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December 16, 2007

TOP 10 ALBUMS OF THE YEAR

I don’t know what you think (in fact, I don’t care, since no one ever says what they think in the comments), but this has been a pretty remarkable year for music. My personal top 10 list is full of bands I love and have loved, but my honorable mention shows the range of excellent releases. I’ve been blown away by several albums, disappointed by few (though Ryan Adams’ album was pretty lame). Without further ado:

Honorable Mention:
The Shins, WINCING THE NIGHT AWAY; Josh Ritter, THE HISTORICAL CONQUESTS OF JOSH RITTER; Richard Thompson, SWEET WARRIOR; Son Volt, THE SEARCH; Of Montreal, HISSING FAUNA, ARE YOU THE DESTROYER; Radiohead, IN RAINBOWS; Yo La Tengo, I AM NOT AFRAID OF YOU AND I WILL BEAT YOUR ASS; Loudon Wainwright, STRANGE WEIRDOS

Josh Ritter’s HISTORICAL CONQUESTS was a little underwhelming; part of it seems to be him trying to be Spoon. I still love him, but he seems to be going in a direction that’s antithetical to what made his earlier efforts rock so hard and authentically. Of Montreal’s new album reminded me of THE GAY PARADE – it’s kind of unaccessible and my O.M. predilection leans toward the more pop-heavy and ear-friendly.

As for IN RAINBOWS, I tried, I really did. I don’t find it to be a metal ball bouncing in an echo chamber while robots talk to each other (like I did AMNESIAC), but it isn’t the sonic freak-out that OK COMPUTER or KID A, or the more subtle, beautiful Britpop masterpiece of THE BENDS.

So that’s the back-ups, here’s the top 10

Bruce Springsteen, MAGIC

Not an album to introduce anyone to the Boss with (though 2005s DEVILS AND DUST, with its stark descriptions of desert-scapes and lonely soldiers is a great intro), but a kind of amalgamation of everything he’s ever done. This is unusual from him, as he often picks a tone and sticks with it for 45 minutes or so.

Elliott Smith, NEW MOON

Kind of a cheat, but this is basically the B-sides for ELLIOT SMITH and EITHER/OR. It also includes his version of “Thirteen” by Big Star, which may be my favorite song of the year. It’s also nice to have this collection instead of the GOOD WILL HUNTING soundtrack, previously the one place to get “Miss Misery.” A must-have for any obsessive fan.

Bloc Party, A WEEKEND IN THE CITY

In some ways, Bloc Party is the new U2 – solemn, kind of angry, powering through as though their stuff can change the world. A WEEKEND IN THE CITY is a step up over 2005’s SILENT ALARM.

Harlan T. Bobo, I’M YOUR MAN

My favorite Memphis alt-rocker sings soulful, honest songs – so much so that we won’t deride him from stealing one of Leonard Cohen’s most famous phrases. I would like to see Harlan become the next Townes Van Zandt with his similar touch of “we’re all doomed to some degree of misery for the rest of our lives but we may as well go to a bar tonight.” Best song is “Pragmatic Woman,” a tune that Cohen probably wishes he had written and Van Zandt would have had a lot of fun with.

Bishop Allen, THE SECOND STRING

The biggest joy of movie-watching and music-listening year was this discovering this precociously joyous band. Lead singer Justin Rice, if you remember, also starred in the latest film by Andrew Bujalski, MUTUAL APPRECIATION. If THE SECOND STRING doesn’t seem like a step forward from 2003’s CHARM SCHOOL, it is a least a hop in the right place. The guy at Monseignor Allen also get the award for weirdest band to be featured in a product placement, as their CLICK CLICK CLICK is making the rounds in some type of camera commercial. Still, this is a

Wilco, SKY BLUE SKY

Pitchfork said that Wilco’s latest “nakedly exposes the dad-rock gene Wilco has always carried but courageously attempted to disguise.” Okay, that’s what I love about it. Suck an egg, you hipster doofuses.

Arcade Fire, NEON BIBLE

Arcade Fire continues to establish themselves as one of earth’s most relevant rock bands. Like Bloc Party, they take themselves awfully seriously. And like Bloc Party, they rule. NEON BIBLE gives you what you expect from its title: the mix of absurdly awful and the spiritually significant, and the former makes the latter seem insignificant, but the latter makes the former meaningful. Case in point

“I know a time is coming
All words will lose their meaning
Please show me something that isn't mine
But mine is the only kind that I relate to”

Also:

“Take the poison of your age
Don't lick your fingers when you turn the page
What I know is what you know is right
In the city it's the only light
It's the Neon Bible, the Neon Bible.”

