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naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
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Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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123 Gentle Giant – Octopus (1972)
Gentle Giant started out as a fairly conventional prog band, but with this album they came into their own. Rather than write the sprawling epics of their contemporaries, they were able to compress everything down into conventional song length without losing any of the ambition. Actually, the songs are not compressed so much as they are folded in on each other and tied up. The band had long abandoned any semblance of conventional song structure, or instrumentation, and the songs feature oblique jazz elements, oblique classical elements, nonstandard instrumentation, (multiple) nonstandard time signatures, and enough jamming to allow for individual expression but not enough to overwhelm any of the other elements. And it still manages to rock in places, even if the kind of rocking it does eludes conventional understanding.
122 Pink Floyd – Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967)
In an earlier review, I described the underlying ethos of British psychedelia as “kaleidoscope bicycle lollipop cloudy cloud man”. The cover of this album has a kaleidoscopic image of the band, and there is a song about bikes, but, overall, the vibe of Piper is much, much darker than that description would suggest. This may be a fairytale world, but it’s one of crooked men and mad gardeners. This is largely due to a heaviness that just isn’t present on, say, Sgt. Pepper, but the sound is still nimble enough to avoid the heavy psych sludge of proto-metal groups like Blue Cheer or Iron Butterfly. As an aside, I refuse to go to laser Floyd until they stop taking votes on what show to run. A general audience is always going to pick Dark Side or The Wall, but it’s clear from the options that a Piper exists, too, but will never be played unless a dedicated group can brigade the show.
121 The Doors – Strange Days (1967)
I grew up in the ‘90s, part of a sizeable minority of Millennials who eschewed the homogenized crap that pop radio was pushing at the time in favor of the music of our Boomer parents; it was this phenomenon that led to the ubiquity of Pink Floyd and Bob Marely posters on dorm room walls. The Doors certainly fit into this paradigm as well, but unlike those other artists, most of us stopped listening to the Doors sometime shortly after college. Jim Morrison’s mystique—a combination of rebelliousness, a turbulent personal life, and poetic aspiration—certainly fueled a lot of this adoration (kids who were really into the Doors seemed more into Morrison than the music itself), but once you hit a certain age, something was lost. Morrison was a good lyricist but a bad poet, his antics seem juvenile in retrospect, and his problems with drugs and alcohol are just sad. At a certain point, nihilism stops being cool. And then, preferably once you’re past thirty, you go back and put the albums on and just listen to the music, and realize that there’s more to the Doors legacy than Morrison’s larger than life persona. He’s a bad poet but a good lyricist, and his crooner ambitions were in such opposition to the material that it perversely works. Ray Manzarek’s Vox Continental and Robby Krieger’s flamenco-inspired guitar give the band a sound that’s unique in the history of rock. And, while the psychedelic feel is certainly there, it’s based in a grim Los Angeles reality of broken dreams, worlds away from the idealism of San Francisco. While later albums would have more of a blues influence and result in higher highs, this record remains the best expression of their original sound.
120 Radiohead – Kid A (2000)
The album that killed rock music; it seems fitting that this came out in 2000 because it signaled a totally new direction for the music to take. But that was the end of it. Radiohead had ventured further out into the abyss than any other mainstream rock band, and found a reasonable amount of success, but that’s where it ended. Few bands were interested in picking up where this album left off (this was the age of Nu-Metal), and those that did had no hope of mass success. Even Radiohead themselves would backtrack. What’s left of the rock mainstream seems more interested in revisiting the blues than in pushing sonic boundaries, and this isn’t a bad thing, but it still feels like something has been lost.
119 Tortoise – TNT (1998)
Post-rock is one of those styles that’s had an outsized influence on the music scene despite being virtually unknown to the general public. And everything about the style is self-contradictory. The primary emphasis is on texture and atmosphere, yet it’s rigidly structured. It’s rigidly structured, with tight tempos and an emphasis on repetition, yet the playing is surprisingly loose and jazzy. It’s loose and jazzy, but there is little soloing or improvisation. Some albums on this list are difficult to describe. This one is easy to describe, but the description doesn’t make sense. And it should go without saying that this is entirely instrumental.
118 Billy Joel – The Stranger (1977)
Around the time in every young millennial rock fan’s life that he realizes that the Doors aren’t as cool as he once thought they were, he starts to realize that Billy Joel is a lot better than he ever gave him credit for. I suspect this is purely a generational thing—Billy Joel released his last new studio album in 1993, and if you aren’t old enough to remember the era when he was a contemporary pop force whose music was all over the radio then it’s hard to understand how uncool he really was. It was music for housewives. But actually listening to his best material without bias reveals an artist who places melody above all else. While he worked in a conventional pop/rock style, his music was never simple; he would always find the perfect chord progression and polish everything until it was perfect.
