  5. Appetite for Destruction - Guns N' Roses 4. Back in Black - AC/DC 3. This Desert Life - Counting Crows 2. When I Woke - Rusted Root 1. Kind of Blue - Miles Davis Appetite and Back in Black are easy. They're loud.
They block out noise through sheer volume. The others are a little more subtle. They all have a way of sharpening my focus to help me shut things out. This Desert Life does it by sucking me in with great lyrics. When I Woke uses persistant, driving rhythms. And then there's Kind of Blue ... Kind of Blue has a sort of perfect imperfection about it. For most albums the musicians do take after take, trying to perfect parts, then the producers and engineers assemble the takes into something "perfect". Miles refused to let that happen on Kind of Blue. His band (John Coletrane, Cannonball Adderly, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb) were trying something new: modal jazz. The tonality of the pieces was built from modal scales instead of chord changes. Miles had learned the concept from George Russel (who was working on his urlLink Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization ) and briefly tried it out on Milestones . But Kind of Blue was the first full-length album to employ modal jazz, and Miles wanted to capture it raw.
The result is breathtaking. Masterful musicians pushing their boundries, trying things for the first time, sometimes failing, usually succeeding. It's likely that Miles could have recorded more takes and gotten more polished tracks on the album. It's inconcievable that they would made a better album. All that being said, I'm not sure why it's so effective at blocking other people out. It just is. 
