Jeremy's 300 All-Time Favorite Albums: Nos. 157 to 141
- petsch6787
- Apr 6, 2017
- 18 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. 174-158 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
Welcome one, welcome all! My intro for this week is simply the first line spoken by Michael Showalter in this clip: The Line. Just the first line, though, any disconcerting language after that I shall not bear responsibility.
157. Gnarls Barkley - The Odd Couple
Year of Release: 2008
Gnarls Barkley is the collaboration between singer and all around strange fellow, CeeLo Green, and producer and all around pimp extraordinaire, Danger Mouse. Danger Mouse makes four different appearances on this list, both as a collaborator and as a producer, but I actually think this is his first showing so far. That should say something about the quality of his work that his lowest spot of his contributions to my favorite albums comes in at 157. The Odd Couple is the second album from the duo and was released pretty quickly on the heels of their debut album. The Odd Couple is a bit spottier than St. Elsewhere was, but the best songs on this album trump the best on the other. Who's Gonna Save My Soul is a heart-wrenching, soul ballad chronicling the mental process of someone who has just been dumped, ranging from responses that are reasonable “All I have is the memory, yet I never start to wonder, was it possible you were hurting worse than me” to the understandable self-centered immediate follow-up line “Still my hunger turns to greed, ‘Cuz what about what I need?!?”. CeeLo’s voice stretches like a cartoon character, fitting into whatever beat Danger Mouse lays down for him, but Green still maintains humanity in each song, allowing the listener to relate with the anguish behind each tune.
Song: Who’s Gonna Save My Soul
156. Portishead – Dummy
Year of Release: 1994
I actually heard about this band for the first time in Nickelodeon Magazine when I was a little kid. They were featured in a thing about how bands with weird names had gotten those monikers (for Portishead, it is the name of a town near where the band is from). The second time I heard about Portishead was way, way later when I was in college and taking a class about Horror Movies (part of an aborted Cinema Studies minor), and we were watching a film called Nadja about Dracula's lesbian daughter which features Roads and Strangers from this Portishead album, and when my professor pointed out who made the music, I went home and downloaded this album (or bought it on CD, I can't remember which came first) and loved it. Dummy is regularly credited as the album that brought the Trip Hop genre to some popularity (well, also the first Massive Attack album), and it's hard not to hear Portishead in every single trip hop album that came after because they personified the genre so well. They use jazz samples that sound like they are being played off of vinyl as the background and Beth Gibbons's voice is the forefront, the voice guiding you through the old movie, all of Portishead's songs exist on a plane where the existence of some small funky groove is the constant flowing from one song to the next.
Song: Pedestal
155. Pet Shop Boys - Bilingual
Year of Release: 1996
While going upon my personal chronological exploration of Pet Shop Boys discography, I found myself enjoying their albums from the latter half of the nineties and the first half of the aughts the least. As such, it makes sense that, with Bilingual making its appearance here, all of their albums from 1996 through 2006 have all made the list and none of their other albums (except last year's Super, but that album is less than a year old) have made appearances yet (but they will, oh they all will!). Bilingual took the style of the slickly produced Very and added some Latin flair to it, with the tone of the album influenced by dance music from south of the border, and with Neil Tennant mixing in some Spanish and Portuguese into his lyrics. The first half of the album is a straight-up latin dance sensation, with the two opening tracks, Discoteca and Single, creating one eight minute long dance track before Metamorphosis, an upbeat exploration of coming to grips with one's homosexuality. This song is Tennant's sexual explanation point, guaranteeing no one would need to ask him of his sexual preference again. This is followed by Electricity, a slinky number dripping in sex, claiming to be "the greatest show with the best effects since Disco-Tex and the Sex-o-Lettes," a flamboyant novelty disco act from the seventies. This song also uses a bunch of computer-esque synth noises in the background, the same sorts of sounds would populate the background of most of the computer central pop music of the early aughts. The only thing that knocks this album down to 155 for me is that there is some spottiness with second single Se a Vida é (That's the Way Life Is), which is a good song but seems out of place with it's crazy sunniness, and since the first half of the album is super dance track heavy, the second half has more ballads than necessary. Still, though, in the slow portion of the album there is Before, an ageless Pet Shop Boys dance song that could have been on any album.
