I bought a massive poster of a naked blonde woman sitting on a guitar amplifier, which I then put on my wall at an angle when I came home drunk out of my mind.
Sunday, 28 December 2008
THE MAIN THING THAT RULED ABOUT YESTERDAY...
I bought a massive poster of a naked blonde woman sitting on a guitar amplifier, which I then put on my wall at an angle when I came home drunk out of my mind.
TWO ALBUMS THAT SHOULD'VE BEEN IN OUR ALBUMS OF THE YEAR AND THE REASONS WHY THEY WEREN'T.
'Folie à Deux' - Fall Out Boy
Reason why it's not on the list: I only bought it yesterday.
Approximate position it should've been in our albums of the year list: #17
This was released real late in December, in the one week I had to cut back on spending money on CDs in order that I could buy my Nan a real nice bag from Gap that she will never use. This is the usual 9/10 shit from Pete Wentz and the guys...actually to be honest, I'm actually only listening to this for the first time and what's more, I'm only up to track 3, but come on, it's Fall Out Boy and they are the kings of not knowing how to write a crappy album.
'Temper' - Benoît Pioulard
Reason why it's not on the list: I am a massive spastic.
Approximate position it should've been in our albums of the year list: #11
This is so fucking annoying. Ever since I received a promo copy of this from Kranky way before it's release, I made a point of telling everyone how awesome this album is, for the following two reasons:
1) It is awesome.
2) I didn't want there to be any doubt in anyone's mind that I liked this record before everyone else.
Anyway, I got so caught up in writing the world's best summary of this album, that it became an albatross round my neck, my very own 'Chinese Democracy' if you will. I was constantly writing, re-writing and pushing my amazing talent for punctuation to its absolute limit in order that I give this record the review it deserved. In terms of literary worth, my short paragraph on 'Temper' was going to be the 'Ulysses' of glib blog-reviews. Then to cut a long story short, I accidentally deleted it from the rough draft of our albums of the year list, and only realised my error when it scored really highly in the albums of the year list on my friend Daniel's blog. This then became annoying on yet another level, because Daniel knows more about music than anyone else I have ever met in my life, yet I reccomended this album to him, and then he ends up looking like the Benoît Pioulard champion.
Reason why it's not on the list: I only bought it yesterday.
Approximate position it should've been in our albums of the year list: #17
This was released real late in December, in the one week I had to cut back on spending money on CDs in order that I could buy my Nan a real nice bag from Gap that she will never use. This is the usual 9/10 shit from Pete Wentz and the guys...actually to be honest, I'm actually only listening to this for the first time and what's more, I'm only up to track 3, but come on, it's Fall Out Boy and they are the kings of not knowing how to write a crappy album.
'Temper' - Benoît Pioulard
Reason why it's not on the list: I am a massive spastic.
Approximate position it should've been in our albums of the year list: #11
This is so fucking annoying. Ever since I received a promo copy of this from Kranky way before it's release, I made a point of telling everyone how awesome this album is, for the following two reasons:
1) It is awesome.
2) I didn't want there to be any doubt in anyone's mind that I liked this record before everyone else.
Anyway, I got so caught up in writing the world's best summary of this album, that it became an albatross round my neck, my very own 'Chinese Democracy' if you will. I was constantly writing, re-writing and pushing my amazing talent for punctuation to its absolute limit in order that I give this record the review it deserved. In terms of literary worth, my short paragraph on 'Temper' was going to be the 'Ulysses' of glib blog-reviews. Then to cut a long story short, I accidentally deleted it from the rough draft of our albums of the year list, and only realised my error when it scored really highly in the albums of the year list on my friend Daniel's blog. This then became annoying on yet another level, because Daniel knows more about music than anyone else I have ever met in my life, yet I reccomended this album to him, and then he ends up looking like the Benoît Pioulard champion.
Monday, 22 December 2008
MEAL DEAL ALBUMS OF THE YEAR PART TWO: 25-1
25. ‘Skeleton’ – Abe Vigoda
A ‘tropical-punk’ band hailing from, wait a minute... a bit more.... more.... more….....more…..The Smell!!!!…Abe Vigoda have perhaps turned in the best album of all the bands hailing from the scene. A joyful, and cacophonous rush of noise, melodic yelps and trebly-guitars which sound like steel drums. That they are all really, really tiny hispanic dudes just makes them so much more endearing than No Age.
24. ‘Rip It Off’ – Times New Viking
Somehow causing controversy in the indie blogosphere by their decision to cake their record in saturation, tape hiss and distortion, what many of these whining bloggers forgot to realise is that making your record sound this shitty when the songs beneath it are this good is a massively cool thing to do. Even if you back-pedal those volume dials about ten-notches, you’re still left with a seriously mean collection of art-school, lo-fi jams that sound like a bit like early Sebadoh if they got laid more and had a really hot girl singer.
23. ‘New Amerykah Part One (4th World War)’ – Erykah Badu
My view of Erykah Badu prior to this album? Well let’s put is this way, I thought anyone who was the musical inspiration for India Arie’s career needed to have their vagina cut off. That was until this phychedelic masterpiece dropped. With the Madlib and 9th Wonder helming much of it’s production and the presence of the late J Dilla felt largely throughout, ‘New Amerykah Part One (4th World War)’ comes across like Sly Stone’s ‘There’s a Riot Goin’ On’ only with more knocking drums and way less sexism. As a side note, I would’ve enjoyed it even more with the sexism.
22. ‘Third’ – Portishead
Whilst sections of the press would have you believe that Portishead’s third offering is the missing link between Lou Reed’s ‘Metal Machine Music’ and ‘Black One’ by Sunn 0))), truth be told ‘Third’ is no massive departure from their previous two records. If anything, I’d hoped that they would have time to rewire the genetic infra structure of music in the nine years since their last album, but instead we get a band who have used the time to meticulously construct an album which plays to their strengths whilst almost totally shedding the tag of tastefulness which has plagued them since their debut became a favourite of the dinner-party set. What has always set Portishead apart from their peers (without ruining any surprises, you won’t be seeing the new Tricky album anywhere in this list), is Geoff Barrow’s endless ability to use musical genres as instruments in themselves – this way we get Italian horror score synths sitting on top of drone guitars and dusty drum loops without ever sounding like anything other than themselves. A massive triumph.
21. ‘Mountain Battles’ – The Breeders
A new Breeders albums gives me a fresh opportunity to say “The Pixies kind of suck”, which is something I really enjoy doing. Anyway, ‘Mountain Battles’ is thing of low-key beauty (as nearly all their albums are) – it’s refreshing to hear a band, especially one whose members must be well into their forties, just plug in, knock out a few 90's college-rock jams and then put their instruments down for about six years before doing exactly the same thing all over again.
20. ‘Dear Science,’ – TV On the Radio
I think I’ve come to terms with the fact that these guys try way too hard to be clever to turn in a truly classic album, but ‘Dear Science,’ was their most convincing LP to date, trading in the echoed-out haze of ‘Return to Cookie Mountain’ for a taughter more polished LP. Way less baked in Dave Sitek’s studio tapestry, and instead thriving by virtue of a very high ratio of good melodies ‘Dear Science,’ is an artistic triumph even if its not the classic album everyone knows they’re capable of making.
