Time for an update before I go to bed! Somehow, these write-ups get lengthier and lengthier as we progress, I hope you don't mind. Tell me if no-one bother to read them anymore, then I'll reign myself in.
36. Pink Floyd – Animals (1977)
Animals – what can I say about this album that hasn’t been said already? Next to Wish You Were Here, Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall, this album is often cited as Pink Floyd’s greatest achievement, and it is easy to see why. This album contains three longtracks, bookended by a short acoustic piece split into two parts. The songs themselves deal with humanity and its structural concept as presented by George Orwell in Animal Farm – Pigs, Dogs and Sheep, representing the greedy and gluttonous leaders of society, the hardworking and goal-oriented people that seek to maximise their own gain at whatever cost, and the mindless followers that do as they are told.
This seems like an ambitious concept at first glance, and while it really is nothing but simple, Pink Floyd (mainly in form of Roger Waters as the main songwriter, who, despite of how much of a dick he was as a person during the later years, was a musical genius in his own right) somehow manage to make it work, creating a dark and gloomy album about the faults of humanity, yet somehow still interjected with a little hopefulness, found primarily in Pigs on the Wing (both parts), which offer the only reprieve from the gloomy mood of the album.
Animals is, of the Pink Floyd albums that I know (which are all from Atom Heart Mother to The Division Bell, excluding The Final Cut), the album that took the longest to click for me, but when it did, I was rewarded with a listening experience that really is second to none.
A word to the performance: as usual, the members of Pink Floyd show that they are undoubtedly a very talented bunch, even if they don’t fly up and down their instruments at blistering speeds, but the real star of the album, even though it is, when boiled down, ultimately a creation of Roger Waters, is David Gilmour, who delivers some of his most memorable playing of his whole career on this album. The main example for this is Dogs, which features plenty of perfectly crafted leads and a very innovative use of the voice box, which Gilmour manages to use in a way that actually enhances the song, without sounding gimmicky or stupid.
All in all, this album is truly fantastic, though it is also a lot to digest. If it doesn’t click immediately for you, don’t give up, because when it does, the end result is well worth it.
Recommended tracks: Dogs, Pigs (Three Different Ones), Sheep
35. die ärzte – Geräusch (2003)
And here we have arrived at the first album of die ärzte on this list, one of my all-time favourite bands and also one of the first bands that I listened to at all. They are also the band that I have seen most often live, that I have the most albums and that I have, if last.fm is to be believed, most often.
die ärzte play a very distinguished version of rock, though you would be hard-pressed in trying to actually shoehorn them into one genre alone, because from their debut album on, they have always loved to experiment and to enrich the songs with elements utterly alien to the genre of rock in normal cases, such as rap, metal, country, ska and many more.
Geräusch, released in 2003, is a rather special album, even in the extensive discography of the band, mainly because it is a double album, featuring twenty-six tracks (twenty-seven if you count the hidden track on CD 1), which, once again while rooted in rock somewhat, span a variety of genres and themes.
I have not mentioned it before, but one of the things that makes the music that die ärzte do work and not simply seem over the place or pretentious is the fact that the band take themselves about as unserious as I could imagine for a band that still manages to live on their income, and they have a rather unique sense of humour that is, in one way or another, imbued into nearly every song that they have recorded. This sense of humour is even more prevalent live, where the lyrics of songs are often spontaneously altered, the result making no sense whatsoever (indeed, one of their songs, Rock Rendezvous has never been performed with its original text).
On this album, die ärzte have managed to balance this humour with a little more seriousness, which allows them to also tackle political and social issues without coming across as people that have no idea what the hell they are actually talking about – and this is exactly what makes Geräusch such a great album. Simply every aspect of the music of die ärzte is present, be it the wildly humorous and at times even nonsensical (Als ich den Punk erfand, Jag Älskjar Sverige!, Pro-Zombie), simple rock songs about day-to-day occurrences (Anders als beim letzten Mal, T-Error, Nichts in der Welt) or songs that deal with more serious issues (Geisterhaus, Nicht allein, Der Grund, Nichtwissen).
This diversity is not only present in the lyrical themes, but also in the music, with everything from straight-out rockers skidding on the edge to metal (Geisterhaus, Der Grund, Die Nacht) over the anthemic and grandiose Nicht allein to songs with ska and jazz influences (Jag Älskjar Sverige!, Als ich den Punk erfand) and even piano ballads (WAMMW), everything is present on the CD. Every member has also penned several of the twenty-seven songs that can be found here, which further heightens the diversity.
Yet, despite all the diversity of this album, die ärzte manage to somehow still make this record feel cohesive instead of a random assembly of tracks, and that is maybe the greatest achievement of this album. No, the end result is not greater than the sum of the tracks, but it is also nothing less, and that is something that is a thing to behold in itself when talking about an album with twenty-seven tracks.
Recommended tracks: Nicht allein, Geisterhaus, Jag Älskjar Sverige!, Schneller leben, Unrockbar, Deine Schuld, Nichts in der Welt, Pro-Zombie, Nichtwissen
Topic: Scorpion's Top 50 Albums v. Honourable Mentions, I AM THE LAAAAAAAAAAST! (Read 45570 times)