The Top 90 Most Influential Albums in my life (so far)

My turn. Enjoy them / agree with them / rip them apart. It's my list and I have my reasons for every single one of these being there. Top 90 only because that's as far as I got before I ran out of steam -- perhaps I could add ten more at another date.

"Influential" is different that "Greatest" -- these are albums that made a heavy impact on me at the time I heard them and carved out a place in my collection that was a little different than a normal album. These were "in the right place at the right time" and influenced my future music appreciation because of it. And the only artist that got two spots was U2 - there's a reason for that.

So with that in mind, and by date of release:

Charles Mingus - The Clown (1957)
Thelonious Monk - Brilliant Corners (1957)
Nathan Milstein - Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto in D Major (1961)
Dexter Gordon - Go (1962)
Herbert Von Karajan - Beethoven 9 Symphonies (1963)
John Coltrane - A Love Supreme (1965)
The Beatles - Revolver (1966)
The Doors - Strange Days (1967)
Simon and Garfunkel - Bookends (1967)
Johnny Cash - At Folsom Prison (1968)
Frank Sinatra - Watertown (1969)
Fairport Convention - Liege & Lief (1969)
Miles Davis - Bitches Brew (1970)
Black Sabbath - Paranoid (1970)
John Lennon - Imagine (1971)
Yes - Close To The Edge (1973)
Led Zeppelin - Houses of the Holy (1973)
Clash - London Calling (1979)
Julian Bream - Julian Bream Plays Granados & Albéniz (1982)
U2 - War (1983)
Tears for Fears - The Hurting (1983)
Madonna - Like a Virgin (1984)
Kate Bush - Hounds of Love (1985)
The Smiths - The Queen is Dead (1985)
REM - Life's Rich Pageant (1986)
Run D.M.C. - Raising Hell (1986)
Cactus World News - Urban Beaches (1986)
The Call - Reconciled (1986)
House of Freaks - Monkey on a Chain Gang (1987)
Sodom - Persecution Mania (1987)
The Replacements - Pleased to Meet Me (1987)
Mary Black - By the Time it Gets Dark (1987)
Patty Smyth - Never Enough (1987)
Beastie Boys - Licensed to Ill (1987)
N.W.A. - Straight Outta Compton (1988)
The Sugarcubes - Life's Too Good (1988)
Dinosaur Jr - Bug (1988)
Shona Laing - South (1988)
Morrissey - Viva Hate (1988)
Public Enemy - It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988)
Skin Games -The Blood Rush (1989)
Pixies - Doolittle (1989)
The Sundays - Reading Writing and Arithmetic (1990)
Jellyfish - Bellybutton (1990)
Robert Johnson - The Complete Recordings (1990)
Dead Can Dance - Aion (1990)
Echo & The Bunnymen - BBC Radio 1 Live in Concert (1991)
U2 - Achtung Baby (1991)
Buffalo Tom - Let Me Come Over (1992)
Tool - Undertow (1993)
Sebadoh - Bakesale (1994)
Deep Dish - Penetrate Deeper (1995)
The Bottle Rockets - 24 Hours a Day (1997)
a-ha - Lifeline (2002)
Interpol - Turn On the Bright Lights (2002)
Sara Groves - All Right Here (2002)
The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2002)
Bleu - Redhead (2003)
Bhimsen Joshi - Bhajan (2003)
Rufus Wainwright - Want One (2003)
Snow Patrol - Final Straw (2003)
Thrills - Let's Battle Bohemia (2004)
John Frusiante - DC EP (2004)
Embrace - Out of Nothing (2004)
The New Pornographers - Twin Cinema (2005)
The Cardigans - Super Extra Gravity (2005)
Eisley - Room Noises (2005)
Midlake - The Trials of Van Occupanther (2006)
Rodrigo y Gabriela - S/T (2006)
The Hidden Cameras - Awoo (2006)
The Divine Comedy - Victory For The Comic Muse (2006)
Scanners - Violence Is Golden (2006)
Kanye West - Graduation (2007)
Orchestra Baobab - Made in Dakar (2007)
Straightener - LINEAR (2007)
The National - Boxer (2007)
Fleet Foxes - S/T (2008)
Shearwater - Rook (2008)
Disturbed - Indestructible (2008)
Mates of State - Rearrange Us (2008)
Sister Suvi - Now I Am Champion (2009)
Jukebox The Ghost - Everything Under the Sun (2010)
Wye Oak - My Neighbor / My Creator EP (2010)
Grouplove - Never Trust a Happy Song (2011)
Elbow - Build a Rocket Boys! (2011)
Daughn Gibson - All Hell (2012)
Death Grips - The Money Store (2012)
Michael Kiwanuka - Home Again (2012)
Frightened Rabbit - Pedestrian Verse (2013)
Savages - Silence Yourself (2013)

No Stones, no Who, no Floyd. Like them all, but none of their LP's were in that "right place at the right time" moment. I also debated on adding bands like Mercyful Fate, Slayer, Nas and dozens of others in various genres but some of my picks were my "gateway" albums into other genres and thus my reasons for adding them and also their overall importance.

