rock: *ffavoriteistsas works
Submitted by Feif Umgotnn on Wed, 02/20/2008 - 08:37
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- Bob Dylan: The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Live 1966 - The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert (1966) – this is my FAVORITE LP recording of “rock” music.
The Doors: The Doors (1966)
- I would have preferred The Doors put out an album of all originals, which they could have done by substituting the two covers and release them instead as B-sides to singles, and swapping out their places on the album with two better songs as indicated below. I did not go out on a limb with my ordering…but I think that it actually has better flow than what the album has now. they would have had to master “Moonlight Drive” closer to what they did on Strange Days for it reach its potential that is lacking a bit in the outtakes they attempted in their sessions for their debut.
- Side 1:
- 1. Break On Through (To The Other Side)
- 2. Soul Kitchen
- 3. Crystal Ship
- 4. Twentieth Century Fox
- 5. Indian Summer
- 6. Light My Fire
- Side 2:
- 7. Moonlight Drive
- 8. I Looked At You
- 9. End of the Night
- 10. Take It As It Comes
- 11. The End
Tim Buckley: Lorca (1970)
Pere Ubu: The Modern Dance (1977)
- This is THEE masterpiece of rock music. Set in the urban wastelands in an end of a nuclear industrial era, anxieties ebb and flow as the singer sings, whales, yelps, gargles, and most anything else that a human voice can do to pierce through the solitude and frenzy of modern life. The heartbreak, the fears of “street waves”, the devil, red books, and adulthood (and whatever else you can conjure in your mind while listening) swell in the band’s grooves of concrete musique and garage rock, and David Thomas’s infectious warble. As the walls crumble around the singer, by the aforementioned nervosa, manic-depressive and frantic band, he tries to cope with the “way of the west” by pacts of love, devotion, and solace in home-life however; but, can he get it? The whole may seem bleak, a bit of a lark at times, but it is never unfocused – the dance is never abandoned. Every moment of every track is cut to perfection (if there ever is such a thing: The Doors!) but the summation of the tracks is even greater than any one by itself.
- Every second of the feedback on “Non-Alignment Pact” drags the listener into the world of “their poor boy” in his modern dance to put out the fire of the night (but he will never get it). One of two rockers on the album, “Non-Alignment Pact” rips out of the 30 seconds of feedback directly onto the dance floor as the drums kick in along with the synth belting out an industrial whistle, steam effervescing relieving the pressure of the Thomas’s warble and anxiety of loneliness: the peak of this coming as he recites the thousand names he longs for. (A cover by “the indefatigable R. Stevie Moore” can be found here, while it remains there.) “The Modern Dance” (possibly Ubu’s Ultimate Masterpiece, up there with Berlioz’s “Songe d’une nuit du sabbat”, or any movement from Coltrane’s Love Supreme) is the core of the album’s loneliness and hopelessness. The poor boy will not give up easy, even when chance leaves him stranded amongst crowds of strangers. When the band tries to shatter the boys mind, the guitar cures the laughter of the bourgeois with fits of rage and concussions of sound, while the synthesizer hisses, and the rhythm section carve out a funky groove to dance to in the meantime.
- Needing a rest, the band lounges around a little free-jazz opener for the first half of “Laughing” before erupting into a rock’n’roll protest of love. The singer enjoys the prospects of the apocalypse so long as he has his baby and her well of confidence in their love and its ability to outshine the sun, shoot the devil with a gun, and LAUGH! Back to the future, “Street Waves” picks up where “The Modern Dance” left off with an eerie synth, and the singer screaming, like in “Non-Alignment Pact” as the rest of the band kicks out the jams in the second rocker of the album. The singer rides a surf-rock riff up to the wake of the groovy solo, staying afloat with the wind from the synth, the bubbling bass, and the tapping from the drums, keeping the rhythm alive while the guitar recharges to explode, along with the singer, for one more verse of riding a “street wave” by a girl’s side.
