Reviews by therealab

Another debut album, another contender for best first song off a debut album for Runnin' with the Devil. I like guitar solos, but Eruption has never been one of my favorites. I like them in the context of a song, not as the song. You Really Got Me is a great cover. Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love is another Van Halen staple. I don't know if a band started a first album with more consecutive staples than Van Halen does here. This is a fun album. Jamie's Cryin' AKA the song that would become the sample from Tone Loc's Wild Thing. Six straight songs that probably make any Van Halen's greatest hits album....that's quite a start. First came KISS, then came Van Halen. Brothers maybe more than anything, but definitely related. That's a quick album. Good stuff.

I remember liking Flava Flav as a hype man much better as a kid. His ridiculous presence in the videos might have contributed to that, a silly image alongside the important lyrical content provided a balance. Professor X's beats wouldn't work for anyone but Chuck D, great combination. 911 Is A Joke has one of the sickest beats ever. Welcome to the Terrordome is a great song. The "soundscape" tracks aren't great, they feel like a reminder that DJs were once as integral a part of the group as the MCs. Why did rappers add some random Jamaican saying "buck, buck" on so many albums? No irony in Ice Cube's "Fuck Hollywood" at the end of Burn Hollywood Burn. Power to the People is a good album track. It feels like the early 90s could have seen hip hop move to either socially conscious rap or gangsta rap. I guess it isn't surprising that entertainment won. Definitely an album that I remember more fondly than I like it now. The album tracks aren't that good. B Side Wins Again is good if it weren't for the static running over the whole track. And then it closes with Fight The Power. That's a great final track, has to be among the best last tracks of all time, sums up the album and is an amazing song.

This album is in my top ten of most listened to all time. I love it, I love Cypress Hill. It's crazy that The Cocteau Twins got two albums on the list but Cypress Hill's Black Sunday was left off. How I Could Just Kill a Man is the best Cypress Hill song ever. This is an all time great song: the beat, the lyrics. Hand On the Pump next...that might be the greatest back to back tracks on an album of all time. Hole In the Head is a great album track, they wouldn't lean into the Spanglish or Spanish lyrics until later, but you get a brief taste on it. 90s hip hop acts loved skits/intermissions in their albums. The Phuncky Feel One is another great album track. This might be the best hip hop album of all time. The hits were huge, influential and awesome and the album tracks are terrific. B-Real and Sen Dog are underrated MCs and DJ Muggs is an underrated DJ. Real Estate is going to roll right into Stoned Is the Way of the Walk, love it. These guys love weed. Latin Lingo...with the funky bilingual...underrated song. Latin Lingo was released as a single which I do not remember but it definitely deserved to be. Tres Equis was their first Exito en Espanol. Born to Get Busy's chorus and the party noise is the first thing I actively don't like about the album. One of the best albums ever made, confirmed.

I always though Husker Du was more of a hardcore band. Another double album? Come on, music critics. Just because a band you like made a bunch of songs all at once doesn't make it good. It's so hard to make a single good album, why do so many artists think a double album is a good idea? This is more like a grunge album so far. I'm not sure why everyone thought that Nirvana and Pearl Jam were so ground breaking at the time. These guys and the Pixies were doing something similar before the grunge explosion. This is much better than I anticipated, at least I like it more than I expected. I think their name threw me off. I don't know why this wasn't more mainstream, maybe before their time with grunge or after their time with punk? The lead singer sounds like the guy from Barenaked Ladies. This is completely forgettable but there are a million 90s bands that owe these guys a huge debt of gratitude. She Floated Away could be a Pogues song from Rum, Sodomy and the Lash. If this album was the soundtrack to a 1987 version of the movie Singles, it would have changed the trajectory of so many bands and music history. This is starting to drag a little. Maybe "post-punk" is making more sense to me now because I can hear how someone would think this album sounds like REM in spots. You Can Live at Home sounds like a Talking Heads song, the bass line and vocals are clearly imitations, or "influenced by", them.

