1. Sword

    Sword Member

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    Your FAVORITE album of all time?

    Discussion in 'The Lounge' started by Sword, Oct 24, 2014.

    Does anyone else have an entire album that they've listened to 500+ times? Some albums just have a feel that sticks with me and I play them on repeat over and over and over again.

    Please tell me others do this and I'm not crazy.
     
  2. jonahmann

    jonahmann Active Member

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    Probably the albums I've listened to most are Metallica or Slayer's Reign In Blood. Right now I would say my favorite album is Pink Floyd's The Wall.
     
  3. Okon

    Okon Contributor Contributor

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    Naveed, by Our Lady Peace. It was just so well done on all accounts.
     
  4. Adenosine Triphosphate

    Adenosine Triphosphate Member Contributor

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    Lupe Fiasco's Food and Liquor. The Cool. Talib Kweli's Gravitas. good kid, m.a.a.d city. Aquemini. It's hard to pick one.

    For metal, it would be The Jester Race at this particular moment, but that could and probably will change as I listen to more of the genre.
     
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  5. Wreybies

    Wreybies Thrice Retired Supporter Contributor

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    It's a tossup between two albums by Joni Mitchell: Blue and For the Roses.

    Now that music is just data with no physical medium, I doubt I will ever have to purchase those albums again since I own them via iTunes, but back when physical media was still a real thing, at least twice I bought both of those albums, already owning them, but not having them on hand, so I stopped into the local music shop and picked up cassette copies (now you know the when) to have right there and then because I needed to sing along with Joni like a crazy person in my car. :)
     
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  6. thirdwind

    thirdwind Member Contest Administrator Reviewer Contributor

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    Favorite depends on my mood. Pink Floyd's The Wall is definitely up there. So is The Beatles. Nas' Illmatic is probably my favorite rap album.
     
  7. minstrel

    minstrel Leader of the Insquirrelgency Supporter Contributor

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    I have a few. Maybe the number one is a very obscure choice:

    There used to be a French Canadian band called Harmonium. The made a double concept album called L'Heptade. They played a live concert version of that album in Vancouver in 1977 called En Tournee. That is my favorite album of all time. It's an amazing mix of folk, jazz, rock, prog, and maybe some genres that only exist in their music. It's all in French and I don't understand all the lyrics, but the music is incredible. I love it. Their leader, Serge Fiori, is a musical genius, but he has retired from music, alas. The world weeps!

    I'm a huge fan of The Who. Quadrophenia is one of my top three favorite records, I think. Pete Townshend is a genius, and this concept album proves it.

    Another Canadian artist, Bruce Cockburn, made a record called Dancing in the Dragon's Jaws. I've listened to it endlessly and it always amazes me. He's a devout Christian and I'm an atheist, but the songs still speak to me, probably because he's not trying to convert me. Instead, he's celebrating his own faith, and the results are amazing. It's basically folk, but a very modern folk - exquisite guitar work, remarkable vocals (don't try to do this in karaoke!), and a level of courage most singer-songwriters can't match. This is brave, bracing, beautiful music.

    I love live albums by prog-rock bands: Yessongs by Yes, Welcome Back My Friends to the Show That Never Ends by ELP, Live Bursting Out by Jethro Tull, Alchemy by Dire Straits (okay, not a prog band), and of course, Live At The Fillmore East, by the Allman Brothers Band. I also love the Band's The Last Waltz.

    There's plenty more, but if you want to know where I come from, musically, you can start with these. Thanks for asking!
     
  8. jannert

    jannert Retired Mod Supporter Contributor

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    I'm 65 years old, and it's impossible for me to look back on a fairly long life and pick out ONE album that is a favourite. I've gone through several phases of music, and have had favourites throughout. My current favourites are The Punch Brothers, and I listen to their Antifogmatic and Ahoy albums all the way through, then repeat, several times a week. Going way back, I guess I loved the Beatles albums, and could listen to them straight through, every album, over and over. (Up to their psychedelic phase ...Sgt Pepper onwards ...when I kind of lost interest.) I also loved The Last Waltz, and was hooked on the Who's Tommy when it first came out. And the Red Clay Ramblers Merchant's Lunch/Twisted Laurel compilaton. And Third World's Prisoner in the Street. And Michael Chapdelaine's Spanish Roses and Bach is Cool. And Borodin's string quartet compilation.

