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

[sneakyblueberry]

You may very well be the definition of 'eclectic', Fluffy.  Good stuff.

[Big Hath]

Tchaikovsky's 4th is good, but I have 5 and 6 a bit higher

[Fluffy Lothario]

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.

Blue Train and A Love Supreme are cool albums of his. I really like Africa/Brass, it's his first take on big band before Ascension. And Meditations is a cool later album, though Sanders gets a bit excessively weird on it at times.

Do you have this set? https://www.amazon.co.uk/Miles-Davis-Classic-Albums-Audio/dp/B004UVCOZ4
If so, start with the later albums and work backwards. From about 1957 on, his band was really hot. Milestones and Porgy and Bess are both great.

You may very well be the definition of 'eclectic', Fluffy.  Good stuff.

It's the result of being single with no kids for my entire twenties. 

Tchaikovsky's 4th is good, but I have 5 and 6 a bit higher

When I first checked out his symphonies, I was nuts on the 5th, but it's my least favourite now of 4/5/6. I'm not as fond of the chest-beating nationalist stuff. I can't stand his 1812 Overture, for example. The 6th is neat though.

[Fluffy Lothario]

#34

Florence + the Machine – Lungs (2009)



Occasionally, when I trade music with friends, I ask them to choose several albums I don’t have and plonk them in my collection as surprises. Lungs was one of these albums, so on first listen, I had never heard a song from it, and I didn’t even know who Florence + the Machine were. I was won over immediately; in fact, as track after track played, I found myself in greater and greater disbelief about how incredible this album was.

During that first listen or two of the album, I was also playing the first Assassin’s Creed (a few years late, I know), and I’ve since always associated the sound of the album with that washed out medieval landscape. The connection between the two probably endures because it isn’t entirely unfitting. Florence Welch and her band are unmistakably playing modern rock/pop, yet the use of piano, cellos, harps, tambourines, a choir, and big reverberating drums often makes Lungs sound like some weird age-old relic.

Over all of this soar Florence’s exquisite acrobatic vocals, wailing out weird gothic pieces featuring animal sacrifices, starless nights, werewolves, crows, ghosts, and coffin-craft. Other than Kiss With A Fist, a punkish song in the middle of the album that doesn’t fit in with the rest of the material at all, every song is great, but my favourites are Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up), Howl and Between Two Lungs.



#33

Bob Dylan – The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963)



Bob Dylan is currently on thirty six studio albums, and by now, people are very familiar with his approach to genre. Generally speaking, he mines it for inspiration, pillages from it what he likes, reshapes it according to his own wishes, and then moves on, possibly to return, possibly not.

Of course, there was a point in time when his fans were yet to learn this, and they had to learn it the hard way. When he took folk, mixed it with rock’n’roll and beat poetry, and turned it into an electric absurdist nightmare of its former self, he was literally branded Judas. But so long as his take on the genre was considered desirable to the interests of the genre, and the policing of its fanbase, he was hailed as the saviour, which is what happened on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

After a mostly forgettable first album of folk standards, Dylan erupted, a tremendous talent appearing from thin air. Eleven of the thirteen songs on this album are his compositions, a rarity at the time; on the early albums of Joan Baez, the darling of the folk scene before the arrival of Dylan, there isn’t a self-written song to be found. With the exception of Corrina Corrina, which features a quiet band, the entire album is just Dylan, his guitar and his harmonica.

The reason that this is not only his best acoustic folk album, but one of his absolute best albums, is that it reflects all sides of his personality at the time in one package. There are hard-hitting protest songs that sound timeless, current topical songs, love songs, and surrealist silliness. My favourites are Girl from the North Country, a gorgeous love song; Bob Dylan’s Dream, which will leave you aching for younger days and friends never seen again; and A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, a protest song about a young man returning to his father after travelling and detailing the sad state of the world in one devastating image after another:

I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’
I saw a white ladder all covered with water
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children

(As ever with Dylan, I'm reliant on alternate takes and live versions).

[sneakyblueberry]

Lovely!  I really love Lungs, as you say, Kiss With a Fist is really the only weak song on the album, I really think it hurts the album alot.  Were it replaced with Swimming, which for some stupid reason got cut, it would be a much stronger album.  Swimming is so beautiful.

Classic Dylan, no mention of Don't Think Twice?  Probably the song I remember the most from the album, besides Hard Rain of course.

[Fluffy Lothario]

There are some really great songs in the B-Sides. I really like Heavy in Your Arms, which I think was demoted to inclusion on a Twilight soundtrack. Swimming is definitely one of the better ones.

Don’t Think Twice is awesome, of course. I once saw a list of the Best Bitter Love Songs, or something, and the top ones were Alanis Morissette’s You Oughta Know and Don’t Think Twice.

Not doing an update tonight, back is bad. Maybe tomorrow.

