What are your 10 favourite albums and WHY?

Cafe Society
61

There are probably 20 or so that sort of revolve in my top 10…

TODAY’s picks are, in no particular order.

The Jam - All Mod Cons
Quite a leap from the previous two albums, this album hooked me when I was 15 and I’ve probably listened to it weekly since

The Clash - Give 'Em Enough Rope
Sure, London Calling is classic and the first album was seminal, but this one ROCKED…

AC/DC - Let There Be Rock
This was loud, rude and nasty. You could hear drum pedals sueak and amp feedback rattling the snares. Awesome.

Cheap Trick - At Budokan (I & II)
They were a truly great live act at this time. Hooks, power and humor in one package…

The Beatle - Rubber Soul
Nothing I can say really. A definitive album.

The Kinks - Are the Village Green Preservation Society
It has a loose, wildly creative feel. It’s my Sgt. Peppers, in a way…

The Plimsouls - The Plimsouls
Their relatively un-heralded debut has a 60s soul feel that is near perfect 3 minute pop.

Elvis Costello - This Year’s Model
Speaking of near perfect 3 minute pop…This was the first (and nearly only) album where you can hardly hear the guitar that I liked.

R.E.M. - Murmur
Absolutely stunning. They made “alternative rock” possible, IMHO.

The Psychedelic Furs - Talk Talk Talk
A very good pop album and quite a departure from their debut. This was a soundtrack for the summer of my 18th year, when I had a hopeless crush on a girl…

62

Wow. Quite a few that I like have been mentioned, but I have some that haven’t…

I don’t know if I can get to 10, but let’s go (in the order that they occur to me, I’m just typing stream of consciousness…) Many of the songs in list make it because of when I heard them, as much as what I heard. They just came along at important times in my life.

Alanis Morisette “Jagged Little Pill”
“Under Rug Swept” is good too, but JLP just has so many songs that I enjoy listening to…

The Police “Synchronicity”
Makes the list despite the fact that Mother may be the worst song ever.

Pat Green “Three Days”
Country seems under-representated on everyone’s list. Oh, hell, this makes the list simply because I fell in love while listening to it. And I still am, even if she’s not so sure anymore.

Paul Simon “Graceland”
I tried really hard to pick “Rhythm of the Saints”, but “Graceland” is simply better.

Led Zepplin “IV”
Stereotypical, and mentioned here many times, but still good.

The Beatles
Call it a cop out, but I cannot pick just one.

and now for the mainstream 80’s section of my list…

Men at Work “Business as Usual”
Journey “Escape”
Styx “Paradise Theatre”

Oh well, I’m tired. That list will do for now.

63

In the ever-popular “no particular order”:

Nonsuch , XTC
Rubber Soul , The Beatles
Tunnel Of Love , Bruce Springsteen
The Juliet Letters , Elvis Costello & The Brodsky Quartet
Misplaced Childhood , Marillion
Mercury Falling , Sting
Sign O’ The Times , Prince
The Man And His Music , Sam Cooke (compilation)
Pet Sounds , The Beach Boys
Temple Of Low Men , Crowded House

and probably a dozen other albums that deserve mention, but the request was only for a favorite 10.

What I find interesting about this is how these things change over time–even though none of these albums listed above is a recent release. For instance, as with others who have posted to this thread, I probably would have included a Pink Floyd album (or two) on this list a decade ago, but, while I still dig Floyd, they’ve slipped off the radar a bit. If you open this thread again a year from now, everyone who posts here will probably submit a different list then vs. now.

64

Well, for what it’s worth, here’s my list, as of 2PM today. Maybe a couple of surprises on it.

Beatles: Revolver
Poised just at the perfect balance point between ingratiating aim to please and wild-assed self-indulgence.

The Band: Music from Big Pink
Sounds like a jug band from the hollers of West Virginia just dicovered electricity. Brilliant Americana, from what was mostly a bunch of Canadians, naturally.

Rolling Stones: Exile on Main Street
Uncut smack on record. Richards & Co. somehow haul up the greatest blues-based rock ‘n’ roll album ever.

Led Zeppelin: Physical Grafitti
The second greatest blues-based rock ‘n’ roll album ever.

