Numbers 39 to 30 My 100 Favorite Albums of All-Time

(Once Again, for those who still may be interested)

Numbers 39 - 30 of My Top 100 

All-Time Favorite Albums

* means I bought the album right when it was released or at the latest a few months

# means I discovered it later 

39 - Hard- Ons - Love is a Battlefield of Wounded Hearts (1989, Taang!) - One thing Australias Hard-Ons could do that almost no other band can do is combine heavy metal thrashy guitars with melodic pop hooks. To this day they still manage to pull it off successfully. Also the drummer Kiesh sang most of the songs which is a plus in my book. Some of the later albums lean more towards the metal side but Love is a Battlefield is a pop/metal/thrash masterpiece and one of the most listened to albums in my collection. (*)

38) Love and Rockets - Earth, Sun, Moon (1987, Beggars Banquet) - I was a big Bauhaus fan early on but was never "goth". In fact I would inadvertently piss of the goth crew at the Mall by wearing my Bauhaus t-shirt with a bright pair Jams. So when that band's Daniel Ash, David J, and Kevin Haskins formed the, less dark Love and Rockets I was very excited. Their second album Express was very good but I couldn't locate a copy of their first album Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven until a year or so later. Earth, Sun, Moon is perfect. It rockin', poppy in some places, and just the right amount of darkness leftover from the Bauhaus days. it was also psychedelic in spots, which prepared me for bands like Pink Floyd which would be discovering in the not too distant future. (*)


37) Circle Jerks - Group Sex (1980, Frontier)- Group Sex was one of the first true hardcore/punk albums I owned when I won a copy of the cassette at a boardwalk game in Ocean City. It had the whole album on both sides and I would play it, flip it over, play it again. Repeat over and over again. I was enamored by how fast the music was and still have so many hooks. How in such a short 15-minute long album they could fit perfectly 14 songs. Years later I would own a CD with Group Sex and its following album Wild In The Streets. Both albums combined were only 40 minutes.(#)

36) U2 - Unforgettable Fire (1984, Island) - The Penultimate U2 album. The band took all the aspects they were working on the previous three albums to absolute perfection. This is what I thought U2 was supposed to sound like. The band took a major turn in direction for their next album, and even harder for the next one, losing me after that. (*)

35) Black Sabbath - Master of Reality (1971, Vertigo) - I like the first 5 Black Sabbath albums almost equally so picking one of them for this list wasn’t easy. Master of Reality gets the nod because every song is classic. From the cough that starts off "Sweet Leaf", to the instrumental interludes of "Orchid" and "Embryo", to "Into the Void" at the very end, the album is perfect. Plus my favorite song by the band in “After Forever” is on this album.(#)

34) Sex Pistols - Never Mind The Bollocks (1977, Virgin) - Up until six or seventh grade I was mostly listening to stuff like Depeche Mode, The Cure, The Smiths, Joy Division, or New Order. Then someone gave me a copy of Never Mind the Bollocks. After I pressed play on the tape player and heard the music I was excited and a little scared, But I immediately knew my life was changed forever. Side story: One day the album jacket was leaning against my stereo while I listened to it. My cairn terrier walked up and peed on it. Somehow I think the band would have approved. (#)

33) Gorilla Biscuits - Start Today (1989, Revelation) - One thing that Gorilla Biscuits taught us is that it was ok to throw some melody into the New York Hardcore mix. After a decent debut EP, they perfected it. For me Start Today still remains the highwater mark for pulling this off. It also must say something that every one of the titles of the thirteen original songs on the album has been taken as names for many bands out there. There is even a also a Buzzcocks cover at the end. (#)

32) Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures (1979, Factory) - Joy Division is a band that if you took Unknown

Pleasures and their second album Closer and put them together they would go a lot higher on this list. Possibly Top-5. Unknown Pleasures gets the nod because I can listen to the whole thing where the "Atrocity Exhibition" might get a skip on Closer. Coming off first listening to the band's later incarnation, New Order I was originally caught off guard by and loved the starkness and somberness of the music and Ian Curtis's vocals. It was also great when the band picked it up a bit, and it was just a bit, on songs like "She's Lost Control" or "Interzone".  These would be the only two albums Joy Division released but they are both in regular rotation, more than those by their later group who is missing from this list. Maybe Lowlife would be #101. (*)

