25 Albums Worth Owning (and yes, I mean every last track)
There are certain things that make me feel old. One of those things is the idea that bands used to make albums. My musical awareness began when you could still buy LPs. Side one had different songs than side two — and someone thought about what should be where. A sides, B sides on singles - these things actually mattered. My musical adolescence was spent mainly with tapes. It was complicated to drop the needle on the same track over and over again on an LP to listen to one song. It was incredibly frustrating to rewind a tape over and over. The world was designed to force you to listen to whole albums (particularly if you were lazy like I was). Somewhere post-college, I started buying CDs, with their deconstructive ability to skip tracks. Now, with downloading mp3’s, we never even need to own the tracks we don’t want.
Are we better off because we’re able to choose? Yeah, probably. A lot of albums had a lot of filler and a lot of that filler really sucked. It still does. But now we don’t have to buy it. Yay us. Score one for better off.
That said, in honor of feeling old and because sometimes artists actually do manage to pull together a whole album’s worth of great stuff, here are 25 albums that I think deserve to be bought as a whole and even listened to in the order intended.
1. New Wave - Against Me!
2. Automatic for the People - R.E.M.
3. American Idiot - Green Day
4. Avalon - Roxy Music
5. Magnolia soundtrack - Aimee Mann + others
6. Silent Alarm - Bloc Party
7. Foiled - Blue October
8. London Calling - The Clash
9. Fine Young Cannibals - Fine Young Cannibals
10. Welcome Interstate Managers - Fountains of Wayne
11. Lost and Gone Forever - Guster
12. It’s a Shame About Ray - Lemonheads
13. Car Wheels on a Gravel Road - Lucinda Williams
14. The Sunset Tree - The Mountain Goats
15. The Black Parade - My Chemical Romance
16. Electric Version - The New Pornographers
17. Smells Like Teen Spirit - Nirvana
18. Us - Peter Gabriel
19. Doolittle - The Pixies
20. OK Computer - Radiohead
21. More Adventurous - Rilo Kiley
22. The Specials - The Specials
23. Stop Making Sense - Talking Heads
24. Achtung Baby - U2
25. Violent Femmes - Violent Femmes
Michael Landweber writes fiction for adult, young adult and middle grade readers. He lives in Washington, DC with his wife and two children. His stories have appeared in Pindeldyboz, Fourteen Hills, Barrelhouse, American Literary Review, Fugue among others. He is an Associate Editor at the Potomac Review and can also be found writing and blogging about TV, movies and other fun stuff at Pop Matters.
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