1. Remain In Light (1980)

Few albums step into the light of unrepeatability, in which one can bathe, unable to move forward but also unable to ever look back at music the same way again. Remain In Light is this sort of record. After listening to it, something seems scarred, permanently and transcendently, and that peculiar thing about great music — when it seems you’ve both never heard anything like it and heard it somewhere before — begins to consume you.

Remain In Light draws so much music history to its center, even that which was only emerging at the time of its recording. There’s freedom (the associative and open lyrics of “Seen And Not Seen” and “Crosseyed And Painless”) and structure (the West African polyrhythm algebra of “The Great Curve”). Speaking of Africa, there’s western (highlife full-band arrangements, even in the outtakes), northern (dirge-like Islamic overtones on “Listening Wind” and “The Overload”), and even southern (the loud harmonies and vocal polyphony on “Born Under Punches”) influence.

And there’s even rap, not even a year old, really, in 1980 — the spoken “facts” breakdown in “Crosseyed And Painless,” sure, but also the unmistakably hip-hop beat on the classic “Once In A Lifetime.” The last album in the string of three produced by Brian Eno (not coincidentally, all at the top of this list) succinctly forges together the advances of their previous work, stomping out the last glowing embers of pop in place of a flaming machine of twitchy propulsion and a rewriting of the self.

Throughout a loss of identity (“How did I get here?”) and a continual shift in musical traction, there’s a magnificent (if temporary) death of the band’s ego: somehow we’re reminded that the world may be as destructive as it is on Fear Of Music or as schizophrenic as it is on More Songs About Buildings And Food, but that it’s the “same as it ever was.”

Remain in Light offers the rare reminder that music has always been so deep, referential, and innately world-shattering. As Eno has said of this record, it’s about “looking out to the world and saying, ‘What a fantastic place we live in. Let’s celebrate it.'”