Ah, the holidays – a time for yuletide joy, spending time with family, and the opportunity for Nate, Kelly and I to go toe-to-toe on the best music of the past year. It seems like only yesterday when I dominated them with my 2007 list (and, for some odd reason, was accused of getting too competitive with my list-making prowess). So here we go, 2008 style:
Best Albums of the Year
10. Hot Chip – Made in the Dark – Hipster dance squad follows up their kick-ass breakthrough record (“The Warning”), and one of the hottest dance tracks of the last decade (“Over and Over”) with an even better follow-up album. But, shirking the urge to rest on their laurels, “Made in the Dark” is an expansion of their club-rock sound, blending tweaked-out balladry (“We’re Looking for a Lot of Love”) with top-drawer bangers (“Shake a Fist,” “Ready for the Floor,”) and still find a little time to write the best Franz Ferdinand song that Franz Ferdinand never wrote (“One Pure Thought”).
9. Atmosphere – When Life Gives You Lemons You Paint That Shit Gold – 2008 was a banner year for hip-hop, with a seemingly unending supply of brilliant skills and beats on display. No, Lil’ Wayne didn’t deliver (although, based on the mainstream media, you’d think the man reinvented the wheel this year), but with great turns from the Knux, Black Milk, Wale, and T.I., fans of the genre had good reason to feel like spoiled, chocolate-smeared kids at grandma’s house. Leading the charge in ’08 was Atmosphere, the forever-inventive duo from the Twin Cities who dropped arguably their best – and clearly their most musically inventive – release yet. Slug may have decided to MC this one from a little too far off the sidelines, constantly calling the plays on other peoples’ lives and struggles, but with beauties like “Can’t Break” and “Your Glasshouse,” I can’t imagine why we’d complain.
8. Elbow – The Seldom Seen Kid – On the title track of their 2005 record, “Leaders of the Free World,” Elbow painted a picture of impending doom with infantile politicians playing schoolyard games with our rights, while simultaneously mourning our apparent apathy to the crumbling world outside. (Key lyric: “I think we dropped the baton like the sixties didn’t happen.”) Three years later, the English lads haven’t lost their sardonic – and, to varying degrees, pessimistic – touch, and internalize the struggle with staggering results. On the opening opus, “Starlings,” singer Guy Garvey talks about his intention to boot the premiere and the “bunch he luncheons with” to the curb, right after “stopping by your place of work and acting like I haven’t dreamed of you.” And so begins the Mercury Prize-winning Album of the Year, and Garvey’s shining moment as a pop artist. Whether he’s pleading for love from the bottom of a barrel (“I guess I’m asking you to back a horse that’s fit for glue”), or just throwing in the towel (“I’ve been working on a cocktail called grounds for divorce”), Garvey is uproarious, pensive, and plain brilliant.
7. Martha Wainwright – I Know You’re Married But I’ve Got Feelings Too – One of modern rock’s greatest voices shakes off her sub-par 2005 debut with a killer sophomore record about getting dumped on and always, always running back for more. But Rufus’ little sister does not suffer fools gladly, and with every turn of bad fortune Martha is ready with a quip, a scream, her middle finger in the air. On “Comin’ Tonight” she laments the man whom she hasn’t spent the night with in nearly 30 years, before coyly suggesting that it’s “not such a long time.” And on the mesmerizing “Jimi,” Wainwright lets it all hang out, taking her father to task for “leaving her sad and alone in this big house,” before just losing it over a wall of cascading guitars.
6. Girl Talk – Feed the Animals – Don’t call it a mash-up; this is an art form, painted on a canvas of 322 samples (“borrowed” from other musicians under the beauty of the Fair Use Doctrine), blended and melted together into the sickest dance party of the millennium. While the practice of dropping one song’s vocal onto another track’s musical bed has been popular practice for the past few years, nobody does (or, likely, is capable of doing) quite what Gregg Gillis has done on “Animals,” where Jay-Z slashing through “Roc Boys” over Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android” is maybe the most normal thing going on. Elsewhere, Girl Talk hammers through Pete Townshend, Daft Punk, Cameo, Cat Stevens, UGK, Faith No More, Lil Mama and an army of others in his quest for the sublime. As yes, closing the album’s fourth track (“What It’s All About”), is Vanilla Ice’s “Havin’ a Roni,” Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and the Jackson 5’s “ABC” mixed seamlessly together into booty-shaking bliss. And yes, it is the HOTTEST. SHIT. EVER.
5. Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever Ago – Love is an utter and total bitch, or so the saying kind of goes. In the winter of 2006, Justin Vernon left North Carolina after splitting with his girlfriend, holed himself up in a desolate cabin in the middle of the Wisconsin woods, meditated about the girl who got away (and whose middle name, of course, is Emma), and recorded what would become the most gorgeous record of 2008. Under the alias Bon Iver, Vernon crafts nine tracks of brilliant, acoustic poetry, highlighted by “Skinny Love,” where the refrain, “My, my, my,” somehow translates as the best lyric of the year.
