All the samples were lame: here are live versions on YouTube instead.
Minuano (Six Eight),originally from Still Life (Talking)
Phase Dance, originally from Pat Metheny Group
And just for the heck of it, here is Are you Going With Me?, originally from Offramp.
One more: The First Circle, originally from First Circle.
The Beatles: Revolver
Alice Cooper: Alice Cooper Goes To Hell
They Might Be Giants: Flood
Jethro Tull: Song From The Wood
Golden Bough: Winter’s Dance
The Roches: The Roches
You might prefer the Euro version of MiSL, which is mixed as a long DJ mix and is much more geared to the dance-oriented feel. The song “Namistai” is fantastic.
Huh, there’s really no way to introduce someone to **Phish ** without them having preconceived notions of dirty hippy jam band – which they are, but they manage to make some pretty good music while they’re dirty-ing and hippy-ing it up.
I’d probably suggest Billy Breathes - it’s a great, quasi-baroque album that flows well and doesn’t have a song over 6 minutes. It also gets to the heart of what **Phish **is about, which is good musicians that mesh well and interlace (sort to speak) the melody among several different instruments.
Favorite Album by **Phish **would be Junta; favorite album of all time would have to be Abbey Road
My all-time favorite: The Who. Forerunners of the second British Invasion, they transmogrified American R&B into something completely different. If you don’t dig anything from “Tommy”, “Live at Leeds” or “Who’s Next”, don’t bother delving any deeper. An acquired taste that usually lasts a lifetime.
My new favorite: Nelly McKay. Her first CD went from pop to show tunes to jazz to country to rap and several places in-between. She went on to Broadway to do The Threepenny Opera and appeared at the 2008 TED conference in Monterey. There are tons of talented female singer/songwriters around–but recently, none have impressed me as much as Ms. McKay.
Bob Dylan: Blood on the Tracks
Iannis Xenakis. A philosopher at heart, an architect by training, a musician by nature. The best place to start is with his early music such as Metastasis from the 1950s. Many of the elements there are ones he used throughout his life – the rich three-dimensional curved carpets of strings, the enormous blocks of wind and brass sounds.
Above all, the way the music is designed to be something other than emotional. He tried to develop a mathematical theory of music which could both encompass and create any possible combination of sounds, of which traditional western music was just one subset, and to do this used mathematics and statistics very much as a philosophical tool. He certainly intended to connect with the listener, on a deeper and perhaps elemental level.
I think he achieved this. And for this reason, for the fact that his music carries with it little or no contextual or social baggage, I think he stands a far better chance of being listened to and understood in 500 years’ time than just about anything else from the past century. This is a transcendental nature normally reserved for Bach alone, but I think it’s applicable to Xenakis, too.
Yes. Love that song.
I love “This Binary Universe” (although probably not the best introduction to BT). “Good Morning Kaia” is beautiful (with a great video).
The album that got me into Tool was Aenima, but I’m not sure I would recommend it to someone who had never heard them before. It took me awhile to like that album, and the first songs on it (Stinkfist and Eulogy) don’t grab your attention very quickly, although they’re both pretty incredible.
Their next album was Lateralus, which is an amazing work of art but leads off with a song that sounds like ten pounds of shit.
The latest album is what I would recommend to a Tool newbie, called 10,000 Days. They put their most radio-friendly song (Vicarious) at the very front of the album, and rock you hard, fast, and deep for the first 5 minutes. It really sets a fantastic tone for the rest of the album, although there’s only about 25 minutes of actual songs through the whole thing.
That’s the only problem I have with current Tool. They fill a whole lot of space on the album with tribal chanting, long repetitive instrumental tracks, static, whale calls, babies crying, etc.
I never listened to the whole first album, except for the US-released singles: “I Want to Be Adored” and “Fool’s Gold”. I guess I’ll give it a listen.
oboyoboyoboy! You are gonna have some fun - what a great album. My personal fave is Waterfall - for the gorgeous tones of the overdriven guitar at the end and John Squire’s wah-wah work - oh, the song rocks, too… 
And, what - no comments, positive, negative or otherwise about my previous post on Prince? :dubious:
For Queensryche, I’d go with Promised Land. Empire was their best-selling album by far, but listening to it now it sounds kind of stuck between hair metal and their “usual” sound of semi-operatic hard rock. Promised Land, on the other hand, is everything a Queensryche album should be- daring, conceptually brilliant, moving, and not much of a seller. Plus, it has a little of everything - the weird (9:28AM, Disconnected, I Am I; the ballad-y (One More Time); the straight-up metal (Damaged), an accoustic piece (Bridge); and the semi-operatic (Lady Jane, Promised Land, Someone Else).
It’s a really good record, and also signalled the beginning of the end of the band - lead guitarist Chris DeGarmo stuck around for one more album, Hear in the New Frontier, which was awful, and once he left everyone realised that nobody else in the band was any good at writing songs.
IMHO, Depeche Mode are better represented by Songs of Faith and Devotion. Violator was great, and probably more accessible than their other albums, but didn’t sound entirely like them. Ideally, we could go with that 2-CD greatest hits set - The Singles 1985-some year around 1998, and get the best of both worlds, especially since Barrel of a Gun would be the best possible way to introduce a hard rock fan to DM.
As a Tool “layman” I’d say you have to stick with Aenima for the simple reason that the other Tool records aren’t any good, and Aenima is brilliant.