[Fluffy Lothario]

#32

Opeth – Deliverance (2002)



I explained in my write-up for Scenes from a Memory how that album, which I heard in about late 2001, got me right into prog and right out of extreme metal. In the immediate aftermath of hearing SFAM, I was prepared to leap on anything I could find with the “progressive metal” label attached to it. But it hadn’t clicked yet how useful the internet could be to look for such bands and sample their music, and it wasn’t so easy to track them down otherwise.

It happened that on the back cover of a metal mag I had bought around that time was an ad for Blackwater Park. It had a line from a review that said (from memory) “Opeth are the stuff progressive death metal dreams (nightmares?) are made of”. Great, a progressive metal band! But progressive death? Well, I’ll give it a go, I guess. And I got the chance several weeks later, when Bleak was played on a weekly metal show on the radio.

I recorded it and then listened to it over and over and over again, and eventually got used to the death metal vocalist dude who actually pronounced his words half well while growling, rather than just grunting incoherently like a farmyard animal as all other death vocalists seemed to do. Besides, he also sang cleanly, really fucking well. When Opeth brought out Deliverance not even a year after that, it was even heavier and death-growlier, but, under the same constraints, I had to approach it the same way. I taped Wreath and Deliverance off the radio, and while waiting for the album to show up in the music store of a shitty little rural New Zealand town, I played those two songs to death.

If someone were to put a gun to my head and demand I cut swathes out of my music collection, I could do Opeth easily: I’d biff everything but Wreath and Deliverance. As a testament to the months when those two songs were all I had of the new album, when I put on Opeth these days, I will frequently, without even thinking, put on just those two songs, and then move on to something else. They are like a two-track EP in my mind, and the ideal Opeth experience. Wreath is for Opeth ultra-heavy, yet trance-inducing and Deliverance is the best song they’ve ever written, a nice little pop track about being possessed by a demon and drowning your lady love, with THAT four or five minute pummelling extended outro.

When I can be bothered going on, the rest of the album lives up to those two tracks as well, for the most part. A Fair Judgement is some nice doomy fun and Master’s Apprentices continues the ultra-heavy Opeth that Wreath brought. By The Pain I See In Others ain’t the greatest Opeth song ever, but it’s still very good. For a long time, Blackwater Park was my favourite Opeth album, but Deliverance now gets there, admittedly largely on the strength of those first two songs alone.



#31

Beirut - Gulag Orkestar (2005)



In 2009-2010, I lived in a small German town called Speyer. It is probably still my favourite place I’ve ever lived. Decent weather and company permitting, I could happily sit in Biergartens and the cafes on the main street and chill for hours. I recall a pair of buskers from vaguely somewhere in Eastern Europe who on several occasions would stand near the outdoor seating areas, play their very basic, but neat jangly jaunty music, and then go around asking for change. The experience awakened a musical craving in me that I had no idea how to properly satisfy. Where to find recorded music like that? The next year, a friend from Brazil gave me Beirut’s Gulag Orkestar. Tick.

Beirut is a band led by Zac Condon, an American who dropped out of high school at 17 to travel Europe, during which he fell in love with Balkan and Romany folk. Upon his return to the USA, he supposedly recorded all of Gulag Orkestar alone, every song, every instrument, in his bedroom. As a result, this isn’t just straight Balkan folk music. This is a heavily nostalgic, romanticised form of Eastern Europe and its music fed through an indie rock blueprint. Think the full band moments of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea with a bigger band, dripping with sadness, stretched out across an entire album.

I have no idea what Zac is singing on most of these songs, nor do I care. His vocals’ main purpose is to add to that rich sad tone the music carries, and his crooning baritone does it perfectly. Instrumentally, it’s all about a cast of accordion, trumpets, piano and keyboard, violins, and all kinds of other instruments – oh, and ukulele. Zac broke his wrist as a kid, so he can’t play the guitar, but can get by on a ukulele, which is just fine here.

The most well-known song here is Postcards from Italy, and it is a damn fine song, one of the ones where the lyrics come through the most strongly and make some impact in and of themselves. The keyboard-led Scenic World is also quite a fan favourite. It’s hard for me to pick and choose songs, as they’re all magical, not to mention that many really come across best within the context of the album. One of the delights of the album for me are the really rustic songs that sound like more of a pure representation of the music that inspired this, like Bratislava.

[Big Hath]

Deliverance

 

[Fluffy Lothario]

#30

John Butler Trio - Sunrise Over Sea (2004)



Australian John Butler’s earliest material can be very easily distinguished from that of any other guitarist. He developed a lush swift finger picking style interspersed with slide guitar that seamlessly combined folk rock and bluegrass with a bit of a Celtic feel. Ocean, one of his most famous and best songs, is a great showcase. The further into his career you move, the less pronounced this style becomes, and the more standardised his songwriting. This means on his earliest albums, the guitar playing is phenomenal, but the songwriting could often be better, and on his most recent ones, he has a much better knack for writing a song, but he’s diluted his unique style down too much.

