'It's how the hustle goes, see what the juke box knows' by @diaryofaledger

First up, I fricking love this album.  It's a bit lightweight at times, pretty throwaway in others and the world did not stop in awe at it's brilliance but it has its gems.  Lots of them.

Back when there was a channel called MTV2 on your telly box that wasn't a pile of unadulterated drivel they played quite a lot of excellent music.  Ok they'd still play the same ten songs in rotation but at least they were decent tunes.  One of those was The Middle by Jimmy Eat World.

Bleed America Bleed came out in 2001, promptly caused an uproar with its title and was repressed in 2002 without it.  The Middle got heavy rotation on MTV2 and that was about it in terms of interest over here.  I was in some kind of, 'MUST HAVE ALL MUSIC EVER MADE,' melt down and went and got the album that was by then self titled.

The opening of Salt Sweat Sugar hooked me in big time, immediately heavy, although in that kind of gentle, non threatening way, with lyrics about top soil.  That kind of mental always gets me.

I guess it is an album full of mid twenties American angst but it's a fun ride.  There's sort of a 50s vibe in some of the words too, although musically it's indie lite and all about the jangle of guitars.

Top tracks?  Well that opener is hard to beat but A Praise Chorus that follows it is a great rock song and The Middle will still make you smile.

But... Sweetness is my fave Jimmy Eat World song, all noise and harmonies.  It takes me back to those early Queen albums with stuff like In The Lap of the Gods on them.  And the words are aces too.

String from your tether unwinds,
Up and outward to bind,
I was spinning free,
With a little sweet and simple numbing me.

It goes through a little mid album slump as it descends into cheese.  However things soon pick back up with the brilliant and uber feisty Get it Faster.

I wanna do right by you,
I'm finding out that cheating gets it faster.

After the rather cloying efforts at a few love songs mid album they nail it with the lovely Cautioners, one of the saddest break up songs I've ever heard.  I won't put the lyrics up because someone will, inevitably, think they're aimed at them (which they really wouldn't be) but for the rest of you, go Spotify it.  Lovely lovely song.

And then with barely a beat missed it's Authority Song.  Probably the reason I fell in love with this album if truth be told.  It's me at seventeen (I mean eighteen... obviously), gracing the pubs of the Isle of Wight putting coins into Jukeboxes in awful pubs.

For an album that's so full of life it's a shock when it ends with the slow and sad My Sunshine.  But it fits perfectly after the energy of Authority Song.

It's not an album that's gonna change your world but hey, get it anyway.  There's something on there for everyone to love.

'If things get real promise to take me somewhere else' by @diaryofaledger

Once in a while I stumble upon albums like this one.  Albums that mean so much to me, that nearly got missed altogether.  It's in my Top Ten... maybe.... 

Turin Brakes are two guys and two guitars.  Modern folk apparently, whatever that is.  What The Optimist LP is is something else entirely.  It's a collection of some of the most well spun songs I know.  The words are like honey, slowly dripping on a hot summers day.  The guitars are a joy.  As delicate, graceful and poignant as anything in my collection.

It's an album that doesn't connect to any relationship other than the one I have with myself which in itself is pretty unusual.  I think I probably got it around 2002 a few months after release and I can remember listening to it loads in the car.  Volume on 'excessive', as per usual, on hot summer days to and from work.

It begins with Feeling Oblivion, which opens with a few notes on a piano before the simple tune actually starts.      The words are all over the place, but sit with in the song perfectly.  That last chorus preceded by the haunting, 'So don't leave me here on my own.'

Underdog (Save Me) is about running away from everything.  It nearly inspired me to get off my arse and go see the world again.  There's a 'great little' guitar solo in it too.  

The album is full of 'great little' songs, all warm and lush but my favourite comes towards the end.  Mind Over Money has one of the best 'join in and burst your lungs' choruses I know.  It's sort of anthem like without actually being an anthem.

That's alright I warned myself,
Keep blood on the inside and nowhere else

An album for warm summer nights for sure.  Beach parties? Yes.  But there's so much depth there within the light.  There's a bleakness that sort of sat nicely with turning thirty soon after the turn of century (2003 fact fans), it is the sound of age catching up with me.  Over ten years later and I still love the album.  It can still make me smile and it still feels like a well kept secret.  Which sometimes still feels like it means something.

