Best of 2006

It's getting harder and harder to locate these lists.  2006.  Pre-Facebook, pre-MySpace.  I think I might have been on Friendster at the time.  Yes, kids, technology from less than a decade ago was pretty ancient. In 2020, I'll probably be sending this list directly into your brain.  Just try to avoid reading it then.

Anyways, this list would have been strictly an e-mail only kind of thing.  I'd send it out to anyone I thought might remotely be interested.  Now, I just post the thing online for pretty much everybody to see.  But, back in the day, you had to at least know me to be included in the list.  I moved to Ireland in 2006 but this list still shows a definite Minnesota bias to it:  2 Minneapolis bands and a host of albums that would have been featured on 89.3.  Once again, the write-ups are word-for-word from 2006 so they might seem just a little bit outdated but so it goes:

10. Matisyahu - Youth

Well, maybe it's all just the kitsch of it with Matisyahu being a Hasidic Jew that does dance hall.  But it's not like he's doing this as a lark either, he is legitimately Hasidic and happens to like (and sing) dance hall.  It's not a great album throughout, but there are some really fantastic songs on it.  "King Without a Crown" is one of the best of the year and certainly, we can all agree, the best song about Yahweh to come along in quite some time.  Interestingly, this spot came down to Matisyahu or Prince, who seems to have finally given up all of his lousy religious-tinged albums and gotten back to being freaky/funky.  In the end, I figured I'd give the tie to Yahweh.

9. Ratatat - Classics

Not nearly as good as their first album but still quality stuff and I'm making up for their first album here since I didn't learn about them until 2 years after they released that album.  Their brand of garage rock electronica is really pretty unique and, heck, I just like their sound.  They also included a song that samples a cougar, which coincided nicely with my viewing of Talladega Nights.  I like that kind of symmetry in my life.

8. Cut Chemist - The Audience is Listening

The best electronic album of the year in my book.  Cut Chemist has been doing it for years with Ozomatli and J5 and, normally, I can't stand DJ albums as they just contain inexorable periods of scratching and songs that last 10 minutes or so with no real structure to them, but this album's different and much more along the lines of what a DJ album could be.  I don't know how they got around all of the sampling costs as their seems to be a ton of it on here, but it's amazing.  The songs all have a different sound to them and they don't all sound like they're straight from Ibiza or anything. It's a pretty diverse album.  Plus there's a song that starts with the line "People get ready…the robots are coming".  It's about time someone started getting that message out…

7. Peter, Bjorn, and John - Writer's Block

Shortly after I moved to Ireland, there was a time where the radio here seemed to play nothing but Shakira's "Hips Don't Lie" and "Young Folks" by Peter, Bjorn, and John.  The latter makes this list, while Shakira, um, does not.  Now they certainly need to come up with a more rock n' roll name than "Peter, Bjorn, and John", but they seem to be the next in line of mellow, downbeat Swedish pop along with the likes of Kings of Convenience or the Concretes.  "Young Folks", in fact, is a duet with the singer from the Concretes.   

6. Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan - Ballad of the Broken Seas

Great meeting of voices here.  Isobel Campbell is the sugary sweet, Dusty Springfield-like voice from Belle & Sebastian while Mark Lanegan is the I've-smoked-3-packs-a-day-for-20-years-and-I-barely-have-any-vocal-cords-left raspy voice from Screaming Trees (among others).  Basically, she sounds like 20-year-old Marianne Faithfull and he sounds like 50-year-old Marianne Faithfull.  The duets on this album are great theater playing up the male-female differences in their voices, though Isobel's sugary sweet voice belies not so sugary sweet lyrics.  Add to that that the songs are all old-school, jangly country which has its own stereotypical gender roles that Isobel & Mark turn on their heads.  Their cover of Hank's "Ramblin' Man", in particular, is worth the price alone.

5. Sunset Rubdown - Shut Up I Am Dreaming

No Arcade Fire on the list this year, but Sunset Rubdown makes for an adequate Canadian replacement.  Featuring members of Wolf Parade and a few other bands (I swear there's a pack of Canadians who are in, like, 6 different bands), these guys are sort of a mix between Arcade Fire and Queen and Davie Bowie.  The songs all have a real dramatic air to them, are long, change structure completely at least once during the song, and feature ridiculously ostentatious names like "The Men are Called Horsemen There".  Really evocative music.  They sound just as big as Arcade Fire can at times.

4. Tapes n' Tapes - The Loon

Let's hear it for Minneapolis.  This band really came out of nowhere (even on the local scene), but put together one of the best albums of the year.  A mix of indie, some classic rock Kinks-type influence, 50's kind of doo-wop type vocals, and subtle samples among other things.  It's a hard album to characterize.  "Insistor" is the best song of the year if you ask me. 

