Y’all, I lied. In Part One of my list of favorite albums list, I indicated that only the record in the top spot was immovable, and everything else was arbitrary—that anything from the first list could swap places with anything on the second (at the time unpublished) list, and it wouldn’t really matter. And in my defense, I believed that at the time I wrote it. But as I stepped back to re-read the first article in preparation for writing this follow-up, I realized there was, indeed, a bimodal distribution of the albums contained in these two lists.
The albums on last month’s list, as it turns out, are my safe picks. They’re the ones that feel like home. They’re the records I turn to when I need comfort. When I need to know exactly what experience I’m going to have. They’re the albums that don’t age as I do.
The next seven albums on my list hit a bit differently. To borrow a phrase from psychopharmacology, they are records for which “set and setting” make all the difference to the experience. They are, in a sense, entheogenic, and if there’s one thing I can depend on each of them to provide, it’s an ever-shifting perspective and fertile ground for discovery and rediscovery.
That doesn’t make them better or worse, mind you. I still stick by the claim that the only album on this list that could not be placed in any other spot is the one at the end—my all-time-and-forever number one. But it does mean the records on this second list do stand apart, and it’s difficult for me to imagine, now that I’ve spotted this bimodal distribution, that many of these could swap spots with any of the albums on last month’s list.
With that said, let’s stop talking about categorizations and start talking about music. And we’ll kick things off with one of my favorite modern rock bands.
King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: Nonagon Infinity
I am, at the core of my being, a dialectical materialist. As such, I’m fascinated by contradictions, which constantly pop up in my writing. Normally, I have to go hunting for those, but the contradiction I’m focused on today is blatant.
If you ask me to name my favorite King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard album, I’m going to give you a different answer depending on the day of the week and my current mood. Most days I might be likely to say Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava. Or Changes. Or Butterfly 3000. Also high in the ranking would be Polygondwanaland and Flying Microtonal Banana.
But none of those records popped into my mind as I sat down to construct my list of all-time favorite records, artist be damned. There was never any question in my mind that Nonagon Infinity would represent the band’s output here.
As I’ve described it in the past, Nonagon Infinity is a “gapless, infinite-loop garage-prog magnum opus that leaps off the mark doing a bazillion miles per second and doesn’t let up for an instant until it arrives right back at the point where it began.” And that’s true. But where the album begins and ends is something of a choice. You’re not limited to merely starting it at the beginning of the first track. And depending on where you start it, it’s a wholly different experience in terms of mood, energy, and the implied story, which would go on to inform and inspire the rest of the so-called Gizzverse narrative.
I’ve listened to Nonagon Infinity at least three times a week for the past seven years, and it’s the album I typically cue up during my daily swim—usually more like five days a week these days. By this point, you’d think there would be no surprises left to be discovered in its all-too-brief 41:45 runtime. But every day with this record is a revelation. Every journey through its nine cuts ends with new discoveries and new appreciation.
Honestly, the only bad thing you could say about the album is something I also wrote in the review linked above: it sounds like it was “recorded on a potato, mixed and mastered on a Speak & Spell,” and it is “brick-walled to within an inch of its life.” What’s more, the album is the only King Gizz effort that just doesn’t work on vinyl. It was made for MP3 players with a repeat function.
If you’re looking for something that’s more akin to an audiophile experience, though, I recommend Fuzz Club’s officially sanctioned bootleg live version, released in 2024. It’s not as meticulously orchestrated as the studio recording, as the boys do a good bit of exploration of their own when playing these tracks in concert. But at least it sounds great on a hi-fi rig. And it still gets the point of the composition across beautifully. Just not in quite the same fashion.
Joanna Newsom: Ys
Trying to encapsulate the complexity of harpist Joanna Newsom’s epic follow-up to The Milk-Eyed Mender in a few simple paragraphs would be a herculean task that I won’t even bother to attempt. But a few sketches that hint at its greatest are in order. It is, in a literary sense, something of a mash-up of Cronicques et ystoires des Bretons and Little House in the Big Woods. Take a turn through its lyrical ins and outs, and you’re just as likely to end up in Avalon or at a traveling carnival of curiosities, or perhaps in a library, thumbing through the ancient pages of Sidereus Nuncius.
It is, in its poetry, a study of tensions—specifically the tension between the erudite and the beautifully and elegantly prosaic. It is a piece of Gustav Stickley’s Craftsman furniture tucked into the corner of a medieval hall.
