Jeremy's 300 All-Time Favorite Albums: Nos. 26 to 11
- petsch6787
- Jun 5, 2017
- 19 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. 157-141 Nos. 140-124 Nos. 123-107 Nos. 106-91 Nos. 90-75 Nos. 74-59 Nos. 58-43 Nos. 42-27 Nos. 10-01
Welcome back! What's happened this week? Well, some dumbass decided to pull us out of the Paris Accord, against the desires of everyone besides Paul Ryan. And also, the Warriors beat the stuffing out of the Cavs in game One and Two of the finals. So some good, some bad. Anyway, let's get this show on the road, here is the second to last of these posts, let's do it!!!!
26. The Beatles - Please Please Me
Year of Release: 1963
When I was growing up The Beatles were always a part of our lives, but mainly through secondary resources like the radio or on TV shows, it wasn't until I went to college that I started listening to the band on an album by album basis. However, the exception to that rule was The Beatles' first album, Please Please Me, because it was the only one that any of us had on CD (my mother owned it) until 1 came out, so this album is sort of The Beatles that I grew up with. However, nostalgia only gets you so far on this list, and the reason that Please Please Me made it all the way up to No. 26 (and is also the third highest Beatles entry) is because this is a really great album. The songs are simple in their composition, but Lennon and McCartney's songwriting is already great at this point. This album has great upbeat songs like I Saw Her Standing There, the Ringo led Boys (this song really stuck with me after I got Beatles Rock Band as it was one of the playable songs on there), Love Me Do, and the Ferris Bueller sexual revolution that is Twist and Shout. This album also has lots of great slow songs like Anna (Go to Him), the title track, and the Harrison sung Do You Want to Know a Secret. This is the album that launched the most important band in the history of rock and roll, and yet still remains extremely listenable a solid fifty three years after its release.
Song: Please Please Me
25. Air - Virgin Suicides
Year of Release: 2000
This album is the score from Sophia Coppola's first movie The Virgin Suicides, created by Air. Air seems to fluctuate between making albums that sound like movie scores and albums that sound like proper albums (not that a difference needs to be made between the two, just that Air themselves make that difference when it comes to their discography), and, while there have been a couple of duds in the proper album department, every time Air ditches that format and just makes instrumental scores, it's always a knock out of the park. This release is the pinnacle of Air's soundtrack abilities. Air morphs the lush electronic music from their debut into a creepier offshoot on this album. After you get past the opening acoustic version of the film's theme, the listener gets dropped right into a strange pulsing siren synth on Clouds Up before the creepy keyboard line shows up, giving the aural sensation of the strange atmosphere the movie takes place in. The rest of the album follows this song's path, lots of creepy synthesizers, sometimes a crazy french guitar solo will show up. On The Word 'Hurricane', Air starts with a groovy bass line, some slow drum beats, and some heavenly choir Aahs, before they feed in an educational film's audio from the movie describing how high pressure and low pressure masses mix to create the title storm, while in the background you can here Kirsten Dunst and Josh Hartnett making out, their characters from the film being the two different masses and their connection leaving a hole in both of them that results in his getting addicted to drugs later in life and her committing suicide by the end of the film. The star of this album is Dirty Trip, it's slinky and dark, lots of soft percussion, everything one loves about an Air song.
Song: Dirty Trip
24. Clinic - Walking With Thee
Year of Release: 2002
This album was a gateway drug for me into the world of weird music. After my parents split, my mom lived at her friend Jen's house for a bit, and there I often watched MTV2, because at the time that was the only place you could find music videos. The video for the title song on this Clinic album made frequent appearances on MTV2 at that time, and also is super, super weird. I mean the song is awesome, but the video is of a Barbie trying to buy shoes over the phone, and a Ken trying to hook up with her. But that song got me hooked and I got this album, and what I found was a type of music I'd never heard before. Mixed into this album are lots of little punk rock tidbits, but mostly the album's sound is dominated by strange keyboards, a melodica, a clarinet, and a flute. Sometimes the guitars get crunchy, like on the title track or the flat out punk song Pet Eunuch, but most of the album trades in melody. The opening notes of opener Harmony sound like the intro to ER, with heartbeat synthesizers setting the backbone. Mr. Moonlight is a slow-paced jazzy piece centering around the woodwinds (or maybe the melodica, it's hard to tell them apart on this album). Come Into Our Room starts with a beat similar to the ER one on Harmony, but stays upbeat for the whole track while the rest of the instruments and the vocals are almost whispered around it. The album closes with the near lullaby, For the Wars, full of soft snare hits, a keyboard set to something close to a xylophone setting, and singer Ade Blackburn softly serenading us to sleep before a beautiful clarinet solo leads us to the end.
