Records came to me this year in waves. At times I felt like I was swimming in sound, all murky and disorienting, and I would grab for whatever was safest. Some of my life preservers this year included albums by Scott [...]]]>

Let This Be The Apogee of African Guitar Appropriation and Auto-tune!

Records came to me this year in waves. At times I felt like I was swimming in sound, all murky and disorienting, and I would grab for whatever was safest. Some of my life preservers this year included albums by Scott Walker, Townes Van Zandt and The Rolling Stones. At other times I felt buoyed by records from new artists and career-best LPs from favorite bands. It feels like a struggle to catch even part of what floats by in the the ever-growing soundstream, let alone absorb it, but here are the records that managed to grab me and not let go.

Records So Good I Never Put Them Away

Future Islands : In Evening Air

Dark, electro-pop mutant coursing with the kinetic energy of Joy Division and the spartan intimacy of Young Marble Giants, with singer Samuel T. Herring growling and crooning like a manic Richard Burton reciting urgent Shakespearean odes. One of several great releases this year on the continually interesting Thrill Jockey label.

Deerhunter : Halcyon Digest

Rising from the gauzy haze that’s characterized Deerhunter up to now, Halcyon Digest burns slowly, then radiant with bright melodies and a big clanging pop sound – even the register seems to have grown by octaves – to support Bradford Cox’s most pop-oriented batch of songs yet.

Lower Dens : Twin-Hand Movement

Nothing on this list hit me as immediately as the debut from Lower Dens. Don’t let the meaningless Freak Folk tag fool you – on some songs they bring a krautrocking surf psychedelia to the androgynous cool of Velvet Underground. I’m dying to hear what they do next and if it fails to live up to my dreams, I’ll dust my guitar off and try to pick up where this album leaves off.

The Walkmen : Lisbon

A record to score the sound of the sunlight streaming into your apartment on a sunday afternoon. Hamilton Leithauser sings his balls off (for you, baby) while delicate horn and string arrangements add new color to that signature warbly guitar tremolo. Lisbon may not be a revelatory, masterstroke album, but neither perhaps is The Kinks’ Lola Versus Powerman, yet on those lazy sunday afternoons nothing sounds better.

Maximum Balloon : s/t

I didn’t hear a lot of people talking about this record, but David Sitek’s production is an art unto itself. Taking inspiration from Cyndi Lauper, Talking Heads and Prince he brings a palpably electric vitality to their ideas and utilizes a stellar cast of vocalists to guest on each track, lending the whole record the feeling of an electro-R&B version of Stephen Merritt’s The 6ths.

Near Impenetrable Moody Pop Opuses

Sufjan Stevens : The Age of Adz

Deliberately shedding the angel wings of his past, The Age of Adz and the All Delighted People EP represent an exorcism more than a sonic development. Cloaked in dark, messy electronic textures and over-modulated instrumentation, Sufjan’s tender, sotto voce is all but buried. The track “I Want To Be Well” ably illustrates the scope of his ambition, pairing driving beats with choral singing and fluttering woodwinds and ending with Sufjan’s desperate, pleading vocal “I’m not fucking around”. I applaud his intention, but it’s not exactly pleasant listening.

Joanna Newsom : Have One On Me

Joanna Newsom has blossomed here with the kind of artistic self-assuredness that graced Joni Mitchell in the 70′s. Have One On Me similarly recalls Mitchell’s iconic mixing of jazz and folk idioms while giving in to the contemporary tendency for theatrical excess (see above, Arcade Fire below, The Flaming Lips’ last LP, etc). It will probably take another year for this record to really sink into my mind, but that’s an endeavor I can look forward to.

Special Mention Records From Great Bands

I might be guilty of giving short shrift to these bands as they consistently make great music and their records released this year are all very good, but none of them managed to stick with me like the albums above.

Arcade Fire : The Suburbs

This record plods a little under its thematic weight and layers upon layers of instrumentation, even veering upon a U2-Springsteen brand of self-importance, but it continually holds my interest to the end.

Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings : I Learned The Hard Way

Spoon : Transference

New Pornographers : Together

More Good Stuff

Timber Timbre : s/t

Floating down the Mississippi river to the funereal dirge and marching grooves of Screamin Jay Hawkins and a ghostly hovering organ a la ? and the Mysterians, this is spooky appalachian gothic soul.

Surfer Blood : Astro Coast

Much better live than the sound on their debut, which at times wavers on the line of arena rock Pixies-pilfering. I’m definitely interested to see what these guys do next.

