Reviews by suspiciousnumber

This album was cool. It's not the most amazing disco album I've ever heard, but it's solid and it goes by in what feels like no time

4/5

I feel like this is one of those albums where the production really makes it work. The songs are well-crafted, and they are both played and sung beautifully, but the production really helps give it emotional depth. It's like there's so much open space in the record, and yet it feels cozy and warm. The producer does need to back off on the reverb on the vocals a bit, since he occasionally sounds like he's been trapped down a well and needs Lassie to rescue him. Other than that, it's just a really peaceful album that's easy to connect with emotionally

4/5

I was kinda surprised to see this album pop up today, since the other handful of albums I've gotten on the user-submitted list were albums I'd never heard of by bands I've never heard of in genres that I've never listened to.

This album is cool. I love the combination of his voice over synth pop. It just has this smooth, ethereal quality. I don't have a lot to say about this, but this is an album that I want to come back to

4/5

This album was okay. I've never been all that drawn to prog rock, so it's not a surprise that I'm not particularly drawn to this. It's fine and competently made, it's just not what I get into

3/5

I have no idea what this album is or how to describe it, but it's really cool. The production is great, which can't be easy on an album this unusual with this many moving parts. The lyrics fit the music perfectly, and the lead singer has a great voice that he uses to the fullest

4/5

This album is pretty interesting for being part of the nu metal genre at sort of the tail end of that genre (at least as far as I'm aware). It's definitely good in parts, but it starts to sound like a lot of other things I've heard in other parts too. The real strength of this album is the production. There's a lot of good stuff that I think would be missed if it wasn't mixed and mastered so well. The sound is super crisp, and the texture of the bass really comes through.

3/5

The concept for this album is fascinating. What I'm really not sure what I think about is the execution of the concept. I've never heard an album before where I was less sure of what the artist was actually doing. In general, it sounds like he's just put a microphone up at some distance from a speaker playing music on vinyl. About halfway through the album, he has some shorter loops and has things moving between the left and right channels, which makes what he is doing a bit more obvious, but for the most part his role is very mysterious. In some ways, it's this question about what the artist is doing that makes this work. We are transported through unknown means into a hazy past that may never have existed for us. We experience the work of the artist's hand, but the hand itself is never visible. In some ways, I think this is meant to mimic the unstuck timelessness of Alzheimer's, since AD patients and their connection to music from their pasts were the inspiration for this album. It works. I don't know how or why, or even what works, but it works

4/5

This album really falls into a sweet spot for me. The combination of metal and shoegaze definitely scratches an itch in my brain. I could see how lots of folks would not care for this album since it's so noisy, but I thought it was really well executed overall, though I think the production could have been a little cleaner in places

4/5

Well, this is a bit of an anticlimax for my last album on this list. I've never found Arcade Fire all that inspiring, and it was kind of a let down to go out on an album that I will almost certainly think is okay and not much more.

Anyway, onto my review. This album is okay and not much more. It's fun at times, but I've always found this group to be kinda bland. I'd say more, but I don't really want to, and I'm finally done with this list after more than 4 years of listening to an album every week day. I found lots of albums that I will cherish forever, and I also found out that I don't really care much for Arcade Fire. I looked back at my previous reviews for this band, and found my review for Neon Bible:

"I don't know. They keep giving me Arcade Fire albums, and I keep finding them competent, but not spectacular. Maybe it's me, maybe it's Arcade Fire, but I must ask as I enter the endgame with this list, to respect my wishes and not make me review any more Arcade Fire albums at this time"

This makes it kinda funny that I ended with this band, although it would have been a lot more cosmically funny to give me another Randy Newman album at the end of all this, given the terrible things I said about him in my previous review

3/5 or whatever, who cares?

I think this is my last album on this list. I started doing this in January of 2021, and it is not March of 2025. It feels weirdly anticlimactic listening to this album just the same way I have 1088 other albums. I can't say that this album grabbed me the way some of the albums on this list have. It's fine, it's just not for me (a sentence I've written a few hundred times while reviewing albums for this list)

3/5

Albums like this are why I love this fucking list. It's the last week of new albums for me, and after all this time I still get albums I've never heard of by artists I've never heard of, that I instantly love. This album is just so cool. Also, Atticus Ross (Trent Reznor collaborator) worked on the first 6 songs on this album.

