Damp, Drizzly November In My Soul
My favourite album released on each date in November, starring Nirvana, the SpiceGirls, Patti Smith, Jay-Z an Michael Jackson twice!
Last month, I went through every day in October and found my favourite album released on each date - every album having a birthday. And you know what? It was fun, so here is my favourite album released on every date in November!
November 1:
Nirvana - MTV Unplugged In New York (1994)
This album came out about half a year after the death of Kurt Cobain in April 1994; crazy to think its been thirty years. I discovered Nirvana late and ended up collecting dubs of the albums Nevermind and In Utero in early 1994 and got super into them. And then Cobain died. MTV Unplugged in New York was the first Nirvana album I bought; I own Nevermind and In Utero as well now. And to this day, MTV Unplugged is my favourite live recording. Its a stunning album, showing the genius of Cobain as a performer.
November 2:
Foo Fighters - There Is Nothing Left To Lose (1999)
November 3:
Rage Against The Machine - Rage Against The Machine (1992)
The first time I heard Rage’s debut album, I was not a fan of heavy music; my tape collection contained luminaries such as MC Hammer and Mariah Carey. My buddy Dave (I say “buddy” but he’s my best friend) brought a cassette tape of Rage Against The Machine over to show me, I want to say in early 1993 - he had discovered this band and was really excited to show me. We were both twelve at the time. He put it in the tape player and we listened, and what I heard was so different that my body straight rejected it; I recall pulling the tape out and throwing it in my parents pool. What a dick. (Sorry about that, Dave.)
Fast-forward to mid 1994: I decided to take up the bass guitar and my parents helped me pick up an old Samick Sunburst and a small Fender practice amp. My plan was to try to learn the entire Rage Against The Machine album from start to finish. By this time, I was in love with the band. What a difference a year makes.
(Trying to learn the entire album was a lofty goal - I eventually learnt three or four of the songs. I managed to learn the entire album by the mid-2000s.)
November 4:
Spice Girls - Spice (1996)
For a time in the mid-1990s, the Spice Girls were the most famous group of women on the planet; “Wannabe” was #1 in like 40 countries, it was being played everywhere, it was inescapable. And I hated it.
Now, as an adult, I find the Spice Girls charming, and the song “Wannabe” - as well as other singles from this record like “Who Do You Think You Are” and “Say You’ll be There” - are nostalgic sounds of the 1990s.
November 5:
Justin Timberlake - Justified (2002)
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve appreciated pop music more and more - and it feels like Timberlake was one of the better purveyors of it in the 2000s. Justified boasts one of his best songs, “Cry Me A River”, a brutal break-up song that is well-produced (courtesy of Timbaland) and well-sung. The whole album is full of bops: “Like I Love You”, “Senorita”, “Rock Your Body” among them.
November 6:
Grimes - Art Angels (2015)
I love video games and occasionally this dalliance has extended into mobile games,and one of the mobile games I’ve played most is Beatstar, a kind of thumb-tapper equivalent to something like Guitar Hero using excerpts from real songs in a range of difficulties from Normal to Extreme.
One of the most challenging songs in the game is the extreme version of Art Angels’ best track “Kill v Maim”. I am yet to complete the game. But one good thing came out of it - I listened to this album and found it was a brilliant record.
November 7:
Alice In Chains - Alice In Chains (1995)
I mean, basically all of Alice In Chains’ albums are contenders for Best Album On The Day They Were Released. Their self-titled album - the one with the three-legged dog on the cover - was the final album released by the band before the death of singer Layne Staley, and was recorded amid dissent within the group; guitarist Jerry Cantrell once said of it ‘There's a sadness to that record—it's the sound of a band falling apart.’ And I think knowing its the last album with Staley, it kind of hits different listening back now compared to an album like Dirt.
November 8:
Lou Reed - Transformer (1972)
Whenever the subject of 70s music is raised, the first thing that comes to mind is the sliding bass line from “Walk On The Wild Side”, one of the biggest hits from Transformer, one of the most remarkable records of the era.
The album contains some of Reed’s best songs either in or out of The Velvet Underground, “Satellite of Love” and “Vicious” and “Hangin’ ‘Round”. It also contains “Perfect Day”, which I would argue is one of the greatest songs ever written (and part of one of the best needle drops ever when it was used in Trainspotting to score Renton’s near overdose).
November 9:
Men At Work - Business As Usual (1981)
My entry into the work of Colin Hay and Men At Work was their brilliant live album Brazil - and if I have to choose, I’ll usually veer toward that album before any of their studio recordings. But that’s not to say Business As Usual is not good; to the contrary, I think its very good. Even once you go beyond opener “Who Can It Be Now?” and mega-hit “Down Under” (my old cover band did a cover of Pennywise’s cover of it) you find songs like “Catch A Star” and “Be Good Johnny” and “Touching The Untouchables”. Brilliant record.
