10. Bon Iver – For Emma Forever Ago

Justin Vernon’s voice was described in an interview as being close to TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adibempe and that’s why I checked the record out. And while the comparison might be an odd one – his voice is more raspy and a little higher than Adibempe’s – it’s not far off. You can hear it most on “The Wolves (Acts I and II)”. The record itself has this singular atmosphere. Vernon is a singer-songwriter.  But the comparison with other singer songwriters is unfair, as Vernon has the kind of voice that can set himself above his peers and he’s, actually a good songwriter. Like its said of the Scout Niblett in the first issue of Phonogram, he’s using the same set of tools but there’s an entire world of difference. His voice, especially on tracks like “Skinny Love” and “Creature Fear”, is a Jeff Buckley-level instrument. Only Vernon doesn’t use his voice as a crutch the way that Buckley did – the voice might be great, but it’s a record of songs, and that places him with Nick Drake. The title track and “re Stacks” close out the record, better than the entire album that precedes them. The interplay between the acoustic guitar and horns on “For Emma” is the sound Zach Condon and Jeff Magnum have been aiming for their entire career, and it’s effortless.  One hell of a record.

09. The Walkmen – You+Me

When I was knee-deep in FD land this album leaked, and the opening lines of “Donde Esta la Playa” became my motto – “It’s back to the battle today/ but I wouldn’t have it any other way” is as good a credo as you can get in that situation. Like the Roots’ Rising Down, this is the best Walkmen album yet, and there isn’t much to say other than that.Well maybe a little more. There are only two seasons on Walkmen records, sweltering summer heat and the dead of winter. Particularly winter, as almost every song seems to be a kind of New Years Eve chant. Hamilton Leithauser always sounds completely desperate, but angry enough to understand it doesn’t matter. And the music always sounds like a distant electrified mariachi band. This album is the best album not for any particular reason that when you place it up against Bows+Arrows, it sounds better. Like Velvet Underground’s self-titled record (one of my all-time favorites), You+Me may not have the attack of it’s predecessors, but it’s traded up in the quality of songs. And there is an ease and a craftsmanship to the record that hasn’t become bland professionalism yet. For all we know, this might be the last good Walkmen record. Let’s enjoy it.

08. Spiritualized – Songs in A+E

Even more stripped down than Amazing Grace, this album is still a Spectoresque thing. I guess it’s something Jason Pierce can’t help but do, it’s also a much bluesier album. But this another album that’s entirely about the singer – Pierce’s voice has gotten even more fragile due to his health (you can even hear his respirator on “Death Take Your Fiddle”). Pierce’s themes are only amplified by his nearness to death – self-destruction, religious imagery slamming against atheism, fire, drugs, love, and death.”You Lie You Cheat” is the most resentful thing Pierce has ever done , but the themes of ascension slide in here as well. “Soul on Fire” might be my favorite song of the year (actually it’s no.2, but it’s close). It sounds more Dave Fridman-esque than Spectoresque, it’s a guitar anthem without really focusing on the guitars, its huge without being bombastic, it’s a the best love song Pierce has ever written but it might not even be about love at all.

07. Be Your Own Pet – Get Awkward

The UK version that Universal deemed “too violent”. Because it has songs about teenage girls stabbing each other and cannibalism. Also on this album is a song called “Bitches Leave” that quotes heavily from Robocop. Which is fucking awesome. It’s not as raw as the band’s debut, but the tour-trained chops make these songs sound a lot looser. Jemina Pearl is all control, and like a good actor, this just makes her more dangerous. Rather than screaming her throat out, is using that power to her advantage. All those pop punk bands that could never escape writing songs about highschool never really show the frustration that being a teenager was all about, and that’s exactly what this album does. Be Your Own Pet were also a band that didn’t care if they looked stupid, and occasionally reveled in it. It’s a damn shame that BYOP broke up after this album, but it’s kind of fitting that they go out while still at the top of their game. This isn’t a band that you want to grow up, even if moment like “You’re a Waste” hint at what a mature BYOP would sound like.

06. The Kills – Midnight Boom
“Time ain’t gonna cure you honey, time don’t give a shit”. I first heard about the Kills when Allison Mosshart sang on Primal Scream’s Riot City Blues. And her voice is perfect for the traditionalist-but-not rock music. The kind of desert-psych that usually only comes out of American bands who burn out within two albums. “Black Balloon” and “Last Days of Magic” don’t actually sound like 13th Floor Elevators and Nancy and Lee songs, but they evoke them while sounding new. “Goodnight Bad Morning” is one of the great comedown/sunup songs (the live version is even better with out-of-tune guitar notes building on top of each other to match the lyrics).

