Timeless Albums

[The Batlord]

Sometimes albums can only have been made in the time in which they were made. I'd only need to listen to ten seconds of Led Zeppelin of Black Sabbath to know that they seventies bands. Beatles? Sixties. No question. No matter which album, they were clearly from the sixties. Nas' first album? If you didn't know it was from the early nineties then you'd have to be deaf.

Some albums are almost impossible to figure out though. What albums are like that for you?


Danzig: Danzig I - 1988

Pretty much all of Danzig's albums are hard to put in a timeline. They're just so unique and outside of any kind of movement that they just have no connection to any musical time period. For some reason pure blues and metal are combined so rarely that blues metal almost isn't even a thing. If I want to listen to Danzig, I only have Danzig to turn to. I can go listen to some COC, or some Cutch, but I'm still kind of drawing at straws. Both of those bands are also kind of timeless too. Probably because they're also pretty unique for the same reasons.

I go with this album mostly because of Rick Rubin's production though. It's certainly true that his stripped down production takes away a lot of the personality of the rock bands that he works with, but that also means that any relation to their contemporaries is further removed. Slayer's first three releases could only have been done in the early-to-mid eighties. Even a retro-thrash band couldn't have done those. But Reign In Blood, despite clearly being an eighties thrash metal album, is as close to timeless as any album made by any of their fellows.


Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers: The Modern Lovers - 1976 (recorded 1972)

I'm not exactly sure how the band did it. I can figure out why Danzig was timeless, but this band confuses me. They take influences that are purely and completely fifties and sixties, and yet they do so in a way that sounds modern even to this day. They sounded like an eighties alternative band over a decade before such bands existed, but still sound fresher than most of those groups. Much of it is probably down to Jonathan Richman's singing. He has a Buddy Holly kind of style, but his refusal to reference any kind of persona that any singers from previous decades adopted makes him stand apart, and his personal yet nonchalant lyrics just give the feel of some goofy guy who just stumbled upon a mic and said "Sure, why not?". He's just so much himself that he can be pigeon-holed into no particular time period of singing style.

Musically I suppose that they're too simplistic for the personality of the times to come through. There are plenty of power pop bands from the same time period, like Big Star or Cheap Trick, that are clearly seventies bands, but the Modern Lovers are a singular group. A tragedy they went belly up before their debut was even released.


The Monks: Black Monk Time - 1966

If the Modern Lovers were too simplistic to sound like their contemporaries, the Monks were too basic for any kind of emotion to come through in their music whatsoever. I can see why they were so influential on kraut rock, and by extension, electronic music. Their music is stripped down to the point where it's just pure rhythm. It would be sterile if not for a sense of pure, manic fun. Their singer likewise could give a **** about sounding like anyone but himself. He doesn't sing, seemingly as a **** you to actual singers; his lyrics, while they might mention Vietnam in the first song, otherwise mock at-the-time-current themes of love and positive vibes just to give a middle finger to the musical landscape of the times; even the 'Nam mention is too "**** you!" to come across as normal hippie fare. I actually feel as if, right now, I should be getting pissed about all of our soldiers dying in the Tet Offensive.


I could probably come up with more, but I'm lazy.