Sam Prekop Old Punch Card

Caribou Swim

Lambchop Live at XX Merge

Tracey Thorn Love and Its Opposite

Wild Nothing Gemini

Wye Oak My Neighbor/My Creator

Sharon Van Etten Epic

Once Great Bands Who Gave Us Pablum

Magnetic Fields : Realism

There is no one better than Stephen Merritt at writing immediate, hummable hooks. He probably defecates melody the way others craft and strain to write memorable lines, but several of the songs on this album are just too goddam precious. You left Merge Records to write “We Are Having A Hootenanny”?! You must be out of your mind, son.

Blonde Redhead : Penny Sparkle

I guess misery is not a butterfly, but a sparkly penny. Do you want to know what would happen if Enya and the Cocteau Twins got together to revisit the B-sides of Human League? Me neither! I don’t know that I could even get through this once.

The Great Bright Hope of 2011

Wild Flag

Supergroup of ladies from some of my favorite groups: Janet Weiss and Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney, Mary Timony of Helium, and Rebecca Cole of the Minders. Think Wire and The Small Faces kicking out the jams in a Pacific Northwest garage. It was a thrill to see these four women working out songs together onstage and having fun doing it.

Great Stuff From The Past I Was Hooked On This Year

Rodrigo y Gabriela
Jackie DeShannon
Van Dyke Parks
Tim Buckley
John Prine
Miles Davis : In A Silent Way
Wye Oak
Iggy Pop : The Idiot
Curtis Mayfield
Jack Nitzsche

Only time will tell how the last year will fare in my personal pop music canon.  I saw only a fraction of live shows that I did in previous years. And whether it was my own [...]]]> The Curmudgeon Awakes! Wait, it’s already February?!  The Curmudgeon snarls, turns around three times, and falls back asleep.

Only time will tell how the last year will fare in my personal pop music canon.  I saw only a fraction of live shows that I did in previous years. And whether it was my own frame of mind or the stale state of new music, I rarely felt inspired by any of the year’s releases. So, in almost 10 years of making these lists, here’s a first:

My Top 5 Records of 2008

Fleet Foxes : s/t

Fleet Foxes s/t

These kids went to the mountains, divined their songs and floated out like buddhas on a magic carpet of beard and siren voices. Superlative mesmeric folk-pop of the same sonic cloth (carpet) as the Beach Boys, Shins, Bee Gees, and the Hollies. That is to say, it’s filled with blissed-out harmonies.  What My Morning Jacket wish they could have made instead of trying to fit their country asses into a skinny Prince suit. This record sounds like it came straight out of the early 70′s but to these ears it’s fresher than anything else on here.

The Walkmen : You & Me

The Walkmen You & Me

A band I have several times now written off as nothing more than a nice sound and an attitude completely blew the black plastic aging hipster frames off my face with this one. There’s nothing revolutionary here, just a perfect encapsulation of the album as art form: from the jacket cover to the tracking, the whole work plays like an exposition on the state of you and yours. In our era of blogs blogging about blogs blogging about sound clips and tedious name-that-influence bands, a suite of songs like this is the real new wave.

Vampire Weekend : s/t

Vampire Weekend s/t

Like the Strokes’ debut, there’s something almost too perfectly glossy about Vampire Weekend’s own debut. The songs are remarkably good, forging a pop fusion from lithesome african guitar figures, insistent rhythms and squeaky collegiate insouciance. It may turn out to be an ephemeral pleasure, but for the time being this is impossible to put down.

Bonnie Prince Billy : Lie Down In The Light

Bonnie Prince Billy Lie Down In The Light

An undeniably great set of songs from the bright bearded appalachian misfit otherwise known by Will Oldham. His ability to win over the straight-ahead music crowd at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival made it even clearer that he’s at the top of his form. If you’ve followed Oldham off and on over the years like I have, this album should finally make a fan out of you.

Bon Iver : For Emma, Forever Ago

Bon Iver For Emma, Forever Ago

I kept hearing about this record, but I didn’t expect something so quietly affecting. As stripped down and hauntingly lovely as Elliott Smith’s first records, For Emma is the soundtrack to twilit wintry nostalgia. It took repeated listens for Justin Vernon’s whispered croon to get under my skin, but this set burns bright and true with plaintive soul.

Also Enjoyed

TV On The Radio Dear Science
Deerhunter Microcastle
Atlas Sound Let The Blind Lead Those Who Can See

REM Accelerate
For the joy alone of hearing a band reassess their direction and come back roaring after so many albums. Almost makes me forget their last one.

