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The 100 Greatest Albums Of All Time, According To Kid Dynamite, nos. 50-26

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Now we’re cooking. Be home by Christmas.

(part 2 is at https://theafterword.co.uk/the-100-greatest-albums-of-all-time-according-to-kid-dynamite-nos-75-51/ and part one can be safely ignored at: https://theafterword.co.uk/the-100-greatest-albums-of-all-time-according-to-kid-dynamite/)

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  1. 50. Early Day Miners – Offshore

    I found this album on a listening post in HMV Shibuya, suckered in by the sleeve sticker describing it as “a 37 minute epic in six parts”. Let’s be honest, it had me at that, and it didn’t need to be anything like the kind of emotional and musical heavyweight it is. I knew nothing about Early Day Miners at the time, but this was their fifth record – the internet variously labels them ‘post-rock’, ‘slowcore’ and other microgenres, just so you know where we’re coming from here.

    The record starts with the cover, a nocturnal seascape illuminated by a sickly yellow light. It’s beautiful and slightly uneasy, setting the tone for what’s to come. “Land Of Pale Saints” opens, a pounding ten minute instrumental. There are layers and layers of guitars building on each other, muscular shoegaze augmented by rising and falling keyboard washes. About five minutes in the guitars drop out, and the drums take centre stage, as they will again and again throughout the record. Purposeful and ominous, they lend a foreboding air of apprehension until this too stops, and is replaced by a brief interlude of strings and feedback, signaling a move away from noise and into a quieter place. This whole middle stretch, starting with “Deserter”, has a hushed, nocturnal quality (most of this record seems to take place in the dark), the same spooky ambience that Daniel Lanois brought to Emmylou Harris’ “Wrecking Ball”. The music stretches out, becomes reflective and the first vocals appear, a man and a woman singing together over rolling percussion and a lost harmonica echoing in the dark. The lyrics of “people lost underwater” and a “ruined city” conjure images of loss and floods, and bring New Orleans’ recent history to mind, as they must have surely been intended to. From here we move seamlessly into “Sans Revival”. The assorted instruments come together to make a beautiful shimmering texture, all-enveloping and uplifting, despite the constant vocal exhortation to “give up”. This is just gorgeous, shafts of light in the dark, and still one of the most played tracks in my iTunes library. It finishes with the first moment of silence we’ve heard on the record, probably the end of side one in old money.

    “Return Of The Native” is a quieter, more subdued piece with brushed drums and a broken, barely there, female vocal eliding into the instrumental “Silent Tents”. The previously roiling percussion is slowed down and the guitars become mournful and elegiac, playing long low notes that speak of loss and regret. This is the aftermath, the morning after. Eventually the drums fade away to nothing, and a guitar and keyboard hold a protracted slowly decaying note as the sun rises on muddy brown devastation. The closer “Hymn Beneath The Palisades” returns us to the martial drumming from the opening, with renewed purpose. This rhythm, the snap of cymbals and the discordant notes of the guitars, herald a vengeful (re)construction. About halfway through the guitars begin to climb. They fall into step with the drums and redouble in intensity. Something big, dark and dangerous is coming. Just as we think it is upon us, it stops dead and you know you’re going to push that play button to listen again and savour that sense of beauty in melancholy.

    Okay, I may not have made this sound like much fun but if emotion expressed through electric guitars is your bag then this is essential. Only 37 minutes long. What else are you going to do, watch an episode and a half of the Big Bang Theory?

    • If this sounds a little familiar, it’s because I’ve half-inched most of it from a review I wrote here seven years ago. Seven years.

      Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
      BY JAMES WRIGHT

      Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
      Asleep on the black trunk,
      Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
      Down the ravine behind the empty house,
      The cowbells follow one another
      Into the distances of the afternoon.
      To my right,
      In a field of sunlight between two pines,
      The droppings of last year’s horses
      Blaze up into golden stones.
      I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
      A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
      I have wasted my life.

  3. I will investigate this–thanks!

    I bloody loved the listening posts at Shibuya HMV when I lived in Tokyo, and would spend Friday evenings checking out the stuff (my best discovery was the first Nite Jewel album). It is long gone, alas, but HMV has returned to Shibuya as a more hipster-ish vinyl retailer.

  4. This top 100 is so slow that Mark Lewisohn will have finished his three volume Beatles* tome before you reach No. 43 in your top 100 Kid 😎 After that mild rebuke any chance of your 100-51 appearing as a list.

    *Beatles fans (me) have been waiting for Vol. 2 for 5+ years.

  5. The Kid’s barely believable ability to extend the duration of our delight, teasing us just often enough to sustain our pleasure, while employing the countdown device to slowly increase our enjoyment until it builds ultimately to the point of ecstasy makes me suspect that Sting will be number one..

  7. 49. Screaming Trees – Dust

    One of the great lost albums of the 90s. I was working in a record shop in Portsmouth when it came out, and I remember raving about it to the Sony rep, and him sadly saying “it’s a shame no one’s buying it”. If you’d listened to it knowing nothing about what actually happened you’d be forgiven for thinking that this must have been one of the bestselling albums of the decade. But instead it just went out there and died.

    The timing didn’t help. In 1996, Britpop was taking over the UK and I don’t know what the Americans were listening to, probably Korn or something. A plaid shirted Seattle band playing music inspired by classic rock was very much last year’s thing. Throw a terrible cover and the Trees being incredibly volatile and dysfunctional into the mix, and you’re not looking at a recipe for success. More fool the record buying public, though, because this is a sensational album. At its core it’s a solid rock record, full of chunky riffs and catchy choruses, but it’s the stuff round the fringes that elevate it to the dizzy heights of a place in my top 50, the dustbowl gothic vibe and backwoods menace, or the psych touches with sitars, tablas, mellotrons and even a harpsichord. They’re all deployed carefully, avoiding the risk of whimsy and always in service of the song, not overwhelming it. I’m listening to it now, and getting angry that more people haven’t heard it all over again.

    Dust was the first record I reached for after hearing of Mark Lanegan’s passing and it’s still one of the best things he was ever involved with. The production is brilliant, the recording is brilliant, the performances are brilliant and the songs are brilliant.

