There are great albums, favourite albums, important albums, and albums everyone agrees you’re supposed to own. These aren’t necessarily any of those.
These are the records I consider essentially flawless from beginning to end. No filler. No obligatory deep cut I politely pretend to enjoy. No reaching for the skip button. Just albums where the songs, performances, production, sequencing and whatever other mysterious ingredients were involved somehow came together exactly right.
Entirely subjective. Completely defensible.
Probably worth arguing about.
Expansive, atmospheric and impeccably produced, The Division Bell is Pink Floyd operating at a remarkably assured late-career peak. Gilmour’s guitar is everywhere it needs to be, Wright’s presence gives the record its soul, and the songs unfold with the kind of space and patience almost nobody gets away with anymore. From Cluster One through High Hopes, it feels less like a collection of tracks than one continuous, beautifully constructed piece of music. No skips. No apologies. A perfect 10.
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Choosing Dear Rouge’s Phases over Black to Gold is harder than it has any right to be, but there’s something about this record that cuts considerably deeper. It’s huge, polished and ridiculously consistent, yet underneath all of that is an emotional current that runs through virtually every track. There’s so much between the lines here: vulnerability, tension, longing, uncertainty, resilience. The more you listen, the more you hear. And somehow, every track still manages to feel better than the one before it. An extraordinary record.
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The Downward Spiral may be the masterpiece. The Fragile may be the epic. I’ll take Hesitation Marks. This is Reznor at his most refined and, somehow, still completely raw. Cold, precise, electronic and occasionally almost funky, every sound feels obsessively placed while everything underneath it feels dangerously exposed. This isn’t the chaos of earlier Nine Inch Nails cleaned up for middle age. It’s what happens when the person who made those records survives long enough to dissect the wreckage with considerably sharper tools. Dense, uncomfortable, darkly funny and absolutely fucking brilliant. Turn it up.
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Big Sugar’s Heated is an exercise in just how enormous a stripped-down rock record can sound. There’s space everywhere, Gordie Johnson’s guitar tone is absolutely monstrous, and the rhythm section lives somewhere several floors below ground. The playing is exceptional without ever becoming the point, and the whole thing feels loose, heavy and completely under control. It also sealed the deal on my own move to a Gibson SG through a Traynor and, as it happens, became one of the first albums I ever had a review of published. So yes, there’s some history here. Twenty-plus years later, it still sounds absolutely massive.
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Forget the hits. Forget the synthesizers, sequencers, spinning guitars and furry everything. Rhythmeen is ZZ Top stripped back to three people making an absolutely colossal amount of noise. By far the heaviest record they ever made, it’s filthy, raw, hypnotic and almost impossibly thick, with Billy Gibbons producing guitar tones that sound less recorded than excavated. Everything has weight. Everything has groove. Nothing is there that doesn’t need to be. This is ZZ Top reduced to its essential ingredients, then turned up until the walls start moving.
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Jamiroquai’s Travelling Without Moving is what happens when ridiculous musicianship, impeccable production and an almost pathological commitment to groove all land in exactly the same place. Funk, soul, jazz, disco and electronics move effortlessly through a record that is impossibly slick without ever feeling sterile. The rhythm section is frightening, the arrangements are immaculate, and there’s an organic looseness underneath all that precision that keeps the whole thing alive. Cool without trying to sound cool, sophisticated without showing off, and funky beyond reasonable measure. Nearly thirty years later, it still sounds like the future.
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There was a time when Coldplay was arguably the biggest band in the world, and A Rush of Blood to the Head is a pretty compelling explanation of why. Beautifully written, impeccably produced and emotionally devastating in places, it’s an album where virtually every song could have been a single. From the explosive opening of Politik to the extraordinary restraint of Amsterdam, there’s an almost ridiculous amount of great music here. I don’t particularly care what Coldplay became. This is what they were capable of, and for a moment, they were untouchable.
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At a time when Nirvana, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam had effectively rewritten the rules of rock music, along comes Travis Meeks with an acoustic guitar and Days of the New. And somehow, it hits every bit as hard. Dark, hypnotic, unsettling and astonishingly accomplished, it’s difficult to comprehend that this music came from someone barely old enough to drive. The songwriting, the arrangements, the sheer intensity of the whole thing. An album that seemed to come out of absolutely nowhere, sounded like nothing else, and still feels like one of the most remarkable debuts of its generation.
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If there’s an archetype for the modern singer-songwriter, Sarah McLachlan helped define it. One of the most enchanting voices ever committed to tape, equally compelling behind a piano, with a guitar, or commanding a stage. And Fumbling Towards Ecstasy might be her finest achievement. Beautiful, haunting, deeply personal and almost impossibly timeless, it’s the kind of record that becomes intertwined with your own life. People, places, moments you haven’t thought about in decades. Turn it down low or play it at full volume, and suddenly they’re all right there again. Some albums become part of your consciousness. This one never leaves.
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Love him or hate him, there is nobody on the planet who sounds quite like Seal. And Seal is the kind of debut album that makes you wonder how anyone could possibly have had this much music in them right out of the gate. Soul, rock, dance, electronica, orchestral arrangements, all colliding in a spectacularly ambitious record that somehow makes perfect sense. Trevor Horn’s production is staggering, the songwriting is fearless, and that voice is simply beyond comparison. One of the greatest debut albums ever recorded? I’d have a hard time arguing otherwise.
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