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The perfect synthesis, the perfect mix of styles (Heavy Metal, Pop Punk and Synth Rock) and the perfect synchronicity? Many artists have struggled to make the perfect album by trying to perfect the defects and pushing up the excellence. They completely missed the point. What makes an album perfect is not the greatness of their melodies, since not all the songs can be constantly engaging or constantly fantastic: The Cars' debut album is slick, polished, and obviously a pair moments don't work as the highlights ("I'm in Touch with Your World", "Don't Cha Stop"), but it would be stupid to have great expectations. Hell, it barely lasts 35 minutes, so it serves as a party record, the kind of work it does perfectly. The loud rockers "My Best Friend's Girl" and "You're All I've Got Tonight" have everything a loud rocker should have: careless riffs, strong hooks and a creamy synth surface: the smooth numbers "I'm in Touch With Your World" and "All Mixed Up" keep the suspence very well (although the first recalls a bit too much café music): there are even moments when The Cars go close to dissonant Post-Punk artistry ("Let the Good Times Roll" and "Moving in Stereo, the first graced with an irregular rhythm) with dancing results. All these gems however can't match the sublime melody of "Just What I Needed", a song so excellent that its chorus riff was copied by Eddie Schwartz for writing Pat Benatar's hit "Hit Me With Your Best Shot". He pretended to be the new Ric Ocasek, but time won over him rightly.

The Cars don't deserve the destiny to be pushed into the 80's corner, and not because the album was released in 1978, but because this album has everything a listener would want: catchiness, simplicity, clever wordplay ("You get the diplomatic treatment / You get the force fed future / You get the funk after death / Get the Wisenheimer brainstorm") and storming intelligence and even humility ("I don’t care if you hurt me some more / I don’t care if you even the score / You can knock me and I don’t care / Well, you can mock me and I don’t care / You can rock me just about anywhere"), chameleon-like attitude and a strong sense of economy (how many bands would close an album with an epic like "All Mixed Up", which feels anything but?) and pragmatism. The Cars keep the groove going on without repeating themselves: on "Moving in Stereo", the producer put a bit of tridimensional spacey effects to justify its length, while only on "Don't Cha Stop" they raise the tempo (and perfectly, since it's a song a bit deficient of hooks). Everything is exactly on its place and every element contributes to make the album an authentic meteor shower. If all the songs were great like "Just What I Needed" and "You're All I've Got Tonight", The Cars would have made a miracle: as it is: their debut is simply a stunner.

Highlights:"Just What I Needed", "You're All I've Got Tonight", "Moving In Stereo", "All Mixed Up".

Most fans and music critics agree that Joni Mitchell’s best and most complete albums are Blue and Count and Spark: all of them seem to ignore fanatically the singer’s first album Song to a Seagull (originally titled as the singer, but some found a second title watching the birds forming the second title), which probably deserves the same praise if not more. The two albums were hypnotic and seducing, but were slurred and their melodies sometimes confused, revealing the artist’s struggle to write consistent and fully-formed songs. Instead, on Song of a Seagull, Mitchell’s personality was already fully formed and all the songs uniformly terrific! “I Had a King”, one of the very few songs recorded in standard tuning, anticipates a good chunk of Gothic Rock’s fixation with minor and seventh chords, and most of the other songs feature similarly explorative melodies accentuated by the constant change of dynamics and sudden raises of volume. The flat mix, caused by erroneous recording (in order to take most of the tape hiss) is incredibly suited to the solo-guitar structure of the album, adding up to the album’s up-lifting mysticism and its spiritual nature.

And have we to talk about the lyrics? At the age of 25, Mitchell was writing lyrics that seemed transcendental of an older age, and reflect her personal experience avoiding any explicit name linked to her life. On “I Had a King”, she voluntarily references the despotic nature of her father and her forced marriage with someone who couldn’t care; “Michael from Mountains” references a similarly seducing individual which manages to impress her woman and making her forgetting she wants to discover something else, and the title track personalizes the protagonist’s desire to leave off the concrete and greedy human world. Elsewhere, Mitchell sings about lack of company driving to melancholy or suicide (“Marcie”, the theatrically structured “The Pirate of Penance”, “The Dawntreader”) and malevolent feminine seduction (“Cactus Tree”): "Night City", instead, seems fairly generic, despite the use of moderate percussion.

