Reviews by rylee

Oh no. Ohhhh no.

This is one of THE most hated albums on the site. I understood why, at least I thought I did at first. It's noisy, it's hectic, it's unpredictable and downright scary sometimes, and it's got a whiny singer. All your least favorite things for most of you, right? That's part of what drew me to it. I love noisy, I love weird singers, I love unpredictability and being so taken aback and astonished by whatever it is I just heard. I was so ready to sing my praises for the album before I even heard it, because it seemed so in line with everything else I usually like!

And then I heard it, and you were all proven right. I'm not sure if I'll be able to get into this. Many of my friends are early Pere Ubu fans, so it might need a bit of time on my end to appreciate. But I just...this singer, man. He's a bit too whiny, even for me. If I felt the songs were stronger, I'd probably appreciate him more. But I don't even think the songs behind him are that great. Caligari's Mirror I found to be just too bizarre for my tastes. The songs aren't even boring, I can say that. Nothing about the album is boring. But to me, there's not enough to latch onto. Not enough legitimately pleasing musicality. The amount of times I felt like I was listening to a ringtone, or listening to my dryer cycle being done...

Maybe in a few years I'll grow to love this, just like I did with some other favorites of mine. But now is not the time. As of right now, I don't want to come back to a single song on this again. I have to give it a 1 just so I can laugh at my ratings in five years time when I end up loving it.

I was so prepared to give this a 1. This is already in a genre I historically dislike, and I figured I could up sum up the album by saying "There are two different songs on Tommy where the titular character gets molested by a family member. No thank you."

But here's the thing. I listened to the first half while driving to go on a first date. And it went really well. (Future Rylee, what is it with you and girls named Lily?) On the drive back, I found myself enjoying Tommy significantly more. It's not just the fact that the second half contains Pinball Wizard, the only truly fantastic song on the album. But it's a little louder, a little more rockin'. A little happier. Or maybe that was just the butterflies in my stomach talking.

While I'm still not a big fan of this genre of prog rock, and I do not like the innate exaggerated performances that come with it, I have at least a tiny bit of affection for Tommy. Maybe if it was shorter, and had one less song about molestation, or more songs like Pinball Wizard or Go to the Mirror, or if I liked Billy Joel more, who obviously took a lot of inspiration from the song Sally Simpson.

Tommy could've been a lot of things for me. I don't think it ever could have been a fantastic listen, but it could've been a lot worse if that date didn't go well.

Everything I could think of that I might want to say just doesn't feel right. His rapping ability. The influence he had. The real shitty things he did. The shitty things he got accused of doing. The difficulty there is to distinguish between those two. I'm not equipped to talk about any of it. All I know is that, in general, I wasn't really a fan.

Not the kind of thing I wanted to listen to during a headache, immediately after a bad date. It went almost perfectly. But she kept calling me "boy" after getting a little too drunk. I wonder, when I read these reviews back far in the future, I will remember who this is, or if she'll still be in my life. Hey future Rylee, her name begins with A. Remember?

Anyway, 50 minutes of mediocre Elvis Costello didn't help. I really liked the first album I heard from him, This Year's Model, but this is far less exciting. More bloated. More varied, sure, but that means there's a higher chance for things here to sound like something I don't like. And most of the time, I don't. Sorry.

I don't hate it. You might be surprised to hear that, given the abysmal rating I'm giving the album. Admittedly, I'm a little proud of the rating. This is the first album I've come across in this project that 1) I was very familiar with before starting, and 2) I really don't like. My first one-star to a classic, highly--regarded album? Maybe it's a badge of honor.

I respect it more than anything. I know it's a big deal to a lot of people, including other musicians. And that's fine. But I still find it monumentally boring. From the intro track, I always get tricked into thinking that the album will be full of exciting cuts and scratches, chopped-up sentences and the like. It isn't. Well, not entirely. That's about 10% of it. The other 90% is droning beats that go on far too long. Every time a new song starts, I hear the first beat loop, and I realize that this is the beat I am going to get tired of very quickly. I still like the vitality of The Number Song, and the kickass intro to Mutual Slump. That's about it. I cannot, for the life of me, get into the rest of the album.

