Very Close to, if not actually in, the CD player:
seen/heard ° listen ° buy
seen/heard ° listen ° buy
seen/heard ° listen ° buy
“Who’s the Band?! This One’s Just: Who’s the Band?” (Best Music, 2005)
Okay, let’s do this. We’re two tiresomely-hyped Brit bands into the new year, already.
I’ve been wallowing in 2005. And while that’s not a bad place to be – musically, at least – it’s time to move on. That’s one thing End-of-Year Lists are good for: Separate the wheat from the chaff, decide what’s hearty enough to survive and what’s best left behind. Anything I’ve missed – and I’m using your Top 10 Lists to find all that – will just have to be a part of my 2006.
Below is a list of favorites. Nothing has been judged in terms of musical “importance” or cultural significance. Thank God. I’m not playing prognosticator or concerned with anything that “advances the form.” There’s a whole lot of music I enjoyed listening to over this past year (and over and over again these past few weeks); I figure it should come down to what I enjoyed most. That means the list is going to suffer from my own myopia: It’s pretty much all independent-flavored rock and roll. There’s no hip-hop – I liked that M.I.A. CD a lot, but it’s not what I reach for when I want something to listen to. There’s no jazz – the Sonny Rollins was kind of meh, I’m still listening to the Charlie Haden, and I refuse to pay more than $10 for that Monk/Coltrane joint (they’re both dead, shit should be sold at cost). There’s no classical – I’ve grown so radically out of touch, there, that almost any purchase I’d make would be a crapshoot. And it’s all in English – though you could certainly make arguments about Babyshambles.
Enough preamble! Show me some pictures of CD covers with numbers and important-sounding summary judgments! Now!
1. Cloud Cult, Advice from the Happy Hippopotamus.
All the CDs on this list are – I think – quite good. Very good, even. But this one is not just good, and not just great: It’s necessary.
So necessary I’m not afraid to spend an entire entry explaining exactly why, despite the odd name and the off-putting cover art, you must own and love this record.
That entry will come. Soon. And lord help you, it’ll be convincing.
For now, I’ll simply put it at the top of this list. Where it belongs. Nothing else comes close.
2. Broken Social Scene, Broken Social Scene.
I know, me too. Shrugged it off the first time I heard it. But I went through something similar with You Forgot it in People. This one is everything you love and hate about a sequel: The same, but more.
Silly as it may sound, there’s nothing obvious about this 679-piece Canadian collective. It’s not going to reach out and pull you to its chest, it’s not going to offer you easy answers. You have to find your own way in... but once you get there it will embrace you. On People, for me, the key was the producer’s voice in “Looks Just Like the Sun.” Here, it was the simple, concerned chiding of Emily Haines on “Swimmers:” “If you always get up late, you’re never gonna be on time.” Unlike her sexy, blasé Metric persona, BSS makes Haines sound like she cares.
It’s a deceptive entrance point, though: Broken Social Scene is about learning to not care so much. Intensively worked and re-worked and re-re-worked over years, the album’s theme is imperfection (a dangerously good thesis for an outfit always threatening to become a jam band) and it is fraught with self-admonishment. After all his exactitude, you still can’t understand what the fuck Kevin Drew is singing (Is his favorite band “a witch?” “A wish?” Does he actually say “You can marry my mumble” in the middle of “Hotel?” – if so, I Do), but what the CD says is: Hey, you, so concerned that everything come out just so: Stop fucking ghosts. Don’t get high on what you create, or it might just steal you. It’s all gonna break; accept it, embrace the fear of letting go and allow it to become joy.
3. Low, The Great Destroyer.
Not because it’s faster, not because it’s louder. Despite all that, even: At its best, Destroyer is Low being Low, straightforward melodies splintered into rich harmony, momentum taken not from pace but tension. What keeps these slowcore Mormons perpetually interesting is the question mark they seem to place at the end of every line, the seriousness with which they’re willing to reevaluate everything they believe.
It’s the sort of approach that can turn one in knots, and anyone surprised when frontman Alan Sparhawk suffered a nervous breakdown earlier this year simply hadn’t been listening. For someone who has spent years devoted to a certain sound, he expresses an awful lot of reluctance towards his art on this record. “Death of a Salesman” finds some small solace for someone who’s tossed his musical ambitions aside; another song starts, “When I go deaf, I won’t even mind.” “Just Stand Back” either reeks of self-reproach, or serves as a threat to producer Dave Fridmann: “I can’t decide/and I can’t hide/Make up my mind/it’s a waste of time...it’s a hit/it’s got soul/steal the show/with your rock n’ roll.”
There are some sore spots. Some of the transitions between songs are jarring. When they stop on “Broadway” to wonder “Where is the laughter?” you might want to smack them upside the head with a copy of The Song Remains the Same. And, as always, there’s a certain amount of patience demanded.
