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November 30, 2009
BEST ALBUMS OF THE DECADE 30-21
30. The Arcade Fire, NEON BIBLE
There is a humorless earnestness to the best Arcade Fire songs; its best accomplishment is that these pretensions are not themselves laughable. When I saw Win Butler smash a guitar on Saturday Night Live in '07, I realized that he (like Jack White) was the kind of kid who really really wanted to be a rock star, but was experiencing the discomfort of being a critical darling. That mix of introspective integrity and showmanship is what makes the best songs so damn stirring - "Intervention" uses allusions mystical, historical, and spiritual in a way equally transcendent and unusual, and it is carried along by music that doesn't bear a trace of irony. If you can find the irony in the could-be-jokey title "My Body is a Cage," you'll defy me. It means what it says; the predicate nominative is a substitution for both the physical body and the body of work that Win sings about. Stuff controls him, nuff said.
These songs are often about being lonely even when you don't want to be, or occasionally they're about Haiti or some unnamed revolution. When people die in an Arcade Fire, it's a cause for a dirge, not a reflection. It's a tribute to the band's consistency and craft that no song on the album outdoes the others. They don't quite outdo the instant classic that was their first album, but they don't denigrate it either.
Best Song: "Intervention"
29. The Headlights, SOME RACING SOME STOPPING
In terms of listenabiliy, no album on this list exceeds SOME RACING SOME STOPPING. I saw them live in 2005, opening for a friends' band. I liked them then, but they've exceeded my expectations. The opening beats of "Cherry Tulips" signal the kind of absurdly joyful that follows. They're charming in the off-putting poetry they produce, capturing the fun that they must have in writing these songs and playing together. Maybe there is an angst beneath the surface here, but I've never noticed it and I listen to this album repeatedly (though their recent follow-up, WILDLIFE, venture into some darker territory). There's a lot going on in these songs - instrumentally, mainly, but these remain to score the soundtrack of someone's life who isn't rereading THE BELL JAR.
Listen: I have been trying to turn you on to this band for a long time. And you aren't listening. I am still the only person I know who likes them. I got all excited that they were coming to DC only to be met by numerous shrugs. Go to their Myspace page, buy this album. Get caught in the headlights.
Best Song: "Cherry Tulips"
28. Johnny Cash, AMERICA IV: THE MAN COMES AROUND
Not an album per se (which explains why its lower on the list), but it contains many of the songs that we associate with the Man in Black before he died. "The Man Comes Around" is grainy and apocalyptic, announcing the things he can do with his voice that he couldn't then do with his body. It was one of the last songs he wrote before he died. Mostly full of covers, there is a fascinating cover of "Personal Jesus" - perhaps overdone by the impresarioship of Rick Rubin - alongside more idiosyncratic stuff like "Desperado," "In My Life," and "Danny Boy." But all of the songs on the album, new and old, are all scenery for the cultural moment that was his rendition of Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt."
I have never actually sat down to think of the best covers ever. It would be a long list, and one impossible to quantify. How does "Twist and Shout" compare with the myriad versions of "Hallelujah"? When a cover outdoes its predecessor it seems to negate the original; Cash certainly doesn't do that - as the now-legendary video proves, Cash uses it to reinvent his mythology and reduce his legend while cementing his status as one of the grandest of iconoclasts. Maybe this was Rubin's baby; Trent Reznor wasn't overjoyed that it had the potential to turn into a top 40 country hit. But Cash used this opportunity as a glorious swan song, as understated but powerful as the man himself, a fitting end for someone who needed a fitting end.
Best Song: "Hurt"
27. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, NO MORE SHALL WE PART
Most Cave fans grow frustrated at the influence of Warren Ellis, who popped on the scene and made Nick light years less disgusting. Until Ellis came along, you could still hear the traces of the guy who growled into the microphone for The Birthday Party. Along with 1997's THE BOATMANS CALL (my favorite Cave album), NO MORE SHALL WE PART is the kind of philosophical mission statement many hoped he would never make. But the guy writes novels, screenplays, poetry . . . we may as well get used to the fact that he's going to want to pontificate occasionally. And if it's this good, I don't mind. Cave would combine his former self with the new, more notably seriously post-Ellis version on the albums that followed - a weird, fascinating mismatch of allusion, street violence, and his gutter voice.