Sunrise Over Sea is the point where the two factors find a perfect balance. John Butler’s signature sound is still in abundance on these songs, albeit in a honed form, and for the first time, he constructs an entire album of fine tunes. The album also got a big boost due to Butler’s strange decision to “lay off” his bass player and drummer and bring in new recruits. This could have been a disaster, but Shannon Birchall and Nicky Bomba are both damn good musicians in their own right, and the new trio immediately tapped into a chemistry and energy the old one had rarely possessed.

Thus the million dollar hippie and his compadres create an incredible set of songs. The most famous is the bubbly, bouncy Zebra, which has a chorus you couldn’t stop yourself from singing along to if you tried. The lyrical themes remain centred on environmental activism and social awareness. On Company Sin, a man joins a mining company drilling on land sacred to the Aborigines, and is haunted by angry spirits. Oldman takes the perspective of a man who reaches retirement, but can’t cope with the modern world. But after his marriage and the birth of his daughter, Butler is also more at peace in himself, which inspires some beautiful songs – see Peaches and Cream, What You Want, and Seeing Angels. 



#29

Herbie Hancock – Mwandishi (1971)



This is probably a pretty rare pick for favourite Herbie Hancock album. To be fair, it’s quite hard to look past Empyrean Isles and Maiden Voyage, both very catchy melodic hard-bop albums from the mid ‘60s, and the all-out jazz-funk of Headhunters. But Mwandishi is really something, my personal favourite of the explosion of jazz albums that followed Miles Davis’ initial channelling of jazz fusion in 1969, as the massive cast of musicians who had taken part in it went out and tried their own hand at it.

Hancock assembled a new band in 1970 and completely abandoned the piano, happy to rely entirely on keyboards for his fusion experiments. The first track on Mwandishi, Ostinato, opens with a droning bass clarinet, and develops into a light jazz-funk track dominated by quirky solos by Hancock on keyboards and Eddie Henderson on trumpet. This track wouldn’t sound at all out of place on Bitches Brew itself.

It’s on the next two tracks that the album gets really interesting though, as, despite being a sextet, the group begin exploring quite ambient territory. The intention here is clearly to investigate the twilit open spaces, the moments of atmosphere lingering on the edge of silence. You’ll Know When You Get There is very quiet, yet still very interesting for its entire ten minutes; in fact, the entire band vanishes for a blissful early trumpet solo, and Hancock is later backed up only by the light touch of Billy Hart’s drums.

The last track, Wandering Spirit Song, is an avant-garde stunner. In the midst of the ambient opening, again created with a spooky Bennie Maupin bass clarinet solo, a neat mini-climax of a refrain blasts forth, which hints at what’s to come. It moves into similar territory as the previous track, Hancock and Henderson jamming together over near silence, before the refrain comes again, and this time, the intensity is sustained. All participants let loose in a squonking, hiccupping, screaming chaotic free-jazz-esque frenzy that rattles and echoes about in that space previously inhabited by a few lone quiet voices, to hugely dramatic effect. The noise finally dies again, and the song gradually, quietly slips away into the dark.

[sneakyblueberry]

Ha funny, I just heard Beirut again the other day, for the first time since I was in high school, and learnt one of the songs on my daughters ukulele that was lying around.  Zach is a great songwriter.  I don't think I really heard this album, but I had a couple of the EPs back in high school and really loved them. 

[Fluffy Lothario]

They (Beirut) just released a new album a few weeks ago. Their sound is quite different now, still a bit exotic, but much safer. They don't really go headfirst into specific culture explorations anymore. Everything they've released has been at least good though.

[Fluffy Lothario]

#28

Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath (1970)



So I figure I won’t have to convince much of anyone hereabouts when it comes to the brilliance of Black Sabbath, the fundamental metal hippies from Birmingham. But why this album, and quite decidedly so, of their many strong ones?

I experienced this album in a very captivating piece-by-piece manner. I started with a Sabbath Best Of that had a good range of material from across their first six albums – but from their debut only The Wizard, with its combination of chugging riffs and harmonica a very unique, interesting track. I then got hold of a number of their albums, but couldn’t find this one. With only one track on the Best Of though, I had no reason to suspect it was any good.

As luck would have it, on the metal show I now listened to on radio weekly, they had a big Sabbath night once a year, and I went mad taping all I could. They started by playing everything from the debut but Sleeping Village/Warning. I beheld that first track, the definition of doom, for the first time. And I realised that first album, with the band taking their first energetic steps, all of their ideas fresh and new, wearing unabashed blues influences right on their collar, was just what I wanted from this band. (I’ve also found with time I prefer Ozzy’s more natural singing style on Black Sabbath and Paranoid.)