 

Have half
nice discerning primer
through the nineties
to present
though you could now well be
the forum's hipster poster child

 

you and I have very different tastes in music .... but it's great and makes the world diverse.

from your list I like::
The Beatles - Revolver (1966)
The Doors - Strange Days (1967)
Black Sabbath - Paranoid (1970)
John Lennon - Imagine (1971)
Clash - London Calling (1979)
The Smiths - The Queen is Dead (1985)
Pixies - Doolittle (1989)
a-ha - Lifeline (2002)
The Divine Comedy - Victory For The Comic Muse (2006)

9/90

 

I very much like the thinking behind this - a lot more interesting than some of the various "best" lists. It would be good if you could explain the reasons behind a few of your choices. I too can think of some albums which would not necessarily make my "best" list but were nevertheless important to me for some reason. I may do a list as part of this thread but there won't be 90 of them!

 

Wow. I never thought I'd see this one:
Shona Laing - South (1988)
This is one of my favorite NZ albums. She was one of the few NZ artists back then who actually got mainstream (NZ) radio play. All other NZ music was consigned to student radio ... which was fine with me.

 

I have 15 from your list, though I have a few complete cycles of Beethoven's symphonies, just not the Karajan. Interesting list, nice to see some rap on it as well.

 

Here's a very VERY quick summary of some of these, as to the why:

Two U2's. The first was my main intro to U2 which made me a fan, the 2nd was when I thought they had lost me but they knocked me over with something new and refreshing.
The jazz. Those were my gateways to more jazz. The ones that really grabbed me. The MD one, for example, was the first album from him I actually really enjoyed.
The classical items were essentially my gateways to that. Karajan, Bream, and R&G for a more "modern" flavor.
The rap / hip-hop were different aspects of that. So Run DMC for more Top 40, PE for more political and NWA for Gansta rap. And Kayne got a nod for re-igniting hip-hop interest for me in 2007.
Mary Black for Celtic, Cash for Country, S&G and FC for Folk, Yes for Progressive, Sabbath for early Metal, Sodom for heavier metal, Disturbed for Nu Metal, Madonna for dance pop, Embrace for BritPop, Sara Groves for Christian Contemporary, Straightener for J-rock.

You probably get the idea. They were either a gateway to another genre or an early favorite that really grabbed me and kept my attention. Also of interest is the heavy late 80's / early 90's influences (which makes sense given my age of 46) but also the heavy modern influences -- more so than I even realized. 1994 to 2002 was a pretty "dead" musical period for me and the list shows that, but after 2002 I had a new-found interest which hasn't stopped yet.

Very important album for me (obviously) - such a great album and more than just the few "hits" on it. And not dated, at least to these ears. Got this on vinyl in 2011 when I had a renewed interest in that format.

 

Thurenity, what is the rationale for the Bunnymen's live BBC concert among all their other works? I like that one, but ironically just finally tracked it down about 2 months ago. I'm just curious why that one would be considered influential but not one of their classic albums like Ocean Rain or Heaven Up Here?

Jeff

 

That CD is a good example as to why this list is such a personal one. And why, if I had been born a year or two earlier or later, or had been doing something else on that particular day versus hearing this concert, it probably would have never made my list.

Echo and the Bunnymen was, up until that point in time (1989 or so) more of a singles band for me. Similar to The Cure where it's just how the cards fell at the time. But I heard this live concert on the radio (and luckily had the foresight to record it) and it just floored me - some of the earlier songs I had never even heard before and I just played this tape over and over again. I believe I had gotten the S/T album shortly after hearing this concert, and mainly because of this concert.

In 1992(?) I happened upon the import CD and it's been a critical part of my collection ever since. It's hands down my favorite live album.

I've since gone back and found a new appreciation for Ocean Rain / Crocodiles / Heaven up Here, for example. But this live album was the one that really made me a fan, so it makes the list.

 

Great story - I figured there was something to it. I'll never forget hearing certain concerts on the radio (Cure, Bunnymen although a different show, Radiohead) and just being blown away and wishing I was at the show!

I can totally see why you put U2 on their twice - it was almost a different band in the 90s.

