#1 - Spiderland

#1
Artist: Slint
Album: Spiderland
Year of Release: 1991
Label: Touch & Go

I could go into great detail of why Spiderland is the final entry in this little project.  But instead I will simply note that I am writing this piece while connected to a wifi network named for this album.  The waves from "Spiderland" are literally pulsing through my body as I type this.  I am connected.  I am secured.  There is no other choice.

I recently watched Breadcrumb Trail, Lance Bangs' documentary about Slint.  The film is a brisk journey that lasts just over an hour and a half, which taken by itself seems unremarkable.  But then you consider the even more fleeting nature of the band's recorded output (their two albums and one EP amount to about 80 minutes of music).  In this way, Breadcrumb Trail literally expands the story of Slint.  As such it is a necessary companion piece to Spiderland, which is both the swan song of a helplessly enigmatic band and the greatest album ever recorded.

The documentary itself is straightforward, relying mostly on interviews and archival footage.  It's relatively short on specific details about the creation of the band's magnum opus, which is fine as the record speaks for itself.  Instead, it emphasizes the personal journey of the band members and the context from which they arose.  While the details of the 1980's punk/house/hardcore/indie scene in Louisville, Kentucky are a necessary portrait of a most peculiar milieu, it's the former aspect that makes Breadcrumb Trail essential.  What the band's story specifically reveals is that the genesis of Spiderland was a paradox of sorts, a deliberate accident if you will.  It's at once the logical result of great musical minds working in concert and an amazing instance of serendipity.  It's simply put, a miracle.

The "deliberate" part of "deliberate accident" is not hard to articulate.  The members of the band all had a drive to create at a young age and started playing music together in various iterations in their early teens.  Britt Walford and Brian McMahan teamed up in the most notable such precursor, Squirrel Bait.  The documentary describes that band's sound as "ironic hardcore," which begins to hint at the philosophy that Slint would later inhabit.  Walford himself described the group as being "comfortable with each other," suggesting a natural resonance that brought out the best in everyone involved.  And the process for actually bringing Spiderland to life is shown to be painstaking and purposeful.  The details of five-day-a-week hours-long practices in the Walford family basement depict a band as committed to their craft as any.  Through all of this, the band displays a combination of focused intensity and an utter lack of pretension that suggests the end result will be nothing short of brilliant.

And yet, Breadcrumb Trail seems to subtly make the case that some sort of cosmic entropy played just as large of a role in the creation of Spiderland.  Every step throughout the band's journey feels tenuous and appears to happen almost by luck (all the band members participate in the doc, but they're all interviewed separately and appear to be slightly coy with the truth, adding to the mystique).  Ethan Buckler, the group's first bassist, left before Spiderland primarily because he clashed with Steve Albini during the recording of their first album, Tweez.  The other band members appear to make decisions at random as well (Britt Walford in particular appears to be an inscrutable individual).  Spiderland's producer Brian Paulson remarks that he arrived just in time for the recording session and didn't have much of an idea how it would go.  And then there's the matter of the record's lyrics.  What appears to be a pitch-perfect accompaniment to Slint's hushed and twisting compositions is much more happenstance than one would expect.  The basement practice sessions reveal that Slint never wrote lyrics until they were physically in the studio.  The life-changing brilliance of phrases like "Don stepped outside..." and so many others represents not a planned artistic statement but rather a fleeting moment of transcendence.

Where does this leave us?  Spiderland is as clear of a musical statement as there is, but does the band even know what that statement is?  The album is clearly the work of a precise and exacting set of minds and yet its very existence is dependent on so much randomness that even now it feels precarious.  If a butterfly flaps its wings, will it go away?  Does it even exist?  Maybe I'm the one visiting the fortune teller in "Breadcrumb Trail."  Wouldn't be the weirdest possible thing.

In the end, Spiderland is the musical equivalent of an inherent contradiction.  A surface-level description of its contents would lead anyone to dismiss it out of hand, but that's only because there's nothing like it.  Because something like it could only happen if everything goes right.  And as of today, everything has gone right only once.

#2 - F♯ A♯ ∞

#2
Artist: Godspeed You! Black Emperor
Album: F♯ A♯ ∞
Year of Release: 1997
Label: Kranky

Do you think the end of the world is coming?
No.  So says the preacher man, but I don't go by what he says.

GYBE's debut album is apocalyptic.  So obvious is this statement that it circles back around to being an essential utterance.  The beginning of each proper track on the CD version begins with a depiction of or reference to the end of days.  The electronic hums and the screeching violins and the literal trains emulate the sounds of a proper journey to hell.  The individual movements evoke the fury of a dying society ("The Sad Mafioso" was literally used as the opening to 28 Days Later).   Its identity is remarkably clear and says something original about a well-worn topic while never becoming something cliche or dull.

