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Towards the end of his final interview with The New Yorker , published less than a month before his death in November 2016, Leonard Cohen closed his eyes and recited a “sweet little song” to journalist David Remnick. “Listen to the hummingbird/ Whose wings you cannot see/ Listen to the hummingbird/ Don’t listen to me,” he rumbled. “Listen to the mind of God/ Which doesn’t need to be/ Listen to the mind of God/ Don’t listen to me.”
Opening his eyes, he told Remnick he doubted he would have time to finish the song before he died. It was a tough concession for a man who famously spent years (sometimes decades) refining his work: his best known song, “Hallelujah”, took him five years, some of which he says was spent “on the floor, on the carpet in my underwear, banging my head on the floor saying, ‘I can’t finish this song’”.
Two years on, it turns out Cohen made time to record the nine new songs which appear here. As on 2016’s excellent You Want it Darker (2016), most of the music was written and produced by Cohen’s son, Adam. Long-time collaborator Javier Mas flew from Barcelona to LA to play Cohen’s own guitar. Producer Daniel Lanois (U2 , Emmylou Harris ) added piano, and a quiet constellation of singing stars (from Damien Rice to Feist) gathered at the microphone.
Although the fear was that Adam would be spreading his father’s legacy too thin, each track has the weight of a completed thought, not a sketch bulked out.
Cohen’s voice – deepened by “50,000 cigarettes and several swimming pools of whiskey” – rumbles through lines on sex, death, faith, politics and economics like a steamroller over dry gravel. The familiar weltschmerz and one-liners are all delivered at the same controlled pace, which Cohen learned from a hypnotism manual aged 13 and promptly employed to “persuade” the family’s maid to strip naked for him.
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019Show all 50 1 /50The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 50) Nils Frahm – Spaces (2013) Nils Frahm’s music feels most alive when you’re witnessing it in concert, so it makes sense that Spaces, a collection of field recordings made over two years, is his most immersive and dynamic. The shifting energy is due to how no single performance is ever the same; the one constant is the German composer’s joy in creating sound, and the spaces in between. (RO)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 49) Bill Callahan – Dream River (2013) “I have learnt, when things are beautiful, to just keep on,” confides Callahan on the most laconic and nuanced album of his career. Warm grains of flute and fiddle run through the rich country soul. Masterful, minimalist storytelling guides us through summers spent painting boats and long nights in hotel bars. (HB)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 48) Arctic Monkeys – Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino (2018) Twelve years after Arctic Monkeys released a debut album that shook the British rock scene out of its doldrums, the Sheffield boy wonders came up with this: a concept album about a luxury lunar resort that surgically removed the blues influences on AM and replaced them with lounge jazz and absurdist lyrics. It upset fans who wanted more of the same, and yet, frontman Alex Turner’s musical and lyrical meanderings mark one of the boldest moves by any rock band in recent memory. (RO)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 47) Richard Dawson – Nothing Important (2014) Richard Dawson was once a heart-on-sleeve singer-songwriter, but by 2014, the Geordie’s outré folk had made him Britain’s leading avant-bard. On his breakthrough LP, malevolent instrumentals bookend a pair of 16-minute epics, bending from the ambitiously autobiographical title track to “The Vile Stuff”, a delirious tale of a boozy school trip gone awry. (JM)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 46) Julia Holter – Have You in My Wilderness (2015) Refreshing as summer rain, the avant-garde – and occasionally difficult – Californian artist’s fourth album sees melodies splashing merrily from her keyboard. Her pretty, literate vocals spin playful mysteries of faceless lovers in raincoats and strange women on remote shores. “It’s lucidity!” Holter teased. “So clear!” A ludic, lucid dream of a record. (HB)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 45) Sky Ferreira – Night Time, My Time – 2013 Sky Ferreira did it her way. After years of label disputes about image and musical direction, the Californian finally decided to put her own modelling money towards financing her debut record, 2013’s Night Time, My Time. And what a record it is: melding Eighties pop with alternative rock, it brims with a wild vivacity, as squelching synths come up against gnashing guitars, vulnerable lyrics and often distorted vocals. “Everything is Embarrassing”, produced by Dev Hynes, is one of the songs of the decade. (PS)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 44) Alabama Shakes – Boys & Girls (2012) Combining rumbustious soul-rock with swampy blues grit, this four-piece from Athens, Alabama, were one of the most exciting sounds of 2012 thanks to their humdinger of a debut album. Gutsy and unrefined, Boys & Girls is indebted to a bygone era but somehow feels fresh. It’s underpinned by powerhouse frontwoman Brittany Howard’s astonishing voice – capable of both a piercing falsetto or a guttural roar. Barack Obama would subsequently invite the band to play at the White House. (PS)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 43) Stormzy – Gang Signs & Prayer (2017) When the documentarians of the future make films about the UK in the 2010s, you can bet they’ll put Michael Ebenazer Kwadjo Omari Owuo Jr on the soundtrack. The charismatic grime MC is bursting with all the self-aware anger, humour, confusion, vulnerability and creativity of his generation in multicultural urban Britain. (HB)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 42) Todd Terje – It's Album Time (2014) After a run of spellbinding singles, the Norse disco maverick released this synthesis of the frivolous and cinematic: an album so casually virtuosic it seemed to have dropped out of an alien supercomputer. From crate digger space-funk to dance floor ecstasy (and a Bryan Ferry feature), It’s Album Time is endlessly replayable: a perfectly formed confection that requires no sequel. (JM)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 41) Big Thief – Two Hands (2019) There’s a kind of telepathy that develops when a band spends as much time together as Big Thief. The indie-rock band’s second album in the space of five months (the first being UFOF), was described as the “earth twin” and, indeed, they sound utterly grounded – to each other, and to their surroundings in the arid Chihuahuan Desert of Texas, near the Mexico border. In contrast to her fragile performance on UFOF, here Adrianne Lenker sings in lusty whoops and calls on “Forgotten Eyes”, while “Not”, the record’s dark, brooding soul, caterwauls with feedback screeches and a merciless, two-minute guitar solo that leaves you simultaneously devastated and enthralled. (RO)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 40) Christine and the Queens – Chaleur Humaine (2014) On her electropop-laden debut – the UK release of which meanders between French and English – Heloise Letissier explores the lonelinesses and triumphs of being queer. On “Saint Claude”, she steals glimpses of a feminine boy being mocked on a Paris bus, too ashamed to step in. On “Tilted”, she is newly defiant. “I am actually good, can’t help it if we’re tilted.” (AP)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 39) James Blake – James Blake (2011) Inspired by the “icy altitudes” of Joni Mitchell’s open-tuned