Take 10 Albums
Posted: March 28th, 2016, 14:10
I saw a thing on Facebook and it sounded like a good question. Naturally I don't give a shit about what people on Facebook think, so I'll repost it here instead. The question was "what 10 albums would you take with you?" I don't know where you're going, but it sounded pretty final. The criteria is albums which have been with you a long time, one per band. Maybe you're taking them to hell, or to the khazi for a 12-hour shit after an ill-advised vindaloo fish kebab. Anyway, it takes a bit of thinking to get 10:
1. Hysteria - Def Leppard
This fits the criteria 100%. I think I discovered this album on tape in my Dad's car when I was about 8. It was actually the beginning of Rock of Ages from Pyromania which attracted my attention to Def Leppard initially - the silly nonsense-German gunter glieben glauchen globen at the beginning appealed to my childish brain. I loved the music of Hysteria though, and have done ever since. I've owned, I think, four copies of it on various media, always have it in the car. I like every song and love half of them. It's not all that coincidental that this is the case - to quote Wikipedia, "The album's goal, set out by Lange, was to be a rock version of Michael Jackson's Thriller, in that every track was a potential hit single." In fact although 7 of the tracks were released as singles, only one (Animal) broke the UK top 10. Still, it remains my all-time favourite album.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HR0P3sIb80[/youtube]
2. The Fat of the Land - Prodigy
Whereas my love of Hysteria doesn't extend to Def Leppard's other albums, although I do like them, with Prodigy I like pretty much every album they've ever released. Arguably my favourite band (depending on my mood), it's a tough call whether to choose this over their first studio album, Experience, and its successor, Music for the Jilted Generation. If you were to ask me which my favourite song was it could fall into any of their first three albums at any given time. It was Fat of the Land, however, which focussed me on the band though. As a teenager of the 90s I was aware of them, and enjoyed the likes of Charlie (Experience) and No Good (Jilted Generation), but it was Firestarter that made me realise that Prodigy were something different. Hot off the back of a long obsession with thrash metal, the rough synth and snarled vocals attracted to me, and although the album tracks were pretty eclectic they all appealed to me in different ways. I don't love every track, but there's no filler on the album.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmHDhAohJlQ[/youtube]
3. Youthanasia - Megadeth
As mentioned in the previous entry, I spent a lot of my early- to mid-teens listening to various forms of heavy metal. For the most part I flitted around different bands and genres, but there were two bands I loves enough to consume everything they'd produced that I could get my hands on. Both were part of the big 4 of thrash metal and, unbeknownst to me at the time, came from the same origins - Megadeth and Metallica. Every metal fan has their opinions on the two bands and I'm no exception, but unlike many I like both. It was very difficult to single out one album from Megadeth's early catalogue, partly because Dave Mustaine's style didn't change a great deal throughout, and maybe partly because I only ever managed to find four of their albums in the back-street record shops of Burnley. Of my favourite songs though, of which there are literally enough to fill a CD of their own, most came from Youthanasia. The album was released while I was actively listening to Megadeth, unlike their earlier stuff, so maybe that was part of it. Or maybe I would have preferred one of their later albums if entry number 2 of this list (and the appeal of night clubs full of girls) hadn't set me on a path of dance music by the time they released their next album. Either way, Youthanasia remains, for me, the high point of my enduring relationship with Megadeth.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceiyvKwpRRo[/youtube]
4. Discovery - Daft Punk
Discovery is the first album in my list which is included for its entirety rather than my love of many of the individual songs. Taken alone each track varies from okay to great, but played in sequence they become greater than the sum of their parts. I'm not pretentious enough to suggest that they tell me a story, but I can't deny that part of the reason I love the album so much is the companion animation Interstella 5555. The two are linked in my mind so that Discovery is like an opera to me, specifically appealing because I've never felt the need to pay attention to the details. They're there, if I want to dive in and take an interest, exactly as they are with the movie, but for the most part I can simply absorb it without any effort.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGBhQbmPwH8[/youtube]
5. Master of Puppets - Metallica
