Yes, it’s another big album list thread inspired by @midnightpunk’s excellent thread. @SunnyB hope you don’t mind me starting mine while yours has only really just got going but I’ve managed to write up the first four or five posts and it looks as if ours are going to be pretty different so I doubt they’ll clash.
My 100 does unsurprisingly have a handful of cross overs with MNP’s list and tbh I’ll probably refer to his, inevitably better write up regarding the actual music and I’ll add any personal recollections or anecdotes. It also has a couple of compilations in it but they’re mainly present due to nostalgic reasons.
First post when I finish work in a couple of hours.
27 Likes
Look forward to reading it
2 Likes
100. MONO - Under The Pipal Tree (2001)
We’ll start this countdown with a classic post rock album. I didn’t hear this, the debut by Japan’s MONO until a couple of years after it was released when I was diving deep into all things post rock and had heard their then current album “Walking Cloud and Deep Red Sky, Flag Fluttered and the Sun Shined” in 2004 (there’s a proper post rock album title for you! Now I know English is not their first language but “shined”?) and went back to their two previous releases.
Under The Pipal Tree begins with Karelia (Opus 2), it builds, peaks, crashes and builds again over the course of its twelve and a half minutes. The Kidnapper Bell follows, a heavily delayed guitar riff on its own then drums rolling in like an approaching storm. These two tracks pretty much set the stage for the rest of the album, guitars sometimes squalling with noise sometimes quietly plucking the gentlest of melodies.
The slow builds and quiet/loud dynamics may have become cliched in the latter days of the genre, but at this point it was the drug you sought and this album served it up to you in bucket loads. Listening to this now as I write this and I really wonder if this shouldn’t be a fair bit higher in the list than 100, but we have to start somewhere and I feel I might be thinking that about a fair few of the albums in the lower reaches of the list!
8 Likes
Will there be more than one mono album ?
1 Like
Nope. There are a couple of “double entries” in the 100, but not from these guys.
edit: Just realised you might have been making a play on the word mono, I’m slow 
1 Like
99. Genesis - The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974)
The early eighties, and me and a couple of equally uncool friends in the first couple of years at secondary school were unashamed Genesis fans, went to see them as my first gig at the NEC in 1983, two of us went down on a coach and had a great time. But as the years progressed and my music tastes moved on I was less and less interested in the Phil Collins era of the band, but still held a fondness for the Peter Gabriel years.
At some point in the early eighties my sister gave me this album, not as a Christmas gift or anything but because she’d bought it and found it too weird and generously gave it to her younger brother thinking I might like it, possibly implying I too was weird. So what, free record!
As befits its mid seventies birth date, the album is a concept album, the story laid out across the gatefold sleeve. A young street kid in New York by the name of Rael finds himself transported from the gritty NY streets to a disorientating alternate reality, meeting strange characters and having really quite odd adventures over the course of the double album. A story I paraphrased at one point into an essay for English and passed it off as my own. It wasn’t until after I’d handed it in I remembered my teacher mentioning previously that she liked Genesis, oh shit, as it turned out she obviously hadn’t heard this album and I got an A!
It still remains one of the couple of Genesis albums I can listen to in its entirety without getting bored or irritated half way through. It’s so Gabriel it might as well be a solo album and this was indeed the last Genesis album he appeared on. Daft, overblown and pompous but 40 years ago I loved it and nostalgia earns it a place in this list.
13 Likes
98. New Order - Substance (1987)
In 1987 I had just started my first full time job on shift as a computer operator for Barclays Bank in Gloucester. From my mum’s house it was a 45 minute drive each way so a car full of tapes was essential, especially to keep me awake driving home after a night shift (it didn’t always work, but that’s another story!). My music taste at this point was still pretty unadventurous but I’d heard Blue Monday and True Faith a few times on mainstream radio and loved them so not long after one of my first paydays I decided to buy the double CD of Substance. I taped CD1 and a selection of tracks from CD2 onto a C90 cassette for the car and it was a regular commute soundtrack.
