COUNTDOWN: Top 50 Music Albums Of All-Time.

Electric Nitwit wrote: »

20pts for Songs For The Deaf, so the Bronze 14 and Urbansprawl both gave it first place

20pts for Surfer Rosa, so Urbansprawl and Bobby Malone both gave it first place

So Urbansprawl gave first place to Songs For The Deaf and Surfer Rosa?!

No wonder Trump doesn't trust mail in votes

Hello 2D Person Below wrote: »

I was baffled when I saw my name in the OP list. Haven't a clue what I nominated aside from two of them and, like Necro, I no longer have the PM haha.

Doolittle features an eclectic mix of musical styles. While tracks such as "Tame" and "Crackity Jones" are fast and aggressive, and incorporate the band's trademark loud–quiet dynamic, other songs such as "Silver", "I Bleed", and "Here Comes Your Man" reveal a quieter, slower and more melodic temperament. With Doolittle, the band began to incorporate further instruments into their sound; for instance, "Monkey Gone to Heaven" features two violins and two cellos.

"Tame" is based on a three chord formula; including Joey Santiago's playing a "Hendrix chord" over the main bass progression. "I Bleed" is melodically simple, and is formed around a single rhythmical repetition. Some songs are influenced by other genres of music; while "Crackity Jones" has a distinctly Spanish sound, and incorporates G♯ and A triads over a C♯ pedal, the song's rhythm guitar, played by Francis, starts with an eighth-note downstroke typical of punk rock music.

The lyrical themes explored on Doolittle range from the surrealism of "Debaser", to the environmental catastrophe of "Monkey Gone to Heaven". The prostitutes of "Mr. Grieves", "Tame", and "Hey" share space with the Biblical analogies of "Dead" and "Gouge Away". Black Francis often claimed that Doolittle's lyrics were words which just "fit together nicely", and that "the point [of the album] is to experience it, to enjoy it, to be entertained by it". Francis wrote all the material for the album with the exception of "Silver", which he co-wrote with Kim Deal.

The album's opening track "Debaser" references surrealism, a theme that runs throughout the album. "Debaser" alludes to Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's 1929 surrealist film Un Chien Andalou, and the lyric "slicing up eyeballs" refers to an early scene in the film.

Surrealism heavily influenced Francis in his college years and throughout his career with the Pixies. In 1989, Francis expressed his interest in surrealism and its influence on his songwriting method to The New York Times by stating "I got into avant-garde movies and Surrealism as an escape from reality. ... To me, Surrealism is totally artificial. I recently read an interview with the director David Lynch who said he had ideas and images but that he didn't know exactly what they meant. That's how I write."

Another of the album's main themes is environmental catastrophe. "Monkey Gone to Heaven" deals with man's destruction of the ocean and "confusion of man's place in the universe". As Francis put it:

"On one hand, it's this big organic toilet. Things get flushed and repurified or decomposed and it's this big, dark, mysterious place. It's also a very mythological place where there are octopus's gardens, the Bermuda Triangle, Atlantis, and mermaids.""Monkey Gone to Heaven" is concerned with man's relationship to the divine, a theme shared with "Mr. Grieves".

Two songs on Doolittle are fashioned after Biblical stories: the story of David and Bathsheba in "Dead", and Samson and Delilah in "Gouge Away".

Francis' fascination with Biblical themes can be traced back to his teenage years; when he was twelve, he and his parents joined an evangelical church linked to the Assemblies of God. This background was to be an influence in Doolittle, where he referred to the Devil being "six" and God being "seven" in "Monkey Gone to Heaven".

Other songs explored eccentric subjects, such as in "Wave of Mutilation", which Francis described as being about "Japanese businessmen doing murder-suicides with their families because they'd failed in business, and they're driving off a pier into the ocean."

