Reviews by cmhess98

The blueprint before the building was finished — Paul Di'Anno's rawer, punk-inflected vocal approach giving this debut a grit that the more polished Dickinson era traded for operatic ambition, which is either a feature or a limitation depending on what you're after. The galloping bass lines and twin guitar attack are already fully formed, the compositional ambition audible in the multi-part title track, and the NWOBHM energy is genuine throughout.

The honest limitation is that "Hallowed Be Thy Name" doesn't exist yet, and that song was doing significant heavy lifting for the four that Number of the Beast earned. Good moments are real and scattered across the runtime without accumulating into something that demands the higher rating. A respectful three for a band finding what it would become — interesting as a historical document and less essential than what followed.

Fourteen songs, zero filler. "Eleanor Rigby" with its string octet and no guitars, one of the great lonely songs in any genre. "Tomorrow Never Knows" closing the record with backwards tape loops and a Tibetan Book of the Dead lyric that sounds like it was made a decade later than it was. "Got To Get You Into My Life" as a pure soul horn workout that Motown would have been proud of. "Here, There and Everywhere" as the most perfectly constructed pop ballad they ever wrote. "Taxman" opening everything with George Harrison's sharpest lyric and a guitar solo played by Paul, which is the kind of detail that reveals itself slowly and rewards the closer listening.

The range is the achievement — classical, soul, psychedelia, folk, rock and roll, and genuine experimental music covered in sequence without any of it feeling like genre tourism. Each song sounds inevitable in its own context and surprising in the album's flow, which is the definition of sequencing done at the highest level.

A five that needed no deliberation and no argument.

The anachronism is the whole point and it works completely — Mark Ronson and Salaam Remi pulling the Ronettes, the Shangri-Las, and classic Motown into 2006 and rebuilding it around a 22-year-old Londoner who had absorbed the tradition so completely that it sounds like the only context her voice could ever have existed in. The production shouldn’t feel this inevitable and does, which is the mark of a collaboration where everything clicked at exactly the right moment.

The singles run is remarkable by any standard. “Rehab” announced the whole thing with immediate confidence. “Back to Black” delivers on the Motown promise completely. “Tears Dry on Their Own” sounds like it was recorded in 1965 and discovered yesterday — the Ain’t No Mountain High Enough chord sequence repurposed into something that feels entirely Winehouse’s own. “Love Is a Losing Game” is the quiet peak — just voice and orchestral arrangement and a lyrical directness that makes most breakup songs sound evasive, the kind of song that earns its place in a setlist and stays there.

Winehouse’s voice is the central fact throughout — a contralto with jazz phrasing and soul directness coexisting in ways that formal training doesn’t produce, making everything around her sound slightly smaller by comparison. She sounds like she’s been singing these songs her whole life because in every way that matters she had been.

A record that shouldn’t work and largely does — Bobby Gillespie handing his band’s music to producers Andrew Weatherall and Hugo Nicolson, who rebuilt it from the inside out into something sitting at the intersection of rock, house, gospel, and dub. The gospel warmth of “Movin’ On Up” and the euphoric house pulse of “Loaded” give the record genuine emotional texture that most dance music of the era couldn’t manufacture, and the spiritual ambition running through the whole thing is real rather than decorative.

The honest ceiling is that enjoyable without pull lands at three regardless of the craft on display. The electronica territory has been consistent in this project — the exceptions have been records where the groove or the warmth connected deeply enough to generate genuine enthusiasm, and Screamadelica delivers pleasantly without quite getting there. A solid three for a record that earns its reputation without earning a return visit.