November 10:
Patti Smith - Horses (1975)
The Observer’s Simon Reynolds once wrote of Horses: “Horses is generally considered not just one of the most startling debuts in rock history but the spark that ignited the punk explosion.” Its hard to say it much better than that.
November 11:
LS Dunes - Past Lives (2022)
My buddy Richard introduced me to two bands at the same time, both of which were side projects of the seminal punk/emo group Thursday, who released albums in 2022. My favourite of the two was No Oblivion by the band No Devotion, featuring Thursday singer Geoff Rickly and the remaining members of Lostprophets. The other was LS Dunes, featuring Saosin singer Anthony Green, My Chemical Romance guitarist Frank Iero, Coheed & Cambria guitarist Travis Stever, and Thursday bassist Tim Payne and drummer Tucker Rule.
I mention all these bands because they’ll probably trigger memories for most of you. While No Devotion have gone quiet, LS Dunes have announced a new album for 2025; I highly recommend (and I assume Richard does too) checking out their debut Past Lives, a heavy record that is actually better than the sum of its parts.
(Thursday also released a new song this year. Fingers crossed for a new album from them next year too.)
November 12:
Deftones - Koi No Yokan (2021)
Koi No Yokan is an album that I can listen to from start to finish without feeling like there is a weak track among it. I love this album so much that I actually order an A1 sized poster of the image on its cover from Temu. The poster is a little blurry; they clearly printed it from a low res image. But still, I’m gonna frame it and put it up on the wall because I love this album that much.
November 13:
Them Crooked Vultures - Them Crooked Vultures (2009)
There are super-groups that don’t sound like they should work but do. There are super-groups that sound like they should work and don’t. And then there are super-groups like Them Crooked Vultures - Queens Of The Stone Age’s Josh Homme on guitar, Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones on bass, and Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl on drums - about which there is no chance they won’t work.
The album itself is brilliant, an amalgam of QOTSA with the big rhythms of Led Zeppelin, and is packed with great tracks: opener “No One Loves Me and Neither Do I” has an exciting final three minutes, “Dead End Friends” and “Scumbag Blues” absolutely slap, “Mind Eraser, No Chaser” is incredible. Such a good album.
November 14:
Jay-Z - The Black Album (2003)
The Black Album is Jay-Z’s eighth studio album overall and - this might be a spicy take - his first good album. Originally intending to have a different producer on each track, the album ended up with different producers on a majority, then a small handful of tracks from frequent Jay-Z collaborators Kanye West and Just Blaze. As a rock fan, my favourite track here is the Rick Rubin produced “99 Problems”, but the whole album is good - a stylistic departure for the legendary rapper and, arguably, the cause of a change of direction too.
By the way, two interesting facts about “99 Problems”: 1) the second verse - the one starting ‘the year's '94 and my trunk is raw / in my rearview mirror is the motherfucking law’ is basically a factual retelling of a real incident that happened to the rapper in 1990s New Jersey; and 2) the music video was meant to be directed by Quentin Tarantino, but Rubin convinced Jay-Z to hire Mark Romanek, the winningest music video director in Grammys history.
November 15:
TLC - CrazySexyCool (1994)
Back in about 1994, my friend Kezz and I lay on her floor and recorded a radio show called The Chris And Kezz Show, with us being silly in between dubs of songs, and having an insanely good time. One of the tracks we included was the brilliant “Creep” from this record; CrazySexyCool is an album that sounded good in 1994, and sounds just as good now. “Waterfalls” is on this record. The insanely sexy “Red Light Special” is on this record. Its brilliant.
November 16:
Korn - Issues (1999)
One of the late 1990s stories that I find myself fascinated is the story of Woodstock 99, the three day festival in New York that ended with a riot, which was marked for its 20th anniversary with a Netflix documentary series, an HBO documentary feature (which is absolutely brilliant), and a podcast series from Luminary and The Ringer that tells the story in the most detail.
Why am I mentioning this? I was a huge fan of Korn in the late 1990s, and word somehow leaked that they would be playing music from their new album Issues during their Woodstock 99 set on Friday night (Saturday morning NZT). Korn headlined the event on its first night, opening with classic “Blind” and, sure enough, busting out early versions of “Beg For Me” and “Falling Away From Me” from Issues (both songs changed by the time the album was out). Fortunately, since the event was broadcast live on TV via pay-per-view, MP3 versions of the tracks made their way to download sites online and apps like Napster and Limewire, and I went about getting a hold of them and listening voraciously.
