Reviews by benc

What a monument of a record. Nearly every song is packed with subtle, understated harmonic, formal, and timbral experiments. It set the pace in jazz music for the next 10 years, until Miles started another revolution with Kind of Blue. And it helped define "cool," which is such a ubiquitous concept now in the Anglophone world it's almost difficult to imagine a time before it existed.

This is the ACTUAL oldest album on the list, considering some of these tracks were released as 10" 78 rpm records as early as 1949, which is pretty crazy because it means these songs were recorded before the "album era."

A relatively successful pastiche of popular rock and r&b styles from 1966 to 1974. The songs are pretty good, and LK is a good instrumentalist (a surprisingly strong drummer), but points deducted for being the biggest nepobaby of his era.

Derivative, generic, insignificant

Including a classic 50s Elvis album on this list is tough because the most radical, world-changing songs were all released as singles in the Sun days. You get some hints of that sound and style here, but there's also plenty to remind you that Elvis was a balladeer at heart, not just some perverse hip shaker. The Ray Charles and Little Richard songs are definite downgrades from the originals, but overall this is just a good rockabilly record.

This is a tough listen and I had a hard time processing what the hell this record is. (I hadn't really heard 10cc, but this is NOT what I expected them to sound like.)

This isn't a "so-so" record, it's constantly teetering between "really interesting" and "utterly terrible." Sometimes they sound like some of the freakier post-psychedelic acts but with their act cleaned up. Sometimes they sound like audaciously pompous rock showtunes.

Extra credit because Dilla heard something in here.

I love this record -- it was a daily listen around the time I was 22 years old. It's probably my favorite rock record of this era that has absolutely zero connections to punk or new wave. This is peak PG -- hooky songwriting, funky grooves, weird instrumental textures. There may be 1 or 2 skips (especially the JFK assassination showtune), but the rest of the album is basically perfect prog pop.

A life-changing album. Along with Wire's Pink Flag, this was the first album that opened up my mind about what punk could be. When I was in high school, this was not an easy record to find, and it felt like my friends and I stumbled across something obscure, sacred, and truly counter-cultural. Everything about the Minutemen -- their musical radicalism, their personal ethos, their politics, their affability, their realness -- is exactly what I love about punk. I've since seen Watt play a handful of times, including a Missingmen show about 15 years ago where I got to meet him and speak with him briefly. The dude is the real deal. I did the fan thing -- I told him how much I love and appreciate his music -- and he immediately started recommending other bands I should listen to. "Oh, if you like the Minutemen you really should listen to the Pop Group and Captain Beefheart. Me and D Boon loved those guys. That stuff's really out there." It just seemed so humble and genuine, and to me it affirmed these guys were real, no bullshit, working-class artists who loved and cared about their craft with no pretense whatsoever; in this day and age, this kind of authenticity is almost impossible to come by.

A perfect rap album. Everything is perfect. The drums, the samples, the rhymes, the flow, the storytelling, the vibes. I could listen to this on loop for the rest of my life.

-when I was 14, I would have told you this is a perfect album. Now that I'm older, and know more about rock history, I see this as arena rock posturing -- these are guys with a modicum of underground credibility aiming for a superstar moonshot. To their credit, it worked; literally half the songs on this album got constant rock radio play.

-the lead guitarist was found working in a guitar shop, and it definitely sounds that way. If anything has aged poorly, it's the constant Clapton-worship noodling.

-Eddie Vedder's voice has been impersonated so many times it's almost difficult to hear him as anything but an "Eddie Vedder impression." Dude has a weirdly polarizing voice, his lyrics barely make sense (and never really rhyme), but he's got undeniable pipes, which is probably why so many people want to sound like him.

-the worst thing that ever happened to Pearl Jam was getting lumped in with Nirvana. They were both from Seattle and wore flannel, but the comparisons basically end there. Nirvana are totally different (and a thousand times better, in my opinion), but if you disentangle PJ from the grunge hype machine they are nonetheless a pretty good rock band who made some pretty good records.

