Top 100 Greatest Music Albums by babyBlueSedan
My favorite albums, or "The 100 albums I'd keep if iTunes had a capacity of 100 albums."
The theme of this update, as with the past couple, is upheaval. Every time I update this I claim to be moving new favorite up higher while still stubbornly putting albums I used to love but never listen to anymore near the top. I won't know for sure if I've been more successful this time around until I update this again. But I hope that this current iteration shook things up a bit and added a bit more variety, even if that variety is in the form of albums most people have heard of. I've tried to include as many artists and genres where possible, partially because I want to appear more interesting than I actually am, but in the end this is still very rock and pop oriented. In particular, this iteration makes obvious my current love of plaintive folk/singer-songwriter stuff.
I've also relaxed my artist limits just a bit to highlight the artists I really love, but I still couldn't include everything I wanted because spots are so limited. In some cases I decided what to include based on what I wanted to write about. I recommend checking out my decade charts for more deep cuts.
Also, I appreciate all the kind and generous comments - they're my main motivation for updating this every couple years or so.
- Chart updated: 05/30/2020 02:15
- (Created: 07/31/2013 04:33).
- Chart size: 100 albums.
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This chart is currently filtered to only show albums from Modest Mouse. (Remove this filter)
You know what's great about Modest Mouse? You'll be listening to a song and you'll hear lyrics that you swear you've heard before. You get chills and wonder if you're crazy. Then you listen some more and you realize that it's Isaac Brock who's bat-shit crazy, not you, but you have to be at least a little insane to empathize with him. And you have heard those lyrics before (about ships sinking, cars driving, land being paved, and "the thin air"), and the whole thing is just one big loop of insanity. And this album is all about that, a mournful look at the old west seen through the eyes of someone who spent just enough time in it to not be able to be sure why he misses it.
Any conversation I have about Modest Mouse will always begin and end by talking about Isaac Brock's lyrics, and I believe this album was his lyrical peak (Moon and Antarctica isn't far behind though of course). Brock has a knack for writing songs that seem really general or obtuse and then injecting one or two lines that just really hit hard. Take the opener: the verses are pretty abstract, forcing to listener to make up their own meaning in some cases. And then the chorus (or slower bit, this is hardly a verse-chorus-verse song) hits, and Brock mentions malls and Orange Julius and seriously, who can't relate to that? Teeth like God's shoeshine is such amazing imagery, and then comes "And the telephone goes off. Pick the receiver up try to meet ends and find out the beginnning, the end, and the best of it...." This line always catches me off guard - him trailing off as he realizes he no longer has anything in common with an old friend is such a striking statement of finality. And just like that the song makes sense...kind of.
I could go on for days about the lyrics, but this album's other strength is the sprawling, country feel it has and the loose songwriting. "Trucker's Atlas" has an extended outro that sounds amazing at first but goes on about four minutes too long, though that feeling of exhaustion is surely meant to mirror the lyrics about driving three days from Alaska to Florida. It's harder to find a verse/chorus/verse song here than to find one that ignores the pattern entirely; "Teeth Like God's Shoeshine" eschews conventions entirely while "Doin the Cockroach" opens with a fairly standard sound and then quickly speeds through four different verse structures in a row. "Lounge (Closing Time)" is the highlight from a writing perspective, as it has four different songs crammed inside, and I'm not sure why is my favorite. It opens frantically, with one of the greatest guitar riffs ever put down by indie rockers. Then it stops on a dime, with Brock whispering sweetly about his girlfriend outside the city who's very pretty. From there the song slows down, stretching out as all three instruments maintain their own rhythm. Slowly they fuse together, and the moment the guitar gets in sync with the drums as the drums increase in volume is the clear highlight of the track. After that the song slows down and loses form, like water breaking out of a dam, and the band reprises not one, but two, past songs: both "Lounge" and "Heart Cooks Brain." In the middle of the album is what is probably the greatest three song stretch on an album ever in "Doin' the Cockrach" -> "Cowboy Dan" -> "Trailer Trash." And then there's the closer, which starts out as a folk song and then morphs into a drum driven track as it repeats into glorious infinity.
