Jeremy's 300 All-Time Favorite Albums: Nos. 174 to 158
- petsch6787
- Mar 29, 2017
- 16 min read
Other Pages in this list: Nos. 300-286 Nos. 285-271 Nos. 270-257 Nos. 256-241 Nos. 240-225 Nos. 224-209 Nos. 208-192 Nos. 191-175 Nos. 157-141 Nos. 140-124 Nos. 123-107 Nos. 106-91 Nos. 90-75 Nos. 74-59 Nos. 58-43 Nos. 42-27 Nos. 26-11 Nos. 10-01
Hello, friends! Welcome to the fabulous new entry into my list of my favorite albums. Since we last met, nothing's happened. Oh, I guess a lot of people get to keep their health insurance. But other than that, not much has changed this week. But that's OK, no bad news is just as good as good news these days. Let's get to the music!
174. The Smiths - The Queen is Dead
Year of Release: 1986
The Queen is Dead is widely considered by music snobs worldwide to be the crowning achievement of The Smiths' short but impressive career, however I am not one of those snobs (not to say that I am not a snob, just not one that feels that way). My favorite Smiths album is Meat is Murder, but that's a story for the end of this post. And for now we are at the beginning of this post, and I have to admit, I don't have much to say about this album. It's almost as good as my favorite Smiths album but not quite as much. I really enjoy Bigmouth Strikes Again and There Is A Light That Never Goes Out. Very good album, nothing too controversial or interesting for me to say, if you want some good Smiths talk, you won't have to wait long.
Song: I Know It's Over
173. Weezer - Weezer (Blue)
Year of Release: 1994
Back in the day, VH1 and (to a lesser degree) MTV would create a lot of list shows because what easier way to replay old videos that they already had the rights to than making a list? And my favorite of those list shows was when every couple of months, one of the two music channels would run a list of the best videos ever made, and it would always be videos that were amazing in a technical sense. I would tape them over multiple VHS tapes and would watch them a bunch of times, and these lists would always include the Happy Days video for Buddy Holly, and that is how I learned about Weezer. Their first album is their best. This is not a matter of opinion (unless you want to say Pinkerton is better, that is the only dissenting option that I will even consider). After their first two albums, Weezer took a nosedive in quality, but let's not focus on that. Rather, let's focus on how simple and pleasant the melodies are throughout this album. On a real note, The World Has Turned and Left Me Here is one of my all time favorite songs, and no amount of latter day novelty songs can erase that.
Song: The World Has Turned and Left Me Here
172. New Order - Movement
Year of Release: 1981
For a lot of these albums, I have stories that range on the emotional spectrum from "Super Happy Good Time" to "Melancholic Nostalgia", but this is not the case for this New Order album. Similar to the way the band was feeling while creating this album, I associate it with a very, very dark period in my life. This is New Order's first album after Ian Curtis killed himself and the band renamed from Joy Division, and as such, this album sounds and feels like a group of guys who are mourning their friend and trying to scrape together the pieces of their band's identity. Movement is almost a perfect mashup of the grim post-punk that Joy Division was known for and the sparkly new wave dance that New Order would put out on their follow-up to this album, Power, Corruption, and Lies (more on that album much, much later). My intense relationship with this album built when I was working two jobs that I did not enjoy, and I started listening to this album on an extremely frequent basis. Dark times. Never going back to them times. This album is great though, grim thoughts aside.
Song: Senses
171. Outkast - The Love Below/Speakerboxxx
Year of Release: 2003
This Outkast double album is really two solo albums released together: Big Boi's Speakerboxxx and Andre 3000's The Love Below. Speakerboxxx is great, I love a bunch of songs on it, specifically Ghetto Musick and War, but the real reason that this album is on my list of favorite albums is because of The Love Below. It's basically a Prince album but made by Andre 3000 instead of Prince. The Love Below is a concept album, chronicling the life of a relationship. This also marks the second album on my list (after Kasabian's West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum) to have a song featuring Rosario Dawson on it, strangely. The best tracks on this album are Happy Valentine's Day (told from the perspective of Cupid), Hey Ya! (told from the perspective of If You Need Me To Tell You What Hey Ya! Is, You Done Lost Your Mind), She's Alive (Bout babies), and an instrumental, funky cover of My Favorite Things (as in, from The Sound of Music). I'm pretty sure that this is Brian's favorite album.
