Reviews by thelofistorm

Some really good songs here. “Stay” in particular caught my ear, for its really great new wavey guitar solo and its chorus. Also “Heat Wave,” with its instrumentation, and its coasting drumbeat, and its beautiful, passionate vocals. I was also really into the kind of nocturnal vibe the entire thing fostered, that kind of 1980s thing that I can generally take or leave but if I must listen to I enjoy. A lot of the production can err on the sparser side, but I kinda get it; a lot of this album feels like that moment when you’ve been up for a while, and it’s like midnight or 1 in the morning, and you’re just about to fall asleep. The lead singer has this really dreamy voice that’s perfect for this brand of synthy, piano-ey, new wave type music. I honestly really kinda love this one.
9.3/10

Listened to this on the bus in a torrential rainstorm, which I think is probably how it’s meant to be listened to. The outside was all blackened, and it felt much more passive than it should’ve, all due to the cooing of Jónsi’s vocals on “Svefn-g-englar,” the album’s clear high point. A 10-minute song about birthing through a child’s eyes, especially with that cover art, is pretty perfect. Sadly, past that song it is pretty hard to tell whether I am getting a truly transformative experience out of this album or if I’m getting pretty falsetto and ethereal guitars. It really is up to the listener to assign meaning to any piece of music, but this makes it especially hard, when it is so universally acclaimed, but it doesn’t sound much more than pretty. It isn’t experimental, at least not particularly, though its use of electric guitar and cello bows is at least interesting, it isn’t really political, at least not outwardly or obviously, and it’s not influential, at least not mainly. It’s just really pretty, with one phenomenal song on there, and a couple of other great songs too (see: “Hjartað hamast (bamm bamm bamm)” and the title track). I love it, surely, but I feel compelled to look at it with some suspicion.
9.0/10

Stop, hey, what’s that sound? Everybody look what’s goin down. Yeeeeeah. Good song. Not on this album but that’s fine. Certainly a beautiful cover. And the music is fine. Nothing too special, and some obvious derivative moments here and there. That being said, moments such as the banjo in “Bluebird,” the chorus of “Hung Upside Down,” and the easygoing country-folk-pop of “A Child’s Claim To Fame” all contribute to an overall mood that this album emanates that is at the very least pleasant. Not very much more, though.
7.3/10

Elvis. Elvis, Elvis, Elvis…. Elvis. ELVIS!! ELVIS IS BACK, BABY!!! 1960, 4-ish years before the first Beatles Breakthrough, and 3 years before Bob Dylan dropped his first 10/10 album. People, we are in for a relic. I can’t say it’s good, but I see the importance. Elvis’s voice is really very pretty, if a bit polite, and the backup singers are the same. It lacks soul, and it is often vapid and unimportant in a way that isn’t very enjoyable, but it can also be pleasant enough. Has some very nice piano and drum tones, and it’s pleasant-ish. No, I did not enjoy this album very much, but I have no hard feelings toward it.
5.4/10

I keep meaning to listen to classic soul like this and then I end up not doing that. So thank you for giving this to me. This album is real good. Just classic soul. It doesn’t stand out enough to love-love, but the title track is exceptional, and the vocals and vibes are right-on all the way through. I enjoyed this.
8.0/10

Ouuuuuuuu shiiiii 👀👀👀 I’m a huge Pink Floyd hater and even I fucking love this album. There are a couple of songs on here that blow me away, but the entire thing is pretty fucking incredible. Every song flows into the next, and hits you in the gut, in the chest, and anywhere else that you might think to be hit my an emotional powerhouse. It’s the cry of a friend group calling out to a man who has been fucked over by the world, knowing it’s way too late. Syd Barrett’s mind was broken by fame and by drugs, and the rest of the band saw this happening, and made this. Starting with the emotional anthem for Barrett, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” starts with its iconic spacey intro, going into a full on rock ballad, and finally making its way into a sax solo, one of the best in rock history. It’s an instant classic, home run, barn-burner, whatever you want to call it. It is incredible. “Welcome To The Machine,” an observation of fame, continues the album forward, and works with “Have A Cigar” to criticize the powers that be for the way that Barrett ultimately turned out. The album then shifts its attention back to Barrett himself, in the album’s other super iconic song, that being the title track. Heartbreaking, especially the line that I’m sure everyone reading this is incredibly familiar with, “we’re just two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl year after year,” an acknowledgment of the band’s own compromised nature in comparison to Barrett’s: though only one of them is in fact truly lost, we’re all lost in a world such as this one. And finally, the album brings it back home to the opener for the closer, an emotional, dramatic send-off to the album. It’s dumbfounding, it’s heartwrenching, it’s beautiful, it’s perfect, and it’s waaaaaaay better than that piece of shit Dark Side of the Moon.
10/10