And that’s just the beginning of this monumental album’s brilliance. Musically, it’s just as anachronistic, just as diverse, just as perplexing. It’s equal parts freak folk, progressive Americana, and baroque avant-garde. Honestly, one of the least interesting things about it, musically speaking, is that it features the best and most memorable orchestration that Van Dyke Parks ever committed to multitrack tape, and yes, I’m including Smile and Randy Newman’s eponymous debut in that estimation. It’s also, in my opinion, recording engineer Steve Albini’s best work aside from Nirvana’s In Utero.
It’s an album that provides so many disparate avenues for exploration. Some days, an oblique literary reference will become clear and force me to reevaluate an entire song and its densely layered meaning. Other days, I’ll get lost in the resonances of one of Newsom’s intricate Zappa-esque polyrhythms and forget the lyrics (and Parks’s orchestrations) altogether.
I’ve simply never been able to convince literally anyone else of its brilliance, though, which breaks my heart. In fact, I’ve only ever been able to have a meaningful conversation about it with one person: the proprietor of my local record shop. But as a consequence of that, it’s also probably the most deeply personal and telling entry on this list. Of everything here, it’s the record that probably says the most about me, if learning something about me is what you’re here for.
Fatboy Slim: You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby
For whatever reason, people in the hi-fi community seem shocked to learn that I’m a huge fan of dance music. I cannot for the life of me understand why, because I’m clear about the fact that The Grateful Dead is my favorite musical act, and as Jerry Garcia once said to poet and lyricist Robert Hunter, “Look . . . we’re a goddamn dance band, for Christ’s sake! At least write something with a beat!”
Much as I love the Dead, though, few artists embody the essence of dance music as well as Norman Quentin Cook, aka Fatboy Slim. His music simply cuts straight to the heart of why humans started beating on animal skins and boring holes in animal bones to begin with. There’s something ironically primitive about it, and I mean that in the dictionary sense of the word. Despite the heavy reliance on the technology of the day, there’s a pagan sort of drum-circle vibe to the Cook’s music. It’s a bit messy. A lot organic. It’s human to the core. And the aspect of human experience it celebrates most is that we’ve managed to scrape together enough sentience and self-awareness to comprehend that we’re really little more than animals who’ve learned to walk on our hind legs.
A lot of the album’s aesthetic charm comes from the technological constraints of the mid-to-late 1990s. Aside from the hardware nightmare that Pro Tools was at the time, digital audio workstations as we know them today weren’t really a thing back then. No Ableton. Certainly no Garage Band. Fatboy Slim didn’t chop up samples, grid them, arrange them in a sequencer, and nudge blocks of audio back and forth until they lined up. He ripped LPs he’d found in crate-digging expeditions to his Atari ST and then played the samples on his keyboard, often chopping up vocal samples a syllable at a time and assigning each to a different white key so he could control the rhythm of, at times, arhythmic original recordings.
Granted, I’m talking about the music on its own terms. You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby isn’t merely a collection of amazing tunes, though. Yes, it contains a seemingly endless stream of bangers, and as such, it suffers many of the same potential problems I brought up with Cake’s Comfort Eagle last month. Add “Weapon of Choice” from the follow-up album and perhaps “Going Out of My Head” from his first LP, and you’d have a viable Fatboy Slim greatest-hits compilation.
But that’s the problem—neither of those songs has any place on You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby. Either would completely disrupt the flow. To wit, when songs from this album ended on 2006’s official greatest hits release, Why Try Harder, they had to be remixed, re-edited, and stripped of their connective tissue to fit their new contextual constraints. They could not exist in this form in any other collection of tunes.
I recently turned a young comrade of mine on to You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby, since they’ve released a few jungle/D&B albums independently, and I thought they’d appreciate hearing the sort of music we older silverbacks enjoyed in a similar vein back in our day. Three tracks in, they said, “This freaking rules!” By the time we hit “Soul Surfing,” they exclaimed, “Why don’t more people understand the difference between an album and a mixtape? This is an album!”
I couldn’t agree more. But even more so than that, it’s the musical equivalent of the old adage about never being able to set foot in the same river twice. With its deft sequencing and brilliant flow from song to song, You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby lulls you into a trance at times, bitch-slaps you out of it from out of nowhere, and then falls back into the same groove as before, if only to demonstrate that your body cannot help changing the way it reacts to that groove in light of new modulations and intentional disruptions.
