Reviews by gregorsmith

Absolutely unmemorable, very much a "listen to once, forget forever" album. Now I'm afraid to relisten to it in case the dreaded Spotify algorithm thinks I actually liked it... Not as bad as their other album on here, but that's not praise in any way.

Solid Glam Rock, and songs like "Telegram Sam" and "Metal Guru" are the high points of this album, but it mostly sounds like bluesy chords with hot licks over the top, and I dig that...

Soothing Cuban jazz that was the hottest thing in the whole world for a hot minute due to the popular documentary. Its good, but nothing particularly stands out for me, is just good background music.

A pseudo live album that's a real blast, you can tell Tom is feeling the crowd assembled in his fake smoky jazz club as he tells his stories preambling into the actual song.

A heavy album in between their solid debut (the eponymous Suede) and poppy comeback (Coming Up), the fact they even needed a comeback after this tells you how well this was received.... if their debut was the drugged up high of poppers, this is the hard comedown. "The Wild Ones" and, appropriately, "Heroin" stand out.

One thing you can say about Missy Elliott is her albums are fun, Timbaland production is tight as hell and undeniably of it's time, but Missy's raps are just so off the wall surreal one minute then super serious the next... It keeps you on your toes. "Work It" remains a timeless banger though

Sonic Youth are legit time travellers, creating one of the definitive grunge album 5 years before everyone else. Anyway, you don't need to tell me to listen to Sonic Youth...

Johnny Rotten tries to become a serious musician. Fails.

Honestly, started off with a ratcheting noise and then warbling tremolo guitar, and those are my least favourite noises in the world so my view was tainted from the 0:00 mark. What follows is dreary, dreamy, pretentious indie bullshit, so in hindsight the 0:01 mark was the high point.

Its not 1 star bad, but it's like 1.5 stars....

Sweet sweet Bossa Nova, no idea what its saying, but its so nice... Some soft drift away music.

Finally, a Roxy Music album without Eno, and it's pretty rocking. "The Thrill Of It All" is a blistering opening that really sets up everything else that follows. Also an S-tier album cover....

Copy/paste of my previous SFA album on this list... "I didn't like Super Furry Animals back in 1996 and I don't like them in 2025..."

I'll be honest, my knowledge of The Specials was pretty much limited to "Too Much Too Young" and "Ghost Town" and none of this matches up to those songs, so pretty disappointing, really.

The title track is a jaunty number, but overall I didn't like this as much as previous albums. My one abiding memory of this at the time was Rosie O'Donnell freaking out that it won the Grammy for Album of the Year because she had never heard of it...

Not much of a legacy I suppose.

A punk band who could actually play their instruments.... in fact the bass in this album is S-Tier, just a ridiculous groove going on. I had heard "Peaches" before and this is far above that level. Just a tight punk album.

Alright thrash metal, good way to pass the time, but also nothing really stood out as a "must relisten to".

While Elephant remains the pinnacle of The White Stripes' discography, Get Behind Me Satan marks the onset of a gradual decline. The production, though polished, feels slightly overdone compared to their earlier, raw recordings. There's an obvious ambition to replicate the success of "Seven Nation Army" with "Blue Orchid", but it falls somewhat short. The album is well-crafted and consistent, but it ultimately feels like a rehash of previous ideas, lacking the same spark as their earlier work. However, "My Doorbell" and "The Denial Twist" have stood the test of time and remain staples in my playlist.

Can one hot song make an album something you need to listen to before you die? What if that song is the unbelievably catchy "Groove Is In The Heart"?

Welcome to my TedTalk... "Can a Single Spark Ignite a Whole Album's Immortality?"

The question posed, whether one hot song can elevate an album to the status of an essential, "must-hear-before-you-die" masterpiece, is a beautiful, vexing puzzle that strikes at the heart of how we consume, value, and remember music. Highlighting Deee-Lite's World Clique and the magnetic pull of "Groove Is In The Heart", provides a perfect flashpoint for this very debate.

In an age of streaming and hyper-curated playlists, the single's dominance has never been clearer. A single track, like the undeniable funk and sheer joy of "Groove Is In The Heart", can be a cultural monolith, instantly recognizable, endlessly sampled, and a guaranteed dance floor filler decades after its release. For millions, the song is de facto Deee-Lite. So, when an album houses such a momentous piece of music, does it inherit that songs "essential" status?

The affirmative argument is compelling in that the historical context is essential. That one song, in its brilliance and popularity, acts as a cultural key to a specific time, sound, and mood. The surrounding album, even if wildly inconsistent, becomes an artifact, a complete document of the moment that birthed the hit. Listening to the full album can allow for a deeper appreciation of the creative ecosystem. Perhaps the other tracks offer the necessary shadows to highlight the bright peak of the hit, or they showcase the artistic breadth, or even the limitations, of the artist that led to that single stroke of genius. The hit is the doorway, and the whole album is the room one must enter to understand the architecture of the era.

However, the counter-argument elevates the album form itself. A truly "essential" album is often defined by its cohesion, its narrative arc, or its sustained excellence. It’s the entire statement, the fully realised artistic vision, where every track is deliberately placed to build a greater whole. Can an album riddled with filler, B-sides that barely made the cut, or clumsy experiments truly deserve a spot among the pantheon just because of one incandescent star?

This perspective argues that such an album is merely a vessel for the hit. It forces the listener to sift through middling mediocrity for a fleeting moment of ecstacy, a task better suited to a playlist or a greatest hits compilation. If the remaining tracks are forgettable, do we truly need to hear them? Is the experience of being underwhelmed by eleven tracks for the sake of one glorious song a prerequisite for musical enlightenment? While an album like World Clique, for example, may be an undeniable landmark of the early 90s house and rave scene, is it a masterpiece of album construction, or simply a collection of tracks anchored by one perfect, gravity-defying moment?

The discussion leads us to the classic "one-album wonder" or "one-hit wonder" conundrum. In many cases, artists whose careers were defined by a single smash often released albums that, upon closer inspection, reveal untapped potential or a fully-formed artistic vision that was simply ahead of its time or overshadowed by their own initial success. Making Mirrors by Gotye (with "Somebody That I Used To Know") or even The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (though a more complex case of a single studio album) are often cited as examples of albums that offer more than the massive single suggests, suggesting the public's focus was too narrow, not the album's quality.  

Ultimately, the judgement rests on the definition of "essential." Is it essential to hear the full story of the artist, even if that story is flawed? Or is "essential" reserved only for the uninterrupted, sustained brilliance of albums that change the course of music with every track? The former suggests a historical and contextual imperative; the latter, a pure artistic standard. And perhaps, the truth is a spectrum, where some albums are essential for their sheer cultural weight, regardless of their track-by-track consistency.

TL;DR Nope, but Lady Miss Kier is dope...

Lennon spreads his wings by taking the bones of his best work from The White Album, Abbey Road, and Let It Be, and turning it up to 11. He goes for that raw bluesy garage band style sound he started in songs like "Come Together", "I Want You (She's So Heavy)", and "Yer Blues" in songs like "Hold On" and "Well Well Well", while some of the slower acoustic song sound like interpolations of the "Sun King" riff...

Derivative? Maybe, but it sounds really good.

Literal elevator muzak, nothing grand, nothing flashy, nothing remotely memorable at all...