Reviews by suspiciousnumber

I love some Curtis Mayfield. I didn't find this album to be as fun as Superfly, but then again I don't think that it was supposed to be fun. Overall another great album by Curtis Mayfield

4/5

I've listened to Demon Days before, and I though that album was fairly interesting, but I think I like this album more. There's a lot of various in the music, but it always seems to work really well with Damon's voice. This album also deserves a lot of credit for being the first album by a virtual band (at least that I know of, I'm sure someone attempted it before and no one cared). It's a cool idea but it would be meaningless if the music didn't grab you. Lots of credit to Gorillaz for making really fun music that also has a lot of substance to it

4/5

This is kind of a weird album, in the sense that I don't really see why it's significant in terms of it's role in music history or the era/movement that it was part of, but I still just enjoy it. There's something about the sound of his voice that I really enjoy. The production is very solid all the way through. There's also something that feels very personal about his writing

4/5

Usually when I talk about having to separate the artist from their personal activities, it's because of awful crimes that they've committed against humanity. With Dolly, it's the opposite. I have to separate all the the good that she's done for humanity from the music presented here. Luckily, this is a good album. I'm not a big country fan, but a lot of the older stuff has qualities that makes it very approachable. Parton has a great voice, she's an incredible songwriter, and the music that accompanies her covers a lot of dynamic range. It's also crazy that this is her 8th solo album.

In a better world, we would spend a lot more time listening to Dolly Parton and a lot less time listening to Henry Kissinger. Also, in that better world Kissinger would be long dead and we would all take turns peeing on his cursed bones. Long live Dolly Parton!

4/5

I fucking love this album, and I loved it from the first time that I listened to it. It's the first album I think of when someone uses the term "Indie rock." It's lofi, but somehow that makes it work better. The low production quality never gets in the way of the music, but it lets the ingenuity and songwriting craft of the band shine through. I'd recommend listening to the extended version of this album (Luxe and Reduxe). 1992 was a seminal year in rock, and this album is easily one of the top 5 albums of that year

5/5

I found this album really tough to rate. It started off cool, but then it faded into the background while I was listening to it. A lot of it seemed to be pretty straightforward R&B. The quality of the album overall is good, but it didn't stand out to me as particularly groundbreaking in the context of when it was made.

3/5

I wasn't sure what to think about this album at first. This is after the era where I was aware of what Mariah Carey was doing and doesn't contain any of the songs I think of when her name is mentioned. However, at this point I'm three songs deep in the album and I recognize all of them. Moreover, each song has its own thing going on. Some sound more like her earlier work, some presage some of the movements in pop music that would happen in the early 2000s. The hip-hop tracks provide a good balance to the more straightforward R&B tracks. Her vocals are more subdued than a lot of the vocal acrobatics of her earlier work, though the angelic power of her voice is still evident in every track.

I do feel like the album bogs down a bit as it goes, but overall it's still a

4/5

Imagine yourself in Radiohead's collective shoes as they worked on Amnesiac. They managed to follow up the titanic breakthrough of OK Computer with the otherworldly Kid A, and then here they are needing to find a way to follow up Kid A with an album that is neither a step backwards nor a facsimile of their previous work.

And they fucking did it.

Amnesiac is my least favorite out of the three albums, but it absolutely deserves its place on this list and among the greatest recorded albums of music history. It picks up where Kid A left off, but it does its own thing. While Kid A is ethereal, alien, and psychedelic, Amnesiac is far more ground. The Radiohead's anger and disillusionment show through more on this album. It's as if they thought releasing Kid A was going to change the course of the world in some way, and they created this album to tell everyone that they're disappointed that the world is still bullshit, but that that fact isn't going to stop them

"After years of waiting, nothing came. And you realize you're looking in the wrong place"

This album still gives me chills to this day. Easily a 5/5

5/5

So, fun fact, the first band that I ever really got into. This was during their Get a Grip era when they were suddenly all over the place again. After getting my money's worth out of Get a Grip, I decided to get Pump. Unfortunately for Aerosmith, I also got Dookie by Green Day and Nevermind by Nirvana. That last album would change my life in many ways, but the long and short of it is that I never really got into this album because it just seemed uninteresting next to the more modern rock I was being exposed to.

I find this album's inclusion on this list to be a bit strange, since I don't remember it as being particularly groundbreaking, either in terms of Aerosmith's development as a band or in terms of the larger patterns present in the world of popular music. Hearing Steven Tyler sing about Young Lust at 41 years old is not particularly the experience that I was looking for this morning either.

This album is not without its charms. The hits off of this record hold up decently well for white boy blues rock. Still, this album feels like a bunch of rockers that are getting to be over the hill pretending like they're still in their 20s. Also, Janie's Got a Gun would be a lot more powerful song if the rest of Aerosmith's catalogue wasn't creeping around young women. I really struggle to finish any of these songs because Aerosmith always feels like they're trying to filibuster their own albums. Little did we know at the time that we would have to listen to 25 more goddman years of this stuff. It's good that Nevermind came along 3 years after this album and put all of this nonsense to death

3/5

This is a very good album. It's also an album that I find difficult to contextualize. I don't know what to compare it to, which may reveal more about my ignorance of R&B than it does about Frank Ocean. I don't usually go in for the R&B genre, but this album is endeniable. Great production, compelling songwriting and lyrics, and Ocean's beautiful voice to bring it all home

4/5

This album didn't make a huge impression on me, but it was consistently good. It's an interesting look at the interim period between the prog rock Peter Gabriel of Genesis and the pop start Peter Gabriel that I grew up with

4/5

It's rare to hear an album that is so clearly the origin point for a genre of music, but this one seems pretty clear. I've never heard an earlier album that sounded like heavy metal, and later heavy metal albums don't have the 60s psychedelic sound wrapped into them the way this does. All of the elements of what would become heavy metal are here. Even the overly grandiose album title is present.

