Category: albums

Meteora [discogs.com], Linkin Park’s [discogs.com] sophomore album, is a rare beast: a second studio album, from a band that hit the big-time with their first album, that manages to surpass the earlier album. I listened to Linkin Park’s first album, Hybrid Theory [discogs.com] pretty much from it’s release in 2000. It was one of my favorite albums while sitting in my dorm or studying at the Johnson Center at George Mason.

Hybrid Theory is a good candidate for the album I listened to most in the CD drive on my first laptop, sitting in my dorm or in the Johnson Center while studying. I remember it being one of the first albums I ripped to my fancy MP3 player when I was going off to study in England. I purchased the MP3 player specifically because there was no way I was going to carry all those CDs around Europe but I’d have been dammed to go without my music. I was working at a small dot-com era consulting company while I was in school and I enlisted their entire fleet of desktops in the evening for a few weeks to rip my CDs to a central location.

And while I discovered much new music while I was in England, I spent many hours walking around the great and small cities of Europe or riding trains between those cities listening to my favorite albums, and Hybrid Theory was there with me the whole time.

By the time Meteora was released in March of 2003 I was back in the US. I had just started a new job, and I spent hours coding while listening to Meteora. It’s not the best thing to program to I must admit. Dance or Jazz works better, for me. But still, I was obsessed with Meteora for a long time when it came out, as I said it surpassed, for me at least, Hybrid Theory.

In the late 1990’s and the first few years of the 21st century my appreciation of heavy metal and related genres was at its peak. Having been in two relationships with people who liked heavy metal I had gotten deeper into many bands that I already knew; Metallica [discogs.com] of course, and Black Sabbath [discogs.com] and Rammstein [discogs.com] (including several live shows that are among the best I was ever at, one of my favorite bands of all time but I don’t listen to any of their albums end-to-end so much…), and more. I also discovered a host of heavy metal I would never have found, like Drain STH —an amazing all female band I would never have come across otherwise. But I was also a fan of much rap and hip-hip, like OutKast [confusion.cc], A Tribe Called Quest, and more, Eminem was at his zenith and both Slim Shady [discogs.com] and Marshall Mathers [discogs.com] were among my rips. So I was primed for nu metal when it came and I was still listening to a lot of heavy rock when Meteora was released.

Of all the nu metal or rap-rock or rock-rap bands of the early oughts Linkin Park was, by far, my favorite. Chester Bennington singing and Mike Shinoda rapping across Hybrid Theory and Meteora was the quintessential mix of these two genres. The success of their official mashups with Jay-Z should attest to how they were fully competent in their rap side. In any case, Linkin Park was the right mix for me.

After Meteora I was less enthused about their album output for along time. It was more straight rock and while I listed and there were many songs I liked, they never topped Meteora, or even Hybrid Theory for me. That is until their final album, One More Light [discogs.com]. I seriously debated if I should put One More Light on this list, I may still, but I think Meteora deserves to go first at least.

The suicide of Chester was a tragedy and the end of Linkin Park a sad thing. Too many music stars and stars in general are lost too early, to suicide and to drugs; to fast living and mental illness, to the intensity of fame. It should make you question the whole idea of fame and make you worried about the generations now and in the future growing up in front of the spotlight of social media, always on camera, always under scrutiny, always at the good, the bad and the truly ugly we as a society can throw at them. Our society chews up and spits out anyone who becomes famous, be it the work of days or years. Of course, some survive, a few even thrive, but fame is serial killer. Think on that while you listen below.

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This entry is a little different than the other albums [confusion.cc] I’ve posted because you can’t buy this album. At least not officially. It’s a bootleg of The Cure’s 1990 set at the Glastonbury Festival. I’m sure you can find it somewhere on the internet, but I actually bought this pre-Napster and still have the physical bootleg CDs.

In 1990 I was 12 and had never heard of The Cure. I think I first encountered The Cure a few years later when Friday, I’m in Love, from their 1992 release Wish [discogs.com], was in heavy rotation on MTV. I can remember sitting in K████’s living room every morning waiting on the school bus with K████ and M██████ and watching the music video. Good times, there are a lot of music videos from 1992/1993 burned into my memory from those mornings.

I didn’t catch The Cure bug for a few more years. In 1997, my girlfriend was big into The Cure. We listened to a lot of Cure in the car driving around. I actually bought the Glastonbury bootleg with her in a little shop on the downtown mall. It’s one of a number of bootlegs I got from the same guy. Mostly live stuff; Bush, The Chemical Brothers, Tori Amos, Jewel, Sarah McLachlan, others.

