The Invisible Library

Now that my supervisors are perusing this blog, I thought I’d give them something fun to read that also provides genuine insight into my personality (lest they think I’m just a disgruntled atheist with an overwrought fondness for cats). So here are my top five favorite albums (in no particular order):

1. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Neutral Milk Hotel.
   For the last few years, Elvira and I have treated CDs as nothing more than transportation devices for MP3s, allowing us to add more, more, more! to our Massive Music Collection (as I write this, I’m importing the new Frank Black double album which, when complete, will put us at 12,497 songs.) But In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is one of the few CDs I’ll pul out and listen to as an album because it’s the best way to hear it. All the songs flow into each other, telling one long, surreal story involving decay, reincarnation and talking smack about Jesus. Bonus!
2. Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, The Flaming Lips.
   It’s a screaming, mad, lamenting rock album about pink robots and life on Mars. What’s not to love? It’s also a solidly fun album. There’s not a track on here that I don’t enjoy, even part II of the title track, which is just a girl screaming over synthpop noise and drums. It’s what john Cage would have done if he had attempted something even remotely enjoyable.
3. Doolittle, The Pixies.
   This is the album that Nirvana wanted to make with Nevermind but couldn’t because Curt Cobain was a no-talent junkie. Even if you’ve never heard of the Pixies, I gguarantee you’ve heard at least three songs from this album and if you have heard of the Pixies, you know why: songs about, “Biblical rape and torture, death, deprivation, […], both the spooning and slicing of human eyeballs.” and monkeys. Let’s not forget the monkeys. I heard them play last year and it was quite possibly the second greatest concert I’ve ever been to.
4. The best concert I’ve ever been to was Wilco. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is my favorite album of theirs, probably because it was the first I heard and the one that blew me away. But they’re all good. I could gush abut this album for a thousand words, but I don’t need to. Just listen to it and you’ll agree: you can’t be totally human until you’ve heard this album. it’s Shakespeare with a blues guitar and weird, haunted radio sounds.
5. 69 Love Songs, The Magnetic Fields.
   See, I am a softy, really. A whole album about love songs (technically, three whole albums). Happy, sad, poppy little ditties about love and all the tragic beauty it creates, from revolutions to obsessive compulsions and even bad jazz. Actually, I suspect it’s a complex treatise on the nature of love and that all 69 songs played in a certain sequence will bring romantic enlightenment. Or just get you off, one or the other.