Reviews by declaniom

Cool album. Relaxed, not challenging. Makes me want to use the word vibe and I never use that word.

Obviously the Girl from Impanema is the stand out track, but you’ll be strangely familiar with may others.

There’s great fun to be had at the punk-psyche crossroads.

This is a great album. The Pixies's greatest.

Good album, possibly their last great one. There are certainly some memorable lyrics.

Pretty ordinary album. Begins well and trails off. Some songs go on too long.

I haven't thought of this album in twenty years, then it appeared on the generator today, the I watched Harry Hill's podcast on YouTube and the comedian Stewart Lee was challenged S.A.R.A.H. an AI robot that lists his favourite music,, as The Fall, Giant Sand, Calexico and Ms Dynmite, Challenged on the latter Lee points out that it was an interview from 25 years ago and he needed to add somethong he loked that was in the charts but now "sounds like a really strange thing to admit to." Harry then sings Put Him Out accompaning himself on swanny whistle, clapper, duck calls etc, Its better than the version on album.

People ask why this is in the book. It was a big album in Britain at the time and this is a British book written for the British market. It rather unexpectedly won the Mercury Award and sold well on the back of that.

The book was published a year or so later. They chose a current big lp. They didn’t have the hindsight to see it would not become a classic 20 years later. A few years on that was clear and the record was removed from later editions.

For me the problem with this lp it isn’t especially English. I like music that feels like it comes from a particular place. The Mercury Award that year should have gone to Original Pirate Material which is undisputably about being young and English and urban. Ms Dynamite could be American and there are Americans who do this sort of thing better.

I like this album. It’s basically a 00s electronic ambient lp played on strings instruments in the 70’s.

First two songs are upbeat and fun. Then they play Comfortably Numb - a dull song by Pink Floyd - they fail to make it interesting and everything afterwards is pretty ordinary.

I listen to this at the time when an older lady at work (who was probably younger than I am now) leant me the cd. Just like now I grew bored. It’s all kind of low energy Deee-Lite.

Not entirely meritless especially considering the early 00s was a low point in general. 1.5.

Strangeways by the Smiths

Surprised that there are 7 Smiths or Morrissey LPs in the list but the first year represented by the Smiths lp and Hatful of Hollow isn’t there.

Smiths timeline one of slow decline from an extreme peak. Beginning with the 4 Radio Sessions and first two singles in 1983, to the debut album in 1984, onwards to Meat is Murder before the Queen Is Dead, which is their low point. Then, I think sensing the end they rallied with non- lp singles Panic, Ask, Shoplifters of the World Unite and Sheila before ending with this rather jaunty lp. Morrissey’s solo career has been a slow steady decline and his latest single (Make Up is Vile or whatever) sounds like someone asked an AI machine to make a Marc Almond song.

I kind of lived this timeline passionately and then disinterestedly. I was 14 in 1983 and revising for an exam. Listening to Kid Jenson he played a session by the band and then John Peel followed on with a session recorded for his show. Went into school the next day and told everyone I’d heard a great new band. No one believed me.

Anyway all the Smiths have said that Strangeways is their favourite album by the band. There is a case for that it’s certainly the best produced. I especially liked Paint A Vulgar Picture - is Moz the idol or the fan clawing at the star? Or both?

I’d found new bands that were as thrilling as the Smiths or more so by the time this lp came out. But I was glad that the rockist tendencies of the Queen is Dead had been vanquished and Morrisseys songwriting was sharper on Strangeways.

It felt like a last hurrah! Like they knew it was ending soon and that freed them up. And even now it feels like a glorious Ta-Ra

5 ish.

Prior to beginning this challenge I listened to Kevin Rowlands’s autobiography and did a lot of listening to Dexys and his solo stuff. So I probably didn’t need the first three LPs to pop up in the first 100 LPs. If you're critical of Dexy's lps rest assured so's Kev! Restlessly searching for perfect never quite finding and not settling when he got pretty close.

I'll be honest, Young Soul Rebels, and post-reformation lps One Day I'm going to Soar and the cover lp Dexys Do Irish and Country Soul would be the three of their lps I'd say you shuld hear before you die.

Once I was at a festival and Elton John (an elderly pop pianist who's Americans will probably be surprised to learn has had more hits than just Goodbye Yellow Brick Road) was banging away doing his poorly enunciated Chas & Dave thing on he main stage. Went to see Dexys in the tent. Beforehand the lad next to me complained about the people only interested in hearing songs they heard before, then spent the whole set calling for Eileen. Which they didn't play because they wanted to play their current album, which was theatrical and had a narrative arc that Eileen didn't fit. That illustrates the contrary nature of Kev.

