The Clash: What's the best album, ever?

Robert Smith of The Cure.

Opinion

Hauraki's Matt Heath and Jeremy Wells battle for their picks of best album, ever.

Matt Heath says:

From now until next Friday on Radio Hauraki we're doing a huge album battle on-air called Spin The Black Circle, where we put different albums up against each other and listeners text vote for their favourite. It gets pretty intense towards the final. Last year it ended in a fierce battle between Tool's Aenima and Radiohead's OK Computer in the final. Tool won. Just.

The best album ever is of course Disintegration by The Cure. It changed my life. It came to me when I was a bored teenager living on my parents' farm. I'd spend my weekends clearing gorse then steal a bunch of beers from my parents, some smokes from the neighbours and sit up in the top paddock blasting it full volume right into my earholes. Opening track Plain Song never failed to ramp up my teenage angst. So epic it's almost classical and great lyrics "I think it's dark and it looks like rain, you said, And the wind is blowing like it's the end of the world, you said. And it's so cold it's like the cold if you were dead, and then you smiled for a second".

I wasn't a goth, I never spiked up my hair or wore make-up. I just loved the intense emotion in the album. No one else in my life gave it any respect. I wrote out the lyrics to the title track, Disintegration, for the creative writing section of my English exam and failed.

So many good tunes Prayers for Rain, Pictures of You and Untitled.

I still blast the album when I am in a bad mood. It's violent grimness cheers me up no end... Disintegration. Favourite. Album. Ever.

Jeremy Wells says:

US hip-hop artist Snoop Dogg. Photo / NZH

There's an old cliche - "timing is everything" - and in music this has more than one meaning. When I first heard Snoop Doggy Dogg's 1993 hands and knees leg opening album Doggy Style, my musical world was awash with the crywanking durge of grunge.

Internationally, Kurt Cobain was about to shoot himself in the head. Billy Corgan was doing his best impersonation of a whinging child, and locally Hammond Gamble and The Red Nose Band had soared to number one with a song about, oddly, red noses.

Enter Calvin Broadus, AKA Snoop Dogg, with his funky, fresh and fun melange of free-flowing rhymes and singalong friendly catchy choruses. Somehow Doggy Style provided the perfect antidote to the intense navel-gazing that was gripping my 18-year-old world.

Did I know that at the time? Probably not. But when I hear that synthesized keyboard and over-produced bass that has now come to define the G-Funk sound I immediately think of sunny summer days cruising with my friends, smoking Chronic in a white Toyota Corolla FX-GT with a 15" sub-woofer.

Who Am I (What's My Name) has truly stood the test of time, as has Gin and Juice, G Funk Intro and Doggy Dogg World. Many people will argue that Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back is the most important hip-hop album of all time - and that's fair enough - but in 2015 most of the tracks on Doggy Style can still get people wiggling their 40-year-old booties on the dance floor... and that's important to me.

* Spin The Black Circle: Battle Edition features every hour between 10am and 6pm weekdays until Friday 6th of March on Hauraki. Follow the progress on hauraki.co.nz.

- TimeOut