Fluffy's Favourite Albums (currently #2 > #1)

[sneakyblueberry]

And tomorrow, the start of the Top 50.

I was never one of those hardcore Dylan freaks, but I would've spent about a year getting into his discog, which really isn't that long when you consider the depth of his work.  I did see him in '06 or '07 in Wellington, which was a pretty good concert.  We got a couple of oddball choices, My Back Pages I think was one of them.  But, Dylan being Dylan it was mostly unrecognisable from the album version.

My favourite studio albums were probably Nashville Skyline, New Morning and Desire.  Oh Mercy is great, even though its probably the only album from the 80s worth anyone's time.  But if I reach for any Dylan it'll most likely be something from Bootleg Series live albums, especially the '75 Rolling Thunder Revue, everything about that record is magical. 

If it was '07, I saw him the same year, but in Chch. His band was amazing at that time, and I was enough of a disciple even then to recognise every song he played bar one. Of course, he focused on more recent material, and I had all his comeback albums, and that is these days my favourite period of his, so I loved it. The friend I went with though was your ho-hum rock/classic rock radio fan, knew two or three of his hits, but often went along to see 60s and 70s legacy artists who just rattle off their greatest hits  and figured he knew what to expect. He got a shock. 

Rolling Thunder Revue is bloody good. None of your favourite studio albums are very typical picks, though I know perpetualchange (if he still posts here) loves that married country Dylan period from the late 60s to mid 70s. And if you haven't heard it, there's a song called Brownsville Girl from the late '80s that I would encourage you to track down. Best song he wrote in that entire decade, weird 11 minute epic.

Yeah, I love that era of Dylan.  He sounds like a totally different person on Nashville Skyline.  New Morning is fantastic.  I also have a soft spot for Saved

Recent Dylan I haven't checked out much.  The tour I saw him on, Modern Times had just been released, which is another great record. 

Good update, though I've not really delved much into the artists covered.  Kid A I've never heard, but I liked OK Computer.  Radiohead is another one of those bands who everyone seems to like but have never really clicked with me.

[Fluffy Lothario]

#50

Salmonella Dub - Inside the Dub Plates (2001)



So I’m a New Zealander, and as must be the case in many countries, there’s a lot of great music that is quite well-known here, but sadly never gets noticed beyond our shores. A lot of it falls under your typical genres, but if someone told me they wanted to hear music that is unique to NZ in some way, a local specialty, I’d point them towards dub reggae. There are sizeable scenes in reggae (see Katchafire, Trinity Roots, House of Shem, Kora) and drum and bass (see Concord Dawn, Shapeshifter, Pitch Black) here, and the point at which the two intersect produces the finest New Zealand music. Case in point, Salmonella Dub.

The Dub were the first band to combine the two genres together in these parts, the granddaddies of the subgenre. They had a good foundation in their early albums, and then added to their ranks singer/guitarist/producer/goddamn visionary Tiki Taane (best known in recent years for being arrested for the heinous crime of – wait for it - performing a cover of N.W.A.’s Fuck the Police) and their careers took off. Inside the Dub Plates was their second album with Tiki in the band, and they are firmly in the zone.

I can describe the appeal of this band, and dub reggae in general quite simply. Listen to the first track, ironically called Problems, and I challenge you to try to experience the remotest degree of stress. That lush, chill vibe, those smooth-as-fuck beats are found on every track, with the exception of Tha Bromley East Roller, on which they turn up the heat and you get something closer to straight hard-driving drum and bass. It’d be hard to call any track but Love Your Ways (a song any young NZer would recognise) the best song on here, and ambient closer Tui Dub is really something, but my favourite track is Push On Thru, which encapsulates everything great about this album and this band.



#49

Dream Theater - Scenes from a Memory (1999)



(Yes, this one is long. Few if any others will be this big. This review essentially functions as a summary of how my taste in music came to be what it is. Feel free to read selectively, or not at all, if you don’t care.)

Like Toxicity, this album feels like it should be higher. A lot higher. But it could also be quite a bit lower, and is possibly only in the Top 50 at all thanks to an immense amount of past credit.

I’ll not mince words: this is the single most important and significant album of my life. Nothing could possibly topple it. My taste in music completely changed as a direct result of hearing this album. You can draw a line, with on one side of it Before SFAM, and on the other After SFAM. The influence of the album is that clear-cut.

My taste had been heading into a narrow corner for years before this album. I’d gone from being into anything that tickles young fancy, to rock, to hard rock exclusively, to metal exclusively, and at the time I found SFAM, was starting to feel less fondness for anything that wasn’t in the direction of extreme metal, all of this due to a mad pursuit of speed and technicality and heaviness.

And then I found SFAM. Literally picked it out off the shelf of a music store because the cover looked interesting – it wasn’t even in the metal section, for fuck’s sake. Turned it over – those are some long songs. What the hell’s all this shit about acts and scenes? Let’s have a quick listen, just out of curiosity.