Everything about Endtroducing makes me want to listen to something else of which it reminds me. The mountain jazz of Eivind Aarset and Nils Petter Molvaer. The SimCity 4 soundtrack. Anything but this.

All the kickass spy movie themes I've ever loved seem to originate from this man! James Bond, The Incredibles which is obviously parodying James Bond, Sly Cooper, Peter Gunn and the two games I can think of which sample that theme, all of it. All of it came from this guy. I loved this. Why is it that I seem to rate things 5/5 twice in a row? Almost every time I give a 5/5, the next album I rate is usually a 5/5 too. Maybe I'm just excited.

FUTURE RYLEE: Next time you play a show and you're feeling antsy, and you're pacing around the room waiting to start performing, ask them to play this over the PA instead of whatever grindcore or noise rock they're playing. This shit kicks ass and it can only ever get you hyped up.

FOR A VERY LONG TIME FOR A VERY LONG TIME FOR A VERY LONG TIME FOR A VERY LONG TI

I truly was not expecting to love this album whatsoever. I looked at every single one of the genre tags and not a single one appealed to me. So color me fucking surprised, I loved this front to back!

I enjoyed the fast pace of the first track, and how widely critical its message is, even though it's dated. And even though that's the fastest song on the album, I feel like the intensity never slows down. Every song makes me wanna bob my head constantly, every song is super catchy. Even if the lyrics are...weird. I'm still trying to figure out what exactly is going on in Geisha Boys and Temple Girls. But I LOVED this thing. I was really shocked by it!

I love it when an artist carries themselves with swagger. Like hell yeah, express yourself, don't even try to convince me that you're cool, because you already know you are. BDE. Hell yeah. This album has the E but not the BD to back it up.

I wish these songs had more /song/ to them. Most of them are pretty short, revolving around a very simple riff with even simpler lyrics. Even Maps, an obvious standout, is built on super sparse verses and a chorus that happens to be quite catchy. I wanted a fuller mix, though. It's a little too raw for me. That rawness does come with incredible energy throughout its entirety, but there just isn't enough meat on the bones to make it all that satisfying for me.

Might have been influenced by the fact that I listened to this album while absolutely dead tired. I drove five hours with my friend Kylee to see Modest Mouse. They were pretty good.

I don't know the history of reggae music, but Bob Marley is iconoclast in that field, so this feels like a satisfactory place to start. And I did like the album while it was on. It was...fine. But as it continued, it started to get tougher to differentiate the songs from one another. There's nothing inherently wrong with an album that's just a "vibe" but I was hoping for something more. It's pleasant, but I'm struggling to find more words to write about it...

I was so ready to just absolutely dread this album. I'd heard about Morrissey and I thought he was some crazed alt-right nutjob. And I was kiiinda right. But to be honest, I did some reading before listening to this album, and a lot of the quotes I read were very tame. Sometimes he's deliberately obtuse or contrarian, but the vibe I got from him wasn't "crazy Trumpie uncle." It was more "that one kid in my class in high school that said really stupid shit but it made sense to him and he was genuinely confused as to why everyone was laughing at him." Looking at you, Max.

So that's not why I disliked You Are The Quarry. It was mostly because, well, the songs just aren't good. They should've been! All of the instrumentals here are well-produced, they're pretty, they're rockin' and they just sound good. I liked them. I did not like Morrissey's lyrics at all. His voice is fine, but for every single song, it sounds like he wrote the lyrics without ever hearing the accompaniment, and then forced himself to apply his lyrics to the song unchanged. They just don't mesh whatsoever. It sounds very awkward, especially when Morrissey is singing the least subtle lyrics known to man.

And oh my god, why won't be shut up about how single he is? Every other song, he's complaining about how unloved or unloveable he is. Maybe if he stops bitching about it, he'll find someone. He even blames Jesus for it in track 3. He seems to blame everyone except himself. What a loser.

