Fluffy's Favourite Albums

[Fluffy Lothario]

Oh look, another list thread. This is actually my first one though, so bite me.

I've been meaning to make this list for ages, but have spent forever tweaking it and not posting it. So, to make things easier for myself, rather than nailing the albums in place, I'm just going to post them in brackets, along with the disclaimer that this list is far from definitive. I could come along to this list next week and completely mess it up. It will be completely different in a year. It’s really just a sketch of my taste right now. I look forward to tearing it to pieces and rebuilding it in the years to come.

I'm also not going to post big descriptions on the albums (well, maybe some later), as I can imagine if a namedrop and a short description doesn't make your ears prick up, there's not much point in me rambling.


Okay, 60 through 56:

Metallica - …And Justice for All
My favourite Metallica album, and one of the best from the classic thrash period.

Santana – Supernatural
This is still my favourite Santana album, though I have a few of the classics still to hear (Abraxas and Lotus, to be specific). Santana's guitar playing on this album stands out more than on most of his albums, and there's tons of great songs, regardless of genre. The collaborations with Dave Matthews/Carter Beauford, Lauryn Hill/Cee-Lo Green, and Eric Clapton are my favourites.

Bob Marley and the Wailers – Exodus
This album is basically a mullet. Business at the front, party at the back. The first half is political, preaching reggae, the second half is your love songs and chillout material. The second half is a bit better than the first, but the album's great as a whole as well.

Tori Amos - Boys for Pele
A really nice balance between weirdo Amos and brilliant songwriting Amos, between modern pop Amos and solo piano Amos. One of those albums I rarely listen to all the way through because of the length, but when I do actually bother, it's good all the way.

Seeed – New Dubby Conquerors
English German electronic rap reggae. Whereas this band has dropped most of the reggae and the German over time and just sounds like any old shit on the radio nowadays, their first album has a good mix of everything.

[Seventh Son]

I actually find it more interesting when people go into detail about their writeups, but hey its your list.

[King Postwhore]

Fluffy out of your first 5 I like Tori Amos.  Such a unique songwriter and her music is dense. A lot to soak in, which I love.

[Marvellous G]

YES, I've been waiting for you to do one of these for ages. Will most definitely follow, and I'll try and check out everything you mention.

[jsem]

The title track to Exodus is pretty epic.

[Fluffy Lothario]

I'm gonna be away a few days, so here's the next five now.

55 through 51:

Bic Runga – Beautiful Collision
Bic Runga, a fairly poppy but sublime singer-songwriter from New Zealand, still doesn't have a perfect album, but this one is extremely good. After her debut, which had a very gritty production to it and often leaned in the direction of rock, she dabbles much more in folk and sweeping classical here, and gives us a much stronger set of songs.

Silverchair – Diorama
Daniel Johns stops taking anti-depressants, decides to face up to the ebb and flow of human emotion, and delivers an extremely affecting, uplifting album. You'll possibly never hear so much orchestra on a mainstream rock album again.

Lauryn Hill - Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
The fact that I got this album for one euro just made it feel like even more of a triumph. Lauryn Hill abandons the more aggressive rap of the Fugees and makes a massive Christian soul/hip-hop statement. My favourite track is Nothing Really Matters.

Michael Jackson – Thriller
For a while, I thought I preferred Dangerous to this album, but Thriller won out in the end. I'm not fond of either of the last two tracks here, but every other is perfect. There's a reason this album's sold a gazillion copies - it's pretty damn good.

Bob Dylan – Time Out of Mind
Bob's 1997 comeback is an unbelievably morbid blues sermon. In a voice that sounds a thousand years old, he tell us that life is a pointless and mundane journey which you take against your will, the destination cloaked in unnerving uncertainty. In fact, the only certainty is that you'll foolishly fall in love and painfully lose it, again and again... Okay, so that sounds a bit like most blues, but this album really drives the message home.

[King Postwhore]

Silverchair – Diorama
A freaking home run.  What a great CD.  This cd showed such great growth for the band.

[Marvellous G]

Just listened to all of Diorama. I loved some tracks, but some of the 'angrier', for lack of a better word, songs, didn't really click with me. The happy bunnies ones did though, and the orchestral stuff throughout was great. I'll try and give the rest of those ones a listen.