And thus Dream Theater threw upon me that there was another way to create music that amply employed speed and technicality and heaviness, without having to growl like a garbage disposal and squeal like a pig and reduce oneself to a subculture of drab hues of black and grey and the colours between. But its influence goes far further than turning me away from extreme metal. Dream Theater explored those things I was looking for and also had fairly regular rock tracks and piano ballad moments and you name it. Hearing them do those things made me capable of appreciating them again. I was now walking away from the corner I had backed myself into, out into open space again. And I started looking into other prog metal bands, and prog rock bands, and regular rock bands of all varieties, and then jazz, and then classical, and then folk and electronic and reggae and before I knew it, a huge array of music was interesting, and whereas I had previously had all the choice of one cobwebbed corner, now I saw the room was almost infinite, and I liked that great big space.

Do I need to go into specifics amongst you folk about why this album is good? Overture 1928/Strange Déjà Vu, Fatal Tragedy, Home, Finally Free – the lion’s share of my favourite moments in this band’s history are on this one album. After the experience of being stifled making Falling Into Infinity, then free as they pleased and amongst kindred spirits with Liquid Tension Experiment, and now being able to bring that to Dream Theater, creativity and energy leaps from them.

 So why is the album this low then? Because it isn’t as flawless as I once felt. Other than Through Her Eyes, I probably still find everything on here good, but not necessarily great. And the album has been quite terribly marred by a fact that dawned on me in the years of exploration that came after it: I really, really don’t like concept albums. The fact that any one song can’t really stand alone, that I can’t absorb its themes and its lyrics on their own terms, that I have to approach the song with consideration of the prior narrative, the characters involved, and endure tons of tedious matter-of-fact narration… it’s just really not my thing. And SFAM is a pretty big offender in all these respects.

And because SFAM opened up the floodgates, I’ve heard a ton of albums that I continue to like better. So the most momentous album of my life sits at #49.

[sneakyblueberry]

Haha Salmonella Dub on DTF, who would've thought.  I'm glad you didn't include Six60 in your list of the reggae scene.  God I hate that band.

"The fact that any one song can’t really stand alone, that I can’t absorb its themes and its lyrics on their own terms, that I have to approach the song with consideration of the prior narrative, the characters involved, and endure tons of tedious matter-of-fact narration… it’s just really not my thing. And SFAM is a pretty big offender in all these respects."

That's part of why I don't like SFAM as much as most DT fans.  I think the storyline in the lyrics is incredibly corny.

[Tomislav95]

I feel similar about SFAM. Before it I liked music but I listened to songs from bunch of artists and SFAM was first time I had need to listen to whole albums. It introduced me to DT and (I would add) to music.

[Crow]

i agree that Through Her Eyes sucks 
I feel pretty much the same about SFAM myself, too, good album but not their best and I don't come back to it as much in recent years.

[Sacul]

i agree that I do suck 
I feel pretty much the same about SFAM myself, too, good album but not their best and I don't come back to it as much in recent years.

Fixed

I feel that, for some reason, I like Dream Theater less and less with time, specially this album. Maybe a matter of expanding tastes, as it happened to you.

[Fluffy Lothario]

Just to be clear, SFAM is far and away my favourite album by DT.

FII has awesome tracks, but bad ones too.

ADTOE is great, but came too late to really resonate with me.

IAW is cool, but the snare irks me, and the early, more 80s-leaning sound isn't my cup of tea.

And no other album really even deserves a mention.

I think the storyline in the lyrics is incredibly corny.

I'd agree, but on the tracks that I enjoy the most, I can quite easily tune it out and enjoy the song as I remember hearing it originally when I wasn't really thinking about these things.

[Fluffy Lothario]

#48

Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antenna to Heaven (2000)



Amusing fact: Godspeed have been around for slightly more than 20 years now, and in that time, they’ve written a grand total of seventeen songs (this is of course excluding their first demo, which we may never hear, and is probably shit anyway).

Despite being all for the concept of post-rock, Godspeed are still one of the only bands in the style I’ve found that I enjoy very much. They make so much more of the genre. I feel like Godspeed are much better at writing the quieter sections in their music and really making them distinct parts of the songs with their own purpose. They don’t treat them as a means to an end, as a point from which to escalate towards a climax. In the same way, climaxes aren’t just points to be reached. Some songs are big and loud for almost their entire length, while some don’t really feature a climax as such. Godspeed are characteristic of post-rock, but at the same time far less observant of its customs, which is why they seem much better at it.

I prefer listening to live material by this band, so a lot of their studio stuff doesn’t affect me to the same degree, especially as complete albums. Lift Your Skinny Fists is the studio album that works the best – even were it not the longest, it has the most to say and is the most interesting. The four compositions, each huge and awesome on its own, come together to form an enormous symphony of sorts.

