The jwalkernet Musical Canon: Part Seven (77-74)

Consider this my invisible post. We'll see if anyone sees it. (I'm posting this because it almost completely written anyway.)

77. Queens of the Stone Age, Songs for the Deaf
This album's loose concept is that it's the songs picked up on the radio of a car headed from Los Angeles to Mexico in the middle of the night. Fitting, then, that most of the tracks barrel forward with single-minded drive and focus. Josh Fromme lives and dies by his robotic, pounding riffs, and he's wise enough to hire drum master Dave Grohl to handle percussion duties. The songs hum and drone with an incessant urgency: "No One Knows," "Go with the Flow" and "First It Giveth" are must-haves for any soundtrack for an endless late-night drive. But they save their best gag for last -- the gorgeous and terrifying "Mosquito Song," parked at the end of the album, the only moment of delicate beauty.

76. The New Pornographers, Electric Version
There are other members of this band -- it's a "supergroup," apparently made of Canadian stars -- but it's really all about Niko Case. Feeling down? Listen to "All for Swinging You Around," and let her voice blast that sadness from every dark corner of your soul. "The Laws Have Changed" is a great song, until Niko comes in and makes it amazing. That's short-changing the rest of the group, obviously, and the fact is that everyone brings their A-game to this, creating a power-pop masterpiece on basically every track. But -- just between you and me -- it's all about Niko.

75. The Mars Volta, Frances the Mute
I guess in addition to being an obsessive completist, I also have an unwavering respect for artists that do exactly what they want to do, no matter what anyone else thinks. Take the Mars Volta -- a group of rational people might try to make their lyrics less obtuse than "She was a mink handjob in sarcophagus heels." Or at least pick just one language to sing those lyrics in. But clearly the Mars Volta are anything other than rational. Their song cycle not only begins in the middle of a song, its title track -- and "key" song -- isn't even on the damn album at all. But the music that is here, songs with impenetrable titles like "Cygnus...Vismund Cygnus" and "Miranda, That Ghost Just Isn't Holy Anymore," is flat-out jaw-dropping. They call this "progressive rock," but Pink Floyd was progressive rock, and there's no way the Floyd could have kept up with this schizophrenic lunacy. Frances the Mute is gargantuan -- the final piece, "Cassandra Gemini," clocks in at over 32 minutes, and features more melodies and themes than most other albums get through in twelve songs. If every band was as fearless as the Mars Volta, the world might be a lot better for it.

74. Fleetwood Mac, Rumours
There's a time in one's life when your only cultural knowledge comes from your parents. And then there comes the time when you reject it and find your own way. And then there comes the time when you look back and realize that maybe your parents got it right once in a while. Rumours is an album I loved as a kid, hated as a teenager, and have now fallen back in love with again as an adult. Because, really, there's no denying these songs. "Gold Dust Woman" sounds as fresh and amazing as it did when I was nine, and as it must have sounded when it was released over twenty years ago. "The Chain" is one of the perfect rock songs, starting so sparse and quiet and building to an amazing finish. I don't care who you are or what genre of music you prefer -- everyone can love Rumours. It's okay. Trust me: your mom was right on this one.

The jwalkernet Musical Canon: Part Six (82-78)

It occurs to me now how much longer I have until we finish this thing. I mean, we're just now getting out of the 80s. It didn't really settle in until yesterday, when I was tweaking the list -- I'd made a few egregious errors in ordering the albums from 40-60, but that's all settled now. I've got the whole thing in an Excel spreadsheet, of which here is a tiny, tiny piece:

(The titles in red -- which are numbers 51-100 on this list -- I've given a four-star rating at Rate Your Music. The gold albums, ranked 16-50, have a four-and-a-half star rating. The top fifteen, ranked a perfect five stars, are green, but aren't in this image, obviously. I can't imagine why I thought you would give a damn about this.)

