1001 Albums (so far)

I have long since stopped blogging my progress through the 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. I’m doing this through a web site which serves up an album each morning, and an associated plugin for the music server that I use (Lyrion Music Server, or LMS). The plugin links to the album via Qobuz, which I subscribe to. In fact, I can only recall a single album that the plugin couldn’t find, and I ended up playing it on YouTube.

I recently found I’d played half of the albums on the list, so I thought maybe an update was worthwhile.

I’m not gaining appreciation for genres I’ve not previously enjoyed

There are some genres I really don’t care for: heavy metal, country and western, country rock, folk rock and hip hop spring to mind. I reckon some of this is because of cultural background. I also dislike bland music that just washes by the listener.

There are exceptions: for example one of the Johnny Cash prison albums swayed me a bit.

I occasionally buy an album I’d not heard before

But mostly in a genre I like anyway.

I’ve tried to take account of how important or influential an album is when I rate it.

On occasion I can rate an album higher than my dislike of it would indicate. If an album is hugely influential, I bump the score up. This may be heresy, but I’m not a massive Beatles fan (reflected in my low score for their early albums), but for their key albums I think top scores are appropriate.

Some of my favourite albums seem to generate bimodal review scores

Occasionally an album like Suicide's debut album - in my view a really important, influential and excellent album - garner strikingly bimodal reviews where listeners either love or loath it.

Here’s the shareable summary of my reviews.