My Favorite 100 Albums of the Decade: 30-21

i’m a little drunk, you’re a little drunk… let’s do this.

30. El Perro Del Mar - El Perro Del Mar

the dog from the sea. sarah assbring. what’s in a name? in this case, the words “ass” and “bring.” … it’s a good name. and the woman behind that name makes some damn good music, though she’s yet to eclipse (hoping that will score me some hits from some wayward twi-hards) the innocuously perfect down-cast pop of her self-titled first album. assbring’s strained voice feels lonely regardless of how many flighty strings and synths are floating around it, and the wispy songs (most of which are centered around a single, immovable hook) on which she pours it like an overdose of night-time triaminic are only as wanting as they are implacable. if only all such irreconcilable binds were this pleasant. there are (obviously) albums on this list that i ostensibly prefer… such is the nature of this stupid endeavor… but for what it’s worth this is one of the few truly perfect albums i’ve heard this decade.

29. Fever Ray - Fever Ray

ya know, this was a good decade for the swedes. in film they had roy andersson. in royalty they had (king) henrik lundqvist. and in music they had… well, just about everyone who isn’t british on this list. assbring? that name’s more swedish than socialism. and fever ray’s karin elisabeth dreijer andersson… well, she’s about half as swedish as swedish electro group, The Knife. coincidentally, andersson comprises half of swedish electro group, The Knife. i’m unaware as to the dynamic she shares with co-Knifer and brother Olof, but… well, if this record is any indication it seems as if she’s in charge of bringing the darkness and the awesome. my roommate once referred to this album as “the most listenable thing ever,” and i can’t disagree. the beneficiary of immaculately crisp production and instantly familiar melodies that are almost too natural not to listen to… it’s a shadowy coil of songs for sure, but it honestly makes the rest of the world sound in some way discordant by comparison. i mean, i recently listened to this album from front to back immediately before attending a pre-dawn buddhist ceremony at a japanese monastery cloistered away in the mountains near osaka… and it felt more like a score than a distraction.

28. The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots

yeah, this is how you follow The Soft Bulletin - one of the most acclaimed albums of the 90s. with something so distinct and off-kilter that it almost demands to be considered on its own terms. or woefully misread. whichever is more commercial. so suggests the rash of commercials and retail stores blaring unlikely hit “do you realize??,” which has to be the most aggressively fatalistic song to ever soundtrack an apple store. but yeah… that long-overdue gripe aside, this LP - an immaculately arranged series of gurgles and squelches that occasionally flirts with a loose dystopian narrative - desperately recasts the very human, deceptively tragic concerns of The Soft Bulletin in an otherworldly light… wayne coyne’s imagination sort of went supernova here and it hasn’t come back since. also, the first 3 seconds of the title song (part 1) is better than most albums. hell, it’s better than most lists of albums. and yeah, this was definitely more description than critique, but i can’t even begin to tell you how uninterested i am in providing even the most cursory of academic analyses, particularly when i have this human-sized hamster ball to play in.

27. Regina Spektor - Soviet Kitsch

i know. i’m surprised she’s here, too. i mean, i’d be slightly more surprised if she were actually HERE, like… on my couch hanging out with me and taylor swift in my human-sized hamster ball (for those of you who are keeping score), but yeah… spektor isn’t just for Guster fans jonesing for an estrogen fix or people who prefer their music to remind them of kittens (inspired by kittens). i’d never have bothered if it weren’t for a recommendation from a reliable source, but i’d have been seriously missing out. opening track “ode to divorce” is a deeply-felt breath of sober, tooth-brushed functionality in the midst of crisis that capitalizes on spektor’s reputation for silliness to lower your guard (without ever sinking to the WHOSE REPSONSIBLE THIS? shenanigans at which the title hints). while Soviet Kitsch quickly jettisons such topics for love ballads, haughty sailors, and cancer… ballads… it maintains the delicate vulnerability achieved in that opening salvo, and if bits like closing number “somedays” dip their toe into sentimentality, it can’t really be blamed, cause that track is fucking devastating. in unrelated news, i almost cried at the end of the movie Serendipity. yes, that Serendipity. anyhoo, whereas her earlier albums were too idiosyncratic for their tones and later ones were a bit mired in the studio trickery made available to her by major labels, Soviet Kitsch was the fleeting moment at which spektor was at the height of both her voice and her craft.

26. The Mountain Goats - Sunset Tree

john darnielle - that narrator of recent americana - deserves better than for me to write him up. this is my favorite record of his. just go on itunes and buy the song “dance music.” if you don’t like it, i’ll send you an over-sized check for the amount of you’re-an-idiot dollars.

25. Dodos - Visiter

where the bloody fuck did this come from? san francisco? oh… well, i guess that answers that question. but seriously, these guys rawk!!! about 4 seconds into opening track “walking” one of the (then) duo strums his guitar with enough ferocity for the string to audibly rattle for a moment beyond its intended duration. but, wee lass, this is more of a mission statement than a mistake… more of a harbinger than a bit of amateurish production. the 13 songs that follow resolve themselves into a blast of unbridled energy, virtuosity, and finger-bleeding (seriously, tunes like “jody” just sound like bleeding) that are most impressive for how they don’t just explode apart at the seams. actually, the most impressive bit might be that the songs are so effing good that you quickly forget about just how inhuman the feat of actually playing them must be. these things are mannered mayhem of the highest order, powered by a spasmodic and indefatigable youthful energy that - as was proven by tepid follow-up Time to Die - not even Dodos could top.

