It’s come to this.

After starting my “50 Albums Project” back in June 2010, then hitting a wall April last year, I’ve come to the sad conclusion that the only way I’m ever closing out this thing is to group the rest into packages. Starting here, I’ll roll the final 12 out in a few group-posts, with mini-blurbs explaining my stance on each record listed. Then I’ll post separately for No. 1.

I apologize, dear imaginary readers (aka Spencer Zierk). This is how it ends. We could’ve had it all….

Go on to read about the 12th to 10th most important albums in my life, starting with The Who’s “Tommy.”

12. The Who: Tommy

“… Especially if you and me see it in together”

The summer of 2007, I discovered classic rock. Not AC/DC or Ozzy classic rock. I discovered the guys with bigger plans, the pioneers of prog — guys like Jimi Hendrix and The Who.

“Tommy” was the soundtrack to a weekend that, although about a million years removed from today, remains a point of transition for me. One of those moments you know, even as they happen, mean something more.

Holed up in a cabin in the Tennessee mountains, I found out by phone that my girlfriend had another boyfriend. OK, I thought, sitting alone on a balcony, staring out into the moonlit hills. Behind closed doors, my family celebrated, laughed: it was a reunion. I rocked quietly on a wooden chair outside, felt the grooves in the deck below me and wondered how small I’d have to shrink to slip down between the planks.

When you’re newly turned 21 years old, first heartbreak plays out like a funeral for youth and the days when you knew everything. But somehow, buried beneath the blah, there was also optimism.

When I get back to Florida, I thought. She’ll see. She’ll remember.

And the mountains posed for me, as if they wanted me to paint them. They posed, slipping shadows down their shoulders like bra straps.

I hated them for that.

The rest of the weekend carried on the same, and I think I needed The Who just then. I needed an album about emerging from darkness. About coming to life. About religion.

I needed something new to me but old to the world. Something with history.

Tommy was a savior and a revelator. He had sight and optimism and enthusiasm. Sure, he’d been abused, molested, deaf, dumb and blind. But then he wasn’t anymore, and everywhere he looked, there was something new to discover.

After regaining his senses, Tommy saw the world. Like every baby ever born, he became a traveler and explorer. There was always something there, just past the darkness and the treeline and the hillsides.

There was something out there for him, despite everything, despite the harshness of so much new light. There had to be.

I had a feeling 21 was gonna be a good year.

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11. The Beatles: Abbey Road

When I think of “the best” albums ever made, admittedly, “Abbey Road” headlines in the Top 3. As a full package, I honestly don’t think an album can get more solid from front to back, more coherent, more fun or downright impressive.

It’s definitely one of my favorite records.

But for the sake of maintaining some surprise, I’ve quarantined it out of the Top 10. It’s there, but it’s not. It’s the Beatles. We know what we’re dealing with here. Listen to the suit of songs at the end of this record, climaxing with McCartney’s “And in the end …” routine, and there’s no way anybody could debate this album’s place at the top of any music list.

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10. Bon Iver: For Emma, Forever Ago

Before I listened to Bon Iver’s “For Emma, Forever Ago,” I hadn’t listened to anything like it in my life.

I had some folk in my collection, but always more coffee shop folk, more focused on rhythms and words than mood. But Bon Iver turned all that around. “For Emma” is a record that’s as barren sparse as it is crammed full with vibration and intangibles.

Justin Venon’s vocals are layered, and layered. His guitar strings only sound when they have to. Drums are barely there, but essential. And in between all of it is this incredible yearning, the sound of an artist, and man, in transition, locked inside a cabin, in the winter, alone with a tape deck and time.

It’s at once one of the saddest and prettiest albums I own. I can’t imagine anyone who loves music not loving this record.

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Listen to Agalloch’s Marrow of the Spirit and, just like that, you’re strolling through the snow-lined pastures of a Robert Frost poem.

It’s not easy to explain; Agalloch is a metal band. Their vocalist is a part-time growler, other-time chanter, whisperer and, very last on the list, singer. The band means business, taking out a dark but tempered sort of rage on its abused and down-tuned instruments.