Song: Come Into Our Room
23. Sparta - Wiretap Scars
Year of Release: 2002
My discovery of this album is almost identical to the story I just told about Clinic, actually it is identical, I heard Cut Your Ribbon on MTV2 at Jen's, and then my grandmother got me this album for Christmas. This was just the beginning because from this album, I worked backwards towards At the Drive-In and then outward to Mars Volta (Sparta and Mars Volta were created from the remnants of At the Drive-In). This first Sparta album will always be my favorite of all of the works of that group of people, and as I've grown up, I realize it's because my favorite member of At the Drive-In is Jim Ward, kind of like how you realize which Beatle is your fave (mine's McCartney), and Sparta is his band. They maintain a more steady line from At the Drive In continuing the original band's post-hardcore sound, but Ward also takes songs off from the power to slow things down. Cut Your Ribbon starts the album off with a bang, but the second track, Air, is by far the gentlest song on the album, almost as if by another band. On this song, Ward's voice is small, barely rising above the keyboard, but for most of the album Ward's voice fluctuates from a simple yell to a throat shredding scream. This album came at just the right time in my life, I was a young teenage boy, filled with young teenage boy angst. I was open to the weight of the choruses in Sans Cosm, but also to the softer guitar intro on the next song, Light Burns Clear. My favorite track on the album has always been Rx Coup, with it's chorus "This tunnel vision breaks my mind, dark days leave this world behind." Also, Wiretap Scars features my favorite closing song, Assemble the Empire. The whole track is propelled by Ward's whirling guitar, and it ends with him pleading in an all out scream, "Slow Down!"
Song: Rx Coup
22. Orgy - Candyass
Year of Release: 1998
There was an extended period of my life when I considered this album to be my No. 1 favorite album, but things change, and now it's at No. 22 (which is still pretty damn good, nothing to shake a stick at). My first exposure to Orgy was on TRL when their cover of New Order's Blue Monday got super popular. This was the first burned album I ever had, it was made for me by my childhood friend Kevin Lavazza and since there was extra space on the disc, that first copy also had four Eminem songs and two Outkast songs on it after Candyass's length ended (this is why I still, to this day, know every word of both Bombs Over Baghdad and So Fresh, So Clean). Candyass is a very crunchy album, the guitars are very thick, and there are lots of crunchy robot noises. Sort of like a zombie goth industrial kind of thing. The sound maintains for the whole album, but it's a sound that worked for young Jeremy, and it still works for old Jeremy. I am pretty sure that this is the album I have listened to the most times in my life. Trying to write description of this album is giving me writer's block and I've basically just spent the last thirty minutes in front of my computer, not typing, singing along to this album, so let's just leave it at that.
Song: Pantomime
21. Deftones - Koi No Yokan
Year of Release: 2012
Koi No Yokan and its predecessor, Diamond Eyes, are by far the two loudest, most powerful albums of the Deftones discography, and they also happen to be my favorite two of the band's albums. Koi No Yokan is a slight (very slight) ease off the throttle from Diamond Eyes, with just a bit more focus on the atmospherics that became the main focus of their most recent release, Gore. As on so much of their material, the guiding light for me on this album is Stephen Carpenter's guitar, it is pummeling throughout, setting the pace for each song, always standing out through the noise, sometimes becoming a drone like during the bridges on Leathers. Carpenter's guitar is so interesting to me that I often find myself singing the notes along with it, mentally relegating singer Chino Moreno's vocals as the rhythm, this is especially so during the choruses on Poltergeist or on the intro to Graphic Nature, when he opens the song with a siren call. Abe Cunningham's drums are also amazing per usual, he drums like he's attacking those things, keeping rhythm with snares but rambling around with the rest of his kit, a constant presence in every song. The quiet moments on this album shine as well, mostly due to the keyboards and atmospherics from Frank Delgado, giving a warm feeling to the album, which is fitting since the album's title is a Japanese term for the feeling when you know you are about to fall in love. All in all, my second favorite album by my second favorite band.