The car's on fire and there's no driver at the wheel
And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides
And a dark wind blows
The government is corrupt
And we're on so many drugs
With the radio on and the curtains drawn
We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine
And the machine is bleeding to death
The sun has fallen down
And the billboards are all leering
And the flags are all dead at the top of their poles

I started this countdown as a distraction of sorts from our current apocalypse.  And now another apocalypse has taken its place.  And the end boss of all this still awaits in global warming.  So it's an appropriate time to sink into this album, even as it's more than twenty years old.  Because it's such a singular and bold work (even within GYBE's already peculiar oeuvre), it retains a sense of timelessness unlike anything else on this list.  The spirited waltz in "The Dead Flag Blues (Outro)" would sound as appropriate in an old west saloon as it would in whatever future you care to imagine.

And yet for all the talk of end times this album (and this band) does not despair.  What routinely strikes me upon re-listening are the moments of hope and grace present throughout.  It's not just in the music either.  It's in Efrim Menuck's drawing from the liner notes above.  It's in every live show the band kicks off with "Hope Drone."  And it's in the fact that this record exists at all.  GYBE very clearly does not go by what the preacher man says.

For Montreal art kids in the 1990s, there was no other way. Godspeed’s dark and foreboding sound suggests civilization heading toward collapse, and conjuring such a world wasn’t an act of imagination. They could see it around them. In April 1996, right around the time things were heating up at Hotel2Tango, an article appeared in the International Herald Tribune called “Montreal’s Deep Malaise,” in which reporter Anne Swardsoa described a city on the brink. On the ballot the previous year was a referendum on Quebec’s independence, and it was defeated by less than a single percentage point. Conflict and uncertainty were rife, and many English-speaking Montreal residents fled the city during the campaign. “The city that once was Canada’s financial and cultural center is in serious trouble,” Swardsoa wrote. “Its tax base is eroding, poverty is increasing, roads are deteriorating and, most important, citizens are leaving.”

It seems odd then that one of the seminal works on finding hope in despair comes from the middle of the nineties, one of the few times in recent memory where society seemed functional, at least on the surface.  But this is an extremely American perspective and GYBE is an incredibly Canadian band.  The quote above (from this fantastic review) shines some light on the context surrounding the record's creation.  Even without these specifics, such a worldview speaks to how armageddon is always present.  If not for you, then for someone else.  If not visible, then in the shadows.  And if not imminent, always at least possible.  Given this, how can you not feel a sense of doom all the time?  But how else can you move forward without some semblance of hope for the future?  This album is the contradictory nature of these feelings set to music.

The band accomplishes this in two ways.  One is the sense of urgency that underlies everything.  Songs build toward crescendos, multiple drummers pound away for added effect, industrial sounds dot the landscape, and "Black Helicopter" directly evokes a plague of locusts.  Even though the end product is clearly the result of a deliberate entity, every moment still sounds like it was recorded in one frantic take.  Not coincidentally, the individual movements appear in a different order on the CD than the original vinyl release, as if to say "get it all out while you can, who cares about the order."

The other is a delicate touch that subsequent GYBE releases would never quite match.  The band's entire career is based on an understanding of how to use soft/loud dynamics, but it's never as lived-in as it is here.  The precision of the faded guitars in "Slow Moving Trains," the hush of the band singing the melody in the middle of "The Sad Mafioso," the push and pull of "Dead Metheny."  All of these moments and more feel like they could fall apart immediately but they never do.  It always pushes forward until the final moments where a period of silence precedes the final "hidden" track.  Normally just a gimmick, this silence instead feels deserved and even necessary.  We've all been through a lot and a moment just to sit and reflect on something beautiful is as good of a gift as any.

#3 - White Pony

#3
Artist: Deftones
Album: White Pony
Year of Release: 2000
Label: Maverick

I started this list with my first favorite record.  As we near the conclusion, let's talk about my second favorite record.  During the span of 1998 to 2000, I went from knowing nothing about popular music to having a fair idea of what I liked and didn't like.  As I shared in those early posts, Eve 6 indicated the kind of sound I prefer while Third Eye Blind started to hint at my inclination towards nifty songwriting.  But as much as I can specifically map how this period of discovery would lead to a love for this album, I cannot emphasize enough how unprepared I was for White Pony.  Much like how Stone's Ruination would change the way I think about beer, this record neatly divides my music-listening history into pre-Deftones and post-Deftones.  Everything before is fuzzy and foreign and everything after is clear as day.

