The Chaos Theory of post-relativity physics tell us of Strange Attractors — inexplicable higher-order functions that provide a kind of boundary or shape or structural dynamic for chaos systems — and this model fits R. The essential character of R. But it is grounded in an implicit order: the rhythmic and melodic deep structures of North Mississippi blues.
It is Radiohead taking everything about the genre, everything about themselves as a group, all the press, marketing, and corporate greed, dousing it with gasoline and breathlessly lighting the match. The instrumentation is complex, inspired by everything from Aphex Twin to Charlie Mingus. The lyrics are intentionally cryptic for some lyrics Yorke reportedly cut up words and phrases and drew from a hat and at times nearly inaudible.
The combination, however, captures not just the mood of the current times, but of those to come. The album offers nowhere to stand, nothing concrete to grasp, only fleeting thoughts and questions, but very intentionally so. Swedish hardcore band - check.
The most influential hardcore album ever made - likely. Visceral, vein-popping energy and focus - yup. Best served on a spinning platter - but of course. Few albums so completely sum up a genre of music as Exile On Main St.
Rebellion, check. On the run from the taxman the band wrote and recorded a large portion of the album in the basement of rented villa in southern France. Drugs, check. Lots of heroine. Love, check. Mick Jagger got married during the making of the album. An album best viewed as a piece of art and an example of a band going in a completely different direction than anyone at the time and succeeding…you need this album. In the lukewarm bathwater of the early s music scene, The Strokes came in and lit a fire.
Their debut album pulls all the right energy from 70s and 80s garage rock, while feeling at home in the modern NYC. With the above album cover deemed too racy for America, the band switched up the domestic version prior to release the rest of the world got the good stuff. It contains people, places, and events relative to the title. The songs are not about the state explicitly; they just make a reference to the state in one way sometimes direct, often indirect or another.
Written and recorded after a move to rural New York with his wife, Moondance is the album that put the Northern Irish singer-songwriter on the map. Blending jazz, soul, rock, and blues, the album contains a nostalgia that is easier to feel than describe.
Some may scoff at the notion of putting such a young album on a list of this caliber…scoff on, we stand by it. Drawing on bouts of paranoia and depression following their Slave Ambient tour, lead singer Adam Granduciel wrote his way through it.
The result is a more personal, razor-sharp style that serves as the backbone of an album that feels equally at home in any decade in the past 40 years…in other words, timeless. No pretense, just real music with a humanness that jumps off the vinyl. If listening to music on vinyl is a mild rebellion against the digital age, then Elephant , the fourth studio album by The White Stripes, is the French Revolution. Jack and Meg White chose to intentionally avoid modern recording technology or computers in the production process using an eight-track tape machine and decades-old gear while laying down the album in just two weeks.
The story of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is the classic tale of the artist triumphing over an increasingly bureaucratic and money-hungry record label. After a grueling year in the studio they handed the album over to Reprise Records only to have them refuse to release it without major changes. This put the label in an awkward and soon very public position that eventually led to the album rights being transferred back to Wilco, who were then free to take it elsewhere.
This is an album to own not just because of its musical beauty and integrity, but because of what it represents — artistic conviction in an era too often marked by compromise and apathy. Fed by the canned goods stolen by Ghostface from the local corner store, this was the Clan when they were still young and hungry, promising world takeover and believing it was possible.
To love rap means to have 36 Chambers in your collection. To love 36 Chambers means to know a time in rap history when many of the players had no certainty of fame and riches, but knew that they loved the game.
Below is a list of 52 albums we consider essential to own on vinyl due to a variety of factors to include: sound, production, mastering, album artwork, special features, etc. Blur — Think Tank Damon Albarn is known for a myriad of successes throughout his career that include leading the widely popular band Blur in the s through the early s, as well as his genius work as the unsuspecting leader of Gorrillaz starting in Bob Dylan — Blonde on Blonde We could have included ten Bob Dylan records because his sound lends itself so well to the vinyl format, but Blonde on Blonde is an easy standout even among his catalog.
Daft Punk - Random Access Memories To enter into the world of Daft Punk is to find yourself in a parallel world where man and robot alien? Within these entrancing soundscapes, stray ruminations float to the surface. Cut off from her usual muses—her crew and the club—Charli XCX needed a different kind of community space to inspire her this year.
The resulting songs pierce her party girl persona with something more sentimental—and sometimes quotidian—but, true to form, she buoyed the vibe with sugar-rush hooks and blowout beats. Never before has eating cereal sounded like such a riot. In February, it was a memorable yet conventional track Atlanta rap album.
But with the addition of six songs on the deluxe edition in May, the record kicked dirt on the arbitrary and outdated rules of rap albums. Baby can jump from whining about middle-school crushes to name-dropping denim brands to attempting to encapsulate one of the most tense and unjust moments of our lifetimes.
Twentieth-century listeners imagined the music of the next millennium as a harsh, mechanistic grind or a frenzy of twitchy glitches. Afrobeats is a prime example of the future-pop that actually transpired, a hyper-digital sound far easier and oozier on the ear.
