This probably made it on to the list for its historical significance. But surely only white blues purists/those people who insist Brian Jones was the real genius of the outfit/professional contrarians would argue this was the best Stones’ album?
170/1001
The Shamen - En-Tact
Heard before? ❎
Revisit? ❎
I understand that this is integral to the 90s club scene, but this felt too repetitive and samey over the course of over an hour.
Opening track - nice groove, i thought I'd like this, 4 stars! But then the rest - each of them on their own low 2 stars with perhaps 2 or 3 threes. But... the album as a whole became just so repetitve, bland and boring that it started to annoy me. As a whole: 1 star.
for how wacky & dissonant this is, it feels like it's lacking in the urgency & energy that I'd want from an album of this type. a very interesting listen that's combining a lot of cool elements and sounds that I don't really see myself revisiting
at time of writing i have 68 albums remaining. if the 1020 prior to En-Tact are any indication, i can look forward to somehow around 300 more albums of dull, repetitive english electronic trash, and the Shamen are making sure I know it
mano. o cara do you've got a friend in me falando a n-word.
bom eh isso. não foi ruim e eh meio bizarro como as letras são atuais. mas eh isso só, nada demais não
There’s no doubt that Curtis Mayfield has a good voice, and the quality of production is also very nice. I don’t connect to many of the songs, though. So in love is the standout song for me.
pretty annoying and wholly unnecessary when there are 2 better albums from them on the list (and any more than 1 is pretty unjustifiable to begin with!)
In the early 2000s, there were so many 'The' rock and indie bands that this fact alone led to the downfall of rock music itself. That and the fact that 80% of those bands were balls. I have never heard of this one though. The Bees. In fact, I have no idea if they are even a rock band. Soon find out... But first, here are some actual, important, good 'The' bands who do not feature on this list, it should - The Gathering, The Music, The Delays. Also, why are there no albums by Sia or Lady Gaga? U mad bro?
Alas, this album is a far cry from those by the artists I mentioned, and therefore I am obliged to question its inclusion here. In order to be considered one of 'must hear albums before you die', an album must meet certain criteria. Let us walk through them.
Historical Significance and Innovation: This album barely charted, same for its singles, and has received no significant airplay. Very few people have ever heard of it or the band. It appears to have zero historical significance. In terms of innovation - how innovative can you buy with yet more white boy reggae and plinky plonky bollocks?
Internal Cohesion and Journey: I'll allow this one. I mean, when every song is filler, it's still coherent.
Timelessness and Endurance: It doesn't sound dated but it also doesn't sound like it was recorded at any point in the last 20 years. It feels like a lost album from the 60s that was only recorded because the singer was the dealer for a bigger band.
Emotional and Social Impact: Zero. It seems to have influenced no-one and held no emotional impact for me.
So, an album which didn't sell by a band no-one has heard of which influenced nobody, had no wide impact, and sounds like any number of artists from decades before. Plus the album artwork is a hate crime. Some people who don't like music will probably like this. It's well made. The best thing I can say about it are that the first ten seconds of roughly a third of the songs are 'nice'.
äntligen har jag förstått! rolling stones är ett misogynt pojkband! de älskar tjejer och de hatar tjejer. det är såå poserande och innehållslöst. och visst! det är lite svängigt. och visst! jag har en väldigt personlig relation till paint it black eftersom det 2008 var min favoritlåt på guitar hero 3. men det räcker tyvärr inte boys.
The first album by Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers sounds like a lot of things. Some of it just fits nicely in the 'new wave' sound that was emerging. A lot of it derives from the Stones, but there are flashes of the Byrds, even Status Quo, and openly imitates Van Morrison in 'Mystery Man'. 'Luna' is more interesting, slow and brooding and harder to pin down. But there's no flashy excess, it's all kept quiet tight and brief. And of course the closing 'American Girl' is the live favourite that anybody with even a passing acquaintance with TP should know. Great song.
This band hits their stride 2-3 albums in, not to mention the multi-plarinum 1989 solo comeback but there's enough to recommend in this solid debut.
I'll be a rock 'n' rollin' bitch for you if you give this five stars. This isn't my favorite Bowie album but it's probably his best overall. Straight up classic.