Metallica were my gateway into heavy metal. I was given a copy of the black album by a school friend in my early teens and then re-traced the band's steps back into thrash metal. In retrospect I'm not a huge fan of that first encounter, it's too produced and toned down for my liking, but if it hadn't been then maybe I wouldn't have decided to investigate further. My opinions on the estranged twins of thrash metal are that I prefer Megadeth, mainly because I dislike the direction Metallica took with Loaded and beyond, but if I just take their pre-black album stuff into account then it's a photo finish. Metallica were much easier to find than Megadeth for me, and I bought all of their first five albums in quick succession. As such they all kind of blur into one for me, and I had to go to Wikipedia to work out which one contained the most songs I liked. Turns out that is Master of Puppets, which only has 8 tracks but I reckon I must have damn near worn out the first four on the tape I had.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhuH0l9Wqfc[/youtube]
6. The Best Of - Depeche Mode
I was really late coming to Depeche Mode. Whereas the other bands to this point had been still active and I was working into their back catalogue, here I'd begun to rediscover the music I'd heard but never paid attention to as a child. Ignorant as I was at the time, I've developed a passion for 80s electro and new wave in the last 10 years or so, and since I'm reflecting on memories I formed before I really appreciated music it's difficult to pin down individual bands. The Best Of, then, draws on those singles I heard on the radio and TV, as opposed to the albums they come from, which aren't familiar. So this is a mixture of songs I love, and songs I don't really remember. Some of the latter I've grown to like as much as the ones I remember, and out of the hundreds of songs I've collected into my 80s playlist this album probably contains a higher number than any other.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDxM8-k60_M[/youtube]
7. What's The Story Morning Glory? - Oasis
My lack of any interest at all in popular music throughout the mid-90s meant that I missed a lot of the hype around Oasis. It was only when the kids I hung out with at college, who took me into their clique because they were all musicians and liked that I was into heavy metal, started singing and playing Oasis songs that I paid any attention to them. My two enduring memories of that time are seeing an early performance of Live Forever and instantly hating Liam Gallagher, and then later associating that with the band, and of my mates playing Champagne Supernova in the college canteen to the jeers and boos of the numerically superior R&B-inclined ethnic Pakistanis. That took some balls, and while it didn't immediately sell me on the band it certainly put them on my radar. I think I only bought the album years later while shopping away a hangover, and came to love it while passing the occasional lonely days in the RAF when my mates were all busy and I had nothing to do but sit in my room.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gr7MSSPNH9o[/youtube]
8. Travelling Without Moving - Jamiroquai
This is probably an unpopular choice, more so than Oasis, but I don't care. Harking from the same period in my life of staving off boredom while staring at the same four walls, it tied those dull moments into the exciting nights of drinking and dancing which defined my early service career. The album is unusual in the same way that Discovery is - in that I don't particularly love most of the tracks, but I like all of them. Whereas with Daft Punk, though, it's an atmospheric and ambient appeal, Travelling Without Moving has me jiggling about and wanting to dance like Jamiroquai does. I don't do that, because I can't, but it makes me feel like I can and that energises me like few other albums can.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JkIs37a2JE[/youtube]
9. Greatest - Duran Duran
The story behind this is almost identical to that of the Depeche Mode compilation earlier on. Apparently at the time Duran Duran were deeply unpopular with my older cousins, who still sneer at their boy-band-esque image when mentioned, but I was too young to notice that. The relative position in my list is a signifier of how I feel about particular songs, and the volume of those therein, but I like the two bands for different reasons. While Depeche Mode are dark and complex, Duran Duran are obvious and slutty. That's not to say they're shallow, some of the subject matter is kind of dark, but the focus is more on the overarching effect of the music than the story that's being told. I'm pretty sure I remember Simon Le Bon saying that Reflex literally doesn't mean anything, it's just a load of shit they made up to sound good. That's pretty 80s to me, and to my ears it produced some damn good music.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Uxc9eFcZyM[/youtube]
10. Nevermind - Nirvana
I don't listen to Nirvana much any more. It coincides precisely with my teenage angst years, and I don't look back on myself fondly during that period. Even so, whenever I hear one of their songs I'm reminded of how batshit and unusual they were, and how much I liked them. As with many of the other albums here, I only discovered Nirvana after they had peaked. When I did though I ate up every album I could get my hands on, and to me they only seemed to get weirder. I've come back a bit now, like I say, but I still have this album around and hearing any one of the tracks from it will have me screeching my own words along to the unintelligible lyrics.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbgKEjNBHqM[/youtube]
