Reviews by anoriginalcliche

Proper British indie, this

There are few truly timeless albums in hip-hop. This is one of them.

I don’t care if the 🇬🇧 version came out first, the 🇺🇸 version is the only one that matters. Without Paint It Black, what are we even doing here?

Back in 1994 if you wanted to call yourself a real chiller you had tolerate a dude badly rapping over shitty blues riffs just to have someone pass you the worst joint ever rolled. No wonder Kurt Cobain couldn’t do it anymore.

This is the first I’m hearing of the futuristic fantasy space paradise called “Canada”, but it sounds like a beautiful dream. Perhaps someday we will reach it.

One of the most emotionally arresting albums I’ve ever heard, and it grabs hold within seconds

Even now, as we speak, people are out there underrating Wire. We must stand against this. We must fight

I was raised by a very cool woman, and as a result, Nine Inch Nails was my first favorite band. Apparently I’d just go nuts for their debut from my car seat, and even all these years later, there’s something about his music that tickles my brain like few others.

The Downward Spiral has to be one of the least boring albums ever made, manic, diverse and immaculately produced. And even with the career he’s had, probably his best.

I admire the DIY

Sometimes I think I’m too mean to all the other shitty 80s/90s British electronica in this challenge, but hearing this I realize I’m not nearly mean enough.

You can’t sound this much like 80s Ryuichi Sakamoto without me hooting and hollering like a cartoon hound in a zoot suit.

The Knife’s Silent Shout, fever ray’s group with her brother, is still better, but this is a 4.5.

Favorite track: Triangle Walks

The Beatles would still be great without this album, but their legacy wouldn't mean as much. It was here that they pushed the boundaries into weird, silly, experimental and transgressive places as far as they could, all wrapped together with the greatest sequencing in music history.

This album gave all the musicians that followed more of a cultural license to be weird/creative than literally anything else in the mainstream, but for all its influence, has still has never really been topped.

This is a god tier album, one of the pillars of what an album can be.

Everybody liked Gram Parsons. Hanging around with other musicians, he was the young kid who opened their eyes to American Southern roots music, changing the sound of his friends the Rolling Stones and his short-lived bandmates the Byrds forever. (He also probably wrote Wild Horses. Google that for more)

His vision was to create Cosmic American Music, blending all the roots genres together. With this and its (slightly better) predecessor GP, he achieved that -- discovering a brilliant young singer named Emmylou Harris to accompany him. If he hadn't died of an overdose in the Joshua Tree Motel four months before this came out, he could had a career like hers.

Critics liked him too, but audiences were indifferent. But like the best flops, it found its way into the right hands, and created the Alternative Country genre that became more and more necessary as mainstream country devolved into a cartoonish and soulless parody of itself.

These were not his best songs, it's mostly leftovers, castoffs and a few hastily put together, but the execution is beautiful, and in retrospect they made a fitting coda, particularly the final song co-written with Emmylou.

A challenge like may not do this stuff justice, but these are two records I've returned to again and again.

Honestly their sound is more interesting and higher quality than most landfill indie of this period and Not Over Yet Is cool so while it may deserve an objective 3 this didn’t really resonate overall and I kept checking when it would be over

As John Milton once wrote, I’d rather be in hell than hear stairway to heaven.

I was dreading revisiting this because any charm Taylor Swift once held for me has completely disappeared as she's devolved as an artist and grown as a megalomaniacal cult leader, but was surprised to find this is still a very charming and winning transition from country to synth-pop, and maybe the most successful career move of its kind since Michael Jackson's Off The Wall.

Even setting aside a listening experience that ranged from fine to annoying, I struggle to reconcile hearing so much Black music packaged and sold under the name of one of the biggest bellends in music history.

Undoubtedly a good album, but it's groundbreaking mainly because of John Lydon's lyrics and vocal delivery. With a different singer this could probably pass for hard rock/glam rock/proto metal, and it's far too cleanly/expensively produced, full of overdubs to really fit with punk. The brilliant marketing campaign also did a lot of the work in making this a cultural movement. It's a solid listen, but not anything I ever need to go back to.

Sung Tongs to Feels to Strawberry Jam to Panda Bear’s Person Pitch to Merriweather Post Pavilion is one of the best five album runs in history. This is the most accessible, but not the peak. Worth doing them all if you loved this.

Real chillers only.