Eventually I got a hold of the pay-per-view of the event on Sky TV ($39.95 for the entire event) and watched it religiously; I can’t recall if it was delayed on Sky TV or if it was a recording I saw. But by that point, music news was full of coverage of the disastrous weekend: the death of a boy in the crowd, rampant sexual assaults, the so-called “mud people” who stopped attendees accessing clean water, and the riots that destroyed facilities on the final night of the event. None of which is visible in the pay-per-view. I looked at the time.
November 17:
The Offspring - Americana (1998)
Another band touring a new album at Woodstock 99 was The Offspring, now two albums removed from their 1994 mega-smash, uh, Smash. If 1997’s Ixnay On The Hombre was a solid follow-up, 1998’s Americana - and particularly its hit singles “Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)” and “Why Don’t You Get A Job?” - was the first step toward completely selling out for the foreseeable.
At the time, though? Americana was a catchy and hilarious middle finger to the establishment, and a statement of white masculinity that, despite sounding different, felt at home next to the Bizkits of the world.
(In hindsight? Its clear that a lot of the social criticisms of young white men in the wake of Woodstock 99 were completely accurate. And I think the fact that The Offspring get away scott-free is a sign of how widespread it was.)
November 18:
U2 - Achtung Baby (1991)
I don’t know if I like the album Achtung Baby as much as I just like the song “Mysterious Ways”. I mean, I like the musical style of the record, the lean into alt-rock and industrial and Kraftwerk style electronica. There are other solid songs: “Even Better Than The Real Thing” and “The Fly” and “One”. But its “Mysterious Ways”, the eighth track, that stands out to me.
November 19:
Audioslave - Audioslave (2002)
I’ll be honest: I was highly skeptical of the idea of Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell joining forces with the non-vocal members of Rage Against The Machine (guitarist Tom Morello, bassist Tim Commerford, drummer Brad Wilk). It didn’t seem like a match that made sense. And I was probably annoyed that both sides weren’t making music with their respective bands … whom I loved.
And yet. Opening tracks “Cochise” and “Show Me How To Live” make the case for the bands existence, while later tracks like “Like A Stone”, “I Am The Highway”, “Shadow Of The Sun” (my personal favourite on the record) and “Light My Way” expertly show the potential. Nowadays its an all-time favourite.
November 20:
Tim Minchin - Apart Together (2020)
Back in March, I went to see Tim Minchin live at the Auckland Town Hall with my buddys James and Rhi, as part of the Arts Festival and part of his tour helpfully titled An Unfunny* Evening with Tim Minchin and his Piano. I actually reviewed the show here; it was like my fifth post ever.
I’m not going to rewrite about the show. But I will say that Apart Together was a big part of the show; he wrote the album while separated from his family on the other side of the world. And its closing song, “Carry You”, which was written for his wonderful television series Upright, was a beautiful moment in the show, one of those spiritual, everyone-is-all-in moments that happen in a concert every now and then (it also happened to me at a Pearl Jam show in 2009).
Minchin is a comedian, and Apart Together is a well-written, almost genre-less album that is jam-packed with cleverly written lyrics and wonderful ideas. It also boasts one of the most remarkable music videos released in the last decade, accompanied by one of the most remarkable behind-the-scenes videos too.
November 21:
Chris Cornell - Songbook (2011)
Another beautiful concert that featured one of those spiritual, everyone-is-all-in moments - or rather a slid half-dozen of them - was the Songbook tour show Chris Cornell put on at the Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre in October 2011. The tour was well covered before he arrived: Cornell was playing completely solo, surrounded by a selection of guitars, belting out tracks from throughout his career with Soundgarden, Temple Of The Dog and Audioslave, plus a number of covers (my sister, who I went to the show with, walked down the aisle to his cover of Led Zep’s “Thank You” from this tour).
For me, Cornell is a megastar, a musician who was in one of my favourite bands at a time in my life when that was a formative element. And now that Cornell is gone, when I think of him, I think of that show, sitting on the upper balcony to the left of the stage, enthralled by one of the most incredible performers to have graced the stage in my lifetime.
November 22:
Pearl Jam - Vitalogy (1994)
My buddy James has a theory that your favourite album from a band is the first album you heard from that band, and he might have a point: I heard a couple of songs from Pearl Jam beforehand, but 1994’s Vitalogy was the first album I heard in full, and the first Pearl Jam album I bought. And its my favourite. In fact, I would go as far as to argue that it contains the two best Pearl Jam songs to date: “Better Man” and “Not For You”. Yes, better than “Black”.
(Another buddy of mine once told me that a friend of his painted the words to “Immortality” - ‘A truant finds home / And I wish to hold on, too / But saw the trapdoor in the sun’ - on his workplace ceiling. You can’t do that with “Jeremy”.