It still took me another year or more to actually get a hold of the album itself. And of course, when I did, I listened my way through all of the tracks I was already very familiar with, ending with the huge fun blues jam of Sleeping Village/Warning, at which point there was no doubt this was my favourite Sabbath album.



#27

Massive Attack - Blue Lines (1991)



I’m generally interested in electronic when it’s used as a medium for more traditional songwriting – by which I mean, I can’t see myself ever jumping to listen to twenty minute unse-unse instrumentals. Add to that my fondness for NZ dub reggae’s very chilled out take on electronic, and trip-hop – a form of electronic with dark, low tempo beats and songs featuring elements of funk, soul, jazz and of course hip hop – was probably destined to stand out to me.

Blue Lines is Massive Attack’s debut, and trip-hop’s founding “text”. It astonishes me to this day that this album came out in 1991. That puts it three years behind Portishead’s debut, and two years behind Björk’s. And it’s not like this album is an early, incomplete prototype of the genre, a bare bones first attempt. In fact, that’s why I prefer this album to the later and these days more celebrated Mezzanine. That album was all about taking the doom and gloom of their sound to its fullest, and, though great, it can feel a bit one-dimensional in its entirety (not to mention they stacked most of the best material at the start of the album). On the other hand, Blue Lines packs a variety and a spark that make it a more interesting and satisfying full length album.

The album’s hottest include Daydreaming, which has (bold claim) quite possibly the greatest beat ever conceived; the extended rap session of Five Man Army; Unfinished Sympathy, an enormous symphonic storm of a song; and Hymn of the Big Wheel, an uplifting end to the album with fantastic singing by frequent guest vocalist Horace Andy.

[Tomislav95]

That is great BS album but I like Paranoid, Master of Reality and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath more.
If I had time machine I would like to go back to hear and see when they were performing song Black Sabbath in front of the audience for the first time. I bet some people knew this band is going to change their lives and others shat their pants

[Sacul]

While I enjoy mstw of Blue Lines, I can't help cringing a bit whenever Horace appears - I just don't like his voice. It doesn't help either that most of the tunes he sings in are quite cheesy imo. Mezzanine, on the other hand, is glorious, and I think he appears just in a song or two. But I get you may not enjoy it that much - the first half is fantastic, and the rest is a bit of a mixed bag.

[Fluffy Lothario]

If I had time machine I would like to go back to hear and see when they were performing song Black Sabbath in front of the audience for the first time. I bet some people knew this band is going to change their lives and others shat their pants

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Black Sabbath specifically became regarded as the metal blueprint, but I also think people overstate how singular they were at the time. There were a good handful of bands playing heavy blues / hard rock in slightly different forms. It’s actually a fun period to look around in. See Cream’s Disraeli Gears, Blue Cheer’s Vincebus Eruptum, Jeff Beck’s Truth, and then of course Led Zep and Deep Purple. I’d say Sabbath became the metal forefathers more because they stuck it out and explored that heavy sound for the longest.

While I enjoy mstw of Blue Lines, I can't help cringing a bit whenever Horace appears - I just don't like his voice. It doesn't help either that most of the tunes he sings in are quite cheesy imo. Mezzanine, on the other hand, is glorious, and I think he appears just in a song or two. But I get you may not enjoy it that much - the first half is fantastic, and the rest is a bit of a mixed bag.

I really like his voice, though I can see why you might not.

Every now and again, I put on Mezzanine and get all the way through and think, why don’t I think more of this album?, but it doesn’t happen often. It’s still a really good album, and it was on a rough list of albums I considered, but didn’t include.

[Fluffy Lothario]

Alright, I’m about to pass the half way mark. From here, everything is god-tier shit that I’ve thought to myself “this must be a Top 10 album for me” at some point in time, but I’ve thought that about enough albums that they now total over 25.

#26

Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin IV (1971)



Hopefully, no-one needs to be reminded who Led Zeppelin were - that one band that mixed blues, rock’n’roll, psychedelic and folk, and probably wrote more awesome songs than any other rock band. I’ve never really been through a phase of thrashing Led Zeppelin, and particularly haven’t played them much in recent times, but they’ve always chugged along in the outer circle of my favourite bands.

I also rank Led Zeppelin III and Physical Graffiti very highly, but, as boring and predictable a choice as it might be to some, none of their albums has ever contested Led Zeppelin IV/Four Symbols/Zoso/Man With Sticks/whatever you want to call it. There’s a reason this is such a predictable choice for favourite. Every single song is brilliant; at least six of them are classics of the highest order. If someone from another planet was to ask me to introduce them to earth music, and I was to choose one album per genre, I think I’d use this album to represent all of rock.

