Before and After your favorite.

[Listmeister]

Take your favorite album, the one at the top of your overall list. Then find the album that the band recorded right before that one and the one right after that one. Listen to them back-to-back. Comment on them, explain why your favorite (the one in the middle) is the best of the three.

My #1 is Time, by ELO, 1981. Right before that, they were involved in the Xanadu project with Olivia Newton-John, and recorded half the songs on the soundtrack. Judgment call, I'm not counting that one. So the one before that is Discovery, 1979, or as ELO fans refer to it, Disco?Very!

Now disco is not a dealbreaker for me, as long as it's good disco. And the album is not all disco all the time, in fact only one (Shine a Little Love) is hard-core disco. Don't Bring Me Down, the big hit from the album, is a straight-up rock song. The surprise track is the comical Diary of Horace Wimp.

After Time came Secret Messages, 1983. There's a lot of good tracks on that one, with an understated spy theme throughout. They use female backing vocals, adding a new element to the ELO sound. They are masters of their craft on this one. With "Time After Time", "Four Little Diamonds", "Danger Ahead", and the hit "Rock and Roll Is King", song for song, it might even be better than Time.

There are two advantages of albums over singles. First, an album gives you a snapshot of a band at a certain point in time. ELO in 1983 was not the exact same band as ELO in 1979 even if all the band members were the same. Their music had evolved, and the musical context had changed. The other advantage of albums, which is all too rarely taken advantage of, is you can build a set of songs around a concept.

Time tells the story of a time-traveller. A man is snatched from his time (1981) and brought forward against his will to the year 2095. At first he is desperate to get back home, but then he meets a girl (the lonely sidewalk dancer from the end of the world) and things are better for awhile, but he still wants to go back.

That concept, that story, the epic-film quality of the album puts it ahead of the other two albums. What can I say, it's my favorite.

[nutso42]

My favorite album is London Calling by the Clash. It's preceded by Give 'Em Enough Rope, which is a fairly straightforward punk album. It's followed by Sandinista!, which just tries too hard.

But London Calling strikes a perfect balance between punk and branching out, and results in a perfect album that never sounds like it's repeating itself.

[JMan]

My top is Led Zeppelin IV. Obviously, III came before it. it's diverse and has many hits, but the album after IV (Houses of the Holy) captures more of a Zeppelin vibe and has all that Led Zeppelin III has to offer.

Led Zeppelin IV is my top because it's well-produced, has fantastic lyrics, two legendary songs (Stairway and levee), is very diverse, and has no song that doesn't get a four star rating from me. In fact, five of the songs are perfect.

[JMan]

I recently listened to Pyromania and Adrenalize. Overall, Pyromania is on of the hard rock pinnacles carrying four hit songs in it's bosom while Adrenalize is only popular for it's album cover and the majority of the album is decent. Hysteria, on the other hand, is where Def leppard found their style and how they made it big with glam metal hits throughout the first half hour of the album.