The 10 Best Albums Ever (intro and honorable mentions)

Once upon a time, I shared with you my favorite movies. These were listed as my favorites, not objectively "the best ever," but let's face it--my opinion is basically fact. You can go ahead and read it as a "best ever" list.
In the same spirit, I will be bringing you my top 10 favorite books, music videos, and albums (not necessarily in that order). First to come will be the albums.

As evidenced by the multitudes of  one-hit wonders we've seen over the years, writing a good song doesn't necessarily mean you'll write a good album. To be truly great, an album needs to be a constant stream of good songs from start to finish as well as a few great ones.
Unfortunately, bands are notoriously bad at self-editing and will include songs that could and should have been omitted. More songs doesn't necessarily mean a better album.

A prime example of this is Nightwish, whose album Once you will find conspicuously absent from my list despite featuring "Ghost Love Score," which is the best song ever written.¹ Once eliminates itself from contention with a few mediocre songs and the embarrassingly bad "Creek Mary's Blood," which sullies the message it tries to convey with bland music and weak lyrics.
Due to their similar penchant for filling their albums with nonsense and filler material, Type O Negative find their discography falling short of my top ten despite being one of my favorite bands with plenty of my favorite songs.
Worse still, Rammstein's Rosenrot album would have made the top five if it were only the first five songs, but they decided to follow the best material they've ever written with six tracks of unlistenable crap.
The point I'm obviously trying to hammer home here is that albums are judged from start to finish without skipping any songs.

Similarly to my movie favorites, albums will come and go from the lesser echelons of the top ten depending on my mood and what styles I've become obsessed with of late. Once we get closer to number one there's more stability to be had.

Lastly, I've limited each band to one entry on this list because it was otherwise at risk of being "Jake's top ten favorite Metsatöll albums."

The countdown will begin in the next post, but first some honorable mentions that didn't make the top ten:

Finntroll - Nattfödd (2004)

Just a solid album from start to finish with no bad tracks. It was tough to leave this one off the list but the album's brevity nearly pushes it into EP territory and the overly compressed production combines with some repetitious material and lack of variety to just miss the cut.

Various albums by Type O Negative, Arkona, and Eluveitie

For these three bands to miss the cut was painful for me as all three would land in my "top ten bands" list with little risk of falling out. Unfortunately none of them have yet managed to release an album that doesn't suffer from too many bad songs mixed in with the great ones (Type O), or too many forgettable, samey songs (Eluveitie and Arkona). These three bands are further proof that writing a great album is a tricky thing to do and apparently not even necessary for a band to be successful. I'd argue that all three could have made the list simply by removing a handful of junk songs from any of their albums, which seems counterintutitive BUT I SAID THE ALBUMS WILL BE JUDGED FROM START TO FINISH, DAMN IT!

Stay tuned for numbers 10 through 7 next.


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1. I guess this means I've spoiled a "top ten favorite songs" list already, huh?