Best Punk Album in The World...Ever

Product Information

The greatest punk album of all time was made by a band trying to escape punk. Not its intent, force or even attitude, but its implied restrictions and captivity by fundamentalists. The Clash had gently expanded their scope on their second album Give ‘Em Enough Rope, but on London Calling they blew everything apart: styles, dynamics, vantage point and subject matter. In 2003, the success of Volume 1 meant the album was released in the US by Hollywood Records. It was given the new name World's Greatest Air Guitar Album. The album cover featured the same image, but was moved, alongside the new album text. Genreless … Guitarist, singer, songwriter and producer Steve Lacy. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian In psychology, arrival fallacy describes the feeling of fulfilling a goal and yet still feeling disappointed. These are the underpinnings of Mitski’s sixth album, in which the Japanese American songwriter confronts the compromises her career has forced on her art and personhood – an album, no less, that she had no intention of making until she realised she still owed her label one more. These sound like inauspicious invitations to listen to Laurel Hell until you remember that – perhaps unfortunately for Mitski – her songwriting thrives amid this sort of conflict, between what we’re meant to want and what we truly want. Set primarily to the kind of tarnished 80s synth-pop the Weeknd would also explore on Dawn FM, Mitski charts the captivating battle between her weariness and drive, her rage and her discipline. LS 20 Soul Glo – Diaspora Problems

It’s a chance encounter, to be sure: As Jello Biafra joined up with what would become Dead Kennedys in San Francisco, he and his new bandmates discovered he couldn’t play guitar. Instead, he would hum and sing what he thought the music should sound like behind his lyrics, and the players would build compositions from there. The results have punk’s anger, but there’s a particular chug in Klaus Flouride’s bass and twang in East Bay Ray’s guitar that set up rhythmic noise in songs like “Holiday in Cambodia” before crashing down around listeners’ ears come chorus time. Sadly, the band imploded under a cloud of misbehaviour, violence and a sophomore album flop in 1979, and we never got to find out how great they really could have been. I don’t give a shit that Raw Power didn’t make our top spot: If punk is about spewing bile at musical norms, than this album is more punk than any release, by any band, will ever be. Raw Power is eight songs of the filthiest guitar-based music made by American musicians, in any genre. Christ, even “Gimme Danger,” a pop song in many ways, sounds menacing and eventually lapses into chaos. If The Clash never really disavowed White Riot, they also never recorded anything like it again. It split the audience and ultimately split the band too. The Swedish pop star’s fifth – and first independent – album works as a decent primer for anyone who hasn’t been paying attention to the past few years in pop. It’s got Dua-style disco (thanks in part to sharing a collaborator in SG Lewis), Charli XCX’s death drive and one of those now-ubiquitous, infuriatingly catchy Y2K pop interpolations in 2 Die 4, which, quite bafflingly, samples Crazy Frog’s 2005 cover of Gershon Kingsley’s 1969 song Popcorn. Consequently Tove Lo is less of an eye-popping presence here than on her previous records, though her apparent recalcitrance makes her unusual anxiety and conflict around relationships and intensity all the more striking. LS 48 Kojey Radical – Reasons to Smile

The Slits, ‘Cut’ (1979)

Rosalía’s third album delights in flinging diverse, even contradictory styles together – dembow, hip-hop, dubstep, salsa, industrial, bachata, the experimental electronics of Arca, R&B, flamenco, pure radio-ready pop – and presenting the results to the listener with an insouciant take-it-or-leave-it shrug. It’s the work of an artist who clearly sees her success as a platform that enables her to do what she wants rather than as an end in itself. “Es mala amante la fama y no va a quererme de verdad,” as the Weeknd puts it on their collaboration La Fama: fame’s a lousy lover and won’t ever love you for real. Better to exploit it than chase it. Read more. Alexis Petridis 4 Charli XCX – Crash The Best Air Guitar Album in the World...Ever!, referred to in retrospect as Air Guitar I, released 5 November 2001, was compiled by Brian May. A sequel was released in November 2002 and another in November 2003, the latter proclaiming itself to be the last Air Guitar Album in the World...Ever!. Both sequels were again compiled by Brian May. In 2005, a 3CD The Best of the Best Air Guitar Album in the World...Ever! was released. Whilst Air Guitar III proclaimed to be the final volume, the liner notes written by May in The Best of the Best start with "OK, we lied." EMI, Chrysalis, Polygram, Polydor, Phonogram, A&M, Warner Music, Sony Music, Castle Communications, Demon, Bright Music, Trojan and Templemill Music.

No one owned up to writing the graffiti either: “I think it’s because they can’t spell ‘cunts’ right,” says bassist Michael Bradley. “Who would own up to that?” In a sea of soul revivalists, Gabriels are the rare group actually pushing the genre forward. Their adventurous arrangements swap feelgood retro stylings for confrontational mosaics of samples, and moments where they pull the rug out from under the listener. Rather than dial up the volume or slather on the horns, as their less imaginative peers might, they use painstaking attention to detail as a way of heightening the drama. Equally shapeshifting is frontman Jacob Lusk, who can do diva, Nina and gut-wrenching balladeer at the light of the touchpaper: just listen to how he tastes the danger and deliciousness in the word “taboo” in a song of the same name. LS 26 The 1975 – Being Funny in a Foreign Language The series was immensely popular, and most of the volumes performed well in the compilation charts, with some even making number one. The series started to become subject to popular culture parodies, such as spoof band Shirehorses titling their first album from 1997 The worst...album in the world...ever...EVER!. Blur, who appeared on some of the albums in the series, were originally going to title their 2000 compilation Blur: The Best of as Best Blur Album in the World Ever. In Los Angeles in 1980, the first wave of local punk bands, including incendiary art-punks X, had established a groundswell of allegiance among the disillusioned. “Punk in LA was reacting against the great success and dominance of bands like Van Halen,” explains Mark Vallen, an illustrator for Slash, the influential West Coast punk magazine. “Just the whole look and feel of it reeked of elitism.”

Notes

The ultimate gang of punk outriders, The Stranglers never bothered to endear themselves to the mainstream public or the music press. Early gigs often saw mass walkouts and punch-ups. In 1975, two years before their debut single, Melody Maker sneered that “the only sense in which The Stranglers could be considered new wave is that no one had the gall to palm off this rubbish before”. It’s a put-down that sounds even more risible today, given a catalogue with some 23 hit singles and 17 Top 40 albums. The brand new The Album: series spawned six more volumes (although a hiatus was present in two of its five active years)