Jeremy's 300 All-Time Favorite Albums: Nos. 270 to 257
- petsch6787
- Feb 3, 2017
- 12 min read
Other Pages in this list: Nos. 300-286 Nos. 285-271 Nos. 256 to 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. 26-11 Nos. 10-01
Well, I was about halfway done with this post when Wix decided to delete everything that I had written and autosave it, and not allow me in any way to retain any of the information that I had spent two days typing. So that was great. Bear with me if some of these descriptions get short, it's hard to get pumped to try to remember the stuff you wrote previously. I'm going to try my best here. Let's do this!
270. The Field - Cupid's Head
Year of Release: 2013
The Field is the alias of Swedish DJ Axel Willner. He specializes in repetition, starting with one beat, and repeating it for thirty seconds, and then adding another layer, and doing this on and on. It reminds me of this time that I saw Jon Brion performing at the Intonation Festival with my friend Rick. Jon Brion was the only person on stage, and he would start playing one thing, and then loop it, and then start playing a different instrument and loop that until he had an entire backing band playing for him and he could just focus on playing guitar and singing. That's what this entire album is like, and really all of The Field's work, and sometimes it hits (this album and his first album) and sometimes it becomes super tedious (his third album). Black Sea is focused around a distorted vocal sample looped with a soft synth beat, before the percussion shows up and it's built up and upon for eleven minutes. The title track is also centered around a distorted vocal but is more upbeat and danceable. A Guided Tour's sunny beats give the impression of taking a Disney bus tour but through the clouds.
Song: A Guided Tour
269. Teams - Dxys Xff
Year of Release: 2011
While Teams and The Field both make music in the instrumental electronic space, they couldn't sound any more different. The Field begins with one gentle sound and then builds more and more of them on top of each other, Teams just starts with a beat and then throws every possible sound effect and distortion possible until you can barely even tell what you are listening to anymore. Teams can sometimes ride this too far and his music can sound completely inaccessible (like the album he released after this one) but when he's hitting it right, the songs can be awesome. There's a lot of crunch and a lot of fuzz throughout this whole album and the whole thing sounds like it was recorded through a record player. My favorite songs on the album are the ones that start out lowkey and funky and then break down into some big scene, such as Stunts or Lxv Spxll. The only track on this album that has vocals is The Only One featuring Bobbi Dahl as she tells off someone who wants to be her friend but is too clingy and is mimicking her life. The song is great but her lyrics are really brutal.
Song: Stunts (That video is wacky)
268. Slowness - Hopeless But Otherwise
Year of Release: 2011
Slowness are a band from San Francisco that makes a blend of dream pop and post punk, all filtered through the fuzziest shoegaze filter known to production. This four track EP is a pretty good sampler of the music they would go on to make over their next two albums. The first and last tracks, Black & White and Little King, are slower paced, sunnier tracks, which is the direction they went with on their first full album, For Those Who Wish to See the Glass Half Full. The middle tracks, Duck & Cover and Slowboat, are more urgent and angry, especially Duck & Cover which comes flying out of the gate led by its runaway guitars. Those two tracks are a reflection of their second full length album How To Stop From Falling Off A Mountain: an album that ends in a seventeen minute four song suite. Doesn't get much more Serious Rock Band than that. Strange side note: I have no idea how I heard of this band. I just remember that they were on my list of stuff to to download and that it took forever to find their music and until they had released their most recent album, there was almost no way to even get information about them, even in these technology heavy, information-flowing times.
Song: Duck & Cover
267. Warpaint - Heads Up
Year of Release: 2016
Every Warpaint song sounds like it's being played in a dark dive bar with smoke lingering in the air (even though you can't smoke inside around here, so let's pretend it's somewhere in Indiana or Nevada or something, I bet you can smoke inside there. Don't factcheck this). Sometimes they create a soundscape using keyboards, which can lead to a dancier sound, especially compared to the two albums that preceded this one. I have Heads Up ranked the worst out of the three Warpaint albums, but that's just because it only came out last year, so it doesn't have that deep meaning for me yet but I can still recognize how much I love it and it's definitely a keeper in the rotation. One thing I will say is that this band is comprised of all females, and there ain't nothing better than that; ladies singing, ladies playing guitars, ladies playing keyboard, ladies playing drums. We need more of em, let your daughters learn instruments!!!
