The Factual Opinion

The Top 30 Albums of 2008: # 8

Fleet Foxes
Sun Giant

Well, if you were looking to find a band that got hit by massive hype, but still managed to maintain public goodwill upon the release of their album--as opposed to the way things went for Black Kids and everybody else who tried to sound like the new Belle & Sebastian--it's the Fleet's you look to.  Formed only a few years ago and barely acknowledged until the beginning of this year, wherein they proceeded to win over absolutely every music publication they ran into, from Rolling Stone to Pitchfork (and quite a few websites and magazines in between), pretty much the entirety of the European music press (excepting those who still give a shit about whatever Bloc Party is doing), and even earning a breathy, over the top proclamation form the fucking Guardian, who described the Foxes self-titled debut as "a landmark in American music, an instant classic."  Here's the scoop.  That album?  Not bad.  Decent, even.  Hell, it's good.  Pick it up, put it on, learn the words, try and hit those notes.

But you don't really need to.

Everything about the Fleet Foxes that they get right--which is quite a decent share, as they're tremendously gifted musicians--is easily available on the five song Sun Giant EP, and it's there with complete, naked purity.  From the opening a capella that clues you on the type of experience you're in for to the American Idol level vocal gymnastics they populate "Mykonos" with, from the gutpunch reminder that harmony will still break your spine when it's done right, from the celebration--unashamed and blatantly excited--of the decades old sound of a band like Crosby, Stills & Nash, Sun Giant covers everything that made the world's music critics and a quarter of a million Myspace friends freak the hell out back when these guys showed up at South by Southwest.  They started off the year as the back-up band for Blitzen Trappen, and they've ended it with their name plastered on every single music magazine that doesn't limit itself to rap or heavy metal coverage.  Yet--and this is in part why you don't see their full-length being here while it's the talk of the town everywhere else--they've remained essentially the same band that charmed its way into a Sub Pop contract eleven months ago.  Every photo you see of them, whether it's a live shot from a show, a make-up covered take in a studio or one coming from an iPhone, is exactly the same.  A bunch of happy looking dudes in need of some barbering, smiling so hard they're on the way to a shattered jaw.  The Fleet Foxes kept doing exactly what they'd been doing, and the world woke up and started loving them right back for it--they were a bunch of guys who liked to sing with each other (it didn't matter about what, as their treacly let's-all-get-back-to-camping and looking-at-trees-and-shit lyrics testify), they liked to play songs that sound like a 70's back room revival of an old 60's hippie freakout, and they liked to cut the tracks before they got to noodling.  If there was a Maslow Heirarchy of Innovation, these guys would be the one's messing with bongos outside--little of what they do is going to be called "different."  The thing is, with these guys, that's just fine.  It's doubtful that the Fleet Foxes could, or should even try, to go in a different direction, especially this early in their career, especially when they probably wouldn't want to, especially when there's nothing wrong with shooting to be a 2008 harmonizing hippie rock band.  Hell, we've got enough people trying to be the next Jay-Z, U2 or, for whatever Satanic reason, the next Norah Jones.  At least the Foxes have the chops to pull off taking over where the 60's left off.  (Just as long as that doesn't become a trend.  Hippies are pretty disgusting.)

-Tucker Stone, 2008

The Top 30 Albums of 2008: # 9

DJ /rupture

Uproot

Jace Clayton, also known as DJ /rupture, is not the only blogging musician who appears on The Factual Opinion’s favorite albums of 2008.  Nor is he the only blogger that doubles as a music critic—the other will appear a little further down the list.  But he is the only one to actively fuse music criticism into his albums.  Uproot, Clayton’s first fully-licensed, commercially available mix since 2002’s Minesweeper Suite, is a taste-making album, one that plays with an “if you like this, you might like this” agenda.  DJ /rupture essentially uses the same lingua franca as Girl Talk—he pits large chunks of source material against one another in order to illuminate the commonalities between disparate pieces of music.  In both artists’ hands, a mix is almost a political act—as bridging common ground often is.  Still his artistic peak, Girl Talk’s Night Ripper provided the perfect metaphor for the musical terrain of 2006, at a time when pop, rap and club artists—Girl Talk’s source material of choice—began to gain the same sort of critical cache as their rock contemporaries, and almost unlimited access to music threatened to make fans and collectors spontaneously combust.  Two years later, so much has changed, and Uproot stands in stark counterpoint to Girl Talk’s masterpiece—the creepy comedown to Night Ripper’s euphoric high.  Uproot encapsulates feeling of 2008 by building a case for what music is, wants to be and should become.

