Reviews by littlestlassloves

Another album not on Amazon to stream so I got to experience this through YouTube. The playlist I listened to had an unfortunate hour long crypto ad after the first two songs (boo, hiss, down with that type of thing etc, etc).

I should have known from the name there would be a bit of talk-singing on a par with Shatner (which is not a compliment), but I liked San Francisco Baby Blues once he started singing. And track 2, Ol' Riley. It did make me giggle that he was slightly obsessed with insects (The Boll Weevil being immediately followed by Bed Bug Blues). Woody Guthrie turning up was a surprise for me as I had no idea of their history together.

This made me think of the soundtrack to O' Brother Where Art Thou (which remains the only time I've walked out of a cinema at the end and gone straight to HMV to immediately purchase the soundtrack). I can't see me regularly listening to this in the same way, but I did enjoy some of the non talk-singing bits.

It loses a least 1 star for the ramblin' though.

2/5

I love Human Behaviour, always have from the moment I first heard it on MTV in the 90s. I also absolutely adored the music video. That was, I think, the first Björk song I ever heard, but I think I've liked ever single she's ever released. But never listened to a full album.

By all rights, based on how I feel about singers with similar vocal styles, I should hate Björk's voice, but I love it. I mean, her pronunciation of ghetto blaster alone is enough to make me love her.

I loved this album. Easy 5 stars to me, though I suspect it's enormously polarising.

5/5

Track 1 I know best through Reel Big Fish's ska version so this was a very different experience, although I have always loved the "run, run, runs". Away from Talkin' 'Bout A Revolution I knew Fast Car and Baby Can I Hold You, the latter also mostly via a (terrible)cover version. The former has great lyrics that I honestly never really paid much attention to before.

I actually enjoyed this quite a lot, which I think might have a been helped by listening to this in an airport (AKA a place I find extremely stressful) because she has an extremely relaxing voice. It might not be the most exciting album in the world but it was extremely lovely.

More a 3.5 for me, but I'm plumping for:

4/5

I have a lot of goodwill towards The Flaming Lips, due to a combination of Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots and them once releasing a record on vinyl that had four records that had to be played simultaneously for the record to sound right - essentially I have a certain level of tolerance for odd bods (though not Captain Beefheart levels obviously).

Race For The Prize is a great song that sets the tone for a record. I like A Spoonful Weighs A Ton, The Spiderbite Song (with the weirdly Phil Collinsesque drum fills), and The Gash.

I think this is another 3.5, but good enough to get me to round up, not down.

4/5

Baba O'Riley is a great start to an album, which is both promising and worrying (a disturbing number of albums seem to start with the most well-known - and best - song). But this seems to keep up a good standard throughout.

I like Tommy a lot, which was the same era, so the fact I like this album so much more than I liked My Generation makes a lot of sense.

This should be a 3.5, but as no half stars, it's going to still get a 3 (given it's not quite 4 star worthy for me).

I like Blowin' In The Wind. Happy now, 1001 Album Generator?! Can you give me a break from the bloody Bob Dylan albums now, please!? Seriously, I've had 120 albums generated so far and four have been sodding Bob sodding Dylan! That's too much Bob in too little time!

Each new Bob Dylan album gets me more and more annoyed at the lack of They Might Be Giants albums making the cut, and I'm trying to not let it influence the rankings, but my goodness it's tricky.

I found his voice marginally less annoying on this one than the last three, but not enough to make me actively want to listen to it again.

2/5

The whole 'being a teenager in the UK in the 90s' thing means Oasis were inescapable, and I liked them but I was never their biggest fan (Blur over Oasis, and Pulp over both). However I would have said Definitely Maybe would have been my favourite Oasis album, and I gave it a 4 when it popped up on the Album Generator. I think I need to reevaluate my Oasis rankings.

(WTS)MG? still suffers from the same issue (for me) that all Oasis does, namely that I like Noel's voice so much better than Liam's, but this is objectively a great album.