Song: Electricity
154. The Lonely Island - The Wack Album
Year of Release: 2013
I got really into this album in 2014 when I was sleepwalking through a mind-numbing routine of work-sleep-work and I needed some comedy. The Lonely Island's third album makes me laugh from start to finish. They find a way to make actual smart humor disguised as simple potty jokes. Dramatic Intro gives a fake history of the band (they win a Grammy, then a Noble Peace Prize, then are elected President as a band, then are beat to death with their own dicks, etc.), Go Kindergarten riffs on the insistent nature of techno singers, Diaper Money is about getting old (the chorus: I got that diaper money, I'm a grown ass man), Spell It Out is a minute long song with Andy Samberg spelling the whole time (and the thing he spells is super gross if you write the whole thing down), Spring Break Anthem was a riff on how outrageous it was that the rape culture of Spring Break was acceptable at a time when marriage between two loving dudes was not, I Run NY is a profanity laced boast rap from a fictional mayor of New York City, and Meet the Crew is a two minute intro track, first introducing the three actual members of the group before proceeding to introduce something like twenty fake members of the group. This is before getting to the final three tracks which are the pinnacle (other than Diaper Money, that song is my jam) of the album. There's We Need Love, the romance-centric fourth entry in the deadpan Just 2 Guys saga, and closer Perfect Saturday, which tells the story of farts gone wrong, over a beat that would do Nate Dogg justice (RIP Nate Dogg). But my favorite song on this album is The Compliments, a simple rap track of each of the three dudes paying one of the others a series of compliments. Just a funny, funny album from some really funny dudes.
Song: We Need Love
153. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Howl
Year of Release: 2005
Howl has the distinction of being the only album that I ever purchased that had been cursed with the short-lived greedy record companies' attempt at preventing listeners from burning music from CD's onto their computers (so short sighted). When I got the album for Christmas, my freshman year of college, I plugged it into my computer to back it up, as I do with all of my music, and the songs kept burning all jumping around and scrambled because RCA had copy protected the album. The band got pissed off because they thought it was bullshit, like all of the fans, and they posted a workaround on their website. Good thing because I would have been bummed to not have this CD on my computer. Howl is a big departure from the garage rock of BRMC's first two albums, instead centering on a cleaner folksy blues rock sound with a thematic focus on religion. The songs that shine on this album are the ones without any drums, focusing only on the sullen sound of the acoustic guitar and the voice of doubt and insecurity singing over, especially Fault Line and Restless Sinner "He's the reason why you came, and the reason why you ought to go". When I was a Junior in college, I called in to WPGU and won tickets to go see BRMC at Canopy Club and that concert was the first date I ever went on with Lisa. The history of it all.
Song: Restless Sinner
152. Tenacious D - Tenacious D
Year of Release: 2001
I checked yesterday, and this Tenacious D album is the final "created to be funny" album on my list, so I suppose it wins the title of Jeremy's Favorite Funny Album. But the thing that sets Tenacious D apart from their peers is that their version of Hard Rocking Metal is actually pretty good (same goes for Lonely Island and the rap beats that they use), and this is because the backing band on this album is full of actual skilled musicians including members of The Vandals, Phish, and Redd Kross, as well as Dave Grohl on drums and guitar. This is not to sell Jack Black and Kyle Gass short, Black has a terrific vocal range and Gass is a classically trained guitar player, but it helps to have some dudes that are well experienced at rocking to back you up. This is before even getting to how freaking funny this album is. The debut slate is full of tracks that the duo had been working on since the days of yore (the nineties) including the well known Tribute, Wonderboy, and Fuck Her Gently, but it is also full of skits (hit or miss), lots of other great songs, like Friendship, which ends with the line "As long as there's a record deal, we'll always be friends," and also a bunch of tongue in cheek worshippings of Satan (as to assimilate with the general Heavy Metal crowd). Perhaps the line that best sums up this album is the opening lines from Karate which exemplifies both the superb expertise of Black's profanity but also the randomness of the humor, it begins "With Karate I'll kick your ass, from here to Tiananmen Square. Oh yeah, motherfucker, I'm gonna kick your fucking derriere, yeah-e-yeah."