On his blog Negrophonic, DJ /rupture rarely discusses Uproot.  One of the few times he did, he posted the (phenomenal) video for Nokea Baby Kites' "Reef" alongside an animated YouTube depicting T-Pain and Akon on a trip to the mall.  Right now, on the front page, there are mp3s of cumbia, dubstep, and a Hot Chip Wiley remix.  With his wealth of knowledge, you get the idea that DJ /rupture could have made any mix he wanted to.  With his wealth of knowledge, you get the idea that DJ /rupture could have made any mix he wanted to.  That he chose to craft Uproot is telling.  Like many of his contemporaries, Clayton has become fascinated with dubstep, and Uproot makes a case for it as one of the richest and most vital genres in dance music today.  He does this not by creating a strict dubstep mix, but by unearthing songs like "Elders" by Clouds--a DIY dubstep outfit from Finland--and placing them in opposition to songs from other, often world-music-referencing, styles in order to extract an overall impression.  The result is a darkly moody, late-night mix that accentuates the post-apocalyptic doom of The Bug and Burial, but with the elbow-room to fixate on, say, the lush strings of Ekkeherd Ehlers' "Plays John Cassavettes Pt. 2"  /rupture uses the Ehlers piece at the end of a beat driven but laconically paced first half.  After the song fades, there's a moment of silence--as if to alert the digital listeners, "This is where you would flip the record"--before picking back up again with Ghislain Poirier's "Ignadjossi."  Poirer is a contemporary of Clayton's--a global-thinking DJ from Montreal--and, aside from "Ignadjossi" being a breathtaking tune of its own right) the inclusion of him on Uproot speaks to the generosity of spirit that pervades the album.  Clayton is interested in bringing disconnected things together--whether in the form of drawing connections between countries' indigenous music, or introducing his audience to sounds outside their particular wheelhouse.

The Top 30 Albums of 2008: # 10

TV on the Radio
Dear Science

The semantic change TV on the Radio make in the first song on Dear Science is crucial.  “Halfway Home” opens the Brooklyn band’s third—and arguably best—album with many of the very elements that made them iconoclasts:  the aggressive “Wolf Like Me” drums, doo-wop vocals, and an otherworldly remove from its own lyrics.  At the beginning and the end of each phrase, vocalist Tunde Adebimpe’s voice softens a little, so it sounds crystal clear in the center but fuzzy on either end, as if he’s walking slowly past you while singing.  TV on the Radio have always been thrilling aesthetes with a deft hand for socio-political commentary: The band’s debut album opened with a song about “Magic Nigger” movies—films like The Green Mile and The Legend of Bagger Vance, in which black men show up with magic powers and infinite wisdom to solve white dude’s problems—and managed to turn an intricate and thorny issue into a pretty kick-ass song.  But Dear Science is TV on the Radio boldest album yet, a tapestry depicting life in a Bush-addled, pre-election America where no one knows whether to feel hope or dread for the future—and “Halfway Home” has the dubious job of introducing it.  The opening lyric, “The lazy way you turned your head into a rest stop for the dead,” sounds like pure Bush-baiting until you look closely at it.  It sets up the idea of someone’s mind as a halfway home—a place where criminals and the mentally ill live while trying to ease themselves back into society.  Except… that’s a halfway house—and what’s the difference between a house and a home?  In the most blatant terms, a house is simply lodging; home is where the heart is.  So, TV on the Radio set up for an album exploring desperation, fear, expectation, anticipation, neuroses, nostalgia, and regret—in other words, the perfect 2008 cocktail—but the secret implication is: We like it here.

With major assists from fellow Brooklynites Antibalas, Dear Science is more horn-reliant than previous albums.  Oscillating between a brass band free-for-all and the Afro-beat they’re known for, Antibalas work in tandem with programmer/multi-instrumentalist Dave Sitek’s rhythm-busting drum tracks to create the album’s central sound, though the band seems just as comfortable breaking the form they’ve created.  “Dancing Choose” commits to some awkward rapping, while “Family Tree”—possibly the best-written track on the album, and one of the songs least reliant on TV on the Radio’s singular aesthetic—is a straight-up ballad.  Lead single “Golden Age” promises “There’s a golden age coming round,” as it expands TV on the Radio’s musical palate to include a slinky funk groove and a Prince-referencing falsetto.  Later, “DLZ” declares “This is beginning to feel like the long-winded blues of the never” amid aching percussive clatter and a chorus of “la la la la”’s.  The two sentiments pin down Dear Science’s point of view precisely—desperately waiting on a miracle they’ve been told to expect but may not live to see.  Perhaps that’s why TV on the Radio named the album after a note Sitek posted in the studio: "Dear Science, please start solving problems and curing diseases or shut the fuck up."

-Martin Brown, 2008

The Top 30 Albums of 2008: # 11

The Constantines
Kensington Heights

The Constantines can't catch a break, it seems.  Saddled with the moniker of being an "art-punk" band, a description that succeeds only in making no sense whatsoever, with the after-effect of not sounding like something anyone would care to listen to, then abandoned by the Pitchfork critics that had not so long begun the same champion-ing process they eventually turned on its head (with admittedly less anti-hype than they directed at similar "you disappointed us, the indie-rock tastemakers" bands like Vampire Weekend and the Arctic Monkeys) and, as if the year wasn't bad enough, 2007 saw the dissolution of their original label.  It wasn't as bad as when Stereolab's lead singer went under a bus, but still: pretty tough road there.