Deftones gets lumped in with the nu metal genre, which is fine.  They were contemporaries of the most famous bands of the zeitgeist and share enough characteristics to justify the classification (plus nu metal as a whole is unfairly denigrated to some degree).  Still, they do hold a special distinction as a gateway of sorts.  The fine folks from the P.O.D.Kast describe it best:

"Deftones are known to many as the band that crosses over a lot of fans: they're the one nu-metal band that people who hate nu-metal like, and they're the one nu-metal band that can get fervent nu-metal fans to listen to other, better music. "

This sounds cliche and it is cliche but it is also incredibly true.  You can draw a throughline in my music-listening history directly from them to Tool to Isis to....everything else, eventually.  I came to most things on this list long after their release (I was not kidding that I didn't listen to anything until 1998), but White Pony and I both came into concurrent existence at exactly the right time.  I can still remember spinning this over and over on my Discman on the way to Rocky Mountain right after I got it, and it still sounds as fresh as it did then.  I owe a lot to this record and I hope this humble post can pay back some of the debt.

The appeal to nostalgia and formative nature of this album is enough to justify its high rank.  That said, it absolutely stands on its own merits as one of the best and most complete rock records ever made.  This isn't to denigrate the rest of the band's catalogue - they've been consistently good to great over the course of nearly three decades - but White Pony finds the band peaking in every single aspect of their craft.  The addition of Frank Delgado on keyboard and turntable is the key, as his work adds to the atmosphere much like his counterpart on the previous entry.  The haunting sounds supporting tracks like "Digital Bath" and "Change" help to elevate them, and give the whole album a distinct feel that only the self-titled follow-up even approaches.  They also maximize the use what I call the "Deftones chorus," where each iteration adds something new.  The lyrics are appropriately abstract, which helps them to earn their Wikipedia-approved moniker of "the Radiohead of metal."  And the opening and closing tracks ("Feiticeira" and "Pink Maggit") experiment with structure in effortlessly successful ways.  Tonight, much like every night, I feel like more.

#4 - Oceanic

#4
Artist: Isis
Album: Oceanic
Year of Release: 2002
Label: Ipecac

I've talked a lot about post-rock on this list but haven't even mentioned post-metal (Neurosis gets lumped in with the genre, but they are better described as sludge metal in my opinion).  Part of this is because post-metal is a less well-defined term that seems to encompass a relatively smaller sliver of bands.  But the bigger reason is that most such bands are merely fine.  Russian Circles, Pelican, Cult of Luna...it's all fine.

Isis is more than fine.  In fact you might even know that they are my favorite band of all time.  The reason for this is not just that the band is the standard-bearer for the post-metal genre (although they are).  Rather, it's that they excel so thoroughly at each of the defining aspects of the genre that they make it impossible for anyone else to live up to that standard.  Accordingly, their third full-length Oceanic is their best record precisely because each of these aspects is on clear display.

Metal - We've certainly established that the term post-rock does not imply a deficit of rocking.  The same goes for post-metal.  Isis' early work was more relentless in bringing the noise, but the relatively mellow sounds of Oceanic still require moments of catharsis.  The opening "The Beginning and the End" features two of the record's best riffs at...the beginning and the end of the song.  "The Other" doesn't sing or even scream its lyrics as much as it bellows them.  "False Light" is essentially just one catchy groove stretched across seven minutes, with only a brief respite in the middle.  And that's just the first three tracks.

Balance - The "post" part of post-metal speaks directly to the dual nature of the genre.  The loudness is important, but the delicate touch of both quiet passages and atmospherics is just as crucial to making this all work.  Oceanic marks the point in Isis' discography where this emphasis becomes clear.  This starts right away, as the opening notes of "The Beginning and the End" are elevated by Bryant Clifford Meyer's electronic work.  Mid-album palate cleanser "Maritime" serves as a sort of rebirth after the album's punishing first half.  And "Weight" is a culmination of sorts for this musical idea.  The song itself can be reduced to a few notes repeated over and over with minimal vocals.  Where the true art arises then is the patience and care that the band puts into wringing every ounce of pathos they can from the slow build to the finish.

