*cue the soundtrack*
As 2008 is hours away from being over, this list is but a mere ten albums from its completion. These are the elite of my listening habits this year, the ten albums that–more than any of the others–wormed their way into my consciousness. If you know me, there aren’t any surprises here, and its true that a lot (probably all) of these albums have ended up on other “best of” lists, but I stand by my choices, even if the ranking is a little fuzzy in places.
But before we get down to it, one more look at the last 40 albums on the list:
THE LIST SO FAR:
50. Fall Out Boy - Folie a Deux
49. Oasis - Dig Out Your Soul
48. Owl City - Maybe I’m Dreaming
47. Of Montreal - Skeletal Lamping
46. Counting Crows - Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings
45. Sigur Rós - Með Suð í Eyrum Við Spilum Endalaust
44. The Raconteurs - Consolers of the Lonely
43. Juliana Hatfield - How to Walk Away
42. Lil Wayne - Tha Carter III
41. The Kills - Midnight Boom
40. Man Man - Rabbit Habits
39. Shugo Tokumaru - Exit
38. Lambchop - OH (Ohio)
37. Bonnie “Prince” Billy - Lie Down in the Light
36. Drive By Truckers - Brighter Than Creation’s Dark
35. Panic at the Disco - Pretty. Odd.
34. TV on the Radio - Dear Science
33. The Mighty Underdogs - Droppin’ Science Fiction
32. The Gutter Twins - Saturnalia
31. Titus Andronicus - The Airing of Grievances
30. REM - Accelerate
29. School of Seven Bells - Alpinisms
28. Spiritualized - Songs in A&E
27. Benoit Pioulard - Temper
26. The Last Shadow Puppets - The Age of Understatement
25. Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes
24. The Tallest Man on Earth - Shallow Grave
23. Grouper - Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill
22. Augie March - Watch Me Disappear
21. Deerhunter - Microcastle
20. Rodney Crowell - Sex & Gasoline
19. Aimee Mann - @#%&*! Smilers
18. Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks - Real Emotional Trash
17. Hot Chip - Made in the Dark
16. Frightened Rabbit - The Midnight Organ Fight
15. Juana Molina - Un Dia
14. Larkin Grimm - Parplar
13. Nada Surf - Lucky
12. Okkervil River - The Stand Ins
11. The Hold Steady - Stay Positive
And with no further ado, my top ten records of the year.
10. Erykah Badu - New Amerykah, Part 1: 4th World War
Erykah Badu’s fourth album opens with an announcer promising “More action! More excitement! More everything!” and the hour that follows delivers fully on that promise. It’s an adventurous, playful record that draws from all corners of urban music, from ’60s Motown to modern hip-hop, blending them into something both unique and timeless. The songs wander hither and thither, sometimes brightly melodic, other times muted and hypnotic, full of more ideas and creative touches than I could possibly comment on. The title suggests a political manifesto, but rather this album draws from a sense of community–political, racial, artistic, familial, however it may manifest–and the complexity of the music is mirrored in the clearly heartfelt stories and observations laid over it that draw from cautionary tales about crime and drugs to tributes and celebrations of the power of music and artists. The sum total is something exciting and passionate that cannot be easily pigeonholed but yields more with each listen and sounds soulful, powerful and important.
9. Sun Kil Moon - April
Coming five years after the warm, inviting Ghosts of the Great Highway, this epic, 74-minute album blends those warm sounds with the cooler, more deliberate feel of the early Red House Painters records, standing as not only a summation, but one of the best records of Mark Kozelek’s 16 year career. The album takes its time–five of the eleven songs run between 7 and 11 minutes–creating atmosphere via interwoven electric and acoustic guitars playing variations on simple riffs, sometimes close to the vest (the brief, relatively spare fingerpicking of “Harper Road”), other times letting loose in massive drones (the towering, Neil Young-inspired centerpiece “Tonight the Sky”). Kozelek’s honeyed vocal wanders down alleyways of memory, pulling up observations that are sentimental without crossing into saccharine. They’re full of rich, sometimes arresting images (”When the skies come apart she leans over so helpless and cowering / Until the storms come to cease and somehow she’s the only one standing”), but like the music, often focus more on painting an atmospheric picture, rather than delivering a punch-in-the-gut blow. This is an album meant for daydreaming–lie down with it and let it infuse your thoughts and you’ll wind up in some melancholy yet stirringly beautiful places.
8. The Mountain Goats - Heretic Pride
The eleventh Mountain Goats album (not counting numerous EPs and rarities collections) is the first in some time not to have an explicit narrative or thematic concept, instead creating a series of vignettes that expand both the band’s sonic palate and John Darnielle’s already impressive emotional range. The band’s last 3 records have slowly been incorporating new elements into the low-fi sound but this album plays with and pushes them further than ever before. “San Bernadino” is built on a rich, tender string arrangement; “Lovecraft in Brooklyn” is easily the hardest song in the group’s vast catalogue, rocketing along on charging drums and electric guitar pulses; “Marduk T-Shirt Men’s Room Incident” uses lovely background vocals to great effect, etc. Darnielle’s lyrics are clever and wordy as ever and he alternates between a gentle lilt and a ferocious nasal howl as he frames stories about childbirth (”San Bernadino”), death (”Sept 15, 1983″), and everything in-between. The album is the latest entry in a startling consistent career that proves John, Peter and company still have new places to go in their music.
7. Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago
If you want to get really technical, this album was self-released in 2007, but because it was picked up by Jagjaguwar in 2008, most critics count it as an ‘08 release and thus I’m doing the same. This accomplished debut was recorded alone in an isolated cabin and that chilly loneliness comes through in the beautiful sounds herein. Justin Vernon layers his creamy voice over flowing threads created by acoustic guitars, banjos and very subtle percussion. Loose fibers of electric guitars and electronic effects spiral in and out here and there, adding gentle flavor when they appear, and the whole thing is drenched in a light echo that creates wide open spaces, especially in the sparer moments like the haunting “The Wolves Act I & II,” which starts out barely there and crashes into a noisy climax. The words mimic the etherial nature of the music, using gorgeous, often abstract details (”Sky’s the womb and she’s the moon”) mixed with powerfully direct statements (”With all your lies, you’re still very loveable”) to paint soft, brokenhearted pictures. It’s a powerful, quietly intense collection of songs that not only stands very well as its own entity, but also suggests vast potential for follow-up records.
6. Shearwater - Rook
On the follow up to the gorgeous, masterful Palo Santo, Shearwater have tightened their sound, delivering a record that’s leaner and more propulsive while maintaining the haunting beauty that informs their best work. There is no easy way to describe the music–pianos, dulcimers, bells, horns/winds, electric and acoustic guitars, drums and strings peck and circle each other in something that sounds like a marriage of traditional, even mythical/mystical folk music and modern indie rock. At the center of the ghostly mist is Jonathan Meiburg’s voice, one of the most stunning male vocals in said indie rock–he floats effortlessly between deep croons and falsetto peaks, never losing his rich, powerful timbre. The words are perfectly suited to the music–enigmatic, natural, beautiful and dangerous, littered with lines like “I am starlight, I am moonlight over burning fields and bodies” or “Can this sullen child, bound as the ox I ride / Climb to the heart of the white wind, singing high / And blow through my frozen eyes?” It’s spectacular, a record that equals the heights of its predecessor and bodes extremely well for the future of the group, even if it’s an even harder act to follow than the last time.
5. Portishead - Third
It’s been 11 years since Beth Gibbons, Adrian Utley and Geoff Barrow have put out an album–an absolute eon in pop music terms–which makes the simply titled Third all the more striking. It picks up right where the band left off–building off the mysterious atmosphere of Dummy and Portishead and taking it to stranger and more ferocious places. The songs are dark, foreign and exotic, throwing in unexpectedly harsh elements into the jazzy, velvety sound the band laid out on their ’90s albums. Take “Machine Gun,” where Gibbons’ soulful melody is almost drowned in thundering percussion, or the sudden electronic boiling that jaggedly interrupts the lilting, seductive croon of “Hunter.” And just when you think you’ve got a line on the music, they take a sudden left turn with the ukulele piece “Deep Water.” The words only reenforce the tortured torch singer image that Gibbons’ voice creates–”Wild white horses, they will take me away / And the tenderness I feel will send the dark underneath,” etc, fitting in perfectly with the eerie, unsettling nature of the music. That a band could sound this vital and important long after most fans lost hope they’d ever come back speaks to the amazing musicianship in this trio–a band that helped define a genre (trip-hop, if weren’t paying attention) and continue to sound like no one else.
4. The Dodos - Visiter
This album originally started further down the list (somewhere in the 20s), but every time I listened to it, I felt compelled to move it up a few spaces. Meric Long and Logan Kroeber’s second album crams in even more wild ideas than Beware of the Maniacs, but rather than flying between this and that, it integrates all that craziness into something that’s undeniably messy but also strangely cohesive. The heart of this record is the thundering, crashing, stomping rhythms that drive the songs–both the shorter jaunts and longer epics–forward like a rocket engine. Over these is a layer of truly frantic acoustic guitar that shifts between manic strumming, sped up blues riffs and spiderwebbed picking, more often than not, in the same song. Mixed into this organized chaos is a stew of electric bass, piano stabs, horn blares, grunts and howls, tinkling bells and heaven knows what else. The sound has a gritty space–it feels like it was recorded in an empty warehouse–that makes the songs sound even messier, but for all of that, it’s anchored by undeniably pop melodies that keep things reined in just enough. The lyrics reveal that these are actually cleverly disguised love songs–consider the inner monologue of “Park Song,” where Long mutters to himself “Saw the girl I know from my job / I think that she must think that I’m retarded / I act so dumb when I get started.” The everydayness of this kind of writing makes the album all the more charming, and it is a charming record–one that hooks you in with its unabashedly wild flavor and keeps you engaged throughout.