3. P.O.S. - Audition

Tapes n' Tapes would be the best album to come out of Minneapolis, if it wasn't for P.O.S.  Last year, Atmosphere made the #2 spot on my list coming out of Minneapolis Rhymesayers' Collective.  This year, P.O.S. checks in as a member of the other Minneapolis rap outfit, Doomtree.  P.O.S. listed his two biggest influences as Dr. Dre and Fugazi, essentially earning my respect right out of the gate.  This album's a great punk-rap effort showing that the two styles aren't as different as you might think.  In particular, the lyrics get away from the typical I'm-a-playa rap lyrics and have more of an old-school rap vibe of "I'm barely making ends meet".  There's even a song entitled "Living Slightly Larger" in response to the "Livin' Large" stereotype.  And, come on, the very first line of the album is "First of all, f*** Bush, that's all that's the end of it".

2. OutKast - Idlewild

Forget Brangelina or TomKat's kid.  The progeny to watch for in the next 20 years will be Andre 3000 and Erykah Badu's kid.  He'll have some real talent.  Proving the point that most of what's original in today's music comes from the hip-hop world is this completely uncharacterizable album.  It's not really hip-hop, not really rock, it has some of both, but it's also got a Broadway musical vibe, some blues, some Vaudeville, even some ragtime.  It's really bizarre in a lot ways and it's the album of a band that has the freedom to do what it likes and doesn't really care what people think, but is also talented enough to pull it off.  And, really, there is just no one cooler than Andre.  I'd read in interview where he just decided that he wanted to learn how to play trumpet so he just hung out with Fishbone for half a year until he learned it.  It's on my life list of things to do:  Hang out with Fishbone for 6 months and learn the trumpet...

1. Bruce Springsteen - The Seeger Sessions

And here we are.  Maybe not such a surprise, since the Boss is an all-time favorite of mine.  I was really skeptical with this album, though.  I mean, come on.  A collection of folk songs, gospels, and traditional music with a latter-day bluegrass band?!  I held out for a long time buying it, when I applied a Brett Isenberg quote about Joe Strummer: "Springsteen could fart into a microphone and I'd buy it".  So, I broke down and got it and instantly knew that it would be the top album of the year for me.  The only other person who could've pulled this album off died a few years back: Johnny Cash.  As if to prove that point, there's even the requisite song about John Henry.  There's an earnestness and an honesty to the way Springsteen sings these songs.  In the traditional Irish song, Mrs. McGrath, he sings "Now I wasn't drunk and I wasn't blind when I left my two fine legs behind.  A cannonball on that fateful day blew my two fine legs away."  And you can hear strains of songs like Born in the U.S.A. of veterans coming home and not being able to find jobs or even a society that wants anything to do with them.  And he adds a rollicking sort of flavor to folk and bluegrass songs that Cash never had.  It's a different take on the songs alright.

Best of 2007

I've been trying to hunt down my top 10 lists dating all the way back to my first list in 2001 when I was still a bright-eyed graduate student in Minnesota.  Some dogged detective work dug up my list from 2007, which was my first full year living in Ireland.  Despite that fact, the majority of this list still is very North American centric.  Thinking back to that period, I was still finding it hard to adjust to living in Europe and found myself listening to a lot of radio stations back in the States.  Anyways, I'm just cutting and pasting my write-ups from 2007 so they might sound a little dated now particularly when you read those for bands like the National that have become househould names these days.  Or when I refer to MySpace.  Goodness, that was so 2007.  Anyways, with that caveat in mind, here's that list:

10. Arcade Fire - Neon Bible

Sage Francis nearly took this spot by virtue of quoting John Donne, Charles Bukowski, and Allen Ginsberg in the space of two songs.  In the end, though, I just couldn’t overlook what is a pretty solid album.  The first couple of songs are a bit milquetoast, but it really picks up by the end of the album.   It suffers from my unrealistically high expectations of the album, but it’s still quality.  Definitely gloomier than their previous efforts, but it also appeals to my egalitarian side with lyrics like “eating in the ghetto of a hundred dollar plate”.  “Intervention” was overplayed a bit, but it’s a really fabulous song.   It might be a bit of the egotistical rock star thing to record a song in a church using a pipe organ, but it really does work.  Plus, every time I hear the pipe organ on that song, I think of the Simpsons episode where Homer replaced the organist’s regular music with “Inna Gadda Da Vida”.

9. The Raveonettes - Lust Lust Lust

This is based on only a handful of listens as this album just came out a few weeks back, but the Raveonettes have always, always, always been one of my favourite bands.  They just have such a unique sound.  The music, as ever, is a mix of retro 60’s twangy guitar and feedback and, on the vocals, they’ve got this incredibly cool thing that only the Scandinavians seem able to do: a really detached, yet melodic voice.  It always sounds like they really couldn’t be bothered to be singing and really have better things to be doing but, since they happen to be singing at the time, why not do it with perfect pitch.  As far back as Nico with the Velvet Underground, the Scandinavians have been able to do this!  I wish I knew what was going on up there.  Not as good as their first two albums, so only #9 on my list.