Composition - Finally, a deft touch and some level of intricacy is needed to make this all work.  The dynamic nature of the first two aspects is crucial, but if every song simply alternates between loud and soft with no larger purpose or design, everything falls apart.  I would argue that Isis perfected their approach to this with their 2004 follow-up Panopticon, but they're clearly on the right track here.  The transitory middle section of "The Beginning and the End" uses a slow build and hushed female vocals to bridge the gap.  And "Carry," the best song on the record and maybe of their whole catalogue, is the champ at this.  The layered guitar work, the creative uses of the otherwise typical 4/4 time, and the controlled crescendo indicate a band at the height of their powers.

#5 - Loveless

#5
Artist: My Bloody Valentine
Album: Loveless
Year of Release: 1991
Label: Sire

Much like with my post on In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, I'm not sure what else there is to say about Loveless.  It is the defining My Bloody Valentine record and the defining shoegaze record and hell, maybe the defining record of the nineties (at least for nerds like me).  Every track is an absolute banger as the band shifts constantly between its high energy songs and its more ethereal sounds (some songs do both, too).  It's such an accomplishment of musical perfection that it took 22 years for Kevin Shields and company to release a proper follow-up.  And in spite of that impossible level of build up, the follow-up ended up being pretty good.  So in the spirit of my Aeroplane write-up, let's time travel again....but to the future.

February of 2013 was probably one of the most nothing times of my life.  I was right in the middle of my first tour of duty with Nationwide, in an extremely boring job that was still pleasant enough.  My kids weren't around yet but I was also past the more revelrous times of my early twenties.  And it was February, the most definitionally nondescript month.  So there was no better time to pore over every inch of m b v, which appeared almost out of nowhere one weekend.  I had yet to move past physical media at that time so I paid something ridiculous like $27 for the full package, which still allowed me to download the digital files so I could listen immediately.

Because I tend to savor "important" experiences like this, I only let myself listen to one new song per day.  This meant that over the first weekend I got through the "Sometimes" clone "She Found Now," the fuzzy guitar banquet of "Only Tomorrow," and the perfectly cromulent "Who Sees You."   A third of the way into the new album, it seemed like an acceptable imitation of Loveless.  Which is fine, if slightly disappointing.

But then things start to zag.  The next three tracks veer more into dream pop.  The vocals are still muted and the guitars in "New You" still do their thing, but in all this is a bit of an evolution.  And then comes the last third which takes a hard turn into noise rock.  It's still got some of the MBV trademarks to be sure, but at this point it's clear that the band was not content to stand still.  Taken as a whole, m b v shows how it's possible to follow-up something great.  It's not about repeating yourself or completely re-inventing your sound; rather it's about synthesizing both of these instincts and then refining the end product until you've found the thing you aspired to all along.  Not a bad trick.

#6 - I Could Live in Hope

#6
Artist: Low
Album: I Could Live in Hope
Year of Release: 1994
Label: Vernon Yard

A year after this one, Low released their follow-up Long Division.  It's equally great and is basically the cleaner, more polished version of their debut.  The presence of these two superlative albums echoes almost exactly the same internal conflict from my Guided By Voices post, right down to the specific years.

And yet I Could Live in Hope won the battle in my head and it wasn't particularly close.  I mentioned "raw earnestness" as the deciding factor in choosing Bee Thousand, and that reasoning goes double here.  Long Division is devastating in its precision, but this strength also lends itself to distance the work ever so slightly from the emotion behind it.  I Could Live in Hope does not suffer from such a problem.

To this end, the vocals certainly do their part.  Mimi Parker's range is the soul of "Lullaby."  Alan Sparhawk's venom comes through at key moments in "Down."  And their harmonization is a highlight throughout, whether adding a layer of drama to the chorus of the opening track "Words" or a touch of whimsy to their cover of "Sunshine."

But it's the guitar work that really captures this record's emotional edge.  It almost has to be, as early-era Low is defined by their minimalist nature.  Sparhawk does this largely by eschewing the traditional methods of dynamic guitar work.  Instead of switching between musical ideas, the swells in his playing are typically come from drawing more out of the same passages.  And instead of going right from quiet to loud, these transitions are more gradual and subtle.  He's used this skill throughout his career but perhaps nowhere quite as well as here.  What a singular sound from a singular band.

#7 - Third

#7
Artist: Portishead
Album: Third
Year of Release: 2008
Label: Island/Mercury

In the mid-90's, Portishead made two albums that set the mark for trip hop and then disappeared for a spell.  Had that been it for them, their legacy would have been secure as a brilliant if peculiar shooting star.  Luckily they returned a decade later with something even more brilliant and even more peculiar: A Portishead record that feels distinctly like a Portishead record but one that abandons the trip hop mantra and becomes something both more precise and more ethereal.

