Reviews by stevey_

This album is full of immaculate and captivating instrumental arrangements. The vocal performance takes some getting used to though - the first verse of the first song was pretty tough, and I wasn’t sure I was going to make it through the whole album. Once I adapted to Bill’s spoken word singing style, I found this to be a rewarding listen.
Maybe the subject matter is too bleak for any of these songs to cross into the mainstream, but I’d be curious to hear these instrumentals in the hands of other vocalists. Like, “Faith/Void” sung by Orville Peck?! Hey, it’s the right time to start thinking about a 20th Anniversary project!

When I was growing up, Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian frequently showed up on TV as a music pundit (maybe he's still doing that, idk I don't watch much TV these days). My knowledge of Anthrax is pretty limited beyond whatever incidental exposure I got from the clips used to prove his bonafides on those shows. It was always a little strange to me that Anthrax was (is?) held in such high regard but I absolutely never hear anybody talking about their music. With other "Big Four" acts like Metallica or Slayer, you will randomly see people wearing the band t-shirts or hear the music blasting from a car in traffic, but I don't feel like Anthrax has had that same staying power. Maybe it was all the line-up changes and new lead singers.

Musically, thrash just feels like metal with a little extra punk sprinkled in and I can handle that just fine for the length of an album. But vocally, this album is very much 'of its era', with the soaring chorus vocals that were popular in metal at the time (think mid-80s Metallica, Judas Priest, etc). The grunty verses and borderline-falsetto choruses are my least favorite thing about this era in thrash/metal and my biggest hurdle here.

Listen, none of these songs are bad, but stacked on top of eachother they create a very boring album. As soon as I put this on, I thought “oh, I’m going to hear Sultans Of Swing today, aren’t I?” And I did, six tracks later. I guess that’s my point here; this album feels like nine iterations of the same idea in a hunt to find the best version. It’s a great idea, but 41 minutes has never felt so long and today was the closest I’ve ever come to falling asleep while mowing the lawn. Mark Knopfler’s guitar work borders on sounding like a lap steel from time to time and that only makes me wish for an actual lap steel guitar in the mix. That might have really launched this record into the cosmos for me. As is, im not sure I’m picking up what new and influential sound we’re getting here.

And for what it’s worth, I’m not convinced “Sultans Of Swing” actually beats out “Wild West End” as the best version of the idea, but I think that ship has sailed.

I’d hoped to like this more than I did. It was pretty disjointed and I could never really get into a groove with it.

There aren’t any bad songs here, but about 1/2 of the album is pretty unimpressive - I’m thinking of songs like “La-La-La Lies”, “Much Too Much”, “The Kids Are Alright”, and “It’s Not True”. But then there are some truly big swings like “My Generation” and “Please, Please, Please”, or even “I’m A Man” or “The Ox” which pull me back in.

There’s an argument that “My Generation” is one of the earliest proto-punk rock recordings and it’s inarguably the most interesting thing they do on this album. The rest is pretty standard “English band that listened to too much American blues and R&B”.

So much of the music I listen to sounds like it came from here. Or like it’s still just copying this.
I’ve never listened very closely to Sonic Youth and I hate myself for that right now. I grew up with the grunge movement constantly being called as the biggest and most influential thing to happen to rock&roll in my lifetime, and of all the bands that influenced grunge, SY feels like it’s where my favorite ingredients came from.

I need a weighty word that isn't "quintessential", because music reviews use that word too much. This is American Punk Rock. It's the (very good) picture next to the definition in the dictionary, it's the formula you'd read in the textbook, it's what you're handed if you walk into a record store and say "one punk rock, please", or the first record you play for someone who grew up in an separatist cult and has never heard punk rock before. Except “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” because that song is corny and below them and I hope Tommy caught more grief for writing it than he ever did for being so short.

I’m giving this my first 5star rating.

This is an impeccable album and the 36min runtime is exactly the right length. I didn’t enjoy this as much as I did Youssou N’Dour, but that’s just my personal taste.

