Reviews by apollo

My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts was certainly a really interesting album as are most of Brian Eno's solo works. This time around, he teamed up with David Byrne which makes a lot of sense since Eno and Byrne alongside his band were practically joined at the hip during the late 70s and early 80s. This album was quite a mix of rock and electronica with some dashes of world elements as well. I thought this little mashup worked shockingly well as these songs had a real nice atmosphere top them. The very heavy bass did irritate me but not because it sounded bad (which it didn't) but actually because it constantly made me think my phone was vibrating. Despite that annoyance, this album was shockingly pretty good.
Best Song: Mea Culpa
Worst Song: Moonlight in Glory
Side note: Last album where Brian Eno is specifically credited, time to rank them
1. Ambient 1/Music For Airports
2. Here Come The Warm Jets
3. My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts
4. Before And After Science
5. Another Green World

The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn is definitely one of the trippiest albums i have ever heard. This is the only Pink Floyd album that Syd Barrett and after listening to his solo album, it shows. Nearly every song here had at least one weird aspect to them. If you look past all the weirdness though, you can definitely see the building blocks that made Pink Floyd into what they are today but with this album, you can still tell that this is their first effort and they still were trying to figure out what kind of band they wanted to be so they just ended up throwing whatever they could at the wall and seeing what would stick. Its not a bad album but Pink Floyd would go on to do much better.
Best Song: Lucifer Sam
Worst Song: Interstellar Overdrive
Side note: All Pink Floyd albums are done, you know what that means:
1. The Dark Side Of The Moon
2. Wish You Were Here
3. The Wall
4. The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn

I was honestly shocked with how good Cupid & Psyche 85 ended up being. I went into this album with zero expectations considering a good majority of the users on this site absolutely hate it (in fact, as of writing this, it is the 18th lowest rated album on this site) so i wasn't expecting it to be as good as it was. But as it turns out, this album consisted of some very good new wave music complete with cool synths, solid vocals and melodies that shouldn't work well but end up really working well. And there wasn't a single song that i really disliked. I know the reputation with bands like this being cheesy and being very much products of their time, but i found that if you come in with the right expectations, you can really enjoy this one.
Best Song: Small Talk
Worst Song: Lover To Fall

Yeah, i don't think good kid, m.A.A.d city was that great of an album. In my eyes, there are two major things that drag this album down a lot. First, the lyrics, for the most part they are very immature and rely on the same old rap stereotypes that you commonly see among rappers like this. Another issue is the identity crises these songs have. There are so many times where the songs, at odd points no less, will randomly change to a completely different song yet still be part of the same track which makes me ask "Why don't you just make them different songs at this point?". The only reason that this album does not get a 1 is the fact that if you ignore the odd song changes, there are points where the production is very good. That is about the only good thing i can say about this album though as i still find it rather hard to recommend.
Best Song: Real
Worst Song: Backseat Freestyle
Side note: It is pretty funny seeing Kendrick Lamar collab with Drake on this album considering the relationship those two have now

Highway to Hell is a pretty fun album. Back In Black (the previous album i did by AC/DC) isn't all that fresh in my mind so i'm not sure if i completely remember my opinions on it but i definitely do feel like this album is better since it feels a little bit more heavy and i definitely like heavier sounds in my hard rock albums. Every song here was very good with a bunch of great guitar riffs, catchy melodies and fun vocals. My main issue with this album is that all the songs sound super similar to each other to a point where i had trouble distinguishing them but the album wasn't overly long to a point where that was a huge turn off for me. I still enjoyed this album quite a lot.
Best Song: Night Prowler
Worst Song: Walk All Over You

Electric Prunes is just another one of those albums where i am at a loss for things to say about it. I figured that this was gonna be yet another band trying to imitate the Beatles and i was 100% right. I definitely don't think it sounds bad, this was perfectly acceptable for an album from 1967 but overall the songs, despite their attempts at quirkiness, don't really manage to stick out and kinda just blend in with all the other bands doing this kind of thing at the time. On the plus side, this album thankfully is very short at less than 30 minutes so even if it is very generic, at least it never got tedious. This album is okay but with so many others like this, you can do way better.
Best Song: Get Me to the World on Time
Worst Song: Bangles