I really didn't like it, but at least the instrumentals were serviceable. I'm giving it 2 stars because I know it can get worse.

I can feel it when I type. I have no personality. Everything I've done is just a ripoff from somebody else. I can hear it in my head whenever I say anything, I'm just parroting something I've heard or have been told before. It's aggravating. Any speck of self-examination I try to do is shot down by my own brain. I don't know how to fix this. I don't know if therapy has been helping me. I feel like an idiot. I don't know how to do anything. I can read numbers, but I can't read people, or figure out how to accomplish simple tasks. I often embarrass myself. I'm not cut out for my job, I'm not cut out for a relationship, I don't even feel really qualified for existence. I often feel like I may actually take my own life after this 1,001 album journey is over. I don't want to, I definitely don't want to die, but I feel like I have to. My brain doesn't work. I don't know how to fix it.

This album isn't helping. Every song felt like its own individual kind of nothingness. Her vocal chops are great, and I guess she's versatile. But why are so many of these songs covers? The best songs, the beginning and the end, were the only songs across the entire album that she wrote. I wish she had done that more often.

It was great! I had never really heard Pixies before, but looking back, I understand better how they were influencing some of the biggest bands of all time, like Radiohead and Nirvana. The one thing that really surprises me was how Frank's scream sounded. I loved the...the....

I'm gonna be honest guys, I haven't been getting great sleep lately. Work has been really stressing me out. I've been sleeping next to an open window because the weather is getting warmer, and there has been someone cruising every night, and their engine is just SCREAMING down the road. It woke me up at 2 AM last night. It's crazy, and really getting on my nerves.

So I know I liked Surfer Rosa quite a bit, but I don't have the energy to write the kind of review I usually do. I'm more fatigued than normal. And it's funny that I write this as if literally anyone is reading these other than me. Hello future Rylee.

When anyone over the age of 45 talks crap about "techno" and how much they hate it, they're talking about a specific song from this album, even if they don't realize it.

The song 'It Doesn't Matter' perfectly embodies everything people think of when they describe "techno" whether it's good or bad. It has a nonsense vocal line, seemingly self-aware in its meaning. It's both hypnotically repetitive, as the bass is just one simple note that sounds atonal when compared to every other element of the song, while the drums remain undanceable as they scatter all over the beat with every measure. There is no melody to speak of, as all the high-end is either skating along the top of the drums or playing with this annoying, incessant "wew" sound. It doesn't make a lick of sense, the bass doesn't do anything, there is little to no progression at all in this song.

But I loooove that song. It's my favorite from Dig Your Own Hole. In fact, I love the entire back half of the album, and the short suite of songs that kicks off with It Doesn't Matter. That first bass hit is just bliss to me. This entire album gives me that same feeling. I'm not a huge big beat fan. My knowledge of it doesn't really go past the greatest hits from The Prodigy and the debut Crystal Method album. But this album has always stood out to me, ever since I heard it for the first time in high school. It's uniform in its presentation, but when you dig deeper, there are so many eccentric nuances that get you hooked. Weird sound design choices, strange drums, near-gibberish vocal samples, not to mention the real psychedelic edge throughout the whole album, especially on the last track.

I know that almost no one on this site enjoys techno, at least not the ones selected for the 1001 books. That's because they hear songs like It Doesn't Matter and are thrown off-balance by its awkwardness. That's fine. I love that shit.

I noticed that this one also has Nile Rodgers credited on it. I think that's funny because the guitar is like the least interesting thing about this album. I liked the vocals, I liked the basslines, I liked the grooves made by the drummer, there might've been a song in here that didn't have guitar. I wouldn't know.

It was fine. I didn't actively dislike it. But I also heard it while playing video games with my friend Molly. So it was the soundtrack to a pleasant time.

Molly is bad at Slay the Spire 2.

Oh my god. Lighten up y’all. This album is great! So many people, specifically on this site, are writing it off completely for god-knows-what. It probably scares them. This is no raunchier than the classic Led Zeppelin songs, not any more blunt than cuts from Frank by Amy Winehouse. But this can’t be here? A black-led concept album talking explicitly about the agency (or lack thereof) that women have over their own bodies? Shut up.

