10+2 Seminal CD's (Part 1)
Spent some time listening and organizing my music collection over break, and I've decided to list what I consider are ten seminal CD's in my collection. (Plus 2 honorable mentions...)
Also-ran #1: Jesus Jones - Doubt
Jesus Jones? One hit wonder with "Right Here, Right Now", right? I disagree and here's why: Their sound continues to sound fresh, fifteen years after they hit it big with the MTV crowd. Grunge hit and stole their thunder, but Jesus Jones' techno-rock was an alternative to the alternative movement, and besides... grunge basically sucked. "Right Here, Right Now" was a little too slick on the production values - but it was the hook that convinced a fifteen-year-old me to start putting away my dusty LP's and give "modern" music a try. Other songs on the CD (Are You Satisfied?, Welcome Back Victoria, and the ahead of it's time "Blissed") bring me back occasionally to this master work. (Only "Stripped" - a little too hard for my taste, rates too low to get a spot on my ipod.)
Also-ran #2: ABBA - The Visitors
Okay, for the "serious" music lover, I'm on strike 2... And I picked the final ABBA release, from the early eighties, after the disco heyday, and an album produced by two split up couples on shaky terms, not the mid-70's Swedish starry-eyed lovefest of Dancing Queen and Waterloo.
I started liking this album when I was twelve and I have never really stopped. The title track ranks among my top fifty individual songs and I like it for very personal reasons. "When All Is Said And Done" is the best - best, and possibly only post-breakup/reconciliation song ever written. "I Let The Music Speak" and "Soldiers" are beautiful and also trancend the musical trappings of the eighties. By 1981, ABBA was no longer trying to prove anything and seemed to resigned to hang up the microphones. The album does a great job of conveying that, without the group actually hanging them up until the album is done. (Well, except "One Of Us", which really was trite and unoriginal - and frankly a bad enough song to keep this one out of my top ten...)
And the list begins....
#10 - ATB - No Silence
I discovered this CD this summer, and as such it's not making it any higher than #10 just yet. This is the first of the two trance CD's to make my list - I discovered trance almost six years ago working the night shift at Stargate listening to Paul Oakenfold's Tranceport, a fine CD that did not make it on this list - and one that I would highly recommend to anyone looking for a good "trance for beginners" CD, even at eight years old. Oddly enough, even though I own a number of his albums, no Oakenfold made it on my list, and until this summer, ATB would have been even further from the list, except this new one came out and hooked me. ATB takes good solid techno beats, but trumps other trance offerings with a solid lyric/vocal side that drives the whole record without overwhelming the trance basics that underly the whole thing. It's enough to get this CD to sneak into my current top ten.
Track 2, "Ecstasy" is excellent and sets the lyrical/vocal tone for the rest of the album. Track 3, "Autumn Leaves" is an unusually slow, almost lullaby-like song with lyrics and an aural landscape that really stuck with me this particular autumn. Track 4 "Here With Me" flips the depression from track 3 into a confident resolution to start things over that I really like. "Sun Goes Down" is kind of nice - nothing better to say about this except that the music really sounds like a sunset to me - it leads into one of my truly favorite songs "After The Flame" - an upbeat, refuse to give up on foolish, wasted love, caution to the wind type song, that, yes, really sounds like a dying fire to me. The rest of the tracks hold up well enough to not detract from these highlights, definitely four of my most played on the old ipod.
#9 - Madonna - Ray of Light
I am not a huge fan of Madonna, although I have an embarassing weakness for "Vogue", "Like A Prayer", "Borderline" and her new ABBA sampled "Hung Up". I am a huge fan of William Orbit, who co-wrote and produced "Ray of Light" (See #8 on my countdown.) Madonna must have heard William Orbit's Bassomatic or Strange Cargo work and decided to do Electronica right, and did she ever.
I bought this CD my junior year in college and it was a soundtrack for me to the exploding Internet revolution happening all around me, both in school and then later in the work place. It's sad to say, but I used to listen to the title track - an amazingly powerful pop tune that has Orbit written all over it - to get myself all jazzed about delivering Internet solutions at Stargate. (Ray of Light - Fiber Optics - communications... yes AT&T was all over it in an ad campaign, but I always imagined it was Stargate that had the bucks to have done it .) But, even before that "Drowned World/Substitute For Love" and "Sky Fits Heaven" were my personal soundtrack for graduation - used "Sky Fits Heaven" for my final highlight montage for my final video art project, has an awesome base line. The rest of the CD is solid, except perhaps the last couple songs that kind of trail off in this self-satisfying personal coda that Madonna appears to have tacked on because, well, she's Madonna and she can. Still a damn fine CD that I continue to listen to.
Next up, CD's 8-4.
posted by Jason at 8:28 PM
|
0 comments
