Another 100 Best Albums of All Time List

Part 2: 90-81

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As I compiled my list of Top 100 Albums for this series, it was strange to reflect on how much Pitchfork shaped my musical discovery. Their cultural voice was important, sure, but ultimately it was a reliable seal of approval for discoverability back when listening to new music required some type of time and/or financial investment. I used to binge through thousands of 30-second iTunes previews, read physical magazines, go to stores like Strawberries and FYE, and dutifully combed through various eyesore blogs to get low-res mp3s; a kind of crow-like gathering process that informed future downloads on Limewire. This was a slow, accretive, accumulative method, and it left me with a uniquely warped sense of which music was “cool.”

Pitchfork, with its insane overwrought prose and high-pseud pretensions, was a one-stop shop for building a music taste that I could lord over my provincial suburban friends, earn me a place at the flannel-clad lunch table at my university, and impress increasingly pitiful girls. I may sound dour, but it was fun to be a part of an entirely directed project whose ultimate end-goal was imbuing every participant with a sense that we were unique trailblazing aesthetes for reading year-end “best of” lists and pretending we enjoyed shitty white-people cosplay disco from DFA records. In fact, their year-end lists felt like an event and there was real weight to who made the Top 10, the #1 spot reserved for those truly epochal works that defined their time.

I stopped following Pitchfork consistently sometime in the mid-2010s, correlating with, but not necessarily because of, their sale to Condé Nast and their subsequent turn towards poptimism. This started as a new-sincerity-infused attempt to be contrarian about insular contrarianism. Instead, it metastasized into a half-assed reckoning with “whiteness” in indie culture, and then it gradually and sluggishly shrugged its way into becoming a cynical business gambit to expand to demographics that didn’t have a real interest in in-depth musical analysis. Freddie deBoer wrote about this in his essay on Pitchfork: The quality of the music matters less than how it fits into the broader discourse of what is or isn’t cool, which determines the content of a review. Poptimism from the mid-2010s onward mutated into the music equivalent of Simu Liu responding to Scorcese’s Marvel criticism by saying his films are so white. Over the years, P4K became increasingly unrecognizable. All of their reissued decade lists were significantly degraded and degrading, and it’s clear their attempts to score cheap internet woke points played a role in the updates. That this happens to correlate with Pitchfork’s descent into utter dogshit, well, make of it what you will.

This angle of criticism is only interesting or relevant when it’s applied to music that has influenced wider culture or represents a cultural change in any meaningful way—and this certainly doesn’t pertain to their desperate framing of popular bland musicians as the modern equivalent of a Bowie or Prince. I’m not saying Pitchfork shouldn’t champion diversity, but a decade ago, it would cover the kind of hip-hop, funk, reggae, etc. that someone in their target demographic would genuinely enjoy and it didn’t seem so calculated. They were perfectly comfortable knowing more about ‘80s alt-rock b-sides than modern pop trends. But now their “amplifying of marginalized voices” feels forced and cynical, like they’re chasing Spotify algorithms. All that used to matter was imagining a grumpy guy in glasses, a kind of paternal record-store father figure, writing a Lit 1000 ass intro paragraph to an Arcade Fire album. Pitchfork’s Kid A review is one of the most insane articles ever published: “I had never even seen a shooting star before…” is up there with the likes of “Call me Ishmael” or “Lolita, light of my life.” I never thought I would be nostalgic for the days when Brent DiCrescenzo compared Kid A to witnessing the stillborn birth of a child, but here we are.

Looking at Pitchfork now is like having a 24/7 open wake of your best friend, and someone shoved a dildo in their mouth.

To quote their recap of Olivia Rodrigo’s GUTS on their list of 50 best albums of 2023:

Boys suck. Modern society’s expectations of young women suck harder. So what do you do when you’re a 20-year-old girl navigating romantic disappointment and the perilous transition to adulthood while making one of the most anticipated sophomore albums of the decade? Rock the fuck out. On GUTS, Olivia Rodrigo teaches an AP course in Angry Girl Music of the Late 20th and Early 21st Centuries, consulting a syllabus of foremothers from Courtney Love to Kesha on insouciant hot-mess anthems and somber ballads that explode into musical-theater showstoppers. Everyone from the Zoomers on TikTok to the Boomers at the Rock Hall is eagerly lining up to enroll.

I’ve never seen a paragraph that was so innocuous and also made me want to chug bleach. It scans like it came from a 33-year-old man who writes like he desperately wants to be a sophomore in high school—and there’s nothing more unsettling than that. ChatGPT would never.