Song: Poltergeist
20. The Beatles - Magical Mystery Tour
Year of Release: 1967
Magical Mystery Tour is the first Beatles album that I started listening to on my own, I downloaded it some time during my sophomore year at Illinois. The first half of the album is made up of songs that were created for the "Beatles in a bus" film of the same name, and the second half is filled up of singles that were recorded and released at the time, but didn't have an album to call home. You would think that this haphazard assembly would leave this album feeling pieced together, but everything blends smoothly. The self titled opener is a raucous intro similar to the intro on Sgt. Pepper's, and it leads into the absolutely beautiful McCartney piano ballad, Fool on the Hill. Next is the smooth instrumental Flying, one of the few songs where all four band members are credited as writers. This is followed by Blue Jay Way, definitely the creepiest Harrison Beatles song, and then my second favorite Beatles song, Your Mother Should Know, a simple dance number sung by Paul. The film side ends with the classic I Am the Walrus, and we make our way into the single side, which is led off with the stellar Hello Goodbye (one of my faves from the pre-deep cut Beatles Jeremy fandom). Other songs on the second half include Penny Lane, Baby You're a Rich Man, and All You Need is Love. The only song I didn't mention is the centerpiece of the album, Strawberry Fields Forever. I mentioned that Your Mother Should Know is my second fave Beatles song, and Fixing a Hole is my first, but really, if I'm being honest with myself, Strawberry Fields Forever is probably the best Beatles song. It's just so damn perfect and weird, and I don't usually get this pumped for Lennon songs, but it's really just great. It's amazing how prolific The Beatles were in 1967 that they had time to write and record both this amazing album and Sgt. Pepper's.
Song: Strawberry Fields Forever
19. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Fever to Tell
Year of Release: 2003
Fever to Tell is my favorite punk album (although it's more of a kind of dance-punk), and it is filled with fury. Singer Karen O's voice is like acid, dripping all over this album, infecting everything it touches and melting it down into pure black energy. Nick Zinner's guitar is the main driving sonic force of this album (the band consists only of singer Karen O, guitarist Zinner, and drummer Brian Chase, there's no bassist), and it's his guitar that opens the album, starting Rich like a guitar being fed through a keyboard. Many of the songs on this album don't have real choruses, usually just Karen O repeating one word (as she does for the end of Rich) or yelping in place of words, or spinning out of control like a crazy person on Tick or on Date With the Night where the chorus is just her saying "Chop Chop" over and over. The thing that draws me back to this album over and over again all these years is just the pure energy, and the manic nature of the whole album. Man starts with a verse which is just the repeated line "I got a man that makes me wanna kill" followed by a verse of "I got a man that makes me wanna die" before breaking down to "Well, we're all gonna burn in hell, we're all gonna burn in hell!" The song that got super popular from this album was the ultimate slow burner, Maps, which is fine, but slow Yeah Yeah Yeahs are not my favorite of their modes (which is why I enjoyed the followup albums to this one a lot less). It's like they say on Black Tongue, "Boy you just a stupid bitch, and girl you're just a no good dick."
Song: Man
18. Air - Talkie Walkie
Year of Release: 2003
One day during my sophomore year at Illinois, I was quite sick and I stayed in my room all day watching Veronica Mars. And one episode was about child abuse and ended on a super dark note with this super creepy electronic song playing. These were the days before Shazam so I had to find a website that listed all the music used in Veronica Mars, and discovered that it was a song called Run by a band called Air. I promptly left my sick room, drove to Best Buy, bought the album, then returned home and slept the rest of the day. That is the story of how I first became interested in downtempo electronica music. Talkie Walkie is playful and light, compared to how dark Virgin Suicides was. The vocals on many of the songs are altered so Run sounds like it's being sung by a sickly android, and Cherry Blossom Girl has Jean-Benoît Dunckel's high vocals pitched slightly higher, to make him sound like a French alien. The three instrumental tracks are all amazing, Mike Mills is almost completely composed of two different repeating piano lines, Alpha Beta Gaga sounds like someone whistling through the apocalypse, and the lovely closer Lost in Kyoto (which was created for the film Lost in Translation) sounds like Scarlett Johansson walking through Kyoto alone. This album is gentle and playful, light and dark at the same time, but always stunning and always beautiful, my favorite Air album.
Song: Run
17. Pet Shop Boys - Behaviour
Year of Release: 1990
If you would have asked me in January before I started this, to list all of the Pet Shop Boys albums in order of my favorites, I probably would have given you a slightly different order than what they ended up as on the list, but I would have 100 percent given you Behaviour as my favorite, and that still stands now because Behaviour is basically a perfect synth pop album. Pet Shop Boys took the synth pop that made Actually excellent and added in the orchestral elements that made Introspective interesting and created an album that they've yet to top (although they've come close a couple of times). Neil Tennant fills every vocal sung with a melancholy that permeates the attitude of the entire album. This Must Be the Place I Waited Years to Leave recalls the pain of high school (also, how terrible were British public schools during the 70's? I feel like there are numerous Pet Shop Boys and The Smiths songs about this topic). Only the Wind tells the story of a family held in fear because of an abusive parent, To Face the Truth is sung from the point of view of someone in love with someone who is cheating on them, Nervously exists completely in the moments at the beginning of a first conversation between two people falling in love. Every song on this album is a classic.
