Reviews by mitch058

I'm not a big REM fan, and there are far too many of their albums in this collection (although weirdly they didn't include "Out of Time"), but this is definitely the best REM album I've listened to, by a long shot. I'm not sure exactly why or how the band tamed Michael Stipes' often nasal/whiny style, but aside from the fluffy "The sidewinder sleeps tonite", and to some degree "Man on the moon", the tracks are much more somber and weighty, and they sound so much better for it. My favorites of the lot are the opening "Drive", crowd favorite "Everybody hurts" (with an interesting video too), and the curious "Sweetness follows". Also interesting to read that they got Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones to do the string arrangements on several tracks. It's a shame that this collection doesn't pick from any of their albums after "Automatic for the People", as it would be (mildly) interesting to see where they headed after this, but I'll admit not interesting enough to pursue that on my own.

I remember when this album came out wanting to fully embrace the inspired funk/metal/rock band, yet while I enjoyed many of their songs, the album always seemed to lack a certain something. Listening to the album nearly 40 years later, I still have that same feeling, and I'm still not sure what it is exactly that prevents me from enjoying this album more than I did/do. I think part of my hesitation is that, even when they broke on the scene and certainly even more today, their social commentary seems far less profound than it could have been with better lyrics and ideas. "Cult of personality" is the worse victim/culprit of this--I can remember singing along as a teenager and feeling like tying together Mussolini and JFK, or Stalin and Gandhi, didn't feel all that accurate or particularly insightful. Other songs do a better job with the commentary aspect, especially "Desperate people", "Open letter to a landlord" and "Which way to America", but I remember feeling like Fishbone did a better job with almost every aspect of their music and lyrics with "Truth and Soul", and was disappointed at the lost potential. But it's still fun to revisit this album and enjoy their distinct sound and style, especially on tracks like "Funny vibe", and lots of credit to them for carving out a interesting niche in the music world, even if no one really followed. (This is one of those albums that needs half-stars, but I'll give them the boost to four stars.)

Although I suppose I should be more supportive of a 60s Pacific Northwest band that definitely seems to have put the "garage" in "garage band", this album didn't really do much for me. I guess I can see how this has become characterized as a sort of proto-punk band and album, but poor production quality, poor musicianship and fairly unimaginative covers make for a tedious listen, although I can imagine they put on a good live show. I *was* thankful, though, it clocks in under 30 minutes.

An odd selection, and hard to imagine what their seven/eight previous albums must have sounded like, given the demo-tape-style sampler of this album seems much more of a debut offering than a fairly long-lived band. I'm not sure I'd go as far as Christgau's Dud rating, but I have to agree that this album doesn't do much for me. A few songs seemed kind of interesting--the opener "A salty salute", the Beatles-inspired "As we go up, we go down", "Closer you are", and a few others amongst the 28 tracks--but all ended long before they really ever got anywhere (yet somehow this album felt like it was *so* much longer than 41 minutes). And while some people apparently liked the extremely low-quality basement 4-track production, it just makes the whole thing feel that much more...disappointing, I guess. Impressive that they got their label Matador to front them $100K for this, although it probably wasn't exactly what they expected.

I'm really glad to have heard TV on the Radio's debut album in the collection before this one, as the contrast between the two albums is both striking and elevates "Dear Science" even more than it would have otherwise. (Although since I own this album, it was already elevated in my mind.) It's always nice to get a thoroughly solid album from start to finish, and while some of the tracks are a bit forgettable, I particularly enjoyed "Crying", "Dancing choose", "Golden hour" (mainly for the quirky video), "Family tree", "Shout me out" and "DLZ". And I loved finding out that the album title was drawn from a note in the recording studio, "Dear Science, please start solving problems and curing diseases or shut the fuck up." Admittedly, that reads a little less humorous in 2025 than in 2008 (thanks, anti-vaxxers, climate deniers, and Xian nationalists), but still a pretty funny inspiration for a title.

