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.
Another early-2000s albums that received great reviews but no radio airplay, Electric Version was a revelation to me. I finally got to hear it for the first time on the jukebox at Casino El Camino and fell in love instantly. Everything that made me happy about music is contained the the first four songs. Power pop, soaring harmonies, delirious lyrics, and just plain giddy fun.
Wasn’t music always fun? Well, no, not really. Grunge was not fun. Industrial is not fun (except, of course, for PWEI). I love me some Radiohead, but OK Computer and Kid A are not fun. I loved all that stuff, but wasn’t even aware of how little joy there was in the music.
Electric Version, for me, brought back the sing-along choruses and hooks-upon-hooks that first made me love the rock and the roll. That’s the primary impact. The unabashed fun of it. Oh sure, Dan Bejar wanders in and delivers “Testament to Youth in Verse,” the most gorgeous paean to teen celibacy you’ll ever hear. Bejar, (whose solo band, Destroyer, is also one of my favorites) brings a loose and cynical voice to the proceedings, keeping it from becoming too…not twee, but too….much?
Love this record so, so much, in case you couldn’t tell.
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.
Welcome to the 2000s (for now at least)! In the early years of this strange, new millennium, living by myself in a new town, I had more time on my hands than I had music to fill it with. Radio was (and remains) an unproductive place to look for new music. Fortunately, I has Spin magazine and the MUCH music channel. Between the two of them, I found more great new music than I had during any other period of my life.
That brings of, naturally, to Mr. Leo and his Pharmacists. Hearts of Oak was an album I bought on the basis of great reviews and a ton of mentions on end-of-year best lists. None of that gave me any sense of what to expect with how it would sound (“dancing about architecture” indeed, and I understand the irony of what I’m doing now). What it sounds like, in a nutshell, was brilliant.
I was intrigued by the intro, “Building Skyscrapers in the Basement”, but it was the riff that starts “Where Have All the Rude Boys Gone?” that made me start giggling like a loony alone in my apartment. I didn’t just like this album; I loved it from the first listen. It’s guitar rock with a nod or two to Thin Lizzy and The Jam, heart-on-the-sleeve sincere with a complete lack of hipster irony (so, of course, hipsters loved it).
I like Ted Leo so much as a person that I’m sure my bias affects how I hear his music. That may matter when it comes to giving recommendations, but from the point of view of my own enjoyment, I see no reason to separate them. Hearts of Oak is great, in no small part because it restored my belief that great music was still being made, I’d just stopped looking for it.
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.
Fear of a Black Planet closes out an block of albums from 1989 and 1990 on this list. I remember the first time I heard it, at Stefan Boyle’s apartment after work. He knew I was in to Nine Inch Nails and he couldn’t wait to play the PE record for me, figuring I’d like it. I did, and would up buy myself a copy the next day.
The first word that comes to mind when trying to describe Fear of a Black Planet is “challenging.” I wasn’t especially in to hip-hop, primarily because I wasn’t impressed with most of the backing tracks. “Welcome to the Terrordome” just blew me completely away. It was immaculately produced, in your face, with a deft use of sampling that put most industrial acts to shame. And Chuck D’s lyrics and delivery on that song? I’m not exaggerating when I say I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anything that powerful.
Fear of a Black Planet gets up in your face and dares you to call rap frivolous, defies you to say that it does anything but rock. In hindsight, I’m not even sure that it’s a better record than It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back, but it’s the one that introduced me to the hard rhymer. Did it have an impact? Yeah, you could say that.
I will return to my list of “10” albums shortly, but we’ve done some camping recently and I wanted to share a few photos before too much time passed. Last weekend we spent a couple days at McKinney Falls State Park which is in southeast Austin, and Garner State Park, about an hour west of San Antonio.
Here’s our basic camping setup when we’re prepared for rain. It is a good thing we ready, too, as it would have been pretty uncomfortable without it.
Garner is a pretty special place. Apparently, I’m late to the game on this one because everyone I’ve mentioned it to has said it’s their favorite of the Texas state parks. It’s in the middle of the hill country, that little bit of Texas that isn’t flat and covered with wheat or grass that looks a lot like wheat.