Or, here are some choice cuts from their review of a Boygenius performance at Madison Square Garden that is not flattering to the band or their audience:

Turns out there are more of those people than ever. This fact was made crystal clear last night, when Boygenius turned New York’s Madison Square Garden into the world’s largest bisexual convention. After an opening set from daddies-in-arms Muna, a land dedication to the Lenape tribe, and the ceremonial blasting of “The Boys Are Back in Town,” Dacus, Baker, and Bridgers huddled behind the curtain to coo the a cappella opener from the record, the Roches-esque “Without You Without Them.”

Boygenius, on the other hand, is self-directed and aimed at the queer gaze, fiercely pro-woman but not in a performative, pussy hat kind of way. It’s tits out, messy polycule vibes, where group therapy and birth charts are topics of the day almost every day.

“World’s largest bisexual convention” is a weird way to say the crowd was full of white women. The funniest part to me is the attempted contrast between the zillennial word salad of “messy polycule vibes,” which is apparently cool and radical and subversive, and the “pussy hat,” which is “performative.” Hate to break it to the author, but they’re the same. Also, something about doing a land acknowledgment and then playing “The Boys Are Back in Town” feels like it’s furthering the idea that these gestures are a flex on Indigenous peoples.

All of this was an unnecessary stemwinder to say that the decade-long defanging of Pitchfork has rendered it an atrophied pop culture site collecting internet dust. Pop culture journalism has no major writers with discerning taste and they created giant monuments of aggregators to prove just how uniform all of them are in their bargain-basement opinions and taste, which blew a hole straight through all this poptimism nonsense.

This is why I’m happy to partner with

Kevin Alexander

to contribute to a burgeoning music community on Substack that feels organic, authentic, and positive. So we continue with our Top 100 Albums, and below you’ll find my picks from 90-81, the reason why I chose them, as well as Kevin’s picks and my response to them. For Kevin’s explanations of his albums and his reaction to my picks, check out his list below (and subscribe to On Repeat!).

Wax Ecstatic: The 100 Greatest Albums of All Time Part 2 (Electric Boogaloo)

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My #90: Laughing Stock - Talk Talk (1991)

Listening to Laughing Stock and Spirit of Eden for the first time completely disoriented my senses; I can’t imagine how people in the late-’80s who were invested in new-wave Talk Talk processed this album when it initially dropped. It’s instrumentally rich, a work of staggering complexity and immense beauty and emotional heat. All the exploratory dynamics contain this sound that becomes even more powerful when it’s surrounded by great gulfs of silence.

All the songs here ditch structure in favor of mood and atmosphere, crafting an immersive and ever-flowing style, alternately hushed and loud, lush and arid. It’s like there’s this great inhale of this quasi-religious feeling, and the thrill and stasis of that held breath carries the subtle intensity of Laughing Stock from beginning to end. Talk Talk more or less invented post-rock with their last two albums, influencing some of my favorite bands like Sigur Rós, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and Radiohead. Also, Kevin did a great write-up of this record.

Highlights: Everything

Kevin’s #90: The Way It Is - Bruce Hornsby and the Range (1986)

My Take:

Tupac’s “Changes” brought me to “The Way It Is” back in high school, and that song just rips on so many levels. The socially conscious lyrics paired with the two piano solos are just a whirlwind of apathy and hope. The rest of the album is pretty cool, and I love how it pulls from folk rock, jazz, bluegrass, folk, Southern rock, country rock, jam, heartland rock, and blues into this cohesive sound. Other standouts are “On the Western Skyline,” “Mandolin Rain,” and “The Wild Frontier.” This is another one that feels like it could fit easily into a midwestern summer soundtrack.

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My #89: Raw Power - Iggy and the Stooges (1973)

It was tough to choose between Raw Power or the Stooges’s debut, as both of them are wall-to-wall proto-punk masterpieces. As the album title suggests, these eight tracks are an overpowering swirl of scuzz that drags you into Iggy Pop’s monomaniacal fury. The lyrics and singing have this ferocious assertiveness that is slightly absurd, confused, and violent. You just have to roll with the chaotic rumble. I vividly remember blasting “Search and Destroy” on my way to hockey practice after school, and even on my thousandth listen, it would reverberate through me like a fissure. I won’t get into whether the David Bowie mix or the Iggy mix is the superior listening experience, so if you’re an audiophile, just listen to them both.