The first half of Storm, before the turn at about twelve minutes, is one of the high points in the band’s discography, and one of few they haven’t outdone in live performances. I have so many great memories attached to it; to name one, when I lived in Bonn in Germany, I was once unable to sleep due to a messed-up head after a break-up, so I went out and walked along the Rhine for hours in the night, til I was far out of the city. As the sun rose and my head cleared, I found myself in the midst of dewy fields about which more rabbits than I’d ever seen wandered and grazed, indifferent until I was several metres away. For an hour or more, I went back and listened to that first section of Storm over and over, and just bathed in the moment.



#47

The Mars Volta - The Bedlam in Goliath (2008)



I doubt anyone has noticed, but this is up to this point the most recent album on the list by a full seven years. And having a quick look at the list, there are only four more released after it.

The Mars Volta are my favourite of the bands that came out of the resurgence of prog in the 2000s. Courtesy of guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and an ever-evolving cast, their brand of punkified prog rock was a prismatic maelstrom of noise housed in impeccable compositions. Across a single album, they could take detours into psychedelic noise, ambience, jazz, funk, and Latin rock; on occasion, they would combine a number of them in the same song. Adorning all of this were the high-pitched vocals of Cedric Bixler-Zavala, delivering a cryptic onslaught of acidic imagery.

After a pair of albums very heavy on the prog, the band make a point of stripping things back a bit and rocking hard on The Bedlam in Goliath. On my first few listens, I was astounded by how this album sustains such high levels of energy across 75 minutes and stays interesting throughout. Aberinkula and Metatron smash the gates open; blink and you’ll miss the transition between the two. Then comes Ilyena, Wax Simulacra and Goliath, a phenomenal trio of songs. The late album packs its own power trio too in Askepios, Ouroboros, and Soothsayer.

Many albums by The Mars Volta have lyrics connected to the lives of the actual bandmembers. The stories they tell are admittedly bizarre and implausible and should be taken with an ocean of salt, but that’s part of the fun of the band; they ultimately serve to amplify the larger-than-life, fantastical music they create. This album was supposedly birthed in the wake of a curse that plagued the band after toying with an Ouija board they bought in an old shop in Jerusalem. The lyrics allude to the curse they worked under and the personalities that were reaching out to them.

[sneakyblueberry]

two excellent albums

[Crow]

an album I love and an album I can't stand 

[Fluffy Lothario]

One thing I’m discovering as I go on in this list is that the advice to do your write ups before you start posting is a tremendously good idea. It’s not just that they take a wee bit of time; listening through the albums and writing about them really hones your sense of how you feel about them, and, as I mentioned in the Oasis review, you realise some albums should be higher or lower than you first ranked them.

So I’m thinking I may post a list with slightly reviewed rankings when I get to the end.

[Train of Naught]

Best Mars Volta album! 

[Fluffy Lothario]

#46

Santana – Santana III (1971)



Santana had the extraordinary luck to appear at Woodstock before they had even released a debut album. They were received so well, their fame was essentially guaranteed, as long as they didn’t royally fuck up the landing. Not only was their debut great, they released three amazing albums in a row in the space of two years, on the strength of which they became the definitive Latin rock band. Carlos Santana is now a brand in and of himself, with a silky style that combines his Latin roots with blues and jazz.

The Santana albums generally lauded as their best are their debut, because of its quick release after Woodstock and smoky raw early sound, or their second, Abraxas, for managing to streamline and expand that early sound into hits. But I think Santana III takes the cake. For this album, seventeen year old Neal Schon (the dude from Journey, who I only know by name, but his name will apparently mean a lot more to eighties children) is added to the band on guitar, and they pursue a harder-edged sound than before.

Like The Bedlam in Goliath, Santana III has an opening duo of tracks that flow seamlessly and open the album with an explosion, Batuka and No-one To Depend On. Toussaint L’Overture and Jungle Strut are also much harder, faster tracks than the band had produced in the past. Between the likes of Taboo, Guajira, and Everything’s Coming Our Way, they still pull out some softer tracks though.



#45

Keith Jarrett - Vienna Concert (1992)



There came a time, still before I had started checking out jazz, that I started looking for recommendations on the glorious interweb for great piano music. Upon sampling a lot of artists, one recommendation stood head and shoulders above the others.

Keith Jarrett was a calm, quiet rebel within seventies jazz. With the emergence of jazz fusion in the early ‘70s, popular jazz that wasn’t played by very rock-influenced bands using electric instruments vanished almost overnight. Jarrett played briefly in Miles Davis’ pioneering fusion group, but his career became thereafter a crusade against the electricisation of jazz. He has led two quartets and a long-running trio, but his name is most connected to his breathtaking solo piano concerts, where he walks up on the stage with no setlist, no preparation whatsoever, and improvises entire sets in huge free-flowing pieces off the top of his head.