This difference is clear almost immediately.  Whereas most previous Portishead songs feature a straightforward structure filtered through their funhouse mirror sound, "Silence" most certainly does not.  The opening track begins with a spoken-word passage in Portuguese with some sort of piano backing which then transitions into a mood-setting guitar section (complete with plenty of goodies).  Then that fades away just as Beth Gibbons' muted vocals begin, which eventually ushers in the crescendo that doesn't stop until the very end.  This is something else entirely and so is the rest.  The synth bridge in "The Rip," the ukulele in "Deep Water," and the....whatever it is in "Machine Gun" - all of this serves to differentiate each song as well as the album as a whole.  By the time we get to the ninth track "Small," we've reached the band's apex.  A near-seven-minute culmination of everything that came before it, equal parts delicately crafted and bombastically overflowing.  There's no topping this.  It's no surprise they haven't released anything since.

#8 - Stratosphere

#8
Artist: Duster
Album: Stratosphere
Year of Release: 1998
Label: Up

This is the most recent "discovery" of mine on this countdown.  The YouTube algorithm of all things recommended it to me back in January.  Because of this, it has been the standout part of my personal soundtrack for the past few months.  It's a really good combination of shoegaze and space rock that checks all of my boxes.  Simple enough, right?

But there's a catch.  Something that's really stuck out to me as I've gone through this list is just how much I associate a lot of these records with the time and place when they were new to me.  This process of recollection is not just limited to the obvious either - some re-listens are digging up memories I haven't retrieved perhaps ever.  Luckily, uncovering these associations has been a largely pleasant experience.  My past is not all sunshine and roses, but I do a good enough job living in the moment and finding the small pleasures such that even memories of relatively difficult times point towards those good aspects.

So what memories will this album draw to mind?  The combined weight of the pandemic, the election, and other things have precipitated the closest thing to an existential crisis I have ever experienced.  I am lucky in many ways and am getting by fine, but still my brain is understandably very weird right now!  When things return to some semblance of normal and I hit play on "Gold Dust," what memories will awaken?  Will this tendency of mine limit this great music to the here and now?  This is obviously of extremely small concern compared to...everything else.  Still I wonder what the sum of such small concerns will amount to and what toll that will have on our collective psyche.

There's a second more individualized aspect to this, too.  It has to do with the rest of Duster's discography, specifically their 2000 follow-up Contemporary Movement.  The album has a similar rating to Stratosphere on Allmusic and Discogs which leads me to think that I may like it as much or even more than their debut.  But I haven't listened to it yet.  While it's pretty common for me to let individual albums breathe before digging into the next one, this feels different than that.  I sense that part of my reluctance is related to my fears that this will become the next "pandemic record."  I seem to have developed a new defense mechanism where I wall myself off from any avoidable disappointment, no matter how inconsequential it may be.

Why is this the form my anxiety has taken?  If I'm being honest it probably has something to do with the parallel development in my relationship with anxiety's good friend, depression.  I've had struggles with this over the years, but had found a way to live with it largely through a) staying busy, and b) placing emphasis on looking forward to things like sports, TV, and going places.  This strategy is obviously less tenable now.  On the staying busy front, I am indeed busy right now what with the kids being home all of the time.  But it's a much different and formless kind of busy that actually has the opposite effect on my brain.  And on the looking forward front, most of my prior totems are now either non-existent or fraught with peril.

The resulting pivot has looked...eerily similar to the other one.  I've made a list of stuff to catch up on now that I have some free evenings, and just like with Duster I'm putting off some of the good stuff (the new season of Bosch, my Leftovers re-watch that's way overdue).  Part of the reason for this is the same avoidance, but I also think it's a way to artificially extend the remaining stuff that I do actually look forward to.  And I'm finding new ways to stay busy, most notably by writing all these dumb blog posts.  So in the end I'm still avoiding my anxiety and deflecting my depression, but at least I am doing so in new and creative ways.  Calamity Jane from the Deadwood series said it best: "Every day takes figuring out all over again how to fucking live."

To tie this back around to the putative subject of the post, here's some lyrics from the second track "Heading for the Door" that sums all of this up in many fewer words.  Should have just done this.  Oops.

