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"Do you call out his name, when your conscience is shivering?"


An album is (for yours truly, anyway) a complete experience. Sure, there can be some standout tracks, but in order for me to consider something a great album, I have to enjoy listening it to it all the way through. Occasionally, that may be the only way for me to truly appreciate it. Such is the case with the focus of our fourth day of Top 10 Albums.

#7 - GusGus / Polydistortion (1997)

While there are some tracks of note on Polydistortion -- Is Jesus Your Pal? and Purple come to mind -- it is mostly an experience. This is an album where you turn down the lights, and just chill. While it evokes the type of happening where you'd likely hear it played in the white-walled room of a young person talking about the meaning of life and the universe for the first time, with one of those multi-colored, psychedelic blankety-things pinned to the wall, I never listened to it that way. I always heard it alone, in the dark of my bedroom, on nights when I just wanted to shut out the world and let my mind drift off, occasionally drifting back and picking-up a lyric or two.

I'd never heard of GusGus until one day in 1997, when I was working at Circuit City and wandered from my area over to another department and struck-up a conversation with a co-worker. A pencil-thin nose, with a broad, chiseled face, curly hair and bespectacled, he had a sort of dreamy intelligence about him, and I took whatever he recommended as some sort of pronouncement. On that particular day, he'd asked if I'd ever heard of GusGus (which he pronounced as 'goose goose') and, when I'd replied in the negative, he lit up and said I should give this particular album a listen. So of course I did.

A week or two later, after I'd had Polydistortion on avid repeat almost every night, I eagerly went up and told the co-worker with exceedingly good taste in music that I was really enjoying the GusGus album, and he acted as though of course I liked it, he recommended it. Oh well. Slight ego aside, I'm glad he suggested it to me. It's been (quite obviously) a long-standing favorite.




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