Sincerely I don't get the point about Belly's Star. It is a brilliant record. I mean, why not. I would take out an awful lot of records from the list but not this one. I might have missed the irony perhaps.
One of the only true masterpieces I happened to love right when it was released, at an age where I did not know a lot about music, and I now rank very very very high even after having listened to a whole bunch of records.
I enjoyed Oracular Spectacular as an instant classic, but one might admit that Congratulations is closer to what MGMT had in mind in the long term for their music... I really cherish Congratulations, this is a messy yet fantastic record. I am not sure they gonna lose me with this one.
Maybe that would have been more fun to do
Side 1: Neil Young's Acoustic Albums From Worst To Best
Side 2: Neil Young's Electric Albums From Worst To Best
and allow some albums to appear on both sides...!
I mean, man, bloody hell I live in Europe and always come after the battle. I cannot say anything that has been said already. Kanye has to release another album in the few remaining hours.
This is funny because Songs for the Deaf is the first QOTSA album I bought the day of its release and listened to full length. What a great album. Turns to be a personal classic but it never came to my mind that it was an instant classic for so many people. I thought people usually prefers Rated R.
The first half of Vampire Weekend's Modern Vampires Of The City is close to pop perfection, and I cannot help listening to it all in a row (this is worthy of notice in the mp3+stream area of randomness and playlisting). And the second half has "Ya Hey" in it. Damn, I was deeply struck by this album. Others in the list touched me, but nothing quite like the Vampire Weekend stuff. This is funny because (and I am not sure people agree with me on that) I found the previous albums were great but missing something, while this one just hit me in the face since the first listen.
(Perhaps I'll add the David Bowie album too, although I agree it is hard to distinguish the real greatness of the music itself from the greatness of the surprise comeback)
Interesting how their career path gets its highs and lows, but really start to look like a fascinating path. This new stuff sounds great, and funnily enough this sounds both close to Julian's solo efforts and completely Strokes-idiosyncratic in the greatest way possible. I mean, even haters will hate this for the good reasons, leaving lovers loving this for the good reasons too (the music, not the hype). Wow!
Well the VIP bar is usually free but it is hard to get there. Same for iTunes for people with Linux (impossible to install except with Wine which does not make iTunes work very well) or Windows (this is just slow as hell and memory-consuming).
Still there are ways to listen to music in a VIP bar, but hey, have it playing on the radio and it is much straightforward and available to anybody. I usually prefer a streaming applet on the artist's website so that everybody can easily access.
Streaming on iTunes is kinda like listening to music in a VIP bar you are not allowed into. Sorry I could not make it guys. I'll wait outside, you'll tell me how the party went. Bloody hell, if I may.
Phoenix and Oprah-praised Seb Actifry are perhaps the two best French stuff exported in the world. Sorry for Marion Cotillard but she failed really bad in dying properly in the latest Batman.
"I can tell you that those guys take the task of year-end listing seriously"
That might be a problem, considering Call Me Maybe appear in the list (and unfortunately not the Dan Deacon version...)
That list gave me an opportunity to listen to Taylor Swift. But sorry I found the song pretty bad. For good cheesy stuff I would have included Passion Pit instead.
The doo-wop record is "Everybody's rockin" and I do agree it is really bad. But as far as "Trans" is concerned, I read everywhere it is bad then I listened to it and found it has some kind of interest and good songs despite the horrifying synth sound. I found it actually better than "Life" and "Landing on Water" (it is difficult for me to say which one is worse). "Arc" is not an album per se and I never managed to listen to it. I hate "Are you passionate?" but I would not qualify it as bad, perhaps just boring and irrelevant (especially Let's roll lyrics).
But I totally agree it is a difficult list to create. Even for the best albums. For instance I count "Mirrorball" as one of my favorites along with "After the Gold Rush" and "Rust never sleeps" and "Ragged Glory" and "Tonight's the night", but I am pretty sure a lot of people disagree with this choice.
Once Neil said (I think it is in Weld) "it's all one song". What is really difficult is that even in the worst records there is a killer song. For instance "Reactor" is close to being really bad, but there is "Shots" which is an absolute masterpiece I think.
That said, it would be nice if Stereogum tries to come up with a list. In the end, we don't care if they are right or wrong, we just argue over the stuff and that's the fun of it.
What is incredible is in 2012, in our epoch of faster-than-hell life, we get longer-than-hell epic masterpieces from people in the scene for a while. GYBE! Swans! Neil Young! Oh my. I am younger than all those guys. I am hoping to stay forever young.
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