Top 100 Greatest Music Albums
by 
Rug 
(Album notes incoming)
I've been on BEA in various forms over the last decade. I'll have an account, use it for a year or so, then forget it for a year...then come back and realize my old rating system is impossible to fix so I start all over. Nothing has had a greater impact on me musically from the ages of 14-24 than this website. The most important thing I've learned is that I haven't heard anything and I will never, ever feel like I have. The sheer volume of music out there is impossible to comprehend.
- Chart updated: 07/16/2022 04:15
- (Created: 02/05/2022 22:06).
- Chart size: 100 albums.
There are 5 comments for this chart from BestEverAlbums.com members and Top 100 Greatest Music Albums has an average rating of 90 out of 100 (from 7 votes). Please log in or register to leave a comment or assign a rating.
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There's great work, and then there's work that transforms you as a person. It grips the trunk of your soul and shakes the rotten fruit from your branches.
If You're Feeling Sinister killed a part of me that was infected. When you grow up in a religious, far-right household, parts of you are bound to be deeply, irreparably sick, and the only treatment is to identify those parts and cut them out. Stuart Murdoch's loving, careful depictions of various regular people, the kinds of regular people that operate in direct opposition to the Puritan Work Ethic and thundering heterosexuality of the church, tenderly taught me what was sick and what was well...and sounded damn good while doing it.
As a young teenager, listening to this album made me feel guilty. Loving it left me feeling liberated. So I listened and listened until I couldn't feel guilty anymore. [First added to this chart: 02/05/2022]
If You're Feeling Sinister killed a part of me that was infected. When you grow up in a religious, far-right household, parts of you are bound to be deeply, irreparably sick, and the only treatment is to identify those parts and cut them out. Stuart Murdoch's loving, careful depictions of various regular people, the kinds of regular people that operate in direct opposition to the Puritan Work Ethic and thundering heterosexuality of the church, tenderly taught me what was sick and what was well...and sounded damn good while doing it.
As a young teenager, listening to this album made me feel guilty. Loving it left me feeling liberated. So I listened and listened until I couldn't feel guilty anymore. [First added to this chart: 02/05/2022]
Year of Release:
1996
Appears in:
Rank Score:
10,285
Rank in 1996:
Rank in 1990s:
Overall Rank:
Average Rating:
Comments:
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If there has ever been a perfect sound, something so balanced in timbre and tone that your ears drink it in like Dr. Pepper; something so emotionally rich with tannins and sweetness that you're left with the promise of infinite drunkenness without the slightest threat of a hangover, it's Brian Wilson's voice on "Wouldn't it Be Nice."
I'm sure I don't have to convince anyone of Pet Sounds. Its place in the annals of music history is well established. If anything, yet another glowing review from the likes of me is more likely to hurt its stature than help it: how many music obsessives have, entirely by accident, convinced you the water is poisoned while waxing poetic about the well? With Pet Sounds, there is absolutely nothing of value left to be said. Listen to the legends, sure, but let your soul absorb the music like the world's thirstiest sponge. [First added to this chart: 02/05/2022]
I'm sure I don't have to convince anyone of Pet Sounds. Its place in the annals of music history is well established. If anything, yet another glowing review from the likes of me is more likely to hurt its stature than help it: how many music obsessives have, entirely by accident, convinced you the water is poisoned while waxing poetic about the well? With Pet Sounds, there is absolutely nothing of value left to be said. Listen to the legends, sure, but let your soul absorb the music like the world's thirstiest sponge. [First added to this chart: 02/05/2022]
Year of Release:
1966
Appears in:
Rank Score:
39,155
Rank in 1966:
Rank in 1960s:
Overall Rank:
Average Rating:
Comments:
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Before you listen to Church Street Blues, which you absolutely ought to do, it is imperative that you fire up YouTube, search "tony rice church street blues live." Watch the man play. Watch his hands.
If you had to teach the blind what a waterfall looks like, you'd play Tony Rice's crosspicking.
