Reviews by mitch058

So.Many.Mustaches! And why does the drummer look like a bear-cum-caveman in the "More than a Feeling" video??? Regardless, much like "Rumours", this is another album filled almost entirely with songs that played on the radio over the years. And much like "Rumours", while it's not my favorite music, it's hard to deny that this is a very solid (and popular) album and band. Musically and lyrically, it's definitely not as interesting as "Rumours", but it's certainly a bit more rockin', and this album's influence on American rock is undeniable. I do wish the band wasn't as cringe-worthy to look at (and I wish they didn't all look like extras for "Spinal Tap"), but I'm confident they looked great to all their fans at the time.

The Wikipedia entry for this album is definitely worth reading, and at least partly explains why (nearly) all the songs became radio-hits, as they had been written and shopped for many years before the album was signed and produced. It's also both impressive and I imagine very grating how the guitarist Tom Scholz was effectively a one-man band and producer for the album, and how he basically worked almost exclusively from his basement. (Also pretty funny that he kept his full-time job at Polaroid until the album went gold after its release.)

I'm not sure if Scholz ever felt he'd achieved the "perfect band" or the "perfect song", but it's an impressive attempt.

I'd probably feel badly for whatever album came after Fela Kuti's "Zombie", because it's hard to imagine there are all that many albums that can match "Zombie", its messages, and the extremely disturbing political/military/physical violence that surrounds it. Sadly, this album ("Life Through a Lens") is *definitely* not one of those albums, which makes it a bit harder not to hear the typical sort of singer-songwriter music as a bit...trite. Which isn't Robbie Williams' fault at all, I know.

That said, this seems like a decent debut album, and a decent sound, with plenty of nods to UK music from a decade earlier, and far too much similarity to Oasis at times, but still having some distinctiveness. I'm guessing, though, that he had better albums than this one, but prioritizing debut albums is just part of the deal with this collection. And I'm also guessing that this album was chosen because it's a distinctive departure from his previous band Take That? Regardless, he's definitely stronger on the harder-edged songs; songs like "Angels" aren't very interesting (to me, at least, as it sounds like this was got him attention). And I can definitely see why "Let Me Entertain You" became his opener song for all his (many many many many) subsequent concerts, a nice homage to The Who and many others.

I suspect this is one of the more truly political albums we'll get in this collection, and it's really weird to read about the context (as well as the lyrics) from nearly 50 years ago, in a very different place and time. If I hadn't read the Wikipedia entry for the album, I doubt I would have guessed at *any* of the lyrics or their intent, and probably would have simply enjoyed the tracks for the music alone. And I also wouldn't have ever realized that the title track not only caused riots in Ghana, but the album effectively killed Fela Kuti's mother and destroyed his home and his community. It's also sad that this album marked the end of his band Africa 70, apparently because he chose to fund his presidential campaign instead of paying them after the Berlin concert in 1978.

Given that there have been nearly 45 albums by Fela Kuti between 1970 and 1990, I kind of wonder whether this was a good choice to showcase him and his music? "Zombie" (the song) is a fun listen, at least musically, but some of the others aren't particularly distinctive, and kind of drag along at times, both before and during the lyrics parts. (And I only belatedly realized that the original LP only had "Zombie" and "Mr. Follow Follow", but I still feel that way even with the LP's second track/side.) But with all the context of the album and its aftermath, it's hard to give it fewer than 3 stars, given how much he sacrificed (and sacrificed of others) for his music (and I feel a bit guilty for only 3 stars).

At first, I thought this was another album by John Martyn, which seemed surprising, but then realized that it wasn't. And it took me well into the 2nd song/track of the album to realize that this album was from 1997, not 1979, despite that it seems much better suited to the 70s than the 90s. Either way, I'm not sure it suits me all that well. I'm guessing that the often-atonal noises and instrument choices are intentional, as is the not-really-singing vocals, but the end-result for me is an unpleasant and sometimes cacophonous, sometimes sleep-inducing album that's far too long. It's a bit shocking that this is Robert Wyatt's 7th studio album; I'm guessing (hopeful?) that this album marked a new direction for him, as it's hard to imagine any studio seeing a wide enough audience for six previous albums like this. That said, I did enjoy "Blues in Bob Minor" and its "Subterranean Homesick Blues" cover/adaptation.