Depeche Mode: Violator
Heartbreaking, swooningly beautiful pop songs and that rarest of entities: electronica that truly swings.

Oasis: Definitely Maybe
Noel said it all, tunewise, first time out of the gate, and no one can convey the attitude “I couldn’t give a rat’s ass” better than Liam.

Sam Phillips: Martinis & Bikinis
Talk about economical pop songs. Lots of inner meanings to puzzle out and not a single note more than necessary.

Massive Attack: Mezzanine
Quoth my friend Laura on first listen: “Man, that’s some serious fuck music.” End of story.

Lounge Lizards: Voice of Chunk
Criminally overlooked, angular jazz-rock whatsit. The last great blast of the New York beatnik hipster pose.

Boards of Canada: Music Has the Right to Children
Obscure to most (I started a thread on this album last year and got not a single reply), this weirdly handsome ambient epic, constructed out of samples from '60’s educational films and leftover noises from an old Atari computer, has a crunchy goodness unequalled by anything else I’ve ever heard in the genre.

65

Top Ten - No order

  1. Nevermind - Nirvana
  2. Raise - Swervedriver
  3. Sublime - Sublime
  4. Rage Against the Machine
  5. White Album - The Beatles
  6. The Chronic - Dr. Dre
  7. Check Your Head - Beastie Boys
  8. Paul’s Boutique - Beastie Boys
  9. Who’s Next - The Who
  10. Led Zeppelin II - Led Zep

With these 10 albums, I could survive a very long time on a desert island (with electricity of course).

66

1) Hüsker Dü - Zen Arcade
This album has all the odds stacked against it. I mean how can a 70 minutes long, hardcore-punk, concept album that was recorded and mixed in under 85 hours possibly work? I don’t know, but it does. Acoustic ballads, tape loops, psychedelic experiments, nightmarish instrumentals, raging hardcore and larynx shredding vocals. Whenever I play ‘Pink Turns To Blue’ the temperature in the room drops below zero. Listen to this at winter nights with headphones on as you watch pale northern lights dance across the night sky. This bleak masterpiece was IMHO the album where hardcore peaked.

** 2) My Bloody Valentine - Loveless**
A blissful, sensual, hypnotic and trippy mindfuck. You can have sex while listening to this album and forget what you’re doing. Seriously.

3) Fugazi - Red Medicine
Fugazi has never made a bad album, Red Medicine just happens to be the best of the best. During a period of six months ‘Bed For The Scrapping’ was the only song that mattered.

4) The Replacements - Tim
The 'Mats were the kings of loser anthems. ‘Here Comes A Regular’ should be played on the jukebox during closing time at every bar in the world; it’s still only one of two songs that can make me cry.

5) Minutemen - Double Nickels On The Dime
“Our band could be your life.” 44 songs and at least 41 of them are keepers. Try putting it on shuffle mode in your CD player, it works even better then. An album perfectly suited for swiling frosty beer on the back of your porch while swatting mosquitoes of your sweaty neck. ‘History Lesson Pt. 2’ is the second song that can make me cry.

6) Neutral Milk Hotel - In The Aeroplane Over The Sea
Disturbing, yet beautifully realized songs dealing with incestuous sex, Anne Frank, time travel and semen stained mountaintops. ‘Holland 1945’ is perhaps the best pop song of the 90’s.

7) Built To Spill - There’s Nothing Wrong With Love
I’m torn between this Built to Spill album and Perfect From Now On. This one wins because of the beautiful double punch of the childhood nostalgic songs ‘Twin Falls’ and ‘Some.’ Nobody can emote feelings with just a guitar like Doug Martsch.

8) The Stooges - Funhouse
No album is more goosebump inducing than Funhouse. Perhaps Raw Power has better songs (Search & Destroy is my alltime favorite song) but there is just something about Funhouse that appeals to me on in some primal way.

9) Pavement - Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain
Almost a tie with Slanted & Enchanted, but with killer songs like ‘Gold Soundz’, ‘Silence Kit’, 'Cut Your Hair and ‘Range Life’ it deserves to win.

10) Guided By Voices - Bee Thousand/Alien Lanes
A tie. I can’t chose. I used to have both albums on a tape, they just go hand in hand. I heard Bob Pollard writes the song titles before he writes the song, that way the choruses sound original. Proof: ‘Gold Heart Mountaintop Queen Directory’, ‘Tractor Rape Chain’ and ‘My Valuable Hunting Knife.’

