Your Favorite Album

Not a poll. Not a contest. Just a soapbox. I did a search to see if there's ever been a thread of this nature before—there has been. However, it features next to no persuasive rhapsodizing. I guess what I'm wanting to find out here is (1) whether or not you can isolate a single album you consider your favorite and (2) what its appeal is to you and (3) why it might appeal to someone else who hasn't heard it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLalCFhRvXo

1) Yes
2) I've said a few things.
3) Now this is a good question, especially since as with everything (if you're lucky not to lose something in history) its impact is murkier, echoing out and in different areas over and again. Personally I always assume someone who hears it may just get terribly frustrated with it. But maybe someone will like the hooks, others will like the noise, others will find the combination enough and others will sense something deeper again. Beyond that I'm not sure why it might appeal, I wouldn't be able to explain others' reactions, I think.

http://i.imgur.com/HR1K5o4.jpg

Kris Kristofferson - Kristofferson
Monument Records, 1970

I was 13 when The Joshua Tree came out, and I considered that my favorite album for the longest time. I still like it, but realize that it comes with a heavy whiff of personal nostalgia. Later on, I realized that I'd probably listened to Doolittle more times in my life than I had any other individual album, and I LOVE IT for many reasons, but it's more a comfort item than something I actually get awed by.

Kristofferson's debut is something I get awed by. It straddles the chasm between Nashville's country machine and the wary singer/songwriter more ably than anything I've ever found...that's just context, though. His voice. The arrangements. Even the album cover. It's like a vivid, sun-stained, 8mm movie, except it's not a movie and it's not an abstract and it's not a novel or short story. It feels real to me. I lose myself inside of it more deeply and more satisfyingly than any other album I've ever encountered.

So that might have just come out as jibber jabber, but it was written on the fly. I like it so much it's difficult to even talk about.

Wow Ned, I've never seen that linked before. Will read the whole thing asap.

Good thread idea. This is kind of how it went for me (sorry if this a bit long and rambling)

Over the last fifteen years I've had various favourite albums of all time. The first one I remember saying was Denim on Ice just after it came out but that was really when I didn't own that many albums and hadn't really developed my taste further than British indie albums. For Christmas 1998 I was given Virgin's top 10000 albums of all time which is when I stared going back and hearing older albums which apart from a few 80's synth pop albums I'd never done before. This influenced the next few years of my music buying and naming my favourite album. First it was Grace, then Searching For The Young Soul Rebels and finally I settled on Pet Sounds. For the longest time I would be happy to say that but I would listen to it less and less and it didn't quite have the same affect it did. Obviously I still love that album but it's nowhere near the top of my list these days.

In 2005 I heard an album that took over my life which I know is a totally unpopular opinion to rate so highly it was Bang Bang Rock 'n' Roll by Art Brut. I'd rate this in my top three these days but for a good few years it was my favourite album of all time. The people that like that album will understand but I know a lot of people can't make it through a whole song by them.

Throughout all this time whenever I'd make lists (and I am one of those High Fidelity type guys) I always had an album in my top five that now I think I almost took for granted, it was never my number one and really I'm not sure why. In 1993 when I was ten I heard Ordinary World by Duran Duran which pretty much changed my life and made me get into 80's music in such a big way that by the time I went to high school a year later I was obsessed with Japan, Talk Talk, The Human League, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Duran Duran. I earned the nick name 80's kid.

Sometime in 1993 I went out and bought three albums on cassette, Dare by The Human League, Liverpool by Frankie Goes to Hollywood and The Lexicon of Love by ABC. Two of those have remained high in my affections, one of them really hasn't (guess which one?) Dare is a synth pop masterpiece and one of my ten favourite albums of all time but it's The Lexicon of Love that is both my most played album of all time and an album I get that same thrill from every time I put it on. Those opening strings that lead into the funkiest bass line on Show Me really is one hell of a way to start an album. From that moment is does not let up, there is not a wasted second on there. It has two hit singles (Look of Love and Poison Arrow) that are so overplayed but somehow it's still a joy to hear them both. They just happen to be two of the most quotable songs of all time. All of My Heart is the big heartbreak moment but it's Date Stamp that's my favourite song. The "I get sales talk from sales assistants, When all I want to do girl, is lower your resistance" line is one of those moments that just makes me glad that music exists. I always feel like I've watched a great movie after I've finished the album, It's dramatic, ridiculous, quotable and has a slightly sinister ending (4Ever 2Gether!)

There really isn't any point reviewing this album further as I feel people already know this album well enough and If you don't then the next time you see it for a pound in a charity shop, pick it up! People may name Thriller or Purple Rain as perfect pop albums and they wouldn't be wrong but for me ABC tops them. For twenty years I've played this album constantly and somehow the magic has just not warn off, just writing about it now makes me want to put it on right this second.

I don't think I have one. The last time I was sure I did was as a teenager, and my favourite album was In a Bar, Under the Sea. Nowadays my appreciation of music is too disparate to sum up in just one album (I know this isn't exactly the question) or to pick one that's somehow better than the rest. My "favourite artists", the ones I say when someone asks me, are Arthur Russell and Jacques Brel - neither of whom peaked on any one album.

My contenders...

