Jeremy's 300 All-Time Favorite Albums: Nos. 42 to 27
- petsch6787
- May 27, 2017
- 17 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. 26-11 Nos. 10-01
Hello, friends. I hope you have had a pleasant week. What has happened since last we met? Well, we move one step closer to the Cavs-Dubs Finals that we have all know was coming since this time last year. Trump's out fucking with other countries instead of ours for a change, it's nice to take the week off in that respect. Anyway, let's move on, beyond our country, beyond our planet, and into the land of rhythm. Here's some tunes.
42. Pet Shop Boys - Actually
Year of Release: 1987
Actually is Pet Shop Boys' second album and is essentially just a better version of their debut. It's better produced than Please was and, you know, all the typical improvements that come from Album No. 1 to Album No. 2. The trap that befalls many groups when they move on from their successful debut album to their second is usually a drop in songwriting, either from pressure or from not being broke and miserable anymore or whatever, but Pet Shop Boys never fall prey to this because Neil Tennant's lyrical skills are top notch. The duo has been performing together for thirty odd years and the stories that Tennant sings about are still just as good on Super, their most recent release, as they were on Please. I have to admit that I have pretty much run out of different ways to describe Pet Shop Boys albums, what with this being their thirteenth album on this list. I'll just leave it at this: Actually is a welcome step forward from an already amazing debut, and every song is extremely well written. Plus it has great lines like "I love you, you pay my rent" and "For everything I long to do, No matter when or where or who, Has one thing in common, too, it's a sin!" This is really the album when Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe first perfected their sound.
Song: Heart
41. No Doubt - The Beacon Street Collection
Year of Release: 1995
If it wasn't for this album there would be no Tragic Kingdom. No Doubt's label was dubious to invest more money in them after their self titled debut sputtered (understandably) and were hesitant to give them creative freedom, so No Doubt said "Eff you Interscope, you want to cancel our recording sessions? Fine, well we have been writing some stuff, and we'll just record it at home and release it on our own," which they then did, and when the self-released Beacon Street Collection sold three times more than the widely distributed debut, Interscope allowed one of their sub labels, Trauma, to record and release Tragic Kingdom, and the rest is history. The reasons this album succeeds when the first one didn't are pretty simple: 1) This album is harder rocking and less cheeky and "hilarious", and 2) the songs are just better written (this was also the first time that Eric Stefani wasn't the only person contributing songs, he would leave the band after the recording but before the release of Tragic Kingdom). This album is certainly a bit more raw than Tragic Kingdom would end up being, but every song on here is full of heart and tons of catchy guitar and keyboard parts. Also, Total Hate 95 has guest vocals by Sublime's Bradley Nowell, a rare feature during the early No Doubt days.
Song: That's Just Me
40. At the Drive-In - Acrobatic Tenement
Year of Release: 1996
Last week, I told the tale of how Sparta's Porcelain always brings me back to the first summer that I could drive, zipping around in my Monte Carlo, and this is all definitely true, but the number one "Monte Carlo" album is At the Drive-In's first album, Acrobatic Tenement. I was listening to this album when I was taking my driver's test, because it calmed me down to have music playing. This album sounds quite different from the two albums that would follow, where Relationship of Command leaned into the band's post-hardcore style, Acrobatic Tenement is as emo as the band ever got. This album was obviously made for considerably less money than the albums that followed, but that lo-fi sound gives it a certain charm. The vocals are mixed lower here than on any of their other work, and honestly, I think it's a benefit. Cedric Bixler-Zavala's abilities as a frontman are not being doubted here, but his vocals being lower allows for the music to take it's foot off the pedal at times, allowing for us to have the wonderful soft spoken Initiation on the same album as the chugging Communication Drive-In. I'll never be able to re-live that summer, but when I listen to this album, it brings me back to that youthful, ignorant bliss.