Bittersweet Symphony was everywhere when it was released. It is a good song though. Kind of an alternative-lite album, clearly influenced by Achtung Baby. This is another album that sounds very much of it's particular time. These guys were one-hit wonders, but the album is good so far. Very string heavy. This could have been a late 90s U2 album or series of outtakes except for Bittersweet Symphony. I guess they could be called proto-Coldplay or Radiohead for pop fans. I'm realizing a lot of music from the UK in the late 90s/early 2000s had an eerily similar sound. The lyrics are a little whiny throughout. It feels a little bit like these guys strategically planned to make a knock off of (What's the Story) Morning Glory? It started out strong but it loses its appeal pretty quickly. The album has a specific sound, there's just very little after the first song that is different at all, the songs all kind of blend together. 15 minute final track which is really two tracks separated by a five minutes of silence to.....I don't know what...this was a stupid but popular trick to try and pull on your fans. They aren't the only band to do it and it was so incredibly dumb. I think with the rise of mp3s and streaming this might be a relic of a time when CDs ruled music formats. Six and a half minutes of silence for a static filled "hidden track" lasting two minutes. I don't get the point of this...finding out who your real fans are? Being clever? Burying something that sucks but you love? The baby crying noises on a loop are an especially nice touch. Why do so many artists need to have such moronic last tracks on an album? Songs played by Spotify automatically after the album?.....The Cranberries and, you guessed it, Coldplay.

I accidentally deleted all my thoughts on this album so it basically boils down to a couple of good to great songs surrounded by relatively weak album tracks. There is no denying the greatness of the title track though.

Ronald Isley's voice is instantly recognizable. That Lady, Pts. 1 & 2 is an amazing song. Pop funk, I am really liking this album even if I don't always love Ronald Isley's voice. This album is great, it's got a massive hit that stands up to replaying and a ton of great album tracks. You Walk Your Way is like Motown meets Curtis Mayfield. Although, now that I think about it, maybe this is just knock off Curtis Mayfield. The Listen to the Music cover has been the low point so far. This album is a revelation. Sunshine (Go Away Today) is a miss. The covers are generally weaker than the original material on the album, and unfortunately they are roughly half the songs.

The last Bowie album and the lyrics are just as weird as ever. You can hear a difference in his voice. There is a lot of saxophone on this album. You can definitely hear a sadness in the songs, the title of Lazarus gives that one away, but there's a quality to the music that conveys the feeling too. I listened to this album right after he died and remembered liking it much more than I do now. I love the sound of the album, but the individual songs are kind of up and down. I Can't Give Everything feels like a perfect ending to an amazing career.

This album was the Jagged Little Pill of 2015, half the album ended up as massive singles, every person I knew loved it at the time and now no one admits they ever liked Adele. Good songs, she has a great voice. This album was definitely overrated. Even as singles I'm not loving these songs as much as I did when it came out. I Miss You is good though, Skyfall feeling (great Bond song). Maybe it's more of an exhaustion issue with the singles? When We Were Young was the best of the hits, reminds me of her cover of Dylan's Make You Feel My Love. It's hilarious when she talks about getting older and being young at the age of 25. This is a great song. Water Under the Bridge is also better than I remember, maybe it is just Hello and Send My Love (To Your Lover) that got overplayed (still are?). River Lea, Love In The Dark, both good. Maybe it is only the hits that are overrated. All I Ask was produced by Bruno Mars and you can hear it, another good one. I stand corrected, this album is underrated. Despite everyone complaining about Beyonce not winning Album of the Year, this was a deserving choice.

Another album that's not available on Spotify...I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if it's this difficult for a person to listen to an album, it is not so essential that it belongs on this list. This is already the best of the albums I couldn't listen to on Spotify. I bet the Avett Brothers love this guy. Man, this is depressing. His voice reminds me of Damien Rice. O definitely feels like it was written after listening to this. The music is good, I'm going to have to give this a second listen to really get into the lyrics. The drums in Madeline-Mary makes it different from the rest of the album but it's great. This album was good. I'm going to listen to it a second time before I give it a final rating but I definitely liked it. This was a few years before it's time probably.