8. Aesop Rock - None Shall Pass

Moving to Ireland has really cut down on the amount of hip-hop I’m exposed to.  It’s just doesn’t seem to be very popular in these parts.  I surmise that House of Pain put an end to that experiment.  So, sadly, this is the only representative of the genre on the list this year (with Sage Francis on the outside looking in).  And this one came about from a night spent randomly strolling through eMusic.   But what a great find.  Really dense lyrics, complex rhymes, great production, and your man raps faster than that dude from Onyx.  But, like, good as well.

7. Candie Payne - I Wish I Could Have Loved You More

Amy Winehouse gets all the buzz as far as the retro-60’s chanteuse crowd goes, but that’s largely ‘cause she’s cuckoo and has a crazy beehive hair-do.  If that’s the style you’re after, Candie Payne’s album is waaaayyyy better.   She’s got this sound that reminds me of Beth Gibbon from Portishead.  It helps that the music oftentimes has that same kind of sultry, 60’s-spy-movie sound that Portishead perfected.  She has a sweeter voice than Beth Gibbon, though, particularly on a few of the tracks.  More Dusty Springfield-ish.

6.  The Bastard Fairies - Memento Mori

This is my favourite story of the whole lot.  I owe discovery of this band entirely to Bill O’Reilly.  No, really.  You see, those that know me really well know that, every now and then, I have this overwhelming need to make myself angry.  I’m like the reverse Hulk.  And few things get me angrier than finding Bill O’Reilly videos on YouTube.  One in particular was the Queen Mother of bizarre Bill-O rants.  He was going on and on about some video on “an internet site” (he wouldn’t say which one, though anyone this side of Ted Stevens knew he meant YouTube).  I mean, I can’t even explain how crazy Bill-O’s rant was. Of course, that necessarily piqued my interest in finding said offensive video.  

Turns out that it was a promotional video for this band.  So, I kept following the trail to their MySpace page where I find that they’re essentially a duo replete with a super cool punk-rock Sioux lead singer named Yellow Thunder Woman (is thunder really yellow?).  Even better, they were offering their album for free on their website.  Score!  And, even better, the album’s really good.  The music captures the punk rock message (which is basically the middle finger to societal conventions) hidden inside of simple, sugary sweet melodies and Yellow Thunder Woman’s coy voice.  A lot of the instrumentation on the album was even done with toy store instruments.   Not really for the easily offended, though...

5. Shout Out Louds - Our Ill Wills

First album of Mike’s Blue Period here and my second Scandinavian entry.  This album was my soundtrack to October and November.  It’s fabulous autumn music.    It’s a complete departure from their debut album, which was all chirpy and happy.  This one’s like the exact opposite (without being annoying, though), but it still retains the great melodies and pop sensibility.  It reminds me a lot of Beck’s Sea Change album; more proof that better art comes from the end of a relationship than the beginning of one.   What most people notice, though, is how eerily similar the lead singer’s voice is to that of Robert Smith.  Which I happen to quite like, but I suppose could turn off a few people.

4.  The Budos Band - Budos Band II

Why don’t more people play baritone sax?  You never see that.  Turns out it’s a way cool instrument.  It’s rapidly replacing the double bass as an instrument I’d make my kids learn.  It just looks cool.  And it sounds so impossibly low on the register.  Anyways, enough about the baritone sax, hard to describe the Budos Band.  Imagine a slower, smoother version of Booker T. and the MG’s.  They play a brand of instrumental R&B/funk with a full brass section and a proper organ.  It’s just a groove album that would play well in any 60’s swingers pad.  Playing this album instantly makes me a lot cooler than I actually am.

3.  The National - Boxer

It’s about time I got an Ohio band on one of these lists (though they’re technically a New York band now).   And, what’s really, really, really strange about that, is that as I’m looking for material on them right now, I just realized that one of my college fraternity brothers is their drummer.  You know, you might come across someone that you’ve lost track of on Facebook or MySpace or something like that.  You don’t expect to come across them in the lineup for one of your favourite bands of the year!  Anyways, this is a great album.  It feels very Midwestern American to me for some reason.  Lyrics start out innocent, invariably with the loss of innocence right around the corner.  The mood is always even-tempered sometimes a bit high, sometimes a bit low, always ending up level but with a tinge of resignation.  And I know this review comes off completely hollow to a lot of people on this list, but to me the best word that describes this album is really “Midwestern”.  I know the place where this album comes from.  I grew up there.

