Tag: National Music Year-End List

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Rewind

Chris Herrington:

This year, more than most, there was a big drop-off for me between a top four albums I loved and dozens more I merely liked. And with my listening habits, like most, becoming more and more oriented around individual tracks, I’m giving equal weight this year to albums and singles.

Top 25 Albums

1. good kid, m.A.A.d city — Kendrick Lamar (Aftermath/Interscope): In an increasingly and aggressively solipsistic form (hip-hop or pop writ large, take your pick), one of the many things that’s so impressive and righteous about this sprawling headphone-hip-hop debut is how Lamar’s own Compton coming-of-age story is packed with different characters, stories, and perspectives without being overpacked with guest stars. There hasn’t been a rap record rooted in this kind of diverse, generous sense of modern black life since Kanye West’s The College Dropout.

2. Older Than My Old Man Now — Loudon Wainwright III (2nd Story Sound): An old folkie with a warm, funny, fearless career album about, well, getting old. About reaching an age his father never reached. About outliving an ex-wife. About medications and memories of sex. About almost being “free of the shame and the doubt” and aching for a do-over.

3. Perfectly Imperfect — Elle Varner (RCA): The most celebrated soul album of the year (Frank Ocean) was R&B for art-rock fans. The best was R&B for R&B fans, except smarter, more decent, more relatable, and more concrete than any genre cohort in recent memory.

4. Agnostic Hymns & Stoner Fables — Todd Snider (Aimless/Thirty Tigers): An intensely purposeful return to form, in Snider’s own sidelong way. Partly it’s the songs, which sharpen his class animus (anthem of the year candidate: “New York Banker”), but it’s also a rattling uniformity of sound — inspired by the wobbly roots rock of Bob Dylan’s Desire and Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night — that makes Snider’s underclass vignettes motorvate.

5. R.A.P. Music — Killer Mike (Williams Street): You can have your Rick Ross. This former Outkast protégé is my rotund Southern rapper of choice. On this breakout — full title: Rebellious African People Music — Mike’s targeted bark (“We some money-hungry wolves and we down to eat the rich,” he snaps on “Big Beast”) is backed by golden-age production (from New York indie icon El-P) that would have sounded good on Radio Raheem’s boom box.

6. 1991 — Azealia Banks (Interscope): Her double-dutch rap “212” was the most exhilarating single of 2011, and on this four-song EP she adds three more almost as good.

7. Attack on Memory — Cloud Nothings (Carpark): I’ll credit homebase Cleveland for this ’90s-esque indie-rock band feeling appreciably homelier than competing blog-rock acts. Their midpoint evocation of the Nirvana-Archers of Loaf continuum of indie/alt sounds like guys discovering themselves instead of just discovering old records.

8. 12 Bit Blues – Kid Koala (Ninja Tune): With Gary Clark Jr.’s full-length registering as a minor disappointment, I’m willing to call this bracing turntablist pastiche the “blues” album of the year.

9. Europe — Allo Darlin’ (Slumberland): The songwriting isn’t quite as precise as on this Brit indie-pop (don’t say twee) band’s eponymous 2010 debut, but the band is sharper on the fast ones, singer-songwriter Elizabeth Morris’ excellent taste (there Chiffons, Johnny Cash, Graceland; here the Go-Betweens and Toots & the Maytals) is still entirely her own, and her heart is still as strong as a drummer.

10. Sing the Delta — Iris Dement (Flariella): A voice I can’t quit, and with 16 years between original albums, I’m glad she didn’t quit on it either.

Honorable Mentions: Write Me Back — R. Kelly (RCA), Blunderbuss — Jack White (Third Man/Columbia), Bouger Le Monde — Staff Benda Bilili (Crammed Discs), The Truth About Love — Pink (RCA), Kaleidoscope Dream — Miguel (RCA), The Carpenter — Avett Bros. (Island), Transcendental Youth — Mountain Goats (Merge), Red — Taylor Swift (Big Machine), Nehru Jacket/Wild Water Kingdom — Himanshu/Heems (Greedhead), The Idler Wheel … — Fiona Apple (Epic), Call Me Sylvia — Low Cut Connie (lowcutconnie.com), Channel Orange — Frank Ocean (Def Jam), Boys & Girls — Alabama Shakes (ATO), Wrecking Ball — Bruce Springsteen (Columbia), Cruel Summer — G.O.O.D. Music (G.O.O.D. Music/Def Jam).

Top 25 Singles

1. “Call Me Maybe” — Carley Rae Jepsen: After about three listens, this joined “Since U Been Gone” and “Umbrella” on the short list of the new century’s most undeniable pop songs. If you’re one of the seven people in the country still holding out, I don’t know how to help you.

2. “Adorn” — Miguel: Sexual healing goes digital, with raindrops-and-rubber groove and onomatopoeic vocal throb.

3. “Move Fast” — Galactic featuring Mystikal & Mannie Fresh: Crunk hits middle age: “Hold up!/Look/I’m 40, baby/Go slow.”

4. “Dream Baby Dream” — Neneh Cherry & the Thing: “Buffalo Stance” icon teams with Scandinavian jazz trio for epic, slow-burning, skronk-jazz cover of no-wave nugget. The least foreseeable great record of the year.

5. “Merry Go Round” — Kacey Musgraves: In a lousy year for country singles, here’s a late-breaking, debut-single savior from a Nashville hopeful not concerned with making nice: “We get bored so we get married/And just like dust we settle in this town.”

6. “We Take Care of Our Own” — Bruce Springsteen: Exhortation with an aftertaste. Cynicism and faith battling it out like Robert Mitchum’s two fists. In other words, the first classic Springsteen single in a quarter-century.

7. “Go Away” — The Coathangers: Or, “Don’t call me so much, maybe?”

8. “Womyn” — Himanshu: Good-hearted dork, preaching: “Women/You’re great!/On behalf of men/Thanks!”

9. “Refill” — Elle Varner: Showing her competitors that brainy and erotic aren’t mutually exclusive.

10. “Daughters” — Nas: Giving old rival Jay-Z a preview of coming attractions. And maybe you too.

Honorable Mentions: “Hit Me” — Mystikal, “Bad Girls” — M.I.A., “Oh What a Night” – Elle Varner, “Climax” – Usher, “Reagan” — Killer Mike, “Swimming Pools (Drank)” – Kendrick Lamar, “Serpents” – Sharon Van Etten, “Grown Up” – Danny Brown, “Love Interruption” — Jack White, “Don’t Owe You a Thing” – Gary Clark Jr., “Hold On” — Alabama Shakes, “Big Beast” – Killer Mike, “Runaway” – Imperial Teen, “Disparate Youth” — Santigold, “In a Big City” — Titus Andronicus.

Stephen Deusner:

1. Mr. M — Lambchop (Merge) and Shut Down the Streets — A.C. Newman (Matador): Twenty years into Lambchop’s long run and 10 into Newman’s, neither should be releasing their best albums in 2012. But Mr. M, which was marked by Kurt Wagner’s gently soulful vocals, examines loss and aging in a tone that’s simultaneously solemn and playful. Meanwhile, Shut Down the Streets added burbling synths to Newman’s rambunctious power pop, which made these survivor anthems sparkle.

2. good kid, m.A.A.d. city — Kendrick Lamar (Aftermath/Interscope) and Channel Orange — Frank Ocean (Interscope): Dormant for too long, West Coast hip-hop surged in 2012, with two innovative artists evoking different L.A. neighborhoods with cultural insight. Ocean’s breakout was set among the privileged kids of Beverly Hills, which allows him to plumb romantic yearning and class friction. Lamar cruised the same Compton streets that label boss Dr. Dre rode a quarter-century ago, which became a backdrop for a novelistic tale of a guy tempted by the city’s violence but steadied by his family’s spirituality.

3. Occasion for Song — Black Swans (Misra) and Young Man in America — Anaïs Mitchell (Wilderland): The Black Swans and Anaïs Mitchell recorded the two best storyteller albums of the year. Head Swan Jerry DeCicca wandered the haunted landscape of Ohio, dogged by the death of a friend and bandmate. Mitchell took a broader view of recession-era America and all its riches-to-rags downfalls.

4. Sing the Delta — Iris Dement (Flariella) and Agnostic Hymns & Stoner Fables — Todd Snider (Aimless): These two indefatigable ’90s holdouts have spent years shirking convention and making increasingly idiosyncratic country music. The key to Snider’s success may be his savvy deployment of a righty music toward lefty ideals, but his stoner sense of humor cuts his agnostic outrage. Dement isn’t as topical, but she writes about the South like a longtime expat, singing the Delta to feel more at home. It’s impossible to tell what evokes the region more affectionately: her literary lyrics or those deep-fried horns.

5. O Be Joyful — Shovels & Rope (Dualtone) and Bloom — Beach House (Sub Pop): The economic realities of the digital era have caused many bands to whittle down their membership, but these co-ed duos show just how much you can do with less. Beach House made a mighty noise on its fourth album, which was criticized for sounding like their third. Big deal: Bloom struck the perfect balance between an enormous sound and a very personal scope. Shovels & Rope were never quite so polished, which was precisely the point: The more rambunctious and squirrelly O Be Joyful sounded, the better it was. Their DIY country proved slyly smart, alternating between rock-critical explications of their sound and baby-making jams slinky enough to make you yell, “Get a room!”

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Count It Off

It’s that time again. In the first part of a three-week look back at the year in music, I’m listing my national favorites. I’ve stripped the album list of local entries — which will be featured next week — but, for the record, Cities Aviv’s Digital Lows, Amy LaVere’s Stranger Me, and Don Trip & Starlito’s Step Brothers would have found a home on this list. And I kept the local selections on the singles list.

1. w h o k i l l — tUnE-yArDs (4AD): This beefed-up second album from Merrill Garbus and her merry band of studio helpers works as music first: skronk guitar, dub bass, polyrhythmic percussion, honking-session horns, and innumerable bells and whistles setting a foundation of sprung rhythms giving way to unexpected melodies; Garbus darting around with a vocal range that incorporates fluttering, swooping, scatting, and guttural.

Bracing on contact and surprising no matter how many times you play it, w h o k i l l evokes such left-field sound savants as Captain Beefheart and Tom Zé while being more accessible than either. Conceptually, this musicality is put to the service of a set of slippery “protest” songs that address inequality and unrest from provocative and novel angles. I know of no work of art in any medium that captures 2011 as fully.But though it was a down year for great albums, this would have been a worthy #1 any year.

2. Hell on Heels — Pistol Annies (Columbia): Newly arrived country megastar Miranda Lambert sacrifices songcraft on her merely fine new solo album to save the good stuff for this inspired girl-group side project, where she pulls Ashley Monroe and Angaleena Presley up the ladder with her. The best “roots” album of the year proved to be too arty for the Nashville mainstream, too pop for the “Americana” and indie-folk scenes, and too smart — really, too good — for either.

3. So Beautiful or So What — Paul Simon (Hear Music): Or, Paul Simon’s Tree of Life. An unexpected triumph from a soon-to-be-septuagenarian legend that consolidates previous career peaks (1972’s Paul Simon, 1986’s Graceland) while looking toward the eternal. Funnier and lighter than it sounds.

4. Carolina Chocolate Drops/Luminescent Orchestrii — Carolina Chocolate Drops/Luminescent Orchestrii (Nonesuch) and Bright Lights EP — Gary Clark Jr. (Warner Bros.): Does the blues have a future as a living pop form? Here are two reasons for optimism: wildly different four-song EPs from the genre’s greatest young hopes. On the former, a North Carolina string band teams up with a New York gypsy band for a lusty, high-stepping culture crash. On the latter, a Texas guitar-slinger with ample star potential proves that blues-rockers can have taste, tone, and song sense and don’t need to show off.

5. Wild Flag — Wild Flag (Merge): Sure, the gravity and vocal power of Corin Tucker is missed, but spacier co-frontperson Mary Timony provides a different personality and keyboardist Rebecca Cole adds a new bounce. Mostly, though, this album is about the two-thirds of Sleater-Kinney that remain, guitarist Carrie Brownstein and drummer Janet Weiss, an indie-punk Richards/Watt who motorvate like no guitar/drum duo in decades.

6. Watch the Throne — Jay-Z and Kanye West (Roc-a-Fella): Too many were eager to dismiss this summit meeting on principle, but its musical command, pop power, and force of personality thunders with nearly as much grandiosity as they boast about and worry over. And West is still smarter about his faults than most of his critics, even offering up his own preemptive, Tweet-worthy pan on that Stax-biting lead single: “Luxury rap/The Hermes of verses/Sophisticated ignorance/Write my curses in cursive.”

7. Divine Providence — Deer Tick (Partisan): Rambling twentysomethings finally find the sweet spot amid fake country, garage-y post-punk, and Stones strut for an album reminiscent of the Replacements’ Hootenanny. Do they have the heart and vision to follow up with their own Let It Be? The way they puncture their swagger on the opening “The Bump” suggests they just might.

8. Dedicated: A Salute to the 5 Royales — Steve Cropper (429): More purposeful and less indulgent than most tribute albums, here former Stax guitarist/producer Cropper corrals a bunch of like-minded players and singers for a celebration of the too-little-remembered ’50s R&B titans.

9. Undun — The Roots (Def Jam): For years I thought their jazzbo tendencies and the limited vocal personality of frontman Black Thought relegated the Roots to being an interesting good band rather than the great band they were purported to be. That’s changed over the past few years, partly because their evolving music has developed a tough grace akin to prime Curtis Mayfield but mostly because the incorporation of multiple rappers has turned anonymity into a virtue by positing their music as the collective voice of a living community. If Undun isn’t quite as strong as Rising Down or especially How I Got Over, it belongs in the same company.

