Classic Rock Magazine's 50 Albums of 2017

“I wanted the new album to physically shake your soul. It’s a wake-up call.” says Hughes. Fourth studio album by Black Country Communion. Recorded in early 2017 at EastWest Studios in Los Angeles, California with producer Kevin Shirley, it was released on September 22, 2017 by J&R Adventures in North America and Mascot Records in Europe. BCCIV is the first Black Country Communion album to be released since the band's initial breakup in 2013. All songs on the new album were co-written by Glenn Hughes and Joe Bonamassa. Glenn wrote all the lyrics on the album except for the song ‘The Last Song For My Resting Place’ which was written by Joe. Glenn Hughes – vocals, bass Joe Bonamassa – guitar, vocals Jason Bonham – drums, percussion Derek Sherinian – keyboards Kevin Shirley – production, mixing, additional percussion Gerry O'Connor – fiddle (track 3) Jared Kvitka – engineering Bo Bodnar – engineering assistance Cramer Helton – engineering assistance Bob Ludwig – mastering Dennis Friel Art Studios – cover artwork, design, illustrations Dale Voelker – package design Neil Zlozower – portrait photography Annie Lesser – studio photography

Following the crunchy, conceptual sprawl of 2014’s *Sonic Highways*—an album whose making was documented in an equally ambitious HBO series of the same name—Foo Fighters show no signs of slowing down. Recorded alongside The Bird and The Bee’s Greg Kurstin (Adele, Sia) in just one L.A. studio, *Concrete and Gold* finds the Foos balancing Beatles-like pop (see: the psychedelic shimmer and lush harmonies of “Happy Ever After (Zero Hour)”) with metallic abandon (see also: the quiet-LOUD thrills of “Run”), all while making room for guest appearances from Paul McCartney, Justin Timberlake, and Boyz II Men’s Shawn Stockman. Further proof that rock’s most reliable band can still surprise us.

The Liverpool group’s 11th album is a conceptual sequel to their sixth, 2001’s *A Fine Day to Exit*, made when they were still a doomy metal outfit. But *The Optimist* caps their interim transformation into a cinematic art-rock ensemble, whether building minimal electronic beats into hard-charging anthems (“Leaving It Behind”) or using desolate piano chords to summon a shoegaze tsunami (“Springfield”). This album finds its suitably grand finale in “Back to the Start,” whose comfortably numbing Floydian sway blossoms into orchestral ecstasy.

Rich, melodic metal from members of Thin Lizzy.

On his fifth solo record, the prolific Steven Wilson builds a monumentally lush collection inspired by his ‘70s and ‘80s art-pop heroes, like Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel. Wilson’s cinematic ambition pays off in spades: The title track’s mystical grooves ease you into the album’s layered sound, and Israeli singer Ninet Tayeb provides a showstopping performance amid cosmic pop atmospheres on “Pariah.” Steady yourself for the guitar solo of “Refuge”—it’s an epic shred over the song’s spacey crescendo.

Politically turbulent eras traditionally breed angry, young bands. However, six middle-aged veterans of rap and rock have made one of 2017’s most bracingly polemic albums. Addressing racism, poverty, and social injustice, MCs B-Real and Chuck D retain all their intensity and verve, the latter lacing every syllable with a penetrating, imperious punch. Behind them, founding members of Rage Against the Machine crystallize anger and resistance into razor-edged, metallic funk as if it were 1992 all over again. “Hail to the Chief” and “Unfuck the World” are as zealous as you’d expect, while “Legalize Me” adds an intriguing psych-glam stomp to their sound.

From the record title to the snarled lyrics, Roger Waters is clearly not content. His sumptuous, languorous post-rock mixes through gruff interjections about the state of the world. Waters channels Pink Floyd’s greasy funk in “Smell the Roses” and even their sense of epic grandeur in “The Last Refugee,” given an immaculate buff by producer Nigel Godrich. He’s at his malevolent best playing the exasperated old coot, either taking on God’s mistakes in the stately “Déjà Vu” or cursing up a storm in “Broken Bones.”