The record that has been a touchstone throughout this project — referenced in the Television listen for the guitar interplay, in the Marquee Moon review for the extended instrumental conversations, in the Americana discussions as the record that took the tradition somewhere genuinely new. Arriving as an assigned listen after all that context feels less like discovery and more like formal confirmation of something already known.
The backstory is almost too perfect: Reprise Records rejected it, Wilco streamed it for free, it became one of the most acclaimed records of the decade before it was officially released, and then it outsold what the label that dropped it ever expected. The story of an institution failing to hear what a record was doing and the record proving them irrelevant is the right origin myth for something this good.
Jeff Tweedy's Americana songwriting and the experimental instincts of everyone around him shouldn't coexist as naturally as they do — the noise, dissonance, and texture that push against the melodies creating a tension that makes both elements stronger rather than undermining either. "Jesus, Etc." is the emotional center, strings and pedal steel and Tweedy's voice doing something that feels completely inevitable. "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" opens the whole thing with a statement of intent that rewards every subsequent listen differently.
The Television connection is real and audible — those extended guitar conversations doing the same work that Verlaine and Lloyd were doing in 1977, the lineage clear and the execution completely Wilco's own. A record that sounds like it came from the whole American music tradition and invented its own corner of it simultaneously.
A five that needed no deliberation.

Fun in a ridiculous sort of way — and committing to the ridiculousness so completely that resistance becomes beside the point. Bruce Dickinson's arrival transformed Iron Maiden from a promising heavy metal act into something genuinely operatic, his range and theatrical conviction giving Steve Harris's galloping bass lines and the twin guitar attack of Murray and Smith a vocal center that could actually carry the ambition the music was reaching for.
"Run to the Hills" and the title track deliver the guilty pleasure in its most concentrated form — enormous, propulsive, completely committed to their own mythology in the way that only the best heavy metal manages without tipping into self-parody. The Vincent Price spoken word intro and the subsequent religious controversy and record burnings are the cultural artifacts that surround the record without diminishing what it actually is.
"Hallowed Be Thy Name" is the reason this lands at four rather than three — a seven-minute narrative about a condemned man awaiting execution that earns every second of its runtime and operates at a level of genuine songcraft that separates it from pure bombast. A song that serious and that well-constructed gives the record a different ceiling than guilty pleasure alone would allow.
A four that fun and craft earn in roughly equal measure. The ridiculousness is real and so is the quality underneath it.

A Philadelphia trio making a sound that nobody else was quite making in 1994 — blues, hip-hop, and lo-fi folk colliding with a naturalness that felt genuinely original rather than calculated. Garrett Dutton's slack, mumbled vocal delivery sits over acoustic guitar, upright bass, and drums in a combination that absorbed the blues tradition completely and then ran it through a hip-hop sensibility without losing what made either thing work.
The lo-fi production is exactly right — this sounds like a band playing in a room, which is what it is, and the warmth and immediacy that creates is something overproduced records of the era couldn't manufacture regardless of budget. "Cold Beverages" is the signature, a lazy summer groove that establishes the record's temperature immediately and delivers on every promise the formula makes. The blues DNA throughout is real and direct, Robert Johnson and Mississippi John Hurt filtered through a Philadelphia kid who understood the tradition without being reverent about it.
A lot of fun — which is its own category of achievement and the honest reason this lands at a comfortable four. Groove doing real work, blues roots genuine rather than decorative, and a record that delivers exactly what it promises without pretending to be more than it is. Sometimes that's exactly enough.

The sessions compiled here from 1949-1950 essentially invented cool jazz and created a template that an entire generation of musicians built from — Miles at 23, already thinking a decade ahead of where jazz was. That the record exists as a compiled artifact rather than a single conceived album changes nothing about what it actually is, which is one of the most consequential collections of recordings in the music's history.
The nonet is the instrument. Gerry Mulligan, Lee Konitz, J.J. Johnson, Gil Evans arranging — nine musicians creating a sound that was deliberately softer and more orchestral than bebop's intensity, the French horn and tuba giving the whole thing a warmth and low-end texture that jazz hadn't quite attempted before. The arrangements breathe and move with a patience that bebop's relentless momentum deliberately avoided, which is the philosophical statement the record is making as much as any individual performance.
J.J. Johnson on trombone deserves specific acknowledgment — one of the great jazz trombonists in history, and hearing him here with ears that understand the instrument from the inside gives the listen a dimension that casual appreciation can't quite reach. The trombone as melodic voice rather than harmonic furniture is exactly what Johnson understood completely and demonstrated here definitively.
Miles' muted trumpet is characteristically understated throughout — stating melodies with an economy that leaves maximum space for the arrangements to work. The through-line from these sessions to Kind of Blue nine years later is audible in every choice: the same patience, the same philosophy of space, the same understanding that what you don't play matters as much as what you do.
A five that the arrangements earn and J.J. Johnson confirms.

