Demon Days by Gorillaz
Silent Alarm by Bloc Party
Metallica (Black Album)
They Might Be Giants - Flood
A Perfect Circle - 13th Step
Long Live by Atreyu, though it feels kind of like cheating. They went on hiatus after leaning toward more casual songs with the two albums before, and came back five years later with an excellent album that made people think they were back to their roots. And then they started trending towards the more popular stuff again.
Bush: Sixteen Stone
Mathew Sweet: Girlfriend
Sex Pistols - Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols.
I’d agree with this, except they only really recorded a single album. The Rock n Roll Swindle was just a bunch of outtakes and session recordings mostly done after Johnny had left
That was the joke.
D’oh…
Smashing Pumpkins: Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
R.E.M. - Automatic for the people
These are great. In this vein I add:
Pearl Jam - Yield
(and forgive me but)
Radiohead - OK Computer
Kid A was class when it came out
Gish is a transcendental album that created the genre that dominated the next 20 years: alternative rock.
Everything after Gish might have been more popular or well known, but none of it will ever approach being as influential.
As massive R.E.M. fan, this made me conflicted! Automatic for the People is beautiful, and most days my favourite, but I wouldn’t want to miss where the band went after.
Their last album was brilliant, Accelerate was fun… I know AftP was a hell of a peak, but I can’t find it in me to write off anything except a chunk of Around the Sun…
Thank you for allowing me to talk about my favourite band. :)
Accelerate was a lot of fun, but for me the last album that was stellar front to back was Life’s Rich Pageant. It was joyous, raucous, and they hit their signature sound head on. Every track sparkled (even the Superman cover that Michael hated).
That’s a very fair opinion too! I feel they changed about 4 times as a band (understandably I guess as they were about for 3 decades), and damn Life’s Rich Pageant was special - it’s one I play very often, and it is stacked! :)
It’s the best they sounded as a pure rock band, even though I have such a soft spot for Murmur. New Adventures touched on that feeling again, but it wasn’t front to back perfect in the same way (partly because of its length!)
The trouble I have is I couldn’t imagine life without what came after Life’s Rich Pageant, for instance Automatic meant a great deal to me, as it was the first album I remember hearing and loving growing up. :)
For sure! One of the reasons they’re such an amazing band is that they were able to innovate and adapt over a long career without losing their core style. They grew with their audience instead of apart from it.
My opinion is based on my own music preference (I’m a sucker for power pop) but there’s no denying R.E.M. stayed at the top of their game far longer than most bands even stay together.
I don’t know is Mellon collie was a huge drop off, but their direction definitely changed.
I agree with both of you. I’m very fond of everything by them up through the American Gothic EP, but Mellon Collie is still kinda the peak.
Peak, yes. But it’s not like their next couple of albums were terrible. They were just a different direction.
Oh absolutely. Adore was actually the album that got me into them.
Modest Mouse - The Moon and Antarctica
This is really the only band I have that hipster thought that they were better before they got big. This was the last album they made that I love every song on. Then they dropped Good News for People Who Like Bad News and their style was almost completely different, but also got many more people listening to the band.
Similarly I liked Kings of Leon before they changed the original vocalist. They had a rather unique sound when I discovered Aha Shake Heartbreak, but by Only By The Night, they had completely lost everything about their sound that I liked.
I’m in agreement that The Moon and Antarctica is the peak album, but I feel Good News is a great representation of the band transcending into something brand new rather than just fizzling. It’s Iike going out with a bang. Then after that it feels like fizzle haha.
I would probably have hated Good News if I had followed them before it came out, but it has a great representation of rebirth and becoming an unapologetically new person. I return to it usually when I go through loss.
Stone Roses - Stone Roses.
Their debut album put them on a very high pedestal that they were never able to match.
Funny with Metallica … I think there’s an argument that Death Magnetic (2008) is, for the thrash fans, the “Black Album” they wanted.
The bad thing about Death Magnetic. You have the loudness war thing about the album. To an point you have people saying the Guitar Hero version sounds better then the album version.
I agree wholeheartedly about the GH version. I couldn’t stand it until I heard that version.
Bad mastering in an album has ruined many great albums.
I feel like this is a based take (as a Death Magnetic fan myself). My favorite is still the Black album, but Death Magnetic is a very close second
Yea … apart from the “loudness wars” tone, which in the early 90s might actually have come off as an attempt to get back to the garage band early days vibe, it’s very easy to imagine Death Magnetic as the follow up to Justice.
It seems popular to think that Load, Reload, and St. Anger are the worst Metallica albums. If that’s the truth, they fell off after the Black Album. In this case, Death Magnetic is a comeback album, not the creative zenith before their worst albums because it happened after their worst albums. With that said, my vote would be And Justice For All… if we’re speaking about their creative zenith. It’s the most progressive musically. The Black Album is more representative of their sound at the zenith of their popularity.
Yep agreed. I think it’s fair to call the black album a successful and good album for what they were trying to do, which was walk back the progressive metal thing and go for punchy simpler music. Enter Sandman and Nothing Else Matters are basically pop classics now, which in the case of Sandman is really something as it’s undoubtedly a metal or heavy track.
Otherwise yea, Justice is awesome, and my personal favourite, however much Master might be objectively better or more consistent. Something people forget about Justice, but which always resonated when I first gave it a listen, is the progressive themes.
First four tracks: Blackened, And Justice For All, Eye of the Beholder, One, which are thematically Environmentalism, Corruption, “Manufactured Consent” (free thinking), War.
Nine Inch Nails - Pretty Hate Machine
I would push this to The Downward Spiral.
