Prince Daddy & The Hyena is an alternative rock album that doesn't really bring anything new. Ni fu ni fa, as the Spanish idiom I see used on this site a lot goes.
A second and third listen didn't help. Some songs started to annoy me, "El Dorado" most of all, mostly because it's so mediocre and middle of the road.
Rated 8/10
Whatever and Ever Amen is a super fun album with heaps of uptempo songs, and I appreciated it much more than I expected to. The lyrics are great, and unlike a lot of clever or funny lyrics, ("Give me my money back, you bitch!") they stay good after repeated listens.
"Fair" is my favourite song on the album, for the combination of text, music and feeling. Musically, "One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces" is my favourite.
Rated 10/10
Thunder and Consolation is an album I still adore, even if (oh horror!) I like some other New Model Army albums better. It's a five star record for me regardless.
This is a rock record that contains everything that makes music worthwhile: passion, fighting spirit, fierce determination, and grim, incisive lyrics. Music simply doesn't get more urgent than this. The moment you hear the ominous opening of "I Love the World", you know this album is a winner. "White Coats" delivers the ultimate kick in the teeth. Beautifully done.
It's also one of the very few albums from the 80s that I never replaced with a remaster, because the bonus tracks were missing from it. That's baffling to me, since "Archway Towers", "The Charge" and "Nothing Touches" are on the same level as the original album and might well belong among its highlights, next to the amazing "Green and Grey" of course. Spotify has the bonus tracks on its listing, so that's good.
Note: in 2019 they released From Here and in 2024 Unbroken. I urge anyone that like this to see what this band does with an extra 30 years. It's marvellous.
Rated 8/10
A strange combination on paper, deep South Black musical tradition, blues stomp and gospel, fused with black metal. I like both styles separately, so the pairing itself was never going to be an issue for me.
The issue, such as it is, comes down to execution rather than concept. Not every track lands with the same strength, the quality shifts noticeably from song to song, and it doesn't always come through as powerfully as the idea behind it deserves.
But as a whole, I like this. It's not perfect, but it's interesting and curious enough that it kept pulling me back for repeat listens, and that counts for a lot.
Rated 6/10
This was a huge hit in the 90s, and that was never really a surprise. After the relentless weight of the grunge era, something this light was probably exactly what alternative rock needed at that point.
Listening back now, it's not the best music, and some of the lyrics are fun for about two listens before the joke wears thin. But a handful of songs still stand tall. Kitty remains genuinely great, I remember doing the meow meow along with tens of thousands of people at Pinkpop 1996 during that song, and it was a lot of fun. PUSA was at the top of their game. Peaches, Dune Buggy, and Lump all still hold up as fun listens too.
Great? No, not even back then. But it was a breath of fresh air in the musical landscape at the time, and it's still a genuinely fun rock album today. Something you need to hear before you die? Nah. But it earned its place in the story of that era, and that's probably exactly why it's still fun now.
Rated 2/10
I'll be honest, I hated this. Not entirely new territory either, I came across the same artist before under his own name, Neil Cicierega, with Mouth Sounds, and my problem with that one was the same as here: heavy on internet-culture recognition, light on actual craft.
Spirit Phone is less mashup and more proper songs this time, reaching back into 80s and 90s synth territory, but not in a good way. The music itself is just bad. Standard and forgettable.
I have to lead with this: I have a genuine issue with how this is marketed. Naming Kenny Wayne Shepherd as the artist on this album feels bloody rich. The artists here are Neal Pattman, Clarence Brown, Bryan Lee, John Dee Holeman, and the rest of the legends and near-forgotten blues musicians he travelled the back roads of New Orleans, Shreveport, and Kansas to find and record, in juke joints and on front porches.
True, Shepherd deliberately stays in the background on nearly every track, no guitar showboating, no attempt to be the star. This is a field-recording preservation project he financed and organised, using his own name and platform to get these players heard and documented before they were gone. Five of them died before the album and documentary were even finished.
But that context matters, and I have a genuinely hard time rating this as a Kenny Wayne Shepherd record when it so clearly isn't one, in any meaningful sense.
But holy shit, is this good. The music itself is absolutely fantastic. This is an album I could listen to over and over, and I deeply appreciate what Shepherd actually did here, using his position to preserve something that would otherwise have been lost. My issue is entirely with the framing, not with what's actually on the record.
Five stars, and a genuine thank you to Jerry McCain, B.B. King, Henry Townsend, Etta Baker, and everyone else who made this what it is.
Rated 8/10
The Beach Boys album that takes a few listens.
Rated 8/10
A beautiful second album from these melancholic souls out of the UK. The music isn't the easiest listen, but it's not exactly hard to digest either, and I'm particularly enjoying the wide range of instruments at play throughout. It isn't fast paced, but the original approach and Stuart Staples' vocals are the standout features of the whole package, sitting on top of compositions that are simply solid throughout.
The record creates a brooding, pitch-black atmosphere, something quintessentially autumnal, black romanticism might be the best way to put it. The Nick Cave influence is there, but you won't find the explosive outbursts Cave sometimes unleashes on his earlier records. These are Brits, after all, they tend to keep their cards close to their chest.
