All these songs are well-written, with great melodies, but they all work in exactly the same way, and Stevens’ voice isn’t strong or interesting enough to elevate the material any more than what it is. It’s all very pleasant. Best track: “Longer Boats”
Contains three of the greatest songs of the psychedelic era (“Somebody to Love”, “Today”, and “White Rabbit”) and eight more that are merely okay. Works better as a symbol of The Sixties than as a coherent statement. Best track: “Somebody to Love”
A masterpiece that kicks your ass for a half-hour and leaves you wanting more. To paraphrase James Merrill, you stand ready to receive the filler tracks that keep never coming. Best track: “Blitzkrieg Bop”
Yes, it’s juvenile and embarrassing, but it’s about things that are innately juvenile and embarrassing, and you can’t deny that Chester Bennington meant it. It’s catchy and it’s over pretty fast, which helps. The rapping is God-awful. Best track: “Forgotten”
Boring. Inoffensive. Only a step or two higher, aesthetically, than that Lo-Fi Beats To Relax/Study To stuff. Best track: “Clint Eastwood”
Save for “Freedom ‘90”, which is a classic, these songs are not particularly well-written or arranged, but George Michael was such an incredible vocalist—so charismatic—that he managed to pull it off anyway, barely. Best track: “Freedom ‘90”
The best that late-90s corporate pop can offer, which isn’t much. The title track, “Sometimes” and “I Will Be There” are OK, but mostly I’m just glad this era of music is over. Best Track: “Sometimes”
Hmm…the longest, densest, probably greatest album from the greatest singer-songwriter of the past 60+ years…what rating should I give it…Yes, this is a lot to digest on the first listen, or even the tenth, but man oh man is it rewarding. I could probably listen to this every day for the rest of my life and still discover new things. Best track: “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”
The band is now at its apex in terms of songwriting, but they aren’t quite there yet in terms of studio arrangement, their true métier (that would come with their next two records). A few of these tracks (“Bones,” “Sulk,” the title track, “Black Star”) have the problem of being excellently written yet not very distinguishable from other, similar Britpop material of the era. A near classic. Best track: “Street Spirit (Fade Out)”
Of course it’s impossible to pick only one record from classic rock’s most massive and forbidding catalogue (it has to be 500+ records by now), but if you had to do so, I’d say this one probably goes the farthest towards illustrating what the Dead were all about. There’s a colossal acid jam (“Dark Star”), pop (“St. Stephen”), guitar heroics (“The Eleven”), an upbeat blues jam (“Turn On Your Love Light”), a dark, moody blues track (“Death Don’t Have No Mercy”), and, uh, more dicking around on the guitar (“Feedback”). Or just avoid it entirely if you don’t want to get sucked down that hole; to paraphrase Pope, with the Grateful Dead, you have to drink deep, or taste not the stream. Best track: “Dark Star”
So much fun. Dated, but in a good way – you feel like you’re driving in a Corvette down a coastal highway, palm trees flying by, circa 1989. Best track: “Pacific 202”
The standard Flawed Yet Promising First Album. Winehouse’s voice is a bit much here (she would control it better on her follow-up) but the songwriting and production are by and large excellent. It is also, as the title implies, frank: a song where the narrator wonders if her boyfriend is gay because he needs a lot of emotional support isn’t necessarily the most forward-thinking but it certainly expresses the mindset of a lot of people. There’s a light “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)” feel to it, the sort of cheekily “offensive” thing that later artists like Lana Del Rey would run into the ground. Here it works. Best track: “Intro / Stronger Than Me””
I really don’t care for reggae all that much. It’s a style of music that’s so circumscribed, so locked-in to being its one thing, that there’s not much room for the things I love. In this case my general distaste for reggae is in conflict, here, with my admiration for Marley’s songwriting genius. There are great songs on here. But, then again, Marley wrote even better songs on other albums. Best track: “Concrete Jungle”
Oldest story there is: former guitar rock group whips out the synths and tries to go pop and falls flat on their face. In my opinion, at least—other people like this a lot, I guess. Painfully boring and indistinguishable from a hundred other similar groups, with only three superior songs: “Heads Will Roll”, a great pop song with cool U2-esque guitar work, and surprisingly enough (or maybe not; this band wrote “Maps” after all) the album’s two colossal, tearjerker ballads “Skeletons” and “Little Shadow”. Best track: “Skeletons”
This is nothing but AIR with all-female vocals, don’t kid yourself. I expected “Cherry Blossom Girl” to start playing any minute because every single song on here sounds exactly like that. But, see…the thing is, I really like “Cherry Blossom Girl”, so ten copies of that song is fine with me. Best track: “Happiness”
There’s a song on here called “Let the Music Speak,” and they should have, because ABBA’s vocals are like absolute nails on a chalkboard to me, utterly intolerable. The title track and “Soldiers” are very good songs, however, and in fact it’s entirely possible some of the others are too, but I just can’t tell because of the horrendous vocals. Best track: “Soldiers”