The people on this board have great taste in music, please post more lists.

67

Oh boy…well, I’ll give this a shot :slight_smile: It’s pretty heavy on my two favorite bands at the moment, but hey, they are my favorites and I’ve been listening to them a lot lately. :wink: List can be subject to change depending on current listening hapits. In no particular order, because there is no way I could do a particular order:

Radiohead: The Bends - A beautiful, consistently good, and amazing album. Not much else to say. They are my favorite band.
**Rent: Original Broadway Soundtrack ** - This has been my favorite musical since I decided to hear what all the fuss was about in…7th grade maybe?
**Radiohead: OK Computer ** - It’s on everybody’s list, but with good reason after all.
**Tori Amos: Little Earthquakes ** - GOD it’s good. The woman is a musical genius, pure and simple, and she is my other favorite alongside Radiohead.
**Barenaked Laides: Stunt ** - These guys are so fun!!! I bought the album because of “One Week” but discovered so much more. They’re lyrically clever and musically pleasing…it’s a great album to play and dance around in your room to.
**Radiohead: Amnesiac ** - It’s similar in many ways to its experimental predecessor, Kid A, which I also love dearly, but I personally prefer this album just a bit.
Tori Amos: From The Choirgirl Hotel ** - I love pretty much all of her albums, but this one also particularly stands out to me. She branches out into more electronica stuff to challenge her “girl with a piano” image, and many songs deal with her miscarriage. It’s a wonderful album–beautiful, sexy, and haunting all at once.
** NIN: The Downward Spiral - I haven’t listened to this album in a long time…it’s tough to handle sometimes. But wow, what a concept album, and what talent Trent Reznor showed on it.
**Pink Floyd: The Wall ** - Another one on everybody’s list. Ain’t it great?
**Tori Amos: Boys for Pele ** - I think this is a less traditional choice for many Tori fans, but even though it’s long and can take several listens to get into, the wait is worth it. It’s an album I’ve really taken to…I love the quirkiness and obscure lyrics, and some moments (Hey Jupiter, Marianne, and The Doughnut Song are some for me) are knock-you-on-your-ass beautiful/sad/haunting.

68

Oops…“habits” and “Ladies.” I can’t type. :stuck_out_tongue: Also, while it’s almost a toss-up for me between The Wall and Dark Side of the Moon, I go with The Wall partly because it was the first Floyd album I got–and it has Comfortably Numb, which is the song that first got me into the band.

69

This thread sucks because it makes my brain hurt thinking about it. Yet I… can’t… resist! Arrgh!

Oh well, in alphabetical order:

Belle and Sebastian: Tigermilk. Damn fine wussy pop music. Just about every song on this one is a candidate for getting stuck in your head at inopportune times.

The Cure: Pornography. Remember that time you really felt like crap? Well, this album let’s you know, reassuringly, that someone once felt much worse. And the music is really good, too. Excellent fuel for teenage angst.

Godflesh: Streetcleaner. Well… um… see, Godflesh made some really intense music that got lumped into the grindcore category, while they managed to not be silly characatures (sp?) the way the other bands dumped in that label were. This album is one of the only ones where at first listen my jaw slackened and my eyes glazed over whilst thinking “Oh. My. God!” That is why it’s on this list.

James: Seven. I actually bought this at the same time as I got Streetcleaner (not a bad day of shopping, I must say). This is unlikely to be most James fans pick for their best, but something about it screams perfection to my ears.

Love & Rockets: Seventh Dream Of Teenage Heaven. Dog End of A Day Gone By. Saudade. The title track. Mmm, yeah. Great songs, excellent production. Fragmentary sentences. Inarticulate defense of a pick. Oh yeah, I’m there.

My Bloody Valentine: Loveless. As mentioned before, this is easily one of the best albums of the 90’s. Takes a few listens to get into it, but once you do you’re rendered a junkie. So good an album they’ve been scared to release a new album (even tossing out an entire recording session) due to the challenge of besting the predecessor.

