sound

Music

Albums and songs I return to. Music that means something.

filter6 entries

album1998

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

Neutral Milk Hotel

I resisted this album for years because of how much people talked about it. Then one night it made complete sense. The rawness isn't affectation — Mangum sounds like he has no choice but to mean every word. Two-Headed Boy Pt. 2 is the most heartbreaking song I know. I return to it when I want to feel something.

★★★★★5.0

emotionalnostalgicquietly-brilliant

stayed with me

album1971

Blue

Joni Mitchell

The benchmark. Everything laid out without flinching — the loneliness, the wanting, the California lightness that somehow makes the sadness heavier. 'A Case of You' alone justifies the whole thing. Every serious songwriter has had to reckon with this record. You can hear it in everything that came after.

★★★★★5.0

timelesstenderdevastating

stayed with me

album2016

A Moon Shaped Pool

Radiohead

Daydreaming is the best thing Radiohead have done since Kid A. The whole album feels like a reckoning — slower and more orchestral than anything before it. True Love Waits finally got its proper recorded version after twenty years of live performances. It was worth the wait and somehow sadder for it.

★★★★½4.5

emotionaldarkbeautiful

stayed with me

album2008

For Emma, Forever Ago

Bon Iver

Made alone in a cabin over one winter, and it sounds exactly like that — isolated, raw, built from grief with company somehow. The lo-fi recording, the falsetto, the layered guitars: it's the sound of someone making art to survive something. Re: Stacks is one of the best closing tracks on any record.

★★★★½4.9

devastatingbeautifulsolitary

stayed with me

album2015

Carrie & Lowell

Sufjan Stevens

I put this on during a long drive and had to pull over. Not because it's a sad album — though it is — but because it's so specific. The grief is particular and named and that makes it more universal somehow. Death With Dignity and Should Have Known Better are in my permanent memory. Return it to regularly, always unexpectedly.

★★★★★5.0

emotionalbeautifulquietly-brilliant

stayed with me

album2016

Blonde

Frank Ocean

There's no album that sounds more like the interior of someone's mind. Ocean builds moods rather than songs — Nikes, Self Control, Nights. The sequencing is part of the meaning. I've listened to it beginning to end more times than I can count and it still feels new in different moods.

★★★★★5.0

nostalgicbeautifulemotional

stayed with me