As a thank you to those who participated in the year polls I have decided to write a little bit on the albums which got most of your votes. I'll start with the last closed poll on 1995 and I will try to slowly work my way back to the first poll covering 1972.

In 1995 I already had given up on the Smashing Pumpkins as their second much-hyped sticky over-produced MOR album Siamese Dream was such a letdown after the wonderfully rough and dynamic Gish. I taped the best songs of Mellon Collie... from a friend on a C90 and I was pleasantly surprised of what I heard. Especially as I had been extremely sceptical about a double album which seemed like a manifestation of the huge ego of Pumpkins leader Billy Corgan.

Of course not every minute of these two hours of heavy 90's prog-rock is great. But there are many moments of brilliancy where Corgan's often unnerving shrieking nasal voice doesn't bother me. As the music occasionally is so intense that I don't perceive his self-indulgence. Like e.g. in Love which is a glistening psych mess with hard knocking beats. I can also savour the instrumental(!) title track which opens the album. A solemn piano ballad with some cheesy synthesizer strings on top of it which gives me this kind of Weltschmerz feeling. It segues into Tonight, Tonight like a soundtrack for a glorious western. But when Corgan starts to sing in his false falsetto I have to fast forward.

The pastoral songs are the ones which I can appreciate most. Galapagos is one of them. Corgan abstains from screaming most of the time and that is a benefit on its own. Or the shining guitar pop hymn of 1979. Thru the Eyes of Ruby starts out very promisingly with a yearning vocal delivery in the first two lines but loses me in the middle when things get loaded. The slow and moving By Starlight where Corgan has found his voice would have been the perfect closer. Of course there are also some great hard-rock songs I dig like Where Boys Fear to Tread with the infectious bass guitar riff.

On the whole this weighty multi-faceted double album would have been much more digestible if it had been condensed to one CD with maximal 45 minutes playing time. And would maybe have even been in my top five of 1995.

I continue surprising myself when choosing my favourite albums on a year by year base. 1995 was such a safe bet before having relistened to anything from my top ten. Yo La Tengo who have been one of my most beloved bands for many years released Electr-o-Pura, their most hypnotic record with the melancholic drone monster Blue Line Swinger as the closer. Maybe I know them too well by now. Electr-o-Pura was too predictable to be no.1. The first surprise from 1995 was Vic Chesnutt's warm and folky songwriter gem Is the Actor Happy? which I almost forgot in the poll. There was also the first album Boire by Miossec, the troubadour from Brittany who came from nowhere and made the most urgent French album since Gainsbourg.

In the end I settled for Mark Linkous debut with the strange compounded one word name. As it combines catchy touching guitar tunes with experimental not listener-friendly songs like no other release I know of from 1995. There is a lot of variety in this record and it still holds together amazingly well. I don't know a thing about Linkous but he must be an autodidact to make music so totally apart from the rest of the world. And he must be totally nuts as well.

Here is the overview of the series 40 years, 40 albums of which part XVIII was this post.

Buked & Scorned has a phantastic Jean Paul Sartre Experience song online: Own Two Feet. The guitar sounds so tender and frail, it is unbelievable. Dreamy psychedelic kiwi heaven. There is no better way to start a day.

Chosen from 99 items in my music database. Feel free to suggest something else. Who knows maybe I didn't get it right again.

People who have followed this series from the beginning on might be a little surprised by my 1982 choice. It is an album which didn’t feature in the poll. When creating the poll I didn’t think of On Land as I hadn’t seriously listened to it. Phil from one faint deluded smile mentioned it in the comments and after having realised that none of the ten records in the poll was exciting enough to be my album of the year I started relistening to On Land. When reading the liner notes with the music on the speakers it suddenly clicked. I was drawn in slowly like into a far away maelstrom in a sea which I had taken erroneously for totally calm. I have never cared a lot about Eno’s minmal and ambient music as put forward before on Discreet Music and Music for Airports. The kind of stuff to which Satie’s term furniture music fits quite well. It does not ask to be listened to. It flows along without any highs and lows. If it creates an atmosphere it is an atmosphere of void. Music with the aim of going nowhere, just turning around itself endlessly. Music which does not reward the listener.

On Land is different. It uses natural sounds to which the listener can cling to. They evoke memories. They tell stories of places. Brian Eno just forms those found sounds and weaves an electronic wrapping around them. He creates something highly unique and seamless by fusing the organic with technology. Eno recorded this album in New York. Like the city it is a melting pot.

