Top 10 Albums 121113

In my film blog there is an infrequent series of top tens that serve to illustrate the difficulty of ever coming up with anything so definitive and to question the need for such. They change each time but for one title. I don't even have that one title here and might well see if one emerges. I'm going to pick ten just from what I'm feeling as I write this post. I'll try one next week and compare. Only one rule is that for classical choices it's that recording/performance rather than the piece of music which fits in with choosing by the effect of the music first. Oh, and not numbered or ordered in any way more than how they occur. So let's begin..

Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols: This album changed my life as it reached out with an offer to leave the ordinary world for exploration and creation. Justa buncha rock songs, innit? No, for me, much much more.

The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society: Discovered decades after its release. I had always just thought of The Kinks as one of the best singles bands ever, each one an essay on the tempora and mores or just a burst of sheer youthful brilliance. Village Green is like that but instead of listening to a string of them over a timeline it's a concentration within a small time frame and the effect is of great depth. Oh, and great tunes, lyrics that sting with sadness or tickle (Do You Remember Walter does both at once). I can't imagine this is ever going to be far from these lists.

Revolver/The Beatles: One journalist in the 70s put it well: Before it it was fun and after it things got too serious but Revolver gets everything right and can easily illustrate by itself why the fabs deserve their reputation. At the height of their fame when they could do no wrong they tried to do just that. Songs about tax, loneliness, depression, bad trips, speed doctors, discovering cannibis, eastern flavoured dirges about loveless hedonism and finally here are a few words from the Tibetan Book of the Dead to the sounds of backwards guitars and feedback loops.

Do you remember the reaction to Radiohead's Kid A and Amnesiac in the noughties and folk saying that they were virtually attacking their fans by not coming up with more OK Computers? Well, multipy that by ten for this one. The stakes were a lot higher.

Mozart Requiem/Colin Davis: First album I bought after finishing Uni. Summer day. Turned on the ABC and this came out. Couldn't believe the power. Needed to know who it was. Really? Little Mozart? Took a bus into town and got it that afternoon. Brought it home and lay back as the swelter of Brisbane in January faded and I fell into a delicious cold darkness. Played the grooves out of it (well partly because my player was such a crudmonster) and then got it on cd. If it appears as a hi-res flac I'll get that, too.

This goes against my advice to anyone who starts listening to classical music to avoid clinging to the first performance of a given piece. The music was almost enitrely intended to be performed live and so inevitably change in some way each time it met the air. Pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim famously said that classical recordings should be destroyed after a single listen. That's what he meant. We are guided as consumers to court the apex or at least the standard and reject all else but music for performance cannot meet this expectation unless the first encountered recording of a piece in considered the definitive. I remember buying a friend Pablo Casals' recording of Bach's Cello suites even though I knew of several I preffered over it because he simply considered it the ONE.

That said, while I've heard a fair few superb preformances of Mozart's Req, nothing beats this one.

Closer/Joy Division: Loved it from afar until I finally bought a scrathy second hand copy in 1984 and for the first time heard the entire album in proper sequence. It took me to new worlds. They were always cold and unsettling places but so truly and powerfully reported that they were irresistable. The Eraserhead of rock albums.

Colossal Youth/Young Marble Giants: This would be called Hipster now the way that The XX is but then it was a unique blend of fragility, cool sweetness and laughter in the dark. It launched a thousand increasingly tiresome imitators none of whom got beyond its surface. Got a spare 45 minutes? Put it on, be patient and you will find it with your eyes closed.

This Year's Model/Elvis Costello and the Attractions: 16, treated for cystic acne with sessions of dry ice skin burning and antibiotics. I bought this after one of them and never knew such a perfect match for my spite at the world around me as I repeatedly soaked my entire face into a bowl of salt water. Someone wrote into RAM magazine ridiculing the album, citing the number of times the phrase "I don't want to" appears in the lyrics. It's even most of one title. It's the very first phrase intoned. "I don't wanna kiss you. I don't wanna tooooouch." And BAM! goes the band coming in as the exclamation mark. From there it's hooks melodic and pugilistic as Elvis and the Attractions tell you what they don't wanna. Got me through a few Fridays.

Mezzanine/Massive Attack: Big spooky and cinematic, Mezzanine was the apotheosis of trip hop, taking it from the scary addictive noir of Portishead to scenes of huge movies that could only ever play behind the eyelids of the listener. Giant bass and insistent beats and swirling trips of midrange brewed cauldrons of atmosphere and over them the aching tenor of Horace Andy, the whispered rapping of 3D and the fragile luminous beauty of Elizabeth Fraser's cooling melismas. "Teardrop on the fi-i-i-ire." It warmed and chilled and you floated feeling both.

Una Stravaganza di Medici: A friend of mine and I were chattin' o'er some beers a few summers ago and he cmoplained that he was tired of most of the music he was listening to. I put this on. He rose from his seat and fell to his knees in front of the speakers covering his heart with both hands. This music has such an intense beauty that it makes you feel ashamed to be listening but it's too compelling to stop. Yes, I know what that also describes. So would the bride and groom for whom the music was written and performed. Hell of a plateau stage for a nuptial night.

Criminally out of print at time of writing. My cd has a fault. >:(

 

Art of Fugue/Musical Offering/Neville Marriner: This giant of invention holds its unworldly power with such dignified confidence it's easy to forget the maelstrom of genius that is happening as it enters your brain the hard way: through your heart.