THE GREATEST ALBUMS OF ALL TIME (Rankings 10-6)

Submitted by AfterHours on Fri, 10/27/2006 - 10:39
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  • 10. SPIRITUAL UNITY-ALBERT AYLER (1964)

  • MY RATING: 9.3/10

  • MY FAVORITE TRACKS:
  • 2. THE WIZARD
  • 4. GHOSTS (SECOND VARIATION)

  • CHALLENGE RATING: 7.5/10

  • GREATEST MOMENT:

  • CRITICS' LIST RANKINGS:
  • Joe S. Harrington, Blastitude (USA) - The All-Time Top 100 Albums (2001): 49

  • CRITICS' RATINGS:
  • All Music Guide (USA) - Album Ratings 1-5 Stars: 5 Stars
  • Spin's Book of Alternative Albums, Ratings 1-10 (USA, 1995): 10

  • CRITICS' QUOTES:

  • ALL ABOUT JAZZ.COM: Whole generations of musicians and listeners experienced a dramatic and irrevocable awakening in the years after Albert Ayler's Spiritual Unity came out in 1964, and the record has a certain timeless quality that makes it just as important today. The piercing emotional emphasis and startlingly voice- like qualities of Ayler's saxophone playing turn childishly simple melodies into expanded voyages of personal discovery and spontaneous invention. Bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Sunny Murray share an abstract, ethereal connection where norms of meter and harmony seem quite naturally irrelevant.

  • But Spiritual Unity remains enigmatic even now, nearly 35 years after Ayler's body was mysteriously found in the Hudson River. Part of that mystique comes from Ayler's own shrouded references to religion and spirituality, with revolving titles like “Ghosts” and “Spirits” evoking milennia- old cycles of meditation, discovery, redemption, and rebirth.

  • Part of it also comes from the makeshift presentation the record received as the ?rst of?cial release on Bernard Stollman's brand new ESP-Disk, a haven where “the artists alone decide” what would happen during their quick, mostly one-take studio sessions, but where the information provided about these events was spotty and sometimes contradictory.

  • This latest reissue of Spiritual Unity transports me to an existence ecstatically free of time and place, bringing back memories of how I ?rst got swept away in the Ayler phenomenon years ago. Oddly enough, I never noticed the first track was recorded in mono until today—which is a sign that the disc's sound quality, while less than spectacular, does nothing to interfere with its effectiveness.

  • The sound is better on this remastered version than the one I picked up a few years ago, but the liner notes fall short. The essays on the ESP-Disk phenomenon and the session itself don't have the same information content as the biographies, label story, and Stollman interview included with the earlier release. So there's really no need for those already familiar with this recording to dash out for the latest and greatest.

  • But if you haven't heard this record, you've missed out on one of the most profound artistic statements of the 20th Century. Enough said.

  • CD UNIVERSE.COM: Like all the great free-jazz players, Albert Ayler possessed a musical intelligence that ranged far and wide. With an approach to the saxophone that reinvents its vocabulary, Ayler's playing tests the limits and possibilities of harmonic structure and tonality. His work is singular however, and markedly different from peers Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy, in that it is not primarily intellectual or willfully deconstructive. Instead, Ayler's aesthetic is almost naïve; his motifs are based on folk melodies and popular themes turned inside out with a luminous, superhuman emotion and intensity. SPIRITUAL UNITY is Ayler's defining statement. Ayler, bassist Gary Peacock, and drummer Sunny Murray form a telepathic network of accelerating and decelerating rhythms and ideas. Ayler's voice is perfectly realized here, from the surging run of "The Wizard," to the lyrical ruminations in "Spirits," to "Ghosts," whose two variations bookend the album, musically and thematically. Ayler unleashes bird-like flurries and guttural groans deep enough to coax spirits from the earth. His aggressive attack and wide vibrato are tempered by the child-like purity of his expression, and the listener is pulled inexorably into a transcendent unity promised by the title, making SPIRITUAL UNITY a free-jazz classic.