  8. 48. Fu Manchu – The Action Is Go

    Just look at that cover. Everything about it is awesome, from the great skateboarding action shot to those 70s cans taped under the headband to the font used for the band logo. Can the record possibly live up to that promise? Oh yes, yes it can. It’s got fuzz, it’s got feedback, it’s got cowbell, it’s got riff after riff after riff after riff. In short, all the ingredients for a contented and successful life.

    Fu Manchu have the happy knack of being able to weld together the fuzz and rumble of stoner rock with the energy of punk. The mix gives the traditionally bong-bound genre some relentless forward motion, and it works brilliantly here, from the squalling fury of opener ‘Evil Eye’ to the Tony Iommi goes funk vibe of ‘Guardrail’ to the stoned ascent into space of ‘Saturn III’.

    I went to see them on the tour for the album after this one, travelling up from Brighton to the Garage in London with my friend Metal Matt. He was so excited he fainted when they came on stage, just like the Beatles at Shea Stadium all over again.

  10. 47. Poisoned Electrick Head – The Big Eye Am

    Not enough bands have thought about combining far out space rock with angular post punk and analogue synths. And even fewer went out to play it live dressed in Giger styled latex outfits and bizarre sci-fi death masks. Another act on this list that were heavily involved in the free festival / travelling scene, St Helens’ Poisoned Electrick Head were just plain weird, and I loved them.

    This album is probably the best recording of their juddery, uniquely-vocalled sound, but to get the full experience you had to see them live. Which I did, several times. The most memorable occasion was a free festival in Nottingham circa 1994. The Leccy Heads were playing late at night on the Wango Riley travelling stage, a couple of crusties had climbed up onto some of the vehicles parked nearby and were breathing fire up into the night sky, and I was looking up at the stars feeling my DNA being rearranged. Absolutely tremendous stuff, like The Cardiacs in space or something, pure psychedelic punk rock strangeness.

  11. you’re all going to hate this one as well

    46. Agalloch – The Mantle

    Music for forests.
    This is a record soaked in nature, in reverence for the wilderness and the inconsequentiality of man against its huge panorama. It’s nominally black metal, but a large part of this record is acoustic and / or melodic. There are vicious riffs and goblin vocals, but they are deployed judiciously, one element in a varied arsenal that encompasses neofolk, post-rock and even prog. The overwhelming mood is melancholy and wintry. There’s a coldness at the core of the record that bleeds through every second of it. This is not a barrel of laughs, just in case song titles like “And The Great Cold Death Of The Earth” or “In The Shadow Of Our Pale Companion” didn’t clue you in. But that’s okay, because it is also beautiful and affecting.

    I can’t think of a better way to listen than to wait for fresh snow to fall and putting on your headphones to go walking alone in the woods, feeling the snow crunch under your feet and letting the epic widescreen compositions fill your head.

  12. 45. Phoebe Bridgers – Stranger In The Alps

    I mean, you all know this one, right? I still think it’s the best thing she’s done by some distance. Anyway. I thought it’d be interesting to dig up the review I wrote here around the time of release in 2017, back when she was still Phoebe Bridgers and not PHOEBE BRIDGERS.

    Haven’t edited, as the historical perspective is kind of the point, plus I would only be tempted to add a sentence like “I predict her next album will be massive, maybe called something like Punisher, and perhaps she will even make a collaborative record with Conor Oberst and then form an all-female supergroup, crazy as that sounds!”

    Phoebe Bridgers is a disgustingly young LA artist. She’d previously put out a 7″ on Ryan Adams’ label, and this debut is produced by Bright Eyes’ Mike Mogis, and features a duet with Conor Oberst, all of which gives you a pretty good idea where she’s coming from. It’s not a million miles from the Julie Byrne album that got some traction here earlier in the year – the sound is basically folk, with a bit of invention and studio trickery. The songs are built on foundations of acoustic guitar and piano, with support from electric guitars, synths and strings, and then some wilder sounds thrown in. A plane passes overhead above the Twin Peaks twang of opener ‘Smoke Signals’, and there’s a moment in the gorgeous crescendo of album highlight ‘Scott Street’ where among the wordless vocals and building strings you hear the bell of a child’s bicycle, then the choo-choo of a steam train. Okay, it sounds daft, like the Mad Professor dubbing Joni Mitchell, but it works beautifully.
    It strikes me writing this that those sounds are all of travel and memory, and that fits with the album. It’s full of wistfulness, a longing for a time and a place that isn’t here or now. It’s sad and melancholy, but hey, I like sad and melancholy. It isn’t maudlin or self indulgent, but uplifting and unifying. These songs are all stories, based in the specific but reaching through to the universal.
    Bridgers’ vocals are strong and clear, but still fragile and intimate, and her lyrics have enough self awareness that she doesn’t come off as yet another pretty but sad girl with an acoustic guitar. Take ‘Funeral’ – it’s the night before the funeral of “a kid a year older than me”, and she quashes her nascent self pity: “And I woke up in my childhood bed / Wishing I was someone else, feeling sorry for myself /When I remembered, someone’s kid is dead“. The album ends with a cover of Mark Kozelek and Jimmy LaVelle’s ‘You Missed My Heart’, a crime and punishment ballad that would have fit right in on a late period Johnny Cash album, that is here given a luminous honeyed glow, like a beautiful dream that is also true.
    It takes a lot for a largely acoustic singer songwriter album to get me, but this one has. It’s sad and beautiful, and I love it.

    This is still a magical song

  13. 44. Texas Is The Reason – Do You Know Who You Are?

    Mid-90s emo was very much my jam in those days. From the poppier sounds of The Promise Ring through to the pretty much just actual hardcore sound of Lifetime or Grade, if it was on Revelation or Jade Tree I was all over it. Texas Is The Reason (named after a line in a Misfits song) fall more or less smack in the middle of that scale, heavier than the likes of The Get Up Kids but still not afraid to embrace melody and indie rock. This was their sole album, and that kind of adds to the appeal – there was no On A Wire or Wood/Water to stain their reputation, just one untouchable record (there was also a three song 7” and a few tracks on splits and comps, but even the complete discography version of this album only runs to slightly over an hour). The balance of aggression and pop hooks is right in my sweet spot, from the fuzz and introspection of Nickel Wound to the towering Back And To The Left.
    Of course, I never saw them in their all too brief lifespan, but they did do a reunion tour about a decade ago. I had tickets for the London show which turned out to be the last show they ever played, but it also coincided with a significant birthday for my best friend. No worries, I thought, I can make this work, only to wake up on the morning of the gig in the middle of Dartmoor, miles from the nearest road let alone railway station, and with a crushing hangover. Reader, I still have not seen Texas Is The Reason.

