You cats already hit the nails on their shiny little heads regarding what makes a great album. I thought I'd post something a bit tangential but relevant.
Those "top 500 albums of all time" surveys are always a bit silly. They always mix current stuff that probably won't be listened to at all in a few years, with classic stuff that likely will be relevant to future generations. It is about selling magazines, after all, and magazines are bought at the grocery store checkout, as impulse purchases. Include too many bands or albums that today's thirteen-year-old hasn't heard of, and you won't make back your ink money.
At the same time, I find it noteworthy that the surveys always end up loading a number of Beatles albums in the top ten. Good for them, I say. Those albums deserve the praise they get, to a very great degree. I'm not kidding when I say that to me, great art of the 20th century is well represented by (among many others) James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, Picasso, and The Beatles.
But I wonder what kind of list you would get if you asked about "rare gems" or "forgotten masterpieces," rather than albums that sold well enough for almost everyone to have heard of them.
I think of Toy Matinee, of course. What a fantastic album. And in a more obscure vein, I think of the album "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea" by a band called Neutral Milk Hotel.
Whereas Toy Matinee are impeccably studio-perfect sounding, for example, Neutral Milk Hotel sounds rough and raw, and the guy can't play guitar with anything approaching the skill of TM. But the NMH lyrics are intriguing and passionate, and intelligent. And the packaging/cover of NMH is neat (nostalgic, surreal), but nowhere near as slick and polished as the TM. These two albums have almost nothing in common except for the fact that . . . they're both bloody brilliant! And, of course, neither will ever appear in any "top 10,000 albums of all time" list by any magazine with a subscription base of more than 1,500.
So what are your "obscure but wonderful" albums?
Herring405
