Reviews by ultraclear

Less of a snooze than "Trafalgar," but still not great. The People Demand Saturday Night Fever!!!

lil bit dull, but hardly a crime

Lotta people I know are into this kind of thing. I have nothing bad to say about it, but it doesn't Speak to me at all. I prefer a more *staccato* layered soundscape.

My first thought was this sounded kind of like B-52s, but then I kept listening and realized "wait a minute no, that's *definitely* Björk singing!" Keeping up the trend of preferring her early work, I liked this one a lot.

Inoffensive, but this is the third album I've been served from them, and that's really just too many Aerosmith albums.

The rest of it's good, but at the end of the day, "Superstition" is a song that gets you into heaven

I do not, and never will like honky tonk, but I do prefer country music being this kind of silly cornball stuff compared to what it's doing in the year 2024.

Jesus another iconic album of an awful era. Lotta overlap with the Timberlake album I listened to last round, but this one's way more interesting to think about, even just culturally. Both of those albums were dropped from later editions of the book, but imo they should have kept this one on there. Makes me really sad to listen to, knowing the injustice of what was coming up for her.

Setting aside the paparazzi angle, though, I would have been 7 when this released, and I couldn't stand this music back then. It was interesting to revisit this, having picked up more literacy about what Music was doing during that era. It was cool to be able to detect "oh this is doing shit that Janet Jackson had already worked over 10 years ago." R&B repackaged for white people, there's a much bigger context that this is clearly a component of.

Any case, I didn't really like this. I do like "Toxic" alright, but I never sat down with the album it came from, so idk if the rest of her stuff from that point sounded like that.

I think this wraps up all the PJ Harvey on the list. I'd probably benefit from doing a marathon chronological listen of her stuff at this point--there's a shortlist of artists with a bunch of albums on the list, and for me she's at the David Bowie level of "ok I actually did kind of need to listen to so many of these to get the hang of this artist"

80s pop of the good variety.

I don't really get Joni Mitchell, I don't think. A lot of these sounded fine, but extremely aimless and unstructured. Made me bored. Couldn't settle into the right wavelength for it.

It's not Black Eyed Peas bad, but it's down there. iconic album of a dreadful era

Checks out, they do seem like they're having fun

Decent, but I don't think Sepultra needed two albums on this list. Keep this one, ditch *Arise*, imo

Not Bad, but baffling inclusion

Not as good as their other album on the list and Garbage, but solid. Girl grunge good

*Finally* a band that understands title capitalization rules around prepositions and articles. Fuck!

Legendary album, these guys rule.

Noodling around the kind of stuff that built up to that one Weeknd song. Wish I hadn't seen someone in the peanut gallery point out that the drums are basically identical on each song, because that person is right and it became really distracting.

Pleasant! Didn't think the UK had this in them during this era

Might have liked it more if I hadn't learned by experience by now that Scottish 80s pop/post-punk is one of the most overrated and over-represented scenes on this list. Had some highlights, but I'm over it.