Essential Studio Albums

[epilogue]

Most days I probably say Revolver is the best Beatles album.

Excellent album. Top three for sure.

That's so tough because I'd say Revolver, Rubber Soul, Abbey Road, Sgt Pepper's, and the White Album are all top 3.

[liebzz]

for 1967 I suggest:

sam rivers Contours
don cherry Sympathy for Improvisors

Added

[liebzz]

The Beach Boys - Pet Sounds

Purportedly inspired by the direction the Beatles were taking circa Rubber Soul, The Beach Boys set out for Brian Wilson’s own masterpiece, a shockingly dark album that seems to trace the life of a budding relationship that quickly goes sour. The innocent and downright bouncy Wouldn’t It Be Nice slowly gives way to the more crushing Here Today and I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times. In the middle are wonderful and fascinating ruminations all bound together with studio experiments layered under infectious pop music. Sloop John B and God Only Knows are the most well worn of those tracks but don’t sleep on I Know There’s An Answer, or the sound collage that is Pet Sounds. This is unquestionably one helluva album.

The Essential Track: God Only Knows

Up Next: The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

[Kalevi]

Most days I probably say Revolver is the best Beatles album.

Excellent album. Top three for sure.

That's so tough because I'd say Revolver, Rubber Soul, Abbey Road, Sgt Pepper's, and the White Album are all top 3.

And let it be!

(I would put sgt pepper and abbey Rd a notch below the others personally)

[McParadigm]

Most days I probably say Revolver is the best Beatles album.

Excellent album. Top three for sure.

That's so tough because I'd say Revolver, Rubber Soul, Abbey Road, Sgt Pepper's, and the White Album are all top 3.

I can never get behind the idea of Abbey Road as a great album, because it’s so creatively stagnant. It sounds like exactly what it is: a professional and experienced album, made by brilliant people who are very purposefully keeping to their comfort zone. Not having difficult conversations. Not being daring. Not doing anything to upset the Apple cart (ha ha). An intentional revisiting a former glories, with no intention of initiating new creative journeys.

I think the get back project is far more remarkable, even though most of the music is not as good, because while it is also looking backwards… It is doing so to seek guidance and recalibration. It is creatively desperate, in a way that Abbey Road fears being.

Even the titles reflect this. The original project being called “get back,” as in “return.“ And then ultimately ending as “let it be”….as in, do not ever get back. You can’t.

Creative conversation, in the form of an album title. Interesting.

Versus “we wanted to call this album Everest, but couldn’t be bothered to fly out for a photo shoot, so let’s just call it Abbey Road because that’s where we already are.”

[liebzz]

And yet, and we’re not there yet, some of the music on Abbey Road is some of the most stunning work I think may have been recorded by anyone. I think its greatest strength is capturing an amalgam of what the band was capable of in part because it’s the last thing they would record together. That they still had a Something and a Here Comes the Sun in them while they hated each other is pretty incredible. And ending everything on a wild medley is perhaps a bit more daring than you give credit.

[liebzz]

The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

I had previously, for no good reason other than it being the weirdly consensus pick as the greatest album of all time, held a grudge against this album. Mostly I have never liked to be told what to like. And frankly, I do believe there are better Beatles albums out there. However, that’s not to say that this one isn’t a landmark, and truthfully it probably is very close to being their best (I can rank them, again, once we get through Let It Be). I mean, the first four songs alone are astoundingly great, and none of them are the best song on the album. There’s range here in the middle of the album that’s really mind boggling for a band to pull off so naturally. It doesn’t feel like whiplash at all jumping from Mr. Kite to Within You Without You to When I’m Sixty Four, but by all measures it should. What a transition to pull off without any awkwardness. And it finishes, again, with one of the all time great tracks in A Day in the Life. They really were pretty untouchable at this point in time.

The Essential Track: A Day in the Life

Up Next: The Grateful Dead

[Anders]

Love that album.

[Happy Trees]

The Animals - Animalisms

This actually came before Animalization, the US version of basically the same album, but it features four different tracks and I just needed to go back to it. The album is still fantastic, and this is highlighted in particular by Outcast, Squeeze Her - Tease Her, That’s All I Am to You, and She’ll Return It, all songs that have that raw Animals feel to them like the Doors churned through the blues. I am surely seeing that this is one of those bands that didn’t get their due in the long run.

The Essential Track: She’ll Return You

Animalisms UK = Animalization US
Animalism (singular) = entirely different and exclusive songs to US only - hard to find because there is an overlap with a change in management and record labels. One track written by Frank Zappa and two produced by him. Only officially released on CD once and god only knows what shit unauthorized version is up on Spotify, but it's a great album. https://www.discogs.com/release/8725079 ... -Animalism

[liebzz]

What a mess.

[tragabigzanda]

Top 10 maybe?
Hello Morning
Close Captioned
The Kill
Place/Position
Do You Like Me?
Latest Disgrace
Recap Modotti
Nightshop
Break
Life & Limb

I'd maybe bump Life & Limb for Epic Problem

[liebzz]

The Grateful Dead

This feels like a rare moment of stepping out from the British Invasion to other things bubbling on the surface getting into the later 60s. As we know, there were a few bands emerging from San Francisco, and the Grateful Dead would become a sub-genre of their own in due time. This album is sequenced in a way that almost feels like the birth of the jam band, from the poppier start of The Golden Road into bluesier territory on Beat It On Down the Line and Good Morning Little School Girl (this is classic Pigpen riffing), meandering into more spacey and noisy territory in Cold Rain and Snow, Cream Puff War, and Morning Dee, and then finally putting it all together into the jammed out epic Viola Lee Blues. Approaching it from these songs having been long worn, at least the live versions, for me over the past how many years, it all seems so young and fresh here. There’s not a weak song on this album, even if it’s a band in its infancy not yet reaching full potential.