THE CURE - DISINTEGRATION

A close friend of mine given this as a gift to a girl, then later broken up with her and then taken it away from her before she got to listen to it and gave it to me. I'll always remember the first listen as magical somehow even though I thought it sounded mostly terrible and was baffled why it was seen as a classic. I thought it sounded monotonous and hoped this was actually their worst album because I really wanted to like the band. But gradually I fell in love with it although it taken quite a lot of time.
It still is one of my gold standards for dreampop and I wish more bands managed to get the essence of "Plain Song" and "Pictures Of You" and expand of them.

SCOTT WALKER - TILT

My first Walker album. I was fascinated by its reputation and totally loved it and wondered why on earth anyone would prefer Scott 1-2-3-4 (obviously I do understand many people find the earlier ones more palatable), then Drift came out a year or so later and I was in heaven again.

YES - CLOSE TO THE EDGE

This was the start of my journey in prog rock, finding out the truth was totally different from the reputation (for better and worse), prog isn't my no1 favourite genre but it is the most surprising and rewarding for me. In some ways it has been a massive comedown because there aren't many other albums like this one. I wish more bands in the genre aspired to this, I think from the 80s onwards most new prog bands were happy to worship this and the other 70s classics as if they could not and SHOULD NOT be bettered.
When I said prog was different from its reputation for worse, I mean that I would love there to have been bundles more grandeur and more long epic albums in the spirit of this one. I really wish it was true that there was lots of 5 hour long symphonic albums propelling you madly through astonishing panoramas and fantastical vistas. As I've said before, this is much easier said than done, but way too many self-proclaimed prog bands sound like plain old rock bands.
The main surprise of listening to the negative reputation of prog and then hearing it for myself was how funky, hard hitting, groovy, danceable and fun it was while keeping the grandeur, best exemplified by this album.

EMPEROR - ANTHEMS TO WELKIN AT DUSK

I loved the first album and I was a bit let down the first time I heard this one; but then I got into it quickly. I've heard some make fun of the lyrics but I thought they better expressed the whole strength/individualism/will power thing than any other similar band, I found that inspiring. Although I think the aesthetic of the first album is more satisfying, the song writing and power of this one is better. I think more than anything I'm amazed by the sheer energy of the album, I don't think I've ever heard anyone more awake and ALIVE than this. It's immensely moving and energising. The night I got tinnitus from listening to this too loud is really special to me.

DEVIL DOLL - SACRILEGIUM

This one is the only one that lots of people might not know.
It's a mad symphonic classical metal goth prog thing with a singer who is a cross between Peter Hammill and the horror actor Dwight Frye making music full of classic expressionist horror imagery. Utterly stunning one long piece of music in different segments that is like no other experience I've ever had in music (except for other Devil Doll albums). I'd already been a huge music fan before I heard it, but this album opened up doors for me to realise how much more potential there is for music doing all sorts of things it never usually does. I've rarely heard anything where a musician so utterly immerses you in their world and personality.
The only thing is (as I mentioned in the Annoying voices thread I made), many people cant get past his voice and will find the whole thing too silly, but I think it is pure genius and I pray that they will start publicly releasing their albums again (it might be a lie that he has been recording albums for himself all these years, but the idea of loads of new albums suddenly becoming available makes me salivate).

I may be forgetting some albums. I don't know which Swans album I'd pick. I'm tempted to add Cocteau Twins, Slowdive, Lycia, Chapterhouse, Trance To The Sun, Red House Painters, Con Dolore, Jacula, Beach Boys, Art Zoyd, Renaissance, Rise And Fall Of A Decade. But maybe 5 is already too much.

1) yes. yes - close to the edge

2) no other album delivers goose bumps like this one. it's the aural equivalent of reading r. r. tolkien/martin. the only flaw is a lack of humor that opens it up to nagging inner snark. musically it is more than flawless (though sometimes jon anderson's vocals can be grating); it sounds to me like the far end of the spectrum of what can be done with standard instrumentation in the rock idiom. each instrumentalist is among the most skilled i've heard -- bill bruford's drumming is dazzling; steve howe's guitar, acoustic and electric, is mind-bogglingly virtuosic; chris squire's bass playing makes others on that instrument sound like unschooled dilettantes; and rick wakeman is rick wakeman. if yes were a basketball team this would be the magic-jordan-pippen-stockton-malone olympic dream team. there are hymnlike moments, particularly in the title track, no other band has ever recorded, offering an otherworldly, almost prophetic holy dimension to rock music (that's anathema to punk, but so what) different from what i get out of earthier gospel music. i realize that escapism this unapologetic is not everyone's cup of tea but i grew up incredibly poor and disadvantaged in a world of bored privileged people and appreciated countless times how transporting beyond the solar system these three songs are. this is the blues, done cosmically

3) the best entryway is the last of the three songs -- "siberian khatru" -- one of the great epic 70s rock jams, built on a monumental riff on par with anything by deep purple, zeppelin, uriah heep, the groundhogs, etc. after that a newcomer could catch a contact high from "and you and i," which classic rock radio would do well to play in place of "stairway to heaven." side 1, "close to the edge," should maybe be approached with caution for the patience-challenged but i can't think of a song someone could listen to as much without getting sick of it

still working on mine, but i had to say that ned's piece on loveless, linked upthread, is wonderful and everyone should read it.

1. Yes, but it changes from year to year. Once an album has been in my consciousness for about four or five years, my appreciation of it starts to be associated with a particular time and place and it ceases to have the same resonance? It becomes nostalgic. Right now it's The Knife "Shaking The Habitual". Previously it's been Scott Walker "The Drift", Harvey Milk "My Love...", US Maple "Talker", Bjork "Post", Xiu Xiu "A Promise", Neurosis "Times Of Grace", etc.