24. Grizzly Bear - Yellow House

yeah, you thought i was kinda ragging on this in that veckatimest blurb a few days ago, but i mean, when was the last time you were right about something? the answer is about 3 minutes ago when you decided to come to my blog. see, you don’t have to be right often, but when you are right you have to make it count. towards my google analytics. we done here?

okay, so Yellow House. a bit sneaky… lulls you with florid touches, tripping this way and that until you suddenly find yourself at the summit of Mt. Gravitas (which is between K2 and Mt. Heart Attack, for those keeping… topography). endlessly awesome-saucesome (i just had some more to drink. it was a melange of low acid tropicana and water) song “on a neck, on a spit” is practically a microcosm for the album as a whole, whereas “lullabye” (um… JUST noticed the deliberate misspelling) displays the serious musical chops that elevate this stuff to the realm of high art. methinks the illustration adorning this album takes quite the literal approach, as even the knives on this record are better heard than felt. the sounds here are more comfortable sinking into the cracks and panels, pluming up with dust when someone climbs those stairs, and lingering in that sliver of light until long after the floorboards have stopped creaking. and “colorado” might / must be the most evocative song about colorado ever written. it’s over 6 minutes long. here are all the lyrics:

“When I clung to you there was nothing to hold on tight with, you left me adrift. Colorado, what now?”

23. Interpol - Turn on the Bright Lights

this record utterly exhausted everything this band had to offer. this is going to sound lazy as hell (at least it should), but to this lay-listener this is Joy Division for the 21st century. it’s a bit more affected than ian curtis ever allowed his music to be (i mean, interpol has a dress code), but Interpol’s debut is an immaculate assembly of finely aged (tired but not too mature) woebegone-rock (whenever this becomes too much of a chore, i just invent another genre. Woebegone-rock is maybe my masterpiece) that canvases New York City from couches to subways and the drift that binds them. i’m not sure if these songs are piercing the darkness in any way, but they’re certainly mapping it.

… just go take a late-night stroll downtown whilst listening to “NYC.” real loud, now. bust out the bose. that’s a lot of decade in 4 minutes and 20 seconds.

22. Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

has jeff tweedy ever sounded more perfectly like jeff tweedy than on “Radio Cure?” i think i’ve returned to the word “album” so much on this list (and in its title) less as a crutch than as a plea… or maybe as an elegy. much has been written about the demise of the album, and this sad state of affairs… well, it’s the worst thing ever. little-known fact: the nazis used to make the jews listen to singles. there are merits to one-offs… lady gaga’s immortal “paparazzi” is Dannon’s pudding proof. but… albums, man! fuck it, i just had a lovely heart-to-heart with my mom about inter-generational dynamics and i have to be in temple in the morning, so let’s just say that this album is not bad. and it features jim o’rourke!!!!! oh FUCK. i forgot to include jim o’rourke’s AMAZING album Insignificance! shit. whatever, that’s #22.5. anyhoo, i was gonna go on about how this is as a remarkable set of like-minded, inextricably linked songs that are held together only by the most tenuous of abstract bonds and a single fleeting motif that cohere into a forever revelatory album, an album that was almost not even released (as ben fong-torres said in Almost Famous… “craaaazzzyy.”), but i really had nowhere to go from there… other then bed.

21. The Notwist - Neon Golden

tired. so. former heavy metal german dudes (they’re still german, i think) forever change their sound with this long-gestating foray into the world of electronica… a splash they make with folksy touches and twangs that co-exist with ambient loops and the smoothest german voice this side of werner herzog. every new element they introduce is seamlessly woven into the mix as if it’s been there all along, and the conflict of genre is sorta absolved by the crisp conception of… whatever is they came up with here. i’m all outta names. if you play “consequence” for someone and they aren’t either emotional or visibly aroused, they’re probably both.

wait, i just listened to it again and that song is like… the anti-sexy. it’s just sort of sad. hypnotic but sort of sad. oh well. good album. SLEEP.

might take a holiday break from this madness tomorrow, rediscover my will to finish this / live, and wrap it up sunday / monday. me writing about music is like anthony lane writing about movies - needlessly dumb.

Cross-posted from The Ecstatic Truth.

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My Favorite 100 Albums of the Decade: 40-31

40. Erlernd Oye - DJ-Kicks

the best of the DJ-Kicks series by such a stupid margin, the usually hushed Kings of Convenience frontman Erlend Oye uses his time as curator to weave together a movingly moody mix, on which he adds his own spin (pun always intended) to the selected songs on more than one occasion. his spacey version of the smiths’ “there is a light that never goes out” is actually preferable to the infallible original in certain situations, and with a version of “2d2f” (or too drunk to fuck) as its centerpiece, this mix means business.

39. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Fever to Tell

a rocket from the crypt of garage rock if ever there was one (if your garage was filled with nothing but exhaust fumes and talent), the yeah yeah yeahs’ debut record is low-fi for the club. or for drinking alone in your apartment. or pretty much any other occasion. lead by the indomitable karen o - that carefully dirtied prototypical front-woman of the 21st century - Fever To Tell exploded into being with a sound as brash as its cover art, practically beating ears into submission. a violently confident ode to abandon, Fever to Tell is a lean bundle of raw, unleashed rock spasms, but tracks like the ubiquitous “maps” (which really is that good) and even “y control” hint at the versatility and command that has maintained their relevance for the 6 years since this here LP came out.