But these Fela-like or Marley-esque moments tend to melt into the glide-and-glisten of the sound. Twice as Tall triumphs not so much for its substance but as a shimmering surface, a landslide victory for the politics of pleasure.
Using only her transmuted and multi-layered vocals, the Berlin-based composer creates a dense architecture where choral music and meditative techno meet. While some vocal lines emulate pulsing bass and celestial synth, the prevailing current is a surging chorus of near-language, struck through with the unmistakable trembles and notches of a human voice. Look , Pramuk seems to declare, at how much we contain. Eventually, they were shared on Instagram by Gibbs himself, completing an utterly contemporary loop of art and life.
Room for the Moon feels like a safe place to hide from mounting anxiety. So as she thrashes between anti-capitalist bops and introspective anthems, Sawayama assumes the role of both pop diva and pop rebel, subverting expectations of what the genre could and should stand for. For their exquisite follow-up Flower of Devotion , Dehd upgraded to a proper studio, refining their gritty alchemy without scrubbing it too clean.
Kempf and Balla trade yearning, hiccupy vocals across riffs that reverberate like heat waves off asphalt, as McGrady thuds away through the humid air. Duval Timothy is constantly dismantling to rebuild on Help , a gorgeous, crestfallen record about possession and healing. His songs can be layered and minimal, lingual and graphic, natural and mechanical—all coming together in a work that both registers the omnipotence of imperial history and documents an ongoing restoration process.
Hannah Read can make a melody out of anything. Throughout Hannah , her fifth album as Lomelda, her expressive warble blooms and shrinks into strange and beautiful phrasings, heightening their meaning. She sings like no one else in indie rock, as though she is guided by a golden energy from within.
New Orleans electro-punks Special Interest see catharsis in demolition. Ka has spent his 40s laboring over how to animate the ghosts of his home. Singer-songwriter Alex Stoitsiadis was supposed to be hollering his hooks over melodic post-hardcore guitars in roiling cap clubs, and the scenes of heartbreak he described were supposed to be playing out for listeners in real life.
The internet has plenty of playlists full of pillowy background noise, built for tuning out while you dig into the task at hand. Workaround inverts that dynamic: By requiring sustained close attention to the thumps and shimmers in your headphones, it offers something truly meditative. They are mostly untitled, proceed according to a single tempo across the whole album, and feature a drastically limited instrumental palette.
Rarely does a particular sound last longer than a single beat. There is almost no reverb. But if you listen closely, a universe might open in the split-second space between two hi-hats. Synth stabs that at first seem uniform take on entirely new shapes with every repetition. Each element, shorn of everything extraneous, glows with significance. There had been no-nonsense women country stars before, of course, but Kitty Wells and Patsy Cline to choose just two obvious antecedents never had a gold album.
And Lynn's new commercial clout was a direct result of her songwriting talent: Her name is on the hit that anchors this album, which not only established her as a creative force but opened up new possibilities in a male-dominated market for generation of female country tunesmiths to follow, from Dolly Parton to Taylor Swift.
The engineers took the heart and soul of the concept and translated it into metal designed to go like nothing else. Pepper's came out, the entire Yale and Harvard student body bought copies. Pepper's wasn't the first album to blend rock music with high art, but it was probably the first time that musicians of the Beatles' stature and popularity if there even were musicians of their stature and popularity before them decided to turn their back so completely on what had made them famous.
Put positively, it was the first time the Beatles were free of the responsibility of being the Beatles. The irony is that no other album cemented them so firmly in the public's mind.
Listened to with five decades of perspective, the most shocking aspect of the Velvet Underground's debut aren't its taboo-busting songs about hard drugs and hard sex, but the songs themselves. And sometimes the noise. Traces of the album that launched a thousand bands can be found in Reed's contemporaries like David Bowie and Iggy Pop, as well as successive generations of snotty aesthetes from proto-punks, punks, post-punks and art-rockers from Jonathan Richman and Patti Smith, to R.
For the album widely considered the first commercial LP to be composed of electronic music, musician Jean-Jacques Perrey's synthesizer prowess was harnessed by arranger Gershon Kingsley's pop sensibilities. They positioned themselves as nothing less than messengers from the future: "Here is the electronic 'Au Go Go' that might be heard soon from the juke boxes at the interplanetary way stations where spaceships make their rest stops," read the liner notes.
As it turned out, they were right. Well, not about the spaceship rest stops, but about what giddy, playful compositions like "Electronic Can-Can" and "Computer In Love" presaged — namely, a future where Daft Punk and Dr. Luke defined the parameters as much as any axe-wielding rocker, thanks to the Moog, the Ondioline and their digital descendants being just as likely to create chart-topping hits as guitars. Released in June , Frank Zappa's major-label debut was only rock's second double album Bob Dylan released Blonde on Blonde a month earlier but it set a higher bar for conceptual audacity.
