That helped. Listening to it again reminded me why it keeps making these Lists. It's not because of the long instrumental "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" tracks at the beginning and end; it's because of the stuff in the middle: the non-instrumental part of Shine On, Have a Cigar, the title track, Welcome To The Machine. Those are all great songs. It's the stuff that surrounds them that keeps me from listening to this more often.

The rest of the album is far less menacing than Strange Fruit, but the band is just as inventive. Well-known songs like U2's "Love Is Blindness", Neil Young's "Harvest Moon", Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry", and "Last Train to Clarksville", are all rearranged so as to be almost unrecognizable if not for the lyrics and vocal melody. And they all work. An amazing band, an amazing singer. Great album.

Though I've been a fan for a decade or so, this year is the first time this record has made the List.

But, the rest of the record, all that slow, lonely, sinking-feeling stuff, is what keeps me coming back. I never get tired of it.

Always reminds me of sitting in the Tops parking lot, corner of Winton and Blossom, Rochester NY, winter 1994, listening to Sour Times on the radio.

This is also a newcomer to the List.

Oh yeah: whenever this would come up in the voting, Suffragette City would start playing in my head. And that's a kick-ass song. So are Moonage Daydream, and the title track. The rest of it is pretty good, too. Though I could do without Lady Stardust, Five Years, and Rock & Roll Suicide. OK, so it's a good album but I just don't find myself wanting to hear it much anymore.

But now, the hard part: figuring out what to say about them. Nod's a hard band to describe. They sometimes sound like a blend of Daniel Johnston, Captain Beefheart and the Modern Lovers, but not really like any of them at all. It's rock, but it's free-form; there are folk and punk elements, pop, no-wave, blues, jazz, noise. It's all in there. But none of it dominates. It's just... beyond my abilities to pigeon-hole. But, I find them charming, and intriguing, sometimes frustrating, but mostly fun.

On some tunes, half the band sounds like they're not even trying to play the same song, which makes it sound like a really frustrating band practice, if I'm not in the mood. On other tunes, some of them will drift in and out of the groove. Sometimes they all rock it out together. The drummer keeps things chugging along, and the vocals are usually close by, but the rest of them come and go. So, it's chaotic, but intentional. And it's something I can either love or something I can't handle at all, depending on my mood. Lately, I've been in the mood quite often.

If I didn't go to school in Rochester NY, I'm sure I would know nothing about them. Sadly.

Regardless, Paul's Boutique is a great record. The backing tracks are completely brilliant and would probably be great all on their own. The Boys' lyrics are typically silly (but amazingly clever) and their hyper-energetic tag-team delivery on top of those dense tracks just makes my head spin. While you're trying to figure out that lyrical reference or nail down that one sample, five more good ones have come and gone. There's so much good stuff going on.

The music often sounds like a ramshackle psychedelic marching band, careening and wheezing, spinning, thundering behind Jeff Mangum's howling vocals. Other times it's Mangum singing with just an acoustic guitar (this is where the Barrett influence is most pronounced). Either way, Mangum's lyrics are the focus. While I don't think NMH has ever claimed that this is a "rock-opera", the songs do seem to form a narrative of sorts. Or, at the very least, there's enough shared imagery and common themes (in the words and the music) that one can't help but assume there's a story behind all of it. His words are vague and opaque, but as I hear it, this record is a story about children in Europe during WWII (Anne Frank, in particular), the death of family, the afterlife. So, alternately sad and uplifting.

It's best to hear this one all at once, too. The story I've constructed for it, though vague, and dark, is beautiful. And everything on the record seems crafted towards telling it. So, I want to hear it all.

Or maybe it's all in my head. (Well, of course it is. This is music appreciation: it's going to be all in my head either way.)

After the more experimental and often difficult "Wowee Zowee", this one sounds like an attempt to make a commercially-viable record. The sound is polished and the songs are tight (by Pavement standards). Melodies are up-front, and the distracting noises are kept to a minimum. The only problem is that sometimes the songs sound a bit uninspired, compared to earlier records. The better songs are very good, but don't rise to the awesomeness of their best. It's the sound of a band running out of steam. But, since it's Pavement, their B-level material is still special.

