first time listening
maggot brain: haunting, gorgeous, lovely, dreadful
can you get to that: spooky little intro bit perfectly transitions the vibe from the title track into the main riff which sounds like a cat napping in a sunbeam. love the beat, love those real low vocals, love a little lyrical dissonance
hit it and quit it: organ goes crazy, love how loud the vocalist gets when he goes high
you and your folks, me and my folks: yeah this album is an all-timer. there's some sort of reverb/echo(?) effect on the bass/drums(?) that i can't decide if i like or not
super stupid: goes CRAZY
back in our minds: WHAT is that instrument. all i can find is one youtube comment saying it's a flexatone and that seems to be it. love it
wars of armageddon: BOLD USE OF FART NOISES #RESPECT. chaotic angry manic fat and funky
EASY 5
really?
in a vacuum i would give this a respectable if unremarkable and sometimes irritating 3. (i can only be made to hear about jack white's problems with women for so long before i start to resent it.)
but because it has been presented to me as one of the most important albums of all time i have to give it a 2. presumably it was removed from the book once the contributor(s) recovered from mid white guy blues-rock fever
#previously listened (partial)
i've loved a lot of tracks off this album since high school but haven't given the full thing a proper listen since then. there's some preachiness and a relatively conservative streak to some of the lyrics (the both sides-ism in doo-wop [that thing] in particular) that i've never cared for but the music, her voice, her lyrical craft is good enough i can look past it. some guys really are only about that thing though.
no bad songs here but some are more memorable than others and the runtime is pushed a bit far. doo-wop, when it hurts so bad, i used to love him, everything is everything, tell him, are long-time favorites. lost ones, ex-factor, to zion, superstar, forgive them father, can't take my eyes off of you (fantastic cover of a song i've always loved) stood out on this listen.
this album is so firmly a 4.5 to me but i can't do that here. i was going to give it a 4 but i've been listening to it all day and added it back to my library and i'm sitting here vibing to can't take my eyes off of you as i write this and i think i'm going to have to go 5. love.
#previously listened
they called it U2 because "U" had to get "2" ribs removed to suck your own dick to be a member.
they do get some brownie points from me for having a vaguely homoerotic song about judas (until the end of the world). mysterious ways is a pretty good car commercial song. quite like the guitars on acrobat. love is blindness is genuinely great.
songs i didn't skip before they ended:
zoo station
until the end of the world
the fly
mysterious ways
acrobat
love is blindness
i want to be a hater but this album is undeniably pretty good. it's yet another mid-century white guy rock band appropriating the blues, but a pretty good one of those. jim morrison calling himself "mr. mojo risin'" because it's an anagram of his own name is genuinely insufferable. but the song he does it in is still pretty good.
highlights: love her madly, been down so long, cars hiss by my window, l.a. woman, hyacinth house, riders on the storm
could easily bump this up to a 4 or down to a 2 depending on my mood.
#previously listened (partial)
it's good!
highlights: aladdin sane, panic in detroit, cracked actor, time, let's spend the night together, lady grinning soul
#first time listening
-cinnamon girl sounds like a parody of a classic rock song
-title track is forgettable
-round & round is lovely
-really goofy little riff/guitar solo on down by the river. like it's giving middle schooler's first guitar solo at the school talent show. i would be proud of that middle schooler but this is an adult professional musician. song is otherwise forgettable and goes on forever
-the losing end is forgettable
-running dry starts with nice strings but now why are you singing directly into my ear neil. back up from the mic a bit. recording quality is just weirdly quite bad on this track. maybe it's a streaming issue? the violin is still lovely though.
-cowgirl in the sand sounds like a child wrote the lyrics but the music is good
some people have always been old and neil young (ha) is one of them. he sounds about 74 years old on this record. not a negative or a positive just a fact.
i guess neil young is a Culturally Important musician and i respect that but i dont know if i needed to listen to this album. i probably won't listen to it again. it's pleasant background music but there's a lot of that in the world.
#first time listening
falling into the lake drowning submerged and buried under sediment hit by a rock floating in the dark washing up onto the sand dancing in the light rain destroying and rebuilding yourself mourning and moving on
just incredibly gorgeous. ingenious production and arrangement. had my jaw on the floor on multiple occasions. bjorks vocal performance is beautiful and powerful and versatile as always. lyrics raw and intimate and complex in their simplicity. a beautiful interlocking living mechanism of an album. it's really just that good
the most truly perfect 5 so far. i want to go back and rate everything else lower
#first time listening
first listen had me a bit underwhelmed ("i guess you had to be there?") but it grew on me. walk on the wild side in particular is dated but a genuine classic.
highlights: vicious, andy's chest, perfect day, hangin' round, walk on the wild side, make up, satellite of love, i'm so free, goodnight ladies. so most of it.
#first time listening (mostly)
finally got an album i've never heard of in my life! wasn't expecting much and was very pleasantly surprised. just a little corny in a way that really works for me. when they started talking about fantastic prisms in the magic hollow and shit that's when i knew for sure it was a 4 star album. it's also like the platonic ideal of summer music.
highlights: are you happy, only dreaming now, nine pound hammer, magic hollow, the wolf of velvet fortune (SWIFTLY!), old kentucky home (fun little satirical number)
#first time listening
very late aughts-early teens adult alternative radio. music for guys who say they like "anything but rap and country" but all they listen to is bands that sound like this. white dad on the brink of divorce blasting this in his prius in 2009. generally pleasant and inoffensive but it's not for me. not in 2026.
one of those tricky cases where nothing on the album is really "bad" and i kind of feel like a dick giving it a 2. but i resented having to listen to it when i could have been listening to anything else and it felt like it just kept going on and on and on. 2 stars because it made 54 minutes feel like 2 hours.
#first time listening