I *will* say that this album wins the briefest-Wikipedia-entry award (at least so far in this collection), which is a shame as there might have been something redeeming about this album's background or production that would have made it more interesting. Also, Brian Eno truly *is* everywhere! (He's listed in the "Personnel" section of the Wikipedia entry, and you can definitely hear his playing in places on the album.) (And then I cheated and looked to Google for any reviews of this album, and came across this panegyric, where the reviewer claims "Shleep" is the best entrypoint for Wyatt and one of his two masterpieces (the other being "Rock Bottom"): <https://www.headheritage.co.uk/unsung/review/780/>. Other online reviews also revealed that he was a cofounder of Soft Machine, which makes total sense, now that I've heard both Soft Machine and Robert Wyatt in this collection. And this Pitchfork review of the Shleep reissue (among other Wyatt materials) has good context too: <https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14895-shleep-eps-cuckooland-theatre-royal-drury-lane/>)

There's a strange affinity in this collection to presumably underrated (or at least little known) Scottish bands, and this seems like a pretty good example of that. Enjoyable, but not particularly memorable. I know Lloyd Cole apparently cited Bob Dylan as a major influence on the album (at least in the Wikipedia article for the album), but many of the songs, and "Perfect Skin" in particular, reminded me much more like a more pop-oriented version of Lou Reed somehow mashed up with a little Cure and REM.

It's kind of endearing, too, to read that "Charlotte Street" was meant to be a boy-meets-girl song set in a library, but Lloyd Cole didn't even realize until a year later (or more) that he'd never mentioned in the song that it all took place in a library. And kudos to them for the Citroën reference in "2cv". And I like the (Wikipedia) description of this album's style as "jangle pop"--a good description, and an apt way to characterize this album.

I enjoyed listening to this album, but (a) never having listened to a War album before, and (b) with a pretty meager Wikipedia entry as a guide, I'm not really sure if this is among their best, and (c) it appears that this is the only War album in this collection, so I'm left feeling like I would have liked an even better War album than this one (maybe "Why Can't We Be Friends?").

"City, Country, City" was both intriguing and maddening, as it has a lot of great segments, but seems way too long and meandering for what I think they were trying to accomplish. I think I enjoyed "The Cisco Kid" the most, and a close second the radio-version title track (and foolishly heard "The Four-Cornered Room" as "the porcelain room," which gave a decidedly different take on the song...).

Fine, I suppose, but nothing special to this album, and the Wikipedia entry for this album, spartan as it is, reinforces my question about why this album for Loretta Lynn?

Listening to this album, though, made me think again about what it must be like to be the backing (studio?) band for someone like Loretta Lynn, where the focus is almost exclusively on her, her voice and the lyrics. There's some variety in the songs' music, but not all that much, and nothing that sounds to me like it would excite a band player. Hopefully it paid the bills, though!

Brian Eno is everywhere! But strangely, I think this is the first time I've heard an album by him. I largely enjoyed it, as I suspected I might, but I wish we'd gotten an earlier album, as this one makes me feel like he's better collaborating and/or inspiring with others, and I'm pretty sure some of his solo work is great as-is. Just maybe not this one. It felt too much like music for an art museum exhibition, and not for active listening.

I think the main issue for me is just that there's just too few tracks with singing and/or lyrics, which would have made the album a lot more interesting (I think), and less easy to kind of tune it out as ambient music (as interesting as it is for that); basically, I was hoping for more tracks like "Everything Merges with the Night", but probably harder-edged too. I *will* say that, as ambient music goes, especially from the mid-1970s, this is quite impressive, as it feels like it anticipates music from *much* later; there's even hints of Radiohead, Air, and Chemical Brothers in some of the better ambient songs, and the album as a whole makes me think of some of Ween's albums (at least to me, and I know none of those bands are technically ambient anyway).

It's a bit hard to hear Hole and not be influenced by Courtney Love's sad and often incredibly abrasive life and personality. Overall, while this might have been considered a "softer" version of Hole, I'd say it's pretty representative of what I remember of Hole, and sadly not all that distinctive from the other grunge/alternative acts that existed in the massive hole and shadow of Nirvana. (It's funny how there are so few bands that seemed to resent Nirvana's rocket-to-fame the way so many West Coast bands resented Green Day (and maybe Weezer too?).)

Honestly, I'm really surprised at all of the best-album accolades that are listed in the Wikipedia entry for this album. It's fine, I guess, but neither musically nor lyrically all that interesting to me, sadly.

