Reviews by littlestlassloves

Right, so prog rock is definitely not my thing, but this was less awful than I feared. I mean I still wouldn't chose to listen to it on a regular basis, but it wasn't as annoying as I thought it might me.

Much as I'm sure it's considered heresy by Genesis fans, I actually really like their pop years (the song Jesus He Knows Me is my favourite song about TV evangelists, though it's weird there's more than one). Hopefully we'll get some of that later in this project.

2/5

Absolutely loved side one, other than Papa Was a Rolling Stone being far far too long at 11 minutes 44 seconds - no vocals kick in until nearly 4 minutes have passed, during which time very little had happened. The single version, at 6 minutes 54 seconds is already long enough. It is one of my favourite songs with handclaps though, and the strings are perfection.

A Side - beautiful voices all round, funky, made me want to dance (which given I listened to this the evening after I'd been awake most of the previous night, is high praise indeed).

Side B was too slow and ballady for me to enjoy it anywhere as much as the upbeat funk of the previous tracks. Mind you, I think I might be a bit in love with Melvin Franklin's bass vocals.

If I was just marking the A side it'd be a 5, but overall it's going to be a 3

3/5

I really expected to like this more than I ended up liking it. But I'm not entirely sure why it didn't click with me.

Everybody Wants To Rule The World is obviously great, as is Shout, though suffers from being too long.

I think I will probably revisit this at some point, but for now it's a

3/5

I really like hiphop beats - the music has a great groove and the skill of putting samples together in a way that creates a whole new sound but simultaneously sounds like it never could have been anything different, is so impressive to me - but I find it so hard to connect with the lyrics, especially in this era.

For me, Ol' Dirty Bastard and Method Man are just miles ahead of the rest in terms of being fun to listen to, even it they aren't technically the best rappers.

I can't be arsed with skits. It's like every rapper in the late 80s/early 90s was a frustrated action movie actor and this was their only outlet.

This would be a 3.5 if I had half marks, but as it is, it's getting a 3.

3/5

I seem to be building up quite the list of albums I'd love if you replaced the lead singer whilst also recognising the lead singer is kinda the point of the album. And the vocals really aren't *too* far away from artists I do like, like the B52s, but there's just something about the rhythm of the delivery that I find irritating over a full album.

The music, however, I really enjoyed (especially all the tom tom percussion) so that leaves marking this quite tricky. I'm going for a 3 because the music is probably a 4 and the vocals a 2.

3/5

Elliott Smith is a name I recognised but, to the best of my knowledge, I had not listened to before today.

I really, really enjoyed a big chunk of this album. I particularly loved Son of Sam for multiple reasons but the ooh ooh backing vocals just really spoke to me.

The vocals really reminded me of Badly Drawn Boy, who I love, so as the singer's voice is normally the first hurdle for me when listening to a new artist, we started off on a good foot. And then there way a ton of piano too.

This nearly scraped the top mark, I liked it so much, but I'm going to settle for a still great:

4/5

EDIT: after a couple of months where I have regularly relistened to this album, I'm accepting that this always should have got a 5. So it's my first ever remark...

5/5

Some absolute classics on this album. And I appreciate that some of the most famous and respected songs in history are barely 2 minutes long - no pointless filler to stretch out a song for Lennon and McCartney in the mid-60s, just perfect pop. I have always loved Tell Me Why and Can't Buy Me Love, and this era of the Beatles in general, so while I have very little to say about the record, it's clearly worth a:

5/5

I had a brief period of my late teens/early 20s when I listened to a lot of Wilco, but only specific albums, and mostly the first two Billy Bragg/Woodie Guthrie Mermaid Avenue records. This was not one of the albums (it's weird to remember a time where, if you discovered an artist you really liked, checking out their back catalogue generally meant spending a whole lot of money on something you might hate or infecting your computer with multiple viruses).

I loved Monday - the brass, the vocals, the upbeatness (I don't care that's not a word), the handclaps, the fact it all sort of falls apart at the end. It's my type of song. Red-eyed and Blue is another high point for me (whistle solo!) and I Got You (At The End of The Century).