19. ‘Anywhere I Lay My Head’ – Scarlett Johansson
Let’s get one thing straight, this is Dave Sitek’s album, not Scarlett’s. What’s more, she knows it. Her flat and uncharismatic vocals never even attempt to rise out from the landscape of sounds that surround it. Regardless of the presence of members of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV on the Radio, David Bowie and not to forget one of the most famous actresses in the world on the album, Sitek’s details are its main attraction. His production shines – almost literally, with layers of bells, chimes, glockenspiels encasing this set of Tom Wait’s covers with a frosty melancholy. As far as music as decorative art goes, this is one of the year’s best.
18. ‘High Places’ – High Places
What’s with all the vegans making awesome albums this year? High Places’ debut proper after their collection of previously released 7”s this year was a tie-dyed patchwork quilt of samples, processed-ethnic percussion and Mary Pearson’s low-key, but ultimately pretty damn affecting vocals, spread thick like organic soya milk raspberry ice cream across it’s ten tracks. P.S. ‘From Starlight to Sentience’ has got to be the best closing jam pretty much ever.
17. ‘Saint Dymphna’ – Gang Gang Dance
If this is Gang Gang Dance getting concise and un-weird, then they should go and get full time jobs as accountants, and write an album based on reading the Sunday paper supplements. Asides from the playing being a little bit less messy, and the reverb being turned down (admittedly alot), this one isn’t that much less weird than ‘God’s Money’. I mean, just the concept of a track featuring Tinchy Stryder saying "oh shit, Gang Gang" is weird.
16. ‘Secret Horrrsing’ – Fuck Buttons
Over the course of 40 minutes 'Secret Horrrsing' genuinely made me think the adjective “digital jungle” was the only phrase capable of describing it’s dense walls of drone, collaged-samples and percussion (and that’s jungle as in the Amazonian jungle sense, not the Shy FX feat. General Levy sense). I hadn’t been to sleep for two days when I thought up this shitty description, but it was embarassing for me nonetheless. It's pretty awesome that these guys are from the U.K. because we need at least one band making this kind of stuff who are as good as The Skaters.
15. ‘World I See’ – The Present
It’s pretty cool when you put on an album and realize that you’ve never heard anything like it before in your life. As sometime Animal Collective collaborator Randy Santos pushes his improvisational envelope into the realms of ambient collage, African percussion and post-rock you’re pretty sure that The Wire had to call an editorial meeting to brainstorm over which review section to include this in. While they’re doing that, the rest of us can just sit back and enjoy its far-out awesomeness.
14. ‘Forest Diving’ – Natural Numbers
When I was 13 years old, I had just about got into ‘Nevermind’, and my main precoccupations were not doing my homework and watching WWF wrestling. At 13 years of age, however, Trevor Fitzhugh has created one of the year’s best albums informed as much by My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive as it is by No Age and Deerhunter. This record is remarkable not for its creator’s diminutive age, but more his insane talent for burying emotive melodies under the avalanches of distortion he forces into his PC through it’s shitty in-built microphone. With another full-length alreeady in the can and due for release in early 2009, the potential of this kid is staggering.
13. ‘808’s & Heartbreak’ – Kanye West
Most music critics are white, middle-class and boringly obsessed by Radiohead and therefore incorrectly compared ‘808’S & Heartbreak’ to ‘Kid A’ citing it as a brave step-forward, designed to baffle sections of Kanye's fan-base and thereby removing all commercial constraints for future releases. Are you fucking kidding me? Have you ever listened to a single word that comes out of Kanye West’s mouth? The guy literally wants to sell more records than The Beatles and is unlikely to be making a record as boring as ‘In Rainbows’ anytime soon either. What we got here was his own version of Marvin Gaye’s ‘Here My Dear’ – i.e. a record obsessed to the point of autism with the dissolution of a relationship played out in almost embarassing detail. Kanye’s spits his hurt and venom guiltily through Auto-Tune across ‘808’s & Heratbreak’s’ palette of digitized, robo-soul, conveying more emotion and expressing more forward-thinking musical ideas than Radiohead have ever managed in their entire career. The guy is a total fucking genius.
12. ‘Women’ – Women
This album was recorded by Chad VanGaalen on a variety of boomboboxes in his basement, and sounds very much The Shins if they were recorded by Chad VanGaalen on a variety of boomboxes in his basement.
11. ‘Vivian Girls’ – Vivian Girls
Hearing this for the first time I was very much of the “what in the hell is all the fuss about?” camp, hearing this for approximately the thousandth time, I’m very much of the “this album has the second-most amount of awesome songs on it after the Vampire Weekend album this year" camp.
10. ‘The ’59 Sound’ – The Gaslight Anthem
Sometimes all it takes to make a great album is a big-heart and a worn-out copy of ‘The River’ by Bruce Springsteen.’ This’ is without doubt the most moving record of the year buoyed by singer Brian Fallon’s world of diners, Cadillacs, girls, highways, leather jackets and the non-ironic turns of phrases like “standing in the Jersey rain”. The Boss’ influence is felt all over ‘The ’59 Sound’, but filtered through the sound of a band that cut their teeth on the local hardcore circuit. Strangely, the sound that they arrive at is not dissimilar to that displayed by The Killers on ‘Sam’s Town’, only you know that The Killers have neither big hearts, nor a copy of ‘The River’ by Bruce Springsteen between them.
09. ‘Black Sea’ – Fennesz
Christian Fennesz makes very serious music; serious and beautiful, digitally obliterating his guitars into orchestral walls of noise that have veered increasingly into more classical terrain as his career has progressed. If anything, ‘Black Sea’ is the total counterpoint to his generally-lauded masterpiece ‘Endless Summer’; where that record buzzed with warmth, ‘Black Sea’ is frostier, grander, but no less powerfully evocative, adding another masterpiece to add to his already stunning catalogue.
08. ‘For Emma, Forever Ago’ – Bon Iver
Albums like this are a rarity. When Justin Vernon exiled himself to a wood-cabin with his acoustic guitar, primitive recording equipment and his absolutely torn-to-shit heart, I very much doubt he was thinking that his act of cartharsism would end up being the year’s most acclaimed record. ‘For Emma, Forever Ago’ is the kind of album that succeeds on every level – it’s sound, that of utter heartbreak, is both universal and personal and rarely has it been articulated so profoundly as here. There hasn’t been a record like this since ‘Either/Or’.
07. ‘Tha Carter III’ – Lil Wayne
Impossible to ignore this year as much for being an event as the music contained within, ‘Tha Carter III’ mowed down competiton, ruthlessly letting the blood of anyone who stood in the way flow in a flurry of Autotune, R&B hooks, the most jumped-on beat of the year in the shape of ‘A Milli’ and the sense of something very, very important happening. At its centre, dreadlocked, drooling, savage stood Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr simply bathing in the acceptance of something he had known himself for a long time – Lil Wayne is the best rapper alive. ‘Tha Carter III’ is so mammoth in its scope that upon initial listens it seems disjointed, trying too hard to cover every base, to please everybody. However, by the fifth or sixth time of hearing the album it becomes clear, the collision of aliens, doctors, female police officers, drugs and graphic sex makes it tantamount to a William Burroughs novel in rap album format and if selling a million copies of that in a week isn’t genius, I don’t know what is.