Cat Power Jukebox
Jim White Transnormal Skiperoo Beautifully melancholic
Cut Copy In Ghost Colours
Joan As Police Woman To Survive

Blitzen Trapper Furr
Really strong collection of songs that nimbly skip on the grooves of old 70′s AOR, melodica dirge, acoustic ballads and country-fried AM radio pop.

Bob Dylan Bootleg Series Vol. 8 Tell Tale Signs
Elvis Costello Momofuku
Calexico Carried To Dust

Sigur Ros med sud i eyrum vid spilum endalaus
Loved the way they stretched out with bright and folkier textures on here.  The first track comes off as bulgarian choral folk meets The Feelies. Fitting, given that the title translates to “with a buzz in our ears we play endlessly”.

Jonathan Richman Because Her Beauty Is Raw and Wild
Department of Eagles In Ear Park
Sea and Cake Car Alarm

You make me sick

Beck Modern Guilt
Honestly, why don’t you just score Tom Cruise’s latest diatribe against psychiatry? It would probably hold as much interest as your last few records.

Mogwai The Hawk is Howling
Absolute shite; unless I just grew out of a music that once sounded really powerful to me.  No, no. This is absolute shite. Sounds like a band trying to imitate Mogwai because they heard that post-rock is the new thing.

Where You Been All My Life

Older stuff I got into or revisited this year

Serge Gainsbourg
Booker T. & The MG’s
King Sunny Ade
Erik Satie
Mose Allison
William Bell
Coleman Hawkins

By now the haunting and touching Annie Leibowitz photographs that formed John’s last photo shoot are very familiar to most. Less familiar to me was this set by Allen Tannenbaum.

I [...]]]>

By now the haunting and touching Annie Leibowitz photographs that formed John’s last photo shoot are very familiar to most. Less familiar to me was this set by Allen Tannenbaum.

I can’t really describe what it is about Tannenbaum’s photos I like, but they have this color austerity that I find perfectly redolent of films and photography of the early 1980′s. Films like After Hours and One From The Heart. In contrast to the striking Leibowitz image there’s a levity at work in these, yet there’s the same naked honesty, the same intimacy.

The parallel statements between the visual language in these photographs and the music John and Yoko had just finished on Double Fantasy is unmistakable. I look at them and find myself daydreaming about the person John might be if he were alive today; how he and Yoko would be ambassadors of a provocative and honest marriage of love and art. It’s inspiring.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah were uninspiring if not somnambulant live, but I loved their debut record. Their recent sophomore [...]]]> I know there are far more troubling things to occupy my mind than bad music, but damn it if it doesn’t make me feel crestfallen to find a good band fall flat.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah were uninspiring if not somnambulant live, but I loved their debut record. Their recent sophomore release, Some Loud Thunder, is to my ears virtually unlistenable. Any decent song or melody is obscured by muddy, over-modulated production. A thumb in yer eye, or ear, as it were. That Dave Friedmann, who has helmed some of my favorite records, sat in as producer on this is perplexing.

This Saturday I caught Brightblack Morning Light at the Great American. The floor was half-filled with kids sitting around like it was a knit-in. When the band came on, some of those in the crowd implored others to sit, but I don’t know how that would have helped. I wasn’t expecting anything mind-blowing – somehow I thought the molasses-groove southern soul would entrance instead of embalm. But the guitarist could hardly open his eyes to find the strings, so it was a lost cause.

Lastly, Wilco, a band that as the years go by I respect more than appreciate their music, offered a streaming online preview of their upcoming album (out May 15) over the weekend. A kindly gesture to those of us who as they said, “remember when they used to do that on the radio.” Very cool. I only went through it once and the first half sounded pleasant enough, but soon the songs devolved into the guitar and piano honky-skronk of A Ghost Is Born and then it was only a matter of time until the harmonizing guitar leads kicked in. And then what do you have?! Fucking prog. The only thing worse than prog is hearing it the second time around. Jeff, I’m glad you’re making music, but I liked it better when you were writing the bridge between Gram Parsons and ELO.

Thank Elvis, then, when a record comes out that reminds you why you’re even bothering with all this anyway. Arcade Fire released Neon Bible today and thanks to Merge, I’ve been enjoying the deluxe CD set all weekend. It may not have the immediate and incendiary power of Funeral but it’s a moving record that resonates more with each listen.