Reviews by mondo-kun

The Rolling Stones have one, but a very big problem: they're not an album-oriented band at all.

It's no secret that the Stones have always been The Beatles' main rivals, but if you compare any two studio albums by these bands, there's no arguing: The Beatles win 100% of the time.

But if you compare their greatest hits collections, the Stones will definitely beat the Beatles (now THAT'S the pun). The same goes for this album — it's a good blues collection; Mick Jagger's signature voice, the intertwining slide guitars. It would have remained a decent three stars worthy album if not for the excellent closing track and the great, incredible, band's best song, and one of the best songs ever, which gives me goosebumps every time and which I would listen to if I were to witness the end of the world — the opening track, "Gimme Shelter."

I really wanted to give it a fifth star, but I won't fool myself.

When David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash decided to form a supergroup, they named it after their last names so that if one member left the band, the band would no longer exist.

It all seemed logical. Only the musicians didn't consider that another member might join the group, which would require a new name. As you can see on the cover, two more session members are listed there — a drummer and a bassist — but adding them to the band name would have been too much.

While I found the debut album by Crosby, Stills & Nash quite boring, this album is a bit better: traditional acoustic folk is diluted with an electric blues sound. You'd think Neil Young had something to do with it, but no, he's the one whining, true to his work of the same era.

The album is considered an immortal classic in the US, but I again found nothing special in it.

"Lazy genius" — that's Shuggie Otis. At twelve, he first hit the R&B charts; at fifteen, he was tipped to be the next Jimi Hendrix; at nineteen (!), he turned down (!!) The Rolling Stones' offer of a guitarist; at twenty, he released this album.

And the album is good! It's a calm, pleasant funk, a precursor to acid funk, very similar to the music now being made by Jamiroquai and (at a slightly faster tempo) Parcels. Towards the end, this funk actually takes on a trip-hop feel.

However, the album flopped, the label terminated its contract with the artist, and Shuggie looked on it and thought, "I'm fine as it is!" And for many years, he worked as a session musician. He only released his next album in 2018.

In 2001, David Byrne's label reissued Inspiration Information, adding four tracks from the previous album. This version is now available for streaming.

Can are the finest creations of the German krautrock school, contrasting it with English prog and American jazz, and this record shows it.

The music here was made according to the principle of "writing absolutely everything in the studio, then chopping it up and looping it endlessly," and these long songs with a repetitive rhythm, more powerful than any psychedelic, allow you to soar without any substances. German electronic musicians would later repeat this approach in the form of techno, and here you can also hear grunge, noise, and industrial... In short, genres whose emergence was still a couple of decades away.

But there's also an "Experiments" section. The experience of side three is comparable to sitting in a dark, damp basement haunted by ghosts for seventeen minutes, and the next song has no structure at all.

So either you like this album, or by the end you'll turn into its cover — your brain will boil and you'll puke.

If this album had come out today, most of music lovers would have unanimously declared it AI-music and treated it accordingly (i.e., as trash).

But since it came out fifty years ago, it instantly became a cultural phenomenon for so-called "advanced users," the kind of thing you'd give it a 10/10, and if you disagree, light a cigarette like the Joker at the end of the film and say, "You wouldn't get it."

There's nothing to get here; it's just forty minutes of Brian Eno messing around with synthesizer settings. Robert Fripp and Phil Collins occasionally join in on their instruments, and then Eno starts singing in a mournful voice. Basically, it's a friendly get-together.

Only a seasoned, mature, and incredibly relaxed old man could enjoy this record. Young people have nothing to gain here.

If In Rock was a good Deep Purple album, then Machine Head is their greatest album and one of the best in hard rock.

And after the breakthrough album two years ago, they didn't even need to invent anything new! Just five professionals who knew their stuff and continued to play an incredible blend of old blues and new (at the time) hard 'n' heavy.

Every song here is amazing in that it's a pleasure to listen to both as a whole and just to listen to individual parts. I don't know what the original releases sounded like, but the remaster you can find on streaming services is very good. Yes, the riff in "Smoke on the Water" might make guitar stores workers' ears bleed, but pay attention to Jon Lord's organ part; it really carries the whole song!

Ladies, take note: if a guy says he doesn't like this album, he might have issues with his father. No offense, guys, just the facts.

As the saying goes, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks". And so, on Public Enemy's latest album, Chuck D and Flavor Flav spend a solid hour complaining about the heavy fate of blacks.

Unlike their next album, things become less monotonous toward the middle of the second side; the samples are more interestingly chosen, and at one point, even fragments of Slayer's "Angel of Death" are heard.

Overall, this album can be used if you want to get drunk, and on different levels:
- Easy: drink while you hear "BASS";
- Medium: drink while you hear "TERMINATOR X";
- Hard: drink while you hear "YEAH, BOYEEE!";
- Unreal: drink while that nasty sample plays, sounding like either a mouse or a whistling kettle.

