#2 The Bends by Radiohead
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After recording the vocals for "Fake Plastic Trees," Thom Yorke stumbled out into the London night, sobbing, and proceeded to drink himself into a drunken stupor. This occurred because the album, that moment, wasn't only a culmination for Yorke after a long recording process, but it was a culmination for all rock music up until that point in history. The song is about knowing, either consciously or sub-consciously, that the person you love isn't able to reciprocate that telltale emotion, knowing this and still being unable to wretch yourself from that person. When the song crescendos with Johnny Greenwood's white-noise sound wall it is physically painful. It's the sound of the limitations of rock music crumbling like an empire. "Just" is about a really annoying person. After The Bends, Radiohead chose to augment their sound both to evolve sonically and because they simply had no where else to go. This is as good as rock will get. And on "Street Spirit," the album's, and most likely any album's, most implausibly beautiful track, lush arpeggios carry Thom Yorke's pained musings on insignificance into an icy atmosphere populated by phantasms and half-speed remembrances, and he coos as the album eases to a regretful halt, the most simply perfect lyric that anyone could have wrote it and only Radiohead could have wrote it.Immerse your soul in love.
#3 Frances the Mute by The Mars Volta
Covering over seventy-five furious minutes in five songs, Frances the Mute blends so many genres it forges a genre unto itself. Songs traverse prog, jazz, metal, shoegaze, marimba within single movements, the lyrical pendulum swings from verbose English to blazing Spanish to dead as dead Latin without missing a beat, decibels oscillate like a bungee jumper. This isn't mind-bending music. This is music that wiggles into your axons and dendrites and sets C4 explosives at the base of the axon terminals and run for medula because of all the shrapnel. Seeing the Mars Volta live is akin to watching a fireworks store on top of a skyscraper catch on fire. Omar Rodriguez-Lopez composes songs with meticulous care and Jam-rock experimentation, all while shredding and power-chording like Carlos Santana's bad acid nightmare. Cedric Bixler-Zavala's banshee falsetto lasers lyrics that are so esoteric and abstract they come off as the mad ravings of an Inquisition-era priest receiving plague revelation on a night drenched in moonlight. It is incomprehensible and enlightening. "Cassandra Gemini" is the epic to end all epics, over 32 minutes in length with 12 distinct movements and an ancient scroll of lyrics that are just so good Carmen can barely stand it. LOOK.
The greatest double album of all time. No other artist, ever, has ever dragged language past its inherent limitations to the lofty doorstep of universality that all music strives for. Dylan's lyrics aren't good because of their guile or delivery or topicality or emotionality; they are good because they fill the listener with the hot goo of recognizing that they are playing audience to something that is entirely, undeniably true. From a certain standpoint, esthetics aside, art seeks only to give rise to notions and musing that are already present in its audience, yanking the veracity out like teeth and holding the bloody kernel up for everyone to see and saying, "You see, this was part of you all along, and you're not not alone, not by a long shot." Four decades later, Blonde on Blonde's most extraordinary feat is that it says this with such lucidity, simplicity, woefulness, bombast and assuredness that time melts away around the sound and you're left with nothing but yourself and the music because you know, without a shadow of a doubt, that you know exactly what this maniac is talking about.
Covering over seventy-five furious minutes in five songs, Frances the Mute blends so many genres it forges a genre unto itself. Songs traverse prog, jazz, metal, shoegaze, marimba within single movements, the lyrical pendulum swings from verbose English to blazing Spanish to dead as dead Latin without missing a beat, decibels oscillate like a bungee jumper. This isn't mind-bending music. This is music that wiggles into your axons and dendrites and sets C4 explosives at the base of the axon terminals and run for medula because of all the shrapnel. Seeing the Mars Volta live is akin to watching a fireworks store on top of a skyscraper catch on fire. Omar Rodriguez-Lopez composes songs with meticulous care and Jam-rock experimentation, all while shredding and power-chording like Carlos Santana's bad acid nightmare. Cedric Bixler-Zavala's banshee falsetto lasers lyrics that are so esoteric and abstract they come off as the mad ravings of an Inquisition-era priest receiving plague revelation on a night drenched in moonlight. It is incomprehensible and enlightening. "Cassandra Gemini" is the epic to end all epics, over 32 minutes in length with 12 distinct movements and an ancient scroll of lyrics that are just so good Carmen can barely stand it. LOOK.Behind this snail secretion, leaves a dry heave that absorbs.
A limbless procreation, let the infant crawl deformed.
A bag replaced the breath of these suffocating sheets.
And now when the craving calls, I'll scratch my itchy teeth.
Come on and sing it now.
Sink your teeth into the flesh of midnight.
#4 Blonde on Blonde by Bob Dylan
The greatest double album of all time. No other artist, ever, has ever dragged language past its inherent limitations to the lofty doorstep of universality that all music strives for. Dylan's lyrics aren't good because of their guile or delivery or topicality or emotionality; they are good because they fill the listener with the hot goo of recognizing that they are playing audience to something that is entirely, undeniably true. From a certain standpoint, esthetics aside, art seeks only to give rise to notions and musing that are already present in its audience, yanking the veracity out like teeth and holding the bloody kernel up for everyone to see and saying, "You see, this was part of you all along, and you're not not alone, not by a long shot." Four decades later, Blonde on Blonde's most extraordinary feat is that it says this with such lucidity, simplicity, woefulness, bombast and assuredness that time melts away around the sound and you're left with nothing but yourself and the music because you know, without a shadow of a doubt, that you know exactly what this maniac is talking about.
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