But as artists — and that’s what they are —  this Oregonian fivesome care far more for the environment of their sound than whether it’s keeping heads thrashing and fists clenched. It wants you inside of it, so far within its twisted woods that once the sun sets and everything is moonlight, it’s grown too dark to follow out the bread crumbs lined behind you.

The first time I heard this band’s music, I literally couldn’t stop thinking of Hansel and Gretel.

Recorded on all analog equipment, Marrow of the Spirit plays like a record, not a CD. It has texture and grain, a low-fi and degraded kind of character. But as is the case with the rest of the band’s catalog, it’s the instrumental texturing that sets what Agalloch does apart from that of its contemporaries.

To me, there is no genre more difficult than metal. The line separating good from brutal, ominous from whiny, mature from adolescent just couldn’t be more fine. And maybe it all comes down to reserve.

Sure, there’s growling here — and, admittedly, that’s still not a device I totally “get” in music. But in Marrow, it’s just another instrument. All the while, there’s some other earthy, folk-y anchor — a guitar strum, or the echo of a woodblock, or something — grounding the piercing stabs of electric, the hisses of reverb, the relentless pulsing of bass. And then you listen to something like 2006’s brilliantly subtle and hyper-pastoral The White EP, and it’s easy to see: this band might growl, and they might drone and relish in doom, but in some strange way they do it all as a love letter to nature, in all its beautiful, horrible glory.

Take a closer look at the candy house and you’ll see it’s painted cardboard. Step inside and you’ll find the cannibal witch behind a curtain, pulling levers like Oz.

Released November of last year, Marrow of the Spirit may not be a new record, but for me it was a new kind of record. The tracks, tied together with sounds of crickets and brooks, are long — 10, 17 minutes, even — and beg to be listened to, digested and explored over and over again.

It’s rare to find metal that hates as intensely as it loves. It’s even rarer to find bands that realize, in metal, the two emotions couldn’t be more interchangeable.
 
 
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Man Up; Dig Some “Girl Rock”

I’ll admit: like most red-blooded male Americans, I know way less about female musicians than I probably should.

Don’t get me wrong—it’s not that I’m sexist. It’s more, who has the time? After a day full of pumping iron, pounding red meat, strapping on some flannel and chopping wood, I think I speak for most guys when I say I’m pretty wiped. Sure, maybe I can squeeze in a few Steveweisers and a couple games of Black Ops before passing out, but that’s only in the NFL (and my fantasy team’s) offseason. Otherwise I have more pressing responsibilities.

But in all seriousness, it’s hard out there for female rockers. To be noticed, they have to do something different, be something weird. And even then, if the end result sounds pretty, most male radio listeners aren’t going to want to be associated with it. And that’s a shame, especially for a group as interesting as Eisley.

With influences in bands like Radiohead, Pink Floyd, Ben Folds and Neutral Milk Hotel, it’s really no wonder this Texas-based family band (4 DuPree siblings and a cousin) is a little eccentric. Traditionally they write in fairy tales, soaking each track in a kind of fantastical brand of melancholy, as if we’re being taken by the hand while listening and led excitedly through the moonlit woods of their collective imagination.

Three LPs into their career and Eisley’s sound in The Valley has definitely maintained a certain Alice in Wonderland vibe (“Mr. Moon,” title track). With sisters Sherri and Stacy at the vocal helm, we never stray far from lullaby. What they do is pretty, without a doubt, but that’s more a byproduct of the moods they go for than the ultimate goal.

In the band’s best tracks, they achieve a seamless combination of tones, a sort of pitch-perfect vocal harmony mixed with something eerie.

Most concerned with painting dreamscapes, the band uses its assets wisely, never cheaply or cutely or merely for ballads. Coming at it from a just-vocal-harmony angle, Eisley’s Sherri/Stacy combo is probably my favorite since Kath/Cetera from Chicago’s “golden era.” Big words, I know, but that’s how much I love the contrast.

The Valley, however, is its own record.

Removed four years since Eisley’s last release, the album is their darkest yet, decorated in grief, yearning, and even some orchestral stuff. It’s spun from tragedy, not whimsy: divorce, breakups, a split from the band’s longtime label. And the heavy emotions that accompany those things are palpable, tending to take a sometimes unwelcome creative precedent.

