Jeremy's 300 All-Time Favorite Albums: Nos. 300 to 286
- petsch6787
- Jan 17, 2017
- 18 min read
Other Pages in this list: 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. 26-11 Nos. 10-01
In this unholy year of 2017, I will cross the threshold from being in my twenties to being thirty years old. June Seventh will mark my transcendence to the land of the thirties, full of joys and wonderment, or possibly some sort of financial stability. Who knows? Also, who cares? Because this isn't about the future, not yet anyway. For now, I am going to take a nice firm look into the past.
Music has always been the driving backbone of my life. When I was a grade schooler, I would bring my Walkman with me to school, then I upgraded to a Discman which I carried with me always, headphones around my neck, never being too far away from my music. So much so that when I was in an improv-y sketch show in High School, my nickname for the show was Johnny #5, given to me because I always had my headphones hanging around my neck, thus making me look like a lanky robot. I imagine this attachment to my musical provider came from being in a family with four children; there was usually someone who didn't want to listen to whatever was playing in the car, so everyone had headphones. I took that Discman with me to college, and only stopped using it when I was a junior and I got an iPod. Yes, that was late to make the switch to digital music player, but I have a shitload of CD's, I wasn't in a hurry to stop using them.
Another factor in my deep love of music was that my parents were young when I was born, which meant when I was little, I was listening to whatever was popular at the time instead of oldies, I didn't start exploring old music until I was in college. This gave me quite the range of musical knowledge at a young age. We had a six disc changer in the living room, and each of us would pick an album, we'd put the whole thing on random and then have dance parties.
Anyway, I though that a nice way for me to delve into my back catalogue and to celebrate my first thirty years on this blue, spinning marble would be to make a ranking of my favorite 300 albums. Since this is quite the undertaking, I'm going to split it up into chunks and each week I get to listen to whatever albums I picked for that week and then at the end I can do a post with them all in there, and I feel better, and you feel better maybe, and everyone wins. There will definitely be anecdotes tied to a lot of these, so everyone that reads this is going to learn a little bit about Jeremy, but maybe, you'll like some of these tunes, and I think that people will know a lot more of these albums than the lists I do at the end of each year. So please, please read these, it will be fun for all ages. Well, most ages. Some ages. It will be fun for some ages.
Disclaimer: The fact that I am turning 30 this year is a good indication that I may have grown up in the nineties, and I may have been in high school from 2001 to 2005....so there will definitely be a Limp Bizkit album on this list and I know for a fact that there is a Hoobastank album in this very post. I don't care if you are a hater, I will never apologize for the kind of music I listen to. Expand your horizons, Prude.
Second Disclaimer: Since I am writing this, and I assume I am the only person that will actually read all of these, I make up the rules. If I want to rank The Nutcracker Ballet as an album, I'm going to do it. If I want to throw some compilation albums on to this list because they have emotional significance to me, I'm going to do that, too. Again, my blog, my rules. Also, mo money, mo problems.
So without further ado and disclaimers, please enjoy the first installment of Jeremy's 300 Favorite Albums!!!!!
300. Heart - Dreamboat Annie
Year of Release: 1975
I am fairly certain that the first time I listened to this album was as a junior high student, renting CD's from the Crest Hill Public Library, and also that Magic Man was definitely on one of the old mixtapes that I made to listen to on long car rides, and by mixtape, I mean an actual mixed cassette tape. Dreamboat Annie straddles the line between killer 70's rockers and that kind of folk-pop that was super popular with acts like The Carpenters (No hating here; I like The Carpenters). The title track appears as three different interludes on the album, each iteration carrying along with them wave and bird sounds in the background, as Ann Wilson serenades Dreamboat Annie, the "little ship of dreams." The first of these interludes leads directly into the acoustic guitar solo that Nancy Wilson plucks to begin Crazy On You, Heart's greatest song, not just on this album but altogether. Sometime when I was in college, a bunch of my friends and I went to go see Heart at Ribfest in Naperville, and that concert was so packed that we had to sit so far away that we could hear them, but could not see them. Moral of that story: Heart rocked in the seventies, and they still rock now, if you want to go see them, get there early.