  • MY REVIEW: Albert Ayler's Spiritual Unity is among the most successful free-form jazz masterpieces of the era. It begins with a warm, folkish melody before frantically ascending into a world of telepathy, of communicating, haunted spirits, vibrating phrases, cries and extended wailing, before wrapping around back to the same folkish tune of its bookended variations, Ghosts, and Ghosts (Second Variation). Throughout, Ayler plays with a childish naivette, as if discovering the saxophone for the very first time. These are not passages filled with jaw-dropping skill and technical gifts. These are phrases that are cathartic, emotional, immediate, playful, frightened and altogether beautiful, exuding the pathos of a child spirit searching for his home in the life he left behind too soon. He's bound to encounter things and situations for which he doesn't understand, first and foremost not being a part of the normal universe and the loss and protection of his loved ones. Despite being only about 30 minutes long, Spiritual Unity is a transcendant, full-bodied, emotional spectrum of the otherworldy and the inexplicable, carried forth by the easily amused, easily struck fascination and innocence of children.


  • 9. DOLMEN MUSIC-MEREDITH MONK (1981)

  • MY RATING: 9.3/10

  • MY FAVORITE TRACKS:

  • CHALLENGE RATING: 8.0/10

  • GREATEST MOMENT:

  • CRITICS' LIST RANKINGS:

  • CRITICS' RATINGS:

  • CRITICS' QUOTES:

  • MY REVIEW:


  • 8. THE VELVET UNDERGROUND & NICO-THE VELVET UNDERGROUND (1967)

  • MY RATING: 9.3/10

  • MY FAVORITE TRACKS:
  • 4. VENUS IN FURS
  • 6. ALL TOMORROW'S PARTIES
  • 7. HEROIN
  • 11. EUROPEAN SON

  • CHALLENGE RATING: 6.5/10

  • GREATEST MOMENT: Heroin suddenly explodes into a ringing, scratching plethora of chaos.