38. Sun Kil Moon - Tiny Cities

red house painters / sun kil moon frontman mark kozelek - home to one of the prettiest voices in modern music - decides to attack a bunch of Modest Mouse songs with only an acoustic guitar and a few other bits of accouterment. the ensuing album is pretty much perfect, recasting the harder-edged isaac brock originals as glacial ballads designed for nights on rolling plains. wisely not attempting strict emulations of the source material (a fool’s errand if ever there was one. and i’m pretty sure this blog is living proof that there are fool’s errands. and yes, this blog is… alive?), kozelek and co. utterly expose them, mutating and reducing them to only the bits that play to their strengths. the tactic not only makes for mournful little bits of quiet indie bliss, but unveils layers of the original that idiosyncrasy once kept hidden. the fact that pitchfork gave this a 3.0 only made sense to me once i learned that the review was written by nia vardalos.

37. Bjork - Medulla

it makes a whole heap of sense that bjork - after an absurd string of masterpieces like Debut, Post, Homogenic, and Vespertine - felt as if she had sort of conquered, um, the entire kingdom of musical instruments. she had reached a point at which their offerings were simply limiting her imagination or bestial vigor. cue Medulla, an audacious album on which 99% of the sounds are byproducts of the human voice. from the now-familair bjorkisms to biz markee’s inhuman beat-boxing to Dokaka’s… well, whatever it is that Dokaka does (a japanese dude who, among other things, uses only his limber voice to cover famous and dauntingly complex songs) on DAAMMMMNN-inducing album closer “triumph of a heart,” Medulla is confrontational at its meekest, and more often just animalistic. more challenging than any of her earlier records (“sonnets / unrealities XI” is bjork singing an e.e. cummings poem over some faint chanting) yet just as rewarding, Medulla is one of the world’s great musicians casting her tools aside to better explore her own instrument; herself. oh, also, the video for “triumph of a heart” is prettttyyy much the rapture in music video form. it features bjork marrying a cat. you WILL watch it. and it WILL blow your kitty-loving mind.

36. M. Ward - Transfiguration of Vincent

all of m. ward’s friends should die (okay, maybe not zooey deschanel). well, maybe that wouldn’t be the beeesssttt thing… allow me to rephrase - if every time one of m. ward’s friends happened to die, his grieving process included whipping up another tribute album as transcendent as Transfiguration of Vincent, i wouldn’t complain. i never knew vincent o’brien, but i have to imagine that the album his untimely death inspired is a fitting tribute. an accepting yet urgent bit of folksiness awash in m.ward’s unmistakable voice and signature guitar-picking (here complete with a number of reflective instrumental pieces), Transfiguration of Vincent is a versatile eulogy; a twisting trip through the DABDA process that touches upon acceptance, confusion, resignation, and david bowie… once even all on the same song. it’s the most pointed album on this list, yet also among the most likely to endure, as it’s too-genuine appeal is seemingly unencumbered by genre and other earthly concerns.

35. M83 - Saturdays = Youth

m83 maestro anthony gonzalez finally found something that could adroitly channel his hankering for massively emotional electronica - john hughes. where earlier m83 albums were full of nervous free radicals and lifelessly loud laptop blasts, on Saturday = Youth gonzalez found an ideal conduit which allowed him to wrap up his tendencies in a deeply poignant bow of teenaged nostalgia. on this record, his voice has a precious effervescence to it, like an over-exposed picture taken in the magic hour (or, um, like the upper left corner of the perfectly fitting album art pictured above). for an album designed to consist of such fleeting pleasures, the songs… decked out in their best 80s garb to evoke neon lights, big hair, and blinding hormones… are more tied to relatable, cinematic wistfulness than any particular era. it’s not the soundtrack to the adolescence you had, but rather the one you remember having.

34. Joanna Newsom - Ys

woodland nymph-like harp prodigy makes great. joanna newsom’s 2nd album found her joining forces with arranger van dyke parks, who molded her tales of constellations and forest creatures into absolutely epic narratives (the album consists of 5 songs and is about 57 minutes long) that flow and redouble upon themselves with the grace of a master storyteller. newsom’s divisive drawl is again front and center, but the songs just have such understandable purpose and drive that it’s hard to ignore their cumulative effect. seeing her perform this album in full with an orchestra at an opera house made for one of my favorite shows of the past 10 years. and seeing as how the shows i attended more than 10 years ago were either dave matthews, or bush, creed, or van halen that i wished were dave matthews… you can safely assume it was one of my favorite shows ever.

33. Arcade Fire - Funeral

i only have two things to say bout this record. it’s real good. and makes for surprisingly good fodder on a running mix. try it sometime. mix this up with a little bloc party (silent alarm, duh) some lady gaga, and a raging penchant for sloth and beer and you’ll be as fit as me in no time.