Don't take this as a criticism, but I notice that about half of your list is from the past 10 years (hence the hipster joke somebody made). I would probably define "influential" differently than you I suspect, because I see certain artists on the list as overlapping styles/genres. I also notice a gap in your list from '97-'02. Nothing rocked your world in those years?

 

25 of this list are some of my all time fave..

extra kudos for including Divine Comedy, Sugarcubes and the Tears for Fears discs

 

I have 32 of these. I am a big Echo fan and have seen them live 5 times. The last time in Toronto they played all of Heaven Up Here and Crocodiles(which is on my top 25 list).

 

I actually commented on this in a later post - I was pretty shocked at how many albums from the last ten years made my list. 1985 to 1993 or so makes complete sense in that I was in my late teens / early twenties so I was in that critical point that we all seem to be in in those years. And the older stuff ie 60's / early 70's were things I generally found after-the-fact, obviously. But the last ten years I had an almost "re-birth", for the lack of a better word, with music appreciation. In 1993 I got married, by 1996 I had bought a house and was building a career and in 1998 I had my first child, so those years were part of my "dry spell" for new music. I was well on my way to being one of those "I only like the music of my youth" persons but in 2002 I came back out of that shell. I still can't quite explain why that is.

And there's definitely some musical overlap -- lots of Indie / Alt rock in there. Not all of them are gateway albums, some are just albums I really really like as they have hooks galore or have had staying power or they fit into a certain memory of my life that I find important. They essentially became part of the musical soundtrack of my life.

The 2012/2013 ones are obviously the most "tricky" ones since not a lot of time has passed. But I can usually gauge the influential ones pretty quickly since they usually have an impact on me pretty quickly. Frightened Rabbit got a lot of playtime and my daughter really likes the album as well so there's a bond there and I'm pretty sure it will stay on the list because of that. And Savages was simply a slap in the face, kind of like how Death Grips and Daughn Gibson were the year before. Daft Punk's new album might also make the 2013 list but it's still just a tad too early to commit to that yet. But in another month or so I might be able to say for certain.

 

A very fine eclectic list: Classic rock, indie, post-punk, African, classical music, prog, pop, rap,...

I love the fact you've put on your list that great live album of Echo and the Bunnymen in Sweden. It's indeed an amazing fine concert...

 

I counted 17. Not much of the newer stuff. My 'newer stuff' is mostly metal & prog.

 

Can see why no one's ever accused me of being a hipster - just 18 in common here...

Seriously though, interesting list just the same, and an intelligent and thoughtful way to frame its presentation.

 

Not a fan of the '90s, I take it.

 

Unfortunately not as much as other periods. It was just a bad time for music for me - I wish it wasn't but it's how things came to pass.

Some albums I just got sick of, like Nevermind or Ten. Others just didn't make that heavy an impact as I wasn't really interested in new music all that much. In some ways I'm just scratching the surface of mid to late 1990's music today. It's not that there isn't good music there, it was more that I wasn't really a heavy part of it and now I have to play catch-up.

I almost added Semisonic and Travis, but they were both more "singles" bands for me so I didn't think a Greatest Hits really applied as it wasn't in the spirit of what this was about. I left out The Cure's "Standing on a Beach" for the same reason.

 

I've heard 15 of the albums on this list, of which 3 ("Revolver", "War", and "Boxer"--what a great trio of albums that is) were on my top 100 favorites list. If I revised that list more recently, I would probably put the Savages album on it, too; "a slap to the face" is a great way to describe it. I might put "A Love Supreme" on it, too, although I think I like "Giant Steps" better.

I like your mention about how you were surprised by how many recent albums are on your list--that's exactly the sort of thing this sort of exercise does, you learn about your own interests! Do you think some of the reason that you might have gotten back into music around 2002 is because music just got really good around that time? That's around the time when "indie" started to emerge--I think it got bigger over the course of the '00s, but it got off to a really good start around then. You've written about how your life changed from the '80s to the present, and I wonder if changes in popular music itself is a motivating factor.

I also can't help but notice that the original wave of punk in the late '70s and early '80s is largely absent. Any sense of why that is the case? I noticed that I had a similar gap when I looked at my own favorites. My own experience is that as much as I think Elvis Costello or Talking Heads or the Clash are good, I don't really have that I must hear more of this impulse that I have with, say, the great Chicago blues acts on Chess, or the Beatles, or with indie rock in the present.

 

Good question about punk. I was ten years old on 1977, so I was really too young to appreciate it in real time. Even London Calling was mostly a catch-up exercise - the S/T song was on the radio of course but I didn't actually get into the LP itself until around 1983 (around the time Combat Rock came out). But it did grab me and it was important enough that it made my list.