Song: Magic Man
299. U2 - War
Year of Release: 1983
If you will, let me spin you a yarn about a boy and his automobiles. The first car I drove was a Monte Carlo, but that is a story for a different album so we'll skip the tragic story of that car for now. After I was without car for my entire senior year of high school and freshman year of college, my father purchased a new four door to replace the 1998 Gold Ford Windstar minivan that he had been driving when there had been four children to lug around all the time, and the Windstar became mine. I loved that minivan, it had a six disc CD Player underneath the driver's seat, I treated it with love, but I also used the hell out of it, and I rode that beast into the ground. Sometime during sophomore year, the heat stopped working and the CD player stopped working, which was a bit of a problem because when I would drive to and from school, I would lose radio signal leaving me in a bit of a quandary. The one thing that did work though was the tape deck. When the CD player quit on me, I was at my dad's house about to leave for school so I ran into the garage and grabbed three of my dad's cassettes from his collection on the wall and they were basically the only thing I listened to for half a year, while smoking cigarettes to forget about how cold I was (I quit, eventually). All of those three cassettes are on this list, and one of them was War by U2. My love of U2 is pretty minimal (I mean everyone loves Sweetest Thing), but mostly I am not a huge fan. War, however, is the perfect balance of the band that U2 began as (college rock) and the band that U2 would become (arena rock, then art rock, then back to arena rock). It has my two favorite U2 singles (New Year's Day and Sunday Bloody Sunday), and all of the rest of the tracks are great, my favorite is the slow but beautiful plea, Drowning Man. There's also lots of strange samples from old-timey television shows floating around in the background. I may have started to love this album while I was freezing my buns off driving down 57, but the love stuck around even after the Minivan hit the trash-heap.
Song: New Year's Day
298. The Horrors - Skying
Year of Release: 2011
The first year that I was living in Chicago, I was working at an Investigative Agency downtown (it was way less interesting than that title makes it seem). Anyway, I got canned from that job, and out of necessity, I started delivering for the Leona's that was a block from my apartment. During this time, life got a bit dark, and it started to reflect in the music I was listening to. I was downing nightfuls of early New Order, and I started getting into The Horrors, a beautiful, gothic, psychedelic rock band from the UK. Skying is their third album, released on the heels of their (immensely popular in Britain) second album, Primary Colours (I have it on good authority that this album is on this list, as well). Skying is just as good an album as Primary Colours because the Horrors expanded their sound, taking a step further in the direction of psychedelic music and a step away from their goth-rock roots (a step they take even further on their 2014 album Luminous). I love the technicolor river that is Endless Blue before it jumps to life about halfway through and turns into a fuzzed out grunge attack. It struck a special chord with the unemployed delivery driver version of me from back in 2011, and it's stuck with me since. Oh! Also, this is one of those albums that I wanted to listen to in my car so I burned myself a copy to listen to until I got the real version for Christmas later that year. The burned version I had cut the last song off like forty five seconds in, and I didn't realize it was supposed to be a seven minute epic closer until I got the real copy. Moral of this story: Buy physical copies of music, fools! (No one will ever listen to that advice).
Song: Endless Blue
297. Jimmy Eat World - Stay On My Side Tonight EP
Year of Release: 2005
(Apologies for the Parental Advisory sticker on that picture to the left. I try my best to get clean album covers but I couldn't find one for Stay On My Side Tonight that wasn't all pixelated to hell)
Back in college, my freshman year, we had kind of a strict bandwidth limit in the dorms. It was based on a 24 hour system, so if you went over the limit by downloading a GB of stuff at midnight, you basically couldn't use the internet again until that crazy hour cleared the queue 24 hours later. This was a lesson that my roommate, Jim and I learned the hard way. Also, this was a time when we were still using Bearshare (I wouldn't learn about torrents for at least another couple of months). So when you wanted to download music, you had to be selective, and you had to find each song individually. It was a lot of work. That's why it was super easy to find EP's: only a couple of songs, if you could find one person that was posting them all, you were probably set. This Jimmy Eat World EP was one of the albums that made the cut of the downloaded few that year, and it also is something of a historic relic, in that it was released after the classic Futures, and marks the final good music that Jimmy Eat World ever released. The seven plus minute opener Disintegration builds up to a Goodbye Sky Harbor style chant of "Bye bye better next time, stay on my side tonite, oh." Over is one of my favorites. This is just a great little packet of songs; there's only five, one is a cover, and one is a remix. But it's a strong packet, like Ramen Seasoning. Too bad that everything they've released since has been just the noodles and hot water.
