Perfect Albums: My Picks
Jason Kuznicki on Dec 7th 2006
Underworld, Beaucoup Fish
Yes, yes, I know: Sometime right around the millennium, techno music crawled into a back alley behind a nightclub in East London, choked on its own pomposity, and died in a messy puddle of obscure subgenres. (Electroclash, anyone?) But this one album makes the whole experiment worthwhile. I could listen to Beaucoup Fish — the American version or the U.K., I have both — for hours on end. Every song is perfect. Every moment is perfect (though I particularly like the inspired instant of silence before the final takeoff in “Cups,” which is somehow beyond perfect).
Neko Case, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood
I took a while to come around to this one. Scott bought it after hearing Neko Case on NPR; he was blown away, even by what the artist herself admitted was a pretty crummy recording. Case describes her music as “country noir,” but to my ear it sounds a lot like early R.E.M. with a female vocalist and vastly more interesting instrumentation (Admit it: Some of those early R.E.M. albums were pretty trite, especially the ones that used the same guitar solo again and again and again.)
I tend to demand interesting lyrics from my music, and this one delivers. My favorite track is “Widow’s Toast,” and here are the lyrics:
Specters move like pilot flames
Their widows toast at St. Angel
Better times collide with now
The tears were warm, I feel them still
They heat to vapor and disperse
And cloud our eyes with weary glazeYou raise your glass and may exclaim
“I’ll put my hands on the truth by God”
But it’s faster, love, than you and me
Faster than the speed of gravity
That’s how it catches you from falling
And how it always, always slips awaySpecters move like pilot flames
Their widows toast at St. Angel
Better times collide with now
And better times are coming still.
I love the way that it almost imperceptibly likens truth to orbit: It’s a process of continual approach, and continual falling away. Like love. Perfect.
The Fiery Furnaces, Blueberry Boat
When we first got this album, we put it in the stereo and then began to talk about something else.
We tried in vain, because you can’t ignore the Fiery Furnaces. They intrude, no matter what you’re doing. It’s also possible that you’ll despise them; they’re very much a love-em-or-hate-em band. If you like some of the quirkier prog rock acts, if you have a bent for odd word games and obscure jargon, and if you don’t mind the occasional (oh wow I’m sounding geeky!) wurlitzer… Then try this album.
Tortoise, Millions Now Living Will Never Die
Subtle. Mellow. Trippy. And perfect. I don’t even know the names of the songs, because I never — I mean never ever — play just one song on this album. It’s always the whole album, all the way through.
…and, just to prove that I’m not all cooler-than-thou indie and techno…
U2, The Joshua Tree.
This album really needs no introduction. Everyone has heard it, whether they realize it or not, and I never get tired of it. In the discussion going on behind the scenes, the Big Four disagreed on this one: Is “Bullet the Blue Sky” a perfection-killer? I don’t think so, obviously, but I’d be willing to entertain a discussion in the comments.
(While I’m at it, I should note that some of the very best music ever made has been on some jaggedly imperfect albums. Consider the Velvet Underground, which never made anything without at least two or three tracks of unlistenable dreck. Or Radiohead’s OK Computer, which I’m pretty sure was an act of deliberate perfection self-sabotage.)
Filed in The Bistro
Having grown up in large part in the lower desert of California, I’ve long enjoyed Joshua Tree in part because it so perfectly captures the feeling of driving through the desert–particularly the first three songs. And the album accomplishes something that I think is really unique: it is genuinely beautiful. As I see it, beauty has never been a particular goal of rock music. Energy, vitality, fun, ruggedness, anger–all sorts of other emotional tones and values have been well represented in rock, but beauty? It seems that rock musicians, when they want to express beauty, go back into some other genre instead, performing covers of jazz tunes, for instance. Joshua Tree has genuinely beautiful music on it. But, as you said, the deal-breaker for me is “Bullet The Blue Sky,” which disrupts the flow of the album completely. As with “Graveyard Train” on Bayou Country, it’s good–but out of place, I think.
Your other picks? Well, I’ve never heard of them, cause I’m an old fuddy duddy.
Love the thread:
1. Gotta agree with Moving Pictures by Rush, of course.
2. “August and Everything After” by Counting Crows. Totally and completely perfect, and a debut album too.
3. Indigo Girls, “Swamp Ophelia” Beautiful music and beautifully engineered.
4. REM “Automatic for the People” - Yes, “Ignoreland” sucks but I don’t care. The rest of this album is note perfect
5. And finally the best band you never heard of - The Tragically Hip “Trouble at the Henhouse”. If you don’t know the Hip, you should.
An old fuddy duddy at, what, 28? Don’t worry, I was already a curmudgeon at that age too.
