As of
this week, Record Club has covered 400 different albums. I see it every week and I'll say it again here: I fucking love doing this. I love exploring music in this way. And we've listened to so many great albums. So much joy to be found in these 400 weeks.
But I'm not concerned today with what the best albums we've covered so far are. I'm more interested in talking about some albums that have fascinated me over the years. I want to touch base with the albums that I haven't stopped thinking about. It could be because the music was good in a different way, but just as likely it could be that it was bad in an interesting way. Some of these albums changed the way we think about Record Club; some of these albums changed the way we think about life.
They are not ranked below, but instead are in chronological order. I'll drop a small explanation about why I chose the album for this list, but I encourage you to use the space this week (in between repeats of Norman Fucking Rockwell!) to revisit some of these albums. This is the music that make Record Club worth the efforts of 400 weeks in a row.
I think about this one mostly because it was the first one. But it feels like a really good pick for the first pick, right? Pam did a great job choosing it. Maggie Rogers just has such a welcoming sound, one that I think really benefitted the club, here at the beginning.
I remember having a conversation very early on in Record Club's existence, like maybe the third or fourth week, when me and a few La Salle friends were discussing the possibility of doing a rap album, and what that would look like for some of us who were not familiar with rap at all. I'm really glad, in that respect, that Nate pulled the band-aid off early on. I've listened to a lot of hip hop since Innanet James, but I appreciate the opportunity to consider the genre seriously for one of the very first times.
My sister Jenny reviewed albums during the first couple months of RC's existence, and that was fun. She brought a willing amateur's perspective to the proceedings, which I really appreciated. She was babysitting baby Willow at the time, maybe once a week, and so she would listen to that week's album in the car ride to our house in Port Richmond, and type up a few words while Willow took a nap. After that ended, she bailed on RC, but not before choosing this dude for Week 10. It was really funny talking shit on this album, even though, in retrospect, it's not bad (or good, but definitely not bad). I like to view it from a wider lens now, like, this was all part of RC's story, the music and the authors and the critics, a living breathing organism. It all matters.
Connie Converse turned 102 this past August. She disappeared in 1974, but she's still alive, making music in secret. Okay, okay... not really. But I love thinking about Connie Converse, because her story is compelling. One of my oldest friends, Drew P., chose this album, and I remember getting multiple text messages on the Friday morning of the Connie Converse reviews, noting that Drew had not written a review. I have hung out with Drew maybe once or twice since then, and have spoken a few more times over the phone (and he just wrote a great
RC review this summer), so I know he didn't pull a Connie on us. But I think about Connie Converse all the time, and I think about her as I grow up and the passage of time strains most of my relationships. How sad that we could grow apart from the people we care about. How lovely that we knew them to begin with.
There aren't too many albums on this list that are here because they represent a new genre. This was our first jazz album, and that's notable, but that's not why I'm spotlighting Fyah. It's here because of the tuba. What a hook that was, to be able to listen to an album and know exactly what to mention in one's review as soon as it's heard. "Oh shit, yeah, that's a tuba all right, front and center." I think it's fun when you hear an album in RC and are perplexed, but I also think it's fun when you hear an album and know exactly what it is and why, right from the start. This is the tuba album. Not much more to be said.
I liked covering Ashlee Simpson early on, because it acted as a good and interesting example for potential RC members that I met out in the wild. You might assume, when you hear some loser (me) talking about a "music club," that it was just a bunch of dudes huddled around talking obnoxiously about the "coolest" albums of the modern day. There's some of that, sure, but also... we listened to Ashlee Simpson! And some of us liked it! And it was super interesting to reevaluate! See, we are open-minded and interested in all kinds of music! Come join us!
The artist was and is ubiquitous, and the music was either not great or straight-up bad. This is the recipe that resulted in at least four RC members completing and sending their review by the end of Monday morning. That was the first time it happened, and it has not happened since. Sometimes an album comes with immense baggage, and during those times, it's just a whole lot easier to write about the baggage. That can be a lot of fun. I have a lot of fun thinking about T-Pain, even now.
All music can be interesting if you attempt to approach it that way. But in order to maximize one's interest in any given album on any given week, then in my opinion there needs to be some guardrails. Those guardrails are designed by me, and they are addressing my own needs for "interesting" music, which is subjective. The rule for "no repeat artists" came about after we covered Foals twice. It didn't feel satisfying to me, to revisit Foals so quickly, and so we made the rule. But now when I think about Foals, I think about what it means to be "interested" in music, and so I'm thankful for Foals for that reason (and maybe that reason alone).