06. ‘Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson’ – Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson
This album has got me through a lot of shit this year and the fact that it almost fell victim to its creator’s demons, drug addiction and homelessness makes me even more thankful for its existence. With a little bit of help from his friends in Grizzly Bear and TV On the Radio’s Kyp Malone, Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson crafted an album which is at turns depressing and redemptive, self-depreciating, self-pitying and most importantly, totally naked in its humanity. Often this album brings to mind Elliott Smith’s final, incomplete statement ‘From a Basement On a Hill’, only where that genius gave up on life, this one sounds like he’s ready to give it another go.
05. ‘The Recession’ – Young Jeezy
I am as surprised as anyone at how high this has ended up in my albums of the year list, but I’ve been constantly drawn back into this album time and time again since its release. I’ve probably listened to it more than any other record released since ‘Cryptograms’ last year. As a drug-dealer turned rapper, Young Jeezy was cold-hearted and not particularly talented, but had some unidentifiable charisma that elevated him above all the other mediocre Southern trap-music to the point where by the eve of the release of ‘The Recession’ it was like he was the spokesman for the entire black community. What made him that slight bit more convincing than Obama was the fact he had absolutely fucking slamming beats to back him up.
04. ‘Microcastle/Weird Era Cont.’ – Deerhunter
All but abandoning the ‘ambient-punk’of ‘Cryptograms’ in favour of a a tighter, more coherent sound influenced in equal parts by Joe Meek, The Breeders and The Everly Brothers, ‘Microcastle’ presents a totally different band to the one we got last time round. Shrunk to quartet for the recording sessions after the departure of guitarist Colin Mee (new guitarist Whitney Petty was to join after its completion), the album has the sound of a band for whom being awesome comes really fucking easily. This is much less the Bradford Cox show this time round too, the first voice we hear on the record belonging to guitarist Lockett Pundt and the album’s most well-known track ‘Nothing Ever Happened’ being penned by bassist Josh Fauver. The coherency of ‘Microcastle’ even comes across as an experiment in itself, a thought perhaps supported by the fact that the bonus-album packaged along with it entitled ‘Weird Era Cont.’ seems to show the band once again in fine experimental form throwing coherency to the wind at every creative urge. This band is seriously great.
03. ‘Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill’ – Grouper
Just when I wanted the sonic gap between The Cocteau Twins and Khonnor in my record collection bridging, along comes Liz Harris (AKA Grouper) with her glacial, sadly-beautiful LP ‘Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill’. Whereas The Cocteau Twins can occasionally sound a touch like Enya with a rack of effects pedals, Grouper’s muse is a fragile one – femine, melancholy, never afraid to observe the dark edges but without becoming consumed by them. Whereas the term ‘shoegaze’ can often drown in its very masculine portentousness, Grouper’s chains of delays and reverbs act as gauze through which to peer into her peerless, insular creations.
02. ‘Vampire Weekend’ – Vampire Weekend
It may just be my upbringing, but my world-view says that there is literally nothing to dislike about a group of predominently-Jewish rich kids, trying to sound like Paul Simon.
01. ‘Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel’ – Atlas Sound
OK, so I’m not going to even pretend that I’m not a massive fanboy of Bradford Cox. ‘Cryptograms’ was my favourite album of last year and you may’ve noticed ‘Microcastle/Weird Era Cont.’ elsewhere in this list. The fact remains that music simply pours out of this individual in its purest form. The frequent posting of demos and other tracks on his blog shows that ‘Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel’ could easily be an arbritrary collection of tracks that loosely fit together as opposed to some definitive statement from the Deerhunter frontman, however, this is where its beauty lies. The music exists as its own entity, caked in reverb and delays, fluid and hugely imaginative. Those whose idea of ‘punk’ involves macho skate dudes in cut-off shorts and Vans are really missing out on the integrity, spontaneity and creativity contained within the world Bradford Cox creates for his music. The fact that when the disc finishes, you know that there’s more to explore outside of its walls only adds to its beauty. Album of the year hands down and has been ever since I heard it for the first time back in January.
A ‘tropical-punk’ band hailing from, wait a minute... a bit more.... more.... more….....more…..The Smell!!!!…Abe Vigoda have perhaps turned in the best album of all the bands hailing from the scene. A joyful, and cacophonous rush of noise, melodic yelps and trebly-guitars which sound like steel drums. That they are all really, really tiny hispanic dudes just makes them so much more endearing than No Age.
24. ‘Rip It Off’ – Times New Viking
Somehow causing controversy in the indie blogosphere by their decision to cake their record in saturation, tape hiss and distortion, what many of these whining bloggers forgot to realise is that making your record sound this shitty when the songs beneath it are this good is a massively cool thing to do. Even if you back-pedal those volume dials about ten-notches, you’re still left with a seriously mean collection of art-school, lo-fi jams that sound like a bit like early Sebadoh if they got laid more and had a really hot girl singer.
23. ‘New Amerykah Part One (4th World War)’ – Erykah Badu
My view of Erykah Badu prior to this album? Well let’s put is this way, I thought anyone who was the musical inspiration for India Arie’s career needed to have their vagina cut off. That was until this phychedelic masterpiece dropped. With the Madlib and 9th Wonder helming much of it’s production and the presence of the late J Dilla felt largely throughout, ‘New Amerykah Part One (4th World War)’ comes across like Sly Stone’s ‘There’s a Riot Goin’ On’ only with more knocking drums and way less sexism. As a side note, I would’ve enjoyed it even more with the sexism.
22. ‘Third’ – Portishead
Whilst sections of the press would have you believe that Portishead’s third offering is the missing link between Lou Reed’s ‘Metal Machine Music’ and ‘Black One’ by Sunn 0))), truth be told ‘Third’ is no massive departure from their previous two records. If anything, I’d hoped that they would have time to rewire the genetic infra structure of music in the nine years since their last album, but instead we get a band who have used the time to meticulously construct an album which plays to their strengths whilst almost totally shedding the tag of tastefulness which has plagued them since their debut became a favourite of the dinner-party set. What has always set Portishead apart from their peers (without ruining any surprises, you won’t be seeing the new Tricky album anywhere in this list), is Geoff Barrow’s endless ability to use musical genres as instruments in themselves – this way we get Italian horror score synths sitting on top of drone guitars and dusty drum loops without ever sounding like anything other than themselves. A massive triumph.
21. ‘Mountain Battles’ – The Breeders
A new Breeders albums gives me a fresh opportunity to say “The Pixies kind of suck”, which is something I really enjoy doing. Anyway, ‘Mountain Battles’ is thing of low-key beauty (as nearly all their albums are) – it’s refreshing to hear a band, especially one whose members must be well into their forties, just plug in, knock out a few 90's college-rock jams and then put their instruments down for about six years before doing exactly the same thing all over again.
20. ‘Dear Science,’ – TV On the Radio
I think I’ve come to terms with the fact that these guys try way too hard to be clever to turn in a truly classic album, but ‘Dear Science,’ was their most convincing LP to date, trading in the echoed-out haze of ‘Return to Cookie Mountain’ for a taughter more polished LP. Way less baked in Dave Sitek’s studio tapestry, and instead thriving by virtue of a very high ratio of good melodies ‘Dear Science,’ is an artistic triumph even if its not the classic album everyone knows they’re capable of making.
