158. Carl Thomas - Emotional (2000)

Carl Thomas' album Emotional gets onto the list by having a couple of fantastic songs even though there is a lot of filler. As an album it tends to meander along, doing its thing, but never really reaching out of the speakers and grabbing you, demanding your attention. Individually songs like 'I Wish', 'Woke Up In The Morning' and 'Summer rain' are nice but the standouts on this album (and the reason the album made it to the list) are 'Emotional' and 'You Ain't Right'. These two songs are just fantastic and show what Carl Thomas can do with the right material.

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159. Keith Sweat - Ill Give All My Love To You (1990)

As Ive mentioned before, Keith Sweat is one of my favourite artists. Theres not many who do a slow jam better than Keith. This album isn't his best but it still has some classic songs. 'Just One of Them Things', 'I Knew That You Were Cheating' and 'Merry Go Round' are fantastic ballads (how Merry go round' works as a song ill never know, but Keith pulls it off) and 'Your Love' and 'Make You Sweat' hold things down on the up-tempo side. All in all a great example of why people still love New Jack Swing till this very day (including me!).

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160. Eric Benet - True To Myself (1996)

3 albums in one day. Hope that makes up a bit for my absence!

I really liked this album when it came out, however this is another case where an artists' later material influenced my opinion of their earlier work. His subsequent albums did absolutely nothing for me, so I imagine that this album is probably not as good as I thought it was at the time it came out. Eric has a great voice there is no debating that. 'Lets Stay Together' is a nice track as is 'Femininity' and 'While You Were Here ' is my favourite song despite is melancholy subject matter. I think the production lets this album down a bit especially on the more uptempo tracks. It is rather unique sounding but unique doesn't always equal good.

Oh and nothing to do with his music but Eric looses 1 million points for cheating on Halle Berry. The man is obviously insane. ;)

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161. Brownstone - From The Bottom Up (1995)

Aaah, another classic from (my) heydey of R&B. Around 93-95, I really started to get seriously into R&B (and rap). 93 was the year I started listening and by 95 I was regularly trawling second hand shops, cd shops and record fairs searching for that elusive album that was missing from my collection. Given that I live in Australia, R&B was not huge and there wasnt much available besides the most popular albums. I used to listen to a radio show that was dedicated to R&B (on at some ungodly hour of the morning) and it was there that I first heard Brownstone. Supposedly they were a big deal because they were on Michael Jacksons new label and while I could care less about that, I kinda dug their sound. It was different to a lot of other stuff. The harmonies were more aggressive than I was used to and i thought to myself that these were some women with some serious voices. 'Grapevyne' was the first song i heard and remains a favourite. 'If You Love Me', 'Sometimes Dancin' and 'I Cant tell You Why' are my other favourite tracks but with maybe only one or two exceptions this is an album you can listen to front to back. Another one from the second golden age of R&B...

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162. Lauryn Hill - The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998)

Apologies for the lack of updates, computer problems are the bane of my life.

Ok, so every man and his dog will tell you that this album is a classic. Certainly I have never heard a better singer who can rap/rapper who can sing. I have never been able to decide if Lauryn is a better rapper or singer. I'm leaning towards singing if only because she doesn't do much rapping these days. A few things have tarnished my view of this album since it came out. One was the somewhat dubious production songwriting credits and the fracas that followed surrounding this. Lauryn came across as someone who had gotten a bit big for her boots. This image (in my eyes anyway) was further enhanced when she released her second album 4 years later which was an incredibly self-indulgent affair. A live album of songs no-one had ever heard? Sorry Lauryn you lost me there and that was despite me giving you the benefit of the doubt. Don't let people tell you that album was a masterpiece and that if you didn't like it you didn't 'get it'. If you didn't 'get it', it wasn't any good.

This album has lots of great songs. I won't go through them all but my favourites are 'Ex-factor', 'When it hurts so bad', 'Everything is Everything' and 'The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill'. I loved this album when it came out and I think artistically it certainly deserves to be on the list, but I just cant bring myself to put it any higher than 162. Maybe one day Lauryn will deign to give us another record.

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A Short Interruption

I thought i would take a moment to explain a little something about the list. Its been kinda bugging me since I started so i feel the need to elucidate..

When I was making it I started to feel a little daunted and overwhelmed with the sheer scale of it and also with the thought of stating that I thought Album A was better than Album B. I got through the top 10, then 20, then 30, then 40. That was all fine. I took a lot of time deciding which album I liked, and how much I liked it in relation to other albums. Strangely, the top 10 was probably the easiest because having listened to R&B for many, many years, I knew exactly which albums were my favourites and why. As I started to get higher on the list, I would finish a particular block, then come back to it a couple of days later and change it completely. After a while I realised that I would never finish the list if this kept happening and decided that once I had decided, I would leave it, no matter how I felt when I came back to it.

As a result, when i look at the list now, I see some glaring inconsistencies that make me wonder what i was thinking. I see some albums in the #170's that could just as easily have gone 100 spots higher if I was in a different mood. So while I have done my best to make this a list that is an accurate depiction of my taste, until we get into the lower numbers try not to think of it as a sequential list. If an album comes in at number 145, that does not necessarily mean I always like it better than the album at number 146. Its a fair bet I would like it better more of the time than an album at 195 but only as a general rule.

OK, thanks for listening to me blab on. More music to come ;)

Oh and soon (when i have the time) I will be doing a special post of my top 10 songs from the year that was 2007. Not a great year but we will see what we can dredge up from all the sludge that was released....

-GMC

163. Brian McKnight - Back At One (1999)

'Back at One' is probably my favourite Brian McKnight album, mainly due to the fact that it is free from too much outside interference and is the best example of Brian McKnight at the peak of his songwriting ability. Its a ballad heavy album (which I love) and there are a number of really classic, timeless love songs, which gives the album a sense of sentimentality that keeps you coming back for more. I wont go on about it, just give it a listen and I'm sure you will agree, that this is Brian McKnight's best album to date.

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