32. Sufjan Stevens - Seven Swans

stevens’ quietest record by a mile, this hushed rumination on (christian) faith also contains what i believe are his finest songs. from the flannery o’conner inspired “a good man is hard to find” to the, um, jesus-inspired title track, the tunes here are replete with such meaning and contemplative, almost melancholy belief that they transcend their eventually obvious implications. vague lyrics and fierce banjo-pluckery prove to be inviting to those of all creeds and colors, and, well… i dunno, i listen to the finest melodies and flourishes of a career that has produced a surplus of such things, and here they all just seem to inspire an accepting sense of helplessness… perhaps replicating for this agnostic jew the wonder and tumult stevens elicits from his faith. i mean, it’s tough to derive any on-the-nose meaning from epic centerpiece “sister,” and even harder to fight it. but if this motherfucker doesn’t release a recording of live classic “majesty snowbird” by the end of the next decade, i’m gonna… i’m gonna… be very upset at this inexplicable decision. the end.

31. Stars of the Lid - And Their Refinement of the Decline

so, um, i’m gonna go ahead and quote pitchfork quoting pitchfork here, cause that ambien is gonna kick in at annnny second. so one review quoted another review saying that “stars of the lid make the kind of music that makes consciousness seem like an annoying state.” just about nails it as far as i’m concerned. ambient music is one of those areas where i only have history and my prominent gut as my dual guides, as any formal training in music criticism is instrumental in dissecting the genre. get it? INSTRUMENTAL. AMBIENT. here, i’ll give you a blank line to laugh.

good. hope you got that out of your system, cause we’ve got some serious business to wrap up. not sure what it is about this record (it’s sheer 2-disc scope, perhaps), but this is just about my favorite ambient record this side of brian eno or early aphex twin. i’ve laid tracks of this over home videos of family vacations to lend them a missing poignancy. for realz. one such tape was on a mercifully defunct blog i used to have. i love swimming around this album… never really learning the topography well enough to know where within it’s soft folds i am at any given moment. horns, synths, guitar licks… it all drones.

Cross-posted from The Ecstatic Truth.

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My Favorite 100 Albums of the Decade: 50-41

50. Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago

dude (justin vernon) goes into a cabin in the wisconsin woods and emerges a few months later with one of the most heart-rending albums of love-lorn folk in… ever. each of the 9 songs here is a full well of feeling, and none of the 9 songs ever risk becoming too on the nose to lose the record’s blustery purpose as a cold lament - it never becomes more of a pillow than a too-thin blanket, and that’s why i think it’s gonna last a lot longer than the isolating despair from whence it came. also, let me know if justin vernon is having sex with your friends or acquaintances. curious if this is something of an epidemic.

49. Antony and the Johnsons - Antony and the Johnsons

probably would never have heard of antony’s first, self-titled record if not for the album with which he followed it, but even if this had been the alpha and omega of the giant gender-obfuscating chanteuse, it would have been a brilliant career. a bit harsher (both musically and lyrically) than the records antony and co. have released since, their debut blends the group’s patented ethereal charms with a more confrontational element, epitomized by songs like “hitler in my heart,” and… well, if you don’t get my point after mention of a song called “hitler in my heart,” then i should probably give up. probably their most thematically ambitious record, the LP canvases nothing less than the entire human heart (beginning with the “twilight“‘s first swells of love and being subsumed by the “rapture” just a few tracks later). no simile is too far-reaching for these songs, but antony’s voice - bellowing from the heavens like the unsexed cry from mt. olympus - makes it all seem to scale.

48. Tender Forever - The Soft and the Hardcore

tender forever (aka melanie valera) is the product of a girl holed up in her portland apt. with nothing more than a guitar, a computer (with pro tools, duh) and a lot of crushes on other girls, some of whom probably also have apartments, guitars, and computers (with pro tools, duh). methinks that makes for a more compelling origin story than that of bon iver, but that’s just me. also, i may have made some of that up. i just assume valera likes the ladies… i know it’s in the lyrics somewhere here, but i can never remember exactly where. or maybe i’m mistakenly confusing her pride in being strange (“then if i’m weird i want to share”) for queer, but ya know… it really doesn’t matter. the kitchen sink songs on this debut LP - all so full of ideas and whimsy - transcend any of that jazz, as they’re as far-reaching as anything U2 ever screamed at an arena, albeit in their own shy way. and with more handclaps and nervous pleas to make out. like kimya dawson minus the hippiness and plus a boatload of musical know-how, tender forever is perfectly balanced quirk for the laptop era. the lesbian laptop era. lesbian laptop - the next genre to be coined on this list. one day, historians will cite my blog as the monolith of 21st century vernacular, and they will refer to you as the people that jumped around it in ape suits while high on LSD. i have foreseen it.

47. Bert Jansch - The Black Swan

wellll, after all these debuts it’s definitely nice to see a member of the old guard return to the scene with such panache. probably the oldest guy on this list (and definitely the only one to have influenced nick drake rather than the other way around), jansch has released an album every 4 years or so since approximately 1943, but The Black Swan was the first one in a while that really stuck with me. his plaintive Scottish voice - which seems to contain the entirety of (irish, oops) playwright Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer in every note - has aged magnificently, and he’s still rich with fine ideas, and now imbued with the confidence to improve upon history with covers of traditional ballads like “Katie Cruel.” but it’s the original title track that best captures the mournful majesty of this record - its 6 minutes encapsulate jansch’s entire career and all the lives he’s lived with a melody it probably took him 5 minutes and 50 years to come up with.

