The Top Ten Debut Albums

Today I took matters into my own hands and lopped all the hair on my stupid jew-y head off. I feel kind of liberated. If anything, I can shower less frequently and still look relatively put-together. In a perfect world, I would have kept growing my beard and then shaved when it was nice and bushy. Only a certain kind of man can rock the utterly bald crown atop an Appalachian mountainman forest of a face. The imagery in that last sentence is almost stunning enough to earn its way into a PitchforkMedia record review. It’s that crystalline.

Since I spent the past two days discussing external issues I figure it’s time to once again do what I do best and talk about myself. This weekend I have some plans that should see me hanging out with people I love and don’t get to see very often. Next week I’m driving down to Savannah, Georgia for ten days. That’s the immediate future. I printed out some resumes and (gasp) got them into people’s hands. We’ll see what happens. I have no real expectations of any opportunities coming to fruition.

Here’s your weekly Top-Ten, sponsored by Hot-97 and US Weekly.

The Top Ten Debut Albums

Anyone can make a debut record. Most artists don’t hit their stride until album number two or three or four, but how many make their first one so incredible that your veins assplode? These folks have! These aren’t in descending order, nor are they in ascending order. They’re just listed using what appear to be a descending series of ordinals instead of bullets or dashes.

10) Leonard Cohen Songs of Leonard Cohen – My personal favorite is still Songs of Love and Hate, but he really started his recording career by setting the bar, as one cliche would have you believe, impossibly high. His songs are void of ego, his lyrics about losers and love are far more poignant than his peers’ attempts to portray similar circumstances. If I had to make a list of the most influential writers in my life, Cohen is without question near the apex of the list.

9) Jimi Hendrix Are You Experienced? – Soothsayer that I am, I foretold that this would definitely be ranked as one of the all-time greatest debuts on a list that I invented. Perhaps no other musician, in one album (let alone their first, for fuck’s sake!), influenced such a wide breadth of people with a style so new and unique. The shrill feedback and the bombast, maybe only Pete Townshend was as innovative a guitar player at the time. It’s pure musical genius. And madness. Maaaaaadneeeessss!

8) Tom Waits Closing Time – There isn’t a more melancholy album on this list. Each song is about drinking and being indelibly lonesome, set to jazzy melodies and instrumentation. No wonder he smoked so much! Too bad on the rest of his albums he sings with, as Mark Prindle so perfectly describes, a “scraggly vomitous phlegm voice.” Not that it’s a bad thing, I still enjoy Nighthawks and Mule Variations and Alice.

7) The Velvet Underground The Velvet Underground & Nico – Again, I don’t like this one as much as the self-titled album but this list isn’t about me and my aesthetic tastes, it’s about releasing a stellar batch of songs as your first official LP. Also, it is about me, because this is my list and I am King Shit of Fuck Mountain, and you will listen to what I have to say. You will go home and buy these albums and they will change things, for you. Now, if you choose to buy this particular album, the one thing that will change is you’ll probably start doing more drugs.

6) Pavement Slanted and Enchanted – Some hipster dufus would probably ring my neck if I forgot to include this album. I love it a lot, but it’s easy to forget because Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain holds a special place in my genitals.

5) Television Marquee Moon – I wrote about this one a few weeks ago so I’ll conserve mental energy and rely on the ol’ copy/paste trick to make my point. “Richard Lloyd is a genius, and this album is absolutely the very definition of a “guitar record,” if ever there was a Grammy awarded for the distinction. A lot of folks say that before Marquee Moon guitarists were just wailing on blues riffs, but these guys did the garage rock three-chord shuffle like you wouldn’t believe, and subtly influenced BILLIONS of people. Go listen to the title track. Epic. Then go over to 30th Street Guitars in the city, they’ve got Lloyd’s Echoplex on sale there. I know it’s his because it’s got a little index card next to it that says “Belonged to Lloyd of Television” and on the case itself there’s a piece of electrical tape that says LLOYD.”

4) Joy Division Unknown Pleasures – It’s a very stark recording. I like that. Also, there were some good songs on it, I heard. Wrought with emotion. But then again, what else would you expect from a guy who killed himself a few years later!

3) Big Black Atomizer – What would one of my music lists be without some sort of Albini reference. Most of the bands that constructed the American underground in the 80′s had phenomenal impacts pretty much right off the bat. You could say that Black Flag’s Damaged or Mission of Burma’s Vs. were better albums than this, but out of those three I still listen to this one the most so that’s how I chose. Pretty smart idea, huh? You know what always pissed me off during the presidential debates in ’04? John Kerry standing at the podium and saying “idear” over and over and over. I wanted to slap his face, but it was already melting off his skull so he probably wouldn’t have even felt it.

2) Wire Pink Flag – Was way more innovative than anything else the British punk kids were doing at the time. It’s so much fun to listen to, it could KILL YOU. Man, I’m bored.

1) Van Morrison Astral Weeks – I don’t know if this counts because, I think, technically (if I may use another comma or six), Blowin’ Your Mind was his first album. But we’re willing to forget that simple fact for the sake of sensationalism. Here’s what I once wrote about Van Morrison’s “debut” album, Gastrointestinal Weaks. “Let the fools have their “Brown Eyed Girl” and their “Moondance,” we know Astral Weeks is one of the greatest fucking albums ever recorded in the history of mankind. The man was 21 or 22 years old, and there’s so much pain and hardship present here you have to wonder the immense amount of strife Morrison saw in his early years. It opens with the title track, a forceful number based around two or three chords with lyrics I couldn’t begin to comprehend. Then he launches into “Beside You” which is one of the most gut wrenching songs you’ll ever hear. As far as my own songwriting is concerned, no one has taught me more about utilizing the English language than Morrison did on this album. It’s not so much the vocabulary as it is the tricks he’s able to pull, his style of manipulating words and fitting as much as he can in a finite space. He repeats words and phrases in spurts with force enough that they become a series of mantras. It’s in every track on this album, from the crescendo of “you breathe in, you breathe out” on “Beside You” to the utterly insane “And the love that loves the love that loves the love that loves the love that loves to love the love that loves to love the love that loves.” God bless him. I could try my entire life and not write one song as rich in emotion and color as any of these songs. He’s truly a marvel of modern songwriting, and Astral Weeks is absolutely, unflinchingly one of the best recordings ever.”

ps – Here is how I feel today: