Reviews by nevele

This is a fun album, but ultimately an unremarkable one for me. I already knew the big singles, and after a couple of full listens I feel the rest of the record sits in that “typical product of its era” zone. It’s energetic, experimental, and full of late-’80s social commentary, but not always consistent.

The highlights are obvious: “Def.Con.One,” “Can U Dig It,” and “Wise Up Sucker” still land. Those song I should really add to some of my driving playlists. Outside of those, the album loses some steam. Tracks like “Inject Me” and “Wake Up! Time to Die…” haven’t aged well. They lean too heavily on late-’80s clichés and the thinner production makes them feel a bit dated rather than charming.

It’s a decent album and it shows a band willing to take risks, but not every experiment works. For fans of alternative dance rock from that period, it’s worth hearing. For me, it has its limits. It's not an album I'll return to.

The Lioness hit me harder than almost anything I’ve heard in years. Forty minutes in and it felt like this record carved out a permanent space.

The recording is so pure you can hear fingers on strings, every drum tap puts you in the room. Jason Molina sounds three feet away, working through wreckage in real time, and somehow it becomes yours too. Andy Miller's production is raw but full, stripped down but complete. Nothing is polished. Nothing is hidden. It’s intimate to the point of feeling a little dangerous.

That's what took me by surprise mostly: how un-American this album feels for an American songwriter. The last band that touched me like this was Arab Strap, and the overlap is clear. It's the same emotional directness, the same sense that someone is telling you the truth. Desolate, yes. But not hopeless. It made me want to hug someone I love, remind me that connection still matters even when everything else is gone.

I don’t really know what to do with this album yet. It left me almost in tears, and that doesn’t happen often anymore. But I know it’s one I’ll carry with me.

Mellow Funky Psychedelic Rock. The guitar sound owes a heavy debt to the twang of Duane Eddy and the surf sound of someone like Dick Dale.

It's pleasant, but I don't feel more than that.

This isn’t chill-out music. Portishead demands your full attention. It’s frozen melancholy in electronic hip-hop jazz, and it’s not meant to relax you. It’s meant to unsettle you.
This album is harder and sharper than Dummy. The production leans into abrasion with heavier beats and harsher scratching. Beth Gibbons sounds like she’s working through demons, her voice raw and fraying at the edges. Where Dummy had a kind of smoky sadness, this one feels claustrophobic and tense.
It isn’t bleak or nihilistic. It’s paranoid. Something feels wrong in every track, but just out of sight. The music mirrors that unease: brittle, disturbed, always slightly threatening. Even the hip-hop elements feel stripped of any swagger. What’s left is anxiety with nowhere to go.
It takes more listening effort than Dummy, but it rewards that effort. You sit down with it and let it work on you. It isn’t easy, but it’s worth it.

Canadian musician Patrick Flegel's seventh album as Cindy Lee is an ambitious, sprawling collection that overflows with brilliant ideas. Some fascinating guitar work and vocals that perfectly contrast the raw, rattling instrumentation. Drawing heavily from 1960s pop with touches of The Beach Boys, Phil Spector girl-pop, and psychedelic rock.

At over two hours and 32 tracks, Diamond Jubilee is undeniably too long. While the rambling, kitchen-sink approach has its appeal, the album's greatest strength is also its weakness. Cut this collection in half and you'd have a 45-minute masterpiece.

I gave this album a fair chance. I listened to it all the way through on first pass, hoping something would click, but every track felt skippable on second listen. This is everything I dislike about modern Spotify-core pop: ultra-smooth bass, plasticky rhythms, endless toplines, and production so polished it turns into emotional wallpaper.

The writing is completely generic. These songs could be sung by almost anyone. And when they are sung by Rita Ora, the vocals are so drenched in autotune they lose any sense of character. Her voice just isn’t strong enough to carry an album that relies almost entirely on personality.

It’s not that this is “bad pop.” It’s “nothing pop.” No spark, no edge, no identity. I know this came out with some hype, but within months it had already vanished from the conversation, and listening now makes it obvious why.

Possibly the weakest entry on the user generated list. I can't believe that after listening to the 1001 albums, you think this is the one missing...

I grew up in the 90s with grunge in my bloodstream. Ten was one of the great pillars of that era for almost everyone, so coming back to Vs. should have felt like home. It never really has for me.

This is a heavier and edgier record than Ten, but it doesn’t feel like a band naturally getting heavier or edgier. It feels like weight they were carrying. The anger is there, but it isn’t the wild, feral anger of the first record. It’s clenched. It’s directed inward. It’s pressure rather than release.
You can hear a band that suddenly found itself massive. A band that was all of a sudden classed as one of the official stewards of “grunge," trying to live up to everything the world expected from them.

There’s still plenty to enjoy here. WMA and Rats hold up well, and Rearviewmirror remains the best song Pearl Jam have ever recorded. But most of the album sounds like a group who lost their fun and their looseness in the rush of becoming one of the biggest bands on the planet but also not repeat Ten.

In later years, Pearl Jam learned how to relax into themselves again. Vs. is the uncomfortable moment in between: important historically, but emotionally strained.

A collision of Latin rhythms, ska, punk attitude and street-corner storytelling. It has the feel of street performance and that gives it a warm and fun energy. It does feel like they're pulling a lot from son, cumbia, danzón, perhaps even more than from early punk.
While reading up on it it seems this really was a foundational album for lots that came after it.
Highly enjoyable

The album where they got really good. It's as if Aphex Twin were noisy punks.
A little more controlled and focused than their earlier work and a little less electronic and cinematic as their later work. Really good pick to showcase the band.