    And And And....
     
    Last edited: Oct 25, 2014
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  9. Lemon flavoured

    Lemon flavoured Active Member

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    The ones that immediately come to mind for me are Nirvana's MTV Unplugged album, and the Chris Wood album None The Wiser
     
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  10. Sword

    Sword Member

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    good kid, m.a.a.d city is one of my favorite albums! It's a great cohesive piece of music.
     
  11. Sword

    Sword Member

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    I love obscure bands (My favorite band is pretty obscure :p). Unfortunately, I just couldn't get into the vocals of Harmonium. I enjoyed Dancing in the Dragon's Jaws and Live At The Fillmore East though! I don't think there's such a thing as a bad taste in music so I'm always interested to see what people are listening to.
     
  12. Sword

    Sword Member

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    Can't argue with Nirvana.
     
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  13. Sword

    Sword Member

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    The punch brothers were really fun. Banjo and fiddle make me tap my feet. One of my favorite songs that is similar is Wagon Wheel by Old Crow Medicine Show (not the Darius Rucker cover).
     
  14. Sword

    Sword Member

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    Illmatic is fantastic.
     
  15. Sword

    Sword Member

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    Joni can really sing. Not quite my style but she's definitely got talent.

    I know! Sometimes I forget that I do have a bunch of CD's and such sitting on one of my bookshelves. I like having the physical copies but digital is just so much more convenient.
     
  16. Sword

    Sword Member

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    Never heard of these guys before but they were pretty good actually. Considering that they're pretty similar to my favorite genre's I'm surprised I hadn't heard of them.
     
  17. Sword

    Sword Member

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    Floyd is always good. If you haven't watch the music video for Another Brick In The Wall. It's pretty funny haha.
     
  18. jannert

    jannert Retired Mod Supporter Contributor

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    I really like that I don't know some of these artists being referred to on this thread—because they are new. So real music is alive and well, and separate from the corporate-generated pop crap we're all inundated with all the time. Good to know.
     
  19. Mike Hill

    Mike Hill Natural born citizen of republic of Finland.

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    I'am still so I cannot yet say a particular album but here are few.
    Gill Scott-Herons The Best Of collection differs from the music I regularly listen to but I love it. I actually heard first time about him when he died. Johannesburg and The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.
    Style is funk.
    Quincy Jones Big Band Bossa Nova has some great jazz.
    On the pop side of things Akon's Freedom.
    Rap is what I mostly listen to but there are only few that I like as a whole. Paul Wall's Hearth of a Champion.
     
  20. Lemex

    Lemex That's Lord Lemex to you. Contributor

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    Slayer's Raining Blood, you mean.

    I've got a few:

    Pink Floyd's The Wall.
    Bedouin Soundclash Sounding a Moasic and Street Gospals
    Eric Johnson Ah Via Musicom and Venus Isle
    R.E.M. Automatic For the People, Out of Time and Green
    Radiohead Best of (I must be honest - and fine, I out myself as a Radiohead fan)
    Every Tool and A Perfect Circle album - I'm a big Maynard James Keenan fan.
    Also, Puccini's Tosca and Wagner's The Ring Cycle by the London Opera House. Wonderful stuff!
    Muse - Origin of Symmetry, Absolution and Resistance
    Also, The Beatles The White Album
     
    Last edited: Oct 25, 2014
  21. daemon

    daemon Contributor Contributor

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    My two favorites are Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town. I sort of alternate between the two. I think Born to Run is musically better, but Darkness has some songs that speak to me personally in a way that nothing on Born to Run can quite match. (The specific songs are Racing in the Street and Darkness on the Edge of Town, and maybe The Promised Land.) Listening to Born to Run is like watching a movie; listening to Darkness is like listening to the soundtrack of my own life in an alternate universe.

    OK Computer might be my third favorite album. Which is mainly because of three songs: Paranoid Android, Karma Police, and No Surprises.

    Four albums I have been listening to obsessively lately are Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, and Exile on Main St.