[73109]

I am a Metallica junkie, so seeing what I feel to be one of the best metal albums of all time at number 60 makes me

BUT! I do look forward to seeing what is to come.

[Mladen]

What a diverse list so far. I've heard only a couple of these, one of them being ...And justice for all. I must say it's way lower than I would place it - I'm pretty sure it would be in my top 5.

Also, I'm glad to see Diorama in the list, and even more glad to see some Silverchair fans at DTF. Diorama is a really cool album with some amazing tracks, but I like Neon ballroom and Young modern much better. Especially Young modern, it's genius from start to finish.

[skydivingninja]

My next door neighbor for the past two years fucking LOVED Silverchair.  I'm not a fan of their heavier stuff, but their orchestral stuff on that album is pretty cool.  Nothing to make me want to keep listening though.  Still a pretty diverse list.

[sneakyblueberry]

What a diverse list so far. I've heard only a couple of these, one of them being ...And justice for all. I must say it's way lower than I would place it - I'm pretty sure it would be in my top 5.

Also, I'm glad to see Diorama in the list, and even more glad to see some Silverchair fans at DTF. Diorama is a really cool album with some amazing tracks, but I like Neon ballroom and Young modern much better. Especially Young modern, it's genius from start to finish.

Frogstomp is the best them.  That album is so 90's.

[Fluffy Lothario]

Just to reiterate, this list is extremely loose, the lower 25 or so in particular. ...AJFA was a bit higher several weeks ago, but got shunted down in recent changes I made to the list. There's already an album or two in the lower reaches that I now feel could have been in that bottom ten, meaning some in the bottom ten could have been higher, but I'm not going to touch the order while I'm posting the list.

Also, I like all of Silverchair's albums that I've heard (still haven't heard Freak), but the only one I'd call amazing is Diorama.

50 to 46:

Liquid Tension Experiment – 2
One of my favourite DT/DT-related releases. The energy and creativity present on the LTE albums is really quite extraordinary, and this time around, the band churned out a finer overall album. For me, the album's weakest point is the song title When the Water Breaks (seriously, what were they thinking?). After that though, the latter sections of Chewbacca and/or Liquid Dreams, although I actually don't enjoy them only occasionally, depending on my mood. The duo of Another Dimension and When the Water Breaks are my favourites.

Miles Davis – Kind of Blue
This was my first jazz album (after a few Keith Jarrett solo piano ones), and as anyone who listens to jazz would tell you, it's a pretty good place to start. Though it is a fairly 'sleepy' or quiet jazz album, it's about as good as you'll get in that department, that relaxing tone is really nailed here. Almost every solo on every track is very memorable too.

Nikhil Banerjee – Afternoon Ragas
Indian classical has been one of my favourite areas of music in recent years, and this album is one of the best I've heard. Banerjee was an extremely devout sitar player, who saw music as a spiritual endeavour, and judging by this performance in the Netherlands in 1970, he was certainly onto something. The Bhimpalasi is transcendent, the Multani as beautiful as it is brooding.

Allman Brothers Band – At Fillmore East
Another blazing live album, this one from 1971, from the band who, in my opinion, play Southern rock exactly how it should be played. This album is very good the whole way, and in its finest moments, most of which admittedly take place in the longer jam tracks - and many of which are admittedly Duane Allman's guitar wielding - it's jaw-dropping. I still can't tell you if I prefer You Don't Love Me or Whipping Post, but both have to be heard anyway.

Keith Jarrett - The Survivors’ Suite
This is one of those albums that has that Tribute feel to it. As in, the group were sitting around in the studio, and the devil showed up and demanded they play the best music they've ever played to keep their souls... and they made at least a decent effort at doing so. The music often sounds wild and ritualistic, often celebratory and life-affirming, as Jarrett and Co shift seamlessly through multiple shades and sub-genres of jazz across fifty minutes.

