Albums that Speak to the Musician In Me

[Idioteque Stalker]

Everyone on this board has a point in their life when they really started listening to music. It may have been triggered by a band, a song, a magazine, or a friend. It may have clicked in an instant or intangibly grown over a period of years. Personally, it's hard for me to pinpoint a time because I've been surrounded by music my whole life. My parents met at music school. My sisters and I began learning our first instruments at the ages of two, three, and five. My whole family became somewhat famous in my home town for playing music at weddings, churches, holiday and business parties, etc. At some point we've all made money, if not a living, by playing and/or teaching music.

I've always struggled to reconcile myself as a music listener with myself as a classically trained musician. Ever since I started listening to the Flaming Lips and Radiohead when I was twelve--long after I was able to understand basic music theory, not to mention read music and play multiple instruments--there have been two battling angels on my shoulders: artist versus artisan, creativity versus skill, vocation versus occupation. I went through a phase when I didn't know there was more to music than practicing a lot. I also went through another phase when I thought any type of musical training impeded all creative growth. Now I understand that it isn't as black and white as any of that. This list is an expression of me coming full-circle, a snapshot of the period of my life where I maybe started to understand how the one informed the other. It may or may not be what you or even I expect.

What you won't find on this list: technical mastery for its own sake and gratuitously complex time signatures. I'll watch professional sports if I feel like ogling at an amazing feat of human skill. Technical mastery in music has been boring to me since middle school, and your song in 13/8 is probably a gimmick.

What you will find on this list: detailed arrangements, clever compositions, and tight musical interplay serving an artistic vision shared by people who listen and react well to each other while performing.

Summer is a very busy work time for me, so I'll be updating whenever I get the chance. There is no set number or order of entries. Feel free to mention your own favorite musician-y albums.

[Idioteque Stalker]

Tom Waits - Rain Dogs

I've spent an inordinate amount of time repeating the piano intro to "Tango Till They're Sore" and still can't decide whether it would be more impressive if the sour notes were written out or improvised. In the end it doesn't matter. This song--and indeed the whole album, which sounds like early 1900s Top 40 radio where all the songs are performed by the same drunken raving lunatics--has such evocative tone and potent satire that one can't help but believe every musical "imperfection" is not merely intentional, but maybe the entire point.

[Idioteque Stalker]

Teebs - Ardour

An instrumental hip-hop album on Flying Lotus's Brainfeeder label (where they take their musical chops as seriously as their DMT trips), Ardour seemingly asks the question, "Why be afraid to exploit the prettiness of arpeggios, trills, and major sevenths?" Teebs somehow manages to avoid inoffensive kitschiness, and instead the whole thing comes off as the most twinkly, luxurious album in recent memory. "King Bathtub" for instance is practically one big harp glissando. Put it on and you've suddenly got a harem feeding you grapes and fanning you with palm leaves.

[Idioteque Stalker]

D'Angelo - Voodoo

The notoriously endless recording sessions for Voodoo turned what should've been an overstuffed, meandering r&b album (it clocks in at over seventy minutes) into a behemoth of musical sensitivity. It's as if they grooved on these songs for hours and hours on end, just throwing licks at the wall to see what stuck. In the end everyone is on point. Try singling someone out on opener "Playa Playa": the guitars sound tremendous, the horn flourishes add so much without being obnoxious, and goodness gracious the way he sings. The whole thing has a very earthy, home-grown quality to it--these are real people who simply make it look easy.

[Idioteque Stalker]

Minutemen - Double Nickels On the Dime

For all I know these guys were total slackers, but their album Double Nickels On the Dime makes them sound like the hardest workers in the history of rock and roll. Here are forty-four songs, averaging about 100 seconds each, played with the ferocious attitude of hardcore punk but the clean expertise of jazz. I bet they won all their battle of the bands competitions by default: I know as soon as they played something like "West Germany" I'd just throw up my hands and say "screw it."

[Idioteque Stalker]

The Beatles - The Beatles (White Album)

The White Album isn't really my favorite Beatles album (everyone has songs they love/hate), and there's not much rhyme or reason to the thing as a whole, but it's almost as if the lack of a grand concept allowed them to write all the killer songs that wouldn't have otherwise fit on any one record. Everyone contributes, but to me McCartney is the clear winner: "Martha My Dear," "Blackbird," and "Mother Nature's Son"--where the complex pop melodies are overshadowed only by an incredible tenderness--are some of my all-time favorite songs. Compositionally, Lennon went ham on tracks like the Karma Police-predating "Sexy Sadie" and the five-songs-within-a-song "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" (both of which coincidentally have incredible background vocals). Even so-called silly songs like "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da," "Piggies," and "Goodnight" have pretty astounding compositional qualities when you listen closely. And I maintain that "Wild Honey Pie" is the most musically sound WTF curiosity in the history of pop music.

[Idioteque Stalker]

Here are a few odd songs that stick out to me, although for some reason or another the albums do not:



Dr. Dre Feat. Snoop Dogg - "Nuthin' But a 'G' Thang"

The guitars, the bass, the flow, the woman during the chorus--it'd be a masterclass in writing hooks if it wasn't first and foremost a masterclass in being chill as hell.





James Blake - "Buzzard & Kestrel"

A rhythm-fronted, giddy slow-burner where the barely-audible jazz chords eventually burst forth into an impossibly thick onslaught of hair-raising release.





The United States of America - "Stranded In Time"

The arrangement on this is so tight and lively it almost makes me want to talk smack about Eleanor Rigby.

[quido8_5]

The Beatles - The Beatles (White Album)

Compositionally, Lennon went ham on tracks like the Karma Police-predating "Sexy Sadie" and the five-songs-within-a-song "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" (both of which coincidentally have incredible background vocals).

Not to be a dick, but isn't it H.A.M.? At any rate, great choice here. If Sgt. Peppers didn't exist, this would probably be the most influential album of all time. Like where this thread is headed thus far. For some reason, your post had me thinking about some of the folksy/baroque gems that the British invasion mined:

[Idioteque Stalker]

Wow. Three great tracks, two of which I hadn't heard before. Good stuff.

[Idioteque Stalker]

The Knife - Shaking the Habitual

I've heard and been skeptical of thoughts like, "Leaves rustling in the wind can be as beautiful as any symphony," and "Who are we to say that an old man banging sticks together is any less accomplished than Beethoven?" Seriously, I get it, but I just can't go there. Shaking the Habitual, however, makes whatever ethnomusicologist there is in me geek out. Here is an album where the woodwinds (of all things) turn a song called "Without You My Life Would Be Boring" into the funkiest campfire dance ever, a didgeridoo takes center stage for three minutes to make distorted-as-hell overtones on "Raging Lung," and the rhythmic intricacies of "A Tooth for an Eye" could keep a serious percussionist practicing rudiments for months. They claimed it was a political album, and I have to give it to them: at the very least it has given me some non-Western music to which I can shake my ass.