Reviews by 1001mjanzai

This was a great listen!
I’m not a huge listener of country music but the old stuff sounds the best to me.
Like gangsta rap music, the outlaw, fugitive, on-the-run thing, doesn’t mean much to me but makes for great fantasy.
The thing that really rwaonates though are the love songs including the broken hearted kind.
Now that I can relate to!
The clincher though is that Merle Haggard has a great voice!
The tone of his voice as well as how he enunciates and sings his words sound so damn musical!
I have heard his music before and it just came and went but this one finally clicked with me.
I hope I have some time left in my life to dive into the rest of his vast discography!

Once again it was very refreshing to hear pop rock music done in such a great experimental way.
I can’t believe I never got to hear anything after their first album so getting a couple of albums on this list so far has been a bit of a revelation.
I’m pretty keen to dig into the rest of their discography!

I remember having this on cassette when it came out!
This was my introduction to his music so I’m pretty into it even though many might site his work from the ‘70s as his best.
I’ve never really listened to any of his other albums other than this one so I hope I have time to get around to some of the others.
I know they will be good listens and it’ll probanly add to my enjoyment of this album as I figure out the roots of his songwriting methods which when you strip away the production here are all there at its heart.
I do like his lyrics as well.
A lot of deep stuff in there!

It’s not possible for me to fully understand this album because of the subject matter and hiw many times the “n” word gets used.
The beats and backing tracks are pretty static and the subject matter is unrelateable.
There’s really not much “music” here but I can get ti a better understanding if I just switch my perception towards fantasy.

This was an interesting listen.
It was pretty hard funkin’ but with a bit of a psychedelic edge to it.
These guys are kind of like the Grateful Dead of funk music but maybe more of a rough and tough version of P-Funk.
They have a lot of great songs in a lot of different styles and you can tell that when played live these songs have the potential to be stretched out quite a bit.
I saw these guys open for Prince in the early 2000’s and enjoyed them a lot.
After listening to this album I feel like I understand them better now.

Kind of a fun listen.
Maybe the style wore thin after a while.
Lots of good playing here overall but the vocals aren’t good at times.
Definitely a very British thing going on here hence the inclusion on this list.
Not sure if I would call this essential but it is a unique sound, although second generation.
I’ll need more listens to get into this more but the style does deter me a bit.

My favourite Miles is after 1967 but this was a good listen.
Wild to see that this is a compilation of recordings from 1949-1950.
It has a nice soft sound with all the horns.
At its root is a fairly straight jazz sound which is pretty boring to me but I dig the arrangements here which keep it interesting.
I think I can see why this would be considered essential although I’m still disappointed at the omission of all 9 albums from 1971-1976, which are far superior albums to me.

Classic!
One of the earliest examples of punk rock!
This must have sounded amazing when it came out back then.
Seeing them live back then must have also been amazing.
The music here sounds so fun anyone who doesn’t like this album clearly has no understanding of good music and should leave this project now!

Hmm this is strange.
Why would they choose a double live album instead of some of their great studio albums?
I guess you get a bunch of their best tunes all in one place and the quality of their live performance sounds great.
Still doesn’t explain why this is on here and an album so revered as Kiss Alive is not on this list.
I can think of many albums on this list that can be replaced by 2 or 3 studio albums by Thin Lizzy.
Just adds to the frustration of this list.

Classic!
Probably one of the greatest albums ever made!
This is what good music is all about.
So much great experimentation with the writing, arranging and recording of these pieces.
I hadn’t heard this in ages and it kind of shocked me how great it sounded so many years later.
I noticed so much more happening in the mix!
The short pieces showcasing each band member are great little interludes to the epic long form songs.
I enjoyed this listen so much I’m probably going to have to put this on again soon!

What a great album!
I never got to hear this until decades later and what a surprise it was!
I got into music when Belinda Carlisle had just set out on her own with a couple of great albums of her own and never got to go back to where she came from.
I also thought that their album from 1984, Talk Show, was really great.
I’m sure Vacation is also a good album but I haven’t gotten around to hearing that one yet.
I think that will be coming up on my listening list soon as I’m digging this re-listen of their debut album.