31) Dead Kennedys - Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables (1980, Alternative Tentacles ) - The Dead Kennedys really weren't a hardcore band but Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables was probably the hardest and fastest album I had heard so far when a friend of my sisters gave me a tape with this on one side. (The Violent Femmes debut was on the other side). Every song is just bang bang bang. One after another fast and short songs with singer Jello Biafra's sarcastic sociopolitical lyrics. East Bay Ray's guitar at the beginning of “Holiday in Cambodia” at the end of the album still gives me chills every time I hear it.(*)

30) Lemonheads - Hate Your Freinds (1987, Taang!) - Like 1988's Creator and 1989's Lick, Hate Your Friends had two singers. Although I do love everything the band has done and consider them my second favorite band, I think they were most interesting with two singers. Even at such an early stage  Evan Dando has a smooth voice while Ben Deily's was more on the raspy end. Both have a pretty even amount of songs written and sung on the album. Plus they duet on "So I Fucked Up..". There is a even a revved-up cover of "Amazing Grace" right in the middle. (Ideally Lick would be my favorite album by The Lemonheads but I already wrote about that album here (#)

Up next 

29 - 20

Mickey's Lost Control

Joy Division was a band from the UK. The band was one of the most influential post punk groups. Their slow, somber, music, fronted by lead singer Ian Curtis’s deep baritone voice would influence many bands from rock and roll, new wave, industrial and Gothic music. Joy Division’s debut album Unknown Pleasures was released in 1979. The album was critically acclaimed right from the beginning.

 Because of emotional turmoil caused by the relationship with his wife as well as another woman, epilepsy and the pressure of dealing with his new found fame, Ian committed suicide on May 18^th 1980. Even though Joy Division had released another album Closer before Ian’s death, Unknown Pleasure’s cover, with it’s pulsar image taken from the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy, would go on to be one of the images Joy Division would most be known for.




 So it only make sense to take one of the worlds most recognizable and beloved cartoon characters Mickey Mouse and parody the Unknown Pleasures cover image. Not only that but take this new Disneyfied pulsar image, put it on a t-shirt to sell at Walt Disney World.

I wonder who the "imagineer" was that brought this design to the table. An image that pretty much will always be thought of as a symbol of musical starkness, despair and tragedy is on a t-shirt for sale at "The Happiest Place On Earth".

I could understand a t-shirt parody of other classic albums. Maybe the Mickey, Minnie, Goofy and Donald walking across the Abbey Road crosswalk or something along those lines.Even the image of Donald Duck smashing a guitar on stage in the style of The Clash's London Calling album would not be too startling. But Joy Division? A band who was named after a fictional group of women kept alive at Concentration Camps for the purpose of satisfying German Soldiers.

Were sales of A Nightmare Christmas merchandise on a decline and Disney is attempting to hold onto their "goth" demographic? Is Disney attempting to attract a new "hipster" phenomonon? Was the "imagineer" not fully aware what the design was know for? How was he able to slip this design the know for being very "attentions to detail" Walt Disney World corporation? Maybe the "imagineer" was an avid follower of Astronomy and had no idea of the images connection to Joy Division. Was the "imgineer" let go as soon as the history of Joy Division was discovered?

What would Ian and the rest of the guys in Joy Division (of course all now in New Order) would think about this shirt?

Either way I was totally stunned when on the first day of my recent trip to Walt Disney World, (and you can bet you will be hearing about that trip in future posts) I walked into Epcot's Mouse Gear store and laid my eyes this shirt up on the racks next to all the classic Disney World shirts.

During the rest of the trip I spotted at least a dozen other people sporting the shirt around the parks and hotels. A quick Google search when I returned home shows this to be a highly sought after piece of Walt Disney World attire.It looks like the Unknown Pleasures "imagineer" may have just known what he was doing.


The title of this post was totally stolen from my friend Carlos A. Thanks Carlos!