And finally, since it's the weekend and I have the chance to finish it off now, here's the last lot. The top five doesn't change much at all, so I've built on album descriptions I used in a "Top 5 Albums" thread some time ago.
5 through 1:
Dave Matthews Band - Before These Crowded Streets
The DMB’s early albums are an exercise in throwing rock conventions to the wind and remaining very listenable all the while, and none more so than Before These Crowded Streets. Their cool brand of jazzy alt-rock here receives more treatment from world music than it had yet, and this is the album on which the band’s live jam-band festivities shine through the most strongly in the studio.
This is also the one DMB album where, the majority of the time, the band simply cannot outplay the studio versions of the songs live. They sound far less muted and reserved here than they had in the studio previously. Steve Lillywhite’s production is spot-on, giving many of the songs an intense but intimate quality. But most of all, Boyd Tinsley’s violin has been granted a daring prominence on this album, a move that worked so well, an entire string quartet accompanies him on several songs. Put all this together, and it becomes impossible to recreate these songs live, or to better them. The album’s finest run of tracks is the stretch from Halloween through The Stone and Crush to the Dreaming Tree. But at any rate, this is a rock album with a very unique sound, a fact which almost any song on the album betrays.
Bob Dylan - Bringing It All Back Home
On Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan tears folk in two. Side A is completely different from everything he had put out at this point, a rollicking assault of electric guitars and strangely upbeat rants. On Freewheelin’, Bob vowed to walk on water to fight injustice, and told how he’d rather walk round the block than drive a sports car. Here on Side A of BIABH, Bob is knocked off his feet by a bowling ball, and then kicked in the face through a telephone. Folk’s earthliness, its sense of conviction and principle are gone, swept off their feet by an urban absurdity, and Bob seems to find this more amusing than anything else. Side B is closer to traditional folk (in part simply because it’s actually acoustic), but still in a world of its own, inhabited by mystical figures, princes, angels and presidents, where the light and dark of the world are so great and kaleidoscopic that they’ve become staggering and perhaps beyond our ability to grasp at all.
Dylan’s genre experiments became far more daring in his next few albums, and what here are clearly two distinct halves soon melded into a single new envisioning of folk and rock and roll, but I find this album, with his joyous first steps into one land and his solemn departure of another, his most enjoyable. BIABH would still make this list were it an EP with just Side B’s four tracks on it.
Miles Davis - Bitches Brew
The primal, sublime gloom of this album has accompanied me on so many trains and planes, in so many cars and buses, I can hardly listen to it without seeing fields and forests and cities rushing past. And that’s possibly quite fitting, for this album travels such a great distance within ninety minutes. I’m incapable of describing where it actually goes. It’s as if Davis and his caravan of twenty-something musicians plunged into an abyss in the musical landscape, an abyss created by Davis’ own tearing the map in two. Bitches Brew sonically depicts their descent into the underworld, and the wonders they found there in the dark.
This is one of the longest albums I’ve ever heard with so little to drag it down. Highlights are almost impossible to specify; for every moment I name, you’ll find one similar that rivals it on elsewhere on the album, whether it’s the hypnotic din that builds in the middle of Pharaoh’s Dance, the echoing blare of the trumpet in the title track that threatens to fill every corner of every dark room on this earth, or the campfire calm of Sanctuary.
Tool – Lateralus
This must be one of the most uncharacteristic metal albums ever made, one built not around themes of darkness, fantasy, war, anger or hate, but around meditation, enlightenment, empathy and communication. Of course, metal’s shadow still hangs over the music, and over many of Maynard’s lyrics, as he contemplates the obstacles he will face (Schism, The Grudge) and the personal failures he will suffer (Ticks and Leeches) in pursuing such a path. But though the journey is often haunting and unsettling, the listener also encounters the great serenity that Maynard is seeking in the eye of the storm, (Parabol, Disposition), and at times, that serenity builds to a spiritual peaking of perception and understanding, becoming a rejuvenating storm in itself (Lateralus, Reflection).
Prog-metal remains the genre which, though I never delved particularly deeply into it, I fell for the hardest, for which my enthusiasm and captivation was at one point the greatest I’ve yet felt, and Lateralus for me will always be the peak of that genre.
Keith Jarrett – The Köln Concert
In this performance in 1975, Jarrett single-handedly dismissed fusion and electric jazz, and triumphed. In just over an hour, Jarrett proved that jazz could still be unabashedly acoustic AND contemporary. This album is the stately, shimmering antithesis to the dark, rebel call of Bitches’ Brew. Jarrett’s solo performance is just as determined, dynamic and exciting as the ensemble on BB, and all the more remarkable because the waves of music are being created by him alone. The music is improvised the whole way, not a single note was planned in advance, but Jarrett is teeming with spontaneous ideas. To pick a highlight, of the two ‘parts’ to the performance, Part I has more high points and is slightly more consistent, although perhaps only because Jarrett tends to build to the climaxes more gradually and patiently in Part II.
The first time I visited Köln, I broke off from my group of friends for an hour or so and made a pilgrimage to find the Kölner Oper, where this album was performed. I managed to convince the folks in charge to show me the hall where Jarrett’s performance took place. I wasn’t allowed to take any photos, but I’ll cling to the memory of that room forever.
Topic: Fluffy's Favourite Albums (Read 5737 times)
