Rated 8/10
Distinctive Wu Tang production - sparse herky jerky beats and Kung Fu samples for a vaguely spooky combative action-packed cinematic feel that sets the stage for the verses's terse concise delivery. As good as this, Raekwon, Ghostface, and GZA's albums are, they do feel kind of over-represented on this list. A tight 2 disc compilaiton of the best of the Wu-Tang extended universe would really hit the spot.
Rated 8/10
Goddamn this is so cool. Dark minor key synth-based post-punk with an edge in the vocals and the guitars touch of punk to the vocals. The somber and introspective mood constrats with the glossy artifice of the synths for a nightmarish party feel - this is a great document of the imaginary of what the inside of a computer, and so the impending computer-based future, must've sounded like in the late 70s. Kind of a Blade Runner of an album, but projecting that dystopian aesthetic onto an imagined alien other: 'Tokyo'.
Favorites: Fall in Love with Me, Alien, All Tomorrow's Parties, Quiet Life
Rated 10/10
You never forget your first musical love. When it's this good why would you even want to?
Rated 2/10
I really hated this when it came out, but figured so many people seem to like it and it gets so much critical praise, I must've been missing something. Then the flute comes in, and I remember why I hated it. And then his voice comes in and I remember why I hated it. Then he starts with some of the most irritating lyrics imaginable and I remember why I hated it. Then there's more goddamn flute. Then I look at the cover again. I see the sentence-long song titles. Then I remember this was part of the an absurd conceit that delighted the most NPR-brained homework lovers on earth but that thankfully it only ever got 4% completed. Then I see that he filled up the entire damn 74-minute CD. The flutes haven't stopped. The circus music starts. Then it's the forced intimacy of hushed whisper singing over fingerpicking acoustic. Plinky plonky plink piano tenderness. The dreaded millenial banjos and ukeleles come in for some fake pastoral aura. The french horn for faux-grandeur. I'm at serious risk of doing harm to myself and those around me if I'm subjected to more than 10 minutes of this, yet bravely I persist. The flute persists. The red mist thickens.
Favorite: Night Zombies
Rated 6/10
A perpetual motion machine created out of layers and layers of rhythm from the rich percussion, bass, even the way the piano is played like a drum at times, and the multiple melodies from vocals, horns, guitars & piano to create rhythmic counterpoints.
Rated 6/10
I prefer the more raw hardcore of their self titled debut to this album's slower performance and more polished sound with glossy 80s production and a weird chorus effect on everything. That said the funk bass and shredding guitars rip unabashedly hard and this is them pushing well beyond the edge of the overly reductive/restrictive hardcore formula they'd already perfected.to craft a more eclectic hard rock sound that grunge and alt rock bands would be ripping off for the next decade+.
Rated 6/10
Tense, weird, sprawling, dreamy, lush, harmonically dense & dissonant, spacious, dark but optimistic. A very out of time album where 60s folk psych meets 70s prog experimentalism meets 80s synths meets 90s postmodernism meets 00s post rock rhythms meets 2010s electro ambience.
Favs: Alien, Free Will and Testament, Heaps of Sheeps, Blues in Bob Minor
Rated 8/10
Propulsive beats assembled from infectious high energy soul/RnB samples. The vocals are top tier - it's rip roaring raps with an emphasis on storytelling verses, tight word-play, funny lines, and great images from an all star cast of Wu-Tang affiliates. Full of drama, vision, and powerful vignettes, but nothing super catchy in terms of memorable choruses/hooks - a bit overlong too, this is a prestige TV series of an album.
Favorites: Shakey Dog, 9 Milli Brothers, Back Like That
Rated 2/10
I like the Lo-Fi garage rock sound and DIY spirit - amping up the fuzz, shredding the vocal chords, direct raw performance, and pushing the recording into the red - but they have literally 0 ideas. They're even derivative in who they're ripping off! I'm sure this was a fun band to be in and to see live at the sock hop in 1966, but my god the mid 60s are the most over-represented era. It's as if the world would end if every micro step in the evolution of white guys learning how to play Chuck Berry and Little Richard songs wasn't represented in excruciating detail. Can't we just have the Nuggets compilation instead of all these mediocre 'proto-something interesting' albums with one ok song?