Song: Initiation
39. The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Year of Release: 1967
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is widely considered to be the best Beatles album, and often times has been ranked as the greatest album ever made by any band. And I can totally see why. The production advancements that were made on this album are unbelievable, the songs are so crisp, I'm sure that the first time people heard A Day in the Life, it probably blew their minds open, or the carnival antics of Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!, I can only imagine. This seems like the last time the band was ever really having fun working together, especially since their manager Brian Epstein died at the end of 1967 and all of the responsibilities of being The Beatles then fell onto the shoulders of the band members. I have this ranked as my fifth highest Beatles album, only because there are a couple of songs on this album that are insanely generic (although this could just be a result of having heard them since my birth), specifically Getting Better and Good Morning Good Morning. But every other song on this album is a classic including my favorite Beatles song, Fixing A Hole. This is also one of only three albums that were released in their entirety on Beatles Rock Band (the others were Rubber Soul and Abbey Road), so it has a certain soft spot for me in that I have played each of these songs a million times.
Song: Fixing A Hole
38. Pixies - Surfer Rosa
Year of Release: 1988
When I was living in the dorms my freshman year, my roommate Jim and I would play Tiger Woods golf on his PS2, and whoever won each hole got to pick a song to listen to. This would mostly result in Jim picking like seven songs in a row, me playing How Soon Is Now? by The Smiths and then him playing seven more songs in a row. I suck at competitive video games. But this also allowed me to learn some new music, and this is how I first heard Where Is My Mind?. I got Surfer Rosa for Christmas that year, and it kind of blew my mind. I didn't know that songs could be so short (six of the thirteen tracks are two minutes or less) or that the definition of singing could be stretched so far. Frank Black didn't just sing melodically, he'd also scream and yelp, and make all kinds of primal noises in the background, or on River Euphrates, Kim Deal repeats the word "ride" over and over again for at least half of the song, stopping only to let Black sing his verses, but returning for the chaos of the choruses (of which the lyrics are "Ride the tiger down the River Euphrates"). To go from the madness of that song to the super slow burning Cactus two tracks later just shows the versatility that Pixes had within their weird little space. I am hard pressed to find an opening four tracks that get me convulsing and gyrating as strangely as the ones that open this album.
Song: Break My Body
37. The Beatles - A Hard Day's Night
Year of Release: 1964
When I think about the studio albums of The Beatles, I mentally split them up into these groups: 1) Please Please Me (This album is its own group), 2) Everything before Rubber Soul, 3) Rubber Soul through Magical Mystery Tour and 4) Everything after that until the broke up. A Hard Day's Night comes in my first place for all of the albums in category number two. It's the best of the "moptop" albums, and the first with out any cover songs, with The Beatles taking over songwriting completely. Every song on this album is near perfect. There are so many highlights, And I Love Her has George Harrison playing on a classical guitar, creating a sparse atmosphere that contrasts with McCartney's lovey lyrics, I'll Cry Instead is basically a country-western Beatles adventure, and my favorite song on the album, Things We Said Today, is interesting in that it's told from the perspective of a narrator who is currently in love, but knows that when the love fizzles, he'll need to look back on this day to remember the good old days. It's a strangely cynical love song, one that matches the tone of McCartney's dour double-tracked vocals. Each song on this album is less than three minutes, but they are all interesting and amazing.
Song: Things We Said Today
36. Gorillaz - Demon Days
Year of Release: 2005
My mom used to live in Iowa and when all four of us children were visiting, as well as one Callie who lived there, there was not a lot of space to go around. So my siblings and I spent a lot of time in the basement, playing Crash Team Racing on the Playstation. There was also a stereo down there, and when I got this album we would listen to it on repeat because all four of us liked it. And what's not to like? Demon Days is the second Gorillaz album, and this time around Damon Albarn enlisted Danger Mouse to produce. We all know that Danger Mouse is awesome so it makes sense that this album would also be awesome. This is the first album where the concept of the cartoon band really started to make sense, Gorillaz started to sound like their own thing, not just a Blur side project. There's a grimness that floats through the whole album, starting with the intro that borrows from the Dawn of the Dead soundtrack to the general bleakness of Last Living Souls and Kids With Guns. Fire Coming Out of a Monkey's Head features the spoken vocals of Dennis Hopper telling an oil allegory, but the album does close out with a sunny disposition (although not so sunny lyrics) on Don't Get Lost in Heaven and Demon Days, when Callie was really little, I used to play these two songs and dance around with her because it made her smile. To this day, when this album comes on, visuals of Crash Team Racing pop into my head.