Algerian folk music (rai) over a hip hop/dance beat. Honestly, this could be worse. And now it is. El Harba Wine's background music is from a cheesy 80s music, and not a good one. This is like what you'd expect to play over the Algerian dub of Teen Titans Go! in place of The Night Begins to Shine. I guess some of this is in French. The musical styles of the first three songs are all wildly different, this feels more like a greatest hits album as there's very little cohesion between the songs musically. Cover of John Lennon's Imagine is recognizable and awful. Much like modern Western music has been greatly influenced by the history of sacred music, a lot of this sounds like calls to prayer. English lyrics! The guest singer, Noa, does not have a strong voice. It's not helping that this is unavailable through Spotify. You can't even find E'dir E'sseba anywhere to listen to. The music from this is all over the place, pick a style and stick with it. This should only be on a list of 1,001 albums if they are albums from Algeria specifically. Ok, El Bab has something going on, massive improvement but again, no connection to the rest of the album. It feels like every musical style included in this album, and there are MANY, is from the 80s...maybe Algerian music is 25 years behind America.....so maybe the great Algerian Britney/Christina debate is happening right now. I'm counting the minutes until this is over. Mele H'bibti could be the music from a terrorism action movie sequence, Algeria or Paris based....Jason Bourne driving a car through the streets of Casablanca. It must be exhausting having to be this pretentious all the time for music critics. No one should need to feel like they need to impress people they will never meet this much.

Subterranean Homesick Blues, often imitated, never duplicated. The Velvet Underground definitely were influenced by Dylan. Maggie's Farm, the song with 1,000 meanings. It always resonates as an anarchist anthem to me: anti-education, anti-business, anti-military, anti-government. A great song that spawned a great Rage Against the Machine cover. He's the best lyricist in popular music history, he can do it all, from allegorical and symbolic to literal storytelling. This is a bluesy album, Dylan is such a chameleon musically. The music from Bob Dylan's 115th Dream sounds like Lay Down Sally by Eric Clapton. Mr. Tambourine Man is the most popular song from the album and probably the worst one as well. Billy Joel's Piano Man borrows something from this even if it is played straight rather than as a metaphor. I like the electric half of the album better than the acoustic but his lyrics are just absolutely amazing. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue is great. Great album, underrated Dylan album.

Psychedelic B-team artist whose most famous song isn't even on this album. They sound like a Doors cover band, apparently if you were a band in San Francisco in the late 60s and sounded a certain way they let you have an album and eventually critics found it "important". Jefferson Airplane, The Doors and The Grateful Dead are all on this list...there's no reason to have this album on the list other than some critic showing off how much he knows about psychedelic rock. This album is one more reason to hate San Francisco. Some comical political lyrics, this is the Country Joe and the Fish I was expecting, more comic book references than I would have expected though. Understood, you love doing drugs. This album is going downhill fast, The Masked Marauder is particularly awful. Psychedelic Simon and Garfunkel.

Starting off good…but definitely of its era. Early 90s alternative, like a more commercial Sonic Youth, or a more punk Pixies. Definitely some Tori Amos style vocals on some of these songs, very much of its time. There are long lead ups to the lyrics in several of these songs. There’s a rawness to the music and the singing that gives the album soul. Her voice is perfect for this album. Man-Size Sextet would be perfect for a feminist horror movie. Bold choice to cover Bob Dylan and I don’t love it. 50ft Queenie rocks. Me-Jane is good too. Her voice is definitely accompanying the music, the music drowns her out sometimes. Snake is the most punk song on the album. Steve Albini produced this, Surfer Rosa and In Utero…like I said, of a very specific time. Ecstasy has a blues throwback feel, you can hear echoes of Nirvana, and it is the best song on the album.

