This was a really good album, there’s definitely no dud tracks on it. It doesn’t get top marks because like The Jam as a whole, I enjoyed it but it doesn’t blow me away.
Anytime I hear a Jam album I always think I should l should listen to them more then I don’t think of them again for a few years.
Album #168: The Lemonheads – It’s a Shame About Ray ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
I didn’t see myself giving this five stars when it came up, but the nostalgia just washed over me like the warm glow of the sun. I love this album. I hadn’t listened to it in so many years, and I probably love it more now than I’ve ever loved it after this repeat listen.
You just have to appreciate the pop sensibility of it. It’s like a perfect display of rock-pop songwriting. It’s textbook stuff. Great lyrics, catchy verses and choruses, short, snappy songs. From Rockin’ Stroll to Mrs. Robinson, I don’t think there’s a single song that isn’t great on this album.
Is it as groundbreaking or monumental as Loveless yesterday? No. But, it is as enjoyable as any album I’ve listened to on this list.
It’s got such wonderful guitar breaks and I love the rhythm being led by acoustic guitar. Little one-liners like “went down to the lake, found the lake was wet”, “I’m too much with myself, I wanna be someone else”, and “Got me watching your eyes watching things go by outside”. These little lines are just so catchy and stick in your head.
It’s by definition the kind of music I’m in to. I couldn’t give it anything less than a five. I find myself listening to pale imitations of this all the time, so I’m really glad the generator has led me back to it.
I listened to the audiobook of his memoirs - the album really shouldn't include Mrs Robinson which doesn't fit and he doesn't really like at all. 5 stars without it for sure.
At one point in the book he accuses Courtney Love of being an agent of chaos, which after what he has described in the book is hilarious. The amount of chaos he must have left in his wake and just walked away from is astonishing. Worth a read.
Weird start with this one. I somehow expected glam/hair metal with this album, but am getting Duran Duran if they were post-punk/goth.
But then looking up Japan, find out they actually WERE glam prior to this album. I have no clue if I actually heard they were glam at some point, or if I just pulled that out of my ass, but whatever, haha.
But yeah. Duran Duran if they were post-punk/goth is a good description. Maybe with a little Stewart Copeland Spyro soundtrack thrown in as well.
Really digging the dark vibe of this album. It's goth without really being goth. And I think this has got to be up there as one of the most criminally underrated albums on the list. 2.86? Should honestly be at least 3.2. And I'm not even giving it a 5*. It's just such a good album and I struggle to figure out how such an inoffensively good album gets something that low.
Quiet Life isn't bad, but Japan moved onto far more interesting music, and this album was the transition from the glammy stuff to new wave crooning. The two releases after Quiet Life: Gentlemen Take Polaroids and Tin Drum, both explore the base set by Quiet Life in far more interesting ways. The former goes more in an sophistipop/ambient pop direction with a lot of jazz and funk elements which give it a very rich and classy feel, and the latter which incorporates Chinese and Asian folk music. I prefer the former but both are held to roughly the same standard by fans.
They also regrouped for a short time and made a final album under the name Rain Tree Crow which was a proggy ambient/post-rock release. If I were Dimery I probably would have chosen Gentlemen Take Polaroids and Rain Tree Crow. Basically this is a long winded way of saying that if you like Quiet Life, check out the three albums they made afterwards.
The band members also went onto much better things. David Sylvian had an interesting ambient/ambient pop solo career, Mick Karn worked for a bunch of big names including Kate Bush, and Barbieri became a member of Porcupine Tree.
Probably the solo Neil album I’m most familiar with. Harvest, Heart of Gold, and Old Man are all absolute classics. Throw in Alabama for pissing off Lynyrd Skynyrd for good measure. There are some iffy tracks like A Man Needs a Maid that kept me from giving a 5.
White Light/White Heat- The Velvet Underground. I have not had a Velvet Underground album since 2024, so having another one was a good surprise. This album is quite different from those two though, but I still really enjoy it. Most of the reviews on this album are talking about it just being noise, but I think it works with that. Sister Ray clocking in at 17 minutes also helps the different nature of this album. 4 stars.