The vocals throughout take you away to somewhere else and although sometimes slightly awkward and not compromised to fit the tunes, the harmonies are quietly pretty as each song places you in a different part of your world.  I can imagine sitting and listening to it with someone pretty (maybe I have on occasion) but equally it works as dark room and headphones album.  Just be careful with the singing along when you try that... sorry neighbours, I really should have closed the window.

Do you not have The Optimist LP by Turin Brakes?  No?  Fool. 

'And altogether it went well' by @diaryofaledger

I was on the cusp of separation when Is This It by the Strokes came out in 2001 but I fell for it after.

It's still one of my favourite albums ever.  The perfect blend of laid back slackers, talent and hipster cool, an album was just too good to be ignored.  They didn't really live up to the hype post Is This It but the debut still lives up to all that attention that was thrown at it.

It screams of New York, of drugs chic and waif thin model girlfriends.  The cover deserves to be borderline iconic alone but it's what's contained within that made everyone swoon.  Every track is special.  No filler just great tunes.

There's a wonderful simplicity to the album, in the playing and production.  It all sounds like it was recorded in one hit which was exactly what The Strokes wanted, a back to basics approach that felt incredibly refreshing at the time.

Julian Casablanca's lyrics and voice are what all the songs hang off.  It's a voice that can hardly be described as glorious but it fits with the music wonderfully well.  The sound of a few too many cigarettes as he struggles to hit a high note and falls into a croak quite brilliantly captured.  The words within the songs paint a picture of living in New York on the cusp of breaking through, urban cool as relationships start and then fizzle out.

See, alone we stand, together we fall apart - Someday

Everyone fell for Last Night.  It's the one that rang out at Indie Disco across the land for about five years and probably still does (I got too old for that shit).  It's still a great tune though, but there's others on the album that are easily it's equal.  Hard to Explain, which follows it, it just, well, fuck awesome.  It even has that little moment of silent perfection.

It was the sound of New York just prior to September the 11th.  The sound of dirty bohemians making great music while they smoked weed and hung out with pretty girls.

One of those albums everyone should own.   

'A Song for our Fathers' by @diaryofaledger

Sometimes music is just all about how it makes you feel.  Classical music lovers will get that.  Emotion and passion dripping from something that contains no words.  This album is like that but different.

I first heard Explosions in the Sky four years ago, recommended by a friend at work who'd stuck this album (How Strange, Innocence) on the department iPods and I was immediately hooked.   Their debut from 2000 is one of the most beautiful albums I own.  Electric guitar, bass and drums but no words.  At all.  It's an instrumental rock album that works on so many levels.

At times it's incredibly mournful, quiet and pretty.  At others it's uplifting and joyful.  And there's noise too.  Loads of it.

The four piece create something that you can live in over the seven tracks.  With headphones on, lights off, it's a magical listen.  Never pretentious, never forced, just slow and deliberate in its simplicity and all of its interwoven complexity.

The surprise for me was not missing lyrics at all in a rock album.  There are moments when the guitars do enough of the speaking for you.  Glittering Blackness, just past half way through, has some wonderfully timed moments as the song breaks from a wall of sound into a gentle refrain.  You get utterly lost in where the songs go as they spiral and spin into different directions, the band clearly embracing the lack of words as a chance to push off in other directions mid track without deviating from a songs purpose.

So how does it make me feel?  I discovered them at a rough time and there's some of that emotion residing in there when I listen to it now.  But that's the beauty of it, because you're not being forced to accept that the songs actually about anything they take on new meanings each time you listen.  And tonight as I type I guess what I get is hope.  And that's a good thing.

Explosions in the Sky aren't a one off, but their beautiful delivery make them a very special band and there are another four albums since this one to immerse yourself in.  Lovely.

'First it giveth then it taketh away' by @diaryofaledger

Remember when rock was dirty and fun?  Back in the 1970s?  No?  Oh?  This was a throw back to that younglings.  Heavy, thunderous actually, but also tongue in cheek and one of the best rock albums of the last ten years.