confessionals, the dubstep producer took singer-songwriting into a compelling new landscape of minimalist clicks and autotuned emotion. He sang of “testing sounds/ For the deaf and the forest cold” and now describes his sparse, graceful debut as “a fractured diary” reflecting “a lack of something”. (HB)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 38) Skepta – Konnichiwa (2016) In 2016, the UK was in chaos. The EU referendum produced a shock result, David Cameron resigned as prime minister, and the arguing began, as a new harder-right politics emerged. The future felt bleak. In the midst of all this, Skepta – always wary of institutions – poured gasoline over the whole mess and lit a match. Konnichiwa is an album heavy with contempt for authority; a sizzling brew of jungle, UK garage and dancehall into which he pours all of his anger, frustration, fear and suspicion. (RO)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 37) Bon Iver – Bon Iver (2011) Where 2008’s For Emma, Forever Ago was an exercise in sparse, solipsistic introspection, Justin Vernon’s follow-up is the sound of a man setting himself free and fully embracing the depths of his imagination. Less hermetically sealed than his debut, it's exquisite in every way, with Vernon’s soulful falsetto woven into a gorgeous patchwork of jazz, folk, ambient and electronica. He would add more autotune to his voice on later albums; here it’s just perfect. (PS)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 36) Ane Brun – When I'm Free (2015) There’s a glorious elasticity of both sound and spirit to the Norwegian singer-songwriter’s seventh album. Gone is the feathery folk of her early releases as she flings open the doors to big timpani, hip hop rhythms and liquid Eighties bass lines. Lyrically, she celebrated the suffragettes and her own possibilities in the face of chronic illness. (HB)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 35) Jamie xx – In Colour (2015) A solo album from The xx’s most elusive member was the subject of rumour for a good few years; the reality was better than fans could have hoped for. In Colour is a lovingly crafted tribute to the rave; a kaleidoscope of beats and pulsing synths that stitch together the many moods you can find on the dancefloor, from the ecstasy of a drop to the melancholy of knowing the night must, at some point, come to an end. (RO)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 34) Mitski – Be the Cowboy (2018) Upon the release of Be the Cowboy, Mitski described how she had “f***ed with the form, almost in ways that make me uncomfortable” – hardly surprising for an artist whose songs pivot between lullaby-like calm and reckless, scuzzy urgency. Her fifth album sits to the left of just about every box you might try to put it in, those signature distorted guitars joined by bright, bold synths, organs and show-tune pianos. Lead single “Nobody”, with its almost aggressive vulnerability, is a masterpiece. (AP)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 33) Kacey Musgraves – Golden Hour (2018) Three albums in, Kacey Musgraves worried that falling in love with her husband would affect her music. “I was a little wary,” she told The Independent last year. “I was like, ‘Man, I wonder if I’m gonna be able to write.’” She needn’t have worried. With synths and Daft Punk guitar licks added into the mix, her fourth album, which she dubbed “cosmic country”, is rich and ambitious with a subtle, psychedelic gloss, winning the Grammy for Album of the Year. (AP)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 32) Björk – Vulnicura (2015) For three decades, Björk has weathered professional belittlement, abuse and tragedy, always reiterating herself in song, as if it were normal to absorb so much. On Vulnicura, recorded amid a scrappy breakup, the Icelandic virtuoso snapped. Monstrous ballads meet shattered beats and siren strings, a cyclone propelled by the wisdom of age. When the dust settles, she sounds reborn. (JM)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 31) Marianne Faithfull – Negative Capability (2018) A breathtakingly brave and graceful testament from the ultimate survivor of patriarchal rock. Romance and realism, love and fear are held in perfect tension as the 71-year-old conjures shimmering myths of ye olde England, then tells a friend: “I do understand why you want no more f***ing treatment.” (HB)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 30) These New Puritans – Field of Reeds (2013) With 2010’s Hidden, These New Puritans fashioned dancehall and medieval heraldry into pop overtures. They re-emerged with something improbably subtle: a dreamscape shorn of excess pomp, beats and even consonants, with Jack Barnett’s voice remade as an instrument. Amid ineffable neoclassical, his shy croak elevates the record, the sound of a doomed romantic awash in the music of the heavens. (JM)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 29) Anohni – Hopelessness (2016) Released before Trump’s election and the Brexit vote, there was a dark prescience to this gleefully disruptive blast of electronica. Anohni jettisoned the gorgeous chamber pop which had brought her critical acclaim to make a radical ecofeminist wake-up call about the horrors of the violent patriarchy, drone warfare and global warming. (HB)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 28) Joanna Newsom – Have One on Me (2010) Newsom’s third album – an elaborate, six-sided odyssey whose musical palette blends harp, tambura and kaval with drums and electric guitars – heralded a noticeable change in her voice. The removal of vocal cord nodules had shaved the edges off its trill, and its new deeper, fuller sound suited an album as intricate and aching as this. “I found a little plot of land/ In the Garden of Eden,” she sings on one of its best tracks, “81”, seemingly poised on the edge of religious reverence. “It was dirt, and dirt is all the same.” (AP)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 27) Fatoumata Diawara – Fatou (2011) “Why did you cut the flower that makes me a woman?” sings the Malian artist on “Boloko”, the first African song to address female genital mutilation. Immigration and forced adoption are also challenged on a culture-shifting debut that brings a rare sweetness to the protest genre. The sensual power of Diawara’s lullsome voice and her shimmering guitar patterns remain hypnotic. (HB)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 26) Arca – Arca (2017) As “deconstructed club music” became a buzzword, electronic artists considered how to reassemble the pieces. One pitch for how that might sound – somehow futuristic yet familiar – came from Venezuelan producer Arca. The Björk and FKA twigs collaborator’s third album relaunched her zero-gravity sound world with a secret weapon: the bruised, disarmingly operatic voice of an angel in hell. (JM)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 25) David Bowie – Blackstar (2016) On his 69th birthday, two days before his death, David Bowie released perhaps the most extreme album of his career. Blackstar is more alien than Ziggy; as inscrutable as the deepest corners of the universe. He refuses to go quietly, whether making a joyous racket on “’Tis a Pity She Was a Whore” or adding eerie buzzes and whines to album closer “I Can’t Give Everything Away” where, faced with the nearness of his own death, Bowie engages in a final tussle with his own myth. (RO)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 24) Adele – 21 (2011) Earlier this year, Adele announced that she had split from her husband Simon Konecki. While some sympathised, others rejoiced at the brilliant break-up album that was surely on the cards. “Bunch of f***ing savages,” she joked in response to those gleeful fans. “30 will be a drum ’n’ bass record to spite