The blues is where it's at. I was surprised at how good this album is. I'm also surprised John Lee only has 1 album on this list. Dude was a blues master.
Ooh, I am diggin' these drones. Noisy, repetitive, driving. This is exactly my thing. Hints of 60s punk (MC5 and Stooges), 70s krautrock, and 80s no wave, this really hangs together. It's a collage of musical references built into a whole new thing.
The NY Times obituary for Lou Reed referred to him as the godfather of "high IQ, low technique" rock and roll. and that's exactly what this album is. I could listen to this all day. I never knew where to start with Spacemen 3 (although I am long time Spiritualized fan), but I think I need to rush out and buy this record. I have been listening to this all day.
It's magical noise.
Headhunters, hell yeah! One of my measures of whether an album is a classic for me is "could I listen to it every day?" Yes. Yes, I could listen to this every day.
My friend Kate introduced me to this album when we were in high school, and it has been a favourite ever since. I have limited love for most jazz fusion, but this I love. It's funky as hell and a lot of fun; it lives in the damn pocket and the band is playing the hell out of everything. Favourite moment; about 7 minutes into 'Chameleon', the lead synthesizer oscillator goes wildly out of tune, and Herbie wrangles it back into key, landing the plane with both engines on fire.
Herbie Hancock has done many great things over his career, and one of greatest achievements (in my opinion) is to make music that is accessible without dumbing down. This is likeable and catchy without being stupid or pandering. And you can dance to it!
Five stars, no notes.
Something did happen on the day he died. I screamed liked a baby.
If it needs justification at all, I’d played a handful of Bowie songs on guitar at my mother’s deathbed the day before. She wasn’t yet gone – she had another ten days - but she was living the end of her life as pleasurably as she could amid the excruciating pain and her strength and consciousness slipping away.
She had given me my first Bowie record when I was fourteen, though we’d listened to him in the car for years, especially on those long drives to the hospice when my grandfather was dying two decades earlier. Bowie has always been tied, for me, to grief and dying - and, by extension, to love and living.
The surprise release of Blackstar allowed me to briefly share the idea of Bowie’s new work with my mother. But when he died so soon after, we agreed she didn’t need to hear it. If we could only fit a thousand and one albums into her last ten days, she didn’t need something new - certainly not one of her favourite artists confronting the thing she herself was approaching. She was content with the music that had brought her happiness during the five short decades she had on earth.
People call Blackstar a grand final statement, but that misreads Bowie’s nature. Sue and ’Tis a Pity She Was a Whore were older pieces tied to another project. The return of Major Tom didn’t feel like a revelation; he had always been part of Bowie’s orbit, a ghost in the system. Bowie had already begun handling the legacy on his previous record, and the Nadsat of Girl Loves Me was simply another of his recurring fascinations. Even Dollar Days, written in the studio, struck me as playful rather than portentous. Bowie rarely said anything definitive, and he wasn’t about to start.
Lazarus interests me far more. It was the title song from the musical he wrote with Enda Walsh, which closed its first run at almost the same moment my mother died - within a few hours. Of the four new songs he wrote for the show, it was the only one he carried across to Blackstar. I don’t know why. But it feels like the more searching piece, Bowie revisiting his own mythology through the figure of Thomas Newton and finding something unsettling there. Unlike Blackstar, the show received mixed reviews.
Bowie had always been a flawed architect of concept albums anyway. His planned musical of 1984 was never produced. 1.Outside remains gloriously confusing. Even Ziggy Stardust abandons its narrative almost as quickly as Sgt. Pepper. And thank goodness: It Ain’t Easy does more for the record than any plot device could. These failures aren’t incidental: they’re intrinsic. Bowie’s form of invention was incompatible with totalities. His art emerged from excess, leakage, overspill - from the impossibility of containing all his personae within any stable frame.
He was part of that generation of art-school musicians who treated popular music as the quickest route to a public imagination. He loved music, but also recognised it as the last mass-cultural space where experimental aesthetics could intervene in everyday life. It was a place to share ideas that could never have found a home in more formal disciplines. He wasn’t a novelist. His paintings were respectable. He was more a star than an actor. But in the interplay of albums, sleeves, performances and videos, he found a gallery for ideas that ranged from the profound to the ludicrous, sometimes in the space of a single track.