2. 3. The records are obv great and I don't feel the urge to talk or type about how great they are, I prefer to give them as gifts

I don't understand why lack of humor is so constantly bemoaned (unless its Joy Division or something else similarly cool) in music. What's wrong with keeping your face straight now and then? Or is it harder for people to feel secure when they get into fantastical music without irony?
Yes certainly did have humor in some of their stuff, but I think that optimistic starry eyed dreaming sincerity is a big strength and a lot of Anderson's charm.

The main surprise of listening to the negative reputation of prog and then hearing it for myself was how funky, hard hitting, groovy, danceable and fun it was while keeping the grandeur, best exemplified by this album.

This is definitely true, and also probably more true of Close to the Edge than any other prog-era Yes I'm familiar with. But I think that's less due to a misconception of what prog means than it is to the fact that Yes' points of difference get subsumed within the general definition, i.e. I think when people think of prog per se, esp. in the negative-cliche sense, they're imagining something closer to Selling England By The Pound than Close to the Edge.

I tend to think of Tales of Topographic Oceans myself. WAKEMAN!!!!!

1. No, not one -- but I do have two favorite albums, Uncle Meat by the Mothers of Invention and Double Nickels on the Dime by the Minutemen.

2. Both are documents of situations where the creative ideas were coming so fast and furious that the minds at work (FZ on one hand, all 3 Minutemen but esp. Boon & Watt on the other) seemed to go completely unconscious, get outside themselves and their egos (a rare feat in Zappa's case) and get stuff down on tape as fast as possible. PLUS, the Mothers and the boys from Pedro were great players. If there was ever any doubt, on either record from any of the musicians, of their ability to play what they had in their heads, it never shows up. The records sound so confident.

3. Uncle Meat is, imo, the best example of Zappa's personal credo that musical genre distinctions are stupid and get in the way of real enjoyment and appreciation. Double Nickels is just full of hooks and joy and energy; what's not to love there?

I don't think it is fair to blame the worst parts of Topographic on Wakeman, as he always was the most vocally critical of it.

I think the sense of fun in the genre is pretty widespread, Wakeman's first album is fun and exciting (the only one I've heard so far), Selling England has enough hooks and pop.
Before getting stuck into the genre I was expecting everything to sound like Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon and Eloy's Ocean, where you mainly float slowly in a soundscape. I like parts of those albums (one track of Dark Side I love, but cant remember which) and I love soundscapes (I did mention Lycia Slowdive and Cocteau Twins as favorites)but I think the most boring prog rock slowly meanders and drifts without the things that make Tangerine Dream or Camel work.

Having said all this, maybe my false expectations from the stereotypical reputation of the genre is different from other peoples false image. But the exciting dynamics really surprised me. Just imagine me putting on Close To The Edge thinking I was going to get creamy drifting with lyrics about unicorns, gnomes with long slow isolated Clapton solos only to be hit with fun flying at me from all sides.

I hasten to add that I don't have enough experience with Clapton to diss him and I don't have anything against using fantasy tropes in lyrics and imagery but there has been a surprising lack of it in all the stuff I've heard so far.

A seasoned witch does come up in "Close to the Edge" tbf but Tolkien-esque fantasy lyrics are more of a thing in Zep and the artier end of heavy rock for the most part, I think.

1. I've defnitely had a lot of favourite albums in my life but I decided on Fleetwood Mac's Tusk a few years ago and nothing's displaced it since.

2. The Buckingham/Nicks era of FM is such a goldmine of great music for me but even within that body of work, Tusk stands out as a peak. It was the first of their albums I bought (based on a favourable review of the 2004 reissue I saw in passing) or even heard in full and I grew to love it more or less one song at a time, starting with 'Brown Eyes'. There are certainly songs on it that work on their own and even a few that would fit comfortably on other FM albums but it just feels like such a complete and perfectly realised piece of art. The fact that it wasn't, that it's the work of three songwriters with very different strengths and approaches, makes it even more impressive. It's a masterpiece of songwriting, playing, singing (so many amazing vocal harmonies), studio creativity and of course track sequencing... I even love the needlessy elaborate vinyl packaging, the endless series of sleeves somehow mirroring the 'passing through a series of rooms' feeling I get from listening to the record.

3. I think most people who'd be interested in Tusk have already heard it, one thing I would say to sell it is that you can take it on its own and it's worth listening to even if you consider Rumours played out or have no interest in the band otherwise.

i need to spend more time with Tusk. i have an 18 hour flight the day after tomorrow so i think i'll listen to it then, maybe print out lyrics to read.

