Ten Favorite Albums
2005
1. Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti—Worn Copy: Who is this? I have only the dimmest idea. Apparently, this is just one person who lives in LA who makes all this racket. Extreme warning about this CD: it is a hard sell. This is not music that you will slip into your stereo, that will come hammering at you, grabbing your attention, making you hum and sing along. This is basically extremely (extremely) weird pop music. The first couple of tracks are basically a mess, totally incoherent.
But upon repeated listenings, the album
starts to coalesce into some sort of understandable idea, the idea that
you can combine easy listening with the avant garde. How to describe
it? Think of clever pop music from the 1970s (e.g., "How Long Has This
Been Going On?" by Ace,
Stealer's Wheel, the Rasberries) recorded on a fucked up 2-track
cassette player with the shittiest sound quality, sprinkled with
Captain Beefheart-type weirdness and lyrics that span the gamut from
deeply disturbing to simply observant. (There is one amazing song,
vaguely reminiscent of Madness' "Our House," entitled "Credit" which is about the
act of charging your credit card.) I would say that the CD (70 minutes
long!) has a lot of great pop songs, interspersed with weird spaceout
avant-garde jams. You can tell that I am having a hard time describing
this. Basically, whatever you do, don't buy it. You won't like it. I
barely like it myself. And I have no idea why I included it in my top
10 of last year. Yet, I keep listening to it over and over. It repulses
and attracts at the same time. That time being the nostalgic myth of
the '70s.2. Bloc Party—Silent Alarm: Like many of their contemporaries (and indeed, much of what passes for the popular end of non-mainstream music these days), Bloc Party are firmly derivative. And that's really another bigger story about why this is so. Why are the "hip" guitar-based bands of today, to the very last one, all copies of replicas of imitations of tributes?
So, really, in order
to properly evaluate Bloc Party,
you have to already begin from the assumption that what they
(and Franz Ferdinand, Art Brut, Radio 4, the Strokes, Clap
Your Hands Say Yeah, !!!, Arctic Monkeys and all these millions of
shitty
bands) are doing has been done, done, done before. Working within that
context, Bloc Party are pretty good. 
Appealing
to an '80s vision of high energy guitar-based pop, they write good
melodies and kick some ass, combining the two in a euphoric rush in
songs such as "Like Eating
Glass,"
the opening and best track on
this
album. The rest of the album really doesn't catch up after that, but it
doesn't get boring either; in song after song, they
steer
their muse from soft ballads to four-on-the-floor power pop wrapped in
catchy melodies and
the aspiration of saying something "deep" (which they don't).
But I really like them. They recreate a fond memory of some sort
of imagined nostalgia
without being too regressive and they do it quite well. I saw them in
concert on September 9, 2005 here in New York and they were
loud, the drums of "Like Eating Glass" reverberating
loudly through the auditorium. The whole show was a manic
pop thrill, guitars moving through speed and melody for an
hour-and-a-half.
If you like somewhat intelligent melodic power pop, pick
this up. As a sidenote, they had this album remixed by a number of
artists such as M83, Four Tet, and people like that.
According to some,
the remix album (Silent Alarm
Revisited) is as good if not better than the original
album.3. Boards of Canada—The Campfire Headphase: Conventional wisdom has it that Music Has The Right to Children (1998) was the pinnacle of their body of work. Influenced by Aphex Twin, Brian Eno ('80s era), and early 1990s stuff like the Orb and Orbital, the band Boards of Canada makes beautiful electronic music. I find it extremely hard to describe music like this without resorting to the obvious nature-related cliches (dusk, willow, gossamer, pasture, tides, etc. etc.). All of those things make their music sound kind of hippie-ish which is not really so off the mark.
