Kick Out the Jams

Nice album! 3/5

3.5

4.0/5.0: Great

this one is interesting. its very poorly produced, even by live album standards, and the audio balancing is all over the place. that said i did really enjoy the songs and the fact that its live helps bring the energy needed for songs like this.

The audio has such high clarity for a live album. It feels like it was very ahead of its time too with lots of elements you didn't typically hear in 1969. It's like they heard Helter Skelter and made an entire album out of it and I'm all for it. Much better than I expected having never heard of MC5 before.

Only knew Kick out the jams and that was through covers, so had high hopes for this album. Turns out that those hopes were misplaced. Far more straight down the middle rock than i expected and just fails to provide anything interesting

I think I expected to like this more than I actually did. It was certainly different to what I was expecting, far more bluesy in places. I just didn't like the vocals much and that's a big sticking point.

I ended up listening to it more than once, because I didn't know how I felt about it. As I was willing to do that, I guess this gets:

2/5

Ehhhhh *muffled guitar noises (Live)*

This was a fun one. Love the sound they were going for. Still only a strong 3 because there's no standout track on it. I only love the sound, not any specific track.

It starts with someone testifying like he’s Cyrus in The Warriors telling the gangs to join forces and overthrow the police, getting you all pumped up for... some sloppy garage rock. I couldn't dig it.

This album is an absolute fucking mess. Guitars are all over the place, drummer sounds like he has been on a seven day meth binge and the singer objectively couldn't hit a note if his life depended on it.

5/5 and going straight onto my heavy rotation list.

I wanted to like this and there were things that I liked. The riffs were decent, especially for the era. It just didn't click with me. The vocals weren't great and the production sucked. 2.5/5

Anecdotally, recorded live as "no studio would have been capable of capturing [MC5's] sheer energy, excitement, and danger".

Unfortunately the audio quality dampens most of that energy. Like most of the "live" albums on the 1001 list, I guess you had to be there.

Great energy at least for the first half

This was poor, loud, and pointless noise with over sexualized lyrics.

With reagrds to the tracks nothing stood out. I am guessing this made the list as its very early punk and at the start of the era.

Favourite song: None
Least favourite: All of them, its a poor album
Album artwork: meh

I don't get why this album is as praised as it is. I didn't find it interesting, and I really don't see how this was important for the revolution of punk rock. Really, I don't know why people like it as much as they do.

I've heard Kick Out the Jams many times, but never listened to the whole album. The energy is great, the story is fun to read and the album has solid historical significance, but the music itself... meh.

Sure, I can dig this. Abrasive, raw and, yes, in some ways, not very good. But there's something there that helps it rattle along. Probably not going to come back to it so often, but can now nod sagely and make reference to how influential they would prove to be.

Pretty damned good, actually. Kinda punk, kinda zeppelin-y blues rock, kinda pissed off counter culture hard rock.

Glad to hear that punk had cemented its iconic repetitive and annoying nature early on in its lifespan by giving a live album full of the same song six times in a row, only to end with frankly disturbing mouth noises and a rock space odyssey somehow just as meandering and dull as the rest of the album. Sure, you could argue that the raw energy is what fuels this record's angst and influence, but by '69 I could've certainly found that within another album, live or otherwise. The instrumentation is sloppy, the vocals are poor, and the message is ham-fisted. Must be a punk record! A bad one, at that.