Reviews by suspiciousnumber

I thought this was a really cool album. 1993 is sort of a tough year for me to contextualize for rock, since so much had happened in the previous few years with grunge coming into the mainstream and bringing the rest of alternative rock with it, but perhaps it doesn't matter. This album very much has a timeless quality about it. There's a lot of variety in the music of the album without it feeling incoherent, and her voice and lyrics fit the music perfectly. It feels very intimate

4/5

I was not excited to see this album today, since I really did not enjoy the other Spiritualized album that I got on this list. However, this album proceeds a little more in the vein of the work that Spacemen 3 was doing prior to the breakup of that band. I liked Spacemen 3 a lot more, and I like this as well. I haven't gotten a lot of ambient music on this list, but I really like it, and it's well executed here.

4/5

I'm always excited to get a kraut rock band on here, since that generally means I'm in for something cool and different. I've listened to Faust before and didn't get much out of it, but I really liked this album. Solid grooves throughout as I've come to expect from kraut rock, with great instrumentals over it. I generally don't find their vocals all that impressive, but they tend to be sparse anyway. Overall, it's an album that feels really advanced for the time when it came out. Well worth the listen

4/5

One of the cool things about this list is how it's helped me appreciate Bob Dylan. I always liked a bunch of his songs, but struggled to get into his albums. Every time I get one of his albums on this list I think that surely it will be the one that I don't really get in any meaningful way. Then I listen to it, and it's really good and I start to see why people regard him as highly as they do.

This is another one. This dude released so many good albums, he wrote so much great poetry. I guess I actually like Bob Dylan

4/5

I feel about this album the same way that I feel about the previous Byrds albums, which is to say that it's not bad, but I also don't like it very much, and I'm happy to have completed this review so that I can stop listening to it, though it's perfectly fine if you like it because, again, it's not bad, and it has artistic merit, it's just not for me

3/5 Please let this be the last Byrds album on this list (monkey paw curls and another Randy Newman album appears tomorrow)

Despite the fact that I like Ornette Coleman, I was set to not like this album, since it's difficult to reinterpret the work of such a distinctive artist. I think what makes this album really work is the drums, which help bring focus to the chaos of each song. The drums thunder throughout and it makes everything seem much more coherent. I will say that the tone on the bass can be a little muzak-y for my taste, but it doesn't do much to harm the overall sound of the album

4/5

This is probably my least favorite of the Bjork albums that I've gotten on this list. However, the other Bjork albums I got were absolute bangers, and this album is really good, so feel free to keep feeding me the worst Bjork albums that you have

4/5

I was really dreading this one when I saw it. I've had a pretty good run with Van Morrison so far on this list, despite the fact that I find him to be problematic as a person, he makes music that I enjoy more than I thought I would. I was hoping that we could leave it at that, but no, today I got served up a live album. I don't like live albums, and I don't see how I could possibly like a Van Morrison live album

And yet, it's one of the best sounding live albums that I've ever heard. It's very clean-sounding, yet maintains the live energy. It's honestly kinda bullshit that that they did this to me and made me give another positive review to a Van Morrison album

4/5

It's kinda crazy that all three of My Bloody Valentine's albums are on this list. This album, much like their third album, suffers from the inevitable comparison with Loveless, which is my favorite MBV album (and it's not close, either). This album just feels a bit half-baked compared to Loveless. The elements that make that album great are here, but they're inconsistent, and some of the things that they're trying on this album don't work super well. It's good, it's definitely a groundbreaking album, it's just not quite the caliber of album that the Smashing Pumpkins can rip their entire career off of yet

4/5

Listening to this live Grateful Dead album here in this year of our lord 2023, I'm reminded of the first time someone sat me down and had me listen to a live recording of this band more than 20 years ago, and the words that echoed in my head then as clearly as they do now:

"Why in the fuck is this jerk forcing me to listen to this garbage?"

It's fine if you like the Grateful Dead, I just don't get it and I'm pretty sure that I never will. I've given it a chance. I've given it 100 chances, it still sounds like a bunch of people with nothing meaningful to say noodling around a guitar for a half hour so that hippies have something to listen to while they do drugs and pretend to be more enlightened than the rest of us.

