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

[Fluffy Lothario]

Hi, these are a bunch of albums I likes a lot.

I'll rattle off 20 that didn't make the cut at five a day, then 50-11 at two or three a day, then 10-1 at one a day. Or something like that.

I'll give links to one or two songs from each album, youtube permitting (there is one artist on here I'm aware of who polices their music appearing on youtube vigilantly), to make it easier for folks to sample the music I'm spewing guff about.

When it comes to what's on here, anything goes. Multiple albums per artist, if they have more than one I like that much. I'll include my favourite classical pieces, and live albums I like as much as studio albums. In case I need to justify that, not all live releases are just a non-studio best of/career retrospective, some hold as significant a place in an artists' output as their best studio stuff. An example of what I mean: MC5's debut Kick Out the Jams was a live album, the material on it was never re-recorded in studio, it was at the time one of the loudest, hardest albums ever released, and it's an early rock classic.

For those not familiar with my taste, while it features prog and metal, they're only parts of the whole package. Of the 70 albums I'll list, I count 11 metal albums, 8 prog albums, and 4 prog metal albums (those four being included in that 11 and 8).

Every time I've looked at this list as long as I've been compiling it, I've shuffled albums around based on my mood at that time, so don't be mortified that #38 ain't five places higher. Those in about the top 20 don't seem to move much though, and there is a fairly clear divide between those above and below 50 (which is mighty convenient in both cases). Of course, I won't touch the list from here on out.

That's all I have to say about that.

[sneakyblueberry]

following sans pants

[Sacul]

Following

[Fluffy Lothario]

Hmmm, okay, I have nineteen albums that didn’t quite make the Top 50, not twenty. So I’ll do three sets of five albums and then one set of four albums.

Oh, and I should mention, my list comes complete with occasional bold claims.

[Scorpion]

Will they always be bolded for easy referance?

[Fluffy Lothario]

And all things going my way, we're off.

#69

John Petrucci and Jordan Rudess - An Evening with (2000)



Definitely the most undervalued DT-related album out there. I’ll use the same fact I’ve always used to describe this album’s appeal. In my last few years of high school, my friends and I went on a number of road trips around the North Island of New Zealand, and generally spent a shit-ton of time in a car. Much music was listened to, of course. Dream Theater was never appreciated by anyone else on said escapades, and was always switched for something else after one or two songs. This album was not only liked, it was requested, frequently.

So what’s different about it? Your two biggest clues are that it’s only Petrucci and Rudess, and the only track you’re likely to be familiar with if you haven’t heard it is State of Grace from the first LTE album. That gives you an idea of what to expect, though only a bit. I’m not sure why this only ever happened (as far as I’m aware) once, but for this evening, Petrucci and Rudess try their hand at instrumental jazz-rock. Other than on one track, Rudess sticks to piano, and Petrucci plays about 1/3 acoustic (for some of which he tries out flamenco-style guitar), 2/3 electric. The vibe here is one you will pretty much never hear them channel again. In fact, other than the imported State of Grace, nothing from this show has ever been repeated (again, as far as I’m aware).

The album is very chill, relaxed and playful, it’s obvious they’re just experimenting and having a bit of fun. For most songs here, as in jazz, they’ve sketched out the basic structure of the composition in advance, but otherwise, they’re just seeing what happens. The highlights are Truth, an impeccable track which (time for a bold claim) I’d argue is the single most beautiful song anyone from DT has their name on, and Black Ice, a slightly more rocking track by this album’s standards to close up. The album’s only real irk is that the electric-acoustic guitar Petrucci is using doesn’t sound as good as it could at some acoustic moments.

Oh, and skip the added studio track at the end, it’s just two minutes of pointless wank.



#68

Rage Against the Machine - Battle of Los Angeles (1999)



Although the alpha and omega of rap metal are still performing, it doesn’t look like we’re ever gonna get another album from them now, and even if we did, I don’t think they’d produce something that sits with me as well as this does. For a long time, their undeniably brilliant debut was my go-to Rage album, but over time, I’ve found myself gravitating towards The Battle of LA more, and ultimately preferring it.

