Between top 40 and classic rock radio stations and my parents’ collection of mix CDs, I grew up thinking of albums simply as bodies of disconnected music from which would be plucked the best singles.
When I got my own computer, right after the take-off of iTunes, I continued only ever buying individual songs. I bought Jazz (We’ve Got) by A Tribe Called Quest in 2009, a song from their album Low End Theory, one of the most legendary hip-hop albums of all time; I went 9 years before finally listening to the rest of the album. I’ve been listening to Pink Floyd’s Time and Money regularly for 10 years, but I still have never listened to Dark Side of the Moon, one of the most well-regarded albums period, all the way through. I even spent many of my adolescent years listening to individual movements of Dvorak’s New World Symphony without ever hearing it in its full form.
With a couple exceptions, I only began listening to albums when I moved to my dorm at the University of Chicago. I’m not sure why. Perhaps because I made friends there who enjoyed music more “academically,” thinking about albums as coherent and story-driven works of art, and preferring music that fell into these categories, instead of singles. In addition to my own developing intellectual curiosity and emotional experience, I also had more time on my hands; time enough to listen to an entire album while grinding lap times in Trackmania, or even to listen to an album for its own sake.
My appreciation for album-listening again increased when I bought a record player in early 2018. It was only then that, for the first time in my life, I sat down and listened to Low End Theory with no interruptions. I did the same for Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid M.A.A.D. City.
While much of the music I listen to still comes in single form (I recently compiled a highly disorganized playlist of some of my favorite songs, and only rarely do more than two songs from the same artist appear, for variety’s sake), a great percentage of the music which I regard as most transcendental comes in album form. What follows are my favorite albums of all time.
Autumn – George Winston
Autumn, by George Winston, is the first album I ever loved. It’s probably also the first album I ever listened to all the way through. I can practically hear the leaves falling in George Winston’s piano playing. With my particular form(s) of synesthesia, truly good music almost always evokes season, weather, and/or degrees of light or temperature, but you don’t need to be synesthetic for Autumn to evoke visions of the fall.
Its first song, Colors/Dance, sweeps me off my feet like the wind made manifest into a mother’s arms. From there, Autumn is at times fast and passionate, at times restful, and often melancholic, but from beginning to end, it is one of the more visually powerful albums on this list.
Humming Jazz – Kenichiro Nishihara
Hip-hop’s union with jazz, soul, and related styles is as old and storied as hip-hop itself. Q-Tip said it best: Back in the days when I was a teenager/ Before I had status, before I had a pager/ You could find the Abstract listenin’ to hip-hop/ My pops used to say it reminded him of bebop (Excursions, 1991). The Japanese role-playing game Persona 4 Golden introduced in my life a craving, nay, a desperation, for atmospheric, gorgeous yet subdued, jazz-influenced hip-hop instrumentals – these often accompanied by soft and thoughtful vocals.
Over the last 6 years since Persona 4 entered my life, I’ve listened to many such albums. None, not even those by the stellar Nujabes, J Dilla, or DJ Okawari, have achieved so exquisitely the calm, lush, first-bloom profundity of Kenichiro Nishihara’s Humming Jazz.
The River – Ali Farka Toure
Ali Farka Toure’s The River, on some days, is my favorite album of all time. It at once possesses the timelessness of classical music, the incorruptible soul of folk music, and the inimitable caress of a lullaby. Ali Farka Toure sings in a multitude of languages and I can understand none of them, but of all the albums on this list, The River probably has the most story-like quality.
With Ali Farka Toure’s voice, as well as his minimal but lilting and colorful instrumentals, this album listens like a fable told by a fire on an early summer night. It’s wistful and emotionally saturated, playful and childlike, and universally filled with a fatherly wisdom (again relayed through his voice and his accompanying instruments, even though I don’t know what he’s saying).
Arrows & Anchors – Fair To Midland
This album is the tie that binds me to my three closest friends from UChicago. Though much of my favorite music they would find nigh unlistenable, and vice versa, our shared love for this album is deep. As another candidate for single best album of all time, the speed and saturation, the strength and fragility, and the patience and absurdity of this album utterly sweep me off my feet from beginning to end.
Arrows & Anchors is sung in a language I understand, but this album shares The River’s surface incomprehensibility, rife with disconnected and often incoherent stanzas. It takes no effort to see the beauty beneath the surface, however (to the extent beauty and incoherence preclude each other; I think they are in fact often mutually required). Like the ebb and flow of a story’s intensity, both the instrumentals and the vocals of the album move fluidly from overpowering to pensive, furious to bittersweet. This album invites one to discover along with it the allegory, the miracles, the tragedies, the anxiety, depression, and ecstasy of the fable-like journey it takes.
Palingenesis – Nebelung
Palingenesis is an impenetrable winter’s night. To be caught in the thick of its sometimes rushing, sometimes marching, sometimes yearning jungle of instrumental black-greenery is effortless. Each song, in my listening, recounts a certain moment of the night, evoking the thoughtfulness of silence; the hopefulness of light; and sweet, pervasive darkness, in reflective but unstoppable progression. It is far deeper than gloom but not quite despondent, transferring easily between rare moments of playful discovery and the overshadowing impossible melancholy. This album captures perfectly the tantalizing sensuousness of depression, enveloping you in its cool, wet undergrowth right at the moment you feel all is lost, and for that reason, it can both comforting and dangerous.
Honorable Mention: Wish You Were Here – Pink Floyd
A brief aside: A lot of music regarded by the majority as classic or good is extremely difficult to divest from its reputation, its hype, and the utter staleness that accompanies those extraneous but ultimately significant facets of its presence in history. It’s hard for me to enjoy Beethoven’s 5th or 9th symphony in the same way that I enjoy Tchaikovsky’s 1st or Mahler’s 1st; the former’s music, because of its overuse, feels so intractably impersonal. Similarly, by the time I first listened to music by Biggie and 2pac, their reputations had far preceded them, so much that I found I could not enjoy the experience (see footnote).
Pink Floyd is such a well-regarded band that regarding them well has become something of an affectation. The ethereal, cynical, abstract yet raw radiance of their album Wish You Were Here shines through anyway. This album transcends the group’s reputation. Part jazz, part prog-rock, part industrial noise, it treads the line between technical and cynically removed post-modernist art, and the visually lush absurdity of an opium dream. The title song stands out in soft, colorful opposition to the grey scale precision and harder textures of the rest of the album.
Footnote: This distaste may also result from my general distaste for more glitzy and marketable pop-rap (of which Biggie and 2pac were, in my mind, progenitors) — a rap that lacks the raw, street-smart soulfulness, hardness, or honesty of groups like Tribe Called Quest or Wu Tang Clan.
midnightstatic 