CBJE was a band like no other. While their later records went towards more of a country/western sound, their early sound was a truly unique blend of blues, jazz, rock and country, expertly played, with absurdly clever lyrics delivered in a gentle deadpan. Horns, vibes, guitars, drums, etc.. Many of CBJE's songs are based on a structure where the full band plays a melody in unison for a couple of bars, then the band sits back and there are a couple bars of vocals, then back to the melody and repeat. That, with the drummer's two-beat style, gives them a distinctive mechanical feel. But not mechanical like Pinback, mechanical like a demented player piano. Very fun. The precision music + absurd lyrics makes for a sort of Zappa or Beefheart sensibility - intelligent and ironic, silly on top of serious. Though really, CBJE sounded nothing like either of them.

It appears this is the first record, thus far, to have more wins than losses.

Nirvana gets all the credit for popularizing the Pixies' loud/soft/loud dynamics, but this album is all about the quiet verse / loud chorus, came out before Nevermind, and it doesn't sound anything like the Pixies. Hell, Jane's was doing it before the Pixies put out their first record. [Stomps foot. Punches Firefox.]

There's a lot more instrumentation on this than there are on most of their later records; Dave and Gillian are accompanied by drums and electric guitars, bass, etc.. It's not a bad sound - far from overdone - but I really prefer hearing just the two of them.

I have pretty much no interest in modern R&B. But, as with Q-Tip and his record, it's Badu herself who makes this record interesting. She's funny and slinky and she injects all of the songs with her off-beat, quirky, funky personality. She's having a blast, doing her thing, experimenting, and I enjoy hearing her do it. Plus, she's got a great voice.

The high point for me is the closing suite, "Out My Mind, Just In Time". It stats off as a nice, but old-fashioned, jazzy piano ballad; Badu's singing about being an "recovering under-cover over-lover" is sweet and pretty. But there are slight sound glitches sprinkled throughout - tape warbles, strange subtle distortions on the piano. A violin peeks in. Then, out of the blue, the whole song slows as if someone grabbed the tape reel just to slow down the particular phrase she's singing at the time, but they slowed down everything instead. An instant later, as quick as it slowed, it speeds back up for just a few more seconds before moving to the next part of the suite: a segment based on a chopped-up piano loop, repeating slightly off time. Then another segment, and another. All of them getting progressively stranger, and more expansive, Badu's singing getting more and more improvisational. Until finally, the last segment abruptly breaks-off and we're back to a simple piano for the outro. As with the whole album, it's full of clever beautiful details and Badu's infectious personality; you just gotta pay attention to get it all - otherwise, it will just slide past as groovy background music. Oh, and it's also good as groovy background music.

It's always nice to listen to. There are plenty of good songs, a handful of great ones (esp. "In A Future Age"). But for some reason, it doesn't stick in my mind as a great record; I never really think I like it until I play it.

I'm surprised to see a record with a 15/45 win/loss record this high up. Those 15 wins must've been good ones.

And IMO, there are some fantastic songs here, some well-done covers, and some great performances. And you definitely can't say the Doors were unimaginative. The first side features bossa nova, electric blues, 1920's show tunes, flamenco, and lounge-lizard crooning (e.g. The Crystal Ship). The second side starts with Willie Dixon and closes with a 12 minute, live-in-the-studio, break up song that slowly twists into a Oedipal murder fantasy. They were a great band, too. While Morrison dominated everything, the rest of them were doing some really cool stuff outside the spotlight - especially Robbie Krieger.

* Frankly, they didn't really sync with the style of the late 60's, either; their sound was unique at the time and was never copied. Nobody even tries to sound like The Doors.

"Sister Morphine" makes a great addition to the list of songs about opiates. And the rest of the record is good, too. Well, it's good so far as I know. I've just discovered that somehow, when I acquired my copy, I didn't get the last song from either side (You Gotta Move & Moonlight Mile). I've been missing 20% of the record! Guess it's off to Mr iTunes' Record Emporium to procure them.

The album is primarily covers: plenty of jazz standards along with songs from Leonard Cohen, Dylan, Elliott Smith and Hank Williams. And unlike Cassandra Wilson, Peyroux's covers tent to stay close to the original.

The Elliott Smith cover (Between The Bars) is my favorite. The song is a love note from booze to an alcoholic; the bottle is trying to seduce its man, by promising to push away reality, into drinking more. Smith's version is a stark solo-acoustic thing, sounding much the same as all other Smith songs from that era. Thin, brittle, cold. I have a really hard time getting into those early records. And here, his shaky whisper doesn't really sell the idea behind these lyrics - it's not immediately obvious that he's doing a character. But, without changing a word of the lyrics or a note of the vocal melody, Peyroux's version is sultry. She purrs and strokes and drags the words like Billie Holiday (the comparison is inevitable), over that late-night jazz club vibe - yow. She makes for a far more tempting spirit-of-spirits. Though they're clearly the same song, I was digging her version for a long time before I even realized it was that Elliott Smith song I didn't really care about. Smith wrote a great song, but it took Peyroux to bring that song to life.

