves into this funky Alice In Chains feel (which I like) and then You Just Have to Be Crazy which might as well be a country song. Interesting little progression
I feel like my George Michael experience up to this point has been the occasional Wham! around Christmas, Careless Whisper in every movie ever, and a smattering of commercials. What I found here was an incredibly cleanly produced pop album with silky smooth vocals throughout. He spends a large portion of the album showcasing his vocals with absolutely nowhere to hide, backing himself with simple pianos and acoustic guitars and using a backing choir not to augment but to accentuate. Cowboys and Angels was what I was looking for in the Sade album I listened to a few days ago. The whole album kind of oscillates between almost disgustingly upbeat and beautifully haunting.
Much like the Talking Heads album I got a few days ago, this isn’t my favorite by Funkadelic, but that doesn’t make it any less of a great album. If P-funk was the sound track of my life I’d be a happy man.
I’ve never listened to this one in its entirety until now and I came to notice that it’s the (relatively) calmer moments between the “Rage” that really make this one special. Killing in the Name fades into the background of the funky walking bass lines, Morello doing something new and interesting, or Zack just rapping instead of yelling. Solid first album.
I’ll admit I’m not much of a Dylan fan outside of the most popular songs. This is easier to listen to than some because of the bluesiness outweighing the folk influence a good bit of the time but it’s still pretty rough.
Loved this album going into it and I love it coming out this time as well. We start with that raw Atlanta sound with an OutKast spin and then pivot into the smooth So Fresh, So Clean. Then it brings both together with Ms. Jackson. About halfway through we get to probably my favorite OutKast song, B.O.B. We finish with some just solid ATL rap. My one complaint is I could do without all the interludes.
After an incredible opening this one is kind of hit or miss for me. Parts of it are fine but others just kind of devolve into “noise.” I can’t deny the album’s influence but that doesn’t really make it my thing.
Unpredictable without being chaotic in melody, tempo and instrumentation. It’s got the 60s rock backbone but isn’t afraid to get a little weird with it. It just never quite does what you expect it to do in the best way possible. One real standout in this regard is Bummer in the Summer, which takes what sounds like an electric blues rock song and somehow makes it work over a folksy acoustic guitar.
A bit repetitive both in each song and across the album as a hole but if you enjoy the loop there’s a good album to be had here. I was leaning toward 2 stars but when I heard her turn “Sanford and Son” into “Big Pimpin” I was sold on 3.
The Gallaghers are too into themselves and even this early in their career it shows through some. It’s a solid album though and you can see why it went to their heads. A solid 3 for me that almost leans toward a 4 but doesn’t have quite enough to make it stand out.
Love some Radiohead, not quite psychedelic enough for my taste though.
Started with a trio of melancholy songs that made me want to chain smoke a pack of cigarettes by myself, then went through more genres than I knew Wilco was capable of, before finishing right where it started. Solid 3 creeping toward a 4.
Smooth, clean, and timeless.
After opening with what sounds like Pink Floyd, the unmistakeable Elton John piano comes in, guiding us through Love Lies Bleeding, a song that sounds better placed in the 80s than its original early 70s release. The. You just get nailed with hit after hit, from all sorts of genres, styles, and time periods it feels like.
About the only reference point I have for this one is Primus, even though this one came first, and so much of that comes from the string bass that just absolutely refuses to sit back and be the rhythm section. I get a little bit of the later punk sound in some songs but unfortunately the disjointedness of it all keeps the album got really landing as hard as it could for me.
This one lost me a bit on the first track, where it feels like the sampled vocals are sitting over the music rather than in it. As the album went on and the vocals started to weave throughout the music I was hooked though. A lot of the samples make this sound like an album from the late nineties rather than 15-20 years before.
Tracy Chapman has a set of pipes, don’t get me wrong, but singer-songwriter doesn’t do a lot for me. A couple of really good ones on this album though.
One of THE albums that defined my late teenage years. Muse’s brand of harder but still radio friendly electronic influenced rock hit hard then and it certainly hits just as hard now, 20 years later.
There’s probably a 5 star album hidden in here somewhere but you can unfortunately tell that these weren’t recorded with the intent of being one cohesive album. That’s about all that’s holding this thing back from perfection. Nina Simone’s vocals and piano or amazing as usual, making we want to smoke a cigarette alone in a bar at 1 am and contemplate all my life choices. The backing band is complex but doesn’t overtake the lead. All around great performances.
What a trip this one is when you really get down into the story. A double concept album with explorations of sexuality and interpersonal relationships through a journey through mythological fantasy world eventually ending in castration and literal self discovery. Crazy stuff. Great prog rock though.
I dig the Violent Femmes. They’ve got this way of making punk accessible by letting the melody lead and not turning into a wall of sound like a lot of other punk bands of the time. They’ve also got that cool underground almost island sound that sets them apart. This album showcases all of this.
R&B isn’t normally my jam but this one sets itself apart from a lot of the others. Jazmine can sing and the whole album has this cohesiveness to it even if the styles vary across the individual tracks. “Put it Down” and “Lost One” are the real standouts here but I don’t think there’s a bad track on the album.
I remember my parents had this album when I was growing up and I was so confused why all these ladies had yogurt on their faces.
Solid pop rock album with an almost surf rock feel and a lot of obvious influence on later female-driven ska punk like No Doubt and Save Ferris.
I think I prefer the haunting CSN over the moody and rambling versions we also see on this album. The subtle instrumentations, the spooky harmonies.. this one bounces around a bit too much for me even if the ones that hit (Helplessly Hoping in particular) hit hard.
What a weird party of an album this is. From the drug use-inducing Maggot Brain, through all the funky vibes throughout the rest. Not carried by any one instrument, unless you’re putting the whole album on the back of Eddie Hazel’s opening guitar solo, this one is absolutely my favorite funk album of all time.
Sebadoh is a band without an identity, or rather too many identities. The album opens on a strong note with Soul and Fire and then it loses and gains my attention multiple times over its hour plus runtime. It turns out I like Harlow as a songwriter but not Sebadoh as a band so much.
After my main Beastie Boys experience being License to Ill this one was a real treat. It’s crazy the amount of progression we got from one album to the next. All the samples, the cleaner vocals, but still all that raw Beastie Boys energy.
After having just pulled a CSN album from the 1001 a few days ago, I really thing Young is what was missing on that album. His haunting voice and melancholy tone give even his more
"upbeat" songs a spooky quality that's perfect for fall- the Harvest time.
A solid piece of psychadelia with some bluesy influence to shake things up a little. Didn’t leave a huge impression on me but great for background music.
What a wild story there is behind this band and a really interesting album to match. We go through a few different genres, with the whole “jock jams” sound being the predominant one for most of the album. It’s like being at an NBA game in the 90s, until they start throwing hints of rock, synth, and even twangy country into the mix. Not always my cup of tea but I can respect what they were going for.
Man there is just so much influence this album had on things to come. Its fingerprints on modern Latin music can be seen coming from pretty much every track. It’s catchy and does this amazing balancing act with the horns between dissonance and perfect tight harmonies, often within seconds of each other. Also love how the horns often join the rhythm section.
This album sometimes loses itself in a wall of noise but the varied nature of the tracks keeps me coming back for more. There are some real gems in here even if none of them have had staying power in the sense that there are no big breakout singles from this one.
Love Lou Reed, especially when he gets a little weird.
Reminiscent of video game music from the 90s and early 2000s. Wasn’t really enough to hold my attention throughout the whole thing but parts of it were great.
