Reviews by benc

I hadn't listened to this full album in probably 15+ years and it was a real joy to revisit. It's gut punching heavy punk rock from weed smoking Black power activists. What more could you want? It's a shame MC5 never really put out their *album* that totally captured this kind of live performance mania.

This album is great! I'm really grateful to have encountered it through this list. I definitely understand why it's not for everyone, but I adore the overall weirdness and it sounds like some pretty inventive psychedelic experiments for 1968. I will need to continue relistening because there's just so much going on with this album.

I am a Neil Young enthusiast and I can acknowledge this album is not exactly "essential." But it is really fucking good. And well-timed; Ragged Glory came out right before the grunge explosion and it helped solidify Neil's status as the "godfather of grunge." This album also set the pace for the next few decades of what a Neil Young album would sound like -- fuzzed out guitars and warbly vocals backed by a killer rhythm section. There's not much else I really could ask for.

I hesitantly admit this is a great album. I have such complicated feelings about this band and how their status has changed over the course of my life, but this is an incredible blend of alt metal, funk grooves, blues punk, etc made by really imaginative and daring musicians. Of the big four Seattle grunge bands, Alice in Chains were the most distant from the underground scene most associated with the development of the genre. They really are their own thing, and it's a shame how much butt rock they inspired (but I guess that's what you get from near non-stop rock radio airplay for a decade). But now I am meeting a lot of young people who love this band? It's kind of odd, but I think if you are approaching Alice in Chains less in the terms of "Seattle grunge" and more within a greater context of rock history (especially as a young person who didn't grow up watching VH1), they sound much better.

It's extremely difficult to pull of the jazz-folk pop thing, but Joni does it better than almost anybody. A couple of these tracks light up my cornball sensors, but this is otherwise a wildly inventive record. Joni has a completely unique ear and, as a result, her songs never sound hackneyed or generic. Her sense of harmony, structure, texture, and melody is unmatched.

I have love for the British folk-jazz thing, but it's really difficult to pull it off tastefully. I was happy to listen to this album, which I had never heard before, but I think Martyn's music works more successfully when it leans closer to roots blues than the prog-fusion thing he's got going on in most of the time. He seems like a pretty inventive guitarist, though, so it at least makes me want to check out his earlier work.

This album was released on my 16th birthday and I remember going to buy the CD the week it came out. As I've mentioned in previous reviews, Radiohead are a bit of a tough band for me to evaluate because my personal experiences have definitely skewed my perception. With Hail To the Thief, I have fond, poignant memories of listening to this on my discman, walking home on a Spring night after dark. I also remember watching the "There There" premier on MTV2 and talking to my friends at school about it the next day. I'll never forget my one friend who loved this album because he hated Kid A/Amnesiac: "yeah it sounds like they're actually playing their guitars again instead of just recording the sound of them taking the guitars apart and putting them back together." I certainly prefer Kid A/Amnesiac, but there's a handful of songs on this album that have really stuck with me -- "Sail to the Moon" might be my favorite Radiohead song ever. So yeah, it's tough to have a fair take on this album, especially since a couple of the guys in the band have revealed their odious politics, but overall I really liked re-listening to this album.

I love psychedelic music, but I found this album mostly irritating. It seems like their approach to "experimental" music is entirely additive: more counter-melodies, more bowed strings, more wind instruments, more gospel choir, more backup vocals, more organs, more synthesizers, and make the song longer. It's all so epic and grandiose and expensive, but when you peel back the layers there's not much to love underneath.

Damn I disliked this much more than I expected. It's like a Broadway showtunes interpretation of working class rock n roll. Way too much glockenspiel.

In another universe, this might be a perfect album to me. I wrongly dismissed T Rex when I was younger; I liked some of their earlier psychedelic folk music (i.e. the Tyrannosaurus Rex albums), but for whatever reason I didn't quite understand the classic T Rex records that were so influential on punks. Now, on relisten many years later, I found this album to be a pure joy. The riffage is surprisingly great, the vibe is cool as hell, and Bolan's songwriting is never generic or cliched except when it's intentional. There's lots of fun, funny, tongue in cheek weirdness here and it feels like Bolan (along with some of his obvious contemporaries) was among the first to unlock how richly one could parody the image of the "rock star."

