By “important” I mean that it didn’t just become hugely popular, but it also changed a music genre or launched an entirely new one, or otherwise made a huge impact on music in general.
By “important” I mean that it didn’t just become hugely popular, but it also changed a music genre or launched an entirely new one, or otherwise made a huge impact on music in general.
Good call with Angel Dust. King For a Day, Fool For A Lifetime completes the syllabus.
As much as I enjoyed Pet Sounds when I was younger, it wasn’t until it was pointed out to me that it was one of the first albums by a big act to not be written around live performance that I began to realise its significance. Almost every other album released on major labels at the time was in service of selling tickets to live shows, along with copies of the records. They were full of songs to sing and dance along to.
Pet Sounds was an album that was best enjoyed at home on a decent sound system.
Pet Sounds is a work of art that happens to contain some incredible pop music that must have pissed off the other members of the Beach Boys as they listened to it and tried to figure out how the hell they were supposed to perform it live. But Brian made a damn good go of saying what he needed to say with it, and that was what was important to him.
Pet sounds and Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band are what I think of as the first studio driven albums and I can to them later in life after just ignoring the pop song hits that always played on the radio.
Amazing sounds with a good set of headphones.
Forgot to mention:
All of sly and the family stones albums. Larry invented slap bass, they renewed funk, Greg laid the groundwork for what all hip hop artists draw from, sly used a drill machine that was more or less a toy to create really nasty and murky beats by lioping, overlaying and tooting with speeds ented and theyinnovated sludgy lo-fi sound. All in a few years.