you.” Cruel though it was, there was a reason for the gleeful reaction – Adele sings of heartbreak like nobody else. And never better than on 21, a sad, soulful masterpiece which on these shores is the best-selling album of the century. (AP)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 23) Daft Punk – Random Access Memories (2013) The French electronic pioneers brought funk back for the summer of 2013 with an album drawing heavily on the sounds of the Seventies and Eighties. Pretty much everything you need to know is in the opening salvo “Give Life Back to Music”; Daft Punk tend to pop up at times where other artists are grasping frantically for something new. Random Access Memories restarted the party with good old-fashioned craftmanship and Le Daft’s undiluted love for what they do. (RO)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 22) Lana Del Rey – Norman F***ing Rockwell! (2019) It is striking that Lana Del Rey – the greatest artist of her generation – creates art full of meaningful observations about men and women that are deeply unfashionable outside of an Esther Perel podcast. Del Rey desires to be desired; she likes it when her man makes her feel like a child; she "wants to die". The longing for unconsciousness is still present in NFR ("I’m the void," she sings on "Mariners Apartment Complex") but her most playful record to date is as close to a celebration of her world-conquering status as you are ever likely to hear. (PS)
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The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 21) Sufjan Stevens – Carrie & Lowell (2015) Tiptoeing to the bleeding heart of Steven’s relationship with his schizophrenic, alcoholic mother, this is an album that faces difficult truths with hushed grace. The featherlight folk acquires a remarkable bioluminescence, as the artist finds hope in “signs and wonders, sea lion caves in the dark”. (HB)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 20) Rihanna – ANTI (2016) ANTI’s botched rollout – Rihanna was teasing the record for years before a leak prompted a hasty free release – seems strangely fitting for an album as joyfully scattershot and unrefined as this. Dark dancehall sounds flirt with hip hop and R&B, as the Bajan singer embraces her roots and slyly rebels against the pop tropes du jour. (AP)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 19) Arcade Fire – The Suburbs (2010) Having released arguably the Noughties’ defining rock album in Funeral, the Montreal six-piece began this decade with a record bathed in nostalgia. Loosely inspired by frontman Win Butler and his brother Will’s childhood on the outskirts of Houston, The Suburbs has much in common with Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA, with its themes of familial responsibility and personal crises. The sound is expansive; there are lyrical and musical motifs throughout. If 2007’s Neon Bible was a little portentous and po-faced, this album offers moments of levity in tracks such as the shimmering synth-pop masterpiece "Sprawl II". Nothing they’ve done since has been as good.
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 18) St Vincent – Strange Mercy (2011) St Vincent, AKA Annie Clark, has a tagline for each of her albums. This one, her third, was “housewives on pills”, though that does little justice to a record that marries uncomfortable intimacy with a cool detachment, its obtuse stories of grief, loss and lust told through angular art-rock, frenzied guitar solos and bold melodies. (AP)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 17) Nick Cave – Ghosteen (2019) When his 15-year-old son died in 2015, Cave thought public grieving would be “impossible”. But he found unexpected relief in sharing his feelings with his fans. This ambient double album plays like a warm cloud of solace: direct about the agony and inevitability of loss, in awe of the love that helps us survive it. (HB)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 16) Taylor Swift – Red (2012) Red is the last album Swift released before it became impossible to discuss her work without mentioning the narrative around her as a person, not just an artist. Her turn of phrase – already impressive for an artist so young – improves immeasurably from opener “State of Grace” and leads the listener to the greatest song of her career to date: “All Too Well”. The analogies and references are less spelt out, too. Then there’s the song structure, the way these songs unfurl as she dissects – with scientific scrutiny – the most intimate details of a relationship, in order to find out where it all went wrong. Red shows Swift with a newfound confidence – and at times, weariness – that can only come with experience. (RO)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 15) Frank Ocean – Blond (2016) Brilliantly confounding, Blond keeps the spotlight fixed firmly on its creator’s voice. Tracks are stripped of any unnecessary embellishment, anything that might distract from Ocean’s hypnotic musings on love, sex and death. “Every day counts like crazy,” he sings on “Skyline To” – few lyrics capture quite so well the suffocating feeling of being dragged through life at breakneck speed. Blond is far less cohesive than its predecessor, Channel Orange, but does that really matter? Life is messy and confusing; Ocean makes all of it sound beautiful. (RO)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 14) Leonard Cohen – You Want It Darker (2016) A passing comment in a New Yorker profile about being “ready to die” forced Leonard Cohen to tell fans that reports of his imminent death had been hugely exaggerated. Yet the album he was promoting, You Want It Darker, is as powerful a last testament as any artist could hope to release; Cohen’s weary utterances – “I’m ready, my Lord” – are delivered in that fathomless baritone, and his meditations on mortality are bleak, even for him. The fact that Cohen did in fact die just three weeks after its release makes those themes, although it didn’t seem possible at the time, even more poignant. (RO)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 13) Solange – When I Get Home (2019) The decade’s second great Solange album churns several deformed, jazzy aesthetics – including Brainfeeder’s gloopy electro-funk and the concoctions of DJ Screw – into a lustrous cloud of R&B. The result hints at Seventies soul voyagers like Stevie Wonder yet retains its future-shock, celebrating Houston futurism without pandering to fans of its explicitly political predecessor. (JM)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 12) PJ Harvey – Let England Shake (2011) The spooky piano and PJ Harvey’s keening howls on the opening, title track of her eighth studio album are enough to signal this album isn’t a barrel of laughs. Yet her finely wrought arrangements – echoing guitars, beautiful melodies and samples that wrongfoot the listener with their cheerfulness – form a superb kind of juxtaposition with the album’s themes. Across 12 brisk tracks, she casts a despairing eye over everything from the conflict in Afghanistan to the mass casualties of the First World War; she sings in a kind of pleading tone, all the while knowing that humans are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. (RO)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 11) Kanye West – My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010) West has always been a complicated, divisive, frustrating sort of genius. Never is that more on display than on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, a maximalist, genre-crushing album that looks both outwards and inwards – self-aware even in its most crowing moments – it breaks apart the myth of the American Dream. “The system broken, the school is closed, the prison’s open,” he sings on “Power”, one