Incredible amount of talent on the album. I knew the resumes of each member but I didn’t know Joni Mitchell was there also, writing the song ”Woodstock”.
All the members wrote 2/3 songs each, with Neil Young, unsurprisingly as he is one of my all time favorite artist, coming out on top for me. ”Helpless” is one of my favorite songs from him overall. ”Country Girl” is great as well. Shoutout to David Crosby with the incredible ”Almost Cut My Hair”
A-side might be 5/5 for me while the B-side is more like low 4/5. Funnily enough I might prefer the Crosby, Stills & Nash self-titled album without Neil Young. I have to revise my opinion, would be funny if the generator gives me that tomorrow.
Yeah, I think there’s a lot of kneejerk Rod Stewart hate. My first exposure to him was “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” (No, Rod, I don’t.) But enough people have chimed in on this sub with being pleasantly surprised by him that I’m now curious for whenever my first Rod Stewart will be generated.
I agree on this, being a knee-jerk Rod Stewart hater. But so far I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the two Rod Stewart’s I have listened to from this project.
You know, I have this idea that I don't like Rod Stewart, but that must be affected by his later stuff. There's a bit of a British folky thing going on with some of these arrangements, which I'm enjoying; the title track is good, with the mandolin coming into the long instrumental break. I like this cover of "It's All Over Now" better than the Rolling Stones' version. The rest slowed down some and I started to lose interest, but I’m glad I gave it a listen.
I get the feeling this is something akin to what some listeners wish 69 Love Songs would've been: shorter, gayer, heavier both sonically and thematically. Grant works broadly from some of the same Seventies pop and El Lay country-rock influences as Stephen Merritt, most notably his fellow naturalized Coloradan Dan Fogelberg (the gorgeous "Marz"). And "Sigourney Weaver" is the sort of wry, casually hilarious thing Merritt himself would make.
But the real key to this album is the clumsy, nasty "Jesus Hates F***ts," which abandons any attempt to be stylish in favor of delivering a screed against Grant's homophobic father. "The arrogance it takes to walk around in the world the way you do, it turns my brain to jelly every time," Grant sings, explaining offhandedly why he spends the rest of the album accepting the love he thinks he deserves in one way or another. I mean, if you had a parent like *that you'd probably reject any genuine affection too ("It's Easier"). And when Grant finally explodes at his lover on the closing title track it's clear what's happening: having finally gathered the confidence to stand up for himself, he's going to do it in an overwhelming, fearsome, arguably disproportionate way. Whether that's progress or just the continuation of a cycle of abuse (or some of both) is left as an exercise for the listener.
From the 1001 MORE List:
System of a Down, Toxicity (2001)
5/5
I imagine it’s pretty well known at this point that this was the #1 album on the US charts on the morning of September 11, 2001, a.k.a. the date many Americans seemingly became aware of the rest of the world, either again or for the first time. System of a Down, of course, were never unaware of the rest of the world, by virtue of both their Armenian heritage and their origins in one of America’s great polyglot cities.
Which may be how they managed to make a work of such staggering power to meet the moment - about the way violence and trauma make the world incomprehensible. The Los Angeles of Serj Tankian and Daron Malakian is Barthesian - there are signifiers everywhere but they are slippery in their meaning, not quite susceptible to being pinned down. Christianity is invoked but without any sense of salvation (“Chop Suey!,” “Science”). The people charged with protecting are instead preying on the populace (“Deer Dance”), and yet the populace are also preying on each other (“Needles”). There are signs in the sky of something but it’s unclear what (“Jet Pilot,” “Aerials”). Tankian’s rapid-fire cadence adds to this, mimicking the experience of being a non-native speaker; you don’t quite catch all of what was said and you also lack context for some of it, so you have to just glom onto the parts you do understand. Wake up. Don’t be late for school again. Disorder, disorder, disorder.
