Top 100

"Teach me how to fight", a song title and chorus in Last Exit is a vibe in a single phrase that if incanted will get you in touch with your gentle and very cool warrior soul. Or you can just listen to a few songs by the Junior Boys.

One of the earliest albums I loved. None of the first albums I've loved can hold a torch to it now.

I always thought this was the title of a mix from one of my Bard college friends.

Bard College friends introduced my to this obscure band with connections to Mission of Burma, Shellac, and probably many more. Knowing and loving Volcano Suns is probably a weird ticket to some dark area of heaven.

It should be Slanted and Enchanted, Wowee Zowee, or that collection of b sides that is now on all the things anyway...

I won't write about Pavement much for a bit but I should say that for a time they were unequivocally my favorite band.

I very personal private reasons for loving this album that I probably share with an ex of mine. I don't listen to this as much as I might if it weren't so specific in it's personal privateness.

My public and important reasons for loving this album is that it is beautiful. The fuzz of shoegaze masters, the strange layering of sound that these bands provide is a magic carpet with dark sunglasses and custom fit whatever.

In high school, Doors, Beastie Boys, Sublime, and Violent Femmes transcended boundaries. Even the jocks.

A mystical fever overcame me when I heard this album. It would be the next edgy band with universal appreciation.

It is not that. No one knows about this band.

For a long time if I was listening to any beats, the rhymes from this album came in my head. Poetry with such a tight delivery and continual imagery. I could probably say something about meter and metaphor, but when I heard it went straight to something that I could spend a career analyzing.

The description of the streets, the feelings of brothers in jail, being connected in a deep way to an oppressed group of hustlers. "One Love" is a miracle, but everything is on this album. This is a certain type of black experience that I only can access this deeply through pieces of art like this. It doesn't just remind me of the differences, but evokes the emotions that I imagine I would feel if I was in the situation. The situation of a black man in Queens, America.

The production and pace of this album is relentless and hard yet most of the beats complement the smooth hypnotic way that Nas presents his lyrics.

handing them out with both hands word dripping off fingers.

Pixies. So many songs on the first albums are amazing. I may have picked this one just because I carry several Black Francis screeches permanently in the soup of my brain. "It's Ed-u-cational" from U-Mass, "Stay all day, if you want to" on Gouge Away. And we are chained. Kim Deal punches the "Chained" on Hey. "We're ch u ained, chained."

They don't want to admit they are among the best ever, because that would be uncool. Maybe that was just an interview I watched on youtube.

I feel so cool to know this band.

Wild frontman and just the best forceful angular guitar.(I think I know what that means). The sentiment is rock. Funny too. "Crawling can be beautiful", and a song about how a kidnapping might turn out good if it ended in adoption.

So hip. As hip as LCD Soundsystem but a little less above it all. Something completely new when I first heard it. Funny too. They have a guitar and a synth and hearts in throats.

We loved this album as if it had been given to us by god. We wondered what it was, what about it made it such a perfect thing. We created playlists that played the songs in reverse. This album will be coming back again and again.

Found via a KEXP live performance and it hit me like a brick.

A nostalgic brick - I can't recall exactly what it reminds me of but it's 80s synth and a dreamy lady with a gentle even-toned style. I haven't gone deep yet, but I feel like this is a fresh thing that echoes some of the 80s pop and the late 90s indie.

So often music is like this, it is exactly like some old musical friend, even though you might not remember that friend's name. But maybe that's just me.

I will have a lot more to say about this music, especially when I remember what was coming out of my Walkman at 12 that was a spiritual ancestor.