    Anyway, this’ll blow the cobwebs away on this sunny Sunday morning

  14. 43. Godspeed You Black Emperor – Slow Riot For New Zero Kanada

    Okay, it’s only two tracks and some might call it an EP, but on the other hand it’s longer than the entirety of Reign In Blood (of which more anon), so you know.…

    The default setting for writing about GYBE is to talk about apocalypse, fire, massing dark clouds, the end of the world, etc, but that’s not the whole story of their music. The first track here, Moya, is a thing of shimmering beauty, and the endless ascending chords towards the end are light in the dark, an acknowledgment of the possibilty of grace in a failed world. BBF3 on the flipside, however, brings all the darkness you could want. For most of it’s length it’s a sombre, melancholic, accompaniment to a field recording of the eponymous anarcho-libertarian crackpot (whose diatribe against the modern world is largely lifted from an obscure Iron Maiden song), and then, about five minutes out from the end, Godspeed hit the overdrive button. Every instrument ever made starts playing at maximum intensity, a crashing, hammering, and, yes!, apocalyptic climax followed by a brief string coda that sound like sunlight playing over the waves on a new, empty, world.

    The Hebrew text on the cover translates as “formless and void”. It’s a phrase used in the Book of Jeremiah, and the inner sleeve of the record provides a helpful translation of the relevant section:

    I beheld the earth,
    And, lo, it was waste and void;
    And the heavens, and they had no light.
    I beheld the mountains, and, lo, they trembled,
    And all the hills moved to and fro.
    I beheld, and, lo, there was no man,
    And all the birds of the heavens were fled.
    I beheld, and, lo, the fruitful field was a wilderness,
    And all the cities thereof were broken down
    At the presence of the LORD,
    And before His fierce anger.
    For thus saith the LORD:
    The whole land shall be desolate;
    Yet will I not make a full end.

    This is pretty much exactly what the record sounds like. It’s their most concise work, a distillation of everything that makes them great, and it’s the one I reach for most often when I’m in a Godspeed mood.

    • It’s still Lift Your Skinny Fists… for me.

      It’s more obvious and less tight, but I will always remember getting it home (purchased in the same record shopping session as Relationship of Command by At The Drive In, what a day), sticking it on and sitting with my jaw on the floor through the endlessly spiraling first quarter of Storm before it all calms down into that gorgeous picked guitar and (I think) cello, which in turn proves only to pave the way into what can only be described as the soundtrack to Jesus walking on the water. Only not your regular Jesus, but epic none-more-metal, throwing up the horns and shooting flames from his fingertips Jesus.

      I can think of very few moments in my life where a record has so brilliantly and immediately demonstrated the boundless power of music to take the human soul for a spin round the block on rocket powered skates.

      I’m not sure GY!BE have ever made a truly bad record, and there’s so much more to love about them besides (any band that records a trio of tracks entitled “Bosses Hang” gets a thumbs up forever).

    • And it is F♯ A♯ ∞ for me, but I find it disconcerting how the apocalyptic /survivalist elements of their material have been mainstreamed since them.(PS feel similarly about Coil @ number 42 as well)

  15. 42. Coil – Musick To Play In The Dark

    There is indeed something ineffably nocturnal about this record. It’s one of those records that sounds like it’s cover, a foreboding forest shrouded in mist and watched over by the alien beauty of the moon. Eerie chittering synths, quiet and unnerving. Mysterious aphorisms delivered by a voice that seems to be very close, maybe too close, to your ear. Was an album ever so aptly named?

    The music moves between low-key industrial, ambient electronica and even touches of dark jazz, but it’s always slow and stately, washed in silver. The sonic palette is crackles and glitches, febrile electronics and synth exploration with mysterious and esoteric spoken word. Sometimes it is reminiscent of, and perhaps conjured forth, the hauntological sounds the likes of Ghost Box would run with in the decade after this was released, but there is none of that genre’s comforting tug of nostalgia here. This is cold, cryptic, music. It’s ominous and unsettling, but always compelling, and soaked in a strange beauty all its own. Nothing else sounds like it. I played it while I was writing this and it upset the dog.

    Eat your greens, especially broccoli, wear sensible shoes, and always say “thank you”.

  16. 41. Fugazi – Repeater

    This is like one of those Oscars where the award is ostensibly for one film, but everybody knows it’s really for the full career. Fugazi were sensational. Their music is rooted in punk, but moves outwards to encompass much more. There’s a strong dub reggae influence from their earliest recordings, not least in their use of space – they took a traditionally dense and claustrophobic sound and found the space that was hiding in it all along. The guitar style is unusual. There’s no real differentiation between lead and rhythm, rather both guitarists occupy different parts of the sound spectrum, with Picciotto’s needling treble interlocking with MacKaye’s chunkier riffs, but the real musical stars of Fugazi are the rhythm section. Lally and Canty are just superb, with sensational interplay, drive and groove, so much better than the MOJO canon of Entwistle and Moon or Jones and Bonham. All of that is present and correct in the first twelve minutes here, four songs played without a break between them that make for one hell of a mission statement. It’s so powerful, so driven, and it sets a template for one of the best careers in American music.

    My own introduction to this album happened kind of by accident. There was a song that kept getting played in the alternative clubs I went to that opened with a really huge and distinctive bassline. Yeah, you all know what it is now, but this was way before the internet and Shazam and all that. Somehow I knew the artist was Fugazi, but not what the song was called, and so when I saw a lone copy of Repeater in Rival Records I picked it up, reasoning that it must be on it. I took it home, went up to my bedroom and skipped through the beginning of every track, lifting the needle up and down, thinking it must be this one…and of course, it wasn’t. Yeah, disappointed at first, but I when I listened to what I actually had instead of what wasn’t there, I was blown away. Even more so when I moved away for university the following year and saw them at Nottingham Poly, after this one and before Steady Diet came out. That sealed the deal, and the love affair has lasted all the way through. Just a couple of years ago I saw Messthetics in a tiny venue and was like a giddy schoolkid when Brendan was setting up his kit five feet in front of me.

