in tune with the universal hum: the best albums of 2008
Apr 28 '09 (Updated Apr 29 '09)
The Bottom Line [Actually, this came out a lot better than I expected, although I didn't end up finishing the list.]
It is not my impression that I will be writing actual, detailed product reviews anytime soon. If I do, they will be of children's books, but let's face it, I've been thinking that for months now. What energy I have left at the end of a day spent with my toddler and infant sons -- and they are delightful beings, though perhaps at their very peak of delightfulness when napping -- is devoted to cooking and eating; to drum practice; to exercise; to friends; and especially to time spent with my wife (by which I largely mean conversation; I'm not quite sure how families with three or more young children happen, but I suspect storks are involved).
To spend time trying to pick the right words to explain what a song means, the right passages and relevant comparisons to explain or justify or challenge a book -- to spend time even watching a movie -- would be either to be antisocial, or to give up and decide five hours of sleep in a night are too many. And to write a review _without_ doing these things would feel, to me, half-asssed at best.
On the other hand, I still listen closely to huge amounts of music, and if I write loose, consumer-friendly descriptions of twenty albums at a time, that's ten-asssed for the price of none: a bargain, we can surely agree. So here I present my favorite albums of 2008. I present them in reverse order, from the merely excellent to the very best. This is not to build phony suspense -- my very favorite 2008 album is Veda Hille's This Riot Life; see, how hard was that? -- but in the hopes that I shall outgrow my jitters and rustiness as I type, that my writing might get more inspired as I discuss albums that were more inspirational. I know: it's not the way to bet.
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20. Why?, Alopecia. Folk music is the music I grew up with, the dance music, consolation music, and close-harmony togetherness music of the dead white underclass. Hip-hop, on the other hand, is a music I gave in and began exploring as a 30-year-old, urged via modem by enthusiastic invisible friends: partly a music of inner-city males bragging and strutting, partly a music of gadget-loving suburban tourists. Superficially, the traditions are near-opposite, separated by centuries, lingoes, and hundreds of hours of informal singing lessons; I know this, since this superfice kept me isolated on one side of the imagined divide for decades.
But both musics also have traditions of immediacy, of morbidity and open weakness, of using grim poetry to ward off death and terror. Besides, guitars and untutored piano and nasal, word-driven singing can be as rhythmic, propulsive, and echo-laden as the smoothest digitized samples. Why?'s vivid free-association-built half-stories merge those aspects of the two musics until it's hard to remember where the borders were ever drawn, or why.
19. Jesca Hoop, Kismet. A naive-sounding folk-pop debut from a pretty young west-coast woman who was living in a van until local radio picked up her single ... and so far I've also described Jewel's first step on the road to becoming the wealthy voice of robo-dance-pop razor commercials, saccharine Christmas carols, and whatever the hell else she's up to lately. But Jesca Hoop's vision is far sunnier, more elliptical, and more developed. Competing hooks and weird drum sounds and complex auto-harmonies lock into place, while alternate choruses multiply and mutate according to a logic I haven't parsed but am quite sure exists. And "Intelligentactile 101", which was not the single, is the catchiest song I heard all year.
18. Nick Cave, Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!! Grimy, hard-charging, sometimes clanging rock-and-roll written and powered by a 50-year-old ex-goth at the peak (so far) of his charisma. I've never been at all seduced by Nick's beat-poet literary aspirations, his murder ballads, or the campy deep vocals he was using circa "Do You Love Me?" (well, maybe the latter a bit), and none of those are entirely gone. But his storytelling has improved, the sleaze is as grim in words and joyous in performance as the play requires, and when social and political commentary show up -- non-self-righteously, of course -- they are directed, as much in puzzlement as in anger, at our Maker, who gave us big brains, bigger appetites, and no instruction manuals. Some human figured out drums and electric guitars, and even how to use sleighbells like a chain-gang's rattle, but Nick isn't sure why we were forced to endure so much struggle and waywardness to get here, and hey, neither am I.
17. Head of Femur, Great Plains. The third album from a band whose debut was for me a classic of sugar-rush maximalism: twenty friends still hanging out years after high school marching band (or so it seemed) rushing in and out of the studio to lay down exuberantly unneeded parts for songs that would have been easier to sell in the mildly angsty guitar-bass-drums pop/rock form the words and core melodies might have dictated. Head of Femur have learned about restraint, drama, and the slow build since then, and a part of my brain can't help thinking those are wrong ideas (on the grounds that they aren't anything I asked for).
