Reviews by pops

Ms Dynamite - now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time. And I say that as someone who owns this album. There’s some filler, but the best tracks have held up much better than I was expecting. It’s a promising debut, so it’s a shame she never really delivered on it.

It’s real separating the art from the artist territory. Because Kanye West is a terrible person, but this is a great album.

In 1960s pop, it was often a very fine line between social commentary and outright sneering at people who have day jobs and live in the suburbs, and I'm not sure Ray Davies always walks it that well on this one. However, there are some great songs here, and Victoria is one of the Kinks' best.

The opening track Pristine reminded me of the Velvet Underground, and there were a few other songs where I found myself wondering “who does this sound like?” It's not bad, and I really liked a couple of tracks, but I'm not sure it's quite good enough to justify the length (or maybe it's place on this list).

I knew I'd bought If I Can't Change Your Mind as a single, but was under the impression that I'd never heard the whole album. Then when I was listening to Copper Blue, I realised I knew a lot more of the tracks than I thought I did. There are some good songs here (and I still love If I Can't Change Your Mind), but the fact that I might have owned this album or at least borrowed it from someone and then forgotten about it isn't exactly a ringing endorsement.

In 1987, people probably hadn’t realised just how bad Michael Jackson truly was (like really, really bad), but they must have noticed that he was hitting a creative dead end. There are some fun tracks but as an album, Bad is pretty patchy, and his vocal mannerisms are starting to slip into self-parody territory.

As this site is pretty much anonymous, I'll reveal I first heard this album when my brother had it on cassette when we were kids - I have an inkling he now wouldn't want anyone to know he was once a U2 fan. I suspect he's not the only person rewriting history where U2 are concerned, but if you ask me, there's no shame in liking The Joshua Tree. There's a reason this album turned them into the biggest band in the world for a while.

I don’t really know what Frank Zappa was trying to achieve with this. It’s not enjoyable to listen to, it’s not funny and I don’t know what the message is beyond “everyone is stupid except Frank Zappa.”

One of the rare albums where you can say “that’s not music, it’s just noise” without sounding like an old fart because that’s what they were going for. Some tracks might even feature literal old farts. It was interesting as a one-off, but can’t see this one turning up in my Spotify wrapped.

I heard Heads Will Roll for the first time in ages recently, and was reminded what a banger it is. This album proves the Yeah Yeah Yeahs had more great tunes where that came from.

A bit of a mixed bag - the tracks I liked, I loved. At its best, this is a really fun and inventive use of sampling. However, some of it just kind of washed over me.

One of the tracks is called The Heart Remains a Child but I’ve always found Everything but the Girl a bit too grown up. Tracey Thorn has a great voice but they went from making tasteful pop to tasteful dance without ever sounding that excited about it. I just want them to put a bit of oomph into it.

Is it considered poor form to give one review multiple thumbs up? Because the person who described this as 'yacht prog' has got it bang on. That's a genre I didn't know I needed in my life. (I also like the way Martyn draws on dub influences without lurching into awkward white reggae territory.)

To use a generator term, The Cure are one of my uncontroversial artists - I’ve had three albums by them and I’ve given them all four stars. If I had to pick a favourite though, I’d go with this.

I surprised myself by liking this. The mix of Brazilian percussion and heavy rock on some tracks was really interesting. If this was 10 to 15 minutes shorter, I might have given it four stars.

I’ve seen Badly Drawn Boy live a couple of times, and he doesn’t try to hide the fact that his career hasn’t panned out the way he’d hoped. In retrospect, maybe this album had all his big ideas and that’s why it proved hard to top (and why it’s a shade too long) but it is a great debut.

The generator gave me the all killer, no filler Sticky Fingers as my 13th album and unluckily for the Stones, it may have spoiled me for their other albums. Don't get me wrong, this one is still really good, and it begins and ends with two of their all-time greatest tracks. But around Midnight Rambler it starts to get, well, a bit rambling.

It's very much variations on a theme - but what a theme. And Little Richard's energy is still infectious.

Every day's a school day - I never realised Hung Up was referencing Madonna's duet with Prince. Maybe the reason I'd never heard Love Song before is because that track is less than the sum of its parts - for two of the 80s most provocative pop stars, they don't have much chemistry – but the rest of this is Madonna at the top of her game.

What a singular, fascinating album. It varies from the fun (Heaps of the Sheeps) to the beautiful (Maryan) to the flat-out annoying (The Duchess) - and that's just the first three tracks.