It just has this seamless blending of modern sounds and classic instrumentation. Like one minute it's trip-hop, then suddenly it's Bitches Brew, but there's nothing startling about the transition between the two. Also, this album has the perfect amount of vibraphone on it, which is to say a shitload. It slows down a bit in the back half of the album, but by that point they've already got my money, so there's no point in complaining

4/5

This album is pretty fun, though I like Synchronicity better than this, despite the fact that I wasn't terribly charitable in my review of that album. It's cool getting to see how reggae and other music brought to the British Isles by immigrants influenced the rock that was coming out of the punk scene. I always thought that the Police got into reggae later, but it seems like it was a part of their sound from early on.

3/5 This album is fun overall, but The Police have a way of putting songs that are a chore to listen to on their albums that I don't understand.

I think this album tends to get overshadowed by some of the other albums from the first round of Wu-Tang solo releases. I don't like it as much as Only 4 Cuban Linx or Liquid Swords, but at the same time it's a hell of an album. RZA's unbelievable string of hits continues with this album, and Method Man always sounds great. The tragic thing is that some of the tracks for this album were lost in RZA's basement flood, but despite that, this album is still a stellar addition to the Wu-Tang pantheon

4/5

Well, this is certainly an interesting album, even though I can't say that I find it all that engrossing. LL Cool J very much feels like he's caught between hip-hop's past and future here. At times he shows the intensity of gangsta rap, but the lyrical style often sounds more like the 80s than the 90s. The sampling is using a lot of well-known songs, much like groups like Tribe and De La Soul were using at the time.

It's a weird little time capsule that doesn't feel connected to any particular movement in hip-hop, but rather straddles several of them. I don't think I'll ever listen to this album again, but I have to admit that my initial skepticism that this doesn't belong on this list was unwarranted. It feels like it represents a true inflection point for hip-hop

4/5

I really like the first song on this album. After that, the album kept playing, and I would look up occasionally and be surprised that the track had changed because most of the songs on this album sound roughly the same. The early 2000s is a bit over-represented on this list, and this album is yet another example. It's not bad, but it doesn't belong here either

3/5

I got Yeezus last week, so I'm going to skip over ranting about how Kanye being a nazi makes it really hard to evaluate his work. This album definitely feels a bit dated now, as a lot of early 2000s stuff does, I will also say that I prefer his more synthesize-heavy work that came after this. However, as a debut album for a rapper/producer, this is really good and deserves it's iconic position in hip-hop history. Kanye got better from here, and then he got a bit worse, and then he got a lot worse. It's best just to enjoy the music and not think about it too much

4/5

It's too bad that the other Traffic album on this list was one of the early albums that I got, while this one is among the last. I feel like I like this album better than the John Barleycorn album, but it would be better if I could compare them more directly in my head. Regardless, this album is cool overall. It feels like part of that transition from the 60s to the 70s in rock and roll. This album also does a lot to showcase Steve Winwood's songwriting ability

4/5

This album is a really cool listen, though I also had trouble listening to it actively. Taking it in a bit more passively, though, I found it really cool. The music is great. It all fits together, but with plenty of variation so it never gets boring. Lots of big, sprawling instrumentation that the vocals sit on top of

4/5

I've learned that I generally like French music when it pops up on this list. This album, however, I really don't know what to make of. It doesn't sound particularly inventive from a musical standpoint, since it feels more like they are trying to imitate an earlier style of popular french music. Mixing that with electronica is interesting, I suppose, but it starts to sound very samey after a while. It's pleasant enough, but I'm not sure what I'm supposed to get out of it

3/5

It's interesting getting this album directly after Yeezus by Kanye. I said it before, but I'll say it again: fuck Kanye for being a nazi. He made so much great music, this album included, but how it's hard to think about what he was doing on this album without thinking about what he would become.

That said, this album is really solid. It's a great example of the soul sample flipping that Kanye was doing in the early 00s, and it holds up. The addition of Dilla to this album changes the way it feels, and it's another reminder of what we lost when he died, less than a year after this album came out

Common is really solid as a rapper on this album, better than I remember him being, and he really takes advantage of having a well-produced album

4/5