David Bowie Albums Ranked Stereogum

Like I wrote a few times above, American Beauty and Workingman's Dead are generally the most widely accepted Grateful Dead albums among non-Deadheads, but the band's real crowning achievement is Aoxomoxoa. Coming off the more freeform Anthem of the Sun, Aoxomoxoa was really the first time the Dead showed off the pop songwriting chops that would define their most popular work. Or maybe it's because they've got the psychedelic production that the band mastered for this album and never really returned to again. "Psychedelic" and "Grateful Dead" are inseparable terms, but the truth is the band's studio work didn't tend to have that acid-induced sound after the '60s ended.

Aoxomoxoa is the album where the Dead went as nuts with studio experimentation and trippy sound manipulation as their contemporaries who are more regularly praised for studio work. You can hear it in the aquatic guitar tones of the "St. Stephen" intro, or the proto-dream pop of that song's "Ladyfinger" section, or Jerry's vocal effects on "China Cat," or that song's woozy keyboards. But those moments are far from the trippy heights that Aoxomoxoa reaches. The two-minute "Rosemary" sees Jerry's voice manipulated to the point where it sounds like he's singing underwater, and he's backed by nothing other than a gentle acoustic guitar. It's the kind of psychedelic folk nugget that anyone from John Lennon to outsiders like Dave Bixby and Mark Fry probably would've loved to have written, and it still rivals most of the all-time great psych-folk today.

On a similarly delicate but slightly more sober note, "Mountains of the Moon" is another of Jerry's finest psych-folk moments. The acoustic guitar and keyboard arpeggios shimmer like diamonds, and Jerry gives one of the most captivating vocal performances of his career. The Dead's 1970 albums may be best known as their folk albums, but the folk of "Mountains of the Moon" tops almost every song on the band's two subsequent LPs. And then there's "What's Become of the Baby," the moment where the band's studio experimentation and levels of trippiness are off the charts. It's just Jerry running his voice through all kinds of effects, and I get why some fans may tire of it , but it's one of the earliest examples of this type of avant-pop, and weirdos for decades to come would take inspiration from this kind of thing.

Elsewhere on Aoxomoxoa, they've got stuff like the folk-rockin' "Dupree's Diamond Blues" and the psych-blues-rock of "Doin' That Rag," which are both lesser known "pop" gems than "St. Stephen" and "China Cat" but nearly as effective. Aoxomoxoa also has a leg up on the other Dead albums 'cause Jerry handled almost all of the lead vocals on this one. He's not just the band's most worshipped and most mythical member, he's also by far their best singer, and his lead helps this album go down just a bit more smoothly than any other Dead album. Usually a constantly-busy live band, the Grateful Dead played just four shows in 1975, and rather than laying road-tested songs to tape as they often did, the Dead went into the studio for Blues for Allah and wrote from scratch. The time off from touring and the new approach to writing and recording may have contributed to the amount of detail and care that went into Blues for Allah. It was the first time the Dead were firing on all cylinders in the studio since their nearly-flawless 1970 albums, and ultimately -- though a good amount of in-studio magic was created in subsequent years -- the last.

"The Music Never Stopped" is probably the closest the album comes to sounding "traditional" in any sense of the word; otherwise, Blues for Allah is totally in its own world. That's immediately evident on opener "Help on the Way / Slipknot!," which was like little else the band had done before or since. It sounds like a blender full of the band's then-increasingly-prevalent jazz tendencies, the exploratory jams of their live show, and the trippy acid rock that they helped pioneer, yet it still manages to be a cohesive pop song.

The instrumental passages may go off into outer space, but Jerry's calmly addictive refrains always keep the song coming back to down to Earth. It's got the kind of wet, spacious production that bands like Grizzly Bear favor today, with chilled-out keys and vocal harmonies that do a lot to fill the song's atmosphere. It's sort of a condensed, easily accessible version of what the Dead had done more effectively many times in the past, and it is weird and disappointing to think it took mainstream America so long to catch on to a Grateful Dead single. It's irresistibly catchy and danceable, and, in the context of music today, it actually sounds less corny and less dated than even some of the Dead's '70s material.

Modern-day indie rock leaders The War On Drugs have a handful of songs that sound modeled after "Touch of Grey," and I doubt they'd deny this -- they covered "Touch of Grey" for the 2016 indie rock Dead tribute album. It shouldn't be their biggest studio song, but it really is one of their best. As written above, American Beauty came just months after Workingman's Dead and was cut from a very similar cloth, but it's a noticeable step up. The production is more lush, and there are more stunningly good pop moments. Workingman's Dead has "Casey Jones" and "Uncle John's Band," but American Beauty has "Friend of the Devil" and "Truckin'" and "Sugar Magnolia" and of course "Ripple." And even the songs that are less accessible/popular are just as iconic.