One more note on that last song - I never realized until recently that the guy in heaven who "looks a bit like everyone I ever seen" is God. It's a great line and I thought it just meant the guy was nondescript, but I think it's supposed to be God because we're all supposed to look like him. It made an already awesome song about an atheist going to heaven and baking manna, somehow, even better. [First added to this chart: 08/04/2013]
For a long time I debated whether The Lonesome Crowded West or The Moon & Antarctica is Modest Mouse's magnum opus. In a lot of ways, the two albums are opposites. LCW is sprawling and unstructured, but MA is tight and planned out, with almost pop song melodies. LCW is emotionally schizophrenic and unhinged, but MA is restrained and reservedly downcast. LCW is an outside album, recalling highways and fields. MA is a cold, desolate album that recalls rainy days and full moons. And for me, both of them knock their atmospheres out of the park. In the end, which one I prefer came down to which version of the band I prefer. While MA was my first love, I eventually grew to love Isaac Brock's drunken early days more, and LCW is my current love. But MA is still an incredibly important album.
One thing that didn't change on this album was the band's penchant for unpredictable and non-traditional song structures. "3rd Planet" is the band's best song for a lot of reasons, not least of which is the incredibly imagery ("You were outside naked, shivering, looking blue from the cold sunlight that's reflected off the moon"). But the circular song structure is also dizzingly. The song starts with an opening verse and chorus, then introduces a middle segment that includes the first chorus. Next it repeats the second verse but without the part from the beginning, as if the song is slowly evolving and casting off the ideas that birthed it. But in the end it repeats the first verse, showing that (appropriate, given the lyrics) it went straight long enough to end up where it was. Elsewhere, "Life Like Weeds" cycles through two or three different verse structures that are progressively more beautiful, and "The Stars Are Projectors" is an extended epic whose strings recall the best Godspeed You! Black Emperor songs. The opening couple tracks are some of the most accessible songs the band had written at this point, but proving that the more things change, the more they stay the same, Brock lets loose on the fiery closer, the drums of which nearly caused me to crash my car the last time it came on because they ignited such passion.
Unlike its predecessor, the mood of The Moon and Antarctica can be hard to pin down. There's a lot of quiet depression here, with songs like "The Cold Part" displaying a kind of resigned sadness. But I like to think there's a lot of optimism here, even if it's framed by all the melancholy. "Gravity Rides Everything" mourns how eventually the weight of our troubles and lives will drag us down, but there's some hope in the idea that this same inertia keeps us united and prevents us from growing too far apart. "Lives" reminds us that in the end no one really cares what becomes of us, but it uses this as a rallying cry to encourage us to live how we want because people will mock us regardless, so we might as well enjoy ourselves. With that in mind, this is a bit of a transitional album between the band that made LCW and the band that made "Float On." I think it's a nice mix of optimism and realism, and beautiful music fits it well. [First added to this chart: 08/04/2013]
I went through a lot of mental anguish when trying to decide whether to include this one. I already had two Modest Mouse albums on the list! It's a singles compilation! People will figure out I like this one anyway! But, in the end, it felt wrong leaving it out for the simple reason that it's plain better than most of the albums here. And all the reasons I listed earlier are bad anyway. Even three Modest Mouse albums is barely enough, considering they're an artist I've loved for nearly a decade and I'm still able to get lost in their work for weeks at a time. There are artists I fell in love with only a couple years ago that I've already grown bored of. And yes, this is a compilation, but it really feels like an album because all the tracks were recorded around the same time. Lastly, I'm not convinced readers would listen to this just because they fell in love with Modest Mouse after reading this. This one kind of gets lost in the shuffle since Modest Mouse have so many well-loved studio albums.
Most of all, this is not a retread of any of the band's other work. It really feels separate, and in fact I'd say this is the sound of the band that I prefer the most. The band's debut is full of long-winded rustic jams, The Lonesome Crowded West refined that a bit, and then the Moon and Antarctica blew it up all by creating a more polished and even pretty sound out of the same elements. This feels like the halfway point between LCW and M&A: the guitar tunings are off the wall and sound like nothing else, but it doesn't feel as loose or sprawling as LCW. It's a lot tighter, which means some of the crazy song structures that made LCW so great are gone. But in their place are a group of songs focused on very singular concepts. Sometimes those concepts are tested to their breaking points. On "Broke," Isaac Brock finds about ten different ways to use the word "broke" and tells a story focused on those uses. On "Life of Arctic Sounds" he lists of all the different distances that are long drives in a car, in increments of 100, from 100 to 1,100. It's maddening the first time you hear it. But all of these concepts have a purpose. In the latter case, the final "eleven hundred miles is too far inside a car" is the real dagger to the heart, as Brock implies that there are some distances, real or metaphorical, that are too far to travel for someone you love. A lot of these songs deal with hard truths and realizations that just take the air out of you.