Even if you’re one of those people who is tired of hearing Stairway to Heaven (ah, the joys of being only at the mercy of your own taste), there’s still the sublime acoustic Going to California or Battle of Evermore (which, by the way, has guest vocals from Sandy Denny, singer with another neat English folk-rock band Fairport Convention, who you can hear at their best on Liege and Lief); Rock and Roll and When the Levee Breaks, both of which have (bold claim) maybe the coolest drum beat in history (and I know, I made a similar claim only an album or two ago on Massive Attack’s Blue Lines – speaking of which, Bonham’s drum beat on When the Levee Breaks is actually the source of the beat on Massive Attack’s Man Next Door); and the awesome stop-start heaviness of Black Dog. And it’s not like the two songs I haven’t mentioned, Misty Mountain Hop and Four Sticks, can’t hold their own weight.



#25

Shakti – Shakti (1976)



I featured this band way at the start of my list, the Indian jazz project of John McLaughlin after he disbanded Mahavishnu Orchestra in the mid ‘70s, their sound a melee of dense playful soloing between McLaughlin’s guitar, Shankar’s violin, and Hussain and co’s percussion.

The last album I featured, A Handful of Beauty, was their second, on which they were stretching out and pursuing a whole lot of separate ideas on very different tracks. This is their first album, recorded live, before they had slowed down enough to think quite that carefully. Here, the first ecstatic explosion of energy is documented in three songs (in fact, more two and a half than three; Lotus Feet fades out before the end, totally needlessly, as other full length versions I have only last another two minutes).

And in case “ecstatic explosion of energy” seems like I’m overselling it, try the first track, Joy, eighteen minutes of non-stop shredding, McLaughlin and Shankar belting out one jaw-dropping solo after another, trading places with greater and greater frequency until they finally join forces and up the ante again in the last few minutes. Lotus Feet gives you a breather for a few minutes before the third and last track.

A universe in a single song, that track’s full title is “What Need Have I For This? What Need Have I For That? I Am Dancing at the Feet of My Lord. All is Bliss, All is Bliss”. It’s structured much like a traditional Indian classical piece, with a percussion-less alap-like scene-setting first phase. Then the percussion comes in, and the intensity starts to picks up, escalating until the group are in full-blown attack mode again. About the last ten minutes of the track are one big  percussion jam between the three drummers on tabla (two drums), ghatam (one drum), and mridangam (a clay pot), in the midst of which Zakir Hussain on tabla blows the audience’s minds and gets the biggest round of applause of the night.

[sneakyblueberry]

I don't think your bold claim is all that controversial - pretty sure anything Bonham played was the coolest ever anyway.

Shakti sounds effing awesome, will deffo check that out.  I loved Visions of the Emerald beyond, but never delved any further into Mahavishnu or John McLaughlin, though I'm aware that he's a legend. 

[Fluffy Lothario]

The only Mahavishnu album that did it for me was their first, The Inner Mounting Flame. Fusion in general doesn't do tons for me, which is really odd.

[Fluffy Lothario]

And now for some ARTIST HONOURABLE MENTIONS, artists who are right up there amongst my favourites but beyond all comprehension don’t have an album I feel I can justify including on this list:



Damien Rice

Folk artist best known for The Blower’s Daughter and Cannonball. For his first two albums (from 2002 and 2006), his band featured co-singer Lisa Hannigan, with whom he was in a rocky on-again-off-again relationship, their breakups and relationship troubles the inspiration for a lot of the songs they then sang together on. Finally, in 2007, they had a big fight, and she left him and the band, never to speak to him again. Rice then spent years battling depression and devastation over the loss of Hannigan, appearing only sporadically for one off tracks and appearances. Here's the same guy in 2011. He finally made a return to touring and a new album last year, on which he spends many songs describing how he overcame his depression.

On every Damien Rice album, there are a good handful of songs that resonate with me on a level few writers manage even once, but I don’t feel any of his albums comes together as a whole so well, not well enough to contend with the likes of the ones listed anyway. A lot of the performances on his studio albums are also hugely inferior to their live counterparts. If you want an example of what I mean, here’s a great live show from last year. The sound is fucking impeccable, literally the greatest audience recording I’ve ever heard.



Jacques Brel

A Belgian singer/songwriter of chanson (French language “pop” music) from the late ‘50s to the mid ‘70s, best known for songs like Ne Me Quitte Pas, Le Moribond, and Amsterdam. This guy, and from my further dabblings in it the chanson scene in general, was at a level of artistry in the late ‘50s and the early ‘60s that pretty much no English language popular artist could stand up to. His songwriting, his live performances, and his lyrics, eloquent to the point of poetry, are all breathtaking.

I’m still making my way through his albums – even just sticking to the highly regarded ones, there are tons – but as of yet, none of them are enough of a complete experience to make this list, a lot of which probably comes down to the era he was writing in. To his credit, some of them come pretty close. For a good starter, here are some neat performances of his.



Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan

A Pakistani Qawwali musician, who many people know because Jeff Buckley raves about him on Live at Sin-E. Qawwali is the “praise music” of Sufis, Muslim mystics who devote their lives to reaching as pure a form of worship of God as they can. The musicians, then, spend their entire lives honing their skill. Songs typically go for 10-30 minutes, and have a structure vaguely similar to that in Indian classical, though here the “soloists” are a number of singers, always utter virtuosos, who take turns soloing and building massive harmonies together, alternating between singing devotional chants and freely improvising melodies.

Nusrat was given the honorific “Shahen Shah”, King of Kings. He seems to be generally considered not only the greatest qawwali, but one of the greatest singers in history. At any rate, his voice and the group he led is remarkable. The problem I have with most of his albums is there will be two or three tracks that are so good, the others pale in comparison, so I always end up sticking to those strongest ones and not listening to the whole album. Probably his strongest album is Shahen Shah, though I'd say my favourite pieces of his are Shahbaaz Qalander and Jewleh Lal from Shahbaaz.

[Fluffy Lothario]

#24

Dave Matthews Band - Before These Crowded Streets (1998)



As popular as they are in America – which I say judging by the fact that they can comfortably tour stadiums annually - it has proven pretty hard to come across a DMB fan out in the wide world. I’ve literally never met another, unless you count a handful of people who got into their music through me. So it amuses me sometimes that there’s apparently an entire loathsome subculture surrounding this band that I have absolutely no connection to. Not that it bothers me; it means I can listen to them without preconceptions and distractions and hear Dave Matthews for the great, sometimes very fun, sometimes very emotionally riveting pop rock singer songwriter he is, and his band for the great jazz-lite jam-lite rock band they are.

Before These Crowded Streets is the DMB’s finest moment, the only studio album of theirs on which all tracks are as good as if not better than their live counterparts. Dave Matthews wrote a set of songs that are as listenable as ever, yet this is also the album where he took all kinds of risks and experimented the most. Musically, mainstream rock albums don’t get any richer than this. Of course, Le Roi Moore plays saxophone throughout. Matthews is accompanied on two tracks by Alanis Morissette, and on one by a gospel group. Butch Taylor plays piano on several songs, banjo player Bela Fleck appears on a few, and Tim Reynolds, guitarist slash occasional creator of weird alien sounds, is all over it. And Boyd Tinsley decides not to play violin alone on several songs and invites along The Kronos Quartet.

Dark, Eastern driven The Last Stop is generally accepted as one of the best DMB songs; late album epic The Dreaming Tree is one of the more poignant songs out there about perishing youth; The Stone is intensely orchestrated; and Crush might be the most epic love song ever written. Dave Matthews’ songwriting on this album is generally extremely adventurous, much more so than it’s ever given credit other than by diehard fans.



#23

Sigur Rós - ( ) (2002)



There are a lot of superlatives you can throw at this album. ( ) is the artiest Sigur Rós album, the most abstract and mysterious; it’s the most ambient and peaceful one, yet also the bleakest, yet also most likely the most beautiful and emotionally resonant.

I’d say it’s also the most polarising of their albums. I had a flatmate at uni who would raid my CD collection at random looking for something he liked. One day, he grabbed ( ). After ten minutes, he loudly declared that “this is the most depressing, boring shit I’ve ever heard”. Another flatmate wanted to hear this remarkably terrible album. He emerged from his room an hour later (well, seventy-two minutes) and loudly declared “that was one of the best albums I’ve heard in a long time”. None of which is surprising at all, I’m sure, to anyone who’s heard this album.

On ( ), Sigur Rós tested the limits of their picturesque sublime post-rock sound. Exploiting its ambient possibilities, the songs unfurl like a slowly drifting mist, occasionally revealing stunning vistas, though as the album goes on, they become harsher, more desolate and despondent. Rather than singing in Icelandic, Jónsi spends the entire album chanting several meaningless phrases in an invented language, making the album a blank canvas thematically that the listener can project their own emotional connotations upon very openly. The album is a miracle of craftsmanship; despite swirling forward in a low-tempo lull, it never becomes monotonous, each track is subtly distinct.

This is one of the few albums for which I’ll give no specific track recommendations. Although the tracks work independent of each other with time, I think if you tried listening to them outside of the flow and logic of the album on early listens, they would fall flat. And the album’s much more powerful as a whole anyway. Start at Untitled 1 and make your way through the fog.

[Crow]

oh, finally an album I know
and a damn good one at that 

[Sacul]

Totally agreed on what you said about ( ) - magnificent record, one of endless beauty 

[Outcrier]

Only that ( ) is one of their most acclaimed albums, not anything polarising about it.

[Fluffy Lothario]

Not to seem like I'm withdrawing from the statement, but I didn't mean so much amongst their fanbase, but with people who have little or no experience with the band. Based on my own experiences with friends/gfs/family, the response to that album tends to be either very positive or very negative, far more so than their other stuff.

[Outcrier]

Oh, i see... Fair enough.

