Reviews by ultraclear

I didn't care for Medúlla when it came up on here (and am still not really on board with it, on relisten), which had me worried about taste blasphemy for a while. But I really, really liked this, and the two albums are doing such wildly different things that this actually gets me very, very interested in checking out more of her stuff compared to if I'd just listened to one or the other.

Really gotta go listen to that one with the album cover that everybody posts, in other words.

My only real exposure to the strokes was through Pandora, where they filled in soundspace just fine, but didn't excite me all that much. Looking at that release date, though...
Did some quick wikipedia'ing, and yeah it's looking like this one might have been at the same level as MGMT *Oracular Spectacular* in terms of "hey all this other shit you were listening to came from specifically this". "Post-punk revival", as they call it, apparently. Like I like some Killers, I like Franz Ferdinand, those bands probably don't come out sounding like that without this having come first. So definitely respect where it's due

This is one of the ones I was most excited to get to. Modern-day Kanye is unquestionably A Mess, but 13 years ago the conversation around him was more "well he's an egomaniac, but *he delivers*", which I assumed could be true, but I didn't listen to his music back then.

But yeah this album fucking delivers. I'd drawn "College Dropout" already for this project and liked it, but that didn't fill in a whole lot of context for me. But this one's Post-MTV awards incident, pre-explicit-nazi-shit, and extremely fascinating to listen back to, knowing that his introspection and seeming self-awareness about megalomania and self-destruction in this weren't enough to save him.

Easy to forget that once upon a time, being a popular band didn't involve mostly playing original songs

*Hard Day's Night* really won me over. Compared to a lot of their contemporaries and imitators, they'd done a really good job keeping the tempo up and the arrangements engaging

…What are we even doing here, man.

I'm on an educational journey here when it comes to punk and punk-adjacent, but you can't show me groups up to actually interesting stuff (X-ray Spex, for example) and then expect me to be interested in something that's this tepid.

There's some, but not many Sonic Youths left in the list, and I might need someone to explain what's the big deal they bring to the table, because I do really like what I've heard from them so far, but I know people who are *enthusiastic* about them in a way I can't access

Man, I always forget I actually like Adele quite a bit. Like out of the major radio-friendly acts of the ‘10s, she's held up incredibly well, and this wasn’t even her breakout album

I didn't know Neil Young could jam

Pretty good, but I liked their other one better, and they didn't need two albums on the list

Struggling to describe my feelings on this that don't just sound like backhanded compliments, but I think this is the album that's made The Who kind of click properly for me, and the thing that did that was hitting the books on the making of this one and realizing that:

- a.) Pete Townshend's kinda... his reach exceeds his grasp, and he has a very very long reach, is how I'd maybe put it; but

- b.) that’s the band's secret weapon. Leads to them taking big swings and having interesting results fall out of the effort. Their good songs don't happen without that

Pretty sure I've heard some of these playing at various Kohls stores

alright I guess "industrial metal" works as a genre descriptor, but that undersells how loopy the sample loops get. like listening to a youtube poop

Alice Cooper’s persona’s such a fun middle ground between guitar hero music and gothy theater kid, hard to not be charmed by that

Some of these entries I think basically sneak onto the list for doing stuff out of the ordinary for the era. But the problem is I'm listening to like a 70-year archive in random order, so this doesn't feel like the breath of fresh air it might've felt like at the time, and instead just reminds me of 70s groups that I like more

Ah lol so that's where the humpty dance comes from. It's silly

Second try at these guys after being mean to *Yankee Hotel Foxtrot*, this time I'll write while listening.

...Plonky plonk style indie rock. Good for a cloudy day, but I can't focus to this and it was a double album. "Monday" was good.

lol jesus every single one of their famous guitar hero songs is from this one album. Brings me back to annoying memories of high school sports teammates, but that's not really bon jovi's fault, 3/5

A++ Jazz Funk

Jesus I had no idea about Destiny's Child, and this was a revelation. I feel like a lot of the time I find myself getting ready to be sorta bored by R&B when it comes up, but this was refreshingly energetic