    Exile, while an excellent album with some songs that affect me deeply (especially Shine a Light), clearly cannot compete with the other three. But I cannot seem to pick a favorite out of the other three. It is easier for me to single out my favorite songs: Sympathy for the Devil, Gimme Shelter, Sister Morphine, Monkey Man, You Can't Always Get What you Want, Sway, Moonlight Mile, No Expectations, and Jigsaw Puzzle. (Just so happens that those songs are evenly divided between the three albums.)

    If I had to rank albums, then Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, and Sticky Fingers would probably form a tier between OK Computer and everything else.

    Other favorites:

    The Sound of Perseverance: some of the best electric guitar solos I have ever heard. Jimi Hendrix did some interesting things with a guitar, but he did not come close to the raw emotion or the melodic complexity of the guitars in To Forgive Is to Suffer, Story to Tell, and Moment of Clarity.

    Appetite for Destruction: one of the few albums that made me literally feel sad when it ended, mostly due to the way the last track, Rocket Queen, plays the trick of suddenly switching from sexually charged "bad boy" rock to a heartfelt, unabashed statement of what love really is. Plus, Sweet Child O' Mine contains the best guitar solo ever. And the album contains the sing-along classic Paradise City. It is possibly the best album ever at maintaining momentum (if not Who's Next): each song is perfectly placed so that I feel like I am listening to one greatest hit after another, with never a dull moment.

    Forever Changes: some of the best melodies I have heard since the works of the old classical composers. Old Man never fails to give me goosebumps.

    Dark Side of the Moon: listening to this album is like watching a sad, intensely personal movie directed by Stanley Kubrick, where everything is executed perfectly. The Great Gig in the Sky is especially amazing and emotionally powerful.

    The Doors: the only album that I could call truly "psychedelic" to me: the only one that seems to transport me into my own personal Twilight Zone. And it contains the 12-minute epic The End, every minute of which is breathtakingly engaging. Listening to The End is like watching Apocalypse Now, which is quite fitting, since it is part of the soundtrack.

    And then some favorite albums from some other favorite bands, on a per-band basis, in no particular order:

    The Beatles: Rubber Soul. I have never gotten the same sense of a unified "album" from any of the Beatles' albums, other than Sgt. Pepper (which is brilliant all-around, but does not affect me very strongly) and the second half of Abbey Road, that I get from albums like Born to Run and Beggars Banquet. So, to me, their albums are generally just collections of songs. Abbey Road has the most songs that either affect me deeply (e.g. Nowhere Man and In My Life) or are just insanely fun to listen to (e.g. Drive My Car, The Word, and What Goes On).

    Bob Dylan: Normally I would say Desire (best songs: Hurricane and Black Diamond Bay), but I have been listening to John Wesley Harding more often lately (best songs: As I Went Out One Morning, I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine, and All Along the Watchtower) and I think I might like it better. For both albums, it is mainly a matter of a type of sound I really like, plus a couple stand-out songs that tell the kind of story that keeps me awake at night.

    The Who: either Quadrophenia or Who's Next. Quadrophenia is a beautiful movie in the form of an album. Who's Next is much denser in terms of quality; it is like a greatest hits album with absolutely no filler. Who's Next has better songs overall, but it does not provide the same story experience as listening to Quadrophenia from beginning to end.

    Muse: Origin of Symmetry. Mainly for Bliss, Space Dementia, and Plug In Baby. And the overall sound of the album, better than any other album, does the best job of evoking the same feelings in me that I feel about outer space. But there is something to be said from Exogenesis Symphony, from their album The Resistance, which is actually my favorite of their songs.
     
    Last edited: Oct 25, 2014
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  22. jonahmann

    jonahmann Active Member

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    The album's called Reign In Blood. Raining Blood is the last song on it.

    Interesting that a couple other people mentioned The Wall.
     
  23. Lemex

    Lemex That's Lord Lemex to you. Contributor

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    Ah, yes, you are right.
     
  24. Lemon flavoured

    Lemon flavoured Active Member

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    Another album that comes to mind is This Earthly Spell by Karine Polwart.
     
  25. 123456789

    123456789 Contributor Contributor

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    Do you listen to these while you paint your nails black?
     

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