The Great Escape

As with many things in my life, the idea for this post came from a particular sequence in my life.

I was listening to the 2023 release from The Body, I Shall Die Here/Earth Triumphant. This is an amazing album, but it is extraordinarily dark. Like Vantablack dark. It is a headspace that I could only occupy for so long with the coldness of the Minnesota weather rattling my body and the winter darkness enveloping my soul. I needed an out.

I put on the new Fennesz, but that wasn't the vibe. I started listening to Office Culture, but that didn't totally work either. I moved on to musclecars, but that also didn't hit right. I eventually ended up listening to ONoffON by Mission of Burma, which is a great album. It also launched me into a separate thought.

While that Mission of Burma album is great, I was on a nearby wavelength and could deal with the band's angular excellence. I wondered if I knew albums that came with their own vibes.

Consider this idea in the following manner. If you think about albums that you like, there are certain albums that you can turn to when things are getting you down, when you're happy, when you want to retreat, etc. What if you don't know where you want to go or how you feel? All you know is that you want to listen to something excellent.

I came up with a metaphor for this. The albums that I described before—the ones for happy or sad times—are comfort albums. Comfort albums are the friends, for example, you call when you've had a bad day; you want to just hang out with them and talk about how much things suck.

The albums that I wanted—and the albums I'm discussing in this post—are escape albums. If comfort albums are the friends you meet up with, escape albums are the friends who pick you up.

Imagine if you will: You're out cruising in the world, living your life, and you run into these friends. You're very excited because they rule and are always a good hang. You ask them what they are up to and they tell you something awesome. They invite you, and, obviously, you agree to go. As you expect, it's an awesome fucking time, a time you didn't even know you wanted.

So, I started an odyssey to find these albums. There were ones that I thought would be absolute shoo-ins for this project. Some of these were Heart Shaped World by Chris Isaak, the 1994 greatest hits album by Sade, Ege Bamyasi by Can, and Miami by the Gun Club. These are some of my favorite albums of all time, and not a single one made the list.

There were some gentler albums like Tigerlily by Natalie Merchant and Crystal Ball by Monster Rally that are great but did not make the cut.

So, with all that now said, I'll tell you what actually works as an escape album.

The pinnacle of this category in my mind is the first album by the B-52s. As you tune into the outer space bleeps of “Planet Claire,” you know you are in for a fun ride with a group of the coolest weirdos any of us will ever know. Plus, I don't know how anyone can feel bad after listening to “Dance This Mess Around” or “Lava.”

For some of these albums, I came up with ideas for what these friends might tell you they were doing when you ran into them. I won’t give you all of them to avoid repetition, but for the B-52s, I had them going to see Polyester and eating tacos afterwards.

Another album that works well for this category is Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express by the Go-Betweens. Lacking the sentimentality of 16 Lovers Lane and the artiness of their earlier albums, Liberty Belle exists as its own portal into another world. Songs like “Spring Rain,” “To Reach Me,” and “Head Full of Steam” bring excellent vibes, and even when the album slows down, the album is buoyant and engaging. I don’t think that this album gets quite as much as attention as their other albums, and that’s a shame. It is one of the great albums in a truly stellar discography.

To continue in a slightly off-kilter mode, the last couple of pop albums I’ll discuss aren’t obvious for this assignment, but I found that they worked. The first is Architecture and Morality by OMD. If you are familiar with this album, this shouldn’t be a surprise to you. Aside from being one of OMD’s best albums from back to front, it has the legendary synth-pop tracks “Souvenir” and “She’s Leaving” as well as an amazing opener, “The New Stone Age.” After the intensity of “The New Stone Age,” OMD travel through all of the emotions, highs and lows, across a diversity of sounds and styles. This album works for this endeavor because the music is so strong, you cannot help but be swept up in its majesty. By doing this, it satisfies one of the primary requirements of the escape album: bringing its own vibe to the listener.

The other album is I’m Terry by Terry, an Australian pop band. Sharpening up a bit from their previous releases, I’m Terry also satisfies the brief of this project by bringing its own vibe. Theirs is smart, catchy, and breezy. The four members clearly have been playing together for a long time, and their ease with each other comes through in the music. It goes down so very smoothly every time. My favorite song from this album is “The Whip.” If you dig this, absolutely check out the rest of their catalog.