Rated 3/10
Replacement level 90s pop radio alt rock - nice jangle, strummy, some twang, it's very bright, melodic and earnest, but extremely paint by numbers. I like this genre a lot, but really hard to call this essential listening as an album - maybe a song on a best of the rest 90s comp.
Rated 4/10
This has all the hallmarks of mid 10s pop production, trauma-core. An electropop pallette that's all about moody pulsating synth and a patina of nostalgia for a sound its audience originally knew as always already retro. Drawing on electronic dance music for the build/drop crowd moving effect but played too slow to dance to, instead the pacing makes room for big swells and leaves lots of room between the beats. Huge choruses - shouted rather than sung for pop buy-in - that feel a bit forced like they were written to be on at the emotional peak of a mediocre teen drama. An explosion of big fill-in-the-feeling feelings, fill-in-the meaning meanings. Dynamics that flip between bombastic beats and quite piano. Hushed breathy vocals that create a whispered intimacy, then they're doubled and tripled for a polyphonic effect for maximalist choruses. Subwoofer testing low end bass hits to connect the ethereal synths to your body and ground it. A detached disillusioned affect from hyper-mediation and lyrics that mix up deepening isolation and self care. This was one of the big albums that made this sound hegemonic, but it still ends up feeling a bit predictably samey and none of the songs really pops in the way Royals did.
Rated 8/10
The birth of millennial indie arena rock. Combining the massive atmospheric post-rock sound and elaborate instrumentation of other Montreal bands like Godspeed and Broken Social Scene with more straightforward up-tempo songs and epic headline melodies (and martial drumming) makes for a hugely effective anthemic album full of drama: building tension, big climaxes and sweeping moments of release.
Rated 4/10
Their most famous song but not their best album. Kind of a tired burned out one, lo-fi, shaggy, and sprawling. Lots of songs but it's stuck halfway between their brash zannier previous style and the more experimental stuff to come.
Favorites: Death of a Party, Song 2, Beetlebum
Rated 2/10
Written by someone who's only been exposed to a Michael Jackson slow jam cover band and performed using only a toy Casio keyboard. Somehow this is rotting my teeth.
Rated 6/10
A 90s slacker alt rock take on Nick Drake. Slow and somber songs with folksy acoustic guitar at the center of understated and tastefully lush arrangements that sound a bit like Beta Band. Beck delivers a sensitive and hushed vocal performance. Their whole thing has a melancholy wistful mood. Nothing especially original, but all extremely well crafted and executed, it's comfortingly familiar sounding even though I never (consciously) listened to this when it came out.
Rated 6/10
Jazzy Native Tongues style beats for a feel good relaxed sound. His delivery is great, incredible pacing and a cadence that wraps language around itself as he shifts tempos, accelerating through a verse hitting a rapid fire couple of lines and stepping back for a more spacious playful flow.
Rated 2/10
Just because something was commercially successful in the era when there only like 5 bands and all they did was rip each other off and smoke the mildest pot and think they were tripping doesn't mean it's essential listening. As much as I like the Rickenbacker jangle, this doesn't hold up well at all. Sounds like if the Monkees were a Dylan cover band.
Rated 6/10
A melting pot of disco synth pop new wave and soul with incredibly neon 80s production and some gale force full blown diva vocals. Fun and sad and idealistic. At its best in radio pop hit and dance club banger modes - less strong on the ballads.
Rated 6/10
Bluesy country with crisp clean high gloss production, a yodeling twangy vocal, lush arrangements and the slightest twist on some classic genre songwriting that does, in the end, become a bit generic. The late 80s is an interesting moment in the recurrent back and forth exchange between country, rock, and pop with urban cowboy, Dwight Yoakam, cowpunk and the rest embracing and reworking the the Nashville, outlaw, and roadhouse archetypes for a very knowing almost pastiche but not winking continuation of the sound.
Rated 8/10
The pinnacle of disco production paired with pure pop songwriting and fueled by endless supplies of cocaine and funk. Updating the Motown sound for the synth erA, this album that has been the template for commercial RnB ever since. When you open with an all time great song it's going to be downhill inevitably. The slow jams and ballads stink - skewing way to far to the saccharine schmaltz side and lacking the tight dance grooves that make it endearing.
Favorites: don't stop till you get enough, rock with you, burn this disco