A Las Vegas band that somehow sounded more British than most British bands — Brandon Flowers absorbed the Smiths, Duran Duran, and New Order so completely that Hot Fuss arrived in 2004 feeling like a transatlantic artifact from 1985. That's either a remarkable act of stylistic synthesis or an elaborate tribute act depending on your generosity, and the record is good enough that the question becomes academic fairly quickly.
"Mr. Brightside" is the obvious landmark — one of the defining singles of the decade, the opening riff instantly recognizable, the melodrama completely committed, the chorus arriving with the force of something that was always going to be enormous. But the honest verdict is that it's not just Brightside. The record holds up consistently across its runtime in a way that the singles-carrying-the-rating pattern that has defined several fours in this project doesn't quite apply here — kind of good all around is the accurate assessment, which is a more meaningful achievement than it sounds.
Flowers' theatrical sincerity is the record's defining quality — committing to the emotional stakes more fully than the Morrissey influence he's clearly absorbed ever quite allowed its originator to do. The synth-driven post-punk arrangements give everything a momentum that the 2000s rock landscape around it mostly couldn't match.
A four that the whole record earns rather than just the hit. In a decade that has averaged 3.16 in this project, that's worth noting.

One hundred percent in the lane — funk average 4.17 in this project for good reason, and Mothership Connection is the record that built the lane. George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, Bernie Worrell, and a rotating cast of musicians creating something that was equal parts music, philosophy, and cosmic spectacle, the whole enterprise held together by a groove philosophy so complete it became a worldview.
Bootsy is ridiculous. The bass playing throughout — rubbery, melodic, simultaneously anchoring everything and pulling it in unexpected directions — is one of the great instrumental performances in recorded music and the engine that makes the whole mothership fly. Bernie Worrell's synthesizer work is the other essential element, genuinely pioneering in 1975, giving the record a sonic texture that nothing else of the era could match and that Prince, Outkast, and Kendrick Lamar all drew from directly whether they said so or not.
"Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof off the Sucker)" is one of the great funk singles ever recorded — a complete argument for what the genre can do at its highest expression, delivered with the kind of joyful conviction that makes resistance beside the point. The Afrofuturist mythology surrounding it — Black people as the original inhabitants of space, funk as the cosmic frequency connecting everything — gives the whole record an intellectual and spiritual framework that separates it from mere excellence.
The Mothership has landed. A five that needed no deliberation.

Three transcendent tracks is a remarkable achievement and the honest reason this lands at four rather than five. "Little Wing" is two minutes of the most concentrated beauty Hendrix ever committed to tape — the guitar voicings filling every frequency simultaneously while leaving room for everything to breathe, a complete emotional world in the time it takes most songs to finish their first verse. "Castles Made of Sand" is the storytelling peak, three vignettes of lives undone by fate delivered with a gentleness that the blues-rock context around it never quite prepares you for. The title track closes the record as a sweeping, orchestrated love song that shows Hendrix operating in a register pure guitar pyrotechnics never required.
Everything around those three is solid without reaching the same height, which is the honest limitation and the reason five stays out of reach. A record that sustains transcendence throughout earns a different rating than one where the peaks are carrying the weight — both can be excellent, and this one is, but the distinction matters.
Mitch Mitchell's jazz-influenced drumming gives Hendrix the freedom to treat the guitar as a full orchestral instrument throughout, and the variety across the record's moods and textures shows an artist expanding in real time. Released eight months after the debut, which remains one of the more remarkable creative accelerations in rock history.
A four that three genuinely great songs earn completely.

Solid and self-aware and operating at a higher level than most of what 2002 was producing in this territory — Ms. Dynamite's voice is warm and precise, the political consciousness running through the lyrics gives the record genuine weight, and "Dy-Na-Mi-Tee" delivers exactly the soul and reggae warmth the best moments here reach for. The Mercury Prize was earned.
The honest ceiling is that British R&B and UK garage have a consistent upper limit in this project regardless of the quality on offer, and A Little Deeper sits comfortably within that limit. Solid without generating pull, accomplished without feeling essential. A respectful three that acknowledges the talent without pretending to a connection that isn't there.

