LogFAQs > #968258480

11) Japanese Breakfast - Jubilee: Jubilee has sumptuous soundscapes paired with sonorous singing enriched by strong songwriting, but it doesnt entirely stick with me. I find opener Paprika characteristic in that it would pretty much be the perfect Disney princess song if only it were catchier. Then again, I firmly believe pop should be under no obligation to foster hooks, and yet that feels more than a little like the missing piece here.
12) The Beatles - Rubber Soul: Its the Beatles, which breeds built-in expectations. In this case, as masterful musicians, the Fab Four enliven simplistic subjects and structures into ditties fun via familiarity, helping form the foundation of decades of future pop in the process.
13) Black Marble - Its Immaterial: For some odd reason, I felt a wave of nostalgia coming from it. Is ita spirit? I sense the presence of spirits.
14) Yasiin Bey - Black on Both Sides: A quite consistently (but for me, not quite spectacularly) compelling record with segments of standout songwriting embedded within the strong rhythmic + narrative flow it sustains at length.
15) Love - Forever Changes: From my too-modern perspective: very pleasant, very accessible - maybe a little too quiet and inclined to fade into the background, but it clearly has more going on under that surface.
16) Dream Theater - Images and Words: Its sonic bombast, self-serious lyrical sweep, and simply its songs length all render it fittingly larger than life. The effect is very performative, and its a performance its performers clearly believe in wholeheartedly, but that and its technical prowess typically substitute for more than add to my emotional engagement.
17) The White Stripes - Elephant: Plays like an affectionate yet knowing deconstruction of the 90s indie alt-rock wave that wears its 60s rock inspirations - restricted toolkit included - on its sleeve. However, the catchy, punchy, technically accomplished outcome is characteristic of something altogether novel. Elephant isnt quite consistently memorable, and it sometimes seems to slip into a sort of smug, self-congratulatory tone, but at least its simultaneously classy and rollicking big single (which I previously underrated) justifies that type of hype.
18) Eagles - Hotel California: It starts and finishes in fine style, to say the least - too bad about the muddled middle. The resulting record is often compelling, but for me, it fails to live up to its towering critical and popular stature or to Henleys sweeping concept-album ambitions.
19) VAST - Visual Audio Sensory Theater: Its singular soundscapes seem to soar against a sort of basement-dwelling milieu, or at least thats my best attempt at describing this album. The effect intrigues me at first, only to wear out much of its initial interest over time.
20) Sunspot - Singularity: Sure, Singularity is highly inconsistent - only partly by design - and it never really reaches any great heights. But I find most of it endearing, even sort of enduring in its easy-breezy enjoyability anyways.
21) System of a Down - Toxicity: I struggle to take this album seriously, yet that actually strengthens its fun factor much of the time. A structure built on short bursts of sound that bounce between disparate subjects serves it well as such, but with fourteen of those songs, excessive repetition still leads me down the path of diminishing returns.
22) Faith No More - Angel Dust: An eclectic album with a genuinely transgressive beating heart derived from its routinely subversive songwriting. Its an admirable approach, one which feels like it stands alone among the many metal(-adjacent) albums of this cycle, with all due respect to genre-defining Master of Puppets. Still, theres something melodically missing from a record I respect but am still not sure if I like.
23) blink-182 - Enema of the State: I originally found the repetitious refrain of I time bomb that ends Enema of the State ludicrous to the point of laughter. Now it feels more like the manifesto of a record thats often remarkably perceptive and personal, plus plain enjoyable in places - albeit permanently a product of its time. Its sophomoric, somewhat misogynistic surface still puts me off, but Ive come to realize that its smarts lie under that skin.
24) Phil Collins - Face Value: The rest of this record is fine enough but feels conventional to a fault in spite of its solid components. I guess its a kind of talent to be able to conceal so many layers of vulnerability under such a middlebrow surface, but in this case, it doesnt leave me any less apathetic.
25) Guns n Roses - Appetite for Destruction: I guess Im just the outlier, because theres precious little I like here and lots I dont at all. Honestly, Appetite for Destruction repels me, and Ill leave it at that.

Of course, the above comments are terribly insubstantial, as with anything I post almost by definition. Additionally, theyre strictly my opinions, and as with last time, Im likely to have said some utterly stupid things as part of that.