Proof positive that a band can have seemingly everything going for them on the surface and yet if there’s no inspiration there, no truly compelling reason for being, none of it will matter. There are a million bands that sound exactly like this and most of them are much better. If you really need this vibe, listen to Elbow instead, or Coldplay, or Muse, or, etc... Best track: “Words”
Turns out that the best way to separate your new-agey, vaguely irritating progressive rock group from a dozen other new-agey, vaguely irritating progressive rock groups is the liberal addition of mind-shattering, face-melting bass. Please don’t play this album loud if your house has a weak foundation. Best track: “Starship Trooper”
Look, I know this is a masterpiece, probably one of the most important electronic albums ever made, etc., but the fact remains that each of these tracks is 6+ minutes long and during all of them I’m (figuratively) checking my watch repeatedly after 3 minutes. Excellent pop songs extended far beyond what they can handle. Best track: “The Robots”
I prefer hard-rocking Young to folkie Young, and so I can’t give this a perfect rating despite its status as probably one of the most beloved albums ever made. All the songs are great, but Young’s very…particular voice in a folky context is hard for me to completely get over. Best track: “Southern Man”
Pac was probably 20 percent better a rapper than B.I.G., but the problem is B.I.G. was about twice as good at making coherent albums, and that’s why he produced two masterpieces while Pac only made several extremely good records. Pac is rapping his ass off here, but the production and sequencing on this one is merely a little bit better than okay. Best track: “If I Die 2Nite”
I have almost zero frame of reference for whether this sort of music is good or not and why. It certainly sounds fine to me. Best track: uh, “Splanky,” I guess?
The Who were one of the world’s greatest live bands, and this is their definitive live document. Unfortunately not all the tracks work so well in the live setting (the general rule here is, the longer the better) but the ones that do show the group at the peak of their powers. Try to focus on Keith Moon’s drum playing if you can – he’s losing his fucking mind back there. Best track: “My Generation”
The band’s sound is there (boy, is it) but the songs aren’t yet, with the obvious exceptions of “Born on the Bayou” and “Proud Mary,” two of the greatest rock songs ever recorded. God did this band sound incredible, though. Best track: “Proud Mary”
Elbow were probably one of the strongest of the wave of British groups that popped up in Radiohead’s wake (although nowhere near the most successful – Coldplay and Muse, anyone?) which says something about how impressive those groups were overall (not very). Three very good songs here – “The Bones of You”, “Mirrorball” and “One Day Like This” – and an awful lot of mopey, unmemorable stuff. Guy Garvey is a talented vocalist, though. Best track: “One Day Like This”
Frank Zappa is one of classic rock’s more fascinating figures because he didn’t really love the rock music of his era very much (he did enjoy 50s doo-wop, however) – his true dream was to become an avantgarde classical composer, but he realized pretty soon you couldn’t make any money in that and switched to rock music, a genre he both prized for its immediacy and detested for what he believed was its lyrical and conceptual idiocy (his first album Freak Out! is if nothing else a parody of how stupid most contemporary pop lyrics were, and in all his later records whenever he played a “traditional” rock song he made sure to saddle it with the filthiest, dumbest lyrics possible to call more attention to that). This album is probably his most successful attempt to unify the two sides of himself – ultradifficult jazz-rock-fusion-whatever jams that are meant to leave you in a state of stupefied awe at their complexity, which they do, but the whole thing is very distant, arrogant and unemotional, as all Zappa’s stuff was. Brilliant, and very, very cold. It must have driven him insane that the only real hit he ever had was partially written by his daughter, who possessed real human vulnerability, something Zappa generally found weak and laughable. Best track: “Willie the Pimp”
Smith was really a pop musician trapped in a folk musician’s body, and so you don’t come away from this marveling at his lyrics or his sensitivity, you come away marveling at the unbelievably catchy songs. The only thing this is missing is more elaborate production, which Smith would correct on later records. Best track: “Rose Parade”
Steely Dan are unquestionably the most controversial group of the classic rock era; one half find them insufferable, unbearable elevator muzak that spits in the face of all that is exciting and good about rock and roll, the other half find them geniuses, sarcastic parodists of an entire decade (The 70s—in all their horror and glory—are represented best by Steely Dan) who accomplished their work by hiding it in the catchiest, most professionally performed and recorded songs known to man. I tend toward the second view. Steely Dan cannot be understood unless one pays close attention to the obvious disjunction between their lyrics—bitter, sarcastic, literate, at times horrifying—and their music—smooth, placid, immaculately performed. This particular album leans a bit too hard to the “placid, overproduced” side for me—I don’t care much If a guitar riff is “tasty” or not—but only a bit. Best track: “Aja”
