Incubus' self-imposed five year break between the albums
Light Grenades and
If Not Now, When? was clearly a stroke of genius on the band's part since when they regrouped for the later offering, it was the best goddamn album they ever made. And one that was almost Incubus in name only. The band took a bit of a gamble with changing up the entire genre they were in pretty much with the adult contemporary, pop craftsmanship on delightful display on
INNW?. But with songs this good, they would've been fools not to follow it through. The album's opening title track is the band trying to re-write U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" and it comes about as close as any attempt at such a thing yet has. This song's slow, lumbering groove and very simple chord arrangement speak volumes for how much beauty you can get out of such a minimal structure on paper. "If Not Now, When?" would probably be the band's best song even as an instrumental but alas, Brandon Boyd has a vocal here that I'd preach belongs in the top ten by any singer ever. I have been a fan of this band and Boyd's voice for years now but even I had zero a clue that they could do something this amazing, let alone this far into their career.
Band's full of white boys had been covering blues songs for many a year by the time American supergroup Cactus got around to making Howlin Wolf's "Evil" their bitch in 1971. Hailing off the
Restrictions album, and dubbed "That's Evil" for some reason, this is basically the most perfect classic rock song ever. I heard it and Cactus for the first time in general way late in the game, only within the last six or seven years and within about five seconds, I knew I was hearing one of the sickest pieces of ass-whooping awesome I had ever heard. The riff in the Cactus version is one of the infinite examples of a re-working that many an early rock band took much liberty with. Listening to the original, and still goddamn great Howlin' Wolf version, it's unrecognizable except for the vocal arrangement. Cactus created a gem of early heavy metal glory here, a blues vamp that's just monstrously heavy. Carmine Appice's drumming is the tits and Rusty Day's vocal sounds like somebody who's just smoked all the cigarettes, got done fucking a ballroom full of groupies, and who's about to die of alcohol consumption. It's furious, dangerous sounding, groin-heavy boogie, nigh ever done better.
Two bands plus a solo artist have two songs each make their debut on this list in the upper thirty, and the first be England's greatest singles band of all time, the Smiths. I am a Morrissey fan as I will be for all the days I have left and the Smiths therefor are one of my very favorite bands. With only four albums but about two-hundred singles and b-sides, the Smiths hardly churned out a bad song in their five years as a band, Stephen Patrick Morrissey and Johnny Marr easily becoming one of pop music's most excellent songwriting duos. It's not surprising that such a gem was a b-side to "The Boy With the Thorn In His Side", that being a track off the band's finest album
The Queen Is Dead. 1986 twas a good year indeed. "Asleep" is hardly textbook Smiths. It's a piano ballad with just Marr on the ivories and Morrissey's luscious crooning on top. A typical depressing and direct Mozz lyric minus most of the humor, all about that delightful subject of suicide, it certainly has the ingredients to ruin your day but "Asleep" is a thing of beauty above anything else. Even without the hooky, multiple guitar tracks and the laugh-out-loud word play, the Smiths could instead offer up a sorrowful masterpiece such as this and have it be damn near the best song in their catalog.
I love Black Sabbath, as anyone who loves songs with distorted guitar in them are required by law to, but I have also said for years that I love other bands playing Black Sabbath songs even better. Can't really say that about too many other artists, (besides Leonard Cohen), but there is evidence I dare you to dispute where Kyuss' version of "Into the Void" is concerned. Yes, Kyuss keeps the arrangement and obviously the riffs exactly the same, but that borderline low-fi production from the
Masters of Reality album, as well as Bill Ward's sub-par drumming and Ozzy's sub-par vocals are not invited to the party. Instead, Kyuss just explodes this fucking song. Josh Homme's drop tuned six-string run through a bass amp may be the heaviest guitar tone ever heard and it makes "Into the Void" sound like it always should've sounded. Which is actually the case when most bands who are given better production values take on a Sabbath jam. They just fucking come alive. I can hardly stress enough not to get the wrong impression, since Sabbath is unholy greatness, (see my number thirty-seven here for proof that I tell true words), but this version of "Void" is so good that I'd like to start a kickstarter to get Kyuss to re-record every single song from the first six Sabbath albums.
This is the first time that
Born To Run's lead-off track "Thunder Road" has been my favorite Bruce Springsteen song. Though I can't really offer up an excuse as to what the hell took me so long to make such an obvious revelation. There is no finer album the Boss made than
BTR and in the case here, all the critics are totally right. It is one of the best collections of songs in all of rock music. The album has two songs on this list, the opener here, and the closer "Jungleland" as well. So we can certainly say that no record is bookended more perfectly. "Thunder Road" sets the stage for the album, a tale amongst several of two lovers, (perhaps the same lovers throughout?), who are setting out for "one last chance to make it real". The song has no chorus and is linear from start to finish more or less, the lyric just rolling and rolling right along, ultimately climaxing before the best thing Clarence Clemons would ever blow on his trusty axe caps the whole thing off on a soaringly divine note. It is one of music's most perfect songs and a glorious invite to the album that put Springsteen on the map for the rest of our times.
