My Top 15 albums
March 1st 2009 12:05
1. Jeff Buckley, “Grace”. Sheer aural bliss. There is nothing more beautiful and graceful in music than Jeff Buckley at his best, there really isn’t. I’d recorded Eternal Life on tape off the radio before I bought the album, and that song was just intense. Jeff Buckley’s music just has something that no other music does, and I can’t pinpoint what it is. Some sort of mix between sadness, passion, anger, vulnerability, soulfulness, beauty… maybe it’s just Jeff-ness. Anyway I heard that in Eternal Life, especially part where it quietens down and builds back up to where he screams “when will I find the strength to bring me release?”. I think one of the main things that is so amazing about Jeff Buckley is that every little part of the song is infused with this Jeff-ness beauty: the guitar intro blew me away, the chords of the verse; just every little part is a microcosm of wonder. And I could say the same about every single song on Grace. I like to say that if music just sounds like a bunch of notes or chords, that’s a sign of bad music. With Jeff Buckley, a C chord never sounded like a C chord, and a guitar never sounded like a guitar, it all just completely transcended that. It really is beyond music.
2. Pearl Jam, “Ten”. No other band changed my life the way Pearl Jam did. Before I got into Pearl Jam, I was listening to whatever was playing on Ugly Phil’s Hot 30, including non other than the Spice Girls, whose album I even bought. But I changed over to Triple M for some random reason, and it wasn’t long before I came across Pearl Jam, whose songs they used to play on fairly heavy rotation. Songs like Alive, Daughter and especially Even Flow just blew me away. I already had Vitalogy sitting at home which my dad had bought years before, but never bothered to listen to it, so I got it out and gave it a few listens. It wasn’t until I bought Ten, though, that I was completely won over. There used to be a sort of magic about buying CD’s for me that unfortunately kids of the new generation will not be able to experience. I saved up the $30 required and headed over to Sanity Eastgardens with the sole purpose of buying Ten. Unfortunately I have to resort to a cliché here: words simply can’t describe how much magic that CD contained for me (after all, where words fail, music speaks). I was completely riveted, moved and inspired, and begun playing guitar in order to learn all the songs, in particular the main riff and solo to Alive. I listen to Ten today and it doesn’t have quite the same effect on me – I have listened to it far too much over the years and the shiny gloss has kind of worn off, but I still remember the feelings when I first used to listen to songs like Black, Release, Alive, Once…
3. Ben Harper, “Fight For Your Mind”. This was the album that got me into Ben Harper. I’d read an article about Ben Harper in a magazine that was lying round the house (not even a music magazine mind you, more of an arts magazine), and he seemed like a really interesting guy. So when I was browsing through HMV Pitt St’s top 100 albums of all time and came across Fight For Your Mind, I had to buy it. Just prior to this, I’d read an interview with James Hetfield from Metallica saying that when he was younger he used to buy CD’s on the basis of song names, and I thought that was really cool. Well, I looked at the song names on Fight For Your Mind, songs like “Power of the Gospel”, “Another Lonely Day” and “One Road to Freedom” and they just gave me even more reason to be excited about the album. When I listened to the all-acoustic album, it just spoke to my soul like nothing else (and to this day, no other music speaks to my soul like Ben Harper’s does). Songs like Ground on Down, Another Lonely Day, By My Side – it was probably the first time I realised that music could be deep without being sad.
4. Metallica, “Master of Puppets”. I can’t have a top albums list and not have this in it. I made a tape of this so I could listen to it in my walkman, and I listened to it and listened to it and listened to it some more. I just lapped it up. The intros, the solos, the choruses, the riffs, this album is just completely epic. The album cover really paints the “red” kind of mood of the album as well – I just love the Puppets album cover. Metal might be a lot more "brutal" now, but for me, metal is at its pinnacle with Metallica on this album.
