Masakatsu Takagi - Kagayaki (2014)
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Blissfully pretty chamber folk, new age, and min'yĆ music mixed with field recordings and various musical recordings from around the rural village Masakatsu Takagi made this album in. A portal to a beautiful, peaceful, Japanese village.
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Extremely underrated jazzy, math-influenced, Chicago School style post-rock. This album came about a lot later than more celebrated albums by Tortoise and The Sea and the Cake so it gets overlooked. It's not as pioneering but it's better than all of them.
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Monumental modal jazz mixed with blues. Half the credited musicians on this are as celebrated and influential as Miles Davis is. One of the most famous and lauded jazz albums for a reason.
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Simple, nostalgic, small-town emo-revival/pop-punk done extraordinarily well.
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Quiet, gentle twee-pop that's incredibly sweet and comforting.
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I debated whether or not to include this album here and I don't know how to describe it in a way that doesn't feel cheap or contrived. It's eleven songs Phil Elverum (of The Microphones) recorded shortly after his wife died of cancer. I just included the first thirty seconds of the first song because choosing an illustrative sample felt wrong. Incidentally the first lyrics of the album sum up why discussing this album as a piece of art makes me uncomfortable.
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The main reason I limited this section to one album per artist is so this entire page isn't dominated by Mountain Goats albums. John Darnielle is my favorite musician full stop. I think All Hail West Texas is probably the most representative of his early sound. Lo-fi acoustic guitar and vocals over a whirling tape recorder hum, three or four chords, and some of the best modern American folk songs ever written.
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All the albums I've put on this page are albums I think are perfect from front to back. Albums that if any tiny detail were changed, they would be worse for it. Illmatic is somehow the most perfect in this list of perfect albums, if that makes sense. I want to put on surgical gloves just to listen to it.
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Eerie, heavy droning folk. Sounds like it was made by ghosts of medieval plagues. I can't say I'm intimately familiar with it since it's seven hours long, but every time I've listened to it in installments it's left a massive impression on me.
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Nina Simone is my favorite singer. Her voice is so strange and strong and beautiful and is perfect for this bluesy vocal jazz. Simone's performance of "Strange Fruit" is the most powerful I know of. It being in an otherwise fun album is like war photographs being published in a newspaper alongside the sports and comics pages.
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