It’s telling to compare his first and final on-screen appearances. His screen debut, in the 1967 student horror film The Image, shows an artist tormented by a painting come to life - played, of course, by Bowie. In the video for Lazarus, Bowie, dressed in the Kabbalistic imagery of his mid-70s persona, writes frantically. When he runs out of parchment, he writes on the table, then down the table leg, and on. There is never enough space to capture everything. The beginning and the end share the same insight: creation was both his torment and his great animating force.
To imagine Blackstar as a final statement is to succumb to a fantasy of closure that Bowie’s entire career repudiates. He didn’t make final statements. Nothing he did was final. He revised himself constantly. He contradicted his own mythologies. He had a decade of silence before The Next Day, and it suited him, but even that felt provisional. Dying forced him into new shapes he might never have adopted otherwise. It was a meeting of compulsion and inevitability, and the work emerged from that tension.
It was death, not intention, that made Blackstar the last word. Had he lived, Bowie might have dismissed it or replaced it, and the critics would have obliged. But he didn’t live, and the album became a vessel for our need to find meaning in endings. I struggle to hear it outside that context. And I cannot view it without personal history interjecting: for me, it contains moments of brilliance, moments of silliness, and a great deal of confusion. But I am no better equipped to face death from Blackstar’s insights than I am from the Labyrinth soundtrack - except that Blackstar is, on the whole, the better record.
It is not Mozart’s Requiem. But it is the record by - possibly - my favourite artist that was released just as he and my mother died. And that means something. Perhaps too much.
My mother’s choices to face down death - Starman, Sorrow, The Prettiest Star - brought her comfort simply by existing, not by offering instruction. Let all the children boogie: words to live by, surely.
I’m unsure whether artists are answering a calling or nursing an affliction, but what they produce lets us feel things we might never access otherwise. So when I cried at Bowie’s death, I was crying for my mother. It hardly needs explanation.
She died relatively young; he was respectably old. When I think about my own ending, I wonder which model I’ll follow: Bowie’s anxious compulsion or my mother’s remarkable ease. Bowie achieved more; my mother was content with less. I believe she would have liked Blackstar, though I doubt she would have replayed it. Blackstar is only seven tracks, and none of them are built to carry the weight we place on them. Yet Bowie’s achievement with this final album was to remind us that it is the spirit of creation, rather than any specific creation, that is the meaning of an artist’s life. 3.5
It is nearly impossible to listen to Blackstar and not think about death the whole time. And yet we know that for a couple of days after this album was released this feat was entirely possible. Like most people, I missed that window and by the time I sat down with the album every bar and syllable of it was slathered in one unifying ‘meaning’ imposed from up there, in Heaven. Blackstar had drama that couldn’t be stolen.
Still, I have my suspicions that in those first two days I would have found less of a gulf in quality between Blackstar and, let’s say, Reality. Reality has both the (apparently ‘defiant’) energy of Blackstar and as much (possibly more) lyrical material that can support morbid close-readings. Yet Reality is more or less forgotten, while Blackstar is venerated - particularly by young people I have noticed in recent years.
Listening again this weekend, I can’t help thinking that between the absorbingly odd title track and the lovely closer ‘I Can’t Give Everything Away’, Blackstar mostly gets by on supplying ‘vibes’ while the listener is unable to draw their critical attention from the limitlessly dramatic notion of Bowie’s confrontation with untimely death. There is neither much structure, nor lyrical heft to stuff like ‘Tis Pity or Sue or Girl Loves Me. Drums go round and round. Portentous riffs go round and round. Saxophones tootle. Surely this is not Bowie’s best work by a long shot. In any case, all was transmogrified by the near-simultaneous release of Bowie’s spirit along with his final music. The album begins and ends memorably (and with sublime poignancy in the musical recall of A New Career..). It has an identity. If it should happen to falter in the middle, well…how did I rate Young Americans?
3/5
This is the roots. You can draw lines from all the music I've listened to my entire life that connects back to Fats Domino in some way. If this music hits you right, you never forget how it made you feel the first time you heard it. Pure magic.