Undisputed in his spot on bluegrass's Mt Rushmore, Tony Rice's legacy is primarily his innumerable contributions to bluegrass lead guitar ("flatpicking"), his personal swing and jazz obsessions permanently transforming the genre. He considered Church Street Blues his greatest challenge: a collection of solo guitar and vocal interpretations of his favorite folk songs. The featured songwriters (Bob Dylan, Tom Paxton, Gordon Lightfoot, etc.) were also mutual admirers, and Rice's magnetic baritone and technically brilliant rhythm playing transcend any performances of the songs before or since. Tony lost his voice in the early 1990s to vocal dysphonia and his playing was slowly dimmed by physical ailments from the 2000s onward, but Church Street Blues stands as a monument to the brief moment when the man with the perfect hands was at his most versatile. [First added to this chart: 02/05/2022]
If you had to teach the blind what a waterfall looks like, you'd play Tony Rice's crosspicking.
Undisputed in his spot on bluegrass's Mt Rushmore, Tony Rice's legacy is primarily his innumerable contributions to bluegrass lead guitar ("flatpicking"), his personal swing and jazz obsessions permanently transforming the genre. He considered Church Street Blues his greatest challenge: a collection of solo guitar and vocal interpretations of his favorite folk songs. The featured songwriters (Bob Dylan, Tom Paxton, Gordon Lightfoot, etc.) were also mutual admirers, and Rice's magnetic baritone and technically brilliant rhythm playing transcend any performances of the songs before or since. Tony lost his voice in the early 1990s to vocal dysphonia and his playing was slowly dimmed by physical ailments from the 2000s onward, but Church Street Blues stands as a monument to the brief moment when the man with the perfect hands was at his most versatile. [First added to this chart: 02/05/2022]
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I know that my mid-20s is a bit young to be too old for anything, but I don't relate to this album anymore. I just don't. Twin Fantasy soundtracked a very specific moment in my life: a period where I was reflecting on a long-term relationship, coming to terms with feelings of extreme indifference towards my higher education, and facing down the fact that maybe I'm being way too dramatic about all of this shit.
And that's what Twin Fantasy is: a reflection on what it means to mythologize your relationships. Will Toledo set out to re-record his 2011 opus Twin Fantasy with proper studio equipment (and, more importantly, 6 or 7 more years of recording experience), but had more in mind than improving the sound. Through new lyrics and the careful injection of melodic callbacks, Toledo managed to capture exactly how it feels to come to terms with your younger self's failure to successfully process romantic trauma. It's a reflection on a prior attempt at reflection.
Given that, it's amusing that the 2011 original was dubbed "Mirror to Mirror" while the substantially more meta revision is "Face to Face." What the 2018 version succeeded in doing was helping me come face to face with my own tendency towards self-mythologizing, a message that seems lost on many of Toledo's fans.
The whole point of Twin Fantasy Face to Face is helping you no longer relate to Twin Fantasy. It's making you a better partner, a better ex-partner, and a person who lives in the present rather than making a vision-quest of the past. [First added to this chart: 02/05/2022]
And that's what Twin Fantasy is: a reflection on what it means to mythologize your relationships. Will Toledo set out to re-record his 2011 opus Twin Fantasy with proper studio equipment (and, more importantly, 6 or 7 more years of recording experience), but had more in mind than improving the sound. Through new lyrics and the careful injection of melodic callbacks, Toledo managed to capture exactly how it feels to come to terms with your younger self's failure to successfully process romantic trauma. It's a reflection on a prior attempt at reflection.
Given that, it's amusing that the 2011 original was dubbed "Mirror to Mirror" while the substantially more meta revision is "Face to Face." What the 2018 version succeeded in doing was helping me come face to face with my own tendency towards self-mythologizing, a message that seems lost on many of Toledo's fans.
The whole point of Twin Fantasy Face to Face is helping you no longer relate to Twin Fantasy. It's making you a better partner, a better ex-partner, and a person who lives in the present rather than making a vision-quest of the past. [First added to this chart: 02/05/2022]
Year of Release:
2018
Appears in:
Rank Score:
5,705
Rank in 2018:
Rank in 2010s:
Overall Rank:
Average Rating:
Comments:
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The story goes that Nick Drake's understated, intimate lyricism was a product of his being "too sensitive for this world," a remark that diminishes his skill and commitment to revision by reducing them to an emotional quirk. Nick had "a skin too few" maybe, as Gabrielle Drake would say, but hardly a superpower or malignant brand of genius.
