Usually with songs albums and artists, the ones which come to mean the most to me are not the ones that made a strong first impression on me. The music most precious to me tends to be what I've gradually grown a deeper and deeper appreciation of through familiarity, and through a better understanding of its nuance and style with repeated listens. But there are some exceptions. Sometimes a song or album or artist kicks down the door of my soul and changes me forever. This writeup will be highlighting on some of those albums I've come across in my listening experiences which have truly wowed me from the get go.
The concept for this list is pretty straightforward, and so are the parameters and eliminators. Basically the only situation I tried to avoid was an album which made a strong initial impression on me but which faded over time. I'm just focusing on albums which both impressed me at first and which I still find impressive today. There will be some objective critique and analysis of these albums and a bit of historical context but the entries will be a little more autobiographical than other lists I've made.
So, since it's so simple let's get right into it. These are 10 albums that instantly blew my mind:
Black Country, New Road - For the First Time (2021)
There's still this part of me that's just hipster trash. I try to resist it, but it's so deep-seated. I can be so scornful and reticent of a new act bursting onto the scene that's being lauded and praised, compared to old innovators who I deeply revere. You could only imagine how smugly and skeptically I went into my first listening of this recent and highly acclaimed debut from young English upstarts Black Country, New Road. It has been most consistently compared to Slint which, to me, seemed downright heretical. And then you can imagine how humbled I was, like Stephen Spurrier first tasting Napa Valley wine in the mid 1970s, when I discovered how incredibly good For the First Time is. And how I agreed that yes, I can absolutely hear Slint in this (the band even makes an overt reference). While I can't say it holds quite the same revolutionary weight as what Slint did over 30 years ago, it really is a breath of fresh air. And when I say fresh I mean turbulent, intense, tragic, and very emotional. It is pretentious in its own way, and certainly prone to melodrama, but the arrangements and delivery justify how self-important it all seems. These are some brilliantly colorful narratives set to some incredibly engaging music, the final product ranging from frenetic to dark to strangely comforting. It's a modern classic and I expect that it will stand the test of time as well as Spiderland, or anything else to come from this decade.
Cult of Luna and Julie Christmas - Mariner (2016)
Julie Christmas scares the fuck out of me in the best way. She's quite possibly the most intense vocalist I've ever known. Her method is inimitable and her emotional range is untouchable. As a longtime fan of Made out of Babies' brief and brutal catalog, and as a lukewarm to moderate fan of Battle of Mice and of her solo album The Bad Wife, it intrigued me when in 2016 I stumbled upon a then-recent collaboration she'd done with bona fide Swedish prog rockers Cult of Luna called Mariner. I was further intrigued to find that it was an album conceptualized around space travel. And then I heard it. The scale and width of this thing is so broad and epic. It is loud and intense, but it's also very fleshed out and "spacey" if you will, with the shortest of its 5 tracks still clocking in at over 8 minutes. The music on a fundamental level isn't all that complex, especially by Cult of Luna's standards, but it's very satisfying and easily followed and appreciated for its atmosphere, lending to the concept of the lyrics, and yielding to the vocals that really drive this album. It is...scary. And dark and enormous. Like outer space itself. Not recommended at all for those who don't have any taste or tolerance for unclean vocals. But if it seems like it might be palatable to you then you should give it a chance, because as much as I've listened to it for 5 years the power of it still shatters me every time.
Earl Sweatshirt - Some Rap Songs (2018)
I'll talk more about Mac Miller later, but for now suffice it to say that my deep dive into Mac led me to discover Earl. Yes, I know I'm "late" but I'm pretty out of touch with modern rap and hip-hop, and nothing is guaranteed to hit my radar, especially while it's at the peak of its popularity. In any case, when I first heard Some Rap Songs it was kind of impossible for me to wrap my head around it. For a 24 minute album this thing is incredibly dense, both sonically and lyrically. But I knew I had stumbled upon something special. As someone who really appreciates old school perfectionist style of loop and sample based music making (basically I'm a big fan of The Avalanches and Paul's Boutique) the lo-fi yet meticulously produced beats really caught my attention. Then there's the weight of it. The album is incredibly heavy handed, and the space in which it exists is at the absolute dead bottom of depression. In retrospect I probably listened to this album too much in 2019, and it might've done something to enable or to perpetuate how lousy I felt about life. But it gave me strength as well, in how relatable I found it, how much I could learn from it, and how artistic it was and still is. I might not obsess over this album like I used to, in fact it's kind of taken the Pink Floyd effect in the sense that I'm very careful about when and how often I choose to listen to it. But there's no doubting how deep of an impression it's had on me, and how it's informed or changed the way I see literally everything.
