bright-green-gloves:
I was tagged by tender-buttonss to post my top 10 albums. I am not going to add much commentary, but you are more than welcome to ask me. Also, these are in no particular order.
1. The Velvet Underground & Nico – The Velvet Underground & Nico
I first listened to this when I was in 8th grade or…
I’m not that much an album guy, it always sounds to me as a format tied to obsolete media limitations. I’m more into specific songs, live concerts or mixtapes. Anyway, it’s a good complement to my top 10 songs post.
– Serge Gainsbourg – Histoire de Melody Nelson. Concept albums are of course the best kind available, and this one, which very scandalous nature about the love story between a child and a Rolls-Royce bad driver, is very well sustained by the wonderful Vannier’s orchestration and Gainsbourg’s poetry. It’s probably the best French pop album ever, very tightly packed and faultless.
– Diabologum – #3. Noisy pop from Toulouse. This album is still dear to my heart, with his very modern and powerful post-situationnist spoken word on a bed of oversaturated guitars. I was young, everything was possible.
– Joy Division – Unknown Pleasures. Of course. It took me a long time to begin to like cold wave, and I was surprisingly adult when I began to really love Joy Division – and I miss a lot of oppurtunities before. I remember a Fun multipliation bootleg cassette tape a devoted fan got in his huge music collection, I remember buying a used tape of Unknown Pleasures when I was in boot camp, just because of the cover. I didn’t really listened to it, I was mesmerized by Duran Duran’s Thank you – and in the end, I give it to a friend of mine, an African soldier I shared some classes with. In the end, it’s a near perfect album to listen to while driving on highway.
– Laibach – Macbeth. It’s surprising I wasn’t into cold wave when I was so into industrial music. This album is just perfect to really creep the fuck up some hitchhickers, particulary when played at low volume, so it works on a subconscious level. This is also with this album I was able to befriend our local political commissar from Navy’s counter-espionage service.
– Léo Ferré – Une saison en enfer. Of course I’m a big Léo Ferré fan, and I would have a lot of trouble to select only one album from the Anarchist Poet. But I’m also totally rimbaldist, and Ferré chanting the most perfect poetry text of the whole world litterature was a perfect choice.
– The Velvet Underground & Nico – The Velvet Underground & Nico. What not to love about the most perfect pop album ever made ? Perfectly paced, so fragile it hurts, I hope it will be broadcasted on every radio station available to announce the end of the world or the collapse of the civilisation.
– The Smiths – The Queen is Dead. Another classic from the Eighties, loaded with so much great songs it’s almost unbearable. It’s my favourite album for the seasonal blues of Fall.
– Brigitte Fontaine – Comme à la radio. I went into Brigitte Fontaine in my late high-school years thanks to the Nipponese-produced Le Nougat. But then after I discovered her golden age, before the all the drug and alcohol-induced autoabuse. And Comme à la radio is so great it beats without breaking a sweat the American counter-culture artists of the sixties.
– Fauve – Blizzard. I cheat a little bit since it’s an EP. Vieux Frères was a bit weaker, maybe the lack of surprise, the lack of innocence also. I still stand behind what I wrote about two years ago.
– La Souris Déglinguée – La Souris Déglinguée. Still the best French punk band, and already was in 1981. Their first album is perfect from a song to another, an hymn to La Zone. The poetry of Rien n’a encore changé (”Nothing has changed”) is still unsurpassable almost 35 years later (”on rêve qu’on est à l’hôtel – avec des Américaines – qu’on les ken sans problème – puisqu’elles sont américaines” – is for me the most beautiful quatrain produced in French since the death of Arthur Rimbaud).
Discover all those wonderful pieces of music here.
If they want to play, I tag alexrpcornish, alte-hase, backfromcamden, johanvandemerwe, kevinsmellsgood, librtd, themazette, unsisypheheureux and any of my mutuals that is in the mood to share their musical taste.