Jeremy's 300 All-Time Favorite Albums: Nos. 208 to 192
- petsch6787
- Mar 13, 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. 191-175 Nos. 174-158 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, one and all! Welcome to this week's entry of my favorite albums of my life. What an eventful week we've had; the Bears tied the success of the 2017 season to Mike Glennon and released Cutler, the Illini fired Jon Groce, and the Cubs continued to play spring training games getting us prepped for the only Chicago team that we can rely on to be good this year. Anyway, let's get to the list!
208. The Postal Service - Give Up
Year of Release: 2003
Everyone born in 1986 or 1987 already knows what this album is, but let me explain for the other 93% of the population; Postal Service was a one-off group formed by electronic musician Jimmy Tamborello (also known as Dntel) and Death Cab for Cutie singer, and one time Zooey Deschanel spouse, Ben Gibbard. The majority of the collaboration took place with each of the two members creating music and mailing each other CD-R's to work on, hence the name of the band. This album is basically what it would sound like if the members of Death Cab were reduced to Ben Gibbard and a musically inclined robot, and I dig it. This was before electronic music had saturated every aspect of our cultural life, so I imagine it was this aspect that lured all of us impressionable youths who were already in on the Death Cab train. When I went to college, the first or second week I was there, I sent out a Facebook message to everyone I was friends with and asked them all to send me back a list of their ten favorite albums, just for curiosity's sake, and the lists that came back were varied, but two albums were on almost every list, one of them I'll tell you about in May but the second one was this Postal Service album. Also, while downloading a clearer picture of the album cover for this post, I realized for the first time that the cover has both a castle in the distance and UFO's flying around. I've had this album for fourteen years! ALSO also, Jenny Lewis sings back up on most of this album, so I need to take back my statement from last week that Under the Blacklight is the only thing I have ever liked her on.
Song: Brand New Colony
207. At the Drive-In - In/Casino/Out
Year of Release: 1998
The second of the three currently existing At The Drive-In albums (a new one is coming out this spring without Jim Ward, so basically a Mars Volta album but under the name of At The Drive-In) finds itself, understandably, wedged between the two very different styles of their other releases. Their first album Acrobatic Tenement is a masterpiece of lo-fi emo, while Relationship of Command is a much louder post-hardcore album. In/Casino/Out finds a nice little nook in the middle, definitely stepping towards a clearer produced sound. The band recorded this album as one big unit live, rather than recording one instrument at a time, and you can feel the energy in the recordings. I bought this CD in Chicago with my friend Rick, and when I played it for him for the first time, he turned to me and said "This is bad. I don't like this." My music taste in a nutshell right there.
Song: Pickpocket
206. Beastie Boys - Check Your Head
Year of Release: 1992
My opinion of the Beastie Boys changed a lot from being a child to being an adult. I used to dismiss them as joke rappers, but, my oh my, was I wrong. My father owned a Beastie Boys anthology on CD that I inherited when he decided CD's were no longer something he wanted to own. One day I was listening to my iTunes on random and a song came on that caught my attention for two reasons: 1) It was awesome and 2) I had no idea what it was, which is strange because I listen to everything that I have on my computer. That song was from The Sounds of Science, the anthology, and was called Something's Got to Give, which is from this album, which I promptly downloaded. Something's Got to Give is actually a pretty good example of what makes the Beastie Boys special for me: that, while they do use samples and make great raps, they can also step away from the rap genre from song to song and make a rock song because they all play their own instruments. So when they want to make a trippy lounge rock song like Something's Got to Give, they totally can. And when they want to record a hardcore cover of Sly Stone's Time for Livin', they can totally do that too. Or if they want to create a fuzzed out guitar rocker like Gratitude, they got it covered. Check Your Head is really only half rap, the other half a menagerie of experimental rock avenues. That isn't to take away from the rap songs on here though, the Beastie Boys create awesome beats and their lyrics range from hilarious to impressive, they craft great rhyme schemes. It would have been great to see what kind of post Beastie music MCA would have put out. RIP MCA, it's a shame we lost you so early.