It’s not perfect, I wish the beats weren’t so minimal. They could have stronger instrumentation. But the vocal performances from everyone are just fantastic. Her singing is great, her chemistry with Lennox and her voice is perfect, I even love Anderson .Paak’s rap verse despite the fact that he is clearly trying to make the song about himself.

Heaux Tales doesn’t overstay its welcome, and it doesn’t compromise its vision in the slightest. As of right now, it’s the most recent addition to the 1001 Album list. The recent additions always get the same treatment. The only difference between this and Microshift is that Microshift actually deserves the criticism. This doesn’t need any more hate from racist, sexist people.

I do like it, don't get me wrong. The grooves that are present are great, the production is awesome, makes everything sound tight. But I've been spoiled by Stop Making Sense.

Talking Heads are at their best when they are jamming on a strong groove, and even the best songs here don't get the chance to do that for long enough. I love the song Life During Wartime. But I love the Stop Making Sense version ten times more. Same goes for the song Heaven, unfortunately, I love how it's really able to soar in the live version!

I forgot how much I liked the song Memories Can't Wait. That one kicked ass. Talking Heads have always been in my orbit, but I've never really fallen for them completely. No individual album has enough strength to win me over. But I'm sure I'll get there eventually.

hey I'm really tired but I just want y'all to know that Neil Young makes cool music. I liked this album. I feel like if anyone out there hates Bob Dylan, you might like Neil Young, because they accomplish the same things but like from different angles. It's cool. I need to go to bed

Okay, so...obviously a lot of people older than me have super pleasant memories with this album. That's awesome. And I do love lots of techno, for example I'm very happy to see a Floating Points album on the user albums list. I enjoy his entire discography. But this is something I just can't get into.

It came out in 1993, and it sounds like it. I love techno that's really aggressive, trunk-knocking, heavy. Unless it's something I'm actively trying to fall asleep to, like anything Gas puts out. I don't think this fits in either category, so I find myself just bored by it. Of course, if you love early 90s techno, you're gonna love this, because it captures that era perfectly. A bit of ambience, tons of repetition across very long tracks, a suite-like presentation...that's all fine. But it is so far removed from the kind of techno that I really enjoy.

It's obviously pretty damn difficult to discuss and/or praise this album without discussing the context from which it came. Nirvana. Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love. Grunge as an entire era. And now we have to somehow contend with this existing outside all of that.

It's alright. I mean obviously it sounds like Nirvana, but that's not because I'm subscribing to the conspiracy that Cobain ghostwrote all these songs. He didn't, even though I could easily imagine his voice and guitar work in place of Love's. No, it's because that's just straight-up how grunge sounds sometimes.

And how grunge sounds is...not reeeaally for me. I like it when she screams! I like harsh vocals. And I like the more straightforward punk songs, especially in the last half. Gutless and Olympia are an awesome one-two punch. Funny enough, even though it almost functions like a Bikini Kill diss track, Olympia reminds me more of Sleater-Kinney than anyone. But I'd rather listen to Sleater-Kinney, unfortunately. It sounds pleasant, but I couldn't fall in love with this one.

I really lucked out here, because I happen to LOVE her voice! Every single song here has an incredible performance from her. Her vocal runs are fantastic, even when they don't really seem to add to the lyrics. Sometimes she's just showing off. Which is fine by me, because she sounds awesome.

While every song has her beautiful voice, most songs here accompany that with a truly astounding instrumental. The piano embellishments are just as pretty, and if it's not a subtle ballad like her Black Is The Color rendition, then those are replaced with epic crescendos like the one at the end of What More Can I Say?

Not everything here is immediately arresting, but I strongly enjoyed this record. I had recently listened to one of the Aretha Franklin albums on this list, and was expecting something in that vein. But what we get here, despite the bright pink cover, is something really poignant and desperate. She's really screaming on this, even when it's a happy song. I'll have to get into more of her hits...