Vienna Concert is one of these performances from 1991, and Jarrett wrote inside the cover that he considered it, at the time, the best concert of his entire career: “I have courted the fire for a very long time, and many sparks have flown in the past, but the music on this recording speaks, finally, the language of the flame itself.” By coincidence, this was the first album of his I tried out, and I was spellbound on first listen. There are two pieces on this album, the first 42 minutes, the second 26. The music Jarrett plays can swing and hop and twinkle away rapidly, but on Vienna Concert, he’s in a very somber mood, and the music across the entire concert is very dark and dramatic. For more than half its length, Part I is slow, quiet, and sad, but Jarrett later reshapes it in an obtuse, frenetic direction before a bright finale, the only moment of its kind of the night. Part II is even moodier and more intense, the themes bending and transforming into new ones only very slowly to hypnotising effect. It’s not hard to see why Jarrett felt it was his best show, if certainly not his most cheerful one.

[Fluffy Lothario]

No takers then? May be the case with the next update or two too. 

[Fluffy Lothario]

#44

Fat Freddy’s Drop - Dr Boondigga and the Big BW (2009)



Ever had the experience where you mention a band to someone, they ask what kind of music it is, and you can’t describe that band’s music (accurately) without naming at least four or five genres? Cue Fat Freddy’s, another New Zealand dub reggae group, (see #50), and the reigning masters of the genre because the concoction they’ve devised holds huge breadth. They can play straight drum and bass, or reggae, and of course mix the two, but then there are songs that bleed over into funk. Their singer, Dallas Tamaira, aka Joe Dukie, has a velvety voice like a soul singer. And their brass section can deliver passages that would be at home on a jazz album.

All three albums by The Drop are stellar, but their second, Dr Boondigga and the Big BW, is really special. No longer concerned with getting their sound sorted, on Dr Boondigga, they stretch their legs and become more playful. They start with chill, jazzy Big BW, changing tack completely for driving drum and bass on Shiverman, before pulling off a poppy reggae track in Boondigga, and then there’s weird, synthy The Raft, very strong on the Pasifika. And that’s just the first four songs. Thematically, the songs detail storms, high seas and wild winds, in the outside world and in our hearts, and the means by which we may weather them. In this way, the album can turn from lighthearted tracks like The Nod, a goofy funk blast about inviting everyone around for a cook-up (there’s something cooking in the kitchen tonight), to the dark jungle dub of Wild Wind (you’d better run for shelter, there’s a devil at your gate).



#43

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Symphony No. 41 “Jupiter” (1788)


(Again, don't know the exact version I have, so here's a pic of Mozart)

I’m sure everyone here knows Mozart. Child prodigy and musical genius the likes of which the world has possibly not seen again since, or at least if there has been someone of his ability, they haven’t made an impact like he did. The trick to Mozart - as someone imparted on me at some point in time, though I can't remember who - is to listen out for his “Heiterkeit”, a German word meaning cheerfulness. You can listen to almost any piece by Mozart and hear that he’s immensely talented and he knows it. Composing music of an incredible standard is little more than a big game to him, he positively relishes the experience of writing it, and his music beams as a result. Even the relatively sad or dramatic moments, that would carry a gloom in the hands of almost any other musician, retain this feel; Mozart remains ensconced in the thrill of the art form, and the glow of Heiterkeit never quite leaves the music. The Jupiter Symphony, his last, illustrates this beautifully.

The symphony is now the defining form classical music takes, without a doubt the most popular form, and the one most composers have proved themselves with for a long time. But of course, at one point, it didn’t exist; it had slowly developed over the 1700s, largely at the hands of Joseph Haydn and Mozart (and would later be taken even further by Beethoven). In this sense, then, Mozart’s late symphonies are some of the earliest symphonies that would recognisably ring as symphonies to a casual listener - expansive, explorative works that seek to make a grand statement.

The Jupiter Symphony has a good dose of this dramatic flair to it, for example in the first movement, alternating rapidly between big rolling themes and calmer, violin-led segments, but it is Mozart drama, so still laced with a swelling merriment. The second movement, which is often quite melancholy in symphonies, is serene and sweet here. The third movement is a stately dance, and then the fourth returns to the epic feel of the first for a big finale.

[sneakyblueberry]

Never heard that Fat Freddy's one.  I listened to the album with Wandering Eye on it a couple times, and that was solid, didn't dig all of it.  Wandering Eye was everywhere at one point tho, you couldn't escape it. 

[splent]

OMG I'm so doing what you are doing and putting classical works in the same vein as albums. It will make it SO much easier for me to make a top 50.

[Sacul]

Lift Your Skinny Fists is an album I may never truly understand or appreciate - I just feel their debut is miles better.

