Category: toplists

Look; either I’m getting older, more irrelevant, more intolerant… unable to cotton to the “new sounds,” or there just wasn’t a whole lot to froth at the mouth about in the first half of 2011.

I was disappointed with Radiohead’s effort; first-time since well… since never.  It was a trial admitting that and leaving it off the list; felt like betrayal.  Much of the year’s hotly-anticipated or raved-up albums just didn’t work for me – Panda Bear, James Blake, The Weeknd; no thanks..  Even old stalwarts fell short, I’m looking at you Decemberists and Strokes.  It was just an off half, I guess.

Honestly, and I’m not making this up it’s backed with hard data from Last.fm, my most-listened-to record in the first six months of 2011 was Sufjan Stevens’ 2010 LP Age of Adz.  I don’t do that a lot, cling to a record for that long.  It’s a fabulous album, to be sure, but something in 2011 should’ve been able to unseat it from heavy rotation.  To be fair, the music below is really good too – but January through June just didn’t speak to me the way it has in past years.  I’d recommend all the stuff that follows for your listening pleasure, and let’s hope together that something spectacular comes from the back nine.

So then, to get on with it for those still with it… here’s my best-of so-far list for 2011.  Only a scant six records to speak of, but I think it’s a pretty decent crop of tunes in the end.  Check it:

06. Mogwai- Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will [listen]

Back around the year 2001 I “discovered” Mogwai.  At the time I simply could not get enough of their sound.  I liked them so much, in fact, that Sharaun surprised me with tickets to go see them live in the city around that time.  It was a Valentine’s Day gift, and she accompanied me.  It was an awful show, I recall.  Mogwai were too loud during their awesome loud parts and not loud enough during their well-crafted quiet parts.  As the years wore on Mogwai continued to make albums, and I continued listening to them, but with waning interest.  Maybe I was over “post rock,” maybe they just weren’t that good, maybe both. I don’t know if this is just Mogwai doing right again, or me meeting the album in the right mood… but if you like the soft/heavy-loud/quiet kind of thing and are into instrumentals this is for you.

05. Yuck – Yuck [listen]

And some of the records I do like this year sound like Dinosaur Jr. or Pavement or Archers of Loaf.  Yuck is from England, but these guys would be right at home with Mascis and Barlow in some seedy Chapel Hill bar. I kept bouncing this album higher in my list and then bubbling it back down, but that might be because of the six here it’s my most recent acquisition and I’m just not ready to have this new guy bump some of the more established stuff I’ve been digging so far this year.  I could see that changing though, as time goes on and I look back in December.  Yuck’s record is for you if you were a skater in middle school; you maybe snuck out late one night with a can of green spraypaint and tagged Mrs. Canty’s, the math teacher, van.  You listened to Green Mind and daydreamed about making out with chicks or maybe buying some firecrackers or maybe getting a rush from stealing Now & Laters from the Sunoco.  Some people call this “post-punk” or other such dumb taxonomy.  You’re gonna call it awesome and I’m maybe gonna call it “with a bullet” here on the old best-of.  Watch out top-four… watch out.

 04. Cut Copy- Zonoscope [listen]

Cut Copy is one of those bands where, sometimes when I listen to them, really listen to them, I’m surprised I like them as much as I do.  I’m sure, in a previous review, I’ve made the Utah Saints comparison – and perhaps even gone back to access the memory databank and pull up the good time associated with similar sounds of yore, but Zonoscope is more than just an homage or Shanghai-Gucci.  Generally poppy and beats-based, but with plenty of quirky arpeggio and oooh-kinda harmony, it’s just a fun album.  We listened to this a lot on the RV trip because it was something Sharaun didn’t detest (which says something in its own right).  Maybe the best compliment I can pay here is that the album makes me want to dance, and I detest dancing.  Get it and shake your body in time.

03. The Pains of Being Pure At Heart – Belong [listen]

Some of the records I do like this year sound like the Smashing Pumpkins or MBV.  Hey, maybe I was right in my exposition… I’m “stuck,” I can’t hear new sounds.  I like stuff that sounds like stuff I like.  Records that sounds like Siamese Dream or Daydream Nation.  No, that can’t be right.  I drank the Animal Collective Kool-Aid, admitted my penchant for Kanye… I have to be hip, must be with-it, right?  Well, whether I’m faking it or not, I liked this record immensely.  Yes, it does, at times, sound like the Smashing Pumpkins with Debbie Goode pedals – but, seriously, what’s wrong with that?  Maybe I’m becoming myopic in my old age, but I still know a good record and I urge you to seek this one out.  What?  You want to know a little about it?  OK: It sounds commercial, it’s well-produced, your roommate who loved “that one Killers CD” will probably like it.

02. Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues [listen]

I so loved the Fleet Foxes’ first album, and I was a little surprised when I didn’t immediately cotton to Helplessness Blues.  It took a few listens, quiet listens in solitude where I could really sink into the thing, to catch-on here.  It’s one of those paradoxical albums – so seemingly sparse and reserved in instrumentation yet coming off so very lush and sonic-ally “full.”  (Is that a word, “sonic-ally?”)  There’s this rollicking kind of breakdown that gets repeated in “Bedouin Dress,” like something you might hear sung on a ship… and it’s these little bits and pieces that make the Fleet Foxes’ music almost an anachronism, crafted with eyes on the simple folks of the past.  With strings and banjo and simply gorgeous moments like the sea-change transition in “The Plains/Bitter Dancer.”   I wore the grooves off this thing.

 01. Smith Westerns – Dye It Blonde [listen]

I love it when bands “come out of nowhere.”  Of course they had a record before this and I’ve still never heard it.  Finding a band I’ve never heard of and being super-impressed with their album is like hunting treasure.  And Dye It Blonde is a treasure.  Ever heard of the “C86 sound?”  Well, honestly neither had I until I wanted to make a reference to Smith Westerns’ sometimes likeness to the Teenage Fanclub for this paragraph.  Wikipedia says the C86 sound is typified by “guitar-based musical genre characterised by ‘jangly’ guitars and fey melodies.”  I don’t know about “fey,” but there is some good jangling going on here, and I hear shades of Teenage Fanclub’s “The Concept” all over.  What are you going to hear?, you ask?  Beatles sounding melody!  Guitar!  Drums!  Sorta-feminine vocals!  Catchy hooks and happy rhythms.   I love this album too, and I bet you might.  Really, go into my head and then come back out and tell me I’m wrong.

You know what’s funny?  After writing all that I think I may have been wrong up above… there was some good stuff around to listen to this year.  Maybe I’m just not consuming as much anymore.  I’ll admit I listened to a lot of “new” old stuff, going on benders with new boxsets and live shows and reissues of purportedly great music I’d not yet digested.  Maybe this tomb-raiding took away a portion of the bandwidth I’d have devoted to pawing through the new release bins (the digital kind, that is).

Take a listen for me, OK?  Goodnight.

Man… this thing has really become a labor of love.

I mean… I worked on writing this; worked hard.  It’s maybe ironic (a word so oft misused that I never trust myself enough to use it correctly, and pretty much know I’m not doing so here) that I feel some of my best writing is saved for an entry that most folks just gloss over.  And maybe I say it anytime, but if you’re a “regular” reader I’ve done some good stuff below that I think you might enjoy even if you’re not a stupid music-nut like me.  I hope you’ll check it out (despite it’s length; I know how my generation is with a wall of words and the perceived value we can derive from our time spent reading them).