But they haven't matured in the foolish way that insists on sounding mature all the time. And even the dramatic songs are still a parade of instrumentalists playing too many notes, all there to warmly embrace a singer who still sounds like a 12-year-old who lost his parents at the Brookfield Mall. That's a combination that I will let uplift me in whatever form it chooses to take.
16. R.E.M., Accelerate. The critical cool-person consensus holds that R.E.M. were a great band when young and mumbly, as mystifying as they were certifiably intelligent. Then, we're told, they began to go downhill when Michael Stipe started to sing identifiable words, a decline which went terminal when his words became clear attempts to communicate. The votes of the unwashed masses prefer a later, more rousing R.E.M., but at least in the U.S. there's almost no dispute that a decline happened _eventually_, and that it started (with a loud, abrupt whimper) with the densely experimental New Adventures in Hi-Fi and the drum-machine oddities of Up.
I'm a lot closer to the masses on this issue. Michael Stipe is an interesting, empathetic, very nice man who's worth understanding, and R.E.M. are inventive musicians who knew how to make good use of major-label, then superstar-level, recording budgets. I never stopped liking new R.E.M. albums, in fact, and New Adventures was almost my favorite of their albums. It would have been if the songs had averaged 4 minutes or less and had real, worthy endings: that, a crippling middle-aged tendency to drag on and on, is the one undoing we all seem able to agree on.
Including R.E.M. Accelerate is not a comeback album in the sense of sounding like anyone's definition of their prime -- they never rocked this hard before (except on the glammy, freaky Monster), and the last time they sounded this stripped-down musically, Stipe's lyrics were still in shy, youthful disguise. But Accelerate is a coming home to brevity and efficiency, and it sounds good on them.
15. Brooke Fraser, Albertine. Ms. Fraser's music is good in a defined mainstream style: piano-centric and slow-to-midtempo, soft but willing to employ well-timed surges, built on pretty melodies prettily sung. Vanessa Carlton and Sara Bareilles and Sarah MacLachlan have made lots of money this way, and if Emm Gryner and Rachael Sage haven't, that's certainly not my fault or theirs. There's enough of this music around, though, that there needs to be something special about it for me to pay attention.
Fraser is an excellent lyricist. It so happens that her lyrics become more thoughtful and compelling as they become more explicitly Christian. It also so happens that I've never been even remotely Christian, nor indeed spiritual in any way. My longings in life are mainly there to be filled by other humans, plus the occasional kittycat (nor do I know for a fact that the entrees at Saffron Indian Buffet aren't cooked by tin kitchenmen, C3P0's cousins, or superintelligent cockroaches who dutifully wash all of their many hands). So I am an unlikely man to give testimony here.
But even I know that the logic of "If I find in myself desires nothing in this world can satisfy, I can only conclude that I was not made for here" is more satisfying than "...that other people are being jerks". A humanist can endorse (and check himself by) the moral instruction of "Hosea's Wife" as easily as a believer who didn't have to look up the referenced story. A loving parent need only be aware of the land and of history to identify with "Seeds". And I'm not sure I agree with Tris McCall that "Deciphering Me" is a song of sexual longing for Jesus, but it might be, and c'mon, that would be awfully nifty.
14. Ben Folds, the Way to Normal. Ben Folds is a far flashier pianist than Brooke Fraser. If his prior solo albums seemed (forgivably in context) to forget that, he seems to have remembered in the wake of his divorce, which is just as well since said divorce kind of spoils the exquisite romantic delicacy of "the Luckiest". (Enough of my favorite love songs have been written a few years prior to vindictive breakups that Cindy should feel very lucky that I just write long damn essays about Napoleon Dynamite instead.)
Ben actually spends fair portions of Normal coming across as a self-centered, angry, obnoxious jerk with desires we suspect can be satisfied in this world, at least for a little too long, by groupies after shows. But he's a smarter man and better writer than to settle for that: too self-aware not to turn his own flaws into good lines, too playful to put up a good front where anguish and pathos can be funnier, too observant not to catch that it's only now that he's rich that restaurants want to give him stuff for free. The music, from "Free Coffee"s full-on electronic chatter to "Eglington"'s soft Broadway drama to "Hiroshima"s hammy Elton John pounding, shows him getting better every day in every way even if his actual life doesn't, and the Ben of happier times has earned the benefit of all doubts.