Well then. Turns out I’ve been sleeping on one of Steven Wilson’s best albums. This thing is absolutely marvellous. The themes hit right away: growing older, the insecurity that creeps in with it, fear of being forgotten, the strange loneliness of city life. The story seems to be told from the perspective of a young woman in a huge city, surrounded by friends yet somehow invisible enough that no one notices when she’s gone. It’s unsettling because it’s believable.

Across 11 tracks and more than 65 minutes (yes, it’s long), Wilson walks through an emotional range: calm, intimate passages, heavier raw moments, and everything in between. It never tips into metal, but it definitely borders at times. Melody is the anchor throughout, and Wilson’s unmistakable voice carries the whole thing with ease.

His supporting cast is ridiculous in the best way. Ninet Tayeb’s vocals add real emotional lift. Marco Minnemann and Nick Beggs are a tight rhythm section. Adam Holzman’s keys occasionally explode into brilliant solos. And Guthrie Govan tears the roof off “Routine.”

The album even hands you a couple of radio-ready tracks: the title track and “Perfect Life.” Then it throws you back into the deep end with the 13-minute “Ancestral,” which is more for the prog-lovers, but expansive and emotional rather than show-offy.

Prog rock is very hit-and-miss for me. This is a hit. What really sold me is the emotional layer that runs through every track. Wilson isn’t reinventing anything here, but everything is executed with such care and quality that it doesn’t matter.

Bloody quality, start to finish.

This is undoubtedly the best from The Hold Steady, a band whose albums haven't always been convincing, but on this one, everything falls into place. Are they original? Far from it. Can the singer sing? Not really, but he spits out the words and manages to give it all a certain punk edge. Okay, it's all been done before and better, but sometimes, after a hard day at work, you just want to put on an album full of cheerful music played with obvious joy.

Some people here treat it like avant-garde comedy; others as a bizarre love letter to internet nostalgia. Others just think this is too... online.

Coming at it from a listener’s perspective rather than an internet historian’s: this inside-joke of early 2000's internet culture relies heavily on recognition rather than on craft. If you’ve heard inventive mashup work (like Girl Talk’s Feed the Animals or The Avalanches’ Since I Left You) this feels lazy because, musically, it is. It's honestly a lot of slapping things on top of one another.

Please appreciate it all you like with everything you recognise, but this really isn't for me. And I was there when this all came out. Didn't really appreciate it then either.

On first listen, I didn’t mind this one. It’s got that familiar blend of The War on Drugs atmosphere, Springsteen-style rock and ballad, and a bit of 80s nostalgia. The songs are well-built, the production is lush, and that inevitable saxophone swell at the end of each track feels both predictable and oddly satisfying.

But repeated listens made it clear: this album is beige. Safe, polished, and utterly risk-free.
If there’s such a thing as the opposite of a grower, this is it. Each listen strips away another layer of charm until all that’s left is a carefully arranged, thoroughly forgettable collection of tunes. Three listens was plenty.

Great energetic DIY album and one of the cornerstone records of ska punk and East Bay punk culture.
What I love about this is the idealistic feel this album still has, anti-corporate, anti-elitist, deeply community-driven. None of that cynicism. But talk about unity.

This is not the feel you afterwards got from Rancid.

Then again, this album is one of those albums that’s more important than it is great. You can hear how half the 90s punk scene grew out of it, the chord progressions, the ska upstrokes, the shouted choruses, but as a listening experience, it’s messy, rushed, and often repetitive

3,5*

This is likely an album that means a lot to the submitter and possibly speaks to a certain period in time, likely their mid to late teens?
But stripped of that nostalgia, it just sounds like a hundred other post-grunge bands trying to sound meaningful. Big choruses, vague angst, and polished production that feels more radio than raw.

This album is smooth, polished, and safe to the point of sterility. Tom Misch is clearly a skilled guitarist and has an ear for groove, but Geography is pure Spotify-core: hyper-produced, mid-tempo, and designed to please everyone without challenging anyone.

There’s nothing wrong with easy listening or coffee-shop funk, but I kept wishing his playing was in a rougher, more daring context. The beats are simple, the edges too clean, and the whole thing feels airbrushed. Funk, jazz, and hip-hop all make an appearance, but only in the most polite way possible.

A pleasant listen, sure, but far too safe to stick.

A darkly atmospheric album that reminded me a bit of Laibach due to the ritualistic industrial of the songs. Tracks like Hollow and Alive, hit that sweet spot between raw industrial weight and dark ambient trance for me

A holiday record of an energetic blind couple. I almost feel like there's a movie in there somewhere

A genuine surprise, and a genuinely fun album. This is pure European synth-pop for the dance floor, the kind of record that could only have happened when Sparks met Giorgio Moroder.
It’s fast, busy, and full of energy. “Academy Award Performance” is a gloriously over-the-top standout for me, and “Beat the Clock” is as catchy and propulsive as anything Moroder ever produced. Love the extra drums in there as well.

A Saturday-night record.

Even before forming an opinion on this album, you have to admit that its absence from the original Dimmery list is a massive oversight. Whether you enjoy it or not, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea has had an enormous impact on music and on music fans. It’s the record that made half the indie men in the world pick up a guitar (for some reason it was always the men) and it shaped how a generation thought emotional honesty should sound.

It’s lo-fi, cracked, and often out of tune, but that’s exactly why it hit so hard for many. It came out at the moment when irony was collapsing, when sincerity was starting to feel radical again. Suddenly it was fine to sing too loudly, to be weirdly intense, to write about ghosts and grief and Anne Frank. That shift opened the door for everything from Funeral-era Arcade Fire to Bright Eyes and Beirut.

Even if you can’t stand Jeff Mangum’s voice, it’s impossible to deny the influence. This album made imperfection fashionable again.
Whether you think it’s a masterpiece or a myth, it changed the conversation and that alone earns its place in the canon.