Since The Strokes are poised to release some generational crud later this month, I thought it would be a good idea to get familiar with their less-beloved middle period albums. Angles seems to be consistently the most well-liked of the three, and I can definitely see it as both overhated and overpraised in equal measure by different listeners.

It's easy to listen to this today and not think of it as some massive departure for the band, but I can definitely see how after three very garage ... read more

Not my absolute favorite britpop record, but a very cool debut that's also a great early showcase of what would become the dominant sound for British pop rock of the following few years. Predating the genre's revolution with other landmark albums Parklife and His 'n' Hers by a full year, they really did manage to get in early even if singles from the aforementioned Blur and Pulp were already making waves by early '93.

Plus, while the other major groups were mostly ... read more

I confess I knew next to nothing about this band going in here outside of having heard their couple well-known hits (and never a single time on purpose, at that). Hell, I knew so little about them I thought that ‘take me to your best friend’s house’ song was also theirs, but no, that’s “Tongue Tied” by Grouplove, an entirely different set of mid-2010s alt-pop hangers-on I’m told. In all seriousness though, when I was looking around a bit ago for what ... read more

I was definitely interested in revisiting this record to see if it was actually really good or even just one that holds up better than you might think, but I have to admit what Foster the People represents in pop culture is just as interesting to me. Aside from maybe Somebody That I Used to Know, Pumped Up Kicks is *the* song people think of when thinking about the couple years in the early 2010s where a song from a random indie band next to no one had ever previously heard of could become one ... read more

Bloc Party might just be the purest of the 2000s indie rock one-album wonders. Follow-ups from the likes of Arcade Fire, Interpol, and The Killers are still well known and liked, and even an example like The Postal Service’s Give Up has solid successors in Death Cab’s Transatlanticism and Plans. Hell, I even know people who like Franz Ferdinand songs other than Take Me Out. With these guys though, I’ve never a single time heard of anyone I know personally checking out or ... read more

Haven't been excited to tap into 2026 releases in a while, and even this I am a month late to, but I'm glad I had the good sense not to fully miss it because Immolation are absolutely one of the most consistently great bands in death metal, and maybe even metal as a whole. This might not be as fantastically vile as their first five albums, but based on what I'm hearing it might be their best since then, and even though I have more to get to from them I'm happy to believe it ... read more

This is a real good mid-2000s indie debut that should leave no one scratching their heads as to why it's so well liked. These guys got Isaac Brock as producer, for god's sake! I especially started to vibe with it more and more after getting to the highlight I'll Believe in Anything, a certified scene classic (which I actually didn't know was in Heated Rivalry until reading other people's reviews just now), so I'll probably have to relisten to fully cement my ... read more

I love Paul Simon to death. His stuff as a duo with Art Garfunkel and even some of his solo songs make up some of my all-time favorite folk/singer-songwriter music. And to be sure, this has a couple undeniably great songs on it, ones that fully prove he can still make great stuff without his former partner. It's a good record, just not one I'm as consistently head over heels for as Sounds of Silence, Bridge Over Troubled Water, or even his later solo work like Graceland. Me and Julio ... read more

Hard to pretend I didn't absolutely love this. It doesn't contain many of my all-time favorite Weird Al songs (though any record without Amish Paradise, White and Nerdy, or Foil is fighting a losing battle in that regard) but being so consistently well-done and hilarious I can absolutely see why this is considered his best full record overall as well as his most popular. I've obviously heard the singles here in passing at least a couple times each, those being The Saga Begins, ... read more

Ben Gibbard's cutesiness definitely comes through here at some points and might make this a bit too much for some people on whole as a result, but overall this is still a very pretty indie album of the type he was unquestionably one of the early to mid 2000s's best voices for. Not much here is bound to blow your head off, especially if you've already heard the bigger songs, but it's consistently super sweet with no major low moments to complain about.

I myself was already ... read more

Not sure what compelled me to listen to this one in full today as I've barely ever listened to John Mayer before, but this is a super sweet record if you're in the mood for it as I was. Yeah, it's rather mainstream 2000s pop for the most part, especially with the normie-sophisticated blues/soul inspired soft rock sound of it all, but there's nothing necessarily wrong with that especially when it's done as well as it is here. Call it dated all you want, I'll just ... read more

Before Linkin Park, there was Korn, the original favorite band of shallowly angsty teenage boys. I definitely get why their debut is pretty well-respected nowadays--you can call Rage Against the Machine a precursor if you want, but this is definitely the first album that feels like nu metal as we understand it today. And now that the average person doesn't uncritically hate nu metal anymore, we should more than happy to respect the work these guys (and Deftones) did to birth the genre in ... read more

Ode to Queztalcoatl is yet another one-off singer-songwriter record that never received a proper follow-up until crate diggers rediscovered it decades later, got it rereleased, and convinced the artist in question to record and perform again. It's now considered a landmark in underground folk among those who've heard it, and rightfully so. It reminds me a lot of Songs From Suicide Bridge, being super intimately recorded and depressive to a degree where while listening it feels like ... read more

Myslovitz are a band that's been on my radar of ones to check out for a while now, as my knowledge of Eastern European rock is unfortunately pretty lacking. Catching up with their 1999 album Miłość w czasach popkultury (or Love in the Time of Pop Culture) though, I was pretty much entirely in love with it from the start. I know the lyrics are quite melancholic for the most part, it's turn of the millennium Poland for crying out loud, but I still can't help feeling uplifted ... read more

Well, shit. Here I am again talking about Maroon 5, this time with what's probably their most notorious album. Listening to them basically back to back I can say with confidence that the following one is more soul-suckingly awful, but given that was technically their lowest charting release to date with slightly lower charting singles and came out after the point streaming had become pretty much the only way the average person was listening to music it makes sense for this to be thought of ... read more

I said back when Maroon 5's latest album came out last year that I'd probably be morbidly curious enough to check this out eventually, and here I am. And I don't think anyone even remotely familiar with modern popular music and with even a tenth of a critical ear needs me to tell them this, but this is abjectly, soul-crushingly lifeless from beginning to end. I'm old enough to remember when we used to at least get to laugh at Adam Levine for stuff like his howling on ... read more

I ended up saving this one for last in my 1971 albums catchup just because it was by far the longest, but it also ended up being a fantastic one to end on, which shouldn't have been surprising considering how great I already knew Isaac Hayes to be. It's actually wild to me that after just having released the Shaft soundtrack album four months prior (which I'm told is already the first ever r&b double album of original material), he had it in him to cook up another full ninety ... read more

This seems to be the least regarded of ELP's first four albums, with a reputation as having a fantastic A-side and a B-side barely worth caring about, and even though I enjoyed some of the material in the back half I think that's about fair. I've complained before about prog albums with one massive track taking up an entire side not knowing what to do with themselves for the rest of the time, and this is easily the clearest case of that I've thus far seen. That said, the ... read more

I had heard Faust before, specifically their final album before their initial breakup Faust IV, but I wasn't aware of the group's background and it's actually quite interesting. Apparently the producer and music critic Uwe Nettelbeck went to Polydor's German division one day and secured funding under the guise of wanting to create a 'German Beatles' entirely from scratch and then got two groups together before merging them into one and eventually turning this in ... read more

God, what a wonderful album--it's examples like this that make it difficult to believe how many self-styled serious music appreciators write off the entirety of country, implicitly or otherwise. John Prine strikes what I feel is the perfect balance here between the fun and occasionally funny side of classic country and the real sadness and melancholy, making for a seriously great debut from a seriously great singer-songwriter I feel bad for not having paid attention to before. So many ... read more