10. Go-Go Boots — Drive-By Truckers (ATO) and Strawberry — Wussy (Shake It): Too old and too trad to make waves in an indie media culture focused on the trendy and ephemeral, these two Middle-American bands, each built on the rich chemistry of dual singer-songwriter-guitarists, are still among the very best indie rock bands of the past decade and fall only a little short of their peaks here.

Honorable Mentions: The King of In Between — Garland Jeffreys (Luna Park); Let England Shake — PJ Harvey (Vagrant); Devil’s Music — Teddybears (Big Beat/Atlantic); The Year of Magical Drinking — Apex Manor (Merge); This Is Country Music — Brad Paisley (Arista Nashville); Chief — Eric Church (EMI); Hot Sauce Committee Part II — Beastie Boys (Capitol); Nostalgia, Ultra — Frank Ocean (Odd Future); The Road From Memphis — Booker T. Jones (Anti-); Four the Record — Miranda Lambert (RCA); The Book of David — DJ Quik (Mad Science); Black Up — Shabazz Palaces (Sub Pop); Screws Get Loose — Those Darlins (Oh Wow Dang); In Light — Givers (Glassnote); The Return of 4Eva — Big Krit (self-released).

Top 20 Singles: “Letter to My Son” — Don Trip; “Mean” — Taylor Swift; “Rolling in the Deep” — Adele; “Call Your Girlfriend” — Robyn; “Gangsta” — tUnE-yArDs; “Will Do” — TV on the Radio; “Coney Island Winter” — Garland Jeffreys; “We Found Love” — Rihanna featuring Calvin Harris; “Countdown” — Beyoncé; “Bulletproof” — Steel Magnolia; “Coming Home” — Diddy Dirty Money; “Nasty” — Nas; “212” — Azealia Banks featuring Lazy Jay; “Coastin'” — Cities Aviv; “Hell on Heels” — Pistol Annies; “Bizness” — tUnE-yArDs; “Up Up Up” — Givers; “Novocaine” — Frank Ocean; “Cruel” — St. Vincent; “Someone Like You” — Adele.

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Listening Log

After spending the last several years grousing about the domination of indie-rock bands on year-end lists — a product of the Internet-driven proliferation of indie-rock-specialist critics at the expense of generalists with more open ears and a better sense of history — I’m surprised and somewhat disappointed to report that this is my most indie-rock heavy year-end list ever. Five of my Top 10 albums this year are indie-rock records, and it would be six if I included Harlan T. Bobo’s Sucker, which I voted for in The Village Voice‘s “Pazz and Jop” critics poll but which I’m leaving off here to avoid duplication with last week’s local year-end lists.

But what can you do? Kanye West and Taylor Swift aside, Titus Andronicus’ Patrick Stickles, Allo Darlin’s Elizabeth Morris, and Love Is All’s Josephine Olausson are the three most compelling personalities I encountered in one year and hundreds of records worth of listening. And the other two indie selections — from the music-first Vampire Weekend and No Age — were, discounting some decades-old Afropop, simply the prettiest records of the year.

Instead, where I think the crit consensus erred this year (aside from a good but not great Arcade Fire album) is on a couple of very much alt-oriented R&B records: Janelle Monae’s The ArchAndroid and Cee-Lo Green’s The Lady Killer. I understand why, because I want to like those albums too. But Monae’s reach exceeds her grasp on an album that’s too ornate and too draggy, while Cee-Lo’s rejection of his Rev. Ike rap flow has been good for his pocketbook but bad for his art. Monae and Cee-Lo were both singles artists for me this year, as the following lists attest.

Top 30 Albums:

1. The Monitor — Titus Andronicus (XL): Patrick Stickles and his crew of unruly punk-Springsteen Jerseyites mix up their mythologies on this bravura second album, named after the Union Navy ironclad and launched with a pre-presidential quotation from Abraham Lincoln. For Stickles, the recurrent Civil War imagery ties into his own personal advance into and retreat from Southern territory, but he gets off on the era’s union of elegant language and righteous anger, and the band evokes the enormity of that historical moment as something of a rebuke to their own generational torpor. Like abolitionist hero William Lloyd Garrison, also quoted, they do not wish to think, speak, or write with moderation. And they will be heard. Loudly. For this scalawag, in a year when “Confederate heritage” came roaring back, nothing else matched it.

2. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy — Kanye West (Roc-a-Fella): Insecurity, awkwardness, and self-flagellation would seem to be fatal flaws in the Darwinian world of mainstream hip-hop, but West has long made these traits the source of his artistic strength. And they are everything on this relentlessly self-focused, dark-comic, and belligerent opus, which earns every adjective in its cumbersome title. Even on the rare occasion when words fail West, the music never does. This third classic in five tries is a tour de force that combines unnerving distortion, stormy orchestral passages, icy piano loops, thundering beats, and sharp samples (most pointedly: King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man”) into a musical maelstrom meant to reflect West’s rattled psyche.

3. Contra — Vampire Weekend (XL): The songs here — travelogue observations, generous snapshots of a doomed relationship — are harder to pin down now that Vampire Weekend is off campus and out into the world, but they are very much into the world: There’s an admirable lack of navel-gazing on this sophomore album, which expends no energy reacting to either the band’s own success or its inevitable backlash. Musically, Contra is gorgeous, as refined as The Monitor is raw. The band’s brisk union of Afropop and new wave (along with other secondary components) lacks the bracing novelty of the debut, but the sonics prove more expansive and confident over time. And frontman Ezra Koenig has put as much work into his unabashedly pretty vocals as the band has into its heroically syncretic yet simple sound.

4. Allo Darlin’ — Allo Darlin’ (Fortuna Pop!): On this London indie-pop band’s jaunty debut, bandleader Elizabeth Morris starts with three consecutive nightlife evocations of charming modesty (“Will you go out with me tonight?/Lose it on a disco floor/Take the night bus with me tonight?/Frost on the window”), then opens up into a vision of the good life that I can get with: making dinner with your sweetie, taking a vacation swim, arguing over movies, referencing-without-naming Johnny Cash and the Chiffons on back-to-back songs. Morris worries that she should have stayed in school and isn’t sure where this band thing is headed, but for now she’s all-in. Her heartbeat is her backbeat: “Though I’ve got no money to burn/I’m gonna burn what I’ve got/And though this band is awful/I like them an awful lot.”

5. Two Thousand and Ten Injuries — Love Is All (Polyvinyl): With tiny Josephine Olausson chirping mightily over springy, skronky guitar-bass-drum-sax art-punk accompaniment, this Swedish band evokes such spirited femme-fronted first-generation punks as X-Ray Spex and Kleenex. This passionate, spirited third album is their most melodic, a collection of bigger, bolder mostly love songs that run the gamut from exuberant (“Bigger Bolder”) to spiteful/regretful (“Less Than Thrilled”) to yearning (“Side in a Bed”: “I want my hands to be held/I want someone to put under my spell”).

6. Everything in Between — No Age (Sub Pop): Like Hüsker Dü and Pavement before them, this California guitar/drum duo with skate-punk roots tweaks hardcore into something more personal, artier, and more affable. But the way they locate hazy beauty in dissonance and propulsion on this, their third and most tuneful album, evokes pastoral, post-revolutionary Sonic Youth. (No Age plays the Hi-Tone Café on Tuesday, January 25th.)

7. I Am What I Am — Merle Haggard (Vanguard): Maybe if Haggard had worked with a producer like Jack White, Rick Rubin, or T-Bone Burnett, covered songs by critically overestimated alt-rock vets like Elvis Costello or Tom Waits, or released it on some hip rock-oriented label, this autumnal gem might have gotten a little more attention. Instead, the 73-year-old Haggard penned a batch of new songs, recorded them with his road band at his home studio, and quietly released them via the rootsy indie Vanguard. The result is a beaut of a record — quite possibly his best studio album — with the Western swing and straight jazz influences that have always underpinned Haggard’s music pushed out front. I Am What I Am doesn’t sound like a final testament. It sounds like a late-life renewal with the potential for encores plenty. Here’s hoping he gets the chance to top it.

8. Speak Now — Taylor Swift (Big Machine): A preternaturally gifted songwriter who represents something rare if not unique in the annals of pop music and speaks to a big, interesting audience in big, interesting ways, Swift graduates from teendom with her best album yet, featuring premonitions of adult love, intimations of sex, feisty daydreams, anthemic ammunition for the beaten and bullied, a farewell to fairy tales, and a heartbreaker in which she reminds her 14-year-old fans of their parents’ mortality on the way to introducing them to their own. Not bad for 21.

9. Once Upon a Time in Senegal: The Birth of Mbalax — Etoile de Dakar (Stern’s Africa): Most of this year’s “old music newly released” attention went to Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stones for handsome, packed-with-extras editions of really good (Darkness on the Edge of Town) and really great (Exile on Main Street) ’70s albums. But my favorite archival title of the year was this lilting, lovely, but still invigorating two-disc selection of 1979 to 1981 recordings of Youssou N’Dour’s first band.

10. Welder — Elizabeth Cook (31 Tigers): This indie-not-alt country singer-songwriter splits the difference, stylistically, between folk-rock icon Lucinda Williams and mainstream stalwart Miranda Lambert. And though Cook’s not quite the same magnitude an artist as either, she gets there on this good album’s two great songs: the richly detailed autobiographical showcases “Mama’s Funeral” and “Heroin Addict Sister.”

Honorable Mentions: Sir Luscious Leftfoot … The Son of Chico Dusty — Big Boi (Def Jam); Body Talk — Robyn (Konichiwa); How I Got Over — The Roots (Def Jam); Treats — Sleigh Bells (Mom + Pop); Rush To Relax — Eddy Current Suppression Ring (Goner); The Big To-Do — The Drive-By Truckers (ATO); This Is Happening — LCD Soundsystem (DFA/Virgin); To All My Friends: Blood Makes the Blade Holy — Atmosphere (Rhymesayers); Blue-Eyed Black Boy — Balkan Beat Box (Nat Geo Music); Astro Coast — Surfer Blood (Kanine); The Suburbs — Arcade Fire (Merge); Sea of Cowards — The Dead Weather (Third Man/Warner Bros.); All Day — Girl Talk (self-released); Fixin’ the Charts — Everybody Was in the French Resistance … Now (Cooking Vinyl); Maya — M.I.A. (Interscope); A Badly Broken Code – Dessa (Doomtree); Next Stop … Soweto: Township Sounds From the Golden Age of Mbaqanga — Various Artists (Strut); Distant Relatives —  Nas & Damian “JR. Gong” Marley (Def Jam); Heaven Is Whenever — The Hold Steady (Vagrant); Trunk Muzik 0-60 — Yelawolf (Interscope)

Top 20 Singles: “Rill Rill” — Sleigh Bells (Mom + Pop); “Bigger Bolder” — Love Is All (Polyvinyl); “Only Prettier” — Miranda Lambert (Sony); “Mine” — Taylor Swift (Big Machine); “Wut” — Girl Unit (Night Slugs); “From a Table Away” — Sunny Sweeney (Republic Nashville); “Holding You Down (Going in Circles)” — Jazmine Sullivan featuring Missy Elliott (J Records); “Shine Blockas” — Big Boi featuring Gucci Mane (Def Jam); “Dancing on My Own” — Robyn (Konichiwa); “As We Enter” — Nas & Damien Marley (Def Jam); “Cold War” — Janelle Monae (Bad Boy); “Rude Boy” — Rihanna (Def Jam); “Draggin’ the River” — Blake Shelton and Miranda Lambert (Warner Bros.); “Only an Expert” — Laurie Anderson (Nonesuch); “Tightrope” — Janelle Monae featuring Big Boi (Bad Boy); “Lightweight Jammin'” — E-40 featuring Clyde Carson and Husalah (Heavy on the Grind); “Fuck You” — Cee-Lo Green (Elektra); “Bloodbuzz Ohio” — The National (4AD); “Airplanes” — B.O.B. featuring Hayley Williams (Atlantic); “Little White Church” — Little Big Town (Capitol)

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Our Year in Lists

With the digital revolution and breakdown of major labels leading to more recorded music, not less, the amount of new music released becomes more staggering each year. No one can keep up with it, but we were happy to try. Our critics report on their year of musical discovery:

Chris Herrington:

After extolling the virtues of Jay Reatard and Al Green in our local year-in-review piece a couple of weeks ago, I didn’t want to double-up here. For the record: Reatard would be number eight on the following list, while Green would be among the honorable mentions.

1. Hold On Now, Youngster … — Los Campesinos! (Arts & Crafts): As a sprawling, gender-balanced indie-rock ensemble whose music is not terribly guitar-driven, Wales outfit Los Campesinos! can’t help but resemble genre heavyweights Arcade Fire. But across a two-year body of work that includes two full-length albums and a gaggle of singles and EPs, these underdogs prove to be the smarter, funnier band. On Hold On Now, Youngster …, the first of their two 2008 albums, co-leaders Gareth and Aleksandra trade off verses like conjoined twins completing each other’s thoughts while their bandmates bop around behind them in a tumult of handclaps and vocal interjections, dancing to the breakbeats of broken hearts. This young band obsesses over their messy lives (favorite title: “My Year in Lists”) and is always ready with a sardonic rejoinder (“I cherish with fondness the day before I met you”). But they’re the kind of sarcastic, introspective wallflowers delighted to discover themselves having fun (“You! Me! Dancing!”). The music is springy, chaotic, breathless: It has to be to keep up with their overactive minds and racing hearts.