Likewise, her cover of Dylan's "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go" (from whence the album's title) takes a song that I never spent a second of thought on and turns it into a song I like to hear, and makes me realize just what a sweet song Dylan wrote. That's what a good cover should do: make you appreciate the original more - if not for the original as it was originally performed, then at least the original as a good base.

It's a simple setup: she sings in a dreamy voice and plays guitar. He plays drums, plus keyboards with his left hand. And they play hypnotic songs built around pretty melodies spiked with dramatic surges in volume. Seems superfluous to say any more.

Interesting fact: the recording of this was the drummer/keyboard-player's senior thesis at U-Maryland.

Also, this is the first record in the List to come out net-positive on score (each record's score started at 400). It's also another first-timer.

There's just so much awesome here. The songs kick ass, the sound kicks ass, Jimi's super-human guitar playing certainly kicks ass. Mitch Mitchell's heavy/jazzy drumming kicks ass (and reminds me of Keith Moon's style of making the drums almost a lead instrument). Noel Redding's bass is kindof lost in the mix most of the time, but I'll assume it kicks ass too. Lots of ass is kicked. Luckily, the world is full of ass, especially the kind that needs kicking.

The songs are all solid, and do have that back-to-basics feel the band was trying for. It's definitely a simpler record than Sgt Pepper's. And since it's something I've only recently taken to, it's still mostly fresh for me. I'm awfully fond of "Dig A Pony" and "Don't Let Me Down". They're the primary reason this record is here.

Side note: I'd be fine if the Replacements' "Let It Be" was in this spot. But, I forgot to include it in the voting, so it never had a chance. I definitely need to improve my seeding process. Let's all take a moment to pay our respects to "Gary's Got A Boner".

There's not a big difference between the two records. They're both shiny, melodic, early-70's power-pop, bittersweet love songs and pleasant rockers. What difference there is can be attributed to this record's lack of co-frontman Chris Bell. He brought a slightly sweeter, just-a-bit-more melodic vibe to the first record. And his absence here means the songs are a little darker and a little more strange. A little more Alex Chilton. But only a little. For most of them, I still have to check the track list to see which record it belongs to.

This record stands out because it was the first one where he really seemed to embrace a big studio sound. The previous record was bigger than the first two, but this is where it all came together. And normally I prefer minimal production; normally I like hearing the songwriter with as few layers of intervening stuff as possible. But in Smith's case, the songs were definitely improved by the extra attention (ex. Peyroux @#69). In the studio, he could add more melodies, harmonies, parts that wouldn't work with just a single acoustic guitar, etc.. The songs got bigger and shinier and prettier. Alas.

And she says I like long walks and sci-fi movies
If you're six foot tall and east coast bred
Some lonely night we can get together

You really don't expect the next lines to be:

And I'm gonna tie your wrists with leather
And drill a tiny hole into your head
Oh, I'm gonna drill a tiny hole ...
Into your

Right?

Hearing that the first time is quite an eye-popper. And, he lines up the final line so that the decapitated "head", were it still attached, would fall on a brief but triumphant bit of finale. It's a nice trick. To fit the finale, you end up singing that "head", mentally filling-in what he left off, as an exclamation - "Head!". Then you feel a little creepy for having happy thoughts while singing about trepanation ("Trepanation" was the name of the song he took this bit from - he likes to dismember and recombine his own songs). One of my favorite musical moments.

"Fake Palindromes" is the high point for me, but there are plenty of other really good songs on this: "Nervous Tic Motion...", "Opposite Day", "Sovay", "Skin Is, My", etc., etc.. They're all good, really. But what sets this record apart from his others, is that there's a little bit of a spark here; a playful, macabre, excited spark. Recent records are good, but they don't leap out at me the way this does.

Whatever the reason, it remains my favorite, by far. "Tom Courtenay", a song vaguely about 60's British cinema icons, is a noisy pop gem; "Decora" (FYI, Spoon's cover), and "My Heart's Reflection" are hypnotic slow-burners; "Blue Line Swinger" is one riff, building, building, building, for nine minutes, as only YLT can do it.