A mysterious record which gives the listener the freedom to associate whatever his phantasy is able to come up with when exposed to this earth music. Exactly in between Tangerine Dream’s cosmic star track Zeit and Peter Gabriel’s tribal Passion soundtrack. In the past couple of years I got more and more attracted to simple environmental sounds like the waves hitting the coast (Jack Kerouac wrote a long poem on the Pacific ocean at Big Sur). Or wind chimes. There is a place near Big Sur where they have thousands of them which play a magnificent natural symphony when it is windy. Last summer in Norway we cycled to the end of an island where there were hundreds of screaming sea-gulls flying around. It was like the end of the world. You could forget about humanity when closing the eyes and taking in those rough bird screams.

Some track by track impressions:

1 Lizard Point Enormous insects buzz around.

2 The Lost Day Menacing sounds in the background. Like the rumbling of a far away thunder. Which does not come closer but stays there for the whole nine minutes of the track. Metal pieces hitting each other in the wind. Is there a boat passing by? A spooky atmosphere. Accentuated by the low symphonic soaring synthesizer sounds which give the piece an even more apocalyptic flair.

3 Tal Coat It is dark. I am undergound in a cave or something. A humid place. Snakes are all around. They make these hellish sounds with their tongues. They move towards me.

4 Shadow A hot summer evening in the steppe. Maybe in Australia. Crickets chirping. Someone hums. A warm enveloping guitar sound.

5 Lantern Marsh It is cloudy. The sky is low. Nothing is happening.

6 Unfamiliar Wind (Leeks Hills) Birds flying around making noises. Sheep. Where are the frogs? A short animal sound symphony.

7 A Clearing More animal sounds. In the water.

8 Dunwich Beach, Autumn, 1960 Piano echoes. Like played in the water. We are floating.

Some quotes from Eno and another contributor on the album:

On the origin of the music from the liner notes:

On the instrumentation and the sampled sounds (liner notes):

On the ideas behind and reverb:

Bill Laswell who plays bass on Lizard Point on the featured sounds:

Here is the overview of the series 40 years, 40 albums of which part XVII was this post.

Eric Tamm's Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound. The out of print 1989 classic on Eno online. Updated 1995. 208 page Word document.

Der Tag, an dem man sich eine schwarze Krawatte kauft. Vielleicht ist das ja der Tag, an dem mann erwachsen wird.

It was a tough choice between the first Tindersticks (excellent but too long), the last Gun Club (extremely touching but a little too fusionish) and this album. Which nobody seems to know except those French guys from Libération, France Inter (Bernard, you are the one and only radio deejay) and Les Inrockuptibles who made me get it in early 1994. Probably the most criminally overlooked album by the Anglo-Saxon critics in my discotheque.

Idaho are a slowcore guitar band from LA. Not the sunny kind of music you would expect from California. Leaning more towards the David Lynch sort of weird unworldly atmosphere. Jeff Martin has got this kind of grave baritone voice which in my mind is the apotheosis of existential melancholy. An extremely masculine voice I always dreamt of having myself.

This is the album to which we have made love most to. 55 minutes full of relish. Inciting the most tender and attentive parts of me in the old ceremony. A slowly unfolding affair. Lugubrious and solemn but creating a precious warm and cosy enveloping atmosphere like few records. When Jeff Martin starts to sing I feel like having come home. An album I was always afraid of killing by listening too often to it. The restraint did pay off and the magic has been preserved till now. A perfect record without a dud. Music to slit your wrists to has never been so soothing. An album of an incredible consistency. It goes straight to my heart and body and soul.

Lusher than Mark Kozelek's Red House Painters. Sadder and darker than Low. Less self-pitying and pompous than Mark Eitzels's American Music Club. White man's blues. A bath in wistfulness. A quartet playing four string guitars. The often leading electric bass guitar is accompanied by fuzzy guitar textures underlining the atmosphere. They have all the time of the world. Gorgeous harmonies. I bought two more CDs by them but they were lame in the sense of more of the same stuff but much less compelling compared to their phantastic debut.

Please forgive me all the clichés in this review. Without clichés the world would be an even sadder place as it already is though...

mp3: Save

Here is the overview of the series 40 years, 40 albums of which part XVI was this post.