No One Knows warmed us all up.  Dave Grohl in the video, drumming like he used to (like a tub thumping madman) peaked the interest of Nirvana and Foo fans.  If Dave was in, maybe we all should be.

They've always been a fluid band in terms of members but this had Mark Lanegan, Nick Oliveri, Grohl and of course Home who'd always been a noise merchant.  They were all peaking. it's an album rammed full of talent, vocally and lyrically, and spilling out of the darkness of the unrelenting bass and guitar and weird harmonies is a sound unlike anyone else.  I used to listen to it a lot in the car (back when I had one).  Volume straining to cope with the bass heavy tracks as I'd try to catch any meaning in the at times impenetrable words.  

It's one of those albums that's all about how it makes you feel.  There's actually no point at all listening to this on any other volume level than loud.  It loses something when the bass and drums aren't being felt through every bit of your flesh at high volume, almost like your being assaulted by the noise.

It's sexy as fuck too.  Something about the pounding I guess, even on something like The Sky is Falling, where things are  a bit quieter, it's still a throbbing mass of sound.  Go With the Flow's video was hardly subtle about what the band felt the song was about.

That they fell apart so badly post this album was such a pity, drugs, women and more women, and then some more drugs all played their part but as an album it's a stunner.  Grohl's best drumming ever. FACT.

'We don't talk about love' by @diaryofaledger

I didn't really fall for the Manics until I saw them live at Glastonbury.  They were still a four piece back then, all wearing balaclavas and full of energy and menace.  Like so many others Richie Edward's 'For Real' self harming had captured something for me a few years earlier, a moment so full of proper punk rock and passion that despite the shock factor actually had you believing (that despite) the hype maybe just maybe there was a band here that really meant it.

The Holy Bible proved it.  What followed, post Richie's disappearance, showed that it wasn't just him that drove the Manics, they were all for real.

When Everything Must Go came out there was so much good will out there for the band that it could have been awful and sold a shed load.  That it wasn't was an achievement under the circumstances.  That it went on  to mean so much to so many was incredible.

Design for Life had already shook everyone up prior to the album.  Shit, even now, what a song that is.  It feels even more relevant than ever as a generation lives for the weekend and drinking through their lives.  James Dean Bradfield's voice sounds like it's on the edge in the chorus, straining to make the notes, the orchestral backing fitting in perfectly with bombastic call to arms.  Rarely has a song that talks about libraries been so powerful.

I think we all expected something morose.  Something almost private that we'd be scared to look at.  An album full of grief and loss, but it's so far away from that.  There's songs about photo journalists, expressionist artists and Blackpool.  No compromises, still a Manics album.

Highlights?  Well obviously the singles, Australia and Everything Must Go, both great songs, but for me there's the beautiful Small Black Flowers that Grow in the Sky and Removables,  both written by Edwards.  One delicate and fragile one just a great rock song.

Of course Richie Edwards presence is there throughout but it heightens the experience knowing what circumstances the band recorded the album in.  It took years before they could go back to Edward's words fully and make an album completely made up from his writing with 2009's Journal for Plague Lovers.  That's the only album since that really hits home as much as this one does.  Yes Everything Must Go is very different from the Holy Bible but it kind of needed to be.

It ends with the amazing No Surface All Feeling.  Wonderfully written by Nicky Wire, who still has that knowing glint in his eye all these years later.  It's just a great closer, noisy and poignant.  Just the way Richie liked things.

What's the point in looking back,

When all you see is more and more junk.

Never bothered with the Manics?  Start with this and work backwards.  The Holy Bible is still my favourite album but then it has got Faster on it, but Everything Must Go was a great introduction to a brilliant band.  Roll on Isle of Wight festival.

'I bet you don't know how to sell conviction' by @diaryofaledger

Half way through 100 Broken Windows is a song of such wonderful loud/quiet madness that I couldn't help but fall in love with Idlewild, however briefly.

This was sort of my introduction to them way back in 1999, I was aware of a great track called When I Argue I See Shapes, from their first album prior to this coming out.  I must have heard Roseability on the radio at some point and thought, fuck, that's a pretty cool song.  They were Biffy, before I found Biffy.  Then they went soft...