I'll basically always prefer a tight 40-50 minute album rather than this 1 hour 15 minutes, but reading that the band recorded too many tracks and, knowing it would mean an expensive double album, negotiated it being priced as a single record with their label, losing their share of the album royalties in the deal, makes me love it a little bit. Still, I think this would be much better at 50 minutes as it's a little uneven.

This would be a 3.5, but I like it too much to be a 3, so

4/5

Only 11 albums ago I was listening to Get Behind Me Satan saying I never got into the White Stripes when they first came out, and now they're back. It honestly surprised me there was another White Stripes album on the list (and then I checked and discovered I have another one to go). Once again, not one They Might Be Giants album made the list - harrumph!

I like Hotel Yorba despite a massive list of things that mean I should hate it - the shrillness of the vocals, the Megness of the drumming, the fact there's basically nothing to it - but nope, the catchiness is undeniable. Same with Fell In Love With A Girl.

"Jack asked recording engineer Stuart Sikes more than once "not to make it sound too good."."

...and then the album went platinum in the UK and USA. The music industry is a bafflingly entity.

I liked this album a better than Get Behind Me Satan but I can't really put my finger on why.

3/5

Another album that doesn't appear on Amazon Music so I ended up listening to it via YouTube. The extra ad breaks are really not the best way to listen to an album (I do not want Hello Fresh YouTube, please stop).

I love the track Beyond Belief already but based entirely on former Reel Big Fish trumpeter and backing vocalist Scott Klopfenstein's regular Twitch streams - it's on his list of covers people can request (along with 9/10 by Jeff Rosenstock that I also fell in love with because of that stream).

Of the songs I didn't know, I loved Man Out Of Time, ... And In Every Home, Little Savage and Town Cryer. The weird out of tune guitar solo in Pidgin English was not for me though, and really took away from a track I was otherwise enjoying. It was like those old comedy routines where songs were purposely played wrong for laughs.

In general though, the 1001 Album Generator has really driven it home that I like Elvis Costello.

4/5

135 albums generated so far, this is the fifth Bob Dylan. That's a Dylan album every 27 days. For someone who has so far given every Dylan album a 2/5, that's too much Dylan.

The first song sounds like Nick Cave so that was slightly confusing. His voice sounds pretty different on this (much later) album and I'm not sure how I feel about it. I think I like his voice more (I couldn't really like it less), but I like his songwriting less throughout most of this record. It's frequently just very plodding.

By the time Cold Irons Bound hit, I realised that the parts of this album I was enjoying the most, were the bits that reminded me of Nick Cave. And them he butchered his own song (I don't even particularly like Adele, but her cover of Make You Feel My Love is so much better).

This possible scrapes a 2.5 but it's not enjoyable enough for a 3/5 so it's another

2/5

This was another album that just sort of passed me by. I listened to it (twice in fact!) but remember virtually nothing about it the next day, although I will say he has a nice voice. On one song, he sounded so much like Damon Albarn, I had to google and check there wasn't a guest appearance.

Another for the "wouldn't choose to listen to it, wouldn't skip if it came on shuffle" pile.

3/5

If "too much of a good thing" was an LP. Or more accurately, 5 LPs.

Her voice is amazing, the musicians are wonderful, the songwriting is great. Even admiring the ballsiness to release this, it's too long to be a fully enjoyable listening experience (ironically, her previous Gershwin album is too short at only 25 minutes). The Wikipedia page also defeated me, as I normally like reading the background to the album, but this had a page for basically every song and frankly, I ran out of enthusiasm half way through.

All of which makes this hard to mark. A nice trim 50 minutes likely would have got a minimum 4 from me, but an album shouldn't be a test of endurance.

3/5

P.S. Even as a Brit, the phrase "Carry on, old fluff" in Stiff Upper Lip made me giggle.

6 songs, 43 minutes? I can't lie, that's not a good sign in my book. And then 5 out of 6 being instrumentals was another nail in the coffin. And finally, the one song with vocals being sung by Captain Beefheart? It's like a recipe for disaster (or a 1 star rating at least) in my head.

However... I actually quite enjoyed this. Zappa I knew by name but would have struggled to name any of his songs, and therefore simultaneously had no idea what he'd sound like but also never would have expected it to sound like this. It's very funky.