Song: Over
296. The Beatles - Let It Be... Naked
Year of Release: 2003, but the original Let It Be was released in 1970
Here's a bit of hot news: I love The Beatles. Like most humans, they are one of my favorite bands, and they have a ton of albums on this list. I always knew the hits, my mother still listens to Breakfast With the Beatles, but I didn't start my own deep exploration of The Beatles until the beginning of my sophomore year of college, which means that I was lucky enough to always have both versions of Let It Be to choose from. This is especially fortuitous because I really hate the original version of Let It Be. It sounds super flat, and it is really hard to listen to. But this remastered, remixed, and stripped down version created by Paul McCartney in 2003 is really great, it brings out the beauty of these songs that were buried below Phil Spector's heinous production. Two Of Us is such a simple little tune, but it's so beautiful, it's one of my favorite Beatles songs. The stripped down production really benefits The Long and Winding Road and Across the Universe. Also, this version includes Don't Let Me Down, a Beatles Rock Band classic. Yeah, whatever, I like nerd stuff, it's fine. Fun Fact: Let It Be... Naked is the only of the post-Sgt. Pepper's albums that made this list.
Song: Two of Us
295. Pet Shop Boys - Release
Year of Release: 2002
Here's a bit more of hot news: I love Pet Shop Boys, also. The fact that Release is my least favorite of their studio albums should be a good indication of the amount of times that they will be appearing on this list over the next couple of months. I started getting into Pet Shop Boys when I was working in the office of a pet food distribution warehouse. I rode two buses and a train to get to work and then the same going home. The only places with food within walking distance were the worst pizza place on earth and a gas station. I listened to my headphones a lot, and when I was getting into this album was right before I was about to move on to my new awesome job, so this album fills me with a lot of hope when I listen to it. Release is as close as Pet Shop Boys ever got to making an Easy Listening album which still works but just not as well as when they want to dance it out, but we all made questionable decisions in the early years of the new millennium. This album contains a lot of great songs, especially The Samurai in Autumn, which always sounds like Tekken to me. PSB fo lyfe!
Song: The Samurai in Autumn
294. David Carbonara - Mad Men: Volume One
Year of Release: 2008
Mad Men is my favorite show, and that is definitely the reason I first downloaded this album, but the reason it finds itself here at number 294 is because this album is the perfect mix of many genres that I love: Sixties Jazz, Bossanova, and Lounge. Carbonara's jazzy ditties give the perfect feel for Matthew Wiener's genius television show, and while all of the songs on this album were written for the first season of the show, they are used throughout most of the show's run, with especially heavy use in the first three seasons. The first track The New Girl has some of that old fashioned bossanova tribal screaming in the background and How Many Get Sable is all jazzy horn stings. A Girl Can Dream imagines a trip through the clouds to the top of a Manhattan skyrise, with a tumbler of whiskey in your hand. There are also a handful of somber tracks, named after appropriately somber parts from the first season: Betty's Mechanic (poor, poor Betty, the most misunderstood character not named Pete Campbell) or the rising tension of Don's Meeting With Adam (RIP Adam Whitman, we hardly knew ye, it's not your fault that your brother is a selfish asshole). The two most popular pieces from the show are the waltzy interpolation of Song of India, which weaves it's way through every entrancing smoking delight of the first two seasons and The Carousel, which sets the scene for Don's famous speech to end the first season about selling memories and then makes a reappearance as Don gently strokes the grass in the third season as he watches his daughter's teacher run around the maypole (Abigail Spencer, you were too good for Don, he just wanted your youthful exuberance!). This album tugs at my heart just like the show did. All other things our country has created, you have a high bar to live up to!
