The album that carried reggae music to the four corners of the world and made Bob Marley an international superstar also set the political tone for many artists to follow. HBĬatch a Fire (Jamaican version) (1973), Bob Marley and the Wailers Propulsive polyrhythms drive against the lyrical pleas for us to stop and take stock. “Facts are simple and facts are straight / Facts are lazy and facts are late…” sang David Byrne, submerging personal and planetary anxieties about fake news and conspicuous consumption in dense, layers and loops of Afrobeat-indebted funk. Although that was really the only mediaeval imagery they conjured up – they ripped Dungeons & Dragons clichés out of the lyrics and replaced them with the apocalypse, with bassist Cliff Burton, drummer Lars Ulrich, guitarist Kirk Hammett and singer/rhythm guitarist James Hetfield serving as the four horsemen. This album is about storytelling – the mediaeval-influenced guitar picks on opener “Battery” should be enough to tell you that. In 1986, they released one of the best metal records of all time, which dealt with the potency and very nature of control, meshing beauty and raw human ugliness together on tracks like “Damage Inc” and “Orion”. HBĭespite not featuring any singles, Metallica’s third album was the UK rock radio breakthrough they’d been looking for. You can hear her listening to the band, biding her time before firing up her voice to demand “R-E-S-P-E-C-T”, 50 years before the #MeToo movement. The Queen of Soul gave herself the same space. When Jerry Wexler signed the daughter of a violent, philandering preacher to Atlantic records, he “took her to church, sat her down at the piano, and let her be herself”. I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You (1967), Aretha Franklin Half a century on, all you have to do is put electricity through The Velvet Underground & Nico to realise that he was right. That’s before you even get on to the song about buying and shooting heroin that David Bowie heard on a test pressing and called “the future of music”. “European Son” is rock’n’roll turned sonic shockwave. “Venus in Furs” is a jangling, jagged-edge drone about a sex whipping not given lightly. Side one, track one, “Sunday Morning”, is a wistful ballad fit for a cool European chanteuse sung by a surly Brooklynite. It starts with a child’s glockenspiel and ends in deafening feedback, noise, and distortion. Truthfully, though, Victor Frankenstein himself couldn’t have sewn together a creature out of more mismatched body parts than this album. It was Andy Warhol who wanted Lou Reed and John Cale to let his beautiful new friend Nico sing with their avant-garde rock band. The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967), The Velvet Underground But first, the olde English meaning of list, or “lyst”: shush and harken. Hopefully, you’ll use the comment section to tell us what surprised you and what confirmed your suspicions. Hopefully you can hear the influence of these albums on some of your own favourites. Hopefully you can still feel the electricity of invention in The Beatles’ Revolver, Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and Nas’s Illmatic. Most of our personal favourites aren’t here, because we’ve tried to pick the records that broke new ground rather than those that refined old sounds. We’ve included classics and curveballs, because “to list” can also mean to tilt. This list is designed for anybody interested in extending their aural attention span and genuinely challenging their preconceptions. Watching it blow his mind, I changed mine. Then I played it to my nine-year-old son, who doesn’t share any of my cultural baggage. I didn’t want to include Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Consequently we can end up believing we have solid opinions on records we may never have given our honest and sustained attention. When was the last time you listened to an old album from start to finish? With our ears set to shuffle since the death of the CD, only the vinyl fetishists seem to do it any more.