2008 was a great year for music and paring down the top 8 albums was no easy task. So without further delay, below are the CYPJN!? finalists. Let the judgement begin!
There are few bands still making music today that I’ve loved as long or as deeply as R.E.M. Which is why 2004’s middling crapfest “Around The Sun” felt like such a slap in the chops. For a band whose late-career output had, up to that point, been some of its best, it was particularly perplexing. It left me wondering if R.E.M.’s moment had finally come and gone.
Luckily, those four years of doubt and disappointment were definitively erased within the first crunchy seconds of “Supernatural Superserious”, the lead-off single to “Accelerate”. By the time the chorus came around, I was already snapping, swaying and involuntarily busting into my own Stipey T. Rex moves. This was a bonafide R.E.M. radio hit of the highest order. I was ecstatic.
I mean, here’s the deal… I own every R.E.M. album. There was no way I wasn’t going to buy this one. But the strength of “Supernatural” made me excited about buying it. And after a single top-to-bottom listen, I was firmly able to pronounce it their strongest, most cohesive release in 10 years.
Consciously or unconsciously, “Accelerate” manages to be the perfect distillation of the band’s almost-30-year history, yet it finds R.E.M. sounding as fresh and vibrant as any of the baby bands on Pitchfork’s “Watch-Out-For-These-Guys” lists.
Simply put, the boys didn’t let me down. Even more simply put, “Accelerate” rocks.
Serving suggestion: This is a quintessential anytime album. Especially friendly on the morning commute with a dark, steamy cup of joe.
7. Department of Eagles – “In Ear Park”
The line “What the fuck is this?” can have many different points of view, depending on the delivery. For the purposes of this capsule, the proper reading would need to indicate intense curiosity followed by utter astonishment. Practice the line a couple times on your own and then hit play on “In Ear Park”. Halfway through the opening title track, try the line again and you’ll get the absolute right inflection. This was my reaction upon hearing Department of Eagles for the first time.
A side project of Grizzly Bear’s Daniel Rossen and former dormmate Fred Nicolaus, Department of Eagles has created one of the most inventive releases of the year. “Do you listen to your classical records anymore?/ Or do you let them sleep / In their sleeves where they weep?”, Rossen asks on “Classical Records”. His reverence for the art of arrangement is clear from the first tickly, pizzicato strings of the album opener to the dreamy banjo swell of “Balmy Night”.
For the chorus of “Nobody Does It Like You”, a delicate, dappled guitar progression paints a late summer sky whose stars have begun to fall, loosely, one after the other in rapid succession.
The production throughout is lush but with a distinctly lo-fi appreciation of the key elements. Here, solid melodies and Rossen’s silvery vocals are the anchors that keep “In Ear Park” from devolving into what could be just another silly, disposable freak folk wankfest, ala Joanna Newsom or Devendra Banhart.
Haunting, complex, unconventional and inherently listenable, I haven’t been as genuinely intrigued by an album in a long time.
Serving suggestion: Requires an active listen. Make yourself a cheese plate, open up a nice, dry Riesling and settle in.
6. Kings of Leon - “Only By The Night” Oh, Kings of Leon. They were always just almost there. The potential to make a great record was palpable, simmering just under the surface but never jelling into anything truly remarkable or cohesive. They had something for sure, but it seemed even the band themselves weren’t sure what it was. Happily, on “Only By The Night” it seems the Followill boys have finally sussed it out.
In pre-release interviews, frontman Caleb spoke openly about the recording process and rediscovering his own voice… "I knew it was a risk for me to go in there and really open up and belt the way I know that I can… I just hid my singing for so long because I was nervous that people would listen to my lyrics, assume I wasn't intelligent because I'm from Tennessee and pick me apart, so that's why I sang the way I did. But going into this, I knew these melodies that we were playing were too beautiful for me to fuck it up. I had to go for it."
And go for it he does. In my estimation, this epiphany is the single identifiable element that makes “Only By The Night” the band’s crowning achievement. Followill’s achy wail, finally fully unleashed, gives the songs an emotional depth and urgency lacking in the bands previous “cooler” releases. The steamy propulsion of first single “Sex on Fire” announced that something hotter was going to be in store this time around.