'Harder Faster' by @diaryofaledger

There's a moment in Bionic when you realise that you're listening to something a bit special.  The 'None of you can make the grade,' refrain moves into a guitar solo that keeps repeating throughout the song, and it's just exactly what you want the song to do.

As a debut it's a superb album.  That they've never bettered it in my eyes speaks volumes about where Placebo went.  It's not that they've become a bad band but somewhere along the way they lost their playfulness, the tongue firmly planted in cheek (or somewhere less appropriate) thing that makes the first album such a joy.  It only surfaces on songs like Infra Red on later albums, which get way to bogged down in being taken very very seriously.  Not that there aren't moments like that here, but there's a lot of fun to be had in the scatter shot lyrics, that may well have kicked about on a school pencil case at some point.

Songs wise the obvious high points are Come Home, Nancy Boy and Teenage Angst but there's so much more here than that.  There's the none to subtle but vaguely ambiguous sexuality stuff throughout which sometimes deviates into self loathing, check out the 'tool' line in Hang Onto Your IQ.  Funny as fuck to be honest but wrapped up in a great tune.

The thing is it is a great rock album.  So vibrant and lacking in self conciousness that it never feels contrived when it so easily could.  The bad rhymes and throwaway lyrics never devalue the tunes or Molko's voice which never quite sounded like this again.  There's a weird delicateness to it, that just works so well on this album.

Bionic though is by far my favourite song here.  Great riff, great words (there's only three lines) and a great guitar solo.  It's probably an incredibly simple song to play, I guess sometimes they're the best ones.

'Pour the milk and I'll say when' by @diaryofaledger

Remember The Word? Kind of dreadful Friday night freak show on Channel 4 hosted by Terry Christian?  Well because I was nineteen and easily amused, I used to watch it, but it did have one redeeming feature.  At the end of each travesty there was a band and the producers were well into the early Grunge scene. Many punters would have seen Nirvana for the first time because of it but the band I remember more is the Lemonheads and their performance of Mrs Robinson.  Evan Dando in a massive red furry coat, playing a brilliant cover of the Simon and Garfunkel classic.

The album, It's a Shame About Ray, is one of the most uplifting I've ever owned.  Dando, before the drugs took hold, had this kind of ethereal quality to him that was both charming and disarming.  A genuinely nice guy who suddenly and completely unexpectedly had fame thrust upon him following the success of Mrs Robinson.

It' an incredibly short album, no song is longer than three and a bit minutes but it's a lovely blend of folk, pop and grunge.  You can't help but smile at the tunes.  They remind me of great summers at home, driving around in a bright yellow Ford Fiesta, living without a care.

The lovely Juliana Hatfield is on loads of the songs, her beautiful voice blending with Dando's and there are loads of highlights.  Alison's Starting to Happen is a personal fave along with the brilliant Ceiling Fan in My Spoon.  Some of it's silly and almost throwaway, but there's just a hint of depth throughout and it's that and Dando's lost puppy thing, that makes the whole thing so endearing.  The Mrs Robinson cover is great but there was so much more to the Lemonheads than that.

The follow up, Come on Feel the Lemonheads, still had some of the magic and contains my favourite song of theirs, Into Your Arms, although not my favourite version which sits as a B-Side on the Mrs Robinson single.  It lasts a minute and half.

If you've never listened to them, they're worth checking out, but start with 'Ray', if you're feeling blue post New Year it'll put a smile on your face.

'I'm ready to take it to the street.' by @diaryofaledger

This is like a confessional:  Achtung Baby never really leaves me alone.

When U2 disappeared, after Rattle Hum, for three years, they said they were going away to 'dream it all up again', and they came back with their best album, ever.  Maybe one of the very best albums I own, certainly one that I often say is my favourite.  No one is more aware than me of how not cool that is.  As per, I really don't care.

I was in Australia when it came out, was already a fan and I can remember watching the video for the Fly and people saying that U2 had blown it.  That it was so far away from what they were as a band that the fans would turn.  Like many others though I bought Achtung, out of almost curiosity and it quickly became the album that soundtracked that trip and the relationship I was in at the time.  Had they blown it?  Nope.  They'd nailed it.

That opening still takes me back to the old Wembley and seeing them for the first time live.  Bono high on a perch way above the stage, hopping to that dirty industrial guitar sound.  The voice messed with and all over the place way before it even starts to sound like U2 at all.