What's odd is that Kensington Heights is, regardless of what you've heard, not a bad album at all.  It's a developing album, that's for sure--The Constantines are clearly moving away from the more bombastic rock standards they'd toyed with on previous releases, but the ambition here isn't one that's just dedicated to constructing moody ballad work, it's one that's dedicated to exploration, plain and simple, full stop.  The Constantines have already proven--with Tournament of Hearts--that they can do a collection of rock standards (that isn't embarrasing) better than bands like Coldplay or post-2000 Pearl Jam.  There'd be no reason for them to go any further in that direction, and it's clear that they've gotten a taste for what bands like Angels of Light--who put out the best album of their career last year--do.  Kensington Heights is still touched all over by pure Guitar Hero style noodling--"Hard Feelings" is one of those songs designed to make a 13 year old beg for his first axe--but the heart of the album is found in the humbled troubadour climbing on the soapbox stand outs "Life or Death", "I Will Not Sing A Hateful Song" or "Brother Run Them Down."

It's tempting to slight a band that, when the time comes for "experimentation", proceeds to explore what is, inherently, a populist range of sound.  To assume that, simply because a group has decided to play with what bands like Led Zeppelin (on the good end) or Creed (on the bad) work with.  But besides being snobbish and stupid, the assumption is based on flimsy ground.  Any time a band hasn't done something before, doing that very thing is, by definition, experimentation.  That doesn't necessarily make it a good thing--nobody is chomping at the bit for Garth Brooks to bring Chris Gaines back, nor are they hoping that Sade's next album is a noise-core odyssey.  (Although that last one might be preferable to her depressing attempts to make love songs.)  But then again, nobody at record companies--or for that matter, most fanbases--really knows what the fuck they're talking about anyway, if they did, and if bands cared, Radiohead wouldn't have made OK Computer or Kid A.  Of course, it's going to be somewhat difficult to heap praise on a low-level indie rock band trying to make a grand rock piece when A) there singer is far too moody and introspective to belt out a "Where The Streets Have No Name" or B) when grand rock pieces are what about 18,000 other bands are trying to make.  What makes Kensington Heights so much more exhilarating is that the Constantines clearly grasped this in the recording process--there was no way that any of these songs were going to end up being played during fourth and long at the local high school game--so they decided to sublimate all the impulse for the power chord and bring the volume down.  What they did was take songs that could be played loud, that could be played fast, and then they garaged them up, dropping it all into the sort of one-level process effects that bands like Pavement and My Bloody Valentine built careers on.  They took what makes "hard rock" and turned it into indie, which worked to their benefit--they do, after all, have a singer who likes to drawl it out, and who has a voice where the speedy refrain would never work.

A big part of what's made some of 2008's music so worthwhile has been the tendency to take the limitations of the sound and break that limitation on the fire of experiment until it became strength:  AGF did it with computers and vocal inflection, Girl Talk did it by doing away with the idea of reaching conclusion or providing answer, and the Constantines did it when they figured out they weren't going to be the next Stone Temple Pilots.  Their loss wasn't just our gain.  It belongs to them as well.

-Tucker Stone, 2008

Music Of The Weak: The Top 50 Songs Of 2008

Tucker and I got out our abacuses and our protractors and we calculated the best songs of 2008.  Please enjoy.

50.  Baby Dee – “Big Titty Bee Girl (From Dino Town)”

Ostensibly, Big Titty Bee Girl is advocating the inclusion of an Albino in your posse.  However, there’s a perverse joy that comes through as Baby Dee sings about hitting said Albino with a bat, shooting said Albino with a gun, taking away said Albino’s hat and leaving him in the sun, pooping in his pie, pissing in his sink, and tying a sausage to his dick before sicking the dog on him.  A sad, sad song.

49.  Brightblack Morning Light – “Hologram Buffalo”

Most bands drive to the end of the song.  Brightblack Morning Light drive to the end of the night—through the cornfields, in the rain, dragging a 1979 Rhodes.  A five minute song that lasts five years, “Hologram Buffalo” could be the dyed-in-the-wool hippie band’s clearest mission statement.

48.  The Roots – “Rising Down (Featuring Mos Def and Style P)”

“Hello Hello Hello Hello” goes the vocal sample woven into the beat of Rising Down’s opening track—because, after 15 years and 8 albums, The Roots still need an introduction.  Mos Def spits some Ghostface-dense rhymes about, maybe, speed addicts; Black Thought is concerned about the environment; and Styles P shows up out of nowhere to hate on Claritin because why the fuck not.

47.  John Legend – “Green Light (Afroganic Remix Featuring Andre 3000)”

John Legend’s club banger gets a sweet reggae reworking and Andre 3000 continues his hot streak of guest spots (possibly the best streak of his career) by freestyling some near-lame yuk-yuk jokes.  Mindbending.

46.  Mogwai – “Batcat”

Ladies, meet Mogwai.  Likes: grinding guitars, growling, feedback, creepy animal hybrids, volume, and scaring children.  Dislikes: you.  Mogwai do know how to fry an egg, though.