19. ‘Anywhere I Lay My Head’ – Scarlett Johansson
Let’s get one thing straight, this is Dave Sitek’s album, not Scarlett’s. What’s more, she knows it. Her flat and uncharismatic vocals never even attempt to rise out from the landscape of sounds that surround it. Regardless of the presence of members of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV on the Radio, David Bowie and not to forget one of the most famous actresses in the world on the album, Sitek’s details are its main attraction. His production shines – almost literally, with layers of bells, chimes, glockenspiels encasing this set of Tom Wait’s covers with a frosty melancholy. As far as music as decorative art goes, this is one of the year’s best.
18. ‘High Places’ – High Places
What’s with all the vegans making awesome albums this year? High Places’ debut proper after their collection of previously released 7”s this year was a tie-dyed patchwork quilt of samples, processed-ethnic percussion and Mary Pearson’s low-key, but ultimately pretty damn affecting vocals, spread thick like organic soya milk raspberry ice cream across it’s ten tracks. P.S. ‘From Starlight to Sentience’ has got to be the best closing jam pretty much ever.
17. ‘Saint Dymphna’ – Gang Gang Dance
If this is Gang Gang Dance getting concise and un-weird, then they should go and get full time jobs as accountants, and write an album based on reading the Sunday paper supplements. Asides from the playing being a little bit less messy, and the reverb being turned down (admittedly alot), this one isn’t that much less weird than ‘God’s Money’. I mean, just the concept of a track featuring Tinchy Stryder saying "oh shit, Gang Gang" is weird.
16. ‘Secret Horrrsing’ – Fuck Buttons
Over the course of 40 minutes 'Secret Horrrsing' genuinely made me think the adjective “digital jungle” was the only phrase capable of describing it’s dense walls of drone, collaged-samples and percussion (and that’s jungle as in the Amazonian jungle sense, not the Shy FX feat. General Levy sense). I hadn’t been to sleep for two days when I thought up this shitty description, but it was embarassing for me nonetheless. It's pretty awesome that these guys are from the U.K. because we need at least one band making this kind of stuff who are as good as The Skaters.
15. ‘World I See’ – The Present
It’s pretty cool when you put on an album and realize that you’ve never heard anything like it before in your life. As sometime Animal Collective collaborator Randy Santos pushes his improvisational envelope into the realms of ambient collage, African percussion and post-rock you’re pretty sure that The Wire had to call an editorial meeting to brainstorm over which review section to include this in. While they’re doing that, the rest of us can just sit back and enjoy its far-out awesomeness.
14. ‘Forest Diving’ – Natural Numbers
When I was 13 years old, I had just about got into ‘Nevermind’, and my main precoccupations were not doing my homework and watching WWF wrestling. At 13 years of age, however, Trevor Fitzhugh has created one of the year’s best albums informed as much by My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive as it is by No Age and Deerhunter. This record is remarkable not for its creator’s diminutive age, but more his insane talent for burying emotive melodies under the avalanches of distortion he forces into his PC through it’s shitty in-built microphone. With another full-length alreeady in the can and due for release in early 2009, the potential of this kid is staggering.
13. ‘808’s & Heartbreak’ – Kanye West
Most music critics are white, middle-class and boringly obsessed by Radiohead and therefore incorrectly compared ‘808’S & Heartbreak’ to ‘Kid A’ citing it as a brave step-forward, designed to baffle sections of Kanye's fan-base and thereby removing all commercial constraints for future releases. Are you fucking kidding me? Have you ever listened to a single word that comes out of Kanye West’s mouth? The guy literally wants to sell more records than The Beatles and is unlikely to be making a record as boring as ‘In Rainbows’ anytime soon either. What we got here was his own version of Marvin Gaye’s ‘Here My Dear’ – i.e. a record obsessed to the point of autism with the dissolution of a relationship played out in almost embarassing detail. Kanye’s spits his hurt and venom guiltily through Auto-Tune across ‘808’s & Heratbreak’s’ palette of digitized, robo-soul, conveying more emotion and expressing more forward-thinking musical ideas than Radiohead have ever managed in their entire career. The guy is a total fucking genius.
12. ‘Women’ – Women
This album was recorded by Chad VanGaalen on a variety of boomboboxes in his basement, and sounds very much The Shins if they were recorded by Chad VanGaalen on a variety of boomboxes in his basement.
11. ‘Vivian Girls’ – Vivian Girls
Hearing this for the first time I was very much of the “what in the hell is all the fuss about?” camp, hearing this for approximately the thousandth time, I’m very much of the “this album has the second-most amount of awesome songs on it after the Vampire Weekend album this year" camp.
10. ‘The ’59 Sound’ – The Gaslight Anthem
Sometimes all it takes to make a great album is a big-heart and a worn-out copy of ‘The River’ by Bruce Springsteen.’ This’ is without doubt the most moving record of the year buoyed by singer Brian Fallon’s world of diners, Cadillacs, girls, highways, leather jackets and the non-ironic turns of phrases like “standing in the Jersey rain”. The Boss’ influence is felt all over ‘The ’59 Sound’, but filtered through the sound of a band that cut their teeth on the local hardcore circuit. Strangely, the sound that they arrive at is not dissimilar to that displayed by The Killers on ‘Sam’s Town’, only you know that The Killers have neither big hearts, nor a copy of ‘The River’ by Bruce Springsteen between them.
09. ‘Black Sea’ – Fennesz
Christian Fennesz makes very serious music; serious and beautiful, digitally obliterating his guitars into orchestral walls of noise that have veered increasingly into more classical terrain as his career has progressed. If anything, ‘Black Sea’ is the total counterpoint to his generally-lauded masterpiece ‘Endless Summer’; where that record buzzed with warmth, ‘Black Sea’ is frostier, grander, but no less powerfully evocative, adding another masterpiece to add to his already stunning catalogue.
08. ‘For Emma, Forever Ago’ – Bon Iver
Albums like this are a rarity. When Justin Vernon exiled himself to a wood-cabin with his acoustic guitar, primitive recording equipment and his absolutely torn-to-shit heart, I very much doubt he was thinking that his act of cartharsism would end up being the year’s most acclaimed record. ‘For Emma, Forever Ago’ is the kind of album that succeeds on every level – it’s sound, that of utter heartbreak, is both universal and personal and rarely has it been articulated so profoundly as here. There hasn’t been a record like this since ‘Either/Or’.
07. ‘Tha Carter III’ – Lil Wayne
Impossible to ignore this year as much for being an event as the music contained within, ‘Tha Carter III’ mowed down competiton, ruthlessly letting the blood of anyone who stood in the way flow in a flurry of Autotune, R&B hooks, the most jumped-on beat of the year in the shape of ‘A Milli’ and the sense of something very, very important happening. At its centre, dreadlocked, drooling, savage stood Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr simply bathing in the acceptance of something he had known himself for a long time – Lil Wayne is the best rapper alive. ‘Tha Carter III’ is so mammoth in its scope that upon initial listens it seems disjointed, trying too hard to cover every base, to please everybody. However, by the fifth or sixth time of hearing the album it becomes clear, the collision of aliens, doctors, female police officers, drugs and graphic sex makes it tantamount to a William Burroughs novel in rap album format and if selling a million copies of that in a week isn’t genius, I don’t know what is.