"Our main goal was to make an album that would stand the test of time," Chuck D said. Dude, you failed.

What Miles Davis certainly knew how to do was never rust. He invented cool jazz, and twenty years later, he's once again at the forefront of a new subgenre, this time jazz fusion.

Many would later adopt this style of twenty-minute improvisations, but the music here is completely uncluttered and leaves a surprisingly ambivalent impression — it feels like background music, yet it's also engaging to listen to.

Perhaps this interest for me stemmed from the fact that this record is quite far removed from classic jazz: yes, the constant brass solos are there, but some rhythmic patterns are still discernible; on the second song, something reminiscent of a riff from the psychedelic rock of the time even appears. And these long compositions were stitched together from several separately recorded pieces, which by jazz standards at the time was considered the ultimate taboo.

A relaxed, but still complex, album, a distant ancestor of ambient.

While Speakerboxxx/The Love Below found the Outkast members separating into their own sound, Stankonia exemplifies how the duo could work brilliantly together.

Andre 3000's meowing, clearly soul-inspired vocals blend beautifully with Big Boi's blistering, sometimes slightly angry, rapping. According to the artists, they didn't listen to rap at all while recording the album, and it shows — if you stripped away the lyrics, the instrumentals sounded like rave electronics, funk, or old rock, but certainly not like the slow, languid beats of late-90s hip-hop. I'd even say that in some places, the songs could be mistaken for Cypress Hill or Rage Against the Machine (not surprising, considering B-Real raps on one track, and another was remixed by Zack de la Rocha).

A very juicy and cheerful album, despite the serious topics it often raises, which, however, are sometimes relieved by humorous skits.

Honestly, I don't understand why, when the latest reissue of "1001 albums..." needed to add some hipster favorites from the early 2010s, the creators decided to go with Hot Chip.

Not Two Door Cinema Club, not Metronomy, or Vampire Weekend, but Hot Chip. And not their most obvious album, either! I mean, the album isn't bad, but the band had been together for ten years by then, and the youthful exuberance and energy that were fully present at the beginning... Well, it didn't evaporate, but it gave way to calmer and more mature, albeit still danceable, songs about love and long-term relationships. Which, again, is not a bad thing. Rüfüs Du Sol will soon be doing something similar — romantic electronic music that's just as good for one-on-one time as it is for a club dance floor.

It's an okay record, but nothing special.

I'd never really listened to My Bloody Valentine's music before, but I'd heard a lot about them — like, they were the fathers of shoegaze, their guitars were incredibly loud, and at concerts they played so loud that some listeners felt physically sick.

Given this, I was expecting something closer to experimental industrial, like HEALTH, but what I got was quite calm, even relaxing at times. Yes, it sounds like the guys decided to turn on every effect pedal at once, but it doesn't turn into a cacophony. I couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman singing, but the voice was quite soothing, even though it was drowned out by the guitars, making the words inaudible.

But I don't understand the band's cult status; a lot of people played such music in the 90s, and the album itself feels like it belongs to that era. And the band members don't hide it — even though it was released twenty years after the last album, all the work was already in place back then.

After releasing three albums, James Murphy disbanded his band, only to reform it four years later and release this comeback album two years later.

Now, say, a Korean band can announce a comeback every six months, but back then, the band was heavily criticized for the short time it took to reunite, the lazy cover art for the new album, and, ultimately, the album itself.

Unpopular opinion: this is LCD Soundsystem's most interesting work and the one worth starting with when getting to know their music. They haven't invented anything new here; on the contrary, Murphy has completely abandoned his shyness toward his influences, and the album is replete with echoes of Bowie, U2, and, most importantly, Talking Heads. The record is imbued with the spirit of the '80s, new wave, and the nascent alternative rock scene, and I don't see anything wrong with that.

A dance soundtrack for a little reflection.

Another case where the cover can tell a lot about the album right off the bat.

The story takes place in a vinyl store. DJ Shadow (not Sonic's friend) really did need a lot of vinyl to create the album — considering the lack of vocals, it was the first record ever composed entirely of samples plucked from jazz, funk, hip-hop, and a few films.

And the blurry state of the photograph is clearly meant to symbolize the listener's vision, because I almost fell asleep while playing this album. It's an incredibly monotonous, repetitive mid-tempo affair, though it does occasionally reveal interesting melodies. However, that's very rare, given the album's hour-long length.

Perhaps the lack of vocals is actually a plus here, in that the record could serve as a good background for work. But nothing more.

You can argue all you want about jazz being incredibly wise, but for me, it's mostly just a few musicians inventing their own completely different parts and then playing them simultaneously.