05. Deerhunter – Microcastle

I don’t know anything about Deerhunter. Or I don’t really care to know about Bradford Cox’s internet bullshit or the bands prolific output of diminishing returns or his personal life or interband conflicts. I could give a shit. I was turned onto Cyrptograms via Tucker telling me to check them out in last years end-o-the-year nonsense. I liked it, and I wasn’t really aware of the band outside of the album. And I’ve tried to maintain that perspective for this album. As music, it’s nothing new, but damn is it good. The songs are great for the most part, the ones that actually are songs. Half of the album is atmospheric pieces that intersperse the songs – its meant to be listened to as an album, and tracks like “Activia” can feel throwaway, but it’s a deliberate move. It only doubles the punch of tracks like “Nothing Ever Happened” when they finally hit. The way the tracks expand is my favorite aspect – the best ones kind of expand geometrically without feeling formulaic. That and “Twilight at Carbon Lake” is a hell of a way to end an album.

04. Los Campesinos – Hold On Now, Youngster
This album fucking rules.

… not enough? Songs about disguising yourself as a robot that sound like missing Breeder b-sides rerecorded with a choir doing the vocals. It’s fun, and not in the asinine way most indie-pop bands are “fun”. They’ve got the dozen-members who all sing, the rock orchestration straight from Broken Social Scene, the choppy guitars that could have been snatched from either the Pillows or Pavement, the shouty girl backing vocals like the Go! Team, the pretensions of Belle and Sebastian without the fey posturing, and lyrics that feel like arguments going on inside someone’s journal entries. They’re too literate, too arch, too cheery, too chirpy, too good too ignore. “My Year In Lists” is less than 2 minutes long and manages to say more than every other song on the album AND include Go! Team style shouted countdowns. “You! Me! Dancing!” is a great song no just because it’s a dance song about not being able to dance, but because it’s a masterpiece of dynamics. From the long lead-in to the spots where the violin and ooh-ooh-oohs come in, where the handclaps start and instead of feeling like a good song drawn out to fit the arrangement, it feels like it fits.

03. TV on the Radio – Dear Science

Speaking of dynamics, jesus christ how do these guys structure albums this well? Everything is impeccably placed and yet it all feels off-the-cuff. The big difference with this album is it’s precision. All the elements are pretty much the same here, even the lyrics are focusing on a lot of the same things. But where Cookie Mountain was an epic sprawl on the level of Daydream Nation or something similar, Dear Science is a direct, cohesive whole. The precision on hand has molded what were no wave guitars into r and b chops, the drums verging on disco. “Stork and Owl” and “Family Tree” are delicate pieces. “Stork and Owl” reminds me of Homegenic with it’s mechanical expressiveness. “Family Tree” is an almost holy sentiment. Immediately after, “Red Dress” brings us back down to earth. It’s a vile sentiment, sure that the world is gonna end so the iconography of “Roxanne” is made into a metaphor for prostitution of all kinds. The horns just make it feel dirtier. The penultimate track “DLZ” is the best thing Tv on the Radio has made since “Wolf Like Me”. It’s a sentiment that hasn’t been articulated before in this way, musically as well as lyrically. Adibempe is perched on the edge of disaster with the rest of the world, and he’s the first one to say what everyones thinking. In the structure of the album, placing this at the end is a pretty definitive refutation of the optimistic “Golden Age”. The closer “Lovers Day”, also like “Wolf Like Me”, is concerned with the physical and the carnal rather than the universal. It’s a personal sentiment, free of the weight that’s been sitting on the band’s chest the entire album. “Yes here of course there are miracles”, Adibempe says as the song marches offscreen Brazil Samba-style.

02. Nine Inch Nails – The Slip /Ghosts I-IV

Ghosts I-IV is 36 instrumental tracks of Trent Reznor just recording for the sake of recording. The nearest comparisons are the Fripp/Eno albums, just working as a final result and not molding these sounds into songs. But a more apt comparison might be to call this album Reznor’s version of J Dilla’s Donuts. As a whole, it’s someone who’s been making very structured work their entire career letting loose and showing off. Both albums are artists letting us know that they’re skilled enough that they can captivate us on the fly. But it was clearly just a warm up for The Slip, which was released – in pop terms – immediately after Ghosts.

The Slip is a culmination of everything Reznor does as an artist – more specifically, it shows how much Reznor has grown since getting sober – it’s changed his process as an artist completely, going from an obsessive and hermetic studio perfectionist to a ravenous producer. In the past 3 years, he has produced as many albums as he did over the course of the entire 1990s. And somehow, the work has only gotten better.

The Slip keeps a lot of the looseness that’s evident on Ghosts. The drums have never felt as live as they have on an NIN record, including the live discs. It feels like a lot of this album was recorded live to tape. Listening to Pretty Hate Machine and Broken recently, the first thing I noticed is how much Reznor’s voice has changed. It’s not just deeper – years of screaming through live shows will do that – but he’s actually a better singer now. On “Head Down” it goes from a guttural bark to an expressive croon with ease. “Head Down”, along with “Letting You” are Reznor’s political songs on this disc – which if you compare with the earlier albums has been there all along. On Pretty Hate Machine and The Downward Spiral, Reznor was angry at a god that doesn’t exist. Now that hate and distrust of authority has a more deserving and real target in the Bush administration (even personally, Reznor has a lot to be angry about). It’s not just blame and sloganeering either, “Letting You” says in micro everything that Year Zero was saying in macro – that this is the our fault just as much as it is theirs.