They're another 'post-rock' band. So, their music is jazzy, experimental, introspective, essentially instrumental, but still, somehow, engaging. This seemed like it had to have come from another world, when it showed up. It was nothing like the rest of the indie music scene, which was still wallowing in the big dumb loud of the grunge years. This felt so clean and defiantly intelligent. Two bassists and three percussionists - vibraphones and marimbas, fer fuck's sake! And even though Radiohead has managed to popularize something like this sound, this still sounds unique.

I think they're still going, but I haven't paid attention to them in years. After this, their records became progressively less interesting to me, and I eventually stopped buying them - though I do like their second record, "Millions now living...".

Elliot Easton is another underrated guitar player. His solos are great: amazingly quick and fluid, but so very melodic. And Benjamin Orr was a great singer (though because he and Ocasek have similar styles and inflections, a lot of people don't know he sang at all).

Well, because we're not in the middle of a 70s music revival - there's no need to revive 70s pop since it never went away - no, it wouldn't be interesting. You can probably find a station anywhere in the country that's playing that stuff right now, and if you can't, there's probably someone in every other dockside bar, up and down both coasts, playing that stuff. But when Bob Dylan discovered Leon Redbone, in 1975, in a nightclub who was doing faithful, non-ironic, versions of songs from the 30s, it was interesting, and the country wanted to hear it.

Or something. Whatever the reason, the guy's a genius. Watch that video. Check out his 'trumpet' playing. He's also a fantastic whistler. And this is a great album. His other records are basically more of the same (wonderfully done versions of songs from the 20s and 30s), but this one has the best songs.

They span the band's early to middle period, stopping in the Head On The Door era. But they're still feel somehow more coherent than the A-sides do. You can definitely hear the changes in style, over the years, in the A-sides; but the B-sides don't seem to follow. They have their own sound: a little silly, a little daring, a little experimental. Together, they feel like they make up a proper album, but from a time I can't pinpoint.

And this is a great album, start to finish (so long as you skip "The India Song"). Alex Chilton's rough edges and Chris Bell's sweetness combined to create the best power-pop since Lennon & McCartney. Too bad the partnership only lasted for this single album.

Fun fact: Whitney Houston's mother does backups on "Mother and Child Reunion". And, I can't think of any other album that mentions "chowder" and "chow fun"; and "Mother and Child Reunion" is the name of a dish Simon saw on a Chinese menu (a chicken and egg dish). It's another record I like to cook to.

PF's third appearance ? Hmm.

The drummer on this is now with Pinback, which seems appropriate. If you like Pinback, or Trail Of Dead..., give this a listen. Very cool stuff. Total rock action.

Seriously, if there's one record on this list you all should check out, it's this one.

And if you don't believe me, believe the good and honorable, TBogg, who turned me onto them (they being both from San Diego).

This is a newcomer to the list.

Matt Pond writes excellent songs: ridiculously catchy songs, with beautiful melodies and smart lyrics. And they're delivered so effortlessly (and he turns out so many of them!) as to make anyone who has ever tried writing a song shake an envious fist in his direction. And sometimes they even rock a bit. "Sunshine", in particular, is just so fucking good I can't believe it. Gah.

Great album. Another good one to cook to.

Sometimes it sounds like there's barely enough room between Marah and late-era Replacements (or solo Westerberg) for you to swing a beer bottle. It's that same smirking swagger, hearts-on-their-sleeves, non-nonsense, melodic rock & roll that Big Star started and then Westerberg reworked once the Replacements started running out of angst. Marah puts a little more grime and soul into it than the Replacements did, getting a little Faces action in there. And they turn up the blue-collar earnestness in the words, which gets into more of a Springsteen feel. So, if you know those bands, Marah's sound probably won't startle you. Which isn't to say they're ripping anyone off, just that, you know: it's a style. And anyway, influences aside, Marah is very good at what they do. This record is full of songs that sound like they came from some awesome but overlooked garage band from a couple decades back. And they did - except it's only 7 years old. And the band is still out there. And they put on a great live show.

So, after a few years of putting out sub-par records, diggin on heroin, losing Mick Taylor, and eventually gaining Ron Wood, they got their shit together (thanks to the influences of punk and disco and NYC in general) and put out this scrapper. Just the sound of thing is a million times better than Black And Blue or It's Only Rock And Roll. It's all sharp and punchy and in your face. There's plenty of slop and little misses, but that just adds to the impression that this is a band that's getting its rock on. I like it. I don't skip anything, on this one.