-It sounds like I'm harsh on this album, maybe because PJ are an easy band to rag on, but I still enjoy listening to it and (for what it's worth) it's a "no skips" mainstream rock record.

This is fine. Appropriately decent new wave rock music and I can hear how it influenced a bunch of bands in the 90s and 00s. Also quite generic, a bit like an 80s version of landfill indie.

-truly a "mixed feelings" record for me. The highs are quite high, but there's a lot of stuff that aged poorly, doesn't hit right, or is just too dilettante.

-the singles are absolute stand-outs. New Pollution sounds great to me and, even though I've heard it a zillion times, Where It's At is still a surprisingly weird song to have become a moderate radio hit. The best parts of the album are the ones that lean away from all the dabbling and posturing, and instead just try to build a steady psychedelic groove.

-as a kid, I wondered how the hell Beck wrote and recorded these songs. As an adult I can't help but hear this as a Dust Brothers album with Beck singing on top.

-there's so much stylistic hybridity going on here it feels like Beck is being a self-conscious appropriator, which isn't always as cute as he thinks it is. Beck is a pretty good epitome of postmodernism (derogatory).

-there are absolutely some songs on here that sound like Kid Rock.

For a lot of bands, the best way to understand their discography is to start with their first album and listen through the rest chronologically. Talk Talk is the exact opposite. Their magnum opus is Laughing Stock, their final album (which should be on this list). It took them about 10 years to find a musical signature, which was the spacious, collage-like texture you start to hear hints of on The Colour of Spring. This album is a weird pick because it's the exact mid-point of their transformation from sophisto-synth pop to experimental proto-post rock. They only get better from here on out, but this is nonetheless an absolutely great listen.

I'm coming to terms with the fact that most orchestral pop just doesn't hook me in. There are a few songs here that interest me more than others, and I could see how I might learn to love this more if I gave it time. But for now it doesn't excite me.

On my first, surface-level listens of Roxy Music, I didn't quite understand what was so exciting and radical about this band other than some of the Eno bleep bloops in the early 70s. As I've learned more about pop music in the late 70s through the 80s, I now hear their influence everywhere. They sat somewhere between prog and glam, but avoided the worst excesses of both genres -- they sound like the first "new wave" band.

Carole King is one of the best songwriters ever and this album is one banger after another.

This is some of the most abstract, cubist pop music ever written and it's incredible.

Every song is truly a "how did they write this thing" musical curiosity.

I can still remember the first day I heard this on CD in John Horner's beat up Camry 18 years ago. One of my all-time favorite records.

Damn I was pretty surprised how much I enjoyed listening to this. It's tight and heavy and brutal, but also weirdly elegant. Metal even a punk could like.

When I was a younger punk (and therefore obliged to hate Fleetwood Mac), I had a friend who insisted "Fleetwood Mac are corny but Tusk is good." I took her word for it because I didn't care to listen. 15 years later, I'm listening and pretty underwhelmed. Fleetwood Mac are a "good band" insofar as they are all strong players and singers who have figured out how to mesh well. But the songwriting is bland, uninteresting, and uninspired (at least on this album). The musical compositions do nothing to me, they pass over me like a stray breeze.

I'd never heard of Elbow before. As I listened to this I thought, it sounds like they're trying to do Talk Talk, Peter Gabriel, and OK Computer. I check the band's wikipedia and what'd'ya know are the three bands listed under "influences"?! They certainly wear these influences heavily on their sleeves. It's fine, they're decent enough songwriters and performers, but it's extremely uncool music. Way too blandly palatable and ready-made for commercial TV/film syncs.

I thought this album was good when it came out, and with hindsight I think it's great. It held up incredibly well over 20+ years and I feel like I've heard a lot of imitations over those decades. The ballads at the end would eventually overshadow everything else and come to define their style, but the raw unhinged loudmouth energy is really what makes this album so awesome. It's hard to think of a better mainstream rock record in the 21st century.