Orbital: Snivilisation. By no means a perfect album, but it overflows with bucketloads of originality. No one ever made music like this before or after (Orbital included, unfortunately, even if In Sides was a damn good album). I swear I listened to this at least daily for a good year in college.

Slowdive: Souvlaki. Take one mopey shoegazer band and add Brian Eno producing, and you get Souvlaki. Their previous work was good, but the atmosphere of the music was dense and rather oppressive. Eno changed that and gave them a less claustrophobic/more airy sound. Yowza! Exit Eno and the band takes his idea one step further by becoming an almost inaudible “slo-core” (I heard that term on NPR once. Then never again.) band that could render any insomniac unconscious in a matter of seconds. Producers do matter, people!

The Talking Heads: Remain In Light. The eccentric art-nerds go very global in influence. Simply put: there are no bad songs here. I didn’t know until I listened to it that the world moved on a woman’s hips, so it’s educational, too.

A Tribe Called Quest: People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm. OK, Q-Tip has a great voice and raps very well, that’s the surface stuff that most people agree on cuz it’s easy. But what sets this album above almost any other hip hop album it the sampling. Behind every rap is one of the greatest patisches of others’ sounds that I’ve ever heard. Public Enemy’s bombastic sounds were all well and good, but until ATCQ put this album out I would have been very hesitant to call such creations art. Now I know better.
There. That’s 10. And I’m exhausted.

70

Things I’m listening to and loving:

  1. ‘At The end’ by IIO
  2. ‘american life’ by madonna
  3. ‘getaway’ by becky baeling

7-10 would actually have to be anything involving Guster or Dave Matthews…b/w those two we could certainly think of 6 albums!!

i think becky is actually really cool. Her album just came out on Universal…I love the cover she did on ‘heaven is a place on earth’. every time i hear it in the club it makes me wanna dance and french roll my jeans.

:wink:

71

As of right now, in no particular order

**Green Day - Dookie **: Great punk rock
**Dr Dre - Chronic **: It is so clever it just never, ever gets old
**Nirvana - Nevermind **: Every track is simply superb
**Beck - Midnight Vultures **: More accessible than most of his other stuff
**Prince - Sign o the Times **: Hasn’t really dated at all
**Michael Jackson - Thriller **: Ditto
**Spooks - SIOSOS **: Terrific lyrics, great vocals
**Wu Tang Clan - 36 Chambers **: Ditto, just love the RZA sound
**Public Enemy - Fear of a Black Planet **: So influential, great lyrics
Kid Rock - Devil Without A Cause: If Prince was a redneck …

72

Hearty slaps on my hand (with the dreaded yard stick) for not including the following albums above (despite being limited to 10 by the OP):

Shadowland, k.d. lang
Dulcinea, Toad The Wet Sprocket
Little Creatures, Talking Heads
The Joshua Tree, U2

and a host of others which would make my list run to about 30 or so.

73

Whew, those are some good lists. Here’s mine (of course, this is only of the moment, subject to change, etc.).

INPO:

U2 - Joshua Tree
Not much to say about this one. I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For and With or Without You on the same album. It don’t get better.

Queen - Queen
The best classic rock album I’ve heard. (Yes, even better than any of the Beatles music I’ve heard.)

Massive Attack - Mezzanine
Perfect groove.

Hooverphonic - Blue Wonder Power Milk
Barely edges out their A New Stereophonic Sound Spectacular. Very smooth and groovy.

Bob Dylan - Nashville Skyline
Perhaps the least Dylan-y of all his albums. My dad used to listen to this as he drove us to go camping.

Sarah McLachlan - Fumbling Towards Ecstasy
Pure musical heroin. I consider this her best, but The Freedom Sessions and Surfacing come close.

Dave Matthew’s Band - Crash
I had a tape of this playing in my car constantly during my early driving years. I can also play Crash on my guitar (but then again, who can’t?).

Frou Frou - Details
Imogen Heap can ride a wave on my inhaler any day :).

Jars of Clay - Jars of Clay
Very good Christian band. This CD is home of perhaps the most moving song I’ve heard, “Worlds Apart.”

The Beatles - Abbey Road
I only recently got this album. Very good. I still don’t think it’s as good as Queen.

Hmm. For the most part, I seem to have departed from the rest of the posters in the thread. Oh well, such is taste.