Now then, without additional delay, honorable mention this year goes to: Menomena [listen], Sleigh Bells [listen], The Love Language [listen], and Yeasayer [listen].  Actually, the “honorable mentions” would fit well at the tail-end of this list and make for a more round fifteen picks – but I honestly ran out of steam and time and just wanted to post the dang thing.  So I quit and took the easy road.  As usual, I wanted to be done so bad that I did no real editing or “post” or proofreading… so I’m sure that, when I’m no longer sick of this entry and I decide to go back and reread it, I’ll make some little tweaks later on.

But for now, what follows are those pieces of art which ranked in my mind.  Hope you enjoy them.

13. Wavves – King of the Beach [listen]

Two dominant yet antithetical themes dominated the music I fell in love with this year.  I could pick tons of adjectives to describe each dueling idea, but I think boiling it down simply it would come to “safety” versus “frenzy.”  In some way maybe this denotes the cycle of me this year, the Scylla and Charybdis pendulum of my own ups and downs.  When the confidence is up and the sun is shining and I feel I’ve managed to shelve my sins – frenzy sounds right.  When my footing is tenuous and shadows loom and press (which, for an optimist such as me, is something that doesn’t get taken out and paraded around), safety piques.

Looking for the duality, King of the Beach is definitely in the left-hand of “frenzy.”  It speaks to a side that doesn’t care, a part that just wants to enjoy some loud nonsense and doesn’t mind a lack of polish.  No; that craves a lack of polish.  Wavves, which I think is  just one person – comes presented with no polish.  All the scuffs and scratches and faded leather is out-front and unabashed.  Words and lyrics are stupid, chords and riffs are sloppy and shambling, rhythm is haphazard and jaunty (or cocksure, maybe that’s a better word, I can’t decide).  But, egads it’s fun!!  More than just novelty fun, too.  Well, to me at least.

You should check it out and try.

12. Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti – Before Today [listen]

Before Today at times sounds like lounge music, or maybe just music to lounge to.  You just loosed the cord and fired your rocket and shot straight to the moon and you put on this record and lie face-down in the thick shag.  As you pretend you’re hurtling through a synthetic fiber wormhole you can kick back to the whacked-out horns, 1970s synth and sometimes jazzy bass.  Apparently Mr. Pink (no relation to Messers Blue, Red, and Orange), who is new to my musical Rolodex, has been recording these same tracks for years… sometimes in snippets or as wholes, but the same songs.  Before Today is simply the spendy-production “major label” release of his well-known (in some circles, I suppose) repertoire.

I don’t know about any of that; the history of the songs or their elemental versions the die-hards may be attached to.  I just know these versions from 2010 and Mister, they are good.  They are real good. Midyear I said of Before Today, “Some retro Bowie/Eno/Hall & Oates mashup thing?  Oh no wait here comes some Velvet Undergroundy guitar stuff.  Man this is oddball.”  This is one you’ve probably got to hear for yourself.  So what are you waiting for, click the link and check it out.  Don’t forget your scag.

11. The Black Keys – Brothers [listen]

Eons ago when I was a fresh-faced twenty-something scratching out a living as a grunt at the sawmill, I had a best friend named Ben.  Between the both of us we were like a two-man indie music record club.  We went to concerts and streamed the latest and greatest and downloaded with abandon.  Oftentimes we were united in what we liked or disliked, either coming to the same opinion independently or one of us likely swaying the other (how many of your held opinions are solely yours and free of influence?).  One thing we were together on, though, was our dislike for The Black Keys.

I don’t know why… but we both decided it was cheap imitation garage blues-rock and wrote it off.  I like to think this was more of  decision Ben made and foisted upon me (makes me feel less guilty for this record making the list while the band flew under the radar in years past).  Whoever made the call, it settled into my subconscious and led me to dismiss the band’s efforts each time they produced a new recording.  How silly the way our brains work: One time we puke our guts out after eating cauliflower and for the rest of our lives we avoid cauliflower like it’s a sure-fire sick-maker.  I’m afraid the Black Keys were that guaranteed emetic to me, and I’m here to set things right and overcome my mental block.

Brothers is a gritty, driving work of art.  It’s music for beer and mescaline and sweat and heat.  It’s simple bluesy rock that’s unadorned yet well produced; simple in the way that makes it elementally great – like eggs over easy in the morning with a cigarette after; as simple as grabbing the thing God put under the chicken and frying it and eating it.  Undecorated; nothing special; yet good for it.  A steak with a pinch of salt and pepper; no four hour marinade, no dry rub, no herb-infusion, and for the love of all that’s holy no salsa, A1, or catsup.  You’re getting the basics here: guitar, drums, and bass.  You want glockenspiel you’re on the wrong record.

So just shut up and open your mouth and chew and enjoy the stupid-good flavor of some unpretentious rock and roll.  Then remember that this is what it’s supposed to be like; it’s rock and roll the way cavemen ate it.  Take pleasure in your connectedness.

10. Zeus – Say Us [listen]

As I wrote halfway through, Zeus’ Say Us takes a page from the Beatles’ songbook.  It’s not a bad thing.  Again, as I wrote, rock bands have been emulating the Beatles since there were Beatles songs to emulate – and will likely be doing so for a time to come.  When you define a genre, you’re going to end up in that oft-imitated bracket.  It’s not that Zeus is doing the straight ripoff thing… they’re just mining the same vein.  So, now you know what to expect… to a degree (harmonies, 4/4, verse/chorus/bridge/verse/chorus, etc.) – but you still need to check out the record.

I daresay that anyone who is looking for a good “periphery” record (one for backgrounding at barbecues or in the headphones while you snowboard or while you comment that subroutine in your cube) would do right by Say Us.  I don’t listen to the radio much, so can’t say if any of these songs got much play – but they totally could have, that’s how approachable they are.  Maybe put more simply, if you decided to get all adventurous and check out each album on my list the year and you heard that Wavves record and we’re all like, “Dave… what are you on?!,” I should redeem myself with Say Us.

09. The National – High Violet [listen]

I found it hard to shuffle High Violet into this list, but I knew (knew hard) that it belonged.

The album has something of a “subtle beauty” and a “quiet ferocity” and all sorts of other oxymoronic adjective couplets.  I wrote about it at midyear by calling their albums “growers.”  I guess this is as good a description as any.  I wrote it this way in July, and I can’t think of a better way to sum it up here:

Sharaun has commented more than once that this album sounds “slow” and “boring,” but she’s still got the scales on her eyes and I’m just a little closer to Damascus.  When those scales drop, my friends, you’ll hear such a passion in each deceptively muted rythym and baritone lyric you’ll know right away there’s substance to this one.  The National do more with less (the pause between the words “blood” and “buzz” on “Bloodbuzz Ohio” drips with anticipation and is likely to make the weak swoon).

Yup; well-said Dave.

08. Surfer Blood – Astro Coast [listen]

At one point in high school I decided I wanted to surf.  I didn’t want to be a surfer, with the culture and haircuts and mannerisms and groupthink likes and dislikes – I just wanted to surf.  From somewhere, I got a board or two (the things are like tumbleweeds in Central Florida… blown around in the onshore breeze and passed from teenager to teenager through the years until the meet their ultimate fate falling from the bed of a truck or being crunched on the coral).  My roommate and closest compatriot at the time took up the pastime with me, or he had already, I offer no pretense of memory as mine is often shot.  And we, the both of us, took to the briny tides.