Much like with her brother, I was never really much of a Janet Jackson fan, although I'm nonetheless impressed at how much success she had with this album. In many ways, I think this would have been a stronger album if it could have been made without the painfully hollow late 80s production sound, and even better if she'd managed to spend more than three tracks on the social-consciousness songs, as the rest of the album is far less distinctive musically (and lyrically); even if there's nothing necessarily profound in "Rhythm nation" or "The knowledge", they feel like a welcome excursion into the real world from one of the Jackson Five. The only other track that really stood out for me was the more rock-oriented "Black cat". But full credit to Janet Jackson for crafting a solid pop album that appealed to an amazingly wide audience.

What a strange and scatterbrained album. It sounds like the lack of any continuity between the songs was largely the result of the band members' dysfunction, lack of communication and (unsurprisingly) clash of egos, manifesting in part by how the tracks were largely recorded with only the primary singer/songwriter and sometimes a few of the non-Young/Stills/
Furay musicians (although Neil Young apparently went completely off the reservation in that regard, at least with "Expecting to fly"). It starts off so promisingly with "Mr. Soul", but then wanders off into other (and largely sappier) realms and never really returns, although "Good time boy" and fragments of "Broken arrow" come closer than most. (Pretty interesting to read that Young wrote "Mr. Soul" in about five minutes as he waited in a UCLA hospital room to find out why he'd had an epilectic event on stage, only to be eventually told that he should "never take LSD or any other hallucinogenic drugs" ever again. I doubt he was able to heed that advice.)

I was kind of hoping that maybe the sum of the disparate parts might make for an engaging album as a whole, but it mainly just feels like a musical version of the bizarre game in "It's Always Sunny", "Chardee MacDennis: The Game of Games." Sadly, though, the album never puts Stephen Stills in a dog kennel, forced to eat the pieces of a broken guitar.

I always lumped Tears for Fears in with the likes of Duran Duran, Pet Shop Boys, Human League, etc., and never really paid much attention to them, although it was impossible to ignore their massive pair of hits from this album ("Shout" and "Everybody wants to rule the world"), both of which seemed to play constantly on the radio for years. I was a bit disappointed that the rest of the album didn't really live up to the legacy of those singles, but I'm glad to have gotten a chance to hear something else by them (and to revisit "Head over heels"), and I thought it was more interesting than I expected, albeit marred by a very 80s production quality and style.

I was surprised to read that one the tracks was included in the "Donnie Darko" soundtrack ("Head over heels"), as I thought the only Tears for Fears song in that movie was the amazing cover of "Mad world" by Gary Jules (in contention for the best cover song ever, I'd say). And I'm sorry for them that they chose a very Hall & Oates-style album cover; I'm guessing they've regretted that cover for many decades now.

It's nice to get a stop in the Congo along this project's musical tourism itinerary (apparently the only Congolese artist and album in the "1001 Albums" collection), but I always feel at a disadvantage with the Asian- or African-based albums in this collection, and this is no exception. At times he sounds an awful lot like the Barry White of the DRC, and the unfortunate choice of a 90s album lends a karoake style to the backing music. Interesting to read, though, that "'Papa Bonheur' was listed among the '100 Greatest African Songs of All Time' by the Kenyan weekly magazine 'Daily Nation'" (from the Wikpedia entry for Koffi Alomide). I suspect my surprise at this factoid reveals much more of my ignorance about what goes into a great African song than anything else.

This is definitely the most interesting and intriguing of the five Brian Eno albums in this collection. A large part of its intrigue, though, at least for me, is whether it's really even a music album, or for that matter an album that's even meant to be listened to intentionally at all. Despite its intended airport venue, this album feels more like something that would do best in a museum-like setting, especially where the listener is able to commit a fair amount of time sitting and watching/contemplating something other than the music. At the North Carolina Museum of Art, there's an outdoor camera obscura in a wooden hut that would be perfect for this, as well as an indoor silent, ultra-slow-motion video (Bill Viola's "Quintent of Remembrance") that lasts almost as long as "1/1" but could easily be played with any of the tracks. The only track that didn't do much for me was "2/2", as it reminded me more of Vangelis' "Blade Runner" soundtrack than mechanical ambient music.

I have no idea how to rate this album that Eno described as "music to resign you to the possibility of death", but even if it didn't really prompt *those* kind of feelings, it got me thinking more than many albums in this collection. And I'm certainly glad to have heard it before I die.