Song: Pink & Blue
170. LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver
Year of Release: 2007
This is far and away LCD Soundsystem's best album. It's got the least amount of cheeky bullshit that can at times put me off of some of James Murphy's creations. It starts off with the seven minute Get Innocuous! which spends its entirety with only a simple drum kit beat and a keyboard line as its instrumentation, with Murphy's lyrics being reverse echoed so that they sound as if they are drifting in from the other side of the spirit realm. Time to Get Away is much more upbeat, with Murphy acting the indie rock frontman, singing about booking it from a cancerous relationship, and it contains my favorite LCD line "You, you make me sleep, I try and try, but you undermine me, and I start to get sensible (if you know what I mean)." North American Scum is probably the cheekiest tune on this album but it's so fast paced that you can skate past the lyrics and just dance. Someone Great and the title track use instrumentation borrow from parts of LCD's long form instrumental album 45:33, released the year prior, but with lyrics added in, something that especially benefits Someone Great which tells the heartbreaking story of the narrator grieving the death of someone from a past relationship, the emotion of which is best encapsulated in this line "You're smaller than my wife imagined, surprised you were human." Someone can leave such an impact on somebody else's life and then be gone forever.
Song: Get Innocuous!
169. No Doubt - Push and Shove
Year of Release: 2012
The first appearance of my favorite band, No Doubt. Push and Shove is their most recent release, coming out a solid eleven years after Rock Steady, and after Gwen put out two solo albums and the rest of the band meandered around musically. Gwen's solo career has always been strictly a pop affair, and even Rock Steady was mostly poppy, so it's not surprising that Push and Shove ended up being quite poppy as well, but at this point if anyone is still hoping for a full on Rock N Roll album from No Doubt, you may need to wait a bit longer on this list because those all came out before I went to college. This album doesn't quite bring No Doubt back to their highest of highs, but Push and Shove wants you to do two things, either be dancing or be feeling those feels. This is why we get dance tracks like the title track or the first two songs on the album, Settle Down and Looking Hot. This album came out before Gwen and Gavin broke up, so there are only subtle signs of any unhappiness in the lyrics; Heaven is a song of wanting but only slightly tinged with melancholy. My least favorite No Doubt album (except for their self-titled debut, but I barely count that album as existing), yet it still comes in at 169.
Song: Heaven
168. Justin Timberlake - FutureSex/LoveSounds
Year of Release: 2006
My man, JT! I got this album on Easter one year, from my mother, and when we were leaving Best Buy, I turned on Sexy Back, and my little sister Callie, who was two at the time, starting going bonkers dancing in her carseat. And why wouldn't she? This album is made to dance to! Every song on this thing is good, and the best thing about Justin Timberlake albums is that he will also create interludes in between each song, sometimes with the interlude being longer than the original track or sounding completely different. Timberlake was smart enough to see the incoming trend of putting electronic music behind everything, and beat it by sticking elements of trance throughout this album, especially in the interludes. The I Think She Knows interlude helps cool down the intensity from LoveStoned before the album jumps into What Goes Around.../...Comes Around (Interlude). This album will make you dance, and this is all before getting to My Love, undoubtedly one of the greatest pop songs ever created. I will ride or die with my man JT. Ride Or Die Justin!