2. Brighter Than Creation’s Dark — The Drive-By Truckers (New West): Though Brighter Than Creation’s Dark peaks at the very beginning with the saddest, loveliest song Patterson Hood will ever write, it holds its shape for an epic 19 songs and 75 minutes. Hood takes the toll of the Iraq war from two vantage points, ruminates on road life, spits in the wind of recession, and tips his cap to printer-of-legends “the great John Ford.” Musical life-partner Mike Cooley spins one wonderful, low-rent character sketch after another, several of them probably autobiographical, led by a definitive metal-to-grunge saga he’s old enough to have lived and a shaggy confession that outs country storyteller Tom T. Hall as this great band’s biggest influence.

3. Tha Carter III — Lil Wayne (Cash Money/Universal/Motown): Lil Wayne is rap’s Al Green — an idiosyncratic vocal genius who combines cutesy with carnal while deploying a wide range of verbal registers and tics. This commercial tour de force is his best album because it’s the first time he’s reined in his logorrhea and put it at the service of so many conceptually focused songs. And while this 16-song, nearly 80-minute opus drags a little down the stretch — and would have been better as a tidy, 10-song banger climaxing with the Kanye West-produced “Let the Beat Build” — the reason it gets better over time is that Wayne’s dense, voracious, stream-of-consciousness rhymes constantly yield new surprises.

4. The Way I See It — Raphael Saadiq (Columbia): There are suddenly a surfeit of artists tapping into ’60s and ’70s soul sounds, but former Tony Toni Tone singer Raphael Saadiq has been working in the vein for 20 years now: He’s not a tribute artist; he’s a practitioner. And the nonstop groove, compositional detail, and sometimes surprising songwriting (“Keep Marchin'” the campaign theme Curtis Mayfield wasn’t around to write; “Sometimes” a family meditation of Smokey Robinson-level grace) on The Way I See It is the closest he — or anyone else — has been to the muse since his old band’s 1996 swan song, House of Music.

5. Made in Dakar — Orchestra Baobab (Nonesuch): The follow-up to this vintage Sengalese band’s unlikely 2002 comeback triumph Specialist in All Styles, Made in Dakar combines fresh versions of unknown-in-these-parts West African standards with new songs. As always, guitarist Barthélemy Attisso spins indelible melodies and launches entrancing grooves with his vibrant but deliberate style, while sax man Issa Cissoko offers droll, elegant counterpoint. The unavoidable comparison is the Cuban rehab project Buena Vista Social Club, but Orchestra Baobab is better — less folkie, more organic, not as molded by an outside producer. Made in Dakar is great groove music for body and soul.

6. Alphabutt — Kimya Dawson and Friends (K): Juno soundtrack star Kimya Dawson followed up her rather unlikely rise to fame with this silly, scatological concept album about kids and parents. With “friends” of all ages joining in to give the record a rambunctious, campfire spirit, Dawson lets songs about hungry tigers, splashing bears, and potty-training triumphs commingle with songs about pregnancy anxiety, schoolyard lessons on egalitarianism, and the ethics of food availability. This collection of deceptively simple acoustic ditties alternately for, to, and about Dawson’s own kid — and maybe yours too — is her most engaging album yet, though perhaps too sweet, too homely, and too messy for a lot of listeners.

7. Stay Positive — The Hold Steady (Vagrant): This fourth album from America’s most literate bar band opens with something of a master statement: “Constructive Summer,” which spins some Springsteenian imagery off a title almost surely inspired by Hüsker Dü’s “Celebrated Summer” before splitting the difference with a song-ending dedication to the Clash’s Joe Strummer. This fits an album where songwriter supreme Craig Finn literalizes more than ever his band’s mission to unite classic-rock grandeur with the regular-guy modesty and small-scale ethical sense of the hardcore and punk scenes that weaned him.

8. That Lonely Song — Jamey Johnson (Mercury Nashville): This been-to-hell-and-back-again Waylon Jennings fanatic covers his hero twice, references him once, and sings with the same garbled machismo. But Johnson’s damaged tales of hard living, divorce, and recovery are too detailed and lived-in to be merely outlaw cliché. And the best song here (well, aside from an opener that boasts the instant-classic lyric “That Southern Baptist parking lot is where I’d go to smoke my pot”) is a bit of modern Nashville songcraft that might be a Kodak commercial if it weren’t so tough and unsentimental.

9. Feed the Animals — Girl Talk (Illegal Art): By and large this masterful mash-up mix from Pittsburgh DJ Greg Gillis layers rap vocals over pop hits from the ’60s to the present. Though I do wish Gillis’ taste in hip-hop samples more often reached beyond the declamatory and pornographic, he mines his juxtapositions for plentiful comedy. And, musically, it never quits. The prurient party record of the year.

10: Vampire Weekend — Vampire Weekend (XL): From the write-what-you-know department: detailed, insightful, witty, and not at all uncritical evocations of collegiate lust over some the year’s most sprightly guitar pop. I suspect most criticisms of this pale, “privileged” band’s “appropriation” of Afropop forms (primarily a guitar sound, but with plenty of other rhythmic and vocal bits as well) come from people who don’t actually listen to much African music. Given that African guitar is one of mankind’s greatest achievements, this enthusiastic longtime Afropop dabbler only wishes more western guitar bands would follow suit.

Honorable Mentions: Conor Oberst — Conor Oberst (Merge); When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold — Atmosphere (Rhymesayers); Harps and Angels — Randy Newman (Nonesuch); Fearless — Taylor Swift (Big Machine); Primary Colours — Eddy Current Suppression Ring (Goner); Distortion — Magnetic Fields (Nonesuch); Alegranza — El Guincho (XL); Dear Science – TV on the Radio (Interscope); Oracular Spectacular — MGMT (Columbia); Rising Down — The Roots (Def Jam).

Top 10 Singles: “Paper Planes” — M.I.A. (XL); “Time to Pretend” — MGMT (Columbia); “Black President” — Nas (Def Jam); “More Like Her” — Miranda Lambert (Sony BMG/Nashville); “Gangsta Rap Made Me Do It” – Ice Cube (Lench Mob); “In Color” – Jamey Johnson (Mercury Nashville); “Lights Out” — Santogold (Downtown); “Takin’ Off This Pain” — Ashton Shepherd (Mercury Nashville); “Sequestered in Memphis” — The Hold Steady (Vagrant); “A Milli” — Lil Wayne (Cash Money/Universal/Motown).

Stephen Deusner:

1. Brighter Than Creation’s Dark — The Drive-By Truckers (New West); Stay Positive — The Hold Steady (Vagrant): Two of the most reliable rock bands further entrenched themselves in their respective regions, the Truckers telling more Southern stories with such natural verisimilitude that they have the force of literature and the Hold Steady hashing out dime-novel murder mysteries set in Midwestern college towns and set against mash notes to Iggy Pop and the Dillinger 4.

2. With Blasphemy So Heartfelt — Jessica Lea Mayfield (Polymer); Fearless — Taylor Swift (Big Machine): Mayfield worked with Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach to create a dark album about romantic resignation, while Swift worked with high-profile Nashville handlers to show that tween culture could transcend the Jonas Brothers. Laying it all out for the high school set, these two late-teen singer-songwriters reveled in youth while sounding older than their years.

3. Fleet Foxes — Fleet Foxes (Sub Pop); Awake My Soul: The Story of the Sacred Harp — Various Artists (Awake Productions): The joy of hearing many voices singing together: Their astonishing harmonies elevated Fleet Foxes’ debut above all the My Morning Jacket comparisons and dad-rock accusations, while the soundtrack to Matt Hinton’s shape-note-singing doc made rock stars of small-town congregations.

4. That Lonesome Song — Jamey Johnson (Mercury Nashville); 808s & Heartbreak — Kanye West (Roc-a-Fella): Break-ups fueled these two artists’ similarly themed albums. West’s anger at his cold-hearted ex is offset by his constant self-mutilation via Autotune, while Johnson simply directs his ache inward to create a doom-laden country album that’s as self-assured as it is self-loathing.

5. Hercules & Love Affair — Hercules & Love Affair (Mute); Dear Science — TV on the Radio(Interscope): Two different visions of dance music, one looking backward and the other forward: Herc’s disco portrayal of the dancefloor as perpetual gay safehaven gives the modern beats a mirrorball heart, while TV on the Radio’s examination of race and sexuality lends their rock-oriented rhythms a distinguishing braininess.

Honorable Mentions: Robyn— Robyn (Cherrytree/Interscope); Dig Lazarus Dig!! — Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds (Mute); Carried to Dust — Calexico (Touch & Go); Jeanius — Jean Grae (Blacksmith); Asking for Flowers — Kathleen Edwards (Rounder).

Andrew Earles:

1. Dear Science — TV on the Radio (4AD/Interscope); Smile — Boris (Southern Lord): Every time I see Dear Science topping someone’s year-end list, I’m elated that something this inventive has reached mainstream popularity. But I also wonder if we’ve simply become too lazy to embrace genuinely bold music. Smile adds the important elements of “challenge” and “risk.” It is not safe music, like Dear Science, but it is beautiful music if given the proper chance. Dear Science‘s feat is that it masterfully cherry-picks influences and styles that only deeply imbedded music nerds know about then repackages all of it into music that won’t alarm anyone’s parents. It’s the Wilco/Radiohead trick to an extreme. Part of the reason the Velvet Underground, Black Sabbath, Black Flag, and Sonic Youth were so important is that, in their respective days, anyone over the age of 45 would recoil from and denounce the music. Smile feels like one of those historical checkpoints.

2. Third — Portishead (Mercury/Island): Third is not a comeback because Portishead never made music this arresting; never even came close. This is the stark, moving music that Stereolab would be making today if they hadn’t spread themselves so thin with 400 albums in 15 years.

3. The Ace of Hearts Reissues — Mission of Burma (Matador): To date myself, Rhodes College’s WLYX collapsed into obscurity not long after introducing me to bands like Hüsker Dü and Mission of Burma, and I’ll never forget the pathetic Saturday night alone at home when my lost 15-year-old ears were filled with “Revolver,” a song that has since become the “Mustang Sally” of post-punk. The past 20 years of indie rock, emo, post-hardcore, etc., would be a completely different animal without this band.

4. Meanderthal — Torche (Hydra Head): Aside from a three-month blackout in Cabo, I never thought I’d have anything in common with Sammy Hagar fans, but Meanderthal actually makes me drive recklessly. It’s more a lack of careful attention than exceeding the posted speed limit or rutting people’s yards in a rock-and-roll frenzy, as this is an album that demands full attention while rewarding listeners with what is more or less a simple formula: heavy rock-influenced hardcore and metal driven by golden pop hooks.

5. Nouns — No Age (Sub Pop): No Age’s Nouns is like a Time-Life Music infomercial of forgotten bizarro-pop brilliance from 10 to 15 years ago (Thinking Fellers, Sebadoh, Swirlies, some Guided By Voices). Unlike other bands who turn calculatedly “crappy” production values into an important, deliberate sonic element, No Age writes killer songs.

Honorable Mentions: Pyramids — Pyramids (Hydra Head); Alight of Night — Crystal Stilts (Slumberland); Saint Dymphna
— Gang Gang Dance (Social Registry); The Chemistry of Common Life — Fucked Up (Matador).

Categories
Cover Feature News

World of Sound

It’s been estimated that some 30,000 records get released every year. There’s so much music out there that no one — no matter how much time, money, access, or enthusiasm — can hope to keep up. But that doesn’t mean our stable of music critics haven’t tried. Collectively, we heard hundreds of the year’s best records and have compiled personal lists of the crop’s cream. Popular music is our most democratic, most pluralistic art form. Every year-end list is a state-of-the-culture address. Here’s what our 2005 sounded like:

Chris Herrington

1. Separation Sunday — The Hold Steady (Frenchkiss): The next three records on this list have tons to say about the world we’re living in, but this intricate concept album from a Brooklyn guitar band mostly illuminates a world of its own creation. While his comrades are busy cribbing classic-rock guitar and piano riffs, songwriter supreme Craig Finn spins a chronologically complex, intellectually addictive, and emotionally engrossing tale about a Catholic high school girl sucked down a drug-culture rabbit hole and onto a 16-year, cross-country journey back to salvation, with Sopranos-worthy subplots (“Charlemagne in Sweatpants”) along the way. Mixing up their mythologies and pushing them out through p.a. systems, the Hold Steady concoct a twisty good-girl-gone-bad narrative that plays like a rock-and-religion version of Mulholland Dr., albeit with a much happier ending.

2. Arular — M.I.A. (XL): It was absolutely no surprise to see this Sri Lankan/British import fail to cross over into the American mainstream. No matter: Fusing Jamaican dancehall, Brazilian baille funk, American hip-hop, and British techno and grime into something as spellbindingly new as it is utterly familiar, this homemade polyglot pop is an instant dance party. Twentysomething Maya Arulpragasm may not have completely sorted out her conflicted feelings — terrorist or freedom fighter? — about her estranged Tamil Tiger father, but in the crossfire of global pop genres, political bullhorn lyrics, lovely double-dutch melodies, and utter confusion, she fashioned something more important: the year’s most undeniably crucial album.