2.  Sunset Rubdown - Random Spirit Lover

On the first draft of this list (yes, how sad is that, I’ve gone through this like 10 times), this album showed up much lower.  Somewhere around #8.  Fortunately, I listened to the top contenders over and over while in the throes of Galway traffic and it dawned on me how good this album really is.  Just like their last album, it’s more of a meal than an appetizer.  With songs routinely clocking in over 6 minutes long and featuring abrupt structural changes, it takes a bit to get into it.  It’s not an easy listen, but stick with it.  The songs are all epic and do a fabulous job of taking the listener on an emotional roller coaster.  But all in all it’s a really happy, tender album.  So maybe I’m not so melancholy after all.  They score extra points for naming a song “Trumpet, Trumpet, Toot!  Toot!” inclusive of exclamation points.

1.  Happy Apple - Back on Top

I’ve been waiting for this album for at least a year.  The fabulous jazz trio from Minneapolis features easily the best rhythm section anywhere.  On “Very Small Rock”, Eric Fratzke’s bass line actually sounds melodic for half the song before he changes it up, keeping the beat by playing only single notes every now and then.  He manages to go from a really lush bass line to an extraordinarily sparse one and makes it work.  And there’s no real way to explain Dave King’s drumming on “Density and Dan’s Fan City” other than using an open-mouthed stare with maybe some unintelligible syllables dropping out.  That song like a lot of the ones on this album (“Calgon for Hetfield”, “The New Bison”, etc.) have been standards at Happy Apple shows for years.  They’ve just now finally gotten around to recording them all.  Far and away, though, the best is “Dan’s Fan City” (named after a real place in St. Paul, next to the spot where Dave King buys his drums).  It’s as good as anything Radiohead’s ever done.  And, as always, they remain fabulously hilarious in their own nerdy way.  Song titles on this release also include “Rise!  Marc Anthony” and “Hence the Turtleneck” and the last time I saw them they took time out of their show to do a medley of Rush, Foreigner, and Bon Jovi.   Ah, that’s good for a laugh.

Best of 2013

So, we've made it to the end of another year.  For anyone who doesn't know how this works, this little exercise is something I've done with friends for the last 13 or so years to share the best music we heard over the past year.  It's actually incredibly, ridiculously simple, just list your top 10 or top 5 or top 17 albums of the year.  Don't worry if you've got Miley in your top 10, you're in a safe place here.  The idea is just to write about what albums you liked and why.  Trawling through other people's top 10 lists has always been a great way for me to discover new music.

2013 was actually loaded with albums that I was really excited about but, in the end, almost none of those made my end of the year list.  I couldn't wait for the Knife's Shaking the Habitual to hit and, while I love it, I wouldn't put it in my top 10 list.  Similarly, a new Arcade Fire and a new National album.  A new Nick Cave, a new Sin Fang, and, imminently, a new Tom Waits.  All of which are really great albums but, as I made my list, none of them actually cracked my top 10.  Part of that is due to my bias of grading a band's album against their last album which was a particularly difficult hurdle for Arcade Fire.  But the other way to look at it is that there were a lot of albums this year that completely blindsided me with how spectacular they were.  As I look at my list, there are only two albums (#2 and #5) that I would have predicted would be on this list at the beginning of the year.  Everything else was a pleasant surprise. 

So, that's my intro.  I'm really very interested to hear everyone else's list.  But, until then, here's mine:

Album that would have made this list if it wasn't released in 2011 - The Goat Rodeo Sessions - S/T

Strange to see a group tour on album that was released a year and a half ago, but I guess that's what happens when Yo-Yo Ma is part of the group.  This was, quite likely, the best concert I saw all year.  Up until the Goat Rodeo Sessions, my perception of classical musicians was one of someone who debated the pitch of an oboe on a recording of Prokofiev while smoking a cigarette out of a holder.  So it's really remarkable to see this group composed of the absolute top, top names in Americana music (many of whom played on the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack): Edgar Meyer on bass, Chris Thile on mandolin, and Edgar Meyer on fiddle team up with Yo-Yo Ma, essentially the only classical cellist I can name.  Until now, I just assumed classical musicians were so.......boring.  Yet here, Yo-Yo Ma is experimenting, he's delighting in screwing up, he's enjoying listening to the other musicians.  It's really incredible.  But through it all, the skill of these guys is unparalleled. You very well may not come across a better cello, bass, fiddle, or mandolin player anywhere. And I love the realization that being a virtuoso on the cello in the field of "classical music" is no different than being a virtuoso on the mandolin in the field of traditional Americana.  You will not find four better people at playing stringed instruments than these four. The music, by and large, is traditional Americana albeit all original pieces except every now and then, they'll decide to take a Bach piece written for the harpsichord and adapt it to the mandolin.  It's the sort of thing that only "serious" musicians can do.