"Have you ever done a classic album?" I think is how Allison presented the idea to me, almost seven years ago. So for RC's 50th week, we did a classic. We've done a few more in the years since, and I'm still trying to figure out how the music criticism is affected when we turn our attention to something that is so well-known that it's almost besides the point to write an album review. I think it works? Can you review Jagged Little Pill? We sure did try.
100 gecs caught me right on the cusp of reaching true openness and humility when it comes to the wide range of music that exists in this world. This was the last time I ever expressed trepidation for covering something in Record Club because I was afraid I wasn't going to like it. As it turns out, we all loved gecs. It ended up being a really pivotal moment for our little club here! What the hell was I ever afraid of? Never again. I am open to the mysteries of the universe. I will listen to anything RC tells me to, and I'll be excited for it. I am humble. I know nothing, but I want to know it all. That starts here.
There was the whole "should EPs be allowed" thing that I've gone back and forth on over the years (we are currently at "sure, why the fuck not," at least until too many EPs are chosen). But more importantly, this was Sunny's first pick. He had written nine reviews in as many weeks at that point. At this point, he's written an average of 1.06 reviews per week over the last 350 weeks. I think it's safe to say that without Nate and Sunny, Record Club wouldn't still exist. I listen to Mountain Brews and some of their other RC picks, and I try to remember that.
I chose this album because it sounded interesting and because one of my favorite artists (future RC alumna Waxahatchee) recommended it, but it ended up feeling genuinely important within the context of our lives. Here was a very old album about using music as a way to address the oppressor, and here we were, listening to it in the present day and grappling with a very different (and yet very similar) oppressor, in the wake of the George Floyd murder. The timing was a coincidence, but that doesn't make it any less impactful.
Most of Rachel C.'s RC album picks have been artists I've never even heard of, and I really value and appreciate that sort of contribution to this club. I would've gone my whole life having never even been aware that La Rappresentante di Lista even existed, and yet, because of RC (and R.C.), this album was the most important album in my life for at least one week. When you use a wide lens to see the whole picture, it really gives you a sense of wonder.
Christmas albums, when they come around once a year, are mostly a joke. At least I don't take them seriously, and that's because there are eleven months in a year when I can't fucking stand that shit, and only a brief four weeks when I begrudgingly put up with it. We would've eventually gotten around to listening to a Dolly Parton album, but I'm glad she was saddled with a holiday album in the confines of this music club. Obviously, since her death, she's been in the news a lot, and that's fine. I just think it's strange and sad and beautiful that we got to know her through a bunch of hoary old classics and a handful of terrible originals. A bad album, a fine musician, an okay person, a wonderful experience in Record Club.
One day I will meet Uncle Greg, and I will talk to him about how strange it is to have met someone whose music you own and like a lot. And how impossible it is to be a music critic in that situation, and how funny it is that his nephew forced us to do it anyway.
Not all of these are on this list because of their place in the Record Club canon, or because they changed this club or whatever. Some of them are just straight-up like nothing I'd ever heard before, and that's the reason they made an impact. There were three reviews during Fishmans week. I wonder how different the world would look if there were ten or 20 or 100. It was that kind of album.
There are so many little running jokes threaded throughout RC that only still exist to make myself laugh. I had heard, shortly after we listened to Demi Lovato's album, that she had big thoughts about lizard people, like she was an advocate of the conspiracy theory that the government was run by lizard people or whatever. I don't know why that made me laugh so much, but it did. And I've been
claiming for so long that Demi Lovato is a lizard person herself that this is all I think about. I could listen to
Tell Me You Love Me right now and the only thing going through my mind would be a secret society of lizard people who are pulling the strings of the human government. I regret nothing.
I think about Sam's comment underneath a Song Challenge post about a song from this album, a couple years later, that was basically like "I appreciate how much mileage we've gotten out of this." He mentioned a childhood friend's dad, who chose an album for us, and I wrote a bad, drunken review for it, and then eventually atoned for that review, and then... well, what's the next part of the story? I love this album, and I consider next steps when I listen.
I think it's cool to "keep up with the joneses" sometimes. Not often that Record Club pulls it off. But I believe that PinkPantheress' star has risen significantly since we covered her in November 2022, and I am proud of knowing this young artist well, and supporting her by listening and liking her art. I know we can't have our finger on the pulse every time, but the rare weeks that it happens, I notice it, and I value it.
Probably the silliest album we've ever done, but this also might have been the most successful week of RC we've ever had too. It was maybe the final time I ever felt comfortable texting everyone in my phonebook and asking them to write a review. We might be past that point now, with RC existing for so long. The longer it goes, the more pathetic I feel begging. I keep talking a big game about tripling the number of McGruff reviews we got for the upcoming Donny Most week, but I am afraid too. Afraid I don't have it in me.