Five Leaves Left is his best album by a hair, and that hair grows on a little patch of versatility. While Pink Moon and Bryter Layter are masterpieces in their own right (and both would find spots on this chart if it weren't for my 1 album per artist rule), Five Leaves Left is more emotionally flexible. "Time Has Told Me" could be either your mother whispering the opening notes of a lullaby or your lover murmuring a gentle good morning. It's the balm you reach for to soothe or the champagne you sip to celebrate.
Five Leaves Left is both a respite from the harshness of the world and an exploration of the thousands of beauties you might find within it, and that duality only happens through Nick Drake's willingness to speak as carefully as he listens. [First added to this chart: 02/05/2022]
Five Leaves Left is his best album by a hair, and that hair grows on a little patch of versatility. While Pink Moon and Bryter Layter are masterpieces in their own right (and both would find spots on this chart if it weren't for my 1 album per artist rule), Five Leaves Left is more emotionally flexible. "Time Has Told Me" could be either your mother whispering the opening notes of a lullaby or your lover murmuring a gentle good morning. It's the balm you reach for to soothe or the champagne you sip to celebrate.
Five Leaves Left is both a respite from the harshness of the world and an exploration of the thousands of beauties you might find within it, and that duality only happens through Nick Drake's willingness to speak as carefully as he listens. [First added to this chart: 02/05/2022]
Year of Release:
1969
Appears in:
Rank Score:
8,871
Rank in 1969:
Rank in 1960s:
Overall Rank:
Average Rating:
Comments:
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[First added to this chart: 02/05/2022]
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As a fiery fourteen year old who was a bit too involved in the Elton John concert bootlegging community, my soul purpose in joining BEA was to prove that Elton John was the greatest musical force to ever exist. Luckily for everyone involved, cooler heads prevailed, and I was granted the rare opportunity to be humiliated by my elders and those who knew far, far more than me, an opportunity I took with some hesitation...
(I deleted my account)
Every teenager needs a good kick in the ass sometimes, and that kick got me started down the long and winding road from classic-rock-supremacism to...well, listening to music besides Elton John and Led Zeppelin (who, unlike Elton, don't even appear on this chart). What that should tell you is that, despite 10 years of effort to find records I like more than Madman Across the Water, it holds up very, very well. [First added to this chart: 02/05/2022]
(I deleted my account)
Every teenager needs a good kick in the ass sometimes, and that kick got me started down the long and winding road from classic-rock-supremacism to...well, listening to music besides Elton John and Led Zeppelin (who, unlike Elton, don't even appear on this chart). What that should tell you is that, despite 10 years of effort to find records I like more than Madman Across the Water, it holds up very, very well. [First added to this chart: 02/05/2022]
Year of Release:
1971
Appears in:
Rank Score:
1,669
Rank in 1971:
Rank in 1970s:
Overall Rank:
Average Rating:
Comments:
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Every young genre has an artist that bridges seemingly every growth spurt, every miniature era. In middle-aged genres, this generation-spanning man becomes a rare breed: in bluegrass, which has been around since the 1940s, that man is J.D. Crowe. He's played the roles of child prodigy banjo-picker with Jimmy Martin, genre-bending (and, ultimately, redefining) auteur with The New South, bluegrass tastemaker, and, until his death in December 2021, elder statesmen and old wise man.
The chisel with which he etched his face into bluegrass's Mt Rushmore is this self-titled record, affectionately referred to as "Double O forty four" by its admirers (its call number in the Rounder Records catalogue). It's your favorite bluegrass musician's favorite bluegrass album. 0044 reinvented a tradition that, at only three decades old, was already growing stale; Crowe played curator by assembling a group of young upstarts that included (no joke) eventual "greatest bluegrass guitarist of all time," Tony Rice; Ricky Skaggs (yes, that Ricky Skaggs); and Jerry Douglas, universally accepted lord of all things dobro.