10.  The Suburbs - Si Sauvage

If I'm scoring this just on albums that I thought were the most solid front-to-back, I'd probably have to put the National's Trouble Will Find Me here.  But, I've always left room for albums that I thought were important for other reasons and this one certainly fits the bill.  First, it's a fucking new Suburbs album.  Which, bizarrely enough, came on the coattails of a number of states legalizing gay marriage which led to a solid 2 days of air time for Love is the Law.  Secondly, though, this was the first album that I ever funded on Kickstarter.  Since then, I've funded four more albums.  And this is something that I think is a well-overdue advancement.  Anything that lets bands circumvent labels and get their albums funded directly by their fans is a positive as far as I'm concerned.  Plus, I ended up with a really sweet pink vinyl LP signed by Chaz, Beej, and the rest of the band.  As far as the music goes, I love the fact that this is the same Suburbs that you would have had in the mid-80's.  Fun, happy, we're-all-glad-to-be-alive pop highlighted by Turn the Radio On and You've Got to Love Her

9. Pascal Pinon - Twosomeness

One consistent theme for me is that I've had a Scandinavian band in my top 10 for the last 7 years.  It's not my fault that Scandinavians do better and more interesting pop music than anyone else.  And here we go again.  This album actually won Best Icelandic Album of 2012 but, seeing as I never made it to Iceland in 2012 and the album wasn't released anywhere else until 2013, I think it's fair to include it on this list. I have a complete man-crush on another Icelandic artist, Sin Fang, who also had a new album out this year and it has to be said that it's a bit of an upset that his album hasn't actually made my list.  Sin Fang is on the Morr music label and did a mini-tour throughout Europe in support of his new album and, opening for him, was his label mate, Pascal Pinon.  That's how I discovered these guys.  Pascal Pinon are two sisters who craft these really lo-fi tunes with a ton of things going on in the background.  Almost every song on the album has the two sisters harmonizing while a range of synths and assorted electronic paraphernalia play in the background.  The result is haunting, surreal, beautiful.  Check out Bloom and Twosomeness.

8. Phosphorescent - Muchacho

Honestly, this album is on here almost exclusively for one song.  The best song of the year hands down, as far as I'm concerned, was Song for Zula.  This is one of those songs you hear at a certain point of your life that really gets to the heart of how you feel.  It's a relentlessly simple song: simple instrumentation, repetitive drum beat, etc. but the stark instrumentation combined with the near perfect lyrics are just heartbreaking.  It's a song about not becoming cynical, hard, jaded about love after a particularly cold and brutal break-up with lines like "See, honey, I am not some broken thing, I do not lay here in the dark waiting for thee" and "Then I saw love disfigure me into something I am not recognizing".  For my money, it's a near perfect song.  The rest of the album can't live up to Song for Zula but there's plenty of fuzzy guitars, jangly rhythms, and debauched lyrics like on Ride On/Right On.

7. Bells> - Solutions, Silence, or Affirmations

I can't figure out how to do the greater than or equals sign that is part of Bells>' name, but their website informs me that the symbol is silent.  So let's just call them Bells.  My punk rock proclivities throughout high school and college included an infatuation with the band Jawbox.  As luck would have it, I would then go to graduate school with the brother of the drummer from Jawbox (Zach Barocas).  Said brother was just about the most adept mathematician I've ever met.  So, it's only appropriate that Zach Barocas' latest project would be an intersection between punk, jazz, and math rock.  Drums, double guitars, and electric bass is all you get out of Bells.  It has the precision you might think of with a band like Boards of Canada (also a great album this year), but it's just got a harder edge reminiscent of the Bad Plus or even Ratatat.  Check out Brothers, Sisters and Promenade.

6. Devendra Banhart - Mala

I feel a little bit like this album has missed out on a lot of press simply because it came out in February/March.  This was the first album of the year that really caught my attention.  I couldn't get the hooks and the mix of funny, desperate, depressed lyrics in Never Seen Such Good Things Go So Wrong out of my head.  How great a line is "Love you're a strange fella" or "If we ever make sweet love again, I'm sure it'll be quite disgustin'".  The rest of the album jumps between his native Spanish and English but all of the songs dwell on the ridiculous yet intoxicating aspects of romance all done with a mix of folk, indie pop, and flamenco.  Check out also Mi Negrita.

