Interesting. I was just starting to question whether I needed to re-evaluate some old-time favorites of mine against newer work to see if they truly passed muster. I'll always be an avid defender of Much Afraid and it's always good to know I'm not the only one who regards it so highly. But is it their best work, according the things that I love the most about music now? (It was according to the things I loved about music in 2001, which was when I first declared it as such. Because I hold it in such high esteem, I may have not given anything else of theirs since then a fair shot at beating it.)
The bigger issue for me here is that Much Afraid has been not only my favorite album by Jars, but by anyone, for quite some time. And "Like a Child" has been my all-time favorite song. I don't feel any pressure to change these. But I'm wondering if they are still truly my favorites.
It probably simplifies things a bit to have less nostalgia for these things. In any case, the Jars albums are close enough that I might have a different answer next week.
The Beatles are another good example of why you shouldn't codify one album as someone's "best" too quickly. They have enough albums that hold up exceptionally under scrutiny that there'll probably still be arguments over which one was really their best long after we're all dead. I'd also argue that they're a good example for different reasons to like albums - I'd say
Rubber Soul was best songwriting-wise,
Revolver best in terms of new experiments, and
Sgt Pepper's... was most influential.
Maybe I'm crazy, but for the AR fans here - what the heck is the appeal of the mish-mash on the back of
Abbey Road? Between all the half-formed ideas, the corny ending, and the two uber-childish songs that drag down side 1 ("Octopus' Garden" and "Here Comes the Sun"), AR is easily one of my least favorite Beatles albums.
...then again, that's the cruel extreme when it comes to musical nostalgia - any song that's been turned into a Kindergarten age singalong is doomed to never be taken seriously when those kids grow up. "Yellow Submarine" suffers the same fate.