November 23:
Cat Stevens - Tea For The Tillerman (1970)
I don’t have a lot of memories of music playing around the house when I was growing up, but I remember seeing and hearing this back in my youth, and it has stuck with me as an adult. The first side of the album is as close to a Best-Of as you could get - “Where Do The Children Play?”, “Hard Headed Woman”, “Wild World”, “Sad Lisa” and “Miles From Nowhere” - while Side B has “Father & Son”, generally agreed to be one of the most emotional songs ever written.
My parents also had a cassette of Bread songs, so they didn’t all stick.
November 24:
Joss Stone - The Soul Sessions (2003)
Honestly, there weren’t a lot of options for November 24, and Joss was the best of a lacklustre bunch. I do enjoy her soul cover of “Fell In Love With A Girl”, though I wish she wouldn’t have changed it to “Fell In Love With A Boy”.
November 25:
Missy Elliott - This Is Not A Test! (2003)
I feel like people forget how awesome Missy Elliott is. 2002 brought us “Work It” and put her on the scene in a big way, but it is this album that stands as one of the best hiphop records of the 2000s. Missy collaborates with Timbaland on 12 of 16 tracks here, including singles “Pass That Dutch” and “I’m Really Hot”. Jay-Z shows up on one track, Nelly on another, Monica on a third. Mary J Blige appears twice, on the Intro and Outro tracks. Hell, I think This Is Not A Test! is one of the most underrated hiphop albums ever made.
November 26:
Michael Jackson - Dangerous (1991)
I remember when our household switched from tapes to CDs and I remember it because the first CD that I remember seeing around the place was Dangerous, the 1991 album from Michael Jackson. Dangerous was kind of a comeback album, his first since 1987’s Bad, and almost overtook Bad for sales - its estimated to have sold 32 million copies (Bad sold 35 million, while Thriller sold an estimated 70 million and is the highest selling album of all time).
Dangerous was also a change for Jackson - he took on a much more active role in writing and producing, and the album moves lyrically to tackle much more socially aware content - the anti-racism of “Black And White” being one of the most obvious, but “Heal The World” and “Will You Be There” and “Gone Too Soon” hammering it home.
It also boasts some surprising credited guest performances. I remember loving opening track “Jam” and its rap from Heavy D, and “Give In To Me” with its guitar solo from Guns n Roses’ Slash - but have you ever heard a song that featured a literal princess? “In The Closet” features a guest spot for Princess Stephanie of Monaco. Crazy.
November 27:
Sugababes - One Touch (2000)
The Sugababes first album was something special from the beginning, a pop record from a group who seemed to eschewing pop norms in their sleep and rocking audiences by day. Of course they were British.
One Touch is the only album that features the original lineup of Mutya Buena, Siobhán Donaghy and Keisha Buchanan - a lineup so popular that the group has had a rejuvenation after reforming that original threesome in 2011. And despite multiple changes, and multiple hits (“Push The Button”), its still this first album that stands out from the crowd. You need go no further than “Overload”, the indie-rock tinged pop opener from the record - though I recommend going further, all the way to closer “Run For Cover”.
November 28:
Incubus - Light Grenades (2006)
I loved - LOVED - Incubus back in the day. Make Yourself landed in 1999 and blew me away, then I went back to listen to their debut Fungus Amongus (1995) and brilliant sophomore record S.C.I.E.N.C.E. (1997). I kept following the group though I wasn’t as in love with 2001’s Morning View and 2004’s A Crow Left Of The Murder, so when Light Grenades landed in 2006, it felt like a return to form for me - lead single “Anna Molly”, opener “Quicksand”, highlight “A Kiss To Send Us Off”, moving ballad “Dig”. Its one of my favourite Incubus records now.
November 29:
Michael Jackson - Thriller (1982)
C’mon, who doesn’t love Thriller?! It sold 70 million copies!
November 30:
Pink Floyd - The Wall (1979)
The Wall was originally received poorly by critics even though it contains a number of brilliant tracks - “Another Brick In The Wall, Part 2” and “Mother” and “Young Lust” and “Hey You” and “Comfortably Numb” and “Run Like Hell” are phenomenally good, even if the album is almost another piece of evidence that every double album would be a great single disc album.
But my favourite part of the album - and one of the reasons it is my favourite for this date - is the tour. Pink Floyd set off on tour in February 1980: shows started with a band of lookalikes on stage performing in time while a wall of over 300 cardboard bricks was built on the stage between them and the audience and animations were projected onto the wall. After the first song, the fake band would be revealed and the real band would take over while construction continued and giant inflatables floated over the audience. I didn’t even mention the fake plane that crashed onto the stage. Or the collapse of the wall.
There are plenty of shows I wish I could have seen in person. Pink Floyd’s The Wall tour is right at the top.
I’ll probably skip this post in December as there is a two weeks period called Christmas where albums just don’t get released with the same regularity. But I’ll likely bring it back for January.
In the meantime, thanks for reading!
Chris