Reviews by ultraclear

mellow r&b, meaning it’s good as long as it’s not the first boy thing i’m paying attention to

Took a minute to figure it out, but then I learned this is a Clapton thing. And it's got Clapton doing what Clapton do, little bit samey at points, but that'sa some pretty good blues guitar

soundtrack of every ride share i’ve ridden in nyc

sounds not at all like the 90s and very much like how singer-songwriter people are in the last 5 years

Good music to cook to, especially good music for you and your partner to cook *together* to. A lil date at home for you & yours

Sort of the rap equivalent of when on twitter two people manage to stay nice to each other during a disagreement, and then some third dipshit chimes in “wow a calm rational discussion? on the hellsite???”
By which I think I mean the corniness of the project, while not a fault, isn’t on its own really cause for praise, either

Hey alright I liked this, and mostly didn't know the songs before. I might have been done a disservice with the order I heard the U2 entries in. Apparently this one was pitched as a major reinvention of their sound, which might have made "All That You Can't Leave Behind" make more sense if I'd listened that one after this? maybe unlikely, and I'm definitely not going to listen to that one a second time to find out

...had to be there, I guess. Think there's only one more of this guy on the list, but he's had frankly too many opportunities on this thing to win me over for how boring each of these has been.

I might need somebody to explain patiently to me what the appeal is here, because everything I've osmosed just seems to point at inside baseball stuff around the particular scene he's involved in?

I already liked *Frank*, and this one's even better.

What the fuck is it with all these guys and the constant cuck-revenge fantasies, it's so weird and pervasive! Still comes out way better than Eminem, though; I like the Bomb Squad's production a hell of a lot more, Chuck D's presence on the album is very appreciated, and Ice Cube has a much better range of topics that he's capable of covering, compared to Mathers

And that's a wrap for all the velvet underground on the list. Verdict: not really for me, but they're good, and endless respect to them for sounding Like That back in the 60s.

Enough Costello's come across here enough times now to make clear that there's not going to be too much stylistic variety between albums, so you'll either be on board with him or not (he is a consistent 4/5 for me). This one's maybe a little bit cleaner/tighter than *Armed Forces*.

Dated in a way that makes me smile instead of groan (fucking losing my mind at the aerosmith cover, it's so good). This one must have been huge at the time, I feel like this is still probably a lot of people's mental model of how rap music sounds.

an era when being impressed by The Joker didn’t get a person viciously made fun of

Faced again with being kind of a basic bitch about a few things, "Paper Planes," overexposed as it is, is both very different from the rest of this, and also I like it more.

kind of a curveball. I'm pretty sure I've heard this one indirectly before, as one of many weirdo things my brother was pirating off music forums at the time. Haven't heard it at all since those days, surprised to see it coming up on the list

Mother Fucker, if Hindi movie soundtracks are on the table, I am going to fucking Demand you have more than a single album representing that on the god damn list. The Indian music industry and the way it's tied up with their film industry is a whole fascinating world, that I'm very of the mind that if you're going to showcase it at all, you should be giving it way more shrift than a single 70s album. I like David Bowie fine, I will have listened to nine of his albums by the time I'm done with this thing, The Next Day was enjoyable but expendable. Get your fucking priorities straight

Has what's been the typical Bowie hit rate for me, where there's a handful of great songs on there, but the overall Album Experience^(TM) is just alright.

On a Meta level, it was probably the right move to drop this one from the later book editions, since Blackstar does a better job covering the reasons you'd think to put this one on here

Extremely good trip hop! nothing like a genre double feature to immediately clarify what the good stuff’s supposed to sound like

Mediocre trip hop