Song: The Men of Sterling Cooper
293. Viet Cong - Viet Cong
Year of Release: 2015
I understand Political Correctness, I'm totally on board with it, I don't think it's for the weak willed or any of that nonsense, but sometimes even I think it goes overboard. For instance, this band had to change their name after this album, now they are named Preoccupations, which is a far inferior name to their original Viet Cong. Who were they trying not to offend? All the Vietnam vets that are currently in their seventies who would never be listening to their brand of iron-sided post-rock? All you are doing is making it harder for people who liked your first album to even realize you have a second (inferior) album! The naming of the band does not affect the actual music though, and this debut album is a gem. It sounds like a rock album being played through an old radio during a Mad Max style desert apocalypse (no Mel Gibsons though, thankfully). Mechanical sound effects create an overall theme sound for this album, but there are lots of little beautiful moments sprinkled throughout, like when the droning drum beat and vocals of March of Progress eventually give way to the high-pitched spiraling guitar breakdown of the second half of the track. Or the spiky guitar leaping through the fuzzed out bass of Bunker Buster. I imagine this album will be very popular after Trump has started World War III and the United States is in a John Carpenter style dystopic state in a year or two.
Song: Bunker Buster
292. Savages - Silence Yourself
Year of Release: 2013
Savages sound like if Linda Perry were fronting Cloud Nothings, or if Geddy Lee was a woman and got tired of singing arena-prog rock to huge crowds every night and switched it up by playing in a beer soaked hole in the wall on a Tuesday night. In other words, this album rocks pretty hard. This is another album I got into when I was making the three hours a day commute to and from Des Plaines, sleeping until ten every morning, getting home at midnight. Ugh. I needed the thrashing guitars, explosive drums, and throat splitting howls of Savages to keep me feeling steady, couldn't thrash out at the real world, so I had to thrash out in the music world. My soul needed the feedback that weaves itself in and out of the guitar on Waiting For A Sign, until it takes over during the guitar solo that is basically just one giant screech of feedback and reverb and effects. This album rawks, and that's all I have to say about that.
Song: City's Full
291. Lush - Split
Year of Release: 1994
The history of how I got into this album is quite convoluted. When I was growing up, my dad had this album on CD, but he never listened to it because he had gotten it as a gift from someone in our family but whoever that person was had bought the wrong thing and my dad just never got rid of it. So, my entire childhood this album was just sitting in my living room. I once got curious in junior high but my adventurous listen did not yield anything for me, and I moved onto whatever other thing my young active brain was focusing on, probably some Kevin Smith movie or something (Chasing Amy, ride or die!). After I graduated from college, I moved into my mother's basement for a couple of months and got two jobs, bought myself a new computer and a Playstation 3, along with which I, of course, bought Rock Band 2. On Rock Band 2 was a little ditty called De-Luxe that I liked by a band called Lush. I thought to myself, "Oh, hey, I know this band, my father has that one album of theirs," after which time I got really into this album. I called my dad to find out if I could get this CD from him, and this is when I learned that my dad had just a week previous tried to sell his ENTIRE collection of CD's to Disc Replay because he feels in this digital age, that he no longer needs physical CD's (the injustice!). Disc Replay is picky, so they only took about half of his CD's, after which I got to pick through and grab whatever I wanted from the scraps. But this album was not there! After all that time not being listened to, I finally got interested in this album, and it was in the possession of the heartless bastards in Disc Replay. I still don't have this on CD. Life's unfair sometimes. Someday, I'm going to own a car again, and I am going to go on a CD buying spree (I imagine it won't hurt me too much at the bank, since no one seems to care about CD's anymore. Fools!) and this one will be on the list. Also, I love shoegaze, of which this album is a bit of a historical staple. Two songs on this album top seven and a half minutes, and neither one of them feels too long.
Song: Undertow
290. The Coathangers - Suck My Shirt
Year of Release: 2014
Three Chicks from Atlanta. One plays bass. One plays guitar and sings in a high girly sing song voice. One plays drums and sings in a gravelly yelp. When they perform live, they all play each instrument during the show at some point. Also, The Coathangers destroy worlds. Suck My Shirt was their first album as a trio, after their keyboardist left the band and the remaining members just decided, "Well, the keyboardist left so let's just figure out a way to make music without keyboards," which then saw the band take a simpler approach, cutting down on the experimentation of their previous album Larceny and Old Lace, but still maintaining every ounce of malice. The simpler approach reaped benefits; every song on this album is a classic, my favorites being Zombie and Smother, and the last time I saw them live, they blew my freaking mind open. Anyone who reads all of these will come to realize that I am, and always have been, into ladies that make the rock music.
