What's Your Favourite Album?

[Feytalist]

Weather Systems by Anathema. Anathema have changed quite a bit over the years, and the journey from inconsolably heartbroken songs on Judgment and A Fine Day To Exit to the wondrous, tear-strained but joyous anthems on Weather System is quite a difficult one. Weather Systems speaks to me on a spiritual level, from Gathering of the Clouds to Lightning Song to Storm Before The Calm.

Strange you mention Weather Systems. I love Anathema; A Fine Day To Exit and A Natural Disaster being my favourites. They did melancholy damn good. Then with Weather Systems their sound changed so dramatically. Or not even their sound. Their message. Weather Systems is incredibly uplifting, and it's amazing that it can be so different and still so good. (I still prefer the old stuff, though.)

And Internal Landscapes is a leeetl heavy-handed but we can forgive that, I think.

[robinhussain2]

And why the first place is a tie? Because which I prefer swings a lot with the mood of the day. Dead Winter Dead when I'm more romantic/nostalgic/"blue emotion". Wake of Magellan when I'm more energic/dynamic/proud/"red emotion".

[Weezer]

My favorite album by far is Velvet Underground and Nico by Velvet Underground. I firmly believe its one album everyone should really listen to. Here's a massive wall of text I posted on another forum analyzing it and trying to show why I think it's so good. Went a bit overboard...

Spoiler

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A bit of background:

The Velvet Underground were a sign that rock was changing. They were the harbingers of punk, with their first album released in 1967 while they were still the house band for Warhol's Factory and his roadshow Exploding Plastic Inevitable. The VU are one of the primary influences on punk and in their music you can really see the transition from the largely pop sensibilties of mainstream 60s rock (your Stones and Beatles) to the grittier, more raw and experimental sounds of the punk, postpunk and even much of mainstream 70s rock. Doomed to obscurity throughout their existence, they still managed to influnce an incredible amount of the rock that followed and become very well known in the decades following their dissolution. To quote someone who I can't remember "The album [Velvet Underground and Nico] sold 10,000 albums and everyone who bought an album went on to found a band".

The Album:

This album is in many ways a look at the darker side of the wild 60s, a side of drug use and sexuality not seen in much of the music of the time, though there were more conventional pop songs on the album. The album really showcases their range veering from the dreamy pop of Sunday Morning to the garage rock of I'm Waiting for the Man to the atonality and bursting static found in The Black Angel's Death Song. A very diverse album, but still one tied together by a penchant for darker themes and experimentalism.

The opening track, Sunday Morning, is as I mentioned before one of the poppiest songs on the album and actually the last song recorded. Their producer felt the album needed a track with the potential to become a hit single, and this was the result. Its dreamy, flowing feel with a melancholic undertone works well to ease one into the album. After the gentle Sunday Morning fades away, you're hit by the garage rock attack and pounding piano of I'm Waiting for My Man, a song about an out of place junkie waiting around a ghetto to score some drugs. This is the first real glimpse at the album's gritty focus, especially the reminder that even though he's feeling good from his hit, it will fade and he'll be back tomorrow, waiting for his man. Again, we have a tonal shift as the abrasiveness of Waiting transitions into the gentle Femme Fatale another of the poppier tracks. This track served as the B-side for the album's single, and is one of my less favorite songs of the album, the transition from Waiting for my Man to Femme Fatale is jarring in a way that doesn't quite work for me.

After this track comes Venus In Furs, a song about sadomasochism (named after a book written by Sacher-Masoch, the person who gave rise to the term "masochism"), describing a dominatrix dressed in "boots of Shiny, shiny leather" and wielding a "Tongue of thongs, [and] the belt that does await you". It's again a look at the darker side of live, in this case sexuality and the violence that some see in it. Interestingly enough (from a musical standpoint) the lead guitar was tuned in a fashion known as "ostrich", where all of the strings are tuned to the same note, in this case C. This is also the album where John Cale's atonal electric viola makes an appearance. The juxtaposition between the rhythmic, insistent ostrich guitar and the grating atonality of the viola serve to create an uncomfortable feeling that well matches the lyrical subject. The second to last song on the A side was Run Run Run, it's a chronicle of a number of characters seeking for and/or using drugs, including a heroin overdose (When she turned blue, all the angels screamed, They didn't know, they couldn't make the scene). This song is characterized by Reed's heavy blues guitar, including the best solo of the album, and the interesting lyrical combination of drug use and religious imagery. The final track for this side is All Tomorrow's Parties, Warhol's favorite song by the band. It's a description of some regulars at Warhol's Factory and it's constant cycle of partying, a lot calmer than the at time frenetic preceding track, it's a more melancholic track, focusing on the 'trap' of constant pressures of appearance and of staying on the edge of and ever changing avante guarde that Reed saw many of Warhol's clique fall into.

The second side opens with the song Heroin, whose topic should be self explanatory. It's a varied song that features repeating frantic and increasingly atonal crests and drifting troughs, representing the highs and downswings of heroin use. It very explicitly depicts heroin use, abuse and addiction in a way that's not quite an endorsement but not quite a condemnation, and talks about it as "the death of me, it's my wife and it's my life". In many ways the darkest song, it depicts ones complete dependence on this drug. I think it's my personal favorite, the uncomfortable, atonal, screaming crescendos and the ever shortening releases really effects me in a physical way. Whether that rising discomfort and then calming denouement are accurate representations of heroin use, I can't say, but it certainly feels that way. It's a genius song and one of the best musical depictions of drug use I've come across.

The following track is There She Goes Again, a deceptively upbeat sounding song describing a prostitute, the exact details are ambiguous, but I've always seen it as it looking through from the perspective of a guy who drove away his (once very dependent) girlfriend, who is just becoming a prostitute desperation? Regardless of its intended meaning, this song depicts clearly the extremities some people are forced to go to in order to survive. The next song, I'll Be Your Mirror is the final song with Nico as lead vocals, and like the previous two she lead is a rather poppy, though melancholic. Despite the sound, this is in many ways the most positive song on the album, depicting someone acting as a mirror for another, showing them their true beauty rather than their self-loathing and belief that inside they're "twisted and unkind".

The second to last track on the album is The Black Angel's Death Song and is the most experimental track on the album. It features most heavily Cale's atonal viola and regular hissing static/feedback that is probably someone blowing hard into a microphone. The atonal swirls are overlaid by Reed's deadpan, almost speaking, vocals are a philosophical musing about death, fate, personal choice and pain. The final song European Son opens with a bluesy style common to many contemporaries, a familiarity shattered when one minute in a glass is shattered and an atonal screech drags itself from your speakers. The song breaks into a wild rock improvisation filled with (yet more) atonality, screaming solos, random noises and pounding base. It's a suitably complex and uncomfortable track to end an album that is just that.