Funny, “Bullet the Blue Sky” is my favorite song on Joshua Tree, but I guess you’re right, it doesn’t really fit with the rest.
And I think Radiohead’s rebellious “self-sabotage” on OK Computer actually makes the album more perfect. Really, I think from the beginning of The Bends (to this day, I think Radiohead’s best song is “My Iron Lung”) to the end of Kid A, Radiohead did little wrong.
Oh, and check out Soul Coughing’s “Ruby Vroom,” which is pretty close to perfect too (even the final song, “Janine,” though silly, fits perfectly).
As one who falls in love with albums as a rule, I’m thrilled with this thread!
OK Computer is sabotaged only if your definition of “perfect” has to include “feel-good.” An artistic statement need not have that as its raison d’etre, and I submit that OK Computer’s raison d’etre is closer to “feel bad.” I’m always annoyed when Jason skip the “bad” track, and always listen to it when he’s not there :)
On that note, I agree with several of Jason’s picks, Fox Brings the Flood in particular, of course, and Tortoise. Some that I’d pick would be:
Nine Inch Nails, The Downward Spiral
I’m not the angsty teen I once was, but still, when I put this album in, I want to hear it all the way through, no stopping–it’s produced to be a single track, really, which is a primary complaint of mine with Ipods. They break each track apart from its neighbors. Feel-good? Not exactly–more like “feel strong in weakness,” which is a statement worth making in our society.
Pretty Hate Machine had no bad songs on it either, but it doen’t have that same album feel.
I’ll second Steve’s pick of “August and Everything After.”
Enya, Watermark
Her later albums have been increasingly trite, but Watermark gets just the right balance of traditional, classical norms and exoticism. My brother refers to that album as “imagination music.” I have often put this album on Repeat Forever.
I think the Indigo Girls debut album has no problems at all; I love every song.
And, the most imperfect album that I still want to hear all the way through or not at all is the Microphones “The Glow, Pt. II”. I think one critic said that the first song is the most incredibly perfect song ever recorded, and then he goes and ruins the album with all the songs after it. But to me it has this consistent atmosphere of an amateur trying his darnedest to describe his inner state only when you hear it as a unit.
OK, back to work!
I’m just going to mention one here, one most of you don’t know. “Definition” by CHRYSALIS, a late 60s band that put out only the one album, got lost in the mGM collapse, and has steadily maintained a strong cadre of friends who would put it among the five best rock albums ever — yes I am one. (It was finally released on a CD a few years back, and the ‘perfection’ only covers the first 12 cuts — the original album. The others were songs that didn’t make it in, and two earlier versions of songs that did.)
I have to quote a few lyrics here — the music is exceptional as well — with psychedelic, blues, middle eastern, and other elements in the mix, and there’s division on the vocals with some people such as Martin Rundkvist and I loving them, others thinking they are the one weak spot — but it is the incredible lyrics that make the album.
From “Fitzpatrick Swanson”
“At dawn with a rake
Fitzpatrick Swanson
Chases the children away
From his Lawn
Paring his nails with the point of a knife
Wondering what has become of his life…”
From “Lacewing”
Sadly, the lacewing
Is pacing the walls
Upside down in a trance,
Some kind of dance
He got too close to the
Light and it burned him
He’s cleaning his wings.
Strange-looking things
Fly at my head in the dawn
Oh how I dread to go
On — Endless clock towers
Gape at the sky
And both hands point straight down
Into the ground…
From “Baby Let Me Show You Where I live”
“There’s the tree where I built my first
House. I wanted it there,
Up in the air
Where I could see
All around
And nobody nailed to the ground
Could get to me…
And finally — only because I have to stop, I could quote every lyric on the album
From “Father’s Getting Old”
“Waiting for the big bands to
Come back, he flips the tv
Switch to Channel 5 and
Rushes out to get a beer
Sits and drinks it while
He waits for them to
Start the ball game
Wonders why he doesn’t
Recognize the players’ names this year
Father’s getting old.
Yesterday he used to know
The score of every game
Back to 23 or 24
Now he can’t remember where
He left his only pipe
Guess it doesn’t matter anyway…
And those don’t even include “Cynthia Gerome” (When I was showing up at poetry readings the lyrics to this song were the only piece i ever recited that I hadn’t written) or the off the wall “Dr. Root’s Garden,” the happiest song about the end of the world I know. (The liner notes on the CD revealed that there really was a Dr. Root, a teacher of Spider Barbour, the writer of the songs, he DID have a garden, where Spider worked in college, and that, meeting him some years later, Dr. Root told him he hadn’t forgotten but had forgiven. “Maybe he just liked the tune.”)
If you can find it, enjoy.
(No, i have no connection to the group, just am a fan, and with these lyrics, can you blame me.)