Interesting that you include classical, I used to be big on it years ago. But never really enjoyed Mozart - his works feel way too "perfect", whereas Beethoven's pieces, which I love, sound more human and expressive. Moonlight Sonata is one of my favorite songs ever, and playing it in the piano puts me in trance and gets me every time.

[splent]

Lift Your Skinny Fists is an album I may never truly understand or appreciate - I just feel their debut is miles better.

Interesting that you include classical, I used to be big on it years ago. But never really enjoyed Mozart - his works feel way too "perfect", whereas Beethoven's pieces, which I love, sound more human and expressive. Moonlight Sonata is one of my favorite songs ever, and playing it in the piano puts me in trance and gets me every time.

Mozart had a sound. A lot sounds the same. He was just starting to deviate from it when he died... His last 3 symphonies and his requiem are very different than the rest of his works. That said I prefer Beethoven so much more than Mozart.

Hmm.... This gives me an idea....

[Fluffy Lothario]

Never heard that Fat Freddy's one.  I listened to the album with Wandering Eye on it a couple times, and that was solid, didn't dig all of it.  Wandering Eye was everywhere at one point tho, you couldn't escape it. 

I've heard some people say their first all blurs together. It is an exceedingly chill album. And yeah, Wandering Eye is a monster.

OMG I'm so doing what you are doing and putting classical works in the same vein as albums. It will make it SO much easier for me to make a top 50.

I've only seen a few people include them, but it makes sense to me. Okay, they're not "albums" in the modern sense, but the concept isn't that far off.

The only issue you could run into is whether to include, for example, Rhapsody in Blue, one-off symphonic poems, etc. Is 15-25 minutes long enough to justify inclusion?

Lift Your Skinny Fists is an album I may never truly understand or appreciate - I just feel their debut is miles better.

Interesting that you include classical, I used to be big on it years ago. But never really enjoyed Mozart - his works feel way too "perfect", whereas Beethoven's pieces, which I love, sound more human and expressive. Moonlight Sonata is one of my favorite songs ever, and playing it in the piano puts me in trance and gets me every time.

I'm not huge on the last track of the debut, but it is also very good.

And there is Beethoven to come.

[splent]

I agree. I think for me I would include works that could constitute the length of an album (symphonies, masses, concerti) but not smaller works.

However my idea is a top 50 classical music works list... And everything is fair game.

[Fluffy Lothario]

THAT would be cool.

[PuffyPat]

bedlam is such a good record. definitely my fav record from them. and keith jarrett is my fav piano player, and that concert is awesome.

[Fluffy Lothario]

#42

Lo’Jo - Bohême De Cristal (1999)



Here’s a band I don’t expect anyone to have heard of. Lo’Jo are an otherworldly French group, and (time for a bold claim) probably the single most interesting band on the planet.

Their frontman, Denis Pean, is a gruff French poet dude who has spent his whole life becoming staggeringly well-versed in world and folk music, from all cultures he can form a connection with. Some years ago, he was literally given a house by the mayor of a commune in the French countryside in exchange for holding and drawing concerts there, teaching music and poetry and art in schools, and generally encouraging the arts. This house is open to anyone who is artistically inclined and is passing through. It is also the home of Lo’Jo – as in, the entire band lives there together.

Lo’Jo is Denis Pean’s unwavering misfit musical collective. Despite their choice of musical pursuits being forever on the fringe, they’ve dedicated more than thirty years to their craft, completely indifferent to fame. They’ve toured with a travelling circus, performed with travelling gypsies and street acrobats, in art schools, theatre performances and arthouse films. They befriended desert nomads in Mali, where some members of the band originate from, and co-founded an annual music festival in the Malian desert in 2001. Lo’Jo’s PA system was stolen at said festival by nomadic outlaws, and they had to pursue them through the desert and strike a deal with the help of fellow nomadic musicians. Yes, this is a real band. 

Anyway, their sound is generally a mix of French chanson, gypsy folk, and North African vibes, with various other influences sprinkled about. Crucial to the band’s sound are Denis Pean on vocals and piano/keyboard; Richard Bourreau on violin or kora (an African instrument, a bit like a harp); and the sisters Yamina and Nadia Nid el Mourid on vocals and saxophone. All their albums have a ton of great songs, but the one that comes together best as a whole is Bohême De Cristal, released in France in 1999. You have songs like heavily African Baji Larabat and Jah Kas Cool Boy; Spanish-flavored Señor Calice; jazzy Kamarad; the gypsy madness of Dobosz, plus examples of the band’s core sound like Lambritcho and Brûlé la Mèche.



#41

Hariprasad Chaurasia and Shivkumar Sharma – Rasdhara (2006)



Another Indian classical album, and this time the one that is absolute dearest to me.

