Best Albums Of The 1970s, Pt. 1

As I mentioned two months ago, I have begun an epic project to list off all my favorite albums from the 1960s onward. I’ve broken this down into four sections, spread out every other month until the end of the year. Back in April, I featured my favorite twenty-five albums from the 1960s. However, for June, I’m upping the ante. This time around, I’m writing about fifty albums from the 1970s! Yup, every day this week, ten new albums will be added to the list, counting down to my favorite album of the entire decade. Should be fun!

Now, I understand that this list could be a bit…how should I say this…controversial? There’s only one Pink Floyd album on this list (and it’s not Dark Side Of The Moon). There’s also absolutely no Led Zeppelin anywhere within these fifty albums. I can already hear the masses of music lovers (who may or may not actually be reading this blog) raising their voices in anger and fury. Well, for all of you naysayers and…uh…people with different tastes (how dare you not have my exact taste in music!), I offer up this short word:

The requisite disclaimer:
This list is just a matter of my own opinion. This list is less about saying one album is “better” than another and more about just presenting music that I’ve enjoyed over the years. If you disagree with anything on here, feel free to comment and say so. Polite disagreement is always appreciated, however.

#50
Never Mind The Bollocks Here’s The Sex Pistols
The Sex Pistols
1977

There’s no point in pretending this legendary album is anything more than four great singles surrounded by a hell of a lot of mediocre filler. But even with all those lesser songs diluting the Pistols’ punch, those four songs, “Holiday In The Sun”, “God Save The Queen”, “Pretty Vacant” and above all “Anarchy In The U.K.”, have the unstoppable feral energy that allowed the Sex Pistols to forever change the course of music history. Is the album a well-crafted, cohesive statement of intent? Hell fucking no! But is it effective? You better damn believe it.

#49
Ege Bamyasi
Can
1972

In the early 70s, Germany became the place to be if you wanted to be an avant-garde musical pioneer. This explosion of intensely strange music has been retroactively dubbed “krautrock” and one of the genre’s greatest bands was Can. With Japanese frontman Damo Suzuki’s off-key warbling and slurred chanting, Can created an eerie, murky brand of music that had little in common with anything else at the time. Ege Bamyasi is the best of their three 70s masterpieces, since it comes the closet to sounding like more conventional music, while still maintaining all the weird elements that made Can great.

#48
Songs The Lord Taught Us
The Cramps
1979

While we’re on the subject of silly genre names, it’s worth pointing out that this album single-handedly created what is apparently known as “psychobilly,” a skuzzy combination of b-movie campiness and gore with gritty garage rock. While I’m not sure exactly how important the creation of psychobilly was for the history of music, what I do know is that Songs The Lord Taught Us is a spiky, dirty tour-de-force, taking retro rock-and-roll and stripping it down to its bare essentials. Even without a bass player, the Cramps created some seriously creepy, dangerous music that continues to be very appealing.

#47
My Aim Is True
Elvis Costello
1977

Sure, he hadn’t quite perfected the angry-young-man persona he would later master, but My Aim Is True introduced the world to the genius of Elvis Costello and that’s worth more than a little praise. Brilliant lyrics and wiry guitar were only two of Costello’s endless skills, as he took Buddy Holly-aping to glorious new heights. He also managed to fit an impossibly moving ballad into the mix, in the form of the heartbreaking “Alison”. The album may sound a bit restrained at times, but the songwriting is still at such a high standard that the end result is tremendous.

#46
On The Beach
Neil Young
1974

In 1974, Neil Young was coming out of one of the darkest periods of his life. The deaths of close friends had hurt him deeply and his marriage was collapsing. His bleak opus, Tonight’s The Night, had been shelved by his record company for being too damn depressing. So, instead, Neil delivered On The Beach, which tempered the misery a bit…but not by much. The targets range from the personal (“Motion Pictures”, about his actress wife) to the globally huge (“Revolution Blues”, about Charles Manson). Neil had began to recover from his sadness somewhat, but On The Beach is still a gorgeously downbeat album.

#45
Sticky Fingers
The Rolling Stones
1971

The Stones first post-Altamont album, Sticky Fingers saw Jagger, Richards and the rest of them returning to the simple formula of really dirty rock-and-roll that they built their career on. While it may not have some of the heavy social significance of other Stones records, Sticky Fingers is impressive because it delivers exactly what the Stones should deliver with remarkable consistency. Jagger sneers and yelps some, Richards dips further into his endless bag of perfect guitar riffs and the band seems to be playing with extreme confidence. It all adds up to the Stones’ third consecutive masterpiece.

#44
The Clash
The Clash
1977

While their contemporaries the Sex Pistols just wanted to spit, bleed and vomit on the world until everything collapsed, the Clash took a much more political slant to their rebellious fury. Attacking racial tension, warmongering and American foreign policy (among other things), the Clash seemed to be one of the few punk bands interested in rebuilding something on the ashes of the establishment after they had burned everything to the ground. Of course, the Clash would eventually sink into self-parody on later records, but for the time being, they helped create some crucial, moral bedrock for the rest of punk rock to build upon.

#43
Aladdin Sane
David Bowie
1973

Anyone who thought David Bowie couldn’t become any more dramatic after Ziggy Stardust was in for a rude surprise when Aladdin Sane arrived in 1973. Taking his monstrous, kabuki-influenced alter-ego to America, Bowie created an album that, somehow, topped its predecessor when it came to shambling rock, elegant drama and overall insanity. The fey, swishy, stardust-covered English rock was replaced by crunchy, American power chords, as Ziggy took in the sights at a drive-in in Detroit. Bowie’s orbit would eventually become so extreme that his albums started to suffer, but, for the time being, his music continued to be nothing short of brilliant.

#42
Horses
Patti Smith
1975

There’s a line between poetry and rock, but no one ever told Patti Smith and Horses continues to be the most perfect combination of the slightly abstract strengths of poetry and the forceful immediacy of guitar music (not that it has many competitors). The songs are sharp and dangerous, with Smith’s raw voice tearing gigantic holes in whatever poor, unfortunate target she has in her sights from song to song. Horses is still one of the most ferocious albums recorded by a female rock artist and it helped establish the full range and potential of rock music. It wasn’t just about guys playing mindless chords anymore.

#41
Roxy Music
Roxy Music
1972

While the early English glam era has two iconic superstars in the forms of David Bowie and T. Rex’s Marc Bolan, the great unheralded master of artsy, early 70s rock is Bryan Ferry. Since his vibrato-heavy voice essentially prevented him from being the romantic crooner he always wanted to be, Ferry settled for the next best thing: to be the frontman in an artistic mindfuck of a band. Roxy Music, the band’s debut album, also features the stunning first musical products from Brian Eno, who has gone on to become a certifiable demigod in the world of music. His squealing electronic squiggles are just one of the many off-the-wall elements zooming around haphazardly on this great album.