117 The Velvet Underground – The Velvet Underground and Nico (1967)
Alternative rock begins here. Half garage band, half avant-garde experiment, with Andy Warhol as benefactor and a German chanteuse for good measure, the Velvet’s debut is the heavyweight champion for influence as a ratio of units sold. If the Doors added a hefty dose of oblique Los Angeles realism to their psychedelia, The VU stripped psychedelia of all its normal trappings save its experimental tendencies, and added a heftier dose of explicit New York realism. They sang about topic like domestic violence, S&M, and, especially, heroin addiction, and were conventional enough that one song can fit in easily on a playlist without notice but experimental enough that the entire album at once is a trip.
116 Brian Eno – Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks (1983)
Brian Eno’s most notable achievement was the development of ambient music, and while this record draws heavily from that work, its purpose as the soundtrack for a television documentary about the Apollo missions means that the music is tied to director cues and a narrative structure in a way that most of his prior work hadn’t been, giving the music a focus and structure that serves it well. But its greatest achievement is, as the title suggests, delivering the perfect atmosphere, as the cold, empty, loneliness of space is balanced with the sense of wonder that comes with man’s greatest achievements.
115 Gordon Lightfoot – The Way I Feel (1967)
Leonard Cohen may be most people’s pick for best Canadian singer-songwriter, but my money is on Lightfoot. While Cohen was developing a whiny John Updike/Phillip Roth ethos where the dominant theme is about being sex-obsessed yet unsatisfied, Lightfoot was developing actual songwriting skills. And what skills! This album is a master class on where contemporary folk music was at the end of the 1960s, and Lightfoot would later help define what it was in the 1970s.
114 Beck – Morning Phase (2014)
When this won the Grammy for Album of the Year there was grumbling from the usual circles about how the RIAA was just a bunch of old white guys who where out of touch with contemporary music and wanted to give a lifetime achievement award to a guy who should by all rights be playing the hits on the oldies circuit. What these critics ignored, is that this is Beck’s best album. It is largely evocative of 2002’s Sea Change, but that album suffers slightly from being the product of real emotional turmoil. Coming at Morning Phase fresh, though, allows Beck to return to the same low-key vibe while focusing on craftsmanship and exploring themes other than despair. As such, he is able to navigate similar territory as before but without the album dragging.
113 Joan Armatrading – Joan Armatrading (1976)
Don’t trust your biases. The idea of a black, female singer-songwriter with a huge natural afro probably brings up visions of Carly Simon or Carole King-style soft rock with more of an R&B influence. But don’t be fooled, this is a rock record, with Glyn Johns producing and Armatrading providing acoustic guitar work that stands up with the best of them. Her guitar playing and vocal style actually presages Dave Matthews (and he isn’t shy about admitting it), though her music dispenses with the “eclectic” mix vibe and ersatz jam-band style that can make Dave grating at times. If you only listen to one album you’ve never heard of from this list, this should be it.
112 The Rolling Stones – Between the Buttons (1967)
Mick Jagger hates this record, but it doesn’t mean you should. It’s a head first dive in the art pop scene that started to develop in 1966, and it’s understandable that the frontman of the quintessential rock and roll band would want to pretend that this never happened. But there’s nothing on here to be embarrassed about. While there’s little of the blues based music that they would soon come to perfect, this album proves that the Stones were among the rock world’s best songwriters, and this is a key element that shouldn’t be dismissed when discussing their later work.
You're a bit rough on Cohen (his debut album stands with most anyone's) but I'd take Lightfoot as well. His masterpiece is 'Sundown' (1974) -- odd how the invasive production frills help him where they hurt Cohen (e.g. his adventures w/ Spector).
I'm enjoying this series you've got going. A few years back, I took on a similarly ambitious task. To it I added the strict arbitrary limitations of no more than 2 albums per artist and no more than 2 per year. The omissions kept me up at night. Did you impose any such criteria on your list?
Nope, no limitations. I said in the addendum to another comment that this list omits jazz, country, bluegrass, and anything else that's outside the rock/R&B paradigm, and it's obviously limited to albums I've actually heard (which means it's less comprehensive than lists compiled by professional publications), but other than that, no restrictions. If the 5 best albums of all time were all from the same band I'm not going to pretend that they aren't.
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I think Cohen is great, and I'm much more familiar with his work than Lightfoot's, but Lightfoot has a voice you could just sink into. I love that kind of quality.
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I’m also a big fan of Stan Rogers as one of Canadas greatest singer-songwriters. The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald is a solid karaoke song, though.
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