Admittedly it’s a bit Partridge to put a “best of” on a list such as this but it’s such a great collection and shamefully I never really went back to check out their actual albums prior to '87. I bought Technique when it came out in 1989 but that was it for my New Order explorations.
19 Likes
97. The Stranglers - IV Rattus Norvegicus (1977)
Despite the “IV” this is the band’s debut album, those jokers! I cannot honestly remember when or where I bought this record, but it’s on the budget Fame label so would have probably cost me the princely sum of about £2.99! I think I probably bought it for the track Peaches that I would have remembered hearing years before, presumably when it was a single in 77, it no doubt stuck in my young memory due its sleaziness and the inclusion of a swear word ooh!
As I soon found out Peaches is by no means the best track on here, there’s not a duff track on the album to be honest. But in what is emerging as a pattern in those youthful days, I never bothered to investigate the band any further, to this day this is the only album of theirs I know well, I do have Dreamtime on a picture disc I got from somewhere many years ago but I think I’ve only listened to that a couple of times.
“Making love to the Mersey Tunnel with a sausage, have you ever been to Liverpool?” - London Lady.
You charmers you! 
8 Likes
I really, really like the run of tracks from “Hairless Heart” to “Anyway”. I struggle with the rest outside of a few others, but still appreciate the overall concept and sound. That middle section is just full of gold.
1 Like
96. Mussorgsky - Night on a Bare Mountain
Ok, one more tonight then I’ll have to do some more writing!
This is a bit of a cheat as this is a piece of music not the whole album. But the album it resides on here has a big sentimental attachment for me so here it is.
My dad was only ever interested in classical music and when he died in 1984 his modest record collection was split between me and my sister but I made sure this record was in my half!
I’d been taken to the cinema by my dad years earlier to see Disney’s Fantasia when it had been re-released on the big screen in the mid 70s (no VCRs or DVDs back then!) and the section that transfixed me at the time was the scene that played out to Night on a Bare Mountain (or Bald Mountain as it also seems to be called). When we got home he picked this album out to show me, the surreal Hieronymous Bosch painting on the cover just dragged me in even more!
He would possibly be quite disappointed that I have never really embraced classical in the decades since, I don’t think I’ve ever been through his old records despite always saying I should. But this piece of music will always take me back to sitting in a dark cinema next to my dad, the ominous music accompanying pretty dark (for 1940s Disney) animation of Lucifer himself summoning ghosts, skeletons, demons and witches to an infernal rave sending shivers down my spine.
8 Likes
I wasn’t actually, just surprised by the choice if it’s the only one
1 Like
It’s always been my favourite of theirs.
95. Addaura - Burning For The Ancient (2012)
I was quite late getting into black metal, only really getting into it in my 40s. By around 2010 I had branched out from post rock into post metal with bands such as ISIS and Cult of Luna and through this I had grown used to and had starting enjoying harsher vocals. Wolves in the Throne Room were my actual gateway to black metal, particularly atmospheric black metal (more on them later in the list), and this album from Seattle band Addaura inhabits the same aesthetic space. One of the first albums of the genre other than WITTR that I fell in love with, Burning For The Ancient consists of four long tracks of that Cascadian wall of noise, blast beat fuelled repetition cloaked in almost oppressive yet dream-like atmosphere. A real close your eyes, nod your head and zone out listen. It’s therefore a shame that up to now it’s their only full length. But I still hold out hope of another, Austere coming back this year with their first album in 14 years is encouraging!
6 Likes
94. Electric Light Orchestra - A New World Record (1976)
Zooming back in time again now to the first LP I ever bought. In 1979 I started secondary school and in the house area the prefects were allowed to play their own records during breaks and lunchtime (until someone put the Sex Pistols’ B side to Pretty Vacant, Friggin’ in the Rigging on at full blast which did not go down well!). Then one day one of them put this record on and it kind of kicked off my lifelong love of music.
