What is the measure of a great artist? Is it the enduring power of their songs? Check. Is it their notoriety? Check. Is it the size of their catalog? Big ol’ check…

Or is it the number of songs you can recognize on an album labeled “Greatest Hits?” In this case, one.
And it bears repeating: I am a Johnny Cash fan. I am pretty familiar with his work, and have been for over a decade. And yet, I recognize only one song on this compilation of “greatest hits” (One Piece at a Time).
And sure, it’s worth mentioning that Cash’s career was dominated by the shadow of his early works (Folsom Prison Blues, I Walk the Line, Cry Cry Cry, etc). But his career was solid through much of his life. So much so that’s it’s easy to fill a record with forgotten hit singles.

Johnny Cash is an interesting figure. For his infamous trouble with the law and addictions to drugs and alcohol, John had a devout faith that guided him through his turmoil…

Man in Black is not the first religious album Cash made—he released several albums of hymns and spirituals before this. But it is probably his most personal. Six of the ten tracks are original. Including “The Preacher said, ‘Jesus Said,’”  (his most overtly religious song) “The Man in Black” (maybe his most personally spiritual tune), and “Singin’ in Vietnam Talkin’ Blues” (perhaps his most political). 

As such, Man in Black carries a different mood than the rest of his albums. There’s a sincerity here that escapes most of his other discs. It’s a heavier disc, and he plays it with all the gravity it deserves. 
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Even if “I Talk to Jesus Every Day” gets a little preachy.

It took me two years to get through the first run of Johnny Cash albums in my collection (out of laziness, not quantity). Then, just when I thought I was out, a friend gave me four that he picked up at a garage sale.
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So let’s knock these out.

While Johnny Cash is an undeniably iconic figure in American popular music, part of that is purely thanks to his prolificity. He released ninety-six studio records in his forty-nine-year career. Not every one of those is going to be as memorable as, say, Live at Folsom Prison.

This is his twelfth studio album, and it comes just six years into his career. There are only two songs on here with much notoriety, and even those are famous for other recordings (Delia’s Gone, I’m Free From the Chain Gang Now). 

​Which isn’t to say it’s bad–it’s very difficult for Cash to release a bad song. He has a format, and that format works. He sticks to the script here, and the results are just as devilishly charming as ever. 

Every year, no matter how closely I follow the music blogs, there’s always some record I miss until the following year, which inevitably becomes my favorite. In 2010, it was Beach House’s Teen Dream. In 2014 it was La Dispute’s The Rooms of the House. In 2015, it was a tie between Revisionist by Sannhet and Caspian’s Dust and Disquiet.
And last year, it was this.

I never even heard of If These Trees Could Talk until this album showed up in my recommendations on Amazon Prime. And while their algorithm sometimes misses more than it hits, this one was an atomic bomb. Since my first listen, I’ve been desperate to add it to my collection.
The Bones of a Dying World is the exact sort of post metal I yearn for. It’s punishingly heavy, but without ever sacrificing melody. The guitars are soaked in proglike delay and countered with a punishingly heavy rhythm section. It’s an evocative juxtaposition, and creates some incredibly moving moments.
The album opens with “Solstice,” which almost sounds like a metal rewrite of “Sirius” by Alan Parsons Project (note: this is a great thing). The group then creates an album that serves up all the best archetypes of post metal without ever sounding formulaic. There’s plenty of soft-loud dynamic changes, as comes with the territory, but ITTCT adopts the format more thoughtfully than many of their contemporaries, shifting dynamics with purpose rather than out of necessity.
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And while most post metal/post rock guitarists rely heavy on the reverb to create atmosphere, these riffs are decidedly more rhythmic. Palm muted delay lines (think more Phoenix than Explosions in the Sky) run through the bulk of the tracks (”Solstice” and “The Giving Tree” most effectively). As a result, there is a groove here that is rare in post metal.

Apparently, Julia Holter has a pretty well-respected catalog outside of this album, but I’ve somehow missed all of it. Her other albums are song cycles built around Ancient Greek literature. While Ekstasis isn’t nearly as heady, there’s a seriousness here that betrays Holter’s derision towards the laziness that so often pervades “bedroom pop.”

There are heavy reverbs and electronic drums all over this disc, but it’d be foolish to compare it to the flood of synth-leaning dream pop bands that have cropped up on Bandcamp over the last several years. This so carefully composed that it might be chamber pop if it were played on acoustic instruments. 
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What’s also telling is the flow of the tracks. When I first heard this digitally, I was amazed at how naturally the tracks ran between eachother. So I was aghast when I got the vinyl to see that the track list has been completely redone. But somehow, the record’s cohesive narrative has remained intact.  