The Essential Track: Viola Lee Blues

Up Next: The Mothers of Invention - We’re Only In It For The Money

[liebzz]

The Mothers of Invention - We’re Only
In It for the Money

If the Grateful Dead are the representatives of the emerging San Francisco scene, The Mothers of Invention are chaos actors mocking it all here, from the flower child San Fran thing to the British Invasion and the mock Sgt. Pepper’s album cover. Zappa and co. seem intent on taking things a bridge too far, and there’s some sonic genius happening amongst the loosely told story here. Absolutely Free, Flower Punk, and What’s the Ugliest Part of Your Body? (and the reprise) are full of inventiveness and this wonky sense of humor. Is it a bridge too far? My answer is a definite maybe.

The Essential Track: What’s the Ugliest Part of Your Body?

Up Next: The Velvet Underground & Nico

[liebzz]

The Velvet Underground & Nico

This is often cited as one of the more influential albums, and there’s certainly a through line to future bands like Sonic Youth that are obvious. This is also one of those albums I have heard dozens of times, so I am quite familiar already. It is incredibly creative for its time, mixing the songs that would fit on many albums at that time, like I’m Waiting For The Man, Run Run Run, and There She Goes Again, against songs that are really breaking through the pack with noise, like Femme Fatale, Venus in Furs, and the epic Heroin, which I have never taken but imagine the experience in the chaotic build and crest of this song. I have to be in the right mood for these guys, but when it clicks, it’s always an incredible experience through any of those early albums.

The Essential Track: Heroin

Up Next: John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers - Crusade

[Happy Trees]

The Mothers of Invention - We’re Only In It for the Money

If the Grateful Dead are the representatives of the emerging San Francisco scene, The Mothers of Invention are chaos actors mocking it all here, from the flower child San Fran thing to the British Invasion and the mock Sgt. Pepper’s album cover. Zappa and co. seem intent on taking things a bridge too far, and there’s some sonic genius happening amongst the loosely told story here. Absolutely Free, Flower Punk, and What’s the Ugliest Part of Your Body? (and the reprise) are full of inventiveness and this wonky sense of humor. Is it a bridge too far? My answer is a definite maybe.

It's not really a loosely told story. It fairly blatant what his message is.

This album is about the commercialization and exploitation of "peace and love and flower power" and American youth rebellion in general, which he believed really had sinister intent and was the beginnings of a future to be continuously determined by corporations and the powers that be, soon to be run by people who are a worse version of their parents after all.

He was right, but he was mocked for "taking it too far" like he always was. And now here we are.

By the way, that's Eric Clapton speaking at the beginning and Jimi Hendrix (in person) on the album cover.

[liebzz]

Fascinating. I will say I enjoyed this much more than the live album I complained about on the other thread. It may not be well within my preferences, but if his point is to challenge the listener, which I am sure it is, then I think that’s a success.

Your point is well made though. I was catching a bit of the tongue in cheek running off to San Fransisco part at the start, and then he has more of that corporate exploitation part around Flower Punk. I guess that is why I used the term loosely.

[tragabigzanda]

[Happy Trees]

Fascinating. I will say I enjoyed this much more than the live album I complained about on the other thread. It may not be well within my preferences, but if his point is to challenge the listener, which I am sure it is, then I think that’s a success.

Your point is well made though. I was catching a bit of the tongue in cheek running off to San Fransisco part at the start, and then he has more of that corporate exploitation part around Flower Punk. I guess that is why I used the term loosely.

I can't say that I'm wild about early Zappa musically (the musicianship). It's more about the ahead of his time, Nostradamus messages. And this album is no exception.

The Edinboro 1974 concert has it all. It's as bad-ass as Zappa gets musically and it doesn't go over the top in locker room lyrical content at all. And you also get full-on humorous interplay between the band members and between Zappa and the audience. And some of his best guitar playing.

If there was context, you would understand.

[liebzz]

John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers - Crusade

This Mayall album puts a bit more of the rock in British blues rock than the last we covered, which seemed more straightforward electric blues. Their cover of I Can’t Quit You Baby (soon thereafter also expertly covered by Led Zeppelin) was on point. Oh Pretty Woman is also pretty great here, though my favorite on this was The Death of J.B. Lenoir, which is probably the song that most deviates from the formula on this. This was a damn good group.

The Essential Track: The Death of J.B. Lenoir

Up Next: The Rolling Stones - Between the Buttons

[Happy Trees]

My dad is an enormous Zappa fan and this is his view too

It was actually Zappa's intent in his own words.

He would frequently give college lectures in the US and Europe in the late 60's and early 70's. During Q & A periods, he would be confronted for being a hypocrite or a traitor and his views and intentions would be questioned. They would ask him why he didn't support the counter-revolution and he would respond that it wasn't revolutionary because the people involved in it weren't informed about the intent and implications of what they were being sold, nor were they qualified to replace the people they were complaining about. He stood on the street and watched the Watts and Sunset Strip riots. He saw how counter-productive it was. He was constantly harassed by law enforcement in Southern California - it was what made him an activist. He thought the only way to fight the system was to infiltrate the government and to be a better influence and taskmaster than the people you are complaining about. And in the summer of 1967, he realized that probably wasn't going to happen.

Then in the 80's he was angry about the religious right infiltrating and influencing government because he believed that it would give way to tyrannical, fascist leaders and a cult-like atmosphere. They thought he was crazy and over-reacting. But he was right again wasn't he? And he was a conservative.

As far as he was concerned, the people involved in these things from both perspectives were "only in it for the money" whether they realized it or not.

I was surprised to see Bob Dylan giving Zappa props recently and suggesting that he was more "in tune" with what was going on that anyone else and not given credit for it.