1)The Rolling Stones, Aftermath: Their first really strong album, and stunning to think it was all Jagger-Richards originals in 1966, plus the peak of Brian Jones experimentation, eh? (It was also the longest album released in the UK at the time, 52 minutes!) Should people start here? I started with Let It Bleed, probably at George’s behest. I think of the UK version with 14 songs as the real album and the better overall, though I guess the optimal way to purchase 1966-67 Stones on disc would be to get the US version of this so you could have “Paint It, Black,” then buy Flowers, then the UK version of Between The Buttons. The best songs on it are indeed the best known songs, but I think I’ve heard “Mother’s Little Helper,” “Out Of Time,” “Lady Jane,” and “Under My Thumb” enough to last a couple of lifetimes. “Goin’ Home” basically sucks (and Arthur Lee said it inspired Love’s godawful “Revelation,” so fuck it even harder) and “I Am Waiting” is kinda prissy, but “Don’cha Bother Me,” “High & Dry,” “Think,” “It’s Not Easy” and “Take It Or Leave It” are all kinda underrated, I forgot about these songs. None of them are classics, but still enough to push the album towards the top tier of 1966. We don’t discuss the Stones much since the whole breakup with George all those years ago, but do you people like this album as much as the 1968-72 stuff? I’m not sure myself…

2)Ride, Going Blank Again: This one has predictably dropped a couple points, though I never really thought it was a great album, it just seemed so big and important at the time, like a diverse shoegaze-era epic; furthermore, I was still high (and still am today) on the fumes of this band’s masterpiece, Nowhere. Nowadays, it’s pretty clear at the followup was a big overproduced overlong bloated fuckfest, netting only “Time Machine,” with its metallic-thoonk bassline, as something I’m likely to ever revisit. If I squint, I can think of a few other mid-level shoegaze dreamers to temporarily enjoy, like “Twisterella,” “Cool Your Boots,” “OX4,” maybe “Chrome Waves”?…but let’s get real, even the better songs are coasting off the fumes of that debut album, and there’s truckloads of rewrites and second-rate songwriting on this album. Shit like the 10 minute bore “Grasshopper” doesn’t help. At this point, Ride have surpassed The Decemberists and Aztec Camera as my go-to answer to the posed-every-day-on-Reddit question, “What band was only really good for their first album?”

3)Argent, Argent: Few people in the world probably still care about Argent, aside from “Hold Your Head Up” and possibly one or two other songs you might hear once in a blue moon. I was only able to find a tiny handful of reviews of their 1970 debut album, one of which was George’s thumbs-up, which said it was an absolute must for anyone who liked the Zombies’ Odessey & Oracle (a couple of the other reviews reiterated this.) Even with Rod Argent co-leading the band, I don’t think Argent sounds much like the glorious O&O, and of course it isn’t nearly as good. What it is (probably due to Russ Ballard as much as any ideas Rod Argent had) is a total “1970” album from head to toe, featuring big bloozy long-haired stuff, keyboard-heavy quasi-prog with timid jazz/classical flourishes, and heavy dollops of the same early-theatrical-feel that guys like ELO, Rundgren, Supertramp, etc. would exploit throughout the middle of that decade. The two best songs are ones I have revisited since hearing this album about 10 years ago–the sneering hard-rocker “Liar” and the utterly gorgeous stoned-in-a-meadow hippie chant “Dance In The Smoke,” which I adore every time I hear it and which is actually even better than anything on Odessey, if you ask me. “Schoolgirl,” “Lonely Hard Road,” “Stepping Stone” and the proto-Queen album closer (seriously, this is WAY closer than any Sparks stuff to being “proto-Queen”) Bring You Joy” are pretty worthwhile too. Still, this album is just okay and doesn’t really make me want to bother with the rest of Argent’s catalogue if it’s their best (and it seems like even less has been written about other Argent albums than this one!)

4)The 13th Floor Elevators, The Psychedelic Sounds Of…: If this really is the “first psychedelic album,” then it makes for an interesting case as to how the genre was even born, because this is mostly an album of straight-out-of-1962 garage rock being pushed in the direction of “trippiness” through the use of three tools: 1)the overly echoey, reverby production, 2)Roky Erickson howling and screaming like a maniac a whole lot, and 3)the silly electric jug, which pretty much sounds the exact same in every song. It does work, mind you–this does seem like a pretty freaky album to come out in friggin’ Texas in 1966. Did you know that it was actually the electric jug guy, Tommy Hall, who even formed the band in the first place? People who find out about this band are far more likely to hear about Roky Erickson ending up in a mental hospital than that!! I think the album BTW is more than the sum of its parts–I don’t actually think any of the songs are classics, though “You’re Gonna Miss Me” and the ballad “Splash 1 (Now I’m Home)” come across best. I could make a case for “Fire Engine,” “You Don’t Know,” “Kingdom Of Heaven,” and a couple of others, but the truth is that I’d forgotten every single note of this album, “You’re Gonna Miss Me” included, and it is generally very samey-sounding all the way through, aside from a couple of ballads. I didn’t even remember what the electric jug sounded like, to be honest. I don’t know how much I’ll revisit it, either–I remembered the followup album Easter Everywhere having some beautiful hippie ballads that would have had no place whatsoever on this luney tune garage-rock album. That said, again, it’s better than the sum of its parts–it’s a nice historical listen; imagine kids in Texas back then trying to listen to it…

5)Swans, Greed/Holy Money: Two 1986 albums that have been reissued together and were recorded at the same time and might as well count as one album, so fuck it. I was ready to downgrade this the same as all the other Swans stuff I’ve disappointingly relistened to in the last few months, but that’s because it’s too big and fat a Swans truckload to take in all at once–a very long, slow, repetitive, samey 1986-Gothic-industrial pound-fest. I’ve always loved “Fool,” with its sick molasses piano line, and that’s still the only classic, but the whole thing does average out as being more good than bad, if you bother to sit down and take it one song at a time, like “Greed,” “Nobody,” “A Hanging,” “Money Is Flesh”…errr, “Fool #2” (which is scarier and nastier than “Fool”) and the short Jarboe showcase “You Need Me.” Oh, BTW, this is where they started with Jarboe, IIRC. They needed her!! But don’t listen to this all at once.