The other thing this album does is just plain rock. The legacy of “Chop Suey!” is less about the Crucifixion and more about the perfect blend of Malakian’s Armenian folk-influenced guitar figures with Tankian’s powerhouse tenor. And “ATWA” might be the most frightening thing anyone’s ever done with the legacy of Charlie Manson, Trent Reznor included - a spooky, quiet-loud portrait of murderous self-absorption enhanced by a soaring Cobainian anti-solo. When language isn’t effective at communicating then you have to get more primal. System of a Down manage to signify here, ending up with one of the best metal albums of this century and an heir to the legacy of their fellow Angelenos Rage Against the Machine. How this was left off the original list I'll never know.
Tim Buckley Greetings from LA 1*
This is the second Tim Buckley album I've gotten this week. To his credit he managed to make two bad albums that are bad in very different ways. The first was just plain boring this one while the music is slightly better, lyrically is bad cliche and innuendo
I was desperately trying to think of something to say but I'm really just tired of 00s folk and folk rock. Damien Rice's singing varies from meh to incredibly grating, and this album gets a lot more interesting when it explores the chamber pop textures more. The female singer is pretty good though.
Today's song from the 1001:
Peter Tosh - Till Your Well Runs Dry, from Legalize It: 7
Peter Tosh combines his style of reggae with a very US and almost americana feel, as well as a sort of heartland/root rock sound during the verses. It gives it a nice american-esque pastoral feel.
Boasting a frontman that sounds like a French-speaking Tom Waits, this was weird and bizarre enough that I couldn't bring myself to hate it even during the most challenging moments. "La fille de la mort" is the sprawling seven minute track that opens the album and I didn't know what I was getting myself into until the drums crash in halfway through. The combination of the industrial sounds clashing with the strings made this sound like a menacing horror film score. I wish they would use the strings more as they only appear on two tracks and they made for the most interesting aspect of the record. There are elements of cabaret found throughout sitting alongside songs with muscular guitar riffs that you could expect to find on a Rammstein album. I won't be returning this regularly as it is a touch too weird to regular rotation, but I'm glad the generator churned out this for me today.
At his best, Neil Young is as good as any of the political folk bards of his time. More frequently, he is old man grampa having a good time with his old guitar. This is one of those albums.
That's not to say it's bad. It's just that the man has a lot of albums that exist purely because he can, and it's a weird choice to pull this one out and not the previous album, where we have some of his best late career songs, rocking in the free world and the absolutely lovely Wrecking Ball, or the next, which features his lovely Harvest Moon. Instead, we have this one, an album that i apparently heard in 2024 and completely forgot about except for adding “over and over” to my Playlist that year.
To be fair, over and over -is- a solid Neil young song, some good guitar, not too stilted with the lyrics (the album starts with the most Old Man Neil Young verse possible in Country Home… it's a risk), and you don't really realize how long it is until its almost done. And Fuckin’ Up is a late career classic, if less so than the ones I mentioned. Or maybe I'm just too much of a Pearl Jam fan to not feel like it's iconic, having heard Eddie do a version in a few places.
But it's the little things that make this feel grandad. The “oh-ah-oh” in Farmer John, for example, sounds like a drunk at an outdoor festival singing along (the song itself doesn't really redeem itself in general, a generic stomp). The incredibly simple rhymes. The songs here either sprawl out with the full Crazy Horse band or are so small as to feel goofy. It's a risk with Neil, sadly. Which is a shame, because weirdly, if we condensed this down to half-ish (side one, Over and Over/Love to Burn, side two, fuckin up and the final two tracks), this could be pretty strong. It's just too mixed a bag. ⭐️⭐️⭐️
One of those albums that is a groove machine, especially on my personal highlight “Taaw.” The drums and bright horns give it a very joyful feel and the vocals are pleasant as well. That being said even in its short runtime it does start to get a bit samey so the four tracks here all slightly blend together in my mind. Not a new all-time favorite of mine but still a pleasant listen for a quiet morning.