If new people find the group because of Fridmann’s boomier, busier sound, fine. But it’s not necessary. Just listen to the album’s prettiest cut, “Cue the Strings.” It’s another one of those effortlessly beautiful tunes (a la “Laser Beam” or “Stars Gone Out”) only Low can seem to create... and it would be just as beautiful a capella. The trembling keyboard arpeggios, that heartbeat, all unnecessary. Sparhawk’s and wife Mimi Parker’s voices are what give the song its shape, fill it out, set it soaring.
4. Art Brut, Bang Bang Rock & Roll.
Smart enough to keep it simple, funny enough to not be the joke, Art Brut is here to remind us that this rock and roll thing is worth the saving.
Has there been a more important personal appearance, this year, than the band’s series of November concerts? Eddie Argos looked us straight in the eye and told us, once and for all, that this was not irony – and suddenly it all made sense. It’s important to start a band, especially if you can’t sing. There’s nothing better in the world than to get the name of your first love into the mouths of schoolchildren. It’s all right and proper to go freaking out over the color blue. Woooooo!
If you don’t think you get it, that’s because you’re too used to looking for the safety net. Art Brut refuses the warm, blubbery confines of self-pity. You can navel-gaze your way through the looking glass, you can swath yourself in comfortable regurgitations of the Velvet Underground (or Gang of Four, or Joy Division, or...). Or you can get up there and deny those secondhand, refracted emotions. Get excited about your new girlfriend (“I’ve seen her naked! TWICE!”). Get embarrassed about a brush with impotency (“Don’t Tell Your Friends!”). Feel things, express yourself. Art Brut makes it look easy because it is. That’s the method, and the message.
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5. Andrew Bird, The Mysterious Production of Eggs.
This album really isn’t too much better than the last couple Bird has put out; you’ll know that because Eggs is the sort of record that makes you buy up an artist’s entire catalogue.
The words are full of unhappy happenstance, unlikely births and accidental suicides. But the delivery – Bird whistles, bows and purrs – is so fluid it’s buoyant. The vowels are so round they can be used as flotation devices. At its most consciously percussive, his singing – he actually “bum bum bums” out some syllables – is Nerflike. When he plays at pizzicati, it’s given just a hint reverb. It’s a little like laying on a bed of nails. Sharp, and strangely comfortable.
Rich and beautiful and intimate. Unlike Rufus Wainwright – whose voice Bird’s sometimes resembles – his ambition doesn’t sprawl out of control. His apocalypse doesn’t come with bangs or whimpers. It comes with snacks. Some will say this album is awful, and they won’t be wrong. But I love it. If the Libertines’ last full-length was the sound of everything coming apart, Albion sounds like someone mucking about in the rubble. Though his new band (Babyshambles is a great name... and I’m guessing “Enabler” was taken...) and his producer (Mick Jones deserves a Purple Heart for getting through this) do their best to prop it all up, it’s nothing more than little crackhead Pete Doherty making a big fucking mess. A glorious fucking mess. Albion pits Doherty’s self-destructiveness against his talent, and there’s no clear winner. Perfect, impervious rockers are rendered unlistenable by Doherty’s duct-taped tongue, his inability to exist anywhere outside a glass pipe, his supermodel girlfriend. Songs barely there suddenly come into sharp focus, then stumble off into incoherency. It’s a nightmare, a car wreck, a nuclear meltdown: Come watch! The only thing missing is a duet with Whitney Houston. There’s a raw desperation about this Babyshambles record that makes it so damned fascinating. In these image-conscious PR-ruled times, Down in Albion just shouldn’t exist. There are twin addictions at work here: Pete needs a hit, and Pete needs a hit. He’s ready to rock, and for some rock. While it’s too pathetically easy to romanticize the role drugs have played in the arts, an addict’s focus narrows to what his body tells him he must have. He needs his crack, and he needs his music. 7. Wolf Parade, Apologies to the Queen Mary. If you’ve gotten over it already, you get over good things too easily. The New Wave Carny Punkers survive being the latest Canadian Band du hype by being exactly what no one expected: Themselves. The sound depends so much on synthesizers and Theremins and other things that don’t work ‘less you plug ‘em in, but the howl is human. They accomplish this by keeping the beat as regular as bran and everything else wildly inexact.
6. Babyshambles, Down in Albion 
Kids: Stay off the crack. But feel free to buy the album.
Haunted, haunting, and unapologetically odd, they’re not likely to be playing prime-time fashion shows with David Bowie anytime soon. Thank goodness.
8. Thunderbirds Are Now!, Justamustache.
Bloc Party, Bloc Party, Bloc Party... Bloc Party bores the fuck out of me. They take the process of aping Gang of Four so bloody seriously. Theft should be fun, and Justamustache is the perfect post-punk crime: At a stealthy thirty-four minutes, it gets in and out before you settle on exactly what’s happened. Smart, funny, and hypercaffeinated from its first double-time cadence to the final sugar crash. Murder! 9. Sufjan Stevens, Illinois. It’s been praised to high heaven, and it’s lovely stuff. No, really it is. I like it a lot, or it wouldn’t be here. I don’t have problem with Stevens’ gimmicky state-by-state project, not while he can take cities and events and personalize them so effectively. I do have a couple issues with the album, though, and feel it’s time to air grievances: If this were a truly great-great-great record, I could get through it in a single listening. It careens along back roads adeptly, for a while, but misses the turn-off for the interstate and putters out of gas long before Track 20, Part III. Texas will have to be a double-album, New York a boxed set.
