Enjoy An Album with Liam Withnail & Christopher Macarthur-Boyd

The 38th Greatest Hip-Hop Record of All Time (as well as the 115th Greatest Album of All Time, of any genre) according to Rolling Stone, GOOD KID, M.A.A.D. CITY transcends its specificity and realism with goated storytelling and bone-deep authenticity. Autobiographical and universal at the same time, K. Dot presents this record as a “A Short Film By Kendrick Lamar”, but it’s just as novelistic as...

Jarring post-punk guitar lines riddle this 2023 Paramore record, having more in common with the British indie-guitar rock of Bloc Party and Franz Ferdinand than the scene-kid emo-core genre that originally spawned this group. THIS IS WHY teems with funky tight riffs and stop-start rhythms, which belie Hayley Williams’s darker mature songwriting that skewers the narcissism of the modern age. Featur...

The ninth best-selling album of all time both worldwide and in the U.S., Shania Twain’s COME ON OVER is also the sixteenth best-selling album in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Featuring blue-collar banger after blue-collar banger of arena-country hen-do pop smash hits produced by AC/DC and Def Leppard soundsmith Mutt Lange, Shania topped the charts time and time again wi...

Final Fantasy VII enthusiast Gareth Waugh, largely considered the Cloud Strife of the Scottish comedy circuit, joins Liam and Christopher on this episode of Enjoy An Album to talk about the original soundtrack to the 1997 Japanese role-playing game FINAL FANTASY VII by groundbreaking video game composer Nobuo Uematsu. Described by Nobuo as “his greatest harvest” in terms of creativity, this soundt...

One of 2022’s best albums according to NPR, Rolling Stone and Brooklyn Vegan, this debut slab of post-punk-inflected psych-indie went to number one in the UK charts and won fans across the world from Edgar Wright to Elton John. Skewering soft bois and bashing boring parties, this Isle of Wight duo followed up on the viral success of Chaise Longue with the masturbatory fantasies of Wet Dream and th...

The fourth Joker card in the initial Dark Carnival mythos created by Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J, 1997’s THE GREAT MILENKO went platinum even as the record was pulled from shelves by a skittish record company. Protested by social conservatives, the Insane Clown Posse pleased their army of juggalos with a sixteen-track opus bursting with puerile skits, chintzy carnival beats, gross-out humour, incl...

Generally regarded as one of the greatest albums of the noughties by the likes of Pitchfork, , this two-disc instrumental post-rock symphony by a gaggle of Canadian anarcho-Marxists is the soundtrack to the apocalypse. Samples of old men mourning the halcyon days of their youth spent sleeping at the beach on Coney Island mingle with stirring cinematic strings, scraping industrial drone and wild sw...

Abandoning their D.I.Y. roots in San Francisco to go global with their major label debut, Green Day welded megaton bomb pop-hooks to the scrappy queer punk of 924 Gilman Street to bring raucous juvenilia to the masses on DOOKIE. Fun at a time when the rock landscape was dominated by dour and serious arena-grunge, Green Day went from slumming it in squats to being the biggest band in America in jus...

The closest Nina Simone ever came to pop, before her civil rights activism, black nationalism and Marxism led to her being blackballed from the mainstream. Featuring stunning interpretations of everything from showtunes and blues workouts to the French balladry of Charles Azvanour, I PUT A SPELL ON YOU (1965) showcases her inimitable blend of classically-trained piano, smoky jazz-contralto and ste...

Drunk puerile hooky skate-punk that inspired Blink-182 and Sum 41 but refused to make any concessions to commercialism or good taste, PUNK IN DRUBLIC found Fat Mike in fine form. This was chosen as the album to enjoy by special guest Rosco Mcclelland who was a punk drummer in bands like Kicking Buckets, Bandito Fleeto and Psyko Dalek before becoming a Twitch stream nightshifter and capable stand-u...

Matty Healy has lit up timelines with nepo-baby discourse and the kissing of teenage girls, but his pop band The 1975’s latest album BEING FUNNY IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE has been described as one of the best records of 2022 by Pitchfork, NME, Dork and the Los Angeles Times. The album is accompanied by an arena world tour called “The 1975: At Their Very Best” and is choc-a-bloc with maximalist Antonof...

Combining Vince Guaraldi’s laid-back Brubeck-esque San Fran jazz-piano with the existential yuletide sadness of the fictional bald child Charlie Brown, the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s A Charlie Brown Christmas was ranked by centrist rag The Guardian as the Greatest Christmas Album of All Time. This episode features Christopher Macarthur-Boyd and Liam Withnail talking about everything from Arrested Devel...