My love of The Cure long outlasted that relationship. I devoured their back catalog, and continued to follow them. It was their back catalog that really hooked me, Poronography [discogs.com], and The Walk [discogs.com] are awesome albums. But their masterpiece was Disintegration [discogs.com]; Fascination Street, Love Song, and Pictures of You, my three favorite Cure songs, all on the same album. Disintegration is Robert Smith’s masterpiece. As Tricky says in the liner notes to his 2003 entry in the Back to Mine [discogs.com] series: Robert Smith is the best love song writer in the world. All his lyrics and melodies are unbelievable. For me that’s true. While Tricky picked Lullaby for his Back to Mine playlist, I would but Love Song and Pictures of You in my top few loves songs ever.

But the live performances at Glastonbury in 1990 is the one I’ve always come back to. It’s peak Cure. It was a year after Disintegration and includes a lot of songs from that album but also an amazing selection of songs from their earlier releases. And this era, 89, 90, 91, is the perfection of The Cure’s synth-goth-post-punk-shoegaze-alternative-rock sound. Even the older songs that might have been a little ‘meh’ on the original releases here have something extra, something amazing.

I wish I could post an Apple or Spotify link, but as a it’s a bootleg they don’t have it. The best I could do would be one of the official live releases from around this time; Show is the best option. But Show released on as single CDs you only get about 80 min while the 1990 set at Glastonbury was close to two full hours with the two encores (not including the helicopter landing to evacuate some lady who was getting crushed). But I can link to this YouTube video that seems to have the whole set. It’s an hour and forty-four minutes, enjoy:

Artist

Thievery Corporation

Realse Date

September 30, 2002

I purchased The Richest Man in Babylon [discogs.com] sometime in late 2002 or early 2003 while I was living in Dupont Circle in DC. I purchased it at a music store that I can’t remember the name of, it was near Kramers bookstore. I spent a lot of time browsing both Kramers and that music store; several other albums I plan to cover came from there. I spent a lot of evenings and weekend afternoons sitting at Xandos reading books from Kramers and listening to albums I purchased at that music store.

I purchased The Richest Man because while I was living in Dupont I spent many evenings chilling at the Eighteenth Street Lounge [18thstlounge.com]. The Eighteenth Street Lounge, or ESL, is a story in itself. Hidden behind a plain street level door, sandwiched between a mattress store and… something else at the time. Next to the door was a brass plate that said “Eighteenth Street Lounge, Washington DC”. Opening the door and climbing the stairs led you to the best live music and DJ place in DC. The ambiance was amazing: an eclectic mix of baroque and thrift store couches and tables, damask wallpapers and exposed brick walls, light from electric candelabras and chandlers, a well stocked bar and the best sound system you can imagine.

So what’s the connection to the Richest Man in Babylon? The band, Thievery Corporation, started when one of the lounge co-owners, Rob Garza, met Eric Hilton at the ESL. ESL played a lot of Thievery Corporation music and the music that inspired them. So I went searching for the album. ESL has it’s own record label, also ESL, that besides Thievery Corporation also released other amazing artists like Federico Aubele and Les Hommes.

I purchased both The Mirror Conspiracy [discogs.com] and The Richest Man in Babylon at the same time. Richest Man became my favorite and still remains my favorite Thievery Corporation album. The music is an eclectic mix of influences, Latin American jazz and bossa nova, indian and middle eastern traditional music, with Jamaican dub most evident in the vocals. All layered over chill out electronic beats.

Any album on my best list has to be one I can, and do, listen too from start to finish, no dud songs. And Richest Man is defiantly there. From the opening sounds of Heaven’s Goona Burn Your Eyes, through to the end of Until the Morning. This is one of the best chill albums out there. The electronic beats blend with the world music precession and synth melodies providing a timeless background for the vocals. Often the vocals are non-english, like on Omid, which lend it an even more chilled out sound to me.

The best songs on the album are probably “Heaven’s Gonna Burn Your Eyes” and “The Richest Man in Babylon” followed closely by “All That We Perceive” and “Un Simple Histoire”. But have a listen from beginning to end. It’s all amazing.

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Artist

Micheal Kiwanuka

Realse Date

July 15, 2016

This is going to be one of the newest albums on this tour of my favorites (at least, as of when I started this list. Let’s see how long it goes on…). An album has to be around for a while to move from current obsession to long term “favorite”. This one is from 2016, six years ago at this point and I still go back to it again and again. That’s long enough, it’s faded from any popular zeitgeist. The artist has released newer music since this one.

