I haven't listened to this record since it was new, but my overall impression at the time was that the dark mood of the record just sounded canned and tired from someone as fabulously rich, successful, and feted as Trent Reznor. He built his reputation on turning negative emotions into cathartic music, but I felt like…

I haven't listened to this record since it was new, but my overall impression at the time was that the dark mood of the record just sounded canned and tired from someone as fabulously rich, successful, and feted as Trent Reznor. He built his reputation on turning negative emotions into cathartic music, but I felt like…

Pretty good list, although I'd say that ELP's decline didn't begin until after Brain Salad Surgery. Each of their studio albums up through and including BSS are flawed classics, but after that you can pretty much wipe everything.

Pretty good list, although I'd say that ELP's decline didn't begin until after Brain Salad Surgery. Each of their studio albums up through and including BSS are flawed classics, but after that you can pretty much wipe everything.

I saw Smashing Pumpkins in.. (thinks)…1996, I guess? I loved the bigness and the variety of sounds on their records, and was looking forward to a good musical experience. Whoops. It is still to this day the worst thing I've ever seen happen in public, bar none.

For me, that moment was Prince's "Graffiti Bridge"—-the movie, the album, the singles that came off the album, the videos to support the singles off the album—-the entire enterprise.  It kicked enormous holes in my Prince fandom that would never fully close again.

Oh, and every time I hear a rock critic's indignant cry of "There's no melody here!" I think of the same charge being leveled at Joni Mitchell, and her retort: Does Marvin Gaye have melody?  If the only thing a person is able to hear in a given piece of music is The Part That Is Most Obvious, then that person isn't…

I fell in love with oM at "Coqliquot Asleep in the Poppies" in 2000-ish and have enjoyed the whole ride since then, and as a longtime fan, it's clear to me that Barnes' accidental success and subsequent hipster-pop affectations have derailed his vision by creating a false set of expectations. I thought "Hissing Fauna"…

Mellow Candle's "Swaddling Songs" is a beautiful album.

I think it's idiotic that Jeff Buckley's posthumous reputation is put down to him being pretty and dying tragically, particularly with fucking Joy Division on the same list (as if the writer would have found them just as enthralling had Ian Curtis retired from music and become an accountant). BTW, was this list an…

I think some of the studio run-throughs are interesting. I've listened to Tales From Topographic Oceans very carefully, if not obsessively, over the years and was always convinced that Side 3 was mostly bullshit cobbled together in the studio. It took hearing the "studio run-through" on the remaster to prove to me…

Certainly a great album, but far from perfect. The tricky thing about Stevie Wonder's "golden era" is that he didn't record any bad songs, but he frequently made good songs wear out their welcome by ending with 4 minutes of repetitious coda—-as if "Hey Jude" would result from this pointless elongation. This means that…