Listed below are the overall rankings for the best albums in history as determined by their aggregate positions in over 59,000 different greatest album charts on BestEverAlbums.com! (Chart last updated: 2 hours ago).
"Sting is excellent for his voice and his message. Consistently reflective and sometimes haunting he makes interesting music. I prefer the debut and Ten Summoners Tales over this, but I rank Nothing Like the Sun 3rd or 4th in his Catalogue Fragile is a fantastic song. Englishman in New York is a f...""Sting is excellent for his voice and his message. Consistently reflective and sometimes haunting he makes interesting music.
I prefer the debut and Ten Summoners Tales over this, but I rank Nothing Like the Sun 3rd or 4th in his Catalogue
Fragile is a fantastic song. Englishman in New York is a finely written tale. Starts of excellent with tracks 1 and 2
I find most songs that are about dancing tacky and corny but Dance Alone is done splendidly.
B side of the album is good work but less memorable as the beginning.
Great Sting record"[+]Reply
"One of the most complex and deeply rooted pieces of loud music ever recorded. Vile, poetic, emotional, and pure, Jane Doe is indeed a piece of music history. It needs more than one listen to get into, but once it has rampaged through your mind, it will quickly become one of the best things you'll...""One of the most complex and deeply rooted pieces of loud music ever recorded. Vile, poetic, emotional, and pure, Jane Doe is indeed a piece of music history. It needs more than one listen to get into, but once it has rampaged through your mind, it will quickly become one of the best things you'll ever hear."[+]Reply
"i remember the first time i heard this album. i purchased it at some commercial giant (best buy, i believe), went home, threw the disc into my portable sony walkman and paced around my parents' backyard. i was barefoot. the grass was green and slightly damp. the sun was up, and there wasn't a clo...""i remember the first time i heard this album. i purchased it at some commercial giant (best buy, i believe), went home, threw the disc into my portable sony walkman and paced around my parents' backyard. i was barefoot. the grass was green and slightly damp. the sun was up, and there wasn't a cloud in the sky. it was just cool enough outside that the sun was not a nuisance.
i listened through the entire album, throwing tennis balls for my dog throughout the ordeal. i was floored. i also felt a little bit dirty. this was not an album for children, but at the same time, that's exactly what it was. it's the opposite of disney. there's no sugar-coating. it's life. it's raw. it's messy. yes, it's dirty.
and it's brilliant. i read through the lyrics over and over, making sure i understood every word. this was not a lyrical style i was familiar with, and every word was so packed full of wit, the packaging could hardly contain it. it took me years to truly understand a lot of it, if i'm being honest (and i am)."[+]Reply
"This album is a cacophony of joy. Guitars, horns and, "lobotomy beats", you can hear the influences talking over each other like drunk students solo cups in hand at some epic party. Nicotine and Gravy is a highlight towards the end it is punctuated by a James Brown snare onto a Stevie Wonder clav...""This album is a cacophony of joy. Guitars, horns and, "lobotomy beats", you can hear the influences talking over each other like drunk students solo cups in hand at some epic party. Nicotine and Gravy is a highlight towards the end it is punctuated by a James Brown snare onto a Stevie Wonder clavichord and finally to a transcendental electric sitar. Beck's nonsensical lyrics are off putting to some (hot dogs no doze hot sex in back rows) but perfect for an album which wants to be nothing but fun, almost to the point of parody with its closer Debra. No party mix is complete without one track from this album. "[+]Reply
"I'm still listening to this, so I'll update this review in a little while, but Weyes Blood has been slowly working on her craft over the years and is working herself into the generational pantheon. A contemporary artist making "classic" songs is rare, so I'm sure the anti-pop elite of this site s...""I'm still listening to this, so I'll update this review in a little while, but Weyes Blood has been slowly working on her craft over the years and is working herself into the generational pantheon.