There are many Folk albums based about bluish feelings and melancholy, but few get spiritual like this. Hands down: this may be Joni Mitchell’s most consistent album ever, even more than her following efforts. It has all the ingenuity her writing lost later, along with terrific songs to recommend, mostly in the first side of the album. Maybe it’s time for a re-valuing?

Highlights: “I Had a King”, “Michael from Mountains”, “Nathan La Franeer”, “The Dawntreader”.

Probably American band Agalloch will never be recognized as one of the best 00’s acts of all time (according to a branch of nostalgic listeners, none will ever), but ignoring the hype and media phenomenon they helped to establish around the time slowly, but steadily, would be ingenuous to say the least. The band was recognized in making a Black/Doom Metal hybrid (actually, more the latter) with Radiohead guitar effects and a sparse use of Folk instruments, but Ashes Against the Grain found them completing the metamorphosis into an authentic Psychedelic/Post Metal band. The echo in the recording is indicative of an accurate and thoughtful production, and the use of Drop C tuning permits a specific range of open-chord arpeggios not many had exploited in the past (neither Xasthur) while employing the same G-minor scalar melodies of In Flames, favoring them much more accessibility than other “Cascadian Black” bands like Wolves in the Throne Room, Skagos and Woods of Ypres.

Most of the album is instrumental, based over moderate-balladic rhythms with elementary, simple and emotional acute guitar lines with sustained arpeggios and occasional use of e-bow. From “Limbs” to “Not Unlike the Waves” it’s a series of Gothic/Doom songs with simple, driving rhythmic guitar progressions and emotional (rarely tremolo) lead guitar lines by John Haughm, something that’s definitely opposite to the nascent revival of cerebral Progressive/Rock Metal of the time favored by Dream Theater. Though “Not Unlike the Waves” is more renowned by the public, it’s the opening duo of “Limbs” and “Falling Snow” that’s the album’s highlight thanks to their more effective structural minimalism. The last three tracks are an entire suite titled “Our Fortress Is Burning”, which starts with sparse, acoustic guitar arpeggios and ends with electric guitar feedback favored by sustained pedals. The lyrics are scarce and some of the imagery evokes Suicidal/Depressive Black subjects (“These arms were meant to be lost / Hacked, severed and forgotten”, “Red birds escape from my wounds and return as falling snow / To sweep the landscape; a wind haunted, wings without bodies”).

The flatness of the arrangements, all relying over digital production and effects, proves that the bandmembers didn’t really had the instruments to make a masterpiece, and the material here, though very strong, isn’t exactly miraculous, but, once again, ignoring such an album, which literally re-launched a second Katatonia fanbase and inspired hundreds of bands from all the world to reconsider simplicity, would be not only ingenuous, but also unfair. Though they were no Forgotten Tomb and no Cradle of Filth, Agalloch were definitely a band with personality, and Ashes Against the Grain stands as their most consistent album ever. An ideal “Cascadian Black” introductory album.

Highlights: “Limbs”, “Falling Snow”, “Fire Above, Ice Below”.

One of the most charming Post-Psychedelic British bands to come out in the 80s were named Felt, founded by the cryptically named Lawrence Hayward, whose lyrics were more indecipherable than the typical Proto-Shoegaze project around the time ("A messenger reads / From the books of old / And how they come they never stop / That's what we said / Inscriptions proclaim / That they were wrote for us"). Lawrence constantly sings with a constant, breezing croon that sounds like Morrisey when is stoned, and the music beneath him consists of jangling chords with the occasional Classical citation (due to Maurice Deebank's musical education).

Felt's debut Crumbling the Antiseptic Beauty is literally naked: the bass is played by three members in different tracks, the drums often consist of spartan, tribal pedals ("I Worship the Sun") or may even be absent ("Evergreen Dazed"): only "Fortune" presents a "regular" rhythmic pattern. Felt's main characteristic was their unpredictability, and first time listeners never really understood the whole album at first listen.

This is literally Post-music in the purest sense of the world, music that is done by people who don't actually know how to write songs and rides the fine border line between Straight and Free approaches, becoming literally something of its own. A close comparisons could be The Smiths, but one of the reasons this comparison is never totally right is because, when they were still a good band, Felt had their own fixations (one of these is the frequent inclusions of instrumentals in their albums). Also, their albums tended to be shorter than the others' (this contains only 6 songs, bringing up 30 minutes of music).