Song: Dirty Harry
35. Pyotr Tchaikovsky - The Nutcracker
Year of Release: 1892
So, yes I am classifying the entire musical portion of The Nutcracker ballet as an album. My list, I make the rules. Last week, when I was talking about A Charlie Brown Christmas, I spoke of how only two of my childhood Christmas albums made it into adulthood, one was that soundtrack and the other is The Nutcracker (which I have seen live only two times, seems like it should be more). The version that we listened to in the Crest Hill house was an abbreviated version (since the ballet runs longer than the length of a standard CD), and I used the cover for this version as the cover on this page, but when I moved out I downloaded the full version of the ballet's music rather than the suite and I have been listening to it every December since. It's my favorite piece of classical music. I won't attempt to try and describe it to you, everyone has heard The Nutcracker, but I would like to marvel at just how deeply this music has permeated our culture. I imagine this is probably because The Nutcracker is public domain, but I've heard approximately eighty percent of the running time in things not related to Christmas. It's in commercials, movies, everything! It's a beautiful piece of work, and honestly, nothing puts me at ease more than The Nutcracker. Maybe someone will someday make a live action version of the ballet in movie form, keeping the music, but expanding the visuals. All this Nutcracker talk is making me want to play some Donkey Kong Country! Song: A Pine Forest in Winter
34. Liars - WIXIW
Year of Release: 2012
Liars has a knack for completely revamping their sound with every album. Throughout their history, I had made more than one attempt to give them a listen but it just never clicked with me. Then 2012 came around and they released WIXIW (pronounced "wish you") and it all made sense. Still present was the crazy noise rock, but it would arrive in pieces, not taking over the whole album and sometimes not even taking over an entire song. And laying in the valleys of the noise rock mountains are a number of truly beautiful soft electronic soundscapes. The first three tracks on the album start out in one of those valleys, with opener The Exact Colour of Doubt barely trickling out of the speakers, then Octagon stays quiet but introduces a dull bass beat that propels the listener through the track, as crazy sideshow noises pop up and fade away with singer Angus Andrews switching from the gentle lullaby voice he uses on the opener to a kind of wretched demon on this track. Which then leads into No. 1 Against the Rush, the most Radiohead song ever made by a non-Radiohead, with a pitter-patter beat running through the entirety of the song. When we head back up into the mountains we get the jungle-y (mixed geographical metaphors!) instrumentation of A Ring On Every Finger, and the clitter-clatter sample used as the background of Ill Valley Prodigies. WIXIW is a dance album that's been recorded where the wild things are. This album came in at number one on my list for 2012, and it's only been surpassed since then by one Deftones album from that year (consistency!).
Song: A Ring on Every Finger
33. Blink-182 - Dude Ranch
Year of Release: 1997
Dude Ranch is pre-teen Jeremy music-onofied (I am making that a word). It's so steeped in teenage angst. Literally the first lyric on the album is "I know I'm pathetic, I knew when she said it" with the chorus of that song, Pathetic, going "Don't pull me down, this is where I belong, I think I'm different, but this is where I belong." My first exposure to this album was when I heard Dammit in the movie Can't Hardly Wait, but I didn't get the album until after I got into Enema of the State. Dude Ranch has always been my favorite of their albums. It's everything one loves about Blink-182: it's goofy as hell, but also extremely earnest. This is perhaps best shown in Waggy where we go from the verse "I'm trying to be what you want me to be, but it's so damn hard to keep playing the part of the fool week after week" to the first chorus, "I think you need some time alone, you say you want someone to call your own, Open your eyes, you can suck in your pride, you can live your life all on your own" but then the slightly different second chorus "I don't want to live this lie again, I know I'll get it right but I don't know when, I'll open my eyes, I've got something inside, I'll just jack off in my room until then," those lines are pure Blink-182, full of pain and yearning but also with some bathroom humor to cut the tension. Really that's a perfect example of teenage boys in general. My favorite track on Dude Ranch is Emo which is about a woman in a one sided relationship and finishes with the repeated line "she's better off sleeping on the floor, because she fell right off the bed." I used to listen to this album while I rode around on my bike, hoping that there was a girl's softball game happening at the baseball diamonds.