1. Hysteria - Def Leppard
This fits the criteria 100%. I think I discovered this album on tape in my Dad's car when I was about 8. It was actually the beginning of Rock of Ages from Pyromania which attracted my attention to Def Leppard initially - the silly nonsense-German gunter glieben glauchen globen at the beginning appealed to my childish brain. I loved the music of Hysteria though, and have done ever since. I've owned, I think, four copies of it on various media, always have it in the car. I like every song and love half of them. It's not all that coincidental that this is the case - to quote Wikipedia, "The album's goal, set out by Lange, was to be a rock version of Michael Jackson's Thriller, in that every track was a potential hit single." In fact although 7 of the tracks were released as singles, only one (Animal) broke the UK top 10. Still, it remains my all-time favourite album.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HR0P3sIb80[/youtube]
2. The Fat of the Land - Prodigy
Whereas my love of Hysteria doesn't extend to Def Leppard's other albums, although I do like them, with Prodigy I like pretty much every album they've ever released. Arguably my favourite band (depending on my mood), it's a tough call whether to choose this over their first studio album, Experience, and its successor, Music for the Jilted Generation. If you were to ask me which my favourite song was it could fall into any of their first three albums at any given time. It was Fat of the Land, however, which focussed me on the band though. As a teenager of the 90s I was aware of them, and enjoyed the likes of Charlie (Experience) and No Good (Jilted Generation), but it was Firestarter that made me realise that Prodigy were something different. Hot off the back of a long obsession with thrash metal, the rough synth and snarled vocals attracted to me, and although the album tracks were pretty eclectic they all appealed to me in different ways. I don't love every track, but there's no filler on the album.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmHDhAohJlQ[/youtube]
3. Youthanasia - Megadeth
As mentioned in the previous entry, I spent a lot of my early- to mid-teens listening to various forms of heavy metal. For the most part I flitted around different bands and genres, but there were two bands I loves enough to consume everything they'd produced that I could get my hands on. Both were part of the big 4 of thrash metal and, unbeknownst to me at the time, came from the same origins - Megadeth and Metallica. Every metal fan has their opinions on the two bands and I'm no exception, but unlike many I like both. It was very difficult to single out one album from Megadeth's early catalogue, partly because Dave Mustaine's style didn't change a great deal throughout, and maybe partly because I only ever managed to find four of their albums in the back-street record shops of Burnley. Of my favourite songs though, of which there are literally enough to fill a CD of their own, most came from Youthanasia. The album was released while I was actively listening to Megadeth, unlike their earlier stuff, so maybe that was part of it. Or maybe I would have preferred one of their later albums if entry number 2 of this list (and the appeal of night clubs full of girls) hadn't set me on a path of dance music by the time they released their next album. Either way, Youthanasia remains, for me, the high point of my enduring relationship with Megadeth.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceiyvKwpRRo[/youtube]
4. Discovery - Daft Punk
Discovery is the first album in my list which is included for its entirety rather than my love of many of the individual songs. Taken alone each track varies from okay to great, but played in sequence they become greater than the sum of their parts. I'm not pretentious enough to suggest that they tell me a story, but I can't deny that part of the reason I love the album so much is the companion animation Interstella 5555. The two are linked in my mind so that Discovery is like an opera to me, specifically appealing because I've never felt the need to pay attention to the details. They're there, if I want to dive in and take an interest, exactly as they are with the movie, but for the most part I can simply absorb it without any effort.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGBhQbmPwH8[/youtube]
5. Master of Puppets - Metallica