45.  The Raveonettes – “Sad Transmission”

The Ravonettes build one of those paeans to 60’s pop that everybody loves these days (almost everybody.)  Then, they systematically dismantle it by drenching it in electronic squall, shoegaze guitar and reverb.  The titular sad transmission could be pirate radio or a call from the bottom of a well.

44. The Constantines – “Life and Death"

The Constantines’ unsung triumph, Kensington Heights, shows a mature band at the height of their talent.  “Life and Death” plays it awfully close to the vest, knitting a slow build so tight you could bounce a quarter off it, and swelling into the joyous declaration, “I was lucky to get out alive.” 

43.  Leila – “Deflect (Featuring Martina Topley-Bird”

2008: The Year of Trip-Hop?  Portishead, Tricky and Martina Topley-Bird all came out of the woodwork this year, with Topley-Bird rocking this mostly overlooked gem from Leila’s Blood, Looms and Blooms.  The song twists through several permutations, transforming from a low-key burner into a whispered torch-song into a stomping, aggressive guitar workout.

42. Islands – “I Feel Evil Creeping In”

The notoriously berserk Islands restrain their ADD impulses and make their own “Stairway to Heaven,” paved with evil.  “In the back of my mind,” it starts, “I want to do bad things/ I want to be unkind.”

41.  The Sea & Cake – “Weekend”

With two incredible albums in two years, The Sea & Cake have doubled their output in this millennium both in quantity and quality.  “Weekend,” with Sam Prekop’s indelible vocals and a series of electronic squiggles running through it, sounds timeless and nostalgic—but couldn’t have been born anytime but now.

40.  Cut Copy – “Feel The Love”

“Feel the Love” seems to start Cut Copy’s In Ghost Colours in the middle of a song before nicely revealing the gist of the album’s sound in its first two lines: “All the girls I know are crying/ But all the clouds have silver linings.”  They go on to play a beautifully sad, New Order-indebted song that leaves you feeling sadly beautiful.

39.  The Magnetic Fields – “California Girls”

The Magnetic Fields rework The Beach Boys the way only New Yorkers could: “I Hate California Girls.”

38.  Busta Rhymes – “Don’t Touch Me (Throw Da Water On Em)”

Puffy Dad’s posse The Hitmen continue their string of successes after their production on last year’s “The Roc Boys (And the Winner Is…)” by updating Public Enemy’s sound with sirens, horns and mad bongos.  Busta turns in his best performance in ages, pausing ¾ of the way in to finally take a well-deserved breath.

37.  Frightened Rabbit – “Keep Yourself Warm”

With The Midnight Organ Fight, Frightened Rabbit find a niche inexplicably vacant for the last 25 years: the Scottish U2 (early 80’s era, of course.)  But Bono never declared “Jesus is just a sponge-boy’s name,” as they do on “Head Rolls Off,” or admonish “It takes more than fucking someone you don’t know to keep yourself warm” as they do on this album highlight.  Bet Bono’s kicking himself now.

36.  My Morning Jacket – “Touch Me I’m Going To Scream Pt. 1”

Remember when you heard “Touch Me I’m Going To Scream Pt. 1” and thought that My Morning Jacket’s Evil Urges was going to be AWESOME?

35. Black Mountain – “Bright Lights"

This 16+ minute behemoth of a classic rock song was THIS CLOSE to being sung at Tucker and Nina’s wedding.  By Tucker.  With Nina on drums.

34.  The Faint – “The Geeks Were Right”

The Faint project a world where “Egghead boys with thin white legs/ Have modified features and software brains/ But that’s what the girls like” and every guitar sounds like it’s plugged into a calculator and used as a drumstick.

33.  Re-Up Gang – “20K Money-Making Brothers On The Corner”

Five Reasons “20K Money-Making Brothers On The Corner” is better than “A Milli”:

1. The title alone is built better for the current economy.

2. Pusha T claiming, “We ain’t a part of your coke-rap genre” is like Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka claiming he’s never been “a little bit gay.”

3. The second, secret return of Clyde Smith.

4. No Lil’ Wayne.  We love Weezy, but his rap on “A Milli” is pretty tired.

5. They’re giving this shit away, proving dudes in a lower tax bracket are also usually more generous.

32.  Hercules & Love Affair – “Time Will”

Antony Hegarty perfects disco anguish on the stunning opener to Hercules & Love Affair’s self-titled debut.  Hegarty may be hell-bent on turning every music fan in the world a bit sexually ambidextrous, as it’s impossible to hear “Time Will” without falling a little bit in love.

31. Air France – “No Excuses"

Two dudes from Sweden pick up the gauntlet The Avalanches threw down at the turn of the millennium.  “No Excuses” nicks all of Since I Left You’s best tricks, down to the voices that bubble under the music.  Plus, you can dance to it.  Of course, my dad could have made it.

30.  Plantlife – “Time Traveler”

The secret history of rap music, told by the man sentient being that was there.

29.  Why? – “The Hollows”

An excellent entry in the legion of “This goes out to…” songs (see also: Lifter Puller’s “Let’s Get Incredible), Why? dedicates “The Hollows” to “all to my under-done, under-tongued, monk-lunged frontmen” before pausing to watch “two men fuck in the dark corner of a basketball court.”