Anyway. With that in mind, tonight we're gonna be a little more brief. One paragraph, if I can manage it. And even though I didn't do this on purpose, it's all '90s rock this time around. Go figure.

82. The Verve Pipe, The Verve Pipe
You remember from earlier in the list: I seem to love the album bands make after the one that makes them famous. In this case, the Verve Pipe followed the one-hit-wondertastic smash "The Freshmen" with this album-long meditation on stardom and the temporary nature of fame. The Verve Pipe is the rare sophomore album that seems to know it's a sophomore album, and there's no way the band could have actually believed these dark, sarcastic songs would actually hit. Even the songs that don't fit that theme are resigned and defeated, filled with broken hearts and bad dreams.

81. Oasis, Be Here Now
The first three Oasis albums, to me, each sound like the controlled substance the Gallagher brothers used most during its creation. Definitely, Maybe has the loud, clumsy roar of a good, drunken bender; (What's the Story) Morning Glory? has the sound and pace of a contemplative cigarette. Be Here Now, with its endless track listing and mammoth songs and arrangements, could only be the result of a mountain of cocaine. And it sure didn't appeal to audiences at the time -- Be Here Now is apparently the most-often pawned record in Britain, and not a single track from it made their greatest hits collection a few years back. But you know what? All that sound, all those guitars, all that noise? That's why I like the album so much. "All Around the World" could just be a throwaway pop song, but Noel Gallagher -- bless his douchebag black little heart -- stretches it out to over nine minutes, adds three (!) orchestras and something like fifteen key changes, and it becomes a fucking work of art. "D'You Know What I Mean?" doesn't need the two minutes of helicopter noises and Morse code at the beginning, I guess...but at the same time it really does. These songs have what Oasis songs had never had and would never have again -- weight. They could have just rewritten "Wonderwall" a dozen times and made everyone happy, but instead they took their body weights in Bolivian marching powder and recorded the longest, loudest fuck you they could muster. And it doesn't hurt that these are the best, most compelling songs the band would ever put together, with some of Noel's strongest lyrics (and Noel's lyrics are always awful -- he makes Coldplay look like Leonard Cohen). It's too bad they never tried anything this incredible again.

80. Foo Fighters, The Colour and the Shape
Dave Grohl recorded most of the first Foo Fighters album in his spare time, while Nirvana was still a thriving entity. After its success, he had to prove on his second album he was more than just Nirvana's drummer -- he needed to prove his chops as a genuine frontman. Luckily for him, he knocked it out of the park, and The Colour and the Shape is his best post-Nirvana work. This is late-nineties modern rock at its very finest -- "Monkey Wrench" is one of the best songs ever written, and "Everlong" isn't far behind. This is the first album of what I think of internally as my High School Trilogy -- the three albums that, honestly, I don't think I could have survived those four years without. The Colour and the Shape was one of them: when Grohl ends the record by repeatedly screaming I'm not scared, I felt like I could find a new way home, too.

79. Smashing Pumpkins, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
Billy Corgan is kind of an insufferable tool, but this is the album he was born to make. (It's also the third double album on the list. I can't help it, I like epics.) Everything Smashing Pumpkins was great at, everything they weren't so great at, all of it on display here. The loud ("Bullet with Butterfly Wings"), the melodic ("1979"), the twee ("Thirty-Three") and the insane ("We Only Come Out at Night"), stretching out as far as humanly possible. Siamese Dream seemed better at the time, but they've flipped sides completely looking back now: Mellon Collie feels like a perfect document of its era, when modern rock music was trying to morph into something else entirely -- maybe something electronic, maybe something grand and orchestral, maybe something ugly and out of its mind. It did none of those things, as we ended up with nu-metal and the post-grunge trash that Nickelback and Creed would deliver, but Billy Corgan was at least trying, dammit. For all its faults, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was a statement, something most artists of the time couldn't be bothered with. Oh, and "Zero" is just a great fucking song. So there.