Their debut’s greatest strength was the songwriting, their second album’s was its punk energy and noise, and Battle of LA makes a perfect concoction of the two. Not every track is perfect, a claim you could possibly make for their debut, but it’s still consistent enough with its share of stunners to hold its own. And whether or not this is their angriest album, this is the one where they sound the angriest and heaviest - the two biggest singles from the album, Guerilla Radio and Sleep Now In The Fire, are both great examples. My two favourites are Calm Like a Bomb, with a crushingly heavy chorus, and Born Of A Broken Man, a creepy track – and a rare one that isn’t full of political or social commentary - about the demise of Zack de la Rocha’s father:

Like autumn leaves, his sense fell from him
An empty glass of himself shattered somewhere within
His thoughts like a hundred moths
Trapped in a lampshade, somewhere within
Their wings banging and burning
On through endless nights
Forever awake, he lies shaking and starving
Praying for someone to turn off the light



#67

Bedřich Smetana - Má vlast (1875-1880)


(I have no idea what the album cover is for my version of this, and I'm not enough of a classical aficionado to be picky about these things, so here's a picture of Prague).

The first classical on the list, and something fairly massive to start with. Most of my favourite classical comes from the Romantic period, a major feature of which was its very strong nationalist themes. Smetana is an icon of Czech culture, a composer who prominently wrote about his homeland and infused his work with the style of traditional Czech music.

Má vlast, which literally means “My Homeland” was his crowning achievement written late in his life. Like Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, this suite is made even more unbelievable by the fact that he composed the entire thing after having gone deaf. There are six symphonic poems here about Czech landscape, history, and figures of legend, that last (in my version) 77 minutes altogether, a pretty mighty chunk of classical goodness with lots of recurring themes and ideas across the pieces.

The most famous one by far, for good reason, is Vltava, or The Moldau, about the river that runs through Prague and the Czech Republic. The themes in this and the fourth movement have a very scenic, pastoral feel to them, and Smetana’s utter adoration of these places really shines through. My favourite piece is the first, Vyšehrad, depicting an age-old castle in Prague. The piece is just packed with huge, grand, stirring themes, very typical of late Romantic music.



#66

Shakti - A Handful of Beauty (1976)


(As an aside, am I the only one who finds this album cover kind of creepy?)

 In Shakti’s three albums from between 1975 and 1977 is an incredibly concentrated amount of awesomeness. Shakti was the project of John McLaughlin, who, if you aren’t familiar with his name, you should do something about it very quickly. McLaughlin is a jazz guitarist who played a huge part in the transition from jazz to jazz fusion in the early seventies through his work with Miles Davis and the band he created after that, the Mahavishnu Orchestra.

After years of rock-leaning fusion in Mahavishnu Orchestra, McLaughlin wanted to explore a largely untapped passion of his: Indian music (which you’ll be seeing a bit of in this list too). Not doing things by halves, he formed a group entirely with experienced Indian musicians, creating from scratch a unique Indian-inspired brand of joyous jazz that centered around the interplay between himself and violinist Lakshminarayana Shankar.

This is Shakti’s second album, and they are now completely comfortable in the niche they are carving out. Between these six songs, you have the lightning speed Danse du Bonheur and Kriti, explorative epics India and Isis, and the achingly beautiful Lady L and Two Sisters. L. Shankar does things with a violin throughout that will just make your jaw drop, as does McLaughlin with a guitar, and it’s all acoustic. On Lady L, a really sweet theme by Shankar frames a catapulting guitar solo, and India is the better of the epics, building from an intensely tranquil guitar intro to a blistering finish by Shankar.



#65

System of a Down – Toxicity (2001)



I feel a bit bad having Toxicity even this low on the list, and yet admittedly, this is the first of a few albums on here that place as well as they do based largely on past fondness. System of a Down have vanished from my radar recently as my metal listening dwindles, but this album was just such a big one for me in my teens, I can’t let it go unmentioned.

Other than Spiders being great, I wasn’t entirely convinced by the tracks I heard from their debut, yet as soon as Toxicity hit and I caught Needles and Chop Suey! on the radio, I remember thinking “okay, now this band is incredible, no two ways about it”. On Toxicity, SOAD perfected the metal song turned pop song, crafting a heap of catchy, fun, very singable blasts of four minutes or less at no expense of heaviness.  The vocal duo of Serj Tankian and Daron Malakian pull off inimitable performances, both cartoonish goofball moments on Bounce and Prison Song as well as breathtaking vocal harmonies on Aerials and Chop Suey! SOAD are one of a few metal bands from around 2000 that I’ve seen frequently labelled nu-metal, while most people who listen to them consider them anything but. Are they nu-metal? Who really cares, at this point? If they are, they’re about as good as it ever got.

[Fluffy Lothario]

Will they always be bolded for easy referance?

I think so, yes.

[sneakyblueberry]

Good start... good start.  Havent heard the two oddball choices, but the others are fantastic.

[lonestar]

*waits for a bunch of Dick's Picks*

[jakepriest]

Since I'm Czech, I love the inclusion of Smetana on any list. 

[Fluffy Lothario]

Wow, out of curiosity, how well-known is Má vlast with your average Czech on the street then? I get the impression almost anyone would recognise at least Vltava, if not other pieces as well.