Stumbling through the crowd
I was heading for the door
Remembering a cooler party
Angels started in song
There was something in their eyes
The time was standing still

#9 - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

#9
Artist: Neutral Milk Hotel
Album: In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
Year of Release: 1998
Label: Merge

There is nothing left to write about this album, so I'd like to do some time travel instead.  Specifically I'd like to go back two years before this record was released.  It's now 1996 and the up-and-coming band Neutral Milk Hotel has just released their debit album, On Avery Island.  It is fine.  Unique and self-assured, yes, but ultimately just fine.  If I were to (correctly) predict their next work to be an all-time great, I would be ridiculed.  But given that we've time traveled here from the future we can afford to be benevolent and introduce the topic for discussion: Is there anything here to suggest that Neutral Milk Hotel has something transcendent to offer in their not-too-distant future?  To answer this question, let's scout the band like we're watching Mike Trout play for the Salt Lake Bees.

Sound - The band's strong suit.  Everything is there to suggest a band ready to explode onto the scene.  The fuzzy guitars, the acoustic sections, the additional instrumentation, the emotive vocals.  Neutral Milk Hotel has a distinct sound that is nonetheless warm enough to endear itself to any listener.  Lean into this and maybe even expand it.

Lyrics - Endearingly weird.  From the first few lines of "Song Against Sex," we understand that we're in for a distinct and wild ride.  A few songs (ie. "Naomi") fall into the uncanny valley of creepy dude lyrics, but this isn't anything that can't be smoothed out by, say, shifting your focus to an undying love for a 15-year-old girl that was killed in the world's most infamous genocide.

Songwriting - The weak spot.  Most of the songs don't progress beyond their initial verse-chorus structure.  Even if those end up being interesting some of the time, the band will need to progress beyond that to stick out.  Maybe consider more up-tempo songs or some strongly-plucked acoustic work to make this easier on you.  Most of the chord progressions are pretty pedestrian as well, although there's a part of the ninth track "Three Peaches" that sounds like it could be part of something epic.  Like maybe an eight-minute acoustic track that's so good Scott Spillane says "Holy Shit!" at the end of the recording.  Just a thought.

Intangibles - Song titles are cute, stick with that.  Album cover is blah, try a painting or something more welcoming.  Keep the weird instruments and get even weirder - maybe play a saw?  Instead of being against sex, be for it, and mention the product of it multiple times.  Also try sharing your feelings on Jesus Christ at least once.  And lay off the 3-1 slider.

#10 - You & Me

#10
Artist: The Walkmen
Album: You & Me
Year of Release: 2008
Label: Gigantic

The Walkmen are the only band I've seen live twice.  Once was early 2008 in Madison before I even knew who they were and the other was here in 2013 when they were (as they are now) one of my favorite bands.  This turned out to be quite fortuitous as The Walkmen's biggest strength lends itself to excellent live shows.  If you're curious what exactly that strength is, go listen to the seventh track from this album, "Red Moon."  When Hamilton Leithauser croons "...by your side" about a minute in, you'll hear it.  The way his voice echoes off the walls of the recording space is maybe the most obvious reflection of the richness and attention to detail that The Walkmen put into their work (this record was recorded in four different places, presumably for this reason).  The songs themselves seem to invoke a certain time and place, but it's this additional layer of composition that truly brings it to life.  The revelry at the end of "Dónde está la playa," the raucousness of "On the Water," and the regret present in "If Only It Were True":  The affect of all these sections (and more) is only possible because of this holistic approach to songwriting.

#11 - Kid A

#11
Artist: Radiohead
Album: Kid A
Year of Release: 2000
Label: Parlophone

There's four albums that have a claim to being Radiohead's best.  If you just want some good tunes you can go with The Bends.  If you want to elevate AN IMPORTANT ALBUM about TECHNOLOGY and THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY that also has some good tunes, you can pick OK Computer.  If you want something newer that skews a little more electronic and is mellow as hell, you can't go wrong with In Rainbows.  And if you're a weirdo like me you can pick the one that's the synthesis of those other three, which would be Kid A.  From the opening synth notes of "Everything in Its Right Place" to the relatively straigtfordness of "Optimistic" to the marriage of strings and organ in "Motion Picture Soundtrack," nothing is a better highlight of everything the band excels at than their fourth album.

 

#12 - Ænima

#12
Artist: Tool
Album: Ænima
Year of Release: 1996
Label: Zoo/Volcano

It's weird to think I was once a Tool "fan."  I had a shirt and a poster and was on the message boards and tried to decode all the cryptic messages that Blair posted on the website.  Why did I go to such great lengths for such a goofy band?  It was something to do for sure, but more importantly it was something resembling an identity for somebody in search of one.  I remarked on the details of this here, but that analysis is incomplete because of what transpired after.  In retrospect I haven't just moved away from the idea of being a Tool fan, but rather the idea of being a fan of anything at all.  There's a lot of practical reasons for this; for example, I wouldn't have time for everything I want to do if I focused too much on any one entity.  But the bigger reason is that the last several years have shown how toxic modern fanhood has become.  Of course you still can and should enjoy things - things are great!  Just don't let them become who you are.