I could write a book about this one, and I’m not sure nobody ever has. It’s as deserving of an entry in the 33⅓ series as any albums dissected therein, and I’ll die on that hill. Perhaps the thing that has kept it from getting the respect it deserves in all the proper circles is that it’s not an album intended to be listened to on a hi-fi system. It’s made to be listened to on the move—in the car, in the bedroom, on the dancefloor, or while strapped into a hastily bolted-together Super Himalaya ride operated by a carnie with missing pinkies at your county fair, while the smell of corndogs and elephant ears wafts through the air. Enjoyed alone or in the company of sweaty humanity—in pairs or in throngs—it’s an album that simply must be enjoyed in motion.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience: Electric Ladyland
I know I’ve told this story before, so my apologies for boring you with it again if you already know it, but the story of how Electric Ladyland became my first grown-up album is worth telling again. I was in daycare at the time, and one day our teacher asked us to bring in our favorite record the next day. I, of course, reached for my copy of The Six Million Dollar Man, a record-and-book set that I’d very nearly worn out. (Remember, kids: at the time we didn’t have VCRs or DVRs, so if you wanted to relive your favorite movies or TV shows, audio drama / book combos were all the rage.)
Another kid brought his brother’s copy of Electric Ladyland, and while the rest of our class (not to mention our teacher) recoiled in horror, I was immediately captivated, and we never even made it all the way through “. . . And the Gods Made Love.” I didn’t care. I offered that kid a record swap, went home, closed my door, plugged my headphones into my old denim-covered record player with a nickel taped to its tonearm, and had my little mind completely blown. He later got his ass kicked by his brother for stealing his favorite record, but I didn’t care. It was mine now.
I wish I knew what happened to that old LP. I still have a lot of my childhood records, but not that one. I imagine my parents found it and trashed it along with all of the KISS records they dumped into the trash to keep me from becoming a devil-worshiping juvenile delinquent.
Every time I go crate digging, I look for an old copy, and I’ve had the 50th-anniversary LP box set on my Christmas list for the past few years, to no avail. The thing is, though, my body remembers the structure of the LP, and whether I listen to the album on CD or streaming, I still perform mental platter-flips at the appropriate spots.
That’s how you know that Electric Ladyland is a truly great album: it only really works in the original form for which it was sequenced. Play the tracks all in a go, and “Little Miss Strange” is a bit of a jarring non sequitur. Experience that song as the first track of side B, though, and it suddenly makes sense. Sides C and D also form one of the most magical song suites in all of rock music history. But you don’t really appreciate that if you’ve only ever experienced the album as a straight-through experience. The side breaks here are as important to the appreciation of this one as the songs themselves.
So, while Axis: Bold as Love contains my all-time favorite Jimi Hendrix Experience tunes, Electric Ladyland will forever be my favorite Hendrix album. And not merely because it was my first.
Gil Scott-Heron: Pieces of a Man
Comparison is—as I’ve said on many occasions and as many have said before me—the thief of joy. So I hesitate to be responsible for any juxtaposition between two such masterpieces as Gil Scott-Heron’s studio debut and Marvin Gaye’s iconic What’s Going On. But it’s hard not to discuss the two together, released as they were at nearly the exact same moment in history. Both albums explore the relationship between the personal, familial, and societal from the point of view of Black men at a pivotal and tumultuous time for everyone, but specifically African-Americans. Both blend soul and R&B beautifully with jazz. Both, coincidentally, feature songs titled “Save the Children.”
One major difference is that What’s Going On was a near-instant hit, whereas Pieces of a Man lingered in obscurity for years, perhaps due to the lack of major label support, perhaps due to less name recognition. But there’s also something to be said for the fact that Scott-Heron’s revolutionary record is a lot rawer, a whole lot more unflinching, and heaps more honest in its grappling with personal struggles such as addiction.
It’s also a musically more interesting album, in my opinion, with some truly world-class piano stylings by Brian Jackson, inimitable flute and sax by Hubert Laws, and some of Ron Carter’s most solid bass lines. (For what it’s worth, this is one of two albums on my list with bass by Ron Carter, which will surely make my podcast cohost, Brent Butterworth, proud.)
