In Search of the Perfect Album
Spoilers: found a few.
I hate to admit something so gauche about myself, but popularity has always factored negatively into my tastes, especially in music. The more airplay something is getting, the less likely I am to enjoy it. Correlation isn't causation — I have Good Luck, Babe! on repeat right now — but this rule holds up pretty well for me, so I’ve always tried not to let the mainstream get to me; I’ve always been determined to form my own opinions on music, and those opinions have typically been very strong. Unfortunately, early on I tasted secondhand success: after a year of religiously making my parents listen to Augie March’s Moo You Bloody Choir on the CD player every time we got in the car, the lead single One Crowded Hour topped the 2006 Triple J Hottest 100. For the non-Australians in the room, you might’ve heard of Triple J — a public radio station — through their highly successful Like A Version series, where bands come into the studio to do covers. The Hottest 100 is an annual survey of new music, voted on by the public. There’s the occasional special edition, such as the Hottest 100 of All Time, which has happened a number of times, revising history on the fly. It’s always interesting to see what the popular consensus looks like, even if I don't agree. But I don’t really follow the Hottest 100 anymore — Triple J, originally an indie station, has become steadily more mainstream in the last decade and change. And I would say the poll itself it started going downhill after One Crowded Hour took home its crown. This was the kind of incident that people joke about as “changing the timeline.” A surprise one-hit-wonder by a little-known local band is not a typical number one. The top five, maybe — the Hottest 100 has always fairly strongly represented local artists — but I maintain that One Crowded Hour is the only truly offbeat song to have ever topped the chart. This was a one-off freak event that insured no other one-off freak events could ever happen to the Hottest 100. Or maybe any other music ranking ever.
These are the perilously low expectations I brought to the Apple Music 100 Best Albums list. One thing we must say is that this is mostly a marketing bid from a streaming service that is losing the numbers game to Spotify, and the credibility game to Tidal. But the joy of being a critic is that you get to take even the most cynical things seriously. Apple’s list was allegedly crafted by a team of “artists, songwriters, producers, and industry professionals.” This is supposed to give it some sort of integrity, but for me, it actually feels subtractive — at least the Hottest 100 is democratic. (For those who don’t know, Australia has a compulsory democracy. Voting is mandatory and the people participate in it with zeal. A poll like the Hottest 100 couldn't have taken off as it did anywhere else.) A popular vote is also filled with music I’m more likely to have heard. Of Apple’s top 100, there are plenty albums where I’ve heard a song or two, but I’m only familiar with 19. By “familiar” I mean I’ve listened to all the songs and I have well-formed opinions on the album as a whole. After all, that is how we must judge an album: not as the sum of its parts, song-by-song, but as a unit in and of itself. There is Abbey Road at #3 and Revolver at #21 — I do think Revolver is the Beatles’ most complete and well-formed album-as-artwork, but if it were up to me, Abbey Road wouldn’t be there at all. Radiohead are also represented twice, with the overhyped Kid A at #33 and the rightful classic OK Computer at #12. Is This It, definitely the Strokes’ best album, is cruelly relegated to #68, but I guess at least it’s there at all. The Smiths album they’ve chosen is The Queen is Dead at #66, which is almost too easy — my Smiths pick, based on the album as a whole, is Meat is Murder. Similarly, Nirvana’s Nevermind is a clichéd #9, whereas I would say the strength of Nirvana is that none of their albums, when taken as a whole, are good enough for a list like this; the best grunge is a little shitty. It’s literally in the genre name.
Obviously, the most egregious choice on this list is Normal Fucking Rockwell! I consider myself one of the world’s foremost Lana Del Rey scholars. I may not like every song she’s ever put out, but I still remember exactly where I was the first time I heard Video Games in 2011, and I’ve been a devotee ever since. Though there is very little she could do to lose me, there was a brief period where I thought it might be over between us. That was when she put out NFR! I had high hopes for the album — the singles Venice Bitch and Mariners Apartment Complex are both brilliant, Lana at her best. Venice Bitch is particularly ambitious, 9 minutes of ambience, overlapping sounds and melodies. But this is where it ends. NFR! is piano-heavy and overwhelmingly soft — I mean tonally soft: slow, minimally melodic, understated — and each track melts into the next in a blur of forgettable mush. Lana is good at soft, and is in fact one of the only artists who can get me to listen to soft. But she's at her most compelling when her music has an edge to it. “Edges” might be harder to define than softness; the quality of a song that makes it unlike any other song you’ve ever heard. Some artists can get away with fairly homogeneous output, a same-y sound between songs that is just so perfect it’s hard to find fault in the lack of surprises. (I’m thinking particularly of Tennis, who only have one trick, but damn, it's a fantastic trick.) Lana is not such an artist. Her oeuvre is built on a set of themes she plays with, and the innovation is in how she treats them; to an extent lyrically, but mostly sonically (this is my chief concern — lyrics only very seldom factor into whether I like a song). I’ll be the first to admit that maybe it’s just because I hate soft songs, but there’s nothing exciting in NFR!, nothing new. I kind of wonder if everyone is just pretending that it’s a good album because it was produced by Jack Antonoff.
