Reviews by jf01

I played this 2-3x/day virtually all of 1L year. Easy 5. Might have to listen 2 or 3 times today, too. Update: 2.5.

I once read a review that panned “seen your video” because the reviewer thought it was a childish, immature swipe at other bands. Dude. The next song is called “Gary’s got a boner.” The childishness is the point. The immaturity exists alongside the more “mature” songs androgynous, unsatisfied, sixteen blue, and answering machine, but the songs here are usually yes-and, not either-or. This album has a song about getting your tonsils removed that’s also a class critique. It has a serious song about 16 being the hardest age. An answering machine is an antagonist … and I totally buy it. That tonsils/class solidarity song is three songs away from one of my favorite love songs of all time (I will dare) and two songs away from a Kiss cover. The album encompasses the whole of the adolescent/coming of age experience, equal parts idiocy and maturity. Everything about this album is perfect, and everything about it is imperfect, at once. An all-time favorite, possibly one of my five favorite albums.

And also, a lot of sellout videos in 1984 sucked.

I don’t think I’ve ever listened to this before, I just know the big songs through cultural osmosis (ABITW, mother, hey you, comfortably numb, run like hell). But, pretty good

My father was born in 1954, so it was mandatory that we own Chronicle in the 1990s. That, along with Fortunate Son’s inclusion on the Forrest Gump soundtrack, was my intro to CCR. I think this is our third CCR album of this project? And this one has eight songs from Chronicle, all of which I love. When eight songs from the same album form the backbone of a beloved greatest hits album, I’m going to award a 5. Ramble Tamble is pretty great, too.

Also, there’s something very endearing about this nonsense of an album cover.

“Get me away from here” has been one of my favorite songs for 20+ years, but I don’t think I’ve ever listened to this album all the way through. Oops.

I’ve never intentionally listened to Def Leppard before today, and yet I “knew” three songs from this (photograph, too late for love, rock of ages). Pretty impressive staying power for DL. And I even liked one song (photograph)!

I know this is going to be a 4 or 5, the issue is I don’t get to disc 3 often enough to remember it with the perfect recall I have of discs 1 and 2.

Disc 1: perfect, no skips, wouldn’t change a thing

Disc 2: slightly more inconsistent but still contains some of my favs (I shatter, papa was a rodeo, you’re my only home, asleep and dreaming, epitaph for my heart), if this were a standalone disc I’d probably still give it a soft 5

Disc 3 would probably be a 3/4 borderline. I like underwear, acoustic guitar, ferdinand, gin, and zebra (“Zelda looks lonely” kills me every time), but I don’t think the rest are memorable.

Still, even a 5 + 5 + 3 is a 4.33 average and I’m comfortable rounding up for how strong the first two discs are. The math doesn’t have to be perfect.

Thirty seconds in, I found myself wondering if an album had ever been bold enough to put its worst song first and then progressively improve until the final track. I couldn’t think of one like that. This one started meh but did vastly improve. I went from 2 to 3 to maybe 4 over the course of the album, and that’s no easy feat after starting with that first song.

Liked the songs I knew (don’t know why, come away with me, shoot the moon), didn’t love anything else. Easy listening.

Really liked the long song, the rest was just okay

A 3.5, rounded down for not being a 4

On first listen gonna give it a 4, and then return to it later

I liked “beautiful day” when this came out and “elevation” is kinda fun, if a little goofy. So I was curious which way this album would go after the first four songs, which I’d heard before. It didn’t go well. We were already comfortably in 2 territory before “Grace, it’s the name for a girl / It’s also a thought that changed the world.” So now I have to consider if 1 is on the table.

I’m very familiar with this but I’ve never thought about what I’d rate it, exactly. I told myself that whatever I thought it was leading into the final three songs, which I know to be some of my favorite songs ever, I’d add one to that score to account for those final three. I thought it was a 4 before those, I’m adding one, 5.

The instrumental medley was the best song. Not great for a singer-songwriter.

Never again

I have no memory of ever listening to this album, so it was a real delight to open the album page and find I’d previously liked five songs. Now I feel like I’m in for the best possible outcome: an album I like and that I get to “discover” all at once.

Two albums I owned as a kid in a row! One a revered classic, and then there’s this pile of shit. In my defense, it was hard to avoid some clunkers as a teenage boy who liked music in the early 00s. I had forgotten about the instrumental track, though, and I think that’s okay.

It’s interesting he calls it a short film because I do think it’s paced like a movie. I like BDKMV and backseat freestyle a lot, but mostly the first half or so is just scene-setting and rising action. But everything from maad city on is a classic, like how a great movie will build to an exciting conclusion.

If there was an award for “greatest 12 seconds of a song,” 5:24-5:35 of maad city would be a strong contender.

Also, mild hot take: the vision of TPAB and Damn might be greater, but this and GNX are more fun. This is the Kendrick album I play the most.

Strange to have this one but not Things Fall Apart on the list.

Expected this to be a 2. After listening it’s a 3. That’s about all I have to say about ZZ Top.

Oh wait. Sometimes you encounter a song where the disparity between the strength of the music and the godawful lyrics is so vast that it feels like the song is begging to be sampled and put to better use by some superior artist. “TV Dinners” is such a song. The website “who sampled” has no records of it being sampled, other than one cover version. A shame.