That sounds a bit dramatic but I have no memory of any other records that were played on this stereo in those couple of years other than the Sex Pistols incident and this one. The reason I remember the Sex Pistols one is pretty obvious, a minute or so of a room full of kids shouting along to “…and there’s fuck all else to do!” followed swiftly by the house master* marching out of his office and ripping the needle off the record, his face purple with rage! The reason I remember this record is the swooping synths and violins of the first few bars of Tightrope that just hooked themselves into my 12 year old brain and instead of listening to whatever my friend was talking to me about at the time I just became hypnotised by the sweet melodies and realised I needed to own this album.
It was also the first time I recognised a “sample” of music that had been used on TV, there was a local west country arts program that I can’t remember the name of that used the first 20 seconds of the song So Fine in its titles. When it came on the stereo at school I was like “woah, I recognise that!”
Yes it’s cheesy, yes it’s dated but it’s one of those records that I loved so much at the time as a youngster that it’s pretty much a part of me now.
*this all makes it sound like I attended some posh public school, I assure you Wyedean Comprehensive in Chepstow was a looong way from a posh anything!
6 Likes
contender for best album title ever
93. Puressence - Only Forever (1998)
Second album from Manchester’s Puressence. Objectively I would probably place their 1996 self titled debut above this one but as with a lot of entries in this list, this one has memories inextricably linked to it meaning it has to be this one.
Only Forever is a more polished, radio friendly album than their debut, proven by single This Feeling making it to the heady heights of number 33 in the UK charts! It was released just as I was going through a break up and it became my go to listen to try and blank out what was going on at the time. This lead to me not being able to listen to it for a few years afterwards, it was too linked to heartbreak. But gradually I could go back to it without getting maudlin and start to enjoy it again.
Puressence formed in 1996 at the height of Britpop but their sound had more shoegaze than pop influences and James Mudriczki’s vibrato vocals made them pretty unmistakable but were a bit love 'em or hate 'em so were possibly part of the reason they never really made it as big as they maybe could have done.
For a few years in the late 90s early 00s I saw them live at least twice a year at various sweaty venues around Yorkshire and they were always a great live band. Mudriczki had quite an imposing stage presence and the regular die hard fans always made the modest pit great fun. Unfortunately the albums that followed never rally captured the same verve and urgency as their first two and I gradually lost interest, they released a final album in 2011 (that I’ve never bothered listening to) and split up in 2013.
10 Likes
92. Peter Gabriel - III (1980)
During my Genesis “phase” in my teens, when I realised the Gabriel era was my preferred period I naturally began investigating his solo output. I remembered loving the single Games Without Frontiers (his joint highest ever charting single at no.4 in the UK) so got this album on tape.
His solo output was far less prog rock than during his time in Genesis, reflecting the time and embracing more elements of post punk, new wave and art rock. This is his third solo album and like all his albums up until “So” had no official title but this tends to be referred to as III or Melt due to the Hipgnosis cover of the album, although for some reason my pre-recorded cassette forewent that for a pretty boring head shot (I was going to include a photo of that alongside its more recent vinyl replacement but despite me thinking I still had it I cannot locate it. I have a vague memory that it might have been chewed by some tape player or other and got binned, bloody cassettes, another reason I cannot get onboard with their resurgence!).
The album opens with Intruder, Gabriel draughted his former band mate Phil Collins in to drum on the album and for this track he came up with that very recognisable gated reverb sound. Also following Gabriel’s instructions there are no cymbals used on the album. It’s quite a dark track to open an album, Gabriel with his whispered vocals playing the part of a creepy house breaker going through people’s belongings.
This track kind of sets the stage for a far more serious album than anything his former band touched on; Anti-war (Games Without Frontiers), political assassinations (Family Snapshot), and the murder of South African activist Steve Biko (er, Biko)
As Rolling Stone said “He made more popular albums after this one, but never better ones”
11 Likes
This is an approach I can get on board with 
1 Like
The first album is on my list. I got the album to review in my student newspaper and “Fire” blew my mind. 
It still reminds me of uni.
5 Likes