The first full day we stayed there, it misted all night and stayed foggy until the sun burned off the clouds in the early afternoon.I’m a sucker for “water drops on things that don’t normally have water drops on them” photos, so there many, many more than I’ve posted here.
The fog makes the hills seem a lot taller than they are, but an 1800′ peak is pretty tall for central Texas, particularly when it’s rising out of the Frio river canyon. The camping space we had backed directly up to one of the taller hills and I bounded (note: “bounded” is an absurd exaggeration of the level of spryness I exhibited that morning, but it felt distinctly bound-y) out of our campsite and up, up, up. We took a couple of the more remote trails, including one that was the old road into the park, letting the mist keep us cool.
When the sun broke through, we were treated to an altogether different park. We left the hills and hiked down to a trail down by the river. The Frio was true to its name; cold, as well as swift and clear. We were lucky enough to have booked our trip during the 15 minutes between winter and summer when the trees are at their peak. We couldn’t have planned it better to get those bright green leaves intermingled with the darker, older live oak leaves.
The funny thing is that, while we had a fantastic time, we didn’t even do some of the most popular activities at the park. The Frio is dammed at the southern end of the park, set up for tubing and, just below the dam, is the park’s signature hill, Old Baldy. We missed out on that, as well as the food trucks, the miniature golf, and the dance hall. Guess we’ll have to go back, huh?
P.S. Yes, that’s a picture of a turkey. The Rio Grande turkey is abundant in the park.
McKinney Falls doesn’t have the same abundance of water features and topography, but it’s a nice park, nearby, and it’s where we got married, so it has a lot going for it. In case you were wondering, late May is a dodgy time to camp in Texas. Sometimes, its lovely, but it can be very hot or very wet. Or both, as was the case last weekend.
It’s still well worth the trip. Nicole was clever enough to get us one of those tents that is all mesh above 30″ or so, so we had a little breeze at night. We didn’t really move around much except at dusk and dawn, but as it turns out, those are great times to take pictures. You may notice a picture or two where, lacking a proper polarizing filter, I just put my sunglasses over the lens. Worked a treat, too.
The blue-tinted photo is a weird one. I took that one at night. We had little blue LEDs strung over the edge of the umbrella, and the fairy lights were reflecting off of the flashlight’s lens in a really pretty way. It was better in person, but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.
Funny thing: I didn’t really enjoy camping when I was a kid. There were some good times, but it was mostly something to be endured until I could get back home to my…well, we didn’t have computers or video games or anything, but I’m sure there was something I was eager to get back to. Now? I get it. We can take off on a Friday afternoon and spend two nights at a park and it feels longer and more relaxing than a month of weekends at home. I’m a lucky SOB in that Nicole not only enjoys it, she enjoys it in much the way that I do. Oh, and we can camp-cook like nobody’s business.
Hope you enjoyed the pics. This is my first time to use the slideshow function, so…will it work? Let’s find out!
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.
Oh, They Might Be Giants. What would I do without you? I’ve seen TMBG 14 times so far (I think), and they never fail to delight. I was already a fan when this album came out. Both They Might Be Giants and Lincoln were in heavy rotation on my cassette player, but it was Flood that turned the band into a life-long obsession for me.
The first two records were quirky, awkward, and not quite fully-formed. Flood was a silly masterpiece from start to finish. It’s a confident album, with some of the rough edges of their earlier work smoothed out, but with just as much (if not more) giddy glee.
Fandom was weird back in those pre-internet days. The only way to find out which songs would be fan favorites was to go to the shows and see what the fans reacted to. “Particle Man” was a huge favorite of mine, but I had no idea how loved that song was until I saw the Arcadia Theater bouncing up and down to it back in 1990.
There’s a personal reason for loving this album, too: My mother used to sing a silly song to me before bed when I was a wee one. The song was “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)”, so when I first heard it on Flood, I couldn’t believe it. I love this band, and this album in particular, so, so very much.
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.
Pretty Hate Machine was always going to be on here, wasn’t it? There was a pretty long period of time where it was almost the only thing I would listen to. It was the first album I was aware of that successfully merged industrial with dance with rock with the kind of “feeling sorry for yourself” that would have made Morrissey blush.