- “Chinese Radiation” opens with a meditative acoustic guitar, sparks of electronic malice, sparse slides on one guitar and strums from another, as the singer mumbles over two lovers with Red on the mind. (Note: the click around the 40 second mark is not a composed sound, it is a tape splicing problem that is supposed to be corrected on 2009 released Datapanik compilation and is supposed to be corrected on the 2005 Silverline release, but I can still hear it…). Like “Laughing,” Ubu cannot contain themselves for very long. They erupt once again with a (pseudo?) live deluge of slide guitar, oscillating bass, continued motorik drumming (as is the case for the entire album), as the singer tells a tale of being stranded in the ocean (of revolution?), then moving into a scream of the beginning verse of Red revolution in the face of cheers. The chaos is corralled by a piano finale which plays the band majestically off of the first side (along with melancholic drumming and the singer mumbling the opening “red guard, new world” verse one more time: devastating.
- Though the B-side to the album does not have the jarring feedback that opened “Non-Alignment Pact,” or the rocking of the first five songs, it does have Thomas at his most manic. Covering an unfinished song by their former, and recently deceased, founding member and friend Peter Laughner, Ubu supercharges “Life Stinks” with fits insanity as the singer does everything but lose his vocal chords competing with (and demolishing) the guitar in a spasmodic interlude where each “instrument” fights for manic supremacy. Grieving the stinkiness of their life with quick inane hyperbolic statements of a life forlorn, and the loss of their friend, Ubu is in and out before anyone can catch up to their intensity. “Real World,” caught between electronic pulses and a cool relaxed jam, Thomas sings the absurd, earning the Ubu in their name, with more heartache, “Techniramic Heartache [TM]” “in real time.” Though superficially relaxed in many ways, “Real World” continues the insanity evoked on “Life Stink” an absurd manner rather than vitriolic one.
- Running out of energy as the singer struggles in his modern world, and the destruction thereof, “Over My Head” has the singer whispering as he drifts to sleep, with sirens going off slow and distant, promising to be perfect from now on as he loses contact with the world. The band drags along to the climax, “Sentimental Journey,” sometimes released as “Doris Day Sings Sentimental Journey” (a live release is the only instance I know of this title). The boy is now alone, but has a home. Musique concrète (broken glass and the broom to clean it up), very sparse guitar and bass, more electronic antics, and a solo horn diffusing the tension of the singers peril of his paradise, slide and scrape to his safety from the outside world. The boy is still confused with himself and his surroundings, he takes solace once again in a “girl,” and her advice: to go home. Home, the boy lists the contents in disgust, but with acceptance, meanwhile the band self-destructs along with the singer every couple of minutes reaching deeper and deeper into the remnants of an personal/industrial holocaust. Sweeping up the glass and the various horrors of the last 30+ minutes, Ubu dissolve the sorrow with the reggae tune “Humor Me,” claiming the preceding sentiments to be a farce, all in jest, and that it is merely “the way of the west”: to suffer. The world described was all in his mind. The “Classical Girl” put him in such despair. He never had love; he never had anything but himself and his thoughts. He never got “the modern dance”. The emotions were real, but everything else was a joke, just like the music which has a good laugh as well with, skipping along amid the destruction and anxiety as the singer asks to be humored – “it was just a joke mon.” “My Dark Ages (I Don’t Get Around)” could have been the ending to this saga as well, or spliced into “Humor Me” with the singer coping with his loneliness all the same. Another ending could have been “Final Solution” but that would not have sealed the album the way “Humor Me” did.
- Other people prefer the other succeeding albums by Pere Ubu, but none have a concept as real, harrowing, or executed as well as The Modern Dance. Dub Housing is a tighter recording, but lacks the supreme emotion of The Modern Dance captures in virtually every moment. Thomas’s warble is merely attempted at these levels found here on New Picnic Time, and he does a good job there (and everywhere else as well). Tom Herman’s guitar would never ignite, and Tony Maimone’s bass would never grind, groove, and dance in the hollow places like here again. Allen Ravenstine would produce other very interesting sounds on later records, but nothing as cohesive and agonizing as here (and the band never really left that theory). Scott Krauss’s motorik drumming exercises are never as unrelenting as they were here as he pounded whatever agony, danger or violence the others were calling for.