First of all I'm pleasantly surprised to see Close to the Edge nominated twice here. I've given a lot of thought to what I would consider the best prog album ever (at least, in the traditional sense) and even though I'm really a lot bigger on a band like say Van der Graaf Generator, I just can't see how anything tops that album. I mean it's boring in that it always seems to be the #1 among any hardcore prog community but everything about it is so tightly wound. It feels like five musicians coalesced into one, which I think is the goal of any great prog band. Anyway to answer the OP -

1) Yes, I can - Sing to God by Cardiacs
2) Cardiacs are just one of those bands that appeal to pretty much everything I dig in music. Hell they're very much "prog rock" but not like Yes or anything like that, but much more fun. I've always had an affinity for "fun" music, I love stuff like Scooter and They Might be Giants, so when I hear someone like Tim Smith who can write this kind of incredibly complex, syncopated music that also happens to be catchy as sin, I can't help but turn it into an obsession. The band came along at a time in my life when I was starting to get that feeling of "I've heard it all", where I was wondering if I could get into anything the way I got into say Underworld as a teenager, then I hear this band and suddenly I realize I never really loved any music this much, that Tim Smith is truly a guy on another level, someone who can write tunes that are irreducibly brilliant, with as many ideas as a sidelong by Yes or Genesis, but with all the good stuff condensed into just a few short minutes. I dunno, I feel I'm not describing this well. Anyway, Sing to God for me is obviously the peak of all this, where the band started to feel a little less plastic and gimmicky and just really got down to business. One thing I always appreciated by say, ELP's Brain Salad Surgery, is that it does have this feeling like, "these guys are trying to make the greatest album of all time here". StG gives me that feeling too, only (to me) it succeeds - there's just so much to hear, so many great pop moments interspersed with knock-you-on-your-ass guitar bits and moments of blinding density. Well. Enough about that.
3) Hmmm...see above. I think in general if you're a fan of prog but prefer goofball melodic stuff you should at least give Cardiacs a try.

Could have written this about YMO's BGM, too, or even Hirasawa's Technique of Relief, but Sing to God is a double, so it wins out

excellent posts here so far

I assume both discs of Sing To God? Are they seen as the same album or are they like one album and its sequel?

The two parts are the only Cardiacs stuff I got so far. A lot to do with the expense of their albums and that I'd rather cds than mp3s and that I heard there is the future cd reissues possibly coming.

BGM was also my first YMO.

Yeah - both halves. I know that at one point you could get the discs seperately but I've always seen it as one release. RYM lists it that way and so do most other websites.

BGM was one of the first ones I got from YMO too, and to be honest I didn't really like it at first. I had one of their single-disc comps and remember thinking "they totally botched the production on this, it's all murky and echoed out" ("Cue" was a lot lighter and crsiper on that one). A while ago I installed a good system in my car and ran through my YMO discs again. And from the very start of "Ballet" with that drum sound (which had a deep kick to it that I would never associate with a 1981 release - the same year as Computer World, for Christ's sake!), I started to hear just how state-of-the-art pretty much everything on that album was, and how great the production really is. Like I said before - I could easily write an embarrassing, overwraught paragraph on it as well (too late?)

Go ahead

instead of coming up with something new I can just c/p this from my RYM page (maybe one of the most overwrought reviews I've ever written, but hey)

If you have the LP of this, you can see a ridiculous list of YMO's touring equipment. Even now, it looks like a synth-head's wildest fantasy, but I can't imagine how high-tech this was back then. In the 60's, The Beatles did absolutely everything they could to produce the best sound that was possible, and that's why their albums still sound good even today. Over a decade later, YMO took a similar approach; yes, the equipment is dated, but the album still sounds incredible, and I'm not sure a better-sounding electronic album was possible in 1980. This is one of the greatest synthesizer albums of all-time. Most groups at the time looked at the synthesizers as a way to produce electronic disco or electronic pop, something that was very new and very danceable. This was kind of the approach of the previous YMO albums, but here they try a lot of new and different things at once. They use the 808s to produce breakbeats and double-time drum tracks; they layer synths on top of each other to create pristine and complex pop; they use keyboards to create classical symphonies or to make nearly orchestral backing tracks. In fact, besides some drumming and thundering grand piano on "U-T" (a great, high-energy piece that foreshadows the next album), almost everything else is electronics. This is similar to some of the interesting things that Jarre was doing at the time, but YMO had more talent and a wider range.

It starts off fairly normal - "Ballet" is a good pop song with a steady beat and an unusual vocal approach from Takahashi - it sounds like one of the better tracks from his Neuromancer album, with a new vocal approach and an unsettling hook. From there it gets weirder and more surreal, and by track 4 we're already on abstract pieces made from chiming, layered synths ("Happy End", similar to both Sakamoto's B-2 Unit and Hosono's later album Philharmony, though Sakamoto wrote this one). This is a dark album - there are minor chords abound, and even Takahashi sounds distrought. In "Camoflauge", not only does he sing in quieted tones ("A secret - from the dark" is a particularly haunting line), but his vocal gets mangled beyond recognition later on, which is actually kind of scary. "Mass" is Hosono's piece, and it's practically a symphony with a backbeat; it's chilling, melodic, and sounds great loud. And "Loom" is legitimately terrifying - the first two minutes are an unsettling rising synth tone, similar to the famous deafening THX sound test, before giving way to calming keyboard washes. Eno would be proud. "Cue" is a full-on electronic ballad with great vocal hooks (the final part of the song where Yuki sings "I'm sick and tired of this same old chaos" is one of my favorite moments in technopop), and remains one of YMO's crowning achievements. They do let their dry sense of humor come through in one track, Hosono's goofy and deliberately misguided "Rap Phenomenon", which is funny and likeable with a complex arrangement that moves the track away from gimmick territory. "Rap, rap, do you think you can rap?" Yes, it sounds ridiculous, but do you think the world was ready for this in 1980? Before "Planet Rock", The Message, and Computer World? This might be YMO's least accessible album, but stick with it; it's their best, and there are so many things hidden in the mix that multiple listens (on multiple stereos) are required. This is technopop's high watermark.

