Top 30 Albums of the 1960s
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21. Scott Walker 'Scott 4' (1969)
A veritable pop-star in his adopted homeland of England, Scott Walker —teen-pop pin-up turned television-variety-show host— took an artistic leap-of-faith on Scott 4, a commercially-disastrous masterwork that, in hindsight, shows an artist heading out into the artistic darkness. Heard with contemporary ears, the things that may've alienated listeners in its day —Walker's weird interpretive delivery, the uneasy orchestrations (which walk a fine line between cheesy and crazy), the strange, strained relationship between the emotionality of lyric and music, its lyrical obsession with imperfection— sound classical. This is a big, regal, important, near-operatic album from an era in which men —both figuratively and literally— shot for the stars.More »
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22. Alexander 'Skip' Spence 'Oar' (1969)
Skip Spence's one-and-only album is the stuff of legend. Its mythology tells the tale of a Moby Grape guitarist whose heavy doses of LSD lead to a bout of schizophrenia, an attempt to kill a bandmate with a fire ax, and a stay in a mental hospital. There, he wrote a suite of songs, and, on release, used his solo-LP advance-money on a motorcycle, rode down to Nashville in his hospital pyjamas, then showed up to work day and night, playing every instrument himself on a set of veritable demos unpolished, strange, heavy on cheap echo, and utterly unhinged. Supposedly Columbia's worst-ever-selling record upon its release, Oar's off-the-deep-end take on blurred, disturbed Americana went on to become on of the great cult records anywhere, ever.More »
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23. Brigitte Fontaine 'Comme à la Radio' (1969)
In 1969, a French stage actress, an Algerian multi-instrumentalist, and a Chicago jazz quartet authored an experimental, exploratory, revolutionary attempt at redrawing musical parameters by fusing French chanson, North African folk, free jazz, and Western classical in sweet, strange, psychedelic songs. The first collaboration between fated foils Brigitte Fontaine and Areski Belkacem roped in the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and together they cast a spell of magical creation. Though its various musical elements are all deconstructive —Fontaine breaking down traditional song-forms, Belkacem musical/cultural boundaries, the AEC jazz strictures— the LP builds a magnificent sense of togetherness, its every element contributing to the greater whole.
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24. Higelin & Areski 'Higelin & Areski' (1969)
Brigitte Fontaine's Comme à la Radio wasn't the only groundbreaking recording Areski Belkacem worked on in 1969. His collaboration with chanteur Jacques Higelin was just as radical; Belkacem positioning the vocalist's crooning in a series of minimalist, merely-hinted-at arrangements shocking in their utter starkness. For much of the pair's eponymous collaboration, Higelin's voice is presented the only melodic instrument, matched to an array of ethnomusical percussion bashed with interpretive irregularity. In part, Belkacem is drawing from his Algerian heritage, but, largely, he's working artfully with the concept of negative space; Higelin & Areski an album as defined by its deployments of silence as its uses of sound.
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25. Nico 'The Marble Index' (1969)
Regarded as near-talentless muse through her work with The Velvet Underground and on her bizarro-chanteuse debut, 1967's Chelsea Girls, Nico showed herself to be a fearless, peerless artist on The Marble Index, which matched her deep, doleful, half-spoken vocals with the wheezy, creepy drones of a harmonium. Delivered with no percussion nor any kind of consistent rhythm, the LP feels wholly unmoored; feels rootless, formless, bodiless, worldless. With Nico's spectral singing evoking moaning ghosts, these sombre laments and brutal dirges float "close to the frozen borderline," that eerie realm between life and death. It's the perfect expression of a woman who, even whilst alive, seemed a lot like a ghost, already half-lost to the darkness.More »
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26. The Stooges 'The Stooges' (1969)
Modern listeners who've grown up with Iggy Pop as some eternal punk godfather, hearing "I Wanna Be Your Dog"'s one-note staccato-piano riff played only in a classic-rock-radio context, will possibly be shocked to hear "We Will Fall," the ten-minute centerpiece of The Stooges' self-titled '69 debut. As the viola of producer John Cale (the Velvet Underground's resident avant-gardist) wails in an unending drone, the band chant tribalist incantations, making for a mantra that proceeds at a slow crawl. This open-mindedness shows a band out to author their own take on rock'n'roll. They ended up writing a string of rifftastic classics —"No Fun," "Little Doll," "1969"— that have gone on to inspire innumerable rockbands, from punk founders onwards.More »
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27. Can 'Monster Movie' (1969)
West Germany in the late-'60s found a fertile creative climate, a libertarian generation out to author a new culture unburdened from the sins of the past. This gave birth to a floodtide of early-'70s acts that became the krautrock movement. Can were the first to arrive; a band of sweaty, hairy dudes who, on stage, played exploratory jams inspired by free-jazz, and in the studio worked with a fastidious precision and the intent to explore the limits of magnetic tape. Can's essential duality is perfectly captured on "Yoo Doo Right," the legendary 20-minute cut that takes up the whole of Side B on their 1969 debut Monster Movie. Both funky rocksong and radical experimentation, it introduced a ferocious new outfit out to conquer new frontiers.More »
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28. Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band 'Trout Mask Replica' (1969)
Captain Beefheart's bizarre monsterwork of cut-up recontextualization and rampant Dadaism has long been one of the fringe's most persistently puzzling discs. The double LP finds Beefheart —Californian conceptualist and dictatorial savant Don Van Vliet— dealing almost entirely in atonalism and arrhythmia, his Magic Band —a crew of crack musicians so well-drilled it bordered on torture— exploding blues form and assembling the pieces together in a splattered, scattershot fashion inspired by free-jazz seer Ornette Coleman. For many, Trout Mask Replica will be the definition of difficult listening, but its fearlessly 'out' playing has proved infinitely influential, whole movements —no-wave, post-punk, noise-rock— owing the set an obvious debt.More »
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29. Cromagnon 'Orgasm' (1969)
What must it have been like to hear Orgasm, the sole album for New Yorker noiseniks Cromagnon, in 1969? What reference points were there for a record that sounds, over four decades on, like some genre-splattering mash-up of the digital age? These days, you can interpret Orgasm as blending black metal, Celtic folk, industrial noise, and neo-primitivism together, can see this LP as some spiritual antecedent of Einstürzende Neubauten, Royal Trux, Wolf Eyes, Liars, early Animal Collective, and countless other purveyors of abject audio terrorism. But when it came out? What did people think? Luckily enough, no one seems to have actually heard Orgasm in its day, making it no casualty of history, but glimpse of the future.More »
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30. The Shaggs 'Philosophy of the World' (1969)
Though completely unknown in its day, Philosophy of the World has since been celebrated in two divergent ways: as both work of outsider-art weirdness, and as one of the worst records ever made. A trio of sisters from small-town New Hampshire, The Shaggs were the brainchild of one of history's most monomaniacal stage-parents, Austin Wiggin. Despite the obvious absence of musical ability in his offspring, Wiggin pushed them to start a band, play weekly, and make an LP. Said record adheres to no known logic, follows no familiar rhyme nor meter. Its guitars are out of time and out of tune, its melodies haphazard, its lyrics bizarrely bland. It is undoubtedly painful to listen to. And up to you to work out whether that's good, bad, or both.More »