13. Jesus H. Christ and the Four Hornsmen of the Apocalypse, Happier than You. Risa Mickenberg is, as far as I know, the funniest lyricist going these days, which is not to say her band should be filed (or dismissed, if that's your sad way) with Tom Lehrer or Moxy Fruvous or They Might Be Giants. Hers is a social, storytelling humor of the people around her, Atom and His Package with more devoted rhyming skills and a less-flourished geekiness. Why, seven of the thirteen songs are about male/female relationships, even if Risa is more likely than most to ask you to be her "Back Burner Guy" ("you can stroke my ego, but that's all") or to imagine a song in Missed Connections Craigslist ad form. The jazzy Rogers-and-Hammersteiny show tune "I Miss Your Arm" doesn't miss her ex's brain or his personality or his sexxxing her up, but does miss his sheer comforting physical presence. Which actually isn't funny, but humor often is simply the guise that unused good ideas hide in.
When they want to, the Four Hornsmen play top-notch good-time rock and roll, supplemented with horn section (hence the name) and the sprightly Cars-style synth lines that Del Shannon legitimized way back in 1961. More often they're futzing skillfully with surf-rock ("Vanity Surfin'"'s internet goofery is lyrically simple but musically far more developed than the genre requires), or balancing piano balladry with thrash-punk, or waiting for some Rockettes to prance by, or doing a gentle folk sing-along tribute to the "Alcoholics in My Town". I have no idea how sincere the album is, and I may not have expected to care. But the spoken-word sections of "I Hope You're Happy" are as emotionally universal and touching as they are weird and specific in detail, "Pathetic" sure works as an anthem, and "I'm Around" actually sort of frightens me and probably drops the album a few ranks from where it belongs. The lesson being, don't judge a band on their stupid name, even if, like me, you're in favor of the stupid name.
12. Eric Matthews, the Imagination Stage. Eric makes serious-sounding music, and is also serious-minded lyricist, although it took me awhile to realize the latter -- as all songs called anything like "Little 18" have always been displays of dirty-old-man lewdness, for example, it took me several listens to realize that Matthews is actually urging the young woman to avoid men while exploring and becoming herself. At any rate, Matthews's lushly melodic music and singing are more than distinctive enough to stand up proud on their musical merits. If Brian Wilson, in his (Pet Sounds/ Smile/ Surf's Up) prime, had produced Steely Dan in theirs, and if Steely Dan had been the uncles you turned to for good advice and art-project help instead of the uncles who helped assure the bartenders that no, you only _looked_ like a 9-year-old, it would have roughly sounded like this.
11. Marnie Stern, This is It and I am It and So are You. Marnie's lyrics often settle for brief, excitable, carelessly bossy homilies, and her vocal melodies don't always seem aware that it's okay to use more than one note, that they aren't destroyed for future generations from overuse. The word "cheerleader" tends to crop up in reviews of her albums, and if the cheerleaders at your school tumbled around full-speed, leaping each other to tackle the unwary and bash them into submission with megaphones, I can't think of a better description for her either.
This is..., at any rate, is as excitingly _kinetic_ an album of rock music as I have ever heard. There are more technically able guitarists than Stern, certainly more versatile ones, but not ones whose ever-proliferating rapid solos gleam so brightly and buzz so eagerly. There are faster drummers than Zach Hill, but none who articulate so cleanly, pound so firmly, and use dynamics so masterfully (and also play really fast). Call it limited if you like, but I interrupted the Eric Matthews album to write about this one, and it took no more three seconds for my arms to start tensing happily in rhythm: as long as it overrides _my_ limits, its own seem silly to harp on.
10. Gentleman Auction House, Alphabet Graveyard. My favorite debut LP of the year, Alphabet Graveyard is full of perky, bouncy, assembled indie-pop songs. There's two percussionists, there's two keyboard players equally fond of piano and toy electronics, there's horns and the usual guitar and bass. There's a male singer whose enthusiasm makes him sound constantly on the verge of running out of breath, and a female harmony singer just often enough to sound pretty and to acknowledge the fact that most of the songs are about boys and girls together, however awkwardly.
There's good beats throughout, so you can dance to it, but if you don't dance you can wave your arms and snap your fingers. All of the songs are excellent, and in a style the world can always use more of.
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You know what? This is getting long. I'll stop here for now. I hope I resume in a few days, because albums 9 through 1 are even better than these. But you can go buy these for now.
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Member: Brian Block
Location: Greensboro, NC
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