The Perfect Ten

[HoldenM]

Giving an album 100 and saying that an album is perfect are two very different things to me. For the former, it mostly comes down to the fact that, for me, once an album reaches a certain threshold, it simply gets a 100. I've rated around forty-two albums a one-hundred, but none of them are "perfect." They simply amount to the kind of experience that is so potent to me, and so meaningful, that they can only be measured by the highest numeric value I can give.

The latter idea is another story. I honestly don't believe in "the perfect album." Even my top album has two or three songs that I don't just absolutely love. Each album that I have listened to ever has one song that I could complain about, at least a little. The closest there will ever be to a perfect album for me, at least as far as I can tell, is Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon. If some songs were just a little bit stronger, then it would be my favorite album, and it would be a perfect album. Yet, it lacks just a little bit of transcendence for me to fully embrace it as the platinum or diamond standard for all recorded music. To me, there are perfect songs can exist independent and in context with a given work, and still come off as nothing short of marvelous. Yet, there's just not an album where there are all of these perfect songs that play off of one another perfectly. Sometimes albums are good enough as wholes that the inferior pieces can be overlooked, and even appreciated for their part on whatever record they're found. Yet, they're still lesser works that hold back a construction.