28.  Sigur Rós – “Gobbledigook”

Sigur Rós evolve their sound—for the first time in 10 years—into an Animal Collective-style pastiche of clattering drums, yelping and nakedness.

27.  Talvin Singh – “Diya Milan (Radio Edit)”

Where the fuck did this come from?  According to the interwebs, “Diya Milan (Radio Edit)” does not exist.  However, we’re pretty sure it actually is an Indian-influenced slow-burn comedown track.  It came for free on a shiny disc attached to some sort of a bound and printed information source.  Any idea what that’s about?

26.  Ra Ra Riot – “Too Too Too Fast”

Ra Ra Riot figure out that the key to synth pop is acceleration.  Wes Miles sings like an emo Rick Ocasek (but in a good way), manages to pull off a spoken chorus, and even rocks a bit of a falsetto.  Cellist Alexandra Lawn sings back up vocals like a devil sitting on Miles’ shoulder, winding him up.  The drums are unstoppable.  This is the rock & roll we want back.

25.  Max Tundra – “Which Song”

English musician Max Tundra rocks an Amiga 500 like it’s 1989, but it doesn’t keep him from having romantic troubles:  “If this song is the one about you and me/Then which song is the one about Kelly B.”

24.  Mark Stewart – “Mr. You’re A Better Man Than I”

When Ex-Pop Group member Mark Stewart schools the new jacks on industrial techno, at this point, he’s just showing off.

23.  Tricky – “Council Estate”

“Council Estate” could be an answer song to Lupe Fiasco and Matthew Santos’s “Superstar.”  On one side of the argument, Santos whispers, “If you are who you say you are/ A superstar/ Then have no fear.”  On the other, Tricky demands, “Remember, boy, you’re a superstar.”  Tricky’s statement may be more definitive, but in his version the fear is also included.

22.  Beck – “Chemtrails”

Chalk up another solid year for Danger Mouse.  Dude collaborated with The Black Keys, The Shortwave Set, and Martina Topley-Bird this year, but never forgot he was also the only major rap producer ever to roll with the Elephant 6 collective.  His 2008 albums with Beck and Gnarls Barkley may be his strongest work to hark back to that time, and “Chemtrails,” the best track off those albums, spins Beck into a churning, Beatles-worthy haze.

21.  Gang Gang Dance – “House Jam”

2008 was a great year for moody, after-hours electronica.  What skyrockets Gang Gang Dance’s “House Jam” ahead of most is that it never quite decides what it wants to be.  Stray ambient noises clash with aggressive synthesizers and 1000 ghostly voices as vocalist Lizzie Bougatsos simply tries to hold the whole thing together.  Along the way, they may have redefined what a “House Jam” even is.

20.  Kelley Polar – “Chrysanthemum”

If it had been released fifty years ago, “Chrysanthemum” would have rendered Hair, Harvey Milk, and the 1980s obsolete.  Even so, everyone would have inevitably discovered the part about killing people in their sleep—probably once all of the free love subsided.

19.  Autistic Daughters – “Gin Over Sour Milk”

A deathly trudge into the abyss by a super-group of experimental musicians, “Gin Over Sour Milk” sounds as bitter and remorseless as it must taste.

18.  Atmosphere – “Wild Wild Horses”

It’s always a coin toss as to whether or not Slug’s drunken love stories will turn toward the misogynist and self-loathing.  On “Wild Wild Horses,” he restrains his uglier tendencies, describing disintegrating love in the third person until—surprise!—the male protagonist turns out to be a popular rapper whose exes watch him enviously from the audience.  Ant’s horn-dappled production and one of the best choruses of Slug’s career still manage to make “Wild Wild Horses” an Atmosphere career highlight.

17.  The Bug – “Poison Dart (Featuring Warrior Queen)”

With “Poison Dart”’s grimy dread, The Bug captured the feeling of nerve-melting tension in 2008.  Seemingly determined to bend dubstep to his will, he may also be determined to bend the world to dubstep’s will.  Whose hands are we in?

16.  Ricardo Villalobos – “Enfants (Chants)”

Perennially underrated Ricardo Villalobos spins a simple concept—children’s voices over minimal techno—into a 17 minute opus.  Your move, Lindstrøm.

15.  Erykah Badu – “Hip Hop/The Healer”

Of all the stand out tracks on Erykah Badu’s New Amerykah: Part One, the skeletal “Hip Hop/The Healer” stands out a little further, produced by the consistently surprising Madlib, On “The Healer,” Erykah Badu claims that hip hop is bigger than religion and the government.  She could have thrown The Beatles in there for good measure.

14.  The Teenagers – “Homecoming"

If success were measured in smarmy French punchlines, The Teenager’s Reality Check would be the album of the year.  Its opening track, “Homecoming” tells the story of a British dude and an American girl who have their perfect European romance.  We don’t want to spoil any of the plot twists, but let’s just say that things don’t quite turn out the way you’d expect.