  • CRITICS' LIST RANKINGS:
  • Amazon.com (USA) - The 10 Best Albums by Decade (1999): 10
  • Blender (USA) - The 100 Greatest American Albums of All time (2002): 17
  • Entertainment Weekly (USA) - The 100 Greatest CDs of All Time (1993): 17
  • Fast 'n' Bulbous (USA) - The 500 Best Albums Since 1965: 6
  • Gear (USA) - The 100 Greatest Albums of the Century (1999): 8
  • Joe S. Harrington, Blastitude (USA) - The All-Time Top 100 Albums (2001): 25
  • Kitsap Sun (USA) - Top 200 Albums of the Last 40 Years (2005): 138
  • Paul Gambaccini - The World Critics Best Albums of All Time (1977): 14
  • Paul Gambaccini - The World Critics Best Albums of All Time (1987): 7
  • Radio WXPN (USA) - The 100 Most Progressive Albums (1996): 12
  • Rolling Stone (USA) - The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time (2003): 13
  • Rolling Stone (USA) - Top 100 Albums of the Last 20 Years (1987): 21
  • Spin (USA) - 100 Alternative Albums (1995): 3
  • Spin (USA) - The 25 Greatest Albums of All Time (1989): 18
  • The Review, University of Delaware (USA) - 100 Greatest Albums of All Time (2001): 6
  • VH1 (USA) - The 100 Greatest Albums of R 'N' R (2001): 19
  • Guardian (UK) - The 100 Best Albums Ever (1997): 8
  • Guitarist (UK) - 101 Essential Guitar Albums (2000): 11
  • Hot Press (Ireland) - The 100 Best Albums Ever (2006): 22
  • Hot Press (Ireland) - The 100 Best Albums of All Time (1989): 38
  • Melody Maker (UK) - All Time Top 100 Albums (2000): 12
  • Mojo (UK) - The 100 Greatest Albums Ever Made (1995): 9
  • New Musical Express (UK) - 20 Near-as-Damn-It Perfect Initial Efforts (1992): 15
  • New Musical Express (UK) - All Times Top 100 Albums (1974): 13
  • New Musical Express (UK) - All Times Top 100 Albums (1985): 16
  • New Musical Express (UK) - All Times Top 100 Albums + Top 50 by Decade (1993): 6
  • New Musical Express (UK) - Top 100 Albums of All Time (2003): 9
  • Q (UK) - Top 20 Albums from 1954-1969 (2004): 5
  • Sounds (UK) - The 100 Best Albums of All Time (1986): 3
  • The Anarchist (UK) - The 33 Best Albums Ever (1997): 3
  • The Times (UK) - The 100 Best Albums of All Time (1993): 11
  • Time Out (UK) - The 100 Best Albums of All Time (1989): 2
  • Uncut (UK) - 100 Rock and Movie Icons (2005): 12
  • Adresseavisen (Norway) - The 100 (+23) Best Albums of All Time (1995): 7
  • Aftenposten (Norway) - Top 50 Albums of All Time (1999): 15
  • Expressen (Sweden) - The 100 Best Records Ever (1999): 6
  • Platekompaniet (Norway) - Top 100 Albums of All Time (2001): 6
  • Pop (Sweden) - The World's 100 Best Albums + 300 Complements (1994): 101
  • Slitz (Sweden) - The 50 Best Albums of All Time (1990): 12
  • Soundi (Finland) - The 50 Best Albums of All Time + Top 10 by Decade (1995): 19
  • David Kleijwegt (Netherlands) - Top 100 Albums of All Time (1999): 14
  • Nieuwe Revu (Netherlands) - Top 100 Albums of All Time (1994): 4
  • OOR (Netherlands) - The Best Albums of the 20th Century (1987): 1
  • OOR (Netherlands) - The Summer of Love, the Best Albums of 1967 (1992): 3
  • Berlin Media (Germany) - The 100 Best Albums of All Time (1998): 6
  • Max Magazine (Germany) - The 50 Best Albums of All Time (1997): 2
  • Musik Express/Sounds (Germany) - The 100 Masterpieces (1993): 19
  • Rolling Stone (Germany) - The 500 Best Albums of All Time (2004): 4
  • Rolling Stone (Germany) - The Best Albums of 5 Decades (1997): 14
  • Spex (Germany) - The 100 Albums of the Century (1999): 3
  • Wiener (Austria) - The 100 Best Albums of the 20th Century (1999): 6
  • Zounds (Germany) - The Top 30 Albums of All Time + Top 10 by Decade (1992): 10
  • Telerama (France) - 50 LPs in the History of Rock (2004): 2
  • Plásticos y Decibelios (Spain) - The 80 Best Albums of All Time (2000): 28
  • Rock de Lux (Spain) - The 200 Best Albums of All Time (2002): 1
  • Alternative Melbourne (Australia) - The Top 100 Rock/Pop Albums (1996): 18
  • Courier-Mail (Australia) - 50 Defining Rock Albums (2005): 11
  • CDNOW (Japan) - 100 Essential Albums (2001?): 94
  • Yediot Ahonot (Israel) - Top 99 Albums of All Time (1999): 2
  • Mucchio Selvaggio (Italy) - 100 Best Albums by Decade (2002): 1-20
  • Viceversa (Italy) - 100 Rock Albums (1996): 4
  • Pure Pop (Mexico) - The 10 (+50) Most Important Albums of All Time (2004): 1
  • Pure Pop (Mexico) - The Best Albums of All Time (1993): 6
  • Rolling Stone (Mexico) - The 100 Greatest Albums of All Time (2004): 11
  • Showbizz (Brazil) - 100 CDs of All Time (1999): 7

  • CRITICS' RATINGS:
  • All Music Guide (USA) - Album Ratings 1-5 Stars: 5 Stars
  • MusicHound Rock, R&B and Country (USA) - Album Ratings 0-5 Bones (1998-99): 5 Bones
  • Robert Christgau (USA) - Consumer Guide Album Grade: A
  • Rolling Stone Album Guide, Ratings 1-5 Stars (USA, 1992): 5 Stars
  • Rolling Stone Album Guide, Ratings 1-5 Stars (USA, 2004): 5 Stars
  • Spin's Book of Alternative Albums, Ratings 1-10 (USA, 1995): 10
  • Martin C. Strong (UK) - The Great Rock Discography 7th Edition, Ratings 1-10: 10
  • Paul Roland (UK) - CD Guide to Pop & Rock, Album Ratings 1-5 Stars (2001): 5 Stars
  • Virgin Encyclopedia of Popular Music (UK) - Album Ratings 1-5 Stars (2002): 5 Stars
  • José Ramón Pardo (Spain) - The 1000 Best Pop-Rock Albums, Ratings 1-5 (1997): 4 Stars

  • CRITICS' QUOTES:

  • POPMATTERS: The result of that quick studio visit is astonishing, a combination of white noise, classic rock and roll, soul, and folk music, a sound that is impossible to categorize in anything else but "The Velvet Underground". Wispy-gentle one moment, chugging and driving the next, disturbing a few minutes later, and cacophonous at the end, The Velvet Underground & Nico was so far ahead of its time that it still sounds fresh today, and thanks to a brand-new two-disc, Deluxe Edition of the album, fans can now own the definitive version.