But PART demands your attention. "Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow" is probably the song that most ardent Seeds fan reject, but I find it to be one of his most authentic: Cave songs always operate between an hopeless present, a past that's worth forgetting, and a future that seems dire at best. But imagination has always been the Cave paradise; it's the place where he can escape the intellectual conundrums he always finds himself in (best exemplified on CALL, but hear too). Ironically, the snow is a grave instead of a winter wonderland, but the metaphor works to belie the emptiness he feels with some kind of surface beauty. Elsewhere, he's just as dire, but the piano gives us a glimpse of hope - in "God is in the House" he actually bothers to rhyme, and the results are off-puttingly catchy. This is the best album of an underrated prolific decade for Cave.
Best Song: "Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow"
26. Brian Wilson, SMILE
The story is something like this: Brian Wilson wanted to create the greatest album ever made to outdo SGT. PEPPERS, but Mike Love had a really cool song about the cream he used in his hair. They got into an argument and Wilson ran to his bedroom and didn't come out until 1988, when he sang back-up vocals on "Kokomo" and made an uncomfortable cameo in FULL HOUSE. Then in 2004, he finally released that greatest album ever. Who knows what it would have been? We gets his "Good Vibrations," which is no better or worse than the original, and there's the kind of pop-whimsy (probably the result of collaborator Van Dyke Parks) that's miles removed from the cool guy fantasies of "I Get Around." Not as lonely as the later SURFS UP, and not as melodic as PET SOUNDS, SMILE may have ultimately been a disappointment in its own day. But these days it's pretty fantastic - the kind of concept album that started concept albums, and acts without the knowledge of anything that has happened since 1966. "Heroes and Villains" is one of the greatest of unheralded pop songs: it evokes the rapidly declining optimism of the late 60s while painting the world in a dualistic prism that is more complicated than it seemed. If SMILE lacks the killer tracks of the PET SOUNDS-era Beach Boys, it makes up for it by producing a coherent piece in the absence of 30-odd years of good Wilson-produced albums (the last was 1976's LOVE YOU). You have to listen to this thing the whole way through; trust me.
Wilson is apparently just as weird as he ever was, but I could imagine him becoming a dynamite producer for those bands who are made careers off the first time they heard "God Only Knows." That probably won't happen - instead he's off doing other unusual projects - his last, THAT LUCKY OLD SUN, was an amusing diversion. But SMILE remains. We don't have to piece together the fragments, which was kind of fun, but we see the tantalizing vision, however far removed from its most productive period.
Best Song: "Heroes and Villains"
25. Wolf Parade, APOLOGIES TO THE QUEEN MARY
Like their contemporary break-outers, Arcade Fire, Wolf Parade's debut is solemn and intense - brimming-to-exploding with suspicions toward technology and convention, revisiting a past that is equally troubling and necessary. Since then, Spencer Krug has shown a sense of humor, realizing that songs with that apply the theremin are funny whether you want them to be or not. But that didn't result in a better album than APOLOGIES, which relies on its power more than its listenability, and somehow comes out being an album with a remarkable degree of replay.
Released in 2005, APOLOGIES gets lost in the mix of the decades' best - even on my own Ipod. I often forget I have it, and then find myself wanting to listen to it. Its best songs are haunting - as "Same Ghost Every Night" is achingly symbolic and impressively serious. Ghosts are a central theme to this album: haunting memories, lost childhoods, and a supernatural that might be off not existing.
Best Song: "Modern World"
24. Of Montreal, THE SUNLANDIC TWINS
I didn't want to choose a "representative" title, which is why there are no Magnetic Fields albums on this list; while their collected output creates an impressive impression, no one album stands out. Of Montreal is kind of in the same boat, releasing album after album, each good, none particularly better than the other. A "Best Of" would be helpful, and after some scattered field work, I discovered that most of that imaginary collection would come from THE SUNLANDIC TWINS, a loose group of songs connected by melodic themes and similar instruments. It's typical work for Kevin Barnes' project - concerned with Wraiths, Norway, and their usual gift for matching their odd tunes with lyrics that make no damn sense (See the wonderful, incomprehensible "Forecast Fascist Future."