3. Late Registration — Kanye West (Roc-a-Fella): While Kanye West’s masterful 2004 debut The College Dropout was built around high-concept anthems (“We Don’t Care,” “All Falls Down,” “Jesus Walks”), the lyrical profundity of this far sneakier follow-up is almost casual. It’s in the litany of mundane social ills on the sadly beautiful “Heard ‘Em Say”; the Randy Newman-esque satire of pimp-rap and R. Kelly-R&B sleaze on “Celebration”; the incredibly gentle counterpoint to Houston hip-hop’s myopic content on “Drive Slow.” Instead, Late Registration is more immediately bracing as music: Bringing in pop producer Jon Brion as a collaborator, this is West’s attempt to make a hip-hop album with the opulent soulfulness of a classic Stevie Wonder or Curtis Mayfield disc. Mission accomplished.

4. Black Dialogue — The Perceptionists (Def Jux): This two-MCs-and-one-DJ Boston group is not your typical indie-rap outfit. Lyrically, they’re neither obscure nor overtly confessional; musically, they’re a return to hip-hop’s head-bobbing basics. They’re more a cross between late-’80s political rap like Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions and the smoother early-’90s boho hip-hop of Jungle Brothers and A Tribe Called Quest. Black Dialogue has a little less musical juice than the former but a worldview that’s more grounded and more expansive. Funniest song of the year: “Career Finders,” which offers job counseling for gangsta rappers.

5. Man Like Me — Bobby Pinson (RCA): I’ve long been a defender of big, bad mainstream country music against its mostly knee-jerk detractors, and I think the genre’s in better artistic shape right now than ever in my listening lifetime. But even I can’t imagine this individualistic, gruff-voiced songwriter having much of a chance at lasting Nashville stardom. Which is too bad, because Bobby Pinson’s debut album is a wonder. More than anyone else on either side of country’s mainstream/alternative divide, Pinson respects the touchstones of country music — small-town life, simple Christian faith, high school sweethearts, family heritage — while investigating them fiercely. And no one else in music right now redeems red-state religiosity so convincingly.

6. Bang Bang Rock and Roll — Art Brut (Fierce Panda import): Like Brit-rock heroes Pulp, but more crude, more punk, maybe even funnier, this band of London never-will-bes are too cranky to be trendy (“Yes, this is my singing voice/It’s not irony”), and besides, they have more important things on their mind: “We’re gonna be the band that writes the song/That makes Israel and Palestine get along!” Maybe not, but they sure have plenty to say about old girlfriends, new girlfriends (“I’ve seen her naked! Twice!”), younger siblings, poor bedroom performance, and museum etiquette, among other topics.

7. Little Fugitive — Amy Rigby (Signature Sounds): It’s sad that Rigby’s bid at a Nashville songwriting career failed, because nobody writes sharper songs about love and sex on the wrong side of 40. Oh well, country radio’s loss can be your gain. On her best album since her career-making 1996 debut Diary of a Mod Housewife, Rigby is all over the place: a new husband’s ex-wife, her identification with Rasputin (“In 1981, I withstood similar attack/I got hit but I came back”), a dream about Joey Ramone, old flings, needy men, that exasperating thing called love. Her fizzy voice is as charmingly limited as ever and, as always, bolstered by bull’s-eye phrasing.

8. The Woods — Sleater-Kinney (Sub Pop): The best American guitar band of their generation, they make a bid for reinvention by cranking up the amps and delivering the most fuzzed-out, most distorted, heaviest, and most effed-up record of their career. It falls well short of past career peaks Call the Doctor, Dig Me Out, and One Beat, but along the way it suggests that as long as Corin Tucker’s voice, Carrie Brownstein’s guitar, and Janet Weiss’ drums are the parts that form the whole, it’s impossible to make a less than stellar record.

9. Kerosene — Miranda Lambert (Epic): Who could have predicted that a third-place finisher on cable’s Nashville Star — a small-town Texas girl with pin-up looks — would pen the class-rage anthem of the year? Or that, after ripping off Steve Earle’s “I Feel Alright” and ripping it apart on that title single, the rest of her smart, tough, almost entirely self-written debut album would be almost as strong? Pop music: where the unexpected always happens.

10. Extraordinary Machine — Fiona Apple (Epic): Here’s an album of confessional singer-songwritery break-up songs for people who are skeptical of such things, because Fiona Apple sure seems skeptical of them. Apple’s bright latticework lyrics are full of uncertainty and sardonic self-doubt and are put over by a singer with a sharp feel for the theatrical and jazzy. For someone so smart and so demanding, she’s also kind. But that doesn’t mean she isn’t merciless when she wants to explicate a relationship gone awry. (“I opened my eyes while you were kissing me once/More than once/And you looked as sincere as a dog.”)

Honorable Mention: Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike — Gogol Bordello (Side One Dummy); There’s More Where That Came From ­— Lee Ann Womack (MCA); Stairs & Elevators — Heartless Bastards (Fat Possum); Get Behind Me Satan — The White Stripes (V2); Run the Road — Various Artists (Vice); You Could Have It So Much Better — Franz Ferdinand (Domino); The Sunset Tree — Mountain Goats (4AD); Be — Common (Geffen); This Right Here Is Buck 65­ ­— Buck 65 (V2); Celebration Castle ­— The Ponys (In the Red).

Top 10 singles: “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People” — The Legendary K.O.; “Alcohol” — Brad Paisley; “Heard ‘Em Say” — Kanye West; “Kerosene” — Miranda Lambert; “1 Thing” — Amerie; “I May Hate Myself in the Morning” — Lee Ann Womack; “Random” — Lady Sovereign; “Hate It or Love It (G-Unit Remix)” — 50 Cent & The Game; “Since U Been Gone” — Kelly Clarkson; “Stay Fly” — Three 6 Mafia.

Stephen Deusner

1. Black Sheep Boy — Okkervil River (Jagjaguwar): Driven less by narrative than by themes of prodigality and responsibility, this concept album based loosely on the life of doomed singer Tim Hardin towered above higher-profile releases by similar-minded artists such as the Decemberists and the Mountain Goats. It expands Okkervil River’s sound well beyond the sleepily eccentric Americana of past releases, granting them a much greater range and sophistication to highlight Will Sheff’s intense vocals and intelligent songwriting. No album combined matters of the heart and of the head quite so naturally or overwhelmingly.

2. Separation Sunday — The Hold Steady (Frenchkiss): Channeling the Beats via Jesus’ Son-era Denis Johnson, the Hold Steady’s Craig Finn writes skewed story-songs set among the junkies and hoodrats of Minneapolis, who contemplate Catholicism and Kate Bush between highs. Meanwhile, the band cops inspiration from classic-rock sources like Springsteen and Fleetwood Mac, creating an enormous sound for these big urban tales. Perhaps the only album this year that’ll make you dig out your old Bob Seger LPs.

3. Twin Cinema — The New Pornographers (Matador): Chief Pornographer A.C. Newman’s consistency threatens to become boring: This makes three uniformly excellent albums he’s made with this binational superdupergroup, and, like its two predecessors, it seems like it’s untoppable. I keep expecting him to flounder, and he keeps refusing to write a bad song.

4. The Woods — Sleater-Kinney (Sub Pop): Six albums without a hit or even much of a following beyond a coterie of enamored fans and critics, Sleater-Kinney go for broke by changing record label and producer, bolstering their sharp punk style with mountains of feedback and indulging Carrie Brownstein’s guitar-goddess jones on the 11-minute sex epic “Long Time for Love.” The result is an album that’s among the year’s best and most adventurous. Too bad nobody beyond enamored fans noticed.

5. Alligator — The National (Rough Trade): The year’s ultimate grower: Underestimated upon release, this Ohio band’s third full-length made more sense after repeated listens, when Matt Berninger’s oddball lyrics and fevered delivery revealed the dark humor behind the depressive veneer.

Honorable Mention: Bang Bang Rock and Roll — Art Brut (Fierce Panda import), Illinois — Sufjan Stevens (Asthmatic Kitty), Late Registration — Kanye West (Roc-a-Fella ), Arular — M.I.A. (XL), Apologies to the Queen Mary –Wolf Parade (Sub Pop).

Andrew Earles

1. Dinosaur, You’re Living All Over Me, Bug — Dinosaur Jr. (Merge reissues): Please allow a pedestrian but very true statement: This is my favorite band of all time. You’re Living All Over Me (1987) was this eventual writer and music geek’s life-changing album. Years later, I can still listen to it straight through without a tinge of boredom. You might even say that it continues to excite me. In the original J. Mascis/Lou Barlow/Murph line-up, Dinosaur Jr. had a heavy hand in creating several underground genres of the future: indie rock, alternative country (listen to the debut), plus the re-embracement of ’70s metal. The debut (1985) and You’re Living All Over Me are very different albums, though they are as seminal as anything produced by Sonic Youth, Hüsker Dü, or the Replacements (or anyone) in the ’80s. The wheels had begun to fall off byBug (1988), relegating it to a lowly “great” status.

2. Secret Migration — Mercury Rev (V2): Everyone loves getting a lot when they’re not expecting much. I was expecting next to nothing from this once-mind-blowing band that had seemingly settled into less adventurous territory 15 years into the game. Whoops. They went and pulled off a downright beautiful and grandiose pop album.

3. 4 — Major Stars (Twisted Village): Rock musicians tend to peak early in their careers. Major Stars are the exception to this rule. Wayne Rogers and Kate Biggers had been making and peddling mostly obscure fringe rock and noise for almost 20 years when they formed this fully realized psychedelic, solo-happy, barnstorm of a band back in 1998. It got better — exponentionally — with each album. If Sonic Youth removed all arty pretensions (fat chance) and reemerged as a jam band (not in the dirty-word sense), it would approach what the Major Stars leave laying on the cutting-room floor.

4. Children of Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the Second Psychedelic Era 1976 — 1996 — Various Artists (Rhino): That this set claims to represent an era or movement is a misnomer. The package’s honorable accomplishment lies outside of the several forgettable inclusions that fall into the late-’70s/’80s garage-psych revival (Chesterfield Kings, the Fleshtones). There are many styles covered: ’80s college rock, ’80s American indie rock, British jangle pop, New Zealand pop, L.A.’s Paisley Underground, etc. Do yourself a favor and get floored by powerful early versions of the Church, the Screaming Trees, and the Bangles, or get seduced by the flawless pop of the Chills and the Posies. And that’s merely scratching the surface.

5. Closing In — Early Man (Matador Records): Early Man’s debut three-song teaser EP sounded like uninspired indie-metal fakers indecisive about which strain of real metal to plagiarize. But this full-length debut proved I was dead wrong in that unfair assumption. The metal record of 2005.

Honorable Mention: The Runners Four — Deerhoof (Kill Rock Stars); Celebration Castle — The Ponys (In the Red); Cardinal — Cardinal (Wishing Tree reissue); Broc’s Cabin/Mariposa — Rein Sanction (Sub Pop reissue); Never Let Us Speak Of It Again — Out Hud (Kranky).

Andria Lisle

1. Saw Mill Man — Cast King (Locust Music)/You Ain’t Talkin’ to Me — Charlie Poole (Columbia/Legacy box set): Overlooked 79-year-old country singer Cast King (who, legend has it, cut a few songs at Sun in the ’50s) surveys the world from his perch atop Alabama’s Old Sand Mountain and finds it sadly wanting on this astonishing curveball from Chicago’s eclectic Locust label. Meanwhile, Charlie Poole’s music marks the rough-and-tumble times of the late ’20s. Poole’s indelible, ramblin’ banjo licks and sonorous growl provided respite from the cold reality of the American Depression; today his music sounds no less pertinent.

2. Late Registration — Kanye West (Roc-a-Fella): In a year that yielded so many unexpected rap pleasures (Young Jeezy’s “Go Crazy,” Lil Wayne’s “Hustler Musik,” and the entire Hustle & Flow phenomenon), Kanye West nevertheless stole the show with his sophomore album. “Gold Digger” got me moving. “Diamonds From Sierra Leone” made me think. But West’s unscripted outburst on NBC’s Hurricane Katrina telethon sealed the deal: I love this man.

3. Weird Tales of the Ramones — The Ramones (Rhino box set): Three CDs and a DVD bundled up in a weird, wacky comic book, this box set is just dumb enough to make you yuk out loud yet sophisticated enough to share coffee-table space with the photography books and stack of New Yorkers. If you’re a fan, you probably already possess these recordings, but you’ll buy this one for the beautifully wrought accoutrements.

4. The King Khan & BBQ Show — The King Khan & BBQ Show (Goner Records): Brazilian and Canadian musicians (who recorded in Germany), the King Khan & BBQ Show are an utterly confounding group. Trying to decipher the details is like peering through Alice’s looking glass: Sometimes they appear in blackface; other times, they wear ghostly white makeup. Their songs — about inane activities like a “Fish Fight” and “Waddlin’ Around” — reverberate with old-school cool and modern primitivism alike. Musically, they might be the Monks’ illegitimate children, weaned on Bo Diddley records and horror-flick soundtracks. Whatever the lineage, their trashcan beat proved irresistible during their Gonerfest and Rockening appearances in Memphis this year.

5. Run-D.M.C., King of Rock, Raising Hell, Tougher Than Leather — Run-D.M.C. (Arista/Legacy reissues): Recorded in the mid-to-late ’80s, shortly before rap became a million-dollar industry, these rudimentary, albeit innovative, albums epitomize the DIY aesthetic of the New York scene. Utilitarian boasts like “Sucker MCs” quickly gave way to rap-rock collaborations like “Walk This Way,” the catalyst that pushed hip-hop into the pop mainstream. With Tougher Than Leather, Run-D.M.C. rendered itself obsolete, although two decades later, the group’s rise (and fall) still sounds explosive — particularly in comparison to the current crop of cookie-cutter thug superstars like G-Unit and Terror Squad.