Song: Karate
151. Pet Shop Boys - Elysium
Year of Release: 2012
It took twelve studio releases before Pet Shop Boys put out an album that I wasn't immediately on board with. Elysium was sandwiched in between the return-to-form album, Yes, and the return-to-the-dancefloor album Electric, and it couldn't be more different from the two. Yes is very similar to Very: it has lots of full instrumentation backing Neil Tennant's singing, while Electric is entirely EDM-tinged dance tracks, most similar to their DIsco remix albums, but Elysium is quiet and gentle, most similar to Behaviour. I imagine that this is why they released it so close to Electric, just to cover their bases, if you weren't into the slower Elysium, you could always just switch to the mad beats of Electric. Mad beats are probably what I was expecting when I first gave this album a spin, and I was definitely disappointed with what I heard instead, but then one morning as the sun was rising, I took a walk to Montrose Beach (as I sometimes do during the warm months), and I had an epiphany moment with this album. It all clicked for me that morning and I understood the anguish of realizing you've become a background figure in Invisible, and the cheeky jab at "artistes" on Ego Music, their exasperation with explaining why they still make music on Your Early Stuff. While Elysium is mostly devoid of any breakneck dance beats (even when tracks like A Face Like That and Requiem in Denim and Leopardskin lean towards the dancefloor, they still do so with a leisure not found on their adjacent releases), repeated listens revealed an album to me that I love for different reasons than the rest of the PSB catalog. Reasons that were only revealed to me that morning, on my way to the beach.
Song: Invisible
(Technically this is the exact middle of this list, the space occupied between two keyboard heavy British bands)
150. Squeeze - Singles: 45's and Under
Year of Release: 1982
Way, way back in my first entry into this list, I told the tale of how at one point my primary mode of transportation was a minivan with no heat and a busted CD player, resulting in me listening to three cassettes on my drives to and from Champaign. One of those tapes was the aforementioned War by U2 (entry number 299 on this list), the second of those tapes will not yet be revealed (not in this week's post anyway) , and the third was this early singles compilation by Squeeze. Squeeze is the band that my parents have seen live the most times, and as such, they received pretty heavy airplay in my home as I was growing up, specifically this collection of singles from their first five albums. Now, some might say that putting a compilations album on a ranking list such as this would be a cheat, and I suppose they would have a point, but my rebuttal to these hypothetical people is that I don't care. And also that they aren't real, and this list has zero stakes, so I make the rules. Also, the versions of the songs on this album are generally superior to the album versions, which kind of baffles me, why would you put inferior versions of your songs on your albums? Weird. But anyway, this album is full of great new wave tunes. Squeeze can vary from being uber-weird (Take Me I'm Yours, my favorite song on the album) to fairly straight forward early eighties version of rock (If I Didn't Love You or Black Coffee in Bed). Another album that has been around for every second of my life.
Song: Take Me I'm Yours
149. Jimmy Eat World - Futures
Year of Release: 2004
Rare is the band who gets extremely popular and then follows it up by releasing a much heavier album, but Jimmy Eat World is in that rarefied air. After they got super popular with The Middle (probably the catchiest song they have ever released), they followed it up with Futures, an album definitely descendant of Bleed American, but much darker. Gone was the wistful, sad melancholy of the last album, replaced by anger and grit, by tense muscles. The album starts off with the one-two punch of the title song and Just Tonight, followed by the slower Work, a song admonishing someone for their version of a relationship, and Kill, a song about wanting to leave because you know it's unhealthy but you can't help it. Pain, the lead single, is about taking pills to take away the pain of a suddenly emotionally distant relationship. My favorite line from the album is from the chorus of Just Tonight, "We'll never be the same, never feel this way again, I'd give you anything but you want pain, A little water please, I taste you all over my teeth, Never again. Just tonight? Ok." It's about getting into that brutal fight that is probably going to kill the relationship, but you might as well just forget about it for that one last night.
Song: Just Tonight
148. Spoon - Gimme Fiction
Year of Release: 2005
Generally, when I reminisce about the second half of my freshman year of college, those memories are set to a score composed from this album. This was the first Spoon album I had ever heard, in fact I think I asked for it for Christmas without even listening to it first, but it worked out because it's one of my favorite Indie Rock albums. I actually can't really explain this album very well because I have a hard time explaining to myself why I like some Spoon albums and others I am just completely bored by. For instance, the album they released after this one, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, was released to humongous critical fanfare, and I couldn't get into it at all (except for The Ghost of You Lingers, that song is great), and my favorite Spoon album, Transference, is generally written off by Spoon fans and critics alike as the ugly duckling of their output. I don't get it. But the songs on this album are all pretty amazing, the first two tracks are pretty straight forward rockers, with weird lyrics about queens swordfighting and dragons and stuff. I Turn My Camera on stutters and stops on a bass line, as Britt Daniel sings in falsetto, My Mathematical Mind has a piano line so good that Daniel recycled it in the phone ringing scene in Stranger than Fiction. The centerpiece of the album is the stunningly, beautiful I Summon You, sung over quickly strumming acoustic guitar. Used to listen to this album a lot when I was washing dishes at Late Night.
