After all the rave reviews for first self-titled album from the band with the imperative for a name, I found it a bit underwhelming. They were not as interesting as the bands they were clearly trying to emulate, and their novelty wore off pretty quick. Alec Ounsworth, that energetic, raspy fellow who yells now matter soft or loud the music behind him, didn't seem to have a lot to sing about. Needless to say, I wasn't expecting much from their follow-up.

My friend, frequent blog-reader Bethan, gave me an advanced copy that I otherwise wouldn't have listen to. When I heard the first song, I imagined that something had gone wrong in the burning process: it seemed to start mid-lick. After one second, the lyrics came crashing in and neither the song, nor the album, never relented from the energy of that first moment. It was a brash, bold feat, and I've never heard anything like it before or since. Their first album was all catch and quirk and pop-tastic lyrics hidden by a grungy aesthetic, but this one immediately told you it would be nothing like that. The lo-fi style is never betrayed by any grander ambitions, and what remains is something at once stunningly personal and not quite attainable.

And that's where the Vonnegut comparison came up. I assumed I had heard the advanced copy of the album everyone would be talking about. I was flummoxed when I found, after its release, that the advanced reviews were so lukewarm, occasionally dismissive. But each I listen to it, I reassure myself that I'm right - I have no secret motive or ambition for selling this album; I'm merely surprised that it hasn't even developed a cult following.

The title track is a knock-out, a post-modern anthem never acknowledged. It's about being unable to communicate, a descriptive cacophony of noises that mirrors the frenetic sound. As Ounsworth keeps shrieking, "That's the state of my story / and it could be maybe something complete someday," we're reminded that much of the best music wasn't supposed to mean anything, and this album - with its artless cover and chaotic exuberance becomes a blank slate on which we can all project our meanings. Yet I find that its poetic even its discord.

And it's followed by the most gentle song CYHSH has ever sung, a mix of their familiar nonsense and a fascinatingly earnest love song:

"You're not like me
It seems that people stick like flies to you
And my mystery
Is just that I've no one to cling to"

"Emily Jean Stock," who is in reality Ounsworth's wife, highlights our insecurities in relationships while reminding us why they're so wonderful when they work. The song contrasts the beautiful, charismatic title character with the singer's realization that he doesn't belong with her. Knowing that this is about his wife makes its combination of saccharine intensity and vulnerable confession welcome.

The next show stopper is "Satan Said Dance," a perverse, ambitious dance number which mixes electronic music with actual electronic dissonance. Its absurd balance sounds like an explosion at the studio and speaks to and exemplifies the liberation of hedonism while parodying the earliest critics of the genre: if dancing is really Satan's lurid vehicle for God's creatures, it might end up looking and sounding something like this electro-nightmare.

The one-two-three punch that leads to the end of the album - "Arm and Hammer," "Yankee Go Home," and "Underwater (You and Me)" keeps this from being as uneven as their debut. Because SOME LOUD THUNDER is ultimately about the failure to communicate with anyone, even though we need that communication to survive, and its oscillation between those two extremes is what makes it moving even its dissonance, coming together in "Underwater." If the album opens with "All this talking / You'd think I'd have something to say" and closes with:

"We'll design a clever disguise
Or retreat to the bottom of the sea
We were destined to live out our lives
Underwater you and me"

Ounsworth ultimately gives us a love letter in spite of itself.

The last song - the shouting and sounds of "Five Easy Pieces" is kind of a letdown; I wish it closed with the aforementioned "Underwater;" it's this that keeps it from being number 2 (but not number 1). But I will continue to sing the praises for the best album you haven't heard, listened to once, or didn't listen to carefully enough.

AVATAR - It is what it is: a three hour spectacle that I have no interest in seeing again. Sigourney Weaver, adding humor and pathos, was a welcome presence because the Na'vi themselves were kind of dull noble savages. Their world, however, was anything but dull, and the 3D and the IMAX made it an enchanting experience, even if it was caught up in a pretty standard anti-imperalism narrative (the DANCES WITH WOLVES comparisons are appropriate). So while every beat of the story and its characterizations were familiar, the visuals brought it to the level of a really awesome documentary about space that you might see in a planetarium. If it wins the Oscar, it will be the ironic equivalent of a movie that is nothing like it: AMERICAN BEAUTY. We look back at its 2000 victory and wonder why; AVATAR will certainly be surpassed by better, more inventive movies that share its visual flourish. It's like a Cecil DeMille movie without the camp, but I found myself wanting the camp.

THE BLIND SIDE - Here is what this movie is saying, and sadly it is why some of its audience liked it: if poor African Americans could only get on board with the spunky upper-class ethos of white people, they would just be fine. Because other than its central virtuous manchild, all the people of color in this movie are repulsive stereotypes: at one point we see they are smoking weed and drinking malt liquor and talking about raping white teenagers around illegitimate children. I imagine the real Michael Oher story is one of nuance, complexity, and troubling projections about race, class, and culture. The movie whitewashes all those to tell a neat story about a rich white woman who teaches a black kid how to play football (literally; there is a scene when she tells him how to be an offensive tackle). It's inspiration is drawn from that, and the most troubling feature of the story - true and fictional - is breezed over in a hamfisted way: Oher ultimately went to play for a university for which his foster parents were consistent boosters. I really have no problem with this last fact - the family practically raised Oher for three years, they should have some say in where he goes to college - but the way the movie artlessly deals with it suggests that you should be suspicious. Sandra Bullock's performance is pedestrian at best, embarrassing at worst, and I say this as a begrudging fan: she was really quite good in 28 DAYS. But Bullock lacks the innate charm of a southern woman and broadcasts her confidence in actorly gestures. She succeeds because the story gives her offensive stereotypes to react to: the African American community with no perceivable values who, apparently, are there because they aren't enough like Bullock or Tim McGraw. It is unfortunate that this film will endure as a monument to an undeserving actor and a troubling "inspirational" tale.

DISTRICT 9 - This inventive, highly political alien movie worked for audiences because it established its premise quickly and effectively, putting us in an alternate universe that we never once questioned. Neil Blomkamp has made the first realistic alien movie, using the documentary style to good effect. The movie is fascinatingly bureaucratic, only enhancing the realism, and that commitment draws in much of its absurdity. But showing how ill-equipped contemporary diplomacy is to handle outsiders or "threats," we're left asking questions about the implications of any foreign policy. My issue with the movie is its protagonist - "Wikus." I couldn't stand him. He bugged the crap out of me. He distracted me. I kept wanting him to go away, and his central presence made the movie difficult to watch. But that strangely adds to the integrity of this piece.

AN EDUCATION - Carey Mulligan gives a tour-de-force performance, making her a breakthrough star and eventually (perhaps) an icon. The iconography she fits into loves her: Audrey Hepburn, the early 1960s, the yet-to-come British Invasion. But mostly the movie is an anecdote to all those "manic pixie dreamgirl" flicks in which quirky romance leads to a freeing sense of individual perspective. This drama, more kitchen sink than soap opera, eschews such conventional readings. Peter Saarsgard is equally great - his Americanness makes him out of place even as his charming personality helps him to fit in: it's inspired casting. I loved the details of this movie: the dog races, the Oxford bars, and the papers by teenage girls about Jane Eyre. I didn't much care for the ending which, without spoiling too much, turns a denouement into the kind of conventional theatrics that the movie usually avoids.

THE HURT LOCKER - Jeremy Renner is the other breakout star of the year, and I've liked him even when he's been in awful movies as diverse as SWAT and NORTH COUNTRY. THE HURT LOCKER gives him a role he's born to play, and I wonder whether he'll ever be able to play anything but: a jockish, slightly thoughtful dude who is only happy when he's in some kind of immanent danger. THE HURT LOCKER is driven primarily by the performances of Renner and Anthony Mackie (who deserved a nomination but stupidly didn't get one), and the overt political commentary that has produced a number of forgettable movies about Iraq is gone here. Kathryn Bigelow treats the film as a character study under duress, and it works as such. That said, I wasn't as entranced as most audiences: it was fine piece of craftsmanship and a nicely intimate portrait, but nothing particularly profound or fascinating.

INGLORIOUS BASTERDS - Here is my favorite of the nominated films: like all Tarantino movies it is in love with movies, but this one is brash and bold enough to make the movies a means of liberation and history. My only complaint is that it isn't long enough: we needed another scene of the Basterds wreaking havoc in France. All the polyglots are remarkable: not only Christoph Waltz but also the many German and French speakers who make up the other heroes and villains - every beat they hit is just right. Tarantino takes two of his loves - World War II action movies and Sergio Leone Superhero Spaghetti Westerns - and maps it onto a historical terrain; the result reminds of the virtues and glorious excesses of both (their music, their revisionist history, their archetypes, their killer dialogue).

PRECIOUS - Didn't see it . . .

