Reviews by mitch058

I'm really surprised there are (at least) two Van Halen albums in this collection, but I always enjoy vintage Van Halen (pre-Hagar), so no complaints here. This definitely isn't as good as their debut album, or some earlier ones, but I'm pretty sure this is the first truly commercially successful album (or at least the only album with a #1 single), so it makes sense to have it here. Even when this came out I was a bit surprised at how synth-heavy some of the songs were, and that hasn't aged all that well (in my opinion); it's a bit like how we got "Hysteria" instead of "Paranoia" for Def Leppard. (I didn't know until reading the Wikipedia entry that the synth/keyboard was Eddie's brainchild; a still mystifying preference given his guitar virtuoso/diva side.)

But I've always loved "Panama" (and never could play it very well in my brief-lived guitar years), and "Hot for Teacher" is also definitely in the classic Van Halen vein (as is "Top Jimmy" and "Drop Dead Legs"). It's too bad that David and Eddie struggled to share the spotlight, as they had a great sound.

*Another* Smashing Pumpkins album?!!! I'm not sure why they'd really warrant two (or more?) entries in the 1001 album collection, and it always seems like a perverse form of torture to inflict a double album on any but true fans anyway. (Worse, the YouTube music link went to some 5-hour version of the album with 92 songs, which was fortunately so long that I knew it wasn't the version I should have gotten.)

I've always wanted to like them more than I do. And this album didn't help, with it's annoying Belle-Epoque-style cover and title (although in some ways they occasionally *do* have a Hugo-like aesthetic, so maybe it's fitting?). However, at least there's more range on this album than on "Siamese Dream"...

Much like Steely Dan, I generally enjoy listening to Elvis Costello, and have one or two of his albums, so it's always nice to get him in the collection's rotation. But this particular album is a bit of a mystery, as there's nothing particularly distinctive about it; the Wikipedia entry for the album is remarkably scanty (and provides no context for why this might have been included); and, more damning, the Wikipedia entry notes that there are six(!) Elvis-Costello-related albums in the 1001 Albums project, which seems about 4 (or 5?) too many. But who knows? Maybe some of the other ones are truly distinctive or totally different genres.

"Brutal Youth", though, seems pretty classic Elvis Costello, and while that's perfectly fine, it's also neither super exciting (at least to me) nor does it have any classics or radio hits.

I'm not really a Kanye West aficionado (or particularly a fan), so this is probably my first time hearing a whole album by him (and perhaps the only time, depending on whether there are other Kanye West albums in this project). It's hard to believe that his debut album is the best of (pre-unstable) Kanye West, but regardless there's not a lot of particularly memorable stuff on a surprisingly long album, and it's hard to believe that most of what he produced on this album was all that ground-breaking either (aside perhaps from avoiding the gangster-rap mode), although apparently a lot of critics would beg to differ.

The songs with featured artists are probably the high points on the album (for me, at least), but even these aren't really to my taste, I'm afraid; I guess "chipmunk soul" is an acquired taste. I did enjoy "Jesus Walks (Version 2)", though, and also somewhat for "Two Words" and "Never let me down", and the backstory of "Through the wire" and West's horrible car accident is kind of (morbidly) fascinating. But it's hard to ignore the hot mess he became over the years, which means he has a higher bar to meet for being both entertaining and interesting even in his earlier work. I was really tempted to give this only 2 stars (mainly for how long and indulgent the whole thing felt), but that didn't seem fair given that he produced and wrote the whole album.

"Just like Cream! But worse" (Lester Bangs, Rolling Stone) What a perfect, and fairly accurate, description of a great classic album. To be honest, I would have liked to have had "Paranoid" instead of their debut album, but it's fun to listen to the roots of both Black Sabbath's style and heavy metal more generally, and the Wikipedia article is a good read. (I had no idea that Tony Iommi had lost his right-hand fingertips in a sheet metal factory accident, or that Geezer Butler was originally a guitarist, and how much both of those facts made the band both distinctive, and worse than Cream with all the power chords and simplified bass.)

Definitely not their best album, and I'm impressed at how much less "heavy" this album was than later ones, but I loved finding out that they recorded it essentially live, in one day, and before closing time at the pub. And for that alone, it's really impressive.

