favorite album closers

tyler

A Burden on Online Simpsons Fandom Since '13
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when the big finish lives up to its expectation, there's little else like it. there's a certain bliss or transcendence to a closing track that knows its job, that knows what album its on and how to cap it in a way that seals it with a beautiful bow. i'm gonna periodically post my favorites in this thread, and i encourage you to do the same, with as much explanation or as little as you like.


no real better place to start for me. since i left you by the avalanches, my favorite album of all time, is an all-out party, a perrenial "summer" album, an eclectic score for the movie that is the euphoria in your lives should you invite it in, comprised of about fifteen billion samples, its a world no other album inhabits, and in its final moments, as its ship sails to shore and the party winds down, the record crackles out its last melodies. first comes a looped french vocal sample, one last taste of the albums wide array of vocal flavor which vividly elucidates its comprehensive adoration of musical expression, a world of embraced talent, spun down to its last heart cradling lullaby. then a gorgeous flute comes fluttering amidst stacatto strings of defiant beauty and whirling psychedelic textures that wrap the atmosphere like northern lights, gnarling and discombobulating in their final fervor before our final chorus. the opener of the album, naturally, is called "since i left you", and here we have a totally different sample of a looping "since the day i left you". the opener finds sheer joy in the freedom of "since i left you/i found a world so new", but here we get "but i just cant get you/since the day i left you", colored by refractory shudders of noises, final whistles and whispers as the sun sets. it is the final bittersweet vestiges of bliss as you know, thats it. party is over, the record is fading. until next time. listen to sily.
 
a classic




and of course my favorite album of all time would have one of my favorite closers of all time

 
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picking favorite r.e.m. songs is like picking favorite children, they're all so well-dressed and well-behaved and lovable and full of life, but r.e.m. closers don't actually tend to be their killer apps. by necessity, this album demanded exception, that the closer be specifically impactful (ditto collapse into now's finale "blue"). cued by one of the most gorgeously stratospheric harmonica figures to tickle the soundwaves, r.e.m. craft a stargazing soft hymnal befitting their impressive growth from jangle pop wizards to four-piece orchestra for the common, marked by sweet pianos and characterized by the extremely r.e.m. choral harmonies, bill berry going low and moody and mike mills wailing into the heavens as he is so good at doing, stipe maintaining the middle with a folk song as timeless as any with the weight of melancholy the whole album carries, only shed to its barest sensory space. its a deeply comforting and warm song, despite itself, perhaps because its grim reaper is an endless ocean. overwhelming, but beautiful, inevitable. the organ really is what seals it together, spiritual not by virtue of godliness, but the embrace of an earthy magic, that mythicality of nature and being they've always lived inside. it makes it feel so real that its weirdly okay. all of this is coming your way.
 

in case i let ya'll forget for too long, ween are one of the greatest groups of all time. the mollusk alone should answer any questions, ween are not just smirking chucklefucks painting mustaches on beloved artworks, ween themselves were painters in the studio. their appreciation for the importance of texture, timbre, atmosphere, color and so on thrives through their discography but especially in capturing the nautical scapes of the mollusk. "she wanted to leave" is actually just half of the four minutes of this closer with the rest being a slovenly post-show cleanup reprise of the opening "dancing in the show tonight", and that full circle shows just how far the album has taken you. by its second half the songs go from standing at the dock to largely submerged, the mournful echoing sway of drums and rippling acoistic guitars carrying the mood, a weary gener donning his drunken irish voice to give the song its deserved dedication, and thats when you get ween. yeah its a little funny, this serious sounding forelorn ale swillin' farewell to our speaker's lass, but its also beautiful and tragic, its fiction that revels in the caricaturistic and yet feels like a timeless sadboy shanty that conjures the whole albums aesthetic in a space that has lost much of its grandeur, now swamped in itself, buried in its guitar filters and spacious percussion, especially come the coda slowdown, the vocal dragging in its defeat with a slight bitterness as if the alcohol has both kicked in yet not done nearly enough. ween are silly boys, but they also seemed to know with almost incomporable sharpness exactly what each of the rainbow of ideas they tackled demanded to exist in a fully realized space, even in the context of an album similar. its a bang of a whimper that feels like you've gone from gazing at the ocean from a beach house to scuba diving to submarining to eventually sinking like a stone to the dank dark ocean floor, and all the while for all its costuming its a pretty succinctly classic tune of ravaging heartbreak. love ya ween. please make another album.
 
I guess I'll participate too.


Still one of the best to me, if not my favorite. The entire album is great, but this two part ending is icing on the cake (also, the preceding song 'Fire Coming Out Of The Monkey's Head' I tend to count as a prologue as it has that feel in my opinion).

I won't do much of an explanation (other than mention the sorta peacful, dreamlike atmosphere of this two-part piece that just works so well in my opinion) so I'll let the music speak for itself.
 
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after a full record of the grit and grime and sleaze of 80s Los Angeles rock, I like that the closer ends on a positive note. Even if there is very graphic sex taking place in the middle of the song, kids it's past your bedtime.

speaking of...
maybe it don't count because it's a hidden track, but cmon! cmonnnnnn!
 
In the vein of the somber acoustic closer that all by myself is



 
Echoes


This ranks as one of my favorite Pink Floyd song.The middle part of the song makes you feel like an explorer on a distant planet. David Gilmour's playing is one of the reasons he's my favorite guitarist. Also, Gilmour and Wright's vocals explain why they were extremely important to the Floyd sound.
 
in terms of "last song on last album" closers nothing beats the argument for me

especially like the last minute of the song
 
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