The 100 Greatest Albums: 30 - 21Aug 19 '03 Write an essay on this topic.The Bottom Line Spiralling inevitably to the grand conclusion, here's another in the series of greatest albums of all time. Or my 100 favourite at any rate! These reviews seem to be getting longer as I get more enthusiastic about the albums I'm reviewing. Or maybe I should stop being quite verbose. Ah well... After a bit more controversy we get right down to things with numbers 30 to 21. And I do enjoy the comments I've been getting on this lot! 30} Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band - The Beatles (Parlophone 1967) This is often billed as the world's first concept album, mainly because it's sandwiched by different versions of the same song, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and this fictional band forms a central concept. Personally I can't see it, but this was the Beatles', most diverse album up to this point, featuring a dizzying array of styles and the first printed lyric sheet. It's got some of the biggest, best songs the Beatles ever wrote, including the rocking title track, the trippy psychedelic Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds and olde style music hall on When I'm Sixty-Four. But the thing that cements it's popularity and position as one of the best albums of all time is the fact that it lacks a weak link. Even Ringo gets to sing a halfway decent song on the homely With A Little Help From My Friends with its suggestive lyric "I get high with a little help from my friends." Hmm... Elsewhere there's freak-out music hall on Good Morning Good Morning, George Harrison indulging in a bit of sitar-led Eastern weirdness on Within You Without You and the scratchy stop-start riff to Getting Better. Buy this album to hear one of the world's most influential bands right on top of their game. Standout Track: A Day In The Life - This would have to rank as one of my all time favourite Beatles tracks as it sees them being commercial and innovative at the same time. It comes in two separate parts; a woozy, melancholy verse from John Lennon and the frantic mid-section from MacCartney that suddenly dissolves back haziness. And it's all backed by a huge orchestra which eventually crescendos to leave the album stood on a prolonged chord that finally vanishes into nothing. Similar To: Radiohead, The Coral 29} Out Of Time - REM (Warner 1991) After the breakout success of Green, REM surprised the entire world by becoming globetrotting mega-stars by using mandolins and writing about love-gone-wrong. Every single one of these songs are about the end of a relationship which has fallen apart, with the obvious exception of the lurid, day-glo jingle-jangle fun of Shiny Happy People. This song will either have you clapping along in an ironic style or retching, depending on what kind of sense of humour you have. I love it - apparently they only wrote it when the rest of the band asked Michael Stipe to stop writing such miserable songs, so he wrote a happy one. And they never spoke of it again... That aside, most of the songs on here range from reflective (Low's atmospheric... lowness) to downright fraught and unhappy (the free-associating gem that is Country Feedback). You've also got, of all people, KRS One guesting on Radio Song, all about a split up and a Mike Mills fronted Near Wild Heaven about an almost but not quite perfect relationship. Much like Out Of Time then - almost, but not quite perfect. Standout Track: Losing My Religion - One thing that is perfect though is Losing My Religion, the biggest REM hit of all time, and my second favourite song. It's led by a jangling mandolin and sees Stipe at the end of his tether having been rejected by the object of his affection. It's Every Breath You Take for sensitive kids basically. Similar To: Coldplay, Idlewild 28} Wonderland - Charlatans (Universal 2001) Everybody's tenth favourite band was how the Charlatans were once described, which is a bit of a shame seeing as they have some truly great songs and albums. They're not hip but they constantly evolve and write some truly memorable tunes, a lot of which appear on this white-boy soul collection. This is a record with real groove and funk that you wouldn't have thought possible from five blokes from rainy Britain. Probably the most funky thing on here is the pumping instrumental dance track The Bell And The Butterfly. Strangely, all Charlatans instrumental tracks are incredibly good, and this is probably their finest, a driving, insanely funky tune which harks back to acid house glory days with thumping beats. Elsewhere there's a couple of classic singles with unbelievable Tim Burgess falsettos - Love Is The Key, a slinky sexy rawker, and A Man Needs To Be Told an incredibly understated, reflective little half-ballad. Add on top of that the single-that-wasn't and insidious opener You're So Pretty We're So Pretty, the frantic, urgent, damaged soul of I Just Can't Get Over Losing You and the quite filthy Is It In You? and you have one hell of an album. Standout Track: Judas - My favourite Charlies track, this sees Burgess go into that falsetto over unsettlingly funky beats and all manner of synthesised fart noises. This song literally funks and grooves around making the band sound at once incredibly loose and happy as in their Madchester inception, but also a tight, cohesive whole that doesn't once sound forced. One sublime slice of white-boy soul. Similar To: James Brown, The Stone Roses 27} The Coral - The Coral (Deltasonic 2002) The Coral are one of the best bands to have come out of Liverpool since four mop-tops sang Love Me Do, and there is one reason for this critical and commercial success - pirates. The Coral are obsessed with them, and most of their songs sound like a bunch of drunken, demented buccaneers