I got deep into, (huh huh), John Mayer rather quickly. In less than a year I picked up all of his albums, (in hard copy form, none of this downloading shit), and I will continue to stay on top of this man's output as long as he keeps putting out albums. Once I had everything at my disposal to listen to, this song became the one I couldn't stop hearing, either actually hearing or just never leaving my head. Mayer is a top-notch guitar player, which I hope I shouldn't have to tell anyone, and one of the reasons for this is the amount of restraint that he shows more often than not. The solo for "Edge" is an example of this fo sho, it's brief with not much at all to it and it's also exactly what it should be. The chord structure and melody here make love together stunningly and Mayer's lyric is full of such longing that you can almost feel the inevitable bouncy-bouncy that's bound to go down when listening to it. It's the best everything this guy has given us thus far and it'd be totally unfair to expect him, or almost anyone, to ever top it.
24. "
Needs" - Collective Soul
I've been a fan of Collective Soul since "Shine" came on the radio, where it's remained regularly since. And every single Ed Roland and Co have released I have also been a fan of. And every album. Collective Soul is on the short list of band's that don't really have a bad song, nor an embarrassing stumble along their twenty plus years together as a band. They are steady and reliable, pure and simple. The forth album
Dosage contained the hits "Heavy" and "Run", the later of which has endured as a signature jam. The most luscious of ballads "Needs" though is a song I incredibly just keep liking more and more. I easily convinced my band mate that we should cover it, which we've since continued to do, and she said she researched a bit and found it somewhere on a list of the best break-up songs ever written. You will find no argument here far as that goes. Ed Roland most always seems to construct his songs on the most basic of chords, which explains why I can play anyone I attempt to figure out by ear since I can barely move away from the first three frets of a guitar myself. And how this man has made such a career out of penning SO many excellent songs this way is admirable if it's anything at all. This is as good as it gets, an acoustic ballad and some strings coming together all over yo face.
So soon? Yes, the Mighty Smiths return with their very finest single and very finest song period, of course meaning "Ask". This one was also released in 1986, clearly the band's best year, and it's one of the rare Smith tunes to contain some guest vocals courtesy of Kirsty MacColl, who helped out on the harmonies and was married to producer Steve Lillywhite at ze time. Whereas that other letter A single/b-side "Asleep" didn't sound like the Smith's on paper in the least, "Ask" is pretty much the atypical Smiths song. Johnny Marr's jangly, multi-layerd guitar tracks that he weaves in and out like a classical composer would do with a string section, the solid back-beat and rhythm section of Mike Joyce and Andy Rourke, and the farthest from least hilarious lyric from Morrissey. "Writing frightening verse to a buck-toothed girl in Luxembourg" is one of the Mozz' best lines as is "It's the bomb that will bring us together", the word "bomb" I'm guessing is made intentionally to sound like it could be "bond" that he's singing. Just speculation but certainly nothing I'd put past him for a hoot. For anyone who's never heard this greatest of bands before, "Ask" is the first and last choice I'd make as the first song to play for such a soul.
I love when band's get away with playing the same thing throughout an entire song and making it brilliant. In fact I've sandwiched this Snow Patrol jam right in between two other songs that almost do that exact same thing. "Open Your Eyes", the penultimate track off of SP's best album
Eyes Open, takes this to more of an extreme. It's closer along the lines of those other Irish darlings U2's "With Or Without You", where the same simple chord progression is played throughout with no changes and the building on top of it just keeps growing to a feverish pace. "Open" is also rare in that, unless my ears have been deceiving me, there's some double bass drumming going on during the outro. Secret Slayer fans be these lads mayhaps? Ultimately I love this here chord progression whenever it's used but this song soars to it's utter greatness due to Gary Lightbody's perfect vocal melody. The entire
Eyes Open album is fantastic most largely due to how frontman Lightbody chooses to sing all his words, and this song be the example that shines most brightly. The chorus here is just the song's title with "Tell me that you'll..." thrown before it but just that sung over and over again does it for me. An example of stripped bare pop perfection, my kinda shit.
And while we're on the subject of "less is more" and one of the most simple pop/rock songs in construction ever, may I hereby welcome you to world of Uriah Heep and the awesome that is "Lady In Black". I have loved the Heep for more than two decades of my life in counting and few finer classic rock bands exists. And perhaps no finer classic rock band exists at all that's still putting out albums that stand-up proudly to the excellence of their heyday, (see 2011's
Into the Wild as one of the very best examples of a band full of sixty-year old's who are just killing it). "Lady In Black" though stems way back from Heep's second album
Salisbury and was composed by still the band's finest songwriter in one Ken Hensley. Hensley, as everyone hip to Heep's history well knows, was the band's main songs-smith for about the first eleven years of their existence and he pretty much single-handedly wrote 90% of what the band still plays live today and the cuts on all of their greatest hits albums. "Lady" was big in Germany, as most of their songs for whatever reason were, and it at least at one point was used to teach children English in classrooms there. Heep has a number of ballads in their canon but nothing at all is better than this here piece. As Hensley himself put it, "A song with only two chords and a chorus with no words in it. Way to go!". Damn right.