Honorable Mention: One Kiss Can Lead to Another: Girl Groups Lost & Found –Various Artists (Rhino box set); Brick — The Talking Heads (Rhino box set); Transistor Radio — M Ward (Merge); The Singing Drifter — Blind Arvella Gray (Conjuroo); Lookaftering — Vashti Bunyan (DiCristina/Fat Cat).

Werner Trieschmann

1. Kerosene — Miranda Lambert (Epic): No, I never expected to have the third-place finisher of Nashville Star‘s first season anywhere near my Top 10 list, much less my favorite album of the year. But 2005 was a great year for country music and Lambert’s album is best of them all: It rocks (the title track), weeps (“Greyhound to Nowhere”), and bounces (“Me and Charlie Talking”). Lambert, who just turned 22, defied Nashville tradition by writing or co-writing every song on it. Nashville fought back by making sure every single track sounds like one million bucks.

2. Man Like Me — Bobby Pinson (RCA): The best-written songs this year can be found on this debut album by a Nashville songwriter turned singer. The images here — short-fused cherry bombs and shotgun-blasted “Welcome” signs for claustrophobic small towns — are as sharp as Springsteen in his prime. Pinson’s gritty voice puts him outside Music Row’s fast track, and that’s fine, because it suits his darker approach.

3. Illinois — Sufjan Stevens (Asthmatic Kitty): The indie-pop record of the year, no question, and its ambition to sum up a state is as outrageous as the resulting sound is deep and pleasurable. Sure, Stevens keeps inserting himself into the story, but it’s not narcissistic or off-putting. And the small army of voices and instruments that support him find interesting ways to startle your ears.

4. Late Registration — Kanye West (Roc-a-Fella): The best decision by a megalomaniacal pop star in 2005 goes to West for handing the production keys to his sophomore release to pop producer Jon Brion. The resulting orchestrated hip-hop might not get any cred from crunk devotees, but that’s their problem; this album sounds great.

5. Tough All Over — Gary Allan (MCA): Last year, Gary Allan’s wife committed suicide, and Tough All Over is a response record that, incredibly, never begs for sympathy or wallows in self-pity. Allan’s cool tenor is a wonder, and “Nickajack Cave,” a song about Johnny Cash’s attempted suicide, rips your head off.

Honorable Mention: A Bigger Bang — The Rolling Stones (Virgin); Celebration Castle — The Ponys (In the Red); Somebody’s Miracle — Liz Phair (Columbia); The Story of My Life — Deana Carter (Vanguard); Fever Dreams — Boondogs (Max Recordings).

Categories
Music Music Features

On the Record

A couple of weeks ago Flyer music critics named their favorite local records of 2004. Now we close the books on the past year by counting down 2004’s best national releases.

Chris Herrington

Albums:

1. The College Dropout Kanye West (Roc-a-Fella): With its scholastic framework, conflicted relationship to hip-hop proper, admittedly grating skits, and overwhelming hubris, Kanye West’s undeniable, ubiquitous, endlessly compelling debut is the newer, better version of an earlier sure shot, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. But where Hill got by on sonics organic production and sixth-sense vocal arrangements West is an idea and detail man: confrontational kiddie chorus defending drug-dealing as survival, “token blackey” rolling a blunt on break at the Gap, autobiographical anthem rapped through a wired jaw, literal salvation on the dance floor, family reunions and handed-down civil rights history, the first nigga with a Benz and a backpack.

2. Horse of a Different Color Big & Rich (Warner Bros.): Like The College Dropout, this debut tour de force challenges the assumptions of its largely conservative genre from squarely inside the belly of the beast. If Big & Rich’s mainstream-country-as-classic-rock-as-hip-hop conceit was a notion whose time had definitely come, it wouldn’t have been as sweet without such an avalanche of inspired music and deceptively elegant songwriting: classic-rock crunch and honky-tonk swagger, calypso & western and rap en espanol, soaring choruses and endless Everly Brothers-style harmonies, witty boasts, Walter Mittyish fantasies, and novel romantic metaphors. And though the pair played coy when it came to party politics, “Love Everybody” seems like a pretty welcome message given what we learned on Election Day.

3. All the Fame of Lofty Deeds Jon Langford (Bloodshot): “Hard work, get it while you can,” Brit-turned-Chicagoan Jon Langford cackles sarcastically midway through his outsider’s appraisal of a country gone crazy. Once an unintentional preemptive strike at George W. Bush’s debate strategy, it’s now the comic-horror refrain that haunts this president’s almost surely disastrous second term. As for Langford, he’d like to condemn his adopted home to damnation but he loves it and its music too much to give up: “The country isn’t stupid even though it’s silent,” he promises, against all countervailing evidence. “It still has eyes and ears, it just can’t find its mouth.”

4. Van Lear Rose Loretta Lynn (Interscope): This is just the kind of high-concept reclamation project (see all those Johnny Cash/Rick Rubin records or Solomon Burke’s borderline-unlistenable Don’t Give Up On Me) so consistently and predictably overrated that I found myself underrating it until a late-year round of relistening reminded me how grand it really is. Lynn’s all-new songs are shockingly, uniformly excellent (tell me “Family Tree” isn’t the equal of “Fist City” or “You’re Not Woman Enough To Take My Man”), but hipster-backlash victim Jack White deserves equal billing for his genius production. With Lynn a better singer than Meg White or Holly Golightly and a better songwriter than Jack himself, Van Lear Rose might be a better lovestruck mash-note follow-up to the White Stripes’ White Blood Cells than Elephant was.

5. A Grand Don’t Come for Free The Streets (Vice/Atlantic): With its linear narrative, this sophomore platter from Brit one-man-band wunderkind Mike Skinner is pop music as novella where his heroic debut, Original Pirate Material, was more a collection of self-contained short stories. Skinner’s plotline about missing cash and sketchy friends can be a little hard to follow, but the relationship songs at the core comprise a sure romantic arc untouched by anything else in hip-hop or techno history. A love song about coming to the realization that you’d rather lie on the couch at your girl’s house watching TV than go boozing with your mates speaks the kind of common truth rarely heard in a pop song. And when it sounds like the Chi-Lites, Valhalla awaits.

6. The Hold Steady Almost Killed Me The Hold Steady (Frenchkiss): Craig Finn and Tad Kubler’s previous band, Minneapolis’ Lifter Puller, earned a nationwide cult following what seemed about six months after they called it quits. Relocated to Brooklyn to pursue real work, they’ve been pulled back in: “She said, ‘It’s good to see you back in a bar band, baby,'” Finn sneers on “Barfruit Blues.” “I said, ‘It’s good to see you still in the bars.'” Trading in Lifter Puller’s heavy-machinery new wave and spastic punk-funk for the bar-band basics, including Skynyrd guitar, Clarence Clemons sax breaks, and the essence of Meatloaf and Billy Joel, Finn continues to write insanely quotable songs about nightlife glitz and grime that he may or may not have any actual experience with.

7. East Nashville Skyline Todd Snider (Oh Boy): This career-best effort from onetime Memphian Snider is the saddest, funniest, and most deeply humane “protest” record of the year even if it isn’t overtly political. Snider is too modest and too nice to lecture anybody about anything, but he seems to understand in his bones just how extreme American life has gotten over the past three years, and he is certain of at least one thing: The bad shit always rains down hardest on the poor.

8. Sonic Nurse Sonic Youth (DGC): Though I guess there might be some, um, Aerosmith fans who would disagree, Sonic Youth has evolved into the most durable American rock band ever, as good or better more than 20 years into their run as they’ve ever been. Their singular career arc from pure chaos to relatively straight-ahead rock into a more organized noise has landed them in a place where it seems like they could rock out in their own urban-pastoral free-jazz kinda way forever and ever, amen. I still think 1998’s A Thousand Leaves is their finest “post-sellout” record, but this is a close second.

9. More Adventurous Rilo Kiley (Brute/Beute): I’d heard of but never actually heard Rilo Kiley until More Adventurous, and even though I haven’t had the chance to backtrack through their discography, I find it unfathomable that earlier records could match this indie-rock breakthrough. Even in this age of clueless commercial radio and overwhelming listening options, pop music this glisteningly tuneful and strongly, soulfully sung can’t stay hidden long.

10. Hidden Vagenda Kimya Dawson (K): More than a dozen listens in, a few songs on this hopelessly obscure, partly homemade collection of anti-folk ditties still don’t connect. But the ones that do provide the finest guide for living pop music provided this year, from a part-time day-care worker skilled in imparting wise advice in instantly graspable language.

11. Shake the Sheets Ted Leo/Pharmacists (Lookout!): With classic-rock reach and a punk-rock heart, Leo & Co. pack one feverishly kinetic, achingly sincere, politically committed anthem after another, making Shake the Sheets the perfect alternative for rock fans too put off by Bono’s martyr complex to give themselves over to U2.

12. Get Away From Me Nellie McKay (Columbia): Flipping the bird to Norah Jones with the deliciously sarcastic title of her debut album and signaling its contents with a gloriously silly album cover (the Lil’ Red Riding Hood of Manhattan Avenue, replete with “parental advisory explicit content” label), this cabaret-piano-playing, drama-queen hip-hop fan proved a little too weird to be embraced by the NPR-listener fan base she courted. But from gin-soaked reveries to deceptively prickly cocktail-jazz to a gleefully guileless paean to the transformative powers of adopting a pound puppy, this double-disc opus is so teeming with ideas you know she’ll be back to give it another shot.

13. To Tha X-Treme Devin the Dude (Rap-a-Lot): This laconic Houston underdog with his smart, funny, and comparatively gentle tales of weed, women, and not much else delivered the second-best American rap record in a year dominated by one.

14. Showtime Dizzee Rascal (XL): Officially released in the U.S. in January but widely available as an import months prior, Brit teen rapper Dizzee Rascal’s debut, Boy in Da Corner, was the sound of a kid whose world ended at the end of the block but who knew the landscape intimately. This quick-footed follow-up is an after-the-goldrush record from a kid hungry for a prime place in global hip-hop culture. With standard-issue hip-hop bluster balanced by sharp, regretful reportage, the cold-eyed threat of violence informed by a menacing sense of humor, and everything made stronger and more purposeful by a foundation of generosity, Dizzee might just be the most compelling MC on the planet, even if it’ll take most American listeners a dozen listens to cut through his Donald Duck brogue enough to find out.

15. Laced With Romance The Ponys (In the Red): With their chugging-and-chiming duel-guitar attack, yelping vocals, danceable rhythm section, and open-hearted personality, this Chicago quartet was the indie-rock little-engine-that-could I rooted for hardest this year.

Honorable Mentions: Good News for People Who Love Bad News Modest Mouse (Epic); Last Exit Junior Boys (Domino); Mm Food? MF Doom (Rhymesayers); Madvillainy MF Doom & Madlib (Stones Throw); Franz Ferdinand Franz Ferdinand (Domino); Encore Eminem (Interscope); The Dirty South Drive-By Truckers (New West); Red Bedroom The Fever (Kemado); We Shall All Be Healed Mountain Goats (4AD); When the Sun Goes Down Kenny Chesney (BMG); The Present Lover Luomo (Kinetic); Here for the Party Gretchen Wilson (Sony Nashville); Van Hunt Van Hunt (Capitol); Harder and Harder The Paybacks (Get Hip); The Grind Date De La Soul (Sanctuary Urban); Universal United House of Prayer Buddy Miller (New West Records).

Singles:

1. “99 Problems” Jay-Z: How a man can go from concocting this the most blistering rap-rock hybrid in the long, proud history of the form to doing an entire album with Linkin Park is a mystery beyond my comprehension.

2. “Maps” Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Right, we were all putting this on mix-tapes a year and a half ago, but 2004 was when I first heard it on the radio or saw it on TV. My most telling musical moment of the year: The shock of hearing this brutal lovelorn plea on a local modern-rock station followed by the predictable sound of a deejay making strip-club jokes.

3. “All Falls Down” Kanye West: Invoking Lauryn Hill’s meltdown and making something of the impulse, West puts hip-hop, black America, consumer culture, me, you, and even himself on the couch.

4. “Happy People” R. Kelly: Kelly may be a creep in real life, but he’s a genius in a recording studio, and this is his most beautiful single ever. Soft soul so relentlessly gorgeous Smokey Robinson himself couldn’t have topped it.

5. “Remember When” Alan Jackson: This indelibly delicate and clear-eyed adult love song makes every competing nostalgic Nashville product sound like the ad copy it no doubt is.

6. “Jesus Walks” Kanye West: Liberation theology via Hot 107.

7. “Redneck Woman” Gretchen Wilson: I doubt she really knows all the words to every Tanya Tucker song, but I totally believe that Lil’ Miss Pocahontas Proud buys her lingerie at Wal-Mart and wills it into looking as good as anything in a Faith Hill video.

8. “Love Me for a Little While” Janet Jackson: Buried under the hoopla of the “wardrobe malfunction” and quickly forgotten, this shoulda-been-a-contender wasn’t just the best guitar-driven R&B since “Hey Ya!” but nearly the best since Prince’s “When You Were Mine.”