I think maybe if I would have picked it up earlier in life, like around the pre-teen years, I would have affected the lifestyle a lot more. I did this, in fact, with skateboarding sometime around seventh grade (there truly are limited options at that tender age… when we so want to be classed and cliqued and to cling to some taxonomy).  I dressed skater, talked skater, listened to skater music, hung out with skaters.  Even still, I was anything but a skater.  If my chosen charade had been surfing, and if Astro Coast was thrown back in time to those years – it would’ve been the soundtrack of my feigned passion.

This music is “surf” to the core; right down to the marrow (sloshing in rhythm to the rolling sets) inside the bones under your suntanned skin.  Put this record on and open up a wrapped puck of Sex Wax and you’ll actually feel the crunchy saltwater tangles in your hair.  Like I wrote at the midway mark: “… it’s that record you were listening to that one time you lost your sunglasses.  The Ventures and Beach Boys meet Weezer (when they were good) and JaMC.”  Get it and go coastal.

07. The Local Natives – Gorilla Manor [listen]

I was enamored with this album midway through the year; a handful of really great tracks shored it up in my mind.  As the year trod on, and records with slightly better ERAs trickled out, I began to see the tiny cracks in Gorilla Manor’s veneer.  Yes it’s a super-fine album, and “Airplanes” is one (if not the) best track of the year, but I couldn’t even get it into the top five when I did my week of comparative re-listening.

I should be less negative, I don’t mean to dissuade anyone or bag on a record I’m including in my very own best-of list.  You’d like this album. It’s very good.  The harmonies and percussion particularly, sounding like a callback to folkier times (but with modernized production).  There are songs that’ll knock your socks off, namely the penultimate “Airplanes,” which I can’t stop mentioning.  And, like I said at the halfway point, there are parts that “droop and sag.”  But in the end you’ll want to hear this to round out the better stuff of the year.  I promise.

06. Kanye West – My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy [listen]

Let’s get the elitist stuck-in-his-ways stuff dispensed right up front: I don’t like rap.

No really, on the whole I just don’t dig it.  I don’t discount it as an art form or anything, that would be ignorant for a music-o-phile, it’s just not my cup of tea.  It’s hard not to like this record though.  The tunes are memorable and catchy and the words are just perfect (sometimes maybe a little too perfect, Kanye…).  To me the goodness of this album comes moreso from the attitude that comes across than anything else.  Take for instance this little call-and-response triplet:

How ‘Ye doin’?; I’m survivin’.

I was drinkin’ earlier; Now I’m drivin’.

Where the bad bitches, huh?; Where y’all hidin’?

The italicized portions are delivered in this sneering, know-it-all, entitled, Angelica Pickles tone.  That Kanye’s response to peoples’ hatred of him is to stoke the flames while cupping his own balls is what makes his stuff so good.  Oh, that and that he makes some wicked-sounding hip-hop that even a dyed-in-the-wool rock ‘n’ roller like me can appreciate.  There’s a catch, however.  A reason I don’t like this record.  I know it sounds odd but I actually feel indulgent for enjoying it.  Indulgent, moreover, to the point of feeling guilty (I told you it would sound odd).  I guess maybe all the cursing, all the trite braindead talk of sex and money… I end up asking myself, “How can you enjoy this basal crap?”  It’s akin to the feeling I used to have in the morning after getting high – a guilt and a nagging “why?” and “was it worth this?” brought on, perhaps, by upbringing or Officer Dave or Nancy Reagan or Afterschool Specials.

Uh-oh this review is getting long in the tooth.

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy topped nearly every single 2010 list I’ve seen.  Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, CokeMachineGlow, Stereogum – only PopMatters dared slight Kanye this year.  I’m gonna stand with PopMatters on this.  The record is really, really good.  Better than College Dropout good.  It’s just not top-of-my-list good and, besides, it gives me an morality hangover.  Sorry Ye.  You done real good though.

05. Arcade Fire – The Suburbs [listen]

I don’t know when it happened, but something bad went down between me and the Arcade Fire.  We had this falling out, or growing apart, or something.  I suppose maybe it’s my fault; putting them atop of the lightning rod at the summit of Mt. Olympus didn’t give them much room to go anywhere but down.  So our relationship sort of soured and my hunched shoulders and folded arms whenever they came around were clear tells that I’d backed away.  Maybe the Arcade Fire picked up on my aloofness, because I think The Suburbs a love letter written to woo me back, to court them into my good graces one again.

And, oh, Arcade fire!  You did it!  My counselor says I should take you as you are.  He helped me see that, as love matures, those flirty fluttery-hearted days of Funeral will give way to the security of The Suburbs.  That those times of sweaty palms, perfume highs and nary an imperfection are past us shouldn’t push me away – they should draw me closer to your constancy.

I’m sorry we waned and I’m glad we’re back.  You keep making “Empty Rooms” and “Sprawl IIs” and I promise I’ll always be here for you.  XOXO.

04. Sufjan Stevens – The Age of Adz [listen] &  All Delighted People EP [listen]

I guess maybe it looks like I love everything Sufjan’s ever done.  I don’t.  I didn’t care for that BQE thing at all.  Not that it matters.

These two efforts, unbound but for the year of their release, each moved me to write their respective epics: “Djohariah” and “Impossible Soul.”  But each is more than just their standouts, and both stand starkly different from each other in feel and sound.  The EP, which came out first, is full of “classic” Sufjan instrumentation, while the long-player strays into beats and synthesized bass and blippy electronics.  You’ll go wrong with neither.

I’ve written so much about these two already throughout the year that I’m not going to try and do more here – it’d be forced.  Check those links above and see how obsessed I was with the records.  Then go check out the music for yourself.  Might not be your bag; that’s OK don’t feel guilty.  Nickelback is just fine (and I’m being perfectly serious) – there’s no need to step to this milquetoast hipster stuff, and I’m no cooler than thou for pretending to “get it” so don’t sweat it.

03. Morning Benders – Big Echo [listen]

It was hard for me… the battle between #1, #2, and #3.  I know maybe I didn’t make it sound so by my comments on Teen Dream down below… but it truly was hard.  This album, Deerhunter’s album, and the Beach House record are all in what we in the corporate world, those of us who “manage” people and rank them, rate them, what we refer to as the “top bucket.”  Ordinal ranking within the top bucket is not quite meaningless, but it’s close enough.  Like any good statistician, the “banding” of data matters nearly as much as the top-to-bottom ordering.  To be clear, the “top bucket” starts here – with Big Echo.

This music makes me so happy.  Like a week’s vacation spent in sometimes-sunlight slanting through pines; like when I was at the bottom of Molokini crater with Sharaun on my flank, floating around coral; like when I sat poolside in Mexico with Jeff, more than half-crocked & daydreaming I was Jake Barnes and Sharaun in the pool was my own Lady Brett Ashley.  That kind of bone-deep happiness and comfort.  Maybe people who aren’t music people won’t know what I mean; maybe it’s hard to grok that music can do that kind of stuff.  But I’m telling you, ye Philistines, it’s real; it’s really real.