Metallica were my gateway into heavy metal. I was given a copy of the black album by a school friend in my early teens and then re-traced the band's steps back into thrash metal. In retrospect I'm not a huge fan of that first encounter, it's too produced and toned down for my liking, but if it hadn't been then maybe I wouldn't have decided to investigate further. My opinions on the estranged twins of thrash metal are that I prefer Megadeth, mainly because I dislike the direction Metallica took with Loaded and beyond, but if I just take their pre-black album stuff into account then it's a photo finish. Metallica were much easier to find than Megadeth for me, and I bought all of their first five albums in quick succession. As such they all kind of blur into one for me, and I had to go to Wikipedia to work out which one contained the most songs I liked. Turns out that is Master of Puppets, which only has 8 tracks but I reckon I must have damn near worn out the first four on the tape I had.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhuH0l9Wqfc[/youtube]
6. The Best Of - Depeche Mode
I was really late coming to Depeche Mode. Whereas the other bands to this point had been still active and I was working into their back catalogue, here I'd begun to rediscover the music I'd heard but never paid attention to as a child. Ignorant as I was at the time, I've developed a passion for 80s electro and new wave in the last 10 years or so, and since I'm reflecting on memories I formed before I really appreciated music it's difficult to pin down individual bands. The Best Of, then, draws on those singles I heard on the radio and TV, as opposed to the albums they come from, which aren't familiar. So this is a mixture of songs I love, and songs I don't really remember. Some of the latter I've grown to like as much as the ones I remember, and out of the hundreds of songs I've collected into my 80s playlist this album probably contains a higher number than any other.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDxM8-k60_M[/youtube]
7. What's The Story Morning Glory? - Oasis
My lack of any interest at all in popular music throughout the mid-90s meant that I missed a lot of the hype around Oasis. It was only when the kids I hung out with at college, who took me into their clique because they were all musicians and liked that I was into heavy metal, started singing and playing Oasis songs that I paid any attention to them. My two enduring memories of that time are seeing an early performance of Live Forever and instantly hating Liam Gallagher, and then later associating that with the band, and of my mates playing Champagne Supernova in the college canteen to the jeers and boos of the numerically superior R&B-inclined ethnic Pakistanis. That took some balls, and while it didn't immediately sell me on the band it certainly put them on my radar. I think I only bought the album years later while shopping away a hangover, and came to love it while passing the occasional lonely days in the RAF when my mates were all busy and I had nothing to do but sit in my room.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gr7MSSPNH9o[/youtube]
8. Travelling Without Moving - Jamiroquai
This is probably an unpopular choice, more so than Oasis, but I don't care. Harking from the same period in my life of staving off boredom while staring at the same four walls, it tied those dull moments into the exciting nights of drinking and dancing which defined my early service career. The album is unusual in the same way that Discovery is - in that I don't particularly love most of the tracks, but I like all of them. Whereas with Daft Punk, though, it's an atmospheric and ambient appeal, Travelling Without Moving has me jiggling about and wanting to dance like Jamiroquai does. I don't do that, because I can't, but it makes me feel like I can and that energises me like few other albums can.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JkIs37a2JE[/youtube]
9. Greatest - Duran Duran
The story behind this is almost identical to that of the Depeche Mode compilation earlier on. Apparently at the time Duran Duran were deeply unpopular with my older cousins, who still sneer at their boy-band-esque image when mentioned, but I was too young to notice that. The relative position in my list is a signifier of how I feel about particular songs, and the volume of those therein, but I like the two bands for different reasons. While Depeche Mode are dark and complex, Duran Duran are obvious and slutty. That's not to say they're shallow, some of the subject matter is kind of dark, but the focus is more on the overarching effect of the music than the story that's being told. I'm pretty sure I remember Simon Le Bon saying that Reflex literally doesn't mean anything, it's just a load of shit they made up to sound good. That's pretty 80s to me, and to my ears it produced some damn good music.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Uxc9eFcZyM[/youtube]
10. Nevermind - Nirvana
I don't listen to Nirvana much any more. It coincides precisely with my teenage angst years, and I don't look back on myself fondly during that period. Even so, whenever I hear one of their songs I'm reminded of how batshit and unusual they were, and how much I liked them. As with many of the other albums here, I only discovered Nirvana after they had peaked. When I did though I ate up every album I could get my hands on, and to me they only seemed to get weirder. I've come back a bit now, like I say, but I still have this album around and hearing any one of the tracks from it will have me screeching my own words along to the unintelligible lyrics.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbgKEjNBHqM[/youtube]