[ThatOneGuy2112]

( ) is just

These days I juggle it and Agaetis byrjun as my favorite Sigur Rós album.

[sneakyblueberry]

Your honorable mention list makes me feel like there could be some Jeff Buckley coming in hot, and maybe some Scott Walker.

[Big Hath]

Great pick with the DMB, my favorite of theirs.  Crush has such a great jazzy groove.

[Fluffy Lothario]

#22

Ludwig van Beethoven – Symphony No. 9 (1824)



Anyone who’s been reading the classical entries on this list will have long realised that I, as a person who doesn’t play music, am pretty rubbish at describing what is going on in your average classical piece musically. So to communicate how awesome Beethoven’s 9th is, I will talk about reputations, expectations and disappointments.

There are certain pieces of music with a reputation so colossal, it is pretty much impossible to approach them without some sense of an impression that you should be fucking impressed with what you are about to hear. Do what you might, you simply cannot escape pretty hefty expectations sometimes, and so, do what you might, you simply cannot escape pretty hefty disappointment sometimes. The two biggest examples of this I’ve ever experienced were the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Pink Floyd’s The Wall. In both cases, I felt the music fell so short of the reputation it had garnered, my perspective of the band overall was marred ever after as a result.

And then there’s Beethoven’s 9th. I don’t think it’d be a stretch to call this the most highly acclaimed piece of music in history. I had already been listening to Beethoven for several years before I got my hands on it. And once I did, I was terrified to listen to it. Could this piece of music possibly justify the spectre of its name? (I mean, there is literally the “Curse of the Ninth”). So I sat on it, and it took me (ironically) nine months to rip the bandage off.

And even with the name it has, I needn’t have worried. Beethoven’s 9th is simply that good. Regardless of the tremendous overuse of sections of the final movement in our culture, listen to it in full and it still rises above the dreck that utilises its brilliance with ease. It was also a very fortunate coincidence that I didn’t get around to the 9th until after I had studied enough German that I could follow the text of that last movement, which just makes it even more magnificent, and the translations I have seen do barely a jot of justice to.

Freude, schöner Götterfunken
Tochter aus Elysium,
Wir betreten feuertrunken,
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!
Deine Zauber binden wieder
Was die Mode streng geteilt;
Alle Menschen werden Brüder,
Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.

And that’s just the last section. There are forty minutes of awesome music before you get there. Of the symphony overall, I will simply add that I find Beethoven’s reputation as a dark, gloomy composer quite inaccurate, and this symphony is a great example. While his life is sad, and a lot of his pieces reflect on triumph over adversity, the emphasis is generally on the triumph and not on the adversity. The first and second movements are some of the most lively, spirited classical music you will ever hear, and the whole thing is really a testament to what a strong-willed motherfucker Ludwig Van must have been.



#21

The Verve - A Northern Soul (1995)



Like a lot of people presumably, my first exposure to The Verve was with Urban Hymns. It was an album I liked, but not one I really loved. But I was listening to it at school one day, and my group teacher (teacher who dealt with absences, giving us general notices, etc) happened to be a fan. He gave me a cassette with A Northern Soul on it.

Now if all you’ve heard from The Verve is the beaming Britpop of Urban Hymns, this album could shock you. The band started out on their debut, A Storm in Heaven, playing quiet, spacy shoegaze. A Northern Soul between them has elements of the albums to either side, but sounds totally different again. It has its quieter moments, but is frequently very loud, a big noisy psychedelic surge of an album. Imagine an album that spends most of its time in the same headspace as Oasis’ Champagne Supernova.

However, thematically, this album is the polar opposite of (What’s the Story) Morning Glory. That album is a sunny, joyful manifesto. ANS follows along the lines of (from albums already featured on the list) Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind and Ben Howard’s I Forget Where We Were – bleak existential crises of albums bemoaning the cruelty of the world, the meaninglessness of life, and love and the pain of the almost inevitable eventual loss of it. To borrow from a review on the Wikipedia page which is just perfect:

"It is a traumatic realisation of the hopelessness of human existence, a document of fractured mentalities…. Songs in the key of pain…. On a hillside somewhere in the distance a man screams his desolation at the sky and curses his birth, overcome with fear that this emptiness may be all he can ever know. This record is his scream."

Richard Ashcroft molded these songs with the band in the aftermath of a breakup, which he reacted to in an intoxicated, energetic haze. The first few tracks are shorter and more focused, before the album plunges into seething depths, though it retains at times a crucial subtext of defiance. So It Goes is six minutes of dark meditation: “So it goes / You come in on your own in this life / You know you leave on your own / Life / This is my life”. On the title track, over crashing guitars that will make your head swim: “I’m alive with something inside of me / and I can’t seem to get it out”. And later in the album, Life’s An Ocean: “Say that I will see / Something more than I have / There’s something inside of me / Crying out for something else”. And the album also offers up a few aching psychedelic soundscapes of instrumentals, like the closer.