The other notable facet to this album is the maturity of the band’s sound. It seems the rest of the family, brothers Nathan & Jared and cousin Matthew, had reached as far outside themselves as their singer had. The album kicks off with the spooky/sexy slink of “Closer”, an unlikely opener that nevertheless sets the perfect tone. Other album standouts include the arena-ready “Use Somebody”, the weepy “Cold Desert” and the lovely “Manhattan”, which features Edge-inspired minimalist guitar chimes and one of the most deliciously bouncy bass lines I’ve heard in ages.
Some of my favorite bands started good and got great. It looks like Kings of Leon are finally vying for their spot.
Serving suggestion: I can imagine this album would best be enjoyed high-school-style: in a parked car with a cute girl, splitting a bottle of Mad Dog. If you’re looking for something more age-appropriate, try it at home with some steaks and a cold beer.
Release your first-ever EP in the spring, your first full-length in the summer, then end up on basically every music publication’s year-end Best Of lists by winter. Quite a feat, right? Must take a pretty special band to pull something like that off, right? And a pretty special album, right?
Right.
If you’ve spent any time with Fleet Foxes’ self-titled debut, you know what all the hoopla’s about. And you know it’s well deserved. If you haven’t, then you have a purchase to make, dear reader.
After deftly navigating a slew of reductive My Morning Jacket comparisons from the snobbier corners of the blogosphere, the band quickly managed to develop their own devout audience. And on their own terms. Truth is, anyone who gave the album more than just a cursory spin knew that they were hearing something singular and undeniable.
I could spend a lot of time describing this album to you and pull out a bunch of fancy music-journo-centric adjectives in the doing of it. I could try to put it in a box with labels like Neo-Folk or Southern Fried Baroque Pop. But, I’m not going to. I’m simply going to say this…
It’s gorgeous. Go buy it.
Serving suggestion: Perfect for a road trip through the Catskills. Or sitting around the house on a snowy night, with candles and some Pimm’s Winter with apple cider.
Serving suggestion: Perfect for a road trip through the Catskills. Or sitting around the house on a snowy night, with candles and some Pimm’s Winter with apple cider.
4. The Black Angels – “Directions To See A Ghost” Narrowing down and finalizing these lists is an arduous task. Even harder is then deciding the placement of the final picks within their own ranks. When it gets particularly difficult, I often revert to one definitive criterion: “How often did I actually listen to this album?” After all, that should be an honest gauge, no? Bottom line is, between my morning and evening commutes, my workday and the evening cleaning/dinner prep routine, I spend about 8 hours a day actively listening to music. So, with the sheer amount of tuneage I consume on a daily basis, if there’s an album that consistently ends up in heavy iPod rotation, I tend to make a note of it as being something pretty special. That standard brings The Black Angels to my number 4 spot.
Longtime readers may remember that The Angels’ debut, “Passover” made my inaugural Top 6 of ’06 list two years ago. And here they are once more, blowing my mind all over again.
It’s no small secret that I have a fairly prominent dark side. If I didn’t, maybe “Directions To See A Ghost” wouldn’t be such a treat. But I do. And it is.
How else can I explain why such a foreboding journey could bring me such unmitigated joy. For all it’s brooding sonics, “DTSAG” isn’t a moper. No, sir. This is a live one, baby.
Active. Flirty. Dirty. Dangerous. If I was forced to nutshell it for someone, I’d say “It sounds like the mix you’d make for a road trip through Hell.” Followed by a wink and a smirk.
“You On The Run” gets the trek started with a low-n-slow, bendy tremolo riff and devilish hipshake toms. “Doves” opens the infernal gates with a grand and twisted flourish. “Science Killer” makes a pit stop at Satan’s own personal strip club, featuring a grungy bass groove and the sexiest maracas you’ve ever heard. And epic album closer “Snake In The Grass” is the very definition of a slow burn, licking at our heels in a wash of distortion for over 16 minutes. The album’s centerpiece (and my personal fave) is “18 Years”. Featuring a wall of sound so dense Phil Spector himself would be left scratching his head, it’s the album’s most curious and compelling track. Just after the three minute mark, Alex Maas speaks of “something black” that “answers back from the dungeon”. What we hear immediately afterward may or may not be from this world. Whatever it is, it makes my spine tingle every time.
At a time when the fantastic blackness introduced by Joy Division, Bauhaus, The Cure, etc. has been co-opted by the Hot Topic generation and packaged into something way sillier than any of those bands could ever have imagined, they're an important presence. Closer to what I’d call “dark indie psychedelia” than “goth”, it’s still nice to know the Black Angels are out there keeping it real for the rest of us aging darksiders.