I doubt we'll get too many albums in this collection like this, as I think I've heard more songs from this album on the radio than any other album (and I don't think I've ever listened to the album itself, at least as an album); the only ones I wasn't familiar with was "Songbirds", "I Don't Want to Know", and "Oh Daddy". It's almost like a best-of album, except it's clearly not, and it works as an album.

I know there's a lot of arguments on both sides for which incarnation of Fleetwood Mac is the best, but it's hard to ignore at the longevity and success of this album's version of the band, and even if the music isn't particularly novel or ambitious, I can totally see why this sits towards the top of best-album-of-all-time rankings.

I'm actually kind of glad that I still remain ignorant of most of the drama and intrigue and at-times despicable behavior of some of the band members, although I'm guessing that we couldn't have had Spinal Tap and so many other epic band fails without their legacy. Regardless, I *am* intrigued to listen to the band's early years, given all the references to their "Peter Green" years.

Wow. Quite a contrast to the previous album (Fatboy Slim), and the first song/composition was pretty much different from almost anything else I've heard in this collection so far, although there are definitely echoes of Frank Zappa at times, of ELP's "Fanfare for the Common Man" concert album (although possibly that's vice versa in both of these cases), and I can definitely see the earlier Pink Floyd connection too as they played in the underground scene. I'm having a harder time imagining them winning over Jimi Hendrix fans during their 1968 tours with The Jimi Hendrix Experience...

I'm not sure I can say I enjoyed this album, and I definitely wish there was a way they could have distilled the double album into a single (vinyl) disc, as it seems a bit much for non-hardcore fans, but it's definitely an experience, and at times an interesting one. I also wish the Wikipedia entry for this album was better, as it's hard to get a feel for either the band (at least in its composition on this album) or the album's purpose or genesis. I am not at all surprised that (a) they were never particularly commercially successful, or (b) that the band name came from William S. Burroughs.

I always laugh when I see this album's cover, which I know isn't nice. (I'm also quite shocked that the internet has yet to identify this person from the 1983 Fat Peoples Festival in Danville, Virginia...) And I always enjoy listening to songs from this album when they show up on my playlist, as they're (to me at least) uniformly fun and driving. (I'm not at all surprised, though, that the US version of the album had a different cover, which is my personal copy's version, sadly...) I had never seen the videos for the singles on this album until now, and they're about what I expected, although I didn't expect to see the cover guy at the end of "Right Here, Right Now", and I thought the Spike-Jonze-directed/-featuring "Praise You" was truly mesmerizing.

This album also evokes a very specific time and place for me, as I think the first time I heard Norman Cook's music was when I came across this wild Webbie-Award-winning site in the early 2000s which featured Fatboy Slim's and other artists' music in this weird dress-a-dancer interactive game-like thing, called "Dancing Paul". (It got created by an out-of-work web developer who wanted to teach himself how to use Flash, and amazingly it's still there and largely functional in a post-Flash-world at <https://www.dancingpaul.com/>)

I know this isn't really a "great" album per se, and I'm not sure exactly whether it's fair to describe Fatboy Slim as a musician either (although Norman Cook is clearly a musical artist), but I really like this album nonetheless.

Aside from the title track, I'm pretty sure I haven't heard the rest of this album's songs, and it's an interesting journey. I'm not sure I enjoyed the B-side as much as, say, the parts of Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" where the songs blended into each other, but it's still fun to hear the Bowie/Eno/Fripp collaboration across the entire album. (Brian Eno is everywhere, btw.)

I also found it really helpful to read the Wikipedia entry for this album and how it was created, as I would never have guessed that the vocals and lyrics were almost tacked on at the end (except apparently with "Sons of the Silent Age"), and that everything was largely recorded in the first take. It's really impressive, given how layered and seemingly cohesive the songs, and most of the album, are. I'm also glad to have read that this album came after extensive collaboration between Bowie and Iggy Pop, as we (or really I) left David Bowie's timeline with "Ziggy Stardust"'s Iggy Pop fascination and emulation. Also very cool to read about the legacy and influence of the album, especially the later Philip Glass adaptations of "Low" and "Heroes" into symphonies.

I'm almost tempted to give this 4 stars, but it feels like it's not quite *that* good of an album, at least for me.

