(Enigma 1988, Nick Sansano)
I recently wrote a very long peice on this album (it's listed under music reviews if your interested), because I have to be honest until this summer I had never listened to this record. It seems quite incredible looking back, considering my love for American Alternative music in this period that I'd never actually listened to the Genre's magnum opus and many American's concensus pick for the greatest album of all time. Well of course I fell in love with the record on first listen, it's simply sublime and incredibly infectious. It's an album of great contrasts, the gorgeous laid back dreamy observational songwritting of Thurston Moore and the scathing rath of rock goddess Kim Gordon. This was a band that perfectly captured the zietgiest. That disaffected alternative American culture is perfectly encapsulated by this record. From the perfect title DayDream Nation to that beautiful and affecting album artwork, every inch of this album is sublime.
Thurston's spacey day dreamy melodies float perfectly on the gorgeous Teenage Riot as he croons with such a sense of disaffected joy. You feel like your walking around New York City half a sleep in a daze, it's a heavenly track. Elsewhere, Sonic Youth are torturing there instruments and warping perceptions, the excellent Silver Rocket starts out as a straight rocker before breaking down into a rasping scraping musical meltdown. This is a signature of Daydream Nation even the most seemingly simple of songs confounds you expectations, they warp, evolve and the challenge you the listener. The music can be abbrasive but it's always controlled you feel like your on a journey, that every last scrathy riff and stab of guitar is utterly essential. Kim Gordon is the real star on this record, while this album is perfect from track one to track twelve, she is simple uber cool. On The Sprawl she's the ultimate femme fatale, she in your face, she's disgusted by you, and yet while she's mocking you and burying consumerism you can't help but love it, her cynical tones are a sheer delight. My own personal highlight is album closer Trilogy bringing together three great invidual tracks into one great music clusterfuck, its a long esxcaberating journey, grueling and yet beautiful. As far as musical relevance and importance records don't come much bigger than this, it's simply impossible to imagine the next twenty years of American music without Daydream Nation and Doolittle. Ultimately this record is all things to all people a visceral jab of rough around the edges alternative punk, an ice cool pop record, or the first and last word in avante guard rock, honestly, who cares? Only one word can really do justice to Daydream Nation: genius.
4. Thriller - Michael Jackson
(Epic 1982, Quincy Jones)
There is no escaping this album, it's an aboslute monster, it's probably the concensus choice for the greatest pure pop record of all time, and while I personally prefer the disco stylings of Off The Wall or the excentricity of Purple Rain I'd be hard pressed to come up for a convincing argument against this album. I really do feel deeply sadden listing back to Thriller now and thinking of Michael Jackson's life, the tragedy and triumph that built and built until this absolutely perfect moment. Everything after that, well we'd all like to pretend that never happened. This was Jackson ultimate creative and commercial peak, and it was the ultimate triumph for a black artist, and a incredibly important record culturally. It's almost impossible for me to state the importance of MJ and Thriller to African American culture, and I'll try to avoid being a partronising arse as I will never quite understand but this record does mean the world to someone people.
When it comes to pop record this is the absolute zenith, of the nine tracks on this album seven went on to become wildly succesful singles and this album still sells by the shed load today. Why exactly? Becuase it's stuffed to the brim with grade A level awesomeness. Not to sound unproffesional but there is no other way to put it. This is the album that brought the world Wanna Be Starting Something, Billie Jean, Beat It, Thriller, The Girl Is Mine, Human Nature and P.Y.T. This is just solid gold hit making at its best. It has it all, the sweetest ballads, the sickest dance moves, the best videos, the ultimately guitar lines, that solo from Beat It, and best of all it has that undefinable X factor that only MJ could bring to a record. The albums influence is still being felt, just last year Rihanna pinched the refrain from Wanna Be Startin' Something to top the charts with Please Don't Stop The Music. Thinking back I'm staggered that Baby Be Mine never got a release it's a sublime pop song and georgeous ballad with a killer Streets of Rage baseline. However when it comes to Micheal Jackson and this album there are always two tracks that I will come back to again and again. First and foremost Beat It possible my favourite track of all time, it's just perfect, every note, every clang, every pulsing synth, the knocks, every lick of guitar and of course every last "Shamone". The other track is Billie Jean with its more seriously writing, and it's the high water mark that every great single from any genre will be measured against. Quite simply, the perfect pop record.
3. Master Of Puppets - Metallica
(Elekra 1986, Metallica)
So from the King of Pop music and his masterpiece to Metallica and the holy bible of metal Master Of Puppets. Some albums are bigger than life itself, and this is one. For die hard metal fans, who take there love of heavy metal like a religion, a tribe that they must defend with the derision of all other types of music, this is alter at which they all prey. Now I'm not all that much into music genres, I think its petty and mostly used as a social device to associate and disassociate people from another, so I can never do justice to just how beloved this record is. However there is one thing that even a die hard fan of Lily Allen and the Strokes can tell you; that this album will absolutely rock your fucking socks. It will make your knees freeze and your liver quiver, mere mortals tremble in the presence of this record. Okay enough silly hyperbole, but you get the point. This record is a monster, and while I am jesting with my overly lavish praise, there is something every special about this record. When I finally got to see Metallica live at last years Reading it was a draw dropping show, but it's the tracks from this album and particularly the title track Master Of Puppets itself that make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end and sends a shiver down you spine. It would probably be terrifying if I wasn't being controlled like some hypnotic zombie to pump my fist and shout "Crawling faster....Obey Your Master, Master!".
