Reviews by wotanmjolnir

Hip-hop is not my thing, but this has the decency of being a lot shorter than most, and the beats and the flow are good.

Lyrical content … oh.

God damn is this boring, self-pitying and childish.

I did not have high hopes when I saw this - an artist I’d never heard of, released in 2010. But then I listened to it and loved it. Really engaging folk-pop/rock, angry and acerbic and tender and just really, really enjoyable.

This is ok in a background-y ambient soundscape. I’m never going to actively listen to it again, but I’d happily have it on whilst pottering around the house.

I’m not a big EDM fan, but I really enjoyed Fat Of The Land. This is nowhere as accessible, and it goes on way too long (both individual tracks and as a whole album), but it’s pretty solid.

I feel like I should like Rush - I like prog, after all. But, aside from a few tracks (that aren’t here) they just don’t really gel with me.

This is not shit, but it’s just average rock music, with a little bit of tasteless cultural appropriation in A Passage To Bangkok and a weird section where Alex Liefson spends a minute or two just tuning up.

I’ve tried, but I can’t love this.

It’s hip-hop; it’s over long; it has rubbish skits; its not terrible, but it’s not for me.

He’s not the Antichrist Superstar, he’s a very naughty boy!

Separating art from artist this is ok, but very samey and really is the most edgelordy album I’ve ever heard which I guess is not surprising since Manson is perhaps the uber-edgelord.

There were a lot of albums and artists like this floating around in the early to mid 2000s - Anthony and the Johnsons, Jack Johnson, Corinne Bailey Rae, James Blunt, or the Magic Numbers for example. That doesn’t mean that they were good, but they were inoffensive and easy for people who don’t really listen to music to listen to.

This is bland, inoffensive, forgettable, and very beige. It’s not terrible, it’s not even bad, really - it’s just … there. There are a couple of good-ish tunes, but this album is nearly an hour long and a couple of tunes is just not enough to make me like the album. It’s three stars, but really it is 2.5 as it’s totally mid and rounding makes it 3, but it couldn’t be any lower on that grade without dropping.

I think the best way to sum up this 40-track, two-and-a-quarter-hour monstrosity is ‘self indulgent’. It’s not completely awful but I did not enjoy any more than maybe 15 minutes of it, and that ROI in my books is pretty shit.

This is not the worst album on this list, but don’t get me wrong it is still quite shit. However it may be the most ‘why on earth is this on the list’ album in the whole project.

This bears no resemblance to the recognisable form of what the Bee Gees would become, and the music is really derivative 60s tinged pop. It is also just fucking weird in places - at some points it feels like it’s a novelty record or slightly comic ‘b’ side collection, occasionally they seem to be doing weird vocal impressions and end up sounding like Neddy Seagoon from The Goon Show, or some weird parody of Scott Walker with his balls in a vice. So often the lyrics are completely nonsensical - Don’t want to live inside myself / I’m much better off alone - I mean, that sounds very much like the same thing to me, but maybe I’m just an idiot.

All in all a very fucking odd record, and an even odder inclusion.

I can’t claim to like Talking Heads and then not say I like this. It’s pretty good, one of the better picks from the 2010s on this list for sure. It’s not brilliant, but it’s fine.

I thought this was great when it came out, and it’s still pretty solid although it hasn’t aged wonderfully. Even if they had not done a not-terrible cover of Comfortably Numb you would be able to smell the Gilmour influence all over this - the guitar tone on especially Return to Oz is pure prime Gilmour, and I’m here for that.

About as flash-in-the-pan as it is possible to be, but a pretty good album.

I generally prefer punk to new wave, but this is punky enough to be pretty good. Unapologetically British and grubby, and that’s fine by me.

I’ve never been an MJ fan, even before the full-on craziness and paedo shit came out - it’s just not my kind of jam, and the super-slick over-production doesn’t help either. It’s very uninteresting to me, but at least it doesn’t have as many “ow”s, “cha”s, “sha-MONE”s or “hee-hee”s as his later stuff. Scrapes a 3.

Lightweight early punk - it’s fine but very ubremarkable.

This just reminds me of the soundtrack to any mid-90s Ugly-Duckling-Removes-Glasses-and-Becomes-Swan movie. It’s ok.

I have no cultural connection to this so it is hard to say if it holds up against other similar albums, but I didn’t hate it. I’m never going to listen again, but it wasn’t bad and boring like a lot of this list is.

This is one of those legendary albums, like Dark Side Of The Moon, Sergeant Pepper, Rumours, Velvet Underground and Nico, or Pet Sounds, that anybody who knows anything about music has heard of.

This is peerless in its execution.

This is boring bloody bollocks.

Jazz is jam band music for people who look down on jam bands. Jam bands are also shit.

This album is just so much better than the average rating suggests. Yes, it’s a bit musical theatre / operatic, but that’s not surprising when you consider who is involved. What it also is is brilliantly performed, and musically strong. Just give it a fair crack of the whip.