The second half of the record, starting with the oddly placed ballad “Lights In the Sky”, is almost a single song in four movements. “Corona Radiata” and “The Four of Us Are Dying” (a title is taken from a Twilight Zone episode about having your identity erased) gradually build into expansive vistas and it gets slammed down back down to earth with the closer “Demon Seed”. “Demon Seed” shares a structure with the tracks preceding it but the lyrics are buried under the sounds until the stress and rage well up enough until by the end Reznor is on the verge of screaming – and then all the sound drops out and fades back, and suddenly the accusation has turned inward – “there is a seed inside of me” – as it inevitably does.

The one standout track is “1,000, 000″, which may be the best thing Trent Reznor has ever written. The song is kept constant by a relentless Josh Freese snare . On top of it are completely fuzzed out guitars and squealing noises held over from Year Zero. Reznor is singing far more than he is screaming. David said that it sounds like “robotic annihilation”, and he’s not far off the mark. Lyrically, it’s Reznor’s most honest moment ever, probably the only thing close is a couple lines on the song “Where Is Everybody” from The Fragile “God damn I am so tired of pretending/ of wishing I was ending/ when all I’m really doing is trying to hide”. Which, if it were more than two lines on a not-great song, might have been a revelatory moment. “1,000,000” is a revelatory moment on the other hand. Ten years later, Reznor is a better writer, and someone who can honest with himself for a lot longer. The phrase “a million miles away” is most famously used on “Hurt” and he uses it again here for much different reasons. Anyone who listened to the first few NIN knows that Reznor has made his name on depression, alienation, and self-destruction. And “1,000,000″ is a rejection of all that. It’s waking up 40 and saying that isn’t the reason I do this anymore. Playing with suicidal imagery is a joke now, no matter how many times he talks about it not a damn thing is going happen, he’s still going to be in the studio the next day. If he’s addicted to anything these days, it’s working . He repeats ” I feel a million miles away, I don’t feel anything at all”, while he’s singing in the most expressive way possible. This isn’t the sound of someone who feels nothing, it’s the sound of someone trying to convince themselves that they don’t feel anything. It’s a song about not being able to detach yourself from the world anymore, and putting it on as the leader of an album like this shows a definite break from the guy who sang “Ruiner”.

01.Portishead – Third

For the largest part of this year I had very specific rules to the music I was listening to. I had a moratorium on what was allowed and what wasn’t and if it was non-FD-music I only listened to it during certain times, and blah blah blah. Mostly, this meant that I listened to Scott Walker for what seemed like entire months at a time, with some Public Enemy and Primal Scream popping in occasionally to cut the sameness. It was at this time that Third leaked. You have to understand Portishead always held a special place in my musical pantheon, the self-titled album is one of my favorite records of all time. Third is the one piece of music that cut through, that was something new and yet still was applicable to what I was working on. It was immediately a favorite, and it hasn’t faded in the seven months that has followed. Third is a classic, it takes sounds and styles that shouldn’t work together at all, let alone with this band, and makes it work. Reading and listening to interviews with Adrian Utley and Geoff Barrow have mentioned Public Enemy, Sun O))), Can, and John Carpenter which are an odd group of choices together – but make cohesive sense when listened to as a whole. In order to stay relevant, the band could no longer be a triphop group – there are no stoned jazz grooves here. This is the difficult paranoid album in the tradition of Vanishing Point and Ready to Die, not something you could put on at a dinner party and chill out. The Native Tongues-style beats are gone, replaced with krautrock drums and electro breaks, the steady grooves have been replaced with throbbing uneven dubplates, the horns are completely gone, and structures taken from the bastard children of folk and prog (ie Aphrodites Child, Serpent Power, Os Mutantes), and the smooth John Barry and Henry Mancini strings have been completely replaced with John Carpenter synths. The transition from 90s espionage, a cool and aloof paranoia, to the ever-present horror of the Aughts – moving from Barry to Carpenter is the logical progression, and ironically only makes the music more timely.

Beth Gibbons voice is the only holdover from the previous albums, and with the sped up beats her cries seem even more desperate. There is an encroaching guilt to the proceedings, by the time you reach the first single “Machine Gun” she’s a basket case and the music only enhances this – this is a voice arising from turmoil and chaos. Where earlier there seemed to be an element of theatricality to Beth Gibbons’ voice – especially on the live album where her voice changes drastically from song to song – on Third, that feeling disappears. Everything feels much more personal and at times confessional. This is a masterpiece, weird barbershop quartet song and all.