4. Drive-By Truckers – Brighter Than Creation’s Dark – Earlier this year, lead Trucker Patterson Hood admitted in an interview that his band’s latest release was far from perfect, but contended that was exactly the point. After a few spins through “Brighter Than Creation’s Dark,” it becomes absolutely clear what Hood means. The Drive-By Truckers’ new album is a flawed masterwork – at times disjointed and mystified at its own vastness, but always compelling, and never afraid of crashing through the boundaries. An alt-country treasure for the last decade, the Truckers have rebounded from the departure of co-founder Jason Isbell with a gospel on messed up guys and girls and the wild world stretched out in front of them like a caustic game board. The moral of the story? As Hood suggests on the gorgeous centerpiece, “The Opening Act,” sometimes it’s enough to just hop in your car, turn down the windows, and “change the station.”
3. Kanye West – 808s and Heartbreak – First, get over the fact that it’s not “Late Registration” or “Graduation.” Kanye’s done good by us over the past few years, delivering pop-hit after pop-hit without barely batting an eye. Next, move past the fact that the man’s not the world’s best singer, and nearly every hook he croons over the course of the album (and, as the hip-hop on “808s” is represented at its most minimal, there’s a lot of the crooning) is oozed out through the magic of Auto-Tune. Get over your preconceptions of what we’ve come to believe a Kanye West record should sound like, and just get hip to the fact that the audacious Mr. West has made his most adventurous – and, in many ways, most satisfying – record yet. From the chilled atmosphere of “Street Lights” to the joy-in-heartbreak symphony “Robocop,” Kanye lets his big, damned broken heart burst over 12 tracks of deliciously weird electro-pop, and the results are so good that you can’t help but hope (at least a little) that the man finds himself back at the business end of a break-up as soon as possible.
2. The Gaslight Anthem – The ’59 Sound – “Young boys, young girls ain’t supposed to die on a Saturday night.” So goes the monster finale of the killer title track from the Gaslight Anthem’s brilliant new album – a punk-meets-Springsteen beauty summed up in the sentiment that, in the exhaust of our fading youth, we cling to one another, the radio, and the idea that everything is still possible. Oh yeah, it’s also a kick-ass rock record, propelled by chugging guitars, pitch-perfect melodies, and Brian Fallon’s Boss-tastic vocals. What Against Me did for the disgruntled with 2007’s “New Wave,” the Gaslight Anthem do for the rest of us on “The ’59 Sound” – which is to say, they’ve just made the soundtrack for your life.
1. TV on the Radio – Dear Science – Only in hindsight do we usually realize that a record came out at exactly the right time – a record that fits the times thematically (System of a Down’s “Toxicity” – released a week shy of September 11, 2001), musically (Nirvana’s “Nevermind” – the perfect tonic for a changing of the guard and a new generation), or for sheer bombast (The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” – pretty much shattering what anyone would ever expect an album could be, at exactly the time music was ready to change forever). Add “Dear Science” to that list – an album of lovesick, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it party jams as orchestrated by one of the most ingenious bands of the last decade, just in time for an economic collapse and seemingly unending global conflict, but with hope on the horizon. TV on the Radio stunned in 2006 with the swirling epic “Return to Cookie Mountain,” but on their follow-up the Brooklyn boys head straight for the indie rock disco in the sky, ranting about war (“Red Dress”), looking to dance (“Golden Age”), and cooing to the girl at the bar that they hunger for her “like a cannibal” (“Lover’s Day”). As delivered by twin-frontmen Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone, and filtered through the sonic template of producer/multi-instrumentalist Dave Sitek, “Dear Science” is nothing if not a revelation, a revolution, the best come-on of 2008, when everything seems both lost and yet, if you’re standing at just the right spot on the dance floor, better than ever.
The Honorable Mentions
- Black Milk – Tronic
- The Knux – Remind Me in 3 Days
- Various Artists – Guilt By Association Vol. 2
- Kings of Leon – Only By the Night
- Wale – The Mixtape About Nothing
- Los Camepsinos – Hold on Now, Youngster
- Glasvegas – ST
Best Songs of the Year
25. Man Man – Doo Right
24. The Knux – Hush
23. Coldplay – Viva La Vida
22. Alkaline Trio – Love Love, Kiss Kiss
21. Los Campesinos – This Is How You Spell Hahaha, We Destroyed the Hopes and Dreams of a Generation of Faux-Romantics
20. The Killers – Spaceman
19. The Ting Tings – That’s Not My Name
18. Atmosphere – You
17. Bon Iver – Skinny Love
16. T.I. – Whatever You Like
15. We Are Scientists – After Hours
14. Drive-By Truckers – 3 Dimes Down
13. Jill Barber – Hard Line
12. The Walkmen – In the New Year
11. Bloc Party – Ion Square
10. Vampire Weekend – Walcott
9. Guillemots – Get Over It
8. Gentleman Auction House – The Book of Matches
7. Martha Wainwright – Jimi
6. Little Jackie – The World Should Revolve Around Me
5. Passion Pit – Sleepyhead
4. Kanye West – Robocop
3. The Gaslight Anthem – The ’59 Sound
2. Those Dancing Days – Hitten
1. TV on the Radio – Lover’s Day