of the best protest songs of the century. Later, he adds, “They say I was the abomination of Obama’s nation/ Well that’s a pretty bad way to start a conversation.” So far, West has yet to write anything half as sharp about Trump’s nation. (AP)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 10) Robyn – Body Talk (2010) Robyn’s magnum opus barely even charted when it was first released at the dawn of the decade. It’s almost a compilation album of the three great EPs she released in one year, Body Talk Pt 1, Pt 2 and Pt 3. But, nearly 10 years on, it is rightly one of the most influential pop albums of the 21st century. Every popstar tries (and mostly fails) to emulate the silky dance-and-cry beauty of songs such as “Dancing on My Own” and “Call Your Girlfriend”. (AP)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 9) A Tribe Called Quest – We Got it From Here... Thank You 4 Your Service (2016) After an 18-year break – and within months of co-founder Phife Dawg’s death – there were mixed expectations for ATCQ’s return. It arrived in the hubbub of election week, but the group rode into the melee like angry gods on horseback, firing out thunderous rebukes. The hip-hop odyssey delivers America’s existential reckoning, one equally suited to street protests or a recuperative headphone voyage. (JM)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 8) Lorde – Melodrama (2017) When you experience your first heartbreak, you feel as though you’re the only person to have ever felt pain like it. On Melodrama, written when New Zealand musician Lorde was 19 and on the cusp of adulthood, she indulges her heartache, grief, and self-pity with both tenderness and reckless abandon. This is pop music at its most precise – every synth and drumbeat fired off like a bullet from a sniper – but at its most unbound, too, finding brutal, beautiful new ways to sing about the most saturated of subjects: breaking up. (AP)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 7) Kendrick Lamar – DAMN (2017) Kendrick has always been a superb storyteller, but the Pulitzer Prize-winning DAMN is his odyssey, an album where he presents evidence of his greatness via a series of challenges: tests of loyalty, will, faith and perseverance. It’s an epic punctuated by schizophrenic changes in pace and track structure; all the while Kendrick raps as though he doesn’t need oxygen, and you realise his greatest battle has never been with his fans, or another rapper… he’s competing against himself. (RO)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 6) D'Angelo – Black Messiah (2014) After hit album Voodoo, D’Angelo almost died by various means, including addiction and a car crash. Fifteen years on, its follow-up arrived suddenly one Christmas: a grungy, deathly reanimation of the sexy, Soulquarian R&B he helped pioneer. Its #BlackLivesMatter-referencing lyrics reveal a man renewed yet still fluttering in the crosswinds of passion and vulnerability. (JM)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 5) Beyoncé – Lemonade (2016) When footage leaked of Solange Knowles hitting and kicking Jay Z in an elevator at the 2014 Met Gala, word was that the rapper had cheated on his wife, and was receiving the full force of her sister’s wrath. Two years later, Beyoncé seemed to confirm the affair as only she could: not with a statement, but with an astonishing concept album and accompanying 65-minute film. Dipping into genres as though they’re a dressing-up box, the singer traverses the whole spectrum of emotions as she grapples with the betrayal: “My lonely ear pressed against the walls of your world,” she sings on opener “Pray You Catch Me”. “Suck on my balls/ I’ve had enough,” she sings on “Sorry”. (AP)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 4) Frank Ocean – Channel Orange (2012) A few days before this album’s release, Frank Ocean released a Tumblr post where he spoke about how, aged 19, he fell in love with his friend, a boy. At the time, many interpreted the letter to mean Ocean was coming out as bisexual, when in fact he has never felt a need to put a label on his sexuality. Channel Orange’s ever-shifting nature – the lolloping bass and his meanderings between that exquisite falsetto and richer timbres – is a beautiful statement about the paradoxes we can find in our own identity. (RO)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 3) Lana Del Rey – Born to Die (2012) It’s easy to forget that before Lana Del Rey came along – back when Billie Eilish was barely in double figures – lo-tempo sad-pop was not the chart-hogging phenomenon it is today. Born to Die, a minimalist masterpiece, languid and lachrymose, changed that. The month of its release, a shaky performance on SNL prompted naysayers to write the singer off as a flash-in-the-pan, but the album – full of beauty, gloom and strange subservience – had staying power. As did Del Rey. (AP)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 2) Solange – A Seat at the Table (2016) Solange’s third album is so meticulous, so modernist in its approach to space and structure, that early listens could feel like walking admiringly around an exhibition. Then the lights go out, and a distant scream draws you into the shadows. Anguish is the true pitch of this quiet masterpiece, yet it’s impossibly graceful: an R&B battle cry of black art against white supremacy. (JM)
The 50 best albums of the decade – 2010 to 2019 1) Kendrick Lamar – To Pimp a Butterfly (2015) By 2015, Kendrick Lamar was already a grandmaster stylist. But with To Pimp a Butterfly, the Compton rapper became a cultural institution, as if summoned by the decade’s converging flash points. There was the murmur of creeping fascism, the roar of a re-energised black rights movement, and its roots in racist police shootings broadcast and protested across an infernal social media landscape. This all collided with a resurgent jazz sensibility in rap – brass, blue notes, manic freedom, melancholy – primarily via LA beat scene luminaries Flying Lotus, Kamasi Washington and Thundercat. Each contributes to this modern classic, as despairing and murky as it is lucid and fireball bright. Centrepiece “Alright” is now a civil rights anthem, but To Pimp a Butterfly plays less like a statement than a bad dream: conflicted introspection, vexed empathy and political irreverence meet pitch-black humour that jolts you awake, with the sense that without this music, we’d be lost. (JM)
When I first read that story in Sylvie Simmons’ terrific biography, I’m Your Man , it made sense of the feeling I’ve always had listening to Cohen: the sense of being seduced but suckered by a charming, wounded predator.
Perhaps that’s how Cohen feels about his own interactions with the world. I think about him losing his father at nine, taking decades to achieve recognition, suffering from depression, being embezzled by his business manager, becoming the spiritual pupil of a “holy man” later accused of serial sexual abuses. In turn, Cohen treated the women in his life as maids and muses – there to bring him sandwiches or sit at his feet and wait for him to leave them a song (on which he’d collect the royalties) before moving on to the next lover. It’s all there in Joni Mitchell’s double-edged description of the man as the “boudoir poet”.
The clouds of these betrayals gather and darken throughout songs like “Happens to the Heart”. He growls about how both Christ and Marx “Failed my little fire/ But the dying spark is bright”. He acknowledges the “Mist of summer kisses where I tried to double park”. You wince at “I had a pussy in the kitchen/ And a panther in the yard”, draw breath at “Every soul is like a minnow/ Every mind is like a shark” and ponder “In the prison of the gifted/ I was friendly with the guards/ So I never had to witness/ What happens to the heart.”