  • Some may argue that The Velvet Underground & Nico is not a concept album, but think about it: Lou Reed's bittersweet, first-person narratives cut from scene to scene, much like William S. Burroughs' books Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine, a nonlinear tale of life in New York City. Opening with the startlingly beautiful "Sunday Morning", Reed's narrator wakes up on the morning after a night's debauchery, afraid to remember what happened the night before ("Sunday morning / And I'm falling / I've got a feeling / I don't want to know"). "I'm Waiting for the Man", with its pulsating beat by Tucker and Reed's and Morrison's distorted guitars, depicts a Manhattanite's journey into Harlem to score some heroin ("Hey white boy, what you doin' uptown? . . . He's got the works, he gives you sweet taste"), while the grandiose, yet seamy "Venus in Furs" describes a sadomasochistic scene inspired by Leopold Sacher-Masoch's infamous novel of the same name ("Tongue the thongs, the belt that does await you") as Cale plays a sumptuous drone on electric viola, as Morrison repeats the same two-bar bassline and Tucker pounds ominously on tom-toms, one of the best marriages of rock and modal jazz ever recorded. The Bo Diddley-influenced shuffle on "Run Run Run" dominates Reed's story of homeless characters such as "Teenage Mary", "Seasick Sarah", and "Beardless Harry", while Cale's boogie-woogie piano riff drives the majestic "All Tomorrow's Parties", a heartbreaking sketch of an empty, upper crust party girl (When midnight comes around / She'll turn once more to Sunday's clown and cry behind the door"). "There She Goes Again" niftily steals its opening guitar riff from Otis Redding's "Hitch Hike" as the song's misogynist narrator tells a cuckold to set his unfaithful woman straight: "You better hit her". The twisted, Dylanesque "The Black Angel's Death Song" represents the darker side of psychedelia, and the frenetic noise-fest "European Son", complete with its unsettling sounds of a table scraping across the studio floor and glass shattering, closes out the album.

  • The album's three centerpiece songs are also polar opposites of each other. Reed's "Heroin", with its speeding and slowing tempo accompanied by Cale's one-chord viola playing is neither a cautionary tale, nor a pro-drugs rant; in keeping with the rest of the album, it's just another first-person depiction of a scene, but the difference here is the quality of Reed's lyrics, whose simplicity and poeticism ("When I'm rushing on my run / And I feel just like Jesus' son") paint a picture of the drug experience as effectively as Burroughs' Junky, and Hubert Selby, Jr.'s novel Requiem for a Dream. On the other end, Nico provides the other highlights. The statuesque German-born model/singer (who joined the band on the request of Andy Warhol) puts her own husky-voiced stamp on the album on "Femme Fatale" and "I'll Be Your Mirror", two of the best love songs Reed has ever written (she also sings on "All Tomorrow's Parties"). She isn't the greatest singer, but neither is Reed, and her sultry, Eastern European accent further enhances the album's mystique.

  • ALL MUSIC GUIDE: One would be hard pressed to name a rock album whose influence has been as broad and pervasive as The Velvet Underground and Nico. While it reportedly took over a decade for the album's sales to crack six figures, glam, punk, new wave, goth, noise, and nearly every other left-of-center rock movement owes an audible debt to this set. While The Velvet Underground had as distinctive a sound as any band, what's most surprising about this album is its diversity. Here, the Velvets dipped their toes into dreamy pop ("Sunday Morning"), tough garage rock ("Waiting for the Man"), stripped-down R&B ("There She Goes Again"), and understated love songs ("I'll Be Your Mirror") when they weren't busy creating sounds without pop precedent. Lou Reed's lyrical exploration of drugs and kinky sex (then risky stuff in film and literature, let alone "teen music") always received the most press attention, but the music Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Maureen Tucker played was as radical as the words they accompanied. The bracing discord of "European Son," the troubling beauty of "All Tomorrow's Parties," and the expressive dynamics of "Heroin," all remain as compelling as the day they were recorded. While the significance of Nico's contributions have been debated over the years, she meshes with the band's outlook in that she hardly sounds like a typical rock vocalist, and if Andy Warhol's presence as producer was primarily a matter of signing the checks, his notoriety allowed The Velvet Underground to record their material without compromise, which would have been impossible under most other circumstances. Few rock albums are as important as The Velvet Underground and Nico, and fewer still have lost so little of their power to surprise and intrigue more than 30 years after first hitting the racks.

