(t5!) My Year In Lists 2008: Albums!
I know.
2008 is no more since, like, three months ago. So, let’s just chock this up to lack of time and Internets and move on. More written content is on the outlook for this year, whether be it about sports, or music, or me. Let’s dream big.
I just wanna give a big up to my friends in Canada. Part of the reason why I’m having such a hard time writing about music is because I don’t have anyone to bounce thoughts off of other than myself. I know it don’t seem like it most times, but I do miss the snot out off all you guys. Hope you've been having a wonderful 2009.
Albums I liked, 2008!
#30: Crystal Castles – Crystal Castles
“The whole album is a lsd-induced nightmare-trip in cyberpunk clubs of the dystopian future where everyone is perverted, every family is dysfunctional and drugs are like food.”
-- Kunk
crimewave, alice practice, air war
#29: Ne-Yo - Year Of The Gentleman
“the perfect catchy yes yes yes r&b form, the perfect thing for slow-dances and lip-sync and romantic montages”
-- Said The Gramophone
mad, single,, fade into the background
#28: The Knux – Remind Me In 3 Days
“The brothers are nimble lyricists, delivering raps in catch-me-if-you-can fashion, exercising little patience but encouraging repeated listens.”
-- Vibe
roxxanne, daddy's little girl, lights, camera, action
#27: The Magnetic Fields – Distortion
“Stephin, Stephin, Stephin, how I wish I could take away your pain! Make you happy! Put a smile on that pretty face of yours! But wait! Surely if you were contented, happy even, you’d cease making these sorrowful, yet wonderful pieces of sheer beauty!?”
-- Letters Have No Arms!
california girls, please stop dancing, courtesans
#26: The Walkmen – You & Me
“i think the best description i can come up with is an abstract notion that it occupies the space in between sunset and evening”
--Sand Is Overrated
in the new year, canadian girl, new country
#25: Lykke Li – Youth Novel
“Poised to to take over as the new queen of Swedish indiepop with her debut”
dance, dance, dance, little bit, time flies
-- The Yellow Stereo
#24: Los Campesinos! – Hold On Now, Youngster…
“it’s just a unapologetically large dose of hyper-literate and twee Indie Pop delivered intravenously without any pretensions,”
--(Mis)Speak Music
my year in lists, we are all accelerated readers, 2007, the year punk broke (my heart)
#23: Santogold – Santogold
“This album is a place to crash, boots to wear, pepper spray to fight back with and charcoal to dirty your hands.”
--Popmatters
creator, starstruck, say aha
#22: The Presets – Apocalypso
“The deep, often overwrought vocals can be both soulful and theatrical while the music leaps from grimy depths to soaring heights of melodrama.”
--Condemned to Rock ‘N Roll
my people, this boy's in love, talk like that
#21: Dr. Dog – Fate
“The album is a vintage rock 'n roll collage to yesteryears past filled with feisty note clusters of hooks ‘n choruses.”
-- Doctor Money’s 115th Dream
the breeze, the old days, from
#20: Deerhunter – Microcastle
“Deerhunter were a band unfettering polychromatic shades rather than monochrome dirges.”
-- Nialler9
agoraphobia, microcastle, nothing ever happened
#19: Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes
“I long to sit around a fire and harmonize with these guys.”
-- pop librarian
white winter hymnal, quiet houses, meadowlark
#18: The Cool Kids – The Bake Sale
“Finding a comfortable niche in hip-hop as the Clipse you can listen to with your mom in the car, the Cool Kids favor real-life descriptions of the real life most of us actually know”
--merry swankster
what up man, mikey rocks, gold and a pager
#17: Girl Talk – Feed The Animals
“just about everyone who hears it will have different favorite moments that stick out to them”
--Almost Cool
play your part (pt. 1), still here, in step
#16: Hot Chip – Made In The Dark
“Hot Chip is the personification of the cell phone, text message, video game, internet generation in sound.”
--Bag Of Songs
out at the pictures, shake a fist, wrestlers
#15: Spiritualized – Songs In A & E
“Rock & roll redemption from a fallen spaceman.”
--The Post-Rockist
you lie you cheat,
sitting on fire, death take your fiddle
#14: Young Jeezy – The Recession
“That gulliness is still there but with it there's a sense of, dare I say, "consciousness" amid the big beats, big rhymes and big hooks.”
-- Rose Quartz
what they want, don't do it, my president
#13: Kelley Polar – I Need You To Hold On While The Sky Is Falling
“music that delivers a jolt of originality and fresh life into a genre (dance) that’s most often about predictability, re-hashed ideas, and conformity.”
