Daveportivo's Cultural Evaluation Facility

Now before I tell you to sit back and enjoy, I must reassure you that this list will be concluded within the next two months, if not sooner. I know I've been unreliable lately, but I've been very busy working for 411mania and genuinely living my life. However I have ample time to update five albums each and every day. Finally, one more in house note, I do fully intend to restart the Top 1,000 singles of the 2000s around September, and hopefully have it finished by Christmas.

Now for those of you new to the Cultural Evaluation Facility, this list is judged on critical quality, influence, importance and of course my own personal preference, with the overall aim of telling the story of the decade, now lets begin shall we? We Shall.

After a hit and miss start to his post-Beatles career, McCartney was feeling the weight of critical scrutiny like never before; while Lennon and Harrison were greeted into the art house elite with open arms. Not to be deterred McCartney resolved to blow the world away with Band On The Run an ultra-slick melodic assault of Abbey Road-eske collages. It may well be the one of the most overrated albums in pop history, but it's certainly anything but a bad record, as it contains most of McCartney's best post-Beatles work. "Band On The Run" is a meandering riot, "Jet" remains strangely addictive, "Mrs. Vandebilt" is a classic piece of joyful McCartney granddad music and "Let Me Roll It", McCartney's rebuke to Lennon, remains McCarntey's best attempted a singing the blues. Inconsistency, is rampant, but Band On The Run remains a damn good time; it may be over produced and it certainly lacks substance, but it has an endless supply of slick hooks and fun melodies, and remains a sublime slice of pop music.

Alive!'s place in music history as been severely marred by the "overdubbing" accusations and admission, but whatever the case, Alive! remains one of the most enjoyable listens in rock and roll history. Kiss never were an albums band, sure they made some decent records, but who wants to "appreciate" Kiss? Kiss we're unashamedly shallow, they were showman, and records constrained Kiss more than anything, so a live album was the perfect solution, and it should come as no surprise that Alive! remains their best selling and best loved LP to date. It's stacked full of hits "Deuce" sets the the tone, "Strutter" lets you know you in for the night of your life, and by the time "Cold Gin" thunders into "Rock And Roll All Nite", overdubbing will be the last thing on your mind.

The 1980s would see women prove definitively that they could rock just as hard as the boys, and in retrospect Heart's brand of folk meets rock music feels like a natural transitional, if not a trailblazing, record. While they were often pigeon holed as a novelty the strength of their melodies, the sheer catchiness of their hooks and the smooth accessible gleam of their production meant that over thirty years later, with the aid of Guitar Hero, Heart would still be winning new fans. "Magic Man" summed up their entire appeal, big chunky slamming chords, a sweet addictive melody, a bold spunky vocal combined with a strong folk twinge that builds and grows into a prog epic, it's classic Heart, and now it's very much classic rock. Then of course there's that intro to that song, "Crazy On You" remains Heart's defining work, and a song that's never really fallen out of vogue; Eminem sampled it free of irony just as easily as he did Aerosmith. It seems the further removed we get from Dreamboat Annie's original release the more influential, the more important, and the more essential it becomes.

A Night At The Opera may just be the single most overrated album of all time; it's the one truly cohesive Queen record, and it seems that critics are obsessed with laying all their praise for the band as a whole onto this one record. Despite this huge stock of good will, A Night At The Opera is not a five star album, but it is a damn good one, and a much loved one, and at the end of the day that's far more important. A Night At The Opera is forty three minutes of sheer pomposity that refuses to take it's self too seriously, and is yet to cleverly crafted to ever be considered a throwaway. It manages the near impossible feat of feeling both irreverent and substantial, and completely over the top without being remotely self indulgent. It also sees Queen broaden their remit, Freddie delivers a selection of music hall ditties ("Good Company", "Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon" &"Seaside Rendevouz") with a wink and a nod either side of the trippy studio experimentation of "The Prophets Song". In between the silliness there's plenty of room for hard rock as "Death On Two Legs" still feels like the blue print Muse would use for stadium sized sonic expansion thirty years later. While at the other end of the spectrum sure fire singles "My Best Friend" and "Bohemian Rhapsody" send everyone home happy with two monstrous sing along, before "God Save The Queen" brings the curtain down in the most ludicrous fashion imaginable. A triumph of pure ambition mixed with the utterly ridiculous.

Behold the greatest marriage in rock and roll history. It must have been love at first sight when the Jim Steinman first laid his eyes upon Meatloaf. The over the top composer of pop rock musical theatre epics finally found the one man who perfectly encapsulated his vision. Meatloaf was the ultimate showman, too grotesque for musical theatre, too unfashionable for pop music, but somehow Jim Steinman transformed him into one of the world's biggest superstars. Bat Out Of Hell was a the soundtrack to the broadway musical that never could never have actually existed. And in all honesty, it still baffles me how this record ever got made, I mean Springsteen meets Wagner in the middle of the Rocky Horror picture show must have been a tough sell. Well however it happened, it did get made, and thank god it did because the world was treated to one of the silliest slices of pure fun imaginable. "Bat Out Of Hell", "Two Out Three Ain't Bad", "You Took The Words Right Out My Mouth" and "Paradise By Dashboard Lights" are preposterous epics that only Meatloaf could have pulled off. It may be chronically unfashionable to say it, but snobbery to one side, Bat Out Of Hell is legitimately one of the greatest albums ever recorded, even if it's utterly impossible to explain why.