A SERIOUS MAN - It's probably my least favorite Coen Brothers movie other than the two in between THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE and NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. I've noted before that the Coens are experts at diving into a dialect and a sub-culture and putting their own joyfully weird spin on it. A SERIOUS MAN, however, is a prolonged exercise in nihilism, both implicitly and explicitly, and in many ways this very, very Jewish movie resembles that most famous of Hebrew tales of suffering: the book of Job, with its endless suffering and backseat religious commentary. The Coens sit us through every painful moment: ineffectual Rabbis, Lawyers who need retainer fees, and (of course) a really stiflingly filmed Bar Mitzvah. It's the one Coen brothers movie that I've appreciated more than liked.

UP - I saw UP at a drive-thru with my girlfriend on a beautiful summer evening. So obviously I was in a good mood. I laughed the whole time - it's one of two Pixar movies that captures the goofy, go-for-broke charm and imagination of Disney flicks (RATATOUILLE is the other). The opening scenes are wistful and sad and go places that animated films uses don't.

UP IN THE AIR - I do NOT understand why everyone is freaking out about this movie or about George Clooney's performance. I've heard that Clooney is vulnerable, which means that this is the first movie he's made where he's allowed himself to look older than normal. But, come on . . . George Clooney is from Wisconsin and has two unglamorous sisters? And I found his "job" a bit disingenuous: every scene sounded scripted to give Clooney the winning shot. The best scenes involved the two females: Anna Kendrick and Vera Farmiga, but the worst had Clooney brazenly praising the airline industry. Even the final revelations didn't make this shallow; you leave thinking that American Airlines is an awesome company.

That's it!

(IF YOURE ON IT, LOOK OUT!)

1. DONALD TRUMP - YOURE WORTHLESS

2. E.E. CUMMINGS - CAPITALIZE YOUR NAME, MORON!

3. KATHERINE HEPBURN - YECH!!!!!!

4. PHILLIP RIVERS - I'M SORRY, I DON'T LIKE YOU AND I NEVER DID

5. FATS DOMINO - JOKES OVER, YOU'RE TO FAT.

6. BREAKFAST - YOURE NOT THE MOST IMPORTANT MEAL OF THE DAY; I DON'T CARE WHAT ANYONE SAYS

7. MITCH ALBOM - NO!!!!!!!!!!!

8. ANDY RODDICK - I WOULDN'T PAY TO WATCH YOU HIT A TENNIS BALL IF MY LIFE DEPENDED ON IT

9. ANGELA LANSBURY - THAT'S RIGHT, I DON'T LIKE YOU, AND THERE'S NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT

10. GEORGE STEPHANUPHOLOUS - NOBODY CAN SPELL YOUR NAME RIGHT, YOU WEIRDO

11. LORNE MICHAELS - YOU FILTHY STINKING IDIOT

12. SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE - I HATE YOU AND THE SNOTBALL DETECTIVE STORIES YOU INFECTED THE WORLD WITH

13. THOSE IRISH HIPPIES FROM THE MOVIE "ONCE" - GET A HAIRCUT AND STOP SINGING, YOU DIRTBAGS

14. MIKHAIL GORBACHEV - YOU ARE THE WORST WORLD LEADER WHO EVER LIVED AND YOU KNOW IT

15. THE NOTORIOUS B.I.G. - MORE LIKE THE (NOT) NOTORIOUS B.A.D.

16. PARLIAMENT - YOU BEAUROCRATIC GAP-TOOTHED MEATHEADS

17. DICK TRACY - YOU COULDN'T STOP A TRAIN THAT WASN'T MOVING, YOU BORING GUMSHOE

18. NEIL ARMSTRONG - YOU'RE ONE GIANT LEAP FOR JERKS.

19. JOSE CANSECO - STAY AWAY FROM ME!

20. MARTIN SHORT - YOU REMIND ME OF THIS KID IN MY FIRST GRADE CLASS AND I DIDN'T LIKE HIM EITHER

A lot of people have read the first song, "Neighborhood #1: Tunnels" as some of post-apocalyptic nightmare. I don't: it seems like a nine year old boy try to talk a nine year old girl into running away with him and imagining the future. But what does he imagine in the future? Missing his parents. But the closing lines, where a "golden hymn" is capable of "purifying" his mind seems to be more mission statement than metaphor. We are dealing with someone who thinks music can change the world, who writes rock and roll polemics about being enslaved by modernity, and who harbors no mythologies about his childhood yet misses it dreadfully.

A lot of people think I'm taking their solemnity too seriously (haha), but I've yet to find any moment that seems like a throw-away. The second song compares a prodigalolder brother to a Russian dog who was sent to space to die. The Neighborhood is a prison, parents are wardens who we love nonetheless; the images of the neighborhood possess an otherworldly mystery: the shadows and streetlights hide secrets.

A while back I read a tome called GEOGRAPHY OF NOWHERE by some Rolling Stone writer, which did a pretty thorough (if typical) job of tracing the suburb from its earliest development and makes grim predictions (in 1993) that have more or less come true. If anything, that narrative seems a little familiar, and the Arcade Fire has done a nice job of complicating that. No matter how mechanical the reproduction of suburbs are, we will invest our "neighborhoods" with meaning nonetheless. We will memorialize its mysteries, amplify its secrets, mythologize its events, and make it the idyllic place it never was. And then we won't, which is why the words "Wake Up" are divested of their empowering potential: in this case, it's necessary to adjust, to feel things deeper, and to realize that its all a lie.

I admit my analysis of this album is sketchy. I really don't have the skills to do it justice. But if you can tell me that the last lines of the album harbor some hope, you'll defy me. Instead I think these guys are like Jeremiah-esque prophets, deeply invested in some tragedies that the rest of us ignore. Those lyrics:

I like the peace
in the backseat,
I don't have to drive,
I don't have to speak,
I can watch the country side
Alice died
in the night,
I've been learning to drive.
My whole life,
I've been learning.

Nothing about Eef Barzelay, or the band he acts as an almost non-existent primary factor of, the rotating entity called Clem Snide is fairly original. Eef is a poet of melancholy, as were many others, and his band plays something between Alt-Country and standard Indie-Rock - this very fair Pitchfork review says so, and it's right. The band is neither particularly innovate or interesting in terms of what its been doing in a period when bands hop to the forefront by being innovate and interesting. Which is why you may not have heard of YOUR FAVORITE MUSIC, my favorite Clem Snide album (BTW, Pitchfork gave this a hyperbolically bad 2.1, saying it "begs for laugh tracks").

If Bob Dylan's melancholy was contrived to sound original, Eef's is so original it sounds contrived. When he sings, "Tonight we're going to party like its 1989," he reminds listeners like me that he participated in the same pop cultural phenomenons, and has been just as disappointed in them as harbingers of the exciting new era they were supposed to bring. 1989 had the Berlin Wall falling, and yet it was still kind of boring - there are things going on here that you might at first scoff at; like Clem Snide is being funny in the same way everyone else is. But they aren't.

THE GHOST OF FASHION, the album that followed, largely eschewed the somber melodies of this album and was their most critically and commercially popular - it featured the opening credits song to the cult-TV hit ED, but it was scrapped for the Foo Fighters song from the first season. GHOST rocks a little harder. I like listening to it, along with 2003's SOFT SPOT and 2005's END OF LOVE. But YOUR FAVORITE MUSIC combines both intimate sadness with Eef's recognition that he has to explain it. "Your Favorite Music," the title track only "makes you sad" - this is as trenchant an explanation as Nick Hornby's opening question from HIGH FIDELITY (paraphrased): "What came first, the music or the misery? Do I listen to pop music because I'm miserable, or Am I miserable because I listen to pop music?"

I wrote an unsuccessful statement of purpose for grad school around Eef's transcendent "I Love the Unknown," a loose narrative about a guy who quits the job his dad gave him, refuses to love the girl who loves him, rides buses to nowhere, and tells a psychiatrist that he's afraid of "going through life feeling numb." And when he tells us in "Messiah Complex Blues" that "I wouldn't die for your sins," it's at once a rejection of faith and an endorsement of the idea of a Messiah. Nobody working in popular music has dealt with issues of faith and spirituality like Barzelay; as a cultural commentator, he's incisive without making each song a polemic. It's a shame Johnny Cash died before he could cover "Messiah Complex Blues" (or a number of CS songs; my dream album would be AMERICA V: CASH COVERS CLEM SNIDE).

Maybe, like the "favorite music" to which the title indicates, this album is supposed to make you sad. But it ends up always making me feel like I have a fellow traveler, someone who can't really articulate what's going on, but wants to bring the night alive with laughs, as he suggests as an anecdote to the awful party in "1989." I suppose everyone doesn't want to spend time with that guy, who realizes that the party isn't any fun but anticipates making fun of it later. He's kind of like that "Debby Downer" character from SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, but I think you can see that mixed in a with a desire for something awesome, something "unknown," that creaks out from behind the sad violins and ironic horns. You feel like you know him.

So there's one last shoutout for my favorite band who no one has heard of.

