COUNTDOWN: Top 50 Music Albums Of All-Time.

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.

Unknown Pleasures was recorded at Strawberry Studios in Stockport over three weekends between 1 and 17 April 1979, with Martin Hannett producing.

Hannett, who believed that punk rock was sonically conservative because of its refusal to use studio technology to create sonic space, used a number of unusual production techniques and sound effects on the album, including several AMS 15-80s digital delays, Marshall Time Modulators, tape echo and bounce, as well as the sound of a bottle smashing, someone eating crisps, backwards guitar and the sound of the Strawberry Studios lift with a Leslie speaker "whirring inside".He also used the sound of a basement toilet.

Hannett recorded Curtis's vocals for "Insight" down a telephone line so he could achieve the "requisite distance". Hannett later said, "[Joy Division] were a gift to a producer, because they didn't have a clue. They didn't argue".

Referring to the recording sessions, Peter Hook remembered, "Sumner started using a kit-built Powertran Transcendent 2000 synthesiser, most notably on 'I Remember Nothing', where it vied with the sound of Rob Gretton smashing bottles with Steve and his Walther replica pistol."

During the recording, Morris invested in a syndrum because he thought he saw one on the cover of Can's 1971 album Tago Mago.

Describing Hannett's production techniques, Peter Hook said, "[He] didn't think straight, he thought sideways. He confused you and made you do something you didn't expect."

The band members' opinions differed on the "spacious, atmospheric sound" of the album, which did not reflect their more aggressive live sound. Sumner said:

"The music was loud and heavy, and we felt that Martin had toned it down, especially with the guitars. The production inflicted this dark, doomy mood over the album: we'd drawn this picture in black and white, and Martin had coloured it in for us. We resented it..." Hook said, "I couldn't hide my disappointment then, it sounded like Pink Floyd."

Morris disagreed, saying, "I was happy with Unknown Pleasures. My theory on things at the time was that the two things—listening to a record and going to a gig—were quite different. You don't want to hear a record when you go to a gig: you want something with a bit of energy."

Curtis was also happy with the production of the album and was impressed with Hannett's work.Hook conceded in 2006:

"It definitely didn't turn out sounding the way I wanted it ... But now I can see that Martin did a good job on it ... There's no two ways about it, Martin Hannett created the Joy Division sound." Hook also noted that he was able to hear Curtis's lyrics and Sumner's guitar parts for the first time on the record, because during gigs the band played too loudly.

According to the band, the album marked the start of a gradual turn in Yorke's songwriting from personal angst to the more cryptic lyrics and social and global themes that would come to dominate their later work. Most of the album was seen to continue the lyrical concerns of Pablo Honey, although in more mature fashion. The songs "My Iron Lung" and "Bullet Proof..I Wish I Was" have been compared to the band's later work, namely "Paranoid Android" and "Subterranean Homesick Alien", respectively. "Fake Plastic Trees" was inspired by the commercial development of Canary Wharf and a performance by Jeff Buckley seen by Yorke, who inspired him to use falsetto."Sulk" was written as a response to the Hungerford massacre.According to Yorke, "Street Spirit (Fade Out)" was inspired by the book The Famished Road by Ben Okri and the music of R.E.M.

The Bends received critical acclaim in the United Kingdom. In her Guardian review, Caroline Sullivan wrote that Radiohead had "transformed themselves from nondescript guitar-beaters to potential arena-fillers ... the grandeur may eventually pall, as it has with U2, but it's been years since big bumptious rock sounded this emotional."

Dave Morrison of Select wrote that the album "captures and clarifies a much wider trawl of moods than Pablo Honey" and praised the band as "one of the UK's big league, big-rock assets".

Q described The Bends as a "powerful, bruised, majestically desperate record of frighteningly good songs", while the NME's Mark Sutherland hailed it as a "classic" and "the consummate, all-encompassing, continent-straddling '90s rock record".

Critical reception in the United States was mixed. Chuck Eddy of Spin was unimpressed, deeming much of the album "nodded-out nonsense mumble, not enough concrete emotion", while Kevin McKeough from the Chicago Tribune panned Yorke's lyrics as "self-absorbed" and the music as overblown and pretentious.

Writing in The Village Voice, Robert Christgau said that the guitar parts and expressions of angst come skillfully and naturally to the band but nonetheless lack depth: "The words achieve precisely the same pitch of aesthetic necessity as the music, which is none at all."A positive review in the American press came from the Los Angeles Times' Sandy Morris, who described Yorke as "almost as enticingly enigmatic as Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan, though of a more delicate constitution".