ANOTHER GEORGE MICHAEL ALBUM! Michael’s sophomore effort comes from a decidedly different place than anything he has attempted so far. Where his previous album, Faith, was largely a continuation of his work with Wham, a perfectly fine, and at times incredibly iconic and high-quality work with obvious mainstream intentions, this is something much different. Michael approaches his art with a vision of something seemingly greater than that: where Faith purposefully arrived with a polished sound that catered to seemingly as many people as it could, this album takes greater risks: songs about social issues, songs dealing in personal life and struggles, and also songs with greater musical variety, such as the use of alternative dance-derived drums on “Freedom! ‘90,” one of the album’s two main standouts, a driving, soulful anthem to letting go judgment and living authentically, pertaining in no small part to Michael’s identity as a gay man (something that, while not necessarily known to the public, is evident in retrospect). The other standout is the jazzy, waltzy, seven-minute “Cowboys and Angels,” an emotional powerhouse that largely achieves that effect through the beautiful use of instrumentation throughout it, and Michael’s reserved yet pained vocals and lyrics. I really really enjoyed this album all the way through, and I’m super glad to have listened to it today.
8.9/10

Two Beatles in a row! What even are the chances? This one is significantly worse than the last, that being The White Album, but it’s still important. Also, it’s got some bangers! The majority of this album is really quite great. Frankly, however, this album also contains some pretty dismal numbers. “The Word” is annoying, and so is “What Goes On.” “Run For Your Life,” despite the pretty good vocal performance, is very plainly contemptible, and I can’t help but dislike it for that. Truly, this album is an important turning point for the band, and it can be pleasant, with some incredible songs, but I don’t see how I could truly love it, at least for what it plainly is.
6.8/10

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!

Truly, what to say about The White Album? Well, for one, it’s my favorite Beatles album. I only just realized that but it’s true. The first side has some absolute perfect songs, having several of their best, and it also creates such a lack of specificity that makes a lot of these songs timeless for me. For example so many of their albums feel like they’re marketed to appeal to the time period they were released in; this instead feels like it deals so heavily in everything across all music, that it can’t help but catapult itself across all times, making it invoke pretty much anything you want it to. However, the songs that truly help this album achieve both its sprawl and its incredibly high quality are “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” “Blackbird,” “Julia,” “Helter Skelter,” and “Revolution 9.” “Guitar” is the obvious first high point, and it’s a legendary song that pushes the album’s momentum forward really well. “Blackbird” is similar, though in my opinion in a much better way, especially because of its iconic tune and performance, which really ascends it into a sort of anthem, in a strange way. “Julia,” my personal favorite song on the album, is one of the best songs ever, and works so well as an abstraction of a deep melancholy and persisting love. I love it as the closer to disc A 2. “Helter Skelter” is an obvious barn-burner that not only works so well as a really great hard-rock song, but also effortlessly subsides into the ballad-type songs that populate a lot of the last side. “Revolution 9” ties the album all together in a way, though: first of all, just to say it, I fucking adore electroacoustic, it’s one of the best music genres out there and certainly the best experimental one. After all the cute songs of the D-side, you get a 9-minute sound collage epic, one of the best songs on the album, and a song that, if you’ve made it this far, really helps to ride out the rest of the album, to the lullaby closer. Kind of a perfect album, but only if you acknowledge that it’s purposefully very far from actually perfect. It’s this popular for a reason while still being so weird.
10/10

I like… I JUUUUUUST got this on CD. Like, LAST FUCKING WEEK AGO. For THREE DOLLARS. THREE DOLLARS. This album is fucking fantastic. The title track is the perfect tone setter, giving the entire album a sense of dystopia that gives each and every song a true and pressing level of urgency. It also introduces us to Joe Strummer’s fantastic, rebellious, and charismatic vocals. The use of each genre the album employs is done masterfully, especially the reggae songs, which I was surprised to find were all incredibly good. Though not pristine, this album does an incredible job of focusing a truly incredible energy throughout its entire runtime, and not once does it get boring. It is a comprehensive display of musical mastery, across the board: the sequencing, the vocals, the playing, the production, the incorporations of reggae, the atmosphere… it is a truly admirable album, and an incredible experience. If you have not heard this yet you are doing yourself a massive disservice.
10/10

IT’S DARE! IT’S DARE! IT’S- who the fuck is this? Ohhhh, they did that one song. Hardly seems like reason to put them on some list of important albums but whatever. Maybe it’s good or something.