Song: Something's Got to Give
205. Youth Group - Skeleton Jar
Year of Release: 2004
I saw this band open up for Death Cab for Cutie my freshman year at Illinois, and they played at Foellinger, which is sizeable for a lecture hall, but pretty awesome for a concert. I think that in all my years of concert going, Youth Group is the only band that I ever had started listening to because I had seen them open for a band I liked. They are best known for their cover of Forever Young because it was used in The OC and got pretty popular for a hot minute. This album is all gentle folksy rock. The singer, Toby Martin, has Garfunkel hair. This album has a lot of good upbeat songs, but the standouts are the songs that allow for Martin to really stretch his range, such as album closer Piece of Wood which is just him singing over an acoustic guitar about being various things that were once part of something living but alone are dead: a piece of wood, a fingertip, the tail of a worm. Skeleton Jar starts with the line "I feel like hell, you feel like dancing" and halfway through the song he yells out "Why am I so miserable if these are the best years of my life?" The anguish!
Song: Skeleton Jar
204. Nine Inch Nails - The Slip
Year of Release: 2008
I read an article this year that described Beyonce's "surprise" release of Lemonade as inventing the "surprise release album." Let's get real here, the first two surprise releases that I remember during this digital age of information was when Radiohead released In Rainbows ten days after it was announced that it had been completed, for the price of "whatever you want to pay," and when Trent Reznor just flat out gave away The Slip online for free with no prior announcement whatsoever. Beyonce can take a step back. Eventually Nine Inch Nails did release a physical copy of this album (only 250,000 CD's were created, I have No. 102,827), but, release quirks aside, this is the last Nine Inch Nails release that I truly enjoy. It was the first album (other than the entirely instrumental and unlistenable Ghosts project) to really integrate the traditional industrial sound with the quiet soundscapes that would win Reznor an Oscar for scoring Social Network. Most critics malign the album for having twelve plus minutes straight of instrumentals between the slowly pulsating Corona Radiata and the more traditional Nine Inch Nails rocking The Four of Us Are Dying, but that's actually my favorite part of the album. Those twelve minutes are preceded by Lights in the Sky, possibly Reznor's most gentle song and definitely the song that is mixed the quietest, his voice is barely a whisper over the slow piano notes. This album is the best latter days Nine Inch Nails release, hands down.
Song: Lights in the Sky
203. Swervedriver - I Wasn't Born to Lose You
Year of Release: 2015
This album was the first released for Swervedriver in fifteen years, but I had never heard of them the first time around, so I didn't come to this album through a previous love of the nineties shoegaze-gone-hard band, but rather through a mistake. On the cover of The Coathangers' Suck My Shirt, Meredith Franco is wearing a Hellshovel shirt. When this album came out, I read a review of it and I was like "Oh Swervedriver, isn't that the band that is on Meredith's shirt on that album cover?" and then I downloaded it, and started to like it. Swervedriver and Hellshovel are not the same words, nor the same bands, in fact, I don't know anything at all about Hellshovel. However, I am glad I made this mistake because I love this Swervedriver album. Despite being released two years ago, it still sounds much of the nineties. The guitar riffs are cyclical and when the band gets psychedelic, it's always in a fuzzed out, heavy shoegaze way. I find myself having trouble describing the shoegaze albums that are on my list because much of that genre is about creating so much sound and fuzz that it all melds together to create one big impression, and then whether or not you enjoy them is based on how you deal with the impression. (Can you tell I'm dreading the My Bloody Valentine write-up down the page?) The impression created by Swervedriver is shoegaze fuzzing out in a muscle car.