3. M83 - Saturdays=Youth
There’s a lot to be told from the title of this record. It’s bright, shiny and wide-eyed, full of all the capriciousness of youth. It’s also nostalgic, drawing very skillfully from the past (specifically, the late ’80s) while still sounding like something fresh. The songs are drenched very heavily in shoegazer/JaMC style washes, something immediately apparent from the droning, hypnotic opener “You Appearing,” which builds from a lonely piano into Cocteau Twins-style ambience, covered in hazy electronic sounds. This spacy opening yields immediately into “Kim & Jessie,” one of the album’s best tracks and an indicator of the pop sensibility on the rest of the record, where spare, gentle verses segue into towering choruses, complete with wailing distortions that wouldn’t be out of place on Loveless. Tracks like the long, winding “Couleurs” show Anthony Gonzalez’s French-electronica roots, but this record is warmer and more immediate than anything he’s done before. The lyrics, while somewhat secondary to the music, are nonetheless sly and smart, full of both teenagerisms (”I look into your eyes / Diving into the ocean”) and cleverly put observations about youth, eg: “She worships Satan like a father / But she dreams of a sister like Molly Ringwald” (from the stellar “Graveyard Girl”). All in all, it’s a hooky, beautiful, bright album that builds on traditions yet blazes new territory for the man who made it.
2. Why? - Alopecia
After a series of intriguing near-misses like Oaklandazulasylum and Elephant Eyelash, Why? finally deliver an album that capitalizes on their huge potential. This is apparent immediately as “The Vowels Pt. 2″ storms in with heavy bass beats and Yoni Wolf declares “I’m not a ladies man, I’m a land mine filming my own fake death.” The first two tracks emphasize the hip-hop influence–there’s melody in Wolf’s voice, but he’s still doing a strange, slow, moody but involving version of rapping amidst layered, dark instrumentation. It’s not until the staggering “These Few Presidents” hits that the album fully turns into a pop record–an absolutely gorgeous melody plays against a running bass, culminating in a stormy, heavy chorus. From there the record takes off into jittery piano-rock (”Song of the Sad Assassin”), cheerful and shimmering pop (”Fatalist Palmistry”) and all sorts of other neat places. But as pop as the record gets, it never quite shakes the beat-influenced poetry that characterizes Wolf’s lyrics. He’s at times uncomfortably direct (”Jerking off in an art museum john til my dick hurts / The kind of shit I won’t admit to my head shrinker”) while other times playfully obscure (”Never in the night when the knot grows tighter than the thinkers can untie / And the last half dammed rivers have gone dry”), but always with an absolute mastery of timing and rhythm and a penchant for urban(e) images and ideas. The record dodges classification but it’s addictive as all hell and vies almost equally for the top spot with…
1. MGMT - Oracular Spectacular
There’s a lot to be said for artistic experimentation–bands that push envelopes, do unexpected things and otherwise challenge the listener to pay attention and figure them out. I love that kind of music. But not all records need to be difficult or even terribly complex to be completely brilliant. There’s not a lot to discover about MGMT’s songs–they’re painted in broad, bold colors, comprised of in-your-face hooks in bright, shiny instrumentation. The lyrics are smart enough, often thoughtful (see: “Pieces of What”) and occasionally silly (see: “Electric Feel”), but they don’t make a thing about making any philosophical statement–the key line on the album comes in “The Youth,” which opens with the bold statement “This is a call of arms to live and love and sleep together.” This kind of casual, unabashed earnestness in the lyrics is definitely appealing, but that’s not what makes the record really great. What pushes it over the top and puts it in the number one slot for this year is the fact that every single song on here is catchy as fuck. I’m impressed every time I listen to it–it never once lets up, delivering ten absolutely perfect pop gems in 40 minutes. Even the somewhat more obscure moments like “4th Dimensional Transition” or “Future Reflections” end up wrapping themselves around your head and drilling into your brain if you let them. “The Handshake” is stomping and soaring, “Time to Pretend” is absolutely goddamned anthemic, “Electric Feel” is wiggly and funky. And at the center of this is “Kids,” which has a mind-bendingly stunning riff and melody that basically defines the earworm, so much so that it took me months to hear the second half of this album cos I kept hitting repeat whenever this track came up. Even if it’s not the deepest record on this countdown or the even best in a purely artistic sense, the music is so ridiculously joyful, the excitement communicates so wonderfully and I’ve listened to this so much I can’t not call it my favorite record of the year.
Alright, so that’s my list, make of it what you will. A lot of great music was put out this year and I’m still discovering new stuff–if I were to do a “Best of 2008″ list a year from now, I’m sure it’d probably be pretty different (just like my list about 2007 would be different if I made it now). But as the year closes out, this is how things stand. Time to look forward to a whole slew of releases set for 2009, ones that are already shaping it up to be an even more amazing year than 2008 was.
So happy New Year and see you folks in January!