This is Micheal Kiwanuka’s second album, I had never heard him before this one. All of his albums are great, but this one is beyond great. I was turned on to it with this album via the BBC World Service’s Arts Hour program one morning while driving to work. They played part of an interview and then a live version of “Black Man in a White World” as I recall. I was hooked immediately, it was amazing! First thing I did when I got to the office was lookup the album, Love & Hate [discogs.com] and listen to it. I listened to it all day, over and over again. I was obsessed with it for weeks and yeas later I am still listening to it.

Apple Music lists the album as R&B/Soul, while Discogs adds Rock, Funk and Acoustic to the mix. And it’s that mix that takes this album to a whole other level. It’s out of world. From the slow methodical opening of Cold Little Heart which takes it time to get going and sucks you into the album as it does so. To the gental weaping guitar of The Final Frame the album never settles down into one genre.

His follow up to Love & Hate, the 2019 KIWANUKA, might have won the Mercury Prize while Love & Hate only got a nomination but Love & Hate is my favorite. It’s perfect for a rainy day, laying in the dark and listening. The production and style is just the right mix of quiet and lyrics and crashing guitar and drums, a lush layered sound, sometimes soul, sometimes R&B and sometimes straight out rock.

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Artist

DJ Tiësto

Realse Date

March 15, 1999

At the turn of the century (that sounds pretentious, but it’s true), I was deep into dance music. Rave music. Specifically the house and trance varieties in their various forms. EDM was not a term, it was all just “techno” to people who didn’t listen to it. It was just starting to become a thing in mainstream clubs. I started attending ‘raves’ when I was in high school, initially local underground parties in the basement of Club 216 and in the SERP house. Later driving to Richmond and beyond. All over the mid-Atlantic and eventually going way too far in pursuit of a good party.

Quck aside: I remember coming back from a party on new years morning one year and passing thought four separate sobriety check points. At each one I had to get out of the car and do the walk and touch my nose and whatnot. I was completely sober and passed all four, though I suspect I smelled of weed (along with sweat and tobacco smoke, specifically menthol as that seemed to be the only thing people smoked at Raves), given I’d spend the whole night in a warehouse party where more than a few people were smoking all manner of things. The funny part was the other 3 people in my car were stoned out of their fucking mind. And the cops didn’t care at all. They were only looking for drunk drivers.

Anyway, getting good dance music in my home town was not easy. The stores had little sections of CDs labeled “techno” that were filled mostly with cheap unmixed compilations of hit-or-miss tracks. I bought too many of these just to get a specific song. Often they were multi-CD bundles, two or three, or even four discs. And there would be two or three songs I actually wanted on them. But before Napster that was about all I could get. DJ mixes were things we bought or traded with others at raves on cassettes with hand written labels or low quality black and white dot matrix printed pictures.

It was Napster that really opened up access to electronic music; I was in college in 1999 and 2000 when Napster blew up. Free fast internet meant amassing an obscenely large collection of music. Browsing forums to find good DJs and downloading mixes — I had a library of more than 100 Radio 1 Essential Mixes at one point. I remember songs that I have never been able to find again – talking bout you Kai Tracide song with the crazy sax solo. Who knows, maybe it was mislabeled, or maybe it was a self release unique to Napster, but I could never find a legit copy of that one or many others.

I don’t know how I first stumbled upon Tiësto but I became obsessed. I spent hours finding good rips —high bit rate— of all his mix CDs that were released in Europe in the late 90’s: the Lost Treasure series (four releases), the Forbidden Paradise series (seven releases) and the first few Magik releases (eventually there were seven of these but the later ones were after I left college). Later when I had a job I ordered used copies of all of these, I still have them. But in 1999 Tiësto released two mix albums that blew my mind. In Search of Sunrise [discogs.com] and Live at Innercity [discogs.com]. Either of which could be on my favorites list but if I had to choose one it would be Innercity.

I love the feeling of this mix from beginning to end. You can hear just the right amount of the crowd in the mix especially in the beginning; cheering and whistling. The way the energy of the tracks flows across the whole disc is amazing, the energy builds, dissipates and builds again across it’s 70 plus minutes. Perfect. Put on a good pair of headphones and listen. The opening track, The Universal Nation by Push deserves a lot of credit, but all the tracks are great and the mix has a wonderful gestalt. I also appreciate the fact that there is only 1 track that lists Tiësto as the artist, no other self-promotion, only one Tiësto track and no remixes. Too often mix albums, even live performances, end up being a self promotion, the DJ showing off their own tracks and remixes on after another.

My clubbing and raving days are far, far behind me but I do find myself listening to Innercity every once in a while. I Search of Sunrise too. A lot of nostalgia I guess. They don’t make me what to get up and dance, but the are relaxing. Great driving music, great music when I need to grind through some work, great when I just want to sit in the dark and relax.

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