Reviews by apollo

Somehow, Live At Leeds is my favorite album by The Who. I do not say this about a lot of bands/artists (in fact, i have pretty much never said it until now) but i genuinely think that The Who's live performances are better than their studio albums if the albums i have listened to in both fields are anything to go off of. I feel that The Who is not exactly the best when it comes to producing their albums so this album not really having any production at all actually sorta helps it. The songs here all generally have a fun, raw sound which i really like and the album never got tedious due to it's short length. This is one of the better live albums i have looked at for this project.
Best Song: Magic Bus
Worst Song: Substitute

Warehouse: Songs And Stories is a pretty alright album. Musically, i do quite like what it does. It does mostly go for an alt rock sound with punk sounding guitars with the energy of indie music and it even does have a few diversions here and there so that's also nice. The vocals, however, leave something to be desired. They feel so weak and while i did get used to them as the album went on (partly thanks to the album's fairly long length), I still do not believe they are all that well recorded and the music does often have a tendency to drown them out. This album is pretty flawed but i have heard worse.
Best Song: Bed of Nails
Worst Song: You Can Live at Home

Time Out may be yet another instrumental jazz album but i think i do like it more than quite a bit of the other instrumental jazz albums i have listened to before. I tend to find this genre of music to be pleasant and inoffensive but it often tends to meld together as there are just so many of these albums. But this album does a little bit (though not much) to help itself stand out from the rest of them. Sometimes the players could do solos on their instruments (i guess i call them that) in a few of the songs and those parts are what i find to be some of the more unique parts of this album. This album may be another instrumental jazz album but these parts elevate this one above some of the others.
Best Song: Take Five
Worst Song: Blue Rondo a la Turk

Man oh man was ...And Justice For All a great album. I have always heard from various different sources that this album was not very well produced but other than the bass not being very hearable (for lack of a better word)(and even then, it's common to not be able to hear the bass unless you listen closely in most metal tracks) it was pretty well mixed with it sounding as crisp and clean as you can get. Every song, of course, was incredible with them ranging from fast and ferocious thrash metal, to slower and more melodic technical metal. I absolutely love this album so much.
Best Song: One
Worst Song: To Live Is to Die

The Joshua Tree is a pretty good album. This album does tend to play it safe throughout most of the songs as it doesn't really try anything to help it stand out from all the other alternative rock bands that were around a lot throughout the 1980s. It does try some things but not all that much to make the album feel like it's own. That being said, it's still a solid album and while the songs do tend to play it safe, a lot of them actually sound pretty good and there was also no point when i was so bored to the point where i was losing track of the songs. This album isn't anything all that special but it's still a solid one nonetheless.
Best Song: Bullet The Blue Sky
Worst Song: With Or Without You

Deep Purple In Rock certainly shows that Deep Purple is some of the best in rock (my jokes are so great, aren't they). I initially went into this album thinking that Machine Head would be the better album from these guys but as i kept listening, this album proved me wrong. It still has the trend from Machine Head of having the best songs at the end of the album but this album somehow remained more consistent with it's quality throughout over Machine Head. It, of course, still shows some great musicianship from the band throughout it all. This album most certainly, is a great one.
Best Song: Into the Fire
Worst Song: Speed King

Honestly, I liked Low-Life way more than i thought i would have. This album is of course, horribly dated, and you can easily tell it's an album from the 80s considering it has all the usual elements you would expect from an 80s new wave album. The vocals were also strange in some areas like sometimes they weren't well produced and could get drowned out by the music and there was that one bit of bad grammar in Face Up. However, I still really enjoyed this album, The guitars and synths were really well done, and songs were also super catchy at points. On top of that this album went for the perfect length. This was quite the pleasant surprise.
Best Song: Face Up
Worst Song: Love Vigilantes

Snivilisation is a really weird album (probably because it's an electronic album and those have often been pretty weird). There are things that i like about it and things that i don't like about it. This album does have plenty of cool beats, some well done melodies and enough 90s charm to be really memorable. I thought i was gonna give this album a 4 but as it kept going, i soon realized that towards the end, it was just going to drag itself out especially with it's last two songs which easily pass the 10 minute mark. The album did get pretty tiring towards the end but i still liked the majority of it.
Best Song: Crash And Carry
Worst Song: I Wish I Had Duck Feet

Loveless is a weird one for me. Yes, it is repetitive, yes, the vocals are really muffled and difficult to hear for most of the songs, and yes, the songs can sound really noisy at points. But for some reason, i kinda enjoyed this one. The noise of a lot of the songs for some reason felt really pleasant, relaxing, and hypnotic and i also didn't seem to mind the repetition throughout most of the songs since the sounds that are repetitive are at least unique in some ways. This one is obviously a really difficult one to get into due to all the reasons i mentioned above but i felt as if i was able to get past it and enjoy the album to a decent extent.
Best Song: When You Sleep
Worst Song: To Here Knows When

The Age Of The Understatement is a pretty decent album. The album gave a vibe of a 60s western movie throughout the majority of it's runtime with all of it's instrument choices (except for the last song which had a more romantic vibe). I thought that the songs here sound pretty good and could be pretty catchy and get their intended feel out well but they did feel a little too similar to each other. The album was a fairly quick one at around 35 minutes so the sameyness of the songs were not really too irritating to me. I wouldn't really call this a great album but it does do it's job pretty well.
Best Song: Black Plant
Worst Song: Time Has Come Again