A contemporary artist making "classic" songs is rare, so I'm sure the anti-pop elite of this site should have no problem shipping this, and for good reason: she delivered again."[+]Reply
"I used to compare Phil Elvrum's works as the musical equivalent of Lars Von Trier's movies. The Boldness is combined with a sense of creativity that spills emotion all over the listener, He/She is ripped out from the comfort zone and thrown out in the middle of a hurricane without any clues of ho...""I used to compare Phil Elvrum's works as the musical equivalent of Lars Von Trier's movies. The Boldness is combined with a sense of creativity that spills emotion all over the listener, He/She is ripped out from the comfort zone and thrown out in the middle of a hurricane without any clues of how he got there, and how Elvrum decides to treat us is insanely weird, he quietly comes closer and closer until we can listen to him breathing, so close that we can hear his blood moving through his veins, so close that we can see that wilderness that is covered behind his eyes. He appears alone to calm down the disorder that is established in "The Sun", and inserts us in some kind of stellar ritual, with the moon and the sun as witnesses, the abstract glow is now swallow by a big mass of vacuum and negative energy coming from a big black hole. What I most love in Phil's works is how much it seems personal and how much it represents the chaos that is the human mind, our pessimism personified in trumpets and nymphs' voices, inducting you to be weaker and weaker. "Solar System" is the perfect ode to the myth of the eternal return, The troubadour that interacts with his loneliness and outside forces to wish his lover comeback, The continuous use of "I Know you're out there" reinforces the feeling of how much he has waited and will wait for her to be back, let it rain, let there be sun, the world will end and his dreams will still be floating in the ether. In "universe I" the band join its multi-instrumental magic to give life to the fragility of human conscience and confidence, from the lonely guitar that follows Elvrum through the glow of the moon, going through reflexes in mud puddles with her curves drawn, until our hero down to his knees offers himself to the force that moves the universe, and we are brought then to a weird journey that is mount eerie, a force that purifies and devours each piece of your soul. The eclipse starts, his eyes are burnt, he is tilting towards the sun, and the mount eerie wakes from his thrones and begins to drain any light that remains in the listener's hope. This has been a hell of an adventure huh? When I first completed Mount Eerie I got myself theorizing all night and dawn, what the hell did I just passed through? Is this some kind of metaphor to the trifling human emotions and feelings? That's why I consider this record to be so great, it explores the outside world of music, it's not just about listening to something, but rather taking a philosophical walk to somewhere, we are humans and overall we should know how soulless we have become in the last years. We have stars and galaxies inside us, we are a whole universe of deception and loneliness, love and hate, we are a big avalanche of synesthesia, we are a big mess of sense. And In the end we will be all swallow and superb about how deep our night is, how coloured our supernovas are, how enormous our soul is."[+]Reply
"The talking heads were still experimenting in david byrne's latter years with the band, here incorporating a country flare working the steel guitar often."Reply
"Love this strategy of having 12 songs that are all good and interesting, performances that are tight and dynamic, and production that's organic and warm and punchy. More artists should try this because it might make their music good."Reply
"I always feel grateful to hear John Martyns voice. He shares a lot of himself. This album is both deep and playful and somehow manages to comfort my emotions and then rip them apart again. Solid Air is like an old friend. It never fades. Everyone should own this"Reply
"The quotes below are - for the most part - from “Van der Graaf Generator - The Book” by Jim Jim Christopulos and Phil Smart. John Frusciante (Red Hot Chili Peppers) - "When we started touring for the album By The Way, I and the rest of the band would always be listening to Pawn Hearts on the bus ...""The quotes below are - for the most part - from “Van der Graaf Generator - The Book” by Jim Jim Christopulos and Phil Smart.
John Frusciante (Red Hot Chili Peppers) - "When we [RHCP] started touring for the album By The Way, I and the rest of the band would always be listening to Pawn Hearts on the bus and back stage... With Hammill's singing there are so many vocal gymastics, he's capable of so much with his voice, and he's pushing himself even beyond his capabilities! Anthony [Kiedis, RHCP singer] has a couple of Van der Graaf albums, and he likes that extreme kind of singing very much. As a singer myself, I'm really in awe of Hammill."
Stephen Morris (Joy Division & New Order) - [names Pawn Hearts as one of his all time faves] "At the time, with Pawn Hearts, all of your mates would say: 'Ooh, there's a track that's three days long… it's pixie stuff'. But 'A Plague Of Lighthouse Keepers' is... like a nightmare with saxophones... terrifying. I really like Peter Hammill. He's another guy who's really unique - he has a really individual way of singing, and it's very raw."
Simon Gallup (The Cure) - "'We Go Now' [a SG 'desert island' pick off of Pawn Hearts] is brilliant. Van der Graaf weren't involved in all mysticism and stuff, they were still a bit hard, there was some attack. Peter Hammill was a bit of a god as well."
Jello Biafra (Dead Kennedys) - "I liked them, especially Pawn Hearts... [Peter Hammill] is one of the most brilliant songwriters of his or any other generation."
Julian Cope (Teardrop Explodes & solo artist) - "Prog wasn't all Genesis and Gentle Giant, baby. VdGG were punks in a prog rock style... Pawn Hearts is a masterpiece in the old-fashioned sense of the word, that is: it is a musical blueprint on which to build in the future and has as sensibly structured an anti-structure as you could wish for. It is in turns beautiful, ridiculous, foul, overwhelming, irritating, mutating, and magnificent... First time I ever heard Pawn Hearts was in [summer 1972]. How I adored this record. However, thirty-one years and a couple of hundred spins later I'm still genuinely disoriented by this extremely everything LP, and even more in shock and awe of Peter Hammill than I was all those years ago."
Bruce Dickinson (Iron Maiden) - "Peter Hammill was one of my childhood lyrical hero's but, you know, you say 'Peter Hammill' to most people and they go, 'Huh?'... And it's such a shame cause they had so much more to them, I think, than Genesis. They were a bunch of pansies compared to Van der Graaf, really... I was talking about this with the manager of Entombed, Dave Thorne, who's a huge Van der Graaf Generator fan and we were talking about how amazing some Van der Graaf Generator songs would sound if a metal band did them. It'd sound really f***ing heavy... I mean, can you imagine 'A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers' done by a real prog metal band, it'd be amazing!"
Gary Lucas (Captain Beefheart's Magic Band, frequent Jeff Buckley collaborator, solo artist) - "Pawn Hearts to me was the summation of all that was great about Van der Graaf. Lyrically and instrumentally, it was haunting, elegiac, eerie, and mad. It gave new credibility to the words 'progressive rock.'""[+]Reply