I have no idea how anybody could answer this one and claim the same album from, say, 10 years ago, or even five. Actually, no, scratch that: I’ve known some folks who are almost autistically fixated on the same band/artist that they liked as children and have clung fast to them for decades.
To each their own, I suppose. That’s not me. There are plenty of albums I have loved since childhood, including Culture Club’s Colour By Numbers, or Prince’s then-now-and-forever Purple Rain. I still listen to innumerable albums from my adolescence (digitally), such as every single Ramones album, the best of The Damned, loads of hair metal, Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I and II, and every album by The Who until 1979.
Past that, the 2000s were astonishingly great for churning out amazing records I continue to enjoy as a whole, and I can immediately name quite a few, including Funeral by Arcade Fire, the self-titled debut from LCD Soundsystem, Twin Cinema by The New Pornographers, the aching Love Is Hell by Ryan (not Bryan) Adams, and Turn On The Bright Lights by Interpol.
In this current age of label-generated, generic, forgettable tykes who only release singles, I rather feel sorry for Generation Zed (well, not really, but in this case I do). They don’t understand what it’s like to purchase an album and have it be a complete experience. You’d happily go down to the record shop to buy your record, tape, or CD, take it home, and immerse yourself in a transportive sonic adventure. There might be a few singles on there, but there would also be deep cuts that were thrilling to discover, there was usually some kind of theme or overarching cohesion to the entire finished product, and you could listen to it from start to finish and press “skip” maybe once or twice depending on your mood. I don’t think people make full works of art like that anymore. I suppose this is why that billionaire blonde girl whose daddy bought her a record label has become as much of a product as Coca-Cola or Amazon: she actually has no competition. I can’t think of another person in popular culture who is releasing full albums (constantly, because she is also greedier than a bridge troll) and absentmindedly strumming a guitar onstage while singing about mean boys at the age of 34.
However, if I have to pick just one, I suppose my favourite album of all-time–which I have never stopped listening to, and with every listen brings the same amount of joy and wonder and satisfaction that I felt when I first discovered it at the age of 15–has to be Jellyfish’s Bellybutton. I don’t talk about them much, because barely anyone I know has heard of them. This album assisted in permanently etching out my taste in music for the rest of my life, as well as understanding what album production, lyricism, influence, and innovation through musical output were truly about. There wasn’t anyone like Jellyfish back in the very early 90s; they released two perfect albums, and this was their debut. I kind of wish they had stuck around, but in a sense, those three years of pure bliss they gave their fans in an era of sloppy, angry junkies raging about Who Knows What is something all of us will cherish.
As a lovely bonus, every member of the band was mind-blastingly talented, and cuter than a ladybug picnic.
That’s all I’m going to say, as this would constitute an entirely different blog, and I can almost guarantee there are websites and online threads devoted to this utterly magnificent, timeless band, created by Jellyfish disciples such as myself who parse every last detail of their three years of existence. Oh, except that “The King Is Half-Undressed” is what seized me by the soul when I was a kid after I luckily caught it on MuchMusic, and the rest is herstory.
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