    • Could not agree more about those first four songs and the imperious strength of that rhythm section.

      This is one of the best albums any band has ever made, and although all Fugazi’s albums are great in their own way for me this is the undisputed peak. Brilliant cover too.

    • Speaking of Fugazi, I knew nothing of Australian band Eddy Current Suppression Ring until I went on my local radio station’s round-table record review show just before Covid lockdown, and one of the other guests (a massive Fugazi fan) brought this tune along. It reminded me a bit of the Colorblind James Experience.

      I do know what an Eddy Current Suppression Ring is, though. I am very dull.

  17. 40. Bomb The Bass – Clear

    Bug Powder Dust, which kicks off this album, is one of the all time great “play it loud before you go out for the night” tracks. It’s a rager, welding booming drums and a huge sampled Flora Purim bassline to a torrent of words from Justin Warfield, referencing William Burroughs, Apocalypse Now, Ginsberg and more counter culture touchstones. It’s got to be one of the best opening tracks ever.

    The rest of Clear doesn’t follow that template, but is rather broadly downtempo electronica, spinning out from the trip hip the record company was probably hoping for (this was the mid-90s) to encompass a huge variety of sounds, styles and vocalists. One To One Religion is a weightless electro soul groove with an androgynous bent, Dark Heart is transformed from the roots reggae of the single version to brooding industrial clang, while 5ml Barrel has Will Self reciting a grim tale of injecting drugs over abstract electronica. Elsewhere performance artist ©Leslie Winer delivers eerie spoken word, and Bernard Fowler’s honey vocals take us somewhere close to lovers rock and smooth 80s soul. But the track that overshadows all is closer Empire, a thunderous slice of militant dub reggae excoriating the British Empire, framed as a duet between Sinead O’Connor and Benjamin Zephaniah. It’s a career highlight for everyone involved, excellent righteous fury. I guess from the YT thumbnail below that it made it onto Sinead’s Best Of, so someone else was listening as well!

    I don’t think Clear made any great commercial waves, and I’m not sure Tim Simenon ever even made any records again, but it’s a triumph, so creative and eclectic, so open minded and adventurous. It’s like getting a really good mixtape from one of the cool kids.

    Turn it up:

  18. 39. Hüsker Dü – New Day Rising

    Most bands don’t have one genius level songwriter, the Hüskers had two. They wrote the manual on how to combine hardcore aggression with pop hooks. That mixture of hurtling speed with melody provides a fizzing adrenaline rush that I never get tired of. New Day Rising is where they perfected the idea of catchy pop music drenched in feedback and noise. It’s a relentless record, one that hits the ground running and just doesn’t stop. There are so many gems here.

    One of the goofiest, catchiest basslines around:

    Beatles-y psychedelic whimsy:

    and Celebrated Summer, which wraps adolescent nostalgia and confusion into one of the greatest songs ever written. If you only listen to one clip in this post, make it this one:

    Fair’s fair, I can’t deny they are badly let down by the production. It’s not very good at all, and way too keen on the treble, but the songs are still in there, and I quite like that you have to dig a little bit and work to appreciate just how they good they are. It’s a bit like, I dunno, Michelangelo looking at a block of marble and seeing his statue of David inside it. I’m split on whether or not I want them to do a remix / remaster program – it’d be nice to hear a brilliant album sounding a bit better, but magic is a fragile thing and easily destroyed.

    The best of all those Our Band Could Be Your Life bands by a mile, a perfect cocktail of fire and energy, introspection and sadness.

    Also, singing drummers rule. RIP Grant.

    • Steven Wilson does Husker Du would be a bad idea.
      Cleaning them up would remove the essence of the sound – a mess of energy and hooks, and a sound that takes a little perseverance to get and enjoy
      (I’m guilty of that – took me a long while to properly appreciate the band)

    • If I had a vote – and I don’t – I’d vote to leave it exactly as it is. It’s a “warts ‘n’ all” record and I can’t imagine it being improved by fixing its apparent “faults”. More would be lost than gained, I suspect.

    • There’s a live HD album just released which is available on the hi-res dowload sites (and probably streaming, I haven’t looked).

      Of all the acts I doubt would be improved by 24 bits… They would actually sound better heard through a curtain.

  19. 38. The Clash – London Calling

    They were one of the very best bands this country has ever produced, but there is an argument for saying that the Clash were never really an albums act. So much of their best work was only on singles or EPs – if you stuck to the studio albums you’d never hear Armagideon Time, Bankrobber, even White Man in Hammersmith Palais or Complete Control (in the UK at least). They’re one of those acts that might be best served by a collection, like the excellent Story Of The Clash, Vol 1 or a decent playlist (here’s one I made earlier)

    https://music.apple.com/gb/playlist/clash-rockers-galore/pl.u-bDNFXkgop

    Of the albums they did make, London Calling is probably the one that best hits the sweet spot between their early guitar attack and the later genre experimentation (I came this close to picking Sandinista instead, but ultimately side six defeated me). It’s that rare thing, a double album that wouldn’t be better off trimmed to a single. A sprawling glorious hodgepodge of rock, rockabilly, folk, reggae, ska and soul, perhaps the only missing genre is the one The Clash are most closely associated with. There’s precious little punk here (although Rudie Can’t Fail did accidentally invent Rancid), and the sneering of “1977” is left in that year as the band spend the hour plus duration of this record doing their own version of crate digging, a glorious deep dive into the last thirty years or so of music. It’s politically aware, passionate, energetic, pretty much a distillation of all I love about music.

    This version of Clampdown from Lewisham Odeon is one of the best rock n roll clips I’ve ever seen. If you don’t find the bit around 0:50 where they all rush their mics just a tiny bit thrilling then I’m afraid it’s Val Doonican and Ovaltine from here on out for you.