  • MY REVIEW: As the most influential album in rock history, The Velvet Underground & Nico is one of the rare albums that actually lives up to the heaps of praise and hype awarded it. It combines an exhausting amount of inventive elements to produce a sound and vision that has never been replicated, but always borrowed from, such is the honor of producing a work so seminal, so revered and so irreplaceable in the rock catalog. This is it. The place where practically every sub-genre and attitude of alternative music really began. It represents the key moment where rock developed into a much more personal odyssey to be documented by the lives, the confessions, and the souls of men, completely unafraid to tell what its culture really was and produced. This is music at war. It is music torn between accessibility and the avant-garde.

  • Beginning with the fairy tale dream of Sunday Morning and concluding with the free-jazz apocolypse of European Son, The Velvet Underground & Nico envelopes us into a world that is the very streets of New York, courageously shifting tones from the sterile beauty of the thin, lonely line between lost dreams, fading youth and pending self-destruction, as well as the hyperrealism of the street life, its drugs and hollow lives reaping the souls of human beings, and the basic purposes and inherent beauty within all people. It unflinchingly exhibits this in decadence, in the slums, in the bedroom, on the corner, in the veins, the struggle and in the glint of sorrow and lost hope of dying men and women, recklessly driving their lives down the back alleys that not only show, but endorse the path through to the very sad, inevitable end. Such is the condition these songs lay: poetic and beautiful, harsh and violent, hallucinating and dreaming, drugged and forgotten, cathartic and personal, hell desguised as paradise--brilliant, valuable, aesthetic human beings observant of dropping themselves on down the dwindling spiral, losing their grip on the very things they once had and loved.


  • 7. UNIT STRUCTURES-CECIL TAYLOR (1966)

  • MY RATING: 9.4/10

  • MY FAVORITE TRACKS:
  • 1. STEPS
  • 3. UNIT STRUCTURE

  • CHALLENGE RATING: 8.0/10

  • GREATEST MOMENT:

  • CRITICS' LIST RANKINGS:
  • Fast 'n' Bulbous (USA) - The 500 Best Albums Since 1965: 444

  • CRITICS' RATINGS:
  • All Music Guide (USA) - Album Ratings 1-5 Stars: 5 Stars
  • Rolling Stone Album Guide, Ratings 1-5 Stars (USA, 1992): 5 Stars

  • CRITICS' QUOTES:

  • AMAZON.COM: Uncompromising and endlessly controversial, Cecil Taylor's percussive, intellectual approach to jazz composition, improvisation and piano remain largely outside the mainstream after more than 40 years. A classically trained pianist prior to discovering the music of Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, and Horace Silver, Taylor soon developed a percussive, clustered, impressionistic style that, while taking Monk as a harmonic starting point, charts a course straight for the stratosphere. Indeed, Taylor frequently seems to have dispensed with both melody and form, yet he's brilliant at conveying a broad complex of emotions, from introspection to tenderness to rage.

  • Unit Structures, through its use of two bassists (Henry Grimes and Alan Silva) and the two-reed front of Ken McIntyre and Taylor-mainstay Jimmy Lyons, suggests a "double band." Yet such structures become almost meaningless in Taylor's world: it is all about energy and exploration. Punctuated by percussive bursts and melodic eruptions, Unit Structures is, despite its title, impressionistic and whimsical, although devoid of all standard structures and romance. Instead, Taylor pushes his band to explore the limits of improvisation where nothing--neither form, nor melody, nor structure--is a given. Still challenging listening after nearly four decades.