MAVI - Let the Sun Talk (2019)
Further down the rabbit hole we go, from Mac Miller who led me to Earl Sweatshirt who led me to MAVI. While all three of them stand out in their own way, I'd say MAVI easily has the most progressive voice and tone of the three. He's brutally honest about everything, sometimes critical and often confessional, but it's clear to see that he wants very desperately to work towards enlightening himself, his particular community of Charlotte, North Carolina, and black America as a whole. He has a big heart and he wears it on his sleeve. But he's not so caught up in his feelings that he can't or won't give you extremely hard bars and verses at a blistering pace. Like Earl, his work is dense and heady. His first full length album Let the Sun Talk makes so many ethical politial and personal statements, but without seeming detached or condescending or hypocritical in any way. Also like Earl, his production and sampling techniques are often fuzzy and lo-fi, fairly complex, and extremely sonically satisfying. His 2021 EP END OF THE EARTH is another moving and deeply contemplative record (especially for being so brief) but Let the Sun Talk stands as his most ambitious and colorful project. I haven't come across any rapper who's ever had this much spirit and I look forward to seeing what he manages to create over the course of a promising career that's hopefully just getting started.
Metallica - ...And Justice For All (1988)
...And Justice For All is far from a perfect album, and there has been some fair criticism lobbed towards it. The practical absence of bass (in an album that was released 2 years after their pioneer genius and badass of an original bassist Cliff Burton was killed in a tour bus accident) combined with the overproduction, particularly in the echoing and reverb, have led some to the reasonable opinion that it's the worst of Metallica's 80s albums, or even worse than the 1991 eponymous album. But I can't help but hold a sentimental bias towards it, because it was my introduction to metal. My father bought a CD of this album and played it on the way back from a trip across state lines to trade in our old vehicle for a newer one. I was 11 years old. This was an absolute game-changer for me, and it would ignite a deep passion for Metallica and for other popular classic metal bands that would dominate my listening habits for the next 3 years and inform the way I would listen to music for the rest of my life. And it is objectively good, despite the polarizing style. James Hetfield's songwriting is more politically fueled and less personal on this album, and it showcases some of his boldest and best work. The music itself compositionally is Metallica at their most complex. This is as close to progressive music as they ever got. Kirk Hammett's solos are as solid as ever, Hetfield's vocals were approaching the top of the bell curve in his career (after his high pitched and tinny younger days and before alcoholism took him too far in the other direction of deep and muddy) and even Lars Ulrich's drumming is pretty good, for him. In any case, I hold this album in high regard as both a quintessential building block of metal music and a great introduction to the genre, and also as a sentimental favorite that opened my mind to intelligent and expertly crafted metal. And no it's not overrated. It can't be overrated if half the fans call it overrated.
Mac Miller - Swimming (2018)
So Mac Miller died in September, 2018, and it sent a shockwave of mourning through the rap & hip hop community. It was through this commisseration that I heard of him for the first time. And looking at the man's career with fresh eyes retrospectively, it's hard not to be impressed. He was insanely prolific for someone who was only commercially active for about 9 years. A lot of his ideas missed the mark to me, and a lot of his ideas were intriguing and brilliant. His work ethic, cleverness, creativity, and above all his honesty have earned him a respect which he hasn't always received, even now. But the album released a month before he died, Swimming is near universally respected and appreciated. It doesn't resonate like a suicide note the way In Utero might seem to some, but rather as a memoir and an acknowledgment from Miller of his past journey, the man he's become in the present, and the type of future he'd like to see. Overall he's not known in his music to come across as very subtle or mature but that's very much the tone of this one. More than anything the timing of the album's release in conjunction with his death served as a framework for how impactful it was to me and to a lot of other people when we watched the music video for "Self Care" after the night of September 8, 2018. I won't commentate on the "commodity of death" and its impact on an artist's success, and treat it as coincidence. It's just a fact - the man died, and then I saw his art, and it pierced me forever. As mentioned it led me down a deep rabbit hole of musical discovery which led me to uncover a deep discography with a lot of interesting and unfamiliar featured artists. I would like to think he'd be pleased to hear that, but he can't, and if he was still alive today and somehow it were true and somehow he heard it, I'm positive he wouldn't give a fuck. And that's the attitude, of both the album and the man, not to decide to not care about anything, but to choose wisely about what to care about. That's why I've come to like him and respect him as much as I do.