Song: Untitled
32. Moby - Play
Year of Release: 1999
At my Junior High graduation party, I got something like three hundred dollars worth of Best Buy gift cards. So what did I do with that Best Buy cash? Bought a ton of CD's of course. This was one of them. It was the first one I listened to when I got home with my stash, and when the first sample on Honey played, I was like "What the heck is this?" but then I kept listening, and the next song I'm Going to Find My Baby was similar, one soul sample repeated with lush electronics providing the texture. Then Porcelain, all texture with Moby very gently singing, then Why Does My Heart Hurt So Bad, another soul sample showcase. And that's when I realized "This album is blowing my mind." I'd never heard a DJ album like this before, and there aren't really that many DJ albums that sound like Play anyway. It is an album that has its own sound. Moby took the piano soundscapes that made Everything Is Wrong so popular, and expanded upon them, songs like Rushing and Inside pulsate with warmth, but Moby also incorporated his work from the old trance/house days giving us the cold of Machete and Bodyrock as compliment to the more human sounds of the rest of the album. The emotional soul of this album, though, is Everloving, a song that starts with Moby humming and playing an acoustic guitar for the first half of the song before he mixes in a soft trip-hop beat and his signature piano, the last third of the song reaches a crescendo with the drum beat expanding to a more triumphant cymbal crash with every fourth beat. This album is similar to The Nutcracker in that people unknowingly are aware of the songs on here because every single one has been licensed out at some point or another (Play is the first album ever to do that): That car commercial? Yeah that's Porcelain. The scene when Mulder finally comes to grips with the fate of his sister? My Weakness is playing for that. And this wasn't a gimmick, it's because the music Moby created is so beautiful and emotive that it fits in perfectly with what an advertiser is trying to portray over a thirty second advertisement. I know I am not alone in saying this, but this album truly changed the way I listened to music.
Song: Find My Baby
31. Björk - Homogenic
Year of Release: 1997
I came to Björk through two other bands: 30 Seconds to Mars had a cover of Hunter on their second album, and Death Cab for Cutie covered All Is Full of Love on The Stability EP. After figuring out that these two Björk songs were on the same album, I went out and grabbed it and the rest was Icelandic history. What I found was Björk's most complete album, one without a letdown track, and one that is as metallic and cold as an album full of emotion could possibly be. This album is equal parts computer and symphony, mixing the two in a way that must have seemed revolutionary in 1997, and still sounds amazing today. All of this before even getting to how beautfiul Björk's vocal performance is on this album, on Hunter she moves from a whispering growl to an all seeing, all knowing presence, on Bachelorette her voice booms above the orchestral swells giving the aural equivalent of trying not to be swept away by the music, in a song in which she sings about not being overwhelmed by someone's love and sings "I'm a path of cinders, Burning under your feet, You're the one who walks me, I'm your one way street, I'm a whisper in water, Secret for you to hear, You are the one who grows distant, When I beckon you near." On Pluto, Björk moves from an electronic growl to just straight up yell-moaning during the crunchy electronic breakdowns. This album was my gateway drug, not only to the rest of Björk's discography but also to the entire dance scene of the mid nineties that eighteen year old me didn't know existed.
Song: Immature
30. Splender - Halfway Down the Sky
Year of Release: 1999
My dad came home one day and had a burned copy of this album one of his friends had made him, and that copy ended each song like two seconds early, so when I finally bought a real copy of this album in college, it was like a whole new experience, songs ending with one more word, all kinds of mind blowing stuff. I loved this album from the first time I heard it, and that love has never waned. Splender made the perfect alternative rock album: it's melodic but also hard, it has beautiful lyrical imagery, like on their most radio popular song, the extremely pleasant I Think God Could Explain or on I Apologize when Waymon Boone sings "For rain that's fallen halfway down the sky, I apologize, For sunlight burning holes in through your eyes, I apologize" but also tons of messed up imagery, like on the other single, Yeah Whatever, when singer Waymon Boone lays down "You sit all alone with your color TV, Your hair starts to glisten in spite of the fleas, We don't have to stay friends, Let's pretend to be enemies." This album also is the soundtrack of a bunch of really specific memories from my adolescence, like listening to it in the van when me, my father, and Dan Griffin were driving back from the eighth grade science fair regional at IIT or listening to it the next year in the gym at Joliet Central that my group of friends had to ourselves because my friend JP's teacher mother was the chaperone of a lock-in for the students in a different part of the school. The nostalgia!