"Cue" sounds very different to the video version I saw first. Surely it isn't the same as the video version? I prefer the sound of the video, a bit harder.

I don't know that I could whittle it down to even five. Hurm.

"but i had to say that ned's piece on loveless, linked upthread, is wonderful and everyone should read it."

for realz x 100.

I'm not really sure if I could name only one album... But I can say that what comes to mind as being the album I listen to the most, that I never seem to get sick of is Lilys - Eccsame the Photon Band. It wasn't love at first sight either. Some songs were instantly moving but others seemed so plodding and the always loud drums were at odds with the meditative parts. But the more I listened to it the more I loved it all. I realized I'm much more excited about albums with "events", where song lengths, tempos, straight forward tunes & experiments vary constantly. Also why I love early Guided by Voices, or Giant Sand.

Oh wow. I'd never heard Yellow Magic Orchestra before today. This album is great - and the thread is cool too. Thanks for the posts.

I guess the Pet Shop Boys owe these guys a lot.

oh god. Yeah, tilt is one. Might be THE one. Except for the drift, I listened to that every day for about a year. Other contenders would be field commander cohen or blackout or big science/united states. I might pick one tomorrow when sober/hungover and try to articulate why it's so great.

There isn't one album good enough for me to love forever. At the moment Monks Dream gets close to that ideal and various other shit I listen to lives in it's shadow.

I'm tempted to add Cocteau Twins, Slowdive, Lycia, Chapterhouse, Trance To The Sun, Red House Painters, Con Dolore, Jacula, Beach Boys, Art Zoyd, Renaissance, Rise And Fall Of A Decade.

You should write something about Renaissance. I don't know them well, I only have Live at Carnegie Hall, but Annie Haslam is incredible. She makes a virtue of not having any mannerisms at all, just being perfect.

frank black - teenager of the year

an entry point into the pixies and weird/melodic rock (generally), where bands like nirvana, smashing pumpkins, and weezer left weaker impressions. I could meet halfway, here, with a friend who was into darker stuff like danzig and mark lanegan, in a high school arena that championed the grateful dead and classic rock favorites. It was agreeable, with agitated, uptempo songs, odd, bittersweet melodies and there's a general strangeness that doesn't wear thin. And it doesn't go too far out. Only took a few listens to open up, and to me (around 1994), it sounded pretty complex and varied. Nowadays, the production sounds a little slick and gussied up (sugary), but it's a sentimental favorite that still inspires wonder (song craft) and emotion, even when it's highly subjective and personal.

but, yeah, i would easily cite us maple's talker, or drukqs in another conversation, for context. of course with age, you have to start considering 'the classics' after spending time with albums in general.

My Renaissance choice is Scheherazade. It is often incredibly exciting in the best way that I like with symphonic music. But to me, the first track has a serious flaw, it starts with an utterly astonishing hair raising build up but plays out and ends far too conventionally. So it brings you up and lets you down a bit.
I also have Ashes Are Burning and Turn Of The Cards; from looking around reviews unfortunately it looks like the studio albums go downhill from that. Both those albums have some amazing tracks but I don't think they come close to Scheherazade.

Maybe I should mention my Beach Boys pick is Holland.

Listening to Teenager Of The Year for the first time is a very fond memory of mine, after hearing the first 3 tracks I just couldn't stop smiling, it just made life seem so great. I don't think there is a bad song on it but just like Bossanova (my favourite Pixies album) it sorta tapers off in quality at the end.

If you are new to YMO, you gotta hear this...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxIZ7ZPtEcI

blackout

Britney or Linkin Park? *scratches chin*

not sure if it's my favorite album ever, but since we're talkin ymo, haruomi hosono's mercuric dance is the album that's hit me hardest over the last five years or so. "windy land" in particular never fails to bring out some heavy feelings ;__;

Enter the Wu Tang

Ha, I assumed he meant the Scorpions' Blackout.

There are like 3 types of answer for this. 1 'my favorite album' ie the album I love the most 2 'the greatest album IMO' ie the album I think about the most 3 'my desert island disc' ie the one I now at this time can envision enjoying over and over again to the excl of others.

1 maybe spirit of Eden or Harmonia Deluxe
2 maybe tilt or winter songs
3 maybe Ivan Moravec playing Debussy Images book 1 and 2 and Estampes on Vox or A Walk Across the Rooftops

If the box set cheat is allowed:

1 Soft Boys 1976-1981 rykodisc
2 Scott walker 5 easy pieces
3 alfred brendel complete Beethoven piano sonatas (Philips digital) (unless I only have headphones on the desert island in which case sub Claude Frank complete Beethoven sonatas (music and arts)

Alan have you heard the "Nokto de la Galaskia Fervojo" soundtrack? that's definitely my favorite of that Hosono era (although I'd nominate Paraiso as my overall favorite, that's another album that hits a spot like nothing else)

oh, definitely. that's really good and paraiso is also top notch but mercuric dance is the one for me. I think it's the sustained mood.

I forgot to mention Bongwater's Power Of Pussy being another very high favorite.

Ha, frogbs has already dealt with mine! I'll provide the Youtube link, though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4PV3xaBgII

The reason why it's my favourite album is that it contains more genuinely heart-stopping moments of musical joy and wonder than any other album I've heard. It flows with demonic intensity from one brilliant tune to the next, occasionally sitting you down and overwhelming you with delicate beauty rather than kaleidoscopic delirium, although the record mostly keeps a perfect balance between the two. And the lyrics are slanted poetic brilliance, an English afternoon's reflection gone madly skewhiff, a childhood of sin and redemption sped through a witch's loom.

