I’m going to listen to the top 3 upvoted albums and give you my honest unfiltered thoughts.
Please explain what makes the album special to you. For context, lyrics are very important to me, so I gravitate to music with good storytelling.
Alright! Results are in. I’ll be listening to:
- Lateralus - Tool
- To Pimp a Butterfly - Kendrick Lamar
- Pink Moon - Nick Drake
- Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness - The Smashing Pumpkins
(I know I said 3, but I couldn’t resist!)
Frank Turner Love, Ire & Song
Frank is a similar age to me, from the next town up the motorway, so lyrically Love, Ire & Song talks to me about things I mostly understand. When he sings ‘Once I was young and crass enough to care’ I know exactly what he means. On ‘Photosynthesis’ he sings “I won’t sit down, I won’t shut up, and most of all I will not grow up” and I get that too, with every fibre of my being.
Musically, it’s folk-punk through the prism of the hardcore band he was in before going solo. It’s energetic when it needs to be, melancholy when it needs to be, and hopeful even when things feel hopeless. It’s an album I can’t listen to once. It’s two or three times, or not at all.
What helped to cement my love of this album was seeing him play it live in a sweatbox of a pub somewhere in Nottingham with 200 other people, crammed in with apparently little regard to fire safety regulations. The crowd knew all the lyrics and sang them with gusto. For one night only we were all in Frank’s band, and it was glorious.