I thought this might be some sort of corny blues rock but it turned out to be quite good!
There are a lot of interesting things going on with the arrangements and there’s a nice mix of blues styles.
The recording is also great.
You can pretty much hear the fire in their playing!
Another name to add to the list of musicians to further check out their discography.

This sounds strangely old and comforting.
Like something from a grandparent’s collection which now would be great-grandparent’s collection.
Nobody makes albums like this anymore.
I wonder why?
Perhaps this kind of music has finally aged out to be relegated to the past and brought out only for nostalgia’s sake because I don’t think I will ever want to listen to this like baroque music or dixieland jazz.
I wonder if young people could ever be impressed by the fact that this album is made by real musicians, probably in one take?!

This was a nice listen.
But that’s about it.
Pretty inoffensive.
A little more fire in the playing would have been great.
I wonder how this album made it on the list and not Tony Williams Lifetime?!

Another album you put on and sounds like an instant classic.
I was never into Bob Dylan when I was younger but now in the last half of my life I’m starting to get the appeal.
The words and their delivery are definitely part of the enjoyment.
I think the amount of words were probably too much for me to want to understand when I was younger but now I have more patience for it.
I’m kind of into the idea now of checking out the rest of his discography.

Three albums on this list is a bit excessive for this band.
This is the second one by this band I’ve heard so far from this list and it’s not doing much like the other one I listened to.
I don’t really understand why they’re so popular although they do have a fairly inoffensive sound so that’s probably how they found appeal.
These songs just sound so second rate.
Whatever style they’re going for is done pretty lightly.
In a way it does seem kind of classically Canadian to take indie rock and make it sound so bland.
I’m Canadian so this band is kind of embarrasing to me, ugh.
Although there are apparently many people in the world who like this but I suppose that’s not surprising because most people in the world are very conservative.
I’ve been trying to keep my comments as kind as possible but I’ve been getting a run of sub-par albums lately so I’m losing my patience with the amount of crap on this list…

This album can be found discarded in many dollar bins which makes me suspicious of its quality.
They seem to be working within some sort of prog rock genre and for the most part pretty much all of these songs are pretty interesting.
However there’s a certain blandness that kind of creeps in by the end of the album.
I am curious to hear some other albums by them to see how they fare against this one.
Something tells me though that they might be one of those bands with one or two great songs per album therefore making a best of compilation the best way to hear this band.

This album is cited by so many great rock musicians as their gateway album to rock and metal.
However it might be a case of time and place as I didn’t grow up with this and listening to it now I don’t fully understand the appeal.
There’s a sort of showtune bombast to this album that kind of reminds me of what a lot of rock bands were kind of going for in the mid-‘70s but I don’t think that this album has stood the test of time very well though.
I do like some KISS songs here and there but I’m not sure that they’ve ever recorded a full studio album that is some sort of masterpiece.
So to me what we have here is just a plain old good rock album and perhaps a few more listens in the right mood and atmosphere might make me rate this as better than average.

A live recording is a great way to display the power of his voice and in a prison!
It’s fun to hear him break and laugh at certain moments and to hear the audience of prisoners there laughing with him.
Not sure if I would consider this a must listen but it’s a great document of his music at that point in time.
I see there’s another live in prison album just a year later on this list so I’m thinking there only needs to be one of those on the list.
And then let’s get an earlier studio album by him on this list instead.

This was a cool listen.
Very refreshing to hear music done this way.
Also doesn’t hurt that it was made in what seems to be the best era for warm sounding music recordings, the ‘70s.
Makes me wonder why music like this isn’t more popular or isn’t attempted more.
Could be the slight abstraction of it?
Or the guts it would take to have a deep set of words and to just go for it with the delivery?
But who am I kidding?
It’s just the unfortunate truth that most listeners of music are very conservative and at this point in time, have no attention span to appreciate deep abstractions.
I only know Gil Scott-Heron from “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” so it’s great to hear something else and will definitely be looking out for some more material by him and his collaborator Brian Jackson.