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.