What's important about the selection of these specific musicians is that, at the time, they were all essentially unproven: TR had played guitar with The Bluegrass Alliance, but their reach was limited and he was ultimately still green. Ricky Skaggs was sideman to Emmylou Harris and did some picking with The Country Gentleman, but his primary reason for joining The New South was "to keep my singing warmed up," something he inexplicably wasn't being enabled to do by those groups. Jerry Douglas, despite what his playing on the record might suggest, was a teenager.
All of this speaks to Crowe's willingness to experiment and wrangle boundaries to achieve his vision, something the bluegrass community of his day wasn't always terribly interested in. Using The New South's 6-nights a week gig at The Red Slipper Lounge in Lexington as his testing ground, Crowe gave his bandmates freedom to propose new material that would provoke skepticism in many a 'grass diehard: without that freedom, modern folk artists like Gordon Lightfoot might never have become an essential component of the bluegrass lexicon.
Every musician on this record (besides the bass player, who seems to have stepped away from music) appears in some capacity on another album on this chart. Most appear multiple times. That is J.D. Crowe's legacy...and we didn't even talk about his picking. [First added to this chart: 02/05/2022]
The chisel with which he etched his face into bluegrass's Mt Rushmore is this self-titled record, affectionately referred to as "Double O forty four" by its admirers (its call number in the Rounder Records catalogue). It's your favorite bluegrass musician's favorite bluegrass album. 0044 reinvented a tradition that, at only three decades old, was already growing stale; Crowe played curator by assembling a group of young upstarts that included (no joke) eventual "greatest bluegrass guitarist of all time," Tony Rice; Ricky Skaggs (yes, that Ricky Skaggs); and Jerry Douglas, universally accepted lord of all things dobro.
What's important about the selection of these specific musicians is that, at the time, they were all essentially unproven: TR had played guitar with The Bluegrass Alliance, but their reach was limited and he was ultimately still green. Ricky Skaggs was sideman to Emmylou Harris and did some picking with The Country Gentleman, but his primary reason for joining The New South was "to keep my singing warmed up," something he inexplicably wasn't being enabled to do by those groups. Jerry Douglas, despite what his playing on the record might suggest, was a teenager.
All of this speaks to Crowe's willingness to experiment and wrangle boundaries to achieve his vision, something the bluegrass community of his day wasn't always terribly interested in. Using The New South's 6-nights a week gig at The Red Slipper Lounge in Lexington as his testing ground, Crowe gave his bandmates freedom to propose new material that would provoke skepticism in many a 'grass diehard: without that freedom, modern folk artists like Gordon Lightfoot might never have become an essential component of the bluegrass lexicon.
Every musician on this record (besides the bass player, who seems to have stepped away from music) appears in some capacity on another album on this chart. Most appear multiple times. That is J.D. Crowe's legacy...and we didn't even talk about his picking. [First added to this chart: 02/05/2022]
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[First added to this chart: 02/05/2022]
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[First added to this chart: 02/14/2022]
Year of Release:
1980
Appears in:
Rank Score:
1,933
Rank in 1980:
Rank in 1980s:
Overall Rank:
Average Rating:
Comments:
Total albums: 100. Page 1 of 10
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Top 100 Greatest Music Albums composition
| Decade | Albums | % | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1930s | 0 | 0% | |
| 1940s | 0 | 0% | |
| 1950s | 1 | 1% | |
| 1960s | 8 | 8% | |
| 1970s | 18 | 18% | |
| 1980s | 20 | 20% | |
| 1990s | 14 | 14% | |
| 2000s | 15 | 15% | |
| 2010s | 18 | 18% | |
| 2020s | 6 | 6% |
| Artist | Albums | % | |
|---|---|---|---|
|
|
|||
| The Beach Boys | 1 | 1% | |
| The National | 1 | 1% | |
| Jackson C. Frank | 1 | 1% | |
| Lucky Soul | 1 | 1% | |
| Billy Joel | 1 | 1% | |
| Rufus Wainwright | 1 | 1% | |
| The War On Drugs | 1 | 1% | |
| Show all | |||
| Country | Albums | % | |
|---|---|---|---|
|
|
|||
| |
63 | 63% | |
 |
24 | 24% | |
 |
4 | 4% | |
 |
2 | 2% | |
 |
2 | 2% | |
 |
1 | 1% | |
 |
1 | 1% | |
| Show all | |||
Top 100 Greatest Music Albums chart changes
| Biggest climbers |
|---|
| Up 10 from 60th to 50th Solid Air by John Martyn |
| Biggest fallers |
|---|
| Down 2 from 53rd to 55th Lightfoot! by Gordon Lightfoot |
| Down 1 from 50th to 51st Helplessness Blues by Fleet Foxes |
| Down 1 from 51st to 52nd The Velvet Underground by The Velvet Underground |
| New entries |
|---|
| The Great Unwanted by Lucky Soul |
| Leavers |
|---|
| Lucid Dreamer by Krüger Brothers |
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Top 100 Greatest Music Albums ratings
Average Rating = (n ÷ (n + m)) × av + (m ÷ (n + m)) × AVwhere:
av = trimmed mean average rating an item has currently received.
