Essential Studio Albums

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Talking Heads - Fear of Music

As juxtaposed against Unknown Pleasures, this seems like another of those hugely beloved albums. If Joy Division’s album is foreboding, this one is hanging by a steady rhythm that keeps a pace suggestive of less harrowing times. It explores themes that could have landed in the same place, but the music takes it in a different direction altogether. And for my money, this one just seems to hit the mark incredibly well. Love During Wartime is a no-brainer of a highlight, and the momentum leading to the track starts right at the start of the album, so the entire first have is just fantastic. Then you get that different but even more killer riff off Memories Can’t Wait, and that then steals the show. And it’s not as if this ever lets up, all the way through the atmospheric finale in Drugs, but man, that riff on Memories Can’t Wait!

The Essential Track: Memories Can’t Wait

Up Next: The Specials

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The Specials

This debut album is apparently a key album in the UK ska movement. Not that I knew there was one or anything of course, but all things considered it makes sense - the UK punk movement of the late 70s was quite prominent and Bob Marley had gone into exile in England at that point, and this does sound like punk met Marley on some corner of the Earth. There’s some real good tracks here too: Concrete Jungle (not a cover), (Dawning of a) New Era, and Too Much Too Young are all exceptional songs here. This was a nice surprise in the midst of a bunch of albums I was really waiting to hear or re-hear.

The Essential Track: Concrete Jungle

Up Next: Led Zeppelin - In Through the Out Door

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Led Zeppelin - In Through the Out Door

So this album doesn’t seem like it works at all when you barrel through the Zep catalogue straight through, or say you just want to hear something Zep. But it works in this context, removed from the weight and pressure of all the albums that came before it. What’s remarkable is that the only song on here that follows the Led Zeppelin formula is In the Evening, which frankly is still the best song here to my ears. The rest of the album does still like an album searching for Led Zeppelin’s future, which would never really materialize. Would it be more dancy like South Bound Suarez, or influenced by reggae in Fool in the Rain, countrified like Hot Dog, a synth hot mess like Carouselambra, ballad focused like All My Love (yeah I know the backstory and quite devastating), or a hybrid like I’m Gonna Crawl? Probably the latter, but I guess we’ll never really know. It’s a hodge podge of sounds here that show they wanted to take a new step - a bravery that worked in concept more than execution - But it’s still Led Zeppelin and still great in its own way. It won’t measure up in direct contrast to their other albums but maybe it just doesn’t need to in order to flourish. On this listen at least, it hit more than a curiosity, making it the best listen I have had on it so far.

The Essential Track: In the Evening

Up Next: Neil Young & Crazy Horse - Rust Never Sleeps

[wease]

Fool in the Rain, my brother.

[doug rr]

Fool in the Rain, my brother.

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Fool in the Rain, my brother.

For the ref whistle solo?

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Neil Young & Crazy Horse - Rust Never Sleeps

This is an album that never gets old for me. One side largely acoustic and the other electric and both sides featuring unforgettable songs. I’m a big fan of both Hey Hey My My versions, though the electric has the meanest sounding tone and just slays. Thrasher, Ride My Llama, Pocahontas - all solid acoustic tunes while Welfare Mothers and Sedan Delivery are both wild electric tracks. A special place has to be saved for Powderfinger, both my favorite track here and the ultimate gif machine…Big John’s been drinking since the river took Emmilou!

The Essential Track:

Up Next: Fleetwood Mac - Tusk

[wease]

Fool in the Rain, my brother.

For the ref whistle solo?

For the modified Purdie Shuffle.

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Fool in the Rain, my brother.

For the ref whistle solo?

For the modified Purdie Shuffle.

I actually really did enjoy most of the album, and Fool in the Rain. It is a really confused album, and I wouldn’t put it with their others, but it probably would have been a transitional album to something else for them, or they would have called it quits maybe soon after, but it feels to me like they felt like a band that needed a new direction, as if they were no longer getting the same rise out of their brand of heavy blues.

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Fleetwood Mac - Tusk

This album is also sort of all over the place, but coming back with calibrated expectations, I got a whole lot more out of this album than the last time I heard it. I would go so far now as to say that this one is my favorite of theirs outside Rumours. Starting from the Ledge mostly through I was really happy with this one, with the standouts for me being Sara, Think About Me, What Makes You Think You’re the One, Sisters of the Moon (which is fantastic), That’s Enough for Me, and Never Forget as highlights - the winner for me is the title track: weird, exciting, partially nonsense, but addictive, and one of those track that never gets out of your head.

The Essential Track: Tusk

Up Next: Buckingham Nicks

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Buckingham Nicks

With the recent reissue, I wanted to make sure to hit this one up before departing the 70s. It’s a real nice album to predate the magic we’ve been covering in the last three Fleetwood Mac albums, the album that got them noticed and hired and certainly the talent is evident from both of them here. Crying in the Night, Without a Leg to Stand On, Long Distance Winner, and Frozen Love were the standouts for me. Worth several listens even to hear where they came from when Fleetwood Mac and Rumours turn the world on its head.