[Outcrier]

While SOAD is a band i rarely listen to nowadays, i still think they have a pretty good discography, Toxicity being the best of the bunch.

SOAD are one of a few metal bands from around 2000 that I’ve seen frequently labelled nu-metal, while most people who listen to them consider them anything but. Are they nu-metal? Who really cares, at this point? If they are, they’re about as good as it ever got.

I think of them as Alternative Metal.

[Fluffy Lothario]

They really don't fit into nu-metal very well. No rappy singing, no real personal angst themes, very different guitar tone. But when new metal bands came out during that period that didn't fit into old subgenres, people just lumped them all into nu-metal. But whatever.

[Fluffy Lothario]

#64

Sepultura - Beneath the Remains (1989)



After a brief flirt in that direction, I decided I wasn’t really up to extreme metal in the early ‘00s. But then strangely, of the metal I do like, many of my favourites tend to border on that territory to some degree. For example, if I wanted to listen to thrash, this is one of the first albums I’d turn to these days.

Sepultura still weren’t the complete package at this point. Max Cavalera’s vocals are quite unexceptional, and the lyrics only really stand out in a few places, Inner Self notably. But musically, this is not only Sepultura’s fastest and most powerful album, this is pretty much the endpoint of speed thrash. Even Reign in Blood doesn’t hit as hard as Beneath the Remains when it aims for speed. The whole nine songs are just one dense tapestry of riffs and relentless drumming to quench your thrash thirst like chugging Gatorade until your head swims. The most memorable solo of the album is that in Mass Hypnosis, but the two best tracks are the self-assured strut of Inner Self and the furious tempo-switching Stronger Than Hate.



#63

Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (1998)



a.k.a. one of the most divisive love-it-or-hate-it albums in rock history. People use that term, love it or hate it, about a lot of things, but this one really does seem to have little middle ground. Chances are, you find this album god-awful, or a queer musical revelation.

NMH were still largely unnoticed at the time this was released, and they broke up not long after, but it has slowly, cumulatively gained attention to the point that In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is now regarded by many as the indie rock Bible.

And it is a pretty great album. Bandleader Jeff Magnum clearly wrote it for an audience of one, which gives it a charm you can find on very few albums. Instrumentally, you have a folk rock band, and occasionally on top of that, it seems, absolutely anything that it was felt could add to the song, but not in a way that overloads the album or any one song – indeed, many feature little but voice and acoustic guitar. Magnum’s singing, a hard sell for some, is an everyman warble, strained when he pushes himself, yet honest, emotional and riveting.

And then there are the lyrics. Magnum writes, if not from the perspective of a child, with a persisting child-like mentality of innocence, looking out at the adult world in which, on a smaller scale, adults bicker and fight and fuck each other and then other people – love is sweet, but sex carries a grotesque glean on this album (your father made foetuses with flesh-licking ladies while you and you mother were asleep in the trailer park) - and on a larger scale, wars rage and young lives are caught in the crossfire (and it’s sad to see that the world agreed that they’d rather see their faces filled with flies), and the whole sordid mess just royally baffles him. Oh, and a whole lot of stuff about Anne Frank and wanting to save her in a time machine.



#62

Coldplay - A Rush of Blood to the Head (2002)



I probably just committed blasphemy in the eyes of many by putting Coldplay above NMH, and a unit of skinny-jeans-wearing terrorists might be on their way to my house right now to unleash a wave of rabid skunks, but fuck it.

Coldplay are the uber-popular band of the last ten years or so that everyone rips into that really ain’t that bad. Viva La Vida is the one album of theirs it’s generally more acceptable to like, but my favourite of theirs, and it seems that of many older fans, is Rush of Blood. Chris Martin and co. just have a real knack for writing a great soft rock song, particularly those of a more melancholy nature like Amsterdam and The Scientist. But as everyone has certainly heard in Fix You from X&Y, they’re quite capable of creating an almost post-rock-esque layered din when they like, as you can find here on the amazing Politik and the title track.

This album is actually quite dear to me simply as a symbol. After years of listening exclusively to metal, I realised I’d been backing myself into a musical corner, and eased back out of it. That I would hear In My Place on the radio and a friend would give me this album the week after it came out and I would fucking love it was something completely unimaginable, say, six months before. Rush of Blood was a major signpost in the sea change of my taste in music that led the way to me starting to check out all kinds of shit in the next few years.

 

#61

Tim Buckley - Happy Sad (1969)



Yes, this is Jeff Buckley’s absent daddy, a bizarre pixie of the sixties folk rock underground. And he’s a fantastic musician with a rich, gorgeous voice.