But in a way, Boards of Canada are also
about robots. They are robot music for nature lovers. Or maybe nature
music for robot lovers. Music Has
the
Right to Children and its successor Geogaddi
were really brilliant and
succint summaries of the best of inventive but palatable electronic
music of the early 2000s. This new album, The Campfire Headphase is a
departure from their previous two full-length CDs, partly by dint of a
more aurally evident use of guitar, albeit guitar treated heavily with
electronics. Where the earlier records were kind of doomy or just
weird, the new CD is all about weariness, shuffling along at mid-tempo
pace. It's still beautiful but just a little less weird, less
minimalist, and maybe a little more conventional. But just as hard to
describe. Boards of Canada, by the way, are two brothers, Mike and
Marcus Sandison, who are from Britain (Scotland, actually). There's a
nice long interview at Pitchfork here.4. Dead Meadow—Feathers: In the scheme of things, Dead Meadow is also a throwback to an earlier era, one of stoner dudes with long hair, smoking lots of pot and deeply into knights and dragons. OK, they're not as bad as all that.
In fact, this album, Feathers, is an example of
kickass contemporary spaced out rock, but much more sophisticated than
just
four guys in a garage playing 20 minute anthemic tributes to
Hendrix and Sabbath. Dead Meadow's
guitars have huge reverbs and echoes, their
songs are relatively slow and lumbering, and their vocals evoke
distant, very distant, faraway things -- psychedelic, heavy, but
strangely modern. I listened to this album hundreds of times last
year, on my headphones in train stations, walking on the streets, and
it pretty much disconnects me from my surroundings. The second song on the CD, "Such Hawks,
Such Hounds," is wonderful, a short slow burner, sounding
vaguely like
an olde English folk song. And yes, the lyrics are a litttle wanky
(think of Tolkien and Lovecraft?), but without the slightest
embarassment:"As Dawn's first rays cross the green field, they shine in open eyes lying still
From the boughs of the oak tree, three ravens wait over his cold bones lying as they are
The wind will moan forevermore
They'll perch on his backbone beneath the morning sun, peck out his eyes one by one...."
If you like slow, somewhat dirgey but not too heavy stoner rock with a strong dose of dreamy psychedelic guitar, this is really as good as it gets. I saw them opening for Sleater-Kinney on September 13, 2005, and for a three piece, they were pretty amazing; Jason Simon, their lone and brilliant guitarist (and vocalist), sending waves of reverb across the whole auditorium that was a jarring contrast to the heavy dry rock of Sleater-Kinney that was to follow. Dead Meadow are from Washington, DC.
5. Eluvium—Talk Amongst the
Trees: So if you like music where nothing happens, you might
like this. I sometimes get into this mega-ambient mode where
percussion, craft, improvisation, virtuosity, etc. drive me crazy.
Sometimes I want something that is mechanical yet with blood. Muzak
with the smiley face turned upside down. Sometimes, I actually like
paying attention to
background music. Eluvium is some guy named Matthew Cooper who makes
music that incorporates the typical motifs of electronic ambient music
-- the deep melancholia, the winteriness, but also a little bit of the
sinister, the "hey - something's - not - right" vibe. 
Cooper
is mostly a pianist, so I imagine some guy sitting with his giant piano
in the middle of an empty house, banging away the same notes in
repetition. It's all done beautifully and tastefully, culminating in a
final 17-minute track, "Taken,"
that basically combines a guitar strumming pattern, repeated ad nauseum
into infinity. Remarkably, although you notice little that is different
in the track from beginning to end, the very act of listening to these
melancholy chords over and over and over creates a strange sense of
anticipation and expectation, like being a bug on a mobius strip,
circling over under sideways down into oblivion. Beautiful stuff.
6. Jackson and His
Computer Band—Smash:
This is
some crazy disco shit. Take little bits of disco, little bits of
electronic music, little bits of cut up technique, little bits of
mashup, and you get this. Songs assembled meticulously from many
different sources into something that is totally unique. 
This
is the most innovative weird music that I can think of that I actually
like. It reminded me of that Avalanches
CD from a couple of years ago
but what do I know? In the first song, the singers ask "Have you really
thought about utopia?" If this is utopia, then utopia is basically one
hundred little robots all conspiring to create the most mutant disco
music you've ever heard. Go ahead, just try and listen to the second
song on this CD, "Rock On."
It's brilliant, disco that is so whacked, I
can't think of any reference point. This is a little bit of a
challenge, but the challenge is worth it. Not music to relax to.
Jackson and His Computer Band are apparently one French guy named
Jackson Fourgeaud (right). You can listen to some of his stuff here at the
BBC. Also, an interesting review here where
the reviewer calls him "the great hope of dance music" which may be a
little bit of hyperbole.