- The Modern Dance is about a fictitious love set in the nuclear age; it is about “heartache,” real or imagined; it is about “the real world,” and Dorthy’s mantra – “there [really] is no place like home.” Now you have to find your home, journey to your sanctuary, and respect it, let it caress you and warm your bones; let home keep you safe for another day, a day you will need to again participate in, to find “that Classical Girl [(or Boy)]”, ride the big waves and take them as they come. Oh, and have some surf music playing in the background, you gotta love surf music, The Beach Boys rule!
Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band: Trout Mask Replica (1969)
The Velvet Underground: The Veltvet Underground & Nico (1966)
Bob Dylan: Blonde On Blonde (1966)
Van Morrison: Astral Weeks (1968)
The Minutemen: Double Nickels On The Dime (1984)
Butthole Surfers: Butthole Surfers EP (1983) - a.k.a. A Brown Reason To Live and Pee Pee The Sailor
Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited (1965)
Royal Trux: Twin Infinitives (1990)
- other great albums:
- Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: The Good Son (1990)
- The Velvet Underground: White Light/White Heat (1967)
- Leonard Cohen: Songs Of Leonard Cohen (1967)
- Nico: Desertshore (1970)
- Butthole Surfers: Psychic…Powerless…Another Man’s Sac (1984)
- Faust: Faust (1971)
- The Residents: Meet The Residents (1974)
- The Fleshtones: Roman Gods (1981)
- Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band: The Mirror Man Sessions (1967)
- Lisa Germano: Excerpts From A Love Circus (1996)
- My Bloody Valentine: Loveless (1991)
- The Pixies: Surfer Rosa (1987)
- Talk Talk: Spirit of Eden (1988)
- The Residents: Not Available (supposedly recorded 1974, released 1978)
- Neu!: Neu! (1971)
- Tim Buckley: Starsailor (1970)
- Mercury Rev: Yerself Is Steam (1991)
- Mercury Rev: Boces (1993)
- The Feelies: Crazy Rhythms (1980)
- Robert Wyatt: Rock Bottom (1974)
- Pink Floyd: Ummagumma: Studio Album (1969)
- The Gun Club: Fire Of Love (1981)
- Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band: Safe As Milk (1967)
- Pink Floyd: Piper At The Gates Of Dawn (1967)
- Television: Marquee Moon (1977)
- Joanna Newsom: Ys (2006)
- The Beach Boys: Pet Sounds (1966)
- Pere Ubu: New Picnic Time (1979)
- Chrome: Half Machine Lip Moves (1979)
- John Fahey: The Voice of the Turtle (1968)
- Pere Ubu: Dub Housing (1978)
- The Dream Syndicate: The Days Of The Wine And Roses (1982)
- Nico: Marble Index (1968)
- Joni Mitchell: Blue (1971)
- The Modern Lovers: The Modern Lovers (1972)
- Suicide: Suicide (1977)
- Popol Vuh: Hosianna Mantra (1972)
- Faust: Faust IV (1973)
- Thinking Fellers Union Local 282: Mother of All Saints (1992)
- Ant-Bee: Pure Electric Honey (1990)
- Tom Waits: Rain Dogs (1985)
- Slint: Spiderland (1991)
- Butthole Surfers: Cream Corn From The Socket Of Davis EP (1985)
- Soft Machine: Third (1970)
Author Comments:
this is a list that combines my feelings on what are my Favorite and what i think are the Greatest albums of all time. if this was just my favorite then the list would have to be updated every week. if this were a list of the greatest only, then i would have to figure out some way of grading albums on a purely objective scale in order to distinguish between 1 & 2, and 5 & 6, and 37 & 38, and 412 & 413; and where i draw the line to what is great and what is on the cusp of greatness. i cannot not fathom that system and do not care to put the hours or seconds into figuring out something like that. so, this is what you get from ME! enjoy! :^)
albums by year are archived – many i have rated on RYM are missing, and many, many more I have heard in my lifetime are missing. I will eventually start to put together Jazz and Classical/Other album lists together, if I get around to listening to that music enough to make anything substantial. Otherwise just check my album log for those if you are interested.
