Posted on January 24th, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Lists.
Luke asked for "Top five albums, musical genre of your choice, that (a) were completely missed in 'Best of' lists and year end polls in the year of their release and (b) have become more influential to their musical genre than albums that were in 'best of' lists and year end polls."
5. Talk Talk, Spirit of Eden (1988)
Yes, it's the new wave band that did "Talk Talk" and "It's My Life". No, this doesn't sound anything like that. Spirit of Eden is as massive a stylistic break as can be found in any band's catalog. It's not electronic, it's not pop songs -- it's barely songs. It has the quiet and majestic sweep of classical music without the bombast of prog rock; it has astonishing shifts of mood and power. It's delicate, but swells to moments of huge beauty. It's... hard to describe. I don't know if its influence has been nearly as great as the other albums on this list, but I hear the sound of this album in a lot of moody music that's come since: Tindersticks, Doves, Mogwai, Sigur Ros.
4. Wire, Pink Flag (1977)
Probably got more attention in the U.K. than it did here initially; it did not make the 1977 Voice Critics Poll list. The stripped-down, laser-tight, precise yet urgent punk of Pink Flag paved the way for turn-of-the-decade postpunk bands like Gang of Four and Mission of Burma, and is still heard today in the sound of bands like Spoon and Elastica (who famously had to pay for copping a riff from this album, though I think it was no more of a cop than many others that go unpaid). Wire were not content to stay in one place: their next album, Chairs Missing, is weirder, stylistically and structurally more ambitious and varied, moody, subtle, still urgent and tight. Chairs Missing hasn't had nearly the influence of Pink Flag, but it's my favorite rock album ever.
3. Slint, Spiderland (1991)
Love it or hate it, this is where post-rock begins. I love a lot of it, myself, at the same time that I think it's basically prog rock in a new more respectable guise. There's nothing here that you can't find in some of the art-rock of the previous twenty years -- Can, Univers Zero, Faust, etc -- but this is the album that coalesced the angular, pointy-headed sound of a hundred albums in the next decade, half of them seemingly coming from Chicago.
2. Big Star, #1 Record (1972)
Big Star didn't quite sound like nobody else at the time: the best songs of Badfinger and the Raspberries have the same ringing guitars and power-pop hooks and harmonies. But Big Star did it best and most consistently, and unfortunately by far least successfully. The first two Big Star albums were commercial stiffs, but their sound is preserved in a thousand power pop singles since. More than any other band, they focused the sound of the Byrds and the Beatles' pop singles and turned it into a genre. Probably best known to mainstream rock fans via the Bangles' cover of "September Gurls".
1. Killing Joke, Killing Joke (1980)
Bradley Torreano at Allmusic sums it up well: "Since 1980, there have been a hundred bands who sound like this; but before Steve Albini and Al Jourgensen made it hip, the cold metallic throb of Killing Joke was exciting and fresh. The harshly sung vocals riding over the pulsating synth lines of the opener 'Requiem' have a vigor and passion that few imitators have managed to match. The precise riffs and tight rhythms found in songs like 'Wardance' would influence a generation of hardcore musicians; yet 'The Wait,' with its thrashing guitars and angry vocals, would find itself covered on a Metallica album only six years later. That such a bleak and furious album could have such a widespread influence is a testament to its importance. . . . [T]his is an underground classic and deserves better than its relative unknown status." In a year in which a few influential cult albums made it onto the Voice Critics Poll list (Gang of Four's Entertainment! at #10, X's Los Angeles at #16, the Feelies' Crazy Rhythms at #17, Joy Division's Closer at #22, even Young Marble Giants' barely-disqualified-for-this-list classic Colossal Youth at #25), Killing Joke's debut didn't make the list. I don't remember anyone particularly talking about it at the time. I never heard it on the radio, even the briefly surviving new wave stations; I was turned on to it by my friend Jim Maier, who I think shopped randomly for odd music things and also turned me on to the two Tubeway Army albums pre-"Cars". (British readers may not know that "Are Friends Electric?", a smash over there, was nothing over here.) That first Killing Joke album was like a blast of the industrial dancefloor future. It was like being blasted in a wind tunnel. It was awe-inspiring and cathartic and disturbing. It inoculated me to the sound of Nine Inch Nails, which consequently seemed like attitudinal silliness pasted over music I'd already heard; later, Marilyn Manson would allow me to appreciate Trent Reznor's relative maturity and subtlety. Today the first Killing Joke album sounds a little tinny, a little thin; it needs a good remaster sprucing-up. But in the meantime I can still turn it up loud.
Posted on January 11th, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Lists.
I'm listening, for the first time in a few years, to Teenage Fanclub's Bandwagonesque. It's pleasant in a pop-buzzy way: low on grabby hooks, but consistently melodically interesting. Never great, never bad.
But, hey, Spin Magazine? I have not forgotten that you guys called this the best album of 1991.
A short list of better pop and rock albums from 1991:
I could make a list of thirty more 1991 albums I think are better without trying hard, but that would be a more personal list. I think that any of the above albums, though, would be objectively better choices, with the benefit of hindsight (though the choice was an eyebrow-raiser at the time) than Bandwagonesque. (Well, okay, The Real Ramona is a personal choice, but it belongs with the albums above, damn it.) Note that with Nevermind, Loveless, and Spiderland you have three of the most influential rock albums of the decade to choose from (though predicting Spiderland at the time would have been a three-cushion shot, and pretty far off Spin's somewhat more mainstream brief).
There've been worse calls -- somehow the Village Voice Critics Poll for 1985 thought Talking Heads' Little Creatures was the album of the year, although at least 1985 was a pretty crappy year.
Posted on March 9th, 2002 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Lists.
Blender has a list of top 100 American albums. Most of the selections are good, obvious, or at least defensible. They do a couple things I don't like in lists of this sort: they mix albums and compilations, but inconsistently -- I'll get back to that -- and they dabble. They make a few nods toward jazz and country -- Kind of Blue, Johnny Cash, you know -- just enough to make a pretense at being not ignorant, but not nearly enough to actually give jazz and country a fair shake. To my mind, you either have to give jazz and country their due, and let the best of them compete on an equal footing with the best of rock, or just ignore them and admit that the list is only really about rock'n'roll.
The most sigh-inducing thing is their number-one choice, though, which is Madonna's Immaculate Collection. It's not that I don't believe there are some people who would claim it's the best American album ever made; I just don't believe Blender thinks so. I think it's a transparent controversy generator. After a whole list of hipster favorites, we top it all off with a big populist anti-hipster choice! Which of course is a play at being really hip. Except it's not a card they've been playing through the list, so it doesn't convince at the end. Sure, sure, Madonna. Whatever.
And they have to stretch the spirit of the exercise to make the choice at all: since apparently no individual Madonna album could be put at the top of the list without inspiring derision, they chose the hits collection (and a fine collection it is). But what of, say, Stevie Wonder? There he is at number four with his great Innervisions. Maybe you could argue that Immaculate Collection is better, somehow, than Innervisions. But what if you chose Stevie Wonder's hits package (Original Musiquarium) instead? Is Immaculate Collection better than that? Seriously? Better than the best of Bob Dylan? than the best of Joni Mitchell? the Supremes? James Brown? Duke for god's sake Ellington?
Don't do all the talking, let love speak up itself.