--Ear Farm
entropy reigns (in the celestial city), satellites, chrysanthemum
#12: M83 – Saturdays=Youth
“Thanks to him, there’s a new generation of moony-eyed teenagers out there letting this sort of sound wash over their love-addled bodies.”
--Hello Vegetables
kim & jessie, couleurs, we own the sky
#11: Erykah Badu – New Amerykah, Part One (4th World War)
“It’s got a weird, edgy, funky thing that veers from a lost Roy Ayers soundtrack to wildly experimental and, dare I say, almost avant-garde.”
-- floodwatchmusic.com
soldier, honey, the healer
#10: Cut Copy – In Ghost Colours
“Not a revolution or a movement or anything particularly new, but a triumph nonetheless.”
-- Pretty Much Amazing!
feel the love, lights and music, hearts on fire
#09: T.I. – Paper Trail
“Atlanta's favorite convicted phenom bids subcultural purism goodbye, augmenting "King"'s steamroller anthems with all the hooks we can eat, putting the words on paper before delivery.”
--Robert Christgau
live your life, no matter what, swing ya rag
#08: Gang Gang Dance – Saint Dymphna
“when I listen to Saint Dymphna I feel like a madly lustful lunatic, losing possession of his senses in an epiphany initiated by the simultaneous massage of mind and body in the just the right spot at just the right time.”
--No Ripcord
house jam, princes, first communion
#07: Lil’ Wayne – Tha Carter III
“Sometimes I can’t decide whether Lil Wayne is years ahead of his time, from another planet, or just one of a kind.”
--Pretty Much Amazing
3 peat, got money, lollipop
#06: Portishead - Third
The magnificence of Third starts and stops with vocalist Beth Gibbons. It’s such a blatant renouncement of their past discography that this wouldn’t even be recognized as a Portishead album without her. And in truth, it’s favorable that there is a dissimilarity in styles between this and its antecedents. If they persevered with trip-hop (a genre they helped pioneer more than a decade ago), it would’ve sounded outdated, like a band that is desperately clinging onto something exhausted long ago. Fortunately, Gibbons has a voice that sounds extraordinary in any musical setting: it sounded extraordinary amongst the moonlit lulls of the past, it still sounds extraordinary in the anxious industrial eulogies of Third. It quivers faintly and harrows piercingly, shifting fluently to accord with the new found pathos of Portishead’s re-debut.
the rip, plastic, deep water
#05: Hercules And Love Affair – Hercules And Love Affair
Hercules And Love Affair’s eponymous debut is an exhibition of forward-thinking revivalism. It’s like getting an opportunity to repeat your childhood with what you know now as an adult. It relives the past with the possibilities of the present. New York City DJ Andy Butler’s vision is to take your mother’s disco, to save its flamboyance, irresistibility and propulsion, and to reinvigorate it with a prolific amount of sound. With DFA production’s helping hand, the vibrant 4/4 beat that commonly exuded from the cracks and crevices of a 70’s New York loft is dressed excessively: vibrant trumpets, animated bongos, tenacious open hi-hats, buttery strings, elastic bass, levitating synths, engaging vocals by Antony Hegarty (of Antony and The Johnsons), Nomi, and Kim Ann Foxmann, instruments that the disco zeitgeist of the past didn’t have the luxury or foresight of using.
hercules theme, you belong, raise me up
#04: Kanye West – 808s & Heartbreak
A well-documented, catastrophic year has made Kanye West spiteful and cold, and I like it. The passing of his mother and the heartbreak caused by a girlfriend gave him a compulsion to cathartically write sorrowful songs. Of course, the most glaring trait of the fourth album is the absence of rap verses from Kanye. He turned to the auto-tune to assist him in singing out the tragedy he is suffering within. The tactic isn’t a move to adopt a trend, nor is it an arrogant attempt to veer left from the norm. It’s done to make his vocals as shivery as its aural backdrop, to match that bitter clang of the 808s. How permanent the new sound is yet to be determined, but the experiment that is 808s & Heartbreak let Kanye confess successfully, which not is easy for someone so sure of himself.
