woodennickel2020

A bit of a personal story about this one: When I was a child, I often would have problems being restless/calming myself down enough to go to sleep. My mom gave me a CD of a jazz record that I would play on my alarm clock radio/CD player. It helped a lot. I don't remember how long it has been since I used that record to sleep - 15 years at least - and I certainly didn't remember the record title or who made it. Yet after all that time, once "So What" started getting going I knew exactly what I was listening to. It's nice to hear it after all this time and the generator overall has made me a Miles Davis fan.

In my head, I feel like I have a bias against pre-90s albums. They make up a very small portion of my listening outside of what I do for this project, perhaps I partly think they are limited by the technology that was available at the time and I get it in my head that it won't be that great.

Then, when I listen to an album like this, all those concerns go away. Of course I knew the hits from this album (who doesn't, and they're amazing) but the entire album is excellent throughout. 70s Elton John is an extremely strong vocalist and he shines through on all the tracks, and the compositions are excellent as well. Definitely a 5/5 from me.

Back when I began getting into listening to music, I started by going through System of a Down's discography, which I quite enjoyed. Once I had sufficiently treaded through that, I had to decide where to go next. I ended up thinking to myself "Well, I've heard that Radiohead is pretty good, I'll listen to them" and started my Radiohead journey with The Bends.

It took a few listens, but I eventually realized that this album was special. The first song that really stuck with me from this album was "High and Dry", which is a brilliantly simple song that is executed to perfection, really carried by Thom Yorke's vocals, which I think are at their absolute best on this album. He has this angelic quality that never really shows itself on Radiohead's later albums.

The album itself is just rock perfection. The guitar riffs and melodies are jaw-dropping, and well-complemented by the drums/bass as well as those phenomenal vocals. One aspect that I really appreciate about this album is the balance; there's a great balance between more driving rock songs ("The Bends", "Bones", "Just") and more laid-back ones ("High and Dry", "Fake Plastic Trees", "Bullet Proof ... I Wish I Was"), as well as balance between more simple and more complex songs. It provides a wholistic rock experience that is executed at the highest level.

it's not just Radiohead's best effort. It's the greatest album ever made.

As its name would suggest. The Holy Bible is an album that sits at the top of music. Unlike most albums to come out of this sphere of music in Britain in the mid-90s, this is a bleak look at the darkest aspects of human life. Prostitution, politics, mental disorders, and genocide are amongst the many topics that this album rages about throughout its 56-minute runtime. Richey Edwards, who is perhaps described as the band’s lead lyric conceptualist (as it was primarily his fellow bandmates who would arrange his ideas into viable songs) would disappear from the globe, presumably dead a few months after this record released.

In terms of the music, one of the most striking features here is that every song here is a driving rock banger, creating a perfect juxtaposition to the subject material of the album. The guitars sound phenomenal here and James Dean Bradfield’s vocals are perfect here. I don’t think anyone else could have performed these lyrics here any better as they manage to encapsulate the disillusion with life that this album was written with. The lyrics themselves are expertly written, where they convey the disposition in their writer while also retaining a bit of poetry and without being extremely in-your-face about it that one might expect with this kind of album. These elements combine to make one of the greatest listening experiences of the 90s.

This is one of the few albums that I call perfect, a 100/100.

It took maybe the better part of one minute for me to figure out I hated this. The guitar here feels like it’s lifeless most of the time and I pretty much despise all of Pharrell Williams’ vocal inflections that he uses throughout the album. It’s not like the lyrics are anything special. I know comparisons are generally not too fair, but this album came out the same year as The College Dropout, and I couldn’t help but think about how much I’d rather listen to that album than this one. “Backseat Love” (probably the worst song on the record that I had to pause midway through because it was so bad) made me think of how much I’d rather listen to the indie rock group The Backseat Lovers. I think that “Jump”, “Breakout” are tolerable, while “Drill Sergeant” (without the hidden track) and “Maybe” are actually good.

Well, when my experience with an album is so poor that I can only think about other albums I’d rather listen to, it’s no shocker that it’s going to get a 1/5. Currently, it will end up as #2 lowest rated album, still decently ahead of 1989.