I immediately caught onto The Strokes, hopping on an already full-to-capacity bandwagon, because they seemed loud, disgusting, and vaguely untalented. But they've proved anything but - after a few years adopting the personas of lounge singers, they're something an elder statesmen to bands who are much, much worse than them, and maybe Julian Casablancas reformed by seeing what junk he spawned. Yes this album is influential and its influence is, mostly, not very good. But I like to think of it in terms of ITS influences - Velvet Underground and Guided by Voices among them. And while this album probably isn't as incendiary as it seemed in 2001 (wow), what with the gloved hand touching the woman's bottom and all, it is only bad if you've listened to it 200 times. And I have and I still like it.

"Hard to Explain" remains one of my favorite songs of the decade - a loud homage to the kind of music they liked -

Raised in Carolina, she says:
" I'm not like that"
Trying to remind her
When we go back

I realize that devil-may-care is usually used to refer to profligate sons of extremely religious shopowners from the 1800s, but it seems to fit the vibe of the Strokes lyricizing. When they announce, in "Hard to Explain," that "this place is a zoo," they are not technically speaking in the pejorative. And "grandsons" may not understand what happened "Last 'Nite," but that - to ape Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs - is what makes it fun.

PS - you should find the bootleg copy of "New York City Cops," a song they often play live which states the titular subject is simply, "not very smart." It's so stupidly subversive . . . I saw them play it live and it was a highlight.

Best Song: "Hard to Explain"

9. Josh Ritter, THE ANIMAL YEARS

Josh Ritter falls uncomfortably into a category of singer-songwriters who lack his ambition or experimentation with lyrics. First, let's forgive him for being named "Josh" - and not "Bob" or "Bruce" and recognize that on his signature he channels them both without aping either. And that he seamlessly enters references to Laurel and Hardy that make those two black and white goofs a haunting allusion. The lack of pretension in Ritter is what makes him endure, he churns out effortlessly lines like "the keys to the kingdom gets lost inside the kingdom" (Bob) and "Packs of dogs and cigarettes For those who ain¹t done packing yet" (Bruce)

"Lillian Egypt," "Girl in the War," "Here at the Right Time," and "Good Man" are a fine introduction to Ritter's work, but many might be put off by the gravitas and poetry of the second to last song, "Thin Blue Flame."

"I became a thin blue flame" begins a song full of endless ambiguity that never gets unraveled. It's sublime - both wonderful and terrible, full of clouds, clowns, and God - if he's up there - "in a cold dark room." Questions are being asked without being phrased as questions, and Ritter lets the modernist imagery take over along the way with a relatively simple sound. It gets louder, then softer, then louder - Springsteen's Nebraska mixed with Dylan's imagery without, and I have to emphasize this, stealing from either. Were it an actual poem, it probably wouldn't be published in the NEW YORKER, but its great stuff nonetheless, reaching transcendence through some pretty weird passageways - unlike some of these guys, Ritter doesn't sound like he's too enamored with his college creative writing class.

"The straight of the highway and the scattered out hearts They were coming together they pulling apart And angels everywhere were in my midst In the ones that I loved in the ones that I kissed I wondered what it was I'd been looking for up above Heaven is so big there ain¹t no need to look up So I stopped looking for royal cities in the air Only a full house gonna have a prayer"

Ritter's next album, THE HISTORICAL CONQUEST OF JOSH RITTER, was something of a letdown, but I know people who love it (update: I listened to it again and enjoyed it more). But this album nears perfection in a way that a guy this new to the world shouldn't be able to.

Best Song: Thin Blue Flame

8. Destroyer, DESTROYERS RUBIES

Yes, Dan Bejar is a troubadour - that's not a back-handed compliment. His lyrics are dense, vaguely melodic, full of wild abstractions and lines that seem lifted out of Finnegan's Wake. It isn't, obviously, for everyone; the songs Bejar sings are usually the weirdest on any of the New Pornographers albums, and occasionally the most awesome (as on Challengers). And Bejar has a cult like no other - the scarily exhaustive Destroyer Wiki takes some of the mystery out of what should be endlessly complex: telling us, for instance, that the lines "typical me, typical me" in track one ("Rubies") are ripped from a Smiths song. In fact, the Wiki records about six references to iconic bands or singers in "Rubies" alone.

But no matter what you can tease out of a typical Destroyer song, what remains magical is what you cannot. And it's wild poetry, indeed - carried along by an epic sense of place and mood. Each song on "Rubies" captures the feeling that Bejar strives for on all of his albums, as Andy Battaglia writes from the AV Club, "a literary exercise in just how far songs can stretch to make sense of the words within them."

Bejar teases us by making the songs sound so DAMN meaningful - each one capturing a memory that we'll never be able to decipher, so we have live in the moment he captures musically. But his images, while approaching some kind of redundant imagism for its own sake, always reflect rather than deflect his creative urge, his desire to do something that no one else is doing. And it that, he is wildly successful.

Best Song: "Your Blues"

7. Radiohead, KID A

There is nothing else to be said about this album. I agree with all the praise it gets. It did what few similar projects did: built on an agreed-upon masterpiece with something new and equally celebrated. KID A did all the things we expected of Radiohead, while doing them in ways that none of us imagined they would. My narrative with Radiohead, unlike most, begins with KID A - it was the album I understood all the rest of them through: the earlier poppier sound of THE BENDS and the grand achievement of OK COMPUTER, followed by the dissonant dissent of HAIL TO THE THIEF. That its B-Sides, as of yet unloved by me, make many top 50 lists is an understatement to the creative capital this band possessed in the early ots.

I confuse a lot of people with my insistence that VANILLA SKY is a wonderful, albeit extremely flawed, movie and it was hearing "Everything In Its Right Place" as Tom Cruise drives through an unoccupied New York that only exists in his dreams, that made me give KID A another listen; I got it. So did everyone else. Thanks Cameron Crowe.

Best Song: "Everything In Its Right Place"

6. Wilco, YANKEE HOTEL FOXTROT

Another album that really doesn't need much revisiting from me, but I'll reflect on a few songs.

"Heavy Metal Drummer" is one of the songs that makes me happier about music, and the opening lines, "I sincerely miss those heavy metal bands I used to go see in the landing in the summer" could begin a novel. It hints at a memory at once lucid and elusive: there's a girl who loved those drummers, and there's innocence that paints the landing and the music that happened there as an impossible paradise: that is EXACTLY the way we reminisce about our teenage years: that Wilco goes for the shameless romanticism of this song is why so many people love them, I think, and it's the harbinger of their last two albums, each of which have taken this wistful moment and elaborated on it. And fittingly enough, there is some pretty superlative drumwork.

But there's also the deep, simple longing of "Poor Places" ("I really want to see you tonight"), the coded dissent of "War on War," and the giddy euphoria of "I've the Man Who Loves You." I'm always struck by how the bizarre lyrics of "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" gradually become more cohesive, how it moves from the surreal nonsense of an "American Aquarium Drinker" to "What I was thinking when I let you back in."

The story behind this album is more momentous than the album itself, but the drama behind its production and release, and the way it seemed to be a mirror for every artist/"the man" dichotomy that ever played out, tends to be unnecessary background noise for the album itself. That's unfortunate, yet necessary. Too many people have seen I AM TRYING TO BREAK YOUR HEART and saw the band at their most griping (which, all things considered, was handled with considerable maturity). Jeff Bennett's recent death was an unhappy ending to that narrative, but it should not challenge the best album they've ever made.

Best Song: "Poor Places"

TOP 5 TO COME (Individually wrapped)

I would say something witty like "these guys would be like the Beatles and there would be an Icelandic invasion if we could pronounce their names," but that would be stupid. I don't possess the music vocabulary to write about what's going on in their songs, and I don't speak Icelandic, so only the Wikipedia can help me know, for instance, that their name means "White Rose" and that one of their members goes by "Goggi."

But every Sigur Ros album is singularly stunning in a way that enhances the last and anticipates the next. This is typically strong stuff, perhaps not as resonant or revelatory as 1999's AGAETIS BYRUM, and a bit more dissonant, but it's an album you can both admire and like. I found myself, during a bleak February (the worst month for high school teachers), rotating between AGAETIS, ( ), and TAKK constantly. I have trouble distinguishing them, but I rarely was disappointed when it was time for a specific album to come up. And that's all I can say about it.

Best Song: I dunno . . . they all blend together; here's one.

19. Peter, Bjorn, and John, WRITERS BLOCK

WRITERS BLOCK is a departure for an electro-heavy band I don't listen otherwise - a warm, goofy, infectious compilation. Songs from it are always in my top 25 most listened on Itunes, particularly the much-mixed most popular track "Old Folks" but also the haunting last tracks "Roll The Credits" and "Old Cow." There isn't a bad song on this album, which is full of interesting sounds. There's an interesting narrative here that I've never made time to follow, something that wavers between joyous reflection and post-relationship malaise, which makes any of these songs a proof-text for whatever you happen to be feeling at the moment.