#02: TV On The Radio – Dear Science
If TV On The Radio’s previous album, Return to Cookie Mountain, is an ominous hurricane, an aural cataclysmic maelstrom enveloping the listener’s surrounding; Dear Science, the next one from the Brooklyn band, is the eye, rays of sunlight piercing through the sinister haze. Noise nut, David Sitek has definitely taken a more acquiescent approach to his production this time around. It’s a sound easy to the ears, a sound you can treasure at first listen, a pop record at its most technically intricate. At the front of it all, Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone parade their unmistakable voices while singing about passion, lust, remorse, anger and depression. Keep in mind, just like any eye of the storm, it’s more likely that there is TV On The Radio’s brand of organized chaos right around the corner. If you prefer Dear Science to its predecessors, relish this pop tranquility for as long as you can.
family tree, stork & owl, love dog
#01: Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever Ago
If you don’t know by know the story line behind the creation of this album—how Justin Vernon sequestered himself in a secluded cottage in Wisconsin for four wintery months—the ambience of For Emma, Forever Ago ensures that you feel the tragedy behind it. Bon Iver aim to imitate the tranquility of a remote environment: acoustic strums rustle forlornly, soft harmonics suspend in the air nakedly, the emptiness that exists between notes fill the creaking voids of your surrounding. Even his closely microphoned falsetto sounds cavernous yet stark, exposing the loneliness and grief he experiences as he quietly curses Emma whoever she is. Bon Iver’s debut swells your heart, inspirits your thoughts, and warms your spirits. It’s a close-your-eyes record, a refreshing recess from chaos and clamor.
flume, blindsided, the wolves (act I & II)
2008 is no more since, like, three months ago. So, let’s just chock this up to lack of time and Internets and move on. More written content is on the outlook for this year, whether be it about sports, or music, or me. Let’s dream big.
I just wanna give a big up to my friends in Canada. Part of the reason why I’m having such a hard time writing about music is because I don’t have anyone to bounce thoughts off of other than myself. I know it don’t seem like it most times, but I do miss the snot out off all you guys. Hope you've been having a wonderful 2009.
Albums I liked, 2008!
#30: Crystal Castles – Crystal Castles
“The whole album is a lsd-induced nightmare-trip in cyberpunk clubs of the dystopian future where everyone is perverted, every family is dysfunctional and drugs are like food.”
-- Kunk
crimewave, alice practice, air war
#29: Ne-Yo - Year Of The Gentleman
“the perfect catchy yes yes yes r&b form, the perfect thing for slow-dances and lip-sync and romantic montages”
-- Said The Gramophone
mad, single,, fade into the background
#28: The Knux – Remind Me In 3 Days
“The brothers are nimble lyricists, delivering raps in catch-me-if-you-can fashion, exercising little patience but encouraging repeated listens.”
-- Vibe
roxxanne, daddy's little girl, lights, camera, action
#27: The Magnetic Fields – Distortion
“Stephin, Stephin, Stephin, how I wish I could take away your pain! Make you happy! Put a smile on that pretty face of yours! But wait! Surely if you were contented, happy even, you’d cease making these sorrowful, yet wonderful pieces of sheer beauty!?”
-- Letters Have No Arms!
california girls, please stop dancing, courtesans
#26: The Walkmen – You & Me
“i think the best description i can come up with is an abstract notion that it occupies the space in between sunset and evening”
--Sand Is Overrated
in the new year, canadian girl, new country
#25: Lykke Li – Youth Novel
“Poised to to take over as the new queen of Swedish indiepop with her debut”
dance, dance, dance, little bit, time flies
-- The Yellow Stereo
#24: Los Campesinos! – Hold On Now, Youngster…
“it’s just a unapologetically large dose of hyper-literate and twee Indie Pop delivered intravenously without any pretensions,”
--(Mis)Speak Music
my year in lists, we are all accelerated readers, 2007, the year punk broke (my heart)
#23: Santogold – Santogold
“This album is a place to crash, boots to wear, pepper spray to fight back with and charcoal to dirty your hands.”
--Popmatters
creator, starstruck, say aha
#22: The Presets – Apocalypso
“The deep, often overwrought vocals can be both soulful and theatrical while the music leaps from grimy depths to soaring heights of melodrama.”
--Condemned to Rock ‘N Roll
my people, this boy's in love, talk like that
#21: Dr. Dog – Fate
“The album is a vintage rock 'n roll collage to yesteryears past filled with feisty note clusters of hooks ‘n choruses.”
-- Doctor Money’s 115th Dream
the breeze, the old days, from
#20: Deerhunter – Microcastle
“Deerhunter were a band unfettering polychromatic shades rather than monochrome dirges.”