  • ALL MUSIC GUIDE: After several years off records, pianist Cecil Taylor finally had an opportunity to document his music of the mid-'60s on two Blue Note albums (the other one was Conquistador). Taylor's high-energy atonalism fit in well with the free jazz of the period but he was actually leading the way rather than being part of a movement. In fact, this septet outing with trumpeter Eddie Gale, altoist Jimmy Lyons, Ken McIntyre (alternating between alto, oboe and bass clarinet), both Henry Grimes and Alan Silva on basses, and drummer Andrew Cyrille is quite stunning and very intense. In fact, it could be safely argued that no jazz music of the era approached the ferocity and intensity of Cecil Taylor's.

  • MY REVIEW: Probably the most intelligent, supremely skilled and utterly baffling composer in jazz history, Cecil Taylor made a huge dent in jazz tradition with his masterpiece, Unit Structures. Here he completely obliterated the conventions of structure by manipulating even "free-form", the avante-garde, into the most complex and dynamic of forms--so complex and beguiling that it was the ultimate refinement of mad genius. The compostional exactness here is absolutely jaw-dropping. It is brilliantly timed and manically calculated in execution by free-flowing, inter-woven phrases and spastic solos clamouring for space from each and every instrument, each so driven and intense that combined, Steps and Unit Structure become galvanized, wild hurricanes, whirlpools, and tornados of head-spinning exclamations and ideas, erecting monoliths of emotions both shedding and building, racing against time. Yet each inter-connected part never seems to collide with one another. Each individual piece is free, yet altogether they act as a single unit with an unstoppable purpose, an unyielding, maverick force of nature.


  • 6. PARABLE OF ARABLE LAND-THE RED CRAYOLA (1967)

  • MY RATING: 9.4/10

  • MY FAVORITE TRACKS:

  • CHALLENGE RATING: 7.5/10

  • GREATEST MOMENT:

  • CRITICS' LIST RANKINGS: N/A

  • CRITICS' RATINGS:
  • All Music Guide (USA) - Album Ratings 1-5 Stars: 3 Stars

  • CRITICS' QUOTES:

  • PITCHFORK.COM: "And yet, there was an even more momentous day in the marshmallow-sky twirling unicorn massacre we call the 1960s. In March 1967, The Red Crayola walked into the studio and spent a day making one of the most visionary album of the year, The Parable of Arable Land. It's a band that has no idea how to play its instruments. In fact, they don't even know what instruments are, or if the guitarist has the ability to remain conscious long enough to play whatever it is a "note" might be. Shattered psalms, wobbling percussion courtesy of poet Frederick Barthelme, patently overused echo chambers, and the clumsiest staircase bassline in garage history smashes into a bunch of clopping machine men as Mayo Thompson croons out the only serious line in his entire career: "I have in my pocket a hurricane fighter plane."

  • KELKOO MUSIC: "Red Crayola was one of the freakiest bands of the 1960s, and that's no mean feat. Visionary wierdo Mayo Thompson and a couple of Texan pals made up the first incarnation of the mercurial group (legal wrangles with a certain crayon company would soon find the band replacing the "c" in its name with a "k"). The resulting debut, PARABLE OF ARABLE LAND, is mind-bendingly psychedelic without resorting to any of the now-dated tropes of the era.

  • You'll find no backwards guitars or electric sitars here. Instead, there are six wild and wooly pieces, each bearing the prefix "Free Form Freakout". A glorious cavalcade of skewed-sounding guitars, percussive havoc, and voices create a discordant sonic tapestry that occasionally deigns to fall into a traditonal melody or harmony. Echoes of everything from free jazz to the later freakiness of krautrock can be heard in these highly experimental and wonderfully wierd tracks.

  • MY REVIEW: The Red Crayola's Parable of Arable Land is among the most erratic, momentous and cacophonous albums ever made. It carousels through its tracks, getting split open by a revolving door of savage free form freakouts that could be described as volcanic earthquakes wreaking total havoc in every which way. Spawning from these are a set of psychadelic, emotionally blistering songs that fleetingly fall in and out of focus, get bulled over and lost in the wreckage, their spastic formations and foundations acting as rumbling floorboards to the dense seismic thrusts of hectic chaos that sporadically, inevitably interrupt the albums' structures and balance. This builds a cumulative series of falling cages of debris, soaking the music in walls of mangled noise, in sheets of disruption and overwhelming force, causing the sensation of tumbling circuses and exploding cities, usually both at once. When the band finally emerges from the mix with a brooding, dreary, cavernous finale, it is an emotional payoff of great sacrifice and survival.