Best Song: Objects of my Affection

18. British Sea Power, THE DECLINE OF BRITISH SEA POWER

I won't praise this justly praised, very loud, very energetic effort from this curiously named non-naval force. Ultimately, I prefer a BSP mix from their three albums (DECLINE, OPEN SEASON, DO YOU LIKE ROCK MUSIC?), but their first is their signature and features all their best qualities: it always seems like they're a poor-man's someband or another, but they always end up impressing me with their ability to bring together disparate elements. BSP came along in the middle of the "weird guys wearing weird costumes being weird in concert" phase, and it wasn't as original as the Flaming Lips, who were popping out of pods and dressed as rabbits. So they always seem to be hanging on someone else's coattails.

But here's the thing: there is NO bad song on this album, and only about two or three aren't achingly awesome. "Lately" could be expanded into a symphony, and at 14 minutes, its one of the few songs that long that I would call too short. It blends dissonance and the clear talents of everyone in the band into questions about what it really means to make music, and does it while proudly displaying the same absurdity as other songs. If there's one thing I could do to this album, it's this - end the album with the charming, should-be-radio-hit "Blackout;" as it is, it's disjointed to hear this pretty piece of pop next to the epic "Lately." But even if its parts don't always come together, they're pretty amazing to see in pieces.

Best Song: Blackout

17. Spiritualized, SONGS IN A&E

I'll just quote what I said last year when I picked it as my favorite album of year: "Jason Pierce has already created a cult that, on a microcosm scale, Morrisey might be jealous of. Spacemen 3 are godfathers of about five different genres, and Spiritualized emerges to remind everyone they exist every so often. Pierce resists the cult by disappearing into other projects, but Spiritualized offers him the front-man job he sometimes resists, but clearly deserves.
LADIES AND GENTLEMAN WE ARE FLOATING IN SPACE may remain the defining Spiritualized album, and with good reason, but SONGS IN A&E is clearly his most personal work. Written during or after the long stint Pierce spent in the Accident and Emergency Ward because of respiratory failure (hence A&E), these SONGS form an at-times magical concept album about the cruel divide between passionate and unrequited love. Pierce competently works in a variety of noises (church bells, computer sounds) that enhance rather than distract, and the harmonies form touching chapters in between the songs that wear the influences of Pierce's friends and idols in every second (Springsteen, Daniel Johnston).
Critics raved about SONGS when it came out, but it's been noticeably absent on the year end best lists. But in a year when bands repeated themselves to good effect, I'm going with the ambitious power-drive of A&E as the best of the year."
Best Song: Soul on Fire

16. Spoon, GA GA GA GA GA GA

An album that I find myself listening to constantly - I'll argue with anyone that this is the best one they've ever put out. It captures their gift for the lost art of the three minute pop song - even the one that goes nearly five minutes feels like a short but perfect moment. The opening beats of "Don't Make a Target" are rhythmic in a way that anticipates the later songs, but there's something lonely and desolate even among the energy - like coming into the middle of a party. "The Ghost of You Lingers" is about as deep as they get: a lot of surface fears articulated with the utmost gravitas, ultimately making a lot of simple yet clear points about losing people and trying to forget them. We'll never know if that's the appropriate way to listen to this song, or this album, or if its just the meaningless words that accompany the experimental bombast, but it works.

Best Song: "The Underdog"

15. Sufjan Stevens, ILLINOIS

The grand mission that hasn't been fulfilled: Suf's plan to make an album about all fifty states. So far, he's 48 short, and in the years since his stunning breakthrough outside more esoteric circles, he's only put out a superlative B-sides albums, yearly awesome and unironic Christmas records, and some quirky side-projects. ILLINOIS remains as the harbinger of a follow-up that never was, and the ensuing response . . . perhaps that's why it never happened.

In "Chicago," the most oft-played of the bunch, Sufjan sings, "I fell in love with a place, in my mind, in my mind," and its that passion that carries the whole album - a sympathy matched with a completely unique quirkiness that drew so many fans to this weird, infectious concept piece. "John Wayne Gacy" does not hide its curiosity behinds layers of self-reference; it's the kind of story that has to be told if you want to understand a place, whether in your mind or elsewhere. Sufjan's commitment to this place is why I'm disappointed he hasn't continued to explore other significant places.

ILLINOIS still finds new fans, and I imagine that it will resonate with younger audiences (for good reasons) more than any other album of this decade.

Best Song: "They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back From The Dead!! Ahhhh!"

14. Beck, SEA CHANGE

My favorite Beck album is his most significant departure; it's often debated among Beck fans, as it signals a move away from the experimental goofball that everyone fell in love with. As he oscillates between those two personalities, I hardly prefer one to the other, but am glad that such a talented human being is willing to explore both sounds. We could see the Beck of "Mutations" or "Odelay" taking a title like "Guess I'm Doing Fine" as his latest collage of fascinating sounds, but it's actually a pretty accurate way of the way this album feels. "Paper Tiger" is gloomy and eerily deprecating while the optimism of "Sunday Sun" gets lost in everything that's going on around it; who ever thought Beck would be compared to Nick Drake? But that's the mood that occurs here.

Beck had a good decade, but his star has neither risen nor fallen; an album like SEA CHANGE isn't likely to open him up to more audiences, but it further endeared to an artist I liked, and made me like him more.

Best Song: "Paper Tiger"

13. AC Newman, GET GUILTY

Were I to make a "Best of 2009" list, it would be short. I didn't freak out quite as much about any of the albums that most people loved - Grizzly Bear, Animal Collective, Phoenix, The Dirty Projectors - and the only two that I find myself repeatedly listening to were by members of the New Pornographers - Neko Case's MIDDLE CYCLONE and A.C. Newman's awesome and mostly-unheard of GET GUILTY. It's a grand album, from its opening licks that tells you exactly what you're going to get: Newman's inimitable ability to create diverse harmonies bound by a common mood and energy.

On the opening line of the opening track, Newman sings, "There are about ten or twelve things that I can teach you; make of that what you will." When he gets to the last one, he's telling us, "You have to got to be . . . ****ing kidding me." That's what we're dealing with here - the dance floor rhythms of "Like a Hitman, Like a Dancer" and the dour indecipherability of "Young Atlantis." Newman rocks this sucker out; I can listen to every one of these songs at any moment of my day. To describe it would be ridiculous, so I won't, but continue to endorse it so that Newman finds new fans.

Best Song: All My Days and All My Days Off

12. Bishop Allen, CHARM SCHOOL

My love for Bishop Allen and their debut album is linked to my discovery of mumblecore. MUTUAL APPRECIATION - which will show up on my fave films of the decade - starred B.A. frontman Justin Rice, a bespectacled doofus with a good attitude. "Things are what you make of them," he tells us, on a song that got me through a tough period of my life, or "Ghosts are good company." He does a weird remix of "Eve of Destruction" that shows his gifts for entering stories In Media Res. And "Bishop Allen Drive" is achingly romantic without being about romance. These guys have a gift for picking stellar back-up singers, like the luminous Kate Dollenmayer, mumblecore star of FUNNY HAHA.

The album itself features an ambitious array of allusion and anachronism (and alliteration!), which makes them seem Decemberist-lite, though Charm School came out before the Dec.s breakthrough, PICARESQUE. It features an interesting sampling of Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction" that takes that title and applies it more universally, drawing out the alluring melody of the original while sacrificing the dated draft-card burning doom and gloom. And "Things Are What You Make Of Them" should become a mantra, particularly its closing verse: "and you know what I mean; yeah you know what I mean." But it never became a hipster rallying cry, even as its taken on a lot of significance with me.

CHARM SCHOOL may ultimately be too twee for those who got really excited about Animal Collective or, for that matter, Nirvana. It's an album and a band that doesn't seem interested in any of the bigger issues, and yet their poppy roots still sound experimental; that's probably why, outside of "Click Click Click" (from 2nd album THE BROKEN STRING, and the soundtrack to a camera commercial), they've yet to show up anywhere except the random Independent movie soundtrack. But this an affecting and effective album, an album whose surprising mix of whimsy and melancholy acted as the soundtrack for a turbulent moment I wanted to end, yet remains as residue for what I think I like about the things that I like. And you know what I mean. Yeah, you know what I mean.

Best Song: Things Are What You Make of Them (this is an interesting version, different from the album, that was used for the craptastical farce "Saved," and inexplicably is scoring a bunch of highlights from HALO - I guess b/c he repeats the word "Halo or Hello")

11. Pedro The Lion, CONTROL

My introduction to Pedro still stands as my sentimental favorite, and no amount of David Bazan's neuroses is going to make me dislike this album. Bazan made his name as a darling of the Christian rock crowd, but CONTROL signals the break (I think) from the early PG-rated stuff to the ironic and angry energy of CONTROL. At first adamant about his faith, Bazan has since been elusive, and the results have been surprising. CONTROL marks the last good work he's done, and I'll argue that with anyone (though ACHILLES HEEL, the last official Pedro the Lion, has its moments).