I get that Wonderwall is hated by many people due to being played to death, memed to death and generally invading people's dreams while they sleep, but it got to that level of ubiquity because its a good song. Not as good as Don't Look Back In Anger, but a good song nonetheless.

And this album has She's Electric which I always loved too, not least because Noel's backing vocals are genuinely beautiful.

Honestly, if I had half stars this would be a 4.5 (because of nasally Liam), but I don't and I genuinely don't think this deserves to lose a whole star. So....

5/5

Donovan did the sneaky thing of putting the two songs I really like at the beginning of what would be side A and side B of the vinyl. Very cheeky, Donovan! I see your game!

The rest of it was alright but nothing to write home about. And Catch The Wind is by far my favourite Donovan song and it's not on this album, so didn't make it onto the 1001 Album Generator at all, which is a travesty.

Another 3/5

Rating based off the original tracklist, not the Vanishing Point "(Expanded Edition)" Amazon Music gave me. Having never seen the film Vanishing Point, I have no idea whether this works as intended either. So this is purely based on the music.

I appreciate that Primal Scream are not adverse to a bit of brass, but otherwise, I'm not sure this is entirely for me. I will say, you don't often get to hear bass clarinet outside of orchestral music, so that was nice. I also remember, and like, Star from the time of release (I weirdly don't remember Kowalski despite it charting higher in the UK). Trainspotting sounds like it was written by Gorillaz (or rather Gorillaz sounds like it I guess) as it's very Tomorrow Comes Today in places. It's interesting that, for a band I associate so much with Bobby Gillespie's voice, there's far more instrumental than I would have thought.

This feels like another "it's fine" review. But, you know, it's fine, just not anything to get too excited about.

3/5

I only knew (and liked) My Generation before listening to this. In my head, The Who are an early to mid 70s rock band through and through, so hearing them being quite 60s jangly guitars (and in Mono!) was slightly discombobulating. La-La-La-Lies was a bit Beach Boys which somehow made it even more confusing.

They gets bonus points for rattling though 12 songs in 35 minutes, but I'm honestly not sure why people hold this in such high acclaim. It's fine.

3/5

I have probably not heard Can You Forgive Her in 20 years before today, yet I still remembered all the words. Why is valuable space in my rapidly deteriorating middle-aged brain, still being filled with lyrics to a song that came out before I was even a teenager?

Still, I do still love it. And Go West too (I enjoyed the Guardian quote that said it distinguished "itself by making the Village People original seem flagrantly heterosexual").

The Theatre has a synth on it that sounds almost exactly like I'm Going Slightly Mad by Queen, a song I have always loved.

As for the rest, I mostly found it kinda dull, which was disappointing. There's now a few artists I would have said I liked before starting this project, but now I've listened to a full album it turns out I like the big singles and not much else.

This is getting a 2 and that's made me a bit sad.

2/5

This was weird. Good weird, but weird nonetheless.

I only knew She Wants To Move going into this listen - nobody in the history of music has said the word "sexy" with anywhere close to that level of drama - and I genuinely didn't know what to expect. I particularly liked Breakout and Thrasher, but I enjoyed pretty much all of it and would absolutely listen to it again.

I am frustrated that Wikipedia did not explain why two members of Good Charlotte ended up on a track (Jump), but shout out to the Genius contributor who annotated the line "Now I'm in with the - negotiator" from Fly or Die with:

"The negotiator is now helping the teen with his problems, who is now on the verge of ending it all. Let's hope the negotiator is skilled at his job, like Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon 1 (when he saves the guy from killing himself by jumping off a roof)."

I surprised myself with how much I liked this.

4/5

If you played this album for someone with no knowledge of Elastica and asked them the nationality of the artist and era of release, there's not a cat in hell's chance they'd get it wrong. It's extremely of it's place and time... But then so am I.

I surprised myself by knowing more of this than I expected, and weird Kula Shakerish song aside, the tracks I didn't know did not sound particularly different.

I expected to like but not love it, and I like but don't love it. Perfectly pleasant.

