We Love Music Vol 3

WLD Music

This is an album which will always be associated with my youth and the wonderful time of growing up in the 90s which was a golden time in my opinion. One of my all time favourite albums The Stone Roses

Released in May 1989, The Stone Roses received little attention from both consumers and critics in the United Kingdom, with the exception of NME and Melody Maker, who were covering the Madchester music scene at the time. Bob Stanley from Melody Maker called it “godlike” and said the foundation of the music was John Squire’s guitar playing, which he deemed “beautifully flowing, certainly psychedelic, there are elements of Hendrix (especially on ‘Shoot You Down’) and Marr (check out the fade to ‘Bye Bye Badman’), but the rest is the lad’s own work”. NME ranked it as the second best record of 1989 in their year-end list. The Stone Roses received more mainstream exposure after their debut on Top of the Pops in November 1989.

In a less enthusiastic review for The Village Voice, American critic Robert Christgau found the band “overhyped” and no different than the numerous indie bands in the United States: “They’re surprisingly ‘eclectic.’ Not all that good at it, but eclectic … Though they have their moments as songwriters—’Bye Bye Badman’ always stops me, and ‘I Want to Be Adored’ sums them up—their music is about sound, fingers lingering over the strings and so forth.”

Since then, The Stone Roses has been acclaimed by critics and musicians alike, being viewed as an even more important album than when it was first released, as reflected by its high ranking in polls of the greatest albums of all time. Rolling Stone later called it “a blast of magnificent arrogance, a fusion of Sixties-pop sparkle and the blown-mind drive of U.K. rave culture”, while BBC Music’s Chris Jones said it served as a peerless testament to the fusion of rock and dance music inspired by “working class hedonism” at the end of the 1980s. Mojo strongly recommended its 1999 reissue to listeners and wrote that the album “set the tone for rock music in the ’90s”. Bernadette McNulty of The Daily Telegraph believed the 2009 reissue polished the band’s bold mix of discordant psychedelic sounds and clever dance beats, but that its legacy as a fabled debut album was enhanced more by the darker, masculine music that followed in Manchester during the 1990s.

Zeth Lundy of The Boston Phoenix said it “has been deified by such dubious tastemakers as the NME and Oasis’s Noel Gallagher — and the rest of us really like it too”. PopMatters critic Jennifer Makowsky argued that “the psychedelic, drug-powered pop songs on the album earned the band a well-earned place in alternative music history.”