Supernatural, Santana and guest artists. This one won eight Grammy awards, including album of the year and three Latin Grammy awards, including record of the year, and it hit number one in ten countries.
Laura showed up like clockwork at the Bottom Line on West 4th, every Xmas season through the 1980s and '90s. I remember seeing the ads and listings in the Village Voice for over fifteen years. “Laura Nyro…I’ve heard of her…she’s supposed to be really good,” I would say. Did I ever go…?
[sigh]
OK… for a select few of my list…
Pentangle: Cruel Sister — folksie group at their best on this album.
“A Maid That’s Deep in Love” has nice picking and Jacqui McShee’s vocals are a good match. “When I was in my Prime” is an a cappella piece showing off her straightforward and very pleasant voice. My favorite on the album is the title track “Cruel Sister”, a traditional tragic ballad with vivid imagery. Then there’s “Jack Orion” which is a magnum opus of a folksong that just keeps going and going… it changes meter and tempo, containing a part II and a part III and a part IV and so on, all with nice harmonies between the vocalists and instrumentalists; for all its length it’s a relentlessly driving piece with a lot of intensity. That leaves “Lord Franklin” which is similar to “A Maid Deep in Love” but with most of the vocals by John Renbourne – again with great guitar work.
Harry Belafonte’s To Wish You a Merry Christmas has some of the most intimate and least overplayed Christmas music. Christmas just doesn’t feel right until I put this album on. A perennial nomination from me when the annual “what’s your favorite christmas album” threads are up and running. No duds. “A Star in the East”, “Where the Little Jesus Sleeps”, and “Jehova, Hallelujah, the Lord Will Provide” are special to him and to this album, he owns those songs. You’ll perhaps recognize “The Gifts They Gave” as a sunday school sing-a-long from childhood but he makes it tender and sweet the way only Harry Belafonte can. “Mary’s Boy Child” is the Caribbean-calypso piece on the album, catchy and delightful. Of the more traditional fare, “What Child is This?” and “Silent Night” are well-done and benefit from That Voice; I like what he does with the chord structure on “What Child is This?”, he makes is a song distinctly other from its source music “Greensleeves” by putting a major where you expect a minor. “The Joys of Christmas” and “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” are medleys, cutely done. And he ends with “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” the Longfellow poem, and once again he just owns that song.
Alan Parsons Project’s Ammonia Avenue is an underrated masterpiece. The Project was prone to put out one or two densely textured ear-grabbing musical tapestries on any of their albums but on this one you get “Prime Time”, “One Good Reason”, “Don’t Answer Me”, and “You Don’t Believe”, all earwormy-ecstatic listening, AP at their best. “Let Me Go Home”, “Since The Last Goodbye”, and “Dancing on a High Wire” are slower and superficially more simple; sometimes the Project doesn’t handle those moderate tempos well, coming off as second-rate thumping and/or whining things as they did on Eve with “You Lie Down With Dogs” or on Pyramid with “Pyramania”, but these more mellow pieces on Avenue don’t feel like a letdown after the more driving cuts before. “Pipeline” is probably the weakest cut on the album —unusually, it’s the one and only instrumental, and Alan Parsons Project typically does excellent instrumentals and it’s their vocal numbers that don’t always hold up; but be that as it may, it still suffers mostly by comparison, an intermediate to segue from “You Don’t Believe” to the final track, “Ammonia Avenue” which is a surreal ballad with a plaintive thoughtful tone, a sense of more there than the words actually directly convey, something mystical or mythological; musically it builds to a final head that’s surprisingly grandiose for something so balladesque. All good fare.
As someone who went through a Phish phase, I can totally get behind this one. I still give this and Picture of Nectar a spin from time to time. (Assuming you don’t mean the CD version with the three bonus tracks, which I do end up skipping.)
Another one for me is The Beastie Boys Check Your Head, not just the signature raps, but also their instrumentals like “Groove Holmes” (especially) and “Namaste,” and even their jokey interludes like “The Biz vs The Nuge” which seques straight into some old-school style pre-hip-hop Beastie Boys punk “Time for Livin’.” That is just such a great album with a wide range of styles and influences; I never get sick of listening to it.
My media player (Clementine) allows me to assign a rating from 0 to 5 to each track, and I’ve rated most of the 10,000 or so songs in my music collection. From a quick look through my favourite albums, it seems there are only a few where I’ve rated all the tracks 5:
Mike Oldfield - Tubular Bells - Probably somewhat of a cheat, since the album isn’t divided into tracks. There’s just “side one” and “side two”.
The Beatles - Love - Another borderline case, as it’s almost-but-not-quite a “greatest hits” album.
Monster Magnet - 25…………tab - The only bona fide all-fives album. I think every track is a masterpiece.
Honourable mentions:
Captain Beyond - Captain Beyond
The Beatles - Magical Mystery Tour
Tom Petty - Wildflowers
The Who - Who’s Next
I can’t think of a record with more quality and range. They did what they thought was best, prevailing attitudes be damned.
E.g., country influences in “Love Ain’t for Keeping” (and the lead guitar playing in “Bargain”). I remember how much hostility rock critics had for country music (a (friendly) once critic said of the guitar playing of Townsend, who was said to have played banjo early on, “Some say there are touches of banjo playing, but I can’t see it”.)
