Reviews by pops

When it started, I thought I was going to love it, but my enthusiasm dwindled as it went on. Maybe there's just a limit on how much I can enjoy this sort of thing - I only gave the Pogues three stars too.

Hey, hey it's the Monkees! They were maybe more of a singles band, and this is a tad patchy, but I'm glad to see Headquarters on the list, if only for Randy Scouse Git and the gorgeous You Just May Be the One, both of which they wrote themselves.
(Also, I never knew Mistadobalina by Del tha Funky Homosapien was inspired by the Monkees - every day's a school day.)

As someone who owns this album, I was genuinely surprised that this is rated so low. I'll concede that Hearts on Fire and I Can't Dance are skippable, but don't the rest of you find those Emmylou Harris harmonies on Love Hurts, $1000 Wedding and the title track truly spine tingling? No? Just me? Ok.

I had a friend who thought Pavement were singing that they wanted Two Steaks rather than States, which I think is more relatable. As for the music, I found it kind of irritating when it started, but it grew on me as it went along.

This lady loves cool James - the whole album is a lot of fun and the title track is an all-timer.

My rating style is Cheerleader and out of 573 albums, I’ve only given 12 one-star reviews. So Public Image Limited should probably be proud to have two of them - it feels like John Lydon at least set out to be deliberately annoying.

I liked this, but No Substitute made me think I’d have liked a fully solo John Lee Hooker album, rather than one with an host of celebrity collaborations, even more.

I’m partial to the Small Faces and this is a fun album, but I do prefer it when Steve Marriott ditches his “one of Monty Python in a headscarf” voices and slips back into his full-throated rock voice.

I See Your Dad Is Taking The Divorce Well: The Album.

Years ago, I horrified my dad by saying that I preferred Rod Stewart’s version of Downtown Train to the original. I still think that’s a decent cover, but I can understand why my dad was so aghast now - I have come around to Waits a lot since then. I really liked this.

Sonic Youth are one of those bands I always want to like more than I actually do. I thought this was decent but I didn’t love it.

Poor Kurt - even when he was trying to put off all the “wrong sort” of fans, he couldn’t help writing bangers.

It has its moments, but it also did slightly too good a job of conveying the apparent tedium of being a rock star. You can shoehorn a lot of self-pity into 80 minutes.

The reviewer who said that this transports you to a backpacker hostel in the early 2000s has it spot on. But there are worse places to be.

So much of this is great (Free Man in Paris especially), but I'm deducting a star for Twisted. For the sake of our sanity and hers, no one wants to get Joni Mitchell on the subject of how much she identifies with jazz musicians, but I don't think it really works.

I liked this a lot - it feels loose and improvised, but they cram enough hooks into that tight 36-minute runtime to let you know there’s real craft here.

I hate to play favourites with the Wu-Tang Clan, but Ghostface Killah, I think I might love you most of all. When everyone else was losing their sense of quality control, he was still making classics like this.

If a music genie granted me the power to pick one artist who died tragically young and hear the albums they would have made if they’d lived, I’d pick Otis Redding. He died after writing Sittin' On the Dock of the Bay and wowing a crowd of hippies at the Monterey Festival, which suggests to me that he was ready to move in some interesting musical directions. But given that I’m unlikely to get my wish, I’ll settle for listening to this stone-cold classic.

Could have done without the skits, fam, but given that British rap is a bit of a blind spot for me, I enjoyed this.

I listened to this two days ago without a prompt from the generator just because I was in the mood to hear it, and I still listened to it again today because you can’t really have too much Rumours. So as much as I’d like to be a contrarian, I have to give this five stars. (If Stevie Nicks had got her way and they’d included Silver Springs, it would be six.)