Anyone who saw indie dork/genius Win Butler smash his guitar on Saturday Night Live saw the weird mix of showmanship and dangerously introspective whiplash that we call The Arcade Fire. Avoiding the current trend that everything should be ironic, or should be ironic by not being ironic (which is ironic), these guys sing about human frailty and the panic that you inherit merely by being alive. In 1996, a refrain like this . . .

“Mirror, mirror on the wall / Show me where the bombs will fall”

. . . would have been laughable, some kind of death metal fairy tale scenario you’d listen to while playing DOOM. But today, the Butlers have an ominous sense that there’s no magic, and that sucks. Or maybe it will be transcendent if you can survive it.

By the by, though the Butlers certainly have that White Stripes a-hole singer/sweetheart behind him dichotomy, isn’t it nice to know that this sweetheart actually helps the band be good, and doesn’t just sit in the background wearing funny t-shirts and irrythmically banging a drum.

It’s an amazing album, in many ways more assured and resonant than FUNERAL. Fans of the Fire, like myself, like these guys because they hearken back to a pleasanter time and subtly suggest we can attain it. But they also are really really scared of the world, and it isn’t a geeky fear of bullies or paving the rain forests, but truly archetypal nightmares of sound and fury. Other than Yorke and Tweedy and their groups, there is probably no better match of vocalist and band than than Win and the burned-down arcadium.

Spoon, GA GA GA GA GA

On the flip-side of that aforementioned solemn burning is the Clash-esque GA GA GA GA GA. I more or less resisted all but a few of Spoon’s earlier efforts, but GA . . . has them working at their highest and most joyous. Their lyrics are not so much as screamed, and there’s so much going on in each individual song (even with lines like Oh you know mmm the rhythm and soul Get your hands out your back pockets, boy let it go). There’s a certain simplistic idiocy here that’s what I like about the best 70s punk music, and the up-top tempo of the Talking Heads. After a few listens, I didn’t really love it, but I found myself listening to it almost daily. A great album.

New Pornographers, CHALLENGERS

I have been firmly on record as saying that I like all the relatively recent individual Pornographer’s solo efforts better than than their should-be-superlative supergroup. Neko, Bejar, Newman have each released an album that blew my mind (respectively, FOX CONFESSOR, DESTROYERS RUBIES – my last year number one, and SLOW WONDER, one of my favorite albums of the millennium)

Well, CHALLENGERS is their first that doesn’t make me wish they spent less time together. It’s also the first one that doesn’t have the semblance of what seems to be a dictatorial control by Newman and his tenacity for groovy power-pop. The three songs by Bejar, particularly “Enter White Cecilia” are particular exciting, and makes up for the lack of a 2008 Destroyer release.

If nothing else, it makes excited about the Justice League-style powers of supergroups.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, SOME LOUD THUNDER

Spoon’s album took me by surprise when I found out I loved it. On the other, SOME LOUD THUNDER had me at its opening. The title track is one of the best songs I’ve heard in years, a sonic explosion of sound and fury that seems to be missing an opening minute. After about two seconds of hard, distorted guitar, Alec Ounsworth announces, “All this talking, you think I’d have something to say.”

More than any album since IN THE AEROPLANE OVER THE SEA, Clap’s new album is a modernist text because its central themes are:

1. The inability for anyone to communicate to anyone
2. The need for love in spite of this
3. The sense that the world is going to collapse
4. The darkness on the edge of town may just be truth
5. The feeling that childhood memories may be the only thoughts that matter
6. Imagery that borders on psychotic, yet lingers profound.
7. Idiotic metaphors that somehow make a lot of sense (I am the coin in your pocket)

But mostly, SOME LOUD THUNDER just owns in a way that no other album has this millennium. That’s right. It’s my favorite album of the millennium. It comes from a band whose first album sounded derivative and kind of stupid, yet still listenable. Their new album shows a potential that no one else seems to grasp. Pitchfork made fun of it. The AV Club says they “overreached” (good!) Rolling Stone (wankers) said, “Alec Ounsworth splashes his warbly David Byrne alto around like cheap paint.”

Listen you sellouts (I’m talking to R.S. here), if Ounsworth and his hand-clappers/yea-sayers were ripping off Byrne, I’d hate them. The fact that they wear their influences on their sleeves (along with Television, which is rare) make them pretty freaking awesome. In reading all the backlash for this masterpiece of an album, the one album that manages to fit inside the aesthetic and transcend it, I’ve learned something valuable about musical criticism: it’s easier to burn down a barn that to build one. All the creeps out there who knocked this are going to change their tune once a future generation rediscovers it and puts it in a proper category.

There, I said it, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah may just be the new Velvet Underground.

More to come, including: Ten best albums I bought in 2008 that didn't come out in 2008, and Ten best songs of 2008

| By Andytown | 03:37 PM

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Posted by: bethlehem H. at December 16, 2007 04:45 PM

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