Song: Whiteout
266. DJ Rashad - I Don't Give a Fuck
Year of Release: 2013
DJ Rashad was the pride of Chicago's footwork house scene. He builds his songs around vocal clips and high pitched, fast snare beats. Each song on this four track EP follows that formula, but each one of them is a masterpiece, so this little EP made it's way onto my list. The title track is built around a spiraling dirty beat, and a clip of Tupac's dialogue from the movie Juice, "I don't give a fuck about you, I don't give a fuck about myself, Ain't no one man above The Crew." This line is cut up and runs throughout the entire song as the beat in the background goes berserk. Brighter Dayz is built around a sample of someone saying the title of the song, and it's chopped up and distorted to become the main beat, with just the drum machine in the background. Everybody rotates around someone saying "Because I know that somewhere deep down in my heart, I still love you" with the second half of the song just taking the word "you" and skipping it around a million times. DJ Rashad had my favorite song on the entire Grand Theft Auto V soundtrack, It's Wack, and then in 2014, DJ Rashad died. Chicago misses you DJ Rashad, I miss you.
Song: I Don't Give A Fuck
265. Garbage - Beautiful Garbage
Year of Release: 2001
I was a little late to the party on this album; I had known who Garbage was when their third album was released, their first album had been in constant rotation in our household since it's release, but when Beautiful Garbage came out, I was a bit busy being a freshman in high school and dealing with the fact that 9/11 had just occurred. So my first exposure to this album was when Breaking Up the Girl was released as the theme song for the series finale of Daria, and the band was animated for the video release. My second experience with this album was on Christmas 2002, when Santa got us a Playstation 2 and it came with the game ATV Offroad Fury 2, which included Parade on the soundtrack (that soundtrack had such a profound effect on my life, this is not the last time it will be mentioned on this list, trust me). My third exposure to this album was that Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go!) was used in a VH1 ad, and it blew my mind. I finally got a copy burned for me, and I've loved it ever since.
Song: Nobody Loves You
264. Badbadnotgood - IV
Year of Release: 2016
I have a hard time writing about this album for a couple of reasons: 1) Badbadnotgood makes jazz which is great but is also pretty formless, so it's hard for me to create a vivid description of it and 2) I don't have any fun story behind this one. Literally my entire history with this album is, I read a review of it on Spin, then I downloaded it and have been listening to it ever since. There are a lot of keyboards floating around on it, and they collaborate with a variety of artists, which gives the album an eclectic feel, with BBNG adapting to whoever the guest artist is. Time Moves Slow features Future Islands singer Sam Herring and is slow and aching. Lavender features Kaytranada and will almost certainly be used on a rapper's mixtape at some point in the future as a background beat. Confessions Pt. II revolves around guest Colin Stetson's frenetic saxophone. It's a good album to listen to for chilling out.
Song: And That, Too
263. Wild Nothing - Life of Pause
Year of Release: 2016
2016 albums are getting run through pretty quick on this list. It's hard to move these super new albums too far up because I have had so little time to form a strong connection with them, but the ones that made the list are on here because they made as big of an impact in just one year as some of these albums did over my whole life. Wild Nothing has created an indie masterpiece by mixing the electronic leanings of Chillwave with the sharp production and stylings of 80's New Wave. The album opens with a marimba, and honestly I am sucker for marimbas and xylophones. It works every time, it worked on Tears For Fears' Change and it works for Wild Nothing. Most of this album sounds pretty similar to the style that Tame Impala was being lauded for the year previous (the clean keyboard production taking center stage, the one man doing-it-all aesthetic), but for some reason this album stayed pretty lowkey throughout the entirety of 2016.
Song: To Know You
262. Captain Murphy - Duality
Year of Release: 2012
I always find it interesting the different ways that someone can learn about a particular kind of music, whether it's learning the artist or hearing a song. When someone cares deeply about music, as I would claim that I do, the places you find music can get even weirder. With the invent of Shazam, it gets even crazier because you can look up any song that is playing around you at any time. The way I learned about this Captain Murphy mixtape is the same way I have learned about so much music over my adult life, I heard it on Adult Swim. Specifically, the outro for Between Friends played over one of the many bumps Adult Swims plays in and out of commercial breaks. That clip was so good that I rewound my television (take that pre-2002 world!) and Shazamed it and downloaded this album. Captain Murphy is the rap alter ego of musician Flying Lotus (who I love and who is on this list a ton) and Duality is a mixtape centered around people forming a cult. There are samples from what can only have been a cult leader recruitment tape, and there are samples from The Simpsons, The Dark Knight, and a whole bunch of other random stuff. It's a freaky trip of an album and sometimes it takes you to places you never knew you wanted to go to.
Song: Between Friends
261. Damien Jurado - Brothers and Sisters of the Eternal Son
Year of Release: 2014
I don't typically gravitate towards the Singer-Songwriter type of artist, not that this is a steadfast rule, I love Beck, Sufjan Stevens, etc, but generally I just don't click with them (I'm looking at you Iron and Wine). One big exception to that rule is this album by Damien Jurado, which is loosely based around the concept of a man looking to find himself by taking a journey and never returning. This album is the second of three in Jurado's Mariqopa Trilogy, and, similar to Empire Strikes Back, the second part of the trilogy is the best. Half of the tracks on this album follow the Silver (Name) format, such as SIlver Katherine or Silver Timothy. Take a look at that cover over there, of that man walking down a beach towards an unknown bubble-like structure. That is actually a very apt way to describe what this album sounds like: one man with an acoustic guitar singing out towards an unknown nothingness, wandering endlessly, hoping to find what he is looking for, but only finding more questions, his voice being distorted by the wind and the supernatural forces floating around. And though this isn't what he set out looking for, it's still better than what he left behind.