A rights dispute means this isn't available on Spotify which is a shame. One Nation Under a Groove is a great song, maybe the quintessential funk song. This is the album that spawned 1,001 samples. Typical George Clinton ridiculous lyrics. Groovallegiance has a definite reggae influence. The lyrics continue to be a distraction to the music. Each song has gotten progressively worse. Prince was definitely influenced by Funkadelic and added real lyrics, that's why he's one of the greats. My kids come up with better lyrics about poop than Promentalshitbackwashpsychosis Enema Squad (The Doo Doo Chasers) has. The call and response of poop lyrics is so awful. One great song to kick off the album. Honestly this album would be better if it was all instrumentals after One Nation Under a Groove. The groove from Mac Ayres' Soon owes a lot to the instrumental PE Squad/Doo Doo Squad to end the bonus EP.

If you are going to do "industrial" music, this is the way to do it. I bet Trent Reznor loves Einsturzende Neubauten. What is the fascination with pigs on this album? This album could have been the soundtrack for the movie Seven rather than just Closer over the opening credits. Closer is the biggest hit from Nine Inch Nails' career and for good reason, great song. The screeching saw on metal sounds are distracting from what is a pretty good album otherwise. There aren't too many songs that benefit from terrified screaming on a loop in the background. I love the piano on the album, it works great in creating the feeling of the album. It's hard to tell if Trent is mad at himself or someone else in these songs, very teenage angsty. You can feel the angry young male energy pouring out of each song. From Closer on it gets better. The industrial noise component of the album is tiresome. The Downward Spiral ties together the musical themes from Closer and Hurt, the two big singles off the album, it's interesting. Hurt is a great song, I think I like it better than Closer. Johnny Cash's cover is great too.

Late Madonna...Dance Party Madonna. This sounds like a Sneaker Pimps album, like this should be playing over the credits of a Johnny Lee Miller movie. Ray of Light is the single. Maybe it was music that changed, not Madonna. She always just rode the pop/dance trends and it didn't matter what the sound was, she was just always club music. Nothing Really Matters is the best track so far. Shanti/Ashtangi would never happen today due to the fear of being accused of cultural appropriation. Although, maybe Madonna was big enough to transcend that at some point. I vaguely remember Frozen on the radio. There's a world music thread running through this album too. I wonder if this is when she made the move to the UK. There's a vulnerability about Madonna's voice on some songs that resonates (Mer Girl on this album). She's varied between sex kitten party girl and vulnerable lover throughout her career.

Album covers can tell you a lot about what you're getting into and this one is correlating pretty well. This is the band that launched Nick Cave...it always surprises me how fame works. Every time I think I've just had bad luck in the albums I've gotten so far, I get hit with something like this again. This is like Rockabilly/Metal/Punk. It's like Elvis and The Ramones and Sepultura made an album. The screeching guitars are hard to listen to. Distorted guitars, distorted vocals, is this the original garage band? This is the music and album cover that inspired Mad Max: Fury Road, especially Dead Joe (2nd Version). The album switched to Sonic Youth and I barely noticed.

Dr. Dre back from the dead after NWA broke up and the introduction of Snoop Doggy Dogg. This album is basically one extended diss track for Eazy-E. This was definitely the era of the Parliament and Funkadelic sample in hip hop, truly the G-Funk era. Nuthin' But A "G" Thang was the first single and is absolutely amazing. The skits and intros/outros are needless filler. Snoop was a revelation on this album, the rest of the guest rappers not so much. My memory had this higher, still good though. Maybe I'll have to do this project again in 20 years and see if it changes again.

THIS is the Leonard Cohen I was looking for. Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits are playing to identical audiences, I would not be able to tell the difference between this album and some Tom Waits. Leonard Cohen could have been less goofy Randy Newman for Pixar. You can hear his sound coming through, it's like late Dylan where it's different but you can still hear his sound.