It opens on one of its finest notes, "Box of Rain," a rare moment where Phil Lesh sings lead, and as is abundantly clear here (and as the "Let Phil sing!" chanters already know), Phil has a gorgeous voice and it really is a shame he didn't take lead more. He's probably the band's second most appealing singer after Jerry, and the timeless "Box of Rain" is some of the best evidence of this. Not to mention it's one of the Dead's most captivating stories lyrically, and Jerry gives a legendary vocal performance of it on American Beauty.

Immediately after that is one that can be better live, the Bob Weir-sung "Sugar Magnolia." The slightly more rockin' version of this song that the band tended to do live is one of their biggest crowdpleasers, but hearing in it its American Beauty form is a treat too. There are a lot of Dead songs that didn't reach their full potential until they were heard in concert, but the "Terrapin Station" suite was the opposite. Parts of "Terrapin" have been performed live, but the Dead never played the entire thing from start to finish, and they certainly didn't play it with the orchestra or the choir that's on the album version.

Apparently, members of the band disagreed with the extravagant arrangements that Keith Olsen commissioned for the song, but if that's true, I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with them. "Terrapin" is the single most awe-inspiring song in the Grateful Dead's catalog, and that is thanks in no small part to all of its grand embellishments. It sounds like someone mashed Sgt. Pepper's and Aqualung together into one 16-minute song, but it also sounds like no one other than the Dead. The weirdo acid-trip passages are there, the Rhythm Devils are going wild, and Jerry leads the way with the same presence he had since the late '60s. Even if you stripped all the fancy stuff away and listened to him play the song on an acoustic guitar, it would rank among the band's finest moments.

And the song is long but all the parts are tightly packaged together; it never drags or overstays its welcome. It's the moment where the band's pop songwriting, ambitious arrangements, and impeccable musicianship came together better than ever before or since, and not a second of the song is wasted. If you're still wary of the Grateful Dead's studio work but you haven't heard this song, do yourself a favor and change that. "Terrapin Station" is a triumph far beyond the context of "jam bands." Taken even in the context of The Beatles, Bowie, or Pink Floyd, it's a triumph in pop songcraft and studio wizardry. The Grateful Dead went on to become one of the greatest rock bands in history, but their studio albums didn't come out of the gate swinging.

They were already starting to put on mesmerizing, psychedelic live shows, but their self-titled debut album was pretty straightforward in comparison, and mostly included covers. The originals, "The Golden Road " and "Cream Puff War," are mostly of the garage-psych variety, and -- though the Dead vastly improved by the time of their next album -- it's cool to hear them writing this kind of music, which they didn't do much of afterwards. A lot of the covers on this album are better heard in live recordings, though some of them stand out here too. The melancholic "Morning Dew" has hints of the slowed-down, spacious version the Dead would introduce into their live sets in the early '70s, and the ten-minute "Viola Lee Blues" proves the Dead already knew how to spiral into an exploratory jam in 1967. The Grateful Dead was a humble beginning, but it's still an enjoyable record, and it's an interesting look into the early days of the band's career. If nothing else, it's worth hearing just to see how huge of a jump they made for the following year's Anthem of the Sun.

The music on Blackstar has been characterised as incorporating art rock, jazz, experimental jazz, free jazz, and experimental rock, as well as elements of industrial rock, folk-pop and hip hop. Bryan Wawzenek of Ultimate Classic Rock writes that it was his most experimental album in years. The saxophone was the first instrument Bowie learned; he was an avid jazz listener in his youth and had occasionally worked with jazz musicians in the past. The album's title track incorporates nu jazz, while progressing through a drum and bass-style rhythm, an acid house-inspired portion of the instrumental, a saxophone solo, and a lower-tempo blues-like section.

Ten minutes in length, it originally began as two separate melodies, before being merged to one single piece. Although some critics felt the track begins to drag as it goes on, Pegg believes it's one of the album's "most luminous moments". "Girl Loves Me" features synthesisers, "acrobatic" drumming, strings and "bouncing" bass. "Dollar Days", the sixth track, contains a sax solo and an arrangement that Dalton considers reminiscent of Bowie's work on Young Americans . Biographer Chris O'Leary believes "Dollar Days" has "the lushest arrangement" on the album. In the final track, "I Can't Give Everything Away", Bowie plays a harmonica solo similar to one from his instrumental track "A New Career in a New Town" off his 1977 album Low.

The album picks right back up after that, with Jerry's gently folky "Candyman," and then side B is nearly perfect. The second half of the album begins with "Ripple," the Dead's finest campfire singalong and a rare favorite among Deadheads and non-Deadheads alike. Even more so than "Friend of the Devil" or "Casey Jones," "Ripple" feels like a folk music standard today, the way so many of Bob Dylan's songs do. It emerges as some of the band's best pop songwriting when an entire stadium sings along to it, but it's presented subtly on American Beauty.