Highlights: Search and Destroy, Gimme Danger, Raw Power, Death Trip

Kevin’s #89: Diamond Life - Sade (1984)

My Take:

I’ve gotten into Sade about a year ago and I suppose I’m part of the revival in interest in her. This album has a casual cocktail-lounge elegance; it’s soulful and jazzy yet poppy, funky yet easy listening. Sade just has a soothing voice and the production and instrumentation fit perfectly. “Your Love Is King” is one of the greatest love songs ever made, and it’s perfect to dance to in the middle of the living room with the love of your life. And my favorite thing about Diamond Life was that one scene in Shaun of the Dead where they failed to kill a zombie by throwing a vinyl copy of it at her. I get why this album is consistently listed as a major influence on neo-soul. I also love Promise and Love Deluxe, but Diamond Life is a great pick.

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My #88: The Soft Bulletin - The Flaming Lips (1999)

The Soft Bulletin is just a stunningly beautiful album that is preoccupied with The Great Themes—poignantly exploring love, loss, good, evil, existence itself, and the fate of all mankind—veering from Superman to artificial insemination in the space of a few seconds. Rhythmic and piano-laden, it’s heavenly in both its conception and execution. Its multi-dimensional sound is positively celestial, a shape-shifting pastiche of blissful melodies and stereo sound effects, a dazzling collage of harps, strings, operatic choirs, and orchestral flourishes. Yet it’s still a pop record. Wayne Coyne’s lyrics are nakedly emotional and transcendentally spiritual, and he created a lushly symphonic masterpiece. You would have to be a truly rotten curmudgeon to be not moved by its beauty.

Highlights: Race for the Prize, A Spoonful Weighs a Ton, The Spark that Bled, The Spiderbite Song, Suddenly Everything Has Changed, The Gash, Feeling Yourself Disintegrate, Waitin’ for a Superman

Kevin’s #88: 74 Miles Away / Walk Tall (Live) - Cannonball Adderly (1967)

My Take:

It’s like Kevin knows I’m a sucker for discovering new jazz. And this record is smooth. Adding this to my jazz rotation.

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My #87: Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not - Arctic Monkeys (2006)

The first words to tumble out of Alex Turner’s mouth on this record are “Anticipation has a habit to set you up for disappointment.” He could be talking about a night out, your teenage years, or just life in general. While Turner is a master observer of nightlife and youth culture as the Arctic Monkeys grew up in a bleak steel town in Northern England, his depiction and dissection of being a disaffected teenager in Sheffield very much spoke to my boredom as a high schooler in suburban Connecticut.

Every song is utterly infectious, filled with creaky melodies and a snaggletooth guitar attack. This is a stripped-down punk record that touches on the sounds of every great British band: The swooning melodies of The Beatles, the unabashed Britishness of The Kinks, the cynical sneer of Sex Pistols, the dry wit of The Smiths, the mercurial groove of The Stone Roses, the epic anthems of Oasis, and the unignorable clatter of The Libertines.

Highlights: The View From the Afternoon, I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor, Fake Tales of San Francisco, Dancing Shoes, Still Take You Home, Perhaps Vampires is a Bit Strong But…, A Certain Romance

Kevin’s #87: Tossing Seeds (Singles 88-91) - Superchunk (1992)

My Take:

Fast-paced, aggressive, and a heaping of thick guitar scuzz—where was this album in my peak punk rock phase in high school? This gives me heavy Hüsker Dü vibes. Really dug their cover of “Train From Kansas City,” “Slack Motherfucker,” and “Cool.”

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My #86: Norman Fucking Rockwell! - Lana Del Rey (2019)

I never thought I’d say this about a Lana Del Rey album, but I was floored at how massive and majestic Norman Fucking Rockwell! turned out to be. It is nothing short of stunning. She takes you on a tour of sordid American dreams, going deep cover in all our nation’s most twisted fantasies of glamour and danger. Lana digs into the atmospherics, sitting somewhere between minimalist trip-hop and scuzzy desert rock, and assembled a collection of psychedelic piano dirges that pour into each other and rarely shift tempo from track to track. This is yoga music for the apocalypse.

You know you’re getting into your feels from the devastating opening line, “Goddamn, man-child, you fucked me so good that I almost said ‘I love you.’” From there, Lana’s perpetually wounded drawl hovers above swooning strings and swirling synths, and you get a fond look back at the world we just wrecked, a frank assessment of the psychic effects of a society spiraling into chaos. But by the end, you’ll make peace with this complex, dystopian reality.