And testament to the endure power of Eileen. Even here they leave it until the last. Eileen is perhaps a millstone in the public perception. Kevin, normally very dapper, is forever in dungarees in the public imagination. BUT Eilleen still saves misfiring wedding discos 45 years. And consider when it came out, 1982, the fun years of Punk, New Wave, 2 Tone, Post Punk experimentalism were being replaced by regiments of pretentious but vacous - Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet. Yet here was a song by a band that were unassamedly intellectual that you could dance to. A band that were fun and clever. A band that looked to the future whilst acknowledging the music of the past.

Paranoic, dense, and cool. This is my favourite of the 90's Bristol Trip Hop, apart from Tricky's Pre-Millenial Tension.

This was the UK's 65th best selling album of 1995 at the height of Britpop. After surviving the 80's, we so lucky during that time to have so much good music in the mainstream at once.

Daisy age hip hop. I wasn’t feeling it today but will in the summer.

Get the 2 disc vinyl version rather than the 1 for best sound

I was pleased this made the list given that Brit Pop is underrepresented on this list (maybe 10 lps by the big 4, this, Supergrass, Ash, plus Urban Hymns and Everything Must Go and that’s about it.)

It’s a fun album that made a big splash at the time. I think Elastica like a lot of that era, work better on an ep or a radio session - brief immediate and insistent. It was the last great hurrah! of the single after all. Sleeper are in the same territory but have aged better. And Salad gave an Anglo- Eurotrash take that remans thrilling.

Yes they owe a debt to Wire. Even at the time that was obvious. But do do Minor Threat and Big Black and they’re lionised.

However I’d like to make the case that this is a more groundbreaking record than we give it credit for. This is the first Strokesified album. 6 years before Is This It? Established the formula of taking an old sound, crank up the loudness, use modern technology and a cool modern Gen X front person Elastica did that to post punk.

It does for Wire what Silent Alarm did for the Gang of Four. Yet Bloc Party, Strokes, Franz Ferdinand, Kings of Leon, Libertines, Arctic Monkeys etc never received the same backlash for following the formula. I guess the 9Os found repackaging old music less palatable than the 00s.

Difficult LP to score.

It's almost as if Todd invented the cd deluxe reissue in 1972, Side one and two are a pretty cool classic lp. I Saw The Light is wonderful; Wolfman Jack a tired 50 style boogie and the rest in between. It would be a four or five star lp.

Side Three is like a radio session or stand alone ep. It's over guitar soloy and a bit boring. Black Maria is especially bad. 2.5 Stars.

Side Four sounds like the studio outtakes from an aborted session where the band was sacked immediately afterward. Contains Springsteenesque saxomophone slop. Grim. 1 Star.

Bit surprised this is on the list. It’s a great album, but without any great songs, it’s a great album for people far down the Dexys rabbit hole. And that’s me. I can’t see it winning any new converts.

One hit wonders in my country and this LP doesn’t even have the hit.

Ponderous pop rock with an awful singer. Often everything stops while the guitarist “shreds” it sounds like he’s concentrating really hard with his tongue stuck out.

There’s a version of the Kinks’s You Really Got Me that has none of the energy of the original.

All in all it as if the Saffron Walden Townswomen’s Guild’s UFO tribute band decided to become an original act but the normal singer phoned in sick that day and they got the lass who makes the cucumber sandwiches to fill in.

If you like your rock n roll devoid of anything that rocks or rolls this is for you.

It’s bamboozling that this lp is on the list of 1001 albums you should hear. I say this not because Jon Spencer Blues Explosion aren’t my thing, they are, but because this isn’t their best work by a long way.

The album suffers from excessive compression. This makes it loud but without the dynamic range a trio like the Blues Explosion need where there no space. Performances are sound but fewer stand out tracks. Besk is the guest appearance from Rufus Thomas singing Chicken Dog (are all his songs about dogs).

I haven’t listened to this album in years and on revisiting I realise why - there are many better Jon Spencer LPs. I recomend Acme (or its remix album) and Extra Width. Also worth checking out is the lp backing up bluesman RL Burnside an Ass Pocket of Whiskey.

It’s particularly sad that this album is on the list because it’s their only entry and the only entry from the fantastic 90’s garage punk scene that lead up to the White Stripes commercialised breakthrough. There’s no Gorries, Dirtbombs, Mummies, any of Ian Sveneous’s bands like the Make-Up, Detroit Cobras etc.

Pleasant Album. Understated global hobo sound. Reminds me of Joe Strummer’s last albums, but more professional

This is a top ten all time play for me and hip hop’s greatest achievement.

Good lp. Psychedelic Afrofuturist. Wondaland is a great song.

Another 90’s album I’ve never owned but seem to know very well from parties and friends houses back then. I’m rather a sucker for that sound.

This is risk adverse funky dance music. Not sure why anyone who wasn’t nostalgic for the sound of 90’s UK would play this more than once. Pleasant though.