If you asked a good A.I. Engine to generate a psychedelic rock album, it would probably spit out an approximation of this record. Is it chock-full-o-bangers? No, but it absolutely nails the psychedelic sound on every track; you could easily throw this album on instead of a psychedelic rock playlist and not feel like you're missing much. Sure there are bands that did it better, but The 13th Floor Elevators did it first so they get more credit.
If you don't know what an electric jug sounds like, not only will you absolutely know its sound after this album but you'll certainly have feelings one way or the other about its use as an instrument. Had Janis Joplin committed to joining the band, they would have had two of the most polarizing sounds in 1960s rock&roll (and maybe some more success). Oh what could have been...

PS- If anyone reading this is considering an Elevators/psychedelic rock cover band, "The Electric Jugs" would be a great name (currently available per spotify's artist listings).

I can't decide where exactly I land on this one. It's correctly labeled as 'post-punk' because it's doing more than punk rock, but definitely not as much as new wave... like they're trying to convey some new wave ideas but only using the language of punk rock. The Fall does eventually learn to speak new wave (even with horns!), but they aren't there yet in this debut album. In a lot of ways, The Fall is an excellent case study in the evolution of punk/post-punk/new wave.

If you're into 'classic' punk, this should be a tolerable listen for you. If not, this is probably a little too hardcore (or weird) to get all the way through. Some of their later records are a little more broadly palatable, but I enjoyed chewing on this one for a little bit.

A great bridge between grunge and heavy metal for anyone who needs it. Growing up, alternative radio sort of jumped around between all of the various alternative/rock genres and I never fully appreciated where Alice In Chains fit into the big picture. I’m realizing that I’ve probably drastically underrated their influence on much of the music I listened to growing up - more than Nirvana, Alice In Chains feels like the wellspring of my early 00s CD case.
At least four of these tracks were always in rotation on alternative rock radio in the 90s/00s ("Them Bones", "Down In A Hole", "Rooster", and "Would?"), so you're never very far from a familiar song on this album. After listening, I'm sure Alice In Chains was a gateway to heavy metal for a lot of kids in the early 90s and I'm glad I listened a little closer. All that said, will I revisit this very often? I kinda doubt it.

“Ace Of Spades” is one of the best rock songs ever made and I’ll love Motörhead forever for making it.
But Motörhead is like the poor man’s AC/DC, and I can only handle so much before I hit my limit. At least when I’m sober. I listened to just the 11 tracks from the original album, and there are like five songs that start exactly like “Ace Of Spades”. That might have been a fun tease if AOS was at the end of the album, but not when it's the very first track.
Live albums usually aren’t great, and this one is no exception. I wonder if this album list attempts to use live albums in place of greatest hits albums so it can include influential bands who don’t have a standout album. In this case, the live album doesn’t standout either.

Reviews of this album are extremely polarized so I wasn’t sure what I was getting into. Fortunately, this is right up my alley and a quick addition to the “this is the stuff I hoped to discover from this project” list. Infected is an interesting peek at the sloppier, sleazier, side of new wave. The extra dose of funk and the horns can lean things a little circus-y at times, but I’m here for it.
It’s kinda like if Tom Waits told his band to play happy music and he rested his voice, or Talking Heads if David Byrne brought a little more creepy lounge singer energy. Or like if Electric Six formed 20yrs sooner and invented their sound from scratch.
Begrudgingly, I can’t deny that I’m a New Wave fan at this point, especially the weirder stuff. I might need this on vinyl.

After Oasis, brit-rock took a sabbatical from mainstream radio, but that ended when Franz Ferdinand showed up in 2004.
From a Pop perspective this album was a smash hit and it’s absolutely unsurprising that it’s on this list.
In the same vein as bands like The Killers, Bloc Party, and The Strokes, this is indie rock built more for a good time than a long time. I hadn’t heard the term “landfill indie” before reading reviews for this, but it makes sense. These bands were the soundtrack of an era where everyone bought hipster clothes at H&M and Urban Outfitters. But where are all those outfits now?