-- Nialler9
agoraphobia, microcastle, nothing ever happened
#19: Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes
“I long to sit around a fire and harmonize with these guys.”
-- pop librarian
white winter hymnal, quiet houses, meadowlark
#18: The Cool Kids – The Bake Sale
“Finding a comfortable niche in hip-hop as the Clipse you can listen to with your mom in the car, the Cool Kids favor real-life descriptions of the real life most of us actually know”
--merry swankster
what up man, mikey rocks, gold and a pager
#17: Girl Talk – Feed The Animals
“just about everyone who hears it will have different favorite moments that stick out to them”
--Almost Cool
play your part (pt. 1), still here, in step
#16: Hot Chip – Made In The Dark
“Hot Chip is the personification of the cell phone, text message, video game, internet generation in sound.”
--Bag Of Songs
out at the pictures, shake a fist, wrestlers
#15: Spiritualized – Songs In A & E
“Rock & roll redemption from a fallen spaceman.”
--The Post-Rockist
you lie you cheat,
sitting on fire, death take your fiddle
#14: Young Jeezy – The Recession
“That gulliness is still there but with it there's a sense of, dare I say, "consciousness" amid the big beats, big rhymes and big hooks.”
-- Rose Quartz
what they want, don't do it, my president
#13: Kelley Polar – I Need You To Hold On While The Sky Is Falling
“music that delivers a jolt of originality and fresh life into a genre (dance) that’s most often about predictability, re-hashed ideas, and conformity.”
--Ear Farm
entropy reigns (in the celestial city), satellites, chrysanthemum
#12: M83 – Saturdays=Youth
“Thanks to him, there’s a new generation of moony-eyed teenagers out there letting this sort of sound wash over their love-addled bodies.”
--Hello Vegetables
kim & jessie, couleurs, we own the sky
#11: Erykah Badu – New Amerykah, Part One (4th World War)
“It’s got a weird, edgy, funky thing that veers from a lost Roy Ayers soundtrack to wildly experimental and, dare I say, almost avant-garde.”
-- floodwatchmusic.com
soldier, honey, the healer
#10: Cut Copy – In Ghost Colours
“Not a revolution or a movement or anything particularly new, but a triumph nonetheless.”
-- Pretty Much Amazing!
feel the love, lights and music, hearts on fire
#09: T.I. – Paper Trail
“Atlanta's favorite convicted phenom bids subcultural purism goodbye, augmenting "King"'s steamroller anthems with all the hooks we can eat, putting the words on paper before delivery.”
--Robert Christgau
live your life, no matter what, swing ya rag
#08: Gang Gang Dance – Saint Dymphna
“when I listen to Saint Dymphna I feel like a madly lustful lunatic, losing possession of his senses in an epiphany initiated by the simultaneous massage of mind and body in the just the right spot at just the right time.”
--No Ripcord
house jam, princes, first communion
#07: Lil’ Wayne – Tha Carter III
“Sometimes I can’t decide whether Lil Wayne is years ahead of his time, from another planet, or just one of a kind.”
--Pretty Much Amazing
3 peat, got money, lollipop
#06: Portishead - ThirdThe magnificence of Third starts and stops with vocalist Beth Gibbons. It’s such a blatant renouncement of their past discography that this wouldn’t even be recognized as a Portishead album without her. And in truth, it’s favorable that there is a dissimilarity in styles between this and its antecedents. If they persevered with trip-hop (a genre they helped pioneer more than a decade ago), it would’ve sounded outdated, like a band that is desperately clinging onto something exhausted long ago. Fortunately, Gibbons has a voice that sounds extraordinary in any musical setting: it sounded extraordinary amongst the moonlit lulls of the past, it still sounds extraordinary in the anxious industrial eulogies of Third. It quivers faintly and harrows piercingly, shifting fluently to accord with the new found pathos of Portishead’s re-debut.
the rip, plastic, deep water
#05: Hercules And Love Affair – Hercules And Love AffairHercules And Love Affair’s eponymous debut is an exhibition of forward-thinking revivalism. It’s like getting an opportunity to repeat your childhood with what you know now as an adult. It relives the past with the possibilities of the present. New York City DJ Andy Butler’s vision is to take your mother’s disco, to save its flamboyance, irresistibility and propulsion, and to reinvigorate it with a prolific amount of sound. With DFA production’s helping hand, the vibrant 4/4 beat that commonly exuded from the cracks and crevices of a 70’s New York loft is dressed excessively: vibrant trumpets, animated bongos, tenacious open hi-hats, buttery strings, elastic bass, levitating synths, engaging vocals by Antony Hegarty (of Antony and The Johnsons), Nomi, and Kim Ann Foxmann, instruments that the disco zeitgeist of the past didn’t have the luxury or foresight of using.