06. ‘Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson’ – Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson
This album has got me through a lot of shit this year and the fact that it almost fell victim to its creator’s demons, drug addiction and homelessness makes me even more thankful for its existence. With a little bit of help from his friends in Grizzly Bear and TV On the Radio’s Kyp Malone, Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson crafted an album which is at turns depressing and redemptive, self-depreciating, self-pitying and most importantly, totally naked in its humanity. Often this album brings to mind Elliott Smith’s final, incomplete statement ‘From a Basement On a Hill’, only where that genius gave up on life, this one sounds like he’s ready to give it another go.
05. ‘The Recession’ – Young Jeezy
I am as surprised as anyone at how high this has ended up in my albums of the year list, but I’ve been constantly drawn back into this album time and time again since its release. I’ve probably listened to it more than any other record released since ‘Cryptograms’ last year. As a drug-dealer turned rapper, Young Jeezy was cold-hearted and not particularly talented, but had some unidentifiable charisma that elevated him above all the other mediocre Southern trap-music to the point where by the eve of the release of ‘The Recession’ it was like he was the spokesman for the entire black community. What made him that slight bit more convincing than Obama was the fact he had absolutely fucking slamming beats to back him up.
04. ‘Microcastle/Weird Era Cont.’ – Deerhunter
All but abandoning the ‘ambient-punk’of ‘Cryptograms’ in favour of a a tighter, more coherent sound influenced in equal parts by Joe Meek, The Breeders and The Everly Brothers, ‘Microcastle’ presents a totally different band to the one we got last time round. Shrunk to quartet for the recording sessions after the departure of guitarist Colin Mee (new guitarist Whitney Petty was to join after its completion), the album has the sound of a band for whom being awesome comes really fucking easily. This is much less the Bradford Cox show this time round too, the first voice we hear on the record belonging to guitarist Lockett Pundt and the album’s most well-known track ‘Nothing Ever Happened’ being penned by bassist Josh Fauver. The coherency of ‘Microcastle’ even comes across as an experiment in itself, a thought perhaps supported by the fact that the bonus-album packaged along with it entitled ‘Weird Era Cont.’ seems to show the band once again in fine experimental form throwing coherency to the wind at every creative urge. This band is seriously great.
03. ‘Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill’ – Grouper
Just when I wanted the sonic gap between The Cocteau Twins and Khonnor in my record collection bridging, along comes Liz Harris (AKA Grouper) with her glacial, sadly-beautiful LP ‘Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill’. Whereas The Cocteau Twins can occasionally sound a touch like Enya with a rack of effects pedals, Grouper’s muse is a fragile one – femine, melancholy, never afraid to observe the dark edges but without becoming consumed by them. Whereas the term ‘shoegaze’ can often drown in its very masculine portentousness, Grouper’s chains of delays and reverbs act as gauze through which to peer into her peerless, insular creations.
02. ‘Vampire Weekend’ – Vampire Weekend
It may just be my upbringing, but my world-view says that there is literally nothing to dislike about a group of predominently-Jewish rich kids, trying to sound like Paul Simon.
01. ‘Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel’ – Atlas Sound
OK, so I’m not going to even pretend that I’m not a massive fanboy of Bradford Cox. ‘Cryptograms’ was my favourite album of last year and you may’ve noticed ‘Microcastle/Weird Era Cont.’ elsewhere in this list. The fact remains that music simply pours out of this individual in its purest form. The frequent posting of demos and other tracks on his blog shows that ‘Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel’ could easily be an arbritrary collection of tracks that loosely fit together as opposed to some definitive statement from the Deerhunter frontman, however, this is where its beauty lies. The music exists as its own entity, caked in reverb and delays, fluid and hugely imaginative. Those whose idea of ‘punk’ involves macho skate dudes in cut-off shorts and Vans are really missing out on the integrity, spontaneity and creativity contained within the world Bradford Cox creates for his music. The fact that when the disc finishes, you know that there’s more to explore outside of its walls only adds to its beauty. Album of the year hands down and has been ever since I heard it for the first time back in January.
MEAL DEAL ALBUMS OF THE YEAR: PART ONE 50-26
50. ‘Oracular Spectacular’ – MGMT
Why don’t more people come out and make the really obvious statement that this album is just an attempt to rework ‘In a Priest Driven Ambulance’ into a formula that is more impressive to hot girls than it is to acid dealers?
49. ‘Chinese Democracy’ – Guns N’ Roses
Included in this list predominatly for the fact that it sounds exactly as I dreamed it would. Axl has clearly been utterly consumed, artistically compelled to create the world’s greatest ever album for the past 17 years. He failed by miles, but what we are left with is utterly fascinating record which when it occasionally strikes gold, reveals God in it’s details. For my money, this is the best Guns N’ Roses album.
48. ‘Dream Island Laughing Language’ – Lucky Dragons
What sucks is that I have never seen these guys live. Apparently they hand out brightly-coloured electrodes out to the audience and everyone hold hands and weird electronic noises are created, and it’s so good that people don’t even realise they're being hippies. On record, Lucky Dragons sit somewhere between a more cacophonous High Places and a less cerebral Fridge with clipped gongs and weird ethnic instruments, colliding with drum machines, chimes and cut-up vocals in the mix. These guys are definitely vegans.
47. ‘Definition of Real’ – Plies
This album is so fucking lacking in intellectual worth, it’s basically the hip-hop equivalent of when you got a shitty mark on a test paper back at school and went round showing off to your friends about it.
46. ‘Sick to Death’ – Eat Skull
As the other Siltbreeze band people seem to know, Eat Skull’s ‘Sick to Death’ is the older, grubby brother of its artier sibling ‘Rip It Off’ by Times New Viking. To extend the metaphor, this record is the kind of kid who is always covered in cuts and brusies, who pulls the wings off flies and burns them with its magnifiying glass. This really is shitty recording for shitty recording’s sake and I just happen to think recording your band shittily as an end in itself is absolutely awesome.
45. ‘Weezer’ (The Red Album) – Weezer
The pre-release hype on this one was that it was going to fuse everything that is brilliant about Weezer together (i.e. everything except ‘Make Believe’), then we’d forget that they actually went to the effort of recording ‘We Are All on Drugs’ and then releasing it as a single, world peace would ensue and we’d all laugh at Rivers Cuomo’s ironic moustache together in blissful harmony. It never happened, but their third self-titled album is a million miles away from the infinite suckness that was its predecessor. It’s basically Weezer on autopilot, which is absoloutely great and loads of fun. Thanks.
44. ‘The Cool’ – Lupe Fiasco
Lupe Fiasco’s debut ‘Food & Liquor’ had the weight of expectation on its shoulders, and boy did it sound like it – perhaps coming-off too expansive and grandiose than any debut rap LP has the right to. ‘The Cool’ readresses this balance, retaining its predecessor’s ambition, whilst not afraid to, you know, feature a fun, easy-on-the ear hip-pop radio jam like ‘Superstar’. Lupe himself seems more at home amonst the less portentous musical scenery, allowing his creativity to hit its peak-to-date on tracks such as ‘Gotta Eat’ where he trades off the evils of dope-slinging and fast food against each other to stunning effect. If he raises the bar as much again on his next (and supposedly final) LP then he’ll be in with a shot of recording this milennium’s own ‘The Low End Theory’. (F.Y.I. I don’t really like that album, but everyone else seems to).