Song: Lone Star
202. My Morning Jacket - The Waterfall
Year of Release: 2015
My love of this album came as something of a relief as I was starting to worry that My Morning Jacket wasn't going to release anything else that spoke to me. Evil Urges had some great songs on it, but as a whole, I found it lacking, and Circuital, same thing except the highs weren't quite as high and also I wholly associate that album with a pretty rough breakup which took place the day before my birthday. But then The Waterfall came out two years ago, and it is everything that I hoped My Morning Jacket could return to. The Waterfall doesn't have any of the synths that they have used so well in the past, but they actually aren't missed. They still can make a ruckus and they can get experimental by messing with guitar effects. The opening minute of Tropics (Erase Traces) reminds me of the opening of Wanted Dead or Alive, but with just the guitar. It took ten years but My Morning Jacket finally came back with something as much fun to listen to as It Still Moves and as impressive as Z, it was worth the wait.
Song: Spring (Among the Living)
201. My Bloody Valentine - Loveless
Year of Release: 1991
I can't really describe this album with words and do any kind of justice to what it sounds like. My Bloody Valentine's first album, Isn't Anything, is already pretty laden with effects and layering, so when the legend of the follow-up is that it took two solid years to record and that they did so in nineteen different studios during that time with a number of different engineers, you have to imagine the amount of sound that is going to be on this album. And even that information doesn't do it justice. The guitars are layered and warped and pedaled and distorted to create a kind of cyclone of sound and the vocals were recorded so many times that most songs have numerous versions of the same lyrics being sung; some are sped up, some are slowed down, and then they are all played on top of each other so that the vocals are more abstract instrument than anything you would imagine came out of humans. I literally do not know any of the words to any of these songs, whatever words I am singing along are mostly just sounds coming disjointedly out of my mouth. I suppose this description does not sound positive or like something that people would want to listen to, and there were a couple of times when I tried this album and I felt like that. But then the time you listen, and it all clicks, and you can hear what the song is hiding behind all the noise, it's so satisfying, and then you feel that satisfaction every other time you listen again because it's turned from being work to being enjoyable to the ears, it's an inside joke that you finally get. Shout-out to my dad's cousin Cal, I know this is one of his favorites.
Song: Loomer
200. Pet Shop Boys - Nightlife
Year of Release: 1999
While this album does find itself in my lower half of the Pet Shop Boys studio catalog, the first three songs of this album are all in the top ten of my most listened to songs in iTunes. My guess as to why this is would be that when I made it to this point in my exploration of the Pet Shop Boys discography, I was reaching the end of my time working at the pet food distribution company, and I was pretty much checked out mentally. I worked at night, so my entire week was generally just work, getting to and from work, and then sleeping, which meant that most of my cultural mental input was from music. It was the only thing that I could always do, I could tune out the boringness of the job and listen to some tunes, and this album definitely has some great tunes. Actually now that I'm looking at it, all of the songs in the top ten are from albums I was listening to during this period. Weird. This album is full of tracks that were written for the Pet Shop Boys penned musical Closer to Heaven so you would expect it to be overly theatrical, but the Pet Shop Boys are already pretty theatrical in general so the result is just your run of the mill, awesome Pet Shop Boys album. This album has two of the best named songs ever: I Don't Know What You Want But I Can't Give It Anymore and You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You're Drunk. Radiophonic and For Your Own Good are two of the most banging of the many bangers in the Pet Shop Boys repertoire. Add in the duet with Kylie Minogue (pre-comeback) and you have a great album.
Song: For Your Own Good
199. Washed Out - Life of Leisure
Year of Release: 2009
Life of Leisure is a six-track EP that was released in 2009, two years prior to Washed Out's full length debut, and it contains his best work. All six songs are great. The best known is most likely Feel It All Around because it is the opening theme song for Portlandia. The whole album is awash with sunny electronics and reverb and all kinds of vocal effects. The vocals on this album are kind of the anchor, in that they stay relatively monotone and sedated while the guitar, bass, and synth drums skip around. Kind of like if a recently reanimated skeleton was singing in front of a bunch of possessed instruments on a beach. This is a short album so it's going to get a short review, but its brevity does not limit its greatness. This is a chillwave classic.