I liked this album a lot around the time I was 18 (though not as much as the parentheses album). I thought it was "experimental," and it helped introduce me to post-rock, for which I am thankful. Sigur Rós can be quite "cinematic" when you're 18 and listening on headphones while you walk around on a rainy fall day. On relisten, though, it is maybe a bit too glossy and schmaltzy for me; it may be slightly unusual, but it's all a bit too clean and smooth, and I now hear a zillion movie/TV syncs that sound similar to this style of epic melodrama.

Holy shit is this album bad. The first 30 seconds are kinda great -- you know, the bit they loop on The Exorcist. The rest is completely pointless and aimless guitar noodling. It absolutely sounds like a 19 year old made this because it's basically the 1970s version of a guy who plays coffee shops with a loop station, piling a bunch of diatonic crap on top of each other. I legitimately think he could have looped The Exorcist bit for 40 minutes and had a post-minimalist masterpiece. But alas, we have to live with this garbage forever. And somehow Richard Branson became a zillionaire from this?

Chuck Berry didn't invent rock n roll, but he crystalized its disparate strands into a recognizable, replicable, conventional form.

Similarly, the Ramones didn't invent punk, but they drew up the blueprint for the next 5+ decades of punk bands.

This is a powerhouse of a record, and every single song is instantly charming and memorable. Probably my favorite girl group record of the 70s.

I never really "got" the Band, and I still don't. But The Weight is an all-timer hippie anthem; extra points for Easy Rider.

These guys are ultra-nepo-babies and this album is basically funded with Epstein money. But you really can't overstate how much better this album was than basically ALL mainstream rock at that time.

Personally, I have a hard time evaluating Is This It because it was so meaningful for me around ages 14-16; and also, I had pretty much disavowed the Strokes by the time I got to college. It's important to remember that in 2001, when this came out, the available rock music on radio/MTV was either nu metal or pop punk with practically zero deviation. The Strokes felt cool and different and even "hip" in a way my friends and I couldn't put words to. The songwriting is really unique, and (despite the fact that they're pretty much churning out eighth notes 99% of the time) the band kinda cooks. I definitely remember learning about Television after reading a music mag that (favorably) compared the Strokes to them. Julian's blase too-cool-for-school thing can be irritating, but he can also belt like a soul singer when he wants. Nevertheless, the "coolness" can be kind of maddening, especially because these guys weren't particularly "underground" in any of the ways they fashioned themselves.

Overall, there's about 10 billion reasons I could dismiss this album, but I still like it and it scratches an itch.

I mean this in the nicest possible way: PRR are a second rate 60s beat band. i.e. if you love mid 60s pop/rock, and you're looking to dive a bit deeper than the obvious names, this is a great place to start. "Kick" and "Stepping Stone" are truly great songs, and the rest of the record definitely scratches the itch for soft psych garage rock. But if you're a casual listener, this album will probably sound like mostly generic filler, and you wouldn't totally be wrong.

At first, I was slightly confused how poorly this album rates on this website. I've loved this record since college, and in my memory it is GORGEOUS and mellifluous and easy to love and popular (at least among friends). Upon relisten, I also remembered how jarring Nico's voice is, and how some of the songs are like bizarre abstract paintings of noise -- it's maybe not as friendly as I thought. Personally, I adore these songs completely and think it is some of the most moving pop music ever recorded. It really feels like a lost VU album, with some strangely orchestrated folk tunes added. Recommend frequent relistens.

I enjoyed listening to this, at least more than the other Stan Getz album on this list. Will I listen again any time soon? Probably not.

This album is absolutely not for me. It's primary quality is "confessional," which I find to be a pretty boring artistic mode. I have lots of friends who are Dylan enthusiasts, and they all love Blood on the Tracks. But they also acknowledge it's really a lyrics-first style of music and that, if you want the richest possible experience, you need a near-parasocial relationship with Dylan.

I like this album a lot. Really great, creative songwriting, and the band is cooking. The Kinks don't just "sound British," though, they have constant themes of British nationalism throughout their music. It's definitely more than a bit ironic, though (certainly less creepily earnest than Village Green). Excuse the cliche, but I prefer their earlier stuff. Nonetheless, a really good set of songs.