The sea and underwater themes of "Wave of Mutilation", which also feature in "Mr. Grieves" and "Monkey Gone to Heaven", are explorations of one arena for man's death and destruction. Ben Sisario points out that the album begins ("Debaser") and ends ("Gouge Away") with songs about violence being done to eyes. "Crackity Jones" covers another offbeat subject; Francis' roommate in his student exchange trip to San Juan, Puerto Rico, who he described as a "weird psycho gay roommate".

Doolittle also references more ostensibly conventional subjects. "La La Love You", sung by the band's drummer David Lovering, is a love song—though with its "first base, second base, third base, home run" break, it's been referred to as "a dig at the very idea of a love song". Francis gave it to Lovering as a song to sing, "like a Ringo thing"; Lovering at first refused to sing, but Norton said that soon he was unable to "get him away from the microphone". As well as lead vocals on "La La Love You", Lovering played bass guitar on "Silver", with Deal playing slide guitar; this arrangement did not occur again.

Dylan said: "The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the Blonde on Blonde album. It's that thin, that wild mercury sound. It's metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up."

Recorded fast with Nashville session cats who were used to grinding out country hits, Blonde on Blonde has a slick studio polish that makes it sound totally unlike any of his other albums, with sparkling piano frills and a soulful ****kicker groove. Yet the glossy surface just makes the songs more haunting. Released on May 16th, 1966, Blonde on Blonde remains the pinnacle of Dylan’s genius – he never sounded lonelier than in “Visions of Johanna,” funnier than in “I Want You,” more desperate than in “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again.” It’s his most expansive music, with nothing that resembles a folk song – just the rock & roll laments of a vanishing American, the doomed outsider who’s given up on ever belonging anywhere. “I don’t consider myself outside of anything,” Dylan said when the album came out. “I just consider myself not around.”

These guys were punch-the-clock pros, used to regular working hours and three-minute country sides, so they had to adjust to Dylan’s more eccentric approach. He kept them waiting around the studio office playing cards long after midnight, as he put the feverish final touches on a song he was still writing. He finally called them into the studio at 4 a.m. and started playing. But they were taken aback when the song didn’t end after three minutes – every time they thought they’d played the final chorus, this guy would jump right into another verse. “I was playing one-handed, looking at my watch,” Buttrey once said. “We’d never heard anything like this before.” Nearly 12 minutes later, they’d played “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.”

The album’s first session would produce the epochal “Visions of Johanna,” which Dylan first debuted in 1965 at a Berkeley concert attended by Allen Ginsberg and Joan Baez (who insisted the song was about her). With Kooper’s organ and Robertson’s trebly guitar shadowing Dylan’s lyrics, which go on for five image-stuffed verses, the song turns a recollection of a hazy New York night into a liquid meditation on carnal obsession and spiritual desire. At seven minutes long, it also suggested this wasn’t going to be just another series of recording dates.

“It was really … ‘far out’ would be the term I would have used at the time,” said Bill Aikins, who played keyboards on the song. “And still today, it was a very out-there song.” As Dylan later said, “I’d never done anything like it before.”

Blonde on Blonde came a few months after Rubber Soul, and it clearly spurred Dylan to step up his melodic game. “4th Time Around” was his famous parody of “Norwegian Wood” – a song he cruelly played in person for John Lennon. (As Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1968, “He said, ‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘I don’t like it.'”) But talk about the anxiety of influence: Maybe Dylan had to mock “Norwegian Wood” just to hide how much Rubber Soul was lurking behind “Visions of Johanna” or “Sad Eyed Lady.”

Dylan scholar Michael Gray wrote: "To have followed up one masterpiece with another was Dylan's history making achievement here ... Where Highway 61 Revisited has Dylan exposing and confronting like a laser beam in surgery, descending from outside the sickness, Blonde on Blonde offers a persona awash inside the chaos ... We're tossed from song to song ... The feel and the music are on a grand scale, and the language and delivery are a unique mixture of the visionary and the colloquial.