[sneakyblueberry]

Very diverse list so far.  Glad to see the Bic love, as per usual.  I haven't heard anything from the last batch though

[LudwigVan]

Allman Brothers Band – At Fillmore East
Another blazing live album, this one from 1971, from the band who, in my opinion, play Southern rock exactly how it should be played. This album is very good the whole way, and in its finest moments, most of which admittedly take place in the longer jam tracks - and many of which are admittedly Duane Allman's guitar wielding - it's jaw-dropping. I still can't tell you if I prefer You Don't Love Me or Whipping Post, but both have to be heard anyway.

One of the best live albums ever.  I think the Allmans live were better than their studio stuff.

[Marvellous G]

Surprised at how low Kind Of Blue is, but as you literally said right above it the rankings aren't definite, so far enough.

[Fluffy Lothario]

45 through 41:

Madonna – Ray of Light
In the lead-up to this album, Madonna had a daughter, starred in the musical Evita, and dabbled in Eastern religion. As a result, on Ray of Light, she shed much of her blatantly sexual public image, and the album reflected her soul-searching. Ray of Light is often lyrically closer to Tracy Chapman at her most optimistic and mature than Madonna, and musically closer to Massive Attack.

Audioslave – s/t
This album will probably be largely forgotten in another ten years, due to the downward spiral that Audioslave unfortunately suffered, but a downward spiral starts at a high point. Sure, this album isn’t as good as Rage + Soundgarden, but it’s still a fun, heavy, groovy rock album with a ton of excellent songs.

Opeth – Deliverance
Delieverance is excellent right up to the last track, which is still very good, but a part of me wonders what might have been if the whole album lived up to the promise of the first two tracks, both of which I taped off the radio months before I bought the album. Wreath’s hypnotic slog through fire and Deliverance’s demonic “Down by the River” are as good as Opeth ever got.

Rage Against the Machine – s/t
Rage’s debut is one of those albums that made almost everything that came before it and after it redundant. There is probably no better mixture of rap and rock or metal than this, and there are few bands of any kind with half the conviction and zeal Rage present here.

Salmonella Dub – Inside the Dub Plates
Expanding on what they had started with Killervision, Salmonella Dub create another lush mixture of drum and bass and reggae. The formula is even better realized here, the songwriting more focused and accessible. There are tons of highlights, but Push On Thru has always been my favourite.

[sneakyblueberry]

The first Audioslave album is absolute gold.  The Last Remaining Light has some amazingly haunting lyrics, then there's Like A Stone, I Am The Highway, Show Me How to Live, Shadow on the Sun; Chris was on form for that first album both lyrivcally and vocally.  Out of Exile had some pretty decent tracks, but never quite lived up to the self titled.  Revelations was just plain bad bad (besides the title track).

[MetalManiac666]

Definitely an interesting list.  A lot of very unusual picks here.  I'm liking it.

[SPNKr]

45 through 41:

Madonna – Ray of Light
In the lead-up to this album, Madonna had a daughter, starred in the musical Evita, and dabbled in Eastern religion. As a result, on Ray of Light, she shed much of her blatantly sexual public image, and the album reflected her soul-searching. Ray of Light is often lyrically closer to Tracy Chapman at her most optimistic and mature than Madonna, and musically closer to Massive Attack.

Hell yes.

[Fluffy Lothario]

40 through 36:

Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble - Texas Flood
My favourite guitarist on his debut romp, and there’s hardly a weak moment, from the gloom of Texas Flood, to the upbeat Love Struck Baby and Mary Had a Little Lamb, to the paint-stripping mid-album instrumental duo of Testify and Rude Mood, to the almost eerily beautiful closer Lenny. I often hear people talk about a guitarist playing with “the perfect mix of technicality and emotion”; for me, that would be Stevie Ray, and this is still the best album of his I’ve heard.

Anthrax – Among the Living
Anthrax were the last of the Big 4 that I checked out, and remain my favourite thrash band behind Metallica. Among the Living is more vibrant and interesting than much of what you’ll hear in thrash. It’s lively, it’s light-hearted, it’s simply a lot of fun, despite lyrics thick with dark themes and social criticism. The clever balancing of these two qualities makes Among the Living one of the strongest metal albums of the ‘80s.     

Sepultura – Roots
Roots is both an expansion on and a complete departure from Sepultura’s previous work. The groove metal of Chaos AD is half-buried in nu-metal, at that time a fledgling sub-genre, while the tribal influences that had grown with every album now erupted onto almost every track, the band keen to explore the music of their native Brazil. The result is a raw, primal, inspired and, well, somewhat heavy album. I sometimes feel that Metallica might have been aiming for something in this direction when they made St. Anger.

