Reviewing Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: #465

Overrated/Underrated?: Appropriately Rated

There's been a lot of talk amongst the other folks who are reviewing this list about compilation albums and Greatest Hits albums and whether such things should be included on this list. I share the frustration in some cases (like why is there a Supremes Greatest Hits on this album when so many great Supremes albums exist? And even the Muddy Waters Anthology was questionable to me). But ... read more

Reviewing Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: #467

Overrated/Underrated?: Overrated

I'm tempted to not even call Maxwell's 2009 comeback album "neo-soul" because he plays so close to the traditional soul sound that there's very little that's "neo" about it. Still, while there isn't much here that's inventive or original, Maxwell does create some really nice, sensual tracks that blend funk and jazz.

Maxwell's songs sound pretty nice, but there's a certain ... read more

Maybe this is just me, and I haven't been paying attention to the genre enough, but I feel like it's been awhile since we had a solid industrial metal release. Perhaps not since Bad Witch by the Nine Inch Nails (the Beatles of Industrial Metal you might say) from back in 2018. For that reason, HEALTH's latest release is really refreshing.

The instrumentals on this are really nasty and, sometimes, downright terrifying. The percussion is heavy as hell and the whole album is a slew of noise. I ... read more

Okay, let the record show that it says I'm a poptimist in my bio and I maintain that I still am. But dear god, sitting through this whole album was taxing on my soul. I'd love to pick one song that demonstrates all of the problems with this album, but there are just too many different ways in which this album sucked.

So, right out the gates, we get arguably the worst song on the album. 'Are You Gone Already' is just kind of a mess. It doesn't build toward anything and, right when Nicki seems ... read more

Apparently this is a great week for dark folk. Panopticon's latest album has bits of dark folk mixed with atmospheric metal and the result is something that feels icy cold and enormous. While I normally don't use this term for the harsh style that comes with metal, I'm tempted to call this album beautiful. But it's hard to feel any other way about it and it's a perfect album for the winter months.

The best song is easily Winter's Ghost, the 20 minute epic of a track which opens the album. The ... read more

Reviewing Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: #469

Overrated/Underrated?: Overrated

Either I'm missing something here, or the idea of Manu Chao is way more appealing than the real thing. Manu Chao is a musician-activist who emerged during the late nineties at a time when anti-globalization was having a moment in Europe and America and he became big amongst the Latin American left but also amongst leftists the world over.

All of this is immediately apparent in Chao's debut which ... read more

Reviewing Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: #470

Overrated/Underrated?: Overrated

Juvenile's blockbuster album feels like the quintessential bling album. It's chaotic, it's over the top, there are way too many features but somehow the crowdedness doesn't hurt the album too much and I mean the album cover...what can you even say about it. It's so absurd but kind of awesome at the same time. Juvenile's flow also is very much of the era as well.

400 Degreez is definitely an ... read more

Reviewing Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: #468

Overrated/Underrated?: Underrated

I'm generally not a big Rolling Stones fan but I have to admit this album was pretty awesome. Even given the oh so many problems with this album, it's a hell of a lot of fun and it captures what made the Stones such a phenomena for so long.

The album opens really strong with one of the best songs of the Stones' career 'Miss You', which is the bands best attempt at disco and while it certainly ... read more

Unprocessed's math rock inspired metal sound has a lot of potential but it falls flat because of an overreliance on metalcore tropes. The guitar solos and the choruses were really generic and I was always bummed whenever the band turned away from some of the genuinely interesting math-y instrumentals in order to play a chorus I've heard a million times on other albums. The album also suffered from an issue that I feel a lot of metal bands suffer from which is very weak lyrics.

As I said, ... read more

For the first spin of this collaboration album between Sludge Metal group Full of Hell and Shoegazers Nothing I thought it was too disjointed to be an effective album. But upon follow up listens there's something about monstrous and brutal slow moving metal being juxtaposed against dreamy, spacey dream pop that weirdly works.