One of the weird things about re-listening to an old album that you've practically memorized is the peculiar things you pick up on.  Now that I'm old, one of the first things I notice is the cohesiveness of the songwriting, which can be an issue with bands as ambitious as Tool.  On that front, Ænima is a mixed bag.  Some of the big hits (namely "Forty Six & 2" and the title track) are put together well.  On the other hand, "Stinkfist" is mildly clunky and "Eulogy" is kind of a mess.  But don't worry, everything still rocks and there's enough individual moments of greatness to make up for any deficiencies. 

Ænima is the best/favorite Tool album primarily because of all its great hits, but it doesn't hurt that it nails the interstitial tracks as well.  Later Tool albums have a more self-serious air about them whereas the band strikes the perfect balance between earnestness and goofball irony here.  A prank (?) phone call set to a dramatic piano tune, a cookie recipe that sounds like something more sinister, and a carnival-like adaptation of the subsequent "Jimmy" highlight the playful side of the band and help to take the edge off.

Finally, younger me never fully realized it but Justin Chancellor really brings this outfit together.  Not sure there's a bassist outside of Les Claypool that's as crucial to the success of their band.

#13 - Young Team

#13
Artist: Mogwai
Album: Young Team
Year of Release: 1997
Label: Jet Set

I wrote about the reasons behind my bias towards artists' earlier work a few entries ago, but I probably should have saved it for this one.  Mogwai has been making excellent music for more than two decades.  Still, nothing tops the raw energy emanating from their debit album.  Hell, I would even say that their first two tracks top everything else that came after.  "Yes! I am a Long Way from Home" starts off with tongue-in-cheek praise of the band that includes the line "If the stars had a sound, it would sound like this" before launching into a delicate little groove that seems to represent the sound of a literal sunrise.  It's a small an unassuming musical idea done so well and with such light touch that you can't help but fall in love.  Fun fact: I listened to this song on my way to my first day of work in 2007...what a corny boy I was. 

After that we progress to "Like Herod" which I previously listed as my favorite song of all time.  I don't think it retains that title to this day, but it's still the epitome of what "post-rock" can be.  It starts with a simple theme, and then pushes and pulls it through the sonic vacuum a few times until it resolves itself in pure contentment a few minutes later.  The rest of the album is great as well, but all the tricks are on full display before you even get to "Katrien."  Which is nice I guess because you'll know if you're in or out on Mogwai real quick.

#14 - Pink

#14
Artist: Boris
Album: Pink
Year of Release: 2005
Label: Southern Lord

Pink is three things.  First, it's the soaring introductory track "Farewell," which is about as perfect a marriage of shoegaze and metal sensibilities as is possible.  Second, it's a rip-roaring collection of incredibly loud tracks that thrash and groove in an uncannily self-assured manner.  And finally, it's the logical culmination of such a trajectory, an eighteen-minute death dirge lovingly titled "Just Abandoned Myself."  This final track moves flawlessly from the record's most propulsive beat into a formless wall of noise that somehow manages to ramp up the intensity even further.  It isn't until the final seconds that you're finally able to relax, but after listening to Pink you might not be able to relax ever again.

#15 - Source Tags & Codes

#15
Artist: ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead
Album: Source Tags & Codes
Year of Release: 2002
Label: Interscope

What best reveals the genius of this album is the shuffle function.  When I'm randomly listening through my library and something like "Homage" or "Another Morning Stoner" comes up, it fits in with the flow better than almost anything.  This is because every song on this album is perfectly crafted while forgoing any sense of pretension or inaccessibility.  Conrad Keely's voice is earnestly expressive (I recall a reviewer describing it as "vomiting confetti"), the lyrics are clever while avoiding complication ("how near how far how lost they are"), and the songs aspire to be something more than standard radio fare but don't steer away from power chords and bombastic choruses.  I appreciate the desire to celebrate this record that drives Pitchfork's semi-infamous perfect 10 review, but what the text of the piece gets wrong is how it tries to exhalt all of this to the level of the profound.  You don't need to give Wendy's a Michelin star to to say the spicy chicken sandwich is one of the best things to eat and you don't have to elevate this album to the highest levels of art to say it's one of the best things to listen to.  It just is and that's enough.