It's a shame that there's no Wikipedia entry for this album, only a profile of Baaba Maal, as it's hard to know why this particular album was selected from his apparently extensive discography. And his story is fascinating, with a lot of interesting connections to Western artists (Brian Eno is everywhere!) and his work on soundtracks (like "Black Panther") or collaborations with other big names like Taj Mahal (for a Fela Kuti tribute album).

But this album doesn't have any of that, and I don't really even feel like I can appreciate whether his music on this album is more traditional or more innovative in Pulaar/Fula culture (although the non-lyrics music seems largely modern, and sadly in a horrible 80s/90s synth- and drum-track mire). I guess it's fine? I liked "Yela" and "Daniibe", more from the sound than whatever the lyrics meant; everything else is kind of lost on me. I was often reminded of Babatunde Alotunji's "Drums of Passion", even though they're different generations and cultures and countries, of course.

Looking at the entry for this album from the 2005 edition of "1001 albums you must hear before you die", it appears that the draw for this album was the collaboration between Simon Booth and Baaba Maal (and the editor particularly (perhaps solely?) liked the track "Daande Lenol", which ironically is named after Maal's band, but mixes in all the usual world-music suspects), and how this was a sort of launchpad for Simon Booth to explore world music and later form Afro Celt Sound System (without Maal involved at all). So I guess this album was included more for Simon Booth than Maal, although the editor notes that "Maal continued his pop fusion with varying degrees of success"?

Hm. It's always fun to get a band and album that I've never heard of, but I'm not sure there's a lot to this one, at least for me. The band sounds a lot like a whole lot of other alt/indie bands from the later 1990s, and while there's nothing wrong with that, it's a bit hard to know why this album (and band) made the cut to be in this project. (I also made the mistake of trying to watch the video of the first song, "Writing to Reach You," and was both baffled at whatever storyline the video was trying to tell, and which didn't seem to relate to the lyrics. Kind of annoying. "Turn" and "Why does it always rain on me" weren't much better.)

I almost wonder if we should have gotten their debut album instead (ironic given the project's tendency to over-favor debut albums)? I feel a bit badly giving this only 2 stars, but it just feels like such a bland and forgettable album, with almost no sort of backstory or drama to make it more interesting.

The only song I've heard from them before is their great "Bang a Gong/Get it On", so I wasn't sure what to expect (and very glad that that was on this album, their sixth(!)). Although they don't have much else that stands out on this album, it's an interesting album overall, with a lot more variety (and interesting experimentation) on the B side. It's also funny how out of place "Get it On" seems, as it's so familiar and the rest of the album doesn't seem all that similar style-wise (except the near-copycat "The Motivator"). There's something kind of haunting (and memorable) about "Cosmic Dancer", too, and I enjoyed "Planet Queen".

I know many of the associations I made with some of the songs aren't really related to "glam rock", but for me there were a lot of echoes of bands both before and after in this album--David Bowie, Beatles, Iggy Pop, Velvet Underground, and so on. Or so it seems to me. :) I'm just really glad we didn't have to listen to their earlier fairy-tale folk music, as that sounds really annoying.

Well, I'm not a huge connoisseur or particular fan of Joni Mitchell, so my response isn't all that informed. OK album, I guess, but (at least based on what I read in Wikipedia) it seems like "Court and Spark" might have been a better choice for this period of Joni Mitchell's career?

It's interesting that she was experimenting with Moog and ARP synthesizers, and it's conceptually intriguing that "The Jungle Line" features one of the first musical samples, but I found so many songs (and especially "The Jungle Line") kind of cringe-worthy, especially the more world-music oriented songs (in much the same way I find Paul Simon's world music approach kind of painful).

I guess I empathize more with the early reviews of the album than the later ones that seem to feel it's both timeless and a masterpiece.

I actually got this album previously, but it got lost in the shuffle as I transitioned over to the group listening arrangement, so it's here again (but would have been anyway, I suppose). As I noted the last time around, it feels like a somewhat forgettable collection of semi-lush semi-trip-rock-like songs (with a little light-industrial thrown in).

It's also likely an album that was probably a lot more enjoyable when it came out than listening to it over 25 years later, but I do sort of wonder why this particular Primal Scream album made it into the collection, as they were more of a distinctive new sound in the early 90s (with their second album "Screamadelica"), but since I always ding this collection for so many early/debut albums, maybe I shouldn't complain.