Author Comments: 

These are my picks for the greatest albums of all time. ONLY MASTERPIECES ARE GOING TO BE ALLOWED ON THIS PARTICULAR LIST (9.0 & ABOVE). I've found true masterpieces to be very rare in music, so these albums deserve special attention and therefore their own list. Rankings are based on my opinion of their merit. To me, the overall greatness of an album is primarily dependant on the four categories listed below. These are the factors I believe to be most important in making up an astonishing and profound musical experience, which is the ideal effect a work of art can have on one. My ratings are derived from a combined score from each of these four factors, in addition to the value I prescribe to each individual album track:

1. PROFUNDITY
-How powerful is it? Does it make me want to cry? Stare forth in awe? Is it miraculous? Does it give me goosebumps? Chills?

2. DEPTH
-How expansive is its content? As a work does it blossom and flourish, or is it just a stand-still of repetitive content? Does it make you feel as though you've endured a full experience by its conclusion, or is it insignificant and slight?

3. INGENUITY
-How inventive is it? Do you feel you are at the hands of great intelligence, subjectively creative ideas, or is it merely an artist or group just trying to get by?

4. CONTINUITY
-How consistent is the album's flow? Does it feel like an uneven hodgepodge, or is it carefully constructed for maximum climax and maximum impact?

All album ratings are based on the following scale:

RATINGS SCALE:

0.0-4.9 NOT WORTH LISTENING TO
5.0-5.4 AVERAGE
5.5-5.9 ABOVE AVERAGE
6.0-6.4 GOOD
6.5-6.9 QUITE GOOD
7.0-7.4 VERY GOOD
7.5-7.9 EXCELLENT
8.0-8.4 OUTSTANDING
8.5-8.9 AMAZING
9.0-9.4 MASTERPIECE
9.5-9.9 SUPREME MASTERPIECE
10.0 ULTIMATE MASTERPIECE

To give you an idea of how I conduct my ratings, and the quality I am looking at here on this list, here are some examples of where I would rate some well-known albums:

0.0-4.9 NOT WORTH LISTENING TO
FOREVER-SPICE GIRLS

5.0-5.4 AVERAGE
BACK TO BEDLAM-JAMES BLUNT

5.5-5.9 ABOVE AVERAGE

6.0-6.4 GOOD
THE FREEWHEELIN' BOB DYLAN-BOB DYLAN
A HARD DAYS NIGHT-THE BEATLES
PABLO HONEY-RADIOHEAD
RUBBER SOUL-THE BEATLES

6.5-6.9 QUITE GOOD
THE BEATLES-THE BEATLES ("White Album")-THE BEATLES
BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME-BOB DYLAN
HUNKY DORY-DAVID BOWIE
IS THIS IT-THE STROKES
REVOLVER-THE BEATLES
THE RISE AND FALL OF ZIGGY STARDUST AND THE SPIDERS FROM MARS-DAVID BOWIE
RUMOURS-FLEETWOOD MAC
THE VELVET UNDERGROUND-THE VELVET UNDERGROUND

7.0-7.4 VERY GOOD
ABBEY ROAD-THE BEATLES
BEGGAR'S BANQUET-THE ROLLING STONES
THE BENDS-RADIOHEAD
BORN TO RUN-BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
DARK SIDE OF THE MOON-PINK FLOYD
LET IT BLEED-THE ROLLING STONES
LONDON CALLING-THE CLASH
THE MOON AND ANTARCTICA-MODEST MOUSE
NEVERMIND-NIRVANA
PET SOUNDS-THE BEACH BOYS
THE RIVER-BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND-THE BEATLES
THERE'S A RIOT GOIN' ON-SLY AND THE FAMILY STONE
WHAT'S GOING ON-MARVIN GAYE