Yet for all the visceral pummelling that this album has to offer, and trust me there is plenty, it's also an album of great melody and beauty. Simply take one look again at Master Of Puppets a brutish Orwellian rant about coperate commercial dictatorial mind control right? Wrong, listen to that epic guitar breakdown, where silence rings out before Kirk brings in a tender a majestic guitar line, this is no punch in the face, this is a full blown work of art. This is an album of great texture and surprising control, the guitars are lush, and rather than being a straight up race to see who can thrash hardest on their guitar, the arrangements are as subtle as they are powerful, brooding epicly and moving from place to place. When you listen to a ludicrious huge track like The Thing That Should Not Be, a track so silly lyrically that on any other record it would be dismissed as a fun throwaway, is some how transformed into this mamoth widescreen epic that feels like an old monster movie come to life. Of course fear not, this is not an album devoid of insane thrashing this is the album that brough you Damage Inc. and Battery after all. Master Of Puppets is an intriguing listen all these years on, while in terms of immediacy Ride The Lightening will always be king, Master Of Puppets will forever be remember as the classic Metallica album. Because quite simply this album is fucking epic, if it where a movie it would be the unholy offspring of The Lord Of The Rings trilogy and the Evil Dead trilogy, huge, epic, ridiculous, and perfect.
2. Doolittle - The Pixies
(4AD 1989, Gil Norton)
Now this was a really really tough choice but unfortunately the mind blowing genius of Doolittle is going to have to second for second place. It's a shame because this record really is all things to all people. Everyone can enjoy this record in one way or another, be you a metal head, an alternative junkie, indie scenster, or pop lover, actually hell even a fan of dance music could probably get into Kim Deal's slick bass grooves. It's this variety of sound that really makes the Pixies and Doolittle so special. It's almost too easy to talk about their world famous quiet-loud dynamic and then talk about Curt Cobain and tell you how Doolittle and the Pixies reinvented rock music and by proxy saved music from the worst excesses of Bret Michaels. But this is just one side of the story, it's too reductionist, the Pixies are so much more than just Black scream and Deal's coo. This is a band who had it all, who never made bad records and in 1989 they took all the momentum built up on Come On Pilgrim and Surfer Rosa and absolutely knocked it out of the park.
Debaser the album opener is typically of this album dichotomy of sound, it's features a goregous surf rock guitar, and a killer baseline, and then suddenly Black starts to meniacally rant about slicing up eyes balls and the song is thrust into stratusphere. Of course the chorus is devine, Black unleashes his legendary scream while Deal dripping with nonchalant cool coos "Debaser". It's an incredible opening and the pace is never allowed to drop Black flies right into his best sex offender vocals on the sardonic Tame; "hips like cinderella". Every time he delivers that line I feel like I've some how been violated and then of course theres that monster screaming chorus. Between this record and Daydream Nation you can pretty much hear where every trend in 90s hard rock originated, from Industrial, to Grunge via the whine of Shirley Manson and Brian Moloko. So anyway how do we follow the sex offenders anthem Tame? Well with a lovely surf pop anthem called Wave Of Mutiliation? Yes only the Pixies could make such a lovely sunshiny track with such a maccabre presence. It almost goes without saying how superb the vocal interplay between Deal and Black is, the way they contrast, not just in volume, but in tone and intonation. I love it when Black raves with a demented sincerity while Kim Deal rolls her eyes and delivers her lines with brutal cynicism.
Okay enough talk of Deal and Black, it's time to give Joey Santiago some praise. His guitar work is wonderous. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing technical going on here, it hardly bares comparison to Master Of Puppets but he glides so effortlessly between genres, complimenting Deal's bass perfectly and seemingly inventing new sounds as he went along. Santiago is a hugely important guitarist as he was a real pioneer in US hard rock showing how much amazing warped sound you could get with such limmited skills. He added subtly and these brutal abbrasive flourishes, whether it be an industrial squeel on Dead, a bouncy pop hook on Here Comes Your Man or whether it was the epic power chords of Monkeys Gone To Heaven. He pointed the way forward to the creative guitar work of the next twenty years, and is the ultimate proof that you should never let a lack of technical talent stiffle your creativity.
Okay I should really start wrapping up, but there's just so much to talk about on this record, every track is almost a world unto itself. Doolittle is a musical universal full of brutish slabs, sexy basslines, unparralled creative, huge pop hits, abbrasive wailing, there's a new surprise waiting around every corner. And just when you think you've heard every last trick they have to offer Mr. Grieves kicks in with a maccabre ska beat? Yes I did just say ska! They threw in a jaunty little sea shanty ska number, minus the brass section, my god, did the Pixies invent the Libertines too? Holy shit! Is there any stone this band left unturned, literally that track feels like the sex child of The Libertines Death On The Stairs and Amy Winehouse's Me & Mr. Jones. It's incredible, and best of all at the heart of this album were huge monsterous hits Debaser, Tame, Hey, Here Comes You Man and Monkey's Gone To Heaven. I seriously have to stop now, I could go on praising this album forever, I didn't even get to the gorgeous drum work, and the sleazetatcular La La Love You. This album is simply too much, it's too much of a good thing, it's everything you could possible want one after another, it's like a greatest hits collection that should span twenty years of musical development thrown together in one short sharp record. If you've never heard this record, go buy it now, no matter what music your into, you'll like something on this record. And I put this second???? God how stupid am I, next I'll be calling Ok Computer the second bes....oh.
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