Well, it’s at times disappointing, but also very pleasant! I very much loved it in its moments when it felt genuinely full, songs such as “Open Your Heart,” “Darkness,” and the obvious home-run “Don’t You Want Me.” Though it all too often feels sparse, there are moments that imply this album’s deeper, more innovative edges. At the end it feels much more like a holy combination of Violator by Depeche Mode and Speaking In Tongues by Talking Heads, with its otherworldly synths and vibe of being on the edge of synthpop, and its crazed vocals and surreal lyrics, topped off with a hit big enough to rival both those albums’ majesty. I was not at all disappointed by this excellent album.
9.3/10

I mean, it’s LCD Soundsystem. They’re a top 10 band of all time for me. This Is Happening is one of my favorite albums of that decade, and James Murphy is one of the most brilliant minds in indie music in my opinion. And this is generally seen as their masterpiece, containing one of their two most well-known songs, that being “All My Friends.” Really, I don’t know what to say about this album other than that. It’s an album that at large criticizes the intricacies of the social world under capitalism, and song to song breaks down under those same intricacies: the stress of tour, of aging, of foreign criticism, of losing someone important, of New York itself, at some point Murphy even cries out to a cloud to “block out the sun over [him].” It’s an album of fear, anxiety, and depression, and that’s why I love it.
10/10

Frankly? Not as bad as I thought it was gonna be. Pretty good, actually. Honky Tonk as a genre is much more pleasant than its stupid fucking name would suggest. This isn’t to say that this album is all hits and no misses, but a beautiful voice, country charm, and a generous helping of pedal steel really does a lot. I could deal without some of the more polished-sounding string arrangements, and the album’s attitude toward women, though certainly not an awful attitude, still finds me put off a bit. And it’s also repetitive. REALLY repetitive. But there’s not a lot more that I can say in the way of this album’s worth. I like it plenty!
7.0/10

Incredible for the first 3 songs, and then “Social Disease” kinda snaps you out of it. Bon Jovi (the guy)’s voice is actually great, which was exactly what was missing from AC/DC’s Back In Black, the album I’ve chosen to compare this to, since I like this significantly more than that even though they’re very similar, and that’s interesting. This kind of rock, when done correctly, is the type of stuff I live for. Except, even then, I can’t listen to it for too long. It’s really awesome for a bit, but it eventually becomes very apparent that you’ve been listening to a variation of the same song for half an hour, and then you don’t want to listen to the rest of it, especially when you know the best is behind you. That being said, even though some of these songs can contribute to this feeling, a lot of them are really fucking good either way. Just look at how many hits are on here! And they’re good too! Yes, “Social Disease” and “I’d Die For You” kinda suck. But look at all those really good songs! Tracks 2, 3, 5, 6, and 8 are all massive, and ridiculously good. Yes, it’s campy. Yes, the lyrics intermittently suck. But that doesn’t stop the commercial power, and much more importantly the amount of fantastic songs on here.
8.7/10

A beautiful journey of lonesome tunes, sung brilliantly by one of the best voices in country, tied together by the common denominator of every song here being a rendition of a traditional pop standard. And looking at the cover, staring up at the night sky, is what this whole album feels like. Even on the happier songs, there’s an air of sadness on them. There are some songs that I think would’ve been much better off not on this project, but it’s hard to not appreciate it for what it is, which is a great, charming little album.
8.4/10

Zep time (remastered 2026)
I’ve grown to like this a lot more than when I first heard it. I was talking with my dad about it, when I got this as my 150th album on the list of 1001 albums you must listen to before you die. When I first listened to it, I think I was really caught up in the perception of it, and what it represented, rather than the merit of the music itself. So, I decided to revise my opinions, seeing as it grew on me kind of significantly.

“Good Times Bad Times” is pretty incredible, pretty much perfect as an opener, with lyrics about youth, and a really good representation of the album’s sound. It’s also really well produced, with the guitars sounding nice and bluesy, psychedelic and distorted, but still very, very distinct. The performances are also all incredible, and Robert Plant’s vocals are better than I remember.

“Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” keeps the momentum of the album going, with an excellent folk-rock vibe, turning a traditional folk song that was a popular subject of covers at that time, and turning it into an absolute barn-burner. This entire song sounds like a storm, and each climax is crazier, wilder, and more wanton than the last. It’s a beautiful, incredible song, and my favorite here.

Sadly, the good on the album is interluded by the worst song by far here, “You Shook Me.” Now, even though the song is obviously bad, Plant’s vocals suck, the instrumental is more lurching than anything, and the use of blues feels almost condescending, as if it’s a self-aware demonstration on how electric blues “should” sound, it’s even worse when you compare it to Muddy Waters’ rendition, the most popular version of the song outside of Zep. Waters is lively, warm, and easygoing. Plant is a good vocalist, but I don’t believe he is capable of any of those adjectives.

