I'm a fan of lists. A big fan. If you don't believe me, look at the lists on my web site. I'm a sucker for magazines with cover stories about the "Top (number) (somethings) of (a certain period of time)". I always look at these stories, no matter now ridiculous the concept. Yeah, I even looked at Maxim's "Top 500 most beautiful women ever" issue. I wrote about it somewhere on these pages. Was it even 500? Was it 1000? I don't remember. But I definitely don't consider a list to be the last word on the subject. I can reminisce about great music from years past while looking at my Top Tens from the last several years, but there's a lot more to a year of great music than a ten item summary.

Sometimes you buy a record and it doesn't really hit you until months afterward. Those sorts of records aren't always well represented on a yearly compiled list (it depends on where the end of the year falls in relation to the "adjustment" cycle of the album in question). Exclaim! referred to the new Weakerthans album as a "creeper", i.e. a record that will take months to fully digest. But as I understood it, they used the term "creeper" to describe a record that one immediately recognizes as being great, yet also understands that the record's complexity neccessitates the passage of some time to fully understand that greatness. The first album to do that for me was "The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld". I immediately took to it, but it was so unlike anything I'd been listening to before that I knew it would take a while to adjust myself to hearing that sort of music. And in the process of doing so, I'd grow progressively more attached to the album as I understood it more and more with each listen. Which is exactly what happened.

But there's another category of music closely related to the creeper which, in similarly awkward grammatical fashion, I'll call a "dormanter". This is an album whose greatness is NOT immediately recognized, but is finally recognized as being truly great after weeks or months of listening. Here are some examples from my experience:

Orbital -- Snivilisation (1994). I'd secured an advance copy of this about two months prior to its release. The 4/4 rush of the "Brown" album literally made me a techno fan for life, and I was expecting similar material on the follow up. But "Snivilisation" had only one track of so-called "banging techno", and that track ("Crash and Carry") was previously released. The rest of the album was filled with bizarre samples, strange breakbeats, and vocal tracks reminiscent of the most recent 808 State album ("Gorgeous"). In retrospect, these were the criticisms of a novice who couldn't decide which was the better 808 State album, "Gorgeous" or "Ex:El". Ha! As techno continued to develop and mature, it soon became obvioius that one album was infused with the spirit of classic Detroit and London dance and thus sounds remarkable even today. The other was a rave album for the post-rave indie set which became old around the time the Shamen petered out. The reader may deduce which is which at his or her leisure.

Orbital were mashing up nearly every existing genre of electronic music, and putting a half serious/half ironic "state of the world" bow tie on top of the whole thing. Musically, it was so far ahead of its time that I had no idea what to make of it. For instance, jungle (now drum n bass) was not even close to breaking through in the UK, but Paul Hartnoll had been spinning the stuff in his DJ sets for months. So it's no shock that an unsuspecting fan like myself was flabbergasted by the fifteen-minute "Are We Here?". "Snivilisation" was a quantum leap forward, and I had to take baby steps to catch up with it.

Verve -- A Northern Soul (1995). Their debut album had soundtracked many a lonely day. I was obsessed with it, and I don't use that word lightly. I have been obsessed with only two other albums in my life, Pulp's "His N Hers" and Drugstore's eponymous debut. "Obsessed" means listening to it many times a day, not being able to enjoy other music because I'm still thinking about my obsession, and thinking about it while not listening to music to the point of not being able to concentrate on daily life. Fortunately, these states of existence never lasted more than a week or so, for that would have been seriously unhealthy. Caring about music in this manner must be correlated with either youth or loneliness, because it hasn't happened to me in quite a while. I'm hoping it's youth.

It wasn't that I didn't like "Snivilisation", as much as I just couldn't get it. Not so with "A Northern Soul" -- I really hated it. It repulsed me. Gone was the half-asleep, half-waking dream production of John Leckie. Gone were the light as a feather ballads. In its place were lumbering rock riffs and the up-front production of Owen Morris, who duplicated the sound of his work on "What's the Story Morning Glory?". That's not a slag against Oasis, but the style didn't seem right for Verve.

Eventually, I realized that it might have sounded like Oasis (and nothing like "A Storm In Heaven"), but Verve still had something that Oasis never had and never will. Soul. I even grew to love the riffs.

That WAS a slag on Oasis, though.

Pulp -- This is Hardcore (1998). I started out ahead of the pack by connecting the dots between this album and Pulp's macabre material from a decade before. Those who were only familiar with Pulp's 1992-1996 catalogue likely gave up on "This Is Hardcore" right away, and I can't say I blame them. It's dark, there's a recurring theme of death and things coming to an end, and the title track uses pornography as a metaphor for the apocolypse. I was in the minority of people who'd actually liked Pulp's early work (seriously, "Freaks" is a way underrated, totally ignored classic) but that didn't make it much easier to swallow "This Is Hardcore".

But with all Pulp albums, you don't really "get" them until you "get" the lyrics. No matter how good the tunes are. In this case, the lack of a "Disco 2000" or a "Common People" clouds the accessibility of the album as a whole, and that includes the lyrics. I didn't realise how good this album was until I watched the "Live at Finsbury Park" video. The tunes sprung more to life, I started to really listen to what Jarvis had to say, and I listened to "This Is Hardcore" more than any other album in 1999 (the year *after* it was released).

Sigur Ros -- () (2002). When this album came out, I said the success of "Agetis Byrjun" was a fluke and certainly wouldn't be duplicated by an album without a title. And I was right. But I left out something important: this album is awesome.

Of course, if I'd known this at the time, I'd have said so. Sampling it, I decided it was a largely bland album with only one standout track (the last one). So in retrospect, I'm not sure why I bought it. I think it grew on me because it's a cleverly disguised excercise in rock n roll minimalism. But not in the way of NEU! with their motorik beats, It's with the glacial pace that could soundtrack "Eyes Wide Shut". The simplistic melodies that seem to keep recurring throughout the whole album (I'm still not sure if they really do, or if it's my imagination). "Agetis Byrjun" is filled all sorts of shimmery noises, in its place, () has ... well, mainly just silence and open spaces.

They say only a few percent of the people who bought Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" actually read it. Well, "Agetis Byrjun" is the "A Brief History of Time" of music. It's not easy to get through, and neither is the follow up. Too bad the hype all came with the far inferior album.