I’m going to listen to the top 3 upvoted albums and give you my honest unfiltered thoughts.
Please explain what makes the album special to you. For context, lyrics are very important to me, so I gravitate to music with good storytelling.
Good Kid, maad City by Kendrick Lamar. It’s a concept album that tells a non-linear coming of age story. It’s a nice throwback to 90s west coast hip hop and the message behind the concept is powerful and relatable to anyone who has ever lived in low income neighbourhoods. Pretty much every thing this man has made is gold but GKMC is the one that impacted me most.
I’ll have to check it out. Obviously a man of taste
Tool - Lateralus. It’s an album best played from start to finish, and takes a very dynamic ride that I interpret as a ride through human consciousness, communication with others and ourselves.
Alt-J An awesome wave - it really is considered as a whole in its creation. There are interludes, dips & swells in the energy, and a whole journey of sonically related songs which keep introducing new variations and sounds.
Sufjan Stevens the BQE - another album that really should be enjoyed as a whole journey, it follows the daily commute of so many along the Brooklyn Queens Expressway in NYC. It wanders from orchestral to electronic noise, and is a wonderful album to put on for a slow Sunday morning.
My favorite is The Beatles Revolver.
Revolver is, IMO, the best transitional album - the songs are all approachable, yet remain experimental. The execution is polished.
While many will say that Sgt Pepper is the Beatles’ best album, over the years I found myself leaning more toward Revolver. Pepper is a great concept album, but there are only a few memorable songs. Most people have heard the majority of Revolver at some point in their life.
So if I were to pick one album that represented the Beatles at their height as a pop music band, it would be Revolver.
Sgt. Pepper’s is a great record, but it’s only as massive as it is because it was one of the first of its kind; a rock album not designed to be danced to, but listened to and enjoyed almost passively. It was certainly one of the first from a band as enormous as The Beatles.
Meanwhile, Revolver is a fucking great record from start to finish.
Sgt. Pepper is incredible, and for decades I considered it the “gold standard.” But I always found myself re-playing Revolver. But Pepper remains the reference album for “that album a band puts out that is the epitome of the band’s output.” No album since Pepper was as good - though some of The Beatles best songs are post-Pepper.
The amazing thing about The Beatles is that their catalog is a diverse collection of numerous different pop and rock sensibilities, like they just could not pick a direction, but hit on nearly every form of pop and rock they could think of, then immediately got bored and moved on to something else.
For folks discovering The Beatles for the first time, I always recommend listening in chronological order, simply because their musical evolution is really their defining characteristic - many bands found a voice and then did deep-dives (thus defining the later genres of rock that The Beatles maybe lightly touched on before moving on). The Beatles refused to be constrained, and I think that’s why we are talking about them some 50 years later.
It’s probably worth mentioning their compilation double albums too - 1962-66 ( the red one) and 1967-70 (the blue one). These after i wore out a 45 of Penny Lane when I was 7 or 8.
