In retrospect, Diary was about the same.
The first Crosby, Stills and Nash album is just about perfect. I love their next two albums but nothing touches the first.
Depending how you define enduring career, the first Buffalo Springfield album counts.
Santana made a number of great albums but I could argue that no other group’s sound and personality was as completely defined by a great first album.
Astral Weeks was Van Morrison’s second solo album, BTW. And Moondance is better. So is Saint Dominic’s Preview.
Nonetheless, his career as an album artist continues to this day.
Technically, yes, but Blowin’ Your Mind was a collection of tracks, mostly intended as potential singles, compiled by producer Bert Burns and issued as an album without Morrison’s knowledge. Astral Weeks was the first album Morrison recorded as an album.
I’d argue Sheryl Crow never topped Tuesday Night Music Club her first album.
Partially because that album came about because of some informal jam & writing sessions. The other musicians never got the writing credit that Crow took. Her ex bf Kevin Gilbert cowrote a lot of that album.
I did acknowledge, explicitly, in the post you quoted, that “Yeah, not all of these are ‘enduring’.” He did have four “real” LPs, however (unlike nowadays, when artists commonly have hiatuses between albums that last longer than Jimi’s entire career), so not exactly a flash in the pan, either.
I can’t really see any quality distinction between Moondance and Astral Weeks. Astral Weeks was arranged and styled by Richard Davis and Moondance was arranged and styled by Van Morrison. No other Van Morrison album sounds anything like Astral Weeks including the versions of the songs from Astral Weeks that were recorded before Astral Weeks without Richard Davis.
Richard Davis’s ethos permeates. Astral Weeks is his album - Van Morrison merely wrote and sang it.
Other Van Morrison albums of the time can be compared easily to Moondance - the horns, lots of backing vocals, etc. Moondance is the best of the bunch. St. Dom’s is a close second.
Bruce Springsteen - Born To Run.
Nothing he made after that came close. I know he had some hits, but as far as a complete album goes, this was his best and he hasn’t come close since then.
I think you’ve got a good one there. Although he’s changed his supporting cast very often, and the group that made Santana and Abraxas didn’t last much longer than those albums.
That’s not his first album though, is it? Isn’t his debut Greetings from Asbury Park?
ETA: And, even so, while Born to Run is probably my favorite, too, it’s a difficult choice. He’s certainly come close since then, especially with Nebraska, but arguments can also be made for The River and Born in the USA. Lots of great work from that guy and his band.
You are indeed correct - my mistake there. Thanks for the correction. :smack:
Actually, it looks like Born To Run is his third album, with the second being The Wild, the Innocent, & the E Street Shuffle. Somehow, I’ve never heard that one.
John Prine. More than a dozen albums in 40 years, but the songs that everyone seems to know (and cover) are on his debut.
Jonathan Richman: 20+ albums since the mid-70s, but nothing is quite as good or critically acclaimed as his (patchwork) debut, and even his second (first proper, I guess) career reset album sets the template for and is (in my cafesocietal opinion) more solid than the next 20.
My favourite debut album is *See The Light *by the Jeff Healy Band. He made plenty of music after that, but nothing really touched the excellence or success of that first album.
The Flying Burrito Brothers - 'The Gilded Palace of Sin"
Harvey Mandel - ‘Christo Redentor’
+1 on ‘It’s a Beautiful Day’
Pearl Jam’s Ten was their best and first. Vitalogy came close to matching it, but is considered a bit too uneven.
Yeah, This Desert Life is awesome and overlooked by a lot of people, but August and Everything After is basically the perfect mid-90s record.
I’d argue that Stunt is pretty great from top to bottom and is just as good as Gordon.
The Doors.
L.A.Woman came close, but nothing beats the self-titled debut.
Blood Sweat & Tears: The Child Is Father to the Man. The second album had the hits, but the debut was the great one.
George Harrison: All Things Must Pass
Traffic: Mr. Fantasy
This. I know we had a big set of polls on REM songs by album, but was there a straight-up favorite/best REM album poll? I’m sure Murmur would be in the top handful, but it certainly wouldn’t be a clear winner if it was even the top choice.
Boston put out a self-titled debut album that represented a paradigm shift for popular music. It was completely different from the disco sound that permeated the airwaves at the time, and it was a tight, perfectly conceived Swiss watch of an album. Every single song on it was a hit – how often does a band put out a first album without a single clunker of a song on it?
Future albums had singles that approached the stuff on Boston in quality, but no album of theirs really bettered that first one.