Second Post = Best Seconds

It was easy enough to come up with the concept of this list; compiling the list proved much more difficult. It's apparently easy enough to come up with one good album when you're in a band like Televisions, but putting together that masterful second album could only be achieved by an elite few.

These are my personal top five best musical sophomore efforts:

5. Kanye West - Late Registration
Ye's follow-up to his ground-breaking solo debut took his art, and possibly hip-hop, to another level musically. While his rhymes on Late Registration are not nearly as personal or intense as those on College Dropout, his collaboration with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind score composer Jon Brion on most of the album seamlessly meld contemporary orchestral composition with pop and hip-hop in a way that has not been achieved before over the course of an entire album. "Gold Digger" had the entire country hollering, "We want Prenup!", "Touch the Sky" had the entire country dancing along, and "Celebration" will drive any man to drink... in a good way.

4. Garth Brooks - No Fences
No Fences was the first CD I ever owned. It was a gift given to me at my 10th birthday party, before heading to the Mesquite rodeo for the first time. My country music phase was a sort of rebellion against my parents and is a part of my life I still cherish. I felt that it set me apart from my immediate family; that it made me into something I wanted to badly to emulate: the country boy and the epitome of that which is Texan. Though No Fences is not my favorite Garth album, it certainly ranks among the top second efforts. Garth Brooks' debut on the Nashville scene was relatively standard, and it was in the recording of his second album that we could see the first signs of transformation into the Garth.

3. Foo Fighters - The Colour and the Shape
After the death of Nirvana frontman Curt Cobain, drummer Dave Grohl began to look at the alt/rock scene from a different angle. While still true to his grunge roots, he began to appeal to his internal pop and folk demons with his new project, the Foo Fighters. While the Foo Fighters debut had commercial success and showed a kind of new, fun spirit that was lacking in dark grunge and alternative musics, it was still very green and, in hindsight, was incomplete. Two years later, with The Colour and the Shape, Grohl took alternative rock to light speed and left all the flannel behind. One single on the album, "Everlong" would make any top-five rock songs that I might compile in the future.

2. Daft Punk - Discovery
I'm tired of defending my choices. Posting in this blog is taking forever.

This is the most awesome electronic/dance album ever. Listen to it. If you still don't agree, I hate you and everything you stand for.

1. Weezer - Pinkerton
Weezer, I think we can all agree, is the greatest band of all time ever in the entire universe (known and unknown). Now that we have that out of the way, we need to talk a little about their discography. "Hardcore" Weezer fans argue that Rivers Cuomo peaked with the too-honest, autobiographical, commercially-underachieving Pinkerton, Weezer's last album with falsetto-belting bassist Matt Sharp (now of the Rentals). These people are, of course, idiots. Their fascination with Pinkerton, is not, however unfounded. With Weezer's sophomore album, Cuomo really let down his guard. In making his music so personal and emotional, listeners could connect to the artist in a way that I think had been lost in popular rock music. The commercial failure of the album and Cuomo's reaction to that rejection changed his musical personality for the rest of his career, thus alienating many of Weezer's most intense fanbase. Because of this dramatic shift in rock personality, Pinkerton stands up as a kind of time-capsule, representing an exact time and place in music that will never be newly experienced again.