    • The ‘No Hits’ Clash are best represented on singles? Probably true

      London Calling is pretty much a standard issue Rock album, horn section provided by The Rumour. Plus, as a double, has zero weak tracks, isn’t actually overlong and was sold at the price of a single LP. Released in 1979, it was the best album of the eighties. By Sandinista, they were given too much studio time and lost any discipline they had.

      The Clash were best experienced live. They were always aggressive and edgy right up to Strummer’s exit and are responsible for some of the best gigs I’ve attended. (I never saw The Sex Pistols but did witness every other Punk band.)

      • Think Jan 1980 in US (Dec 79 in UK) hence Rolling Stone’s view. Magnificent album, best of Sandinista runs it close. But yeah great singles band too, as were (more popular) rivals The Jam who never made an album as good as London Calling (or “The Clash”)

        You saw “every other punk band”. That’s a lot, must be thousands 😉

        • Indeed. What were Peter & The Test Tube Babies like live?

          London Calling is great, but for some reason I rarely bother with it anymore, whereas the best bits of Sandinista! (sides 1 and 4) still get regular plays.

          • I should have added a caveat.

            My mate was in a Punk band that actually recorded a single. I got dragged along to quite a few third division Punk gigs. They were all desperate for an audience. The first time I saw The Clash, there were only a few dozen watching. I did queue to see The Pistols but it was cancelled because of the Grundy event.

      • I would dearly love to have seen The Clash. I saw Joe Strummer the first time he went out with The Mescaleros, and that was fantastic (with a Clash-heavy setlist), but I can only dream of seeing the real thing. There’s not even that much good video of them live – that Clampdown gig above is one of, iirc, only two songs that were taped at the Lewisham Odeon. I’d love to see it all, or one of the Bonds Casino gigs. There must be a roll of film in a lock up somewhere, just waiting for someone to stumble across it…

    • London Calling was a successful exercise in proving The Clash were more than just a Punk band and had some depth about them.
      That said, I will still argue that Give Em Enough Rope is their best album.

      • When I heard the first 3 tracks of GEER I thought this is going to be the greatest album ever made. Then I felt it didn’t live up to that promise overall

    • I loved this when it came out, bought it on the day of release and played it endlessly. A few years ago, when I was clearing out what I could from my collection, I found out that the original pressing with lyric insert was going for DAFT MONEY. I realised that it was at least 15 years since I had played it – so I poured a dram, put the needle on the record, and realised that I had sucked the marrow from the bones of the LP and I did not actually need to hold on to it. So I sold it, and bought 2 jazz lps and 1 dub lp with the proceeds.

  20. @vulpes-vulpes, turns out they were number

    37. Explosions In The Sky – The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place

    It’s hard to write about a post-rock album without falling into all the usual cliches. If I use the words “crescendo”, “chiming”, or “elegiac” in the next few paragraphs feel free to submit a ban request. In much the same way the genre itself has become an overcrowded dead end. That’s at least partially down to the success of this record, which raised the bar for the whole ‘lengthy instrumental with quiet bits and then loud bits’ scene.

    In many ways, it’s a really simple sound – just bass, drums and two guitars with a minimum of fripperies. But EITS tapped into something here, an expression of emotion without words. From the opening minutes of ‘First Breath After Coma’ and their evocation of hospital monitors and heartbeats, this is an album of bruised beauty, of hope and resilience. It’s in the defiant ‘not’ of the title, in the trees growing back after a blaze in the interior artwork, and most of all in the music. In a genre largely concerned with invoking apocalypse and portending doom, it’s a welcome approach. That emotional core and resonance means it has stayed with me, while albums by Mono, Tarantel, Up C Down C, even Mogwai, have had brief moments of my attention and then faded away.

    I saw them shortly after this record, in a tiny place in Dublin called The Hub, the first and last time I went there. They were very good, as they have been when I’ve seen them since, but really I think the best place for this album is sitting down at home with a good pair of headphones and just luxuriating in the sound of it.

    • Not only am I starting to recognise some names now, this is a band I have actually seen live! Very good they were to. Probably not the kind of music I listen to at home though, but very good live.

    • This is an utterly brilliant record that is showing signs of really standing the test of time.

      For whatever reason though, I have always marginally preferred the follow up (2007’s All of Sudden I Miss Everyone).

      It’s a less even album overall, but I think it contains several of the band’s absolute peaks, including the below, which is to my mind the best thing they’ve ever done. Those magnificent galloping drums, those guitars reaching for the sky. The back half sounds like a Metal band covering the close out of Marquee Moon. Glorious.

  21. 36. Bob Dylan – Blood On The Tracks

    My mate Tom is my oldest gig buddy. We’ve been going to shows and festivals together for thirty years. By and large, it’s always been me that does the legwork, and finds bands and gigs to go to, and he’s happy to come along on my recommendation (with good reason as well, seeing as I have impeccable musical taste, just in case the preceding sixty entries haven’t made that abundantly clear). But this is the one album I can think of that he introduced me to, certainly the only one I still listen to. Flicking through records in his flat one afternoon, going got it got it got it like we were swapping football stickers, this one popped up. I’d never heard it, so we had a listen….

    It’s great, innit? Tangled Up In Blue is an all timer, that marvellous wandering narrative delivered in a cadence that fights against the forward propulsion of the music, the sound of the narrator swimming against the tide of life. One of the greatest opening tracks ever. Idiot Wind and its brilliant in media res opening is one of the great vituperative break up songs, almost as good as All Too Well (the ten minute version, natch). Elsewhere, Simple Twist Of Fate is another time shifting mystery, Lily Rosemary And The Jack of Hearts is a rambunctious epic, and Shelter From The Storm is an allusive and mysterious journey into Dylan’s dying marriage. The whole thing is world weary and battered, but enduring. It’s a survivor of a record.

    • Agreed, a great record. I love the simplicity of the less showy tunes like Buckets of Rain and Simple Twist of Fate. My first exposure to Dylan actually, as we had a tape we played in the car when I was wee.