I realized at some point that, when it comes to pop music, I like the formulaic, the patterned, the designed.  I read some reviewers saying that Big Echo tries to hard to be catchy or poppy, or some crap like that.  Whatever.  So did the Beatles (OK so maybe they defined or discovered the formula).  I enjoy the results; you’ll enjoy the results.  Just go do it.

02. Deerhunter – Halcyon Digest [listen]

When the first refrains of Halcyon Digest’s lead-track, “Earthquake,” come dripping through a pair of headphones – I like to close my eyes and imagine myself high above everything.  Related to something I know, I’m cruising at 30,000ft looking out the window on a wide swatch of God’s (flawed) creation.  Related to something I don’t know, yet something which somehow seems more appropos to the sounds, I’m floating weightless in space, tethered by a lifeline to my spacecraft; I can turn left and look down upon the world from whence I came (thanks to tons and tons of high-octane rocket fuel) and I can turn right and look out into the preponderance of seeming emptiness.  Yeah, this album makes me think of floating.

So what does it sound like?  What are you going to hear?  I dunno.  Basic stuff, mostly…  but I think it’s more the tunes than the composition here (I feel like I say that a lot, maybe too much).  I guess, if anything, it’s more distorted, overall, than the #1 spot (they sound not much alike at all, in fact), and edges away from #1’s “classic sounding” production.  Themes you’ll hear are loneliness, regret, salvation and redemption, and the daily grind.

Finish here.

01. Beach House – Teen Dream [listen]

Shimmery.

Teen Dream shimmers.  It’s such an easy album to love.  Hovering around your head weaving tendrils in and out of your ears.  It’s an easy album altogether.

The chords and plucked themes are all suffused through this hazy fuzzy sound I try to sum up as “shimmery.”  Do you remember, as a kid, learning from the fire fighters that came to your school auditorium that, if you found yourself trapped in a building that was on fire, you should get low to avoid the smoke?  Get on the ground; the smoke rises.  If you can, dampen a piece of cloth, a rip of your shirt, perhaps, and fix it over your nose and mouth to breathe through as a makeshift air filter.  Have you ever tried that (no housefire required)?  It’s not quite as easy as breathing free at all… it’s a strained fight for oxygen through the wet cloth.  But man, imagine if your house were burning… how sweet would that fresh air be?  How worth the huffing and sucking and sputtering?  Something as easy and familiar as the air you breathe everyday – a million times more precious.

Teen Dream manages to impart that same sense of extra-preciousness through it’s layered “shimmer.”  Don’t mistake me for saying it’s complicated; it’s anything but.  If you tried to dissect a track you’d come up feeling short: all the elements are rudimentary – Beach House sticks to the top couple rows of the periodic table of music.  Doesn’t matter though – it’s the construction that hits hard here.  Midway through I wrote, “As far as songs go, I often find myself falling for tracks with vocal melodies that are well-defined enough to be standalone songs in their own right.”  Teen Dream has them in spades.

Looking back over the year, this is the true capstone to me… no doubt.

Hard to believe it’s already more than halfway through 2010, right?

I’ve had my usual “halfway best of” list near-ready to post since way back in early June, but I was really unhappy with the substance of the content I’d written on each record.  What I needed to do was sit down and listen to each one as I wrote about it… but even until now I’ve only had times to do that in fits and starts.  With Cohen’s arrival and work and the other trappings of the daily grind the best I could muster was a few re-writes aimed at saying something more than “this album is good, you should try it.”  I’m still not entirely satisfied, but I’ve been working on this thing so long it’s just time for us to part ways.

So I sat around Sunday night with headphones on and banged this out.  I tried to flourish where I could.  Hopefully it might turn you onto something, or at least give you cause to call me a front-running wanna-be hipster, one of those two (perhaps both).  See if there’s anything you can dig on:

10. Sleigh Bells – Treats [listen]

People who know my taste might find it odd I like this record so much, but so help me I do.  You know what this record is?  It’s a cheerleading record.  No I swear I’m not kidding.  It’s an album that tweaker cheerleaders do routines to.  At times the guitars and beats and vocals and everything else are so distorted and clipped that songs risk becoming a static wall of sound, but in the end the beats and teenage-chant vocals prevail and land smack after smack of meth’d-out Toni Basil.  All of it hits hard, but “Kids” and “Riot Rhythm” are likely my favorite of the stompers here.  A lot of times I’ll try and give my opinion on what setting a particular “best of” album works best in – but for this one you should just turn it up and dance.  Go; dance.  Badly around your living room with your sons and daughters like I do.  Dance and have fun doing it.  This music is stupid and disposable and that’s what makes it so very enjoyable.

9. Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti – Before Today [listen]

One of the later entrants on the midyear list, Before Today didn’t grace my ears until sometime midway through May.  I can still remember my first impressions: “What is this?  Some retro Bowie/Eno/Hall & Oates mashup thing?  Oh no wait here comes some Velvet Undergroundy guitar stuff.  Man this is oddball.  Drug music.  Music for drugs. Slick; intravenous.”  I guess this is what they call “art rock;” what a dumb taxonomy, music nerds are so full of themselves.  But man, this swings.  Pink’s music divides critics; some hate it some love it.  With ties to indie wunderkind Animal Collective and a ton of underground press I think people are actually afraid to like this album for fear of being judged to be among the sheep.  So do I like it or did the internet tell me I should like it enough that I’m brainwashed?  Does it matter?  I like it, of my own doing or the hivemind’s… I like it.  Shut up.

8. Yeasayer – Odd Blood [listen]

If most of what I dug in earl 2010 can be pigeonholed as dreamy harmony-based pop, then Yeasayer’s record is the outlier.  Opening with a relatively unapproachable (at first) beat-based Radiohead-sounding experimental piece, the album changes quick and offers up several pieces of highly danceable quirk-rock.  In fact, I daresay that tracks like “Ambling Alp” and “ONE” would get most people shaking something.  While other numbers aren’t as easy to categorize, the album as a whole leaves you with a happy feeling – each song upbeat in its own way, no harshing of one’s buzz here.  It’s a hard sound to describe, and maybe a hard one to fall in love with, but I’m convinced that spending some time with this one will turn you, too.

7. The National – High Violet [listen]

The National’s records have always been “growers” for me.  I don’t know how they manage to do it, but the urgency and energy of their music is often masked to me upon the first few listens. Yet as I listen more and listen carefully the real push and charge of each track is revealed.  Sharaun has commented more than once that this album sounds “slow” and “boring,” but she’s still got the scales on her eyes and I’m just a little closer to Damascus.  When those scales drop, my friends, you’ll hear such a passion in each deceptively muted rythym and baritone lyric you’ll know right away there’s substance to this one.  The National do more with less (the pause between the words “blood” and “buzz” on “Bloodbuzz Ohio” drips with anticipation and is likely to make the weak swoon).

6. Surfer Blood – Astro Coast [listen]

Surfer Blood make trashy surf rock that, upon listening, recalls hearing Weezer’s debut album for the first time.  You like guitars and fuzz?  You like triple-tracked vocals with stadium echo? You like shimmery cymbals on a majority of downbeats?  You like a 2010 take on 1960s beach-styled phrasing?  Well by God man you owe it to yourself to get this album!  I want to listen to these tracks hanging onto a rope stretched off the backside of a ski boat, a wakeboard strapped to my heels and a bellyful of beer while my bald head simmers in the summer sun – it’s that record you were listening to that one time you lost your sunglasses.  The Ventures and Beach Boys meet Weezer (when they were good) and JaMC.  You’ll want this to accompany your waterside summer, get it and find a palm tree to lounge under, bring a chick and a blanket.