Song: To Face the Truth
16. My Morning Jacket - Z
Year of Release: 2005
I've never stopped listening to this album since 2006, but this album always exists in one specific space and time for me: the summer after Freshman year at Illinois. I was working at a landscaping company, spending my days on riding lawnmowers and driving pickup trucks with trailers full of lawn gear. It was exhausting, and not very rewarding, but it gave me lots of time to listen to music (and Cubs games, before we lost Ronnie), and I spent much of that music time listening to this My Morning Jacket album that my father owned. Z is an eclectic mix of everything trippy, starting with the pulsating synth beat of Wordless Chorus, to the dark love song It Beats 4 U. Gideon ends with a guitar solo while singer Jim James wails a note at high pitch. Off the Record is a straight up reggae jam, while Into the Woods ends with chanting vocals that sound like they were taken from a Viking Drinking Hall. Anytime and Lay Low are a great two song pairing, both feature strong guitar, and Lay Low ends with a multi-minute instrumental break down that always makes me close my eyes and jam out. They end the album with the slow paced Knot Comes Loose, and then the ultimate slow burner, Dondante, which hears James and the instrumentation barely rise above a whisper until about three minutes in when everything explodes. This is an album best appreciated in the dark, possibly by black light's shine. A Radiohead that calls Tennessee its home.
Song: It Beats 4 U
15. Foals - Antidotes
Year of Release: 2008
Oh boy this album makes me dance. I heard of this one on WPGU, back during my Helium Liquefying Laboratory days, and Foals' first single, Balloons, was all over that college rock station. When I downloaded the full album, I was struck by how every song had at least one point in it where I would have to stop whatever I was doing at the moment, close my eyes, and jam along with the music. Every song has some enrapturing instrumental part that just takes me over, sometimes it's just guitars, but usually it's a mix of meandering guitars, far away drums, funky synths, and random horns (a touch added by producer Dave Sitek). This applies to every song, from the spiky guitar pop of Cassius to the spacy tripped out atmosphere of Red Socks Pugie, the outro to which sounds like a guitar floating through a space station. This album is kind of the soundtrack of my entire senior year at Illinois, living with Brian. We would listen to this album before the power hour and then again after the power hour, we would listen to it to get pumped for the Bulls-Celtics series, or to space out on a Sunday. A side note, I saw Foals with Lisa at Lincoln Hall in Chicago, only the second show ever played at the then-new tiny concert venue.
Song: Red Socks Pugie
14. Pink Floyd - Animals
Year of Release: 1977
When I was a Freshman at Illinois, I decided, "Jeremy, you are a college student now, time to start really exploring Pink Floyd" and so I started my exploration with Animals, for two reasons: 1) It's only five tracks which made it easy to download in the ole Bearshare days, and 2) I had always been intrigued by the idea of an album based around animals and each song having a sample of that animal in it. This was the extent of my knowledge of this album, but when I finally got to listen to it, it blew my mind. Honestly, the album is mostly spent on three songs, Dogs (which is over seventeen minutes long), Pigs (Three Different Ones), and Sheep, the latter two each averaging eleven minutes in length. These three songs are bookended by two different versions of a short, simple acoustic song called Pigs on the Wing. The moods of the three main songs are fitting for the concept of the album. Dogs is hyper-aggressive, with a lyrical viewpoint that is vicious, describing the successful businessman with the lyric "You have to be trusted by the people that you lie to, So that when they turn their backs on you, You'll get the chance to put the knife in." Pigs (Three Different Ones) opens with a demonic keyboard line, and then proceeds to describe the gluttonous wealthy, with Waters' vocals getting super grimy for the second half of each verse, giving the mental feel of being down in the mud with these swine. Sheep is filled with robot noises and robot voices, the better to express the automaton ways of the unfortunate working class. I lucked out that when I was getting into this album, Animals had become the go-to drinking album of my group of friends, and almost every night that we would be apartment drinking, we would spend forty minutes barking along with my favorite Pink Floyd album.
