Albums 1-100 – The Top 100 Reviews

Top 100 Album Review: #90 – Talking Book, Stevie Wonder (1972)

An Album Where Every Track Is Good.

Hits, b-sides, upbeat, slow tempo — this album has it all.

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Rolling Stone’s Ranking: #90/100
My Rating:

Ten years ago, I tried to do this same blog where I reviewed the top 100 albums, books, and movies of all time. I didn’t get very far, maybe only posting three times (versus the 143 posts I’m currently sitting at 😇). One of those posts were Talking Book. I gave it five stars then, and I’m giving it five stars now.

My favorite moment was the end of track nine where I thought it was the end of the album. “I couldn’t ask for anymore,” thinking to myself. Then, I was rewarded with one more beautiful love ballads in I Believe, a complete surprise to cap off what I thought was already the limit.

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Top 100 Album Review: #49 – At Fillmore East, The Allman Brothers Band (1971)

I Recall None It.

With some songs going as long as 23 minutes, nothing is important from this aimless jam.

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Rolling Stone’s Ranking: #49/100
My Rating:

This album is your typical top 100 switcharoo. Here is how it goes:

You know of the band or musician (in this case, it is the Allman Brothers) and you like the songs you do know (for instance Midnight Rider and Ramblin’ Man). You are excited to learn more of their stuff, and since it’s a top 100 album of all-time, you know it’s going to be great. Instead, you get NONE of the good songs that you do know, no good NEW stuff you didn’t know, and find there is NOTHING special about the album.

They did it to me with Frank Sinatra, then Sly and the Family Stone, and now the Allman Brothers. I realize I’m on the wrong side of history — good luck finding someone who doesn’t revere this as the most important live album of all-time. It’s just truly aimless, and the incessantly repeated improvisations lasting as long as television shows never made a dent with me.

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Top 100 Album Review: #73 – Back in Black, AC/DC (1980)

A Tasteful Hard Rock Album.

Tasteful in musical composition, not lyrics of course.

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Rolling Stone’s Ranking: #73/100
My Rating:

Anything that fits under the genre Hard Rock or Heavy Metal is rat poison to me: the crass lyrics screamed at the decibels of chainsaws just doesn’t do it for me. Actually, it makes me shut-down, and like a nuclear reactor that’s about to explode, I begin an emergency protocol to get the hell away from it as quick as possible.

Considering AC/DC hard rock might be a joke to some — I know if you look at the Rock n’ Roll continuum, there is such screaming, hard rock out there that in comparison they can look like a Bach coverband. For me, Back in Black is touching the outer limits of what can be inherently pleasing to me but transcends it by reigning in the “hard/heavy” aspect along with some very good songs.

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Top 100 Album Review: #46 – Legend, Bob Marley and the Wailers (1984)

All You Need to Know: 500 Weeks on Billboard’s Top Albums.

This reggae album is awesome not because of the genre but because of the song writing.

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Rolling Stone’s Ranking: #46/100
My Rating:

This album has achieved incredible staying power: Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon is the only album that’s been on the Billboards Top 200 Albums longer (another Top 100 Album selection).

What makes the album so good is that the songs themselves are so different even with the consistent reggae feel and rhythm. Put on any station dedicated to the genre and you will be lulled into lethargy as the monotonous sound waves melt into one another without distinction. Bob Marley and The Wailers, however, command your attention from start to finish with well-written songs, and this collection gives you the most powerful 15 examples of it.

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The Top 100 Album Review: #10 – The Beatles “The White Album”, The Beatles (1968)

Probably Should Have Been One LP.

But who cares — it’s still so good!

Rolling Stone’s Ranking: #10/100
My Rating:

A favorite pastime of music critics, amateur and professional alike, is to pontificate how The Beatles could have done it better. I mean, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band might be the best album of all-time, but didn’t you find the chord progression on Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds a little lacking? Wasn’t Let it Be a total let down with only 6 or 7 amazing songs?

The gripe with The White Album is its length. Clocking in at over a hour and half, there is so much material. I’ve had this album on rotation since October, and I finally feel comfortable writing about it. Yes, there is a lot to sift through, some of it meh, but much of it is amazing — so who cares.

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Top 100 Album Review: #21 – The Great Twenty-Eight, Chuck Berry (1982)

Now This is Some Driving Music.

Even with being 28 songs, there is so much to enjoy here.

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Rolling Stone’s Ranking: #21/100
My Rating:

Months ago, I took a long trip down to Florida and loaded the phone up with all types of albums. Chuck Berry saved me at just the right time: I hit the country lines of North Carolina and needed something to pep me up. This album is full of old rock n’ roll with many references to automobiles and cruising. It was the perfect antidote.

It also satisfies my self-created rule of what makes a Top 100 album with one killer track (Johnny B. Good) and over half the album being worth-while.

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Top 100 Album Review: #44 – Horses, Patti Smith (1975)

An Album to Make Intellectuals Feel Good.

Trying to sort out my confusion, my Aunt pegged the reason people “like” Patti Smith’s Horses.

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Rolling Stone’s Ranking: #44/100
My Rating:

This stream-of-consciousness beat poetry album with three chord progressions is awful. AWFUL.

It is so bad, you could be guaranteed that its rise in the minds of music critics and fans came from either two sources: social justice or elitism. This dive into the Rolling Stone’s Top 100 Albums has taught me the lengths people will go to defend awful, avant-garde art. Worst yet, it’s operates on a negative correlation where the worse the art, the more people defend it.

In Patti Smith’s Horses, the defense is primarily elitism with some flourishes of social justice. How Aunt Mandy puts it:

There isn’t anything good about it, just people wanting to be cool so they say it’s great to try to make you think “if you were an intellectual like me you might get it. Buuuuut you’re too stupid to know how great it is.”

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