Everything feels different on Achtung and yet it's still U2 at its heart.

Next year it's twenty years old but for most fans I suspect it's the one album that gets a regular airing.  The symbolism and sexuality in the lyrics and at times just the sheer simpleness of it all make it a complete joy to listen to.

Of course it contains One.  I've been thinking today about what I say about it.  How do I describe a song that means so much to me?  What does it mean to me?  That might be where I dry up because it's someone else's words, that I suppose embody the relationship that I was in at the time and the aftermath of it ending.  And then it's about all the others that have followed too.  It's not a painful listen it's just one bound up in a shed load of memories.   Truly the most beautiful thing Bono ever wrote.

Until the End of the World still sounds amazing and still takes me back to those days living in Bondi.  I love the religious references and the the no holds barred blow job moment.  It's so far away from the Joshua Tree in the quality of the writing.

Let's pretend the one about the Wild Horses isn't on it m'kay?  Cheers.  ('Hey hey sha la la....' WTF?!!!)

There's a sense throughout that U2 thought they were fighting to stay where they were as a band.  Forget the tax dodging and preaching shit of the now.  At the time, despite selling well, Rattle and Hum had been widely ridiculed, they had to make a record that changed everything.  For me, despite the brilliance of One it's on the album tracks like So Cruel and Ultraviolet that they really achieved this.

So Cruel is understated brilliance.

Desperation is a tender trap

It gets you every time

You put your lips to her lips 

To stop the lie

The Fly has lost the shock factor now and feels a bit throwaway, sort of a Get on Your Boots of its time.  Mysterious Ways is still the one really uplifting song on the album and it still brings a smile to my face but it's the darker shit that I really love on the album.

The last three tracks are three of my U2 songs.  Ultraviolet (Light My Way) which they're still playing live, is a truly brilliant piece of work.  It's dark but there's hope within it all.  Acrobat which follows is probably one that gets forgotten, possibly because it's kind of like those last few tracks on Joshua Tree, kind of dense and full of The Edge.  But lyrically it's pretty special and I love Bono's voice on it, breaking and croaky like a smoker.  'Don't Let the Bastards Drag You Down,' has never sounded better.

Then it ends with Love is Blindness.  Beautiful and U2 at their best.  And also on reflection quite odd.

So there you go, I rather like U2.  Kill me now, put me up against the Twitter firing squad, I doth not care.  Achtung is still up there for me.  Life defining stuff.

'The photograph on the dashboard' by @diaryofaledger

Automatic for the People by REM isn't a typical GC album to love.  I guess, listening to it now, it's almost a precursor to where Coldplay ended up.  Just way better than that.

It's nearly twenty years old.  Eighteen to precise.  Fuck. Me.  How?

It still sounds absolutely fresh though, although it's hard to think of why I felt such a strong attachment to it at the time.  R.E.M were one of my favourite bands, although as per usual I did them backwards: from Out of Time, working my way through there back catalogue after falling in love with Losing My Religion.  Out of Time broke them as a big band, rivals to U2 as the biggest band in the world for a while, and Automatic cemented that.

Remember the first time you heard Everybody Hurts, before it became their signature and an X-Factor regular?  Remember that brilliant video on the highway overpass?  Remember when it wasn't played to with an inch of its life?  I saw them play it live once at the Isle of Wight Festival and was moved to tears.  They are, and I suspect, always will be the best live band I've ever seen.  Not the best gig I've ever been to, but the best, most understated, wonderful performance I've ever seen.  Stipe just connecting to thousands with his words.  Put it on now.  Remember that song properly.  Not as the pastiche of itself it has become.  Take it back.

Drive opens the album, a kick at the Bush administration, with it's lovely solemn accoustic guitar.  'Hey kids, rock n' roll, nobody tells you where to go.'  The album is full of stand out lines like that and full of strange moments, that all feel like they have a deeper meaning.

Sweetness Follows totally blows me away still.  Death and grief and release from the pain.  'It's these little things that will pull you under, live your life full of joy and wonder,' it may as well be my mantra.

