“Con Todo El Mundo” – Khruangbin
Took a little detour on revisiting my top 100 albums but we’re back with Con Todo El Mundo by Khruangbin. It’s easy to see why this album didn’t make the cut in 2016: It wasn’t released until 2018. I think I stumbled on Khruangbin via an NPR Tiny Desk...
“Photographs and Memories: His Greatest Hits” – Jim Croce
The annals of music history are full of artists cut down in their prime. John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Andrew Wood, the list is entirely too long, and the world is poorer for the music they never got to make. One can only imagine what Jim Croce might...
Revisiting my top 100 albums: The 24 that didn’t make the cut
In 2016 I wanted to take on a 100-day blogging project and decided I’d do a top 100 list of my favorite albums, at the time. Looking over the list, it’s a good point-in-time snapshot, but a lot has changed in seven years or so....
“Skylarking” by XTC (No. 1)
I’m not saying that Skylarking is the best album in the history of the universe, but I’m not not saying it either. Certainly it’s the finest album XTC have produced. I know precisely when my love affair with XTC began, it was May 3rd, 1987 when MTV played the...
“Abbey Road” by The Beatles (No. 2)
Abbey Road is more or less The Beatles‘ final album1, and it contains some of the group’s strongest work – especially George Harrison, who finally gets his day in the sun. I’m not sure when I got my first copy of Abbey Road. Might have been high school, or...
“Help!” by The Beatles (No. 3)
Here’s where it all began, my lifelong obsession with music. Technically, it was the movie Help! that helped turn me into a music junkie, but we’ll go with the album here. Here’s how it all started. When I was seven, I came home from Sunday school (yes, really) and...
“Disintegration” by The Cure (No. 4)
Disintegration is the album that really sold me on The Cure. Yes, I know, I was a bit late to the party. Some of the singles off Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me were too good to ignore, but I wasn’t a big fan of Robert Smith’s voice initially....
“A Night at the Opera” by Queen (No. 5)
A Night at the Opera has some of Queen‘s best-known songs, including “Bohemian Rhapsody.” But what if I told you that “Bohemian Rhapsody” isn’t even the best song on A Night at the Opera, or at least not the most epic? A Night at the Opera has Queen trying...
“Lost in Space” by Aimee Mann (No. 6)
Fun fact, Aimee Mann is the only musical guest on Buffy to get a speaking part. That has not a lot to do with Lost in Space, except that two songs from the album are played during an episode. There’s a little more to this album than an intersection...
“Element of Light” by Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians (No. 7)
If Robyn Hitchcock hadn’t gone into music, perhaps he’d have become a novelist like his father. His penchant for storytelling shows through heavily in Element of Light. Hitchcock has a pretty solid catalog of music as a solo artist, with his backing bands The Egyptians and The Venus 3,...