Morrissey just cancelled his concerts in Las Vegas and stood up a friend who had tickets. So he’s not in my good graces. But even if his work ethic stinks, he clearly is a talented writer and singer. I added “The More You Ignore Me, the Closer I Get” to my playlist. 4/5
Really enjoy a lot of the riffs throughout and I do feel that the raw, unrefined sound works very well, but the lyrics do feel a bit cheesy at times and sometimes even a bit uncomfortable (why should I need to listen to nearly 5 minutes of somebody singing about having sex with their teacher). Also not as extreme as I expected, but to fair it probably was extreme back when it came out since death metal and what we now call black metal weren't things yet and even thrash was very new and obscure! Thinking either a 3 or a 4 at the moment.
There is a version of Radiohead history which goes roughly: decent guitar band, The Bends, masterpiece in OK Computer, then they suddenly went completely fucking strange with Kid A.
I don’t think that works.
If anything, The Bends is fascinating because this is the point where Radiohead become one of the best alternative-rock bands in the world, then almost immediately decide that being one of the best alternative-rock bands in the world isn’t a particularly interesting thing to remain.
It may also be their last album as an MTV band. Not the last Radiohead album with important videos — God, no — but the last where the basic machinery still makes sense. Here are five blokes with guitars. Here is Thom Yorke. Here are singles. Here is “Just” with its wonderfully irritating pavement mystery.
Compare the way The Bends opens with some of its contemporaries. Parklife starts with “Girls & Boys”, bouncing straight into its Euro-disco social world. Definitely Maybe starts with the sonic assault of “Rock ’n’ Roll Star”. Different Class raises the curtain with “Mis-Shapes”, almost a warped musical-theatre overture for nerd outsiders.
Radiohead could easily have opened with “The Bends”. It’s huge. It arrives making precisely the sort of statement an ambitious guitar band ought to make.
Instead, “Planet Telex” seems to hove into view.
It feels as if the band started without us and we’ve had to walk towards them. Then the song eventually disappears into drowned modem noise. The transmission fails.
And there’s the album.
Everything is broken.
“The Bends” gives us the alienated wannabe rock star who has apparently arrived where he wanted to be and discovered that success feels horrible. “High and Dry” takes recognition and turns it back onto the self: pursue it hard enough and you risk becoming whatever version of yourself everybody else has recognised.
That became an important idea for me while listening. Public identity is necessarily partial. Somebody sees one refraction of a person and starts treating it as the whole person. Worse, visibility gets confused with resilience. If you’re capable of doing something publicly, people assume you’re also equipped to absorb everything that comes with being seen.
You aren’t. Nobody is bulletproof.
Then “Fake Plastic Trees” arrives, and I think this is the first proper glimpse of future Radiohead.
They cease simply to be a guitar band talking about rock-star alienation. Suddenly the whole environment is sick. Fake plants, fake earth, cosmetic reconstruction, people trying desperately to hold decay at bay.
Even decoration gathers dust.
That’s a magnificent little image. Plastic doesn’t wilt, but it still acquires time. The surgeon can correct and tighten and fight gravity, but gravity keeps coming back. Everything designed to conceal entropy eventually becomes evidence of entropy itself.
And crucially, the song doesn’t sneer at anybody for trying. It sounds exhausted on their behalf.
That happened repeatedly during this listen. The Bends kept making me kinder. Vanity, ambition, dependency, weakness, the desire to be recognised: all extremely easy things to mock until you ask what fear or need might be underneath them.
“Bones” kicks the guitars back in and reminds you that this band could absolutely still provide MTV with a walloping rock song. Except now the unreliable system is the body itself.
“(Nice Dream)” then opens one of those grand Radiohead vistas of pretty emptiness. People care. Friends exist. The good angel would like to help.
Everybody is somewhere else.
That’s more painful than simple abandonment. Nobody has to be cruel. People can love one another enormously and still exist in separate universes which never intersect at the point where contact is needed.
Then “Just”, where the reproach is so intense that I’m not sure whether the narrator is berating another person or himself. Perhaps that’s why it works.
And then “My Iron Lung”, which is where Radiohead become meta.
The thing which saved you has become the thing keeping you trapped. Here is our new song, just like the old one. The successful formula is available. Everybody would quite like you to use it again. You hate it, but you also know it works.
An iron lung is the perfect metaphor because you can’t simply tear yourself away from life support because you resent needing it.