So I'll pick the SUNLANDIC TWINS even though it doesn't contain their best song ("The Past Is A Grotesque Animal" off HISSING FAUNA, ARE YOU THE DESTROYER) or their most impressive, cohesive representation (SATANIC PANIC IN THE ATTIC). But SUNLANDIC is the one album that you could perceive being played on the radio, and it's the one where I finally started liking them.
And yes, when you listen to this album, this album features the song that became Outback's commercial jingle for a bit. It's just as goofy and fun here as it is there, only not so specifically about an Australian-themed steak restaurant.
Best Song: "Forecast Fascist Future"
23. Cat Power, THE GREATEST
It has been an interesting decade, personally, for Chan Marshall. She recorded her defining album - THE GREATEST - that seems to hint at what she's capable of when she works with talented producers and backing bands (recorded in Memphis and featuring Memphis musicians - holla!). And she went batshit crazy on numerous occasions, often in front of people. THE GREATEST remains of what we can do with that voice; "Where is my Love" is the most romantic song of the decade, and it proves that Cat can do something besides cover other people, even though she is very very good at that.
In a typically snarky review that I remember being mad at for about a week, Pitchfork noted that the album begins with the upbeat Memphis rhythm section luring Cat into their word only to have Cat draw them back by the end. I don't find that very convincing, and it seems an attempt to intellectualize something that never happened so you can sound smart by writing about it (yes, that is how I feel about pretty much every review I read there). There's a balancing act of darkness and upbeat soul that you find in the best stuff that got recorded in Ardent, and not just in the songs that seem more "Cat Powerish" than the others - the entire album is fascinating because "Could We" exists in the same hour-span as "Love and Communication."
Bound to be derided as her individual songs show up in Zac Efron movies and Starbucks CD bins, recover the original intentions by listening to the source.
Best Song: "Where is My Love"
22. Low, THE GREAT DESTROYER
Low acolytes probably place this one in the middle of their list, but it's my absolute favorite - wall to wall great sounds that grow to a peak of intensity and sadness. Low has been and remains both my initiation and stopping point into something called "slowcore." That's not a word that has a whole lot of meaning to me, other than that "slow" seems an appropriate description. And beneath all the noise and pounding drums, there's a lot more here than just the snail's pace that people usually ascribe to them.
"Monkey" may be one of my favorite track one, side ones of the decade: its weird and kind of epic, as is the whole album - full of strange sounds and even stranger lyrics. I find myself listening to it constantly with no real desire to further delve into their catalog (as of now, the only other album I own is the 2007 release DRUMS AND GUNS). Because it just doesn't seem it can get any better than this.
Best Song: "California"
21. Ryan Adams, HEARTBREAKER
After a few of his formative years with Whiskeytown, Adams went out on his own and released a kick-ass debut and then spent the rest of the decade apparently squandering that social capital by being an annoying stage presence. If you, like me, get sick of Adams' constant waffling between punk rocker and country crooner, you probably are surprised that he puts on decent shows and often defers to his back-up bands (currently The Cardinals). But Adams continues to define his mythos by releasing three albums in a year (in 2005) and trying to top his break-out HEARTBREAKER. It's an unfortunate move, because HEARTBREAKER sounded so good when we first heard it, but now we have trouble removing it from the layers of Ryan Adams finely-crafted devil may care public persona that makes these beautiful songs sound schizophrenic.
"Come Pick Me Up" is an anthem to being rejected, and it's much more grounded than typical efforts; there's no attempt to turn it into something bigger, as the girl who continues to crap on him will steal his records and screw all his friends. This girl usually becomes Medusa even in Robert Johnson songs, but here she's just a chick who comes up with a smile on her face and does terrible things repeatedly because the singer lets her. That's good stuff - penetrating and soulful, and it operates on the interesting double meaning of the title and the endless, unsearchable ambiguities of the refrain: "You know you could; I wish you would."
The rest of the songs are both sweet and satisfying: I find myself listening to the title track "To Be Young" over and over again. Regardless of what he continues to do, it shouldn't sideline what he did.
Best Song: "Come Pick Me Up"
| By Andytown | 10:47 AM