First, let me explain some ailments of mine. I have a very sensitive neck and head. Since I was a teenager, doing a lot of exercise, or physical labour, or simply working long hours, can very easily give me either a) belting headaches, or b) stabbing pains in the muscles in my neck, which, if I don’t remedy, will spread into my head. Fixing this requires massages, painkillers, heat and rest. I also suffer from mild scoliosis (an S-shaped back) and am beginning to suffer from back pains in recent years. Long story short, depending how good of a week or month I’m having, I can spend hours immobile, trying to dispel pain.

Now at times like these, Indian classical is generally my soundtrack of choice; it’s the best music for relaxing myself and dulling my perception of pain in the short term. And of all the music of this style I have, this album by Hariprasad Chaurasia and Shivkumar Sharma (who both appeared on album #57) is the most effective. I once read a review of Mezzanine by Massive Attack that claimed the album was “so dark, it absorbs light”. Well, this is an album that absorbs pain.

Chaurasia on flute and Sharma on santoor trade solos and create an impossibly peaceful, yet captivating atmosphere across these two raga renditions, each an hour long. Like all Indian classical, the two pieces both start on the quieter side, and very gradually speed up. They feature heavy tabla accompaniment by Ustad Shafaat Ahmed Khan in their later sections, but remain serene and calming even in stronger waters. Sample here to hear two men substituting as wind chimes for the gods.

[Scorpion]

It might just be because I'm started singing in a choir recently, but most classical music without choir does very little for me.

[Lolzeez]

Yeah this is the most interesting top albums list on here in a while. I'm following this without a doubt.

[sneakyblueberry]

Hey, that video from Rasdhara you shared is excellent.  I recently got into Derek Truck's playing and he takes a lot of influence from different raga and incorporates it into his guitar playing.  I've been reading up a little bit on different raga, and it seems like they are supposed to help with different ailments.  Do you know if what you posted (raga kirvani/kirwani) is meant to 'absorb pain' like it does for you?  That's really interesting.  And really beautiful. 

[Fluffy Lothario]

Hey, that video from Rasdhara you shared is excellent.  I recently got into Derek Truck's playing and he takes a lot of influence from different raga and incorporates it into his guitar playing.  I've been reading up a little bit on different raga, and it seems like they are supposed to help with different ailments.  Do you know if what you posted (raga kirvani/kirwani) is meant to 'absorb pain' like it does for you?  That's really interesting.  And really beautiful. 

I’ve never looked carefully into that sort of thing, so I’m not sure. It would actually be interesting to find ragas that are supposed to help with pain, get some, and test them out. I do know both ragas on this album, Jhinjhoti and Kirwani, are late night ragas though. Maybe that’s why they’re quite relaxing.

It might just be because I'm started singing in a choir recently, but most classical music without choir does very little for me.

Pretty much the opposite for me. I’ve only really enjoyed the occasional choral piece. The classical approach to using the voice just feels very foreign to me. It’s often very hard for me to hear what they’re going for. I imagine playing classical helps immensely with that.

[Fluffy Lothario]

#40

Shihad – Killjoy (1995)



Shihad are the Foo Fighters of the New Zealand rock scene. Since the mid ‘90s, they’ve reliably turned out albums loved by your average rock fan every few years, alternating between albums with a softer sound and harder-edged ones. They have a fair few songs by now that are anthems of modern rock over here – see Home Again, My Mind’s Sedate, Pacifier, and Run.

Shihad, however, have very different roots than the Foos. Their first EP, Devolve, is thrash metal. The band do a pretty good imitation of Metallica, and a decent cover of Black Sabbath’s The Wizard. By the time they’d found their own identity on first album Churn in 1993, they were playing industrial metal.

And then there’s Killjoy, the album that divides early-formative-Shihad from local-rock-legends-Shihad. Have a listen to the first and most popular track, You Again (all the stand-alone vids on youtube are the radio edit, but it's the first song here). Is this still metal? Or are they now playing hard rock? If it is hard rock, it’s really really fucking hard rock. You Again is a good indicator of the sound of Killjoy – a dense wall of dirty distortion, massive riffs so loud, they half bury Jon Toogood’s snarling vocals, and Tom Larkin’s impassioned, albeit simple, pounding drums.

In the middle of the album, Deb’s Night Out offers a bit of a breather, and was the other song played on NZ radio. The entire album is brilliant, but the master stroke is the late album duo of life-affirming, but still crushingly heavy For What You Burn and furious Silvercup.

Oh, and I almost forgot: this is my favourite album to exercise to. Try not to get amped listening to this shit.



#39

Claude Debussy - La Mer (1905)



I can’t say I know very much about Debussy as a composer. He was a French composer working in the late Romantic period, but his work points forward towards more modern classical, which (like a lot of modern art) starts to gets really weird and avant-garde. A brief movement called Impressionism around this time prepared the classical world for some of the weirdness to come, as composers attempted to capture moods and atmospheres, sometimes at the expense of any structure and tunefulness.