46. Juana Molina - Son

juana molina is the argentinian jay leno. much like jay leno, she is an immensely successful talk show host. they’re actually pretty much the same person. the only difference i can think of is that where jay leno has a passion for antique cars and numbing mediocrity, juana molina loves writing amazing, spanish-language hypno-pop. seriously, if you can think of a better album to take ambien and play wii sports bowling to… i’d really like to hear it. but you can’t. because there isn’t one. there’s not a bad song on any of molina’s 4(?) albums, but Son is my fave cause the songs are just so crazily hypnotic. she plays approximately 394 billion instruments on some of these tracks, but they never leave lines or thoughts unaccounted for… everything resolves itself into a circle… a ball of sound tumbling over and over itself as she sneaks her sweet voice into the cracks. tracks like “la verdad” are enough to charm a south american snake (or wii bowl a 294), and that’s the truth.

45. Grizzly Bear - Veckatimest

oh, grizzly bear. the nicest guys in smart-rock. as loyal readers of my blog know, these dudes (namely singer ed droste) went way out of their way for absolutely no reason to be super nice to me and elena when we were in osaka, which pretty much earned them a spot in the top 50 in and of itself. but it’s the songs that earned them those last 5 spots. grizzly bear have been a bit more inviting with each subsequent album (though i do enjoy myself some good Horn of Plenty action), and veckatimest is the tipping point at which they broke through (read: when jay-z became a public fan). grizzly bear is a miracle of chemistry… 2 singer-songwriters that mix, match, and share in an extraordinary and mutually complimentary manner, and chris taylor and the (coincidentally named) chris bear round out the team nicely. ed droste and dan rossen never sound as if they’re competing, and while the dichotomy between their styles has never made for inadvertent tension, on veckatimest it seems as if they correctly figured the band’s most song-driven album to be the perfect showcase for their distinctly different talents. singles like “two weeks” and “while you wait for the others” punctuate veckatimest like exclamation points where previous LPs only had semi-colons - Yellow House sort of sweeps you along, but Veckatimest is a lot more up front with its calculated pleasures. bookending tracks “southern point” and “foreground” definitely make the long record feel like a bit of a journey, but its more disjointed feel isn’t a knock, but rather a change of pace that provides the band the freedom they needed to write some truly mammoth songs.

44. Wolf Parade - Apologies to the Queen Mary

the triumphant and much-heralded arrival of the spencer krug and dan boeckner brigade, this first wolf parade LP is still the almost perfect indie rock i remember it as being. a bit sparser and colder than follow-up At Mount Zoomer, Apologies to the Queen Mary had the unenviable tasks of introducing the indie cognoscenti to two distinct and divisive voices simultaneously - and it unapologetically (zing!) oriented listeners to spencer krug’s world while all the while smoothly interjecting that stiff handshake with the propulsive beats of dan boeckner. that the results feel so direct and stream-lined without sacrificing any of the kookiness behind the helm is a major coup, but yeah… as this novice music writer (who has zeerrrooo interest in ever writing about music again) is so wont to do… all i can say is that these are great songs. a bit reined in for these guys, but an honest and proper welcome to one of the decade’s great, reliable founts of indie music.

43. Wild Beasts - Two Dancers

so i first heard of these dudes approximately 8 minutes ago, but just as i thought when i first saw audrey hepburn, “when you know, you know.” this repugnantly young UK 4-piece arrived at the unusual and madly confident sound of this, their 2nd record, while traveling along a rather familiar path. their first record - Limbo, Panto - was raw and overstuffed with neat ideas, whereas Two Dancers coheres their penchant for twin falsettos and secretive syncopation into some airtight and instantly grabbing art-pop that isn’t afraid to wander down some darker avenues. methinks these lads sound like an infinitely more talented kings of leon by way of antony, and if songs like “all the king’s men” don’t grab ya, i can’t imagine you’d like much of the stuff on this here list. i needs me their 3rd record - i’ve been aware of their existence for about 2 weeks and i already feel like they owe me.

42. Sigur Ros - Agaetis Byrjun

often mistakenly cited as the greatest icelandic record of all time, sigur ros’ sophomore effort (never forget Von!) is a transcendent and now iconic moment in which a sound is simultaneously both discovered and perfected. jonsi’s wail and the occasional bombast sure contribute, but its sheer exoticness alone earns it a timeless quality to these ears, making for a record as difficult to forget as it is to pronounce…. is what i would write if i were functionally retarded / wrote for rolling stone. no, agaetis byrjun - which is actually not all that tough to at least attempt to pronounce - means “a good beginning,” which is certainly appropriate given that the record heralds their renovated sound, a fresh start from the frightening and impenetrable Von. wikipedia > ignorance. oh, p.s. if you ever get the chance to see these guys play live, go. twice. your giddily romantic post-show praise will inspire plenty of cringe-worthy soundbytes.

41. Broken Social Scene - You Forgot it in People

okay, it’s late and i’m tired and i’ve already packed in my yebisu for the night, so let’s make this quick. approximately 934 canadians (including feist, emily haines, amy millan, etc…) jammed into a recording studio with every instrument that scribblenauts could possibly conjure and jacked out a series of stunning and versatile songs that share little in common save for their quality. some songs breeze along, some songs are larger than life adolescent rally cries, others (“cause = time”) center around some of the cleanest guitar lines this side of the saskatchewan border. so tired. am way more interested in making a post about the “keep fucking that chicken” incident of 2009 (gawker is your friend) than i am writing anything else about BSS. nighto.

Cross-posted from The Ecstatic Truth.