The gentle album version sees the band practicing much restraint, which makes it even more impressive that an anthemic pop song managed to poke its head out anyway. Then it's another comedown with the airy "Attics of My Life," where the group's harmonies are angelic, and finally "Truckin'," a song so deceptively simple that it can almost seem underwhelming at first, until you realize it's drilled its way into your brain. Not to mention it produced the since-immortalized line, "What a long strange trip it's been." It's unbelievably prescient that the Dead managed to put that line in a song five years into their career. And then there's "Weather Report Suite." The almost-thirteen-minute, Bob Weir-penned Wake of the Flood closer came just one year after Bobby's solo debut Ace, and it's a far more impressive composition than anything on that album. The Dead did a lot of interesting stuff in the studio, and among the most interesting -- up there with the '60s psych experiments and the 1970 folk songwriting -- are the multi-part prog suites they released in the mid to late '70s.

The first of these was "Weather Report Suite." It starts out as gentle folk rock that isn't super different from Workingman's Dead/American Beauty/Ace, with some nice organ, pedal steel, and truly angelic harmonies fleshing things out. First gospel harmonies, and then it changes even more, when it switches from its lazy-Sunday first half to the more sinister-sounding "Let It Grow" portion. Keith Godchaux starts pounding on his piano, and Bob Weir finds his voice as a pop songwriter more than he ever had previously. Then enters the triumphant horns and strings, and it becomes even clearer that the Grateful Dead are in territory they had never been in before 1973. They were known for "long songs" because of the way they stretched out their jams live, but this wasn't jamming.

This was an orchestral rock song cycle than rivaled Tommy and side B of Abbey Road, both in ambition and in how fun it is to listen to. This side of the Dead is an often unsung part of their legacy, and it deserves to be much more widely celebrated. The Grateful Dead performed live up until July 1995, one month before Jerry Garcia's death, but they never recorded another studio album after 1989's Built to Last. That's probably for the best; they were clearly out of stream as a studio band by the end of the '80s anyway. Even on the band's weakest albums, Jerry managed to contribute one or two pleasant songs that reminded you a little of the good old days, and on Built to Last those songs were the title track and "Standing on the Moon," but mostly, this album is entirely skippable.

Keyboardist/vocalist Brent Mydland, who joined the band in 1979 and whose shinier pop rock style never really fit with the Grateful Dead, co-wrote and sang almost half the songs on this album. Bob Weir contributes just two and they both rank among his most forgettable work. Thomas Rhett scored his first hit in 2012, introducing a sound that mixed the southern swagger of country music with pop hooks, R&B grooves, soulful strut and the anything-goes attitude of rock. During the subsequent years, thanks to eight chart-topping singles, he is now a headliner of massive arenas. New album Life Changes is filled with songs that stretch his sound to new limits. Kicking off the set is the already chart-topping "Craving You," and from there it carves a path as wild and wide as Rhett's own career.

There are coming-of-age country ballads, heartland rock & roll anthems, EDM-influenced pop tracks and R&B slow jams all wrapped together by the songwriting skills and elastic vocals of a frontman who's willing to shine a light on his own milestones and mistakes. The end of the '70s was a major turning point for the Grateful Dead. Keyboardist/vocalist Keith Godchaux and his wife/Dead vocalist Donna Jean Godchaux had both left the band in 1979 , and their replacement was Brent Mydland. The end of the Keith & Donna era (1977's Terrapin Station and 1978's Shakedown Street) varied between moments of utter greatness and moments that showed the Dead were running out of ideas, and the latter severely outweighed the former during the Brent Mydland era. Brent brought a more straightforward, more commercial style to the band, and his increasing presence as a lead singer did not help the Dead's songwriting into the '80s.

He takes two songs on Go to Heaven, "Far From Me" and "Easy to Love You," both of which have the Grateful Dead sounding like any middle-of-the-road commercial rock band . Bob Weir's songs at least induce some nostalgia since his voice was still in great shape, but Bobby's songwriting style was a lot closer to Brent's than Jerry's at this point, making his songs a far cry from the band's inventive '60s and '70s material. "Althea" is slow and airy but hypnotic, and it sounds like the type of song you could imagine Jerry writing as far back as the late '60s.

It's a truly special moment in the band's catalog, and even if the rest of Go to Heaven fails to hold your attention, this song is still worth it. So, while digging through the band's live recordings is crucial to understanding and experiencing the Grateful Dead, their studio albums deserve to be taken as seriously. To honor and celebrate the band's fruitful discography -- and maybe help provide some newcomers with a few good entry points into the band's larger-than-life legacy -- we've ranked the band's studio albums from worst to best, and included commentary on each one. This means we left off truly essential albums like Live/Dead, Europe '72 and Skull & Roses, but we did include the solo debuts by Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir, which fit neatly into the Dead's story and the Dead's sound. And while it didn't send him into retirement, NEVER LET ME DOWN also caused Bowie to leave something behind. After chasing the ghost of LET'S DANCE's success throughout the '80s, a period many critics now consider the artist's fallow period, Bowie created this much maligned record.