5. The Tea Party, “Triptych”. I was already familiar with The Tea Party from their song Temptation, which used to get solid rotation on Triple M, Channel V and Triple J, but it must not have hit me quite enough to make me want to get the album. It was hearing the Spoonman play Heaven Coming Down on Triple M which stopped me in my tracks – I had to get that album. Before I bought it, I kind of expected every song to be as happy as that one, which is kind of funny in hindsight. It’s not their most intense album, there are a lot of “slow” songs, but I just love it. I would describe it as being really dreamy. There’s a sort of yearning for another world, for another time, especially in songs like Taking Me Away and Halcyon Days, and I could really connect with that at the time.
6. Guns n Roses, “Live Vol.1”. This is a bootleg that was part of my dad’s CD collection, and soon became a part of mine. I only listened to it out of necessity, I didn’t have any other Gunners CDs, but it got some serious rotation on my CD player – after a while I’d listened to it so much that I’d almost memorised Axl’s between-song talks. After listening to this bootleg, Appetite for Destruction just sounds over-produced to me. This is just more raw, and has the best version of Sweet Child O’ Mine I’ve heard – Slash’s little ditties over the second chorus are just so integral to the song that when I heard the studio version, it just wasn’t the same. His solo doesn’t have the same rehearsed quality to it either, and in the intro I swear you can hear that all the guys are just really digging grooving together. The other songs on the album, by the way, are It’s So Easy, Used to Love Her, Out Ta Get Me, My Michelle, Mr Brownstone, Rocket Queen and Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.
7. Joe Satriani, “Time Machine”. I had Joe Satriani in my CD collection long before I started getting into him. I don’t know why, but all of a sudden I gave Crystal Planet a real solid listen and even though a lot of the tracks were ordinary, some such as Train of Angels were just corkers. But the album that really stands out to me and typifies Joe Satriani is Time Machine. It has the early stuff he released on an EP before Surfing with the Alien, which I still think is his best ever stuff – songs like Banana Mango, Dreaming #11 and Saying Goodbye which are just so dreamy and out of this world. They are not the work of a guitar virtuoso but of a musical genius. As my brother said, it is beyond music. To be fair, this album is a compilation, but I don’t care, it is just so good. The live version of Rubina it has is just way way better than the studio version, the solo is just perfection.
8. Nine Inch Nails, “The Fragile”. I got this album for my birthday I think, in 1999. I was looking for music that was angry and intense, and gee did I find it. Funnily enough it wasn’t Closer that got me into Nine Inch Nails – I’d heard that many times on Triple M, especially in the top 100 all-time countdowns they used to have, and I don’t know, it just didn’t hit me (although it did later). I thought it was a bit freaky too. The song that got me into Nine Inch Nails was We’re In This Together, which never got played much on the radio but used to get played a fair bit on Channel V. It was and still is just an absolute kick-ass song, Trent Reznor completely being Trent Reznor, extremely intense but also intricate and deep. So I got the album The Fragile and I was a bit freaked by it, it was definitely going into some dark dark places, but I’d by lying if I said it didn’t have a profound effect on me. I would later go and get the album Downward Spiral, but to me even though that album had fantastic individual songs, as a whole it was a bit too industrial for me and didn’t have the scope and complexity that The Fragile does.
9. John Mayer, “Continuum”. This album is by far the youngest on my list, and I’m glad it came around when it did because I was starting to lose faith in music. I was a fan of John Mayer from his first album Room For Squares, but he was still pretty much a pop artist back then. I have an immense admiration for artists who actually get better and grow with each album rather than get worse or stagnate. In the next two albums that followed, he raised the bar significantly each time, carving out his sound and becoming much more than just an interesting pop singer-songwriter. With Continuum, he reached musical genius stage – there is some serious soul in these songs.
10. DC Talk, “Intermission”. This is a best of album which isn’t really fair, but it still had a big impact on me. It has its corny moments, but it was the first album that showed me that music could be Christian and still good. When DC Talk are bad, they are really really bad, but when they are good, by gee they are good. Say the Words (Now) is still one of my favourite songs of all time.