Perhaps the number-one reason why Pieces of a Man made my list and What’s Going On didn’t is the simple fact that, despite its obscurity at the time, the former ended up being far more musically influential than the latter, especially in the way it contributed to the sound of both hip-hop and neo-soul in the years and decades that followed. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that without “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory (see the first half of this list for more details) wouldn’t sound anything like it does. And that’s not entirely down to the contributions of Ron Carter, either.
Pieces of a Man is a shibboleth of sorts, as well as a seed that flourished into so much more over the decades. And perhaps that’s why it sounds as vibrant and relevant today as it ever did, whereas I cannot help but hear What’s Going On as a relic of a bygone era, much as I love it.
Vince Guaraldi Trio: A Charlie Brown Christmas
Is A Charlie Brown Christmas a clichéd pick? Yes. Does including it on my list violate the rule I established in the introduction to Part One, in which I said, “No The Dark Side of the Moon. No Abbey Road. No Rumours. I love those as much as anybody, but it also means that I love them as much as everybody, and anything I could say about them would reveal next to nothing about the music . . .”? Of course it does, because this album is every bit as iconic as any of those and honestly twice as likely to have a spot in your record collection already.
For whatever reason, though, that truism applies only to normies. I feel like audiophiles—and jazz fans especially—look down their noses at me for ranking this as my all-time favorite jazz album. Let them look. Maybe that’s my own insecurity speaking. I don’t care. A Charlie Brown Christmas is simply one of the most brilliant works of art ever created by the hand of men. “Linus and Lucy,” overplayed as it may be, is the answer to the question, “What would the waveform look like if you fed pure joy to a seismograph?” “O Tannenbaum” is so far and away the definitive rendition of this old standard that all other versions simply sound wrong. And “My Little Drum” is the yardstick by which every performance of “The Little Drummer Boy” must be judged.
Here’s the thing, though: while pretty much everyone I know cues this one up or drops a needle on it as soon as Thanksgiving dinner is done and the tinsel is pulled from the attic, A Charlie Brown Christmas is an all-year listen for me. It is, without question, the most synesthetic album on this list. Listen to “Skating” in mid-July, and you can’t help but feel a chill in the air. That song simply sounds and feels like winter, and the only thing bad I can say about the album as a whole is that it’s far too brief. Two minutes and twenty-five seconds of “Skating” almost feels like a cruel tease.
Tool: Ænima
As I said from the giddy-up, there’s only one album on this combined list whose position is immutable, whose place in the overall ranking is so firmly cemented that it’s impossible for me to even imagine having another favorite. But it’s such an important album for me that I don’t even know where to begin explaining why.
If You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby is a celebration of humanity’s animal nature, Ænima is, in many senses, a rumination on everything we gained and lost when we started walking upright and writing novels and sorting ourselves into hierarchies and becoming fully modern humans, then fully postmodern posthumans. It’s a meditation on Jungian theory, an ode to anesthetics both figurative and literal, an unpacking of the trauma of abuse (including self-inflicted abuse), a treatise on the comedy of Bill Hicks, and a recipe for Mexican wedding cookies screamed in a terrifying German dialect.
And that’s merely scratching the surface. This one is, in so many respects, the embodiment of all the characteristics that make every other entry in this list such brilliant albums. It plays with the structure of recorded music in the way Nonagon Infinity does. But it’s as beholden to that structure—indeed, as elevated by that structure—as is Electric Ladyland.
If A Charlie Brown Christmas is the synesthetic sound of winter, Ænima is the sound and texture of inner turmoil and battling one’s own demons. Its effortless toying with polyrhythms is as brilliant as anything on Ys. It’s as raw and honest as Pieces of a Man, although nowhere near as influential—because how could any band show the influences of this record without merely aping it? It’s not as if anyone could fully comprehend it. I’ve listened to it deeply and intently literally thousands of times, and each and every listen simply serves to remind me that I still haven’t begun to figure it out.
Tool has released three brilliant albums since and reportedly has another one on the way. And for that matter, the band’s first LP, Undertow, is an essential prog-metal effort that would have cemented the band’s place in rock history if they’d never recorded a follow-up. But Ænima is such a perfect package in every respect, checking every single box on whatever list of criteria you might have for “The Best Album of All Time,” that it stands apart even in the midst of such an incredible discography.
. . . Dennis Burger
dennisb@soundstagenetwork.com