  22. 35. Sarabeth Tucek – Get Well Soon

    It’s not my usual kind of music at all, but it seems that every five years or so there’s a female singer/songwriter kind of album that I really flip for. A couple of years ago, it was Cassandra Jenkins, before that it was Phoebe Bridgers’ debut, and before that, back in 2011, it was this. It’s a record born out of grief, written in the wake of her father’s sudden death, and it charts the course of that anguish, from the opener ‘The Wound And The Bow’’s reference to the classical myth of Philoctetes and his wound that never healed, through to the acceptance of the exquisite final title track. It’s a raw and painful record, incredibly personal, but also finding the universal in the specific, articulating emotions and experiences we all share. Musically, it’s what you might expect from a singer-songwriter record, largely acoustic guitar, soft drums and piano, with some extra touches to lift it, subtle electronic flourishes here and there, as well as the occasional break into full-on Crazy Horse style electric guitar crunch. But it’s Tucek’s words and luminous voice that dominate. Her vocals range from hushed pleading to crystalline keening to warm low murmurs. It’s a captivating performance that’s emotional and cathartic, and the album as a whole is similar, showing us that something resonant, beautiful and life-affirming can grow out of tragedy.

  23. 34. Slayer – Reign In Blood

    The apotheosis of a genre, the greatest thrash metal album of all time. Twenty eight minutes long, and not one second of slack. It’s brutal and relentless with not a chink of sunlight on offer, just hyper fast aggression propelled by some frankly insane drumming and guitars that sound like they’re being disembowelled before your ears. It’s an exhilarating noise that feels like it should fall apart at any moment, but somehow Slayer have enough control to keep it from crashing and burning. It allies the energy and attack of punk to the weight and technical chops of metal and in doing so redefines a genre. It’s also deeply deeply silly of course, the sound of a million teenage boys refusing to tidy their bedroom, but that’s all part of the fun.

    Also responsible for the best Xmas lights display ever

    • One of the Big Four alongside Metallica, Anthrax and Megadeth.
      Great album it undoubtedly is, for me the rest of their output places them at number 4.
      “the greatest thrash metal album of all time” – nearly, and it would be if Master Of Puppets didn’t exist.
      That said, I will now be waking up the house (and my probably my neighbours) tomorrow morning with this album

  24. 33. Nas – Illmatic

    Hiphop isn’t a genre that’s always been served especially well by the album format and you could argue that the 90s was the nadir of that. It seems that almost every artist felt they had to fill the 74 minutes of space available regardless of quality control, stuffing those little silver discs full of guest appearances and witless skits.

    Illmatic turns it’s back on all that. Coming in at just nine full tracks, and running a hair under forty minutes long, it’s sharp and tightly focussed. No skits, just the one guest verse, this is pure Nas. He’s an incredible wordsmith, his storytelling skill painting vivid pictures of a life none of us reading this will experience. The six blocks of Queensbridge are the landscape of the entire album, and they become as much a character on the record as Ill Will or Jerome’s niece. He sidesteps gangsta rap’s empty celebrations of violence and bling to offer an introspective and existential take on the street life – incredibly, he was still in his teens when he wrote most of these words, drenched in a fatalism you might expect from someone two or three times that age. There’s only something like twentyone verses on the whole record (that focus again) but almost any of them could be picked out as examples of his lyrical deftness. Writing them down only reduces them, hides the cadences and the flow, but have just one anyway, from One Love:

    I rose, wiping the blunt’s ash from my clothes/Then froze, only to blow the herb’s smoke through my nose

    Under it all, the music fits the words perfectly, hard hitting boom bap beats garnished with simple loops sampled off old soul and jazz records, giving Nas a base and the space to deliver those brilliant lyrics.
    It’s one of the most assured debut albums in history, and it hit the Earth like a comet – invasion!

    • Illmatic is 100% the peak of a certain type of Hip Hop sound and probably an absolute lyrical peak for the genre. It raised the bar for absolutely everyone and has a very strong claim to being the greatest Hip Hop album ever released.

      Every single track slaps and there isn’t really a dull moment – on first impact it was proper jaw to the floor stuff. His flow was also completely imperious at this stage; just pick a track and check how coldly he rides the beat, try saying the words out loud and see how good they feel coming out your mouth in these combinations.

      I saw him live earlier in the year, on his tour with most of the Wu Tang – sadly no Meth. While most of them have gotten older and a little slower, Nas still absolutely has it locked in. He’s still releasing great albums, still rhyming like he’s just getting started.

      Glad you went for Halftime, it’s my favourite. Check me out y’all/Nasty Nas in the area/about to cause mass hysteria. What an intro.

    • Now this is a proper album. I agree that the problem with Hip Hop albums is that the genre rose during the era of CD. Many tried to fill the extra space but few managed to do it well. PE’s Millions is a notable exception. 😉

      Another great little vignette.

  25. 32. The Hold Steady – Boys And Girls In America

    “So! Much! Joy!” shouts Craig Finn towards the end of every Hold Steady performance. He’s probably been listening to this.

    Lyrically, it’s sombre, mostly tales of lost kids looking for cheap thrills and cheaper booze and drugs, wasted youth in every sense. Musically, however, it’s nothing short of euphoric. A song about the suicidal poet John Berryman sounds like the sort of thing that might be set to careful acoustic misery by an Elliot Smith or a Sufjan Stevens. Here it’s a triumphant crash of power chords and ringing E Street piano, an anthemic call to arms that saw my pint last around 0.7 seconds before getting knocked into the air when they opened with it at their recent London show. That song, Stuck Between Stations, is a hallmark for the Hold Steady sound, and one of its best couplets could even be a mission statement for all of rock n roll:

    She was a really cool kisser and she wasn’t all that strict of a Christian.
    She was a damn good dancer but she wasn’t all that great of a girlfriend.

    Finn’s words are exceptional throughout the record, the gritty street verite of Lou Reed applied to kids from small towns with nothing to do except walk around and drink some more. One of my favourite tracks is Chillout Tent, where two kids attend a music festival, get messed up on mushrooms and pills (started recreational, ended kinda medical, as another song here has it) and finally start making out in the medical area:

    They started kissing when the nurses took off their IVs
    It was kind of of sexy, but it was kind of creepy
    Their mouths were fizzy with the cherry cola
    They had the privacy of bedsheets
    And all the other kids were mostly in comas

    Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together indeed. This sort of big dumb rawk music with clever and literate lyrics could be the worst kind of 2000s Pitchfork hell, a record with one archly raised eyebrow smugly letting you know how ironic its use of classic rock riffs and licks is, but the Hold Steady play it 100% straight, unabashedly revelling in a love of Thin Lizzy and the Replacements. It’s soaring throw your fist in the air and hug your best mate stuff, Richard Linklater’s Dazed And Confused reborn as an indie rock record.