Two months before the release of Closer, Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis hung himself in his kitchen at the age of twenty-three. He had been struggling with epilepsy and his marriage for years, and confided in his wife that he had no desire to live past his twenties.
Closer was read like a suicide note, a man’s one last baritone yowl into a cruel world that wouldn’t mourn him. He laments betrayal, isolation, mockery, and more, wringing his deep voice into painful contortions. “No wonder he did what he did,” the listeners said. “He was clearly tortured.”
But this isn’t Curtis’s album alone. We would be remiss if we didn’t note the growth of the players behind him since the previous album. Unknown Pleasures might be the more iconic album, but Closer is, by every measure, better written and better played. Bernard Sumner throws himself fully into his noisy riffing on a few songs (especially on “Atrocity Exhibition,” which I don’t think has a single coherent note on the guitar), but he also spends a few tracks completely on the synthesizer. Drummer Stephen Morris and bassist Peter Hook (who famously couldn’t hear Bernard or Ian over himself until he heard the first album) carry this album on their backs with far more surefootedness. They are unmistakably the same band that created the first album, but they cast a shadow that looks an awful lot like New Order, which would form after Ian’s death.
There’s also the dark atmosphere, once more supplied by producer Martin Hannet (which was, again, a sour point with the band). While Unknown Pleasures was written as a punk album and produced as something else, Closer knows exactly what it’s trying to be. It lacks some of the rough edges of the previous album, but with ballads like “The Eternal” and absolute rippers like “Twenty Four Hours,” it’s hard to mourn that change.
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In all, Closer is a massively important statement from one of the most important and tragic groups in rock and roll history. It’s telling that New Order’s discography took a very poppy trajectory, because after creating this, they were going to need a whole lot of pop therapy.

But seriously, the pairing of Ella Fitzgerald’s velveteen alto with Louis Armstrong’s trumpet/voice hybrid (he somehow manages to sound the same whether he’s playing or singing) is so perfect that it’s amazing that it took so long to happen.

At this point, Miles Davis had already taken jazz from Charlie Parker, who had taken the mantle from Louis Armstrong before him. Satchmo had been doing this for thirty years. Ella for twenty. Both were undisputed icons. This duet series was a massive collision of supergiants.

But you’d never guess at its importance based on the absolute preciousness of the album cover. Nor is its gravity betrayed anywhere in the music. Ella and Louis croon and gravel and play their way through the most popular standards of the day with giddy playfulness. 

And these tunes have endured–Gershwins and Irving Berlin have a fair amount of representation here, so that’s no surprise. There’s also the absolute classic April in Paris, which is correctly remembered as one of this era’s pinnacle tracks. Also included is a charming rendition of They Can’t Take That Away From Me, which is a personal favorite.

But overall, this album is perhaps the most charming thing ever recorded. It certainly doesn’t show either’s technical chops, nor does it have to. It’s merely a perfect example of what these two megastars do better than anyone.

Here it is: the album cover you’ve seen all over Tumblr. All the trendy kids are wearing it on their t-shirts (myself included). Just such a hip album, right?

​But yo, dig it. This album is legendary. It birthed the entire post-punk scene. But it’s not exactly like they were trying to do much different. They were just some Manks trying to play punk rock. They just had a couple hiccups there…

Notably, Bernard Sumner’s poor equipment. His only amp was this small thing that he could barely hear over the din of the pounding drums and driving bass lines. To make himself heard, he would play higher riffs, often scraping his strings into noise rather than proper melodies (it’s worth nothing that bassist Peter Hook first heard Sumner’s guitar parts on the record, as he played too loud live).

Then there’s the atmosphere. There’s an unusual amount of echo on the drums and vocals for a punk record (which Hook famously hated). This is essentially because producer Martin Hannet thought punk rock was boring, and Joy Division didn’t have enough studio experience to argue with him.

The result is a weird, wonderfully dark record that served as the perfect atmosphere for the morose baritone of Ian Curtis, one of rock and roll’s most celebrated and tragic frontmen. While their next album would be much more shaded by Curtis’s suicide, Unknown Pleasures does little to offer contrarian narrative, and would go one to be embraced by weird sad kids everywhere across every generation (that I missed it until after college astounds me.

​Looking at its humble beginnings, it’s amazing that Unknown Pleasures became the monolithic icon it is. More than just a weird underground hit, it has been lauded by every music publication from NME to Rolling Stone. I sometimes wonder if it owes its legacy more to its cover and aesthetic than its songs. But when I revisit it, I am quickly corrected.