How many times have you listened to a ‘classic album’ and been tempted to skip a track or two?
The fact is that many classics have their share of duffers. Only a select few are perfect all the way through. Here's our roll call of start-to-finish perfection.
Perfect rock albums
1. Pink Floyd: The Dark Side of the Moon (1973)
An obvious choice, perhaps, but a good place to start. Dark Side of the Moon: A Piece for Assorted Lunatics’ as it was initially known, remains Pink Floyd’s masterpiece, having been extensively road-tested for a full year before release. This gave the band the opportunity to tweak and improve the compositions at a time when they were still on speaking terms.
Like all the best concept albums, Dark Side's themes (conflict, greed, the passage of time, madness, etcetera) are suitably grand yet also universal. And it’s sequenced perfectly, making this one of the great alums to experience as a whole, conceptual piece. For added poignancy, the spirit of the departed Syd Barrett hangs heavily over the entire album.
2. Guns N’ Roses: Appetite for Destruction (1987)
The Gunners' first proper album was a revelation upon release in 1987, though it took a lot of people (critics and the public alike) a long time to catch up with it.
Indeed, mainstream critics were sniffy about Appetite for Destruction when it came out and the album initially sold poorly. To those of us who bought it during the week of release, the Gunners felt like the cleaned-up Aerosmith’s snottier, druggier younger siblings and were a breath of fetid air during the hair metal era.
The astonishing thing is that the album tuned out to be so cohesive, given the messiness of its conception and the fact that so many of the tracks began life as solo compositions by band members. Axl Rose’s ‘Welcome to the Jungle’, for example, recounts an incident that occurred when he arrived in New York on the bus from Indiana, while 'Mr. Brownstone' records band members’ tussles with heroin and ‘Sweet Child O’Mine’ boasts one of the best, most instantly recognisable guitar riffs you’ll ever hear. It all adds up to one of the greatest debut albums of all time.
3. Steely Dan: Aja (1977)
Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were such perfectionists that Steely Dan wasn’t really a band by the time of their sixth album release. They simply hired session musicians – nearly 40 of them – to realise their vision. The result was the most musically adventurous Steely Dan album, which bordered on jazz on occasion, with the most oblique lyrics.
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The smoothness of the music contrasts with some pretty dark themes on tracks like 'Josie, which seems to be about the return home of a “good-time girl” and the eager anticipation of her male admirers of the sex they’re about to have. Aja proved to be the band’s biggest seller, and its reputation has only grown since release in 1977.
4. Slayer: Reign in Blood (1986)
The best, most acclaimed pure thrash metal album of all time runs for less than half-an-hour and has absolutely no fat on it. Superbly produced by Rick Rubin and released on the hip Def Jam label way back in 1986, Reign in Blood has simply never been bettered.
Rubin had no experience with recording metal bands at the time, and his reverb-free approach makes the sound suitably darker and more menacing. Slayer rose to the challenge with a collection of their bleakest songs, rooted in the real world rather than the fantasy Satanism that had characterised their early work.
These included, most notoriously, album opener ‘Angel of Death’, which some daft critics chose to interpret as an endorsement of the activities of Nazi war criminal Dr. Josef Mengele, rather than simply a description of them. Album closer ‘Raining Blood’ proved so popular that Slayer rarely got away without playing it in their concerts. Even an unlikely cover version by Tori Amos failed to dent the song’s popularity.
5. AC/DC: Back in Black (1980)
1980 was AC/DC’S bleakest year – and also their most triumphant. The Highway to Hell album had left them poised on the brink of greatness – and everyone wondered what the Australian rockers would do next.
What nobody expected was that frontman Bon Scott would die in London in circumstances that are still contested. Scott’s family urged the band to carry on, and so the day after his funeral they began a search for his replacement, eventually recruiting Brian Johnson of Newcastle rockers Geordie.
With Robert Kohn ‘Mutt’ Lange behind the knobs (sorry – but ‘Back in Black’ is packed with double entendres), the new outfit set about creating the second-best-selling album in music history. Although the death of Scott hangs heavy over proceedings, the songs were also drenched in sleazy fun, from ‘Let Me Put My Love Into You’ to ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’.
The title track, with its infectious staccato rhythm, came to define ‘80s hard rock/heavy metal, and the album is bookended by two other stone-cold classics: ‘Hells Bells’ and ‘Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution’.
6. Fleetwood Mac: Rumours (1977)
Familiarity breeds contempt, so they say, but the joy of Fleetwood Mac’s vituperative masterpiece is that there are always new pleasures to be discovered in its grooves. It’s truly extraordinary that such a background of chaos should produce an album that’s so cohesive and satisfying.