There are better Felt albums posterior to Crumbling the Antiseptic Beauty, but this can still be considered a fine introduction to this schizophrenic, often uncategorizable career of this obscure band. Well-spent time.

Highlights:"Evergreen Daze", "Fortune", "Cathedral".

Zeit is a difficult album. Not exactly because of its insularity (Tangerine Dream have never been an accessible band), but because of its extreme length: 74 minutes. Compared to their other albums of the period, it's twice their usual length. It doesn't help the fact that this music is extremely ambiguous. But again, Tangerine Dream were never a band who played things straight, so it isn't a problem at all.

However, a first listen to opener "Birth of Liquid Plejades" should do the trick. The songs starts with atonal violin passages and then gets mystic, with organ drones below liquid synth lines that pop up through and through: it can be considered as the most distinct piece of the album (a sort of "highlight"). The other pieces don't fare as well. "Nebulous Dawn" starts as distant horn alarms that evolve into assailants drones, then into menacing aerial sonars followed by bubbling high notes and helicopter rumors. "Origin of Supernatural Probabilities" starts as a sort of quiet Chillwave melding of electric guitar arpeggios and synth lines, then evolves into a driving, spherical "rhythmic pattern" (because of the absence of drums in the album) that falls around the 13th minute mark, leaving its way onto decadent, fading chorus effects. At last, the title track starts as a sacral bed of low string lines, then it verges onto spirals of synth lines and while sonar-like electric guitar enters. Around 5 minutes, the track gets separated by synth lines that emulate waterfalls, evolving into a sort of a recreation of a spacey forest (graced by birds-like passages), then ending the album like a fader that brings back the memory of a cathedral: it's also the most uniformly quiet piece of the album.

In short, Zeit's ambitions often make the album unlistenable. This doesn't necessarily mean it's bad: instead, often, the clash of sounds brings suspence and terror, and only a few passages on the first song recall Alpha Centauri (especially the organ lines), while the frequent hiss of the recording is even somehow remarkable, but Zeit is still a long, mind-blowing album that's definitely for those who have enough patience and imagination. Listeners who are not accustomed to this kind of Progressive Rock music should know this and take it like a warning.

Highlights:"Birth of Liquid Plejades".

Apart of an up-tempo pop song (no joke), the rest of Relentless finds Pentagram going for the hard road. Choosing decadent melodies and a bluesy vamp to high up the trip is the last road a rock band would choose to make their own contributions to music. Especially a 70s band like Pentagram, who based their whole career with these elements.

Yeah, you understood right. Pentagram may be an 80s band, but they were founded in 1970, following the rules written by Blue Cheer and Deep Purple. Pentagram didn't want to act like a modern act because they were sensibily older than others during the time of their first album, and they knew it well. It's the kind of situation a lot of bands would not survive for long, but a lot of thanks have to be given to Bobby Liebling, who waited 15 years to see his dreams made true. This is bravery.

The best cuts on Relentless are the ones that don't want to be impending (namely, the Griffin-penned songs), but instead inject a great amount of sleaze on the sound. "Relentless" and "Death Row", both first tracks on the two different editions of the album make it clear, and are totally different from dumb pieces like "The Ghoul" and the useless "You're Lost, I'm Free". Another melodic intruder is "Sign of the Wolf", a song worth of bands like The Ramones. However, cuts like "Dying World" or "20 Buck Spin" have good chops, but feel like bar songs. Maybe the production, muddy and cavernous but not enough to be innovative, is what penalizes the album the most. But overall it's a high quality album, especially in a genre when certian bands are incapable of write memorable melodies.

Highlights:"Death Row", "Sign of the Wolf (Pentagram)", "Relentless".

Morbid Angel have always been a crushing band, one whose riffs, despite not being slashing nor truly memorable, functioned as fractured images. Gateways to Annihilation, however, is another whole different thing. Not only the songs are slightly slower, they are more concise and even more relentless than before because of this (and the compositions don't even seem so convulsed). What sticks in the head are not the melodies but the whole instrumentation.