A lovely record — that's the right word and it's not a small thing. Court and Spark is Joni Mitchell at her most accessible and her most sophisticated simultaneously, the jazz influences that would come to fully define her later work beginning to integrate with the folk-pop songwriting that made her famous. The result is something that satisfies both worlds without compromising either.
The LA Express provide the backing and Tom Scott's saxophone gives the whole thing a warmth that Mitchell's earlier guitar-and-voice records didn't have. The arrangements are lush without being busy, leaving space for her chord voicings — those open tunings creating harmonic colors that conventional guitar playing can't produce — and a voice that carries emotional weight the conversational lyrical style makes feel like something overheard rather than performed.
"Help Me" is the signature and her biggest commercial moment, a piece of jazz-pop that sounds effortless and is harmonically more sophisticated than almost anything on the radio in 1974. The second half delivers the variance that keeps the record from settling into a single emotional register — good sequencing rather than accident, the album breathing differently as it goes rather than maintaining one consistent mood throughout.
Some critics have never quite known what to do with Joni Mitchell, which is a failure of listening rather than a legitimate critique. Court and Spark makes the case for her without asking anyone's permission. A four that the songwriting and the sophistication earn completely.

The quiet parts are where this record lives — the dreamy, surf-inflected textures that Black Francis was pursuing alongside the sci-fi imagery and space obsessions that make Bossanova the Pixies' most internally coherent and most peculiar record simultaneously. Joey Santiago's guitar work is more melodic and less abrasive than the band's reputation suggests, and Gil Norton's production gives everything a cleaner sheen that suits the record's more atmospheric ambitions.
"Velouria" is the centerpiece and the best argument for what the band was reaching for — hypnotic, patient, the quiet-loud dynamic deployed with genuine emotional purpose rather than pure aggression. The louder moments like "Rock Music" are where the connection is less complete, the noise doing less interesting work than the spaces around it.
Genuine respect for a band operating at a high level within a specific aesthetic world — really good at what it does is an honest assessment that lands above the respectful threes that have populated the recent listening run. The four is earned by the craft and the moments where the atmospheric ambitions fully land, with the honest qualifier that this isn't a record worth seeking out so much as one worth appreciating when it finds you.

The third Roxy Music record in this project and the third time the verdict lands in the same place — perfectly fine, respectfully acknowledged, no desire to hear more. Bryan Ferry's lounge lizard persona is an acquired taste that hasn't been acquired, and the art-rock formula around him is accomplished without generating any pull toward return visits.
The band plays with genuine energy here and the record has more muscle than For Your Pleasure, which earned the same three for similar reasons. The ceiling is consistent regardless. A respectful three, delivered efficiently and without ambiguity.

"Good Times" is one of the most consequential bass lines in recorded music — the foundation on which "Rapper's Delight" and "Another One Bites the Dust" were both built, eight bars of Bernard Edwards that changed the course of popular music in multiple directions simultaneously. Hearing it in its original context, as the centerpiece of a Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards production at their absolute peak, is the kind of experience that recalibrates what you think a groove can do.
The honest accounting of everything around it is that the Chic formula is solid and consistently delivered without generating quite the same pull. The interlocking rhythm guitar and bass, the string arrangements adding warmth without weight, the vocals serving the groove rather than competing with it — all of it working exactly as intended, all of it excellent, none of it reaching the height that "Good Times" sets in the first thirty seconds. A record where the single is carrying most of the rating weight is still a four when the single is this significant and the surrounding material is this accomplished.
Nile Rodgers' choked, rhythmic guitar playing remains one of the great underrated instruments in pop music, and the precision of the whole enterprise — groove as philosophy rather than decoration — connects directly to everything that has scored highest in this project. The four is honest rather than disappointing. "Good Times" alone justifies the listen.