43. ‘HLLLYH’ – The Mae Shi
I know what you’re thinking – “not another band from The fucking Smell” and I’d agree with you. However, although they give off the impression of a bunch of dudes let loose in a music store on their skateboards (or in a skateboard shop with their musical instruments – whichever you’d prefer), nothing could be further from the truth. Just listen to this record carefully – something this complex and intricate, has obviously been tweaked and laboured over by its creators with microscopic precision in order to attain the most fun results physically possible. Also, twenty five bonus point for including a megamix of all the tracks on the album in the middle of the album.
42. ‘Get Awkward’ – Be Your Own Pet
These guys really shouldn’t have split up – it would’ve been so awesome if they had just continued making the same record until one of them died and they were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame when they were about 65 and really embarassing.
41. ‘Distortion’ – The Magnetic Fields
Conceptual to the core, Stephin Merritt led the Magnetic Fields into a swathes of Jesus & Mary Chain inspired fuzz for this pretty self-explanatorily-titled album . Not only guitars are overdriven - everything from pianos, drums, bass and strings are totally doused in saturated, buzzing, distortion. A Place to Bury Strangers this is not however, underneath the stylistic cloak, lies Merritt’s typically literate, tongue-in-cheek wordplay, and if you look hard enough beneath that, perhaps something approaching genuine emotion.
40. ‘Hercules and Love Affair’ – Hercules and Love Affair
As a label, DFA is relentlessly tasteful and consistent – almost to a fault (but not quite). Looking back at their catalogue, spanning everything from Black Dice to The Juan Maclean, via the only good song The Rapture ever did, it’s actually verging on frustrating how on point this label has been for the best part of a decade. Hercules and Love Affair is a project steeped in 80’s disco-house, and inevitably the production is absolutely immaculate. It’s one of those records where you give at least a ‘7’ just for the reverb-tails on the marraccas. This is no mere outing in simulacra however, the record is also emotionally a total winner, bursting with heart courtesy of the frequent melodic input of Anony Hegarty (of Antony & the Johnsons). It looks as though it could be a little while longer before we can enjoy that backlash.
39. ‘Initiations’ – Burial Hex
Oooh hello scary man with your power electronics and blackened, idustrial misanthropy, can we have some more of this please? The new Bloc Party album just isn’t doing it for us.
38. ‘Elephant Shell’ – Tokyo Police Club
I genuinely thought these guys could be the new The Strokes. They’re good looking, write rad songs and have lyrics that don’t make sense. If the general public thought this was enough to start a cultural revolution in 2001, I don’t know why they’re so indifferent to it now.
37. ‘Pretty. Odd’ – Panic at the Disco
Oasis would be so much cooler if they realised that The Beatles were a bunch of pretty boys making orchestral pop music, constantly perplexing their fans in the process, whilst retaining a hardcore following of underage girls who really wanted to give them blow jobs.
36. ‘The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull’ – Earth
The Earth of today is a very different band to the one who released 1993’s ‘Earth 2’ masterpiece – where that record (and I’m going to steal a phrase I read somewhere) sounds like “grunge liquified”, ‘The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull’ is more like Neil Young’s soundtrack to Jim Jarmusch’s ‘Dead Man’, being liquified, but very…..v---e----r--y s----l—o—w----l--y. The lack of information between notes on this record being as vital as the arrangments themselves – new empires have time to rise and fall between the solemn reach of every chord. With Dylan Carson passing the mantle of downtuned Sabbath-inspired extremity on to Sunn 0))) (who legend has it started as an Earth tribute band), this deeply-philosophical, Spaghetti Western funeral-march sees Earth once again enter the saloon of greatness.
35. ‘2’ – Semifinalists
I am in no way biased or exaggerating when I say Ferry Gouw is the most talented person I personally know. Inbetween doing the artwork for our releases here at Meal Deal, directing far-out videos for the likes of Lightspeed Champion and Bloc Party and dressing really well, he’s in the most underrated band the world has ever seen. I mean who else has thought of making a record that could soundtrack a high-school dance at the end of a John Hughes movie as seen through the eyes of the protagonist from a Daniel Clowes graphic novel?
34. ‘21’ – Mystery Jets
In the past, Mystery Jets had always been the kind of band I’d admire from afar, like the kind of girl you know is pretty, but ultimately they’re just not your type. With ‘21’ however, everything changed, the departure of quite literal father figure Henry Harrison along with the arrival of producer Erol Alkan allowed the band to embrace a sound which incorporated Brian Ferry saxophones, faultless harmonies, 80’s synths and the experience of being young, creative and in love written so perfectly, that this can’t be considered anything other than the best guitar-pop record made by a British band this year.
33. ‘All Hope Is Gone’ – Slipknot
After the pretty momumental ‘Vol 3: The Sublimal Verses’ seemed to bring natural closure to the Slipknot saga, (to make a shitty pun) all hope was gone that they would return with another album, let alone one as furious as this. From the outset, ‘All Hope Is Gone’ burns with an anger not heard since ‘Iowa’ became the most extreme album ever to get to hit #1 both sides of the Atlantic. There are however, a couple of ballads on the album and these do sound a bit like Staind (memo: Staind have a couple of big jams).
32. ‘Falling Off the Lavender Bridge’ – Lightspeed Champion
Post Test Icicles, hooking up with in-house Saddle Creek producer Mike Mogis and writing a record inspired in equal parts by Cass McCombs, Bright Eyes, and hanging out with Peaches Geldof at parties in Dalston wasn’t exactly what the world was expecting from Dev Hynes – well, apart from the last part maybe. ‘Falling Off the Lavender Bridge’ is however, an admirably ambitious, occasionally brilliant and frequently touching insight into the psyche of this exceptionally gifted songwriter , it’s folk-inflected melancholy (almost certainly intentionally) lightyears apart from his previous group’s vivid, day-glo screamo. A autumnal record, in the best sense, and one which perhaps only hints at the greatness that this man is capable of.
31. ‘What You Don’t Know Is Frontier’ – Asva
Consumed with anguish by the premature death of his brother, Stuart Dahlquist, along with ex-members of Burning Witch and other doom luminaries, decamped to the mountains to record this hugely emotive record of dramatic art-metal. Like a more religious Sunn 0))), guitars rumble blackly, with holy Church organs bringing with them a pervading sense of melancholy. It never sinks into bleak moroseness though, as its creator notes, “What You Don't Know Is Frontier is about rebirth… about that light at the end of the tunnel. Amen.” Indeed, this record stops only just short of being a total masterpiece.
30. ‘Devotion’ – Beach House
Ripping off how you'd imagine Mazzy Star would sound if they were forced to eat a ton of hash brownies and then play 'Among My Swan' on a really hot summer's day is such an obvious idea, that I can't believe no one has thought of it before.
29. ‘The Devil, You + Me’ – The Notwist
In the six years since their last release, the almost-perfect ‘Neon Golden’, it’s as though The Notwist have been hermetically sealed in their own world, wrapped in a blanket of warm melancholy, totally oblivious to musical trends and the passing of time. Once again, ‘The Devil, You + Me’ is a understatement of the most beautiful kind, a deeply cerebral, yet hushed, sad, poignant and natural album of sad electronica. I find it really weird that these guys used to be a hardcore band.
