Rare Bits

NOTE: This is a long-ish post, PLEASE read the awesome stuff below it first if you haven’t already.

This list will seem very unorthodox to some folks, and make perfect sense to others. I’ve always loved the movie and book High Fidelity, specifically the notion that albums can be sorted many different ways, not just alphabetically, by genre and chronologically. The following list is a personal compilation of albums that played an important role in my musical and creative life. Each calls me back to memories and emotions that were sweet, sublime or painful.

Disclaimer about this list: It is NOT a fixed list and is open to revision in coming years. It is NOT ordered in a hierarchy, the number 1 spot simply denotes the most recent acquisition. I, Sam Carbaugh, am NOT a music critic and these are meant to be heartfelt and not pretentious or condescending. If you like or dislike ANYTHING about this list, please let me know in the comments. I will be including a list of secondary albums that were very close and on certain days are interchangeable with the follow list.

And now, on with the show:

10. Nirvana: MTV Unplugged in New York.

My aunt Kris, God bless her soul, sent me a package shortly after I began high school. It was filled with Grunge-era CD’s that she had either grown out of, or made copies for herself. My mother wasn’t too keen on me listening to them right away, but eventually let me. Among the treasure trove was the entire career of Nirvana, and my number 10 album. It’s the perfect “best of” album I have ever heard from a band very much in their prime. Although I love their electric cascade of sound in their studio recordings (In Utero being my favorite), this one has an intimacy and vulnerability that was the goal of the MTV Unplugged sessions. I was introduced to the Vaselines and Muddy Waters as a result of this album and it will continue to be in any top ten list I make for the rest of my life. The rendition of “All Apologies” alone makes this a must-have for anyone who loves good music.

9. Semisonic: Feeling Strangely Fine

It feels strangely fine to have this on my list. Some time around my sophomore year, I was heavy into listening to ANYTHING on VH1 and MTV’s TRL. Some of the obsessions are embarrassing today: Creed, Korn, Eagle-Eye Cherry, and Limp Bizkit (although some good memories are attached to the music of these bands). It was a tape of Semisonic’s Feeling Strangely Fine that had a longer lasting appeal for me. Sure, everyone knows “Closing Time” and it was the reason I bought the album, but unlike most one-hit wonder albums of the late 90’s the other songs were great pop-rock. I listened to that tape over and over again during my family’s summer car trips, during study sessions and when playing Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness on the newly-created Battlenet website. Semisonic’s follow up work wasn’t nearly as great as this album, and even as I re-listen to it now, it’s not just a nostalgic love that taints my senses, it’s just good music.

8. The Smashing Pumpkins: Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

My first double-record. I loved this band all through high school but it wasn’t until my Junior year that I really got into their work. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was the first time I noticed an album that was deliberately put together AS an album with heavy songs happening every other track and quieter work rounding out the valleys in the mountains of noise. A perfect driving album with great emotions and hooks. It stands in my mind as one of the best mainstream rock albums of the mid to late 90’s. I remember listening to this album on bus rides to marching band events and on long autumn walks in the mojave desert nights. Billy Corgan’s voice haunts the memories of my last two years of high school, in a bittersweet way, which seems appropriate.

7. Minor Threat: The Complete Discography

The best teacher I had in high school, Bret Dobson, turned me on to Fugazi and the band that gave rise to it, Minor Threat. It was my first “underground” punk album and it blasted my teeth off. I was a very zealous teenager and the lyrics and passion in the band’s shotgun songs (most are under one minute) made me excited and a bit of a jerk. Now, I just love to play the record very loudly when driving through bad city traffic. “Good Guys Don’t Wear White” really struck me as a fun song that began to change my then-heavily right-winged political views toward a more moderate approach. Minor Threat is the kind of cultural gem that I look forward to handing to one of my kids once she or he begins to get interested in “Dad’s music.”

6. Radiohead: Amnesiac

The summer of 2001 was the strangest I’ve ever had. I was living with my grandparents in Grand Rapids before I would start college that fall. I knew no one my age in town and didn’t have a regular job. One day at Meijer, the local department store, I found a tape of Radiohead’s Amnesiac. I had never, ever heard any album by this band. Only once had I seen a music video for “Paranoid Android” which freaked me out . It was the design of the album itself that made me buy it. The neo-futuristic font and cover image of the torn up book made me think I might like it. It was in my Walkman for the rest of the summer and into the next year. Eventually I bought a CD of it and gave the tape to a friend. I regret that. It’s the space-like quality of the album, without a trace of radio appeal, that moves me each listen.

5. Pearl Jam: No Code

Perhaps the band’s least enjoyed album, No Code is my favorite Pearl Jam record. I was a fan of Pearl Jam before coming to college, but had never heard this one. I bought my copy with my friend Ryan Prins right after we saw the Royal Tenenbaums for the first time in January 2002. No Code has some of the best classic-rock influenced songs I’ve heard from an “alternative” band. Though completely disregarded by the majority of PJ fans, it has more longevity than other albums like Ten and Vs which sound dated by today’s musical standards.

4. The Beatles: The White Album

I know, weird that it would be so late in my musical list that the Beatles show up, well, I didn’t really LISTEN to the whole album until 2003. Sure, my parents had best of albums with “Back in the USSR” and “Ob-la-dee Ob-la-da” on them which played over and over again along with the Moody Blues and Blood Sweat and Tears, but I never really paid attention to the few times the album was played on our record player. Even than, it was just the first of the two records that played, never the second with “Helter-Skelter” and “Revolution 9.” I love this album, ALL of it. Probably the most influential album of their career, in the broadest sense.

3. The Pixies: Doolittle

Strangely, while I was 6 when this album first came out, I experienced the musical phenomenon of the Pixies much the same way as fans in the late 80’s. First, after watching Fight Club for the umpteenth time, I bought Surfer Rosa. Then a year or so after listening obsessively to it, I got Doolittle. Doolittle blew my mind. It’s like the Rosetta Stone for alternative and indie music that followed in its wake. I hear more of the Pixies’ influence in the alt/art/indie rock of today than other of their contemporaries like Sonic Youth and REM. It is on the short list for my number one album of all time.

2. The Arcade Fire: Funeral

So much has been written about his album by so many music snobs, critics and hipsters. You can read better summaries of it anywhere. What this album means to me, is purely emotional. Never since I heard Nirvana in my early teens had a band or album cut straight through me and illuminated my world in a new way. Funeral is an upbeat album about working through the crap and crud of life to celebrate while lamenting our condition and building our futures.

1. Sufjan Stevens: Come On Feel the Illinoise!

Less than a year since I was first blown away by the Arcade Fire, I was rocked by Sufjan Stevens. Yes, hipsters love Sufjan Stevens, and what is wrong with that? I’ve heard people dismiss this album due to its association with bright-eyed 20 somethings or its popularity. The music and lyrics of this album not only stand as a perfect representation of how I view/experience the midwest, I feel connected to the spirit of the recording the way generations of readers connected to “The Catcher in the Rye.” Sufjan points to something beyond ourselves that is good and true while rooting everything in experience.

My list of close seconds (in no particular order):

1. Weezer: The Blue Album

2. Wilco: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

3. Five Iron Frenzy: Proof that the Youth are Revolting

4. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!: Self-titled

5. Pedro the Lion: Control

6. Starflyer 59: Leave Here a Stranger and the Gold album

7. TV on the Radio: Dear Science

8. Ben Folds: Ben Folds Live

9. Bright Eyes: I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning

10. Iron and Wine: The Creek Drank the Cradle