It’s not that every Eisley song should be all magic and bats with butterfly wings, but this hyper-direct lyric approach, although angrier and arguably more “adult,” can infect song style, making a couple tracks on The Valley feel a little bit too much like emo (“Smarter”), not Eisley.

Still, this is an album the band “had” to write—a low point between peaks, as the title suggests. And although the “meh” moments are minority, even while they’re happening I can’t totally dismiss them—the voices leading the rhythms are just too entrancing.  I can listen to these girls sing anything; they trade off and carry each other, creating a space with their music that lives somewhere between the nurturing hum of a bedtime storyteller and the brilliantly lit landscapes of linen-clad unconsciousness.

It’s in this space where this young band transcends expectation, makes more than wimpy “girl rock.” There’s a lot of talent here but more importantly there’s ambition, peaking out like a specter from the peeling bark of an old sycamore, drifting through its dying leaves, rustling past them like reverb.
 
 
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*NOTE: Weekly posts have been seriously slipping lately, but I will finish this countdown. I might miss a week, or weeks, here or there and have to play catch-up, but it will happen. To stop on the fringe of the Top 10 would just be madness.

“You’re the inspiration”

My uncle had a theory on rock ‘n’ roll.

He believed that every band had a two-part dynamic: a heart, and a soul. The heart keeps the band moving, he said, there’s something sentimental about him, he keeps the sound grounded and melodic. But the soul is different. The soul gives the band wings, makes it animate and throb. The band wouldn’t be THE BAND without each element, but the soul has more right brain priorities: creativity, risk, experimentation.

Chicago’s soul, he said, was Terry Kath.

And that’s how he explained the split in Chicago’s sound eras. For 11 records, they pushed boundaries, utilized their big band, jazz-fusion dynamic with funky, full and restless compositions. Then Kath, the band’s lead guitarist and split vocalist, shot himself in the head. Apparently, he was struggling with depression and drugs and weight problems. They say he was thinking of quitting the band anyway and already started working on solo stuff. But the bullet in his brain was ruled accidental. He was showing off his gun collection to friends, mock-blowing himself away with unloaded weapons. Except one wasn’t unloaded.

After that, Chicago wasn’t Chicago anymore. They devolved into the ballad-driven, pre-emo pop band everyone thinks of nowadays when they hear their name. They still had Bobby Lamm and Pete Cetera singing and songwriting, but they’d lost their soul.

It was Weekend at Bernie’s but with music. The band was moving, but it was cold and croaked and totally faking it.

“The whole world’s watching”

Albums like Chicago’s 1969 and 1970 CTA and II are the types that make me wish I’d been alive to experience the musical urgency of that time. That two records this dense and celebratory could be produced back to back is a special kind of achievement — forget that they were released within a year of each other and add up to nearly 2.5 hours of sound.

To call the band prolific really no-sells it, but there at bigger things at play here than productivity. To this day, I have heard no other work a wood block quite like Chicago did in their first two offerings. The word “hardcore” seems too much for wood block work, you say? Listen to “Beginnings” on CTA then talk to me.

They just get it, this band. Funk, fun, rock, surprise, excitement — they nail it all. Then they make it emotional.

The Heart & Soul theory can be stretched to other outfits — The Beatles’ heart was McCartney, soul was Lennon; in Genesis, Gabriel was all soul. And it’s a concept I agree with. But the point, I think, in listening to Chicago do what they were born to do musically in these two records, is that rock ‘n roll is a life force. It’s a bunch of guys getting on stage and having way too much fun pounding on leather, wood and wire. Because in those few minutes, speeding by like gunfire, things like depression and solo projects and fat hang-ups don’t matter. They simply don’t exist. They can’t, there’s not room enough on stage for them.

Up there, caught in the blizzard of the houselights, it’s all, and only, noise.
 
 

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Nearly four years removed from 2007’s grounded and melody-heavy In Rainbows, mood masters Radiohead have returned home, to the shiny star-clustered space station where I imagine they craft every one of their records.

Listen to The King of Limbs and it’s hard not to think about Kid A, Radiohead’s hyper-atmospheric 2000 release. Both pieces are more experience, more excursion than traditional album. You won’t find many clearly defined “hooks” on either, no predictable rises or falls. Instead, what we get are these mixed palettes of noise, both electronic and acoustic, wrinkled and rubbed together until their edges turn fluid and soft, warm and erotic, until they couple, to birth something better.

After so long —18 year’s worth of discography — it really shouldn’t be surprising. This is what Radiohead does. They don’t record and produce, they transcend and document. And after so long, they’ve earned the right to do daring and crazy things — things like give away albums for free (In Rainbows) and not worry, not even a little, if their music isn’t “accessible.”

After so long, the only thing predictable about this band is that they will be unpredictable. Listen to The King of Limbs next to The Bends next to OK Computer and there’s only one thing for sure: it was all without a doubt, 100% Radiohead. Period.

Still, The King of Limbs isn’t a revelation. Less lively and tumultuous than Kid A, it’s clear Thom Yorke and the gang aren’t so unabashedly fascinated with the toys at their disposal as they were 11 years ago. This album is content to glide, without too many bursts or blowouts. It’s happy to simply be, to exist as a cloud of feeling, a breeze laced with scents both familiar and new.

It’s ecstatic to be calm.

Running throughout Radiohead’s eighth and latest studio album (including Amnesiac, a b-sides collection), is a vibe that this band has reached a sort of plateau. Was I floored by how The King of Limbs played out stylistically? Not entirely. But I was still loving every minute of it. Comparisons can officially begin to be made within this band’s catalog, and I can’t wait to hear how they’ll use that to their advantage in the future.
 
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I have a soft spot for bands that go too far. Pretty sure it was Bill Maher who said something like, “If you never cross the line—how would you know where it is?”

In music, that idea should be Gospel.

The first modern “prog” band I ever heard, it was Dream Theater’s penchant for line-crossing and excess that drew me to them. I went nuts for just how over the top they could be. Everything from the 25-minute songs, the huge melodic bridges, the overblown concepts—I loved it all. I even loved how often they showed off in their tracks, going on these massive instrumental tangents that may or may not really have anything to do with the song’s primary melody. They did it because it sounded cool, and because, technically, they could.

They were virtuosos; they could anything they wanted. And I wanted them to.

That being said, there’s a time and place for hyperactivity. Excess can be fun, but emotional excess is better. Scenes from a Memory proves how powerful focus could be in an album. It isn’t Dream Theater’s fastest or most eclectic piece of work, but I’d say it’s definitely their best.

Trading in the “epic” formula for mood and melody, Scenes taught me that it’s possible to be proficient and grounded simultaneously. It’s a concept album, sure, but I’ve always been more concerned with the music than the story. It’s the thematic mantras that keep us moving; the narrative is just a canvas for emotion.

“What we have been is what we are”

If you’ve read anything I’ve written on Dream Theater in the past, you know how I feel about their recent output. What’s most disappointing, and genuinely upsetting, however, is how the band really seems to be completely without any sort of identity anymore. They’ve spiraled, into this nothing routine of just… making records, pumping out songs that feel more like compilations of riffs and solos they’d had in storage from older sessions. Except it’s all filtered this faux-metal veneer.

Say what you want about the band’s earlier stuff, but it wasn’t afraid to be pretty, and melodic (“Another Day,” “Space Dye Vest”). And with Scenes, they hit a climax (one they get close to in the 2^nd disc of Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence), really creating some beautiful and graceful stuff. Sometimes it goes too far (“Home,” “The Dance of Eternity”), but mostly it’s focused, honest music, stuff the band really poured themselves into, body and soul. That can be said of exactly nothing they’ve produced in an easy 6 years. Closer to 8.

But, at the end of the day, I’m a Dream Theater fan. It’s just the way it is. And even if they happen to suck at the moment, maybe never even make another album worth praising, well, they’re still Dream Theater.

We’ll always have Scenes.
 
 
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Honorable Mention(s): Dream Theater – Images & Words; A Change of Seasons; Awake; Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence

Six years in the making, this self-proclaimed ex-“doom” metal band has put together something so inspirational you might wonder whether it’s being ironic. And who could blame you? With a name like Anathema (cursed, profane), gritty growl rock seems like the obvious genre. Instead, the group has used the space in their discography to evolve, moving album by album since 1993 away from angsty “gothic” themes and onto ground that couldn’t be more eloquent and adult.

We’re Here Because We’re Here is a document of 21^st Century spirituality, a melodic prayer to the gods of Struggle and Acceptance. It’s a wholly modern epiphany: basically, the idea that epiphanies in the traditional sense are overrated, the stuff of movies and melodrama. Clarity comes in embracing the unclear, it suggests.

We’re here because we’re here. And that’s enough.

Produced by progressive rock mastermind Steven Wilson (Porcupine Tree), there’s a lot of drama on this record. There’s a darkness, bass lines creeping below the surface of glossier rhythms, haunting piano melodies. And in a way, that prevailing mood seems to carry the brighter elements on its back, keeping the optimism from ever feeling hokey and the moments of relief that much more ethereal (“Presence” is the perfect mid-album respite; “Summer Night Horizon” builds a pretty kind of tension that permeates the entire runtime).

Through a lot of great vocal harmonies (you’ve really got to hand it to Lee Douglas for the depth of color she contributes) and some subtle and fantastic keyboard work, the album builds its atmosphere. The organs, the orchestral sections, it’s all icing after that, because although a lot is happening in these tracks, the compositions are pretty straight-forward. The musicianship is dense, but never showy.

This is not your everyday rock album.

Buried deep beneath We’re Here’s rolling piano-driven soundscapes is the suggestion that the space within us all holds the potential for divinity, the potential to love and be loved. But there’s no talk of God here—it isn’t that kind of record. It’s more about learning to be happy in a world where the concept of God is irrelevant.

“Only you can heal your life”—this line is sung over and over again (“Angels Walk Among Us”). Understanding it is the charge that keeps this album breathing.

Released last June (Kscope), We’re Here Because We’re Here could have (and maybe should have) been on my shortlist of “Albums About Starting Over” in January.  It’s recently been taking home awards (UK’s Classic Rock Magazine named it “Prog Album of 2010”), and I wanted to talk about it before getting any later in the year.

With their eighth and latest LP, Anathema—the ex-metal heads, the former “death” rockers—have made one of the most triumphant records around. It’s an experience, one that gets better on each listen. It’s also a response to the band’s earlier work—a response to itself.

We’re Here Because We’re Here may explore serious themes but don’t think it’s all ideas and philosophy. The album’s got listenability. It’s a musical diary entry, a soaring flight into the piercing light of letting go.

It’s an invitation to come along.
 
 
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Again, I’m referencing myself. This will probably be the last album I post on, however, that I’ve written a review for in the past. So no biggie. The rest should be new.

To me, writing-wise, time exists in dog years. I look at what I wrote about this album 2 years ago, for example, and even though my feelings haven’t changed, the way I tried explaining them feels totally foreign. So much of it feels bulky, labored over until all the texture’s gone. The concerns are the same, the way I “read” this record, but the layout feels long and 7 years away–not a measly 2.

CLICK HERE to read what I wrote about Tinderstick’s The Hungry Saw a couple years ago. And see below for a quick couple of my favorite tracks off this dark, bright and beautiful record.

When a band loses its lead singer-songwriter-composure, the reflex reaction is to roll over and die. And that would be understandable.

When Chicago lost Terry Kath, they didn’t split but they quickly took up sucking. And when Peter Gabriel left Genesis, same thing. They didn’t quit but after a few albums they weren’t Genesis anymore; they were some pale pop imitation. They figured, if Gabriel’s gone (and Hackett), so should be experimentation. “That was his thing.”

But it has to be mentioned: both bands, Chicago and Genesis, were probably way more successful commercially as pop acts than progressive. Whatever significance can be seen in that, the point is it’s hard losing a frontman, hard to stay focused and continue building a creative identity.

That’s just one reason I adore Spock’s Beard’s Octane, the band’s 2^nd release as “New Spock’s”: Spock’s Beard minus its brain and beating heart Neal Morse.

