Top 10 Albums of All Time
- The Top10113
- Anne Watkins’s version
- Your version
×Exile on Main St. – The Rolling Stones
The first ten years of the Stones’ career as a band was all peak and no valleys, and Exile on Main St., coming at the tail end of their most interesting period, captures them at the zenith of their considerable powers. They’re also at their most decadent here, and all their anger and bitterness comes through in a way that no other rock band of the era would have dared to try. The album is helped by the legendary story of its making, but it would be perfect even if it existed in a vacuum.
×OK Computer – Radiohead
Radiohead were the first band to fully capture the unprecedented contradiction and loneliness of living in this globalized digital age. The lyrics of OK Computer are almost unbearably melancholy in tone, but the fact that they’re set to some of the most gorgeous music every created makes the whole album strangely inspirational. Even if these times are as bleak as Thom Yorke seems to believe they are, at least we still have music to get us through it.
×London Calling – The Clash
Punk was already past its prime when The Clash released London Calling, the biggest and most important statement of their career, and the album captured the moment of punk’s decline perfectly. Strummer, Jones, and co. seem to realize that punk’s anger had failed to make a positive difference in the world, and the band seems to be searching for better ways to bring about change. I’m not sure if they ever found it, and their rapid decline following this album shows that they may have lost their optimism about the power of music, but the album stands as a timeless call to action for revolutionaries everywhere.
×Blonde On Blonde – Bob Dylan
Before making Blonde on Blonde, Dylan had already been leaving his early folk-troubadour image behind for some time, and Blonde On Blonde has him at the peak of his strange and brilliant surrealistic blues-rock phase. The music is great, but Dylan’s genius comes through in his lyrics, which could stand with any great work of literature of the 20th century. We usually don’t expect to be wowed by rock lyrics, but Dylan bucks this trend with an album full of some of the most compelling writing of its time.
×In the Aeroplane Over the Sea – Neutral Milk Hotel
Listening to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, one gets the sense that Neutral Milk Hotel’s unassuming songwriter and frontman Jeff Mangum had no inkling that he was creating one of the greatest albums of all time. But there was clearly some kind of strange alchemy happening as these songs were recorded, and the result is a great gift to music fans everywhere, raw in its emotional power and endlessly rewarding in its lyrical content and idiosyncratic instrumentation.
×Pet Sounds – The Beach Boys
We tend to credit bands like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones for breaking all the musical ground during the mid-60s, but the decidedly poppy and mainstream band was ahead of the curve with Pet Sounds, their beautifully composed and orchestrated concept album. Legend has it that Paul McCartney went head-over-heels with appreciation and jealousy when hearing this album and was thus inspired to venture into the sonic experimentation of Sgt. Pepper. Legend aside, Pet Sounds stands as a great album, and while it wasn’t fully appreciated in its time, it’s become one of the most influential pieces of music to come out of the 60s.
×Velvet Underground – Velvet Underground
Critics usually point to The Velvet Underground and Nico as the greatest album from these New York art-rockers, but my personal favorite is their self-titled third album, where they gave up their Warholian pretention and focused on crafting songs. The songs are spare, beautiful, and eclectic, and while they may not have the big, bold sound of early VU albums, they have a deeper resonance.
×Daydream Nation – Sonic Youth
The music scene was at the height of its mid-80s doldrums when Sonic Youth came along and cut right through all the silliness with guitar-driven music that somehow managed to be both punk-inflected and sprawlingly symphonic without becoming overblown. Sonic Youth took their cues from the late-70s New York bands like Television, but they pioneered their own unique sound, blending noise rock with and punk songwriting with long passages of gorgeous dual-guitar interplay.
×Revolver – The Beatles
Sgt. Pepper tends to get all the attention for being the Beatles’ great groundbreaking album, but if you ask me, Revolver is the Beatles album with the greatest number of top-notch songs. It just doesn’t get better than “I’m Only Sleeping,” “She Said She Said,” “And Your Bird Can Sing,” and “For No One.” The guys were still a little too warm and cuddly for their own good, but they were right at that perfect stage where their music was becoming more complex without being pretentious.
×The Village Green Preservation Society – The Kinks
Forty years after their peak, the Kinks are still a criminally underrated band, as evidenced by the unrelenting goodness that is there late-60s/early-70s work. The Village Green Preservation Society was the first in a string of critically acclaimed but poor selling albums that saw the Kinks at their quirky best. The songs seem bright and bubbly at first, but multiple listens reveal a slyly dark sense of humor and a genuine feeling of melancholy about loss and the passage of time.