In a similar vein, it seems that there’s been a token nod to the entire genre of 2010s indie in the form of the Arctic Monkeys album AM. As someone forged in the fires of NME and The Word, I can safely say that picking AM to represent the Arctic Monkeys is clinically insane, when Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not is right there. Maybe if your criteria for the best albums include “popular on Tumblr in 2014.” Listen, I like AM. Every single track is good. (Fireside is my standout.) But good tracks alone do not make a good album. This is what really got me thinking about what exactly makes my perfect album. Certainly every song should be listenable, but it doesn’t need to be wall-to-wall bangers — in fact, AM is an album that struggles under the weight of how good each individual song is. I’m not necessarily looking for continuity between songs — god knows I can barely stand a concept album — but for some sense of form. I don’t think there are rules to this; it can’t be summarised as simply as “put a slow song next to a fast one” or anything like that. But I know it when I hear it. AM has no flow because it's straight bangers, just as NFR! has no flow because there are no bangers.
To define my idea of a perfect album, I think it’s best to teach by example. I won’t pretend to make a ranking, because as we’ve established, all music rankings were cursed forever in January 2007. The following are five of my all-time favourites, which I think speak to the variety of ways an album can be perfect, or at the very least, what I’m looking for. I also want to note that my favourite musicians don’t necessarily ever make perfect albums. Augie March don’t have a single album I’d describe that way; the thrill is in the imperfections, in knowing that there are a couple duds and low points on each album, which only makes the gems shine brighter. And there are albums which certainly draw more emotion out of me — Julia Jacklin’s Crushing comes to mind — which I find so evocative precisely because they speak to messy feelings in a way that’s almost too raw to be listenable sometimes. Anyway, in the Age of Streaming, there can be a pretty good argument made that the album is becoming irrelevant to a lot of artists. But I think that’s all the more reason to pay attention to albums that recognise that the sound and the order of the songs is in and of itself an artform.
I am not going to overwhelm you with links, but I also suggest seeking out at least the songs I mention to get an idea of each album.
The Bends – Radiohead (1995)
We all know why OK Computer is on best-albums lists. In 1997, at the apex of Cool Britannia, Radiohead hit the mainstream with a fuck-you to pretty much everything else that was going on, a more comprehensive takedown of modern life than Modern Life is Rubbish (which is, incidentally, my favourite Blur album.) My dad gave me a copy of OK Computer in 2003 and I’ve been obsessed ever since. But the seeds of OK Computer were sown in Radiohead's second album, The Bends. Music critics love to talk about second album syndrome — which I know is fake because the Yeah Yeah Yeahs put out Show Your Bones second — but I think The Bends tends to get unfairly slammed, not for any imperfections, but because it’s not really representative of anything else Radiohead have ever done. Pablo Honey can be easily written off by snobs as basic whiny guitar music; The Bends has traces of that, but it’s overall too intellectual to sit on the same shelf as a record that is largely complaining about how hard it is to get a girlfriend. On the titluar track of The Bends, Thom Yorke’s lyrics have transcended the basic condition that produced Pablo Honey: now he is “talking to [his] girlfriend and waiting for something to happen.” Radiohead have always dwelt in the space of social critique, but The Bends expresses it more directly than any of their other albums. There is none of the frenetic directionlessness of Kid A or the bite of tracks like Electioneering (OK Computer) or Bodysnatchers (In Rainbows). Instead what you have is an album that looks you right in the eye and says, “man, this SUCKS.” Alienation is not a topic that can be talked around. The direct approach, drawing attention to something that by definition does not want to be noticed, is the only effective approach.