I'll say this, though: it kind of makes me want to find and watch the 1971 "Vanishing Point", and I also imagine that this album makes for a better soundtrack to that movie than the original. (But "Kowalski" has got to be one of the worst music videos I've seen, so maybe not....)

It wouldn't feel right to have *no* Def Leppard in this collection, I suppose, but this seems like a completely arbitrary choice for an album, especially since it's not what I think of as their defining album, "Pyromania". Most of this album seems like lighter-rock variations on that previous album's songs, although "Pour Some Sugar on Me" is one of their singles that seemed more like vintage Def Leppard. Overall, though, this album seems so much more anodyne than "Pyromania", and much more of a trend towards Journey-style rock than what they were playing before, which I guess was the point (according to the Wikipedia article) but still disappointing. And such a *long* album too, for what you get.

Maybe it was the sympathy vote for the poor drummer? I've always been impressed that they didn't ditch him after the gruesome accident (and that he didn't decide to bow out), and although he definitely had to adopt a different drumming style afterwards, it's more or less worked for all of them (although it would have been nice if he had been able to stick with physical drums, as the drum pads just don't have the same sound).

I haven't listened to much of Radiohead, so I'm not sure whether this album is typical or not for them (or at least typical for them in the mid-90s), but it's an interesting combination of very familiar-sounding mid-90s indie/alt-rock sort of stuff, yet without being at all distinctive beyond a song or two that might have made some air-time (like "High and Dry" or "My Iron Lung", I think, but then again it might just be very similar to some *other* mid-90s indie/alt-rock tune). I *was* a bit surprised that some of the songs were a little harder-edged (and a teensy bit less falsetto) than I expected of Radiohead.

It kind of feels like this isn't really a great Radiohead album to include in the 1001 album collection, frankly, but maybe it was more influential than I appreciate, and certainly the "Influence" and "Legacy" sections of the Wikipedia article suggest I'm just ignorant of this album's majesty. Either way, entertaining enough, in a somewhat disappointingly generic way.

Although I've never been a huge fan of hers, I was sorry to read (in the Wikipedia entry) that this album has been sliding down in Rolling Stone's best 500 albums (and likely is gone by now), as it's a solid album for its time and was--and to some degree still is--enormously popular.

I had no idea about all the struggles she endured before this album came out, and I'm glad it rescued her career, as she seems like a great artist and person. And she and Lyle Lovett put on a great show at the 2002 MN State Fair, so it's hard not to hear some of these songs and think about that performance.

For all that I've seen her name in the news and on the screen, I had no idea what her music was like, or for that mater even heard any of her songs (at least knowingly). Based on the Wikipedia article, this seems like a good selection for Christina Aguilera (somewhat surprisingly for this project), but I can't say it really stood out in any particular way, except (unfortunately) for how *long* the double-CD album is. Aside from Aguilera ("Baby Jane"?) fans, there's really no need for so many songs, and while the two discs are somewhat distinct from each other, there just aren't that many good songs in this album. I enjoyed at least parts of a few of the first disc's songs, likes "Makes me Wanna Pray" and "Ain't no Other Man", and "Candyman" is pretty catchy, so there's that. And I appreciated it that she was so involved in the production and songwriting and styling.

Although I never sought out an album by her, I never minded when her many songs made it onto the radio (many from this album, too). However, it never felt like there was much there beyond her weird voice/intonation, even though the songs were more catchy than I'd have guessed.

I was also a bit mystified by the incredibly negative reaction she seemed to create in some people. I remember hanging out with some people not long after this album came out, and this one guy started arguing with *everyone* about how horrible she was and untalented and psychotic and disgusting, etc., and then just started screaming the lyrics from "You Oughta Know" (or maybe "Ironic") in this truly freaky falsetto that actually made Alanis Morisette sound like an opera singer by comparison. Apparently he was more drunk than usual, and the next day apologized to everyone, but I'll never forget the depths of hatred he was spewing.

