Top 10 Albums 191113

Lee Ranaldo's copy of the White Album

White Album/Beatles: There's a big article about this one already so all I'll say here is that this album pushed all the innovation and scope of anything the fabs had already done and probably should have been their last one. I can live without Let it Be and even though Abbey Road has wonders on it perhaps they might have better served to fill the depression of the initial solo material. Then again, the solo material is so poor by comparison that the notion that the internal competition was the thing that created the greatness is inescapable. This album for me at the very local level is August holidays 1976, playing along with an old nylon string guitar to get as far as I could into the inner chambers of the songwriting. In one sliver of memory, I'm doing this in the rumpus room while Mum is outside watering the lawn and the dry pre-rain fragrance of the wet cement in the sun rises. For that moment, this is the best place in the world in history.

Best track: Helter Skelter.

Piper at the Gates of Dawn/Pink Floyd: Late in 1978 I borrowed a copy from one of my sister's uni friends. Between the sweet and airy Scarecrows and hippy lilting there were great expansive space scapes and crunching journeys and everything still sounded like it wore double breasted paisley. This was quite a secretive pleasure for me. All the psychedelia I encountered during those years pointed away from hippy and also away from punk. It felt like unfinished business and I felt like finishing it.
Best track: Lucifer Sam.

Ágætis byrjun/Sigur Ros: The most convincing claim for the title of post-rock is this world breaking album from those krazy Ijslaenders Sigur Ros. The textures range from tiny, intimate DI-ed guitar, through beergarden oompahpah to mighty tides of sound that don't have to be guitars because they don't sound like them. Over this is a male voice that often sounds so androgynous that it might best be described merely as human. Cries in giant landscapes encased in the weather of sagas. I never tire of this one.
Best track: There are tracks?

Baroque Concertos/Various: Four brash pieces that conquer everything from hubris to pathos over two sides of an LP. The cover Art was a kind of popped-up contemporary print of Venice with the footpaths buzzing with commerce of wildly varying legality. It's a kind of Physical Graffiti of the eighteenth century.
Best track: All.

Physical Graffiti/Led Zeppelin: David Hunter hated Led Zeppelin because I loved them. He reported with a sneer that he heard a recent LZ track on the radio the night before. It was slow and heavy but ... he'd forgotten the name. Oh, the pain, the pain! I think that it must have been Kashmir from this album. That song is the centrepiece of this half new half archive-raid double disc, having the dambusting power of the first few albums and the exploratory exotica of the later ones. It's a kind of White Album and like that it probably should have been their last. Also, though the increasingly elaborate cover art of the bigger league bands had reached unintentional self-parody by this stage, the brownstone with the changable window views is still fun.
Best track: Kashmir.

The Doors: I first heard The End during the titleless opening of Apocalypse Now. It rained lightly at the drive-in in the tropical swelter. I recognised the gluey heat-distorted shoreline palms as the lazy eastern flavoured guitar line rose through the waves and the choppers stuttered by in slow motion. Then as Morrison groans "This is the end, beautiful friend..." the entire line of trees flashes orange with napalm. From that moment I needed to hear what else they'd done apart from that and Light My Fire and the very few others I'd already heard. When I finally bought a rerelease I found a fair bit of R&B bravado which I winced at but also some ice on a summer day creepiness with things like The End of the Night and Crystal Ship. Further investigations into later albums made sense of the bravado but nothing felt quite like the young brash men who yet housed darkness in each hedonistic thought. Still love this album.
Best track: The End.

Maxinquaye/Tricky: Trip Hop was old by the time I heard this all the way through so I didn't judge it as a Trip Hop piece as much as a constantly refreshing approach to mood and colour, from laze to action to horror to sunshine to the darkness on the edge of the cosmos. It's all here. To my mind everything Brian Wilson is celebrated for is done more convincingly here.
Best track: Overcome.

Funeral Music for Queen Mary/Purcell/Marriner: The version I picked up at the second hand section of the Record Market in Brisbane was a repackaged World Record Club release with a groovy portrait of Purcell under a red tint.  Complete tack. (The cover art here is for the original EMI release.) But put the thing on the platter and the opening march and canzona stripped of much of its baroque embellisment called out from across the waters of Lethe. I almost wanted someone to mourn while listening to it. The choral sections that followed were tides of great light. We're still here, let's try to keep warm, they seemed to be saying. Elliot Garnder's later more period-correct recording is also a favourite but this is the one I go to phase out sadness.
Best track: March and Canzona.

Their Satanic Majesties Request/The Rolling Stones: Oddly, more psychedelic than Sgt Pepper with tales of New York groupies storming citadels, mass searches, Bhuddist temple ceremonies, girls who don't just look like but are rainbows, eight minute jams with Les Pauls and wine glasses, trips trips and more trips and journeys thousands of light years from home. It's a mess but everyone's on form, especially Brian with a selection of anything he could find at the bottom of the fairy garden and I think the junk shop from Blow-Up. Not quite as cruelly dismissed as Between the Buttons but still unfairly treated by the fan base for being UnStoneslike. Well, this is a record of the Stones at the 6a.m. end of the Swinging London trip, wandering the streets of the rain grey town seeing nothing but ghosted Dr Seuss landscapes. I love this album.
Best track: Citadel.

Evol/Sonic Youth: As dark and complex as anything from the heights of psychedelia, this early masterwork from the last innovators that rock music has known is cinematic and literary. I first heard it as an unmarked cassette given to a flatmate. We listened to it for a week before we knew who'd done it. This is still the best mix of traditional guitar rock and noise I know of without one side ever needing to surrender to the other.
Best track: Marylin Moore.

Jeunehomme Piano Concerto/Mozart/?: Sorry, don't remember the performer or even the label. I don't have this LP anymore but can recommend the hi-def flac download of the recording with Alfred Brendel on the ivories. Unusual for a piano concerto we hear the piano itself in the first few bars rather than a swathe of orchestral protocol to introduce and announce the soloist. A big bamming chord from the strings, a cheeky statement of the first theme in the reeds and then there's the piano answering. From then on it's a blend of bragging rights fiddle and sheer heavenly mastery of major key material. After the brashness of the opening, the second movement is a glacial trek through a sadness more profoundly felt than Mozart usually admitted to. Its power is such that it's hard to decide whether to be swallowed by its gravity or marvel at its sheer beauty. After an earth heavy sigh we pause before falling into the largest glass of aural champagne we are likely to experience in concerto form as the sprightly sparkle of the closing rondo springs into the light, delighting us with the first sip but going on to tease and hold us at breaking point before everything comes together in a big final woosh. Music written for performance by a young woman whose name means young man. I'm sure Mozzer had a few things in mind on that head.