13.  Religious Knives – “In Brooklyn After Dark"

Brooklyn’s Religious Knives slow Flipper’s “Sex Bomb” down to an 11 minute psychedelic crawl, remove the sex, and add a pipe organ.  Yes, a real pipe organ.

12.  Jamie Lidell – “Rope of Sand”

The tone of “Rope of Sand” may be wistful, but the lyrics sometimes border on straight-up goofy: “Shoes don’t know which way they’re going, so who are you following?”  However, Jamie Lidell has such a flexible and delicate touch with his vocals that he manages to sell them.  Instead of trying to make a capital-B Big statement with his album-closer, he aims for something more ephemeral, letting the titular metaphor describe the song as well.

11.  Wale – “The Kramer”

Rarely do rappers comment on the samples or clips of dialogue that get used to introduce songs, but Wale bookends “The Kramer” with the clip of Michael Richards going on a racist tirade in a comedy club and the clip of his apology for that tirade, and uses them to launch into one of the most intelligent conversations about the word “nigga” in rap music, period.  In 4 minutes, he explores personal, political and social implications of the word, and gives a dark, thoughtful heart to his Seinfeld-themed Mixtape About Nothing.

10.  Drive-By Truckers – “The Man I Shot”

Rock’s most dependable songwriters ease up on the lyrical complexity and lean heavily on the twisting, gnashing guitars, whipping up a “Cocaine Blues” for the age of the rationalization: “The man I shot/He was trying to kill me/And I had to take him out.”

9.  Big Boi – “Royal Flush (Featuring Andre 3000 & Raekwon)”

After half a decade of missing freethrows (“Hey Ya!” notwithstanding,)  OutKast fuck around and hit a triple-double. Over a slinky bass wobble and some understated background cooing, Big Boi gets politicized, and Raekwon shouts out Manhattan subway stops, but the real show is Andre 3000, who chops up his words (“dang-erous,” “nega-tive”), compares himself to crack, and does the hokey-pokey.

8.  David Byrne & Brian Eno – “Strange Overtones”

David Byrne’s victory lap begins here.  “This groove is out of fashion,” he sings on “Strange Overtones,” “This beat is twenty years old”—which is probably 100% accurate and, at the same time, completely irrelevant.  Though it bumps like vintage Talking Heads, “Strange Overtones” feels immediate to 2008, with Byrne’s voice gently leading everything into uncharted territory.

7.  Santogold – “Lights Out”

In spite of all the genre-exploration she did in 2008—into hip-hop, reggae, house, pop, R&B, you name it—Santogold reached her greatest height beating the New Wave imitators at their own game with “Lights Out,” a laid back, Strokes-indebted party jam.

6.  The Dodos – “Fools”

It’s all about those drums.  On “Fools,” The Dodo’s Logan Kroeber sounds as if he’s playing two or three rhythms at once.  More importantly, he turns the drums into the lead instrument—the beat practically becomes the guitar riff, and the guitar becomes the time keeper.  It all provides a foundation for Meric Long’s vocal performance.  Amid a series of yelps and count-offs, Long sings tenderly and steadily, building to the final chorus of “I’ve been/I’ve been silent.” “Fools” is the best way he could have begun to make noise again.

5.  M83 – “Kim & Jessie”

M83 mastermind Anthony Gonzalez tones down his shoegazier impulses in order to craft a song that purposefully echoes Tears For Fears and Kate Bush.  “Kim & Jessie” is about luminous secret worlds with someone whispering and lurking in the shadows—which the music reflects, as M83 sends piercing synthesizers swooping in whenever things threaten to get too ethereal.

4.  Fleet Foxes – “Mykonos"

Mykonos is a Greek island where upper-middle class college kids go to party and sleep on mattresses in the sand.  Fleet Foxes are a Seattle-based folk band formed by a group of self-effacing high school friends.  It’s unclear whether the band has any personal connection with the island, but their “Mykonos,” from the Sun Giant EP—which tells a story of someone escaping to somewhere “With a vision of a gentle coast/And a sun to maybe dissipate/Shadows of the mess [he] made”—shows off everything that made Fleet Foxes one of the year’s best bands: a capella four-part harmonies, an epic scope, and an anachronistic pastoral sound.

3.  The Mountain Goats – "San Bernardino"

San Bernardino, California is not a very nice place.  I know, I grew up there.  It is a city at the foot of the mountains where all of the smog and poverty from Los Angeles goes to settle.  At one time, it was the murder capital of California.  It has the worst air pollution in the United States.  There are 53 registered sex offenders living in my former area code.

John Darnielle’s San Bernardino is a place of comfort and hope, with a certified “welcome” sign (believe me, no such sign exists), but the idyllic place he sings about in The Mountain Goats’ “San Bernardino” isn’t mythological fiction; it’s the place my parents thought they had found when they stumbled into town in the 60’s.  Over a simple guitar and strings, “San Bernardino” tells their story, practically the way I’ve heard it told my whole life, which makes both the song and the circumstance even more bittersweet.