A sardonic, satirical, weirdly entertaining predecessor to kitchen-sink productions such as Sgt. Pop parodies like "Wowie Zowie" may not necessarily stand the test of time, but Zappa's tribal frenzies and consumerist parodies hey there, "Weird Al" resonate still. P et Sounds' emotional ambiguities and rich arrangements brought a through-line of maturity to the adolescent fun, fun, fun of early rock. The influence of Pet Sounds' huge palette of strings, horns, accordions, mandolins, vibraphones and harmonies could be heard almost instantly, not least via Beach Boys super-fan Paul McCartney, who said that "God Only Knows" spurred the Beatles' Sgt.
A primo reference point for Radiohead, Nick Drake, My Bloody Valentine and anyone else looking to evoke the eternal teenage bedroom of the mind. The Beatles didn't stop touring till the summer of , but a year earlier, on Rubber Soul , you can hear them deciding to make the recording studio their home.
The harmonies were trickier, the recording techniques more considered, and the instrumentation more varied as the band expanded upon the standard rock band format they'd established.
Maybe the sitar stood out the most at the time, but dig all those pianos, often electronically tweaked, most notably to impersonate a harpsichord on "In My Life. You can say this represents "maturity," call it "art" or credit it for moving rock away from singles to album-length statements — but regardless Rubber Soul accelerated popular music's creative arms race, driving competitors like the Stones, the Beach Boys and Dylan to dismantle expectations and create new ones. Here is where white American kids got the notion they could play the blues.
This Chicago quintet featured two stunning guitarists in Elvin Bishop and Mike Bloomfield — the latter, an early version of the skills-centric "guitar hero" model.
Their debut album only reached Number on the Billboard charts but it has reverberated through the decades. Backed by Howlin' Wolf's rhythm section bassist Jerome Arnold and drummer Sam Lay , with Mark Naftalin on organ, Bloomfield played piercing runs against Bishop's driving rhythm, while Butterfield laid down storming harmonica and sang with authentic passion.
Bloomfield played on Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited the same year the album was released, but his boundless talent was marred by years of drug addiction. He died of a cocaine overdose in Sure, Dylan could have invented "folk rock" if he wanted to, but he left the construction of lush, profitable acoustic-electric pop to inspired followers like the Byrds.
This also meant the few snobs still slotting all that electric pop racket as kiddie music had to get hip. The lyrics on his fifth album seemed to garble every bit of language Dylan had ever read or heard or otherwise ingested — from French symbolism to beatnik jive to advertising slogans to bad jokes to Old Testament verses to blues usages — into a frenzy of effusion, its dynamic ingenuity more important than any literal meaning you could discern.
Bringing It All Back Home wasn't great because it showed rock lyrics could be "poetry," it was great because it showed rock lyrics could be anything. Syd Nathan, the head of King Records, thought it was a lousy idea. So James personally financed the recording of this blazing half-hour set at the storied Harlem theater, and soon radio DJs were playing entire LP sides on the air.
Had this historical document done nothing more than introduce the wider world to the majestic, violent grace of a James Brown live performance, that'd be plenty groundbreaking.
But as Live at the Apollo crossed over to the pop charts, it convinced both artists and businessmen that black music could thrive commercially not by making concessions to genteel white tastes. In , Ray Charles had more to offer country music than country music had to offer Ray Charles. As the struggle for civil rights raged down South, this self-conscious exercise in integration reminded fans on either side of the racial divide of their common musical roots. Yet by embracing the new string-laden Nashville Sound rather than looking backward to the honky-tonks, Ray's fusion was as modern as the title promised, not just expanding the audience for country but expanding the idea of what country could be for future musicians.
The album that launched "world music" in America and inspired an infinite number of parking lot and college lawn drum circles was created by Babatunde Olatunji, a Nigerian who moved to the United States in to attend college, and a cast of African-American singers and percussionists. And while Olatunji slipped below the radar during Afropop's s heyday, he opened the Grateful Dead's New Year's Eve show, introducing the Americas' most visible African-music presence to a new young audience.
Dave Brubeck was an ambassadorial figure who spent a chunk of his career bringing jazz to the world on behalf of the U. State Department — a job that, in , sent him to Turkey, where he heard some of the alluringly lopsided rhythms that ended up here.
In truth, Brubeck had been flirting with uncommon time for years, but it wasn't until Take Five that it became an organizing principle. In turn, he made something familiar seem exotic and raw: in this case, cool jazz by way of Eurasian folk.
Suddenly Istanbul seemed a little less farther away, or California, a little more. The saxophonist would get much further out what's that piano doing here? One of Ornette Coleman's greatest insights was that sometimes the most avant-garde music is also the truest to its roots, that you can demolish traditional musical architecture without abandoning the sounds that made those traditions once feel so alive.
The cohesive tone, overarching concept and wild popularity of Frank Sinatra's In the Wee Small Hours helped establish the emerging inch record format. The first Sinatra record specifically recorded to be a set of songs instead of a collection of singles helped solidify the idea of "album as a statement" — something we still adhere to in the digital age. After a healthy career singing charming, uptempo numbers for sweethearts of all ages, Sinatra decided to make an album so broken and lonely he couldn't even smile for the cover.
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