It's hard to find a better example of 70's light rock.

It's a long one, but worth the time. When I can find the time.

This was released roughly forty days after Nevermind, and I was already sick of Nevermind by that point. And yet, here this is, 21 years later, at #38.

Wiki says the only place you can get this is on the CD release of Dead Letter Office, which seems absurd. This is REM at its best: energetic, fresh, unprocessed.

Lilys started out as a MBV-style shoegaze band, and their first two albums were appropriately dreamy and hazy. But in between those two records, they put out the aforementioned "Brief History Of Amazing Letdowns" EP (@ #42), which sounded more like Big Star-worshipping Teenage Fanclub than MBV. And that's the direction they took with this one. Actually, they went so far in that direction that they bypassed Big Star entirely and ended up sounding and looking) like Big Star's influences: Beatles, Kinks, Monkees, Byrds. It was a pumped-up and fuzzed-out version of 60s Brit-pop, but just as fun and catchy as the best of that era.

Since the original release, Kurt Heasley (the man behind Lilys) has gone back and added strings and horns and all kinds of other sounds onto the original recordings. So, most of the links up there are to re-touched versions. But, I really don't like those changes. Even if the songs on the newer release are closer to the band's original conception (they reportedly ran out of money while making the record and couldn't afford to do all the strings and whatnot that they wanted to do), the original 1996 release is the one you want.

My favorite memory of this is listening to it my friend's beat up Oldsmobile one Sunday morning. One of the speakers was blown, so when Page's guitar ping-pongs from channel to channel after the break in "What Is And What Should Never Be", we would only hear half. We were on our way to go hunting just south of Glens Falls, NY, on some land that Bobby had been on before and said was OK. After a couple hours of wandering in the woods, we stepped into a clearing full of picnic tables and public grills. And there was a Sheriff there, too. We were arrested for having guns on a state park, then released. We were minors, so it never showed up on my record.

It's punchy and jangly and fun. And where it's not giddily-upbeat it's still super-catchy; and the lyrics are always awesome. Plus, it's very short, so it always leaves you wanting more. It's a perfect little record.

Referring to the original North American release, here. It doesn't have the covers "Evil Woman" and "Crow"; and both "Wasp/Behind The Wall of Sleep/Basically/NIB" and "A Bit of Finger/Sleeping Village/Warning" are counted as single tracks.

My roommate had this in college and for some reason, we got it into our heads that this was a goofy stoner-space-jazz record. So we never listened to it much. But, I wanted to give it another chance, 20 year later, so I bought it this year. This time, I was blown away.

No, it's not a jazz record. It's really more of a blues-rock record with scary lyrics than a metal record. But it's a grimy, sludgy, ominous blues; not as deliberately messy as, say, Blue Cheer, but it's nothing like Clapton either. It's definitely not about precision of technique, purity to the form, and the worship of old blues legends. The blues is the foundation, not the goal. And there's more than blues, of course; there's that yummy tritone thing - those unmistakably metal notes that you hear in the first seconds of the first song ("Black Sabbath"). Instantly, you know this isn't going to be a Cream record. Hell of a debut.

I'm not kidding. It is important that you hear this.

But even more important than all that: it rocks.

I was only seven when this came out, so I was too young to really know what it's impact was at the time. But looking back, there's a pretty clear line between hard rock / metal guitar playing pre-VH and post-VH. After this record, everybody was a-tappin' and a-shreddin'. Eddie really changed the world, in that respect. Overall, though, it seems like it took metal until the mid 80's (and the advent of hair metal) to really catch up to VH's blend of jet-fueled guitar playing, hammy good-time frontman, and overall sense of "Woohoo! Let's party!" The whole "new wave of British heavy metal" thing had to get thrashed out, first, I guess.

History aside, this album just plain kicks ass. The awesome pop songs, the hard rockers, the punky bits, "Eruption". It all flies by in 35 minutes and only slows down late on side 2 for the album's only real low point, "Little Dreamer". Fucker makes me want to grow a mullet and buy a '78 Trans Am.

This is Zep at their richest and most melodic. Though the songs have plenty of rawk in them, there's a lot of beauty in there, too. Quite a nice record.

It's another one that I think I'm done with until I hear it again in the right setting, and then I cannot deny it.