Rolling Stone magazine named “Rumours” by Fleetwood Mac as the 7th Greatest Album of All Time in 2022. The amount of cocaine involved in the record was matched only by the amount of incestuous infidelity, harrowing heartbreak, and gentle genius generated by the band members at the time. It immediately sold twenty million copies upon its release, and has went on to sell platinum twenty times over....

Mashing up elements of riot grrl punk, Bananarama plastic pop and outright eurosceptic Thatcherism, Spice Girls outsold the Beatles and swerved Britain’s charts away from the Blurs, Oasises and Pulps into a future of Little Mix and Fifth Harmony. Spiceworld was the Spice Girls’ second album, but shared a title with the 1997 film co-starring Richard E. Grant and Meat Loaf alongside the Fab Five, as...

Recorded over five years as Kanye climbed up the lord’s ladder by getting signed to Roc-A-Fella Records and established himself as the best new producer in early-00s hip-hop by popularizing chipmunk soul samples, before proving himself as a unique artist capable of fusing conscious rap’s social politics with proto-hustle culture megalomania. The College Dropout is chock full of skits, guests and b...

Generally regarded as the best heavy metal album of the 21st century, Serj Tankian and Daron Malakian of System Of A Down expertly blended alt-skuzz riffage, anti-imperialism, sunshine state harmonies, Armenian genocide awareness and Zappa-esque absurdism to make Toxicity - a perfect statement of intent that perfectly predicted the terrorist attacks that took place in New York on September 11th 20...

 Before her collaborations with Conor Oberst, The 1975, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker made her the undisputed queen of sad indie folk-pop of the last few years, Phoebe Bridgers made a statement and a splash with this debut record of wry sun-bleached confessional songcraft that’s as funny as it is morbid. Named after a line from the edited-for-TV version of The Big Lebowski, Stranger In The Alps...

Forming in 1997 and fumbling through line-ups featuring Razorlight’s Johnny Borrell on bass and an elderly jazz musician on drums, The Libertines were signed to legendary indie label Rough Trade in 2001. They were supposed to be the British equivalent of The Strokes, but they were so much more. Pete Doherty and Carl Barat shared songwriting duties as well as needles, with the rambunctiousness of t...

Harvey Keitel starred in the film “That’s The Way Of The World” that this record functions as a soundtrack to, but Maurice White and the rest of Earth, Wind & Fire sensed that it was going to be a box office flop, so they pushed for it to be released before the premiere. They were correct. The album went to number one in the Billboard charts, whereas the movie became a “lost film.” Signalling...

The seventh album by Arctic Monkeys finds Alex Turner and the lads continuing the lounge-rock direction that began on 2018’s Tranquillity Base Hotel & Casino with a tight taut song cycle of baroque longing and cinematic style. Disappointing certain fans who hungered for the arch desert riffage of Humbug or the slick maximalist swagger of AM, The Car instead offers a dazzling smorgasbord of imp...

Two years before her megahit Paper Planes made her a global celebrity, M.I.A. (or Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam) combined electroclash, baile funk, peng teng, dancehall, grime and ragga in 2005 to make Arular - a debut album named after and inspired by her freedom fighter father Arulappu Richard Arulpragasam. Released by XL Recordings and partially produced by awful man Diplo, Arular was nominated...

Two years after decisively capturing the zeitgeist of civil unrest with What’s Going On?, five years before he would release the incredibly divorced masterpiece Here, My Dear, and eleven years before he would be shot to death by his own father, Marvin Gaye redefined American sexuality with his 1973 coitus album Let’s Get It On. The wah-wah guitar in the intro to the title track has become memefied...

Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley have been married and making music together as Yo La Tengo for over thirty years at this point, but in the spring of 1997 they recorded their magnum opus - “I Can Hear The Heart Beat As One”. They put Hoboken on the indie map around this time with legendary Hannakuh residencies at a bar called Maxwell’s and collaborated on music videos with local alt-comedy luminaries...

The son of an experimental artist and a Scientologist composer, Beck Hansen cut his teeth in the New York anti-folk scene before returning to L.A. in the late 80s as an alternative freakfolker in a sea of hairspray and spandex. He broke into the mainstream just after Kurt Cobain’s death with his hit single Loser - a genre-melding combo of hip-hop, honky tonk and grunge that rode the zeitgeist like...

Everybody thought Art Garfunkel was going to be the Shawn Michaels of Art & Garfunkel, but - as we all know now - he was the Marty Jannetty. Paul Simon’s self-titled 1972 solo album didn’t sell well compared to Bridge Over Troubled Water or even as well as Graceland eventually would, but it proved to the world that he was truly the brains behind A&G. Combining his trademark fingerstyle fol...