For the record, my favourite Radiohead album is actually Hail to the Thief. It’s where I like their sound best, playing at the fringes of shoegaze and the perfect circle of repetition. But it’s certainly an imperfect album, indulgently long and with a couple of duds. There’s something to be said for an album which isn’t necessarily one of your all-timers, but which you can recognise as perfection nevertheless. The Bends is thematically cohesive, which allows it room to play around with the sound. It’s still the same Radiohead that put out Pablo Honey, but there is more refinement here, and the instrumentation is more inventive. And unlike Pablo Honey, The Bends absolutely refuses to be samey, going from chill (Fake Plastic Trees, which was in the Clueless sountrack) to intense (My Iron Lung — check out the single also for some extremely good B-sides) to chilling (Street Spirit (Fade Out), one of the closers of all time.) There is some real genuine musical brilliance. In the title track, the bassline and tapering-out lead guitar at the start of the second verse is one of those ecstatic corners of music that makes my heart sing. And Black Star is the most perfect pop-rock song ever written. It’s straightforward genre music, with just enough dissonance and energy to distinguish it. The bridge is outrageously good. The new guitar line in the second chorus is indescribable. The stripped-back third verse sets the standard for every third verse ever, with the unexpected vocal harmonies making it richer. There’s an argument to be made that, despite being the tenth track, it's the centrepiece of the album. But you could almost as easily make the same argument for any other track; despite the ebb and flow, each song refuses to take a backseat. And I think that is one of the hallmarks of a perfect album: never a dull moment.
They Want My Soul – Spoon (2014)
I am going to contradict myself slightly I guess, because I actually do think this album is wall-to-wall bangers. Spoon are a patchy band for me — I don’t typically like every track on every album, and they have put out a lot of albums — but this one stands out because I can listen to it front-to-back, no skips. I think what makes They Want My Soul a successful bangers-only album, as opposed to, say, AM, is that there is a rare cohesion in the sound; that kind of staccato uncomfortableness that threads throughout Spoon’s oeuvre but turned up to eleven. The album refuses to settle, but in a good way. There’s tension — and, in the same way that tension is what makes a novel compelling, it drives this album too. The other thing that I personally really love about this album is that most of it is in a minor key. I’ve always found minor key songs far-and-away more interesting than major keys (but check out My Brilliant Career by Australian indie band The Panics for a counterexample) — this, too, I think is related to tension. Minor keys are often written off as “sad,” but I think this is because as human animals we largely associate sadness with the feeling of something unresolved. Grief, after all, is a sadness you can never really “get over.” The way our animal brains react to music is tonal — that is, we expect any atonality or dissonance to resolve. Major and minor are two modes of tonality, each with their own form of resolution in the tonic chord of the key, but minor keys have more opportunities to sound “wrong.” Even the minor tonic feels as though it’s leading somewhere. The best musicians use this to good effect to show that the minor key is not just there for evoking sadness: it can handle any kind of drama. My standout track on They Want My Soul is Rainy Taxi, which, apart from the evocative name, does something really clever with tonality. Where its home is in a minor key, and dissonance in their typical guitar sound is reinforced by clashing piano tones, there’s a major key middle eight that, in context, feels more unsettling than the minor. It is a striking inversion of a classical songwriting structure, and here, it tells a captivating story.
There is also a sense on this album that Spoon are reworking their best into better. Another of my favourites, Let Me Be Mine, wouldn’t sound out of place on their earlier album Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. The opener Rent I Pay has hints of their earlier hit single The Way We Get By, but fashioned into something more sophisticated without ever feeling overproduced. Tracks like Inside Out and Outlier have a hint of the more immersive sound they’d experiment with on their next album, Hot Thoughts — though it’s clear they’ve already perfected it here. This album was produced after a hiatus, and you can see the pensive edge to the songwriting: every track engages with their back catalogue. And they do it in a way that also engages with the idea of constructing an album itself: ten perfect songs, just under 40 minutes in total. Yes, each song jumps off the shelf, but one cannot say that any of them are trying to be singles any more than any other. It’s the sense of balance that makes this album so perfect: it is not trying to be anything more than a perfect album. What more is there to say?
