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: 1 hour ago).
"BOCs first album was unlike anything that had come before, and well demonstrated the dark wit and musicianship these guys had to offer. The sound is raw and low-tech, but that works well with their songs and presentation. One of the great debut albums in rock history."Reply
"The point where I got into Depeche, true, there are some weak songs but hating on it is a bit like criticising your childhood teddy bear for having bad stitching. Leave it alone!!"Reply
"this website is frustrating lol. Too many hipsters and boomers and not enough cultured individuals. If you like jazz-funk-soul then disregard this album's rating and go listen to it NOW. If you're a Radiohead or Kanye West fan, go ahead and leave without leaving a rating. Thanks."Reply
"For such a major event, I’m surprised I have not listened to more music about the pandemic. Certainly some surface level references but nothing really conflicting with the event. That was until I heard “Dance Fever”. Florence paints such a vivid picture of the removal of live music by the plague....""For such a major event, I’m surprised I have not listened to more music about the pandemic. Certainly some surface level references but nothing really conflicting with the event. That was until I heard “Dance Fever”.
Florence paints such a vivid picture of the removal of live music by the plague. The music struggles with the loss of an artist’s entire livelihood and the longing for its return. “Choreomania” shows the ecstasy of movement with its pitter-patter drums and the increasingly exuberant vocals. “My love” is frantic with the loss of her emotional outlet. “Daffodil” is a gothic monster built through the growing crescendo of drums. The diversity of angles in which it’s covered just makes the concept stronger.
The Machine’s traditional instrument selection is fantastic. In particular, the harp becomes an elegant accent point. The best sound on the record is Welch’s voice. Her voice shoots into chorus just as naturally as it buries itself in growls. Truly impressive breath control throughout. Some tracks like “King” and “Restraint” are a bit flatter, but the album lacks a truly bad track. The movement can’t be stopped."[+]Reply
"'PAINLESS' is spare and brooding, with crunching electronic drums and fizzing alkali guitar and synths. I enjoyed myself overall, as I thought Yanya's writing had a harsh beauty to it, Wilma Archer's exec production was very consistent and I have a soft spot for the flourishes Bullion added to th...""'PAINLESS' is spare and brooding, with crunching electronic drums and fizzing alkali guitar and synths. I enjoyed myself overall, as I thought Yanya's writing had a harsh beauty to it, Wilma Archer's exec production was very consistent and I have a soft spot for the flourishes Bullion added to the sonic palette. Overall however, I have to agree with Arthurknight that it's really very good but perhaps doesn't surpass that."[+]Reply
"After the disappointing Cyclone album (in comparison to previous work) Tangerine Dream pulled out all the stops with this album, thankfully losing the vocals. I have a near mint copy on vinyl and it sounds superb on a decent audio system. I hear things on the vinyl I don't hear on my CD version. ...""After the disappointing Cyclone album (in comparison to previous work) Tangerine Dream pulled out all the stops with this album, thankfully losing the vocals. I have a near mint copy on vinyl and it sounds superb on a decent audio system. I hear things on the vinyl I don't hear on my CD version. At this point in time Tangerine Dream are moving away from sound collages into more melodic territory, a typical example being 'Cloudburst Flight', I saw Eric Froese play the guitar intro to this at the Royal Albert Hall and was mesmerised by the Mini Moog sample which led the piece of music, skilfully delivered by Thornsten Quaeschning, a bass sequence underpinning the track, originally on a Moog Modular no doubt. Nice to hear real time drums played, most notably on 'Thru Metamorphic Rocks'. Overall a superb album."[+]Reply
"(It's a Julien Baker album, it's a good album. One of the contenders for the championship belt of badass sad sack songwriters comes back with a whole lot more production punch than she had on her last couple albums. The result is a lush, at times overly so, but mostly gorgeous album that will abs...""(It's a Julien Baker album, it's a good album. One of the contenders for the championship belt of badass sad sack songwriters comes back with a whole lot more production punch than she had on her last couple albums. The result is a lush, at times overly so, but mostly gorgeous album that will absolutely have you sobbing in solidarity with her if you aren't careful.)
This is easily my most anticipated album of 2021 thus far. I adore Julien's debut Sprained Ankle, and, while I found her second album considerably less cathartic and powerful, I still quite liked it.
From her first 2 albums I felt that As a songwriter Julien is pretty miserable, not like she's bad, I mean she is very VERY good at just completely expressing utter despair and self-loathing like few songwriters I've ever heard. This is perhaps the main feature and most obvious aspect of her music in her career thus far. This aspect is so much on the forefront that sometimes I think her other strengths are overlooked. Lyrically she does know how to plunge the knife in and then twist it for maximum effect. Melodically she isn't an all time great, but she generally can write a good hook and a good and memorable melody. And she knows how to make just a very consistent and engaging emo album to sob along with.
In the lead up to this album I was feeling kinda meh and in the dumps and as a result I was very eagerly anticipating this album. When I heard it the night it was dropped I was initially lukewarm. Then I woke up and listened a couple more times and I started to warm to it a bit more. Now as I write this and I listen yet again, I am starting to really quite like it.
The obvious change in her production is what is probably going to get the most ink. And for good reason. Cuz this album is indeed MUCH more adorned with big synth parts and walls of electric guitar and keyboard and just a lot of embellishments that are trotting along beside Julien's familiar emotional voice and songwriting themes. This upscaling of musical...stuff... is generally well done. What the album clearly loses in terms of that intimacy and cathartic power that her first album had, it gains in terms of just a lot of beautiful moments of epic earcandy. The absolutely badass chorus of "Heatwave" is something that just couldn't happen without the new production angle and to say it works in enhancing the emotional punch of the song would be an understatement. There are other moments when the increased production touches work quite amazingly alongside Julien's songs.
