ARTISTS INDEX

Below you will find the primary reviews library for my music collection, sorted artist by artist into their respective discography breakdowns. The below catalogue only considers artists for whom I've collected the complete discography, or enough of one to deem myself suitably knowledged of their works. Where appropriate, various solo/side projects and other related releases are also included within the respective artist pages. If you're wondering where all the various other random music or more truncated collections I own go, head down to the Miscellaneous Reviews section instead.

For ease of browsing/listing, the artists have been categorised below based roughly on the personal resonance and importance they hold for me. There isn't any kind of scientific measurement to which artist gets lumped into what class, it's largely based on gut feeling and how I feel like they've contributed to my life in music over the years. Therefore I would say don't take the classifications too seriously - and certainly don't think that anything going into the "lower" categories isn't worth your time! Every artist here is one that has provided hours and hours of great music worth delving into; there's just a difference between the music that made me and the music I've gotten some kicks out of over the years, so to say.

The individual albums have been rated on a scale from 1 to 10. A summary of the ratings can be found on Ratings page.

This list as it stands represents but a ripple of the music I own (you can find links to my full collection on the About page) but this page will be constantly updated as and when enough reviews are amassed per artist.

In this house we stan these people. Or to put it less quaintly, these are the artists who have had the greatest personal impact on me - and continue to do so, constantly. This section doesn't contain all that many artists because I am trying to prove a point here: these (intentionally limited number of) acts are for me the greatest of all time, the musicians who I've latched onto with my very being and who have been responsible for introducing me to entire worlds of music that would leave ripples throughout my listening habits. This is the music that defines me, this is the hapless fanboy zone. Beware of gushing praise.

The second category consists of artists who I love dearly, simple as that. This is incredibly resonant music that has shaped my tastes and which goes on to have a great effect on me, even as the years pile up - the difference between these acts and the ones above is simply that these artists haven't been quite as influential for me. You could, however, still consider these artists the core of my taste - and as a rough ballpark method of categorisation, they've all released at least one of the rare 10/10 albums.

The artists listed below are ones whose discographies are - for the most part - full of excellent music, the occasional stumble nonwithstanding. With many of these acts I've had a truly obsessive phase where I have spent countless hours listening to them non-stop, and which since has normalised into a general love and appreciation; with some there's a continued reverence around a particular period of their work and the rest of their music is a bonus. The common denominator is that for at least one point of their career, I have as much fondness towards these artists as I have for any of the ones listed in the first two classes, but one thing or another places them just one notch below.

As in the saying about lightning bolts rarely striking twice in the same place. These artists have released a truly spectacular album or two, which then inspired me to take the plunge deeper into their back catalogues (or follow them further) - only to retrospectively find out they never quite lived up to those highlights. The reasons for that are as varied as the artists and even though the promise set up by their best albums was perhaps never fully lived up to, there's still something in those other albums that have kept me engaged at least to some degree. Or I just kept buying albums in hopes they'd eventually deliver again.

In a nutshell: I like these artists. They've done good albums, some great songs along the way, they may have even made it to my Top Albums of the Year lists once or twice. That's where the story ends. I like these artists enough that I've kept accruing their albums (at least to a point), but the deeper connection mostly isn't there. It's still a good bunch of music, though.

Some projects don't last for more than one or two albums. In such cases we are technically talking about complete discographies, but from a nerdy writer's perspective it means there's little that I can say about the artist overall that isn't already covered by the usual contextual parts of the reviews - there's little room for a deeper, summarising analysis when there's only a few items to consider. I've therefore split these artists into their own section, giving them their own artist pages but without introductionary speeches etc on the proviso that anything I'd say in the opening paragraphs will be included in the main reviews anyway.

Sometimes I've ended up reviewing individual albums on other websites for artists who will eventually have a page here. Rather than keep these away until whenever it is that I tackle them here, I've stashed them below in their bare skeletal states. The reviews haven't been contextualised for a full discography sweep and they may change later down the line, but for now the points stand.