✅️ STILL BANGS
Favorite track: Supernaut
✅️✅️✅️ STILL BANGS HARD
fav tracks: Glory Box, Sour Times, Roads, Numb
✅️ STILL BANGS
favorite tracks: Dirty Work, Kings
✅️ STILL BANGS HARD
fav track: Mama Said
I don't really love this era of Miles Davis but I'd feel like an asshole rating it less than 4 stars. It's beautiful and maybe perfect but not perfect for me.
I much prefer "Miles In The Sky" (1968) which ✅️ STILL BANGS
A couple songs are undeniable all-time BANGERS but the album just isn't their best work.
⚪️ moderately BANGS but doesn't reach the high highs of "Songs in the Key of Life" or "Innervisions"
Fav tracks: I Believe (When I Fall In Love It Will Be Forever), Blame It On the Sun, Superstition
⚪️ moderately BANGS
fav tracks:
He's Always There
Happenings Ten Years Time Ago
✅️ STILL BANGS
beautiful album. haunting, silly. some times raw, other times layered and complex
fav track: little red riding hood hit the road
✅️ still bangs
But less than it did in the heat of its newness. It's less interesting and more repetitive (lyrically and production--wise) than her follow-up Kala, and it's harder to forgive her shortcomings when she's no longer believably the coolest person alive but alas, the cringe comes for us all.
Fav tracks:
Galang
U.R.A.Q.T.
✅️ STILL BANGS HARD
Fav tracks:
Oh! You Pretty Things
Life on Mars?
Andy Warhol
The Bewlay Brothers
Some of the best lyricism in the world but for the most part the music doesn't do it for me, even if it's admittedly beautiful
✅️ STILL BANGS HARD but my favorite tracks are pretty much the ones that hit big for everyone:
Rio
Hungry Like A Wolf
Save A Prayer
✅️ STILL BANGS HARD
Fave tracks:
Bone Machine
Gigantic
Where Is My Mind?
Tony's Theme
Vamos
⚪️ moderately BANGS. I like them as a country/Americana group, but I wish they went maybe 10% more hippie with it.
Favorite tracks:
Wheels
My Uncle
Hot Burrito #2
⚪️ moderately BANGS, and much of that can be attributed to production by The Bomb Squad and Sir Jinx.
Cube's flow and lyricism aren't that impressive, but his voice, presence and presentation always have been. It works better on faster tracks than slower ones.
Fav tracks:
Amerikkka's Most Wanted
The Bomb
I always made fun of Wilco for being "music for old white guys" but I'm a white guy and I get a little older every year I don't die, and maybe I'm approaching my Wilco era.
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot still isn't the album for me, but I found a lot of it very pretty. Favorite tracks included "War on War" and "Jesus, Etc."
⚪️ neither BANGS nor DOES NOT BANG
✅️ STILL BANGS
So many of these songs have taken a life of their own, that it's easy to forget how "The Wind Cries Mary" into "Fire" into the more jazzy jammy funky freakout "Third Stone From the Sun" into "Foxey Lady" is such an incredible suite of rock'n'roll.
This album just wasn't for me. Nothing turned me off, nothing was bad or repellant. The whole album just came and went, in one ear and out the other.
⚪️ Neither BANGS nor DOES NOT BANG
Fav track: Radio Free Europe
There is some undeniably great guitar work here, and some killer keyboards, and at least one monster drum solo, but all it ads up to is British whiteboy blues. I think we as a society have evolved past the need for such things. Just put on some real Memphis and Chicago electric blues. Muddy Waters is right there.
🚫 DOES NOT BANG
This was the most popular album in the world when I turned twelve. I was just starting to care about music and it was as sad, angry, and angsty as I was. I don't know if I can ever listen to it completely objectively, divorced from my history with it, but I'm pretty sure it ✅️ STILL BANGS HARD.
Fav tracks:
Tourette's
Rape Me
Dumb
Very Ape
Heart-Shaped Box
Familiar seeming songs and song-structures kept taking interesting turns and surprising me.
Ratings are silly, but I kept wavering on whether to give this 3 stars or four. Went with the higher rating because like I said—these songs kept handing me surprises, and so few things do. Great musicianship as well.
Favorite track:
Make It Right
Eminem is probably the only artist where I prefer to the radio cuts to the explicit originals, because he's gets much weirder and more clever with the constraints.
Eminem would eventually become an artist with songs I enjoy, but when The Slim Shady LP came out and blew up, I was a teenager and it was already too juvenile for me. It's aged incredibly poorly since. You can see glimmers of the incredible wordsmith he's going to become but, while his flow is there, a lot of the writing is just lazy rhymes and violence against women. That content is no more offensive now than it was 25+ years ago but it's a lot less shocking, to its own detriment.
🚫 DOES NOT BANG
Favorite track:
Train Song
This is one of the Springsteen albums I've been less exposed to over the years, but my Mom is from Jersey and came of age in the '70s. This music is pretty much encoded in my DNA.
✅️ STILL BANGS
Favorite tracks:
Badlands
Adam Raised a Cain
The Promised Land
Sometimes Nick Cave's music speaks to my soul, other times it bores me. I didn't find much to love or much to hate in this album, but I can see what other folks do.
Favorite song:
Release the Bats
Post- The Strokes rock revival music to listen to in Urban Outfitters changing rooms.
There were some killer hooks and melodies throughout the album but the songs never amounted to much more than background noise for me. I didn't find the singer grating like some people did, but he just didn't do it for me.