This guy was a risk-taking motherfucker. Seriously, you just have to hear his discography to get a sense of what I mean. His first album is quite safe and bland, then on his next album, Goodbye and Hello, he suddenly went all-out psychedelic folk stoner. On Happy Sad, recorded about a year after that, he’s taking that psychedelic folk and pushing it even further, into jazzy, avant-garde territory.

The songs here are all defined by the striking use of a vibraphone, an instrument similar to a xylophone, and Buckley’s experiments in a “voice-as-instrument” vocal style, but they also take a wide range of different tones. You have the breezy folky Buzzing Fly, and then the jamming 12 minute freak-out of Gypsy Woman. In the middle of the album are two quiet and crushing tracks, the Love from Room 109 at the Islander (On Pacific Coast Highway), about a man in desperate denial about a failing relationship, and Dream Letter, a song directly addressing the infant Jeff Buckley and his mum Mary Guibert and inquiring about the family life he has fled from.

Oh, is he a soldier or is he a dreamer?
Is he mama's little man?
Does he help you when he can?
Or does he ask about me?



#60

Oasis – (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? (1995)



To those who grew up in the nineties, let me now remind you of some of those albums you probably couldn’t have escaped had you wanted to: Tragic Kingdom. Jagged Little Pill. Spice. Backstreet’s Back.

I’m still quite fond of, er, some of those albums. I’m not one for forcing nostalgia. But I’m sure for many, there is probably no more treasured aural conduit to your youth than What’s The Story.

Of the nineties biggies that kids were susceptible to the hype of, this one still holds up brilliantly to this day. There’s not a bad song on it. Other than She’s Electric, there’s not a song on it that isn’t absolutely great. There’s just one Britpop classic after another, and if you don’t immediately recognise a song, don’t worry, it’s still damn good. I surely don’t need to say a word about Wonderwall and Don’t Look Back In Anger. Champagne Supernova, the last track, is a heady beautiful psychedelic epic. Some Might Say in the middle of the album is so upbeat, it almost shimmers.

This album, and Noel and Liam Gallagher’s songwriting in their early career in general, was basically a series of soaring happy anthems coming off of - and I’m sure to some degree written in reaction to - an era where grunge, much as I enjoy that too, had turned rock music into one great dirge. What’s the Story in contrast hits you like fresh air in a dank space.

Damn, I should have put this album higher. Oh well.

[jakepriest]

Wow, out of curiosity, how well-known is Má vlast with your average Czech on the street then? I get the impression almost anyone would recognise at least Vltava, if not other pieces as well.

I don't think many people know the album, but the tracks are very well known and are used in a lot of shows and movies. For example I went to see Daniel Landa (probably the premiere czech rock artist) yesterday and he opened the show with an orchestra playing Vltava. Was pretty cool to see.

[Tomislav95]

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is queer musical revelation Really, it was love on first listen for me even though back then I didn't listen to anything indie or folk. But it initiated my love for genre and broaden my music taste.
Some other cool ones there but also some I'm not familiar with.

[splent]

I feel like 2000s era popular music was very stagnant. There isn't a lot that I like. But Coldplay I do (esp. Rush of Blood and X&Y). I played that album a LOT in college.

[Sacul]

I really like ITAOTS, but don't think it's any revelation  or whatsoever - just a bunch of great songs with a singer that really grow on you. Great write-ups btw 

[Elite]

This list is already more diverse than most of the lists here, and it hasn't even started properly yet

[425]

Absolutely love Coldplay. Rush of Blood is a fantastic album, though it isn't my favorite by them.

[Outcrier]

Some great Coldplay and Oasis albums there 

Parachutes and A Rush of Blood are quite tied for my favorite Coldplay album but the later may win because of the Scientist, probably their finest song.

Morning Glory is an album i started to appreciate lately. Don't Look Back in Anger, Champagne Supernova, Some Might Say, Wonderwall... so many amazing songs.

[sneakyblueberry]

You make that Tim Buckley album sound sweet.  The only one I had was Goodbye and Hello, which I think is the one before Happy Sad.  I remember seeing a live performance of Song to the Siren on a music channel one time and the similarities between Tim and Jeff's voices buzzed me out, as a huge Jeff fan I felt I owed it to myself to check out his dads stuff, but sadly it never really clicked with me. 

[Fluffy Lothario]

Really, it was love on first listen for me

Yeah, me too. On first listen, I was like, "wow, this is so weird, but so damn good".

The only one I had was Goodbye and Hello, which I think is the one before Happy Sad.

Yeah, Goodbye and Hello was the album before Happy Sad. It's also really really good. I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain is probably his best song, such an amazing performance.