5. Zeus – Say Us [listen]

I’m not even certain how I heard about Zeus, but this album is what Dr. Dog should have made in 2010 (let’s not talk about what they did make).  Every month of every year since the days of The Beatles some band released an album that sounds like the Beatles.  That’s a lot of Beatles-esque records since 1969.  Zeus shouldn’t be shy about their Beatles-tinged effort, however, they’ve done a great job and crafted some great pop-rock gems in the process.  If you are looking for the most universally-approachable entrant on this year’s list look no further than “Say Us” –  hardly anyone would ask you to turn this off at the barbecue, I promise.

4. Wavves – King of the Beach [listen]

The whole Wavves frenzy of a couple years back completely missed me.  I didn’t even download that acclaimed record.  The reviews alone turned me off, rambling on and making the music sound all a bunch of overblown half-baked garage crap, listeners suffering from the same strange mass hysteria that allows bullshit like Trout Mask Replica to rank as a “great” album.  So I didn’t touch it.  Then I heard the title of the new Wavves record and I was intrigued.  For in 2010 the beach/surf/coastal theme is in vogue (sorry The Thrills in 2003, you tried), and calling your album King of the Beach is like catnip to front-running indie hipsters.  Next, I saw the dang album cover.  All Sgt. Pepper badge-esque in terms of color and featuring some kind of Freemason weasel or fox smoking a joint.  I mean come on – I had to download it.  And you know what, it is simple, it is garage, but it’s anything but overrated.  In fact it’s right up my alley.

3. The Local Natives – Gorilla Manor [listen]

This record, the Morning Benders Record, and the Beach House record pretty much sum up the “sound” I’m digging so far in 2010.  These LA-area folks seemingly came out of nowhere.  I read about them in the UK press sometime early in the year and decided to give the album a try.  Wow.  With harmonies that would do any modern folk outfit proud, rim-and-stick happy percussion, and enough chops to get loud when they should – the Local Natives have made one of the best records of the year.  And so yes, people may say that the album droops and sags at points (namely points that aren’t shored up by the stellar “Airplanes” and “Camera Talk), but the whole effort is sound to me.  I mean, honestly, you could put eight tracks of random noise around the awesomeness that is “Airplanes” and I’d still buy the record.

2. Beach House – Teen Dream [listen]

Picked and plucked scales, dreamy harmonies, and plush backdrops.  I got this album as winter was turning to spring and it fit so well.  I just love the tunes here, the melodies are incredible – almost understated to the point of near breakdown, but done to perfection.  As far as songs go, I often find myself falling for tracks with vocal melodies that are well-defined enough to be standalone songs in their own right.  When a band or artist is able to craft a killer song musically, and then layer a completely different, yet just as amazing, vocal accompaniment on top of it I get goosebumps.  Teen Dream is like that, and although you might think it’s too slow or limp at first I’d urge you stick with it.  I mean just listen to the harmonies on “Love of Mine” and you’ll see what I mean.

1. Morning Benders – Big Echo [listen]

There’s that very last scene in the very last episode of the Wonder Years.  It’s a slow-motion soft-focus Fourth of July parade and we learn the fate of the entire cast; it was a perfect ending.  Even today my heart swells when I watch that scene, my eyes sting with tears held back.  Not sad tears but the tears you experience when years of nostalgia crescendo and eclipse everything else in your head.  When those moments come, those points of piled-on memory when all else in the mind slips away, you get a moment of pure feeling.  That’s what happens in my head when I hear this record.  The songs are somehow so familiar to me that I instantly loved them, “remembered” them even.  In part I think it’s the lead singer’s voice, in part it’s the subject matter.  I mean, the, “I can’t help thinking we grew up too fast,” bit in “Promises”… the tinkling piano and hints of feedback at the ends of the chords… fantastic.  This is the kind of record that doesn’t come often, one of those love-at-first-sight things, and nothing in 2010 has topped it for me yet.

Honorable mention this year goes to The Radio Dept.’s Clinging To A Scheme [listen] and The New Pornographers’ Together [listen].  Both excellent records but each, whether due to pure whim or a lack of diligence or true deservedness, not bowing in my top 10.  This should not, however, prevent you from checking them out – and it does not preclude my listening habits from elevating them come end-of-year.

So that’s what I dig so far.  And yeah I know the Arcade Fire’s new one leaked already, but I’ve only been listening to it for a week or so and it can debut at end-year if it deserves it (I’ll let you guess).

Goodnight.

Internet.  It’s nearly the last day of this here year.  I let these trailing days sneak up on me…

Still haven’t managed to take down the Christmas tree, although I did get the lights off the house before the rain came this week.  Not all the gifts are properly stowed away either.  Still work to do.

Speaking of work to do…

I almost had an honest miss of 2009 with this entry.  It’s just that I usually do the year-end music list thing earlier in December, but I didn’t this year.  In fact, I forgot all about it until I today.  I was sitting at work, listening to one of the albums shown below and thinking about how much it’s grown on me in the past month or so… to the point where I’d probably rank it among the 2009 efforts I enjoyed most, and that’s when it hit me: I’d not done my list.  Spent some time today to rectify that, and here is the fruit thereof.

First up, the almosts:
(click for more info)

Honorable Mention

And now, the real-deal.  I tried to go back and write some fresh content on the portion of these records I’ve already given accolades in my halfway post, but a careful comparison would reveal at least a little blatant plagiarism betwixt the twain (hard to come up with original thoughts on the same content twice, y’know).  Even still, enjoy.

10. The Most Serene Republic – … and the Ever Expanding Universe

While not as immediately unstoppable as some of the MSR’s previous efforts (which have all, unfailingly, ranked here on previous blog toplists) – the Canuck collective’s latest release is nothing to turn away from. Still layered and dense and thickly sung by many voices, it still seems a tad bit dialed back from the all-out cacophony of their earlier stuff, and might benefit from being a little less unapproachable this time around because of it. For me, it may be that this band continues to do no wrong… but I liked this album from the first time I heard the first few seconds of the first song. Good stuff here folks; good, exciting stuff.

9. The Flaming Lips – Embryonic

Of all the records on this 2009 list, I got the least amount of time with this one. Released in October, and only really seriously appreciated by me beginning in December, it’s a squeaker. But, even with the limited exposure I knew it had to bow here. I think the last Lips album I really dug was 1999’s The Soft Bulletin. Oh sure, Yoshimi was listenable but wasn’t anything I flipped over. Then again, the band has always been hit or miss for me – maybe because they seem to approach each record as a new experiment in what they can sound like. Sometimes I like the results, sometimes not. Well, ten years have passed since Bulletin and, on this album, they have an entirely different sound. It’s a consistent new sound though: fuzzed-out bass punched-out by distorted rhythm and wandering bells, picked accents, and the familiar Flaming Lips “trippy” vocals and various random-sound accoutrement. Might be the closest we’ll get to a modern-day reincarnation of Pink Floyd, if that makes you want to hear it.