Pure uncut Godfather of Soul for thirty minutes. What’s truly astounding about this record is that, because it was produced before the standard “conventions” of live albums of popular music came into being, it feels more like some sort of field recording, something taken on the fly rather than a “traditional” prepared live record (which it of course was – Brown himself put up the cash for it). An astonishing historical document. Best track: “Lost Someone”
This group is best known in the U.S. these days for ripping off a bunch of Wire songs, which is really too bad because this record is pretty good, although the overall sound is more interesting than any individual track. The sort of record that creates great excitement over what the band will do next, which in this case was…nothing much. Best track: “Stutter”
Underworld were the greatest electronica group of the 90s (Aphex Twin doesn’t count – that’s one guy) and this is their second best record. What they did with vocals – a kind of half-drunken, propulsive, poetic improv – worked perfectly in a techno context. There still is no sound like theirs, an experience like being stuck in a hot, echoey cave with an unstable British man alternately whispering and shouting nonsense in your ear while percussion threatens to rip your chest open. But in a fun way. Best track: “Juanita: Kiteless: To Dream of Love”
Wonderful keyboard playing here, and “Peaches” is some kind of depraved classic. The rest are just kind of depraved, and catchy, and not necessarily classic, but at least the aforementioned keyboard playing makes it all distinctive. Best track: “Peaches”
Is it as good as they say (by which I mean, one of the hundred or so greatest albums ever made)? No – the production holds it back at some points, and at its worst moments this feels a bit more like 1997’s Earthling (one of Bowie’s weaker records) than anybody perhaps wants to admit. But the songs are great, and the cleverness with which Bowie orchestrated this album to coincide almost perfectly in every way with his own impending death is fairly incredible. Having a song’s chorus be “where the fuck did Monday go?” and dying on a Sunday night was just the cherry on top, making it feel like Bowie—in all his impervious perfection—controlled the universe. He was rock’s canniest operator, that’s for sure, a CEO of a billion-dollar advertising firm in another life. Best track: “Lazarus”
The century’s high point of hyper-obsessive studio arrangement on an R&B record. A jaw-dropping experience. This is to most other records of its type as Dark Side of the Moon is to most other rock records, that is, conceptual and arrangement-wise. Listen to “Walk On By” at max volume and never be the same again. Best track: “Walk On By”
Get this into a hospital fast because man it is sterile. Also very long. Chop a half-hour out of this and you might have something that reaches okay! I don’t even like the alleged classic “Mr. Blue Sky” all that much—just annoying, pounding piano so overproduced it hurts my ears, although the song does have a great ending. “Sweet Talkin’ Woman” and “Turn to Stone” are pretty good, too. Jeff Lynne was certainly a skilled songwriter and producer, but for some reason ELO’s style at length (this album is over an hour long!) just becomes unbearable. Best track: “Sweet Talkin’ Woman”
Pure anxiety and terror in album form. Each track is approachable, due to Beth Gibbons’ traditional torch-song vocals, and yet at the same time it is impossible to predict how any of it will go, due to the group’s complete abandonment of any sort of traditional instrumentation and arrangement. This sounds nothing like other Portishead records, and in fact nothing much like anything else. One of the best of its decade, and time will reveal it to be a classic. Best track: “Machine Gun”
Oh, no. You are not going to make me listen to James Taylor. People liked this? This makes Gordon Lightfoot look like Bob Dylan. The 70s were wild. Taylor was good in Two-Lane Blacktop, though. He should have stuck to acting…alright, I guess “Fire and Rain” is okay. Best track: “Fire and Rain”
For the first six tracks (well, technically five if you don’t count the one-minute ambient intro) this seems like a singular, unclassifiable masterpiece, one of the greatest albums ever made, but once track 7 rolls around with its over-the-top string section and hyper-sentimental melody it’s like you snap out of your trance and realize that it’s all been actually somewhat manipulative, shallow, etc. Track 8 brings it up to standard again, but 9 and 10 (I’m not typing out these names) are the worst tracks on the record, boring and tedious. Advice to rock groups: do not put your weakest tracks near the end of an album. Still, that first half – man! People went insane over this record when it finally came out in the U.S. two years later, they’d never heard anything like it (I vividly remember), and, at least for the first half, it was all justified. Best track: “Flugufrelsarinn”
Despite this album’s considerable virtues you can already see the beginnings of what ended up destroying this band, mainly a focus on Big Statements over melody, a growing sameness, and a pivot to synths over traditional rock instrumentation. Granted, synths eventually start looking good to every washed-up rock group, but only a lucky few (one out of ten, maybe?) are able to come out the other side of that unscathed. Arcade Fire, somewhat infamously, did not. Still, there are numerous excellent songs here: “The Suburbs,” “Ready to Start,” “City With No Children,” “Modern Man,” “We Used to Wait”…it all is a bit too long, though. Best track: “Ready to Start”