It took getting to the end of their second album to remind Royal Blood what they loved about being in a band. The huge success of their self-titled debut in 2014 had thrust bassist and singer Mike Kerr and drummer Ben Thatcher into a world of rock stardom they hadn’t planned for, and now they had to follow it up. “We were terrified,” Kerr tells Apple Music. “Suddenly, what we thought was a bit of fun, something our mates would hear, had become this traumatically amazing experience. It was awesome, but after every high, there’s a low.” “Daunting” is how Thatcher remembers it, and as people around them began to bandy about the phrase “difficult second album,” the duo struggled to generate momentum. “It became like a self-fulfilling prophecy,” recalls Kerr. Propelled by a breakthrough in the form of the gnarly rock groove of “Lights Out,” they found forward motion. Their second record’s title might give some insight into Kerr and Thatcher’s warped mindset at the time—“I was in a pretty mad place,” says Kerr—but the songs here chart a thrilling evolution, expanding their drum-and-bass setup with subtle flourishes of keyboards and Rhodes while retaining the epic minimalism of their debut. *How Did We Get So Dark?* cemented Royal Blood’s status as a new rock superpower. “It’s almost like we had to remind ourselves who we were,” says Kerr. “As soon as we put the chemistry of the band as the priority, that’s when the songs began to come to us.” Kerr and Thatcher put themselves through the wringer, but they got there in the end. Here, they guide us through their triumphant 2017 album, track by track. **How Did We Get So Dark?** Mike Kerr: “I think we probably mixed it and finished it days before the deadline. It wasn’t until it was on the record that we had time to sit back and go, ‘Oh. This song is actually really good.’” **Lights Out** MK: “I was doing some writing with a friend of ours, John Barrett, who’s in a band called Bass Drum of Death. I showed him a few ideas I was working on. One of them was the groove of what would become the verse of ‘Lights Out.’ He was like, ‘This is amazing. This has got something to it.’ And I was a bit like, ‘Has it?’ It was nice to have someone who wasn’t in the band, to give us that sense of relief, basically giving you a bit of a hand. This song, for us, was a big slap in the face, like, ‘Wake up. You’re really, really good. Now fucking finish.’” Ben Thatcher: “We were trying to find the blueprint, and when ‘Lights Out’ came, we knew it was a good song and that we just needed to follow up with nine others.” **I Only Lie When I Love You** MK: “I wrote this in an Airbnb in Brighton. I think I was trying to write songs that sounded like The Hives, a mixture of The Hives and a Jack White song. Someone told me this quote: ‘Women fake orgasms, but men fake relationships.’ I was like, ‘Oh my god. That’s brutal.’ I thought of the phrase ‘I Only Lie When I Love You’ and it was so horrible. I paired it with the riff and I was like, ‘Actually, this is really, really sick.’ It was different for us because the song is made up of, essentially, the same riff throughout. We were listening to a lot of songs that did that—hip-hop does it all the time—and we were like, ‘How do you write a song that’s essentially the same the whole way through?’ We realized how much more complicated it actually is. There’s lots of tricks to keep it interesting.” BT: ”It’s quite bold, too. Straight away, it’s in your face. We hadn’t got a song like that, that starts with the words.” **She’s Creeping** MK: “I became really interested in the vocal melody and the bass melody doing two different things and creating two countermelodies. Before, I played riffs and sung over them, whereas this is when I was really getting really into the idea of creating harmonies with the basslines. It was the first time I was singing more falsetto, and I guess that really comes with confidence, and allowing more of my voice to be heard, and more of your influences to be heard. Just getting a bit more comfortable in your own skin.” **Look Like You Know** MK: “This is one of those songs that was trying to reveal itself in loads of other ideas. And it was really the rhythm and the groove of the song that helped it come alive. We started adding keyboards to it and suddenly it felt almost like a James Bond ballad, which was cool. We’d made a whole record with just a vocal and a bass and drums, so adding keys felt fun. But we were very cautious and tried to remain as tasteful as possible, as to what purpose it’s serving.” **Where Are You Now?** MK: “This was written on the road. It was for a TV show called *Vinyl*, which Martin Scorsese was producing. They sent us the trailer for the first series and it was just mayhem in the ’70s music industry, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, trashing shit. I realized that I’m quite stimulated when I see something. It was the first time I’ve written a song with a real brief to it.” **Don’t Tell** MK: “This was another leftover idea from writing ‘Lights Out’ with John Barrett. We were listening to a Beck song called ‘Debra.’ It has a ridiculously high vocal, and John was like, ‘Can you sing that high?’ I said, ‘At karaoke, I can, yeah.’ I think we were writing a song for John, because he was like, ‘Oh man, I want to sing that high on stage.’ But I called him and said, ‘Hey, remember that idea we started? We’ve actually made it a Royal Blood song, believe it or not.’ The solo section was just desperately trying to sound like Jimi Hendrix on a bass and tremendously failing, but I gave it a shot.” **Hook, Line & Sinker** BT: “This was one of the first songs to be written. At that stage, we didn’t know what the second album was gonna be like. When you go back to writing an album, you just want to do the craziest thing you can do. And it was just really heavy. I think the end of this song is the heaviest thing we’ve done.” **Hole in Your Heart** MK: “‘The Keyboard Song,’ as it’s known on tour. ‘Hole in Your Heart’ and ‘Sleep’ were two songs that kept borrowing from each other. We tend to write in puzzle pieces and we wait until we have enough pieces that come together to make a song. And we couldn’t work out which chorus was for what song. At the time it seemed crazy, but we were just like, ‘What if we had most of the track on Rhodes and used a Fender Bass Rhodes?’ Playing different instruments, suddenly you prove to yourself you can actually change quite a lot and it doesn’t change quite a lot. You can actually be more varied and you can’t escape the band’s sound.” **Sleep** MK: “The lyrics are so comically dark. I like the idea of it ending and someone being like, ‘Oh. There’s no hope at the end.’ We already thought the album title was funny, because why would you want to listen to an album called that? What possesses someone to put that on? Finishing it on this is like, ‘Remember: You wanted this.’ This was one of the last songs we recorded. You can probably hear that I’m like, ‘Thank fuck it’s over.’”