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My Favorite 100 Albums of the Decade: 60-51

60. Emily Haines and the Soft Skeleton - Knives Don’t Have Your Back

Metric’s leading lady brings the lights down for her first solo record, and the results are pretty great. the lower range of her surprisingly expressive voice is the star of the show here, and freed from the sex and sweat of her Metric tunes she busts out material that provides the perfect home for that tenor register. but tracks like “doctor blind” and “crowd surf off a cliff” are only as lonely as they are catchy, and the propulsive piano licks that bind it all together are, um, propulsive. i really should have limited this shit to 50. i’m running out of adjectives with which to describe music. pretty girl makes pretty sounds. buy this record.

59. Sufjan Stevens - Illinois

oh sufjan. you make the ladies swoon at the same time that you make me look productive. cause the man’s attractive and hasn’t done jack shit in the past 4 years? ya dig? anyhoo, Illinois (or as i refuse to call it: Sufjan Stevens Invites you to: Come on Feel the Illinois) is Stevens’ most sprawling album, leading a journey across the state’s brief history from superman to john wayne gacy without missing a beat (literally every beat there is appears at some point on this album). and with stevens, the accounts are occasionally inscrutable but never dry, as he squeezes nostalgia from events you never lived or conveys the wonder that exists at the intersection between myths and the recorded past. and this record - freed from the misery of Michigan - plays to those strengths, and for 70 some-odd minutes manages to make Illinois an adventurous place to which you can sing along. also, i don’t care if this album was released in 2005 or whatever, it still posits (by omission) that predatory wasps are more important than obama. sufjan stevens - birther?

58. LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver

james murphy makes dance music that matters - at least he does on this record. transgressing against the norms of a genre proud of its meaningless bloat, murphy puts his fingers on our throats to gauge the pulse of new york and finds it sad and dancing. there’s not a moment of this album that doesn’t either scorn or lament, but murphy seems to adopt a sort of “dance dance dance” philosophy here, and makes even “all your friends,” that epic ode to being aimless and alone - something you can shout along to at parties without feeling like an asshole. you’ll still sound like an asshole, though, but that’s more because you’re tone deaf than anything else.

57. Doves - The Last Broadcast

one of the saddest albums on this list, if only because doves haven’t been able to string together a series of songs remotely as strong since. seriously, these guys are like… if pablo honey came out AFTER the bends. but they were firing on all cylinders here, with clean, precise, vaguely arty rock ditties that borrow liberally from a number of disparate influences… be it the southern twang of “there goes the fear” or the stadium rock echo chamber of “satellites,” or even the guitar wizardry on “pounding” that once had my high school self convinced these guys were the thomas edison of massive british rock. but my high school self was also convinced that chris carraba should be our poet laureate and that i would have a job after college (it was a time of youthful dreams), so… ya know. whatever, at least they’re not Muse. which is pretty much how i handle all of life’s disappointments. i.e. i can’t believe Isadora Duncan died in a freak accident - at least she didn’t die in Muse. see? i should rename this blog the TIMELY Truth, featuring always relevant Isadora Duncan references (and kevin eubanks).

56. The Avalanches - Since I Left You

i found a world so blueee, ohhh everyday. oh man, this album. comprised entirely of samples from moving images and old recordings, it never ceases to blow my mind that the debut of these aussie formalists is almost as fun as it is seriously impressive. i really can’t fathom how much insanely frustrating time ittook to assemble allllll of these samples into orders and layers so organically coherent that the crossovers only generate tension deliberately. but yeah guys, this album seamlessly (literally) trips from the smooth tropicalia of scratch-funk (dude, 49% of writing about music is just making up genres. and yet i still find it intensely laborious. bummer) to the likes of “frontier psychiatrist,” the surprise smash of the album that is at once the strangest and most accessible chunk of the record, and also the best song R2D2 should have written (but couldn’t).

55. Robyn - Robyn

robyn’s 4th (!?) album, but the first one that actually matters… it’s no accident this thing is self-titled. the badass sounds of robyn re-announcing her arrival, this thing sweeps the entire first act of her career - a chapter uncharacteristically spent as a pop starlet, fronted by ubiquitous single “show me love” - under the table by the end of the first song, which isn’t really a song at all (it’s literally a laundry list of all the ways in which this new robyn is a badass). it would all be a wee bit too much if the songs that followed weren’t so fucking great. these are some of the best examples of the radio-friendly pop that sweden churned out like umlauts this decade, filled with immediately huge beats and more girl-power bravado than the spice girls could generate with all their archetypes combined. girls like robyn are why i’ll never be able to american idol or american radio all that seriously - cause she fiercely proves that big pop can have both flair and heft. also, she puts on a shockingly kick-ass live show.

54. The Dismemberment Plan - Change

not as classic as Emergency & I, but it was never going to be. on this record the prematurely disbanded DP eased into a more settled sound without sacrificing any creativity. they should really get back together. if i were rich, like reeeallly rich, i would pay them to re-unite on a stage made entirely of $135,000 blu-ray players. suck on THAT, Live Aid!