78. Days of the New, Days of the New II
See my note in entry 82 about sophomore albums. Travis Meeks recorded the first Days of the New album at the age of seventeen, and it got a lot of play on rock radio for its unique sound -- he wrote grungy rock songs, but played them all acoustically, giving his work an amber tint and special quality. So, of course, he immediately fired the rest of his band and recorded this gigantic follow-up, which is about as sharp a turn one can take artistically without switching genres altogether. It's still rock, I guess -- but I can't think of a whole lot of other rock music that sounds like this, with the oboes and violins taking the melodies on several tracks. Meeks ties it all together as one massive piece, dropping in instrumentals and sound effects freakouts whenever the mood strikes. Suffice to say, Days of the New II was a massive commercial bomb on release, as fans of the first record fled to Creed concerts in horror.

The jwalkernet Musical Canon: Part Five (86-83)

[All entries.]

86. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
It doesn't get a whole lot more indie than this. Clap Your Hands's debut album was originally self-released, and by "self-released," I mean "the bassist personally licked the stamps and mailed discs to people." That independent attitude informs the entire record: this is noisy, jangly weirdo pop, insanely catchy and intensely weird at the same time. Alec Ounsworth's vocals stretch and snap like rubber bands -- sometimes they're on key, sometimes they're not; sometimes he enunciates, sometimes he doesn't. Sometimes the songs are good, sometimes they're not: the opening track is one of the most off-putting pieces of music I've heard, and it's meant to be that way. If you want into this album, you're going to have to earn it.

And that's probably why this is such a great record, and one of my favorites: its utter and complete confidence. They know their songs are good enough to deserve your attention, and if you're not willing to keep up with them through "Clap Your Hands!," well, that's your problem. The album's final track, "Upon This Tidal Wave of Young Blood," features my favorite moment: the band halts in transition from one part of the song to the next, hanging in the bridge as Ounsworth sticks on the phrase "child stars" like a skipping LP, repeating both music and words for what seems like a minute. The tension builds, and builds, and builds, and then releases you back with no warning. If that's too much for you, well, Clap Your Hands doesn't really care. (Which led, of course, to the inevitable hipster backlash, and I'm not sure it's cool to like this album anymore. Because I give a damn.)

85. The Postal Service, Give Up
Ben Gibbard's been writing delicate sad bastard songs for ages now with his band, Death Cab for Cutie, so I'm not sure why it's such a surprise that he'd turn out a set of similarly beautiful tracks for his side project. But the Postal Service -- a collaboration with electronic musician Jimmy Tamborello -- brings an entirely different feel, and the result is fantastic. Give Up is icy and dark, but pulses with energy -- a sad, mournful energy, but energy nonetheless.

It's the kind of album I wish I'd had in high school. Lonely, heartbroken songs like "Recycled Air" would have spun over and over in my CD player. I would have tried my best at writing pale retreads of "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight" in my notebooks, trying as hard as I could to recapture that elusive feeling. I would've tried to name my garage band We Will Become Silhouettes, and my friends would have refused.

But the best song here is, stunningly, the least despairing. "Such Great Heights" is easily the best thing either of the artists here have ever done and one of the best love songs ever written by anyone, four-and-a-half minutes of driving pop that is as close to perfect as one can get. And when someone as insistently depressed as Ben Gibbard says, "They will see us waving from such great heights," the hope in his voice is moving beyond words. If I'd heard it when I was fifteen, I probably would have been a much more pleasant guy to be around.

84. Genesis, Duke
Here's the thing with Phil Collins, okay: the guy takes a lot of crap, but he's actually a fairly talented guy. His tendencies toward schmaltz and over-emoting are problematic, but there was a time when he had a band that would rein him in. That band was Genesis, of course, and Duke is the last time they put out an album before the Phil Factor started pushing them over the shark and into bland irrelevance. Even the poppier excursions -- "Misunderstanding," I'm looking at you -- hold up much better than, say, "Sussudio."