Serving suggestion: “Directions” has treated me very nicely on several rainy night walks through lower Manhattan. At home, try it in your PJ’s at 2am, with a deep, oaky French red.
“You On The Run” gets the trek started with a low-n-slow, bendy tremolo riff and devilish hipshake toms. “Doves” opens the infernal gates with a grand and twisted flourish. “Science Killer” makes a pit stop at Satan’s own personal strip club, featuring a grungy bass groove and the sexiest maracas you’ve ever heard. And epic album closer “Snake In The Grass” is the very definition of a slow burn, licking at our heels in a wash of distortion for over 16 minutes. The album’s centerpiece (and my personal fave) is “18 Years”. Featuring a wall of sound so dense Phil Spector himself would be left scratching his head, it’s the album’s most curious and compelling track. Just after the three minute mark, Alex Maas speaks of “something black” that “answers back from the dungeon”. What we hear immediately afterward may or may not be from this world. Whatever it is, it makes my spine tingle every time.
At a time when the fantastic blackness introduced by Joy Division, Bauhaus, The Cure, etc. has been co-opted by the Hot Topic generation and packaged into something way sillier than any of those bands could ever have imagined, they're an important presence. Closer to what I’d call “dark indie psychedelia” than “goth”, it’s still nice to know the Black Angels are out there keeping it real for the rest of us aging darksiders.
Serving suggestion: “Directions” has treated me very nicely on several rainy night walks through lower Manhattan. At home, try it in your PJ’s at 2am, with a deep, oaky French red.
“Well, I ain’t gonna live in your world no more,” Todd A. declares in the opening line of “Borneo”, the first track on Firewater’s incredible “The Golden Hour”. Following the disastrous 2004 election and a bitter divorce the same year, the frontman did what many disillusioned progressives across the country felt like doing. He left America. With a raised middle finger and no backward glances.
The intervening three years found him trekking through India, Turkey, Pakistan, and Indonesia in search of something he felt America was seemingly long past being able to provide him. What he found along the way would become the building blocks, both lyrically and musically, of “The Golden Hour”.
Part travelogue, part diatribe and (ultimately) a declaration of independence, the band’s fifth album takes all the fist-in-the-air defiance of punk and filters it through gypsy rhythms, slinky surf guitar, Balkan horns and Indian percussion. The end result is the most uncannily danceable collection of political barnburners since The Clash’s “Sandinista!”. Ideas this pointed and unapologetic are usually limited to the purview of hardcore, but find a much richer point of view placed among such dynamic sounds. For evidence of this, one need only look to the chorus of the anti-Bush screed “Hey Clown”. (“Hey clown! / We’re gonna put you in the ground / We had it all and then you threw it all away / Hey clown! / You turned our happy upside down / We’re gonna burn your flag and piss on your parade!”) What reads like a typical punk rant is actually the album’s greatest celebration, a jump-up-and-down singalong rife with tuba, trombone, banjo and a thumping yo-yo bass line.
The primary achievement of “The Golden Hour” lies in its seamless melding of the political and the personal. Both “Six Forty Five” and “Feels Like The End of The World” feel like sunset postcards from a faraway place, with glimpses into the mixed feelings of a lonely American ex-pat abroad. And “Weird To Be Back” perfectly sums up the conflictions of one returning home after so long away.
In 2004, I desperately needed a rousing election year album. Who’d have known I’d finally get it four years later?
Serving suggestion: An iPod, a passport, a plane, a train, a rickshaw, a country with an alphabet you can’t read… and an alcoholic beverage you’ve never heard of served by someone who hasn’t bathed in a couple days. Mwah!
2. Bon Iver – “For Emma, Forever Ago”Boy meets girl, girl breaks up with boy, boy moves to remote cabin in Wisconsin to write the most achingly beautiful album of the year.
The stark simplicity of “For Emma, Forever Ago” is a testament to the power of what a man can accomplish with an acoustic guitar if he’s truly connected to the songs he’s creating. Justin Vernon’s warm, delicate falsettos, sparse arrangements and intensely personal lyrics turn what could be dismissed as mere coffeehouse fodder into something altogether deeper and more profound.
I love, love, love this album.