I haven't heard any of the songs on this album beyond the radio hits, so it was interesting to hear a little more variety from Alanis Morisette, although I find it hard to heard beyond her voice/style, so the non-radio songs weren't all that distinctive to me. ("Perfect" is a great example this, a very 90s Lilith Fair-style emo song that just sounds a bit off thanks to her voice/style.) It's pretty cool to read that all of the vocals on this album were recorded in 1-2 demo takes, and also cool to know that Dave Navarro and Flea were involved in "You Oughta Know" (especially given how young she was when she was making the album); it's be interesting to hear how the original version of that song was like. It's also hilarious that there's been a whole thread on whether "Ironic" actually contains any ironic situations (which seems like the real irony, I suppose?).

Hm. Not exactly my first choice for something to listen to, but it's nice to know that the band drew a regular crowd in Birmingham's The Mermaid, so that European punk/hardcore bands could play there too (not so cool that the Mermaid owner never paid Napalm Death for their appearances). And it's always inspiring to read about how one of the band members (and apparently the only one to play on both sides of this album) had a driving goal as a musician, although "extremely fast drumming" seems a bit limited as far as goals go...but I think he largely achieved that goal, at least on this album.

It's hard to imagine listening to the CD reissue of this album, as it apparently contained *54* songs on it, few of which were as blissfully short as that "Silicon Valley"-featured song "You Suffer", but still, 54 is about 50 songs too many. However, I'll give credit to the concept that "Scum" was "the conclusion of a ten-year competition for the fastest and hardest sound, marking the point from which neither speed nor intensity could increase" (from the Wikipedia article). We can only hope that this means no more of this kind of album in the 1001 Greatest Albums collection....

I'm not familiar with The Youngbloods, so this seemed like a good introduction to them. It also seemed like an interesting mix of other late 1960s bands and their own style, although I didn't find it all that distinctive. I was disappointed to read that the instrumental "On Sir Francis Drake" was not in fact some sort of historical reference, but much more mundanely about a road near where they moved to California. I guess that was expecting a bit too much from the Youngbloods, but I still enjoyed listening to their album (mostly).

I don't think I've ever listened to a whole album featuring Justin Timberlake (either solo or in a band), so there's a bit of novelty here. I do wish this 1001 albums project didn't have such a fixation on debut albums, because there's no way this is his best album (or at least I certainly hope not). But that's not Justin Timberlake's fault, I suppose.

This isn't really my cup of tea, so I'm not sure how to rate it. I feel like he's got a style going on here, and it seems like a pretty well produced album, with an impressive number of collaborators and guest artists and the Neptunes' involvement, but I can't really say I enjoyed listening to it, and it doesn't sound all that distinctive. It's pretty funny that this seems to have been widely considered as Michael Jackson's album to take or leave (or he apparently left it).

I'm also bummed that we didn't get songs like "All These Things That I've Done" which he lip-synched in the "Southland Tales" movie (and Justin did a solid job as a bit character in that movie too, I would say); but since that's actually by The Killers, and not by Justin, and is in no way R&B, I guess that would have been asking too much.... (2)

I actually own two different Air albums ("Talkie-Walkie" and "Pocket Symphony"), so it's hard for me *not* to enjoy listening to their debut album (although it makes me wonder all over again why debut albums get so much attention in this collection, since they're rarely the best for each band/artist).

I'll admit that what appeals to me about Air's style is that it's great background music, which I'm sure makes any artist cringe, and certainly isn't fair to them (or anyone). But I still enjoy listening to them in all sorts of environments, and I enjoyed this album too, knowing that I was missing out on whatever the lyrics meant, at least when they were in French. I also thought this album was actually more in the foreground than the other two are, which is an interesting aspect. (A little annoying that the YouTube Music version of the album had a few substitutions on the versions of some songs, but that's not Air's fault.)

A solid album, although nothing exciting in the context of this 1001 albums project.

I'm initially impressed by two things with this album: (1) it's a 21st-century selection, which seems to be a rarity for this project; and (2) Wikipedia has almost nothing on this album or the band, making it hard to get a feel for why this might have been included in the 1001-album collection (unless it was because a few songs were featured in ads and video games?).

My initial impression is of a not-particularly distinctive sound or band, with not very interesting lyrics or beats, but playable enough as background music. Some tracks minded me of a mashup of Blue Man Group, Beta Band and Meat Puppets (especially "Default" and "Firewater"), and the "WOR" video definitely caught the can't-look-away effect of the wall-of-death attraction.

I enjoyed listening to the album, but have a hard time understanding why this made the cut instead of one of their other albums, or some other band altogether...