Song: Zombie
289. Hoobastank - Hoobastank
Year of Release: 2001
This album came out when I was a freshman in high school. The country was reeling, trying to come to grips with the post-9/11 world that we were living in, fear no longer belonging to those in countries you only see on television; fear was now an every day reality, clinging to every exchange made in every person's life. And when it looked like life would never get back to normal, a band with a really stupid name released an album that united the masses. "I am crawling in the dark!" said America as one. Teenagers met with their friends and said "Hoobastank really understands how I feel, all of the complexities of the American Youth" and Hoobastank nodded in agreement. It's said that in the weeks before his assassination, Osama bin Laden heard this album for the first time (they are delayed in American music culture), and knew his time had come. He was quoted, "If the American infidels have heard this musical beauty, then surely they will come for me for they will never lack in motivation and heart. My hourglass is beginning to empty." God Bless You, Hoobastank! And God Bless America! (This album is awesome, it has not aged, at all. I will love it forever.)
Song: Let You Know
288. Frank Ocean - Channel Orange
Year of Release: 2012
In 2012, I was delivering pizza at Lou Malnati's. This was enough to get by, but not nearly enough for me to have an apartment by myself, so when my lease in Roger's Park ended, I moved onto a couch in my mother's living room in an apartment with no cable or internet for three long months. During this fun period of my life, I purchased this Frank Ocean album and it got a lot of spin in the car. I was driving from Oak Park to Lincolnwood, delivering pizza for four to five hours, and then driving back, pretty much every day, so you can understand why I was up for listening to Ocean sing about the excesses of luxuries on Sweet Life and on Super Rich Kids. I could relate so hard, for I was also living an excess of riches (LOL). Honestly, though, this entire album is great, very rich, lots of feelings. Just listening to this right now reminds me of driving around in my Sebring. That car was frequently breaking down, but I do miss it from time to time. Channel Orange is one of those times.
Song: Sweet Life
287. Incubus - Morning View
Year of Release: 2001
There was a time when I considered Incubus to be one of my favorite bands. I had loved their last two albums, and Morning View came out and was super popular, on TRL and such. Unfortunately, Morning View was the last album of Incubus's that I like at all, but that does not diminish how great this album is. They still managed to be the band that once toured on Ozzfest: loud and brash, but were also embracing a warmer natural sound, one that they had been hinting at on Make Yourself. This warmness flows through the acoustic guitar on Nice to Know You and in the orchestral swells on Just A Phase or on the Native American flute sample at the end of Circles. Incubus reaches new levels of granola outer space on Are You In? and of course the frog laced closer Aqueous Transmission, which sounds like it is being played to you in a Koi pond with small pink petals falling from the trees. But though I speak of all this existential transcendentalism, there are plenty of rockers on this album as well; Just A Phase does start slow with the aforementioned orchestral swells, but the swelling is leading to the eruption of the second half of that song and Have You Ever bobs up and down between heavy riffs and space station crooning. Morning View was Incubus reaching the perfect nexus of heavy underground band and weirdo space prog.
Song: Echo
286. Perfume - Cosmic Explorer
Year of Release: 2016
I just wrote a review of this album last week for my list of my favorite albums released in 2016, so I don't really have anything groundbreaking to put into print here. I suppose this album is interesting for being the first entry onto my list of 300 that is not in English (mostly). Perfume is a Japanese girl pop trio that sings in mostly Japanese, but a little bit of English as well, especially during a lot of the choruses. They do a lot of hand-based dancing to electro-J-Pop beats. I saw them in August this past year, and to prepare, I binge listened to this album, and it has stuck with me since. It's the most successful of the handful of Perfume albums I would qualify as Pop albums, and it has a lot of dance breakdowns on here, as well. My favorite song on this album changes every couple of weeks. For right now, my favorite is Tokimeki Lights because of the video game redemption beat break down at the end so that's the one I'm going to post down here. (Editor's Note June '18: It's a year and a half later, and it's still my favorite song on this album.)
Song: Tokimeki Lights
Well folks, that's the first installment of my weekly Top 300 Albums. I hope you enjoyed everything in here, and please stop by again and check out what wacky tunes will make an appearance next. Also, for the love of God, please let the Falcons beat the Packers next weekend. (Editor's Note Jan. '17: They totally did, they destroyed them.)
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