swashing buckle and shivering timbers to a gleeful soundtrack of Merseybeat, Captain Beefheart and reggae. Songs like Spanish Main can only be about pirates really, and the Coral's magpie-like plundering of influences probably makes it a just comparison. But it's not a total rip-off seeing as they create something new, brilliant and vital along with some of the best tunes of last year. These include I Remember When: what starts life as a hazy, woozy rumination of love lurches into a stomping chorus which eventually collapses into a cossack-style freak out. Then there's Shadows Fall, a dubby, pirate-reggae track, Goodbye, a rocking slice of pirate-rawk with extra wig-out thrown in for fun and the mighty Dreaming Of You, a full-on pirate hoe-down with trombones and everything. They're probably yet to conquer America, and probably never will, but the Coral are currently by far and away one of Britain's most consistently interesting bands. Standout Track: Skeleton Key - Originally appearing on it's own EP, this is the quintessential bizarre, skewed sound of the Coral - most of the time it's a raw throated stomping piece of shiver-me-timbers and avast ye land lubbers pirate rock, but halfway through it bombs out into a freaky haze of psychedelia. One can only imagine the amounts of dope that produced this and the accompanying video which involved the band careering round a lighthouse like an episode of Scooby Doo gone psycho. Similar To: Captain Beefheart, The Beatles 26} The Clash - The Clash (Columbia 1977) The punk movement of 1977 only had one band that really mattered - The Clash, led by sadly deceased political firebrand Joe Strummer. Although the Sex Pistols jarred more with the establishment, they weren't as good as the Clash, and didn't say half as much as Strummer's group. They never wrote things like I'm So Bored With The USA, inspired by Strummer getting fed up with endless US cop shows and (White Man) In Hammersmith Palais, the Clash's first attempt at incorporating Jamaican reggae sounds into their music, in this case an attack on racism. Elsewhere they attack their own record company on the superlative Complete Control, a blasting stadium, opener Clash City Rockers, a jarring, jagged call to arms, and What's My Name a sneering, aggressive minute-and-a-half inspired by Mohammed Ali. And that's not forgetting other greats like their cover of I Fought The Law and the dissenting stomp of London's Burning. The best album from the only band that really mattered and inspired the likes of Rage, Public Enemy and the Manics. Standout Track: White Riot - Ushered in by a wailing siren this was the original Clash single - rapid, vicious and sloganeering with such gusto and situationism that really did inspire riots. This is one hell of a loud, angry track and rivals the Sex Pistols in terms of who's more in yer face! Similar To: Sex Pistols, Manic Street Preachers 25} Music For The Jilted Generation - Prodigy (XL 1994) Most people will always remember the Prodigy as that band with the Firestarter song which featured a scary punk guy in a tunnel. Well before they let Keith Flint off his leash to sing like an unimaginative version of John Lydon, The Prodigy made one of the greatest dance albums of all times on Music For The Jilted Generation. It's loud, angry and ten times as subversive as its more popular successor, The Fat Of The Land and it's stacked full of stonkingly rocking tunes. It left contemporaries like The Chemical Brothers and Leftfield in the starting blocks as Liam Howlett decided to take on a political agenda. The whole album is an attack on the Criminal Justice Bill, which was bought in to prevent raves from taking place and further controlling Britain's youth, tackled specifically by the guitar laden two fingered salute of Their Law. Howlett also wisely decided that the guitar was being underused in rave, so we get a host of searing guitars over tracks like the metal riffing Voodoo People. And most of all he wanted the album to be a frighteningly nasty antithesis to the Prodigy's tag as comedy rave band - pumping, gimp noise sampling Poison being a prime example. Most of the time he's just stirring up the nation's youth - songs like Break And Enter and Full Throttle are rave tracks gone very nasty. One Love was a bit of a frantic rave choon just like in the good old days though... Standout Track: No Good (Start The Dance) - The zenith and encapsulation of Jilted Generation, this is a firestorm of sped up basslines, absolutely manic beats and a kind of sinister infectious energy that is quite unlike anything that came before it. The sample of "It's no good for me / I don't need nobody," was recently used on a garage track, but it was no match for the original's subversive, simmering anger and insidious energy. Similar To: Primal Scream, Leftfield 24} Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea - PJ Harvey (Island 2000) Everything about this album rocks - it's PJ Harvey for one thing, a local hero in Dorset. But this is the album where she relocated to the bustling metropolis of New York and wrote a whole album of fractured ballads and out-and-out blues rawk, ending up as Dorset relocated to Manhatten. Sure, this is a fictional romanticised version of the Big Apple, but you have to realise that here in the coontryside we do here that there be cities out there the size of whole counties where the streets be paved with gold and be full of motorised carts! On the whole Stories From The City... rocks - tracks like the full on elegiac roar of The Wh*res Hustle and the Hustlers Wh*re, Kamikazee which sounds just like it should and This Is Love, a crunching, steamy blues tune. When she's not rocking she's either writing upbeat love songs (Good Fortune, A Place Called Home) or collaborating with one Thom