Song: I Summon You
147. 30 Seconds to Mars - 30 Seconds to Mars
Year of Release: 2002
Jared Leto joins the very short list of actors who decide to be the front person of a band and the music isn't complete garbage. In fact, that list is only Jared Leto, and maybe Jason Schwartzman, but he wasn't really the frontman of Phantom Planet, so I'm going to stick with just Leto. When this album came out, he was mostly known for having been on My So Called Life, having his face destroyed in Fight Club, and losing his arm to heroin in Requiem for a Dream, so when he shifted his focus to music, pretty much no one cared. But this debut album is actually pretty great. Listening to it this week, I was struck by how similar a lot of these songs sounded like Tool (quite like Chevelle), but Leto always had one foot in the "marveling at the mystery of Space" camp. But, famous actor aside, this album is really solid, and I still know every word to every song, fifteen years after its release. I've actually seen 30 Seconds to Mars twice, once because I went to go see them at Assembly Hall (now State Farm Center) with this chica Tracy that I used to date way back in the first year of high school, and once because I went to the Q101 Block Party the day before I graduated high school to see Interpol, and after Interpol finished and I was leaving, I happened to notice that this band that I liked was just starting on the side stage, and Me, Rick, and Sam (my girlfriend at the time) stayed and watched 30 Seconds to Mars on my last day as a high schooler.
Song: Edge of the Earth
146. M.I.A. - Kala
Year of Release: 2007
This is another one of those albums that when I heard for the first time, I reacted "Wow, music can sound like this?". I'd never heard anyone use the kinds of beats and sound effects that M.I.A. uses on this album, such as the rooster crows on Bird Flu. And I will admit that the first song that I ever heard of this album was Paper Planes, just like everyone else, but I heard that song playing on WPGU during my sophomore year, and got this album a solid nine months before Pineapple Express came out, so I'm calling playa dibs on that one. The biggest influence on this album is world music, for sure, and it plays out in lots of interesting ways, like featuring The Wilcannia Mob (a group of preteen Aboriginal Australians) on Mango Pickle Down River or the urumee drums on Boyz. When I came back from summer break between Junior and Senior years, the first night I was back, I met the crew over at Kaitlynn and Claire's place and we walked one-hundred feet to a house party, and when I walked in, Bird Flu was playing, and I thought to myself, "Wow, I really fit in with the people that I go to this school with." Been a damn long time since I felt that way, or since I've asked someone if they knew a new band and wasn't met with a No.
Song: Boyz
145. Bloc Party - Intimacy
Year of Release: 2008
Bloc Party showed that they might be interested in electronic music on the album before this, A Weekend in the City, but that interest turned into a full fledged desire on this album, with electronics featuring much more heavily and foreshadowing the solo career singer Kele Okereke would have on the side (all electronic). The lyrical content is themed around the title of the album (relationships, breakups, etc.), but the driving force on Intimacy is the same as it is on every Bloc Party album: Russell Lissack's guitar and Matt Tong's drums (which I imagine is why I found their most recent album, Hymns, super boring, as it is the first one without Tong, and it misses his frenetic energy). Lissack's guitar sets the mood of every song, whether it's pummeling you at the open of Halo, setting the scene as the gentle background to Okereke's epiphany at the beginning of Biko, or run through distortion pedals and emerging as a crunch monster on Trojan Horse. I have this album on CD, and the CD version came with extra tracks Letter to my Son, You're Visits Getting Shorter, and Flux, and all three of those songs are solid additions to the original playlist. Also, I love the cover art for this album.