On control, Bazan's anger often takes the form of an overwhelming frustration, put to music and given exclamation by his wit - in Bazan's ruminations about sex, capitalism, childhood, and some of the big questions, there's always the welcome aspect that he doesn't understand any of them, and that makes his commentary less incisive, more personal.

Bazan sometimes reminds me of the Simpsons episode where Krusty the Klown becomes a rage-fueled stand-up comic, and that makes his sometimes-audience, me among them, the Homer Simpson who shouts out things like "Don't you hate pants?" We want Bazan to articulate our frustrations, and he used to do it as well as anyone - without preaching to us, where the anger on the surface collides with the intellect and curiosity beneath it.

Best Song: Indian Summer; which isn't available, so here's the equally good Magazine

Efron is better than inoffensive, worse than great in Richard Linklater's gloriously entertaining new film ME AND ORSON WELLES. He sings, smiles, and has a kind-of whiz-bang clean-cuttedness that hides his intentions always on the sly. But he and the always-boring Claire Danes are merely scenery for the best performance of the year from Christian McKay.

I know nothing about McKay; neither do you. Check out his IMDB profile - not even a supporting role on LAW AND ORDER. But he looks the part and gives it the necessary gusto. Welles is a force of nature, a boy genius who walks into the room with false humility only to vehemently prove he's smarter than everyone else. He's a master of two mediums (theater and radio), and the film closes as he sets his eyes on another (film). McKay dominates every scene he's in, and Linklater shoots him appropriately - the camera follows him, or the camera centers on him even as others are more pertinent to the context of the shot: it's as though Welles the character is implicitly directing the scene.

There's a rogue's gallery of long-forgotten actors and personalities, lovingly embodied on the surface without any unnecessary depth by Linklater: Norman Lloyd (later to become famous by falling off the Statue of Liberty in Hitchcock's Saboteur) is a ham; George Colouris (a Welles regular) is an arrogant neurotic; Joseph Cotten (who had a great run in the 40s) is a slick ladies man with a good heart. And there are dames, divas, and Guffman-esque critics to boot. But the movie belongs to McKay, and it's to Efron's credit that he lets him have it. The romantic intrigue plot is not what you'll come away talking about, but it doesn't make it a worse film: it allows us to see Welles in all his bluster and bravado. In that sense, it's a nice conceit.

Linklater is an interesting cat. DAZED AND CONFUSED is one of my favorite movies, but I'm only fond of a few of his others: not really big on the SUNRISE flicks (mumblecore does that so much better), thought SCHOOL OF ROCK was overrated, and FAST FOOD NATION an interesting misfire. But SLACKER (which spawned mumblecore, I get it), DAZED, WAKING LIFE, and A SCANNER DARKLY make a fascinating aimless canon: dreamy flicks about people wandering around and trying to figure out what it's all about without ever really getting there. I never would have thought he would have been up to the task of a period piece, particularly since he muffed THE NEWTON BOYS, but the result is an unfussy, energetic portrayal of a period and a scene. The final set-piece - Welles' contemporary revisioning of JULIUS CAESAR featuring fascists and a Mussolini-like Caesar - is accurately realized without ever calling attention to its own artifice.

So I'm happy to give one glowing recommendation (see it!); here's another. Surprise! I like Wes Anderson's latest movie - THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX. It's his funniest movie since BOTTLE ROCKET, and its charming without the rough edges of some of Anderson's best characters. Mr. Fox reminds me of the lovechild of Dignan and Royal Tenenbaum - he has the former's good nature and the latter's need to control things.

I've always thought a pretty typical, unheralded moment in Anderson's filmography is when Royal meets Chaz's kids at the playground. He sees their dog Buckley, and says, "Sit Buckley." Anderson always thrives on characters who like to plan events that might fail magnificently, who try to control that which utterly evades them: Dignan's cold-storage heist, Max Fischer's aquarium, Chaz's protection of his children, Francis' trip through India, Zissou's hunt for the Tiger Shark. Mr. Fox is no different, and that's probably what drew Anderson to Roald Dahl's lovely little book.

There's a joyful subversive sense of the radical here: Mr. Fox is stickin' it to the man and still unabashedly a hero. He's a fox who rejects no one - the animal kingdom has never seemed more democratic and communal. Even an evil rat has a poignant moment. And the father/son stuff, always more complex than it seems in Anderson, is just a nicely wrought here as it has been before.

But mostly this movie is funny. Every backdrop, song cue, and anthropomorphic personality is lovingly conceived; my personal favorite is Owen Wilson as a passive but brutally sincere polar bear coaching a sport too ridiculous to be described (it involves long division, and lighting a pine cone). And the constant digging is like something out of DIG DUG.

- My friend Jake wrote a much better review of ME AND ORSON WELLES on his blog - check it out.

http://thenighteditor.blogspot.com/2009/12/portrait-of-welles-as-young-man.html

But last night, perhaps because the guest lacked the talent to carry any of the sketches, Sudeikis, Hader, and Forte were showcased. Also Bobby Moynihan, who is clearly pretty gifted, and the two newcomers who I can't tell apart. The best skit was the last one featuring Forte and Sudeikis - a glorious piece with layers and layers of absurdity and allusion about a man inexplicably dressed as Colonel Sanders applying for a job as an Astronaut who steals a potato chip. At its best moments (before it devolves into gross-out humor), this skits recalls MR. SHOW with its singularly driven vision and attitude of "I don't care if you think its funny, this is what we're doing." I also find it hilarious that they keep referring to the purloined snack as a "Potato Chip."

These three guys have proven their comedic skills off the SNL stage - Sudeikis in 30 ROCK, Forte in FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS and some Bob Oedenkirk projects, and Hader in SUPERBAD and ADVENTURELAND (Hader needs one more solid supporting role in a hit movie to start thinking about being that Will Ferrell type, but it looks like that mantle will be assumed by Samberg, who is not nearly as gifted or funny). Along with Armisen, they need to be the ones carrying the show. Forte's clueless sports announcer is a perfect showcase for his quirky and inventive talents; a few years ago, they had him playing G.W. Bush, which shows how wrong the show tends to get it.

But sadly, there seems to be some strange ultimatum about promoting the hell out of Kenan Thompson. Since I've had DVR, and don't have to watch it live, I've watched SNL for the last four years - it's been mostly unrewarding, but I have grown to love Hader and sometimes fast forward to his bits. Thompson often dresses in drag and always hams it up. The results are unrewarding: he's a professional but he's rarely funny. Most of the time he plays a hysterical black person who dominates the scene. It's rarely funny, and it's sometimes vaguely racist - particularly because he's the only black actor on the show. So they often play him against someone who is not black, but is pretending to be.

It is the failure of the show to cast some other funny people of diverse ethnicities. They have got to be out there, but when the show peaked, they always had a Tim Meadows or Chris Rock or Garrett Morris or (best case scenario) Eddie Murphy. When Maya Rudolph has to guest star as Oprah, that's a problem, and when the only vaguely Hispanic-looking Armisen has to play Obama . . . another problem. But SNL continues to round out their cast with white hipsters who are good at playing white hipsters. And to remedy this, they rely on the not-so-talented Thompson. This myopic casting vision has haunted SNL since Tim Meadows left, and I find caricatures like the one where Thompson plays a large black woman who tries to trade sex for a dress repulsive. It plays on the worst stereotypes, doesn't comment ironically on them, and ultimately is grotesque and offensive.

Even after the millennium, SNL continues to be a star-making factory: Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are both doing great work; Will Ferrell is still a mega-star even after a few box-office flops; Samberg has clearly broken out and Hader and Wiig are about to. But the show needs to dedicate itself to something it only rarely does: being a venue for people other than funny white people (Murphy and Rock being the obvious exceptions). When the only black actor they have is mainly a vehicle for making fun of black people, that's a problem.

I don't know what to make of Seth Meyers. When he was a full-time cast member, he was awful: terrible at imitations and bad at anything else other than playing a straight man (when he would occasionally lapse into laughter, unlike Sudeikis who nails the above scene). It would be reductive and fallacious to blame him for the bad scenes and others for the good; for all I know, but someone had to green-light the "disgusting, imbecilic black woman shopping" sketch, and I can't think Meyers was surprised to see it. Someone is deciding to showcase Thompson and Wiig over the three guys I've mentioned; and they dropped Casey Wilson, who was (in my opinion) funnier than Wiig because she didn't mug so much.

Why do I keep watching? Because it's easy and I can fast forward through the commercials. Often I've stopped watching before Weekend Update. But the show should develop into the new millennium, because I think it's lost its hipster audience, and needs to acknowledge that.

(Maybe I'm too hard on Wiig, but all of her characters seem to be a thirty second joke stretched out into five minutes. It's obvious she's a talented comedienne, but most of what she does relies on mugging, shouting, and portraying only slightly divergent versions of menopausal women. She's got potential)

The "Hide and Seek" scene from the OC

I have watched this clip over thirty times. Seriously.

