Those Best Album Of All Time Lists...

MoonlitSunshine · 12-08-2011, 09:40 AM

In theory, you could believe that an album is only marginally the best album ever, but it could be rated as far beyond anything else ever conceived. It would then be overrated. However, I don't think that much thought has gone into his statement :P

Chives · 12-08-2011, 12:43 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Pedestrian

Sorry, but I've got to ask: How can you think an album is your favourite of all time, but also think it overrated?

Well, a lot of people get crazy over Sgt. Pepper. I happen to really enjoy listening to the album but the way some people talk about it like it's some magical, god-like entity (I haven't seen that response on Music Banter). It's a very important, very good album, and I listen to it a ton, but there are some minor things that urk me about the album. Basically, some people I know treat it as a perfect album when in reality it's just a good album.

Unknown Soldier · 12-08-2011, 12:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chives

Well, a lot of people get crazy over Sgt. Pepper. I happen to really enjoy listening to the album but the way some people talk about it like it's some magical, god-like entity (I haven't seen that response on Music Banter). It's a very important, very good album, and I listen to it a ton, but there are some minor things that urk me about the album. Basically, some people I know treat it as a perfect album when in reality it's just a good album.

Its because its seen as the pinnacle achievement of the Beatles and like any album thats held in such high esteem, critics will always look for its flaws. Is it one of the best albums of all time? Most certainly, even if its just the second best album of 1967.

Salami · 12-08-2011, 01:02 PM

If you are interested in reading a review which does exactly that, allow Rolling Stone to elaborate:

Quote:

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is the most important rock & roll album ever made, an unsurpassed adventure in concept, sound, songwriting, cover art and studio technology by the greatest rock & roll group of all time. From the title song's regal blasts of brass and fuzz guitar to the orchestral seizure and long, dying piano chord at the end of "A Day in the Life," the thirteen tracks on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band are the pinnacle of the Beatles' eight years as recording artists. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were never more fearless and unified in their pursuit of magic and transcendence.

Issued in Britain on June 1st, 1967, and a day later in America,Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is also rock's ultimate declaration of change. For the Beatles, it was a decisive goodbye to matching suits, world tours and assembly-line record-making. "We were fed up with being Beatles," McCartney said decades later, in Many Years From Now, Barry Miles' McCartney biography. "We were not boys, we were men . . . artists rather than performers."

At the same time, Sgt. Pepper formally ushered in an unforgettable season of hope, upheaval and achievement: the late 1960s and, in particular, 1967's Summer of Love. In its iridescent instrumentation, lyric fantasias and eye-popping packaging, Sgt. Pepper defined the opulent revolutionary optimism of psychedelia and instantly spread the gospel of love, acid, Eastern spirituality and electric guitars around the globe. No other pop record of that era, or since, has had such an immediate, titanic impact. This music documents the world's biggest rock band at the very height of its influence and ambition. "It was a peak," Lennon confirmed in his 1970 Rolling Stone interview, describing both the album and his collaborative relationship with McCartney. "Paul and I definitely were working together," Lennon said, and Sgt. Pepper is rich with proof: McCartney's burst of hot piano and school-days memoir ("Woke up, fell out of bed . . . ") in Lennon's "A Day in the Life," a reverie on mortality and infinity; Lennon's impish rejoinder to McCartney's chorus in "Getting Better" ("It can't get no worse").

"Sgt. Pepper was our grandest endeavor," Starr said, looking back, in the 2000 autobiography The Beatles Anthology. "The greatest thing about the band was that whoever had the best idea — it didn't matter who — that was the one we'd use. No one was standing on their ego, saying, 'Well, it's mine,' and getting possessive." It was Neil Aspinall, the Beatles' longtime assistant, who suggested they reprise the title track, just before the grand finale of "A Day in the Life," to complete Sgt. Pepper's theatrical conceit: an imaginary concert by a fictional band, played by the Beatles.

The first notes went to tape on December 6th, 1966: two takes of McCartney's music-hall confection "When I'm Sixty-Four." (Lennon's lysergic reflection on his Liverpool childhood, "Strawberry Fields Forever," was started two weeks earlier but issued in February 1967 as a stand-alone single.) But Sgt. Pepper's real birthday is August 29th, 1966, when the Beatles played their last live concert, in San Francisco. Until then, they had made history in the studio — Please Please Me (1963), Rubber Soul (1965), Revolver (1966) — between punishing tours. Off the road for good, the Beatles were free to be a band away from the hysteria of Beatlemania. McCartney went a step further. On a plane to London in November '66, as he returned from a vacation in Kenya, he came up with the idea of an album by the Beatles in disguise, an alter-ego group that he subsequently dubbed Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. "We'd pretend to be someone else," McCartney explained in Anthology. "It liberated you — you could do anything when you got to the mike or on your guitar, because it wasn't you."