11. Slipknot, “Slipknot”. Slipknot seemed to lose their reputation for brutality somewhere along their way, but it was well and truly intact when this album came out. People didn’t know what had hit them, this album was just insane, right from the video for Spit It Out with its axe-wielding maniac, to the red jumpsuits and horror-type masks they wore, to the brutally sung lyrics such as “don’t you fucking judge me!” and people equalling shit. I actually analysed Wait and Bleed for a high school musicology assessment which was kind of cool but also kind of weird – I had to analyse it tonality, structure, texture and stuff like that. Slipknot may have not have the highest credibility on the metal scene thanks to wankers who prefer brootality over actual good songs, but to me this album was and still is the shit.
12. Pearl Jam, “Vitalogy”. Apart from absolutely loving the tracks and the mood of the album, I was enthralled by the album booklet as well. It just added so much to the experience of the album. Again, I think it’s a shame that the new generation of music listeners who just download an mp3 file do not get to experience that.
13. Metallica, “Metallica” (the black album). Although I went on to like other Metallica albums more than this one (in particular Master of Puppets and Ride the Lightning), this is the one that got me into them in a big way, around the same time I was getting into Pearl Jam and rock in general. Metallica got a lot of rotation on Triple M, in particular the black album songs Enter Sandman, Nothing Else Matters and The Unforgiven, and it was just the most powerful stuff I’d ever heard. The famous Enter Sandman riff was just imprinted on my brain, it was so punishing and strong. This might sound lame in hindsight, but when I bought the black album and cranked it up full loud, I felt like a man. The riffage on that album is still something to behold: Sad But True, Wherever I May Roam etc, it’s pretty hard to top even now.
14. Stevie Ray Vaughan, “Texas Flood”. Stevie’s guitarring and vocals are just so gritty and intense and full of soul, and you really feel it on this album. Mary Had a Little a Lamb, Texas Flood, Pride and Joy… most of my favourite SRV tracks are on this album. I did Pride and Joy for my guitar HSC performance and it was supposed to be my crowning moment, but I don’t think I quite nailed it. Well, nobody has been able to nail Stevie’s tone and nobody ever will.
15. Steve Vai, “Passion and Warfare”. I remember telling my guitar teacher that I’d just discovered Steve Vai’s Alien Love Secrets and that it had blew my mind. He said “oh that’s nothing, go out and listen to Passion and Warfare”. And he was right – it surpassed Alien Love Secrets. Love him or hate him, if you think he embodies everything that’s awesome about guitar or everything that’s wankery about it, this album really has some moments. For the Love of God is not a great guitar song, it’s a great song full stop, particularly to those with spiritual, other-worldly inclinations. The album is quirky, deep, erotic, trippy, insanely virtuosic… everything that is uniquely Steve Vai.
2. Pearl Jam, “Ten”. No other band changed my life the way Pearl Jam did. Before I got into Pearl Jam, I was listening to whatever was playing on Ugly Phil’s Hot 30, including non other than the Spice Girls, whose album I even bought. But I changed over to Triple M for some random reason, and it wasn’t long before I came across Pearl Jam, whose songs they used to play on fairly heavy rotation. Songs like Alive, Daughter and especially Even Flow just blew me away. I already had Vitalogy sitting at home which my dad had bought years before, but never bothered to listen to it, so I got it out and gave it a few listens. It wasn’t until I bought Ten, though, that I was completely won over. There used to be a sort of magic about buying CD’s for me that unfortunately kids of the new generation will not be able to experience. I saved up the $30 required and headed over to Sanity Eastgardens with the sole purpose of buying Ten. Unfortunately I have to resort to a cliché here: words simply can’t describe how much magic that CD contained for me (after all, where words fail, music speaks). I was completely riveted, moved and inspired, and begun playing guitar in order to learn all the songs, in particular the main riff and solo to Alive. I listen to Ten today and it doesn’t have quite the same effect on me – I have listened to it far too much over the years and the shiny gloss has kind of worn off, but I still remember the feelings when I first used to listen to songs like Black, Release, Alive, Once…
3. Ben Harper, “Fight For Your Mind”. This was the album that got me into Ben Harper. I’d read an article about Ben Harper in a magazine that was lying round the house (not even a music magazine mind you, more of an arts magazine), and he seemed like a really interesting guy. So when I was browsing through HMV Pitt St’s top 100 albums of all time and came across Fight For Your Mind, I had to buy it. Just prior to this, I’d read an interview with James Hetfield from Metallica saying that when he was younger he used to buy CD’s on the basis of song names, and I thought that was really cool. Well, I looked at the song names on Fight For Your Mind, songs like “Power of the Gospel”, “Another Lonely Day” and “One Road to Freedom” and they just gave me even more reason to be excited about the album. When I listened to the all-acoustic album, it just spoke to my soul like nothing else (and to this day, no other music speaks to my soul like Ben Harper’s does). Songs like Ground on Down, Another Lonely Day, By My Side – it was probably the first time I realised that music could be deep without being sad.