Highlights: Norman Fucking Rockwell, Mariners Apartment Complex, Fuck It I Love You, Love Song, How to Disappear, California, The Greatest, Happiness is a Butterfly, Hope is a Dangerous Thing…

Kevin’s #86: The Gilded Palace of Sin - The Flying Burrito Brothers (1969)

My Take:

I’ve listened to my fair share of rock music from the late-’60s, and The Flying Burrito Brothers has always been a name I’ve come across but never got around to listening to. The only thing I knew about them was Gram Parsons was briefly one of the frontmen. I have to thank Kevin’s inclusion for giving me the push to finally give The Gilded Palace of Sin a spin because, holy shit, this album is downright magnificent. It’s a concoction of irony-fueled hillbilly anthems, inventive covers, and achingly beautiful two-part harmonies. The micro-grooves and pedal-steel guitar work here effortlessly fuses country, rock, and soul. I see why this album is listed as a major influence on the alt-country sound that would come decades later. Now I have to revisit the Byrds’s Sweetheart of the Rodeo and Gram Parsons’s Grievous Angel.

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My #85: Yellow House - Grizzly Bear (2006)

If you ever wondered what it would feel like to wander through Brian Wilson’s mind on a clear day in 1967, play Yellow House. Sink into a claustrophobic dream and go cloud hopping. Each song slowly unfolds to reveal dense rhythms, choirs of silky voices, and opulent melodies rich in atmospherics. It’s widescreen psychedelic folk that sounds awe-inspiringly huge and intimate at the same time. These sounds are drenched in emotion, and mix banjo, acoustic guitar, wind and brass instruments, and subtle electronica. Their following album, Veckatimest, is a piece of perfectionist chamber pop that launched them into the indie stratosphere, and I go back and forth as to whether I prefer that to the relatively lo-fi sounds of Yellow House. But I’ll never forget the shimmering, echoing melodies of “Colorado” while cruising along the winding highways through the Rockies and was struck by the stunning scenery.

Highlights: Easier, Lullabye, Knife, Plans, Marla, Colorado

Kevin’s #85: Exile In Guyville - Liz Phair (1993)

My Take:

Well, yeah, this is a defining ‘90s feminist alt-rock album. This crop of songs is brash, uncompromising, snarky, sexy, and tender. Phair flexes her narrative prowess by exploring the real and oafish transactions between imperfect people and tells us that all the weird and uncomfortable things you think and worry about are just ordinary fears. It’s an indie classic for a reason.

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My #84: The Lonesome Crowded West - Modest Mouse (1997)

The Modest Mouse of the 1990s was very of its time. If contemporary records like Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Pavement’s Brighten the Corners, and Elliott Smith’s Either/Or were epochal last gasps of pre-Internet indie rock, The Lonesome Crowded West stood out as defiantly weird. The great theme of this album is travel, or how motion through space feels. You get the sense that singer Isaac Brock is always moving forward without getting anywhere different, and he confronts this existential emergency with disdain and terrified awe.

The urban paranoia of post-punk seeps into wide-open rural, looming industrial landscapes, all alike in their sinister, hypnotic repetition. The grand monotony settles over me whenever I play Lonesome Crowded West, as I think about growing up in suburban Connecticut and envision glimpses of empty strip malls and parking lots, open fields and dark forests, scrolling by in a purgatorial loop. The feeling of being stuck in a small town inflates to cosmological proportions, crushing us in the seam of its psychic trap.

Highlights: Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine, Heart Cooks Brain, Lounge (Closing Time), Jesus Christ Was an Only Child, Cowboy Dan, Trailer Trash, Shit Luck, Truckers Atlas, Bankrupt on Selling

Kevin’s #84: 5 - J.J. Cale (1979)

My Take:

J.J. Cale is another name I’ve heard a lot but never got around to listening to. I know he’s been a major influence on rock music, so I gave this a spin. It’s pretty wild how much this album sounds like Dire Straits while being a direct influence on them. Some highlights here with “I’ll Make Love to You Anytime,” “Don’t Cry Sister,” “Friday,” and “Mona.”

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My #83: Liquid Swords - GZA (1995)

I had the pleasure of watching Liquid Swords performed in its entirety last year with a backing band, and it confirmed to me that GZA is a rapper’s rapper, and this record is for the real ones. Full of tight beats, each track emphasizes the finesse with which GZA weaves his vocals over austere and straightforward rhythms. The lyrics reveal layer after layer of thought with repeated listens and finding a weak line on it is nearly impossible.