This is also one of Modest Mouse's loosest and, in some cases, funniest albums. Maybe it's because these songs were all released at different times? Whatever the case, it really works to the album's advantage. In most cases at least: "Medication" was for a long time the one Modest Mouse song I didn't really care for. But in almost every other case it makes this album a lot of fun despite the subject matter. "Sleepwalking" puts lyrics to a classic instrumental, painting a nostalgic picture of life as a high schooler. "Workin' on Leavin' the Livin'" interpolates "In Heaven" from Eraserhead (I didn't realize this until I finally watched Eraserhead - imagine my surprise when the lady in the radiator started singing what I thought was a Modest Mouse song). "All Nite Diner" tells an insane story of the narrator meeting a guy at a diner who recommends he think about pavement during sex so he can last longer. This type of bizarre interaction with a stranger is also used to good effect on the closer, "Other People's Lives." And last but certainly not least you have my namesake, "Baby Blue Sedan." That's a good reason to include this album on the list, even if there were none others. Why did I name myself after this one? It's no longer my favorite Modest Mouse song by any means; in fact, its basic musical structure pales in comparison to the band's more adventurous songwriting. It's really all about that chorus: "It's hard to be a human being, and it's harder as anything else." That's really what Modest Mouse had been trying to say all along, but they decided to get right to the point on this one. The chorus also has the "I'm lonesome when you're around but I never am lonesome when I'm by myself" part. I don't like to talk about that one though, because it hits too close to home. [First added to this chart: 08/04/2013]
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Top 100 Greatest Music Albums composition
Decade | Albums | % | |
---|---|---|---|
1930s | 0 | 0% | |
1940s | 0 | 0% | |
1950s | 0 | 0% | |
1960s | 4 | 4% | |
1970s | 9 | 9% | |
1980s | 8 | 8% | |
1990s | 23 | 23% | |
2000s | 28 | 28% | |
2010s | 28 | 28% | |
2020s | 0 | 0% |
Artist | Albums | % | |
---|---|---|---|
|
|||
Modest Mouse | 3 | 3% | |
Songs: Ohia | 2 | 2% | |
Sufjan Stevens | 2 | 2% | |
Kendrick Lamar | 2 | 2% | |
Kanye West | 2 | 2% | |
Guided By Voices | 1 | 1% | |
Dead Kennedys | 1 | 1% | |
Show all |
Top 100 Greatest Music Albums chart changes
Biggest climbers |
---|
Up 44 from 79th to 35th E•MO•TION by Carly Rae Jepsen |
Up 35 from 45th to 10th Songs About Leaving by Carissa's Wierd |
Up 29 from 76th to 47th The Glow Pt. 2 by The Microphones |
Biggest fallers |
---|
Down 32 from 57th to 89th Dig Me Out by Sleater-Kinney |
Down 29 from 26th to 55th The Suburbs by Arcade Fire |
Down 29 from 52nd to 81st Crack The Skye by Mastodon |
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Rating | Date updated | Member | Chart ratings | Avg. chart rating |
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01/16/2023 22:04 | Johnnyo | 2,015 | 80/100 | |
05/21/2022 09:11 | Timestarter | 114 | 90/100 | |
09/11/2021 15:03 | AvalancheGrips | 125 | 89/100 | |
08/31/2021 21:02 | leniad | 686 | 85/100 | |
04/28/2021 09:45 | DriftingOrpheus | 79 | 91/100 |
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This chart is rated in the top 1% of all charts on BestEverAlbums.com. This chart has a Bayesian average rating of 93.6/100, a mean average of 93.5/100, and a trimmed mean (excluding outliers) of 94.1/100. The standard deviation for this chart is 7.6.
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Great chart and the work that has gone into each entry. Wow! Brilliant stuff
good writing and good taste
cool chart man. love the descriptions.
Any chart with this much time put into it is so cool to me
These notes are so detailed and helpful for advocating your choices. You must really know how to listen to music and listen to it hard. Great albums, too.
Best Chart ever
incredible. you have a different taste in music, but wow these descriptions are prime
Is there a limit of how much inspiration, this chart can give?
Holy crap what a chart, have a bunch in common with me and a whole list of new ones to check out, i also loved your descriptions.
This is one of the most amazing things I've ever read
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