Acclaimed Music

One of my absolute favorite web sites is “Acclaimed Music” at http://www.acclaimedmusic.net/. This site is run by a Henrik Franzon who I believe lives over in Europe probably in Sweden. Anyhow, the idea is this: to take all music critic lists and some high profile reviews such as the ones at the All Music Guide to derive, via a statistical program of sorts, the 2000 most critically lauded records in rock and roll (including soul, reggae and all sorts of music but limiting jazz to the more rock albums such as Miles’ “Bitches Brew”). Originally the list covered only 1000 albums. Using the same lists Henrik also arrives at the most critically acclaimed artists. Now, this project is superior to the ones we see gracing music magazine covers every month (i.e, Rolling Stones’ Top 500 rock albums) because it is fairly exhaustive. If you click on an album or single fortunate enough to make it you’ll see all the sources from which it obtained points. Furthermore, Henrik is permanently updating the list. As far as I know it’s a unique idea. Now obviously most of the say top 100 albums music lovers have all heard as they are the standards core of any decent music collection but its fascinating to look at the list and find records one has never heard of and give them a chance and lo and behold 8 times out of 10 the albums have something interesting to offer. You could do worse than accumulate the top 1000! ..now I do have some disagreements because obviously no list is going to take into account my personal taste..but.. Nirvana at number 3? REM’s “Automatic for the People” at 44? Bob Marley’s “Natty Dread” ahead of “Catch a fire”(at 137)..etc.. but you could worse than these 100 records.