Song: Supernatural
29. The Kills - Keep On Your Mean Side
Year of Release: 2003
I bought The Kills' debut album the week it came out without ever hearing a single song off of it because the review of it I had read in Blender Magazine sounded interesting. This is something I used to have the money to do (dat high school money). It was the right move because I ended up loving this album. The Kills are only two people, Jamie Hince and Allison Mosshart, and it sounds like it's only two people. Keep On Your Mean Side is as grimy as that album cover looks, like the album was rolling around in dust and smoked a couple of cigarettes before it started playing out of your speakers. It's aggressive (one of the songs is called Fuck the People) but also catchy, and it's buoyed up by the outstanding guitar throughout, sort of like a DIY garage blues guitar, it's dirty enough to have landed Kate Moss (she's married to Hince). There is a pattern over The Kills' career of their slow ballads getting popular while their rocking songs get ignored, which I think is a freaking travesty. I love the anger and the disdain for being cool, they give such little of a shit on this album, that it makes them cool. Not wanting to be cool is the coolest thing of all.
Song: Hitched
28. R.E.M. - Green
Year of Release: 1988
Way back in the first entry of this colossal undertaking, I started a story about how the CD player broke in my Ford Windstar during sophomore year of college and I only had three tapes to listen to, the first was U2's War, the second was Squeeze's Singles: 45's and Under, and the final of those three tapes was R.E.M.'s Green. How about that? I just finished a story that I have been telling over a span of five-ish months. Also, how weirdly symmetrical is the distribution of those three albums, War is No. 299, the second album on the entire list, the Squeeze album was No. 150, directly in the middle, and Green is pretty dang close to the top. Not planned at all. Anyway, this is definitely my favorite R.E.M. album, I've been listening to it basically for my entire life. When I listen to this album versus the rest of their albums, Green just feels so clean and natural, like it's the best of what this band would ever be, or at least of the iteration of the band that existed in the eighties. Pop Song 89 is a spectacular album opener. You Are the Everything is just a really, really beautiful song. I Remember California always reminds me of driving with the windows down at nighttime. There is also hilarious/terrifying nostalgia about one of the songs on here because in third grade, we had a little talent show for our class and, while other children were singing Lion King songs, I lip synced to Orange Crush, no dancing, nothing of that sort, just me, standing in front of my entire class, lip syncing Orange Crush. What moxie! What nerve! Just getting up there, and letting it all hang out, like a gangster. Stay bold third-grade Jeremy! You stay bold!
Song: You Are the Everything
27. Pink Floyd - The Dark Side of the Moon
Year of Release: 1973
It's hard to think of many prettier sounding albums than Dark Side of the Moon. It sounds so lush and wonderful that it's that album that Tony Soprano first used to test his new (ill-gotten) stereo system in his entertainment room. My first exposure ever to Pink Floyd was my love of Money as a child, it was on my Walkman mixtape that I brought with me everywhere. This was also the only Pink Floyd album that anyone in my family had on CD growing up (obviously my dad had them all on vinyl) but then he loaned it out to someone and it never came back (later my dad did buy The Final Cut on CD as well, but that wasn't until high school). But my real adult introduction to this album was when I purchased it myself my Freshman year at Illinois, and honestly, I don't know why, but it took me a hot minute to get into this album as much as I was into Animals. But then it clicked. From the starting heartbeat of Speak to Me/Breathe to the ending heartbeat of Eclipse, Dark Side of the Moon is just one wonderful adventure all the way through. I've digested this album in every possible way: straight up listening to it, I've watched Dark Side of the Rainbow, in college we piled into my van (with no heat), drove to Parkland Community College, and saw Laser Floyd (the lasers are going to cut off my face!). Also, I think the guitar solo on Money might be the best rock solo ever recorded.
Song: Time
Oh boy, we are getting close to the end here. Who is left to rank? Find out next week, when we will whittle this thing down. Only two more entries left, are you as excited as I am?
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