The Essential Track: Frozen Love

Up Next: Pink Floyd - The Wall

[wease]

Buckingham Nicks

With the recent reissue, I wanted to make sure to hit this one up before departing the 70s. It’s a real nice album to predate the magic we’ve been covering in the last three Fleetwood Mac albums, the album that got them noticed and hired and certainly the talent is evident from both of them here. Crying in the Night, Without a Leg to Stand On, Long Distance Winner, and Frozen Love were the standouts for me. Worth several listens even to hear where they came from when Fleetwood Mac and Rumours turn the world on its head.

The Essential Track: Frozen Love

Up Next: Pink Floyd - The Wall

Which one has the guitar riff from The Chain?

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I didn’t immediately recognize that, but I did have a note about the riff in Long Distance Winner so..maybe that one?

[wease]

Lola (My Love)

[Matters]

Lola (My Love)

Wow, cool to hear that. The Chain is so damn good.

Essential Track: Frozen Love

His guitars on this one are some of his best ever.

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So after almost 50 pages of this thread and a shade over 7 months, tomorrow marks the last album of the 70s we’ve covered here. I don’t think another decade will take this long, but damn that’s amazing. And frankly so much amazing music that’s so varied. I know you can’t really draw a hard decade line in the sand, but it’s something worth beholding.

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Pink Floyd - The Wall

For this listen, it was wildly important to me to catch 80 minutes where I would be uninterrupted - having heard this album quite a few times, I knew I needed to be drawn into the narrative of the album and not emerge from the din until it fully resolved. This album really, as much as Dark Side of the Moon, demands a full listen, and where on Dark Side the songs never seem to make sense to me musically and atmospherically out of context, there’s a collection of tracks here that do exist both within and outside the narrative. That said, the one fair criticism I think of could really have of this is that the remainder of the tracks are so dependent on the narrative of the story that they could be besides the point. But I am not making that argument here because this is tackling the whole of the album - and those songs are ultimately the driver of the story, from building the wall to protect the psyche from the devastation of the outside world, to poking your head out from that protective bubble only to be thrust into mass level destructive forces (even if it’s a hallucination), and then back inwards, attempting to reconstruct the wall.

The concept is dark and the world outside seems dystopian, but even created from a perspective of a rock star examining themselves and the ways others impact their voice, it’s easy now, in 2025, to imagine an experience not so dissimilar. This is the sort of place I connected, uninterrupted, with this album in a way I never had before. I always took this in from a distance, as if this album is about a crazy person stuck between what goes on in his mind and reality. But now, not as a crazy person, but as a regular person having to grapple with what the world is tossing at me/us on a vicious and never ending news cycle, against a personal narrative living every day, wishing for a wall to protect against these outside forces, this struggle no longer seems so bizarre or for the crazy person. On this level, this album leaped a great deal today in my personal preferences for albums.

The Essential Track: Comfortably Numb

Up Next: The Rolling Stones - Emotional Rescue

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The Rolling Stones - Emotional Rescue

This goes with a number of Rolling Stones albums that get a bad name on one or two tracks. The word on the street had been the Stones went disco, and indeed there are a few attempts to “modernize” their sound like on the title track and Dance (Pt. 1). These attempts aren’t bad, but the album’s sound got pegged on these when this was a varied album that certainly contained more than its fair share of classic Stones. Summer Romance, Let Me Go, Where the Boys Go, Down in the Hole, and She’s So Cold could have been on any Stones album from the 70s. Send It To Me is the Stones playing with reggae, which they did plenty of in the mid-70s. All About You is token Keith, though admittedly not as good as his best. Simply said, this is yet another solid Stones album, and maybe like It’s Only Rock n Roll and Black and Blue, ends up a bit underrated - at least for the Stones.

The Essential Track: She’s So Cold

Up Next: Grateful Dead - Go to Heaven

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Grateful Dead - Go To Heaven

Speaking of underrated maligned albums, Go To Heaven might feature one of the ugliest album covers in here, but the music is largely on point. Alabama Getaway, Althea, Feel Like a Stranger, Saint of Circumstance, and the revival of Don’t Ease Me In is more than 2/3 of the album and all key components of their catalogue. As Brent songs go, both Far From Me and Easy to Love You are pretty solid, a rare moment of the Dead channeling soft rock. Even if the live versions all surpass this studio effort (they always will), this is the sleeper gem of their catalogue.

The Essential Track: Althea

Up Next: Paul McCartney - McCartney II

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Paul McCartney - McCartney II

McCartney it seemed had a reputation for writing silly little love songs (there’s even a hit song poking at that!), but on the McCartney series, Paul was never afraid to get a little weird. Here is obviously no exception, and some of his most challenging and quirky works sit right here. Even the songs that most capture his poppier leanings are a bit off center in Coming Up and Waterfalls - both fantastic fusions of pop sensibility with the wonky nature of this album. It doesn’t all work, but I imagine it wasn’t meant for that. Bogey Music was another I immediately jumped on.

The Essential Track: Coming Up

Up Next: John Lennon - Double Fantasy