In 1997, Jonny Greenwood said The Bends had been a "turning point" for Radiohead: "It started appearing in people's [best of] polls for the end of the year. That's when it started to feel like we made the right choice about being a band."Selway said The Bends was the album where, with collaboration from Donwood, the "Radiohead aesthetic" began.

When opening track “Planet Telex” was released as a split single with “High and Dry”, it pointed toward the future, but no one, perhaps not even Radiohead, knew it yet. The loops, the keyboards, the studio flourishes, the shimmering tone, and the abstract lyrics — all, in retrospect, point to the band’s future. There was a haphazardness to the way this song came together. Story goes, the band laid that record down in one night, after a night of drinking. Thom Yorke was lying on the floor as he recorded the vocals (in one take). And they were going to call the song “Planet Xerox” before they realized it was trademarked.

One thing they were sure of was that they didn’t want to create a second Pablo Honey. Although The Bends still bears the influence of grunge and ’80s indie rock, musically it was a massive leap. The guitar playing became more complex and mercurial, oscillating between placid strums and frenetic freak-outs. We see this duality in a song like “Nice Dream” starting with chords and lyrics by Yorke before being expanded and complicated by Johnny Greenwood and Ed O’Brien. You can hear this tendency to **** up (in a good way) a would-be straightforward song across the record, particularly in tracks like “My Iron Lung”, which purposefully flouts the constraints of a song like “Creep”.

On The Bends, Radiohead were not content — to be another Britpop band, to be a one-hit wonder, to be what they were last year, last month, last minute. That restlessness has ironically been a major factor in the band’s consistency over the years — an unwillingness to settle, as Thom Yorke said shortly after the release of Kid A, “The best things are often those that go somewhere you weren’t expecting.”

Colour crystallized the sound that would become the Foo Fighters standard, less grungy and more poppy without losing its arena-rock heft, a fertile midpoint between Grohl’s considerable pop instincts and his shrieking hardcore roots. And it ventured beyond that template too, successfully toying with all sorts of other styles while maintaining Grohl’s emerging voice. Perhaps Grohl noticed the jangly pop tune “Big Me,” an outlier on the first Foos record, had become its biggest hit, or maybe the success of the first album encouraged him to realize the full scope of his ambitions. Whatever the reason, The Colour And The Shape significantly broadened this band’s horizons: One three-song stretch offers a shuffling acoustic ditty (“See You”), a screaming Pixies sendup (“Enough Space”), and a gargantuan power ballad (“February Stars”). More lightweight forms of balladry manifest on lo-fi lullaby “Doll,” dreamy slowdance “Walking After You,” and “Up In Arms,” which eventually blooms into a power-pop burner.

Many of the lyrics address the dissolution of Grohl's marriage to Jennifer Youngblood during the winter of 1996, which Grohl said had been "the winter of my discontent."The album's track sequence reflects this sentiment, chronicling his change from chaos to newfound happiness. Grohl admitted the lyrics of the previous album had been "obscure" and "nonsense," but Norton challenged Grohl to write lyrics that were more meaningful and comprehensible. Grohl delved deeper into his feelings with the lyrics and said

"there was a new freedom: 'Wow, I can actually write about things I feel strongly about and things that mean something to me and things I wouldn't normally say in everyday conversation.'"

The frontman stated that the experience was "kind of liberating," comparing the album to going to a weekly visit to the therapist "and then the rest of the week feel pretty good about everything." Grohl also found new strength in his singing, overcoming insecurities he had about his singing voice on the debut.Three types of songs permeate the record: ballads, up-tempo tracks and combinations of the two. Grohl felt they were representative of the specific emotions he would feel after the divorce.

From its pantheon-level guitar riffs to its expertly escalating drama to its iconic Michel Gondry-directed music video — “Everlong” endures as not just Foo Fighters’ signature song but one of the greatest songs in rock history.  Grohl penned the track at a converted barn that had been turned into a studio just outside of Seattle. He was staying in the secluded house at the studio during his separation. During a break in recording, he returned home to Virginia where he completed the track.

Speaking with Kerrang, he stated, "I knew it was a cool song, but I didn't think it would be the one song by which most people recognize the band." According to the vocalist, he penned the track about a girl he'd fallen for. "It was basically about being connected to someone so much that not only do you love them physically and spiritually, but when you sing along with them, you harmonize perfectly," said Grohl.

The album was nominated for Best Rock Album at the 1998 Grammy Awards and as of 2012, the disc had gone double-platinum for sales, making it their top-selling disc.

Hotel California went on to top the charts for eight nonconsecutive weeks, and is now the third best-selling album of all time, having been certified 26-times Platinum by the RIAA for sales and streams of more than 26 million copies.
Over the years, the Eagles have included most of the Hotel California album in their concert setlists, including such classic album tracks as "Wasted Time," "Victim Of Love," and "Pretty Maids All In A Row."