Song: Silver Timothy
260. The Morning Benders - Big Echo
Year of Release: 2010
Apparently the word "bender" is a derogatory word for gay men in the UK and Europe. I didn't know this fact, and neither did the members of The Morning Benders, an indie pop band from California. After this album gained some steam, and they toured in the UK, they were told of the unintentional meaning to their band name and in an effort to not further any kind of slurs, they changed their name to Pop Etc. which is clearly an inferior name but whatever, I'm not in the band, not my choice. The real shame is that when they made the transition to Pop Etc., main songwriter Chris Chu also transitioned from the breezy summer time flow of Big Echo (which is what makes the album so great) into a more computerized eighties sound, not that there's anything wrong with computers. Either way, Big Echo is a triumph. It's the perfect summer record, and I remember when I was living with my friend Zoe and we would cruise to go get some food (Wendy's) and we'd pump this record and sing along like no one's business. Simpler times, y'all, simpler times. To quote Promises "I can't help thinking we grew up too fast, and I know that this won't last a second longer than it has."
Song: Promises
259. LateNightTales: Nouvelle Vague
Year of Release: 2007
The LateNightTales series is a collection of mixtapes, each put together by a single artist or band to create a mix to be listened to when the sun isn't out. For a time in college, I was crazy obsessed with the French band Air. I still love them, but when I was first wandering through their early discography, I couldn't get enough of them, ingesting everything they released, including their LateNightTales entry. I liked that so much that I started exploring the series and the next installment to come out was this Nouvelle Vague album, which they sold not only at Best Buy, but also at the counter of the Nordstrom that I worked at during the summer. Nouvelle Vague populated this mixtape with a bunch of bossanova tracks, including their own slinky cover of Come On Eileen. This mix includes well known tracks like By The Time I Get to Phoenix by Glen Campbell, but is mostly filled with bands unknown to me beyond what I've learned because of this album. Also, this album houses my all-time favorite cover of a Beatles song, the gender switched And I Love Him by Shirley Horn. It's so gentle and beautiful, click on that little white triangle down there and listen to it.
Song: And I Love Him
258. The Cure - Faith
Year of Release: 1981
I can only speak to what I may surmise, far be it for me speak on behalf of my parents, but as far as I can tell, The Cure seem to be a band that my parents were into more during the 80's, my dad had a copy of Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me on tape, but during the 90's when I was growing up, there wasn't a whole lot of The Cure listening to in the house, other than when it was on the radio, at which time everyone would of course sing along. And then when I was in high school, my dad got The Cure's Greatest Hits on CD, and it entered my rotation for a long, long time. In my adulthood, I have had my own exploration of The Cure and have all of their albums up to Disintegration on my iTunes, so it might seem strange that the only entry for them on my top 300 is Faith, their third album. But actually, and I am literally just realizing this as I am typing this, my love of this album also started with Air's LateNightTales album because the first song on that mix is All Cats Are Grey which is from Faith. The thing that makes Faith my favorite release by The Cure is that I think it's the best possible version of the kind of goth sound they were trying to create for their first four albums. I love every song on this album, I play it a lot on Saturday mornings.
Song: The Drowning Man
257. Dada - American Highway Flower
Year of Release: 1994
Dada has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, and since their first album came out when I was five, I guess I can only remember as far back as being five years old. My parents were pretty young when I was born so they and their friends were still cool when I was a child. And in this cool group of people, every single one of them knew who Dada was, and they all listened to them. Outside of this group of people, I have never met another person who knew who Dada was. Ever. It's really weird. Dada made (and continues to make, they are still a band) pretty much perfect alternative rock. Their first album is...well let's just say, we aren't ready to talk about that album, probably not til like late May, early June are we going to be talking about that one. Their second album, American Highway Flower, was always part of young Jeremy's small rotation of musics but I didn't get into it in earnest until high school. It's an honorable follow-up to their debut, the production is cleaner. One of Dada's best weapons is that their two singers sound so great when they sing at the same time, which is about 75% of the time. I know all the words to all of the songs on this album and I know that inside the CD jacket, there were lyrics for one song on each of the pages and every other page had a big black and white picture of one of the three band members. I know this because I have spent more than an adequate amount of my formative years listening to this band.
Song: S.F. Bar '63
That's it for this installment of my fave albums! There were chills, there were spills, there were websites deleting two days of work and crushing my soul for an additional two days before I could pick myself up again and start over, there were thrills! Come back again next time, and Go Falcons!
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