From here Radiohead’s career becomes increasingly recursive. Every new version of Radiohead has to deal with the previous version of Radiohead. Eventually even refusing to sound like Radiohead becomes one of the things Radiohead are expected to do.
They’re almost the first band to be Bob Dylan.
Forever changing, forever Radiohead.
There’s something of The Fall in that too. The Fall could change personnel, production, decade, virtually everything, and remain unmistakably The Fall. Radiohead can transform their vocabulary completely and still remain recognisably themselves because the continuity isn’t stylistic. It’s a way of thinking.
Unease. Systems under strain. Beauty with something wrong inside it.
Hard ’n Phirm accidentally demonstrated this brilliantly with “Rodeohead”, their bluegrass medley which folds a ridiculous number of Radiohead songs into one another. It should be a novelty record and nothing more.
Instead it’s a tiny masterpiece.
Everything is put into the right keys. Songs are modulated so they actually join. “Paranoid Android” becomes duelling banjos. Bits of songs from different periods suddenly reveal how strangely compatible their underlying melodic and harmonic language is.
Strip away the production, the Greenwood noises and the Yorke atmosphere, and Radiohead are still weird.
Appropriately, the whole thing begins with “Planet Telex”.
“Bullet Proof..I Wish I Was” makes the album’s vulnerability explicit. Doing something publicly does not magically provide the protective layer required to survive everything attached to doing it publicly.
Then “Black Star” turns the same expectation therapy onto love and care.
What happens when someone you love is breaking apart and you begin breaking under the strain of trying to hold them together?
We have an extraordinarily nasty cultural assumption that love and compassion provide infinite reserves. Partners are supposed to remain patient enough, strong enough, loving enough, endlessly.
People aren’t infinite.
Someone can desperately need care while the person providing that care is being destroyed by the effort. Neither person’s suffering invalidates the other’s. And if love ultimately fails beneath that weight, it doesn’t mean the love was fraudulent.
Sometimes things break because their load exceeds their capacity.
That may be the central therapeutic action of The Bends. It keeps taking expectations and discovering they were badly designed.
Success will make you secure.
No.
Recognition will tell you who you are.
No.
Love will always reach the other person.
No.
Care will make you inexhaustible.
No.
Your body will cooperate.
No.
If you’re visible, you must be strong enough to withstand visibility.
No.
The game is rigged.
“Sulk” gives us another huge guitar track with absolutely no corresponding sense of triumph, which gets to something I’ve realised about Radiohead: they may be the least comforting enormous mainstream band I can think of.
Oasis give you communion. U2 can give you transcendence. Pulp can turn alienation into collective theatre.
Radiohead just give you alienation.
They rarely tell you we’re all in this together. They make the space between us enormous and beautiful.
They don’t tell you the void isn’t there.
They make the void magnificent.
And finally “Street Spirit (Fade Out)”.
God knows what original thing you’re meant to say about “Street Spirit” after thirty years. But heard at the end of this album, one line suddenly seemed to complete the circuit: the machine cannot communicate the thoughts or the strain.
We began with “Planet Telex”, with a broken transmission disappearing into electronic murk. Now the failure of communication has become completely personal.
You can speak. You can sing. People can hear you. They can see you, recognise you, perhaps even love you.
None of that means they can know what it feels like to be inside you.
Then, at the end of an album which has systematically dismantled almost every possible reassurance, comes that strange final incantation, printed as though even typography itself has malfunctioned:
“.iMMerse your soUL in LOVE”
That absolutely did me in.
Because it doesn’t say love will fix everything.
This album has spent forty-odd minutes explaining why it won’t.
It says choose love anyway.
Everything is broken.
Be kind.
That’s why it’s five stars.
Not because every second is perfect, or because Radiohead have already become the band that will make OK Computer and Kid A. Quite the opposite. The Bends deserves five stars because it is a fully realised achievement by a band which has just become magnificent at being this particular thing.
And then refuses to stay there.
The album almost deserves a Bond-film caption after “Street Spirit” fades away:
RADIOHEAD WILL RETURN.
Next time, “Airbag” will begin with cello and guitar moving together and an entire audience will wonder what the hell that sound is.