But I think this is where my age definitely comes into play - if I was born just a few years earlier, I'm guessing a lot of the post-punk / New Wave / Alt rock stuff I have listed now would have been replaced with EC or Talking Heads or Ramones or Blondie or Sex Pistols. As it stands now, I certainly like all these artists but none of them have that impact that some of the others had probably because I simply missed the window. It's also why I think I'm so modern music heavy because I found all of those as they were released - there was no catch-up there.

Your 2002 comment could be true as well, but I find it a bit too coincidental that my dropoff timeframe was the same period where my priorities changed. 2002 was also the beginning of subscription services, the iPod and I believe my first mobile device which I think was also a factor -- I used to take MP3's and drop them in my Windows CE device and play them on my long train ride to / from work. That was actually a pretty big deal and probably Interpol, as an example, got a lot of playtime that way.

I also remember Interpol being a huge deal for me as it was the first album I had heard in a very long time that really engaged me. I was actually quite amazed at it.

 

Interesting. I love their debut album quite a bit too. Have you kept up with them through the ups/downs? I had high hopes for them personally after Turn On The Bright Lights, but while I liked Antics was really really disappointed in their major label debut. I thought the return to indie self-titled was also a return to form and I really enjoyed it, but now wonder if it is going to be the end of the band with Carlos leaving and a loss of momentum/sales overall. You probably know this but there was a 10th anniversary edition of the debut with a bonus disc of b-sides, live cuts, demos, etc.

I'm curious how you discovered them, and many of the other more recent indie bands. Was it through online streaming or recommendations? Was it a coworker?

For me, a coworker turned me onto Interpol, Doves, Mogwai, The Notwist, Godspeed! You Black Emporer, Keane and even Coldplay (before they were mainstream) all in the 2000-2002 timeframe. He also got me into Massive Attack and I can't recommend highly enough their 1998 masterpiece Mezzanine, probably my favorite album in your musical blackout period. I have a number of other suggestions for that time period if you would like them!

 

They basically lost me after Antics (which was another good album, imo). I have the S/T on lossy but I just couldn't get into it. I'm not sure why - some bands I really enjoy that one album but, for whatever reason, they just can't seem to keep me engaged. "Lightning doesn't strike in the same place twice", as the saying goes.

Other than Mogwai / Massive Attack, I have albums from all those bands. Editors was another one which I almost put on this Top 90 list ("The Back Room"). I've been scanning the year by year threads as he's up to 1999 and will probably do some more sampling when I get time. But appreciate the suggestion!

I'm not going to lie - some of my sampling came from eMusic (I think?) at the time, but some came from not-exactly-legit means. This was in 2002 where I would grab samples of stuff monthly and then what I liked I'd buy. This was soon replaced with Yahoo Music! where I was a subscriber for many years until they moved all their subscribers to Rhapsody in 2008 (which I still use today). Also in 2005 I moved to PA and quickly found a college radio station where I found quite a few artists from - The New Pornographers being one of them. And head-fi.org got me into Fleet Foxes and Shearwater before I even knew about this forum. So it was a mixture of sources.

 

Do you know the band The Chameleons, Thurenity? I hear quite a bit of their music in Turn on the Bright Lights, and it wouldn't surprise me if Interpol were influenced by them (as well as other post-punk acts like Joy Divison, The Cure and early U2) as I'm pretty sure the band, being half British would have been familiar with them along with the rest of the UK 1980s alt rock scene and musicians tend to be more savvy when it comes to lesser known music than the general public.

Anyway, you can't go wrong with any of their first three albums, especially Script of the Bridge, and by all accounts the ones they released in the early 2000s after their long hiatus are worth checking out, though far less well known. You might also want to track down the compilations The Fan and the Bellows and Return of the Roughnecks with the bonus disc, which are a bit short in supply but still can be ordered at a not too high price from the UK, as they include songs from their two EPs Up the Down Escalator and Tony Fletcher Walked on Water.... La La La La La-La La-La-La.

 

You mentioned The Cure upthread, and Robert Smith is a massive fan of both Interpol and Mogwai. Both bands were invited to join his Curiosa festival back in 2004 - for the life of me I can't recall who else was on that now.

Editors debut is excellent and I feel the way about that group that you do with Interpol - their followups haven't done it for me.

Tangled, thanks for the suggestion. Given our common interests I will definitely check that band out.
Jeff

 

Thurenity: Why the jump from '73 to '79? There was a lot of good tunes during that period, imo.