I first heard “Down In It” at the Dallas dance clubs in the summer of 1989, but the album didn’t come out until November. The intervening months gave me plenty of opportunity to blow my expectations sky high and, somehow, Pretty Hate Machine exceeded them. There wasn’t a song on the album I didn’t love, a feat that wouldn’t be matched until….sometime later in this list.
NIN never made another album anything like this one. Adrian Sherwood, Keith LeBlanc, Al Jourgensen, John Fryer, and Flood all worked on the production, which sounds like it could be a mess, but it all came together in a seamless whole with slinky dance groove underpinnings. Subsequent albums tended to be more aggressive and/or abstract, which is great, but wildly different in texture to the debut.
Did it make an impact? Lordy, yes. Pretty Hate Machine was a lifestyle for me; it was an identity I didn’t know I was looking for. I wouldn’t stop talking about the damned thing. I went through more Rit black dye during this era than the rest of my life combined. It was an absolutely glorious time.
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.
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.
A co-worker at the music store recommended this album to me…well, ok, that’s not strictly true. He recommended an album by Christian Death and I mis-remembered what he’d said and picked up Bad Religion instead. I’m glad I did, too. I’d never really taken punk seriously prior to hearing Suffer. I liked punk music, but I wasn’t cool enough to really “get” it.
This, though, I was something I could dig my teeth into. I’ll freely admit to having to whip out a dictionary, but c’mon, who uses “obsequious” in a song? BR get a lot of criticism for having clear vocals and tight harmonies (“that ain’t punk!”), but those were the things that appealed to me.
Did this album influence me? You could say that. It turned me into a shameless fanboy. I’ve seen Bad Religion over a dozen times now, and I own (and have read) all of Greg Graffin’s books and solo albums. Suffer opened the door to a bunch of other bands I now love (NOFX, Dance Hall Crashers, et. al.). It’s lean, it’s mean, and it’s nerdy-smart and it’s still my favorite punk album (although Punk In Drublic) comes close.
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.
I was raised on 60s musicals and 70s country and western music, which is to say, I wasn’t really that into music until I heard this album. 1970s Nashville-sound country was suffused with big string arrangements, maudlin lyrics, ultra-slick production and maybe a steel guitar or a slight twang that would identify it as “country.”
So, when my dad brought home this album, it was a bit of a shock. It was recorded live, with fiddles instead of strings and production so rough that you could use it as a chainsaw. I’d never heard “country” music with this kind of energy and musicianship. Hell, I’ve never heard it since.
In terms of “made an impact”, this one completely changed my understanding of what music was. This album was (and is) as rebellious as anything this side of Public Enemy (I mean, that’s a high bar). It was the antithesis of what the Nashville establishment wanted country to be and it’s all the better for it.
Last night I came home to a wunnerful surprise. We were going on a pic-a-nick. Nicole had already packed up all the grilling supplies, so we were ready to head off to the park as soon as I got off the train. We picked Northwest Park here in Austin because it’s a little more forest-y than the other parks with grills and the sunsets are prettier, too.
One of the things I love about Austin as opposed to, say, Dallas, is that the parks get a lot of use. While we were making the fire and prepping the veggies, there were four competing sounds vying for our attention. The PA announcer at the baseball field next to us, the “country and 80s mix” the crossfit instructor was using for a class on a nearby hill, the clacking of the fake swords of honest-to-god LARPers by the tennis courts, and the children laughing on the playground. It was a pretty good mix that sounded more “alive” than “dischordant.”
We (I) may have gone a little overboard on the coals, but we were cooking ears of corn, baked beans, a poblano, bacon, and burgers on a small park grill, so we needed a little more width to our heat than normal. This also resulted in a lot more heat than I usually get, so everything cooked relatively quickly and we were eating before sunset.
The other activities died down a little so we dined to the sounds of some French cafe jazz on the iPad. Accordions, acoustic guitars with nylon strings, you know the sound, right? Everything came out well and, after packing up, we decided we weren’t quite ready to leave yet. So, we wandered over and caught the last inning of the baseball game, a playoff between the underclassmen at two local high schools.
The game ended and half the people were super excited and the other half weren’t and we decided that was enough for the night and headed back to the car and then home. No photos since we were focusing more on enjoying the night than documenting it. Damned if I know what I’ve done to deserve such a lovely Tuesday evening but all I know is I want to keep doing whatever it is because this is way better than the life I thought I’d be living.