Alexander Tudor wrote for Drowned in Sound that "minimal beats on each track prove to have been constructed with incredible attention to detail, as are the smooth synth washes, and electronic simulacra of birdcall or animal noises. The tempo may be nightmarishly unvaried, track after track, but it's composed of glitches [and] bouncing balls", citing "Keep the Streets Empty for Me" as the album's best track.

In a review for AllMusic, Heather Phares opined that "Fever Ray's mix of confessional lyrics and chilly, blatantly synthetic and often harsh sounds make this album as successful an electronic singer/songwriter album as Björk's Homogenic." Phares continued, "With almost tangible textures and a striking mood of isolation and singularity, Fever Ray is a truly strange but riveting album."

Alexis Petridis of The Guardian felt that the album's "dolorous chords and stately rhythms recall the Cure, circa Faith, the glacial pace makes you think of the Blue Nile", noting that, "as unlikely a step as Fever Ray may seem for one of electronic music's most enigmatic figures, the results are triumphant."

BBC Music's Chris Jones called the album "bloody marvellous", while observing "a vague sense of holding pattern here rather than massive innovation. Without brother Olof as a guiding hand on the droning sequencers the tunes fall a bit by the wayside", but wrote that "this very tiny drawback doesn't stop Fever Ray from being the kind of brilliant album that it may not make sense to play if you're prone to nightmares."

The Guardian named Fever Ray the second best album of 2009, calling it "[g]lacial, creepy and impish" and commenting, "Between the cavernous synths, the echoes and loops, the polyrhythms and snarling vocal processing, Andersson managed to capture the feeling of being totally alone while also projecting a childlike wonder."

Lyrically the album contains elements including depressing emotions, anger, and recovery. Explaining to MTV, Bennington said: "We don't talk about situations, we talk about the emotions behind the situations. Mike and I are two different people, so we can't sing about the same things, but we both know about frustration and anger and loneliness and love and happiness, and we can relate on that level." In the same interview, Shinoda explained it as: "What we really wanted to do was just push ourselves and push each other to really find new ways to be creative." He continued: "We wanted each sample that was in each song to be something that might perk your ear – something that you might not have ever heard before."

In titling the album, Mike said that "Meteora was a word that caught my attention because it sounded huge." Dave, Joe, and Chester elaborated that just like how Meteora, the rock formations in Greece, is very epic, dramatic, and has great energy, the band wanted the album to have that same feeling.

Meteora has sold around 16 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling albums of the 21st century. 

Recorded in 30 hours of studio time stretched over a three-week period (“I know because I paid the bill,” Page said), Zeppelin’s debut was hardly a high-concept affair; its making has been compared to the breakneck daylong session the Beatles pulled to cut Please Please Me in 1963. Yet the essential elements the band would expand on over the next decade are all in place: There’s a miasmic psychedelic blues trip (“Dazed and Confused”), high-def Fifties revisionism (“Communication Breakdown”), shifts from tender ballad to metal body slam (“Babe I’m Gonna Leave You”), and rips-cum-retooling of folk, blues and even classical on John Paul Jones’ Bach-bitten organ intro to “Your Time Is Gonna Come” — all unified by the band’s undeniable brute force.

In Britain the album received a glowing review in Melody Maker. Chris Welch wrote, in a review titled "Jimmy Page triumphs – Led Zeppelin is a gas!": "their material does not rely on obvious blues riffs, although when they do play them, they avoid the emaciated feebleness of most so-called British blues bands".

In Oz, Felix Dennis regarded it as one of those rare albums that "defies immediate classification or description, simply because it's so obviously a turning point in rock music that only time proves capable of shifting it into eventual perspective".

In comparing the record to their follow-up Led Zeppelin II, Robert Christgau wrote in The Village Voice that the debut was "subtler and more ambitious musically", and not as good, "because subtlety defeated the effect. Musicianship, in other words, was really incidental to such music, but the music did have real strength and validity: a combination of showmanship and overwhelming physical force.