The Motifs - Cross Paths (2008)
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Quiet, gentle twee-pop that's incredibly sweet and comforting.
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The main reason I limited this section to one album per artist is so this entire page isn't dominated by Mountain Goats albums. John Darnielle is my favorite musician full stop. I think All Hail West Texas is probably the most representative of his early sound. Lo-fi acoustic guitar and vocals over a whirling tape recorder hum, three or four chords, and some of the best modern American folk songs ever written.
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All the albums I've put on this page are albums I think are perfect from front to back. Albums that if any tiny detail were changed, they would be worse for it. Illmatic is somehow the most perfect in this list of perfect albums, if that makes sense. I want to put on surgical gloves just to listen to it.
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Eerie, heavy droning folk. Sounds like it was made by ghosts of medieval plagues. I can't say I'm intimately familiar with it since it's seven hours long, but every time I've listened to it in installments it's left a massive impression on me.
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Nina Simone is my favorite singer. Her voice is so strange and strong and beautiful and is perfect for this bluesy vocal jazz. Simone's performance of "Strange Fruit" is the most powerful I know of. It being in an otherwise fun album is like war/genocide photographs being published in a newspaper alongside the sports and comics pages.
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Religious/classical Sufi music from Pakistan. I'm definitely not well-versed in this type of music but Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's performance here is amazing and the music is so incredibly energetic and infectious.
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Opeth's unique brand of progressive death metal mixed with gothic folk/rock hit its apex here. Some of the best songwriting and performances across the entire metal landscape.
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Slightly noisy, punk-inspired twee pop. Super warm and melodic and sweet.
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Pat Schneeweis has been making drug-fueled anarchist folk-punk under a bunch of different names since he was a teenager. A lot of it is pretty awful, some of it is brilliant, and it's all near to my heart. His post-rehab songs about sobriety are incredibly uplifting but his post-rehab songs about the futility and naivety of anarchism are bittersweet at best. Still, there's an overarching positivity in his later music that consistently shines through. This is a big compilation of some of his later songs.
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Relentlessy cold and evil atmospheric black metal. So black metal at times it's not even recognizable as black metal. Probably my favorite album in the entire metal universe.