🚫 DOES NOT BANG
favorite track: Velvet Snow
LEAST favorite track: Milk
Eh, it was fine.
Favorite tracks:
In the Light
Down By the Seaside
✅️ STILL BANGS HARD, even if the singer is a dickhead.
Favorite songs
-Unhappy Birthday
-I Started Something I Couldn't Finish
-Girlfriend In A Coma
-Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before
Slick. Well-played. Just not really my flavor of jazz.
My first thought was "yee haw American Radiohead" thought that wasn't the vibe throughout. Beautiful in ways I hadn't expected. I'd avoided this for too long because the "singer-songwriter" label led me to believe it'd be boring. A life cut short too soon.
Favorite songs:
Mojo Wine
Grace
Dream Brother
It's transitionary-stage Beatles. It's a classic. It somehow changed the whole world and I can take a nice nap to it.
✅️ STILL BANGS
favorite songs
Nowhere Man
Michelle
Girl
They are going to evolve into one of my all-time favorite bands with subsequent albums, but this is not a good start or a good album.
I do like how obnoxious "Fodderstompf" is, however. It's like a Monty Python sketch where a bunch of grannies make dub music. It will be entertaining to listen to exactly ONCE a decade for the rest of my life, and hopefully not more often than that.
Favorite track:
Public Image
A darker new wave classic
✅️ STILL BANGS HARD
Favorite tracks:
Disorder
She's Lost Control
In my simplified, pop-damaged brain, there's only four types of music:
- music to dance to
-music to sing to (those aren't always mutually exclusive)
- music to be sad to
- and music to meditate to
This is the latter for me. It'd be good for deep thinking, head clearing, getting high and rehashing my whole life, but I don't think I'd put it on casually. I like some jazz but I need it to have a little more funk to it. After I listened to this album, my computer autoplayed some Charles Mingus, Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders. That was all a little more my speed.
⚪️ moderately BANGS
This was like pleasantly catching up with an old friend I'd grown apart from. When I was first developing my musical tastes, multiple songs from the black album were still in heavy rotation on the local hard rock station, and I end up picking up the album.
My dad walks in on me listening to it and says, "this is what you're into now? Let me play you some real shit" and hands me his copy of Ministry's Psalm 69. I fell in love with industrial and metal took a backseat. When I did get back into Metallica, it was their thrashier '80s albums I gravitated towards, but the black album is still loaded with classics, and holds a place in my heart.
✅️ STILL BANGS
favorite songs:
Enter Sandman
Wherever I May Roam
The Unforgiven
Nothing Else Matters
Didn't really make an impression on me. Nothing I didn't like but nothing I loved either.
⚪️ neither BANGED nor DID NOT BANG
Another "just fine" one for me. Not my cup of tea, but well made and well played. A couple songs that might hit immaculately if deployed at the right time on classic rock radio.
Favorite tracks:
Photograph
Rock of Ages
Franz Ferdinand was so good for me when I was a dj in the '00s. I could drop "Take Me Out" at a hipster dance party to make my sets feel a little less alien and pretentious, and I could drop it at a bro-y sports bar and I would seem a little cooler just by playing something other than 70s/80s butt rock or 90s rap.
They were never in my regular at-home rotation and I don't think they're going to be after this listen, but I was surprised how many of their songs straight up ✅️ STILL BANG
favorite songs:
Come on Home
Take Me Out
This Fire
Michael
Some all time favorites on this album, and a lot of perfectly fine songs that sound similar but don't reach those high highs.
✅️ STILL BANGS
Favorites:
Pump It Up
Lipstick Vogue
Radio Radio
Dickheads pretending to be meatheads ironically, playing late '50s/early '60s singalong rock songs with heavy Bronx/Queens accents in wrestling outfits.
The song titles had me thinking they would be a little more edgelord than they ended up. "Back to Africa" is a lovesong with a *lightly* anticolonialist message. "Master Race Rock" is mostly just making fun of country boys and jocks. Half of the album is California surf rock from some guys I'm not sure had ever seen the West Coast.
✅️ STILL BANGS
Favorite songs:
(I Live For) Cars and Girls
Next Big Thing
I Got You Babe
Prince was a legend and a genius, but I definitely prefer him leading a full band on guitar than leading with a drum machine and doing most of the parts himself.
✅️ STILL BANGS
Favorite songs:
Sign 'O' the Times
Housequake
A legendary album by one of the undisputed greats.
✅️ STILL BANGS HARD
Favorite songs:
Crosstown Traffic
Little Miss Strange
1983 (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)
All Along the Watchtower
I downloaded this off Soulseek in 2005, listened to it, decided "wow this is very different and very beautiful" and then forgot about it for two decades. It might take another 21 years before I listen to it again but I think it's great and I'm so glad I've experienced it. It's just not generally what I'm in the mood for.
⚪️ Neither BANGS nor DOESN'T BANG but a SECRET THIRD THING
Favorite songs:
What can I do?
Spiralling
Solid '90s rock album form one of the coolest bands of the era. I tend to prefer the songs where Kim sings to the ones where Thurston does, but it's not a hard fast rules.
Favorite songs:
Drunken Butterfly
Sugar Kane
The energy of the crowd really puts some fire into King's performance. A great tradeoff for the polish of the original studio recordings.
✅️ STILL BANGS
Favorite song:
Help the Poor
The single that's a classic is still a classic, but the rest of the album is good, not great
Favorite songs:
Sound of the Crowd
Darkness
Don't You Want Me