Not warm and fuzzy, and not trying to be. Becker and Fagen wore their ironic detachment like a badge throughout their career, and Aja is the record where that detachment is most precisely calibrated against the warmth of the musicians surrounding it — the contrast between Fagen's cool persona and the absolute heat of what Steve Gadd, Bernard Purdie, Wayne Shorter, Michael McDonald, and a small army of the greatest session musicians in the world are doing underneath him is the whole secret of why this record works.
Gadd's drum performance on the title track is one of the most celebrated in recorded music — not because it's flashy but because it's so precisely right, every fill landing exactly where it needs to. Purdie's shuffle opening "Babylon Sisters" is the other landmark, one of the most imitated grooves in pop music history captured here in its definitive form. Wayne Shorter's saxophone on the title track puts the jazz credentials beyond argument. McDonald's background vocals provide the soul warmth that Fagen's vocal persona deliberately withholds — the tension between those two things is the record's emotional engine.
Seven tracks, forty minutes, not a wasted note anywhere. The harmonic sophistication that makes this challenging for some listeners is exactly what makes it endlessly rewarding for others — complex enough to reveal new things on return visits, accessible enough that the complexity never becomes a barrier. Can't Buy a Thrill earned a five earlier in this project. Aja confirms that Steely Dan belongs in the conversation about the greatest American bands of the era.
A five that the musicians earn and the production deserves.

Absolutely fine and not my thing are compatible verdicts and this record earns both simultaneously. Polly Jean Harvey and Steve Albini make a predictable combination in the best sense — raw, close-miked, no reverb, no sheen, just presence and intensity in a room together. The blues foundation underneath the noise is genuine, the emotional world is real, and Harvey's voice doing things from near-whisper to full-throated howl within the same song is an instrument operating at a level the surrounding rawness doesn't always deserve.
The title track makes the strongest case — quiet menace building to complete abandon over a bass line that sounds like it was recorded in a cave, one of the great opening statements of its era. Everything it promises the record delivers consistently, which is the mark of an artist who knows exactly what she's doing.
Knowing exactly what you're doing and making something that generates no pull toward return visits are not mutually exclusive outcomes. A respectful three, honestly delivered — well done, not sought out, filed accurately.

"Breaking the Law" and "Living After Midnight" are two of the most recognizable riffs in metal history — anthemic, simple, delivered with complete conviction, and almost certainly better known than they would be without fifty years of movies, TV shows, and classic rock radio doing the work of familiarity. Whether you love them because they're great or because you've heard them hundreds of times is a genuinely interesting question without a clean answer. Probably both, in proportions that can't be separated.
What's clearer is that the rest of British Steel doesn't generate the same response, which is either the familiarity bias at work or an honest assessment of a record where the singles are doing most of the heavy lifting. Rob Halford's voice is the genuine article throughout — one of the great heavy metal instruments, capable of range and power the genre's stereotype undersells. The twin guitar interplay is tight and riff-oriented. The competence is real and consistent.
Competence without the pull that the singles generate lands at three, which is where this sits. A record that gave the world two genuine landmarks and surrounded them with material that earns respect without earning return visits — which is an honest outcome and a more common one than the canon usually admits.

Billy Corgan's maximalist ambition is the defining fact of this record — hundreds of layered guitar tracks, Butch Vig's enormous production, and a wall of sound that owes more to classic rock grandeur than anything in the Chicago underground scene the Pumpkins nominally came from. The result is alt-rock that thinks bigger than its contemporaries, which is either the reason it holds up or the reason it occasionally feels overwrought depending on which track you're on.
The hits make the case completely. "Today" is the melodic peak — the contrast between quiet verses and explosive chorus is dynamic range done exactly right, the kind of song that earns its place in any setlist regardless of era. "Cherub Rock" opens the record with immediate confidence. "Disarm" goes the other direction entirely, orchestral and vulnerable, showing Corgan's range at its most unexpected and most genuine.
The honest limitation is that the back half doesn't fully sustain the level the singles set — not weak exactly, but not pulling with the same force. A record where the hits are doing most of the heavy lifting is still a four when the hits are this good, which is exactly where this lands.
A solid four built on singles that have earned their place in the permanent rotation and a production ambition that still sounds enormous thirty years later.