Thanks for posting this. I love seeing Coltrane holding the #1 spot. Truly a religious experience like none other. Also, nice to see some due attention given to Geek the Girl, which seems to be an album that many "Scaruffists" dismiss to some degree(understandable, since its ultimate virtues aren't necessarily obvious on the first spin).
I also like that you've given such high praise to what is probably the best album of the decade so far (Ys of course). Here's hoping her next album is even better (no easy task).
3 Zappas but where's Uncle Meat?
All in all a great list!
Geek The Girl should be higher (#9 or so), and i am eagerly anticipating the next Newsom release, and the My Bloody Valentine release??? which was supposed to have been released by now???
Uncle Meat has never really been on my radar (and that goes back before scaruffi when i started to go to the library and check out every album i could; i never fell in love with it), nor has Freak Out! They are both very good, but i rarely play either and do not ever think to play them, whereas the others i play on a consistent basis; you should also add Burnt Weeny Sandwich (basically Little House... is the only great part of it, but it makes the album), Hot Rats, one of the You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore live albums, and possibly Jazz in Hell to the list of good/great Zappa albums.
and the My Bloody Valentine release??? which was supposed to have been released by now???
What? Really?
Uncle Meat has never really been on my radar (and that goes back before scaruffi when i started to go to the library and check out every album i could; i never fell in love with it), nor has Freak Out! They are both very good, but i rarely play either and do not ever think to play them, whereas the others i play on a consistent basis; you should also add Burnt Weeny Sandwich (basically Little House... is the only great part of it, but it makes the album), Hot Rats, one of the You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore live albums, and possibly Jazz in Hell to the list of good/great Zappa albums.
I'll be checking out all of Zappa's highly rated albums within the near future, namely the rest of the Scaruffi-rated 8/10's.
MBV's new album was talked about being released in January, it is now Feb-March and i doubt we will hear anything of it until the summer???????????????
Awesome review of Modern Dance. It reads more like music (or poetry) than a "review". Excellent flow going on there man and great observations.
thanks, it is somewhat legible, that is all care about for now; i will try to improve it, and then move on to a few more, probably not all the bold...i just noticed some grammatical errors - my calling card. ;-) there you go, that is a bit better.
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THE DOORS! Nice!! Incidentally, I listened to both The Doors & Modern Dance last night and was metaphorically raped. The scary part is I loved it. Honestly, I feel like those two albums are neck and neck. They are both so goddamned amaazing. I never quite realized how freaking perfect Modern Dance is.
yeah i have never been able to get enough of that and Highway 61, now lets see how long it will last.
if you have access to a 5.1 DVD surround sound system you may want to pick up the reissues of both remastered for it.
for awhile i thought The Modern Dance was conceptually perfect (or close to it), but most seem to think (notably Thomas himself) that Dub Housing is the masterpiece by the band, so i will have to give that a hard scratch and see what i can find that i may have missed before.
Those people are crazy, from the few times I've given Dub Housing a listen.
Boy that sounds swell, that sounds swell, that -- sounds -- swell
I do indeed have a 5.1 system, 110 W Sony. Not bad at all. But get this: I refuse to utilize the surround sound setup. Instead, I align all my speakers Left and Right and sit in front of them. Surround Sound makes me feel dizzy and I just generally don't like it. One of my quirks. I'm also first and foremost, a headphone guy. Listen to 80%+ of my music on headphones. By the way, I totally agree with you on Lorca and can finally see why you and others would rank it so highly.