7. LCD Soundsystem—LCD
Soundsystem:
Today I was coming home from work, took Metro North down from the
Bronx, got out at Harlem and walked out into the insanity of 125th St.
when "Yeah (Crass Version)"
came up on my iPod. My mood instantly
changed into ebullient. I felt like I needed to dance across across the
several avenue blocks to get to my number 2 train at Lennox and 125th.
Unfuckingbelievable. This is the best dance record I've heard in years.
LCD Soundystem is basically some dude named James Murphy who has a
talent that could, in lesser hands, sink any music project, that talent
being an encyclopedic knowledge of cool music. This
whole (double) CD set is a collective tribute to any and all sorts of
the best dance music of the 1970s and 1980s, principally disco and
funk, melded with bits of punk and post-punk. Or to put it a diferent
way, if you remember the best disco music from the 1970s (I'm
thinking Ceronne, Giorgio Moroder, Kraftwerk, even stuff like
Earth
Wind & Fire, the Commodores, Donna Summer), you stick that in a
blender with some post-punk (mostly the Fall, late period Brian Eno,
etc.) and then throw in some left field curves to update it to the
2000s, then you get this music. Barring a few songs, all the drums
sound "real," and Murphy throws in a guitar break here and there
to embellish the crazy synth rhythms. In a way, it's explicitly
anti-techno but shows a deep appreciation for the aspects of techno
that make dancing so much fun. But the album also displays a broad
eclectic nature. For example, there's one song, a ballad ("Never As
Tired As When I'm Waking Up"), that wouldn't be out of place on an
early George Harrison solo album and borrows a guitar figure straight
out of "Ten Years Gone" by Led
Zeppelin. But somehow it sounds totally
contemporary. There are so many standout tracks: "Daft Punk Is Playing
At My
House," "Tribulations," "Movement," "Losing My Edge," etc., many of
which were stand alone singles released prior to the full album.
"Losing My Edge," by the
way, is basically a hipster's lament that he's
falling behind the "it" music of the times, that he can't keep up
what's hip anymore. Kind of like a preemptive strike against inevitable
obsolescence. Murphy utters every single indie rock
hipster reference in a tirade that is constructed so well that it ends
up ridiculing indie rock hipsterdom. And despite the obvious labored
nature of the tribute to his heroes, the record is genuine fun. You
don't have to have any interest in his influences. And thank God, you
don't have to be a music critic. This is just killer dance music. One
of the best of the year. Here is
an interview with James Murphy at Magnet.
8. Lemon
Jelly—'64-'95:
I've
always liked Lemon
Jelly (basically a DJ and a producer), although I
discovered them only around 2002; Anoo had their CD LemonJelly.ky
(2001), a wonderful
collection of three e.p.'s that was finely constructed downtempo
electronic music but quite organic too, and very upbeat if not
happy-sounding. Totally unlike music I like, I know. Their songs
(really, instrumentals) are typically constructed around one major (and
usually beautiful riff), slowly building from the beginning
to the end, repeated ad nauseum for four or five minutes. In anyone
else's hands, the songs would get boring, but partly because the
melodies and arrangements are so wonderful, you never tire. Perfect for
your Sunday morning driving. 
They're
not quite as sterile and yuppie as the Thievery Corporation--many of
their best pieces are too quirky to be palatable to the upwardly mobile
downtempo set. The experience of Lemon Jelly is completed by the
fantastic art material accompanying the CDs, drawn by one of
the two men (Fred Deakin) who make up Lemon Jelly. Holding their CD
covers in your hands is the closest substitute to the visceral (and
lost) thrill of buying an
l.p. album. The new set '64-'95
is
a big (well, sort of big) departure from all their previous material.
It has a much more heavy beat, more danceable, and is less explicitly
downtempo. That said, the album is basically like a trip through those
approximately 30 years of music ('64-'95), comprised of songs
painstakingly collected from a hundreds of different samples from
incredibly diverse music, all put together in a seamless whole. Each
song is linked to particular year and evidently a style of music. If
you've never heard Lemon Jelly before, this album might be a little
eclectic but if you're feeling energetic enough 'cause you're having a
good day but not energetic enough to go the gym, this would also be
ideal
ambience. My favorite track here is almost '70s-era soulful although
linked
to the '90s: " '95 (Make Things
Right)."