[Fluffy Lothario]

#59

Liquid Tension Experiment - Liquid Tension Experiment 2 (1999)



So when it comes to Dream Theater, my preference is for the stretch running roughly from Falling Into Infinity to Six Degrees. The early sound of the band is not so much my thing, and after Six Degrees (and even starting with that album), they head into territory that doesn’t appeal to me. But that middle period of the Portnoy era is just fantastic, of which the middle of that middle, the trio of albums where Rudess first hit the band (LTE>LTE2>SFAM) is the pinnacle.

After taking one week to pull off the first LTE album, this time, they stretch out and take all of two weeks. Biaxident is probably the best LTE track in terms of having more careful and intricate development and interplay to the composition, and Liquid Dreams and Hourglass together kind of point forward to the JP & JR album that started the list. But the highlight of the album and (bold claim) that of all of DT’s career is the horribly titled When the Water Breaks. The track has the cut-and-paste medley feel of a lot of bigger prog epics, though of course this is instrumental, but whereas that is a drawback to most prog epics for me, here, it gives the song a very frenetic, exciting feel. I still remember listening to this song for the first time on headphones lying in bed in total awe. Where will they go next? How many twists and turns can there be?



#58 and 57
Ravi Shankar - Live: Ravi Shankar at the Monterey International Pop Festival (1967)
and
Hariprasad Chaurasia, Brijbushan Kabra, Shivkumar Sharma - Call of the Valley (1967)

A general introduction
These two albums are Hindustani classical, essentially high-brow Indian music, with centuries-old traditions, where the musicians train under a master in their instrument for years before being unleashed on the world. Shakti, (#66 on the list) was a group that took the sound of this form and toyed with it in a jazz format, but here you have “the real thing”. I realise this shit is pretty out there to most people, but if it helps, these are two of the foundational albums that introduced it to Western audiences, and great starters to the genre.

The essentials (though I’ll stress that I’m a complete layman with this stuff) are that each song is a recital of a raga (pronounced raag), a pre-established “riff” or melody. The musicians take that raga and interpret it and improvise their way through it and around it. Depending on the will of the musicians, they may spend five minutes ruminating on that melody, they may spend a hundred. There is a general structure that pieces adhere to. They will start quietly and slowly, with the lead musician/s feeling the melody out (a section known as alap) and eventually build to a climax, normally fast and intense, though not always; the important thing is that the expression of the raga has progressed and developed in some way. The lead musician may do this all alone, with just the drone that always backs up this style as accompaniment, but normally, percussion will come in after the alap to help take the piece to new places. Like the raga melody, the percussion is also bound to a specific pre-decided teental, or rhythmic cycle. Here’s Ravi Shankar himself explaining it to you better than I can.

Ravi Shankar - Live: Ravi Shankar at the Monterey International Pop Festival (1967)


Ravi Shankar was a sitar player (and a little-known fact, the father of Norah Jones) who was friends with George Harrison, and helped him bring experiments in this sound to the Beatles’ music, before trying to bring the unaltered product to the West. The Monterey International Pop Festival isn’t so well-known these days, I don’t think, so for context, this festival was Woodstock the year before Woodstock, which Woodstock built on and dwarfed in the long run. Ravi played both Monterey Pop and Woodstock; these are selections from his Monterey Pop performance.

The first track is a 27-minute solo rendition of Bhimpalasi, my favourite raga. Shankar has a slightly more ragged, aggressive style than most sitar players, a trace of which even comes through in the tranquil moments, like the first half of this track. The second track lets tabla player Ustad Alla Rakha have a bit of fun on his own, before the final track, a massive Dadra. They skip the alap here; from the start, you have intense sitar/tabla interplay, humming along gaining momentum. This was the end of a three hour concert, so the entire last ten minutes of the track are just an explosion, which features a lot of playful “call and response” playing, as I call it (as I don’t even know the name for it, though I’m sure it has one) where the lead player plays a stretch of notes, and the tabla player then has to mimic and interpret it on the drums. You can listen to, and watch, the whole thing here (the first seven or so minutes are just shots of crowd response, so a lot of bewildered faces).

Hariprasad Chaurasia, Brijbushan Kabra, Shivkumar Sharma - Call of the Valley (1967)


This would have been a big mover in the genre even if it hadn’t been a culture crossover album. It features three instruments rarely, if ever heard in Indian music, yet still a bona fide classical album. You have an early appearance by Hariprasad Chaurasia, now an extremely prolific flutist. Brijbushan Kabra plays the Western guitar (i.e. the one we’re all familiar with), perhaps never used in Indian classical before this, and the same applies to Shivkumar Sharma and the santoor, like a harp which you lay down and pluck the strings of with two small sticks, an instrument which before him had been associated only with lowly folk music.