I chose Michael Stipe as an icon one week and got ripped a virtual new one on Twitter for it.  But it's there in that song why I chose him over all the other, well, all the other 'Michaels'.  That sense of understanding in seemingly impenetrable words.  So yes, you heard it here first, it's a very personal thing, the man made me cry in person.  The bastard.  That's why he's one of my icons.

The album isn't just about Stipe's words though it's about the way it sounds.  Rich and full.  The production is perfect but the playing of the instruments (and many were used) is by men at the top of their craft.

It's an REM album so there has to be a misstep somewhere and Automatic has Ignoreland.  We shall, for the purposes of this post, pretend that it does not.

It does have Man on the Moon though and it's still not easy to listen to without a smile on your face.  Feeling glum?  Put Man on the Moon on.  It'll lift ya.  Promise.  Lovely stuff, it even includes and Elvis impression.

What follows is one of those songs that connects with me with every fibre.  It's probably the song that meant so much to me back in 1992.  Back then it wasn't about the words.  It was about two things I think.  One is that the song just sounds incredible.  Piano and orchestra and Stipe's amazing voice.  The other thing is something that I won't share, again not about the words, just more personal and in some ways just plain strange.  It's still my favourite REM song for all those reasons, the explained and the unexplained.

REM never sounded like this again.  Which is a shame, but to be honest I don't think they could or should have tried.  Apart from that one aberration it's perfect.  Listening to it tonight feels like welcoming an old friend back into the house.  It's a great album for a cold night and nowhere near as down beat as I remembered it being.  Serious yes.  But full of hope inside the sadness of a broken shell.

When bands get big they get stick.  Put aside that for one night, put Automatic for the People on and forgive REM their success for an hour or so and soak it all up.

(Skip Ignoreland though.)

Big thanks to AT for letting me post these weekly on here about some of my favourite albums.  In many ways they are one of the reasons my own site has become so music and 'life' dominated of late and become better for that (I hope).  Cheers bud.

'This little squirrel I used to be slammed her bike down the stairs' by @diaryofaledger

First year of University I was living in some woman's house in Chingford.  My girlfriend was in Stoke on Trent and we were both struggling with the distance thing.  Then I fell in love with Tanya Donnelly.

First time I heard Feed the Tree would have been sat in the room of my digs listening to the radio while I played Sensible Soccer...  I was so studious.  I loved it immediately but knew nothing about the band or where Miss Donnelly had come from.

I probably had the album within a week and slowly but surely, mainly thanks to the NME I started to get the bigger picture around Donnelly and just how damn cool she was.

He fragile, little voice, was immediately attractive, but there was also an element of a girl rocking out.  She was a precursor to PJ for me, lovely and more than a little kooky.  I do so love kooky.

Listening back to the album now it's all very quiet and dark to start with until Dusted kicks in and the album springs to life.  Sure it's about Drug addiction, but it's the voice, almost buried by the guitars, that makes it such a great song.

It's an album of slow thoughtful songs punctuated by moments of joy and energy.  It's one of the first indie albums I fell for and an album that took me on a winding path to the Pixies.

I'll always be grateful to Tanya Donnelly for that.

'You wake up with a gun in your mouth.' by @diaryofaledger

I wasn't a fan if the first Suede album.  It was ok, but I didn't really get the Brett love.  To me he just seemed a bit of an arrogant twat and although all the indie chicks seemed to think he was a god and that Bernard was some kind of guitar wielding geek genius, I just didn't get it.

At the time of their second album, Dog Man Star, I was reading the NME every week and the big news was that Brett used to date Justine from Elastic who was now dating Damon from Blur.  How terribly exciting.  Before Blur v's Oasis there was Blur v's Suede and it was much more interesting, in a sort of gloom laden, probably addicted to coke and heroin sort of way.

It was 1994 when Dog Man Star came out.  Just weeks before release Bernard Butler walked away from Suede and my interest was piqued.  Here was a band labelled as the next great British hope and they were falling apart at the seems.  Who doesn't love a bit of tension?

We Are the Pigs had whet everyone's appetite, a stirring guitar, arguably that classic Suede sound of the first album, but tighter and more dynamic.  It's a great great song, but the album is something else entirely.

