.

1: THE SMASHING PUMPKINS - SIAMESE DREAM

Siamese Dream was one of the first albums I truly loved. It's sixty minutes and not a second of it is dull. The music is consistently some of the most amazing ever composed and the drumming is some of the best I've ever heard. It's wall of sound gives it a great atmosphere and thankfully drowns out some of the poor lyrics. Billy Corgan's voice here is unique but not overly nasally and grating like it is on their follow-up. Still have no clue what "The killer in me is the killer in you" means though.

2: PEARL JAM - NO CODE

I found No Code during a very shitty time in my life. It was after my first break-up and I was in state of constant and inescapable depression. At that point I'd only listened to Pearl Jam's first three albums because I'd been told they fell off after that. One day I decided to give this album a listen and thank God I did. No Code is quite different from Pearl Jam's previous albums. The song closet to anything on Vitalogy is "Lukin" and it's only a minute long. It's very warm and calm but every song still manges to be memorable. At the time I had moved away from my home, Seattle, and I missed my friends and this album reminded me so much of home. It has what is easily Eddie Vedder's best lyrics.

3: PAVEMENT - SLANTED AND ENCHANTED

An album that always makes me think of summer.

4: FAITH NO MORE - ANGEL DUST

After the massive hit "Epic" Faith No More took a serious step back from the mainstream. And thank God they did because everything before this album is utter shit. Angel Dust is an incredibly unique album that I could only describe as "psychedelic funk metal" and would be a huge influence on many shitty bands in the late 90s like Slipknot, Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park. Oh well, the album itself is amazing, Mike Patton's vocals are insane.

5: THE SMASHING PUMPKINS - ADORE

Adore is an album I didn't appreciate when I went through a phase of loving the Pumpkins but I love it so much more. After drummer Jimmy Chamberlain was kicked from the band after him and their keyboardist overdosed (with the keyboardist dying), they made every song on this album either acoustic or electronic, a huge step away from the art rock of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, seeing as Chamberlain is an irreplaceable drummer. And it works beautifully. It has some of the most dreamy and entrancing music I've ever heard and Billy Corgan's lyrics are the most genuine here. Goes on for 73 minutes and never gets boring.

6: DEPECHE MODE - VIOLATOR

7: BEASTIE BOYS - ILL COMMUNICATION

There's not many albums that manage to be so experimental and accessible at the same. I don't know if there's an album that fuses hip hop, hardcore punk, funk and jazz as well as this one and still remains cohesive. Ill Communication and Check Your Head are nearly equally good but I put this one ahead for its standout tracks like "Sure Shot," "Sabotage" and "Get it Together."

8: NAS - ILLMATIC

Not many albums that sound so perfectly reminiscent of the place they were made like this one. This album reeks of New York. Every song on this album is incredible. "Life's a Bitch" has the best lyrics of any hip hop song ever made and the sax solo at the end from Nas's dad never fails to move me.

9: BECK - STEREOPATHETIC SOULMANURE

An album that has received mostly negative reviews but is one of my all time favorites. A beautiful cohesive collage of so many genres. It simply works. Easily Beck's most underrated album. There are few songs in the world as funny as "Satan Gave Me a Taco."

10: BEASTIE BOYS - CHECK YOUR HEAD

Almost as good as Ill Communication. While Paul's Boutique is one of my favorite albums of the 80s, I think the Beasties peaked in the 90s with their first two albums of the decade. While Paul's Boutique was definitely a massive leap in its artistic merit from the frat rap of Licensed to Ill and an indication of the great things they would later do, it was still immature party rap. Check Your Head was when they truly became great.

11: U2 - ZOOROPA

As someone who doesn't particularly like U2, this is great album despite being hated by the band's fan base (for being... different I guess?). It's not really anything like most U2 albums. The lyrics are a little lacking as is always the case with U2 but the (mostly electronic) music itself is beautiful. "The Wanderer" with Johnny Cash is such a wtf moment and is one of my favorite album closers ever. Cash's voice fits shockingly well with electronic music.

12: THE RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS - BLOOD SUGAR SEX MAGIK

Coulda been higher if it wasn't so unnecessarily long. This is where Frusciante develops his own style after he basically just copied Slovak on Mother's Milk. This one of the most fun albums ever made.

13: THE LEMONHEADS - IT'S A SHAME ABOUT RAY

14: JOHNNY CASH - AMERICAN RECORDINGS

15: PEARL JAM - 10

The second half is a boring slog but there few songs as great as "Once," "Even Flow," "Why Go," "Alive" and "Jeremy." And I don't know if there's a song out there more beautiful than "Black."

16: WEEZER - PINKERTON

For two albums Weezer was actually interesting, and this is the better one. It's a more personal and is one of the handful of albums that got me through my first breakup. After the mixed reviews it received Weezer went back to the sound of their debut but to increasingly diminishing results and were never interesting again.