Broken is my absolute favorite. But starting with The Perfect Drug he began to do nothing but suck at ever greater intensity.
as nin albums became less driven by chunky 80s synthesisers and more driven by guitars, they got worse. however, the quake soundtrack and ghosts I-IV are excellent, in my opinion.
lmao.
if you don’t get it — it’s his first album
I find myself listening to year zero a lot, maybe I’m too big a fan of NIN in general. Something I like from every album.
I’ve been a NIN fan since way back and I felt like every album was their best before falling off with pretty much every album when it first releases. After a couple of listens and thinking I’m not gonna ever get into the new stuff, I catch myself having songs off their newest album stuck in my head only to repeat the process with the next one.
This happens to Queens of the Stone Age with me too but less so. I always go into a new Qotsa album with the understanding that it’s going to take a couple listens before it becomes my new favorite album.
I really enjoyed year zero as well. It felt fresh, there was a decent amount of experimentation, and I appreciated the lyrical themes
I was going to come in and say The Fragile
At the drive in - Relationship of Command
Refused - The Shape Of Punk To Come Tocotronic - Digital ist besserI def used “one armed scissor” as a screen name back in high school.
Pink Floyd - The Wall
Not their last album before Roger Waters left the band (that was The Final Cut, the album which followed), but it was far superior, and arguably their best album-- and inarguably their magnum opus.
The David Gilmour-led era of Pink Floyd was ok, but it would never reach the fevered heights and sick intensity of the Roger Waters days.
It’s good album. But I view The Wall as a Waters solo album than a Pink Floyd one.
how do you figure that?
A lot of the tracks have to do with what both Waters and Gilmour went through as children, as they both lost their fathers to World War II. David Gilmour got writing credit on a bunch of the tracks as well. And given the amount of work that both Waters and Gilmore put into the album, it’s not really right to say that it was a solo project. Not even to mention what Nick Mason put into it. If you wanna cut out Richard Wright’s contributions, considering that he got fired during this album’s production, that would be fair. 
The Wall is absolutely Rogers album. The concept and the songs are all his. Gilmour only received credits on three of the songs.
You can’t point to a few guitar solos and then give Gilmour half the credit, it was a great contribution, but even Gilmour would admit that Roger wrote the wall.
He essentially did write the whole thing.
Except for the parts that David Gilmour wrote
David Gilmour was good at solos, not song writing.
He wrote all of The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, and Animals.
Except for the parts that David Gilmour wrote
He essentially wrote everything post Syd Barret all the way up to the Final Cut which was supposed to be Floyd’s last album.
No. Dark Side was the first album Waters wrote all of it.
I’m not saying that the other members didn’t contribute, just that post Barret, Rogers wrote the vast majority.
The drop in vision and quality after The Final Cut really shows. The division bell is essentially Gilmour ranting at the poltergeist of Roger.
It’s an okay album. It’s a rock opera. It’s very melodramatic. There are some great songs.
I go back and forth on Animals or Meddle as their best record, with Wish You Were Here close behind.
Definitely The Wall feels much more like the solo Roger stuff than the best of Floyd.
Though the real purists only like the Barrett stuff.
I agree except that Dark side of the moon is clearly Pink Floyds magnum opus.
I understand that Roger is a divisive character (personally I love him despite his flaws), but god damn he could write an album.
More popular, more commercially successful, and more accessible to casual fans. Agreed.
But for magnum opus, I gotta agree with the wall for a few reasons
- They made a movie out of it
- The ode to the intense para social relationships that revolve around stardom and how a truly crazy creative can take advantage of it in scary ways was not only true back then, but predictive of how much worse it would get in current time.
- DSotM always seemed like a lot of good ideas in an unordered list. I felt like they could be scrambled and the album would be similar, except for the first and last songs… Meanwhile the wall tells a story of pain, alienation, search for meaning, lashing out, and then a quest for self-forgiveness.
Best guitar solo of all time helps too
Fair shout. I also love the wall.
Everyone knows Ummagumma was their best album, they’re just too scared to admit it!
Best song is several small species
The Suburbs by Arcade Fire
Girl You Know It’s True- Milli Vanilli
Tragic Kingdom by No Doubt
Blood Sex Sugar Magic by Red Hot Chili Peppers
Tragic Kingdom is one of my favorite albums of all time. It’s just so damn good.
Seen both of these in concert. Still both amazing shows.
Hard agree. One Red Hot Minute was really the beginning of the end.
This is gonna be a really spicy take - Nightmare by Avenged Sevenfold. Pretty much every song is a banger and Save Me is a masterpiece. The singing is on point. I debated Waking the Fallen, but sadly I feel that some songs on that album just aren’t up to the same quality (and Nightmare is much more approachable).
As for albums after Nightmare, Hail to the King was okay, The Stage was good but flawed (we got so many songs, but the mixing wasn’t very good imo) and Life Is But A Dream is… Just not good - again, in my opinion as a long-time fan.
Before Nightmare, self-titled was okay (certain songs like Unbound kinda pull it down for me, but they’re not straight SKIPS per se) and City of Evil was amazing but not quite Nightmare quality in my opinion (just because of Matt’s nasally singing, especially in songs like Seize the Day). WtF I’ve already went over, and Sounding the Seventh Trumpet honestly only had a few good songs in my opinion.
I just checked it out and Save Me feels very Dream Theater. I’ll have to dig around their discog a bit.
If you like Save Me, I also highly recommend I Won’t See You Tonight Part 1. It’s very solid and pretty ubiquitously referred to as one of their best songs
I could definitely see that. I heavily disagree with you on the self-titled album just being okay, but as for a creative peak, it kind of feels like they’ve been phoning it in after Nightmare. There’s excellent songs on all the albums, but Nightmare was the last one where it felt that the majority of the tracks were ones where you really didn’t want to skip.