Duke is also the last time Genesis really stretched out like the progressive rock pioneers they could be. "Duke's Travels/Duke's End" is as compelling a piece as they ever recorded, almost eleven minutes of rich, layered music; "Turn It on Again" may be pop, but its 13/4 time signature adds a rare element. Those instincts running in opposite directions -- to one side straightforward rock, to the other progressive experimentation -- came into perfect balance on Duke, which stands as their last great album.

83. Genesis, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
Of course, there was a time when Phil Collins was just a drummer, and a truly demented man stood up front...sometimes dressed as a flower. If Duke was Phil's best Genesis record, then The Lamb is Peter Gabriel's masterpiece, a mammoth two-disc suite that shows all of Gabriel's lunacies in full bloom. A barely intelligible story, laden with symbolism and sexual imagery, coupled with the most intricate, elaborate music Genesis ever recorded together. The creation of this album drove Gabriel from the group completely, but I almost can't blame the band. How could they be expected to keep up with this?

I won't try to summarize the story, because I can't, so I'll stick to the songs, which are uniformly brilliant. "Broadway Melody of 1974" throws pop culture into a blender, dishing out a surrealist treasure ("Lenny Bruce declares a truce and plays his other hand/Marshall Mcluhan, casual viewin', head buried in the sand"). "The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging" starts tiny, but stacks on itself until it reaches titanic size. "The Carpet Crawlers" might be the best song Genesis ever put to tape, hushed and gorgeous, swaying with such power and beauty that it almost tricks you into thinking you understand what Gabriel's talking about. (You won't, though: "Mild mannered supermen are held in Kryptonite/While the wise and foolish virgins giggle, with their bodies glowing bright/Through the door, a harvest feast is lit by candlelight." Yeah, and don't even get me started on the part with the raven who steals the protagonist's penis.)

I love The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway for a lot of the same reasons I love Clap Your Hands, now that I think about it: it's a flat-out shitballs crazy record confident enough to let all its weirdness flow out as far as it can. There are no "safe" songs here, no ready-for-radio singles to give the audience an entrance into the album. There's just The Lamb, all of it, and you're either in or you're out.

My 25 Favorite Album Covers

And of course, this is solely about the quality of the cover art -- the actual music inside doesn't always stack up, unfortunately.

25.
Neon Bible
Arcade Fire









24.
A Momentary Lapse of Reason
Pink Floyd









23.
King of America
Elvis Costello









22.
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
The Beatles









21.
Stankonia
OutKast








20.
Illinois
Sufjan Stevens









19.
Late Registration
Kanye West









18.
Dark Side of the Moon
Pink Floyd









17.
Dirt
Alice in Chains









16.
The Slim Shady LP
Eminem









15.
Korn
Korn









14.
...And Justice for All
Metallica









13.
Quadrophenia
The Who









12.
Who's Next
The Who









11.
Relentless
Bill Hicks









10.
Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King
Dave Matthews Band









9.
Ride the Lightning
Metallica









8.
Animals
Pink Floyd









7.
Peter Gabriel 3
Peter Gabriel









6.
Frances the Mute
The Mars Volta









5.
Nevermind
Nirvana









4.
Wish You Were Here
Pink Floyd









3.
The Blueprint
Jay-Z









2.
Master of Puppets
Metallica









1.
Abbey Road
The Beatles

The jwalkernet Musical Canon: Part Four (89-87)

By the way, I'm getting all of the album art for these lists from Rate Your Music, a handy music cataloging and research site. In case you were curious. Which you probably were not.


89. Ben Folds, Rockin' the Suburbs
Ben Folds is an avowed admirer of Randy Newman, so it's no surprise that his first solo pop album would take a similar approach: a series of short stories and character sketches, masterfully crafted and performed. Actually, the biggest surprise is how little his work suffers from the lack of his backing band -- though I love the Ben Folds Five (and they will most certainly show up later in our countdown), he shines here alone, playing almost all of the instruments himself. That autonomy results in an album that's more tightly wound than previous efforts (all those overdubs leave little room for improvisation), but the songs and performances are so brilliant that it doesn't matter.