Honestly, I never thought super highly of The Beatles prior to doing this project but it really opened my eyes to how good they are especially with The Beatles (The White Album as fans call it). This album had quite a lot more variety with the kind of music being played, more so than any of the other Beatles albums that i have listened to. And for the most part, it paid off with a lot of these songs actually being really solid listens and generally being very memorable. I do feel like this album is pretty long however and i personally think that it would be great if the album was trimmed down a bit. That being said, this is still a really solid album and definitely my favorite Beatles album by far.
Best Song: Helter Skelter
Worst Song: Revolution 9

So, Back At The Chicken Shack was an album that just exists. I have a lot of the same problems with this album as i do with an album like Sunday At The Village Vanguard by the Bill Evans Trio as in i think that this album, while not being as well recorded as the one i mentioned, generally sounded fine and didn't really have anything for me to really hate. However, that's all it had, it never deviated or tried anything new or interesting and just stuck to the same old formula it had from song one which even with this album's 37 minute runtime (43 if you are talking about the CD rerelease), it still got tiring. I can see that Jimmy Smith and all the other musicians here absolutely had talent but that talent couldn't really save this album from being anything above mediocre.
Best Song: Back At The Chicken Shack
Worst Song: When I Grow Too Old To Dream

Korn is one of my favorite bands of all time, second only to Linkin Park so i came into Follow The Leader expecting nearly everything from it, and yet somehow, I'm still so impressed with how amazing this album is. This album had an incredible sound which blurred all the right lines between heavy, weird and haunting which made my whole listening experience so enjoyable. So many songs also had some really fun and unique ideas with an example being All In The Family which is just two intoxicated men just thinking of the best disses on each other and i just loved every single second of it, in fact every song here is just a pure banger. Hybrid Theory may forever be my #1 but this is still easily a close second.
Best Song: Dead Bodies Everywhere
Worst Song: Earache My Eye

Okay, I am not sure how Superfly hit so differently from the other Curtis Mayfield album i did but somehow, it just did. The music here still has some of that messiness from There's No Place Like America Today but it seems to be slightly better mixed with far less sudden instrument introductions than that. The vocals here are also somewhat better as the music complimented Mayfield's voice quite a bit better even if the lyrics here are a little strange (I'm sure they fit in the context of the movie though). This album isn't the most amazing thing ever but compared to There's No Place Like America Today, It is heaven.
Best Song: Superfly
Worst Song: Pusherman

The Hour Of Bewilderbeast is what i expected from an album that's at least 1 hour long. Basically, its an album that has it's really high highs but also has it's really low lows too. Typically, the songs were of the high variety with them often having an Elliott Smith like sound with a lot of it's strengths and as someone who likes his stuff, it's a major plus. But in some cases, there were songs that were annoying or just tried things that clearly didn't work and even some of the good songs could go off the rails when it was completely unnecessary. This is a good album but it's flaws do hold it back from greatness.
Best Song: Another Pearl
Worst Song: This Song

The New Tango had a sound that i feel is very unique and because of that, i think this album is pretty good. This album only really made use of three different instruments being an bandoneon, a xylophone, and a violin with maybe a double bass or cello being used but i don't quite know. These instruments somehow managed to blend together perfectly and give this album the sound a mystery movie or play would have and i think that's really cool. There were points where i did feel that the album was starting to get a little bit too long but i still enjoyed this album regardless.
Best Song: Nuevo Tango
Worst Song: Little Italy

Apocalypse 91... The Enemy Strikes Black is an album which i really enjoyed. My impressions on the first Public Enemy album i did (Fear Of A Black Planet) and technically what i think of most hip-hop albums especially on this project seemed like they were going to carry over here with the album having really good moments and really bad moments but i was pleasantly surprised to see that this album was actually consistently good throughout. With cool instrumentals, some really good social commentary and the songs sounding really distinct from each other (especially with Bring The Noise). This album did quite a lot to make me like it
Best Song: Bring The Noise
Worst Song: Rebirth

Cloud Nine is an okay album but is one that didn't really leave much of an impression on me. In every aspect in nearly every song, they were all handled well enough but didn't exactly do anything all that memorable or even interesting, this causes this album to lack it's own identity as it just falls in the sea of late 60s early 70s R&B albums that were more than prevalent during those times. Track 3 was probably the most interesting, helped by the fact that it was the longest but it was mainly that one song with all the interesting stuff. This isn't a bad album, just one i probably won't think about that much ever again.
Best Song: Runaway Child, Running Wild
Worst Song: I Gotta Find A Way (To Get You Back)

Beach Samba was a pretty good album for what it was. It does feel like an elevator album (It's been a long time since i used that term) but i do feel like it does a good job at being one by being a pleasant and relaxing listen. The times that the album does divert are kinda all over the place when it comes to how good they are. Sometimes they can be cool, like Gilberto having her son sing on track 11 but they can be off-putting at points like that one parade song which did sound rather jarring. However, i still think that this is a good album and one that you should listen to when you want to relax on a beach or something.
Best Song: Misty Roses
Worst Song: Parade (A Banda)

Live At The Harlem Square Club was an album that i quite enjoyed. At first the album did sound a bit messy and noisy at the beginning but either that was just in the intro song (which is exclusive to the 2005 edition by the way) or i just got used to it but either way i started enjoying the album from the second song onward. Whether it was the fun and jazzy songs or it was Cooke's energetic stage presence, this album was always a fun time through nearly all of it's runtime whether the songs were fast and fun or slow and romantic. This is one live album i thought was pretty good.
Best Song: Nothing Can Change This Love
Worst Song: Soul Twist / Introduction