I'm already so sick to death of this, and I just finished the first song. It's 23 minutes long. I thought I'd listened to multiple tracks, but it's hard to tell, since all of their songs sound the same. It's like if you took prog rock, and stripped away everything interesting that they were doing musically and lyrically, leaving a miasma of pointless notes played over and over until the acid finally wears off and you realize that you're in your mid-40s with no vocational skills and a broken-down VW bus full of dirty children with names like Magnolia and Dew Drop and Camshaft

2/5 I will never forgive you for making me listen to this band again. Never.

This is a band that I've been waiting for for a long time. I've known about how influential the Dolls were for a long time, but I've never had the impetus to listen to them for myself. This album has so much to it, it's easy to see how it influenced everyone from the Ramones to Kiss. I like glam rock a lot more than I thought I was going to.

I wish the vocals were a bit better, but I think the fact that the vocals were a bit rough is one of the things that inspired early NYC punks, so it's sort of a wash. That's really the only criticism that I have for the album. It has a lot of great songs built around a lot of different moods. There's lots of different stylistic choices here that were picked up by a lot of different bands over the next few generations

4/5

I just don't get it. Like, whatever it is that I'm supposed to hear in this album that makes it significant, I just don't hear it. Also, their cover of Born to Be Wild is just the normal song, but not as good.

2/5

Well, I'm going to be grading this one on sort of an unusual curve. This is the 4th Talking Heads album that I've gotten on this list, and it's my least favorite. It's honestly astounding how fast the first four Talking Heads albums came out, and how different they all are. I like the style of Remain in Light more than this album. It's not bad at all, and a lot of the little things that make this band good are here, it just doesn't hold up the way their other albums do for me. But, just because it leaves me feeling a bit flat doesn't mean that it's not a good album, it just doesn't meet the ridiculously high expectations that the Talking Heads set with their other albums

4/5

This album was really interesting. It's very much of its time, and not particularly a genre that I tend to like, but it's really good overall. Just a good vibe to it. Good music, the lyrics fit well. The mix doesn't sound amazing, since it's a bit muddy (at least the version I listened to was), but it features every instrument well

4/5

This album is fun enough, but I don't really get why it's significant. It's one of those weird bands where I'm 100% sure that I would have fun at their live shows, but I'm not really sure why I would want to critically listen to one of their albums.

3/5 It's done well, it's just all been done before. Also, where are all the goddamned Butthole Surfers albums? If I can listen to Rendezvous with Anus, you all should have to listen to Dog Inside Your Body

I thought this album was really cool. It's fairly innovative, given the time period when it was made. It's a little harder to judge rhymes in a foreign language, but given that most rap styles in 1991 were garbage anyway, I'm going to just give him the credit

4/5

I don't have a lot to say about this album, but it was really good overall. Lots of different musical influences coming together, but it works more like a soup than a salad

4/5

Kids, if you have one of the greatest male singing voices in the history of pop music, I beg you not to pair it with soulless song writing and vapid lyrics. This could be so much better than it is, and I'm a bit baffled as to why its on this list. It's basically just a Michael Bolton album, but with more early 80s flair. Is this album the birth of muzak? Is that why it's significant?

2/5

Well, we've done it. We've found the Neil Young album that I dislike the least. I never really realized how much resentment I'd built up towards Neil before this list started shoving his albums down my throat in a seemingly endless stream. As I've said before, it's fine. He's fine. I just don't like his music or his voice, or his personal sense of style, nor do I like the way that I imagine that he smells.

This album is pleasant enough, though. It's a pretty early album to be this distortion-heavy, which is cool. The songs are all pleasant enough. Fine. I'll give it a good score. Now leave me alone and stop making me listen to Neil Young

4/5

Are there two words more fearsome and loathsome on this list than "British rapper?" Having been through the gauntlet of the Limp Bizkit album, I can certainly but the words "Chocolate Starfish" above it on the list

Anyway, this album is about what you would expect it to be. British people haven't quite gotten the hang of rap yet, but, to be fair to them, they've only had the last 45 years to figure it out. I like some of the beats on this album, and the first couple of songs made it seem like this album might be worthwhile. Then it kept going and got thinner and thinner and thinner.

3/5 I think the beats were actually pretty cool for 2003, and I like the fusion of hip-hop with electronica. However, Tech N9ne was doing the same thing in 2003, and doing it much better