La Mer is a fantastically gorgeous mini-symphony of sorts by Debussy from 1905, in which, for about 25 minutes, he tries to depict the ocean via music. Classical works had already been depicting real-world objects, mostly through the sounds they make, for hundreds of years at this point – an example that everyone knows is the birdsong in Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. In La Mer, Debussy takes this spirit of emulation to another level.

As someone who doesn’t actually play music, I’m totally at a loss to describe what is occurring here musically. The music is amorphous, featureless, in a sense, and almost completely devoid of structural signposts to guide you. At times, the music is calm and glassy, while in other moments, it becomes harsh and stormy. It is grand and vast, yet ethereal. In short, Debussy did an incredible job. This is wonderous stuff.

[Scorpion]

La Mer is glorious. Great choice - Debussy at his best imo.

[Fluffy Lothario]

#38

Bob Dylan - Blood on the Tracks (1975)



The second Dylan album of the list, and this is one very often spoken of as his absolute best. You can ignore context and it’s just a bunch of really good songs, but Blood on the Tracks was regarded by many as a big comeback for him.

To describe that mindset, you have to go all the way back to 1966. After spending five years eclipsing the folk scene and playing a pivotal role in laying the foundations for rock, Dylan had a motorbike accident and messed himself up pretty good. He was out of the spotlight for all of 1967, and his musical ambitions completely changed. He suddenly wanted to get back to basics, play and write traditional folk and country songs and chill. This inspired a general shift towards nostalgic folk and country rock, and Dylan entered a safer, quieter phase in his career. He didn’t tour for eight years, more interested in spending time with his wife and kids.

This state of affairs finally broke in 1974, as he began touring again and his marriage broke down. With his head in a mess, Dylan crafted Blood on the Tracks, which has gained some reputation as the quintessential break-up album. Again accompanied by The Band, this is probably his prettiest album musically, and one of his least cryptic lyrically. Normally very guarded, he becomes a little more open and writes a series of songs detailing a variety of emotions.

The jangly first track, Tangled Up In Blue, one of the most well-known, appears to try to see a silver lining in the situation, a strange reflection on being “off the chain”, loose upon the world again for better or worse. You’re a Big Girl Now heartbreakingly documents the initial shock of having his cozy existence thrown into disarray. If You See Her, Say Hello, covered by Jeff Buckley, looks at the distance imposed upon him, the pain of simply hearing her name mentioned by others. But the masterpiece of the album is Idiot Wind, unquestionably one of the best songs Dylan has ever written, eight minutes of biting bitterness and lyrical genius that just doesn’t stop.

I woke up on the roadside, daydreamin’ ’bout the way things sometimes are
Visions of your chestnut mare shoot through my head and are makin’ me see stars
You hurt the ones that I love best and cover up the truth with lies
One day you’ll be in the ditch, flies buzzin’ around your eyes
Blood on your saddle

(Almost no songs from this album available. Tangled Up In Blue is a live version from his 1975 tour, and Idiot Wind is an acoustic demo version, which many people prefer to the album one anyway).



#37

Ben Howard - I Forget Where We Were (2014)



This is the most recent album on my list, released only in October of last year, and Ben Howard is my most listened to artist in the past year.

Ben Howard was originally considered by a lot of people as just another English poppy folk dude in the vein of Ed Sheeran. His first album Every Kingdom got criticism for being too light and without substance, from people who clearly didn’t listen very carefully. It has a mixture of upbeat songs, and, well, far less upbeat ones. Even the message of (going by youtube views) his biggest song up to this point, Keep Your Head Up, is that happiness doesn’t necessarily come naturally, that it’s not something you can just bank on, and that you may have to actively strive for it.

While Every Kingdom is fairly optimistic, and Ben Howard appears to have been on the upswing, I Forget Where We Were finds him experiencing a severe collapse in his spirit. The natural folk rock feel of his debut is replaced by a strange, frosty, echoing electric sound that occasionally swells into crashing, unsettling soundscapes. The album is a long hard, almost uncomfortably honest look at being seemingly pre-disposed towards unhappiness, your own mind, for reasons you can’t explain, your worst enemy. In fact, in the grip of such a downturn, perhaps even as a direct result of it, he has gone through a breakup, which then in turn also haunts the album (in case this seems presumptuous, there are clues across the album that it occurred in this order).