I don't know why, but I think this scene is masterfully edited and that the music matches the scene both ironically and emotionally. I recognize that perhaps because I know nothing about this show, and have not seen a bunch of mildly talented generic good looking probably whiny young adult "actors" muff it with absurd rich-kid melodrama, that it gains some of its power. But as a one minute clip, this is pretty great stuff.

What a weird and awesome match of music and moment! I'm struck by everything about it: the darkness and shadows of the room, the suspense over the dude who is going to hit the guy who looks like Russell Crowe with a telephone (!), the girl who holds the gun like a girl who has never a gun, the way the unusual music and the manipulated, peculiar voice of the singer kicks in right when the bullet hits and both jars and makes more potent the impact, the way the blood cakes on the shirt and then drips, the way dude turns toward her, the symmetric layout of bodies on the floor as the music becomes a bizarre angelic chorus, the wordless eye of God last shot of a bunch of characters looking at the scene as the music provides no commentary whatsoever. The fact that this is apparently the last scene of a season, and that it fades out afterwards.

People tend to write me off as a high-culture contrarian or, at best, a high-culture contrarian wannabe. True, I guess; I don't watch reality TV and I find professional wrestling repugnant and uninteresting. I attempt to validate myself and my taste by expressing my genuine love for Burt Reynolds movies, but also comes across as ingenuine, and then my snobbishness is challenged as an affectation. I spend a lot of time wondering whether I am, in fact, a pseudo-intellectual poser who finds rhetorical means and aesthetic theories to validate the things that I think should be considered objectively good (like Neutral Milk Hotel and MOBY-DICK) but I wonder if I'm only liking stuff because other people like it.

And I just don't know what to do with this scene.

I'm writing a paper on THE FEDERALIST PAPERS about the linguistic/rhetorical/syntactic concept of "iconicity" - where "discursive form often enacts representative content" - that's working at the sentence level, of course, but its basically when form and theme work together so well that the former not only enhances the other (which it is supposed to do) but seems to make the implicit meaning absolutely indispensable and ultimately persuasive.

And I don't know, I feel like this scene kind of does this. It may not be a perfect match of background and foreground, but it works pretty beautifully.

I am thinking of going to see a mental health professional.

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"

Woody Allen is neither overrated or underrated; he's an academy award winner who makes a movie every year and some of them are great and some are mediocre. Over the last ten years, his output has been spotty, redeemed by MATCH POINT and - in some eyes - the recent VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA.

I couldn't agree less. Here is a film that doesn't capture any kind of live reality, yet tries to make bold statements about the nature of love. Three of the most beautiful people in the world (Bardem, Johannson, Cruz) occupy archetypes instead of characters; this was also a problem in MELINDA AND MELINDA. And they live in the kind of remarkable luxury that refuses to acknowledge a world that operates on any reasonable currency.

This has been a big problem for post 1980-Woody, who himself is a rich man and could never make a movie about the kind of schlubs who showed up in his wonderful, hilarious early work. These part-time teachers, out-of-work actors, fledgling comedy writers, and graduate students live in two bedroom apartments that the actors playing them probably couldn't afford. This spiritual problem carries over to VICKY: Barcelona apparently has no poverty; both American and Spaniard alike live in villas and mansions that Woody probably scouted on tourist calendars. This is because, I imagine, these are the kinds of places he goes when he visits Barcelona. It is an opulent fantasy that never acknowledges its opulence, and a luxuriousness that is ridiculously acknowledged as the status quo.

Cruz plays a troubled artist type and Bardem plays a Don Juan. Bardem's character has the potential to be the most interesting: he's far from the neurotic Allen surrogates that act as protagonists in most of his recent films (most recently played by Larry David). But no one like this has ever lived or will ever live - he's without nuance or narrative, and Bardem salvages it just because he's so damn interesting to watch. But the characters are crazy and passionate only so much as Woody needs them to be and never more.

(Side note: Bardem must be 5 foot 2; both of the actresses in the film are taller than him. He and Tom Cruise would stand side by side in a line-up)

(Another side note: I recently rewatched RAIN MAN - I've said it before and I'll say it here: Cruise gives one of the best performances of the 80s in that film and no one ever notices it. He makes the movie work).

There is a threesome between three of the best looking people in the world and it's referred to nonchalantly. At one point Johannson, Bardem's new lover, allows him to sleep with his ex-wife, who he still admits infatuation with. We don't see the conversation that allows this to happen, probably because Allen was too lazy to write it. The whole movie is clumsily explained in an intrusive, unnecessary voice-over. If ever "Show Don't Tell" were needed outside a creative writing class, it's here.

Barcelona looks great and the music (as always) is evocative. But it exists in a world of doll-houses and landscape photos. There was an excellent movie about Barcelona, and it was called, fittingly enough, BARCELONA. This is a romance that isn't romantic, a sex comedy that is only vaguely sexy. I mentioned doll-houses and this is my problem with Allen and it's my problem with Sam Mendes: they get the world's biggest playsets and churn out something hacky, clumsy, and unoriginal.

Woody Allen was once a great director, but if this is the best he can do, he needs to hang it up. This film lacks the charm and the deep insight that marked his post ANNIE HALL work, as well as the brilliant wit that has carried him from stand-up comedy to movie-making legend status. VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA is the worst movie he's ever made, and it will be a while before I consider seeing another one he makes.

40. The New Pornographers, CHALLENGERS

My favorite NP album is everyone else's least favorite. I feel TWIN CINEMA and MASS ROMANTIC are a lot of nice parts that don't really come together perfectly - like a "Best of" compilation. Being a supergroup has its issues, and the magic of the Pornos is that they bring together all these disparate points and make bellowing pop music - it obscures the random emptiness within: the messed-up poetry that doesn't really go anywhere. With songs like "Challengers" and "Myriad Harbor," CHALLENGERS approaches the coherence that their previous efforts lack; a lack, I realize, that many champion. But in this case I could see them not for the sum of their talented parts, and it's the one time I haven't wished I was listening to one of their solo efforts. The best song (below) is the perfect combination of Carl Newman's power-pop and Dan Bejar's rambling, troubadour instincts.

Best Song: "Myriad Harbor"

39. The Walkmen, YOU & ME

Last December, I wrote "YOU & ME doesn't reach for the rafters, but it tends to explode into passionate bursts that defy the ethos of the album: what is supposed to be a relatively subdued affair end ups transcendent by the sheer force of personality of the Walkmen." I still think this is an inspired effort by the group, who remain relatively obscure because they don't use their obvious skills to put out anything that would be played on the radio. The sparse, kind of lonely lyrics are augmented (for the first time) by a kind-of tinny echo, particularly on track 1, side 1 - "Donde Esta La Playa." The gang is describing a world that they're kind of tired of living in but don't want to leave - the momentary highs and memorable defeats. It's impressive work.

Best Song: "A Long Time Ahead of Us"

38. Radiohead, HAIL TO THE THIEF

I've had much to say about my failure to appreciate or even admire AMNESIAC. It kind of reminds me of this puzzle on the back of a box that Lisa finds in THE SIMPSONS; all of her friends get it immediately, but she can't. If AMNESIAC is that box, I've looked at it for a while, and I can't figure out the puzzle, and I'm getting tired of the puzzle. My strategy is, when I'm driving, to listen to all the Radiohead albums in order, as to better appreciate it. It hasn't worked, mainly because as I'm listening to the noise and cluttered sound of "I Might Be Wrong," I'm just wanting to skip ahead to HAIL TO THE THIEF.

Not that THIEF is The Beach Boys in terms of its listenability, but its full of an indecipherable anger that at least makes it exciting. In some ways, this seems like the most perfect achievement of both their intellect and their creative capacities, even if it is their fourth best album.

Best Song: "When I End and You Begin (The Sky is Falling In.)

37. Neko Case, FOX CONFESSOR BRINGS THE FLOOD

I saw Neko in 2006. She was a little, red person singing into a bad sound system. I didn't realize how little until she was inadvertently standing next to me. It's hard to believe that such a powerful voice comes out of such a little person; she's incredibly coordinated, holding the guitar and balancing herself while not exactly pulling a Janis Joplin on stage in terms of physical activity. FOX CONFESSOR may not be her most assured album - that's MIDDLE CYCLONE, or her mission statement - that would be BLACKLISTED. But FOX offers her telling stories, singing songs about people who have it worse than she does, reflexive and wistful yet always passionate.