And for a guy who achieved fame as frontman of "the piano band that rocks," Rockin' the Suburbs is stunningly low-key. Sure, the title track is a heavy hitter (and truly hilarious, as Folds lampoons the whiny white-boy metal of Fred Durst and his ilk), but it's wildly out of place. Even more thumping songs like "Not the Same" are tempered and almost delicate. And the album does work best at its most quiet: "Fred Jones Pt. 2" is practically whispered, and "The Luckiest" is love-song cheese at its very finest.

88. MC Frontalot, Nerdcore Rising
Someone over at Pitchfork wrote recently that rapping about the internet is never cool. Well, MC Frontalot has never been very interested in being cool, as each and every beat of Nerdcore Rising proves. This is a phenomenally geeky record, obsessed with everything you'd expect to find rattling around a nerd's head: illegal music downloads, Star Wars, collectible card games, Penny Arcade, Nigerian email scams and girls in goth makeup. And as for Pitchfork, they might give a listen to "Indier Than Thou," which has choice words for their often tiring hipsterism.

The geekiness wouldn't be noteworthy if Frontalot weren't such a talented rapper, but thankfully he's a genius -- his work on tracks like "Charity Case" and "This Old Man" can stand up to any other "real" rapper you'd care to mention. And Front's blinding-fast delivery stacks up the clever rhymes and jokes high and deep, unfolding in the listener's ear over multiple plays. Screw Pitchfork: Frontalot turns being uncool into a art form.

87. Bob Dylan, Blood on the Tracks
Some of Dylan's best songs are like listening to someone juggle. Take "Simple Twist of Fate," one of Blood's very best songs. He keeps piling on the lyrics, telling his elaborate and intricate story, and you know that every verse is going to end with a word that rhymes with "fate"...but you don't know which one. And that lends the entire song with an almost mysterious air of tension, waiting for him to finally land on that last line. This wouldn't work for most songwriters, of course. But Dylan isn't most songwriters, and Blood on the Tracks isn't most albums.

Inspired by either the end of a marriage (if you ask critics and fans) or the short stories of Anton Chekhov (if you ask Dylan), Blood on the Tracks is a largely bleak, somber affair; its short bursts of humor ("Tangled up in Blue") ring out like firecrackers. "Idiot Wind," on the other hand, is a head-shaking, drunken scream of rage, enveloping both the listener and Dylan's target in a shroud of bile: "You're an idiot, babe/It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe."

This is the album that turned me into a Dylan fan. I'd heard some of his bigger hits, but this was the first Dylan album I ever truly fell in love with. When I heard him tripping through "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts," I finally understood what all the fuss was about. I don't see how anyone could hear "Shelter from the Storm" and not understand it.

The jwalkernet Musical Canon: Part Three (93-90)

[Hey, yeah, it's back. Time to finish what I started. Previous entries are here and here.]

93. Nine Inch Nails, The Fragile
Trent Reznor's work has always been frustrating and uneven to me. That he managed to fill two complete discs with music not only listenable but jaw-droppingly amazing, then, is not just impressive, it's a goddamn miracle. The Fragile is the sound of a master studio craftsman branching out in every direction he can, as far out as he can, all at once. It's a little overwhelming at times, in fact -- the frequent sparse instrumentals serve as much-needed breathers. At least, some of them do: "Just Like You Imagined" starts quietly, but ends up pounding with more force than anything Reznor had constructed before, or since.