As far as the music goes, they put out a hell of a lot of sound for a trio. The production could be a bit better, and some of the songs could be a little more interesting, but at the same time they were clearly experimenting with something here they deserve a lot of credit for the innovation in their sound

4/5

This is a cool album from what I would describe as the "mature" period of new wave/synth pop that followed the earlier work of bands like Gary Neuman and Human League. This is a great example of that style, and the lead singer of the band has an incredible voice that fits in great with the synthesizer sound. A really strong debut album, and it's incredible that this band had never played a concert before Take On Me reached #1 in the US

4/5

Living in the 60s must have been dope with all of these great vocal harmonies running around. Obviously this album is filed to the brim with them. Other than that I don't have a huge amount to say about it. It's a Simon and Garfunkel album. They didn't make a huge number of albums together, but all of them were good. This doesn't have the best production quality, at least on the version that I listened to. You can hear that it's a good album, but it's also evident that there is some loss of audio quality. Overall I liked Bridge Over Troubled Water better, but this is still a very beautiful album. I don't even like folk music, but it's hard for me to see how you wouldn't like this

4/5

Welp, the time has finally come. I'm a native Iowan and have made it this far without ever listening to a Slipknot album, and that streak ends today.

One of the benefits of listening to albums on this list is that I can hear a lot of Slipknot's influences in their music. It's easy to see how this band was influenced by earlier metal bands like Slayer, Metallica, Iron Maiden, Megadeth, Nine Inch Nails, and Pantera.

Overall, the production really stands out on this album. While I don't always love the music and (especially) the lyrics, the album is undeniably well put together. Great production makes it a lot easier to appreciate a band that I've always thought of as deeply unserious because of the stupid mask thing. And honestly, as bad as a lot of metal was in the first decade of the 2000s, this album is worth listening to. Lots a variation in the style keeps it interesting

4/5

I don't really want to like Billy Joel. Not for any particular reason, it just feels vaguely weird to like a musician that my mom is really into because she has terrible taste in music (sorry mom, but all Christian music is garbage). I don't want to like Billy Joel, but goddmanit if that man can't write a catchy song. There's a lot of variation in style in this album while still sounding coherent, and this album is wall to wall hits. It's an album full of bangers for people who like to sit down at concerts.

This may not have been the most interesting musical movement happening in New York in 1977, but it's pretty undeniable. Fuck. I guess I like Billy Joel

4/5

This is an interesting album. On the one hand, it's not my favorite album in terms of the overall style of the music and lyrics. On the other hand, I recognize almost every one of these songs from either the radio or from appearances in movies and TV. I think it's good overall, though I'm not sure why this album gets so much praise relative to a lot of other Dylan albums made in this period. Blonde on Blonde is commonly held up as the pinnacle of Dylan. It's good, but I feel like it's substantially similar in terms of quality to a lot of his other albums. To be fair though, I've never been the biggest Dylan fan. He's good, but not really my thing

4/5

It's fine. Morrissey's fine. The Smiths are fine. It's all fine. I don't like it, I don't dislike it, I just want this review to stand once and for all so that I can stop writing down my opinions on Morrissey's sadness. Like, it's good, but it's a fucking bummer that I don't need right now. I also don't need it when I'm sad. Or when I'm happy. Or at all.

It's just that, every time I think I'm done being served albums by Morrissey, or Neil Young, or Randy fucking Newman for christsake, then here comes another one. I want to hear music by bands that I've never heard of and be transported to strange new sonic landscapes, not hear Morrissey whine about how he doesn't have a girlfriend, or doesn't like his girlfriend, or whatever his fucking problem is.

3/5 Like I said, it's fine. Everything's fine. Stop asking

It's really cool getting to see the albums that helped rap transition from what it was in its early days to what it had become by the time I started hearing it. Run DMC seems to be one of the axes around which rap history turned. This album feels more mature than the last Run DMC album I got on this list (I think their debut album). A lot of that comes from advances in the music production side, as their lyrical style was mature pretty early on.

Rick Rubin produced a lot of albums that I really like, and this is no exception. It's easy to see why this album was the first hip-hop album to break through to the mainstream. It's tough to overstate the influence of Run DMC on hip-hop, and this album is the clearest proof of that. The suburbs had to find out about hip-hop at some point, and we can be grateful that it was Run DMC that made that introduction

4/5

I'm not sure if I just wasn't in the mood for this album today, but this one didn't really strike me all that much. Chapman is a gifted songwriter and has a beautiful voice, and I like the social messaging of music with more personal songs mixed in. I think perhaps the issue is that her musical style is a bit stripped down for me. Many of the songs are just her and a guitar, and I like a bit more accompaniment than that. I think there's a lot that's good to this album, but I was also bored pretty fast.

3/5