I think it's widely considered one of Bowie's worst from what I can gather, and as is clear, I nearly agree. I don't think any artists from the '60s or '70s escaped the '80s without at least a couple of embarrassing records, but Bowie transcended trends to the point that NEVER LET ME DOWN is a little more than tolerable. But Bowie couldn't quite escape the musical tropes of the '80s, and much of the rest of the album is mired in them. It speaks to Bowie's innate musical ability, then, that NEVER LET ME DOWN ultimately isn't a slog.

However, it, in addition to the massively expensive and incredibly theatrical Glass Spider tour, disillusioned Bowie in regards to his own artistic direction, and he formed the band Tin Machine to ultimately create two records and get back to his rock roots. The albums are pretty good, but they aren't considered in this piece. "Zac Brown isn't just trying to sell records, he's selling a way of life, a Southern Fried way of life, and he's doing it very successfully. He and his band are as tight as a small community and they play a highly professional, appealingly commercial country style.

His voice is a warm, comforting aubergine and the tunes are homespun and inclusive. There was a feeling they over elaborated on their last couple of albums, so on Welcome Home they are back to the simplicity of their breakthrough, The Foundation, with some songs completed in one take. Welcome Home evokes a family gathering in the sunshine, barbecue smoking away, a few beers being drunk, children and dogs running around. Then, dad fishes out his guitar, uncle Jimmy places his fiddle under his chin, cousin Clay tickles an ivory and they are away until the sun sets" – The Afterword.

All The Light Above It Too was recorded over the past year at Johnson's Hawaii based Mango Tree Studio. For the first time in years Johnson handled most of the instrumentation himself, echoing the four-track recordings that launched his career over seventeen years ago. "This album shares what has been on my mind during the past year or so," says Johnson. "A year in which I sailed through the North Atlantic Gyre for a documentary about plastic pollution in the ocean. A year in which Trump was elected as the President of the United States. A year in which I camped, surfed, got stitches, explored, dreamed, shared time and endless conversations with my family and friends…all of which inspired these songs.

I usually make sketches of the songs first then set up a time to actually record the album. This time around the original sketches became the final versions. I didn't want to lose any of the spirit that a song has in its rawest form." To finish out the record Johnson called upon producer Robbie Lackritz , along with his longtime band mates to play on a few of the tracks.

Poignant lead single "My Mind Is For Sale," is a politically charged anti-Trump anthem which still manages to maintain his characteristic easy-going instrumental sound. Shakedown Street came one year after Terrapin Station, and it continued the shift towards Disco Dead that began on that album, particularly on the iconic title track. With a funky groove, a fat, rubbery guitar riff, the singalong hooks, and especially the shoutalong "whoo!", "Shakedown Street" became a favorite among Deadheads, despite resistance against disco by rock fans at the time. It's more effective in a live setting, especially because of the satisfaction the crowd gets when the Dead land back on the verse after extended jamming, but it's in fine form on this album too. It's got the shiny production that this kind of song needs but it's not overproduced, and Jerry's voice and the background harmonies are as smooth as can be . The same way the Stones kept their rock swagger intact when they went disco on "Miss You," Jerry manages to still sound like the mythical musical creature he was during the psychedelic era.

After DIAMOND DOGS, YOUNG AMERICANS could have been a more conventional "plastic soul" record from a white British guy. And while it was a plastic soul record from a white British guy, YOUNG AMERICANS was not conventional in its ultimate appeal. Its title track is one of my favorite Bowie songs, an absolutely moving soul song with incredible backing vocals, and it kicks off a series of absolutely pleasing tracks. I've used the words "fun" and "challenging" to illustrate the Bowie dichotomy of, maybe, the old "one for them, one for me" maxim you find in the film industry, but with YOUNG AMERICANS, Bowie got his cake and ate it too.

It's not experimental in the way of the Berlin Trilogy or something, but after the glam rock ramp up of the past half a decade, Bowie briefly reinvented himself and made a singularly soulful album. "HEROES," released the same year as LOW, softened its predecessor's avant-garde leanings with stronger pop hooks. The most significant result is the title track, one of my favorite Bowie songs, but another outcome is a more cohesive bridge between the more "conventional" side one and the more experimental side two. 12-track live album includes songs recorded during Young's 1984 and 1985 US tours without the support of an album, or Young's then record label due to unique and unusual circumstances. The deluxe CD+Blu-ray version features a curated selection of video that lends context and imagistic power to the tracks.