Dave’s Music Database Hall of Fame: Album Inductees (Aug. 2019)

Originally posted 8/22/2019. January 22, 2019 marked the 10-year anniversary of the DMDB blog. To honor that, Dave’s Music Database announced its own Hall of Fame. This month marks the third batch of album inductees. These are the top ten best-rated albums of all time (with at least 20 ratings from various sources including All Music Guide, Amazon, CD Universe, New Musical Express, Q Magazine, Rolling Stone, and USA Today. (Click here for a full list of sources.) Two of them were previously inducted – Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue and Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, – leaving eight inductees in this round. See the full list of album inductees here.

Beach Boys Pet Sounds (1966) Inducted August 2019 as a “Top Rated Album.”

“In everything written about this album, ‘genius’ and ‘masterpiece’ are two words that invariably appear.” SP “The former is applied to the album’s creator and spiritual avatar, Brian Wilson,” SP who humbly “set out to construct the greatest pop record ever made.” SP By general accounts, he succeeded; it is “a pop milestone” SP “considered by many to be one of the most influential albums ever.” SM “This is more than just an album by a great American band; it’s THE great American pop album.” CDU Read more.

Derek & the Dominos Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs (1970) Inducted August 2019 as a “Top Rated Album.”

Eric Clapton was a superstar by 1970 when he formed the supergroup Derek & the Dominos with fellow guitarist Duane Allman and members of Delaney & Bonnie, with whom he’d just toured. This was their only studio recording, but it proved to be “one of the few blues-based classic rock albums which avoids dull predictability or Led Zep-ish testosterone riffs.” PK It gave Clapton “his greatest album” AMG and made for “one of the all-time classic dual-guitar albums.” VH1 Read more.

Bob Dylan Highway 61 Revisited (1965) Inducted August 2019 as a “Top Rated Album.”

This is “Dylan’s most relentless and flawless album,” TL but also his “most accessible.” NO It “changed the face of popular music, and serves as proof of his legendary status as one of the true masters of both words and music.” NO In hiring a full rock band, “powered by Mike Bloomfield’s slashing guitar lines and Al Kooper’s bracing, rudimentary organ,” TL “Dylan didn’t abandon folk music; he just hauled it forward a few centuries. Out went acoustic hymns of protest, in came a whirlwind of images – mad, random, yet cruelly precise.” BL Read more.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience Are You Experienced? (1967) Inducted August 2019 as a “Top Rated Album.”

This is “one of the quintessential statements of psychedelic rock” NRR and “one of the most groundbreaking guitar albums of the rock era.” NRR Hendrix “expanded the sonic possibilities of the electric guitar” TL “radical new techniques in feedback and distortion” RV and other things “no one ever dreamed about trying.” DV The songs “sound as revolutionary and as far beyond category today as they did the day they were recorded.” TL Read more.

Velvet Underground & Nico Velvet Underground & Nico (1967) Inducted August 2019 as a “Top Rated Album.”

While it took ten years for VU’s debut to crack six figures, AMG there’s a classic line from producer Brian Eno that “everyone who bought one…started a band.” JD This is “chapter one of alternative rock” BL and made VU “the poster children of the avant-garde;” TL they “proved that rock, too, can be art.” RV “Glam, punk, new wave, goth, noise, and nearly every other left-of-center rock movement owes an audible debt to this set.” AMG Read more.

The Who Who’s Next (1971) Inducted August 2019 as a “Top Rated Album.”

Many consider this “the Who’s crowning achievement.” MU It “set a hard rock standard that even its creators struggled to emulate.” CD Lead singer Roger “Daltrey fully comes into his own,” EK Pete Townshend’s guitar playing “alternates between delicate acoustic picking and earthshaking riffing,” SM and dummer Keith Moon and bassist John Entwistle play as if theirs “were lead and/or melody instruments.” EK “You essentially have four lead players…In the hands of any other musicians it would have repeatedly collapsed into chaos.” EK Read more.

Stevie Wonder Innervisions (1973) Inducted August 2019 as a “Top Rated Album.”

Innervisions stands as Stevie Wonder’s masterpiece.” RV It is “the summit of the wunderkind’s blend of funk-addled synth-pop and socially conscious lyrics.” UT “Introspective, melancholy, sassy and uplifting, it transcends all notions of soul as schmaltz.” WR It is “by far his most political work” RV with “songs addressing drugs, spirituality, political ethics, the unnecessary perils of urban life, and what looked to be the failure of the ‘60s dream.” AMG Read more.

Neil Young After the Gold Rush (1970) Inducted August 2019 as a “Top Rated Album.”

Young had already been a member of the highly-influential Buffalo Springfield and worked with Crosby, Stills & Nash on the blockbuster Déjà Vu album when this, his third solo album, was released. This collection of “country-folk love songs” AMG “represents the morning after the mayhem, both personal and cultural – the sound of Young waking up with a post-‘60s hangover, catching his breath, and trying to sort through the wreckage.” TL Read more.