John and Christine McVie were breaking up, as were Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham, at the time of writing and recording – and various other shenanigans were taking place, all of which found their way into this 40 million-selling rock classic. Indeed, ‘The Chain’, which is known to even non-fans as the soundtrack to the Beeb’s Formula One coverage, was the only track on which all five members of the band get a writing credit.
Even the addition of Nicks’ vengeful ‘Silver Springs’ to later editions of the album didn’t interrupt its flow.
7. Gentle Giant: Three Friends (1972)
Something of a wild card, but I’ll attempt to justify its inclusion. English proggers Gentle Giant’s first concept album has tended to be overshadowed by Octopus, released later in the same year. But Three Friends is an extraordinarily satisfying and occasionally surprising piece of music, written by the three Shulman brothers and multi-instrumentalist Kerry Minnear.
Like all the best concept albums, it proceeds from a simple, universal premise. In this case, three schoolboys are followed into adulthood as their lives take very different paths. One becomes a labourer, another an artist and the third a proto-Thatcherite businessman.
Considering that the album is so short (a little over 35 minutes), you’d perhaps expect the songs to be very wordy – verbosity being the curse of the prog rock concept album. In fact, though, Three Friends is mostly instrumental – and every word is made to count, as the band sketches these three very different personalities. One might anticipate that Gentle Giant would have most sympathy with the artist, but after a gentle start ‘Peel the Paint’ proves to be a vicious takedown of artistic pretensions set to increasingly heavy music that recalls GG’s then-regular touring partners Black Sabbath.
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Here's the poignant 'Schooldays', in which we learn of the trio's divergent destinies:
8. Boston: Boston (1976)
One of the best selling debut albums of all time, Boston’s first release was a revelation in 1976. While the British music press was in thrall to punk, MIT graduate Tom Scholz pursued a very different direction in setting out to create the perfect hard rock album. That he very nearly succeeded is testament to his talents as a songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist.
The songs were all written by Scholz himself, with the exception of ‘Smokin’ which was co-written by vocalist Bradley Delp and ‘Let Me Take You Home Tonight’, which was credited solely to Delp. Album opener ‘More Than a Feeling’ sets out Boston’s stall brilliantly. and all eight tracks soon became staples of US rock radio, putting the band alongside the genre’s greats.
9. The Rolling Stones: Exile on Main St. (1972)
Not for nothing is Exile on Main St. the only double album on this list. Bands who opt for doubles tend to have ambitions that outweigh their creativity. But the Stones pulled it off in 1972 with this extraordinarily diverse collection of songs, which ranged from country rock to Delta blues.
Recorded largely in the basement of Keith Richards’ rented villa at Nellcôte in the south of France while the Stones were tax exiles, it’s a back-to-basics affair that spawned the hit single ‘Tumbling Dice’. Dig deeper and you’ll find such Stones classic as ‘Rocks Off’, ‘Sweet Virginia’, ‘Torn and Frayed’ and ‘Shine a Light’.
Contemporary critics didn’t know quite what to make of Exile on Main St., but its stature has grown over the years to such an extent that it now overshadows many of the Stones albums that preceded and came after it and has earned a place on all the Greatest Albums of All Time lists. The remarkable thing is that they managed to achieve all this in all-night sessions surrounded by sundry sleazeballs and drug dealers.
Here's the wonderful 'Let It Loose' with its gospel fadeout, and some brilliant Exile-era footage:
10. Aerosmith: Toys in the Attic (1975)
Aerosmith’s third album was their biggest commercial success. Released in 1975, it includes several of the band’s best-loved songs, including 'Walk This Way’ and ‘Sweet Emotion’. It’s mostly written by Aerosmith themselves, with the exception of the cover of Fred Weisnantel’s ‘Big Ten Inch Record’, whose double entendre lyrics rarely fail to raise a smile.
The album enjoyed renewed popularity 11 years after its initial release when rappers Run DMC released a cover of ‘Walk This Way’ – the proto-rap-rock classic about a young man losing his virginity – which introduced Aerosmith to a whole new generation of teenagers who wondered who the old dudes in the video were.
11. The Beatles: Revolver (1966)
You’re on a hiding to nothing nominating a perfect Fabs album, since many have their champions. But this 1966 release enjoyed wide critical acclaim and has grown in stature ever since. Even ‘Yellow Submarine’ serves its purpose on this brilliantly sequenced collection, as a piece of silliness sandwiched between Paul McCartney’s lovely ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ and John Lennon’s suitably trippy ‘She Said She Said’, inspired by actor Peter Fonda’s account of an acid trip.
And this brilliantly diverse album ends with the Beatles at their most experimental, psychedelic and influential on the magnificent ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’.
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