It's over an hour of genuinely great, beautifully arranged music, hats off to the production, but it does suffer a bit from long-album syndrome, mostly because the tempo stays so uniformly slow throughout with very little pacing shift to break things up. I get a similar feeling here to what I have with Elbow, a band capable of one truly great album if you mixed and matched the best songs from two or three of their records.
I'm a sucker for pure melancholy, and a surprising amount happens in these songs without me even fully noticing it while listening.
Travelling Light is my standout track, though Tiny Tears is also great, if already well known.
Four stars, could easily have been five with a bit of culling. A luxury problem if ever there was one.
Rated 4/10
There's so much genuinely boundary-pushing music in the metal scene right now, and Nu Delhi just isn't it. This is nu metal built on the foundations of Sepultura, Fear Factory, Electric Callboy, bands who do all of this better, with some localised Hindu instrumentation layered on top.
The BABYMETAL collaboration is strangely enough the clear standout on the record. But most of the rest lacks the hooks to stay engaging across a full listen.
Bands exist who fuse native and traditional music with metal far more interestingly than this, and against that standard, Nu Delhi doesn't feel like it earns a place here. I like metal. This just isn't pushing anything forward.
Rated 8/10
I think this remains an underappreciated album, and part of that comes down to Dave Navarro, the guitarist who played with Jane's Addiction both before and after this period. I genuinely enjoy his playing, and it feels like a real missed opportunity that his time in the band ended so abruptly after just this one record.
I had a partner around this time who was a massive Chili Peppers fan, but I never fully converted the way she did. Kiedis has a distinctive voice, but I was never much of a fan of his singing, and I always found their albums at least somewhat inconsistent. Even Blood Sugar Sex Magik, which has some genuinely great tracks, has always felt to me like it maxed out the CD running time unnecessarily. Cut twenty-five minutes and it's a great record. As it stands, it's just a good one.
One Hot Minute has the same issue, and it drags a bit for the same reason, a handful of songs here simply aren't strong enough to justify the runtime, and Flea getting more room to sing wasn't really necessary either. But the album is varied and diverse, and this is roughly the last time the band genuinely pushed their own musical boundaries. Warped, Aeroplane, and My Friends are all catchy, even if they don't quite reach the level of genuine gems.
Kiedis's heroin addiction and what seems like a distracted Rick Rubin behind the desk make this feel like a false start rather than a dead end. There's a real alternate reality where the band bounced back from here with Navarro still in the fold, and I find that more interesting than dismissing this as simply a lesser record.
I never grew along with the band's later evolution. I bought Californation afterward, but my interest faded significantly from there. Mother's Milk, Blood Sugar Sex Magik, and One Hot Minute are the only three albums that still genuinely excite me. After that, the magic was gone for me. And the darker, heavier side of the band that shows up here is a side I actually quite like.
Rated 4/10
News at 11 is apparently vaporwave, specifically the mallsoft strain, built from slowed down and processed smooth jazz, elevator music, and easy listening, and here that palette gets repurposed for something darker than a shopping mall. The concept is striking: soundbites from television broadcasts, talk shows, commercials, the news, sampled from the hours before the September 11 attacks, all laid over that same slick, unbothered elevator jazz underneath.
It's clearly meant to sit somewhere between soothing and unnerving, evoking a parallel universe where the day simply keeps going and nothing ever happens. I can appreciate that as conceptual art, the idea is genuine and the discomfort it's reaching for is real on paper.
It just doesn't do anything for me as a listening experience. I respect what it's trying to do far more than I actually enjoy hearing it.
Rated 10/10
I can't believe Crazy Rhythms is from 1980. The post-punk DNA is obvious, but you can also hear exactly where later alternative rock bands like R.E.M. got some of their ideas. This feels like a cult album that absolutely should have been on the original list.
The Feelies' debut seems to inhabit a dimension entirely its own, far removed from much of the New Wave around it. Even the cover is a classic: a legendary bunch of nerds, deliberately presented in direct opposition to the rock-star theatricality of the time.
The opening track, “The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness,” hits immediately. A catchy, endlessly repeating guitar riff gets pushed to almost epic proportions by Anton Fier's drumming. A lot of the album carries that same Neu!-style motorik pulse, with Klaus Dinger's influence audible throughout, but beefed up considerably. “Forces at Work” is probably the clearest example. “Fa Cé-La” is short, cheerful, almost cheesy, with its repeated “fa fa fa fa fa cé-la,” yet somehow this band makes it work.
Fier is only one part of the equation. The guitar duo and songwriting team of Glenn Mercer and Bill Million are firing on all cylinders, with virtually every track offering something memorable. “Moscow Nights” is hypnotic, “Original Love” almost semi-acoustic, “Loveless Love” has a fascinating structure, “Raised Eyebrows” is simply delightful, and the title track closes the album with an acid-soaked jam. There's also a healthy dose of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground running through the whole thing.
The combination is what makes Crazy Rhythms so compelling. Fier's drumming can become almost diabolical in its repetition, while Mercer and Million keep laying genuinely catchy songs over the top. Hypnotic and melodic at the same time. An unusual and completely winning combination.
It's been a long time since an album blew me away like this. “The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness,” “Loveless Love,” “Forces at Work,” “Raised Eyebrows,” and “Crazy Rhythms” are all favourites, which is an unusually long list for such a short record.
Exceptionally good.
This is quite the exquisite example of chamber jazz from the veteran duo Carla Bley and Steve Swallow (aged 83 and 79, respectively, at the time of recording) and their longtime collaborator Andy Sheppard (62).
These three suites are defined above all by the serene calm that permeates the performances. This trio truly had nothing left to prove, and it shows. It also demonstrates once again that Bley remains a gifted composer. The synergy is wonderful; these musicians were so perfectly in tune with one another.
Rated 8/10
Splendor & Misery could easily fill pages of commentary on its own. It tells the story of Cargo № 2331, a slave held captive on a spaceship, breaking free after an uprising, only to end up the sole living soul left on the vessel. The ship is run by an intelligent onboard computer that gradually falls in love with him. It's a genuinely dystopian concept with real political weight, technology, power, social inequality, all of it carrying both outrage and a desperate urge to escape. In the end 2331 doesn't return to the rest of humanity. He flies the ship out into the vastness of space instead.
Form and content are perfectly balanced here, thanks to Daveed Diggs and producers Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson. Diggs uses his delivery to tell you exactly who's speaking, the album's opening verses are the computer's emotionless, rapid-fire reaction to the uprising starting. The production throughout is harsh, noisy, mechanical, industrial, but fragments of melody keep breaking through, and a lot of that melodic material is clearly rooted in chain-gang music, not just in the a cappella passages on Long Way Away and Story. Future, present, and past all get woven together through Cargo № 2331's story in ways that feel genuinely intentional.
The concept isn't just a convenient metaphor bolted onto political themes, or a vehicle for clipping.'s love of science fiction. It actually aligns with the group's musical style at a structural level.
That said, does it actually sound good? I'm honestly still not entirely sure. It isn't the most comfortable listen, but those are often the albums that reward repeat listening the most. On concept and content alone, this is the most interesting hip hop album I've come across on this list so far.
Rated 4/10
I just find this too hard to rate. Objectively this one of the very best albums in the genre. Subjectively this is everything I dislike about Hardrock/metal. It's really just not my subgenre.
The Sensational Alex Harvey Band were primarily known as a live sensation, and listening to Tomorrow Belongs to Me, that tracks. You can feel that the album misses some of the vicious punch a live show would have carried, pushing boundaries into the genuinely over the top, but even reined in for the studio it's intense. Theatrical, flamboyant, swinging between self-confidence and self-deprecation, drawing heavily on music hall, cabaret, and French chanson, then layered over with hard rock, blues rock, and a Zappa-esque sense of sprawl.
'Working class glam king' is a genuinely apt description of what's happening here, and it's a shame the band has been somewhat overshadowed by the more celebrated glam acts, Bowie and the Spiders, Roxy Music, T. Rex.
Their influence is undeniable regardless. You can draw a direct line from Harvey through to Nick Cave, Bon Scott of AC/DC, Iggy Pop and even Robert Smith of The Cure, and plenty of others. Hearing where some of my own favourite artists actually came from was worth the listen on its own.
Definitely hearing the Deee-Lite influence here, and it's incredibly danceable, proper dance floor material. I wouldn't call it satire so much as camp, done in a genuinely fun way.
This isn't something I'd put on at home for fun, but I'd absolutely play it out when DJing, and a couple of these songs are going straight into my upbeat road trip playlists. Better Sit Down Boy and Boyfriend are the ones that stood out clearly after two listens.
Not every song holds up, and I'm not convinced a full album of this actually works as a front-to-back listen. This feels like a singles band rather than an album band. Would I put it on the 1001 list? No. But a few of these tracks are well worth having in your back pocket before a night out.
Rated 6/10
When I moved to Brisbane from Europe in 2010, people were genuinely outraged that I hadn't heard of Powderfinger. They couldn't believe it wasn't a household name internationally. Silverchair got a bit further overseas, but Powderfinger were right up there in the conversation, and here in Australia these guys were massive, half a dozen number one albums, an act you simply couldn't avoid growing up in this country.
Odyssey Number Five is pleasant, and in a slightly different alternate reality they'd have been as big internationally as Crowded House or Coldplay. It just wasn't meant to be. The slower tracks are where it's strongest for me, Waiting for the Sun and These Days especially, but not every song on here carries that same quality.
A perfectly solid, occasionally great road trip album. Might invoke the wrath of my fellow Aussies for saying so, but three stars for me.
Rated 4/10
The vocal talent is real, Liniker can genuinely sing, and that's about the only thing that consistently lands for me here. Musically this is generic R&B, made in a style that's barely evolved since the 90s. The handful of tracks leaning into Brazilian rhythm and uptempo influence are a bit better, more life to them, more actual rhythm, but the rest is largely forgettable.
I'm keeping that judgment entirely separate from the album's social significance, Liniker's history as the first transgender to win a Latin Grammy is genuinely important. But on musical merit alone, this doesn't come close to justifying a place on this list.