Only two songs on the final LP, both McCartney's, had anything to do with the Pepper character: the title track and Starr's jaunty vocal showcase "With a Little Help From My Friends," introduced as a number by Sgt. Pepper's star crooner, Billy Shears. "Every other song could have been on any other album," Lennon insisted later. Yet it is hard to imagine a more perfect setting for the Victorian jollity of Lennon's "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" (inspired by an 1843 circus poster) or the sumptuous melancholy of McCartney's "Fixing a Hole," with its blend of antique shadows (a harpsichord played by the Beatles' producer George Martin) and modern sunshine (double-tracked lead guitar executed with ringing precision by Harrison). The Pepper premise was a license to thrill.

It also underscored the real-life cohesion of the music and the group that made it. Of the 700 hours the Beatles spent making Sgt. Pepper (engineer Geoff Emerick actually tallied them) from the end of 1966 until April 1967, the group needed only three days' worth to complete Lennon's lavish daydream "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds." "A Day in the Life," the most complex song on the album, was done in just five days. (The oceanic piano chord was three pianos hit simultaneously by ten hands belonging to Lennon, McCartney, Starr, Martin and Beatles roadie Mal Evans.) No other Beatles appear with Harrison on his sitar-perfumed sermon on materialism and fidelity, "Within You Without You," but the band wisely placed the track at the halfway point of the original vinyl LP, at the beginning of Side Two: a vital meditation break in the middle of the jubilant indulgence.

The Beatles' exploitation of multitracking on Sgt. Pepper transformed the very act of studio recording (the orchestral overdubs on "A Day in the Life" marked the debut of eight-track recording in Britain: two four-track machines used in sync). And Sgt. Pepper's visual extravagance officially elevated the rock album cover to a Work of Art. Michael Cooper's photo of the Beatles in satin marching-band outfits, in front of a cardboard-cutout audience of historical figures, created by artist Peter Blake, is the most enduring image of the psychedelic era. Sgt. Pepper was also the first rock album to incorporate complete lyrics to the songs in its design.

Yet Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is the Number One album of the RS 500 not just because of its firsts — it is simply the best of everything the Beatles ever did as musicians, pioneers and pop stars, all in one place. A 1967 British print ad for the album declared, "Remember Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Is the Beatles." As McCartney put it, the album was "just us doing a good show."

The show goes on forever.

**Janszoon** · 12-08-2011, 01:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rolling Stone

For the Beatles, it was a decisive goodbye to matching suits...

Really?

Salami · 12-08-2011, 01:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Janszoon

Really?

Four smilies?

I knew Rolling Stone was never a match for Janszoon!

There are so many pieces of unnecessary pomposity in there, I present you with a choice few:

Quote:

"We were not boys, we were men . . . artists rather than performers."

Quote:

Sgt. Pepper defined the opulent revolutionary optimism of psychedelia and instantly spread the gospel of love, acid, Eastern spirituality and electric guitars around the globe.

Quote:

The show goes on forever.

s_k · 12-08-2011, 04:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Unknown Soldier

Don`t underestimate yourself, looking at your list, you can probably teach some people quite a bit, there`s a lot of great classic and forgotten releases on it.

Well thanks

. I'll see what I can do.

Quote:

That Styx album btw, is easily their poorest from their mid to late 1970s golden era, as is only really on there because it contained "Babe", the rest of the album is quite bland.

I, in general, don't like that kind of 'eighties rock'. Which is why I only play boat on the river, as it's so different from all the other Styx tracks I've heard. Or did I really miss out on something?

Quote:

I never said I disliked the original FWM, just that I preferred the second incarnation (proper) of the band. I`m actually a huge fan of blues rock in general, but I happen to think that a lot of the artists of that genre performed far better live than they did on their studio recordings. Ten Years After are a perfect example.

Well, I obviously prefer these old Ten Years After albums to FWM. It's just... Well I don't like pop music I guess. And the later Fleetwood mac is zo... poppy, so aimed to be loved by many. It's disturbing.

captaincaptain · 12-08-2011, 08:35 PM

Great albums, but due to the status quo you will rarely see "music experts" change things up.

1. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - The Beatles - 2 years
2. Pet Sounds - The Beach Boys - 1 year
3. Revolver - The Beatles - In the past year for the first time.
4. Highway 61 Revisited - Bob Dylan - 3-4 years
5. Rubber Soul - The Beatles - 2 years
6. What's Going On - Marvin Gaye - 8 years
7. Exile on Main Street - The Rolling Stones - I've listened to this about a dozen times in the past year
8. London Calling - The Clash - At least a half of dozen times in the past month
9. Blonde on Blonde - Bob Dylan - 3 years
10. The Beatles ("The White Album") - The Beatles - This year
11. The Sun Sessions - Elvis Presley - A year ago
12. Kind of Blue - Miles Davis - A long time
13. Velvet Underground and Nico - The Velvet Underground - This year
14. Abbey Road - The Beatles - 2 years
15. Are You Experienced? - The Jimi Hendrix Experience - 8 years
16. Blood on the Tracks - Bob Dylan - 2 yers
17. Nevermind - Nirvana - This year, the remastered version
18. Born to Run - Bruce Springsteen - 2 years
19. Astral Weeks - Van Morrison - A couple of weeks ago
20. Thriller - Michael Jackson - When he kicked the bucket
21. The Great Twenty-Eight - Chuck Berry - Never though I've probably heard all the songs on it.
22. Plastic Ono Band - John Lennon - Only select songs
23. Innervisions - Stevie Wonder - 5 years
24. Live at the Apollo - James Brown - This year
25. Rumours - Fleetwood Mac - This year
26. The Joshua Tree - U2 - 2 years
27. King of the Delta Blues Singers, Vol. 1 - Robert Johnson - 10 years
28. Who's Next - The Who - 4 years
29. Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin - This year
30. Blue - Joni Mitchell - A couple of weeks ago

Howard the Duck · 12-08-2011, 08:53 PM

addendum:-

Born to Run - Bruce Springsteen - isn't really remarkable, except for the title track and Jungleland - much prefer Nebraska

captaincaptain · 12-08-2011, 09:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Il Duce

addendum:-

Born to Run - Bruce Springsteen - isn't really remarkable, except for the title track and Jungleland - much prefer Nebraska

Nebraska is definitely better and I consider it his "masterpiece". The Boss was always sounded better without the E Street Band.

12-08-2011, 09:40 AM	#41 (permalink)
MoonlitSunshine Dat's Der Bunny! Join Date: Jul 2006 Location: Ireland Posts: 1,088	In theory, you could believe that an album is only marginally the best album ever, but it could be rated as far beyond anything else ever conceived. It would then be overrated. However, I don't think that much thought has gone into his statement :P __________________ "I found it eventually, at the bottom of a locker in a disused laboratory, with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard". Ever thought of going into Advertising?" - Arthur Dent

12-08-2011, 08:35 PM	#48 (permalink)
captaincaptain I Am Become Death Metal Join Date: Sep 2009 Location: Stankonia Posts: 695	Great albums, but due to the status quo you will rarely see "music experts" change things up. 1. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - The Beatles - 2 years 2. Pet Sounds - The Beach Boys - 1 year 3. Revolver - The Beatles - In the past year for the first time. 4. Highway 61 Revisited - Bob Dylan - 3-4 years 5. Rubber Soul - The Beatles - 2 years 6. What's Going On - Marvin Gaye - 8 years 7. Exile on Main Street - The Rolling Stones - I've listened to this about a dozen times in the past year 8. London Calling - The Clash - At least a half of dozen times in the past month 9. Blonde on Blonde - Bob Dylan - 3 years 10. The Beatles ("The White Album") - The Beatles - This year 11. The Sun Sessions - Elvis Presley - A year ago 12. Kind of Blue - Miles Davis - A long time 13. Velvet Underground and Nico - The Velvet Underground - This year 14. Abbey Road - The Beatles - 2 years 15. Are You Experienced? - The Jimi Hendrix Experience - 8 years 16. Blood on the Tracks - Bob Dylan - 2 yers 17. Nevermind - Nirvana - This year, the remastered version 18. Born to Run - Bruce Springsteen - 2 years 19. Astral Weeks - Van Morrison - A couple of weeks ago 20. Thriller - Michael Jackson - When he kicked the bucket 21. The Great Twenty-Eight - Chuck Berry - Never though I've probably heard all the songs on it. 22. Plastic Ono Band - John Lennon - Only select songs 23. Innervisions - Stevie Wonder - 5 years 24. Live at the Apollo - James Brown - This year 25. Rumours - Fleetwood Mac - This year 26. The Joshua Tree - U2 - 2 years 27. King of the Delta Blues Singers, Vol. 1 - Robert Johnson - 10 years 28. Who's Next - The Who - 4 years 29. Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin - This year 30. Blue - Joni Mitchell - A couple of weeks ago __________________ LAST.FM RYM