Machine Head – The Blackening
Machine Head obviously enjoyed writing the epic tracks on Through the Ashes of Empires. On The Blackening, they decided to test themselves further in this department, and thrived. The band’s sense for composition is impeccable throughout, and almost every twist and turn benefits the song. A Farewell to Arms would be a serious contender for my favourite metal song written in the last ten years. Many a prog band could learn a thing or two from this album.

Coldplay – A Rush of Blood to the Head
I bought A Rush of Blood… the week it was released, which is odd, considering I was obsessed with prog metal at the time. And I was so impressed by this collection of soft rock songs that Coldplay became the first band that weren’t prog metal to really catch my interest since I’d discovered it. The album has a gorgeous tone throughout, on sweeping and grandiose tracks like Politik and the title track, but also on modest, melancholy pieces like The Scientist and Amsterdam.

[73109]

Back to back to back amazing metal albums.

ROOOOOTS BLOODY ROOOOTS!!!

And The Blackening is one of my favorite metal albums ever.

[Marvellous G]

Hell yes for Texas Flood. I can't wait to see your top 10 based on these, I'll probably end up buying all of them. 

[skydivingninja]

Amsterdam is a fantastic song.

[Fluffy Lothario]

35 through 31:

Shivkumar Sharma and Hariprasad Chaurasia – Rasdhara
I have a very sensitive neck. A bad night’s sleep, an awkward lift of a heavy object, even just sitting in a funny chair can leave my entire neck on fire, and the pain soon spreads into my head. The only way to deal with it is heat and rest. On such occasions, Rasdhara is the perfect album, almost impossibly relaxing and beautiful. It contains two mesmerizing hour-long ragas of fluid interplay between Sharma’s santoor, an instrument that tinkles away like a wind chime, Chaurasia’s soothing flute, and Shafaat Ahmed Khan’s tabla.

John Coltrane – Blue Train
It might have been his first album, but this is still my favourite Coltrane album I’ve come across. Throughout the five pieces on Blue Train, the soloing is always exciting, there’s a great sense of pace, and the finished product is always impressive. A nice touch is the triple horn attack, with Coltrane on saxophone, Lee Morgan on trumpet and Curtis Fuller on trombone.

Beirut – Gulag Orkestar
To sum up the story of this album in a short space: “American teen drops out of school, travels eastern Europe for several years, and falls in love with traditional Balkan folk music. Upon returning home, he single-handedly writes and records his own tribute”. Gulag Orkestar is the soundtrack to a road-trip through a heavily romanticized, almost mystical re-imagining of Europe, riding along on a gypsy caravan.

Pixies – Doolittle   
Music that’s as good as it is outright wacky. Doolittle is a collage of mostly one-and-a-half to three minute alt-rock pieces. The lyrics are bizarrely bleak if you bother to dwell on them, but if not, it’s barely noticeable, as the band are clearly having the time of their lives, whether they’re playing lush surf-rock-esque pop (Here Comes Your Man, La La Love You), or maniacal screaming punk (Tame, Crackity Jones), or anything in between.

Herbie Hancock – Empyrean Isles
A pleasantly playful jazz album, both fun and explorative. At first, Empyrean Isles seemed a bit overly spacious to me, as it's only a basic quartet and the soloists are given a lot of room to breathe, but Williams' drumming and/or Hancock's piano playing are a bit forward during the other solos, adding a touch of spice to the mix, and the solos themselves remain interesting throughout. The middle two tracks also have very nice catchy rhythms.

Halfway mark!

[faemir]

I love diverse lists like this, good job so far

[skydivingninja]

I love Blue Train, but for whatever reason its the only Coltrane I have.  Any recommendations?

[MetalManiac666]

I've heard a lot about Beirut, so this list finally gave me cause to check them out.

[sneakyblueberry]

I love the song Elephant Gun from Beirut.  That's about as far as my experience with them goes.  The singing is kinda crooney-y, which is nice.