53. Antony and the Johnsons - The Crying Light

oh antony… kazuo ohno would be (is?) proud. and very, very old. look at him. jeez. anyhoo, for an album so concerned with the otherworldly (equally concerned with both spirits and other corporeal worlds), ohno’s is a perfect image. sure, strident hints like “aeon” and “kiss my name” have me eager to antony to move even farther out of his comfort zone, but that the songs on The Crying Light are imbued with their own identity and yet (allmosssttt) on par with those on preceding LP “I Am a Bird Now” is achievement enough. it conjures and relies upon an entirely different feeling from its predecessor, but with songs as instantly fetching as “epilepsy is dancing,” perhaps the most surprising and admirable bit about this record is that it almost hits as hard as his revelatory first album. seriously sports fans, antony is one of the few artists on this list that (your) life without whom your life would be qualitatively worse.

52. St. Vincent - Actor

a new album, better songs, and a greater appreciation for my facial hair (it’s a long story. okay, it’s a short story: she signed my LP “dearest david, nice beard!” and not because my roommate told her to or anything, but just cause she’s a lady who knows what she likes… things that grow on my face). so i’m not wild about the orange backdrop, but i guess this list is supposed to consider the music as well. ugh, it’s fine. okay, it’s much better than fine. the multi-instrumental virtuosity on display here exhibits an exhilarating command of her world without ever suffocating the life out of her nearly too-smart tunes. her lyrics - by turns aggressive and ominous, but always surprisingly communal for an album so focused on individual presentation - and jarringly discordant punctuations (by now her trademark) make for a dynamic, quasi-narrative record that threatens to become an uninviting and somewhat academic exercise, but songs like “marrow” and “laughing with a mouth of blood” serve to remind that rock can be both smart and muscular. these songs are obviously brilliant, and after earning your respect they eventually earn your affection, too. could not be more excited for this woman’s career / impending marriage to me.

51. The Decemberists - Her Majesty the Decemberists

the more evolved half of the twin-headed hydra of the couplet of LPs that brought these shanty-loving guys to my attention (the other record being Castaways and Cutouts), Her Majesty the Decemberists just has the better tunes. it’s as simple as that, really. opening track “shanty for the arethusa” immediately flirts with the whole pirates and plunder element of their music which has proven so divisive (put me in the “love” column), but a few scant minutes later those same singular colin meloy vocals are vicing out an ode to modern las angeles, effectively bridging the gap between two unlikely historical signposts more effectively than pirates of the caribbean ever could. but by the time they get to vacuum-sealed epics like “the gymnast high above the ground” and the pervasively theatrical “i was meant for the stage,” such progression is rendered entirely irrelevant. this is the sound of a unique band writing the songs only they could write, while also making those first prematurely graceful steps towards the songs that would define them.

Cross-posted from The Ecstatic Truth.

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My Favorite 100 Albums of the Decade: 70-61

i’m so hungry i could eat a spaghetti cat. just sayin. ugh, when i’m out of my ito en green tea, the writing gets pretty dry. drier than… my mouth with no green tea in it. sorry bout that. this was such a tragic idea. but i’m pot committed now, i guess. the only way to stop this madness is to give me a job. this is in your hands now, people.

70. Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca

bitte orca, orca bitte! ahem. where was i? right. Bitte Orca is the sound of an immensely talented band (masterminded by dave longstreth) melding art with heart. their previous LPs were peppered with brilliance but suffocated by conceit (The Getty Address was a “glitch opera” about musician don henley, for example), but with this record they finally allowed their own inclinations to speak for themselves, and the results are always relentlessly intricate, often jangly enough to feel surprisingly organic, and sometimes downright anthemic. “stillness is the move” is one of the most unsuspecting body-movers of the decade, but the whole album darts around with a calculated looseness that is almost as fun and casual as it is deeply brilliant.

69. The Knife - Silent Shout

probably the most foreboding album on this list, Silent Shout is electronica (those dark, twisted, swedish voices…) that makes excellent use of empty space. most of the record feels like an interconnected series of dark alleys punctuated by some flashing neon lights. the whole thing isn’t frightening so much as it’s just chilly… chilly without being cold, and dark without ever being scary. apparently this album also dashed any dreams i had of being a music writer… which is fine because ever since i saw that fucking isopod i haven’t been able to dream about anything else. anyhoo, it’s rare to find electronica that uses the human voice (modified… i hope) as its main weapon, and even rarer to find some that does so this successfully. there’s more of a heartbeat here than in their cover of jose gonzalez’s “heartbeat” - you feel surrounded but can’t help but sing along.

68. The Wrens - Meadowlands

fun fact: i once saw these dudes shove aside the criterion section at the now-defunct columbia university Kim’s and churn out a sick set to… well, me and a few other people. if life gets better than picking up the (then) new Knife in the Water criterion disc while the Wrens blast you with “ex-girl collection,” … i dare life to prove it to me. anyhoo, these grey-haired guys are among the best at adapting the sounds of teenage angst to the more abstract concerns of middle age. straight-up vaguely whiny guitar rock that jams with a masterful poise that never feels contrived. methinks this record possesses a subtle greatness… tear through it too fast and they sound like a generic opening band that missed their shot. but give it a little time and you’ll be amazed at how eager you’ll be to return time and again to a record named after new jersey. which leads me to my next thought - fuck the devils.