The two tracks neck in neck as popular standout are ghostly Conrad, and End of the Affair, an eight minute track that is sunken in quiet misery for about two thirds, then erupts in desperation and frustration. Honestly, it would be far easier to talk about low points than high points; the album is harrowing from start to finish. Opener Small Things is great; two acoustic tracks in the middle of the album, In Dreams and She Treats Me Well, offer a slight change of tone, the latter as much of a positive respite as the album offers:

Morning
I’ve done my time here
Stood here watching my own death
But a few things are going my way this time
Got a woman at home
She treats me well

And the last track, All Is Now Harmed, is one of the most emotionally overwhelming endings to an album I’ve ever heard, but I won’t link to it, as I think it’s better to hear it in its place at the end of this bleak modern masterpiece.

[Lolzeez]

A girl I used to have a crush on recommended me that Ben Howard guy,I should check him out,especially if you put it above my favorite Dylan album. But yes,Blood on the Tracks is an essential breakup album and just one of the most depressing albums I've heard. I love it so much.

[Fluffy Lothario]

The two albums are just as good as each other, I prefer Ben Howard's for personal reasons, really.

[Fluffy Lothario]

#36

John Coltrane – Ascension (1965)



This will be the only Coltrane album on the list, a fact that would shock and appal the majority of jazz fans. Coltrane is one of the high priests of jazz, a man whose mastery of the saxophone was about as complete as it is possible for a human being to achieve on an instrument. So why just the one album? Well, the dude has tons of great albums and tunes, but he has a very straight-backed, disciplined feel to his playing and his composition. I tend to enjoy other jazz greats just a bit more due to this stiffness -which he crucially abandoned late in his career.

Coltrane became more strongly religious, and strived to better communicate religious themes by turning to free jazz. Free jazz is a subgenre within jazz that worked on creating a more open approach to composition and soloing. It often involves soloists playing in disregard for tempo, many soloists blasting away simultaneously, and soloists with more extreme, “unhinged” playing styles. By 1965, still fairly few musicians had really embraced free jazz fully, so Coltrane converting to the cause was a big game-changer.

Ascension is Coltrane throwing down the free jazz gauntlet. He modelled it directly on Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz, a ground-breaking album with one 37 minute track featuring two quartets. Ascension runs for 41 minutes, and features a piano/bass/bass/drums rhythm section – and then two trumpet players and five saxophonists. Other than the drums, each musician gets an unaccompanied solo throughout the track, though the two bassists play together. Between each solo is a remarkable sonic blast.

The way I think of it is to imagine a black gospel choir with every singer screaming out devotion to God at the top of their lungs as they please, though working towards a vague collective motif. Put a saxophone or trumpet into each person’s mouth, and you have the ensemble sections of Ascension bridging each solo. It’s like a big band jazz group that are trying to use music to summon a flying carpet that will take them to heaven. It’s simple, but damn is it an awe-inspiring sound. Nearly all of the individual solos are also extraordinary, but the standout one for me has always been Pharaoh Sanders’. You can hear it beginning to rise up from the din at around 11 minutes, before it tears free and the man wails and screams into his sax like he has been tasked with scaring the devil away and catching God’s undivided attention single-handedly. This is a solo that redefined the way I thought about what can be done with an instrument in the service of creating music.



#35

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky – Symphony No. 4 (1878)



Probably everyone who will ever read this is familiar with the Fate motif that opens Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. Well, if you want to hear an even more daunting and awesome Fate motif, check out the one that opens Tchaikovsky’s 4th.

Tchaikovsky was a late Romantic composer, during which era classical music was put to excellent use in portraying darker emotions. Many late Romantic pieces are enormously dramatic and dramatically enormous. Tchaikovsky had plenty of ammunition to write in such a style. He is widely thought to have been gay, though of course he hid it, and it may have caused him massive stress doing so. In 1877, he married Antonina Miliukova, and their marriage fell apart in months. Prone to bouts of depression, the man suffered immensely, and left Russia for a year, during which time he wrote his Fourth Symphony.

Over the course of the symphony, you can essentially hear Tchaikovsky mentally processing his doomed marriage and his grief, before he eventually manages to pick himself up again. The first movement, almost 20 minutes, depicts the shuddering jolt that the failure of his marriage deals him, with fate looming large and crashing down on him between periods of abject despair. As it goes on, fate dawns on him more and more imposingly, and the motif comes thick and fast and more loudly, overwhelming the main melody, itself ever building, of his suffering.

The second movement is also grief-laden, before turning in tone at its finale, leading into the fabulous third, a brief and quite unique-sounding piece with an ensemble of string instruments being plucked in unison (which I am informed is called pizzicato) to give a feel of the lifting of one’s spirits. Finally, in the fourth, brass and strings come together to create a triumphant ending, a great shout of “I will endure!”, though tellingly, clanging fate manages to break through one more time towards the end.

[FlyingBIZKIT]

Still need to explore more of Coltrane, and more jazz while I'm at it. I have Blue Train and A Love Supreme. I also have a 20 disc Miles Davis collection. I'm not sure where to start though. But Coltrane is great. I should listen to this album.