The opening pair of tracks is probably the perfect demonstration of this dynamic at play. Rose Tinted World is a grimey, disgusting and heavy track and when it gives way ... read more

When I saw Albion's album cover, I was expecting Skyrim-core type music (others refer to this as 'dark folk' but I prefer Syrim-core). And while I occasionally enjoy music like this, for example I was pretty fond of some of Myrkur's more folksy albums which fall firmly under the Skyrim-core banner. However, there are a lot of tropes in the music that fits this label and it can often make the music feel kind of bland.

However, Harp's melancholic and poetic take on the genre is fresh and a lot ... read more

Reviewing Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: #471

Overrated/Underrated?: Overrated

I originally picked up this album from a thrift store when I was in college and listened to it on my cheap record player. I always just assumed that I was gonna love this album since many of my musical heroes were big fans of this album and since it's so universally regarded as a classic.

Maybe you can blame my high hopes, but I consider this to be one of the great musical disappointments of my ... read more

Reviewing Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: #472

Overrated/Underrated?: Overrated

While I don't think SZA's debut was groundbreaking the way many critics at the time did, it's a solid R&B release with an emotional depth and lyrical maturity that's kind of rare for an artist this early in her career. It would foreshadow her much better sophomore release where she would establish herself as a real force in pop music.

I definitely found the production on some of these tracks ... read more

Peter Gabriel's latest is a moody prog album with soaring ambitions. The album explores aging, nature, dystopia and other heavy themes. The record contains some interesting reflections on humanity's place in the universe but it also contains some relatively shallow songs like 'Love Can Heal'.

For my tastes, the pacing was a bit slow and the enormous grandeur in the lyrics was met with a relatively muted and tame sound. There wasn't enough bombast in the production to match the ambitious scope ... read more

[I'm gonna be spending this week catching up on some releases from earlier in the year. Let me know in a shout or a comment if you have any recommendations]

If you read my bio, you might get the sense that I'm a Sufjan Stevens Enjoyer, which is true. I found Sufjan Stevens when I was in college and I was a devout Christian who was gradually losing his faith as one does in college. I desperately wanted to find music with Christian themes that didn't royally suck. Partially because I thought ... read more

Reviewing Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: #473

Overrated/Underrated?: Overrated

When I was in elementary school, I would sneak MTV (and it's much lower quality companion Fuse) in the basement of my very Catholic household. I watched Yo Mama (a show I have somehow brought up twice in this series), Pimp My Ride and the plethora of music videos that would air on that channel (because yes they were still in the business of releasing music videos back then).

On that basement TV, ... read more

[I'm gonna be spending this week catching up on some releases from earlier in the year. Let me know in a shout or a comment if you have any recommendations]

The Last Whole Earth Catalog was one of my favorite discoveries from this year. LWEC seems to be the work of Daniel Parr and he describes it as "a free form, stream of consciousness, meta jazz, joke on the bubblegum wrapper experiential timepiece, with the minute hand ticking on and the hour hand on whatever the heck time is" so ... read more

Reviewing Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: #474

Overrated/Underrated?: Appropriately Rated

In a way, Big Star feels like the type of band that could never exist in the modern day. There are no longer hidden gems because you no longer need to dig through a record stack to find music, you can just Google around or get recommendations from Spotify. Lesser known bands with enormous influence feel like they don't exist anymore because influential bands pick up followings pretty ... read more

Reviewing Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: #475

Overrated/Underrated?: Overrated

[In which I question the validity of this entire project]

The best part of this Sheryl Crow record, which is considered a classic in some circles, is the lyricism. Sheryl Crow strings together a series of stories that are reminiscent of Simon and Garfunkel lyrics.

The record falls flat because of the production and instrumentation. I don't think I heard one unique sound or progression on this ... read more

Reviewing Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: #476

Overrated/Underrated?: Overrated

Sparks is one of those my bands that I assumed I would be really into but I kind of just never got around to listening to for whatever reason. And generally, I did like their sound quite a bit. Sparks sounds a bit like Of Montreal if they were a 70's prog band or maybe David Bowie if he was even more flamboyant.

That said, relative to my expectations, I was a tad disappointed. There were a lot of ... read more