28. ‘Nouns’ – No Age
No Age are a couple of vegan pancake-eating, all-ages-party-throwing dudes who have more than paid their dues in the hardcore scene in their previous incarnation as Wives, so how they became so fucking big is kind of weird. What isn’t surprsing after hearing last year’s collection of E.P.’s ‘Weirdo Rippers’ is the quality of ‘Nouns’. It’s a single coherent statement that hangs together by its own logic – a record where ambient noise can sit next to grunge rock jams without it ever sounding anything more or less than a couple of guys making some noise and having fun with it. ‘Gnarly’ being the only appropriate adjective to describe it all really.
27. ‘Crystal Castles’ – Crystal Castles
Don’t hate – fact is ‘Crystal Castles’ is one of the year’s strongest records. Whether your scepticism is borne of their pretty lame Suicide meets electroclash posturing, their way too calculated “fuck you” attitude, or even just that guy’s massive nose sticking out from the front cover of NME, the music on this album is nothing short of spectacular almost from start to finish. What’s more as the elctronic squalls and diced vocals fade into a final track which sounds a bit like ‘Daydream’ off ‘Gish’ by Smashing Pumpkins, it’s clear that these guys could have another great record in them. (Then they’ll probably go shit on their third album – just like Suicide).
26. ‘Saturdays = Youth’ – M83
Much has been made of ‘Saturdays = Youth’ being Anthony Gonzalez’s nostalgia album – in fact he has publically said that this album has as much to do with John Hughes’ movies as it does with his record collection. If there’s any evidence of this, it’s that the record sounds like 2005’s ‘Before the Dawn Heals Us’, but set on Earth as opposed to trying to soar around its stratosphere. Whilst the emotional scope and ambition of M83’s earlier album has been reduced, what we get as a trade-off is Gonzalez is wrapping his natural gift for melody around some of his best and most straightforward songwriting to date, which on ‘Graveyard Girl’ strangely sounds a bit like early The Stone Roses.
Why don’t more people come out and make the really obvious statement that this album is just an attempt to rework ‘In a Priest Driven Ambulance’ into a formula that is more impressive to hot girls than it is to acid dealers?
49. ‘Chinese Democracy’ – Guns N’ Roses
Included in this list predominatly for the fact that it sounds exactly as I dreamed it would. Axl has clearly been utterly consumed, artistically compelled to create the world’s greatest ever album for the past 17 years. He failed by miles, but what we are left with is utterly fascinating record which when it occasionally strikes gold, reveals God in it’s details. For my money, this is the best Guns N’ Roses album.
48. ‘Dream Island Laughing Language’ – Lucky Dragons
What sucks is that I have never seen these guys live. Apparently they hand out brightly-coloured electrodes out to the audience and everyone hold hands and weird electronic noises are created, and it’s so good that people don’t even realise they're being hippies. On record, Lucky Dragons sit somewhere between a more cacophonous High Places and a less cerebral Fridge with clipped gongs and weird ethnic instruments, colliding with drum machines, chimes and cut-up vocals in the mix. These guys are definitely vegans.
47. ‘Definition of Real’ – Plies
This album is so fucking lacking in intellectual worth, it’s basically the hip-hop equivalent of when you got a shitty mark on a test paper back at school and went round showing off to your friends about it.
46. ‘Sick to Death’ – Eat Skull
As the other Siltbreeze band people seem to know, Eat Skull’s ‘Sick to Death’ is the older, grubby brother of its artier sibling ‘Rip It Off’ by Times New Viking. To extend the metaphor, this record is the kind of kid who is always covered in cuts and brusies, who pulls the wings off flies and burns them with its magnifiying glass. This really is shitty recording for shitty recording’s sake and I just happen to think recording your band shittily as an end in itself is absolutely awesome.
45. ‘Weezer’ (The Red Album) – Weezer
The pre-release hype on this one was that it was going to fuse everything that is brilliant about Weezer together (i.e. everything except ‘Make Believe’), then we’d forget that they actually went to the effort of recording ‘We Are All on Drugs’ and then releasing it as a single, world peace would ensue and we’d all laugh at Rivers Cuomo’s ironic moustache together in blissful harmony. It never happened, but their third self-titled album is a million miles away from the infinite suckness that was its predecessor. It’s basically Weezer on autopilot, which is absoloutely great and loads of fun. Thanks.
44. ‘The Cool’ – Lupe Fiasco
Lupe Fiasco’s debut ‘Food & Liquor’ had the weight of expectation on its shoulders, and boy did it sound like it – perhaps coming-off too expansive and grandiose than any debut rap LP has the right to. ‘The Cool’ readresses this balance, retaining its predecessor’s ambition, whilst not afraid to, you know, feature a fun, easy-on-the ear hip-pop radio jam like ‘Superstar’. Lupe himself seems more at home amonst the less portentous musical scenery, allowing his creativity to hit its peak-to-date on tracks such as ‘Gotta Eat’ where he trades off the evils of dope-slinging and fast food against each other to stunning effect. If he raises the bar as much again on his next (and supposedly final) LP then he’ll be in with a shot of recording this milennium’s own ‘The Low End Theory’. (F.Y.I. I don’t really like that album, but everyone else seems to).
43. ‘HLLLYH’ – The Mae Shi
I know what you’re thinking – “not another band from The fucking Smell” and I’d agree with you. However, although they give off the impression of a bunch of dudes let loose in a music store on their skateboards (or in a skateboard shop with their musical instruments – whichever you’d prefer), nothing could be further from the truth. Just listen to this record carefully – something this complex and intricate, has obviously been tweaked and laboured over by its creators with microscopic precision in order to attain the most fun results physically possible. Also, twenty five bonus point for including a megamix of all the tracks on the album in the middle of the album.
42. ‘Get Awkward’ – Be Your Own Pet
These guys really shouldn’t have split up – it would’ve been so awesome if they had just continued making the same record until one of them died and they were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame when they were about 65 and really embarassing.
41. ‘Distortion’ – The Magnetic Fields
Conceptual to the core, Stephin Merritt led the Magnetic Fields into a swathes of Jesus & Mary Chain inspired fuzz for this pretty self-explanatorily-titled album . Not only guitars are overdriven - everything from pianos, drums, bass and strings are totally doused in saturated, buzzing, distortion. A Place to Bury Strangers this is not however, underneath the stylistic cloak, lies Merritt’s typically literate, tongue-in-cheek wordplay, and if you look hard enough beneath that, perhaps something approaching genuine emotion.
40. ‘Hercules and Love Affair’ – Hercules and Love Affair
As a label, DFA is relentlessly tasteful and consistent – almost to a fault (but not quite). Looking back at their catalogue, spanning everything from Black Dice to The Juan Maclean, via the only good song The Rapture ever did, it’s actually verging on frustrating how on point this label has been for the best part of a decade. Hercules and Love Affair is a project steeped in 80’s disco-house, and inevitably the production is absolutely immaculate. It’s one of those records where you give at least a ‘7’ just for the reverb-tails on the marraccas. This is no mere outing in simulacra however, the record is also emotionally a total winner, bursting with heart courtesy of the frequent melodic input of Anony Hegarty (of Antony & the Johnsons). It looks as though it could be a little while longer before we can enjoy that backlash.