[SPNKr]

I love Blue Train, but for whatever reason its the only Coltrane I have.  Any recommendations?

Giant Steps
My Favorite Things
Africa/Brass
Olé Coltrane
A Love Supreme
Ascension

[Fluffy Lothario]

I love Blue Train, but for whatever reason its the only Coltrane I have.  Any recommendations?

The others I have are A Love Supreme, Giant Steps, My Favourite Things and Ascension (though I haven't listened to that), and of those, the next I'd recommend would be ALS, which is also extremely good.

I've heard a lot about Beirut, so this list finally gave me cause to check them out.

Their other album, The Flying Club Cup, is also really good, though it took me a bit longer to get into than the first.

And also,

The first Audioslave album is absolute gold.  The Last Remaining Light has some amazingly haunting lyrics, then there's Like A Stone, I Am The Highway, Show Me How to Live, Shadow on the Sun; Chris was on form for that first album both lyrivcally and vocally.  Out of Exile had some pretty decent tracks, but never quite lived up to the self titled.  Revelations was just plain bad bad (besides the title track).

This is pretty much how I felt about Audioslave. Obviously loved the first. The second has about half excellent songs, quarter pretty good songs, quarter fairly rubbish. The third was the most unbelievably sparkless nosedive of an album I've ever heard.

[Marvellous G]

Excellent picks, at least the ones I've heard are. Rasdhara sounds right up my alley so I'll be checking that out soon.

[Fluffy Lothario]

30 through 26:

Fat Freddy’s Drop - Dr Boondigga and the Big BW
Fat Freddy’s Drop play perhaps the most undeniable chillout music ever conceived, a melting pot of reggae, dub, soul, jazz and Pacific vibes. Their brand flourishes on Dr Boondigga, an album about asserting your place in a world of brewing storms and foreign invaders (The Raft), demonic winds (Wild Wind), antideserts (The Camel), and your own insecurities (Shiverman). Survival in the face of such forces proves a matter of inner peace and solidarity with the people around you.

Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes
In 1808, Beethoven premiered a symphony in which he romanticized the countryside, and country life, now known as the Pastoral Symphony. If Beethoven’s sixth can aptly be summed up in that one word, pastoral, so too can the Fleet Foxes’ debut album, released two hundred years later. The songs spring forth with an almost unfathomable idyllic beauty, the music, the vocals, and the lyrics all evoking a humble peasant lifestyle against a lush backdrop of vast forests, generous fields and crisp mountain ranges.

Meshuggah – Nothing
I’m not a music fan who insists on a sound system that produces nothing short of audio perfection. In fact, I rarely listen to music very loudly. Nothing, which I bought in 2004, was one of the last albums I really felt the need to play extremely loudly. That fact alone really speaks volumes (mind the pun) about this album. There’s plenty of metal out there that’s far more cacophonous and mental than this, but there is perhaps none that flourishes, that is enhanced at high volumes quite like songs like Nebulous or Rational Gaze.

Jeff Buckley – Grace
It’s little wonder Grace, Buckley’s sole studio album, is still revered over fifteen years after its release, despite only moderate initial sales and his early death. Buckley was that rare singer-songwriter – a figure who seemed impossibly learned in the art of songcraft, and was determined to reshape and transform it entirely into a means of channeling himself. Though it was only his debut, Buckley achieved this with flying colours on Grace, as tracks like Mojo Pin, Grace, Lover, You Should’ve Come Over, and Dream Brother display.

Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
I’m not going to pretend I know exactly what’s going on on In the Aeroplane… (fantasies about rescuing Anne Frank in a time machine?) but a major element of the album is the newly adolescent mind’s encountering the outside world and judging it anew, simultaneously fascinated and utterly frightened. An idealistic sense of compassion and sexuality contends with grotesque reality. The entire adult world falls to pieces in a spectacular collage of infidelity, war and death in which all it seems anyone wants to do is hurt each other. The album portrays the collapse of childhood misperceptions, and the narrator’s fight to cope in the fallout.

[sneakyblueberry]

I <3 Grace.  So much.

[skydivingninja]

I do NOT understand the love that NMH gets, especially that album.  Gave it plenty of chances, can't get past the horrid vocals and uninteresting music.  Just not my thing, whatever it is.