Faith No More is Red Hot Chili Peppers if RHCP hired a heavy metal guitarist and only liked California as a friend.
FNM laid the groundwork for the 'nu-metal' acts of the (very) late 90's and early 00's, which comprised a large portion of my CD case during that time. At that time I only knew "Epic" and didn't fully appreciate how metal the rest of the FNM catalog was. The whole playbook, including the vocal shift from grunting verses to whiney choruses, is present here. But to their credit, this doesn't feel like a band that got together and agreed to just chunk out a bunch of same-y rap metal songs and call it a day. Songs like "Woodpecker From Mars" make a convincing argument that they know how to play their instruments and have some interest in exploring their musical space. To the extent that an album track can be broadly influential, I would argue that this track is one of the earliest examples of post-rock and may have contributed to creating that genre. With several tracks in the 5-8min range, they weren't recording this to be potential radio fodder, and probably could have had more hits if they edited themselves a little more.
I won't call this an easy listen, but it was intriguing and worth my time.

This is the kind of music I feel like you'd hear in a store like Urban Outfitters if the manager is feeling particularly energetic and planning to make the staff rearrange a bunch of things. That's to say: this feels like the outer edge of bland mainstream 2010s psychedelic/hipster/indie/brit rock on the corporate retail safe-list. They sound like a band you should have heard of but somehow don't know anything about.
My tasting notes include hints of Passion Pit, undertones of Arctic Monkeys, and the cinematic flourishes of Muse - all bands that came before Hookworms, not bands that would have taken influence from them. And I guess that's where I'm struggling with this one. While this album is totally fine, I don't understand why it's on this list or what lasting impact it's had on the music industry. Like many reviewers, I've never heard of this band/album before and that's weird because it's one of the most contemporary albums on the list.
Most of this review was developed during "Ullswater" which somehow felt like the longest 7 minutes in recorded history, only to be outdone by the 8:35 runtime of "Opener" (which is track 5, despite its name). If this list is supposed to stay at 1001 albums, I hope this record is replaced by a more meaningful work soon.

You have to be influential if people use your album name for a whole genre, right? This album sounds a little dated now - partially because it sounds like it was recorded in a highschool locker room, and partially because metal has evolved so much since 1982. Even looking past that, I think they blew it with the sound levels on this album. If you saw these guys live, I’m sure the vocals were usually buried under a lot of guitars/drums and you’d have no idea what they were shouting about. I’ve been to SO MANY shows like that, and honestly, that’s probably the right way to mix this kind of music. Nobody needs to hear the lyrics, just play loud noise and let me lose myself in it for a while.

Lately I’ve been getting a lot of soul/funk records from this list, and I wish this one came a little earlier. This feels like a good bridge between early 70s 'hard rock' and funk music, and I could have appreciated Funkadelic and even David Bowie's Young Americans a little more with this context.

It’s not wholly surprising that this album sold well, but I’m impressed to find out it was the top selling album of 1973. With a few tweaks to the formula we’ll get “Low Rider” in 1975 and everyone knows that song. It feels mean to call this “training wheels Funk”, but that doesn’t make it not true. War is fun, I liked this.

I was ignorant to how much The Prodigy probably influenced the music I listened to in highschool. My only exposure was the song “Firestarter” (not on this album), and more specifically, clips of the music video which had very goth/industrial overtones that led me to believe this music was a very different thing.
Pushing past that visual prejudice, this album sounds like you’d expect from any early ‘techno’ record, with a lot of happy motifs in place of the darker and more agro music I expected.

“Voodoo People” - was this a single? I’ve definitely heard this one before.

“3 Kilos” - nothing could have prepared me for the flute takeover on back half of this track. I'm here for it, but it wasn't on my bingo card for this album.

I was pretty excited by the first 15 seconds of this album because I’ve been listening to a lot of lap steel guitar country music lately (surf country, psychedelic country, etc). Sadly, as soon as Ray Price opened his mouth, the spell was broken. And to hear it was for a long winded album introduction… woof. Admittedly, that tainted my first listen of this album, but I enjoyed it more the second time around.
If I’m going to listen to 50/60s crooning, I think I prefer this to the lounge lizard alternatives. As a kid, I think this is what I thought Elvis sounded like; at least late stage white jumpsuit Elvis. Anyway, at only 37min, the album wraps up just as my attention span starts to wane and that’s great.
Lastly, Idk if we’d have Orville Peck without Ray Price, and thats reason enough to give this a thumbs up.

I’m struggling with whether to call this Disco or Diet Funk. This one feels like it was engineered to be a pop success, and the sound has been sampled (and copied) countless times. It’s the kinda feel good album you want to play on a sunny day.