Cohen has always flipped witty couplets like pancakes – it’s brilliant and infuriating. On the page, the technique folds ideas in on themselves, it shuts things down. But the warmth of Mas’s fretwork and spacious echo of Lanois ivories allows the flip-flopped lines to stretch out, concertina style. It gets beautiful.
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Sign up Cover artwork for Leonard Cohen's posthumous 'Thanks for the Dance' (Sony Music) “The Night of Santiago” finds an opportunistic Cohen recalling a one night stand with a woman who “Said she was a maiden/ That wasn’t what I’d heard/ For the sake of conversation/ I took her at her word.” In the space of the second verse, his lover’s breasts are first sleeping, then opening lilies, then “her nipples rose like bread”. Icky. Cohen – as ever, just “passing through” – “Took her to the river/ As any man would do,” where he takes off his tie and her thighs become “shoals of fish”. It turns out she is married with children. We believe Cohen when he says he wasn’t born to judge. But he’s on shakier ground when he says: “I wasn’t born a gypsy/ To make a woman sad.”
“Moving On” finds the old romancer on more appealing form: “I loved your face/ I loved your hair/ Your T-shirts and your eveningwear…” although the lover he’s addressing – possibly Marianne Ihlen, who died four months before him – is gone.
The title track reads as a braver and more brutal reckoning with that complicated open relationship, including her abortion of their child. “Thanks for the dance and the baby you carried/ It was almost a daughter or son… It was hell, it was swell, it was fun.”
The 40 best albums to listen to before you dieShow all 40 1 /40The 40 best albums to listen to before you die The 40 best albums to listen to before you die The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967), The Velvet Underground It was Andy Warhol who wanted Lou Reed and John Cale to let his beautiful new friend Nico sing with their avant-garde rock band. Truthfully, though, Victor Frankenstein himself couldn’t have sewed together a creature out of more mismatched body parts than this album. It starts with a child’s glockenspiel and ends in deafening feedback, noise, and distortion. Side one track one, “Sunday Morning”, is a wistful ballad fit for a cool European chanteuse sung by a surly Brooklynite. “Venus in Furs” is a jangling, jagged-edge drone about a sex whipping not given lightly. “I’ll Be Your Mirror” is a love song. European Son is rock’n’roll turned sonic shockwave. That’s before you even get on to the song about buying and shooting heroin that David Bowie heard on a test pressing and called “the future of music”. Half a century on, all you have to do is put electricity through The Velvet Underground & Nico to realise that he was right. Chris Harvey
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You (1967), Aretha Franklin When Jerry Wexler signed the daughter of a violent, philandering preacher to Atlantic records, he "took her to church, sat her down at the piano, and let her be herself". The Queen of Soul gave herself the same space. You can hear her listening to the band, biding her time before firing up her voice to demand R-E-S-P-E-C-T 50 years before the #MeToo movement. Helen Brown
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Master of Puppets (1986), Metallica Despite not featuring any singles, Metallica’s third album was the UK rock radio breakthrough they’d been looking for. In 1986, they released one of the best metal records of all time, which dealt with the potency and very nature of control, meshing beauty and raw human ugliness together on tracks like “Damage Inc” and “Orion”. This album is about storytelling – the medieval-influenced guitar picks on opener “Battery” should be enough to tell you that. Although that was really the only medieval imagery they conjured up – they ripped Dungeons & Dragons clichés out of the lyrics and replaced them with the apocalypse, with bassist Cliff Burton, drummer Lars Ulrich, guitarist Kirk Hammett and singer/rhythm guitarist James Hetfield serving as the four horsemen. Roisin O’Connor
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Remain in Light (1980), Talking Heads “Facts are simple and facts are straight / Facts are lazy and facts are late…” sang David Byrne, submerging personal and planetary anxieties about fake news and conspicuous consumption in dense, layers and loops of Afrobeat-indebted funk. Propulsive polyrhythms drive against the lyrical pleas for us to stop and take stock. Same as it ever was. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Catch a Fire (Jamaican version) (1973), Bob Marley and the Wailers The album that carried reggae music to the four corners of the Earth and made Bob Marley an international superstar also set the political tone for many artists to follow. Marley sang of life “where the living is hardest” in “Concrete Jungle” and looked back to Jamaica’s ignoble slaving past – “No chains around my feet but I’m not free”. He packed the album with beautiful melodic numbers, such as “High Tide and Low Tide”, and rhythmic dance tracks like “Kinky Reggae”. Released outside of Jamaica by Island Records with guitar overdubs and ornamentation, the original Jamaican version is a stripped-down masterpiece. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Revolver (1966), The Beatles An unprecedented 220 hours of studio experimentation saw George Martin and The Beatles looping, speeding, slowing and spooling tapes backwards to create a terrifically trippy new sound. The mournful enigma of McCartney’s “For No One” and the psychedelia of Lennon’s “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “She Said, She Said” can still leave you standing hypnotised over the spinning vinyl, wondering if the music is coming out or being sucked back in. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Like a Prayer (1989), Madonna It may be the most “serious” album she’s ever made, yet Like a Prayer is still Madonna at her most accessible – pulling no punches in topics from religion to the dissolution of her marriage. In 1989, Madonna’s personal life was tabloid fodder: a tumultuous marriage to actor Sean Penn finally ended in divorce, and she was causing controversy with the “Like a Prayer” video and its burning crosses. On the gospel abandon of the title track, she takes the listener’s breath away with her sheer ambition. Where her past records had been reflections of the modern music that influenced her – Like a Prayer saw her pay homage to bands like Sly & the Family Stone, and Simon & Garfunkel. The album was also about an artist taking control over her own narrative, after releasing records that asked the audience – and the press – to like her. RO