  26. Mike Skinner’s debut took an almost punk approach to its creation, produced in his bedroom on an old Amiga, vocals recorded in a blanket lined wardrobe. Musically it’s a cocktail of hip hop and garage, approached with a scrappy DIY attitude. Although the foundational sound of the record is the skippy two step beat, OPM rejects the aspiration of UK garage – there’s no champagne here – in favour of day in the life stories of young underemployed men far from the bright lights. It’s not gritty oh isn’t this awful social realism though. Skinner’s sharp eye catches the everyday nuggets of joy found in such a life, smoking weed, getting a pizza delivered, playing video games. No one here is having a miserable time, just maybe an aimless and undefined one. It’s excellent observational songwriting, in the lineage of Ray Davies or Jarvis Cocker, supported by some standouts turn of phrase: “I’m 45th generation Roman”, “In 500 years they’ll play this song in museums”, “we first met through a shared view/ she loved me and I did too” and dozens of others. It’s a really funny record, which is a rarer thing than it should be, but also unafraid of dark subjects, like the tale of overcoming addiction in the downbeat closer “Stay Positive”. That such a tough listen should be just an interlude away from the euphoric rave nostalgia of “Weak Become Heroes” only highlights Skinner’s range. And it’d be criminal not to highlight “Turn The Page”, one of the all time great opening tracks, setting the scene with references to Gladiator and the Birmingham Bullring over a bed of swelling rising strings and a cocksure confident set of lyrics (stand by me, my apprentice) that tell you how good the next forty minutes are going to be.

    I never really kept up with his later albums, but this speaks to what it was like to be a young man in Britain at the turn of the century like nothing else I know. I was probably a good ten years older than the characters in these songs, but still close enough to feel the recognition and accuracy. In many ways it’s a modern take on 2-Tone in its combination of black musical idioms and focus on young provincial working class life. It’s a record that could only have come from one time and place, and it captures them both brilliantly.

      • This is an excellent album. The problem is that it tells a story. I find Rap albums that tell a story are like novels. I might read the odd one more than once but, mostly, I know the ending and don’t bother. Strange, because there are some records I could listen to thousands of times, knowing every word and note.

        • I must have a blind spot (deaf spot?) with this sort of thing because I have never had any sort of interest in following the “story” of an album. Quadrophenia, The Wall, ArchAndroid are just collections of songs and/or bits of music, like the second side of Abbey Road.

          • I make a distinction between singing and speaking. A story told in song is different to one told in rapping. I don’t hear the narrative with songs but find it inescapable with Rap.

        • Interesting, because I think his second album is much more of a story based record than this one, and that is one I’ve only listened to a few times, maybe for the reasons you mention there (but also because of the ubiquity of Dry Your Eyes after the England football team crashed out of whatever tournament it was at the time)

  27. 30. Fields Of The Nephilim – Elizium

    A band mostly known for dressing as cowboys and covering themselves in flour producing a sprawling epic that is also a concept album about ancient Sumerian ideas of the afterlife? Sign me up!

    One of my favourite things is when a band develops their sound with each new release and tries to reach for something new.The Nephilim’s previous record was itself a big step on from the warmed over goth cliches of their debut, but still very much a traditional song based record. This is is something else again. It says eight tracks on the back, but really there’s only half that here. The first four songs are movements in one long piece, and the only border between the closing duo of Wail Of Sumer / And There Will Your Heart Be Also is a tiny drum fill that you can easily miss. These epic lengths, chat about ‘movements’, and those song titles (I haven’t even mentioned At The Gates Of Silent Memory yet), may lead you to worry that the dreaded P-word is about to hove into view. Then you discover that the album is produced by Andy Jackson, who had previously worked with Pink Floyd, and the fear is complete. We’re dealing with goth prog here, and it really is marvellous stuff. The music is dreamy, hazy and hypnotic, not afraid to take its time and build towering quasi ambient soundscapes, fuelled by prog and dub, occasionally interrupted by wailing guitars (you can hear a whammy bar break at the end of one outburst). It rises and falls through the album, ending with a long and beautifully gloomy drift into eternity.

    Look at the cover, a gloomy smeared impressionistic painting of…something. A kneeling figure, surrounded by unknown, unknowable, smeared objects. Is is some sort of ritual? What’s going on there? I’ve been looking at it for thirty years (not continuously) and I still have no idea, fitting for this mystical, beautiful, murky and elusive record. Shine on you crazy black diamond.

    • For three or four years in the mid-90s I worked on the outskirts of Stevenage and Carl McCoy would drink in the same pub where I and my colleagues went for a lunchtime pie and a pint. I never did let on that I knew who he was.

    • I have this record and listened to it about once. It didn’t really grab me at all. Guess I wasn’t in the right mood.
      May give it another go based on your review .

  28. 29. Jane’s Addiction – Ritual De Lo Habitual

    Jane’s were the missing link between sleazy 80s Sunset Strip glam rock and artier underground songs, Motley Crue meets the Cocteau Twins. This was their third album, and the last before they collapsed in mess of bad drugs and arguments about money. It’s also their masterpiece, although you might not think that a few songs into the record. The first five tracks are all variations on taut, muscular funk metal. They’re good solid tracks, including the minor hit Been Caught Stealing, but a whole album of them wouldn’t have placed this high in my list.

    On side two (in old money) though they unfurl their wings and stretch out. This is where the mysterious promise of that infamous cover is delivered upon. Four long songs that see the band move into something transcendental and magical. The centrepiece is the eleven minutes of metallic psychedelia that is Three Days. From whispered hazy beginnings it builds into an avalanche of thumping tribal percussion and wild guitars, with Perry Farrell shrieking gibberish about “erotic Jesus”, but absolutely selling that gibberish. After that, The She Did is a string laden piece that recalls Kashmir, delicate and powerful at the same time. Of Course is an otherworldly beauty, with a klezmer inspired (and how many ostensibly metal bands do you get to write that about?) violin line snaking through it’s head trip of childhood fears, and then the cool cloth of Classic Girl on your fevered brow brings you out of it at the end. One of my favourite sides on a record of all time. For a single album it has the richness and depth of a double, with all the range, ambition, creativity and achievement of a Screamadelica or an Exile.