Yorke on Beautiful Feeling and the haunting break-up song This Mess We're In. And it all ends on the blissful We Float which is like watching sunset over Staten Island. Standout Track: Big Exit - The enduring image this album leaves is that Polly has turned into some kind of gun-totin' gangsta ho. The opening track is a banging, paranoid ode to wanting to find somewhere safe to live and sees her on the run from the cops. And it's got the great chorus of "Baby, baby ain't it true / I'm immortal when I'm with you," which is a perfect chorus, and possibly directed at her pistol. Similar To: Kings Of Leon, Tori Amos 23} Suede - Suede (Nude 1993) Back in 1993, music in Britain was generally sh*t. Ace Of Bass and Shaggy were basically as good as it got, but when Suede appeared with Animal Nitrate and its parent album Suede things could never be the same again. A proto-Britpop band, Suede never quite fit into the genre they helped invent as their seedy glam rock was nothing like the butch posturing of, say, Oasis. However, their grimy neon-lit voyeurism predated bands like Blur and Pulp and was quintessentially British in a grunge-obsessed world. Their debut is far from perfect but has enough gems on it to make it a classic. Aside from Animal Nitrate, there's seedy, pounding glam stomp The Drowners the barreling velocity of Moving and opener So Young, a swooning heroin addled introduction to Suede. In fact the key concepts of this album are heroin, being gay and swooning. Oh, and the fact that Damon Albarn had run off with Brett Anderson's ex, Justine Frishmann. This led to some of the album's standouts like, She's Not Dead, a beautiful, hazy ballad where Brett spits about his ex "F*cking with a slip of a man", the effervescent pop suss of Metal Mickey and Pantomime Horse a swooning epic where Anderson challenges Albarn to see it from his side. They still cut it live despite their recent output not being so good, but Suede will always have this to look back on. Standout Track: Animal Nitrate - Most people's first impression of Suede, this hacking glam sleaze-fest is a biting attack on empty relationships (More Albarn baiting?). The title is a corruption of the aphrodisiac Aminal Nitrate, and the song itself is an unforgettably sleazy piece of pop music that has few equals. Similar To: JJ72, Pulp 22} The Remote Part - Idlewild (Parlophone 2002) After years of trying, it was nice to see Scotland's answer to REM finally break the top ten with You Held The World In Your Arms. The Remote Part was written deep in the Highlands, but is stacked full of tunes all of which are capable of being a hit single. You Held The World... is a string washed rocker which was urgent enough to break Idlewild straight into the top ten, while American English is a ballad of huge proportions which consolidated their success. Then they released the less well known Live In A Hiding Place, jangly little ballad about being shy, which is what Idlewild songs are usually about, although normally they're screaming it. It helps with REM comparisons, along with Roddy's free-association lyrics and Rod's ear for melody. They do get some good screaming done though - I Am What I Am Not and Stay The Same are both buzzy punk blasts and Out Of Routine is a glorious buzzsaw song with a huge chorus. One of the best moments on the album comes right at the end though - In Remote Part is an acoustic lament which finally breaks down into blistering, very Scottish rock with a poet reading the specially written Scottish Fiction over the top about being Scottish. Sadly bassist Bob Fairfoull has now left and his drunken legacy ends here, but Idlewild are now officially the Scottish REM and have a huge future ahead of them. Standout Track: A Modern Way Of Letting Go - Philosophical musings turned up to 11. This song does just plain rocks like a whole mountain, and stands as a reminder of what a force to reckon with Idlewild are. Bob Fairfoull is gone, but won't be forgotten (But who can forget his slot on Radio 1 where they broadcast his pub crawl around Lerwick getting "A wee bit silly.") Similar To: REM, The Smiths 21} Remain In Light - Talking Heads (Sire 1980) Loads of bands have taken to ripping off CBGB acts, but only now are they realising the potential of emulating the genius that was Talking Heads. Remain In Light still stands as the pinnacle of their journey into world music influenced funk rock soundtracking David Byrne's side-swipes at Reganomics and forays into surreality. Saying this album is odd is an understatement - it's so skewed it's facing the wrong way. There are only eight tracks but they're so diverse and goddam weird that they sound like virtually nothing else ever. And that's just the music. Among the strangest song subjects tackled is the guy who changes his features by imaging his ideal face on Seen And Not Seen, a truly insane and unsettling rant which Byrne delivers in a thoroughly reasoned tone. Then there's frenetic opener Born Under Punches, a scratchy piece of funk with tribal beats and fear-inducing Byrne vocals. Occasionally they move out of funk territory into other uncharted waters, like The Listening Wind about the invasion of Native American lands and The Overload, which sounds like a downbeat Joy Division. Now that is saying something. It's telling that Radiohead were named after a Talking Heads song. Standout Track: Once In A Lifetime - As straight-forward as it gets, famous for the spoken word delivery of much of the lyrics by Byrne as he describes the wants and dreams of suburban America. Really it's a nightmarish scenario with the chorus warning of "Letting the days go by." All this set to a rumbling tribal rhythm and swirling synths and guitars. Similar To: Radio 4, The Rapture  |
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