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Led Zeppelin IV (1971), Led Zeppelin Millennials coming at this album can end up feeling like the guy who saw Hamlet and complained it was all quotations. Jimmy Page’s juggernaut riffs and Robert Plant’s hedonistic wails set the bench mark for all subsequent heavy, hedonistic rock. But it’s worth playing the whole thing to experience the full mystic, monolithic ritual of the thing. Stairway? Undeniable. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die The Best of the Shangri-Las (1996), The Shangri-Las Oh no. Oh no. Oh no no no no no, no one ever did teen heartbreak quite like the Shangri-Las. Long before the Spice Girls packaged attitude for popular consumption, songwriter Ellie Greenwich was having trouble with a group of teenagers who had grown up in a tough part of Queen’s – “with their gestures, and language, and chewing the gum and the stockings ripped up their legs”. But the Shangri-Las sang with an ardour that was so streetwise, passionate and raw that it still reaches across more than half a century without losing any of its power. "Leader of the Pack" (co-written by Greenwich) may be their best-known song, but they were never a novelty act. This compilation captures them at their early Sixties peak. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972), David Bowie Flamboyance, excess, eccentricity – this is the breakthrough album that asserted Bowie as glam rock’s new icon, surpassing T Rex. He may have come to rue his Ziggy Stardust character, but with it, Bowie transcended artists seeking authenticity via more mundane means. It was his most ambitious album – musically and thematically – that, like Prince, saw him unite his greatest strengths from previous works and pull off one of the great rock and roll albums without losing his sense of humour, or the wish to continue entertaining his fans. “I’m out to bloody entertain, not just get up onstage and knock out a few songs,” he declared. “I’m the last person to pretend I’m a radio. I’d rather go out and be a colour television set.” RO
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Unknown Pleasures (1979), Joy Division In their brief career, ended by the suicide of 23-year-old singer Ian Curtis, Joy Division created two candidates for the best album by anyone ever. Closer may be a final flowering, but Unknown Pleasures is more tonally consistent, utterly unlike anything before or since. The mood is an all-pervading ink-black darkness, but there is a spiritual force coming out of the grooves that is so far beyond pop or rock, it feels almost Dostoevskyan. There are classic songs – "Disorder", "She’s Lost Control" and "New Dawn Fades" – and for those who’d swap every note Eric Clapton ever played for one of Peter Hook’s basslines, the sequence at 4:20 on "I Remember Nothing" is perhaps the single most thrilling moment in the entire Joy Division catalogue. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Hejira (1976), Joni Mitchell Though her 1971 album, Blue, is usually chosen for these kinds of lists, Mitchell surpassed its silvery, heartbroken folk five years later with a record that found her confidently questioning its culturally conditioned expectations of womanhood. Against an ambiguous, jazzy landscape, her deepening, difficult voice weighs romance and domesticity against the adventure of “strange pillows” and solitude. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Body Talk (2010), Robyn The answer to whether Robyn could follow up the brilliance of her self-titled 2005 album came in a burst of releases in 2010, the EPs Body Talk Pt 1, Pt 2 and Pt3, and this 15-track effort, essentially a compilation album. It includes different versions of some tracks, such as the non-acoustic version of “Hang With Me” (and we can argue all night about that one), but leaves well alone when it comes to the single greatest electronic dance track since “I Feel Love”, “Dancing On My Own”. Body Talk is simply jammed with great songs. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Off The Wall (1979), Michael Jackson “I will study and look back on the whole world of entertainment and perfect it,” wrote Jackson as he turned 21 and shook off his cute, controlled child-star imagery to release his jubilant, fourth solo album. Produced by Quincy Jones, the sophisticated disco funk nails the balance between tight, tendon-twanging grooves and liberated euphoria. Glitter ball magic. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Illmatic (1994), Nas How good can rap get? This good. There are albums where the myth can transcend the music – not on Illmatic, where Nas vaulted himself into the ranks of the greatest MCs in 1994, with an album that countless artists since have tried – and failed – to emulate. Enlisting the hottest producers around – Pete Rock, DJ Premier, Q-Tip, L.E.S and Large Professor – was a move that Complex blamed for “ruining hip hop”, while still praising Nas’s record, because it had a lasting impact on the use of multiple producers on rap albums. Nas used the sounds of the densely-populated New York streets he grew up on. You hear the rattle of the steel train that opens the record, along with the cassette tape hissing the verse from a teenage Nasty Nas on Main Source’s 1991 track “Live at the BBQ”: ‘When I was 12, I went to Hell for snuffing Jesus.” RO
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Trans-Europe Express (1977), Kraftwerk This is the album that changes everything. The synthesised sounds coming out of Kraftwerk’s Kling-Klang studios had already become pure and beautiful on 1975’s Radio-Activity, but on Trans-Europe Express, their sophistication subtly shifts all future possibilities. The familiar quality of human sweetness and melancholy in Ralf Hutter’s voice is subsumed into the machine as rhythms interlock and bloom in side two’s mini-symphony that begins with the title track. Released four months before Giorgio Moroder’s "I Feel Love", Trans-Europe Express influenced everything from hip-hop to techno. All electronic dance music starts here. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Kind of Blue (1959), Miles Davis With the sketches of melody only written down hours before recording, the world’s best-selling jazz record still feels spontaneous and unpredictable. Davis’s friend George Russell once explained that the secret of its tonal jazz was to use every note in a scale “without having to meet the deadline of a particular chord”. Kind of Blue is unrepeatably cool. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Astral Weeks (1968), Van Morrison “If I ventured in the slipstream, between the viaducts of your dream…” To enter this musical cathedral, where folk, jazz and blue-eyed soul meet is always to feel a sense of awe. Recorded in just two eight-hour sessions, in which Morrison first played the songs to the assembled musicians then told them to do their own thing, Astral Weeks still feels as if it was made yesterday. Morrison’s stream-of-consciousness lyrics within the richness of the acoustic setting – double bass, classical guitar and flute – make this as emotionally affecting an album as any in rock and pop. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die West Side Story Soundtrack (1961) “Life is all right in America / If you're all white in America” yelp the immigrants in this passionate and political musical relocating of Romeo and Juliet to Fifites New York. Leonard Bernstein’s sophisticated score is a melting pot of pop, classical and Latin music; Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics sharp as a flick knife. An unanswered prayer for a united and forgiving USA. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Sign o' the Times (1987), Prince Sign o’ the Times is Prince’s magnum opus from a catalogue of masterworks – a double album spanning funk, rock, R&B and most essentially, soul. It is the greatest articulation of his alchemic experiments with musical fusion – the sum of several projects Prince was working on during his most creatively fruitful year. On Sign o’ the Times, the bass is king – Prince cemented his guitar god status on Purple Rain. There are tracks that drip with sex, and love songs like “Adore”, which remains one of the greatest of all time. Stitched together with the utmost care, as if he were writing a play with a beginning, a middle and an end, the album is a landmark in both pop and in art. RO