*Prisoner* continues to refine the sound that Ryan Adams first explored with his 2014 self-titled album: a sure-handed mix of *Tunnel of Love*-era Springsteen, ‘80s college rock, and soft-focus synths. A track like “Anything I Say to You Now” illustrates how perfectly this formula suits him; a Smiths-esque jangle of guitars gives sentimental depth to his plain-spoken refrain, “Anything I say to you now is just a lie.” As he works through the rest of the emotional wreckage, highlights like \"Shiver and Shake” prove that Adams’ poignancy as a songwriter can still bring us to our knees.

Fifty years after Fleetwood Mac shook up music with its glistening California folk-pop, two members team up on an LP of duets. In many ways, it’s still quintessential Fleetwood Mac; the songs were recorded in the band’s old L.A. studio with support from Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, and have the same jangles and harmonies that soundtracked the ‘70s. But Buckingham and McVie find room to play, from stripped-down guitar in “Love Is Here to Stay” to blustery drums in “Too Far Gone.”

A master of showmanship, shock value, and theatrical controversy, Marilyn Manson has unquestionably cemented his place in American pop culture. The Antichrist Superstar’s industrial-strength 10th album is as diverse as it is brash. Bluesy riffs violently fling from beat to beat on the swaggering “Tattooed in Reverse,” the deliberately obnoxious “WE KNOW WHERE YOU FUCKING LIVE” shrieks and shakes with the disemboweling aggression of *Mechanical Animals*’ finest moments, and, in a rare moment of (relative) fragility, Manson pleads for understanding on “Blood Honey,” insisting, “I’m not being mean/I’m just being me.”

After his breakthrough *Lost in The Dream*, Adam Granduciel takes things a step further. Marrying the weathered hope of Dylan, Springsteen, and Petty with a studio rat’s sense of detail, *A Deeper Understanding* feels like an album designed to get lost in, where lush textures meet plainspoken questions about life, loss, and hope, and where songs stretch out as though they\'re chasing answers. For as much as Granduciel says in words, it’s his music that speaks loudest, from the synth-strobing heartland rock of “Holding On” and “Nothing to Find” to ballads like “Clean Living” and “Knocked Down,” whose spaces are as expansive as any sound.

David Crosby’s music has always had a touch of jazz to it—think back to the labyrinthine harmonies of CSNY circa *Déjà Vu* or the looser moments of late-‘60s Byrds (“Tribal Gathering,” “John Riley”). Continuing a late-career streak that includes 2014’s *Croz* and 2016’s folksy *Lighthouse*, *Sky Trails* indulges in the fascination fully, from the slick, Steely Dan-ish funk of “She’s Got to Be Somewhere” to “Before Tomorrow Falls on Love” and the gorgeous “Home Free,” which recall the organic, almost living quality of mid-‘70s Joni Mitchell—Crosby’s longtime friend.

For their fifth album, Chris Robinson Brotherhood overhauled their rhythm section. Regardless of the shaggy Southern rockers’ style—whether it’s clavinet-spiked country-funk (“Behold the Seer”) or rural psychedelia that sways like Georgia pines (“Dog Eat Sun”)—drummer Tony Leone and bassist Jeff Hill steer the band with grooves that emphasize smooth elasticity and percussive subtlety over backbeat heft. Their hypnotic allure comes out on “Hark, the Herald Hermit Speaks,” a textural gem shaded with slurred harmonies and tumbling electronics.

Pushing 70, Alice Cooper still knows how to have a good time. Produced by longtime collaborator Bob Ezrin, *Paranormal* recalls the golden age of albums like *Billion Dollar Babies* and *Welcome to My Nightmare*: campy, expertly calibrated hard rock, filled with sinister intimations and gleefully dumb jokes. Just listen to the roadhouse blues of “Fallen in Love” (featuring ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons), where Cooper bites off lines like “I’ve fallen in love and I can’t get up” without a flinch. Elsewhere, he riffs on societal degeneration (the soul-injected “Dead Flies”) and gender fluidity (“Genuine American Girl”), a subject on which the mascara-soaked Cooper was ahead of the curve by decades.

"Trippin With Dr Faustus" is the 6th Amplifier Album. Specifically designed to coincide with the end of the world. Thank you for flying Amplifier Airways. Enjoy your trip.