2.  Portishead – “Machine Gun”

Portishead announced their return after an 11 year hiatus with an unflinching drum machine loop and an edge they never showed in their mid-90’s heyday. The idea defines simplicity—dueling drum machines, stuck on repeat—but the Bristol veterans’ unwavering confidence with it, letting the unadorned, cacophonous industrial noise carry the Beth Gibbons indelible vocals, turned “Machine Gun” into the best (and most iconoclastic) single of their career.

1.  TV on the Radio – “DLZ”

Oh, by the way, the world's falling apart.  Looking back from a less turbulent time, TV on the Radio's "DLZ" will represent the undercurrents of hope and fear running through 2008.  At present, it's a lifeline.  Thousands of artists this year scrambled to come up with a line as simple and cutting as "Congratulations on the mess you made of things," with the flexibility to be personal and political.  Yet, the surgical lyrics only tell half of the story.  The other half gets relayed by the clattering drums doing battle with the "la la la" refrains.  2008 felt to many like a time when hope was given to us in the form of a beautiful new rug that subsequently got yanked out from beneath their feet.  Many felt the opposite:  a sense of desperation restored by a promise of change.  "DLZ" proposes that either feeling could be accurate, so that when Tunde Adebimpe screams, "This is beginning to feel like the long-winded blues of the never," he could feasibly be both scared and serene.

-Martin Brown, 2008

The Top 30 Albums of 2008: # 12

Wale
The Mixtape About Nothing

If you listen closely to Wale’s The Mixtape About Nothing, you can hear how the idea for his Seinfeld concept album evolved.  “I get Seinfeld with these rhyme skills,” he raps on “The Chicago Falcon Remix,” “I’m Larry David/ Give me my paper/ This a cos’ mo’ like Jerry Sein neighbor/ My cold stanzas stand like Phantoms or Maybachs/ You won’t get Elaine if you came whack/ I hate rap like Kramer hate blacks.”  Lacking the intricacy of many of the other Seinfeld-inspired rhymes on The Mixtape About Nothing, this one must have been the first.  It tells a lot about Wale.  First of all, he obviously loves puns, as he twists Cosmo Kramer’s first name into also meaning “cost more.” In fact, the whole thing carries the faint whiff of serious cheese—which is typical of the dude who twisted Justice’s biggest hit into “W.A.L.E.D.A.N.C.E.”  Groan.  But you also start to see how his mind works.  Notice how he teases out the reference to Jerry Seinfeld into something that includes three out of four of the sitcom’s major characters.  There’s an element of literary completism in it—not 100% uncommon among the best rappers—and it’s also an indicator of a desire to play out each of his thoughts to their extreme conclusions.  The original Seinfeld idea—a castaway, run-of-the-mill pop-culture simile—blossoms into the larger idea of building a whole album around his favorite television show.  That, in turn, veers off into many different directions.  He raps in the structure of one of Jerry’s stand-up routines.  He uses Michael Richards’ notorious racist tirade to dive into an intelligent discussion about race.  He even calls up Julia Louis-Dreyfus for a cameo.  This is a guy whose mind works free-associatively, each of his ideas having a domino’s effect on a series of other ideas.

As a concept album, The Mixtape About Nothing succeeds because Wale uses a simple concept as a starting point from which to charge in many directions.  Additionally, he uses the medium of the mixtape in unique and exciting ways, and he does it with the self-awareness of Jerry Seinfeld himself.  Each of the tracks are named like a Seinfeld episode, which allows him to comment on his own work as he does it.  “The Roots Song Wale Is On” retitles Rising Up’s title track and blasts it at the front of the album.  “The Remake of a Remake (All I Need)” and “The Cliché Lil’ Wayne Feature (It’s the Remix Baby!)” allow him to get away with common mixtape chestnuts simply by acknowledging them, sort of like the old headline from The Onion that read “Asshole Admits to Being Asshole in Supreme Asshole Move.”  By the time he gets to final song “The Hype” (which Wale has received a good amount of, getting called “The Next Lupe Fiasco” by Entertainment Weekly, among other places), Wale has grown as an artist in leaps and bounds, over the course of the album.  His flow has a relaxed and confident tone that was completely absent from the Seinfeld rhymes on “The Chicago Falcon Remix.”  More importantly, Wale has pulled off the tricky gambit of The Mixtape About Nothing because he has done more than simply reference Jerry Seinfeld’s sitcom:  He has embodied it by creating a postmodern album that could be about anything.  A young artist who can pull that off should have some pretty great stuff ahead of him.  Now, if we could just get him to work on those puns.