I guess it's technically a concept album, though I'm not sure I can parse what exactly that concept might be. Things start bad ("fuck the rest and stab it dead"), get worse ("it didn't turn out the way you wanted it, did it?"), and then bottom out entirely ("the closer I get, the worse it becomes"). But along the way, Trent finds himself reaching outward for the first time: "We're in This Together Now" is a wail of optimistic determination, and the title track ends with his repeated declaration that he "won't let you fall apart." All of which makes his eventual downfall on the album's final songs all the more tragic.

92. Elton John, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy
It isn't his most popular album, or his most epic, or his most experimental. But Captain Fantastic is my favorite Elton John record because it's the one with the most feeling. Bernie Taupin's lyrics aren't character sketches or vague, obtuse tone poems anymore -- these songs are fiercely autobiographical, telling the story of his and Elton's rise up to the top of the pop music world. And it's exactly the kind of raw, emotional experience you'd expect, tinged with just the right amounts of nostaliga, relief and regret.

It's also really angry, though Elton's sweet melodies and blast-to-the-rafters vocals can hide that. "Someone Saved My Life Tonight" can sound, at first listen, to be a lighter-waving ballad; further analysis finds real bile in lines like "A slip noose hanging in my darkest dreams/I'm strangled by your haunted social scene." And "Tower of Babel" -- Elton makes it appear to be a standard-issue pub rocker, but Bernie's there to say "See the letches crawl with the call girls under the table/Watch 'em dig their graves." But in the end, they can't look back in anger anymore -- "Curtains" brings the album to a close by addressing the listener directly, with the notion that "just like us, you must have had your once upon a time." Sometimes those childhood dreams and fairy tales do come true.

91. Randy Newman, Good Old Boys
Some satirists aim their jokes like sniper rifles. Some like machine guns. Randy Newman manages to do both at once somehow, eviscerating people on both sides of an argument. Take this album's opening track, "Rednecks." Listen to the lyrics. Now, exactly who is he making fun of? Southerners, for being racists? Northerners, for hypocritically mocking southerners for racism while clinging to racism themselves? Southerners, for hypocritically attacking northerners for making fun of them hypocritically? The listener, for laughing at either one of them? No, the joke is somehow on everyone, everywhere, all at the same time.

Newman's a master of this, and his gifts were at their peak on Good Old Boys, a loosely-constructed song suite about life in the American south. His bouncing rhythms and sweet piano melodies are a perfect place to hide the ugliness at the bottom of a story like "Back on My Feet Again," and his ochestra is the perfect accompaniment to the pain and anguish of "Louisiana 1927." He'd write better and more popular songs, and evetually win an Oscar for one, but he'd never again put together an album with quite the impact as Good Old Boys.

90. Peter Gabriel, Us
Gabriel reacted to the success of his breakthrough pop hit, So, in a rather surprising fashion: he scored a controversial film (The Passion of the Christ), and then didn't do anything else at all for six years. By the time 1992 rolled around, most of the momentum from hits like "Sledgehammer" and "In Your Eyes" had faded, and Us didn't really make the impact on the mainstream it should have. Which is a damn shame, because Us is a stunning collection of material that doesn't really sound like anything else.

It's an intensely lonely album, beginning with an extended plea to "Come Talk to Me," and continuing through the wreckage of failed relationships in "Love to Be Loved" and "Blood of Eden." "Steam" and "Kiss That Frog" lend some pep and humor, but "Washing of the Water" is arresting in its bald-faced anguish; "Digging in the Dirt" turns that sadness into a bipolar stomp through rage and misery. But through all of that, there's Gabriel's voice, and when he finally concludes on "Secret World" that "With no guilt and no shame, no sorrow or blame/Whatever it is, we are all the same," his happy ending seems more than earned.

The jwalkernet Musical Canon: Part Two (#94-97)

97. Fastball, All the Pain Money Can Buy
A peculiar brand of rock dominated my local radio station from the mid- to late-nineties. Let's call it alterna-pop: big guitars, lots of distortion, massive choruses and ready-for-radio hooks. Some of these bands you may remember, others not, but they were all I could find on my FM dial through most of my years in high school. Marcy Playground, Tonic, Better Than Ezra, Semisonic, Eve 6, Lit, etc. They were all huge. Some had multiple hits; most had but one.