5. My Bloody Valentine - MBV

Oh my god, how much I love this band.  This album would be on the list if, for no other reason, than to remind me of how great an album Loveless is.  Just like the Suburbs, 20+ years elapsed between Loveless and MBV, but you would never know it from listening to the album.  The driving guitars, the hazy vocals, the tension as they keep you on edge for the moment when they're going to make your ears bleed.  I wish I knew why it took them so long to release another album.  I just love the way songs like In Another Way and She Found Now are constructed.  There's this dreamy, woozy character to the guitars and the vocals that always ends up building and building and building to this crescendo of controlled chaos.  It is, in it's own right, beautiful. A lot of time spent in the car with this one this year.

4. Kanye West - Yeezus

It's gotta be on here.  This is such a ridiculous good album.  I never came around to Daft Punk's Random Access Memories but this is the "widely released" album that I really fell in love with this year.  I tend to prefer my hip hop humble.  You know, the De La Soul's or Digable Planets of the world.  But, screw it, every now and again I want my hip hop artists to come out with an album called Yeezus with songs like I am a God on it.  If you're going to check humility at the door, you may as well go all the way.  This is Kanye with really tight rhymes over an aggressive, aggressive backing track.  You won't find a better rockin' out song this year than Black Skinhead.  And the album is tight.  Barely 40 minutes long, the songs are heavy on the drums, the guitar, the screaming.  Kanye's delivery is intense, immediate, but varied enough to keep you on your toes.  It's one of the best produced hip hop albums ever.  It's almost enough to make you forgive Kanye's various lyrical slip ups - like the fact that the Romans had nothing to do with the Battle of 300.

3. Lucius - Wildewoman

Absolute late-comer here that I only discovered because my buddy Alex informed me that the two ladies in Lucius provided the studio vocals for the album at #1.  Both of them have amazing voices and they use them to produce such great harmonies.  Behind the two female leads, you've got a mix of slide guitar, percussion, and the occasional synth.  They also make liberal use of a personal favorite: hand claps.  They'll slide easily into songs that are real country-western (like Go Home) to Ronette style girl group choruses (like Turn it Around) to straight up indie pop (like on Don't Just Sit There).  In every case, though, it's the combined voices of Holly Laessig and Jess Wolfe that make the songs.  I also do admit to loving bands that have a look.  Lucius has this sort of nerd chic matching outfit thing going on with the female lead singers wearing one set of matching outfits and the all-male backing band wearing a different set of matching outfits.  Yeah, I like that sort of thing.

2. Vampire Weekend - Modern Vampires of the City

Vampire Weekend's debut album made my list a number of years back what with songs like Oxford Comma, Mansard Roof, and Walcott.  Then they dropped off my list for a while.  But this album....  It's got everything I love about Vampire Weekend:  Ezra being a little bit too cute with the lyrical word play (Ya Hey instead of Yahweh, Diane Young instead of Dying Young, lines like "But actually Oakland but not Alameda, your girl was in Berkeley with a Communist reader"), drum crashes, Caribbean rhythms, the whole nine yards.  But this album finally added a little bit of depth.  More than anything, the song Hudson is a total departure.  It's dark what with a militaristic drum roll and its requiem choruses over the top of Ezra's lyrics ("Hudson died on Hudson Bay, the water took his victim's name.").  The rest of the songs on here are solid, solid Vampire Weekend songs: songs like Step, Ya Hey, and Hannah Hunt.  But Hudson is the song that puts this over the top for me.

1. San Fermin - S/T

This probably isn't a surprise for those of you who have heard me gush about this album.  An incredible debut album from a bunch of 20-somethings out of Brooklyn.  There's something here for everyone.  If you like you're albums to stand as a whole, the album is meant to document the rises and falls of a young romantic relationship with both a female and male protagonist.  There are many points of the album, in fact, where I think I'm listening to Sufjan's Illinoise album in that it feels like a soundtrack to an unwritten play.  On the flip side, if you're into your singles there are some unbelievable standalone tracks on here.  It features the depth of sound and instrumentation that you might expect from Beirut with a female voice that sounds a little bit like the Dirty Projectors and a male voice that really reminds me of Matt Berninger from the National.  Sonsick, Methuselah, and Daedalus are all tracks worth checking out.  As an added bonus, San Fermin is one of those bands that is actually better live than they are recorded.  The recording was made with the ladies from Lucius but they've since been replaced with the impossibly powerful Rae Cassidy.  As good as the ladies from Lucius are, they can't match the sheer power Rae brings to the songs.  It's kind of overwhelming.  Blend that with the number of voices, the amount of instrumentation, it's all a little bit Arcade Fire.  But more of a down-home, humble kind of Arcade Fire.

So that's my list for 2013 done.  Let's hear from you!

Best of 2008

Well, some of you all would've gotten this via e-mail already, but for those of you who I don't have e-mail addresses for and who are remotely interested in my opinion on such matters, here's my take on the Top 10 albums for 2008. As ever, I'm keen on hearing what you all think were the best albums of the year.