Boring, lame and generic trip hop that the 90s produced by the metric ton, except this time with a bonus: awful rapping! There is only one memorable song, which the group must have understood, because they made it the opening track, the first single, and named the album after it. Best track: “Connected”
The Stones never made a perfect record, but they made many excellent ones, and this is probably the most excellent (although Let It Bleed comes close). I’m a bigger fan of the rockers here, which are all brilliant, than of the ballads, which skirt the edge of eye-rolling sentimentality despite the group’s skill. Still, this is one of the highlights of 70s ultra-macho classic rock. Best track: “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking”
I had (over)rated this in my mind as closer to a 4, remembering only the few truly excellent tracks (“Motion Sickness”, “These Chains,” “Flutes”, “Let Me Be Him”) and forgetting the truly awful ones (“Night and Day” in particular is an embarrassment) and the mediocre ones (all the rest). I guess on the most recent listen I was so electrified by what was good here that the lesser stuff was twice as disappointing. Best track: “Let Me Be Him”
Yes, it’s all the same song, but it’s a great song, isn’t it? Best track: “Let’s Get It On”
Funkadelic were one of the greatest American rock groups, and if this album suffers a little bit from its seemingly aimless, tossed-together nature (and the tacked-on bonus EP is a bit weaker than the rest) it still all rocks, it’s still all groovy, it’s still all great. Best track: “Who Says a Funk Band Can’t Play Rock?!”
Primal Scream are (were? are they still around?) an interesting group because they so completely switched up their sound between records; Screamadelica and XTRMNTR, for example, barely sound like the same group. This record sits between those two, a combination of the chill druggy happiness of the first and the out-and-out terrifying aggression of the second. Yes, it’s very dated, but there are few better records to illustrate what the 90s sounded like. Best track: “Trainspotting”
I really shouldn’t enjoy this as much as I do, because it’s just so derivative, but I kinda have a soft spot for this sort of generic soundtracky stuff, and Holmes keeps things interesting with fascinating found recordings of NYC street denizens. The whole thing is all vaguely Pulp Fiction-y and very 90s and embarrassing, but you’ve got to let the hokiness wash over you. Can you find love in your heart for “Don’t Die Just Yet” even though it’s a bald-faced Serge Gainsbourg ripoff / cover / homage? If you can, this record is for you. Best track: “Don’t Die Just Yet”
One of the best indie groups of the 2000-10s, prevented from receiving the acclaim and success they should have by lead vocalist Hayden Thorpe’s eccentric vocals, which, yes, are love-it-or-hate-it, but if you hate it, you’re wrong. Marvelously strange, technically proficient, and creative. How can you hate a record where a guy sings “This is a booty call / My boot, my boot, my boot up your asshole” in an androgynous falsetto? We didn’t deserve this band. Best track: “All the King’s Men”
I’ve never cared for this record much. It’s supposed to be some kind of classic but I don’t quite get it – in this album Cream seems like a blues group awkwardly attempting psychedelia, like it’s some kind of uncomfortable, ill-fitting coat they’re putting on because it’s in fashion. Jack Bruce’s vocals are unbearable, and the songs aren’t hard-rocking enough to really rock nor poppy enough to be memorable. It definitely has an evocative Summer of Love “feel”, I suppose, but I wonder if that’s really legitimate or just because I’ve heard some of these songs in that context so many times. Ginger Baker was a great drummer, though. Best track: “Sunshine Of Your Love”
This album is g i g a n t i c (2 ½ hours) and as such it suffers from the main problem that all similarly-sized albums do, that even the best tracks tend to drown in the overall length, making them lack the impact they would have if they weren’t surrounded by so much other material. Plus, by the end, you just get tired of it no matter how good it is (There are, of course, exceptions to this concept, but they can probably be counted on two hands). I remember that when this project was announced people were expecting that Andre 3000’s disc would outclass Big Boi’s, and when the opposite turned out to be the case, nobody really quite knew how to react. But it’s true: Speakerboxxx is a great rap record, whereas The Love Below feels like a less talented, more pretentious Prince (and it’s hard to be more pretentious than Prince). Still, this album is so ambitious and so huge that there’s at least a normal-sized record full of great songs hiding somewhere in there. Best track (or tracks: we’ll do one from each this time since it’s technically two albums stuck together): “Bowtie” and “Pink & Blue”
This is very close to a classic – a single, perfect mood established immediately and not broken for close to forty minutes. These old Nashville Sound guys sure knew what they were doing. Best track: “Night Life”
As effective as your music might be, it’s never a good look when the best track on your album is a cover of another artist’s song (in this case, Dylan’s “My Back Pages”). Very pleasant, and there are no bad songs on it, but when compared to other totemic 1967 albums it can’t help but feel a bit wan, a bit like marking time. The band did better work both before and after. Best track: “My Back Pages”