Listen to the first five tracks. Don't let Eat It Up Worms Hero put you off. First five, then you'll either be sold or horrified and you'll know whether to pursue the butterfly.

Pawn Hearts by VdGG is the only other serious contender for my favourite album ever, although I've just discovered Hammill's solo The Silent Corner And The Empty Stage which is rapidly pulling up alongside (it's pretty much a follow-up to Pawn Hearts, and of equivalent quality)

cardiacs one of those things i only know from ilm. never heard of them or heard anyone mention them until people mentioned them here. pretty demented. i definitely couldn't listen to a whole album of that.

me neither. have tried and failed.

a childhood of sin and redemption sped through a witch's loom.

read this as "sped through a witch's lemon."

What is the next Cardiacs album to get?

The Seaside is also on Youtube and is brilliant, maybe the second best. Infernally hard to find on CD though. Guns, Heaven Born And Ever Bright and On Land And In The Sea are also absolutely superlative. Obtain them in any order you desire.

Some of Tim's side-projects are just as good if not better, though. His Extra Special OceanLandWorld album and Spratleys Japs - Pony are both essentially Cardiacs albums, and contain some of his best tunes.

I genuinely don't have a 'favourite' album.

It goes without saying that "favorite album" is impossible, but The Sounds of Silence and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band were my first, both released on or near the year of my birth (1967) and hardwired into my infant brain before I could talk. My mother is the type to care for only a few albums, but love those with boundless, almost obsessive intensity, playing them day after day, even year after year in regular-to-constant rotation. (Is that a type? If it is, she's one.) To be honest, though, those two are in some sense just placeholders for Simon & Garfunkel and the Beatles, who collectively scored my earliest years. Tracks from Magical Mystery Tour, the White Album and Revolver get lumped in there somewhere, along with S&G's 60's hits.

That's not to slight the particularity of Sounds and Sgt. Pepper's. They were specific sources of endless, joyful (sometimes terrifying) wonder and fascination, albums whose sound and language seemed large enough, almost, to enclose the world. They certainly expanded mine, sketching out the places and people, ideas and emotions I expected to encounter later in life, the future in miniature. A not inconsiderable portion of boyhood was spent trying to make sense of "A Year in the Life", or falling into the staggering canyon of reverb that gradually opens out under "Bridge over Troubled Water" (a song I can't now stand, but retrospective cynicism isn't the point here).

I can't hear these albums today the way I did then, perhaps can't reach that state at all. I love certain songs and both groups, but neither can tell me anything I don't know already, or don't think I know.

I have to say I've never been able to comprehend how someone can listen to the same album everyday for a long time, especially big music fans who have thousands to listen to.

A typical album burns out for me after 4-7 listens and then I need to put it away for months or years before I listen to it again, otherwise I start to hate it or feel nothing for it.

In picking these sorts of favorites most people pick something that has endured lots of listens over time, but music is very easily overplayed for me; which is a large part of why I find adverts and popular radio soul destroying. Some people might call me overly precious but I think music is too special to be played until you hate it (sometimes having a radio station on at your job that plays the same handful of songs every few hours, every day for half a year FEELS like abuse. I heard that Junior Senior hit single at college something like 800 times).

I've only heard Scott Walker's Drift 4 times but I found it surprisingly easy to get into; the absoloute power of it is deeply ingrained in me. I look forward to going back to it, but I'll select the occasion carefully.

I think I should say something about the least well known album I listed: Con Dolore - This Sad Movie. This is something else I think I've only heard 4 times but it totally blown me away. It really lives up to the title and cover art, it's a dreampoppy/shoegazey story of a romance that I found very powerful, it has some incredibly sweet and beautiful sad songs. I was totally gutted when I found out they had split up (but the second album wasnt nearly as good, maybe they were running out of steam).
Years later I finally tracked down cds of the earlier Moss/Ballinger project Polar. The difficulty was there are several bands called Polar and their discography somehow always gets listed and mixed up with a slowcore band of the same name. Their two albums are A Future History Of The Frigid Polar Night and Lies Set By The Polar Mob. I've seen listing of an album called Begins The Frigid Night but cant confirm it really exists.
They were both well worth the tracking down. Several sites have them on mp3, the second album harder to find. I think Con Dolore/Polar deserve to be very high among the dreampop/shoegaze canon.
Kirsty Moss was in a band called Les Enfants but I'm not sure they managed to get anything out. Yet another band name that is difficult to search and there being several other bands called that!

I feel the same as you do about overexposure, Robert, but there are albums that have stood the test of time. My slots 2-10 change over time but my favorite album has long been The Chameleons "Strange Times". It came out when I was in college but the emotions that swirl within it (desperation, longing, hope, loss, nostalgia, joy) are always things I can connect with despite the changing circumstances of my life. I am a listener of lyrics first and always try to make an emotional connection with music, and "Strange Times" delivers in spades. And with each listen I focus on a different instrument, or the interplay between two instruments, and am still amazed at how they got THAT sound. I still wouldn't want to listen to it daily or even monthly though, unlike the vast majority of albums, I could.

The Smiths "How Soon Is Now" is a song I could listen to everyday without tiring of it.