n = number of ratings an item has currently received.
m = minimum number of ratings required for an item to appear in a 'top-rated' chart (currently 10).
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N.B. The average rating for this chart will not be reliable as it has been rated very few times.
Showing latest 5 ratings for this chart. | Show all 7 ratings for this chart.
| Rating | Date updated | Member | Chart ratings | Avg. chart rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ! | 01/15/2025 17:28 | Exist-en-ciel | 144 | 98/100 |
| ! | 01/05/2023 15:21 | uphill | 4 | 93/100 |
| ! | 03/16/2022 16:00 |  Cytoma | 171 | 90/100 |
| ! | 03/01/2022 05:06 |  seb7 | 115 | 91/100 |
| ! | 02/09/2022 20:39 | pctrooper | 332 | 88/100 |
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Top 100 Greatest Music Albums comments
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From uphill 01/05/2023 15:22 | #292519
Discovered Alvvays by this chart
Helpful? (Log in to vote) | +1 votes (1 helpful | 0 unhelpful)
From seb7 03/01/2022 05:07 | #282056
seb7 03/01/2022 05:07 | #282056
I really don't agree with most of your choices. I can, however, appreciate the diversity and the care put into this chart. On a site full of so similarly-minded individuals, it's so nice to see a chart that stands out. Some great notes for the first few albums!!
Helpful? (Log in to vote) | +2 votes (2 helpful | 0 unhelpful)
From pctrooper 02/07/2022 22:20 | #280928
Not a huge fan of everything on here but I do really like around 50 or so of your choices. It's nice to see charts like this that are actually interesting and don't just copy the overall picks, plus there are some new albums to discover which I have not heard of before.
Helpful? (Log in to vote) | +2 votes (2 helpful | 0 unhelpful)
From 
Larcx13 02/07/2022 18:59 | #280921
Larcx13 02/07/2022 18:59 | #280921
Speaking of blind spots... 0 albums in common. Perfect!
Helpful? (Log in to vote) | +1 votes (1 helpful | 0 unhelpful)
From kynes 02/06/2022 07:35 | #280833
kynes 02/06/2022 07:35 | #280833
Why do we have an unreal number of albums in common?
Helpful? (Log in to vote) | +1 votes (1 helpful | 0 unhelpful)
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| Best Artists of the 2000s | |
|---|---|
| 1. Radiohead | |
| 2. Arcade Fire | |
| 3. The Strokes | |
| 4. Coldplay | |
| 5. Sufjan Stevens | |
| 6. Muse | |
| 7. Arctic Monkeys | |
| 8. Wilco | |
| 9. Animal Collective | |
| 10. The White Stripes | |
| 11. Kanye West | |
| 12. Phil Elverum | |
| 13. Interpol | |
| 14. Modest Mouse | |
| 15. Queens Of The Stone Age | |
| 16. Madvillain | |
| 17. LCD Soundsystem | |
| 18. Godspeed You! Black Emperor | |
| 19. The National | |
| 20. The Flaming Lips |