9. “This One’s for the Girls” Martina McBride: Ostensibly “country,” this nifty, righteous little guitar-pop anthem crossed over to soft-rock radio and should have gone a lot further.

10. “Yeah” Usher, featuring Lil Jon and Ludacris: The blandest superstar sex symbol imaginable, it’s fitting that Usher was by far the least interesting component of his own biggest hit. Usher’s verses are entirely forgettable and Ludacris’ cameo is put-out-or-get-out misogyny at its worst. But none of that matters with Lil Jon’s sproingy synth riff implanted in your hum matrix or when the producer du jour comes back with the beat that makes your booty go clap.

Honorable Mentions: “Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)” Big & Rich; “Float On” Modest Mouse; “Yeah (Crass Version)” LCD Soundsystem; “Wild West Show” Big & Rich; “Suds in the Bucket” Sara Evans; “Dream” Dizzee Rascal; “Rubberband Man” T.I.; “Dirt Off My Shoulder” Jay-Z; “Toxic” Britney Spears; “Take Me Out” Franz Ferdinand.

Stephen Deusner

1. Funeral Arcade Fire (Merge): At the top of the indie-rock heap sits this full-length debut from the Montreal-based Arcade Fire, a quasi-concept album about the fears of childhood and the disappointments of adulthood about, as its title suggests, death and grief. Win Butler sings about old neighborhoods and lost friendships while the band takes the songs down dark roads into new wave, punk, folk, heavy metal, and the best string parts in ages, all with a passion that is no less heartfelt for being so big and ambitious.

2. Get Away From Me Nellie McKay (Sony): A precocious psychotic with one of the most gleefully anarchic debuts in recent memory, McKay gets AOR soft rock in a headlock and gives its pretensions a well-deserved noogie. She flying-tackles Eminem rap (“Sari” beats anything on Encore), Doris Day weepies, art-metal bombast, and supper-club jazz, while eulogizing her dead kitty, seducing her own clone, taunting President Bush, and dissing men in general. The year’s most invigoratingly fearless album.

3. Van Lear Rose Loretta Lynn (Interscope): Van Lear Rose introduced a new generation to the feisty Butcher Holler native Loretta Lynn and added “producer” to Jack White’s c.v. Lynn sounds best vulnerable, heartbroken, steely, strong-willed on quieter numbers such as “Trouble on the Line,” the spoken “Little Red Shoes,” and “Miss Being Mrs.” Generous and good-hearted, closely observed but casual, they’re less songs than late-in-life ruminations, coming from somewhere beyond the stage, the studio, and the record label.

4. Scissor Sisters Scissor Sisters (Universal): These dozen tracks, which straddle as many gay cultures as possible, prove intelligent, inventive, and forthrightly emotional. Stronger stuff than your average dance album, this debut moved hearts, minds, and booties.

5. Shake the Sheets Ted Leo/Pharmacists (Lookout!): Listening to Shake the Sheets on November 1st made me hopeful that I could make some sort of difference in the way my country was run, that millions like me could save the world. Two days later, listening to the same songs was a sobering experience: The album’s message had changed profoundly, and on the eve of another four years, Leo demands we not let life go back to normal, that we try to maintain this level of involvement and activism, that we keep shaking the sheets, no matter who’s in power.

6. Anniemal Annie (679): If bubblegum pop is going to be the new garage rock, then Annie is the new Strokes. A Norwegian dance-music veteran, she sings in a whisper like Kylie Minogue but her hooks are more shameless and satisfying, which is saying a lot. Subtle shades of emotions, perhaps sparked by the untimely death of her musical and romantic partner Tore Korknes, color each song, so that “Me Plus One” possesses a potent self-deprecation and “Heartbeat” sounds perfectly, even exuberantly heartbreaking.

7. SMiLE! Brian Wilson (Nonesuch): The album we all knew he had in him but we never thought would actually get made, SMiLE! was Wilson’s “teenage anthem to God,” which he started back in 1967. Almost 40 years later, it’s catchier than garage rock, more sincere than emo, and more challenging than post-rock as it pushes American pop music to its compositional limits.

8. The College Dropout Kanye West (Roc-a-Fella): This would have been higher on my list it’s the most innovative rap album since Big Boi’s Speakerboxxx but for that last track. The man who created “Jesus Walks” indulges the sin of pride as he reminisces about his career in a long, self-worshipping monologue. On the other hand, West has 20 songs leading up to it that earn him the right to boast.

9. Our Endless, Numbered Days Iron & Wine (Sub Pop): Improperly lumped in with freak-/neo-/nu-folkies such as Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom, Florida’s Sam Beam transcends any trendy scene label. His second full-length is a gently sung, percussively strummed Americana folk album that’s easily better than those of his supposed scene competitors. While “Naked As We Came” devastates as Beam contemplates his and his lover’s mortality, “Cinder and Smoke” proves perhaps even more fearsome, if only for the out-of-nowhere coda in which Beam aiih-yigh-yighs his way to an oncoming apocalypse.

10. The Slow Wonder AC Newman (Matador): One of four satellite albums this year orbiting Planet New Pornography, Newman’s solo debut proves, perhaps inadvertently, who the brains behind that supergroup really is. Each of these 10 songs is a Frankenstein’s monster of verses and anti-verses, choruses and pre-choruses, and bridges and counterbridges. Despite the stitched-together aspect, they move fluidly and organically, each hook outdoing the previous as Newman sings about creative frustration, bruised romance, and political hypocrisy.

Honorable Mentions: Too Much Guitar! The Reigning Sound (In the Red); Thunder! Lightning! Strike! The Go! Team (Memphis Industries); The Dirty South Drive-By Truckers (New West); All the Fame of Lofty Deeds Jon Langford (Bloodshot); Good News for People Who Love Bad News Modest Mouse (Epic); Franz Ferdinand Franz Ferdinand (Domino); East Nashville Skyline Todd Snider (Oh Boy); A Grand Don’t Come for Free The Streets (Vice/Atlantic); Showtime Dizzee Rascal (XL); Mignonette Avett Brothers (Ronseur).

Andria Lisle

1. The College Dropout Kanye West (Roc-a-Fella): In 2004, Kanye West’s big mouth finally paid off when the braggadocios producer dropped his own album on an unsuspecting audience. West who literally came back from the dead after a near-fatal car crash breaks all the rules by mocking his peers (“All Falls Down”), pulling off badass rhymes (“Through the Wire,” where he spits “There’s been an accident like Geico/Thought I was burned up like Pepsi did Michael”), and, most importantly, singing about faith (“Jesus Walks”). Gaudy and glorious, The College Dropout is a real stunner.

2. Van Lear Rose Loretta Lynn (Interscope): The blacktop highway that stretches from Nashville to Memphis is exactly 200 miles long. It’s listed on maps as Interstate 40, but everyone from truckers to tourists knows this ribbon winding between the pine trees as “The Music Highway.” Loretta Lynn and Jack White burned up that road working on Van Lear Rose, recording on location at Lynn’s Double L Ranch and Memphis’ Easley-McCain studio. On the self-explanatory “Story of My Life,” Lynn hammers her point home: She’s gambled on her life, and she’s loved, laughed, and lived and lost a few things along the way. But, with Van Lear Rose, she’s scored a winning hand once again. “I have to say that I’ve been blessed/Not bad for this ol’ Kentucky girl I guess,” she sings with a laugh on the song’s last verse. It’s the perfect ending to a perfect album typically understated, characteristically jubilant, and 100 percent Loretta Lynn.

3. Laced With Romance The Ponys (In the Red): Led by guitarist Jered Gummere, the Ponys channel Television’s gritty street style, flavoring the sound with equal parts melancholy and wonder. Initially, jaded Brooklynites hardly cocked a collective eyebrow toward this solidly indie Chicago rock outfit, but songs such as “Let’s Kill Ourselves” and “Sad Eyes” quickly won over the naysayers.

4. Exhibit A The Features (Universal): Don’t send your skinny ties and white belts to Am-Vets yet: Just when new wave seems unbearably passé, the Features blast off with this impeccable major-label debut, which blows Franz Ferdinand and the Strokes out of the stratosphere. Remember when Pavement dropped “Summer Babe” on an unsuspecting world? With handclaps, Buzzcocks-worthy guitar riffs, a wailing organ, and Guided by Voices frontman Bob Pollard’s flair for songwriting, Exhibit A marks a similar milestone for a new generation. Who knew that tiny Sparta, Tennessee, could birth such a wonderful band?

5. Half Smiles of the Decomposed Guided by Voices (Matador): By the time you read this, Robert Pollard will have pulled the plug on Guided by Voices: The band’s final concert occurred on New Year’s Eve at Chicago’s Metro theater. Clocking in at just 45 minutes of music (much shorter than earlier, epic releases such as Bee Thousand or Alien Lanes), GBV’s swan song is grandiose nevertheless. Pollard’s soaring vocals make “Girls of Wild Strawberries” sound like the Who’s “Behind Blue Eyes” updated for the 21st century, while “Sing for Your Meat” is pure pop insanity.

Honorable Mentions: Before the Poison Marianne Faithfull (Anti-); Sunshine Barato Mosquitos (Bar/None); Juve the Great Juvenile (Universal); Uptown Top Ranking EP Scout Niblett (Secretly Canadian); The Drifter Waylon Payne (Universal).

Andrew Earles

1. The Doldrums Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti (Paw Tracks): Discovered hiding out in the Los Angeles hills by the band Animal Collective, Ariel Pink makes music that will quickly polarize the room. You may think you hear shades of Guided by Voices or Bobby Conn in New Doldrums, but Ariel Pink has that distinctive feel of someone who is completely oblivious to contemporary music. Maybe he was a latchkey kid who grew up next door to a thrift shop and only devoured 25-cent Little River Band and Pablo Cruise LPs until deciding to take a crack at his own brand of afternoon rock. The ultramurky recording will be the first quality to turn some listeners away, but those willing to pay very close attention will be rewarded to no end. If this guy could be utilized in some sort of underground Brill Building situation, we’d have unforgettable hits everywhere. Again, this is not for everyone.

2. On/Off Mission of Burma (Matador): When a once-seminal band reunites to wide acclaim, a new studio album is not far behind. I usually let someone else tell me how inevitably bad it is, but I’m such a huge fan of Mission of Burma that I gave this one a chance. Color me impressed. This has more energy and passion than a large portion of the younger bands attempting post-punk these days this from a 53-year-old man (band leader Roger Miller) with acute tinnitus.

3. Pass the Distance Simon Finn (Durtro/Jnana): Mired with legal issues upon its initial release, this obscure folk anomaly from 1970 has been hard to come by until re-released this year. By all accounts, and there are few, Finn was a folkie embracing a (very) customized version of Christianity not an unpopular route for hippies of the day. Sounding addled and unhinged, Finn’s minimal but maniacal open door to his singular (and admittedly, confusing) spirituality will have some listeners white-knuckling the armrest. He makes Syd Barrett sound like Dan Fogelberg. The album’s centerpiece, “Jerusalem,” is like the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin” as performed by a stripped-bare Skip Spence, and there’s so much outpouring of emotion toward the song’s climax that Finn starts coughing uncontrollably.

4. Witchcraft Witchcraft (Rise Above): The degree to which this band makes it sound as if the last 25 years never happened is almost overkill. Just when I thought that the Doom/Black Sabbath clone movement wouldn’t yield another worthy listen For fans of Dead Meadow, Pentagram, Electric Wizard, etc.

5. Probot Probot (Southern Lord): The guest vocalists on this record are exactly that guest vocalists. That erstwhile Foo Fighter Dave Grohl wrote every song, played every instrument (Motörhead’s Lemmy did play bass on his track), and managed to make each song sound so true to the source band providing each song’s lead singer is a gross show of talent.

Honorable Mentions: Panopticon (Ipecac); Leviathan (Relapse); Your Blues Destroyer (Merge); Blue Cathedral Comets On Fire (Sub Pop). •

Categories
Music Music Features

Breaking It Down

A couple of years ago, Spin cheekily proclaimed “Your Hard Drive” as Album of the Year. Perhaps it’s because I’m a couple of years behind the technological curve, but 2003 was when that concept hit home. There was tons of great music this year, but I was still my own DJ savior: My favorite record of the year might be the singles mix I made in the spring, where Panjabi MC opens and closes the set while the Rapture and Electric Six go nuts, Ted Leo and the Drive-By Truckers provide definitive riffs, and Lil’ Kim, Fallacy, and Killer Mike get busy on the mic. Another contender is the Timbaland’s greatest-hits mix I made in the fall. And if my own 15-track, single-disc version of Speakerboxxx/The Love Below were an actual release, it would place fourth on the list below instead of the 12th place occupied by the overlong official version.

But if you still like to purchase your music in officially released order and packaging (a habit I cling to despite my mix-making prowess and one that isn’t going to go away anytime soon), here are 40 albums from the past year well worth seeking out — along with 20 singles you should download right now:

Top 40 Albums

1. Kish Kash –Basement Jaxx (Astralwerks): It seems odd in a year so desperate — and desperately contentious — that there was so little music that acknowledged the colossal mess the world is in, as if all of pop music colluded to deal with it by dancing our troubles away. And there was no greater house party than Kish Kash. Brit DJs Basement Jaxx decided to make one thing we could all have when it all crumbles down, and they invited a jumbled assortment of friends — young rappers and old punks, second-tier teen-poppers and garage-rock soul belters, art-funk chanteuses and (literally) the girl next door — to help them do it. The result: the most ecstatic and warm-hearted party record in recent memory.