This sounds like nothing much else, really, that I’ve ever heard – like rock music rebuilt from the ground up, so strange it stands alone even in the eccentric world of late 70s / early 80s post-punk / no wave music. I suppose The Pop Group had a vaguely similar sound, but theirs was wholly avantgarde and ugly with no attempt to be approachable, and these songs here are catchy! No individual tracks really stand out too much, but that’s fine – the sound is so singular it works much better as an overall experience, and isn’t that the point of albums, really? Best track: “Typical Girls”
Maybe live jazz is where it’s at for me, because this record is a lot more exciting than a lot of the studio-bound jazz of the period seems to be. The band seems to feed off the audience, and the crowd noise adds to the excitement. This is never going to be my favorite type of music (it seems just so abstract to me) but on this one, I can just barely spy why people loved it. Best track: “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue”
The greatest bar band of all time’s best recorded illustration of their sound, and if that seems a bit like faint praise it sort of is (this kind of band could never make an all-out masterwork; it’s just not in their makeup), but neither is it an insult. Every single lame white-boy “blues” (but really hard rock) group wishes they sounded like this. Best track(s): “Waitin’ for the Bus / Jesus Just Left Chicago” [the two songs are always played together on the radio, and who am I to separate them?]
It’s funny how nonrepresentative this album’s cover is – it makes it seem like it’s going to be a heavy, headbanging rock record, when in reality it’s much closer to a pop / boogie one made by an authentic weirdo. This last bit is the key to this record’s success. Marc Bolan was just so strange and every minute of this record is soaked in his eccentricity, which is what makes it near-great. Sample lyrics to illustrate: “Girl you’re good / And I’ve got wild knees for you / On a mountain range / I’m Doctor Strange for you”, “Just like a car, you’re pleasing to behold / I’ll call you Jaguar if I may be so bold / Girl I’m just a Jeepster for your love”; and the greatest of all: “Rocking in the nude / I’m feeling such a dude.” Best track: “Bang a Gong (Get It On)”
This is one of my favorite records of the 2010s and the arguable high-water mark of a type of music that was bubbling up in indie the whole decade prior – breathy, fuzzy, one leg in dream pop and the other in rock. The whole album has a woozy, hazy, nighttime feel that’s like nothing else – “Sailing”, for example, is literally the same barely audible guitar line repeated over and over for nearly 5 minutes accompanied by Bradford Cox’s whispered, scratchy crooning and it’s just breathtaking. And the rest is even better--“Desire Lines” in particular is my pick for the best rock song of the entire decade—its closing three-and-a-half minutes are the musical equivalent of ascending to heaven. Pure magic. Best track: “Desire Lines”
Motörhead were incredible. One of the greatest rock bands to ever exist. I could listen to a Motörhead record every single day for the rest of my life. Over a forty-year career they must have released close to twenty records and none of them are bad, or even (in my opinion, of course) mediocre. And that’s because they’re all the same. Every single Motorhead album, every song, sounds exactly the same. That’s how they worked, that was their “thing”. But I don’t care. James Wood, the literary critic, has talked about how when a great writer reaches the peak of their form they start repeating themselves, simply because at the top there’s nowhere else to go, and this should not necessarily be seen as laziness or a lack of creativity but as a realization that one’s form can be no further “improved” without harming it, and the same applies to Motörhead. Pick Ace of Spades (most people do, although to me it’s no better or worse than the albums that surround it), pick Overkill, pick Inferno, hell, pick Snake Bite Love. It’s all Motörhead, it’s all Lemmy, it’s all fantastic. Best track: “Ace of Spades”
I sort of hate sentimentality in music—well, in everything. One of my least favorite sensations is the feeling that someone is attempting to manipulate me to get me to cry. One—the most—major exception to this would be the songs of Michael Stipe, unquestionably the most empathetic-seeming vocalist who ever lived. I don’t know how he does it, exactly, but something about the way he sings makes it seem as if he’s seen it all, he’s accepted it all, and no matter how screwed-up your life has been, how horrible it has been, he will still accept you, as well. There’s (seemingly – again, this is how he comes across vocally. This has nothing to do with how he might actually be in real life) no contempt in his vocals, no cynicism, endless humility. Even in a song ostensibly bashing Reagan-era America he still takes a moment to poke at himself (“I know that this is no solution, spleen-venting. Still, I feel better having screamed, don’t you?”). The opposite of his affect would be, I don’t know, someone like Mark E. Smith (because he detests the world and all its people) or maybe Frank Zappa (because he feels superior to the world and all its people). Oh, and the music that accompanies Stipe? Some of the most gorgeous pop ever written. Best track: “Drive”