Song: Hold Out
198. White Rabbits - Milk Famous
Year of Release: 2012
I love the guitar on this album. On opener Heavy Metal, the main force of the song is a repeated keyboard sample, the guitar just appears randomly and when it does it jerks into focus and then disappears again just as quickly. It churns endlessly on the next track I'm Not Me. Then it strolls lazily throughout Hold It To The Fire, as if the guitar itself were high. The guitar on this album takes many different forms and each one is perfect for the song, sometimes the supplement, sometimes the main focus. Milk Famous is full of super catchy, slightly dark indie rock songs, it was a big time, pizza delivery listen in the ole Sebring. I have no idea what happened to this band, they kind of disappeared after this album. I heard that their drummer works for The A.V. Club, which does not particularly portend well for more music, but here's hoping because Milk Famous is a good one. Like if Spoon was more focused, with a smoother sounding singer. (No hate to Spoon, they're on here, too)
Song: Back For More
197. Chastity Belt - Time To Go Home
Year of Release: 2015
This Chastity Belt album sounds like it was created during the grunge era of the nineties but by a bunch of millennial chicks with graduate degrees from the greater Seattle area. What this means is dude grunge with feminist lyrics. Most of the time when I am listening to lady rock, it is more of the super intense girl rawk variety, but Chastity Belt doesn't feel the need to speed things up if they don't want to (and even when they do want to, they still don't go that quickly). The leisurely pace matches the general air of exasperated futility in singer Julia Shapiro's voice. The bridge of album opener, Drone probably explains this best, during which Shapiro repeats the phrase "He was just another man, trying to teach me something." This resignation towards the assumed superiority of males in our culture permeates the struggle in every song on this album, as well as a resignation towards never dealing with anything. On that same track she sings "I never expect much from anyone, so I'm never disappointed, and I never have to trust." It's just like, what's the point of opening yourself up to anyone since it will always end in the same betrayal? I've seen these chicks twice, and both times were awesome, although the last time was the same night as the Cavs winning the NBA Finals, so that part wasn't so great.
Song: Joke
196. Daft Punk - Tron: Legacy
Year of Release: 2010
People have really strong feelings about Tron: Legacy, the 2010 sequel to the 80's Disney classic. I don't know where all the hate is generated for it, I think it is a fine movie, but even if I didn't enjoy the plot or the special effects, I would still enjoy that film because it is basically an hour and a half music video for the score that Daft Punk created with composer Joseph Trapanese and performed with an 85 piece orchestra. The resulting work is barely what you would expect a Daft Punk album to be. After seven years of watching this film and of listening to this album, I have a hard time differentiating between the film and the score anymore. The first track, The Grid features Jeff Bridges's opening monologue from the movie, explaining the setting of the film before the keyboards explode in an electronic unveiling over the orchestra. Son of Flynn is a pitter-patter of synthesizers that allows for the series to introduce its new protagonist. Recognizer is the first track from after Sam enters the grid, and it is as sinister and foreboding as this mystery world. Arena sounds like the open of a video game, which is apropos since Sam is being thrown into The Games, a life or death gladiator like affair, with no idea what is going on. This is before even getting to the heartbreaking agony of Adagio for Tron, the beautiful centerpiece of the score, all orchestral strings and pain behind the sacrifice that Tron makes to save Flynn from CLU. For real, this movie is awesome, go see it.
Song: Adagio for Tron
195. The B-52's - Whammy!
Year of Release: 1983
When I got into the first B-52's album, I thought it was great, but for some reason I subconsciously filed it away as a one-off great album from a band that appeared to be goofy. This assumption, I suppose, relied on the fact that Love Shack is such a goofball song. But I'm an idiot, and it turns out that there's actually a large bit of music in the B-52's collection between their debut and their swan song album, Cosmic Thing. The way I was led to see the error of my ways is the same way I have been introduced to so many things, and that is through American Dad. The opening track off this album, Legal Tender, was used in an episode of my favorite adult animated television show and I Shazamed it, and here we are. Whammy! is a much tighter album than the two that preceded it, and every song on here is great. Songs For a Future Generation features all five members of the band on lead vocals, singing about a bunch of crazy mythical creatures (daughter of Dracula, son of Frankenstein, the empress of Fashion, etc.) procreating to populate a future Earth. My two favorite tracks on this album are Whammy Kiss and Trism. They both have great guitar in them from Ricky Wilson, the constant sonic leader of the band before he died. RIP Ricky Wilson, too soon, too soon.
