319. The Stone Roses, "The Stone Roses"

The List is gonna do what the List is gonna do but I have to say I'm genuinely shocked to find the Stone Roses debut album just chilling down here in the low 300's like it's a middlingly-important record your best friend's brother loves and not an album that has repeatedly been voted the Greatest Album of All Time (or in the Top 10) by British people.  In 2003, NME readers judged it to be the Best Album Ever; by 2013, it was only #7.  STILL!  That is a huge difference across the Atlantic.  Even on this side, it's a Pitchfork 10.  So what gives?

First off, it's a very good album.  There are a lot of good, poppy songs dressed up in the Madchester swirly guitars and matched with Ian Brown's nasally, disaffected vocals.  This album has been retconned as some kind of fusion of rock and rave electronica but I don't think that's really true.  It's more like what the Beatles might have become with thicker production and worse singing.  The only real link to dancey Manchester is "Fools Gold," the last song on the album, that would serve as a jumping-off point for their ill-fated and highly disdained second album, Second Coming.  This album really set up Britpop, which would follow in a huge wave in the coming years.  Even the sneering Gallagher brothers said they were inspired to start Oasis by a Stone Roses show.

But why superimpose some future vision on this collection when there are so many good songs on their own merits?  I mean, the first song is "I Wanna Be Adored."  It takes its time arriving - the 40-second fade-in begins so quietly that when I put this album on I routinely turn it up way too loud forgetting that it's an extremely slow build and then get blasted out.  Maybe that's the idea!   "Waterfall" has a guitar riff so lovely and memorable it's one of the best things about the whole album.  "Bye Bye Bad Man" proudly wears its Byrds influences out in the open, mashing up that source material with 80's jangly guitar pop.

I could go on.  Obviously I like this record a lot, and it's gone on to attain a kind of mythic status, as the NME voting proves.  What might be most impressive about it is that the band just popped out with a brand new sound they almost created from whole cloth and went on to influence Oasis, Spiritualized, Christ, anyone out of the UK in the 90's with a chorus pedal and a hooky melody. 

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? Probably Top 50.

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