Another thing bothered me for a while, and I didn’t understand the source of the pain until I saw Stevens’ live pep-fest at the Bowery Ballroom... I like the sound, but there’s something missing. Something necessary. It always makes me think of those ‘40’s Disney scores, with their weird, off-balanced choral parts. And I knew what it was as soon as that funky bassline broke through during “Night Zombies:”
This is the whitest album I own. And, c’mon, I have a Harper’s Bizarre CD. Stevens – smartly, it should be said – complements his high-pitched, soft-edged voice with all manner of treble-riffic accompaniment. Banjos pling ’stead of twang, horns and strings are ordered towards their upper registers. Xylophones tinkle. Piano parts bounce along with Broadway-style gaiety. White, white, white.
Chicago is in Illinois, for chrissake. I’m just sayin.’ 10. Supergrass, Road to Rouen. Some might say it does a little too much heavy-lifting from The Beatles – “Roxy” reeks of ELO – but to me, it only feels like they’ve properly apprenticed.
This could be about three dozen of the CDs you bought this year. Supergrass provides all that hairpin moodswing suiteness y’all crave from Maxïmo Ferdinand types without feeling like ADD-addled yarn-yankers. Instead of assemblages of scraps, their songs feel like choices made when choices had to be made. If, perhaps, it’s a mellower Road than your new-new-wavers, it’s richer – and no less exciting. The opener – “Tales of Endurance” – covers more ground than a sherpa with a Humvee, “Kick in the Teeth” is a great, steady, open-window driving ditty, the title tune gets you lost in the wrong part of town.
11+, the Near Misses, in alphabetical order:
Bright Eyes, I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning: Is Conor Oberst a whiny twat? Perhaps... but he’s an awfully talented one. How nice that the inevitable CD about living in New York wound up being the country one (while the digital one was about... being unlistenable?). Yes, the awkward phrasing remains, and Emmylou Harris’ vocals are a graft that never takes. No, it’s not the cohesive wonder Lifted was. But it’s a solid collection of songs, and “First Day of My Life” is such a pretty, fragile little thing.
If nothing else, Awake is proof it’s possible to fuck Winona Ryder and still put out a decent record.
Go! Team, Thunder, Lightning, Strike: If this list-making came during the summer – and goodness knows I’ve almost put it off that long – the Go! folk would be right up there. It’s a seasonal flavor, is all; the shortened days and shuttered windows makes it all feel a bit silly.
m83, Before the Dawn Heals Us: I do admire (and enjoy) its sweep. But like anything hypermelodramatic, it has its awkward stages.
The Most Serene Republic, Underwater Cinematographer: I very consciously kept them off this list, even though this record gives me much pleasure. They’re young, they’re not ready, they’ve got so much to offer; once their prog-jazz influences – there’s some Yes in there, I swear – fully assert themselves they won’t sound so much like BSS, Jr. But I like this a lot. The drumming on the last track is worth the purchase price.
Mountain Goats, The Sunset Tree – It’s a lovely piece of work, and should find itself on the shelf of everyone who’s ever used their headphones as an escape hatch. The strings are a nice touch, though I waver between thinking they’re overused and that they give the record its sound. And though it seems ridiculous pointing out that two John Darnielle songs sound similar: “You and Your Memory,” the first song on Sunset, never fails to remind me of “Old College Try” from Tallahassee. And that bugs the heck out of me.
The National, Alligator – The writing is beautiful. It may be the most quotable album of the year. But: Needs More Rockers.
There. I’ll stop there. I was going to go on, cite a few December purchases I really loved (Jens Lekman, High Dials, Jose Gonzalez, Tapes n’ Tapes) but can’t include until I know for sure that I like ‘em because they’re good, not because they’re new. And I was going to explain why some obvious popular favorites are missing. But, there. Other than that treatise on Cloud Cult, I think it’s time to shuffle into 2006, already.
I know you hate hyped shit and too much dance music, but while the first of
the "two tiresomely-hyped Brit bands" were -let's face it-
<em>godawful</em>... the second were not just worth the hype
from July 2005, but deserve more. That's right... more. They only UK
bands I'll defend will be Bloc Party, Art Brut, Editors, and maaaaaybe
Arctic Monkeys. I think the last one still have to prove themselves a
little.
Jerry, honey, don't be mad... but where were you when Chuck D. learned us
all to not believe us some hype?
Give the Joggers a few listens... and preferably the entire CD. When I
heard a few tracks, it didn't strike me either. When I finally heard them
four times, and in reference to the album, I found it was Genius.
Am I the only person on this planet who finds Sufjan a smidge snoozy?
Oh thanks for sharing. You continue to wake me up to bands I've never heard
of before. (no really) I'm going to listen to some when I have time to
download them ... (i.e. my connection is freakin' slow ... o_O)
Jerry, lookout. Them GFs push back.