    I never saw them. They played at Rock City when Ritual was out, but in those days I was not confident about going to gigs on my own (do it all the time now), and none of my friends were interested so I skipped it. Then in lectures the next day, one of my classmates was wearing a new JA t-shirt and was telling me about how good it was and how I should have gone with her. Still annoyed about it to this day.

    • I’ve managed to miss them live, too, although I have several JA live DVDs. The closest I came was the 1990 Reading Festival when Perry “lost his voice” (there was a ripple of sniggering throughout the audience at the announcement as rumour had gone round town earlier of an OD in the Ramada Inn, the hotel where all the festival performers stayed.

      I did see Porno For Pyros. It wasn’t very good.

    • Now I understand my problem. From time to time, I think about how brilliant I thought this album was. Then, I sit down to listen again. It’s a CD, so I naturally start at the beginning. After a few tracks, I’m not as impressed as I hoped I’d be and give up. I should start at the halfway point.

    • I loved the single but the band came and went so suddenly. Porno for Pyros later managed to get a long appearance on the genius meta-comedy The Larry Sanders Show, which I thought was odd (either record company pressure or someone in the production team was a huge fan?)

  29. 28. Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds – Let Love In

    Nick Cave’s run of albums between 1989’s Tender Prey and 1996’s Murder Ballads (inclusive) was tremendous. I could have just as easily chosen The Good Son or Henry’s Dream for this countdown, but I settled on this one, which seems to be a useful capstone for this phase of his career. It highlights both the storm und drang hellfire preacher side of his work and the balladeer who would come to greater prominence in years to come, and some of his best lyrics, all soaked in his trademark themes of love, death and religion.

    The title track and opener oozes over the top gothic drama, church bells and organs adding to the cacophony as Nick serenades a wild lover, the sound of standing in a wrecked church in a thunderstorm. At the other end of the record, its Part 2 bookend is a spectral and haunted thing, a resigned and defeated tale of an unwholesome encounter in a cinema. In between we have the thrashing punk of Thirsty Dog and Jangling Jack (an early try out for the Murder Ballads formula), and the laments of Nobody’s Baby Now or Lay Me Low. This latter is perhaps the most obvious representation of another important facet of the record – for all the swirling darkness Cave loves to invoke, it’s also really funny:

    They will interview my teachers
    Who’ll say I was one of God’s sorrier creatures
    They’ll print informative six page features
    When I go they’ll bang a big old gong
    The motorcade will be ten miles long

    And yeah, perhaps it has become annoyingly ubiquitous, but Red Right Hand and it’s carnival menace is a hell of a song.

        • A few good albums and a plethora of good songs after LLI: but it was a peak of sorts, for me anyway – things were never quite the same after it. The slide downhill coincided with the arrival and rise of Warren Ellis, although I’m sure that’s not the only reason…

      • I’m largely with you on that one. One or two songs aside, I don’t like The Boatman’s Call at all, and then the broadsheets got interested and it all went a bit wrong. There have still been a few good songs here and there (Jubilee Street is one of his best) but no brilliant albums (think DLD gets closest). I’m glad he’s chosen to keep pursuing his muse and go where that leads instead of rehashing Let Love In a dozen times, it’s just that I’m not that keen on where it did take him.

  30. 27. Alcest – Ecailles De Lune

    Imagine if Slowdive were actually French metalheads. Sounds brilliant, doesn’t it? Alcest take all the sonic cathedral grace and beauty of shoegaze and put it through a black metal filter. It’s a fabulous sound, more ethereal and prettier than Deafheaven, but not afraid to be crushingly heavy when it wants to. The opening track here, Ecailles De Lune pt 1, is a fine illustration. We have seven minutes of twinkling guitars, layered vocals and a dreamy sun through the eyelids on a summer day vibe, and then the blast beats come in, and the guitars ramp up and develop the classic black metal tremolo sound, but it’s still recognisably the same song. The driving force behind the band, Neige, has spoken of experiencing vivid hallucinations in childhood, visions of a kind of fairyland where colours and sounds differed to those here. Yo can hear that influence in his music, how he strives to open a gateway to the otherworldly. I’ll always have a soft spot for them because they were the last band I saw before the long gig desert of lockdown, but the music being so atmospheric and beautiful just adds to it.

  31. 26. Deafheaven – New Bermuda

    And so to Deafheaven. Nominally in the same genre as Alcest, the charmingly named blackgaze, these San Franciscans are much more on the heavy end of the scale. If Alcest’s take on metal is like being carried heavenward on beds of gossamer by soft winged cherubs, then Deafheaven’s angels are the fierce Old Testament visions of Ezekiel, fiery creatures of wheels and eyes that scour the land. The (mostly) clean vocals of Neige are burnt away, replaced by George Clark’s demented goblin shrieks and rasps. There is a lyric sheet, but even following it the words are impossible to decipher. Best not to even try, just let them become part of the overall soundscape. And what an amazing sound it is. Absolute sheer pummelling noise, it’s a surging visceral force that pushes you skyward. And then they’ll stop and deliver a passage of sheer beauty, like the way Come Back moves from flailing howling rage into a long sliding elliptic coda of tired grace. This is truly transcendent music, something that makes you feel you are standing outside your own body. It’s purging and cathartic. It doesn’t matter that you can’t hear what George is singing, what matters is that you know he is screaming till there is not one drop of air left in him. Not many records leave an afterglow, the kind of exhausted satisfaction you might feel after a long run or some fantastic sex*, but this one does.

    *chance would be a fine thing

    • This would definitely make my top 100 as well, and Come Back is firmly in my top 100 songs.

      I don’t think I’ve been so delighted by music in recent years as I was the first time all the savage riffing and screaming fell away and revealed that beautiful, circling coda with its familiar but alien country tinge. It’s Marquee Moon for deviants, and I absolutely bloody love it.

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