-Martin Brown, 2008

The Top 30 Albums of 2008: # 13

Mark Stewart
Edit

Whereas 2007 was the year that the rest of us got a chance to finally make legal our ownership of Stewart's must-own and perennial out of print bootleg Pop Group classic, their Y debut album, 2008 was the year where Mark dropped his first album of new material in 12 years.  And while the On U Sound mastered by Adrian Sherwood, the sound that became Stewart's home after the 1981 disintegration of the Pop Group, completely infects this years release, there's something else going on here as well. Whether it's due to his off and on experiences in the studio producing or remixing groups like Nine Inch Nails, Tricky, Massive Attack and Primal Scream, Edit stands with both feet firmly printed in the aggro-reggae category--but it's heart belongs to those 90's days when it looked like MTV was going to make superstars out of the Crystal Method and Prodigy's Keith Flint.  It only sounds like those groups--Crystal Method especially--in brief portions of songs, where you can hear the simplified melody of that heavy, shake the earth kind of techno lurking underneath the skyscrapers of dub bass that surround them. Underneath the songs--past the point where Mark's yowling vocals live, past the places where the boom-cluck-boom of a weirdly perfect cover of the Yardbird's "Mr. You're A Better Man Than I" live, there it is: that abandoned, unloved genre of frat house exercise electronica, the stuff that so many pull-ups and fist fights were made of.  While Stewart's weird manipulation of the material couldn't be more obvious--at one point, he clearly begins remixing a song from the beginning, as if to tell prospective dj's "don't waste your time, I know what you're thinking"--the guy has proven over the years that he truly can take his multiple influences--the industrial sound he helped create, the dub that went on to meet the -step, the machine-driven hip-hop production style so loved by the avant-garde--and use them in service of his adopted reggae home.  Ably supported by Sherwood, Keith LeBlanc on drums and female vocals from Denise Sherwood and Samia Farah, Edit is the sort of album that, after constructing a foundation of big-beat sound, layers the rest with funk, acid-jazz--hell, there's even that usually-terrible electroclash kind of thing going on.  It's a fuzzed out mix of all kinds of stuff--which makes it a lot like Mark Stewart albums--but it sounds like something more than one person was involved in the recording--which makes it nothing like a Mark Stewart album.

Mark Stewart claims to have spent the last twelve years drinking and hanging out with his friends, and his work output--dropping the occasional mix, producing the occasional track, or emailing record labels until they agree to put out best-of compilations--seems to bear out a man who is content to let his "critics and producer" acclaim be his legacy.  The credit for popularizing--if you can call what On U did "popular"--will always be directed in Adrian Sherwood's direction.  At the same time, Edit is the best album of Mark Stewart's career, and it stands alongside the strongest of the Pop Group's as well--and while it's tempting to give an older artist the accolades that may seem to have been denied them in their youth, the simple truth is that this--this album right here, and this year right now--this is the album that some of us have been waiting for Mark Stewart to create.  And while it shouldn't be recieved as a swan song or curtain call, if that's what it turns out to be?

That'll be just fine.

-Tucker Stone, 2008

The Top 30 Albums of 2008: # 14

The Dodos
Visiter

The Factual Opinion’s favorite album of last year, Animal Collective’s Strawberry Jam, cast a serious shadow over 2008.  Whether the beloved Baltimore band had a direct influence on the myriad of artists across the globe who incorporated their tribal rhythms and manic yells into new sounds—from Spain’s El Guincho to New Zealand’s Ruby Suns to Iceland’s Sigur Rós, who completely reworked their sound this year—or whether they simply caught the zeitgeist (which I hear can happen if you don’t sanitize your hands after touching a public restroom’s doorknob), the prevalence of Animal Collective’s brand of indie rock became harder and harder to ignore.  When San Francisco’s The Dodos trotted out their second album, Visiter, in March, all of the hallmarks of Animal Collective-indebtedness (Animal Collective Subconscious?) showed up.  But Visiter is much more than an homage, largely because of the talents of The Dodos’ two central members.  Logan Kroeber deftly incorporates West African polyrhythms into his drumming, while Mark Long—strangely, also a drummer versed West African polyrhythms—structures the songs around the rhythmic groundwork.  The result is an unselfconscious blend of global thinking and American folk.

Long found Kroeber while searching for a heavy metal drummer to accompany the songs he was recording as a singer/songwriter, and the two recorded Long's solo album, dodo bird, and an official Dodos album, Beware the Maniacs, before quitting their day jobs in 2006 and touring relentlessly.  The duo wrote the songs on Visiter through the long improvisations while on the road, and named the album after a piece of artwork given to them by a child whose South Central Los Angeles special ed class they'd just played for.  It all makes for an album that seems to run in one thousand directions at once, from a band with the playfulness, energy and confidence to set up and rock anywhere at any time. Album opener "Walking" turns a gorgeous finger-picked guitar and a man-woman harmony into a manifest destiny as Long worries, "Now I've been wasting so much time/Walking the same street every night." "Winter" sounds like a cast-off Magnetic Fields song (and incidentally had me rocking a winter-themed mix CD in the heat of summer, along with Fleet Foxes' "White Winter Anthem.") that bursts into hand clapping and Beirut-style Balkan horn playing.  But it's "Fools" that casts The Dodos out of the province of Animal Collective followers and into true leaders--the song has the slickest and most frenetic rhythm of any on Visiter, and Long's vocals nestle perfectly into it, building to a striking closing refrain "I've been/I've been silent."  If he's speaking autobiographically, then Visiter is the cacophony of all of his ideas bursting forward.

-Martin Brown, 2008