Connected is an album that i didn't expect to like it as much as i did but that is what ended up happening. After the fun ride that was the title track, the album did feel very repetitive for quite a bit of time to a point where despite the fact that i liked how funky it was, i just felt it was gonna be samey and forgettable but when i got to Step It Up, that was when the album was able to hook me right back in and it didn't let go for the rest of the runtime. Like i said, the songs were real funky, the vocals fit well and while the lyrics were a bit basic, they still worked well for the songs and i could see them being fun to sing along to. Despite the repetitive first half, i really enjoyed my time with this album.
Best Song: Creation
Worst Song: Sketch

Compared to the last two albums i heard, The Sensual World was certainly heaven. The only song i was really familiar with from Kate Bush prior to listening to this is Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) (and also her collabing with Peter Gabriel on Don't Give Up) but i'm honestly surprised to see that this music feels like the same kind of music that Bjork would go on to make. I can definitely admit that there are some moments of absolute brilliance on this album but i did feel like the album was too airy (for lack of a better word) and ended up being a bit forgettable. It still is definitely a solid listen, just not a great one.
Best Song: This Woman's World
Worst Song: The Sensual World

Locust Abortion Technician is an album that needed several changes to be anything good in my eyes. I can definitely see a lot of potential for this to be a very good grunge album, most of the regular grunge elements like the guitars are handled pretty well and some of the melodies were pretty solid too and the vocals could work at points. The problem is, this album felt it need to stick out so it decided to add so much of this avant-garde crap to make a lot of the songs really weird and that was where this album fumbled. Almost all of these elements failed to sound even remotely good and made this album painful to get through. It is a shame because if the album dropped all the avant-garde elements and went straight for being a full blown grunge album, it could have been good but alas, this album is just barely going above the realm of awful.
Best Song: Human Cannonball
Worst Song: Hay

Bitte Orca was a genuinely agonizing listen but it didn't have to be this way. The instrumentation for the most part was not the worst and would have made for a decent album if not for the fact that they are paired with some of the most annoying and self-indulgent compositions ever. The sounds just come and go without any rhyme or reason and the vocals suffer from that exact same issue as well. All of this combined just leads to an album that ends up feeling directionless and annoying and trust me, those are not things you want your album to be (unless you're a troll or a sadist, i don't know). All of this leads to an album that tries to do a lot but can't do any of it competently.
Best Song: Two Doves
Worst Song: Useful Chamber

Vulnicura is an album that i feel like had a lot of potential but ended up not realizing it throughout most of the album. This does make me think of that one FKA twigs album that i heard a while back but this one definitely is better for having more of a structure. The big issue with this album in my eyes is that it has so many points where it feels like its building up to something and then when it reaches the apex, nothing happens, it just slides right back where it came from. This problem was mostly apparent during the first half and while the second half fixes the issue, its still too little too late. Overall, a pretty disappointing listen.
Best Song: Atom Dance
Worst Song: Quicksand

Jagged Little Pill is an album i got close to 5 staring. The only songs on this album that i was really familiar with were You Oughta Know and Ironic and i definitely had heard bits and pieces of a few of the other ones too. I really liked a lot of the things this album did. The music was always really interesting with harmonica segments that actually worked well with the songs combined with the standard pop rock fare but also Morisette's vocals were really good here too. The only reason i didn't give this album 5 stars is because most of the songs lacked a certain punchiness which would put them over the top. Despite that, it is a really great album that more than deserves it's place here.
Best Song: Ironic
Worst Song: Right Through You

I thought Brothers In Arms was a pretty solid album. It feels very similar to the last album i did by Dire Straits (from what i can remember, it was quite a while ago) but this one definitely shows that it is from 1985 by having all those synths which were very prominent in most albums during this time. I personally thought that the country rock stuff from the self-titled album definitely worked better for Dire Straits but this one works as well with it as it can. The lyrics were kinda a mixed bag though as sometimes they could be pretty smart but other times could be pretty offensive. I think that their self-titled record is better but this album is still a decent listen.
Best Song: The Man's Too Strong
Worst Song: Money For Nothing

Get Behind Me Satan is probably the least essential White Stripes album on this list (according to most of the reviewers on this site, i can't say for myself since i haven't gotten to Elephant yet) but overall, i found it a fun listen. I really liked a lot of the blues elements on this album as they definitely felt different from White Blood Cells. Jack White's vocals are definitely weaker here than they were in White Blood Cells but other than that, they were pretty good and Meg White sung on a song here too well which is cool. Other than the weaker vocals, i really can't think of many bad things to say about it so all i'll say is that it is a worthy addition to their discography.
Best Song: Instinct Blues
Worst Song: The Nurse
Side note: Is it just me or does Jack White kinda look like Johnny Depp on this cover?