It might actually be the lost great album of the 1990s, buried under their peers now, Suede's legacy, sadly burned by the slightly half baked albums that followed.  But Dog Man Star delivers at every turn, in parts like a throw back to the '70s, rich in sound and full of guitar solos, but in others it's almost 'show tune' like in its pomp and circumstance.

My favourite moment?  Opening line of The Wild Ones.  Sung so beautifully, so perfectly.  Shivers, every time.

The best song?  I've been musing that all day after some comments on my facebook wall from the artist formerly know as ChestyMorgan.  She went with The Power, which I adore.  The words swimming over the guitar, the anger subdued and hidden from view until you listen properly.  It's got Bowie all over it, but it's a stunning track.

For me though Dog Man Star contains one of the best album closers of all time with Still Life.  There's something Phantom of the Opera about it (and I hate musicals, fact) but the words are gorgeous and warm.  Love at its darkest, the chorus when it comes, so potent and over the top.  It's the sort of song that Muse have been failing to write for the last ten years.  And then, just when you think it's over, the orchestra takes you somewhere else, it becomes like something out of a western and always makes me think of wide open spaces and the bluest, clearest skies.  Brett Anderson may have been an utter twat but on that one song he redeemed himself for me.

There's other moments when the album goes way beyond where I'd ever expected to.  The Two of Us and even the opener, Introducing the Band, just two of the best.  Black and Blue is pretty amazing too.  The album gets more and more showy until that stunning climax, building towards it.  It's that attention to detail in the track listing that I love, as the band become something completely different.

Dog Man Star should have been the album that saw Suede take over the world.  For a while they had us in the palm of their hands but without Butler is was never the same.  For one album they transcended everyone else around them by a county mile, producing something that sounded like nothing else any of their peers could write.

Truly special.  (But definitely an acquired taste required.)

'Dance and drink and screw because there's nothing else to do' by @diaryofaledger

Back at the start of 1994 Pulp were nowhere.  Three albums down and their unique(ish) sound had captured no one's imagination.  Brit Pop changed that though and His 'n' Hers did pretty well, songs like Lipgloss and in particular Babies, were coming out of badly set up speakers at every indie disco in town.

What followed, in '95 was an album that put Pulp on the cultural map.  An album that for a while over took them and threatened to break lead singer and driving force Jarvis Cocker.  Different Class is so British, so of its time that listening back to it now it feels dated.  Brilliant but dated.  That there's a song about meeting up with someone in the year 2000 probably doesn't help.

What does survive throughout is the humour.  Cocker knew how to spin a lyric brilliantly, 'Your name was Deborah, it never suited ya.'  Genius.

Pulp were always about the words more than the music.  The songs are built to fit around Cocker, but it works so well here.  There's plenty of art school musings from the the man from Sheffield trying to make his way in London but it's hard to believe how much grief they got for Sorted for E's and Whizz a song basically taking the piss out of rave culture.  But it added to the infamy and helped raise the bands profile even further.

And then of course there's that song that they finished their brilliant set at Glastonbury with in '95 after replacing the Stone Roses.  Common People is the moment when Pulp reached perfection.  Sure there are songs on This is Hardcore (follow up album released in 1998) that are better produced, but Common People WAS 1995.  It's such a perfect piece of joyful pop music whilst at the same time a scathing attack on the rich kids at University slumming it with the masses.  The video was wonderful too.  Cocker's seemingly impossible, skinny, ever bendable body throwing shapes in a dayglo supermarket while trying to woo a young Sadie Frost.

Does the rest of the album stack up?  As a document of 1995 yes.  As an album that you'd listen to over and over again to now... maybe not.  I preferred His 'n' Hers more stripped down approach and the less 'concept album' feel of This is Hardcore with its denser more intense sound.

What is exciting is that around 15 years after I last saw them play live they'll be at the Isle of Wight Festival next summer, reformed and gigging again.  Common People with a backing of 50,000 is going to be special, I can promise you that.

'Can't get the stink out, it's been hanging round for days' by @diaryofaledger

It's easy to forget where Radiohead were on the musical landscape before The Bends came out.  Pablo Honey, the previous and debut album had failed to set the world alight, only Creep really getting any airplay and only after a radio edit to remove the swearing.

