10 all-time favorite albums (as if I could limit it to ten), in no particular order. Albums that really made an impact and are still on your rotation list, even if only now and then.
This is the album that Sigue Sigue Sputnik wish they’d made. It still sounds like an artifact from the future. Imagine the impact in 1989, 6 months before Pretty Hate Machine hit the shelves. I don’t know that any album ever took the cut-and-paste approach to making music to this extent.
It shouldn’t work, but somehow it does. Melding rapping to samples of metal guitar riffs and industrial beats, chock full o’ pop culture references both in the lyrics and the samples, it careens out of of control like a car that’s lost its brakes and is always this close to crashing.
Sadly, I never got to see PWEI. They were set to open for NIN but left the tour two weeks before the show in Dallas. In a sense, that might be for the best. Day/Hour/This was a revolutionary album, but the collage approach may not have worked as well in a live setting.
Was it influential? Enormously so. This was the album that brought hard rock into industrial for me, and hey, can walk talk for a moment about the aesthetic of the band? Look at that album cover. All of their merch was just as immaculately put together. *sigh* At least the singer is doing pretty well with his PWEI career.