Best Song: "Star Witness"

36. Eef Barzelay, BITTER HONEY

"That was my ass you saw bouncing
Next to Ludacris
It was only on screen for a second
But it was kinda hard to miss
And all those other hoochie skanks
They ain't got sh*t on me
And one of Nelly's bodyguards
He totally agreed"

When Eef and Clem Snide broke up (before the eventually got back together), nobody really noticed. Eef was the mastermind of the group, and I hoped for and got the best out of his solo career. His songs are almost anachronistic in their creativity. If it weren't for his skills as a musician, Eef might be Weird Al or Allan Sherman - the above lyrics from the title track are as much a rhetorical exercise as any kind of familiar song-writing. Eef embodies a dancer at some kind of hip-hop music awards, at first grotesque, then tragic, ultimately sad in her self-awareness, but finally confident: "Don't hate me 'cuz I know just what this world is all about."

On BITTER HONEY and LOSE BIG, Eef is typically morose but atypically low-key. Clem Snide records often balanced out Eef's spleen with some foot tappers that were only slyly pessimistic. Here he drops the sly - but he's still the wordsmith and underrated tunesman that he was when was in Clem.

Best Song: "The Ballad of Bitter Honey"

35. Clem Snide - END OF LOVE

The last album before Eef embarked on his solo-career is odd because its upbeatness doesn't anticipate what would come after. "Jews for Jesus Blues" and "The Sound of German Hip-Hop" could make a Jens Lekman album, while "Fill Me With Your Light" resists the irony-barometer that shoots mercury toward the ceiling on any other album. Even "End of Love," ostensibly a song about a break-up, wouldn't sound out of place at the Grand Ol' Opry with its twang and upbeat melody. "Something Beautiful" makes every CS compilation I've ever made - warm and goofy dork rock, expertly produced. It's Clem at their funniest and least bitter, a fitting goodbye to music they wouldn't make anymore once Eef left the band behind.

Best Song: "The Sound of German Hip Hop"

34. Bloc Party - A WEEKEND IN THE CITY

It's unfair to put the British supercool of Bloc Party above the bespectacled doofus who sings Clem Snide. WEEKEND didn't capture America the way it did its native soil, where political statements are judged less for aesthetic reasons than for the way they capture the reigning consciousness. For all their cool, these guys are doom-and-gloom prophets. You can't hunt for witches, after all, unless there are witches, and there seems to be an equal danger to giving up as there is fighting back. That song - "Hunting for Witches" - is a response to the 2005 bombings; so we're in that camp, where a gro The Bloc doesn't seem as smart as most of their Brit counterparts; while they channel the rage of The Clash on this album, they certainly fail to reproduce it. But what's left is a pretty fantastic bunch of songs, loud with energy and invention.

Bloc Party's other two albums haven't had the rotation on my Ipod that WEEKEND has had. It's clearly their best album, but there is still hope they might have their best work yet to come.

Best Song: "Hunting for Witches"

33. Wilco - SKY BLUE SKY

I got pretty pissed off about the critical lashing that this album got. Pitchfork called it "dad rock," which was at once disingenuous and a catch-all criticism for all the things people don't like about post 2003 Wilco. I admit that I'm not as in love with their most recent album, but SKY BLUE SKY is the most quiet work they've done in quite a while, at least since BEING THERE. It's more whimsical, less concerned with using dissonance to say important things that their lyrics don't. At the time, I was pretty angry with all those who felt the direction of their career should go more towards the quirky variations of A GHOST IS BORN; but now I tend to see SKY BLUE SKY as an album that should announce better things, rather than coming late in a declining discography. But that's always been one of the things that Wilco does best, defying expectations while exceeding them. I believe that SKY BLUE SKY does this as well as any of their previous efforts. Were I to introduce someone to the band, I'd use this one.

Best Song: "Sky Blue Sky"

32. TV on the Radio - RETURN TO COOKIE MOUNTAIN

Perhaps TV on the Radio felt old by the time they first appeared because everyone in Williamsburg had gone out drinking with them. But if you weren't one of those lucky few (a small portion of the population who makes up a huge portion of its defining finicky tastes), there's something pretty cool about the mélange of sounds that they produce. I imagine that in the 'Burg they were cool five seconds before they were uncool, but COOKIE MOUNTAIN resonates because it is loaded to the boiling point with great songs, each trying to outdo each other. It doesn't share the reserve of its original listeners, and that's why TV continues to matter. "I Was a Lover" tells you this is going to be a really good listen, and it has been for each of the 100 times I do. Strangely, this is some of my favorite study music.

Best Song: "Dirty Whirl"

31. Death Cab for Cutie - PLANS

I don't enjoy any DCFC album except this one, and this is the one that most avid fans get the least excited about. I find it to be a pretty beautiful album; poetic yet lively and refreshingly uncool. "Marching Bands of Manhattan" actually seems to be about marching bands, while "Someday You Will Be Loved" - for some reason - reminds me of the closing credits song from BETTER OFF DEAD. I often refer to acts like DCFC less as emo (it doesn't seem to fit), nor even as navel/shoe gazers: I saw them live and they actually rocked pretty hard. But "Wuss Rock" is the way I choose to categorize them, and it's not as pejorative as it sounds even if it is at best a back-handed compliment. Not everyone can be NWA, or even the MC5, and the Death Cab offers the best of its kind. While most argue that TRANSATLANTICISM is the best of their catalog, I prefer the gentle, slightly angry moans of PLANS.

Best Song: "I Will Follow You Into the Dark."

50. Josh Ritter, THE GOLDEN AGE OF RADIO (2001)

Ritter's first album at times sounds like it was recorded in his basement. Two of its ingredients may well have been love and sweat, but it introduced the world to one of the few singer/songwriters who doesn't seem like he's stealing all his pages from someone else's songbook. I discovered Ritter on Pandora, and finding him is pretty much the only reason I hold out hope that a computer knows how I think. While never aping his influence, in "Me & Jiggs" he wears his influences on his sleeve. Much like Townes Van Zandt, his songs capture and romanticize an aimlessness that needs to be escaped, but no one wants to. "Harrisburg" is a ballad without ever reaching to the dated ambitions of balladeers. It showed a lot of promise that has (in my opinion) since been fulfilled, even if he isn't showing up on the radio alongside people who he is much, much better than.

Best track: "Harrisburg"

49. Raconteurs, BROKEN BOY SOLDIERS (2006)

The genius of Jack White, while obvious in principle, has always eluded me. I can see why the Stripes represent so many things to so many people, and why a few of their songs are exciting, but I tend to find White to be the kind of polarizing artist who announces his own brilliance, where every song is a statement. But I love his less ambitious side-project, which seems to be the kind of music White would make if no one knew who he was, if he had never played Renee Zelwegger's boyfriend in COLD MOUNTAIN. On BROKEN, "Hands," "Steady As She Goes" and "Broken Boy Soldiers" resemble a power-pop that no one seems dedicated to making any more, as each song seems uncalculated and loud - befitting more of an 8-track than described on the pages of the Village Voice. I've never gotten into Benson's solo stuff, but he seems to channel White's obvious creativity and energy into a format that deserves to be listened to, not analyzed.

Best track: "Hands"

48. A.C. Newman, THE SLOW WONDER (2004)

Those who "follow" me will be surprised to find this so low. As much as I love on Newman and have recommended this album, I'm really only drawn to the first three songs - "Miracle Drug," "Drink To Me Babe, Then," and "On The Table." These songs are bit less coy than most New Pornographer efforts; breezy, light, and fun - if the Pornographers are Newman's attempt to do late period Beach Boys/Beatles, his solo career shows him trying to do their early stuff. Newman is the svengali of the NPs, and I have a weird relationship with him - I prefer all of the solo work of Bejar, Case, and Newman to anything they do alone. But this album at once enhances the supergroup and the individual behind it.

Best Track: "On The Table"

47. Beck, THE INFORMATION (2006)

Almost ignored among the heroic output of the little guy this decade, THE INFORMATION brings together the sarcastic kid who was literally throwing instruments against the wall in his studio with the mellow, reflective guy on SEA CHANGE. The result is some truly memorable tracks - "Think I'm In Love" brings together the focused doubt of SEA CHANGE with the wandering noise of ODELAY. Like everyone else who got excited about Beck in the 90s, I've picked up every album and found that it doesn't meet my expectations. With artists like Beck, that always tends to be a critical indicator that he's failing to live up to that early promise. Or it represents an iconoclastic spirit that can't be contained. You could argue that THE INFORMATION is Beck's contribution to the house music industry, a scene he had some leg in starting. But I prefer to think of it as a thoroughly listenable album that finds him doing what he does best.

Best Track: "Think I'm In Love"

46. Bruce Springsteen, DEVILS & DUST (2005)

After the stellar THE GHOST OF TOM JOAD in 1995, Bruce Springsteen has continued to consistently exist without doing anything superlative. Which is fine, even if his top his five for me (NEBRASKA, DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN, TUNNEL OF LOVE, BORN TO RUN, THE WILD, THE INNOCENT, THE E STREET SHUFFLE) happened before 1987. A guy with such an expansive catalog and shining star that can be sorted neatly into two groups (E Street Boss and Nebraska Boss) really doesn't have time to reinvent himself. MAGIC proved he could still do the E Street thing and make an album you can tap your foot to. But I prefer DEVILS to its other 2000+ NEBRASKA-like effort THE RISING. It's unusually low-key and yet somehow incendiary enough to make Starbucks refuse to sell it in their stores. It isn't so much an anti-war album (the way it was covertly marketed) as a typical rumination on loss, love, good people in bad places, and - yes - war.