To put it in perspective I saw them in Portsmouth supporting James, who were touring Laid, just prior to the release of The Bends.  While I stood up and sung along to the Pablo Honey tracks, nearly everyone else was sat down, barely paying any attention.  They had a presence on stage though, an energy and synchronicity that I'd not seen before from a band.  I can't remember what song it was, but there was a moment where all the band members (apart from drummer Phil Selway) stepped forward and struck their guitars at the same time.  It sounds a bit Status Quo put like that... it wasn't though, it was one of the coolest things I'd ever seen.

My Iron Lung came out as the first single and I wasn't sure I liked it.  It felt cold and emotionless and it wasn't until I heard the songs on the rest of the album that I grew to love it.  It was part of the whole, the majesty of The Bends.

It starts with that strange wind like sound at the beginning of Planet Telex that becomes chopped up and dissolves into that deliciously dirty guitar and Yorke's vocal.  It's all about sound.  Radiohead are the masters of manipulating the noise they make, creating beauty from a cacophony of instruments.  Listen to Planet Telex, there's just so much going on.

The title track explodes into life.  The guitars as sneering as the lyrics.  That, 'blow me sky high,' line is as potent as anything else they ever did.  I love how the guitar solo, if that's what it is, sits over the top the throb, and then how the energy dissipates for the last line.

Don't Leave Me High and Dry is one of those songs that's simplicity belies its brilliance.  That yearning chorus and beautiful tune working perfectly together.  It works so well in tandem with Fake Plastic Trees a song about how false most of the modern world is which features my favourite Yorke vocal who's just completely committed and genuine.

Bones is proper balls out Radiohead.  The kind they buried after OK Computer.  I love it and miss them releasing songs like it.

Anyway, I'm banging on about every track and that's not the done thing.  Do I have a favourite?  Yes.  Black Star.  I love how it starts and it feels like it's already been playing for an age.  I love how it so perfectly sums up what it's like to miss someone and I love, well I love it for one line.  I'll leave you to figure out what one it but around 15 years ago on a train I had a moment that mirrored it.

The whole album is an amazing journey.  Seriously if you don't own this, WTF are you playing at?

Do I prefer it to what followed?  I think both OK Computer and The Bends are two of the greatest albums ever released, by a band that rose above themselves and challenged their abilities.  I can listen to either and declare it better than the other.  So the answer is 'no'.  And sometimes 'yes'.

"And The Radio Says...", By @DiaryOfALedger

Blur launched Parklife with Girls and Boys a song that pervaded every indie disco of 1994 including every Friday night at the Camden Palace.  

The preceding album, Modern Life is Rubbish, had shown that there was more to Blur than their shoe gazing debut but Park Life was the album that sent their popularity through the roof.

'Is there a heart beating? Is it just emptiness?' by @diaryofaledger

...And You Shall Know Know Us By The Trail Of Dead came recommended by the boyfriend of a colleague back in London days.  Their second album, Madonna' had just been released and I was assured that it was right up my street.  So I bought it (imagine that) and initially I was nonplussed.  But I stuck at it.  And now it's one of my favourite albums.

'It's curtains for you Elizabeth my dear' by @diaryofaledger

It took a job at Safeway to get me into the Stone Roses.  Well a job at Safeway and Warrick.  I finished school at 16 and went to Tech College to 'study' Business taking with me an healthy love for poodle rock and not an ounce of cool.  Then I met Warrick and he started me down a path of musical delight.

'Breathe out, so I can breath you in,' by @diaryofaledger

The Foo's don't tend to make great albums, cool, arse kicking singles aplenty but the albums tend to drift, lose their pace and fall short of classic.  All but one that is.  The Colour and the Shape was album two for Dave Grohl after the premature demise of Nirvana and it's here that those demons get exorcised.

'But when I woke up I was happier than I'd ever been' by @diaryofaledger

Gish, the first Smashing Pumpkins album hadn't, despite the mighty 'Rhinoceros', set the world alight. In the wake of a world gone grunge though Siamese Dream was an album delivered at just the right time and many of their peers thought the whole thing a bit contrived.  But the album sold by the bucket load, the angsty lyrics and distinct guitar sound actually sounding like something different at the time.