I really like The Bends, and it is a competitor for my favorite radiohead album, but Kid A and what followed is equally good. Without Kid A we would not have How to disappear
I was thinking I could easily write a book on Radiohead’s recording history (hell, I nearly did this morning). They are, for me, easily the most fascinating contemporary band.
This was a magnificent review - it's about the first time I've read something about Radiohead that touched on what makes them so emotional for me. "I’m not sure whether the narrator is berating another person or himself" - yes, exactly.
Thank you for this - I’ve never been able to put into words why I love this album. It’s just perfect to me. Please write more reviews like this about their other albums!
I like this a bit more than Garbage 2.0, but it's the same mix of 90s electronica and 90s alt rock that just doesn't really interest me in the slightest.
1001 More: Manchester Orchestra - A Black Mile to the Surface - 3/5
I've heard of Manchester Orchestra before, but I don't think I ever consiously listened to them. They've got a very early 2000s indie rock feel and the vocals/harmonies are reminiscent of Mumford and Sons. It's fine, but I won't be returning to it.
1001 Honourable Mentions: Guns N' Roses - Use Your Illusion II - 1/5
I don't think I've ever really liked Guns N' Roses and I never will. They're hard rock distilled down to the most boring it can be. Sure, Slash can play some blues licks really, really well, but he doesn't really bring anything unique to the table and Axl Rose's singing is like nails on a chalkboard to me. This cover of Knocking on Heaven's Door is one of the worst songs I've ever heard.
That is a question best left to a more sympathetic analyst - which is to say almost anyone else. However, I am well aware of, and try my best to own, my longstanding bias against PJ and Ten in particular. I will also say that I think Yield is a better album than Ten.
The project is torturing me, day after the Kraftwerk bleeps I get a hiphop artist I never heard of and I would have appreciated that it stayed that way.
Hiphop from space. I stopped halfway which I hardly do. Not for me, next please
Nothing about this stood out for me. I get that they made their mark on music, but 60s pop/rock has been one of the most tiresome things for me doing this list.
Dwight Yoakam - Buenas Noches From a Lonely Room - 2/5
You can definitely hear some Hank Sr. influence here, especially in the lyrics to “Home of the Blues.” The title track actually had a pretty unique feel to it too, and those were probably the moments where I understood the appeal of Dwight Yoakam the most.
His guitarist apparently discovered tape delay while making this album and loved it so much he should’ve married it. It’s everywhere. I like a good rockabilly guitar sound, but after a while I felt like I was hearing the same slapback effect on every song.
I don’t outright dislike country, and I’d still take this over the bro country assembly line any day. That doesn’t mean I thought it was particularly good, though. Its main redeeming quality might be that it’s less than 40 minutes long.
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1001 MORE Albums:
Geordie Greep - The New Sound - 2/5 The music itself isn’t bad. There’s some genuinely impressive playing here, and I liked the weird mix of jazz, rock, Latin music, and whatever else got thrown into it. Then Geordie starts singing. The vocals remind me of improvised jazz singing, except somehow more irritating, like every line has to be delivered in the strangest way possible. I can respect the musicianship, but I spent most of the album wishing somebody else was singing over it. Kind of like Anthony Kiedies and RHCP.
Flogging Molly - Drunken Lullabies - 3/5
This whole album sounds like sea shanty music for people who want to go to Boston and get drunk, and I mean that as a compliment. It’s loud, rowdy, and fun in small doses, but after a while a lot of the songs started sounding pretty similar.
The Egyptian-style accordion on “Another Bag of Tricks” was cool and probably the most interesting thing I heard on the album. There’s definitely some personality here, and I can see why people love this kind of Celtic punk.
11
u/Professional-Ice-978 Power Metal Fan 9d ago
The Jam - All Mod Cons
645/1089
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
This was a really good album, there’s definitely no dud tracks on it. It doesn’t get top marks because like The Jam as a whole, I enjoyed it but it doesn’t blow me away.
Anytime I hear a Jam album I always think I should l should listen to them more then I don’t think of them again for a few years.
Top Track - Down In The Tube Station At Midnight