Every year there's things that come out that demand I play them for a while, and for that I'm eternally grateful.

I've written about Orchestra Luna several times, including here, in my very first thread:

My first question, about Orchestra Luna

A review by Lance Loud in Hit Parader at the time namechecked The Doors, Roxy Music, Eno, The Incredible String Band, Bette Midler, Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks, The Mothers of Invention, Al Jolson and Eddie Foy. They're all in there, and then some. I don't listen to much prog or 70s rock these days, but I will always love this one-of-a-kind album of off-kilter, showtune-y piano pop.

I could also write a lot about Underworld's dubnobasswithmyheadman. That was one that just came along at a special age - it was already a decade ago when I had heard it, but it connected with me like nothing else. I was about 16, coming off some pretty bad experiences in middle school and high school thus far, but was kind of coming into my own as a person, discovering who I was, and blah blah blah (this part is pretty boring). Of course I didn't really know it at the time but listening to it now, it feels like an intersection of electronic, New Wave, and prog rock - the three genres I remain attached to today. There's something that hit me so personally about the vocals, like a twinge of loneliness to everything, but also a sense of fascination about the big city (I'm from a pretty small town). Like it made me feel like there was something in there bigger than myself or anything that I knew, and of course musically the thing still sounds amazing even today. It really is a pastiche of all sorts of different sounds - "Skyscraper" is like three tunes in one, "Surfboy" is cobbled together from all sounds of disparate pieces, "Tongue" uses some found sound and "Dirty Epic" is really a sort of remix of an earlier track. Of course, Second Toughest had none of this - it sounds incredibly clean, everything very deliberate and calculated, and it's also flawless in its own right, but the "dirty" atmosphere of dubnobass hit me a lot harder. Nobody I went to school with was into anything like this so it was kind of my own secret...I remember bringing my discman to school and watching people walk down the halls to the sounds of "Dark and Long" (until a teacher told me to put it away) - those were special times!

Was all my favourite electronic music of the last 30 odd years derived from YMO's BGM? This is the find of the year, for me. One track sounds like New Order, one like Soft Cell, one like Pet Shop Boys, another wouldn't be out of place on Oneohtrix's Rifts. Ah, here comes the early Autechre one. Damn why didn't I know about this before?

frogbs, I feel exactly the same way about dubnobass - it was hugely important when I was 16. Gonna have to dig that out too.

my favorite album of all time (as of five years ago) is eric dolphy's out to lunch which i've found extremely difficult to write about bc that's what happens when you invest a lot in an album and its ideas, it seems to speak ably for itself. but i guess one thing i'd point to that's also a curving path through almost 100 percent of the jazz i prefer is how it always seems on the point of coming apart but all of the players are reined in by a deep understanding of themselves and each other.

i recently figured out that my new favorite album is probably the blue nile's hats which i still have a distant enough relationship with so that i might write something actually observant about it. maybe later

i recently figured out that my new favorite album is probably the blue nile's hats which i still have a distant enough relationship with so that i might write something actually observant about it. maybe later

― emo canon in twee major (BradNelson), Tuesday, August 13, 2013 4:42 PM (19 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^^ good choice

Oh yeah Hats is a great choice. That would be in my top twenty.

kraudive - you may want to also check out Technodelic, their other 1981 album. or at least the tune "Gradated Gray" which is one of my favorite songs ever.

I feel kinda dorky listing one of those canon albums that everyone hates but I'll give it a go anyway

Rolling Stones Exile On Main Street
I grew up listening to the Stones, knowing most of the singles, being the 15 year old who played Paint It Black constantly because it ~spoke~ to me etc. They were a band that sounded and seemed a certain way to me - cocky and sexual and leering. I was a pretty voracious fan of a lot of new bands, but with a band like the Stones, even though I really dug them, they weren't a band that I explored much. I just always really loved what I heard, I'd always listen to cassettes my friends gave me but I wasn't out reading about them or finding out how to get my hands on more. I was busy with lolgrunge. So they were just kind of there in the background.

I don't remember exactly when it was that I found Exile. It was some time around college, right around the time when I started finding all the musical fossils down in between the cracks of the things you knew about growing up...when you move into buying individual albums from bands instead of settling for their greatest hits, when you pay more attention to the albums that you HAVEN'T heard about, than the ones you have. And Exile wasn't an album that my friends talked about, or anyone I knew even talked about. I didn't move in the kind of circles where I had access to that knowledge. Which sounds weird on a board like ILM, but I still kinda smalltown, I was still learning.

So for me personally finding Exile was like an Indiana Jones moment. A Stones double album with NO singles on it. Not a single track that I recognized. The title was an echo of something I had heard or read somewhere, that it had some weight to it. The cover made it seem like an arcane artificat from a circus. From the moment I put it on, I realized that I didn't know the Stones at all. This sounded like them...I mean, Mick's singing and Keef's playing so it's not gonna sound THAT much different...but I remember thinking, why don't more of their songs sound like THIS? So loose and relaxed and easy and melodic. By the time I got to 'Torn and Frayed' I was in love. And when I tell anyone that I love the Stones -- it's Exile that I'm talking about. That's who they've become for me as a band. When I think of them, this is who I think of.

Sticky Fingers, Some Girls are two of my most favorite Stones albums, they're both up there. But as much as I hold those albums up, Exile has to be at the top because it transformed what I thought I knew...it felt like such a discovery, and it was something I found on my own, without recommendtions from friends or critics or anyone, it just kind of naturally found it's way into my life.