Each week, we cover one album, but the process doesn't end with the Friday reviews. Reevaluations are constant and forever. Sometimes, the reevaluations are unfortunate, and are due to new information received about the artist. Off the top of my head, I don't listen to at least four RC artists anymore because they are sexually abusive. Ace of Base, as another example, were nazis. Recently, I wondered about Jay Electronica: wait, was he actually antisemitic, or was he just called antisemitic in the same style a couple of our blogging friends would refer to Jay Electronica as antisemitic, i.e. that he opposed Palestinian children being murdered by the Israeli government? Nope! He's just straight-up antisemitic! So I still don't listen to him anymore. How about Monotonix? I will cop to the fact that when I chose this album, I had less than zero understanding of anything that was happening with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I still don't know a lot, but I do know that I would feel a little uneasy listening to Monotonix if I found out that its members were Zionist in the way that I define "Zionist." The answer? I don't know. Can't find anything. So it's not for me to know. I assume the best in everyone until I learn otherwise. I read between the lines in a couple 2010-ish interviews and I get the sense that this band's members would be against the oppressor and supportive of the oppressed, so I'm just gonna assume that's the case and go from there (not everyone who lives in Israel supports Israel's actions, just like not everyone in America supports America's actions). I listen to this album and I love this album and I don't feel bad about it at all.
It really is as simple as "good album" plus "hitherto unknown album" sometimes. You go out searching, right? You sift through all the rubble of millions and millions of albums, and occasionally, you find something out of this world that's worth holding onto. Is
Taximen the best album I've ever heard? Assuredly not. But it was great, and fun, and interesting, and makes me so fucking happy that this music club exists.
I think about Reba a lot, but for reasons that don't really have anything to do with Record Club. But that
non-RC Reba thing has taken on such an outsized presence in my life that it can't help but swallow up a lot of other related things, like an album. I sometimes wonder if I dropped the ball with this album's placement this summer. Maybe should've saved it for Labor Day weekend, when Grannies Gone Wild hit its finale, instead of June, when the project was just starting to rev its engines. Ah well.
Fuck, man, there is no better feeling than starting a week having never heard of an artist and ending a week loving an album. I'm so thankful that Zach dropped this shit in our laps. Who are Magic Toaster? Where are they from? I don't remember. Did I ever know? Who cares! Who cares. I still listen to this album all the time.
This was the only time I ever did this—I reached out to the artist, in advance, and got the inside scoop on the album and the artist's intentions prior to listening to the album. I don't know how feasible it would be to attempt such a thing for musicians any bigger than a one-off NYC hardcore band, but every time I think about Person(a), I feel encouraged to try it again.
Remember that
concert? That was a good-ass concert. It felt exciting to have a concrete reason to get excited for a Record Club album. It was especially helpful, in retrospect, because this King Tuff concert was one of the first social outings I had as a sober person. I didn't tell anyone at the time, but I struggled a little bit. And yet it was still a great show. I feel happy when I listen to King Tuff, and this album specifically. He helped me in a way he'll never know, as did my Record Club friends who were there.
Was this album worth the only 0-puke score I've ever given? Absolutely, yes. But sometimes I regret that it had to fall on CANDIACE specifically. I think the album was less than worthless junk, but I also concede to Rachel S.'s point that maybe it was a bad look to come down so hard on an artist who was female and Black. I like to think that the only identity I was coming down hard on was "rich person," but like I said, I get it. This album is not interesting because it's bad, it's interesting because it makes me ponder the reasons we think art can be bad.
I said above that it's cool to have one's finger on the pulse every once in a while. I said above that it's cool to be challenged every once in a while. In Ethel Cain, we did both at once. I still don't really understand it, if I'm being honest. I don't understand the appeal, and I especially don't understand why the young people are gravitating toward this shit. But I am so incredibly thankful for the opportunity to try.
That Geese psy-op thing was not a surprise to me. I've known for a long time that certain bands are pushed on us for reasons outside their artistry. Did you know that for basically an entire year, YouTube tried to push a different Beaches video on me at the top of the home page, every single time I visited to search for something? It's true. But as with Geese, sometimes it's not that big of a deal. It's not a big deal to me because I'm not susceptible to psy-op bullshit, I don't listen to algorithm recommendations, I don't give a shit. But the Beaches gave me the space to think about how there are some bands who are good enough that they can break through all that. If Record Club hadn't forced me to listen to this band, I would've just assumed they were fucking shit. But I listened, and I liked, and I confirmed that this was not the algorithm that tricked me. It was just a good band.
