Reviews by emmabeans

cover art goes hard

this rules. the musicality is so serious and the lyrics are so silly. i was stuck in traffic singing about fried ice cream is a reality. realized i knew all the guitar solos from my little brother learning guitar growing up. added to the library, fave track who says a funk band cant play rock

ive been interested to learn more about this era/type of music but trying to get thru this was a slog. like the single tho

this is like watching a 30s mgm musical when youre like wow there was a time when all these generational talents were just all pulled into the same room to make some popular entertainment and they were all so singularly good at their art and so alchemically combined that what could be just a really silly little bit of distraction is so much better. a bunch of geniuses telling you that they will fuck you up in creative ways for 30-40 minutes. idk how to talk abt this without using a bunch of cheesy music fan cliches. the beats are cool, the sketches are funny. odb is there. there's all the movie quotes. if youre in sync with the same dialogue as the the album there's belonging here for you. fave tracks shame on a -, chessboxin, aint nothin to fuck with, protect ya neck

listened at the gym. its groovy and i the spacey weee ooo sounds and the basslines, when it's got a y2k futurism. wouldnt say it suffers from sameyness since i think the whole point is the exact mood it has. sort or suspect this is on here as an expression of the britishness of the list, as likely there is some black artist who influenced this (or even one that didnt) that could have been chosen in place of this.

i am having an absolute mandela effect moment with the "don't worry, i won't hurt you..." intro. anyway one of my first favorite albums ever in my life still hits like when i was six. absolutely manic orchestration and production on everything, and sex party and romance turn into a driven rhytmic state of euphoria. in my case, literally baby's first extended pop instrumentals. i tbh dont think its all really about sex except in the way that everything is about sex, its like the whole psyche and not having known prince personally it seems like it must have been pretty singular and weird. but also if it is all just about dance, party, sex, and romance, what else do we have in our short small lives? fave track let's pretend we're married

takes me back to moving back to la and working in a lab where we'd listen to kcrw in the morning and id always dread npr news ending and jason bentley playing his set of total dogwater music. i gave this an honest listen because i dont know id he played anything off this album in particular, so there was nothing traumatizing in this for me. but it all sounded like this. he also played the same vampire weekend song like every day that summer. but i dont think we'll look back on this time and remember this band, feels like a premature call on the list writer's part

saw this come up and went oh nooo but was OKayer than anticipated. still wont ever revisit. dont like the vibe of the band or the vocals and cant relate but i get thay theyre good songs. had to skip everybody hurts for grew up in the 90s reasons. fave track sweetness follows

can't put a finger on why i don't like this, its sonically OK, i like the harmonizing parts and guitar sound. i missed this when i was a teen because it was lame radio rock and i hated all that new york/london stuff, i was obsessed with joy division and all the post punk revival stuff felt soulless and gross, a weird imitation of something lost. it was a bleak time culturally if anyone can't remember it was the bush era, not the y2k, reality tv was happening etc... a real era for slop and this takes me back (deragatory). sometimes the songs sound like theyre building to something good and then go to a crescendo thats just unsatisfying. like k liked the intro on the first track andy youre a star until the chorus, but didnt really like any song all the way thru ans skipped a few tracks, especially when they kept trying to move into a grand sound halfway thru. also the cover art feels sinophobic idk

thought this was just gonna be a chill vibe and then it got actively annoying. why is there a parade in there. why is she singing in english. why does this feel like a 60s ad for a sofa. don draper's second wife had this album.

just so lovely. i have a boomer dad that smokes weed so i'm not totally alien to willy, but i don't think i've ever sat and listened to this one. first new to me thing that i liked on the list so far. i listened to it three times today. i love the instrumental interludes, the bach rendition. i love willy's voice, i love his guitar. i love how every song seems like it just flows into the next. i love when it borrows tennessee waltz and red river valley and turns into something else. listening to this feels like you're at a friday night party at an elk's lodge in heaven. fave track hands on the wheel

i can see someone picking this up used at a store the 90s and being like wow this doo wop dude made a pretty good adult album and playing it for a few friends who agree, but for me now i dont care. wasn't so bad to have to actively skip tracks but felt weirdly drained as i gently ignored this for its play time. i suspect the thousand albums writer picked this because primal scream cited it as an influence? no fave track because i really really didnt listen carefully at all

it's cool how the band's style verges on noise and i like whatever the engineer (?) did with the drums on this but these songs are so meh or maybe not coz i can't get into the melody with costello's singing. 10+ albums into the 1000 feel there is way too much rock on this list

wow this sucks its like a record exec said find some nice fellas to do some love songs and put a little a that seattle sound the kids like on it, did not finish

somehow lots of elements that are normally not for me come together in a singular work that holds a dear. i really usually hate that 80s solo guitar thing unless prince does it! thanatos lovers will be like ohhh there's too much eros. but it's got both ok. fave track when doves cry

i like 60s baroque pop, and i like this band, but i like sitting through a mix of hits better than an album like this one; there's definitely standouts in the genre to me but i guess to me the high achievement of a really really good pop hit, whether from a very good band like the zombies or even an industry plant, pulled together are what makes this era to me. i'm a big listener of the rhino nuggets compilations is what im sayin. im not an expert but i kind of suspect there was some tension between rock bands in this era of labels' demands for big radio hits to sell the albums and the bands' desire to pull of their own beates esque album of artisic achievement. this was definitely a no-skip but i still don't connect with it as a whole and don't see myself putting it on again, but i will find myself in a youtube zombies tv appearences hole again. fave track beachwood park

i like the production on a lot of these tracks but i just didn't like any of the writing, so the lightness of it just felt kind of empty vs ethereal and not enough to hold up the falsetto singing, not in itself a bad thing but wore on me sonically and quickly. fave track cologne cerrone houdini, more of a trip hop vibe than the rest of the album
update read the wiki and would not have guessed this was going for british pagan folk except for the cover art... if youre gonna go wyrd, go wyrd...

groovy, cool. felt nostalgic in a joyful way listening in bed on a rainy saturday morning. read the wiki article after and didn't really square the sound with the resistance music thing, but you know what this is a vibe and if you have a good aura and your enemy's is bad then you will win. fave track maseru

kind of nice, i would be happy to listen to this in a bar on a hot sticky night. i don't think i'll remember anything about this tomorrow. fave track six blade knife

i am questioning my committment to listen to 1000+ highly regarded popular music albums. is this objectively good? it is important? did i appreciate this more at a different point in my life? is the cover art kind of neat? do i ever need to hear the song "wish you were here" from pink floyd's 1975 album "wish you were here" ever again? i just dont know. fave track(s) shine on you crazy diamond