7.5-7.9 EXCELLENT
ARE YOU EXPERIENCED?-JIMI HENDRIX
BLOOD ON THE TRACKS-BOB DYLAN
BLUE-JONI MITCHELL
DOOLITTLE-PIXIES
EXILE ON MAIN STREET-THE ROLLING STONES
FOREVER CHANGES-LOVE
FUNERAL-THE ARCADE FIRE
HORSES-PATTI SMITH
IN UTERO-NIRVANA
LOW-DAVID BOWIE
OK COMPUTER-RADIOHEAD
THE STONE ROSES-THE STONE ROSES
SURFER ROSA-PIXIES
YANKEE HOTEL FOXTROT-WILCO

8.0-8.4 OUTSTANDING
THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL-NINE INCH NAILS
FUN HOUSE-THE STOOGES
HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED-BOB DYLAN
IN THE COURT OF THE CRIMSON KING-KING CRIMSON
MARQUEE MOON-TELEVISION
PINK MOON-NICK DRAKE
REMAIN IN LIGHT-TALKING HEADS
ZEN ARCADE-HUSKER DU

8.5-8.9 AMAZING
SEE MY "AMAZING ALBUMS" LIST

9.0-9.4 MASTERPIECE
SEE MY "GREATEST ALBUMS OF ALL TIME" LIST

9.5-9.9 SUPREME MASTERPIECE
SEE MY "GREATEST ALBUMS OF ALL TIME" LIST

10.0 ULTIMATE MASTERPIECE
NONE KNOWN

Challenge Ratings are based on the level of challenge an album poses to the listener. By this, I usually mean the degree of experimentation found on the album. The key determining factor is: how much does it diverge from pop music, from what most listeners are accustomed to? Length of tracks and the entire album are taken into account as well. Agreement with these will vary some from person to person, but I've found are usually quite accurate with most anyone, having made these evaluations based on my own experiences as well as numerous recommendations I've given over the years. One can use these ratings to presume how much work he or she will have to put into "understanding" or "getting" the album. Conceptually understanding the artists' vision is key to enjoying it on an ideal level, so these challenge ratings can be helpful in convincing someone to "giving it another shot" while they remain unconvinced of an album that just hasn't appealed to them yet. I should also note that I have observed that the more one persists in listening to and understanding the most challenging albums, the easier it becomes to take on the next one. That said, if you are reading this list and are used to simple, radio-friendly artists such as Nickleback, The Beatles and others, then it is recommended you start on the album with the lowest challenge rating and gradiently work your way up towards the more difficult ones, step-by-step.

The Challenge Ratings are defined as follows:

1.0 EXTREMELY EASY
2.0 VERY EASY
3.0 EASY
4.0 PRETTY EASY
5.0 NEITHER TOUGH NOR EASY
6.0 PRETTY CHALLENGING
7.0 DIFFICULT
8.0 VERY DIFFICULT
9.0 EXTREMELY DIFFICULT
10.0 NEARLY IMPENETRABLE

I would like to thank Piero Scaruffi (www.scaruffi.com) for the immense help he has been in the discovery of many of the albums on this list. I would also like to thank him for his valuable insight in his reviews and through e-mail correspondance (both of which I've occasionally derived some of my own views). Additionally, I would like to thank all the other webzines/publications and their reviewers I've utilized in the CRITICS QUOTES sections of this list, as well as www.acclaimedmusic.com for their existence, without which posting the multiple rankings of many of these albums from worldwide "best albums" polls, would be a real chore.

lukeprog11/06/2006

That's one hell of a Trout Mask Replica review, AfterHours.

AfterHours11/06/2006

Thank you. While I feel all the albums on this list deserve significant attention and admiration, these last 5 in particular have changed my life as much as any work of art ever could, so I especially feel the need to throw myself into reviewing them.

apeoven11/28/2006

sorry forget this. I was going to ask you about Dolmen Music but then I saw your other post.

AfterHours11/28/2006

Thanks for reminding me. I'll make an announcement here as well.

AfterHours11/28/2006

I've decided to add Dolmen Music to my greatest albums lists, despite going against my own rules. Mainly because it is such an amazing album that should be promoted and I love it so dearly I can't resist the urge. Also, not being a traditional classical album helped a bunch. So don't think this means I'll be adding Shostokavich or Brahms anytime soon. Dolmen Music fits much more snugly into my current modus operandi with my list. Sometime down the road I'll start adding other classical titles but this is likely the only one for some time.