It has a far more warped and disturbing slant on inner-city sickness than the in-your-face West Coast equivalent. GZA is a highly skilled master-graftsman, maintaining a precise flow and increasingly sophisticated style: Shuffling kicks, neck-snapping snares, haunting melodies via plucked harps or sparsely dotting violin stabs, and penetrating bass tones. Liquid Swords is the most potent distillation of the Wu aesthetic as laid out in Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers): Strictly chess, kung-fu, battle raps, investigative reports, Five Percenter Islam. Out of the Wu-Tang solo projects, this is handily top-tier, and it cemented the GZA’s reputation as the best pure lyricist in the group, and one of the best of the ‘90s.

Highlights: Liquid Swords, Duel of the Iron Mic, Gold, Cold World, 4th Chamber, Shadowboxin’, Killah Hills 10304, I Gotcha Back, B.I.B.L.E.

Kevin’s #83: The B-52’s - The B-52’s (1979)

My Take:

Sca-do-ba-da, eww. Sca-do-ba-da, eww. Rock Lobster! This album is unabashed kitsch. These mavens recycled pre-Beatles pop culture with panache—bad hairdos, sci-fi nightmares, dance crazes, pastels—and created this skewed fusion of pop, surf, avant-garde, amateurish punk, and white people funk. Sometimes, it’s healthy for the soul to jam out to easy-listening music that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

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My #82: In the Aeroplane Over the Sea - Neutral Milk Hotel (1998)

This was a tough album to get through on my first two listens—it is as beautiful as it is disturbing. In the Aeroplane is lo-fi yet lush, and its relationship to time is disorienting, It’s a transcendentalist pop record steeped in a century of American music, a quixotic sonic parade through singing saws, Salvation Army horn arrangements, funeral marches, banjo, accordion, pipes, and punk rock. Singer Jeff Mangum’s infatuation with Anne Frank is perhaps the record’s historical center, but the perspective jumps back and forth over centuries, with images and figures sucked from their own age and squirted out somewhere else. Aeroplane is fragile, creaky, dark, surreal, impenetrable, and one of the finest indie rock records ever made.

Highlights: King of Carrot Flowers Pt. 1, The King of Carrot Flowers Pts. 2 & 3, Two-Headed Boy, Holland, 1945, Oh Comely, Two-Headed Boy Pt. 2

Kevin’s #82: Business As Usual - Men at Work (1981)

My Take:

I’ve known the monster hits “Who Can It Be Now?” and “Down Under” for more or less the entirety of my music fandom. I’ve never dived into their deep cuts, so I gave this album a spin. The production here is low-key, but clean and uncluttered, which makes the songs stand by themselves with little embellishment. They have absorbed the sparse rhythmic spunk of reggae and the punchy yet articulate brevity of post-punk pop, and they play with the earthy conviction of a rousing pub-rock band. This album is a mix of The Police, Elvis Costello, and the Rumour. Other highlights here include “I Can See It In Your Eyes” and “Be Good Johnny.”

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My #81: Supa Dupa Fly - Missy Elliot (1997)

Supa Dupa Fly was ahead of its time in so many ways. Timbaland’s production is singular and revolutionary in his use of sampling—in which the samples are not used straightforwardly but instead bend to fit the album’s unconventional tempos. Missy Elliott avoided the whole East vs. West drama, the playas vs. gangstas mess, as she flipped between aggression and romance, sex and nonsense, materialism and imagination, without batting one outrageously spidery eyelash. Her combination of rapped and sung vocals caused a shift in how women in rap were perceived while redefining hip-hop and R&B. This is a boundary-shattering postmodern masterpiece whose experimental and futuristic style became the de facto sound of mainstream hip-hop for the following decade.

Highlights: Sock It 2 Me, The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly), Beep Me 911, They Don’t Wanna Fuck Wit Me, Best Friends

Kevin’s #81: To Live and Die In L.A. (An Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) - Wang Chung (1985)

My Take:

Like many people my age, I was introduced to Wang Chung through Grand Theft Auto: Vice City by strolling through a faux-South Beach nightclub and watching the NPCs wiggle to “Dance Hall Days.” I’d feel the jangling guitars reverberate through me and yearn to live in the ‘80s so I could dance to a song written about the ‘40s, and then proceed to gun every virtual dancer down and go on with whatever mission I was on. I never understood the concept of nostalgia for a decade I never lived in, but listening to Wang Chung gives me that feeling. As a former resident of Los Angeles, I could picture myself cruising down the PCH with the top down as I leave a trail of groovy synths while chasing the simmering insanity of the SoCal sun.

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Our 100-91:

Another 100 Best Albums of All Time List

Our 80-71:

Another 100 Best Albums of All Time List

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