Top 50 Album Openers - 40 - 31
40. Equally Damaged/ In Particular - Blonde Redhead (Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons)
Before this record, Blonde Redhead had only hinted at how good they really were. But from the first notes of these tracks, something felt very different. It starts as just a few blips and keyboard noises before morphing into "In Particular," with Kazu Makino's high, eerie voice hovering over melodic guitar riffs and rhythmic drumbeats. This band, which Touch and Go Records describes as resulting from the chance encounter at a New York restaurant of Makino and Italian twin brothers, took their music to a new level on this record, and this track starts the journey. Jason Hancock
39. TNT - Tortoise (TNT)
This song is jazz. Tortoise's take on jazz, but jazz none-the-less. You could tell that Dave Pajo had been replaced on guitar by Jeff Parker, and with the change brought a new texture to this group's sound. The song builds slowly, beginning with just a disjointed drumbeat, before the guitar joins in. As the song goes on, the rest of the band gets in the act, before the entire thing just pours from the speakers in a glorious blend of instrumentation that only Tortoise has managed to make sound truly interesting without coming across as over the top. Jason Hancock
38. Plainsong - The Cure (Disintegration)
It is the song that launched 1000 miserable ships a-sail. The Cure have never come off as particularly chipper fellows, but Disintegration definitely had a few more dirges than usual. Besides making smeared make-up, black clothes, and self-mutilation popular long before Emo kids latched onto it, Robert Smith was capturing something shared by all of us, funny hair or not. Disintegration is an album about heart-ache, certainly, but don't forget it is the album that gave The Cure some of their biggest hits. Plainsong is the middle-ground between the saccharine Love Song and the bleakness of the album's title track. Plainsong is sweeping and majestic. It is both melancholy and hopeful much like Disintegration as a whole. Travis Hutzell
37. You're Gonna Miss Me The 13th Floor Elevators (The Psychedelic Sounds of The 13th Floor Elevators)
While only a modest hit upon its original release in 1966, You're Gonna Miss Me became every psych collectors dream when it was included on the first Nuggets collection in 1972. The track, which is launched by that unmistakable Roky Erickson scream, starts out the first album by one of the first psychedelic bands. Whether or not The 13th Floor Elevators invented psychedelia is irrelevant. The fact is that the band and its frontman were altered to a religious degree and the counterculture of its time took notice. The track features virtually no psych clich้s just great rock and roll and the excitingly intense vocals of Erickson. It's a simple rock song but it's driven by a passion that dangled over the edge of sanity and eventually fell off. Steph Haselman
36. King Of Carrot Flowers Pt.1 - Neutral Milk Hotel (In The Aeroplane Over The Sea)
Such a simple opening song as this can lead only to a simple album. The simplicity makes for astonishingly catchy songs about rather complex subjects, with Jeff Mangum's inimitable warble the central focus. A basic folk ditty, it is the augmentations to it that are most memorable, with accordion chords woven beautifully around the stumpy acoustic guitar like a worn dressing gown. A diseased family portrait is painted in King Of Carrot Flowers, but one with the hope of escape thanks to love. That yearning desire to climb out is as compelling as the music itself. As Mangum beautifully intones, 'we would lay and learn what each other's bodies were for'. Daniel Ross
35. Burning Down The House Talking Heads (Speaking in Tongues)
Does it blow anyone else's mind that this song was recorded in 1983? The opening song to Talking Heads fantastic Speaking in Tongues is as fresh today as it was twenty-three years ago. The crisp strums of that acoustic guitar act as the foundation for the group's afro-beat pop experiments on this one. The song (and album) opened a new chapter in the Heads sound, taking in new sources of inspiration resulting in a grand sound of off the wall experiments and even more off the wall lyrics. To call these guys innovators and legends might be understating it a bit and I might risk sounding indulgent when I say that this song may be one of the greatest and most exuberant ever written, but really
this song should have been higher in the list.. Jake Haselman
34. Mother - John Lennon (Plastic Ono Band)
On an album full of self-examination, self-discovery and catharsis, we start with perhaps the most emotional purge on Lennon's first post-Beatles solo record. He takes us right inside his psyche, getting right down to the main source of what makes him who he is today: his childhood. As he primally screams over and over, louder and louder, with more and more guts each time, "mother don't gooOOOOHH! Daddy come home!", we realize that, perhaps more clearly and immediately than with any other work on this list, music is at its best when the artist is creating it for him or herself. Robert Ferdman
33. Dalliance - The Wedding Present (Seamonsters)
David Gedge and Steve Albini's collective vision of romantic scuzz-pop to rival the works of Keats reaches one of its highest watermarks here. Beginning in near-silence, Dalliance is a melodically charged scratch 'n' jangle affair with some of Gedge's most heartbreaking lyrics. When he wails 'how much I miss you' and guiltily admits that he 'still wants to kiss you', it's hard not to feel inexorably drawn to his monumentally confessional writing. It is this element that has always separated The Wedding Present from contemporaries, and it is no more clearly displayed than here. The crash of guitar and cymbals as the second half of the song explodes is the stuff that indie-discos have been made of for the last 15 years. Daniel Ross
32. Web in Front - Archers of Loaf (Icky Mettle)
"You're the web in front, of my favorite lie." We were never quite sure what that line is really. If you were to contrast Pavement with the Archers of Loaf, I would like to think that the Archers would seriously beat the living daylights out of Mr. Malkmus and his stage mates. This song is the first arrow (get it?) out of the quiver for Icky Mettle, one of the most acclaimed indie rock records, back when indie rock was called something like "alternative," or "college rock;" terms that are now reserved only for the likes of the BMG music club catalogue. Paul Bredenberg
31. Best Foot Forward/Building Steam With a Grain of Salt - DJ Shadow (Entroducing...)
"Guess who's coming? It's -- Guess who's coming? It's -- Guess who's coming? It's DJ Shadow". Several scratches later, and the first song proper starts, "I'm a student, of the drums. I'm also a teacher of the drums too". And then he shows us that is precisely the case, with a ride cymbal that almost overtakes the phattest beat since I can't remember when -- and until, well, "Midnight in a Perfect World" a few tracks later. The eerie exorcist-themed piano and chanting set the mood just right for mouth-watering beat breakdowns, wah-wah guitar, and fantastically well-timed changes, making you realize that this is not merely a simple amalgamation of rhythms and samples, as DJ records often are. By the time the dust settles and the words "the music's coming through me" fade out in an echo as the song ends, he's given you about as good a glimpse as humanly possible of what the rest of the record has to offer. You know by this point the rest of the album is going to be a trip, and that you couldn't have asked for a better guide. Robert Ferdman
| 50 - 41 | | 40 - 31 |
- IW Staff | 2006-09-19