2. Decoration Day –The Drive-By Truckers (New West): On his band’s justifiably celebrated opus Southern Rock Opera, Trucker Patterson Hood composed musical Grit Lit on a macro level — “The Three Great Alabama Icons,” “the duality of the Southern thing,” etc. On this sharper, prettier, deeper follow-up, his regional ardor is conveyed in offhand details, such as opening a song with the line “Something ’bout that wrinkle in your forehead tells me there’s a fit ’bout to get thrown.” Musical life partner Mike Cooley cribs his boogie riffs on “Marry Me” directly from the dread Eagles but then uses them to put across a lyric that band would never touch: “Rock-and-roll means well but it can’t help telling young boys lies.” And newcomer Jason Isbell proves to be the finest writer of working-class folk ballads on the planet. You don’t expect an album about destroyed lives, failed marriages, and legacies of violence and regret to be invigorating. But this one is. And you don’t expect modern-day trad-rock bands to make records that rival the best of Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, and Lynyrd Skynyrd. This one did.

3. Fever To Tell –Yeah Yeah Yeahs (Interscope): On the debut full-length from the best of the current batch of New York rock bands, Nick Zinner’s attention-deficit-disorder guitar spars with Karen O’s Tourette’s syndrome vocals in a race to finish each song — before someone cuts off the electricity or the world ends, whichever comes first — while drummer Brian Chase tries (successfully) to keep it all from flying apart. The result is a sad, sexy, desperate, open-hearted insta-classic and also the rare CD-age album that picks up momentum as it goes — becoming more confident, more expansive, and more vulnerable as spontaneous noise-tunes evolve into full-fledged songs.

4. The Best of the Classic Years –King Sunny Ade (Shanachie): This master of the hypnotic, guitar-driven African dance music known as “juju” wasn’t introduced to American audiences until the ’80s, when he failed to become the Bob Marley-style crossover success that record-company execs imagined. But this galvanic collection, compiling choice cuts from African LPs Ade released between 1967 and 1974, suggests that American audiences had already missed out on his greatest work by then. Not too late to play catch-up.

5. Boy in Da Corner –Dizzee Rascal (XL Recordings import): This debut album from London’s great hip-hop hope (who was 17 when most of it was recorded) is like a British Illmatic in its mix of high and low, hopping from tear-stained introspection to grimy gangsta rhymes. In Britain, he beat out Radiohead and Coldplay for the Mercury Prize (sort of a Grammy Album of the Year equivalent). In America? We’ll find out soon. Boy in Da Corner is set for a U.S. release next month.

6. Deliverance — Bubba Sparxxx (Interscope): Jay-Z’s the best pure rapper. Outkast has the cultural clout. And Dizzee Rascal feels like the most momentous artist. But the most compelling persona in hip-hop this year may well be that of this hunting-rifle-wielding good ol’ boy from La Grange, Georgia, who not only proves to be no fluke or novelty on album number two but an almost inspirational New South symbol: instinctively populist, devoid of misogyny (by commercial rap standards, anyway), his down-home wisdom carrying no reactionary aftertaste. And then there’s producer Timbaland, who hooks a beat up to mountain music and converts it into hip-hop form. Inspirational verse: “They watch me in the country like the race on Sunday/And I’ll wear the crown for them ’til you take it from me.” Finally: Nascar rap!

7. Seven’s Travels –Atmosphere (Epitaph): Sean “Slug” Dailey built his underground reputation on being the most empathetic MC in hip-hop history, but this expansive, musically rattled tour diary suggests that the only thing keeping him from being hip-hop’s Dashboard Confessional is his awareness of and ambivalence over his ability to manipulate his audience, especially the pretty young things who approach him after a show. Romantic entanglements in hip-hop have never been as funny, real, or fraught with peril as on “Reflections,” “Shoes,” and “Lifter Puller.” But would you expect anything less from a good-hearted smooth talker who uses a pickup line like “Hello ma’am, would you be interested in some sexual positions and emotional investments?” and dedicates a song to “all the depressed women in the house”?

8. Fire –Electric Six (XL/Beggar’s Banquet): With their over-the-top novelty-rock driven by fluid basslines and danceable beats that indie-rock twerps don’t have the chops or abandon for, these Detroit con artists made gloriously silly dance music for people who can actually, you know, dance. (Not that I’m one of those people or anything.) If Tenacious D really were the World’s Greatest Rock-and-Roll Band, this is what they’d probably sound like.

9. Echoes — The Rapture (Universal): Obscure indie-rock band meets hot new dance-rock production team (the DFA) resulting in classic scream-along single (“House of Jealous Lovers”) and — finally — an album that somehow turns emotionally tortured post-punk into bump-able jeep music. The best discovery of rhythm by New York art-rockers since the Talking Heads’ Remain in Light. And the best use of cowbell since “Honky Tonk Women.”

10. Electric Version — The New Pornographers (Matador): With their relay-race vocals signifying gender utopianism and giving off sparks of agape, these seven Canadians practice old-fashioned rock-and-roll as communal pop party: clipping off riffs, diving into choruses, high-stepping through bridges, and leaning hard into hairpin hooks as if they’re inventing it all on the fly.

11. The Black Album –Jay-Z (Roc-a-Fella): Honey-voiced hip-hop Sinatra Jay-Z has always balanced art and commerce, but this ostensible farewell marks the first time he’s let that tension become his theme — justifying his thug while revealing his admiration for “conscious” MCs like Talib Kweli and Common. And then there’s the Rick Rubin-produced “99 Problems,” which deserves this clichÇd instruction more than any other music from 2003: PLAY LOUD.

12. Speakerboxxx/The Love Below –Outkast (LaFace): With Andre 3000’s musical knuckleballs fluttering around the strike zone and Big Boi’s vibrant P-Funk party eventually devolving into standard-issue posse cuts, this 39-track, two-hours-plus opus is essentially Sandinista! to Stankonia‘s London Calling: There’s a great album in here somewhere, but you’ll have to search for it. If only all overambitious messes could be so funny and so beatwise.

13. Justified –Justin Timberlake (Jive ’02): Super-producers Timbaland and the Neptunes play the Quincy Jones role on this blue-eyed Off the Wall, but it’s the cagey vocal performance of Millington’s most famous showbiz kid that makes it such a startling coming-out party.

14. Til the Wheels Fall Off — Amy Rigby (Signature Sounds): How do you explain a world in which Ryan Adams is a star and Amy Rigby is largely unknown? Are we too juvenile? Too misogynistic? How many people are out there for whom Rigby would be their personal poet laureate if only they heard her? Rigby once asked “21 Questions” (from the album Diary of a Mod Housewife — go buy it!) but has had the decency not to quite ask those. Here she has other problems to worry about, as illustrated by her Song of the Year candidate: “Are We Ever Gonna Have Sex Again?”

15. Ego War –Audio Bullys (Astralwerks): Cutting their techno beats and disco rhythms with hip-hop turntable scratches and scene-setting sound effects, this Brit MC/DJ duo offer up a slackers’ tour of the casually lawless side of club culture.

Honorable Mention: Summer Sun –Yo La Tengo (Matador); Elephant — The White Stripes (V2); Later That Day — Lyrics Born (Quannum Projects); Liz Phair — Liz Phair (Capitol); Failer — Kathleen Edwards (Zoâ/Rounder); The Music in My Head 2 — Various Artists (Stern’s Africa ’02); D-D-D-Don’t Stop the Beat –Junior Senior (Atlantic); Spirit in Stone –Lifesavas (Quannum Projects); Ragga Ragga Ragga! 2003 –Various Artists (Greensleeves); Red Dirt Road –Brooks & Dunn (Arista Nashville); Monster –Killer Mike (Columbia); Indestructible — Rancid (Hellcat); This Is Not a Test –Missy Elliott (Elektra); Mississippi: The Album –David Banner (Universal); So Stylistic –Fannypack (Tommy Boy); Love & Distortion — Stratford 4 (Jetset); Soft Spot — Clem Snide (spinART); Hearts of Oak — Ted Leo & Pharmacists (Lookout!); The Rough Guide to Highlife –Various Artists (Rough Guide); Up the Bracket — Libertines (Rough Guide); Room on Fire — The Strokes (RCA); You Forgot It in People — Broken Social Scene (Paper Bag); Atmosphere — The Quails (Inconvenient); Band Red — Kaito U.K. (spinART); Welcome Interstate Managers — Fountains of Wayne (S-Curve/Virgin).

Top 20 Singles

1. “Danger! High Voltage” –Electric Six: Sounding like the very best parts of lots of radically different songs crammed together (disco basslines, AOR guitars, indie-punk vocals, Germfree Adolescents sax), this Frankenstein’s monster of a record could well be the greatest mash-up ever made.

2. “Hey Ya!” — Outkast: Hip-hop’s most charismatic oddball concocts the sexiest rock song of the year and coins more catchphrases than an entire season of vintage Saturday Night Live.

3. “Beware of the Boys (Mundian to Bach Ke)” — Panjabi MC featuring Jay-Z: The World’s Greatest MC introduces thrilling bhangra riddim to a grateful nation.

4. “Move Your Feet” –Junior Senior: Irony collapses as sexually opportunistic Danish duo declares nuclear war on the dance floor.

5. “So Gone” — Monica featuring Missy Elliott: Can’t figure what’s better: Missy exclaiming “New Monica!” at the outset as if she’s opening a long-anticipated Christmas present or the star of the show threatening to drive past my house in her unmarked car (?!?). Though I guess that dense, beautiful vocal arrangement and that turntable crackle are really the best.

6. “Crazy in Love” — Beyonce featuring Jay-Z: That Chi-lites horn sample! That syncopated vocal hook! Jay-Z as personal hype man! This is how the truly blessed make their solo move.

7. “Get Low” –Lil Jon & The East Side Boyz featuring the Ying Yang Twins: I denied this chaotic Dirty South anthem at first — until I watched people dance to it and thus illustrate its phenomenal rhythmic complexity.

8. “Telephone” –The Stratford 4: Seven minutes of drone-pop bliss in which a mother and son exchange notes on life and mom drops the following indispensable advice: “I’ll say it again though I’ve said it before/There’s more to this life than the Stratford 4.”

9. “Rock Your Body” — Justin Timberlake: After the sonic and emotional maelstrom that was “Cry Me a River,” Timberlake lightens up, riding the year’s most insistent groove into disco-pop heaven.

10. “Where Have All the Rude Boys Gone?” –Ted Leo & Pharmacists: A passionate tribute to British ska and punk done with Thin Lizzy guitars? Whatever works.

Honorable Mention: “Gay Bar” –Electric Six; “The Jump Off” –Lil’ Kim; “All the Things She Said” –t.a.T.u.; “A.D.I.D.A.S.” — Killer Mike; “All You Need Is Hate” –Delgados; “Pass That Dutch” — Missy Elliott; “Right Thurr” –Chingy; “Like Glue” –Sean Paul; “Big ‘N’ Bashy” –Fallacy; “Red Dirt Road” –Brooks & Dunn.

E-mail: herrington@memphisflyer.com

Categories
Music Music Features

Sympathy For the Record Industry

The year 2000 was one of pop music’s greatest art-commerce nexuses since the Beatles broke up — Outkast’s and Eminem’s multiplatinum albums and complementary megasingles conjuring up Prince and Springsteen’s tango in 1984, with plenty of other Statement records following: D’Angelo’s breakout, U2’s comeback, Radiohead’s number-one-debut art-rock opus. Hell, even PJ Harvey’s flawless Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea banked decent box office.

In these terms — and I say never trust a critic who dismisses the pop marketplace — 2001 was a comparative dud. There was Bob Dylan and everything else. While I have little tolerance for the continuing sway baby-boomer nostalgia holds over pop discourse, Dylan’s “Love And Theft” was a classic from spin one –one of the four or five best albums ever from one of the four or five most important artists in post-war pop. After that, 2001 looked like a transitional year, full of disappointments but also full of promises for the future.

The mainstream devoured itself this year: Rock radio’s no-girls-allowed playlists were dominated by yet more nü-metal. System of a Down’s admirably personal (if at times hyperactively annoying) polemics and Alien Ant Farm’s rad novelty tunes offered divergently fruitful alternatives to a monster that too often pulled us down more depressing roads: Incubus’ prog seriousness, P.O.D.’s godly rap-metal, Staind’s woe-is-meisms, and the desperate cornucopia of look-alike, sound-alike hacks major labels flooded the market with in a bid to make a few bucks on a cresting trend. Teen pop lost its cherry, the occasional innocent miracle of a few years ago (“Mmm-Bop,” “I Want It That Way,” “Genie in a Bottle”) now unimaginable in a genre governed by celebrity worship and porn-style sex appeal. Mainstream hip hop, where smart pop fans have been getting their fix for years, was drunk on a bling-bling aesthetic, which seemed tired even before 9/11, and produced only one undeniable album (Jay-Z’s The Blueprint). Some might cling to neo-soul as a beacon and though Alicia Keys earned her hype, I sadly heard less than many of my colleagues did in records from contenders such as Bilal, Maxwell, dearly departed Aaliyah, Macy Gray, and even my beloved Mary J. Blige.

But in this void interesting things happened: Techno (dance/club/electronica/whatever) returned with a vengeance, with Basement Jaxx’s Rooty, Daft Punk’s Discovery, and sample-happy Aussies the Avalanches’ Since I Left You constituting the genre’s most commanding triple-threat ever. Hip hop’s nascent indie scene continued to make noise, the likes of Cannibal Ox, Aesop Rock, and Atmosphere offering a compelling alternative to livin’ large clowns like Ja Rule. And so-called alt-rock roared back with Weezer’s successful return and New York City boys the Strokes making friends and enemies in equal measure.