4. Metallica, “Master of Puppets”. I can’t have a top albums list and not have this in it. I made a tape of this so I could listen to it in my walkman, and I listened to it and listened to it and listened to it some more. I just lapped it up. The intros, the solos, the choruses, the riffs, this album is just completely epic. The album cover really paints the “red” kind of mood of the album as well – I just love the Puppets album cover. Metal might be a lot more "brutal" now, but for me, metal is at its pinnacle with Metallica on this album.
5. The Tea Party, “Triptych”. I was already familiar with The Tea Party from their song Temptation, which used to get solid rotation on Triple M, Channel V and Triple J, but it must not have hit me quite enough to make me want to get the album. It was hearing the Spoonman play Heaven Coming Down on Triple M which stopped me in my tracks – I had to get that album. Before I bought it, I kind of expected every song to be as happy as that one, which is kind of funny in hindsight. It’s not their most intense album, there are a lot of “slow” songs, but I just love it. I would describe it as being really dreamy. There’s a sort of yearning for another world, for another time, especially in songs like Taking Me Away and Halcyon Days, and I could really connect with that at the time.
6. Guns n Roses, “Live Vol.1”. This is a bootleg that was part of my dad’s CD collection, and soon became a part of mine. I only listened to it out of necessity, I didn’t have any other Gunners CDs, but it got some serious rotation on my CD player – after a while I’d listened to it so much that I’d almost memorised Axl’s between-song talks. After listening to this bootleg, Appetite for Destruction just sounds over-produced to me. This is just more raw, and has the best version of Sweet Child O’ Mine I’ve heard – Slash’s little ditties over the second chorus are just so integral to the song that when I heard the studio version, it just wasn’t the same. His solo doesn’t have the same rehearsed quality to it either, and in the intro I swear you can hear that all the guys are just really digging grooving together. The other songs on the album, by the way, are It’s So Easy, Used to Love Her, Out Ta Get Me, My Michelle, Mr Brownstone, Rocket Queen and Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.
7. Joe Satriani, “Time Machine”. I had Joe Satriani in my CD collection long before I started getting into him. I don’t know why, but all of a sudden I gave Crystal Planet a real solid listen and even though a lot of the tracks were ordinary, some such as Train of Angels were just corkers. But the album that really stands out to me and typifies Joe Satriani is Time Machine. It has the early stuff he released on an EP before Surfing with the Alien, which I still think is his best ever stuff – songs like Banana Mango, Dreaming #11 and Saying Goodbye which are just so dreamy and out of this world. They are not the work of a guitar virtuoso but of a musical genius. As my brother said, it is beyond music. To be fair, this album is a compilation, but I don’t care, it is just so good. The live version of Rubina it has is just way way better than the studio version, the solo is just perfection.
8. Nine Inch Nails, “The Fragile”. I got this album for my birthday I think, in 1999. I was looking for music that was angry and intense, and gee did I find it. Funnily enough it wasn’t Closer that got me into Nine Inch Nails – I’d heard that many times on Triple M, especially in the top 100 all-time countdowns they used to have, and I don’t know, it just didn’t hit me (although it did later). I thought it was a bit freaky too. The song that got me into Nine Inch Nails was We’re In This Together, which never got played much on the radio but used to get played a fair bit on Channel V. It was and still is just an absolute kick-ass song, Trent Reznor completely being Trent Reznor, extremely intense but also intricate and deep. So I got the album The Fragile and I was a bit freaked by it, it was definitely going into some dark dark places, but I’d by lying if I said it didn’t have a profound effect on me. I would later go and get the album Downward Spiral, but to me even though that album had fantastic individual songs, as a whole it was a bit too industrial for me and didn’t have the scope and complexity that The Fragile does.
