I’m going to listen to the top 3 upvoted albums and give you my honest unfiltered thoughts.
Please explain what makes the album special to you. For context, lyrics are very important to me, so I gravitate to music with good storytelling.
Alt-J An awesome wave - it really is considered as a whole in its creation. There are interludes, dips & swells in the energy, and a whole journey of sonically related songs which keep introducing new variations and sounds.
Sufjan Stevens the BQE - another album that really should be enjoyed as a whole journey, it follows the daily commute of so many along the Brooklyn Queens Expressway in NYC. It wanders from orchestral to electronic noise, and is a wonderful album to put on for a slow Sunday morning.
To Pimp a Butterfly - Kendrick Lamar
It’s a hip-hop album with a strong focus on themes of race in America and mental health. Lamar’s lyricism is incredible.
The instrumentation is equally great, drawing inspiration from jazz, funk, and soul.
My favorite is The Beatles Revolver.
Revolver is, IMO, the best transitional album - the songs are all approachable, yet remain experimental. The execution is polished.
While many will say that Sgt Pepper is the Beatles’ best album, over the years I found myself leaning more toward Revolver. Pepper is a great concept album, but there are only a few memorable songs. Most people have heard the majority of Revolver at some point in their life.
So if I were to pick one album that represented the Beatles at their height as a pop music band, it would be Revolver.
Sgt. Pepper’s is a great record, but it’s only as massive as it is because it was one of the first of its kind; a rock album not designed to be danced to, but listened to and enjoyed almost passively. It was certainly one of the first from a band as enormous as The Beatles.
Meanwhile, Revolver is a fucking great record from start to finish.
Sgt. Pepper is incredible, and for decades I considered it the “gold standard.” But I always found myself re-playing Revolver. But Pepper remains the reference album for “that album a band puts out that is the epitome of the band’s output.” No album since Pepper was as good - though some of The Beatles best songs are post-Pepper.
The amazing thing about The Beatles is that their catalog is a diverse collection of numerous different pop and rock sensibilities, like they just could not pick a direction, but hit on nearly every form of pop and rock they could think of, then immediately got bored and moved on to something else.
For folks discovering The Beatles for the first time, I always recommend listening in chronological order, simply because their musical evolution is really their defining characteristic - many bands found a voice and then did deep-dives (thus defining the later genres of rock that The Beatles maybe lightly touched on before moving on). The Beatles refused to be constrained, and I think that’s why we are talking about them some 50 years later.
It’s probably worth mentioning their compilation double albums too - 1962-66 ( the red one) and 1967-70 (the blue one). These after i wore out a 45 of Penny Lane when I was 7 or 8.
The Red and Blue albums are awesome, especially since they contain songs you can’t find on their main albums — especially when you only had access to the reduced content Capitol record releases.
I’m not familiar with your reduced content. As you say Capitol I’m assuming the US? Did they restrict any particular albums or just some tracks/songs?
Capitol shaved off a few songs off the Parlephone equivalent of earlier albums and then released additional albums. https://ultimateclassicrock.com/beatles-us-uk-album-guide/
Right before CDs became huge, Capitol destroyed their Beatles masters, so the first Beatle CDs were Parlephone, which may be what most of the younger generations are used to.
Wow. What a mess.
Tool - Lateralus. It’s an album best played from start to finish, and takes a very dynamic ride that I interpret as a ride through human consciousness, communication with others and ourselves.
The Kinks, Preservation Act 1 & 2
The Kinks modernized rock, progressing through similar phases as The Beatles, they became increasingly experimental, taking on many different genres and instruments. I believe that The Beatles and many others learned different avenues to expand their sound from listening to The Kinks. Preservation Act 1 & 2 were a exposition into the realm of rock opera. It touches upon super modern and relevant concepts, such as crooked politicians, gentrification, getting old, censorship, etc. It plays out like a story, so please take the time to listen to the albums in order and not skip around. It is a master class of diverse rhythm and harmony. Any one of the songs on each album can get stuck in your head for days. In my mind, every song including the intro is a hit. If you like the album and want to listen to other ones by them, I would also recommend The Village Green Preservation Society, Schoolboys in Disgrace, Muswell Hillbillies, Everybody’s in Showbiz, Misfits, and Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One. What’s so interesting about The Kinks is you can ask someone else what their favorite albums are and they may list totally different ones by them from what I listed because they were so versatile across several decades, but I like these the best.