hercules theme, you belong, raise me up
#04: Kanye West – 808s & HeartbreakA well-documented, catastrophic year has made Kanye West spiteful and cold, and I like it. The passing of his mother and the heartbreak caused by a girlfriend gave him a compulsion to cathartically write sorrowful songs. Of course, the most glaring trait of the fourth album is the absence of rap verses from Kanye. He turned to the auto-tune to assist him in singing out the tragedy he is suffering within. The tactic isn’t a move to adopt a trend, nor is it an arrogant attempt to veer left from the norm. It’s done to make his vocals as shivery as its aural backdrop, to match that bitter clang of the 808s. How permanent the new sound is yet to be determined, but the experiment that is 808s & Heartbreak let Kanye confess successfully, which not is easy for someone so sure of himself.
say you will, heartless, paranoid
#03: Vampire Weekend – Vampire Weekend
“Who gives a fuck about an oxford comma,” Ezra Koenig preaches to the choir. In fact, who really gives a fuck about mansard roofs, or Kwassa Kwassas, or where the M79 goes, or how ghetto Hyannisport really is, or the similarities in taste between English breakfast and Darjeeling, or how badly a kefir stains a Keffiyeh, or other brainy, Ivy league references you need Wikipedia handy for. What I do give a fuck about are floating vocals, and streamlined keyboards, and rubbery basslines, and abstemious drums that do more than keep time, and instrumentation straight off a Wes Anderson movie soundtrack, and Afro-pop, Graceland-inspired melodies that can be digested so effortlessly. Vampire Weekend’s self-titled debut is so easy, you don’t need a degree from Columbia University to listen to it.
oxford comma, cape cod kwassa kwassa, m79
#03: Vampire Weekend – Vampire Weekend“Who gives a fuck about an oxford comma,” Ezra Koenig preaches to the choir. In fact, who really gives a fuck about mansard roofs, or Kwassa Kwassas, or where the M79 goes, or how ghetto Hyannisport really is, or the similarities in taste between English breakfast and Darjeeling, or how badly a kefir stains a Keffiyeh, or other brainy, Ivy league references you need Wikipedia handy for. What I do give a fuck about are floating vocals, and streamlined keyboards, and rubbery basslines, and abstemious drums that do more than keep time, and instrumentation straight off a Wes Anderson movie soundtrack, and Afro-pop, Graceland-inspired melodies that can be digested so effortlessly. Vampire Weekend’s self-titled debut is so easy, you don’t need a degree from Columbia University to listen to it.
oxford comma, cape cod kwassa kwassa, m79
#02: TV On The Radio – Dear ScienceIf TV On The Radio’s previous album, Return to Cookie Mountain, is an ominous hurricane, an aural cataclysmic maelstrom enveloping the listener’s surrounding; Dear Science, the next one from the Brooklyn band, is the eye, rays of sunlight piercing through the sinister haze. Noise nut, David Sitek has definitely taken a more acquiescent approach to his production this time around. It’s a sound easy to the ears, a sound you can treasure at first listen, a pop record at its most technically intricate. At the front of it all, Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone parade their unmistakable voices while singing about passion, lust, remorse, anger and depression. Keep in mind, just like any eye of the storm, it’s more likely that there is TV On The Radio’s brand of organized chaos right around the corner. If you prefer Dear Science to its predecessors, relish this pop tranquility for as long as you can.
family tree, stork & owl, love dog
#01: Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever AgoIf you don’t know by know the story line behind the creation of this album—how Justin Vernon sequestered himself in a secluded cottage in Wisconsin for four wintery months—the ambience of For Emma, Forever Ago ensures that you feel the tragedy behind it. Bon Iver aim to imitate the tranquility of a remote environment: acoustic strums rustle forlornly, soft harmonics suspend in the air nakedly, the emptiness that exists between notes fill the creaking voids of your surrounding. Even his closely microphoned falsetto sounds cavernous yet stark, exposing the loneliness and grief he experiences as he quietly curses Emma whoever she is. Bon Iver’s debut swells your heart, inspirits your thoughts, and warms your spirits. It’s a close-your-eyes record, a refreshing recess from chaos and clamor.
flume, blindsided, the wolves (act I & II)
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