8. Grizzly Bear – Veckatimest

At the halfway mark I called this album “opium party music.”  I stand by that classification. Made for lounging around on satin pillows letting lethargy drive an academic listening. It’s no secret that “Two Weeks” buoys the record from a broad-appeal perspective, or that the rest of the tracks dazzle more through subtlety than fireworks – but there’s a wall-to-wall beauty of perfectionist production here that demands intent listening throughout; even after things seem to “slow down” off the high that is “Two Weeks.” And yes, I’ll admit that I just plain don’t like “Dory” at all… but that’s no reason to shun this sparkly, sometimes slow, quiet beast. With each perfectly placed strum or beat or whisper, it proves it deserves the spot.

7. Wild Beasts – Two Dancers

Oh Wild Beasts, how far you’ve fallen.  Mid-year, you were #2… and here you are finishing at #7.  What happened?  Now look… this album is still super-fantastic.  It’s still seductive, slippery, effeminate, growling, dirty, teasing, young, and dripping with aural sex. It still has the same plucky harmonics, sparse woodblock percussion, and should-be-offputting-but’s-instead-entrancing female/male range of the lead singer.  It’s even still got one of the best lyrics of the year in, “This is a booty call; my boot, my boot, my boot, my boot up your asshole.”  So what changed?

Back then, I’d just then discovered the record and I was simply enamored.  As the year wore on I realized that it was merely #7 good, and that other bigger and badder records more rightly deserved the #2 spot.  But hey, a spot in the top ten ain’t nothing to cry about.

6. Islands – Vapours

I don’t know why, but I didn’t like this album immediately. On first listen, I was disappointed that it wasn’t such an instant pleasure they way all previous Islands/Unicorns records had been to my ears. Maybe this is because I read a review online that called it “safe” compared to their last effort (which also charted on last year’s personal “best of”); perhaps I let that influence me too much. But then Ben commented offhandedly that he was really digging it, and I gave it another go. Lo and behold, on repeat listens, my fondness for the sometimes slower, more plodding and deliberate Islands sound grew and grew. So yeah, maybe less wild or spontaneous in some ways, but let’s think of the new-found structure and brevity as “development,” OK? If you try this record, I’m convinced that you, too, will end up digging the plucky keyboards, marching synth percussion, and, as always, the instantly recognizable vocal styling.

5. The Decemberists – The Hazards of Love

What can I say about this record that won’t make you automatically write it off as just some pretentious concept album? Oh, that’s right: nothing. That’s because this, moreso than any loosely cohesive so-called “concept” record of the last few years, is indeed a supremely pretentious album-length story-arc. A shamelessly complex tale starring a multi-character cast built on the foundation of Meloy’s trademark wordy, arcane songwriting. Through a hefty dose of “thou” and “wilt” and “irascible,” you’re treated to a classic tragedy involving a maiden, a shape-shifting animal-man, a wicked forest queen, and… uh… yeah…

And, as much as that whole mess above might turn you off (and believe me, Sharaun could barely bring herself to listen to this thing after I’d ranted and raved about the story and concept), the music on here is just piss-pants brilliant. Thematically tight, brilliantly instrumented, and entertaining throughout, you’ll want to hear the album if only to dismiss it as trying-too-hard smarmy art-rock.

4. Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros – Up From Below

I’m trying to recall where I heard about this record, but can’t. I do remember that I downloaded it simply because I liked the name of the band… sounded intriguing. Turns out the music sounds like the kind of stuff a bunch of proto-hippies might make if they decided to up and leave LA, move into a bus in the desert, and make music as a collaborative sort of commune-thing. Sounds like that because that’s exactly what it is. And while there’s no one named Edward Sharpe in the band, you might recognize the lead singer’s voice from his previous work in Ima Robot. Bottom line though, this is great 60s-ish roots-rock with doses of psychedelia. Worked great in Mexico in sunny warm weather, and would be a fantastic driving album. It’ll remind you of other things at times: Arcade Fire for the modernists, maybe Jefferson Airplane or even early Bowie for the classicists. See, something for everyone.

3. Phoenix- Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

Back at mid-year I had bone to pick with the “breaker-upper” that is “Love Like a Sunset.”  Since then, though, I’ve actually learned to appreciate the turned-down track as a sort of “naptime” in between the unrelenting saccharine of this record. Phoenix has ranked for me in previous years, and back then I wrote about them that, “Every summer deserves a summery album. Like a sweet, dripping ice-cream cone, It’s Never Been Like That plops perfect little circles of melted goodness all over your favorite Hawaiian shirt.” And, aside from that being a pretty decent descriptive sentence, the underlying statement works for Wolfgang… too.

I want to bring this album back in time with me when they invent the machine; use it as the soundtrack to the saccharine over-emotion of a tweenage bout of puppy-love. The smiley songs could bounce along like a mirror image of my infatuation-fueled heartbeat as we held hand for the first time. Does that make you want to hear it? It should.

2. Mew – No More Stories/Are Told Today/I’m Sorry/They Washed Away//No More Stories/The World Is Grey/I’m Tired/Let’s Wash Away

Mid-year to year-end and Mew jumps four spots to take the silver medal.  Quite a move.  It’s a well warranted uptick for this record, however.  As the year went by, I realized more and more what a frontrunner it was.  I’d find myself going back, back, back… over and over again to delight in the wash of keyboards and guitars and that oh-so-indie falsetto.  But what are you, reader, going to hear if you go snag this album?  I’ve heard the style of music called “space pop,” but I have no idea what that means.  To me this is something like “modern prog.”  The stuttering tempo of the peppier tracks recalls classic Yes, ELP, and King Crimson, while the dreamier slower stuff sometimes reminds me of the downtempo full-chorus stuff turned out by Canadian mutli-player collectives like Broken Social Scene or Most Serene Republic.  But maybe that’s just me.

Oh, and, after writing my own reviews of these albums, I always go to some “respected” music site to read and compare  my thoughts with their formal review.  I was quite happy this time around to see Pitchfork name-check King Crimson in their someone-got-paid-to-write-it review.  I promise I didn’t cheat.

1. Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion

What more can I say about this album?

People have written about it to death this year.  So have I.  If you’re not an Animal Collective person, you’ll likely never share my appreciation for it.  Sometimes I even wonder to myself, “Heck… am I really an ‘Animal Collective person,’ or am I just caught up in the internet lovefest for this band?”  But, be it true love or crowd-influenced love, it’s most certainly love.  More than any other effort from 2009 I find myself coming back to this one again and again and again.

I understand you might think it’s not “music.”  It’s too experimental; too repetitive.; too dense.  Yeah it’s all that, it really is.  It’s out of my comfort zone too.  So really, I don’t know what happened with me and this album.  Perhaps it is some sort of mass hypnosis, but it was fully seeded and completely germinated in my brain if so.

I’m not even going to talk about the music.  It’s been done enough.  Hands-down, though, this is it.  #1 for 2009 beyond a shadow of a doubt.  I drank the Kool Aid; you should think about it.

And that’s it folks.  If you haven’t heard any of these records and want to, go buy them.  I recommend using Amazon’s MP3 store over iTunes, as you get DRM-free downloads you can take with you and load onto any device in the years to come.  Or, head on over to your favorite pirate downloading spot if you feel like risking prison rape.