3/5

I seem to be on a roll of records I would really appreciate if you replaced the lead singer. Musically: loved it. Vocally: Talking Heads: yeah, not for me. David Byrne sounds like they employed someone to intermittently, and completely randomly, stab him with a needle during the recording process.

I think I said this on the previous Talking Heads album the generator gave me, but I do understand that Talking Heads without those vocals wouldn't be Talking Heads. But it doesn't mean I have to enjoy it.

Instrumentation = 4/5
Vocals = 1.5/5

I'm going to plump for a generous 3/5 because of Psycho Killer.

Bubbling under the surface, there's an album I think I could really love here. But there's some potentially insurmountable obstacles:

- Mark Hollis sounds like he's singing whilst in the grips of a terrible head cold. By the end of the album there were glimmers of hope that he could potentially win me over. But they were teeny tiny glimmers.
- each song feels like it runs out of ideas before the end of it's running time and then rather than accepting that a song could just end at 3 minutes, there's a lot of pointless vamping.
- the fade out to Life's What You Make It might be the longest fade out in history and I didn't see the point.
- I'm not convinced that any song has ever been improved with the addition of a primary school choir.
- there was also absolutely no need for the recorders on the final track.

Recorders aside, the actual instrumentation I really liked for the most part (bonus mention for the discordant piano noise that randomly appears in Living In Another World). To the extent that after listening to this, I listened to a few covers - it's so long since I listened to it, I forgot Weezer covered Life's What You Make It and it was inexplicably sung by drummer Pat Wilson and somehow I liked his vocals more that on the original track. I also liked the Duncan Sheik version.

I would say 3.5, but I'm going to plump for:

3/5

It was fine, just really not my thing. I found myself wishing the one Joy Division song I knew was on this album.

Tempted to give it a bonus star because I ended up with "Let's Dance to Joy Division" by The Wombats stuck in my head for most of the day, but I'm going to stick to the spirit of marking and say:

2/5

First off, and entirely immaterial to the music, I feel like I must point out, Iron Maiden album covers are ridiculous. Just absolute nonsense. And, I would argue, completely misleading as they're a far more melodic band than that cover art suggests.

After listening to this twice, I am now categorising Iron Maiden in the same list as U2: wouldn't turn it off if it came on shuffle, never going to choose to listen to it.

3/5

This was a weird one. I got to the end, decided I had no idea what I thought about it, and listened to it again the next morning.

I enjoyed Animal Zoo although was a bit puzzled by the lyric "Oh no, something went wrong
Well, you’re much too fat and a little too long" so I had a look at Genius to see if anyone had an explanation:

"Expresses Spirit’s belief that humans had become an aberration of nature, and built up civilization to the point where they were out of touch from the natural world."

Yep, I wouldn't have got that in a million years.

I liked Mr Skin too - organ, brass and the funky bass is a combo that I generally find hard to resist.

As a whole, I think I've settled on liking it. I would like a 2.5, but....

3/5

There's four Dylan albums on this playlist, and at around 100 albums in, the generator has now given me three of them. I am cursing it.

Just to prove I'm consistent, I will once again say I do not like his voice. It's like nails down a chalkboard.

Musically, I liked the bluesy rocky bits like Outlaw Blues. I think this maybe the first time I've ever fully paid attention to Mr Tambourine Man and it's way longer than I thought - cutting out the pointless harmonica solo would have made me happier.

I think I could potentially enjoy a Dylan album if you got someone else to sing it, but as it is:

2/5

U2 are the absolute definition of "meh" to me - I'm not going to rush to press skip if the appear on shuffle, but I'm also never going to choose to listen to them. The first play through of this I was really distracted with work, so I had a second go in the evening so it got a fair shot.

Yeah, it's just not really for me. I like Mysterious Ways and One but pretty much everything else passed me by. None of the album tracks seemed any more enjoyable to me than the singles I already knew.

This is really a 2.5 for me, but I'm going to say it scrapes:

3/5