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Pet Sounds (1966), The Beach Boys Caught in the psychological undertow of family trauma and all those commercial surf songs, 23-year-old Brian Wilson had a panic attack and retreated to the studio to write this dreamlike series of songs whose structural tides washed them way beyond the preppy formulas of drugstore jukeboxes. Notes pinged from vibraphones and coke cans gleam in the strange, sad waves of bittersweet melody. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Ys (2006), Joanna Newsom Weave a circle round her thrice… Joanna Newsom is dismissed by some as kookily faux-naif, but her second album, before she trained out the childlike quality from her voice, may be the most enchanted record ever made. At times, she sounds other-worldly, sitting at her harp, singing to herself of sassafras and Sisyphus, but then a phrase will carry you off suddenly to the heart’s depths – “Still, my dear, I’d have walked you to the edge of the water”. Ys’s pleasures are not simple or immediate. Newsom’s unusual song structures, with their fragmented melodies, and strange and beautiful orchestral arrangements by 63-year-old Van Dyke Parks, take time to work their magic. But once you’re bewitched, Ys’s spell never wears off. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988), Public Enemy Public Enemy’s second album is hip-hop’s game-changing moment, where a new musical form that arrived fully born after years of development away from meddling outsiders found its radical voice. It Takes a Nation of Millions… is still one of the most powerful, provocative albums ever made, “Here is a land that never gave a damn / About a brother like me,” raps Chuck D on “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos”. Producer Hank Shocklee creates a hard-edged sound from samples that pay homage to soul greats such as James Brown and Isaac Hayes, and Flavor Flav gives it an unmistakeable zest. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Pink Floyd It’s easy to knock these white, male, middle-class proggers, with their spaceship full of technology and their monolithic ambitions. But the walloping drums, operatic howls and “quiet desperation” of this concept album about the various forms of madness still resonates with the unbalanced, overwhelmed and alienated parts of us all. Play loud, alone and after dark. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998), Lauryn Hill Lauryn Hill raised the game for an entire genre with this immense and groundbreaking work. Flipping between two tones – sharp and cold, and sensual and smoky – the former Fugees member stepped out from rap’s misogynist status quo and drew an audience outside of hip hop thanks to her melding of soul, reggae and R&B, and the recruitment of the likes of Mary J Blige and D’Angelo. Its sonic appeal has a lot to do with the lo-fi production and warm instrumentation, often comprised of a low thrumming bass, tight snares and doo-wop harmonies. But Hill’s reggae influences are what drive the album’s spirit: preaching love and peace but also speaking out against unrighteous oppression. Even today, it’s one of the most uplifting and inspiring records around. RO
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Histoire de Melody Nelson (1971), Serge Gainsbourg The great French singer-songwriter provocateur probably wouldn’t get too many takers today for a concept album about a tender love between his middle-aged self and a teenage girl he knocks off her bicycle in his Rolls-Royce. But, musically, this cult album is sublime, an extraordinary collision of funk bass, spoken-word lyrics and Jean-Claude Vannier’s heavenly string arrangements. “Ballade de Melody Nelson”, sung by Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, is one of his most sublimely gorgeous songs. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die In My Own Time (1971), Karen Dalton There’s nothing contrived about Karen Dalton’s ability to flip out the guts of familiar songs and give them a dry, cracked folk-blues twist. Expanding the emotional and narrative boundaries of songs like Percy Sledge’s When a Man Loves a Woman is just what she did. Why has it taken the world so long to appreciate her? HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Let England Shake (2011), PJ Harvey “Goddamn Europeans, take me back to beautiful England.” PJ Harvey may have sounded like she was channelling Boris and Nige when she made this striking album in 2015, but few Brexiteers would want to take this journey with her. Let England Shake digs deep into the soil of the land, where buried plowshares lie waiting to be beaten into swords. Death is everywhere, sometimes in its most visceral form: “I’ve seen soldiers fall like lumps of meat,” she sings on “The Words That Maketh Murder”, “Arms and legs are in the trees.” Musically, though, it’s ravishing: Harvey employs autoharp, zither, rhodes piano, xylophone and trombone to create a futuristic folk sound that’s strikingly original yet could almost be from an earlier century. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Boy in da Corner (2003), Dizzee Rascal It’s staggering to listen back to this album and remember Dizzee was just 18-years-old when he released it. Rising through the UK garage scene as a member of east London’s Roll Deep crew, the MC born Dylan Mills allegedly honed his skills in production after being excluded from every one of his classes, apart from music. If you want any sense of how ahead of the game Dizzee was, just listen to the opening track “Sittin’ Here”. While 2018 has suffered a spate of half-hearted singles playing on the listener’s sense of nostalgia for simpler times, 15 years ago Dizzee longed for the innocence of childhood because of what he was seeing in the present day: teenage pregnancies, police brutality, his friends murdered on the streets or lost to a lifestyle of crime and cash. Boy in da Corner goes heavy on cold, uncomfortably disjointed beats, synths that emulate arcade games and police sirens, and Dizzee himself delivering bars in his trademark, high-pitched squawk. RO
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Hounds of Love (1985), Kate Bush Proof that a woman could satisfy her unique artistic vision and top the charts without kowtowing to industry expectations, Kate Bush’s self-produced masterpiece explored the extreme range of her oceanic emotions from the seclusion of a cutting-edge studio built in the garden of her 17th-century farmhouse. The human vulnerability of her voice and traditional instruments are given an electrical charge by her pioneering use of synthesisers. Thrilling and immersive. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Blue Lines (1991), Massive Attack A uniquely British take on hip hop and soul that continues to influence booming modern genres like grime and dubstep, the Bristol collective’s debut gave a cool new pulse to the nation’s grit and grey. You can smell ashtrays on greasy spoon tables in Tricky’s whisper and feel the rain on your face in Shara Nelson’s exhilarating improvisations. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Surfer Rosa (1987), Pixies It only takes 20 seconds of opening track Bone Machine to realise Pixies and producer Steve Albini have stripped down the sound of rock ’n’ roll and rebuilt it piece by piece. The angry smack of Led Zep drums, ripe bass, and sheet metal guitar straight off the Stooges’ Detroit production line are separated and recombined. Pixies’ sound is already complete before Black Francis embarks on one of his elusive pop cult narratives (“your bone’s got a little machine”). The tension between the savagery of his vocals and Kim Deal’s softer melodic tone won’t reach its perfect balance until their next album but their debut, Surfer Rosa is gigantic, and deserving of big, big love. Its “loud, quiet, loud” tectonics would prove so influential that Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain would later say he “was basically trying to rip off the Pixies”. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Talking Timbuktu (1994), Ali Farka Toure and Ry Cooder If you ever doubt the possibility of relaxed and respectful conversation across the world’s cultural divisions, then give yourself an hour with this astonishing collaboration between Mali’s Ali Farka Toure (who wrote all but one of the tracks) and California’s Ry Cooder (whose slide guitar travels through them like a pilgrim). Desert meets Delta Blues. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die The Great Gospel Men (1993), Various artists Compared to the blues, the incalculable influence of gospel music on pop, soul and rock ’n’ roll has been underplayed. It can be found in every song on this brilliant 27-track compilation. If you can’t hear James Brown in the foot-stomping opener “Move on Up a Little Higher” by Brother Joe May, you’re not listening hard enough. The road to Motown from “Lord, Lord, Lord” by Professor Alex Bradford is narrow indeed, but you could still take a side-turning and follow his ecstatic whoops straight to Little Richard, who borrowed them, and on to the Beatles who copied them from him. The swooping chord changes in James Cleveland’s “My Soul Looks Back” are magnificent. All the irreplaceable soul voices, from Aretha Franklin to Bobby Womack, were steeped in gospel. This is a great place to hear where they came from. Companion album The Great Gospel Women is a marvel, too. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Hopelessness (2016), Anonhi “A lot of the music scene is just a wanking, self-congratulatory boys club,” said this angel-voiced, transgender artist in 2012. Four years later, the seismic drums and radical ecofeminist agenda of Hopelessness shook that club’s crumbling foundations to dust. The horrors of drone warfare, paedophilia and global warming are held up to the bright lights in disconcertingly beautiful rage. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die In Utero (1993), Nirvana Kurt Cobain had one goal with In Utero: to pull Nirvana away from what he dubbed the “candy-ass” sound on Nevermind – the album that had turned them into one of the biggest rock bands on the planet – and take them back to punk-rock. He asked Pixies’ producer Steve Albini to oversee production. It didn’t exactly eschew commercial success upon release (it went on to sell 15m copies worldwide), but the heaviness the band felt as they recorded it bears down on the listener from the opening track. Disheartened by the media obsession with his personal life and the fans clamouring for the same old shit, In Utero is pure, undiluted rage. “GO AWAYYYYYYYYYYY” he screams on “Scentless Apprentice”, capturing the essence of Patrick Suskind’s novel Perfume: Story of a Murderer and using it as a metaphor for his disgust at the music industry, and the press. RO
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Curtis (1971), Curtis Mayfield Curtis Mayfield had been spinning golden soul music from doo-wop roots with The Impressions for more than a decade before releasing his first solo album, which contains some of his greatest songs. While some point to the 1972 Blaxploitation soundtrack Superfly as the definitive Mayfield album, Curtis is deeper and more joyous, its complex arrangements masterly. Mayfield’s sweet falsetto sings of Nixon’s bland reassurances over the fuzz-bass of “(Don’t Worry) If There Is a Hell Below We’re All Going to Go”; doleful horns give the politically conscious “We the People Who Are Darker Than Blue” a profound emotional undertow; “Move On Up” is simply one of the most exhilarating songs in pop. To spend time with Curtis is to be in the presence of a beautiful soul. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Rumours (1977), Fleetwood Mac Before they went their own way, Fleetwood Mac decided to tell a story that would be the quintessential marker for American rock culture in the Seventies. As Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks tossed the charred remains of their relationship at one another on “Dreams” and “Go Your Own Way”, the rest of the band conjured up the warm West Coast harmonies, the laid back California vibes of the rhythm section and the clear highs on “Gold Dust Woman”, in such a way that Rumours would become the definitive sound of the era. At the time of its release, it was the fastest-selling LP of all time; its success turned Fleetwood Mac into a cultural phenomenon. RO
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Are You Experienced? (1967), Jimi Hendrix A virtual unknown to rock fans just a year before – Hendrix used Are You Experienced? to assert himself as a guitar genius who could combine pop, blues, rock, R&B, funk and psychedelia in a way no other artist had before. That’s even without the essential contributions of drummer Mitch Mitchell and bassist Noel Redding, who handed Are You Experienced? the rhythmic bridge between jazz and rock. Few album openers are as exquisite as “Purple Haze”. Few tracks are as gratifying, as sexy, as the strut on “Foxy Lady”. And few songs come close to the existential bliss caused by “The Wind Cries Mary”. Hendrix’s attack on the guitar contrasted against the more polished virtuosos in rock at the time – yet it is his raw ferocity that we find ourselves coming back to. Few debuts have changed the course of rock music as Hendrix did with his. RO
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die We Are Family (1979), Sister Sledge Disco’s crowning glory is this album that Chic’s Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards made with Kathy Sledge and her sisters Debbie, Joni and Kim. Nile and ’Nard were at the peak of their powers, classic songs were pouring out of them – We Are Family was released in the same year as the epochal “Good Times” by Chic – and this album has four of them, “Lost in Music”, “He’s the Greatest Dancer”, “Thinking of You” and the title track itself. Sister Sledge gave Rodgers a chance to work with warmer, gutsier vocals than the cool voices he used to give Chic records such laid-back style and the result is a floor-filling dance party, punctuated by mellow ballads. CH
“Puppets” is loaded with the faux-profundity of a GCSE ditty excusing everybody of responsibility for their own actions: “German puppets burn the Jews/ Jewish puppets did not choose… Puppet lovers in their bliss/ Turn away from all of this.”
But “The Hill” is a grimly triumphant final stand against mortality and the only track for which Cohen wrote the music. A foghorn of bone-rattling brass blasts through the synths as Cohen says he’s “Living on pills/ For which I thank God”. He’s in animal pain but death – evoked as a woman – is approaching to bring relief. “My page is too white,” he concedes, “My ink is too thin/ The day wouldn’t write/ What the night pencilled in/ But I know she is coming/ I know she will look/ And that is the longing/ And this is the hook.”
I always get goosebumps when Cohen unpicks his structure: “It goes like this/ The fourth, the fifth/ The minor fall, the major lift/ The baffled king composing Hallelujah.” Bob Dylan – another wordy charmer I never trust – says Cohen’s melodies were underrated. And here he is, scoring his own ending with a dirge that becomes euphoric.
The record then bows out with a quiet recitation of the Hummingbird poem: it sounds like Lanois is playing his muffled piano back on Earth as Cohen drifts off: still talking, still telling us not to listen to him. Tricky. Witty. Self-indulgent. Self-effacing. Fedoras off.
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