Trio is a pretty solid album but admittedly some very basic country music. I have varying degrees of knowledge involving all three of the singers involved on this record. Dolly Parton i know the most about of these due to not only listening to one of her albums for this project but also listening to the podcast about her, Emmylou Harris i don't know as much about but i have also heard one of her albums and Linda Ronstadt, i don't know much about her and i also never heard much of her work. The album itself really does bring out their great vocals but everything else about this album really isn't that special. Good album but not enough reasons for me to really recommend it.
Best Song: Farther Along
Worst Song: Wildflowers

Beyond Skin was an album that i had a really good time with. In a lot of ways, this album reminds me a fair bit of Talvin Singh's OK mainly because both albums are by British guys using styles from Asian music. I think i like this more due to it being more concise than that album which i felt dragged for longer than it should have. A lot of the songs had some pretty interesting ideas, some of which i never expected like Pilgrim which had some rapping in it and i thought it really worked. The vocals in a lot of the other songs were enjoyable too. There were a few songs which i didn't feel like they worked very well with their elements and some of them did drag but overall, it's a really good album.
Best Song: Pilgrim
Worst Song: Serpents

evermore was quite a fair bit better than i was expecting. The music had a very similar vibe to that one Fleet Foxes album that i listened to quite a while back. I think that the main thing that is the biggest part i have to talk about is the lyrics because oh boy, do i have opinions on those. There were a lot of points where the lyrics could be incredibly heartfelt but there were several times that for every bit of good lyrics, there were bits of not so good lyrics as well. The vocals are all still very good so that's one thing in this album's favor. I was initially getting quite a few reasons to give this album 4 stars but due to the lyric issues i mentioned above, it got locked to 3. It is still quite a good album and i can see why all the Swifties would want the haters to listen to this album.
Best Song: closure
Worst Song: cowboy like me
Side note: I think its funny that in the song coney island, The featured vocalist (Matt Berninger of The National) sounded like a country singer in that song yet his band does not make country music

Fifth Dimension was pretty solid. Its an album that doesn't really do a whole lot of interesting stuff but it is still an album that does what it set out to do decently alright. The music on offer is just some perfectly passable psychedelic country rock with it occasionally doing some interesting things but remaining with the sound it goes for throughout most of it. I would say that the best part of this album is the melodies as they were pretty darn catchy. I also like that this is easily one of the shorter albums on this list with it only clocking in at around 28 minutes but i still felt like i got my fill. Its not super great or anything but still pretty solid.
Best Song: 2-4-2 Fox Trot (The Lear Jet Song)
Worst Song: I Come and Stand at Every Door

Like Water For Chocolate was definitely an album i had a good time with. Ever since hearing Be, i did know that Common was more than capable person of making good hip-hop records and this earlier work from him shows it pretty well. The production here is really well done with that nice mix of hip-hop and R&B and i should have expected it would be good since DJ Premier put his name on one of the tracks. The lyrics can range from really good to pretty bad but that is certainly a common (no pun intended) stigma among records like this. While i still like Be more, i really can't deny that this album is really good.
Best Song: The 6th Sense
Worst Song: Thelonius

Surf's Up is probably my favorite of all The Beach Boys albums here. When i first looked at this album's cover art and saw how dark it looked, i thought that this album was gonna sound very dark and depressing and while the lyrical subject matter is a bit dark, it doesn't seem to stray too far from the path that The Beach Boys Today and Pet Sounds follow. The songs here have that very psychedelic sound which was the other main one alongside the one that the Beatles did. I thought that the songs on offer were pretty good even if that last song felt like it was having a bit of an identity crisis. Could it just be the fact that it's the most fresh in my mind, i don't know but i can say its my favorite Beach Boys album that i have heard.
Best Song: A Day In The Life Of A Tree
Worst Song: Surf's Up
Side note: Oh, and since this is my last Beach Boys album, you know what that means:
1. Surf's Up
2. Pet Sounds
3. The Beach Boys Today