Make Way For Love – Marlon Williams (2018)
Speaking of second album syndrome. This is one case where, at first, I thought the phenomenon was real. I’d been a fan of Marlon Williams since his first album, a powerful eponymous debut that does just about all an album needs to, by way of announcing The Singer-Songwriter of a new generation. And I really do believe he deserves that degree of hyperbole. Just listen to his voice. But Marlon Williams (the album) is not perfect. It is a series of wonderful songs in a lush indie folk style, each bringing something new to the table, and with a balance of feelings: the album both takes its time and is exactly as long as it needs to be. So when Make Way For Love came out, I was a little disappointed, because I was searching for the eclecticism and intrigue of the debut. Make Way For Love is just more... straightforward. But, with time, I’ve realised this is an asset. Make Way For Love takes “crooner” music as its pastiche — there are sonic references to the pop songs of the 50s and 60s — and elevates it to a modern sound, with modern concerns. A comparable album would be Father John Misty’s Chloë and the Next 20th Century (I've written about it here before)— though I think that one's far from perfect, especially because some of the songs just kind of suck. Its final track, The Next 20th Century, is the knife through FJM’s thesis, the “punctum” to his “studium,” to borrow from Barthes; he signals the passage of time through updating his musical references from the same 60s pop vibe that Williams employs to something a little more 70s, drawing on the complicated nihilism of music (and media in general) from that era. I find this interesting as a comparison because Williams does not deviate stylistically on Make Way for Love, but he does subvert all the connotations of the style he’s borrowing, and arguably more successfully than FJM, because he threads that subversion throughout in the sound and the lyrics.
I have a kind of odd fondness for songs that have something sinister about them. Every single track on Make Way for Love has that undertone, from the more obviously minor-key outings like I Didn’t Make a Plan (“... to break your heart, but it was the sweetest thing I’ve ever done”) to the soaring opener Come to Me, which nonetheless holds something unsettling at its core (“there’s nothing sweeter than you when you're blind”). The first track on an album is there to hook you; the second may be a reprieve from the intensity of the first; the third must make sure you want to keep listening. The third on this album is Beautiful Dress, which I think beats out American Pie and All My Loving for the best male vocalist one-octave jump (one of my absolute favourite things a song can do) — “the hard thing about love is that it has to burn all the time.” (Allegedly this is what he's saying, but I've always heard it as “burn or die.”) There’s something a little kinky about the lyrics, which feels like the perfect contrast to an instrumental section that wouldn't sound out of place on a Jukebox Hits compilation. (I mean this as a compliment.) The album closes with a feature from his ex-girlfriend, Aldous Harding — because of course, nothing creates better music than two people who’ve just broken up doing catharsis through song — followed by the title track, which uses characteristically few lyrics to tell a sweeping story, held all in the negative space. “Then shall the wonder of the ages be revealed again.” There is hope in it — the album constitutes a messy narrative, but looks forward to what comes next. I think that’s part of why I appreciate this album all the more in hindsight: on the whole I was not impressed by Williams’ next offering, My Boy. (Though it has some excellent tracks, such as Thinking of Nina.) Maybe we should start talking about third album syndrome instead.
IT WON/T BE LIKE THIS ALL THE TIME – The Twilight Sad (2019)
Mostly I want to write about this album because I can’t believe people aren’t talking about it constantly. The first time I tried to write an essay about perfect albums, well over a year ago, this one had top billing. The Twilight Sad are a depressing Scottish band in the grand tradition of depressing Scottish bands making depressing Scottish music, which honestly just hits different to depressing music from anywhere else. (Maybe it’s because I’m one quarter “tiny sad town in Scotland where it’s always cloudy,” but it just connects with me.) What it seems to me that The Twilight Sad understand, unlike a lot of other bands, is that depression is frequently also anger. It’s frustrating to lack the energy to enjoy life! It feels like injustice! The first thing you will notice about this album is that it has a very annoying title, which I do not want to make you read more than once. This album, from the outset, is yelling at you. It is telling you that something is very, very wrong here. The album opens on a scream: the a repetitive electronic strain in [10 Good Reasons for Modern Drugs], the sharp first line “we’re hanging on by a thread, and you keep bowing your head,” and a shouted refrain: “I’ll call you, call you all night [...] and now the cracks all start to show.” It is nothing if not a misson statement. The whole album sits in this zone of constant paranoia, propulsive wallowing; like many other bands I like (The National come to mind), The Twilight Sad use repetition in the lyrics to their advantage; repetitive lyrics, when combined with a wall of sound, create a sort of sonic claustrophobia, which I find extremely compelling. Many of these repeated lyrics are questions: “What are you doing? Why do you do this to yourself?” Many of the tracks seem more like cries for help than songs. The refrain of “I can’t believe you hit me, I don’t know where to go,” in the menacing Auge/Maschine — haunting.
