Our ninth post comes from Jesse Nason: “drummer, keyboardist, mathematician, beer lover, cold coffee brewer/bottler, vinyl collector”. He’s from Long Beach in California and one can, in his own words, “Find the band that I told my wife we’d start after showing her Refused and Trail of Dead at theblacklantern.bandcamp.com“. Jesse’s also on Twitter at @omnichord.
Here are five of his most loved albums, in no particular order…
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• Pink Floyd, The Wall (1979): I came late to the Pink Floyd party, and obviously started with Dark Side. And I collected every album and a few bootlegs. I used to skim through The Wall for my favorite tracks (“One of my Turns” and “Nobody Home” being my favorite melancholic moments). But as I grew older, and after the Live at Earl’s Court 1980-81 set was released in 2000, I fully understood the “listen to the whole album” point. This album is deep, and up to many interpretations – Roger’s current tour of the album showcases more of an anti-war philosophical bent, but the original theme of isolation is just as provoking. And, because of band politics (firing of keyboard player Richard Wright and then hiring him as a side musician for the tour), all of the orchestration, and the glossy production, some may see this as not quite a Pink Floyd album, or not quite representative of the band at all. But this does not matter….this album is way beyond any of us, even Pink Floyd
• Refused, The Shape of Punk To Come (1998): I discovered this album via MTV2, which when it first started was quite excellent. I discovered a lot of great music (Remy Zero, The Hives being others) through this all videos all the time channel. By the time I saw the video for Refused’s “New Noise” they had already broken up. Their last show was in a basement on the east coast for about 40 people and they didn’t even finish the set. I was only marginally familiar with hardcore music, but the song that went along with that video completely transcended hardcore. The only thing tying them to hardcore, in my mind, was the screaming vocals. But, I liked that, and I liked the music even more. This album is so full of great riffs it’s ridiculous. The drumming is phenomenal, and the epic-ness of the track listing and segues gives a larger than life feeling. Lyrically the album is anti-capitalistic, anti-conformist, anti-“only hardcore music for me sir”. They reunited for just 2012 and I saw them play this music for the first time, 15 years after I saw that video. They were better 
than the album. They represented what integrity in music should be and wore their hearts on the stage. The hundreds of bands that were influenced by this one album were put to shame because they thought it was just the music that mattered – the key flaw to any music “scene”. What mattered to Refused, as evidenced by the shows I saw, was a willingness to be wild enough to destroy everything you know in order to progress.
• Radiohead, Kid A (2000): Its impossible for me to pick a favorite Radiohead album, but this one has the most memories built around it. I hated “Creep”, reluctantly accepted one friend’s advice to listen to The Bends and fell in love, and then fell head first into all of the hype and glory of OK Computer. I started playing keyboards directly because of that album and bought two instruments I still own because of that album. However, Kid A came about with the onset of everything being on the internet before it was physically released. I had the little minotaur and bear logos on my computer, and a weird player that just did 30 second snippets of noise from the album playing on my computer. I found links to the artwork and poured over them like I was trying to discover secrets. However, I adamantly refused to listen to any bootleg downloads available on the internet. The first time I listened to this record was after buying it late at night. This album has remained a late night favorite. I listened to this album each night after recording a record for the first band I played keyboards in. It is THE record to comedown from anything. It requires a full listen through and sounds just like the cover looks – digital, stark, flawed.
• …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead, Source Tags and Codes (2002): I cannot express in any coherent way what this album means to me. Its like they knew what I wanted to hear from a 4 piece band with two guitars. Everything I loved about Fugazi and Sunny Day Real Estate is here. The music speeds up, is chaotic at times, starts to show the limitations of recording a loud band, and is gloriously imperfect sometimes….but most of the time it is perfect in lyrics, sonics, production, coherence, themes. As you can see I’m rambling, this is how much this album just leaves me speechless. Read the pitchfork.com article for a better review. 
• Led Zeppelin, Houses of the Holy (1973): Zeppelin was the first band that I started collecting vinyl records for. I was about 14 or 15, was listening to a lot of crappy music, but also somehow came out of teenage stupor to discover Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin without anyone to guide me as to “the best”. So, I just bought them all. Its impossible to name a favorite, so why do I pick Houses of the Holy? This is the band at the top of their game and fame. The epic jam-ness of I and II is not here, and 
the stunning dynamics of III and IV is not quite as stark here, but the standout tracks of The Song Remains the Same, The Rain Song, and No Quarter were what spoke to me as a kid. The sonics of the album are also my favorite of any of their records. It’s consistent, the drums just sing, there are plenty of tracks for all of Jimmy’s awesomeness, and the keyboards are in full mid-70s glory.
(Postscript: I’d also like to annex the posts already done about OK Computer [here and here], Grace [here], and David Bowie’s Low [here] as those are essential albums).
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Awesome set of records chosen there by Jesse. First mentions on the site for Led Zep and Pink Floyd (and not a moment too soon), and a third in a handful of posts for Radiohead. Refused and Trail of Dead are slightly more left-field picks to freshen us up and give us something to think about. We may be getting more posts from Mr. Nason in the future, too, so stay tuned.
Thanks Jesse.
❦
