Reviews by ultraclear

Cannibal Surf Babe tricked me into thinking this would be a much better time than it was.

Appreciative of people putting more actual world music on the users list, especially for something like this where it’s truly a broad international collaboration

2004 was a really good year in music, this clearly included. Super fun! Seems like a lot of people get annoyed by the cartoon samples, but honestly it's like listening to someone laying the groundwork for how to do a youtube poop (this is a compliment).

*Very* reminiscent of Joni Mitchell, who's an artist that I never really quite got the hang of during the main run. I feel like I prefer singer-songwriter stuff when the arrangements are piano-based instead of guitar.

Final Album!

I'm not minding that this project of 3 years ends with above-average R&B from a random UK rapper who's mostly unremembered 20+ years later. Feels in the intended spirit of the project, while also demonstrating the biases about which lesser-known acts got included (and which ones got removed in later editions lol)

Not breaking new ground in the genre, but pretty fun.

Not a bad draw as this thing winds down. No idea what the last one will be, hopefully something distinctive.

It's always impressive how boring Frank Sinatra etc managed to make Bossa Nova sound. Every BN/Samba offering from actual South American artists has been pretty decent!

It's an Elton John Doing Elton John Stuff piece of business. A Sometimes food for me, but he's got his place.

Fitting that this thing still has some forgettable 60s pop in the tank as I move through the final week. I just need to draw another one-hit wonder new wave band from the 80s, and some no-name DJ's techno release from the 90s, and I'll have a nice balanced 1001 Generator meal to close things out.

Rolling high on these as I enter the final week. Little bit more boring than Document or Automatic, but I'm rarely unhappy to see R.E.M. come up

Damn, I knew this one was on here, and was hoping it'd be number 1089. End the thing on a high note. 12 albums out, almost made it. Alas.

It's great, but also as someone who likes other Jethro Tull albums, it's wearying that this is the only thing in their discography that most people have heard of, or are willing to praise. "Oh yeah Aqualung's great [now stop talking to me about Jethro Tull]," they say.

Problem is, though, at the end of the day their potential > their actual output. They've got some heaters in their backlog ("Thick as a Brick" can unquestionably hang with the Genesis, ELP, and King Crimson prog classics, and I'm willing to go to bat for "Songs From The Wood" and "Heavy Horses"), but the bulk of their stuff was middling, and I gotta be honest with myself about that.

Definitely underrated, but there's still a ceiling there at the end of the day, y'know?

a double album's a loooooong time to simmer in this kinda shucks howdy shit. Imagining that I'm in a mining town only gets me halfway through disc one

Eh, there was a time and a place. Listened to & enjoyed some stuff off Strawberry Jam in my youth, but I don't think about these guys nowadays, and I don't plan to start again

Slot should have gone to a second SoaD album if we’re trying for a quota of this kinda thing

Annoying to be getting this one like a week after he put himself in the headlines (again) with his nazi shit. Anyway, I respect how different it sounds from previous stuff of his, but it's not as good as Twisted Fantasy was

This list invests so much in showcasing UK electronic acts, and every single one of those gets completely smoked by the French and German offerings.

This is the most dumb and petty complaint, but I can’t stand the way this guy leans into his Rs

This wasn’t really my kind of thing back in 2013, but this sound is *so* 2013 that it’s got me nostalgic in a good way.

This plus other kind of random-seeming selections like Hot Chip I think help me make sense of some of the more baffling patterns on the overall list (why so much drab new wave) (why so much crappy drum & bass techno). The common element really seems to be that these were all big deals in the British club music scene of each era. Like that’s treated on the list as it’s own entire ecosystem in the same scale as rock & hip hop. Which is insane, but at least it’s a throughline.

Stop mumbling.

Costello's one of the biggest reasons I might actually go read the book. Why is he on here so much