17 September 2013 (Day 260) – What's The Best Album Ever? Not So Usual Suspects Part 1

I had time to play five contenders for the mantle of my favourite album today.  What binds together all of today’s albums is that these are albums by established acts that polls usually don’t feature very highly, mainly because the artists concerned have released at least one other album that capturing the attention of critics.  I started today with the lowest profile released by the original version of:

(# 599) The Velvet Underground – White Light/White Heat (1968)

In my opinion each of the first four Velvet Underground studio albums is eligible for consideration in my top 100.  Yet when these polls are put together it’s their debut album, The Velvet Underground And Nico that usually gets the nod.  I understand why this occurs given how Lou Reed’s and John Cale’s unorthodox lyrics paradoxically mesh with the fragile beauty of Nico’s voice.  With Nico (and Andy Warhol) now out of the picture a much truer version of the original line up of the band emerged on this album and the result is one of the most uncompromising albums ever released.  To me, this album is the sound of a savage decaying urban environment, sort of like a musical equivalent of the classic movie set in New York City, The French Connection.  The title track zooms part in a rush; the catchy I Heard Her Call my name is drench in feedback and the epic Sister Ray songs is the sound of the album getting lost in the city.  And yet there is still space to feature the breathless, almost poppy, Here She Comes Now and the bizarre spoken word jam The Gift.

(# 600) The Mothers Of Invention – Absolutely Free (1967)

I’ve always found it hard to justify my enthusiasm for Frank Zappa, especially given the puerile nature of some of his lyrics.   What’s beyond reproach, however, is his musicianship which at times is like listening to someone you know knows more about music than you.  That’s not to say he’s showing off, rather there’s so many influences going on throughout his works that you need to have an explanatory guide book to assist you.  No wonder The Simpsons Matt Goering is a fan and was a close friend on the man; a classic episode of The Simpsons similarly contains so many popular culture references that one cannot hope to understand them all, yet that doesn’t prevent its enjoyment.  As for the Mother’s albums; I’ve omitted We’re Only In It For The Money, because there are very few references in it that I do get and, in any case, it doesn’t have as natural a flow as either the debut album Freak Out! or Absolutely Free.  I tend towards the latter, due its presence of classic Zappa tunes including Plastic People, Call Any Vegetable and Brown Shoes Don’t Make It.  It also appears that future issues of this album, like my copy, contains the absolutely irresistible single Big Leg Emma and its magnificent B-side  Why Dontcha Do Me Right?  But realistically, I could have made as compelling a case for Freak Out!

(# 601) Public Enemy – Fear Of A Black Planet (1990)

I’ve never understood why this album gets so overlooked in favour of its predecessor, It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back.  Cresswell and Mathieson included Millions at number 10 in their recent top 100 book and this album invariably is the highest ranked rap album in such polls.  Whilst Millions is a great album, I think it pales against Fear Of A Black Planet.  In fact, I think almost every album ever released pales against it.  A certain member of my top ten, it is the both the finest rap album ever released as well as arguably the finest piece of black music put out since the Stevie Wonder masterworks of the early 1970s.  Yet while Wonder was able to produce albums with songs that eloquently argued the poor state of life for the urban Afro American in a way that still kept him in favour with middle America, PE simply didn’t stand for such niceties.  They simply told it as they saw it with a palpable rage and with an explosive production to match.  And listening to the album, the reason for the rage is thoroughly understandable.  911 Is A Joke bemoans slow response times for emergency teams in black areas, Burn Hollywood Burn about the stereotypical or non representation of blacks in movies and Hollywood’s expectation that movies need not be created for that audience, the hit single Fight The Power rejects notions that white people held up as heroes can’t be racist and the meaning of the title track doesn’t require explanation.   Revolutionary Situation even addresses the misogynist nature of hip hop culture.  Add in some awesome aural collages and brilliant sampling this is the rap album that should be played to any anti rapper who can’t see any merit in the genre.

(# 602) Pink Floyd – The Dark Side Of The Moon (1973)

Sometimes sales figures can be taken as a reliable measure of quality.  And when you have the equal second biggest album of all time (with AC/DC’s Back In Black) you’d think this album would actually rank higher in many best of polls that it does.  Yet frequently it gets trumped by other Floyd albums, notably The Wall and Wish You Were Here.  Why I’m not sure because the more I play this, the more I’m coming around to believing this is their masterpiece.  It is a brilliantly conceived suite of music that appears to be about the greatest fears that spin around inside the heads of humans.  The themes – time, greed, money, illness – are universal ones which are accompanied by magnificent performances.  No other album has as many individual highlights packed within it; the gradual fade in incorporating early sampling and the sound of jack hammers, the 2001 A Space Odyssey freak out that is On The Run,  the clocks heralding the start of Time, David Gilmour’s mighty solo in the same track, Doris Tory’s performance in The Great Gig In Sky, the use of cash registers to create a rhythm at the start of Money, the voices that appear during the instrumental sections Us And Them as well as the completely  unexpected sax solo, the lyrics in Brian Damage (“The lunatic is on the grass” and “I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon”) and the gradual fade out to the sound of heart beats at the end of Eclipse, ready to have you start the record all over again.

(# 603) David Bowie – Station To Station (1976)

I was never much of a Bowie fan during his early years.  However, a lot of people were which is why The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars usually gets a high ranking in many polls.  Hunky Dory too. But, for me, his career really took off with the wonderful albums he recorded with Brian Eno in Berlin and this is the best of them.  This album brilliant absorbs a lot of the experience Eno had gained from working with some of the key German experimental artists of the era (such as Cluster and Harmonia) and brilliantly reinterpreted it for English speaking audiences.  For many people, including myself, it was this album as well as Kraftwerk’s Autobahn that (eventually) opened my eyes to the scene and for that alone is reason to heap praise on this.  Not that it needs to as it stands on its own merits. The epic title track that opens proceedings introduced the world to Thin White Duke; Word On A Wing is one of his more convincing ballads; TVC15 is a cracking number and Stay is seriously funky (especially on live recordings from the era).  Golden Years provided the requisite hit single.