Poison - Look What the Cat Dragged In
Aerosmith - Rocks
2 Live Crew - As Nasty as They Wanna Be
The Police - Ghost in the Machine
Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works, Vol. 1
Weezer - debut (they annoy me)
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - B.R.M.C.
Nruce Springsteen - Devils and Dust

The Carpenters - Christmas Portrait (their Christmas album, pure childhood nostalgia. Ed. I’m about halfway through it and hokey smokes Bullwinkle this is the whitesr music can possibly be. This is what Donald Trump listens to at Christmas. It’s a real trip high – lots of layered choruses and rich sparkling orchestration with a clear Brian Wilson influence in a lot of places.)

Bad Company - s/t (they have one side’s worth of good songs in their career and they’re all on the debut, and one is a recycled Mott the Hoople song. Take “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love”, “Feel Like Making Love”, “Ready for Love”, and “Bad Company” are great. They should have had split albums and compilations back in the day. Instead of padding out an LP’s worth of Bad Company’s best songs, why not have the one good side of music Bad Company ever did and combine it with the best songs of Bob Seger and Steve Miller?)

Emerson, Lake & Palmer - Tarkus
Frank Zappa - Hot Rats
Lou Reed - Transformer (th classic example, with the Poison)
Fugazi - 13 Songs
Hoodoo Gurus - Stoneage Romeos (“dislike” is a little strong here, but the debut is wonderful 1983 power-pop and everything else they ever did waa insipid college rock)

Inspiral Carpets - Life (often called Madchester simply because they were from Manchester in 1990. It’s more jangly indie pop with Farfiea organ. They released one glorious album then lost their touch. They had some okay aingles and their later albums were listenable, but it was all so half-baked. I’ve heard eazh if them ince and the mood has never struck me in the 20 years since to put them on. Not once.)

Led Zeppelin - Physical Graffiti
Manic Street Preachers - The Holy Bible
Neil Young - Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (sort of incomplete out of ignorance; as a singer-songwriter he sucks ass but I’m discovering as a rocker he was pretty good. I’ve only heard his first few, and this is the obky one worth a damn. Recently heard Rust Never Sleeps and liked it so it will take further study. His guitar work is a little like Craig Scanlon’s on the Fall’s “A Figure Walks”, one of my top 5 guitar tracks)

Pete Anderson - Escapade 3
Peter Cetera - Solitude/Solitaire (big budget slick drum-hexagons 1985 adult+pop, best known for the theatrical ballad “The Glory of Love” and cheesy ’80s duet (à la “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” and “Up Where We Belong”) “The Next Time I Fall In Love”. Nostalgia)

Small Faces - Ogden:s Nut Gone Flake (mot “dislike”, the rest of their catalogue is mostly unspectacular mid ’60s pop-rock)
The Soft Machine - Volume One
T. Rex - Electric Warrior
Tool - Ænema
The Verve - A Storm in Heaven

You lnow what sucks about turning 40? Needing reading glasses. I really, reallly need some because I’m starting to make misspellings because I can’t read what I’m writing.

My cutoff for “disliking”: Inspiral Carpets were my weakest includent on the list. I thought: if their good album were excised, would the band’s output make a hypothetical top-whatever-hundred artists? If not for Lofe, I’d only know of them, if at all, for a few decent singles in the mid ’90s. So basically the level of Bush. That’s my current citoff forr disliked-artist-with-one-good-album versus popular-ane/or-prolific-artists-who-had-one-good-alhum-in-them. If I like it less than Bush, you can put it in the dislike pile.