#16 - Frigid Stars LP

#16
Artist: Codeine
Album: Frigid Stars LP
Year of Release: 1990
Label: Sub Pop

I did not listen to this album when it first came out (I was a small child) and I'm reasonably sure I've never heard anything from it on the radio.  As such I have no inherent sense of the temporality of its very peculiar sound.  Because of it's precision and because of how it appears to react to the conceits of the early nineties by stripping them to their core, I have this assumption lodged in my head that it hails from the post-Nirvana wasteland of 1996 or so.  And then every so often I remember that it pre-dates almost everything that sounds vaguely like it.  The simple beauty of "Cave-In" isn't a paean for the death of grunge; it's the primordial ooze from which it came.  In this light the record shines even brighter even as it remains essentially timeless.

#17 - The Downward Spiral

#17
Artist: Nine Inch Nails
Album: The Downward Spiral
Year of Release: 1994
Label: Interscope

If you wanna get reductive, the two most common entry points into this album are a Johnny Cash cover and a hit single that's essentially a better version of Bloodhound Gang's "The Bad Touch."  This may sound like a detriment to its legacy but it's the opposite.  These two most famous songs actually serve to represent the variety and genre-bending present in every single track.  There's also punishing beats ("Mr Self Destruct") and slow jams ("Piggy").  Overblown synths ("Ruiner") and muted acoustic guitars ("The Becoming").  And a song about a man and his...gun.  It's incredibly cool that Trent Reznor took his incredible skill for crafting pop music and did this with it.   

#18 - Bee Thousand

#18
Artist: Guided By Voices
Album: Bee Thousand
Year of Release: 1994
Label: Scat

If you've never heard Guided By Voices before go listen to this and their 1995 follow-up Alien Lanes.  Trust me they're both delightful and you won't regret it.  OK.

Way back when I talked about how more often than not I prefer bands' earlier albums.  This may seem like an odd place to bring this up (GBV existed for many years before either of these records, these two were only released a year apart, and I greatly like them both), but I think it's an instructive example.   First of all, it's clear that Bee Thousand has a less polished sound.  Alien Lanes still has plenty of lo-fi influence but as the band's major-label debut it's clearly more meticulously produced than their earlier work.  But this line from the oral history of Alien Lanes is the key:

"Bee Thousand was an accumulation of ideas leading up for years before we put it together. It’s almost a compilation. All the songs for Alien Lanes were recorded specifically for Alien Lanes. We had developed a great deal of confidence. We had a silly swagger, as the song titles themselves can attest."

Through this lens, Bee Thousand represents the before and Alien Lanes the after of a critical inflection point in the band's history.  And all the stuff from before that point has a raw earnestness that you can't easily recreate (there's nothing quite as wistful as "Gold Star for Robot Boy" in their later work).  This of course doesn't always outweigh everything else about what makes records great (ie. songwriting), but for me at least it's an inherent advantage that often tips the scales.

#19 - Turn on the Bright Lights

#19
Artist: Interpol
Album: Turn on the Bright Lights
Year of Release: 2002
Label: Matador

Everyone in college really liked The Killers and I did not.  It was a whole thing.  From time to time I would try to push the superior alternative Interpol on my unsuspecting friends, but it never took.  My best guess as to the reason I preferred Interpol was that, while both bands employ a certain amount of irreverence and cheekiness, The Killers' particular brand of irony is turned up to eleven.  Which is too much for me I guess.

Of course it also might be that Interpol was better at writing good songs.  It also helps that the unique aspects of Paul Banks' vocals and Daniel Kessler's guitar work fit together in perfect harmony.  "PDA" is my personal favorite example of this, but if you feel differently there are no wrong answers on this album.  And in case you think I'm short-changing the lyrics, the opening line of "Obstacle 1" is among my favorites of all time.

#20 - Laughing Stock

#20
Artist: Talk Talk
Album: Laughing Stock
Year of Release: 1991
Label: Polydor

Roughly a quarter of this list falls under the banner of post-rock, but every time I listen to Talk Talk's last two records I grow to feel that moniker should be reserved exclusively for them.  The ingredients of rock are all there but arranged in a manner so peculiar that you never know what to expect next.  The breakdown on "Ascension Day" just keeps building, the bridge on "After the Flood" gets fuzzier and fuzzier, the melody on "New Grass" never quite resolves itself - all this and more speaks to something fundamentally primal about Talk Talk's later work that no one has quite matched ever since.  A truly singular work.

I strongly considered including Mark Hollis' solo record in this list, but then figured that violated the one album per artist restrictions, but then I thought it's so different from even this that it should count, but then it's the same number of years away from this (7) as "It's My Life" is on the earlier side so maybe constant evolution was just Mark Hollis' thing.  RIP.