The vulnerability of “Song Is Over” and “Getting in Tune”, to the humor in “My Wife”, to the certainty of “Won’t Get Fooled Again”.
And it’s held up incredibly well too - I like it as much as I ever did, which isn’t true about a lot of music I liked at the time.
Here’s another spectacular album I’d wager few, if any, people here are familiar with.
A while back, I started this thread, and in the meantime found out that the album this song is from is every bit as good as the song I stumbled onto while noodling on You Tube one evening. The song is “Fountains” by the late 70s prog band Starcastle, from the album “Fountains of Light”, which I had not previously known existed. I knew they had two albums (s/t and “Citadel”) but not that they had a few others.
Here’s the whole album, which kicks off with “Fountains”. One wonders what the graphic arts department told them about the cover; most likely, they said, “The fountains of light cannot come out of her boobs.” 
ETA: Oops, forgot to post a link to that thread.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=18848935&highlight=starcastle#post18848935
I love every song on Greg Kihn’s solo album Mutiny. It’s different that his earlier stuff, more folk-y, with a twang of steel guitars, a hint of Jamaica, and some nice covers. Great album for a day on the open road.
And, of course, every R.E.M. album up to “Monster”, which finally had a song I didn’t like - and one that unfortunately became a hit single. That song was “Bang and Blame.”
I’m sure there are more, but the first two that spring to mind for me:
Green Day’s Dookie. I remember laying on the beach in 1994, on spring break, put this CD in my boom box and laid there for the whole thing, no skipsies. It was the first time I think I ever did that with an album. (greatest hits albums, nothwithstanding). I could listen to this whole album still today.
The Fratelli’s Costello Music. I was picking up a new company car in Springfield, IL, in 2006, and driving it back to Chicago. I found this CD under the seat of the car I was turning in and popped it into my new car for the ride home. I let the whole thing run, twice, without skipping one song. Great underappreciated album.
There are Beatles albums I’d let run, in fact most of them. The only albums I can think of with songs I’d skip are the white album and Sgt. Pepper.
Some very good ones that have already been mentioned, I won’t repeat. Just add:
John Prine; John Prine. His first album. Every song a treasure.
Bet you never thought Christian music could sound like this. Several years (and albums) later, the singer had a complete psychotic break.
"Human Sacrifice" by Vengeance Rising, released in the late 1980s.
What, even that bizarre hidden track at the end where Tré whines about being all by himself?
Sure. It’s short.
Good call on “Southeastern”. I just got a copy this week and can’t put it down.
Some of my favorites:
Camel - “(Music Inspired By) The Snow Goose”. Probably my favorite album ever. An instrumental prog-rock album based on a novella by Paul Gallico. I especially love the long slow build-up in “Preparation” and then all hell breaks loose in “Dunkirk”.
Wishbone Ash - “Argus”. Amazing guitar work throughout, but especially the intertwining guitar solos at the end of “Throw Down The Sword” to close out the album. Even the “Live From Memphis” bonus tracks on the CD are excellent.
Supertramp - “Crime of the Century”. Yeah, I’ve probably heard “Dreamer” a few times too many, but not enough to make me skip over it. And I still enjoy the wah-wah guitar part in the intro to “Bloody Well Right”.
Richard Thompson - “Mock Tudor” and “Mirror Blue”. Thompson is ridiculously talented but can still be hit-or-miss on many of his albums. These two are awesome albums from start to finish.
Except, that’s not necessarily the same thing as an album where every individual song is great. Ever since this thread appeared, I’ve been pondering the difference between “I love every song on this album!” and “I love this album!”
Lots of times, of course, it amounts to the same thing. I could come up with probably dozens of albums like this, going back to some of the albums my teenaged self fell in love with, like The Kinks are The Village Green Preservation Society, and Madness’s Keep Moving and One Step Beyond.
But an album can be a terrific listen without each individual song being a masterpiece. Abbey Road is a great example of this. Taken individually and out of context, many of the songs are not the Beatles’ best; but it is their best album, where the songs flow and work in context and add up to more than the sum of their parts.
In trying to think of an album where I love every song on it but not the album itself, the best example I could come up with was the 77s’ Sticks and Stones. I love most of these songs, and with the possible exception of the instrumental “The Loop” I could happily listen to any of them if it came on, but for some reason it’s not an album I want to listen to from start to finish. Which may be because it’s actually a collection of unreleased tracks and demos; but I have the same problem with other 77s albums: they don’t flow as well as they should IMHO and somehow seem to add up to less than the sum of their parts.
This reminds me of Norah Jones’ Come Away With Me. My son bought it for me for Mother’s Day because I liked so many songs on it but listening to it from start to finish puts me right to sleep. Not good when I did most of my album listening at work.
That’s the album I would pick second.
First is Procol Harum’s “A Salty Dog.” The interplay between piano and organ is amazing. Robin Trower never played better guitar. And B. J. Wilson’s drums/percussion is perfect thoughout. The symphonic grandeur of the title track and “Wreck of the Hesperus.” Raw blues on “Juicy John Pink.” The whimsy of “Boredom.” And “The Milk of Human Kindness” is downright funky. One of my five all-time favorite albums!