17: THE RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS - ONE HOT MINUTE

Faith No More and RHCP both started out as funk rap / hard rock bands and were rivals but both bands branched out and went in different directions. Yet in and odd turn of events, they both wound up in the incredibly specific genre of "psychedelic funk metal." Who woulda thunk. It sounds absurd to say this about an album from The Red Hot Chili Peppers of all people, but One Hot Minute is insanely underrated. An album that was maligned by critics and fans at the time and for the life of me I can't understand why. This is the only example of RHCP's mature era crossing with their funk rock era. It has easily Anthony Kiedis's best lyrics (I know, that isn't saying much) and it's also the most interesting sonically. This album was made during a time when John Frusciante left the band due to disliking fame and he developed an incredibly serious heroin addiction, so they replaced him with Jane's Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro who was also a heroin addict. Anthony Kiedis had recently relapsed and the lyrics he was writing were much more serious than anything before or after. Contrary to what some say, Navarro meshes perfectly with this band - it just isn't the trademark RHCP sound. Still, there is very little that sounds like this album and it's a sound I love.

18: THE SMASHING PUMPKINS - MELLON COLLIE AND THE INFINITE SADNESS

19: THE RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS - CALIFORNICATION

My first time listening to Californication may be one of my most vivid recollections of a musical experience. We were poor and my dad had stopped paying our internet so I didn't have shit to do. I had a laptop - stolen, mind you - but there was damn near nothing on it besides hundreds of photos of the lady who owned it. Other than the pictures, the only things on it were Minesweeper, solitaire, and Californication by The Red Hot Chili Peppers. I didn't know how to play Minesweeper so I plugged in some headphones and listened to Californication while playing some solitaire. I didn't think of the most two tracks but the moment "Scar Tissue" came on I was covered in goosebumps. I don't know how I didn't know this song was RHCP. I'd heard it so many times years and years ago as a kid and loved but hadn't heard it in ten years. It was like a memory you forgot you had coming back. I listened to the song over and over and over. John Frusciante's guitar work manges to evoke emotions like no other and he does it everywhere on this album. Call it a sellout album, but this is some top tier melodic cheese. Wouldn't've stuck with me so long if it wasn't.

20: NINE INCH NAILS - BROKEN

I'll preface this by saying I'm not a fan of Nine Inch Nails. While there are a few songs from them I love ("Hurt," "Head Like a Hole") most of their 20th century albums are plagued by melodramatic nonsense lyrics that I can't ignore. If I'm being honest, last year's Bad Witch is my favorite LP from them. But despite Broken still having some of my major problems with NIN, it completely makes up for it in its abrasiveness and brevity. It doesn't quietly and pathetically wallow for minutes on end like The Downward Spiral or The Fragile, it's just an explosion of pure anger for 30 minutes. It's never dull, it's never meandering, every second of this album needs to be there. Never before has an album's artwork fit so incredibly perfectly with the content of the music. I fucking love this shitty EP, so long as I can forget that there's a song on it titled "Happiness in Slavery" (which is a good song... so long as you can forget it's titled "Happiness in Slavery").

1. Faith No More - King for a Day... Fool for a Lifetime

22: NO DOUBT - TRAGIC KINGDOM

Gwen Stefani has been a part of three albums I really like, this one sadly being the last. Her voice was off-putting for me at first but I love it now and the music is consistently fun as hell. My favorite third wave ska album, but not by far.

23: SUBLIME - SUBLIME

This was my dad's favorite album while I was growing up so maybe nostalgia has tied me to this one.

24: Nirvana - In Utero

I think In Utero is an album I'd like much more if I hadn't been so overexposed to some of the songs on it. "Scentless Apprentice" is the best song this band ever made.

1. Rage Against the Machine - Evil Empire

26: NIRVANA - NEVERMIND

An album I'd gladly never listen to again but I can't ignore how much I loved some of these songs in my early teens.

1. OutKast - ATLiens

28: RAEKWON - ONLY BUILT 4 CUBAN LINX...

Undoubtedly the best Wu-Tang album, solo or not. RZA's production has never been better and every tracks is a banger. There are so few albums that aren't boring after 70 minutes. This is one of them. Side note: "Criminology" is the best beat in hip hop history.

1. Radiohead - Pablo Honey

2. Rage Against the Machine - Rage Against the Machine

3. Porno for Pyros - Good God's Urge

4. OutKast - Aquemini

5. Kyuss - Welcome to Sky Valley

6. Guns N' Roses - Use Your Illusion I

7. Beck - Mellow Gold

8. Pavement - Brighten the Corners

9. Pavement - Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain

10. Radiohead - The Bends

11. Jay-Z - Reasonable Doubt

12. Soundgarden - Superunknown

13. Weezer - Weezer

14. Peter Gabriel - Us

15. Sigur Rós - Ágætis byrjun

16. Pearl Jam - Vs.

17. 2Pac - The 7 Day Theory

18. Beck - Odelay

19. Alice in Chains - Dirt

20. Björk - Homogenic

21. Alice in Chains - Jar of Flies

22. Dr. Dre - The Chronic

Submitted March 29, 2019 at 03:24PM by INFPindahouse https://ift.tt/2Wwa7hJ