Mogwai - Rock Action (2001)
I was still a fairly new listener to Mogwai when Rock Action came into my life. I'd listened to 3 or 4 other albums of theirs once or twice each. I generally liked what I'd heard and I was hungry for a broader perspective on their style. This very tightly woven and immaculately paced 39 minute gem became my immediate favorite. Their appreciation and understanding of dynamic contrast, tonal contrast, drone, drama, and the ability to musically portray inspiration without relying on nor completely neglecting vocals and lyricism make this a real showoff of an album to me. And I kinda love a showoff, if they can show off. The album buffers its bigger more epic ideas with short and intriguing transitional tracks. The tonal spectrum that's created is really broad, but while the album does show rougher more cacophonous sides, overall it's very melodic. It also just flows so well in spite of the wide variety of moods and textures. In so many ways I still don't understand my own neurotic tastes and I never know what's going to make the audiophile in me fall in love and what's not. But I guess I just have to take it on a case by case basis and in this case I know that this album is such a joy to listen to, and it always has been for as long as I've been listening.
Sufjan Stevens - Come On! Feel the Illinoise! (2005)
By my senior year of high school I had most of my academic requisites done for my graduation, so I ended up with a lot of cushy titles/assignments to fill my schedule such as "library assistant" or "study period" in which I sat on a couch and did nothing for 50 minutes. I also had a teacher's assistant role for my civics/social studies teacher, who was much more lenient and down-to-earth than most teachers. The computer at his desk had originally belonged to another teacher who'd been fired for reasons not entirely clear, but rumor has it his tendency to stare at high school girls' asses contributed to the decision. I had free reign over this computer as he was lecturing, and this ex-teacher had left a considerable amount of music which I'd heard of and was interested in but didn't know on its hard drive. I made copies of some albums which I wanted to further investigate onto my own flash drive* and took it home to study.
Among this music was Sufjan Stevens' most cherished and critically acclaimed album, Illinois. I was instantly impressed and spellbound by the man's elaborate multi-instrumental arrangements and song structures, by his narrative and engaging lyricism, and by the concept of relating an entire album's worth of material to places stories and events around the state of Illinois. It's colorful and deep, perhaps a little pretentious but not super indulgent, especially compared to some of his other work. At the time I was generally focused much more intently on older music than on modern music, and this universally heralded god-tier indie album along with a handful of other key albums and artists played a big role in expanding my attention to certain contemporary music. And it still resonates as an insanely ambitious mind-bender, melodic and playful and bright but still very poignant and purposeful. It might not be my personal favorite album of Sufjan's but I'll freely admit that objectively it's his magnum opus.
*Yes this was technically filesharing and technically illegal but I did
purchase my own legal copy, usually a physical copy, of all the digital
music I'd swiped which I enjoyed and wanted to add to my collection including this album. I believe in supporting artists and in paying for music you enjoy and I practice what I preach.
Swans - My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky (2010)
Back in 2011 when I first heard My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, the first album released by legendary noise band Swans after a long hiatus, I remember thinking that it was as close to hell as one could possibly get. Since that time Swans have released 3 other extreme and exhaustive records, each of them much longer than this one, and now I have a much better understanding of the band and what they do. But I still don't think I was wrong in my thinking about this album exactly--it has a lot of hell in it. Of these 4 albums mentioned this one is the most widely disregarded and I guess I can understand why. It's much less cohesive, much more rough around the edges, much less satisfying overall compared to the other 3 very high concept albums. But I really feel like this one shouldn't be so overlooked. I still see it as a necessary introduction to this era of the band. It does a lot of things successfully, including broadening my horizons and helping me to understand how to listen to music that's so intentionally overbearing. It is dark and stormy and assaulting. There's absolutely nothing pleasant about this music, except maybe the admiration it commands. But for all its excessiveness, it is also very intelligent and meaningful for being such a hateful wall of sound. Maybe it's impossible for some or even most people to see the beauty in chaos and destruction. But I've found it in Swans. I cannot un-experience the terror of this album and I wouldn't choose to.
Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002)
I grabbed Wilco's most celebrated album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot from the same hard drive as I got Sufjan Stevens' Illinois. It wasn't until several months later, after I'd probably listened to Illinois about 50 times, that I got around to listening to this one for the first time. I can remember sitting in the backseat of my choir director's sedan, driving in the dark from one corner of the snow-dusted state to another, with my laptop out and listening to "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" on repeat. I remember feeling, even at the time, that this music was changing my life and that I would never be the same. There are few albums which are more meticulously and expertly mixed mastered and engineered as this noisy broody complex album which was originally rejected by Reprise Records but that's a whole other story. Incidentally the album was released on September 11, 2001. As with Swimming, maybe the coinciding influenced the album's reception and success, with the dark disembodied and disillusioned atmosphere of the album matching the alarmed and somber outlook of the United States and the world at large. But it first came to me well after its release, and while some tracks took multiple listens for me to appreciate, I knew immediately that I had found something grand-scaled and special. I still feel that way. This album is the tough part of growing up. It's getting over your self-hatred. It's the unenthusiastic chore of sorting out exactly what is worth living for. It's a difficult album, not easy listening and not easy to recommend. But the buried heart of it, the light of it, is incredible.
This honorable mentions list mostly contains albums which didn't make *as* strong of a first impression on me, or which were less consistent in quality from end to end, or albums which I still appreciate to this day but simply don't love/listen to very often, or some combination thereof. For the most part these are all very strong records which are all very well worth a listen, but couldn't be considered quite as mind bending, eye opening, and game changing as albums from the main list. Or at least not at first.
Anois - Tree House Whispers (2010)
Between the Buried and Me - Colors (2007)
Boris - Flood (2000)
Haley Bonar - Golder (2011)
Car Seat Headrest - Twin Fantasy (Mirror to Mirror) (2011)
Dream Theater - A Change of Seasons (1995)
Duke Ellington & His Orchestra - At Newport 1956 (1956)
Eminem - The Marshall Mathers LP (2000)
Faraquet - The View From This Tower (2000)
For Those I Love - For Those I Love (2021)
Funkadelic - Maggot Brain (1971)
Galaxie 500 - Today (1988)
Genesis - Selling England By the Pound (1973)
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada E.P. (1999)
Guided By Voices - Bee Thousand (1994)
Hem - Eveningland (2004)
Herbie Hancock - Head Hunters (1973)
Ihsahn - After (2009)
Wyclef Jean featuring Refugee Allstars - The Carnival (1997)
Kendrick Lamar - Section.80 (2011) & good kid, m.A.A.d city (2013)
King Crimson - In the Court of the Crimson King (1969)
Joyner Lucas - 508-507-2209 (2017)
Made Out of Babies - The Ruiner (2008)
Mercury Rev - Deserter's Songs (1998)
Van Morrison - Astral Weeks (1968)
Mos Def - Black on Both Sides (1999)
Nine Inch Nails - Pretty Hate Machine (1989)
Sage Francis - Personal Journals (2002)
Saigon - The Greatest Story Never Told (2011)
SINKANE - MARS (2012)
Songs: Ohia - Didn't It Rain (2002)
Traffic - The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys (1971)
TV on the Radio - Dear Science (2008)
There you have it. Granted, a lot of these albums aren't what I'd call accessible listening, especially from the main list. But I do hope I've inspired someone to open their mind to something new that could radically change their perspective on music. Or at the very least to bring some awareness to some really impressive music that isn't as omnipresent as it ought to be. Everyone has their own experiences, one man's trash is another man's treasure, and all that. But I encourage you to latch onto something previously unfamiliar to you, or maybe something you'd heard of but haven't tried, and see if it doesn't raise your eyebrows. Happy listening.