The winner of this bizarre battle royale? An Austin trio called Fastball, whose hit single "The Way" ruled the airwaves for a few months, gave way to a few less-successful hits, and then pretty much vanished from the face of the mainstream. A follow-up album sold about a tenth as many copies, and Fastball disappeared. And that's too bad, because All the Pain Money Can Buy shows a depth you wouldn't expect from a one-hit wonder. There are the big alterna-pop numbers you'd expect, sure -- "Warm Fuzzy Feeling" and "Fire Escape" are probably the best -- but also a distinct country twinge to be found on the slower tracks, like "Nowhere Road" and the beautiful "Out of My Head."

96. Modest Mouse, The Moon & Antarctica
It's jangly, self-indulgent and overlong. The vocals are shaking, the guitars hovering in and out of key. It's a mess. It's also one of the most achingly beautiful records ever produced, a shimmering suite that feels as lonely and as cold as the locations in its title. Issac Brock's musical meditation on death and its aftermath have an effect so few albums do -- it crawls in your head through your ears and stays there, long after it's finished.

Earlier Modest Mouse albums piled on the noise and the quirk until they were practically unlistenable, but Moon finds them finally hitting all their marks. A large part of that is Brian Deck's spacey production; another is Brock's dogged focus. His songs are wounded tirades, seeking out answers and relief when surrounded by pain. He doesn't find much -- the closer, "What People Are Made Of," slams the door with a bang, coming to the conclusion that they're not made of much more than "water and shit."

95. Jonathan Coulton, Smoking Monkey
This might be a tad ironic, because Smoking Monkey isn't close to being JoCo's best release. The Thing a Week series is stunning merely because of its achievement, let alone the quality of some of those songs; the Where Tradition Meets Tomorrow EP is an essential that everyone should have in their collection. But again, this is my 100 favorite albums, and Smoking remains his only full-length LP. (Unless you count each part of the Thing a Week series as an individual LP, which I don't. And none of those are consistent enough on their own, anyway.)

Not to give you the impression this is a bad record -- gods, no. Smoking Monkey is a funny, catchy minor miracle, a smart collection of songs that shows a wonderfully geeky sensibility. Old holiday stories get tossed into a cuisinart on "Christmas Is Interesting," and "First of May" strips people-get-together sing-alongs of their innocence. My favorite: "Kenesaw Mountain Landis," an hilarious retelling of the 1919 Black Sox scandal, which manages to get just about every fact as wrong as possible in just over three and a half minutes -- "Kenesaw Mountain Landis was a bad motherfucker / He was seventeen feet tall, he had a hundred fifty wives" -- before ending it with a pun on Shoeless Joe Jackson vs. singer Joe Jackson.

94. Van Morrison, St. Dominic's Preview
So, in my first post, when I hinted that the artists with three entries wouldn't be who you'd expect -- exactly who was I trying to kid?

I could go on for days and days about Van's voice (and don't think I won't in his later appearances on our countdown), but this time around I'll focus on the songs, which are among the brightest he's recorded. "Jackie Wilson Said (I'm in Heaven When You Smile)" practically bounces with glee; "Redwood Tree" glows like the sunset. The title track, one of his very best compositions, feels like a reassuring arm slung over your shoulder. Elsewhere, "Almost Independence Day" harkens back to his first album, the flawless Astral Weeks, and features an acoustic guitar melody strikingly similar to one Pink Floyd would use on "Wish You Were Here" three years later.

If you don't have any Van Morrison (for shame!), St. Dominic's may be the best place to start. Not as spiritual as Astral Weeks, but it's the perfect feel-good record. Listening to Van here, I can't help but smile. You won't be able to, either.