Even now when I put it on, I still feel an echo of the excitement I felt hearing those songs for the first time.

kraudive - you may want to also check out Technodelic, their other 1981 album.

i was going to mention the same thing. and Naughty Boys as well. also Solid State Survivor. pretty much all of their albums deserve a good listen!

Since they always get the comparison I'd venture that YMO/SSS/BGM/Technodelic/Naughty Boys is a greater run than Autobahn/Radioactivity/TE-E/Man-Machine/Computer World. I doubt too many would agree with that but as Z S said all those albums are well worth getting.

VG I didn't fall for Exile until well into my twenties. It's not a teenager album I don't think. It sort of demands your respect. It never begs for it.

exile is one of the rare canon records that earns its mythology i think. only other one i can think of right now is there's a riot goin' on. similar murky glow to both

And when I tell anyone that I love the Stones -- it's Exile that I'm talking about.

Yes. Great response, VG.

i was going to mention the same thing. and Naughty Boys as well. also Solid State Survivor. pretty much all of their albums deserve a good listen!

― Z S

Naughty Boys gets my vote for their best album but yeah that is a great run.

should add that it took me forever to love exile and riot which only increased my esteem for them. immediate visceral reaction that paid off even more over time

Love this thread. There’s a bunch I’ve never heard of, let alone heard (Cardiacs, Emperor, Devil Doll, etc). I have two albums, each for roughly the same reasons, and both boring picks – Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA and Radiohead’s OK Computer.

BitUSA was the first album I owned, at the ripe old age of five. For years this was the only album I owned so one can imagine how many times I’ve listened to it. It opened the idea for me that there could be amazing songs that weren’t hits on the radio (simple concept, yes, but I was five). One idea that failed to process was that Springsteen may have other great albums - something I wouldn’t learn about until a good fifteen years later.

OK Computer came out the month of my 18th birthday. I had never heard of Radiohead up to that point; wasn’t into music all that much either, besides whatever was playing on the top 40 stations. I was really interested in getting to know one of my coworkers at the time, and while we were hanging out at her place one day she played this album for me. That planted the seed that there was a world of music out there that wasn’t on the radio. A few years later I was obsessed with reading about and discovering music. Still play this album a few times a year.

Exile is amazing! My favorite Stones for sure, but took 4-5 listens to really start loving it.

took me about 25 years to really love it, but now i really love it. i kept trying.

when i was a teen, i bought every 'classic' album i could get my hands on. some of that stuff took years to sink in (james brown, who i love now, sounded terrifyingly alien to me then), some of it never reached me (i must have listened to derek & the dominos' 'layla' ten times through trying to make myself like it), and a lot of it i loved then and feel no connection to now (most of the who). the one album i love now every bit as much as i did then, with an intensity all the fiercer because i never met anyone else who seemed to love it the way i did, was pink floyd's 'piper at the gates of dawn.'

for me, the appeal of the album had little to do with the mystique of syd barrett, who i barely knew anything about, but more in the way it seemed to create an entirely new world, something i could access every time i sat in my room and listened to it, with my headphones on and the lights out. the whole thing could have been beamed into my bedroom from another planet. there was a sense of incredible menace about the entire album. even the song about a cat. even the song about a gnome. even the song about a scarecrow ("his head did no thinking, his arms didn't move" -- what a creepy, uncanny line). it was as if someone had taken my favorite bits of the beatles' white album, the creepy, nursery rhyme-ish moments ('cry baby cry,' 'sexy sadie,' even bits of 'revolution 9') and somehow made a whole album out of it, skipping the boring parts. the end of the album, in which the giddy romp of 'bike' dissolves into a series of discordant, random, ominous noises, left me feeling unsettled then and still does.

the lyrics, for me, still hold up as poetry -- moreso than those of dylan or cohen or any of the other rock 'poets' ppl like to rhapsodize over. the way the words seem to bubble up out of nowhere, sounding like nothing else before or since, silly and playful and free of pretension, somehow reminiscent of blake without falling into imitation of any particular poem.

i don't think 'piper' ever really fit into the classic rock canon -- i've never heard any of its songs on the radio, and the only ppl i met for years who had even heard it were hardcore floyd fans who treated it as kind of a fun precursor to the later floyd, to the 'real' stuff. but i'm grateful for that, because it still feels like 'my' album, my personal discovery, my secret, in a way that nothing by the beatles or the clash or led zeppelin or sleater-kinney ever could.

all my friends make fun of me cuz i say everything is my favorite but its true a lot when i'm playing something i love. and i love a lot of music.

i think that piper was the first pink floyd album i ever heard. my brother had the twofer. i had never heard the actual original version of astronomy domine until last year when i got a nice japanese pressing of the album! how weird is that to love an album and never hear the original version of it until 30 years later? i always had a nice pair or an american tower pressing. never heard it on cd.

its my favorite floyd studio album too. though i am a fan of their later work.

piper RULES

Does anyone else feel like they are always listening to some sort of classics at any given time. Whenever I look at my current new listening pile, it often has 3 to 6 albums which are either mega classics or a minor cult classic. But rarely feels like this because a lot of them dont really shake me (I got Bridge Over Troubled Water a while ago, I thought it was really good but it didnt leave a mark on me).

Maybe if I listened to as much as I'd like to the classics would run out faster.