I lost interest in so-called 'alternative' music in 2000s. I had kids (who liked pop music), and a busy life, and I thought it was just that I was getting old and irrelevant that I wasn't particularly interested in a lot of the new alternative music coming out. I read enough to be aware of the bands that were getting critical acclaim (The National, Arcade Fire, Wilco, Neutral Milk Hotel, Ryan Adams, etc, etc), but I just thought I was getting old and just didn't get it.
These days I am less inclined to blame myself. I really try with these records, but they are all so pretentious and dull! It's the emperor's new concept album, I swear. How did The Arcade Fire get THREE dull albums onto this list at various times? (Although I note that two have subsequently been removed, including this one)
This is yet another example of critics falling over each other to praise the latest serving of pretentious and earnest literary blancmange.
But really, this kind of music is just a testament to pretentious white middle-class straight male indie rock stars expecting that their creative output will bestow public adulation upon them while simultaneously exonerating their terrible private behaviour. Time has revealed that Win Butler is an arsehole that nobody can stand -- even his wife and brother keep their distance these days. And he's not nearly as clever as he thinks he is. Pretentious white middle-class straight male critics are particularly susceptible to lapping up this conceit -- a form of wish fulfilment fantasy, perhaps? But I think a lot of people are getting sick of the paradigm. I certainly am.
It's literary and worthy, emotional and poetic and profound and tasteful and ambitious and blah blah blah blah blah, I am so bored and slightly appalled. Over-rated.
I can’t believe the top review for this record (as of Dec 2023) is from someone trying to use their PhD in Mathematics as justification for not liking hip-hop.
Weak.
Oh fuck yeah, now we're talking. Wait no, I swear I'm not being pretentious.
This is the lowest rated album on this site because I guess mostly people aren't very fond of German people smashing metal plates together - who would have guessed.
But halle-fucking-lujah, this is something this list needs more of. Albums that make you go "well, that was an experience and now I'm a changed man". Nobody is lying on their deathbed wishing they heard more crappy 80s post-punk or late 60s psychedelic rock. THIS is what we all deserve to be listening to as we embrace eternal oblivion.
I'm giving this a high rating not only because I genuinely really love it, but also to help Kid Rock move to his rightful place as the actual worst album on this list.
Together we can make a difference. Save the turtles.
Brings back vivid memories of when me and my mate Ray went on a trip to Dresden. We met this rotund goth in a bar, head to toe with tattoos and piercings, real filth and after a while took her into the disabled bogs for a spit roast. We were both pumping away in her with Napalm Death on in the background and her wailing "MEIN GOTT" at the top of her lungs. I remember spaffing all over her back just as Siege of Power kicked in. As i shoot over her, she takes Ray's cock out of her gob and says "do you want fries with that?" in a faux American accent. Anyway, we go outside and there's this gammy little geezer in a wheelchair sitting there furious, giving me daggers, because he's had to wait so long, so I lean into him and I go "I hope you have as much fun in there as we just did you little cunt".
Shit like this on the list is both refreshing and infuriating.
Refreshing because it is good, fun, interesting, and also not something I would regularly be exposed to! It's why I started this project and keeps me coming back.
It's infuriating because the fact that it is included here means that Robert Dimery, the original author of the 1001 albums list is aware that music like this exists. He's clearly aware that there is an entire world of music out there. SO WHY HAVE I LISTENED TO 200 80s BRITISH NEW WAVE ALBUMS AND 200 SCOTTISH ROCK ALBUMS FROM THE 90S??!!?
Back when I was in college I used to go to a bar and listen to Neil tunes and do magic tricks for women. There was a bartender there, he was the best. I loved that guy. Some of the best years of my life.
Back when I was in college, there was this dude who would come into the bar I worked at on a Friday night and play fucking 10 Neil Young songs in a row. He would also hit on girls by doing magic tricks. I remember how angry I got every time he made me listen to an hour of Neil Young because I was just trying to have a good time, and he fucking made me listen to this sad, soppy fuck who writes nothing but songs that sound indistinguishable from each other and never seemed to enjoy a happy moment in his entire like. Fuck that guy, and fuck Neil Young.
2/5
Most 60's groups had three choices: copy the beatles, copy the beach boys, or sexually abuse minors. These guys changed the game and did all three- Four stars!