67. Dustin O’Halloran - Piano Solos

chalk this one up to sofia coppola. o’halloran’s beautiful etudes are alllll over coppola’s Marie Antoinette, and i mean it as high, HIGH praise when i say they work just as effectively as the Aphex Twin tunes with which they appear on the soundtrack. i’ll admit that i haven’t heard alllll that many classical piano records this decade, so o’halloran definitely has a bit of an edge there, but this endlessly rewarding collection of ditties definitely earned him a spot on this list. the quiet, invariably melancholy melodies sound as if they’ve been excavated from your brain rather than composed… they’re instantly familiar from the first listen but stand up to countless replays without ever feeling obvious or predicated upon a single, tiring idea. o’halloran released a sequel that lacked the same kick.

66. Animal Collective - Feels

home to what remains my favorite animal collective song (“Banshee Beat”), Feels is the record with which the trio let me in. an acquired taste (to put it mildly), it often seems as if animal collective’s tremendous gifts and miraculous chemistry are rivaled only by their desire to subvert them. or at least to… prove that the listener’s interest in some things exceeds their own. the yelps and noodling that are controversially present on all AC albums (save one, kind of) are certainly present here, but epic soundscapes like “daffy duck” share a mutually enriching dynamic with the more traditionally structured songs around them that resolve themselves into a complete experience in a way i feel records like Sung Tongs and Here Comes the Indian don’t quite. i dunno, maybe it’s a mood thing…

65. The Strokes - Is This It?

you just can’t deny this album, and i’ve tried. i didn’t want to try, but Room on Fire made me try. these guys are the one-note wonders of the decade. but i when i listen to this record now i hear the same thing i did when i first heard it on 9/11/01: unadulterated awesomeness. if this thing dropped today it would earn the same heat… great songs that sound too tossed off to be true always get the kids a-crazy. it’s the musical incarnation of girls liking d-bags. and man did this thing spawn an avalanche of crappy imitators (the best of whom was a band called The Strokes). every song is like a party you weren’t cool enough to be invited to, and julian casablanca’s modulated vocals do a fine job of marrying the wheeze of drug-rock with, um, “the modern age.” zing. still hungry, people. seamless web… you know the drill.

64. Destroyer - Destroyer’s Rubies

dan bejar is like dashboard confessional for the New Yorker set. hyper-nasal, hyper-literate multi-instrumentalist rock that is propelled by a single vision, Destroyer’s Rubies is the album on which bejar best marries his penchant for novelistic lyrics to theme and timbre. from the epic first track to more concise bits like “painter in your pocket,” this is the only Destroyer album on which the music always works with the lyrics rather then distracts from them. fun fact: i once sold bejar a pair of shitty headphones without once looking up, only realizing who it was when i read his credit card. at which point i looked at his face, said “what?” and watched as he walked away confused. they all lived unemployed ever after. well, except dan bejar.

63. Atlas Sound - Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See but Cannot Feel

ohh bradford cox… the greatest artist with marfan syndrome in the history of indie rock? in the history of all of music? i think so. the mop-headed man-boy with the accentuated neck and concave chest (and blog where he accidentally leaks his own albums when not showing kiddie porn) didn’t blow me away with his first album fronting Deerhunter, but when he took up the mantle of Atlas Sound and tossed aside the fuzz for some (fuzzy) bleeps and bloops… shit got real. the relatively subdued affair is cox at his most expressive, and the circular swirls and echo chamber vocals make the whole thing positively hypnotic. his 2nd LP under the Atlas Sound moniker - Logos - is pretty glorious, too.

62. Belle and Sebastian - The Life Pursuit

belle and sebastian - among the most unlikely and most enjoyable indie successes of the 1990s - kept churning out bubbly, sexually frustrated, bits of twee awesomeness with remarkable consistency straight through the aughts. and their most recent LP, The Life Pursuit, is among their very best (if not quite up there with Tigermilk or If You’re Feeling Sinister), filled with delightful, head-bopping melodies coated with stuart murdoch’s deceptively carefree (and not deceptively scottish) vocals. a belle and sebastian LP tends to only be as good as is characters, and from Sookie in the graveyard to the unnamed “White Collar Boy,” The Life Pursuit is stuffed with some of their richest portraits yet. by this point in their career, the be-scarfed gang have a complete mastery over their sound, and continue to discover jubilant ways of never repeating themselves. that being said, the biggest surprise on this record might be when they bring the lights down for a second on “Act of the Apostle II” and actually strike a nerve, infusing the bouncy songs that follow with an instant touch of poignancy it used to take them entire albums to achieve.

61. The Arcade Fire - Neon Bible

oh arcade fire. the great white canadian indie hopes (who aren’t broken social scene). the versatility and sheer virtuosity of their landmark debut Funeral made listeners the sort of promises that more single-minded arrivals like Vampire Weekend or The Futureheads never could… never intended to. it was clear The Arcade Fire could do pretty much anything they wanted to with their sophomore record… which apparently included aping bruce springsteen. the latter half of this record (until the bombastic couplet that finishes it off) consists of genuine blue-collar war cries straight outta… Montreal. when heard in context with the orchestral, sonically demanding and gravitas-laden first half, the later songs feel like the day-to-day symptoms of the metaphysical agonies Win Butler and co. are swamped by like thick oil in earlier tracks “Black Mirror” and “Intervention.” speaking of “intervention,” that’s some pretty wicked rock church organ they’ve got going on there. anyhoo, these guys wisely stepped sideways instead of on their own feet, and barring over-bloated misstep “no cars go,” they proved that who they are is almost as good as who they were supposed to be.

Cross-posted from The Ecstatic Truth.

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