We posted a PropertyOfZack Friday Discussion on The Best Album Openers last week, so we’re following it up this week with The Best Album Closers. Album closers have the ability to leave a truly emotional mark on the listener, and we’ve experienced quite a few memorable ones over the years in our scene. We put the closers together in an Rdio Playlist to listen to as you read the Discussion as well. Check out our list below and feel free to reblog with some of your favorite album closers!
Brand New - Play Crack the Sky
From the classic punk energy of Your Favorite Weapon to the dark intricacies of Daisy, the amount of things that Brand New have gotten right throughout their career is monumental. “Play Crack The Sky” is one of the few songs in the Brand New catalogue that showcase what each one of their masterpieces started out as poignant lyrics carried simply by a single guitar. If there is anything more impressive than their ever-present brazen musicality, it is the fact that even stripped down to bare bones, Brand New can evoke emotion like nobody else. - Alyssa McKinleyDeath Cab For Cutie - A Lack Of Color
Death Cab For Cutie always has a way of making you feel both happy and sad at the same time with heartbreaking and heartwarming songs. “A Lack Of Color” is a tragically beautiful ending to close Translanticism, similar to the aftermath of a torrential downpour. It’s almost like the raindrops that slowly roll down the glass window on your wall as the sun fights to shine between the pockets of dark clouds. Moving at a serene tempo, Benjamin Gibbard perfectly sings every harmony with gentle conviction while the acoustic guitar repeatedly calls back to the piano chord. Ten years later and Translanticism is still considered one of the best Death Cab For Cutie albums of all time. “This is fact not fiction for the first time in years.” - Sydney GoreDashboard Confessional - Several Ways to Die Trying
A Mark, A Mission, A Brand, A Scar is Dashboard Confessional’s transitional album, the one that bridges the gap between Chris Carrabba’s deeply personal early work and the cinematic bombast of the band’s later LPs, and closing track “Several Ways to Die Trying” pinpoints the moment where that crossover happens. The six-minute epic swells seamlessly from ginger, cowering verses into a megalithic chorus — one of the strongest in Dashboard’s songbook —with Carrabba’s meticulously planned delivery pushing the song over the top. His measured crumble in the refrain’s “dying to live” apex coheres into a laser blast at song’s end, searing its way from here to forever and soaring the ashes left behind to the heavens. - Jesse RichmanThrice – The Beltsville Crucible
I used to believe that the closing track to Thrice’s brilliant sophomore release The Illusion of Safety should have been “To Awake and Avenge the Dead,” a fan-favorite anthem and perennial show closer. Silly me. As any good storyteller knows, one does not end the story at the climax; a denouement is needed to resolve conflict and complete the story arc. Enter “The Beltsville Crucible.” Instead of ending the album with the lyric “to awake and avenge the dead,” Thrice was clever enough to end with, “and if you’re feeling all right, you’ve got to play it again.” The last two tracks of many lesser albums are just afterthoughts, but in this case, they’re just too damn good to be left out, and “The Beltsville Crucible” has the perfect intensity level to conclude this album and get the listener ready to let track one start all over again. - Marc Gary Gray
Fireworks - The Wild Bunch
“The Wild Bunch,” the final track on Fireworks’ 2011 album Gospel, is bold, unpredictable and wildly fun; splicing swirling finger-picked arpeggios, The-Who-via-Green-Day arena windmill riffs, double-time skate punk, gang vocals and love-your-friends-die-laughing lyrics into one of the most innovative punk songs in recent memory. Anyone who “grew up weird enough” to make a song like this grew up right. - Jesse Richman