Song: Trism
194. Toro Y Moi - Causers of This
Year of Release: 2010
Finally we reach my favorite member of the chillwave crew that took over my musical life for the better part of a year, Toro Y Moi aka Chaz Bundick (Editor's Note June '18: aka Chaz Bear). Them good ole Zoo days. This is his first album, back before he started using actual instruments and everything was sampled. All of Toro Y Moi's music is pretty breezy, but that is especially so on his first two releases. The samples are often distorted so that they sound like waves crashing on a beach, a musical beach that is. While chillwave acts are often lumped together, I have found that there are sub-genres among the genre that most of its occupants deny even exists. Neon Indian is chillwave but as an 80's new-wave band. Washed Out is chillwave, but downtempo, perfect for winding down. But Toro Y Moi is always upbeat and is always funky. Toro Y Moi is here to make you dance but not in the body thrashing way that Neon Indian wants, no he wants you to dance like a nerd, use small leg motions, sway from side to side, don't mess with the person swaying next to you. There's no harm here. Just a bunch of nerds, listening to this awesome debut album from the best product of the 2010-2012 chillwave movement.
Song: Imprint After
193. Sky Ferreira - Night Time, My Time
Year of Release: 2013
Good pop music is the best. You just have to go looking for it. Similar to how even bad Chicago pizza is still good pizza overall, bad pop songs are usually still pretty catchy, so they still get radio play. Thus we end up with a lot of bad pop music both tarnishing our airwaves with their suck and tarnishing the reputation of pop music in general. But then every year a couple of great pop records are released and sometimes we end up with a perfect pop masterpiece, like the debut full-length from Sky Ferreira. If you can't tell from the cover, this is an album filled with exposed, raw emotion. Ferreira bares her soul over slick 80's style production and even slicker, while also being grungier, 90's influenced sound. Ferreira is successful because the music is great, her voice is strong, and her lyrics expose a self-consciousness in respect to her public image as well as her love life. Every song on this album is powerful and upbeat, until you get to the closing title song, in which everything gets pretty dark and murky, a final step into the abyss that she has been upbeat against for the rest of the album leading up to it.
Song: You're Not the One
192. Chevelle - This Type of Thinking (Could Do Us In)
Year of Release: 2004
The main reason that I started on this little endeavor of ranking was that I wanted to explore the music that has been the soundtrack for the last twenty nine years of my life, especially if there was a chance to rekindle a love of any albums that I hadn't forgotten, per say, but just hadn't gotten around to listening to in a while. This definitely will be the case with this Chevelle album. I was listening to it last week while I was on a long walk, and I found myself struck more and more by how impressed I was with High School Jeremy for his taste in music. Chevelle sounds like Tool, which isn't particularly surprising since they toured with Tool immediately before recording this album. Chevelle manages to find the perfect balance between a series of overplayed staples from the kind of loud boy music that I listened to in high school. They use screaming not as a crutch but as an accent, adding flavor to the more melodic vocals. They are extremely aggressive in sonic presence but also can get quiet and melodic. This album fills me with adolescent nostalgia, and it is definitely going to get more spins in the ole jukebox after I'm done with this project.
Song: Another Know It All
Oh my! We are already more than a third of the way through this list and it has gotten extremely difficult to start parsing these albums out in pockets of sixteens and seventeens. They're all so good! Well on to the next set, I'll see all you homies next week, same time, same place. Well, maybe not same time. Similar time, same place.
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