Thankfully we get right back to the good, with “Dazed and Confused,” a psych classic, with some really important parts (meter switch, the first minute or so), and some really impressive aspects too. Nowhere near my favorite song on the album, but it’s a truly admirable work.

Opening up the B-side is “Your Time Is Gonna Come,” a real pretty song that’s really pleasant after all the craziness. I love the backing vocals during the chorus, and Plant’s softer side is kinda pleasant. It’s followed up by “Black Mountain Side” which is another real easy going cut. Not much to say about it but it’s pleasant, and serves as a nice segue in between these two songs.

I adore the next song, that being “Communication Breakdown.” It’s the only proto-punk song Zep ever really made, so I’m obviously all over it. It’s so heavy and hard, much more than anything else here in my opinion, and it’s So So So Good. The structure, the vocals, the musicality, instrumentation!!! It’s fucking next-level.

“I Can’t Quit You Baby” is the other blues cut, and while it’s more forgivable, it’s still quite milquetoast, especially compared to this album’s outstanding highs.

“One Too Many Times,” the album’s closer, is pretty un-noteworthy, except for the fact that it’s a jam song, which I appreciate. I think I like this song more for the fact that it fulfills yet another specific crevice of rock to end this album out, since that’s what they’ve been doing this whole time: making hard, folk, psych, punk, and blues rock songs, so now to have a jam song to close it out, and a decently epic one, works very well.

The album, though sporting some awful songs, is still really great. The highs are ridiculous, and the sequencing couldn’t be better. It’s an obvious and easy classic of an album, and I enjoy it plenty.
8.3/10

Monstrous 80s pop album, how could it not be? George Michaels solo debut, a seemingly pretty charming dude, loved by a bunch of people. Obviously I know who he is, he made “Careless Whisper” and “Fastlove,” and… well, there are some huge hits off of here. The A-side is two home runs and a strikeout, hilariously. “Faith” is an obvious banger, and “Father Figure” is a classic of adult contemporary, and then there is a 9-minute song called “I Want Your Sex.” I can’t believe this song exists. It’s not even bad, it’s just soooooooo funny. And then from there on out it’s just kinda boring pop numbers “One More Try” is alright but the teacher metaphor is kinda weird and it’s too safe and a bit too long. The B-side is all soft numbers and high-tempo synth funk joints. They’re not bad but they don’t make much of an impression, especially not for the cultural impact this album had. I recognize so many of these songs, and I didn’t even realize it. It’s like the first time I heard “Little Red Corvette” with the knowledge of the song it was, and immediately thought “ohhhh shit I KNOW this song.” All in all, I’m not surprised this album is here, and it deserves its spot. That being said, it doesn’t deserve it because of any sort of exceptional musical quality, at least not all the way through.
7.7/10

Björk has never really meshed with me in the way that she has with many of my friends, and the way other artists have with me. Her voice is great, but I don’t know. I much prefer her standing as a legend of art pop than whatever this site thinks of her. But she doesn’t really have a huge masterpiece (her closest two are Medúlla and Vespertine). This is good, though. “Human Behavior” is a gem, and so is “Crying” and “Big Time Sensuality.” That being said, the best thing that this album does is its building of aesthetic and character: the rustic, sepia-toned, androgynous cover photo, the touches of vocal jazz and down-to-earthiness across the album really helps elevate the work from something small, interesting, but not thematically noteworthy, to something seminal, masterful even, at least in the context of sequencing and characterization. Unmistakeably impressive, and an outstanding starting point for such a career.
8.7/10

I love this shit man. See that album cover? Fela singing in the face of several gigantic soldiers? One of the best covers I’ve ever seen. Opening track an anti-authoritarian smash hit criticizing the army? Not to mention it’s an incredible song in its own right. I sadly found out I had the wrong songs, or at least a different version of this release than the original. Which is fine, I prefer this version; it’s more overtly political and a bit shorter. “Mr. Follow-Follow,” the other track on the album, is fucking superb. I’m gonna have to listen to a bunch more of Kuti’s work after this. He’s always been an artist who I kind of put off listening to, but admired. And this is the real reason why. Because it’s fucking incredible.
10/10

The most unlikely left-wing work ever or something maybe. A satirical take on Nazi imagery, seemingly in an attempt to tie the actions of the Yugoslavian socialist party in with the Nazi party. At first it sounds just ok, but as the first song goes on the concept does kinda sink in, and it ends up being pretty enjoyable. But is the album good? Eh. Honestly the whole concept of the band is a bit sketchy to me, at times it feels less subversive and more like they’d rather just cosplay as fascists and label it as leftist art. Is that accurate? Hell if I know, fuck if I care. Meeting the album where it’s at is easy enough, I see what it’s going for, and I can appreciate it. Other than that though there’s not much intrigue or anything really. I like it.
7.5/10