My Favorite "50" Albums:
The top 50 albums concept has a long tradition here, and since I've technically been browsing older incarnations of this forum for almost half that number of years, I'm long overdue my own list. These are always a snapshot in time. I wish I could have done a proper one a decade ago to compare (or even a decade before that too), but alas. Margins between favorites are so tight that on a different day or a few weeks after the list is published I might feel like including slightly different entries or have them be in a somewhat different order. I'm sure the very process of listening to, writing about, and discussing these is going to alter my feelings about them a bit. But I'm not going to fret about that too much, the general trajectory is what's more important.
I believe my format will be somewhat unique among other personal top 50s we've done before. I knew I didn't want to just do a straight top 50, but have run through countless different ideas and permutations in my head and have settled on a "have my cake and eat it too" kitchen sink version. In particular, I pondered doing a chronological list, but ran into far too many issues with deciding where and when each musical niche properly began and shoehorning each album into them. Nevertheless, I've still incorporated a looser version of that, plus the main list, as well as a few other twists.
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So this will be structured in four sections.
I: Roots/influences
II: Pre-list honorable mentions
III: The primary list
IV: Post-list honorable mentions
I - roots/influences will be to set up various styles and artists that shaped my tastes into what they are today. Some aren't really a primary listening interest for me anymore, but I can trace the effects of them throughout other music I listen to. There should be 18 of these vignettes. I think of these as icebergs, in that I'll pick a few different example songs to illustrate each one, but they generally represent many more artists I dabbled with at the time or later on. Some of them are just individual songs, some represent additional albums.
In a few of them I'll be revealing a surprise album from the main list itself. In a few others, I'll be revealing a surprise stealth honorable mention album(s). I won't directly add them to the honorable mention list itself to keep it from appearing even more overstuffed than it already will be, but they're important and foundational enough to highlight. For the most part this section takes me to around the middle of high school, which is the point at which I started lurking here and when I was building the primary framework of my taste. The fun thing is that I can look at almost all of the albums on my list and honorable mentions and connect them to at least one or more categories here, some in more obvious ways than others, and some of which I didn't quite realize until going through this process.
II - honorable mentions will be for a few dozen albums that didn't quite make the cut, but I don't want to neglect entirely. I'll have an "honorable" honorable mentions list, and then highlight the dozen that almost but didn't quite make the cut. There's dozens, hundreds really of other albums I'd have loved to have included, but I don't think everyone has the patience for my "top 500". I love many of them as artists, or for specific individual songs, but no single album had quite enough of them to merit inclusion. Still, in pouring through my collection I found that the margin between #50 and #150 is quite thin and subjective.
III - the primary list is the main course here. Conventionally this is a top 50, but I'm more of a "go big or go home" type as some of you have figured out, so let's make this a top
60.
IV - post-list honorable mentions are for all the albums that I notice that I managed to overlook in the process of working my way through the list, or that were on the periphery of the honorable mentions and receive a boost sometime during it, but too late to be on the initial honorable mentions or on the list itself. I may actually do these as a short break before I reveal the final five of the main list.
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For the main list, I'm going to be giving more of survey-level comments about the albums, generally assuming as if you haven't listened to them before. At the moment I don't think it's likely I'll frequently get into the granular level of detail I often did in my roulette or in the Katatonia discography discussion thread, but if that happens organically on occasion, so be it.
My "true" top list is probably just my favorite albums from my top dozen bands or so and a handful of strong albums from other artists. But I'll be doing just one release per artist for the sake of variety and inclusion. The focus will be on an overview of each album, my feelings about and history with each of them, and often a brief comparison with the rest of their discography - whether it was a tossup as to whether to include another album(s) instead, or whether it was a clear-cut decision. I will occasionally mention major side or solo projects if they are of a similar level of quality. In this way, even though it's "only" 60 albums, we'll wind up touching on a few hundred in some form or another by the end. Maybe it will be a "top 500" after all, we'll see. : )
There's certainly a bias towards time-tested albums, but here and there I'll throw in something a bit more recent for variety, particularly when it's an artist I'm waffling between several different albums from them anyway.
I'll be keeping a running Spotify playlist to gradually add to as we go along. I'll generally add a song per album to the list, with more added to a secondary list for honorable mentions, roots and influences. I'll provide Spotify links to the albums discussed when available, and to cover more bases, likely Youtube links to an extra song or more, and perhaps a music video or live performance if relevant.
There's no listening requirement, but of course the more that do the merrier. You might be surprised what connects with you. Some of these are time-honored DTF favorites, some are probably quite idiosyncratic to me. Not every section or album is going to appeal to everyone of course (the metalheads in particular are going to struggle with many parts of the roots/influences sections - those not into metal as much might find those the most interesting parts). So read along if you want, skim as you desire, drop in and out as your interest is piqued. The plan is to move slightly faster through the roots/influences and honorable mentions, and then linger a bit more once we get to the meat of the list, but it'll depend upon the flow of any discussions that arise and finishing up short write-ups on each.
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Like my roulette, this will be super-sized (being either epic or less so depending on our compatibility in tastes, but you can always just lurk or skim/skip through the sections that interest you the least), but I'm partially trying to make up for not being around when everyone was doing their V1s, so it's kind of a V1 and V2 (maybe even V3) wrapped up together.
This thread could also be useful for future reference whenever I run another roulette. Maybe you'll wish I'd done this before running my first. Perhaps it'll just make my tastes even more confusing.
But ultimately, post-pandemic, through running my own roulette and participating in others I feel I have a better grasp on my own tastes than I ever have. I'd had a number of epiphanies in the last year that have fundamentally altered portions of it over what they would have been had I done this even a year ago. I can't wait to talk about some of this music, a good chunk of which never seems to fit organically into other conversations here, and/or I would never think to send in roulettes, but is all a part of my musical journey anyway.
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tl;dr version: We're gonna listen to and talk about a whole bunch of cool music. Some of you will like some of it. Others will not like some of it. And vice versa.
Topic: LithoJazzoSphere Top "50" Albums - surprise #22 - way before lonestar... (Read 6888 times)