So you have three lead soloists on three very different instruments all trading off and weaving through each other on each track. The five songs on the original album (there are now three bonus tracks attached) are an instrumental concept album on a day in the life of a Kashmiri shepherd. The album is great the whole way, but the highlights are the first track, a long Bhairav which most clearly displays the expansive way a raga can be explored, (no standalone youtube clip, but it's the first 12.5 minutes here) and the gorgeous last track Pahadi.



#56

Metallica - Ride the Lightning (1984)



After the initial phases of just listening to whatever popular songs were peddled to me as a young kid in the mid ‘90s, then collecting various hard rock tracks off the radio that particularly appealed without ever getting attached to a single band in the late ‘90s, I finally sunk in and started properly checking out bands’ entire bodies of work in about 1999. Metallica was the first band I did this with.

Strangely then, these days, although many individual tracks still resonate, very few of their albums in their entirety have left a lasting impression on me. I’m one of the few who really likes St Anger, but not everything on it by any means. Load has some great stuff, but is too long, and they still left off some great tracks for Reload anyway. From the thrash era, I don’t care very much for Kill ‘Em All, or even Master of Puppets, really (I know, weird, huh?) For a long time, my default favourite Metallica album was Justice, but Ride the Lightning has lately pipped it.

On Puppets and Justice, Metallica get settled into a style all of their own. They produced some incredible songs, but could also be too clinical and calculated at times. There are tracks that are overly long and/or don’t really have a lot of energy. That is never the case on Ride the Lightning. Compared to those other two, Ride seems very impassioned, the songwriting has a lot more kick, and the songs are only stretched beyond five minutes where it’s really justified. It has some real great tracks which are relative underdogs in the greater scope of Metallica’s career like the title track and Escape. But it also has well-known stunners like Fade to Black, one of the only thrash songs that feels really personal and emotionally hard-hitting, and Creeping Death, which does an exceptional job at side-stepping any cheesiness despite the subject matter.



#55

Bob Dylan - Time Out of Mind (1997)



Bob Dylan is one of my very favourite artists, and will probably appear on this list the most times. Allmusic’s biography sums him up greatly in its first line: Bob Dylan’s influence on popular music is incalculable. He was perhaps the first singer-songwriter as a force in his own right (though you could make a case for Elvis, I think). He really pushed onto popular music the idea that you didn’t have to have a beautiful pristine voice to sing your songs, and that sounding rugged and rough could have its own aesthetic effect. Songs written under his charge are unfettered in length; they go for as long as he damn well pleases. That there is popular music with lyrics of any great intelligence or profundity is a fact largely indebted to him; he is such a respected poet at this point, his name is thrown around as being worthy of the Nobel Prize in Literature. I could go on, but you can also ignore all these chest-beating legacy statements and you’re still left with literally hundreds of great songs.

 Dylan’s career has passed through many distinct periods. The mid-80s through the mid-90s is one of the least remarkable of them; in the eyes of most of his fans, for whatever reason, he could barely write a good song to save himself for a long time. And then something set him off again. He’s essentially been on a roll again for the last twenty years, writing in a weird murky post-blues style from which he pillages a variety of old genres at will. Time Out of Mind was the comeback album that revealed this new Dylan.

There’s a misunderstanding about this album that nonetheless helps describe it nicely. Just after he finished recording it, and prior to its release, Dylan got really sick. So when the album came out, and it was the darkest, gloomiest release of his career, everyone falsely assumed he had written it while sick; after all, it was the perfect explanation for the eerie atmosphere (which owes itself to Daniel Lanois’ very interesting production), Dylan’s voice transforming into a weathered growl that sounds a thousand years old, and why he spends much of the album ruminating about death.

The overarching theme of the album is spending your whole life wandering about the earth trying to find purpose, in which you will eventually fail, and then you’ll die. We rely on love for some direction, but we’re all probably helpless idiots for it, because you’re likely to come out burdened with even more pain, and it’s ultimately just a temporary distraction from your inescapable mortality. Yeah, it’s a pretty heavy album. Dylan is the artist I referenced who it’s hard to find youtube clips for, but check out this neat live version of the opener Love Sick from the Grammys, or Not Dark Yet, the song deservingly acknowledged as the masterpiece of the album, and one of my very favourite songs.

I was born here and I’ll die here against my will
I know it looks like I’m moving, but I’m standing still
Every nerve in my body is so vacant and numb
I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from
Don’t even hear a murmur of a prayer
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.

[sneakyblueberry]

Ride is excellent.