The first song I heard off this album follows the strange grammatical convention set in the title: I/m Not Here [missing face]. Missing face? All lowercase?? I love it. Sometimes gimmicks come off forced, like the artist is being deliberately quirky; one listen to The Twilight Sad and you’ll know quirky is the furthest thing from what’s going on here. In fact, the deliberately confusing grammar places this closer to outsider art, in the tradition of shunning convention to get closer to what’s real. (Incidentally, I think this can be related to the wave of Scottish singers singing in Scottish accents that put themselves out there after the shift to BBC Voice from one of Scotland’s biggest acts of the early 2000s, Franz Ferdinand.) All of this can be understood in the context of an event that closely coincided with the writing of these songs and the recording of this album: the suicide of Scott Hutchinson, frontman of Frightened Rabbit, and friend of the band. Frightened Rabbit's songs never shied away from heavy topics, particularly depression and alcoholism. Hutchinson blazed a trail for this kind of confessional indie rock, redefining masculinity around hurt, with a kind of candour that few others could replicate — but if anyone can, it’s The Twilight Sad. The thesis statement of this album, to me, is held in track four, the enigmatically titled VTr — I’ve never sought out an explanation, because I don‘t need to know to appreciate it. Another refrain, to end the song: “There’s no love too small, and I won’t be surprised if it kills us all.” Does that sum it up? I don’t know. I think I’m overexplaining it. Maybe this is one that’s just better experienced.
And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow – Weyes Blood (2022)
Like Marlon Williams, the appeal of Weyes Blood, to me, is that she plays with musical styles from another century and makes them her own. There’s a hint of the late 60s in her work, a little Monterey Pop, a little indulgent psychedelic 70s. There’s always acoustic guitar, no matter what else, to ground us in the history of her sound as she takes it into the future. Listening to her music always feels nostalgic to me, like I’m getting a modern update on the folk music my parents raised me on. There’s also a hint of Stevie Nicks in how she styles herself, and I’ll confess that her long brown hair was no small part of my decision to grow my hair out. She has something few other contemporary artists can manage: a perfect synthesis of style and sound. And, with each album, she only gets better and better. Her sound grows bigger — seriously, ask me about my passion for the wall of sound — and her albums more immersive. She writes long songs but there’s never any sense that she’s overstaying her welcome: the songs take as much time as they need. Into this comes And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow, which sits nicely in the canon of Covid Albums alongside Lana Del Rey's Chemtrails Over the Country Club and Blue Banisters. (It is also worth noting that Weyes Blood features on Zella Day’s extraordinary meditation on the pandemic, Holocene.) I’m usually ambivalent about music that tries to speak to our current-right-now moment; it can come off tacky, for the same reason that books or TV shows with relentless contemporary pop culture references become dated within six months of their release. But, while the references to the present are hard to miss on this album, she does it with a more metaphoric touch, focusing on how the upheaval of routine feels, on the internal turmoil. And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow certainly reflects my pandemic experience more closely than any other media.
Musically, there’s a case to be made that this is more subdued than her other albums, but if that’s so, it's only because she uses quiet to echo isolation and as a jumping-off point for experimenting with sound and form. God Turn Me Into A Flower — which uses dissonance against a downtempo melody to great effect — features two minutes of ambience and birdsong to finish the track. This transitions seamlessly into the title track Hearts Aglow. It is very hard to pull off a transition this good, and Hearts Aglow is indubitably the standout track on the album. She sings so evocatively to the feeling of loneliness and yearning for human connection: “I was so bored, take me to the water, show me what it's like to be yours.” The arpeggiated guitar and relaxed drumbeat pulls us into the familiar Weyes Blood sound and just builds and builds into something ecstatic. It is as if the first four tracks have all been building up to the moment that this song lets its self soar. “Rising over the tide, oh hold me tight, I’m scared I might fall.” The interleaving of each song with the next, and the way the album itself feels like one arc — that is what a perfect album is about. And given the arc of her career, it seems likely I’ll like the next one even better — how exciting is that?