Hope you’re setup proper for 2010.  We’re as ready as we can be.  Ten years married and a second youngling on the way and we’re pointed heavenward as much as possible from this cluttered Earth.

Goodnight.

Happy Friday folks.  I know I’ve been ready for it.

Real quick before I get started, to update you.  The car deal is supposed to go down today (as you read this, Friday).  Still not 100% sure though, as the dealership that has the vehicle we want is the only one around here not offering “early” C4C deals.  Patience… I’m having issues with it.

Hard to believe it’s that time of year again, but we’re halfway through the 2009 and we’re at a good spot to critically cast our ears back over the last six months.

So then, presented here for you without further pretext, my picks for the best releases between January and now.  My ears only, so take the recommendations with a grain of your own aural salt.

And yes, I erred on the side of over-inclusion (makes the year-end choices easier with a larger midyear field).

Enjoy.

8. Wilco – Wilco

Yes, Virginia, they do still make plain-and-simple good music.  Just American heartland; just traditional sounds; breezy and making it sound easy.  With the good bits recalling Dylan or Harrison or some similarly poppy, maybe rooted in country, Americana… this record comes off to me less as a masterpiece and more as just a solid slice of consistently good music.  The band even takes the sunny stuff and flips it from time to time, getting the hackles up and bringing the gruff – but not to the detriment of the overall feeling.  An album you’ll want to listen to with the windows down and the sun on your face.

7. The Most Serene Republic – … and the Ever Expanding Universe

While not as immediately unstoppable as some of the MSR’s previous efforts (which have all, unfailingly, ranked here on previous blog toplists) – the Canuck collective’s latest release is nothing to turn away from.  Still layered and dense and thickly sung by many voices, it still seems a tad bit dialed back from the all-out cacophony of their earlier stuff, and might benefit from being a little less unapproachable this time around because of it.  For me, it may be that this band continues to do no wrong… but I liked this album from the first time I heard the first few seconds of the first song.  Good stuff here folks; good, exciting stuff.

6. Mew – No More Stories/Are Told Today/I’m Sorry/They Washed Away//No More Stories/The World Is Grey/I’m Tired/Let’s Wash Away

Now that’s a title.  I’d never been into Mew before this record; never even really heard of them, to be honest.  Curiosity got this album onto my iPod; I had to grab it when it hit the top of the charts on the 100% legal pay-to-acquire-licensed music website I frequent.  Then, when I spun it for the first time and realized the first track is actually two completely different songs – one called “New Terrain” when you listen to it normally, and one called “Nervous” when you listen to it backwards… I knew this was going to be interesting.

Sure enough, the tunes here don’t disappoint.  Sometimes as simple as enjoyable as the clean hippy stuff that guys like the Band of Horses do, other times as dense and trippy as the most avante garde of the art set – there’s something here for the whole hipster crayonbox.  But more importantly, it’s a fun listen and would make for a good BBQ soundtrack come August.  If for nothing else, you might want to get it for the occasion…

5. Phoenix- Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

Man, if “Love Like a Sunset” didn’t come in and break up the near-unflappable punch of this record, it might’ve jumped up a full spot in the rankings.  Phoenix has ranked for me before, and back then I wrote about them that, “Every summer deserves a summery album. Like a sweet, dripping ice-cream cone, It’s Never Been Like That plops perfect little circles of melted goodness all over your favorite Hawaiian shirt.” And, aside from that being a pretty decent descriptive sentence, the underlying statement works for Wolfgang… too.

I want to bring this album back in time with me when they invent the machine; use it as the soundtrack to the saccharine over-emotion of a tweenage bout of puppy-love.  The smiley songs could bounce along like a mirror image of my infatuation-fueled heartbeat as we held hand for the first time.  Does that make you want to hear it?  It should.

4. Grizzly Bear – Veckatimest

OK so here we go with the Grizzly Bear thing…  I talked about how the Mew album would be good for a summertime BBQ.  Let’s get it straight up-front, this record would be better suited for a summertime opium party.  Lounging around on satin pillows letting lethargy drive an academic listening.  It’s no secret that “Two Weeks” buoys the record from a broad-appeal perspective, or that the rest of the tracks dazzle more through subtlety than fireworks – but there’s a wall-to-wall beauty of perfectionist production here that demands intent listening throughout; even after things seem to “slow down” off the high that is “Two Weeks.”  And yes, I’ll admit that I just plain don’t like “Dory” at all… but that’s no reason to shun this sparkly, sometimes slow, quiet beast.  With each perfectly placed strum or beat or whisper, it proves it deserves the spot.

3. The Decemberists – The Hazards of Love

What can I say about this record that won’t make you automatically write it off as just some pretentious concept album?  Oh, that’s right: nothing.  That’s because this, moreso than any loosely cohesive so-called “concept” record of the last few years, is indeed a supremely pretentious album-length story-arc.  A shamelessly complex tale starring a multi-character cast built on the foundation of Meloy’s trademark wordy, arcane songwriting.  Through a hefty dose of “thou” and “wilt” and “irascible,” you’re treated to a classic tragedy involving a maiden, a shape-shifting animal-man, a wicked forest queen, and… uh… yeah…

And, as much as that whole mess above might turn you off (and believe me, Sharaun could barely bring herself to listen to this thing after I’d ranted and raved about the story and concept), the music on here is just piss-pants brilliant.  Thematically tight, brilliantly instrumented, and entertaining throughout, you’ll want to hear the album if only to dismiss it as trying-too-hard smarmy art-rock.

2. Wild Beasts – Two Dancers

I currently can’t get enough of this music.  I don’t even know how to describe it to you, but a flood of adjectives come to mind and I figured that might be as good as I’m gonna be able to do.  Seductive; slippery; effeminate; growling; dirty; taunting; young; full of sex.  Yeah, these plucky harmonics, sparse woodblock percussion, and the should-be-offputting-but’s-instead-entrancing female/male range of the lead singer – it’s all somehow evocative of all those things (and then some).  It’s not going to be Top 40; and it’s not really typical for what I dig, but I’ve fallen head over heels in love with the sound.  And, besides, when you can have a lyric that goes, “This is a booty call; my boot, my boot, my boot, my boot up your asshole,” you know you’ve got a classic on your hands.

1. Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion

Nothing, not even a whole other top-ten list, could bridge the gap between this record and the previous entrants.  It’s in a whole other league.  So I’ll sound like all the other indie fawners and say that I really do think this is what it sounds like to hear rock music evolving.  And, though haters will say it’s innovation akin to “selling out,” it’s nonetheless the kind of approachable envelope-pushing that can bend the ear of the casual listener.

Kids singing songs about their new families and the joy of having children; the carefree escapism of walking around a city at night; the merits of simply staying in bed: themes that seem almost tailor-made for the me of now.  With unmistakeably Beach Boy styled harmonies and arpeggio-drenched, mechanical bassline-driven thumpers that get you moving, there’s nothing on this record not to like (OK, you could argue about the lengthy fade on “Daily Routine”).

If you missed it; get it.  There won’t be another record like this in 2009 and you owe it to rock and roll to just peek in on it and see how things have been moving along since Bill Haley.  Get it.

And there we go.  Start to finish in one evening, post-gym, with no pre-planning or sketched out ideas.  Atypical for a “best of” deal, but I think it worked well to knock through it all at once (with the help of the iPod to make some split-second decisions on list landing zones).  Hope you enjoyed it or, if you’re not a music person, safely ignored it.