9. Nobody—And
Everything Else...:
Shiny Happy People. I have no idea who these people are or where they
came from. I guess I could find out but I'm too lazy to. Anoo bought me
this CD from Other Music and I really like it. 
The
music is basically semi-instrumental music, grounded in hip hop grooves
mixed with psychedelic type moods. I know that sounds weird. It's a bit
like Boards of Canada but with more beats. It's more upbeat, more
cheery, more like hanging out at the beach with a boombox on a quiet
but not fully sunny day when you're in a relatively good mood. There's
even an appropriate cover of a Flaming
Lips song from The Soft
Bulletin. Into the Groovy
music for people who don't want to think too much. Reviews here
and here.
10. Sleater-Kinney—The Woods: I was never a fan
of Sleater-Kinney.
I'd heard a
couple of songs. They were fine, white girl rock. But I believed the
hype and
picked this CD up and holy fuck it is a good album.
Not musically innovative
(loud guitar, loud guitar, drum) but incredibly masterful, and man,
these
chicks have
significantly upped their volume, way past 11. Let's put it this
way—remember the really heavy songs on Physical Graffiti?
Well, this here whole album is like that. And one of the two
vocalists—whose name I don't know, I can't ever remember these
things—has a voice like a intercontinental wail,
to wake you up out of whatever reverie you were lost in. Of
course, if it
was just loud that would make
it
mediocre, but these songs are well composed, played, and produced. I
think the
greatest achievement of this album is not that it's so good but that it
genuinely sounds like a rock album, not a punk or indie or pop or art
rock or
whatever album. But a heavy rock
album that goes beyond any narrow hipster definitions. I saw them in
New York
on September 13, 2005 and they were incredibly aggressive live,
deploying the
kind of stage presence that showed an awesome understanding of
dynamics, of
playing with the possibilities of incredibly loud sound without
sounding like a
cliche (i.e., heavy metal or crap like that). They took an approach to
sound
like the louder aspects of Sonic Youth but doing it not as a
self-conscious art
project but as a way to stretch their own playing into new (for them)
territory. Led Zeppelin
is clearly one way to think of Sleater-Kinney
but
another is Throwing Muses.
The lead singer of Sleater-Kinney—especially
when she throws her voice out into the void like a fucking banshee—is
like a young Kristen Hersh.
And I imagine that Kristen H., with her
recent band
50 Foot Wave, sounds
probably a lot like Sleater-Kinney. (Kristen, of
course,
edges out Sleater-Kinney in the madness-as-muse department). The three
women of
Sleater-Kinney seemed so powerful on stage that I wanted to know what
they were
channeling into when they played a nearly 15 minute stretch of "Let's
Call It
Love/Night Light," that started as a fairly conventional song,
detoured
into an
amazing passage of aural insanity using two guitars
and
drum (no bass!) in waves of sound, and then back to a riff worthy of
early Deep
Purple. They bathed the audience in one giant fuzzball of distortion
and light,
and after the show, as I walked out of the venue and into the city and
strobe of Times
Square,
I felt like I was going to float away on the strange sonic emptiness of
my
ringing ears. Note: the most "pop" track (and a single and video) is
"Jumpers." For those of
you who enjoy the narcosis of Fresh Air on NPR,
there's an interview with Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein of
Sleater-Kinney here.
Other Notables
1. Ritchie
Hawtin—DE9:
Transitions:
Minimalist techno, gajillions of samples.
2. Jan
Jelinek—Kosmischer
Pitch: This is sort of like Ulrich
Schnauss but perhaps a little
less radio-friendly. I don't know who this dude is but he seems German
or something. Good CD though, especially if you are an architect and
detail interiors all day. I don't. But if you do, this could be for
you. Instrumental music that is completely inorganic but somehow not.
3. M.I.A.—Arular:
This was
the hype of the year last year. I liked it. 