Song: Better Than Heaven
144. Grizzly Bear - Yellow House
Year of Release: 2006
This is Grizzly Bear's first album as an actual band, expanding from being just the solo moniker of singer Ed Droste. The sound expanded as well from the "DIY hushed secret told in a dirty shack" style of Horn of Plenty to the much more lush expanse on this album, still on the quiet side but Yellow House can get plenty loud when you let it work itself up. Also, the guys that joined the band were no slouches, Christopher Bear played some drums on Horn of Plenty and he returned for this album, but Daniel Rossen adds a second songwriter, guitarist, and creative force and bassist Chris Taylor is a multi-instrumentalist, also contributing clarinet, flute, saxophone, and various electronics/keyboard stuff. All of these things add together to create a stirring album full of interesting sounds. In college, I had a hard time focusing to study for exams so I would sequester myself in a library and cram overnight, and Yellow House was one of my best study aids. The last week, it has been pretty much raining non-stop, and that is the perfect backdrop for this album.
Song: On a Neck, On a Spit
143. Franz Ferdinand - Franz Ferdinand
Year of Release: 2004
If ever an album represented the music scene of the year it came out, that album would be Franz Ferdinand's debut. 2004 was the home of punchy indie rock for folks to dance to, and Franz Ferdinand was right there at the forefront with Take Me Out playing every five minutes on every radio station. I originally got into this band because during my junior year in high school, I would watch music videos in the morning on MTV2 before my ride showed up, and the (awesome) video for Take Me Out was on, frequently, and it stuck with me. None of the songs on this album are too serious (Darts of Pleasure has the lyric "you won't feel my lips undress your eyes"), but they all make you want to stand up out of your seat and dance. I got this CD during the summer between Junior and Senior year and also on the same day that I went to go see No Doubt and Blink-182 play together at Tweeter. It was awesome. Best concert ever.
Song: This Fire
142. Pinback - Autumn of the Seraphs
Year of Release: 2007
This is not my favorite Pinback album, but it is darn close. Autumn of the Seraphs followed up Summer In Abbadon by expanding on the sound that made that album so successful. This sound is led by Rob Crow's mumbley vocals (although this album is probably him at his clearest, until his most recent solo album) and the simple math-rock instrumentation that the band is known for: simple drums, the guitars and bass following simple repeating patterns, the occasional keyboard beat providing some texture. Every song on this album is great, and with Crow's voice a bit more understandable, the cleverness of the lyrics can stand out, such as the story of the man floating through the sky on a lawn chair tied to balloons in Walters, or the switcheroo of Good To Sea, "It's good to see you, it's good to see you go". Blue Harvest is my favorite song of the album and is named after the coded working title of Empire Strikes Back. I'm not sure what the new solo career for Crow means for the future of Pinback, but I hope the revitalized nature of that solo venture can translate itself over to a new awesome Pinback album. All we can do these days is hope.
Song: Devil You Know
141. The Shins - Oh, Inverted World
Year of Release: 2001
While not the only possible outcome, we have seen many times a band release a well-received debut album and then follow it up with a lackluster second album. It happens for a variety of reasons, most notably the "you have a lifetime to write a debut and only a year to do the follow-up" reason, which I agree with, but I think that there is another less mentioned effect: when a band gets big, the songwriter may have gotten their validation. When you aren't successful, you have so much to pull from (frustration, insecurity, hunger) and once people start telling you that they like what you are doing, a lot of those emotions can fall away, leaving a writer with a dry well. Obviously this is great for the mental health of that songwriter, but it can be a death knell for the band that was expressing those negative emotions in the first place. I bring this up because when I listen to any James Mercer's work after Chutes Too Narrow and compare to this album (The Shins' debut), I can feel that lack of anything interesting to write about. Oh, Inverted World is full of fanciful flourishes (like a backwards audio clip of running water) that never made their way back into The Shins repertoire, and Mercer's voice sounds raw but also full of emotion, something I cannot say for anything since. I got this album for Christmas one year, and I remember riding home from my aunt and uncle's house in the back of my dad's minivan, listening to it for the first time. It was an indie-rock eye opening. This album is so good that Natalie Portman recommended it to a dude that she just met in a doctor's office lobby after a seeing-eye dog humped his leg. Can't say that about every band.
Song: Weird Divide
Wow, we have reached the Old side of the halfway point. The weeks are dwindling! A new decade of my life approaches (although, I guess technically I've already started my third decade, but I'm being dramatic here). These albums have gotten really hard to rank at this point, everything is so good. This leads me to believe we might start seeing some Beatles albums popping up pretty soon. Hold on to your hats, and I'll see you next time!
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