Time out of Mind is great, probably the only album I enjoy after Oh Mercy, in that part of his discog.  Love Sick and Not Dark Yet are definite standouts, I quite like Cold Irons Bound as well.  That grammy video is pretty cool, I had a bootleg of the White Stripes covering that which was my first introduction to the song, its awesome.  Great song. 

Its looks like there are a bunch of albums on your list that I will have to check out at some point, the real oddball stuff!

[Fluffy Lothario]

Sneaky, maybe I'm one ignorant bastard, but I don't think I was aware you were a Dylan fan, let alone one who obviously knows even Dylan's late career.

Cold Irons Bound is also really great, and Trying To Get to Heaven, and Standing In the Doorway, which has one of my favourite lyrics in all of music.

"Last night, I danced with a stranger
But she just reminded me you were the one".

Oh, and of course, the endless depressing mundane absurdity of Highlands. That song really drives home the message of the album. By the end of it, you don't know whether to laugh or cry.

I had actually never heard this live version of Love Sick until just now, but it is awesome, makes up for not having the studio one.

Also, Love Sick often reminds me of this, which is hilarious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBq7SyGtG8Y

Its looks like there are a bunch of albums on your list that I will have to check out at some point, the real oddball stuff!

This was my logic behind digging up links, there will likely be a number of albums on here few people have heard.

[sneakyblueberry]

No its just I don't think I've ever had the opportunity to talk Dylan with anyone here

I was big into Dylan in high school, mainly due to that thing where you look into your favourite artists influences; for me it was a combination of Buckley, Hendrix and the White Stripes that lead me to get into Dylan a bit. 

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. 

[Scorpion]

Late for this, but there have been some amazing entries already! An Evening With JP and JR is amazing, Toxicity is one of my all-time favourites and Beneath the Remains might be my favourite Sepultura album - I really should give it a spin again.

Also very happy to see some classical. Smetana is always a worthy addition to any list.

[Fluffy Lothario]

#54

Tim Buckley – Lorca (1970)



Tim Buckley again, with an album released less than a year after Happy Sad. That album was the beginning of his turn from being a musician who was experimental yet still potentially marketable to the public, to one unapologetically eccentric. Lorca is the nail in the coffin. In Buckley’s own proud words (presumably some years later), “To this day, you can't put [Lorca] on at a party without stopping things; it doesn't fit in.”

On Happy Sad, Buckley had begun toying with an idea he called “voice-as-instrument”, pushing the expressive capabilities of his singing and centring the songs around his voice. On the first half of Lorca, he takes this to its extreme, crafting two tracks with no rhythm section and largely bereft of cohesive melody, other than that provided by his vocals. The music reminds me almost of Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music with singing over the top of it. Title track Lorca is quite shocking, a funereal jazz love song that could have been written by a vampire. On Anonymous Proposition, there is almost nothing to cling to at all but Buckley’s voice.

The second half allows the listener the slightest return to normalcy, and we get experimental folk rock again, still largely driven by the singing, but with clear, regular melody and conga drumming this time. I Had A Talk With My Woman is the most immediately palatable song on the album, but the better song on this half is Driftin’, again quite a spooky, unsettling song, but the singing here is just unreal.



#53

Nikhil Banerjee - Afternoon Ragas (1970)



And now another Indian classical album, this one by my favourite musician in this style, Nikhil Banerjee, another sitarist who studied under the same master as Ravi Shankar, Ustad Allaudin Khan. Though Shankar is brilliant in his own right, and of course much more famous, Banerjee is the superior musician in every respect. I described Ravi Shankar as having “a slightly more ragged, aggressive style than most sitar players”. Banerjee’s playing, in contrast, is incredibly precise and smooth, and carries much more resonance and depth. Listening to him, you get the sense of an immense spirituality and serenity to the dude, that a master orator is unravelling a narrative before you via his instrument.

On Afternoon Ragas, you get two extended ragas. (Something I didn’t mention in the last write-up: each raga is attributed to a certain time of the day, when it should be played. These are obviously ragas meant for the afternoon). The first is an impeccable Bhimpalasi (clip is only the beginning, the whole thing isn't up, but here's the ending as well). This one, at 36 minutes, is a good bit longer than the one on the Ravi Shankar album, and, unlike that one, features tabla. Banerjee’s range of expression is also far greater, and he creates a wonderfully sublime mood. In its early stages, Banerjee’s note bending will send shivers through you, and it ends in great style. The second piece, Multani, is 42 minutes in all, more subtle and slower to unfold than the Bhimpalasi, Once it gets going, though, Banerjee’s soloing is almost endlessly inventive, and tabla player Kanai Dutta is very involved in the “storytelling” taking place, driving the piece forward for much of its length almost with the prominence of a second soloist.