It had a couple of killer tunes ("Sunshowers," "Bucky
Done Gun," "Galang"). Plus she (Maya Arulpragasam) is pretty hot. But
the album as a whole doesn't display much stylistic (especially
rhythmic) diversity. However, if you can stand to listen to clever
rhymes over a mix up of hip hop + bhangra + reggaeton and whatever for
38 minutes, then you might enjoy this. Her vocal delivery is much
better than her lyrics, which basically saves the day. Put it on, have
a party.
4. Sigur Ros—Takk...: See the concert review section where I discuss this album.
Reissues /
Compilations / Older Stuff / Live
1. Bob Dylan—No
Direction Home: The Soundtrack:
This is Vol. 7 in the Bootleg
Series of archival releases from Dylan (the series began in 1991) which
have contained previously unreleased material from every stage of his
career. Dylan of course has been notorious for recording dozens of
songs but never releasing them. The new release is slightly different
from its predecessors in that it's been released as part of a TV
documentary
(which I review here).
Although praised highly, for me this double CD release is slightly
uneven. The early stuff is fantastic, but listening to the many
alternate takes from the 1965-66 period shows why Dylan decided to
release better versions on his albums. It's not that the
stuff isn't great, it's just that it doesn't compare to the halcyon
heights of the released material. One of the exceptions is the version
of "Desolation Row" which easily outshines the originally released
version on Highway 61
Revisited. Where the original was ruined by this awful calypso
guitar,
this 'new' version is a little more menacing and urgent. The live
version of
"Maggie's Farm" from
1965 is also totally rockin', showing that when
Dylan picked up the electric guitar, he really burned up. Finally, the
live versions of "Ballad of a Thin Man" and "Like A Rolling Stone" are
incendiary, but we've heard them before in a previous live release.
There's also a pretty good booklet with the two CDs. For my money's
worth, though, I would get the first bootleg release, the Bootleg Series, Vol. 1-3
released in 1991 and containing a gajillion fantastic songs.
2. Local H—Live '05 (See live review of Local H)
3. Mogwai—Government
Commissions: BBC Sessions 1996-2003: This actually serves as a
pretty good introduction to Mogwai. It begins with the haunting "Hunted
By A Freak" and includes the 18-minute freakout monster song "Like
Herod." Ten songs from the late 1990s and early 2000s, all
recorded for
the BBC. John Peel introduces the CD.
4. The Stooges—The
Stooges and Fun
House: Needless to say, Fun
House is one of my favorite albums of all time. Maybe my
favorite album of all time. Yeah, probably my favorite single piece
of
pop music of all time. It is fucking insane. It is rock'n'roll
distilled down to 35 minutes or whatever. I don't even want to write
anymore about it because it's a waste of time trying to describe it. A
horrible pathetic waste of time. Genius like this borders on utter
incoherence. Anyway, so they re-released Fun House last year along with a
second CD of outtakes, containing basically (slightly) different
versions of the basic Fun House
tracks plus two unreleased tracks, "Lost In The Future" and "Slide
(Slidin' The Blues)" from the same sessions. And it's all been
remastered. The whole thing sounds like you're standing in the middle
of a jet
engine. Once you hear this, everything else banal. A few years
ago, Rhino Records released a 7 CD box set, 1970: The Complete Funhouse Sessions,
comprising every single note recorded during the recording of this
album. Yes, seven CDs, every song, every take, every flubbed note.
That's how great this album is. Note: the first almost-as-awesome album
(The Stooges) is also given the
two-CD treatment. No Fun indeed.
5. Talking Heads—The Name Of The Band Is Talking Heads: This is an expanded version of the original double album released in 1982, one of their two great live albums. The CD version is fantastic, showing Talking Heads as a great guitar band in the late 1970s (disc 1) and as a guitar band setting off into the funk stratosphere in the early 1980s (disc 2). The original album had 17 songs, the new reissue has 33 songs. Awesome stuff.
6. Yo La
Tengo—Prisoners
Of Love:
A Smattering of
Scintillating Senescent Songs 1985-2003: This is a great
compilation of material spanning the first 18 years of Yo La Tengo.
What can I say? Tasteful. Nostalgic. Sad. Rockin'. Brilliant. The first
two CDs are the greatest hits. A third CD (entitled A Smattering of
Outtakes and Rarities
1986-2002) is also remarkably consistent and rewarding. They
remind me of Pittsburgh, my last memorial of nostalgia.