Have a good weekend; until Monday, I love you internet friends.  Nite.

Happy New Year’s Eve internet.  Hope you all have fun and safe plans for this evening.

And, with a scant few hours to spare in the year – I’m finally ready to post my self-important “best of 2008” list (for music, y’know).  I’m not really prepared to do much exposition here, the text of the reviews themselves took up enough time and effort.

So, without further ado – here are my picks for the best records released this year.  Enjoy:

10. Hold Steady – Stay Positive

So here we are back at this grimy bar, drinking cold domestic beer and buying cigarettes from the machine in the hallway near the pisser. Some guy I wouldn’t normally even talk to pulled up the stool next to me and, by the virtue of sharing the same bar and brew, we’re talking like we’re best friends (when, in reality, neither of us would likely ever choose, of our own accord, to socialize). Before long, we engage in that classic of male bar histrionics: the “crazy stuff I did when I was young” game of one-upmanship. True, half-true, and completely fabricated slurred and exaggerated tales of sex, drugs, and rock and roll flow from our loosened tongues. Now, imagine that’s an album – done. [List to the Hold Steady @ last.fm]

9. Could Cult – Feel Good Ghosts (Tea-Partying Through Tornadoes)

I guess as the year moved on, I kinda forgot how much I liked this Cloud Cult album.  To be fair, it’s your pretty standard “indie rock” stuff… and maybe that’s why I almost consider it a guilty pleasure.  I’ll not be surprised to not see it on any other toplists this year, I wouldn’t expect it to bow much of anywhere.  But, for me, this was an enjoyable piece of the earlier bits of 2008.  I dunno, check it out if you want… it’s fairly rad if you just take it a face-value. [Listen to Cloud Cult @ last.fm]

8. Deerhunter – Microcastle / Weird Era Cont.

Another of the very few 2nd-half 2008 records to break into the list.  Almost every year I have one of these fuzzy, pysch-dripping 60s-nods on the list.  This one’s a bit different, as Deerhunter is most definitely doing new things… and not simply trying to make a 60s record in the 2000s.  But, the reference is still valid (says me).  The tracks here are plentiful and fit to sing or hum along to, and if you’re anything of a fan of music – modern or not – you owe it to yourself to at least check this record out. [Listen to Deerhunter @ last.fm]

7. Wolf Parade – At Mount Zoomer

OK, so this Wolf Parade album is one of those things that, when I heard it, I knew it was good… but something stopped me from fully appreciating it.  And, when I saw it shortlisted in my draft entry for the best of 2008, I actually had to go back and give it a few listens just to remember what spurred me to posit it for a spot.  Turns out, the appreciation must’ve been on the late bus… and showed up then.  Anyway, this is a fantastic record, and well worth your time (trying to make up for the lacklustre urging above). [Listen to Wolf Parade @ last.fm]

6. Vampire Weekend – Vampire Weekend

Something about the Vampire Weekend record feels “special;” like the guys hit on a “new” sound.  Some mix of Ivy League rock for the be-turtlenecked brownstone dwellers and a deeper sense of African rhythm ala Paul Simon’s trip to Graceland.  No, really, I’m being serious – that’s what this record is all about.  A 2008 soundtrack for cigarette-smoking rich college bad-boys to listen to during games of euchre on weekends in the Hamptons… but a completely awesome one at that.  Get it; rock out; get it. [Listen to Vampire Weekend @ last.fm]

5. TV On the Radio – Dear Science

OK, so I hated TV on the Radio for years… never heard what the critics heard; never “got” them.  Then they released this record and, lo and behold, it was good.  Really good, actually.  Like… #5 on my list good.  What will you hear here?  How about: Horns the punch and jump you along; rolling didgeridoo basslines to help you bounce; and thoughtful lyrics delivered with passion and plenty of maybe-misplaced (on such a “thick” sounding record) harmonies and singalong backing.  Honestly, this is one heck of an album. [Listen to TV On the Radio @ last.fm]

4. Islands – Arm’s Way

I just love Nick “Diamond’s” voice… it’s that classic “indie” thing that people who hate the “indie” think will always be able to point to as what sucks most about “indie” music.  Warbly, high-pitched, strong and clear and too-confident for the vocal ability of its owner, etc.  The songs are funny and the beats are just stupid enough to pass the “is this a joke?” test and fall squarely into the “is this awesome?” category.  The answer, of course, is “yes;” this is awesome.  So go get it. [Listen to the Islands @ last.fm]

3. Jason Collett – Here’s To Being Here

Rounding out the top three of my 2008 is a singer/songwriter effort which could’ve come out of the late 60s or early 70s if you adjust the production values to fit the era.  The music, modern production aside, is fairly timeless storytelling rock and roll, the kind that makes you want to swing your hammock back and forth to the Dylan-esque rhythms – just be careful not to spill your beer.  Yeah, this one’s great. [Listen to Jason Collett @ last.fm]

2. Of Montreal – Skeletal Lamping

Man, it took me a while to like this record.  I mean… it’s such a busy mess.  Fragments of song strung together without end, like a large mashup of concepts rather than the usual three minute chunked-out album thing.  And, although I’d fallen firmly in love with the whole ADD thing by the time this past November’s show rolled into town, seeing Kevin and crew do this material live really helped solidify how good the thing is. [Listen to Of Montreal @ last.fm]

1. Cut Copy – Ghost In Colours

I guess nothing in the latter half of this year could beat the Cut Copy album.  It’s just too feel-good.  My midyear review pegged why I like this record so much, so you might want to go there to read the reasoning – but, boiled down, it ends up at “fun.”  The beats and melodies all make you feel good, and it stands up to repeat listening quite well.  You could play this record at your next hipster dance party, or just by yourself in the car on the way to that new indian casino that opened up down the highway – it’s that versatile. [Listen to Cut Copy @ last.fm]

And that’s it.  We’ll returned to our regularly scheduled program here soon enough.  Goodnight, and Happy New Year!

Well folks, I’m a few weeks later than I wanted to be with this, but I think early July is still a valid time to publish a best-of list for the halfway point of 2008. This is something I’ve been doing now for a few years, and I know it’s pretty boring for the lot of you. But, it’s something I enjoy doing, so I’m gonna stick with it and press ahead. Who knows, maybe one day Keaton will reference these lists to see what Dad was “into” back in the day – maybe even make a mixtape of Dad’s “oldies” when she hits that parental-appreciation phase sometime in college. A guy can dream…

I know you’re on the edges of your seats, so here they are, in reverse-countdown order:

8. Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band – 13 Blues for Thirteen Moons

7. Wolf Parade – At Mount Zoomer

6. Jason Collett – Here’s To Being Here

5. The Hold Steady – Stay Positive

4. Cloud Cult – Feel Good Ghosts (Tea-Partying Through Tornadoes)

3. Islands – Arm’s Way

2. Vampire Weekend – Vampire Weekend

1. Cut Copy – In Ghost Colours

Well, that’s it for today. There were a couple near-misses that I wrote up, trying to hit a list of then, but decided at the last minute didn’t really warrant inclusion (I’m looking at you Tapes ‘N’ Tapes). Lotsa work here even if you didn’t read it all. Thanks for indulging me a bit. Goodnight, and, until tomorrow, take care friends.