Hmm...*another* Pet Shop Boys album??? This seems a bit unfair to all the worthy bands that didn't make it into this collection, which makes it a bit hard to rate this album entirely fairly. It does sound a bit different than the other album (so far) we've been subjected to ("Behavior")--more bouncy, less drab--but I remain decidedly not a big fan of their music. (But I do appreciate that their lyrics are more interesting than many pop bands'.)

It's interesting to see the videos of their singles from this album ("Can you forgive her?", "Liberation", and "Go West"), and see how much they were a product of when this album was released. All 3D-modeling and poor CGI animations, although the mixed-live-action aspects of "Can you forgive her?" and "Go West" are a bit more interesting and mesmerizing, in a very throwback sort of way. And it's always fun to have a decent (but not great) cover song in an album ("Go West"). I also feel like Chumbawumba totally based a large amount of their sound off the Pet Shop Boys' "Yesterday when I was mad", so a nice tribute to them.

Although it almost feels like cheating to have a live album that largely consists of an artist's range of singles, it's still a great album and showcase for B. B. King. ("Cheating" only in the sense from what I can tell of the collection's "rules" for inclusion, although I'm guessing that the fact that most of B. B. King's discography consists of singles gives him a bit of a pass anyway.)

I'm also really impressed at the quality of the recording, as you really get a feel for the audience and the instruments, which must have been a tough accomplishment in the mid-1960s. It sounds like a fun concert, and I'm guessing the band enjoyed it almost as much as the appreciative audience. A fun tribute to an iconic musician and artist.

After getting a string of somewhat forgettable albums, it seems like the music gods have smiled and delivered yet another great--and classic--album with "Talking Book". I've never been a big Stevie Wonder listener, so I can't speak to whether there are other, better albums by him for this collection, but this certainly seems like a strong contender (and the Wikipedia article seems to confirm this). I'm also really impressed to find out that he not only composed everything but also played most of the instruments for the album (with some great guests on some of the songs).

It's kind of shocking to read that this was Stevie Wonder's *15th* studio album, yet it's also considered just the beginning of his "classic" period (which seems to coincide with the 1970s). Popular, prolific and a nice guy--quite a feat!

I'm embarrassed to admit that I've never really listened to a whole Bob Marley album (with or without the Wailers), but this makes listening to this album a great treat for this unwashed member of the masses. I get it why the even-higher rated "Legend" isn't included in this collection, but it's nice to get such a complete album like this, with only a few songs not quite as strong as the others, and to have Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer involved in its creation.

In the long line of debut albums that are featured in this collection, it's a good one. But whether it's from listening to this album more than 30 years after it debuted, or just from personal taste, I didn't find it a particularly compelling or even distinctive sound or album, but also not annoying or bad or anything. I'm very glad, though, that this wasn't the first *and* last album she made (as she apparently somewhat feared at the time), as she's clearly a gifted musician and artist, and it's impressive that every album she's done sounds very different from previous ones (or so Wikipedia tells me).

(As a long aside, when I saw this album in the daily rotation, I thought I had a different album by PJ Harvey, so was curious why this one made it into the collection. And then discovered I was thinking of the band Harvey Danger (and the album was "St James Version"), which has zero connection to PJ Harvey aside from somewhat contemporaneous debut years.)

I feel like this album is what this collection is all about: an artist I've never heard of (or knowingly listened to before), with an album that sounds totally different from what I would have guessed, and contains a healthy number of really fun songs to listen to. (The B-side's initial set of love songs doesn't really do it for me, but that may also simple be because the other songs are so much more interesting, including the album's amazing finale, "Small Hours".)

Although I don't think you'd ever need to read the Wikipedia entry for this album to appreciate it, it has a lot of fascinating detail on both John Martyn, the huge range of musicians that participated in the album, and also how the album was produced on an English farm (and at least some of it recorded in a courtyard with speakers playing in the middle of a pond). I can totally see why John Martyn, and this album in particular, is credited with being the ancestor of trip-hop, in all the best ways.

I would have given this album a full 5 stars, if only there'd been fewer of those forgettable love songs .

There's something to be said for an album with under a half-hour running time, especially one as non-stop as this. I've never really listened much to the original decade of rock-n-roll, but it's hard to deny that Little Richard is up in the pantheon, and this actually seems like a good album of his to include (despite being more of a greatest hits/compilation album of his singles than a true "debut album"). Curiously, "Oh Why?" sounds more like a woman singing than Little Richard...