Before I start taking about other genres, some other pop/indie escape albums are You and Your Sister by the Vulgar Boatmen, a cult roots-rock masterpiece; Beauty and the Beat by the Go-Go’s, a riotously fun pop-punk album that doesn't get its full shine due to its singles (one is “We've Got The Beat”); and Dua Lipa's Future Nostalgia, a breezy disco-spiked jam from our most unbothered pop star. All are absolutely worth your time and attention. I only breeze past these albums because I have so much more ground to cover and this post is getting long. Some day in the future, I'll write about the Vulgar Boatmen, one of the strangest bands in rock history and I don't say that lightly.

Pop artists aren't the only ones who bring their own vibes. I will call this next group of artists the Samplers. They are DJ Shadow, The Avalanches, and their love child, DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ.

While both DJ Shadow and The Avalanches have made very good albums through their careers (DJ Shadow's The Private Press and The Avalanches’ Wildflower are standouts in their respective discographies), both are best known for their debuts, which are the ones that best serve as escape albums. Shadow's debut, Endtroducing…, is a monumental hip-hop album, taking the genre in a direction that I don't think it knew it could go at the time. From the first track of the album, you know that you're listening to something special, and that feeling never really leaves as you settle in for an hour of turntable and sampler wizardry that channels classic hip-hop, trip-hop, and electronic music. “Midnight in a Perfect World” hits every time.

The Avalanches’ debut, Since I Left You, was a revelation when it dropped on an unsuspecting world in 2000. A dance album made of nothing but samples was unfathomable, yet here it was. I'm still shocked each time I hear it, and I've been listening to it since it came out. While I do think that some of my fondness for this album and what it can do is based on nostalgia, the overwhelming majority of my love for it is actual awe at what they have done. It still sounds inventive and novel even though it is decades old at this point. It is a raucous journey with a clear emotional throughline, making it easy to fall into. More importantly, it just has absolutely stellar, relaxed vibes, bringing the summer to wherever you are, even if that place is a frozen hellscape.

When you take the style of both of these artists and throw a little more house music and witchcraft into the mix, you end up with DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ. The pseudonymous London-based DJ has been making music since 2014, and she cites Since I Left You as one of her primary influences. Her music bears its marks, blending found samples with a pure house essence. Her music is excellent for just putting on and riding the vibes. Unlike with the other artists on this list, I don’t have a specific album to focus on with her. Each one brings its own excellent escape. I lean toward Charmed and Destiny, but Hex is also awesome, especially if you don’t have three hours for jamming.

I have a couple more electronic albums to add to this list: Underworld’s Dubnobasswithmyheadman and Nicola Conte’s Bossa Per Due. The duo of Karl Hyde and Rick Smith has been putting out peerless electronic music as Underworld for decades. This was the album that got everyone paying attention. Their fusion of house, acid, and trance with stream-of-consciousness lyrics is entrancing and takes the listener on an excellent journey. It hits deep within and does not let go. Whenever I’ve been lost, I can put this album on and am locked in almost instantly. I’ve inserted one of my favorite tracks from this album, “Dirty Epic,” which encapsulates the groove on this album.

Nicola Conte’s Bossa Per Due is maybe the most relaxed album I have listed here. While the Samplers and Underworld are playing near and around house music, Conte is working closer to jazz. As one might suspect, the vibe here is much more relaxed, perfect for cruising through time and space whether on foot or in a vehicle. It’s an album that can carry you through your escape with great ease. I cannot count the number of times this album has done this for me.

I was going to add some rap albums to this list, but I realized there was a problem when I listened to one of the albums again, Primitive Plus by Edan. The ones I thought of were quite fun, but they did require you to meet them a little. Not a ton, but a little. Let's say like 85%. This would be fine in most situations, but that's not an escape album as defined. I am going to come back to this later because I'm sure there are albums that fit this classification, such as The Low End Theory by A Tribe Called Quest. I also think some other Native Tongues albums might work too, but that's more research. In addition, I wanted to add some jazz albums as well.

With that pin now placed, I'll end this post here. Hopefully you'll find the same delight that I find in these albums. Drop me a line or leave a comment with your own escape albums.

With Black History Month around the corner, future posts will focus on my people and our music, maybe even providing some hints for how to navigate various black situations as a non-Black person. Until then, keep your head up.