Song: My Love (well technically this video is of the Let Me Talk To You Interlude, then My Love)
167. Prince - Purple Rain
Year of Release: 1984
We lost a purple legend last year when Prince died, way too young. But luckily he made roughly thirteen albums a year (give or take), so we have lots of material to remember him by (not to mention whatever the hell they find in his media vault, that dude recorded a video for every song he ever created and then just kept them all for himself). Purple Rain is special to me for a variety of reasons: 1) Prince is my dad's favorite, so I have been listening to this album since I was approximately one day old, 2) Purple Rain is one of two albums that I know for sure are on all six iPods of my immediate family (not counting Callie, she's not old enough to know good music, yet), the other album that is on all of our iPods? Well, that's a story for another time. 3) I listened to The Beautiful Ones as my "getting pumped" jam during the 2007 Super Bowl featuring my Chicago Bears (they lost, but I still love that song), and 4) The time that this album really started receiving heavy constant play for me was when I was a Super Senior for a semester at Illinois, and all my musics from that time period have stuck around in my heart. This is a near perfect album, and the guitar on it is amazing (obviously). RIP Prince! Too soon, too soon!
Song: The Beautiful Ones
166. Nine Inch Nails - The Downward Spiral
Year of Release: 1994
This album sounds like no other album I have ever heard, including other Nine Inch Nails releases. Nothing Trent Reznor released after this album ever had the blood-in-your-teeth rage of this one, nor did he ever release another album after this one that had no subpar tracks on it (I'm not hating on Nine Inch Nails, I love that dude, the not subpar tracks usually outweigh the bad ones). My first exposure to this album was hearing Closer on the radio (also, straight up kudos to Reznor for creating his biggest radio hit out of a song where the chorus is just him saying "I want to fuck you like an animal, I want to feel you from the inside"), and also the video for Closer was always on those Best Videos list shows I was talking about back in Weezer. And Closer is great. But so is the rest of this album, especially the first half, which is unrelentingly aggressive. Mr. Self Destruct pounds through at a breakneck speed before the gentler (but still full of simmering animosity) Piggy kicks in. Heresy is a song about the death of God and the world's ambivalence, and March of the Pigs is literally all build up and power before the two piano interludes. The album finally ends with the slow epic Hurt, which was later covered by Johnny Cash. Everyone describes Cash's version as the better one, but I have always preferred the Nine Inch Nails version because it's filled with an almost apathetic desperation that I think Cash just replaced with "being old" so people are like "it's so appropriate to have a dying Johnny Cash sing this song". Bleh. Reznor's version is better.
Song: Mr. Self Destruct
165. Fiona Apple - Tidal
Year of Release: 1996
I got this album from my mother. When I was but a youngster, running around with my little tape player, Criminal was on my frequent mixtape that I'd run around with (this was previous to me having any actual CD's or albums) and when i look back at that, I'm surprised (well, kind of surprised) that young Jeremy was cool enough to enjoy the trippy breakdown at the end of that song, but then again, young Jeremy was one cool dude. I actually don't remember when I first really started listening to this album, in full. It's just been one of those albums that has always been there, despite the fact that I was nine when it was released. I really admire the subject matter of Apple's songs, she finds a way to be both vulnerable and powerful, a balance that I find is reached more often by female songwriters than male, probably something to do with machismo or whatever.
