1. He Made The Best Album Of All Time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuxvKLLCaEQ I Get Wet, Andrew W.Ks 2001 debut album, is the greatest record ever released. A visceral all-out assault on every sense, its the musical equivalent of the sugar rush you get right after drinking two litres of coke and a kilo of pick and mix. Its like being hit in the face with a breezeblock repeatedly, but instead of immense pain at each thwack, you instead feel overwhelming joy. Its done after the fastest, funnest and most breathless 35 minutes youll ever experience, and as soon as its over you want to put it on again straight away. Every single second of its running time fulfils the vision that Andrew W.K. once told NPR he wanted his music to be: pure joy, a total rush of energy, without ideas, concepts, or even specific emotions to stand in the way of the total sonic experience. On the surface its a big dumb party rock album, and in the purest sense it can be enjoyed with just that most basic of understandings. But in another sense, it has remarkable depth and nuance, and was painstakingly designed to be expansive yet immediate. Some instruments were multi-tracked to a truly ridiculous degree, and in Phillip Crandalls Thirty-Three and a Third book on the album, producer John Fields estimated that Party Hard has at least 12 guitar tracks, seven of piano, ten of percussion and no less than three bass parts, each playing something different. Never has such an enormous effort been put into something that celebrates something so seemingly vacuous As with a lot of truly great art, I Get Wet wasnt understood at the time of its release. In 2002, Pitchfork gave the album 0.6, its reviewer Ryan Schreiber calling it an insidious beast...as empty as rock music gets, and dubbing it blistering tard-rock. Yet ten years later, they had seen the error of their ways. The 2012 re-release was given 8.6 and the very first sentence admitted it was the online magazines biggest statistical mea culpa ever. If youve never heard I Get Wet, listen to it right now. Youll instantly understand its complete magnificence, and why all other albums pale into mediocrity when held up against its major chord bombast. There can be no other conclusion drawn than that the man behind it is Greatest Human Being Of All Time. You love Andrew W.K. too. You must do. Tell us why in the comments.