Serving suggestion: Alcohol might make this one too much to bear. I’d stick with a nice hot cup of Vanilla Honey Chamomile under a warm blanket.
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1. Elbow – “The Seldom Seen Kid”I knew within minutes of my first foray into “The Seldom Seen Kid” that it would make this year’s list. And I had a hunch halfway through the song “Mirrorball” that it would be damn well near the top. As the year drew to a close, amid a sea of fantastic new releases, it’s placement in the #1 spot had been solidified.
I can’t talk about this album without first addressing “Mirrorball”, the album’s third track and my absolute favorite song of the year. It’s the kind of moment that only comes along once in a blue moon for me. A song that I have to play twice in a row because I just don’t want it to end. Over a gorgeously augmented piano progression, acoustic guitar harmonies and muted percussion, Guy Garvey’s warm milk rasp opens the song : “ I plant the kind of kiss that wouldn’t wake a baby / On the self same face that wouldn’t let me sleep.” As verse melts into chorus, strings and synth swell and retract in waves of anticipation, evoking the same internal bellyflip in the listener as might be felt at the beginning (or end) of the love affair depicted in the song. It leaves me reeling every time.
But to be worthy of a title like “Album of the Year”, the whole obviously needs to be greater than the sum of its parts. I need every song to blow my mind, one right after the other, and finish the experience feeling like I’ve just been somewhere.... like a great film that leaves you choking back tears after the credits have rolled, all the way into the lobby and out onto the street. For me, this album did that more completely than any other this year.
As an opening credit sequence, “Starlings” starts things off gently before busting open the gates, then slamming them abruptly shut again. This kind of interplay – flirt and retreat – sets the tone for the emotional rollercoaster to follow. Later, “Grounds for Divorce” - a stomping hip-swinger with a stadium-rock chorus and down-home slide guitar - stands as the album’s rockingest moment. “The Fix” pairs Garvey with one of my all-time favorite British crooners, Richard Hawley, for a noir-ish burner with spritely keyboards and a tiptoe beat. And “Friends of Ours”, with it’s weepy, cinematic, string-laden farewell, brings it all to a lovely, bittersweet and fitting close - despite the singer telling us he’s “never very good at goodbyes.”
Elbow were once referred to as “the thinking man’s Coldplay”, which isn’t saying much these days. By comparison, Coldplay has spent it’s past two releases on a downward spiral of boring, bombastic, self-important schlock while Elbow have deepened and matured, creating something profoundly more interesting along the way.
Few bands can pull off this level of authentic intimacy and grandeur on the same album (let alone within the same song) without sounding forced or strident. With “The Seldom Seen Kid”, Elbow can officially add their name to the list.
Serving suggestion: Perfect any time, though I spend a lot of time with this one on the train and when I drive at night. Also, it’s a great dinner-making album. Open up a nice, spicy Spanish red or a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc and get your apron on.
The "If This Were A Top 10 List, These Would Totally Have Been On There" List:
Plants and Animals - "Parc Avenue"
The Black Keys - "Attack and Release"
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Honorable Mentions:
David Byrne & Brian Eno - "Everything That Happens Will Happen Today"
Conor Oberst - self-titled
Vampire Weekend - self-titled
Frightened Rabbit - "The Midnight Organ Fight"
Colour Revolt - "Plunder, Beg, and Curse"
Friendly Fires - self-titled
Devotchka - "A Mad and Faithful Telling"
Foals - "Antidotes"
The Raveonettes - "Lust, Lust, Lust"
Fucked Up - "The Chemistry of Common Life"
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SO.... There you go. The unquestionably definitive list of the top albums 2008. ("But, hey, wait... You forgot - " ) No, I didn't. They didnt' make the list for a reason. ("But what about - ?") No, not them. ("But, not even Sant-") No, not even Santogold. This is the list. BUT, I'd love to hear what your picks were and tell you why you're wrong, so give me a holler.
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SO.... There you go. The unquestionably definitive list of the top albums 2008. ("But, hey, wait... You forgot - " ) No, I didn't. They didnt' make the list for a reason. ("But what about - ?") No, not them. ("But, not even Sant-") No, not even Santogold. This is the list. BUT, I'd love to hear what your picks were and tell you why you're wrong, so give me a holler.
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AND DON'T FORGET....
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The CYPJN!? Best of 2008 Downloadable SUPERMIX
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COMING SOON!
From MSNBC...
