Discover: 50 Essential Rock Albums
Whether your school’s back in session or you haven’t been to class in years, now’s the time to crack open decades of iconic rock music and brush up on the very best eMusic has to offer. Not just familiar faces like Dylan, Springsteen and Cash, either; our Discover: School of Rock sale is here to help you brush up on everything from the ravaged heavy-metal riffs of Mastodon and High On Fire to such rite of passage records as Transformer, Psychocandy and London Calling.
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London Calling pushes the Clash beyond the boundaries of punk rock. The music stretches out in a number of directions, with lyrics that make politics and anger factors rather than focus. "Koka Kola," "Death or Glory," "Clampdown" and Simonon's violence-threatening reggae rumble, "Guns of Brixton," hit reassuringly familiar marks, but songs about actor Montgomery Clift ("The Right Profile") and lonely youth ("Lost in the Supermarket"), plus the surprise hit single "Train in Vain," don't encourage blood-boiling or fist-pumping. Few groups have redefined themselves so adroitly: taken on its own terms, London Calling is nearly flawless.
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Forty-one years after it was first released, this rambunctious performance still stirs the soul. Johnny Cash's rapport with the prison audience is overwhelming — his ability to successfully alternate silly novelty songs with dark murder ballads suggests he understands things about them the rest of us cannot fathom — and his nervous energy injects new life and urgency into every song. He neither romanticizes the crimes he sings about, nor does he try to explain or overdramatize them. They just are. Is it Cash's best album ever? Hell, it's probably the best country album ever.
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After the Velvet Underground, Lou Reed's solo career could have gone in several directions. Communal strength and Andy Warhol's patronage had allowed the group to explore the darkest impulses ever recorded as music — would Reed alone be so intrepid? His self-titled debut was a good start, but hooking up with David Bowie as his under-bearing producer and creative stimulant made Transformer a bigger, bolder and more enduring statement. Together, they explored transgressive lifestyles with a light, occasionally campy, musical touch and the strongest concentration of memorable melodies Reed has ever assembled on one disc. Made in the first flush of the gay liberation movement, Transformer is a masterpiece of inclusiveness, glossing over explicit homoeroticism in favor of lines like "we're coming out...of our closets...out on the streets" ("Make Up"), the feyness of "Vicious" ("you hit me with a flower") and the stylish back cover photos, which could have come from a Roxy Music record. For his centerpiece, Reed depicts gender-blurring superstars of the Warhol stable in the subliminally decadent hit single, "Walk on the Wild Side." But there's more here than just pushing the limits of conventional sensibility: the unironic sentimentality of "Perfect Day" and "Satellite of Love" underscore the humanity at the core of Reed's provocation.
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It was 1973, OK? Even then, the Stooges two albums on Elektra (released in 1969 and 1970) were legendary for their influence on glam rockers like David Bowie and a nascent generation of punks. Raw Power in its time was renowned for two things: a strange and thin mix by Bowie that Iggy has described as "weedy," and its collection of eight nearly perfectly conceived and executed songs — and "executed" may be the operative word here — written by Pop and Stooges guitarist James Williamson, that are unmatched in their musical brutality and carnal wit. The Legacy remastering and reissue (done in 1996) restores some necessary bottom, played with utter lack of inhibition by the bass/drum brother team of Ron and Scott Asheton, that the original mix ignored, but the hysteria remains intact. Just listen to the opener "Search and Destroy"; the barely controlled lunatic firepower lives up to the title's description of a typical mission in the still-ongoing Vietnam War. "Gimme Danger" embodies the life on the edge that the Doors 'Jim Morrison would have died for if he hadn't, in fact, died. "Penetration" is more subtle than its title suggests, the kind of twisted desire the Rolling Stones struggled to capture in "Goat's Head Soup." "Shake Appeal" may have taught the Ramones how to sound obsessive, cementing the place in rock history Raw Power owns as the pivotal album between the garage and punk eras.