I’m not a jazz guy. I’ve tried and I’ve tried, but to me, it seems like incredibly abstract music, so abstract that sometimes I wonder how anyone other than musicians themselves—those who understand the language of music—get much of anything out of it. Even classical, whose tradition is hundreds of years older and more remote, seems far more approachable to me. Yet even I can’t deny that this is some powerful music, melodic and impassioned. There is soloing, yes, but in this case it seems designed to carry the message of joy and hope, rather than to be simply impressive for its own sake, as I’ve felt in other jazz records. Best track: “Pt 1. – Acknowledgement”
As excellent as this is I’m still a tiny bit torn on it because it seems less like a Lou Reed record than a Lou Reed Wearing A David Bowie Suit record. Bowie produced it, and while I’m sure Lou definitely put his own stamp on the recording (I mean, the lyrics to “Walk on the Wild Side” prove that) it’s hard to tell where Lou ends and David begins. The same thing happened with Iggy Pop’s two ’77 records, although there Bowie had an even bigger role. Still, this is wonderful stuff, without a single weak track, it’s a classic, etc…but if you want pure-strain Lou, go somewhere else – there’s a reason why this is far and away Lou’s most popular record, because Lou’s music (aside from this album) was largely structured to avoid popularity by design. Best track: “Perfect Day”
I feel the furious ghost of Steve Albini glaring down (or up?) at me for even giving this a middling rating, as it is very much gross, overproduced corporate pop, but the problem is the songs are excellent. Still, melody / songwriting is only half of the puzzle, and this sounds grotesque, oppressive, fascistic even, the sound of Microsoft and Amazon and so forth grinding your soul into dust. Still, it’s catchy. Comparing this to Britney Spears’ Baby One More Time is instructive in helping you to understand a slaved-over evil pop record versus a half-assed one. Poptimism was a cancer on society, yes, but I suppose it’s harmless to have some fun with the best iterations of it before all the interesting music we love is steamrolled by AI and we are all ground into red paste to help make more billions of dollars for our corporate masters and alleged social betters. Best track: “Wildest Dreams”
I’m torn here between how derivative this record seems to me (seriously, how many ‘90s electronica records sound just like this?) and how much I enjoy large sections of it. It’s a little too long, and not all of the little “experiments” work, but at its best the craft is unimpeachable. To quote Lincoln: those who like this kind of thing will find this the kind of thing they like. And I like it. Best track: “Are We Here?”
I can’t say it better than the estimable George Starostin: “Long, scary, lovely, and goshdarn but is it ever SOOOOO well written. Song after song of terrific Cave material. I'm in heaven.” Eighty minutes and not a single weak moment. One of the best examples of an artist consciously attempting to sand off a few of their more “prickly” elements and coming out with something even better than they had before. A masterpiece, and Cave’s best record, no small thing for the man with one of the most high-quality discographies in rock music. I can’t even pick out any specific memorable moments out of this monster because I’d be here all day. Best track: “There She Goes, My Beautiful World”
This album is off-the-charts pretentious, lyrically laughable (seriously, every lyric sounds like a reject from the Style Boyz’ “Incredible Thoughts” from Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping), and repetitious in arrangement. Unfortunately, it is also emotionally overwhelming, melodically brilliant, and—above all—powerful. This is the band’s best album, in my humble opinion, because for once their Voice of a Generation schtick was matched with arrangements that, despite their saminess, practically kick you in the chest with how colossal they are. Do you like choirs? String sections? An ear-shattering pipe organ? Then you’ll fall in love with this record. You’ll hate yourself in the morning for it, but you will, and you won’t be able to help yourself. Best track: “My Body Is a Cage”
It hurts to dislike this one, because Bowie was really going for something interesting here, but it doesn’t work. He was trying, I can see now, to marry two emotional states that at first seem to be contradictory – emotionless dance music, robotic funk. And he doesn’t succeed (with one major exception). What he wanted was one thing, what happened was just R&B with all the excitement, all the juice, sucked out of it. The aforementioned exception is, of course, “Fame” – the combination of skeletal funk with Bowie’s consciously shouted, ugly vocals is so striking that the song is memorable almost in spite of itself – it’s one of the strangest pop tracks to ever become a classic. And, yeah, the title track has a good chorus, too. But this is best seen as an ambitious failure, a stepping stone to superior later albums. Best track: “Fame”
Another case of a record I intellectually understand is derivative of myriad other records of its time (in this case, the retro-synthpop that infected the 2010s) but I like the sound so much I can look beyond that and have a good time. Don’t look for anything deep here; catchy fun is all. Best track: “Tether”