I'm glad this Kings of Leon album was added at some point to the "1001 Albums" series, as it's likely the best of the three that exist in the cumulative collection (I've only listened to their debut album prior to this one). Like a few other bands and albums, it's also an utter mystery exactly why the 2005 edition included their first two albums, then dropped those soon after, and at some brief point included this one, only to drop it later (or so it seems). Also curious to read (in Wikipedia) that Kings of Leon, and this album in particular, were indeed kings in Australia and the UK and elsewhere, far more successful outside their home country than within. I particularly enjoyed the opening three tracks "Closer", "Crawl" and "Sex on fire", and also the pair "I want you" and "Be somebody", but really there aren't too many weak points on the album, and they seem so much more interesting (and clearly older and wiser) than their debut album, although I suspect their early fans might not have enjoyed their more mainstream sound on this album.

I always get unreasonably excited when we get an album that's from fewer than 15 years ago, so getting this 5-year-old album definitely qualifies for irrational exuberance. And I feel like Sault succeeded in not completely disappointing, although I do wish it could have had a little/a lot more musicality to it. It's interesting to place this and their subsequent album "Untitled (Rise)" in the midst of the Black Lives Matter upwelling after George Floyd's murder in the US in 2020, and this album definitely speaks to this experience (despite the largely British composition of the band). The highlights for me were the combo "Hard life" and "Don't shoot guns down", plus the Afrobeat-inspired "Bow" (especially since it features Michael Kiwanuka) and "Monsters". Not as great as I'd hoped for, and pretty light on musical variety, but still nice to see an album from 2020 represented here.

Although I like it that Jonathan Richman is at least represented in this collection, this also seems like an odd selection from his discography, given its weird life as a cobbled-together album from old recordings and three different demo sessions with two different labels by a band that no longer existed in the album's configuration (or style) by the time it was released. But it's also hard to fault any album that has the magnificent track "Pablo Picasso", a song that is indelibly fused in my brain with the equally magnificent movie "Repo Man" (despite that Burning Sensations actually performed the song in the movie's soundtrack, in a fairly faithful rendition). I also particularly enjoyed "She cracked", "Girlfriend" and "Modern world", the antidote to "Old World", and I'm impressed how consistent the album sounds given its patchwork genesis ("Hospital" is the only one that sounds a bit out of place, likely because it was recorded even earlier than the demo sessions). And bonus points for keeping things short and sweet overall (at least in the original album version), especially because Richman's voice and style can wear out its welcome relatively quickly.

Nice to know this is the last of the four Joni Mitchell albums in the collection. I've never been much of a fan of her style, and although I appreciate being exposed to her music through this project I haven't really warmed up to her any more as a result. I found myself constantly wondering as I listened if this is one of her best albums or one of her more forgettable ones; I also thought the album cover was a little too pretentious, although the inadvertent effect of her left wrist looking for all the world like a dildo emerging from the airbrushed highway is pretty entertaining, especially given how dramatic she's trying to look.

In some ways the highlight of this album is the variety of luminary musicians playing as her backing band, especially Jaco Pastorius on bass and Larry Carlton on lead guitar on several tracks, although it feels like they weren't really challenged *or* unleashed the way they could have been. Songwise, "Amelia" and the title track were the better of the lot, largely because they better captured the road-weary theme of the album and because they didn't sound quite as cookie-cutter Joni Mitchell as most others on the album (e.g. "Coyote", "Furry sings the blues", etc.).

I really like Nick Cave, so it pains me to downgrade anything with him it, but this album really doesn't belong here, especially given how many solo Nick Cave albums *are* in the collection. It's tough to find much that's redeeming or even all that listenable, which may be the point, but it's not particularly fun to listen to, and marred by really poor-quality production (which again may be the point?). "Dead Joe", "Several sins" and the title track are probably the best of the lot, largely because they seem to foreshadow his later solo work and don't just seem like punk-esque thrashing.

Given that they seemed to be hell-bent on just being anarchic and destructive (self- and others), even in their performances, there's so little going for this band or album. I can understand why Cave later said that The Birthday Party era was foundational to his experience and career, but that doesn't really justify having it in this collection, I'm afraid. I've given very few one-star reviews so far, but it feels like there are many *many* other Australian bands that should have gotten The Birthday Party's lone slot.