I mean, I still don't even fucking know. But that bumper sticker sure did stick to the bumper in my brain. Being bewildered is a great thing.
I think you can draw a line from 100 gecs to Yoko Ono, at least in the context of Record Club (in the context of music too, like perhaps in a distant spiritual way, but that's not my point here). With gecs, I opened myself up to the wonders of outsider art. With Yoko, I finally committed to actively defending it. You have every reason to dislike this album, but sometimes, it's more fulfilling if you put all that aside and embrace what's real and true.
This one is about expectations. I was conditioned to believe that music as performed by our illustrious drag queens was cringe-worthy at best. The expectations were low. Trixie Mattel is a very competent musician and her music is fun. Earning this mild compliment means that she blew all expectations out of the fucking water. As long as you're open to the possibility of expectations not being met, then it's a-okay to have rock-bottom expectations for a piece of art. That just means more room for surprise.
It's tough to even think about this as a Record Club album. I think that's a defense mechanism. I have avoided choosing albums I already knew and liked for the majority of my time in RC, because I think that's a recipe for heartache. For example, see: every time anyone has ever chosen "one of their favorite albums" only to see it torn apart by a couple well-placed music-criticism shrugs. But Tigers Blood was chosen as a group project, and featured a double-digit number of reviews, most of which were pretty critical of this album that had already become deeply important to me, from this deeply personal artist. And I didn't like that! Not one bit! I hope to never go through it again!
Ranking RC albums from worst to best, this is probably near the middle. Ranking RC albums by how well they capture the true spirit of this club's purpose, it's near the top. But maybe I feel that way by choice. I laid out my feelings on it in
the review. That's subjective. To most others, it's just some fucking album. But to me, it was a choice to say that this is important, maybe the most important album we've ever covered. Everything you need to know about RC is contained in its story.
You knock it all down to the foundation to see what it's really about. But then you gotta start building it back up. That's music criticism. Get to the heart of it; get to the basics. Then start creating. Even if by "creating" you mean "make up some bullshit about a dumb movie you watched as a kid." There's so much value there. Almost as much value as the CLASSIC 1993 cinematic masterpiece Super Mario Bros.
It's never easy, is it? I can never just enjoy the music. I can never be content with just the surface level, I always feel compelled to dig deeper. Sometimes, it works out well, like when you get depressed on vacation and a dumb pop-punk album shocks you from your stupor. Sometimes, it works out poorly, like when that same dumb pop-punk artist owns a minority share in a private equity firm that guts a music publication and fires a bunch of critics. The wheels never stop spinning, around and around.
It's funny, sometimes you're trying to evaluate how good an album something is and you ask yourself "well can I even remember what any of the songs sound like?" and if you can't answer yourself by singing one of the songs in your head, then it's probably not a good album. And true, I can't think of any melodies or hooks from this album. I can, however, remember a few of the ejaculations that DJ Arana yells out over the course of the album. I can't type them because it's not in English, but I'm telling you, man, I can hear this man yelling in my mind as clear as day, months since pressing play the most recent time. What do you make of that? Does that mean it's a good album? I have no idea.
I'd like to think I take the task seriously. I don't fuck around. I think music is important and I very often treat it with reverence. What we do here is important! I take it fucking seriously! But here's the other thing: I can't take it seriously every single week. I can't do it 400 weeks in a row. If you start taking this shit too seriously all the time, then occasionally you're gonna forget to have fun. So I consider Super Ghostbusters a reminder: sometimes, it can just be fun. I don't have to take it seriously all the time.
Did you ever sit there listening to music and think "I wonder if I'm the only person on earth listening to this song right now"? It's a big world out there. Listening to Fibulator—a band whose album Sunny pulled out of a dusty bin of vinyl at random—is the closest I'll ever get to being assured that the answer is yes. Record Club: there's no bottom to this thing, it goes down deep, forever.
But you don't need to be the only person listening to know that what you're listening to is a singular work of art. Every RC choice is a cumulation of so many tiny steps, a tying together of so many disparate threads. Listening to Slayyyter makes me think about how we got here, and it makes reflect on where we're going from here. Music is strange and beautiful. I'm thankful for Record Club, and for the music we find here.
Alright, alright, fuck it... I'll drop my Top Five Best RC Albums So Far too. But do NOT fucking judge me when I wake up tomorrow and have a completely different Top Five in mind. Too much good music over the last 400 weeks.
How about you? Drop one of your favorite RC albums and one of the most interesting RC albums in the comments. Happy Record Club Week 400, cheers to science racing to find a cure for old age so that we can all reach Record Club Year 400.