Never had Morbid Angel's music been so trashing. Great part of this lies in Erik Rutan, a new talent in the scene, whose objective to seek the most destroying kind of sound has transformed a lot of mediocre bands into one of the heaviest bands of the time. Thanks to the seven-string trickery of Erik, Gateways to Annihilation is the best Morbid Angel of their career. A lot they had made before the collaboration, but the listener can't compare "God of Emptiness" with "Summoning Redemption", because they are two kind of universes. The first is statuary, the second is colossal. And a lot happens to the others tracks too. "I" combines staccato-driven leads with delay-charged instrumental choruses (a bit of Shoegaze), "He Who Sleeps" finds its way through an infected crawling murk: the only completely speedy tracks are "Opening of the Gates" and closer "God of the Forsaken".

All of what's on the album only serves well the band. Don't forget Gateways to Annihilation: you won't find so many similar albums out there.

Highlights:"Summoning Redemption", "He Who Sleeps", "God of the Forsaken".

Who could imagine that Celtic Frost would have been set their throne not in one, but two movements? While in 1992 America was going crazy because of the Grunge movement (remember Kurt Cobain was a Celtic Frost fan), in Europe, apart of some remnants of the New Wave and the still upcoming Indie Rock scene, there seemed to be nothing new in musical panorama. Or at least they believed so.

In Europe, it was Extreme Metal that was growing up of success like nothing else before. Doom Metal had the magic trio Paradise Lost-My Dying Bride-Anathema, Death Metal had started incorporating the Grindcore ferocity (especially the Swedish scene), Thrash Metal would sadly remain underground even in the 00's: Black Metal seemed like a novelty act then, because some artists started deeply appreciate the garage-sounding albums of Venom and Bathory and decided they would create the most impenetrable kind of music in Earth known. Satanism accusations came after.

In 1992 Norway still didn't know the Black Metal scene, that found Darkthrone their favorite children. Ted Skjellum (vocals/guitar), Ivan Enger (guitar) and Gylve Nagell had formed yet the band as a Death Metal act that soon turned into the "polar opposite" following the Inner Circle influence. If Soulside Journey was a dirt, murky, but "clean" rest in technical sugarland, A Blaze In The Northern Sky found the band creating even more guitar webs (they almost sound like synthesizers), making longer songs and, most notably, leaving behind all confusing songwriting direction and relying instead in straightfoward sections (yeah, the songs still got an unpredictable flowing). Nearly absent solos, church-bell shy bass and tribal blasting drums: here you got all the bases.

The genre rarely sounds catchy, and that's not the case. Not the single moments, but the disc as a whole is a musical gem. So there aren't particular highlights, but two tracks hide some surprises: all of them have the Morbid Tales-era riffs and harmonies, but "The Pagan Winter" has a haunting atmosphere and ends like the album started. Even more fantastic is the title track that, after some classic Black Metal power exsposition, changes all things with a sleazy Ramones riff until the end. Good job, guys.

Highlights:"A Blaze in the Northern Sky", "The Pagan Winter".

The band's third album, 2017's Where Owls Know My Name, was their most successful album in terms of media coverage and recognition, and not casually. Most of the tracks move to a C#-minor-based route in the vein of Gothic/Doom Metal acts like Stormlord, My Dying Bride and even Enter Shikari, as the instrumentation includes less palm-muted violence and more musicality, including soothing string keyboards and (!) sax lines, both as a texture for the backdrop and dissonant. “Subtle Change (Including the Forest of Transition and Dissatisfaction Dance) ” includes dizzying electric organ notes, jumpy Rush-like breakdowns and orchestrations that recall prime Emperor, and the rest of the cuts follows the same epic route, adding for an album that lasts almost an hour in duration. Though once again there's a bit of repetitiveness that hampers its quality, the album remains consistent like the previous.

Highlights: “Subtle Change (Including the Forest of Transition and Dissatisfaction Dance) ”, “Capricorn / Agoratopia ”.

The band's second album Monarchy finds the band continuing to unleash blazing Death Metal in a technical fashion, fortunately avoiding to excessively sound clones like most bands of their genre. Most of the rhythms consist of stomping mid-tempos with double-bass, but several high-tempo blast-beats are also included. Occasional inserts of acoustic guitar and keyboard effects don't disturb the whole listening, which remains stable during the palm-muted moments and the low upper-string drones: “Monarchy” features more clean-guitar Rush-like arpeggios than anything else, and it's the album's less punishing track with lyrics. “Circles in the Sky ” features terrific bass leads and the most consistent solos on the album, and in general the last two tracks tend more to Psychedelic/Post-Black Metal than the band's usual Death Metal stomp. Definitely a progression from their immature debut.

Highlights: “Circles in the Sky ”.