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When Mastodon first reared its bucktoothed head in 2001 with the Lifesblood EP, the scriveners of metal took note: here was something promising. With 2002's Remission, the promise was kept; it was a debut that puzzled and excited listeners with an amalgam of styles: hardcore punk's intensity and angular chops; death metal's squealing, complex guitars; a heaviness usually the province of sludge and doom metal; and drumming that risked its integrity and ventured into the territory of wank by courting progressive rock and jazz. (Has anyone other than Magma's Christian Vander dared to marry percussion this complex to metal this extreme?) Other bands have flirted with this territory, most notably Dillinger Escape Plan, but their attack always had one foot firmly planted in punk's messy metalcore backyard. Mastodon, however, are leveraging with all hooves staked in the murky underworld swamp of extreme metal.
We are now out of Remission and into 2004's highly anticipated follow-up, Leviathan, which again puzzles and will surely alienate one old fan for every two new admirers it gathers in its net. The naysayers will note that too many concessions were made on Leviathan in order to gain a wider audience, that the production is too polished and the vocals too melodic, and they are right. On Remission there was a claustrophobic paranoia, a suffocating heaviness like an elephant's heel pressing on someone's chest; its vocals were the raw hardcore screams of an anarchist drill sergeant. Leviathan digs out of the boot camp stampede and seeks out even heavier environs, going where few bands have gone before, straight down into the ocean. However, the studio polish of producer Matt Bayles that will be agonized by underground purists turns out to be just surface glare. Lurking beneath is an expansiveness more massive than anything found on the shores. The sound on Leviathan seems bottomless and infinite in the best possible way: it's not a dip in the pool; it's a headlong cliff dive into deep waters.
There are remarkable no-they-didn't, yes-they-did changes littering Leviathan like chum in shark territory. "Megalodon" moves from angular post-hardcore to chugging boogie thrash with deceptive ease, turning from one to the other with a Southern rawk guitar lick sure to have Duane Allman raise a bony hand in deathly devil-horned approval. It's not just that the sound is now "oceanic," either; metal has always had a tendency to rehash the same dark themes and few bands have the wherewithal to attempt to broaden that vision. Leviathan may not be an out and out concept album, but it's awfully close and thank god they didn't choose anything as cheesy as a blind kid playing pinball. Instead, Mastodon's chosen guide is Moby Dick, and a good portion of the lyrical themes on songs like "Blood and Thunder," "I Am Ahab," "Aqua Dementia," and "Seabeast" are based on Herman Melville's dystopian waters. It's a good fit with the music, too. Filtered through Melville's spyglass, the watery tales and creatures of Leviathan are even more paranoid and intense than the more terrestrial Remission. Those who choose to follow Mastodon into the sea will surely agree.
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Forget about "Last Nite." The single that launched the Strokes is, to paraphrase NFL coach Dennis Green, what we thought it was: the riff from Tom Petty's "American Girl," an adolescent growl, too gutless to be big dumb rock, a song so dimensionally-challenged that it couldn't draw a square around a typical mid-'60s garage stomp. Is This It begins with a yawn — the resigned-sounding, sing-song title track hears frontman Julian Casablancas admitting, "I'm just way too tired" — and it turns out that boredom is the most authentic emotion on the Strokes 'debut. (Tellingly, the album also contains songs titled "Soma" and "Take It Or Leave It.")
more »It also turns out that boredom is the catalyst for nearly all of the strange and wonderful things that have happened in the history of rock 'n 'roll. Is This It was the 21st century's first masterpiece of blasé theatre, a conscious changing of the style guard by five privileged Manhattan prep-school types. Much has been written about the upper-crustiness of the band members, but the Strokes 'real advantage was their cultural affluence: early teenage years spent listening to Guided By Voices, the Velvet Underground and Television — bands most Gen Xers didn't discover until college.
Casablancas 'vision arrived fully formed on Is This It, from the deliberately tinny guitar and drums to the unfashionably round bass tones and vocals that sound like they're coming through a megaphone in the apartment next door. It all sounds cheap, hammered-out (or just plain hammered) and more glorious for each implementation of its let's-get-small approach to recording. Each song chugs along with a peculiar brand of wizened youth, with Casablancas singing about regrets and lost loves with a world-weariness that's almost comically beyond his 23 years. While "Last Nite" is too slight to deserve its reputation as this debut's signature song, "Hard To Explain" is its real anthem. The ducking-and-weaving guitar melody perfectly carries Casablancas 'maze of lyrics — part scribbled bar conversations, part confused meditation on whether he should stay or whether he should go. To be so young and so old at the same time.