Surfing Down the Avalanche

Octane is a sort of narrative piece, taking place in the seconds following the impact of a car crash, while the vehicle and its passengers are spinning out of control in the middle of the blacktop.

It’s a kind of “life flashing before my eyes” story, but it’s focused, on moments and phases, and from the first burst of mellotron to the final optimistic flash of funk (“With a full tank how can we go wrong?”), it’s incredibly special.

Whereas the bands I mentioned earlier grew tame and directionless without their roots, with Octane Spock’s Beard blossomed. They reinvented, building a sound that was rich and truly unique to them as a foursome, a separate entity, not just an offshoot of the Morse model. Submerged in the thrill of the creative chase, Spock’s took Morse’s departure as a challenge to see if they had what it took to exist without him. If they had made another “grab bag”-styled Feel Euphoria as their #2 LP (although I don’t hate that record), part of me doubts there would have ever been a 3^rd.

In Octane “new Spock’s” found its sound, became their own band. There are slivers of what came before—how could there not be?—but most of Octane is guitar- and bass-driven, not keyboard. The energy is different. It’s more emotional, more soulful, even. And it’s obsessed with atmosphere* in a way “old” Spock’s never came close.**

*In large part thanks to Ryo’s absolutely beautiful mellotron work. Couldn’t be more key.

**Intercut between and around songs are sound samples that set the stage of where we are age-wise in the journey. The antique whine of an ice cream truck, a mother whispering “Wake up, sleepy head. It’s time to go to school. Wake up…”—this is all we need for “story” in the traditional sense. The rest are feelings, moments of significance: youth revolt, first love, adult introspection. Ideas are captured here not by words but sounds, and moods, offering a pretty startlingly rich portrait of life, a scattering of dots connected by the fractured glass of a shattered windshield.

Do I think Spock’s Beard will ever again make an album close to as good as Octane? Sadly, no. But that’s okay.

Unless a Neal Morse reunion record ever takes shape (talk about magic), I can’t imagine this not being the pinnacle “new” Spock’s will always aspire to. It’s just so focused, not a minute too long, so elegant. There’s no wasted attention pumped into being “proggy” or making “epics” here. More than the document of a new generation becoming self-realized, it’s just a truly great, honest, patient piece of music. And though it almost definitely wasn’t the case, it doesn’t feel at any moment like the band was trying to prove a thing.

This is Spock’s Beard’s, “old” and “new,” most unassuming and unique record. It’s one of my all-time personal favorites.
 
 
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Oh, Genesis, you kings of prog, you masters of mellotron, you crazy scientists of sound…. How dearly I love you.

With Selling England by the Pound, I want to get straight to the point. To me, this is Genesis’ quintessential and most fully realized album. I love Trespass and Nursery Cryme and Foxtrot, but they don’t work melodically for me on the same level this album does. And Lamb Lies Down is still a record I don’t totally “get.”

Selling England was my first exposure to Genesis, in all their weirdo, relentless, and proficient glory. Peter Gabriel guides the compositions here, weaving his flute- and vocal-work through Banks’ keys and Steve Hackett’s subtle-when-they-need-to-be/awesome-when-he-wants-them-to-be guitars. The three really make an incredible combination, creating sounds as lofty and wild as they are grounded and sweet.

The River of Constant Change

I don’t remember the circumstances around my warming up to this band, but I know that once I did nearly nothing was out of bounds. Long synth epics? Been there. Non-traditional vocals? So what. Total musical culture shock? Yawwwn.

And as that—the last one: musical culture shock—is how this album is sort of remembered in my personal lexicon. It opened me up, stripped away that pre-built feature inside our ears that immediately grimaces every time it hears something out of the ordinary, something it maybe doesn’t understand.

It made me curious for more.

Say what you want about Peter Gabriel and his ridiculous stage antics, but Genesis’ work with him at the helm (the band’s “classic era”) has to be taken seriously. Hearing Selling England by the Pound for the very first time may not instantaneously make you a believer, but maybe that’s why it deserves to be listened to again.

Genesis is Genesis. For me to talk too long about why I think they’re good, and this album is good, seems like a waste of time. They’ve endured for a reason.
 
 
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