Few critical consensuses baffle me more than that applied to this album, which would have you believe it is one of the best hundred or so albums ever made. As for me, I find it hard to hear anything else but a slightly-better-than-average synthpop record. Yeah, if every track was up to the level of “Enjoy the Silence” or “Policy of Truth,” we’d really have something special, but they aren’t, and we really don’t. It’s fine. Hell, it isn’t even the best Depeche Mode album (that honor goes to Music for the Masses). My general practice when this happens is to withhold final judgment, hoping that someday I’ll see what others do, but I’ve listened to this so many times in vain hope of that happening that I’m reaching the end of my patience with it. Best track: “Enjoy the Silence”
A bit of a marking-time record for Bowie, as he admitted later he didn’t quite know what to do after the massive success of Ziggy Stardust and so just kind of did the same thing again. Still, Bowie and his band were so on fire circa 72 / 73 that even when they repeat themselves, it’s a fantastic listen. Just think Ziggy, except the songs are a bit longer, a bit less catchy, and a bit weirder. If it’s not quite the apex of glam rock itself, it was still made by the best glam rockers on earth at glam rock’s height. Best track: “Aladdin Sane”
The funkiest music that has ever been produced or will ever be produced by humankind. If I were forced to listen to the work of only one artist for the rest of my life, Fela Kuti would be one of the contenders. His style is so immediately striking that in the written history of popular music there could be written an entire subplot about famous Western rock musicians (Ginger Baker, Paul McCartney, Brian Eno, Paul Simon, etc,) traveling to Africa, hearing Fela’s music for the first time, utterly losing their minds, and attempting to basically steal it. But Fela was inimitable, because no other popular musician, ever, as far as I know, risked so much personally and politically for his music. This was the album that almost got him killed and did get his mother killed, for Christ’s sake! If you’ve heard one Fela song, you’ve heard them all, that’s true, but the thing is, once you do, you’ll wonder if you ever want to waste time listening to anyone else. Best track: “Zombie”
Boring. It conjures a mood, that’s for sure, but that mood is one of languid boredom. Give me exotica music from the era instead – at least that had some genuine eccentricity. Best track: “The Girl From Ipanema”
What can I say? One of the great ones, Pink Floyd’s greatest album (and that’s saying a lot for the group that, in the 1970s, had one of the best single runs of albums in the history of rock music), and perhaps the only progressive rock record designed specifically to make you cry. Popular music’s closest equivalent to a requiem mass. Love Syd Barrett or hate him, his immortality is assured with this tribute. Best track: “Wish You Were Here”
This is Steely Dan’s most conventionally “rocking” record, and thus the one likely to appeal the most to those who can’t stand their more jazzy and, well, “easy listening” material. One minor issue with this is that because the music rocks harder, the thrilling disjunction between the group’s lyrics and music is lessened, which makes it the tiniest bit less conceptually interesting than, say, Pretzel Logic or Katy Lied. But the songs are still fantastic, and as a bonus this contains the group’s most furious track, “Show Biz Kids,” where the band drops all their arch sophistication and delivers this lyric: “Show business kids making movies for themselves / You know they don’t give a fuck about anybody else.” Best track: “My Old School”
It kills me that I don’t like this more because it sounds so good – this kind of empty, nocturnal, bleak, yet somehow at the same time positive and romantic sound is striking enough that even the weaker tracks are lifted up by it. Except that’s the problem – there are a lot of weak tracks that seem kind of barely written, as though the band was rushed into the studio without enough material. This isn’t so bad for a first album with promise as long as the band pulls it together subsequently, but unfortunately, this time they didn’t: Coexist, the follow-up, was a disaster, the group took five whole years to put out yet another weak record, and they’ve been on hiatus since that, with the members all releasing yet more forgettable solo albums. A real tragedy, because if we’d had more tracks like “Shelter” and “Infinity” this would have been a straight-up classic. As it is, it’s more like a beautiful promise that went unfulfilled. Best track: “Infinity”
Close to fifty years on I’m fully prepared to call this the greatest pop record of the 70s—yes, it’s better than Rumours—and I’m nearly prepared to call it the greatest non-Beatles pop record of all time. It’s almost unsettling how flawless this record is: the sound, which dozens of other groups (and Ric Ocasek himself as a producer) spent the rest of their lives trying to reproduce and failing, and the songs, which are so good that six out of nine of them became colossal hits—and one of the remaining three (“All Mixed Up”) is even better than those. I’m in awe. We’re not worthy, etc. Best track: “All Mixed Up”
Worthwhile as an excellent example of the classic style of hard rock that typified 70s FM radio – Aerosmith are definitely in the middle tier of classic rock groups, but their albums (at least back then) were never outright bad, and you could always count on a few tracks that rose above the rest. This time the standout is “Back in the Saddle,” the title line of which Steven Tyler sings so throat-scrapingly hugely that you can’t resist singing along with him. Better than some, worse than others, but certainly nothing embarrassing (as opposed to quite a few of this group’s later records). Best track: “Back in the Saddle”