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At the height of Nirvanamania, the Secret Machines catalog issued Stopwatch, a cassette by an artist known only as Late! It was no big secret that it was a collection of concise pop songs penned and performed by Nirvana's drum-popping Dave Grohl, and the tape proved that he was a budding songsmith in his own right. So the emergence of Grohl as frontman/guitarist with Foo Fighters in the wake of Kurt Cobain's death was a natural progression. That he would go on to become a hearty multi-platinum rock star of his own accord that same decade becomes evident here.
more »Whereas many of his grunge peers veered towards the angsty side of the spectrum as the decade wore on (unfortunately favoring growled emoting a la Eddie Vedder), Grohl always grounded his discordant guitars and hardcore velocities in pop. No doubt recalling the lessons of Nevermind's massive success, for all of the squall and feedback, he kept sharp, steely hooks at the center of his band's sound. On the strength of singles like the furious "Monkeywrench" and ever-building "Everlong," Foo Fighters became modern-rock radio staples. And when original drummer William Goldsmith left during the album's recording, Grohl also proved he could still make the drums concuss like the thunder god he is.
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This is the one, people, the album that made Modest Mouse one of the most unlikely crossover cases in recent memory. It's not that their songs aren't solid; it's just that the band's fourth album is just as haunted by demons and derelicts as the rest of Isaac Brock's oeuvre. Oh sure, "Float On" is a certified windows-down, speakers-up anthem, suitable for summer drives and backyard barbecues, but it's a ruse, really, a candy-coated gateway drug to a disc that's dark and delightful.
more »Beginning with a horn blast from the Dirty Dozen Brass Band (see also: the wailing backdrop of "This Devil's Workday"), this one's a strange trip indeed, as the group whips out wood nymph whistles ("The World At Large"), hammerhead hooks ("Bury Me With It," "Black Cadillacs") and twitchy, wild-eyed tributes to Tom Waits ("Dance Hall") and Talking Heads ("The View"). And, hey, if you've been here since the beginning, rest assured that "The Good Times Are Killing Me," "Bukowski" and "Blame It On the Tetons" are vintage Modest Mouse at its very best.
Talk about modern rock that's actually modern — a reason to believe in your radio dial again, if only for a track or two.
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Tom Waits is in a profoundly unimpeachable position. He is perceived as grizzled and crazed and magnificently out-of-step. And, most crucially, a genius. An inscrutable iconoclast, with a hobo's sense of style and a coal miner's voice box. Over time, he has begun to resemble a video game villain — dark, rarely seen, unbeatable. The Legend of Zelda's Ganon, basically. So hearing him on Glitter and Doom, a live album, is both a treat and a curiosity. Here is this unknowable artist, perpetuating the folkloric artifice, and perhaps even stretching it into full-blown myth. Waits's growl is deeper, his stories more cracked and poetic, and his band more lurching and lockstep. He is only himself, without context or contemporaries.
more »In 2008, Glitter and Doom was the first Waits tour in three years and he and his band traveled through the underserved Southwestern swath of America — places like Mobile and Tulsa and El Paso. So the fans in attendance, often traveling a great distance to see Waits, are rapturous, slurping down much-loved compositions, like Rain Dog's "Singapore" with the same verve as the never-before-heard story song, "Live Circus." Most of the time Waits's howlish singing style can verge on the grotesque and hilarious. "What does it matter, a dream of life, a dream of lies?" he woofs on Bone Machine's "Dirt in the Ground." It is terrifying, melancholic and logical at the same time — one of Waits great, uncelebrated gifts. On a restructured "Falling Down," one of Waits's best and most heartbreaking songs, he is almost freakishly hoarse. Which, we suppose, is by design.
Glitter and Doom is an unsurprisingly defiant work, culling mostly from stellar later albums like Real Gone and the odds 'n' ends compilation Orphans. It's a stopover until the beast grows bigger and darker, but suitably menacing no less.
![The Shape Of Punk To Come [Deluxe Version] album cover](http://images.emusic.com/music/images/album/119/545/11954587/300x300.jpg)
