Demon Days by Gorillaz
Silent Alarm by Bloc Party
Metallica (Black Album)
Tragic Kingdom by No Doubt
Blood Sex Sugar Magic by Red Hot Chili Peppers
Seen both of these in concert. Still both amazing shows.
Smashing Pumpkins: Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
R.E.M. - Automatic for the people
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.
These are great. In this vein I add:
Pearl Jam - Yield
(and forgive me but)
Radiohead - OK Computer
Nine Inch Nails - Pretty Hate Machine
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 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.
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?
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
The Suburbs by Arcade Fire
And Justice For All… By Metallica
Master of Puppets > …And Justice for All
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.
Bush: Sixteen Stone
Mathew Sweet: Girlfriend
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.
Girl You Know It’s True- Milli Vanilli
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.
Wait you think the Gorillaz fell off after Demon Days???
Not dramatically but it was the best and none topped it.
Plastic Beach was straight fire IMO
Maybe my notion of falling off is different, I consider falling off “and then they were irrelevant” so to speak. I could just have the wrong idea
That’s arguable, and even then it could only ever be considered marginally better than Plastic Beach. Even if you don’t like the new stuff, PB is fire.
Why wherever did you get that idea
Breakfast in America - Supertramp
This seems to happen with progressive rock at alarming levels. They just reach a point where they take their pretentious bullshit a little too far, and the fans grow weary of it. You saw that with Jethro Tull, which pushed its luck with A Passion Play after scoring a critical success with Thick as a Brick. Yes took it too far with Topographic Oceans. I’m sure ELP has an album where they pushed the envelope a little too far and pushed away the audience in the process. Unfortunately, that had a pendulum effect, with ELP releasing the wimpy Love Beach in an attempt to reel back in those lapsed fans.
Massive Attack - Mezzanine
They still had a few good tracks afterwards but that album really was a masterpiece.