Best Song: Reno

45. Elf Power, BACK TO THE WEB (2006)

Elf Power has been making something like folk music albums for quite a while - some pretty awesome, some merely okay. BACK TO THE WEB is my suggestion for an entry into the goofy mysticality. It threatens to be prog rock at every juncture - and no one wants to listen to Rush lyrics when Rush isn't playing behind them. But WEB works because of some pretty excellent melodies and haunting choruses. Not all their songs hearken to the depths of the fairies of Mordor. "An Old Familiar Scene" could exist outside on an album that didn't also include a song called "Peel Back the Moon, Beware!" There's something symbolic in their work that I've never bothered to decipher and thankfully - unlike the Prog - I don't need to in order to enjoy it.

(I saw them live at the Hi-Tone in Memphis in 2006 with about twenty other people in the audience. They put on a great show; no spiders and flies onstage, I promise)

Best Song: "The Whole World is Waiting"

44. The Strokes, ROOM ON FIRE (2003)

When I first heard ROOM ON FIRE, I decreed that the Strokes had bought too much into their own hype and produced a mediocre follow-up to their breakthrough. Now I think the opposite. We needed some remove from Julian Casablancas trying to nail all the good looking girls in his audience. This was the transition to them becoming the disgusting house act that made it and a band who likes to try new things (are you listening to this model, The Killers?). There aren't as many memorable tracks on ROOM as their debut, but the album holds up rather well. "You Talk Way Too Much" seems like the lost track from that first album, while "The End Has No End" and "12:51" are odd departures that transcends anything on THIS IS IT. It showed that The Strokes refused to fall into the one-hit wonder narrative we all secretly hoped they would.

(I saw them in 2006 and it was one of the best shows I've ever seen; I was expecting them to be cutesy and stupid to the audience but they just rocked and rocked hard. Well done, guys)

Best Song: "12:51"

43. The Decemberists, PICARESQUE (2005)

If you had talked to me in 2005, I would have told you how much I loved this album and the band; how it was refreshing to hear a group dedicated to using their songs for stories, how their vocabulary was inventive and inspiring, how much I thought the line "I am writer, a writer of fictions" seemed to be an imperative not only for this band but a whole new direction of Indie Pop.

And now I'm just lukewarm on the Decemberists and I'm not sure totally why. Overexposure? Possibly. That when I saw them live they led a sing-along? Perhaps. That Colin Meloy's precociousness seems like the kind of thing you grow out of after your first creative writing class? Probably. In any case, it's been a situation of diminishing returns . . . THE CRANE WIFE and THE HAZARDS OF LOVE were more of the same, and each time it's less moving, and each time they don't smack you in the face with their creativity - or if they do, it's annoying instead of interesting.

None of the allusions they have are particularly interesting, they all thrive on what Tracy Jordan calls "wordplay!" "The Sporting Life" is the best - it takes an incident of youth sports clumsiness/awkwardness through the eye of an absurd objective reserve. It's funny, catchy, and inventive - Meloy at his best. At his worst, he sings about "coquettes" and uses adjectives like "gadabout." But I still find myself wanting to listen to PICARESQUE quite a bit, despite its indulgences, despite its put-upon fancy. I still really like this album.

Best Song: "The Sporting Life."

(Kudos to this fan-video! This is proof of the quirky following the Decemberists have.)

42. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, DIG! LAZARUS DIG!

Cave's most recent album with his Bad, Bad Seeds is a mélange of everything he's ever done. Here's his thoughts on literature ("We Call Upon the Author to Complain"); here's his use of allusion to bring out something seedy ("Night of the Lotus Eaters"); here's his mix of nihilism and hopefulness ("More News from Nowhere"); here's his rumination on God ("Jesus of the Moon"). The contemporaneous side-project of Grinderman gave him an excuse to be a angry, sex-crazed old man, and that guy is a collaborator on this album. I tend to think about the Grinderman album as one of a piece with DIG! - but while keeping similar themes, Cave tones down the poetry and ratchets up the guitars for what many are seeing as a revival. I disagree; I think this is Cave doing what Cave has always done: playing around with a bunch of different genres in his own distinct voice.

Best Song: "Lie Down Here (And Be My Girl)."

41. The Hold Steady, STAY POSITIVE

The Hold Steady has been making awesome bar-music throughout the decade. Their songs about drinking, going outside to smoke, and realizing you'll wake up hungover are a near-perfect match of form and theme. I tend to think of these any time it's 2 AM and it will take another hour to get home (fewer and further between these days, but still). Craig Finn has been called a "troubadoor," which I think is a pretty stupid description. His songs compete with emptiness and meaning - being "Sequestered in Memphis" is both a good memory and a regrettable situation. Which is why the music suggests pure awesome while the lyrics describe total depravity. This is my favorite of all their albums, and I'm really excited that they show no signs of stopping.

"In bar-light, she looked all right;
In daylight, she looked desperate
That's all right, I was desperate, too"

Best Song: "Slapped Actress"

Scroll down for my honorable mention

I'm back.

I'm returning to you so I can participate in these addictive "Best of the Decade" lists. As anyone who knows me knows, I's all about the lists. I have lists of my favorite condiments (1. Horseradish), favorite kitchen appliances (4. Crock Pot), favorite kinds of 7-Up (1. Cherry), favorite moments in the Cosby Show (6. When Christopher Plummer shows up and starts quoting "Julius Caesar.")

So it's a natural that this rarely read, slightly disreputable blog is a forum for that.

The ots did not have the significant, paradigm-shifting breakthroughs of the 90s - no spiritual equivalents of Nirvana or Pavement. The bands who did shift paradigms in the 90s and survived through Y2K were some of the more productive acts out there: Radiohead, The Flaming Lips, Wilco. But there's nothing about, for instance, TV on the Radio or The Strokes who shook foundations the way any number of bands were doing at any point while Val Kilmer was still a big movie star and THE SIMPSONS was still good.

What's to blame? CD Burning? Napster? Metallica? MTV? Youtube? Online Radio? XM Radio? Eminem? The on-going saga of CHINESE DEMOCRACY? George W. Bush? Record Labels? The idiots in the Dandy Warhols?

In 1988, NWA released perhaps the most incendiary cultural documentary of my lifetime, STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON. And whatever you want to say about the Generation X moniker, there were a lot of mission statements coming out. In 2009, we've waded through the administration of one of the hated figures from a counter-cultural perspective, and what is the defining document that's been produced from the music world? AMERICAN IDIOT? HAIL TO THE THIEF? Those stupid "Vote Kerry" compilations that come out in 2004? I imagine there's more of a narrative in hip-hop, but I'm so ignorant of it that I'll just leave that to the chroniclers who know more than me.

But even if there's not a lot to define the decade - nothing like grunge to kick things off and the independent revolution to close it, as in the 90s - I still found 50 albums that I really, really like. I'm not going to attempt to define these in some kind of dashing aesthetic terminology. I really don't care if the organs in Arcade Fire albums offers a dissonance that keeps them from reaching transcendence, for instance. That stuff is out there, and I can't write it. So mainly I'm going to tell you why I like these albums. They will get, I suppose, progressively more enthusiastic.

And you'll be able to see right away that either I missed a lot or a lot missed me: hip-hop, House Music, The White Stripes, Indie Dance, the Fleet Foxes, the highs and lows of Kanye West's musical genius/terrible personality. There will be (probably) two kinds of respondents - those who find me esoteric and those who find me laughably predictable because my tastes so commonly mirror everyone else's.

I'll publish ten at a time. I'll work on my 50-41, but in the meantime, here's the honorable mention:

51. Bishop Allen, The Broken String
52. My Morning Jacket, Z
53. Iron & Wine w/ Calexico, In the Reins
54. The Shins, Oh Inverted World
55. Of Montreal, Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?
56. Yo La Tengo, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out
57. The Walkmen, Bows & Arrows
58. Neko Case, Middle Cyclone
59. Guns n Roses, Chinese Democracy
60. Bruce Springsteen, Magic
61. Clem Snide, The Ghost of Fashion
62. Yo La Tengo, I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass
63. British Sea Power, Open Season
64. Weezer, The Red Album
65. Sufjan Stevens, Seven Swans
66. Calexico, Garden Ruin
67. The Hold Steady, Boys and Girls in America
68. Mason Jennings, Boneclouds
69. The New Pornographers, Twin Cinema
70. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Nocturama
71. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, And No More Shall We Part
72. Spoon, Kill The Moonlight
73. LCD Soundsystem, Sound of Silver
74. Destroyer, Your Blues
75. TV on the Radio, Desperate Youths, Bloodthirsty Babes