There are some condescending views of this album that contend it’s in poor taste, that Syd was taken advantage of in some way i.e. Wesley Willis or something like that, but I’ve never understood that; now that he’s gone, isn’t it better for all of us (and for Syd) that we got to see this evidence of what he could accomplish before mental illness completely took hold of him and destroyed any ability he might have had to demonstrate his talent? Because he clearly had quite a bit, if this album is taken as evidence; you don’t come across a sound like this (an almost singular combination of childlike and disturbing) by accident. I’m glad we have it. Best track: “Late Night”
The thing with this type of “atmosphere” music is it has to one-hundred-percent lock in to that mood; the least bit of improvisatory noodling will kill it. The side-long title track is too wobbly, too random – there’s no sense of progression, just one part after another. The best track is the gorgeous little interlude “Sequent C,” but that’s only about two minutes. Best track: “Sequent C”
There is no way for me to be any way objective about an album I likely listened to 100+ times before I even entered first grade, as it was one of the less than ten records my parents owned. To those of you who complain that some of the tracks are substandard and they should have cut it down: are you nuts? Do you understand how lucky we are that what is most likely the greatest rock group in the history of popular music decided to make a 90+ minute album where they tried their hands at every single genre and style they could possibly think of? Best track: “Julia”
Undoubtedly the smoothest, funkiest and most approachable jazz fusion record in existence – there’s no question why it sold a gazillion copies, many to people who would have normally never thought of buying a record like this. I wish it had a little more drama, a little more tension (like Miles Davis’ fusion records do) but it’s still fantastic to listen to. Best track: “Chameleon”
Harvey’s most musically conventional record, the one you’d play for those just getting into her (at times it feels like a bit more aggressive Sarah McLachlan) but the songs are so well-written and exciting that any eccentricity lost is more than made up for. As good as this is, it’s good she went back to weirder stuff afterward – there is a lot of music that sounds like this. Best track: “The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore”
The Fall were the greatest punk rock band of all time, and Mark E. Smith was the greatest punk vocalist – his voice just seethes with disgust and disdain, and it’s electrifying to listen to him. The band released nearly forty records and none of them are bad. Of course, none of them are technically “great” either (the group’s whole thing was being shambolic, symbolized by their intentionally ugly cover art) but if they were trying to be “great” The Fall wouldn’t be The Fall. This album probably comes the closest to nonstop greatness, but even it feels tossed together in a fantastic way. Smith was a visionary: he knew what he liked to play (Bo Diddley ripped apart in a particle accelerator), and he did it again and again and again, and you can either deal with it or fuck off, and that’s The Fall. Best track: “My New House”
This one really grew on me. At first, at least compared to The Low End Theory, it felt somewhat lengthy and directionless, a group trying out lots of different things but not doing any of them quite as well. But further listens revealed this is nearly as good, just in a different way: it’s far less focused, but each track has something to recommend it. The samples are obvious yet perfect, and the lyrics themselves traverse a dizzying range of topics. A grower. Best track: “Bonita Applebum”
The type of music your grandparents (or great-grandparents, depending on how old you are) got fucked up to, the Playboi Carti of its day. Does it transcend historical interest? Well, not really, but it’s a lot of fun to listen to and imagine you’re wilding out circa 1956. Best track: “Jump, Jive, An’ Wail”
The great artists of the 50s were done poorly by albums; the art form by that point was not yet fully understood or taken advantage of. Singles were the main vehicles for artists’ expression, and albums were secondary. So it is with this record, which does little more than demonstrate that this Elvis dude is a talented guy, even when his talent is wasted on poorly arranged ballads rather than the fast rhythm and blues he did so well. That’s why this album’s clear highlight is “Blue Suede Shoes,” the only Elvis classic to be found here. The rest is good enough, but forgettable. Best track: “Blue Suede Shoes”
Led Zeppelin at their best (like on this one, the group’s debut) were less a rock band than a raging mastodon destroying everything in its path. They were by no means a consistent group (even their best records always have one or two lesser tracks) but their best work is so jaw-dropping that all that is forgotten. Theirs was a sound that was harder and more violent than metal, blues music stripped of all its sexiness and shot through with demonic energy. Words simply fail when presented with something like the middle three minutes of “Dazed and Confused”; it may be among the ten or so greatest instrumental passages in all of rock music. Best track: “Dazed and Confused”