#52

Counting Crows - August and Everything After (1993)



Counting Crows are one of those bands haunted for having a debut album that eclipses their later efforts. They have a ton of great songs outside of this album – A Long December, Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby, Goodnight Elisabeth, Colorblind, Washington Square, Miami, Einstein on the Beach… – but they’ve never really even looked like putting together a complete album like this again.

Adam Duritz’ songwriting seems to spring out of nowhere fully formed on August and Everything After, a raw emotional style that echoes artists like R.E.M., Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Van Morrison, yet is unmistakably his own. Everyone of course knows Mr. Jones, and probably also Round Here, an awesome track about leaving people behind and leaving behind a bit of ourselves as we do. The album is a bit stronger in its first half, but the late album still has the likes of Sullivan Street, Ghost Train and A Murder of One.

My favourite song on this album though is the one on the cover. Huh, what? Yes, look at the album cover. Behind the band name and the title are hand-written lyrics to a song called August and Everything After, which the band didn’t include on the album itself, and of which no studio version exists that I've heard of. In December 2003, more than ten years after the album came out, Duritz finally caved and performed the song live, a glorious eight minute piano ballad. Bold claim: this song is one of the highlights of Counting Crows’ career, and it’s an absolute travesty it was left off the album.

Well I already got my disease
So take your fuckin filthy hands off of me
I hope you don’t expect me to be crucified
The best that they can do
is just to hang me from the nearest tree
Cause it’s midnight in San Francisco
and I’m waiting here for Jesus on my knees
In August and everything after
I want somebody else to bleed for me
 


#51

Radiohead - Kid A (2000)



Not only did I place Coldplay above Neutral Milk Hotel, to add insult to injury, the only Radiohead album on my list sits one slot outside the Top 50.

I do really like Radiohead. They have a ton of incredible songs, numerous on pretty much every album. But while almost every album of theirs other than Pablo Honey is praised as utter perfection by their fans, the only ones that really scream out at me are OK Computer, and Kid A, of which I definitely prefer the latter.

This album was a weird anomaly in my taste for a long time. When it came out, I was in the deepest depths of my metal phase. Nothing, and I mean nothing, remotely “non-metallic” got through for years, except for the inexplicable Kid A. I look back on it, and it makes no sense. The only song on the radio was Optimistic, and they barely played even that. Why did this album appeal to me when nothing else of its kind did?

Well, okay, what other albums of its kind had I heard? I guess that was the trick Radiohead pulled with this album. They already played icy, sad, but excellent rock, so when they changed over to icy, sad, but excellent electronic rock, it both was and wasn’t a big jump; it was totally different, music the likes of which someone like me had never heard before, and wouldn’t normally try to approach, but being already familiar with the band as a big name in rock, when I got my hands on it – and I can’t remember how I did anymore – I gave this weird artefact a chance.

Everything In Its Right Place throws down the gauntlet immediately; distorted keyboards and layered vocals are nearly all there is. (As an aside, a piece of art I made in my last few years of high school had a far-off sunset over an ocean, with the white rays of the sun big long ribbons covered in text that rippled and curved in all directions, some of them right into the foreground. Running vertically through the middle of the picture was a ribbon with the words: YESTERDAY I WOKE UP SUCKING A LEMON.) Idioteque is basically drum and bass; The National Anthem starts as a crisp drum and bass track with jazz echoes, and ends in a unrestrained free jazz mess. And I’ve never been less than blown away by How To Disappear Completely, almost certainly my favourite Radiohead song, a sedate soft rock song over which a great classical din eventually comes crashing like waves.

[Fluffy Lothario]

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.

[Crow]

Kid A is a pretty solid album but it's never been anything that's blown me away, still a good pick though. Love Everything, Disappear, and Idioteque a lot, Treefingers is a great ambient track too.

[Dr. DTVT]

A lot of stuff I grew up with.

The other important thing we got from Counting Crows was the band name Between the Buried and Me.

[Sacul]

LTE 2 is glorious

Can I say I really do enjoy your writeups? Damn, you quite know your music.

[Fluffy Lothario]

The other important thing we got from Counting Crows was the band name Between the Buried and Me.

Yeah, I always found that quite odd. Regardless of BTBAM's range, you'd think the influence behind their name would be something a bit closer to home.

Can I say I really do enjoy your writeups? Damn, you quite know your music.

Cheers, bruvva, I'll do my best.

[Outcrier]

Kid A is my favorite after In Rainbows but, like you, i'm more a fan of their songs than their entire albums (these two being the exception).