I'm sure this is a well-loved classic among the punk cognoscenti, but I'll admit to the untrained ear this sounds a lot like the other half-dozen British early-punk-era albums in this collection. Fine, but not all that musically or lyrically interesting (to me at least), although Pete Shelley's weirdly distinctive voice and surprisingly romantic perspective (for a punk) gives it a bit of an unusual edge. "Sixteen" was a highlight, and funny to get a 7-minute-plus track ("Moving away from the pulsebeat") on a punk album.

I'm totally baffled that this album only made it into one (maybe two) editions of the "1001 Albums" book before the band and album was unceremoniously yanked. It may not be a perfect album, but I can think of *many* albums that remained over the years that didn't seem nearly as worthy. I can definitely see why some compared Klaxons to Franz Ferdinand, especially on tracks like the catchy "Atlantis to interzone" (and on the less catchy "Magick", with a bizarre video), but it does feel like they carved their own eclectic, often odd sound that kind of morphed across the (pleasantly succinct) length of the album; my other favorites were "As above so below", "Isle of her" and "Forgotten works", and I applaud their effort to do a cover of Grace's 1993 "Not over yet", although it feels like they could have done a much more interesting and distinctive job. The whole sort of homage to J.G. Ballard/Thomas Pynchon/Willam S. Burroughs gets a little long in the tooth at times, but it's also a bit interesting. A fun album overall, and an utter mystery why it got dropped.

The last of the slightly-too-many Talking Heads albums in this collection. It's nice to get their debut album last, mainly to hear how much they stuck to their roots in later albums (although the collection unfortunately stuck with only early albums). I was surprised how...mellow...so many of the tracks were on this album, especially given how renowned they apparently were for their live CGBG performances, but the songs are still very identifiable as the product of the Talking Heads, and of course their long-time classic "Psycho Killer" definitely steals the show. (I can't really imagine what that song would have sounded like if the producer (Jon Bon Jovi's cousin) had successfully inserted "psychedelic strings" into the mix.) I also enjoyed "Who is it?" and "The book I read", although overall this is not their strongest album.

It's nice to get something from the 2010s decade, and nice to get an unknown (to me) and largely interesting artist and album too. I'll admit that she would have gotten a 4- or 5-star rating from me if the whole album was as strong as it started; well, kind of started--for some reason the YouTube Music playlist combined "Preface" and "Video girl" into a single song and video. Her music and vocals are distinctive and an interesting blend of genres (kind of reminded me of Tricky's "Maxinquaye", but for the 21st century), but it seems like she really shines with the videos to her singles. "Video girl" is by far the most riveting, and disturbing, with an unsettling storyline of her as a ghost visiting a death row convict as he's getting a lethal injection, but the videos for "Two weeks" and "Pendulum" are also impressive productions with strong performance art aspects. It makes me wish she'd been able to make videos for every track (a la The The's "Infected"), although I'm not sure that the lyrics to any of the songs would quite live up to the visuals. An interesting album in some ways, but I must admit that I'm unlikely to revisit it.

I always appreciate it when this collection serves up semi-decent albums from outside the somewhat narrow rock (music) tunnel it seems to cleave to, and this seems like an OK country-esque entry in that vein. And it's also good to get a female singer-songwriter to help balance the largely male-dominated music in this project, even if she seems to be channeling Dolly Parton pretty strongly rather than a more distinctive voice. The highlights for me were probably "Love at the five and dime" (apparently covered and popularized by Kathy Mattea slightly later), "Banks of the Pontchartrain" and "Fly by night". (I would have been incredibly impressed if "One of these days" and "Fly by night" turned out to be covers of Pink Floyd's or Rush's songs (respectively), but alas, and not at all surprisingly, it's not meant to be.)

I was also happy to read and see that she enlisted Lyle Lovett a bit for this album (he's on the album cover and provided harmonies on many tracks), but also more than a bit disappointed to be reminded that Lyle Lovett is one of many very worthy artists who aren't represented in this collection. I don't want to disparage Nanci Griffith in any way, but it's a shame that Lyle Lovett (with or without his Large Band) was excluded.