Song: The Child is Gone
164. Grimes - Art Angels
Year of Release: 2015
Grimes (aka Claire Boucher) makes pop music that is kind of hard to describe. For instance, this album starts of with Laughing and Not Being Normal, which features her singing in an operatic style over symphonic strings, before quieting down and transitioning into California, a fairly straight forward indie pop song, although Grimes has synthesizers working their way through all of her songs. Art Angels only features three artists throughout its entire playtime: Grimes (who composes and plays everything), and then guest vocalists Janelle Monáe (who is featured on the fabulous Venus Fly) and female rapper Aristophanes (who raps in Japanese and growls on Scream). This is an album made entirely by females. Don't think that is on accident. And while the lyrical content can be confrontational at times, and depressing at others, there is always a sunniness peaking its head out in the instrumentation, the pop sensibilities anchoring Grimes's more adventurous tendencies. Grimes has made videos for ten of the fourteen tracks on the album, all directed by her (and she has craziness pulsing through her visual aesthetic veins). The only reason this album is ranked this low is because I've only been listening to this album for about a year, if I go through this madness again in ten years, I imagine Art Angels will be in my top 100. (Editor's Note July '18: Again, Ambitious)
Song: World Princess Part II
163. Nellie McKay - Obligatory Villagers
Year of Release: 2007
Nellie McKay switches genres not from album to album, but rather from song to song. Her first two releases were each double albums (by her design not because length dictated it) and the length tended to be her undoing. She would have too many ideas and just include all of them. But a little self-editing does wonders, and her third album Obligatory Villagers showcased everything there is to love about McKay: her voice, her ability to play many instruments, how freaking weird she is. The album starts with the feminist Mother of Pearl, played on a ukulele while men yell things like "take it off!" and "sing us a new one", and is then followed up by Oversure which is basically a show tune. Actually most of McKay's oeuvre would work as showtunes because McKay's voice is of the Broadway pedigree (in fact, she has been in a show or two). Gin Rummy is a downtempo jazz number, Livin' is a twenty five second limerick, Galleon is a song about the animosities built up among members of a Men's Ensemble group. My favorite song on the album is Politan, a song so breezy it sounds as if it blew in straight from the western shores of Spain. I'm going to link that one below, you'll be surprised by how accurate that description is.
Song: Politan
162. CSS - Cansei De Ser Sexy
Year of Release: 2005
This is perhaps the wackiest album that I have on this list. CSS is a brazilian band who specialize in dancey-indie-art-pop and are led by a singer with the moniker Lovefoxxx. They got relatively famous when their song Music Is My Hot Hot Sex was used in an iPod commercial back in the day, and this album (which features that song) is their international debut. Lovefoxxx sings mostly in English, with a thick Brazilian accent, but her lyrics still get through because she has frontman attitude to spare. Sometimes her lyrics can get ridiculous, especially on Art Bitch, but they are always emotionally honest; you can feel the pleading in the standout track of the album, Let's Make Love and Listen to Death From Above, as she tries to express that her physical desires are not motivated by alcohol. I also love the low key dance keyboard on Fuckoff Is Not The Only Thing You Have to Show. This album appears to have been a one off of greatness from this band, but I have never stopped listening to it during the eleven years it's been on my computer.
Song: Let's Make Love and Listen to Death From Above
161. Kings of Leon - Because of the Times
Year of Release: 2007
Speaking of one offs of greatness, Kings of Leon are the ultimate warning tale of what can happen when a band makes a really great album but learns all the wrong lessons from it. I love this album and so did most of the musically critical population of this country when it was released. It's definitely rooted in Southern Rock, but Kings of Leon weren't afraid to get a little weird and start the album off with a seven minute building block of a rocker with Knocked Up. Black Thumbnail starts off as a jaunty Southern guitar jingle before devolving into screaming chaos during the choruses. Basically what I'm saying is this is an album made by some dudes that were having fun and trying new things. But what went and happened? Well, first they released On Call as the lead single, despite the fact that On Call is by far the most boring song on this album and a clear pander to the arena size that they were hoping to populate on tour. Then On Call got kind of popular and Kings of Leon realized that if they stripped everything interesting from their music and just released generic arena rock songs, they could get really rich and headline Lollapalooza for seven straight years and develop a drinking problem. And it was true, and this is how we ended up with the wretched, cookie-cutter bullshit that is Use Somebody. If there is a Hell, it will be playing Use Somebody on a loop. Thank the heavens that we got this gem before the transformation took place.
