Reviews by suspiciousnumber

I quite enjoyed the first half of this album. It seems like it would have been a really cool concert to go to. After a while this album gets to be a bit much, though. Some of the lyrics/voice overs are really cheesey, which is expected for this era and this type of music, but it doesn't age well. I often find double albums frustrating to rate because they could often be reduced to a single album that is good, but as a double album they are often not worth the time commitment. I understand it more for a live album like this, but I also don't have all day to listen to Hawkwind talk about space

3/5

I was excited for this album because I really liked The Prodigy's first album. However, this album sounds much more generic in the present day, and lacks the cool hooks that populated the first album. It's not bad, but it doesn't really stand out from a lot of the techno mixes that are a dime a dozen on YouTube

3/5

What a cool band the Talking Heads were. Their albums have this consistent sound that is definitively Talking Heads, but they are all different, and all great in their own ways. This album doesn't sound dated at all, despite being nearly 45 years old

5/5

When I get blues albums on this list, I always find that I tend to enjoy them, despite the fact that I don't think of myself as much of a blues guy. This sounds like it would have been a really fun concert, and reading about the historical context was interesting as well

4/5

Fucking love this album. Just great song after great song, with everything being something you can move your feet too. I rarely give an album 5/5 just for being fun, but here we are

5/5

I've been meaning to listen to the Cramps for a while after I was introduced to them by the No Dogs In Space podcast. I thought this was cool overall. They seem like a band that would be really fun live, though this album didn't particularly grab me at many points. It was consistently pretty good, but never really great

4/5, but on the low end of 4

It's sort of crazy that the two biggest hits on this album come relatively late in the track list, but every song is so good that you don't really miss it. There is a bit of the acting interludes that infested albums of this era (and the surrounding decades), but it's not too obtrusive (except for the end of Respect, fuck that slurping noise). Biggie's rap style still feels modern, despite being recorded nearly 3 decades ago. A true classic from an artist who recorded far too few songs

4/5

Frank Sinatra is good, but very much not my thing. I prefer for the music to take more of a leading role and the singer to add emphasis to the music rather than being the driver of the song. It's a personal preference thing, and I acknowledge that. I did like the latin Sinatra album I got previously on this list, but these songs mostly sound the same to me. Not bad, just not for me

3/5

Certainly not an album that I need to listen to to rate, but I went ahead and listened anyway. Every single song is good. Run For Your Life is a bit of a strange song to end on, mostly given John's history of domestic abuse, but apart from the darkness of that moment the album is incredible. A huge step forward for a band trying to become something other than the simple pop stars they had mostly been up until that point

5/5

I thought this album was pretty cool overall. Listening to it went fast, but I enjoyed the post-punk influence that influenced much of the album

4/5

Boy, this album keeps going, doesn't it. I'm ordinarily a fan of early MOOG synthesizer stuff like this, but this album is so slow, it's hard to do anything with it but put in on in the background and ignore it. It works fine for that purpose, but it contrasts pretty sharply with, for instance, Plantasia by Mort Garson, which was released the same year and felt like it had much more of a concept to it. I can see why this album is highly regarded in the history of electronic music, but I don't think it holds up without its historical context

3/5

I'm not in love with Kanye as a person, but goddamn if his peak as an artist wasn't absolutely incredible. This album is just song after song of incredible samples and production with excellent lyrics over it. Consistently good throughout the entire album, and often absolutely great

5/5

As much as I haven't enjoyed a lot of the Britpop that shows up on this list, this album seems like a reasonable choice. There were lots of hits off this album, and the rest of the songs were all solid. It doesn't sound that dated either, which is always nice with albums from this era

4/5

Yes is a cooler band than I think that I've previously given them credit for. This album is good from the opening and holds up to the end. It's big and dramatic as a lot of prog rock is, but it's also fun with solid riffs

4/5

I'd never listened to PJ Harvey before, and I thought this was pretty cool. I think that the mix of the album could have been better in places, since it was sometimes hard to separate out the different instruments/sounds. Overall, though, I liked it. It has that heavy early 90s sound without sounding derivative of the other stuff that was happening at the time

4/5

In general, I find listening to double albums a chore, and this album is a good representation of that. I was ready to be done at the end of the first album, and then here is a full other album for me to listen to.

I thought I was going to like this more. I'm a fan of DnB in general, and I remember listening to some of these songs when I was younger, but it didn't really do anything for me this time around. Part of the problem may be that I prefer more modern DnB, and this is pretty true to the roots of the genre

3/5

What can you say about an album that makes you wait until the very end to hear Bohemian Rhapsody and yet you don't feel like skipping any of the tracks to get to that masterpiece? This album is great from the very first song. It features a tremendous diversity of songs and a wide range of emotions and tones, but each one flows effortlessly from the one before it. A true classic

5/5

I can't say that I ever expected to hear a Frank Sinatra album like this, but it works really well.

4/5

Holy shit, two jazz albums in a row! While I liked the Keith Jarrett album I got yesterday, I fucking love Mingus. His songs just pack so much furious energy into every measure. Captivating from beginning to end

5/5

This album was fine, but it's not particularly my style of jazz