9. John Mayer, “Continuum”. This album is by far the youngest on my list, and I’m glad it came around when it did because I was starting to lose faith in music. I was a fan of John Mayer from his first album Room For Squares, but he was still pretty much a pop artist back then. I have an immense admiration for artists who actually get better and grow with each album rather than get worse or stagnate. In the next two albums that followed, he raised the bar significantly each time, carving out his sound and becoming much more than just an interesting pop singer-songwriter. With Continuum, he reached musical genius stage – there is some serious soul in these songs.
10. DC Talk, “Intermission”. This is a best of album which isn’t really fair, but it still had a big impact on me. It has its corny moments, but it was the first album that showed me that music could be Christian and still good. When DC Talk are bad, they are really really bad, but when they are good, by gee they are good. Say the Words (Now) is still one of my favourite songs of all time.
11. Slipknot, “Slipknot”. Slipknot seemed to lose their reputation for brutality somewhere along their way, but it was well and truly intact when this album came out. People didn’t know what had hit them, this album was just insane, right from the video for Spit It Out with its axe-wielding maniac, to the red jumpsuits and horror-type masks they wore, to the brutally sung lyrics such as “don’t you fucking judge me!” and people equalling shit. I actually analysed Wait and Bleed for a high school musicology assessment which was kind of cool but also kind of weird – I had to analyse it tonality, structure, texture and stuff like that. Slipknot may have not have the highest credibility on the metal scene thanks to wankers who prefer brootality over actual good songs, but to me this album was and still is the shit.
12. Pearl Jam, “Vitalogy”. Apart from absolutely loving the tracks and the mood of the album, I was enthralled by the album booklet as well. It just added so much to the experience of the album. Again, I think it’s a shame that the new generation of music listeners who just download an mp3 file do not get to experience that.
13. Metallica, “Metallica” (the black album). Although I went on to like other Metallica albums more than this one (in particular Master of Puppets and Ride the Lightning), this is the one that got me into them in a big way, around the same time I was getting into Pearl Jam and rock in general. Metallica got a lot of rotation on Triple M, in particular the black album songs Enter Sandman, Nothing Else Matters and The Unforgiven, and it was just the most powerful stuff I’d ever heard. The famous Enter Sandman riff was just imprinted on my brain, it was so punishing and strong. This might sound lame in hindsight, but when I bought the black album and cranked it up full loud, I felt like a man. The riffage on that album is still something to behold: Sad But True, Wherever I May Roam etc, it’s pretty hard to top even now.
14. Stevie Ray Vaughan, “Texas Flood”. Stevie’s guitarring and vocals are just so gritty and intense and full of soul, and you really feel it on this album. Mary Had a Little a Lamb, Texas Flood, Pride and Joy… most of my favourite SRV tracks are on this album. I did Pride and Joy for my guitar HSC performance and it was supposed to be my crowning moment, but I don’t think I quite nailed it. Well, nobody has been able to nail Stevie’s tone and nobody ever will.
15. Steve Vai, “Passion and Warfare”. I remember telling my guitar teacher that I’d just discovered Steve Vai’s Alien Love Secrets and that it had blew my mind. He said “oh that’s nothing, go out and listen to Passion and Warfare”. And he was right – it surpassed Alien Love Secrets. Love him or hate him, if you think he embodies everything that’s awesome about guitar or everything that’s wankery about it, this album really has some moments. For the Love of God is not a great guitar song, it’s a great song full stop, particularly to those with spiritual, other-worldly inclinations. The album is quirky, deep, erotic, trippy, insanely virtuosic… everything that is uniquely Steve Vai.
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