Village Voice critic Robert Christgau felt it was their "most substantial if not their most enjoyable LP", while Charley Walters of Rolling Stone felt it showcased "both the best and worst tendencies of Los Angeles-situated rock". Both critics picked up on the album's California themes – Christgau remarking that while it may in places be "pretentious and condescending" and that "Don Henley is incapable of conveying a mental state as complex as self-criticism", the band couldn't have written the songs on side one "without caring about their California theme down deep";Walters in contrast felt the "lyrics present a convincing and unflattering portrait of the milieu itself", and that Don Henley's vocals express well "the weary disgust of a victim (or observer) of the region's luxurious excess".

Billboard gave the album high praise: "The casually beautiful, quietly-intense multileveled vocal harmonies and brilliant original songs that meld solid emotional words with lovely melody lines are all back in force, keeping the Eagles at the acme of acoustic electric soft rock."

Loveless has been influential on a large number of genres and artists. The album is built around walls of layered guitar noise from MBV mastermind Kevin Shields, with both his and Bilinda Butcher’s vocals buried in the mix and acting as another instrument. When You Sleep, Soon, Sometimes and Blown A Wish became staples of indie club nights during the nineties.

Clash called the album "the magnum opus of the shoegazing genre ... it raised the bar so high that it subsequently collapsed under its own weight", leading to the dissipation of the style.

Metro Times called the album "the high-water mark of shoegaze", writing that its "dense production and hypnotic atmosphere drugged listeners with its sound's lovely oxymoron: at once hard and soft, up-tempo and languid, lascivious and frigid." Paul Lester of The Guardian called it "the Pet Sounds of UK avant-rock."

Musician Brian Eno said that "Soon" "set a new standard for pop. It's the vaguest music ever to have been a hit." Robert Smith of the Cure said, "[My Bloody Valentine] was the first band I heard who quite clearly pissed all over us, and their album Loveless is certainly one of my all-time three favourite records. It's the sound of someone [Shields] who is so driven that they're demented. And the fact that they spent so much time and money on it is so excellent."

 Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins told Spin: "It's rare in guitar-based music that somebody does something new [...] At the time, everybody was like, 'How the **** are they doing this?' And, of course, it's way simpler than anybody would imagine."

Greg Puciato of The Dillinger Escape Plan named Loveless one of the albums that changed his life, recalling: "When I was younger, I only listened to riffs and vocals and a more traditional style of composition. So when I heard this My Bloody Valentine record it was so abstract and strange in artistic terms that it ended up taking me on other musical paths."

In 2014 for the documentary Beautiful Noise, Alan McGee, Creation co-founder, said about the album, "people were talking about it as if it was Beethoven's 7th or 8th symphony. No. It's some guy that can't finish a record that took three years ... Loveless is ****ing overrated as ****."

The album features experimental performance sensibilities and controversial lyrical topics, including drug abuse, prostitution, sadomasochism and sexual deviancy.

Upon release, The Velvet Underground & Nico was largely unsuccessful and a financial failure. The album's controversial content led to its almost instantaneous ban from various record stores, many radio stations refused to play it, and magazines refused to carry advertisements for it. Its lack of success can also be attributed to Verve, who failed to promote or distribute the album with anything but modest attention.

However, Richie Unterberger of AllMusic also notes that:

...the music was simply too daring to fit onto commercial radio; "underground" rock radio was barely getting started at this point, and in any case may well have overlooked the record at a time when psychedelic music was approaching its peak.

The critical world initially took little notice of the album. One of the few print reviews of the album in 1967 was a mostly positive review in the second issue of Vibrations, a small rock music magazine.The review described the music as "a full-fledged attack on the ears and on the brain" and noted the dark lyrics.

A decade after its release, The Velvet Underground & Nico began to attract wide praise from rock critics. Christgau wrote in his 1977 retrospective review for The Village Voice that the record had been difficult to understand in 1967, "which is probably why people are still learning from it. It sounds intermittently crude, thin, and pretentious at first, but it never stops getting better."

Many subgenres of rock music and forms of alternative music were informed by the album, including art rock, punk, garage, shoegazing, goth, and indie. In 1982, musician Brian Eno stated that while the album initially sold approximately only 30,000 copies, "everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band."

In 2003, it ranked 13th on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time", and in 2006, it was inducted into the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress.

Arghus wrote: »

Everybody should just post up their personal top 10's at the end.

It was a one per band situation for me too, just felt like the right way to do it.