Song: Dogs
13. Garbage - Garbage
Year of Release: 1995
I got into this album because my mother owned it. Pretty simple stuff, it was played often at my house as a child, so that's how I got to know it. And I've never really stopped listening to it since, and when my mom was getting rid of a bunch of her CD's last year, I made sure to grab her copy of this album (despite her writing her initials on the actual CD in Sharpie, the horror!). This debut is the perfect mix of 90's alternative music with 90's dance music. It's a dark album, both musically and lyrically, with most of Shirley Manson's lyrics centering around thoughts of inadequacy, these thoughts being fueled both by herself, but also by the environment surrounding her. There are songs on here that lean towards the grunge era that was starting to dissipate at the album's release, such as the speaker switching sound on Vow, or the crunchy deep guitars on Only Happy When It Rains, but the thing that makes this album so listenable twenty odd years after it's release is the dance elements that are integrated throughout. This was the time of trip-hop's ascension, so there are lots of songs that start with an electronic element followed by drums before the real instrumentation starts, whether it be the laser synths that open Dog New Tricks, the ice cold flatlining that opens As Heaven Is Wide, or the satellite floating away in space of A Stroke of Luck. Manson's vocals are both powerful and vulnerable at the same time, a lyricist who is trying to feel stronger but keeps being pulled down by the things in her head. I think we can all relate.
Song: A Stroke of Luck
12. Minus the Bear - Planet of Ice
Year of Release: 2007
This is starting to sound like a skipping record, but Minus the Bear was another discovery made because of WPGU. They used to play the two singles from this album, Knights and Throwing Shapes, on pretty heavy rotation during the Summer of 2008, and both singles are great so I bought the album. First things first, if you are reading this and you have a vagina, you probably won't like this album. I don't know why this is, but chicks just don't seem to enjoy Minus the Bear. I've stopped trying to understand why, and have simply filed it away as a gender mystery (this is similar to how chicks for some reason also seem to disproportionately hate the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books). There are two things that make this album successful: 1) Tight, guitar centered writing. The guitar on this album is very aesthetically pretty, and is often tied hand in hand with thing number two: 2) The electronics. Minus the Bear is, in my opinion and on this album only, the most successful band at integrating electronic noises into radio friendly rock songs (which separates them from the likes of Radiohead, who own undoubtedly the most successful integration of electronics with not-so-radio friendly music). The blips and bleeps are treated as a second lead guitar, getting their own solos, setting the pace for the guitar on Knights or creating the spacey intro to Dr. L'Ling. Similar to Foals' Antidotes, this was a big soundtrack for my senior year living with Brian, lots of drinks taken to Planet of Ice. If I'm ever singing in a band, we will cover songs from this album, not only because they are interesting, but because singer Jake Snider's voice is super easy to replicate, he doesn't stretch it very much, I could easily murder him and take his place in the band.
Song: Knights
11. Bloc Party - Silent Alarm
Year of Release: 2005
When I was writing about the Postal Service album (No. 208), I spun a yarn about how when I was a Freshman I sent out a survey to all of my friends on Facebook asking what their ten favorite albums were, and in said post I spoke of how Postal Service album was one of two albums that were on almost every list, the other was this Bloc Party album. The first time I read about Bloc Party was in Blender magazine, and then a month later, I heard a song by them playing at American Eagle, once again this was pre-Shazam so I had to book it to the back of the store to see the name of the band when the video ended. Silent Alarm is a perfect indie-dance album, it caused me much pain to have to place it right outside of the top ten (I still feel conflicted about it). Every member of the band is an essential part of what makes this album amazing: Gordon Moakes provides the rhythmic backbone of each song with his bass and synth duties, and his husky backing vocals. Singer Kele Okereke's voice explodes off of each track, sometimes with exuberance and sometimes dripping with contempt. Russell Lissack's guitar is spiky and whips along at a fever pace for the entirety of the album, and Matt Tong is consistently drumming much more rapidly than the rest of the music, giving a constant feel of dance, even when the rest of the song has slowed down. When I prep for each of these posts, I listen to each of the albums one time, so I can enjoy the list and so that I can refresh myself and get ready to make a new opinion based on my current musical tastes. I finished listening to the albums on this list on Wednesday having listened to each album one time each. I then proceeded to listen to this album two more times over the next day and a half. That's how much more I enjoy this album than the rest of the ones that make up the second highest portion of my list (although I did also listen to Behaviour again, as well). Really next week's post would have been more fitting to be a top eleven so that this album could be with the quality it deserves, but sometimes life's not fair. Also, side note, if you are reading this and you have never heard the song This Modern Love, first chastise yourself, and then go listen to it on YouTube or Spotify, it's the love ballad of my generation.
Song: Helicopter
Alright, I am finally done with this post. Usually I can knock one of these out in two sittings, but this one took five different attempts, and pretty much ate up my entire weekend, so I am happy to finally get the words out of my head and down onto (digital) paper. All that's left is the top ten, which I'm hoping to have done by my birthday on Wednesday, but I'm no dummy, it'll probably be Thursday or Friday. Depends. We'll see. See you then!
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