Make Yourself, in one of the greatest coincidences on my list, was released one week before my number two pick, Rage Against the Machine's The Battle of Los Angeles, on October 26, 1999. The Battle of Los Angeles was Rage’s final album, and it opened at number one,...
The '90s were an amazing time for music, as an enormous amount of great material emerged in the first half of the decade. By the last few years of the decade, however, all of the grunge heavyweights had gone down in flames or, in the case of Pearl Jam, had been exiled...
For a long time, Ten was the only Pearl Jam album I cared about. I bought Vitalogy a couple years after I bought Ten, but I almost never listened to it, and I didn’t discover Vs. until I was in college. As for their post-Vitalogy portion of their career, that’s...
It’s not a stretch to say that Kind of Blue rivals the 1941 film Citizen Kane as the greatest American work of art produced in the entire 20th century. It probes the depths of consciousness and space in a way that’s both riveting and relaxing, thanks to the playing of...
I can still remember the moment Born to Run blew me away. It was the summer of 2004, and it was the night before the first day of my junior year of high school. I was busy studying for a history test that would be given not just the first day, but the second, as well....
Dark Side of the Moon is such a popular album, drawing fans from so many different backgrounds, that it's almost a cliché to put it so high on my list. But these are my favorites, at the end of the day, and Dark Side of the Moon was a key album for me when I...
I first got into the Eagles when I bought their 2003 double-disc compilation The Very Best Of, which is a really excellent way to hear all of their hits and some great album tracks if you’re looking to get into them. The Eagles formed in Los Angeles in 1971, but all...
You'll have a hard time finding many better albums than this one. When I first started checking out CDs from the libraries near my parents' house in Annapolis, Maryland at the age of sixteen, Who's Next was in the first batch. I had heard Limp Bizkit's pointless/awful...
I love how the heavens open up and deliver The Edge's guitar in the beginning of "Where the Streets Have No Name." It's certainly a fitting beginning for one of the most flawless albums ever crafted, a rare modern masterpiece that turned U2 into international...
Texas Flood is one of the most stunning debuts in the history of popular music; it instantly modernized the blues for a new generation upon its release in 1983. The blues had experienced a revival in the '60s, but it had fallen out of fashion by the early '80s,...