[Fluffy Lothario]

Oh, I forgot to mention: there are still one or two albums coming with similar themes to A Northern Soul, I Forget Where We Were, and Time Out Of Mind. Albums of their sort just seem to be my kind of thing.

If anyone wants to try and guess what they might be (and gets one right), you will be richly rewarded.

[sneakyblueberry]

Superunknown?  Grace?

[Fluffy Lothario]

Is Grace one of those kind of albums?  I never really thought about it that way.

[Sacul]

Can't believe I haven't listened to the 9th Symphony in its entirety considering I love most of his stuff. Will fix that now.

[Fluffy Lothario]

And now two debuts, both from 1994, released a month apart (one of which, sneaky, you picked from a mile away).

#20

Jeff Buckley – Grace (1994)



The entire first paragraph here is kind of one giant bold claim.

To repeat what I said in the ‘90s thread a wee while back: of the music which never got the chance to be made because of the artist’s death, that of Jeff Buckley was arguably the greatest loss. A statement like “Jeff would have been the next *insert monumental singer-songwriter here*” is worthless to describe what he might have achieved, as this is really only stated when the artist sounds like logical successors to another artist, and the greats are successors to no-one. Whatever their beginnings, they only become legends when they take off in their own direction and do things with music that are revolutionary. There is little doubt in my mind though that Jeff would have been the next singer-songwriter to possess an uncanny power to shape music so as to channel himself into it, and in doing so reshape music as we know it.

Some would say this is overblown, that the praise for Jeff Buckley and Grace are largely due to his early death, and it is true that while it had its devotees right from the start, it had really gone up a knotch by Grace’s 10th anniversary. To them, two simple facts. 1) Even when he was still touring this, his debut, Jeff had figures like Bono and Robert Plant showing up backstage to meet him, and 2) Matt Bellamy and Chris Martin, the frontmen of possibly the two biggest rock bands in the world formed in the last twenty years, both bands having roots in the nineties, have claimed Jeff Buckley was a huge influence on their aspirations.

The bottom line is, debut or not, regardless of whether he might have achieved even greater had he lived, Grace is still an awesome album, and one with the shadow of death and tragedy hanging long over it. His singing abilities are beyond any criticism, and the breadth of Buckley’s vision on his first album was already greater than some bands ever achieve. Songs like Hallelujah and Corpus Christi Carol are folk at heights of beauty it will rarely see again, while Eternal Life hits with a hard rock crunch. The album offers a weird, mystical, at times almost psychedelic take on ‘90s alt rock in dream-world songs like Mojo Pin and Dream Brother.



#19

Machine Head - Burn my Eyes (1994)



There is only one more metal album on the list now, which I guess means this is my second favourite metal album of all time, which I will now proceed to try and justify.

For someone who swore by metal as a teenager, I’m pretty fussy about it as a genre. I can do without most early metal, i.e. the likes of Judas Priest, Motorhead, and Iron Maiden. As well as that, the major subgenres that the genre splintered into – glam metal, death metal, power metal, black metal - also don’t interest me at all. Extreme metal vocals ain’t my thing, and I also can’t deal with even moderate cheese. And then metal and I went in different directions after the early 2000s. Which leaves what? Thrash, groove, alt-, prog-, and a touch of nu-metal. Although it never seemed so at the time, I was always navigating a fairly narrow path through the genre.

So, by my strange standards, Burn My Eyes is more or less the perfect metal album. Machine Head took attitude-heavy groove metal, made it heavier again, and reinfused it with the energy of speed thrash. Under some bizarre rush of inspiration, they delivered a masterpiece on their first go - in fact, they spent another decade after this wondering what the fuck to do next. This is about as ferocious and impassioned as the genre ever got, and it does it without having to succumb to extreme metal stylings.

Machine Head used Burn My Eyes to reflect on the ugly underbelly of society - domestic abuse, substance abuse, civil unrest, corruption by greater powers. A lot of the songs on here are topical, as is often the case with Rob Flynn’s lyrics, delivered in his emotive snarl. Davidian tells you everything you need to know about this album immediately, a huge song that utilises speed without going full thrash, and has one of the most memorable lines I can think of in a metal song: “LET FREEDOM RING WITH A SHOTGUN BLAST”. None But My Own, one of Machine Head’s many self-determination anthems, moves between quiet verses and crunching choruses; A Nation on Fire similarly starts quietly, and progresses to a thrash ending. And the band harness their slower groove metal side on A Thousand Lies and Death Church. One of the most all-encompassing brilliant albums in the genre.

[sneakyblueberry]

Is Grace one of those kind of albums?  I never really thought about it that way.

lol, nah not really, just had a feeling it would pop up

Its probably more on the other side of those themes, 'being okay with your own mortality when you have true love' to quote jeff.