I don't know if I can say this enough: awesome list.
What does Twin Infinitives' placing and backdropped font mean? Undecided?
It is both brilliant and terrible, it lies outside our realm of spacetime and is entirely beautiful while being a monstrosity. It is.
A man stands naked in front of a mirror, holding a bowl of soup; he is a fool.
what is the quote from? i am wracking my mind trying to remember.
The Day Today
yeah, undecided is a fair word. i only listen to the album once every month or two, and i can put it anywhere on my favorites list and it would make sense to me. so, i put it in gray and unnumbered for now - it is still great, but i am unsure how great i think it is.!.?.?.
I'm assuming you're a Dylan fan? I feel like you said that sometime. Anyways, if you are - how do you feel about Desire?
he is my favorite. i relistened to Desire and it is pretty good, about the same as Blood On The Tracks. i prefer the live track of "Isis" on the Rolling Thunder Revue bootleg series, and of course "Hurricane" is great...alas, not essential - some throw away tracks like "Mozambique". Time Out Of Mind is a better album.
Nice, he is my favourite as well. You know, I don't really like Desire all that much. Even though it has really good lyrics and music, there's something about it that doesn't seem right. I wouldn't put it in the same boat as Blood on the Tracks either, it doesn't feel nearly as personal and heartfelt. Even though it has great emotional songs like Isis - the way he performs it on Desire I don't get a sense that he's really feeling the pain; more like reciting a great story. It has a few throw-away tracks imo and I agree Time Outta Mind is better. I'll have to check out that bootleg Blood on the Tracks and the Rolling Thunder Revue. What you think of Oh Mercy?
Oh Mercy is a depressing album after the first few tracks, and i probably listen to "Most of the Time" a bit too much - it is decent, a step behind Desire & Blood On The Tracks. as for the Blood On The Tracks bootlegs, i prefer them to the redone versions of some songs like "Idiot Wind"; i listen to it so much i do not know the ending lyrics to the album version because Dylan changed them before recording the full band version. Rolling Thunder Revue is a damn good live album, IF YOU ARE A DYLAN FANATIC - it has an MUCH improved version of "Isis".
What would you say is your top 10(or whatever) Dylan albums?
because i like so much of his stuff i would probably list it in the order i would listen to them if i had enough time to listen to them without interfering with important things, and not dying before i could finish:
1. Freewheelin' - Girl From The North Country is my favorite Dylan song
2. Another Side
3. Bringing It All Back Home
4. "Royal Albert Hall" Concert - 1st disc is devastating, 2nd disc is a free for all
5. Highway 61
6. Blonde On Blonde
7. Bootleg 1-3 - Farewell Angelina is one of my favorites of his
8. Best of 2 - just the songs that are not on the aforementioned albums - Tomorrow Is A Long Time
9. Rolling Thunder Revue
10. Time Out Of Mind
11. Blood On The Tracks
12. Basement Tapes - though the better tracks are on his Best of vol. 2
13. a song here and there from most of the other albums
and you?
Based on the ones I've listened to the most:
1. Blonde on Blonde
2. Highway 61 Revisited
3. Blood on the Tracks
4. John Wesley Harding
5. "Love and Theft"
6. Modern Times
7. The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Live 1966 - The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert
8. New Morning
9. Time Out of Mind
10.The Bootleg Series Volume 6: Live 1964 - Concert at Philharmonic Hall
11.Oh Mercy
12.Freewheelin'
13. Bringing it all Back Home
14.Slow Train Coming
I still need to check out quite a few of his works, especially the bootleg 1-3 and the Rolling Thunder Revue. I agree with you on Royal Albert Hall concert, absolutely devastating, kick ass material. Oh, and Girl From North Country is a beautiful song and perhaps my fav on there as well. As for my favourite Dylan song, I have no idea, here's some I really like: One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later), Queen Jane Approximately, I Dreamed I Saw Saint Augustine, Day of the Locusts, You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go & Mississippi just to name a few.