Song of the year: In the New Year, The Walkmen

Just missed: Devotchka, Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip, Doomtree, Girl Talk, The Fireman, Fight Like Apes, Beck, Cold War Kids, MGMT, REM

10. Jolie Holland - The Living and the Dead

Went over and over these last two spots in the list for a good long while as I really wanted to give props to Ireland (Fight Like Apes) and Minneapolis (Doomtree) but in the end I just thought that this was a better album. Plus Jolie seems to be a personal favourite of Tom Waits, which should count for something. She’s brilliant at using her voice like Patsy Cline to somehow simultaneously communicate vulnerability and resolve. It’s albums like these that continue to remind me not to write off country music as a whole. Beyond the lyrics and Jolie’s voice, she’s a really brilliant instrumentalist as well using any amount of homemade and vintage instruments for a really distinct sound.

9. Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago

Who could believe that anything good would ever come out of Wisconsin? The story of this album is well-chronicled (following the break-up of his band, Justin Vernon holed up in his dad’s cabin in Wisconsin in the dead of winter and wrote the whole album), but man I don’t know if there’s ever been an album that so completely reflects the time and location of its writing. It’s bare, stark, simple, emotional. It’s the sort of album that I don’t always go for, because there’s never any rocking-out part on it. But there’s no denying the bare emotions of the album. One of the most emblematic cases in recent memory of an artist totally putting himself into an album.

8. The Gaslight Anthem - The '59 Sound

Let’s see. Working class band from New Jersey that sings about cars and girls named Gail and Janie and Mary and Estella that include lyrics like “I saw taillights last night in dreams about my first wife”. Heck, they even directly reference “I’m on Fire” in one song. You sensing an influence here? No, it’s not Bon Jovi. Yeah, these guys like the Boss quite a bit. Which is good, because you may be aware that I rather like him as well. While they definitely sound like Asbury Park-era Springsteen, don’t mistake the Gaslight Anthem for a tribute band. They’ve taken the best aspects of Springsteen, the working-class ethos, the driving guitar-driven rock, and the complex lyrics about simple themes (the best is “You remind Anna if she asks why that a thief stole my heart while she was making up her mind...But I used to wait up at a diner a million nights without her, praying she won’t cancel again tonight. The waiter’d serve my coffee with a consolation sigh, you remind Anna if she asks why.”), but they also have a harder punk edge than Springsteen has. And, hey, a Springsteen tribute band is just fine with me.

7. Vampire Weekend - S/T

Just really silly, happy, bouncy songs here but ones with really erudite lyrics. They reference Oxford commas, the Khyber Pass, and Jackson Pollack all while setting everything to a punkier version of Paul Simon’s Graceland. Plus they’re able to work the word “Hyannisport” into a song, which is pretty impressive. It’s really hard to be in a bad mood after listening to this album. They score bonus points for making a video clearly referential to Wes Anderson.

6. Atmosphere - When Life Gives you Lemons, Paint That **** Gold

The best concert I went to this year was Leonard Cohen in Manchester. Now, Leonard is just about the best lyricist of all time and was, in fact, the Canadian Poet Laureate back in the 60’s. And it struck me that there’s just not a lot of lyricists like him around any more, but the ones that are seem to be disproportionately hip-hop artists. They’re singing about different topics than Leonard entirely, but the quality of the poetry is still there. Exhibit A is Slug (one half of Atmosphere). He’s a routine entrant on my best-of lists due, in no small regard, to the fact that he’s the standard bearer for Minneapolis hip-hop. He’s a bit lower on the list this year, but that’s due more to the quality of the people ahead of him. You could read “Guarantees” without the solitary guitar behind it and it would still be a brilliant piece of poetry. “No overtime pay, no holidays, months behind on everything but the lottery” is just totally brilliant. It is always refreshing to see the Minneapolis hip-hop artists staying true to the ethos of hip-hop and avoiding the whole self-serving vibe so often seen with modern hip-hop. 

This album features a much subtler production from Slug. Gone are a lot of the guitars, rather much more muted backing tracks. He does feature Tom Waits beatboxing on “The Waitress”, though. 

