Random Album Recommendations

Album: Fulfillingness' First Finale (1973)
Artist: Stevie Wonder
Comment: This album was made just after Talking Book and Innervisions and before Songs in the Key of Life, and it's better than all of them. There is a coherent emotional narrative that runs through the whole album, though apparently I'm the only one who hears it.  "Please Don't Go" is the greatest song ever, and it's not on any of his compliation CDs that I know of which kills me.


Album: Ring-A-Ding Ding! (1961)
Artist: Frank Sinatra
Comment: The one album Sinatra made with arranger Johnny Mandel, who was admittedly just ripping off two other more famous Sinatra arrangers (Nelson Riddle and Billy May) but making everything slightly harder and brassier.  Sinatra at the peak of his power and cockiness.  This music works for every conceivable mood you could ever be in.  A close second on my list of favorite Sinatra albums is Come Dance With Me.


Album: Everything Must Go (1996)
Aritst: Manic Street Preachers
Comment: No one's heard of these guys in the US.  They're very very good and this is their best album (along with The Holy Bible which is quite different and not for everybody).  Co-lyricist/rhythm guitarist Richey James dropped off the face of the earth when they started working on this album, so half the songs use his lyrics and the other half indirectly address his disappearance.  It's all solid guitar-based rock and superb songwriting, and there are good examples of what I consider essential, non-gratuitous string arrangements.


Album: Security (1984)
Artist: Peter Gabriel
Comment: He was doing the world music thing before it was cool, but he was using it as an expressive tool rather than just a sonic novelty.  Each song on this album is its own rich world, flourishing under the terms it defines for itself.  The results are either terrifying or sublime or both.  Also highly recommended: Peter Gabriel 3 (the one with his face melting on the cover) and So -- I consider that progression of three albums the greatest string in the history of pop music aside from the Beatles Rubber Soul/Revolver/Sgt. Pepper's.


Album: Night Beat (1963)
Artist: Sam Cooke
Comment: One of the greatest soul voices ever making a "concept" album a la Sinatra's Capitol albums.  The originals blend in with the standards so seamlessly that you can't tell you haven't heard them before (in a good way).  I don't know anyone who wouldn't like this album. 


Album: Selmasongs (2000)
Artist: Bjork
Comment: It's short, and it's a soundtrack album, but that makes it unified and consistent, and it's the best use of an orchestra in this idiom I've ever heard.  The songs are made up exclusively of orchestra, sampled beats/noises, and singing.  The first track may seem like a dispensable instrumental, but the way it is transformed by the last track makes it all worth it.  The movie for which the songs were written is definitely elevated by the songs, but the songs are not necessarily elevated by the movie -- the CD is worth appreciating on its own terms.  I enjoyed the "counting" song ("107 Steps") more when I didn't know the context of the steps she was counting.


Album: Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs (1970)
Artist: Derek and the Dominoes
Comment: Undoubtedly Eric Clapton's masterpiece, I would argue that this is the greatest double album ever made.   Better than the White Album, better than Exile on Main Street, better than Songs In The Key of Life.  You heard me.  For those of you unfamiliar with the story behind this album: Cream had bitterly broken up, the supergroup Blind Faith with Stevie Winwood had collapsed after one album, Clapton was obsessedly in love with George Harrison's wife Patti, and he was in the late stages of a severe heroin addiction which would take him two years of near-seclusion to get clean from.  After performing anonymously on George Harrison's epic "All Things Must Pass" album, he took that band's rhythm section, added the GREAT GREAT blues slide-guitar player Duane Allman, and recorded this album of originals and blues standards with a very palpable, terrifying, and heartbreaking desperation.  Bobby Whitlock, the organ player, co-wrote many of the originals and added his manic, soulful high backing vocals to pretty much everything on the album, acting as Paul McCartney to Clapton's John Lennon.  (And the very appropriately sad and understated final track is Whitlock's entirely.)  The album would be great just from listening to Duane Allman and Clapton push each other to virtuousic heights, and it is endlessly rewarding to listen to the album focusing exclusively on each guitarist's playing.  But the transcendent feature is Clapton's (and Whitlock's) hopeless, unrequited passion.  It's like watching someone kill themselves right in front of you.


Album: Rubber Soul (1965)
Artist: The Beatles
Comment: Obviously I'd recommend everything the Beatles ever did, but this album more than the others defines the "Beatles sound" to me: the ringing crunch of the guitars; the square drum fills; the busy bass lines; the three-part vocal harmonies on everything.  I always felt like Paul "framed" the band's sound because of his bass playing on the bottom and his high vocals on the top -- the value of such a high voice always willing to add harmony to anything -- and that John and his voice and songs were the core.  John's love songs on this album had reached levels of sophistication which he would never surpass ("Norwegian Wood", "Girl"), and in fact he didn't write another romantic love song for years.  Paul, I think, was finally "catching up" to John as a songwriter at this point, and this is the first album where I feel like his contributions on the subject ("You Won't See Me", "I'm Looking Through You") don't feel incongruous in the flow of the album.  George's two songs are also, for the first time, up to par with the others.  (I always felt that George wasn't confident in his songwriting until he saw the other two move away from conventional sappy love songs, a subject he never seemed comfortable handling.  Of course he would then go on to write the greatest conventional sappy love song in the whole Beatles catalog, "Something".)  Hell even the Ringo song doesn't suck.  The purity of the sound and the songwriting makes this their best album for me; there's no weirdness-for-weirdness-sake which affects some of their later albums.


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