Tuesday Night Music Club from Sheryl Crow. We Do What We Can is one of my favorite songs of all time, but if you want a bit of a story then No One Said It Would Be Easy is depressingly good. There’s not really an over arching story from start to finish with the album, but the flow from one song to another is fantastic.
Frank Turner Love, Ire & Song
Frank is a similar age to me, from the next town up the motorway, so lyrically Love, Ire & Song talks to me about things I mostly understand. When he sings ‘Once I was young and crass enough to care’ I know exactly what he means. On ‘Photosynthesis’ he sings “I won’t sit down, I won’t shut up, and most of all I will not grow up” and I get that too, with every fibre of my being.
Musically, it’s folk-punk through the prism of the hardcore band he was in before going solo. It’s energetic when it needs to be, melancholy when it needs to be, and hopeful even when things feel hopeless. It’s an album I can’t listen to once. It’s two or three times, or not at all.
What helped to cement my love of this album was seeing him play it live in a sweatbox of a pub somewhere in Nottingham with 200 other people, crammed in with apparently little regard to fire safety regulations. The crowd knew all the lyrics and sang them with gusto. For one night only we were all in Frank’s band, and it was glorious.
Divers by Joanna Newsom. I could’ve picked about ten different albums as my all time best, but you said you liked great lyrics and this album has them. The basic question of the album is ‘How is love possible when death is inevitable?’ and Newsom spends forty minutes giving various answers to that question, drawing on Percy Shelley, James Joyce and Albert Einstein, among others.
If that sounds more like an essay than an album, that’s because you need the music, too, to fully appreciate what Newsom does. The lyrics aren’t arbitrary; they always speak to the lyrics and vice-versa. This includes fairly obvious audio-verbal puns, as when she hits a sustained chord on the piano as she sings the word ‘sustains’, and also more recondite use of motifs and key changes that complement the complex lyrical ideas that she’s exploring. The upshot is that I think you’d know this album was about love and loss even if you didn’t understand a word of the lyrics.
The Stage - Avenged Sevenfold
It’s a metal album with a pretty big departure from their normal sound (going from more traditional Heavy Metal to more Progressive Metal), and dropping a Single (the title track, The Stage) then the full album by surprise. It’s their first conceptual album with a focus on where humanity is (in 2016), how we interact with each other, our progression with technology, and our place in the universe which is still very interesting and fun to unpack. The extended version includes their covers of songs they grew up with in Southern California, ranging from Spanish folk songs to Pink Floyd. It’s fantastic to hear a band truly enjoy expanding their sound and creating music they want and seem to love.
I’ll agree with the stage, it’s a great album, but man I do not like their new cd.
Red (Taylor’s Version) - Taylor Swift
It’s hard for me to pick a favorite album because so many of hers have had an impact on me, but Red really is just that album!! It has a beautiful blend of genres (pop, rock, more electronic tracks, country) and it covers every aspect of love — the infatuation, the rose tinted glasses, the hurdles and triumphs and the eventual fallout. Not to mention All Too Well (10 Minute Version) just being an absolute masterpiece of emotional storytelling.
I choose Taylor’s Version specifically because Red, in a way, is Taylor reclaiming herself from a troubled and not so great relationship (which she at the time perceived as normal) and so the parallel of her now also reclaiming her work just adds another layer to the mix.
Red is so fantastic! It’s the album that made me really appreciate Taylor Swift and that blend of genres was part of why. It’s just so solid and good already, but Taylor’s Version is like the leveled-up more full circle version of that.
I’ll have to check it out. Obviously a man of taste
