Sister Albums: An inconsistent premise of my top 10 records that share an element of kinship beyond a single artists natural, chronological output.
No.10 – Iggy Pop's The Idiot and Bowie's Low. The Exemplar!
No.9 – The Clash Sandanista and Ellen Folley's Spirit of St. Louis.
While its own thing, Spirit of St. Louis could be considered the 7th and 8th side of Sandinista as it was recorded on completion with the same writing, performing, producing and engineering team.
No.8 – The Human League's Dare! and Heaven 17's Penthouse and Pavement. The two rival albums from the core of the original Human League. Huge competition and both excellent but Penthouse and Pavement sounds fresher today, to my ears anyway.
No.7 – Roy Orbison - Mystery Girl and George Harrison - Cloud Nine. You can probably also throw in The Travelling Wilbury's and Rock On! by Del Shannon in there too. I've grown to quite like that huge gated snare sound.
No.6 – Faces – Nods as Good as a Wink and Rod Stewart – Every Picture Tells a Story. The most blurring of boundaries of any of their releases. The eclecticism of the Stewart solo probably is the most identifiable difference.
No.5 – Roxy Music – Stranded and Brian Ferry - These Foolish Things. Far more distinction between these and Faces/Rod solo, mostly due to the covers but feels like a great Roxy side project bang in the middle of their best period. BF available in every charity shop
No.4 – Spiritualized – Lazer Guided Melodies and Spectrum – Soul Kiss. Another set of uber-rival records from the core of another. Side 2 of the last Spacemen3 album is essentially this Spiritualized.Soul Kiss is a really great and an unfairly forgotten part of this story for me.
No.3 – Byrds – Younger Than Yesterday and Gene Clark. Yet another rival release but this time when the mothership band still existed, and each featuring much of the same musicians and released in the same month. Both fantastic but sadly, Gene's was a commercial failure.
No.2 – Bowie Heroes and Iggy's Lust For Life. Nothing more needs said.
No.1 – Velvet Underground WLWH and Nico Chelsea Girl. Difficult for two albums, recorded weeks apart and mostly featuring the same musicians and writers to sound so different but they do and they don't. Stephanie Says, recorded by VU shortly after could have sat on Chelsea Girl
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