| 5.0 classic |
| Animal Collective Feels |
| Feels bursts with life and emotion. While simple in their melodies, its dense texture and innumerable, diverse sounds transforms songs into fantastical journeys through bustling, arcane worlds. Mix this with the personal, revealing lyricism of Avey Tare, and the album elevates its angelic atmosphere into a celebration of life, love, and all the good and bad that comes with it. God bless this wonderful Earth! |
| Bluetile Lounge Lowercase |
| Carly Rae Jepsen Emotion |
| I think everyone needs some music like this. Sometimes I don't want music to exhaust me with nihilistic drivel or something to perpetuate my everyday anxious, self-deprecatory thoughts. Sometimes I just wanna be able to reinvigorate that wide-eyed spirit in me and escape into a comfortable, fun-loving trance. Luckily, Emotion has the innocent, heartwarming lyricism and energetic, infectious melodies to more than fill that position in my musical catalog. |
| Galaxie 500 On Fire |
| Sometimes, the things music can do to someone is inexplicable. This album makes me nostalgic for memories that don't exist. It takes me back to the nights of watching local bands playing house concerts in their parents' garage, when the room was full of cheap beer and kids who all got high on the car ride there. This album is in every way amateurish, but that only adds to its wistful, dreamy mood. Any album that can make me feel like I enjoyed my high school years is surely worth a 5. |
| My Bloody Valentine Loveless |
| Loveless is a masterpiece of rock and production. It only took 40 years, but this is the height of the electric guitar. No album has come close to this album's harmonious noisiness. The meticulous detail of these repeating riffs is beyond astonishing; I can listen to it again and again and never get uninterested in it. "Soon" consists of 5 minutes of what is pretty much the exact same 6 second riff on repeat, and it still manages to be one of my favorite tracks. It's sex, pure sex. Repetition has never been so delectable. |
| Shinsei Kamattechan Tsumanne |
| It's the Loveless of the modern era. I always felt like shoegaze lost its momentum before it reached its full potential, and Shinsei Kamattechan seemed to agree. Tsumanne conjures up a disturbing blend of the naive, cheeky, up-beat melodies of J-Pop and powerful, screeching, cathartic noise both digital and organic that Japan has been perfecting since the 80s. It takes the strongest traits of noise music and makes it melodically captivating without losing that feeling of anxiety from our overstimulating and overgrowing society. Also his screams, man. Wew. |
| Slint Spiderland |
| Slint was my gateway drug to music that wasn't whatever the hell my dad thought was good. Spiderland's creeping guitars, zigzagging time signatures, its appreciation of silence... all of it was so new and exciting. However, this isn't to say moments like the explosive "Good Morning, Captain", the gut-punching imagery of "Washer", and the mesmerizing melodies of "Breadcrumb Trail" have at all lost their impact on me over the years. The eerie smiles of the four disembodied heads of Slint will forever be ingrained in my mind. |
| Talk Talk Laughing Stock |
| Laughing Stock is a titan of modern music. It spawned th entire post-rock movement in its creation (not Slint, mess off with that) and yet no post-rock record has come anywhere near leaving the same impact on me as Laughing Stock. Using influence of jazz and blues, Talk Talk creates an album larger than life with tense, sparse instrumentation. A wise giant, a god, an album that fully embraces it's themes of religion in all of its tranquil, ambitious glory. |
| The Beach Boys Pet Sounds |
| Pet Sounds is an absolute triumph of pop music. It's mastery of subtlety and orchestration elevates the idea of pop to standards made unreachable by anyone other than Brian "Coconut Head" Wilson. It's instrumental creativity is admirable on it's own, but each song's magnificent harmonies swirl them together into one large wall of sound, effortlessly averting any distractions from the album's simple (yet sophisticated) pop vibe. Summers exist for Pet Sounds. |
| The Brave Little Abacus Masked Dancers |
| The Gerogerigegege Instruments Disorder |
| The Microphones The Glow Pt. 2 |
| Tricot The |