It's getting an automatic 1 star deduction for including a nearly 13 minute track where it sounded like someone was trying to murder a saxophone though.

3/5

I only knew Paper Planes before this listen.

I really loved Boyz, which musically just feels full of joy (though is lyrically sparse to say the least). Jimmy, despite being Bollywood inspired felt all ABBAy and 20 Dollar samples Blue Monday (and obviously interpolates The Pixies) which surprised me, but the obvious constant in the album are the drum beats which reflect her heritage.

I think I wanted to like this more than I ended up doing (I really didn't like XR2, which I found really grating) but I end up thinking its fine, no better no worse

3/5

Starting with the Unplugged album feels an odd first Nirvana album for the generator to throw out, no matter how famous it is.

I was pretty much the perfect age to be obsessed with Nirvana in their heyday, but I was fairly unbothered by them, Come As You Are and Heart Shaped Box being the two tracks I actively liked. Of the songs I'd never heard before on this apbum, I liked Plateau a lot.

Overall, I liked this, but didn't love it. It's a decent listen, but I don't think it's the album to win over new fans, more an album to give people who are already fans a different experience of the songs they love.

3/5

I started off enjoying this quite a bit - loved the beats and the flow of Raekwon - but over the course of a full album I started to lose interest. My mind started to wander, and by the 4th or 5th song about standard hiphop things (crime, women trying to take your money, how bloody fantastic the rapper thinks he is at rapping) I was wondering how to google hip-hop artist that talk about more interesting things over the same types of beats.

As a result it's a bit hard to rate this, but I think, disappointingly, it's:

2/5

Firstly a small rant about deluxe editions: if your record label wants to make a deluxe edition to generously give the fans more music/fleece the fans for more money (delete based on your level of cynicism) that's great. But do not delete the original from streaming services and force me to have to check where I'm supposed to stop listening to properly assess an album for this project. It keeps on happening! Tut!

For an album that spawned six singles, I genuinely would have only been able to name All I Wanna Do, such was its ubiquity in the early 90s charts. But listening to this, I remember a lot of it. I remember Run Baby Run which would probably make the record company happy as they released it 3 times in the UK in the hope of making it work - genuinely a bonkers choice for first single given some of the other songs on this record. For example, Leaving Las Vegas which is a much better option for first single.

Reading about Leaving Las Vegas made me nostalgic for the era when singles a) got physical releases and b) got multiple versions in multiple formats, each of which would have different b-sides so you ended up collecting the lot. LLV had a 7", cassette and two different CDs in the UK! See people complain about record companies now but you only get 15 different vinyl colours for an album because they can no longer flog you four versions of the same single.

This feels like damning with faint praise, but this was mostly a very pleasant album to listen to. I'm not sure how I feel about Solidify which is extremely early 90s (the instrumentation could easily have had Micheal Jackson singing over the top), and the second half generally doesn't feel as strong as the first half but I did enjoy it. All I Wanna Do remains the absolute stand out track though.

3/5

It may be a bad sign that the thing that's stayed with me most from this album, is that I liked the female backing vocals a lot. I did not appreciate the children's choir in Dress Rehearsal Rag (gently but insistently I tap the "A children's choir never improved any song" sign) although I did enjoy finding out that the choir came from a school with such alumni as Dean Gaffney.

I quite liked when he decided to get a bit more upbeat (if you can consider a song including the lyric "And there are no letters in the mailbox, and there are no grapes upon the vine" as upbeat). But my word, Leonard drones on a lot of the time and everything is too long.

Maybe, one day, I'll "get" Leonard Cohen. But that day is not today.

2/5

I never got into The White Stripes when they first came out (I generally liked my dose of Jack White in the form of The Raconteurs instead) so had only heard the singles from this.

Songs like The Nurse are a weird experience wearing earphones - Meg frequently sounds like she's in a different room off to the left, playing a completely different song. I don't like the production on a lot of this album - it sounds quite empty and the tone on the drums is very thin.

Highlight for me is My Doorbell, mostly due to the piano. I can't say I really love anything else on this album. And much has been said of Meg's drumming, but it pales in comparison to her singing (I hope she's happy somewhere well away from the spotlight living her best life).

Should be 2.5 but...

2/5