It was in these last two areas that 2001’s most momentous “new” artists emerged. Oakland rap duo the Coup and Detroit garage-rock twosome the White Stripes (whose knockout performance before an overflow crowd at Earnestine and Hazel’s on September 10th was the local show of the year, easy) have made records before — good ones, even — but in 2001 they exploded with what we can only hope aren’t career peaks. Outspoken Marxists, I don’t expect the Coup to be gracing MTV anytime soon. But the White Stripes have recently signed to mini-major V2, and I wouldn’t put it past them to storm the castle in 2002.

With major labels skimping on art in pursuit of profit (and dropping interesting acts — see Clem Snide and Wilco), it was no surprise to see my “A” list contain more indie labels and, not coincidentally, more punkish guitar bands than it has in years. Like most other serious music fans, I yearn for the imaginary community that pop provides — and I especially treasure it when that community is writ large. Though I’m hoping the specter of 9/11 will provoke some action at the top in 2002, the democratic miracle of pop music always provides compelling voices from unlikely places, and sometimes that has to do.

In 2001, my culture heroes came from the margins: a multiracial MC from Minnesota (Atmosphere’s Slug) taking hip hop to places — emotional, intellectual, and geographic — that it’s never been before; a north Alabama road warrior (the Drive-By Truckers’ Patterson Hood) struggling with his Southern heritage; a couple of goofball rejects from suburban New York (the Moldy Peaches’ Adam Green and Kimya Dawson) having a ball with no concern for the bottom line.

I’d never suggest that any pop fan shut off his or her radio or stop watching the charts, but in 2001 opting out of the pop game was a fruitful gambit. There are plenty of stories like the three above waiting to be discovered, and no one who craves insight and delight from music should restrict their diet to what is placed on their plate. With that in mind, here are 40 albums and 20 singles from 2001 that thrilled this pop fan. Consider it advice from one friend to another.

Top 40 Albums:

1. “Love And Theft” — Bob Dylan (Columbia): I’ve listened to “Love And Theft” more in the last four months than I’ve listened to the supposedly sacred Time Out of Mind in the last four years. Casually profound and profoundly casual, this startling return to form reminds us that the key to Dylan’s greatness has always lain less in the weighty pronouncements that got him dubbed the “Voice of a Generation” than in the warm, open tone of his music, the freeness of his vocals, and the consistent humor and wit of his lyrics. It is (Oh no! Here it comes!) his best record since Blood On the Tracks.

2. White Blood Cells — The White Stripes (Sympathy For the Record Industry): In its own way, this Memphis-recorded breakout record from Detroit garage duo Jack and Meg White is as cognizant of American pop-song traditions as “Love And Theft” — and more organically female-friendly than any significant hard-rock record since Nevermind. Offering a negation equally relevant to both the womanizing hipsters within his own subculture and the macho metal bullies crowding the marketplace, Jack White pulls no punches in negotiating his battle of the sexes but also never offers less than plain, simple decency, all while ex-wife Meg watches his back by keeping the beat. The result is a blues-rock masterpiece suffused with an uncommon blast of freedom, best summed up by the rollicking contentment of “Hotel Yorba”‘s Lyric of the Year: “It might sound silly for me to think childish thoughts like these/But I’m so tired of acting tough and I’m gonna do what I please.”

3. Party Music — The Coup (75 Ark): The best political rap crew since Public Enemy, sure, but where Chuck D. needed Flavor Flav to cut his blustery bullshit with comic relief, a key to Oakland activist Boots Riley’s triumph is that he effortlessly connects the personal to the political and never comes off as just another programmatic sourpuss. And so Party Music‘s leftist agitprop is never less than human, the militant drive of “Everythang” balanced by the righteous delicacy of “Wear Clean Draws,” the Molotov-cocktail sloganeering of “Ghetto Manifesto” by the profound compassion of “Nowalaters,” the wicked wit of “5 Million Ways To Kill a C.E.O.” by the way Riley posits the anti-religion “Heven Tonite” as one of the year’s truest love songs. And DJ Pam the Funktress always manages to scratch you where it itches.

4. Satellite Rides — Old 97’s (Elektra): Except for two songs — one of which rips anyway — this is where frontman Rhett Miller and company finally trade in alt-country for Art. With tarted-up vocals, rampaging pop guitars, and some of the year’s slyest, sexiest lyrics (“Do you wanna mess around?/I mean deep down in your bones?/In a hotel swimming pool?/On public telephones?” Miller asks one lust object on the love-among-the-ruins stunner “Buick City Complex”), Satellite Rides is a ready-made, old-time-rock-and-roll touchstone on a par with Marshall Crenshaw, the Replacements’ Tim, and Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True — and it’s even on a major label! The most underrated rock record in ages.

5. The Moldy Peaches — The Moldy Peaches (Sanctuary): The most meaningful DIY move in years, The Moldy Peaches is homemade, finger-paint pop — “teen” music totally devoid of self-censorship or commercial calculation. Littered with laugh lines (“I wanted to be a hippie but I forgot how to love”), grin lines (“Here is the church and here is the steeple/We sure are cute for two ugly people”), and choice advice (“If you are a kid and no one will play with you/Stick it out, stay tough, and you’ll wind up super-cool!”), it’s a peek into the lives of two 20-something misfits from suburban New York who alternate from the year’s most moving love songs to dirty little sing-along ditties with titles like “Downloading Porn With Davo” and “Who’s Got the Crack?” They dance this mess around, fling shit at the walls, tell tall tales, fall in love with how each other feel, and fall asleep watching late-night cartoons. With this sui generis debut, the Moldy Peaches have crafted a Have Moicy! for post-Kids kids, and if 90 percent of the listening public would probably dismiss it on contact, that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t learn something if they stuck it out. Choice lyric: “Me and my friends are so smart/We invented this new kind of art!” (followed quickly by “Who mistook this crap for genius?”).

6. Lucy Ford — Atmosphere (Rhymesayers): Charismatic alt-rap everyman Slug may offer hip hop as “therapy on top of turntable riffs” on this coming-out party, but he also may have crafted the most empathetic album in the genre’s 20-year history. And unlike too many of his collegiate contemporaries, he never skimps on hip hop’s basic beats-and-rhymes pleasure principle.

7. Take Off Your Pants and Jacket — Blink-182 (MCA): What The Moldy Peaches does to teen pop, this criminally underrecognized platinum seller does to nü-metal: It exposes the genre’s exploitative bullshit. With one gloriously catchy riff-song after another, these corporate punks acknowledge the pain of adolescence without exploiting their audience’s hormonal imbalance with overstated doom and gloom, respect the girls they readily admit to fearing, make first kisses and first dates out to be the big deals they are, and glimpse the light at the end of the tunnel. The result is a teen-boy near-classic just a couple of notches below masterpieces of the form like Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy, Licensed to Ill, and the Replacements’ Let it Be.

8. Is This It — The Strokes (RCA): Maybe if I lived in New York and traveled in certain social circles I’d care about the backlash that has predictably followed this band’s hype-driven arrival, but from my critical vantage point here in the boonies I’m left contemplating the unavoidable fact that this much kvetched-about debut totally rocks. And the reason I love the Strokes isn’t because they draw on such cooler-than-thou influences (Television, Richard Hell, Lou Reed — you know the drill) but because they’re gauche enough to convert those influences into such blissfully bashed-out, hornier-than-thou party music.

9. Rooty — Basement Jaxx (Astralwerks): A half-decade after the supposed electronica revolution failed to kill off guitar bands and singer-songwriters for good, we finally get the rapturous dance record for diehards and dilettantes alike.

10. Internal Wrangler — Clinic (Domino): This English word-of-mouth sensation beats all other current soundscape bands (Radiohead, Sigur Ros, Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, etc.) not because they write better songs (the best lyric here is cribbed from the Velvet Underground) but because there’s so much pop pleasure bubbling beneath their art-noise surface. They beat most current American radio-rock bands because there’s so much art-noise surface shaking their pop pleasure to life rather than deadening it with studio sheen. And when they segue from the down-tempo, Velvets-meet-Yo La Tengo, organ-drone warmth of “Distortions” into the breakneck, Sonic Youth-meets-surf-guitar assault of “Hippy Death Suite,” they make their bid for rock-and-roll Valhalla.

Runners-up (in order of preference): Southern Rock Opera — Drive-By Truckers (Soul Dump Records); The Blueprint — Jay-Z (Roc-A-Fella); Stephen Malkmus — Stephen Malkmus (Matador); The Ghost of Fashion — Clem Snide (SpinArt); The Rainbow Connection — Willie Nelson (Island); Proxima Estacion: Esperanza — Manu Chao (Virgin); Lohio — The Ass Ponys (Checkered Past); The Facts of Life — Black Box Recorder (Jetset); The Houston Kid — Rodney Crowell (Sugar Hill); Feminist Sweepstakes/From the Desk of Mr. Lady — Le Tigre (Mr. Lady); Sweet Tea — Buddy Guy (Silvertone); Cachaito — Orlando Cachaito Lopez (World Circuit/Nonesuch); That’s Not What I Heard — The Gossip (Kill Rock Stars); The World Won’t End — The Pernice Brothers (Ashmont); Essence — Lucinda Williams (Lost Highway); Memphis Blood: The Sun Sessions — James “Blood” Ulmer (Label M); Lars Fredericksen and the Bastards — Lars Fredericksen and the Bastards (Hellcat); Accepted Eclectic — Aceyalone (Project Blowed); Mass Romantic — New Pornographers (Mint, 2000); Get Ready — New Order (Reprise); AOI: Bionix — De La Soul (Tommy Boy); Songs in A Minor — Alicia Keys (J Records); Blowback — Tricky (Hollywood); Ancient Melodies of the Future — Built to Spill (Warner Brothers); Free City — St. Lunatics (Universal); Change — The Dismemberment Plan (Desoto); Weezer — Weezer (Geffen); Discovery –Daft Punk (Virgin); Tomb Raider — Various Artists (Elektra); Made in Medina — Rachid Taha (Mondo Melodia).

Top 20 Singles:

1. “NYC’s Like a Graveyard” — The Moldy Peaches (Sanctuary): Before September 11th this clearly sounded like the single of the year — fuzztone guitars, snotty/witty lyrics, and gleefully amateurish vocals as invective from outcasts in the ‘burbs straight to the heart of Times Square, ripping consumer drones and Manhattan hipsters to shreds. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 it was unlistenable — its references to “all the tombstones skyscraping” and “all the yuppies getting buried” and “New York City’s like a cemetery” unintentional prophecies and its metaphors obscene. A few months removed, with the cultural stasis it skewers basically unchanged, its intentions sound no less righteous and the utter innocence that produced it now seems heartbreaking beyond description.

2. “Izzo” — Jay-Z (Roc-A-Fella): Charismatic nonchalance and inspired stream-of-consciousness over the most exciting soul sample in recorded history — there hasn’t been a record this cool since Pavement broke up.

3. “Independent Women, Pt. I” — Destiny’s Child (Columbia): Their last blast of near-perfection before their narcissism ruined them, and you can hear the magic dissolve at the very top, when one of Destiny’s Children intones, “Lucy Liu” — shilling for the movie tie-in with jaw-dropping crassness. But for a while last year there was no more exciting sound than that of Beyoncé Knowles coolly dropping “question” at the beginning of a verse.

4. “Jenny and The Ess-Dog” — Stephen Malkmus (Matador): Compassionate, perceptive, and deeply droll, Malkmus never wrote a song this straightforward, or this literary, when he was fronting Pavement. A prime nominee for Best Short Stories of 2001.

5. “Ride Wit Me” — Nelly (Universal): Hip hop’s greatest after-the-gold-rush anthem — and it appears on a debut album!

6. “Romeo” — Basement Jaxx (Astralwerks): With guest vocalist Kele Le Roc providing more soul than your average diva-for-hire, London’s favorite DJ saviors come up with the catchiest romantic kiss-off in recent memory.

7. “Last Nite” — The Strokes (RCA): A beer-soaked, morning-after eulogy for the best or worst night of your life, with guitars buzzing around like a memory you don’t want to let slip away.

8. “Take It 2 Da House” — Trick Daddy (Slip-n-Slide/Atlantic): The year’s great sports-arena shout-a-long. This is the anthem. Get your damn hands up!

9. “Let Me Blow Ya Mind” — Eve with Gwen Stefani (Ruff Ryders/Interscope): The hottest girl-on-girl action this side of Mulholland Drive.

10. “Digital Love” — Daft Punk (Virgin): True love found in the middle of a skating rink.

Honorable Mention (in order of preference): “Fatlip” — Sum 41 (Island); “Get Ur Freak On” — Missy Elliott (Elektra); “Jaded” — Aerosmith (Columbia); “Don’t Tell Me” — Madonna (Maverick); “Chickenhead” — Project Pat (Loud); “Always on Time” — Ja Rule with Ashanti (Uptown/Universal); “We Need a Resolution” — Aaliyah with Timbaland (Blackground); “Fallin'” — Alicia Keys (J Records); “Smooth Criminal” — Alien Ant Farm (Dreamworks); “I’m a Thug” — Trick Daddy (Slip-N-Slide/Atlantic).

You can e-mail Chris Herrington at herrington@memphisflyer.com.