Song: Trunk
160. Sufjan Stevens - Seven Swans
Year of Release: 2004
Before Carrie and Lowell was released in 2015, Seven Swans was Sufjan Stevens's quietest album, which is saying something as Stevens is a pretty quiet musician when he wants to be. Seven Swans is (not coincidentally) also Stevens's most overtly spiritual album. While Stevens's religion has never been missing from his work (he has mentioned biblical figures and has used religion allegorically on all of his albums), Seven Swans brings his contemplation on his religion to the forefront, allowing him to devote an entire song to Abraham or to end the album with The Transformation, a song about Jesus's suffering. I am not a religious person; the aspect of religion that has always turned me off is the type of religious person who believes blindly and does not question what they believe (a person like this can never be reasoned with). I enjoy Stevens's ruminations on God and Christianity because he is always coming at it from a position of question (what do I believe? am I right? am I living up to the standards that I have set for myself?) and this allows him to be vulnerable (in some cases, extremely so) and relatable. The best songs on this album are the starkest, just Stevens and a guitar or banjo, and some piano or keyboard arriving at some point, such as on We Won't Need Legs To Stand or A Good Man Is Hard to Find. The only time I have been fortunate to have seen Sufjan live was at the beginning of his tour for Age of Adz, which hadn't been released yet. He performed his entire new album but bookended it by ending with four songs from Illinois and one from Michigan and started the show with Seven Swans, the haunting title song from this album about the Book of Revelation. It was wonderful.
Song: A Good Man Is Hard to Find
159. ...And You Will Know Us From The Trail of Dead - Source Tags and Codes
Year of Release: 2002
Trail of Dead has existed since the late nineties and have release nine albums, and somehow the two albums of theirs that I really like were released ten years apart. The first of those two albums is their major label debut, Source Tags and Codes (the second is a story for a different week). As they would move through their career, Trail of Dead would receive both accolades and demerits for constantly expanding their sound, sometimes moving into an arena rock realm, sometimes experimenting with sounds from other countries, sometimes creating a prog rock album broken into two long songs. They have expanded into all those areas, but before all of that expansion was Source Tags and Codes: a loud post-hardcore indie rocker. The guitars are mixed much, much louder than the drums or the vocals (although not so much that you can't understand what they are singing), and this is appropriate because this is a guitar album first and foremost. They shred, they cry, they dissolve and crackle. As far as I am concerned, the louder Trail of Dead gets, the better album they put out. Also, shoutout to my freshman year roommate, Jim, for introducing me to this band, the album he played me was the one after this one, but if not for him, who knows if I would have ever made my way to this group?
Song: How Near, How Far
158. The Smiths - Meat is Murder
Year of Release: 1985
In High School, I worked at a movie theater. During my entire life, I have been a movie aficionado. These two things worked together well, and I spent about two straight years seeing every single movie that came out. One of my favorites during this time period was Closer, a movie that is special in that it is one of maybe five movies that I can handle that monster Julia Roberts in and also it was what really got me interested in The Smiths, since How Soon Is Now? is used during the stripping scene featuring Natalie Portman and Clive Owen. The US version of Meat is Murder included How Soon Is Now? on it, and that is how I came to listen to this album. Thank you, Mike Nichols. Meat is Murder is my favorite Smiths album, so much so that my love of this album kind of buoyed The Queen is Dead this far up the list. Every song on here is great, Johnny Marr's guitars are always the star of the show, and Morrissey's singing on this album is the best of any of their releases: still a little immature but full of so much emotion, and not hitting you over the head with his agendas, he generally is at least speaking metaphorically (except of course on the title track, which is a pretty straightforward anti-meat affair, still a good song though). I can understand why the British youth of the eighties would gravitate towards The Smiths in the same way that the boys of my generation gravitated towards Blink-182, when Morrissey is railing against corporal punishment in British schools or is pining in a schoolboy way on I Want the One I Can't Have. He was their musical surrogate and it still rings true to me thirty-two years later.
Song: That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore
Wow, that was a good list of albums. Took me another eight days to churn this one out, maybe next week I can do it in seven. If I wish and I dream, anything is possible. Just use your imagination!
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