39. ‘Initiations’ – Burial Hex
Oooh hello scary man with your power electronics and blackened, idustrial misanthropy, can we have some more of this please? The new Bloc Party album just isn’t doing it for us.
38. ‘Elephant Shell’ – Tokyo Police Club
I genuinely thought these guys could be the new The Strokes. They’re good looking, write rad songs and have lyrics that don’t make sense. If the general public thought this was enough to start a cultural revolution in 2001, I don’t know why they’re so indifferent to it now.
37. ‘Pretty. Odd’ – Panic at the Disco
Oasis would be so much cooler if they realised that The Beatles were a bunch of pretty boys making orchestral pop music, constantly perplexing their fans in the process, whilst retaining a hardcore following of underage girls who really wanted to give them blow jobs.
36. ‘The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull’ – Earth
The Earth of today is a very different band to the one who released 1993’s ‘Earth 2’ masterpiece – where that record (and I’m going to steal a phrase I read somewhere) sounds like “grunge liquified”, ‘The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull’ is more like Neil Young’s soundtrack to Jim Jarmusch’s ‘Dead Man’, being liquified, but very…..v---e----r--y s----l—o—w----l--y. The lack of information between notes on this record being as vital as the arrangments themselves – new empires have time to rise and fall between the solemn reach of every chord. With Dylan Carson passing the mantle of downtuned Sabbath-inspired extremity on to Sunn 0))) (who legend has it started as an Earth tribute band), this deeply-philosophical, Spaghetti Western funeral-march sees Earth once again enter the saloon of greatness.
35. ‘2’ – Semifinalists
I am in no way biased or exaggerating when I say Ferry Gouw is the most talented person I personally know. Inbetween doing the artwork for our releases here at Meal Deal, directing far-out videos for the likes of Lightspeed Champion and Bloc Party and dressing really well, he’s in the most underrated band the world has ever seen. I mean who else has thought of making a record that could soundtrack a high-school dance at the end of a John Hughes movie as seen through the eyes of the protagonist from a Daniel Clowes graphic novel?
34. ‘21’ – Mystery Jets
In the past, Mystery Jets had always been the kind of band I’d admire from afar, like the kind of girl you know is pretty, but ultimately they’re just not your type. With ‘21’ however, everything changed, the departure of quite literal father figure Henry Harrison along with the arrival of producer Erol Alkan allowed the band to embrace a sound which incorporated Brian Ferry saxophones, faultless harmonies, 80’s synths and the experience of being young, creative and in love written so perfectly, that this can’t be considered anything other than the best guitar-pop record made by a British band this year.
33. ‘All Hope Is Gone’ – Slipknot
After the pretty momumental ‘Vol 3: The Sublimal Verses’ seemed to bring natural closure to the Slipknot saga, (to make a shitty pun) all hope was gone that they would return with another album, let alone one as furious as this. From the outset, ‘All Hope Is Gone’ burns with an anger not heard since ‘Iowa’ became the most extreme album ever to get to hit #1 both sides of the Atlantic. There are however, a couple of ballads on the album and these do sound a bit like Staind (memo: Staind have a couple of big jams).
32. ‘Falling Off the Lavender Bridge’ – Lightspeed Champion
Post Test Icicles, hooking up with in-house Saddle Creek producer Mike Mogis and writing a record inspired in equal parts by Cass McCombs, Bright Eyes, and hanging out with Peaches Geldof at parties in Dalston wasn’t exactly what the world was expecting from Dev Hynes – well, apart from the last part maybe. ‘Falling Off the Lavender Bridge’ is however, an admirably ambitious, occasionally brilliant and frequently touching insight into the psyche of this exceptionally gifted songwriter , it’s folk-inflected melancholy (almost certainly intentionally) lightyears apart from his previous group’s vivid, day-glo screamo. A autumnal record, in the best sense, and one which perhaps only hints at the greatness that this man is capable of.
31. ‘What You Don’t Know Is Frontier’ – Asva
Consumed with anguish by the premature death of his brother, Stuart Dahlquist, along with ex-members of Burning Witch and other doom luminaries, decamped to the mountains to record this hugely emotive record of dramatic art-metal. Like a more religious Sunn 0))), guitars rumble blackly, with holy Church organs bringing with them a pervading sense of melancholy. It never sinks into bleak moroseness though, as its creator notes, “What You Don't Know Is Frontier is about rebirth… about that light at the end of the tunnel. Amen.” Indeed, this record stops only just short of being a total masterpiece.
30. ‘Devotion’ – Beach House
Ripping off how you'd imagine Mazzy Star would sound if they were forced to eat a ton of hash brownies and then play 'Among My Swan' on a really hot summer's day is such an obvious idea, that I can't believe no one has thought of it before.
29. ‘The Devil, You + Me’ – The Notwist
In the six years since their last release, the almost-perfect ‘Neon Golden’, it’s as though The Notwist have been hermetically sealed in their own world, wrapped in a blanket of warm melancholy, totally oblivious to musical trends and the passing of time. Once again, ‘The Devil, You + Me’ is a understatement of the most beautiful kind, a deeply cerebral, yet hushed, sad, poignant and natural album of sad electronica. I find it really weird that these guys used to be a hardcore band.
28. ‘Nouns’ – No Age
No Age are a couple of vegan pancake-eating, all-ages-party-throwing dudes who have more than paid their dues in the hardcore scene in their previous incarnation as Wives, so how they became so fucking big is kind of weird. What isn’t surprsing after hearing last year’s collection of E.P.’s ‘Weirdo Rippers’ is the quality of ‘Nouns’. It’s a single coherent statement that hangs together by its own logic – a record where ambient noise can sit next to grunge rock jams without it ever sounding anything more or less than a couple of guys making some noise and having fun with it. ‘Gnarly’ being the only appropriate adjective to describe it all really.
27. ‘Crystal Castles’ – Crystal Castles
Don’t hate – fact is ‘Crystal Castles’ is one of the year’s strongest records. Whether your scepticism is borne of their pretty lame Suicide meets electroclash posturing, their way too calculated “fuck you” attitude, or even just that guy’s massive nose sticking out from the front cover of NME, the music on this album is nothing short of spectacular almost from start to finish. What’s more as the elctronic squalls and diced vocals fade into a final track which sounds a bit like ‘Daydream’ off ‘Gish’ by Smashing Pumpkins, it’s clear that these guys could have another great record in them. (Then they’ll probably go shit on their third album – just like Suicide).
26. ‘Saturdays = Youth’ – M83
Much has been made of ‘Saturdays = Youth’ being Anthony Gonzalez’s nostalgia album – in fact he has publically said that this album has as much to do with John Hughes’ movies as it does with his record collection. If there’s any evidence of this, it’s that the record sounds like 2005’s ‘Before the Dawn Heals Us’, but set on Earth as opposed to trying to soar around its stratosphere. Whilst the emotional scope and ambition of M83’s earlier album has been reduced, what we get as a trade-off is Gonzalez is wrapping his natural gift for melody around some of his best and most straightforward songwriting to date, which on ‘Graveyard Girl’ strangely sounds a bit like early The Stone Roses.
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