5. Duffy - Rockferry

I hated this album for the longest time. Well, I didn’t really hate this album, but the radio stations over here just kept playing “Mercy” over and over and over. And I really, really hate that song. It’s easily the worst song on the album, why record execs insisted on making it the single is beyond me. In any case, during a drive to Wexford, “Mercy” came on the radio yet again and, because I couldn’t tune in any other radio stations, I was forced to sit there and stew and listen to the song in its entirety. And, while I still hated the song, it did occur to me that Duffy is one he11 of a singer. So I did a bit of research and learned that her album was written with Bernard Butler (of Suede fame), which was a definite vote of confidence. Going to YouTube, then, I found this clip from Later with Jools Holland. And that is still the best performance on that show that I’ve ever seen. Around 2:50 of the clip, listen to how she pronounces the word “house”. At that point, she’s belting out the lyrics yet inserts that really shy, almost whispered word into the song. It’s fabulous. And Bernard Butler manages to write songs that suit her very well and are very true to the 60’s soul vibe that they’re going for. But they’re clever enough songs, check out the double meaning of the line “And I wouldn’t write to you, ‘cause I’m not that kind.” Butler also serves up an almost blues standard on Syrup and Honey and the way Duffy enunciates the word “time” is almost heart-breaking. Also I can’t listen to her “baby”s without hearing Ronnie Specter. She really is great with her voice. She’s definitely the best Welsh singer since Tom Jones. Take that Bonnie Tyler!

4. Sigur Ros - Med Sud I Eyrum Vid Spilum Endalaust

The album title just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? Easily the best band to sing in Icelandic since, um, the Vikings? And there's actually one horribly out-of-place song entirely in English, the sell-outs. No, it's the same really lush sound you've come to expect from Sigur Ros even though they dropped a lot of the instrumentation on the album and went with a more traditional rock-band sound. And, maybe it's making me look all soft, but it's another album that can only put you in a good mood. The first track, Gobbledigook, is not really my favorite song on the album but it's so impossibly happy and Bjork is just about as cute as a button in the clip that I had to include it. 

3. The Last Shadow Puppets - The Age of the Understatement

In the span of about a month,my friend Noel turned me on to Scott Walker and I also stumbled across the Last Shadow Puppets. Scott Walker, for those that don't know him (mostly Americans, I suspect), is essentially the British version of the Velvet Underground, an overseas musician (he's American) of moderate popularity that has had a disproportionate influence on rock acts ever since. Aside from having an impossibly deep voice, Walker's whole deal was to incorporate symphonic elements into music. The Last Shadow Puppets formed out of a collaboration between one dude from the Arctic Monkeys (Alex Turner) and another from the Rascals (Miles Kane) that just wanted to make Scott Walker music. So everything on this album is big. It's like Arcade Fire's sound as interpreted by the English. It's also a bit of a gimmick, but it's a pretty solid gimmick in that Alex and Miles will sometimes switch off vocal parts during a song, sometimes in mid-sentence. It's a subtle change since the two sound so similar, but definitely noticeable. I just happened across them on what may have been the best Later with Jools Holland show ever as they led off a particular show that I was watching to see another band that shows up in a little bit on this list. They didn't steal the show, but they were definitely a huge surprise.

2. The Walkmen - You & Me

Being a huge fan of the Walkmen, I'd downloaded this album as soon as it became available. And, seriously, the first time I heard "In the New Year" I listened to it about 10 consecutive times. There's something about the song that I just love. It's not "Born to Run" good, but it's way up there. I suppose part of it is that, for whatever reason, I like simple things in songs like counting (e.g. Soul Coughing), whistling (Peter, Bjorn, and John), handclaps (the Cure), and Too-Rye-Ays (Dexy's Midnight Runners). "In the New Year" has this 7-note progression repeated over and over in the song that for some reason unknown to science (or at least to me) stimulates some kind of music appreciation center in my brain. It's really a fantastic song and on the strength of that alone it would probably be in the top 10 list, but top to bottom this album's great. It's every bit as good as Bows and Arrows, which made my Top 10 list a few years back. Part of it is definitely that I really love their sound. Hamilton Leithauser has a great rock voice, it's just barely melodic enough to not be categorized as screaming. But it's close. Then you add in one of the best rhythm sections in rock and the tinny organ sound that features in a lot of their songs and it's nearly perfect for me. If only they would add some Too-Rye-Ays one of these days... 

1. Portishead - Third

And this is the band that Iwaited for with bated breath on that Jools Holland show that included the Last Shadow Puppets. I (and countless others) have been waiting for Portishead to play for the last 10 years or so really. There's always the danger in setting expectations as high as I did for this album, but it actually exceeded all my expectations. Perhaps it was just hearing their great mix of jazz, electronica, and "spy music" again. Or maybe it was hearing Beth Gibbon's ethereal voice one more time. I do admit to feeling like I was back in the fraternity house listening to Dummy all over again and feeling all superior compared to everyone else who was listening to Rusted Root. That aside, it's just a phenomenal album. It can go from the lullaby-turned-frenetic track "The Rip" to the ominous, nearly goth "We Carry On". "The Rip" sounds like one of the best Radiohead songs of all time and if you search on YouTube you'll find Thom Yorke doing a version of the song. Even the most maligned track on the album "Machine Gun" (named for its backbeat) is classic Portishead to me. So, top-to-bottom good and if you combine that with how long and how desperately I'd waited for this album, it's a clear #1.