| 5.0 classic |
| Arcade Fire Funeral |
| No more can be said about a classic like "Funeral". It's one of the most important indie albums of our generation - the emotion is conveyed with loud, thrilling bursts of energy. |
| Belle and Sebastian If You're Feeling Sinister |
| It's an easily unlikable album if you find Stuart Murdoch childish and cloying. To me, its tone perfectly fits the album's messages about the unseen trials and dead ends of youth. |
| Bill Fay Time of the Last Persecution |
| Bob Dylan Highway 61 Revisited |
| Controversial at the time for reinforcing Dylan's image as a "sell-out" among his old folk scene, "Highway 61 Revisited" is the full culmination of Dylan's musical and lyrical ambition. The surrealism in songs like "Ballad of a Thin Man" and "Desolation Row" give way to more pointed satire to anything he'd done to this point in his career. This is one for the ages. |
| Bright Eyes I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning |
| The fire of Conor Oberst's previous releases is present more in the lyrics than the delivery. This is the most fully-realized Bright Eyes album. |
| Bruce Springsteen Born to Run |
| This is the Springsteen album that nobody argues about - it has the raw power and emotion of his first two albums, anchored by perfect performances by an E Street Band at its full capacity. |
| Bruce Springsteen Darkness on the Edge of Town |
| Songs like "Adam Raised a Cain" and "Badlands" introduce a colder, harsher Springsteen who now takes more cues from the Clash than Dylan. "The Promised Land" and the title track establish the working-class hero that would begin to emerge in his subsequent releases. |
| Car Seat Headrest Teens of Denial |
| Counting Crows August And Everything After |
| I can get behind the pure hero worship for REM and Springsteen if it produces songs as good as "Mr. Jones" or "Rain King" - and it does on Counting Crows' debut. |
| Courtney Barnett sometimes i sit and think, and sometimes i just sit |
| Under Barnett's messy stream-of-consciousness writing is some razor sharp wit. The album mines meaning out of the most unexpected minutiae without preaching in the slightest. |
| Death Cab for Cutie We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes |
| Gibbard lets the music plod on, masking the story's severity by delivering lines like "my able body isn't what it used to be" in passing. |
| fun. Aim and Ignite |
| Jack's Mannequin Everything in Transit |
| Kanye West My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy |
| Liz Phair Exile In Guyville |
| Mount Eerie A Crow Looked At Me |
| Neil Young On the Beach |
| Neil Young After the Gold Rush |
| Neutral Milk Hotel In the Aeroplane Over the Sea |
| Nina Simone Live at Montreux - 1976 |
| Norfolk and Western The Unsung Colony |
| Radiohead OK Computer |
| Sufjan Stevens Illinois |
| The Decemberists Her Majesty the Decemberists |
| The Flaming Lips The Soft Bulletin |
| The Format Dog Problems |
| The Mountain Goats Tallahassee |
| The Mountain Goats Goths |
| The Thermals The Body, The Blood, The Machine |
| The Weakerthans Reconstruction Site |
| Weezer Weezer |
| Whitney Light Upon the Lake |
| Wilco Yankee Hotel Foxtrot |
| 4.5 superb |
| Arcade Fire Neon Bible |
| Billy Joel The Stranger |
| Bob Dylan The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan |
| Bob Dylan Blood on the Tracks |
| Bon Iver For Emma, Forever Ago |
| Bright Eyes Lifted or The Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground |
| If Holden Caulfield made an album, I imagine it would sound roughly like this. |
| Bruce Springsteen Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. |
| The music is out of time with Springsteen's delivery of his wild fantastical tales of the night, but the reckless abandon that defines his early career makes this album a great companion piece to his more tightly produced work. |
| Bruce Springsteen The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle |
| This one depends completely on how much indulgence you can handle. Regardless, it is supreme in its sprawling narratives and musical density. |
| Bruce Springsteen Tunnel of Love |
| Bruce Springsteen The Rising |
| Bruce Springsteen Hammersmith Odeon London '75 |
| Car Seat Headrest Twin Fantasy (Face to Face) |
| Coldplay A Rush of Blood to the Head |
| Coldplay Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends |
| Counting Crows Films About Ghosts: The Best Of |
| Death Cab for Cutie Transatlanticism |
| Death Cab for Cutie The Photo Album |
| Elliott Smith XO |
| Elvis Costello Armed Forces |
| Frankie Cosmos Vessel |
| Gareth Liddiard Strange Tourist |
| Godspeed You! Black Emperor F♯ A♯ ∞ |
Written at a time when its maximalist evocation of apocalypse felt fanciful and required
the breaching of social and political subtext to grasp its immediate menace. Its true
genius is in the long game, as its grandiose vision of the end at times feels preferable
to the stolid and hypernormalized march toward oblivion we are currently on. At least
GY!BE promises a conclusion. |
| Houndmouth Little Neon Limelight |
| Julia Jacklin Crushing |
| "Pressure to Party" is the best representation of the liminal space between post-breakup malaise and freewheeling single life I have ever heard. The entire album seems built around its singular burst of misdirected, cathartic energy. |
| Julia Jacklin Pre Pleasure |
| Kan Gao To The Moon |
| Kendrick Lamar To Pimp a Butterfly |
| Lorde Melodrama |
| Mitski Be the Cowboy |
| Modest Mouse The Moon & Antarctica |
| It's a bit beside the point, but I think the original release of The Moon and Antarctica may have my favorite cover art of all time. Lead singer Isaac Brock describes the two mammoth, godlike hands that hover enigmatically over a barren polar desert to represent the meeting of "two sterile things" - those untouched titular landscapes. The emphasis on the sterility of these landmasses, when taken in concert with the album's themes of transcending the confines of human limitations and social maladies amid the end of history's unending consumption and conquest, immediately turns these shaking hands into omens that evoke horror. On an album that fetishizes escape from the corporeal form - angels rising from babies, tiny cities of ashes, seeing the controllers of the world with clarity in the moments before death - the fact these quintessentially humanoid hands, adorned by the finery of unending profit-seeking conquest, hover over what is conceived of by Brock as one of the last true virgin landscapes signifies that there truly is no escape from the cruel vagaries of humanity. |
| Neil Young Tonight's the Night |
| Neil Young Harvest |
| Panic! at the Disco Pretty. Odd. |
| Pink Floyd The Dark Side of the Moon |
| Radiohead The Bends |
| Radiohead In Rainbows |
| Silver Jews American Water |
| Sufjan Stevens Seven Swans |
| Sufjan Stevens Carrie and Lowell |
| Sufjan Stevens Michigan |
| Sufjan Stevens The Age of Adz |
| The Avalanches Since I Left You |
| The Decemberists Castaways and Cutouts |
| The Decemberists 5 Songs |
| The Decemberists The Crane Wife |
| The Decemberists Picaresque |
| The Decemberists The Tain |
| The Format Interventions and Lullabies |
| The Olivia Tremor Control Music From The Unrealized Film Script |
| The Wrens The Meadowlands |
| The Young Veins Take a Vacation! |
| Tom Waits Closing Time |
| Twenty One Pilots Twenty One Pilots |
| Weezer The White Album |
| Weezer Pinkerton |
| Weyes Blood Titanic Rising |
| Mitski with strings! |
| Wilco Summerteeth |
| Wye Oak Civilian |