There are also songs which feel somewhat overproduced and made me briefly miss that stripped down sound featured in "Sprained Ankle". An example of this arguably over-adorned style somewhat hampering the impact of a song is on "Relative Fiction". That song for me is good but coulda been great if not for those damn silly percussion sounds. Maybe that touch will grow on me, but for now I don't love it, feels a bit much especially with the big bass sounds and the several guitars also being layered on top of it with Baker's vocals also being multitracked, idk it just kinda rubs me the wrong way.
Still, the hits here and the overarching feel and flow of the album are indeed fabulous and there are some pristine and incredible moments sprinkled on this album. Tracks like "Heatwave", "Hardline", "Ringside", "Song In E", "Ziptie" are very powerful songs that are some of her best in her career thus far. While I don't love this like I love her debut, I think its a better album than her sophomore album and its great having a new Julien Baker album in my life to absorb when I'm feeling like my whole world has been bled of meaning and color. She's one of the best singer/songwriters of her generation and this album is quite solid and already has that familiar warmth connected with it in my mind that will make me revisit it often over the next long while.
"Blacked out on a weekday
Still something that I'm trying to avoid
Start asking for forgiveness in advance
For all the future things I will destroy
That way I can ruin everything
When I do, you don't get to act surprised
When it finally gets to be too much
I always told you you could leave at any time""[+]Reply
"This album has entered my Overall list at the expense of Burial’s EPs on their own which gives me room to add other deserving albums. I want to highlight Kindred and Truant/Rough Sleeper as the 2 EPs on this compilation that tower above the others. They have so much to offer the avid, immersive l...""This album has entered my Overall list at the expense of Burial’s EPs on their own which gives me room to add other deserving albums. I want to highlight Kindred and Truant/Rough Sleeper as the 2 EPs on this compilation that tower above the others. They have so much to offer the avid, immersive listener of electronic music. They really do seem to tell a story, but not the same story. There is always a new story floating throughout with each new listen.
As the English writer Mark Fisher so evocatively puts it;
“Burial's London is a wounded city, populated by ecstasy casualties on day release from psychiatric units, disappointed lovers on night buses, parents who can't quite bring themselves to sell their Rave 12 inches at a carboot sale, all of them with haunted looks on their faces, but also haunting their interpassively nihilistic kids with the thought that things weren't always like this. It is like walking into the abandoned spaces once carnivalised by Raves and finding them returned to depopulated dereliction. Muted air horns flare like the ghosts of Raves past. Broken glass cracks underfoot. MDMA flashbacks bring London to unlife in the way that hallucinogens brought demons crawling out of the subways in Jacob’s Ladder’s New York. Audio hallucinations transform the city’s rhythms into inorganic beings, more dejected than malign. You see faces in the clouds and hear voices in the crackle. What you momentarily thought was muffled bass turns out only to be the rumbling of tube trains”.
Some of the purely ambient tracks kick off this album which makes for a long intro to the subtle beats of my preferred tracks and prevent the album from being a top 10 contender for me but the quality of the second half makes it a definite contender."[+]Reply
"(Clairo gets in a spacious, calming, introspective groove with this album and sticks the landing. A beautiful, laid-back, Singer/Songwriter album with some cool folk/pop rock, Baroque/Chamber pop elements. The tracklist never veers far from that feeling of contemplative melancholy mixed with opti...""(Clairo gets in a spacious, calming, introspective groove with this album and sticks the landing. A beautiful, laid-back, Singer/Songwriter album with some cool folk/pop rock, Baroque/Chamber pop elements. The tracklist never veers far from that feeling of contemplative melancholy mixed with optimistic dreeamy youth.)
There is an impressive commitment to mood on this album. With few exceptions this Clairo project stays in a very introspective, hushed, and contemplative Chamber/Baroque folk pocket. This consistent sound, with few angles or almost anything metaphorically jutting out, may turn some people off. Not me, however. I quite like the mood and space this album puts me in. Sounds like a young woman making beautiful folk, filled with many vintage sounds and snippets of self-analyzing and discovery and conversational meandering.
The production is pretty ace almost all the way through. A few times I was a bit put off by the overly-lush and overly-used multi-tracked vocal oohs and ahhs, and I can't remember which track now, but at one point the drums sounded very flat and "off" I suppose. But generally the production is crisp and detailed and gorgeous. Jack Antonoff has a Type and a sound. I was actually unaware of who the producer was the first couple times listening, and I had a thought that this is yet another beautifully executed throwback to those beautiful early 70s folk singer/songwriter records. The other albums from 2021 that I was thinking made up this micro-trend were St. Vincent's 2021 album "Daddy's Home" and Lana Del Rey's 2021 album "Chemtrails Over The Country Club". When I saw a comment on RYM trashing Antonoff's production, I went to verify if this was true. Voila! It is! It's not true that the production sucks, lol, but it is true that the guy behind the last 2 LDR albums, the last St. Vincent album, the last folkie Taylor Swift album - or one of them - "Folklore" and the person behind the very different sounding from those 5 albums "Melodrama: by Lorde is the one who produced this one. Weird. Anyway, the combined work of Antonoff and Clairo make this a tidy, tender and balanced album.
This is just a really even, warm hug of a record. The soft, folkie rock upticks are beautiful, the lush chamber/baroque is solid, the lyrics are solid and the whole record is really well done. The maturity of Clairo before our eyes is almost astounding. At just 22 she has made a very beautiful album and I think she has many more excellent records in her in the years to come. "[+]Reply