This double album has only four tracks, each nearly twenty minutes long, taking up one side of the record. Within the first five minutes of the first track, the album could easily have been a one star — I haven't heard such cacophony in a long time, but fortunately for the band, it gets a little better. The second one is simply unremarkable jazz-rock, the third is a bit simpler and slightly reminiscent of the band's psychedelic roots, and the flowing saxophone on the fourth is actually enjoyable, despite the long ambient intro.

This album, like the entire genre, is for a very dedicated audience, but putting this nightmare as the first track was a crime.

Imagine this: 2005 or so. You come home from school and, while your parents are at work and haven't yet had time to force you to do your homework, decide to play some futuristic racing game, like Wipeout or F-Zero, depending on your console.

You turn on the console, launch the game, but before you can even press "Start" to access the menu, your body, eager to remind you that you ate a ton of hot and spicy Buldak noodles the day before, abruptly forces you to the bathroom for about forty minutes. And the whole time you're sitting there, like the thinker's sculpture, the background music from main game screen plays from the TV.

That's roughly what this album sounds like. I'm sure it was a hit with the English clubbers of the early 90s, who had already consumed a tab, but why anyone would listen to it now is completely unclear, since in our time and in the clear mind, it's perceived as a collection of funny sounds and noises accompanied by a straight bass drum.

In a review of this album, NME, which was truly the leading British music magazine at the time, not a collection of gossip columns, wrote that the first five songs there pound all other guitar albums of 1997 — bar Radiohead's 'OK Computer' — into the ground.

I would have laughed at that once. The Verve? What do you mean? They're a one-song band, and they didn't really write that one.

Surprisingly, the journalist was right. Urban Hymns turned out to be an album that took the best of Britpop and thereby put a bold end to the genre. The epicness of Oasis, the looseness of Blur, the sensuality of Travis, the airiness of Lush, and even the psychedelia of Kula Shaker — all are here at their finest. The top five are truly bulletproof, and there are also the incredible, albeit very different, Weeping Willow and Lucky Man.

An excellent album, and while not as successful as its peers, it's arguably the best in the genre.

If Portishead's first album could be described as a James Bond soundtrack, then the third (and, frankly, likely the last) is more in the vein of a John Carpenter film.

Only Beth Gibbons' vocals evoke the melancholic, soothing past; the rest of the album doesn't let you relax — it frequently breaks the rhythm, sounds like mechanical krautrock, and is simply frightening.

Considering that Third was released eleven years after the previous album, fans were expecting something more familiar and were disappointed. But here's the paradox: listening to it, you feel as if the creators of trip-hop are killing their creation, only to have it reborn right here, before your eyes.

A struggle of opposites, simultaneously rough and soft, simple and profound. A very, very strong four stars.

When I started this challenge I found out that list of 1001 albums is often criticized, among other things, for its lack of hip-hop. Apparently, I'll have to retract that, since I've been seeing it almost exclusively lately.

Here's another legendary album, the debut and only lifetime one by the Notorious B.I.G., a major figure in the genre in every sense of the word.

Why this album has become legendary is something I personally don't quite understand. Obviously, as often happens, the artist's sudden death played a role, but otherwise, it's a typical rap album of the era, depicting the traditional path of a black gangster: from the cradle to the streets, picking pockets of goofs, dealing opiates, and conquering the big stage.

Yes, it's done with respect for the roots, with lots of interesting samples, but the album starts to falter towards the end; it could have been shortened by a third. However, I had no desire to turn it off. Give it a three stars and move on.

Once upon a time, Recording Industry Association of America stopped at gold status — no one could have imagined an album could sell more than 500,000 copies.

Then this record comes out, goes platinum for the first time (for one million copies sold), and for a while even sets a sales record at eight million. How so?

The first side is decent, but rather derivative (The Doors' debut album has been out for a year now) psychedelic rock with saccharine hippie lyrics. But the second side is where the magic begins: one seventeen-minute song, the reason people bought the album, and it was worth it. An eerie organ intro, a guitar riff often considered one of the first in metal, a mesmerizing drum solo... And they recorded the track in one take — and it was an instant success!

Yes, a one-song band, but what if the song takes up half the album?

Frankly, Motown alumni and their work are starting to get tiresome.

Soul, soul, and more soul. Northern, Southern, Detroit, New Orleans... Basically, that's the studio's bread and butter, the problem is that it all sounds the same to me. Even the songs on different albums can be the same — the band takes a standard and reworks it in its own way, and does this several times.

This album by The Temptations attempted to stand out from the crowd a bit — for example, the first side is clearly inspired by Sly & The Family Stone, and the band ventures into psychedelic funk territory (just look at the long "Run Away Child, Running Wild"). However, while they wanted to attract new fans, they were afraid to alienate the old ones, so the second side... Yeah, it's the same old three-minute soul songs, a sure bet.

In short, it's a three stars for the effort, but a light one.